I'm not sure what they're putting in the water over in Cannes, but some pretty wild deals are beginning to emerge from that fest in France. Only a day after Werner Herzog signed to direct Nicolas Cage in a remake of Bad Lieutenant comes word from The Hollywood Reporter that Herzog and David Lynch have teamed up on a film called My Son; a murder drama to be tentatively shot next March. Based on a true story, My Son will tell of a "San Diego man who acts out a Sophocles play in his mind and kills his mother with a sword." HR says the film will jump between the murder scene and this disturbed man's story. Nice family film from two completely sane directors.

Additionally, and this shouldn't come as a surprise (considering the two guys we're talking about), My Son will be shot guerrilla-style with digital video. Herzog, who co-wrote My Son with Herbert Golder, will first shoot Bad Lieutenant in July before directing the Victorian-era drama The Piano Tuner for Focus Features. One can only imagine what the finished product will look like when you've got Herzog and Lynch working together on the same movie -- especially one with a nutty storyline like this one. Not for nothing, but I think I'd rather watch the documentary of them making this film rather than the film itself. You?

As soon as this story hit, I had to check to make sure a) it wasn't April 1st, and b) we all still lived on the planet Earth. Yes, I'm not kidding about this one -- The Hollywood Reporter tells us that Werner Herzog is remaking Abel Ferrara's gritty, NC-17-rated cult classic,Bad Lieutenant, and none other than Nicolas Cage is going to star. Nic Cage! Werner Herzog! Am I the only one who's completely blown away by this bizarre news? (Though, to be fair, we did kinda see this coming ...)

Cage will take on the role originally played by Harvey Keitel; he'll slip into the part of a drug and sex-addicted corrupt cop, though there's no word on how far they'll take this version of the film. However, exec producer Avi Lerner did promise this new take will "deliver as much filth as the original." Wonderful! We'll look forward to it Avi! Nu Image/Millennium Films will finance, with Pressman Film Corp. producing. When asked about his opinion on this new project, Cinematical snark expert Scott Weinberg said "Awesome, let's hope it's as funny as his last remake. The Wicker Man as a comedy ... brilliant!" (Oh man, this is such a nasty, nasty film.)

Okay, now it's your turn: I know you folks are dying to sound off on this one below ...

If you're anywhere near New York City this weekend, you simply must check out the work of this great new filmmaker named Harmony Korine, whose strangely fantastical movie, Mister Lonely, opened yesterday at the IFC Center (it hits Los Angeles on May 9). Some readers may confuse this Korine for the angry young radical who wrote Larry Clark's teen sex drama Kids when he was 19 and later directed the startling divisive, sharply confrontational films Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy.

I assure you that the 1990's-era Korine is long gone -- or, rather, has morphed into an agreeably warmer artist. Mister Lonely, which stars Diego Luna as a Michael Jackson impersonator and New German Cinema legend Werner Herzog as an eccentric priest, doesn't always make sense, but that's precisely what Korine was going for. "I've always been interested in making a perfect nonsense," he told a crowd at the Apple store in lower Manhattan Thursday night. "I never really cared much about plot. I wanted to make movies about moments that went through you, that were experiential."

The writer/director Harmony Korine might have been -- and might still be -- one of the most audacious and terrifying new American talents in some time. At the age of 19, he wrote the script for Larry Clark's Kids (1995) and made his own directorial debut with Gummo (1997), a film so astonishing that most reviewers panned it simply to get it out of their heads. He then made the first official American Dogme 95 film, Julien Donkey-Boy (1999), and cast one of his biggest fans, director Werner Herzog, in a starring role.

All three films conjured up images that inspired the gag reflex. It was hard to look away, though. They were odd and sad and not a little repulsive. From there, he retreated into other art forms, such as photography and music (he directed music videos for Cat Power and Sonic Youth), returning to features only to write Clark's Ken Park (2002), which was so lurid it failed to secure a U.S. distributor. Indeed, like many of the most cutting edge American directors, most of Korine's fans, and financiers, currently reside outside the U.S.

If there's one thing you can say, it's that Werner Herzog has diverse talents. He can not only eat a shoe, but now tune pianos! The Hollywood Reporter posts that he will write and direct a new film called The Piano Tuner for Focus Features. Based on a book by Daniel Mason, the script was first written by Peter Buchman, and is now being handed over to Herzog for a rewrite.

