Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period.
Most of us are probably painfully aware of the stress of the holidays when it comes to familial relationships. Films about families tell the one story that practically anyone can relate to. So in the spirit of feeling better about ourselves I've compiled a list of some of the most dysfunctional families in film. Maybe after taking a look at some big-screen dysfunction, we can sit back and take a little solace in that at least none of us have to sit down to Christmas dinner with any of the people on the following list.
Before he was famous on You Tube for his demented freak-out on the set of I Heart Huckabees, David O. Russell was famous for making the unthinkable; a comedy about incest. Monkey stars Alberta Watson as Susan Aibelli; a lonely and depressed mother who develops a sexual relationship with her son after they are left alone together for the summer. Jeremy Davis stars as her son and the subject of this unlikely coming-of-age story. The film might not be for the weak of heart, but it did manage to win an audience award at Sundance in 1994, and was responsible for turning Russell into the megalomaniac we've all come to know and love.
Besides going down in infamy as the film that beat Raging Bull out of a 'Best Picture Oscar', this 1981 drama about a family dealing with the loss of it's 'favored son' was the directorial debut of Robert Redford. Timothy Hutton stars as the younger brother who is readjusting to life after a botched suicide attempt. Donald Sutherland and Mary Tyler Moore also star as the parents to Hutton and Judd Hirsch as the prototypical 'earthy NY Jewish' psychiatrist. So for anyone who watched Mary Tyler Moore as the epitome of 'chirpiness' during the seven year run of her self-titled series, get ready to be blown away, because her performance as a cold and repressed suburban mom is one of the best there is.
One of the perennial favorites for TV broadcast at this time of year is the 1945 film Christmas in Connecticut, starring Barbara Stanwyck. I sat down for the first time in years to watch the entire movie, and gave it my full attention in a way that I never did while I was wrapping presents or chatting with relatives or trimming the tree. As I suspect from my half-assed viewing of the film over the years, Christmas in Connecticut is a very slight movie; if it weren't related to Christmas, or didn't star Stanwyck, most of us might never have heard of it.
The plot is pretty lame: Liz Lane (Stanwyck) has gained career success by writing a series of columns about the joys of being a housewife and mom on her farm in Connecticut -- a Forties version of Martha Stewart. Trouble is, she's really a single NYC career girl who can barely boil water, and who gets her recipes from her Uncle Felix (S.Z. Sakall), who runs a restaurant. This was never an issue until her publisher Alexander Yeardley (Sydney Greenstreet) decides to accompany war hero Jefferson Jones (Dennis Morgan) to Liz's Connecticut farm for Christmas to experience home cooking and happy holiday domesticity. Liz talks her longtime cold fish of a suitor into lending his farm, they bring Felix along to cook, and even manage to borrow a baby ... but can they pull this off without Liz and her editor losing their jobs?
No, Tom Cruise won't be starring in the new version of Frank Herbert's Dune, but it sure does look like Peter Berg is going to be one busy director over the next few years. According to an informative report over at the MTV Movies Blog, we now know that Berg's next projects are:
2. A "big, big, big" big-screen rendition of Dune, which was made into a feature film by David Lynch back in 1984, as well as a collection of well-received cable mini-series.
When asked about "remaking" a film made by the illustrious David Lynch, the director was more than diplomatic: "Berg said that while he's "a big fan of Lynch," he believes "that interpretation has left the door wide open for a remake."
So that's good news for Berg, obviously. Tom Cruise and a massive sci-fi epic back-to-back. Not too shabby for the kid who once starred in Wes Craven's goofy Shocker. And while Berg's resumé as a character actor might be a little choppy, there's little denying that he's a solid director: His films include Very Bad Things, The Rundown, Friday Night Lights and The Kingdom. That's what we call 4-for-4. Well, I do.
So you might be wondering why I chose not to include the actual photos from the set of Terry Gilliam's latest, The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus. Well trust me, it's in your own best interest if you are not a fan of spoilers. Just Jared has a few on-set photos of star Heath Ledger and they are pretty creepy, not to mention "spoilerific." So if you like to keep things a surprise, you probably won't want to peek at those ones. The film is a passion project for Gilliam and is his first original screenplay in a long time. The story (or what we know so far) centers on the magical Dr. Parnassus and jumps between parellel stories of a modern day London and a far more mystical version of that very same place.
