What can comic book and action movie fans look forward to now? Well, Watchmen, of course! You know, 300 director Zack Snyder's adaptation of Alan Moore's groundbreaking graphic novel. Lucky for me, the trailer just hit the internet this weekend. So have a look.
As any of my close friends will attest, I don't know a damned thing about music. But I do know when I like it, and I especially like it when it's used to wonderful effect in cinema or television. So what's your favorite example(s) of such use? As usual, the rules are loose and fast. It can be a bone fide musical number, or a scene that simply uses music especially well (Is that a "score"? I have no idea about this stuff.) Anyway, here's my first entry. Add yours!
So, you're Gillian Anderson, and you're about to reprise your iconic role as Agent Dana Scully for the first time in ten years in The X-Files: I Want to Believe, and your hi-larious interviewer from Newsweek opens up with these "questions": "I've got to confess. I don't know anything about 'The X-Files' [...] Why is it such a big deal?" What on earth can you say? Well, there's this.
Come on! Can't us Star Wars fans have anything left to brag about? The millions and millions of fans who crammed theaters to see The Dark Knight starting at midnight on Thursday put the comic book movie into record-breaking territory. Which is nice, except the record it broke was previously held by Revenge of the Sith. Sigh.
Can there ever be too many British gangster movies? The answer is no. So we fully support the new documentary A Very British Gangster, which is being released in the US today. Not only has the filmmaker, Donal McIntyre, been described as "the British answer to Geraldo Rivera," but the subject of the film, Manchester crime boss Dominic Noonan (pictured), has been compared to Tony Soprano, and his English thugs are accused of having bad teeth and being reminiscent of Trainspotting. It's satisfying to see every single English crime journalism cliche in one place. But the film itself sounds entertaining; anything starring a guy who gets his point across by chopping off the heads of rivals' pets can't be all boring. The trailer is after the jump.
We got tipped on this an hour ago and happily it still hasn't been corrected. The New York Post's review of Mamma Mia comes with bracketed editor's notes asking the reviewer to clarify vague passages! At no extra charge! Anyone want to check the print version for us? In case they fix it, click to see the screengrabs. [NYP]
Heath Ledger's performance as the creepy Joker in this week's latest outing for the Batman franchise is being treated with such manufactured reverence—the dead actor's even being touted as an Oscar nominee—that some sort of backlash is inevitable. So who'll start it? A blogger with an admirable absence of decency, John Carney.
Dark Knight opens at midnight, and as the previews show, the city gets beat up pretty bad in the epic battle that ensues. New York is always getting destroyed over and over again in movies. Why? Because it looks awesome! Here are clips of the 15 best films featuring New York getting annihilated, curated by Nick McGlynn. (NYC Photoshop Hallucination By Richard Blakeley.)
"That was probably the most accurate part, seeing Fucked Company at your company while you still worked there," Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams joked at a panel after a screening of the film August. Director Austin Chick assured "that was in the script from the beginning." "It's kinda like Fucked Company," Fucked Company creator (and AdBrite founder) Phillip "Pud" Kaplan shouted from the audience moments later. The latest Josh Hartnett vehicle, produced in part by Josh Hartnett, August attempts to portray tragedy while simultaneously reifying the "Internet rockstar" archetype. But it's dated from the start by Aronofsky-esque visuals and a Fischerspooner soundtrack as Hartnett's character Tom, CEO of Landshark, hears in passing of Internet-video startup Pseudo.com laying off dozens as his own public company is exploding around him.
This one isn't brand new, but the current economic turmoil means it's a good time to watch the trailer for August, the upcoming Josh Hartnett flick dramatizing the dramatic dot-com world of August, 2001-a dramatic time. Josh Hartnett is sitting in board rooms! Delivering speeches! Furrowing his brow! And sexing a sexy woman or three in the process! Enjoy the sight of Web boom 1.0, just as Web boom 2.0 may be going over a cliff with the rest of the economy. Side note: Hartnett, who also portrayed a web guy in 40 Days and 40 Nights, is set to corner the market on playing dotcom heroes. Luckily he bears a passing resemblance to Nick Denton! Watch the trailer below and comment freely.
Sure, our end-of-the-day video-fests are usually about the 70s and 80s, but the 90s were pretty long ago. And, the fact is, it was a fairly rocking decade for the cinema. So let's celebrate it! I'll get us started with an instant classic.
Midwesterner in NYC posed this question in the previous thread. It's as good as any ideas I've got. Thoughts? Will Ledger get that posthumous Oscar nod? Opinions? Bueller...?...Bueller...?
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, and Serenity creator Joss Whedon's writers' strike project "Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-Long Blog"-starring Nathan Fillion and Neal Patrick Harris-premieres the first of three fun-filled acts Tuesday. To that end, the director has done the unthinkable-agreeing to a Q&A session with Weekend Gawker! Yaaaay! The totally biased interview after the jump.
So what is Carl Weathers, the actor who played Rocky villain Apollo Creed, up to these days? Mostly just riding around on an odd bicycle with a basket full of flowers, scaring the townfolk with his long disquisitions on their appearance, and behaving generally like a man afflicted with Asperger's Syndrome. He encourages you to CHANGE, in the strongest possible terms! Because change is beautiful! This is all designed to promote some credit union, of course. We bring you three separate examples of Apollo's scary, unsolicited friendliness, after the jump. Someone help this man.
Could 2008 be the year that Hollywood has waited for so long, when that "indestructible cockroach" of independent movies-New York's Harvey Weinstein-finally runs out of luck? Forget about disappointing revenues from movies such as Quentin Tarantino's Grindhouse; one should be looking at the plight of a boring home video distributor which was supposed to be the Weinsteins' salvation.
And it's not the kind of zany premise that gets people into theaters. For that, Prendergast put on a puffy blue suit with a giant, round head — the fictional icon of fictional technology company BlueNexion, which hires his character Salman to stand on a lonely stretch of Texas highway and, inevitably, get into hijinx. To its credit, it looks far more entertaining than August.
Movies about war: even more important than war itself! The Army has never been able to quite get this whole Iraq business to go well, but it's damn sure not going to sit back and allow moviemakers to make their films about this Iraq business without the extensive input and assistance of the US Army. They've always used their leverage-cooperation in filming-to try to influence movie scripts. But they're having a darned hard time with this most recent crop of war movies, which seem to present the Iraq war as big problem. The military's problem with films like In The Valley Of Elah or Redacted? They're just not nuanced enough, you see:
Facebook's third-most popular widget, Slide's Top Friends, is back after Facebook suspended it on June 26. (The offense: displaying Top Friends' users birthdays and other private information that wouldn't normally be visible on Facebook.) What took so long? Following the suspension, Slide wanted to call its apps the most secure on Facebook. To feel comfortable doing so, it contracted a third-party audit firm to review its applications and source code, Slide exec Keith Rabois told us. "The issue with Top Friends was fixed immediately," Rabois told us, "But as you might imagine an independent audit takes time to perform." Elsewhere on Facebook, Slide's privacy troubles seem to be spreading.
