solace in cinema : A vast wasteland of movies

I don’t want all the stories I post today to basically be embedded flash video, but this was too funny to pass up. “grrr I can play the piano”

thanks to my thug Ed for passing this along.

I’m not the biggest Harmony Korine fan, but i’m still interested in anything he puts out. We’ve talked about his new film ‘Mr Lonely’ before and finally a couple of clips have arrived online (viewable above). The sound is REALLY quiet.. just so you’re aware, I had to crank my speakers to full and even then it was barely audible.

video clips via cinemablend

I’ve mentioned ‘Babylon A.D’ before, and the fact that I was worried about the quality of it. Mathieu Kassovitz is 50/50 as a director in anyone’s book. He broke in as a director with the fantastic ‘La Haine’… then came ‘Crimson Rivers’ which was a decent thriller, but for his US debut dropped the stinker that was ‘Gothika’. I’m not sure how much you could blame him for how that film turned out as it reeked of a Halle Berry vanity piece… but regardless it made me wary that he might have lost his directorial skill as soon as he left his home country (we call this ‘The John Woo effect)

Anyways.. so Kassovitz has been working on ‘Babylon AD’ a futuristic action thriller starring Vin Diesel that seems to have been filming forever (they’re still going according to a fan myspace page… currently shooting on set in Prague), I chuckled before at the plot synopsis.. and i’ll do it again..

“Combat veteran-turned-mercenary Thoorop (Diesel) takes the high-risk job of escorting a woman from Russia to China. Little does he know that she is host to an organism that a cult wants to harvest in order to produce a genetically modified Messiah.”

heh. yeahhpp.. still funny.

So to the point of this article, some video has cropped up via a Vin Diesel Fansite that was supposedly shown to audiences in Cannes and it doesn’t look terrible. I’m still reserving judgement but i’m happier after watching the footage than I was before I’d seen it… finger crossed it’s more ‘Children of Men’ than ‘Robocop 3′

Check it out on iKlipz here

I’ve heard working on a film set is stressful, but from the looks of this clip I think that’s a total lie and the people who work on films all share a blood oath to pretend it’s hard work so they can all keep their lucrative jobs to themselves. bastards.

Robert Downey Jnr AKA Tony Stark gets to sit around talking to reporters and ride around the desert on a monkey bike, and Terrence Howard gets to sit in a humvee and fire a ridiculously large gun.

.. I need a job on a film set obviously

(clip via cinematical)

I think I saw a shorter trailer for this last January over on Twitch, and it’s taken until now for the film to sort out a distribution deal. That’s a long time in limbo for any film, especially when this looks like perfect fanboy fodder. It even stars the kid from Freaks & Geeks… playing…shockingly… a geek.

Totally on purpose the designers of the new poster for the Jason Statham/ Jet Li flick ‘War’, have ripped off the poster for 1986 Hulk Hogan film ‘No Holds Barred’…. well maybe not, but i’m gonna start propagating that rumour all around the interpipe. Talking it up in chat rooms. Whispering it in Second Life. Emailing your mum about it.

If the Hulkster new about this you could bet there would be some beatings going down, he’d stare out the graphic designer.. get in his face…destroy him mentally…then choke slam his ass.

The trailer for ‘War’ looked so bad I might dig out my old copy of ‘No Holds Barred’ on VHS and watch the Hulkinator and Zeus take it to the mat one more time instead of going anywhere near the cinema when this is released.

War poster via

Oscar’s back, bringing the smack down to ‘The Karate Kid’.. his Mum, a good friend of mine, sends me these portions of genius via email and with this one added “He made me watch the end about 10 times…”

‘It was really good I mean it was brilliant. I didn’t like the bit when the bully punched Daniel in the eye twice. On the beach when the bully came on his motorbike and destroyed the radio with this wheel. The funny part was when Daniel said to the teacher ‘Here are my buddies’ and the bullies didn’t like that and they ran away! But when the bullies chased Daniel it made me cry because that was scary. But Mr Miyadi arrived and helped the kid.

The part that is my favourite too is when Daniel does a special move and he wins and he kicks the bully’s chin and he lands on the floor. It’s a good movie because it teaches you to trick bullies because if they bully you you have to say ‘Here are my buddies’ and you take them to a tournament and do a
special sensei move.’

- Oscar (now definitely 5 years old)

Oscar doesn’t let fear exist in his dojo.. and that’s a fact.

For more genius check here

Although there’s been a bucket load of spy photography from ‘The Dark Knight’ set banded around, apart from Heath Ledger’s scarred face we’ve yet to see any official photography from the film. So this (above) image cropped up over at USA today, in an article discussing the IMAX version of ‘The Dark Knight’… and yes we’ve seen the masks before, but the image much like the Ledger one just means that we’re starting to see more from the film and hopefully come mid-summer we should see a trailer.. yay!

The article is actually an interesting read if you have 5 minutes..

The director’s sequel to Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, will become the first feature film to be partly shot in the IMAX format, an expensive and cumbersome process that typically is the province of documentaries and short films.

Nolan will shoot four action sequences — including the introduction of the Joker, played by Heath Ledger — on IMAX.

The move is one of Hollywood’s most pronounced steps yet in its embrace of IMAX theaters, which are increasingly showing commercial fare on their giant screens.

“There’s simply nothing like seeing a movie that way,” Nolan says. “It’s more immersive for the audience. I wish I could shoot the entire thing this way.”

While we’re on the subject there’s also this odd image from russian site kino-govno but it looks a hell of a lot like a photoshop job to me.

I’ll never understand why they change film names between markets, it’s often claimed that it’s because the original name doesn’t travel and the people of country X are too stupid to understand it. Personally it smells like distribution companies want to escape the bad press that their film was getting when it was released 6 months ago in the states in a vague hope of tricking some people into seeing it in a different country.

People of the UK don’t be fooled… ‘Paradise Lost’ (released this past weekend) is really a film called ‘Turistas’ ….16% on Rotten Tomatoes. Need I say more? … OK.. I’ve seen it and 16% is generous.

Here’s me getting all excited when I saw the poster in the cinema foyer thinking it was early promo art for the John Milton adaptation (was at one point rumoured to star Christian Bale, now speculation suggest Craig and Ledger are both up for the Satan role) even though it hasn’t even started filming yet… well a boy can dream can’t he?

sweeeeeeeeetttttttttttttttttttt