ponyo on the cliff Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Erotic Vampires. Park Chan-wook's Thirst will have its international premiere at the upcoming Cannes Film Festival, but it's already opened in its native South Korea. In his review for Screen International, Darcy Paquet says that the "visually arresting vampire movie Thirst looks certain to create a stir: adopting a more lyrical mode than before, this complex and supremely inventive work sees the filmmaker back on top form."

I've read the knowledgeable Paquet at his site Koreanfilm.org for years, so his opinion is very encouraging, especially when you consider Park's best work includes Old Boy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, and Joint Security Area. [Via In Contention.] Even better: those of us in the US don't have to wait long to see it. Focus Features will release Thirst in July.

Gentle Fish. If you haven't marked August 14 on your calendars yet, please do so now. That will mark the US theatrical debut of Hayao Miyazaki's Ponyo, the master filmmaker's latest work of art. The plot revolves around a princess who just happens to be a goldfish, and her desire to grow legs and walk on land. She develops a friendship with a 5-year-old boy who tries to help her realize her dream. The poster and a still can be viewed at Ain't It Cool News.

Under John Lasseter's committed oversight, Walt Disney Pictures has done right by Studio Ghibli so far, making the original Japanese-language version available at some venues and ensuring that the English dubbing is as faithful as possible. While we wait for the inevitable English-language trailer, here's a teaser, evidently for its release in France, that is silky, poetic, and non-verbal.

Not many movie-going summers have had the good sense or fortune to formally kick themselves off with the likes of Hugh Jackman and his razor-sharp jazz hands, but as these are the times in which we live in, it's a clear indication that we're in for about eighteen weeks of spectacular spectaculars worth gulping down popcorn and guzzling down pop* with.

Eugene's already shone the spotlight on a fair amount of smaller titles worth your while, so our staff tried to keep the focus on that which we haven't seen, those spectacles for which we're most excited and least likely to text during. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls: sit down and shut up, because these are the seven movies that we're fairly f**kin' pumped for.

(*Okay, I pretty much never call soda that, but you get the idea.)

While The Dark Knight dominated the weekend box office here in the US -- with a little love spared for Mamma Mia! and Transsiberian -- in Asia things looked a little different. The Good, the Bad, the Weird , which was just picked up by IFC for the US, opened in its native South Korea to outstanding returns, according to Variety.

The film, a salute to Spaghetti Westerns with a modern twist, is expected to surpass 2.2 million admissions over the weekend, which would make it the fastest to hit that mark this year, beating out police comedy Public Enemy Returns. Its opening day returns put it in the company of previous monster smashes D-War and The Host. We should hear more about The Good, the Bad, the Weird when it plays at Toronto in September.

The news is not as good in Japan, where master filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki's latest animated achievement, Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, was expected to dominate. Opening on a record number of screens for a local picture (481), Ponyo is said by its distributor to have earned 83% of the total made by Miyazaki's blockbuster Spirited Away, which sounds good. But as reported by Mark Schilling in Variety, those numbers may be misleading.

Some mornings I wake up feeling like an old, old man slouching toward death, and other days I'm magically transported back to my childhood -- like today! That's because Nausicaa.net is reporting that the storyboards for Ponyo on the Cliff, the latest masterpiece from Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki, have been completed.

Our own Monika Bartyzel brought us official word on the project in March 2007. She noted that Ponyo on the Cliff is an original work delving "into the lives of a 5-year-old boy named Sosuke, the image of whom will be visually modeled after Miyazaki's grandson, and a princess goldfish named Ponyo who is aching to become human." One of the things I love about Miyazaki's work is his ability to take you by the hand and lead you into unknown territories, so I really don't want to know more about the plot than that simple description.

As a point of comparison, Nausicaa.net compares the number of cuts in the storyboards (1,138) with those in Miyazaki's previous films, which may hint at Ponyo's eventual running time. The completion of the storyboards by Miyazaki is roughly equivalent to the completion of principal photography on a live action film, which means the film is well on its way. If you can read Japanese, you can perhaps get more information from the official Studio Ghibli production diary.

If the current, perhaps temporary, poster (pictured) represents the style of art that will be presented, it looks somewhat different than Miyazaki's previous films -- still wonderfully detailed, but with softer textures, almost as though the characters are merging more with the backgrounds. I'm very eager to see the finished film, which should hit screens in Japan later this year.