Coming attractions
The Catholic horror genre.
By Vadim Rizov on 11/16/2009
Filed under: Coming attractions
Being unreasonably easy to scare, I'm a soft touch when it comes to horror movies and basically refuse to have anything to do with them at this point, but "The Exorcist" is one movie that's never bugged me. But it has scared the hell (heh) out of every Catholic I know; it's the rare horror movie (theoretically) deriving its scares from the potential of blasphemy instead of either creepy atmosphere or sudden jolts. So it's bemusing that William Peter Blatty and William Friedkin may go back to the well once more, rejiggering the original "Exorcist" as a miniseries. This seems... MORE »
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Brother vs. brother: Zucker fight.
By Vadim Rizov on 11/13/2009
Filed under: Coming attractions
Greenpeace is a good organization that's kind of itchily annoying, the same way a college activist getting you to sign a worthy petition is -- a point driven home quite literally when Bruce Willis was whacking activists with golf balls from his oil rig in "Armageddon." That image might be a good one to keep in mind when reading the news that arch-hack Jon Turteltaub ("National Treasure," "Phenomenon," "Cool Runnings," "3 Ninjas" -- a résumé to set your heart a-flutter) is all set to go on a biopic of the nascent Greenpeace movement of the '70s and early '80s: get... MORE »
The brothers who brought you "Bad Lieutenant."
By Stephen Saito on 11/13/2009
Filed under: Coming attractions
Alan Polsky wanted to tell me a story about how Werner Herzog held a gun to his head and shattered his brother Gabe's eye socket with the butt of the pistol in the middle of shooting "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans," but that was just wishful thinking. "We wanted things to go crazy so that we could tell great on-set stories like [the ones] in Herzog's history," Alan said. "But unfortunately, we don't have any ones like that." If true, the actual production would be the dullest part of "Bad Lieutenant," one of the weirdest and most indelible... MORE »
The many Middle Eastern faces of Ben Kingsley.
By Vadim Rizov on 11/12/2009
Filed under: Coming attractions
In his long and storied career, Sir Ben Kingsley has played Lenin, Dmitri Shostakovich, Simon Wiesenthal, Meyer Lansky, Moses and Sweeney Todd. Thanks to his half-Indian background, he's also frequently been a go-to generic Middle Easterner: one of his first parts was as a Pakistani cab-driver in Mike Leigh's 1973 TV movie "Hard Labour," Mohandas K. Gandhi in, uh, "Gandhi," and -- of course -- Guru Tugginmypudha in "The Love Guru." Now, he's back to the well once more for "Taj," playing Shah Jahan, the 17th-century Indian Mughal emperor "best known," as Variety puts it, "for building the Taj Mahal"... MORE »
"Monopoly" as bad advertising.
By Vadim Rizov on 11/12/2009
Filed under: Coming attractions
There's too many stupid movies these days based on comics, video and board games and theme park rides, but I'll skip the dearth of originality preamble and, well, just pass go and collect $200. That's because there's a new movie based on "Monopoly" in the pipeline and there's not a thing you can do about it. Suck it up. For the edification of the Los Angeles Times' Geoff Boucher, writer Frank Beddor explains how Ridley Scott came to be attached: it was all thanks to the originality and hypnotic qualities of Beddor's scenario. He "created" a "lovable loser" (the first... MORE »
"Nailed" is back, Tony Kaye is probably not.
By Vadim Rizov on 11/05/2009
Filed under: Coming attractions
David O. Russell ("I Heart Huckabees") and Tony Kaye ("American History X") are both fearsomely talented directors and, from most accounts, extremely difficult human beings; their projects attract trouble on a regular basis. Both had the bad luck to get tied up with Capitol Films when the company imploded. It's a complicated saga, but essentially Capitol heads David Bergstein and Ron Tutor owe a lot of people money and are trying to sell their remaining movies even though some of them are now owned by a different company. And their financial problems are far from over. Russell's "Nailed," a political... MORE »
Rewriting the heartland: "Fargo Rock City."
