Film Category
Includes cinema reviews and trailers for upcoming films. A digest of the best and worst interviews on movies and cinema.
The Human Centipede glass pipe for your hot box
The Human Centipede pipe, by Dustin Yunker, is the ‘hot box’ tribute to the film of that name. We’re not sure what end goes to your lips; but our therapist assures us that which end you choose will say a lot about you.
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Spotter: DM
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Posted: 24th, August 2015 | In: Film, Reviews, The Consumer | Comment
Watch: Ice Cube responds to Rap Genius interpretations of the great ‘Straight Outta Compton’
Ice Cube hails his new film STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON by responding to reacting to the Rap Genius interpretations.
Posted: 11th, August 2015 | In: Celebrities, Film, Music | Comment
Watch Future Shock: in 1972 Alvin Toffler’s film excited our human response to over-stimulation
American writer Alvin Toffler poses during portrait session held on July 3, 1980 in Paris, France.
Those good people at Disinfo point us towards Future Shock, the film based on Alvin Toffler’s 1970 book. Released in 1972, Orson Welles narrates.
Alvin Toffler notes:
“We may define future shock as the distress, both physical and psychological, that arises from an overload of the human organism’s physical adaptive systems and its decision-making processes… Put more simply, future shock is the human response to over-stimulation…”
This is Future Shock…
Posted: 11th, June 2015 | In: Film, Reviews, Technology | Comment
Watch 3AM Orson Welles’ ‘antipathetic’ porno
In 1975, Orson Welles edited a scence from the porno movie 3 A.M.
Josh Karp spotted the master’s work in researching his book Orson Welles’s Last Movie: The Making of The Other Side of the Wind. He says Welles “wound up editing a hard-core lesbian shower scene that he couldn’t resist cutting in Wellesian fashion with low camera angles and other trademark flair.”
Welles knew his porn:
Spoter: Vulture
Watch every time Owen Wilson says ‘Wow’ in a movie
Owen Wilson likes to say “Wow”. If the script contains enough ‘wow’, Owen Wilson is in. Had William Shakespeare wrote “Wow, to be or not to be” or ‘Wow is that a dagger?”, Wilson would have been a fine stage actor.
As it is, he just comes across as a man playing himself on camera.
Here’s a supercut of Wilson and his ‘Hear the Wow’ acting. Watch the full video here.
Posted: 11th, May 2015 | In: Celebrities, Film | Comment
Listen as fans react to seeing Star Wars for the first time in 1977
As Star Wars: Episode VII gets ready to hit the silver screen, you can listen to what it was like watching the first film in 1977. Youtuber William Forsche recorded his trip to the movies 18 years ago. He writes:
“You can also hear me making laser beam sounds at the end of this recording, because Star Wars got me all fired up!”
Is anyone as excited about this film?
Star Wars hilarity: listen to Sheffield student Godfrey Elfwick troll the BBC
This is just brilliant. Listeners to the BBC World Service’s World Have Your Say show were introduced to Godfrey Elfwick, a student from Sheffield talking about the lastest Star Wars franchise, Star Wars Episode VIII: The Force Awakens. Godfrey says the character “Dark Raider” is “racial stereotype”.
Godfrey Elfwick is a work of parody. Having said on twitter that he’d never seen Star Wars, the BBC got in touch:
@GodfreyElfwick hi looking for guest who has never seen Star Wars 2 talk on radio – wd u be interested? DM or email angela.sheeran@bbc.co.uk — Angela Sheeran (@Sheerzee) April 17, 2015
Did Angela do any research? If she did, she must have missed Godfrey’s other tweets, like these:
Godfrey pricked the knowing liberal bubble with a skewer:
Brilliant. Just brilliant…
(PS: is he the only work of parody in that clip?)
Posted: 20th, April 2015 | In: Film, Key Posts, TV & Radio | Comment
Watch The Premiere Of John Carpenter’s Night Video
‘Music to shiver by’ might be the name of John Carpenter’s album of Lost Themes. The man who thrilled us with his Halloween and these overlooked gems inspired directors Gavin Hignight and Ben Verhulst to put pictures to Carpenter’s tune Night.
