Archive for the ‘Magnolia’ Category
Filed under: Action, SXSW, Magnolia
Well here’s some fun news for those who already have their SXSW badges tucked into their back pockets: turns out that Mr. Neil Marshall, director of such fine genre films as Dog Soldiers, The Descent, and Doomsday, will be attending next week’s South By Southwest Film Festival, and get this: Thanks to SXSW and Fantastic Fest, he’ll be introducing a movie to the screaming masses, and I bet he’s bringing that wondrous horror geek of a wife with him!
My money is on Neil playing Halloween 3: Season of the Witch, but I polled the Cinematical staff and I got some other good predictions. Will Goss has $600 on Mr. Marshall playing a brand-new 35mm print of Showgirls, while Peter Hall is convinced it’s something else. (“Moulin Rouge,” he says, “I guarantee it.”) Erik Davis went withThe Last Starfighter, Monika Bartyzel said “something by Guy Maddin, definitely,” and Eric D. Snider picked Avatar, “because nobody has seen it yet.” Jette said Willy Wonka, Pete Martin went with Yojimbo, and Jeff Anderson, strangely enough, also predicted Showgirls. I even asked Gilchrist (“The Day After!”), Yamato (“The Breakfast Club!”), and Jenni Miller, who went with Fiddler on the Roof. (The rest of the staff ignored me while watching Pam have a baby on The Office.)
Our lone voice of reason was Ms. Elisabeth Rappe, who chimed in quietly from the back of the room and asked “Hey, doesn’t that Marshall guy have a brand-new movie?” Hmm, she may have picked the winner. I still think it’ll be Halloween 3.
Filed under: Drama, Foreign Language, Magnolia, Trailers and Clips
There’s no predicting when international films will find their way to American audiences. It really doesn’t matter if it’s the next film from a high profile director like Zhang Yimou or a nasty horror title from an unknown director in Thailand, they can arrive six months or six years after their domestic releases. Take The Warlords, for example. One would think that a large scale, historical war epic from mainland China starring Jet Li, Andy Lau (Infernal Affairs) and Takeshi Kaneshiro (House of Flying Daggers) would be a shoe-in for a prompt release in the United States.
But hey, since the roughly two-year gap could have been a lot worse, I suppose stateside fans of Asian cinema should be grateful it’s even getting a release. Magnolia films will be putting the film, co-directed by Peter Chan (Perhaps Love) and Wai Man Yip (Anna in Kung-Fu Land), in theaters April 2nd following an On-Demand release platform. Starting tomorrow, March 4th, you’ll be able to see The Warlords via various VOD cable services, as well as online outfits thanks to Amazon On-Demand, Playstation On Demand and the XBOX Live Video Marketplace.
Below you can find the official Warlords synopsis as well as a clip from one of the film’s battles. Things in this particular scene don’t get too graphic, but keep in mind this is about a rebellious uprising in the 1860s; so if you have any small children (or bosses) around who might wonder why that guy just shoved a spear through the other guy’s chest, you might want to watch this one while they’re not around.
Continue reading Exclusive Action-Packed Clip from Jet Li’s ‘The Warlords’
Filed under: Foreign Language, Magnolia, Columns, 400 Screens, 400 Blows, War
When I saw John Woo’s Red Cliff (5 screens) a couple of months back, I could barely contain my enthusiasm. I thought it was a true return to form for Woo, who came from an exemplary career in Hong Kong to a rather spotty (if underrated) one in Hollywood. It managed to be a personal project for Woo, full of his own themes and touches, but also a mammoth epic of the kind that usually goes on to stun the world and win a dozen Oscars; it was the best such epic since Braveheart or Gladiator, but even better than those films. It was more modest and emotional, more poetic and intimate, faster and cleaner in its action sequences, but no less spectacular. It was apparently the most expensive movie ever produced in China, and also its biggest hit. I had visions of John Woo meeting Oscar for the first time.
