It seems we’ll have another, highly needed female in the director’s chair in Hollywood. From Empire online comes the news that Natalie Portman has signed on to direct A Tale of Love and Darkness. A period film involving basically the birth of Israel revolving around the childhood memoirs of Amos Oz (professor of literature at Ben-Gurion University in Be’er Sheva).

     While I know nothing of the story, this doesn’t sound like the easiest ok pictures to create. Certainly not for a directorial debut. Still, I have a lot of faith in Portman. She’s a tremendous actress (Star Wars not withstanding) and extremely intelligent. I’d very highly anticipate any film she decides to direct. Who knows? Maybe we’ll have another Ben Affleck (Gone Baby Gone) on our hands.

from Empire:

Portman has signed a two-year production deal for her Handmadecharlie Films with Participant Productions. Participant is an outfit dedicated to producing films with social value. They’re behind the likes of Syriana and An Inconvenient Truth.

     The first domestic version of the one-sheet for Guillermo Del Toro produced, The Orphanage, has hit the web. The poster doesn’t do much for me, but it does reek of Guillermo Del Toro’s style, even if he’s not directing. New man in town, Juan Antonio Bayona will be taking the reins for this one and it looks to be very much in the same vein as Del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone. Of course, this is just the feel I get from the poster, so we’ll have to wait and see until some footage is released. In the meantime, here’s the marketing shot (click image for hi-res)…

     One of the best westerns of the last 25 years is certainly Dances with Wolves. I saw it at least three times in the theater and loved it even as a young man. Costner haters be damned as this film was totally amazing in almost every respect and won Costner best picture and best director along with editing and cinematogrpahy wins, not to mention nods in several other categories. It is the epitome of outstanding film achievement.

     So word comes today that a director has just been signed to helm the sequel to Dances with Wolves, The Holy Road. I didn’t even know novelist/screenwriter Michael Blake even wrote a sequel. To me, this is bad news for three reasons.

1) It probably won’t star Costner.
2) The first film is perfect and should be left alone where it ends. I can’t think of a movie with a more unfathomable sequel possibility.
3) The director hired on is Simon Wincer. Let’s take a look at Mr Wincer’s resume:

D.A.R.Y.L.
Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man
Free Willy
Lightning Jack
Phantom
Flash
…and the kicker?
Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles

     Sweet, tap-dancing Jesus does this guy know how to pick ‘em or what? Now, in all fairness, he also did direct a couple of the watchable “Young Indiana Jones” episodes (which were okay). And he also did Quigley Down Under and the “Lonesome Dove” mini-series which were pretty decent westerns for their time. So at least I have hope that the guy has a knack for doing some good western stuff. Otherwise, this is something of a tragedy and the worst news I read all day.

     In case you blinked during the Southland Tales trailer (Apple), that IS Kevin Smith in the wheel chair. Here’s a close-up image of that character.

     I can’t believe that is him! As a side note, as I see this trailer more and more, the more I’m looking forward to it. I think the ridiculous cast will actually work in the film’s favor. Plus I like the comedic, quirky, action-filled vision of the future and what is sure to be a real thinker of a movie (ala Donnie Darko). The kind where you have to watch it 16 times to understand what is going on; and even then have to jump on the message boards to confirm your theory.

     My home state of Minnesota is soon to be the location of a Coen Brothers filming location once again in early to mid-2008. This will be their first filming return to MN since 1996’s, AFI Top 100 list film, Fargo.

     According to a Minneapolis Star and Tribune article, the film, A Serious Man will start filming in their hometown of St Louis Park in mid March. This past summer The Coens scouted locations in Richfield (where I lived just a year ago), Brooklyn Center and Hopkins (where I graduated from high school). These are all neighborhoods that match the ones they grew up in in St. louis Park - just a very short jaunt from any of these locales

     The Coen-scripted dark comedy centers on “Larry Gopnik, a Jewish college professor in the Midwest during the 1960s,” according to the website FilmJerk. Bedeviled by children who lift his wallet, a wife who wants a divorce, a too-intense grad student and a hot neighbor who sunbathes in the nude, “he starts to question the value of life.”

