The Grand Master: Wong Kar Wai Film Trailer

The magnificent Hong Kong film director, Wong Kar Wai, is nearing completion of a new film called ‘The Grand Master.’ It’s a kung fu flick! The film was rumored to have been in a production halt, but now it looks as if things are coming together. It’s hard to find accurate information about this director’s work so I’ll just leave you with this very wet trailer.

Mystery Video From Neill Blomkamp

Wired Magazine for the iPad included this mysterious little film that is apparently some sort of teaser by Neill Blomkamp, the director of District 9. It shows the discovery of a dead alien or unknown life form by two guys driving down a dirt road. Creepy. But why would anyone touch a dead alien?  The creature is stamped as if part of some project at a lab.  Maybe it’s about growing new life forms to feed the planet and then some of them escape.  Or some company has captured and bred aliens for food production!

Here’s a Slashfilm article that suspects it’s a teaser for an online narrative about a company doing genetic engineering.

Fiction, Computer Games and Dante’s Inferno

Here’s an article by Tim Martin in The Telegraph about how computer games are having a growing influence on literature.  As the game’s trailer shows, the upcoming computer game, Dante’s Inferno, will be a wild ride into hell.  I’m sure the game is full of levels as most games are and as Dante’s original literary Inferno certainly is.  It will also most likely contain a good sampling of quotations from the original since you’ve got two poets running around in hell making observations and explaining things for all of us.  In the electronic version I’m sure that Dante will get to cut off many limbs and heads and such things.  I don’t know – is gaming influencing literature or the other way around?  Maybe a little.  I think gaming is having more of an effect on film making.  Maybe the answer is in the trailer.  I also think that if you are going to make a game based on Inferno, you should not make it an action game.  You should make it an open-ended exploration of hell.  Just that.  No more required.

The Limits of Control: Jim Jarmusch Film and Interview

Here’s the trailer for The Limits of Control, a new film by Jim Jarmusch. I’m always very impressed by Jim Jarmusch when he speaks.  Extremely intelligent and serious artist working in film.  In fact, he might be one of the only serious artists working in American film at present.  He’s kind of scary and punkish and seems more like a rock star than a film director.  I’d probably run screaming from the room if he came in to talk to me.  But maybe not.  I always find a person’s weakness and exploit it.  Jarmusch’s weakness is Bill Murray.  Too much focus on stars in Jarmusch films.  He shouldn’t do this.  Great directors in the 21st Century should not cast so many stars.  Stars ruin movies.  Imagine reading a great novel in which every single character is played by a movie star.  Sort of like when you buy a novel that’s been adapted to film and right there on the cover you see a big fat picture of Leonardo DiCaprio.  Ruins the entire book.  Ruins a serious film quite often too.  Why movie stars have become so essential to film is a total mystery.  A great director spends all his energy trying to direct the movie in circles around his star performers.  What a waste.  A movie that becomes a parade of the director’s movie star friends is not worth watching.  He should make new friends.  There’s nothing more time-consuming than watching a movie star pretend to be an artist.  It would serve Mr. Jarmusch better to find people on the street and use them instead.  He needs to get over this Bill Murray fixation and move on.  Murry is a deadly boring actor with a frozen face.  These stars are a major headache and a distraction from what the director has to say with film.  By the way, here’s a fascinating interview with Jim Jarmusch that is casting off sparks of connective ideas all over the place.  They talk about novels, essays, poetry, William Burroughs and the cut-up technique, secret societies, Scientology, Stanley Kubrick, and more.  Fascinating talk.  I really wish he’d stop hiring movie stars.  Jim Jarmusch is not a good director of movie stars.  This guy would be a real artistic threat if he’d just run around with a video camera and work that way.  Why he would want to be eating catered food with the walkie-talkie brigade is simply beyond me.