Posted Jun 27th 2008 11:32AM by Scott Weinberg
Filed under: Action, Animation, Comedy, Documentary, Drama, Foreign Language, Horror, Independent, Romance, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Thrillers, Mystery & Suspense, Festival Reports, Shorts, Fandom, Comic/Superhero/Geek, Remakes and Sequels, War, Western
You know what I call 18 consecutive days of horror, sci-fi, action foreign, indie, obscure, and generally weird movies? Well obviously I call it heaven, but most normal people refer to it as Montreal's Fantasia Film Festival, which runs every July and throws a couple hundred features and shorts to a very ravenous crowd of genre freaks. And with folks like Mitch Davis, Tony Timpone, and Todd Brown (among others) on the programming end, you could probably just book a flight to Montreal without even checking the official Fantasia website.
I'm still not sure if I can make the trek up north next month, but I have been invited and (based mainly on the recently-released full lineup of flicks) I can pretty much guarantee that the current registrants are in for one hell of a good time. Among their selected titles, I can very strongly recommend All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, Dance of the Dead, Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer, Let the Right One In, Mother of Tears, [REC], Stuck, and Timecrimes -- plus they're offering solid titles like Fear(s) of the Dark, The Objective, Red, Second Skin, and Spine Tingler. Among the stuff I'm still drooling to see: Babysitter Wanted, Dark Floors, Midnight Meat Train, Pig Hunt, Repo: The Genetic Opera, and (of course) a new Uwe Boll flick. Plus this festival seems to offer more "Asian weirdness" movies than you'll ever find in one place. At least a dozen that look and sound certifiably insane, unless you'd define Tokyo Gore Police and Negative Happy Chain as "mainstream."
For a complete schedule, lineup, trailer bank, and tons of geeky goodness (in your choice of English or French!), click here and then here. (Montreal's not all that far away...)
Posted Jun 18th 2008 7:32PM by Jessica Barnes
Filed under: Casting, Warner Brothers, RumorMonger, Comic/Superhero/Geek, Images, Western
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So what do you think? Is former
Punisher Thomas Jane the right man to bring gun-slinging
Jonah Hex to the big screen?
Film School Rejects is posting what they claim might be test shots of Jane as Hex in the adaptation of John Albano and Tony DeZuniga's western comic -- and if it's a fake, it's a darn good one. The photo might look legit, but there hasn't even been a casting announcement for the film, which leads me to believe that it could just be an overzealous fan with some time on their hands (and Photoshop on their computer). There had been some
chatter that
Firefly's
Nathan Fillion was in talks for the lead, but nothing was ever confirmed.
Hex is the story of a former confederate solider turned bounty hunter with a drinking problem and an itchy trigger finger. In the original run of the comic, Hex stuck to traditional western story lines, but in a later incarnation, there was a touch of the supernatural thrown in; pitting Jonah against zombies and werewolves. Warners first
announced the project last year, with
Crank's
Mark Neveldine and
Brian Taylor to write and direct; the two had promised that they would be using the later 'supernatural' editions of
Hex as a starting point for the story.
But for now, it's all rumor and speculation, so stay tuned to
Cinematical for the official word.
UPDATE: Shock says it's a fake, straight from the mouth of Mark Neveldine. So there goes that ...
UPDATE 2:
FSR spoke to Jane who says the photo is real, and it was part of his audition to play the character.
Posted Jun 16th 2008 9:32AM by Elisabeth Rappe
Filed under: Action, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Casting, Newsstand, Dreamworks, Comic/Superhero/Geek, Western
According to
The Hollywood Reporter,
Robert Downey Jr. is in talks to star in
Cowboys and Aliens, DreamWorks' adaptation of Fred Van Lente and Andrew Foley's graphic novel. (Read Matt's
original story on it.)
Downey Jr. would play Zeke Jackson, a former Union Army gunslinger, who is engaged in a battle against the Apache. But the battle between settlers and Native Americans is interrupted when an alien spaceship crashes into the Silver City prairie. Turns out, they have their eye on conquering Earth, forcing the warring westerners to form an uneasy alliance.
