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Hints About 2010 Oscars Emerge: No More Five-Person Presenting
Filed under: Awards, Quentin Tarantino, Oscar Watch
As you've probably already heard, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is shaking things up at this year's Oscars by having 10 Best Picture nominees instead of five, and by moving the honorary awards (read: the boring part of the show) to a special ceremony of their own. That ceremony will be held in November, and-- holy crap, it was this weekend! The almost-Oscars were on Saturday!They're called the Governors Awards, and while they won't be televised, the AMPAS website has some photos and background info. Honorary Oscars went to actress Lauren Bacall (pictured), cinematographer Gordon Willis (the Godfather trilogy, Manhattan, All the President's Men), and director/producer Roger Corman (numerous MST3K films). Astonishingly, the legendary Bacall has only received one Oscar nomination in her 65-year career, for The Mirror Has Two Faces. Willis was nominated for The Godfather: Part III and Zelig. Corman, who has directed more than 50 films and produced nearly 400 (!), has never been nominated for an Oscar, probably because all of his movies are terrible. But apparently the Academy is rewarding quantity now, too. So don't give up, Uwe Boll! Just make another 300 movies!
The other award at the special ceremony was the Irving G. Thalberg Award, given to John Calley, who produced The Remains of the Day and Closer and oversaw worldwide production for Warner Bros. throughout the 1970s.
The Governors Awards were also a chance for Oscar telecast producers Adam Shankman and Bill Mechanic to drop a few hints about what the big show will be like on March 7. Mechanic said they're not going to repeat the thing the 2009 show did where a coven of five past Oscar winners introduced the acting nominees.
'Name That Movie' ... Based on These Drawings
Filed under: Fandom, Quentin Tarantino, Fan Made
Most of us know our favorite movies by heart, and we can quote dialog (although not always accurately), describe a scene down to its last detail, or even recount production history if we are particularly geek-minded about it. When movies are a big part of your life, the attention to detail can become downright obsessive, but as we all know, a movie is really just a sum of its parts. Paul Rogers, an illustrator who works at the California Art Center College has taken those separate parts and devised a clever little game of Name that Movie on his blog, Drawger. Rogers' game takes some of our favorite flicks and breaks them down into six drawings, and covers the gamut of Hollywood classics old and new. So if you are a fan of Pictionary and showing off your movie knowledge, this is definitely the game for you.Now I don't want to brag, but I did manage to guess most of Rogers' selections -- although I am honest enough to admit that I didn't get a perfect score. There were a few that, frankly, I wouldn't even know where to begin. But it did remind me how those iconic images can work their way into your brain, and when all you need to see is an ink drawing of Big Kahuna soda cup and you can almost hear Samuel L. Jackson exclaim "That is a tasty burger."
Free Flick of the Day: For A Few Dollars More
Filed under: Classics, Quentin Tarantino, Home Entertainment, Western
I think the mania for Sergio Leone is stronger than it's ever been. It's undoubtedly due to the championing of Quentin Tarantino, and films like Sukiyaki Western Django and The Good, the Bad and the Weird, which are driving fans to seek out where they borrowed their serapes and squints from. There also seems to simply be a hunger for good adventure stories and rugged antiheroes, and there's no better place to get sated than Leone's films. If you feel like spending two hours in the broiling sun with a man who'll shoot you as soon as look at you, then you'll love today's free flick: For A Few Dollars More.For A Few Dollars More might be my favorite of the Dollars Trilogy. I love them all on their own merits, but this installment stands on its own (I hate saying it, but Fistful is decidedly less cool after multiple viewings of Yojimbo), and is less operatic than The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. More also tips the balance thanks to the way it adds a little to the Man with No Name. Here, he's dubbed Monco (Spanish / Italian for maimed) due to the way he keeps his right hand hidden, and he doesn't just ride quietly out of the dust. Now he has a trail in a score of bloody newspaper clippings which suggests he could afford more than one serape. Ennio Morricone fans will also appreciate the little flourish he gave to Monco's gun hand
Even if you hate Westerns, you should watch it. Leone called his films "fairy tales for adults," and that's really what they are. They feel like every genre rolled in one, and have been borrowed from 1965 onward. Fans of everything from Tarantino to Pirates of the Caribbean will see something they recognize here.
Watch For A Few Dollars More on SlashControl!
