Here's something you might be interested in.
Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed
Big Screen — Movie commentary
Blurt — Music's inside track
Booze News — San Diego spirits
Classical Music — Immortal beauty
Classifieds — Free and easy
Cover Stories — Front-page features
Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes
Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts
Feast! — Food & drink reviews
Feature Stories — Local news & stories
Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore
From the Archives — Spotlight on the past
Golden Dreams — Talk of the town
The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it
Letters — Our inbox
Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites
Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans
Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists
Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news
News Ticker — News & politics
Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated
Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna
Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated
Poetry — The old and the new
Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers
Reading — The hunt for intellectuals
Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails
San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds
SD on the QT — Almost factual news
Sheep and Goats — Places of worship
Special Issues — The best of
Street Style — San Diego streets have style
Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves
Theater — On stage in San Diego this week
Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative
Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work
Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego
Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads
Your Week — Daily event picks
Hollywood bets there’s gold in them thar woods! (Also, the womb.)
New movies opening this week: Blair Witch, White Girl, Snowden, and more
Blair Witch: It’s like she's reaching right out of the screen and into your wallet!
Movie
Blair Witch
Found-footage horror hit <em>The Blair Witch Project</em> has already spawned a sequel (<em>Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows</em>), a spinoff (<em>Doc. 33</em>), a comic book series, and a trio of video games. But when the original makes $248 million on a budget under $1 million, you can bet there's interest in keeping the story going. Directed by Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick.
Apple founder Steve Jobs once said, “People don’t know what they want until you give it to them.” Maybe he’s right. I never dreamed people would want threequels to The Blair Witch Project and Bridget Jones’s Diary more than 15 years after the originals and more than 10 years after the inevitable sequels. But maybe they do. At any rate, Hollywood is certainly giving it to them.
Alas, I cannot tell you if Blair Witch and Bridget Jones’s Baby are worth the wait; I was too busy working on my spec script for Charlie’s Angel’s 3: Heaven Can Wait to attend the screenings. Sorry about that.
Another blast from the past: the Ken is playing digitally restored versions of Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows (1958) and Carol Reed’s The Fallen Idol (1948). Treat yourself to a trip back in time to an era “when movies electrified the culture, Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael battled for the souls of the young, and preferring Godard to Truffaut (or vice versa) was a way of announcing who you were.” Yes indeedy. (Go ahead and click — it’s a fun piece, and I say that as someone who enjoys reading The New Yorker‘s Anthony Lane a great deal.) Or, if you prefer your cinematic nostalgia a little less highfalutin’, check out Scott’s video ranking of onscreen Hitlers.
For me, the platinum blonde spot on this week’s movie horizon was White Girl, from first-timer Elizabeth Wood. (I also enjoyed my interview with her, which was kind of amazing, since it included her admission that she decided she wanted to make the movie, sent some script pages to Columbia film school, got in, graduated, went out, made her movie, and had such a positive experience that when I asked her what she’ll do differently next time, she replied, “I think it all went so well that it’s hard to know what I won’t do again; I’m just excited to do it again. I learned so much: I had never done any of this, and every step forward was blind. So I’m excited: next time I can just trust myself, and it’s going to be awesome.” It’s hard to know what to do with such positivity and success.)
Elsewhere on the interview front: I had a fine chat with Leonard Nimoy’s son Adam about For The Love of Spock, the documentary he made about himself, his dad, and his dad’s most famous character, First Officer Spock of the Starship Enterprise. The film screens next week as part of the San Diego Jewish Film Festival. And Scott got to chat with local actor Shane P. Allen about his experience working on Clint Eastwood’s Sully. That was undoubtedly the high point of Scott’s week, since all he got to review was the glorified sake infomercial Kampai! For the Love of Sake. Also because working with Eastwood sounds pretty cool and craftsmanlike.
And then there’s Snowden, which mostly reminded me of how much I liked Citizenfour. Poor Oliver Stone: he finally found a real live conspiracy — a supposedly democratic government spying on its own people, secret courts, public strong-arming of private enterprise, the works — but people love their Internet waaaay too much to feel his outrage. Instead, they chuckle over the grumpy old man who appears before the film to remind them that their cell phones are pocket-size time bombs that can and probably will destroy their lives, and could they please turn them off during the movie? As Charlie Brown would say: sigh.
