Few films from the Bollywood system have arrived this year with as much advance hype as Tashan. Its director, Vijay Krishna Acharya, makes his debut here after writing the scripts for the mega-successful Dhoom franchise. Its headline cast is pretty stellar, starting with Saif Ali Khan and Kareena Kapoor (reteaming here after a stellar showing in Omkara), and rounded out by Akshay Kumar (the man who is Khiladi) and Anil Kapoor (Bollywood’s resilient, jowly ham). The all-important songs are by the venerable Vishal-Shekhar team. The promotion is everywhere, though cleverly it has mostly focused on the soundtrack. Actual footage of the film has been scarce prior to release. There’s a certain swagger to this tactic, a confidence borne out by a recent interview with Khan, in which he called it “similar to the way Led Zeppelin released their fourth album.” The recently beleaguered Yash Raj production house, and the Indian press, saw this as the surest thing for miles.
No such luck. The critics have been less than kind, but popular opinion has been positively venomous. Comments on IMDB have ranged from the disappointed to the utterly murderous (a kind sample: “Tashan sucks from top to bottom”), and a poll on Planet Bollywood has 60% responding unfavorably. But what of the receipts? Bad news there as well. On a cost of 40 crores, the film has thus far failed to recoup even half. In short: a trainwreck on every level.
Here’s the dirty secret, though: Tashan is, though flawed, hugely enjoyable. Imagine if Tony Scott cleaned up his editing act and decided to make a musical. Tashan would be the result. That’s actually a recommendation.
More after the break.
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Are the killers lesbian? Are the vampires? Does it matter? We’ve mentioned this one before but upcoming UK horror comedy Lesbian Vampire Killers is back on the radar due to principal photography launching May 19th, which is next week. Hurray!
Surprising news here: Word is out that Fox has pulled the plug on the McG produced American remake of classic UK sitcom Spaced. Hurray! Be a good boy or girl and buy the North American DVD release of the original show when it hits this summer.
The web monkey has been keeping tabs on upcoming comedy Hank And Mike for a good while now. The film is something of a local product, a feature length expansion of a short film by a pair of young Canadian film makers, and the premise is just stellar. Easter bunnies, unemployed and unhappy. The first official teaser has just arrived and it lives up to the premise. You’ll find it in the Twitch Player below the break.
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A trailer for God’s Puzzle, the latest from Japanese maverick Takashi Miike, first appeared online back in April but at the time it was available only in a horrible, postage stamp sized format and I’ve been anxiously awaiting a decent version of the trailer ever since. Well, it has arrived, with a full trailer and a teaser now available in a size you don’t need a magnifying glass to appreciate. The film - the story of a college age slacker thrust into a relationship with an attractive but withdrawn genius - looks to be by far the most mainstream friendly thing Miike has done in years, possibly his most mainstream film ever, but hey ... it’s Miike and that makes it worth at least taking a peek at. You’ll find both trailers in the Twitch Player below the break, but be aware that you’ll need to wait through a brief interview with the man himself before the main trailer begins. And, for the record, every trailer for every Miike film made from here on out needs to start with that opening graphic ... brilliant ...
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Well, it’s far more about the film makers thn the film but it’s the first motion on the Tokyo! front in quite some time which makes it a happy thing. Tokyo! is the upcoming three part anthology project from directors Bong Joon Ho, Leos Carax and Michel Gondry - each of whom tell an odd little story set in Japan’s capitol. The first teaser has arrived on the film’s official Japanese website and while it is built largely of behind the scenes footage of the projects’ three directors it’s at least something. I caught some scenes from Bong’s section of the film at the European Film Market and this thing cannot arrive fast enough ... You can find the teaser in the Twitch Player below the break.
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Ask those in the know about current Filipino film and they’ll tell you that director Quark Henares is one of the up and comers of the independent scene. Henares has dabbled in mainstream film but his heart belongs with independent work, which is where he does his strongest stuff. His current project is titled Rakenrol, a rock and roll inspired comedy-drama that looks to borrow more from Kevin Smith than from anything currently happening in the Philippines. We’ve just gotten an early look at the first trailer for the film - English subtitles included - which you’ll find in the Twitch Player below the break.
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The characters of debuting writer/director Thomas Callaway’s rustic noir Broke Sky exist in a world perched somewhere between everyday reality and a slightly heightened, off-kilter pastiche of rural Americana. They booze it up at the local saloon, obsess over talent pageants, and dream of movin’ on up from a single- to a double-wide trailer; they also find themselves caught up in murder and near-operatic levels of personal disaster. Against the odds Callaway’s script (co-written with four other writers) melds its incongruent elements into a subversive, satisfying whole. Broke Sky assembles a unique world through cleverly deconstructing overworked genres, resulting in an original and highly rewarding low-key thriller.
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As tempting as it is to label Michel Hazanavicius’ recent French spy comedy a parody of 1970’s globe hopping spy flicks – and, yes, I am absolutely thinking of a certain high profile Ian Fleming creation – doing so would somehow seem to lessen what OSS 117 really is. Parody these days means the endless parade of Scary Movie flicks or, in this particular realm, another stab at Austin Powers, films that poke fun at a genre from the outside looking in. What Hazanavicius has created, however, is something entirely different: OSS 117 is every inch a loving recreation of the films it is looking back on. Rather than make fun of a genre everyone involved here clearly loves – and loves dearly – they have instead brought a popular literary character, equal parts Connery era Bond and Sellers Pink Panther antics, to the screen in an astonishingly note perfect recreation of the films of the era. If not for the satiric edge laced throughout the film’s plot – a savage knock on western meddling in and ignorance of middle eastern affairs – this could easily be a lost treasure of the seventies.
