Film Category
Includes cinema reviews and trailers for upcoming films. A digest of the best and worst interviews on movies and cinema.
Rocketman: Tom Hardy To Play Obvious Doppelganger, Elton John (Eddie Murphy Busy)
IF you were given the job of finding an actor who looked like Elton John, one of the last people you’d choose was Tom Hardy. You’d inevitably go for Eddie Murphy before him, as at least he could play the entire cast of the film with a variety of masks (and he’s got previous when it comes to making soulful pop).
Yet, here we are, looking at a musical biopic called Rocketman, which will feature the man-mountain who played Charles Bronson and supervillain Bane in the last Batman movie, as the little Candle In The Wind singer.
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Posted: 28th, October 2013 | In: Celebrities, Film, Music | Comment
Mod Cinema: Hard-To-Find 60s, 70s And 80s Films
ANORAK loves Mod Cinema, a home for hard-to-find 60s, 70s and 80s films you never knew you were looking for. The Mods put these movies on DVD. They are blasts of my youth, when everything at the cinema sounded echoey and on American TV shows the camera focused on a person’s face when they weren’t talking. And everyone looked a bit sweaty.
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Scarface Meets Seinfeld (With Canned Laughter)
I HATE Canned laughter. It shreds TV’s show’s soul. How bad can it get? Take a look at this – Scarface Meets Seinfeld:
Posted: 24th, October 2013 | In: Film, TV & Radio | Comment
Terrible Taglines: The Day Of The Dolphins (1973)
TERRIBLE Taglines: The Day Of The Dolphins (1973):
“Unwittingly He Trained A Dolphin To Kill The President Of The United States”
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Poto And Cabengo: In The 1970s Grace and Virginia Kennedy Were Bigger Than The Loch Ness Monster
POTO and Cabengo were Grace and Virginia Kennedy. In 1976, these San Diego twins were eight years old. Jean-Pierre Gorin created a study of the girls who spoke in their own secret language. Time magazine produced an extract of their dialogue:
Pinit, putahtraletungay”(Finish, potato salad hungry)
“Nis, Poto?” (This, Poto?)
“Liba Cabingoat, it”(Dear Cabengo, eat)
“la moa, Poto?” (Here more, Poto?)
“Ya” (Yeah)
But was it a secret language? Their father thought the girls’ gibbering fools, mentally negligible and not worthy of educating. He was wrong. Advised to place them in speech therapy, their teacher realised they were speaking a language only they understood.
In July 22, 1979, the LA Times Reported:
…
…
…
Gorin explained his film to Bomb magazine:
A low-budget independent film, shot in San Diego in 1979, in 16mm color negative. It’s an investigation, a film “around” an event—the case of the Kennedy twins. They were front page news at the time, as it was believed they had invented a “private language,” a private mode of communication, with a syntax and a vocabulary of its own. But this kind of an answer seems to frame Poto and Cabengo as a classical documentary…
I got hold of the event through the press. It was the middle of the summer and news was sparse. The Loch Ness monster had been nowhere in sight that year, and I suspect the journalists felt the twins would be a good substitute. They built up a case which reeked of Wild Child mystique. The very day I saw the first article on the twins, Eckardt Stein from ZDF was passing through town and I sold him the idea of a film. I lied through my teeth, told him that I had seen the twins, seen the therapists who took care of them at Children’s Hospital, secured the rights to the story. I assured Stein that they spoke a “private language.” He agreed to do the film. But when I saw the twins for the first time I immediately realized that the story as the press—and by then, myself—had cast it was not there. There was no private language and never had been. All along the twins had spoken a Creolized language, some densely unintelligible American/English, a patchwork of southern lingo spoken by their father and of the deformations imposed on the English language by their German-born mother.
The story had become bigger than the girls.
I got excited by the idea of inquiring about something which had never been there in the first place, which had been so completely misconstrued. It seemed like an eminently dramatic premise: two kids who moved and sounded like hummingbirds, who for years had been privately deciphering the world for each other, who did not know why they had suddenly become the object of so much attention, and who by now were for the therapists and linguists just two rather “ordinary” kids with banal problems of auditory information processing, while the press was still “Ripleying” their case to death. At the same time their parents were desperately hoping to convert their 15 minutes of Warholian celebrity into some hard cash. It seemed pretty interesting to try to unravel all these conflicting interests at work below the surface of this event. And don’t forget to add me, the filmmaker, to the stew: me, with my own agenda, trying to get a film out of this whole situation.
What happened to the girls?
The only clue is from a show about twins that aired on TLC around 2000, which reported that Virginia and Grace were still developmentally disabled. We are told this:
Now approaching 30, the twins continue to experience speech problems and mental delays. Grace, who has achieved a higher level of functioning than her sister, works at a McDonald’s cleaning tables and mopping. Virginia works at a job-training center and performs assembly-line work.
