Archive for December, 2009

There aren’t many genuine movie stars left. Will Smith is one. There are arguments for George Clooney, Johnny Depp and Brad Pitt, but none of those three can reliably open a movie the way Smith can. Until the second half of this year it seems unlikely that anyone would have argued for Sandra Bullock as a genuine star. She hadn’t been in a feature since 2007’s The Premonition, and she hadn’t been in a big feature for a few years prior to that.

But two of her three films in 2009 did massive business, with The Blind Side qualifying as a genuine surprise hit. That performance led a group of theater-owning execs to name Sandra Bullock as the top-earning star of 2009.

The Quigley Publishing Company (No relation to our own Adam Quigley) generates a couple of giant industry bibles every year (the International Motion Picture Almanac and the International Television and Video Almanac) and also conducts a survey of theater chain execs to see who they pick as the top money-making star for the year. Quigley describes the poll as:

…an annual survey of motion picture theatre owners and film buyers, which asks them to vote for the ten stars that they believe generated the most box-office revenue for their theatres during the year. It has been long regarded as one of the most reliable indicators of a Star’s real box-office draw because the selections are done by people whose livelihood depends on choosing the films that will bring audiences to their theatres.

This year the top award goes to Bullock based primarily on two pictures: The Proposal, which took in $315m worldwide, and The Blind Side, which has done nearly $200m domestic since opening five weeks ago. (The film hasn’t opened internationally.) Those two films give a pass to All About Steve, I guess. ($33.8m domestic, no international numbers.)

Here’s the full list of top stars according to the poll:

1. Sandra Bullock
2. Johnny Depp
3. Matt Damon
4. George Clooney
5. Robert Downey Jr.
6. Tom Hanks
7. Meryl Streep
8. Brad Pitt
9. Shia LaBeouf
10. Denzel Washington

• This Week in DVD & Blu-ray: Drag Me to Hell, Land of the Lost, The Proposal, and More
• Harrison Ford Earned Almost 2.5 Times More Than The Top Earning Actress in 2008
• Video Blog: ShoWest 2009
• Speed 3 Ignition? I Smell a Fake!
• Disney Announces 2009 Release Schedule
• Dennis Hopper to Star in Speed 3?

Rodrigo Cortes‘ Buried will premiere at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival in the Park City at Midnight category, one of eight films selected from over 3724 titles from all over the world.

I’ve been following this project since it was announced. For those of you who don’t know, the story is about a U.S. contractor working in Iraq who awakes to find he is buried alive inside a coffin. With only a lighter and a cell phone it’s a race against time to escape this claustrophobic death trap. Ryan Reynolds stars in this one-man show, which is shot completely inside the coffin.

I love minimalistic single-room thrillers that force a bunch of characters to clash, because they seem the hardest to write. Chris Sparling’s indie screenplay is a single-room thriller with only one actor. How does that even work? More photos and posters after the jump.

Sundance describes the 94-minute film as follows:

Paul Conroy (Ryan Reynolds) is a U.S. citizen working as a contract driver in Iraq. After a swift and sudden attack on his convoy, he awakens to find himself buried alive inside a coffin with nothing more than a lighter, a cell phone, and little memory of how he ended up there. Faced with limited oxygen and unlimited panic, Paul finds himself in a tension-filled race against time to escape this claustrophobic deathtrap before it’s too late. If the sheer logistics of this premise are enough to make your head hurt, rest assured that director Rodrigo Cortés tackles these issues with relative ease, aided a great deal by a superbly convincing performance by Reynolds, the lone onscreen actor in the film. The result is a gripping and suspenseful thriller that will leave you gasping for air until the very end.

Apparently Paul is in a “death race against time” and only has 90 minutes to escape before he runs out of oxygen.

Thanks to Bloody disgusting for one of the photos.

• First Look: Ryan Reynolds in Buried
• Buried Movie Poster: Ryan Reynolds Is Not Happy
• Crazy: Buried With Ryan Reynolds Is Really A One-Man Show
• Ryan Reynolds To Star In Indie Thriller Buried
• Casting Notes: Cillian Murphy Rumored for Danny Boyle’s Next; Two For Anna Faris; Thora Birch in Bonnie and Clyde
• Casting Notes: Ryan Reynolds Cross-Dresses, Chris Messina in Shyamalan-penned ‘Devil’

Jerzy Skolimowski’s best known films are likely those he was a writer on and of these none is better known than Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water, a great thriller that was like Dead Calm but 27 years earlier and not actually rubbish. Amongst his work as director are two films from the 70s that I found quite lastingly disturbing since my youth, the supernatural horror film The Shout and obsession thriller Deep End. More recently, you likely saw him acting in Eastern Promises, where he played Stepan, or Mars Attacks or Before Night Falls where he had smaller roles.