Hignight pays tribute to the master of sinister synth:
“Upon hearing NIGHT by John Carpenter my head was instantly filled with these nighttime highway road dreamscapes. Someone or something, haunted, traveling the road alone in the late hours.
“Our goal was to take that feeling and put it into a video that paid tribute to the film work of Carpenter but at the same time gave him a new world to play in… in this case literally through Virtual Reality.”
More here.
Spotter: io9
Oscars: Mike Kleton and Morgan Miller wow New Yorkers with their “Mobarazzi” star maker
It’s Oscar season. And gearing up for the movie biz’s AGM, are Mike Kleton and Morgan Miller with their “Mobarazzi” star maker. New Yorkers are now all the beautiful people…
First drafts: ‘Fifty Shits of Grey’
Shit First Drafts has “found a couple of drafts of the Fifty Shades of Grey script”:
America ignores the Baftas in favour of the American Dance Institute’s New Choreography awards
What does America think of the Baftas, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts awards? A look at the New York Times tells us the anwer is not very much. Or nothing.
One night after British acting’s AGM, and the NYT’s Arts section features not a single story on them awards.
It might be hard luck that the Baftas are staged on the night of the Grammy Awards. But it’s lamentable that Breaking Bad spin-off Better Call Saul ‘DNA’ is bigger news.
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Dad handmakes a David Bowie doll to surprise his 7-year-old daughter
We love dolls, or action figures (as you macho lads call them). We’ve seen the weirdest celebrity dolls of all time. We’ve seen dead dolls. And we’ve spliced and diced more Barbies then you can shake a nagging finger at.
On Imgur, Uh Jess shows has been makin his own dolls. He’s taken Barbie (always Barbie gets it) and turning them into David Bowie, as seen in the 1986 film Labyrinth.
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Posted: 6th, February 2015 | In: Film, The Consumer | Comment
50 Shades of Grey was made with Lego in mind: video
The clunking dialogue. The ability to fold yourself in half and turn your partner into an origami swan. The hands made for w***ing and clutching a ‘martial sex aide’. Yeah. 50 Shades of Grey was made with Lego in mind:
American Sniper: Bradley Cooper’s Slipknot drive to remake news as entertainment
In making American Sniper, Bradley Cooper transformed into Chris Kyle, hero of the Clint Eastwood movie about the late Navy SEAL:
“Walsh added that Cooper didn’t just use his workouts to create the right look for the role. He used them as a springboard to transform into Chris Kyle. The intensity of the workouts got him into the right frame of mind. Cooper would often place a picture of Kyle on the wall of the gym and he blasted Kyle’s personal playlist during workouts, listening to the kind of music that defined Kyle, everything from Metallica and Slipknot to Toby Keith. . . . Bradley Cooper started the program at 186 pounds and ended at 225 with roughly the same percent body fat. By the end of the program, he was performing rack pulls with 425 pounds for 10 reps.”
Cooper’s an actor. What about the real thing?
Iraq veteran Brian Turner ( My Life as a Foreign Country) intakes a view:
This isn’t the defining film of the Iraq War. After nearly a quarter century of war and occupation in Iraq, we still haven’t seen that film. I’m beginning to think we’re incapable as a nation of producing a film of that magnitude, one that would explore the civilian experience of war, one that might begin to approach so vast and profound a repository of knowledge. I’m more and more certain that, if such a film film ever arrives, it’ll be made by Iraqi filmmakers a decade or more from now, and it’ll be little known or viewed, if at all, on our shores. The children of Iraq have far more to teach me about the war I fought in than any film I’ve yet seen — and I hope some of those children have the courage and opportunity to share their lessons onscreen. If this film I can only vaguely imagine is ever made, it certainly won’t gross $100 million on its opening weekend.
The biggest problem I have with American Sniper is also a problem I have with myself.
