by Fred Topel

Julian Schnabel has never made easy films. Basquiat was a biography of the street artist who became a protege of Andy Warhol. Before Night Falls portrayed exiled gay author Reinaldo Arenas. And The Diving Bell and the Butterfly told the story of author Jean-Dominique Bauby – all from the point of view of the one eye from which he could see after a paralyzing stroke.

Miral is a story set in the midst of the Israeli-Palestine conflict, told through the eyes of a Palestinian girl. Miral (Freida Pinto) grows up in a Palestinian orphanage, where her teacher, Hind Husseini (Hiam Abbass), encourages her to stay out of politics. But young activists in the PLO like Hani (Omar Metwally) are powerful examples to Miral, and she wants to get involved.

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by Ryan Stewart

This week will see the release of Revolver, the latest cinematic neckbreaker from 39-year-old British helmer Guy Ritchie. His previous gangster films, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and its follow-up, Snatch, were hailed as major events on both sides of the pond upon their release, and today are seen as cornerstones of a new film genre – the heightened-reality, super-kinetic gangster film, in which the most gruesome toughs and unlikely hoods imaginable all conspire in a near-comical, circle-jerk fashion to outdo each other and rack up the most impressive body count.

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by Ryan Stewart

Over the next few months, Hollywood’s hottest writer, Diablo Cody, will see her second and third scripts rushed into development. One of those, Girly Style, is a girl’s version of Superbad. The other is a horror film called Jennifer’s Body, starring Transformers’ Megan Fox, and it’s about – wait for it – a cheerleader that eats boys. Literally. If you want to know what kind of mind could come up with such a thing, a good place to start is with Cody’s 2005 memoir Candy Girl, which chronicles her unlikely journey from teenage miscreant in a punk band called Yak Spackle to achingly ordinary office drone to topless dancer (she went by Roxanne and other names) to popular blogger to aspiring screenwriter in her late twenties.

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by A.J. Focht

Filmed on a budget of just $4 million dollars, Red State shows a side of Kevin Smith that the world has never seen before. Known for his raunchy nerd comedies, the pseudo-horror Red State defiantly stands out from his other works.

Red State has been the fuel of many an internet fire since its announcement in back in 2006. To start things off, the film’s budget did not include advertising money. As an attempt to avoid the “studio math,” the Harvey Boys studio intends to advertise the movie with viral word of mouth. Then in January, at the Sundance Film Festival, Smith announced his plans to self-distribute the film as the first SModcast Picture, launching things with a road tour that started on March, 5.

On Tuesday, March 22, Red State made its stop in Denver, CO; where I had a chance to catch the movie and a Q&A after with Smith.

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by Blogbot

“I like horror movies, that’s all I really wanted to do,” said filmmaker turned Millionaire Matchmaker Destin Pfaff when SuicideGirls first spoke to him just over a year ago. “I was so against getting sidetracked. And she sidetracked me – magically,” he said of his reality TV star boss, Patti Stanger.

However, 2011 is the year Pfaff gets seriously back on track. His first full-length feature film, Sushi Girl, has just gone into production, and he was kind enough to invite SuicideGirls onto the Universal Studios set.

Co-written and produced by Pfaff, the title of the film refers to the female that serves as the centerpiece of a reunion dinner for members of a gang who we’re involved in an ill-fated diamond heist. The title role is played by newcomer Cortney Palm, who will be featured shortly in a special SG/Sushi Girl photo set.

The cast also features an eclectic and surprising mix of names, which includes Mark Hamill, a.k.a. Luke Skywalker from Star Wars, Noah Hathaway, who played Atreyu in Neverending Story, and Sonny Chiba, whose breakout role was that of Takuma Tsurugi in the martial arts classic, The Street Fighter.

Chiba is the stuff of legend, perhaps being one of the greatest living exponents of the fighting arts. A personal hero of Quentin Tarantino’s, The Street Fighter found his next generation audience as Hattori Hanzo in Kill Bill Vol 1. Unlike Bruce Lee, who shrouded his work in mysticism, Chiba has never been shy about showing extreme aggression.

In Sushi Girl, Chiba plays a sushi chef with an agenda that goes way beyond slicing seafood and moulding rice. Though holding back on the specifics of the twist in Chiba’s fishy tale, the filmmakers promise us the method in which he dispenses with his enemies will have more kick than a wasabi rush.

The day of our set visit, Friday March 11, also coincided with the tragic Tōhoku earthquake that devastated Japan. It was therefore with very mixed feelings that Chiba, who lives just south of Tokyo in Japan’s second largest city Yokohama, walked on set.

We met up with Chiba in his trailer for a brief chat, which was conducted with the help of a translator:

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by Fred Topel

We all know product placement happens in movies. You see the results when a can of Coke is seen in a shot instead of a generic soda, or a corporate logo comes into focus in a scene played out in Times Square.

The existence of product placement is not a mystery or scandal, but Morgan Spurlock wanted to put it to a real test. Big budget movies like Iron Man can command huge numbers for fast food endorsement deals. But could Spurlock finance an indie documentary on product placement alone?

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by A.J. Focht

Superman has been slated to return to the silver screen for quite some time now. It’s been nearly six months since Zack Snyder (Watchmen) signed on to direct the Kryptonian’s next blockbuster. There has been a slow trickle of information about the movie, but none of them have been as substantial as the latest news.

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