Selected Film News — September 2009
I’m a week late, but here’s some news I enjoyed (selected from my del.icio.us feed, as usual), which is film related:
- There are a lot of interesting horror films coming out soon. Splice is one of them, you can see a sneak preview here. It looks truly strange. It comes out in November and it’s got Adrien Brody. Also, a film called Corpsey featured at this year’s DOCFEST, looks great.
- Best article on Twitch this month? Definitely, “Where are My Bleepy Crunchies.” A suggestion of the top five films integrated with electronic music. Number one is Pi, but I haven’t seen several of the others and they look superb.
- The new Fantastic Mr. Fox trailer gives the film just about as much “future of film” hype as I’ve heard about Avatar. Anyway, I think it looks sweet (a look at Wes Anderson behind the scenes in the previous link).
- Contenders for Best Picture of 2012, already? Yup.
- I saw two films this week in the theater: Jennifer’s Body, and Zombieland. Both really enjoyable, though I certainly favored the latter (which I’m biased toward because of the cameo [BR], which I won’t spoil in case you haven’t seen it yet, and the genre [I'm a big Zombie fan]). What I haven’t seen yet, and would really like to see is The Informant. Mainly due to, besides the good trailers and promotional materials, an episode of This American Life, that I’d strongly recommend.
- Herzog is hosting a series of lectures/seminars in L.A. about film making. I’d go, except it cost about $1500. It’s titled Herzog Rogue Film School. Speaking of Herzog, a reviewer at TIFF for Twitch has the first look at his collaboration with D Lynch.
- Thom Yorke went out of his way this past month to promote a film called The Age of Stupid. I’d link to the blog article from DeadAirSpace, but it doesn’t have permalinks…
- The villain has been selected for M Gondry’s rendition of The Green Hornet: Christopher Waltz. You may remember him from such great roles as, the best villain ever in Inglorious Basterds (this link is to Tarantino interviews which you may find interesting).
- Other Movies: Reviews for The Road look pretty favorable. Videocracy looks fascinating, though I bet it’s too late to have any useful analysis of the media publicity overhaul by the Obama Administration (could you imagine George Bush on Twitter?). Year of the Carnivore looks like a good indie romantic comedy. More info on Korine’s presumably-fucked-up-as-usual musical: Trash Humpers. The final trailer for [rec]2, hope it doesn’t “ruin the mythology” to quote Tarantino. Terry Gilliam’s got a film (Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus) that immediately makes me think of “Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium”, but doesn’t co-star Natalie Portman, to my knowledge. Can’t find anything else about this film, but Я looks awesome (from the 15 seconds I’ve seen). Criterion collection releases a box set of Japanese Noir? You bet! And, they are re-making Plan 9, and I can’t understand why even in the slightest (wish they’d give up on the Barbarella re-make, too)
- One-liners from TIFF, Thanks Vulture.
- I discovered possibly the best food related film I’ve seen all year: Disappearing Manhattan from the always entertaining Anthony Bordain.
- The Best Cut in Cinema. Duh, from 2001: A Space Odyssey. In parallel, the greatest long takes in cinema history. Also, 100 years of Visual Effects (ignore the shitty music).
- Time Travel in popular Film and TV (Primer would be impossible to quantify on this map).




