Movieline is excited to welcome Alonso Duralde back to the pages of this site with a new regular feature we’re calling High and Low. Every week, the dauntless Duralde will wade through the mind-numbing number of home-entertainment choices out there and recommend two must-see releases: His first pick will be geared for cineastes looking for essential viewing. His second will be aimed at movie lovers seeking out the highest form of guilty pleasure available: the offbeat, the campy, the kitschy and the just plain wacky. Take it away, Alonso:
HIGH: Les Vampires (Kino Classics; $34.95 DVD/$39.95 Blu-Ray)
Who’s Responsible: Written and directed by Louis Feuillade; starring Musidora, Édouard Mathé, Marcel Lévesque.
What It’s All About: Consisting of 10 serialized chapters, such as “The Severed Head” and “Satanus,” Feuillade’s silent 1915 crime drama follows journalist Philipe (played by Mathé) as he attempts to investigate the notorious syndicate known as The Vampires. (Sorry, Twilight fans, no blood-sucking here.) Over the course of this epic, which has been strung together as a single six-hour-and-40-minute (approximately) movie, we get murder, robbery, identity theft, poison rings, codebooks, gas attacks, paralysis drugs and orgies. What’s not to like?
Why it’s Schmancy: Critics of the era despised Les Vampires — even in 1915, crime stories were considered old-fashioned and beneath Feuillade’s abilities — but the serial was embraced by André Breton and other founders of the Surrealist movement, particularly for the way that Feuillade combined a very realistic portrayal of Paris’ streets and sewers with his fantastic tale of masked bandits and their over-the-top skullduggery. More recent fans include Olivier Assayas, whose 1996 Irma Vep featured Hong Kong superstar Maggie Cheung (playing herself) coming to Paris to star in a remake. (Sexy assassin Irma Vep — played by Musidora in the original — is one of the key…
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Last year, a picture made the rounds of Daniel Day-Lewis eating a salad while showing us what it would look like if Abraham Lincoln co-founded Apple and invented the iPhone that picture was taken on. Well, here’s an official picture of DDL in full Lincoln drag in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, which comes out in November and also stars Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln. DDL looks more like Lincoln than that creepy animatronic Lincoln in Disneyland’s Hall of Presidents. You just want to scream at that picture, “DON’T SIT THERE! GO TO THE BATHROOM! GET SOME FRESH AIR! THIS PLAY SUCKS ANYWAY! GET A KARDASHIAN TO FILL YOUR SEAT!”
And I know Lincoln is supposed to be getting into the play, but those slightly rolled eyes to me that he’s rolling his second blunt.
Accepting an award last weekend at George Mason University, novelist Stephen King treated the audience to a reading of a passage from Dr. Sleep, his still-in-progress follow-up to The Shining. Remember little Danny Torrance, running from his deranged father (Jack Nicholson) in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film version? Well, Danny’s all grown up now, using his gift to help people die peacefully. And there are vampires, because why not?
Release information hasn’t yet been divulged for the sequel, which King is still writing, but this much is known: Danny is now an adult, and comes into contact with “a traveling group of vampires called The Tribe.” Not sold yet? Give a listen to King reading an excerpt from his manuscript:
“How many times have you found yourself behind a lumbering R.V., eating exhaust and waiting patiently for your chance to pass?” Well guess what — those were vampires!!
Chime in below and sound off — is this like anything you ever imagined a Shining sequel would be?
• Stephen King Brings ‘Shining’ Sequel ‘Dr. Sleep’ to Life at Book Festival[THR]
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Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, the shrewd writer/director team behind Hollywood spoof films Date Movie, Epic Movie, Disaster Movie and Vampires Suck, are about to embark on their most ambitious project yet: a 3D parody of James Cameron’s Avatar.
The film, which will be the team’s first 3D endeavor, will appropriately be titled The Biggest Movie of All Time 3D. In a press release from Icon Entertainment, who have already acquired the project’s worldwide sales rights, Friedberg and Seltzer explain why Avatar is ripe for their brand of ridicule:
With a domestic box office of nearly 700 million dollars and an overseas haul of over 2 billion, it was only a matter time before this behemoth got a good ribbing. And what could possibly be riper for satire? You got half naked blue people plugging their hair into strange flying horses so they can read their thoughts! And nothing in this mega blockbuster is off limits, from its overly simplified message of “big corporations = bad; tree hugging environmentalist = good,” to the broadly drawn characters like the buffed out Colonel who’s in a perpetual ‘roid rage to the very colorful, glowing and… come on, totally stony world of Pandora. And just like “Avatar” our movie will be in eye popping 3-D – making it the very first spoof movie ever in this format.
And if The Biggest Movie of All Time 3D performs as well as Vampires Suck, Friedberg and Seltzer could easily extend their success with The Biggest Movie of All Time 2 after James Cameron releases his Avatar sequel. Pretty smart.
Are you interested in paying $12 to see a 3D spoof of Avatar?
· Friedberg and Seltzer are Back with The Biggest Movie of All Time 3D [ComingSoon.net]
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Opening today in theaters, the 3-D action curio Priest seems to have designs on a pair of audiences once thought irreconcilable: Young, overserved vampire-genre devotees; and the older, Christian demographic that loves its religious mythology with a healthy side of moralized violence. Each has their blockbusters, and ne’er the bloody twain shall meet. Until now.
Except that historically the vampire genre is anchored in Christian faith. Humans meet their undead nemeses with crosses and holy water, superstitions and the enduring (if periodic) promise of sunlight. Stakes are ritually driven through hearts. Vampires are evil not because they threaten our lives, but because of their threat to extend it indefinitely on Earth — a clear defiance of God’s law, and an abomination for which they must die. Based on the hit Korean manwha series by Hyung Min-woo and directed by Scott Stewart, Priest offers a world in which centuries of war between humans and vampires — a holy war not so dissimilar to the Crusades — is finally ended by a legion of kick-ass men (and, quite radically, at least one woman) of the cloth. As if it could have ended any other way.
But what follows — and where Priest begins — refracts the genre into something a little more advanced for an era that’s a lot more cynical. These heroic priests return from battle tormented, socially outcast and virtually unemployable. They’re subject to menial labor and years of nightmares. The crosses tattooed on their foreheads only worsen their pariah status. The broodiest of them all, known simply…
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