While meta-action fans anxiously await his turn as “Cock Puncher” in the Untitled Onion Movie, Steven Seagal is still wheeling and dealing, thank you very much. Per The Hollywood Reporter, his rather amazing auteurship will continue with A Higher Form of Learning, an action thriller from Insight Film Studios and Cinetel that Seagal wrote and will star in. This comes on the heels of Prince of Pistols, Seagal’s recent directorial follow-up to 1994’s On Deadly Ground — which helped Michael Caine make mortgage payments, and also featured Billy Bob Thornton. A Higher Form of Learning reportedly centers on a detective who travels the world
in pursuit of serial killers. Before long, he finds himself walking in Memphis, hunting two
murderers while also chasing his own demons. As of press time, there was no word on whether said demons were masters of sartorial weight control…
Daily Archives: September 18, 2007
Jessica Alba Is Bikini-riffic!
Atta boy, Paul Walker! I’d originally grabbed this photo as part of a longer and almost serious piece meant to highlight the work of John Stockwell as Hollywood’s preeminent modern-day butt fetishist, but with Good Luck Chuck just around the bend, it seems as good a time as any to just slap this up in half-assed fashion (pun embraced, if not originally intended).. While Ashley Scott gets most of the butt-worship treatment (including one <I>very</I> lecherous angle and lingering shot), Alba bares a bit of skin as well. <B>Naturally, Stockwell featured plenty of young things in bathing suits in <I>Blue Crush</I>, and did the same with <A href=)
Turistas. I’m just wondering — and a little nervous — about how this predilection is going to get folded into Stockwell’s next film, Middle of Nowhere, starring Anton Yelchin and Susan Sarandon. It better come in the form of Eva Amurri, Sarandon’s real-life daughter. Fingers crossed, y’all…
Aronofsky Offers Up Fountain Commentary
So Darren Aronofsky is not particularly happy with Warner Bros., or their DVD treatment of his most recent film, The Fountain. Apparently they flat-out wouldn’t let him record an audio commentary track. Still, he doesn’t broadcast his displeasure in arm-flapping fashion. Instead, he’s merely done his own commentary track, and posted it on his web site. Score!
Recorded on May 10 in his living room in New York City, the track is a pretty fascinating listen, regardless of what one might think of the film. In talking about the feeling that the science-fiction genre has been hijacked by techno-lust, Aronofsky promises “not to talk too much about what the film is about and clear up any of the questions people have,” but instead just about some of the experiences of making the movie, and its inspiration, from Mayan subculture to enlightenment and reincarnation. Extra great news — you can download the track, save it to desktop, import into iTunes, etcetera. Clearly this, along with a tip of the cap to something like Cameron Crowe’s Led Zeppelin play-along instructions on the “Untitled Bootleg” (commercially available) cut of Almost Famous, augurs great things for the future of artist-audience interactivity, and circumventing corporate gate-keepers.
Daniel Radcliffe To Take Nakedness to Broadway
Despite all the gossip-page chatter, Daniel Radcliffe has
found reaction to his much-discussed disrobing in a
stage production of Equus (below) to be
almost entirely encouraging. “No one actually [has] come up to me and talked to
me on the street about it. Everyone I’ve talked to has been really, really
positive about it,” says Radcliffe at the recent press day for December Boys.
“There’s a paper in
— which shall remain nameless, but isn’t exactly a bastion of truth — and they
printed a story which was written about ‘an angry mother, unnamed.’ And I was just
thinking, ‘Yeah, I’m not sure that this angry mother exists. I think this paper
has invented this angry mother to try to perpetrate a bit of a backlash toward the show.’”
was getting pretty nervous, wondering if the critics were going to
go to this just because I’m in it, or what’s going to happen,” he says. “And
actually they didn’t, which I was really happy about. The thing that I just had
to keep reminding myself was that this was being designed by John Napier, who
designed the original. I’m being directed by Thea Sharrock, who probably will
end up being one of the most important directors in British theater. I’m with
Richard Griffiths, who has more experience than most other stage actors… it’s
lit by David Hersey. If I’m going to screw up, I couldn’t screw up with better
people around me, which is quite a comforting thought.”
Far from screwing up, the show’s commercial and critical embrace has spawned talk of a tour across the pond. Radcliffe, for his part, is game.
I might be doing Equus on Broadway,
which would be very exciting,” he says.
happen, which is great news, and terribly exciting.”
Sean Penn Digs MC Hammer
Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder provides the bulk of the rumbling, original song soundtrack for Sean Penn’s Into the Wild, though alt-rock Americana tunes of yore are also carefully folded into the margins. The most bizarre soundtrack inclusion, though? MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This.” Seriously…
Dennis Locorriere Hooks Boomer Music Fans
Dennis Locorriere was a founding member of psychedelic pop
group Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show, and the lead singer of almost all of the
group’s hit records and most memorable songs. As one of the biggest bands in the
world in the 1970s and early ’80s, Dr. Hook’s plaudits are impressive — a slate
that includes more than 60 gold and platinum albums for Locorriere. Now boomers can relive some of those magical nights with Dennis Locorriere: The Unique Voice of Dr. Hook. Years on, he still has one of the
finest voices around, and impassioned heartbreak and lost innocence are his memes, which he trades in without reservation.