     After a drought in Minnesota film production alleviated only by “North Country” in 2005 and “A Prairie Home Companion” last year, Winter said she was “over the moon.”This is a serious production,” she said. “They’ll be here from January [for preproduction] through June. There’ll be jobs for about 100 Minnesotans.”

     Uh… yeah. And if this means a call for extras, you can bet your ass I’ll be in line hoping for a part. Not to mention this will “jump-start” Minnesota’s visibility as a filming location. And by the way, even though most of Fargo is filmed in Minnesota, the actual city of Fargo is not n Minnesota; it’s in North Dakota - a common misconception.

     The Darjeeling Ltd, Wes Anderson’s new film was scheduled to be released along with the short film, Hotel Chevalier before each screening. Then recently we heard that that idea had been scrapped. Well, today, slashfilm is letting us know that Hotel Chevalier, which is sort of a prequel to The Darjeeling Ltd, will be screened at the Apple Stores in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco on Tuesday. If you’re in one of those small towns, stop in and check it out for free.

     For the rest of us, it will be available on iTunes for free on Wednesday. If Wes Anderson alone doesn’t do it for you, maybe the promise of Natalie Portman nude will keep it in your memory to check out. I know I will. Plus, it might be a good idea to check out before The Darjeeling Ltd. is released in theaters. A back story is always nice before seeing the real thing. If you remember to check it out, stop back here and leave your thoughts.

     I was just reading over at comingsoon.net (via Screenrant) about a story in which Paul Haggis has said that the next Bond film will start about 2 minutes after where Casino Royale left off. I think this is an excellent idea; not to mention fairly original. Especially in the Bond universe.

“My Bond is an actual assassin; when he kills someone, he kills them with a knife, they’re bloody and he pays a price. He denies that he pays a price, but he does. When he sees a woman who witnesses something horrific, and he sees her taking a shower, he doesn’t just go in there and f*ck her, like the old Bond would have done. He sits there with her, and she says, ‘I can’t get this blood from my fingernails.’ So he helps her get the blood from her fingernails; that’s what he does, that’s my Bond. So it’s a different guy… [the next film] picks up 2 minutes after the last one, and it’s going to be fun.”

     What I liked about Casino Royale (MP review), was how unseasoned Bond was and the whys and how of his evolution into what we know as the Bond today. Bond learned a serious life lesson (more than one actually) at the end of Casino Royale. It will be fun to see how that shapes his character almost immediately in the next installment in the Bond saga.

     So today as I went through my daily movie-website visits I came across Total Film’s list of The Greatest Directors Ever. The directors are listed from 100 to 1. Each is given a nickname and dedicated a paragraph on his/her work, and it’s decided what his/her best film is.

     As I go through the well planned list I notice a couple noteworthy inclusions. Sofia Coppola, for example, makes the list at #99, a talented and promising underrated director who’s latest film Marie Antoinette I consider one of last year’s best.

     I scroll further down the list and I’m more or less satisfied and as I get to the top ten I say to myself: “Alright! Antonioni has yet to come up. He must be in the top ten.” At times severely underappreciated, Antonioni generally makes top 100 lists but rarely makes the top ten. I scroll down further: Kubrick, Welles, Fincher (what? at number 10?!?!?!), Bergman, Coppola, Spielberg, they’re all there. And so I’m expecting Michaelangelo Antonioni any minute, and to my total surprise not only is he not in the top ten, he hasn’t even been included on the list! Abel Ferrara sits happily at 100 while Antonioni is nowhere to be found.

     Sure there are other directors they forgot. They remember contemporary directors such as Baz Luhrmann, Ferrara, and M Night Shyamalan but forget the likes of Alejandro González Iñárritu, Alfonso Cuaron, Wes Anderson, and two-time Palme d’Or winning Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne? They include Hollywood blockbuster machines Bryan Singer and Tony Scott but leave out classic filmmakers Charlie Chaplin and Alain Resnais? As is the case with any such list (the recent OFC Top 100 comes to mind), some deserving candidates will get lost in the shuffle.

