With Emmy news immanent and various television items kind of sucking up all the oxygen, it’s a pretty slow day for movie news, give or take an item about a movie Denzel Washington is “looking” to be in or some critical meta-gazing on the ever-bashable Armond White.
Nevertheless, today just happens to be 70th birthday of young Ringo Starr. Joke all you want but, his hugely considerable skills as a drummer and all-around musician aside, Ringo was always the best acting Beatle. With his comically melancholy mien, he was something of a natural but apparently just kind of got bored with it. That’s a shame, but we’ll always have Ringo’s performance in the centerpiece of the most influential rock and roll film ever made.
It’s late, so I’ll keep it brief tonight/this morning.
* Given the wave of movie science fiction we’ve had since the release of “Star Wars” back in 1977, it’s always been a disappointment to me how few of the most respected SF novels (“sci-fi” isn’t a term literary science fiction geeks approved of back in my day) have been made into movies. So, even though the book kind of baffled me when I read it not too long after it’s original release in 1984, it’s nice to see that a film version of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the novel which is the original source of the word “cyberspace” — whatever that means. Vincenzo Natali (“Cube”) appears to be the helmer.
* It’s looking like “Iron Man 2” will not be a huge record breaker after all and may make (horrors!) significantly less than the $140 million “floor” we were originally given.
* The RZA (pronounced “The Ri-zuh”) is joining the select club of successful pop musicians turned movie directors that includes Prince, David Byrne, Rob Zombie, Paul McCartney (on the ill-fated telefilm, “Magical Mystery Tour”) and I’m sure some others I’m forgetting. Not surprisingly for the Kung-fu loving Wu-Tang Clan founder who worked on part of the “Kill Bill, Volume 1” score, it’s a stylized martial arts epic co-written with fellow Tarantino associate Eli Roth.
* Speaking of Paul McCartney, the one time Beatle, an outspoken vegetarian in real life, may be going in a very different entirely unauthorized and fictional direction as a brain-eating mop-topped zombie in a possible film version of yet another comic zombies-in-history novel, “Paul is Undead” which envisions a zombified fab four. Sure, why not.
It’s apparently just a movie called “Enter the Void” from director Gasper Noe which divided viewers at Sundance this year. In my gore-phobe cinema chicken hood, I’ve avoided seeing Noe’s infamously ultraviolent and/or disturbing art-house sensations, “Irreversible” and “I Stand Alone.” This time, however, I’m not imtimidated and ready to have my mind blown, or the opposite.
Certainly this new film is no less a love-it/hate-it/respect-it-but-vow-never-to-see-it-again proposition than past Noe films. However, this time the issue is not so much violence, or even the apparently frequent sex scenes (not a problem for me), so much as the fact that even critics who love it warn that you may well be thoroughly bored. Another writer was so negative that Noe asked if he had raped his mother (presumably the answer is “no”) but even he admits Noe is an enormous talent and even provided the trailer below.
Devin Faraci of CHUD, in a highly qualified rave, tells us that “Enter the Void” is in some way based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the ancient spiritual text about the afterlife which was rediscovered in the sixties by acid guru Timothy Leary and alluded to in the creepiest and most brilliant of John Lennon-penned Beatles acid tunes, “Tomorrow Never Knows.” Watching the trailer below — both subtly headache inducing with its strobe visual effect (at least I think that’s what’s going on) and very, very beautiful — I can’t but think just a bit of another oddly experimental film that not everyone can sit through from Noe’s favorite director, Stanley Kubrick “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
In any case, I definitely think everyone whose old enough should check out this trailer. It’s not something you see every day.
We’ve got a very special bonus video for you all, right after the flip.
Well, I said this morning that I thought Jermaine should be the first guy getting booted off “American Idol” but that nothing would surprise me. Still, I was kind of surprised by a couple of the results tonight. Here is how it all went down…..
First, the awful group number….a jazzy, horrible song I think called “American Boy.” Blech. Most of the contestants looked bored, lost, or indifferent. Yes, it was epic bad.
Last night began the rounds of “American Idol” in which we as Americans have our turn to vote on the talent, and specifically which twelve contestants go home over the next three weeks, and which twelve make up the finalists. And what I saw last night was a case of the judges having done a bad job of delivering us talent. Because there weren’t many women who stood out from the twelve that performed on Tuesday, and yet the judges kept going on and on about how loaded this year’s crop is. Um, not really. At least not where the female contingent is concerned. Let’s recap what we saw, and let’s say that I agreed with almost everything Simon Cowell had to say….
