Okay, I admit it, I never read the Twilight Saga books; I only saw the movies. The advantage of that scenario lies in the fact that I can judge the movie objectively as what it is, without the burden of comparing it to the book and without being brain-washed by mindless Twilight-devotion. In that regard, the Twilight series does a much better job than Harry Potter, whose books I haven’t read, either. They lost me at the third movie, and, as much as I love my wife, a devoted Harry Potter fan, I refused to continue from there on. Honestly, I was merely watching pictures. Thanks to Comcast’s On Demand, my wife can still watch the movies whenever she chooses.

So, last night I went and watched Breaking Dawn with my wife attending and acting as the occasional translator of Vampire slang and explaining their social responses like biting your wife, who is bleeding to death, in the arms, shoulders, legs, and munching on her womb. Yes, my wife has read all the books, and without the additional information I would have been even more grossed out.

The cheesiness started only a few minutes into the movie, when Jacob, yet again, took his shirt off. How original. I heard a few female teenagers swooning a few rows behind us, but, not to worry, they recovered quickly.

Another half an hour into the “action,” I started to feel decently bored, and, for the first time, I looked in vain for that remote control to hit the Fast Forward button. What we saw here was the wedding of Edward and Bella with Jacob (yet again) whining like a four-year-old, a Russian vampire complaining about the presence of another attendent (a werewolf), and the speeches of various friends and members of the family. How original. I have attended a great number of weddings through the years, and, apparently, a vampire wedding is as un-original as the rest. Where is the excitement? What happened to Vampire baseball games? These guys, i.e. the vampires, are as dull as their non-blood-thirsting, regular human beings.

Thanks, though, to our Native American Werewolves! Without the wolves, the movie would lose all the drama, all the excitement. And now, officially, I am with camp Jacob. Jacob, you deserve better than dreaming of Bella. Bella and Edward are as dull as their monotone speech patterns, and that’s why they deserve each other. Werewolves rock!

Yes, Edward swished around a few times at hyper-sonic speed; yet again, where is the excitement?

So, after the wedding comes the honeymoon on a remote South American island, and Bella, in preparation for the most exciting night of her life, needs to shave her legs. What? You didn’t shave your legs BEFORE the wedding? Nevertheless, I got the feeling that something exciting might happen besides breaking the bed in the process of having sexual intercourse. But what followed was the Sesame Street version of making love. I know, the producers were forced to water the scenes down a bit in order to prevent a rating preventing millions of paying teenagers from watching the movie.

But let me get this right… Making love is bad. Having a snack by munching from your dying wife’s womb is cool. I get it… Do I? No, not really.

And even before the highly anticipated, but devastatingly disappointing “love scene,” the young couple, who just got married in the previous scene, is already having some marital problems. I understand that, though. My four-year-old son can create problems in a split second, too, and the books appeal to teenagers who, for the first time, are confronted with the hardship of a married life, including giving birth and saving the child and mother by munching on the wife’s womb. I am sorry when I repeat myself here, but I realize now with relieve how lucky I was, how “easy” the birth of my son was – my wife wouldn’t agree, though.

The cheesiness continues with Bella apparently dying. Well, give me a break! We all know, there is one more installment in the series. Everybody, besides me, has read the book, and even I know that Bella is alive in the next movie.

And yet again, the werewolves do it again! They saved the movie! Great fighting scenes. Great special effects. A tip to the producers: Make a werewolf movie with Jacob, refreshingly detached from Bella’s spell, as the main character. Without the werewolves, Breaking Dawn would have made it into one of the worst movies I have ever seen, and the werewolves are the only reason why I will watch the next and, thankfully, last movie.

VAMPIRE ASCENDING
by Lorelei Bell

Exciting Hunt For A Vampire Serial Killer in Chicago

Sabrina Strong is a Touch Clairvoyant who knows a secret. She knows her mother was turned into a vampire when Sabrina was ten. Now that she is grown up, a powerful magnate in the Chicago business world hires her to reveal the identity of who relentlessly murders vampires in his ultra-modern stronghold of a hotel. [Read More...]

Vampire Ascending is now available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

As a ghost story, The Innkeepers isn’t chock full of scares, but the few that it has are strong ones.  What really makes this movie something special is its unique, well-rounded characters.  Claire is an appealing, realistic female lead — she’s attractive, but not the type of sexualized teeny-bopper eye candy we’re used to seeing in horror films.  She may not always make the smartest choices, but that doesn’t mean she makes outright stupid ones.  Most of her worst decisions are motivated by her deep sense of curiosity and the mistaken idea that ghosts are benign lost spirits.  As Claire, Sara Paxton displays a natural comic energy that’s barely been hinted at in previous roles.  The Innkeepers might not be big enough to be a star-making movie, but Claire is a star-making role.

Pat Healy provides support as Luke, another character who feels like a real person and not the horror movie version of what a comic relief slacker is supposed to be like.  The chemistry of the casting elevates The Innkeepers above its indie horror brethren.  Even smaller roles, like Kelly McGillis as a tired former TV star turned New Age healer, make a big impression.  West has made a fairly stock haunted hotel movie, but he’s filled it with non-stock characters.

It’s a decision that pays off.  It provides The Innkeepers with a much-needed edge, especially considering how dusty some of its haunted house tropes are.  There are pianos that play themselves when no one is looking, a ghoulish bride that shows up when the film needs jump scares, and a dire warning about the spooky old basement.  This is pretty much Haunted House 101 stuff, and none of it is particularly bone-chilling.  It is sort of comforting though — like a familiar story, well-told.

Ti West continues to prove himself as one of horror’s most diverse young talents, and The Innkeepers is his slickest, most confident effort yet.  It’s really a perfect chiller for the scaredy-cat in your life.  The interplay between the two leads makes the film almost immediately accessible, and the moments of horror, while effective, lean more on the PG-13 side.  Bloodthirsty fans won’t find an experience as dark as West’s popular 2009 effort, House of the Devil, but they’ll definitely find one that’s a bit more fun.

Not quite, but it’s brutal and grim enough to satisfy most fans of this type of rain-soaked sci-fi gloom.  The Day is basically a siege movie, wherein our tiny band of survivors find themselves trapped in an abandoned house, outnumbered by a ruthless cannibal gang.  No one wants to be eaten (would you?), so they take what weapons they have, board up the windows, and fight for their lives.

If cannibals weren’t enough, the bond between the group is at the breaking point.  Each survivor has been pushed to their own personal limits for violence, and their darkest natures have been revealed to each other in the process.  How this plays out provides The Day with its most interesting dynamic, particularly the sticky relationship between the characters played by Shawn Ashmore, Shannyn Sossamon, and Ashley Bell. The leader of the troupe is Dominic Monaghan, who brings a welcome dash of optimism to a seriously downbeat tale.

Ashley Bell, who impressed in The Last Exorcism, continues to pick tough, interesting genre roles.  Her character, Mary, is a psychologically scarred hard-ass with pitch black eyes that are haunted by experiences no one should ever have to suffer.  Those eyes are the best special effect in the whole film, and they’re all Bell.  The Day is obviously a B-picture, but she’s bringing her A-game.  It’s appreciated.

A low budget might force a filmmaker (like Aarniokoski) to rely too much on computer-generated blood effects, but it doesn’t force a film to be derivative.  The Day’s cannibalization of other, better films is its downfall; there’s just not enough unique material here to nourish.  If you can overlook that, you’ll find a standard bleak post-apoc action film with some thought-provoking character beats.  If you can’t, then The Day is just another rough, rainy trudge through a really crappy vision of one possible future.

This Pakistani baby was born with two faces, and while it’s not movie related, we could see Hollywood jumping all over this one. Look for The Boy with Two Faces to hit the festival circuit real soon …

And speaking of real-life stories Hollywood might be interested in, have you heard the one about the girl who was arrested for murder and then claimed she was part vampire, part werewolf. Judging from the really bad hair dye situation going on in her mugshot, we just think she’s part stupid.

Okay, you’re hooked on the real-life stories that could be turned into movies, right? Well, what if we had a real-life story that was already turned into a movie? Does that still count, because we want to tell you about the dog named Thor who rescued a woman who was stranded on the side of the road when she went to retrieve her mail and collapsed. The dog, named Thor because he attacks more pussy [cats] than Chris Hemsworth (yeah the joke doesn’t work when you insert the word ‘cats’), alerted his owners of trouble and took them to the woman, and then promptly called an EMT (the owners, not the dog). Man, how come my parents didn’t name me Brad Pitt?

Funny we’re talking about Brad Pitt because he’s currently shooting a zombie movie called World War Z. Know who else is obsessed with zombies? Fed-Ex. Yup, the shipping company decided to tap into the whole zombie trend for their latest ad, which shows you that Fed-Ex will still deliver even in the middle of a zombie apocalypse.

Ah Fed-Ex, maybe you can ship our souls back to the day this Star Wars French Ballet Disco was filmed so that we could take lots of drugs and dance along with everyone else backstage.

Did that freak you Star Wars fans out too much? Okay, here’s something a little more your speed … for those wondering what people are using floppy discs for these days …

Speaking of products of the late-80s and 1990s, fans of The Simpsons can now purchase their very own 24-can pack of Duff Beer, without having to take a trip to the fictional town of Springfield. It’ll cost you about $30, and we have no idea what it tastes like, but we’re sure it’ll impress those cheap, drunken friends of yours who love to drink beer out of a can.

Drink an entire case of that beer and this Halloween costume — featuring a young Harry Potter and the three-headed dog fluffy — might really freak you out.

And finally, we’ll leave you with something to do this weekend with your dragon-tattooed significant other …

So many good choices! And do you appreciate it? No. In my day, we were grateful to suckle up to Hollywood’s teat and guzzle down whatever warm, fresh offerings it had in store for us. My day was one year ago, by the way. Let’s go back and reconsider the movies that came out 52 Fridays ago.

