Whee!  A new Kung Fu Hustle trailer has turned up online, this one from Taiwan ... the dialog has all been left untouched, but the voice over is in English, which makes me think this may be an early version of what we’re going to see in theaters here.  Regardless, it’s a good one with plenty of action and effects sequences included.  Check it out here.  Word is this’ll hit US theaters in late March ...

Via City on Fire.

We’ve been tracking the progress of the Luc Besson-produced Banlieu 13 for a good while around here and for good reason:  this thing stars a couple of Frenchmen who just may be able to challenge Ong-Bak’s Tony Jaa for the ‘next international action star’ title ... these guys actually created their own martial art and, while I have no idea how useful it would be in an actual fight, it looks mighty fine on screen.

Well, things just got weird for this film ... the two largest theater complexes in Brussels have refused to screen it over security fears.  It’s rated for viewers under sixteen and has no political element at all:  it’s simply an adrenaline kicking action flick.  But despite the gentle rating and the fact that the film sold over half a million tickets in France through its opening week it will not be screened in Brussels because “it could provoke spectators to behave violently”.

Now I realize that Europeans have always viewed the North American casual attitude towards violence a little askance but this is well beyond anything I could have predicted and the producers of the film have now gone so far as to suggest what’s actually happening here is anti-French racism.  Check the full story here, and a previous story we ran with a stack of trailer links here.

Digital Spy reports that Godzilla Final Wars will premiere today in the US. Joy! If someone could just turn the big guy a bit to the north and send him up here that would be much appreciated. I don’t want to go to work today and I need someone to step on the auto shop.

Final Wars “will compile the fruits of 50 years’ work and put an end to the series”, the BBC reports Yukihko Mochida of Todo studio as saying. However, Mochida added that the creature may make a return if a “new generation of directors emerge or a brand new film-making method is found to create a whole new world.”

New generation of directors? Brand new film-making method? Gotta admit I’m not sure what Yukihko is reaching at here. Ryuhei Kitamura is pretty new to the film industry. Granted, he’s losing favor with Todd and things haven’t been the same since Versus but he’s still relatively new. What we don’t need is an McG type of Godzilla. And we can all agree that the Roland Emmerich Godzilla sucked nuts but perhaps with the advances in digital technology since ‘98 we can make a bigger and better Godzilla? But then you’re messing with tradition, man. Fanboys and girls will go nuts if you don’t go with the ‘Man in Suit’.

The Godzilla Final Wars site is here.

::: UPDATE :::

According to an article on MercuryNews.com Godzilla was also honored on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame with his own star before the movie premiered at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Los Angeles.

Quite bizzare news coming out of France this weekend. Variety reported that a Paris court had ruled that director Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s A Very Long Engagement is really a Hollywood movie. This ruling will deny the producers access to the Gallic subsidy system, CNC, The National Center for Cinematography. 2003 Productions, a French company acting as the delegated producer for Warner Bros. would have been eligible to claim a share of the box office for reinvestment in future French productions under this system.

But the court canceled the CNC approval, saying that 2003 Productions was created solely “to allow the company Warner Bros. France ... to benefit from financial help even though (the fund) is reserved for the European cinematographic industry.”

The head of 2003, Francis Boespflug, denieds the allegation that his company is a cover for Warner. “This film, which tells a French story, adapted from a French novel, filmed entirely in France, in French, with the participation of more than 2,000 French people, over thirty French actors and actresses and about 500 French technicians for 18 months, is suddenly no longer considered a French film!”

And it just gets worse for Jeunet and his crew. With this ruling the movie cannot compete in the Cesar awards - Gaul’s equivalent of the Oscars - except as a foreign film, and excludes its actors from being nominated.

Jeunet’s movie cannot even become a candidate for the prestigious Cannes Film Festival awards because it will have been screened outside its country of origin, France. Movies shown at Cannes must not have been screened outside the country where they originate ahead of the festival.

“A Very Long Engagement” also faces legal action from Corsicans angered by what they consider to be the movie’s demeaning treatment of the population from the French Mediterranean island.

Jeunet can still hope for honors in the United States but not the best foreign film Oscar, because the film did not open in France in time to qualify. It is, however, eligible for Oscar nominations for best picture, actress or director.

