FilmStew.com: LatestHeadlines

"Inglourious" Treatment

05/22/2009

This year, the print media at Cannes lost the Inglourious Basterds battle to their better looking TV brethren.

"Antichrist" Gives Way to Anti-Trier

05/20/2009

Legendarily press-averse filmmaker Lars Von Trier burnishes the anti-PR at this year's Cannes Film Festival.

Mariah Carey's Harlem Encore

05/19/2009

U.S. songstress reinvents herself to play supporting role in a film festival darling.

The Return of a "Bright Star"

05/18/2009

Kiwi filmmaker Jane Campion remains an empowered Cannes champion.

Catching Up to a "Dream"

05/15/2009

Pixar's John Lassiter completes a long journey from Emeryville, CA to Cannes, France.

Some Pros and Comic-Con's

07/31/2006

In the wake of yet another four-day San Diego smorgasbord celebrating anything that can be turned into an action figure or costume, we take a look at some of the highs (Kapow!) and lows (Kaboom!).

Singer Surveys "Superman"

06/27/2006

In paying homage to the Richard Donner films, filmmaker Bryan Singer managed to include everything except the Krypton kitchen sink.

Beauty and the Regular Guy

06/21/2006

It’s not just the broad theme of Ashton Kutcher’s reality TV series. The onscreen pairing of great-looking young gals with average Joe's is a Hollywood movie trend reoccurring once again.

A Bigger "Bang"

06/05/2006

With next week’s DVD release of Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang sure to finally bring this acerbic film the audience it deserves, we sample the rat-tat-tat-tat chemistry of Kilmer Kilmer, Downey Downey.

Blondes Have More Trophy Ware

05/02/2006

Officially, it was called the US Weekly Hot Hollywood Awards. Unofficially, it looked a lot like a bevy of blonde babes and the shorter male B-Listers who love them.

Sundance’s Sweet "Summer" Breeze

01/28/2009

Following 2006’s Little Miss Sunshine, 2007’s Juno and 2008’s Slumdog Millionaire, Fox Searchlight appears to have all the makings of another crowd pleasing sleeper hit.

A Resplendent "Moon"

01/22/2009

Guided in large part by Michael Light’s photography book Full Moon, the man once known as “Zowie Bowie” has fashioned a “wowie” of a debut.

Top Ten Femme Fatales

12/27/2008

Here are the actresses who, in 2008, most successfully used their seductive onscreen charms to compromise members of the opposite sex.

Bruckheimer’s "Hour" of Reckoning

10/10/2008

In this day and age when CNN and Fox News have become requisite “Must Suffer TV,” one needs to take the good with the bad.

An "Ex"-Showrunner Once More

10/03/2008

Twice Diane Ruggiero has been tasked by CBS to bring TV sitcoms to life and twice she has tasted the bittersweet nature of Hollywood success.

No Room for a Drama "Queen"

06/17/2009

The makers of the low-budget thriller The Red Queen held a bake sale to pay for the salaries of the three union actors in the cast (Valente Rodriquez, Estephenia LeBaron, Harley Jane Kozak). They also chose to pass out Rice Krispie treats to folks like Kozak before she was asked to smile for photographers at a recent red carpet premiere in Texas.

But such cinematic-slash-culinary artistry pales in comparison to the day on set when Kozak’s stunt double showed up to enact a climactic martial arts fight involving her character, gun-toting French speaking Church Lady. “Now, in a perfect world, a stunt double bears a passing resemblance to the actor he-she is doubling,” the veteran TV actress (pictured below) blogged good naturedly. “This being Low-Budgetville, mine was thirty years younger, six inches shorter, Latino and male. But gifted!”

“He was able to fit into my blouse and someone procured for him a blond wig that started out looking like Doris Day and ended up looking like Charo. So, you know . . . roll camera!”

The Red Queen is the seventeenth student feature produced by the University of Texas Pan-American’s Department of Communication, but also the first of these to feature professional actors. Still, before writer-director David Carren became an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, he had a successful career in Tinseltown as a scribe for such TV series as Diagnosis Murder, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Murder, She Wrote. In The Red Queen, a young Hispanic woman (Linda Bustamente) tries to uncover the true identity of her deceased mother.

From the Boardroom to a Burger Palace

06/08/2009

Long before Davis Guggenheim zeroed in on global warming with An Inconvenient Truth, he tried to warm the cockles of 1996 TV viewers with the ER episode “Homeless for the Holidays.” It was one of a half-dozen installments in which Kirsten Dunst appeared as Charlie Chiemingo, a drug-abusing teenage runaway, in this case being tended to during Christmas week by George Clooney’s character.

Now comes a feature film of the same name currently shoting in Indiana, and this Homeless for the Holidays is the kind of tale that appealed to Frank Capra during this country’s previous Great Depression. Written and directed by George A. Johnson (pictured below), it tells the story of Jack Baker (Matthew Moore), a corporate executive who must work at a fast food joint after he loses his high-paying job and grapple with the possibility that he and his family may be out on the street by Christmas.

As with Johnson’s 2005 feature debut The Dreamer, this low-budget sophomore effort is being run through the prism of the Christian faith with the hope that the end result will be an inspirational hybrid along the lines of last year’s surprise hit Fireproof. Most of the actors are working for no pay, although some of the leads may share in future box office receipts.

