Category: Celebs

“No Country for Old Men” Gets the Cinephilia & Beyond Treatment!

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No Country for Old Men is a modern classic.  If you agree, then you’re going to want to check out No Country for Old Men: The Coen Brothers and Cormac McCarthy’s Ruthless Examination of Life.

Click on the link and you’ll find…

  • Joel Coen & Ethan Coen’s screenplay for No Country for Old Men
  • Lessons from the Screenplay: No Country for Old Men—Don’t Underestimate the Audience.
  • Joel and Ethan Coen, Josh Brolin, and Javier Bardem discuss the making of No Country for Old Men.
  • “Just a cameraman”: an interview with Roger Deakins by Lynnea Chapman King
  • Storyboards
  • The making of No Country for Old Men
  • No Country for Old Men: Josh Brolin’s Unauthorized Behind the Scenes
  • The Coen Brothers interview on No Country for Old Men (2007)
  • Rare behind-the-scenes photos
  • and much more!

Sly Stallone Regularly Posting “Rambo 5” Pics

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If you’re not following Sylvester Stallone’s Instagram, you should. Sly posts several updates a week and his most recent was the photo above with this…

Every few days until the MOVIE comes out I’m going to post images from the upcoming RAMBO . See if you can follow along with the story using your imagination. All of the images that I post will be in black-and-white, but the film will be in dramatic color… #rambo5

I am more psyched for Rambo 5 than any of the other previous Rambo films. Not because I will think it will be the best, but because I know how good it will be. Can’t wait for Sly to amaze us all once again.

Martin Scorsese’s 131 Essential Films

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Martin Scorsese is as much a film lover as a film director.  Colin Ainsworth at Mental Floss has compiled 131 Essential Movies According to Martin Scorsese.   

Of the 131 films on Scorsese’s list, I’ve seen the following 35:

1. Nosferatu (1922)
2. Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922) 
3. Metropolis (1927)
4. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
5. Stagecoach (1939)
6. Citizen Kane (1941)
7. Cat People (1942)
8. Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)
9. Gilda (1946)
10. Beauty & The Beast (1946)
11. The Lady From Shanghai (1947)
12. T-Men (1947)
13. Raw Deal (1948)
14. The Third Man (1949)
15. Gun Crazy (1950)
16. Night and the City (1950)
17. The Bad and the Beautiful (1952)
18. House of Wax (1953)
19. Pickup on South Street (1953)
20. Dial M for Murder (1954)
21. Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
22. The Searchers (1956)
23. Touch of Evil (1958)
24. Vertigo (1958)
25. The Hustler (1961)
26. Cape Fear (1962)
27. Jason and the Argonauts (1963)
28. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
29. Midnight Cowboy (1969)
30. Klute (1971)
31. The Godfather (1972)
32. Apocalypse Now (1979)
33. Heaven’s Gate (1980)
34. Do the Right Thing (1989)
35. The Player (1992)

Obviously, everyone’s mileage will vary but I found it interesting that there are as many films that I loved on the list (Stagecoach, The Searchers, Godfather) as there are films I felt were over-rated (2001: A Space Odyssey, Midnight Cowboy, Klute).

John Wick & Jack Carter Get a Tune (Tone) Up by John Beatty

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Regular readers probably remember seeing the John Wick & Jack Carter piece that John Beatty created and gifted to me back in November.   After he was finished John decided it would look better with a gray wash and created / added to the piece as you can see above.  You can see it even better and bigger if you click on the image.

I’ve attached the U-Stream of John adding the tones below.  You can check out all of John’s live drawing recordings here.

Our Top 2018 Posts and All-Time Favorites!

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As we head into 2019, I thought it would be interesting to see our top 2018 posts and our all-time favorites.  So, without further adieu, here are the 2018 most viewed posts…

  1.  Schwarzenegger in “King Lear” & Robin Williams in “Jack and the Beanstalk”
  2.  Louis Meyers: Evidence He Was the Zodiac Killer
  3.  “Dancing in the Sky” by Dani and Lizzi
  4.  11 Nightmarish Facts About “Nosferatu”
  5.  The Final “Sicario: Day of the Soldado” Trailer is Here!
  6.  The TOP 10 MOST ICONIC HORROR MOVIE VILLAINS!
  7.  Steve Reeves as Superman
  8.  New Billy the Kid Photo Discovered
  9.  Bruce Lee in The Matrix and More
  10.  “Creed 2” Poster by Gerardo Moreno!