By Vadim Rizov on 10/23/2009
Filed under: Coming attractions
Chuck Klosterman's "Fargo Rock City" might be my favorite book about music, because it does the one thing great music writing should do: it sucks you in even if you don't care about the actual tunes at hand. In my case, I could care less about the collected musical legacies of Tesla and Cinderella, but Klosterman's book presents his beloved '80s hair metal through irresistible compact sketches of his rural North Dakotan upbringing. "Fargo Rock City" seems unfilmable: it's all Klosterman explaining what the music meant to him, without stand-alone anecdotes. But that isn't going to stop "Letterman" writer Tom... MORE »
Amelia Earhart: Fashion pioneer, lousy pilot?
By Vadim Rizov on 10/22/2009
Filed under: Coming attractions
"Amelia" looks like the kind of splashy biopic that might as well come with the title suffix "Oscar Bait," but the reviews are rolling in, and it's looking like the awards thing won't be happening. All the cultural activity surrounding "Amelia" is turning out to be more interesting than the movie itself. Tuesday's premiere party was held at Bloomingdale's in New York; the department store chain is pushing the "Amelia look" at nine locations across the country. It sounds daffy to me, but Cinetic's Matt Dentler thinks it's a good idea, "considering that a huge demographic for the film (older... MORE »
"Jane Eyre," round 16.
By Vadim Rizov on 10/21/2009
Filed under: Coming attractions
"Sin Nombre" director Cary Fukunaga is in "advanced negotiations" to direct a new "Jane Eyre," according to Variety. Which makes perfect sense, since there've only been 15 previous film adaptations and near as many TV versions, in addition to all of the ballets, musicals and operas. And it's been three whole years since the BBC last "Eyre"d itself. And why not have a guy who directed a gritty border-crossing drama take a whack at it? What is the enduring cinematic appeal of "Jane Eyre"? Why are we destined to see a new version at least twice a decade? Why is... MORE »
What we learned from the "Fantastic Mr. Fox" junket.
By Vadim Rizov on 10/16/2009
Filed under: Coming attractions
Wes Anderson's "Fantastic Mr. Fox" had its world premiere at the London Film Festival this week. A boatload of reporters were there -- 250 print, 35 broadcast/online -- some on 20th Century Fox's dime. After wading through the many reports, here's what I've learned: The London Film Festival is becoming a bigger deal. Its budget has been increased by $3 million from last year, which means it has the power to fly in more journalists for such events, which means more media coverage, which means more people to take the festival seriously as a launching pad for European advertising and... MORE »
Richard Kelly, website auteur.
By Vadim Rizov on 10/14/2009
Filed under: Coming attractions
Richard Kelly might be one for two in terms of the movies he's had in theaters so far, with "Donnie Darko" arguably the only real cult classic of the decade and "Southland Tales"... not. But one thing he has been consistent with are the dense, enigmatic websites that support his films. "The Box," his third feature, opens November 9th, and the full-on Flash-powered head game of a website went live last week, a fitting follow-up to the mind-bending online homes of "Donnie Darko" and "Southland Tales." All of these sites demand immersion and ask you to ignore your usual browser... MORE »
A kids' movie that's not for kids.
By Vadim Rizov on 10/12/2009
Filed under: Coming attractions
Anne Thompson at indieWIRE believes "Where The Wild Things Are" is too expensive to succeed commercially, and I think she's probably right. Standard movie math says a studio film needs to gross two and a half times its budget before it can start being profitable; in that case, "Where The Wild Things Are" would need to make $250 million just to break even, which is a hell of a lot for a seriously weird movie with something for everyone but not enough of anything to satisfy anyone. But apparently to dare to imply that "Where The Wild Things Are" won't... MORE »
Star Trek II: The Wrath of the Allegory.
By Vadim Rizov on 09/16/2009
Filed under: Coming attractions
As someone who dug the way this year's "Star Trek" reboot dug up memories from a few years of a wasted youth (let's not talk about it), I'm none too thrilled at this piece in the LA Times that suggests that for the sequel, J.J. Abrams & co. are considering adding topical political allegory. Co-writer Robert Orci says that in post-release interviews with "the fans," a phrase that came up a lot was "Make sure the next one deals with modern-day issues." Boucher inquired if that meant "Starfleet grappling with the ethics of torture or dealing with a rising terrorist... MORE »
There & Back: Diablo Cody.
