Day: June 28, 2010

Hollywood Round-up, 6/28

"Can we maybe de-friend a few people?"

By Jason Apuzzo.  • Twilight‘s Facebook page currently has more followers than Iron Man, Harry Potter, Transformers and Toy Story combined. Really wishing movie futures trading was legal at this point. Fans are already raving about the new film, and early buzz from critics is strong.  Fangirls starting to muscle out fanboys as the dominant movie audience?

• Toy Story 3 won top honors at the weekend box office again, with everything else doing lackluster business.  Interesting footnote: it turns out that Iron Man 2 did not do as well as its predecessor, domestically.  I think that’s because Mickey Rourke is starting to look like the mad professor from Tarantula!

• Spike Lee will be directing a new terrorist thriller. Working title: Nuke The Right Thing.

• Restrepo was the top film at the indie box office this weekend, with better per-screen averages than either Knight and Day or Grown Ups. Glad to see this.  Read the LFM review of Restrepo here.

• There’s a new teaser trailer out for The Social Network, about Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg. Underwhelmed here.  The trailer’s making me think this movie’s going to feel like jury duty.

• Captain America supposedly starts shooting today. Unless it doesn’t?  Speculation brewing.

• Tim Burton is apparently moving forward with a new 3D adaptation of The Addams Family. John Kerry should play Lurch.

Carla Bruni.

• Oliver Stone’s South of the Border is coming out, and even The New York Times is noticing some whopping factual errors in the film.  NY Post critic Kyle Smith also takes the movie apart today in his review.  I still can’t believe how many films Stone’s been allowed to make, post-Alexander.

• London’s Sunday Times asks whether Christopher Nolan’s older brother is a bizarre, delusional psychopath-criminal mastermind who haunts Nolan’s work like a ghost. I can’t say, but it’s certainly fun to think about.  In related news, Nolan talks Batman 3 today with MTV.

• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … the wonderful Camille Paglia blasts Lady Gaga in The NY Times today, calling her “a high-concept fabrication without an ounce of genuine eroticism.” We agree, which more or less justifies posting a picture of Carla Bruni, by way of contrast.

And that’s what’s happening today in the wonderful world of Hollywood …

Posted on June 28th, 2010 at 3:48pm.

Four Lions Wins the Audience Award at LA FilmFest

They're big in LA.

By Jason Apuzzo. We’re very pleased to report that Chris Morris’ striking new comedy Four Lions, which I reviewed last week here at LFM (I absolutely loved it), has won the audience award for best narrative feature at the recently completed Los Angeles Film Festival.

I’m not surprised by this, given the audience’s overwhelmingly positive reaction in the screening I attended – but at the same time I’m thrilled to learn that the film won this important award.  This will certainly boost the film’s chances for securing a distribution deal here in the U.S.

Best wishes to whole team behind Four Lions, and we’ll keep everyone here at LFM updated on when and where you can see this extraordinary film.

Posted on June 28th, 2010 at 1:43pm.

The Berlin Wall: The Wall – A World Divided Tonight on PBS

By Jason Apuzzo. Apropos of LFM contributor Jennifer Baldwin’s review of the newly restored Metropolis, PBS happens to be showing what looks to be a fine documentary on the history of the Berlin Wall tonight at 10pm EST (check your local listings as times may vary).

The title of the film is The Wall – A World Divided, and the film recently received a glowing review from The Wall Street Journal’s Michael Judge: “… reminiscent of the brilliant 2006 German drama The Lives of Others, which won the Oscar for best foreign film that year … The Wall—A World Divided takes us where only fine documentary filmmaking can: Into the hearts of everyday people who too often suffer at the hands of despots and their ideologies. Don’t miss it.”

The film’s trailer and further details are available at the PBS website.

I had the chance to visit the Berlin Wall and Checkpoint Charlie just a few years before the collapse of the East German communist regime.  It was an overwhelming, disturbing and eerie experience.  It’s difficult to describe what it’s like to see what amounts to being an enormous cage designed to trap people inside.  I wish more Americans had somehow had the chance to experience the grim spectacle of The Wall themselves, in order to understand how precious – and even precarious – our freedom is.  If documentaries such as this one from PBS can help restore an appreciation of our freedom, then so much the better.

Posted on June 28th, 2010 at 1:20pm.

LFM Review: The Complete Metropolis

By Jennifer Baldwin. With almost 30 minutes of lost footage restored, The Complete METROPOLIS is a true cinematic event.

For anybody who read the news two years ago that a nearly complete 16mm negative of METROPOLIS was discovered in Buenos Aires (including 30 minutes of additional footage previously thought lost forever), the anticipation and excitement has been building for when the film would finally be restored and we could all see Fritz Lang’s original cut of his masterpiece for the first time since its Berlin premiere in 1927.

The time has now come. After a premiere in Berlin earlier this year and a North American premiere in Los Angeles this past April, the film is finally being screened in theaters across the U.S. and Canada – all leading up to the DVD release of the Complete METROPOLIS in November 2010.

The tale of METROPOLIS – originally panned by critics and disliked by audiences on its initial release in Germany, and later mutilated by international distributors, who turned the film into a diluted Frankenstein story (a quarter of Lang’s original film was thought lost for decades, one of the ultimate “lost masterpieces” of the silent era) – is a tale well known to classic movie fans and silent cinema enthusiasts. This latest chapter in the film’s life only enhances its mystique and mystery. Almost 40 minutes of this landmark film was lost for nearly a century only to be found hidden away in a Buenos Aires museum in 2008. What was found in Argentina is now the most complete version to date. The print was deemed nearly complete because of the way it matched up to the original Gottfried Huppertz score (the only complete document still in existence from the 1927 premiere). With almost 30 minutes of film time restored, this newest version of METROPOLIS is the closest we might ever come to seeing the film the way Fritz Lang intended.


I was fortunate enough to attend a screening of the Complete METROPOLIS at the Detroit Film Theater earlier this month. It was one of the best movie experiences I’ve had in a long while, thrilling and impressive, making me fall in love with METROPOLIS all over again. Continue reading LFM Review: The Complete Metropolis