fim Tagged Articles at Cinematical

August in Los Angeles is hotter than ... well, it's hot there, and who wants to be hanging outdoors getting all sweaty and sticky? Not me, and probably not you, either, my fellow cinema fans. But no worries, American Cinematheque has you covered: August 2-26, they'll be running the 7th Annual Festival of Fantasy, Horror and Science Fiction! That's right, kids -- the whole steamy month of August you can be inside a nice, cool movie theater, chilling out with all the werewolves, vampires and freaky mad scientists your geeky little hearts desire. Here's all the scoop:

From August 2-26 at The Egyptian, and August 9-12 at The Aero, you'll be able to check out all kinds of scary stuff, including rarely seen films not even available on DVD. The fest will feature tributes to the work of late author Kurt Vonnegut and director Curtis Harrington (who both passed away earlier this year), with Memorial Tribute screenings. Vonnegut fans will get a real treat -- a double feature of adaptations of his works Slaughterhouse-Five, directed by George Roy Hill, and Happy Birthday, Wanda Jane, directed by Mark Robson. Harrington's 1967 film Games, which stars James Caan, will screen as well.

One of my favorite movies of this year is Guillermo del Toro's amazing Pan's Labyrinth, a dark fable about a little girl trapped in a desperate situation, who seeks refuge in a fantasy world that may be more dangerous than the one she leaves behind. When James Rocchi interviewed del Toro for Cinematical, the great director very graciously allowed us a peek inside his notebooks for Pan's Labyrinth. Now The Guardian has an even better look at what lies on some of those pages. Take a peek inside the mind of a master at work -- some day, these notebooks are probably going to sell for a small fortune to some collector, but for now, you can peruse them to your heart's content.

Pan's Labyrinth opens in the US December 29; it's definitely on my Top Five list of the year, and looking through del Toro's notebooks and seeing how it all came together just gives me a warm-and-fuzzy film-geek feeling inside. Go and enjoy, consider it an early Christmas/Hannukah/Kwanzaa/Insert holiday of your choice gift from del Toro and The Guardian to you.

[via Movie City News ]

Wednesday's odds and ends:

• Simon Baker, aka the world's prettiest dead rentboy, has signed on to star in Sex and Death 101, the new screenplay from Heathers (and Hudson Hawk!) writer Daniel Waters. In the movie, Baker's character receives "a mysterious e-mail containing the names of every woman he has had sex with and, eerily, every woman he will have sex with in the future." (And I hope you all appreciate the professional self-control I'm exerting to leave it at that.) Shooting is due to being in April.

• Dragonfly, oddly, seems not to have destroyed the credibility of screenwriting partners Brandon Camp and Mike Thompson. Instead they've got a couple of unproduced projects that are getting buzz, and a pitch of theirs called Minutemen was just picked up by Sony for "high six figures." The pitch is about a small town whose residents are forced "to thwart...invading armies' plan to destroy the nation's command center" when the US is attacked from without for its "perceived imperialism." Emphasis there on "perceived." I'm just going to start chanting "U-S-A!" right now, so I'm good and ready for the film's release.

• Ed Solomon's great track record as a writer - how do Charlie's Angels, Men in Black, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, and It's Garry Shandling's Show strike you? - just earned him a cool $1 million for a pitch. The film, which Solomon will write for Paramount with his Bill & Ted's partner Chris Matheson, is called Me & Olivia, and tells the story of "a man who finds the solution to his on-the-job problems via the imaginary world of his 6-year-old daughter." Confusingly, it's described as being in the vein of Bruce Almighty - is God mentioned in that summary somewhere and I just missed it?
  

A tiny bit of Hoodwinked, the animated retelling of Little Red Riding Hood that the Weinstein Brothers will be revealing to us all on Friday, will be offered to eager Nickelodeon viewers tomorrow night. The clip - which consists of the film's opening five minutes and will air at 8PM - follows in the rather distinguished footsteps of Wallace and Gromit, whose The Curse of the Were-Rabbit was previewed on the channel last fall. Though the quality of two movies is, shall we say, not comparable, it's nevertheless likely that Nick's target audience (2-11 year olds, apparently) will find Hoodwinked really appealing. Since they'll then refuse to go to bed until mom and dad promise a weekend visit to the multiplex, this is probably (yet another) very good move by the Weinsteins.

For those of you currently thinking of taking in a little revisionist fairy tale this weekend, our review will be up tomorrow.

As his ship of wannabe-settlers approaches Virginia one clear, late afternoon in the fall of 1607, Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell) sits shackled below deck. Through the cracks in the wood, he peeks up and out at the land the ship is rapidly approaching and, hands still bound together in chains, throws his head back, and laughs and laughs. Once the Englishmen hit land, the first order of business is to execute the Captain-in-chains. Smith gets as far as the gallows, before his superior, Captain Newport, steps in. Smith, apparently, is a bitch to be around – and we'll soon see plenty of that for ourselves – but he's also the only man on a ship, otherwise padded with bourgie tourists, who can offer any kind of military experience. Newport saves Smith's life, but not without a warning: "You," Newport growls (via the voice and body of the magnificent Christopher Plummer), "Are under a cloud." Smith almost winks in response.

A cloud is right, but oh, what a day to be stuck in the metaphoric rain. The New World is the most gorgeous spiritually overcast epic to hit American screens in some time. Even when he's blinding us with his trademark bursts of sunlight, and further distracting our attention with featherweight monologues that threaten irrelevance, director Terrence Malick knows we're aware of the looming shitstorm that history has waiting for his protagonists and their epoch. With that cloud hanging over the proceedings, Malick's true coup is to seesaw his story's concerns. Famine, assimilation, and I would argue, even the rape of nature are pushed down, whilst a burning star-crossed love story is pushed up. And that love story itself should be the flimsiest of things, a historical footnote of dubious accuracy (many scholars dismiss Smith's claims of a romance with the Indian princess Pocahontas, which are absent from the many monographs he wrote in the years immediately following his journey, as the barroom boasts of a megalomaniac) and very little gravity;  Malick promotes it to life-or-death preponderancy. It would be cruel to call The New World a puppy-love soap opera, but it wouldn't be at all inaccurate. So let's get right down to it: The New World is the best puppy-love soap opera I've ever seen.

While saying that they've appeared just time for Christmas isn't entirely true (seeing as how they won't actually be available until next summer), a photo of a group of Chasing Amy "inaction" figures is now up at Kevin Smith's very own View Askew store. And you can certainly print that out and give it as an XMas IOU - that's almost the same thing as giving a group of small plastic toys. In case, however, you've got demanding friends and family who want more than a piece of paper for Christmas, there are various figures at the store that are actually available this very minute. For example, you can stock up on Jay and Silent (get it?) Bobbleheads, or get a whole set of figures from Mallrats.

Though I'm personally holding out for those elusive My Dinner with Andre figures, the View Askew sets are pretty cool last-minute gifts for the Smith fan in your life. (Or for you to get for yourself. Oh, go ahead - you deserve it.)

[via The Movie Blog]