July 23, 2008
Firefighters Turned Away From Exclusive Nightclub Blaze
DETROIT—After responding to a fire at elite nightclub Tech-Noir, all 20 members of Ladder Company 24 were denied entrance and forced to stand behind the velvet rope guarding the A-list inferno as it raged on well into early Sunday morning. "There was no way I could let them in dressed like that," said bouncer Ken Hess, who asked emergency personnel to step aside while he allowed a group of good-looking, scantily clad women directly into the blaze. "If they had brought some ladies with them, then maybe. But we have to maintain some standards here." While the firefighters were reportedly saddened by the sight of 63 people burning to death, on the way back to the firehouse they agreed the club was probably just full of stuck-up bitches anyway. [Via theonion]
Watch promo for More4's Kubrick season
Promo, shot from the point of view of Stanley Kubrick, to promote a More4 season of the director's films. Made by Channel 4 Creative Services.
Scripts, letters, designs, props, photographs – as many as 900 boxes of material belonging to one of the greats of cinema have been made available to a wider audience. Stanley Kubrick's widow, Christiane, has donated the auteur's paperwork to the University of the Arts, and the collection, carefully sifted for this Kubrick retrospective by Chris Hastings, gives us a fascinating insight into the public and private worlds of an inspirational film-maker:
July 22, 2008
July 21, 2008
How Not To Fake A Heart Attack
If your going to pick some kinda of sudden sickness to fake your way out of a court appearance don't choose a heart attack because once they check your vitals its a tough one to stick with.
Horror Movies: Why Big Studio Releases Are Rare to Scare - By Stephen King
While walking back to my Boston hotel after a surprisingly well-attended Tuesday afternoon showing of Bryan Bertino's horror thriller The Strangers, I found myself musing on what's scary and what's not. Whatever it is, The Strangers had enough of it to do incredibly well at the box office. But what makes such a little film with only one star (Liv Tyler) work in the first place? That the question interests me shouldn't amaze anyone, since I've worked in the scare-'em-silly field for years. And it must be of vital interest to Twentieth Century Fox, which this summer releases two movies in the genre with much higher budgets: The Happening and The X-Files: I Want to Believe. The Happening was better than I expected, but it wasn't as scary as The Strangers. As for The X-Files (out July 25)? Children, I have my doubts.
One thing that seems clear to me, looking back at the 10 or a dozen films that truly scared me, is that most really good horror films are low-budget affairs with special effects cooked up in someone's basement or garage. Among those that truly work are Carnival of Souls, Halloween, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Night of the Living Dead, and The Blair Witch Project. All cost almost nothing to make and earned millions, while their sequels and remakes were crap (Dawn of the Dead in both its incarnations being the exception that proves the rule).
Horror is an intimate experience, something that occurs mostly within oneself, and when it works, the screams of a sold-out house are almost intrusive. In that sense, a movie such as Blair Witch is more like poetry than like the ''event films'' that pack the plexes in summer. Those flicks tend to be like sandwiches overstuffed with weirdly tasteless meat and cheese, meals that glut the belly but do nothing for the soul. Studio execs, who not only live behind the curve but seem to have built mansions there, don't seem to understand that most moviegoers recognize all the bluescreens and computer graphics of big-budget films and flick them aside. Those movies blast our emotions and imaginations, instead of caressing them with a knife edge.
The scariest sequence I can remember is in Night of the Living Dead. The cemetery-visiting heroine, Barbara, is chased back to her car by a lurching zombie with white hair and dazed eyes. She locks herself in only to discover her brother has taken the keys. The zombie reaches down, finds a rock, and begins to bash it strengthlessly against the car window. The first time I saw this (and twice after), the scene reduced me to jelly.Of Fox's two summer creepshows, give the edge to The Happening, partly because M. Night Shyamalan really understands fear, partly because this time he's completely let himself go (hence the R rating), and partly because after Lady in the Water he had something to prove. And, happily, Happening plays as a relatively small movie. The new X-Files movie, on the other hand, looks big...but horror is not spectacle, and never will be. Horror is an unknown actress, perhaps the girl next door, cowering in a cabin with a knife in her hands we know she'll never be able to use. Horror is the scene in The Strangers where Liv Tyler tries to hide beneath the bed...and discovers she can't fit there.
One more problem: Big movies demand big explanations, which are usually tiresome, and big backstories, which are usually cumbersome. If a studio is going to spend $80 or $100 million in hopes of making $300 or $400 million more, they feel a need to shove WHAT IT ALL MEANS down the audience's throat. Is there a serial killer? Then his mommy didn't love him (insert flashback). A monster from outer space? Its planet exploded, of course (and the poor misunderstood thing probably needs a juicy Earth woman to make sexy with). But nightmares exist outside of logic, and there's little fun to be had in explanations; they're antithetical to the poetry of fear.
