Midnight Movies

SAN DIEGO, Calif. — Johnny Depp sent fans into a frenzy with a surprise appearance at Comic-Con in San Diego on Thursday.

“Alice In Wonderland” director Tim Burton was on stage in Hall H at the San Diego Convention Center when he reportedly said he wanted his “imaginary friend” to join him on the stage.
First Look: Tim Burton’s ‘Alice In Wonderland’ >>
Depp then appeared and the crowd erupted with cheers and screams of joy.
The actor only stayed for a brief moment, waving at the screaming crowd at the Disney 3-D panel.

Depp’s appearance flooded Twitter with excited Tweets from inside the crowd.
“Tears wiped over Johnny Depp. Decibel level to 11. This is CRAZY fandom,” one user wrote. While another claimed, “Women are chanting ‘I love you Johnny!’ Men are chanting ‘I love you

Source - www.AccessHollywood.com

Bruce Campbell spends less screen time today bathed in blood and under zombie siege than he did as Ash, the chain-saw-accessorized leading man of the Evil Dead trilogy (1981-1992). But the horror-movie icon turned author and television regular hasn’t shunned his old genre.

Campbell, 50, is in Miami this spring and summer shooting Burn Notice, a USA Network spies-for-hire drama in which he plays a comic sidekick. On Saturday, he stops by Florida Supercon, an annual expo taking place in Miami for fans of fantasy movies, comics, anime and video games.

Campbell, as he has done at similar conventions for 20 years, will be autographing just about any object or body part presented to him. “I sign lots of chain saws,” he says in a telephone interview.

He’ll also participate in a Q&A, a forum in which his sense of humor and scholarly side go hand in hand.

Source - www.sun-sentinel.com

Aussie Sam Worthington, who plays Terminator Salvation’s Marcus Wright, is currently filming a Clash of the Titans remake (scheduled to premiere March 2010) in the Canary Islands with The Incredible Hulk director Louis Leterrier. Even though Worthington is starring as the ancient Greek hero Perseus (opposite Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes), he’s got a more modern inspiration: ”He’s Charles Bronson in Death Wish,” says the actor of his revenge-seeking character. ”That’s how I’m playing him.” And his skirt? ”We’re trying to make it as manly as possible,” he laughs.

 Source - www.ew.com

  David Carradine, whose starring role in the television series “Kung Fu” made him a self-described evangelist for the martial arts on screen and in life, has died. He was 72.

Carradine was found dead early this morning local time at the Swissotel Nai Lert Park hotel in Bangkok, Thailand’s capital, according to Michael Turner, a spokesman for the U.S. Embassy. He was found hanging from a rope in what appeared to be a suicide, Pirom Chantrapirom, deputy chief of the Lumpini police station, said in a telephone interview.

He was the son of leading Hollywood actor John Carradine, who died in 1988, and a member of an acting family that also includes his brother, Keith.

Carradine had a long show-business career that included the two “Kill Bill” martial-arts movies, both directed by Quentin Tarantino, in 2003 and 2004, plus more than 100 other films and 30 plays.

His role as Kwai Chang Caine, a Shaolin monk wandering the American West, in TV’s “Kung Fu” (1972-1975) was a turning point in Carradine’s career and life. He had appeared mainly in Westerns since 1963. After the TV series, he immersed himself in martial arts, writing books and making instructional videos as well as appearing in films and TV shows.

“I’m not a master. What I am is an evangelist for the art,” Carradine said in an interview with Bloomberg Television that aired last August.

‘Change Your Life’

Martial arts “can change your life,” he said. “People come up to me every day and say, ‘Your show changed my life.’ I think it can save the world if everybody can get hold of the true message, which has nothing to do with defending yourself or punching people out.”

Carradine was born John Arthur Carradine on Dec. 8, 1936, in Hollywood, California, where his father was part of director John Ford’s company of character actors. His mother was the former Ardanelle McCool, the first of his father’s four wives.

