Sneer’s to you, Joel Silver for having the foresight to re-boot John Carpenter’s wickedly fun Escape from New York and expand it, Peter Jackson -style, into a trilogy. Now you and Studio Canal just have to find a young-ish Snake Plissken who can carry three three films with the same sardonic charisma that made Kurt Russell such a joy to behold on the big screen. According to Deadline , the first of the three movies will be an origin story — perhaps one that shows how Snake got the eyepatch and how New York City became a maximum-security prison, or whatever plot twists Silver wants to throw our way since, according to the report, The Matrix producer is planning an “entirely new take” on the story. Still, Plissken is going to have to ring some familiar bells with the crowd that will be seeing it because they loved the original. And with this in mind, here are some actors who I’d like see don ere are some of actors I’d love to see take on the role of Snake Plissken: 1) Taylor Kitsch: Take a look at his performance in Oliver Stone’s Savages and the unfairly maligned John Carter and Kitsch could be the ideal choice to grow some stubble and an attitude for the crowd-pleasing thriller that Silver intends to make. Plus, if he pulls it off, the media will remember him for Escape not John Carter . 2) Jim Carrey: If you put Carrey’s is-he-funny-or-just-crazy performance from The Incredible Burt Wonderstone in a blender with his scenes as Colonel Stars and Stripes in the Kick-Ass 2 trailer, you’d get Snake Plissken. 3) Michael Shannon : Plissken would be memorably malevolent and darkly comic in Shannon’s hands. He’d also probably be the most substantial Snake of this bunch. 4) Isaiah Washington: Admittedly an unlikely choice — unless you’ve seen Blue Caprice. Washington is chilling as John Allen Muhammad, the orchestrator of the Beltway Sniper murders. The question is whether he has any comic timing. If he does, he’d be an interesting choice. 5) Ryan Gosling: An even wilder card, but Gosling does the strong, silent, wisecracking type really well. And Only God Forgives looks brutal. If Silver really does want to defy expectations, then Gosling is his man. If he can land him. Agree? Disagree? Have a better choice? Leave them in the comments section. [ Deadline ] Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
If you thought Japanese animation was all horny teens and laser guns and rocketships, prepare to have your mind blown by a tragic tale of wartime and lost youth ( Grave of the Fireflies ). And if you thought French star Alain Delon was known only for his work for art-house directors like Luchino Visconti and Jean-Pierre Melville (and for appearing on the cover of The Smiths’ The Queen is Dead album), get ready to watch him buckle his swash ( Zorro ). HIGH: Grave of the Fireflies (Section 23; $19.98 DVD, $29.98 DVD) WHO’S RESPONSIBLE: Written and directed by Isao Takahata, based on the novel by Akiyuki Nosaka. WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT: Teenage Seita and his young sister Setsuko are on their own after their mother dies in the firebombing of Tokyo in the waning days of World War II. There’s never a good time for children to be separated from their loving parents, but there are few junctures of history worse than being in Japan in the final months of that bloody conflict. The two do what they can to survive, but hopelessness is hard to overcome. WHY IT’S SCHMANCY: My friends in the cartoon biz love to say “Animation is not a genre,” so even though this is an animated movie, and one about kids no less, Grave of the Fireflies is an intensely moving (and often disturbing) film that’s definitely not for the youngest of viewers. Director Takahata doesn’t have the PR in the Western world of his Studio Ghibli partner Hayao Miyazaki ( Spirited Away , My Neighbor Totoro ), but he’s made two movies (this one and Pom Poko ) that leave me a sobbing wreck every time. Fireflies deserves to be mentioned in the same breath with other antiwar classics like Forbidden Games and Spirit of the Beehive , both of which are also told from young people’s perspectives. WHY YOU SHOULD BUY IT (AGAIN): It’s a gorgeous piece of work, even when the misery portrayed is hard to watch, so the fact that the film is finally getting a Blu-Ray release in the U.S. is exciting news. This version also features a