I’m glad to report that Jerzy Skolimowski is back on location in director mode and shooting his next film right now. The Essence of Killing “follows the story of a Taliban member who lives in Afghanistan, kills three American soldiers and then is taken captive by the Americans. He is transferred to Europe for interrogation but manages to escape from his captors and becomes an escaped convict on a continent he does not know”.

And who has Skolimowski cast as this Taliban member? Why, none other than Vincent Vito Gallo, perhaps the most head-scratch/shake inducing character in modern cinema. Just like a great one-liner, every little move Gallo makes is structured as a intriguing set-up followed by confounding pay off. When Gallo signs on to appear in a film, my ears prick up.

Reporting on the film’s production in their native Israel, Haaretz tell us that Gallo is appearing in the film alongside “two Israeli actors, Zach Cohen and Yiftach Ofir… and a third Israeli actor is currently being sought… After shooting in the Dead Sea area, the rest of the movie will be filmed in Norway and Poland”.

Further details on the film are pretty thin on the ground. Indeed, Quiet Earth have only a cut-and-paste portion of the Haaretz story and nothing else, and there’s barely another word about the picture out there. It will be interesting to see what kind of reception a film about a Taliban murderer of American soldiers receives, doubly interesting to see how Gallo reacts to any controversy.

• Metropia Movie Trailer
• Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro Movie Trailer
• Francis Ford Coppola Updates on Tetro with Vincent Gallo
• Adrien Brody to Star in Dario Argento’s Giallo, Vincent Gallo and Ray Liotta No Longer Attached
• Vincent Gallo to Star in Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro, Javier Bardem to Co-Star

On August 31, Marvel and Disney shocked the entertainment world with an announcement that Disney would purchase Marvel in a deal valued around $4 billion in cash and stock. One of the gates any deal like that must pass through is shareholder review, and Marvel’s stockholders have now approved the merger with Disney. Now said to be valued at about $4.3 billion, the deal will be based on the price of Disney’s stock at the end of the day yesterday, and should be done by the close of the New York Stock Exchange today.

The official release, via Nikki Finke, goes like this:

New York, New York – December 31, 2009 — Marvel Entertainment, Inc. (NYSE: MVL), a global character-based entertainment and licensing company founded in 1939, announced that at a special meeting held this morning, Marvel stockholders approved the adoption of the Agreement and Plan of Merger entered into by Marvel and The Walt Disney Company (“Disney”), which provides for a merger in which Marvel will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Disney. Marvel anticipates that the merger, which, based on the closing price of Disney’s common stock on December 30, 2009, has an estimated value of approximately $4.3 billion, will be completed today after the close of the market.

There are still some hoops to go through — Securities and Exchange Commission stuff — but if things go according to plan, Marvel and Disney will be one company at the end of the day today.

On the same day the deal was first announced, CEO Bob Iger said (paraphrased by Peter) that “the company didn’t plan on interfering much with any of the in-development Marvel movies, using the term “If it ain’t broke…” All of the creative control will remain in the hands of the people who know the Marvel Universe best: the people at Marvel.” There have been some big changes at Disney in the interim, but hopefully they won’t change that fundamental approach to Marvel’s output.

• No Related Post

I’ve always loved reading and hearing what great filmmakers think of other great films and directors. You may have noticed that we ask some directors about their favorite films, from time to time, and I’ve even featured other websites and books that delve into this subject on the site from time to time.

Geoffrey Macnab and the British Film Institute have put together a book titled Screen Epiphanies: Filmmakers on the Films that Inspired Them collecting the stories of thirty-five leading international filmmakers focusing on “the film moments that stayed with them long after they left the movie theater” which inspired them to pursue a career in the movie industry.

