I know nothing about this movie other than the fact that I want to see it.

Just a reminder that Children of Men comes out on DVD today. It was one of the best movies of last year, heck, it was one of the best movies of the past five years. If you haven't seen it, get the to a video store. (Or just Netflix it.)

Chud has an interview with Judd Apatow about the movie Knocked Up. The article includes a bit about David Gordon Green's next film Pineapple Express, which Apatow wrote. Excerpts below; read the full interview here

Devin Faraci: You also wrote Pineapple Express.

Judd Apatow: I have a story credit. It’s an idea I had for a movie a year ago and I wrote the story with Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, who wrote Superbad. They wrote the screenplay. That’s just a big, funny, marijuana-infused action movie which is basically inspired by the idea of ‘What if you did a movie like Bad Boys where the two leads were as high as Brad Pitt in True Romance?’

DF: And you have James Franco back in the fold for that. He has a cameo in Knocked Up, but he’s a lead in Pineapple Express.

JA: We’re excited to be working with James Franco again. We always knew he was really, really funny but he hasn’t chosen to make a comedy. He’s riotously funny in this, so I’m excited to surprise people with how funny he is. And David Gordon Green is directing.

DF: He’s such a great director. He’s one of my favorites.

JA: It’s been a lot of fun. We try to choose directors who will bring a completely different artistic bent to these movies, so Greg Mottola, who did The Daytrippers, directed Superbad, and it’s just way better than it ever should be. We’re making the shocking choice to hire artists to direct our R-rated comedies.

The New York Times has a frustrating article about comedians taking serious roles. I completely disagree with his labeling Adam Sandler's performance is Reign Over Me as "two note" and that WIll Ferrel is the best actor of the group. (Not that I don't like Will Ferrel, I do. At one point I even predicted he would be nominated for an oscar sometime in his life.)

This is good news. Anytime Scorsese and DiCaprio team up its something to get excited about. That being said, who knows if or when this will come to fruition. They both have numerous other projects lined up and there is no telling when this will be ready to go. The rest is copied from Variety.

"Martin Scorsese is looking to direct Leonardo DiCaprio in the film adaptation of Jordan Belfort's upcoming tell-all autobiography "The Wolf of Wall Street" for Warner Bros. Pictures, with "The Sopranos" scribe Terence Winter aboard to write.

It's unknown, however, where "Wolf" stands on the list of potential directing projects that have been announced for Scorsese since the Academy Awards.

In "Wolf of Wall Street" DiCaprio would play Belfort, a Long Island penny stockbroker who served 20 months in prison for refusing to cooperate in a massive 1990s securities fraud case that involved widespread corruption on Wall Street and in the corporate banking world, including mob infiltration.

Like "Catch Me if You Can," "Wolf" would be a two-hander with a key part for a second star: Much of the film would hinge on Belfort's relationship with the FBI agent who tried to make him an informant.

At Paramount, Scorsese is developing with an eye to direct "The Long Play," a rock 'n' roll epic to be penned by "Departed" scribe William Monahan. He's also attached to direct the bigscreen adaptation of Eric Jager's historical tome "Last Duel: A True Story of Crime."

Over at Warners, the studio and Graham King's Initial Entertainment Group recently picked up the screen rights to Brian Selznick children's novel "The Invention of Hugo Cabret" as a potential directing vehicle for Scorsese.

DiCaprio's next pic will be the film adaptation of Richard Yates' 1961 tome "Revolutionary Road," reuniting him with Kate Winslet."

I was going to post these photos from Rambo 4 (now called John Rambo) to make fun of them, but that seems a little too easy. You can see more photos here.

Steven Soderbergh has decided on his Hi-Def follow up to Bubble. Next up is a movie about "super high-end call girls" in New York, who make $2000 an hour. Soderbergh will again use non-actors and plans another simultaneous ("day and date") release. You can read more about it here.

Reign Over Me

I wish Adam Sandler would make more movies like this. He has all the tools to be a great actor but generally settles for playing a version of himself. Here he is childlike, aggressive, violent, distraught, suicidal, patient and impatient, sometimes in the space of just a few minutes. I would say it is his best performance but I'm biased towards Punch Drunk Love.

I think friendship is one of the hardest emotions to get right in the movies. Off the top of my head I can only think of a couple examples that get it right, Sideways and The Shawshank Redemption. While this movie doesn't quite reach those standards it does get the relationship between the actors right. Their chemistry never seems forced and it feels like the two did know each other in their past.

The film is not perfect but it's emotional core has enough to lift it above its problems. Director/Writer Mike Binder has a knack of putting odd plot points into his movies (the husbands death from The Upside of Anger) and here a few feel forced. I sort of admire that he is willing to try something different though it distracts from the main story.

