Film Category
Includes cinema reviews and trailers for upcoming films. A digest of the best and worst interviews on movies and cinema.
Acting masterclass: how to eat an egg like Faye Dunaway, Robert De Niro and Paul Newman
IN this acting masterclass, we look at how to eat a hard boiled egg.
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Diana the movie: brace yourselves for car crash cinema
LAST night’s premier of the Princess Diana romance featured no Royals, no Paul Burrell, no Tony Blair, no white Fiat Uno, three members of the SAS, Mr and Mrs Grassy Knoll, not Princess Diana’s lover Hasnat Khan (“It is based on gossip and Diana’s friends talking about a relationship that they didn’t know much about”), lots of paparazzi, “a squirmingly embarrassing script” (Times) , “car crash cinema” (Guardian) and Kathy Lette holding up a bag that we hope had a sick-proof lining loaded with irony:
Posted: 6th, September 2013 | In: Celebrities, Film | Comment
Princess Diana gives five stars to Naomi Watts’ Her Last Love film
NAOMI WATTS is plugging her new film, Her Last Love, the story of her rumoured love affair with Dr Hasnat Khan:
“There were definitely moments when I felt Diana’s presence – I dreamed about her a lot, too, and that’s a first,’ says Naomi Watts. ‘I kept wondering to myself: “Would she have liked it?” So I found myself constantly asking for her permission to carry on. I had saturated myself with Diana and her life and I felt this enormous responsibility of playing this iconic woman. It felt like I was spending a lot of time with her. There was one particular moment when I felt her permission was granted. That won’t sound right in print, I know.”
Indeed.
Posted: 6th, September 2013 | In: Celebrities, Film, Royal Family | Comment
Leads cast in Fifty Shades Of Grey… so start imagining them naked now
GOOD news everybody! The lead roles of Fifty Shades of Grey have been announced! You haven’t heard of them, but no matter, because the main bit of their job is to do a lot of sex, which is nice.
For those who must know, the British Charlie Hunnam and US actress Dakota Johnson will be taking their clothes off and talking to each other with clunky euphemisms, while Mumset tut about it all, before secretly frigging their collective pelvis off.
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RIP Jean E Hill – John Waters’ Desperate Living star
JEAN E. Hill has died. The actress most memorably appeared on greeting cards and played Grizelda Brown in John Waters’ Desperate Living:
Posted: 24th, August 2013 | In: Celebrities, Film | Comment
Worinelve! The latest instalment of Wolverine, apparently…
DOES anyone fancy going to the cinema to watch Human Ghjac in the latest blockbuster, Worinelve? Obviously, you haven’t heard of either of those things, but look at the photo of this prime cock-up and you’ll learn more.
And there we have it, a bus-sized balls-up where one advertiser will be annoyed at Stagecoach making a hash of their paid-for advertising… although, with this surely on the cusp of going viral, maybe we’ll see all future film ads being garbled in such a manner.
Now, where can we get Human Ghjac’s autograph?
Francis Ford Coppola’s original cast list for The Godfather
AROUND 1970: Francis Ford Coppola produced this potential cast list for The Godfather.
Posted: 27th, July 2013 | In: Film, Flashback | Comment (1)
The best British Jaegers – the Pacific Rim challenge
WHAT if Pacific Rim was set in Britain? Yeah. Pacific Rim? As if. First off, no-one would have been able to stop sniggering. And second, well, the sniggering right. But let’s imagine. In the film the characters are called Jaegers. (Yeah. Like the middle-class, provincial fashion outlets). Almost all these Jaegers have two two-noun names created in a Tokyo language school randomiser: Brawler Yukon; Coyote Tango, Solar Prophet and the excellent Gipsy Danger.
Warner Bros’ build-your-own-Jaeger toy lets you create your own:
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Classic movies sing Ice Ice Baby
LIKE classic movies? Like Vanilla Ice’s Ice Ice Baby? Of course you do. You’re not an idiot.
Well, how about both at the same time, with a fun mashup which gets Ghostbusters, Howard The Duck, Conan The Barbarian and more, rapping along to the famous hit?
