STEVEN SPIELBERG MIGHT PART RED SEA FOR WARNER BROS.

Which Spielberg will show up to direct this one? If it’s the “Munich” Spielberg, the moral illiterate who sees an equivalency between Islamists who target the innocent and Israelis who target those who target the innocent — no thanks.  If it’s the “Saving Private Ryan” Spielberg, the moral illiterate who told us saving a single man was  ”the one decent thing we were able to pull out of this whole godawful, shitty mess” also known as World War II — no thanks.

RUSSELL BRAND WILL STAR IN ANOTHER MOVIE — A FAMILY COMEDY

After the remake of “Arthur” flopped rather spectacularly, Hollywood is proving once again they are just about tapped out of stars. Brand is THE most unlikable, charmless, and creepiest guy Hollywood has ever tried to turn into a leading man. And not creepy in a Karloff, Lugosi, Lorre kind of way — not creepy in a way that delights. You wouldn’t let him near your daughter. He should be doing extra stand-ins as Prisoner Number Five in insane asylums.  But here we go again.

EVANGELINE LILY CHATS ABOUT ‘THE HOBBIT’

If she manages her career well, Evangeline Lily has, in my humble opinion, what it takes to be a genuine star, a real box office attraction like Sandra Bullock. She’s undeniably talented, looks great on the big screen (see “Real Steel”), and her presence has the exact right qualities: strong, intelligent, sexy, womanly, approachable, and she carries herself with dignity.

She reminds me of Elizabeth Banks before she did the sleazy “Zack and Miri Make a Porno.”

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NETFLIX USERS STREAM 3000 LIFETIMES’ WORTH OF VIDEOS IN 3 MONTHS

And Hollywood thinks they can put this genie back in the bottle. Never.

DID YOU KNOW KING KONG ALMOST BATTLED FRANKENSTEIN’S MONSTER?

Alternate title: Did you know the greatest movie ever almost got made?

TELEVISION SERIES THAT OUTSTAYED THEIR WELCOME

They forgot the season premiere of “Thirtysomething.”

COMING SOON TO HOME VIDEO

TEXAS KILLING FIELDS, JAN 31:  Anchor Bay Films is proud to announce the release of TEXAS KILLING FIELDS on both Blu-ray™ and DVD  January 31, 2012.  Directed by Ami Canaan Mann, produced by Michael Mann and Michael Jaffe, and based on the real life, headline-making series of unsolved murders, TEXAS KILLING FIELDS is a haunting story of two detectives and one desperate race to catch a killer. The release also contains audio commentary with Director Ami Canaan Mann and Writer Donald F. Ferrarone.

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MICROSOFT BRINGS FOX NEWS, SESAME STREET, COMCAST TO XBOX

Can someone please tell me how this works? Is this a subscription service like Netflix Streaming?

Corp. content from Twentieth Century Fox Films, Fox Television, Fox News and The Wall Street Journal will be available on the Xbox device starting in February, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced at the opening of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Monday.

The initiative continues to transform the popular gaming console into an entertainment and news hub, with Ballmer counting Xbox Live subscribers at 40 million.

The reason I want to know is because I smell the death of cable with Fox News now being available in another format. Most Fox News viewers like myself could live without the non-stop garbage that clogs up most of cable and resent paying subscription fees that prop up networks we hate, such as OWN and MSNBC — networks that likely couldn’t survive without this revenue sharing racket.

More on this below…

DISH TO OFFER ANY SHOW AT ANY TIME

This is cable/ satellite, attempting to compete with Hulu and other streaming services:

Satellite operator DISH Network has unveiled a new DVR at the CES convention in Las Vegas that will automatically record every primetime show on the four major television networks and hold them for later viewing for as long as eight days. The DVR, called Hopper, will sport 2 TBs (terabytes) of storage, half of which will be used to record programs on ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC airing between 8:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m. nightly. Programs on the Hopper can also be accessed via up to three boxes called Joeys in other rooms of the home. Moreover, the DVRs will operate in conjunction with DISH’s Sling box, making the programs available for remote viewing on laptops, smartphones, and tablets.

Beyond revolutionary. I still think that, with the prices they charge compared to Netflix and Hulu, cable/satellite can’t survive. And the reason the prices are so absurd is to prop up a lot of specialty channels fewer than a million people watch.

Something’s got to give, and when it does, we customers will be declared the winners.

