Film

I had a nice birthday in the Spy Vibe lair today! Sushi lunch and dinner with fellow agents, and I got to add more volumes to my collection of classic Dick Tracy comic strips. Opening the box got me thinking about those childhood treasures and holiday moments. How many Spy Vibers liked to look at the Sears or Corgi catalogs back in the day and dream over the cool spy toys? Did any of you collect the Gilbert toys? I never had the Gilbert action figures and play sets below until I was in college (hey, I was a late bloomer!), but they still managed to fire my imagination. I love that they made things like Goldfinger's laser table. Just what every kid needed to torture their own secret agent and stage cliff-hangers at home! And Ken Adam's designed trick pool table with secret map- ingenious! I eventually had all of the sets sealed on their original cards, but sold them off with other James Bond artifacts to help fund my first move to Japan. Sometimes I think about picking some of these up again and photographing ala David Leventhal or Slinkachu. But for now, the catalog does the trick. Here's a little dream for you. Click to enlarge. Enjoy!

Oh my. This is not your mom and dad's JGL. I bet your dad wishes this was his Scarlett Johansson though. Prepare to feast your eyes on a meaty Joseph Gordon-Levitt and a delectable Scarlett Johansson in the trailer for JGL's feature-length directorial debut, Don Jon. A New Jersey guy dedicated to his family, friends, and church, develops unrealistic expectations from watching porn and works to find happiness and intimacy with his potential true love.Before Chase Wale moved on from reviewing films to distributing them he caught the film for us at Sundance. You can find the link to his full review below but here are a couple choice snippets for you. "Don Jon('s Addiction) is filled with a lot of masturbation, pornography, and the wholesome,... [Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]

In my mind this is how I picture JCVD took the news that Universal was planning to reboot one of his most successful films without his involvement. Universal is presently searching out writers to reboot and re-imagine the concept of the 1994 sci-fi actioner Timecop. You will remember that the story of the film is about a police force called the Time Enforcement Commission that regulates time travel. Van Damme played the cop who crosses a crooked politician using time travel to further his career. Can we just take a second to remind Universal what happened to Sony and the near disastrous performance of a reboot of a much more idolized sci-fi action epic Total Recall. The film bombed domestically here in North America. If it were... [Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]

The St Kilda Short Film Festival is turning 30 this year, and to celebrate it is running an extended 10 day program that includes 100 Australian short films, a special program of music videos and retrospective screenings, industry open days and workshops, plus four sidebars showcasing the best of the iconic South By Southwest Film Festival. All in all there will be about 150 shorts and close to 40 music videos, so how does one figure out what to watch amid all the choices? Working at Twitch and its comrade company XYZ Films I get to watch a hell of a lot of short films, many long before they see the light of day. I've picked 13 shorts from across the Australian program that I feel... [Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]

Bruce Chatwin's historically-inspired novel The Viceroy of Ouidah has a story worthy of a swashbuckling adventure from the golden age of Hollywood. It tells of a poor farmer who became a bandit only to be exiled to a foreign land where he overthrew a mad tyrant. Chatwin published his novel in 1980, long after the golden age. By then, it was a subject worthy of Werner Herzog, and a different kind of film resulted. Herzog predictably cast Klaus Kinski as the hero, which signalled that the character, the Brazilian bandit Francisco Manoel de Silva aka "Cobra Verde," would hardly be a hero. Whether Herzog's script and Kinski's performance reflects Chatwin's text, I can't say. I can say that, were that Chatwin's character, Hollywood would have whitewashed him into a more romantic, swashbuckling figure. Herzog presents him warts and all as an amoral rather than romantic figure.Silva is no "social bandit" or revolutionary, no rallying point for the poor. Rather, Herzog shows him witnessing a mass whipping of prisoners in a public square with indifference. When one of the prisoners breaks loose, Silva stops the man in his tracks, basically telling him to go back and take his medicine. He impresses a wealthy plantation owner who doesn't know Silva's bandit identity. He hires Silva as his foreman, only to grow furious when the new man impregnates his half-caste daughters. Only then does Silva reveal himself as Cobra Verde. Rather than have him killed outright, the planter and his cronies give him a new job. They send him across the Atlantic to Africa to purchase slaves from the Kingdom of Dahomey. The trade has lapsed for many years and the king is rumored to be mad. No one really expects Silva to make good or even return alive. Once again they have underestimated their man.Against the odds, Silva revives the trade, exchanging men for rifles and taking residence in an abandoned fort. The Brazilians weren't kidding about the king, however, and Herzog warms to the challenge of having someone on screen crazier than Kinski. The king demands to see Silva, but the trader demurs, insisting that he must always have one foot in the ocean -- he must stay on the coast. The king's men simply kidnap him; respecting his obligations, they fill a jar with sea water and stick his foot in it. At court, the king asks after the health of his peers, the crowned heads of Europe, then asks why Silva has gathered a fleet of several hundred thousand ships to invade his country, and why Silva has poisoned his pet.Silva has a lucky escape and joins a conspiracy to replace the king with a bug-eyed, perhaps equally mad yet more compliant relative. Now at last Silva is the kind of rebel you would expect to see in a swashbuckler. He is tasked with training an army of topless women, the men of the land having proved unreliable. He shows them how to fight with spears and ferocity. This is where most people will put in a screencap of Kinski grimacing and brandishing a spear. Thanks to them, I don't have to; google it if you like.An army of bare-breasted Amazons is a natural Herzog subject, and as in all his pictures there are plenty of sidewise glances at small details that make scenes more real (animals) or more weird (crippled people). He manages an impressive level of human spectacle in the Amazon scenes and the scenes at the king's court, where skulls are the popular design motif. He might be accused of objectifying the Africans as savages had he not established Silva as no more than a savage himself. If anything, Herzog objectifies humanity as savage or, at best, pitifully grotesque. There's something uncomfortably exploitative in his having Kinski attended in the film's final scenes by a handicapped man who walks more like an ape than a man, propelling himself with strong arms while withered legs drag behind, but by now you also understand that the grotesque is a reality principle for Herzog. Addressing slavery, Cobra Verde slightly resembles Jacopetti & Prosperi's