The weekend of Oct. 1-3, 2010

The Social Network
Starring Jesse Eisenberg and the Internet.

A movie about the invention of Facebook sounds boring. But so does a movie about the invention of the intermittent windshield wiper, and look at Flash of Genius! No, wait, don’t look at it, because that movie actually is boring and does not help me my case.

Despite its potentially dull premise, The Social Network had a couple things going for it. For one thing, it was directed by David Fincher, who is beloved by literally every single film buff under the age of 40. (LITERALLY EVERY SINGLE ONE!) For another thing, it was written by Aaron Sorkin, master of snappy dialogue and striding down hallways. If anyone could make a Facebook movie interesting, or at least really wordy, it was him.

Sure enough, The Social Network opened to a healthy $22.4 million and an easy victory for the weekend. Almost all the reviews were positive — 96% at Rotten Tomatoes. (Among the naysayers was Armond White, of course, because his job is to say nay, and someone called “Prairie Miller,” whose Rotten Tomatoes quote is as follows: “Cavalier when not in your face cocky, this Hollywood notion of a dumbed down, sexed up Harvard is less brainiac boot camp than Ivy League Club Med where nobody does homework. A hyper-capitalist homage to Facebook, and an infomercial in biopic clothing.” Yum! Word salad!) The Social Network went on to make $97 million in the U.S. and another $128 million internationally. Then it got nominated for all those Oscars, too, and basically competed with The King’s Speech for Best Picture. The King’s Speech won, at least in part because most of the voting members of the Academy are too old to know what Facebook is and old enough to remember when the king of England used to stammer on the radio.

Jesse Eisenberg followed up his Oscar-nominated performance by voicing a neurotic bird in Rio and playing a neurotic pizza guy in 30 Minutes or Less. He’s in Woody Allen’s next film, probably playing — I’m going out on a limb here — a neurotic person. Meanwhile, David Fincher has The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo coming out this Christmas, and Aaron Sorkin shared screenplay credit on last week’s Moneyball and continues to spend his time striding down hallways.

Let Me In
Starring some kids, a fondness for Swedish vampire movies.

Everyone loves vampires, and everyone loves American remakes of European horror films, and everyone loves Kodi Smit-McPhee and Chloe Moretz. So it’s pretty baffling that Let Me In was such a flop. Despite a high-profile premiere as the opening-night selection at geek-approved Fantastic Fest, and despite overwhelmingly positive reviews (90% at Rotten Tomatoes), Let Me In tanked at the box office, opening in 8th place with $5.1 million. Its domestic total was $12.1 million, with about the same coming in from foreign markets for a total of just $24 million. Still, the movie it was a remake of, Let the Right One In, only made $11 million worldwide, so suck it, Sweden! U-S-A! U-S-A!

Chloe Moretz — who already had one underperforming supposed sure thing under her belt in Kick-Ass — will next appear in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo. Kodi Smit-McPhee no longer exists and might have been a fictional name to begin with.

Case 39
Starring Renee Zellweger and Bradley Cooper, albeit the Renee Zellweger and Bradley Cooper from three years earlier.

This thriller about creepy children was shot in 2007 and had already played just about everywhere else in the world before it finally opened in the United States three years later. Zellweger and Cooper, clearly embarrassed, didn’t bother doing publicity for it, and the studio buried it without press screenings. (All of that sounds eerily like this weekend’s Dream House, by the way.) And yet it still opened better than Let Me In, though not by much: $5.3 million, on its way to $13.3 million domestic and $14.9 million foreign.

Bradley Cooper has been plenty busy since then, starring in The Hangover Part II and Limitless, and he’ll next headline Alex Proyas’s version of Paradise Lost. Nobody knows where Renee Zellweger is. Let us know if you see her.

Hey, look what else opened a year ago!
The unrated horror flick Hatchet 2 opened on 68 screens, made $52,000, and was pulled from theaters by Monday. Coming out the same weekend as two other horror films and the Facebook movie probably wasn’t a good idea.

And what about FIVE years ago??
The weekend of Sept. 29, 2006, was huge for Ashton Kutcher and his fans, who I assume are real. The films were Open Season, a cartoon featuring Kutcher’s voice; The Guardian, with Kutcher costarring with Kevin Costner; and School for Scoundrels, starring Billy Bob Thornton and Napoleon Dynamite. No Ashton Kutcher involvement on that last one, but he probably would have enjoyed it if he’d seen it, which he didn’t. (No one did.)

(All box office figures are from Box Office Mojo.)

“We must be willing, individually and as a Nation, to accept whatever sacrifices may be required of us. A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.”

President Eisenhower’s first inaugural address, 1953.

His words certainly speak to our current Western society, so far removed from many of life’s struggles that we can’t fathom a world of rationing and country-wide suffering, or living without cheap and copious food and water, mass entertainment, and instant information. But his words also speak to the Hollywood machine.

Tinseltown runs on fame and celebrity; money trumps craft, image trumps talent. These days, the problem is even more exacerbated by the rise of reality television, where everyday people get their ten minutes of fame and try apply it to careers as entertainers. We often speak about how this affects the ultimate result – the many ill-conceived and poorly made movies that litter the screens and the stars who become recognizable names for their notoriety rather than their talent. But we rarely think about how this output affects the future of the system.

When Hollywood’s youth are taught that money and image mean everything, there is no necessity for actors to hone their craft. There is no insistence that the basic principles of acting must be learned. Instead, careers are built on puerile entertainment, which is twofold for the young Hollywood actress. She not only has to develop her talent through mediocre showbiz, but also through mainly supporting roles and narrow characterizations.

It’s hard to imagine an undeniable talent like Meryl Streep thriving in today’s cinematic landscape. Yes, her skills are hard to live up to – earning seven Oscar nominations in the first ten years of her career (which led to two wins). But she also developed with films like Julia, The Deer Hunter, Manhattan, Kramer vs. Kramer, and Sophie’s Choice. Her inherent talents grew because she worked on classic films with some of Hollywood’s leading directors and talent, not on rom-coms with directors still figuring out their vision, on action flicks where bang trumps brains, on fluff family fare or straightforward pieces of entertainment.

It’s no surprise that Hollywood often looks overseas when they need dramatic female talent.

When I discussed Hollywood’s New Wave, three of the five actresses I mentioned (Mia Wasikowska, Freida Pinto, and Juno Temple) were international names, and they can be added to the roster that includes women like Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley, Emily Blunt, and Saoirse Ronan (the latter born stateside but grew up in Ireland). These actresses figure prominently in Hollywood’s few notable female roles because they are outside the system. They’ve had the opportunity to collaborate with challenging male and female filmmakers like Jane Campion, Woody Allen, Lisa Cholodenko, and Steve McQueen. They come from systems that breed talent like Lynne Ramsay and Andrea Arnold. They face any number of cinematic situations, modernity to history, old English to modern slang. It’s quite easy for these women to snap up the more dynamic and rare Hollywood roles because they’ve evolved in more challenging creative systems.

Naturally, there are stateside exceptions. The best example is surely Michelle Williams, who moved on from Dawson’s Creek and Dick to become a dramatic powerhouse (much like Blue Valentine co-star Ryan Gosling thrived outside of Breaker High). But she’s an exception – one of the few who made it beyond teen fare as a skilled artist, instead of a star bound solely to typecasting and previous fame.

On the flip-side, take Anna Kendrick, who co-stars in this week’s 50/50. At the age of 26, she’s already earned nominations for a Tony, an Oscar, a Golden Globe, a BAFTA, plus a slew of further accolades including two Independent Spirit nods. 50/50 is only her tenth film, and out of all of this, she has only one starring role, playing Sarah in the abysmally written thriller Elsewhere from 2009.

Kendrick is the sort of talent poised at long-term success, a woman who has shown the diversity and presence required to continue evolving on the screen. She is, in fact, even more unique because she’s a critical success with distinctly comedic leanings. In an interview with Variety in 2007, she said she was inspired by “fearless women in comedy, like Parker Posey, Molly Shannon, and Amy Poehler.” One can imagine the potential for a future Madeline Khan-esque name – someone who merges comedy, stage presence, and dramatic acting chops into one being. Yet with all these wins and scene-stealing moments, she’s had not one chance to command the big, mainstream screen. Her Twilight co-star Kristen Stewart gets the gigs – an actress who clearly loves to challenge herself, but who has yet to gain critical success and award consideration outside of fan circles.

Other notable American actresses, the likes of Emma Stone and Ellen Page, make their names through a specific presence. Both offer depth to their characters, but it’s a particular kind of depth. Stone is the centered heroine adept at banter and a natural level-headedness, while Page is the sarcastic off-the-beaten-path lead. The landscapes around them change, but they remain essentially the same – charming and engaging, but not truly new, wildly different people.

There is potential on the horizon. Women like Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Chloe Moretz, and Rooney Mara are shedding some mainstream skin to reveal dramatic depth, wiping away their exteriors to morph into unrecognizable characters, but the system must change for these women to potentially become the powerhouses of tomorrow. It’s not an untouchable goal – the talent and drive are there. We see actresses like Stewart refuse to relegate themselves simply to the fluff, superstar, paycheck roles. But that’s not enough.

Stardom won’t mold these women into tomorrow’s Meryl Streep. They need improvement stressed alongside fame – craft held to the same standards as celebrity. They need continually high-caliber work to continue evolving, and movers and shakers interested in developing obvious and potential talent. There needs to be a dedication to their development instead of instant success and careers built on past notoriety. If we give up the principles, we will lose the privilege, and it’s sad to think of a possible future Hollywood without the imposing talent that help shape cinema and inspire future generations.

After some serious backlash from fans of the Dark Shadows series that Tim Burton is remaking from a gothic 60′s soap opera into what Tim Burton usually does, some new behind the scenes photos have emerged courtesy of Empire that may ease people’s minds. Gone is the cartoonish style that Burton has become synonymous with, and now appears a group of stern and sickly faces peering back at us.

