Film Festivals

Even though we weren’t allowed to make the trip across the border into Canada, we would still like to bring you some of the Toronto Film Fest updates from our friends and neighbors around the web.

Robert Fure watches 6 shorts at the HollyShorts Festival so you don’t have to, but after reading what he has to say, you just might want to find them for yourself.

Kevin Smith will be traveling to Austin on September 18 to show his upcoming movie Zack and Miri Make a Porno to open Fantastic Fest.

Kabluey is the best film that you’ve never heard of, and it’s finally coming to theaters that are hopefully near you. If you’re geographically challenged in regards to the release schedule, then never fear, it’ll be on DVD in September. Definitely a must-see.

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.