I was lucky enough to receive a copy of Sundance Channel’s Terminal City which just came out on DVD on August 5th. Since I’m busy watching The Wire I figured I’d just pop it in for one episode just so I can make a comment or two on the site and then I’d hold off on watching it till I have time to sit and watch it in a couple of sittings.
I’m not sure now. I can’t see me dropping The Wire so late in the series for this but it definitely piqued my interest. It looks like its going to be a good drama with some quirky comedy. There are a few really touching moments that combine humour, sadness and fear all together. I’ll let everyone know if the series is really worth while once I’m done but I’m guessing its going to be a pretty fine show.
Oh and I almost forgot its a Canadian Show!
Here is a brief synopsis from the official site:
A hit in Canada, where its writing and acting were critically compared to Six Feet Under, Angus Fraser’s witty and challenging drama series bravely examines life, death, family and reality TV. Vibrant 43-year-old mother of three Katie Sampson (Maria Del Mar) has been diagnosed with breast cancer. While undergoing treatment, her spirited and uninhibited comments catch the attention of TV producers who invite her to host the ultimate reality series.
Who would have thought that the story of the invention of the intermittent windshield wiper, first introduced in the late 70s (can you imagine – or remember – life without them?), would be interesting? Apparently, someone figures there’s a story worth telling because here comes Flash of Genius.
The film stars Greg Kinnear who has been on a bit of a roll the last few years, as Phyllis Kearns, a man who spent years in litigation against Ford and Chrysler for using his idea, eventually winning multimillion-dollar judgments. In this film, we’re likely to see it all crammed together into a shortened period of time to make it a little more cinematic. Who really cares that it took him years to reach a settlement? We want the short and sweet version of underdog beats the big corporation!
Alongside Kinnear is Lauren Graham of “Gilmore Girls” fame as Kearns wife, Dermot Mulroney as his business partner and Alan Alda as the lawyer who jumps in on the fight against the big boys. The project was directed by long time producer and first time director Marc Abraham.
Nothing groundbreaking here, it almost feels like this would make a great made for TV movie, but the trailer suggests that it could be a solid piece of entertainment. It reminds me a little of The Hoax and if it meets that film’s charm, it’ll be one worth watching.
Flash of Genius is scheduled to open on October 25th.
I had completely forgotten this film was even in production never mind getting ready for release but with the trailer premiering with The Dark Night, the web has been abuzz with talk of Ridley Scott’s new film.
An action drama titled Body of Lies, the film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a former journalist injured in the Iraq war who is hired by the CIA, represented in all its might by Russell Crowe, to track down an Al Qaeda leader in Jordan. The film is based on a novel by acclaimed journalist and novelist David Ignatius.
The trailer isn’t bad but it’s not particularly attention grabbing either. Watching it, I couldn’t help but think I’d seen a lot of it before in a load of other recent films. There seem to be bits of everything from Rendition to Syriana with a dash of The Bourne Ultimatum in for good measure. Frankly, this story does nothing for me and if someone else was directing and starring in this, I might completely overlook it but how does one say no to the triple threat of Scott, DiCaprio and Crowe? Can one even resist?
We’ll be finding out soon enough. Body of Lies is scheduled to open on October 10th.
You know, thatlittle Clark Gregg movie based on Chuck Palahniuk’s novel. You know the one I’m talking about. The one starring Sam Rockwell, Anjelica Huston and Kelly Macdonald.
Who am I kidding. Of course you know. I’m sure you also know it opens September 26th.
“If this movie doesn’t touch you, go ahead and touch yourself.” Great. I hope this doesn’t mean I’ll have to keep away from screening rooms full of people touching themselves. Gross.
One of the movies that had a lot of buzz coming out of Sundance was Larry Bishop’s second feature, a biker drama called Hell Ride starring Bishop, Dennis Hopper and Michael Madsen. I didn’t really know much about the film other than it looked like it could be bad ass and it had a fantastic poster that we all drooled over.
The film is scheduled to open in limited release on August 8th and in preparation, we’ve been given a pretty bad ass trailer. I hope it’s an indication that the rest of the flick will be this good.
Sidney Lumet’s classic 12 Angry Men is one of those films one doesn’t really expect to see remade. The original still holds up beautifully and the fact that it is considered a classic puts it even further off the remake train but what happens when another culture takes the familiar story and puts their own twist on it?
Last year’s Foreign Language Oscar race was an odd one in that I had only heard of one of the films, never mind seen any of them. Out of the five, Beaufort, The Counterfeiters (our review) and Mongol (our review) have all been released in North America but no sign of either Katyn or 12 – until now.
Oscar winning director Nikita Mikhalkov’s film still doesn’t have an official release date but the folks at Sony Pictures Classics have released an English subtitled trailer for the film and it looks fantastic. Gorgeously shot and just enough of a twist on the original story to make it fresh, this is certainly one to keep your eyes peeled for later this year.
I’ll be sure to pass along the release date as soon as it’s available but for the time being, take a look at the gorgeous trailer below.
