Total Recall (1990) - Two Weeks. Paul Verhoeven Sci-Fi Remakes: Why Now? RoboCop remake 2013: Viral YouTube video features aerial drones. The Total Recall remake, reviewed. Michael Gibson/Columbia Pictures © 2011. After you’ve watched Total Recall, come back and listen to our Spoiler Special discussion with Dana Stevens and Chris Wade. You can also download the podcast here. Dana Stevens is Slate's movie critic. Follow The Philip K. Of course, movie adaptations from works of literature aren’t only worthwhile to the extent that they resemble the stories they’re based on. The new Total Recall remake, directed by the Underworld franchise’s Len Wiseman, relies more closely on the 1990 movie than on the original source. In Wiseman’s version, the Mars angle has dropped out entirely (perhaps for some of the reasons Bryan Curtis mentions in his discussion of science fiction’s retreat from the Red Planet).
Colony-dwelling sad sack Doug Quaid (Colin Farrell) dreams of a more exciting and glamorous life—he even reads a James Bond paperback as he commutes on the Fall (which, this being the end of the 21st century, is very retro of him.) 'The Future Forms Of Life,' David Lance Film, Shows What Happens When We Play God. The idea of human beings playing God and creating new life forms is a sci-fi plot we're all familiar with. In these films and stories, more often than not the creations take on powers that nobody saw coming, and we're all left wondering -- did we go too far? David Lance's new short film, albeit a familiar plot, brings freshness to this theme. The new life form in the film is inspired by Dutch artist Theo Jansen's futuristic beach strolling animals. Jensen's creations, Strandbeests as he calls them (Dutch for "beach animals"), are made out of plastic yellow tubes and are self-propelled by the wind.
They are fascinating to watch and it's no wonder that Lance used Jensen's creations as inspiration for the film's protagonist. One of Theo Jansen's Strandbeests Lance's film, "The Future Forms Of Life," opens with the mechanical Strandbeest strolling through the park with help from an anonymous hooded human, who soon leaves the animal to continue onwards by itself. Chris Marker Dead: 'La Jetee' Director Dies At 91. PARIS — Chris Marker, the influential French filmmaker whose career spanned six decades, has died, France's Culture Ministry confirmed Monday. He was 91. President Francois Hollande led tributes to the director, whose large body of work includes the 1962 classic "La Jetee" – an award-winning post-apocalyptic movie that's often ranked among the best time-travel films ever made.
In a statement, Hollande said the 28-minute black and white film comprised almost entirely of stills "will be remembered by history. " Set in a post-World War III nuclear-devastated Paris, "La Jetee" tells the story of a prisoner sent to the past and future to save the present. The film was one of the first to use sci-fi notions of circular time and has since spawned a myriad of references. "La Jetee" will probably be best remembered as the inspiration behind Terry Gilliam's 1995 feature "Twelve Monkeys," but many critics say its influence stretches as far as James Cameron's 1984 and 1991 "Terminator" movies.
Stanley Kubrick's Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made. By Maria Popova Forty years of anticipation and how to almost-get an autograph from a cinematic icon. After the incredible success of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick began working on a large-scale biopic about Napoleon Bonaparte. He spent countless hours digging through manuscripts, reading books and researching the life of the great French emperor, created a meticulous card catalog of the places and doings of Napoleon’s inner circle, and amassed over 15,000 location scouting photographs and 17,000 slides of Napoleonic imagery.
Then he wrote a preliminary screenplay. Today, publisher Taschen releases Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made — an equally epic tome about the project that never happened, making Kubrick’s ambitious work on Napoleon available to the world for the first time as 10 books that live inside one giant volume. Donating = Loving Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month.
Share on Tumblr. Stanley Kubrick on Mortality, the Fear of Flying, and the Purpose of Existence: The 1968 Playboy Interview. 2001: A Space Odyssey. The Kentroversy Papers. The Hidden (1987) Opening pursuit Ferrari 308 GTS. Tom Cruise vs. Werner Herzog and Adventures in Perilous White People Tourism: It's Time for Trailer Hitch. This is awesome News, Videos, Reviews and Gossip - io9. The Good: AMAZING effects and character design! The battle droids actually *looked* like devices built for live combat situations—heavily-armoured, heavily-ARMED, and just...heavy!
