Category: flix

 The 65^th Venice Film Festival, which kicked off August 27^th and ends Saturday on the 6^th, is worth noting, since stars like George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Keira Knightly, Jude Law, Richard Gere, Natalie Portman, Anne Hathaway and director Jonathan Demme were in attendance this year.

Marco Muller, who is the director of this year’s show, says, “the aim of the Festival is to encourage the awareness and promotion of all the various aspects of international cinema as art, entertainment, and industry, in a spirit of freedom and tolerance.” The festival not only celebrates film, but the venue promotes shows in dance, music, theatre, architecture and visual art.

Last year’s show hit new expectations with viewings of hit Oscar nominated and award winning films Michael Clayton, Lust, Caution and The Assassination of Jesse James. This year, the Coen Brother’s film Burn After Reading opened the festival at the annual gala and Anne Hathaway promoted her new Indie film Rachel Getting Married, where she takes a turn as an emotionally unbalanced sibling of the future bride.

Famed director Jonathan Demme, known for his politically eyebrow raising films like The Silence of the Lambs, Beloved and Philadelphia returns from directing documentaries to this simple drama starring Hathaway and the long lost Debra Winger. Italian film La Rabbia also debuts, which tells the story of the murdered and well-loved “secular saint” (Guardian) Pier Paolo Pasolini, directed by Giuseppe Bertolucci.

Guillermo Arriaga’s new film The Burning Plain is meant to be rather “portentous and self important” (Guardian) and from the UK and France, Vinyan, partially produced by Film Four, stars Rufus Sewell and Emmanuelle Beart as a couple who travels to Burma in search of their lost son. From Japan, Mamoru Oshi’s film The Sky Crawlers is generating some excellent buzz.

Other countries represented in this year’s Venice Festival are Algeria, Brazil, China, Ethiopia, Germany, India, Iran, Israel, Mexico, The Philippines, Spain, Russia and Turkey. 

Two films opening this week directly follow the successful summer blockbuster season; Bangkok Dangerous, an Asian action adventure starring an aging Nicholas Cage, and opening to a limited release is Everybody Wants to Be Italian a small budget romantic comedy with an unknown cast and a hint of bite.

 Bangkok Dangerous, which is a remake of a 1999 film by the same directors and with the same title, takes place in a hectic and politically confused Thailand and Cage, sporting “hockey-player hair” (IMDB) plays the story’s hit man. Though reviews say the story would have faired better if brothers Oxide Pang and Danny Pang kept their main character as a deaf-mute, the film’s directors have quite a cult following that may help it swim. The pair directed 2007 horror film The Messengers, which bombed and early buzz is that the decision to remake the film was a commercially shameless choice on Hollywood’s part.

The plot also sounds rather uneventful, as it’s apparently about a hit man who falls in love with a girl and “bonds with his errand boy.” Is this supposed to be some kind of human piece with an action shell? I’m confused. But hopefully for the film’s sake, others won’t be. To see the trailer, follow this link.

 Roadside Attractions is hoping its pony release Everybody Wants to Be Italian will eventually go to the races. Directed by the virtually unknown Jason Todd Ipson, who made a drastic career change as a previous General Surgery Resident in Boston, the filmmaker has already garnished 9 awards for his Indie work. The romantic comedy focuses on Ipson’s rough autobiography and his romantic experiences in Boston, where he met and married an Italian woman. Penny Marshall makes a cameo appearance and buzz is that the film could catch on with an older crowd. (And by older in Hollywood terms I mean 20’s-30’s)

The film was a hit at the Boston Film Festival, which allowed it distribution cred. Efilm Critic says “The film has a cute hook but isn’t held hostage by it, there are only one or two characters who aren’t at least occasionally funny, and the main relationship has its ups and downs without being melodramatic.” To read the full review, follow this link. 

 New Batman installment and marketing phenomenon The Dark Knight broke a record today as becoming the second highest grossing film at the box office next to Titanic. This is something producers were expecting, but only now officially happened, with the film grossing 502.4 million dollars within 6 weeks of its premiere. Titanic took double the time to make its 600.8 million dollars.

Despite its steady showing at the box office, Knight isn’t expected to ultimately beat Titanic, “which put up smaller numbers week after week but lingered at the top of the box office for months.” (David Germain, Associated Press) Dan Fellman, head of distribution at Warner Brothers, expects the film to finish at around 530 million, thought he admits it could reach as high as 550 million if “business persists as strongly as it has.”

One must also take into account the price of admission today as opposed to 1997 when Titanic hit theatres. Factoring that in, Knight would have to make 900 million more to match the number of tickets sold by the ship sinking tragedy.

Labor Day weekend will bring an end to this year’s highest grossing movie season, and Knight is expected to reach at least 505 million by the end of it. After Knight, the highest grossing films this year were Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, raking in 355.9 million, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian at 310.8 million, Hancock with 280.4 million, Iron Man grossing 267.7 million and Tropic Thunder is still going strong momentarily with 146.6 million so far.

“This is kind of an inauspicious end to a really incredible summer," Paul Dergaragedian, president of Media by Numbers, said. “We limped past the finish line.” 