By Vadim Rizov on 09/11/2009
Filed under: Coming attractions
Unless she changes her schtick, Diablo Cody, last year's fresh face of screenwriting success, could become next year's Shane Black or Joe Eszterhas, screenwriters who were briefly brand names until too many of their films tanked. In Cody's case, the rise/fall cycle's accelerated by the way she served as the main talking point related to "Juno." With a stripper backstory and a pin-up girl tattoo, she was a journalist's dream, shot to fame fast, and just as quickly sparked a backlash and sophomore slump anticipation. Five months ago, the New York Times was profiling Cody and her posse as the... MORE »
Steven Soderbergh perks up...?
By Vadim Rizov on 09/11/2009
Filed under: Coming attractions
It's been a rough summer for Steven Soderbergh. "The Girlfriend Experience" folded domestically at under a million. "Che," despite netting $2.5 million in the U.S., barely made back half its reported $58 million budget worldwide. And, despite best-selling source material and Brad Pitt set to star, "Moneyball" collapsed a mere three days before shooting was supposed to start. An upcoming Vanity Fair feature will supposedly vindicate Soderbergh from studio charges of irresponsibility, but at the time, in late July, it looked as if his career of hopscotching between indie and studio work was in jeopardy. In a despairing interview with... MORE »
Hugo Chávez's "Repo Man" sequel.
By Vadim Rizov on 09/09/2009
Filed under: Coming attractions
I'm among those who was intrigued by the prospect of "Repo Chick," Alex Cox's sorta-sequel to his 1984 cult favorite "Repo Man." The film premiered last night at Venice, and alas, Leslie Felperin's Variety review is in and not so hot. Felperin deems the film a patchy, occasionally amusing mess, "what you would get if Michael Moore directed an episode of Nick Jr. kiddie series 'Lazy Town,' " though halfway through it does turn into a mock thriller. "The terrorists' ultimate demands," she summarizes with an admirably straight face, "are for the President of the United States to close all... MORE »
Celebrating Labor Day with Michael Moore.
By Vadim Rizov on 09/07/2009
Filed under: Coming attractions, Festivals
Happy Labor Day! Here, let Michael Moore make you feel better about working. Most of us, now more than ever, would prefer not to lose our jobs; Moore, on the other hand, views permanently severing himself from his financiers as something to be desired. As Arifa Akbar reports from the Venice Film Festival in The Independent, Moore mocked Paramount for funding his latest film, "Capitalism: A Love Story," saying, "Why would these companies give money to me, a guy who is diametrically opposed to everything they stand for?" Furthermore, he's had a grand plan ever since "Sicko" to save up... MORE »
Werner Herzog and Abel Ferrara want to know who's "Bad."
By Vadim Rizov on 09/04/2009
Filed under: Coming attractions
So the long-awaited "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans" -- the Werner Herzog movie whose absurdist trailer has been an Internet favorite for months now -- is finally dropping at the Venice and Telluride festivals and, predictably, people are generally underwhelmed. This is what happens when people more familiar with Herzog's reputation than his frequently uneven work get something less consistently outrageous than they expected and -- okay, maybe it's not all that. (Though I doubt it.) As a result, the media narrative is shifting back one last time to the Herzog-Abel Ferrara feud. You know the deal: Ferrara... MORE »
Tyler Perry resurrects theater history.
By Vadim Rizov on 09/04/2009
Filed under: Coming attractions
Although Tyler Perry's movies are wildly successful financially -- $400 million worldwide and counting on negligible budgets -- critical interest has been specialized, prone to esoteric theorizing and reactions generally erring on the side of baffled incomprehension at best. Like Pixar, every Perry movie is predicted to flop before release, but he almost always triumphs; his budgets are so low he's never had an outright flop. Critically, though, his respect level is about zero: his out-of-nowhere debut "Diary Of A Mad Black Woman" made $50.6 million and received a 16 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Reactions have been slightly... MORE »
Spike Jonze, Jason Reitman and the fearsome third.
