Casino Royale will achieve what no other Bond film has done before, as it will be officially allowed to screen on Chinese movie screens. Since Dr. No in 1963, China's board of censors has denied entry to every single Bond movie. For those of you keeping count, that's nineteen films. It's the first time the film will be seen in Chinese cinemas, but definitely not the first time a Bond film has been seen on Chinese DVD players since they have such a brisk black market for pirated DVD copies.
This is a massive score for Sony, as it means a lot more box office take for this film (China expects it to be one of their highest-grossing films of the year), and that translates to more revenue. It also allows them to establish a more important foothold in the Chinese market. Sony is probably crossing their fingers that this will make it that much easier to release the next Bond film there. If they want to keep this relationship working well, then hopefully they will keep films like Bewitched out of the pipeline to keep the Chinese government happy. We wouldn't wish that film on any foreign power.
What would really be nice is if this would open up the possibility of a Bond film shooting in China. Imagine Bond being sent deep into the Orient on assignment to track down the source of pirated DVDs. Come on, that sucker just writes itself. As long as Daniel Craig doesn't try to wear an Asian disguise like Sean Connery did in You Only Live Twice, we should be okay.
One more day until Casino Royale hits the theaters. Are you excited about it yet? Have you been following all of the Bond coverage and pretending that you're a superspy? I've personally had the Goldfinger theme song stuck in my head for days. At first, it made small errands (like going to the post office) fun and exciting. I'd pretend I was on a secret mission, and that the stamp on my letter contained a secret microdot that had to get to New York by Saturday. After that was another death-defying mission at the grocery store (plans for the enemy's HQ hidden in the canned vegetables). However, at this point I'm going a bit mental. Get out of my head, Shirley Bassey!
Hopefully my mental slippage won't be too obvious as we immerse ourselves in Part Two of the History of Bond Films. If you missed the first part, you can catch up quickly and be ready for Casino Royale by Friday. Make it your mission, in fact. "Gooollllldifing ... " er, sorry.
Onwards through the doors of MI6 and into Bond history we go -- just don't call me Moneypenny.
Zach Braff's next film Open Hearts may be currently on hold, but he plans to shoot in New Jersey again once everything comes together. On a conference call yesterday, he told Cinematical that he remains involved in New Jersey, where he currently serves on the board of the South Orange Performing Arts Center.
He plans to lens Open Hearts in Northern New Jersey, and enjoys working in the area where he can utilize actors and crews from New York. Braff was born and raised in Jersey, and filmed his directorial debut Garden State there three years ago.
While I wouldn't say Braff's filmmaking sensibilities are diametrically opposed to Kevin Smith's, they do target similar young audiences, but when you watch Garden State you'll come away with a much different view of Jersey than you get from Smith's films. At least no one was getting it on with a donkey in the version I saw.
It's great when a director can work outside of the Hollywood environment and manage to capture the essence of where they come from. Richard Linklater did a great job of it with Slacker, and Braff seems to have done equally as well with Garden State. Although it's hard for me to know for sure since I spent several years in college living in Austin, and have never been to New Jersey, but it feels more real than the Jersey you get from The Sopranos or Clerks II.
If you try your hand at writing, you'll hear the phrase, "write what you know" many times. Whoever coined this phrase probably had no idea how much it applied to directing as well.
James Bond films are always known for their action, sex appeal, explosions, guns, vehicles, Bond girls ... and the opening credit sequences. I still remember being about twelve years old and seeing Octopussy (I'm really dating myself here). My friend and I were like, "Holy crud. You can almost see naked women!" Yes, when you're twelve years-old and living in Texas, that's some pretty exciting stuff. Although these were the days before the Internet was invented, so that's probably all changed now. Believe me, it was hard enough convincing my mom to let us go see a movie called Octopussy.
The point is that the Bond film openings are meant to ooze sex and mystique. They all do an extremely good job of that, except Dr. No which is all wacky flashing lights until about halfway through, and then it morphs into a semi-sexy "Samba Lessons for Adults" sequence, and then jumps the shark into bizarro-land with a Jamaican version of "Three Blind Mice" ... we kid you not. They figured it out by From Russia With Love, and every Bond movie has had a similar opening sequence ever since.
Since we brought you every Bond movie trailer imaginable on Monday, you can find every Bond opening title sequence after the jump. YouTube user jmkaos, if you're out there reading this, thanks for all your hard work. The first martini is on us. (We can expense those, right?)
