Category: Film & TV

  • Borat Banned From Russian Movie Theaters

    The Moscow Times: The distributor, 20th Century Fox in Russia, can appeal the agency’s decision in court, Vasyuchkov said, adding that he had never heard of a non-pornographic movie being banned. Hundreds of hard-core pornographic movies are currently licensed by the agency for distribution. “We got the news today,” said Nikolai Vorunkov, deputy general director…

  • Eko's dead. Let's kill more people on "Lost." In this order.

    Tim Goodman’s The Bastard Machine: So let’s off some more “Lost” characters. In this order: 1. Claire. She’s pointless. Let Desmond raise that baby. He’d at least save it. 2. Sawyer. Enough already. The accent and the nicknames are more annoying now than ever. Too much screen time. Shoot him in the eye, Freckles. 3.…

  • The real face of Boratstan

    Observer: And then she takes us – Steve, my travelling companion, and me – into a cafe where we have a bit of cake. ‘What’s it called?’ I ask. ‘The cake? It is known as “nigger in the foam”.’ So, you see, wrong, wrong, wrong. Or, perhaps, just a little bit right. And although the…

  • Stinkers of the Season

    Stinkers of the Season

    The Moscow Times: Filipp Yankovsky’s “The Swordbearer” The film’s hero, Sasha, is played by the lithe Artyom Tkachenko, who occasionally looks like a new version of the antihero that the late Sergei Bodrov Jr. played in Balabanov’s “Brother” films, but without any of the charisma. He has one distinguishing feature: a blade-like instrument that has…

  • Taking stupid seriously

    Taking stupid seriously

    LA Times: BORAT’S interviews fall into roughly two categories. He seeks out self-consciously genteel, almost impossibly schematic “life coaches” of one kind or another — people whose job it is to tell others how to date, tell jokes, find work, etc. — and barrages them with questions, requests and opinions that, despite being completely outrageous,…

  • This Roadie's Life

    This Roadie's Life

    LA Weekly: Do you have a Brit-humor-obsessed friend who pesters you to get in line and admit once and for all that Steve Coogan is a comedy god? Maybe he’s shoved one of Coogan’s Alan Partridge videos in your hands to get you up to speed on the egomaniacally obnoxious, socially inept talk-show-host character that…

  • THE GRINDHOUSE TRAILER IS UP

    THE GRINDHOUSE TRAILER IS UP

    What Would Tyler Durden Do: Finally a trailer for the Quentin Tarantino / Robert Rodriguez movie “Grindhouse”. I think I read it’s a remake of “Sense and Sensibility”, but that might not be right. Rose McGowan plays a stripper with a gun for a leg, Kurt Russell plays a maniac killer and I play an…

  • Offensive and unfair, Borat's antics leave a nasty aftertaste

    Guardian: There is a further reason why Baron Cohen causes injury and offence. Under Stalin’s forced collectivisation in the 1920s, about half the ethnic Kazakh population were deported or starved to death. In the early 1940s, entire populations of “anti-Soviet” peoples – including Tartars, Chechens, Ingush, Volga Germans and Koreans – were dumped in the…

  • Kazakhs Shrug at ‘Borat’ While the State Fumes

    Kazakhs Shrug at ‘Borat’ While the State Fumes

    NYT: Mr. Ashykbayev denounced Mr. Cohen’s performance as host of the MTV Europe Music Awards in Lisbon last fall, in which a skit mocked the imperial aura that surrounds Mr. Nazarbayev, the country’s president since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Mr. Ashykbayev suggested that Mr. Cohen was acting on behalf of “someone’s political…

  • Kazakhstan fights back ahead of Borat film release

    Kazakhstan fights back ahead of Borat film release

    Guardian: Kazakhstan: land of superstition, religious intolerance, political suppression and goats. Wrong. Kazakhstan is actually a country of metals and machinery, an outward-looking, modern nation with a stable economy that attracts foreign investors to its cosmopolitan capital. The Kazakh government took the unusual step yesterday of publishing a four-page colour supplement in the New York…

  • Street Trash (1987) DVD available at Netflix

    Street Trash (1987) DVD available at Netflix

    Genres: Comedy, Horror Tagline: Things in New York are about to go down the toilet… Plot Synopsis: When a liquor store owner finds a case of “Viper” in his cellar, he decides to sell it to the local hobos at one dollar a bottle, unaware of its true properties. The drinks causes its consumers to…

  • Hollywood turns cameras on Karadzic

    BBC: The film, called Spring Break in Bosnia, tells the true story of a group of journalists who in 2000 went on the trail of Europe’s most wanted man, former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic. In the course of their adventure, they got mistaken for a CIA hit team. Here.

  • It Was Loud. It Was Fast. But What Did It Mean?

    NYT reviews American Hardcore. My review from a January showing at Sundance is Here. NYT: Musically hardcore was a repudiation of almost everything, from disco to the dilution of first-generation punk labeled new wave to, of course, the same high-flying and deeply loathed bands, like the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac and Journey, that the original punks…

  • Back to the computer

    I’ve been in Vegas photographing Warren Jeffs and my Powerbook is in the shop. I’ll post something about photographing Jeffs once I get a minute or two.

  • Bizarro Documentary Trailers from Finland

    Bizarro Documentary Trailers from Finland

    From WFMU’s Beware of the Blog: Every week or so I can expect an email in my inbox from my friend Jussi in Finland, asking me if I know some totally-off-the-wall obscuro 1980’s metal band whom he worships. Recently he sent me a link to a documentary trailer for Shock Tilt, a film recounting the…

  • Doctor Who loses momentum

    From the Guardian: It’s another mystery for Doctor Who – where have the viewers gone? BBC1’s Doctor Who revival has been lavished with critical praise and awards, but there are signs midway through its second series that viewers may be tiring of the time travelling sci-fi drama. Saturday’s Doctor Who, the seventh out of 13…

  • Strap Happy

    From the Guardian: Last year’s Cannes film festival opened in a discreetly classy, impeccably French fashion with Dominik Moll’s Lemming. This time around the Cote d’Azur is set to become one big Hollywood circus, complete with a nocturnal laser lightshow that looks set to induce epileptic seizures in the old women and small dogs who…

  • When Preachers Cuss, video

    When Preachers Cuss, video

    From WFMU’s Beware of the Blog: the late, great Dr. Gene Scott. Here’s the good doctor on the attack, throwing out every rule in the televangelist / NPR fundraising handbook, frothing at the mouth and insulting his viewers, one of whom Scott challenges to a duel. Here.

  • Blek on Film

    Blek on Film

    From the Wooster Collective: For quite some time, King Adz has been working with Blek Le Rat on a documentary which will be released on DVD in the coming weeks. The clip above comes from ‘Blek Le Rat – Original Stencil Pioneer’ There will also be a preview of the film tomorrow in Berlin at…