George Miller is the master of the modern myth. His sprawling "Mad Max" franchise now includes five feature films, novelizations, a comic book series, and two video games — all helping expand a post-apocalyptic Wasteland loaded with lore, characters, and laws different from our own. "Furiosa" serves as a prequel to "Fury Road," but a continuation of the story started in the first "Mad Max" film from 1979. As an audience, we know where Imperator Furiosa's story ends up, but "Furiosa" will show us how she got there.
One of the hardest things about making a prequel is ensuring that there are still stakes to the story at hand, knowing that what comes after has already been established. Sometimes it works, like with "The Hunger Games: The Battle of Songbirds & Snakes," but more often than not, the delivery is more akin to "The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas," "Dumb and Dumberer," or depending on who you ask,...
One of the hardest things about making a prequel is ensuring that there are still stakes to the story at hand, knowing that what comes after has already been established. Sometimes it works, like with "The Hunger Games: The Battle of Songbirds & Snakes," but more often than not, the delivery is more akin to "The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas," "Dumb and Dumberer," or depending on who you ask,...
- 5/8/2024
- by BJ Colangelo
- Slash Film
Back in the 1980s, the term “home video” actually referred to movies that had been transferred to honest-to-goodness analog videocassette tape. Keen-eyed genre mavens would excitedly trawl the aisles of their local emporium, often choosing between titles based on little more than lurid cover art and advertising hype.
One of the premier purveyors of the most cherished low-budget, unabashedly lowbrow entertainments was Charles Band’s Empire Pictures, staffed by a tightly knit “band of outsiders” whose names crop up time and again across the studio’s roster of deliriously enjoyable sci-fi and horror films. As it happens, Empire was a pure product of the decade, founded in 1983 and defunct by 1989, when it made way for Band’s next (and still flourishing) endeavor: Full Moon Features. Now, the fine folks at Arrow Video have gathered together a bumper crop of Empire’s output in their lavishly produced box set Enter the Video Store: Empire of Screams.
One of the premier purveyors of the most cherished low-budget, unabashedly lowbrow entertainments was Charles Band’s Empire Pictures, staffed by a tightly knit “band of outsiders” whose names crop up time and again across the studio’s roster of deliriously enjoyable sci-fi and horror films. As it happens, Empire was a pure product of the decade, founded in 1983 and defunct by 1989, when it made way for Band’s next (and still flourishing) endeavor: Full Moon Features. Now, the fine folks at Arrow Video have gathered together a bumper crop of Empire’s output in their lavishly produced box set Enter the Video Store: Empire of Screams.
- 6/26/2023
- by Budd Wilkins
- Slant Magazine
Lizzie Gottlieb on Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb: “I wanted to express that it’s a buddy movie, it’s got energy and hopefully humour.” Photo: Claudia Raschke, courtesy of Wild Surmise Productions, LLC / Sony Pictures Classics
Lizzie Gottlieb’s loving double portrait begins with Ethan Hawke (star of Robert Budreau’s Born To Be Blue) reading from Robert Caro’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Power Broker: Robert Moses And The Fall Of New York, edited by Robert Gottlieb, and ends with a Chet Baker recording (of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s Do it the Hard Way). In-between we have Colm Tóibín, Lynn Nesbit, David Remnick, Mary Norris, Bill Clinton, Conan O'Brien, Maria Tucci, Ina Caro and many others commenting on the dynamic duo.
Lizzie Gottlieb with Anne-Katrin Titze: “I was really thrilled to be able to interview Bill Clinton.”
Gottlieb, who has been the editor-in-chief of Simon and Schuster,...
Lizzie Gottlieb’s loving double portrait begins with Ethan Hawke (star of Robert Budreau’s Born To Be Blue) reading from Robert Caro’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Power Broker: Robert Moses And The Fall Of New York, edited by Robert Gottlieb, and ends with a Chet Baker recording (of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s Do it the Hard Way). In-between we have Colm Tóibín, Lynn Nesbit, David Remnick, Mary Norris, Bill Clinton, Conan O'Brien, Maria Tucci, Ina Caro and many others commenting on the dynamic duo.
Lizzie Gottlieb with Anne-Katrin Titze: “I was really thrilled to be able to interview Bill Clinton.”
Gottlieb, who has been the editor-in-chief of Simon and Schuster,...
- 12/29/2022
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
Click here to read the full article.
Of all the canonical musicals left behind by Stephen Sondheim, Into the Woods perhaps more than any other lends itself to elaborate design treatment, with its pile-up of fairy-tale characters both high- and low-born and its forest setting yielding equal parts enchantment and disillusionment. Recent New York productions have painstakingly conjured that storybook environment with scenic splendor or crafty props, while Rob Marshall’s starry 2014 film was a sumptuous blend of Brothers Grimm and Disney aesthetics. But the 1987 show about the uneasy awakening that follows “happily ever after” works just as well in a stripped-down presentation, putting the emphasis on the questioning revisionism of James Lapine’s libretto and Sondheim’s lyrics.
