film Archives | Page 3 of 14

Tagfilm

Grant Morrison Working on Rogue Trooper Film?

November 1, 2011 / Klint Finley

Rogue Trooper

Empire Online reports Grant Morrison is attached a film based on the 2000AD character Rogue Trooper:

With all eyes on the incoming Judge Dredd movie, it makes sense that savvy producers would be looking to legendary British comic 2000AD for further inspiration. Hence the news this morning that a Rogue Trooper film is in development at Sam Worthington’s production company, and that cult comics writer Grant Morrison (Arkham Asylum, Final Crisis, Superman) is at work on the screenplay. […]

Morrison never wrote for the strip, but did provide copious Future Shocks, Zenith, and a handful of Dredds, so has plenty of 2000AD heritage. The news of a film and of Worthington and Morrison’s involvement is buried in a Daily Record story that mostly concentrates on Dinosaurs vs Aliens, the property that Morrison is currently working on with Barry Sonnenfeld. It’s an aside so sketchy that it doesn’t even come with a Morrison quote to back it up, so whether Worthington is developing the film with a view to personally slapping on the blue paint remains to be seen. We’ll bring you further details as they emerge.

Empire Online: Grant Morrison Writes Rogue Trooper Film

Rogue Trooper has already had a few video game adaptations.

David Cronenberg Talks About Forthcoming Projects

October 31, 2011 / Klint Finley

David Cronenberg

Empire Online ran a short interview with David Cronenberg on what his next projects will be, after Dangerous Method and the film adaptation of Don Delillo’s Cosmopolis.”

There were odd rumblings some time ago of Cronenberg remaking his own version of The Fly. Not strictly true, says the director, but not exactly false either. “Yeah, that was a thing,” he says. “It’s not exactly a remake; it’s sort of a sequel, kinda. I’ve written a script of that but I don’t know if it’s going to really happen. That has to do with Fox…”

Cronenberg also says he’s considering a sequel to Eastern Promises and denies the rumor that he’s directing the English language adaptation of the Spanish movie Timecrimes.

Empire Online: Cronenberg On Eastern Promises 2 And The Fly 3!

Patton Oswalt and Punisher War Zone Director Lexi Alexander Talk About how the Movie Got Made

October 17, 2011 / Klint Finley

Patton Oswalt joined director Lexi Alexander on an episode of the film podcast “How Did This Get Made?” to discuss Punisher War Zone.

How Did This Get Made? Punisher War Zone

Here are my notes from the interview:

-Lexi Alexander didn’t really want to do a Punisher sequel, but there was a sense that doing a big Hollywood movie was something she needed to do.
-The first meeting was right after the Virginia Tech shooting, and the news showed a clip of the shooter’s bed room and he had a Punisher poster.
-Alexander put the meeting off until later, and the studio ended up picking Rounders director John Dahl.
-But Alexander ended up being tapped for the film again when Dahl asked for too much money.
-The way the studio actually talked her into doing the movie was by telling her that she would be the first woman to direct a major super hero adaptation and that she could serve as a role model for girls who want to direct action films.
-Alexander says she really does hope she can serve as a role model to show girls that they can grow up to direct films other than Lifetime movies.
-Alexander started by doing focus groups of Punisher comic fans and asked them what they disliked about the first two Punisher movies.
-Alexander says all the ways that Frank Castle ends up killing people come from the comics, except the bit where he blows up the parkour guys with a rocket launcher.
-She said she included that bit because people kept telling her not to include any parkour guys because parkour was being over done. She decided instead to include them, but have them get blown up.

And here’s a clip of the Punisher from Super Hero Squad on Cartoon Network, which was played in the podcast:

The Mad Max Future Already Happened

September 2, 2011 / Klint Finley

Fun post from steelweaver about how Mad Max was inspired by the 1976 oil crisis and has some unsettling parallels with our current situation:

as I remember it, the setting for the first movie in the Mad Max series is a world where oil scarcity has led to economic disaster and the beginning of the breakdown of social order; where, whilst the police and justice systems continue to function, governmental cutbacks have diminished their ability to effectively maintain control; and where, whilst small pockets of civil society remain relatively unchanged (Max lives in a comfortable suburb with his wife and child), increasingly large areas are plagued by criminal gangs of looters.