Watch On the Road online at SundanceNow (photo: Sam Riley, Kristen Stewart, Garrett Hedlund) On the Road, Walter Salles’ film adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s semi-autobiographical novel, is now available on SundanceNow. Initially screened at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, where it drew mixed reviews, and later reedited for the Toronto Film Festival and the North American market, On the Road stars Garrett Hedlund (TRON: Legacy, the upcoming Inside Llewyn Davis), Sam Riley (the upcoming Byzantium and Maleficent), and Kristen Stewart — who seemed to be everywhere in 2012: besides On the Road, Stewart was also seen in Rupert Sanders’ summer hit Snow White and the Huntsman, opposite Chris Hemsworth and Charlize Theron, and, in her final appearance as Bella Swan, Bill Condon’s late fall hit The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2, co-starring Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner. (Scroll down to watch new On the Road featurette, with Kristen Stewart and Garrett Hedlund.) On the Road also received mixed reviews in North America. The free-flowing drama has a 44% approval rating and 6/10 average among Rotten Tomatoes‘ top critics. Reportedly budgeted at $25 million, On the Road flopped badly in the US/Canada, grossing only $720,828; despite its stellar cast, it also failed to get any awards-season traction. (Read this post on On the Road and platform releases.) Perhaps unsurprisingly, On the Road enjoyed a warmer reception in France, where it took in $2.7 million shortly after it was screened at Cannes. Also in Brazil, director Walter Salles’ native country — and where Kristen Stewart is a huge star — On the Road scored a respectable (for an indie drama) $1.59 million. Now, check out below a new On the Road featurette with Kristen Stewart and Garrett Hedlund discussing their involvement in the film. On the Road cast Besides Garrett Hedlund as Dean Moriarty, Sam Riley as Sal Paradise, and Kristen Stewart as Marylou, On the Road‘s all-star cast features four-time Academy Award nominee Amy Adams (Junebug, Doubt, The Fighter, The Master), Academy Award nominee Viggo Mortensen (Eastern Promises, A History of Violence), Kirsten Dunst (Spider-Man, Melancholia), 2013 Tony nominee Tom Sturridge (Orphans), plus Elisabeth Moss, Danny Morgan, Terrence Howard, Alice Braga, Steve Buscemi, and veteran Michael Sarrazin (They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?) in his last film role. Jorge Rivera, Walter Salles’ collaborator on The Motorcycle Diaries, was credited for the On the Road screenplay. Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund, and Kristen Stewart photo: Outtake from M Magazine‘s May 2012 feature, photographed by Steven Pan. This post was originally published at Alt Film Guide (http://www.altfg.com/). Not to be republished without permission.

Similar to this review, The Hangover Part III is mostly about Alan (Galifinakis). Other than that, there’s not much worth mentioning. Like all endings, the final part of Todd Phillips roofie-ridden trilogy opts to go back to the beginning. Phil …

In the wake of The World’s End teaser trailer released online just two weeks ago, our computer screens have been graced with a full length trailer for Edgar Wright’s upcoming Blood and Ice Cream finale. The final instalment of the …

We should all just surrender our credit card info to Scream Factory right now and acquiesce to the fact that we'll just be working to support our habits into the foreseeable future. This week saw a pair of fantastic releases and there are many, many more on the way. We'll also take a brief look at a release we missed over the last few weeks that definitely deserves recognition. But first...The BurningI've owned The Burning on DVD since the 2007 special edition DVD came out from MGM, but had never made the time to actually watch it. Thankfully this Blu-ray release from Scream Factory forced me to make the time and I'm damned glad I did. Not only is the film one of the better... [Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]

For a long time now, Ghostbusters 3 has been all talk – mostly from Dan Aykroyd – and no action, but a few new plot details give us hope that production might finally be about to get underway. Of course …