Vulture compiled the exhaustive list after seeing Pitt munch his way through Moneyball recently. Pitt’s penchant for eating almost obsessively in that film got the staff thinking and soon they’d discovered that Pitt eats a lot in all of his films. They’ve chronicled pretty much everything – and if you’re a dietitian, you might want to look away. Not only does Brad consume a lot of calories in his films, most of them aren’t good calories. There aren’t a lot of salads on the list, but there are a lot of cookies, chips, and cheeseburgers (there’s also human blood, thanks to Interview with the Vampire).

The biggest surprise of all? That Pitt’s character Floyd in True Romance doesn’t eat a single thing, despite being a notorious stoner. We thought those guys always had the munchies. Check out Vulture’s full list here.

Meanwhile, Parade Magazine kept things more traditional during a recent chat with George Clooney. The actor and director, promoting his upcoming Ides of March, presented the periodical with a list of his top 100 films from 1964 to 1976. Why such a precise time period? Well, it turns out the Cloon-dog happens to view that particular era as the “greatest era in filmmaking by far” (we’re inclined to agree, for the most part).

His list is surprisingly well conceived – including not only the obvious choices (Jaws, The Godfather films, and The French Connection), but some unexpected choices (The Bad News Bears) and off the radar flicks like I Am Cuba.

Clooney’s list even points out his top 5, which includes All the President’s Men, Network, Dr. Strangelove, Carnal Knowledge, and Harold and Maude. The actor cites Alan Pakula’s All the President’s Men as the best film of the era, calling it a “perfect” film.

While it would be all too easy to dismiss the list as a recitation of popular films from an era revered by fans and critics alike, Clooney is quite literate when it comes to expressing why he thinks this particular timeframe is so important. He cites the fact that a group of legendary filmmakers were all trying to outdo each other while in the prime of their careers as a main factor in the explosion of great films from the period, but he’s also quick to point out that the social and cultural events of the time profoundly influenced the films as well, saying “movies are really good when they do that [utilize real life issues as part of their construction]. They give us a sense of what was going on in our psyche.”

Who knew Clooney was such a movie geek? Head on over to /Film for a look at Clooney’s complete list.

Anyway, some inventive young filmmakers have decided that Dead Island would be even cooler if there was a live action version of the game – and they’ve unleashed their own take on what the game would look like in reality. You can see the awesome video below, which superimposes the game’s icons over real-life items presented in the first person perspective. Our favorite moment? When the quest giver continues to stare off into the distance until our character actually engages him and begins his dialogue. If you’ve played a lot of games, you’ll know how spot on this is.

We can only hope these guys are planning to make more of these vids – they look to be almost as much fun as the game itself. What do you think — would this make a good movie?

[via Geekologie]

Some members of the late-night audience took Pettiette at his word, laughing when The Stranger punched Julia (Valerie Azlynn) in the face, just before tuning into The Carpenters for inspiration on his earphones while shaving and humming along to the mellow soft-rock song. That was a further source of merriment for certain audience members, leading to The Stranger branding his lastest victim on the backside with an “X.”

It’s not too long, though, before Julia turns the tables on The Stranger, knocking him out and then punching him in the face. Julia takes The Stranger home, where her younger sister Jessica (Alicia Leigh Willis) awaits, eager to take her turn in torturing The Stranger. Eventually, a truly hapless victim named Sam (Joel Moore), a young mechanic, also is drawn into the diabolical games played by The Stranger, Julia, and Jessica.

Julia X 3D has a workable premise — serial killer becomes a victim of a pair of serial killers — yet the execution is woefully lacking. The wisecracks sound like dusted-off fan-fiction from 80s action movies, or sub-par James Bond kiss-offs, along the lines of The Stranger smashing Julia in the face (again) and declaring: “This date is over.”

The film seems to relish the idea that powerful women are finally paying men back for their inappropriate advances and repeated lasvicious behaviors, but it also treats women as nothing more than sex symbols; Julia and Jessica can offer nothing of substance in their attacks upon men, and their actions are presented solely as the result of their father abusing their mother and themselves.

Far too much of the movie is taken up with The Stranger, Julia, and Jessica smashing each other in the face and/or inserting sharp objects into flesh. The “suspense” is often created when The Stranger emerges from hiding; the only problem with that is that it’s never established where, exactly, he has been hiding. (I like to think of it as an all-purpose interior location known as “off camera.”) Far too often, it feels like the filmmakers cheated on logic in order to cover up mistakes they didn’t notice until later.

The 3D looks sensational — as an out-of-town visitor, it makes me want to check up with my hometown theaters to see if their presentation matches up with the high standards of the Alamo Drafthouse — but is entirely pointless. If the film was produced with the intent of harkening back to cheesy films of yore, it seems like more shots should have been designed to have fun with the 3D format. Instead, it feels like something to distract you from the weaker elements of the production.

Sorbo is very game, and delivers would-be wisecracks with aplomb, but he’s adrift in a sea of mediocrity. Sorry, maybe I saw too many episodes of Sorbo as Hercules, but he’s not believable as a nasty, woman-hating serial killer, no matter how many times he sings along to The Carpenters and allows his face to break into a goofy smile.

Julia and Jessica are given plenty of motivation in extended (and increasingly unnecessary) flashbacks, yet the actresses portraying them struggle to overcome the weak material.

It gives me no pleasure to describe Julia X 3D as a nearly-complete disaster. It’s a crap shoot to make an independent movie, especally one that takes on the additional challenges of 3D photography and production, and, as I mentioned, the premise has a good degree of potential. And, as we all know, comedy is extremely subjective; what I find humorless may tickle your funny point.

Putting that aside, however, a differing sense of humor does not excuse slipshod narrative construction or, even more problematically, an uneasily misogynistic odor to the proceedings.

Only Joel Moore escapes, basically unharmed, his kind, comic, everyman persona intact. At one point he is freed from a potential deadly situation, and his rescuer tells him to run away, fast.

I wanted to run away with him. But the movie kept playing.

Juan of the Dead

That the film ultimately doesn’t work is a huge shame since the opening act is so genuinely exceptional. We’ve seen plenty of zombie invasions stateside (and plenty in Europe, for that matter), but seeing the undead rise to devour the flesh of the living in the sunny, colorful streets of Havana, Cuba is a breath of fresh air. These early scenes are leisurely paced, introducing us to our colorful cast (led by Alexis Diaz de Villegas as the titular Juan) and their equally colorful neighborhood through broad but effective character comedy. This is not a movie that could have been filmed anywhere — Cuba is a character in Juan of the Dead and Brugues shoots it with the eye of someone who has lived there his entire life. The attention to detail and the flawed, incredibly human characters give this world a true weight. Modern Cuba has rarely looked like this on film before.

And then the dead start to rise and so do the problems.

The first major zombie encounter — which involves one of the funnier attempted exorcisms you’ll see this year — is a blast, a clever combination of practical effects and true idiot wit. However, as the scale of the action increases, the film loses focus on its characters in favor of massive CGI set pieces that wouldn’t look out of place in a SyFy Channel original movie. When the film goes intimate and relies on practical effects and character dynamics, there are real sparks on screen, but it quickly abandons intimacy in favor of transforming into a live action cartoon, forcing the characters to speak in cliches as they wander from one oddly mean-spirited vignette to another. Additional character development, the resolution of subplots and the mourning of fallen friends all conveniently occur off screen. Instead, we’re treated to our formerly relatable characters instantly transforming into zombie-killing badasses who flip through the air like gymnasts and wield weaponry like they’ve been recruited for ‘Resident Evil 16′ or something. Would the cartoonish, CGI-laden zombie busting be more fun if the film hadn’t begun as something more quiet and slyly funny? Perhaps, but that opening sure does spoil us.

What makes Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead one of the best horror/comedies of all time is how it balanced character and location with its horror elements, creating a world that made logical sense and characters who managed to be funny yet all too human while they slashed and bludgeoned their way through hundreds of the walking dead. ‘Juan of the Dead’ desperately wants to strike that same tone (it even steals the whole Dawn of the Dead title riff schtick), but it makes its heroes unstoppable, it never gives them time to mourn and it increasingly values (admittedly inventive but often poorly rendered) zombie killing over a story and a cast that is worth caring about. de Villegas lends Juan a wiry, tough energy that’s completely endearing and his plan to take advantage of the zombie apocalypse to make a few bucks is hilarious, but he’s a complete and total cypher. It’s one thing for a character to be a slacker, but Juan is such a slacker that he spends the entire film doing nothing interesting, making few decisions and reaching conclusions that would have been interesting if we had seen him reach them onscreen.

There comes a point where Juan of the Dead starts to feel like a zombie-themed sketch comedy show, with the dwindling cast of characters avoiding any kind of interesting conflict in favor of wacky encounters with various guest stars (and an alarming number of gay panic jokes). With no plot to speak of, characters are forced to speak solely in exposition and subtext, making sure that the film’s satire — the zombies transform Juan and his team of zombie killers into raging capitalists — remains blatantly on the surface at all times.

Juan of the Dead has many of the problems inherent in a filmmaker’s first project. It’s clunky, sloppy and feels much longer than its running time. However, Brugues’ love for the horror genre is evident and when the film connects, it connects in a major way. A scene that takes us under the ocean to give us a peek what lurks beneath the surface of the water during a zombie uprising is inspired, a creepy and stunning moment that even manages to squeeze in a reference to a certain Fulci movie (you know the one). It’s moments like this that show that Brugues is a guy genre fans should keep an eye on, a guy whose enthusiasm for killing zombies spectacularly will hopefully soon be joined by patience for character and plot. If Juan of the Dead showcases his growing pains, his next film should hopefully display his maturation.

Check it out below, and click on the image for a larger version. And you can claw your way through all our Fantastic Fest 2011 coverage here.

