Smash Cut

One of the more curious movie-related court cases in recent years has completed another chapter, with both sides claiming victory. In one corner is George Lucas and his company Lucasfilm Ltd. In the other: British designer Andrew Ainsworth of Shepperton Design Studios, who happens to have created the highly memorable, damned-near-iconic uniforms for the Stormtrooper soldiers in Lucas’s Star Wars saga.

Lucasfilm has been pursuing Ainsworth because the latter sold some Stormtrooper uniform replicas and helmets to Americans through his personal website, and the company cried foul, claiming that the designer infringed their copyright. Ainsworth felt that because he created the outfit, it was his right to sell it anywhere.

In 2006, a California court ruled that Ainsworth owed Lucasfilm $20 million for selling the uniforms to customers in the United States, the territory in which they own the Stormtrooper copyright. However, in a new court ruling, English High Court judge Anthony Mann has stated that while Ainsworth did, in fact, violate that copyright, his sales to United States customers totaled approximately $50,000 to $60,000. The amounts, according to Mann, were not high enough to make him susceptible to U.S. jurisdiction. Furthermore, Mann noted that under British law, the English copyright to the costume designs had expired, so Ainsworth is free to sell his replicas everywhere except the States.

Lucasfilm lawyer Mark Owen has touted victory for his side, saying, “At the end of the day, there is an order that Mr. Ainsworth infringed our copyright, and the next stage of the case will be discussing remedies for that.”

Judge Mann said that a hearing would be held in autumn to determine the terms of that next stage. The saga continues….

Check out this terrific homage to genre film auteur John Carpenter. It visually riffs off of his 1982 sci-fi/horror classic The Thing, and sonically emulates various soundtracks that the director/composer made for his movies. And, the short clip stars animated G. I. Joe action figures!

Action movies tend to fall into “guy territory,” not just in terms of audiences but also in relation to the people who make them.

One major exception to the rule — one who doesn’t receive nearly as much work or acclaim as she should, in my opinion — is Kathryn Bigelow, former flame of Titanic helmer James Cameron, and the gifted director behind the vampire-Western cult fave Near Dark and the Keanu Reeves/Patrick Swayze bankrobbing surfer flick Point Break. To an extent, I think a lot of contemporary action movies have tried to ape Point Break, but with much lesser impact. After all, what was The Fast and the Furious except Point Break with cars? And over-the-top pics like Shoot ‘Em Up have had skydiving fights, but the Bigelow film totally set the bar for them and, for my money, still raises it far above its imitators. Few current actioners, with their CGI-enhanced stunts, shaky camerawork, and flurried edits, come anywhere close to the stellar staging, tight cutting and jaw-dropping cinematography in the Keanu Klassic. The steadicam-filmed foot chase between Reeves and Swayze should be canonized as a cinematic treasure, right up there with the car chase in The French Connection.

Bigelow will finally be back to theaters with The Hurt Locker, a thriller centered on the challenges faced by an elite Army bomb squad in Iraq. Granted, I don’t know if the world wants/needs/will pay to see yet another Iraq War film (so far, none have fared well at the box office), but I’m definitely chomping at the bit for this one, mostly because of my die-hard support for its director. The movie reteams Bigelow with her Strange Days star Ralph Fiennes, and also features Guy Pearce, David Morse and Jeremy Renner.

The Hurt Locker is going to be one of five U.S. films which will competing for the top prize at the 65th Annual Venice International Film Festival beginning on August 27. I, for one, can’t wait to see how it fares.

Hong Kong cinema has turned out some of our most acclaimed contemporary filmmakers, such as John Woo and Wong Kar-wai. To that roster, you can add the name of Johnnie To, a longtime director who, during the past five years or so, has had his work headline or play in all of the major film festivals such as Cannes, Venice or New York. In fact, To will be one of the jurors at this year’s Venice International Film Festival.

To’s movies often play into genres — cop movies, gangster stories, romantic comedies — but he always manages to sneak something a bit subversive, perhaps even twisted, into fare that would probably be flat-out uninteresting in less talented hands.