Posted: 22nd, October 2013 | In: Film, Flashback, Strange But True | Comment
1981: Heather O’Rourke Gets Her First Barbie Doll
FLASHBACK to 1981, and Heather O’Rourke is enjoying her first ever Barbie doll. Thanks to this doll, Heather was able to channel the full demonic experience in the guise of Carol Ann in Poltegeist. She also featured in 12 episodes of Happy Days.
“Act out every fantasy you can dream up” with Barbie, such as killing your loved ones, possessing your cat; eating the sofa…
It’s all in thsoe eeys:
Posted: 18th, October 2013 | In: Celebrities, Film, Flashback, The Consumer, TV & Radio | Comment
Boris Johnson race gaffe? London mayor tells Chinese Harry Potter’s Scottish lover Cho Chang was a foreigner
BORIS Johnson entered stage left and went into his usual act of being a hapless music hall entertainer stumbling upon sound policy. The London Mayor, for it is he, was appearing as Bozza at Peking University. In an effort to cement Sino-Anglo relations he noted that Harry Potter’s lover was Chinese:
…according to JK Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter novels, was Harry Potter’s first girlfriend? Who is the first person he kisses? That’s right, Cho Chang – who is a Chinese overseas student at Hogwarts school.
Ladies and gents I rest my case. I don’t think I need to argue any further, that is the future of Britain and of London.
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Posted: 14th, October 2013 | In: Film, Politicians | Comment
Stanley Kubrick explains the meaning of 2001: A Space Odyssey
STANLEY Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was a film about… Well, what is about? In 1969, Kubrick told Joseph Gelmis:
You begin with an artifact left on earth four million years ago by extraterrestrial explorers who observed the behavior of the man-apes of the time and decided to influence their evolutionary progression. Then you have a second artifact buried deep on the lunar surface and programmed to signal word of man’s first baby steps into the universe—a kind of cosmic burglar alarm. And finally there’s a third artifact placed in orbit around Jupiter and waiting for the time when man has reached the outer rim of his own solar system.
When the surviving astronaut, Bowman, ultimately reaches Jupiter, this artifact sweeps him into a force field or star gate that hurls him on a journey through inner and outer space and finally transports him to another part of the galaxy, where he’s placed in a human zoo approximating a hospital terrestrial environment drawn out of his own dreams and imagination. In a timeless state, his life passes from middle age to senescence to death. He is reborn, an enhanced being, a star child, an angel, a superman, if you like, and returns to earth prepared for the next leap forward of man’s evolutionary destiny.
That is what happens on the film’s simplest level. Since an encounter with an advanced interstellar intelligence would be incomprehensible within our present earthbound frames of reference, reactions to it will have elements of philosophy and metaphysics that have nothing to do with the bare plot outline itself.
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Posted: 14th, October 2013 | In: Books, Film, Flashback | Comment
Julian Assange nearly makes Benedict Cumberbatch quit film, says leaked email
NOT a man known for attracting attention to himself, Julian Assange apparently refused to meet Benedict Cumberbatch while he was preparing to play the WikiLeaks founder for a film… and amusingly, it is a leaked email that has revealed this news.
In the letter, sent in January, Assange described Cumberbatch’s film, The Fifth Estate, as “toxic” and “distorted“, adding that the actor should “reconsider your involvement in this enterprise”.
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Posted: 10th, October 2013 | In: Celebrities, Film | Comment
Terrible film lines: the Howling III howler
TERRIBLE lines in film presents: the only memorable bit from Howling III:
King v Kubrick: The Shining sequel will be as unfilmable as all great books are
ARE some books unfilmable? Does reading the book first spoil the film and vice versa?
Stephen King’s The Shining is a cracking read. Stanley Kubrick film adaptation of it is also fantastic, a capacious, sinister spine-tingler. But when the film came out many of the book’s fans were upset. Scenes had been omitted from the book’s version of life at the Overlook Hotel. But did you see that lift full of blood? Young Danny riding his tricycle over the wooden floor and then onto the oh-so-silent carpet? Once seen, never forgotten.
The book is not the film. The book is the book. The film is the film.
Talk of King and Kubrick’s work is relevant because the author has released a sequel to The Shining, entitled Doctor Sleep. Kubrick has died, so he won’t be any film version.
King might be relieved. As he says:
“I am not a cold guy. And with Kubrick’s The Shining I thought that it was very cold.
“Shelley Duvall as Wendy is really one of the most misogynistic characters ever put on film. She’s basically just there to scream and be stupid. And that’s not the woman I wrote about…I met him [Kubrick] on the set and just on that one meeting, I thought he was a very compulsive man.”