That sort of thing usually leads to agreement, excitement and speculation in the blogosphere, but perhaps enough sites recognize that it’s an extremely ambiguous remark and, more importantly, there is a huge issue involving the rights to the Blofeld character, among other classic 007 elements, which is precisely why neither Blofeld or the name S.P.E.C.T.R.E. (now known as Quantum) have shown up in the films in decades. Unless Sony, MGM, EON Productions and the estate of late Bond writer Kevin McClory have reached an unknown agreement, it would likely stay this way.

However, I’m very curious if there has indeed been a development we’re not aware of. The fansite MI6 points out that Bond video games produced over the last decade had similarly been renaming or otherwise altering the role of Blofeld to get around the rights issue. Yet last year’s Goldeneye 007 game from Activision not only features the Charles Gray version of the character (from Diamonds Are Forever), but has him officially named Blofeld. Alongside game versions of Craig and other modern incarnations of the franchise. That seems like there’s similar potential for the movies, especially for a non-baldie type…

Of course, it’s still just rumor for the moment. So let’s just go to the bloggers and tweeters to see what they think of Blofeld maybe being in the upcoming follow-up to Quantum of Solace, and who should be cast in the role if so.

This sounds like a move in the right direction. Because for the first time in 40 years the James Bond franchise is in real trouble, at least when it comes to me — and I’m a person. I matter… Right? – John Nolte, Big Hollywood

Blofeld is arguably the Bond archnemesis, but hasn’t figured in a Bond film since the early ’80s. The timing seems right to reintroduce Blofeld to the franchise, and it sounds like Logan feels pretty strongly about the character. [...] Could EON work around the rights issue by using a Blofeld-like character without naming him? (I’m not sure if McClory owns the screen rights to ‘Number One’ in the context of Bond films, so EON might be able to use that as a designation for the head of Quantum, which is basically SPECTRE without using the name.) – Angie Han, /Film

Every great hero has a great villain. Batman has The Joker. Sherlock Holmes has Professor Moriarty. Luke Skywalker has Darth Vader. Professor X has Magneto. Sure, the protagonists may occasionally go off and battle smaller, less important villains, but they are nothing without their most powerful foe. For James Bond, that villain has always been Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the leader of SPECTRE. [...] Back when it was first reported that Javier Bardem had been approached to play Bond’s newest villain, I hoped that it was being set up that the actor would actually be playing the leader of Quantum, the secret evil organization first heard about in Marc Foster’s Quantum of Solace and hinted at in Casino Royale. Now it looks like that dream could become an actual reality. – Eric Eisenberg, Cinema Blend

If, indeed, John Logan’s wry smile and comment about how “Bond should always fight Blofeld” meant anything at all, it was probably referring to a Blofeld-esque villain appearing in Bond 23 as opposed to Blofeld himself. Just as Quantum is the twenty-first century’s stand-in for S.P.E.C.T.R.E., Ralph Fiennes’s (or Javier Bardem’s?) forthcoming villain role will likely be the twenty-first century stand-in for Blofeld. – Ben Moore, Screen Rant

I guess we’ve yet to see the real power behind Quantum, and there’s no reason it couldn’t be Ernst Blofeld. I just don’t expect him to be scarred and to sit around stroking a cat. [....] Should it ever come to it, though, I do think Simon Russell Beale would be good casting for ol’ Ernst. There were at one point rumours that he was going to be in the film, too. – Brendon Connelly, Bleeding Cool

Considering the modern tendency to examine new approaches to old heroes and villains alike, one wonders how Blofeld will be depicted in the new movie. Will he be the campy villain who likes to feed people who displease him to piranhas? Or will he be someone darker, more serious, as befits these troubled times? [...] One wonders, though, if Sir Sean Connery could be enticed before the cameras one last time for yet another Bond film. Not playing Bond may be very tempting indeed. – Mark Whittington, Yahoo!

@weinmanj: Doubt Bond 23 will bring back Blofeld, but if it does, the director will audition 2 actors, praise one, then kill him and pick the other guy

@MattMira: I am all for a Blofeld appearance, but please, give me some gadgets and don’t go “rogue” again.

@nixskits: Alfred Molina. How about a slight combover some Koi fish this time?

Follow Christopher Campbell on Twitter (@thefilmcynic) to join The Conversation.

With so many amazing options, it’s understandable if you’ve forgotten all the amazing options that opened 365 days ago. But how do you think that makes those movies feel? How would you like it if everyone forgot about YOU a year after you opened? Let’s go back and recall what we were talking about this time last year…

The weekend of Sept. 24-26, 2010

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
Starring Michael Douglas, Shia LaBeouf, nostalgia.

When the American economy tanked in 2008, people started getting wistful for the good old days, when greed was a virtue and Shia LaBeouf did not exist. The result was Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Oliver Stone’s sequel to his 1987 hit. Nostalgia for the 1980s was unusually high in 2010 — witness The A-Team, The Karate Kid, The Expendables — and a lot had changed about American capitalism in the meantime, so a Wall Street sequel sounded like a reasonably good idea. I mean, it was a better foundation than most sequels, which get made simply because the first one made $100 million.

Money Never Sleeps (which isn’t true, by the way) scored 54% positive at Rotten Tomatoes, with a lot of critics basically saying, “Eh, it’s not terrible.” Audiences concurred. It made $19.1 million its opening weekend, enough for first place but not enough to automatically greenlight Wall Street 3: Stock Footage. The film’s final tally was $52.5 million in the U.S., plus $82.3 million overseas. Somehow it cost $70 million to make, though, which sounds like the kind of ludicrous spending that led to the events that made a Wall Street sequel timely in the first place.

Michael Douglas will next appear in Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire, one of several “last” movies that Soderbergh is making before he “retires,” which he will never do. Shia LaBeouf was in the third Transformers movie this past summer. Surely you remember his stirring performance as though it were yesterday.

Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole
Starring OWLS!

After he made 300, everyone figured Zack Snyder was the perfect guy to direct a cartoon about owl genocide. (In 3D, of course, as befits a tale of avian slaughter.) Any movie with a title containing a made-up place name with an apostrophe is a hard sell, but Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole — or LOTGTOOG’H, as the kids called it — got about the same level of approval as Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps: 53% at Rotten Tomatoes and a final worldwide total of $140 million.

Once again, though, the budget was a killer. They spent $80 million making the computers draw the owls. What was theoretically going to be the start of a new franchise will most likely wind up being a one-time affair instead. Rumor has it the Owl character in Winnie the Pooh comes from the same universe as the owls in Ga’Hoole, though.

You Again
Starring Kristen Bell, Odette Yustman, Sigourney Weaver, Jamie Lee Curtis.

You Again teaches the important lesson that whatever happens to you in high school is super, super, super important and should dominate your thoughts for the rest of your life. “Moving on” and “getting over it” are crazy ideas for losers. The premise, as it was explained to me by the trailer, is that Kristen Bell and Odette Yustman were rivals in high school, and now Odette is going to marry Kristen’s brother, and Odette’s aunt is Sigourney Weaver, and she had a high school rivalry with Kristen’s mom, Jamie Lee Curtis. Can’t you people all just stop being terrible to each other? This looks like the kind of movie where everybody in it needs to be slapped a lot.

Oh, and Betty White was in it, because we were doing that thing where we put Betty White in everything. And everybody hated it!

Well, maybe not everybody. Your 15-year-old sister probably liked it. But only 18% of critics gave it a thumbs-up, and it opened in fifth place at the box office. It ultimately made $25 million, plus a few million more overseas, and Betty White was returned to her crypt.

Hey, look what else opened a year ago!
The Virginity Hit, an R-rated teen sex comedy, opened on 700 screens, then closed about five minutes later. The thing made $636,000 all told, despite the endorsement of producer Will Ferrell and the presence of well over a thousand obscene jokes.

Buried, starring Ryan Reynolds as a man trapped in a coffin, was a Sundance hit and seemed like it ought to have been a moneymaker. Which it kind of was: it earned just over $1 million in the U.S., but $18 million more overseas. Evidently foreign audiences enjoy seeing Ryan Reynolds buried alive more than we do. Maybe they should have kept the film’s working title, D*** in a Box.

And what about FIVE years ago??

On Sept. 22, 2006, we were given four very, very manly films: Jackass: Number Two, which now makes us sad to think about, even sadder than it did at the time; Jet Li’s Fearless, which is not to be confused with William Shakespeare’s Fearless; Flyboys, which told the inspiring story about the boyfriends behind the dancers on In Living Color; and All the King’s Men, which something something Humpty Dumpty joke.

(All box office figures are from Box Office Mojo.)

Thunder Soul (Roadside Attractions) has charmed and energized audiences ever since it debuted at the South by Southwest Film Festival (SXSW) last year. “?The best documentaries expose us to things we might not otherwise be aware [of], educate, motivate and entertain, and prove that fact can be wilder than fiction,” wrote Jenn Brown at Slackerwood. “Thunder Soul is both a profile of stage band director and composer Conrad O. Johnson and a celebration of the music he and his students created. Between 1968 and 1977, the Kashmere High School in Houston’s 5th Ward had a stage band performing music that put professionals to shame.”

The film “?offers a heaping helping of uplift while documenting the past triumphs and recent reunion of a predominantly black Houston high school’s singularly accomplished jazz stage band,” Joe Leydon said in Variety. “?This crowdpleaser has enough inherent appeal to merit its own theatrical showcase.” Thunder Soul won the Audience Award for the Lone Star States section of SXSW. It will open this weekend on 35 screens; check to see if it will be playing near you.

Gerard Butler stars in Machine Gun Preacher, directed by Marc Forster (Monster’s Ball). Butler plays a rough-and-tumble biker whose life is changed “?upon witnessing the harrowing plight of children in Sudan,” according to the official description. The cast includes Michelle Monaghan, Kathy Baker, and Michael Shannon. Machine Gun Preacher received mixed to (extremely) negative reviews out of the Toronto International Film Festival, but the subject matter and star may draw audiences to one of the four theaters where it will be opening.

