Alice in Wonderland reaps another $62 million to top Green Zone at the BO. People do not want to see movies about the Iraq War. Dancing Johnny Depp, however, is okay. (MTV)
Burt Lancaster: “He approached the script like a scientist.” Richard Burton: “You were never quite sure whether he would blow his lines or explode.” James Dean would call just to hear his voice. Brynn White on the enduring enigma of Montgomery Clift, an actor’s actor whose preference for second-tier auteurs may account for an after-life in the shadows. (Moving Image Source)
After flirting with that Heavy Metal project, David Fincher finally signs to make Pawn Sacrifice, about Bobby Fischer’s 1972 chess cold war against Boris Spassky. Will they keep in the anti-Semitism? Scripted by Steven Knight, creator of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and author of Eastern Promises. (Variety)
They can’t all be world premieres, you know. So quit your complaining and suck up the cream of the other festivals, lovingly curated for you by an underpaid festival staffer. Floating on the surface of the great cinematic morass are the new film from Steven Soderbergh (good news, it’s shorter than Che!) and Michael Caine adding some dodder to Death Wish. Among the documentaries, the wistful trembling of Michel Gondry’s family tree is matched only by the weirdness of the global baby market. Click on the titles for trailers where available.
A guy sitting behind the desk is not everybody’s idea of entertainment. Spalding Gray, however, wasn’t everybody. His monologues explored history, show business, and his complex personal history and ailments in a way that was as riveting as open-heart surgery. Collaborator Steven Soderbergh has drawn on 90 hours of footage to fashion the late performer’s neurotic autobiography.
Crying With Laughter
Cinema has never really gotten to grips with the lonely hell of the stand-up comic. Maybe spritzing for a living is just too much of a one man show. Director Justin Molotnikov’s Scottish take adds a helping of revenge to the patter. Joey (Stephen McCole) tells a funny tale onstage about an old school friend. Alas, the buddy is in the audience and he ain’t laughing. This is one heckler Joey is going to regret snapping back at.
Three simple ideas at work in this music video from Michel Gondry:
i) coordinate the dancers movement so it approximates the beat of the song.
ii) dress the singer and dancers in matching bi-chromatic shirts which create bright colorful patterns as dictated by the choreography
iii) situate the singer and dancers in a featureless concrete corner of a large coastal city. choose locations based on how they highlight the colors and create opportunities for movement
What keeps the video from being a purely formalist exercise is the selection of the dancers, who represent a wide array of shapes and sizes. As Gondry stated in the title of his book, You’ll Like This Film Because You’re In It–or at least see yourself in it. The song is pretty cute, too. Mia Doi Todd is an L.A.-based songwriter and “Open Your Heart” is taken from a forthcoming album.
In-between Be Kind Rewind and the forthcoming The Green Hornet, director Michel Gondry has produced this personal documentary. The subjects are his aunt Suzette Gondry and her son Jean-Yves. Suzette worked as a teacher in rural France. Gondry squeezes her for stories. In the process, he learns more about himself and where he came from. Considering the fraught parental relationships that turned up in The Science of Sleep, this should be more than initially meets the eye. In this extract, Jean-Yves shows off his Super 8 home movies.
Sam Mendes‘ follow-up to Revolutionary Road has been attracting plenty of notice because a) it won’t be as heavy going as Revolutionary Road and b) it’s written by husband and wife Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida. The film is a road movie, with couple John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph trying to find some place to raise their first-born, and discovering a little bit of America on the way.
“I changed the speed of the camera at different spots in the image at different times. So it seems like [Green Hornet and Kato] are in the same world but at different times, and then they’re back together. [... The camera] speeds up and slows down but [at] different times for different characters’ images. So one will go fast and the other will go slow — and then they’ll meet. It’s [as if] they’re in different dimensions, but when they touch each other, they come into the same dimension.”
Clear as boue! Not exactly a quote that screams “pull,” but what are you gonna do? Gondry adds that the villain’s distinguishing feature is “a gun with two cannons” and that the TV Hornet, Van Williams, will make an appearance. He’ll be happy for the work–according to IMDB, it’s the first time Williams has appeared onscreen since 1993′s Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story.
RT @DrownedinSound: If you'd rather just listen to some music, our 25 favourite songs of the half-year countdown is ongoing over at http ... 1 year ago