Centering on a piano tuner named Edgar Drake, the project is about much more than just music and tuning. Set in the late 19th-century, Drake is a quiet piano tuner living in London, who is commissioned by the British War Office to repair a piano housed in a remote village in Burma, which is owned by an eccentric colonel. He makes the long journey there and tunes the piano, but that's only the start. He gets brought in on a peace mission, and as THR describes it: "Drake falls in love with a Burmese woman and her country, but as the officer wins over locals through music and medicine, things grow treacherous when his troops begin to suspect him of treason."

I'm excited about this, and I really want you to get excited about this too. The Grand was one of my favorite comedies from last year, and I've been dying to watch it again ever since. The Grand? What's that? Well, the film premiered at the Tribeca Fest last May (where I reviewed it and interviewed writer-director Zak Penn), and it's a poker-themed mockumentary chock-full of some awesome character actors. Penn wrote and directed this gem, which stars folks like Woody Harrelson, David Cross, Ray Romano, Cheryl Hines, Werner Herzog, Richard Kind, Dennis Farina ... I seriously could go on and on.

But I don't have to, because the first trailer for The Grand has finally popped up on Yahoo. I stress, though, that this is a film where the best parts come in small packages. However, this trailer is pretty damn good. It establishes most of the main players, but the bits may not seem as funny until you're watching the actual film. Ray Romano, for example, is out of his mind here -- and I'm not a big Romano fan, yet I loved him in The Grand. Cross, as always, kills, and everyone else (from the main cast to the cameos) are all a riot. Seriously, go see this film when it comes out in March. You'll laugh your friggin' ass off, especially if you're a fan of shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm and Seinfeld. The Grand hits theaters this March.

For more, check out the film's official website, where you can visit Larry's (David Cross' character) hysterical poker-themed website, http://icantbelieveigettoplaypokerdotcom777.net/.

Most critics simultaneously look forward to and dread awards season. We get to see slightly higher quality films, and the studios begin to act a lot nicer towards us -- no more horror remakes that are not screened for the press. But on the downside, a lot of prestige pictures can get tiring. The worst part of all is the extreme length that most films get away with this time of year. Quite a few films this year get close to the three-hour mark, and most of them run longer than two hours. If you look at the history of the Oscar winners, length has always been an important factor. But this does not have to be the case; many award-worthy films have used their time wisely and succinctly.

1. Duck Soup (1933)
Judd Apatow, please take note. While I enjoyed Knocked Up and Superbad as much as anyone, it just won't do to continue making comedies over two hours long. I found many great comedies that run less than 80 minutes, including several from Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, W.C. Fields, and even one each from Jerry Lewis (The Bellboy) and Woody Allen (Zelig). But this Marx Brothers classic tops my list for its uncanny speed and anarchy. It's like watching a crazy lawnmower ripping all over the yard, but at the end of the run, everything falls exactly into place.

2. Following (1998)
Before he became the king of summer blockbusters (Batman Begins, The Dark Knight) and before he made one of my favorite movies (Memento), Christopher Nolan scraped together this equally impressive crime thriller in black-and-white, running just 69 minutes. It jumbles the three acts together over a fractured timeline but very cleverly leaves clues that tie them all back together. Jeremy Theobald plays a man who enjoys following people, but gets himself into deep and unexpected trouble. See also Shane Carruth's exceptional, low-budget time travel head-scratcher Primer (2004).

The image of Lugosi's Dracula is heavily copyrighted; Nosferatu is, by contrast, an open source vampire; you could tell that from his cameo a few years back on Sponge Bob Square Pants. The silent classic was originally a bootleg version of Bram Stoker's novel. When Werner Herzog went to work on a remake of F. W. Murnau's 1922 vampire film, he could call his creature Count Dracula, thanks to public domain laws. Herzog preserved much of the original's style out of admiration for Murnau and "the most important film ever made in Germany" (maybe so...any other suggestions?).

But Herzog's skeptical, neo-documentary approach--seen this summer in Rescue Dawn--wouldn't permit him to use Murnau's mistier plotting. He took pains to see how Nosferatu works. Why has no one burned the evil castle down in daylight? Simple: it doesn't really exist except in ruins, "except in the minds of men" who are tricked by the darkness of night. How does the vampire beat Harker home? There's a line about how the sea voyage is faster than heading back from Transylvania overland. (Unlike the book, this is set about the time Murnau set his version, 1838; there are no railroads yet in Central Europe.)