Can a lawyer be a hero? Puncture stars Chris Evans as an attorney who fights to do what is right in behalf of his client, a nurse who contracts AIDS after accidentally puncturing her skin with a used needle. The film will be playing at four locations.

Machine Gun Preacher and Puncture are both based on true stories about real-life characters dealing with drug addictions. Am I sensing a theme for this weekend?
Trailer of the Week

Like Thunder Soul (see above), Weekend won an Audience Award at SXSW, though its prize came at this year’s edition. Described as “a startlingly authentic love story,” the drama revolves around two men (Tom Cullen and Chris New) who meet at a bar and spend the weekend together, days filled with “sex, drugs, and intimate conversation.”

In his review, our own Dave White places Weekend in the context of the “Gay Clown” stereotype that pops up routinely in mainstream romantic comedies. In Weekend, however, “?thanks to the good sense of writer-director Andrew Haigh, there are no Gay Clowns. There are just two gay guys living their lives in the city of Nottingham, England. … ?There’s nothing faked here, no rush to resolve romantic tension, no sweeping declarations, no ‘issues’ you can pigeonhole it with. It’s about recognizable human beings behaving in recognizably human ways.”

To get a taste of the film, check out the trailer below.
Last Weekend’s Box Office

The mainstream masses flocked to see The Lion King last weekend, this time in 3D. At art houses, however, the biggest stars were decidedly not cartoons.

In The Mill and the Cross (pictured above), director Lech Majewski recreates the setting, atmosphere, and characters inhabiting “The Way to Cavalry,” a 16th-century masterpiece by artist Pieter Bruegel. The film opened at one theater in New York and took in $11,354, per Box Office Mojo.

My Afternoons with Margueritte features Gerard Depardieu as an illiterate worker who finds himself learning about literature from an older woman (Gisele Casadesus) on a park bench. The business was not as high as I anticipated, but averaging $10,450 per screen at two locations placed the film in the #2 position in the indie box office chart.

Among the holdovers, the documentary Kevin Hart: Laugh at My Pain held up nicely in its second week of release, nearly doubling the number of screens on which it was playing, up to 230 nationwide, and declining only 37.6% in its weekend gross. So far, the film has earned more than $3.5 million.

This updated take on Scarface (which will be the third film with the title, coming after Howard Hawks/Richard Rosson 1932 version and the ever-popular 1983 Al Pacino vehicle) will not be a remake or a sequel, but will instead attempt to tell a new story using the recurring themes from the two earlier versions. An immigrant outsider will come to America and become a crime lord through his use of violence (probably) before dying as a result of the life he’s chosen. It worked in both previous versions, so there’s no reason why it can’t work again, right?

Universal is keeping the important details (like where the new main character will come from and what criminal activity he’ll take part in during his rise to power) under wraps for the time being. The original film featured an Italian main character, while the ’83 version featured Pacino playing Cuban refugee Tony Montana – a man who takes over the Miami cocaine trade before inviting everyone to “say hello to his little friend.”

De Palma’s version has achieved a strange kind of immortality thanks to hip hop culture’s embrace of the film and Pacino’s character. It felt like every rapper and sports star featured on MTV’s Cribs had a copy of the film handy – and many lines of Pacino’s dialogue have become pop culture touchstones. As Deadline points out, the De Palma version was also met with disdain when it was announced since many film fans felt that the 1932 version was a bona fide classic (and it is…).

We suspect news of a new Scarface will inspire similar reactions from fans of De Palma’s film, particularly since the current climate in Hollywood is one in favor of the safe and predictable over the original and daring. Only time will tell if the idea of reimagining Scarface is a good idea or not, but in the meantime, feel free to weigh in with your thoughts on the topic below.

After watching what Matt Mullholland does with the skateboard chase from Back to the Future, we’re now itching to see him do this for every movie featuring an iconic, addictive score (we’re looking at Star Wars and Indiana Jones next, Matt). Here, Matt takes that famous skateboard chase and replaces the music with a one-man multitrack featuring Matt taking over the scene with his own dialogue and a capella version of Alan Silvestri’s score. Really awesome stuff – we could watch this all day for some odd reason.

Check out Matt’s Back to the Future and Matrix videos below, and drop some movie scenes in the comments that you’d like to see Matt take on next.

Tim League is a fascinating man.  In what probably seems like a past life now, he used to be an engineer for an oil company.  Then he and his wife Karrie, who was working in the bio pharmaceutical industry, threw caution to the wind and left their careers to open up a movie theater that would eventually become the Alamo Drafthouse (I’m guessing you’ve heard of it, we kind of talk about it a lot).  And now that we’re just two days away from the Drafthouse’s annual, week-long Christmas in September, otherwise known as Fantastic Fest, we were afforded the opportunity to chat with League about the current state FF, the Drafthouse’s plan for expansion, and what’s going on with Drafthouse Films.

Note: Our chat opened talking about a very recent and huge title change in Tim’s life: from man to father.  We’ll leave that mushy stuff out, but here’s where the movie talk kicked in.

Tim League: It’s funny, Have you seen We Need to Talk About Kevin?

Movies.com: No, I haven’t seen it, but I’ve heard great things.

League: We’re going to announce it tomorrow as a late edition, but I watched two days after the girls were born. They shipped down a print and we checked it out. It’s all about Tilda Swinton holding this baby and feeling like it’s an alien form and her never connecting with it and the rationale for that developing a child serial killer. It’s an odd movie for postpartum, but I did still enjoy it.

Movies.com: How have you been able to strike the balance of what you want for the festival, what’s good for festival growth and what you feel expect from the festival? It seems like a low-key year with very few mainstream films.

League: We have a few mainstream things. Not that We Need to Talk About Kevin is a gigantic movie, but it’ll get an art house release at least. We have a few things like that that will pop out later in the fest, but we don’t have Zombieland, we don’t have the big Paramount screenings. Partially that was just not responding to things we did see. There were some movies we were offered that just didn’t work for us and ended up passing on. There are a couple things we couldn’t get, either. I really wanted to get Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy for example, and that just wouldn’t happen.

What’s important to me is the discovery aspect of the festival– the international things you’re just not going to see anywhere else. That’s where my priorities lie personally and thats where I think the priority lies in building an audience. It’s pretty well aligned this year.

There are people that have come to the festival in the past who will only go to the big Paramount screenings or will only go to something if there’s a celebrity in attendance and I don’t really care about that. That’s what the core of the festival is about to me and even though it’s a really low-key year in terms of stars, it’s a very strong year in terms of programming. The core people for the festival are going to like it.

Movies.com: So it was a very deliberate path to go without a Zombieland or a Vampire’s Assistant, like in year’s past? There’s no need to fit in the Hollywood stuff because there’s already too many great movies from around the world to fit in.

League: I mean, Vampire’s Assistant was okay, but if you really want to see it, it’ll be out in a few weeks. Those movies are on a different set of priorities. They’re on the publicity trail, so we’re providing publicity for the studies and that’s one arena why it would play a festival, but the more important arena is the discovery.

Movies.com: So what is a gem this year you’re most excited about?

League: There’s several. A movie I do really like that I hope a lot of people respond to is called Bullhead. It’s a Belgian, I guess, drama/thriller, but it’s set in the cattle industry in Belgium and it’s a thriller based around espionage involving legal hormones and steroids for cattle. But it has a really strong central character. In the very first part of the film his testicles are smashed with a brick by a neighboring farmer kid, and it obviously decimates his personality and so he grows up and becomes addicted to testosterone and steroids himself and has is this roid rage guy, but he’s all very sensitive about his lack of testicular masculinity. It’s a crazy plot line.

Movies.com: Moving on from Fantastic Fest to the Drafthouse in more general terms. Congratulations on this morning’s announcement about the Colorado expansion.

League: Thank you, I’m excited about that one.

Movies.com: Do you guys have an expansion road map of New York, LA, Colorado, West Virginia, wherever? Is there a guiding goal for future Drafthouses?

League: There is, though we’re still a little loose. I went out [to New York and LA] to scout locations and hopefully we be announcing some things soon. Those are really pivotal for me because of what we’re trying to do on the distribution side of things and the brand side of things. There are key towns we think will work really well for us; towns that have some similarities in Austin, in a way. We want to be in places where there is a cool, engaged, entertainment-driven audience. We don’t have hard numbers, but we’re not going to explode and open 100 theaters at once. We have to very carefully build this thing and make sure we have the right people doing programming and the right people overseeing operations, and do it at a smart pace.

Movies.com: And as for Drafthouse Films, you guys are moving on your first in-house Drafthouse production with ABCs of Death. Is that something you want to explore more of, or will you stick with acquiring instead of producing.

League: I think we’ll be more in the mode of acquiring. We’ve hired on Evan Husney, who is the head of Drafthouse Films now. He’s charged with, starting in 2012, we want to release 6 repertoire titles and 5 or 6 other titles per year. That’s going to be our path. We don’t want to make any sacrifices, we want to make sure we’re the right tone for the film and it’s the right tone for us. We may even look at some films that are at Fantastic Fest.

The interesting thing though… there are a couple of films at Fantastic Fest we want to be involved with, but we also realize that there are a lot of buyers that are coming to Fantastic Fest and we’re not going to get into a position where we see stuff and then lock it up before the festival. That’s not really fair to the filmmakers. It’s only fair if it works for us and the filmmakers. Plus, buyers will stop coming if there’s no films available.

Movies.com: I feel like this year will be a great year for buyers because there are so many – and I haven’t cross checked on IMDb or anything – but it seems like there are a lot of undistributed titles playing in Texas, if not North America, for the first time.

League: I think about half of he films are without U.S. distribution right now, and I think that’s a pretty good ratio.

If you caught Charlie Sheen’s much buzzed-about Roast last night on Comedy Central, then you were in for a no-holds-barred, ultra foul-mouthed evening full of comedians, former boxers and, well, William Shatner — all of whom were taking over-the-top chances with shtick that was ultimately pretty hilarious and insulting at the same time. From host Seth McFarlane’s Charlie Sheen obituary to Amy Schumer (the night’s scene-stealer, in our opinion) comparing Sheen to Bruce Willis in that they were both popular in the ’80s and now their old slot is being filled by Ashton Kutcher, this was one entertaining (to say the least) hour and a half worth of television.

