Midnight Movies

A new brand of entertainment is on the rise. On July 7th, Sci Fi Channel becomes Syfy and, when it does, your adventure begins. The first step will be easy: Imagine Greater. It means that at Syfy anything is possible. Everything you love will come along for the ride. And everything else will be exciting and new - including the look of the place!

Starting this summer, new shows like Warehouse 13, SGU: Stargate Universe and Caprica will join our rich slate of returning favorites like Eureka, Ghost Hunters and many more, to bring you bolder science fiction, stronger drama, faster action, bigger adventure, deeper mystery, louder laughs and…well, you get the idea.

 Source It’s going to be imagination at its finest, and it’ll live everywhere, on every screen. Here at the newly designed Syfy.com, you’ll catch all your favorite shows and web series. Technology, gaming and entertainment news will continue to be just clicks away at our popular blogs Dvice, Figit and Sci Fi Wire. And our mobile site and iPhone apps will engage your imagination wherever you go, whenever you want.

Syfy begins July 7th during the premiere of Warehouse 13. Until then, make yourself at home, and prepare to Imagine Greater. We’ll see you soon.

Source - http://www.syfy.com

The 61-year-old will make a rare big-screen appearance in The Expendables, Stallone’s publicist confirmed.

The film, in which Stallone also stars, follows a group of mercenaries trying to overthrow a South American dictator.

Actors Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Eric Roberts, Mickey Rourke and Forest Whitaker will also star.

As well as acting, Stallone is also writing and directing the film.

Publicist Sheryl Main said Schwarzenegger will play himself as California’s governor and will shoot his scene in Los Angeles.

The actor has made just three cameos for friends since becoming governor in 2003, including Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson film The Rundown in 2003 and Around the World in 80 Days in 2004.

Schwarzenegger and Stallone co-founded the restaurant chain Planet Hollywood together in 1991, along with Bruce Willis, but the Terminator star severed all his financial ties with the business in 2000.

Source - http://news.bbc.co.uk

Even before Park Chan-Wook’s “Thirst” made its Cannes bow, there was buzz about the availability of remake rights. The nightmarish tale centers on a priest who is infected by a virus and becomes a vampire.

Bloodsuckers are a popular theme in Hollywood right now thanks to the success of “Twilight.” That only increased interest in the latest offering from Park, who is fast becoming a magnet for English-language remakes.

Park’s “Old Boy” is being developed at DreamWorks as a potential pairing of director Steven Spielberg and Will Smith; Vertigo’s Roy Lee and Doug Davison will be producers.

His “Sympathy for Lady Vengeance” is being developed by Charlize Theron as a vehicle for the actress to star and produce through her Denver and Delilah Prods.

And his “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” is being developed by “Transformers” producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura.

While Park’s Korean producers on those three pics were able to deal directly with the interested U.S. parties, “Thirst” is a co-production between CJ Entertainment and Universal-based Focus Features Intl., so Focus gets first look on any potential English-language remake.

While CJ Entertainment’s head of international film financing Mike Suh said it is still early days in terms of discussing a remake of “Thirst,” it is another CJ project generating heat.

Bong Joon-ho’s “Mother,” about a feisty widow fighting to prove her emotionally fragile son is innocent of murder, is being circled by a number of U.S. producers.

“There is a high interest in the film, but we’re still in the early stages of talks,” said Suh. “As for Park’s films, they are unique dramas with strong storylines, which is why they could work in other countries.”

In November, Gore Verbinski acquired remake rights to Bong’s monster movie “The Host.” Verbinski will produce with the Vertigo partners and Paul Brooks.

As for Park, the helmer is weighing options for his next project. Aside from producing Bong’s forthcoming adaptation of French comicbook “Le Transperceneige,” he has no specific directing projects to which he’s attached. But the free schedule doesn’t mean he has any desire to get involved in the English-language remakes of his own pics.

“I want them to treat my films as if they were books and I was an 18th century writer who has long been dead,” Park told Variety.

