So yesterday my special lady and I made the drive to LA to catch Let the Right One In, the Swedish vampire/preteen love story I keep talking about and which I've heard nothing but great things about. And guess what? It's fucking great. I can't readily compare to much else in terms of how it's handled. It opens here at Hillcrest Cinemas on the 7th, so be sure to catch it before the shitty remake by shitty Matt Reeves of shitty Cloverfield fame.
Among the film's opening this weekend are Kevin Smith's new one, Zack and Miri Make a Porno, starring Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks. Buzz has been pretty good on it, but apparently it's finding a bit of trouble with theatrical distribution, considering it doesn't shy away from the subject matter.
One of my favorite filmmakers, Mike Leigh, (whose Naked I watched again the other night for the umpteenth time), has a new film, Happy-Go-Lucky.
Clint Eastwood's Changeling, starring Angelina Jolie, also premieres. See the post below for more info...
Recent divorcees Guy Ritchie and Madonna have competing new releases this week, Ritchie with RocknRolla and Madonna with Filth and Wisdom...
Keep an eye out in the coming weeks for Gus van Sant's Milk, about the assassination of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay politician, starring Sean Penn in the title, with supporting roles by James Franco and Josh Brolin...
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Monday, October 27, 2008
Film News for Film Nerds
Not a whole lot too exciting currently. I caught a press screening of Synedoche, New York, the directorial debut by acclaimed screenwriter Charlie Kaufman of Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind fame. It's great, it's insanely weird, and I'll be catching it again as soon as it opens here. Check a few posts down for a nice trailer for the film.
Next Friday, Nov. 7, sees the San Diego release of the Swedish film Let the Right One In (also see below), a film that has been garnering nothing but ecstatic reviews over the last few months as it's played various festivals. I'll be going up to LA tomorrow to catch it...
Clint Eastwood has a couple of films coming out in time for Oscar season, and they both look like total duds. The first is The Changeling, set in the late '20s and starring Angelina Jolie as a mother whose son disappears and is eventually found. The catch is that Jolie doesn't believe the boy to be her son, and nobody is willing to look into it.
The other Eastwood film is Gran Turino, in which Eastwood stars as a grumpy old tough guy who ends up helping the bullied teenage neighbor next door.
It appears that the great Crispin Glover has a role in Tim Burton's upcoming Alice in Wonderland, starring Johnny Depp.
Steven Soderbergh is following up his two-part Che film with a musical about Cleopatra, set in the 1920s, with Catherine Zeta-Jones as the Queen and Hugh Jackman as somebody else. Music by Guided by Voices.
The great little French thriller 13 Tzameti is being remade for an American audience by the original film's director, with Jason Statham, Mickey Rourke, and 50 Cent.
Citizen favorite Todd Field, director of In the Bedroom and Little Children, is signed on to direct Buried for Paramount Vantage before he takes on Cormac McCarthy's epic Blood Meridian.
Another Citizen favorite, David Gordon Green, is putting off his remake of the Dario Argento classic Suspiria to film an adaptation of Freaks in the Heartland, the graphic novel by Steve Niles and Greg Ruth.
That's it for now. Try not to pee your pants on Halloween.
Next Friday, Nov. 7, sees the San Diego release of the Swedish film Let the Right One In (also see below), a film that has been garnering nothing but ecstatic reviews over the last few months as it's played various festivals. I'll be going up to LA tomorrow to catch it...
Clint Eastwood has a couple of films coming out in time for Oscar season, and they both look like total duds. The first is The Changeling, set in the late '20s and starring Angelina Jolie as a mother whose son disappears and is eventually found. The catch is that Jolie doesn't believe the boy to be her son, and nobody is willing to look into it.
The other Eastwood film is Gran Turino, in which Eastwood stars as a grumpy old tough guy who ends up helping the bullied teenage neighbor next door.
It appears that the great Crispin Glover has a role in Tim Burton's upcoming Alice in Wonderland, starring Johnny Depp.
Steven Soderbergh is following up his two-part Che film with a musical about Cleopatra, set in the 1920s, with Catherine Zeta-Jones as the Queen and Hugh Jackman as somebody else. Music by Guided by Voices.
The great little French thriller 13 Tzameti is being remade for an American audience by the original film's director, with Jason Statham, Mickey Rourke, and 50 Cent.