Case in point is one of his newest films, Mad Detective, which is actually going to enjoy some theatrical distribution in the U.S. courtesy of IFC Films. It is, in a nutshell, the story of an investigator (played by actor and longtime To collaborator Lau Ching-wan) who has an amazing knack for solving cases via some rather unorthodox methods. He’s roped in by a rookie police officer to help solve a baffling crime involving a cop’s disappearance.

To say more would definitely spoil a lot of the surprises and gallows humor that the off-kilter plot, written by co-director Wai Ka-fai, has in store. Suffice to say that the movie has a lot of fun setting on ear those “brilliant investigator” or profiler types of movies and shows (stuff like CSI, The Silence of the Lambs, or Cracker) and turning their clichés into something fresh and skewed. There are also, in typical Hong Kong cinema fashion, some genuinely bravura sequences and brilliant filmmaking moments. To deploys a lot of narrative and character information with beautifully staged scenes, careful edits and compositions, and little dialogue. It’s breathtaking to watch such skill on-screen.

Hopefully, the film will play somewhere near you. It’s definitely worth a look if you want a break from the usual summer movie/blockbuster fare. Check out some rave reviews here and the trailer here.

It’s been a long time coming, but the project that’s had comic book fans salivating for what seems like an eternity will finally be hitting theaters in 2009.

The groundbreaking 1986 maxi-series/graphic novel Watchmen by writer Alan Moore and illustrator Dave Gibbons has been adapted into a big-budget feature film by 300 director Zack Snyder. Along for the ride is a cast of acclaimed top-flight actors like Billy Crudup, Jackie Earle Haley and Carla Gugino — not “stars” exactly, but folks who tend to win awards and kudos for their efforts rather than huge salaries. Y’know, actual actors.

Watchmen is certainly a superhero-driven work, complete with costumed characters or genetically-altered protagonists sporting monikers like Nite Owl, Silk Spectre, and Dr. Manhattan. However, what made the comic an instant fanboy classic and a critical success, even amongst “mainstream” reviewers and publications, was the richness of its vision. Author Moore has stated that with Watchmen he hoped to create a work with real heft to it, like Moby Dick, and I daresay he pulled it off. It’s speculative fiction at its finest, a fully fleshed-out “What If…?” scenario that imagines America as it might be today if superheroes had truly existed, specifically during key 20th century periods like the Vietnam era that really molded our country. How would our society have been affected? What would the political ramifications have been? Could law and order truly have been maintained in such a fashion?

Moore’s vision is a dark one, densely plotted and richly imagined. That density was probably the main challenge that kept a film adaptation at bay for so long. A whole slew of writers and filmmakers like Terry Gilliam, Darren Aronofsky and Paul Greengrass have taken stabs at bringing the comic to the big screen since the late ’80s, but Snyder’s the one who finally pulled it off.

Maybe.

Fans will surely make their thoughts known once the movie opens, but we’ll have to wait ’til next year to find out if Snyder was the best match for the material. For the time being, check out the trailer for the film here. The official website for the film is here.

Truer lyrics were never sung. My recent riffs on Italian cinema weren’t exactly an accident. I’m going to be on vacation for a good couple of weeks, so blogging won’t be a daily reality for me anymore. I’ll be taking it easy and, quite frankly, trying to be a bit unplugged from my day-to-day wired existence.

This announcement, however, is still a bit movie related. You see, part of the vacation will be spent in Torino (a.k.a. Turin), the northern city that was the location of the most recent winter Olympics. What you may not know is that Torino was also the hub of filmmaking in Italy before it was unseated by Rome (kind of like New York and Los Angeles, to find parallels in the American film industry). The city has a rich cinematic history, and keeps that heritage alive at the amazing National Cinema Museum, which is housed in a beautiful landmark known as the Mole Antonelliana, the building seen at the head of this post.

Torino’s also the favored shooting location of one of my hallowed filmmakers, Dario Argento, whose classic mindblower of a thriller Profondo Rosso (a.k.a. Deep Red) makes stunning use of the the city’s streets and buildings.

In a nice bit of charming geekiness, a fan went out there, photographed all of the key locations of the film, and scored a montage of them with a key cue from Profundo Rosso’s score, which is by the genius prog-rock band Goblin.

Check out the fan piece here, and the original Italian trailer for Profundo Rosso (with English subtitles!) here.

“Addio” for now….

