Here the Wild Trailer Is

This might be just about my most anticipated movie this year. Spike Jonze's adaptation of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, scripted by Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius). There were a lot of rumored problems with this, but the trailer doesn't exactly give any indication of that...

A Bunch of Stuff

An assortment of news items, etc.....

David O. Russell signs on to adapt The Silver Linings Playbook by Matthew Quick.

Richard Linklater sort of follows up Dazed and Confused.

Did you know Ang Lee was making a movie about Woodstock?

The Farrelly Brothers finally make their long-rumored Three Stooges movie with actors who might be too good for it.

Slumdog actress to work with both Woody and Schnabel.

Lars von Trier makes a big-budget horror film.

True Grit for the Coen Brothers.


I'll leave it there for now and post a couple of stand-alones after this...

--co

Scorsese Opens the Shutters

I've been a little worried about 'ole Marty Scorsese for a while now. Gangs of New York was a bit of a mess, and I definitely don't have the love for the Departed that plenty of other folks do. So he's got a new flick coming out soon, Shutter Island, an adaptation of a novel by Dennis Lehane (Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone),

"in which Ruffalo will play U.S. Marshal Chuck Aule, who travels with his new partner (DiCaprio) to the eponymous Massachusetts island in 1954. As they investigate the disappearance of a patient from a hospital for the criminally insane, they encounter a web of lies, a hurricane and a deadly inmate riot that leaves them trapped on the island."

The film boasts an all-star cast, featuring Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Michelle Williams, Max von Sydow, Patricia Clarkson, Emily Mortimer and Jackie Earle Haley, and is due out Oct. 2. Here's a nifty teaser image:



Here's a link with some info, and if you're curious, I definitely recommend checking out this diary from the set.

--co

The Longest Takes

UGO.com has just compiled this great list of what they consider the most impressive long takes in film history.

New stuff

It's a New Year in capital letters, and in light of all this stupid economic hardship, we can look forward out entertainment. Which for some of us, or a lot of us, means MOVIES. Here's some stuff.

The Superbowl spot for the new film Year One, written and directed by Harold Ramis and starring Michael Cera, Jack Black, David Cross, and Paul Rudd. No, it's not a Batman movie. But it does look pretty funny.



Here's the new trailer for Pixar's latest film, Up. I loved Wall-E and have heard that this might even top that one.



Another Superbowl spot, this time for the big-budget adaptation of the fun low-budg Sid & Marty Croft TV show Land of the Lost, starring Will Ferrell and Danny McBride.




Some of us like BIG DUMB FUN too. There's a new Fast and the Furious, called Fast and Furious:



And Stephen Sommers' adaptation of GI Joe...



We can't forget Transformers 2...



That's all for now, more soon...

--co

Sundance 2009

So this year's Sundance Film Festival, held in the cold mountains of Park City, Utah, just came and went, and we have to start off by congratulating our friend, local filmmaker Destin Daniel Cretton, whose thesis film for SDSU's Master's program in Television, Film, and New Media, "Short Term 12," was not only accepted for competition but won the Jury Prize for Best Short Film. You can read Destin's Sundance blog here. Check out the film's website, featuring the trailer for the film, here.

First, a list of the award winners:

Variety.com

And some nifty links for reviews of the films playing out in the snowy hills:

Chud.com

Film.com

I'll post some more about some of the individual films of interest in a bit...

--co

The Year of Refn

One of the most promising young filmmakers around, Nicolas Winding Refn, made a name for himself with the great Pusher trilogy. Three parallel, violent odysseys through the drug underworld of Denmark, Refn's take on the crime genre paired Euro style with Neorealism, with the ghosts of Scorcese (Goodfellas) and Friedkin (The French Connection) hovering over. He made his American debut with Fear X, an adaptation of a novel by cult novelist Hubert Selby, Jr. (Requiem for a Dream). Unfortunately, that film went into production without a finished script, and the final product definitely shows. This year, however, will see the release of two films by Refn. One of these is Valhalla Rising, what will possibly be the best Viking movie ever.



Today sees the arrival of the trailer for his other new film, Bronson, about the supposedly most violent prisoner in Britain, Charles Bronson (no, that's not his real name).



Rent the Pusher trilogy and Fear X here---www.citizen-video.com