Earlier in April, Javier Bardem dropped out of Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro and now, citing exhaustion from work and awards season, Variety is reporting that he’s also leaving Nine, Rob Marshall’s musical adaptation of Fellini’s 8 1/2.
The actor, who recently won an Academy Award for his portrayal of Anton Chigurh in Joel and Ethan Coen’s [...]

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Apologies in advance for this LA-centric post, but in the big picture, what’s good for cinema in one place is good for cinema everywhere. LA’s New Beverly Cinema is a part of the continuum of movie-going goodness and by making LA a better place, in its own small way it makes the world itself a [...]

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Miramax has acquired the worldwide rights to the remake of the 2007 Israeli psychological thriller The Debt being written by Matthew Vaughn (Layer Cake) and Jane Goldman.
The story begins 20 years after WWII when three Mossad agents track down and kill the Nazi war criminal known as “The Surgeon of Birkenau.” 30 years later, an elderly [...]

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“There’s a whole ocean of oil underneath our feet.
No one can get at it except for me.”
I feel like I haven’t strung the words There, Will, Be and Blood together since the Oscars so here’s a thinly disguised excuse to do just that.
For the 17% of you who care about such things, Paramount is starting to announce [...]

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Roar! 

The only really great thing about the inexplicably popular monster movie Cloverfield was Michael Giacchino’s Roar! theme which played over the closing credits.
It captured the essence of the old Godzilla movies in a way I wish the movie had as well.  I know, Cloverfield simply wasn’t that movie and it was never supposed to be. It [...]

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There was some head scratching when the Cannes lineup was announced recently and Fernando Meirelles’ drama Blindness was nowhere to be found. Nevertheless, Hollywood Reporter’s Steven Zeitchik speculated it would ultimately be chosen to fill the vacant opening or closing spots.
Variety reports this morning that the drama about an epidemic of blindness starring Julianne Moore [...]

Filed under: Film Festivals, Movies, Rumors | 19 Comments »

After the Che films and after The Informant with Matt Damon, Steven Soderbergh is set to direct The Girlfriend Experience to be written by Brian Koppelman and David Levien (Rounders, Ocean’s 13).
The second film of the six-picture commitment Soderbergh has with Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner (the first was the super-low-budget Bubble), Girlfriend will tell [...]

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According to The Envelope’s Todd Martens, Amy Winehouse is working on a theme song for the upcoming James Bond film, Quantum of Solace with producer Mark Ronson. Ronson told the BBC “The demo sounds like a James Bond theme, hopefully. But I don’t know if it’ll get used.”
Artists have been asked to record songs for [...]

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Joel passed this along to me this morning.
Just a day after posting a lovely and moving tribute marking the passing of his wife in 2006, The House Next Door’s Matt Zoller Seitz has announced he’s leaving behind the world of print journalism after seventeen years.
I don’t know Matt. I’ve never met him or had a [...]

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Where is Travis Bickle when we need him? 
This is a little far removed from movies and a little too close to the kind of salacious Entertainment Tonight/TMZ nonsense I hate so much, but it’s all over and since it involves Disney, it plays.
As you probably know, Annie Leibovitz took some creepily sexualized photos of teen [...]

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Burn After Reading, the new film from multiple Academy Award winning cinematic geniuses Joel and Ethan Coen, is set to open the 65th Venice Fim Festival on August 27.
The Brothers’ latest is a dark comedy that stars Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton and John Malkovich. LiC is in full Coen Lockdown mode [...]

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It was a fairly quiet movie-going weekend here at the LiC head offices. The choice between Harold & Kumar and Baby Mama didn’t seem like a choice at all so I chose to skip the multiplex altogether. Instead I hit the arthouse and caught a screening of the surprising Shotgun Stories with Michael Shannon (Bug).
I [...]

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Go Speed Racer Go Music Video
A new Speed Racer music video that riffs on the original theme song has been kicking around for a couple of days and the fanboys are grumbling about it. As you can see above, it’s corny as hell.
Is it possible that the creators of their beloved Matrix movies have [...]

Filed under: Movies, Opinion | 9 Comments »

 
With a few notable exceptions, the second half of the summer season doesn’t seem as promising as the first, but you can decide for yourselves.
After it’s all over, check out LiC’s Top 7 of Summer plus 7 Wildcards that might deliver. As always, release dates are subject to change.
July 2
Hancock. Will Smith kicks off July [...]

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Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir makes the most compelling case so far in support of the minority opinion that Guillermo del Toro is not the right choice for The Hobbit. He’s no fan of the idea of a Tolkien-less sequel either.
Unlike some Jackson/Rings scolds, O’Hehir appears to love and understand both saying “I’m a big fan of [...]

Filed under: Movies, Opinion | 12 Comments »

According to the calendar, summer doesn’t begin until June 20th, but according to the movie industry, it begins the first weekend of May. That’s right, Hollywood’s Silly Season is nearly upon us; the time of year when audiences are pummeled by a surfeit of empty entertainment extravaganzas that make up for a lack of substance [...]

