Film Fatale

No Damien?

Neither the bratty pre-school son of the Devil (Harvey Stephens) of THE OMEN (1976) nor the distractingly handsome Sam Neill of THE OMEN III made Radar's list of the top ten horror movie villains. (I guess the SOUTH PARK episode pretty well destroyed Damien's villain cred - and besides, he was always more of a pouty icon than a truly active villain.)

Who and what did make the list?

A cannibal with a chainsaw.
A camp-counselor hating drowing victim.
A doll possessed by the spirit of a dead serial killer.
A child possessed and persecuted by Satan (wouldn't that make Satan the villain?)
A fundamentalist Nebraska boy who hates everyone over 19.
A Dutch Colonial house (boathouse included) located at 112 Ocean Avenue.

Who didn't make the list?

No supernatural villains from other countries: No little boy from THE GRUDGE. No Samara from THE RING. No undead, no vampires.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 11:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Newsweek, noting the existence of BATMAN BEGINS, THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE: THE BEGINNING, and refreshed 007 in CASINO ROYALE, has an overview of movie-prequels This is great! My nephew loves A PUP NAMED SCOOBY DOO and FLINTSTONE KIDS.

On the horizon: new installments in the HALLOWEEN and FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH movies, featuring earlier adventures of Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees. (Or maybe Jason's mother, when she was young.)

There's also HANNIBAL RISING. Director Peter Webber (THE GIRL WITH THE PEARL EARRING) says the movie will cover a time period well before the starting point of THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS and RED DRAGON, leaving room for sequels to the prequel. French actor Gaspard Ulliel (A Very Long Engagement) will portray adolescent Hannibal Lecter, who's sad because during WWII, Nazi soldiers ate his sister. Don't get Hannibal wrong. All the killing and cannibalism he does later on isn't his fault--it's because Nazis friggin' suck.

So many successful movies could get a shot of new life with youth casting. Who could object to LI'L DIRTY HARRY, in which our favorite sociopathic enforcer dishes out lethal justice on the playground? Or for a more socially responsible audience, the bassinet-berserkings of BABY BILLY JACK. Solve mysteries with YOUNG SHERLOCK HOLMES! Oh, wait. They did that one already. Time to do it again. Maybe another TERMINATOR?

TERMINATOR 3000 BC

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 04:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Carol Cadwalladr, a writer for the Observer, visits Kazakhstan and discovers that despite BORAT's slurs, the former Soviet state is not nearly as dictatorish and flooded with fermented horse urine as she expected.

That's nice.

You, too, can experience the beauties of this exotic land by viewing A LEADER IN CENTRAL ASIA, a 30 second ad that's run on ABC and CNN. Pretty horses!

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 08:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Guardian's John Patterson (Rated: Cranky) hasn't seen SCENES OF A SEXUAL NATURE or SAW III, but that hasn't stopped him from getting his bitch off over the MPAA's tell-all, explain-nothing film ratings and classification system.

Here is my annotated MPAA-type guide to the SAW movies.

SAW II (2005)
Rated R:
For grisly violence and gore, terror, language and drug content.
Translation: Less grislier, more druggier. Also, terror. If you consider flashbacks terrifying.

SAW III (2006)
Rated R for strong grisly violence and gore, sequences of terror and torture, nudity and language.
Translation: Same shit as first two. Plus: boobies!

After the jump, experience a moment from SAW III.

Here is SAW III's nudity interest (left) in a scene with a clothed male actor (right).

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 11:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Alan Moore's LOST GIRLS will be available for bookstore sales in the UK after all. Though the illustrated "porno-graphic" novel featuring the erotic adventures of Peter Pan's friend Wendy, Dorothy from THE WIZARD OF OZ, and Alice from Lewis Carroll's ALICE IN WONDERLAND.

