Film

Friday, November 6, 2009

Method Man Starring in 3D Movie About Life in the 'Hood

Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 3:32 PM

Method Man in 3D
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Shoalin Island rapper Method Man—who last made headlines when he was arrested for owing the IRS $33,000—is set to star in something called The Mortician. There's very little information available regarding the film, but it's apparently a 3D movie being written and directed by Gareth Maxwell Roberts about growing up in the ghetto. IMDb claims it will be a thriller shot in Louisiana slated for release in 2010, and did I mention it's going to be in 3D?

Given the most frequently recurring motifs in Meth's music and his various screen roles to date, I think we know what to expect from The Mortician: 3D bongs, 3D joints and 3D gunfights. I hope he really gets into the role and grows back the dreadlocks he wore at the beginning of his career. Also, the choppy fronts he's wearing in the image at right. Now that would be thrilling in 3D! (HipHopWired)

Tags: , , , ,

Your Apparently Christmas-season Weekend at the Movies

Posted by Jesse Hassenger on Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 9:15 AM

Wow! Five different movies that I would totally go see at some point, all coming out in a single weekend. This obviously can't last all month; you should probably save one or two of these for New Moon weekend.

The Box: When I first heard that Richard Kelly of Donnie Darko and Southland Tales was adapting a Richard Matheson short story that had also been a Twilight Zone episode, it all seemed strangely simple. Why would Kelly, whose two movies have so entertainingly (if puzzlingly) overflowed with insane ideas, focus so intently on a story that can apparently be told in under an hour? According to the trailer, the answer is apparently that a simple short story provides a study handle from which to fly off. Kelly's version of the story, in which a financially strapped couple is given the option of pressing a button that will anonymously murder a strange for a payment of one million dollars, seems to go off in his customary crazy-ass directions, with a half-faced Frank Langella and lots of dead-eyed minions and a chilling Cameron Diaz attempt at a Southern accent (that said, she's an underrated actress). Obviously I am way on board. [Jesse, you will not be disappointed, which is to say good luck being this cogent about the movie after you've actually seen the damn thing. -Ed.]

Continue reading »

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Thursday, November 5, 2009

In Defense of White Movie Critics

Posted by Mark Asch on Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 3:10 PM

precious.jpg
Now, nobody hates white people more than I do (that I know of). But in his cover-story pan of Precious this week, the New York Press's Armond White makes nameless caucasian film critics and audience members into straw men in a way that's both problematic and inaccurate. Which is a shame, because he's also spot-on about why Precious is a much worse movie than many reviewers seem willing to let on, and about the inadvertent condescension in their liberal-guilty reviews.

Here's some great selections from the barrage he unleashes on the movie:

Continue reading »

Tags: , , , , , ,

So a drifter, a prostitute, a priest, a miner, and his deaf-mute daughter walk into a South American jungle...

Posted by Cullen Gallagher on Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 1:05 PM

death_in_the_garden.jpg
A drifter, a prostitute, a priest, a miner, and his deaf-mute daughter walk into a South American jungle. It sounds like the start of a joke, but it happens to be the set-up for Luis Buñuel's anti-colonialist adventure-satire Death in the Garden (1956), just out on DVD from Microcinema International. When Chark (Georges Marchal, of Buñuel's Belle de Jour and The Milky Way) stumbles through a town square past a firing squad, he finds himself in the midst of a revolution. Martial law has shut down the local mine, but its workers refuse to leave without a fight. With violence escalating and Chark and the miner Castin (Charles Vanel, of Clouzot's Diabolique and The Wages of Fear) wanted by the police, the disparate group takes to the jungle in hopes of escaping to Brazil.

Buñuel frequently uses stories of survival (or the lack thereof) as political commentary, and though his targets have spanned the gamut of social classes, his favorite victim by far is the bourgeoisie. Whether it is the party guests that can't even manage to sit down to dinner in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) or the manage to leave the living room in The Exterminating Angel (1962), Buñuel makes clear their lack of resourcefulness even within the limits of their own domain. If they can't survive in the deceptive comfort of their own homes, how could they possibly last out in the jungle, with no food, no guide, no map, and the military on their trail? Therein lies Buñuel's straight-faced humor: taking the adventure scenario absolutely seriously adds to the subversive undercurrents.

