I really like this poster. It feels like a film from the seventies, maybe something Sydney Lumet would have made.

Apparently the same day Ingmar Bergman died, so too did Michelangelo Antonioni. Here is the story from (oddly enought) FinancialTimes.com.

Michelangelo Antonioni, who has died aged 94, was the least Italianate of great Italian filmmakers. A glacial anatomist of love, despair and the alienating tropes of modern life, he seemed to come from another country and culture than the one inhabited by Fellini, De Sica, Visconti, Pasolini and Bertolucci.

Where they coloured their movies with human passion and extremes of style or emotional expression, Antonioni created a landscape and screen language where subtext, symbol and enigma reigned. His stories, from a girl disappearing on a volcanic island (L’Avventura) through a permissive age’s bequest of disillusionment (La Notte) to the semi-surreal blends of drama and mime in Blow Up and Zabriskie Point, were mysteries wrapped in mazy narratives. His protagonists, epitomised in the beautiful ‘blankness’ of his longtime leading lady and one-time wife Monica Vitti, were seekers who did not know quite what they were seeking.

Exactness in Antonioni was confined to the frame itself: precise, unsettling images of a world, natural or man-created, in which abstract forces declare their independence of, or hostility to, human beings. Trees sigh and sough outside a picture-window while Vitti curls foetus-like on a sofa (The Eclipse). Street stalls and their produce share the same colours of industrial-age decay as the earth and buildings. (In The Red Desert Antonioni painted each component of the screen image, including streets, houses, even vendors’ fruit). And in his late Identification of a Woman a foggy road closes in womb-like around a car-driver, to become a dream of annihilation at once beguiling and frightening.

In his most creative decade, the 1960s, Antonioni’s sensibility as an artist seemed closer to a northern European heritage – Camus, Sartre, existentialism – than to anything Mediterranean.

Born in Ferrara on September 29 1912, his interest in cinema began in the late 1930s when he came into possession of a 16mm camera and a part-time job as a film critic. After assisting directors such as Rossellini (Una Pilota Ritorna) and Marcel Carné (Les Visiteurs du Soir), he made his first film Gente del Po, a documentary about Po River fishermen, over a four-year period between 1943 and 1947. Six more documentaries followed, until his first feature Cronaca di un Amore (Love Story) in 1950.

Busy through the fifties – as well a directing four features he collaborated on the script of Fellini’s The White Skeikh – Antonioni became an international name at the decade’s end. His tale of a couple haunted by the emptiness left in their lives by a girl acquaintance’s disappearance – in an unforgettable opening sequence set on a lava-encrusted island – seemed to contemporary audiences so static and obscure that it was booed at its Cannes Film Festival premiere.

Antonioni never looked back, mainly because everyone else did in revisionist shame. L’Avventura was soon esteemed a masterpiece and voted one of the 10 best films ever in an international critics’ poll. And in the next two films of what became an informal trilogy, he forced audiences to look even deeper into cinema’s expressive possibilities.

La Notte was a slow, enthralling mourning-song for a marriage, starring Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni as a couple drifting apart while the sounds and sights of the hedonistic sixties - parties, partner-swapping - form a mocking backrop. And in L’Eclisse (The Eclipse) the love story between Monica Vitti and Alain Delon ‘freezes’ more than once as character interaction gives way to abstract collages of sound and picture, commenting on the theme of emotional impasse. The ending is the director’s greatest single sequence: 10 minutes of wordless imagery, from livid skies to the pitiless glare of a street lamp, as a world bows to a bleak new twilight.

Antonioni never quite found that perfect pitch of symbolic emotionalism again. Nor, after the 1960s, did time and fashion offer his compassionate scepticism about relationships such an ideal counter-harmony. He created haunting moments in Blow Up (the photographer hero’s snap-by-snap reconstruction of a murder incident providing a memento mori for Swinging London) and he pushed at the limits of visual vocabulary by surreally rearranging whole landscapes in The Red Desert, a co-production starring Richard Harris, and Zabriskie Point.

