Previews and Reviews that are Z's Views
The Comics Reporter posted Beauty And Power: 100+ Stand-Alone Pieces Of Art By The Late Darwyn Cooke.
I love seeing so much Darwyn Cooke art being posted since his passing. His art will be around as long or longer than comics. What a legacy!
I met Dwayne Biddix at last year’s HeroesCon. I’d been following Dwayne on DA and Twitter so it was a no brainer to get a Stallone sketch from him. Hope you dig it!
When I read yesterday that Darwyn Cooke was battling an aggressive cancer, it was like an unexpected gut shot. Truth be told, I only knew Darwyn through his art, stories and the several times I met him at comic shows… but I was such a fan and Darwyn always treated me (and other fans) with such respect and kindness, it sure seemed I knew him better than I did.
I’ve always loved Darwyn’s art and when he began adapting Richard Stark’s Parker novels, I thought it could never get better than that. Each time I caught up with Darwyn at a show I’d have his latest hardcover for him to sign and he always included a quick headsketch with the signature. I loved talking to Darwyn about his latest project and what was coming.
Sadly it was announced today that Darwyn passed at 1:30 this morning surrounded by friends, family and aware of all of the well-wishes that had been pouring in since the news about his illness had been announced.
My thoughts, prayers and best wishes go out to Darwyn’s family, friends and fans. Rest in Peace, Darwyn.
Roger Cormier and Mental_Floss present 15 Facts About Twister. Here are three of my favorites…
5. BOTH HELEN HUNT AND JAN DE BONT WALKED AWAY FROM OTHER MOVIES TO WORK ON THIS ONE.
Helen Hunt (Dr. Jo Harding) passed up working with John Travolta in John Woo’s Broken Arrow (1996). After more than six months of pre-production, de Bont left his Godzilla (1998 version) directing gig because of studio feuds over the budget and immediately agreed to direct Twister instead.
9. THE TORNADO SOUNDS ARE MADE UP OF VARIOUS ANIMAL NOISES.
According to Variety, an altered recording of a camel’s moan helped create the storm sounds. It was reported elsewhere that a lion’s growl and a tiger’s snarl were remixed as tornado audio.
14. BILL PAXTON THINKS THEY MADE THE “PEPSI LITE” VERSION OF THE MOVIE.
“I’d love to direct a sequel to that movie,” Paxton said. “I’ve always felt like there was a Jaws version of that movie. I always felt like we did the Pepsi Lite version of that movie.”
Stacy Conradt and Mental_Floss present 10 Slapstick Facts About the First Three Stooges Short. Here are three of my favorites…
2.THEIR SALARY FOR STARRING WAS $1000 PER WEEK—SPLIT THREE WAYS.
After their third short, Men in Black, was nominated for an Oscar, the comedians’ pay was increased to $7500 weekly. But they still had to split it amongst themselves.
3. THEY DON’T PLAY LARRY, CURLY, AND MOE.
Woman Haters marks one of the few times the Stooges play characters other than themselves. Larry plays “Jim,” Moe is “Tom,” and Curly is “Jack.”
8. IT FEATURED A COUPLE OF FAMOUS CURLY FIRSTS.
Curly’s first “nyuk-nyuk-nyuk” was in this film, as well as his first “woo-woo-woo-woo,” but they’re not quite the refined versions we’re used to now. Curly borrowed the latter catchphrase from comedian Hugh Herbert, though Herbert’s version was a little softer and more subdued.
Matthew Jackson and Mental_Floss present 11 Terrifying Facts About The Hills Have Eyes. Here are three of my favorites…
1. IT WAS BASED ON A TRUE STORY.
According to writer/director Wes Craven, The Hills Have Eyes was inspired by the story of Sawney Bean, the head of wild Scottish clan who murdered and cannibalized numerous people during the Middle Ages. Craven heard the story of the Bean clan, and noted that the road near where they lived was believed to be haunted because people kept disappearing while traveling on it. He adapted the story to instead be about a group of wild people in the American West, and The Hills Have Eyes was born.
8. MICHAEL BERRYMAN CONSTANTLY FACED HEATSTROKE.1-
Berryman, who became a horror icon thanks to this film, was apparently game for just about anything Craven and company wanted him to do, though he personally told the producers he was born with “26 birth defects.” Among those birth defects was a lack of sweat glands, which meant that the intense desert heat was particularly hazardous to his health. He soldiered on, though, even in intense action sequences.
“We always had to cover him up as soon as we finished these scenes,” Craven recalled.
11. IT STARTED AN INTERESTING CHAIN OF HORROR HOMAGES.
The Hills Have Eyes is admired by fellow horror filmmakers, so much so that one of them—Evil Dead director Sam Raimi—chose to pay homage to it in a strange way. In the scene in which Brenda is quivering in bed after having been brutalized by Pluto and Mars, a ripped poster for Steven Spielberg’s Jaws is visible above her head. Raimi saw it as a message.
