solace in cinema : A vast wasteland of movies

This isn’t new news, but I just picked up the official Grindhouse book (not worth the full price, but it was on sale) and it had this (above) in the back. I vaguely remember seeing smaller versions of it kicking around before when Rodriguez had talked about making ‘Machete’ into a proper feature… but going on what’s been happening lately he’d probably try and replace Danny Trejo with Rose Mcgowan.

I like Danny Trejo, I like snipers, I like men wielding Machete’s, I like crazy guns strapped to motorcycles. I want this movie inside of me.

I was going to scan the poster from my book, but ingloriousbastards saved me a job.

When the Southland Tales trailer came out the boss said:

“It still looks like a mess to me, interesting.. but a mess. I want to be proven wrong but I don’t think I will“.

I don’t mind the mess at all just as long as it doesn’t suck. I’m tired of movies foreshadowing every dumb move and then wrapping up all the loose ends just before the credits roll. I’m looking forward to Southland Tales because I want it to be as completely over the top as the trailer promises.

This New York Times piece sheds a lot of light on just how messy it sounds:

“Southland Tales” simulates the oversaturation of the 21st-century mediascape and delights in, even as it mocks, the vulgar absurdities of celebrity culture. Ms. Gellar’s character, for example, is a multitasking, politically minded sex-film star — “Jenna Jameson meets Arianna Huffington,” Mr. Kelly said — with a “View”-like talk show and a hit song called “Teen Horniness Is Not a Crime” (co-written by Mr. Kelly and to be released as a single).

Genius.

I still haven’t seen ‘The Darjeeling Limited’ (or the Darjiling as Wilson pronounces it) but our boy Marek checked it out and liked it a lot. I love Wes Anderson, but this ‘interview’ gives me the creeps. Wilson’s obviously either medicated or still fragile from his suicide attempt.. or more likely both, I keep expecting him to go “Wild Cat.. Willllllddd Catttttttt” and Anderson looks like he’s been forced into it. I could barely watch it to the end…

The films had mixed reviews and this weird piece of PR does nothing to hype the film for me… it’s just awkward.

(I saw it when TedZ over at BigScreenLittleScreen posted it)

For people who know and love the book I think the trailers for ‘I am Legend’ looked like a let down, with really nothing in common with the book except the overall concept. For genre fans or people who love Horror they also sat in the hater camp. As a fan of the book, and a massive horror fan… I think I was alone on the tundra in liking what I saw when the first trailer rolled around. This isn’t my form of an apology as I still think the first trailer looks cool, admittedly it has nothing to do with the book, but I was really digging the post-apocalyptic new york/ last man on earth vibe. Then came the second trailer…

I don’t even now how long the ‘international’ trailer has been kicking around, I saw it on a Russian site last week but it’s since vanished from there. The only place I seem to be able to find it now is on sendspace here.

Maybe this is unfinshed CGI, or maybe they used all the budget up on buying Will Smith things to do pull-ups on…. but what the fuck are those monsters/vampires/infected humans??? I’ve seen ‘Pirates of the Caribbean 3′, I saw ‘Transformers’, I saw Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix… I know it’s possible to make cool looking special effects, so what the hell is going on here? are they farming out post-production effects to schools for the blind and nobody told me?? jesus christ.

Welcome to suckville.. population Will Smith.

Grab the trailer while you can from here, if it goes down let me know.

I’m not going to call The Darjeeling Limited a return to form for Wes Anderson because ‘The Life Aquatic’ was a hugely entertaining movie. The general consensus seems to be that his previous shark-chasing Bill Murray starrer was a bit overblown and superficial, the classic ‘third album’ if you will (although his forth film). For me, it was a hugely enjoyable and stimulating hour and a half in the cinema. I sometimes feel that people forget that Wes is basically great at making very entertaining films. He is constantly being copied by other directors and his films will all only increase in acclaim in time. Why the resistance to be entertained? Horses for courses I guess.

Anyway, if you do think The Life Aquatic was self indulgent, you should like this new Indian train caper a little more. It’s an absolutely fantastic movie; smaller, tighter and with a focus on character and fractured sibling relationships. It’s a simple, but enjoyable, premise; three brothers try to get their relationship back on a spiritual journey on a train, ‘The Darjeeling Limited’. As you might suspect, it doesn’t go the way they had planned.

