Monsters and Critics has posted a pair of set photos from Peter Jackson’s King Kong.  Both shots are of Venture - the boat used to transport the big ape - and have a decent amount of detail.  If nothing else they give you a good idea of the scale he’s aiming for ... Check them out here.

So ... you’ve got more money than you know what to do with, you’re a big fan of Spider-Man and you think tossing a bit of cash towards cancer research would be a good thing.  Well, here’s a deal for you ...

The original Alex Ross Spider-Man paintings used in the title sequence of Spider-Man 2 have been put up for auction with all proceeds going to the Women’s Cancer Research Program at UCLA. 

If you want one of these be prepared to pony up some major coin.  One painting is already over twenty thousand dollars.  The auction site’s here.

via FilmRot

So ... you couldn’t make it to Toronto for the film festival but you’ve got this film fixated girl you want to impress.  Well, don’t you worry.  We’ve got your back.  What follows are capsule reviews of every film us Twitch folk got out to see, scored and ranked using our own obscure formula.  Thirty nine films.  Sixty two screenings.  Who’s at the top and bottom?  Read on ...

Continue Reading "TIFF Report:  Our Big Festival Wrap Up"...

I guess it was about ten years ago when Todd, Canfield and I got together and went to see Rumble in the Bronx. Canfield was visiting us from Chicago and we needed to kill some time between some lectures he was doing about film at our college. Who knew it would help kindle my love affair with Asian cinema.

Continue Reading "Jackie Chan interview: New Police Story"...

So, I keep an eye out on forums for strange films that suddenly pop-up on DVD. Admitedly they’re often in European countries, and so it’s often almost impossible to find decent information on them.

One film that caught my eye a while back is “Maladolescenza”. Yes, It’s potentially a highly-controversial film. Yes, you might have heard some naughty things about it : but it is a completely legal certified film production.

I found a couple of sites which might help some who’ve also read little bits find out some more. The pages contents though are “not safe for work” as they say. The sites are here and here. For fans of the very strange and unusual.

So, the boy was asking to check out some cartoons on the computer this morning and since we’d caught up on our Homestar Runner yesterday I opted to head over to Weebl and Bob since I’m a bit behind there as well ... Beyond the cartoony goodness I discovered that Weebl’s coming to DVD!  It looks as though they may have to alter the title to avoid lawsuits from the people who made those old Weeble toys, but the lads are hard at work sprucing up the old cartoons for the DVD and say the disc will have all cartoons in anamorphic widescreen and that it will be narrated by “the greatest Englishman alive today”.

For those not in the know Weebl’s the man behind the stangely compelling Badger, Badger, Badger and also publishes a regular web toon here.  Check out the news here and the latest Weebl and Bob offering - it’s a good one - here.

As I am wont to do from time to time I present here a list of notable films out of Asia that are now available to either purchase or pre-order.  Consider it a bit of a heads up as far as what’s happening on the international scene.  New Twins Effect, classic Jackie Chan, killer Korean wire-fu ... we got a bit of everything ...

Continue Reading "Let’s Go Shopping ... A Stack of New Hong Kong DVDs Up For Pre-Order ..."...

The cast list is building for George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead. John Leguizamo [Ice Age, Moulin Rouge], Canadian Robert Joy [Joe Somebody, The Shipping News], and Simon Baker [Red Planet, The Ring 2] join Dennis Hopper who just oozes cool. And they do a fine job of setting the bar on the babe factor very high in zombie movies by bringing in Asia Argento [XXX].

Canadians may also recognize Boyd Banks who already looked like death warmed up in Harold & Kumar go to White Castle and starred in the remake of Romero’s institution Dawn of the Dead. He’s listed as ‘Featured Zombie’ at imdb.com

The movie marks Romero’s return to the Dead series of films. The release date in 2005 is yet to be announced as the film is still in pre-production stages.

via Empire Online.

Here you go. For all those who shelled out hundreds of dollars, or £150 or so (as i seem to remember), for the uncut Japanese Kill Bill V1 deluxe boxset, cos it had a FREE TSHIRT! and a PLASTIC SWORD! - you can get the uncut asian edition of Vol.1 with Vol.2 and the SAME free SWORD! For $58 plus shipping.