The project has been in and out of development for years, but apparently the latest draft is catching some A-list interest. As it was written by Hawk Ostby and Mark Fergus, who were behind
Iron Man and
Children of Men, I am immediately expecting good things out of something that, if handled poorly, could be as bad as
Wild Wild West. Good writers and a good actor like Downey Jr. could make this movie incredibly fun. This is how movies like the first
Pirates of the Caribbean come about.
I have to say, between this and Downey Jr.'s rumored interest in a comic-based
Sherlock Holmes, I wonder if he is going to plunge into Hugh Jackman levels of geekdom. They will have to start fighting each other to get to the best comic book scripts. And that should be a movie all its own.
Posted Jun 3rd 2008 6:02AM by Richard von Busack
Filed under: Classics, After Image, Western
Before it opened, there was much public mulling over whether Harrison Ford had the stamina at age 65 to play Indiana Jones one more time. Apparently the box office grosses answered that question. It was an irrelevant question, anyway. In those Indiana Jones movies, the machinery is what mattered. Ford was there for the ride, just like the audience. I think what was missing in
...Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is the elegiac qualities of a late period performance ... for example, the aging heroism in John Wayne's last great movie.
True Grit isn't just the sword outwearing the sheath, and the soul outwearing the breast, as Byron put it. It's also about remaining power in an old carcass. Wayne's rallying of that power in the film's memorable duel: blinking his one good eye at the shock of being called a fat old man, he takes his horse's reins in his teeth and rides down four gunmen. The film is often a comedy, with lines worthy of Mark Twain in it; so much so that the emotional content blindsides you. Every film class in the world quite justly talks about the end of
The Searchers, John Ford's image of Wayne framed by a doorway, never at home or really at ease.
True Grit has a scene to equal it: a gentle if tersely written scene at a snow-covered grave yard in the high country, with approximately the emotional fire power of the finale of James Joyce's
The Dead.
Continue reading RvB's After Images: True Grit (1969)
Posted Mar 31st 2008 10:02PM by Eugene Novikov
Filed under: Action, Drama, Deals, Sony, Distribution, Western
Everyone and their (his?) mother loves
The Proposition, the
Nick Cave-penned Australian western starring
Danny Huston as a villain who could give
Chigurh a run for his money in sheer badassery. It's hard to blame them, since movies that gritty and tough don't come along very often. (As modern westerns go, I think
3:10 to Yuma is better, but it certainly isn't as awesomely brutal.) Two years after that film became a critical darling and a sleeper hit of sorts, director
John Hillcoat -- who is currently in production on
Cormac McCarthy's
The Road -- has signed with Columbia to direct an adaptation of a not-yet-released novel by Matt Bondurant called
The Wettest Country in the World. The book is about a trio of gangsters -- the author's grandfather and grand-uncles -- who ran the moonshine trade at the peak of the Prohibition Era, and the writer who tracked them in search of a scoop.
Continue reading 'Proposition' Director Picks Follow-Up to 'The Road'
Posted Mar 28th 2008 11:32AM by Elisabeth Rappe
Filed under: Classics, Deals, Disney, Scripts, Family Films, Remakes and Sequels, Western
Who
was that masked man? Audiences will soon have the chance to find out.
The Hollywood Reporter has broken the news that Disney plans to revive
The Lone Ranger franchise (
as previously reported when it was in rumor form).
And this is going to be a big budget reboot. Writers
Ted Elliott and
Terry Rossio, the two folks behind the
Pirates of the Caribbean and
The Mask of Zorro screenplays, are in talks to write the script for Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer. If they can revive pirates, a long dead and verboten franchise, surely they can do the same for the Lone Ranger.
It will definitely need all the help it can get. The last time the character was revived on the big screen was 1981 in
The Legend of the Lone Ranger. It was such a failure that the film's star, Klinton Spilsbury, never worked in Hollywood again. There was a WB television movie in 2003, with the idea of launching a weekly series, but it too failed.
Continue reading Heigh Ho, Silver, Away! -- The Lone Ranger to Ride Again
Posted Mar 11th 2008 3:32PM by Monika Bartyzel
Filed under: Horror, Deals, Scripts, Western
Man, on days like today, I wish I could make this post have a soundtrack. Just the thought of horror in the Old West makes me think of
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. It would be so easy to darken that tune up and make it creepy. Anyhow,
Variety reports that Rogue Pictures, who will release
Neil Marshall's Doomsday this Friday, has made a deal for the writer/director's next flick, an Old West horror film called
Sacrilege.