The adult sexual nature of LOST GIRLS did not amuse the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, which has been funded by the proceeds of Barrie's beloved children's play for nearly 100 years. (

Now the illustrated novel's publisher, Top Shelf, has agreed not to offer Moore's book for sale until January 2008, when the British and E.U. copyright on J.M. Barrie's novel and play expires.

Here's a link to Galleycat's thorough coverage of the dispute between Moore and the Great Ormond Street Trust.

Galleycat's been following the dispute between graphic novelist Alan Moore and the
http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/comicbookland/

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 01:36 PM | Permalink

The Onion's AV Club writers (Noel Murray, Scott Tobias and Nathan Rabin) do a political reading of some horror films you may or may not have thought twice about, including the best of Showtime's MASTERS OF HORROR series, Joe Dante's "Homecoming."

In What Monster Could Have Done This? Horror Movies For Left Wingers, Horror Movies For Right Wingers, the critics write that this genre is often a "better gauge of what's making the country anxious than opinion polls are."

Both DEATHDREAM (1974) and HOMECOMING (Showtime, 2005) carry echoes of H.H. Monro's short story "The Monkey's Paw," in which traumatized soldiers, more dead than alive, come marching home from foreign wars--to the horror of the homeland.

The essay mentions Abel Ferrara's surprisingly effective 1993 remake of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, set on a military base. The most chilling moment: when pod person Meg Tilly reminds her still-human stepdaughter that no one cares about the alien takeover because "There's no one like you left."

Paranoid yet? Another remake is due in 2007. INVASION stars Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig. The director is Oliver Hirshbiegel, who's best known for making DOWNFALL, the about living and working in the dead heart of the Third Reich in the last days of Nazi Germany. The most chilling moment: when Goebbels refuses to agreea surrender to British and American forces, even though it will mean sparing civilian lives. No, he says, the very young and the very old should be prepared to die in the streets. "It's their own fault. The people gave us the mandate."

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 11:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Have we talked much about fashion here at Film Fatale?

I've never quite understood why women need to more than two handbags. One for day, one for evening. And these things should be small. A woman's handbag should be just large enough to hold her wallet, her keys, and her gun.

I bring this up because Radar has rounded up some truly terrifying accessories that bear suspicious resemblance to faces from the movies. Scary, fugly faces. Click on the link and scream. Look at the prices and scream again. The Bag Lady, who chronicles the accessory life, sees this sort of thing all the time, so she's obviously built up a tolerance this kind of thing. But I have to say it shocked me.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 08:50 PM | Permalink

No film could have stood up to the film festival hype that was piled onto DEATH OF A PRESIDENT, a faux documentary about the crimes against justice committed after the assassination of the U.S. president -- President George W. Bush.

Though many political pundits are having a hard time believing this, the film's "what if?" form is a means to get people thinking about what's happening now--not an excuse to do evil, whenever.

With its incendiary subject matter and election-year timing, Death of a President was bound to be in the spotlight. Then festival programmer Noah Cowan, in his notes on the film, wrote that Death of a President is "easily the most dangerous and breathtakingly original film I have encountered this year."

So like hundreds of other reporters and critics at the Toronto Film festival, I lined up for at least two hours to make sure I got into the first press and industry screening of Death of a President -- I heard that at least 150 people were turned away. (WHEN CRITICS SWARM! If only the Fox TV reality show cameras had been there. It wasn't pretty.)

I spoke to Gabriel Range this week about why he believes his approach, the "what if?" docudrama, can attract a larger audience than a straight up documentary about the Patriot Act (which is what his movie's really about.) The interview is in Sunday's New York Daily News. The film opens Friday, Oct. 27.

Set one year from now in a politically divided war-wearied America, DOAP begins in Chicago, where anti-war protests grow larger and more violent by the day. Director Gabriel Range, a BBC-schooled documentary maker, makes great use of news and archive footage of real protests in the Chicago's urban canyons, letting his actors move in and out of the action. (A techique he borrowed from Haskell Wexler, who shot MEDIUM COOL in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic convention.)