Each and every director’s ‘epiphany’ is different and remarkable whether it is the lasting impression made by a single ephemeral moment in a film long forgotten by others; a movie which captured their imagination and inspired them creatively; or the overall magical effect of going to the cinema and the nostalgia of an early film-related experience. With refreshing frankness and clarity some of the directors describe the hurdles they had to overcome because of race, class or gender to break into the movie industry. Films were a support to many, they describe how they identified with the themes growing up and how they were inspired to pursue a filmmaking career. Their experiences of film and film-making styles may differ radically but what stands out from each director’s epiphany is their genuine passion and enduring respect for film.

The new 304-page hardcover edition will be released on January 24th 2010, and is available for preorder on Amazon for around $19.

Here are some of the filmmakers / films featured in the book:

• Kevin Macdonald, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
• Paul Schrader, Pickpocket
• Anthony Minghella, The Blue Angel
• Danny Boyle, Apocalypse Now
• Gurinder Chadha, Purab Aur Pachhim
• Mike Leigh, Room at the Top
• Mike Hodges, The Sweet Smell of Success
• Thomas Vinterberg, Hearts Of Darkness
• Albert Maysles, Not a film, people
• Sally Potter, Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday
• Nick Park, Rebecca
• Alan Parker, Little Fugitive
• Manoel De Oliveira, Berlin, Symphony of a City
• Don Boyd, Hamlet
• David Puttnam, Pinocchio
• Frank Darabont, THX1138
• Lars Von Trier, Barry Lyndon
• Atom Egoyan, Persona
• Barbet Schroeder, Voyage to Italy
• Bertrand Tavernier, Fort Apache
• Mike Newell, La Grande Illusion
• Ken Loach, The Fireman’s Ball
• Michael Apted, Wild Strawberries
• Jeremy Thomas, Badlands
• Abbas Kiarostami, Eight and a Half
• Stephen Frears, Meeting Karel Reisz
• Terence Davies, Doris Day
• Aki Kaurismäki, Nanook of the North
• Mike Figgis, Weekend
• Mira Nair, La Jetée
• Stephen Woolley, Zulu
• Martin Scorsese, The Red Shoes

Here are a few excerpts that were previously published online:

Danny Boyle / Apocalypse Now: “I had always wanted to be a film director since seeing A Clockwork Orange, but it was in the same way that I wanted to be a train driver. It wasn’t practical really. I never went about doing anything about it. I did plays at school and I directed assemblies on stage. Then I went to university and started doing drama. I started directing there properly but I was directing for theatre (not film). When I came to London for a job in the theatre, I was living in a place in Fulham with some mates. They gave me a bedroom to stay in. I was an assistant stage manager, driving the truck, sweeping up and setting up the stages. They were an amazing company called Joint Stock Theatre Company. Outside the flat in Fulham, there was this huge billboard. One day, this black poster went up with Apocalypse Now on it. I am sure I must have known something about it from Time Out or whatever. Anyway, I went to see it. That was the moment when everything suddenly made sense. I guess what it does it that it collides some of the elements of American mainstream cinema from the time and art. That was what Coppola had done in a way. What was interesting about it for me was that I was so transformed by it. My dad came down to stay with me in London. I wanted to take him to see Apocalypse Now. The only place it was on was at the Prince Charles cinema. Then, unlike now, the Prince Charles cinema usually showed porn but they were showing Apocalypse Now. I took him to see it. Before the film began, there were all these trailers for porn. It was so embarrassing sitting there with my dad, watching these quite explicit group-sex orgy films. Then Apocalypse Now began and we sat there. What I remember was trying to persuade him how great it was. It was like trying to persuade him that Led Zeppelin and David Bowie were great artists and wanting him to come on board about it. But in fact I don’t remember his response to it at all. Why that’s weird is that he fought in the war. He was in the RAF. His friends were killed. He left the RAF because if you stayed in the RAF as what he was – which was a gunner – you basically got killed. You got paid a lot of money. You were very glamorous. You had the best uniform and the girls flocked around you but basically you died quite soon. So he left and transferred into the army, which was what a lot of guys did. It’s typical of being that kind of age that I never really asked him what he thought of the film. I tried to convince him what a great film it was but he never spoke about it in that way. There is something that haunts most directors, which is that we don’t really do anything useful although we’re thought of as being useful. He [my dad] fought in the war and contributed something and yet all I wanted him to do was watch Francis Ford Coppola’s version of the war. It didn’t undermine the film for me but it categorises film for me in a way. Film often runs in parallel with life and it feeds off it but I don’t think it necessarily nurtures it. I don’t think it necessarily contributes in the way we think it does. We, in our world, in our bubble that we work in, imagine that it does but I am not sure that it does.”

