Saturday, August 05, 2006

Film News This Week

Doesn't seem to be one the Web, but this week's TimeOut Chicago has a "5 Minutes with" interview with Noel Neill, the classic Lois Lane who has a cameo in the new Superman Returns. Get this Q&A:
You don't see any residuals from the TV show, do you?
No, thanks to President Reagan, who was president of the Screen Actors Guild at the time. We were getting them up to '65, but he got rid of all the residuals. It really loused up so may people's lives. If I were getting them, I'd be living in the Bahamas, on the beach!
Republicans. Is there anything they don't screw up?

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De Palma's adaptation of James Ellroy's The Black Dahlia opens the Venice Film Festival, which will also include new films by Resnais, Frears, Spike Lee, and David Lynch, who will be honored with a Golden Lion award. Films in competition include work by Jacquot, Straub and Huillet, Verhoeven, To, Tsai Ming-Liang and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. New films not in competition include work by Kurosawa Kiyoshi and Neil Labute

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Looking at last weekend's box office report, I noticed a huge per-screen take for a noirish foreign film called 13 (Tzameti), though it's only playing on one screen (in NYC) so far. TONY liked it but warns against watching the spoiler preview (like I did). Suffice it to say there's enough violence in this film to get the Tarantino crowd over any possible French culture issues. The preview reminded me of Fight Club just a tiny bit. Changing Times (a film this Techine fan is most looking forward to) and Wondrous Oblivious also are starting off well enough.

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Did you see the recent Times article about that annoying political doc America: From Freedom to Fascism? OK, you had to figure its politics were nuts even without seeing it, but what made me laugh was the way the filmmaker faked the claim that it played at the Cannes festival:
The film was not on the program at Cannes, however, not even for screenings made under the festival’s aegis without being in the awards competition. Mr. Russo, the film’s director, writer and producer, just set up an inflatable screen on a beach. Photographs posted at one of Mr. Russo’s Web sites depict an audience of fewer than 50 people spread out on a platform on the sand.


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Soderberg and Co. are making another sequel to Ocean's 11? I'm not interested in the series beyond seeing what projects the franchise enables Soderberg, Clooney, etc. to afford. IMDb lists the ever-busy Soderbergh's projects as including a Che Guevara biopic with a killer cast--Benicio Del Toro, Javier Bardem, and...Franka Potente!

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