Maybe Oliver Stone's George W. Bush biopic, "W" will be a comedy! This might explain why Lionsgate is deciding to release the film on October 17 - just three weeks before the November 4 elections even though not an inch of film has been shot yet.
Filming begins May 12, which basically gives them five months to shoot, edit and finish the film in time for mid-October. Uhh, rush much? And casting for the remaining members of Bush's collusion cabinet haven't even been announced yet!
There's basically three options here: 1) The most obvious one: the deadline is missed and the film has to come out in say, January '09 around inaguration time. It seems impossible that they will hit this date. 2) It's a full-blown comedy, it's shot in long, masters and it's easy to edit and piece together. Danny Elfman does the score. 3) It's the serious drama we're all frightened it might be and it's Oliver Stone, so it's just another one of the hackneyed jobs he's done in the last decade or so. Man, we can't wait for October.
Most telling? Lionsgate's bread and butter is shit like the "Saw" series and other schlocky, pump-'em-out horror films made for the specific purpose of generating money. It's not like there's a lot of quality control or Oscar nominations over at the studio. Prepare for a glorious trainwreck.
Read more...
5/09/2008
Oliver Stone's Bush 'W' Movie Will Completely Be Done and Ready For An October 17 Release??
Count Chocula, Peter Pan, Scooby Doo! Tarsem's Ridiculous Fairytale 'The Fall' Hits This Weekend
God, writing about this movie is like fishing with dynamite in a pond, but we can't help it, it's so much fun. So we wrote about visual magician Tarsem (he sort of strikes us as the David Blane of film directors) and his fanciful, ridiculously-looking new film, "The Fall," in a piece titled,"Ridiculous 'Plot' Of Tarsem Singh's New 'The Fall' Allows Filmmaker To Honor Commitment To Making Pretentious-Looking Twaddle, and we really feel that that says it all (but that won't stop us from prattling on).
Don't let the fact that the film is "presented by David Fincher and Spike Jonze," fool you. This isn't going to be "cool and edgy," it's going to be like the "Neverending Story" only with straight-faced adults in tights, sweaty, homoerotic slaves and magic, tons and tons of fabulous, illogical magic.
Reviews over at Rotten Tomatoes are inexplicably mixed (56% we would assume people would laugh the film out the door). Variety loathes is ("This convoluted, arbitrary, overlong whimsy will strike most grown-ups as childish, and is far too violent and pretentious for kids. " Dennis Harvey writes).
Our buddy, MTV's Kurt Loder describes it as a wet fart or "two hours of high-end perfume commercials," and the New York Post cracks us the fuck up with this bonne mot: "It's basically a Middle Eastern version of "The Princess Bride" with an assisted-suicide subplot, " lol.
Our unfair, pre-judging preview said, "it's kind of a capricious bonding fairy tale/adventure story with lots of faggy-looking costumes, arrows being dodged, elephants swimming in oceans, lithe slaves carrying royalty, monkeys (monkeys are always a must) and other elements of [utter nonsense]. The film stars... well, nobody really, and essentially looks like a collection of pretentious, Salvador Dali-looking surrealist tableaux's and eye-candy for color-correction lab nerds."
To be fair, Glen Kenny kinda loved it, but he just got fired so what the fuck does he know (too soon! his new blog lies here)? "The Fall is a movie whose every frame pulsates with the desire to be a transportive, transcendent work of cinema. And each one of said frames is full of visual bedazzlement and wonder," he gushed.
We didn't bother try seeking a screening and we can't in good conscience pay to see this thing. Best of luck if you venture into theaters this weekend, all three of you.
Read more...
Desperate For Audiences, WB Puts Up The First Seven Minutes Of 'Speed Racer' In Hopes Of Convincing People It's Not A Total Kaleidoscopic Failure
Strap into your seats tightly, put some protective UV sunglasses on and keep a barf bag handy. Oh yeah, and remember the rules of gravity and logic no longer apply when entering this "Speed Racer" zone. Many people are already claiming, "hey, this is pretty good! Not bad, seems like fun!" These are people we don't want to know.
Read more...
