It’s nice to see that some theater owners do understand how to compete with better home theater: give the customer a solid experience, including not just a fantastically curated film selection, but also great food, solid fundamentals, and vigilant protection of the whole experience.
It’s even cooler that the guy TechDirt is using as an example is someone we Heathen actually know, at least tangentially. All Hail Alamo and Tim League!
Twenty Things You May Not Know About The Wire. Hey, I learned a few things.
During the winter, I rode by this bizarre abandoned amusement park in Wichita pretty much every week en route from the client to the airport. I’m glad someone else noticed it. It opened in 1949; it apparently closed in 2003.
Go see this documentary at the New Orleans Film Festival.
You have wasted your weekend until and unless you have watched Fight For Your RIght Revisited. Now. Make time. Starring Elijah Wood, Danny McBride, Seth Rogan, Jack Black, Will Ferrell, and John C. Reilly as the Beasties, and hilarious cameos a-plenty.
About 30 minutes.
Hate Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss? Ursula Le Guin had it worse back when the Sci Fi channel literally whitewashed her entire Earthsea cast.
Were you, gentle Heathen, aware of the following upcoming films?
and
We await Blu-Ray editions, whereupon we’ll host screenings.
Liz Taylor shuffled off this mortal coil today. Here’s a little reminder of her at the height of her power, with her long-term collaborator Mr Burton:
In a bit of odd synchronicity, Mrs Heathen’s birthday delight to me this year is two tickets to see Steppenwolf’s production of this play at the Albee festival in DC.
The extended edition of the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy is available for pre-order at Amazon.
Sigourney Weaver went on Graham Norton, and the discussion wandered to Alien and that horrific and iconic scene wherein John Hurt meets his grisly end. They speak briefly of the effects involved — it came out i 1979, so it’s all puppets and angles with no computer help — and Norton comments that they’ve set up a side stage for a re-enactment.
Madcap hilarity does, of course, ensue:
Granted, nothing else was on in 1978, but have you ever seen something quite so delightfully odd on Leno?
Via the equally awesome vintage-pic blog ThisIsNotPorn.
This may be the best action scene in the history of cinema, from the Indian film Enthiran:
Eric Stoltz and Penelope Ann Miller in Our Town, ca. 1989, shot at Lincoln Center from a production that won a Drama Desk award for Best Revival.
You always thought this show as corny. Watch this now, and tell me that again.
(Hat tip to @LolaJRS over on the Twitters.)
There are two parts so far. It’s really, really well done.
Ok, true believers, check out this cache of Electric Company Spider-Man skits, some of which feature Morgan Freeman.
Watch a few. I didn’t remember them being quite this trippy.
I’m very, very pleased to see Winter’s Bone get the Oscar noms it deserves, for Picture as well as Actress (for teen lead Jennifer Lawrence, soon to be seen as Mystique in the upcoming X-Men prequel) and Supporting Actor for Heathen-fave John Hawkes (of “Deadwood” fame).
Seriously, see this film.
The Most Perplexingly Meta Acting Career in Hollywood — or, in other words, Sheeeeeeiiiiit.
You Have Three Minutes. N.B. that Gleeks may recognize the Asian lead.
As someone said yesterday, “Paul Bettany sure likes paychecks.” Looks terrible. And oddly delightful. As IO9 notes, it can’t be worse than Legion.
Wayne is a pansy and Glenn Cambell is an embarrassment to American film. Coen Uber Alles.
Bridges gives a career performance, and if Hailee Steinfeld isn’t nominated it’ll be a crime. Damon is almost unrecognizable, which is a serious compliment for Mr Bourne.
The Suits of James Bond. Face it: with the exception of the early Moore films, Britain’s favorite secret agent has been a sartorial model for the ages, and the resurgence of trim suits in the wake of Mad Men has made pretty much every bit of kit worn by Connery’s version of the superspy as current in 2010 as it was in the 60s.
Me, I’d love to have that Goldfinger suit. To start. To say nothing of the fabulous Brioni suits the Brosnan-era Bond favored.
JWZ has a great summary of the iamamiwhoiam art project. Check it out:
At the beginning of the year, these weird, short, high-production-value videos began appearing on Youtube with no explanation of what they were or who made them, straight out of Pattern Recognition. They featured a heavily distorted woman licking trees and doing other bizarre things in the woods with music that sounded like The Knife or Fever Ray. Cult following ensued. The videos got longer, revealing more of the singer and the songs.
Then in November they posted a short video saying, “We need one volunteer, call this number”!
The next six videos posted show their volunteer getting on a plane to Sweden, arriving at a hotel, and being silently fucked with by faceless weirdos, eventually getting a supporting role in their “live concert”.
He concludes:
This project is absolutely the best, weirdest thing that the internets have brought us in years.
I agree. He’s got a playlist up of the videos; if you have a bit of time, check it out.
Wrong, but also brilliantly done.
Think of it as a Coen/Tarantino take on the end of Yogi Bear — and by “end,” I mean the part where Booboo kills him.
(Widely linked, but it was MAD who made me finally look.)