Watch and Listen: 'Pulp Fiction' Remix
Filed under: Fandom, DIY/Filmmaking, Quentin Tarantino
Some super-fan made a crazy audio/video remix of scenes and sounds from Pulp Fiction that you have to check out. It's so good that it could be confused with an underground techno mash-up. The remix uses multiple split-screens with the sounds from the scenes remixed to a beat, like Jules's delicious shake, Butch's getaway, Jimmie Dimmick slapping soap into Jules's hand, Zed slapping the Gimp's head and shushing his victims, and Marsellus Wallace grunting behind a ballgag. The detail on this is impressive, especially the remixing of the different scenes. The person's YouTube channel is otherwise made up of music performances, so I'm very curious if there's a collaborator involved or what. There's a lot of Pulp Fiction mashups on YouTube that pale in comparison, although this one is pretty cool. The music mashup culture is a fascinating one; it seems more underground than the video mashups, probably because of how easy it is to share things via YouTube and perhaps how much more litigious the music industry is. Personally, I love music mashup artists like A Plus D and think that creating new forms of art through pre-existing work, like the source files offered by Sita Sings the Blues creator Nina Paley, will become more acceptable as artists realize the potential of sharing their work.
Then again... everyone's got bills to pay.
Watch the Pulp Fiction Remix after the jump ...
Villains We Love: Angel Eyes
Filed under: Quentin Tarantino, Western, Scenes We Love
Great villains are scattered throughout the Westerns, but some of the most memorably savage come from the films of Sergio Leone. While Henry Fonda in Once Upon a Time in the West gets a lot of props for the way he mows down the McBain family (including its youngest and most adorable moppet), it was nothing that Lee Van Cleef hadn't already done in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Angel Eyes seems to be dismissed as something akin to Leone fan fiction, and it's his relation (or lack of) to Van Cleef's Col. Mortimer in A Few Dollars More that people find to be more interesting than his villainy.
But he's a great villain, mostly because he's absent for much for so much of the film. Leone gives him a ruthless introduction (a scene Quentin Tarantino mirrored perfectly with Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds) and promptly yanks him out of the narrative. As Tuco and Blondie torture each other for an hour, Angel Eyes is doing his own thing and it's a wonderful shock when he shows up running a Civil War prison camp. In today's cinema, no one could resist giving Angel Eyes a prequel and a spin-off relating the trail of bodies that led to that alias and that prison camp. But Leone allowed a squint to speak for itself, and told you everything you needed to know by the way men like Blondie and Tuco squirm around him. Considering that no one in this film is exactly good, and they're all a little bit ugly, it takes a lot to convince us that a man is worse than all the others. Van Cleef and Leone did that, and few villains can match his nastiness even when they've got double the screen time.
Go below the jump -- they don't call him Angel Eyes in here!
Tarantino Teases 'Kill Bill 3' - Here's Five People Who Should Star
Filed under: RumorMonger, Fandom, DIY/Filmmaking, Newsstand, Quentin Tarantino, Remakes and Sequels
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The energetic Quentin Tarantino was out and about promoting Inglourious Basterds in Italy, and seeing as he was in the homeland of his hostess spaghetti western, he teased everyone by promising Kill Bill 3. Again. Bad Taste reports that while on Italian talkshow Parla Con me, he prompted his hostess, Serena Dandini, to ask him whether there would be a continuation of the Bride's saga. When I say prompted, I mean it literally. "You didn't ask me whether there will be a third installment, a Kill Bill Vol 3!" Dandini obliged him by asking, and Tarantino said "Yes! The Bride will fight again ... I want ten years to pass between the second one and the third one. Two reasons. I think Uma [Thurman] and I needed a ten year break because the first one was so hard. The second one is that I love the character a lot. I just really really love her. And I think she deserves ten years of peace. ... I put her through a lot in those first two movies, and I wanted her to have a nice, peaceful life for ten years. I want her to put up her sword, and have some peace. And in ten years, something will happen to make her fight again."
Tarantino has been teasing us with a continuation for awhile now (usually themed around the daughter of Vernita Green), so it's hard to get too excited. It's also awfully hard to make predictions as to who or what would cause the Bride to fight again as she did leave most of her enemies in pieces. But we can cast our votes as to who we would like to see as the Bride's villains. Here's five of the people I'd like to see in a Tarantino flick, and I hope some of you have even cooler suggestions ...
Now It's the 50 Best Movies of the Decade!
Filed under: Fandom, Tom Cruise, Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, Lists, Trailers and Clips
Earlier today we brought you Rotten Tomatoes' list of the 100 worst reviewed films of the decade. Now, though it might be a little premature (considering that we still have a little while to go before we hit our next decade), the good folks over at I Heart Chaos have decided to get the ball rolling on those end-of-decade lists by shoveling out what they believe are the Top 50 Movies of the 2000's. Usually these kinds of things start to gain in popularity towards the end of the year, but I guess the early bird does get the worm, so let's get right to the chase and find out who made the cut.