Marshall says: "It is set during the Gold Rush, a time remembered for incidents like the Donner Party. It is meant to be a pitch-black, gritty, period horror movie." Well, we certainly don't get blood fests in period garb everyday. The filmmaker goes on to say that the film is influenced by
The Thing, will tap into isolation and paranoia, and will be "
Unforgiven by way of H.P. Lovecraft." The project is just in the idea phase right now, although Marshall plans to start writing the script immediately.
In the meantime, you can watch Rhona Mitra fight the deadly Reaper virus from within suffering, and quarantined country this Friday.
Posted Feb 26th 2008 7:02PM by Matt Bradshaw
Filed under: Action, Horror, Independent, Thrillers, Killer B's on DVD, War, Western
I never had the pleasure of visiting The Deuce as New York's 42nd Street was called during its heyday as a venue for exploitation cinema. On the one hand it sounds like it was one scary ass neighborhood, but if some rundown theater was running all of the
Ilsa Films back to back or maybe a Sonny Chiba marathon, or perhaps an Andy Milligan retrospective, I might have been tempted to take the risk. For a fascinating history of films on 42nd Street I highly recommend Bill Landis and Michelle Clifford's book
Sleazoid Express, and I have to say 4
2nd Street Forever, Vol. 3 - Exploitation Explosion recently released by
AV Maniacs and
Synapse Films also makes for a great introduction to the exploitation films of this period.
I've collected tons of trailer compilations over the years, and this is easily one of the best. There's a whopping 47 trailers here, some of which will have B-movie buffs scouring Ebay and Amazon for the film itself while others will leave you shocked and appalled that anyone would waste film stock on such an atrocity. The deal is sweetened by the addition of a handful of TV spots, some of which cover the same films as the trailers. But the highlight of the disk is the audio commentary, a feature I've never seen on a trailer comp. Edwin Samuelson of AV Maniacs, Fangoria Managing Editor Mike Gingold and Film Historian Chris Poggiali provide some fascinating background. What kind of movies are we talking about here? The trailers are grouped by sub-genres covering every category from martial arts to horror to dopey
Porkies-inspired comedies.
Continue reading Killer B's on DVD: 42nd Street Forever, Vol. 3 - Exploitation Explosion
Posted Feb 24th 2008 9:32AM by Christopher Campbell
Filed under: Comedy, Drama, Awards, Box Office, Exhibition, Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp, George Clooney, Oscar Watch, Columns, Cinematical Indie, Western
If you still haven't seen all the Oscar-nominated films, you're not alone. I still haven't seen a number of them, and I have less excuse than most people. After all, I live in a city in which pretty much every nominee has played. Some major contenders I haven't gotten around to -- with little reason for not -- include
Atonement,
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and
Into the Wild, all of which are still in theaters and are probably best to see on the big screen.
Apparently, at least
according to Variety, a lot of people are seeing the Oscar nominees on the big screen compared to in previous (recent) years, as cumulatively the five Best Picture contenders have seen a significant bump at the box office since the nominations were announced. I would be extremely excited if I didn't believe the truth is that
Juno's tremendous success has elevated the Best Picture box office average. The comedy is showing on far more screens, is much more accessible to a wide audience and has so far earned twice as much money domestically as the next highest-grossing Best Picture nominee.
Variety also this week had
published a story about how
Juno is the one movie that may save the Oscar telecast's ratings, since it's the one movie people have actually been able to or bothered to see. One thing I will note, though, is that Best Picture nominee
Michael Clayton came out on DVD this past Tuesday and yet there was still a significant number of people seeing it in theaters through the week. Additionally, I would be interested to know how many people took advantage of yesterday's AMC Theatres-hosted
Best Picture marathon.
