Miral

Miral, directed by Julian Schnabel, is based on journalist Rula Jebreal’s autobiographical novel about growing up as a Palestinian in Israel. It tells the first-hand tale of three women whose lives unfold during the first intifada, the Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation that began in 1987. Highlighting the remarkable work of a Palestinian woman named Hind Husseini – a woman who sacrifices everything to establish a school for refugee Palestinian girls in East Jerusalem and takes Miral in – the book and film show that hope still exists within a world of conflict. Bringing numerous elements of her own life into the story – Jebreal and her younger sister were taken in by Husseini after their own mother committed suicide.

"the real problem is the movie is pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel and it is going to be very difficult to get American audiences excited to see it," said one source.

Wikipedia | Guardian

Published by Serpent’s Tail Miral, the book, is out now. Miral, the film, is out now in the UK and released on 25 March, 2011, in the US.

The back story of Rula Jebreal's relationship with Schnabel is also pretty interesting.

Link

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Man of Two Havanas

Looks interesting. Imdb

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The Apollo Landing Was Lucky That It Wasn't Chased Off The Moon By Mushroom People.

Scene beginning @ 7:00

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The Art of Gleaning

Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse (The Gleaners and the Gleaness), is a film by french director Agnes Varda. The film focuses on what in North America is now often referred to as freeganism, but in France is a long established tradition called gleaning, a tradition with a long and important history and which is protected by laws dating back to medieval times. The director a proud gleaner herself, travels around with a handheld camera following and interviewing the interesting characters who survive with the help of the ancient practice of gleaning. This film is not a hollywood blockbuster, nor was it meant to be. Its a real look into real people's lives, their methods of survival, using material that would otherwise be wasted in factory farming, or by a wasteful contemporary approach in general. The film also provides a look at the gleaner's occasional quirks, their interesting thoughts and opinions.

It has a sequel too apparently

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Werner Herzog in 3D

"The film-maker has taken his 3D camera among the rocky fissures and 30,000-year-old cave artwork at Chauvet in France."
Article With Video Interview

So was Herzog sitting around watching Avatar and having an epiphany?, thinking something like, 'enough of this Hollywood Nick Cage Bad Cop crap, its time for a timeless journey into the dawn of humanity in 3D, Herzog style.' This is definitely something to look forward to.

P.S. the other day I was looking up some blues music on youtube and came across this wonderful song, which seemed a bit familiar, but I couldn't quite figure out where it was from... Then I recognized it from the fabulous chicken scene from the film Stroszek. A fun, and useless bit of trivia.

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Floria Sigismondi's The Runaways

The Runaways: from left, Cherie Currie, Joan Jett, Sandy West, Lita Ford and Jackie Fox.

The Girls Who Kicked in Rock’s Door

THE most striking thing about "The Runaways," a new film about the trailblazing bad-girl rock band from the 1970s that spawned Joan Jett, is how authentic it feels. The clubs are properly scuzzy. The dialogue is properly raunchy. The actors can properly sing. The hair is fried and feathered, the skin spotty from weeks of running on little but potato chips and estrogen.

Floria Sigismondi, 44, earned her first big buzz as a video director in 1997 after strapping Marilyn Manson into stilts and gruesome dental gear for the "Beautiful People" clip. She looks like a rock star herself, dressed in slim-fitting black pants and a black sweater, her long, slightly-goth hair fanning over a furry caveman vest. Simultaneously cool and effervescent, she is easy to imagine directing arty musicians like Bjork, Sigur Ros and Interpol as well as pop divas like Christina Aguilera, which she did.

link | trailer

I never cared much about "The Runaways" except for Lita Ford's most excellent guitar playing. I'm way more excited about the fact that Floria Sigismondi directed the film. She's got the magic touch.

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Aya Avatar - Drink the Jungle Juice

Erik Davis of Techgnosis explains the Avatar connection.

"Call it ayahuasca lite."

In paradoxical and altogether predictable terms, James Cameron’s ravishing Avatar sets a blue man group of mystically attuned forest dwellers against the aggressive and heartless exploitation that characterizes the military-industrial-media complex, with its virtual interfaces, biotech chimeras, and cyborg war machines.

The paradox, of course, is that a version of this latter complex is responsible for delivering Camaron’s visions to us in the first place.

To wit: before a recent screening of the film at the Metreon IMAX theater in San Francisco, we hapless begoggled ones were barraged with military ads, not to mention a triumphant techno-fetishist breakdown on the Imax technology that would soon transport us to the planet Pandora almost as thoroughly (and resonantly) as the handicapped jarhead Jake jacks into his computer-generated avatar body.

But those are behind the scenes ironies. With its floating Roger Deanscapes and hallucinogenic flora, the manifest world of Avatar instead spoke another truth: that the jungle pantheism that now pervades the psychoactive counterculture has gone thoroughly mainstream. Of course, noble savage narratives of ecological balance and shamanic wisdom have been haunting the Rousseau-mapped outback of the western mind for centuries.