Vicious Circle, a new independent film by first time writer/director Paul Boyd won the top prize at the 2008 HBO International Film Festival in New York City.  Awarded "Best Picture," it could be a sign of much future recognition for the new filmmaker and his subject material pertaining to minority culture.

Screening to enthusiastic audiences, both shows sold out prior to award time.  Vicious Circle stars professional skateboarder Paul Rodriguez (a.k.a "P-Rod") and Emily Rios of Quinceañera fame in a gritty modern romance tale set in Venice Beach, CA.  RJ (Rodriguez) is an artist and skater with dreams of hightailing it to New York City to fulfill his dreams of becoming a comic book artist when he meets his first love, Angel, a wild and beautiful singer for a teenage punk band.  Their developing relationship suddenly takes a turn for the worst; however, when RJ reveals a secret that could cost them both their lives.  

Critics hailed the film for its strong message on the consequences when one chooses the wrong path in life. Judging by the trailer, it looks like a uniquely detailed vision of urban America--the sort of depiction of Los Angeles we only see in films like Boyz N Tha Hood and Training Day.  While not exactly a Spanish-language film, a great deal of the characters are Latino, and the subject matter--let's just say it doesn't appear to come from a "white collar" perspective.  

"We are so thrilled to have premiered our film in New York and to the Latino community," said Paul Boyd.  "It is exciting to see how well received the film was and to win this award!"  While distribution deals for the film are still unknown, it seems likely to hit more theaters soon thanks to the prestigious HBO award.  

Check out viciouscirclemovie.com for the trailer, behind the scenes, and future updates on screenings.  

Art from the film provided by dominion3

This weekend offers some genre variety as a comedy, a drama, a Sci-Fi action flick, and family film hit theaters.

 Who comes up with these idea to turn a popular film into an opera?  Sometimes it's the original filmmaking team.  David Cronenberg evolved a crazy idea to make his 1980’s cult classic film The Fly into an opera, and it actually worked.

Special effects are about to to reach a pinnacle in realism for Hollywood movies.  Image Metrics, a huge company in the realm of facial animation, just created the most photo-realistic computer-generated (CG) face yet known.  

At the Siggraph Expo in Los Angeles, they recently demonstrated an animation of actress Emily O'Brien that has entertainment industry types in a joyous uproar.  The video, available here, depicts a short a video clip of O'Brien sitting and engaging in a dialogue that, in my opinion, looks just like an HD image of the real deal.  

According to an Image Works press release, the animation was created with a patented high-resolution image scanning process:

This newest process from the ICT Graphics Lab places the actor inside a sphere of LED lights, illuminating the talent with a set of polarized spherical gradient illumination patterns while a pair of high-resolution digital cameras takes around 15 photographs in under three seconds.

These patterns allow the shine of the skin to be photographed independently from the main skin tone so that precise colors and characteristics can be calculated at hundreds of measurements per square millimeter. The resulting CG models provide unprecedented detail of natural facial expressions - down to skin pores and fine wrinkles - with perfectly aligned shading information that allows photo-real faces to be rendered under any illumination and viewpoint with standard rendering packages.

David Barton, Image Metrics' producer said, "Out goal was to create a completely convincing, animated computer-generated face...Given the caliber of creative work and talent in our industry, it was a challenging goal, but one we were confident we could accomplish..."  Currently ICT's scanning method is the only one capable of acquiring such high-definition images. 

Expect James Cameron, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg to make some jaw-dropping films in the coming years.  

It definitely feels like the slow season has officially begun at the box office, after heavy hitting summer action adventure flicks like The Dark Knight, Iron Man and The Hulk have made their mark. This week’s releases all seem a bit generic. That is to say we all know most of the originality has already been sucked out of Hollywood by now. Sucked out, sucked up again and regurgitated many times over. That said, I’m afraid I have very little good news for you movie fans hoping to find a good film to go to this weekend. We may all fare better making it a Blockbuster night this Friday when these doozies arrive in theatres.  However, if you want to brave it anyway, here are you’re choices.

With uninventive comedies like Hamlet 2 and The House Bunny opening this weekend, The Dark Knight is sure to stay on the top 5 list, even though everyone has seen it already. Another comedy, The Longshots, a family football flick, also opens this week, along with Death Race, a Jason Statham NASCAR thriller-action-adventure thingy.

British comedian Steven Coogan stars along with Elisabeth Shue and Catherine Keener in Hamlet 2, the tale of a high school drama teacher whose personal agenda is to get his students to perform his Shakespearean sequel-musical onstage, despite it’s horribly offensive vignettes and not to mention, a lack of talent. South Park’s Pam Brady co-writes some of the songs and Andre Fleming (Arrested Development, Nancy Drew) directs. Buzz has been decent from Sundance, mainly praising Cooper for ‘rising above the material he’s given.’ (IMDB) This silly take on the Bards work would most likely make Shakespeare do something unholy in his grave, but the younger crowd will probably be attracted to its immaturity.

