Neil Gaiman has just posted another stunning still from the upcoming Mirror Mask - his feature film collaboration with Sandman illustrator Dave McKeon - here.  Any chance of a trailer sometime soon?  Please?

Ah, the world is a very strange place ...

The Storm Theater in New York will be premiering a live musical version of The Last Starfighter from October 15 - 30th.  No, I’m not making this up.  It even sounds as though they’re sticking close to the film’s plot - check out the synopsis from Storm’s site:

An 18-year-old with an uncertain future, Alex becomes the master of a video game only to discover that it was put on Earth as a testing ground by Centauri, a huckster trying to save his vulnerable galaxy and make a little money in the process. Centauri offers Alex membership in an elite cadre of space pilots charged with protecting the universe.

Alex must find a way to reach his potential, while a great danger looms out in space, waiting for him....

Via Tagliners, where they also have a link to this song from the Silence of the Lambs musical.  Really.  I’m not making that up either.

Finally! After four years Wong Kar Wai’s 2046 hit theatres in China today. No more going back and re-editing. No more reshoots. Just give us the goods! Well… you know… once China’s had it’s fill. Please?

Even Tony Leung got fed up with the lengthy drawn out process. An excerpt from an article running in ChinaDaily.com…

“I heard Wong was going to shoot more scenes with Gong Li and Faye Wong, so I shaved my moustache immediately,” Leung, who starred in ‘In the Mood For Love’ and ‘Happy Together’, told Britain’s Guardian newspaper. “You just can’t go on shooting like that; you have to stop.”

Read the full article from ChinaDaily right here.

And things apparently aren’t going very well for the uber-hot Zhang Ziyi at home. Read reports of fan unrest here.

Now. If you’ll excuse me I have a couple Wong Kar Wai’s sitting on my coffee table to get to so I am up to speed on the man’s films.

Just a friendly heads up here ... if you, like me, pre-ordered the French edition of Enki Bilal’s Immortel you might want to cancel that order.  Got a call from fellow Twitch-er Nick today telling me that he’d just rented the film from the local cult video store.  This was a bit of a surprise because as far as I knew there was no legal version of this available anywhere in the world yet.  I was wrong.  The version he rented is an Asian release, I believe either mainland China or Taiwan.  I haven’t been able to turn up a retailer of it yet, but I will, and I can guarantee it will be a good bit cheaper than the French edition.  Yes, it does include English subtitles.  I can’t read a word of it - a little help? - but I believe that this is the spec sheet from the Asian manufacturer.  There’s also a Russian edition floating around out there but I have no clue if it’s subtitled.

There is always the possibility that this is a high grade bootleg but I won’t know more until I hear back from the retailers that I’ve contacted about it ...

Well, I am not a huge fan of HK films, but I have watched a fair number of Jackie Chan movies over the years. Ever since the Police Story Boxset from IVL was announced earlier in the year I’ve been looking forward to it. I’ve been temporarily sidetracked by other DVDs, but at $38USD / £20 or so, i can’t avoid it for long.

The films have been totally remastered, but appear not to be the apparently extended versions seen in Japan, apart from Part 2, and the subtitles come from the UK “Hong Kong Legends” range of DVDs, except for those in Part 3.

The picture is obviously sharper, and the aspect / framing seems to be spot-on. I’m not sure about the sound.

Anyone got or seen this set yet? Theres a thread over at the “asiandvdguide” forum containing comparison shots of the remastered version and earlier releases.

Well, I was going to leave this one alone but it’s picked up so much steam on so many film sites that I figure I ought to throw my two cents in.

In a recent interview Shaun of the Dead’s Simon Pegg let it be known that he’s read the Watchmen script and would love to play Rorschach, which has people hyped up all over the place.  As far as I can see this is a simple case of the producer of one of the most anticipated comic adaptations ever passing along the script to a comic obsessed actor friend as a favor and said friend saying - as ANY actor would - that he’d like the plum role for himself.  I really wouldn’t read any more into this.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve met Simon and I like him a lot.  I’m a big, big fan of his work and I think he’s enormously talented.  But he’s not going to get the part.  Here’s why.  Beyond any other considerations Rorschach is a violent sociopath who likes to beat people down with his hands and is very good at doing so.  He’s also masked a healthy majority of the time.  That means that whoever plays him absolutely must be able to carry a sense of physical menace about himself based purely on body type and Simon’s just not that large.

Where do I see the casting going?  It’s all speculation, but read on for my picks ...

Continue Reading "Twitch’s Take on These Watchmen Casting Rumors"...

Now that my Casshern angst has ebbed somewhat thanks to my having the DVD on order it has been replaced by the absolutely delirious Survive Style 5 as my most anticipated film coming out of Japan. 

This baby looks absolutely surreal thanks to some way stylized camera work, a garish color scheme and a cast that includes Tadanobu Asano (aka Ichi the Killer’s Kakihara), Sonny Chiba (70’s film icon most recently seen as Hattori Hanzo in Kill Bill) and Vinny Jones (former pro soccer player turned big screen goon thanks to Lock Stock and Snatch).

The site’s just had a major face lift and had a stack of new material added.  Fire up your Windows Media Player because you absolutely DO NOT want to miss the trailers (here, here, here and here), a series of what I can only assume are VERY surreal tv spots for the film (here, here, here, and here) and a lengthy behind the scenes clip here.