Continue reading »

Tags: , , ,

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Was a Crowd of Trench-Coated Men Standing Outside Your Window Brandishing Boomboxes Yesterday?

Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 4:42 PM

Lloyd Dobler Flash Mob

According to Cinematical, a Lloyd Dobler flash mob took to the streets of Manhattan yesterday to promote the release of the 20th anniversary DVD of Say Antyhing—which, you may recall, played a crucial role in the development of late-80s blockbuster cinema. That's them posing dramatically on the steps of the Farley Post Office on Eighth Avenue, though you might have also spotted them looking for love in Washington Square Park, Rockefeller Center, Times Square or Union Square. I hope that when the 15th anniversary edition of Kazaam finally comes out (two years and counting!) there's a similarly awesome guerrilla marketing campaign.

Tags: , , , , , ,

Rhino, elephants, buffalo... and John Wayne

Posted by Miriam Bale on Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 8:48 AM

hatari_scene_04.jpg
Hatari!, which plays tonight at BAM, is an experimental film, and a dare. "So you think you're a director?" Hawks seems to be asking. Well, why don't you try and throw herds of zebras, giraffes, monkeys, baby elephants and more uncontrollable animals into the mix with a Benetton ad motley crew of mediocre actors with indeterminate accents, plus John Wayne, and from that make a controlled casual masterpiece, perhaps the most Hawksian film of all. All the dialogue is purely rhythmic, conveying little character or story—instead it just glides the riveting action along. In fact, there's only one character, the group, and the main narrative tension is in breaking in the new girl, a high strung Italian named D'Allesandro (so Dallas, natch) into the group's rhythms and codes. As Waynes sums up, "Rhino, elephants, buffalo... and a greenhorn."

Tags: , , ,

Friday, October 30, 2009

That Character in the Wheelchair? It's You.

Posted by Henry Stewart on Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 5:33 PM

f13wheelchair.jpg
Any horror movie worth its celluloid needs to produce a visceral response in the viewer. And, because these films are thus so concerned with the relationship between the seat-filler and the image, horror movies, more than any other genre, regularly explore issues of spectatorship.

This has been especially true lately: as I wrote in my review of A Perfect Getaway, “each in their own way, to varying degrees of success, Vacancy, Cloverfield, Diary of the Dead and Quarantine have [grappled with] the relationship between the camera and the viewer, between screen and spectator.” (Add to that Paranormal Activity and the superlative French thriller Them.) But it’s also been the case for decades, though perhaps in a less conspicuous manner.

One motif that runs, historically, through the horror genre is the wheelchair-bound character, who appears in films from at least the 1950s through The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), The Changeling (1980) and Bubba Ho-Tep (2002), as well as many others, some of which are discussed after the jump; more often than not, this person serves as an audience surrogate. After all, who is more like the movie watcher, stuck in their seat, than the paraplegic? Or the broken-legged?

Continue reading »

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

"Like wearing a costume directly on your brain."

Posted by Nicolas Rapold on Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 2:36 PM

house.jpg
Tomorrow, on the second day of their Halloween-timed Freak Cats series, BAM screens Nobuhiko Obayashi's 1977 curio House. A report:

Like wearing a costume directly on your brain, this New Wave-playful Japanese nutbar deserves a slot on your Halloween itinerary. Seven BFF teens named Gorgeous, Fantasy, Kung Fu, Mac, etc. visit a spooky auntie’s country house, overseen/possessed by a white Persian cat. A Beetlejuicean assortment of things come alive—chandeliers, logs, mattresses, piano—and fly around, change colors, or eat people. Best of all is the pre-Evil Dead, proto-80s-MTV filmmaking—a scissoring together of hyperventilating gloss, collaged camera effects, stop-motion, pink painted sunsets, fake wind, and oddly cut shorts. Not aiming for coherence, this occasionally scary, always on-the-edge effort was the full-length debut of a director who shot experimental reels, commercials, and eventually quite popular features.

