Plus: A YouTube novice checks out the Screening Room, and Quentin Tarantino buys himself some more time before the freefall into total irrelevancy.
The Perfect Ratio isolates a heretofore unanalyzed aspect of The Wackness‘ appeal. “[Olivia] Thirby plays the indie-standard ideal female, what I like to call the “Quirky Aggressive”…Advice: Quirky Aggressives are only beloved in indie films. Please do not try to be one in real life…For the first few months your dude will be all like, “OMG, you’re so cool and funny! You’re not like other girls!” because you said something about giving “Nietzche a BlowJ” or some Quirky Aggressive-esque bullshit, but then after about six months the charm wears off…”
“I like to watch movies in a theater, on a big screen. At worst, I like to watch them on television, on a smaller screen,” Michael Tully disclaims, before reviewing the latest offerings at YouTube’s Screening Room. “Having said all of this, perhaps I’m not the right person to write about [the Screening Room]. Or in a strange twist of logic, maybe this makes me the perfect person for the job!”
You won't need to leave home to see a good movie tonight about cowboys, trojans and sharpshooters--as long as you have cable.
Two westerns on AMC show strong men grappling with the loss of freedom and dignity.The Shootist is John Wayne’s last film, and though the Duke is normally invincible in his movies, this one begins with the premise that he’s dying of cancer. He sets one last goal for himself–to die in a shootout.
Then there’s Open Range, the rare film that Kevin Costner is perfect for. Costner plays a haunted Civil War veteran of a killing persuasion, which he unleashes when a friend is cruelly beaten by a group of trigger-happy thugs. Also featuring the excellent Annette Benning and Robert Duvall, and one of the most intense gun battles I’ve ever seen on film.
If westerns aren’t your thing, you’ve got the classic Jason and the Argonauts playing on TCM. Not everything about the film has aged well, but Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion skeletons still give me the creeps.
Also playing tonight is the Samuel L. Jackson vehicle S.W.A.T. I only saw the last twenty minutes of it at a drive-in, but if that’s supposed to be the exciting climax I’d hate to see what comes before it.
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Two filmmakers offer different points of view on the evolving role of theatrical exhibition in the overall life of an indie film.
Since the conversation about internet and day-and-date distribution really started to heat up in 2005, the alternatives to theatrical distribution have seemed to only multiply and evolve, while the general perception of public exhibition has remained about the same: filmmakers like it, but in terms of bottom line, it’s only useful as an extended commercial for ancillaries such as DVD. But is that perception changing? Two related quotes of note popped up in the feeds this morning.
Seven movies that could use a Guillermo del Toro makeover.
(photo: La Jetée, Hellboy II: The Golden Army)
Guillermo del Toro’s Hellboy II: The Golden Army hits theaters this Friday. Del Toro is a rare filmmaker who, despite his unique vision, often works on projects based on material from an outside source (Pan’s Labyrinth being a notable exception). Assuming all the legal issues get ironed out, he’ll next direct a two part film adaptation of Tolkien’s The Hobbit, the most prestigious property to date to get the del Toro treatment. Here are seven either failed or unjustly obscure movies ripe for being remade by Hellboy’s father.
1. Spawn - Todd McFarlane’s comic about a Hell-trotting anti-hero indebted to the Devil opened my young eyes to genuinely dark storytelling. While the 90s were a simpler time in terms of comic to movie adaptations, I was already dreaming about a big screen adaptation after reading the first issue. Unfortunately, my dream came true in 1997, when Mark A.Z. Dippé’s god-awful Spawn slumped into theaters.
The first full day of Comic-Con 2008, all laid out for your scheduling needs.
So, it’s only the Thursday schedule they’re leaking over at the San Diego headquarters for Comic-Con, but it looks packed.
Start the day with a coffee and Click & Clack, The Tappit Brothers (only PBS would cash in on primetime Family Guy territory with an animated NPR talk show), then head over for a sneak peak at Keanu Reeves and Jennifer Connelly in a remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, more campy source material to convert into a money maker. (Check back, we’ll be liveblogging Comic-Con 2008 when it starts, July 24.)
Read the full Thursday schedule for Comic-Con 2008 after the jump.
UPDATE: At the request of a WB publicist, we made a correction to the information below on the Dark Castle Entertainment panel.