Mike Leigh / Room at the Top: “In 1959 in Salford, at the local cinema, I saw Room at the Top. I have a great respect for Jack Clayton (the film’s director, whom I actually knew a bit). When I think back on Room at the Top, it was not a great film. When you look at it, it still has pretty ropey, old-fashioned acting and ludicrous casting. The choice of Laurence Harvey! He is as northern and working class as Oscar Wilde himself. But at the time I saw it, at the age of 16 or whatever, the epiphany was watching and experiencing a film that was looking at the real world – which was the very world outside the cinema when I stepped out into the street.”

Lars von Trier / Barry Lyndon: “Watching Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon is a pleasure, like eating a very good soup. It is very stylised and then suddenly comes some emotion [when the child falls off the horse]. There is not a lot of emotion. There are a lot of moods and some fantastic photography, really like these old paintings. Thank God he didn’t have a computer. If he had a computer at that time, you wouldn’t care, but you know he has been waiting three weeks for this mountain fog or whatever. It is overwhelming with the boy, because it is suddenly this emotional thing. The character Barry Lyndon is not very emotional. In fact, he is the opposite. He is an opportunist. I saw the film when it came out. I was in my early twenties. The first time I saw it, I slept. It was on too late and it is a very, very long film. What is interesting is that Nicole Kidman told me Kubrick hated long films. If you have seen Barry Lyndon, the last scene of the film, where she is writing out a cheque for him, is extremely long. It goes on and on and on, but it’s beautiful. The good thing is that Kubrick always sets his standards. Barry Lyndon to me is a masterpiece. He casts in a very strange way, Kubrick. It is a very strange cast. But that is how the film should be, of course. This thing that he liked short films was very surprising. And he liked Krzysztof Kieslowski very much. He was crazy about Kieslowski. I don’t know if Kubrick saw any of my films, but I know Tarkovsky watched the first film I did and hated it! That is how it is supposed to be. The narration in my films Manderlay and Dogville is definitely inspired by Barry Lyndon, and the narration there is this ironical voice, this whole chapter thing, the feeling there are chapters. I have done that in Dogville and Manderlay and to some extent in Breaking the Waves. It is all Kubrick!”

Martin Scorsese / The Red Shoes: “I used to call it brushstrokes, the way Michael Powell used the camera in The Red Shoes. Also, the ballet sequence itself was like an encyclopaedia of the history of cinema up to that point. They used every possible means of expression, going back to the earliest days of silent cinema. In the documentary I am making about British cinema, I have to approach it from my point of view, from what I experienced and how I experienced it. It was literally intertwined with American cinema. Watching British film was as natural as watching a Western. We began to understand the different genres of British cinema, whether it was The Blue Lamp, John Ford’s Gideon of Scotland Yard, An Inspector Calls or Seth Holt’s films, let alone the films by Joseph Losey or Basil Dearden or Ronald Neame. In its very restrained way, Kind Hearts and Coronets was a film that influenced a great deal what I do with voiceover. (But) I keep coming back to The Red Shoes. If I come back from shooting a film at 3am from a night shoot or at dawn and it is on, I find it difficult to go to sleep. It is a film that I continually and obsessively am drawn to. It was hard to see good colour copies of the film. I sought out whatever theatre they were playing in. Eventually, we obtained colour television sets and we saw it at least on colour on TV. The big prize was to get a good 16mm colour print. That was a major coup, to get that or at least to see it. That became a kind of obsessive search.”

Anthony Minghella / The Blue Angel: “What I remember was that it was the first time a piece of fiction had had such a devastating emotional effect on me. A lot of children remember seeing cartoons, Pinocchio or Bambi or something that breaks their heart. I remember seeing The Blue Angel and it breaking my heart. It was the first time I realised there was an adult world - that adults could damage each other or destroy each other emotionally. It might have fed into a whole series of epiphanies about my own upbringing. I was living in a family where my grandparents had separated in quite complex circumstances. Perhaps it resonated with some elements of that, to do with simply how love can be a rupturing and damaging emotion as well as a healing one. Also, to see somebody who is in an authority position made so small, so diminished, by the feeling of having no control.”

