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Shakespeare on Film: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead
MM's seventh week of Shakespeare on Film explores the Bard's original comedy duo
Tom Stoppard originally sold the screen rights to Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, the stage comedy which made his name, soon after its 1967 premieres in the West End and on Broadway. He wrote a screenplay for MGM, then saw the project languish for twenty years until the rights were bought back and he rewrote the script and filmed it in what was then still Yugoslavia. With a cast featuring Tim Roth and Gary Oldman, Stoppard portrayed the events of Hamlet entirely from the point of view of the Prince’s doomed friends as they travel to Elsinore, kick their heels ‘off stage,’ and sail to England.
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It’s a 3D Revolution
Once the domain of schlocky 1950s horror movies, 3D movies will once again be leaping off the screen at a theater near you
An exciting resurgence in 3D moviemaking indicates that what was once a fad is now a growing trend. Over the past few years there has been a huge increase in the production of 3D films. More than a half-dozen live-action and a dozen computer animated 3D films are currently in the studio pipelines—with more to come.
One reason for this surge in development is the availability of state-of-the-art digital technology. “It was always possible to show 3D, but never possible to show it in a reliable manner,” says Eric Brevig, an Oscar-nominated visual effects artist and director of this summer’s Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D, the first live-action narrative feature to be shot and released in digital stereoscopic 3D. “It’s a convergence of technology,” he says. The problems of former 3D imaging simply no longer exist.
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Haris Zambarloukos Defies Tradition
As the director of photography on this week’s limited release Death Defying Acts and the anticipated summer movie Mamma Mia!, Haris Zambarloukos is having quite a month. Both films are just steps on the ladder to success that Zambarloukos has been climbing for a while now.
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Recalled: Kimberly Peirce Shows the Depths of War in STOP-LOSS
In a world where every cell phone has camera capabilities, the realities of the world are brought into our homes with relative ease. And for the first time ever this means the realities of war are brought along too. Soldiers, armed not only with guns but very often small, one-chip cameras are documenting their war-torn lives.
Everyone’s a moviemaker. But while these affecting stories are making their way beyond army barracks and war zones via email and other Internet tools, rarely do they reach the masses. Sometimes it takes a skilled hand and a known face to alert the public to a greater social purpose. In her second film, STOP-LOSS, writer-director Kimberly Peirce—along with the film's stars, Ryan Phillippe, Channing Tatum, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Abbie Cornish—has put a mirror to the government, asking that they see soldiers as more than numbers, but as human beings—with families—deeply and forever affected by their experiences at war.
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Warren Beatty Honored with AFI Life Achievement Award
On June 12, 2008, legendary Hollywood star Warren Beatty received the 36th AFI Life Achievement Award. The event will air on the USA Network, Tuesday, July 8th at 9 p.m. Guests including Beatty’s wife, Annette Bening, his sister Shirley MacLaine, Julie Christie, Robert Downey Jr., President Bill Clinton, Gene Hackman and old pal Jack Nicholson gathered to honor the multi-faceted moviemaker's contributions and lifetime commitment to cinema.
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Toshiba and New York Film Academy Name Competition Winner
As part of the ad campaign for its new REGZA brand of LCD TV’s, Toshiba partnered with the New York Film Academy to hold “The One to Watch” Film Competition. Students and alumni of NYFA were invited to create a 29-second film that showed why REGZA is “The One to Watch.” Each film had to tell a complete story and was evaluated by a panel of judges (with representatives from both Toshiba and NYFA) based upon humor, originality and relevance to the contest.
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Thirteen Movies To Celebrate on the Fourth
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Shakespeare on Film: Antony and Cleopatra
In MM's sixth week of Shakespeare on film, we examine why Charlton Heston's Antony and Cleopatra didn't fare too well.
After playing Marc Antony in the 1950 and 1970 Julius Caesars, Charlton Heston had become obsessed with adapting Antony and Cleopatra, which he considered Shakespeare’s finest work, but which had never previously been filmed at feature length. His love affair with character and play reached a rocky conclusion in this overlong epic.
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Will Smith in Action
Will Smith is the king of Hollywood—as named by Entertainment Weekly and Newsweek in their recent rankings—and the July 4th box office, which is why, with this weekend’s release of the movie Hancock, MM saw it fit to take a look at Will Smith in action.
