(Update: this post was on top of the page for most of the day, but it won’t be any longer as all pictures have been guessed already!)
 
Frankly, I don’t know who Mr. deMille is and I don’t know what this whole quiz thing is about.
All I know is that any excuse to re-post the picture on the left is a good one.
 
Seriously though, I like seeing Zhao Wei and not just for the most obvious (visible) reason. I think she happens to be a good actress and has terrific comedic timing. But yes, she’s hot, although seeing her face in a movie will in general make me smile rather than drool.
 
Funnily enough I haven’t heard her sing yet, even though that was the thing which started her career (well, that and the pin-up modeling…).
Zhao Wei, or rather Vicky Zhao for us English-speakers, is soon to be seen in the title-role of the Chinese epic “Mulan” and next year she stars opposite Donnie Yen in Daniel Lee’s “14 Blades”.
 
Yes, you can rest assured I’ll be watching both…
 
So once again I’m going to use a turn in the Twitch-O-Meter to do a gallery of 5 close-ups of one of my favorite thespians. Guess which 5 movies they’re from.
No competition, no prizes, just for fun, try to see how far you get without using IMDB.

What do you get when you mix “Twelve Monkeys” with “Four Weddings and a Funeral”?  If you are a director without a budget and you liked the structure of “Memento” you might end up with something like Bob Gebert’s “11 Minutes Ago”.
 
His film is a romantic comedy with a time travel twist, which shows the blossoming love between two people who meet each other in a series of eleven-minute-long segments. The order of these segments differs for each of them yet this doesn’t hinder the development of their relationship.
In fact, this accelerates it…
 
Shot chronologically and in a single day but shown out-of-order through the eyes of a time traveler, “11 Minutes Ago” could be anything from convoluted comedy, pretentious arthouse experiment, ugly no-budget sci-fi or just incomprehensible dreck.
But instead the film cleverly focuses on its main characters, and becomes a pleasant little affair that is mostly successful and quite charming.
 
The movie did some time-traveling itself: the feature was circulating on festivals in 2007 already. In fact, since February of this year it is even out on DVD in the US.Yet as far as I know the 2009 Imagine Festival in Amsterdam was the first time it was shown in The Netherlands and we never reported about it before, so here follows a full review.
 
(More after the break!)

Continue Reading "Imagine this! 11 MINUTES AGO Review"...

Two things I have to say about the new Ponyo trailer Disney just released.
 
1: What stunningly beautiful imagery !!!
Nice choice of shots, the trailer doesn’t give everything away but demonstrates just how wicked the animation is in this thing.
And in HD too, so I can watch it in near-infinite sharpness as often as I like till the BluRay is released. Bliss…
 
2: What the hell is Liam Neeson saying?

“The whole world is out of balance. Ponyo, you have to trust me! You’re the only one who can save the planet !! Do it now !!!”

And BOOM! Away she goes, off to save the world… or so it seems in the trailer.
 
Huh?? That makes absolutely zero sense. And I have seen the film, even! Ponyo as a trained superheroine, on a mission?
Has Disney done a complete re-imagining of the plot, using vastly altered text? Or was the marketing department as ehm… creative as when they made that computer-enhanced poster for the film with the “Finding Nemo” font (which shows up in this trailer as well)?
 
Anyway, the one thing the trailer DOES correctly convey is that this movie is gorgeous.
Find it at the Ponyo website over at Apple…

Seems I cannot visit our forum reviews anymore these days without seeing a new review worth putting in the spotlight. Do I even write stuff myself anymore, except introductions? Sigh.
Today’s contribution is from loyal forumer Sitenoise, and he has seen a Korean movie that he wrote quite an intimate review for…
 
The stage is your’s, Sitenoise!
 
This is probably too mainstream for Twitch, but I reckon some will like it.
More Than Blue (Seulpeumboda Deo Seulpeun Iyagi), the directorial debut of romantic poet Won Tae-yeon, is in the same league as “A Moment to Remember” ... if you like this kind of stuff. It uses pretty much the standard terminal disease of the week Korean melodrama template: the first half is fun and lighthearted (to set context and set up the sadness); in the first two-thirds of the second half, we watch the knife go in; and in the final third of the second half, the knife is unmercifully twisted.
 
 
(More after the break)

Continue Reading "MORE THAN BLUE Review"...