And our all-time favs…

  1.  Schwarzenegger in “King Lear” & Robin Williams in “Jack and the Beanstalk”
  2.  Zodiac Killer Code Cracked?
  3.  Louis Meyers: Evidence He Was the Zodiac Killer
  4. New Billy the Kid Photo Discovered
  5.  Real Clown Or Horror-Movie Clown?
  6.   Joel Osteen in Jacksonville
  7.  Steve Reeves as Superman
  8.  “Fast 7” Teaser: This is Where Roads Part
  9.  The Life and Times of Deputy U.S. Marshall Bass Reeves
  10.  “Dancing in the Sky” by Dani and Lizzi

Thanks to everyone who checks in here.  I hope your 2018 was a good one and your 2019 will be even better!

“Bird Box” / Z-View

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Bird Box (2018)

Director: Susanne Bier

Screenplay: Eric Heisserer based on the novel by Josh Malerman

Stars: Sandra Bullock, Trevante Rhodes, John Malkovich, Sarah Paulson, Jacki Weaver and B.D. Wong.

The Pitch: “Let’s turn the apocalyptic novel Bird Box into a movie!”

Tagline: Never Lose Sight of Survival.

The Overview: Beware of Spoilers…

When an unknown global pandemic strikes a diverse group of strangers find themselves barricaded in a house.  They soon discover that unknown entities are causing people who see them to go crazy and kill themselves or others.  As the time they’re holed up grows longer and supplies grow smaller, they become as much a threat to each other as the unknown that awaits outside.

I’m a huge fan of apocalyptic movies where strangers must find a way to get along to survive.  Bird Box falls into this category and doesn’t disappoint.  Although this is clearly a Sandra Bullock showcase, she is surrounded by an excellent supporting cast.   Trevante Rhodes is especially good.

Fans of The Mist, World War Z and the like should really enjoy this new twist on the apocalypse.

Rating:

Why Stallone is Still the Greatest Action Star

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Renaldo Matadeen and CBR.com remind us why Stallone Is Still the Greatest Action Star.   Here are a few tidbits…

Stallone picks up this accolade for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it’s his longevity that really puts him ahead in the field. His resume is stacked, with untouchable franchises like Rambo and Rocky under his belt, not to mention other projects that impressed fans of the ’80s and ’90s action scene.

…Creed and Expendables franchises perfectly illustrate his staying power…

…another reason he deserves the title of greatest action star — he’s adapted to the landscape…

That’s another reason why he’s the best action star, period. He mixes drama with his heroics in a style unlike any of his peers. Creed got Stallone an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, and he was previously nominated for Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay for Rocky in 1976, which is something the likes of Bruce Willis, Kurt Russell, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jean Claude Van Damme can’t boast.

Check out the Matadeen’s entire piece, it’s worth your time.

“Mission Impossible: Fallout” Trivia

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Rob Hunter and Film School Rejects present 51 Things We Learned from the Mission: Impossible – Fallout Commentary.  Here are three of my favorites…

7. They tested shorter cuts of the film per the studio’s request, but each attempt saw the scores plummet. Cruise told them “it doesn’t matter how long it is, it matters how long it feels.”

17. The HALO sequence saw them jumping out of the plane at 25,000 feet, and it’s all done live in a single shot. The city lights below are added in post, but the jump and fall are 100% real. “We talked about this for a year. How are going to get this shot?” The camera operator for the scene is wearing a camera mounted to the top of his own helmet, and the whole thing is a legitimately thrilling sequence. Here, I’ll let a very excited and proud Cruise tell you about jumping out of the plane for the scene. “Now he’s backwards. He leaves backwards. I’m coming right at him. Now I have to get from there I have to get within three feet, not two feet ten inches, not three feet and two inches. I have to be right at three feet to be in focus. Now I go past him in that and we had a window of three minutes to get that shot. Now I do this spin, now you’re in my face,I’m up on my back, he’s going up and around. It really is a dance between the two of us. I had to always make sure that the sunset was on my left shoulder. Now we’re traveling at 200 miles an hour at times toward the ground. I’m coming in, it’s like a sprint, boom, I have to hit him. When I hit him, I have to hit him, I don’t know where I’m gonna hit him on his body, I just have to try and take him out and down. And not break his neck, my neck, and not entangle the chutes, deploy his chute or my chute. Any of those things could have led to serious problems.” They built the largest wind tunnel in the world to train and considered filming some of the sequence in there, but it didn’t look real enough.

27. The “what if” sequence at 44:13 where they show the hijack and subsequent killing of dozens of police officers under the overpass was a concern as paparazzi and Parisian gawkers lined the other side of the river watching. They hung 300 feet of silk across the archways so that people wouldn’t see police being murdered, and the unintentional but welcome effect is the “eerie light” across the scene.