A couple of comments that didn't make it into the interview.

Range has taken a ridiculous amount of heat from critics who haven't seen the film. First, he's not a wild-eyed Bush hater, or Bush hater, period--he thinks that the press conferences and speeches filmed by his crew and included in DOAP depict the President as he is, "a leader with a great deal of rapport with his audience. I want to say again, I'm not anti-Bush or even anti-Republican. I seriously question how different things would be if there were a Democratic administration in the White House right now. I still think there would be some version of the Patriot Act, with all its attendant effects.

He didn't have time to elaborate upon that idea. His next film will be a straight up narrative documentary about a well known public figure "who is very much on our minds but whom we know very little about."

It will NOT be, he says, a faux documentary.

The DEATH OF A PRESIDENT website (it's distributed by Newmarket)

Another link to the interview

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 02:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Have you heard? The Young People of Today love horror movies? Sometimes they love scary slashermovies with Roman numerals in the titles. And sometimes they scary, subtle supernatural horror movies with lank haired Asian girl ghosts. Right now they love gore-filled disembowel-oramas.

Yes, horror is hot again, as it always is. But why does this kind of horror film touch a nerve?

TIME, Oct. 30, 2006.
Rebecca Winters Keegan: The Splat Pack: Wondering where all those ultraviolent movies are coming from? Meet horror's new blood.

"People say, 'How can you put this stuff out there in the world?' Well, it's already out there," says Eli Roth. He appeared on Fox News and proclaimed that it was because of George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld that Americans are watching horror: "You're so scared that you want to scream."

For a much earlier and more thoughtful look at this trend, see USA Today's

USA Today, Oct. 25. 2004. Susan Wloszczyna, "Extreme Cinema Returns With a Vengeance"

"I definitely love to be scared," says James Wan, Saw's director. "It draws the primal side out of you."

Or as screenwriter Leigh Whannell, who also co-stars in Saw, puts it: "Humans are still violent animals, and you need to get that out. The killer has done a lot of the work for you by exorcising your subconscious for a while."

Some cite The Passion of the Christ as an example of the new tolerance for extreme viewing.

And for a template of the Horror = $ = ? story, here's Time's 2005 piece.
Newsweek, April 3, 2006.
Devin Gordon: "US Audiences Hungry for Blood"

One prominent critic views the trend as torture porn:

New York Magazine, Feb. 6, 2006.
David Edelstein: Why Has America Gone Nuts for Blood, Guts and Sadism?

"The issue of where the spectator’s sympathies lie at violent movies has always been a complicated one. But there’s no doubt that something has changed in the past few decades. Serial killers occupy a huge—and disproportionate—share of our cultural imagination: As potential victims, we fear them, yet we also seek to identify with their power...

[Watching IRREVERSIBLE..after the first two minutes] I didn’t understand why I had to be tortured, too. I didn’t want to identify with the victim or the victimizer."

About that TIME trend piece.

Does Neil Marshall, a director of action-suspense movies (The Descent, Dog Soldiers), in which much of the horror remains off screen, really have all much in common with Rob Zombie, Eli Roth and Wan/Whannell, who made ultraviolent, show-all, hear-all unapologetically sadistic films in the style of drive in horror movies?

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 11:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is a slightly expanded but still spoiler-free version of a review I wrote for this week's Boston Phoenix.

Postmodern turns out to have been the wrong word, and world, for the Nolan brothers (director Christopher and screenwriter Jonathan) of MEMENTO fame. In THE PRESTIGE, a Victorian-set sci fi tale of rival magicians in search of the ultimate trick, the Nolans revel in embedded flashbacks, purloined diaries, mad scientists (David Bowie, in a deft cameo), and presto-change-o stagecraft ("Abracadabra!" will never again sound cheesy.) Hugh Jackman, cast as a proto-Vegas showman at first appears to have the meatier role, but it's Christian Bale, as the illusionist whose art blights the lives of those he loves, who makes a darker, deeper impression.