Tags: , , , ,

Your Morbid Weekend at the Movies

Posted by Jesse Hassenger on Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 8:56 AM

thriller.jpg
This Is It: Already a moneymaker before the weekend even sets in, I can't help but read the title of the Michael Jackson rehearsal doc This Is It as a carnie-barker cry (just in time for Halloween): this is it, this is it, this is all you get of Michael 'cause he's dead, so step right up and have a gander! I know it's supposed to be a tribute to the fallen Jackson's artistry in his final days, but it skeeves me out, as does all of the trailer-and-interview blather about how Jackson and his cohorts were putting on a multijillion dollar fifty-night series of stadium concerts for l-o-v-e, world peace, and the rainforests. I'm happy to hear that Jackson wasn't a complete mess before he died; I'm just as happy not to watch the rail-thin proof that he could still shake it.

Continue reading »

Tags: , ,

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Quoth The Raven: "How the hell should I know?"

Posted by Andrew Schenker on Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 12:34 PM

The first and funnier of the two early-60s teamings of the so-called triumvirate of terror (Vincent Prince, Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff), Roger Corman's The Raven (screening tomorrow and Sunday at Anthology Film Archives as part of an extensive Corman series beginning tonight) represents the comedic center of the director's 8-film Poe cycle. While other entries in the series veer toward the humorous, with this 1963 offering, Corman places the horror setting at the strict service of the comic. Starting out in an atmosphere of dense gothic brooding, with Price intoning the opening stanzas of the eponymous poem in the study of a gloom-sealed castle, the opening's moody self-seriousness (and by extension that of the earlier films in the cycle) is quickly subjected to a rude deflationary poke. When the raven appears gently rapping at Price's chamber door (or, in this case, window), he asks the bird if he shall ever see his lost Lenore. "How the hell should I know," replies the creature, sounding suspiciously like Peter Lorre. "What am I, a fortune teller?"

Continue reading »

Tags: , , , , , , ,

A Home Video Halloween

Posted by Henry Stewart on Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 11:22 AM

Editor's note: If you're one of Henry's nine Twitter followers, you know that he's been getting himself into the Halloween spirit by watching lots of old horror movies. In this blog post, to put you in a similar frame of mind, he returns to the post-Trick or Treating, pre-drinking years of yore, when Halloween meant meeting up at whoever's parents' house had a furnished basement, drinking lots of sugary cola, and watching bad slasher movies on VHS.

Henry's born and raised in Brooklyn, of course, so these are not actually his memories. But let him join in the fun for once, won't you?

Continue reading »

Tags: , , , , ,

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Radical Poltics, Radical Filmmaking on the Streets of New York

Posted by Cullen Gallagher on Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 11:56 AM

Machetero, which screens this Thursday, Oct. 29 at the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival, is a film whose guerrilla production matches both the film's visual aesthetic and its narrative. It tells two stories concurrently: one in which imprisoned revolutionary Pedro Taino (Not4Prophet) is interviewed by a journalist (Jarmush regular Isaach De Bankolé, pictured), and the other about the political awakening of a young man (Kelvin Fernandez) on the streets of New York. As directed and written by Vagabond, Machetero's radical politics extend to the film's non-linear narrative, and its use of on-screen titles, foregrounding the revolutionary literature passed amongst the characters, as well as lyrics from the soundtrack by the NYC-based band Ricanstruction (of which Not4Prophet is the lead singer). Recently, I spoke to Vagabond about the film's intersections of art and politics.

Continue reading »

Tags: , , , , ,

Friday, October 23, 2009

What was North Carolina circa 1865 if not a massive beardo convention?

Posted by Benjamin Mercer on Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 11:59 AM

AmericanTorso.jpg
Gábor Bódy's 1975 film American Torso, a Hungarian film set at the tail end of the American Civil War, is meant to look like an artifact from an earlier time: light overtakes the screen at unpredictable intervals, the film sometimes slows and "disintegrates" into irregular shapes, and many frames have rounded daguerreotype corners. (The film will screen tonight and next Thursday at MoMA's Carte Blanche: Béla Tarr and Satantango series.) The result is not so much rustic as strangely, hypnotically psychedelic, though, especially when the light effects go strobe. And what was North Carolina circa 1865 if not a massive beardo convention?