This is more than just a technological revolution, it’s a cultural one. Right now, we’re forced in many ways not only to support these dreadful channels but to view what only a very few create. Sure, there might be 500 channels, but they’re all owned by the same 10 companies. Once everything is a la carte, everything will have to stand on its own merit and it will also have to stand up against the past because older, more traditional programs will be just as accessible as the new ones.

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NSFW:

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Brought to you by the same folks who eviscerated “Avatar,” the “Star Wars” prequels and more.

The second video expertly deconstructs the film’s overbearing politics and moral equivalencies, and hammers Lucas for his political hypocrisies.

“When the filmmakers can’t choose a clear side, it affects the overall film.”

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ANOTHER REASON TO LOVE ROBERT DOWNEY JR.

Found this at Hollywood Elsewhere:

I’d so much rather be doing this than some little indie movie that everyone says is fantastic and it kinda sucks and is boring.

Now that I’m back home and have room to spread out my DVD collection again, I’ve been going through the actual physical cases as I organize. It’s been a trip down memory lane, and what has most struck me is how many independent films from the 1990s I purchased and still love. Over the last ten years, though, that indie movement (with rare exceptions) is an embarrassment of pretension, nihilism, pseudo-edginess, and horribly self-conscious acting. Because most of the small studios that produced these films are gone or have been swallowed up by the majors, instead of a movement it’s now a “genre” and therefore a parody of its once glorious and interesting self.

‘JAWS,’ UNIVERSAL CLASSIC HORROR FILMS SET FOR 2012 BLU-RAY RELEASE

Something to look forward to:

Easily the most important news of 2011 is The Digital Bits landing early word that Universal Home Entertainment is slotting Steven Spielberg’s classic 1975 summer blockbuster Jaws for a Blu-ray release on August 14, 2012. Spielberg told AICN earlier this year that the release (thankfully) won’t be amended (like he did with E.T.) in any way leaving in all wires and other visible bruises.

There’s really nothing all that wrong with cleaning up an old film’s special effects, especially wires and the like. The wires holding up the Martian ships in my DVD copy of the original “War of the Words” are pretty distracting. Imagine how much worse the Blu-ray will be. The problem is the slippery slope of intrusive alterations, so a complete hands-off approach is probably better.

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Before I embark on my daily round of puppy-kicking and unicorn-strangling, I have to say that in sitting through Spielberg’s second new release, War Horse, I felt as if I were being lowered into a vat of warm tears, there to remain for nearly two and a half freakin’ hours. This is a movie so boldly old-fashioned that much of its true target demographic must be long dead, or nearly enough.

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It’s a movie about a noble horse and the boy who loves him. Well, the boy and the girl and a few other people who love him. The horse—one Joey—is conscripted into the British cavalry and dispatched to help fight World War I. Joey has many dangerous adventures, and the picture is in fact most effective in conveying, however discreetly, the horrors of the Great War—the mustard-gassed trenches, the mounted soldiers swinging outmoded swords in the face of enemy artillery. That’s not the problem; the movie is beautifully made. The problem is the story, which is an episodic sprawl, and its dripping sentimentality, a quality that Spielberg is unsurprisingly disinclined to mitigate. 

In the 1982 book on which the film is based, the horse was the narrator, I gather. In the 2007 London stage play that was made from the book (and which has since collected a number of Tony Awards on Broadway), the story’s several horses are depicted by ingeniously designed, life-size puppets. Spielberg rightly decided that real horses would be required for the film version, and his ability to turn one of them (or several, actually) into a lead presence is remarkable.

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KYLE SMITH RIPS ‘DRAGON TATTOO’

Ouch:

Once the hype dies, this movie will be best enjoyed as a drinking game. Down a shot of Absolut every time Craig whips his glasses on or off and you’ll be blitzed by the halfway point. When he can’t figure out an excuse to do that, he does bizarre things with the specs, such as leaving them dangling beneath his face like a chin strap. The poor man is under the delusion that eyewear can make anything here seem intelligent.

Here’s “John Boot” at Pajamas, who seconds that emotion:

So take the critical hosannas for Larsson’s trilogy with a grain of salt. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo could hardly be pulpier, nastier, more contrived, or more risible. Its characters — morally pure crusaders, evil fanatics — could not be less developed. The sex scenes between Blomkvist and Salander seem thrown in to give us one more chance to see Mara (who is in her twenties but has the body of a high-school sophomore) naked, not because Fincher makes us see any connection (emotional or physical) between the characters. The film is as depraved as Caligula, but at least Caligula didn’t pretend to be anything other than smut.

It doesn’t sound as though Smith or ‘Boot’ were fans of the original trilogy of films released last year, either.

