Professional choreographers Lauren Yalango-Grant and Christopher Grant deconstruct the final dance in Dirty Dancing. Original below. Nobody puts Patrick Swayze in the corner.
Netflix's big movie release this past week was In the Tall Grass, based on a short story by Stephen King and Joe Hill, and directed by Vincenzo Natali. To say much about the plot would spoil the fun of a first viewing, but there is already an incredible amount of information about the making of the film online.
Natali told SyFy about acquiring the option from King and Hill for a dollar, only to see the project seemingly reach a dead end:
Read the restUsually, these kinds of high-profile options run can five to seven figures, but that's not how they do it in Maine.
“You option the material for a dollar, but you have to reach certain benchmarks,” Natali said. “It's a very clever thing he does, because he avoids getting his projects trapped in development hell. You have to reach certain benchmarks, and if you don't then you can lose the option.”
One of those benchmarks is a tight turnaround time on the writing of the script. Natali was given three months to deliver a draft, but the timing of the deal was problematic for the writer/director. He had already committed to some TV projects, which meant that he had to bang out the first draft in just about three weeks.
“The very thought that Stephen King would read something I wrote, let alone something I had to write in three weeks, was really, really frightening,” he said.
But he met his deadline, and while he'll never know for sure if either King or Hill actually read the script, the option continued to the next step, which was to get it set up at a studio or production house in a timely matter.
Film editor Andrew Saladino of the Royal Ocean Film Society analyzes the exquisitely engineered airships in the films of Hayao Miyazaki. Read the rest
Consent Academy's Sar Surmick writes: "We need to hack culture and improve how people behave around sex and consent. Media today gives us terrible depictions of consent: Men who keep pushing, women who say 'no' repeatedly and then give in, people who ask forgiveness instead of permission, and so on. Read the rest
Ruairi Robinson's short sf/horror film Corporate Monster is a contemporary take on the classic (and still trenchant) 1988 John Carpenter movie "They Live": in Robinson's take, a recently fired corporate drone gets an experimental drug that lets him see the truth of his corporate overlords and their enforcer class. It's beautifully shot and acted, though the whole story arc comes off as a little slight, not sure whether it's serious or silly (a line that They Live walked beautifully). Worth 16 minutes of your time, to be sure. (via JWZ) Read the rest
Robert Garrison, best known for his role in The Karate Kid as Tommy of the Cobra Kai, has died. He was 59. Garrison's sister-in-law told TMZ that "his passing wasn't sudden -- he had been in the hospital for over a month dealing with kidney and liver issues."
Below is Garrison's most memorable moment from The Karate Kid. He returned to the role of Tommy this year for an episode of Cobra Kai in which he died and, yes, was zipped up in a body bag.
The U.S. military fears incels will commit acts of violence at screenings of the edgy new Joker movie, and has warned troops to keep an eye out for them at screenings. Gizmodo:
In a September 18th email, service members were instructed to remain aware of their surroundings and “identify two escape routes” when entering theaters. In the event of a shooting, they were instructed to “run, hide, fight.”
“Run if you can,” the safety notice said. “If you’re stuck, hide (also known as ‘sheltering in place’), and stay quiet. If a shooter finds you, fight with whatever you can.”
It has no specific intelligence. Military officers just watched the trailers, like everyone else. They thought about comic book movies shot in a naturalistic style. They thought about the consequences of depicting the character as a lonely Nice Guy taking revenge on society. And they decided to put a marker down. Read the rest
My latest Locus Magazine column is DRM Broke Its Promise, which recalls the days when digital rights management was pitched to us as a way to enable exciting new markets where we'd all save big by only buying the rights we needed (like the low-cost right to read a book for an hour-long plane ride), but instead (unsurprisingly) everything got more expensive and less capable. Read the rest
DC makes some fabulous animated movies and their television programming has, even where budget has been a concern, been pretty good (I still cry over Constantine and what could have been, however). I've been way less thrilled with the last few DC Universe movies, however. Batman vs. Superman, Justice League and Aquaman weren't to my liking. I've got high hopes for The Batman movie though. Between now and when filming is complete on what will hopefully be a gem of a film featuring the Dark Knight Detective, I've got my hopes fixed on Joker. It looks dark as hell, complex and, with a stellar cast including Joaquin Phoenix, Robert De Niro and Zazie Beetz, could well be worth forking over $40 for a ticket and popcorn to see in the theater.
We won't have to wait long to find out if it's as great as it looks. Joker'll be released this October. Read the rest
For years, it was just about impossible to see a film that Ed Norton didn't have something to do with. Then, just like Kaiser Soze, poof, he was gone. Except now he's back! Given that Norton will wrote, directed and is staring in Motherless Brooklyn, his absence from the big screen is totally understandable—that's a lot of work to shoulder. Bruce Willis, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, with Alec Baldwin and Willem Dafoe are on board to help bring this Jonathan Lethem's gem of a neo-pulp thriller to life. Read the rest
"The story of a generation comes to an end." Who wins?: Kylo Ren vs Rey.
The Critics Company is a collective of Nigerian teen afrofuturist filmmakers who make incredible looking, smart science fiction movies with camerawork courtesy of old, busted mobile phones and VFX generated in Blender. Read the rest
Behold Doom: Annihilation, or "Annthilation" as it appears in the glowy font on the poster. Read the rest
@jonty_pressinger was unhappy that the live action/CGI remake of The Lion King was set in the Uncanny Valley so he "attempted to fix (it) by doing an AI style-transfer using @ellejart amazing fan art."
"Coca-Cola: Blade Roller," directed by David Fincher in 1993.
(via ObscureMedia) Read the rest
Those with coulrophobia are advised to avoid Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas during their upcoming "clown-only" screenings of IT: Chapter Two. Back in 2017, they had clown-only screenings of IT at two theaters so based on that fun, they've expanded the extravaganza to 17 locations across the country.
According to Alamo Drafthouse, guests are “encouraged to come dressed as a clown – the wig, the makeup, the oversized pants and suspenders, the blood-curdling makeup — and sit through this coulrophobia-inducing fright fest with a theater full of fellow clowns.”
What could possibly go wrong. Read the rest
