Category: Cinema

Grimm-Visaged War.

Argh. Terry’s Gilliam’s spate of studio trouble continues, with The Brothers Grimm getting pushed back a full year to November 2005. (Star Matt Damon suggests it may be due to FX.) It was already shaping up to be a particularly lousy fall film-wise, and this doesn’t help.

Po-Tay-Toes.

Boil ’em, mash ’em, stick ’em in a stew…the bizarre LotR-themed “Taters Song” now has its own Flash-y video. Well, I guess it helps pass the time ’til the Extended Edition trailer (which is currently rumored to drop on Friday.) Update: Ok, well, clearly Friday was wrong. The new buzz is at Dragon*Con over Labor Day weekend.

Pilot Needs a Hug.

No need to break the Sci-Fi boycott until the main event, ’cause the trailer for Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars is now online. It doesn’t look like they’ll be attracting any new fans with this miniseries, what with all the various unresolved subplots alluded to in the trailer alone (I’d forgotten about Wormhole Business-Suit Guy, for example), but at least we ‘Scapers will finally get some closure.

SDI, Schmesh-D-I.

Say what you will about the Dem ticket, but at least they understand the importance of protecting our precious bodily fluids from terrorist and Communist impurifications. This October, John Edwards will introduce Dr. Strangelove for Turner Classic Movies. (By way of Quiddity.) For the rest of the “Party Politics and the Movies” series, John McCain chose Paths of Glory, Joe Biden picked Dead Poets Society, and Orrin Hatch took To Kill a Mockingbird.

Under the Sea and Over the Top.

In the trailer bin, Bill Murray dives into Cousteau for Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (I’m looking forward to the Henry Selick stop-motion stuff, which unfortunately isn’t in this preview), Jude Law gets increasingly overexposed in David Russell’s I Heart Huckabees (Can’t say I think much of this trailer, for some reason, nor of the “existential comedy” billing) and Chris Cooper channels Dubya for John Sayles’s political caper Silver City (Looks solid, but Richard Dreyfuss strikes warning bells…he can get real hammy when doing satire.)

3.1.

Digital Bits releases the details of a new Matrix trilogy box set. As y’all might remember, I was cautiously positive about Reloaded and really down on Revolutions, but this box set sounds like hella fun. “There will be two audio commentaries for each film – one from philosophers Ken Wilber and Cornel West (who analyze the meanings behind the films), and one from three professional critics who hated all three films (no names given). According to Andy Wachowski, ‘It’s the best idea we’ve ever had. It’s hilarious. They just sit there and rip the s**t out of us for six hours.'”

A Good man, and thorough.

“The Coens turned down requests to be interviewed about the cult of ‘The Big Lebowski,’ which is frankly infuriating: I did not watch my buddies die facedown in the muck to be blown off by too-cool, insular, press-shunning elitists.” Via All About George, David Edelstein checks in on The Dude, in anticipation of this weekend’s Lebowskifest. Edelstein, you are entering a world of pain.

Law will tear us apart.

There’s talk about that Jude Law will play Ian Curtis of Joy Division in a forthcoming biopic. That’s pretty good casting (better, for example, than Ashton Kutcher as Flash Gordon), although after 24 Hour Party People I’m not sure a Curtis biopic is really necessary (but cast Paul Bettany as Bernard Sumner and we’ll be getting somewhere.) Also in the Jude department, the trailer for Mike Nichols’s Closer is now online, and it looks pretty solid, if you can buy that anyone would actually leave Natalie Portman for Julia Roberts.