Great Movies
Interviews
An American Carol: Sean Baker on Red Rocket
An interview with co-writer/director Sean Baker about his new film, Red Rocket.
An interview with co-writer/director Sean Baker about his new film, Red Rocket.
Marie writes: Now this is really neat. It made TIME's top 25 best blogs for 2012 and with good reason. Behold artist and photographer Gustaf Mantel's Tumblr blog "If we don't, remember me" - a collection of animated GIFs based on classic films. Only part of the image moves and in a single loop; they're sometimes called cinemagraphs. The results can be surprisingly moving. They also can't be embedded so you have to watch them on his blog. I already picked my favorite. :-)
If you go to a yacht party, don't expect to be living out your own version of "The Talented Mr. Ripley."
Barbara Scharres has a few choice words for François Ozon's "Young & Beautiful" and Sofia Coppola's "The Bling Ring," but finds a gem in Ryan Coogler's "Fruitvale Station."
"With Great Power: The Stan Lee Story" is available on-demand at Netflix.com, Amazon.com, iTunes, EpixHD.com and Vudu.com. Stan Lee will be attending a special screening of "With Great Power" at the Stan Lee Comikaze Expo in Los Angeles on September 15, 2012.
By Jana Spider-Woman Hulk Daredevil Wonder Woman Beast Monji
The title, "With Great Power: The Stan Lee Story," is a tip off, but if the only Uncle Ben you know is a nattily dressed black gentleman who sells conveniently packaged rice, then Stan Lee wants to invite you to his Marvel universe. This is the world where Uncle Ben adopted his orphaned nephew who would be bitten by a radioactive spider in high school. That sullen, selfish teen would soon find that the bite of karma can be transformational and he becomes a super hero with an attitude: Spider-Man.
"Twists of fate, love and humour, perseverance and, finally, a philosophical outlook- his story has it all." - Sarah Hampson.(click photo to enlarge) From the Globe and Mail article "You couldn't write this script" published July 19, 2010.From the Grand Poobah: "A young lady with excellent taste". (click to enlarge) "Ever since I was a child messing around with a terrible paint set from K-mart, I have been obsessed with controlling pigment suspended in water. Now I paint with divine, hand-made watercolors from Holland along with brushes ranging from high-end to dirt cheap, but the obsession remains..." - from Kelly Eddington's artist statement. To read more and see her truly wonderful watercolors, visit Kelly Eddington's Website and Gallery.
Ah, watercolors.... so easy to master; only takes decades....
Scroll down for my earlier entries.
The first five Sundance entries I've seen are the kinds of film the festival exists to showcase. It is possible that many of them won't ever open in most of the places you readers live, but you've impressed me with your resourcefulness in finding them anyway (and no, I don't mean piracy). You guys demonstrate that if you want to find a movie badly enough, you often can.
One of them, "Homewrecker," is for rent right now via YouTube, in keeping with the festival's Reinvention/Rebirth/Renewal and its embrace of new distribution channels such as the net and regional art cinemas.
That one and "Armless" are playing in the new Sundance section named NEXT, which specializes in movies with "low to no budgets." The guidelines specify budgets below $500,000, and both of these look closer to half a million than to "no."
Will any child's toy escape being blockbustered?
May 21--I am my Grandmother's dinner date on a friend's yacht. We walk down to the pier where all of the fancy yachts are docked. There are plastic signs hung from the front of the boats with the names of the company renting them for the night. Women are strutting up and down this pier like it's a runway! They're dressed up in expensive dresses and even more expensive heels, which aren't even allowed on the boats. Most of the boats are rented out for company parties, but others are privately owned by billionaires like Roberto Cavalli who can afford the hefty price tag of a docking space.
Since the boat we're going to isn't docked, we're meeting a smaller speed boat to take us out to it. It's pretty windy outside and we're having trouble finding the small boat at the pier. After 20 minutes of walking around and asking if anyone's name is Luke (the boat operator) we finally find him. Apparently we're at the wrong pier for a pick-up, but Luke is willing to pull my grandma along this 7' X 5' floating platform into his small speed boat.
My grandma is hilariously skeptical. She thinks about it for a few minutes, while the platform is sliding and bobbing around on top of the intense waves. "I have to walk across that?" she says. Luke tries to be persuasive, but even he's not buying that his manouever is completely safe. With a "I'm not falling into that water and drowning!" my grandma decides to meet Luke on the other end of the pier where there's a proper docking area.
Psychologists say that depression is rage turned inward. Stand-up comedy, on the other hand, is rage turned back outward again. (I believe George Carlin had a routine about the use of violent metaphors directed at the audience in comedy: "Knock 'em dead!" "I killed!") In the documentary "Heckler" (now on Showtime and DVD) comedian Jamie Kennedy, as himself, plays both roles with ferocious intensity. The movie is his revenge fantasy against anyone who has ever heckled him on stage, or written a negative review... or, perhaps, slighted him in on the playground or at a party or over the phone or online.
"Heckler" (I accidentally called it "Harangue" just now) is an 80-minute howl of fury and anguish in which Kennedy and a host of other well-known and not-well-known showbiz people tell oft-told tales of triumphant comebacks and humiliating disasters, freely venting their spleens at those who have spoken unkindly of them. At first the bile is aimed at hecklers in club audiences (with some particularly nasty invective for loudmouthed drunken women), then it shifts to "critics" -- broadly defined as anybody who says something negative about a figure whose work appears before a paying public. Some of the critics are actually interested in analysis; some are just insult comics who are using the Internet as their open mic. It gets pretty ugly, but it's fascinating -- because the comics, the critics and the hecklers are so much alike that it's no wonder each finds the others so infuriating.
Tom Cruise with his "Miiii" squeeze.
What do we talk about when we talk about Tom Cruise? What are our images of him really based upon, besides his own publicity stunts and some headlines? And just how did the top movie star in the world become so unlikeable in the public eye, an object of scorn and derision in the media, and a punch line for stand-up comics? Normally, a movie star's fall from gross -- er, grace -- wouldn't interest me much (although I am still trying to figure out how Burt Reynolds' 1970s career flamed out). I've interviewed hundreds of actors and filmmakers over the years and I've always made it a personal policy never to ask them, or speculate in print, about what they euphemistically call their "private lives," mainly because I really don't think it's any of my (or your) business. I'm interested in their work, not in what they do in their off hours.
But the fascinating thing about Cruise is how he's made a public commodity of his so-called "private life" (or his own image-manipulation version of it, presented for your entertainment). You'd think he would have learned something from the tabloid headlines generated by the sudden and mysterious split with his superstar wife Nicole Kidman, and tried to keep his personal affairs as private as he can. But no. When somebody boasts about details of his alleged off-screen love life on the most popular talk show in the world, goes on TV to say a pregnant actress (Brooke Shields) was wrong to seek medical treatment for her postpartum depression, and acts as a public spokesperson for his supposed "religion" in interviews (if you grant Scientology that status) -- even to the point of having Scientology tents set up on the set of Steven Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" in case cast or crew wanted to take a Free Personality Inventory -- well, that's when the "personal" becomes part of the star's public branding. And Tom Cruise is a brand name, every bit as much as Apple or Starbuck's or Subway or Volkswagon.