     But these otherwise egregious oversights pale in comparison, fully eclipsed by the total ignorance of leaving out one of the 20th Century’s brightest and most important artists. Antonioni’s films are just as, if not more, important to cinema history than the films of Welles, Bergman, or Coppola; much less George Lucas or John Woo (both included).

     Personally this terribly obvious oversight strips away any and all validity Total Film’s list at one point held.

     It’s been a long time since I’ve just sat down and surfed the internet. I usually go to all my usual sites and check out the news and so forth. But today, I started in one spot and just starting following links around. It’s fun to see where you end up. While surfing, I ran across something blog worthy. Over at Windmills of my Mind, Damian Arlyn is taking on the task of “31 Days of Spielberg, in which he picks a different SPielberg film each day to dissect and review. And when I dissect, I mean this guy really delves pretty deeply into each film. Pages and pages of dissection actually.

     As of this writing, he seems to be about half way through the schedule, which goes as follows:

DAY 1: Prologue
DAY 2: Night Gallery – “Eyes”
DAY 3: Columbo: Murder By the Book
DAY 4: Duel
DAY 5: The Sugarland Express
DAY 6: Jaws
DAY 7: Close Encounters of the Third Kind
DAY 8: 1941
DAY 9: Raiders of the Lost Ark
DAY 10: Poltergeist
DAY 11: E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial
DAY 12: Twilight Zone: the Movie – “Kick the Can”
DAY 13: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
DAY 14: Amazing Stories – “Ghost Train” & “The Mission”
DAY 15: The Color Purple
DAY 16: Empire of the Sun
DAY 17: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
DAY 18: Always
DAY 19: Hook
DAY 20: Jurassic Park
DAY 21: Schindler’s List
DAY 22: The Lost World: Jurassic Park
DAY 23: Amistad
DAY 24: Saving Private Ryan
DAY 25: A.I.: Artifical Intelligence
DAY 26: Minority Report
DAY 27: Catch Me If You Can
DAY 28: The Terminal
DAY 29: War of the Worlds
DAY 30: Munich
DAY 31: Epilogue

     I’m not taking the time to link to each title, but you can just head over to the main URL or start right at DAY 1: Prefatory Remarks & Pre-history and go from there. You’ll be reading for a while, but it seems to me to be worth the time spent. Excellent pieces that are both interesting and highly informative. I had no idea E.T. would have never happened without the guiding hand of Truffant! Check it out.

copy and paste job from Fox News:

     Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, who made history and chemistry together in “Titanic,” are coming back to the silver screen.

The pair, sources say, have signed on for Winslet’s husband Sam Mendes’ film version of Richard Yates’ classic novel of unhappy domesticity in the suburbs.

No, it’s not called “American Beauty.” Mendes already made that movie, and it won the Oscar. It’s “Revolutionary Road,” the 1961 novel many people thought “American Beauty” was based on or borrowed from in the first place.

I do recall asking “American Beauty” screenwriter Alan Ball back when his movie was coming out if he’d been influenced by the Yates novel. He professed to not having read it.

read more by unwrapping the text…
UNWRAP TEXT or SHOW **SPOILER**

     Never did get around to seeing Guy Ritchie’s last film, Revolver. But after the greatness that was Lock Stock and Snatch, I’m more than eager to see his return to film making. I also never saw the remake of Lina Wertmuller’s 1974 comedy-drama Swept Away which starred Madonna and was also directed by Ritchie. Word is that it is atrocious though.

     Anyway, reports today indicate Guy Ritchie has just been assigned to direct The Gamekeeper for Warner Bros. studios. Apparently this is his comic book series? Well, once RocknRolla is finished filming (which looks like classic Ritchie returning to his roots), he’ll be moving on to this new project.

     I’m not one for comic book films, but since this isn’t a super hero movie and since Ritchie produces these comics himself (ala Frank Miller - Sin City, 300), I’m very much looking forward to Ritchie getting back on the horse, so to speak.

here’s the plot outline from monsters and critics:

     ”…the story features a gamekeeper on a Scottish estate with a dark past. When his secrets return to haunt him, and the alleged killer of his son reappears, the gamekeeper uses all his tracking and nature skills to hunt down his prey, wherever they go.”