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The six best photos of Mel Smith using the European Film Award as a hairy phallus
RIP Mel Smith. The British comic marvel died aged just 60. The star of Not the Nine O’Clock News and Alas Smith and Jones, directed the Mr Bean film and created Talkback, now one of the UK’s big producers of comedy TV.
In 1998, Mel was at a photocall at London’s Old Vic theatre to trail his appearance as a presenter of the European Film Awards. He’s presented the awards a further two occasions. Yep. Having tuned their trophy into a phallus, they invited him back:
WITH FRAGRANT FRENCH ACTRESS CAROLE BOUQUE
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Posted: 22nd, July 2013 | In: Celebrities, Film | Comment
Railway Children gets first complaint in 42 years
WE all like complaining, but would you moan about something that is 42 years old? The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) has received its first ever complaint for The Railway Children, which was first aired in 1970.
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Michael Caine explains the power of blinking in this acting workshop
MICHAEL Caine shares with us the power of not blinking,. He keeps on going…. and going… in this acting workshop:
That’s an extract from a film acting class.. You can watch it all:
Posted: 9th, July 2013 | In: Celebrities, Film, Flashback | Comment
Hollywood: How the Zombie beat The Cowboy
TRUE **it. The Zombie beats The Cowboy:
“Sometime in 2011 the total number of film plots with the keyword ‘zombie’ passed the number of film plots with the keyword ‘cowboy,’ according to the Internet Movie Database. One might argue that the zombie has become the great American archetype of the postmodern era, as the cowboy was the American archetype a century ago. With the release of Brad Pitt’s $200 million zombie epic World War Z, what used to be the stuff of low-budget shockers has entered the American cultural mainstream. Therein lies a lesson.”
The 1982 Blade Runner convention reel
BLADE RUNNER is one of my all-time favourite films. The director’s cut is even better. Future Noir:
One of the Blade Runner Convention Reels featuring interviews with Ridley Scott, Syd Mead and Douglas Trumbull about making Blade Runner universe. This 16 mm featurette, made by M. K. Productions in 1982, is specifically designed to circulate through the country’s various horror, fantasy and science fiction conventions.
Psycho slashed: Alfred Hitchcock’s classic in 24 seconds, 60 seconds and 11seconds
DOUGLAS Gordon’s version of Psycho last 24 hours. Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film also inspired Chris Bors to adapt the movie. He compacted the action into 24 seconds:
24 Second Psycho appropriates the entire Alfred Hitchcock moviePsycho and condenses it into twenty-four seconds. Tweaking the concept of artist Douglas Gordons 24 Hour Psycho, where Hitchcocks masterpiece was slowed-down to a crawl, here the process is reversed to accommodate society’s increasingly short attention span. Seeing Hitchcocks most lasting contribution to cinema flash before your eyes in a matter of seconds represents our new information age where culture is packaged for easy consumption at a breakneck pace.
But could the film be show faster? Yes. All hail Joe Frese’s Sixty Second Psycho:
Maybe it can all be surmised in an 11-second gif?
21 Movie Barcodes – classic films in a single image
MOVIE Barcode compresses all the frames of a movie into a single picture. Can you tell the films apart? Yes. If you look hard enough what at first appeared specious, gets to be intriguing. Those aren’t swatches of 1970s raffia wallpaper. Those are films.
When Harry Met Sally
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Exploding actresses – when actresses in famous films explode – volumes 1, 2 and 3
WHEN actresses explode, aka Exploding Actresses is brilliant:
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The most unforgettable corridors in sci-fi – in photos
CORRIDORS. Not just any old creepy, long, silent, anxiety-inducing, lonely, crippling, haunted corridors, but eerie, antiseptic, soulless, menacing, echoey, brooding, lugubrious corridors in sci-fi films. Corridors that when you scream no-one can hear you.
Corridors are the places in film that let the dialogue pause and the tensions build. You’d run along though them. If your legs let you.