God know’s how many Twitch writers “work” on the always thoroughly Twitch reported Toronto International Film Festival. Shortly before that party starts though, another one takes place at the other side of the ocean: la Mostra Internationale d’Arte Cinematografica, also known as the Venice International Film Festival. GhibliWorld’s Peter van der Lugt will be present to cover it for Twitch, and this is the first news he provides us with:
 
This year Venice, already in its the 66th edition and prolonged with yet another festival direction by Marco Müller, will be handing out life time achievement awards to John Lasseter and the other Pixar directors. Furthermore announced are world premiere screenings of “Toy Story” and “Toy Story 2” in 3D, excerpt previews of “The Princess and the Frog” and an extensive Disney • Pixar Animation Master Class. The rest of Venice’s program is yet to be revealed, except for Venice’s opening film, which was announced yesterday. BAARÌA, the latest film directed and written by Academy Award winner Giuseppe Tornatore (“Cinema Paradiso”, “Malèna”), will open the film fest on September 2nd .
 
BAARÌA,  to screen in competition to contend for a Golden Lion, is not only the Italian film industry’s most costly production for many years, it is the first Italian film to open the Venice Film Festival for two decades. According to Tornatore:

” BAARÌA is an ancient sound, a magic formula, a key. The only one capable of opening the rusty box in which the meaning of my most personal film is hidden. An amusing and wistful story, of great loves and irresistible utopian dreams. A legend thronged with heroes… But BAARÌA is also the name of a Sicilian town where the people’s lives unfold along the main street. A few hundred metres, no more. But if you walk up and down it for years, you can learn what the whole world will never be able to teach you”.

 
The 66th edition of the Venice International Film Festival is to be held at the Venice Lido from 2 to 12 September 2009. A behind the scenes look of “BAARÌA” can be found here.

As a Twitch-O-Meter, this post will remain up on top of the page for nearly one day. There might be newer posts below this, so don’t forget to take a look!
 
So… ten years ago we Star Wars fans were picking up the pieces of what had been a close-knit community a scant few weeks earlier. “Episode One: The Phantom Menace” had arrived and had split the fanbase into more different factions than “Return of the Jedi” had ever managed. Forget whether or not you liked Ewoks, now we had Jar-Jar Binks to worry about…
 
Today, we have groups of fans being “Lucas Apologists” , or “Prequel Deniers”, and even the dreaded “Lucas-Raped-My-Childhood Victims” (although these can again be split into “Prequel Caused”,  “Special-Edition Caused” and “DVD-Release Caused”...).
 
Me, I’m a staunch fan of the holy trilogy. The original first one from the Seventies and Eighties. Han shot first, dammit!
And while I like bits and pieces of the prequels and am glad to have seen them all in the cinema, I do also think they are staggering disappointments that don’t hold a candle to what had come before.
 
There are many reasons for this, but I’ll run with a fun one today and do a what-if concerning the director’s side. What if George Lucas had concentrated on the look of the film as much as he did, but had allowed someone else to direct? Someone who is a better so-called “actor’s director” than Lucas?
 
After the break is my list of directors who I’d have liked to tackle the prequels… and feel free to join in with your own choices!

Continue Reading "The prequels: what if Lucas hadn’t directed them himself?"...

It seems you can’t safely travel through our forum anymore without stumbling on brilliantly written reviews. Again I lift one of these gems into the spotlight of the main page, and it’s no surprise the writer is Eight Rooks. We have used his reviews several times before already, most recently with ”City of Life and Death”.
 
This time he tackles the Japanese television series “Kaiba”, directed by Masaaki Yuasa who we all know and love for the Studio 4C movie “Mindgame”.
 
Once again the stage is all your’s, Eight Rooks!
 
 
KAIBA
 
For the love of God would someone please license this thank you.

I dunno, I’d just been meaning to write something about it lately, and you guys do profess to like Masaaki Yuasa. It’s an extraordinary animated series. “Kemonozume” was a disappointment, to a degree - why the ero episode? Why?  - but this was just pure magic from start to finish, and pretty much proves that quote of Oshii’s about the original designs for “Ghost in the Shell” (“Cute characters can’t tell serious stories”) was complete and utter nonsense.
 
(More, MUCH more after the break!)