When you've got a a list of 50, there is plenty of wiggle room, and it's a pretty comprehensive list that manages to find room for cult faves and foreign flicks. But I'll admit, even though Chaos has put together a solid list, I was a little surprised that the #1 film for this decade is Quentin Tarantino's Samurai/Cowboy epic, Kill Bill -- though that's the beauty of a list, everyone wants to have a little friendly debate, I guess. You can read the entire list over at Chaos, but rounding out the top five are The Dark Knight, No Country for Old Men, and Kinji Fukasaku's adaptation of Battle Royale.
The great thing about a long list like Chaos' is that it makes room for all kinds of movies that sometimes you just don't have room for in streamlined lists of five or ten entries. But I love a challenge, so I decided to put together a list of my top films of the 2000s ... although I've cheated just a little.
After the jump: my nominations for the top films of the 2000s...
'Inglourious Basterds' is Tarantino's Top Earner - Because of Twitter?
Filed under: Box Office, Exhibition, The Weinstein Co., Brad Pitt, Quentin Tarantino, Movie Marketing
In what could be read as a big "nyah, told you so" press release, The Weinstein Company would like you all to know that Inglourious Basterds has not only grossed over $108M* in North America but has now out-earned Pulp Fiction, which was previously Tarantino's biggest money-maker to date.
But what's strange is that TWC is giving some of the credit to "an innovative marketing plan. The film was the first to make use of Twitter and other social networking sites in such a direct fashion, even involving Twitter in the film's LA premiere," according to the press release.
Harvey Weinstein is even quoted as saying, "It was great working with Biz Stone at Twitter on Inglourious. It took the campaign to another level."
Okay, what have I missed? How was the Inglourious campaign different from any other of the studios' use of Twitter or Facebook to promote movies through links, contests, and meet-ups? I don't even recall seeing anything on Twitter about it, other than the normal studios using Twitter to cross-pollinate coverage.
Filmmakers Who Love To Talk About Movies
Filed under: Classics, Fandom, Quentin Tarantino, Comic/Superhero/Geek
Let's face it; none of us would be here if we didn't like talking about movies. If you are anything like me, you spend your days scouring for movie news, reading about your favorite films and directors, and sometimes even getting into the odd heated argument. So while most of us play armchair quarterback when it comes to the art of movie making, there are plenty of honest to goodness artists who love to talk about movies just as much as we do, and one person who needs no such prompting is Quentin Tarantino.
The director recently filmed an introductory clip to There Will Be Blood for Sky Movies and despite being a little surprised at the idea that Tarantino and P.T. Anderson are movie BFF's, it did get me thinking about some of the other directors who love to talk about the movies. The rise of the DVD commentary opened up a whole new world to movie geeks like myself, giving us the chance to learn more about the movies we love. But as interesting as it is to hear a filmmaker talk about their work -- sometimes I think it's even better to hear them talk about somebody else's movie.
After the jump; Tarantino's TWBB review, and more movie-making chatterboxes..
Dying to Know All the 'Basterds' Movie-Geek References?
Filed under: Action, Thrillers, Fandom, Brad Pitt, Quentin Tarantino, Lists, War
I always trust that there are far more references crammed into a Tarantino film than I could ever acknowledge, and the extra wink-wink workings of Inglourious Basterds made that all but a guarantee. Luckily, the "video store nerds" (their words) over at Seattle's Scarecrow Video not only have their own extensive and ongoing catalog of films that are either referenced or given homage in Basterds, or are just fitting companions, but they've all been placed in their own section in the store, which just really makes me more jealous of the locals than anything, seeing as all the independent video joints in my own neck of the woods have either gone belly-up or have scaled back their selections.(Really, it's a shame. Netflix may be convenient, but it will never have that personal touch -- a note that Scarecrow's lengthy list happens to conclude on.)
Do you guys and girls agree with like-minded recommendations like Black Book? (I do.) Is there anything you think is missing? (Comment away, here or there.) And more than anything, what one film do you have a hankering to see, or see again, in the wake of QT's latest?
Indie Roundup: 'Sweetgrass,' 'Clarkworld,' 'Broken Embraces'
Shelf Life: Fight Club_thumbnail.jpg)
Watch: Famous 'Matrix' Scene Re-Created with LEGOs
Peter Jackson Says Spielberg's 'Tintin' is Done Filming, but...
Interracial Harmony: 'Ninja Assassin' vs. 'Blind Side'
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