These are the best corridors in sci-fi:
Code-46 – Michael-Winterbottom (2003)
The Black-Hole – Gary Nelson (1979)
Ikarie XB-1 (1963, Jindřich Polák)
Star Wars
Ridley Scott’s Alien
George Lucas’s THX-1138
Dr. Who and the Daleks (1965, Gordon Flemyng)
Stereo (1969, David Cronenberg)
Saturn 3 (1980, Stanley Donen)
Outland (1981, Peter Hyams)
Equilibrium (2002, Kurt Wimmer)
Alphaville: Une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (1965, Jean-Luc Godard)
Titan A.E. (2000, Don Bluth and Gary Goldman)
Forbidden Planet (1956, Fred M. Wilcox)
2010 (1984, Peter Hyams)
Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977, George Lucas)
Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977, George Lucas)
Solyaris (1972, Andrei Tarkovsky)
Event Horizon (1997, Paul W. S. Anderson)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, Stanley Kubrick)
Westworld (1973, Michael Crichton)
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991, Nicholas Meyer)
Robocop (1987, Paul Verhoeven)
Upside Down (2012, Juan Diego Solanas)
Species (1995, Roger Donaldson)
Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956, Fred F. Sears)
Spotters: Borg, SciFiCorridorArchive, Lauren Mullineaux
Posted: 19th, June 2013 | In: Film, Flashback, Key Posts | Comments (2)
Disney Rotoscopes: animated film stars superimposed with their actors
MANY Disney cartoons were made by Rotoscoping? What’s that then? Wikipedia tells us:
“Rotoscoping is an animation technique in which animators trace over footage, frame by frame, for use in live-action and animated films.”
Here are classic Disney characters superimposed onto the actors who played them:
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Beautiful Polish film posters for banned American films
BEFORE the Wall came down and the EU came knocking, Polish film posters for American film were handmade. Nowadays, Poles are seduced to Americans films with the usual cocktail of edited quotes from critics and airbrushed photography. But when US publicity material was banned, film posters for Yankee movies were created by artists interpreting the film.
There is no proof that they were more effective in getting punters in to watch the film. But the billboards would have been more beautiful:
Gremlins
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Posted: 18th, June 2013 | In: Film, Flashback, Key Posts | Comment
Teacher suspended after showing 11 year-olds Saw
REMEMBER the thrill of your teacher telling you that classwork was going to stop in favour of watching a film? Well, one teacher in France decided he’d do that with his class of 11 year-olds and showed them violent horror flick, Saw.
He’s suspended now. Of course he is.
Apparently, Jean-Baptiste Clément told his students: “This will be your first horror film.” It goes without saying that at least one pupil ended up at home looking distinctly unwell.
“He returned from school on Monday evening, visibly in some discomfort, not well,” said the father. “I asked him and he told me his maths teacher had shown them a horror film during class. At the moment the teachers are having staff meetings and parent-teacher meetings, so their classes are cut short and interrupted a bit.”
The father then went to the authorities.
Clement was suspended on Tuesday while the school investigated and will probably face further punishment. “We’re in the process of seeing what sort of legal measures we might be able to take in this case,” said a spokesperson for the school in Hauts-de-Seine.
If you haven’t seen Saw, it involves a masked serial killer who makes people perform gruesome acts on themselves as part of some dreadful sadistic ritual. If you ever went to Cambridge University law school, you’ll know the kind of thing…
Behold! The honest Disney film posters
ARE Disney film posters realistic? Is a cartoon rendering of a fairy tale truthful? Christine Gritmon has created this set of “honest” Disney movie posters.
I still really like Dina Goldstein’s series on Fallen Princesses, a dystopian, Hollywoodisation of the fairy tale dreamers…
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11 pictures of actors laughing between takes
IT’S only make believe. Neatorama points us towards these stills of actors laughing between takes. Can you name all the films?
The more serious the film, the better the laughter appears. If anyone has still of actors giggling between takes on All Quiet on the Western Front or The Elephant Man, please send them over. It’s tempting to think of everyone acting on comedy films like, say. The Pink Panther being stony faced between takes.
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16 living movie stills – can you name the films?
CAN you name the films these 16 living movie stills have been taken from?