new English-language dub, as well as storyboards for the film (and for some deleted scenes), along with the Japanese theatrical trailer. LOW: Zorro (Somerville House; DVD $19.98, Blu-Ray $24.98) WHO’S RESPONSIBLE: Written by Giorgio Arlorio; directed by Duccio Tessari; starring Alain Delon, Ottavia Piccolo, Stanley Baker, Moustache. (Yes, Moustache.) WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT: Nobleman Don Diego de la Vega (Delon) masquerades as his dead friend and fills in as the governor of an embattled province so that by night, as masked swordsman Zorro, he can engineer the overthrow of the despicable Colonel Huerta (Baker) and his troops. Zorro fights on behalf of the oppressed peasants with the help of Brother Francisco (Giampiero Albertini) and the beautiful Hortensia (Piccolo). WHY IT’S FUN: The character of Zorro dates all the way back to the pulp magazines of the early 20th century, and he’s been a reliable standard of film and TV, portrayed by everyone from Douglas Fairbanks to Antonio Banderas. (And I will admit a soft spot for George Hamilton’s hilariously spoofy turn in Zorro, the Gay Blade .) If you’re a fan of spaghetti Westerns — those wonderfully grimy and wildly entertaining horse operas that inspired Quentin Tarantino’s upcoming Django Unchained — you’ll enjoy watching Italian day players pretending to be South American peasants. Delon puts a fun spin on the material, and director Tessari (most known for his contributions to the screenplay of A Fistful of Dollars ) keeps thing exhilarating and exciting. This was my first Zorro movie as a child — it played theatrically in 1976 and then seemed to air perpetually on television soon thereafter — and it imprinted on me for life. (As did the catchy theme song, which will never, ever leave your head after you hear it.) WHY YOU SHOULD BUY IT (AGAIN): This Blu-Ray debut offers up a few extras, including trailers and radio spots, biographies of Delon and Tessari, and side-by-side comparisons that demonstrate how much better the digital restoration makes this zippy Euro-adventure look. READ MORE HIGH & LOW ON DVD! Alonso Duralde has written about film for The Wrap, Salon and MSNBC.com. He also co-hosts the Linoleum Knife podcast and regularly appears on What the Flick?! (The Young Turks Network). He is a senior programmer for the Outfest Film Festival in Los Angeles and a pre-screener for the Sundance Film Festival. He also the author of two books: Have Yourself a Movie Little Christmas (Limelight Editions) and 101 Must-See Movies for Gay Men (Advocate Books). Follow Alonso Duralde on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
There are instances when reviewing intentions would be so much easier than reviewing actual movies, and Red Tails, which was directed by first-timer Anthony Hemingway but conceived, shaped and willed into being by George Lucas, is one of them. Red Tails is – or is intended to be – a rousing comic-book adventure based loosely on real-life events: The picture follows a group of Tuskegee Airmen as they shoot down German fighter planes and blow munitions transport trains to smithereens. In between missions, they fight more personal battles, against insidious racism and bigotry. It’s a great idea to make a movie, in 2012, about the Tuskegee Airmen, who broke ground as the U.S. military’s first African American aviators: They represent a chapter in history that’s been underexplored, certainly in the world of movies. But it’s a shame the idea had to come from George Lucas, whose enthusiasm for his subject translates mostly into a peculiar strain of inept awkwardness. Even if Red Tails becomes a hit – and it just might – it still represents a missed opportunity for greatness. Red Tails focuses chiefly on two fictional pilots, Marty “Easy” Julian (Nate Parker) and Joe “Lightning” Little (David Oyelowo), both members of the Air Corp.’s 332 nd Fighter Group stationed in Italy, guys with very different styles but bound by years of friendship. Easy follows all the rules, rarely straying from the straight-and-narrow (though he does, as it turns out, have his own demons to fight); Lightning is the hotdogger who’ll go out of his way to shoot down that random Nazi, even when it means going against orders. He also has the kind of confident swagger that earns him the love of a pretty Italian girl, Sofia (Daniela