Source - www.variety.com

Jack Rix, an employee at Haight Street’s Red Vic Movie House, had never seen Tommy Wiseau’s strange 2003 cult hit “The Room” when Rix suggested booking it as a midnight movie. “I had gotten several firsthand reports that said it was so much fun - the ‘Citizen Kane’ of bad movies,” he said.
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But Rix was unprepared for the response the film got at the March 11 screening: With no publicity, the midnight screening on a Wednesday night sold out.

“The minute we put it on the calendar, all of these excited people contacted us. There were definitely people who went to that screening who had been to other screenings, because there’s these … routines,” Rix said, likening it to a non-costumed “Rocky Horror Picture Show.”

Spoons were involved. “There’s something about a picture of a spoon? Apparently, there’s a spoon in some of the backgrounds, and people will yell out ‘Spoons!’ and toss spoons in the air.”

What is going on here? Well, it has been an open secret in Los Angeles for the past five years that a new contender for the midnight-movie crown has arrived.

Former San Francisco resident Wiseau, the film’s writer, director, actor and producer, began booking the movie for weekly midnight shows at Laemmle’s Sunset 5 Theater in Los Angeles after noting the emotional reaction of crowds to the film’s few conventional screenings. A dedicated following grew - actors Jonah Hill, Kristen Bell and Paul Rudd are fans - and this spring “The Room” traveled cities all over the country.

But it’s especially fitting that the movie has arrived in San Francisco, as the Bay Area provides the setting for the film, although it was also filmed in Los Angeles.

Describing “The Room’s” appeal can be difficult. The basic story involves a man named Johnny (played by Wiseau, who sports long, curly black hair and an accent that suggests Austrian roots) who lives with his no-good girlfriend, Lisa (Juliette Danielle), who, after a few gauzy love scenes with Wiseau, begins an affair with his best friend, Mark (Greg Sestero).

Beyond that, the plot gets fuzzy, as characters appear and disappear randomly and narrative cul-de-sacs abound. At one point, Lisa’s mother announces that she has cancer; no further mention of it is made. A gun-toting drug dealer threatens Johnny’s neighbor, Denny, who himself is an oddity, and then runs away, never to be referenced again. And so on.

The problems may start with the script, but the actors’ leaden delivery doesn’t help matters. But somehow the film manages to be totally entertaining - a mix of sincerity and insanity, buffeted by unusually high production values. (The budget was $6 million.) “I found it to be a cross between a Shannon Tweed soft-core thriller and R. Kelly’s ‘Trapped in the Closet,’ ” said local film programmer Jesse Hawthorne Ficks. “Tommy Wiseau’s delivery of dialogue was truly priceless.”

Wiseau, in a phone interview from Los Angeles, takes no offense that his high-concept drama can reduce audience members to clutching their sides with laughter. “I love it when people laugh and enjoy ‘The Room,’ ” he said. “That’s what I always tell people before screenings, you can laugh, you can cry, just don’t hurt each other.”

Wiseau wrote “The Room” as a play when he lived in San Francisco (he took acting classes at Laney College in Oakland, Jean Shelton’s Actors Lab and the American Conservatory Theater). Some bits of “The Room” did come from real life, he admitted, noting, cagily, that “two is better than three” when it comes to relationships. He has also made a documentary, “Homeless in America” (2004), and is working on a pilot for a TV show called “Neighbors.”

But Wiseau, who moved to San Francisco from New Orleans around 1999, doesn’t want people to get the idea that the film’s strange features were accidents. Take Lisa’s mother’s cancer situation. “I did the intensive research and found that (cancer patients) don’t like to be reminded of how sick they are,” Wiseau said. “That’s my take. The less you say, the better.”

Fans of “The Room” would probably not disagree with that last statement. Part of the joy of the film comes from its mystery - Why are there framed pictures of spoons in Johnny’s living room? What exactly is Denny’s relationship to Johnny and Lisa? What does the title mean, anyway?