There’s more but I’m so smitten by that tiger headed codpiece that I’m going to stop there.  I gotta find out where I can get me one of those ...

Now, I’m not actually that big a Mel Brooks fan, but I have an enormous weak spot for Spaceballs - quite possibly one of the funniest stupid movies ever made.  There have been sequel rumors floating around forever but here’s one straight from the man’s mouth.  As quoted in Aint it Cool Brooks is writing the sequel now and sees the best case scenario for release as “a week before the new Star Wars opens.” Brooks has confirmed he’ll be back as Yoghurt and I can only hope and pray that Rick Moranis returns as Dark Helmet.  Moranis has been out of the game for a long time now and I miss him.  This would be a prime opportunity for him to make a triumphant return ...

Good Lord, no ... Aint it Cool is reporting that Pitof - the man behind the Catwoman debacle - has been tapped to direct the live action adaptation of Akira for Warner Brothers. 

A note to studio heads:  a large budget bomb should not be considered a positive when deciding on a director for an enormously complex, certain to be very high budget, film.  What are you thinking!?! What!?!

How’s this for a mind bender:  Russia just may be the new breeding ground for the world’s premiere genre cinema.  They’re certainly taking a good run at it.  Strange, but true. Here’s proof.

While looking around for information on Evil Dead 4 - supposedly now greenlit, see below - I turned up a listing for a Russian film just entering the early stages of production called Glubina, with a cast list that apparently includes Bruce Campbell, Rutger Hauer and Christopher Lee.  The English working title is Depth and the film is based on a novel from the author of the Russian blockbuster The Night Watch - a copy of which I have sitting here waiting to be viewed and reviewed. 

Here’s a synopsis of the very Gibson-esque novel:

This book immediately became a cult book for the Russian web dwellers. In this book we encounter the world of the nearest future, where the Internet technologies, coupled with a “deep-program”, produced the internationally shared virtual world - the Deeptown. Of its population , the most mysterious are the Divers, who can at will resist the deep-program and see not only the display picture as it is (where everyone sees an illusion of a very real world) but also programs with all their “holes” as images, and do things which the best hackers could never dream of.

Night Watch did better business in Russia than the Lord of the Rings films and has generated enough buzz that it, along with a pair of in the works sequels, has been picked up for North America by Fox.  Sharing an author, key production people and some actors with Night Watch, along with western cult stars in key roles, Depth should be generating significant buzz among cult film fans any day now. 

The IMDB listing is here.

**** UPDATE ****

Hauer has apparently said he doesn’t know anything about this and his name has been removed from the listing.

One of the more acclaimed films of the past few years Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Millennium Mambo is a film I’ve been wanting to see for quite some time and now, thanks to it finally getting a domestic release via Palm Pictures, I’ve finally had my chance.  Solid performances all ‘round and brilliant cinematography make this a landmark film.

Continue Reading "Millennium Mambo DVD Review"...

I’ve said in an earlier post that I am excited that Jackie Chan has returned to Hong Kong to do more movies. It’s good for him and it’s good for the movie industry back home. Though for someone who is tired of being typecasted as a police officer in hollywood movies you gotta wonder why he would do it again his first movie back on his native soil. That’s neither here nor there. We’ll keep an eye on his current project The Myth and see where that leads him.

I will say this though. Having read this review of New Police Story over at MonkeyPeaches.com it looks like his desire to take a more dramatic turn will reach realization sooner than later. New Police Story sounds darker and heavier than anything leading up to it. But you should read about it for yourself.

The New York Times has just posted an excellent, and lengthy, article on Wong Kar Wai and 2046 here.  It gets into the man’s unorthodox filming style, relationships with his cast and crew and details on the film itself.  Fantastic stuff.  You need to register with the Times to get access to their articles, but it’s free and there’s nothing cheaper than free.  Well worth the moment or two it’ll take to get in ...

Thanks to iamNataku for the heads up.

This is big, big news if it turns out to be true ... Creature Corner has just posted this article from someone who claims to have just wrapped a project with Robert “Freddy” Englund claiming that both Freddy Vs. Jason Vs. Ash and Evil Dead 4 have gotten the go ahead.  Apparently the deal for FvJvA was conditional on Evil Dead 4 also getting the go ahead. 

I really don’t like the idea of putting Ash into anything with Freddy, Jason or pretty much any other slasher icon.  Really don’t like it.  At all.  I just think the feel is completely wrong and that you’ll end up doing some major damage to what makes the character great by trying to jam them together.  That said, if this is what it took to get the money for Evil Dead 4 - which I’m positively giddy about - then I suppose it’s a necessary evil that I can live with ...

Via FilmRot

DVD Fanatic has listed a full set of specs for the four disc, extended edition of The Return of the King.  Due for release December 14th the four-disc set will follow the pattern of the previous extended Rings sets.  The film itself - a 250 minute cut - will be split over two DVDs, which will also include four commentary tracks, with an additional two DVDs crammed with documentaries and behind the scenes features.  The two things that leap out to me are the cast commentary including some split personality Gollum / Smeagol chatter, and the “Abandoned Concept: Aragorn Battlers Sauron” feature.  Yeah, that was a good concept to abandon.  I applaud your abandonment.

Check the full feature list here.