The Bad: 1) WHEN will people finally drop the completely stupid "careful withdrawal of consciousness from virtual environment" trope? The rig on the interrogator's head is clearly a simple noninvasive magnetic-resonance device stimulating parts of his brain. You know how you "withdraw" from such an interface? YOU TURN IT OFF. 2) If a battle bot has some way of overloading its batteries or onboard generator to generate an EMP, IT WILL FRY ITSELF IN THE PROCESS. I know, I know, I'm a nitpicking geek...but, really, what's the excuse for complete scientific illiteracy in so-called "sci-fi" film-making? Spielberg Explains Ending of A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Some thoughts on Prometheus | city of tongues. On Friday night I caught a preview of Ridley Scott’s much anticipated Prometheus, and since despite the slightly OTT security they didn’t make me sign anything agreeing to an embargo, I thought I’d record my thoughts about this flawed, frustrating but intermittently brilliant film.
The first thing to say is that you should ignore the misinformation about it not being a prequel to Alien, because it is, quite explicitly (and sometimes to its detriment). Indeed if you’ve seen the trailer you’ve probably got the basic idea: trail of archaeological clues lead humans to distant planet, hope turns to terror, horrible secrets consume them. The film opens on a suitably epic note, with aerial images of a stark, volcanic landscape. The sense we are watching a sort of creation is powerfully evoked, partly by the stirring music, partly by the manner in which the landscape itself echoes the deep structure of biology.
These scenes with Fassbender are masterly. Like this: Like Loading... Human Rights Watch Film Festival at Lincoln Center. Sundance Selects The artist Ai Weiwei, left, in “Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry,” in the Human Rights Watch Film Festival at Lincoln Center. James Helmer/Cinedigm Entertainment and Docurama Films Lieut. Elle Helmer in “The Invisible War,” Kirby Dick’s look at sexual abuse in the military. Katherine Fairfax Wright/Call Me Kuchu The gay-rights activist David Kato in “Call Me Kuchu.” This unsettling exposé, which won the audience award at the 2012 , may be the most outraged film in the annual Human Rights Watch Film Festival, which opened on Thursday and continues at the Walter Reade Theater in Lincoln Center through June 28. Last week the Pentagon reported that there had been 154 suicides among active-duty troops this year, a rate of nearly one a day.
“The Invisible War” is one of three festival films devoted to women’s rights. In addition to villains, many of this year’s films feature heroes who stand up to power and injustice. Mr. Mr. Mr. The statistics are horrifying. Ms. Michael Fassbender’s David in Prometheus is just the latest great robot performance. Still from the Prometheus promotional video "Meet David. " For all the blood and tentacles in Ridley Scott’s new sci-fi horror film Prometheus, the creepiest part may be Michael Fassbender’s wonderfully uncanny performance as the robot David. Many actors have leapt into the discomfiting chasm between the human and the inhuman, known as the uncanny valley, but few actors have as gracefully danced to-and-fro across the divide.
He’s such a robot! He’s such a human! That eerie territory has never been so much fun. Of course, Fassbender isn’t the first actor to stake his claim on the uncanny valley. Many actors, in fact, have turned in their very finest performances while playing androids. But in the treacherous territory of the uncanny valley, there are many pitfalls. To explore the art of robot acting, we’ve rounded up ten of the most notable performances, and ranked them on a binary scale. 1. 1.
Gigolo Joe isn’t the only movie android to steal his moves from the movies. 1. 1. 1. 1. 0. 0. Todd Solondz: I’m Judd Apatow’s dark side. At one point in my conversation with filmmaker Todd Solondz — which was very friendly and funny overall — he accused me of using big words and having gone to graduate school. (Only for one semester, I protested.) This from a guy who describes his own movies as “a kind of crucible” designed to force the audience to confront uncomfortable truths.
That’s not the only evident contradiction in the life and work of Solondz, a writer and director who burst to prominence in the late ’90s with the art-house hits “Welcome to the Dollhouse” and “Happiness,” but since then has pursued an ever more individual and idiosyncratic path. Solondz insists on referring to his movies as comedies, despite the fact that they have often dealt with the darkest possible themes, including child abuse, rape and suicide, and almost universally refuse to provide a conventional happy ending.