By Vadim Rizov on 09/03/2009
Filed under: Coming attractions
There's two good profiles published in the last few days about polar opposite Great White Hopes of Hollywood film. The New York Times profiles Spike Jonze in anticipation of his adaptation of Maurice Sendak's "Where The Wild Things Are"; Anthony Breznican tackles Jason Reitman for USA Today in advance of "Up In The Air"'s premiere in Toronto. As befits the man, the Reitman profile is competent and occasionally absorbing, but basically pedestrian; Saki Knafo's take on Jonze is a great piece -- if you think Jonze is a major American auteur, it'll be the major piece to refer to in... MORE »
Mike Judge, conservative hero
By Vadim Rizov on 09/02/2009
Filed under: Coming attractions
Since he created "Beavis & Butthead" and made "Idiocracy," Mike Judge is pretty much one of my favorite people around. But he is also an unlikely conservative hero, something I wasn't aware of until "The Goode Family" dropped. It was then that my personal favorite insane right-wing site Big Hollywood started championing Judge as a True Conservative Artist, something that wasn't so clear during the "Beavis & Butthead" era. Big Hollywood's basic tenets are simple: Hollywood is run by stupid liberals enforcing a strict blacklist on conservatives. Barack Obama is a Marxist who may not have been born in this... MORE »
"Chloe" and Canadians
By Vadim Rizov on 08/31/2009
Filed under: Coming attractions
The Toronto International Film Festival starts next Thursday! September 10! Who's excited? Well, you should be: even if you (like me) can't attend, Toronto unveils much of what devoted filmgoers can look forward to over the next half-year or so. I'll be keeping an eye on the festival's high-profile premieres (and perhaps even more so the low-profile ones, where surprising gems can emerge with little notice). But now it's Monday morning and the salivatory pre-coverage is already flowing, so let's start with the best film piece I read this weekend, Katrina Onstad's profile in The New York Times on the... MORE »
"Up In The Air" could be this decade's "Fight Club."
By Vadim Rizov on 08/26/2009
Filed under: Coming attractions
Stills from "Up in the Air," the new film from Jason "Juno" Reitman, have been gathered over at the Playlist, and while I'm not usually into the tea-leaf reading that occurs when an anticipated upcoming movie releases things like this, I'll take any excuse to write about an adaptation I've been anticipating for almost a decade -- one whose meaning has almost completely shifted. Walter Kirn's novel "Up in the Air" dropped in the summer of 2001, a more innocent age, to high sales and acclaim. It follows Ryan Bingham, "career transition counselor" (he fires people) and air-travel veteran, who... MORE »
John Boorman, sinner and sinned against.
By Vadim Rizov on 08/21/2009
Filed under: Coming attractions
It seems like every day brings ever more remake announcements. The entire internet is frothing at the mouth with ongoing discussions about childhoods being metaphorically raped and the point of it all. Most notable this week was the outcry when it was reported that Robert Zemeckis and Disney are in negotiations about a 3-D motion-capture animated version of "Yellow Submarine." It's not like there's anything sacred about "Yellow Submarine," a perfectly fun movie with lots of cool visuals, bad puns and surrealist logic. How could it be tarnished with a remake that ups the eye candy factor? The director of... MORE »
Why can't Justin Timberlake get a hit?
By Stephen Saito on 08/21/2009
Filed under: Coming attractions
Ben Stiller isn't the only big name with a movie getting dumped this month. Next week, Anchor Bay Entertainment will unceremoniously release "The Open Road," a dramedy starring Justin Timberlake as a minor league ballplayer trying to reconnect with his far more famous pop (Jeff Bridges) in order to fulfill his mother's dying wish. Since Anchor Bay's comparably well-promoted "Spread" with Ashton Kutcher tanked at the box office last weekend, they won't probably waste any time whisking "The Open Road" in and out of theaters before an inevitable DVD release. It's unlikely Timberlake will shed any tears over this latest... MORE »
One last refrain for Japanese horror.
By Alison Willmore on 08/20/2009
Filed under: Coming attractions
The next film from director Takashi Shimizu (of "The Grudge," its sequels, its American remake and its sequel) will be "about a haunted song that drives its listeners to suicide," according to Variety. Aside from its signature long-haired ghost women, what's distinguished recent J-horror has been its way of drawing scares out of the mundane and unexpectedly modern. That said, it's hard not to see this announcement as something of a nadir for a genre that's been in a rut for a few years now. Will this haunted song be available on iTunes? $.99 or $1.29? What would turn up... MORE »
Transcendence and world peace through explosions.