Continue reading »

Tags: , , , , , ,

If It's Your Pre-Halloween Weekend at the Movies, This Must Be Another Goddam Saw Movie

Posted by Jesse Hassenger on Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 8:58 AM

Saw VI: Probably one of the more morally appalling things about me is that I've seen all five Saw movies in the theaters. I have a weakness for horror movies, and Tobin Bell's Jigsaw is an interesting boogeyman, despite the fact that he's been dead since Saw III. Watching these cheap, frantically made profit machines is also a stupid but enjoyable form of cultural catch-up; my interest in horror movies didn't peak until well after the heyday of the near-annual Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street movies, which I've found don't play so well on video unless they're actually pretty good (which so far has applied to zero Fridays and one to two Nightmares). Unlike the often self-contradictory slasher movies of the eighties, though, the Saw series treats its continuity with ridiculous seriousness. You're actually expected, as a viewer of a Saw movie, to remember with crystal clarity what happened in all previous Saws, because the set-up to the new movie will inevitably be that the main character was in the background of Saw IV, and the plot twist will inevitably be that the current movie is taking place concurrently with Saws II and V. Yet for movies with painstakingly maintained continuity, the Saw pictures are also hilariously slapdash in terms of actual production. It's a bundle of contradictions left in a rusty bear trap chained to an industrial corn press slowly dragging you to its metal jaws unless you can dig out the bear-trap key buried in your own upper thigh. Happy Weekend Before Halloween!

Continue reading »

Tags: , ,

Thursday, October 22, 2009

Crimes of Passion

Posted by Benjamin Mercer on Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 1:09 PM

György Fehér's muddy, grainy Postman Always Rings Twice adaptation, Passion, co-written by Béla Tarr, takes place in a mountainous Hungarian region at an indeterminate time before the Second World War. The stooped characters barely speak to each other, even before the rot of guilt sets in. As ever, the Postman story concerns a love triangle with particularly sharp points—a wife, a husband, and his much younger live-in assistant, here all unnamed—and the getting rid of the inconvenient husband. The two surviving lovers go to trial, where justice is not served. Comeuppance, though, is forthcoming.

This bleak picture, screening this afternoon and next week as part of a MoMA series curated around Tarr's seven-hour Satantango, is a must-see for any fan of Tarr's, not only for his contribution to the scenario, but for its stylistic affinities with, and pointed departures from, the austere style he has developed over the last 20 years.

Continue reading »

Tags: , , , , ,

James Cameron, the Person, Is Basically a Fake James Cameron Twitter Feed

Posted by Mark Asch on Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 12:36 PM

jamescameronriseofthemachines.jpg
Scattered below are a few quotes from and facts about James Cameron, as quoted in Dana Goodyear's profile of the director in the current New Yorker. ("For pleasure, he designs submersibles.") Interspersed with them are recent tweets from the Twitter account maintained by fake Michael Bay. Can you tell which are the Real Jim Cameron, and which are the Fake Michael Bay? Answers after the jump.

1. "I always do makeup touch-ups myself, especially for blood, wounds, and dirt. It saves so much time."

2. "If you guys have an actual pissing contest, please page me."

3. "Tell your friend he’s getting fucked in the ass, and if he would stop squirming it wouldn’t hurt so much."

4. "In my life, every week is shark week."

5. "I try to live with honor, even if it costs me millions of dollars and takes a long time."

6. "We have a big fire problem here. We take the pool water, mix it with Class A foam, and pump it out over the whole property. Everybody else just runs for the hills. 'Oh, my God!’ We sit and wait. Put on our yellow coats and our breathing gear and wait. And, you know what? It’s impressive. When these hills light up with a hundred-foot-tall wall of flames coming over the top of the hill there, you feel like it’s Armageddon."

7. "You call that a wildfire?"

8. “This film integrates my life’s achievements. It’s the most complicated stuff anyone’s ever done.”

9. "The bottom line is that I make better sandwiches than all of you."

10. "Make me eighteen feet tall."

11. "Look at the gill-like membrane on the side of the mouth, its transmission of light, all the secondary color saturation on the tongue, and that maxilla bone. I love what you did with the translucence on the teeth, and the way the quadrate bone racks the teeth forward. It’s a sharky thing. As wacky as this creature is, it looks completely real. Maybe I’m getting high on my own supply... The banshee lives! He’s a fierce-looking sonuvabitch."