That said, Avatar represents some important twists in that basic tale. The most important of these is that the Na’vi’s nearly telepathic understanding of their environment is grounded not only in ritual, plant-lore, and that earnest seriousness that now afflicts PC Hollywood Indians, but in an organic communications network: the fibrous, animated, and vaguely repulsive pony-tail tentacles that not only allow the Na’vi to form direct control links with animals but also, through the optical filaments of the “Tree of Souls,” to commune with both ancestors and the Ewya, the biological spirit of the planet whose name resonates with Erda, our own Earth.


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Confirmed Date on 'Dark Shadows'

Johnny Depp's Dark Shadows to begin next year

Sci Fi Wire has learned that production will start on "Shadows" late next year. What, you want to know when? "We're actually going to shoot that film next September/October with Tim Burton and Johnny," he said. Which I'm guessing means that the movie will see a summer or fall 2011 release, presuming all goes as planned. Burton is still finishing post-production on Alice in Wonderland, which also stars Depp and opens March 5, 2010.

The Barnabas Collins character will be outstanding with JD doing him. I've been waiting to hear more on this and finally we get dates. Yay! Won't that be grand?

{via} link

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Loving Sam Rockwell

To me Sam Rockwell can do no wrong. His acting jobs are very diverse in the many independent gems and bigger studio movies he appears in and he's always challenging himself. There are two movies out now that offer him up to us Rockwell fans.

From the team that brought us Napoleon Dynamite, comes Gentlemen Broncos. I hate to draw a broad conclusion because I've not seen the film but Sam Rockwell could be the best thing about this movie and that's good enough for me. See Trailer - (more...)

Benjamin (Angarano), home-schooled by his eccentric mother (Coolidge), is a loner whose passion for writing leads him on an journey as his story first gets ripped off by the legendary fantasy novelist, Ronald Chevalier (Clement) and then is adapted into a disastrous movie by the small town's most prolific homespun filmmaker.

The film, Moon, has been around the festival circuit and with limited release in the US in June 2009. The trailer was so intriguing I had to see it and fortunately was able to download the movie. (more...)

It is the near future. Astronaut Sam Bell is living on the far side of the moon, completing a three-year contract with Lunar Industries to mine Earth's primary source of energy, Helium-3. It is a lonely job, made harder by a broken satellite that allows no live communications home. Taped messages are all Sam can send and receive. His only companion is a robot named "Gertie" (voiced by Kevin Spacey).

N O T E W O R T H Y - Moon is directed by David Bowies son Duncan Jones. Did you know that there is a petition to get Sam an Oscar nomination for Moon? Click here.

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Cronenberg and Cosmopolis

David Cronenberg will write and direct Cosmopolis, an adaptation of the Don DeLillo novel about a 28-year-old millionaire’s day-long travels through Manhattan in pursuit of a haircut.

The novel is about much more than that, of course, but it still represents an unusual project for Cronenberg, who recently has entered a creative renaissance with movies very different from the ones that made him famous, namely Eastern Promises and A History of Violence. He plans to shoot Cosmopolis next year.

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First look: What a weird 'Wonderland' Burton's made

Eccentric: Johnny Depp is unrecognisable as the pasty, ginger Mad Hatter
link | Big Photo

The chatty flowers in Alice in Wonderland take their cue from the talkative trees in The Wizard of Oz.
link | Big Photo

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Antichrist - Gigola - King Shot

Antichrist - Gigola - King Shot
three upcoming movies
Lars von Trier, one of my all time favorite directors, is currently working on Antichrist, a film starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg. He wrote and directed it and he's expected to show it at this years Cannes Festival which is sometime in May.

In the village of filmdom Lars' films fly far above the fray. Dancer In The Dark is my favorite one of his.

Trailer

link | link | IMDb | photo (NSFW)

And Gigola has just started in early 2009 and is taken from a steamy novel by Laure Charpentier.

The plot: George, a young woman loses herself in the nightlife of 1960s-era Paris after the suicide of her female lover, and eventually becomes a gigolo catering to women.

It stars the toxic Asia Argento and the smoldering Anne Parillaud, Marisa Berenson, and Tchéky Karyo.

Asia Argento is so enigmatic -- wow! Many of her characters remind me of a younger version of myself, I hesitate to add. I saw her again in Transvylvania a few nights ago.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
She's also working on Alejandro Jodorowsky's King Shot, that's been in production for-ev-er.

Keep churning the good stuff out. We'll be waiting.

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Farrelly Brothers' 'Three Stooges'

According to Variety, Sean Penn -- coming off his best actor Oscar win -- is set to play Larry; Jim Carrey is in negotiations to play Curly; and Benicio Del Toro is being considered to play Moe. In development, first at Columbia, then at Warner Bros., the project is now at MGM, which says that production will begin in early fall for a 2010 release.

link

Who can read this without hearing those crazy 3 Stooges sounds? ha! And Jim Carrey is playing Curly? I've gotta see this.