Gilliam sees a little of himself in Parnassus, telling Variety, "Parnassus is trying to bring amazement to people, and not doing a very good job of it, because they aren't paying attention to him. But if they will enter his mirror, and allow their imagination to mix with his, they enter these extraordinary worlds, and they come back transcendent -- or they strangely disappear" -- sounds about right as a metaphor for a Hollywood career. Along with Ledger, the cast also includes Christopher Plummer (as the good Dr), Verne Troyer, Tom Waits, and Lily Cole.
Back in October, Christopher had reported on the film, and a glimpse at some of the concept art for the film. Now, there are also some images floating around the web of some of the set pieces for the film that emerged in London on Monday. The flick had started production earlier this month, and as anyone who is a fan of Gilliam knows, his kind of fantasy doesn't come cheap. So keep your fingers crossed that Gilliam gets the chance to finish his masterpiece this time around. The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus is set for release in 2009.
In the spirit of the season and goodwill and whatnot, I thought I'd forgo griping about the sorry state of things this week and instead send out some love to the downtrodden, the small films of 2007 that were somehow overlooked, underrated or outright ignored in some way. Let's start with the Russian film The Italian, released in January, which caused critics to dredge up the word "Dickensian" for the first time in a while. But for all that it was a surprising, deeply-felt story of an orphan who escapes the orphanage to find his birth-parents.
Kino released the documentary Romantico in January as well, and they're apparently counting it as a 2007 release. I wrote a few weeks back about the documentary format; there's certainly a place for journalism and reporting, but the very best documentaries, the ones that stand the test of time, are the ones that capture the details of life, like Crumb, Hoop Dreams and To Be and to Have. Romantico is one of those. It tells the story of a mariachi illegally based in San Francisco who decides to go back to Mexico to see his family, even though he risks never being able to return (of course, his income in the States is much higher than in Mexico). Romantico will most certainly be overlooked in any discussion of 2007's documentaries, but it's worth seeking out on DVD.
Student films must be graded on a curve, and Flakes is basically a student film. If you overlooked the fact that the three leads are all moderately high-profile actors, I'd estimate the budget to be less than twenty thousand dollars. Most of the action takes place in or around the titular establishment, a cereal bar in which slackers and stoners assemble on a daily basis to eat their favorite cereals -- everything from standard fare like Cheerios to rare delicacies like Fruit Brute -- and make of themselves a quirky movie character. The two leads are a boyfriend-girlfriend, Neal Downs (Aaron Stanford) and the improbably named Miss Pussy Katz. (Zooey Deschanel) Their boss at Flakes is a 60-ish hippie played by Christopher Lloyd, and his performance is the biggest thing hindering my plan to give Flakes a better review than it deserves. Lloyd comes from some long forgotten school of acting where naturalism is never as a good a choice as creating a character with such a forced way of speaking that no one could ever mistake them for a human being.
With a movie like this, they base their plot on whatever is on sale at the 'cliched plot device' factory, and it appears that what was on sale that week was 'business is threatened by newer, flashier rival across the street.' A nerdy businessman comes walking into Flakes one day and is impressed by the concept but dispirited by the stoner attitude -- he doesn't get what Flakes is all about, man! -- and determines to open an upscale cereal bar directly across the way which will put Flakes out of business. This causes much tension. Miss Pussy Katz -- I can't believe I keep having to type that -- and her boyfriend have a number of rows over how Flakes should respond to the crisis at hand and the loyal customers alternately declare their loyalty or decamp to the new establishment across the street. As bad as this all sounds, there are a couple of things about Flakes that I really liked, and I'm more than happy to point them out and to remind everyone that this is from the director of Heathers.
Focus Features has sent Cinematical a second exclusive clip from In Bruges (check out the first clip, titled Hideout, over here), which will enjoy its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival next month. Here's a bit from the film's official synopsis: "Bruges (pronounced "broozh"), the most well-preserved medieval city in the whole of Belgium, is a welcoming destination for travelers from all over the world. But for hit men Ray (Colin Farrell) and Ken (Brendan Gleeson), it could be their final destination; a difficult job has resulted in the pair being ordered right before Christmas by their London boss Harry (two-time Academy Award nominee Ralph Fiennes) to go and cool their heels in the storybook Flemish city for a couple of weeks." For more, be sure to check out the film's official website, www.filminfocus.com/inbruges. In Bruges is due out in theaters (in limited release) on February 8, 2008.