12. "Mars is one of your better planets... We should ultimately have colonies on Mars... We’ve become cowards, basically. As a society, we’re just fat and happy and comfortable and we’ve lost the edge."

Continue reading »

Tags: , , , ,

Black Rain, Black Rain

Posted by Cullen Gallagher on Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 8:58 AM

blackrain.jpg
AnimEigo has replaced the murky, faded, and long unavailable DVD of Shohei Imamura's Black Rain (Kuroi ame) (1989) with a new edition boasting superior image and sound qualities, annotated subtitles (providing brief cultural context in certain scenes), and a wealth of extras (including a never-before-seen, 19-minute alternate ending). It seems grossly obvious to lump adjectives like "haunting" and "harrowing" onto Imamura's narrative about Hiroshima survivors dealing with bodily and psychological strain in the aftermath, particularly when the film is most affecting when it is least direct. The opening sequence of the bomb dropping is undeniably powerful, but the simple shot of black rain landing on a young girl's face is even more so. Restraining even reticence, Imamura cuts the shot short, limiting the possibility of catharsis through the symbolic image. What is shown on the surface is never so important as what is not, Imamura suggests throughout the movie, and that the most devastating wounds are those beyond visibility.

Continue reading »

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Now the World Knows the Story of How Robert Altman Tattooed Harry Truman's Dog

Posted by Mark Asch on Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 2:12 PM

Robert Altman Oral Biography
Appropriately, reviews of Mitchell Zuckoff's new Robert Altman: The Oral Biography are accruing into an overlapping portrait of the ornery bastard; in times like this, we turn to reviews of new biographies for anecdotes and quotes suitable for bloggy excerpt.

It's touching that Shelley Duvall used to call Altman "Pirate", and weedy, boozy testimonials from coconspirators Tim Robbins and Michael Murphy are fun but hardly surprising (neither are their unpleasant, ugly flipsides); and Altman's alluded-to affair with Faye Dunaway has apparently been a matter of public record since at least 1989—though if this comes as news to you, as it did to me, you're going to want to take a minute to really fully consider the implications here, because seriously, what?—so in looking for something new to post here we turn to Dana Stevens, at Slate, who has already taken the trouble of typing up the section of the book in which Robert Altman tattoos Harry Truman's dog.

Continue reading »

Tags: , , , ,

Carrie Musical in the Works?

Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 11:19 AM

Carrie the Musical
Over at his blog Producer's Perspective, Broadway and Off-Broadway producer Ken Davenport spent some time yesterday thinking fondly on the possibility of turning the Stephen King novel-turned Brian De Palma high school horror flop Carrie into a stage musical. And aside from the fact that it's been done once before (with disastrous results), the idea suddenly seems plausible, if not downright likely.

According to Variety, Jeffrey Seller (the Broadway producer behind the new West Side Story and In the Heights) is organizing a reading of the script, and "'composer Michael Gore, lyricist Dean Pitchford and book writer Lawrence D. Cohen' are revisiting and reworking their script." While there are still no details on when and where the reading will be (and whether it will be open to the public), it's never too soon for a round of fantasy casting. I propose Kirsten Dunst in the lead and Carrie Fisher as her mother.

Tags: , , , , , ,

Monday, October 19, 2009

Spike Jonze Short Film Makes Kanye West's Bad Temper Look Good

Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 11:22 AM

What better time than right after the release of his much-hyped Where the Wild Things Are adaptation (to expectation-exceeding box office numbers) to release Spike Jonze's much-hype short film/music video project with Kanye West, We Were Once a Fairytale. It's very beautiful and funny from the get-go, with Kanye stumbling drunkenly around a club while "See You in My Nightmares" (off 808s and Heartbreak) plays in the background. That part drags on a little, but stick around to see him projectile vomit rose petals and then pressure the evil egocentric creature inside him to commit seppuku. (TDW)

Tags: , , , , ,

Recent Comments

Most Commented On

Most Emailed Stories

Top Viewed Stories

© 2009