14 articles
'Avatar' Watch: Running Time Announced and New Featurettes
12 hours ago | Cinematical | See recent Cinematical news »
Though early rumors suggested the film was going to clock in at over three hours, 20th Century Fox claims James Cameron's Avatar will instead clock in at 150 minutes (or 2.5 hours), or about 156 minutes if you count the credits. The main reason why the film will run under three hours is because of the IMAX showings. Avatar will open in about 180 domestic IMAX theaters on December 18th, and because of the way the IMAX system is set up, the theaters that aren't converted over to digital projection can only hold about 170 minutes worth of film. But while Cameron's final edit came in significantly under 170 minutes, there's no saying whether there will be a cut on the DVD that will run over 170 minutes. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Avatar will open on a minimum of 5,500 screens, with almost half of those screens equipped to show the film in 3D.
In other Avatar news, »
- Erik Davis
James McTeigue Discusses Ninja Assassin
17 hours ago | Reelzchannel.com | See recent ReelzChannel news »
Digital effects have become a mainstay of Hollywood action movies these days and director James McTeigue's (V for Vendetta) latest movie, Ninja Assassin, is no exception. However, in a recent interview with Coming Soon, McTeigue said that many of the weapons were real and that the movie's lead, Korean pop star Rain, trained "for five or six months," and that he had "incredible discipline."
Rain in the movie uses this blade and chain weapon, but when we're training him, it's with an actual martial arts weapon called the rope dart, so he trained with that so he knew how to swing it around, because then ultimately when you get into it, you need something for him to physically use. He'll use that, and the visual FX guys will put tracking markers on it, so that way, it gives the stunt guys something to react to and then we'll replace it later. »
- BrentJS Sprecher
'New Moon' snaps 'Dark Knight' box-office record with $72.7 million opening day
12 hours ago | EW - Hollywood Insider.com | See recent EW.com - Hollywood Insider news »
The Twilight Saga: New Moon grossed $72.7 million on Friday, according to estimates from Summit Entertainment, shattering The Dark Knight's previous opening-day record of $67.2 million. (The figure includes the $26.3 million New Moon banked from midnight screenings, also a box office record.) The astronomic figure puts Bella, Edward, and Jacob on a clear path to possibly the biggest opening weekend ever, all the more impressive considering New Moon is opening in 342 fewer theaters than The Dark Knight did last year. Update: Meanwhile, it appears the vampires and werewolves of New Moon didn't devour the box office whole; the Sandra Bullock true-life »
- Adam B. Vary
Red Cliff Director, John Woo, on Next Secret's Out with Leonard Maltin
20 hours ago | Reelzchannel.com | See recent ReelzChannel news »
Leonard Maltin sits down with John Woo to discuss the director's war epic, Red Cliff, which tells the story of a legendary civil war in early-third-century China.
With thousands of extras in its battle scenes, Red Cliff is the most-expensive production in the history of Asian movies. The movie opens as power-hungry General Cao Cao (Zhang Fengyi) seeks permission from the Han dynasty Emperor to organize a southward-bound mission designed to crush the two troublesome warlords who stand in his way, Liu Bei (Yong You) and Sun Quan (Chen Chang). Red Cliff shows the events during the end of the Han Dynasty and right before the Three Kingdoms period in ancient China.
Tune in for the Secret's Out premiere on Friday, November 27, at 6:30 Pm Et/ 3:30 Pm Pt. Or catch one of its encore showings.
Next Showing:
Red Cliff - Trailer
The battle that effectively ended the Han dynasty's »
- reelz reelz
'New Moon' Shreds Movie Records! Opens To $72.7M Biggest Friday, $125M Weekend
15 hours ago | Deadline Hollywood | See recent Deadline Hollywood news »
Breaking News! Saturday 8:20Am Update: "The night definitely belongs to Twilight." This is what a Hollywood insider told me early this morning after New Moon's late Friday night numbers came in. Summit Entertainment is now saying it debuted to $72.7 million from 4,024 North American theaters. This shatters both previous All-Time Friday and Single Day records of $67 million set by 2008's The Dark Knight. So Batman was beaten by the Twilight sequel's vampires and werewolves which won't sit well with the superhero-loyal moviegoing community. But Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight Saga" novels -- New Moon is the second in the series -- are now proving as [...] »
- Nikki Finke
Director John Hillcoat Interview The Road
1 hour ago | Collider.com | See recent Collider.com news »
Australian director John Hillcoat creates a bleak universe on film and brings it to life with an incredible cast in his latest film, The Road, an epic post-apocalyptic tale about the survival of a father and his young son as they journey across a barren America destroyed by a mysterious cataclysm. Based on the best-selling Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Cormac McCarthy, The Road stars Academy Award-nominee Viggo Mortensen, Charlize Theron, Robert Duvall, Guy Pearce and young newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee.
