Category: News (Page 36 of 401)

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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Mubarak ho, Mr. “Robot”-o

September 24, 2010 /

Though there’s been some bombshell television news today, it’s been a blissfully slow news 48 hours regarding the movie world. True, Mike Fleming had a couple of scoops yesterday. His short list of possible “Superman” directors is fun — I’ll take Duncan Jones please, though Matt Reeves would be okay, too.  Also, though I remain impressed by her work, having just seen another terrific performance by Chloe Moretz at a screening last night of “Let Me In,” the fact that she’s got another nice gig as “Emily the Strange” is interesting but not exactly earth shattering. So, I’ll forgo the end-of-week movie news dump.

Instead, we’ll spotlight what have to be the trailers of the day, if not the week. According to Anne Thompson, it apparently started from a tweet by the very busy former “Lost” showrunner Damon Lindelof, who’s heading to India and will be checking out what has to be one of the most lavish Bollywood films ever in terms of effects. It’s a superheroic science fiction tale involving, well, a robot, a giant snake thing, an enormous number of guns, and, of course, big time musical numbers! Here’s the short trailer and some brief TV spots Thompson ran.

Also, just about the time Thompson put up her post, I was alerted by friend-of-the-blog-and-blogger Randy R. to a another, slightly more musical comedy oriented trailer that was running on the site of Ms. Thompson’s comics counterpart, Heidi MacDonald.

Gotta love Bollywood: something for everyone.

Just for the record, “Robot” is directed by Shankar (though it’s such a common name I’m not 100% sure if this is the same Shankar who crafted the hugely popular  “3 Idiots,” though it seems like a reasonable bet) and stars Aishwarya Rai and Rajnikanth who I gather is known as simply Rajni and is a superstar. The music is by A.R. Rahman who is easily the best known composer of Bollywood music here in the West for his terrific work on “Lagaan” and also as the double-Oscar winning composer of the music for “Slumdog Millionaire.”

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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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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.”

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