Posts tagged: movies

As I rode back from the airport yesterday, my car passed a bevy of Blue Blood hotties including Roxy Contin and others, all decked out and waving Doomsday signs. This reminded me that I wanted to tell you all about the upcoming flick. (These two things are related; they were promoting the movie, not predicting the end of the world in their underwear.)

Doomsday is a movie of a dystopian future. In a present day United Kingdom, a fatal viral epidemic has broken out, so a portion is walled off to quarantine the infected. Fast forward 25 years in the future and the disease appears again outside the quarantined zone. The authorities realize that there are still people living within those walls, so they dispatch a hot chick to go see if she can find a cure. The hot cure-hunting chick is played by Rhona Mitra whose accomplishments off the silver screen include being expelled from boarding school and booth babe appearances as Lara Croft at trade shows. I actually thought she was Kate Beckinsdale when I first viewed the trailers for Doomsday and apparently I’d make a good casting director because she is starring in the upcoming Underworld: Rise of the Lycans vampire movie.

At any rate, once inside the walls of the quarantined city, Rhona Mitra’s Eden Sinclair has to go up against an army of citizens who appear to be rather justifiably pissed off about being walled off and then asked for help. The inhabitants of the walled city include a forceful Malcolm McDowell playing a character named Kane and the Golden Rule seems to indicate to me that the outside world doesn’t really deserve a lot of help. The preview images and videos show some very appealing …

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Cloverfield opens this weekend. Even though I requested their normal press releases, the Cloverfield people inexplicably did not get them to me in time. But they were kind enough to give us money, so I thought I’d post their trailer here. Watch the trailer and see if you can tell me what this movie is about. Anybody?

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When a bunch of my friends went to see Nightmare Before Christmas for Halloween, I took a pass. I think director Tim Burton has one of the most beautiful and impressively realized aesthetics in film today. Unfortunately it bums me out that his misunderstood and offbeat heroes and heroines often accept their second class citizen status. Different does not equal lesser. I just can’t get with that, no matter how poignant the color palette or how extravagant the design. So I’m pleased to see such a master of darkly beautiful cinema taking on the vengeful barber of Fleet Street in his forthcoming adaptation of Sweeney Todd.

Also, I find the posters where Johnny Depp is reclining in his chair, with a straight razor in his outstretched hand, unaccountably erotic. I feel a little spark every time I see it online (thanks for advertising on my sites, guys) and every time I drive by one of the ubiquitous billboards in Los Angeles. There are just times when what turns you on is not what you would find convenient to be turned on by. (I will still shoot anyone who comes at me with an open razor because I always bring a gun to a knife fight. So don’t get any ideas; I’m just sharing my feelings.) You can check out the Sweeney Todd trailer below, after the jump. I’m not personally that big a fan of show tunes, but, damn, that is one gorgeous movie in both the lush scenes and the spare ones. Yumtastic and no mean feat.

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Last night, I went to see Beowulf with a bunch of my unsavory pals. This was our third attempt to put together a group of people to see it, but third time is a charm and there ended up being around a dozen of us including Blue Blood hotties Scar 13, Tassy Pink, Joel Awesome, and Kitty Von Klau, Blue Blood Creative Director Forrest Black, Allan Amato who shoots for Scar13.com and more. It was kind of cool because it seems like it is becoming less common to have a bunch of people get together for something simple like seeing a movie. Yes, I’m thinking of going to see a movie with naked vikings fucking water sprites as a wholesome activity. You have to consider what the rest of my existence is like to put it in context.

We saw Beowulf at the Arclight so we could view the 3D version. The Arclight has extra-comfy chairs and prides itself on its high tech theater equipment. This is Los Angeles, so the front hall featured a display with actual costumes worn by actors in the movie. I sort of thought they were all in motion suits and they made the flick video game style, but I guess physical outfits were involved at some point. I liked the clothing anyway. I think I need to start wearing a royal cape around. The Arclight personnel handed us 3D glasses on the way into the theater.