Just saying…

In fact, the three-movie arc of the Mad Max films is in many ways a beautifully realised totally ridiculous, but excellently costumed, account of the slow breakdown of order (I), followed by total chaos (Road Warrior), followed by the first stages of re-establishing technology, trade and culture (Thunderdrome).

steelweaver: A Mad Max future

(Via Brainsturbator)

Trailer For Rum Diary, Based on a Book by Hunter S. Thompson and Starring Johnny Depp

August 29, 2011 / Klint Finley

The film Rum Diary is based on Hunter S. Thompson‘s only published fictional novel* (though most of his works blur fact and fiction) and stars Johnny Depp.

(via Boing Boing)

*”Fictional novel” may seem redundant, but the New Journalism authors like Thompson, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe called the notion that a novel must be fictional into question.

Are We On the Verge of the Next Psychedelic Explosion?

August 4, 2011 / Klint Finley

DMT the Spirit Molecule
The cover of DMT: The Spirit Molecule

I’m reading Grant Morrison’s Supergods right now, and I’ll probably have more to say on it in the future. But I’ve just passed a part in the book where he talks about the Sekhmet Hypothesis, and wanted to get some thoughts down right now.

The gist of the Sekhmet Hypothesis, as explained by Morrison, is that every 11 years culture shifts as sunspot activity waxes and wains. At one pole is “hippie” culture characterized by longer pop songs, longer hair baggy clothes, psychedelics and an emphasis on peace and love. At the other pole is punk culture, which is characterized by shorter pop songs, short hair, tight clothes, stimulants and an emphasis on anger and rebellion.

Update: Iain Spence, the originator of the Sekhmet Hypothesis and author of a book on the subject left a long comment that’s worth reading. It appears, first of all, that Morrison’s punk/hippie description of the hypothesis is much oversimplified (or perhaps I misunderstood his interpretation of it, this is like a game of telephone – if you want the real scoop on the hypothesis, go to the source). Second, Spence has updated the hypothesis having admitted that he was wrong about the solar cycle aspect of it, among other things.

So it would go:

1966: LSD, psychedelic rock, hippies, happenings, peace and love.
1977: Punk, new wave, shaved heads, cocaine, rock shows, nihilism.
1988: Rave, long electronic dance tracks, shoegaze, Brit pop, MDMA, “Peace, Love, Unity, Respect.”
1999: The Matrix, nu-metal, emo, screamo, cutting going mainstream, Red Bull, Starbucks, cocaine and meth making a come back, 9/11, Law & Order.
2010: Avatar, Alice in Wonderland and the “dandyishness” of the vampires of Twilight and True Blood (not sure I swallow that last part).

I could add the surge of mind fuck movies in the 90s, and their come back in the 10s, but as some readers pointed out in my earlier post on the subject, those types of movies didn’t entirely die out in the 00s. Also:

The 60s were also marked by outrage and protest, some of quite violent. A lot of hippies and mods wore tight clothes.
The late 70s and early 80s also had disco (and later house), psychedelic post-punk, butt rock, epic metal etc.
The 90s had the Rodney King riots, gangsta rap, Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, plenty of metal, the militia movement, hyperviolent video games and movies.
Rave didn’t completely die out in the 90s, instead it turned into teknival with a strong emphasis on the hippie-ish psytrance wing. Burning Man grew larger than ever. Not to mention Massively multiplayer online role playing games and Second Life. Tool put Alex Grey’s art on their album cover and his career exploded. Daniel Pinchbeck sold a bazillion books. And what about the popularity of bands like Radiohead, Coldplay and Muse? A bit more underground, but what to make of doom metal, dubstep and BPitchControl, or the hipster cred of Arthur Magazine?

It’s really hard for me to accept that “punk” is the opposite of “hippie.” The 60s counterculture wasn’t always peaceful and non-violent, and the punks, with their love of Jamaican music, antiwar songs and their vegan and vegetarianism were a lot more hippie-ish than many gave them credit for.

And yet…

It’s hard, given the number of exceptions to the formula, to swallow the idea that there’s a real, society-wide pull between punk and hippie every 11 years. Others have critiqued historicity before, and I don’t need to go there.

But there may be pattern of rising and falling tides of psychedelia, perhaps accompanied by a sense of optimism and energy that eventually dissipates. The 60s had acid, the 90s had ecstasy. And I’m hearing that DMT is becoming a common strong street drugs these days, and the new cool thing to listen to is apparently the sound of a modem slowed way down. We could be in for some weird times indeed.

Trailer for Cronenberg’s Movie on Freud and Jung

June 21, 2011 / Klint Finley

Mentioned previously here, A Dangerous Method is directed by David Cronenberg and stars Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud, Michael Fassbender as Carl Jung, Keira Knightley as Sabina Spielrein and Vincent Cassel as Otto Gross.

(Thanks James!)