Nostalgia Central has posted a list of 40 things that only happen in the movies, and boy do they have it right on the nose. These are movie truisms like, "It is always possible to find a parking spot directly outside or opposite the building you are visiting." This is most laughably true in Swingers when all of the leads drive to the Dresden Room, a popular bar in Los Angeles, and immediately get parking spaces all next to each other right outside. If you've ever been around that area, it's not the easiest place to park.
"If you are heavily outnumbered in a fight involving martial arts, your opponents will wait patiently to attack you one by one by dancing around you in a threatening manner until you have defeated their predecessor. " I just recently watched both Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Kung Fu Hustle, and this is the most spot on fact in martial arts films. I've never understood why they don't just bum rush the hero and take him out. Maybe they all use the honorable "take a number" system.
Ever wonder why the hero in a film has no trouble picking people off with his gun, but seems to be bulletproof himself? "One man shooting at 20 men has a better chance of killing them all than 20 men firing at once (it's called Stallone's Law)." I knew there had to be science behind it. This explains Lethal Weapon and Die Hard pretty well, finally.
"All beds have special L-shaped sheets that reach to armpit level on a woman but only up to the waist of the man lying beside her." You know, I checked at Linens & Things for these sheets, and then Bed, Bath and Beyond. They all thought I was crazy. I should have brought this list with me as proof.
Check out their full list of things like these. It's good for a laugh, and you'll find yourself thinking about it the next time you watch a movie.
Unless you've been hiding under a rock or working on an off-world colony for the past several months, then you know that the 21st James Bond film, Casino Royale, will be hitting theaters this Friday. It promises all the explosions, car chases, fistfights and gunplay that you've come to expect from a Bond film, and an even more emotional Bond, which we might have to get used to.
In preparation for Friday, we're summing up all of the previous Bond movies by capsulizing the plots and picking out our key favorite moments. Oh, who am I kidding, these are my favorite Bond memories. I grew up on these films, reading the novels, playing the role-playing game, obsessively reading the Q Branch Manual to find out about Bond's gadgets. I also must have played GoldenEye on the Nintendo 64 a trillion times, so I like to consider myself somewhat of a Bond-o-phile. Roger Moore was the reigning 007 when I was growing up, but I watched the Sean Connery Bond films on tape, and was sold on his coolness vs. Moore's. This led to an enormous rift between me and my best friend, who idolized Moore (and his dad kind of looked like him). Although we both agree that the latest Bond films are a lot of fun, I think we still want to butt heads over who is the best Bond.
Luckily, you don't have to have seen any of the previous Bond films to "get" the next one, but this little history can help you appreciate all of the effort that has gone into the series. We're serving it up to you shaken, of course ... never stirred.
If you haven't seen any or all of the previous 20 Bond films, then you can catch yourself up by watching the trailers for all of the movies. Extremely enterprising YouTube user famouswillie (and other folks with an extraordinary amount of free time on their hands) have made us very happy Cinemites by doing the tedious uploading work for us.
After the jump check out the trailer for every Bond film up through Casino Royale, and some bonus video treats at the very bottom of the list.
These trailers also serve as a sort of visual history of film. It's especially eye-opening to contrast the Dr. No trailer with the one for Casino Royale. We certainly have come a long way, Mr. Bond.
Sometimes Thursday rolls around and you really have no idea what it will bring you. Could you have ever imagined watching Office Space cut to look like a slasher flick? God bless the wonders of modern-day technology and the internet. What the Maynard? has recut scenes from Office Space into a trailer that makes it look horrifically good as a fear-inducing movie starring Milton as the killer. Come on, he's creepy, he mumbles, is misunderstood and he carries a red Swingline stapler. What's not to fear? He's a horror film baddie just waiting to be unleashed on the unsuspecting masses.
In fact, I've watched this trailer several times now (that really says a lot about me and how I spend my time, but I don't want to take away from the quality of the people who worked on this edit, so do your best to now ignore this entire parenthetical) and it gets better each time. It makes me want to see this version of the movie. Although they could have just as easily made Michael Bolton the bad guy if they used the footage from when he goes to town on the printer. That's scary enough in the normal version of the movie, although not quite as scary as fat David Herman in Idiocracy. Yikes.
Check out the trailer after the jump, just be sure and keep your stapler nearby.
With the new James Bond film Casino Royale rushing toward us at turbo speed (it opens on November 17 in the States), Cinematical tackles the question: Which Bond is the Best?
