Scarface Tagged Articles at Cinematical

• Edward Klosinski (1943-2008) - Cinematographer who shot Lars Von Trier's Europa, Krzysztof Kieslowski's series The Decalogue and his Three Colors: White, many of Andrzej Wajda's films, including Man of Iron and Man of Marble, and Rolf Schübel's Gloomy Sunday. He is also credited as a co-writer on Kieslowski's Three Colors: White and on Felkis Falk's Szansa. He died of lung cancer January 5, in Milanówek, Poland. (NY Times)
• Christopher Bowman (1967-2008) - Champion ice skater who also worked as a stunt man on Lost Boys, License to Drive and Surf Nazis Must Die. He also plays an assistant football coach in Brian DePalma's next film, Down and Disturbance, coming out this year. He died January 10 in Mission Hills, California. (LA Times)
• Grace Cianciotta (c.1964-2008) - Marketing expert who worked for Alliance Atlantis and Maximum Films. She died of breast cancer January 7, in Toronto. (Variety)
• Dusty Cohl (1929-2008) - Founder of the Toronto International Film Festival. Read Kim's full obit post here.
• Alexandre de Paris (c.1922-2008) - French celebrity hairdresser who styled Elizabeth Taylor's hair for Cleopatra. He also worked as a hair stylist on the 1980 Agatha Christie adaptation The Mirror Crack'd and on Claude Sautet's César & Rosalie. His date and cause of death are unknown. (BBC)

The movie may not be due until November, but JoBlo's Movie Emporium has the posters now: Ridley Scott's American Gangster has officially begun the promotional lifecycle. The film -- which was slated to be directed by Antoine Fuqua until he fell off the project and Ridley Scott stepped in -- revolves around the New York drug trade in the '70s -- and features Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe. (And the director's chair wasn't the only switcheroo: Originally, Benicio Del Toro was cast in what would become Crowe's role.) The plotline revolves around an ex-dealer who actually has a change of heart and works with a NYPD narcotics officer to try and stop the flood of heroin that hit New York in the '70s -- but with Scott attached to direct, look for great action and more than a little grit (as well as smoke-filed rooms, venetian blinds and rain, too).

The posters look great -- there's one for Washington and one for Crowe -- and to me the most interesting things about the posters are first, the observation that Universal's marketing department doesn't even have to show all of Washington and Crowe's faces for us to know who they are -- and if that's not proof of super-stardom on their part, I don't know what is. The second thing -- which leapt into my mind unbidden as I looked at Crowe's poster, as seen here -- is that between the black-and-white look and the focus on well-dressed men packing heat, I got a real Scarface vibe off these posters. Time will tell if American Gangster is fit to fill Tony Montana's elegant, blood-soaked shoes; the film is currently set to open November 21st.

One of the joys of reviewing movies is the chance, every so often, to see a restored classic on the big screen. In 2006, I had the opportunity to see the restored cut of Alfred E. Green's nasty pre-code classic Baby Face (1933), with Barbara Stanwyck in all her glory. Better still, I saw Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist (1970) for the first time (both films screened at San Francisco's Balboa Theater). The Balboa also showed a recently uncovered war film, Stuart Cooper's Overlord (1975), a film with a simplicity and power lacking in most of the year's new pictures.

The great Rialto Pictures, the leading distributor of restored classics, gave us Jean-Pierre Melville's masterpiece Army of Shadows (1969); since it had never before opened in the United States, it has turned up on several critics' ten best lists for 2006. Also from Rialto we got Carol Reed and Graham Greene's The Fallen Idol (1948) and Christian-Jaque's silly swashbuckler Fanfan la Tulipe (1952). And to far greater publicity, Sony Pictures Classics re-released a bundle of Pedro Almodovar films, including Matador (1986), Law of Desire (1987), Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), The Flower of My Secret (1995), Live Flesh (1997), All About My Mother (1999), Talk to Her (2002) and Bad Education (2004); I took advantage of the chance to see a few of these on the big screen. And each of them played on 400 screens or less.

Not always, but often, a re-release comes timed for a film's anniversary, and so I've made up a fantasy list of re-releases I'd like to see in 2007.