The only way to unlock the film’s secrets is to keep watching it. Lindsay Robertson, a writer at film and TV Web site Videogum.com, first saw the film in 2006 and has since screened it for more than 20 friends.

” ‘The Room’ is the only movie I can think of that absolutely cannot be ruined or spoiled. You can’t even prepare someone for it,” she wrote in an e-mail. “Everyone who sees it gets the same feeling of discovery and curious wonder, and everyone wants to be the one who introduces it to their friends. It’s like the Gospel or something - you want to pass it on.”

The Room: Midnight Sat. Red Vic Movie House, 1727 Haight St., San Francisco. (415) 668-3994). The film will be screened on the last Saturday of each month, indefinitely. www.redvicmoviehouse.com.

Source - http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/04/23/MVDS175KNE.DTL

Michelle Castillo has a report on “Dragonball Revolution,” which, for right or wrong, may be the most-hated film of 2009 that hasn’t even been released yet.

Hell hath no fury like an angry fanboy. At least not when it comes to the box office.

“Dragonball Evolution” is set to hit U.S. theaters on April 10 but it’s already reaching legendary status as the 2009 film fans love to hate on, at least as far as the Internet is concerned. The makers of the live-action film hoped to tap into a built-in audience by adapting the hugely popular manga epic that had already spawned three anime series, 17 animated feature films and three television specials. Fans all over the world love “Dragonball” but, well, it’s a thin line between love and hate.

Across the web, fans have been bellowing their anger over the choices made by director James Wong (”The One,” “Final Destination”), who was to looking to streamline and mainstream the “Dragonball” mythology, which follows Goku, a monkey-tailed Japanese boy, while he trains in martial arts and searches for the seven Dragon Balls that are said to grant the wish of the beholder.

Fans are frothing on YouTube about the casting, missing characters, the fight scenes and even the hair styles. This is serious stuff to devotees who have followed the manga franchise since it began in 1984 and have shown their allegiance by buying up the tie-in card game, the assorted video games, the apparel and other merch. On IMDB, one fan seemed to think a holy crime had been committed: “I could go on for hours about what they did wrong … may God have mercy on their souls.”

One of the stars, Jaime Chung, who plays Chi Chi, in the film, is asking the fans to give the movie a chance by perhaps waiting until it reaches the screen before putting it in the same category as “Catwoman” or “Speed Racer,” two other Hollywood movies that took hand-drawn fanboy favorites and turned them into spectacular live-action bombs.

“I feel like all movies that adapt some sort of [material], whether it’s a book or a manga or a cartoon, into a film — you’re going to have to take creative liberty in order to change it so that it works for a motion picture,” Chung said. “It’s never going to be the same, and you can’t satisfy everyone. What James Wong did was he adapted it in a way where it still stayed true to the Dragonball series, with the essence of the characters,” said Chung, who is most famous for being one of the housemates in “The Real World: San Diego.”

At 20th Century Fox, the studio behind the “Dragonball” film, there must be some executives missing the old days when fans just waited for a movie to be released before deciding its fate. The studio leadership watched in horror in recent days as a stolen, near-finished copy of “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” became a torrid sensation on file-sharing sites. The FBI has stepped in but, like a man watching his gold coins scatter on a crowded street, the Fox team knows deep down that the damage is already done. (In a twist that will have execs groaning, fans claim that they downloaded illegal copies of “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” solely to punish Fox for its “Dragonball” folly.)

This is a new era of relationships between fans and studios. Warner Bros. had a muggle revolt last year when it abruptly postponed the sixth “Harry Potter” film for no reason beyond pure profit-positioning; frustrated fans came after Warner chairman Alan Horn and pledged boycotts when the film reaches theaters this summer. Fan debate raged also this year with the Warner film “Watchmen,” the Holy Grail of serious comic-book films, but unlike the old days where a controversy might propel a film for weeks at theaters, this time the movie generated more Internet traffic than box-office receipts and second-week grosses plummeted 67%.

