Technically, Heaven’s Gate/The Deer Hunter director Michael Cimino (@Cimino1939) isn’t yet verified on Twitter, but we’ll allow the man the benefit of the doubt: He’s barely been Tweeting for 24 hours and already his account is a must-read.
1980’s Heaven’s Gate was such a notorious overbudget box office bomb that you can consider “pulling a heaven’s gate” Hollywood shorthand for bombastic failure, and yet: “A number of inexcusable, misleading things have been said about me,” Cimino Tweeted after his account sprang up yesterday.
With Heaven’s Gate enjoying renewed interest and critical appreciation (not to mention the estimable Criterion treatment), engaging with cinephiles three decades later could be Cimino’s ticket back into the game. “Being infamous is not fun,” Cimino said last summer at the Venice Film Festival. Welcome to Twitter, Mr. Cimino!
Give the guy a follow here and cross your fingers for some real talk along the lines of these Tweets about his Heaven’s Gate infamy, how he wanted to make The Empire Strikes Back as “a Western with lasers,” and his vision for turning the Kevin Bacon punch-dancing classic Footloose into a Grapes of Wrath-esque musical comedy.
Film recommendation… or modified haiku?
Young people of the world / Watch the films of John Ford / All of them / They are the best.—
Michael Cimino (@Cimino1939) December 07, 2012
On Heaven’s Gate breaking even — and only 32 years after release!
If Criterion's new edition of HEAVEN'S GATE sells enough copies this holiday season / It will finally break even / and we rewrite history.—
Michael Cimino (@Cimino1939) December 07, 2012
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Full Story »The unveiling of the 2013 Sundance Film Festival line-up has begun! (Get the first wave of titles in the U.S. and World dramatic and documentary slate, plus the NEXT selections here.) Here are ten intriguing, surprising, and promising figures and filmmakers to look forward to following around Park City as their films vie among the 16 dramatic and 16 documentary films in competition this year — including a certain Twilight maven, everyone’s favorite boy wizard, and two kinds of Bries.
1. Stephenie Meyer (Austenland)
When you think “billion-dollar vampire franchise” you don’t necessarily think “Sundance,” but after producing the last two films in her Twilight series (Breaking Dawn Part 1 & 2) and the upcoming adaptation of her sci-fi novel The Host, Stephenie Meyer came onboard to produce another lit adaptation, Austenland, based on Shannon Hale’s book — and the Jerusha Hess-helmed pic, starring Keri Russell, Bret McKenzie and JJ Feild, makes its debut in competition in Park City.
Thirtysomething, single Jane is obsessed with Mr. Darcy, as played by Colin Firth in Pride and Prejudice. On a trip to an English resort, her fantasies of meeting the perfect Regency-era gentleman become more real than she ever imagined.
2. David Sedaris (C.O.G.)
Bestselling author David Sedaris gets his first big screen adaptation in C.O.G., based on a short story in Sedaris’s book Naked. Kyle Patrick Alvarez directs Jonathan Groff (Glee) in the account based on Sedaris’s own experience working as an apple picker in Oregon, joined by a colorful cast including Casey Wilson, Dean Stockwell, Corey Stoll, Dale Dickey, and Denis O’Hare.
In the first ever film adaptation of David Sedaris’ work, a cocky young man travels to Oregon to work on an apple farm. Out of…
Full Story »If you missed the excellent ParaNorman in theaters (or saw the similarly macabre and quirky Frankenweenie instead), catch an exclusive clip from the dark, funny, moving, and visually impressive stop-motion animation about a loner kid named Norman whose ability to see dead people first makes him an outcast, then an unlikely hero, when his small town is overrun by zombies.
Movieline’s exclusive clip finds Norman (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and his Goonies-esque band of misfits — including school bully Alvin (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), sister Courtney (Anna Kendrick), reluctant BFF Neil (Tucker Albrizzi), and Neil’s jock brother Mitch (Casey Affleck, who gets one of the film’s biggest adults-only laugh) — searching the town library for a key piece of information as zombies, and more terrifyingly, parents, run amok outside.
Much of what makes ParaNorman one of the best children’s films of 2012 is the writing, which doesn’t condescend to its young audience; this is a movie that knows that being a kid can really suck — especially for victims of bullying, or even just oddballs who stand out from the crowd a little too much. It embraces death as a real tangible fact of life and goes to some terrifying places while moving at a dynamic pace, lightened by a savvy sense of humor, which is what makes ParaNorman the quintessential Tim Burton film that Frankenweenie just quite wasn’t.
ParaNorman hits DVD and Blu-ray November 27. Did you catch it in theaters? Let the ParaNorman lovefest unfold in the comments below.