It must have been something to be a filmmaker in the 1920s, trying to imagine ways to scare people; you had a huge blank slate in front of you. Hardly any of it -- ghosts, vampires, werewolves, mummies, zombies, cat people, maniacs, monsters, homicidal killers -- had been done yet. Moreover, the negative connotations of horror had yet to take hold. Whereas most modern horror films are ashamedly snuck past reviewers, Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) was released to rave reviews. The great critic Carl Sandburg, writing in the Chicago Daily News, called it "the most important and the most original photoplay that has come to this city of Chicago the last year." We can only imagine what Sandburg would have said about F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922); he may have seen it, but he didn't review it. For my money it is the superior of the two films, made by a far greater cinema artist.

Like Wiene, Fritz Lang, Joe May and many German directors of his era, Murnau (1888-1931) worked in German Expressionism, finding ways to manipulate the images in the frame to a point beyond reality for maximum emotional effect. But Murnau was unique in that he used these images to express his personal fears and desires; he also intermingled realistic, nature shots with his bizarre, artificial Expressionist shots. He completed just over 20 films in his short career, and almost half of them are said to be lost. He was gay and constantly struggled with all the conflicting pros and cons of his emotions in his films. He moved to Hollywood in 1927 and made his masterpiece Sunrise there. Just a few years later, after completing his final film, Tabu, he died in a car accident.

Back in high school, I was one of those kids who wore mostly band t-shirts. Now that I'm older and more interested in movies than music, I've filled my wardrobe with movie t-shirts instead. But what if I could combine the two? Well, I kinda already have with my Un Chien Andalou shirt, which I sometimes tell people is a Pixies shirt (it only has the eyeball-cutting shot, with no title mentioned). However, I could also sport these excellent designs, made and sold by CineFile Video in Los Angeles. They combine the names of four of our favorite foreign filmmakers with the logos/fonts of heavy metal bands. There's Von Trier in the Van Halen font, Fassbinder in the Metallica font, Ingmar Bergman in the Iron Maiden font and Herzog in the Danzig font. What better way to pay homage to your favorite filmmaker while also appearing pretentiously hip?

Hopefully CineVideo will design some more, possibly utilizing non-metal logos. I don't know who would work with this, but someone has to be applied to the AC/DC font. And I know it's a bit long, but couldn't Kurosawa be done up with the Kiss logo? Here are some other ideas that I'd be interested in buying: Buñuel as Boston; Wenders as Weezer, Antonioni as Aerosmith; De Sica as Def Leppard; Ozu as Ozzy Jean-Luc Godard as Journey; Jean Renoir as Judas Priest (or the last two the other way around). Okay, some of these are stretching, and I still can't find good ones for Truffaut, Fellini, or Eisenstein. Any ideas? Unfortunately, CineFile is only selling these shirts at their store on Santa Monica Blvd. Anybody want to ship one to NYC for my birthday (ps: I like the Herzog one best).

[via Movie City Indie]

So, here we are at Day 3 of the Telluride Film Festival, and surprisingly, the hottest buzz of the fest seems to be all about Juno, which sneak-previewed to a sold-out house yesterday and is playing TBA screenings tonight and tomorrow. Tonight's screening at The Nugget, which holds only 186 fest-goers, was sold out as well -- I heard from folks who were in line that there were some 150 Patrons in line for the screening, which included a Q&A with director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody, and that pretty much everyone else was out of luck. The folks I talked to on the gondola waited in line for three hours (!) only to get turned away. Fortunately, they were given queue cards for tomorrow's screening, which will be at a bigger venue (and which likely will also be packed).

Other films I'm hearing good buzz about include The Counterfeiters (loved it, and will be reviewing it maybe later tonight if I'm not too wiped after my last screening) and Into the Wild, directed by Sean Penn, who is here in Telluride and participated in two panels. The filmmaker, who has a reputation for being a bit surly, must really love the mountain air (or perhaps his mood is up because his film is getting raves), because at both panels he was warm, inviting, funny and penetratingly intelligent. Today's panel was about Into the Wild and as well as Penn, included Jon Krakauer, the author of the book on which the film is based, and director Werner Herzog, whose film Encounters at the End of the World is also playing the fest. Into the Wild is based on the true story of Christopher McCandless, a young man who, after graduating from college, gave all his worldly possessions and money to charity and went to live in the Alaskan wilderness. I'm hoping to catch this film at a TBA tomorrow.