Chung, for one, has put full faith in Wong, who she believes has made some controversial changes in order to make the film a bit more mainstream to new viewers.

Among some of the major twists include setting the story to take place during Goku’s high school years, as well as casting a Caucasian actor in the role. Other facets that faced the chopping board were fan favorite characters such as Krillin, Tien, and Chaouzu, who were removed in order to make the mythology more manageable.

None of that compares to the change that has fans pulling their hair: What happened to Goku’s towering spikes? The hand-drawn Goku is instantly recognizable for his massive black spikes, which jut out from his head like he has an ebony agave plant growing from his head. Wong opted for a somewhat more mundane level of spikes for Justin Chatwin’s (”Taking Lives,” “War of the Worlds”) natural light-brown hair.

Chang, for one, said sometimes change is good: “I mean you can’t make it look ridiculous,” the actress said. “When you’re doing close-up shots, and he’s wearing a two- foot wig, it just looks ridiculous on film. It’s so different from something that’s from a cartoon to something that’s filming something on film. It’s a completely different world, and it was a huge challenge for James, and I feel like he really overcame.”

Chung also believes the cast was well chosen – despite the fact that they might not look like their traditional Japanese characters. The cast includes Asian superstar Chow Yun-Fat (”Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”) and Emmy Rossum (”Phantom of the Opera”).

Chung said there are plenty of reasons for fans to give Wong’s movie a chance, whether it’s the high-intensity action scenes (shot with a Phantom HD camera for frame rapidity that slows combat for a closer view) or the care given to make sure each character got their own fighting style (Chung’s Chi Chi, for instance, uses Tae Kwon Do, allowing her to “look pretty on the outside, but fight like a dude”).

In an unconventional move, “Dragonball” was released first in Asia (as early as March 12, 2008) and the film has done well despite bootleg copies hitting the market. The film passed the $22 million mark at the end of March, according to Box Office Mojo, and that without any screenings yet in South America, North America or most of Europe.

The reviews by non-believers have also been more kind; Variety’s Russell Edwards wrote of the film: A popular Japanese manga series gets a pleasing if paint-by-numbers live-action makeover in “Dragonball Evolution,” which half-heartedly tries to keep the faith for its pubescent male fan base.”

Chung said “Dragonball” is just beginning its fight to win over fans.

“No one wants to make a movie that people will hate,” Chung said. “We really want people to enjoy the movie for what it really is and to come in with an open mind and to understand where James Wong was trying to come from. Regardless of whether or not the fans will agree with it, they will be entertained. It has so many great elements like a story of love and friendship, and it’s an adventure with loss and sacrifice and finding your inner strength and destiny. I don’t feel like there is a dull moment in this film.”

Source - http://latimes.com

These days, Joshua Jackson is definitely on a roll.

Not only is the Vancouver-born actor making an impact on the small screen as one of the stars of the cult paranormal TV series Fringe, he’s headlining the indie movie One Week, which opens Friday at theatres around Toronto.

The Michael McGowan film tells the story of Ben, a typical 20-something who finds himself diagnosed with cancer.

But instead of opting for immediate treatment, he chooses to ride a motorcycle across Canada in a voyage of self-discovery, casting aside his fiancée and his family bonds.

“The point of the movie,” says Jackson on the phone from Los Angeles, “is not to examine the horrors of a young man dying from cancer, but to look at how your mind grapples with the situation.

“I’m about to be erased, but I need to get my story told. What happens in that first moment – your flight- or-fight response. I can’t just sit in the corner and suck my thumb and cry.”

The 30-year-old actor, who shot to stardom in 1998 as Pacey Witter in the long-running series Dawson’s Creek, says that when he first heard of the movie’s premise, he referenced the old Talking Heads lyric that asked, “How did I get here?”

“Ben finds himself in a really difficult situation,” says Jackson.

“He has to hurt the people he cares about. What he does is selfish, but to shake off his chains he has to cut his bonds.