Check out some of best moments from last night below, but keep in mind this is all very NSFW …

Welcome to Criterion Corner, where the movies love you back. A column dedicated to the wide and wonderful world of the Criterion Collection, Criterion Corner runs twice a month, one installment featuring reviews of Criterion’s new releases, and the other an essay pertaining to Criterion culture. Follow @CriterionCorner and the Criterion Corner Tumblr for daily updates!

My favorite war of the 21st century (so far) is probably the one waged between Blu-ray and HD-DVD. Sure, it was fraught with tension, but I remember the battle between the two dueling media formats as being slightly more enjoyable than all of those violent conflicts in which thousands of innocent people were horribly killed for no good reason (a few Toshiba executives were probably executed, but their deaths were totally justified). And while scores of misinformed consumers may have sent some of their hard-earned money to an early grave, the cold war between these two formats expedited the emergence of HD physical media, ensuring that we would win so long as someone lost. We all know that Sony’s Blu-ray format ultimately came out on top (the recesses of eBay serving as a poignant memorial for HD-DVD), the three decisive turning points of the war being the introduction of the Playstation 3, Warner Brothers’ decision to ditch their support of HD-DVD, and — the most promising nail in the coffin — Criterion’s May 2008 announcement that they had chosen Blu-ray as the next-generation format with which they’d supplement their treasured DVD line. Yeah, HD-DVD may have had porn on its side, but it didn’t stand a chance without a pristine and print-perfect edition of El Norte in 1080p (that’s just simple economics).

In the years since helping Blu-ray to emerge victorious, Criterion has contributed to the format like no other company, both in terms of volume and quality. The meticulous standards and merciless eye for detail with which Criterion upgrades these films have consistently revealed the format’s true potential, returning to the titles the pristine yet textually filmic qualities these films likely possessed on their opening nights, whereas other companies simply bury the image under a layer of HD gloss and plop it on store shelves.

In 2010 they began to release all of their new titles in Blu, and their monthly release slates continue to include HD upgrades of some of the most beloved films that are already in the Collection. And yet, some of Criterion’s choices — both inclusions and omissions — have raised an eyebrow or two from time to time, which is especially impressive considering that Eugene Levy once confused my eyebrows for a mirror.

In the realm of looking a gift horse in the mouth, this is sort of like getting Secretariat for your birthday and complaining that he has a slight overbite, but whatever, I like movies, not horses (George Lucas could overdub R2-D2 with Chelsea Handler’s stand-up material and it still wouldn’t make 5th avenue smell like a dirty stable). All the same, if you give a mouse a cookie he’ll want a glass of milk, and if you give a movie-lover a carefully restored DVD edition of an obscure Iranian epic that one could previously enjoy only on stolen microfilm, they’ll bitch about the aspect ratio. So with that in mind, I give you the 10 Criterion DVDs that most desperately need to be released on Blu-ray!

10.) #162 Ratcatcher (dir. Lynne Ramsay) 1999

A gorgeous film set in an ugly time (national garbage strikes! domestic abuse! awkward-looking teenagers!), Lynne Ramsay’s difficult but hauntingly poetic debut feature is a portrait of a Glasgow adolescence during an era (the mid-70s) in which the city seemed entirely mapped from dead ends. The cover of Criterion’s Ratcatcher DVD succinctly captures Ramsay’s moribund mood, as her protagonist — James — is presented in close profile, his cheek smeared with a mortar of twigs and foul earth. The design’s grey Polaroid anesthetic also hints at a world just beyond the reality of what we can see, and the film delights in contrasting the grey tones of cold living with the most vivid flights of fancy (a mouse tied to a balloon and the most beautiful wheat field since Days of Heaven being my favorite examples), the harsh disparity between the two elements providing the film with a sense of defanged hope that can rattle your marrow. The better Ratcatcher is allowed to look, the more devastating it will feel.

9.)  #62 The Passion of Joan of Arc (dir. Carl Th. Dreyer) 1928

Because when you’re going to watch a young woman endure recorded history’s most hopping mad kangaroo court and then be burned alive at the stake (spoiler alert?), you obviously need it to look as good as possible. For the brunt of its duration, Carl Th. Dreyer’s masterful and uncomfortably intimate depiction of Joan of Arc’s final hours interrogates its heroine within inches of her life from within inches of her face, capturing actress Maria Falconetti’s every pious pore, the camera so trained upon her hardened faith that you can almost see God’s reflection in her eyes.

No other film ever took such complete advantage of the fact that Milla Jovovich was not yet alive, and despite largely confining itself to the taut flesh of Falconetti’s face, few other films have ever felt so visceral and expansive, so arrestingly emblematic of the cinema’s capacity for expanding upon what the eye can see by itself. With all that in mind, it’s abundantly clear that 480p just doesn’t get the job done. The Passion of Joan of Arc screams for an HD upgrade because Falconetti wears her faith on her face, and the more resolutely human and textured that face appears, the more astonishing her faith becomes — this is a film ideally watched through a microscope, but Blu-ray would provide a most fitting substitute.

8.)  #288 F For Fake (dir. Orson Welles) 1975

I”ll never forget the promotional campaign of American Beauty, the posters for which urged audiences to “Look closer.” Which is kind of like saying, “Seriously people, pay attention to the movie, otherwise you might not understand the incredibly labored character dynamics or, like, why the guy from Money Train loves Nazis so much” (a tagline scuttled only weeks before the film’s theatrical debut). Yet “Look closer” seems like a perfectly appropriate piece of advice for viewers wading into the waters of Orson Welles’ tricksy masterpiece F For Fake, regardless of how many times they may have already seen the film.

A smirking essay about truth, deception, and the arbitrary divides that carve up our interpretations of validity, F For Fake is the kind of film that demands a trained eye, if only because it’s the especially observant viewers whom Welles is most determined (and delighted) to seduce and destroy. Welles wants his labyrinth of deceit and misdirection to be as clear as possible, he wants viewers to see and hear every detail as lucidly as possible, if only so they’re convinced that they know the secret to the magician’s trick, which of course makes the revelation of how badly they’ve been fooled all the more satisfying for everyone involved. With a crisp 1080p transfer, viewers would be able to delineate the individual gestures of Welles’ slight-of-hand better than ever before, which — my argument follows — would allow F For Fake to pack that much more truth in its lies.

7.)  #217 Salo (dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini) 1976

Hahaha, imagine how insane this would be! …What’s that? Criterion is releasing a Salo blu-ray in October? But I just put it on the list as a goof… Well, it’s like I always say: “If I’m going to watch people eat human poop, it damn well better look great, because low resolution or even minimal edge-enhancement would just be uncivilized.” In fact, that’s usually my opening line on first dates.

Let’s move on.

6.)  #281 Jules and Jim (dir. Francois Truffaut) 1962

Cinematographer Raoul Coutard is best known for laying the aesthetic groundwork of the French New Wave with Jean-Luc Godard, but it was his 1962 collaboration with Francois Truffaut that most effectively allowed his camera to unmoor itself from the weight of convention. Marrying a somewhat traditional romantic triangle with the kinetic energy of the French New Wave and its elliptical considerations of love gone by, Jules and Jim is too perfect, too important, and too damn pretty not to be available in the best possible format.

5.)  #342 Six Moral Tales (dir. Eric Rohmer) 1963 – 1972

Well, this is flagrantly cheating, but I doubt that Criterion fans who’ve already took the plunge for this brick-sized box set would complain about the opportunity to do it all over again in glorious high-definition. The late, great Eric Rohmer is often positioned as a European Woody Allen, a frustratingly reductive comparison made all the more distasteful because of how much it denies Rohmer’s quietly strident compositions. Rohmer’s mid-career work pulsates with a swift visual energy, a giddily propulsive momentum that motors through human dynamics, developing relationships the way Tony Scott steers trains.

Rohmer’s camera is often wobbly and anxious, still searching for things when other filmmakers are convinced they’ve found them, streaming words over images with such casual force that the resulting alchemy makes it easy to lose sight of how beautiful each element is on its own. The pastoral erotica of Claire’s Knee, the monochrome philosophies of A Night At Maud’s, the svelte metropolitan grind of Love in the Afternoon – these are the kinds of things for which Blu-ray was invented, although these films are so watchable that it can be tough to see.

4.)  #196 Hiroshima, Mon Amour (dir. Alain Resnais) 1959

I was initially tempted to include Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil on this here list, but I ultimately decided that the visual artist’s spellbinding meditation on time and technology was ideal fodder for the streaming age, when moments seem to slip away as soon as they’re buffered. And while an argument could be made that any film so rhapsodically plagued by memory is better served by the haze of standard-definition than the precision of 1080p, I can’t deny my desire to have such stuff available to me in the best format possible.

Moreover, Criterion has exhibited such a fine hand in upgrading their catalogue into high-definition that I believe them capable of restoring the filmic qualities to Sans Soleil and its ilk, effectively satisfying a portion of the Kundera-esque need to return upon which these elegiac movies thrive. But it looks like I decided to go with Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima, Mon Amour, if only because no film about memory has ever been so relieved by the beauty of its here-and-now. Resnais’ documentary footage of the Hiroshima bombing would sear into the brain if projected on a lampshade, but the chatty affair that dominates the story provides contemporary viewers a haunting glimpse of a Japan long gone, and a pristine look at those scenes could help to make the deliberately rough flashbacks by which the lovers are tortured feel all the more punishing if cut into an immaculate present.