Grand Theft Auto IV Also Has Music For Those Quiet, Sunset-Filled Introspective Times When You're Tired Of Jacking Innocent Civilians
A lot has been said about Grand Theft Auto IV since it was released last week; more than we could ever hope to bring to the table. It has something for everyone. No, seriously, everyone.
We were noticing some of the incredible radio stations programmed for the game (over 200 tracks, it's wild, the music supervisor is now officially a god in that world, there's many a choice cut) and we noticed that there was even an ambient/chill-out channel called, "The Journey" filled with many an avante composer.
At first, we were like, "wtf?!?" But then, hey, even we've played the game and we get it based on our experiences. It's like this: it's 5 a.m., you're in your underwear, you've bleary eyed and have to get up in two hours for work, you've been playing since 7 p.m. the day previous and you're having a moment.
You've just fucking murdered the shit out of over 200 people in the last 10-or-so hours. You've blown up a grandmother with a hand grenade, you beat some brat to death with a baseball bat and watched his skull jizz hit your crispy white sneaks; you've yelled incredibly base racial epithets at dyslexic children and stolen over 75 cars which you proceeded to trash for no apparent reason.
After all that carnage and mayhem? We get it. Sometimes you just want to walk around the city, enjoy a beautiful sunset and pour one out with a lone tear streaming down your face to the contrite moment-of-clarity thought, "What the hell have I done?" A song for everything. Genius, programming.
The Journey
DJ: A computer
Genre: Ambient/Chillout
Tracklist:
Global Communication - "8:07"
Terry Riley - "A Rainbow in Curved Air"
Steve Roach - "Arrival"
Michael Shrieve - "Communique 'Approach Spiral'"
Jean Michel Jarre - "Oxygène, Pt 4"
Philip Glass - "Pruit Igoe"
Tangerine Dream - "Remote Viewing"
Aphex Twin - "Selected Ambient Works Vol. 2 CD2 (Z-Twig'')"
Ray Lynch - "The Oh of Pleasure"
Hell, maybe even Tom Cruise will pick this one up since he's such a TD fan.
Listen: Tangerine Dream - "Remote Viewing"
Read more...
Even Chewing Gum Companies Fucking Hate Uwe Boll
Poor Uwe Boll. You gotta feel for him a little bit. The hack video game director has been under so much fire this year for making insipidly mediocre movies that even movie geeks who normally adore garbage like "Hostel," "Transformers" and dreck like that detest his work and have basically called for his death (cinematic or otherwise) in the form of various and numerous online petitions.
Boll's fought back in his grating, Germanic-way and he certainly doesn't make it easier on himself and just irks the fanboys all the more (we're still haven't ascertained if he's the world's greatest deadpan comedian or what).
So there was that petition that asked for Boll to retire for good. Boll said he'd pack it all in only if 1 million signatures were signed (last time we checked it was at like 250k) so to add to all the contempt and bile and fuel this fire chewing gum company Stride (who?) announced that they would give away 1 million packs of free gum if the million signature goal is met.
That's a lot of gum. The caveat? The million mark must be met by May 14 (maybe Stride is having some second quarter business issues we don't know about). Nice little gimmick to capitalize on we suppose, but poor Boll, even gum companies we've never heard of are picking on the poor loser. We suppose this does give a little unintentional promotion to Boll's un-PC comedy, "Postal," which comes out mid May.
All we know is that Boll is gonna be pissed, when he hears that Gore Verbinski is biting his steez and just got hired to direct the video-game adaptation, "Bioshock." This may mean war, people.
Read more...
Donnie Darko Sequel? File Under: Worst Ideas Ever
Those of us with a realistic outlook and clear-headed sense of taste can safely assume that the cult-classic "Donnie Darko," about the retarded kid with the pet rabbit who tells him to murder people (kinda like "Harvey" for emo teens), was a huge one-off fluke.
Have you seen the director, Richard Kelly's hilariously preposterous "Southland Tales," cause if you have, you know exactly what we're talking about.
Moreover if you've seen the "director's cut" of Donnie Darko, which basically ruins the allure behind the movie, reveals too much and basically pulls back the curtain - kinda like Lucas did with the fuckin midichlorians - you know precisely what we mean. Even Kelly is fully aware how much he fucked up with 'Southland,' given his next project.
