The A.V. Club - Film

Film: Newswire: Lawsuit? Did somebody say lawsuit?: Paul Reubens puts a stop to "Pee-Wee Over Louisville" day

Fri, 24 May 2013 15:00:00 -0500

Apparently, there are some secret words that when uttered in a certain order not only make Pee-Wee Herman scream but also make him run to his lawyers: Pee-Wee, Over, Louisville, and Day. Will Russell, one of the guys behind the insanely popular Lebowski Fest that has celebrated all things Big Lebowski every year since 2002, wanted to bestow the same honor on Paul Reubens and Pee-Wee Herman by creating a honorary day for the character in Louisville, Kentucky. Now it appears that the star of the Pee-Wee's Playhouse TV show turned Broadway hit turned down the offer by sending ...

Film: Newswire: Jon Stewart decides to spend his summer vacation with Gael Garcia Bernal

Fri, 24 May 2013 14:15:00 -0500

As previously announced, Jon Stewart is taking a break from The Daily Show beginning on June 10 to direct Rosewater, his adaptation of Iranian Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari’s memoir Then They Came For Me. Bahari’s book deals with his coverage of Iran’s disputed 2009 election and his subsequent imprisonment by the Iranian government, which used Bahari’s appearance on The Daily Show as evidence of his supposed espionage. According to The Wrap, Stewart has now reportedly cast Gael Garcia Bernal—who recently ran afoul of another oppressive regime in No—in the starring role. Bernal’s character ...

Film: Great Job, Internet!: Behold, a life-sized replica of a Star Wars X-Wing fighter built entirely out of Lego pieces

Fri, 24 May 2013 14:00:00 -0500

The Internet seems to have a new life size or intricately detailed Lego sculpture every other day but this one blows all of those away (literally, if Lego has also developed a special piece that could withstand the heat needed to fire a laser cannon). A Lego model shop in Kladno, Czech Republic won the world record for creating the largest Lego sculpture with its 44-foot wide Star Wars X-Wing ship. The craft required the work of 32 "master builders" who took over 17,000 man-hours to put together all 5,335,200 bricks by hand. The massive sculpture recently ...

Film: Newswire: Actually, maybe Tom Cruise isn't going to be in The Man From U.N.C.L.E

Fri, 24 May 2013 13:40:00 -0500

While Tom Cruise had, at one point, signed on to play the lead in Guy Ritchie’s new The Man From U.N.C.L.E. movie, after a string of scheduling conflicts, he’s had to bow out of the whole thing. (or said “uncle,” whatever.) According to The Hollywood Reporter, Cruise and Warner Bros. never closed the deal, and while Cruise had intended to film U.N.C.L.E. before he started shooting Mission: Impossible 5 this fall, it’s too late for the scheduling to really work out now. Cruise is just the latest actor to ...

Film: Newswire: Human Centipede 3 begins filming, plans to sew 500 fake prisoners together

Fri, 24 May 2013 12:45:00 -0500

If you woke up today feeling oddly creeped out and disgusted with humanity and you weren’t sure why, fear not: it’s just director Tom Six beginning production in Los Angeles on Human Centipede 3 (Final Sequence). As such, it’s high time the public learns just what wondrously creative, artistically sound reason Six has come up with for stitching 500 people’s mouths to the assholes of the people adjacent to them. After all, while no logical defense is required for how a German mad scientist could get the better of a trio of idiotic backpackers in Human ...

Film: Great Job, Internet!: Caption Contest: What are the brainiacs from Fast & Furious 6 talking about?

Fri, 24 May 2013 12:20:00 -0500

In the interest of science, creativity, and the science of creativity, we're posting a film or TV still every week, and we're going to ask you to come up with a clever caption. Whoever's caption gets the most likes will win some kind of nonsense prize from The A.V. Club office, most likely a Simpsons toy of some sort. The winner of the last contest, featuring the handsome men of Star Trek Into Darkness, was TheMagicRat, who offered: "I told you - We'll release you as soon as you tell us your real name." "Benedict Cumberbatch ...

Film: Newswire: The Parameter short-film competition has been delayed (but there's good news, too)

Fri, 24 May 2013 12:05:00 -0500

Due to unforeseen circumstances—weather patterns, the stock market, Earth spinning off its axis, new episodes of long-dead TV shows—we’ve decided to delay the launch of the Parameter short-film competition for a couple of months. Twasn’t an easy decision, but we’re hoping that the delay will lead to bigger and better things for your short films—including, perhaps, even bigger cash prizes and a more spectacular final event. Stay tuned to this space for more details, and apologies to everyone who got their cameras fired up in anticipation. We’ll have more news soon, and this ...