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Mickey Rourke's Here To Stay

The Wrestler

I've talked about The Wrestler here before but I wanted to expand on why I'm so passionate about this film. I've been a fan of Mickey Rourke's for over 20 years.

From Body Heat, Rumble Fish, Diner, The Pope of Greenwich Village, oh man, Angel Heart --what can I say, to Barfly, a Bukowski story. "To all my frennns", character Henry says in the film. My husband and I still imitate our favorite scenes from Barfly. Mickey's portrayal was phenomenal or he'd lived through that crazy life before.

So a few years of unforgettable work from Mickey finally leads him to Sin City. The buzz about him is good now but people are still skeptical. When you tell Hollywood to collectively kiss your ass then come back and ask them for work you'll have to prove yourself all over again. If you even get the chance.

Mickey was about to get that chance with The Wrestler. Five long years of raising money to get this independent, labor of love made. Friend Bruce Springsteen wrote and gave them the song that closes the movie. (Why was it not nominated?)

In The Wrestler, Mickey Rourke creates a galvanizing, honest and tender portrait that easily puts it among the great, iconic screen performances and he certainly deserves the Best Actor win.

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Rooting For Mickey Rourke

Mickey Rourke
Actor Mickey Rourke just won a Golden Globe for his work on the film The Wrestler and will probably win an Oscar as well. Everyone seems to be rooting for the resurrection of Mickey. Perhaps no one harder than I and others that can relate to his story of destruction and resurrection. The movie is remarkable.

Christopher Walken, who has known Rourke since their days at the Actors Studio in the mid-'70s, recently caught up with him in New York. (photo from interview)
Whether it was hubris or humility that drove Rourke to walk away from acting 17 years ago and resume the boxing career he began as a teenage welterweight out of Miami, only to return a decade and several concussions later with his hat in hand and little goodwill on his side, the fact remains that the film industry, despite its lack of anything resembling conventional wisdom, can sometimes show flashes of unwitting intelligence and allow a second act. Because actors like Mickey Rourke don't come along once in a generation, let alone twice.

So here's round two, or is it 10, with the championship contender humbled, through the ringer, looking for one more chance, asking for another shot. And because it's cheaper to buy low than to buy high. And because sequels are good business. And because everybody loves a good redemption story. (via)

Sometimes when a man's alone, all you got are your dogs and they meant the world to me.
--Mickey Rourke, during his acceptance speech for Best Actor at the Golden Globes.

If I didn't already love Mickey Rourke before, I have tons of love for him now. Fellas, this is how you successfully balance your manly side with your feminine side. And he's a PETA supporter.

(Watch The Wrestler online)

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Benicio Del Toro: Viva la revolution!

Benicio Del Toro: Viva la revolution!

For the general audience, here’s the release plan — The film will be released on December 12, 2008 for 1 week in NY and LA as the full 4 hour roadshow version. This will be a special presentation with an intermission and a collectible program book.

In January 2009, CHE will open as two separate admissions: CHE PART 1: THE ARGENTINE and CHE PART 2: GUERILLA, and then will be available nationwide on Video-On-Demand.

Related:
* Read Cuba newspaper article - link
* Observer's review - link
* photos from the film - link
* Soderbergh's The Argentine and Guerrilla - link

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Alan Moore Interview

Stripping Down the Comic With Alan Moore

Most writers are boring, and the less they're allowed to talk about what they do behind closed doors, the better. But some writers are verbal rock stars, able to tear off entrancing philosophical riffs or to lay down a hypnotic anecdotal solo upon request. One of the few modern writers who can entertain a general audience is Alan Moore, Britain's bard of the industrial wastelands of Northampton, and the man whom people call the world's greatest living comic-book writer. (Mr. Moore has made it clear in the past that he writes comic books, describing the term "graphic novel" as "something some idiot in a marketing department came up with.")

link | photo via: comicvine

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Flash Of Genius

Trailer for Flash of Genius. Looks good. I couldn't post it without auto-start running.

Movie Trailer | {via}

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Tilda Swinton's Nairn Festival

Tilda Swinton's Nairn Festival

WITH no red carpet, paparazzi or glitzy after-show party, and not even a cinema, Scotland's latest film festival is by no means conventional.

The first Nairn film festival, founded by Oscar-winning actress Tilda Swinton, (LOVE her) launched Friday, showing an offbeat mix of classic, unusual and obscure films – in a former ballroom.

Entry is £3 – or free if you bring a tray of home-baked cakes – and the audience will sit on beanbags. Running from Aug 15 - Aug 23.

link | link | link

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The "W" Trailer by Oliver Stone

The teaser trailer for W. which based on the life and presidency of George W. Bush. It is directed by Oliver Stone and stars Josh Brolin as George W. Bush.

link | via | more

I'm excited about this one.

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