Yesterday afternoon I was thumbing through some Sundance e-mails when I came across an interview pitch for Brian Cox, known to one and all for his many acting roles including Stryker, nemesis of Wolverine in X2: X-Men United. For a while it's been known that the role Cox originated was going to be taken over by the younger Liev Schreiber in the upcoming fourth film, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, so how come Brian Cox has X-Men Origins: Wolverine as his top credit on the actor bio sheet I'm looking at right now? An attempt by me to follow-up with the publicist who sent me the bio has been met with silence, so who knows if this was something that wasn't meant to be leaked or just someone's dumb mistake? I can easily see a publicist accidentally writing down X4 when they meant to write down X2. But the wall of silence hasn't yet dissipated. I'll be keeping an eye on this.
The official synopsis for X-Men Origins: Wolverine -- what a clunky title -- states that the film "explores the claw-wielding character Wolverine's violent and romantic past, and his complex relationship with Victor Creed and the ominous Weapon X programs, as well as his encounter with other mutants." Filming is expected to start in a couple of weeks, so if there are any last minute casting decisions to be made, now is the time, I guess. I'd definitely like to see dueling Strykers, but is time-travel a big part of the X-Men universe, cause otherwise I can't exactly see how they'd pull that one off. More likely that if this is true, there will be a prologue or epilogue with Cox getting to shine for five minutes.
Raising more questions than it wants to answer, Steep, which opens in New York, Los Angeles and selected wintery climes this weekend, provides picturesque, positive propaganda about "wild skiing" and other snowy "out of bounds" activities that go far beyond the strictures of winter resorts and stretch to the breaking point the boundaries of what a man on skis can achieve. Make no mistake, this is a man's world: only two women appear on screen, one who is celebrated for skiing like "a dude with a ponytail" (or words to that effect) while the other is praised for her tolerance and loyal support of her husband's adventures. To a person, though, every skier is shown to be an enthusiastic, rational human being, well aware of the dangers involved yet compelled to keep leaping off tall buildings in a single bound -- er, make that, ski down incredibly steep mountains with breathless anticipation.
The words "daredevil" and "thrill-seeker" are never spoken, though I imagine that, like myself, many civilians might call to mind a syndicated 1970s television series that allowed couch potatoes to watch people risk their lives in every segment. Here the argument is made that, at least for a few, it's not as much of a risk if you're truly skilled at what you're doing. The evidence on display plainly speaks to the point that the skiers are tremendously talented, finely-tuned athletes. Quite often the footage frames the tiny figures of skiers against immense backdrops of magnificent mountain ranges that are staggering in their beauty. The athletes appear to defy gravity by remaining upright while descending incredibly sleep slopes -- we're informed that slopes of more than 50 degrees are preferred.
'Tis the season to get away from your family, bundle up with a gallon of moonshine (preferably one with "XXX" written on the label), and watch endless hours of movies! What follows is not a comprehensive or "Best Of" list. These are simply seven DVD box sets that any film buff would be thrilled to find in his or her stocking this Christmas. Most of them were released in the past few months, and a couple have been out a while but just got amazingly cheap. Have a few gifts left to buy? Consider picking one of these up. You don't even have to get off your fat ass, if you click on the titles you'll be taken to the links on Amazon. I've included items to suit every budget, and they've been arranged in order of price. Naturally, the more expensive the set you purchase, the more you love the person you're buying it for. That's just the way it works.
Pretty much the gold standard for DVD box sets. This collection's price recently took an incredible drop. It was worth every penny of the $80 bucks I paid for mine years ago, so you can better believe it's worth $34. The set gives you several versions of each film in the beloved Alien series -- Alien (one of the best suspense movies ever made), Aliens (one of the best action movies ever made), Alien 3 (David Fincher's misunderstood take is a stronger movie with each viewing), and Alien: Resurrection (Nobody's perfect). An unprecedented amount of extra goodies that includes the amazing Director's Cut of Aliens, extremely cool fold-out packaging, and the absence of Alien Vs. Predator make this set a must-own. I've owned it for four years, and still haven't seen everything in there. Plus, don't you just love the word "Quadrilogy?"
The Muppet Christmas Carol may be to the Muppets what Room Service is to the Marx Brothers. Neither is particularly good, especially in relation to the rest of the Muppet or Marx Brothers movies, but they can still be enjoyed immensely if you are a big enough fan of the Muppets or the Marxes. The films share two significant factors that aided in their surprisingly low quality. Each comedy "troupe" (if you can accept Kermit & Co. as a troupe) had recently suffered from a terrible disruption in their respective commands. Muppet Christmas Carol was the first Muppet movie produced after the death of Jim Henson, while Room Service was the first Marx Bros. movie to be filmed (fully) after the death of producer Irving Thalberg (though, of course, Thalberg was not the Bros.' creator like Henson was the Muppets'). And, most importantly, each is notable for having not been written for their "troupe"; instead the "troupe" was rather ill fittingly dropped into pre-existing stories.