Anywhoo, this is all preamble to say, "Donnie Darko 2," wtf? However, hold the phone, Kelly is not involved and some other hack is taking over (good, that would have been the siren call of desperation if he had helmed).
Apparently the story "picks up seven years after the death of Donnie, with youngest Darko Samantha, now 18, and her best friend Corey being plagued by bizarre visions while on a roadtrip to Los Angeles." The only person reprising their role in the film will be Daveigh Chase (the aforementioned Samantha, their really wouldn't be a film without her).
The whole concept screams of utterly unnecessary and therefore we question the filmmakers commitment to sparkle motion, forget it.
Read more...
5/08/2008
Diddy Says Rapper Playing Notorious B.I.G Is The Mack Dad; Opinion May Or May Not Be Reputable
Hip-hop mogul and unintentionally hilarious YouTube clip making satirist Sean Diddy Combs is claiming the actors on the set of "Notorious," the currently filming biopic of slain Brooklyn rapper The Notorious B.I.G. (born Christopher Wallace) are doing eerie and spot-on impressions of the real-life people they're portraying.
"Gravy, the guy playing B.I.G., it was just too eerie for me to be on that," Combs told MTV. "Gravy's killing it. If I tell you he's killing it, then that's all we need to say, you know what I'm saying? I don't think anybody could have done a better job."
"People asked me years ago who you'd want to play me, and I said Derek Luke ... so it was just destined. I got to see him do his thing, and it was scary for me. I had to leave, 'cause he was acting just like me."
Keep in mind, Diddy is E'd out a lot and not really there half the time, so everything he always says is pretty much suspect.
In other news of black musicians now in films (wow, classy segue), Cedric The Entertainer is assuring anyone who will listen (those skeptical people?), that Beyonce is also killing it on the set of "Cadillac Records" as Etta James.
“I mean, Beyonce’s just dope anyway, but you’ll be surprised by the little subtleties she’s brought to this character to make it pop,” Cedric also told MTV. “Plus, it’s a period piece, so it feels a little bit back in time. She was able to be amazing in this character, with this subtle love affair with the Adrien Brody character.”
Read more...
Good News For People That Love Bad Movie Industry News
There's was a few significant blows dealt to the indie movie world today. Warner Bros shut down WIP (Warner Independent Pictures) and their other specialty indie tentacle Picturehouse. WIP's last film was the now-ironically titled sadist indulgence "Funny Games" and before that was "Snow Angels." The company is still expected to put out Alan Ball's pedo-suburbia-race film "Towelhead," later this summer (August 8). Picturehouse was most recently known for their success with "La Vie En Rose," "Pan's Labyrinth" and they are expected to release a few more films before the year is out (or at least the larger WB will presumably).
Variety called the decision to shutter the operations ones that "reflects the massive pressures to cut costs" and noted that more than 70 jobs would be eliminated.
On the other side of the coin, estimable film critic Glen Kenny used his occasionally too-esoteric, but very fine movies blog to announce that his position at Premiere.com had been terminated. (Premiere of course was once a movies magazine, but the dwindling magazine age closed them down to exist on the web only).
New Line shutters earlier this year, now WIP and Picturehouse. The Village Voice laid off a solid film critic and now Glen Kenny is gone? High school students, pay attention: go to law school. Don't start a blog and certainly not a movies blog with a focus on music.
Read more...
Review: 'Tracey Fragments' Is, Well, Fragmented, But At Times Beautiful
"The Tracey Fragments" is going to be polarizing in the blogosphere, we can feel it. Not so much for the splintered film techniques (more on that later), but more because of hot-button topic actress Ellen Page whose role in "Juno," seemed to provoke a lot of ire of many a blogger and armchair critic who evidently hates teen girls that deign to speak in pop-cultural tones.
No Diablo Cody isn't with her this time, but instead of playing a 17-18 year old smarmy kid, Page now plays a melodramatic 15 year old with a sarcastic streak - just not as pronounced and not as obnoxiously clever (it's a different role, not in a different universe, mind you, but knee-jerk reactions claiming the two characters/performances are the same are sure to come).
Page plays Tracey Berkowitz who comes from a broken home and we quickly learn that her little autistic-like brother has gone missing. Her neglectful parents play the blame game and the story then jumps around in time to illustrate her misfit status at school, running away from home in search of her brother, pining for the elusive, aloof cute hipster boy, and going to see her clueless transgendered shrink (who is some nice comic relief).