Continue Reading "A review for Masaaki Yuasa’s KAIBA"...

Why oh why the hell did I go see Paul Solet’s baby-horror thriller“Grace”? I must have been the worst possible audience for it!
 
Thing is, from the moment I saw this film scheduled in the Imagine Festival Amsterdam programme I wanted to know how it ended. I wanted to know the whole plot, exactly how horrifying it was, how funny, how respectful, how DIS-respectful, if a point was being made, or if it was solely for entertainment’s sake…
 
Basically what I wanted was for someone ELSE to go watch the movie and then tell me all about it. Alas, I couldn’t find anyone so I had to go myself. Them’s the breaks…
 
Why was I such a bad audience for this? Well…
 
I can deal with most kinds of horror easily, and gleefully watch people stare in astonishment at some of the titles in my DVD-collection. Yet there are some weak spots in my armor, some raw open nerves so to speak. Certain kinds of violence against women (or rather, how that is handled in films) get me enraged in ways that take all the fun out of watching such a movie. Violence against babies double so (that Steven Seagal trailer joke was totally lost on me).
And pregnancy horror too has always been a sore spot with me. Lately this distaste has grown FAR worse for reasons I’ll explain later, but I’ve always thought it was too easy a target, a button that was too obvious to push.
 
But Paul Solet ain’t pushing that button. With “Grace”, he’s punching it.
 
More after the break…

Continue Reading "Imagine this! GRACE Review"...

When I found this review in our forum I had no choice but to move it to the main page. It’s not the first time that loyal forumer Eight Rooks wrote something of such high quality that we just had to put it up here for all to see, but this time he’s in even better form than usual.
His review of “City of Life and Death” is… well, read for yourself.
The stage is yours, Eight Rooks:
 
 
CITY OF LIFE AND DEATH
 
The Rape of Nanking remains one of the most notorious war crimes in history, taking place over several weeks during the Second World War from late 1937 to early 1938 when the Japanese army captured the then Chinese capital. After entering the city the Japanese troops are widely held to have embarked on a period of sustained atrocities against the survivors, looting, raping, carrying out summary executions and wholesale massacres of both prisoners of war and the civilian population. Debate over the precise number of casualties, the nature of the alleged atrocities and the reliability of various witnesses continues to this day; while few Japanese deny anything happened at all, their government has yet to issue an official apology and those right-wing factions who insist the Nanking “Incident” remains a fabrication concocted by the Chinese do command some level of political backing.
 
With this in mind, one could be forgiven for going into “City of Life and Death” with some pretty strong preconceptions. Mainland Chinese domestic cinema is not short of blatant propaganda demonizing the country’s aggressors; something like “On The Mountain of Taihang” is enough to make Michael Bay look like a paragon of subtlety, and even Feng Xiaogang’s “The Assembly” is easily interpreted as a strident call to arms. City… dramatizes a period in history only (very) vocal niche concerns insist never took place, where compelling evidence suggests thousands of people suffered appalling brutality on a daily basis. Surely this provides some excuse for the expected syrupy melodrama, stoic nationalist sermonizing and outpouring of collective grief?
 
Yet startlingly, “City of Life and Death” aims much higher than this.
 
(continued after the break…)

Continue Reading "CITY OF LIFE AND DEATH Review"...

Jonathan Mostow is one of those directors I keep track of. I may not be overwhelmed with what he did with the previous installment of the Terminator franchise, but even that one had plenty of memorable images attached. As for his other movies “U-571” and “Breakdown”, those are lodged firmly in the “very enjoyable if not brilliant” part of my mental archive.
 
And his next is the sci-fi thriller “Surrogates”, starring Bruce Willis and based on the graphic novel by Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele. It’s about a nearby future where everyone does their daily activities by using robotic doppelgangers, operated live through the internet, thereby keeping your own original body safe at home from accidents, diseases or repetitive strain injury. An intriguing concept where cops can keep being shot without actually dying, and where being run over by a bus only means a temporary wait for the insurance to pay for a new body.
 
Bruce plays the detective who finds out that there is a problem with the interface between human brain and surrogate robot body, and that knowledge causes him to stop using his robot body.
He takes his biological one outdoors for the first time in years to stop a conspiracy and this ups the stakes, because being run over by a bus or being shot is now suddenly a one-time-only experience again…
 
This might be an “I Robot” surrogate (only with Bruce Willis) or it might be something else. As long as it’s very enjoyable I won’t mind, although greatness would be much appreciated.
 