But to date, in the US, it has earned a paltry $600,000, which is roughly one thousand times less than Avatar. It placed on a tiny handful of critics’ ten best lists, and has barely made a ripple since. I’m sure people did not stay away because of the subtitles; after all, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was a huge hit, and Red Cliff is every bit as good, every bit as crowd-pleasing. Perhaps the advertising and release pattern were a mistake. Perhaps it never opened wide enough when it still had some momentum. But I think the main problem was the plan of releasing a “U.S. cut,” which ran 148 minutes, whereas the original cut ran 280 minutes. The length did not stop it from becoming a huge hit in China, but somehow, somebody decided that Americans could not take length and subtitles.
Continue reading 400 Screens, 400 Blows – Seeing ‘Red Cliff’
Filed under: Action, Foreign Language, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Thrillers, Disney, Lionsgate Films, Magnolia, New Line, Paramount, Sony, Sony Classics, Universal, Warner Brothers, Focus Features, 20th Century Fox, Dreamworks, Tom Cruise, Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, Johnny Depp, Peter Jackson, James Bond, Lists, Miramax, Best/Worst, War, Daniel Craig
Cinematical is about to launch into our best-of-the-’00s series, with a different writer tackling a different genre over these last few weeks of the aughts (or whatever it was we decided to call this decade). Yours truly has been tasked with sifting out the most exciting action flicks these years have had to offer, and in the list-making equivalent of flinching, I’ve decided to divide them up by superlative instead of ranking them in order of awesomeness.
Oh, and before you comment away about what’s missing (which we do want), I have left off The Dark Knight, Spider-Man 2, X2: X-Men United and The Incredibles, so they may be included in any superhero or animated list to come. If those movies are left off those lists, then by all means, give them hell. I might even join you.
Filed under: Action, Foreign Language, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Thrillers, Disney, Lionsgate Films, Magnolia, New Line, Paramount, Sony, Sony Classics, Universal, Warner Brothers, Focus Features, 20th Century Fox, Dreamworks, Tom Cruise, Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, Johnny Depp, Peter Jackson, James Bond, Lists, Miramax, War, Daniel Craig
Cinematical is about to launch into our best-of-the-’00s series, with a different writer tackling a different genre over these last few weeks of the aughts (or whatever it was we decided to call this decade). Yours truly has been tasked with sifting out the most exciting action flicks these years have had to offer, and in the list-making equivalent of flinching, I’ve decided to divide them up by superlative instead of ranking them in order of awesomeness.
Oh, and before you comment away about what’s missing (which we do want), I have left off The Dark Knight, Spider-Man 2, X2: X-Men United and The Incredibles, so they may be included in any superhero or animated list to come. If those movies are left off those lists, then by all means, give them hell. I might even join you.
Filed under: Horror, Magnolia, Theatrical Reviews
By Eric D. Snider (reprint from 5/3/2009 — Tribeca Film Festival)
The House of the Devil is a great name for a movie. It hearkens back to the days of grindhouse horror, when a film’s title and its trailer told you basically everything you needed to know. Yet it’s different from those movies, too, in that it prefers slow-building tension over frequent bloodletting and mayhem. You have to wait for “The House of the Devil” to deliver on its promises — but when it does, holy crap. I know that isn’t a very scholarly analysis, but seriously. Holy crap.
The film is set in the early 1980s, apparently, with appropriately synthesized rock on the soundtrack and lots of freeze-frames in the opening credits. Our perky young heroine, Samantha (Jocelin Donahue), is a college student who’s sick of living in the dorms and is preparing to move into an apartment with her friend Megan (Greta Gerwig). Eager to earn some money to facilitate the move, Samantha responds to a flier posted on a campus bulletin board looking for a babysitter. Rather suspiciously (to me, anyway), the flier is blank except for a phone number and the words “BABYSITTER WANTED.”
The clients are the Ulmans — Mr. Ulman (Tom Noonan) is a tall, gentle-voiced man who uses a walking stick; his wife (Mary Woronov) is old-school sophisticated, a woman whose evening wear requires fur. Samantha learns when she arrives at the house — a huge old isolated place, I needn’t tell you — that the babysitting duties will be slightly different from the norm, but it’s not a deal-breaker. And the Ulmans are offering a lot of money.