While The Road is a tough movie to watch, it’s an incredible story and something worth your time. We recently had the pleasure to speak with John Hillcoat and our interview is after the jump. He talks about making the film, casting, film stock, why did he shoot in Pennsylvania, working with Viggo, and a lot more. It’s a great interview so take a look:
Q: How did you find Kodi? »
- Sheila Roberts
Movie Review: The Carter (New Documentary Redefines the Notion of a Mainstream Pop Star)
3 hours ago | Slash Film | See recent Slash Film news »
Wow. After watching The Carter, the new all-access documentary on Lil' Wayne, one might consider recommending it as the best doc about a hip hop icon ever. The problem with this superlative lies in its limitation. Similar to labeling Lil' Wayne a rapper---even "the best rapper alive" as many profess---and leaving it at that, labeling this a great hip hop doc restricts it to the confines of a niche or genre coated in personal taste and stigmas. That is to say The Carter is foremost a fascinating portrait of a remarkable, modern artist and celebrity who has cooked most if not all bridges for comparison. In The Carter we experience the exact moment when Wayne calmly finds out, overseas and perma-high, that his latest album, Tha Carter III, has sold one million plus physical units in its first week. As his friend and manager, Cortez Bryant, tells the camera, Wayne »
- Hunter Stephenson
How pleasant to meet Mr. Lear!
5 hours ago | blogs.suntimes.com/ebert | See recent Roger Ebert's Blog news »
The limerick's a form metronomical,
For the telling of jokes anatomical.
Yet the best ones I've seen
So seldom are clean,
And the clean ones so seldom are comical.
Auden, that very good man
Said a limerick need not merely scan.
But put up a struggle
And bend itself double
To be decent, and fail at the plan.
And now it comes time, online bums
When your internet blogger succumbs
To numerous entreaties
And posted graffiti
And awards to your limericks his thumbs.
Yes, the Journal's grand contest will be
Devoted to épater le bourgeois!
We'll hold a contest
In vile, dirty jests
And then we will vote by degrees.
Of course please avoid all risks
By employing some quick asterisks--
For there are some words too crude
And unutterably rude,
As when one of your young f**kers sh*ts.
The limerick was invented by Lear
A gent who »
- Roger Ebert
Philip French's screen legends: Shirley Temple | Film
5 hours ago | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »
No. 75: Shirley Temple 1928-
The daughter of a bank clerk, she was born in Santa Monica, a bus ride from Hollywood, and thrust into the movies at the age of three by a fanatically ambitious mother. In her sixth year, she went from supporting to starring roles, had two hit songs ("Baby Take a Bow", "The Good Ship Lollipop"), and was the eighth biggest box-office attraction in America. For the next five years, her confidence as a performer and brilliance as a mimic (in Stowaway she impersonated Eddie Cantor, Al Jolson, Bing Crosby, Ginger Rogers and Alice Faye in one virtuoso sequence, as well as conversing in Chinese) made her the biggest child phenomenon ever known. She was 20th Century Fox's greatest asset, the centre of a little industry of commercial spin-offs, the sweet, curly-haired, dimpled kid that every mother wanted her daughter to look like and the top-ranking Hollywood star, »
- Philip French
DVD Classic: The Jacques Tati Collection
5 hours ago | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »
Tati (1907-1982) was the screen's most fastidious director of comedy and the greatest visual humorist since the silent days of Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd whom he revered, and this comic cornucopia contains all his feature films except Trafic (1971). The first four are increasingly ambitious masterpieces generally using onomatopoeic sound rather than dialogue. The last, Parade (1974), is an anthology of his stage mimes performed as in a circus and made for Swedish TV. Tati burst on the world as a moustachioed rural postman in Jour de fête (1949), then adopted the screen persona of the accident-prone, neo-Luddite Monsieur Hulot whose slouch hat, raincoat, pipe, ankle-length trousers and umbrella made him as recognisable as Chaplin's tramp. In the black-and-white Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (1953), he disrupts a holiday resort; in Mon oncle (1957), beautifully designed and shot in colour, he leaves a trail of disasters in a gadget-laden Paris suburb. The satire on soulless, conformist modernity »
- Philip French
Terminator Salvation, Ice Age 3 and The Proposal
5 hours ago | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »
It might have begun life as a ruthlessly efficient killing machine, but there's something incredibly depressing watching the soul get sucked out of the Terminator. Compared with the latest reanimation of this robotic corpse, Terminator Salvation (2009, 12, Sony), 2003's previously disappointing Rise of the Machines starts to look like some kind of classic.