But the biggest story about 'Tracey' is its incredibly and purposefully fragmented presentation. Directed by Canadian filmmaker Bruce McDonald - once the toast of Canada and without nary at hit in years -, nearly the entire film is shot in a jarring Mondrian-like multiple split screens intended to convey the protagonist's young fragile psyche. Two cameras were running during most of the film and multiple takes of the same scene are often running out of synch with one another while memories, other sequences, and metaphorical tableauxs play out in other frames simultaneously.
Its not as obnoxious as it sounds, but the technique can be both effective and grating at times and will likely make or break the film for audiences. The performances are strong, the visuals are striking and romantic, the music (Broken Social Scene) is typically evocative yet subtle, and in spite of the dark premise, it's a lot more funny and playful than it ought to be (there's a rock n' roll-like trailer in the middle of the film that introduces Tracey's uncontrollable teen crush which is pretty great). It also boasts one of the most painful "sex" scenes to watch that we've seen in a while that is simultaneously beautiful and sad.
Overall the "fragmented" conceit works and it doesn't. Thankfully, McDonald's experimental drama only last 77 minutes so it doesn't overstay it's welcome. And while it's not completely the return to form we were hoping from this filmmaker, it is a strong indicator that he's back and willing to take creative risks at any cost. [-B]
Read more...
John Mayer, Judd Apatow, Martin Starr, Kristen Bell: Let's Do This
We saw this a couple days ago and shrugged. Whatever, John Mayer, right? But then we realized it was directed by Judd Apatow and stars "Freak & Geeks" alumni Martin Starr and "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" belle and new Apatow-gang member Kristen Bell.
But most of all? And we kinda knew this, but hated to admit it? For a guy who writes such terrible music, John Mayer is kind of a really funny motherfucker, dude is really self-aware and he plays a parody of himself, really, really well.
Read more...
Trailer Tease: Michel Gondry's "Tokyo!" (Or More Accurately: Gondry's 'Interior Design' Short Within The Larger 'Tokyo!' Film
Remember Michel Gondry's short "Interior Design" "Hiroko & Akira in Tokyo" about a woman who turns into a chair that's a short within the larger film "Tokyo!" (Fellow French director Leos Carax - "Pola X" - is doing the short, "Merde," and South-Korean filmmaker Joon-ho Bong is also part of the project). Well, that film has a trailer now. Here it is, well sort of, it's a cheap teaser trailer that show very little outside of the three directors working and shots of the city, but hell, it's something...(ok, it's a big fucking tease of nothing, let's face it). Yeah, it's diplaying weird, Twitch doesn't like it when you tweak the size of their clips. Whatever (via Spout).
Read more...
'Sonic Youth: Sleeping Nights Awake' Documentary To Be Featured At CineVegas Film Fest
The CineVegas film festival has announced it's line-up and one of the main films is a documentary on aging, hipster downtown NY noiseniks, Sonic Youth, called "Sonic Youth: Sleeping Nights Awake."
Read more...
RDJ Not Locked In For 'Iron Man 2'?, Matthew Vaughn No Longer Directing 'Thor'?
Wait, so Robert Downey Jr. isn't already locked in to star in "Iron Man 2"? A quote in Entertainment Weekly is ambiguous with RDJ playing coy. "“I really don’t know," RDJ answered when asked if he would be in 'IM2.' "What I’m on board for right now is the ride home. I don’t want to start talking out of my league, because that would have certainly been my inclination in the past. I kind of know how to keep my teeth together a little better than I used to." Does Downey mean by, "the ride home," he's locked in for the Avengers movie? It couldn't be after Terrence Howard's character is supposed to take over cause he'd have to be part of that movie. Odd. Does he just expect more dough to sweeten the deal now that the film has been so successful? [/Film]
Matthew Vaughn is no longer attached to direct "Thor" a script and project he had been developing for months? Apparently so. Buried in a Variety article is a mention that his "holding deal," expired back in December. With Thor already set for summer 2010, Marvel better get cracking. [JoBlo]
Charles Grodin will make a cameo in Jason Segel’s upcoming Muppet Movie (which is probably a year or two off at this point). Grodin is genius and always has been (yes, even in the "Beethoven" dog movies), so this is amazing news. It's nice to see someone appreciate the actor who popped up in many of the Muppet movies. [MTV]
Tom Hanks has officially endorsed Barack Obama. Does this mean, we're fucked now?
