bernard rose Tagged Articles at Cinematical

On the one side, there's Howard Marks -- international drug smuggler and U.K. spy. On the other, there's some faces that you might not expect to find in international drug and spy territory.

The Hollywood Reporter posts that Rhys Ifans, Chloe Sevigny, and David Thewlis are wrapping up negotiations to star in Mr. Nice -- Bernard Rose's adaptation of Marks' autobiography of the same name. Ifans, who long ago played Puff in Michel Gondry's Human Nature, will head the cast as Marks. Once Britain's most-wanted man, he morphed from Oxford grad and teacher into a drug smuggler -- all to impress his wife Judy (Sevigny). Thewlis comes into the picture as an Irish Republican Army boss he asks for a job, which leads Marks to his other gig -- informant for British intelligence.

But wait -- don't expect lots of violence and action -- according to Wikipedia, Marks says that he never used violence during his smuggling career. But with these actors, and the director behind Immortal Beloved, methinks the action won't matter.

Of all the freakin' horror remake outrages, this one might take the cake. Candyman, the freakishly original 'Chicago projects urban legend' flick based on a Clive Barker story, might be remade by Sony with a Caucasian in the title role, according to Shock Til You Drop. The site says that Sony and the unidentified rights holder are in "early talks," with one idea being to change Candyman's skin color from black to white.

I know this is not confirmed, and many stupid ideas are undoubtedly floated in early conversations, but this is wrong on so many levels I'm left speechless. At the most basic level, it begs the question: has anyone contemplating the remake actually watched Bernard Rose's frightening original? In the movie, Candyman (the great Tony Todd) was the son of a slave who "suffered a hideous and unjust death," as Ryan Stewart described in his Retro Cinema appreciation. An urban legend developed around him in the notorious crime-infested Cabrini-Green housing project: say his name multiple times in front of a mirror and he appears. Virginia Madsen, as a sociology grad student, investigates, calls him back to life, and wishes she had stayed in the classroom.

Two sequels, which I haven't seen, followed Candyman to New Orleans and Los Angeles, but Chicago is where he belongs. The Cabrini-Green high-rise projects have been torn down and redevelopment is taking place -- that's your story, the horror of modern redevelopment. If you want to add a political edge, tie in the outcome of the Presidential election. But please, Sony, don't make Candyman a Caucasian.

I came into the world of Immortal Beloved very late in the game. I had been meaning to see it for years, to see what Gary Oldman did with the epic maestro, but I never got around to it. Then, one summer night in 2005, I had a long conversation about the film with a friend of mine. Instead of the normal, surface recommendation one is apt to get in cases like these, his eyes lit up as he began to list off the reasons I should see it. He didn't just vaguely like it; the film stuck with him and inspired him. He talked about how wonderfully the film portrayed Ludwig van Beethoven's music, and he sent me on my way to discover one particularly moving scene for myself.

Since he wouldn't tell me about this moment until I had seen the movie, I had assumed there would be one obvious and moving scene that stuck out above the others. Instead, I was faced with a partly true, partly fictional biopic that presented a number of well-crafted moments that matched perfectly to Beethoven's work. But really, they do not so much match his music, as live it. Many films can team music with a certain mood, but few actually embody the life of the music itself -- the story that it is telling. This film is a doorway into the world of symphonies -- not to notice their power, but to take the first step towards recognizing the story being told by the collection of notes.

The squandered genius of writer-director Bernard Rose is a subject worthy of a documentary. After some steady work as a hired helmer in British cinema, Rose made his writing-directing debut with 1992's Candyman, a movie that, by all rights, should have been a forgettable B-grade chiller about a ghost who haunts a ghetto, but which I vividly remember seeing in theaters on a double-bill with Steven Seagal's Under Siege. Since I was only 14 at the time, I was very appreciative of Under Siege -- specifically Erika Eleniak's nude scene -- but I was absolutely terrified of Candyman, and remain so to this day. By the time Rose's second film, Immortal Beloved, rolled around, I was already a fan and fell for the lush, full-throated and historically absurd sophomore effort as much as I had for Candyman. Then came 1997's expansive, shot-on-location-in-Russia film adaption of Anna Karenina, starring Sophie Marceau, which took in less than a million dollars at the box-office, effectively ending Rose's Hollywood career just as it was beginning.

Should Rose ever be given entrance into the brass ring again, we can only hope his skills are still sharp enough to make movies like Candyman, which does so many things right I can hardly list them all. This is a horror movie that gets depressing right -- how many movies can hit that note? After you've seen it, you don't feel like you've had a "thrill ride" or a "good scare"-- you feel like the world is a grim, depressing and inescapably hopeless place. The plot: two sociology grad students at the University of Illinois, played by Virginia Madsen and Kasi Lemmons, decide to investigate a locally born urban legend figure known as Candyman (Tony Todd) -- say his name a few times in the mirror and he'll appear and gut you with his hook. Their research leads them to Chicago's Cabrini Green, a notoriously gang-infested housing complex that's sort of like a North Shore Compton, only scarier because it's comprised of dilapidated high-rise buildings with rotting walls and empty staircases that just scream out 'very bad things have happened here.'