He attended Oakland Junior College, San Francisco State College (now University) and the University of California, Berkeley.

His theater career began when he studied drama at San Francisco State, according to his Web site. He continued to perform in musicals and dramas while in the U.S. Army.

Carradine’s five marriages produced two children. He also had a son with actress Barbara Hershey.

Source - www.bloomberg.com

The Los Angeles Greek Film Festival will honor director Penelope Spheeris who will be in attendance on Friday, June 26 at the Egyptian Theatre.

A special screening of SUBURBIA will follow a panel discussion with Penelope Spheeris, Ross Albert, Christina Beck, and Bert Dragin moderated by Robert Rosen

Los Angeles, CA May 19, 2009 — The evening will celebrate a blend of her professional landscape of documentary and fiction independent
filmmaking. The event will begin with a special screening of Spheeris’ documentary short NO USE WALKIN’ WHEN YOU CAN STROLL (1998) and her eighties cult classic feature SUBURBIA (1984), followed by a panel discussion with Spheeris, Ross Albert, Christina Beck, and Bert Dragin, moderated by UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television Dean Robert Rosen. The event will conclude with a reception.

Spheeris’ career began with a love for music. In 1974, she formed her own production company, ROCK ‘N REEL. It was the first production company in LA to specialize in music videos. After producing, directing, and editing videos for major bands throughout the seventies and eighties, she directed the 1979 documentary on the Los Angeles punk scene, THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION, which was received with unanimous critical praise.

Still fascinated with the subject, she wrote and directed her first narrative film, SUBURBIA produced by industry legend Roger Corman. The drama revolves around the lives of “The Rejected”, a group of punk kids who have abandoned their homes escaping abuse, and have squatted a Los Angeles bungalow. NO USE WALKIN’ WHEN YOU CAN STROLL is the moving and honest short portrait of Penelope Spheeris’ mother, which sheds light onto the director’s unusual and turbulent childhood years that would later inform the majority of her film works.

Spheeris never veered far from exploring desolation of youth which continued to dominate her subsequent fiction films, including THE BOYS NEXT DOOR (1984) with Charlie Sheen and Maxwell Caulfield; DUDES (1987) with Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea, Lee Ving, and Daniel Roebuck; and THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION, PART II: THE METAL YEARS (1988) with commentaries from Ozzy Osbourne, Steven Tyler, Joe Perry, Alice Cooper.

In 1992, Spheeris directed her seventh feature and first studio film, WAYNE’S WORLD (Paramount Pictures), followed by THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES (Fox, 1993), THE LITTLE RASCALS (Universal, 1994), BLACK SHEEP (Paramount, 1996), and SENSELESS (Dimension, 1998). THE KID & I (2005), starring Tom Arnold and Eric Gores about a brilliant young actor with cerebral palsy is the last film she directed. Spheeris wrote LOVE ABOVE THE STRIP, a romantic heavy metal comedy set in the summer of 1987, and is in development of ROTTEN: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs John Lydon’s best-selling biography.