Ruah); he’s so charming and well-mannered that even Sofia’s old-world mama approves of him. The cast of characters milling, and flying, around Lightning and Easy include Ray “Junior” Gannon (Tristan Wilds), who wants nothing more than to be a fighter pilot even after an injury compromises him, and David “Deke” Watkins (Marcus T. Paulk), the only truly religious pilot in the gang, who keeps a holy card emblazoned with the figure of the deity he refers to as “Black Jesus” close by at all times. In the air, these pilots show a desire to fight hard for their country, and they’ve got the skills to do so. But military brass doesn’t get it – in their eyes, the Tuskegee pilots are inferior and are thus relegated to routine assignments, flying in rickety old junkers. But Colonel A.J. Bullard (Terrence Howard) pulls off a minor miracle, getting a plum assignment for his boys. That pleases pipe-smoking Major Emanuelle Stance (Cuba Gooding Jr.) to no end – his men have been champing at the bit for a chance like this, and at last they’ll have the chance to prove what they’re made of. The problem isn’t that Red Tails paints its story, and its characters, in brilliant, admittedly corny comic-book colors. (The script, filled with dialogue along the lines of “Germans! Let’s get ’em!”, is by John Ridley and Aaron McGruder.) The approach could have worked, particularly when you’ve got a cast of actors as charismatic as these. Gooding and Howard, both known quantities, are perfectly serviceable here – Howard, in particular, makes even the most stilted dialogue sing, thanks to his silky purr. But even the lesser-known performers here, like the British actor Oyelowo, have some astonishing moments of grace – it’s frustrating to watch them working so hard in a picture that can’t, in the end, do them justice. Because there’s just no way around it: Red Tails is, for the most part, simply a clumsy piece of work, one that revels in ’40s comic-book style without managing to capture any of the emotional resonance of comic-book style. There’s no dramatic rhythm or flow to Red Tails . A terrible thing might happen to a character, only to be rapidly erased by this or that handy distraction. It’s as if Lucas were simply afraid of human feeling, any kind of human feeling, even the kind you often find in comic books. The movie has touches of comedy that, for reasons that are almost impossible to fathom, don’t come off as comic. At one point a white character tells one of the pilots that under cover of night, he’ll be safe from the Nazis: “At least they won’t see you in the dark.” The line should be a joke – it is, in fact, a marvelous if obvious joke – but it falls flat, almost as if Lucas and/or Hemingway (it’s hard to tell who’s at the steering wheel here, though we can safely put most of our money on the former) suffered from a failure of nerve and decided to neutralize it. The picture is full of clunker moments like that, instances where the initial impulse may have been good but the execution is nothing but blundering and inelegant. This is Hemingway’s first film, though he has previously directed episodes of Treme, The Wire, and CSI: NY . If he has a distinctive style, it’s impossible to identify it in Red Tails. The handprints all over the movie clearly belong to Lucas. That’s especially true in the technically impressive dogfighting sequences, which are the best reason to see Red Tails . Watching those planes swoop and skim through the air, sometimes flying in ballet-like formation, at others approximating a chaotic streetfight, is the greatest pleasure the movie offers. That’s not surprising when you consider that Lucas, the eternal, wide-eyed naïf among his generation of filmmakers, presented an early cut of Star Wars with old-movie dogfight footage substituting for the space-combat effects he’d fill in later. Yet not even these glorious, effusive sequences are nearly enough to carry the picture, and in some ways, they do it a disservice. Red Tails is a project that has been dear to Lucas’ heart for years. According to a profile of Lucas in the New York Times Magazine , the filmmaker first commissioned the script in the early 1990s, and although 20th Century Fox is distributing the picture, Lucas is footing all the bills himself. Lucas has admitted that with Red Tails he’s using the comic-book approach to lure a younger audience; he wants them to engage with the story of the Tuskegee Airmen, and his intentions are noble. If only his passion had translated into a more graceful movie, one that didn’t squander the considerable gifts of its cast. In the end Red Tails is mostly about the coolness of flying. Its heart is in the clouds, instead of with the men at the controls. Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Gaddafi Deserved His Death In A Libyan Sewer – He Had All The Morality Of A Sewer Rat — Con Coughlin, The Telegraph I can’t think of a better way for Colonel Muammar Gaddafi to meet his end than to be gunned down in a Libyan sewer. It is a fitting end to the career of a man who presided over one of the most murderous and violent regimes of the modern age, and had all the morality of a sewer rat. This… Broadcasting platform : YouTube Source : War News Updates Discovery Date : 20/10/2011 22:03 Number of articles : 2
Gaddafi Deserved His Death In A Libyan Sewer – He Had All The Morality Of A Sewer Rat — Con Coughlin, The Telegraph I can’t think of a better way for Colonel Muammar Gaddafi to meet his end than to be gunned down in a Libyan sewer. It is a fitting end to the career of a man who presided over one of the most murderous and violent regimes of the modern age, and had all the morality of a sewer rat. This… Broadcasting platform : YouTube Source : War News Updates Discovery Date : 20/10/2011 22:03 Number of articles : 2
Colonel Qaddafi’s death today has brought about waves of relief, and has raised questions about the future of Libya, but his fall may have been seen by an unexpected source a long time ago. The pilot of Second Chance , a little known Fox sitcom from the 1980s starring actor Matthew Perry in his first role, featured Colonel Qaddafi being shot by machine gun fire and showing up in heaven, where he was… Broadcasting platform : YouTube Source : FP Passport Discovery Date : 20/10/2011 16:36 Number of articles : 2
Maybe we can finally call this a “thing.” Back in March, we noted how an anchor for Libya’s state-run TV network delivered the news while brandishing an AK-47 and promising to defend Colonel Gadhaffi to the death. Today, with Libyan rebels in Tripoli, Libyan TV anchors are once again brandishing firearms in an effort to “defend” the channels from attack. Al Jazeera English caught the comments: New… Broadcasting platform : YouTube Source : MediaBistro.com Discovery Date : 21/08/2011 18:13 Number of articles : 2
Evans himself presents exclusive sneak peek on MTV and MTV.com. By Kara Warner Chris Evans as Steve Rogers in “Captain America: The First Avenger” Photo: Paramount Pictures On Thursday (July 14), Captain America himself, Chris Evans, presented an exclusive new clip from his highly anticipated caped crusade “Captain America: The First Avenger” on MTV and MTV.com. The clip opens with fan-favorite actors Tommy Lee Jones and Stanley Tucci, in the roles of Colonel Chester Phillips and Dr. Abraham Erskine, walking through an Army base, watching a group of recruits in their basic-training exercises. Phillips is talking to Erskine about their new unimpressive recruit Steve Rogers (a skinny Evans, pre-super serum and superhero status), who looks to be having trouble with his jumping jacks. “When you brought a 90-pound asthmatic onto my Army base, I let it slide. I thought, ‘What the hell? Maybe he’d be useful to you like a gerbil,’ ” Phillips says to Erskine about Rogers, before stopping to watch him. “Look at that — he’s making me cry.” Phillips points out another stronger recruit jumping alongside Evans, who boasts impressive scores in every military test they’ve given him. Erskine calls him a bully, but Phillips doesn’t care. “You don’t win wars with niceness, Doctor; you win wars with guts,” he says before tossing a grenade into the group to see how they react. All the recruits scramble away to safety, except for Rogers, who jumps on the grenade himself to protect everyone else. The grenade turns out to be a dummy. “Is this a test?” Rogers asks his senior officers, after showcasing an early glimpse of the hero he is to become. “He’s still skinny,” Phillips says, seemingly unimpressed, to a smiling Erskine. Check out everything we’ve got on “Captain America: The First Avenger.” For breaking news and previews of the latest comic book movies — updated around the clock — visit SplashPage.MTV.com . Related Videos MTV First: Captain America Related Photos ‘Captain America’