Most people have their stock answers ready to go for this one. It's either a quick, "Roger Moore" or "Sean Connery." Does anyone actually pick George Lazenby? I always end up feeling sorry for him. He went from hunk-of-the-moment in a chocolate bar commercial to potentially being one of the biggest stars on the planet. But would you want to follow in Sean Connery's shoes? Go rent On Her Majesty's Secret Service if you haven't seen it, it's worth a look. Plus it's the only James Bond film with a metareference. In the opening scene, Lazenby saves a woman from drowning and she slaps him before running away. He looks directly at the camera and says, "This never happened to the other fellow." Ouch. So, by default in our books, after only being in one film and forced to try to follow up the original, he's out of the running for best Bond. That leaves us with Connery, Moore, Dalton and Brosnan ...
It's old news by now that Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe will be appearing nude on stage in London during a production of Equus. However, we've recently come across this poster for the upcoming play, and it's hard not to find it just a little bit disturbing. They've even made Radcliffe's nipples into the horse's eyes, and it'll be hard to look at Harry Potter the same way again. The play is about a boy who really loves his horse, and Radcliffe decided to take the role to prove that he could play other parts besides the boy wizard.
There is no doubt that Radcliffe has been offered plenty of other acting roles that would show off his debatable acting skills, but this just really seems off the charts. I recently saw the film Driving Lessons with Rupert Grint who plays Ron Weasley, and he does a great job in the film without dropping a stitch. Plus, with Equus being only a London stage play, won't that limit the amount of people who are going to see what Radcliffe's range is? I guess his parents are supportive of this move, which seems hard to believe, but to each his own. It will be very interesting to see what the public reaction will be to this play. Our prediction: Either shock and empty theater seats, or Potter fans come to see Harry in a whole new light.
Devon DeLapp has posted an extremely handy guide detailing how to use the "Poor Man's Process" when shooting a scene featuring actors talking to each other in a car while driving at night. You independent filmmakers, budding directors, and veteran cinematographers will find this very useful.
When I first moved to Los Angeles, a friend of mine had started work on his own independent film. We tried for days to shoot scenes inside a moving car, and realized what a headache it is. You have to not only contend with the normal elements of filmmaking like the camera, the actors, and the lighting, but you also had to try and find a way to mount the camera on the car, locate a stretch of road you can use over and over, deal with traffic, think about gas, etc. It turned into such a headache for him that he ultimately decided to have the scene set next to a parked car, rather than in a moving one.
The genius of the solution on DeLapp's journal is in the extremely low-tech methods used to simulate effects in the scene: a light pointed at a rotating mirror for passing streetlights, lights mounted on wheels moved back and forth behind the picture car for traffic, Christmas tree lights in the background as the twinkling lights of the city in the distance. These are the kinds of things that once you have them explained to you, make you slap your forehead and say, "Well duh, of course." The only thing that will make this a true poor man's process, however, is if you aren't paying your crew. It takes roughly 20 people to pull this off properly, so call in some favors and get to work.
Talk about guts! This kid submitted this video to Stanley Kubrick way back in 1983 when Kubrick was having open auditions for Full Metal Jacket. Kubrick had advertised around the U.S. for young actors to send in audition tapes to be considered in the casting process. Brian Atene, aged 20 at the time, sent this tape in and was apparently never heard from again, as least by Hollywood. That is until this video started making the rounds on the web.
Now, Mr. Atene can be accused of many things, but being shy about his "acting abilities" sure isn't one of them. He compares himself to a young Alec Guiness, and calls the Juliard School where he is a student, the "finest acting institution in the world". Although he says this, "not as a statement of conceit, but humbly as a statement of fact." He calls Kubrick one of the greatest directors of all time while rolling his eyes to the heavens, although tells him that he isn't quite as good a director as Michael Curtiz, who directed The Sea Hawk (which is apparently Atene's favorite film) in 1940.
After taking Kubrick to task for not directing 2010, he goes on to let him know that his favorite composer is Erich Wolfgang Korngold (he composed the music for The Sea Hawk, of course), that he won a puppy for 50 cents when he was 12 years-old, and his favorite color is green. Oh, and he's a Trekkie. He then performs a short "cutting" loosely based upon on The Outsiders, by which I think he means the book, and not the film, since that came out the same year that Atene was recording the tape.
This is probably the best video definition of the word hubris that I've ever seen. See for yourself after the jump. Once you've seen that, check out the parody update of Mr. Atene, aged 43.
Over at her Risky Biz Blog, Anne Thompson has a piece up on the big scoop around United Artists. United Artists has been a studio in limbo ever since Sony acquired both MGM and UA in April of last year. No one was sure if Sony would simply absorb the other company, or whether they would continue to use their brand and logo as a distribution arm. Today the mystery is over, with MGM announcing today that Tom Cruise and his partner Paula Wagner will help relaunch the new United Artists as partner-operators. This finally lands Cruise at a new studio, after being released by Paramount following the disappointing box office take for M:I3, and displeasure over Tom's couch-jumping antics. The new deal gives Cruise and Wagner the ability to greenlight their own projects, and will serve as a pipeline for them to distribute their own content. What remains unclear is how this newly announced deal will affect the new Cruise/Wagner production company that was cobbled together by investors once Tom left Paramount.
