HERE COMES DISH:  NETFLIX FLUBS ENTICE COMPETITION

Here we go:

At a press conference scheduled for Friday, Dish Network is expected to announce its entry into the streaming-video market via a Blockbuster-branded service that could emerge as a rival to the recently troubled Netflix.

Variety reports that the title for the press event, “A Stream Come True,” suggests such an announcement. Per the trade, the invitation promises the introduction of “the most comprehensive home entertainment package ever.”

Meanwhile, Netflix’ stock was off around 10% on Tuesday.

And guess who has Dish? *points to self with both thumbs*

‘FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS,’ ‘SMURFS’ WILL BE SONY’S FIRST ULTRAVIOLET TITLES

If you recall, “UltraViolet” is also known as The Cloud, a service that stores your purchased films online so you can access them from anywhere. It’s also known as the service that will save the flailing home video market.

Why would we purchase not-very-good movies online for what is likely to be a price of around $15 to $20 when we can stream all we want for month for $10?

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Much has been made about James Agee’s affectionate judgment of Buster Keaton: “Keaton worked strictly for laughs, but his work came from so far inside a curious and original spirit that he achieved a great deal besides, especially in his feature-length comedies. . . he was the only major comedian who kept sentiment almost entirely out of his work, and he brought pure physical comedy to its greatest heights.”

As for me, I agree more with another critic, Roger Ebert, who once wrote that Keaton’s movies, “seen as a group, are like a sustained act of optimism in the face of adversity; surprising how, without asking, he earns our admiration and tenderness.” Marshaling all of the critical gumption he’s earned over the years, Ebert also calls Keaton, “the greatest actor-director in the history of the cinema, and that includes Orson Welles.”

Keaton chalked up a large part of his success to changes undertaken while maturing out of his early, vaudeville-inspired shorts with Fatty Arbuckle (a subject we’ll address in a future FCML series). When first making features, their longer length dictated fundamental adjustments in the way his comedy and cinema interacted. “One of the first decisions I made,” Keaton wrote in his autobiography, “was to cut out custard pie throwing. . . no pie was ever thrown in a Buster Keaton feature. We also discontinued what we called impossible gags or cartoon gags. . . I realized that my feature comedies would succeed best when the audience took the plot seriously enough to root for me as I indomitably worked my way out of mounting perils.”

That quiet indomitable spirit, what Ebert calls his “sustained act of optimism,” separates Buster Keaton’s stone-faced everyman from the other great comedic characters of the age.  Take Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp — at base a hobo, petty thief, and conniving opportunist, his humor derived from his boundless ingenuity in skirting the law, and his pathos came from being an oppressed victim of a cruel society. Late in life, Keaton remembered… (more…)

As the new “Karate Kid” movie opens, young Dre Parker looks at the height markings he has made on the wall of his room where he’s commemorated many past events, including the death of his own father. In this box office smash, Jaden Smith plays an underdog forced to engage in a battle with a bully at school, but in real life, Smith’s new film is engaging in a battle at the box office, a battle that this delightful family film is more than ready for.

When the new “Karate Kid” opened a few weeks ago, it came out alongside “The A-Team,” a disappointing action comedy. Many predicted that The Kid would come in second but it ended up winning the weekend, earning over $50 million dollars at the box office. In its second weekend, the sleeper held and has now earned over $100 million.

“The Karate Kid” opens with Dre and his mother readying to leave the United States for China because of his mother’s job. Dre is clearly upset about moving to a foreign country. In the plane, at his mother’s insistence, he practices his Chinese with someone who, it turns out, does not even know the language. When they move into their new home, the charismatic Dre spends time at the playground and quickly makes friends as well as enemies who bully him on the basketball court and knock him down in front of a girl he likes. (more…)

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A 1995 Los Angeles Times Magazine cover proclaimed him “The Coolest Actor in the World,” and yet most Americans to this day have never heard of him. For fans of Hong Kong films, though, he is Asia’s answer to Steve McQueen — if the latter had made over seventy movies in ten years, most of them decent and some of them great.

