Smash Cut

Whoa, McFly!

Beloved author Roald Dahl always had a slightly sinister sense of humor, and one can’t help but wonder what Charlie and the Chocolate Factory would’ve been like if the eccentric confectioner had been a little less wonky and a cut more nasty.

Well, wonder no longer! Over at the humor website Funny or Die, there’s a hilariously brilliant parody trailer for a phony slasher pic called Gobstopper. The preview features a demonic Willy Wonka taking on some bratty teenagers in pure genre-consistent style. In a bit of casting genius, none other than Christopher Lloyd — Dr. Emmet Brown himself — plays the purple-clad psycho.

Check out the trailer here, and visit the Official Gobstopper Website for more deadly treats.

Also known as Korkusuz, 1986’s Rampage is probably best known (if at all) as the Turkish version of Rambo: First Blood Part II. And by “version,” I mean shameless rip-off.

The thing is, if you’ve never seen a Turkish “adaptation” of a Hollywood hit (such as the legendary Dünyayi kurtaran adam, a.k.a. Turkish Star Wars), then you’re missing out. The flicks may grab everything from their source inspirations with a copyright-infringing zeal that would leave any legal team in the dust, but they spit and whirl those elements with such devilish (or should I say “dervish-like”) glee that they often surpass the originals in terms of pure entertainment value. And Rampage — which is, amazingly enough, from the very same mastermind director of Turkish Star Wars, Çetin Inanç — could deliver the goods in exactly that manner.

What’s Rampage about? A Turkish commando has to kick a lot of bad-guy ass. Whadja think it was about?

Take a look at the amazing Rampage trailer on the DVD’s official website, courtesy of its releasing studio Dark Maze. Or, better yet, have a gander at this clip.

If Taiwanese cinema is known at all in the United States, it’s generally amongst the arthouse aficionados who groove to the deliberately-paced, slice-of-life-fueled dramas from New Taiwan Cinema alumni like Cannes-favorites Hou Hsiao-hsien and the late, great Edward Yang.

Taiwan’s film industry has never been as prolific or as profitable as that of, say, Hong Kong, but you have to give its local talent credit for overcoming financial and technological difficulties and continuing to make world-class efforts that keep them on the international scene. In addition, once in a blue moon, some daring soul actually tries his hand at making a genre pic: a shoot-’em-up, for example, or a thriller. And now, the country’s produced a film that’s going to let it join an ever-growing club: the Trans-Continental Slasher Society. Yup, even Taiwan couldn’t resist the temptation of making a maniacal-killer-on-the-rampage movie, and why not? They’re cheap and audiences tend to eat them up (not to mention slasher pics traverse linguistic boundaries very, very easily).

Invitation Only seems to toe the line of every horror trope — masked baddie, nubile victims, etc. — but who knows, it could still be fun. Check out the trailer that’s embedded on the film’s official website, if you dare to learn more.

I must say, after my first viewing, I think that director Spike Jonze and his stalwart cast and crew seem to have done a potentially good job at adapting a tricky (and very short) children’s book.

Where the Wild Things Are, in case you missed by previous posting, is Jonze’s long-in-production (rumored-to-be-troubled) cinematic version of Caldecott Medal-winning author Maurice Sendak’s classic tale, in which a mischievous young boy who’s sent to bed without his supper embarks on a monster-filled imaginary adventure that leads him back to his mother’s love.

I’ve been eager to see how Jonze’s vision would mesh with Sendak’s, and…it’s different from what I pictured. The director (along with cinematographer Lance Acord) seems shooting for something more akin to realism than fantasy, and that could, frankly, make for a pretty banal movie. But we’ll see.

The brand-new, long-awaited trailer can be viewed here, in standard definition or HD, courtesy of Apple’s trailer page. In case you’re wondering, the music in the preview is the song “Wake Up”, by Canadian band Arcade Fire.

You might not have ever heard of him before, but Hal Ashby was one of the great directors of 1970s Hollywood cinema, right up there, in my opinion, with Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Yates, William Friedkin, Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma.

Ashby juggled tones and genres like a maestro, and movies like his unforgettable oddball dark comedy Harold and Maude, the star-studded drama Shampoo, or the outrageously funny yet achingly sad The Last Detail seem to come from a wholly unique directorial voice.

One of Ashby’s most acclaimed works is his 1976 biopic of American folk singer Woody Guthrie. Called Bound for Glory, the film chronicled the musician’s Depression-era travels that led him to see America through the suffering yet unwavering eyes of the country’s working class, thus finding inspiration for the now-revered ballads that he would compose. The movie was praised for its evocative depiction of Great Depression-era life and a solid performance from actor David Carradine as Guthrie, and it scored Oscars for its impeccable cinematography and soundtrack.

But if you went to a recent March 18 screening of Bound for Glory that was held by the American Cinematheque in California, then you must’ve witnessed a post-screening Q&A that would’ve made all that praise seem like it was for a totally different movie. Star Carradine and director of photography Haskell Wexler pretty much went at each other during the whole thing, flinging allegations of cocaine abuse, backhanded compliments, full-on insults, questions of authorship, and maintaining a general mood of unending animosity. (Co-star Ronny Cox was on-stage too, but apparently couldn’t get many words in during the fracas.)

Some gems:

Wexler: “I went to Hal and I said ‘Hal, just take a minute and STOP SNIFFING THAT STUFF UP YOUR NOSE!’”

Carradine: “Haskell is a little down on people who snort cocaine…And yes, Hal was a great user of cocaine. It does not change the fact that he was…Quentin Tarantino doesn’t beat Hal Ashby, and he’s one of my favorite directors. Quentin is incredible. And he’s a big cocaine freak, too!”

