Category: Movie Dramas (Page 36 of 188)

Trailer for a Sunday morning: “The King’s Speech”

September 26, 2010 /

A preview that’s been on all the ‘net, but not here yet.

Even though he was king during the time of England’s greatest troubles, King George VI tends to be overshadowed by his older brother, the famously abdicating and fascist-leaning King Edward, his long-reigning daughter, the present Queen Elizabeth II who’s been on top since 1952, amazingly enough, and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who actually ran the government during the war. Maybe one reason George VI is so little discussed today is that he didn’t exactly have a natural flair for public speaking.

And therein lies the tale that won the audience award a couple of weeks back at the Toronto International Film Festival and which may well be a player at Oscar time because, like so many of us, the Academy are suckers for English accents.

I admit it, I’m eat this stuff up with a spoon. Great cast led by the ever-better Colin Firth and an impish Geoffrey Rush, interesting topic — stuttering is still a difficult to solve problem for sufferers — probable poignant feel-good conclusion and what appears to be just a bit of cinematic imagination and some really great looking period detail. My cinematic Anglophilia is officially on high alert.

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Weekend box office never sleeps, does it?

September 24, 2010 /

It’s certainly not resting this very busy weekend when the return of Mr. “Greed is Good” himself and a bunch of 3-D fantasy owls will battle for the #1 spot, with any number of other interesting things happening on the sidelines.

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The smart money seems to be pretty positive that “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” will earn in the neighborhood of $20 million and so may end up winning the weekend. At least that’s what I’m reading via jolly Carl DiOrio and the more circumspect Ben Fritz.

The audience for the latest from Oliver Stone skews fairly older, not only because it’s a topical thriller from the bombastic but literate Stone, but because it’s a sequel to a hit movie that is — shockingly for some of us — old enough that 24 year-old co-star Shia LaBeouf was barely a toddler when it first came out. That may help with the film’s longevity since older audiences tend to take their time seeing a new movie. Also, a bit of extra publicity from Gekko-man Michael Douglas‘s well-publicized upbeat battle with cancer might add to awareness over the long term. The reviews, which also have a somewhat stronger effect on older viewers, are only meh-to-okay with somewhat better response from more blue-state-centric “top critics.”

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Midweek movie news

September 23, 2010 /

No promises we’ll have a Friday news dump this week, so you’d better enjoy this edition…

* Well, the big news tonight is most definitely the reorganization going over at the Warner Brothers megastudio. As far as I’m able to suss out, what this amounts to is a consolidation of power for CEO Jeff Bewkes. Reading Nikki Finke‘s current summary of the situation is a bit like reading a Television Without Pity post for a very complicated soap opera you’ve never seen, but Anne Thompson keeps it much, much simpler. On his way out exec Alan Horn is a good guy who Thompson believes was simply superfluous. Another case of a nice guy finishing last?

Warner-Bros

However, Nikki Finke does allude to a very crucial part of the Warners empire, and that’s DC Comics now being headed by the Warners minded and Finke approved Diane Nelson. As it happens, my deep, deep connections in the comics biz were e-mailing me news earlier today — which I was somewhat aware of but failed to properly cover earlier in the week — of an onging reorganization going on over there which certainly ties into the ongoing attempts at Warners to become more aggressive regarding comics adaptations along the lines of what Marvel Entertainment has been doing for some time — and also to try and avoid more flops like “Jonah Hex.”

There was even talk some talk of DC becoming entirely a West Coast operation, but that would be a major breach of publishing industry tradition with some actual problems involved and, in any case, thanks to FedEx and the ‘net, freelancers can live where they want now. Heidi MacDonald’s great comics blog The Beat has been covering this end of the story and you read about some of what’s going on here.

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Action Movies, Actors, Celebrities, External Entertainment, External Movies, External TV, Horror Movies, Movie Dramas, Movies, News, True Blood, TV, TV Dramas

The battle you’ve been waiting to see: garden gnomes vs. Vegas showgirls!

September 22, 2010 /

Okay, I’m feeling perverse and just putting two more or less completely random trailers together for entirely different reasons.

First, a new CGI animation from Disney is called “Gnomeo and Juliet,” which pretty much tells you the story, except the amazing cast which Pajiba was kind enough to list and the fact that there’s a lot of classic Elton John music in, for some reason.

Ugh. Not very promising. Well, since Dennis Cozzalio reminds us that today is the 15th birthday of Paul Verhoeven and Joe Eszterhas’s legendary “Showgirls,” as a cine-palette cleanser please enjoy this delightfully NSFW bare-breasted trailer. Enjoy.

I gather Dennis — whose never afraid to defend orphaned movies — thinks “Showgirls” is actually good. I don’t know because I’m embarrassed to admit I’ve never actually seen it. I’m not a fan of anything post-“Robocop” by Verhoeven or pretty much anything by Eszterhas, but still, I guess I should correct that. Besides, underclothed (naked?) Gina Gershon is enough reason to see any movie.

Animation, External Entertainment, External Movies, Movie Comedies, Movie Dramas, Movies, Trailers

RIP Irving Ravetch

September 21, 2010 /

The noted screenwriter and producer, whose parents were respectively an  immigrant rabbi and a Hebrew school teacher, passed on at Cedars Sinai on Sunday at age 89, the day after Yom Kippur ended. He and his wife, Harriet Frank, who survives him, wrote some of the best screenplays of their day set in the then-contemporary American west, including “Hud.”

The over 20 filmed screenplays by Frank and Ravetch weren’t fancy, they were just, for the most part anyway, good. A couple of scenes illustrating that point, one famous, the other less so.

If these scenes are new to you, the first clip is from “Hud” (1963) the second is from “Murphy’s Romance” (1986), Frank and Ravetch’s underrated penultimate filmed screenplay, both directed by another underrated talent, Martin Ritt.

I’m rather fond of this quote from the NYT obituary I linked to above:

“Movies can’t correct human injustice all by themselves, but they can show it, they can touch you while showing it, and they can seed ideas and wake up dormant minds,” Mr. Ravetch said. “For a medium that began — pretty much in my early childhood — as a few flickering images on a nickelodeon machine, that’s pretty powerful stuff.”

External Entertainment, External Movies, Movie Comedies, Movie Dramas, Movies, News

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