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Jonathan Levine's Total Wackness
Lessons learned in landing one of the world's greatest actors for The Wackness
The prospect of meeting Ben Kingsley is a daunting one for any director, especially a man of such limited talent and eloquence as myself. So when I heard the news that Sir Ben had enjoyed my script for The Wackness and would like to meet me in Vancouver, my excitement was tempered by an immediate pang of terror.
I recalled the episode of “The Sopranos” in which Sir Ben attempts to blow off Christopher and his mob cohorts as they push their script onto him. Needless to say, I hoped my meeting would go a bit better than that...
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Facing the Digital Dilemma
Are you creating films to stand the test of time?
Digital video is fast becoming a popular alternative to traditional filmstock, but is it worth the cost of storage and the possibility of losing the movie forever?
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Pixar Introduces Wall-E
Previous to 1995, no animated feature had ever been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, but Pixar’s first movie (and the very first full-length computer animated film) changed all that. At the time of its release, Toy Story became the highest-grossing animated feature on record and put Pixar Studios on the map. The hardworking company followed its initial success with eight more feature films (including this weekend’s release, Wall-E), each one brimming with humor, ingenuity and technical prowess. With the release of Wall-E, MM takes a look at some of the Pixar films that have changed the face of animated movies and made the company into the well-loved household name it is today.
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A Wanted Man
Chicago location director Mark Mamalakis shares his process for setting the perfect scene
Having handled the locations for such films as Flags of Our Fathers, Ali and this summer’s action thriller Wanted, starring Angelina Jolie and James McAvoy, Mark Mamalakis has become one of the film industry’s leading contacts in the Windy City. As he tells it, managing locations is one of the most intricate and important parts of the moviemaking process.
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Shakespeare on Film: Romeo and Juliet
With Romeo and Juliet, Franco Zeffirelli interprets the language of young love in MM's fifth week of Shakespeare on Film.
With Romeo and Juliet, Franco Zeffirelli interprets the language of young love in MM's fifth week of Shakespeare on Film. Zeffirelli first sowed the seeds of this box-office triumph in 1960, when the Italian director-designer made his Shakespeare stage debut with Romeo and Juliet at London’s Old Vic. In 1967, he set out to replicate that Old Vic passion on film. He was confident of attracting a large international audience and, believing that “the kids in the story are like teenagers today,” took a gamble by casting actors almost as young as their characters: Leonard Whiting was seventeen, Olivia Hussey, chosen ahead of 350 other hopefuls, just fifteen.
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Atom Egoyan's Adoration in the Internet Age
The press alternately booed and applauded the Cannes premiere of Atom Egoyan's new film, Adoration, and few came to greet the director at his press conference. Granted the film, which tells of a boy who reinvents the mundane story of his parents' death as an international terrorist conspiracy only to face the truth at the end, falls as flat as the bomb that never went off on the plane.
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Peter Segal Gets Smart
How a decision made in college brought audiences one of this summer's most anticipated comedies
From the beginning, Peter Segal carved a niche for himself as the director of action-packed comedies. From his first feature Naked Gun 33 1/3 to the hijinks of his remake of The Longest Yard, he has managed to capture the disparate skills—pratfalls and natural comedic stylings among them—of the genre’s top players. Among his collaborators over the years, Segal has worked with Chris Farley, Eddie Murphy and Adam Sandler. His latest project, Get Smart, features the newest comedian to conquer the box office: Steve Carell.
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Daryn Okada Is on Top of the ASC
Celebrated DP wins third term as ASC President
Membership in the American Society of Cinematographers (attainable by invitation only) is itself an honor; to be elected president a higher honor still. Accomplished cinematographer Daryn Okada has just been elected to serve as ASC president for a third term and is well aware of the magnitude of his position, “I feel privileged to be a part of this extraordinary group of dedicated filmmakers,” he acknowledges.
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Shakespeare on Film: Kiss Me Kate
Shakespeare to music? Yep. MovieMaker continues its summer of Shakespeare on Film with George Sidney's Kiss Me Kate
MM's fourth week of Shakespeare on Film looks back at 1953's Kiss Me Kate, an updated, musical version of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. Produced in garishly colored 3-D, five years after the original stage musical became a Broadway smash, George Sidney’s Kiss Me Kate combines Cole Porter’s songwriting genius with energetic backstage comedy.
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Win $1,500 Making SHORTSNONSTOP
Burgeoning moviemakers take note: iThentic and The Canadian Film Centre’s Worldwide Short Film Festival recently announced the renewal of the SHORTSNONSTOP mobile movie festival, presented by TELUS. SHORTSNONSTOP is an innovative, year-round online film festival which movie buffs can experience “Anytime. Anyplace.”