But his rapprochement with western mainstream cinema ended with Profession: Reporter (1975). The cryptic tale of switched identities, starring Jack Nicholson as a man drifting through Europe and North Africa, had notable scenes, including at the end a labrynthine and seemingly impossible camera movement. But the film ended in box-office limbo, its concessions to commercialism – star-casting, thriller plot elements – displeasing art audiences while its obscurities alienated entertainment-seekers

By the 1980s Antonioni began to seem like yesterday’s modernist in a world moving towards the lighter, more ludic postures of postmodernism. After a feature-length experiment with video (The Eagle Has Two Heads) and a couple of aborted projects, including a documentary on China, he collaborated with Wim Wenders in a strange, visually beautiful multi-episode film that again found few buyers: Beyond the Clouds.

By then he had been partially immobilised by a stroke, which left him powerless to speak, though in 1996 he travelled to Los Angeles to receive an Oscar for career achievement. His last work for the large screen, an episode in the three-story film Eros (2004, made with Wong Kar-Wai and Steven Soderbergh), was an enigma without heart or energy, though as ever with some beautiful pictures. His death sees the passing of the last survivor of his generation of Italian filmmakers.

From Roger Ebert's website.

Roger Ebert has received these e-mail observations about the death of Ingmar Bergman:

Paul Cox, director:

A note in the paper.
Ingmar Berman has died.
The man who shaped and nourished my deeper thoughts, feeling and hopes.
The artist who illuminated my dreams.
Ingmar Bergman, the magician!
Master of the most powerful tool of self
expression ever given to man.
May his legacy NOT rest in peace.
May his 'chess game with death' remain a symbol of hope.
May his vision of our dark misconceptions of what it means to be human
enlighten our troubled planet for all generations to come.

Paul Schrader, director: Ingmar Bergman, more than any other director, showed that it was possible for a film director to be an introspective and serious artist in the commercial cinema. Bergman paved the road; the rest of us just road down it.

Richard Linklater, director: For an artist who contemplated what he called "the great mystery" probably more than any other, it's almost comforting to know he's now experienced it... or not experienced it, as he seemed to think quite possible.

Gregory Nava, director: When I was a young man in the late sixties - in high school -- I was first introduced to the films of Ingmar Bergman. It was at a funky art theater in La Jolla, called “The Unicorn” where one could drink espresso and read books to the sounds of Baroque music before going into the theater to see “foreign” movies. Quite an adventure for a Catholic school boy.

The films of Bergman struck me like a lightning bolt - I had never seen anything like them before, even the titles were like some kind of existential poetry -- “The Seventh Seal” -- “Wild Strawberries” -- “The Silence.” Here were films that were not afraid to talk about the big questions - “Who are we?” “Where do we come from?” “Where are we going?” And I drank them up, like a thirsty man finding a crystal spring in the desert. My mind and my soul desperately needed what these films had to say. This was not the escapist fare of Hollywood, or the pat spirituality of Biblical epic films where God spoke in hallowed tones from a burning bush. With Bergman, God was a spider that lived in the upstairs closet! A shocking and necessary jolt to my Catholic sensibilities.

Yes, these films changed me forever -- they cemented my dream to become a filmmaker because if film could do this -- then surely it was the greatest art form of our time. I will never forget the first time I saw the horses standing in the surf against a setting sun, and death with his black cape raised approaching the world weary knight.

He was a giant in a time of giants -- Kurosawa, Fellini -- giants like we don't have anymore. You don't realize how unique and important he really was until there is another generation and another and there are no Bergmans. No giants. Now he's gone.

David Mamet, playwright and director: When I was young the World Theatre, in Chicago, staged an all-day Ingmar Bergman Festival. I went at ten o'clock in the morning, and stayed all day. When I left the theater it was still light, but my soul was dark, and I did not sleep for years afterwards.

Guy Maddin, director: A very sad day. I subconsciously thought that guy would live for ever. Even though he's dead now he must still be perceptibly animated somehow by his unkillable Swedish lust and dread. Someone from the CBC left a message for me today asking for a comment on the death of -- then static came and it sounded like she said "Burton" and I thought maybe Richard Burton had died, again, or Canadian game show icon Pierre Burton had died, again, and then I realized they were asking me about Tim Burton, which they weren't of course. So I was especially surprised by this change-up when it turned out to be Bergman. Or was it Shelley Berman? Woe!

