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Kick-Ass Opening for SXSW
2 hours ago
Matthew Vaughn's Kick-Ass will be opening this year's South by Southwest Film Conference and Festival (SXSW), running March 12 through 20. At Twitch, Rodney Perkins, who saw a rough cut at Harry Knowles's Butt-Numb-a-Thon in Austin last month, calls the adaptation of Mark Millar's comic "an ultra-violent superhero homage that lives up to its name."
Aaron Katz (Dance Party USA, Quiet City) returns to SXSW with Cold Weather; click the title for the trailer.
Elektra Luxx, Sebastian Gutierrez's sequel to Women in Trouble, sees its world premiere in Austin. "Elektra Luxx ([Carla] Gugino) is a porn star whose life is turned upside down when she discovers she's pregnant," writes Variety's Michael Fleming. What's more, "Gutierrez is planning a third installment tentatively titled Women in Ecstasy."
James Franco's Saturday Night documents the making of an episode of SNL; Wes Orshoski spent three years making Lemmy, a doc on Moto »
Tuesday Morning Foreign Region DVD Report: "Boom!" (Joseph Losey, 1968)
13 hours ago
Unlike some directors who give up on a bad script or else send it up, one senses that you always try to play fair; but in some of those early British films, one also sense a kind of irony behind their worst excesses. Is this so?
"There was, but it was a desperate irony because I was so badly in need of work and under such extreme pressure. This can be dangerous, because Tennessee Williams, for instance, had been told by all sorts of people who are not qualified to comment—people with whom I've never worked and who therefore don't know how I work—that I'm death on writers, that I cut ruthlessly, that I have no respect for a script. This couldn't be more untrue. Of course if I get a script which is a piece of nonsense, I will say that I'll do it only if it »
2010: Godard, Malick, Hong, Loach, Kiarostami, Tarr and More
14 hours ago
Updated through 1/5.
A few previews are already in. At In Contention, Kristopher Tapley lists ten big budget roll-outs he's looking forward to in 2010; the New York Times (where Michael Cieply explains why some films opening this year have been in the can and waiting their turn for as long as two years now) and the Boston Phoenix's Peter Keough draft local schedules for the weeks ahead; Geoffrey Macnab (Independent) and Kevin Maher (London Times) do the anticipating for the UK; Martin A Grove's preview for Reuters runs through June; and at Techland, Steven James Snyder looks ahead to the year in science fiction. Dark Horizons is previewing the good, the bad and the ugly, a gadzillion movies, in alphabetical order. As I write, they've made it to the letter "S."
But two entries Screen's Fionnuala Halligan posted at her blog back in November present far more tantalizing prospects than all that. »
Us Indies Abroad, Kelly Reichardt, Elvis
14 hours ago
For the second year in a row, the Babylon theater in Berlin is presenting a series of American independent films, 22 this time around, ranging widely in genre, style, means of production and, for that matter, cultural milieu. Nearly all the articles appearing in the local press present some sort of capsule history of independent cinema in the Us that leads straight up to the current dire economic climate for it. Same goes for Hannes Brühwiler, the programmer of Unknown Pleasures #2, who adds: "But despite, or even precisely because of these difficult conditions, there haven't been such interesting films as have appeared in the past few years in quite some time. Are the mounting challenges to successfully placing a film in theaters freeing up the filmmakers and leading to less self-censorship?" »
Lists #8: Moving Image Source and More
21 hours ago
Updated through 1/5. Previously: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7. See, too, The Notebook's 2nd Annual Writers Poll: Fantasy Double Features of 2009, parts 1, 2 and 3.
Moving Image Source introduces one of the annual collections many of us look forward to most: "We invited our regular contributors and colleagues, as well as some of our favorite writers and artists, to select their moving-image moment or event of 2009 - anything from an entire movie or TV series to an individual scene or shot, from a retrospective or exhibition to a viral video or video game." »
Cinema Scope, "Sweetgrass"
4 January 2010 2:26 PM, PST
Updated through 1/4.
"One way of approaching Cinema Scope, to me," writes editor Mark Peranson, "is as a curated work that has always straddled the boundary between criticism and programming, attempting to provide an overview of a particular kind of contemporary cinema that is, by popular consensus, festival-based, and trying to guide readers through trends, and exposing them to films they might otherwise have ignored because the Msm (in Canada, at least) doesn't care." Issue 41 features a Spotlight on films that premiered at festivals in the fall of 2009. "True, much of this stuff may have zipped under the radar of rabid cinephiles who might have gorged on 40 or more films at Tiff or other festivals, but let me make a controversial statement: by and large, a film that most people have heard of is by its very nature less interesting than a film that only a few programmers or critics have seen. »
Two Train Top Heists
4 January 2010 6:34 AM, PST
One:
Joe Baker and his arch-nemesis race across the virgin American wilderness and try to kill each other in a search for gold. One of about 61 films its director made that year (1912), 13 minutes long, silent, forgotten, and French, Jean Durand’s Le railway de la mort should be a great American classic. But maybe it could only be French: the two men, nearly indistinguishable from each other, occupy far backgrounds beyond swaying wheat stalks and shimmering swamps, as indifferent figures to the landscape as they are to Durand. The human tale is purely existential, in the pettiest ways—the men are nothing more than bodies trying to kill each other and get gold—as the nature ode is totally romantic in the sublimest.
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7 articles