It’s not much of a silver lining but we’ll take what we can get.

via ComingSoon and Yahoo! Movies.

Of course, the date is “subject to change” but any exact date looks at least 99% firm. Momentum Asia, a new DVD label (it seems) from the people at Momentum Pictures, are set to release a whole load of titles during 2005. Oxide Pangs “The Tesseract”, as I mentioned recently, plus all these :

The Heroic Ones, Heroes Two, The Spiritual Boxer, Death Duel, Human Lanterns, The Magnificent Trio, The Trail of the Broken Blade, The Master, The Water Margin, All Men Are Brothers, Two Champions of Shaolin, Invincible Shaolin, Born to Fight.

...a lot of these are from the 30 titles Momentum have licensed from the Shaw Brothers Collection, the rest are fairly recognizable too. See a press release at DVDDebate and a news piece at DVDTimes.

You can never get enough Nicole Kidman in my books and if you get over the whole Mrs. Cruise thing, she’s been in some great films (Dogville, The Others, Moulin Rouge, Batman Forever - ok that last one was a lie).  So if seeing her naked in bath tub with a 10 year old boy in “Birth” didn’t really work for you, then your in luck, because she’s got at least two more coming out next year.

“The Interpreter” co-stars Sean Penn, the under used Catherine Keener as well as the movies director Sydney Pollack and revolves around a UN interpreter who over hears members of the UN plotting an assassination attempt. The trailer looks pretty straight forward, let’s just hope this one doesn’t fall into the fold of Pollack’s last directorial mission Random Hearts eh Dav-O!

“Bewitched” is the quite possibly a little too late big screen version of the television show that my brother, sister and I used to watch when we were home sick from school.  Nicole Kidman plays the Samantha role but the one saving grace of this film may be that Will Ferrell is Darren.  I don’t really know why this movie had to be made but any use of Will Ferrell is a good thing, but I’m still unsure of how much “Will Ferrell” will be in his role.

I’m downloading this as I type, but there is now a full length English subtitled trailer for Wong Kar Wai’s 2046 online, and in Quicktime format even ...

Ooh ... brief pause for viewing ... it’s purty.  Download it here.  I need to go fill in the gaps in my Wong Kar Wai collection ...

via MonkeyPeaches

With Dario Argento in a marked decline Italian film maker Eros Puglielli has decided to pick up the horror-thriller torch on behalf of his country with Eyes of Crystal and if the trailer’s any indication he’s put together one fine looking film.  Serial killers and taxidermy ... what’s not to like?  It may prove to be a disappointment on par with Matthieu Kassovitz’s gorgeous but hollow Crimson Rivers but I could look at these pictures all day ...

Check out the film’s website here, trailer (in Quicktime) here, and Screendaily’s review here.  You’ve gotta give that trailer a moment to get going ... the black screen at the beginning is intentional.  And it’s not particularly work safe ...

Yoichi Sai’s Blood and Bones - currently winning rave reviews around the world - has been picked up for distribution in North America and the UK by Tartan Films. 

How good is this film?  Screen Daily’s Mark Schilling - a man not prone to exaggeration - has labelled it by far the best film to come out Japan this year and a career best performance by ‘Beat’ Takeshi Kitano.  It sounds like a fairly bleak, brutal and uncompromising film; a bit of a surprise considering Sai’s last film was a massive box office success about a labrador retriever puppy.

You can check out Schilling’s review here and the film’s official website here.

Now that the Scorsese remake has undergone a complete makeover, even a name change, making it utterly unrecognizable by fans of the original saga, if there is any opportunity for you to see the original Infernal Affairs you must drop everything that you’re doing - be it delivering a baby, saving the world from global domination one tear drop at a time, or baking a cake - and go! Go now! Now we tell you!

Now I do apologize to the rest of the world because Infernal Affairs is playing at one of Toronto’s rep theatres The Royal this week. Click here for showtimes this week. If we got your hopes up and it’s not playing in your area - we’re sorry.

