Cinematical

Since I've gotten away with confessing my relative apathy towards highly regarded horror classics The Shining and Suspiria, it seems perfectly safe for me to go ahead and admit that I've not yet seen Children of the Corn. I know, I know, that one isn't exactly in the same league as those two, but it does hold a reputation in its own right.

Now that a Sci-Fi Channel remake is getting into gear, I'll likely make a greater point of getting around to it (sorry it has to come to that, but call it somewhat of a personal trend). Monika Bartyzel brought up the first round of casting news, and now from Shock Till You Drop comes word that young actor Daniel Newman has been cast in the role of Malachai on the production, which just began filming in Iowa this week.

I'm going to take a stab and guess that an announcement of this singular import means that Newman will be playing the leader of the Children. If I'm wrong, you lot can go on and have your laugh, but if you're familiar with either Stephen King's original short story or the 1984 adapation, then I suspect that you get the idea of this Corn kernel.

Hey, why'd the laughter stop?

Talk about picking your battles: John Moore, director of the upcoming thriller Max Payne, has openly lashed out at the MPAA for granting the film a full-blown R rating instead of an hoped-for PG-13, explicitly calling out the ratings board for granting leniency towards The Dark Knight. His NSFW thoughts on the matter were brought to light during an interview with Das Gamer; I'd recommend that you head over there and give it a look-see.

Now, most filmmakers shoot for the more profitable PG-13 due to contractual obligation, and while I don't doubt that's part of the drive here -- as a studio, Fox has shown no scruples about trimming out the naughtier bits of last month's Babylon A.D. and last summer's Live Free or Die Hard -- Moore has been quite openly set on earning one. Who knows, maybe the man is actually out to prove the difference between lots of action and lots of violence, or perhaps it's just semantics as he shuffles back to the cutting room.

Moore made the PG-13 action flick Behind Enemy Lines for Fox, but also the R-rated horror remake The Omen, and judging from this most recent trailer, this seems to be a fair cross between the two in terms of genre intensity (guns and demons -- what kid wouldn't sneak in if they had to?). We'll just say how rough and tough Max Payne really turns out to be come October 17th.

[And a tip of the hat to /Film.]

In last year's Best Picture winner, No Country for Old Men, Tommy Lee Jones played a weary sheriff chasing after a man who was chasing after some money. Well, according to the San Antonio Express-News, Jones is now himself a weary man chasing after some money, specifically from the pockets of Paramount.

It appears that a contract signed by Jones between Paramount and its subsidiary, N.M. Classics, Inc. contained two "mistakes" that may have prevented him from garnering up to, and perhaps upwards of, $10 million in the wake of the film's success. What's worse is that he was still deducted for any number of expenses, despite alleged awareness of the errors on the part of Paramount. As such, Jones wants an auditor to go through their books and figure out just how much he is owed.

Naturally, neither side of the case has made much in terms of formal comment. As his character might say, if this ain't a mess, it'll do 'til the mess gets here.

[Thanks to Movie City News for the tip.]

In a world where Don LaFontaine will no longer lend his voice to any trailers, and where floating heads and Photoshop skills are what passes for the 'art' in 'poster art', the prospect of Drew Struzan's retirement is almost too much to bear. The guys over at Ain't It Cool News got the initial news from TheRaider.net, and they get the fact that this makes the sun shine just that much less in this industry of ours.

In a message posted there, Struzan said: "Having been working at not working has produced a guy who could never return to illustration again. It took a lot to attempt the idea of retiring from my 40 years of effort and sacrifice but now that I have, I am delighting in life as never before. I had forgotten how to rest, to smell the proverbial roses and to see the future as opportunity. I am grateful and honored to have had the opportunity to do all the work I did. I am well pleased to have been able to give a gift of beauty and peace through my artwork to so many throughout the world. Now I have laid down the burden and have peace and happiness as the reward for my day's labor."

AICN aptly directs readers to Struzan's official site, and even if they hadn't, I'd advise the same course of action in an attempt to appreciate what iconic images he crafted a career out of.

What a pity it is that we lost both comedian Bernie Mac and musician Isaac Hayes in such short order, and what a stroke of good fortune that they both happened to have completed their roles in the upcoming comedy, Soul Men, in which Mac's character tries to get Samuel L. Jackson to join him for a televised reunion concert.

Yahoo! Movies has released the trailer for the film, and it reflects both the best tendencies of director Malcolm D. Lee and his worst as a writer (though he isn't credited as one here). There's the good-natured nostalgia of something like 2005's Roll Bounce, balanced out with the mean-spirited and utterly un-hilarious antics of this year's Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins (I'm sure that if there could've been room for Jennifer Coolidge in that gem, she would've removed her dentures for fellatio there instead).

