Film Fatale

Want to see a wicked scary short film?
Watch TEN STEPS by Brendan Muldowney.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 06:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Get ready for the revenge of the Revenge Movie.

Two trailers -- very similar -- catch your attention. The movies don't promise the same depth or quality: THE BRAVE ONE, starring Jodie Foster and directed by Neil Jordan, looks far more intriguing and troubling, while DEATH SENTENCE, with Kevin Bacon, looks like a formula picture.

Check out the trailers, posters and tagline: the genre never fails to go for the gut. From THE BRAVE ONE, there's complexity - conflict. "We're on your side," says Terrence Howard, the sympathetic detective. Replies Foster: "How come it doesn't feel like that?" And her voice over - she's going over the edge. "It is astonishing to find inside you there is a stranger." There's a great trailer line for Foster, who can't help but sound badass: "I want my dog back."

Were there trailer lines before blaxploitation movies, Clint Eastwood and Dirty Harry?

In DEATH SENTENCE, here's Kevin Bacon getting the Charles Bronson sell. I feel as though I've seen the entire movie. Here it goes:

Images: Masked thugs holding up store; SFX: Racking shotguns.

Thug VO: "Do it now"

Bacon: "I want this guy to go away for the rest of his life."

Narrator: A senseless murder

Judge: I'm dismissing this case."

Narrator: Gone unpunished.

Bacon: "He killed my son."

Image: Smirking thug.

Narrator: An ordinary man. [Bacon, obviously. Not the scot-free ex-defendant.

Thug VO: "I'm coming for the rest of your family."

[Audience wondering: What family?]

Narrator: With no choice.

Bacon goes Bronson: "I need guns."

Narrator: From the director of SAW. [Pronounced 'Za, as in "Dude! I'm starving! Let's order some 'Za."

Bacon: "I don't care what happens to me. I just need them to be safe.

[Audience thinking: Don't they need guns? And 'Za? Wait! Remember that poster tagline: "Protect what's yours." A man's gotta protect his hypothetical family.

Kevin Bacon. DEATH SENTENCE. [:That's marriage and family life for you.]

Rated R, in theaters August 31.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 02:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As if you know know their site, or some site exactly like it.

The Guardian hoists a black flag and introduces us to the Swedish computer geeks whom Hollywood despises: the pirates behind Pirate Bay. (The link is to the newspaper story, not the torrenty site.)

Obligatory fuming quote from the MPAA: "The bottom line is that the operators of The Pirate Bay, and others like them, are criminals who profit handsomely by facilitating the distribution of copyrighted creative works," says John Malcolm, the group's MPAA.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 08:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Everything that the movie DOMINO should have been, and all the bail bond parts of JACKIE BROWN -- but with tough dames instead of tough Robert Forster: that's Court TV's new reality series BOUNTY GIRLS, my new TV obsession.

How cool are these bounty hunters, the four wily Miami women of Sunshine State Bail Bonds? On their recent visit to NBC's Today show, they demonstrated the art of taking down a suspect -- or somebody who's bugging you.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 06:50 PM | Permalink

When THE NANNY DIARIES came out in 2002, authors Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus insisted that the icy Mrs. X -- the employer in their roman a clef wasn't based on any one of their several real-life past bosses.

Nevertheless, a Manhattan guessing game ensued -- and the acid-tinged gossip was captured thats pring by New York Times Styles section writer Alex Kucyzynksi.

Now that the movie's out, and Laura Linney embodies the icy socialite Mrs. X, NANNY DIARIES producer Harvey Weinstein (according to the New York Post) was overheard offering some "well connected socialites" $100,000 to unmask the "real Mrs. X." Has he and everyone else this thing called TimesSelect (or Google) to spark the memory? Suspect No. 1 was the author of THE PREPPY HANDBOOK.

(How nasty can Mrs. X be, anyway? If Laura Linney's playing her, I know I'm going to come away respecting that bitch.)

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 12:17 PM | Permalink

[Book trailer directed by Anthony Orkin]

When I hadn't seen my friend Paula Bernstein in a while, I wondered what she'd been up to. We were neighbors in Brooklyn, she was a reporter for Variety and I figured she was busy with her first daughter. I ran into her in Park Slope a couple of years ago and go, "So, Paula, what's been going on?"