Citizen favorite Todd Field, director of In the Bedroom and Little Children, is signed on to direct Buried for Paramount Vantage before he takes on Cormac McCarthy's epic Blood Meridian.
Another Citizen favorite, David Gordon Green, is putting off his remake of the Dario Argento classic Suspiria to film an adaptation of Freaks in the Heartland, the graphic novel by Steve Niles and Greg Ruth.
That's it for now. Try not to pee your pants on Halloween.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Horror picks for the month!
Eyes Without a Face
The first time I saw this was with my best friend Brian. We’d both heard that the film was a classic but didn’t know much about it, and he’d just picked up a used copy for cheap, so on one of our many Friday Night Movie Nights we decided to give it a shot. A surgeon dumps a body alongside a river, and from there we learn about his lover who has been disfigured, and the trouble he’s going through to find the perfect face for her. This face, of course, has to come from another woman. Part of the film’s unsettling power hinges a reveal, and Brian and I were becoming tense, and then…we got a phone call about a party. So went and got drunk. But we both thought about the movie all week and where we’d left off, and the next Friday we started from that point, and that unsettling tension returned immediately. The film doesn’t play down its absurd trappings, and works on every level beyond its horror trappings. (If it seems Hitchcockian, that’s because the two writers on the film were also responsible for Vertigo, written two years previous.)
The Haunting
The late, great Robert Wise, director of classics such as West Side Story and The Day Earth Stood Still, decided to take a stab at the horror genre with this adaptation of the great Shirley Jackson novel The Haunting of Hill House. One of the most effective ghost stories in film history, the film finds Dr. Markway investigating a house with paranormal activity, accompanied by Luke, who is in line to inherit the house, and Theodora and Eleanor, who both respond to an ad searching for volunteers with previous paranormal experience. Eleanor stands as the film’s central character, and as the house seemingly comes alive, we are left questioning whether or not the events are actually occurring or are simply in Eleanor’s head, a concept lifted straight from the great Charlotte Perkins Gilman short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” published in 1892. Part of the magic of the film lies in the understated approach to the material and the fact that nothing is ever truly seen; we are only to privy to Eleanor’s experience, and with that, we experience her fright with her, only to watch this give way to the pleasure she feels in regards to the attention the house pays her. Still effective even now, as foreboding and atmospheric as one can hope for in their horror films.
Suspiria
An intense barrage of sound, shocking violence, and a great score by Italian prog band Goblin, Suspiria was a worldwide phenomenom upon its release in 1977, and its impact as a cinematic experience has not been lost over time. A young American ballet dancer, Suzy, travels to Germany to attend a ballet school in the woods, only to discover that it is run by a coven of witches. She watches as her schoolmates are viciously murdered in an attempt to open the gates of Hell, and Suzy has to do everything she can to escape. One of the most influential modern horror films, much of the film’s power comes from its elaborate murder set pieces, and the American slasher film would not exist were it not for the Italian giallos and horror films like Suspiria.
Repulsion
Intensely claustrophobic and unsettling, this film is a tough nightmare to wake up from. After first seeing this, I started telling my fellow film students to check it out if they have any interest in doing horror. Coincidentally, a teacher/friend of mine decided to show it to one of his classes, and everyone hated it because it was too much. Young Catherine Deneuve isolates herself in her sister’s apartment when the sister goes on vacation, and we watch her fears manifest themselves in the apartment, causing Deneuve’s mental deterioration. In the end she is completely broken, and so are we.
Evil Dead II
One of my all time favorites, and one of the biggest cult classics from the late 80s, seeing this at 14 was an absolute revelation for me. As much inspired from the low-budget horror and exploitation of the late 70s/early 80s as it was by writer/director Sam Raimi’s love for the slapstick of the Three Stooges, the film seemingly threw all the rules out the window and decided to just have fun. Bruce Campbell, a cult icon of his own because of this film, stars as Ash, who arrives at a cabin in the woods with his girlfriend, only to accidentally play back a recording of an archaeological who had found the Necronomicon that releases an evil spirit in the woods, possessing first his girlfriend and then him. And then his hand. Which he has to cut off and replace with a chainsaw to ward off the evil spirits. Then the daughter of the archaeologist arrives with her boyfriend and their white trash two truck driver. “All hell breaks loose,” you might say, as they try to avoid being sucked into a dark dimension, and as we laugh all the way.