UPDATE 2: David Glanzer from Comic-Con has left a comment below. David says: “Just a heads up that the schedule was for internal use and isn’t the “official” schedule. There are still changes to be made, so this isn’t a final.”
Its title might be the most daring thing about it, but for a starved audience, it's enough.
I don’t know whether or notI’m Through with White Girls––a low-budget, semi-high-concept rom-com about a black comic book nerd who makes a conscious decision to stop dating girls who look like me in order to start dating girls who look more like him, but ends up falling for a girl who looks like Lisa Bonet in High Fidelity, except more so––has the power to ignite a real, widespread conversation about interracial dating and the contemporary politics of race+class+coolness (or lack thereof). But after last night’s packed-house screening at BAM, which was followed by a surprisingly feisty Q & A, I do know that White Girls has the power to make a Brooklyn blogger self-censor, and that’s a feat to which few films can lay claim.
Artist and experimental filmmaker Bruce Conner has died at the age of 75. He’s maybe best known for his first film, the 1958 assemblage A Movie; his most recent film, Easter Morning, a pure cinema short shot in the 60s and recently released to celebrate Conner’s 50th anniversary, screened in competition last month at CineVegas. Ray Pride has much, much more at Movie City Indie. I’ve embedded one of Conner’s more surprising works, a short set to Devo’s “Mongoloid,” above.
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AFTRA will announce the results of their guild’s ratification vote on a prospective contract with the AMPTP today. It’s said to be “widely anticipated the terms will be accepted,” despite SAG’s pressure on their overlapping union to vote no in order to get a new/more favorable deal.
Kinky Boots, one of those newfangled British comedies where somebody saves something through the power of something that somebody else thinks is naughty, is going to become a Broadway musical.
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Why you didn't see the SPEED RACER you should have seen (if you saw it at all). Plus: spats in the blogosphere and on the streets of New York, real and invented.
At Cinematical, Erik Davis notes that although some bloggers fretted that Sony Pictures Classics would allow The Wackness to “disappear in limited release … and be eaten by a Cabbage Patch Kid, or whatever,” the film actual opening weekend “numbers [were] pretty frickin’ awesome.” And yet, are said fretting bloggers “congratulating SPC on a job well done? Nope. Not at all.”
Nick Schwartz is unemployed. “Or, ‘between things,’ as I’ve been told to say,” he writes at ShortEnd Magazine. This leaves him lots of time to watch movies from the Brooklyn Public Library, read James Agee, and contemplate conflict avoidance: “I’m not some kind of idealistic idiot. ‘Shut The Fuck Up!’ might be some kind of bizarre, fanciful, Lumet-inspired concept of how New Yorkers are supposed to handle conflict.”
Who would make a final color-corrected master of their movie so that 70% of the theatrical audience wouldn’t be able to see the colors properly?” asks David S. Cohen at Thompson on Hollywood. “Apparently, the Wachowski Brothers.”
At Bright Lights After Dark, C. Jerry Kutner sends a Happy Birthday message to Janet Leigh, via appraisal of her little-seen, dancing-in-the-Manhattan-streets musical triumph, the Bob Fosse-choreographed My Sister Eileen. See a related clip above.
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
The Perfect Ratio isolates a heretofore unanalyzed aspect of The Wackness‘ appeal. “[Olivia] Thirby plays the indie-standard ideal female, what I like to call the “Quirky Aggressive”…Advice: Quirky Aggressives are only beloved in indie films. Please do not try to be one in real life…For the first few months your dude will be all like, “OMG, you’re so cool and funny! You’re not like other girls!” because you said something about giving “Nietzche a BlowJ” or some Quirky Aggressive-esque bullshit, but then after about six months the charm wears off…”
Two westerns on AMC show strong men grappling with the loss of freedom and dignity. 
Since the conversation about internet and day-and-date distribution really started to heat up in 2005, the alternatives to theatrical distribution have seemed to only multiply and evolve, while the general perception of public exhibition has remained about the same: filmmakers like it, but in terms of bottom line, it’s only useful as an extended commercial for ancillaries such as DVD. But is that perception changing? Two related quotes of note popped up in the feeds this morning.
So, it’s only the Thursday schedule they’re leaking over at the San Diego headquarters for Comic-Con, but it looks packed.
AFTRA will announce