Panel discussion will be moderated by Robert Rosen, Dean of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. Rosen has published widely in the field of media preservation and has guided the growth of the UCLA Film & Television Archive in original film and television materials. He also holds the following leadership positions: Founding Director of the National Center for Film and Video Preservation at the American Film Institute, the Executive Committee of the International Federation of Film Archives, member of the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress, and Board Member of the Stanford Theater Foundation and the Geffen Playhouse. For ten years he was the film critic for KCRW National Public Radio and he is an active member of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.
Panelists include Ross Albert, Christina Beck and Bert Dragin. Ross Albert started his career making a series of experimental short films, for which he was awarded several film festival prizes. He received his first editing credit for SUBURBIA. Since then, he has worked with Spheeris on nine projects including THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES, LITTLE RASCALS, BLACK SHEEP, and THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION PART III. He has also edited a wide range of other feature films including BLUE CITY, WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE, LISA, DEAD AND BURIED, 2010, BUSHWHACKED, WHAT WE DO IS SECRET, BABY ON BOARD, and THE PEST. Christina Beck began her career as a performer in Spheeris’ SUBURBIA, BOYS NEXT DOOR and DUDES. Beck has directed, written and starred in several short films including SLICE, produced by Fox Searchlight’s New Directors program screened at Cannes short film corner, SO HOT FOR YOU, and THE OPHELIA PROJECT. Her first feature film, PERFECTION is currently in production. Bert Dragin is the writer and director best known for his classic eighties horror flicks SUMMER CAMP NIGHTMARE (1987), co-written with Spheeris and produced by Roger Corman and TWICE DEAD (1988). He also produced Spheeris’ SUBURBIA.
The third annual Los Angeles Greek Film Festival (LAGFF) takes place June 25-28 in Hollywood at The Egyptian Theatre. LAGFF showcases new films from Greece, Cyprus, and filmmakers of Greek descent worldwide.

The Tribute to Penelope Spheeris will be held on Friday, June 26, 2009, 7:00 p.m. at the Egyptian Theatre, located at 6712 Hollywood Blvd in Hollywood, CA 90028. A reception will follow. The event will be presented by The Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation – ERT SA.

Admission to the reception, screening and panel discussion is $15 advance online purchase; $20 at the door. For more information on the festival please visit www.lagreekfilmfestival.org or call 818.728.0720.

May 20 (Bloomberg) — Oleg Yankovsky, the star of cult films by Andrei Tarkovsky and the last actor designated as a People’s Artist of the USSR, died in Moscow today after battling cancer. He was 65.

Yankovsky, born to an aristocratic family exiled to Kazakhstan under dictator Josef Stalin in the 1930s, last performed on stage this year at Moscow’s Lenkom Theater, where he spent most of his more than four-decade long career. He returned to Russia in February after medical treatment in Germany to act in The Marriage, a comedy by Nikolai Gogol.

Leading Russian politicians, actors and directors paid tribute today to the actor, who played the father in Tarkovsky’s semi-autobiographical 1975 film The Mirror and the writer star of Nostalghia in 1983.

“Oleg Yankovsky was a true master, a unique, generously gifted person, an actor from God,” Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said today in a message of condolence. “Oleg Yankovsky will always live in our memories, in the brilliant, unrepeatable images that this great Russian artist created.”

Yankovsky was perhaps most famous in Russia for the title role in The Very Same Munchhausen, the 1979 television movie of the tales of an 18th century aristocrat who travels to the moon and dances with Venus. An English-language film of the stories with Uma Thurman and Sting was released in 1988.

Tsar, the Pavel Lungin film in which Yankovsky plays his last film role as Metropolitan Filipp, the childhood friend and adviser to Ivan the Terrible, screened at the Cannes film festival in the Un Certain Regard section on May 17 and is scheduled to open in Russia this fall. The role earned Yankovsky praise for a “terrific” performance from Variety magazine reviewer Derek Elley, who called the film itself “laden with Russian brooding and violence.”

Actor Robert De Niro, a friend, last month visited Yankovsky while in Moscow for the opening of the Nobu restaurant. “I was happy to see him and his son and his grandson, and have him see my son,” De Niro told reporters at the time. “It was a good reunion.”

The Lenkom Theater will hold a service on May 22.

Source - www.bloomberg.com

 Christopher Lee is set to star in a new “Hammer horror” film for the first time in more than 30 years.

Hammer, one of Britain’s oldest production labels, was launched in 1934 and hit its peak during the 1950s and 1960s thanks in part to Lee’s Count Dracula.

The last Hammer film he appeared in was To the Devil … A Daughter in 1976. Younger fans have been introduced to the actor thanks to parts in the Lord of the Rings and Star Wars trilogies.