Continue reading The Exhibitionist: There Will Be Disappointment
Posted Feb 20th 2008 4:02PM by Scott Weinberg
Filed under: Action, Foreign Language, Horror, Independent, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Thrillers, Awards, Mystery & Suspense, Comic/Superhero/Geek, Remakes and Sequels, Western
Last year we brought you the word when the
Saturn Award nominations were
announced, so it only makes sense that I'd do it again this year. I'm consistent that way. For those who are unfamiliar, The 34th Annual Saturn Awards are handed out by the "Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films, a non-profit organization devoted to honoring, recognizing and promoting genre entertainment." Sounds good to me! Not that I agree with all of their "best of" picks, but I do love it when an organization takes genre flicks seriously. So let's see what the Genre Academy liked the best...
Best Science Fiction FilmCloverfieldFantastic Four: Rise of the Silver SurferI Am LegendThe Last MimzySunshineTransformers(OK, so they nominated
Transformers for best science fiction film of the year; count how many additional nominations it received.)
Best Fantasy FilmEnchantedThe Golden CompassHarry Potter and the Order of the PhoenixPirates of the Caribbean: At World's EndSpider-Man 3Stardust(Pretty loose interpretation of the word "fantasy," if you ask me.)
Continue reading 2007 Saturn Award Nominees Have Landed
Posted Jan 13th 2008 9:32AM by Christopher Campbell
Filed under: Action, Foreign Language, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, New Releases, Exhibition, Columns, Western
Most people have a favorite place to sit when going to the movies. Some people like the back row; some people like the centermost spot (middle seat, middle row); some people like to sit near the front so that they can stare up at the screen and let the picture fill the limits of their peripheral vision.
I figure that last preference made more sense fifty years ago, when Cinerama and CinemaScope presented vast, expansively shot epics and westerns that were made to surround our senses and engulf our whole eye-span. Nowadays, most movies are too fast-cut and often the camerawork is too shaky to really work for close viewing. Have you ever been forced to sit in the first few rows when a movie is sold out? Wasn't it hard to tell what was going on most of the time?
Personally, I like watching movies close up, when it's appropriate. Unfortunately, it rarely is. But movie theaters can't just start removing those front rows because they aren't good for the moviegoer's eyes. No, that would mean a lot fewer tickets sold, a lot fewer popcorns sold, and a lot less money going to both the theater owners and the movie distributors. So, moviemakers should go back to making movies that are more accommodating to the theatrical audience, right? Yeah, that's not going to happen.
Continue reading The Exhibitionist: The Best Seat in the House
Posted Dec 28th 2007 2:02PM by Erik Davis
Filed under: Drama, RumorMonger, Fandom, DIY/Filmmaking, Western
If you thought the Coen Brothers were done with westerns following the terrific No Country for Old Men (which was more of a modern western then a classic western), think again: The boys are apparently gearing up to give us the mother of all Spaghetti Westerns. According to CinemaBlend, Joel Coen was recently quoted as saying, "We've written a western with a lot of violence in it. There's scalping and hanging ... it's good. Indians torturing people with ants, cutting their eyelids off. It's a proper western, a real western, set in the 1870s. It's got a scene that no one will ever forget because of one particular chicken." I don't know about you, but all I needed to hear was "Indians torturing people with ants" and I was immediately sold.
Now don't go licking your lips in anticipation just yet; the brothers still have a few other films to sort through. Next up for them will be Burn After Reading, which appears to be a lighter caper comedy starring George Clooney, Brad Pitt, John Malkovich and Frances McDormand. From there, it's a little sketchy: IMDB has them in pre-production on Hail Caesar (with a description that goes "A 1920's theater troupe stages a production of Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar"), while both guys are also attached to write (but not yet direct) a film called Gambit that has Colin Firth and Ben Kingsley attached, with Lisa Bonet (of all people) in negotiations. So hopefully they'll toss one of these aside in order to give us some much-needed 1870s ant torture ... because I've been craving it for some time.
Posted Dec 11th 2007 5:32PM by Patrick Walsh
Filed under: Documentary, Drama, Foreign Language, Thrillers, Awards, New Releases, George Clooney, Oscar Watch, Western
The San Francisco Film Critics Awards have been announced, and they're especially exciting for us here at
Cinematical. Why? Because three of our writers are in the SFFC! Our very own James Rocchi, Jeffrey M. Anderson, and Richard Von Busack are all part of the San Francisco critic "scene." San Fran made some interesting picks, several outside of the expected Oscar nominees. So what were their choices? For Best Foreign Film, they selected Julian Schnabel's
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (which I am watching when I finish this post). For Best Documentary, they selected
No End in Sight (which didn't blow me away, but was certainly well done).
