The Screengrab : juan antonio bayona

Morning Deal Report: Scarlett Johansson, Amazon Warrior

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Are we ready for Scarlett Johansson, action hero? Ready or not, here she comes in her new dark red hairdo. Johansson is set to star in Amazon Warrior, set in the year 200 B.C. “I think I'm supposed to be a gladiatrix,” Johansson tells Variety. “These film guys are crazy about gladiatrixes. But do I fit into the Amazon mold? I'm a Danish/Jewish girl from New York. I've done weapons training. I've fired all kinds of guns: 9 mm, semi-automatics, machine-guns, shotguns. I've jumped off a 60-foot building. I learned to ride for The Horse Whisperer. But I've never done a full-on action role. I guess I'm still waiting for my Cirque du Soleil moment. It would be fun.”

The third Twilight movie may have found its director. “Sources indicate that horror wunderkind -- and Guillermo Del Toro protege -- Juan Antonio Bayona has emerged as one of the finalists to direct Eclipse,” per The Hollywood Reporter. “Bayona's name has come up in recent months, though generally in a group of other directors -- an eclectic list that's ranged from Paul Weitz to Drew Barrymore to James Mangold.” Any movie that could just as easily be directed by any of those people is surely one to look forward to.

Chariots of the Gods is returning to the big screen, but sadly it’s not a Sunn Classics documentary this time. Paradox Entertainment has acquired the rights to “Erich von Daniken's 1968 bestselling book that pressed the case that Earth was visited by aliens. The premise will be turned into a science fiction film that will be produced by Paradox's Fredrik Malmberg and Amber Entertainment's Mark Ordesky.”

Related:
Scarlett Johansson Blows. Her Nose! Blows Her Nose!
Your Thursday Afternoon "Twilight" Roundup

DVD Digest for April 22, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week, a cinematic master gets the Eclipse treatment, and a viral-marketing-phenom makes its DVD debut.

DVD of the Week: In the past few years, a number of Yasujiro Ozu films have made their way to DVD, but he was so prolific that there are still many films missing, especially from his earlier work. For this reason alone, the arrival Eclipse Series 10: Silent Ozu- Three Family Comedies is cause for celebration. Comprised of three films made between 1931 and 1933, the Silent Ozu box has no extras to speak of (Eclipse doesn't really do extras), but each film features a brand-new score by silent-film composer Donald Sosin, as well as the high-quality transfers we've come to expect from the Criterion family. To date, I've only seen the box's centerpiece film, I Was Born, But..., but that film and the other Ozus I've seen have been so delightful that I have no reservations about recommending the other films- 1933's Passing Fancy and 1931's Tokyo Chorus- as well. Here's hoping that Eclipse continues to do right by Ozu in the years to come. He's certainly worth it.

Releasing today from Criterion itself is Spanish filmmaker Juan Antonio Bardem's seminal, long-overlooked melodrama Death of a Cyclist. The class-oriented of a respected professor whose life goes into freefall when after a hit-and-run accident, the film is at times heavyhanded but always striking and beautifully shot. In addition, the film should provide a fitting introduction for many moviegoers to the charms of leading lady Lucia Bosé. An Italian stunner with screen presence to burn, Bosé was a mainstay of the early films of Michelangelo Antonioni, as well as appearing in work by Buñuel, Fellini, and Marguerite Duras. The DVD also includes a featurette on the life and work of Bardem, but the real story is the film which, like its female lead, is ripe for rediscovery.

Also of note on the classics front is the release of four comedies from Universal's Cinema Classics series. The four films are: the Mae West/Cary Grant vehicle She Done Him Wrong; Billy Wilder's early film The Major and the Minor starring Ginger Rogers and Ray Milland; and two films from director Mitchell Leisen, 1939's Midnight starring Claudette Colbert, and 1937's Easy Living with Jean Arthur. Each film is a gem, but of particular note is Easy Living, perhaps the greatest film written by Preston Sturges before he reigned over Hollywood comedy in the 1940s. And if it's sexy action you want, check out Image's new DVD of the Shaw Brothers cult classic Intimate Confessions of a chinese Courtesan, a movie I'm pretty sure I dreamed one night.