Also opening, and also unreviewed: the Eddie Murphy tearjerker drama Mr. Church, the border drug drama Transpecos, and the Peruvian environmentalist v. Peruvian government documentary When Two Worlds Collide. We’ll get back on the horse next week.
Here's something you might be interested in.
Hollywood bets there’s gold in them thar woods! (Also, the womb.)
New movies opening this week: Blair Witch, White Girl, Snowden, and more
Hollywood bets there’s gold in them thar woods! (Also, the womb.)
New movies opening this week: Blair Witch, White Girl, Snowden, and more
Blair Witch: It’s like she's reaching right out of the screen and into your wallet!
Movie
Blair Witch
Found-footage horror hit <em>The Blair Witch Project</em> has already spawned a sequel (<em>Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows</em>), a spinoff (<em>Doc. 33</em>), a comic book series, and a trio of video games. But when the original makes $248 million on a budget under $1 million, you can bet there's interest in keeping the story going. Directed by Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick.
Apple founder Steve Jobs once said, “People don’t know what they want until you give it to them.” Maybe he’s right. I never dreamed people would want threequels to The Blair Witch Project and Bridget Jones’s Diary more than 15 years after the originals and more than 10 years after the inevitable sequels. But maybe they do. At any rate, Hollywood is certainly giving it to them.
Alas, I cannot tell you if Blair Witch and Bridget Jones’s Baby are worth the wait; I was too busy working on my spec script for Charlie’s Angel’s 3: Heaven Can Wait to attend the screenings. Sorry about that.
Another blast from the past: the Ken is playing digitally restored versions of Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows (1958) and Carol Reed’s The Fallen Idol (1948). Treat yourself to a trip back in time to an era “when movies electrified the culture, Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael battled for the souls of the young, and preferring Godard to Truffaut (or vice versa) was a way of announcing who you were.” Yes indeedy. (Go ahead and click — it’s a fun piece, and I say that as someone who enjoys reading The New Yorker‘s Anthony Lane a great deal.) Or, if you prefer your cinematic nostalgia a little less highfalutin’, check out Scott’s video ranking of onscreen Hitlers.
For me, the platinum blonde spot on this week’s movie horizon was White Girl, from first-timer Elizabeth Wood. (I also enjoyed my interview with her, which was kind of amazing, since it included her admission that she decided she wanted to make the movie, sent some script pages to Columbia film school, got in, graduated, went out, made her movie, and had such a positive experience that when I asked her what she’ll do differently next time, she replied, “I think it all went so well that it’s hard to know what I won’t do again; I’m just excited to do it again. I learned so much: I had never done any of this, and every step forward was blind. So I’m excited: next time I can just trust myself, and it’s going to be awesome.” It’s hard to know what to do with such positivity and success.)
Elsewhere on the interview front: I had a fine chat with Leonard Nimoy’s son Adam about For The Love of Spock, the documentary he made about himself, his dad, and his dad’s most famous character, First Officer Spock of the Starship Enterprise. The film screens next week as part of the San Diego Jewish Film Festival. And Scott got to chat with local actor Shane P. Allen about his experience working on Clint Eastwood’s Sully. That was undoubtedly the high point of Scott’s week, since all he got to review was the glorified sake infomercial Kampai! For the Love of Sake. Also because working with Eastwood sounds pretty cool and craftsmanlike.
And then there’s Snowden, which mostly reminded me of how much I liked Citizenfour. Poor Oliver Stone: he finally found a real live conspiracy — a supposedly democratic government spying on its own people, secret courts, public strong-arming of private enterprise, the works — but people love their Internet waaaay too much to feel his outrage. Instead, they chuckle over the grumpy old man who appears before the film to remind them that their cell phones are pocket-size time bombs that can and probably will destroy their lives, and could they please turn them off during the movie? As Charlie Brown would say: sigh.
Also opening, and also unreviewed: the Eddie Murphy tearjerker drama Mr. Church, the border drug drama Transpecos, and the Peruvian environmentalist v. Peruvian government documentary When Two Worlds Collide. We’ll get back on the horse next week.
Comments