The artistic pinnacle of his work in Hong Kong are his collaborations with John Woo filmed between 1986 and 1992. Those of us who equate the modern action movie to elder tales of heroic bloodshed such as The Iliad and the Norse sagas find these films to be sources of endless delight, and much of the credit for this feeling must go to Chow. In John Woo: The Films, author Kenneth E. Hall makes a trenchant point when he writes that, “Not much is usually said, in connection with Woo, about Chow’s contributions to character studies, but his efforts in A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, and Hard Boiled have created at least three memorable and distinct characters who are yet all of a piece, men of an essential integrity and heroism who rediscover or reaffirm their humanity in struggles with evil.”

This thematic tableau is red meat to conservative film lovers, the same stuff I was talking about when I wrote a piece on Taken here at Big Hollywood last year. But even to give Chow Yun-fat credit for all of this is selling him short — unlike many more muscle-bound action heroes, those Woo classics by no means delineate the limits of his talent or appeal.  Bey Logan, the HK film fanatic who authored the entertaining volume Hong Kong Action Cinema, insists that, in the wake of his collaborations with Woo, Chow became not just Hong Kong’s greatest action star but its greatest acting star. “Chow was the first Hong Kong thespian,” he notes, “to attain boffo box-office with vehicles as disparate as the tragi-comic Autumn’s Tale, the action-packed A Better Tomorrow and the slapstick Eighth Happiness. Chinese audiences just adore Chow Yun-fat in any of his many guises.”

As do many Americans. (more…)

Hard Boiled is a film that serves as not just a great movie in its own right, but as a fitting capstone to a complete body of work. The highly-charged stories, emotional spectrum, visual magnificence, and moral subtext of John Woo’s “heroic bloodshed” canon owes everything to the circumstances of the man’s early years. His is a directorial mind forged in the crucible of a hard but spiritual life.

He came into the world as Wu Yu-Sheng in October, 1946. Originally hailing from Guangzhou (Canton), in the south of China, his family fled to British-controlled Hong Kong in 1950 to escape the newly organized Communist government. Woo and his parents lived in a shantytown slum until a terrible fire destroyed the whole works in 1953, then survived on the streets for a year before finally settling in government housing. “The neighborhood had lots of drug dealers and gangsters,” Woo says, “There was gambling and prostitution. Every day I had to deal with a gang. I used to get beat up by a gang and I used to fight back very hard. I got in lots of fights. But I had great parents who taught me to go straight and to live with dignity and be a decent man.” His father soon contracted tuberculosis, and would die from the disease while Woo was in his teens. “Because we were poor,” Woo says, “I always thought we were living in hell.”

Throughout those grim years, only two things kept Woo’s spirit intact. The first was an event he now sees as miraculous: he became the beneficiary of an anonymous donation from an American family intended to send destitute Chinese kids to school. “I was deeply impressed,” he says, “with the altruism of the American family who paid for my education that my family valued but was simply unable to supply.” Soon Woo was in a Lutheran school and attending church, with the goal of both to “make decent young men and women out of us slum-dwellers. And, I must say, the school achieved its aim.” (more…)

Looking back at The Karate Kid (1984), which turned twenty-five years old this week, a thought keeps recurring.

Wow. . . Avildsen made it work twice.

John G. Avildsen is, in some ways, a director of little distinction when compared with well-known marquee names like Spielberg, Scorsese, Nolan, and Tarantino. The vast majority of his movies are utterly forgotten by the average filmgoer — indeed, he’s been nominated for Worst Director at The Razzies three times. And yet, like Victor Fleming decades earlier with his twin successes The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind (both 1939 — read a great recent article on Fleming here), Avildsen has twice punched way above his weight, netting himself an Oscar for Best Director and giving birth to some of the most memorable moments in motion picture history. (more…)