Film Festivals

The 2008 Cannes Film Festival is over and the awards have been announced. Cue the crickets. Sorry, that was wrong, cue le crickets.

After seeing her film I Am Becasue We Are at the Cannes Film Festival, Moore announced that Madonna will appear at his Traverse City Film Festival on August 2 to showcase her work.

This weekend, the mecca of geekdom was the Drexel Theater in Columbus, Ohio. More than 300 people gathered for 24 hours of science fiction movies. Several of the Rejects were in attendance to enjoy the good, the bad and the ugly that science fiction cinema had to offer.

The complete schedule of the 25th Annual Ohio 24-Hour Science Fiction Marathon has finally been announced. Several of the rejects will be in attendance, enjoying the full grindhouse experience of an all-night movie marathon.

The man’s formative years were spent flinging his extensive film knowledge in the general direction of willing and unwilling ears and his movies are laced with comments on films, past and present. So who better to stand in front of a room full of attentive film lovers and natter to his heart’s content?

The Ohio 24-Hour Sci-Fi Marathon is more then just movies. Each year, you get to see hours of additional material like rare and vintage trailers, short subjects, classic cartoons and so much more.

Today we got some cool news from the Tribeca Press office that the festival, which was founded in 2001 by Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal and Craig Hatkoff, will close with The Wachowski’s tripped out, CGI-infused cartoon adaptation Speed Racer.

Henry Bean’s latest film, Noise, about a man who tries to silence New York City by breaking into cars and disconnecting the alarms is based on a true story. It’s partly his own. I don’t just mean he wrote the script. I mean it’s based on his own life.

It’s an hour and a half from McKinney to Dallas. It consists of a half hour straight shot towards the heart of the Big D followed by an hour of twisting concrete that go back and forth, over and under, on top and underneath each other in order to squeeze every square inch of land into driving space for the daily commuters.

Al Gore has global warming. Rev. Jim Phelps has homosexuality. Uwe Boll has film critics. Everyone needs something to fight whether it matters to the rest of the world or not and director Henry Bean takes noise pollution to task in his sarcastic, clever, witty David and Goliath comedy Noise.

Director/Screenwriter Jason Wulfsohn and screenwriter/actor Sacha Grunpeter experiment with a unique way of delivering their message in Tracing Cowboys, but its delivery makes to hard to want to discover it.

Every journalist who actually carries about journalism knows the legend of Hunter S. Thompson. They know about his love affair with guns, explosives and other things that go “Boom” and can wake up enter counties.

Early on in Paranoid Park we see its adolescent protagonist, Gabe Nevins, from the rear as he walks towards a bench in an overgrown field to sit down and write something—a memoir? a letter?—that he calls “Paranoid Park”.

What do you get when you combine Henry Rollins, inbred mutants, and a guy named Texas Battle? Wrong Turn 2, a film at this years Screamfest and recent DVD I also happened to get my mitts on, that’s what! This movie is available now on DVD and has been getting some pretty positive reviews in the genre community. Does it live up to the hype? Read on!

The good people at Screamfest LA this year saw fit to have us in for a screening of Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror which came out on DVD this week. Lucky for us my quick hands and the strong arm of a Screamfest presenter lead to me catching a copy of this half of Grindhouse.

The cornerstone of this year’s Screamfest film festival in lovely Los Angeles was the much anticipated 30 Days of Night from ever present comic scribe Steve Niles and brought to the screen by David Slade, who is riding his last film Hard Candy straight to the top.

About 90 miles northwest of Los Angeles is the city of Santa Barbara, California, which claims to be the American Riviera.

November 17th - 26th
Wim Wenders was the center of attention in this year’s Thessaloniki Film Festival in Greece, the 47th in a row. A retrospective of 27 films, fiction and documentaries, gave the fans the opportunity to brush up their memories and the rest a chance to know him better. The master himself was present, […]

Release Date: TBD
Hey hey. This was the last movie I saw at Screamfest 06 and again had heard a lot of positive buzz about it. It was even featured in one of the premiere genre magazines, Rue Morgue. So I was excited. It had a cast of mostly unknowns, save for Robert […]

So did the movie pleasantly surprise me? No, afraid not. The story follows David, a youth troubled by the suicide of his “rock-star” older brother who is sent off to Driftwood, a youth rehabilitation facility. Or as most people call it, a prison. There he’s haunted by images of a dead boy who turns out to have died mysteriously (duh) and just happened to be the nephew of DDP’s character, the delightfully nasty Captain Doug Kennedy. Weird stuff happens, secrets are revealed, justice is done.

Release Date: TBA (tentative March 2007)
Ahh Hatchet. You’re a tricky one. I’d heard much about it from it’s limited screenings thus far, so expectations were high. It had a promising tag line that really got to me. “It’s not a sequel, it’s not a remake, and it’s not based on […]

Release Date: October 28, 2006 (television)
Hey all. Pumpkinhead: Ashes to Ashes is a made for TV Sci-Fi original directed by Jake West. Screamfest was tossing around free tickets to this badboy so I went; I probably would have dodged it otherwise. But I found myself in a large theater with very few […]

Hey all. Long time no talk. I’m going to hip you up to Screamfest just in time for Halloween. Wait what? Just in time for Thanksgiving? Oh no, really? Just in time for the start of December? Well ok. My bad. I’ve been a little overwhelmed lately and haven’t […]

In the words of Screamfest themselves, here’s what they say:
Screamfest was formed in August 2001 by film producers Rachel Belofsky and Ross Martin in order to give filmmakers and writers in the horror/sci-fi genres a venue to have their work showcased to people in the industry. We are very proud that the majority of the […]

The reviews on this will probably be a mix of A’s and F’s. It’s either love or hate for the D, and movie-goers won’t be able to know which side they’re on until they pay their ten bucks for a seat.

I was excited for the end of the festival to come because I was anxious to get home, and also because the last two days’ movies were going to be a great experience. Word came today that the last TBA film for the closing night would be Nightmare Detective, a movie I figured I’d have […]

Making movies just isn’t good enough anymore. We’re thrusting headlong into an exciting new world where movies aren’t just biographical, but fictionally biographical; not just documentaries, but mockumentaries; not just fictional, but reality-based fiction. With meta-humor becoming as commonplace in comedies as explosions in action flicks, it’s getting tougher to create the next big twist on classic stories.

There are more than two parts to making every movie, but if it had to be done, the process could be split into concept and execution. Every critic knows this since many of them rely solely on the arsenal of insults involving the execution of a film, praising its concept as genius while distressing over how it could have been made better. I’m not one to follow trends, but after watching this movie, I’m forced to say that I loved Run, Robot, Run!’s ideas and yawned at the way they were presented.

The festival is almost over by this point - most of the L.A. types (excluding myself) have all flown back to their respective homes where they are, as all know, waited on by man-servants and washed by professional bathers. Yes, rich and poor alike all take in the luxury that is Los Angeles.
With no panels […]

Coming straight from Belgium, the horror capital of the universe comes the striking tale of a morally repugnant family that finds a door in their house where one wasn’t there before. It sounds intriguing, but although the idea is interesting, the execution is terrible.