The list of Phillip K. Dick adaptations gets one movie longer. This one has a more romantic than usual feeling to it, and also has a stronger-than-usual cast, including Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, the great Terrence Stamp (kneel before him), and John Slattery (“Mad Men” and Tony Stark’s deceased dad in “Iron Man 2“) who is suddenly everywhere these days.
Author: Bob Westal (Page 111 of 265)
Writer guy Bob Westal was literally born in Hollywood and has commented on the worlds of movies, popular culture, politics, and food ever since. His interest in cocktails is more recent, but he made up for lost time with hundreds of “Drink of the Week” blog posts for Bullz-Eye. In addition to writing and editing, Bob also talks a lot.
There’s no doubt that Alex Gibney is on a historic roll as a documentarian. Within only a few years, he’s been involved with probably the largest number of popular and influential documentaries of any single human being not named Michael Moore. Those works would include the outstanding “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” and the equally strong, and Oscar winning, “Taxi to the Dark Side,” about American use of torture in the “war on terror.” Gibney has also made his share of more historically themed documentaries, including “Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.” He was also involved as a producer in two of the other most important and controversial documentaries of recent years, the Iraq-war expose, “No End in Sight” and “Who Killed the Electric Car?”
If Gibney’s past output is hugely impressive, however, his upcoming list of films is dizzying. At the recently wrapped Tribeca Film Festival in New York, he premiered as a “work in progress,” a new and apparently very revealing, look at former New York state governor, attorney general, and Wall Street watchdog Eliot Spitzer and the sex scandal that drove him from office. He also has a segment in the upcoming film version of the super-hot bestseller, Freakonomics, as well as new films about two very different cultural legends: bicyclist Lance Armstrong and author/super-hippie Ken Kesey of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Merry Pranksters fame.
There’s also the recently completed “My Trip to Al-Qaeda” and the film Gibney was promoting at his publicist’s L.A. office one recent afternoon, “Casino Jack and the United States of Money.” It’s a work of amazing journalistic detail that also works very hard to be lively and accessible.
Even if I felt that Gibney didn’t quite master that “accessible and lively” aspect too consistently this time around, his “Casino Jack” reviews so far have been great overall. He’s certainly a filmmaker to be reckoned with and one with an outstanding body of work behind him and much, much more to come. Not my idea of a lazy person.
Thanks to the amazing Matt Zoller Seitz for sharing this on his Facebook page.
By the way, Matt thinks “Superheroes Suck!,” but don’t tell him I said so. Tee-hee.
With the super-hum0ngous Cannes Film Festival opening today — with Tim Burton heading the festival jury, btw –the movie news is in a kind of hyper-drive. Also, it’s been a few days since I’ve done one of these newsy posts. So, you’ll have to excuse me as I merely skim the surface.
* Is it that no one’s writing books or plays anymore, or do we really need to keep making movies based on games? Tim Burton, it so happens, is the next to contemplate the matter. Will “MONSTERPOCALYPSE” be the first game-based film to screen at Cannes, or will that be “Checkers: the Movie”?
* Here your fix of Cannes-related glitz, and also details on the rather big film-making names. Meanwhile THR takes a moderately bullish look at the market-side of the event.
I’m delaying my next news-aggregation type post until tomorrow morning because, not only am I way ready for dinner, I didn’t want to delay the teaser trailer for the already-much ballyhooed collaboration between J.J. Abrams and Steven Spielberg. There was an earlier version of this that was shot by a video camera. Quite frankly, I just didn’t see the point. Now, we have the real thing and it’s pretty neat-o.
I have to admit that, at least based on the name, and the really nifty explosions, I’m kind of liking this one already. Also, most of you digital generation youngsters might know know about it, but Super 8 was, in its funky way, pretty beautiful. Of course, the connection between the film format and the movie — which presumably will be shot mostly in 35mm — remains unclear. Still, it’s an interesting little trailer for what we understand is science-fiction film with some resemblance to early Spielberg and clearly something to do with alien life forms. I’m definitely picking up a slight “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” vibe.
H/t to the Playlist who also bring us the mystery of the briefly seen face.
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