Though the film's slowish pacing, early on, over-indicates how both magicians' marquee misdirection --a disappearing act--will be achieved, The Prestige still pulls off a neat trick of its own. So what if you twig to the how of the deception; what remains is the horror of how any human being could stand it.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 11:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Was it Joe Queenan who wrote an essay why so many movie heroes are architects?

In the Guardian this week, Paul Arendt takes another look at the cinematic obsession with architects: this time, the movie hero is a photogenic Jude Law in BREAKING AND ENTERING, whose job shows that he's brainy enough to have attended graduate school, rugged enough to show him getting his hands dirty on a building site, but artistic and sensitive enough to stay late at the office doing sketches, collages and model-making.

Personally, I always thought movie makers love architects because they get to commission cool miniatures of the the hero's dream project -- which they can then destroy, preferably with the main character's fists ("Why, God, why?") scene when the heroes hopes and dreams are temporarily destroyed.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 07:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Getting a little tired of the buildup. Enough with the buzz screenings. Will the movie just freakin' come out already?

But Sacha Baron-Cohen--BORAT--I can't stay mad at you. Enjoy his sexytime Q&A with the Times of London.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 10:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Since the departure of David Edelstein, Slate's film section hasn't had a single, strong critical voice. But it's had a series of intriguing essays about various aspects of cinema, including this week's look at the best film composers.

Writer Jan Swafford looks at the work of Max Steiner (KING KONG, DARK VICTORY), Bernard Herrmann (PSYCHO, TAXI DRIVER) and Toru Takemitsu (WOMAN IN THE DUNES, RAN).

Whose film music carries you away? Whose soundtracks have you sought out, even when the film doesn't live up to the score?

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 09:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Do what you can this week to avoid reading reviews of THE PRESTIGE, the new film from Christopher Nolan. Despite the entreaties of Touchstone's PR reps, critics can't help spoiling some of the duelling-magician thriller's finest surprises. (The movie's trailer, by the way, contains some masterful misdirection, setting up the conflict without ruining the coolest trick.)

What no review can wreck is your impression of the lead actors' performances. Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman are well cast as the rival showmen. Bale has three films this fall. Werner Herzog's RESCUE DAWN debuted at the Toronto Film Festival, and HARSH TIMES, due later this month. New York magazine's Logan Hill talks to Bale about Batman, magic and Herzog -- take a look.

Update:

Scott Foundas' review from LA Weekly praises the seductive mysteries of THE PRESTIGE without wrecking any of the film's pleasures. I hope my review in the Boston Phoenix will do the same. It'll be posted on Oct. 19.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 10:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Indiewire's Anthony Kaufman has a smart piece in SLATE on why so many documentaries about the war in Iraq aren't doing well with movie audiences--despite a dearth of US television about what's really going on over there, and a growing sentiment that US involvement should decrease or end entirely.

Four years and 2,745 US deaths into the war, are Americans too jaded and depressed to shell out $10 bucks to see a movie that's probably going to be about about casualties, carnage and political clusterfuckage?

In the wake of Michael Moore's highly poltiical FAHRENHEIT 9/11, which grossed $119 million, there have been at least 10 documentaries about the war in Iraq -- but none has grossed more than $1 million. Only the war-machine-in-general exploration WHY WE FIGHT, has broken that barrier. (THE WAR ROOM, about the military's handling of media coverage from the war front, is nearing the mark).

Beyond GUNNER PALACE, OCCUPATION: DREAMLAND, and THE WAR TAPES, I can honestly say I don't even remember hearing about press screenings for the other films that Kaufman mentions. Other non-fiction filmmakers have been more successful by pointing their cameras in another direction: at the gross civil rights violations committed here in the U.S. since 9/11.