Jason Bailey:
King’s great novels work because they put us into the heads of his characters, because they convey psychological as well as external struggles, because their inner monologues can pour forth out of his prose. It’s part of what makes him a great writer. It’s also why there have been so many lousy films based on Stephen King books — because all of that is lost in the translation. And Kubrick would have been a lousy novelist, his meticulous detachment resulting in, we could presume, so pretty turgid and lifeless writing. But luckily, he was a filmmaker, and his gifts as an aesthete are what made him such a singularly fine one.
Laura Miller says King was right to be unimpressed by Kubrick:
King is, essentially, a novelist of morality. The decisions his characters make — whether it’s to confront a pack of vampires or to break 10 years of sobriety — are what matter to him. But in Kubrick’s “The Shining,” the characters are largely in the grip of forces beyond their control. It’s a film in which domestic violence occurs, while King’s novel is about domestic violence as a choice certain men make when they refuse to abandon a delusional, defensive entitlement. As King sees it, Kubrick treats his characters like “insects” because the director doesn’t really consider them capable of shaping their own fates. Everything they do is subordinate to an overweening, irresistible force, which is Kubrick’s highly developed aesthetic; they are its slaves. In King’s “The Shining,” the monster is Jack. In Kubrick’s, the monster is Kubrick.
Kubrick understood the importance of taking a story and meticulously reworking it for an entirely different medium. The director was a master of genre cinema, stripping it down and blowing it up in its purest form. In fact two other successful King adaptations, Stand By Me (The Body) and The Shawshank Redemption (Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption) are both riddled with inconsistencies between book and film – although not quite as fundamental as The Shining. King has highlighted these two films, along with Misery (1990), as his favourite cinematic interpretations.
It’s all about entertainment. You get to gorge on the book and the film.
Watch Manchester United legend Eric Cantona play The Stallion in erotic French comedy Les Rencontres d’après Minuit
AFTER mucking about playing himself and “a man at a bar” in the likes of Looking for Eric and Jack Says over the years, Manchester United legend Eric Cantona has finally landed the role he was born to play!
Cantona has reportedly been cast as a bearded Gallic lothario, known simply as “The Stallion”, in an erotic French comedy titled Les Rencontres d’après Minuit (which translates as “Meetings After Midnight”).
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Project Drive-In: Possibly pointless renaissance for American drive-ins
ZOD knows there aren’t nearly enough stereotypes about lazy Americans spending too much time in their cars, so it’s a good thing Honda and Sony are sponsoring something called “Project Drive-In” in an attempt to #SaveTheDriveIn, which is not exactly trending on Twitter even though it has been tweeted (in sponsored posts) by such noted celebrities as Will Ferrell.
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Posted: 4th, October 2013 | In: Film, The Consumer | Comment
James McAvoy auditions for Jimmy Savile role at the Filth premiere
JAMES McAvoy’s new film Filth has opened in London. McAvoy would play Jimmy Savile if Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh ever penned a script about the BBC DJ, NHS ward wharbler and sex predator, the Scottish novelist has said. Welsh told the Radio Times that while making Filth, he discussed the subject of sexual abuse with X-Men star McAvoy, who apparently told him: “If you ever write a script about it, I’d love to play Jimmy Savile.” Maybe the film could feature a trial and name some of the enablers who let Savile prosper? After all, the law never did catch up with Savile while he was alive…
[Not a valid template]Is this the best movie death scene ever?
IS this the best movie death scene ever?
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Education for Death: in 1943 Disney taught kids how to be a Nazi
IN 1943, Disney studios produced The Making of a Nazi,. This short film was funded by the US Government. Disney needed the money and the Government’s propaganda machine needed a new avenue. (The US had hired lost of top directors to produce its films, including Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford and Frank Capra). In all Disney produced 32 animated shorts. But this one, based on a book by Gregor Ziemer’s book Education for Death was more hard hitting than Donald Duck declaring “Oh boy, am I glad to be a citizen of the United States of America!” as a tomato slapped Hitler in the face (even Bambi fought the Axis powers in Disney’s Volunteer Army).
Posted: 29th, September 2013 | In: Film, Flashback | Comment
Failed audition tapes: Tom Selleck was Indiana Jones
Once upon a time, Tom Selleck was Indian Jones…briefly:
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Posted: 25th, September 2013 | In: Film, Flashback | Comment
Terrible rap: Top That from 1989 film Teen Witch is a horror show
IN the 1980s, white rap was routinely terrible. In this 1989 teen dream flick Teen Witch, the cast are forced on pain of death (we presume) to perform a rap called Top That.
The film, for those of you not in the know, is:
Louise is not very popular at her highschool. Then she learns that she’s descended from the witches of Salem and has inherited their powers. At first she uses them to get back at the girls and teachers who teased her and to win the heart of the handsome footballer’s captain. But soon she has doubts if it’s right to ‘cheat’ her way to popularity.