It’s a problem I sometimes find in my own work, and it’s an American problem: We don’t see, or even try to see, actual Iraqi people. We lack the empathy necessary to see them as fully human. In American Sniper, Iraqi men, women, and children are known and defined only in relation to combat and the potential threat they pose. Their bodies are the site and source of violence. In both the film and our collective imagination, their humanity is reduced in ways that, ultimately, define our own narrow humanity. In American Sniper, Iraqis are called “savages,” and the “streets are crawling” with them. Eastwood and his screenwriter Jason Hall give Iraqis no memorable lines. Their interior lives are a blank canvas, with no access points to let us in. I get why that is: If Iraqis are seen in any other light, if their humanity is recognized, then the construct of our imagination, the ride-off-into-the-sunset-on-a-white-horse story we tell ourselves to push forward, falls apart.If we saw Iraqis as humans, we’d have to learn how to live in a world far, far more complicated and painful than the difficult, painful one we currently live in.
The movie is not real. It’s made to entertain. If you get your news from Hollywood, then you’re not that into news:
Ghostbusters: First peek at new all-female Ghostbusters movie
The news Ghostbusters movie is an all-female affair. It’s going to be fan-tastic. Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray were at the top of their games when the first Ghostbusters film hit the big screens. But who needs them when you have a script like this?
Spotter and scriptwriter: Sean Mullins
Ghostbusters re-sexed: classive movie reworked as feminist message
Hollwyood has run dry of ideas when you get the third film Ghostsbusters made with an all-female cast. The Hollywood Reporter notes:
Melissa McCarthy, who was already in talks for one of the leads, has signed on for the Paul Feig-directed reboot, and the studio is now negotiating with Kristen Wiig, as well as “Saturday Night Live” players Leslie Jones and Kate McKinnon…
CNN spots that naysayers:
As some of the Twitterati accused the ladies-led “Ghostbusters” concept of being a “gimmick,” Feig swiftly responded, “Interesting how making a movie with men in the lead roles is normal but making a movie with women in the lead roles is a ‘gimmick.’ #its2014.”
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Frenzy: the ‘disgusting’ story of a London serial killer dubbed the ‘Necktie Strangler’
Hitchcock’s 1972 Frenzy Is One Of The Least Festive Films Ever Made…
The BBC2’s decision to screen Alfred Hichcock’s Frenzy at 12.05am on the second of January, five minutes after the end of the holiday season is brutally appropriate, as it is without doubt one of the least festive films ever made.
Frenzy tells the story of a London serial killer dubbed the ‘Necktie Strangler’, and from the start there are references to Jack the Ripper and John Christie. The part was intended for Michael Caine, who thought it was disgusting and turned it down.
Posted: 31st, December 2014 | In: Film | Comment (1)
The Interview: the best reactions to Sony’s cyber war with North Korea
Obama and the FBI blame the hacking attacks against Sony Pictures on North Korea. Who knew the DPRK regime was capable? The hacks were triggered by the The Interview, in which two American journalists played by James Franco and Seth Rogen set out to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
Amid threats of movie theater terrorism, Sony pulled the film from its Christmas Day release.
Reactions have been many:
The Conspiracy of Censors – Roger L. Simon:
The whole Sony story has a certain twisted dark comedy flavor with CEO Michael Lynton bickering with Obama over the release of what is said to be an unwatchable movie. It sure looks that way from the trailers. If the NORKS had any brains, they should just have let the film be released and it would have sunk like a stone. But perhaps they had other intentions — or someone did — beyond making fun of inane Hollywood studio executives or even silencing a movie.
The cyber attack on the studio has a serious side and it’s not really about North Korea. It’s about who helped North Korea, the assumption being that the NORKS don’t quite have the technical expertise to pull this off by themselves. Russia, China and Iran are the three candidates whose names have been thrown into the hopper as possible co-perps — maybe more than one of them.
Hollywood came to the Rev. Al Thursday as embattled Sony exec Amy Pascal met privately with the black leader for 90 minutes in a bid to fix the fallout from the cyberhacking leak of embarrassing, racially charged emails.
Pascal agreed to let Sharpton have a say in how Sony makes motion pictures, in an effort to combat what he called “inflexible and immovable racial exclusion in Hollywood.”
“We have agreed to having a working group deal with the racial bias and lack of diversity in Hollywood,” said Sharpton.