Darjeeling has got everything you would expect from Anderson; it looks amazing, has a fantastic soundtrack, loads of wit and wry observations, great performances and occasional, stimulating diversions from the speedy narrative. Adrien Brody is a fantastic, fresh voice to the Anderson family and he gives a poignant performance of a confused man at a turning point in his life. It’s a good old fashioned movie with quality character development married to the kind of widescreen spectacle that only cinema can provide. It’s another feast of a film from Anderson, once again clocking in at an hour and a half exactly. It was consciously a looser shoot this time and it does feel more natural than his recent work truth be told. The sexy short film with Natalie Portman (Hotel Chevalier) should be in front of prints in the UK too; a pleasure that was missed in the US (and this preview).

I love it. Day-Lewis looks creepy as hell in the trailers for Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘There will be blood’ and he seem to be able to do the same in poster form too. Well either creepy, or like he just let go of a fart, tried to hide it, but it was obvious to everyone else in the room that it was him.. but in some circles they call that acting fuckfaces.

I’m still annoyed that both ‘There will be blood’ and ‘No Country for Old Men’ aren’t playing at the London Film Festival (currently going on) although it’s rumoured that the surprise film might be PTA’s film, that always get sold out to smug BFI memebers before any of the public can get a look-in. nice.

Poster via Impawards

OK, buying dvds is a minefield. One false move and BLAM you’re sat there shitting yourself with bloody stumps where your arms used to be. Well maybe not quite that bad, but it’s still fucked. There’s a new ‘definitive’ edition of Twin Peaks being released on dvd this month. The problem being that in this case ‘definitive’ is clever Illuminati code for ‘half-arsed’.

So what these clever bastards have done is gather up all the dvd extras they can, restore the prints and locate the best mixes of the sound they can find (DTS 5.1 in this case), get a hold of the uncut pilot and dig out some commentaries… then scatter these jewels to the wind and see where they land. The result is a R1 season 1 boxset with some extras, a not great print, the commentaries, DTS sound but no pilot. A R2 boxset with the pilot included, but no DTS. A definitive edition that adds a bunch of new extras, restored prints, but loses DTS sound, loses the commentaries and loses some other extras that were on the individual season boxsets.

Congratulations, and welcome to the asshole club.

The only good thing to come out of it seems to be the above clip that accompanied the set on amazon.com titled ‘Good, hot, black coffee’. Awesome.

I need to check out the ‘Agent Cooper tapes‘ too… regain my David Lynch shaped erection.

and it still creeps the fuck out of me

I posted a link to this in the mini-review of this film below, but I think it’s worth posting directly again, because the more I remember about the documentary, the more I think how much I liked it. The trailer features a couple of excerpts of some really shocking news footage they used in the film of Police Helicopters dropping a bomb onto the roof of a house where a group of black radicals were held up (A siege the police started)

A look at the life of imprisoned political activist and former Black Panther member, Mumia Abu-Jamal, who’s death sentence for killing a police officer was overturned in 2001 due to errors made during his original 1982 sentencing hearing.

Here’s the myspace page and here’s the page where you can find out about screenings at the LFF

Book properties, comic book properties… there’s a a fair few that mean a lot to me and I don’t want to see fucked up by being made into shitty films. ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ is really … really high.. on that list if not at the top. I think Spike Jonze might just be the perfect person to direct the film, and I have a lot of faith the guy will do it justice. So Jonze is coupled with ‘Dave Eggerss’ to write the script, and apparently it’s really good.

The NYmag has this to say:

“In transforming the 338-word story of Where the Wild Things Are into a 111-page screenplay, Eggers and Jonze have fleshed out the story not, unexpectedly, with wild plot developments, and not, thankfully, with densely packed pop-fiction references. Instead Where the Wild Things Are is filled with richly imagined psychological detail, and the screenplay for this live-action film simply becomes a longer and more moving version of what Maurice Sendak’s book has always been at heart: a book about a lonely boy leaving the emotional terrain of boyhood behind.”

So with Jonze at the helm, what is supposedly a great script, and voice talent from people like Forest Whitaker, Catherine Keener and James Gandolfino they’re certainly setting it up right.

I’m trying to not get too pumped-up as it’s not released until this time next year… but sometimes I just can’t help myself.

You can read the full review over at Vulture here

I saw it over at bigscreenlittlescreen