After years of development hell and a production that purportedly lasted right up until days before the actual prints were shipped off to theatres, Alien Vs Predator has finally made it to the silver screen.
The Alien and the Predator are two of filmdom's most beloved and feared creations, and fans have been clamoring for a matchup between the tw [ ... ]
The new James Bond rocks royally!
The return of James Bond in Casino Royale (the 2-Disc Widescreen Edition is awesome), but not as you know him! The new Bond goes back to the early days of Bond and will be stripped of many of the elements that made the Bond movies so successful in the first place.
Let's hope they won't strip away too much, unles [ ... ]
Taking a staggering 1.7 million admissions in its French opening weekend, Heartbreaker marks director Pascal Chaumeil's feature debut and stars the ever gorgeous paring of Vanessa Paradis and Romain Duris.
Meet Alex (Duris). He's charming, funny, effortlessly cool, and most importantly, irresistible to women.
Alex offers a professional service; to break up relationships. In just a few weeks, for a fee equivalent to his reputation, he promises to transform any husband, fiancé or boyfriend into an ex.
Hideouts, phone-tapping, fake identities, a devastating smile, anything goes when it comes to fulfilling his contract. Meet Juliette (Paradis). She's a young, beautiful, free-spirited and independent heiress, with a passion for shopping, fine wine, and a word-perfect knowledge of Dirty Dancing. In ten days she's due to marry the man of her dreams (Andrew Lincoln), much to her father's disapproval.
When Alex is hired to break up this seemingly perfect couple he is thrown into a action-filled race against time, taking him through the sun-drenched streets of Paris to the fast cars and high fashion of Monaco, in his own hilarious seduction "mission impossible" that risks him being caught by his ruthless personal creditors, angry exes, and Juliette herself.
But worst of all, will he discover when it comes to love, the perfect plan doesn't exist? Watch and find out...
Here's Vanessa discussing the film in an interview:
A cult classic which attempts to follow in the footsteps of Animal House while failing to tread any new ground except as a moment of the zeitgeist in which it was created. We're talking of course about 1994, which was sort of the year that the Reagan Era (Error?) ended, and Political Correctness was enjoying its zenith in the cultural mindset.
This was a world before the Internet, where people spent their time offline in the real world, pursuing love, actual physical activities, trying to save the world and the hip hop bling-bling culture had not become the norm.
The story is about a clean cut pre-freshman (pre-frosh in frat lingo) from Delaware (played ably by Chris Young as Tom Lawrence) who arrives after a long sleepy bus ride to the fictional Port Chester University, a place where fraternities have long since been banned and political correctness is running rampant (hence the title's play on name, PCU).
There are the usual college movie devices; the cool man on campus (Jeremy Piven as Droz) who has been attending well beyond the norm; jocks; thesis cheating, and core to the tale, a social struggle between the honest underdogs (The Pit) and the preppy elitists (lead admirably by David Spade, the Reaganite leader of Balls and Shaft, the underground fraternity plotting to get their frathouse back from The Pit).
I won't go much into the dynamics of the struggle except to say it is mildly amusing and a little bit too convenient to the plot-line. The highlight of the movie is a young Jon Favreau playing a grungey space-case music major by the name of Gutter, and the beautifully shot pastel and tie-dye stoner culture that was the early 90s.
While not exactly a stoner movie, per se, PCU has elements of stoner activity in the Bill & Tedish air-heads (Dave & Dave) from The Pit and the campus pot-heads who spend their days playing Frisbee football, with a dog named Blotter. An awesome scene is the pre-Swingers Jon Favreau, epitomizing the mentally challenged on a fool's mission, when on his was to get the beer for the house party, and gets detoured after a couple of huge bong hits with the tie-dye set.
Wasted, and on his way to buy kegs in town, an older woman on the street walks up to him and asks "Can you blow me where the pampers is?" He looks at her dazed (photo, top), and she repeats the request, on the third time saying "Can you show me where the campus is?" before walking away, shaking her head in disgust.