--co
The first time I saw this was with my best friend Brian. We’d both heard that the film was a classic but didn’t know much about it, and he’d just picked up a used copy for cheap, so on one of our many Friday Night Movie Nights we decided to give it a shot. A surgeon dumps a body alongside a river, and from there we learn about his lover who has been disfigured, and the trouble he’s going through to find the perfect face for her. This face, of course, has to come from another woman. Part of the film’s unsettling power hinges a reveal, and Brian and I were becoming tense, and then…we got a phone call about a party. So went and got drunk. But we both thought about the movie all week and where we’d left off, and the next Friday we started from that point, and that unsettling tension returned immediately. The film doesn’t play down its absurd trappings, and works on every level beyond its horror trappings. (If it seems Hitchcockian, that’s because the two writers on the film were also responsible for Vertigo, written two years previous.)
The Haunting
The late, great Robert Wise, director of classics such as West Side Story and The Day Earth Stood Still, decided to take a stab at the horror genre with this adaptation of the great Shirley Jackson novel The Haunting of Hill House. One of the most effective ghost stories in film history, the film finds Dr. Markway investigating a house with paranormal activity, accompanied by Luke, who is in line to inherit the house, and Theodora and Eleanor, who both respond to an ad searching for volunteers with previous paranormal experience. Eleanor stands as the film’s central character, and as the house seemingly comes alive, we are left questioning whether or not the events are actually occurring or are simply in Eleanor’s head, a concept lifted straight from the great Charlotte Perkins Gilman short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” published in 1892. Part of the magic of the film lies in the understated approach to the material and the fact that nothing is ever truly seen; we are only to privy to Eleanor’s experience, and with that, we experience her fright with her, only to watch this give way to the pleasure she feels in regards to the attention the house pays her. Still effective even now, as foreboding and atmospheric as one can hope for in their horror films.
Suspiria
An intense barrage of sound, shocking violence, and a great score by Italian prog band Goblin, Suspiria was a worldwide phenomenom upon its release in 1977, and its impact as a cinematic experience has not been lost over time. A young American ballet dancer, Suzy, travels to Germany to attend a ballet school in the woods, only to discover that it is run by a coven of witches. She watches as her schoolmates are viciously murdered in an attempt to open the gates of Hell, and Suzy has to do everything she can to escape. One of the most influential modern horror films, much of the film’s power comes from its elaborate murder set pieces, and the American slasher film would not exist were it not for the Italian giallos and horror films like Suspiria.
Repulsion
Intensely claustrophobic and unsettling, this film is a tough nightmare to wake up from. After first seeing this, I started telling my fellow film students to check it out if they have any interest in doing horror. Coincidentally, a teacher/friend of mine decided to show it to one of his classes, and everyone hated it because it was too much. Young Catherine Deneuve isolates herself in her sister’s apartment when the sister goes on vacation, and we watch her fears manifest themselves in the apartment, causing Deneuve’s mental deterioration. In the end she is completely broken, and so are we.
Evil Dead II
One of my all time favorites, and one of the biggest cult classics from the late 80s, seeing this at 14 was an absolute revelation for me. As much inspired from the low-budget horror and exploitation of the late 70s/early 80s as it was by writer/director Sam Raimi’s love for the slapstick of the Three Stooges, the film seemingly threw all the rules out the window and decided to just have fun. Bruce Campbell, a cult icon of his own because of this film, stars as Ash, who arrives at a cabin in the woods with his girlfriend, only to accidentally play back a recording of an archaeological who had found the Necronomicon that releases an evil spirit in the woods, possessing first his girlfriend and then him. And then his hand. Which he has to cut off and replace with a chainsaw to ward off the evil spirits. Then the daughter of the archaeologist arrives with her boyfriend and their white trash two truck driver. “All hell breaks loose,” you might say, as they try to avoid being sucked into a dark dimension, and as we laugh all the way.
--co
New in store this week!
We've got a few new DVDs coming to Citizen this week.
First up is Mongol, the Sergei Bodrov-directed, Tadanobu Asano-starring depiction of the ruler's young life. The 2007 Nominee for the Best Foreign Film Oscar is said to be the first part of a trilogy.
