New poster for Pray The Devil Back To Hell, which is a gripping account of a group of brave and visionary women who demanded peace for Liberia, a nation torn to shreds by a decades old civil war. Combining contemporary interviews, archival images, and scenes of present-day Liberia the film recounts the experiences and memories of the women who stood up to their country’s tyrannical leader and brutal warlords, in order to bring peace to their tormented country.
New poster for Let The Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in) a Swedish vampire movie:
Oskar, a bullied 12-year old, dreams of revenge. He falls in love with Eli, a peculiar girl. She can’t stand the sun or food and to come into a room she needs to be invited. Eli gives Oskar the strength to hit back but when he realizes that Eli needs to drink other peoples blood to live he’s faced with a choice. How much can love forgive? Let The Right One In is a story both violent and highly romantic, set in the Stockholm suburb of Blackeberg in 1982.
Panda-ering to fans, DreamWorks Animation has officially confirmed that a sequel to its animated hit “Kung Fu Panda” is in the works and has set a release date of June 3, 2011.
The film, which will reunite Jack Black as kung fu fan Po, Angelina Jolie and other members of the original voice cast, will be released in 3-D — the new standard for all DWA movies starting next year — on regular and Imax screens worldwide.
Jennifer Yu Helson, who was head of story on “Panda,” has been upped to director for the sequel. Melissa Cobb will repeat her duties as producer, and Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger, who were writers and co-producers on the first film, also are returning.
The 2011 date means that “Panda” will be sharing the summer with Disney/Pixar’s “Cars 2,” which Disney moved from a 2012 release to summer 2011 last week. [thr]
Director Davide Marengo’s first feature Night Bus combines a mildly twisting thriller with a ‘two people thrown together by chance’ romantic comedy with mixed results. As many films of this nature do, Night Bus opens with a scene which sets up the tale to come; it seems that the dramatic fulcrum of this movie is a microchip containing sensitive information that is being sought by several parties at great expense and for an even greater reward. This conceit may sound a little retro (think pre Pierce Brosnan James Bond films) but the film displays no real consciousness of this as it zigzags it way to poetic justice and romantic resolution.
Street-smart young siren Leila (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) is a petty thief who specialises in passport theft, seducing unsuspecting men she meets at bars and clubs, luring them to room somewhere, drugging them, and relieving them of their personal possessions. Her latest victim – with an astounding lack in the self control department considering the deal he is about to carry out – unsuspectingly embroils her in a plot far more serious than she could have imagined which sees her dodging a couple of brutal killers. In making good her escape she stumbles upon barely likeable loser Franz (Valerio Mastandrea) – driver of the titular night bus – whose good nature she quickly takes advantage of and with whom she ends up on the run from the very determined bad guys. In the process the pair is slowly moved out of their respective disguises and apathy and, in Keanu & Sandra Speed like fashion, into an unlikely and completely unreasonable romantic relationship.
Unfortunately for Marengo his fusion of genres doesn’t really come together that well; Night Bus attempts to give equal credit to each but fails to do justice to either. I wonder if Marengo would have had more success focussing in on one or the other. Good examples of such genre mixing can be found in any of Tarantino’s work (Pulp Fiction standing out as the best of these) or Shane Black’s more recent Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. The thriller aspect of Night Bus seems like the poorer cousin, twice removed, to the likes of The Usual Suspects or Fight Club, being less serpentine than a patch-together of fairly linear plotlines. That Night Bus lacks any real sense of surprise or mystery means that it is not particularly compelling viewing. The bulk of the comedy derives from the interaction of Leila and Franz and the unintentional crossing of paths of the various groups. Though this creates the odd smile the fact that much of it can be seen coming from a long way off took some of the shine from mine.
I think many of the problems with this film lie in the characterisation; Leila and Franz ultimately fail to draw enough empathy for us to care what happens to them, or between them. Even if the scripting was tightened up and the plotlines overhauled this aspect would still leave Night Bus’ power to engage the audience severely limited. This is not to say that the film is a particularly arduous watch – it is light enough to sit through without completely turning off – but if this is to be your introduction to Italian cinema I think that you would be somewhat disappointed.
Reviewed by: Jacob Powell
Rating: M – contains violence and offensive language
Duration: 105 mins
Genre: Comedy Thriller
Director: Davide Marengo (2007)
Actors: Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Valerio Mastandrea, Ennio Fantastichini, and Ivan Franek.
Country: Italy
Over the winter, I saw the film version of Get Smart (starring Steve Carrell and Anne Hathaway). Right away I recognized the lab rat duo of Bruce(Masi Oka) and Lloyd(Nate Torrence) from CONTROL. These guys’ job is to create imaginative spy gadgets to be used by the field agents.