Neil Young hearst Blu-Ray. The aging rocker loves it so much he's planning on releasing his entire music archive on Blu-ray discs. [DailySwarm]
Read more...
Dear God. First Look: Oliver Stone's 'Bush' Film
Wow, feast your eyes on that, huh?
JustJared has a first look of this week's issue of Entertainment Weekly which has snagged the first photos of Oliver Stone's George W. Bush biopic"W."
Yes, that's Josh Brolin and Elizabeth Banks as George and Laura Bush? Are you feeling a delirious mix of horror, repulsion and giddy, train-wreck anticipation?
Yeah, we feel dizzy too. Don't forget in the original script, which may or may not have changed by now, Dubya calls his oily advisor Karl Rove a "turd blossom" on page one.
Amazing, right? Don't forget we gave our helpful suggestions as to who should play Rove, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the rest of the unannounced cast members to portray Bush's cabal.
The EW story is up. In it, Stone denies that Robert Duvall turned down Cheney and refused to comment on reports that he's talking to Paul Giamatti about the part.
A lot of people are wondering how fast and loose Stone will play with his Bush biopic, but he doesn't really care. ''I'm tired of defending the accuracy of my movies,'' he said. ''I'm past that now. JFK was a case to be proven, Nixon was a penetrating biography of a complex and dark man. But I'm not bound by those strictures anymore."
Still, people have problems with the script. The author of "Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush, Robert Draper is one of those people. ''My quarrel with the script isn't that it departed from factual reality here and there, but that it just misses the guy,'' he said. ''You come away with an even more hyperbolized caricature of Bush the Cowboy President than is already out there.''
Dude, it is Oliver Stone, afterall. We kinda can't wait.
Read more...
Teen Brats To World: If Miley Cyrus Can Do 3D, So Can We!
So earlier this year Miley Cyrus made like a trillion dollars with her 3D concert film, right? And yes, the bohunky teens of the Jonas Brothers appeared in "Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour."
5/07/2008
Tribeca Review: Guy Maddin Continues His Wintry Obsessions In 'My Winnipeg'
Guy Maddin must be OCD. The distinctively arcane Canadian filmmaker has been obsessed with wintry, snowglobe aesthetics, eroticized adolescent Freudian examination and '50s like paranoiac melodrama almost since his career began.
Thematically, when not examining the secret life of ice nymphs, one legged beer baronesses and German expressionism-esque hospitals gone awry, the Great White Northern director has been singularly fixated on his imagined dysfunctional family and the winter wonderland of his Manitoba landscape of birth.
So when asked to make a documentary of his Winnipeg hometown – essentially a propaganda assignment – the filmmaker took the opportunity to look at the city through both his phantasmagorical and autobiographical lens for the appropriately titled "My Winnipeg."
Dubbed a "docu-fantasia," Maddin's fabulist remembrance of Winnipeg is both nostalgic and slightly scornful. The doc begins with the director narrating escape route possibilities on a train from the winter torn city and then vacillates between the fantasized, always sexually-charged childhood and an imagined civic guide through the secret dark alleys and shadowy backdoor cabals that may or may not have happened in the fair city.
Whether there were ectoplasmic seances once in city hall; if a staged Nazi takeover during WWII to scare the citizens of "What If" day actually happened, or whether the Masons built secret code in to the architechtural fabric is fact is completely besides the point - Maddin's distinct take on Winnipeg is purposefully built to construct both allure and myth.
The unique filmmaker is constantly at play; using the film as both aversion therapy and a place to reimagine the past. He rents out his old childhood home to simulate actual painful events of his upbringing
and claims to coax his mother out of acting retirement to play herself when in actuality its a 1940s B-movie actress portraying his moms. His siblings are also played by actors that he says have uncanny resemblance to his family and his oedipal complex is again on display (he hilariously describes the “gynocracy” of the female-infested hair salon that his mother ran growing up).
