Posted on Friday, December 7th, 2012 by Angie Han
We’ve already seen the classic Snow White fable interpreted a few different ways this year in Tarsem Singh’s Mirror, Mirror and Rupert Sanders’ Snow White and the Huntsman, but Pablo Berger‘s Blancanieves may be the most unexpected of the bunch.
The black and white film pays homage to cinema’s silent era, not unlike last year’s big winner The Artist. Perhaps that’s what inspired Spain to pick it as its official foreign language Oscar entry for the year. Unlike Michel Hazanavicius’ crowd-pleaser, however, Blancanieves also draws heavy inspiration from Spain’s flamenco and bullfighting traditions. Watch the trailer after the jump.
Read More »
.
Please Recommend /Film on Facebook
Here’s one reason Wong Kar Wai‘s new film The Grandmasters doesn’t yet have a release date outside of China: it doesn’t even have a firm release date inside China. The movie had been scheduled to open on December 18 in the director’s home country, but that has been pushed back to January 8. Producers say “the original December premiere has been postponed, but it will start screening before the Lunar New Year next year.” One reason could be a small number of reshoots, or some additional shooting, which is somewhat amusing given that Wong has been shooting the film since 2009. He’s not a fast worker.
So we’re back to speculating on the release of the film to some extent. In the meantime a few new character posters have arrived, which you can see below. Read More »
Good news for fans of Hayao Miyazaki and films from Studio Ghibli: the company has taken action to secure rights to two film titles, and in doing so has given us the name of two new projects. Hayao Miyazaki’s next film seems to be called Kaze Tachinu (The Wind Rises), and we know that it will tell the story of the man who designed the Zero fighter plane for Japan. The new project from Grave of the Fireflies director Isao Takahata, meanwhile, is Kaguya-Hime no Monogatari (Princess Kaguya Story), based on the folk story ‘Tale of the Bamboo Cutter.’ Read More »
I’d like to say that an English-subtitled trailer for Wong Kar-Wai‘s long-awaited new film The Grandmasters means that we’ve got a US release date. Alas, that isn’t the case.
This subbed trailer is the same one we ran not long ago, but with the addition of a translation courtesy of Andrew Chan at Film Comment. So now, in addition to taking in the gorgeous visual side of the film, you can start to get an idea of the story and dialogue, anchored by Tony Leung‘s performance as Ip Man, the man who eventually trained Bruce Lee, and who was previously chronicled in films that bear the Ip Man name.
Check out the translated trailer below. Read More »
Back in 2006, Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales was positioned by the director as perhaps the first of a wave of movies that could be improved by watching with access to external info sources. The ideal way to make sense of that messy, troubled movie is to have the connected graphic novels and related website handy, and to cross-reference between them as the film runs. Not a traditional viewing experience, by any means, but it doesn’t really want to be a traditional movie.
Things didn’t really work out for Southland Tales, and the traditional movie experience has mostly remained the dominant one.
Producers of a Dutch thriller, however, are looking to play with the model of film consumption even as they directly confront (whether intentionally or not) the demonization of using phones in the movie theater. A film called APP, which began shooting this week, will “synchronize a parallel storyline via app content to be accessed while in the movie theater.” Presumably, this won’t end up playing at the Alamo Drafthouse, home of the famously strict policy on in-theater phone use. Read More »
Michael Haneke‘s latest film Amour (aka Love) is probably the saddest happy movie ever made. It tells the harrowing story of an elderly couple’s long time love for each other and how their bond is tested when one of them falls incredibly ill. Depressing? More than you can imagine. But Haneke’s realism and the unbelievable performances of his leads, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva, somehow takes terrible pain and transforms it into an affirmation of life.
Audacious in its attempt to make opposite ends of the emotional spectrum into perfect complements, Amour is a true feat that’s not to be missed. The film won the Palme D’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and just played AFI Fest presented by Audi. Read more after the jump. Read More »
If you were perhaps looking for a companion piece to The Flowers of War, in which a big western star (Christian Bale) played in a film about Chinese history, then Back to 1942 might be it. Here Adrien Brody and Tim Robbins are two men caught up in social and political upheaval in China’s Henan province, which in the film’s timeline is enduring the worst famine in modern Chinese history.
There’s a gritty look to much of the footage here that looks great; this is the sort of giant film that Chinese directors such as Feng Xuigang — who directed here — have been able to put together lately with increased funding at home. But there’s also an earnestly serious tone here that almost veers towards the unintentionally comic that I can’t tell if the film will play well. Regardless, check out the trailer below. Read More »
Feels like we’ve bee waiting a very long time for The Grandmasters. That’s the new film from filmmaking master Wong Kar Wai, and a new telling of the Ip Man story. Over a year ago we saw the first footage from the film, but Wong’s long post-production tinkering — which rivals that of prime-era Terrence Malick — pushed the film away from a Cannes debut this year. It moved to a December opening this year in China, and a 2013 release (hopefully) in the rest of the world.
Now we’ve got the full-length Chinese trailer. Even without English language dialogue or subtitles you’ll be able to get some idea of the film from this gorgeous footage. While Wong Kar Wai has made his own strange version of a fight film in the past (Ashes of Time, which has been released in multiple versions) this appears to be a much more overtly action-tinged drama. And judging by the glorious cinematography seen in this trailer, that could be a great thing. Read More »