In the case of The Muppet Christmas Carol, that pre-existing story is of course Charles Dicken's A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas (umm, commonly known as simply A Christmas Carol). Unlike previous Muppet vehicles, such as The Muppet Movie and The Muppets Take Manhattan, this one focuses on a main character not played by a Muppet. Instead, Michael Caine portrays the lead, Ebenezer Scrooge, while the old favorites play minor supporting characters from Bob Crachit (Kermit) and his wife (Miss Piggy) to the narrators, Charles Dickens (Gonzo) and Rizzo the Rat (himself). Strangely the Christmas spirits aren't played by any of the star Muppets. In fact, only one of them is even technically a puppet: the Ghost of Christmas Present, which is a burly, redheaded body puppet (has an actor inside) with a Scottish accent.
While zipping through my RSS feeds this week, I found a blurb from In Style, via CNN. With the title "The world according to Katie Holmes," I couldn't resist. What followed was a word association game that shared her thoughts on a bunch of brief, personal topics like her work, marriage, fashion, and age. Between listing one of her roles of a lifetime as being a wife, making many marriage references, and talking about what husband Tom Cruise likes to see her wear, I started to muse about the good old days.
Remember when she was just starting out and lived for herself? When her main interest in life wasn't the fact that she nabbed Mr. Cruise? How about when Tom was wowing audiences everywhere instead of being the tabloid face of Scientology? It seems like a million lifetimes ago that Holmes was a big up-and-coming actress, and Tom was the uber-awesome, megastar actor that everyone loved. In memory of those days, I thought it would be nice to throw a couple great flicks into the DVD player that captured their great, successful, and gossip rag-free early days.
Before popping up in Dawson's Creek, Katie Holmes was Libbets Casey, a wild schoolgirl in the '70s who makes Paul Hood's (Tobey Maguire) Thanksgiving all sorts of memorable in Ang Lee's The Ice Storm. My favorite of Ang's films, Storm stars one heck of a cast -- Kevin Kline, Joan Allen, Sigourney Weaver, Christina Ricci, Maguire, and Elijah Wood. Instead of the regular thanks and turkey gluttony, the film deals with two families who struggle for happiness and a road out of romantic disillusionment -- all in a '70s backdrop of changing times and political lies.
But Kate comes into play outside of the family dynamic. Libbets is the object of Paul's affection, but he has to battle his paramour-stealing friend Francis (David Krumholtz) for her attentions. While her role is brief, it looked to be the start of something good. Of course, some of the work that followed couldn't even be classified anything but stinkeriffic, but still -- there's some good ones like this wonderful first role, Go, and of course, her next film with Tobey -- Wonder Boys.
Unfortunately, while you can find a few trillion billion TomKat videos up on YouTube, no one has reveled in Libbets love yet. So, here's a selection of other goodies from the movie, and some retro Katie action for good measure.
As everyone's been saying for months now, there are going to be two basic camps of people seeing (and talking about) Tim Burton's screen adaptation of Sweeney Todd: those who've seen and love the musical on stage (and/or those who generally go into orgasms of ecstasy for Stephen Sondheim in general), and those who've never seen the stage version, but who generally go into orgasms of ecstasy for all things Burton. There are, no doubt, those who loathe Burton, but if you loathe Burton, why would you go out of your way to see one of his films anyhow?
At any rate, I fall into the second camp -- love Burton, never seen Sweeney Todd on stage. I went into the film knowing only the basic storyline, and that it was gory, and that it was directed by Burton and stars Johnny Depp. That was enough for me to want to see the film, and I wanted to see it not knowing more than that, so I've been avoiding as much as possible all the buzzing about the film on other sites. I even set aside the cool hardcover Sweeney Todd production book that arrived in the mail last week to savor after the screening, so I'd go into the film with as fresh an eye as possible.