She had the most faraway look on her face. "You're not going to believe this," she says. "I remember you I haven't told many people this yet, but I remember you telling me your mom is an identical twin..I found out I have an identical twin sister, and we were separated at birth. She contacted me through the adoption agency and we've met. It's just -- incredible."

As in a movie, or a fairy tale - a rather dark one - Paula and identical twin, Elyse Schein, have gotten to know each other (this is the happy part) and explored the twisted circumstances of their separation. Together, they've written an extraordinary and moving memoir of sisterhood, blood and emotional ties called called IDENTICAL STRANGERS.

What makes this book more than just your ordinary, magical, as seen on Oprah type tale of long lost siblings reunited is that Paula and Elyse (and many other tri-State area twins they found) were part of a secret and highly unorthodox study of twins intentionally separated at birth. Can I tell you how messed up and callous this study was? You've got to read this book.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 09:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Can't do better than this headline.

"Ah, Hollywood, where men will be boys
What can big-screen women expect from love? A bong-sucking, porn-addled, baby-fatted slacker."

Johanna Schneller of Toronto's Globe and Mail gets to the heart of the male - boyish - romances of I NOW PRONOUNCE YOU CHUCK AND LARRY, THE BREAK-UP, KNOCKED UP (a movie in which guys know 5,000 words for penis but can't bring themselves to say the word 'abortion.'"

Adam Sandler is perhaps the most talented actor who consistently under-casts himself, and Schneller perfectly describes his (or the movie's?) over-indicative comic style: In a scene where he, pretending to be gay, lusts for gorgeous Jessica Biel,

"The agony in his eyes as Biel proffers her luscious but off-limits body is funny. The fact that he quickly has to tie his sweatshirt around his waist is funny. Yet Sandler can't stop there - that wouldn't be literal enough.

He has to jam his hand down his pants and fish around in there, fidgeting and readjusting so assiduously that he stops looking like a man wrestling with an erection, and starts looking like a toddler who has to go pee-pee."

There it is, the annoyance in these movies: the heroes dwindle from manly -- human -- carnal appetites to childish antics. Maybe we're supposed to think this is adorable. But I find it boring.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 12:23 PM | Permalink

Looking around at the Emmy Award previews in Variety and elsewhere, I saw some familiar names in the directing categories.

First up: the nonfiction category. No surprise to see which network dominates the category: HBO devotes considerable support to the documentary form (though Cinemax, PBS and Showtime deserve praise for their doc series, too.)

If Spike Lee's shattering Hurricane Katrina epic WHEN THE LEVEES BROKE: A REQUIEM IN FOUR ACTS doesn't win the award, I think you'll hear shouts of protest. This is passionate, pointed filmmaking from a director working at the top of his form.

Troubled and angry times bring out the best in nonfiction films, so it's right to see one of the finer Iraq docs, GHOSTS OF ABU GHRAIB, Rory Kennedy's examination into the lives and motives of the torturers and victims among US troops and personnel. (As strong as this doc is, PBS' Frontline did a nearly identical doc on Abu Ghraib this past season, with many of the same interviewees.

The History Channel gets a nomination not for a battle doc the nostalgia of STAR WARS: A LEGACY REVEALED. Congratulations to Burns, who's won for his Biography episodes, but come on. The slick Star Wars doc hit all the usual notes: Joseph Campbell, blah blah blah, and played like a promo for the DVD.

Most unusual among the nominees was an installment of Showtimes National Public Radio adaptation THIS AMERICAN LIFE, directed by Christopher Wilcha. A profile of a Mormon painter's search for bearded Bible character lookalikes to pose for his photorealistic canvases, the doc used stunning Utah locations and evocative interviews with locals: Mormon believers (clean-shaven, obviously), bearded believers and unbelievers, and the girlfriend of the artist's "Jesus," a non religious New York woman who has found it difficult to live with a guy who looks like God's gift. [That's him in the illustration.]

Though "God's Close-Up" is the shortest of the non-fiction entries, Wilcha weaves a thoughtful essay about the relationship between artist and model, and how subjects transform the viewer, and vice versa.