Hmmm, interesting serendipity here. I blogged yesterday about Matteo Garrone’s criticially-acclaimed new mafia drama Gomorra, and it turns out the pic is making headlines outside of film critics’ circles.

That’s because one of the cast members, credited as “Giovanni Venosa,” was recognized by inmates at a Naples prison as being one of their own. There was a special screening of the film at the jail, and lo and behold the movie screen became an “line up” of sorts and the alleged hoodlum was ratted out by his buddies. No honor amongst thieves, I guess.

According to press, Venosa always had a passion for acting — even though he was reportedly a wanted crime figure as well — and tried out for Gomorra in an open casting call. Garrone himself supposedly selected Venosa for the film.

After the screening, police easily located Venosa in Modena, and popped him into the slammer.

Cinema as we know it would be nothing without the masterworks from Italy that have illuminated its silver screens. Vittorio De Sica and Bicycle Thieves, Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist, Sergio Leone with Once Upon a Time in the West and Dario Argento’s Suspiria…the list of phenomenal works that span all tastes and genres goes on and on. It’s safe to say that revered Hollywood filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg would not have found the same degree of inspiration from movies if it hadn’t been for Italian masterpieces.

Truth be told, however, films from that country (well, more accurately, films of commendable quality) have been largely absent from the cultural radar in recent years. Works from Romania, France and Iran seem to hold more arthouse attention these days. All of that might change with Gomorra (titled Gomorrah for the U.S. market), a contemporary mafia drama directed by the relatively young talent Matteo Garrone. Garrone made a few films that garnered attention before, like The Embalmer and First Love, but none of them won the raves that Gomorra has been receiving. In fact, the film was a surprise winner at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival where it took the grand prix, prompting The New York Times to declare a rebirth for Italian cinema.

Only time will tell if Gomorra lives up to the hype, but judging from this (unfortunately unsubtitled) trailer, the film promises to be gritty, throught-provoking, visually stunning, and unique. Everything that we can naturally expect from the best of Italian film.

Here’s a music video for a song inspired by Byron Haskin’s criminally underrated 1964 sci-fi adventure Robinson Crusoe on Mars. The ridiculously goofy yet insanely catchy song’s written and performed by actor Victor Lundin, who plays the alien “Friday” in the film. Lundin touts himself on his website as the first actor to ever play a Klingon on Star Trek!

And as there be red band trailers here, I’m guilty of propagating such spoilers, so please don’t click on them if you prefer to stay in the dark.

Hollywood, being the hyper-capitalist market that it is (and that’s understandable considering how much cash gets sunk into each potential blockbuster “investment”), always seems to be on the lookout for marketing trends that’ll hopefully bring the butts of that hallowed 18-35-year-old-male audience demographic into theater seats.

Lately, there seems to be an full-blown return to using red band trailers to catch viewers’ attention. These trailers, which have a “red” opening image (or “card”) as opposed to the usual general-audience friendly green, used to be the cinematic equivalent of truffles (back when truffles were something special, anyway): a surprise that was rarely encountered, with the promise of some really tantalizing pleasure, maybe something forbidden, to boot.

Unfortunately, these days, every film that gets an “R” rating seems to also get a red band trailer. If it isn’t sent to theaters, it almost always appears online in that attempt to have it go “viral” and, of course, bring paying audiences to the movies.

The major downside here is that all these red band trailers seem to blow tons of major plot elements in addition to all the “money shots” in the movies. For example, take the red band trailers for recent films like Street Kings

and The Happening.

Having actually seen both films, I can say that key plot points and/or character fates are revealed in both. I had actually watched the red band for The Happening before seeing the film and basically knew what was going to happen to John Leguizamo’s character before the movie even started.

The red band for the upcoming action-comedy Pineapple Express also seems to spoil some key visual gags, ones that surely would’ve been funny to discover in the theater with other viewers during the course of the actual movie.

It’s too bad that the big studios don’t trust audiences enough to let simpler, less content-explicit material draw their attention. I think it’s fair to believe that people will still choose to see a movie if the story itself sounds interesting, or if the cast or filmmaker seems appealing to them. We moviegoers are not entirely dependent on information overload, and we’re capable of thinking for ourselves.