Though I haven’t seen the remake, I’m a big fan of the original trilogy. And while I do agree with both that the material is pulpy, nasty, and simplistic in both its politics and in the good and evil characterizations, I don’t see those qualities as bad things. None of that bothered me because at heart “Dragon Tattoo” is a vigilante film, and the most satisfying vigilante films are nasty, pulpy, and simplistic.

I cheered every kill.

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‘L.A. TIMES’ TO INSTITUTE PAYWALL IN FIRST QUARTER OF 2012

No one reads this rag now, but now by not reading we’ll save money. Nice.

PODCAST WITH ‘RISE OF THE APES’ SCREENWRITERS

The married screenwriting team of Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver talk about the five-year experience of making the film, from the germ of the idea straight through to production, and how they got started in Hollywood. No overnight successes in screenwriting. They also co-wrote “Eye for an Eye” and “The Relic,” two underrated favorites of mine.

Budding screenwriters should definitely give this a listen.

SIX ‘BASED ON A TRUE STORY’ FILMS WITH UNPLEASANT EPILOGUES

If we learned anything from How Stella Got Her Groove Back it’s that a 20-year-old is capable of having a mature and fulfilling relationship that’s not based on sex. This is still technically true for the real-life Stella, author Terry McMillan, who wrote the book on which the movie is based. See, her real-life Jamaican lover based their relationship not on sex, but on a love of getting the fuck out of Jamaica by any means possible, even if that meant faking interest in an American tourist twice his age. … But that fact alone isn’t why the couple is separating — as it turns out, Jonathan Plumber, the real-life Winston Shakespeare, is actually gay[.]

[…]

When Hinkley’s residents contacted Erin [Brockovich] about their concerns (“concerns” is a term that here means “money for our cancer bills”), they found that their one-time advocate was now unreachable. Once they finally received the money, they noticed that it was far less than they expected. That’s because the law firm, wanting more than the agreed-upon 40 percent of the settlement ($133 million), took an extra $10 million for “expenses.”

SPIELBERG OBVIOUSLY FEELING BURNED OVER ‘INDY 4′

Spielberg should be embarrassed:

Steven Spielberg won’t make a fifth ‘Indiana Jones’ movie to “prove any point”.

The filmmaker – who has directed all four of the previous installments in the franchise – does know many people did not enjoy the last movie ‘Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’, but would not work on further films just so he could win them round.

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WHOA: SPIELBERG RIPS ‘CRYSTAL SKULL’

Is it just me or did Empire bury the lead here:

And Crystal Skull? “I’m very happy with the movie. I always have been… I sympathise with people who didn’t like the MacGuffin because I never liked the MacGuffin. George and I had big arguments about the MacGuffin. I didn’t want these things to be either aliens or inter-dimensional beings. But I am loyal to my best friend.["]

Gawd that movie blew.

The good news is that Lucas is working on ‘Indy 5,’ so maybe ‘Indy 4′ won’t be the worst of the franchise.

Don’t tell me I’m not a glass half-full kinda guy.

APPLE EFFORT TO DEVELOP TV IS SAID TO BE LED BY ITUNES CREATOR JEFF ROBBIN

I understand Apple has a device now that allows you to watch iTunes video on your television, but there’s no way I’m going to start buying one device per provider. What a pain that would be. As of right now, if it isn’t available through my Blu-ray player there’s no sale. Apple’s apparently cooking up something that will allow you to interface with more than just Apple, including Netflix, but I’m still not interested. My universal remote is ready to explode as is.

No more devices. No more wires. No more remotes. No more purchases until this is settled once and for all between all platforms.

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Coming Soon tells us “Gods and Kings” is a “whole new take” on the story of Moses in relation to “The Ten Commandments.”

 Deadline adds: 

Gods and Kings covers the life of Moses from birth to death. In between, there is his awakening to the plight of the Hebrew slaves that led Moses’ struggle against the Pharaoh for their freedom out of Egypt; the Ten Plagues; the Burning Bush; the daring escape across the Red Sea; receiving the Ten Commandments, and delivery to Israel. The film is not a remake of the 1956 Cecile B. DeMille-directed The Ten Commandments, which covered similar ground. Gods and Kings is based on the Book of Exodus and other stories from the Old Testament[.]

I’m torn.

After “Munich,” I hate to think what Spielberg would do with this. Do we really want to see moral equivalency in the story of Moses, where his actions to free the Hebrew slaves are somehow blamed for 9/11? After all, if Moses hadn’t freed the Jews there would be no Israel and if there was no Israel there would be no angry Islamic terrorists…

See how that can work?