Since 1919 United Artists has had a storied past since inception and creation by four of the film world's biggest stars at the time: Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and director D.W. Griffith. It enjoyed both success and failures in the intervening years, giving birth to such franchises as the Rocky, James Bond, and Pink Panther films as part of its highs, and being the studio behind the Heaven's Gate debacle as part of the lows, which left it essentially bankrupt in 1980. The press release lauds Cruise as, "one of the most successful, critically acclaimed and sought after movie stars in the world. Cruise's films have resulted in worldwide box office totals of approximately US$6 billion and his last two films, War of the Worlds and Mission: Impossible III have grossed nearly US$1 billion worldwide." United Artists is hoping that both Cruise name and star power will help bring them home some of that bling.
Although the movie seems to be swirling on the edge of the whirlpool that is "development hell," the article covers some interesting facts. Did you know that the original creator of the Chipmunks, Ross Bagdasarian Sr., first came to fame by recording the song Witch Doctor in 1958? It's no surprise that the witch doctor in the song ("ting tang, walla walla big bang") sounded like Alvin. Bagdasarian would record on a reel-to-reel machine running at half-speed. When the tape was played normally, voila, Chipmunks! The success of Witch Doctor let Bagdasarian play around with the concept, and later in November of 1958, he released The Chipmunk Song. It went on to sell an astounding four and a half million records in seven weeks. From that one song was born the whole concept of Alvin, Simon and Theodore. It gave birth to a television series, tons of merchandise and made an overnight star out of the squeaky-voiced star.
Bagdasarian Sr. died abruptly in 1972, and his son, Ross Jr. and wife Janice, picked up the torch and brought a new Chipmunks series to television in 1983. They have since produced numerous albums and worked on numerous direct-to-video Chipmunk movies including: The Chipmunk Adventure, and Alvin & the mini-Munks. According to the Chipmunks.com site, Alvin & the mini-Munks is a blend of puppetry and CGI that is a work in progress, but it is unclear if this is the same film that Vitti is developing. We're guessing it's not. Hopefully something will happen to bring this project together. It has such an incredible backstory, and Alvin & the Chipmunks are great characters for a family-friendly franchise that needs to be reintroduced to a whole new generation of kids.
ALVIIIINNNNNNNN!
PS - as an added bonus, check out this both creepy and fascinating sound file which plays the Chipmunks at normal speed, and then half speed. You'll hear how Ross Sr. had to speak/sing when recording the Chipmunk lines.
Pharmaceutical juggernaut Roche is using the upcoming CGI film Happy Feet as a vehicle to tell people to get flu shots. According to a press release from Roche, "Happy Feet presents a wholesome storyline in a wintery backdrop that serves as an ideal platform for communicating to consumers, especially moms, about the flu."
Roche will be tying in with the film through TV, print, and online spots, meaning it'll be hard to avoid this sucker. I'm still having trouble deciding if this is a great idea, or a potentially bad idea. I know it's a good thing to be informing the public about flu shots, especially for the young and the elderly, but what comes next? Will we see Mickey and Minnie touting the latest children's cough medicine? Shrek showing everyone the benefits of dental hygiene and a new mouthwash? Statler and Waldorf plugging for adult incontinence products?
It's one thing to use a good opportunity to inform the public, but it's a bit different when you're using it to help your bottom line. Roche manufactures a flu shot, so of course they'd be interested in having more people line up to get them. It's not the first time a studio has used their characters to sell products, but as far as I can remember it's the first time a pharmaceutical company has gotten involved in the process.
It might seem far fetched now, but imagine your child's favorite character talking to them about some new wonderpill, and it's a bit scary.
Casino Royale will achieve what no other Bond film has done before, as it will be officially allowed to screen on Chinese movie screens. Since Dr. No in 1963, China's board of censors has denied entry to every single Bond movie. For those of you keeping count, that's nineteen films. It's the first time the film will be seen in Chinese cinemas, but definitely not the first time a Bond film has been seen on Chinese DVD players since they have such a brisk black market for pirated DVD copies.
Sometimes Thursday rolls around and you really have no idea what it will bring you. Could you have ever imagined watching 
It's old news by now that Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe will be 
Over at her Risky Biz Blog, Anne Thompson has a piece up on 
10 Zen Monkeys has a pretty 
Pharmaceutical juggernaut Roche is using the upcoming CGI film 