Next is The Edge of Heaven, the new film by Fatih Akin, the Turkish director of the great Head-On.
We also have in Standard Operating Procedure, Errol Morris's exploration into the incidents at the Abu Ghraib prison.
Feel free to reserve these online at www.citizen-video.com, or call us at
281-FILM (3456).
First up is Mongol, the Sergei Bodrov-directed, Tadanobu Asano-starring depiction of the ruler's young life. The 2007 Nominee for the Best Foreign Film Oscar is said to be the first part of a trilogy.
Next is The Edge of Heaven, the new film by Fatih Akin, the Turkish director of the great Head-On.
We also have in Standard Operating Procedure, Errol Morris's exploration into the incidents at the Abu Ghraib prison.
Feel free to reserve these online at www.citizen-video.com, or call us at
281-FILM (3456).
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Ashes of Time Redux
So way back in the 90s, one of our favorite modern filmmakers, Wong Kar Wai, was long in production and struggling with a film called Ashes of Time, a strange, surreal wuxia. Halfway through he needed to reenergize and went and shot a little film called Chungking Express. Remember that one? It rules and is still my favorite of his. Anyway, he finally finished Ashes, except nobody really gave a shit when it came out, and we've been subjected to shoddily-transferred alternate versions of the film. Someone eventually decided, though, that it might be a good idea to create a new, director-approved transfer of the film, which played at this year's Cannes film festival under the title Ashes of Time Redux, and this time time it was received much better. The film should be making a small theatrical run soon, and in the meantime here's a nice little interview with Kar-Wai about the film.
Saturday, October 4, 2008
The Right One In
Let the Right One In, from Swedish director Tomas Alfredson, has been receiving some pretty great buzz the past few months during its festival run, and will have a limited run at the end of the month. Make sure to catch it before the shitty American remake in the works by Cloverfield director Matt Reeves.
Friday, October 3, 2008
The Current
This week is the 2008 San Diego Women's Film Festival. You can find information about it at www. citizen-video. com, or at www. sandiegowomensff. com. It is curated by Citizen Video owner Holly Jones and features some great theatrical premieres by the likes of Jonathan Demme as well a number of short films by women filmmakers.
New in the store recently we have the 2007 Oscar Winner for Best Documentary Feature, Taxi to the Dark Side, chronicling the interrogation of an innocent Afghani taxi driver that ended in his torture and killing by American forces, without any accountability.
We also have OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, a French spy-spoof:
From Israel, we have the winner of the Camera d'Or at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, Jellyfish:
Ira Glass, host of NPR's This American Life, brought his weekly show to Showtime, and we have the great first season, six episodes in total.
Dario Argento recently completed his The Three Mothers trilogy, which started with Suspiria and Inferno, with Mother of Tears, starring his daughter, Asia Argento:
Indie and Citizen Video fave David Gordon Green, director George Washington, All the Real Girls, and Undertow, had a one-two punch this year with Snow Angels and Pineapple Express, and we have the former here at the store, starring Sam Rockwell and Kate Beckinsale about the death of a little girl that shakes up the family and the town.
Our shirts, designed by Holly, will be restocked soon, and we'll be sure to let you know when they're in.
New in the store recently we have the 2007 Oscar Winner for Best Documentary Feature, Taxi to the Dark Side, chronicling the interrogation of an innocent Afghani taxi driver that ended in his torture and killing by American forces, without any accountability.
We also have OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, a French spy-spoof:
From Israel, we have the winner of the Camera d'Or at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, Jellyfish:
Ira Glass, host of NPR's This American Life, brought his weekly show to Showtime, and we have the great first season, six episodes in total.
Dario Argento recently completed his The Three Mothers trilogy, which started with Suspiria and Inferno, with Mother of Tears, starring his daughter, Asia Argento:
Indie and Citizen Video fave David Gordon Green, director George Washington, All the Real Girls, and Undertow, had a one-two punch this year with Snow Angels and Pineapple Express, and we have the former here at the store, starring Sam Rockwell and Kate Beckinsale about the death of a little girl that shakes up the family and the town.
Our shirts, designed by Holly, will be restocked soon, and we'll be sure to let you know when they're in.
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