Roman Polanski's recent supporting role in Brett Ratner's Rush Hour 3 raised more questions than the film itself ever could. What could that dynamic have been like? How could one of the world's greatest directors have taken orders from one of the world's worst? We know from previous films (The Fearless Vampire Killers, Zemsta, etc.) that Polanski has a yen for acting, even if his skills in this arena run toward broad, rather than subtle. Likewise Kevin Smith working for Len Wiseman in Live Free or Die Hard. Would Smith have made suggestions on how to make the movie nerdier? It got me thinking about the many directors who have performed for their colleagues, and the very interesting dynamics they created. The following are the seven best and/or most interesting combos. I've only included people who are primarily known as directors, as opposed to actor-directors, like Jackie Chan, George Clooney, Denzel Washington, etc.. I've also left out glorified cameos (Steven Spielberg in The Blues Brothers) and jokey appearances (Samuel Fuller in Pierrot le Fou). Finally, I've excluded Quentin Tarantino, whose lack of thespian skills is unquestioned. (Though I would have loved to have been on the set of Spike Lee's Girl 6 the day those two crossed paths...)

1. Orson Welles in Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949)
This is the most obvious one; the Big Guy's presence as Harry Lime has led generations of moviegoers to believe that Welles actually directed this movie. Certainly his fingerprints are on it. He spoke often about building up to the first appearance of a character by having other characters talk about him long before we actually see him. Welles managed to do this with his Rochester in Jane Eyre (1944), and even more memorably here. We know all about Harry Lime before those lights unexpectedly splash on his face and he lets slip an amused smile. Reportedly, the famous "cuckoo clock" speech was his own. However, Reed undoubtedly directed; the overall suspense and structure of the film has more in common with Reed's The Fallen Idol than with anything Welles made.

2. John Huston in Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974)
The maverick director had a terrific screen presence with his large, ambling frame, cavernous face and sonorous voice, and acted in many films, mostly his own, and notably in cult films like Winter Kills (1979) and Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973). Happily, the news recently broke that rights issues surrounding Orson Welles' The Other Side of the Wind have been resolved, and so the world may get to see Huston's lead performance in that film as well. In Chinatown, Huston gives a flat-out great performance as the insidious industrialist who gets away with more than murder and justifies it with a hearty laugh. Jack Nicholson may have got his nose cut, but Huston emerges untouched.

If you're a film geek like me, you're sitting on pins and needles waiting for the full Toronto International Film Festival schedule to be announced. I'm skipping out on the fest this year because I just put my kids through a 2,000 mile move (though I will be at Telluride giving you all the coverage you can handle from there), but that doesn't mean I'm not pumped up about Cinematical's TIFF coverage, which will be extensive.

The start of the fest seems ages away, and the full schedule isn't even announced for six more days -- stop teasing us already! (Yes, as a kid I did try to scope out the hidden locations of Christmas gifts well before the big day -- I've never liked surprises. What can I say, I'm a control freak.) In the meantime, here's something to whet your appetite: The TIFF Blogs are up and running at full steam. A little sampling of what you can find there:

The Full Frame Documentary Film Fest programmer Phoebe Brush shares her picks from the Real to Reel section with the group. Since docs are one of my own fave genres, I was especially interested in what Phoebe has to say about the TIFF selections. Phoebe's picks are The Dictator Hunter by Klaartje Quirijns (about the brutal regime of Hissène Habré, the former dictator of Chad) Weijun Chen's Please Vote for Me, which played Silverdocs in June, where it won the Sterling Feature competition, and Encounters at the End of the World, which Werner Herzog fans and fanatics will no doubt be lining up to see in droves.

Other TIFF docs that we're especially interested in include Darfur Now, Hollywood Chinese, A Jihad for Love, and My Enemy's Enemy. Scott Weinberg and I saw My Kid Could Paint That at Sundance, and I'd recommend that one for a great doc to see and then talk about over late-night ales at a pub or a 2AM pizza slice.

Midnight Madness is always one of the most fun parts of TIFF, and Scott Weinberg will once again be Cinematical's Man at Midnight, bringing you all the hottest horror reviews and on-the-scene action from those always-zany midnight crowds. Over on the Midnight Madness Blog, MM programmer Colin Geddes gives you a sneak pick at one of the most-anticpated films in the Midnight section, Fumihiko Sori's Vexille. Geddes points all you anime fans to the film's official website, which is streaming the first 12 minutes of the film. Vexille premieres at TIFF on Sunday, September 9 at Midnight Madness.