3.)  #306 Le Samourai (dir. Jean-Pierre Melville) 1967

You know what’s cool? Le Samourai. In fact, movies don’t really get much cooler. You know what’s not cool? Le Samourai horribly compressed within an inch of its life. Don’t take that the wrong way — the Criterion DVD did its best with the cards stacked against it — but Jean-Pierre Melville’s supremely unruffled hitman saga is all mood and style, Alain Delon unignorably badass even when he’s trying to blend into some drab wallpaper towards the bottom of the frame. While I’m of the mind that Melville made a better film (Army of Shadows) or two (Le Doulos), none of his work screams for the benefits of HD quite like Le Samourai, because Delon’s Bushido-obsessed contract killer is supposed to be unnoticed, not invisible. Also, I believe it was Nostradamus who famously Tweeted: “The world will not be at peace until the day that all of Melville’s films are widely available in 1080p.”

2.)  #147 In the Mood for Love (dir. Wong Kar-Wai) 2000
I should just say “Christopher Doyle’s most beautiful work” and leave it there, but I’m not that lazy, and I derive a masochistic enjoyment from diluting my purest points with several sentences of pure drivel.  This may violate logic and / or widely agreed upon recent history, but I’m pretty sure that HD video was invented cause some especially proactive person saw In the Mood for Love in standard-definition and was all, “What is this — a school for ants?” (indeed, there’s a pertinent Zoolander quote for all of life’s most frustrating moments).

All of Wong Kar-Wai’s films are swooningly gorgeous — even when they’re terrible, they still star the likes of Natalie Portman and Chan Marshall — but In the Mood for Love is nevertheless in a class of its own, an infidelity romance rendered as an exactingly choreographed tribal dance of sounds and shadows, slow motion and cigarette smoke. You know, writing about In the Mood for Love is sort of like dancing about architecture or performing gymnastics about the performance art of Marina Abramovic (actually, that sounds pretty essential), but yeah, Wong Kar-Wai makes the sort of films that people would stitch into their skin if they could — there’s not an inch of In the Mood for Love that wasn’t art-directed to perfection, and until AMC reserves an auditorium in all of their theaters to just constantly loop this movie forever, Blu-ray is the only way we’ll be able to fully appreciate its details in the comfort of our own homes, and the Doyle is in the details.

1.)  #482 Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (dir. Paul Schrader) 1985

Earlier this week Anchor Bay released The Entitled on both DVD and Blu-ray, and if a thriller starring starring Ray Liotta, Victor Garber and Laura Vandervoort sounds like it’s up your alley, we would love to save you a trip to the video store.  We’ve got several copies of the film on Blu-ray to giveaway.  So how do you get one?  It’s simple: Just like either Movies.com or The Entitled on Facebook and then leave a comment here.  

You don’t have to post to your wall or convince other people to do the same, and you don’t have to like both, just one or the other.  Then leave a comment on this post with your name (do not leave an adress!).  Midnight on Sunday, September 11th will be the deadline to leave a comment.  On Monday, August 12th we’ll randomly select the winners and then reach out to them individually for their address.  Easy, right?

Without the security of the job he wants or the future he dreamed of, Paul Dynan plans the perfect crime to help his struggling family — extort a fortune from three wealthy men. The plan: to abduct their socialite children and collect a healthy ransom of $3-million dollars. Over the course of one long night, Paul and his accomplices hold the rich kids hostage awaiting the $3-million ransom with little idea of the secrets that will surface between the fathers when they are forced to choose between their children and their money. Once blood is shed and things go horribly wrong, Paul must fight to stay one step ahead of his own twisted game.

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My name is Perri Nemiroff and I am addicted to the Internet. Apologies for the generalization, but I’d like to think the majority of you are, too. The Internet is an incredibly powerful tool when it comes to movie marketing. We get tons of new trailers, posters, photos and news stories a week, but it’s a wonder why more studios aren’t putting more of an effort into website viral marketing.

Just last week, Lionsgate unveiled a viral website connected to The Hunger Games, thecapitol.pn. Over at the URL, you’re prompted to sign in via your Facebook or Twitter account and then you’re automatically assigned a district. So far, so good. It’s exciting to be placed in a district and formulate some sort of identity in this fictional world so many of us have grown to love. Then, by dragging the screen, we reveal some data – the district processing queue, the Capitol announcements ticker, a countdown to The Hunger Games, the gross district product pie chart and the amount of tesserae claimed by each district. I’m curious to know about how long a user signs onto that site and stays on it because from what I can tell, it’s got the power to hold someone’s attention for about two minutes and no more.

Sure, the site has potential to grow and hopefully we weren’t all just assigned a district for no reason, but based on past website-based marketing efforts, growth could be limited. The large majority of movie websites merely show off a trailer, cast list and brief synopsis. However, then we get things like W.A.T.C.H., which was attached to Battle Los: Angeles and tried to authenticate the film through videos of folks recalling their first encounters. Cool, but are you really going to sit there and sort through all of that footage? Or how about the site for Repo Men, TheUnionCares.com? Again, it’s attempting to make you feel part of the film, but as a website, there just isn’t much to do other than scroll through the Artiforg catalog and watch that homepage video over and over.

Then there are the sites like the ones designed for Super 8, where fans are basically taunted with incredibly vague hints at the film’s plot that perhaps ultimately build intrigue for some, but for me, only frustration. The most time I’ve ever spent on a viral marketing website is the one for Inception and that’s because it involved a videogame. Of course the trailer that the game was concealing eventually leaked and my Mind Crime playing days were over.

Now the question is, which path will thecapitol.pn take? It’s certainly shaping up to be some sort of Online Role Playing Game, but I’m hesitant to go that far. Based on the minimal effort put into past websites, I’m going to guess thecapitol.pn will develop, but only in terms of delivering more information on Panem. This likely will not be a site for hardcore fans looking to further immerse themselves in the books, rather something for newcomers to get a taste of what this whole world is really about. Panem October, on the other hand, could be the ARG (alternate reality game) many are hoping for. A site that brings you into the world of The Hunger Games, letting you interact not only with the elements of Panem, but with the other people participating.

Ultimately, what do I know? For now, this is just mere speculation, but in two weeks it won’t be. Be sure to catch the next Hunger Games Countdown set to go live on Wednesday, September 21^st because we’ve got a special treat for you that might elucidate on this topic.

Interview: FAME: Suzanne Collins Author Sara Gundell

In the meantime, how about something a bit more tangible? Since early 2010, Bluewater Production’s FAME series has offered readers an inside look at how their favorite actor, author, musician or athlete rose to fame. The story is presented in comicbook-form, with the text telling of their experience paired with impressively realistic renderings.

Just about a year ago, the writer behind Novel Novice and The Hunger Games Examiner, Sara Gundell, touched base with Darren Davis at Bluewater, and the two discussed what could be “the next big thing” in young adult literature. Guess what was #1 on Gundell’s list? She explained, “I pretty much told him right off the bat, ‘Hunger Games is going to be the next big thing. Harry Potter’s winding down, Twilight’s winding down and with this series, they’re making a movie; it’s gonna be big.’” Sure enough, in January of 2011, Davis gave Gundell the thumbs up and she was in business to pen FAME: Suzanne Collins.

Movies.com What’s step one in this process?

Sara Gundell: First I had to learn how to write a comic book. I’d never written one before, so that was a learning experience. I talked to one of [Darren’s] other writers, Kimberly Sherman. She and I had a long e-mail exchange and phone conversations in which she walked me through the process. She sent me some of her, what is called a script basically, which is the text of the comic book. As a writer of a comic book, you’re not just writing the captions, you’re also describing every page of the comic book – how many panels, what the illustrations should be included and that kind of a thing. I knew how many pages I had and I knew there should be no more than six panels per page and three of them needed to be flash pages, which is a full-page illustration. So I had that as a rough outline and then it was just a matter of doing a lot of research.

Suzanne Collins is a very private person; she doesn’t talk about herself a lot, so it was a little tricky, but there were a lot of interviews that I was able to dig up fortunately from when Mockingjay was released. She was in the press a lot and so I dug up a lot of those and I dug up old interviews she’d done and I found every version of her biography from various websites, from Scholastic to her website that I could find, and then I just took all the research and I read it all multiples times and made notes in the columns and did highlighters and then I just started writing a rough story outline. I just wrote it by hand because that was easiest for me. I just started writing a rough story of her life and then once I had that down, I went on the computer and wrote it out in a nicer fashion so that it sounded good and then went back in after that and started brainstorming ways to tell the story visually with panels and illustrations and whatnot. It went through several drafts, but it came together pretty organically after that, once I got the hang of it. For me, my day job, so to speak, is as a producer in television news, so I’m used to telling stories visually because we use video so much. Once I got to that aspect of writing a comic book, of trying to describe the panels, it seemed strange at first, but once I started thinking of it in terms of telling the story visually, it came to me pretty easily.

Movies.com: Did you ever get to talk to Suzanne Collins during this process?

Gundell: I reached out to Suzanne Collins through her agent and I told them all about the project and what we were doing and I told them, ‘You know, Bluewater’s worked with authors before,’ like Charlaine Harris and Stephen King, they’ve all been involved and doing interviews to write the comic books. I talked to her agent and her publicist to see if they were interested and they went to her and she pretty much wanted nothing to do with it. So I was like, ‘Okay,’ it was back to just pure research.

Movies.com That’s pretty impressive because even when I just do quick interviews with filmmakers, I’m always so nervous about paraphrasing and possibly getting something the slightest bit wrong.

Gundell: Yeah. [Laughs] It does make me nervous, but there were enough interviews with her out there that I could pretty much compare what she said in one interview with what she said in another and all of the facts lined up. And in some cases, I quoted what she had said exactly, so I think it all came together pretty nicely. Obviously there’s less information about her childhood. I couldn’t make anything up so the comic book says pretty much what we do know and it says she keeps quiet about it, but later in life, here’s what she did. You have to work with what you have. [Laughs]

Movies.com How’d you approach this as a story, in terms of having a beginning, middle, end and a solid pace?

