Review: Meet Monica Velour
It’s generally not a good sign when a film about an underage virgin who falls in love with an over-the-hill porn star opens on a sandwich truck with a twenty-foot metal weenie welded to its roof. Relax. Meet Monica Velour …
The Projectionist Has Final Cut — Ask Terrence Malick
A hand-written sign hung in every projection booth that has been my privilege to man: THE PROJECTIONIST HAS FINAL CUT! One lazy projectionist is all it takes to sabotage the years of hard work put into getting a film from …
Scorsese to Direct Big-Screen Biopic of Liz and Dick?
It didn‘t take long for Elizabeth Taylor‘s body to cool. Hollywood Deadline reports that Paramount Pictures has optioned the rights to Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger's showbiz bio Furious Love for Marty to direct. Don’t get your hopes up. I’m …
Steve Martin Duped by German Art Forgers
Banjo playing funnyman and art accumulator Steve Martin must be getting pretty small right about now. According to The Hollywood Reporter, police in Cologne, Germany said Martin unwittingly bought and sold a forged copy of Landscape With Horses, a 1915 …
Projectionists Take Cues From Marks
True films lovers have no use for watches; who needs Cartier when you can count cue marks? Laraine Day & Q. Marks in John Brahm's *The Locket* I miss cue marks. No, not my third cousin twice removed, but changeover …
Free Screening of the 10th Annual Youth Media Showcase
“Change lives through film.” Now there's a catchphrase we can all abide by. No organization in our town does more to promote cineliteracy among youth than The Media Arts Center San Diego. In addition to the Latino Film Festival and …
Walt Disney Unleashes Jaundiced Mutt!
Long before Courage: The Cowardly Dog debuted on Nickelodeon, this 1958 ad -- heralding another lily-livered pooch -- appeared in the pages of the South Carolina Spartanberg Herald-Journal. Disney films are primers for children on adult neuroses. Here's hoping that …
Local Filmmaker's Anti-War Documentary Airs Tonight
Writer-director Glenn Palmedo-Smith’s Hold at All Costs asks the United States military to do the impossible: Learn from its mistakes. Billed as “The story of forgotten soldiers in a forgotten battle of a forgotten war,” the Korean war documentary details …
Top Gun Screening in Oceanside Took My Breath Away
I always said the only way you'd get me to sit through Top Gun again is if a paycheck was involved. For the past two summers it's been my pleasure to team with CommCinema outdoor movies to show films free …
Sean Young's Behind-the-Scenes Blade Runner Polaroids
Blade Runner is the anti-Star Wars, the most visually dazzling science-fiction film since Lang’s Metropolis. George Lucas used desaturated colors and weatherbeaten space ships to make his toy future appear bleak and lived-in. It was his answer to the candy-color …
Attention All Puddingheads: Here's Your First Look at Cast Photos From Upcoming Three Stooges Movie!
A friend forwarded me an early draft of the Farrelly Brothers‘ (There's Something About Mary) screenplay for their hotly anticipated revisionist cinematic treatise, The Three Stooges. The project was (at least according to a 20th Century Fox press release) “written …
Dig a Hole: Joseph Brooks, Oscar®-Winning "Life-Lighter" Gone Wrong
Joseph Brooks, commercial-jingle tunesmith, director, screenwriter, and composer of one of the more pestiferous pop tunes of this or any lifetime -- and accused casting-couch rapist -- is dead of an apparent suicide. He was 73. Brooks began his musical …
Osama bin Laden, Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You!
This didn't take long. Less than one month after Osama bin Laden succumbed to ballistic trauma, Columbia Pictures has acquired the rights to a big screen biopic. According to a studio press release, Oscar®-winners Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal, director …
Hard Breakers' Sophie Monk visits San Diego
Sophie Monk likes the anonymity her time spent in the United States affords her. The chart-topping Australian pop-singer and model-turned-actress can’t walk through the streets of her home town without being swamped by adoring fans, but in SoCal the perfect …
Vintage ads from Fritz Lang's Metropolis celebrate the legacy of Kino International's Donald Krim
Donald Krim (1945 - 2011) I have been wanting to post these vintage Metropolis ads for several days, but other, more pertinent stories kept them on the back burner. Today, news arrived that Donald Krim, president of Kino International, had …
Dig a Hole: Leonard Kastle, The Honeymoon Killers one-hit wonder
One-shot writer, director Leonard Kastle, 82, died on Wednesday at his home in Westerlo, N.Y. He may have been a one-hit wonder, but oh what a hit it was! At the time of its limited release, the low-budget indie The …
Review: Rubber
What reasonable explanation could a filmmaker possibly provide for an abandoned tire suddenly coming to life, rising from its desert graveyard and going on a killing spree? There’s nuclear fallout, but that’s so 1950s, and zombies or a pretty face …
San Diego's Social Swami Burl Stiff Dies
I have been an avid Burl Stiff watcher since I first set foot in San Diego twelve years ago. That has been true even though my only cinematic connection with him was at a couple of screenings during my stint …
Five end-of- the-world movies to see before doomsday
Do the Biblical math: Evangelist Harold Camping + The Scriptures = The end of the world as we know it. I was in my fallout shelter last night speaking with L. Ron Hubbard on the wireless direct from the planet …
UCSD Arts Library to Host Impromptu Sci-Fi Radio & Film Laboratory
Get out your white smocks and tuning forks. The UCSD Arts Library will present what's being billed as an "Impromptu Sci-Fi Radio & Film Laboratory." The one-day event will run from 11 am-5 pm this Saturday at the Geisel Library's …