Best Adapted Screenplay went to Sarah Polley for Away From Her (great script, one of the most kick-in-the-stomach depressing movies I've seen lately). And Best Original Screenplay went to Tamara Jenkins for The Savages.
Amy Ryan was named Best Supporting Actress for her brilliant portrayal of a highly difficult character in Gone Baby Gone. Ryan's co-star in that film, Casey Affleck, was named Best Supporting Actor for his outstanding work in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Best Actress was Julie Christie for Away From Her and Best Actor was George Clooney in Michael Clayton -- two choices I approve of though I disagree with them. Joel and Ethan Coen took Best Director(s) honors for their latest masterpiece, No Country for Old Men. And -- drumroll please -- the Best Picture Award went to Jesse James. A surprising pick perhaps, but it was an absolutely fantastic film, and hopefully the award encourages more people to see it. The SFFC gave a special citation to an indie called Colma: The Musical, "a homegrown song-and-dance extravaganza about the paradoxical drudgery and surreality of life in a city where the dead outnumber the living one thousand to one." That old story again? See the list for yourself here -- it's a San Francisco treat! Posted Nov 11th 2007 6:32PM by Christopher Campbell
Filed under: Comedy, Drama, Steven Spielberg, Cinematical Seven, Lists, War, Western
Today we salute the military veterans who have either served in wartime or in peace. I think technically Veteran's Day specifically honors war veterans, but I don't see why the non-combat military personnel needs to be excluded. Still, in the movies, it's the war vets that are most memorable, and on this holiday, I'd like to present my list of seven favorites.
Obviously this list isn't comprehensive -- in fact, I don't feature any examples of the now-stereotypical Vietnam vet character, which would include Tom Cruise in
Born on the Fourth of July or Gary Senise in
Forrest Gump. This is just a list of characters, positive and negative, that I prefer and which I think somewhat represents the wide and diverse scope of war vets.
"Homer Parrish" from The Best Years of Our Lives (1946, William Wyler)
About fifty years before Robert Zemeckis was digitally removing Gary Senise's legs to make him the disabled vet Lt. Dan of
Forrest Gump,
William Wyler directed a real amputee veteran named
Harold Russell as the handicapped character Homer Parrish in this movie about the difficulty of coming home following World War II. Russell actually won an Oscar for his performance as Parrish, a former high school quarterback who returns to his childhood sweetheart, with whom he's engaged and for whom he no longer feels good enough. The actor/character has hooks for hands and appears in some sappy, obligatory scenes where he has trouble with them, but he ends up a guy that is beloved more than pitied, and it's almost easy to forget he has the handicap, especially after hearing him play piano with the false limbs.
Continue reading Cinematical Seven: Favorite War Veteran Characters
Posted Nov 6th 2007 2:02PM by Monika Bartyzel
Filed under: Drama, Deals, Remakes and Sequels, Western
Watch out, zombies! The cowboys are coming! As soon as that buzz hits the air, hinting that a new theme is going to traverse the cinematic seas, the news starts pouring in. Recently, Jerry Bruckheimer
began to look into remaking
The Lone Ranger. Now
The Hollywood Reporter has posted that American Film Market has bought the remake rights to the 1952 classic that is
most-requested by American presidents --
High Noon. However, the film, which starred classic names like Gary Cooper, Lloyd Bridges, Grace Kelly, and Lon Chaney Jr., is not only prime presidential entertainment.
High Noon has a pretty memorable award record -- it won four Oscars, is considered to have suffered one of the biggest Oscar upsets (losing Best Picture to
The Greatest Show on Earth), helped Katy Jurado to be the first Mexican Golden Globe winner, and is considered the 27th best film of all time by the American Film Institute. If all of this success never inspired you to see the classic western, it focuses on a marshal about to retire and marry when a man he put behind bars returns with a gang, thirsty for revenge.
Having secured the rights from late producer Stanley Kramer's wife, the new High Noon Productions is currently looking for a director and star, so they can begin production next year with a nice $20 million budget. Can they pull it off? Is there anyone who can fill Gary Cooper's shoes? Stay tuned!
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