The film opens with rivers of bright red blood flowing through the cobblestone cracks of a London nearly as dismal as the Paris we met in the opening of Tom Tykwer's Perfume: The Story of a Murderer(one of my favorite films of last year). Much as Sweeney Todd is going to be compared to Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Edward Scissorhands, for me, right from the opening credits, it evoked Perfume more. After zooming us through a cramped, filthy, dismal London, Burton takes us onto a ship arriving in London, where we meet the beautiful and aptly named young sailer Anthony Hope (Jamie Campbell Bower, who's almost -- but not quite -- prettier than Depp), singing "No Place Like London," in which he's joined by his friend Benjamin Barker (Depp), freshly escaped from an Australian prison and returning home to a London he views with a far darker and cynical eye than the fresh-faced sailor. From the first words Barker sings -- and more, from the way Depp acts the part -- we get a sense of just how dark his story is going to be.
The holidays are inescapably upon us, so I find myself thinking of my weekly search for new trailers as a mad dash through the snowy New England countryside on a horse-drawn sleigh, searching for noteworthy previews, each providing a clue that leads me to the next. Granted, you won't actually find movie trailers in the New England countryside but bear with me people, it's a metaphor. Yes, perhaps I've had too much eggnog, and I've definitely watched too many Christmas specials, but this week I hope you'll join me as Trailer Park takes us Dashing Through the Snow.
Dark Floors Lordi. No, I'm not expressing dismay, that's the name of the Finnish rock band this horror film is built around. Monika mentioned back in April that this was on the way and now we've got a teaser and a full trailer. A father pulls his autistic daughter out of her doctor's care, but on the way down in the hospital elevator, father and daughter along with several others find themselves exiting onto a floor of the hospital that shouldn't exist. The place is littered with bodies, and demons (presumably members of the Gwar-esque band) lurk in the shadows. It looks pretty cool, though a possible resemblance to Silent Hillhas me a little worried. I'm always up for a good creep out, though, so I hope to get a chance to see this. For now, it's being released in Finland on February 8, but I imagine we'll be seeing it here in the states eventually. And speaking of "dark"...
The Dark Knight The full length Dark Knight trailer has finally arrived and I have to say it's got me pretty stoked for the caped crusader's return. The voice over by Heath Ledger as The Joker refers to both hero and villain as freaks, recalling similar dialogue from the Tim Burton's 1989 Batman, but this Clown Prince of Crime takes things in a whole new direction. He's grimier and less goofy than Jack Nicholson's take on the character. Many of the familiar faces from Batman Begins are here, and though there's a quick glimpse of that film's batmobile, this Batman seems to prefer a suped up science fiction motorcycle. Looks awesome and it hits U.S. theaters on July 18. Here's Ryan's take on the trailer. And speaking of comic book adaptations...
The question is, if you're going to make a political movie based on a true story, how "true" do you have to be, and is it fair play to make such a film that works as purely entertainment, even if you fudge the facts a little? There are two things going on withinCharlie Wilson's War, which stars the affable Tom Hanks as the title character, a liberal Democratic congressman from Texas with an affinity for single-malt scotch whiskey and women. The first thing is an entertaining story about a good ol' boy from Texas, a hard drinking skirt-chaser who, if we're to believe Hanks' take on the character, wasn't so bad, really. Oh, maybe he called his staff of sexy, all-female all-stars "jailbait," drank heavily, and partied in Vegas with Playboy models while surrounded by cocaine, but heck, y'all, that doesn't make him a bad guy, does it? Shoot, he's just a rascally sort, and after all, he's from Texas, where the good ol' boys are, so that makes it all okay.
But, okay, let's toss that aside and say that in spite of his flaws, he really did, underneath, care about his job, at least enough to look up from the nekkid women in the hottub in the first scene of the film long enough to notice that Dan Rather is wearing a turban, and astute enough to realize it might be interesting to know why. The second thing that's happening in Charlie Wilson's War is the story of what happened after Wilson gets interested in Afghanistan: In the summer of 1980, Wilson reads a dispatch about the hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing Afghanistan in the wake of the Soviet invasion; Wilson, newly appointed to the Defense Appropriations subcommittee, casually orders the CIA funding for Afghanistan doubled from five million to ten million, and presto, it's done. But not quite finished.
No, Tom Cruise won't be starring in the new version of Frank Herbert's Dune, but it sure does look like 
So you might be wondering why I chose not to include the actual photos from the set of Terry Gilliam's latest, 
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Yesterday afternoon I was thumbing through some Sundance e-mails when I came across an interview pitch for 
While zipping through my RSS feeds this week, I found a blurb from In Style, via CNN. With the title "