That's why I can't imagine that anything in X-Files will match Liv Tyler's exchange with one of the masked home invaders in one particularly terrifying scene of The Strangers.
''Why are you doing this to us?'' she whispers.
To which the woman in the doll-face mask responds, in a dead and affectless voice: ''Because you were home.''
In the end, that's all the explanation a good horror film needs.
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July 20, 2008
Holy collections, Batman!
Comics, figures, even a Hall of Justice, Ben Jeddrie’s been amassing his superhero’s stuff since he was a kid.
Article by Bill Spurr / Photo by Jeff Harper [Via The Chronicle Herald] Halifax, Nova Scotia
THE ONE THING that would make Ben Jeddrie’s collection more impressive is a Bat-maid. Jeddrie’s collection of Batman memorabilia, and assorted other superhero stuff, has taken over his Halifax apartment so completely that even Alfred the butler couldn’t keep it all straight. There’s a Batmobile, a Hall of Justice, a Bat-copter hanging from the ceiling, untold numbers of action figures. And comics. An amazing pile of comics.
"I have a collector’s mentality so when I’d get a new comic, I’d hang on to it and that just sort of amassed over the years. So much of it is Batman, not because I’d go looking for it, but because there is so much Batman stuff and so much cool Batman stuff," Jeddrie said.
"I’ve been reading comic books for so long, it’s always been a part of my awareness of the world. I’ve always known who they were and what they do, just like you know what a fireman is, what a cowboy is, cars and trucks, Batman, Superman, Spider-Man."
Jeddrie doesn’t know how many pieces are in his collection and when he says "I have tons of the comic books," the people in the apartment below should be concerned. He was just a kid when the Batman movie was reborn in 1989, and since friends and family knew of his devotion to comics, it was natural that when they saw Batman merchandise, they bought it for young Ben.
"Right now, I’m really gravitating toward the same Batman that I liked when I was a kid, very tall Batman in the blue and grey, very ’70s-early ’80s style, very athletic, not so mean," he said.
"Oftentimes they draw him very beefy these days. That’s one of the great things about Batman, though. He’s so much more open to interpretation than most. That’s also one of the reasons that there’s Batman stuff that you might not like, that someone took this tack on it. It’s the same thing with all the different movies that they’ve done."
Director Tim Burton made four Batman movies, and The Dark Knight is the second by director Christopher Nolan. Batman first appeared in comics in 1939 and on the big screen in 1943, evolving into the campy version of the mid-’60s.
The character has gone through so many incarnations, Jeddrie said they’re almost impossible to count.
"Every year, 12 new issues of Batman come out, 12 new issues of Detective Comics, and there’s always lots of side ones, special graphic novels, a new toy, and sometimes they’ll do a new toy because someone thought, ‘Hey, let’s do a Batman like this,’ so there are almost limitless variations," he said.
"A lot of the appeal to me is the variation on him. Sometimes he’s a brightly coloured cartoon character who has gone on adventures to other planets, and sometimes he’s a shadowy figure of the night that you don’t even know exactly what he looks like. He never comes out into the light, he doesn’t talk to anybody. There are so many things that can be done with him."
An employee at the Halifax comic book shop Strange Adventures, Jeddrie scored a ticket to an advance screening of The Dark Knight, which opened Friday. He didn’t have high hopes for it.
"I’m still a bigger fan of the Adam West version, just because there’s something really entertaining about those. They’re really silly but they kind of knew it. They played it like they didn’t, but they knew they were making a big comedy based around these silly comics. The second Tim Burton, Batman Returns, is a very good movie but from my perspective it’s not much of a Batman movie. It doesn’t take a lot of cues from any of the comics that were around before. It’s much more just a Tim Burton movie. It’s a similar thing with the ones they’re doing now, where it’s very much about what the guy making the movie wants to do."
Anyone who was a kid when the Batman and Robin television series was on (BIFF! ZOWIE! KA-POW!) remembers the theme song and the gadgets the dynamic duo had at their disposal, like the Bat-cycle and the Bat-poles. Or, how when they returned to the Bat Cave, the floor rotated the Batmobile into position so it didn’t have to be backed out into the driveway with the drawbridge-style hedge.
Jeddrie said it’s tough to pick his favourite piece of Batman equipment.
"The utility belt is great because, theoretically, it has whatever he needs in it, and it’s always been a stylish accessory," he said.
"I like a lot of the stuff he has in the Bat Cave. If you get a good look at the Bat Cave, there’s a big dinosaur there, there’s a giant penny and these are actually from pretty obscure stories from the early days of Batman."
Article by Bill Spurr / Photo by Jeff Harper [Via The Chronicle Herald] Halifax, Nova Scotia
THE ONE THING that would make Ben Jeddrie’s collection more impressive is a Bat-maid. Jeddrie’s collection of Batman memorabilia, and assorted other superhero stuff, has taken over his Halifax apartment so completely that even Alfred the butler couldn’t keep it all straight. There’s a Batmobile, a Hall of Justice, a Bat-copter hanging from the ceiling, untold numbers of action figures. And comics. An amazing pile of comics.