Film: Watch This: The wages and the fear remain high in William Friedkin’s Sorcerer

Fri, 24 May 2013 12:00:00 -0500

Every day, Watch This offers staff recommendations inspired by a new movie coming out that week. This week: Fast & Furious 6 inspires us to look back on other vehicular action movies. Sorcerer (1977) Maybe it’s misleading to call William Friedkin’s Sorcerer an action movie. (It was certainly misleading to name it Sorcerer—a reference to one of the film’s central vehicles, but also a transparent attempt to make the director’s follow-up to The Exorcist sound like a supernatural thriller.) Though there’s gunplay, and more than a few explosions, the focus of this grim jungle odyssey ...

Film: Cannes Film Festival: Cannes 2013, Day Nine: James Gray and Joaquin Phoenix reteam for a compelling period drama

Fri, 24 May 2013 11:13:00 -0500

Well, that was a disaster. I successfully got into 3x3D, the omnibus film featuring shorts by Peter Greenaway, Jean-Luc Godard, and a prolific (but virtually unknown in America) Portuguese director named Edgar Pêra, but discovered when the film began that my 3-D glasses didn’t work. Fumbled around for a power switch, but there wasn’t one—they were just defective, apparently. Had I been seated near the aisle, I’d have run to exchange them (as I saw a couple of other folks hurriedly do), but I didn’t feel comfortable clambering over half a dozen people in ...

Film: Newswire: Bryan Singer adds Quicksilver to X-Men: Days Of Future Past, possibly just to annoy Joss Whedon

Fri, 24 May 2013 10:15:00 -0500

Proving some major movie studios just aren’t cut out for sharing, Fox has decided to add the super speedster Quicksilver to its upcoming X-Men: Days Of Future Past, even though Marvel Studios recently announced that it plans to include the character in Joss Whedon’s The Avengers 2. X-Men director Bryan Singer tweeted the announcement Thursday, saying American Horror Story actor Evan Peters will play the character. Quicksilver, along with his twin sister Scarlet Witch, is one of a handful of characters whose rights are shared between multiple studios; essentially, Marvel Studios owns the parts of the character’s ...

Film: Newswire: Francis Ford Coppola wants to do a movie about a non-mob affiliated Italian-American family

Thu, 23 May 2013 14:10:00 -0500

The man who made The Godfather one of the greatest movie trilogies of our time (if you go really easy on the third one) will return to the director's chair for another story about an Italian-American family. This one, however, will have a lot less gunplay and need for blood squibs. Francis Ford Coppola is working on a screenplay that he plans to direct for a saga about an Italian-American family, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The paper describes Coppola's script as a "coming-of-age" story that will focus on a teenage boy and girl and chronicle their family ...

Film: Contest: Chicago, see The Way, Way Back early and take part in a Q&A with Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, a.k.a. Dean Pelton

Thu, 23 May 2013 14:00:00 -0500

Jim Rash and Nat Faxon notably won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for their work on The Descendants, but the duo have a history of comedic work that is nearly as impressive as their Oscar win. In The Way, Way Back Rash and Faxon took on writing, directing, and acting duties resulting in a film that finds a balance between the humorous and the heartfelt. For those who want to see The Way, Way Back before it opens and participate in a Q&A with Rash and Faxon we've got passes to a screening taking place on ...

Film: Newswire: Richard Linklater hopes to begin filming the "spiritual sequel" to Dazed And Confused this fall

Thu, 23 May 2013 13:10:00 -0500

Now that Richard Linklater has filed the latest of his once-every-decade progress reports on the characters played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in Before Sunrise, he may finally be ready to turn his attention to revisiting the spirit of his other most-beloved ‘90s movie, the teen-nostalgia trip Dazed And Confused. The prolific and unpredictable filmmaker has been talking about doing a “spiritual sequel” to that movie for a long time; as recently as 2010, Linklater was lamenting that, while he had the financing in place, he still needed to “get a distributor that would do it or would give ...