Then transition to nighttime, waking up on the sidewalk long after the liquor store has closed, he just sits around picking his nose. Then a bus with George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic pulls up and ask Favreau's character the way to their concert, for which they have little time to get to. He tells them they'll never make their concert and they agree to give him a lift to the house... Ultimately, Gutter inadvertently saves the day, when predictably, they agree to play at the party (a mediocre performance if you ask me) and raise the funds to save the slacker house.
All in all a fun movie worth the price, if for anything just to reminisce about life back in the days when the greatest threat to Homeland Security was a 2LiveCrew album, and political correctness changed the face of America.
Best quote of the movie? When Droz says to Gutter, "... what is this, you are going to wear THIS to the show ... you are going to wear the shirt of the band you are going to see ... don't be that guy ..." classic!
David Lynch, the famous cult director, writer and painter, visited Prague, Czech Republic in June 1996 together with his "family" music composer Angelo Badalamenti to make recording of the music sound [ ... ]
Join Low Po-Yu as she speaks to creators of a new reality TV series that celebrates Phuket's recovery by completing the world's hardest triathlon there!
The first image from Source Code, the new film from Moon director Duncan Jones, has appeared online. It's not a staggeringly exciting photo, but it does show Jake Gyllenhaal in character and dual-wielding a gun and cell phone. What's really going on there? No idea. We know the actor plays a soldier who is brought into a government program designed to investigate terrorism; Gyllenhaal's consciousness is placed into the body of a civilian who experienced a terrorist bombing, and he must live through repetitions of the event to find out who was responsible.
The image is scanned from the latest issue of Empire (scan via Film Source Code) which also reveals that a March 11, 2011 release date has been set for the film, at least in the UK. Jones recently said that his edit was complete and the visual effects were underway and a composer being chosen. He estimated a ...
Every September, a small rustic mountain ski town in Colorado becomes host to one of the most elite film festivals in North America -- The Telluride Film Festival.
My friend Alex Billington of FirstShowing has a theory that most of the good film festivals are hard to get to. Alex's theory is that to see the good films first, you really need to work for it. To attend Sundance, you need to fly into Salt Lake City and drive an hour into the Park City. To attend the Cannes Film Festival, you have to fly into Paris and take a six hour train ride into Cannes.
Unless you take the expensive plane that Hollywood studio types charter directly into the small small airport in Montrose and take a one hour shuttle into Telluride, then you're flying into Denver, taking a very small plane into a very small airport in Durango (this is ...
I wasn't too broken up about what happened to Newt, Pixar's now defunct tale about two newts who can't stand each other and then (presumably) fall in love. The premise just sounded too bluntly familiar, and not up to caliber we've come to expect from the studio that brought us Wall-E and Up. When they canceled the project, I took that as confirmation that my initial response was more than me just being overly cynical.
Now that I've seen the concept art for the film though, I take it all back. I don't care how unoriginal the story is, I want to see this movie.
The art was released on Disney/Pixar's Facebook page, which noted that even though the project was no longer in development, "that doesn't mean we can't share some of the Pixar artists' amazing artwork with our Facebook fans".
If nothing else, Newt had the potential to be Pixar's most ...
After being betrayed by the organization who hired him, an ex-Federale (Trejo) launches a brutal rampage of revenge against the people who double-crossed him.
Buzz:
Historically, Labor Day tends to be a snoozefest in terms of new releases, but not this year, since Robert Rodriguez's long-awaited Planet Terror spin-off is finally set for release, in the wake of The Expendables' success, no less ... Danny Trejo's knife-wielding character was generating his own folklore, as it appeared the project was just another one of Rodriguez's great genre ideas, but everything came together in mid-2009 as cameras rolled that July in Austin. We're psyched for the Lindsay Lohanness, but really we're primed for more Cherry Darling and Jessica Alba playing opposing twin sisters. We hope the franchise talk -- both Rodriguez and Trejo have a trilogy in mind -- comes to fruition. Can we start to dream about Sin City 2 again?
