Darren Aronofsky’s unsettling crystal meth PSAs made the rounds earlier this week. The Black Swan director worked with the Meth Project Foundation to trouble us with visions of intense drug addiction, and boy did it work. Aronofsky isn’t the only gifted filmmaker who has dabbled with short-form film and the telly advertising world, however. Many auteur moviemakers found their start on TV, creating some of the most memorable works that have ever been brought to prime time. Others just enjoy creating little bites of film-esque entertainment as a break from the Hollywood machine. Whatever the reasons, the condensed screen time provides a fascinating snapshot of each director’s overall style. Click past the break for a look at ten directors who made creative commercials for the small screen. Read More »
Last weekend, a “secret screening” at Los Angeles’ AFI Fest marked the first public outing for Haywire, Steven Soderbergh’s new… mixed-martial-arts based action/spy thriller. Come again? Yes, according to Movieline’s report from the post-screening Q&A, Soderbergh cooked up the project while on the rebound after losing Moneyball, stumbling across one of MMA star Gina Carano’s fights and deciding to build a movie around her. While Soderbergh’s filmography has been fairly esoteric, genre-wise (he’s skipped from experimental dramas to big-budget heist movies to dark comedies to coming-of-age tales to sci-fi), we certainly didn’t expect him to get all hyped up about making a film that he would compare to the early pictures of Steven Seagal.
But maybe there’s a lesson to be learned here: too often, filmmakers become defined by a certain type of movie, locked into a specific genre or style. Some break out occasionally (see Scorsese’s upcoming Hugo), and a few have made a career of genre-jumping (think Danny Boyle). But back in the “studio era,” directors-for-hire like Howard Hawks and John Ford were given assignments, and had to adapt themselves into journeymen who could make any kind of film with style and skill. After the jump, we’ve compiled a short list of a few filmmakers who we’d like to see class up some B-movies.
Welcome to “Trailer Park,” our regular Friday feature where we collect the week’s new trailers all in one place and do a little “judging a book by its cover,” ranking them from worst to best and taking our best guess at what they may be hiding. We’ve got ten new trailers this week, from biopics to historical epics to documentaries to thrillers; check ‘em out after the jump.
In a recent edition of our regular Friday feature “Trailer Park,” we took a look at the trailer for the new Daniel Craig/Rachel Weisz haunted house thriller Dream House, and came to the following conclusion: “this is one of those trailers that gives you, about halfway through, the unsettling feeling that they’re showing you the whole movie.” Apparently, concern for that point was widespread enough that executive producer Rick Nicita was compelled to speak up, insisting to Entertainment Weekly that the revealed twist is “not the ending. The twist happens less than halfway through.” But Nicita’s damage control spotlights the fact that our film culture is increasingly dominated by discussion and fear of “spoilers,” and it’s a phenomenon that is only a couple of decades old. (Ever dive into your DVD special features and check out the original trailers for films from the ’40s? Talk about showing you the whole movie.)
We’re still obsessing over Jonah Lehrer’s fascinating study (and subsequent Wired piece) on the effect of spoilers on literary gratification. (The takeaway: knowing a story’s outcome ultimately does not prevent one’s enjoyment of the work, and may even increase it.) A couple of weeks back, we selected some of the books we still read, knowing full well how they end; now we’ve picked out ten movies that still play, even with precise knowledge of their narrative outcomes.
You can probably put this together yourselves, but just to be safe: plentiful spoilers after the jump.
We heard yesterday that David Fincher, who most recently received Best Director nominations for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and The Social Network (and who is currently wrapping up The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo), is set to produce a biopic about the amazing Depression-era photographer Dorothea Lange. Lange’s work put a human face on the Depression and its effects, and has been extremely influential on documentary photography as a whole. Her photographs are also said to have been a large impact on John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, which is no mean feat. The as-yet untitled film will recount her life, including her early struggles with polio, and her profound work in the most desperate of times. Needless to say, we’re pretty excited, and to celebrate we’ve collected some of the most affecting (to our eyes) Lange prints for your perusal. Click through to see our favorites, and let us know if we’ve missed any of yours in the comments!
Thor. Green Lantern. Captain America: The First Avenger. This summer, it seems like every film studio has their own big-budget entrant into the comic book-adaption genre. Usually we bemoan that the superhero movies flooding our local multiplexes lack basic canonical knowledge, that they are just excuses to mindlessly use 3D and blow things up. But, in a post-Batman Begins world, some things have changed – X-Men: First Class was, well, pretty damn good, and the superb casting for Captain America has us eager for its release date. It seems Hollywood has begun to treat the comic-book movie with some respect. Yet, with news of Fox rebooting the failed Daredevil franchise, it’s time to admit that the Marvel/DC universe is pretty much exhausted. As a solution, we present our list of indie comic books that deserve to be films and the directors we’d like to see do the jobs. Check out our picks after the jump.
Now that hype for David Fincher’s American version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has reached fever pitch, a new poster for the film is spreading from blog to blog, like stomach flu. Slashfilm says the French-captioned image “appears to be a Canadian teaser poster” and cites a Hollywood Reporter piece from a few months ago that describes the poster as “black and white and beautiful, but there’s no way in hell any studio will ever let Fincher use it, as he knows. Because Mara is naked from the waist up.”
It takes more than a bit of nudity to get us riled up. In fact, we’d usually be similarly annoyed at the idea of a tasteful, well-shot movie poster being censored for showing torso and a hint of breast. But we have to admit, we think the poster is in pretty poor taste, purely because it so blatantly misrepresents the characters. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is about a survivor of rape and other abuse who has grown tough and seeks revenge. The dynamic in the poster suggests that Rooney Mara’s Lizbeth Salander is sexily vulnerable and in need of Mikael Blomkvist’s (Daniel Craig) fully clothed protection. Does anyone else find this a bit worrisome?
Over the weekend, a trailer for David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, appeared on the internet. (If you haven’t seen it already, watch it after the jump.) Judging by the skewed framing and the fact that it’s been showing in European theaters, most have assumed that the video is a pirated leak. But Slate’s Brow Beat blog points us to an interesting theory — that due to the high-quality audio (yup, that’s Trent Reznor and Karen O covering Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song”) and video, and the fact that it opens with an American MPAA red band, some now suspect the clip actually came straight from the studio. Based on our memory of a bootlegged The Tree of Life trailer that popped up shortly before that preview made it to the internet, those points seem valid. Sony has, of course, denied that they’re the source of the leak, pointing out that the trailer did screen in select US theaters this week — although, as Brow Beat notes, it’s interesting that the company knows the video is out there and hasn’t asked YouTube to take it down.
Good news for Coen Brothers fans (and really, if you’re not one, we’re not quite sure what to do with you): their long-circulating script for Gambit, a remake of the 1966 British caper, goes before the cameras this May, with freshly Oscared Colin Firth in the leading role, Cameron Diaz as his leading lady, and Soapdish director Michael Hoffman at the helm. While we’d be a tiny bit more excited if the Coens were directing it themselves, this is still good news — especially because their True Grit was that rarest of beasts, a remake that respected (and, in our eyes anyway, topped) the original.
It’s no secret that Hollywood has gone remake crazy; along with endless sequels and mindless 3-D, the film business’s insistence on remaking any movie made before 1990 that turned more than a five dollar profit is perhaps its most irritating quality. But lest we forget, The Maltese Falcon was a remake; so were The Thing, The Departed, and Scarface. So, in the interest of putting a positive spin on remake-mania, we took a look at the dozens of remakes in the pipeline and found ten that we’re genuinely excited about. Check them out after the jump. Read More »