Other Midnight Madness coverage we're itching to bring you: Takashi Miike's Sukiyaki Western Django, The Diary of the Dead, Mother of Tears, and Stuck.

TIFF is one of the few places where you can really sink your teeth into some Canadian film, and there are some hot films from Canada in this year's lineup, including David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises, which stars one of my other secret movie star boyfriends, Viggo Mortenson. I stood about 10 feet away from The Viggo at last year's TIFF while waiting to interview Laura Linney, and I can attest that he is even better-looking in person -- the man just radiates "movie star" -- but I must confess that I prefer him all dirty and bearded as Aragorn to golden and glowing for press interviews. Other notable Canadian offerings that we'll try to cover: Francois Girard's Silk, Bruce Sweeney's American Venus, Ernie Barbarash's They Wait, and Martin Gero's Young People F*cking (that one just because ... well, because the title alone intrigues us).

That's enough to get us excited for the fest, now we just need to see the full lineup and start counting down the days. Let us know what you're hot to see us cover at Toronto. And hey, indie filmmakers -- if you have a film at TIFF you'd like us to check out, let us know. Some of my own fave fest finds would've gotten lost in the shuffle if a filmmaker hadn't contacted me to let me know about it. Also, please get your film listed on IMDb and get an easy-to-find official website up! The more we can find out about your film, the more likely it will be to stand out from the slew of films we have to sort through to decide what to cover, so help us out a little here, will ya?

The Toronto International Film Festival continues to sweeten the pot of films it is screening, having now released some of the documentaries that will be shown next month. Leading the charge in world premieres is Grizzly Man director Werner Herzog, who has moved from bears to Antarctica in Encounters at the End of the World. Following are Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland) who has made a doc about former Gestapo commander Klaus Barbie called My Enemy's Enemy and Phil Donahue, yes, the talk show host, who cooked up a film with Ellen Spiro about the Iraq War called Body of War, which also has music from Eddie Vedder.

From there, the docs are all over the map and handle a multitude of subjects as part of TIFF's Real to Reel program. There's a doc called Trumbo, which details the blacklisting of screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, with appearances by big names like Michael Douglas and Joan Allen. Another doc, called A Jihad for Love, which might sound like a war film, is actually a movie about homosexuality and Islam by Parvez Sharma. On the musical side of things, there is Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts, featuring the composer's work and interactions with names like Woody Allen. There's even some time spent on child prodigies with My Kid Could Paint That, which delves into what constitutes art and details the rise of 4-year-old painter Marla Olmstead. It's a pretty great list of films, many of which are just starting to screen, so I suggest heading over to Twitch. They've posted a great primer for the list that includes each film, location, filmmaker and topic.

One of the greatest living filmmakers, Werner Herzog makes movies with an unquenchable curiosity combined with an intrepid fearlessness. His films brim with a kind of madness in an era when Hollywood wishes to control everything and leech out any unexpected qualities. Herzog's newest film Rescue Dawn (57 screens), starring Christian Bale and Steve Zahn, has opened to strong reviews and has pulled in over $1 million in U.S. box office. After a career stretching back five decades, it's his first film produced by a Hollywood studio. Though far from selling out, Herzog has brought his unique vision to the otherwise timid and brain-dead mainstream. This is good news for everyone; many Americans will see their very first Herzog film (though his 2005 documentary Grizzly Man didn't do half bad), Herzog himself may qualify for prizes usually reserved for those with half his talent, and his example may reverse an irritating trend that has prevailed for almost a century.

The 64-year-old filmmaker began in the 1960s as part of what would come to be known as the German New Wave, sharing the spotlight with, among others, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Wim Wenders. Herzog made a small splash with his amazing early feature Signs of Life (1968), and followed it up with the peculiar Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970) and Land of Silence and Darkness (1971), which delved into the lives of little people and blind-and-deaf people with no hesitation or repulsion. His masterpiece Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) made him an art-house sensation, with its use of the physical, jungle landscape intertwining with man's obsession and insanity. While Herzog continued this exploration of untamed nature and human foibles, Wenders heeded the siren song of Hollywood, while Fassbinder burned out and left a good-looking corpse, well before Hollywood even noticed him.