Take a closer look at the super-soldier as we break down the upcoming action movie’s first full trailer. By Eric Ditzian Chris Evans and cast in the “Captain America: The First Avenger” trailer Photo: Marvel Before becoming the engineered superhero called Captain America, Steve Rogers attempts to join the Army five times in five cities, only to be rejected for being a pipsqueak with a ton of heart but not nearly big enough biceps. In a similar series of false starts, we’ve been treated to a slew of teasers for “Captain America: The First Avenger,” from a 30-second Super Bowl spot to a bunch of seconds-long video snippets parceled out over the last few days. Now, finally, we’re getting a shot of cinematic super-serum with the Marvel adaptation’s first full trailer . Here are our picks for the five coolest moments: The Shield … Kinda Here we see Rogers (Chris Evans) in pre-conversion twerp mode. Chased into an alley, he attempts to defend himself with a trashcan lid — a none-too-subtle nod to the red-white-and-blue shield he’ll soon wield as the Captain. Sure, he’s a scrawny fellow, but he’s brave. And as Dr. Abraham Erskine (Stanley Tucci) will tell Steve before transforming him into a superhero, “A weak man knows the value of strength, knows the value of power.” In terms of historical context, this shot also gives us a glimpse of around when the story begins. A poster in the alley shows the date: May 29, 1943. Meet Your Super-Serum So it’s that goopy blue stuff that transforms Rogers into a super-solider. We see Erskine in the laboratory, as well as Howard Stark (Dominic Cooper), who just so happens to be the father of a certain iron-suited hero played in other Marvel movies by Robert Downey Jr. The serum doesn’t look that pleasant going in, but what a difference it makes: Rogers goes from zero to world-saving hero. Captain Action Listen, it’s hard out there for a super-solider. Even when an Army colonel (Tommy Lee Jones) is driving at top speed in a convertible and the Captain looks like he’s about to jump out and whup some Nazi butt, he pauses for a little smooch from Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell). Pimp! Army of the Damned Check them out in all their blue-glowing glory: the HYDRA army controlled by Red Skull (Hugo Weaving), Hitler’s head honcho of weaponry and general evilness. It’s these soldiers who will face off against the Captain and his crew with the fate of the world in the balance. The Boys We’d sleep easier knowing this collection of dudes — Captain America and the much-hyped Howling Commandos — is protecting the nation. In addition to the Captain, you’ve got sidekick Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), Union Jack (JJ Field) and Dum Dum Dungan (Neal McDonough). That’s a hero shot if we’ve ever seen one. “It’s an amazing costume,” Evans told us last year of his look. “Given the fact that his costume is red, white and blue, and it’s tight, and it could be kind of flash and over the top — and given the fact that the movie takes place in the ’40s and ’50s — they’ve done a really good job of making it look really cool.” What were your favorite moments? Share them in the comments below! Check out everything we’ve got on “Captain America: The First Avenger.” For breaking news and previews of the latest comic book movies — updated around the clock — visit SplashPage.MTV.com . Related Photos Five Cool Moments From The ‘Captain America’ Trailer
Beyonce has been criticised for performing a private concert for Libyan dictator Colonel Gaddafi’s son. The 28-year-old beauty has been criticised after reports that she spent New Year’s Eve performing at a party hosted by Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s son Moutassim. The event allegedly took place at nightclub Nikki Beach on the island of St Barts in the Caribbean and it is claimed she was paid $2million for entertaining the likes of Usher, Lindsay Lohan and Gaddafi Jr. Marc Lamont Hill, a Columbia University media professor, said on CNN: “Beyonce’s handlers usually make really good decisions about where she’s going to perform… ‘So it seems to me that someone was asleep at the wheel, or the money was so overwhelming that they said: ‘Screw the public image, we’re going to take the cash.’”