Haskell Wexler, cinematographer: I never had the honor of meeting Ingmar Bergman: I was good friends with Sven Nykvist who told me stories about Bergman. They sat in a big old church from very early in the morning until as black as the night gets. They noted where the light moved thru the stain glass windows. Bergman planned where he would stage the scenes for a picture they were about to do. This had the practical advantage of minimizing light and generator costs. Sven said sitting alone with Ingmar in the church had a profound effect on him. I asked him if it made him more religious. He said he didn’t think so but it did give him some kind of spiritual connection to Ingmar which helped him deal with the times Bergman became very mean. On “Days Of Heaven” we had long beautiful mystic hours because of the northern latitudes. We called it Bergman light because of that long extended Swedish latitude and the many hours of Mystic Light.

David Gordon Green, director: Bergman was one of the greatest psychological poets ever. Plumbed the subconscious and put it up on screen like a dream. A true master of sound as well. Plus all those good-lookin' Swedish babes. He was a lion, truly fearless and totally in control, totally committed.

This is taken from The New York Times.

Ingmar Bergman died today, at 89.

There have been plenty of books written about him. But Bergman’s own autobiography, “The Magic Lantern,” was published in 1988, in a translation by Joan Tate. It was reviewed in The Book Review by Woody Allen.

“Less than ennobling,” Allen wrote, “was the motive for seeing my first Ingmar Bergman movie. The facts were these: I was a teen-ager living in Brooklyn, and word had got around that there was a Swedish film coming to our local foreign film house in which a young woman swam completely naked. Rarely have I slept overnight on the curb to be the first on line for a movie, but when ‘Summer With Monika’ opened at the Jewel in Flatbush, a young boy with red hair and black-rimmed glasses could be seen clubbing senior citizens to the floor in an effort to insure the choicest, unobstructed seat.”

Allen continued:

I never knew who directed the film nor did I care, nor was I sensitive at that age to the power of the work itself - the irony, the tensions, the German Expressionist style with its poetic black-and-white photography and its erotic sadomasochistic undertones. I came away reliving only the moment Harriet Andersson disrobed, and although it was my first exposure to a director who I would come to believe was pound for pound the best of all film makers, I did not know it then.

…

Only in the late 50’s, when I took my then wife to see a much talked about movie with the unpromising title ‘’Wild Strawberries,'’ did I lock into what was to become a lifelong addiction to the films of Ingmar Bergman. I still recall my mouth dry and my heart pounding away from the first uncanny dream sequence to the last serene close-up. Who can forget such images? The clock with no hands. The horse-drawn hearse suddenly becoming stuck - the blinding sunlight and the face of the old man as he is being pulled into the coffin by his own dead body. Clearly here was a master with an inspired personal style; an artist of deep concern and intellect, whose films would prove equal to great European literature. Shortly after that I saw ‘’The Magician,'’ an audacious black-and-white dramatization of certain Kierkegaardian ideas presented as an occult tale and spun out in an original, hypnotic camera style that reached its crescendo years later in the dreamlike ‘’Cries and Whispers.'’ Lest the Kierkegaardian reference make the movie sound too dry or didactic, please be assured, ‘’The Magician,'’ like most of Bergman’s films, had one foot brilliantly planted in show business.

In addition to all else - and perhaps most important - Bergman is a great entertainer; a storyteller who never loses sight of the fact that no matter what ideas he’s chosen to communicate, films are for exciting an audience. His theatricality is inspired. Such imaginative use of old-fashioned Gothic lighting and stylish compositions. The flamboyant surrealism of the dreams and symbols. The opening montage of ‘’Persona,'’ the dinner in ‘’Hour of the Wolf'’ and, in ‘’The Passion of Anna,'’ the chutzpah to stop the engrossing story at intervals and let the actors explain to the audience what they are trying to do with their portrayals, are moments of showmanship at its best.