Obama on hack: “Sony made a mistake” in killing ‘The Interview’ – Xenio Jardin:
One important point in the President’s remarks today: a potentially ominous nod to the need for more regulation and control over the internet. The internet now is like “the Wild West,” he said, “We need more rules about how the internet should operate.” Cybersecurity is an urgent issue, and the Sony hacks underscore that, said the president. But when heads of state talk about more state control over the internet, rarely does greater freedom of speech result.
The only problem: At least one cable company preemptively surrendered to North Korean intimidation, too, reportedly saying it would not air the film. Now, even if Sony had a backbone transplant, it couldn’t release the movie.
Sony could still dump it on the Internet and let it spread virally. It would lose ticket sales, but the company would strike a defiant blow nonetheless.
Don’t hold your breath. Sony would rather go the way of appeasement. And so would everyone else, it seems.
For Pascal, 56, and Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton, 54, the damage has gotten far worse as the flood of stolen material — including both of their email inboxes — keeps coming, and on Dec. 16, the hackers, dubbed Guardians of Peace, threatened a 9/11-style attack on theaters that show Seth Rogen’s North Korea assassination comedy The Interview. Pascal, the lead creative executive on Interview, tells THR she believes she has the backing of her Tokyo-based employers. But by now, high-level insiders have moved from speculating about whether she will be replaced to asking when and by whom.
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At a press conference on Friday, President Obama said Sony made “a mistake” by canceling the release of The Interview. He also praised the film’s stars Seth Rogen and James … Flacco? If, like actor James Franco, you want a new last name—one you can share with an NFL quarterback—then use our name generator below.
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What I wonder is why people aren’t a little more put off by a form of censorship that is more insidious, and will likely affect far more movies in the long run: the soft censorship of appealing to the Chinese government in order to reap the Chinese box office. There have been widespread claims that recent blockbuster movies like the latest Transformers have been written so as to appease Chinese censors. There’s nothing wrong with writing movies to reach out to a particularly huge foreign box office– why wouldn’t you want your movie to play to Chinese moviegoers?– but appealing to the Chinese government is a whole other ball of wax. That’s where you can see genuine self-censorship coming in. And while I imagine that this whole thing will blow over before long, without a great deal of long-term damage, I think the urge to play in China -and for the Chinese government — will only grow over time.
The problem of willingly selling out to the Chinese reminded me of Ayn Rand, whose bracing moral lessons I’m sure Freddie had in the back of his mind. Rand’s finest novel,The Fountainhead, is an anti-capitalist screed about the spiritual and cultural evil of catering to market demand. Forget the problem of giving the commie censors what they want. It’s wrong to give the free market what it wants, when what it wants is aesthetically debased, which it always is. The architect hero of The Fountainhead, Howard Roark, is the ultimate in spine, the patron saint of never selling out. When one of his perfect, austere modernist buildings is bowdlerized the better to suit the public taste, he blows it up. That’s right, Howard Roark is a terrorist, a jihadi for artistic integrity. Maybe Howard Roark is the answer. Maybe can show us the way. Maybe Sony needs to feel that it is unsafe not to release The Interview. Maybe Seth Rogen needs to blow something up! Or maybe Brian Beutler is on to something, and the best we can do is call on Anonymous to steal the movie and make sure that, in this case at least, market-based American spinelessness can’t put a gag on our precious stoner auteurs.
Back Sony with cash – Jonathan Chait:
Sony is a for-profit entity, and not even an American one, that effectively has important influence over American culture. We don’t entrust for-profit entities with the common defense. And recognizing that the threat to a Sony picture is actually a threat to the freedom of American culture ought to lead us to a public rather than a private solution.
The federal government should take financial responsibility. Either Washington should guarantee Sony’s financial liability in the event of an attack, or it should directly reimburse the studio’s projected losses so it can release the movie online for free. The latter solution has the attractive benefit of ensuring a far wider audience for the film than it would otherwise have attracted.
Show me the alien cockroach – Peter Sudeman:
After Sony Pictures announced yesterday that it was pulling the release of The Interview, a film about two American journalists sent to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, from its scheduled Christmas Day release after threats of movie theater terrorism, several theaters across the U.S. said that they would show Team America: World Police instead.