I was surprised how good the soundtrack is in this. It's filled with mostly rock songs from the seventies but the Rolfe Kent score is also nice. There is also an unforgettable sequence that serves as the emotional center of the film in which Charlie's iPod headphones are around his neck. You can heard Springsteen's Drive All Night bleeding through the headphones and into the scene, serving as the scene music that results in adevastating exchange between the two friends.

Director Werner Herzog will be holding a rare q & a session on his films this weekend at the Aero Theater 1328 Montana Avenue, Santa Monica. Saturday, March 24 at 7:30 P.M. highlights the double-feature Aguirre, The Wrath Of God and Fitzcarraldo that star Klaus Kinski. Sunday, March 25 at 7:30 P.M. concludes the series with Lessons Of Darkness a surreal, visual "sci-fi" documentary tale about the fires of Kuwait and Grizzly Man.

I know this means nothing, it was really just an excuse to post this video.

Paramount has picked Jonah Nolan to write Interstellar, the Stephen Spielberg-directed movie about explorers who travel through a wormhole into another dimension. Noaln wrote the short story that became his brother Chris Nolan's Memento, as well as The Prestige and The Dark Knight. He will begin work on Interstellar after he finishes writing The Chicago Fire for Warner Bros. Spielberg is currently working on the fourth Indiana Jones movie and will follow that with a movie about Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. (Variety)

Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio will star together for the first time since 1997's Titanic in DreamWorks' Revolutionary Road. The Sam Mendes-directed movie will be based on the Richard Yates's 1961 novel about post-war disillusionment seen through the eyes of a suburban couple raising two children in the mid-1950s who find their true desires obstructed by pressure to conform. Writer Justin Haythe adapted the screenplay. John N. Hart, Shooting is slated to begin this summer.

At some point I should probably just turn this into a blog that only shows movie posters since that seems to be all I ever post about. This time Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez pick their favorites for Entertainment Weekly. They are sort of a predictable group of exploitation movies from the seventies and eighties and to be honest I'm getting tired of the whole grindhouse thing, they are nearing overkill very soon.

Of course if we are talking about movie posters, nobody does it better than the Polish

Last nights Survivor was actually one of the most entertaining episodes in the history of the show and by far the best of the current season.

If anyone is interested you can watch it for free here.

I never noticed how similar the teaser poster for The Departed and the 25th Anniversary poster for Mean Streets were until, well, I had nothing better to do than look at all of the posters for Martin Scorsese movies.

The original Mean Streets poster is basically the same as the version below, just the buildings are in an orange/red that doesn't look as good as the black

Sadly, it will be 2008 before the next David Gordon Green film will be seen.

The good news is there might be two.

Update:

...And more David Gordon Green news, this time it relates to John Grisham.

Does anyone want to see a movie for free that nobody cared about in the first place?

Premiere.com has a gallery of what they think are the 25 best movie posters ever. Most of them are of the hand drawn variety, from the 50's and before. A few of my favorites from the list are below.

More bad DVD cover art. This time from Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain. I didn't think it was the greatest movie in the world but at least the poster (on the right) captured the mood of the sci fi/romantic/weird ass movie.

I was just reading Richard Roeper's review of 300 and I think he perfectly summed up the whole movie in one paragraph.

In this sweeping and epic adaptation of the classic graphic novel from master-of-the-genre Frank Miller ("Sin City," "The Dark Knight Returns"), director Zack Snyder has created a jaw-dropping, surrealistic dreamscape filled with stunning images, simmering and seriocomic homoeroticism, a topless oracle-babe, a sexy queen, larger-than-life warriors, hot love scenes, cutting-edge special effects and battle sequences so ambitious, you sometimes have to laugh at the sheer audacity of the whole thing.

Clint Eastwood has decided on his next movie. Angelina Jolie will star in his next directorial effort, the Universal thriller The Changeling. The film was originally set up at Universal and Imagine for Ron Howard to direct but Howard and producing partner Brian Grazer approached Eastwood about his interest in directing. The film is about a woman whose child is kidnapped and then returned, but she suspects the kid she gets back isn’t her son then somehow she gets involved in LAPD corruption. It is all set in the 1920's.

300

I'm probably the wrong audience for this movie. I have never read a graphic novel and don't really enjoy the swords and sandals genre. That being said, this movie is actually pretty good. It's all surface material though, you don't really become emotionally invested in any of the characters or their situations. You are just swept along by the visuals and the sound. The whole thing is sort of like playing a video game. It's fun while it's happening but you don't really think about it when it's over.