After a while, Allen finally got around to talking about Bergman’s memoir:

It’s a lot about stomach problems. But it’s interesting. It’s random, anecdotal. It’s not chronological, as one’s life story should be. There is no building saga of how he began and gradually worked himself up to dominate the Swedish stage and screen. The story skips around, back and forth, apparently depending on the author’s spontaneity. It includes odd tales and sad feelings. An odd tale: as a young boy being locked inside a mortuary and becoming fascinated by the naked corpse of a young woman. A sad feeling: ‘’My wife and I live near each other. One of us thinks and the other answers, or the other way round. I have no means of describing our affinity. One problem is insoluble. One day the blow will fall and separate us. No friendly god will turn us into a tree to shade the farm.'’ It leaves out things you’d bet he’d discuss. His films, for instance. Well, maybe he doesn’t leave them out exactly but there’s much less than you’d expect, considering he’s made over 40. There’s also not much about his wives in this book. He’s had plenty. (And lots of children too, though they’re hardly mentioned.) That includes Liv Ullmann, who lived with him for years and was the mother of one of his children and a great star in his pictures. But there’s not much about any of the actors and actresses in his films.

So what is there? Well, many gripping revelations, but they’re mostly about his childhood. And about his theater work. Interestingly he draws a picture of every single scene before he stages it. And there is a moving account of how he directed Anders Ek, an actor in several films, who had developed leukemia and was using his own fear of approaching death to portray a Strindberg character. Bergman loves the theater. It’s his real family. In fact, the warm, lovable family in ‘’Fanny and Alexander'’ didn’t exist for real - they were meant to symbolize the theater. (This isn’t in the book. I happen to know it.) He writes too of his maladies: ‘’I suffered from several indefinable illnesses and could never really decide whether I wanted to live at all.'’ His weak bodily functions: ‘’In all the theatres I have worked in for any length of time, I have been given my own lavatory.'’

His breakdown is in there too, over the income tax scandal. It’s mesmerizing to read about it. In 1976, Bergman was crudely snatched from a rehearsal and taken to police headquarters over money owed the Government because of his mishandling of income tax payments. It was not unlike the type of thing that occurs so frequently where one hires an accountant, presumes he will handle everything brilliantly and aboveboard and finds later one has trustingly signed papers without understanding them or even reading them. The fact that he was innocent of willful dishonesty and a national treasure did not prevent the authorities from dealing with him harshly and boorishly. The result was a nervous breakdown, hospitalization and self-imposed exile to Germany with profound feelings of rage and humiliation.

Finally, the picture one gets is of a highly emotional soul, not easily adaptable to life in this cold, cruel world, yet very professional and productive and, of course, a genius in the dramatic arts. In the translation by Joan Tate, Bergman writes quite well and one is often caught up and moved by his descriptions. I lapped up every page, but I’m no test because I have a great interest in this particular artist. It was hard for me to believe he has already turned 70. In his book he recalls when at 10 he was given a magic lantern, which projected shadows on the wall. It stimulated a love affair with movies that is touching in its depth of feeling. Now that he is world-renowned and retired from cinema, he writes the following: ‘’My chair is comfortable, the room cosy, it grows dark and the first trembling picture is outlined on the white wall. It is quiet, the projector humming faintly in the well-insulated projection room. The shadows move, turning their faces towards me, urging me to pay attention to their destinies. Sixty years have gone by but the excitement is still the same.'’

Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish film director whose depiction of anguished human relationships made him an icon of the art-house cinema has died. He was 89.

I can't admit to knowing the most about Bergman but the films of his I have seen I have enjoyed. Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, and especially Persona are my favorites. You had to be in the right mood to watch one of his movies. To be ready to invest yourself in it, not something to just pop in the DVD player on a Saturday afternoon.

I'm probably most familiar with Bergman by his sway over Woody Allen. Several of his films have been heavily influence by the director and some (such as Deconstructing Harry) borrow the entire plot. When Allen set out and made his first drama (Interiors) he borrowed the tone of most of Bergman's works.

I should say more but I could never really give the man his justice so I will leave you with this, the opening scene from The Seventh Seal.

