Triangle Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Despicable Me
This animated comedy about the world's greatest super villain looks pretty cute and I definitely didn't see the big gag coming. The bad guy is shown in profile silhouette and is it just me or does he look like Danny Devito's Penguin from Batman Returns? Things get dastardly on July 9, 2010.

Whip It!
I had assumed from the title that this was a Devo biopic, but it's actually about a young girl from a small Texas town who grows tired of the beauty pageant scene and joins a roller derby team. Ellen Page stars and this marks Drew Barrymore's first theatrical film as director. Things get rolling on October 9.

It's been ten years since Melissa George made her mark in her first feature film -- Alex Proyas' cult favorite, Dark City. Since then, she's had some stinkers -- oh, the crap that was Derailed comes to mind -- as well as some worthy roles like the beautifully eerie Camilla Rhodes in Mulholland Drive. But now that she's finished with vampires and 30 Days of Night, The Hollywood Reporter posts that she'll get into a supernatural Triangle.

The thriller is about some people who go on a yachting trip in the Atlantic Ocean. When they're "struck by mysterious weather conditions," they move onto another ship. However, it doesn't seem like this new ship was the life-saving convenience they imagined because they "experience greater havoc on the open seas" on this other vessel. I guess they hop onto a ghost ship or something. Or, maybe modern-day pirates?! Anyway, George will play one of the passengers who has a mental disorder and "relives the harrowing experience through each of her three personalities." I guess she survives, or has died and descended into a mental hell. Christopher Smith, who last brought us the bloody team-building flick Severance, will direct the feature, which shoots this spring in Australia.

Programming a film series or festival inevitably requires a degree of compromise, depending as it does on the oft-indecipherable whims of distributors, producers and sales agents. In recognition of the challenges and frustrations involved, I prefer to give programmers the benefit of the doubt. Yet I can't help but wonder what the Film Society of Lincoln Center had in mind with "10 Years and Running: Recent Hong Kong Cinema," a retrospective series that begins tonight in New York City.

Ostensibly, the program is intended "to mark the 10th anniversary of the establishment of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region" with a "series of cinematic highlights." That sounds good, but the program lacks any balance. If the aim was to provide the very best of Hong Kong cinema since 1997, then why include Initial D and Confession of Pain, two moderately enjoyable yet ultimately inconsequential films by the directing team of Andrew Lau and Alan Mak (their much better collaboration Infernal Affairs is also screening). If the goal was to provide historical perspective on the decade, why ignore completely the wave of proto-Hollywood thrillers (Downtown Torpedoes, 2000 A.D.) that flooded theaters in the late 1990's, or the plethora of romantic comedies that followed in the wake of Needing You in 2000, or recent attempts -- by directors other than Johnny To -- to reawaken the action film (Flash Point, Invisible Target)? If the goal was to highlight popular hits, where are the films of Stephen Chow (The King of Comedy, Shaolin Soccer, Kung Fu Hustle)?

Instead, the showcase is limited to the tried and true: Lau and Mak (three films), Wong Kar Wai (two films) and Johnny To (three and 1/3, counting his contribution to Triangle) fill eight of the 13 slots. That's not to denigrate the quality of the selections nor to discourage anyone from attending, but it looks like a lost opportunity to showcase less-heralded gems of recent Hong Kong cinema. All that being said, if I lived in New York I'd park myself in the theater for the entire series, which runs through October 25; I've seen most of them, but not on the big screen.

We've reported a couple of times here about an intriguing-sounding, unnamed collaboration between Hong Kong superstars Johnnie To, Tsui Hark and Ringo Lam. Referred to as a "puzzle film," the movie is expected to be a 90 minute crime feature, with 30 minutes directed by each man, based on what has occurred in the previous section (there is not a screenplay for the film; each bit is being made independently, according to the desires and ideas of its director).

A couple of weeks ago it was revealed to the surprised of no one that To's long-time collaborator Simon Yam would star in his segment, and now further details about the film are starting to leak out. Though no cast members apart from Yam have been confirmed, it's expected that Louis Koo, Kelly Lin and Sun Honglei will also star in one or more segment. In addition, the film -- currently called Triangle -- now has a vague plotline from which Hark, who is at the helm of the first segment, will work. According to people at Twitch who can read the Chinese media, the film will start with "a few guys with little money and a lot to worry about [who] gather together to chat about how to get rich. Then a mysterious man sitting in the same room approaches them with a treasure map. ... To get their hand on the treasure, the map is only the first of a series puzzles they have to solve."

Frustratingly, there's still no reliable info available about shooting or release dates. Rest assured, however, that whether you like it or not, we'll let you know when those details emerge.