SHORTSNONSTOP, which can be accessed at http://www.shortsnonstop.com, is currently accepting short film submissions for a July 15th deadline. A cash prize of $1,5000 will be awarded to the best entry each quarter throughout the year. SHORTSNONSTOP submissions must run under three minutes long and be in either English or with no dialogue. According to Catherine Tait, CEO of iThentic, “Audiences will have the opportunity to see [the] winning films on the big screen at the Worldwide Short Film Festival.”
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M. Night Shyamalan Happens
After the disaster that was Lady in the Water, seems like M. Night Shyamalan's backers have got another marketing trick up their sleeve as they release his latest film, The Happening: Promote the hell out of the fact that it's the director's first R-rated movie. It's probably not enough of an incentive to outdo The Incredible Hulk as the summer season box office continues to heat up, but the reviews so far have been on Shyamalan's side. As the sci-fi auteur awaits the final tallies, MM takes a look at the roller coaster ride Shyamalan has his taken critics and audiences on since The Sixth Sense.
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Zak Penn's Incredible Journey
Sure Zak Penn can write you a surefire blockbuster. He has proven that time and again with X-Men, Elektra, Fantastic Four. But that's not all he can do. The Grand, an improvisational comedy set in the world of competitive poker that he wrote and directed, contains neither a superhero nor a highfalutin special effect, and is on DVD now. And with his long-awaited adaptation of The Hulk in theaters now, MM asked the in-demand scribe to share the "things he's learned" in the business.
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School of Visual Arts Announces MFA Program in Social Documentary Film
Is there value in creating art that is socially aware? The educators at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) certainly think so as they’ve recently announced a new MFA program in Social Documentary Film to begin in Fall 2009. “It’s our goal that graduates leave this program with films which engage larger issues, and perhaps even impact public policy,” says accomplished moviemaker and chair of the program, Maro Chermayeff.
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Shakespeare on Film: Julius Caesar
MM's third week of Shakespeare on Film looks back at 1953's Julius Caesar.
MM's third week of Shakespeare on Film looks back at 1953's Julius Caesar. In 1952, MGM coupled its substantial $1.7 million investment in Shakespeare with one of the most inspired casting decisions in Hollywood history. A year after stunning audiences as macho, mumbling Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, Marlon Brando was to play the “wise and valiant” Marc Antony. Columnists expressed astonishment, TV comedians impersonated Kowalski’s rendition of “Friends, Romans, countrymen,” but the star, declaring himself “sick to death of being thought of as a blue-jeaned slobbermouth,” had decided that Julius Caesar must kill his Streetcar image.
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Bill Maher Finds Religion
Or at least finds Religulous
Particularly in an election year, religion is a hot-button topic. So leave it to writer-producer-actor-comedian and all-around opinion-maker Bill Maher to choose this fall to release Religulous. Directed by Larry Charles, who created controversy with Borat just a few years back, the film is being marketed as "an uproarious nonfiction film about the greatest fiction ever told." Who better to help give a sneak peek at the film than Maher himself.
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Getting to the Next Level in Wilmington
WiFi Film Conference kicks on in June
While no one can say that Hollywood isn’t a great place to be as a moviemaker, with its star power and extensive history, it’s not necessarily the only place to be. In fact, in the past few decades, the thriving film community of Wilmington, North Carolina has been giving Hollywood a run for its money. There may not be a Grauman’s Chinese Theater or Walk of Fame, yet what Wilmington lacks in legendry it makes up in its hunger for independent moviemaking.
From Friday, June 27th through Sunday, June 29th, the moviemakers of Wilmington will be satiated when the inaugural Wilmington Inside the Film Industry Film Conference brings a chunk of Hollywood to the east coast.
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Kung Fu Panda Drop Kicks the Competition
Seems like all those promos must have paid off—first at Cannes, then the TV commercial onslaught—as Kung Fu Panda kicked some serious butt at the box office over the weekend, out-grossing Adam Sandler's new film, You Don't Mess With the Zohan, by 50 percent. The animated action flick, featuring the voices of Jack Black, Angelina Jolie, Dustin Hoffman and Jackie Chan, took in $60 million over the weekend—while Zohan earned $40 million.
Harrison Ford and Shia LaBeouf's Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull held strong in the number three position with $22.8 million, while last year's surprise topper, Michael Patrick King's Sex and the City, saw a more than 62 percent decline in ticket sales, with a weekend total of $21.3 million.
