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12 articles from 2009
Last Minute Video Considerations: Clint Eastwood and Frank Sinatra
22 December 2009 5:53 AM, PST
| Comicmix.com
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MGM Home Video has offered up thirteen different star-centered CD packs, all conveniently priced at $24.95 but savvy shoppers can find them for as little as $14.95. Each box set features four films from the studio’s vast library and neatly packages them together.
What you pay for in convenience, though, you lose in the rich DVD experience that many aficionados want from their home video. The films come with commentary and maybe the trailer but little else. So, if your recipient is a major fan of the films and/or stars, be warned.
Having said that, two that were sent for review, are pretty nice. The Clint Eastwood Star Collection offers up A Fistful of Dollars, For A Few Dollars More, The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, and Hang ‘Em High. That’s 721 minutes of Clint in his spaghetti western days and the birth of a film icon. Oddly, A Fistful of Dollars
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- Robert Greenberger
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Cinematical Seven: Worst Genre-Swapping Remakes
17 December 2009 7:32 PM, PST
| Cinematical
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It's hard to believe anyone thought it was a good idea to turn 8½ into a musical, let alone Federico Fellini. But apparently the filmmaker was happy to see his best work adapted for the stage back in 1982. I guess it had worked well enough for Nights of Cabiria, though the film version of that musical, Sweet Charity, was a tremendous box office flop. I imagine the new film of Nine will have a similar fate. Yet even if it's somehow a hit, that won't excuse the fact that it's a choppy, stagy, soulless simplification of one of the most personal and expressionistic pieces of cinematic art ever produced.
Not all drama-turned-musical remakes are so awful, though the concept of redoing a movie in another genre is pretty funny ever since people started playing with the idea on YouTube. With Zhang Yimou's action-comedy take on the Coen Brothers' Blood Simple
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- Christopher Campbell
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Directors We Love: Monte Hellman
17 December 2009 4:15 PM, PST
| Cinematical
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I have seen nearly every Christmas movie ever made, but there was one I couldn't wait to see that kept eluding me: Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out! (1989). Why, you're wondering, would I waste my time on this crappy, sub-par horror series whose only claim to fame was irritating a group of parents back in the 1980s? Because this third part of a five-film series was the "comeback" feature for one of the greatest American directors of the 1960s and 1970s. Finally, Lionsgate has released the film on DVD for the first time, in a three-disc box set, no less, that also contains Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: Initiation (1990) and Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toy Maker (1991, starring Mickey Rooney!). I finally got to see it. But more on that later.
Like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme and others, Monte Hellman (born 1932) started working for Roger Corman.
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- Jeffrey M. Anderson
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Preview: Invictus
6 December 2009 1:17 PM, PST
| HeyUGuys.co.uk
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In the 1950’s, a western TV show called Rawhide hit Us airwaves. One of several series about the old west, it captivated adults and children alike. Rawhide featured an ensemble cast of largely unknown actors, including a young man named Clint Eastwood. Eastwood had appeared in TV and film before, but it was here he really found fame. After Rawhide ended, Eastwood made a handful of TV shows and movies, until his big break came along. Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars and it’s follow ups made Eastwood into an icon. He went on to play numerous tough guy parts, invariably a cowboy or cop, and was very successful.
He made his directorial debut early on, often combining his newfound talent with his acting. He met with mild success until his 1992 western Unforgiven. It was hailed as one of the best westerns of all times, and gained Eastwood alot of credibility.
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- Barry Steele
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Watch the 'Man With No Name' Trilogy on YouTube
22 November 2009 12:01 PM, PST
| GetTheBigPicture.net
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Trilogies make for good conversation fodder. My preferred trio is the Bourne movies, because the first movie was really good and then the series got better and, inexplicably, even better in round three. That just doesn't happen that much. But you could argue Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, even The Godfather, on the strength of the first two movies.
Not to be overlooked is Sergio Leone's Man With No Name Trilogy, the Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns of the 1960s that were influential in moving the western out of its traditional forms to more complicated heroic figures (or are they heroic at all?) and giving it the kind of narrative and cinematic overhaul the genre desperately needed.
Between now and November 30th, MGM is providing A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly free on YouTube. You can't beat free,
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- Colin Boyd
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Featured Article: Classic Italian Film
9 November 2009 4:45 PM, PST
| Screenrush
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With its silent superspectacles, postwar neo-realism and 1960s new wave, the Italian film industry has enjoyed three major periods of international influence. In between times, it has assimilated the technological advances and dramatic styles of foreign competitors and used them to shape such local trends as the `white telephone' film, calligraphism, giallo, the `sword and sandal' epic, the `spaghetti' Western and the dialect comedy.
Over the years, the unexpected has become commonplace. Therefore, it's no surprise to see Gianni di Gregorio, the screenwriter of the uncompromising crime saga Gomorrah, making his directorial debut with Mid-August Lunch, a charming comedy of bourgeois manners, whose unforced naturalism, social insight and deceptive wit hark back to a golden age that is recalled here by MovieMail - the best place to buy classic movies and world cinema on DVD.