Directed by Robert Garofalo, this two-hour concert disc features
all the hits fans know and love. Recorded at the first British Acoustic Festival
held in Shrewsbury in the summer of 2006, its track listing is as follows: “Walk Right In,” “Only Sixteen,” “Sharing the Night Together,” “A Couple More Years,” “I Don’t Want to Be Alone Tonight,” “Freakin’ at the Freaker’s Ball,” “Better Love Next Time,” “Sleeping Late,” “Baby Makes Her Blue Jeans Talk,” “When You’re in Love with a Beautiful Woman,” “The Millionaire,” “A Little Bit More,” “More Like the Movies,” “Hearts (Like Yours and Mine),” “If Not You,” “The Cover of the Rolling Stone,” “Sexy Eyes,” “Sylvia’s Mother,” “You Make My Pants Want to Get Up and Dance,” “Queen of the Silver Dollar,” “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan” and “Years From Now.” Special bonus features, running just over 35 minutes,
include behind-the-scenes footage, a photo gallery, a glimpse at an exclusive acoustic
studio recording session from Shepperton Film Studios earlier this year, and a backstage interview with Locorriere. For more information, click here; to purchase the DVD title via Amazon, click here.
Ryan Seacrest is Douche-tastic!
Random fact: a Google photo search for Ryan Seacrest yields 76,400 responses, while a same-minded search for the phrase “Ryan Seacrest is a douche” produces 8,460 results.
I realize there’s not perfect overlap, but that’s 11 percent of the original total, which seems hilariously high… and yet also not quite high enough.
Zoe Saldana Joins Star Trek Cast
Avatar co-star and Barack Obama supporter Zoe Saldana has joined the cast of J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek, according to Variety. She’ll play Uhura, a member of the bridge crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise who eventually rose to the rank of commander; Nichelle Nichols originated the role on the famous small screen sci-fi series.
Abrams is producing Star Trek, which revolves around the crew’s early
days at Starfleet Academy, through his Paramount-based Bad Robot
shingle. So far, Saldana joins Zachary Quinto, cast as the young Spock, and Anton Yelchin, cast as Pavel Checkov. Filming commences in November.
Guyana Tragedy: The Jim Jones Story
Originally broadcast in 1980 as a two-part television movie, this gripping recreation of the horrible tragedy of the Jonestown mass suicide in November 1978 connects largely owing to the mesmeric, Emmy-winning lead performance of Powers Boothe.
Directed by William Graham, Guyana Tragedy: The Jim Jones Story features a cast stuffed with heavyweight names and familiar faces — James Earl Jones, Ned Beatty, Brad Dourif, Diane Ladd, Meg Foster, Randy Quaid, Levar Burton, Colleen Dewhurst, Rosalind Cash, Veronica Cartwright and Irene Cara are among the supporting players with roles large and small — but it’s undisputably Boothe who anchors the tale of San Francisco preacher Jones, who relocated his followers to a religious colony carved from scratch into a remote South American jungle. Tracing Jones’ early social activist period to his rise as an ego-driven, modern day messiah, Guyana Tragedy wrings a lot of production value from its relatively low budget. And the climactic suicide sequence is convincingly recreated in quasi-documentary style, a credit to Graham. But the movie’s script — and in particular the dialogue — never gives the broader elements of the story (the social turmoil of the time, particularly among working-class-poor African-Americans) a full, insightful reckoning, so we’re left at a loss for the ingredients that informed a lot of Jones’ disciples, and made the Kool Aid-laced suicide of 913 individuals, including many women and children, possible. Boothe makes up for a lot of that with his eyes — he’s an ace at conveying compassion and dead-pool menace within the span of a single conversation — but the 189-minute running time requires a bit more, truth be told.
Housed on a region-free disc in a regular Amaray case, Guyana Tragedy: The Jim Jones Story comes presented in its original 1.33:1 full screen aspect ratio, with a billed Dolby digital soundtrack that suffers from a few pops and some seeming warping or range compression. Trailers for other VCI Entertainment releases are included, along with brief cast biographies. Yes, this is unfortunately a case of one of those releases — like in the early days of DVD — that bills “scene selection” as a supplemental extra, which is really a shame. Boothe won a flipping Emmy for this, and Robert Rodriguez has gone on record as saying that was one of the reasons he cast him in Sin City, so why weren’t Boothe’s representatives on the ball on this one? Even if they had to give up some time gratis, surely the profile bump of an honestly reflective DVD release would have earned the actor a bump in profile, and possibly some new industry fans. Alas, the lack of bonus features is Guyana Tragedy‘s real tragedy. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C (Movie) D- (Disc)