Here’s the premise. The film follows the parallel lives of Ming, a cop who secretly reports to ruthless Triad crime boss, Sam; and Yan, an undercover police officer who poses as a Triad member in the gang. The only person who knows Yan’s true identity is his mentor Superintendent Wong. When Wong’s officers come face to face with Sam’s gang, both leaders realize there are moles in their midst. Soon Yan and Ming must track each other down, leading to an inevitable confrontation.

The Infernal Affairs trilogy is one of the finest contributions to the crime genre in recent years. You really should give it a go.

And if you want your very own copy to cradle and love you can order it here. Don’t let the cover scare you. We think it blows too.

A Charlize Theron fansite has posted the first image of the lanky lass in her Aeon Flux kit. It may be scanned from an unknown magazine but it loses none of it’s… uh… effectiveness.

The link above goes straight to the fansite or click here to see the first pic of Charlize as Aeon Flux.

Your cold shower awaits you!

Haven’t seen enough of the “Blade: Trinity” footage online yet?  Well lucky you then because here’s 9 new clips to run through your little brain until you can watch the movie completely on a screen somewhere. Sorry but, even though it’s a French website, no Jessica Biel nudity is included.

Some of the clips have footage from the trailers and countless other clips released but with more footage included from the scene.  The clips don’t get away from showing just how crap Jessica Biel fights though (which I’ve said from the start) - I wonder if the director just thought to himself during filming - “Damn, is it too late to get Neve Campbell” (that’s a joke). It reminds me of the time I beat up Jason Georgio when I was 11 with a bag of Oreo cookies on my lawn - a complete waste of violence.

So check ‘em out for yourself and feed the need for vampires, industrial dance music, violence and silver.  “Blade: Trinity” is sneaking it’s way into theatres December 8, 2004.

Via Film Rotation.

The recent USA DVD of Oxide Pangs “The Tesseract” has only just popped onto the shelves in the USA, and so here’s a chance to see the artwork for the UK DVD, due in a few months time.

By the way : Oxide Pang = “The Eye”, which was quite good. I watched it quite happily, and although it has it faults, it wasn’t in the direction. I think Todd knows more about this, so perhaps it’s worht searching the archives if you want more info on the film itself.

OK, I know the pic to the left is tiny. For a much bigger pop-up version click here. From DVDtimes.

The Ultimate Edition : for those of you who want to buy the film twice, for the sake of a nice box.

Anyhow, opinions aside, I must admit that at least it is a very nice box… And now its evident you’re going to get more than you initially imagined. It’s clear though, that it’s geared towards those who’ve already seen the film, once you see how that copper box comes packaged. Lovely purple carboard box for it to “sleep in” too.

The origin of these pics is a Korean DVD sellers site, and just incase the listing goes missing i’ve copied the pictures out and put small versions below (so click to view the extended entry), or you can look at the larger versions here. Warning though, they are large files at that site, and I don’t know if they took them or are simply putting them up.

Continue Reading "Oldboy. Ultimate Edition. 18 New Shots Of Packaging."...

Looking to view something other than the last minute oscar film throw out on christmas day this year? Well your in luck because Dimension/Miramax are releasing (supposedly - we know how often Miramax changes release dates) spanish shot, english spoke “Darkness” on christmas day. 

I didn’t hear about this movie until I just watched the trailer, so after careful, scienctific research (ie, called my mom), she told me this is quite a creppy flick that’s been sitting on the shelves for some time now.  In 1964, 6 children vanish from a house never to be seen again, leaving the house empty until 40 years later when a new family moves into the house and they begin to experience why it’s been empty for 40 years.  Really? Who have thought?

The film stars Anna Paquin, Fele Martinez (who was great in the upcoming “Bad Education”), Lena Olin and a group of “hey, I’ve een you before in….” spanish actors.  The trailer does seem promising - though, can anyone pick up the total rip off shot of “The Shinning” in it other than me?  The bad thing is I heard it was re-edited so as not to get the MPAA “R” rating and go for the more family oriented, christmas heart warming “PG-13”.  I’m sure after christmas day though, every parent will be wishing someone will come and steal their children away. 

Anyone else know anything more than me about this one?  Let us know.  Please, I have children to feed (well, if they don’t vanish that is).

Seriously, I don’t have kids.  I’m enough of one for everyone around me. Jerks! Just watch the trailer here ok!