"I have a collector’s mentality so when I’d get a new comic, I’d hang on to it and that just sort of amassed over the years. So much of it is Batman, not because I’d go looking for it, but because there is so much Batman stuff and so much cool Batman stuff," Jeddrie said.
"I’ve been reading comic books for so long, it’s always been a part of my awareness of the world. I’ve always known who they were and what they do, just like you know what a fireman is, what a cowboy is, cars and trucks, Batman, Superman, Spider-Man."
Jeddrie doesn’t know how many pieces are in his collection and when he says "I have tons of the comic books," the people in the apartment below should be concerned. He was just a kid when the Batman movie was reborn in 1989, and since friends and family knew of his devotion to comics, it was natural that when they saw Batman merchandise, they bought it for young Ben.
"Right now, I’m really gravitating toward the same Batman that I liked when I was a kid, very tall Batman in the blue and grey, very ’70s-early ’80s style, very athletic, not so mean," he said.
"Oftentimes they draw him very beefy these days. That’s one of the great things about Batman, though. He’s so much more open to interpretation than most. That’s also one of the reasons that there’s Batman stuff that you might not like, that someone took this tack on it. It’s the same thing with all the different movies that they’ve done."
Director Tim Burton made four Batman movies, and The Dark Knight is the second by director Christopher Nolan. Batman first appeared in comics in 1939 and on the big screen in 1943, evolving into the campy version of the mid-’60s.
The character has gone through so many incarnations, Jeddrie said they’re almost impossible to count.
"Every year, 12 new issues of Batman come out, 12 new issues of Detective Comics, and there’s always lots of side ones, special graphic novels, a new toy, and sometimes they’ll do a new toy because someone thought, ‘Hey, let’s do a Batman like this,’ so there are almost limitless variations," he said.
"A lot of the appeal to me is the variation on him. Sometimes he’s a brightly coloured cartoon character who has gone on adventures to other planets, and sometimes he’s a shadowy figure of the night that you don’t even know exactly what he looks like. He never comes out into the light, he doesn’t talk to anybody. There are so many things that can be done with him."
An employee at the Halifax comic book shop Strange Adventures, Jeddrie scored a ticket to an advance screening of The Dark Knight, which opened Friday. He didn’t have high hopes for it.
"I’m still a bigger fan of the Adam West version, just because there’s something really entertaining about those. They’re really silly but they kind of knew it. They played it like they didn’t, but they knew they were making a big comedy based around these silly comics. The second Tim Burton, Batman Returns, is a very good movie but from my perspective it’s not much of a Batman movie. It doesn’t take a lot of cues from any of the comics that were around before. It’s much more just a Tim Burton movie. It’s a similar thing with the ones they’re doing now, where it’s very much about what the guy making the movie wants to do."
Anyone who was a kid when the Batman and Robin television series was on (BIFF! ZOWIE! KA-POW!) remembers the theme song and the gadgets the dynamic duo had at their disposal, like the Bat-cycle and the Bat-poles. Or, how when they returned to the Bat Cave, the floor rotated the Batmobile into position so it didn’t have to be backed out into the driveway with the drawbridge-style hedge.
Jeddrie said it’s tough to pick his favourite piece of Batman equipment.
"The utility belt is great because, theoretically, it has whatever he needs in it, and it’s always been a stylish accessory," he said.
"I like a lot of the stuff he has in the Bat Cave. If you get a good look at the Bat Cave, there’s a big dinosaur there, there’s a giant penny and these are actually from pretty obscure stories from the early days of Batman."
"Batman, out of all the superheroes, appeals the most to people who don’t have any interest in reading comics. You’ll find more people who don’t read comics have Batman shirts and Batman hats or a picture on the wall. I’ve been wondering about that for a long time, and I don’t know if I’ll ever figure it out."
- BEN JEDDRIE: Collector
July 19, 2008
July 18, 2008
Watchmen Trailer Hits The Web
The Plot:
A complex, multi-layered mystery adventure, the film is set in an alternate 1985 America in which costumed superheroes are part of the fabric of everyday society, and the “Doomsday Clock” – which charts the USA’s tension with the Soviet Union – is permanently set at five minutes to midnight. When one of his former colleagues is murdered, the washed-up but no less determined masked vigilante Rorschach sets out to uncover a plot to kill and discredit all past and present superheroes. As he reconnects with his former crime-fighting legion – a ragtag group of retired superheroes, only one of whom has true powers – Rorschach glimpses a wide-ranging and disturbing conspiracy with links to their shared past and catastrophic consequences for the future. Their mission is to watch over humanity…but who is watching the Watchmen?
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