Film: Great Job, Internet!: Steven Soderbergh’s new line of t-shirts fulfills his desire for more obscure film references

Thu, 23 May 2013 11:30:00 -0500

Now that Steven Soderbergh has completed his Liberace film Behind The Candelabra for HBO and taken his parting shots at the film industry on the fast track to early retirement, he’s set up shop at a new website, Extension 765, essentially a marketplace for his favorite things. Amid the movie props and Bolivian liquor, there’s quite an array of t-shirts, but they’re not your typical movie-spoiler or promo shirts. Soderbergh writes that for film shirts “the design work is kind of inconsistent, and more importantly, the references tend toward the obvious. So this is our attempt to ...

Film: Cannes Film Festival: Cannes 2013, Day Eight: Blue Is The Warmest Color captures a relationship’s rawness and beauty

Thu, 23 May 2013 11:20:00 -0500

The dirty little secret of criticism is that it’s a form of codified rationalization. We see movies, we have emotional reactions to them like everyone else, and then we consciously or (often) unconsciously construct intellectual arguments to justify those reactions. For example, I was a puddle of tears by the end of Alexander Payne’s latest film, so I find myself much more willing to forgive or overlook the same sorts of condescending moments that irked the hell out of me in About Schmidt and The Descendants. Shot in an anti-lustrous black-and-white that could more accurately be termed gray-on-gray ...

Film: Watch This: Vanishing Point caters to car nuts and existentialists alike

Thu, 23 May 2013 11:00:00 -0500

Every day, Watch This offers staff recommendations inspired by a new movie coming out that week. This week: Fast & Furious 6 inspires us to look back on other vehicular action movies. Vanishing Point (1971) Fans of Richard Sarafian’s Vanishing Point seem to split into two camps: Those who see his movie, about a lone muscle-car driver (Barry Newman) dodging roadblocks on his way into legend, as an existential parable about social rebellion; and those engaged in fierce debate over whether the driver’s 1970 Dodge Challenger has a hemi under the hood. Fortunately, Vanishing Point offers plenty for admirers ...

Film: Movie Review: The Hangover Part III

Thu, 23 May 2013 00:06:00 -0500

Setting aside the rampant sexism, broad racial caricatures, and unfunny Mike Tyson cameos, the most irksome thing about the Hangover films may be the gimmick that drives them. What could be less exciting and less cinematic than three hapless dudes spending an entire movie being told about the mischief they got into the night before? (No surprise that the photo montages during the end credits, which deliver a few glimpses of genuine naughtiness, earn the biggest laughs.) The best that can be said for the third, supposedly final chapter is that it jettisons the retracing-our-steps scenario of the 2009 original ...

Film: Movie Review: Fast And Furious 6

Thu, 23 May 2013 00:05:00 -0500

Fast & Furious 6 is equal parts Ocean’s movie, Road Runner cartoon, and WWE SmackDown. In other words, it’s more or less the same movie as its predecessor, 2011’s Fast Five—a surprise commercial and critical hit that didn’t so much reinvigorate the Fast & Furious franchise as reinvent it. The series, which began in 2001 with Rob Cohen’s throwback exploitation movie The Fast And The Furious, has dropped any pretense of grit; like Fast Five, Furious 6 is a big, colorful B-movie romp where the laws of physics are routinely ignored. There are long, mayhem-heavy setpieces ...

Film: Movie Review: Before Midnight

Thu, 23 May 2013 00:04:00 -0500

When Richard Linklater announced last autumn that he had secretly shot another sequel to Before Sunrise, his 1995 one-night-in-Vienna romance, it was difficult not to feel both excited and a little apprehensive. Before Sunset, the previous film in the series, had ended on such a perfect note—a heart-stopping ellipsis, one of cinema’s great non-endings—that taking the story any further seemed a bit like flirting with disaster. Wouldn’t it just be better to leave Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) hanging in the blissful moment, lost in song and dance and the probability of a missed ...

Film: Movie Review: Epic

Thu, 23 May 2013 00:03:00 -0500

In the animated film Epic, forests are protected by legions of tiny soldiers, all but invisible to the naked eye. Small enough to ride hummingbirds, they are locked in an endless war with a race of equally tiny goblin-like creatures who want to destroy the forest. Why do the goblin-like creatures want to destroy the forest? Because they’re the bad guys. Why do the tiny soldiers—called Leaf Men—look like humans, while the rest of the forest’s inhabitants look like anthropomorphic plants and invertebrates? So that the main character can fall in love with one without raising ...