On the surface, the most obvious choice for the third day of the Los Angeles Film Festival would’ve been Werner Herzog’s man vs. nature in Antarctica documentary Encounters at the End of the World. Besides playing at the Majestic Crest, the coolest venue in the LAFF circuit, I’ve also been looking forward to seeing it [...]
Filed under: Film Festivals | 12 Comments »
After a month of having my face pressed against the candy store window, gazing longingly at all the mysterious and exotic treats in their brightly colored wrappers, I finally got my golden ticket, the doors of the Los Angeles Film Festival chocolate factory swung wide and, like Augustus Gloop, I made a bee line for [...]
Filed under: Film Festivals | 8 Comments »
The LA Times reports that Spider-Man 4 is coming in 2011.
(sound of crickets chirping)
Since #3 combined at least three potentially good movies into one bad one, I’m not sure what there is left to do next. Plus, they don’t have a director a script or a star. Ah well, they only need a franchise character and a [...]
Filed under: Reviews | 13 Comments »
The 2008 Los Angeles Film Festival kicked off last night in Westwood with the World Premiere of Timur Bekmambetov’s Wanted starring Angelina Jolie, James McAvoy and Morgan Freeman. The adrenalized action film based on Mark Millar’s comic seems a strange choice for a film festival ostensibly focused on independent and foreign cinema, but it fits [...]
Filed under: Film Festivals | 11 Comments »
At DVD Panache, Adam Ross runs a weekly feature called Friday Screen Test where he takes someone who writes about movies, ties them to a chair, turns a hot light on them and grills them with movie related questions.
I recently survived the experience and Adam has posted the results this morning.
Head on over to DVD [...]
Filed under: Miscellaneous | 26 Comments »
According to AICN’s Harry Knowles, Quentin Tarantino recently sat down to shoot the shit with Enzo Castellari for the upcoming 3-DVD Special Edition of the Italian director’s 1977 WWII exploitation film, Quel Maledetto Treno Blindato. A Tarantino favorite, the film stars Bo Svenson and Fred Williamson as part of a group of US soldiers facing [...]
Filed under: News, Rumors | 23 Comments »
French filmmaker Jean Delannoy died on Wednesday at the age of 100. Though his film career lasted more than 60 years, he will always be inextricably intertwined with the French New Wave because he exemplified everything its proponents were fighting against.
François Truffaut famously said that even the worst of Jean Renoir’s films would be more [...]
Filed under: News, Obituaries | 19 Comments »
You could do worse than watching Singin’ in the Rain this weekend
I’m just saying…
I thank the movie gods that the LA Film Festival starts tonight because this is truly an awful weekend for new movies. My suggestion? Go rent an armload of Cyd Charisse musicals instead.
Nevertheless, because we must, here are the wide releases:
Get Smart. [...]
Filed under: Upcoming | 39 Comments »
I like to encourage people to watch movies in a theater, but the reality is that more and more people are doing it at home. Also, not all of the movies we talk about here play in everyone’s neighborhood. Sometimes DVD is the only chance people have to catch up on some of this stuff.
I [...]
Filed under: Miscellaneous | 28 Comments »
The love for JJ Abrams approaches Whedonesque or Apatowian heights in some quarters, but LiC is not one of them. Then again, I’m a mystery-puzzle nerd so the news yesterday that Mr. Abrams would be producing a movie based on this NY Times story by Penelope Green caught my attention.
The short of it is that [...]
Filed under: Upcoming | 11 Comments »
I’m a sucker for lists. I really am. I can’t stay away from them, but I’m begging the AFI: please stop. Seriously.
Sure, they probably make tons of money off of this kind of thing, but they’ve long gone past the point of overkill and they’re nearing the frontier of self-parody. Pretty soon they’ll be doing the Top 10 [...]
Filed under: Miscellaneous | 26 Comments »
This one requires no comment from me. Click to enlarge.
Source: Cinematical (who were kind enough not to crap it up with a watermark)
Filed under: Marketing | 14 Comments »
Next up for Spike Lee is Time Traveler which he plans to co-write and direct from a memoir by Ronald Mallett, one of the first African-American Ph.Ds in theoretical physics.
Co-written with Bruce Henderson, Time Traveler: A Scientist’s Personal Mission to Make Time Travel a Reality traces Mallett’s life story from poverty to Ph.D. and of [...]
Filed under: News, Upcoming | 21 Comments »
Dancer, actress, movie star Cyd Charisse died in Los Angeles today after apparently suffering a heart attack on Monday.
I didn’t really grow to love movie musicals until later in life, so my first real memory of her was in college. A couple of friends and I drove up to catch an all night screening of [...]
Filed under: News, Obituaries | 19 Comments »
I was a scrawny kid growing up, but I never idolized the muscle-bound types. Bodybuilding was always a bore, I hated the He-Man cartoon, I didn’t worship Arnold Schwartzenegger or Sylvester Stallone and I never took professional wrestling seriously. Ordinarily I wouldn’t be interested in a documentary about three Hulk Hogan idolizing boys from New [...]
Filed under: Reviews | 10 Comments »