By Vadim Rizov on 08/20/2009
Filed under: Coming attractions
Perhaps you've heard -- the "Avatar" trailer has arrived. And I'd call it a canny, good-looking piece of work; if you're going to market a 3-D IMAX event movie with a 2-D trailer, this is the way to do it. By this point, you're either a) awaiting "Avatar" with every fiber of your existence b) sick and tired of hearing about the damn thing c) don't know what this is all about. And despite the fanboy hype, I suspect c) is more common than Fox would like (they've sold the geeks; now they just need to sell the rest of... MORE »
All your questions about George Hamilton will be answered.
By Vadim Rizov on 08/17/2009
Filed under: Coming attractions
Blessed with an absolute lack of self-awareness, George Hamilton has been America's favorite actor/tanner for near on 50 years now, even if his currency as a pop-culture punchline expired in the late '70s, in a series of "Doonesbury" strips where he mentored Zonker Harris on the art of bronzing. But he perseveres. Last year he graced the world with his autobiography "Don't Mind If I Do," and Friday viewers everywhere will get a chance to see his dramatized teenage years. "My One And Only" stars the perma-hapless Renée Zellweger as George's mother, gallivanting across the country in search of the... MORE »
Who will celebrate "Avatar Day"?
By Stephen Saito on 08/14/2009
Filed under: Coming attractions
There was polite applause at Comic-Con when James Cameron showed footage for "Avatar" -- it was neither the rapturous reception that some would have you believe, nor was it the kind of disaster that one could easily imagine when a crowd's introduced to blue, ten foot tall blue, speckled creatures called the Na'vi from a planet named Pandora. Sitting there in Hall H, I wondered why there wasn't more acclaim -- what Cameron had shown in 3-D was indeed something of a breakthrough, at least regarding how naturalistic the Na'vi were in an environment that completely came out of Cameron's... MORE »
Quentin Tarantino makes war fun again.
By Vadim Rizov on 08/14/2009
Filed under: Coming attractions
Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds" comes out next Friday, but the deluge of negative advance press seems to indicate we should be bored already. Quentin! Always with the talking and the self-indulgence and the references. He doesn't make it easy on himself; unlike Wes Anderson, who went from bad-haircut-geek to styled-out, blazer-wearing fashion template in under a decade, Tarantino hasn't learned anything about dealing with the press over his career. He's still prone to telling people what a great writer he is, which never helps. Because "Basterds" has been gestating and promised for an eternity (remember when Adam Sandler was going... MORE »
Lego: The Motion Picture.
By Vadim Rizov on 08/12/2009
Filed under: Coming attractions
Every time a new ill-conceived attempt at turning a board/video game into a movie is announced, the internet wails "WHY, GOD, WHY?!" And a story this morning is sure to raise that chorus. First they came for the Transformers; then Hasbro cashed in on G.I. Joe, which the world apparently has accepted with gratitude. But... what's that, now? You don't care for these aggressive relics of the American military-industrial complex? Pacifist Danes to the rescue! Yes, Lego is coming to a screen near you. Variety brings the news: Dan and Kevin Hageman, who've yet to have a movie in theaters... MORE »
Disney: Pillaging Russian fairy tales since 2009.
By Vadim Rizov on 08/10/2009
Filed under: Coming attractions
Never mind that 2008's animated Bollywood venture "Roadside Romeo" was a flop -- the Mouse House is now taking the plunge into its first Russian production. "Kniga Masterov" (The Book of Masters) is an expensive-looking live-action, CGI-enhanced fantasy family flick made on the cheap -- $7 million, according to a Variety report from last year. The folktale-based film's a co-production between Disney and much-lauded actor/director Nikita Mikhalkov's production company, which, depending on which English version of their name you run with, is called either Three-T or the unfortunate Studio Trite. Here's the trailer, which just surfaced online: My Russian's not... MORE »
"I'm going to Bollywood!"
By Alison Willmore on 11/25/2008
Filed under: Coming attractionsPaul Schrader, who actually has a movie coming out this year -- "Adam Resurrected," whose circus/Holocaust combo dooms it to "The Day the Clown Cried" associations -- is going with the latest trend and heading to Bollywood. "I've been getting indie movies made for 20 years," he told the Hollywood Reporter. "But I take a good look around and what I see is a barren, barren place -- in terms of the financial community, in terms of audiences, in terms of distribution. It's cold out there." But it's warm and friendly in Mumbai! "Extreme City," his project, will apparently be... MORE »
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