“I took it to mean that Wes Craven … was saying ‘Jaws was just pop horror. What I have here isreal horror.’”
As a joking response to the scene, Raimi put a ripped poster for The Hills Have Eyes in his now-classic film The Evil Dead (1981). Not to be outdone, Craven responded by including a clip from The Evil Dead in his classic A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984).
Rob Hunter and Film School Rejects present 30 Things We Learned from the Planet Terror Commentary. Here are three of my favorites…
7. Bruce Willis enjoyed his time on Sin City so much that he told Rodriguez “any time, any where, I’ll come make anything with you.” The director called his bluff and convinced him to play the bad guy here knowing it would only be two days work. Tarantino visited the set — both to say hi and because he shot some 2nd unit for the film — and was surprised to Willis in costume.
Cheryl Eddy and io9 present 10 Things You Might Not Know About John Carpenter’s Cult Classic They Live. Here are three of my favorites…
1) Before they met, Carpenter was a Piper fan, but Piper had never heard of the director, even though his filmography at the time included such high-profile works as Halloween, Escape From New York, The Thing, and Big Trouble in Little China.
2) The greatest fight scene in movie history runs five minutes and 20 seconds long. It took three days to film, but a month and a half of rehearsing in the backyard behind Carpenter’s office in the San Fernando Valley. According to interviews on the They Live Blu-ray, Carpenter drew inspiration for the clash from a similarly memorable brawl in The Quiet Man, a 1952 John Ford film in which John Wayne plays a retired boxer.
10) “Frank Armitage,” credited as They Live’s screenwriter, is actually a Carpenter pseudonym. It’s a shout-out to H.P. Lovecraft creation Henry Armitage; Carpenter would later pay further tribute to the author with the filmIn the Mouth of Madness. (“Frank Armitage” is also the name of David’s character in the film.)
Steranko is one of the living legends of comic art. Marvel in a very wise move brought Steranko back in 2016 to create never-before-seen variant covers, like the art for one above. The variants ran through 2017.
Eric D. Snider and Mental_Floss present 14 Epic Facts About Gangs of New York. Here are three of my favorites…
1. IT WAS 32 YEARS IN THE MAKING.
Martin Scorsese read Herbert Asbury’s 1928 nonfiction book The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld in 1970 and immediately thought it would make a good movie. He didn’t have any money or clout yet though, so he had to wait. He bought the movie rights to the book in 1979, and even got a screenplay written around that time, then spent the next 20 years trying to get the project off the ground before finding a willing financial partner in Harvey Weinstein at Miramax Films.
7. SEVERAL CHARACTERS WERE BASED ON REAL PEOPLE.
Bill the Butcher was real, though Scorsese changed his surname from Poole to Cutting for the movie to reflect a creative liberty he’d taken, i.e., having the character live to see the Civil War (he was actually murdered in 1855). William “Boss” Tweed (Jim Broadbent) was a real politician who controlled the Tammany Hall political machine, as you may recall from your high school U.S. history class. So were the Schermerhorns, the rich people seen taking a tour of the misery and vice of Five Points. (Interesting footnote: Scorsese’s fifth wife, whom he married in 1999, is one Helen Schermerhorn Morris, a descendant of early New York elites.) Perhaps most surprisingly, Hell-Cat Maggie (Cara Seymour)—the vicious female fighter who bites off victims’ ears—was fact-based, being a composite of the real Hell-Cat Maggie (her real name is unknown) and a few other historical lady criminals.
13. THERE WERE LONGER CUTS OF THE MOVIE, BUT YOU WON’T SEE THEM.
The first cut, the throw-in-everything-and-see-what-works version, was three hours and 38 minutes, almost an hour longer than the final cut. Scorsese and his longtime editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, tinkered with it relentlessly, ultimately producing 18 different versions that were screened for various audiences. Weinstein, rightfully nicknamed Harvey Scissorhands for his ruthless trimming of the movies he releases, no doubt urged Scorsese toward a shorter runtime, but Scorsese said he’s happy with the one everybody saw, which is two hours and 47 minutes.
“There’s not one version that I would say, ‘That’s my original version,’” Scorsese said on the DVD commentary. They were more like drafts: “This was all a series of changes and rewrites and restructuring, until finally it comes down to the movie you see in the theater.”
Twilight Zone: “The Bard” [Season 4, Episode 18]
Original Air Date: May 23, 1963
Director: David Butler
Writer: Rod Serling
Starring: Jack Weston, John McGiver, Doro Merande and Burt Reynolds.