He will join Oscar winner Hilary Swank and Watchmen’s Jeffrey Dean Morgan for Hammer’s new thriller Invasion Of Privacy.

The film will be released under the banner of Hammer Films, although Exclusive Media Group is financing the project, which will be directed by debutant Antti J Jokinen.

Although little is given away regarding the plot, a brief synopsis says: “After separating from her husband, the beautiful and young Dr Juliet Dermer (Hilary Swank) moves to Brooklyn, NY and settles into a new life in a stunning and spacious loft apartment that seems to good to be true. It is …”

Peter Naish, Exclusive’s Head of Sales, said: “It has been exciting to see this project evolve into such a high profile commercial thriller which is now ready to leap off the page. The new script is scary and smart; the cast is fantastic; and Antti is assembling a great crew.”

Hammer’s heyday in the 1960s included releases such as The Curse of the Werewolf, The Kiss of the Vampire, The Devil Rides Out and The Plague of Zombies. Non-horror movies included One Million Years BC featuring Raquel Welch and her famous fur bikini.

The studio however suffered in the 1970s as more sophisticated Hollywood releases such as The Exorcist began to make Hammer look dated.

Source - www.thestandard.com.hk

Steve Martin and Carl Reiner are back on the big screen as the American Cinematheque’s Aero Theatre celebrates the director-producer and the comic actor with screenings of 1983’s underrated “The Man With Two Brains” and 1982’s clever “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid” onFriday, with Reiner scheduled to attend.

But that’s just the warm-up. All you need for Saturday is this lamp — and maybe the new phone book — to see 1979’s classic comedy “The Jerk” and 1984’s Lily Tomlin costarrer “All of Me.”

Keeping the Reiner portion of the film fest alive on Sunday is the 1970 cult classic “Where’s Poppa?” and 1978’s “The One and Only” with Henry Winkler.

The retrospective winds up on Wednesday with Reiner’s first feature, 1967’s “Enter Laughing,” basedon his bestselling semi-autobiography, and the 1969 drama “The Comic,” starring Dick Van Dyke. www.americancinematheque.com

Short and sweet

Get your giggles on at the first L.A. Comedy Shorts Film Festival, which opens tonight and runs through Sunday at the Downtown Independent Theatre. www.lacomedyshorts.com.

Slavic fare

New Russian Cinema, a festival presented by UCLA’s Slavic department and the city of West Hollywood, features the U.S. premiere of the 2008 drama “Everybody Dies but Me,” Saturday at UCLA’s James Bridges Theater. Programming also includes new Russian animation and documentaries.

Source -  http://www.latimes.com

As if a pair of Transformers films weren’t enough to seal the deal that Megan Fox is the reigning action queen, she’s adding another two notches to her belt.First up: she will star in the film adaptation of the cult comic book Fathom. Fox will play Aspen Matthews, an Olympic-level swimmer and marine biologist who discovers that her affinity for water has to do with her relationship to an underwater civilization.

Next, Fox will play Leila in Jonah Hex, the marksman-lover of the scarred bounty hunter hero played by Josh Brolin who is tracking a voodoo master played by John Malkovich who wants to raise a zombie army to save the Confederate south.

Both flicks are scheduled for 2010. We’re Moviefoning our tickets now…

Source - http://radaronline.com

Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Tooth Fairy? Playing John McClane? Fighting Stallone and Willis? These and more in the films that Arnie never made…

Even the biggest movie star in the world can sometimes fail to get a project lifted off the ground. Here, we take a look at an assortment of films that Arnold Schwarzenegger was linked with that for differing reasons never eventually materialised with the Austrian Oak in them…Crusade

Arguably the most interesting movie on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s never-made list was a potential reunion with his Total Recall director, Paul Verhoeven. The film was Crusade, and it was set to be a Middle Ages epic with plenty of hack and slash to it. Carolco was set to be putting up the money for the film, but it quickly pulled the plug in 1994 when it opted instead to put its funding into the Renny Harlin-helmed Cutthroat Island. Crusade would have cost just over $100m to make (and back then, that wasn’t the routine figure it is now), while Cutthroat Island was to be around $30m cheaper.