Watch Lowell Bergman's two part FRONTLINE series about all the heralded arrests of homeland Al Qaeda cells (Lodi, upstate New York, and Miami) that turn out to be nothing (all charges dropped for lack of evidence)--PBS has made THE ENEMY WITHIN available for free on its website.

Meanwhile, this year's hot doc--AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH--a chalk talk with a smart, boring politician/correspondent who cares, is the sort of thing that could have played as a NBC WHITE PAPER on the environment. Forty years ago.

Lately the most pungent -- and probably the most widely seen -- commentary on the US occupation of Iraq war hasn't been in movie theaters. It's been in the season opening episodes of BATTLESTAR GALACTICA
Slate has another interesting cultural commentary piece about why the parallels only go so far.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 02:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Does your carpet match your drapes?
Now you can be sure it always will.

Cue the clip from Paul Verhoeven's WWII thriller BLACK BOOK, in which the brunette heroine mixes up a peroxide rinse to go undercover--way undercover--as an Aryan princess. ("What a perfectionist," leers her Dutch resistance boyfriend, before diving in for a closer inspection.) That Verhoeven, what scamp! But darn it if he ain't a visionary, too.

From Radar Online, the resurrected magazine that ought to be on your essential reading list:

"New York socialite Nancy Jarecki (who's married to Moviefone man and CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS director Andrew Jarecki) has launced a line of pubic hair dyes called Betty." For $20, those unhappy with their hair-hue can "safely" dye their nether tresses Black, Brown, Auburn, Blonde, and Fun - which appears to be pink.

Nancy Jarecki would like "Betty" to become a cute and socially acceptable name for "mons pubis" -- because all the other words are so clinical, ugly or dirty.

Mrs. J gamely answers a key question: how permanent is the dye? A lot of people ask, "If I'm having oral sex with my girlfriend, will it come off on my face?'"

The answer, she swears, is no. The Betty dye will hold.

So go on! Have sex all the sex you want. Swim. Play tennis. Ride horses on the beach. Fool those Nazis, BLACK BOOK heroine. The Betty dye will hold fast.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 11:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

How I love to see my adopted hometown in the movies. Even though THE DEPARTED is a remake of a Hong Kong film, INFERNAL AFFAIRS, screenwriter William Monahan and director Martin Scorsese give this cops-and-gangstah thriller the vicious-to-the-ears accent that I grew up making fun of, but miss whenever I'm a way.

Newsweek picks the best films ever shot -- or at least set -- in Boston

Some picks are predictable: Geography is destiny in both THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE and MYSTIC RIVER, two decent movies. But some of Newsweek's movies seem like list-filler.

I'd put MONUMENT AVENUE, directed by the late Ted Demme, on the list and raise JAWS out of the honorable mentions. Around 1982, Cambridge-based independent filmmaker Jan Egleson made a superior coming of age drama called THE DARK END OF THE STREET, which I still have on VHS somewhere. It holds up better than the incredibly dated THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR.

While GOOD WILL HUNTING may not have amounted to much more than an after school special with razor-sharp dialogue, the MattandBen breakthrough movie did give a real sense of how working class white Boston guys live and speak. (Remember the almost wordless scene of Affleck's character showing up, styrofoam cup of Dunkin' Donuts coffee in hand, at his buddies' houses to drive them to work--wicked early, way too tired for small talk? Grow up in Greater Boston, you know those guys. But until Good Will Hunting, I'd never seen them on film.)

A friend reminds me that I was, as a kid, absolutely terrified by COMA, which gave anaesthesia -- and the Xerox building on Rte. 95, Waltham -- a bad name.

At least LOVE STORY didn't get on there. Ewwww.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 06:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

INFAMOUS-the second movie in two years about the genesis of Truman Capote's IN COLD BLOOD-arrives in theatres a year after the critically acclaimed CAPOTE. This film, too, boasts a career-making performance from its leading man. In place of a physically transformed Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Infamous is carried by a less well known lookalike, the highly regarded stage actor Toby Jones, and his best pal Harper Lee is portrayed this time, with warmth and appealing shyness, by Sandra Bullock.