Spoiler alert: If you didn’t read Beowulf in school (or at any other point), then the rest of this might include spoilers. I studied all the Icelandic sagas in school. When I was in college, I actually took a class called …

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Every once in a while, I like to watch old black and white movies. I’m particularly partial to ones where men speak in clipped strong rhythms and people get murdered. But I’m open-minded and my TiVo recently suggested that I try watching The Wild One.

The Wild One is the classic 50’s flick where Marlon Brando’s Johnny character, when asked what he was rebelling against, famously answered “What’ve you got?” It is difficult to watch the movie in the present day and fully grasp the impact it had at the time. Supposedly many people felt that James Dean was a Marlon Brando wannabe and Brando’s swaggering performance in The Wild One informed the later acting careers of men like Steve McQueen and Jack Nicholson. The rival motorcycle gang, lead by Lee Marvin’s Chino in the movie, is called The Beetles and is believed by many people to have inspired the name of the band The Beatles with an a. I’ve seen mention that Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols had a jacket based on Brando in The Wild One or possibly even the specific jacket used in the film, but I haven’t been able to find confirmation more solid than rumor on this. Regardless, even today, everyone from lesbian drag kings to Leonardo DiCaprio takes inspiration from the seminal role of troubled Johnny Strabler. Heck, I personally even commissioned a Cookie Monster Brando before I ever saw the movie in its entirety, so ingrained is this flick in the American consciousness.

Despite this, watching today, it is difficult to know what mood the movie could have evoked when it came out in the 50’s. The movie was released in America in 1953 and was banned in …

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My mama always told me to find something I’m good at and to then apply it in my day-to-day life. I’m one hell of a screamer. Throughout the years, I’ve developed a decent name for my screams on stage with my music, but one day my dream happened. A good friend of mine, Joseph Bishara (Rasputina, Marilyn Manson, 16 Volt, etc.) walked up to me after one of my band Satiate’s shows and asked, if he paid me, would I let him record me, audibly, for some horror movie work. His exact words were “how’d you like to get paid to puke?” I immediately was into the idea for a multitude of reasons. One, I’m a huge horror movie freak. Two, I’ve always wanted to work in horror movies. Lastly, how awesome would it be for someone to ask me what I do for a living and I can go “I get paid to puke and scream.” From this one conversation a few years ago, I get calls from time to time to come down to the studio and track vocals, screams, eerie voices and, yes, weird noises, like gurgling, gargling and yes, puking. Most of my work is featured in movie trailers and TV commercials, some of the more “known” work in my resume is: The Village, Amityville Horror (remake,) Silent Hill, and The Grudge 2. One of my latest treks into the studio was for the After Dark Films Horror Fest, 8 Films to Die For, The Gravedancers.

It’s very challenging work. The first half of the session was vocal pieces that range …

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I never trust any woman who lists Sixteen Candles as one of her favorite movies.

The most fundamental flaws with society today can all be traced back to 80’s teen movies, specifically the work of John Hughes. I hoped, when I moved to Hollywood, that I would someday get the opportunity to tell him so in person. I’ve been here a while and haven’t run into him yet, so I thought I would post it on a nice busy site and wait for him to find it while ego-searching.

The message of pretty much all John Hughes movies is that you should hate successful people, while coveting what they have and having the exact same sucky values that the people you hate have. If you hate someone, why would you aspire to be like them? I understand that sometimes one can take a wrong turn in life, but who actually wants to become something they themselves hate?

Let’s start with The Breakfast Club. Although Sixteen Candles and Some Kind of Wonderful are so much worse, I’m going to try to go with chronology. The basic conceit of Breakfast Club, for those fortunate enough not to have seen it, is to place a group of dissimilar and unrealistically stereotyped students in a room where they are not allowed to leave and see how it all turns out. The results are an implausible and thoroughly unjoyous exersize in unhelpful group therapy. Anthony Michael Hall’s character blubbers and actually gets sympathy from fellow high school students trapped in detention with him. Molly Ringwald’s character takes the poetic and sexy character played by (much hotter) Ally Sheedy and gives her a makeover that would qualify her to play the ugly friend. You know how lots of …

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