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Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained had me at hello — or at “Dj-” if you will (the “d” is silent) — so at this point trailers and clips are just icing on the spaghetti “Southern.” If I’m speaking a foreign language to you, forgive my excitement for Tarantino’s latest neo-exploitation bonanza and just dive right into Movieline’s rundown of the gunshots, dead baddies, and gleefully inside-baseball genre winks in the second trailer for Django Unchained.
Dead guys: 3, plus 2 or more offscreen
Faintings: 2
Beers: 2
Crash zooms: 2
Glimpses of Sam Jackson in his Benjamin Button makeup: 5
Glee-filled Christoph Waltz quips: 4
Gunshots: 13
Jonah Hills: 1
Explosions: 2
Inside nods to the original Django: 2
Times I’ll be listening to the Franco Nero Django theme for the rest of the week: 100
Django Unchained hits theaters on Christmas. Perfect holiday viewing!
[via iTunes]
Roger Friedman of Showbiz 411 reports that U.K. mega-singer Adele will sing the title theme song to the next James Bond joint, Skyfall — though, grain of salt: He’s confirming his own scoop here, and the phrase “I think I can confirm for you what I said some months ago” doesn’t inspire total confidence. But it’s Friday, and a girl can dream! And Friedman’s got it right when he argues that “Adele’s sound is the quintessential James Bond sound.” Also, those other recent 007 themes did roundly suck. Bring on Agent Adele! [Showbiz 411]
It’s not just the superheroes who are toppling box-office records this summer: Check out the opening for Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, which pulled in $523,000 over the weekend — on four screens. Its $130,750 per-theater average represents a new standard for limited live-action releases, besting Dreamgirls’s $126,316 from 2006. (Moonrise’s four-day holiday total reached $669,000.) Hats off as well to The Weinstein Company’s The Intouchables, no slouch itself with around $26,000 per screen for the three-day frame. Champagne for all! [Deadline]
Come on, admit it: You are going to miss The Twilight Saga when it’s over — especially the delectably, heavily airbrushed countenances of the films’ Big Three stars, glowering out from an eternity of repackaged DVD/Blu-ray sets, Twilight fan cruises, B-action notoriety, story-driven nudity and whatever else awaits beyond the horizon. I know I am! Forever, indeed. That is a very long time. I can barely finish this post conveying the new Breaking Dawn – Part 2 character posters, it is all so wrenching.
OK, I’m finished. [via]
“There’s this expression that it’s written three times: during the script, when you’re filming it and when you’re editing it. And I believe that’s wrong. I think it’s written once, in editing — and everything is clay for that. And I wanted to learn about it — I thought it would be neat. It’s like learning to play the piano and I need a lot of clay. And I thought if I did one movie out of these three … whatever. [...] But I’m never going to show it to anyone. So I think that’s why they were cool with it. By the way: It doesn’t make fun of Star Wars at all.” Also: Close Encounters is apparently Grace’s next. Now you know. [Huffington Post]
The easiest way to start an interview is to ask someone, “Was there a cock sock or not?” Take Jason Ritter, who plays Wally, the sub-par musician friend of Jillian (Jess Weixler), in Free Samples — which premiered last weekend at the Tribeca Film Festival in the Spotlight program. “It was cock sock,” Ritter said, marking the second time Ritter appeared pantsless in a Tribeca film costarring Jesse Eisenberg. “[Before] was The Education of Charlie Banks, but this one was the first time I’ve been bare-assed for an entire scene.”
Meanwhile, the new film’s plot is simple enough: Jillian gets roped into handing out free ice cream samples from a truck as a variety of characters weave in and out of the scene. Samples acts as a counter-point to the classic indie slacker story, as the characters deal with having plans that fall apart — Jillian was in law school and had a fiancé before deciding to “become an artist” — as Ritter plays “Jason Ritter” in Mark Webber’s Sundance film The End of Love, portraying an established, mature version of his actor persona.
“I feel like there are a lot of movies about late 20s, early 30s being directionless and you wonder, ‘How are any of these people surviving?’” Ritter said. “What do they do? I really like that there does seem to be more thought put into this character Jillian. It’s been fun to jump in and do a day here and a day there on each of their films.”
Just when it seemed like we were getting to the heart of the film’s subject, alas, Ritter complicated things by revealing how he’d blacked out the memory of Weixler slapping his ass.
“Did you?” he asked.
“I did smack you on…
Full Story »I’m not going to belabor this: A batch of new media from Prometheus has emerged, including what some mad genius has repurposed as arguably the most revolting — if weirdly entrancing — animated GIF in the history of animated GIFs. No blood or other bodily fluids/waste are involved, but if you are squeamish at all about eyes, do not keep reading.
Via Badass Digest and some outer circle of hell, here goes: Worm, meet eye!
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