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Simon Cowell commentates as Pudsey the dog urinates on a tyre in Sarratt
WHAT news of Britain’s Got Talent winner Pudsey? Well, Pudsey has been filming Pudsey: The Movie. The Watford Observer reports that he’s gone a bit Depardieu and urinated on a Bovingdon man’s car while filming in Sarratt. This might be news if Pudsey were human. But it’s a dog. When Pudsey starts urinating as he opens the batting for England, then it’s news.
The first canine winner of ITV talent show Britain’s Got Talent has been spotted in Sarratt, relieving himself on a car wheel.
Was that in the script?
In the film Simon Cowell will be the voice of a pooch pal of the Britain’s Got Talent dog, while Mr Cowell’s fellow judge David Walliams will take on the voice of Pudsey.
A talking dog?
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Posted: 25th, September 2013 | In: Celebrities, Film | Comment
JD Salinger: Five new manuscripts and a post-Holocaust film to duck
JD Salinger died in died in 2010 at age 91. Some of his unpublished works have been found. Cornel Bonca looks at them:
[T]his is the biggest literary “get” of the American 21st century.
The books include a World War II novel featuring Sergeant X from “From Esme,” the most intriguing character outside Holden and the Glass family that Salinger ever created. It includes a novella, in diary form, written by a World War II counterintelligence officer — Salinger’s job during the war — “culminating in the Holocaust.” Given Salinger’s war experience and his painstaking writing process, these two works could conceivably add up to a contribution to American World War II literature on a par with the work of Mailer, Jones, Heller, and Pynchon.
A third manuscript is, we’re told, a “manual of Vedanta,” a book explaining Vedanta Hinduism (and presumably, its relation to Salinger’s work), “with short stories, almost fables, woven into the text.” Finally, there are two compilations, one entitled The Family Glass, gathering all the published Glass stories together with five new storiesabout Seymour, the last of which “deals with Seymour’s life after death.” Given that once Salinger got going on the Glasses, his “stories” inevitably metastasized into novellas, this book is likely to be a real tome, and might conceivably be the greatest contribution Salinger makes to American letters, dealing as it must, with the question of how to live a genuine spiritual life in a postwar, post-Holocaust world.
Then there’s the final book, which [biographers David] Shields and [Shane] Salerno describe as “a complete history of the Caulfield family,” gatheringCatcher, six previously published (and I would imagine, wholly rewritten) Caulfield stories written in the early-to-mid 1940s, as well as new stories featuring, presumably, Holden, Phoebe, Allie, and D.B. Caulfield. Five new Salinger books! Doubtless, they will make us entirely reconceive Salinger’s current oeuvre. If the books are even close in quality to Catcher or Franny & Zooey, they might reroute the course of late 20th-century American literature.
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Posted: 22nd, September 2013 | In: Books, Film, Flashback | Comment
Haifaa Al-Mansour: Saudi Arabia’s first female direction on Wadjda and growing up where cinemas are forbidden
WHAT’S it like being Saudi Arabia’s first female film director? Haifaa Al-Mansour knows. Well, it has tricky. She directed Wadjda via a walkie-talkie.
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Terrible tag-lines: Patrick Swayze trails Next of Kin
TERRIBLE Tag lines:
In 1989 Patrick Swayze starred in Next of Kin. The trailer was punctuated with Swayze uttering the cracking tag-line:
“You haven’t seen bad yet, but it’s coming…”
…to a cinema near you…
New RoboCop trailer released – start wetting yourself with excitement, now!
THE original RoboCop movie was a tense, bleak affair and any notion of remaking it was going to set everyone’s phasers to ‘uh-oh’. With that, the release of the trailer for the new movie will inevitably swing people either way.
Of course, there’ll be haters… but they’re wrong. That’s because the new RoboCop looks ACE!
Joel Kinnaman replaces Peter Weller as Murphy, who goes from Injured Cop to Super Cool Robot Cop.
There’s a fun cast too, including Samuel L. Jackson (of course), Gary Oldman and Michael Keaton (welcome back!), plus Abby Cornish as Murphy’s wife.
The new trailer shows loads of things getting shot, blown up and punched, which is all well and good, but the best bit is when Michael Keaton basically says ‘let’s make him look more bad-ass by making RoboCop’s suit black’.
There’s also a lovely ‘who is in control of the technology? The machine or man?’ which we’ll no doubt be able to read into, concerning our own technological habits… but mainly, it looks like it’ll be a hoot with loads of fighting and a cool baddie.
RoboCop should be released on Feb. 7, 2014. Here’s the trailer.
Photo :Michael Keaton, left, Samuel L. Jackson, center, and Joel Kinnaman attend the “RoboCop” panel on Day 3 of Comic-Con International on Friday, July 19, 2103 in San Diego.. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP)