Gundell: You have to frame the story. You can’t just start, ‘Once upon a time, Suzanne Collins was born,’ because that’s really boring. The framework for this story is the explosive popularity of The Hunger Games. It starts by talking about how much people are into reality television and that as a form of entertainment and then I kind of use it as a segue into Hunger Games and how it was so popular. Then I go back and explore her life and pull out the moments of her life that became influences on the book. For example, when she was a child, her dad went away and served in Vietnam and when he came back, he was very frank with her and told stories about what war was like and that’s something that she had talked about very openly about being one of the inspirations for writing The Hunger Games. That’s kind of how everything’s framed in the story and in the end, it comes back to the fact that her notoriety is probably only going to increase at this point with the movies coming out.

Movies.com: Was there anything you learned about her that really surprised you?

Gundell: I was fascinated by the fact that she had worked in children’s television, which I’d heard briefly. Like the fact that she wrote for Clarissa Explains It All, which I remember being so obsessed with when I was a kid, that was really cool. I enjoyed seeing how she transitioned from a career in television into becoming an author and what pushed her in that direction.

Movies.com: So how about the book-to-film adaptation process? Is there anything particular you hope they keep intact?

Gundell: I think when it comes to turning a book into a movie, the thing that I look for the most is that I feel the same way watching a movie that I felt reading the book. I know they have to change the way the story unfolds and they have to cut certain parts and combine parts to make it work and I totally understand that and I’m okay with that. I don’t feel the movie has to be exactly page-for-page just like the book. I know it has to be adapted for the screen, that’s why it’s called adaptation. But, for me, what I’m looking for is is the story pretty much the same and do I feel the same way watching it as I did when I read it. That’s why I think the movie has a good chance of being really great is because Suzanne Collins is so heavily involved in the film. I have a feeling that those emotions that I had when I read the book will carry through to the movie.

Movies.com: What’s the future for The Hunger Games in terms of the FAME series? Twilight’s got one for the cast, could we see one like that for this?

Gundell: I’ve actually pitched that to Darren saying, ‘You know, if this movie’s big, here’s the three names that we want to do comic books for.’ It’s ultimately up to him, but he’s definitely open to the idea and we have actually talked about it. When I wrote the first draft of the comic book and sent it to Darren, they hadn’t cast the movie at all yet and so I actually had to go back and revise it twice after they cast Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson and Liam Hemsworth.

Movies.com: At what point in the filmmaking process does your story end?

Gundell: It pretty much ends with they’re making the movie, here’s who’s working on it, only time will tell if the fans will accept it or not. I finished writing the comic book obviously before they had started filming, but the main arc of the story isn’t about the movie, it’s about Suzanne Collins, so it’s definitely looking at she’s involved in the movie, she’s working on the movie and it’s gonna come out next year.

Movies.com: Overall, what do you think fans will get out of this? Do you think it’s important to have this insight into the life of the author of one of your favorite books?

Gundell: Absolutely! Especially in this case because it does offer so much insight into her writing of the book, the different various influences that she pulled from when writing the story and the characters. There’s a two-page spread that I’m really excited to see the illustrations for that I’m particularly tickled with that recounts this ancient myth that she pulled from when she was creating the idea of the tributes and sending them to fight to the death for TV. I kind of recreated the story of that myth in the comic book and I’m really excited to see that one come to life with the illustrations. I think readers not only will learn more about her, but they’ll see how all of these different elements influenced The Hunger Games and I think it’ll give them new insight into the books themselves.

FAME: Suzanne Collins is currently available for pre-order at Amazon.com and will be released the last week of October.

The Hunger Games Countdown runs here on Movies.com every other Wednesday. There are 197 days until release.

Ever since Judd Apatow announced that he was making a sort of Knocked Up spin-off featuring the married couple played by Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann, folks have been wondering whether there would be a role for Seth Rogen too. Even though the film will primarily focus on Rudd and Mann’s characters, we wondered whether Apatow would make some time for us to catch up with Rogen’s character (and his new baby) as well. According to Rogen himself, however, that’s not happening.

Movies.com spoke to the actor for his upcoming cancer comedy 50/50, and while he admitted to visiting the set of Apatow’s latest movie (This Is Forty was the working title at one point), he claims he’s not in it. “Yeah I’m not in it, but I went to visit the set and it looked hilarious,” Rogen told us, later admitting that adding his character back into the equation may have been a bit jarring for audiences. ”It was a good choice, honestly, because I think it would’ve confused people.,” he said. ”But I’m really looking forward to seeing it; I thought the script was unbelievably funny.”

During our interview Rogen also said that he’ll be beginning production on Jay and Seth vs. the Apocalypse in February, which he calls an “oddly personal” film. He also confirmed that he’ll be co-directing with writing partner Evan Goldberg, adding ”It’s now much more than just Jay and Seth — there’s many other people vs. the apocalypse now. It’s gonna be crazy.”

We’ll post our full interview with Seth Rogen real soon.  In the meantime, here’s the short trailer for Jay and Seth vs. The Apocalypse that inspired the upcoming feature. Note: Trailer is NSFW

In this week’s column, we round up four new distribution deals, five films opening this weekend, and one great trailer.
 

New Deals

Johnny To’s thriller Life Without Principle, which debuts today at the Venice Film Festival, has been acquired for North American distribution by Indomina, according to Film Business Asia. Lau Ching Wan, Richie Jen and Denise Ho star as characters under financial stress who cross paths with a bag containing $5 million. No release date has been announced. The film is next headed to the Toronto festival.

Deadline reports that Freestyle Releasing has picked up Sarah Palin – You Betcha!, Nick Broomfield’s documentary, and will open it in New York and Los Angeles on September 30. Set to premiere in Toronto on Sunday, the doc features interviews with her parents, neighbors, and former colleagues, who “trace her values to her upbringing in the Pentecostal faith,” according to the program notes.

“A careful character study” about an ordinary-looking insurance salesman who keeps a 10-year-old boy locked up in his basement will get a theatrical release next year. Entitled Michael, the film by Markus Schleinzer world premiered at Cannes earlier this year and will play at Toronto next week. Strand Releasing will take on the challenge of distributing a film whose lead character is a child molester; indieWIRE has the press release with all the details.

Amador, a drama revolving around a young woman and an old man, has been acquired by Film Movement, which plans a release in the second quarter of 2012, per The Hollywood Reporter. Magaly Solier stars as Marcela, a pregnant woman who travels to Spain for a summer job in the employ of a bedridden gentleman (Celso Bugallo), and is then faced with a moral dilemma when he dies. Fernando León de Aranoa (Mondays in the Sun, Princesas) directed. 

Coming Soon

My pick of the week is Shaolin, an action drama from China. Directed by veteran Hong Kong filmmaker Benny Chan, Shaolin stars Andy Lau as a very angry warlord who must take refuge in a Shaolin monastery after his family is shattered by his opponents. There he learns the true meaning of peace and love, and also discovers that Jackie Chan is pretty convincing as a humble cook / comic relief. Nicholas Tse plays Lau’s former underling, an ambitious, vicious soldier. This is crowd-pleasing entertainment, with little subtlety; the action sequences are definitely the highlights, though, and justify the ticket price. It opens on Friday in limited release.

Also opening this weekend, Tanner Hall is set at an all-girls boarding school in New England as four teenagers enter their senior year. Rooney Mara falls for “older man” Tom Everett Scott, Brit import Georgia King has trouble fitting in, Brie Larson gets into mischief, and tomboy artist Amy Ferguson discovers why she likes drawing girls in her pictures rather than boys. Francesca Gregorini and Tatiana von Furstenberg, longtime friends who studied film together at Brown University, wrote and directed. 

Kevin Hart: Laugh at My Pain, documents the comedian’s wildly successful cross-country tour, and features footage from a visit to his hometown of Philadelphia. “He deftly mixed common stand-up fodder — think sex, relationships and differences between the genders — with deeper observations based on experiences with divorce, cancer (which claimed his mother’s life) and drug-addicted family members,” observed Troy Reimink of The Grand Rapids Press, writing about Hart’s appearance in March. The official site has more information. 

Chinese romantic comedy Love in Space “follows a mother and her three grown daughters as they juggle their assorted love lives,” according to the official description. “Each woman is successful in everything except love – until they unexpectedly encounter new romances in Beijing, Sydney and even on the moon.” Aaron Kwok and Eason Chan are among the potential love mates for the ladies. Produced by Fruit Chan, who’s better known for his art house fare, Love in Space will open in select markets. 

John Landis’ black comedy Burke Hare, starring Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis as 19the century grave robbers, has been greeted with generally unfavorable reviews, which is a bit puzzling. True, it’s an uneven flick, but it’s richly atmospheric and delivers more than its share of laughs. Perhaps Landis’ sense of humor is too far out of kilter with today’s comic sensibilities? In any event, the film gets a limited theatrical release this weekend and is available now via various on demand platforms. 

Trailer of the Week

Swedish filmmaker Göran Hugo Olsson combined archival footage shot by his countrymen in America with contemporary commentary, creating The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975. The documentary features previously-unseen interviews with notable figures in the Black Power Movement — notably Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale, Huey P. Newton, and Angela Davis — and has received generally favorable reviews since its premiere at Sundance in January. 

The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 opens in very limited release on Friday, and will be available via various on demand platforms next Wednesday, September 14. Watch the trailer below for a sneak peak.
 

As many of you already know, there was a nation-wide “sneak preview” screening of Gavin O’Connor’s Warrior over the holiday weekend. And since I highly enjoyed the director’s hockey story Miracle, and frankly I’m always a sucker for a good sports movie, I was in attendance at one of those shows. I liked the movie quite a bit, truth be told, and one of my favorite things about Warrior was the heart-wrenching performance by Nick Nolte. So as I was singing a few praises on the twitter feeds, a few young movie nerds chimed in with replies about Nick Nolte in A) the Arthur remake, B) the first of the Hulk movies, and C) that Zookeeper movie. Apparently he plays a gorilla in that one.