That’s the case with Lear deBessonet’s gorgeous production, which began as a semi-staged concert in the Encores! series this spring and now moves to Broadway for a limited 8-week run,...
Of all the canonical musicals left behind by Stephen Sondheim, Into the Woods perhaps more than any other lends itself to elaborate design treatment, with its pile-up of fairy-tale characters both high- and low-born and its forest setting yielding equal parts enchantment and disillusionment. Recent New York productions have painstakingly conjured that storybook environment with scenic splendor or crafty props, while Rob Marshall’s starry 2014 film was a sumptuous blend of Brothers Grimm and Disney aesthetics. But the 1987 show about the uneasy awakening that follows “happily ever after” works just as well in a stripped-down presentation, putting the emphasis on the questioning revisionism of James Lapine’s libretto and Sondheim’s lyrics.
That’s the case with Lear deBessonet’s gorgeous production, which began as a semi-staged concert in the Encores! series this spring and now moves to Broadway for a limited 8-week run,...
- 7/11/2022
- by David Rooney
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
The enthralling documentary “Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb” opens with white-on-black credits accompanied by the staccato pecks of a typewriter, which will be music to some viewers’ ears. Robert Caro, the author at the center of the documentary, writes towering books of nonfiction — “The Power Broker,” his 1,280-page study of how Robert Moses literally shaped the city of New York, and “The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” his four-volume biography that’s currently awaiting its fifth and final volume — but taps out these imperially detailed and captivating tomes on an old electric typewriter, X-ing out passages as he goes along, backing up each page with an extra sheet and a piece of carbon paper. You can’t get much more analog than that. As “Turn Every Page” reveals, Caro is still married to the methods of the last century; the digital revolution hasn’t touched him.
- 6/18/2022
- by Owen Gleiberman
- Variety Film + TV
Alex Wolff, the self-described “scrappy New York actor” who made a searing impression in 2018’s “Hereditary” and now stars in “Pig” opposite Nicolas Cage and in M. Night Shyamalan’s “Old,” thinks everybody needs a little more self-loathing in their lives.
“My face is not symmetrical. Why would I love myself if my face is unsymmetrical? The only people who truly love themselves have symmetrical faces. I’ve got this mole,” he said on Zoom, pointing to the brown spot just above his lip that’s become his insignia. “It’s just not symmetrical. That’s fine. I’m totally fine. And if my hair was just a little easier to tame, if my personality was a little better, maybe I could have some self-love, but self-love is overrated.” He’s speaking from a hotel room in downtown Los Angeles, where it’s “kind of intense, a little jarring,” and far from his NYC home.
“My face is not symmetrical. Why would I love myself if my face is unsymmetrical? The only people who truly love themselves have symmetrical faces. I’ve got this mole,” he said on Zoom, pointing to the brown spot just above his lip that’s become his insignia. “It’s just not symmetrical. That’s fine. I’m totally fine. And if my hair was just a little easier to tame, if my personality was a little better, maybe I could have some self-love, but self-love is overrated.” He’s speaking from a hotel room in downtown Los Angeles, where it’s “kind of intense, a little jarring,” and far from his NYC home.
- 7/21/2021
- by Ryan Lattanzio
- Indiewire
Daniel Patrick Moynihan was one of those supreme American figures who made looking like a creature of contradiction seem the quintessential way to be. His contradictions were luminous, larger-than-life, and he wore them with a tall, puckishly smiling Irish pride. He carried himself like a patrician — the bow tie, the mop of gray hair falling into his eyes, the preternaturally precise diction — but, in fact, Moynihan grew up in Hell’s Kitchen during the Depression. (He devoted much of his public service to eradicating poverty because he’d known the sting of it.) He was a wonkishly effusive Ivy League academic, but he relished the hurly-burly of combat politics. He was a liberal Democrat who, in 1969, went to work for Richard Nixon (against the furious protests of his wife and many others). If he could have surveyed the perilous divisions that define American politics today, he would have said something like,...
- 10/3/2018
- by Owen Gleiberman
- Variety Film + TV
Woody Allen was back on form in 2011 with Midnight in Paris, and this week sees the welcome return to the big screen (though initially only at BFI South Bank) of two of the five masterpieces he made in consecutive years during the mid-1980s. Zelig (1983) is a brilliant riff on America's permanent identity crisis, the national belief in the ability to reinvent the self, and it takes the form of a wholly fake, but completely convincing documentary of a fictive inter-war celebrity, Leonard Zelig, known as "the human chameleon". Shot in black-and-white except for the commentaries on the Zelig affair by Saul Bellow, Susan Sontag, Irving Howe and Bruno Bettelheim, it's also a brilliant satirical history of America in the 1930s and 40s.
Arguably Allen's wittiest disquisition on life, love and death in Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) is beneficially influenced by Bergman's Fanny and Alexander. One of his most subtly plotted pictures,...
Arguably Allen's wittiest disquisition on life, love and death in Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) is beneficially influenced by Bergman's Fanny and Alexander. One of his most subtly plotted pictures,...
