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The Zeitgeist Made 'Em Do It
Queens splatterfest takes horror, then and now, seriously

Mit der deutschen Fassung der Serie "Die 2" brachte er vor 30 Jahren das verschnarchte ZDF auf Trab - und die Zuschauer wirklich guter Komik näher. Ein Besuch bei Rainer Brandt, dem letzten Meister der Synchronisation

Ennio Morricone hat den Oscar 2007 für sein Lebenswerk erhalten. Als Filmkomponist, Orchestrator und Arrangeur. Preis und Preisträger kommen ungefähr so zufällig zusammen wie "Mundharmonika" und Henry Fondas drei Banditen. Die Preisverleihung fand sozusagen an der kleinen Bahnstation in der Western-Wüste statt. Anlass genug, über den Stand der Filmmusik, nicht nur in Hollywood, nachzudenken. Hier werden zunächst ästhetische und philosophische Grundlangen erörtert: Die Wahrnehmung von Raum und Zeit im Film und in der Musik.

A group including three prominent filmmakers is aiming for creative control in making the $100-million proposal.

Elaborate death traps and the torture of innocents: good or bad?

In preparation for the US release of Election and Election 2 (retitled Triad Election) at the Film Forum in New York (see link here), and with Magnolia Pictures plans to do the same with Exiled, CSB’s David Austin had an opportunity to sit down with Mr. To (in a hotel courtyard so that Mr. To could enjoy his stogie) and discuss the Election films, along with some of his other recent work.

CSB: One question I have to ask before we talk about the Election films – I heard Simon Yam says he wants to do some more PTU movies. Are you going to be involved?

JT: Yes, it’s our company. It will be a four-part television feature shot in 35mm. The name is not PTU – it will be called Tactical Unit instead. Basically, the same characters from PTU return – Simon, Lam Suet, and Maggie Siu come back. I am the producer. Each of the four parts will be directed by good directors - next generation directors. For instance, Law Wing-cheong, who did “2 Become 1,” and Larry Lau [Lawrence Ah Mon], who did the recent Lau Ching-wan movie where he plays an actor who’s out of love with film [My Name is Fame], and he did “Spacked Out” for Milkyway, and “Gimme Gimme.” Universe financed it; it’s supposed to be something for the cable channel.

CSB: How closely involved are you?

JT: I try to stay out of it as much as I can. I’ll give a free hand to the other directors to do their work. I’ll give some comments on the scripts and, of course, budgeting.

CSB: You mentioned that Lam Suet will be involved. Turning to the second Election movie, why so little Lam Suet?

JT: There were extra scenes of Lam Suet that we shot, but I decided not to use them for two reasons. One, if we have more of these characters, it takes the attention away from the main focus of the film, which is about China, about Hong Kong since 1997 – that’s what I want to talk about. And also, of course, I tried to keep a balance in terms of how much of a part each actor has in the film, and if Lam Suet gets more than it’s

Under U.S. pressure, Swedish authorities are going after the popular Pirate Bay Web site for illegal distribution of video files. But if Hollywood wants to stop online pirates—who cost the industry some $7 billion in 2005—it needs to join them, not beat them.

'Grindhouse' squeezes transcendent kicks from a classic form

LOS ANGELES, March 23 — To drive almost anywhere here this week is to run a gantlet of advertising for movies about killing.

Posters for Warner Brothers’ film “The Reaping,” about deadly plagues, and the torture-filled “Captivity,” from After Dark Films and Lionsgate, appear on bus shelters on Pico Boulevard between two elementary schools. A fright puppet from Universal’s “Dead Silence” peers menacingly from a construction-site wall by a children’s center in Santa Monica. A few blocks away, a large billboard promoting Sony Pictures’ “Perfect Stranger” overlooks the campus of the Crossroads School, the daytime home for the offspring of many in the film industry.

All rated R for violence, among other traits, the films belong to what has become an annual winter-spring crop of horror and suspense. But the harvest is trickier than usual this year, as Hollywood braces for a new government review of the marketing of violent entertainment to the young.

Gleich drei Berlinalefilme reflektieren über gebrochene Helden in mystisch verklärten Kriegswirklichkeiten: Steven Soderberghs Film „The Good German“, Robert de Niros "The Good Shepherd" und Clint Eastwoods "Flags of our fathers".

Perhaps the most intriguing promise these sites hold, at least for those whose interest in film extends beyond the new, the recent and the aggressively hyped, is of a kind of virtual cinematheque. The retrieval and preservation of film history has been a project of many decades, accelerated and democratized by the rise of the DVD, which has put integral, aesthetically credible versions of hundreds of old films in easy reach of the multitudes.

At least a half-dozen download services like Jaman want to become your digital art-house cinema, offering movie lovers a universe of alternative films they otherwise might never have known they wanted to see, or had a clue on how to find if they did. At the moment these sites pretty much appeal only to hard-core cineastes, mainly because watching movies on a computer monitor is far from an ideal entertainment experience.

SOME film critics wax nostalgic about the big-screen experience in the age of the diminishing movie image, but I can’t relate. For me movies are movies whether on the big screen or small, on my laptop or on a plane, captured in celluloid or digital. My preferred medium is film, though like a lot of Americans, I imagine, my movie love was nurtured at home while flopped in front of a television, in my case while watching “Chiller Theater” and, every Sunday morning without fail, Abbott and Costello. The first commercially exhibited moving pictures were watched through peepholes in machines called Kinetoscopes, so watching a film on an iPod shouldn’t really seem all that different.

via "Werner Herzog Archive"

The stereotypical image of Antarctica is of an uninhabitable place where only the bravest of men dare to venture. But while the chilly continent might have been thus in the time of explorers like Roald Amundsen, Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton, it has changed drastically over the years. German director Werner Herzog, who has just finished filming at a live volcano located in Mount Erebus in the Antarctic Spring, says the area is no longer as alienating as everyone thinks.

Pan’s Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro on one of his major influences, The Spirit of the Beehive

Ein Gespräch mit dem Autor, Filmemacher und Rechtsanwalt Alexander Kluge über die «Suhrkamp-Kultur»

Seit 35 Jahren publiziert Alexander Kluge bei Suhrkamp. Joachim Güntner sprach mit ihm über seine Stellung als Autor dort, das Besondere an diesem Verlag und die Macht der Bücher.

FOR many filmmakers through the years, a certain kind of pilgrimage to Rome leads to the opulent parlor of the composer Ennio Morricone. It’s the place where he has discussed grand concepts and crucial details, and often unveiled new themes on the piano, for the distinctive film scores he has written over the past four decades, from “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” to “The Mission.” There are more than 400 of them, though he hasn’t kept count.