Johnny Depp is returning to the role of Hunter S. Thompson, sort of. He will produce and star in an adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's autobiographical 1959 book The Rum Diaries. Depp will play Paul Kemp, a freelance newspaper journalist in 1950s Puerto Rico who is surrounded by a group of self-destructive lost souls. Bruce Robinson (Withnail and I) will write and direct the adaptation. Depp just finished shooting Sweeny Todd and is expected to start work on Rum Diaries after he wraps Shantaram, Mira Nair's adaptation of the novel about an Australian drug addict who returns to a life of crime after escaping to India.

Austin sent this to me a few weeks ago but I didn't even think to post it until tonight. Maybe it's because I've heard the song numerous times in the last two days or maybe it's because I saw the horrible trailer for Underdog over the weekend. Either way, here is the really great music video of Spoon's The Underdog.

Watch actor Christopher Walken roast a chicken.

Roger Ebert has added Killer of Sheep to his list of great movies, you can read his wonderfully written review of it here.

I really liked this excerpt.

You have to be prepared to see a film like this, or able to relax and allow it to unfold. It doesn't come, as most films do, with built-in instructions about how to view it. One scene follows another with no apparent pattern, reflecting how the lives of its family combine endless routine with the interruptions of random events. The day they all pile into a car to go to the races, for example, a lesser film would have had them winning or losing. In this film, they have a flat tire, and no spare. Thus does poverty become your companion on every journey.

The first poster from Tim Burton's adaptation of Sweeney Todd was shown at comic-con. I wish I could get more excited about this but I haven't really been a fan of any of Burton's recent work. Maybe when a trailer is released and I can see some of Johnny Depp's performance will help.

The Simpsons Movie

If you are planning on seeing this movie I beg you to not read anything about it beforehand. Part of the joy of watching this was knowing only the slightest of details about the plot and being surprised at every twist and turn.

I laughed all the way through this movie, and actually became a little emotional during the heartfelt scenes. The Simpsons make an effortless leap to the big screen, in my opinion. Using a very large team of the best writers the series has ever had, this amazing team created a movie with a large canvass and a Simpsons story that does innovative things, that does familiar things, and that reminds us of just why The Simpsons was great in the first place.

The movie feels like a classic episode, just extended. I like that the movie is actually about something (I won't say what but it involves a pig, who gets some of the best jokes in the first act) and wasn't just an excuse to string together a series of slapstick comedy. The film has a few sentimental scenes but they never turn to mush. One of them has Julie Kavner (Marge) giving what is easily her best voice work ever. It's the scene that sets up the last act and after it you really believe Homer would do whatever is necessary to right all the things he has screwed up.

This movie is 100% pure Simpsons straight from the top and it put a huge smile on my face for hours after it was over. I was still discussing some of the jokes last night (I saw it Friday afternoon) and laughing at them all over again. I look forward to watching it again and looking for even more jokes, things I’m sure I’ll be finding in repeated viewings.

Listen to Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg talk about The Green Hornet here. The interview is a little annoying because the last question is about The Pineapple Express, a movie I can not get enough news on, but it ends before any answer is given.

A trailer for Things We Lost in the Fire starring Halle Berry and Benicio Del Toro. It's not a great trailer but it looks to be one of Del Toro's better roles. At the very least the movie looks interesting based on his performance.

Apparently the guy who created those digital painting like transitions for Punch Drunk Love killed himself. Read more about it here.

Instead of doing all the work trying to find The Dark Knight teaser, here it is on Youtube.

Here is the trailer for the sequel to Batman Begins, The Dark Knight. No footage is shown but you do get some nice line readings from Michael Caine, Christin Bale and the first sample of Heath Ledger's voice for The Joker.

In order to see the trailer you need to click on the small square on the right, the one that looks sort of like a television with static. It is very easy to miss, but just look for the word "handed", it's next to that.

Someone from a show I don't watch will star in a movie I don't care about. Zachary Quinto, who plays the Sylar (the bad guy) on NBC's Heroes, will play Dr. Spock in the upcoming Star Trek movie, directed by Lost co-creator J.J. Abrams. Not much has been revealed about the plot in the 11th Trek film, but it is believed to be about a young Spock's first encounters with Capt. James T. Kirk at Starfleet Academy.

The only way they could get me interested is if this was a remake of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. I mean, read this plot summary and tell me it isn't the greatest idea for a movie.

