The reason for Dennis Lim‘s career-review article about director Abel Ferrara in today’s N.Y. Times is — wait three years for it — the 10.17 opening of Ferrara’s Mary at the Anthology Film Archives. Abel Ferrara A compressed, probing, well-ordered drama about eroding values and the lure of mystical transformation, Mary — which stars Juliette … Read more
Mean Mag has a short video of Bill Hader being Bad Lieutenant (the old Abel Ferrara-Harvey Keitel version, not the new Herzog). No video screen because Mean’s embed code doesn’t adjust to column size — brilliant!
My Cinevegas visit is over, I leave for McCarran Airport three hours from now and I wish I could say I saw something here that really lifted me out of my seat. But I had an excellent time all around, and for that I owe a word of thanks to the BWR people who brought … Read more
Defamer‘s Stu Van Airsdale has spoken to Werner Herzog about his Bad Lieutenant film that will star Nicolas Cage and will shoot in New Orleans for budgetary reasons. It is not, Herzog says, a remake of Abel Ferrara‘s original but a continuation in a James Bond franchise sense. He also tells Van Airsdale that he … Read more
A remake of Abel Ferrara‘s Bad Lieutenant will begin shoting in the late summer with Nicolas Cage reinterpreting Harvey Keitel‘s coked-out, self-destructive Manhattan cop and — talk about a curious but totally dynamite call — the great Werner Herzog directing. Inspired! I love it sight unseen. The only uh-oh is that it’s being partly slapped … Read more
Here, sequentially, are some of the Cannes Film Festival day-by-day highlights: Wednesday, 5.14: Fernando Meirelles‘ Blindness (comp.). Thursday, 5.15: Pablo Trapero‘s Leonera and Ari Folman‘s Waltz with Bashir (comp.) along with Mark Osborne and John Stevenson‘s Kung Fu Panda (non-comp), Steve McQueen‘s Hunger and de Bong Joon Ho, Leos Carax and Michel Gondry‘s Tokyo! (Un … Read more
Agence France Press published an article two days ago about the rumors surrounding the ’08 Cannes Film Festival line-up. The confirmed Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and the rumored Sex and The City were mentioned, of course. Both would show out-of-competition like Ocean’s 13 andU2-3D were last year. The usual Cannes … Read more
The Reeler’s Stu Van Airsdale has the lineup for the 2007 NY Film festival (9.29 to 10.14), and a good portion seems like a replay of last May’s Cannes Film Festival. There are, however, some notable fresh-pick exceptions — Wes Anderson‘s The Darjeeling Limited for the opening-nighter (old news), Noah Baumbach‘s Margot at the Wedding … Read more
An obvious irony is ignored by Dennis Lim in his 8.12 N.Y. Times essay about the persistence of the body-snatcher metaphor in American cinema, with four films based on or inspired by Jack Finney‘s original 1955 novel having been made over five decades — Don Siegel‘s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (’56), Phil Kaufman‘s same-titled … Read more
Neil Jordan‘s The Brave One (Warner Bros., 9.14), otherwise known as Jodie Foster-does-Death-Wish-slash-Ms. 45, is starting to be shown to select long-lead press with the idea of interviewing Foster before she leaves the U.S. later this month to start shooting her next film, Nim’s Island (20th Century Fox), in Queensland, Australia A WB publicist told … Read more
The good Cannes Film Festival announcement news is that many of the predictions came true and a lot of high-profile titles and big-name directors will be in attendance at the 60th anniversary gathering next month. I’ve got an initial count of at least 23 must-sees, including (thank the movie gods) Joel and Ethan Coen‘s No … Read more
I remember having a quick chat with IFC Films topper Jonathan Sehring and IFC marketing exec Ryan Werner near the end of last year’s Toronto Film Festival, and being asked what I liked that hadn’t been picked up. I said I was pretty taken with Abel Ferrara‘s Mary, which I’d seen a night or two … Read more