All the while the film runs on a feverishly drunk, dream-like rhythm that is hypnotic and metaphorically in step with the going-nowhere train his stand-in is riding - you would fall dead alseep if it weren't so utterly fascinating. Dreams are another infatuated motif. At one point he claims that "Winnipeg has 10 times the sleepwalking rate of any other city in the world," which is obviously meant metaphorically.
In a brief, anachronistic and rare showing of modern day politics, Maddin breaks the fourth wall by showing recent color-footage of various Winnipeg touchstones being demolished - his scorn for the short-sighted bureaucrats that run the city clearly strong enough for him to include this bold deviation.
The autobiographical love/hate affair Maddin has with his provincial city (and therefore childhood) is crystalline. He's constanly trying to leave, yet he's obsessed with revisiting the past which essentially echoes the filmmakers real-life conundrums (he still lives there while Canada expected him to leave to Toronto ages ago). Elements of Winnipeg are beloved to the cineaste, but change and disrespect for its glory days are plainly met with disdain.
"My Winnipeg" is as much an examination of personal psychological paralysis as it is a heartfelt tour of his hometown's history, both literally and figuratively.
You don't need to know jack or care about the town of Winnipeg to enjoy the film. You just simply have to have an appreciation of Maddin's quintessentially esoteric perspective on the world. Maddin is routinely called the David Lynch of Canada, but at this point, that's more of a disservice to his unparalleled artistry. What's worse is he's a national treasure that's basically unobserved. Easily the best film we saw at the recent Tribeca Film Festival. Someone hook us up an interview with Maddin, stat. [A]
'Winnipeg' won the award for Best Canadian feature film at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival. For more Guy Maddin see our coverage of his amazing psychodrama "Brand! Upon The Brain!," which was performed live and narrarated by fans of the filmmaker like Lou Reed, Crispin Glover and Laurie Anderson.
Read more...
'The Rocker' Trailer: 'School Of Rock' For Slightly Older Kids? We Hate You Rainn Wilson
We don't have a lot to add. We haaaate Rainn Wilson. Dude is an insufferable one-trick-pony who does the same bit over and over again (see "The Office," "My Super Ex-Girlfriend," and "Juno" which he almost help ruin). "The Rocker" stars Rainn Wilson and Christina Applegate, but curiously enough she's hardly (or not even in?) this trailer.
Remember the endearing "School of Rock"? If that was PG-13 audiences. This is one is for, uhhh... PG 15 ones (slightly older kids) and stoners that will laugh at fucking anything. Ok, we'll admit, there's some marginally funny bits in the trailer, but Wilson will surely ruin the movie with his tired shtick. On the plus side it does feature cute Emma Stone from "Superbad," but keep in mind: this film was completed ages ago. The official site for this thing (which still reads "coming spring 2008!") was up at least six months ago, which means it had a release date long ago, a site was prepped and the date got pushed - which is never a good sign (we featured it in our spring movie preview, cause at one point it was coming out in April - now it's fucking August!)
Oh yeah, "the plot." Rainn Wilson plays a retard, older drummer who gets one last shot at fame when he gets to play drums in a high school prom band (can you hear our eyes rolling from there?).
Read more...
MTV Movie Awards Disconnect: Future-Forward With 'Superbad' Noms, Lagging In The Past With Host Mike Meyers
Now this isn't a diss at MTV. We know all too well how people paint with a wide brush with their shooting fish in a barrell ad hominem attacks on MTV ("They don't play videos!" Holy, shit, really??? Grow up, Peter Pan) But rather it's a diss on the people behind the MTV Movie Awards, which believe it or not is a separate group of people that run MTV Movies online,"The Hills," regular daily MTV programming, etc., etc., and so on and so on.
The 2008 MTV Movie Award nominations were announced and Judd Apatow's raunchy sweet teen comedy "Superbad" scored 5 nominations (Including one for McLovin' in the Best New, nice). Yay, right? Funny, smart, culturally relevant movie that should be nominated at the MTV movie awards (lets face it, they're not masterpiece theater and they know it). Everyone's happy, right?
But wait, the host is... my grandpa Mike Meyers? Yes, he has a new movie out this summer, "The Love Guru," and the timing is perfect so we understand it from a business perspective, but relevant to the audience or cultural perception at large?