“A lot of my generation,” he admits, “has a sense of purposelessness and goes through the act of life rather than the experience of life. We look to the reward without understanding that the journey is the destination.”

Jackson eagerly embraced the challenges of One Week, because he feels that “you have to put yourself out there, dealing with a topic as serious as this. It’s not a fear of failure. It’s a fear of success.”

He senses that this problem is shared by his peers, whose parents were “a bunch of aging activists, but my generation could never figure out exactly what we wanted to change. Along came Britney Spears and the dot-com bubble, and we got lost along the way.

“But then mortality comes along and slaps us in the face, and we have to deal with it. Every young dreamer has a moment when he has to face reality and One Week is the story of Ben and that moment in his life.”

It’s a strange kind of watershed moment in Jackson’s existence. The son of a Vancouver casting director, he was plunged into the acting profession by his mother in the hope that its toughness would discourage him.

Instead, he wound up selected for roles from the start and embraced the profession wholeheartedly.

He was cast in The Mighty Ducks at the age of 14 and found himself well on his way to a successful career. But even then, he was conflicted.

The kind of work he found himself doing, first on Ducks and later on Dawson’s Creek, wasn’t what he had always dreamed of.

“To tell the truth,” he laughs, “I was never a Beverly Hills, 90210 kind of guy. I always secretly wanted to be on The X-Files.”

But he took the starring role he was offered on the teen heartthrob series Dawson’s Creek and played it faithfully for five seasons.

“I never spent too much time navel-gazing,” he says of those years. “I know people loved the show and so I was happily a part of it.”

Still, he’s a lot more contented now as the star of Fringe, the crazily off-the-wall sci-fi series.

“It’s complete madhouse escapist fun, which allows everyone to take a check-out moment each week, which they totally deserve.

“Hey,” he laughs, “every thesis needs an antithesis.”

In the meantime, Jackson is happy to bounce from serious work like One Week to escapism like Fringe, learning what he can along the way.

“There are a lot of subterranean things in your life and sometimes performances help you articulate things that you otherwise wouldn’t have been able to understand,” he says.

“That’s why I love this business.”

Source -  http://www.thestar.com

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, appears on CNN’s Sunday talk show ‘State of the Union’ with John King, during a live taping, Sunday, Feb. 22, 2009, in Washington. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)Associated Press SACRAMENTO, Calif. - Art will imitate life when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger spends a few hours playing himself later this year in a movie by Sylvester Stallone .

Stallone’s publicist, Sheryl Main, revealed more details Tuesday of Schwarzenegger’s rare big-screen appearance. The governor said he has done just three cameos for friends since becoming governor in 2003.

Shooting on the film, “The Expendables,” will begin March 28 in Brazil and move to New Orleans for two months. Main says the governor will shoot his scene in Los Angeles.

His role will be a familiar one: California governor.

Stallone writes, directs and stars in the movie, a film about a group of mercenaries trying to overthrow a South American dictator. It also stars Jet Li , Dolph Lundgren, Eric Roberts , Mickey Rourke and Forest Whitaker.

Source - http://omg.yahoo.com/news/schwarzenegger-to-play-himself-in-stallone-film/19311;_ylt=A0LEUGpJaqVJTG8A3EPXn414

Because Emily Blunt’s commitment to Twentieth Century Fox and the studio’s upcoming Gulliver’s Travels movie may prohibit her from costarring in Iron Man 2, Marvel is in discussions with other actresses, most significantly Scarlett Johansson, to take her place, EW has learned exclusively. Marvel will not confirm, but sources around Hollywood say Johansson has indeed met with the filmmakers and is interested in taking the role of Russian superspy Natasha Romanoff, who doubles as Black Widow. Blunt’s reps are still trying to make both projects work, but Gulliver’s is further along, with a start date of April 15. Iron Man 2 still doesn’t have a shooting script and a start date has not yet been determined

Source: EW.com