Posted on Friday, February 10th, 2012 by David Chen
The conclusion of the heart story trilogy. Stephen finds the missing time from the recovery room. It comes with a message he didn’t expect and will never forget.
The Tobolowsky Files is a podcast from the people who brought you the /Filmcast, featuring a series of stories about life, love, and the entertainment industry, as told by legendary character actor Stephen Tobolowsky. You can buy Stephen’s new story (EXCLUSIVE to the e-book format) by going to stephentobolowsky.com and you can e-mail Stephen at stephentobolowsky(AT)gmail(DOT)com.
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What does Dark Knight Rises star Tom Hardy think of all the Bane mumbling memes? Will we ever see a Youngblood movie? Want to read Gary Oldman‘s cryptic description of a scene in The Dark Knight Rises? What’s the deal with Marvel, Ghost Rider and lawsuits? Is there a connection between Beyond Watchmen and a famous Internet photo? Has Alan Moore embraced the real life symbolism from V for Vendetta? Read about all this and more in today’s Superhero Bits. Read More »
Posted on Friday, February 10th, 2012 by Russ Fischer
I’ve really enjoyed watching the rise of Patton Oswalt as an actor. His early stand-up remains hugely entertaining (as is his recent comedy), but his legit acting work has been improving massively since his early role on The King of Queens. I still dig his leading performance in Big Fan, and his work in Jason Reitman’s Young Adult is one of the best supporting roles of 2011.
It’s a shame Oswalt didn’t score an Oscar nomination for Young Adult, but we can take heart in the knowledge that filmmakers saw his work, and he’ll likely be in more movies as a result. The next film role looks like it will be in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which Ben Stiller will direct and star in. Read More »
Posted on Friday, February 10th, 2012 by Russ Fischer
The Guard, starring Brendon Gleeson and Don Cheadle, became a tidy little art-house hit last year, and director John Michael McDonagh is planning his next film, called The Calvary.
The movie is set to shoot this September, and has distribution sales going on in Berlin right now. The film brings Gleeson and McDonagh back together, and is now adding Chris O’Dowd and Aidan Gillen, with Kelly Reilly and David Wilmot joining as well. Read More »
Posted on Friday, February 10th, 2012 by Russ Fischer
Briefly: I don’t know what Russell Crowe‘s agent is doing, but it is working. Casting news and rumors have been thick of late for the actor. Though he said the report of MGM looking at him for RoboCop was untrue, there is still the matter of Crowe being in talks for Darren Aronofsky’s Noah and Akiva Goldsman’s adaptation of the Mark Helperin novel Winter’s Tale. He’s also playing Inspector Javert in Tom Hooper’s Les Miserables.
And now Crowe is also reportedly in talks with Warner Bros. to take a starring role in Harker, the Dracula retelling that Jaume Collet-Serra (Orphan) is developing to direct. Read More »
Posted on Friday, February 10th, 2012 by Russ Fischer
When Lionsgate bought Summit Entertainment a couple weeks back — or when Lionsgate bought Twilight, I might say to be more direct — Lionsgate CEO Jon Feltheimer said he would like to continue Twilight, either on film or television.
Now, during a conference call to report Lionsgate’s third quarter earnings for 2011, Rob Friedman, the co-chair of the studio’s motion picture group, says they’re ready to make a sixth Twilight film if Stephenie Meyer will write another book. Read More »
Posted on Friday, February 10th, 2012 by Russ Fischer
Just over ten years ago, French director Christophe Gans got a lot of attention for helping raise global awareness of Monica Bellucci when he cast her in his movie The Brotherhood of the Wolf, inspired by centuries-old stories of beasts raiding the French countryside. He has only made one film since: Silent Hill, which received a much more chilly reception than did Brotherhood.