Sure, "The Love Guru," will do really well at the box-office cause it's perfect middle-of-the-road fodder for all the ham and eggers out there that drive society (stupid people that breed more stupid people). But c'mon guys, we're all aware there's this sweeping sentiment - justified or not - that MTV has become culturally irrelevant and unhip, so maybe instead of the Meyers safe as milk bet you could get someone with a little bit more edge and bite to preserve the greater good (and for the sake of fucking laughter for godsake)? God, can you imagine the inspid Doctor Evil jokes he's probably rehearsing RIGHT NOW? (feeling dizzy at the thought) Hello, Zack Galifinakis? Hello, David Cross. Wait, the world at large wouldn't tune in to see those guys. Hell, they probably have no clue who the fuck they are. Sarah Silverman was too pottymouthed, right? Weren't ratings down? Nope, but apparently they weren't up high enough.
Ah, the eternal conondrum. There's no hope is there. Mainstream culture is just fucked from now on, isn't it.
Read more...
'The Future Is Unrwritten'... On DVD June 24
Remember the rock doc, "Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten" that played Sundance '07 and was released by IFC late last summer in the U.S.?
It's finally coming to DVD on June 24 according to Amazon and Pitchfork. Anything extra on it? Both sources don't say.
Our "review," was this: Julian Temple (the man behind The Sex Pistols doc "The Filth & The Fury") doesn't do a disservice here to his late Clash buddy Joe Strummer in the fair and balanced 'Future Is Unwritten.' The film is neither a love-letter to Strummer, nor is it the toppling of a sacred cow, but rather a reflective look back at the punk rock icon warts and all. Or as Temple describes it: "not a hero-worship film." The film features glowing testimonials with such Strummer disciples as Martin Scorsese (he says "Raging Bulls" was directly influenced by the Clash), a typically effusive Bono, a stoned Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream, worst-teeth on the planet Brit John Cooper Clarke, filmmaker Don Letts, John Cusack, Steve Buscemi, Jim Jarmusch, The Sex Pistols' Steve Jones and Johnny Depp who's tribute is extremely difficult to take seriously while still in full 'Pirates' make-up and ratty goatee.
We didn't do cartwheels for it or anything, but it was decent enough and worth watching if you missed it last year (hello, Netflix queue).
Read more...
What About The Voice Of Geddy Lee? Fact Checkin Cuz Tells Us It Helped Spawn 'The Tracey Fragements'
So last night we attended a screening of "The Tracey Fragments," at a Diesel event where director Bruce McDonald and Broken Social Scene-r Brendan Canning were at for a Q&A after the film (Canning's stripped down version of the Social Scene wrote the film's score; the soundtrack of which came out yesterday via ITunes).
More on the film in a review tomorrow, but the Q&A yielded some interesting tidbits: Namely that Rush's high alto wailing singer Geddy Lee might be the person to thank for the film. It was Lee who first sent McDonald the 'Fragments book as a gift and after he read it, he was inspired to make into a film.
But being that Canadian filmmakers are generally broke, the canny McDonald sent author Maureen Medved a pair as his cowboy boots as his way of saying he wanted the rights to the book. Charmed, she agreed and even penned the screenplay for the film (her first and she "wasn't precious about adapting her own material," the director said)The movie stars Ellen Page, but anyone who thinks they scored the star to capitalize off of "Juno," would be wrong. 'Tracey' was shot way before that phenom-film hit and it was Page's performance in "Hard Candy" that impressed director - that and her love for Patti Smith.
"I was impressed that someone so young would be into her. That pretty much secured her the part," McDonald recalled of the casting meeting.
When asked how Broken Social Scene became involved in the film's score Canning was to the point. "Bruce called and we said yes" (the band and director have a friendship that dates back a few years and projects now). When asked what their scoring process was Canning said it wasn't rocket science. "We watched it, toured, gestated on it, watched it again and tried to compose for it."
He joked that people aren't exactly ringing their phone off the hook with score requests (young filmmakers take note!) "Yeah, we were up for "There Will Be Blood," it was either us or Jonny Greenwood," he joked. "We take take the offers we like, were g