The key scene, for me, is when Jones' Capote is on the phone to his society and literary friends, revising and sweetening one of the most indelible lines in his true crime novel, Perry Smith's remark that he had admired Mr. Clutter "right up until the moment I slit his throat."

I really enjoyed speaking with Jones for the New York Daily News. The actor's well known as a playwright and monologist (he's a great admirer of the late Spalding Gray).

What the Daily News piece couldn't include was Jones' insight into the way writers-especially memoirists-transform their lives and the lives of those of those around them into art. "In Cold Blood was quite different from everything Capote had written before, and everything he wrote afterward," said Jones. "It was groundbreaking, not just as a genre, but for him personally."

"And yes, I did wonder, after reading Doug McGrath's script and working on this film: How much can we trust writers in general, when they write about themselves? How much can we believe? Not just Capote, who was such much about creating a persona, all his life. But all the writers we love and admire. Their gift is all about transforming experience, what did happen, into literature."

Enough of the highbrow stuff.

I'd also like to thank Jones for enduring all my obligatory questionsn about his cellblock sex scene with Daniel Craig, who plays convicted killer Perry Smith. (Questions like, "So, you're the first actor to have a crack at the new James Bond. Tell me all about it."
)

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 11:46 AM | Permalink

Feeling righteous? Want to wreck stuff?

Fans of the LEFT BEHIND books--the pulp thrillers that envision a post-Rapture America--can now enjoy the videogame ETERNAL FORCES, set in battleground Manhattan, where good and evil forces will fight it out. New York magazine reviews the game and meets its makers. Players of this First person shooter game won't have to worry about much collateral damage. Those who've been Saved have been carried up in the Rapture. The Left Behind characters--there are 300 to choose from--must join either the Tribulation Force (good guys) or the army of the Anti-Christ (bad).

The game arrives in stores just in time for Christmas--and the same week that Korea's joined the nuclear club.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 08:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There ought to be a special Emmy award for whoever casts the leading men for PBS' MASTERPIECE THEATRE and MYSTERY. They've found yet another floppy haired, skinny-sexy actor to make thegirls go crazy and turn sexually ambiguous young men into lifelong Anglophiles. He's David Tennant, a 35 year old Scots-born actor who'll be all over TV this fall. Tennant plays the lead role in CASANOVA (on PBS Masterpiece Theatre, beginning Sunday Oct. 8) and he is the new incarnation of the SciFi network's DR. WHO (Fridays at 9pm).

The Los Angeles Times has a look at Tennant in both series. Reporter Robert Lloyd describes Tennant's cut-glass facial structure as "vulpine," which is one of those writerly ways of saying that the actor both looks like a wolf and is rather foxy. Without sounding all gay about it. On DR. WHO, his sci fi pal Rose (Billie Piper) describes the hero as Rose characterizes him as "a big old punk with a bit of rockabilly tthrown in."

Perfect.

Tennant's another in a long line of what a friend of mine calls Britstuds--those stage-trained, TV drama-seasoned actors who can act the hell out of any role--hero, villain, oddball character type--and steal any movie. (You know who you are, Bill Nighy and Jim Broadbent.)

Before Hollywood discovered Clive Owen and Colin Firth, these actors--tall, dark and posh--were mainstays of PBS crime and costume dramas -- the lavish literary adaptations coproduced by the BBC, ITV or Channel 4.

Even Ralph Fiennes, a couple of years before he made his sensational film breakthrough in SCHINDLER'S LIST, caught many eyes with a miniscule role in the first installment of PRIME SUSPECT with Helen Mirren. As a murder victim's grieving boyfriend, Fiennes appeared in just two scenes, but he was so distractingly, attractively neurotic that audiences assumed, on no evidence whatever, that he had to be guilty of something. Turns out he was marked for stardom: Steven Spielberg caught his performance in PRIME SUSPECT as well as his next British-made film, WUTHERING HEIGHTS, and cast him in

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you've been reading the Village Voice lately, perhaps you've noticed that the film review section for New York City's alternative weekly is much the same as the film review section for Los Angeles' alternative weekly. Ever since the New Times company bought the Voice, there's been a whole lot of sameness -- bad news for everyone interested in arthouse film.