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Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure 
Better late than never, it’s the Weekend Forecast. Normally we like to get the party started on Thursday morning, but we were waiting to see if something that didn’t suck was released at the last minute. We’ll let you be the judge of whether or not that happened. (It didn’t)

Baby Mama. [...]

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Well, you can kiss Guillermo del Toro’s ass goodbye for the next four years. He’s agreed to set off for Middle Earth to direct The Hobbit and a sequel taking place in the 60 years leading up to The Fellowship of the Ring.
I loved The Lord of the Rings and all, but I’m more interested [...]

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If you can make a fortune off of movies based on a 50-year-old pirate theme ride, you can make money off of anything.
Seeking to prove that theory, Warren Zide, the producer behind crap like American Pie and Final Destination, plans on turning Jim Croce’s hit song Bad, Bad Leroy Brown into a feature length movie.
I [...]

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Best known for her role as the beautiful Bulgarian bride who was willing to do anything to secure letters of transit for her husband and herself in the classic film Casablanca, actress Joy Page died April 18 of complications from stroke and pneumonia. She was 83.
Though her stepfather was studio head Jack L. Warner (her [...]

Filed under: Movies, News, Obituaries | 11 Comments »

Studio Pinhead #1: Hey, remember when we wanted to remake that Cronenberg picture? That one with the exploding heads? But those other jackals already beat us to it?
Development Weasel: Scanners?
Studio Pinhead #1: Yeah, whatever. Listen. I was watching cable last night and there was this movie with Kirk Douglas and whatisname (snapping fingers) the director with [...]

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“There’s more writing about movies these days than ever before. In print and online, it’s never been worse-especially on the Internet where film buffs emulating the Vachel Lindsay-Manny Farber tradition are no longer isolated nerds but an opinionated throng, united in their sarcasm and intense pretense at intellectualizing what is basically a hobby.”
So begins Armond [...]

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The lineup for the 61st Cannes film festival was unveiled this morning with the biggest surprise being the inclusion of Steven Soderbergh’s twin Che Guevara biographies The Argentine and Guerrilla. Here’s a list of some of the other highlights:
In Competition

Adoration, Canada, Atom Egoyan
Changeling, U.S., Clint Eastwood
Che (The Argentine, Guerrilla,) Spain, Steven Soderbergh
Un Conte de noel, France, [...]

Filed under: Film Festivals, Movies | 22 Comments »

Everyone’s got an opinion about how much trouble Tom Cruise’s latest project Valkyrie is in. Michael Cieply sums the whole thing up in the NY Times and gives United Artists chief executive Paula Wagner a chance to defend the film.
There’s no real news here, but the funny part is that, within minutes of the story [...]

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The 10th Annual Ebertfest, Roger Ebert’s festival of overlooked and underappreciated films kicks off Wednesday, April 23. Unfortunately Ebert won’t be there himself. The film critic is still recovering from a fractured hip he suffered during rehabilitation from a January surgery and he announced on his recently formed blog, Roger Ebert’s Journal, that he has [...]

Filed under: Film Festivals, Movies | 21 Comments »

The full lineup for Cannes ‘08 will be announced soon, but it looks like Clint Eastwood’s Changeling with Angelina Jolie will join Woody Allen’s Vicky Christina Barcelona with Penelope Cruz, Scarlett Johansson and Javier Bardem as representatives from the United States.
Variety is also reporting that Barry Levinson’s What Just Happened? may not be the closing [...]

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Ang Lee is set to direct a comedy based on Elliot Tiber’s memoir Taking Woodstock: A True Story of a Riot, Concert, and a Life.
The story takes place in 1969 when Tiber, an upstate New York motel owner, went from witnessing the Stonewall Riots, regarded as a launching point for the modern gay rights movement, to [...]

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MTV apparently talked to Uma Thurman who dropped hints about an upcoming DVD re-release of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill.
Says the ridiculously beautiful actress, “Right now he’s putting the two films together with an intermission with an added anime sequence he had already written.” She goes on to say “It has nothing to do with me. It [...]

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O.K., not really, but they did unveil their Disneynature brand yesterday through which they plan to make a little green with a series of green flavored documentaries. The first film, Earth, will hit US theaters on Earth Day, April 22, 2009.
The documentary comes from Alastair Fothergill, the producer/director of the Planet Earth series, and it will be [...]

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The folks at Paramount Vantage would like you to check out the official website and trailer for the hit Sundance documentary American Teen.
Filmmaker Nanette Burstein (The Kid Stays in the Picture) filmed five Midwestern teenagers, a Jock, a Geek, a Popular Girl, a Heartthrob and an Artsy Girl, for 10 months during their senior year [...]

Filed under: Movies, Upcoming | 14 Comments »