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Coming at your faster than a bolt of lightning, the Wachowski Brothers Speed Racer kicks cinema into the 5th dimension and is 10,000 volts of gooey fun at breakneck racing speeds of visual excitement that the entire family can enjoy. This is an explosion of eye-popping Busby Berkeley meets Stanley Kubrick meets anime styled techno delirium that will leave your eyes and brain feeling like it has just been hit by a tornadic sugar high (view image gallery). In some respects it should have been easy to see the Wachowski Brothers were heading in this direction with very anime influenced scenes from their previous movies and importantly of note here is they pick up their original Matrix magic wand, leaving their Reloaded and Revolutions hats behind.
From retro futuristic designs and its symphonic techno color overdrive, the anime universe of Speed Racer gets translated perfectly to the big screen. Make no mistake the Wachowski Brothers have turned anime into live action visual opera that promises to be the benchmark and standard all other type of adaptations will be judged against for the foreseeable future. Live action anime cinema has been born with this visual feast that rivals anything that has ever come before it in history. I didn’t like the upcoming trailers (absolutely hated them) or anything I had seen for it walking into it, so believe me I was very surprised at how well this movie turned out. Cue your inner disco monkey, it’s time to have some summer movie time fun!
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Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, I proudly present to you one of the official Best Things Ever: outer space Nazis.
We have been anxiously awaiting the arrival of some footage from upcoming Finnish sci-fi comedy Iron Sky from the day we first caught wind of it seemingly ages ago. We’ve hosted the very first concept art from the film, had a few chats with the director and production team and just generally been sold on the concept from the word go. And here it is: in 1945, realizing that the war was taking a turn for the worst, the Nazis sent a collection of their best and brightest to establish a secret base on the moon where they would nurse themselves back to strength and develop their powerful military technology until the were ready to return. That day will arrive in 2018.
After months of work and fine tuning to get everything just right the teaser arrived on YouTube yesterday, which seems a shameful way to treat something as visually impressive as this. Apparently the director agrees as he’s just passed us a MUCH higher quality version of that same promo spot to load in to the Twitch Player. And, hot damn, the wait has been worth every second. This thing is spectacular, from the detailed CG work, to the spectacular production design, to that weirdly mournful title song - one that wouldn’t be out of place in a Bond film. Everything about this thing is absolutely perfect. You’ll find the teaser in the Twitch Player below the break.
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There’s dark humor, and then there’s the obsidian comedy that pervades Aleksei Balabanov’s Cargo 200, a look at slices of Russia’s population as the country took its first awkward steps away from Communism toward Capitalism in the mid’ 80s. Filtered through the grim details surrounding a series of true-life murders and kidnappings committed by a local police captain and brimming with allegorical characters representing a spread of personalities and institutions, calling the film densely-layered would be gross understatement. A solid grasp of near-term Russian history isn’t required to appreciate what Cargo 200 (the clandestine code for dead Russian soldiers shipped home from Afghanistan) has to offer, but there’s little doubt a great deal more stands to be gained by viewers familiar with the country’s tumultuous turns in recent decades.
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Hurray for puppet films coming back in to style! They’re goofy! They’re fun! One just topped the box office chart in Chile! This one is Carsten og Gitte’s Filmballade and it first came to our attention because it comes from Denmark’s Copenhagen Bombay production outfit, a company overseen by Anders Morgenthaler whose animated anti-porn revenge film Princess we covered extensively around these parts.
This one is obviously much more kid friendly than Princess and features new shorts in a variety of styles by a handful of Danish animators, with Morgenthaler himself contributing one segment - Karla Nielsen, Rikke Hallund, Sabine Ravn, Mette Skov, and Esben Toft Jacobsen are the other contributors. It can’t be all doom and gloom and violence around here all the time, so check out the trailer in the Twitch Player below the break for chirpy happiness, bright colors and popcorn induced trauma.
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It was less than a week ago that we first posted news of Kamigakari, the new hair cutting comedy from Minoru Kawasaki - the director of cult hits like The Calamari Wrestler, Beetle The Horn King, Everything But Japan Sinks, Executive Koala and the upcoming Guilala revival film. This one’s a good bit different for Kawasaki, the action all revolving around an unorthodox hair stylist and the humor looks a good bit more subdued than in his past work. I’m not all that sure I want a more sedate and mature Kawasaki myself, check out the brand new trailer int he Twitch Player below the break and throw your two cents in ...
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Besides stuff from Hollywood, Bollywood too have its own share of highly anticipated blockbusters, and from some of the trailers shown, I’m hyped to watch them too. Tashan was billed as one of THE most highly anticipated for 2008, but I was quite surprised at the lower than low turnout at the cinemas. When I watched Jodha Akbar, it was a full house, but it wasn’t so for Tashan, and I was a little worried.
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