 Scary Movie’s Ana Faris stars as a bubbly blonde ditz in The House Bunny, directed by funny man Fred Wolf. (Saturday Night Live, Joe Dirt) Written by the same creators of Legally Blonde and 10 Things I Hate About You, this film promises to be one in the same. But after Reese Witherspoon made Elle Woods a Hollywood classic, can Ana Faris succeed in a role that is a clear spoof of her? The story follows Shelly, an ex Playboy bunny who becomes the new house mother for a hopeless group of sorority girls. My advice to Faris, who I feel is talented; try something other than spoofy comedies for once. We may all be pleasantly surprised.

Universals’ Death Race, starring trendy Brit action star Jason Statham, follows a former NASCAR champ who is framed for the murder of his wife. I suppose this will fair well with the typical macho action film fans. Family comedy The Longshots, directed by former Limp Bizkit lead singer Fred Durst (um…what?) stars Ice Cube as the coach of a young female hopeful who wants to make a killing in a football tournament. Critics are worried young girls may not be attracted to this film, though I hear young Keke Palmer (Akeelah and the Bee) is irresistible and one to watch for.

Best of luck to you brave filmgoers out there in cyberspace. I for one am sitting this weekend out. 

Every time you think Star Wars is finally over, and George Lucas has decided to move on, some lifelong Star Wars geek comes up with a plan. Hence, Star Wars: The Clone Wars. But to save money on high end production, this time it’s animated. And since there seems to be no more story to exploit in the age old saga, this story’s plot sneaks in between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, following the “on-going intergalactic battle involving the Jedis of the Republic and the battle droids of the Trade Federation.” (IMDB) Lucas, though producing the project, is not directing this time. Dave Filoni, whose directed the animated TV series Avatar: The Last Airbender. He’s also supervising the TV show The Clones Wars, spawned from the feature film.

But are die-hard Star Wars fans even paying attention? Not really, since the film seems to be aimed mainly at children. And on purpose. Lucas and filmmakers have already admitted to wanting to feed the Star Wars saga to the next generation, in hopes it doesn’t die out. Is it any good? Lucas has been quoted as saying it’s “sort of like Band of Brothers, only with Jedi. But Seattle Times reviewer Mark Rahner writes that the “cartoon is so cute that I want to hug it. Tightly. Until it stops breathing.” Ouch.

Also opening this weekend is the controversial comedy Tropic Thunder that has already angered the mentally and physically disabled and black activist groups. You just can’t pay for this kind of publicity. The film is a satirical look at the way Hollywood constantly rewards and awards actors who play disabled characters in films. I suspect the film will do well simply because of the cast (Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Robert Downey Jr.) and inquisitive eyes will want to see what all the fuss is about. And the fuss may end up making it a cult classic. Be ready for some shocking cameos in this one.

Another more romantic comedy, Woody Allen’s Vicky Christina Barcelona is also opening to a mass audience after charming the Cannes Film Festival. Buzz claims Rebecca Hall out-acts Scarlett Johansson, and of course everyone has already heard about the kiss between her and Penelope Cruz, not to mention the ménage a trios relationship between the 2 and Javier Bardem. (Cruz’s boyfriend in the film) And again, you can’t pay for this kind of publicity. Though in an interview with Orato, Johansson downplays these aspects by saying, “When you're shooting there are like 60 grown men eating salami sandwiches. Nobody cares when you're doing it. From all the press that we got out of this one kiss you'd think that it was some crazy X-rated movie.”

Some are worried that Allen is trying to become Spanish director Pedro Almodovar, or something even stranger; a schizophrenic personality. (Does anyone remember Match Point after all his other very similar films?) I for one want to see it, if only to cast those frightening schizophrenic rumors aside.

America lost two of its favorite entertainers over the past weekend, Isaac Hayes and Bernie Mac. The two had acting roles in Malcolm Lee's upcoming film Soul Men, which is currently in the final stages of post-production.

Lee described the news as devastatingly sad and surreal to USA Today. "It had to be some sort of bad dream that these two giants would die on the same weekend, and both would be in my movie," he said.

Mac, 50, died on Saturday from complications related to pneumonia. The comedian suffered from sarcoidosis, a chronic disorder that can cause inflammation in the lungs. Despite the condition, he would often work 12-hour days on set with no signs of trouble, and according to Lee and other film crew members, his personality would always confirm he was in the best of moods. "He was always ready to perform... in between takes Bernie would be cracking them up, giving them an impromptu routine."

Hayes, 65, died the following day after collapsing at his home near Memphis--the cause has not yet been released. Most popularly known for his award-winning theme song to the classic film Shaft, Hayes held a prolific career as an American R&B musician. He remained well-established through the 70's and through some acting roles in the 80's (first coming to my mind the excellent Escape From New York), but gained a whole new legion of fans through his role as Chef on the TV series South Park. Quitting the show in 2006 after a nine-year run, he told the press he could no longer stomach show creators' Trey Parker and Matt Stone's take on religion. He was a Scientologist, and the inciting incident came after the creators dedicated an entire episode on making jokes of the religion.

"There is a place in this world for satire, but there is a time when satire ends and intolerance and bigotry towards religious beliefs of others begins," Hayes said.

He may have lost some of his newer generation of fans, but nothing ceased his status as an entertainment icon.

May Bernie Mac and Isaac Hayes rest in peace.