Heath Ledger

Australian actor Heath Ledger was found dead today in a New York City apartment of an apparent drug overdose. He was 28 years old. Ledger is survived by his two-year-old daughter Matilda Rose Ledger.

Man, what can I say? What a terrible, sad loss of a vital artist just coming into his own. Looks like The Dark Knight will be Ledger's last completed project. He was currently filming The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus for director Terry Gilliam.

Once Upon a Time In Japan

Charles Bronson, the son of Lithuanian immigrant coal miners, was born Charles Buchinski on November 3rd, 1921. His stoicism and craggy manliness made him an unlikely star, earning him supporting roles in over 100 films, including a clutch of classics like The Great Escape, The Magnificent Seven, and Once Upon a Time In the West. After years of being one of the top box-office draws everywhere else in the world, it took Death Wish to make the 53-year-old Bronson a star in America. Inspired by the Death Wish-fest on AMC this week (American Movie Classics? More like the Any Movie Channel), enjoy the Great Leather Face himself schlepping for Mandom, a Japanese aftershave lotion:



"Mmmmm.... Mandom."

Brad Renfro

Bully and The Client star Brad Renfro died today. He was 25.

RIP Vampira

Maila Nurmi aka Vampira died yesterday at age 86. Best known as the silent, slender-waisted zombie vixen in Ed Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space, Vampira made her showbiz breakthrough as a pioneering horror movie hostess, inspiring Cassandra Peterson's much better known character, Elvira. Nurmi went on to a spate of cult movie roles, including I Passed For White, Sex Kittens Go To College with Mamie Van Doren, and The Magic Sword for "Mystery Science Theater 3000" all-star director, Bert I. Gordon. Still, her most memorable role was in Wood's camp classic staring alongside a frail Bela Lugosi.

"I want more life, father."

Blade Runner: The Final Cut Limited Edition (2007)

LOS ANGELES: NOVEMBER, 2019

The single most important thing a science fiction film can do is create a seamless, believable future world- a contiguous setting that is appropriately high tech, yet plausible. World building is a fine art, a ballet of careful art direction, tasteful costume design, precise expository dialog, and performances grounded in an emotional reality. In all of these respects, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner is the most convincingly real vision of the future since 2001: A Space Odyssey and perhaps the single most complete and influential future world ever captured on film. Before Blade Runner, depictions of the future were largely the Utopian progeny of Gene Rodenbery or George Lucas. Man's humanity was never a question. Technology was simply a tool to explore the stars with. Phillip K. Dick was always suspicious- of technology, humanity, even reality itself- and this paranoia informs every aspect of Blade Runner. Before his death in 1981, Dick attended a screening of 10 minutes of footage of the then-unfinished film. Overwhelmed, he was shocked the filmmakers had captured the world exactly as he imagined it in his head.

Swimming through the copious extras on the Blade Runner: The Final Cut Limited Edition set, it would seem that director Scott expended more time and metal energy conceptualizing this film than any other in his career. The sheer number of ideas that populate this world- the spouts of pollution that erupt in the opening "Hades Landscape" sequence, the ethnic makeup of the extras, to the operation of 2019 parking meters- is breathtaking.

Also breathtaking is the breadth of the extras on the set- literally every aspect is covered with a worthy level of obsessive detail. Casting (Dustin Hoffman was seriously considered before Harrison Ford), costuming (Michael Kaplan discusses the pantyhose of the future), and post-production (Hear Harrison stumbling through outtakes of the voice over). Compleitists can rejoice, as the set provides five cuts of the film, the US Theatrical Cut, the slightly more violent European Cut, the long-lost Workprint that got the Blade Runner revival going when it was uncovered in 1990, the much-praised (and re-appraised) Director's Cut and the shinny new Final Cut. Blade Runner's Achilles heel was always it proliferation of cuts. The Final Cut, is not the Lucasized retrofit that many feared, simply a further refinement of the 1992 Director's Cut, with some additional digital spit and polish. Matte lines have been cleaned, Spinner wires painted out. Continuity errors have been tweaked. And the voice over is dead; long live the voice over.

But this, honest-to-god Final Cut is the crown jewel of them all. A worthy retrofit for a classic among classics.

2007: The Year in Review

Theatrical Viewing Experiences 2007
*Watched on DVD

1. No Country for Old Men

2. 3:10 to Yuma

3. Superbad

4. Zodiac

5. Knocked Up

6. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

7. Black Book

8. Inland Empire

9. Paris Je T'aime
   

10. After the Wedding

11. The Dolemite Explosion

12. Apocalypto

13. Spiderman 3

14. Bourne Ultimatum

15. American Gangster

16. Babel*

17. 300

18. Blade Runner: The Final Cut

19. Eastern Promises

20. Letters From Iwo Jima

21. Rescue Dawn*

22. Sicko

23. The Simpsons Movie

24. Sunshine

25. 28 Weeks Later

26. Grindhouse

27. Die Hard 4.0

28. La Vie En Rose

29. The Science of Sleep*

30. Hot Fuzz

31. The Host*

32. Rob Zombie’s Halloween*

33. The Tripper

34. Breach*

35. The Mist

36. Talk To Me*

37. Crazy Love*

38. Severance*

39. Bug*

40. 30 Days of Night

41. Paprika

Disco Halloween

I'm not one to beat the "Hollywood-has-run-out-of-ideas" drum too loudly, but this latest entry in the remake-everything-made- before-1985 sweepstakes is really scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I give you the Prom Night remake.



Wait, you don't remember Prom Night? Seriously? You know, slasher movie, came out about 1980? Stupid kids making out and getting offed? Nerds get it in the van? With Jamie Lee Curtis? Creepy opening with little kids causing an accidental death? And Leslie Nielsen as the principal? Okay, Leslie Nielsen as the disco dancing principal? Ah, I knew you knew the one.



Talk about a carbon copy of something that wasn't that original to start with. Halloween, for all of its grace and style, was built out of shopworn pieces, even for 1978. It was John Carpenter's stylish treatment of those hackneyed elements that made the film into a all-time classic. So why remake a film that was a rip-off of a rip-off? At least the original Prom Night, bless its unimaginative and derivative little heart, was rated R. For some reason, the studio decided that the remake should be PG-13. No gore, no nudity, no drugs, and judging by the trailer, none of the campy fun of seeing Leslie Nielsen disco dance as a severed head goes sailing onto the dance floor.

Just because it's old, doesn't make it a "classic." Or even fondly remembered. Or any damn good to start with.

The unfortunate casualty of this situation is not just originality, common sense, or good taste, but Idris Elba, who has a thankless role in this turd as a cop. Stringer Bell gotta eat!