- 1/1/2012
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
Woody Allen was back on form in 2011 with Midnight in Paris, and this week sees the welcome return to the big screen (though initially only at BFI South Bank) of two of the five masterpieces he made in consecutive years during the mid-1980s. Zelig (1983) is a brilliant riff on America's permanent identity crisis, the national belief in the ability to re-invent the self, and it takes the form of a wholly fake, but completely convincing documentary of a fictive inter-war celebrity, Leonard Zelig, known as "the human chameleon". Shot in black-and-white except for the commentaries on the Zelig affair by Saul Bellow, Susan Sontag, Irving Howe and Bruno Bettelheim, it's also a brilliant satirical history of America in the 1930s and 40s.
Arguably Allen's wittiest disquisition on life, love and death in Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) is beneficially influenced by Bergman's Fanny and Alexander. One of his most subtly plotted pictures,...
Arguably Allen's wittiest disquisition on life, love and death in Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) is beneficially influenced by Bergman's Fanny and Alexander. One of his most subtly plotted pictures,...
- 1/1/2012
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
In addition to speaking to Amanda Seyfried about her role as Valerie in Red Riding Hood, HeyUGuys recently caught up with the film’s director, Catherine Hardwicke. Not only did Hardwicke discuss the film in great detail, but she also spoke about how hard it is to get films made, sexism in the film industry and how that affected her attempts to get in the director’s seat for The Fighter.
On the influences behind the film
I’m not so much of a person top go back and look at other movies as much, like when I did 13, I didn’t look at other teenage movies, I looked at a couple of Martin Scorsese and Cassavetti’s to get that gritty reality, so actually in this movie I looked more at paintings, I looked more at paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, from that time period, and try to find the spirit of the people,...
On the influences behind the film
I’m not so much of a person top go back and look at other movies as much, like when I did 13, I didn’t look at other teenage movies, I looked at a couple of Martin Scorsese and Cassavetti’s to get that gritty reality, so actually in this movie I looked more at paintings, I looked more at paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, from that time period, and try to find the spirit of the people,...
- 4/14/2011
- by Ben Mortimer
- HeyUGuys.co.uk
Amanda Seyfried, Shiloh Fernandez, Max Irons, Adrian Holmes, with director Catherine Hardwicke were in London to promote their new film Red Riding Hood, a twist on the well known fairytale, and we were invited along to a special round table with the cast and crew.
First up were director Catherine Hardwicke, and Adrian Holmes who plays the Captain.
What did you think was special about this story?
Catherine Hardwicke: Leonardo DiCaprio’s company had written this script, and I guess they thought it would fun and interesting to go back to the original roots, even before the Brothers Grimm, when there was a werewolf in the story. It is an intricate tale, with different levels of symbolism… so I said ‘Yeah, sign me up!’
Why do you think forbidden love works so well?
Ch: I guess if you have a happy love story then it’s kind of boring!
First up were director Catherine Hardwicke, and Adrian Holmes who plays the Captain.
What did you think was special about this story?
Catherine Hardwicke: Leonardo DiCaprio’s company had written this script, and I guess they thought it would fun and interesting to go back to the original roots, even before the Brothers Grimm, when there was a werewolf in the story. It is an intricate tale, with different levels of symbolism… so I said ‘Yeah, sign me up!’
Why do you think forbidden love works so well?
Ch: I guess if you have a happy love story then it’s kind of boring!
- 4/10/2011
- by Maahin
- Nerdly
Interview by Karen Lam
“I’m late! For a very important date!” I’m channeling the White Rabbit as I gun the car through weekend traffic towards the studio. But when Catherine Hardwicke’s assistant Nikki Ramey ushers me onto the sound stage, I realize this is no Wonderland. Instead, I’ve plunged head-first into a dangerous dreamscape, to the place where real fairy tales live. Where happily-ever-after only happens after surviving a nightmare...
This is the set of Catherine’s newest film, Red Riding Hood.
I stand in the center of a strangely surreal village. High above me, rustic log cottages are elevated on stilts. It’s an architectural paradox: safe, and yet complete unstable. The paranoia and fear are almost palpable. Like something dangerous is lurking just beyond the walls of this wooden fortress.
Nikki guides me to another set, where Grandma’s house will be built. The...
“I’m late! For a very important date!” I’m channeling the White Rabbit as I gun the car through weekend traffic towards the studio. But when Catherine Hardwicke’s assistant Nikki Ramey ushers me onto the sound stage, I realize this is no Wonderland. Instead, I’ve plunged head-first into a dangerous dreamscape, to the place where real fairy tales live. Where happily-ever-after only happens after surviving a nightmare...
This is the set of Catherine’s newest film, Red Riding Hood.
I stand in the center of a strangely surreal village. High above me, rustic log cottages are elevated on stilts. It’s an architectural paradox: safe, and yet complete unstable. The paranoia and fear are almost palpable. Like something dangerous is lurking just beyond the walls of this wooden fortress.
Nikki guides me to another set, where Grandma’s house will be built. The...
- 1/25/2011
- by Anonymous
- Planet Fury
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