Though it may seem like Homeless for the Holidays has little chance of a theatrical run, Johnson recently told the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette that he has been working closely with a major Hollywood distributor and that if the film passes muster with them, they would help release it theatrically. He says the company in question has also helped tweak the script.

Defending the Almighty Dollar

05/21/2009

Perhaps the only way the made-in-Winnipeg feature Among Thieves could have a stranger local pedigree is if it had been made by celebrated native son Guy Maddin. As it stands, it is the work of author and civil engineer Paul Boge and world premiered late last month at the Winnipeg Art Gallery’s Muriel Richardson Auditorium.

Budgeted at a paltry $15,000 Canadian, Among Thieves transformed the location of Winnipeg into Chicago for the story of three adult friends (Carey Smith, David Dick, Meghan Duffy) who, reunited after ten years, discover a secret document that exposes a very different reason for the Iraq War. Along with the New Testament derived title, debuting writer-director Boge throws in various Christian references and avoids such things as onscreen curse words in keeping with the tenets of the church where he worships (North Kildonan Mennonite Brethren). In Hollywood parlance, Among Thieves is Syriana meets Fireproof.

The inspiration for the above-pictured Boge’s provocative thesis that the U.S. invaded Iraq to prevent a Saddam-fueled devaluation of the American currency came from the 2003 counterculture e-book Real Reasons for the Upcoming War with Iraq, first published in January, 2003. Clark, a manager of performance improvement at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, would go on to publish his explosive theory in book form in 2005 under the title Petrodollar Warfare.

Assuming that the late April quartet of $10 admission screenings at the Art Gallery’s 320-seat house were well attended, Boge and his collaborators should be well on their way to breaking even. They plan to submit Among Thieves to various North American film festivals and may, along the way, baffle conservative U.S. pundits with the movie’s combination of a wholesome approach and explosive anti-Bush theories.

A Drama Teacher Takes Aim

05/21/2009

Back in 1982, Linda Hamilton and Robert Carradine kicked off the miniscule sub-genre of movies about the “Assassins” college campus game via Tag. More recently, the hunt-down-a-designated-opponent pastime (typically played with water or Nerf guns) has figured in the 2002 Tim Allen comedy Big Trouble and the 2007 British documentary The Assassins Guild.

While fans of Tag continue to clamor for a DVD release and-or remake, they can, in the interim, look forward to Spot Check. The low-budget indie comedy - filmed last year in and around Modesto, CA - was written, directed, produced and edited by Susan Romero, a drama teacher at Somerset Middle School since 2000.

Luis Alberto Rodriguez stars as a 14-year-old student prodigy who, after transferring to Central California University, becomes a member of the Assassins team MGM (Mentally Gifted Minors). As he and his mates vie for a trophy and $10,000 prize, they get a taste of college life and eventually face off against an opposing squad made up of “zealous church girls.”

Several of Romero’s former students populate the cast of Spot Check, which will be submitted to film festivals later this year. Romero’s unlikely debut was funded by private investors and put some of that money towards the hiring of professional camera crew and cinematography workers from Los Angeles and San Francisco.

A "Texas" Family Affair

05/21/2009

Aspiring actor-producer Brett Folmar is just getting started in the independent moviemaking business, which means he can work closely with his stepfather under the auspices of resourcefulness rather than nepotism. In the $10,000 recently wrapped period Western Texas and Me, based on a script by his dad Jay Riley, Riley plays a U.S. Marshal while Folmar stars as the Galveston newspaper reporter that he befriends.

Also in the narrative mix is the real-life character of celebrated 19th century cattle rancher Charles Goodnight (pictured below), who earned the nickname “Father of the Texas Panhandle.” It is when Riley’s U.S. Marshal joins Goodnight to fight Indians that the real trouble starts; when Riley returns home, he finds that his own ranch has been ransacked by Comanches and his wife and daughter apparently killed.

Far from the reaches of Hollywood, there is also another unusual wrinkle to be found with regards to the Alanreed, TX filmed oater: a modest producer. “I have never acted, professionally, nor do I claim to be one now,” Folmar, a personal trainer and massage therapist by day, wrote recently on his production company’s MySpace page. “I just pretend. But it looks a lot like acting, and the newspaper reporter on the set the last day said my acting was ’more than adequate for this production’… I won’t claim any title other than a Creative Texan.”

Texas and Me is the first of a trilogy of Westerns that Folmar hopes to make, and if he can’t find a distributor, he will look to the new frontier of the Internet to find an audience. Adding to the convivial nature of the enterprise is the presence of his stepfather’s musical partner Gene Jones, who plays a storekeeper-slash-undertaker-slash-preacher.

Two Clumps of Aussie Claymation

01/19/2009

One started as the first animated project to be brought to the Sundance Director’s Lab, while the other just became the first animated feature to open the Sundance Film Festival.

Suddenly Naked

01/06/2009

Oscar winner Marisa Tomei waited her whole career to do nudity. Now, to her great astonishment, she’s back at it again.

The Brolin Doctrine

12/01/2008

On a day when ABC’s Charlie Gibson has elicited a remarkable Mea Culpa from George W. Bush, the actor who took on the role of the 43rd President has moved on to another ill-equipped politician.

A Brit in Bollywood

11/15/2008

For many North Americans, Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire will be the first slice of cinema sampled from the location of the world’s largest film industry.

Working Hard for His Next "Go" Project

10/30/2008

Since Mike Leigh favors lesser known actors for the lead roles in his movies, the decorated British filmmaker must forever improvise when it comes to securing funding.