Todd, one of the things that’s almost universal in your films is that you offer us a protagonist that we may not like. Right. Todd Solondz: I'm Judd Apatow's dark side - Interviews. South Park City Sushi. SCTV Uzbeks CCCP1. Ricardo Montalban School Of Fine Acting. SCTV Midnight Cowboy Remake. SCTV, 11/6/81 - "THE MERV GRIFFIN SHOW: THE 60s" Leave it to Beaver 25th Anniversary Party. What makes ’Borgen’ and ’The Killing’ special? The most popular female police officer in Danish fiction has to be Sarah Lund from ’The Killing’, who in addition to her fascinating character has also immortalised the Faroese jumper (Photo: Tine Harden/DR) ’Borgen’ and ’The Killing 2’ have both been nominated for the prestigious BAFTA award, which is the British equivalent to the Oscars.
The Danish series are fighting it out in the ‘Best International Series’ category, which the first season of ‘The Killing’ won last year ahead of successes such as the US series ‘Mad Men’. Both series have triumphed in Britain, where Sarah Lund from ’The Killing’ and her Faroese jumper have become something of a national treasure. ’Borgen’ and ’The Killing’ build upon the distinguished tradition that Danish public broadcaster DR’s drama station has developed over the past 15 years, But what is it that places just these two series among the best in the world? Popular series are multilayered This is the subject of a study carried out by Lynge A.
Gunhild Agger. Anne Hathaway - The Daily Show with Jon Stewart - 12/01/08. Cognitive Science Movie Index. Project Prometheus. The Big Lebowski (1998) - Memorable quotes. Global horror takes a new "Road" - Horror. Is there any country on earth — at least any country with its own cinema tradition — that doesn’t produce its own homegrown horror films, spiced up with a little local gruesomeness?
Every time I write about horror, I get at least a couple of letters from people who see the cruelty, bloodlust, misogyny and so forth found in many such movies as a symptom of contemporary culture’s descent into depravity and brutality. On one hand, I always want to leave room for divergent tastes and opinions, but on the other — that’s just not true. The appetite for gore and terror that finds its modern expression in horror movies is nothing new: Check out the uproarious Brothers Grimm tale “How Some Children Played at Slaughtering,” in which an entire family is destroyed in a pointless orgy of violence. You can certainly argue that you find horror movies repellent, or that they reflect deeply unpleasant aspects of human nature — but you don’t get to blame any of that on Ronald Reagan or George W. Pick of the week: Childhood adventure from a Japanese master - Our Picks.
“I Wish” is an old-fashioned kind of movie about a subject that might sound, at first, both worn-out and a little retrograde: the dislocating and disorienting effects of a family breakup. It’s also a movie whose principal actors and characters are children, that tries to view the world from a child’s point of view — and that’s an enterprise so perilous, so prone to easy gags, cheap tears and nauseating sentimentality, that hardly anyone ever gets it right. But “I Wish” is a wonderful adventure film that’s no less thrilling for its modest scale, and a film whose emotional power and intelligence sneak up on you. Thoroughly accessible and rewarding, it might finally mark the mainstream breakthrough (relatively speaking) of Hirokazu Kore-eda, one of the finest living Japanese directors. I should add that “I Wish” is that rarest of fauna in the international art-house market, a genuine family movie that will charm both adults and children, albeit for somewhat different reasons.
Kermit the Frog's German TV Offense - Hans Beinholtz - The Colbert Report - 2012-02-05. “Children of Men” Recut as the Darkest, Artiest Sitcom Ever. New Dolby Technology to Make Horror Movies Scarier. FilmDistrict If you don’t like the sounds in scary movies but sometimes get dragged along to the theater anyway, you’re not going to be a big fan of the latest technology from Dolby Laboratories. The company announced a new sound system Monday called Dolby Atmos, which can move sounds around a theater in an entirely new and realistic way. Rather than pushing the sound out from the left and right side of the theater, as happens in movies today, the new Atmos system will also deliver sound from above in a theater and will be able to swirl sound around in any direction.