I was completely unaware that the small films Scotland, PA (2001, starring Maura Tierney) and Men of Respect (1990, with John Turturro!) were both actually adaptations of Macbeth. Must see both.
A Woman, A Gun, and A Noodle Shop is Chinese director Zhang (“Hero”, “House of Flying Daggers”) Yimou’s remake of Blood Simple.
Leslie Nielsen, dead at 84.
30 Awesome Disaster Movie Money Shots, including the one from Knowing that basically closes the book on disaster movie casualty inflation.
Hey, don’t you want to watch the Harry Potter cast try to affect an American accent?
They’re really remaking Buffy without Joss.
IO9 has his reaction, which is characteristically funny and classy while also bringing the snark.
WB’s release says some ridiculous things, like
“There is an active fan base eagerly awaiting this character’s return to the big screen. We’re thrilled to team up with Doug and Roy on a re-imagining of Buffy and the world she inhabits. Details of the film are being kept under wraps, but I can say while this is not your high school Buffy, she’ll be just as witty, tough, and sexy as we all remember her to be.”
Uh, no. What made her witty and fun was Whedon and his team, not the simple idea of a teen vampire hunter. Compare and contrast the original film (which Whedon wrote, but was not otherwise involved in) and the hit TV show (which was Whedon’s through and through); it’s obvious what made the television version a hit and the movie a “cult fave” at best, and it’s equally obvious that there’s no chance a Whedon-free reboot will be anywhere nearly as charming. It’s a transparent cash-in move that could very well fall flat on its face, given how loyal the Buffy fan base is to Whedon.
Io9 points us to a pretty funny online short theorizing what “The Social Network” might’ve been like had it been directed by, say, Wes Anderson, or Michael Bay, or Guillermo del Toro.
This Tumblr is made entirely of iconic film scenes rendered as animated GIFs.
Julie Taymor’s done a film of the Tempest, with Helen Mirren as Prospero.
Apparently, a 3D re-release of the original trilogy is in the works. Christ.
And when I saw “amazing,” I mean “holy crap, it’s amazing something that unremittingly shitty can exist.”
After giving up on the Texans, I started browing the Tivo guide. On Syfy, we have the following on offer:
I mean, it’s not like you’re climbing 1700 feet in the air without safety gear, right? They do clip in to rest and when they get to the top, but the climb is exposed. Fun fact: If they fell from the top of the 1700-foot tower, they’d fall for more than 10 seconds before hitting the ground.
(Better fullscreen. Rob’s the one that finally got me to watch.)
It’s totally possible for the freakin’ Coens to make a movie with Brad Pitt, Tilda Swinton, John Malkovich, Frances McDormand, and freakin’ George Clooney, and still have it be an unwatchable mess.
Honestly, this brand of farce — in which terrible things happen to lots of miserable people, and which the Coens clearly love — doesn’t need to be done again after Fargo. And the brothers do much strong work when they undertake more meaty fare, such as their previous high point and the recent adaptation of No Country for Old Men, both of which remind us more of their neo noir debut than broad, grotesque messes like Burn After Reading and Intolerable Cruelty. I have no fear about their upcoming project, but I really hope they stop beating this particular farcical horse in the future.
Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman may be bringing Stephen King’s Dark Tower to TV and film in an unprecedented cross-medium project.
Given the breadth of the story, an approach like this is really the only way it could be done without killing it, and long-form King has worked before — but The Stand is a skinny pulp novel compared to the Dark Tower.
Don’t make old-timey Omar kill your ass.
(Still of the inimitable Michael K. Williams from the upcoming Boardwalk Empire.)
The delightful 1999 film The Iron Giant was actually an adaptation of The Iron Man, an illustrated novel published by the poet Ted Hughes in 1968, and previously reworked as a rock opera by Pete Townshend in 1989.
Hughes, of course, is perhaps more famous for being Sylvia Plath’s widower; it’s said that The Iron Man was partially written for his children in the wake of her 1963 suicide.
Age of the Dragons is, I shit you not, a medieval, landlocked dragon-hunting adaptation of “Moby Dick” starring Danny Glover.
The fan-sourced compilation of very short Vimeo clips can be viewed here. Don’t skip the “top 50 scenes.”
IO9 gives us alternate universe sci-fi film posters, and they are BRILLIANT.
They’re making H. P. Lovecraft‘s “At The Mountains of Madness” into a film.
Good news: Guillermo del Toro is directing, which sounds like a great fit.
Bad news: James Cameron will produce, which I fear will drastically compromise the whole thing into a rote, by the numbers piece of crap on which they nevertheless spend a fortune.
This entry into 5-Second Films is just the first of many you’ll watch. After all, at only 5 seconds each, you can afford to watch several…
The Oatmeal points out that Aliens and Avatar are the same movie.
…I give you Sharktopus. God save Roger Corman.
Funny Or Die isn’t always funny, but that’s kind of clear in the name, right? Anyway, this is one of those times. Precis: What would happen if a famous singer put on a disguise and sand their own songs at karaoke? Jewel finds out. It sounds hokey, but it’s sort of delightful.