Now Gans is one of several people trying to revive the classic story of Beauty and the Beast. We’ve just seen the 3D re-release of Disney’s version, and there was the horrible tween take called Beastly released last year. Two new TV version are in the works, at ABC and the CW. Now Gans has written and will direct his own, starring Vincent Cassel (The Brotherhood of the Wolf) and Lea Seydoux (Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol). Read More »
This friday Agnieszka Holland’s In Darkness opens in New York and Los Angeles. It ought to have a decent run at art houses in select cities after that, particularly if it wins the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film this year. (If anything is poised to upset A Separation, it’s this one.)
In In Darkness, Holland, director of Europa, Europa and a few key episodes of The Wire, tells a fascinating true story of a group of Polish Jews who survived for over one year in a city’s sewer system. In the press notes she commented that, just when we thought we’d heard all the World War II stories, she discovered this one. It got me thinking that, yes, not only are there a number of great World War II stories out there that haven’t been told, there are already so many that deserve to be rediscovered by a new audience.
So, with that, let’s set the way-back machine to the madness of mid-century and check out some tremendous art that grew from tragedy.
The Grey Zone (2001); Tim Blake Nelson, director
We’ll kick this one off with one of the most depressing and difficult to watch movies I’ve ever seen.
For those that felt Schindler’s List candy-coated the horrors of the Nazi extermination camps, I offer The Grey Zone. No narrative film has more directly detailed the functions and living conditions at Auschwitz as Tim Blake Nelson’s story of a rebellious group of Sonderkommando. The Sonderkommando, if you don’t know, were the groups of healthy, young Jews who were kept alive and forced to aid the the machinery of death at the camp. Yeah, pretty bleak stuff.
The story of this impossible revolt (and there were others – check out Jean-Francois Steiner’s book Treblinka for a similar tale) is a fascinating portrait of bravery in the face of insurmountable odds and absolute evil.
Hope and Glory (1987); John Boorman, director
Okay, we need to lighten up a little bit, and quick.
Hope and Glory is told from the point of view of a ten year old boy who, despite a vague understanding of distant suffering, thinks World War II is the greatest thing that ever happened to him. School is constantly cancelled, the London blitz offers new destroyed houses to stomp around in and he gets to spend some nights sleeping in the subway station.
It’s hard to make the war seem fun without being flip but Boorman’s quasi-autobiographical tale does the trick. It features a wide and wonderful cast of characters, the full tapestry of British society that held that country together. Among my favorites, the men rejected by the fighting army but relegated to the secretarial pool, puffing their chests and reminding themselves that “we’re typing for England!”
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946); William Wyler, director
After the bullets fly and the flags are planted, the war still rages within the minds of the men who fought it.
Best Picture winner The Best Years of Our Lives was one of the first American films that showed the psychological damage done not only on the battlefield, but on the homefront as well.
Three men of different social classes meet after the war on their way back to a fictional midwestern city. Each finds it difficult to reintegrate into their previous lives. There’s drinking, flashbacks, marital regret, love affairs and adjustments to physical handicaps. The Best Years of Our Lives is basically soap opera, but it is striking to see such issues framed in the conventions of 1940s cinema.
The Best Years of Our Lives won a whole slew of awards, including a Best Supporting nod for “non-actor” Harold Russell, a war veteran who lost both of his hands. Don’t judge this movie too harshly by the clip shown above (one of the few I could find.) Once you get into it, it really is quite good.
Stalingrad (1993); Joseph Vilsmaier, director
Okay, back to the action.
It was Wolfgang Peterson’s 1981 masterpiece Das Boot that made it “okay” to root for Germans in a World War II film provided that a) we were on the side of simple soldiers caught up in the larger machinations of war and b) lots of Germans died. Stalingrad takes this formula and runs it head-on into the ice cold hell that was the Battle of Stalingrad.
Joseph Vilsmaier’s epic features sieges, tank battles, the horrors of penal colonies, assaults on civilians, survivalism and an examination of loyalty versus common sense. There were 260,000 men in Germany’s 6th Army who went to Stalingrad. 6000 returned.