The movie takes place during the same time period as its’ bigger title Get Smart, as field agents Smart (Carrell) and Agent 99 (Hathaway) are in Russia.
The premise of the movie is mostly based in CONTROL headquarters, where the field agents see themselves more superiror to the technology geeks that are Bruce and Lloyd. In the movie, the gadget, titled OCT (Optical Camouflage Technology)… You guessed it, an invisibility cloak… is missing. Having the team run around trying to determine if the OCT has been stolen or is simply invisible and lost. So Bruce and Lloyd, along with a formaldehyde smelling Nina(Jayma Mays), set off to retrieve the OCT and answers to who stole it in the first place and why. Watch and find out if the trio are successful, if the bad guys’ plot is foiled, and if those mean field agents get humbled.
This movie is short, family friendly, witty, but makes more sense if you have seen Get Smart. We liked it.
Reviewed by: Rachel Nigro.
Rating: PG – Contains Sexual References.
Duration: 69 mins.
Genre: Comedy, Spoof.
Director: Gil Junger.
Actors: Larry Miller, Anne Hathaway, Jayma Mays, Bryan Callen, Masi Oka, Mitch Rouse, Nate Torrence, Kelly Karbacz, Marika Dominczyk, J.P. Manoux.
Distributor: Warner Bros.
Release Date: Available now.
Blind people quarantined in a mental asylum, attacking each other, soiling themselves, trading sex for food. For Marc Maurer, who’s blind, such a scenario — as shown in the movie “Blindness” — is not a clever allegory for a breakdown in society.
Instead, it’s an offensive and chilling depiction that Maurer fears could undermine efforts to integrate blind people into the mainstream.
“The movie portrays blind people as monsters, and I believe it to be a lie,” said Maurer, president of the Baltimore-based National Federation of the Blind. “Blindness doesn’t turn decent people into monsters.”
The organization plans to protest the movie, released by Miramax Films, at 75 theaters in the U.S. when it’s released Friday. Blind people and their allies will hand out fliers and carry signs. Among the slogans: “I’m not an actor. But I play a blind person in real life.”
The movie reinforces inaccurate stereotypes, including that the blind cannot care for themselves and are perpetually disoriented, according to the NFB.
“We face a 70% unemployment rate and other social problems because people don’t think we can do anything, and this movie is not going to help — at all,” said Christopher Danielsen, a spokesman for the organization.
“Blindness” director Fernando Meirelles, an Academy Award nominee for “City of God,” was shooting on location Thursday and unavailable for comment, according to Miramax. The studio released a statement that read, in part, “We are saddened to learn that the National Federation of the Blind plans to protest the film ‘Blindness.’”
The NFB began planning the protests after seven staffers, including Danielsen, attended a screening of the movie in Baltimore last week. The group included three sighted employees.
“Everybody was offended,” Danielsen said.
Based on the 1995 novel by Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago, “Blindness” imagines a mysterious epidemic that causes people to see nothing but fuzzy white light — resulting in a collapse of the social order in an unnamed city. Julianne Moore stars as the wife of an eye doctor (Mark Ruffalo) who loses his sight; she feigns blindness to stay with her husband and eventually leads a revolt of the quarantined patients.
The book was praised for its use of blindness as a metaphor for the lack of clear communication and respect for human dignity in modern society.
Miramax said in its statement that Meirelles had “worked diligently to preserve the intent and resonance of the acclaimed book,” which it described as “a courageous parable about the triumph of the human spirit when civilization breaks down.”
Maurer will have none of it.
“I think that failing to understand each other is a significant problem,” he said. “I think that portraying it as associated with blindness is just incorrect.”
The protest will include pickets at theaters in at least 21 states, some with dozens of participants, timed to coincide with evening showtimes. Maurer said it would be the largest protest in the 68-year history of the NFB, which has 50,000 members and works to improve blind people’s lives through advocacy, education and other ways.
The film was the opening-night entry at the Festival de Cannes, where many critics were unimpressed.
After Cannes, Meirelles retooled the film, removing a voice-over that some critics felt spelled out its themes too explicitly.
Meirelles said at Cannes that the film draws parallels to such disasters as Hurricane Katrina, the global food shortage and the cyclone in Myanmar.
“There are different kinds of blindness. There’s 2 billion people that are starving in the world,” Meirelles said. “This is happening. It doesn’t need a catastrophe. It’s happening, and because there isn’t an event like Katrina, we don’t see.” [thr]
The music video for the theme song to Quantum of Solace, Another Way To Die, featuring Alicia Keys and Jack White, hit YouTube recently. It is, I believe the first time that an official James Bond movie title song has been sung by two artists as a duet.
There is something about me..