There are things I really liked about the movie. The use of voice over and how it is telling the story as we are watching it, and how it all wraps up at the end. The use of practical make-up on characters instead of cgi and the bravura that went into the filmmaking. This was shot mostly on blue and green screens and the digital scenery is able to produce landscapes that would otherwise not exist and if did would be too costly to film at. I also appreciated that there seemed to be a clarity to the action scenes. All the characters essentially look the same in the film yet you always know who you are seeing and where they are.

If you are planning to see this movie, see it in the theater with the best projection and sound. It will probably go over best with a large crowd too. This is a movie meant to see with an audience.

Indiana Jones has a son.

If anyone is interested in the new show Andy Barker, P.I. you can see the first six episodes on the nbc website.I only watched the first minute of one so don't know if they are funny or not but the quality isn't bad. It stars Andy Richter and Tony Hale (Buster from Arrested Development) and comes from Conan O’Brien and his old head writer.

Here are some photos of Jared Leto's weight gain for Chapter 27 and his weight loss afterwards. The scans are bad but the photos were taken by Terry Richardson. It would be easier to take something like this seriously if Leto wasn't the lead singer of 30 Seconds to Mars.

Below is both parts of an unseen Al Gore campaign video that was made by Spike Jonze when Gore was running for president in 2000. As the title states it was never shown, it did show up on the first issue of Wholphin though. Not really movie news but with Gore being the most popular man in Hollywood it's a good watch.

Here is an interesting article from screenwriter Larry Gross on Zodiac's experimental narrative.

Zodiac

Zodiac, beyond all things, is a film based on fact. It's about police procedural, a killer, and obsession yet it is all these woven together that makes it hard to categorize.

It initially brings to mind something like All the President's Men or even The Conversation a little bit, but it is not like these films. There isn't really a three act structure and supporting actors get just as much screen time as the leads. It's almost experimental in a way.

Director David Fincher trusts the audience to keep up with the story and this is by far his most accomplished work. Zodiac is an epic that covers decades and when scenes end the next may be six weeks later or maybe next six years. Most of the cops and reporters originally on the case are reassigned or burn out or just give up. Each individual segment almost feels like it's own short story.

Zodiac is a long movie. There is a methodical pace that is needed to cover all the details. Each actor has their own stories yet none of them are really the story of the movie, the whole story is everything that went into the Zodiac investigation.

Martin Scorsese and Mark Wahlberg are teaming up again, this time to produce a dramatic series for HBO about Atlantic City. The project will be based on the book "Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, Hight TImes, and Corruption of Atlantic City" by Nelson Johnson.

Apparently the book chronicles "Atlantic City from its birth as a seaside health resort through the notorious backroom politics and power struggles, to the city's rebirth as an entertainment and gambling mecca where anything goes." So maybe it will be a bit like Casino, just with a larger scope. Then again, that is just a guess.

Black Snake Moan

Six or seven years ago Premiere Magazine asked Martin Scorsese what filmmaker working today he thought most resembled his work. His answer was Wes Anderson. Hard to disagree with his choice but I would argue that Craig Brewer, writer/director of Hustle & Flow and now with Black Snake Moan, more resembles Scorsese (especially his earlier films). Brewer perfectly captures a part of the south the same way Scorsese perfectly captured New York and both directors use music in a way that captures the thoughts and feelings of their characters.

To try and summarize the plot would be impossible. Part of the fun is seeing the characters in these ridiculous situations, then seeing what happens next. You may think you have figured out where the plot will go, but trust me, you will more than likely be wrong.

The film could also contain Samuel L. Jackson's best performance. I'm racking my brain to think of a time he has ever been better (he's always good) and can't come up with anything. He disappears into the character. But every performance rings true, from Christina Ricci and Justin Timberlake down to the smallest of roles.

I'm not sure if the amount of admiration I have for this movie is coming through in this review. I was elated when I left the theater, thinking of turning around and watching the next screening too. It's a great and strange film.

Notes:

The movie starts with footage of an interview with Son House talking about the blues. Later in the movie the interview shows back up to set up the rest of the film. It is nothing short of brilliant.

There is a scene between Jackson and Ricci set during a thunderstorm. I don't want to give away anything else but the whole thing is amazing.

Reno 911!: Miami

Funny movie. They blow up a whale.

Killer of Sheep trailer

I know relatively little about this movie but remember reading it was a big influence on David Gordon Green's George Washington. Watching the trailer you can obviously tell that. Apparently it is going to be re-released around the country sometime this year and hopefully head to DVD after that. Either way, it looks fantastic.