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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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Ain’t it Cool News is reporting that Stan Winston, the 4-time Oscar winner for makeup and visual effects, died in Los Angeles on Sunday.
[UPDATE: Winston suffered mutiple myeloma for seven years, a treatable but incurable form of cancer of the blood plasma cells]
You might not have been able to pick Stan out of a police [...]

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Positioning themselves firmly as the home of tired retreads, Millennium Films is adding The Three Musketeers to its stable of shopworn properties that now include Conan the Barbarian, Red Sonja, Hercules, Buck Rogers and Rambo.
The story will reportedly tell how the original three, Athos, Porthos and Aramis, first teamed up.
The best part for Millenium? Alexandre [...]

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Neil Jordan has put together financing for his self-scripted film Ondine in which Colin Farrell plays a fisherman in southwest Ireland who reels in a sea nymph played by Alicja Bachleda (Trade). The film begins shooting in mid-July.
Meanwhile, Cameron Crowe is stirring up an as-yet-untitled romantic comedy starring Ben Stiller and Reese Witherspoon. Scott Rudin [...]

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In Internet time this is already old news, but in the interest of following up on stuff I’ve already talked about, here it is anyway.
Speaking to Defamer’s Stu VanAirsdale, Werner Herzog shed some light on his upcoming Bad Lieutenant project with Nicholas Cage.
Turns out he’s not actually remaking Abel Ferrara’s film so much as making [...]

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They’re cranking out remakes faster than I can make fun of them. This time it’s an LiC childhood favorite: Peter Hyams’ Capricorn One, the conspiracy thriller about a fake mission to Mars starring Elliot Gould, Sam Waterston, James Brolin, Hal Holbrook, Karen Black, Telly Savalas, Brenda Vaccaro and of course, O.J. “Stabby” Simpson.
Peter Buchman who [...]

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That an independent film might run into financing problems doesn’t strike me as especially newsworthy. Yet, perhaps because Nailed belongs to high profile and controversial filmmaker David O. Russell, every little production hiccup has been reported on breathlessly.
Except for the first sign of trouble when James Caan walked off the set, I’ve steered clear of [...]

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Though Universal has said nothing irreplaceable was lost in the studio fire on Sunday, according to Anne Thompson, a memo from NBC Universal Distribution vice president Paul Ginsburg went out Monday to those who book classic films saying that nearly 100% of the archive prints kept on the lot were destroyed.
In the short term, this [...]

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(Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times)
I woke up this morning to a giant, smelly plume of smoke blotting out the sun. Turns out it was a huge fire at Universal Studios that had begun at about 4:45 am.
Some sets that will be familiar to anyone who has ever turned on the television and certainly anyone [...]

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Yeah, I know “box office” is a dirty word around here, but just because it’s an over-emphasized subject doesn’t mean it isn’t occasionally important.
In this case, while we’re all sitting here chatting so enjoyably, Sex and the City is raking in some serious coin at the cinemas. Most estimates had Indiana Jones and the Whatchamacallit [...]

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For a guy who didn’t set out to be an actor, who’s never been to an audition and who doesn’t have a head shot, Danny McBride is doing pretty well for himself lately.
He stars in The Foot Fist Way which opens in New York and Los Angeles on Friday. Before that he was in David Gordon Green’s [...]

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Though I remember him best cracking up on The Carol Burnett Show on television for 10 seasons, comedian Harvey Korman earned his place in cinema history for his role as Hedley Lamarr in Mel Brooks’ classic Blazing Saddles, a film I just finished re-watching earlier in the week (”That’s Hedley!”).
According to an AP report, he [...]

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Add Gomorra to busy IFC’s growing list of Cannes acquisitions. Matteo Gorrone’s violent, deglamorized weaving of five tales that tell the story of rampant organized crime in Naples received some positive reviews and won the Grand Prix, the runner-up award to the Palme d’Or.
There’s no telling how the exclusive deal IFC has with video satan Lackluster is [...]

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Where do you begin to talk about the long and varied career of Sydney Pollack?
Sure, he was an actor and an Oscar winning producer/director in a career that spanned nearly 50 years, but that only seems to scratch the surface.
Though I had been aware of his work since the 1970s - Jeremiah Johnson was a [...]