Hyperactive Charlie's Angels director McG does his very worst work to date (which is saying something), conjuring an endlessly bombastic stodge-pudding of a picture in which boring backstory becomes full-frontal assault. Sadly, the long-foretold rise of Skynet proves almost unbearably uninteresting, a narrative shortcoming for which the film-makers compensate with CGI shots of things blowing up.
Despite all the wanton destruction, there's precious little exciting exploitation on offer; awarding a lenient 12 certificate, the BBFC noted that "there are none of the darker, sadistic elements" which spiced up the first two movies. Boo! No wonder leading man Christian Bale »
- Mark Kermode
How Robin Williams dodged death and returned to the stage
5 hours ago | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »
After heart surgery and seven years away from the stage, comedian Robin Williams is ready to storm Broadway with his one-man show
It takes some confidence to extend the Broadway run of your one-man show before opening night, especially a few months after undergoing heart surgery. But then Robin Williams has never been short of nerve. His lengthy career is due in equal measure to the fearless nature of his comedy and to the frenetic energy of his performance: he has a reputation as an entertainer that is built as much on his nerve as it is on his nerves.
Now, after seven years away from the stage, a relapse into alcoholism, a divorce and an emergency operation to replace a faulty valve in his chest, Williams is returning to live stand-up. His comeback show, which opens on Monday, is already one of New York's hottest tickets, and then later »
- Vanessa Thorpe
The Informant! | Film review
5 hours ago | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »
Matt Damon gives the best performance of his career so far in this true story of Mark Whitacre, an overweight, moustachioed, highly paid, high-flying executive for a major agri-business corporation in the American Midwest who, in 1992, blew the whistle on his employers for worldwide price fixing. For the next three years, he worked closely with the FBI and the Justice Department gathering evidence against his firm and seemingly putting his career at risk. But his whistle contained a cracked pea or two and at times gave out a high-pitched, off-key sound to which his government minders turned a deaf or tin ear.
Gradually, they and we come to suspect that Mark may not be exactly the straight-up guy with a troubled conscience he presents himself as. Is he perhaps a charming, plausible psychopath of a kind most of us have come across at some time in our lives, if in a smaller way? »
- Philip French
The First Day of the Rest of Your Life | Film review
5 hours ago | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »
This is a funny, deeply affecting and often painfully truthful movie about families, parenthood, growing up, growing old and dying, devoid of sentimentality, acquiescence in Larkinesque cynicism concerning the horrors of family life, or any Gallic equivalent of Hollywood's "I love you, Dad", "I love you too, son". It covers five days between 1988 and 2000, each one seen from the point of view of a member of the Duval family – the taxi driver Robert, his pretty wife Marie-Jeanne, and their children, Albert, Raphaël and Fleur.
In 1988, Albert, a medical student, leaves the nest to live in the attic of his overbearing widowed grandfather. On her 16th birthday, Friday 3 December 1993, Fleur loses her virginity and rows with her parents. Three years later in 1996, Raphaël, a would-be musician, comes to terms with his grandfather and attends his brother's wedding. In 1998, Marie-Jeanne feels rejected and teeters on the brink of adultery. In 2000, Robert takes »
- Philip French
Artists cast as saviours of British cinema
5 hours ago | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »
After the success of Steve McQueen and Sam Taylor-Wood, the UK Film Council aims to fund debuts by a new crop of artists turned film-makers
First came Turner prize-winner Steve McQueen's gritty film Hunger, about the Ira prisoner Bobby Sands. Full of soul-searching and menace, it was the toast of the Cannes film festival last year. Next came the success this autumn of Nowhere Boy, artist Sam Taylor-Wood's uplifting biopic of the young John Lennon.