I don’t know if you folks missed me this weekend (as Row Three is generally quiet during the weekends while all the faithful go and take in new movies; well in my imagination anyway – we all know you folks prep for our weekly Cinecast from the Third Row). For the curious, I was in Montreal attending one of the largest genre festivals in North America: Fantasia. While the festival is nearly 3 weeks long and is too much for any one hard-core fan to completely take in (that many genre films can get exhausting), even being there only 3 short days allowed for some new and unusual cinema.
On the train heading towards Montreal I read David Weinberger’s book on the curious power of linking and more importantly tags on the internet. Weinberger argues that the more tags and the more links the better to coming towards understanding in the new unsorted digital stew of information. In the spirit of cross pollination and whatnot, the below paragraph contains all of my Capsule Reviews which are posted over at Twitch. For anyone interested in stepping a bit more out of the mainstream than we usually do here at Row Three, please do so.
Titles (links to to the IMDb) that I managed to catch were:
The Swedish vampire romance, Let the Right One In; Danish adolescent science fiction, The Substitute, South Korean revenge drama Whose That Knocking at My Door?, Japanese animated Batman: Gotham Knight, the Spanish mystery TimeCrimes, Hong Kong whimsical noir-melodrama Pye-Dog, and two entries from the Spanish tele-movie series Peliculas Para no Dormir (an analog to the Masters of Horror series although if these two entries are an indication, the production values are much, much higher): The Baby’s Room and To Let, pre-apocalyptic genre-smasher Before the Fall and painfully forgettable South Korean female-boxing-slash-empowerment trifle called Punch Lady. In the shorts department, there were too many to count, but the standout was a Guy Maddin inspired bit of madness called Hydro-Lévesques.
What can I say, I like Japanese One Sheets, and the ‘image editor’ aesthetic of this one strikes my fancy. It reminds me a lot of a vintage old Canadian horror flick (staring a one-two punch of hammy Canucks, Michael Ironside and William Shatner), Visiting Hours which did a similar motif, yet the ‘digitized aspect’ was done with hospital windows (That one sheet is tucked under the seat)
(While Blindness (Row Three Review) was not a hit at Cannes, I remain excited at the prospect of seeing it this fall.)
Where to even begin with Francis Ford Coppola‘s The Conversation? Well first off, for any cinema-buff worth their salt, it is mandatory viewing. A film made in the short space between the two widely acclaimed Godfather films and smack dab in the middle of the challenging and vital period of the 1970s (considered by many to be the banner decade of American cinema). Eschewing the artistic bombast of much of his 1970s work, The Conversation is a model of tightly wound tone and visual restraint (it is a decidedly American take on Michelangelo Antonioni‘s fabulous Blow Up; Antonioni‘s pacing combined with some good old American paranoid thriller).
Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) is a socially awkward, but highly profession sound and surveillance man who has a job recording people against their will and without their knowledge. Using multiple hidden microphones and long range parabolics, he attempts to make a clear recording of a couple who are walking through a crowded park and speaking softly, a mixture of the clandestine and the mundane. Coppola establishes this beautifully in the opening scene of the film, in which the visuals are not nearly as important than the sound cues. There is a fetishization of the construction and craft of sound recording. While the direction is not showy here, yet it is still a highly complex rhythm of images, sounds and articulated theme that qualifies it (for me personally) to sit in the 10 best films ever made. I qualify this with the following: Cinema is a voyeuristic act in where one views the dramatization of private and intimate moments of the films subjects, characters, etc., thus The Conversation acts not just as a great story with a timely theme, but also as a comment on the medium in and of itself.
Considering the nature his job, Harry is a bit of a paranoid person, no personal phone, multiple door locks, and his own nature, past and values are kept under tight control. Because of some instance in his past that is never fully articulated, Caul tries his best to focus on the craftsmanship of his work, and not the content. And his coworker (here played beautifully by John Cazale) hits a major nerve, the the point of Caul almost firing him on the spot, by analyzing the content of the current recording project. Like nearly ever scene in the film (perhaps excluding the quite explosive finale) this is handled small and subtle, with a savour for character detail in the acting first and foremost. You can see as Caul denies his coworkers curiosity, it is already beginning to gnaw at him why these two quite innocent folks are targeted by some large and private rich fellow to be recorded. How this plays out, is best left discovered in the film. But this individual scene is the movie in microcosm, the rigorous precision of a job well done balanced by the moral nature of the work in question. A fitting summation of the decade of Watergate, Nixon and Deep Throat. Way, way ahead of its time this adolescence-period of technology overtaking morality has much resonance today in world where ‘The Grid’ of Google, Carnivore-esque information scavenging tools, bank and credit card statements, consumer tracking incentive-programs, street-level cameras, the Patriot Act, et cetera can offer someone with access or means to all manners of personal privacies. The Conversation may be the spiritual father of action blockbusters along the lines of Enemy of the State and The Bourne Identity, but judging from this scene (and others) its headspace is more in line with Philip K. Dick and A Scanner Darkly or Michael Haneke and Cache.
I don’t know if you folks missed me this weekend (as Row Three is generally quiet during the weekends while all the faithful go and take in new movies; well in my imagination anyway – we all know you folks prep for our weekly Cinecast from the Third Row). For the curious, I was in Montreal attending one of the largest genre festivals in North America: 