In all fairness, the writing duo that is credited were last responsible for Man of the House, so maybe we shouldn't be so surprised. I'd like to think that Mac and Jackson could make the most of the material regardless, but we can't say for sure until November 7, when Soul Men tentatively opens opposite Role Models and Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa -- for which Mac lent his voice.

"One night in Bangkok and the tough guys tumble..."
-Murray Head

Don't ask me what happened to the real Nicolas Cage, because I don't know where he is.

I don't know what happened to the man who left Las Vegas, or the man who made Donald Kaufman into such an endearing figment of imagination, or the man who stole diapers as he stole hearts. All I've seen of late is a face, a name, a profile, a character, the artist formerly known as Nic Cage, an entity on auto-pilot and damn near self-parody that knows what he looks like and sounds like and makes do with that alone.

In Bangkok Dangerous, a remake by the Pang Brothers of their own 1999 thriller, Cage-Or-Something-Like-Him plays an assassin, perhaps the most laconic one this side of Forest Whitaker in '99's Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, and he is so reliably aloof throughout, so divorced from the proceedings that it almost becomes its own form of entertainment... which is certainly helpful once genuine entertainment refuses to show up to any other degree.

When the After Dark Horrorfest popped up in November of 2006, I caught about half of the offered 8 Films to Die For, despite a transparently sensationalized campaign of just how horrendously extreme these titles must've been to get such a specialized release. My experiences ranged from not bad (The Abandoned and The Gravedancers) to pretty dreadful (Penny Dreadful), but between the ratio of enjoyment that year and the yanking of actually-possibly-horrific Frontier(s) the next, I just passed entirely in 2007.

One might assume that, in an effort to meet me halfway, the Horrorfest has skipped out on itself this year, but while this is technically true, it's merely shuffled away into the doldrums of this coming January 2-9 instead. Scott Weinberg had already pointed out that The Broken and The Butterfly Effect 3 were among this year's (next year's?) selected batch of titles, and now The Hollywood Reporter reports that From Within -- about a rash of suicides in a small town -- and three After Dark productions: the aforementioned Effect, Slaughter, and Perkins' 14.

That leaves three more titles in the running. Any guesses? Just remember now: they can't be too scary.

(If the version above doesn't work, here's the proper Quicktime link.)

To paraphrase an IM conversation I just had with a friend regarding the trailer for Gus van Sant's forthcoming biopic, Milk: he thought the trailer was "incredible", whereas I felt it painted openly gay elected official Harvey Milk in a bit too saintly a light, at least within those two-and-a-half minutes, much to his chagrin.

I'm not saying that the real-life Milk wasn't a key figure in the fight for gay rights; I'm not saying that he deserved to be assassinated by Dan White (Josh Brolin); I'm not saying that Sean Penn doesn't look or sound just like the guy (that, I cannot speak for) and won't turn in an impressive performance. All I can speak for is the trailer itself and how I felt towards it.

So, as I go to put the 1984 Oscar-winning doc The Trials of Harvey Milk in my Netflix Queue, in the name of knowing better, would any of you care to attest for both the accuracy and anticipation behind this project?

I don't know when exactly AMCtv.com's Sci-Fi Scanner blog came about, but after bringing us the news last week that Mathieu Kassovitz wasn't exactly happy over the final product that was Babylon A.D., they've continued their hot streak by landing an interview with "Lost" and Star Trek producer Damon Lindelof, who fessed up that he'd be just as eager to adapt Stephen King's series as he would be to see someone else do it.

"The Dark Tower is to me every bit as daunting an adaptation as the Lord of the Rings trilogy must have been for Peter Jackson, except we've got seven books we're looking at," said Lindelof, who then explained that doing that doing the films alongside the closure of Lost would be too challenging a task at the moment.

Not unlike Watchmen, King's series remains among the literary works that everyone else insists to me are positively OMG!-awesome and that I have yet to get around to (I know, I know). With any luck, I'll get to them before someone gets to the movies, which seems to be an inevitability with or without Lindelof's involvement.

[by way of Bloody Disgusting]

Despite being seemingly obligated by demographic alone to enjoy it, I didn't particularly care for Michael Bay's Transformers, even after a recent second look on the small screen. Regardless, the people have spoken with their wallets, and Transformers 2: Revenge of the Ka-Ching is well underway for its release next summer.

Embedded above is the first of several behind-the-scenes videos that Wal-Mart will be providing in the coming months, and right from the get-go, the visionary Bay talks about not only making a sequel that'll make kids' dreams, but also sticking his custom-made Nikes up the collective ass of his crew. Watch as "Bay-os" and "Bay-hem" ensue in Bethlehem, PA, with fast bikes, nice cars, and big booms...

Heck, just about the only thing missing from this two-minute taste is some sweet hand-injury action.