5 articles from 2008
27 June 2008 12:09 AM, PDT | From DreadCentral.com | See recent Dread Central news
The remake of Clash of the Titans is still a go, no matter how much voodoo and black/white magic I dabble in to make it go away. Damn you, forces of darkness, why won’t you do my bidding?
Variety reports this morning that Clash now has some competition in the realm of big-budget Greek mythology green screen movies: War of the Gods, which has Tarsem (The Cell, The Fall) Singh on board to direct. Incredible Hulk helmer Louis Leterrier is attached to the Clash remake, so perhaps the two could just fight it out Thunderdome-style?
Relativity Media’s War of the Gods is set in ancient Greece (duh) and tells of a young warrior who leads his men against an evil so great, it pits man against demons and titans. Sign me up! Warner Bros.' Clash of the Titans is, of course, about Perseus, son of Zeus,
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Johnny Butane
24 June 2008 9:01 AM, PDT | From ifc.com | See recent IFC news
By Michael Atkinson
To each fiery cinema individualist his own honorial DVD box set: here we have a reacquaintance . or initiation, for the babies of the Reagan/Thatcher era . with the unique howl of Derek Jarman, dead in 1994 from AIDS at the age of 52, a career attenuated by the very same fate that ended up giving it such amperage. You'd never know it, but there was a time when British filmmakers, emboldened by punk culture, fueled by hatred for Thatcherite conservatism, and funded by the BFI and the new Channel Four, made outrageous, experimental, high culture vs. low culture collision movies, doped on structuralism and gender-bending and period-picture mockery. Jarman was the moment's jester prince; he never made a film you'd mistake for the work of another, or a film that doesn't manifest on the screen as an unpredictably impish riff on serious matters, Art-making and Sex and Death. Not to mention,
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Michael Atkinson
11 May 2008 1:44 PM, PDT | From blogs.suntimes.com/ebert | See recent Roger Ebert's Blog news
The 10th Anniversary Ebertfest begins tonight in Urbana-Champaign. It is with some melancholy that I write these words on a legal pad in a hospital bed in Chicago. After consulting with my doctors, I have decided it may not be prudent to try to make the journey today with a fractured hip.
Sigh. I was really happy with this one. The films, the guests, the friends. Chaz, Nate Kohn, Mary Susan Britt and I had all the pieces in place. The only tweak I didn’t have time for was a proper full-length review of “Shotgun Stories.” It was on the to-do list. What I’m using now is what I wrote after seeing it at the Chicago Film Festival. The rest is almost a turn-key operation---the little festival that runs itself, with the help of countless volunteers.
It’s hard to express what it means to me that the festival is in my hometown.
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Roger Ebert
8 May 2008 2:05 PM, PDT | From avclub.com | See recent The AV Club news
As writer-director Tarsem Singh (these days, just "Tarsem") explains it, he first had the idea for The Fall 14 years ago, but was unable to secure funding for a dark, miserablist fantasy shot in more than a dozen countries, based on a Bulgarian drama (1981's Yo Ho Ho), and largely written by the improvisational choices of a 5-year-old girl. And no wonder. The Fall ranks up there with the collected directorial works of Crispin Glover as an impossible-to-sell act of creative love and insane genius; Tarsem wound up financing it himself, piggybacking his shoots on his commercial-directing work around the world. But for such a homemade project, it's a staggeringly polished and beautiful one, heavily informed by Tarsem's work in commercials and music videos. (He's best known for R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion.") It resembles Cirque Du Soleil's Journey Of Man, another vividly colored fantasia that drew on some of the.
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Tasha Robinson
5 May 2008 8:14 AM, PDT | From ifc.com | See recent IFC news
By Neil Pedley
This week sees the return of the Wachowski brothers, Tarsem Singh ("The Cell") and Henry Bean ("The Believer") to the big screen, not to mention new films from documentarians Nick Broomfield ("Tupac and Biggie") and Doug Pray ("Scratch"). On the other hand, after running around Tribeca, we still need to catch up on last week's releases.
The idea of the spunky teenage boy succumbing to the allure of an experienced older woman is the kind of Hollywood golden goose that launches major careers (think Dustin Hoffman). But when the roles are reversed, the result is the directorial debut of David Ross that sees an entrepreneurial high schooler (Katherine Waterston, daughter of Sam) and her friends turn their babysitting ring into a call girl service, realizing there are alternative ways to pay for college besides waiting tables. It stars when one local dad (John Leguizamo) goes
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Neil Pedley
5 articles from 2008