In all seriousness, DeMille’s “Ten Commandments” still broadcasts on television every year and remains a vivid part of our culture. So where’s the urgency to try again? Also, Spielberg’s last foray into retelling this story through his company Dreamworks with the animated feature “The Prince of Egypt” didn’t fare all that well.

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As a kid, J.J. Abrams was inspired to make films with his Super 8 camera by Steven Spielberg’s “E.T.,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” As a teenager, young Abrams’ work attracted the attention of Spielberg, who hired him to cut together his old 8 mm home movies. Years later, they’re working together to bring their childhood memories of moviemaking to the big screen, with Abrams as writer and director, and Spielberg as producer. 

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The collaboration, “Super 8,” covers familiar territory for the two heavy hitters. It’s a combination of two stories that were, until recently, simply figments of Abrams’ imagination. The first story idea was to make a film about kids making Super 8 films, and the other involved a train carrying cargo from Area 51. The two collide in “Super 8,” a tribute to Spielberg’s earlier work and a chance for both to get back to where they once belonged. 

Set in 1979, “Super 8,” features a group of early teenage kids from small-town Ohio using their summer to make a horror film. While filming at a train station, a military train passing by derails in an explosive mess. They leave as troops arrive to secure the scene. About then, car engines and power line begin to disappear. The kids, unable to put the train’s derailment out of their minds, start to investigate. 

Due to the meshing of two stories, there are definitely two sides to this film. One is Abrams’ attempt to recapture the childlike wonder audiences felt when watching E.T., putting themselves into the shoes of young Henry Thomas and Drew Barrymore. The other is his attempt to make “Super 8” as technically impressive and action-packed as “Transformers,” and as cutting edge as Spielberg’s early films were. It’s a fine line to walk. 

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Boy, things sure have changed in Hollywood… Not completely, though, thank heaven.

Via JTA:

Elizabeth Taylor Offered to Be Hostage, Dinitz Discloses
June 16, 1977
LOS ANGELES (JTA) — Movie actress Elizabeth Taylor offered herself as a hostage for the more than 100 Air France hijack victims held by terrorists at Entebbe Airport in Uganda during the tense days before the Israeli rescue raid last July 4. That disclosure was made here by Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, Simcha Dinitz, at a Jewish National Fund gala honoring Ms. Taylor and her husband, John W. Warner, for their devotion to the land reclamation work of the JNF and other humanitarian causes.

Dinitz, who presented the couple with a certificate for a forest to be planted in their names within the American National Bicentennial Park near Jerusalem, said that Ms. Taylor’s offer was “appreciated” and “the Jewish people will always remember it.”

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Larry Schweikart contributed to this article.

Given Hollywood’s recent love affair with remakes and sequels, new topics and stories should command prime attention. Strangely enough, however, while there have been two updated treatments of the Alamo since John Wayne tackled the subject, and while there have been new approaches taken to important World War II battles such as Iwo Jima and Normandy, Hollywood has by and large shied away from biographies. (The recent John Adams series was a welcome exception). So it is that one of the two or three most important Americans ever, Abraham Lincoln, has received almost no attention from filmmakers over the past decades. 

Perhaps that is about to change with Steven Spielberg’s forthcoming movie on Abraham Lincoln, based largely on author Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals. Considered by many modern journalists as one of the best books today on Lincoln and his presidency, it is no great surprise that Team of Rivals should be used as the starting point for the script by Tony Kushner. But whose Lincoln will we see? Will it be Goodwin’s political genius who managed a fractious cabinet that included three individuals, each of whom thought that they had a better claim to the Presidency than Lincoln? Or will it be a liberal reconstruction, such as “Che” or “W.” or Kushner and Spielberg’s own “Munich”? 

Goodwin’s approach focuses on the formative years of three of Lincoln’s cabinet members, William Seward, Salmon Chase and Edward Bates, and spends a significant amount of time developing their characters.  Using diaries and personal papers of Lincoln’s cabinet members, their families, and associates, common in modern social history, Goodwin draws a picture of the times and likely motivations on the central figures.  That’s not to say that Goodwin’s mammoth work (916 pages in paperback) is without its own issues: her vast number of end notes from primary and secondary sources support a narrative that, at times, seems to hurtle from quotation to quotation. Perhaps, though, this is what has attracted Spielberg and Kushner to this particular version of “Honest Abe,” for it provides a perfect basis for a story from a political and seductive point of view.  (more…)

Seeing “Saving Private Ryan” again is enough to make one forgive star Tom Hanks’ ill-conceived comments regarding racism and World War II.