If the overwhelming political and artistic forces did not make Lee's Katrina doc the deserving winner, I'd favor Wilcha and THIS AMERICAN LIFE. Showtime's captivating series - once again, this is an audio-visual transformation of NPR's radio series - don't have current events, shock, or tragedy to draw in viewers. But somehow these minidocs, too, linger in the mind.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 04:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From the Desk of Uwe Boll

Specially talented movie director and amateur boxer Uwe Boll has embarked upon an epistolary romance with WIRED reporter Chris Kohler.

This a correspondence will surely become as memorable as the rose-scented letters that flew back and forth between Robert Olen Butler and Gawker.

Highlights (from Boll)

chris,

your review shows me only that you dont understand anything about movies and that you are a untalented wanna bee filmmaker with no balls and no understanding what POSTAL is. you dont see courage because you are nothing. and no go to your mum and fuck her ...because she cooks for you now since 30 years ..so she deserves it.
people like you are the reason that independent movies have no chance anymore.
uwe boll
PS: POSTAL is R RATED . The MPAA understood the satire -- you not -- you dumb fuck

Enjoy.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 02:01 PM | Permalink

Nicole Kidman's paranoia gets an aerobic workout in INVASION.

In this summer of sequels, threquels and remakes, one title is actually kind of intriguing: INVASION - yet another imaging of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS.

Though the new film has not been seen by critics (uh oh), the trailer is effectively unnerving, with nervous thoroughbred Nicole Kidman freaking out while her neighbors and friends become strangely emotionless. (Thank you, Jeremy Northam, for your suave Eurovillainy. Don't trust that guy for a minute, Nicole.)

In the Sunday New York Times, Dennis Lim looks back a the various iterations of this marvelously paranoid tale, from the original Jack Finney novel (mid 1950s, naturally) to the Cold War paranoia Don Siegel film (1956), to the psychotherapy-cult weirdness of the 1978 of Philip Kaufman's 1978 update. Abel Ferrara's BODY SNATCHERS (1993), set on a military base in the American South, made the heroine into a moody teenager, was unsettling in a different way: she was trapped and powerless even before the pod people arrived.

Interesting, isn't it, that Kidman already played a Cassandra in a remake of a paranoid thriller? The ill starred STEPFORD WIVES of a couple of years ago. To her credit, she was damn funny as a stressed out TV executive in that movie's first 15 minutes. But STEPFORD, unlike INVASION, did not stand up to re-examination.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 09:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Though I've done my fair share of entertainment business writing, I find it's generally best to leave the dollars and cents reporting these to David Poland, or to link to Anne Thompson at Variety.

But a recent, jawdroppingly stupid story in the New York Times makes me break that rule.

Film business reporter Brooks Barnes, who comes to the Times from the Wall Street Journal (and therefore surely ought to know better) gives an update on the slurry of ongoing negotiations between the Writer Guild of America and the studios, and the fears of a strike in Hollywood.

One issue is how to allocate residual payments - the money paid to writers (and directors, actors and producers) when a film or TV title is re-shown or sold on DVD, television, the internet or on some new media yet to be invented. How do you value each new media platform as it becomes more or less popular?

Boring, complicated accounting stuff: but it's how entertainers and variety acts make money on repeat performances, adaptations and sequels.

The New York Times' Barnes doesn't get this. He starts his story with an analogy only a studio accountant would make.

"Jasper Johns isn’t paid based on the number of years his flag paintings remain popular attractions at museums. Rem Koolhaas doesn’t cash a check every time an architecture fan takes a trip to Seattle to see his space-age public library. So why should the writers, directors and actors responsible for box-office bombs like “Gigli” be able to pocket some cash every time somebody buys the DVD?

It's a question that cuts to the heart of the biggest fight in Hollywood these days and sums up a fundamental choice the troubled entertainment industry needs to make: whether to cling to old blueprints for running the business or to draft a whole new set.

No. That's not the question at all.

Painters like Jasper Johns can sell off their works outright, or sign agreements with musems for exhibitions, or they can license images on T-shirts, posters and calendars. Abstract Expressionism is, I'll warrant you, an unlikely source material for a film script, graphic novel or TV series, but should it happen, it'd be an adaptation, and the original artist would residual payments when the later works are sold.