It's the 23rd Century, and a mysterious alien power is threatening Earth by evaporating the oceans and destroying the atmosphere. In their frantic attempt to save mankind, Kirk and his crew must time travel back to 1986 San Francisco where they find a world of punk, pizza, and exact-change buses that are as alien to them as anything they've ever encountered in the far reaches of the galaxy. To save Earth from the destructive space probe, Kirk and his fugitive crew go back in time to 20th century Earth to recover two humpback whales, who are the only Earth beings who can respond to it.

In all seriousness, it actually is a really good movie. It's way too bizarre not to be.

Ever wondered what a Kanye West video would look like starring Zach Galifianakis and Will Oldham? Wonder no more.

I didn't mean for the post below to sound negative. Well, I did and I didn't. I thought the trailer would look different but that doesn't mean I am any less excited. I'm glad that Zemeckis is trying something different and I really hope it pays off. Just in the context of the trailer it didn't really feel like a real movie, something felt off. Hopefully when it is all completed I won't feel this way.

You know how I said you couldn't really tell how good Beowulf was going to look until you saw it in action? Well, the trailer is online now and all I can say is that it looks like a really great video game.

Warner Bros. Pictures has confirmed the cast for Watchmen, the big screen adaptation of the seminal DC Comics limited series. I'm actually excited about this since it is one of the few comic books (excuse me, graphic novels) I have actually read.

Patrick Wilson, Jackie Earle Haley, Matthew Goode, Billy Crudup, Jeffrey Dean Morgan ("Grey's Anatomy") and Malin Akerman will star in the Warner Bros. movie, which Zack Snyder is directing. Larry Gordon, Lloyd Levin and Deborah Snyder are producing.

Set in an alternate America, Watchmen follows costumed hero Rorschach, who is living a vigilante lifestyle because most masked heroes have retired or been outlawed. While investigating a murder, Rorschach learns that a former masked-hero colleague has been killed, prompting him to begin investigating a possible conspiracy.

Haley will play Walter Kovacs, aka Rorschach, who ignores the ban on costumed vigilantes. This is amazing casting. Not only is he right for the part but we get to see Moocher in a big budget comic book movie (if you don't get the Moocher reference then netflix Breaking Away).

Crudup will play Dr. Manhattan, a superpowered being with godlike powers and temperament. Priceless (if you don't get that reference listen to the voice over on Master Card commercials).

Akerman will play Laurie Juspeczyk/the Silk Spectre, who is involved with Dr. Manhattan -- but that relationship begins to fall apart as he becomes more disconnected from humanity. The only thing I know about her is that she is in one scene of Harold and Kumar.

Goode will play Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias, a costumed adventurer who retired voluntarily, disclosed his identity and built a large fortune. He hatches a plot to avert a global catastrophe he believes will be caused by Dr. Manhattan. He seems a little young for this role but he was really good in Match Point and The Lookout.

Wilson will play the Nite-Owl, a crime-figher who uses technical wizardry and has an owl-shaped flying vehicle. Again, perfect. With him and Haley it's a bit like a Little Children reunion and I have no problem with that.

Morgan will play the Comedian, a cigar-chomping, gun-toting vigilante-turned-paramilitary agent. I have no idea who this is but he has a beard in a lot of his photos, so that's good.

Apparently the Harry Potter 6 casting I posted below was just rumors. MTV checked in with the representatives for Naomi Watts, Joseph Fiennes and Stuart Townsend who said the rumors are not true. According to the reps, Watts has not been cast as Narcissa Malfoy, and Fiennes and Townsend are not on board either.

Naomi Watts will appear in "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince". She has just signed on for the supporting role of Draco's mother Narcissa Malfoy.

Also joining her are Joseph Fiennes and Stuart Townsend, their roles haven't been specified but it's expected both will tie into the flashbacks into the history of Voldemort. It's quite possible Joseph will play either the father of or a younger version of the character his brother Ralph Fiennes portrays.

I have no idea what happens in the next book so I can't really add any details.