Thomas Vinterberg / Hearts of Darkness: “In a strange, lethal way, I was suddenly wildly attracted to the process of filmmaking, even though it is described as a nightmare - a matter of horror - in that film. There is a trancelike atmosphere. Suddenly, I was reminded that you can feel like it’s a matter of life and death when you make a film. It changed from being a mediocre feeling of emptiness in your life to something that feels necessary. I realised that filmmaking can be many things - and it can be narcotic in a way. You can become addicted to it.”

Cool Stuff is a daily feature of slashfilm.com. Know of any geekarific creations or cool products which should be featured on Cool Stuff? E-Mail us at orfilms@gmail.com.

via kottke

• Woody Allen and Miyazaki Not Included on EW’s 25 Greatest Active Film Directors List
• Cannes Posters: Bad Lieutenant, Law Abiding Citizen, Slumdog Millionaire
• Movies That Should Have Won an Academy Award, But Didn’t
• Greatest Living Directors Collaborate on Movie
• New Prince of Persia Featurette Highlights the Sands of Time
• Early Buzz: Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island

In this episode, Dave Chen, Devindra Hardawar, and Adam Quigley countdown their top 10 films of 2009. They also run down some honorable mentions and name some of their biggest disappointments.

Thanks to everyone who listened for a great year! You can always e-mail us at slashfilmcast(AT)gmail(DOT)com, or call and leave a voicemail at 781-583-1993. Join us in two weeks on Monday January 11th at 9 PM EST / 6 PM PST at Slashfilm’s live page as we review Daybreakers.

Download or Play Now in your Browser:

Subscribe to the /Filmcast:

• No Related Post

There’s a serious backlash building against the Nicolas Cage backlash, as if a whole chunk of film fans simultaneously came to the conclusion that his body of questionable and bad work is actually entertaining as hell. (That it all stands apart from his unquestionably good work isn’t in question.) I’m right there with it; my last viewings of Knowing and The Wicker Man pushed me to the point where I’m actively looking forward to films like The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Drive Angry and Hungry Rabbit Jumps. (OK, Cage’s work in Bad Lieutenant and great buzz for Kick-Ass certainly didn’t hurt.)

But it might get out of hand. Since November, Nic Cage has been infecting cinema as a whole, as chronicled on the photoblog Nic Cage as Everyone.

I’m not going to sugar-coat this: a great many of the entries photoshopping Cage into every role from Edward Cullen to Jerry Maguire to Death (in The Seventh Seal) are really quite terrible. Nice tries, sure, but they’re not quite there. But then there are the ones that jump out as being spot-on. How about Steve Jobs and Mo’nique’s character in Precious? Harvey Milk? Yep, that’s good. Tony Stark? Creepy. Bernie Lomax? YES. And I think it’s obvious that any casting problem for the new Conan the Barbarian film is now solved:

It’s not too late, by the way, to get your very own Nicolas Cage Adventure Set, which we featured a month ago. I shot that link to my roommate immediately after Hunter published it, she bought the set for her boyfriend as a Christmas present and the photo below is part of our gleeful first assembly of the set last week. I want expansion packs! With additional fake colorforms, I could put Cage on the cover of every DVD in the house. Or finally have tools to pitch my ‘Nic Cage starring in a mashup of Lost and Scooby-Doo’ project that has been simmering for years.

• First Look: Nicolas Cage in The Hungry Rabbit Jumps
• Kick-Ass Sequel Already Has a Title; Daniel Craig and Mark Wahlberg Were Considered for Big Daddy
• Big Daddy Revealed in New Kick-Ass Poster and Red Band Clip
• This Week In Trailers: What’s Up Lovely, Blood Creek, Seven Days (Les 7 Jours De Talion), Obselidia, ALiCE
• Three High Resolution Photos from The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
• Cool Stuff: The Nicolas Cage Adventure Set

Amazon has a couple good deals today:

• The Star Wars Prequel Trilogy on DVD for only $21.49, 57% off the $50 suggested retail price. If you spend more than $25 on the site, shipping is free.
• Pixar’s Up and Monsters, Inc DVD/Blu-Ray Combo for $27.98 with FREE SHIPPING, an extra $10 off the already low sale price. The suggested retail price for the two releases is around $87. To take advantage of the combo deal, click over to Amazon, and scroll down to the BEST VALUE section.

via: slickdeals/ropesofsilicon

• No Related Post