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Campino and Wim Wenders - star and director of Palermo Shooting (Getty Images)
Palermo Shooting, the latest film from LiC favorite Wim Wenders, is scheduled to be unveiled in competition at Cannes on Saturday, but according to a Reuters interview from Scott Roxborough, Wenders was still working on mixing the film when the festival began and the [...]

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Due to ’scheduling conflicts’ (like maybe he’s just signed on to too many movies), Martin Scorsese is out as director of the upcoming Bob Marley documentary and Jonathan Demme is in.
Demme is no stranger to non-fiction music films, having made the classic Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense and, more recently, Neil Young: Heart [...]

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…to form a production company?
Two if they’re Mark and Michael Polish, the identical twin writing-directing-producing (and sometimes starring) brother team behind such enigmatic films as Twin Falls Idaho, Northfork and the more recent (and more mainstream) The Astronaut Farmer.
According to Variety’s Michael Flemming, the two have formed Prohibition Pictures with the aim of producing four [...]

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Studio Pinhead #1: You know, there just aren’t enough movies with swords anymore.
Development Weasel: You mean like light sabers?
Studio Pinhead #1: No, none of that phony sci-fi samurai shit. I’m talking about man swords.
Studio Pinhead #2: …like porn?
Studio Pinhead #1: No! Metal swords. Big ones. Like claymores. Like, roll a d20, score a critical hit [...]

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John Phillip Law, best remembered by me as Pygar the blind angel in Roger Vadim’s Barbarella, died May 13 of cancer. He was 70 years old.
His first Hollywood role was as Alexei, a boyish Russian sailor in Norman Jewison’s The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming! He also played the title character in the [...]

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No cinematic pun intended…well maybe a little. This one tried to sneak past without my noticing it, but luckily Sartre brought it to my attention. It seems David Lynch and Werner Herzog are going to team up on a “horror-tinged murder drama” called My Son, My Son. It’s loosely based on the true story of a man [...]

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Alynch pointed this out and I can only ask: “Why would Werner Herzog remake Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant along with Nic Cage?”
I get the Nic Cage part, but not the Werner Herzog part.
“Jan De Bont remakes Bad Lieutenant with Nic Cage” would make a certain stupid sense, but Herzog?
Is this an error?
Is it a joke?

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According to Variety’s Pamela McClintock and Anne Thompson, Michael Moore is going to make a sequel to Farenheit 9/11 which will be released next year.
Though the original was the highest grossing documentary ever in the United States with $119.1 million and an additional $100 million overseas, Moore’s most recent film Sicko only pulled in $24.5 million [...]

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I’ll stick with the original, thanks.
Paul W.S Anderson’s Death Race, the remake of Paul Bartel’s satiric 1975 drive-in favorite Death Race 2000 has been moved up from September 26 to August 22. I guess this means they’re not counting on any Oscar nominations.
Bartel’s Roger Corman produced original starred David Carradine, Sylvester Stallone, Mary Woronov and [...]

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For those of you who grow weary of the Speed Racer conversation, here’s a little nugget of news from this morning about Natalie Portman bailing on the new adaptation of Emily Brontë’s oft filmed Wuthering Heights “due to a scheduling conflict with another as-yet unannounced project” according to Variety.
The Hollywood Reporter adds that the announcement [...]

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 I’m about as interested in the business end of Hollywood as I am the ass end of a gassy camel with a chili craving, but the other big story that had everyone feeling gloomy today besides the Glenn Kenny downsizing was Warners Bros’ surprise announcement they were shutting down their specialty divisions, Picturehouse and Warner [...]

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Chuck just brought this to my attention: Premiere critic Glenn Kenny announced on his blog this morning that he is, as they say, no longer with the firm. I’ve never been a huge Premiere fan, but I’d grown to like Glenn’s blog over the last several months. He’s smart, occasionally combative and often entertaining. I hope [...]

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Joel passed along some great news for all you early-adopting AV nerds who actually like movies (no, I’m not talking about the ones who bought the Superbit version of Bad Boys II back in the day). According to their newsletter, The Criterion Collection (every movie lover’s friend) has finally announced they’re going to start rolling out their catalogue [...]

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