After two decades of propaganda and pictorialism, Italian film went back to basics after the Second World War.
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The "Dollars Trilogy" Free on Hulu
5 November 2009 10:27 AM, PST
| JustPressPlay.net
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A quick heads-up for Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood fans. All three of their "Man with No Name" westerns are now up on Hulu for free viewing. Hulu is only going to have these movies up until the end of November, so don't waste time, pilgrim. You can watch all three films right here.
A Fistful of Dollars originally followed the trend of remaking Akira Kurosawa's samurai films as westerns. I say trend, but really there was only, what, The Magnificent Seven? Fistful uses the plot of Kurosawa's Yojimbo as its premise, then reshapes it into Leone's own signature style. Then came the pseudo-sequel, For a Few Dollars More. Leone never meant for the three films to be a trilogy, but it just turned out that way due to Eastwood's same look and acting style in all three. The Good, The Bad and the Ugly is a prequel of sorts,
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- Arya Ponto
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Cjamango
15 August 2009 3:36 AM, PDT
| Latemag.com/film
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Sergio Corbucci's Django revolutionised the Spaghetti Western genre in many ways. The low-budget retelling of Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars – itself a remake of Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo – ramped up the violence, the amorality, the bloodletting and the insanity factor to an unprecedented scale, spawning a glut of rip-offs, cash-ins and unofficial sequels of varying degrees of quality. It also, quite unintentionally, began a trend for titular heroes whose names ended in the letter 'o' and when said quickly enough could possibly be mistaken for Django.
There was Anthony Steffen - the Spaghetti Western standard-bearer, himself no stranger to playing Django - starring as the main man in both Garringo and Shango. 'Sword and Sandal' star Brad Harris as the fast gun in Durango is Coming, Pay or Die. Montgomery Clark (Dante Posani) as the gambling gunslinger in Djurado and Ivan Rassimov in this, 1967's Cjamango.
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- Nick
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1.9 million see naked Angel on Bb
18 June 2009 3:15 AM, PDT
| digitalspy
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Last night's Big Brother highlights show drew an average of 1.88m (11.5%) for Channel 4, early figures suggest. The programme, which featured a clip of Angel skinny dipping in the pool, is down around 1.15m on the equivalent show from last year. It drew 3.03m (17.5%) on June 18, 2008. Earlier on the channel, at 9pm, the final episode of Embarrassing Bodies pulled in 3.06m (14.1%). The second installment of BBC One's Occupation, starring James Nesbitt and Stephen Graham, managed 3.23m (14.9%), down 1.16m on the opening episode. BBC Two documentary The Price Of Life took 810k (3.7%), while Spain: Paradise Lost had 4.28m (19.8%) for ITV1, putting the channel in first place for the hour. Five's Clint Eastwood Western A Fistful Of Dollars averaged 1.58m (8.2%) between 9pm and 11.15pm. The Bill came (more)
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- By Dan French
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Breaking News: Sergio Leone Didn't Invent the Spaghetti Western
10 April 2009 10:01 PM, PDT
| amctv.com - Future of Classic: Westerns
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Sergio Leone's name is synonymous with the Spaghetti Western genre, but he wasn't the first Italian director to reinvent the Wild West. In fact, Leone's first entry in the Man With No Name series, A Fistful of Dollars, arrived rather late in the emerging wave of international Westerns: 25th, as a matter of fact. During the 1960s, the genre was actually very fertile ground for international filmmakers. With American
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Spielberg & Scorsese Mark Kurosawa's 99th Birthday With Special Messages
19 March 2009 6:25 PM, PDT
| WENN
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Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese will toast what would have been late moviemaker Akira Kurosawa's 99th birthday at a gala in his honour on Monday.
The two directors have recorded emotional video messages which will be shown at the Cherry Blossom Gala in Los Angeles.
The event will serve as the official launch of the Akira Kurosawa Film School at California's Anaheim University and various members of Kurosawa's family are expected to be at the tribute.
The revered Japanese filmmaker's movies, like Red Beard and Seven Samurai, inspired moviemakers like Spielberg, Scorsese and George Lucas - and films like Star Wars, The Magnificent Seven and A Fistful of Dollars.
The director died in 1998.
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Some Westerns Come With a Side of Wasabi
20 February 2009 9:00 PM, PST
| amctv.com - Future of Classic: Westerns
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The Western might seem as native as apple pie, but in the 1960s gunslinging American filmmakers began to take their cues from Japan. Their biggest influence was the legendary director Akira Kurosawa. The John Sturges epic Magnificent Seven transformed Kurosawa's Seven Samurai into a Western classic that wisely retained the original's bittersweet ending. In A Fistful of Dollars, Sergio Leone swiped the plot of Kurosawa's Yojimbo -- and set
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12 articles from 2009
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