The Overview: Beware of Spoilers…
An untalented television writer [Weston] finds a way to transport William Shakespeare from the past. Soon the writer is successful thanks to Shakespear ghosting his scripts. Things go south when Shakespeare shows up on the set.
[Burt Reynolds’ take on Marlon Brando is worth the price of admission.]
Rating:
Michele Debczak and Mental_Floss present 10 Towering Facts About The Iron Giant. Here are three of my favorites…
5. THE TITLE CHARACTER WAS COMPUTER GENERATED.
Despite being considered one of America’s last great traditionally animated films, The Iron Giant’s title character was created entirely with a computer. The creators took careful steps to make sure the Giant blended in seamlessly with the hand-drawn world. They even went so far as to develop a computer program to make the character’s lines wobble slightly, producing a crude, hand-drawn effect.
6. IT FEATURES A PRE-FAST AND FURIOUS VIN DIESEL.
Before making a name for himself as an action star, Vin Diesel provided his voice to the towering robot in The Iron Giant. Not counting groans and grunts, the Giant utters a grand total of 53 words in the entire film. When Diesel returned to feature voice acting 15 years later for Guardians of the Galaxy, he played Groot, a character whose vocabulary is even more severely limited.
7. THE DESIGN WAS INSPIRED BY THE ART OF NORMAN ROCKWELL.
The Iron Giant takes place in an idyllic Maine town in the 1950s—a perfect contrast to the themes of McCarthy-era paranoia the film explores. To give the setting more of a wholesome, Americana look, the creators drew inspiration from the art of Edward Hopper, N.C. Wyeth, and Norman Rockwell. Even the fictional town’s name—Rockwell—is a nod to the iconic American artist.
S. Craig Zahler [writer/director of the under-rated Bone Tomahawk] will start production this summer on Brawl in Cell Block 99 with Vince Vaughn in the lead. If the title alone isn’t enough to get you in line for a ticket, maybe this will…
Vaughn will play a former boxer named Bradley who loses his job as an auto mechanic and goes to work as a drug courier for an old friend. This vocation improves his situation until the terrible day that he finds himself in a gunfight between a group of police officers and his own ruthless allies. When the smoke clears, Bradley is badly hurt and thrown in prison, where his enemies force him to commit acts of violence that turn the place into a savage battleground.
Can I get my ticket now?
Source: Entertainment Weekly.
The news broke earlier this week that Sly Stallone is set to star as mob boss Raymonde Aprile in an television adaptation of Mario Puzo’s best seller Omerta. Antoine [Training Day] Fuqua is set to direct.
Stallone and Fuqua along with Harvey and Bob Weinstein and David Glasser will serve as Executive Producers on the series which is being fast-tracked for production.
I think that is an excellent move by Sly. With the right team (and they are off to a great start with Stallone and Fuqua at the helm) this series could be right up there with Justified and The Shield. I can not wait for this!
Eric D. Snider and Mental_Floss present 14 Up-Tempo Facts About Saturday Night Fever. Here are three of my favorites…
6. IT HAS SOME ROCKY CONNECTIONS.
First connection: It was supposed to be directed by John G. Avildsen, whose previous film was Rocky. Ultimately, that didn’t work out and Avildsen was replaced with John Badham a few weeks before shooting began. Second connection: Tony has a Rocky poster on his bedroom wall. Third connection: Saturday Night Fever’s 1983 sequel, Staying Alive, was directed by … Sylvester Stallone.
8. THE WHITE CASTLE EMPLOYEES WEREN’T ACTING WHEN THEY LOOKED SHOCKED.
In the brief scene where Tony, his boys, and Stephanie are loudly eating at White Castle, those were the real burger-flippers, not actors. Badham told them to just go about their business. He also told his actors to cut loose and surprise the White Castlers in whatever way they saw fit. The shot that’s in the movie appears to be a reaction to Joey standing on the table and barking, but Badham said it was actually in response to something else: “Double J (actor Paul Pape) pulling his pants down and mooning the entire staff of the White Castle.”
11. THE COMPOSER HAD TO SCRAMBLE TO REPLACE A NIXED SONG.
For Tony and Stephanie’s rehearsal scene about 30 minutes into the movie, Badham had used the song “Lowdown” by Boz Scaggs, going so far as to shoot the scene, including the dialogue, with the song actually playing in the background. (That’s usually a no-no, for exactly the reasons you’re about to read about.) According to Badham, no sooner had they wrapped the scene than Scaggs’ people reached out to say they couldn’t use the song after all, as Scaggs was thinking of pursuing a disco project of his own. Badham now had to have the actors re-dub the dialogue (since the version he’d recorded was tainted by “Lowdown”); what’s more, he had to find a new song that would fit the choreography and tempo of the dancing. Composer David Shire rose to the occasion, writing a piece of instrumental music that met the specifications, and that’s what we hear in the movie.