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Little Wings Wins Big at Haydenfilms
The indie film circuit's new little movie that could is not a quirky expose that includes a musty yellow VW Bus or a wisecracking pregnant teenager, but instead a harrowing tale that explores the trauma of child abuse through the eyes of a 10-year-old boy.
Little Wings marks the film debut of writer-director Morgan Rhodes, founder of Journey Blue Films, who has previously worked in television, most notably on "Nip/Tuck," and is co-executive producer on "Bitter Brew," a spec pilot.
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Shakespeare on Film: Macbeth
In MM's second week on Shakespeare on Film, we examine 1948's Macbeth.
In MM's second week on Shakespeare on Film, we examine 1948's Macbeth. Made in just 23 days, Orson Welles' black-and-white experiment combines cinematic visuals with theatrical acting and design and a radio director’s emphasis on the verse. His production of Macbeth at the Utah Centennial Festival in May 1947 was effectively a dress rehearsal for the movie, which began shooting a month later on a tight $700,000 budget from Hollywood B-movie studio, Republic.
Welles could only afford abstract sets: The jagged walls of Macbeth’s castle resemble quick-dried volcanic lava; its courtyard has the unmistakable smoothness of a studio floor.
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Perfect Strangers
First-time writer-director relies on his instincts to make The Strangers
First-time writer-director Bryan Bertino recounts the scariest part of making his directorial debut with The Strangers: Action!
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Dirty Harry: Revisited
Warner Bros. is celebrating its 85th anniversary with something they are calling the Dirty Harry Ultimate Collector’s Edition box set, which features all five Dirty Harry films, digitally remastered on DVD and Blu-ray, and including featurettes and Dirty Harry memorabilia. All of the films are available seperately, too, which is a good thing because the one you really want is Dirty Harry. With the 1971 movie, Clint Eastwood and director Don Siegel invented the modern cop antihero, which spawned Bruce Willis’ wisecracking John McClane, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s titanium-skinned Terminator and the lumpen, narcoleptic studs portrayed by the likes of Steven Seagal. But Eastwood and Siegel should get some credit (or blame) for establishing the profitable, frequently risible concept of the franchise film, too.
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Festival Beat
An exclusive look at nine of the hottest winter and spring film festivals of 2007 and 2008.
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Michael Patrick King Talks About Sex
In 2004, during the final season of HBO’s “Sex and the City,” Carrie Bradshaw dangerously flirted with love in Paris and the seed for a movie version of the show was planted. As the series came to a climactic close—ending a heady era of Manolo Blahniks, cosmopolitans and candid girlfriend camaraderie—creative leader and executive producer Michael Patrick King toyed with the idea of taking the fabulous foursome to the big screen.
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Shakespeare on Film: Hamlet
How the Bard of Avon made his way to the silver screen
All serious moviemakers and thespians know William Shakespeare will never go out of style. His universal tales of love, loss, anger and desperation continue to span time, cultures and mediums. Each theatrical incarnation of a Shakespeare play is different from the next as are all interpretations brought to the big screen. Case in point: Writer-director Andrew Fleming made a splash at Sundance earlier this year with Hamlet 2. Set for an August 27 release, the movie is not quite a direct take on the Bard's tragic story of revenge, but inspired by the legend nonetheless. It is for all these reasons that MM has decided to honor Shakespeare with a full summer of Shakespeare on Film. Visit us each week for a new excerpt from BFI's 100 Shakespeare Films by Daniel Rosenthal. From Charlton Heston's Antony and Cleopatra to Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho, we cover the classic and the bold, beginning with Laurence Olivier's 1948 Academy Award-winning Hamlet.
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Indiana Jones Whips the Competition
Indiana Jones proved he's still got what it takes—at least in box office clout—as the latest film in the George Lucas-Steven Spielberg franchise, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, whipped the competition, with a box office total on track to be the second biggest Memorial Day movie opening ever. The film, which brings Harrison Ford back in the titular role alongside Cate Blanchett and Shia LaBeouf, brought in just over $125 million for the holiday weekend, putting it just behind Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, which had a Friday-through-Monday total of $139.8 million in 2007.
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Sneak Peek: Sex and The City
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Video Views Pick: Wanted
The editors of VIDEO VIEWS magazine pick Wanted, based on the Mark Millar graphic novel, as the best new DVD this week. Featuring eight bonus featurettes and a cast that includes James McAvoy, Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman, home video watchers can't go wrong.
Posted 12.3.08 | Video Views Pick | 1 comment
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