An assassin hiding out in an Italian village while he anticipates his last-ever assignment tempts fate by seeking out the friendship of a priest (Bonacelli) as well as the affection of a local woman (Placido).
Buzz:
Renown music-video director Anton Corbijn created an art-scene frenzy with his Joy Division biography, Control, back in 2007/08. Without any intended irony, we love that this production is so non-American (Hollywood) in its casting. All of the players surrounding Clooney should vie for the spotlight here, especially Thekla Reuten (if you've seen In Bruges, you'll know who she is) and the sensation-causing Violante Placido. Meanwhile, screenwriter Rowan Joffe has our attention, but more so for another 2010 film, Brighton Rock, his adaptation of Graham Greene's novel, which also finds him making his debut as director.
Pro football player Pat Tillman left the NFL to enlist in the U.S. Army after 9/11. Upon his death two years later, the U.S. military opted to reward him with the Purple Heart and other posthumous honors; meanwhile, his family set out to reveal the truth behind the events that claimed his life.
Buzz:
Amir Bar-Lev (director of My Kid Could Paint That, producer of Trouble the Water) quickly is becoming a premiere documentarian -- though he's looking to make the jump to features with a Jerry Garcia biopic as his potential next project. We'll see what next step he takes after Tillman wins the Best Documentary Oscar. We're predicting the victory now! It'll battle it out with Restrepo.
A romantic comedy centered on a guy (Long) and a gal (Barrymore) who try to keep their love alive as they shuttle back and forth between Chicago and Los Angeles to see one another.
Buzz:
Drew Barrymore and Justin Long's on/off/on romance is like a real-life Paper Heart. Maybe that's what attracted documentarian Nanette Burstein (American Teen, The Kid Stays in the Picture) to make the jump to feature filmmaking.
In the second half of this biopic, internationally known criminal Jacques Mesrine (Cassel) returns to France to stand trial. What follows is an incredible true story of courtroom escapes, imprisonment, the publishing of his memoirs, reinvention, and ultimate downfall.
Buzz:
Mesrine: Killer Instinct was the highest grossing specialty release in its debut frame, and distributor Music Box Films keeps us interested by releasing part two a mere week later.
The owner of a Chinese noodle shop's scheme to murder his adulterous wife and her lover goes awry.
Buzz:
Unfortunately, renown director Yimou Zhang's remake of Blood Simple. initially has been received as well as Joel and Ethan Coen's version of The Ladykillers. We'll still see it, but our eyes are on the filmmaker's next project, The Love of the Hawthorn Tree.
An alcoholic, has-been coach (Rockwell) is given a second chance when he's asked to run his local high school's girls basketball team.
Buzz:
Writer-director James C. Strouse's unexpected follow-up to Grace Is Gone is an alumnus of Sundance's Class of '99, when Moon was the Sam Rockwell movie to see and co-star Rooney Mara probably had yet to hear of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I imagine the young actresses here benefitted from a Rockwell clinic; he is, after all, the Lebron James of acting (minus the unappealing ego).
Elvis (Nkosi) sets off from Johannesburg to travel the hundreds of miles that lie between him and his bride to be. Stopping first in Durban to pick up his best man (Seiphemo), their road trip goes off-track, and they pick up an English doctor (Whittaker) who questions the institution of marriage.
Buzz:
I'm somewhat surprised this road movie didn't travel more of the festival circuit in the U.S., it radiates the term "crowd-pleaser".
A family embarks on an annual tormenting journey along with 200 other million peasant workers to reunite with their distant family.
Buzz:
Lixin Fan was one of the producers of the excellent documentary Up the Yangtze and here he makes his directorial debut, another look at China as an emerging superpower. Read Slant Magazine's review.
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while failing to tread any new ground except as a moment of the zeitgeist in which it was created. We're talking of course about 1994, which was sort of the year that the Reagan Era (Error?) ended, and Political Correctness was enjoying its zenith in the cultural mindset.
Jon Favreau, epitomizing the mentally challenged on a fool's mission, when on his was to get the beer for the house party, and gets detoured after a couple of huge bong hits with the tie-dye set.