Compared to this week's selection of classics, the new titles can't help but look a little paltry. The big-ticket DVD this week is of course Cloverfield (Paramount), the Matthew Reeves/JJ Abrams rampaging-monster movie. For me, the film was never so much fun as when I first saw the trailer before Transformers, but the DVD should give people a chance to approach the film separated from all the hype. This week also brings a Philip Seymour Hoffman double feature, with Hoffman hitting DVD shelves with Tamara Jenkins' The Savages (Fox)- in which he appears opposite Laura Linney- and his caustic, Oscar-nominated performance in Mike Nichols' Charlie Wilson's War (Universal), which also features mediocre turns by Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts, and a pretty hot scene in which Emily Blunt slinks down the stairs wearing only a man's dress shirt.

In addition, there's a trifecta of indie releases hitting the market today: Andrew Wagner's Starting Out in the Evening (Lionsgate), which garnered awards buzz for the ever-dependable Frank Langella; Paul Schrader's The Walker (ThinkFilm), featuring Woody Harrelson as a too-helpful escort for society women; and Joe Swanberg's Hannah Takes the Stairs (Genius Productions), starring "mumblecore" darling Greta Gerwig. Also worth mentioning are the second season of Friday Night Lights (Universal), J.A. Bayona's supernatural chiller The Orphanage (New Line, also Blu-Ray), and the mostly-ignored Hollywood remake of One Missed Call (Warner, also Blu-Ray). Mind you, the latter is only worth mentioning for the sake of completism, but there you go.

Finally, David Huddleston would like the announce that there are no HD-DVDs hitting the market today. Frankly, he couldn't be happier.

S-Horror?

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 17:00:00 GMT

As we gear up for another spring full of rampaging monsters and psychopathic serial killers, Desson Thompson in the Washington Post wonders if something elemental to the whole concept of the horror movie isn't missing: the victim.

After the usual handwringing over the 'torture porn' generation, the artist formerly known as Howe goes on to make some pretty compelling points: the horror films of today — even the stylized, artsy ones influenced by or coming from the J-horror movement — tend to focus entirely on the means by which the victims are dispatched: intricate traps, complex schemes, gruesome tortures, gigantic monsters. Very little attention, on the other hand, is given to providing the audience with an identification figure: while in previous horror films we were at least able to identify with the person going through such terrifying treatment (as in Rosemary's Baby) or with the person doing the terrorizing (as in Psycho), the modern-day horror film has lost its focus, one way or another, on humanity and gives us precious little to care about beyond the novelty of learning how the next victim will snuff it. "When we think of the horror classics", says Thomson, "we don't recall the gruesome acts so much as the people who weathered them. Think of Rosemary Woodhouse, the determined mother in Rosemary's Baby, who faces the prospect her baby has been fathered by the Devil. Remember Regan MacNeil, the sweet pre-teen of The Exorcist, whose satanic transformation forces heroics from two soft-spoken priests. Even Jack Torrance, the demented murderer at the heart of The Shining, affects us because he's a husband and father gone horribly awry, not some abstract ax wielder."

Providing a much-needed antidote for this alienating inhumanity in the horror genre, he claims, are a new wave of Spanish horror directors, presaged by Guillermo del Toro in the disturbing Pan's Labyrinth and followed up by two of his proteges, director Juan Antonio Bayona and screenwriter Sergio G. Sanchez, whose dark, moody The Orphanage is enjoying limited release in the U.S. They both cite the Spanish cultural heritage of the Day of the Dead (which is "not something that you look upon as horrifying or sad or terrible but as a way to conciliate with death; you bring death home instead of trying not to think about it", according to Sanchez) and the country's all-too-recent emergence from the shadows of fascism as reasons why this brand of non-gory, emotionally powerful, human-centered horror is hitting home with their audiences.

Whether or not The Orphanage will trigger a string of "S-horror" hits in the U.S., they're doing quite well at home; the movie was last year's highest-grossing film in Spain, outstripping even the blockbuster foreign imports like Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End.