For more on Cronenberg, see our dossier on him

Documentary to Examine Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune

May 14, 2011 / Klint Finley

In “Jodorowsky’s Dune,” director Frank Pavich intends to get to the bottom of the proposed film and why it fell apart. The doc, half-completed, is currently looking for distribution at Cannes, though interviews with Jodorowsky, Geiger and others have already been recorded. They’ve also released a promo video, obtained by TwitchFilm, which should whet your appetite for what Pavich has in store—check it out after the jump

We hope this is the beginning of a Jodorowsky renaissance. His collaboration with David Lynch’s Absurda Films, “King Shot,” sought financing at Cannes in 2009, but the project was eventually canceled. And we have no idea what happened with “Abelcain,” the long-rumored sequel to “El Topo” that supposedly secured a budget in the fall that same year. It’s just as well, considering Jodo hasn’t been behind the camera since 1990’s “The Rainbow Thief” (which he has since disowned), but we do recommend the excellent two-disc “Santa Sangre” DVD put out earlier this year by the good folks at Severin Films.

indieWIRE: New Documentary To Go Inside ‘Jodorowsky’s Dune’

Here’s a whole bunch of stuff about Jodorowsky’s Dune.

And here’s a clip from, I think, the documentary La Constellation Jodorowsky about the Dune project:

Jodorowsky’s ideas for Dune ended up in his comic Metabarons, which is still in print.

William S. Burroughs and Gus Van Sant: The Discipline Of Do Easy

April 17, 2011 / Klint Finley

The Discipline Of DE, a 9 minute adaptation of the short story by William S. Burroughs, was Gus Van Sant’s first film outside of film school. It was filmed around 1977. The story first appeared in Exterminator! in 1973.

Here’s an excerpt from the story:

DE is a way of doing. DE simply means doing whatever you do in the easiest most relaxed way you can manage which is also the quickest and most efficient way, as you will find as you advance in DE.You can start right now tidying up your flat, moving furniture or books, washing dishes, making tea, sorting papers. Don’t fumble, jerk, grab an object. Drop cool possessive fingers onto it like a gentle old cop making a soft arrest.

(via Dangerous Minds)

The Dream of the 90s is Alive in Hollywood

March 16, 2011 / Klint Finley

Limitless

The late 90s had a string of interesting movies that made one feel… strange. The Matrix, Magnolia, Being John Malkovitch, Fight Club, American Beauty. Hell, even the Truman Show fit this mold. I call ’em mind-fuck movies. They aren’t necessarily great movies, and those brought-up on a steady diet of weirdness probably wouldn’t be moved by them. But each one played with reality and identity, invoked paranoia in and interesting way, and/or made the mundane seem strange by zooming in a bit too close.

There was something about those movies, and the feeling that they transmitted, that’s been lost in the past decade. But I think it might be coming back.

It seemed at first in the early 00s that the mind-fucking would continue. There was Vanilla Sky (which was actually based on a late 90s Spanish movie), and Philip K. Dick was finally getting his due. But most of those Dick adaptations sucked. With few exceptions the 00s were dominated by realism, bromantic comedies, superheroes and sequels (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind stands out, but it seems a little too sentimental to qualify as a mind-fuck movie) . My favorite movie of the decade, Children of Men, was hardly a mind-fucker.

Actually, the 00s will probably be more remembered for its TV series than for its movies. We’ll remember shows like Deadwood, Six Feet Under, The Wire, Dexter and Mad Men. But great as these shows are, they are hardly mind-fuck material. Lost should have been the ultimate mind-fuck epic, but it ended instead in disappointment. (I haven’t watched all of Battle Start Gallactica, but I could see someone making the case that it should qualify for the mind-fuck category. If so, it’s the exception and not the rule.)

Maybe it was 9/11, Bush Administration and the wars. Maybe it was Hollywood’s risk-adversion. Whatever it was, that surrealist buzz fizzled.

But there’s a slew of new movies coming out of Hollywood that remind me of that 90s vibe. It may have started with Inception, and there are others coming up that look like they will break the 00s mold. Movies like
The Adjustment Bureau (yet another Dick adaptation), Limitless (which looks like a Scientology metaphor) and Sucker Punch. I’m not saying any of these will be good. In fact, I’d bet against it. But each one seems like it could be a story arc or plot line from The Invisibles. I’d say that’s a step in the right direction.

Mind-fuck might be too strong a word for this new crop of Hollywood movies. I’m thinking the term “neuro-film” might be a better fit.

Whatever you call it, here’s to hoping for a better decade.

Theme by Anders Norén — Up ↑

Technoccult

Mutate Your Mind