Playwrights, songwriters, lyricists get royalties and residuals because their works aren't considered on-time experiences. One ticket gets you one admission to the cinema. When you purchase a music CD or a film DVD, you're actually getting a license to enjoy the music in your own home -- not to broadcast it for a paying audience. (Read the FBI warning and fine print)

It's why your high school can't simply put on a production of MY FAIR LADY or RENT or a David Mamet play without getting a permission from Samuel French company. It's why recording artists can't release a new version of the Sex Pistols "God Save the Queen" without agreeing to pay royalties to the copyright holders.

Barnes -- and the studios -- can't really be suggesting that buying a ticket to one showing of 300 entitles me to infinite viewings and free DVD copies and downloads of the film.

If the studios try to curtail residual payments and go for up front, one-time payments to writers, directors and producers, and keep the future earnings for themselves, they're saying they don't value the future of their films and other works. And if studios don't value their future, they deserve a mass audience that pays up-front and once -- or maybe not at all -- for their products.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 03:01 PM | Permalink

Perhaps in recognition of the release of STARDUST -- a film with the most unsettling trailer I have seen since MAC & ME -- Film.com celebrates the Trippiest Movies Ever Made For Children.

Exhibit A is the recently rereleased LABYRINTH (1986), with David Bowie as a Goblin King who kidnaps the baby brother of pre-teen Jennifer Connelly, sending her off on a journey through creepy Muppet-land. Oh, it's weird. But Bowie cuts loose for a few amazing songs.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 10:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Warning: Don't make this man turn around.

From the blog More Than Fine, enjoy -- or fear -- the Top Five Jason Bourne Improvised Weapons. Complete with video and photos.

1) A good book.
2) Kitchenware
3) Candle holder, brass

I haven't had this much fun since I learned, in a self-defense class, how to disable an attacker with a rolled up copy of Allure magazine.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For most people, a celeb story in a magazine should be exactly as diverting and time-consuming as it will take for one's toenails to dry at the manicurist.

In the Washington Post, film writer Ann Hornaday has a wide-ranging piece on why the art of the celebrity interview could use a makeover.

Oh, admit it--you still read them, no matter how bad, redundant and uninformative these celeb profiles are (that 5,000 word Esquire cover story of Angelina Jolie was a recent example of the self-serious, expanding gas to fill the space variety. Nice cover shot, though.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 11:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Matt Damon, BOURNE to run.

In the Observer, here's a profile of director Paul Greengrass -- the man behind UNITED 93 and the two most recent BOURNE movies.

He's not nearly as shaky as his camera.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 10:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In THE NINES, Ryan Reynolds practically forces the audience to stare at his extremely ripped torso muscles. Will this visual ordeal never end?

One film I didn't get to see at Sundance 2007 was THE NINES, which gets a write up in Aug. 5 Sunday New York Times.

Screenwriter (CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY, BIG FISH) turned writer/director John August -- well known to bloggers as friendly and informative blogger johnaugust.com -- has created a "very meta" film about a man (Ryan Reynolds, gratuitiously shirtless, thank you, John August) trapped within a mysterious house of plots. Film plots, it seems.

In the Times piece, August, 37, discusses his successful career and writing a film about a writer. Not once is the movie ADAPTATION mentioned. But Fellini's 8 1/2 is. Omigosh! John August confesses, "I've never seen 8 1/2."

Man, you've got to get out of your house more often.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 05:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Slate's Explainer tackles a science/science fiction question that's surely been nagging anyone who's seen SUNSHINE:

Can an astronaut survive for even a few moments outside of a spacecraft without wearing a spacesuit? Without giving away too much of the plot, there's a tense sequence in SUNSHINE, the new thriller from Danny Boyle, in which three crew members of a solar-bound craft end up outside of the ship with only one pressurized suit among them.

There's a similarly horrific moment in EVENT HORIZON: the space rescue team's youngest member, under the influence of a ghostly force, wanders into an airlock, seals himself in. And as his frantic crewmates race to save him from outside the ship, he opens the airlock.

Can't trust those airlocks, can you?

The unsecured airlock in a sci fi movie is analogous to the French patio doors of slasher movies: highly freakin' permeable. The devil can just walk right in without knocking.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 12:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From RadarOnline, some photos from the intriguing JJ Abrams movie CLOVERFIELD

Production crews made a convincing-looking overnight mess on Orchard and Stanton Streets in Lower Manhattan, but by morning the neighborhood had been restored to its usual state of overpriced grime and trendiness.

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