Filed under: Comedy, Magnolia, Theatrical Reviews, Austin
The first thing everyone seems to mention about Serious Moonlight is that its screenplay is the last one written by the late Adrienne Shelly. Actress Cheryl Hines, who had a role in Shelly’s film Waitress, is making her feature directorial debut with the dark comedy, which stars Meg Ryan and Timothy Hutton. The movie opened Austin Film Festival this year. It sounds like a sure-fire comedy, but unfortunately it just left me with a headache.
Serious Moonlight focuses on a married couple, Louise (Meg Ryan) and Ian (Timothy Hutton), who are supposed to meet in their country house for a rendezvous, but both arrive a day early. Louise wants to surprise her husband, but finds out that he also has a surprise: he’s leaving her. She refuses to accept this, and ends up cracking him on the head with a vase, binding him with duct tape, and refusing to let him loose until he comes to his senses and realizes how much he loves her and wants to stay with her.
Filed under: Action, Magnolia, Theatrical Reviews
By Todd Gilchrist (reprinted from 9/23/09)
Cinematically speaking, there may be nothing worse than when an action star or purveyor of thrills starts taking himself too seriously. Such a transformation almost invariably begets a personal crusade, which often takes the form of a vanity project, and usually turns out about as well as The Quest did for Jean-Claude Van Damme, or On Deadly Ground did for Steven Seagal. Thai martial artist Tony Jaa launched his career with the original Ong Bak, and after that film and its superior follow-up, The Protector, made him an international sensation, he apparently started believing his own hype: Jaa not only co-directed Ong Bak 2, his latest film, but conceived it as the ultimate Thai adventure, reinforcing his own legend with a self-aggrandizing historical epic that somehow proves that you can actually make a movie without a plot – which unfortunately but perhaps predictably isn’t a compliment.
Ostensibly a prequel to the original film, Ong Bak 2 chronicles a series of fairly awesome fights that Jaa’s character Tien gets into en route to becoming a martyred national hero. There’s some back story about the betrayal of Tien’s parents and his training by guerrilla fighters in the jungles of Thailand, but for the most part the film is front-loaded with one scene after another where he beats the bloody pulp out of any and all comers. Meanwhile Jaa’s mentor and co-director Panna Rittikrai documents the action with a surprising, satisfying lyricism, reminiscent of Zhang Yimou’s Hero and House of Flying Daggers, but it seems obvious they’re more interested in throat-ripping than truly capturing the poetry of Thai martial arts.
Filed under: Action, Thrillers, Magnolia, Theatrical Reviews, Fantastic Fest, Remakes and Sequels
When it reached American audiences two years after it opened in France, 2006’s District 13 (or B13 here) served as a breezy introduction to the art of parkour, not to mention director Pierre Morel’s knack for shooting action sequences both energetically and visibly (an underrated quality, that last one). Morel moved on to Taken, though, while parkour began to infiltrate more high-profile Hollywood fare, like Casino Royale and Live Free or Die Hard.
However, writer/producer/all-around action maven Luc Besson stuck around to cash in on the promise of a follow-up, and now we’re greeted with District 13: Ultimatum, a competent if flabby rehash of the first film’s race-against-time plot and dystopian setting.
Continue reading Fantastic Fest Review: District 13: Ultimatum
Filed under: Comedy, Drama, Thrillers, Magnolia, Theatrical Reviews
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By Scott Weinberg. Reprinted from Sundance Film Festival, 2009
Raw, blistering, harsh and compelling in the way that only a really good “prison film” can be, Nicolas Wining Refn’s Bronson is a rather rough experience. Fortunately it’s also very smart, dark, intelligent and disturbing, supported by a force-of-nature lead performance and a screenplay that focuses more on the “character study” angle and less on the “wow, prison sure is disgusting” perspective.
Based (apparently very closely) on actual events, Bronson is about a British thug named Michael Peterson, a rough, gruff, and muscle-bound troublemaker who somehow earned the title of Britian’s most violent prisoner. Incarcerated for a stupid (but non-violent) post office robbery, Peterson adopts the moniker of American film star Charles Bronson and begins a long and rather unpleasant life behind bars. Although he’s more of a angry man than an outright evil one, poor Bronson has a serious problem keeping his temper in check. Stuck in a cell with little to do besides build muscles and pace around nervously, Bronson snatches every opportunity to dole out some raw-knuckled fisticuffs whenever the “screws” invade his cell.