Now, following these unexpected triumphs, a queue of former young British artists, or YBAs, has formed, waiting to entertain the nation's cinema audiences. Among the aspiring directors are the controversial artists Jake and Dinos Chapman and the Turner prize-winner Gillian Wearing.
This week, in recognition of this line-up of potential talent, the homegrown cinema industry has announced that it is to start banking on the trend. The UK Film Council is to promote more »
- Vanessa Thorpe
Glorious 39 | Film review
5 hours ago | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »
This is an enjoyable conspiracy thriller in the manner of John Frankenheimer's Seven Days in May, starring the fetching Romola Garai as Anne, politically naive movie star and adopted daughter of a rich Tory MP with a country estate in Norfolk, who, in the long hot summer of 1939, stumbles across an establishment plot involving the Sis and the aristocracy. They'll stop at nothing, including blackmail and assassination, to keep Britain from going to war, and when war breaks out, to making peace with Nazi Germany. There's a remarkable British cast, and the film holds up well until the last couple of reels. But there's some clunking dialogue, and as history it's fuzzy and unconvincing. The nods towards Hitchcock remind us that in 1938 the Master made an allegorical masterpiece about Munich and appeasement, his greatest British movie, The Lady Vanishes.
Period and historicalThrillerPhilip French
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media »
- Philip French
Friedrich von Schiller: the Romantic lover
5 hours ago | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »
Film and biographies mark 250th anniversary of passionate 'Ode to Joy' poet
He is the "rebel from Arcadia", the author of the lyrics to the modern European anthem, Ode to Joy, and a passionate champion of free spirits. But for some time Germany seemed to forget all about the man who was arguably the country's most famous Romantic thinker. Not any more. Friedrich von Schiller is back, along with a new fascination with his tumultuous love life.
Just as Britain has been rediscovering the attraction of its Romantics, after documentaries about Byron by actor Rupert Everett and the release of Bright Star, the new Jane Campion film about Keats, Germany is also enjoying a romantic revival. And the 250th anniversary of Schiller's birth has given scholars the chance to rediscover one of its most distinguished poets and philosophers.
A racy new film, Schiller, portrays the poet as a dashing, flame-haired womaniser, »
- Kate Connolly
Awesome Orson, Strictly Christine and Sex down the tube | Trailer trash
5 hours ago | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »
>>Awesome Orson
British actor Christian McKay is a revelation in Richard Linklater's Me and Orson Welles, which opens next month. McKay (below) seizes the chance of his first film to give a brilliant performance as young Orson, staging his legendary production of Julius Caesar at New York's Mercury Theatre in 1937. Awards surely await. McKay comes from Bury (Caesar, not to praise him...?) and shot the film – which co-stars Zac Efron, Claire Danes, Ben Chaplin and Kelly Reilly – on the Isle of Man. He told me he thought he'd never been to the island – until his proud mum came to see him filming there and told him: "Oh, your Dad and me came here, to Douglas, for our honeymoon. In fact, you were conceived here."
>> Strictly Christine
BBC Films's glamorous new boss Christine Langan likes a dance (she won Trash's best dancing exec award at Cannes), so expect two new musical film extravaganzas. »
- Jason Solomons
What I know about women | Willem Dafoe 54, actor, married, one son
5 hours ago | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »
Willem Dafoe 54, actor, married, one son
I've never had any close male friends. The most important relationships in my life have always been with women. My five sisters raised me because my father was a surgeon, my mother was a nurse and they worked together, so I didn't see either of them much. It was a sexual education, because my sisters were the horniest little girls. They would tell me stuff that, when I was small, I didn't want to hear. I remember one of my sisters talking about fellatio and cunnilingus when I was six years old. I said: "Only dirty people do that, right?" She just laughed. When I told my friends what I knew about the birds and bees, they beat me up because they found it so disgusting.
I started being interested in girls when I was about 14, which I think is quite late. But once I got a taste, »
- Rosamund Witcher
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