     A few weeks back I was listening to Kevin Smith’s SModcast (where they just talk about whatever - it’s really great) and he started talking about this Jaws documentary that he saw in which EVERYTHING is covered. A movie where they interview everyone still alive even remotely involved with the making of the film: from Spielberg to the guy who painted the original poster to the crew that let them use their boat for the movie. I missed what the movie was called or when I could see it, but he mentioned that he had sort of a “secret” copy that he was going to lend to his co-host so he could see it.

     Well, now I just found the trailer for the film he was talking about (I think this is it). It’s called The Shark Still Works: The Impact and Legacy of Jaws. It has yet to find a distributor, but when it does, I’ll personally be checking this out. I’m not a huge fan of the Jaws phenomenon and I like it quite it bit. A without it, we’d probably not have a Spielberg library as extensive as we do. So anyway, here’s the trailer for the doc. I think it looks pretty cool.

     Ah yes, now I see why Smith was hyping the film. He’s IN the damn thing. Well, still it looks pretty cool.

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     To be perfectly honest, Romero’s last take on the zombie genre, Land of the Dead, left me wanting a little more; to put it lightly. Still, I’ma zombie film-oholic and nothing will stop me from seeing more - especially by the master himself.

     So here’s some old news, but I hadn’t ever seen it before, so I thought I’d post it. A short doc. on the first week of shooting for Romero’s newest picture, Diary of the Dead. There’s nothing terribly exciting or news-flash worthy in this short, it’s just some quick interviews with crew memebers and cast and some quick shots of props and things. But it does get me excited for yet another zombie movie from the great George A. Romero…

     Just a reminder, according to “The Week” magazine, a great documentary will be airing early next week regading Sir Spielberg. Steven doesn’t provide DVD commentary tracks for his films (God knows why), but he will help conduct this candid and comprehensive overview of his career, from such commercial blockbusters as Jaws to Schindler’s List and other socially conscious films. And he doesn’t forget to mention such rare flops like 1941, from which he says he “learned the greatest lesson of my career.” Critic Richard Schickel produced this 90-minute doc.

     The show will air on Turner Classic Movies (TCM) this Monday, July 9th, at 8pm eastern time. It will be followed by screenings of Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, then an encore at midnight.

     Anyone got cable and a VCR?

     Steve Buscemi’s new directorial feature ‘Interview‘ is coming out soon. And I have no idea if the trailer has been out for a while but I personally have just come across it and thought I would share it with you all. Here is the synopsis and the trailer following it:

     “The movie is a remake of the deceased Dutch director Theo Van Gogh. The movie will follow a top political journalist whose career is fading. First, he has a falling out with his editior, and then, against his will, he has to interview the country’s most popular soap actress.”

     Now personally I can’t get enough of Steve Buscemi. He has been one of my favourite actors ever since I saw him in 1992’s Reservoir Dogs where he just blew me away. This film I think looks extremely interesting and unique and definitely worth a look in my eyes. I am a huge fan of Buscemi’s earlier directorial feature ‘Animal Factory’, which is highly underrated. I look forward to seeing this film but something tells me it won’t get wide release, sadly. What are your impressions of the trailer and the film in general?

     It was announced today that Marc Forster is officially going to be directing the next Bond adventure, presently referred to as ‘Bond 22′. Forster has an impressive back catalogue of films such as Monster’s Ball, which Halle Berry won her Best Actress Oscar for, the highly-praised Finding Neverland, which was nominated for tons of awards including Best Picture, and the recent Stranger Than Fiction.

     Forster will begin working with screenwriter Paul Haggis on a draft of the script done written by Robert Wade and Neil Purvis. ‘Bond 22′ will begin filming at Pinewood Studios, London in December 2007 and is set to be released in November 2008.

 

     Having not seen all of his films that he has done thus far I can’t say with certainty that he will do a good job but with what I have seen I am extremely content with him at the helm of the next Bond film. Let’s just hope the next part in the franchise will be just as good as the latest one.