The trailer is out and sells the concept nicely.
Find it after the break!

Continue Reading "Trailer for SURROGATES online"...

Jean Claude van Damme hasn’t really been lacking in attention here at Twitch lately. That is all due to his eyecatching performance in mock-biopic-cum-hostage-thriller “JCVD” of course, but only time will tell if he will be able to fully cash in on his current newfound arthouse credibility.
 
Jean Claude at least used his current momentum to direct his next movie “The Eagle’s Path” himself, but it’s never safe to put all your eggs into one basket so he’s been shopping around for interesting projects.
His choices so far seem intriguing, especially if you believe the rumors of what he turned down already, but he wants to show his fan base (old and new) that he is able to do more genres than he has been getting credit for so far.
 
In his own words:

“This summer I will make a new movie with a famous director called ‘Weapon’. After that I will make a horror movie called ‘The Breed’. Its a great story, great script with true emotion. I want to show the fans I am transferable. I wanted to make a horror movie a few years back but the script was weak and had no direction.
 
Breed is different, it’s set in a village where strange things happen… You know what? Let the movie speak for itself!”

 
We don’t know where his proposed fighting flick “The Pit Bull” will fit in this schedule, but he sure seems busy these days!
 
This could go each and either way, but credit where credit is due: with “JCVD” Jean Claude showed he is not afraid of taking chances, and that these sometimes do pay off.
Let’s wait and see…

Last year Todd pointed us towards some trailers for work from new talent Josh Danger from Giant Killer Presents, a really small indie outfit that creates movies that have virtually no budget but look mighty good nonetheless.
 
Well, Josh is very much alive and kicking, and has now put one of his shorts on the site in its entirety. No pop-up ads, no registration, no hooks: Josh Danger is just eager to show you the film he’s made, all 33 minutes of it.
The title is “Timekiller” and you can check out for yourself why we like this guy.

As part of their “Hungry Ghost” segment this year, the International Film Festival Rotterdam programmed Thai horror anthology “4BIA” (pronounced “four-bia” or “phobia”). And for good reason: this movie actually does involve ghosts in each of its four segments. And all are hungry for something…
 
The IFFR is only once a year however, so by the time they can show a film it sometimes has already been released on DVD in its home country. This was also the case with “4BIA”, so immediately after I saw it I ordered the first English-friendly version I could find. In this case, the Hong Kong Region 3 DVD from distributor Panasia.
 
In short: I liked the film a lot (otherwise I wouldn’t have ordered it on DVD) and the Hong Kong disc is amazing, though not flawless.
 
A longer version with many pictures can be found after the break…

Continue Reading "IFFR 2009: 4BIA Review (and Hong Kong R3 DVD review too…)"...

Because we can never get enough Giger-inspired artwork: this is the new one-sheet for Gabriel Cowan’s sci-fi thriller “Growth”.
 
Well, the poster looks tasty. Gabriel is a musician-turned-director who was responsible for last year’s thriller “Breathing Room”, and here he is directing his own script. Mircea Monroe (who will also be in the upcoming “Tekken” movie) stars.
The release date is unknown (or at least undisclosed) as of yet.
 
 
You can find a synopsis and a far, FAR larger version of the poster after the break!

Continue Reading "One-sheet teaser for Gabriel Cowan’s GROWTH"...

Sacre bleu! Todd is over in Cannes and he keeps emailing us the damnedest bits of news.
 
Try this one for size: Terry Gilliam has teamed up with producer Jeremy Thomas to start filming on… “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote”!
 
Well… they’re giving it a decent try anyway. Fingers crossed for these guys.

As anyone who has seen the documentary “Lost in La Mancha” knows, Gilliam tried to make this film before with Johnny Depp as the star. But everything that could go wrong, went wrong. Sure, some of the mishaps could have been avoided (although that is always easy to say with hindsight) but others seemed like straight acts of God himself, damning Gilliam, his film and anyone working on it. In the end it became hopeless to try and keep investors willing to spend more on it, and the project died.
 
We already knew Terry Gilliam is both stubborn and brave. I just pray that this once, he’ll be lucky too…