During a demonstration at Dolby’s San Francisco headquarters, Stuart Bowling, senior technical marketing manager for Dolby Laboratories, said the Atmos system was one of the most advanced technical jumps the company had made in 20 years and would create an entirely new viewing experience for theatergoers. The new sound system is incredibly realistic. “Whores’ Glory”: A riveting, humane prostitution documentary. Prostitution isn’t just the world’s oldest profession. It’s also a longtime focus of cultural obsession, across many historical periods and on every continent, from the poetry of Catullus to the woodblock prints of 19th-century Japan. There’s such a long history of male artists, writers and filmmakers who depict prostitution in erotic, romantic and sentimental terms that it’s only natural to approach Austrian documentarian Michael Glawogger’s “Whores’ Glory” with suspicion.
Indeed, in the film’s opening scene, Glawogger’s camera directly engages the lurid allure of sex work, showing a group of scantily clad young women in a Bangkok brothel called the Fish Tank as they try to attract clients: Pretending to make out with each other, pressing their breasts and buttocks against the window, using a laser pointer to pick out likely-looking men on the street. Compared with the dire conditions found in Faridpur and Reynosa, the women who work at the Fish Tank have almost middle-class lives. Stephen Colbert's End of the World of the Week - Doomsday Preppers - The Colbert Report - 2012-18-04. BATMAN SURF WITH THE JOKER 1967. The Fourth Stooge: Memories Of 'Uncle Shemp' : Monkey See.
Hide captionShemp Howard (at left) is seen in an undated studio handout photo with actor Emil Sitka (second from left) and the other two then-Stooges, Larry Fine and Moe Howard. AP/Ventura County Star Shemp Howard (at left) is seen in an undated studio handout photo with actor Emil Sitka (second from left) and the other two then-Stooges, Larry Fine and Moe Howard. This weekend, the Farrelly Brothers' version of The Three Stooges arrives in theaters. You'll see plenty of Larry, Moe and Curly. But who won't you see? That's right. "Well, I remember once he came home with a black eye," Bill Goodwin says, "and I asked him what had happened, and he told me that they accidentally — I forget which one, whether it was Moe or Larry that did it, but, uh, he accidentally got hit very hard when he was supposed to, you know, not get hit hard. " Eventually, Shemp left the group he'd formed with his brothers to go solo in Hollywood, and his brother Curly took over.
‘The Cabin in the Woods,’ by Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon. Prometheus Full Trailer 2. Guy Pearce explains his anger. Kyle Sees The Passion (Season 8, Episode 4) - Video Clips. Total Recall – Official Trailer. The Best Memes From Season Two Of "The Walking Dead" ‘The Raid - Redemption,’ Directed by Gareth Huw Evans. Robert De Niro: I'm prone to overanalysis - Movies.
What makes sushi great? - Chefs and Cooks. What came before "The Hunger Games" - The Hunger Games. Julianne Moore in HBO’s Game Change, reviewed. The hero’s new fortress of solitude. An extraordinary testament from Iran’s most persecuted filmmaker. Pick of the week: A disturbing Aussie serial-killer drama - Our Picks: Movies. Paul Weitz’s ‘Being Flynn,’ Starring Robert De Niro. GLAAD To Honor Any Mainstream Film That Gets One Thing Right About Being Gay. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Anyone Ever Feel This Way? (Video) 3 Stooges Shemp Blooper. PT 2 Shemp Howard In Pleased To Mitt You. Michael Mann and John Logan’s lost Hollywood noir. The Simpsons' 500th Episode, Starring Julian Assange: A Look Back at a One of America's Most Politically Relevant Shows. MIRANDA JULY. ‘Bullhead,’ Directed by Michael R. Roskam. Groundhog Day: How Many Days Does Bill Murray Spend Stuck. Coleman Francis. 15 Amazing Animated Short films.
David Lynch - Crazy Clown Time. 10 Movie Cops More Corrupt Than Woody Harrelson in "Rampart" Eva green. A Conversation With Bela Tarr – Hammer to Nail. Hungary: The films of Bela Tarr. Cinema’s ultra-dark unknown genius.