stuff
- Underworld: Evolution
DEREK JACOBI (I, Claudius)! And Steven Mackintosh (Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels). *surprised* God knows how Len Wiseman manages to get these British actors to be in his movie. He can't be married to all of them.
Exclusive look at the first trailer at >> Yahoo! Movies
(If you listen closely, you can hear the Agent Provocateur song from the trailer for the first film playing near the end. For some reason, I find that little touch of continuity very cute.)
- Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Cuaron grounded Prisoner of Azkaban in the intimate and the personal. Now Mike Newell brings to the fourth film an interesting eye for theatrics and spectacle.
The Quidditch World Cup.
Those boys from Durmstrang, what show-offs.
I rest my case.
On the other hand, Potter isn't that much better.
And don't tell me these two aren't destined to be evil geniuses of the future.
See exciting new footage in the 3rd TV spot at >> Coming Soon!
- Atonement
Some of you have to have read this Ian McEwan novel, right? I have to say that I haven't myself, and I'm sorry about that, because then perhaps I'd have a bit more to say on the project besides the fact that Oscar-winning screenwriter Christopher Hampton (Dangerous Liaisons, The Quiet American) is adapting and Joe Wright (Pride and Prejudice) is going to direct.
The news was mentioned in an interview with >> Guardian Unlimited Film and confirmed by >> britfilms.com
- Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
While looking up past projects of Christopher Hampton on imdb, I noticed that he was adapting Susanna Clarke's novel for New Line Cinema. No other details as yet, but be sure that I'll be keeping an eye out. >> Official Site
- Essay: Zhang Yimou's Hero -- the Temptations of Fascism, Evans Chan. >> Film International
Zhang Yimou is now the closest thing to being the Leni Riefenstahl of China. Still one can’t help wondering: since Hero is essentially a film about self-laceration - each assassin readily allows him or herself to be lashed, stabbed, pierced, or killed for some questionable greater good - is there a parallel act of self-laceration, artistic, psychological, spiritual, going on for the filmmaker of Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lanterns? Is Zhang-arguably China’s most gifted filmmaker of the last two decades-the ultimate beneficiary or the victim of the Chinese censors?
- Essay: From GoldenEye to Die Another Day: The Revival of James Bond, James Chapman >> Film International
The film’s most oft-quoted line - the new M’s retort that she considers Bond ‘a sexist, misogynist dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War’ - effectively disarms one of the criticisms that had been made of Bond (that he was an ideological anachronism) by voicing them itself through the agency of a powerful female authority-figure.
- Essay: The Many Faces of James Bond: Cultural Imperialist or Declining Male?, Toby Miller >> Film International (pdf)
...just as Dr No represented the last gasp of Britain's formal rule and its embodiment in a beautiful but vulnerable male form, so Live and Let Die represented postcoloniality's desperate search for equality and the riposte of the old powers to contain insurgency, whether at home or abroad. James Bond is, indeed, a sign of male power and colonial domination. But he is equally a sign of their weakness, as masculine beauty and imperial collapse haunt the series' assertion of virility and national might.