Carradine: “We had this incredible guy… Do you remember the name of the guy that was the handheld camera guy, that used the suitcase camera?”

Wexler: “Do I remember it? How do you think it got in this film, David? Who do you think planned it? Who did the shots? Look it, David, you fuckin’…”

Carradine: “Somebody will talk to me about Haskell and I’ll say ‘Oh yeah, he’s the guy who got an Academy Award for ruining my picture.’”

For the full story — and I highly recommend you check it out, even if you don’t know the film or any of these key players — go to writer Chris Willman’s blog entry about the evening on the Huffington Post.

Back in the days when George Lucas actually made enjoyable movies, he invited director Steven Spielberg and writer Lawrence Kasdan over to have a little discussion. The focus of the meeting was to come up with a screenplay centered around an rugged archaeologist, one that would be almost like a globe-trotting samurai with a whip instead of a sword. He’d come face-to-face with Nazis and other nefarious evil-doers in a breakneck adventure to uncover a legendary holy relic that’s reputed to bring its bearers power of unfathomable proportions: the Ark of the Covenant.

We all know that this story would become the basis of 1981’s unforgettable action classic Raiders of the Lost Ark. But even before the trio even dreamed up the name of Indiana Jones or thought about having Harrison Ford fill his shoes, they had a conference so that ideas could be bandied about, plot points ironed or abandoned, and characters envisioned in a non-stop volley.

That meeting was a gathering of three creators who, at the time, were at the top of their creative game, and we’re lucky that someone actually transcribed the conference, which is now available for our edification, reading pleasure, or plain old satisfaction of curiosity. If you’d like to have a window into the event that led to an unforgettable film and a truly iconic character, go here to download the transcript. It’s about 6MB in size, in pdf format. While it lasts, folks!

It was really only a couple of weeks ago when I first posted about the forthcoming live-action interpretation of the 2000 anime vampire/action classic, Blood: The Last Vampire.

Well, it now seems as if people are salivating for more, because the hype machine is still chugging along at full steam, with a brand-new trailer popping up online courtesy of Yahoo! Japan. It’s not subtitled, but a good amount of it is actually in English so you shouldn’t have any problems following along.

The thing is, now that I’ve actually heard the delivery of the English dialogue (particularly that of lead actress Gianna Jun), I’m toning down my expectations a bit. Some of the performances seem a bit…uh…stiff, which can (and should) be expected given the fact that English isn’t exactly the native tongue of many of the performers. But I can’t deny that the not-so-fluent passages are more than a little distracting. Nevertheless, director Chris Nahon obviously has an eye for flashy style, and the extended footage shows off the movie’s exciting sheen.

Check out the trailer here. (Click on the highlighted blue characters above the paragraph of Japanese text in order to access the preview.)

Probably every single person who ever went through a traditional American grade-school has read Maurice Sendak’s boy-sent-to-bed-without-supper flight of fantasy, Where The Wild Things Are. And just as probable is the likelihood that the book attained a genuinely-beloved, don’t-fuck-with-this-one-Hollywood status for every reader.

So I guess we should take the lack of total rancor towards the idea of quirkmeister Spike Jonze helming an adaptation of the Sendak story for the big screen as a testimony to our collective faith that, hey, here’s a guy who just might be able to pull this one off without totally screwing the pooch. I mean, the fella even tapped lit-wunderkind Dave Eggers to co-write the screenplay and assembled an A-list cast with the likes of James Gandolfini and Forest Whitaker to (vocally) act their furry chops off.

But then, maybe we all felt good about his live-action envisioning three years ago when the movie first entered production. It’s hard not to feel like we should prep for Disaster Mode when a film — especially one based on a short children’s tale — takes such a long time (not to mention a switcheroo between two studios) to reach our screens. Effects problems? Script woes? The dreaded “creative differences?”

Whatever the case, Warner Bros., the studio currently taking the gamble on Jonze’s opus, seems ready to unveil the pic in mid-October, and word on the street claims that a trailer will finally be seen, right before next week’s March 27 release of the animated creature comedy, Monsters vs. Aliens. Let’s hope some enterprising soul leaks that sucker online before then.

Boy oh boy, anime/manga/filmmaking visionary Mamoru Oshii is one busy dude. How he finds time to direct multiple projects (he had three works in 2008 alone) and produce and/or write additional ones is one of Life’s Great Mysteries. But, for fans like me, his unstoppable workflow is also one of its Great Pleasures.

And sure to be one of those Great Pleasures is Musashi: The Dream of the Last Samurai (a.k.a. Miyamoto Musashi: Sôken ni haseru yume), an anime retelling of the life of Miyamoto Musashi, a man who’s considered by many to be the greatest swordsman and strategist in Japanese history. Oshii isn’t directing this film — that task goes to vet animator Mizuho Nishikubo — but he did write the screenplay and is one of its producers. Oshii is promising that this will be an unusual portrayal of Musashi, so we just have to wait and see what novel touches will fuel the movie.

At any rate, I’ve tagged the unsubtitled but dialogue-free trailer below. Take a look. You won’t be disappointed.

So, are you sick of reading all my continuous hype over master fantasist Kazuaki Kiriya’s latest mindblower, Goemon?

Well, too bad, ’cause I’m still jonesing over this upcoming movie, and now there’s an even newer trailer that’s gonna knock your socks off (as if the first trailer didn’t already take care of that business).

Goemon, for those of you who haven’t been paying attention, is a Japanese sci-fi/fantasy/quasi-historical riff on the old Robin Hood legend: a daring hero takes on an oppressive ruler to bring the riches of the wealthy to the poor. But, clearly, he does it with a lot of style.

You can witness the glory of the new trailer over at the film’s official website. It’s set for a May 1 unveiling in Japan.