The 1998 film, just released on Blu-ray for the first time, stands as one of director Steven Spielberg’s towering achievements – no small praise given his iconic resume. Hanks gives a bravura performance as the head of a gifted ensemble, a Captain whose leadership pushes a rag-tag group to save a very special soldier.

The film’s first 20-odd minutes remain the most brutal depiction of World War II combat ever committed to film. It’s enough to make a grown man weep watching young men march straight into gunfire, many of them shredded before they even step foot on Omaha Beach.

Spielberg goes a bit overboard here, reveling in the kind of gore that would make “Saw” fans blush to hammer home the hellish conditions.

We see much of the chaos through the eyes of Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) – the deafening bomb blasts, the need to restore some semblance of order and the fear welling up as the earth shakes below them. (more…)

Since my scathing two-part Big Hollywood editorial on imprisoned Iranian film director Jafar Panahi nearly three weeks ago, I have found myself drawn neck-deep into the campaign to push for his freedom. In that cause I have email-blitzed the media, the Academy, all the major US film festivals and as many contacts in Hollywood as I know and could find. I sent out deep background on his case, petitions for his release, and heartfelt pleas for Hollywood voices to speak up on Mr. Panahi’s behalf, along with not-so-veiled threats of PR Armageddon should the deafening silence continue.

I also informed all parties involved that I would do the same for any of them under similar brutal and inhuman circumstances. Whatever it took, be it sweetheart pleas or promises of a nuclear PR war. I have since dropped the latter approach, as I have been informed by Iranians also campaigning for Mr. Panahi’s release that it was not helpful to his cause. So on Mr. Panahi’s behalf, I have traded in my sword for a plowshare for the duration. Not a problem. I’m not a total ideologue. Just mostly.

This past three weeks have also brought many valuable learning experiences as well. I have since found that Facebook, which I have avoided like the Plague because I have enough on my geek plate already, is an incredibly valuable social networking tool that reaches even into the heart of Iran itself. I have made many new friends behind the Islamist Curtain, among them a Panahi family member, by posting any good news I could find on the Jafar Panahi and Free Jafar Panahi Facebook pages. (more…)

From my “Avatar” review:

“Steven Spielberg’s sixteen year-old dinosaurs are light years ahead of “Avatar” in the reality department.”

Cameron might have used more terabytes, megabytes, spiderbytes, or whateverbytes to create the Na’vi and the paradise planet of Pandora than Steven Spielberg ever dreamed possible in 1993, but in the convincing me this is real department — in the convincing me this is not computer generated department — “Jurassic Park” blows “Avatar” away. Peter Jackson’s Kong and Gollum are also light years ahead of “Avatar.” (more…)

Humans like to think they know the difference between truth and fiction. But in the modern media age, even as we feel technology has made us more savvy than ever, there’s always a disquieting edge that makes us wonder what’s really the truth and where are we being manipulated. Is Fox News really “fair and balanced” just ‘cause they say so, for instance? Or is Obama really bringing “Hope” back to America just because his colorful posters say so? 

Back in 1999, a movie called “The Blair Witch Project” burst into the American pop culture consciousness from seemingly nowhere.  It appeared to be (and was marketed to viewers as) a raw documentary film about three student filmmakers and their tragic last days experiencing supernatural forces while lost in the wilderness, but in reality it was a fictional film made for under $30,000 by a team of indie filmmakers and actors and had caused a sensation at the Sundance Film Festival months before.  (more…)

America’s long past being shocked by anything Roseanne Barr will do for even a smidgen of attention. Why just the other day I was sitting around thinking it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if she dressed as Hitler and made fun of the Holocaust. To be honest, though, it wasn’t much more surprising to find Steven Spielberg’s name attached to this:

“Domestic Goddess Hitler” eats a “Jew Cookie” fresh from the oven.

The director may have captured our cinematic imagination throughout most of the 70s and 80s, but the creator of “E.T.” has a dark, troubling side when it comes to personal politics. He is, after all, the Useful Idiot who had to be shamed out of putting a pretty face on one of the most oppressive governments in the history of mankind — he is, after all, the director of “Munich,” an exercise in moral equivalency and historical revisionism written by a screenwriter who, after claiming he wanted Israel to exist, said, “…the founding of the state of Israel was for the Jewish people an historical, moral, political calamity.” (more…)