The LA Times got a first look at Robert Zemeckis' Beowulf. The film uses the same motion capture technology that Zemeckis used in The Polar Express. A lot of people complained that the characters in that looked like zombies, I never noticed, I think I was too distracted by the 3D quality in IMAX. This, of course, is a much more adult tale and the technology is supposed to have improved. There is no way to really be for certain until you actually see the characters in motion but one section from the story did make me a bit nervous.

His knack for a good scrap is on show in one of the film's pivotal fight scenes when Beowulf battles Grendel in the nude, mano a beast-o. ("Bob asked if he had to be nude, but we said, 'It's in the poem,' " Gaiman explained.) So in a crafty bit of staging to allow a PG-13 rating, Beowulf's naughty bits are obfuscated by random objects in the foreground. It's more subtle and subdued, but shadows, swords, mead flagons and shoulders block all in a sequence not unlike the prankish cloaking device used in "Austin Powers" films.

Here are the images from the story.

I have a suspicion that Wes Anderson has snuck in the final shot from The Darjeeling Limited into the trailer. If you watch at the 1:37 mark there is a tracking shot of the three brothers walking in slow motion. If Anderson is keeping with his past idiosyncrasies then this could very well be the last image, all of his other movies have ended in slow motion.

From Ruhlman.com, Anthony Bourdain thinks that Ratatouille is the best cooking movie ever made.

"I think it's quite simply the best food movie ever made,” Tony wrote today in an email. “The best restaurant movie ever made--the best chef movie. The tiny details are astonishing: The faded burns on the cooks' wrists. The "personal histories" of the cooks...the attention paid to the food...And the Anton Ego ratatouille epiphany hit me like a punch in the chest--literally breathtaking. I saw it in a theater entirely full with adults--and the reaction to that moment was what movie making was once--a long time ago--all about: Audible surprise, delight, awe and even a measure of enlightenment. I am hugely and disproportionately proud that my miniscule contribution (if any) early early in the project's development led to a "thank you" in the credits. Amazing how much they got "right."

The trailer for Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited is finally online. It looks sort of exactly what you would think a Wes Anderson trailer would look like yet just a bit different. I'm not sure what it is but this seems a bit freer, maybe it's just the setting. I'm also really excited about Adrien Brody being in this, he appears to be a perfect fit in the Anderson universe.

Ratatouille

I hadn't planned on seeing two movies last night but I thought it was a better idea to sit in a darkened theater than to wait around in a darkened house for the power to come back on. I'm glad I did though because Ratatouille is every bit as good as any of the other Pixar movies.

This movie sort of snuck up on me. I was enjoying it though out its running time but it wasn't until the final fade out that I realized just how much. Director Brad Bird steers clear of all talking animal movie cliches, not even allowing the rats and the humans verbally communicate. Sure the rats can talk to one another, but when a human observes this is just sounds like, well, like the noise you would imagine a rat making. He also moves his camera as if he was filming a live action motion picture, not an animated one. Depth of focus, long tracking shots, all of these make the movie seem more real (as real as a movie about a cooking rat can seem).

I also liked that Bird didn't dumb down any of the cooking scenes. I didn't think I would ever be watching an animated movie discussing what the role of a seux chef is or that the one thing a soup is missing is a little saffron. There are also small details that really pop, like the virtual jazz like flavors that show up when Remi (our main rat) is tasting something he really loves.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

There is really no reason for me to review this. You either know you are going to see it (and you probably already have) or know that you have no interest. I will say that I put this equal to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban as my favorite of the series. It is also the first time I left the theater and actually felt like reading all the books in the series.

I'm also glad that director David Yates will be back for the next movie. He brings a directorial style to this film that fits into the overall series but is all his own.

The first photo from the George Clooney directed Leatherheads has showed up online. In the film, Clooney plays the coach of a wannabe pro football team in the 1920s, in order to snag some attention and create some attention for the sport and his team, he recruits a World War I hero to be his star player (John Krasinski). When both coach and player fall in love with a journalist (Renee Zellweger) who's out to expose them as frauds, screwball hijinx naturally ensue.

Did anyone notice that Justin Timberlake is an Emmy nominee, for co-writing the song Dick in a Box? Did you even know that the Emmys had a "Best Original Song" category?