Writer Anthony Kaufman over at IFC confirms that there's more bad news

This week, the new Voice editor got rid of two more film section staffers: editor Dennis Lim and critic Michael Atkinson and announced the hiring of Nathan Lee, who's written for the New York Times. J. Hoberman remains, yet the Voice's film sections offers hardly any local local voices. For past few months, most of the criticism has come from New Times' freelancers, scattered across the country, or from reprints of reviews by LA Weekly's Ella Taylor and Scott Foundas. Taylor and Foundas are top knotch writers, but every movie deserves more than one review.

I've already heard executive from a small distribution company complain about the doubling-up. "The arthouse market market is review-driven," he said. "We have limited numbers of prints and a limited advertising budget--we can't always afford to open a film in both New York and LA on the same date."

"If we open the film in LA, and we get killed in the LA Weekly (review), that's it--we already know what the review will be in the Village Voice three weeks later: the same damn thing. What's the use of buying an ad in the print edition? We'll take our chances and buy bigger ads in Time Out New York or New York magazine. Who knows what their critics will say, but at least the movie will have a chance."

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 11:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Radar, the magazine that would not die, has fighting spirit Q&A with Marine-turned-actor R. Lee Ermey, who bitchslapped some sense (and a little psychosis) into the recruits of FULL METAL JACKET. He'll be playing yet another wacko authority figure in the sequel to THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, which opens this weekend.

I'm never sure if the hard-driving Ermey, who hosts a military doc show on The Discovery Channel, is putting us on, or not. But in the Radar interview, he says that director Stanley Kubrick rang him up during the making of EYES WIDE SHUT to say he'd been bossed around by stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, and that the movie would turn out to be a "piece of shit

What did Kubrick mean by this? Ermey's answer dispels any notion of Kubrick as overbearing control freak. "He was kind of a shy little timid guy," says Ermey. "He wasn't real forceful. That's why he didn't appreciate working with big, high-powered actors. They would have their way with him, he would lose control, and his movie would turn to shit."

Read it all--nobody gives good quote like a Marine.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 08:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Screenwriter William Monahan's name has been all over the trades for the past couple of years, but he's a relative newcomer to the film industry. The Boston-born journalist and novelist wrote for the New York Press in the early 1990s, penning a weekly column on politics and current affairs. Now he's better know as the screenwriter for Martin Scorsese's THE DEPARTED, which opens Friday.

Suddenly it seemed that Monahan became the go-to guy for brash, brutal dialogue--a new Mamet--or the man with historical obsessions (knights, the crusades, the shores of Tripoli) that clicked with director Ridley Scott. First he wrote the long, literate screenplay for KINGDOM OF HEAVEN, but it's his adaptation of the Hong Kong cop thriller INFERNAL AFFAIRS that'll let you understand Monahan-speak.

Read all about him in a Boston Globe interview with Sam Alllis.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The British Film Institute has placed short films by Stephen Frears (THE QUEEN), Ridley Scott, Tony Scott and the late John Schleschinger online and available for download--for a fee. Six feature films will be online, including PRESSURE (1974), which is regarded as one of Britain's first black feature films.

The BFI archive houses 230,000 movies and 675,000 television programmes. Curators are putting films online so that these titles-many of which are rarely screened outside of arthouses, film festivals, and academia--can reach a broad audience.

Many clips are are free -- like this guide to British Film, hosted by Malcolm McDowell.

For more information, visit the British Film Insititute's website or the BFI's magazine, Screen Online.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 09:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)