Really, this is a massive pet hate of mine. People buying DVDs for any other reason than the film contained on the shining silver disc. There is loads more to buy : food for instance ... There are even more films out there that money could go on. You probably won’t use the t-shirt, you can’t use the sword: plastic doesn’t cut too well. You probably will not make a profit on eBay, and you’re going to sit and look at it gathering dust on the shelf.

What kind of DVD buyer do you consider yourself to be? Films? “Free Gifts”? “Collectors Editions”?

Like most people I originally heard of Shinya Tsukamoto thanks to his compelling but very, very strange Tetsuo: The Iron Man - an experimental film about a Japanese salary man slowly transforming into some sort of organic / metallic hybrid organism.  It’s beautiful to look at but quite disturbing and as a result I wrote Tsukamoto off as basically a talented freak show for quite some time.  The film that changed my mind about the man was Bullet Ballet.  Shot in gorgeous, high contrast black and white the film tells the story of a man driven to the brink of despair and obsession when his girlfriend commits suicide by shooting herself. 

Still the most linear and straight forward film Tsukamoto has shot from one of his own scripts - he’s got a couple fairly conventional director for hire jobs under his belt as well - Bullet Ballet has also strangely been the most difficult Tsukamoto film to find.  That’ll be changing in Januray with the release of Artsmagic’s DVD release of what I consider an overlooked classic.  I was sent a batch of about fifty still shots from the film, from which I’ve culled my favorites and posted them here.  Check ‘em out.

Continue Reading "Still Shots From Shinya Tsukamoto’s Bullet Ballet"...

While there is no confirmation that Governor Schwarzenegger will return for the fourth installment of the Terminator series the screenwriters of Rise of the Machines have gone ahead and written a script and Jonathan Mostow is clearing room on his schedule to film it. And as there is no word that AH-nold is coming back there is no word that Nick Stahl or Claire Daines have agreed to reprise their roles either.

via Empire Online.

So here it is. Thankfully its the largest version of the trailer I’ve seen. It has the “added bonus” of english text. It’s going to be cut differently though isn’t it?

I will wait for the U.K DVD then, whenever that may be released.

Here you go. A short while after the first blurred on-set shots and newspaper scans of decent images, we get the real thing.

They can be seen in bigger versions by clickin the previews over at Dark Horizons.

Personally, the moment i saw The Thing as a man in a rubber suit i got worried. Don’t expect this to turn out a classic comic book to film adaptation, but it’s great to see they’re giving it a go. I hope i am proved wrong when it comes out.

I took a quick look at the Rotten Tomatoes rating for Shaun of the Dead yesterday after the early reviews started to come in and was encouraged enough by that that I planned to write a little article labelling the film the genre’s best since Army of Darkness.  Well, the full slate of reviews are out now and after taking another look at the Tomatoes listing the scope of the article has expanded just a bit.  After doing a quick survey of all the major zombie related titles I could think of, and after sending Mack on a quest to dig up anything I may have forgotten about, Shaun of the Dead’s rating is bested by only two directors:  Sam Raimi and George Romero.

I think that now makes it fair to make this pronouncement:  Shaun of the Dead is an instant classic.  It is the most acclaimed genre film in roughly twenty years.  Go see it.  Right now.

The complete list of films, listed in descending order based on Rotten Tomatoe rankings, follows.  Feel free to chime in if I’ve left anybody out.

Continue Reading "Shaun of the Dead:  One of the Genre’s Greats?"...

I’m just going to go ahead and say this:  Unleashed will prove to be, by far, the best western produced film Jet Li has ever been involved in.  That’s not saying so much, really, but I’ll go one better and say that based on the footage I’ve seen so far it looks to be a very, very good film.  The first bit of footage to release was very underwhelming but the international trailer - which seems to have disappeared sometime recently - changed my mind in a hurry and now IGN Filmforce has gotten their hands on the Rogue Pictures trailer for the film and it’s even better than that international one was.

Li stars as Danny, a man who has lived his life imprisoned by a thoroughly creepy Bob Hoskins and forced into the ultra violent life of an illegal pit fighter.  He escapes his captor and is taken in by a blind man - Morgan Freeman - and some seemingly random teenage white girl.  Random teenage white girl still figures to be quite annoying but this thing scores large on all other fronts.  Check out the trailer here.