June 2008 - Posts

Trailering: Benjamin Button, Neil Young.
Thu, Jun 19 2008 9:43 AM
I don't think the otherwise gloriously shiny teaser trailer for David Fincher's "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" needs such twinkly Tim Burton music, and Brad Pitt's accented voiceover at the beginning worries me a bit, but it does look awfully good. The film is an adaptation of a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald (that can be read online) about a man who's born elderly and who ages backward, a conceit that's lodged itself in the plenty of noggins — most recently, Andrew Sean Greer's novel "The Confessions of Max Tivoli," the title story of Gabriel Brownstein's collection "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Apt. 3W" and even, sort of, Coppola's "Youth Without Youth." The film's due out December 19th — the trailer's here. My head knows that the "CSNY" part of concert/anti-war doc "CSNY Déjà Vu" stands for Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, but my heart kind of...
by IFC.com - Indie Eye
Filed under: , , , , , ,
Opening nights.
Wed, Jun 18 2008 2:25 PM
Yesterday, the Toronto International Film Festival announced that its opening night film will be "Passchendaele," a $20 million World War I epic from actor/director Paul Gross, whose other helming credit is 2002's "Men With Brooms," as far as I know, the only curling rom-com in existence. Guy Dixon at the Globe and Mail talks with Gross, who based the film on the life of (and stars as) his grandfather Sergeant Michael Dunne: "About two-thirds of the film is set on the home front, so it is a romance that culminates in battle," Gross said. "It is at times epic and at times terribly intimate." When it premieres at TIFF and then hits Canadian screens this fall, the movie is expected to draw inevitable comparisons to the 1981 Australian film Gallipoli. In many ways, Passchendaele tries to do what Gallipoli did: portray a key moment in a country's history for that...
by IFC.com - Indie Eye
Filed under: , , , , ,
Exile on 15th Street, N.W.
Wed, Jun 18 2008 12:08 PM
At the New York Sun, S. James Snyder writes about both the ever-discussed endangerment of the print critic and last week's gathering/reading of selections from "Exile Cinema: Filmmakers at Work Beyond Hollywood," a book of film essays edited by Michael Atkinson, who also writes IFC.com's DVD column. Snyder slips in a bit of news on the first front I hadn't yet heard: "Three weeks ago, what has become a familiar scene played out once again at the Washington Post, as acclaimed writers Stephen Hunter and Desson Thomson accepted buyouts and resigned their full-time positions." Mr. Hunter is one of the few film critics to have been given the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. While I've never much cared for his work, particularly when he suggested the Virginia Tech massacre could have been instigated by overconsumption of the films of John Woo (choice sentence: "Their possible influence on Cho can be clearly...
by IFC.com - Indie Eye
Filed under:
Cyd Charisse, 1922-2008.
Tue, Jun 17 2008 6:55 PM
Cyd Charisse, the impossibly long-limbed actress and dancer (born Tula Ellice Finklea) who starred alongside Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly in classic musicals like "The Band Wagon" and "Singin' in the Rain," passed away today. From the AP: Her height was 5 feet, 6 inches, but in high heels and full-length stockings, she seemed serenely tall, and she moved with extraordinary grace. Her flawless beauty and jet-black hair contributed to an aura of perfection that Astaire described in his 1959 memoir, "Steps in Time," as "beautiful dynamite." You can watch her dance with Kelly at the end of "Singin' in the Rain" here on YouTube. [Photo: Charisse and Kelly in "Singin' in the Rain," MGM, 1952] + Actress-dancer Cyd Charisse dies in L.A. at 86 (AP) + Gene Kelly & Cyd Charisse - from singin' in the rain (YouTube)...
by IFC.com - Indie Eye
Filed under: ,
Odds: "Red Tails," over-restoration, the greatest Western of all time.
Tue, Jun 17 2008 6:35 PM
George Lucas "plans for [new movie 'Red Tails'] to be based on the historic record that brought the Tuskegee Airmen fame, drawn from their own accounts." Let's see that Spike Lee try to pick a fight with me, he thinks. [AP] David Bordwell on film restoration: "[I]t's possible to 'over-restore' a film. That is, by adding footage culled from many versions, the restorer may be creating an expanded version that nobody actually saw." [DavidBordwell.com] Joe Leydon points out that the Western Writers of America have named "Shane" the greatest Western ever made. [Moving Picture Blog] Thomas Doherty tackles serial killers in cinema, particularly "Dirty Harry" and "Zodiac," which trace "the emergence of a predator whose criminal profile, once a blurry police sketch, has sharpened into a wanted poster more photogenic than the western outlaw, urban gangster, or corporate mobster." [Moving Image Source] And Erik Sofge defends Ang Lee's "Hulk": In...
by IFC.com - Indie Eye
Filed under: , , , , , , , , , ,
Famous families.
Tue, Jun 17 2008 6:03 PM
"The Edge of Love," director John Maybury's biopic about the amours of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (played by Matthew Rhys), is having its premiere at the Edinburgh Film Festival tomorrow. Anna Burnside at the London Times talks to screenwriter/playwright Sharman Macdonald about how one gets such a film made, the secret being, and here's one for all the struggling writers out there to try at home, to get your daughter Keira Knightley to sign on as one of the leads. Knightley asked to read the script, loved it, and set up some meetings in LA. It was during one of these calls that Knightley accidentally cast herself as Vera. "They said to her, 'Of course you're going to be in it', and she said, 'Well, Shar' -- that's what she calls me, she doesn't call me Mum -- 'I couldn't say no'." Also in the Times, Andrew Lycett interviews Thomas'...
by IFC.com - Indie Eye
Filed under: , , ,
"Nowadays they call them sound bites."
Tue, Jun 17 2008 5:02 PM
A look at who's been saying what in interviews lately: "There are maybe seven women who make up Caroline. But these 'Did it really happen?' questions really don't interest me. That's what everybody kept asking me when I did a Q&A at South by Southwest. I got off a couple of one-liners, like, 'I've got a BA in dope but a PhD in soul.' I'm good at those. Nowadays they call them sound bites."        —Lou Reed on the inspirations for the main character in "Berlin," at the Independent. "To me, it's used up. It's condescending now. The people that celebrate it are not from it. I feel that in some weird way they're looking slightly down on it. I only celebrate something I can look up to."        —John Waters tells the AP his feelings on Honfest. "It was sort of surreal. He is very professional and made me feel comfortable...
by IFC.com - Indie Eye
Filed under: , , , , ,