Carolco argued that the cost for Crusade was potentially going to be still more, and the project was put into turnaround. And while Schwarzenegger was reportedly trying to revive it at the end of the 90s, Crusade is set to go down as one of the most interesting blockbusters never made. For more on just where it all went wrong, may we recommend David Hughes’ book, The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made. Well worth a read…

Spider-man

Back when James Cameron was developing his version of Spider-man, one of the plans was for the main villain to be Dr Octopus. If that had happened, the name being mooted to play him was none other than Cameron’s old collaborator, Arnie. Nothing concrete ever came of this, though, and once again, we recommend David Hughes’ aforementioned book for more on the Spider-man that never was…

True Lies 2

To be fair on this one, if James Cameron had pushed ahead with his originally-planned sequel to True Lies, then it’s likely that Schwarzenegger would have come aboard. As it stood, in the slipstream of Titanic, Cameron didn’t commit to another major feature until the currently in post-production Avatar. He toyed with True Lies 2, but apparently dropped the project in the wake of the September 11th attacks.

Total Recall 2

Back when the business that was Carolco sort of re-emerged as C-2 Pictures, it reportedly picked up the rights to a few of the original firm’s older films. Basic Instinct was one, Total Recall was the other. The idea was that it could press ahead with sequels to them both, and try and put some green in the bank.

Try as they might, though, but Total Recall 2 simply went nowhere. Schwarzenegger saw and sent back the script, and eventually, C-2 did manage to get the Basic Instinct sequel moving instead. When that bombed, it hardly ignited the chances of a follow-up to Total Recall, to which Arnie never seemed to commit. Instead, there’s now talk of a remake, which we reported about here, with Arnold nowhere in sight.

Sgt Rock

Just looking at the cast list of Sylvester Stallone’s upcoming The Expendables is enough to make any fan of 80s, 90s and even contemporary action cinema salivate. Stallone? Schwarzenegger? Statham? Mickey Rourke? Jet-Li? Just where do we get tickets?

But at the start of the 90s, it could have been Stallone, Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis uniting, when the trio were (almost) all at the height of their box office powers. The project was the comic book adaptation of Sgt Rock, being packaged by uber-producer Joel Silver, and there was real consideration given to bringing the three together in the one project. Schwarzenegger was attached, but we suspect it was the budget that ultimately kyboshed the idea.

Sgt Rock is, however, still in development, and recently was linked to Bruce Willis. Guy Ritchie had been mooted as a director, but he went off to do Sherlock Holmes instead.

Die Hard

Just how differently could history have been? Back in the 1980s, Arnie was apparently offered the chance to be John McClane in the movie Die Hard. This would, of course, have turned the ordinary guy fighting back feel of that film into something else entirely, but fortunately – for unknown reasons – the Austrian Oak turned the role down. Phew.

Tooth Fairy

Back when Schwarzenegger was actively hunting for high concept comedies, given that Twins made very big bucks indeed, he flirted for some time with the idea of Tooth Fairy. At one point with City Slickers director Ron Underwood reported to be mooted to helm, Tooth Fairy would have seen Arnie playing the tooth fairy. The project was on the burner for some time, but never seemed to gel together.

However, the mantle for this one has been picked up elsewhere. The film is now in production, only with The Rock in the leading role instead. It’s due out at the end of the year.

Believe the rumours…

There’s inevitably lots of tittle-tattle on potentially Schwarzenegger projects, but he’s also supposed to have turned down Commando 2, Predator 2 and Full Metal Jacket (!). Furthermore, his name was linked with the likes of Robocop, I Am Legend and Strange Days too. Things really could have been very different…

Source - http://www.denofgeek.com