The basic idea was to replace one movie mocking the North Korean regime with another. Team America, an all-puppet comedy from South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, pits its heroes against a sad-sack version of former North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. At the end of the movie, he’s impaled on a giant spike, and it’s revealed that he’s actually an alien cockroach. Fitting!..
The Daily Beastreports that theaters in Cleveland and Atlanta that had planned to make the switch say that Paramount, the studio behind Team America, has ordered them to stop. The Alamo Drafthouse in Texas, which also planned to show the puppet comedy, announced on Twitter this afternoon that due to “circumstances beyond our control” its Team America screening has been cancelled…. blocking replacement screenings of Team America can really only be described as next-level cowardly bullshit.
Sony was just the latest – Janice Turner:
Not only has Paramount pulled Team America, a decade-old puppet comedy parodying Kim Jong Un’s father, but a Steve Carell movie based upon the graphic novel Pyongyang. This is no comic, but an account by Guy Delisle of his time as an animator in a North Korean studio, constantly monitored by minders yet getting glimpses of the regime in all its absurdity and horror. This is a film that needed to be made.
And when the Sony cave-in was announced, Carell tweeted a still from The Great Dictator. It is an apt comparison: Charlie Chaplin’s devastating and humane 1940 parody did not bring down Hitler but it gave succour to those who were trying. Such was its propaganda value that while it was in production and Britain was still pursuing appeasement, the government planned to ban it for fear of riling the Führer. It was inspired by Chaplin watching Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will: while other anti-Nazis were awed and dismayed by its grandiosity, Chaplin fell about laughing…
…too often, the response to any threat has been cowardice and complicity. Hollywood just behaved like the entire British establishment which dropped Salman Rushdie after The Satanic Verses rather than turning on his illiberal persecutors. And even now Newsnight refuses to show an affectionate Jesus and Mo cartoon depicting the Prophet Muhammad, siding with Salafist extremists rather than moderate Muslims who argued the image was inoffensive.
What if one of America’s violent anti-choice groups threatens cinemas showing a film in which a woman has abortion? Will we capitulate every time the lawyers get nervous? Because Sony Pictures just put artistic freedom in turnaround. And this is no joke.
Free speech has been under attack for an age. North Korea was just picking up the vibe…
Posted: 20th, December 2014 | In: Film, Key Posts, Politicians, Reviews | Comment
Being Stavros: jibes and snides when a 30 stone man enters Mr Gay UK
Organisors of Mr Gay UK turn on a man for being not the ideal weight. Stavros Louca was robbed:
When Stavros decides to enter the Mr Gay UK beauty pageant nothing goes quite to plan. This is the story of one man’s unbreakable spirit – a tale of triumph, heartbreak and how to wear your underpants.
Being Stavros from jonothan mcleod on Vimeo.
Mark Kermode’s Reviews As Painfully Honest Film Posters
We love this. Patrick Smith has used BBC Five Live’s film critic Mark Kermode’s bon mots as film poster reviews.
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Former Chelsea Footballer Frank Leboeuf On Acting And Dining With John Malkovich
THE Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything features a face familiar to fans of Chelsea FC.
The doctor is played by none other than Frank Leboeuf, star of such hits as Taking Sides (2001) and Le foot fait son cinéma (2003).
He tells the Radio Times:
In France I can’t audition because they still think I’m a footballer and don’t take me seriously. But in England they’ve given me the opportunity. I shot two movies here last year, Allies and The Theory of Everything. They give me a chance to show my new skill, and I’m thankful for that. People said very stupid things: they say, “Oh, every football player wants to act.” But there are only three really: Vinnie Jones, Eric Cantona and myself.
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Posted: 5th, November 2014 | In: Celebrities, Chelsea, Film, Sports | Comment
Crap Cockneys: And The Nominations For The Worst London Accent Are…
Crap Cockneys
And the nominations for the worst London accent are…
Dick van Dyke (Mary Poppins)
The mother lode. To quote his song, ‘even though the sound of it is something quite atrocious’, there is something supercalifragilisticexpialidocious about Dick’s seminal cockney performance…
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