Mannix: The Third Season DVD Review

For a full viewing experience a fan must prepare the proper dinner to accompany their DVD. Grill a ribeye steak, bake an Idaho potato and pour a tumbler of Scotch before you press play on Mannix: The Third Season.

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http://movies.insidepulse.com/2009/11/05/mannix-the-third-season-dvd-review/

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Do Actors Have To Match The Ethnic/Race Of The
Characters They Play

Some people don’t like the idea of an American playing James Bond, they want to keep Bond played by any actor from United Kingdom area (England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales)I still haven’t heard anybody complaining about Charlton Heston playing Moses in Ten Commandments when Heston was not even a Jew.People didn’t mind Robert Downey Jr. playing [...]

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http://ramascreen.com/do-actors-have-to-match-the-ethnicrace-of-the-characters-th
ey-play/

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Casting Notes: Michael Fassbender Fires A Single
Shot; William H. Macy and More in Dirty Girl; Goth Icon Peter Murphy Cameos in Twilight 3

It's casting notes time again! First up, Michael Fassbender, the British film critic lieutenant from Inglourious Basterds, has been cast in the thriller A Single Shot, working under director David Jacobson. He's appearing alongside a great cast: William H. Macy, Thomas Haden Church and a newly slim Forest Whitaker. (Seriously, check out this pic of Whitaker in The Experiment. Give the guy a sandwich!) Fassbender will be a poacher on the run from killers -- we don't yet know the killers, but it's not difficult to speculate that Church and Whitaker might be the guys.[Variety]After the break, more William H. Macy news, with Juno Temple, and an on-the-nose vampiric turn from the guy who reminded us that Bela Lugosi is dead.Macy will also be in Dirty Girl, with a cast that now includes Lisa Kudrow, Sally Hawkins and Juno Temple. First-timer Abe Sylvia is directing the film about "a high ...

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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/slashfilm/~3/n5tphc3HdoA/

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My Month of Horror A Wrap-up

.With Halloween several days behind us now and Christmas commercials rapidly consuming the[...]

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http://www.rowthree.com/2009/11/05/my-month-of-horror-a-wrap-up/

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Oprah Reportedly Ready to Walk Away from Her Show

If this pans out, it's is a huge showbiz announcement. Nikki Finke has posted that Oprah Winfrey has decided to give up her CBS-syndicated show and moving her eponymous daytime chat show to her own cable network.

With the contract on Oprah's show running out, and with her fledgling Oprah Winfrey Network struggling to get off the ground, the entertainment world has been speculating wildly about her next move. To most, however, it seemed unthinkable that Oprah could walk away from her ATM machine of a TV show — contemplating the fate of daytime TV minus Oprah is like Cold War strategists trying to imagine a world without the Soviet Union.

The Big O has been developing the Oprah Winfrey Network for some time in partnership with Discovery Communications, but the network has had trouble getting off the ground without the presence of its namesake's own show. Finke reports that Discovery's chief finally demanded that Oprah go all in and bring her show over or give up on the network entirely. If after much vacillation, which reportedly included several canceled phone appointments with Les Moonves to break the news to him, it would be a big change of heart for Oprah to base her empire on her own cable channel rather than a mere syndicated show.

Back in 1998, when Oprah was poised to take over cable as one of the three "founding mothers" of the Oxygen network, she dangled the possibility of her talk show airing on the new cable station:

She also said she intended to provide ''input and ideas'' in the short-term before she is free from other commitments to produce more programming for the channel. Specifically, she said she had never sold rerun rights to the huge library of editions of her daily talk show and, ''This seems like the perfect place to release them.''

A decade later, when Winfrey announced her OWN network in January 2008, she tried to distance herself as much as possible from the disappointing Oxygen: "I was not a participant in the development of the channel... That's why after a couple of board meetings I took myself off the board."

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Orange Cinema Halloween Screening report

You'll remember that for Halloween I ran a competition to give away two pairs of tickets to a special screening of Halloween that Orange Cinema were running in London. Located in the middle of a graveyard late at night, special effects around the screen, actors dressed as priests and ghosts, wireless headphones to immerse you in the film, and a big screen projection, it seemed like a dream for Halloween. Well two people won, Scott and Matt, and they headed off to the screening to enjoy Orange's hospitality, and from the reports they've come back with there was some nice...Visit Filmstalker for the full story. Restricted feeds to protect content.

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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/filmstalker/~3/kwwZLsMCG2g/orange_cinema_halloween
_screen.html

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Interesting review of Precious by Armond White

Interesting because 1) unlike some (or maybe many) of White's reviews, the ideas being put forth in this review can be clearly understood & fit together well, and 2) some of White's reactions to Precious reminds me of some reactions I heard from Indians (from India) to Slumdog Millionaire - that it's an outsider's fantasy of poverty & does not reflect reality accurately (or the large/common/usual reality of life for the kind of people depicted), & 3) points out that good movies that may reflect different sides of the African-American experience - less tragic sides - have not gotten as much support & admiration from Indiewood & Hollywood or audiences. From White's review:

"Precious raises ghosts of ethnic fear and exoticism just like Birth of a Nation. Precious and her mother (Mo?Nique) share a Harlem hovel so stereotypical it could be a Klansman?s fantasy. It also suggests an outsider?s romantic view of the political wretchedness and despair associated with the blues. Critics willingly infer there?s black life essence in Precious? anti-life tale. And the same high-dudgeon tsk-tsking of Hurricane Katrina commentators is also apparent in the movie?s praise. Pundits who bemoan the awful conditions that have not improved for America?s unfortunate are reminded that they are still on top.

This misreading of blues sensibility probably has something to do with the disconnect caused by hip-hop, where thuggishness and criminality romanticize black ghetto life. Director Daniels? rotgut images of aggressive cruelty and low-life illiteracy aren?t far from gangster rap clichés. The spectacle warps how people perceive black American life? perhaps even replacing their instincts for compassion with fear and loathing."

Read the rest of the review at New York Press.

That review aside, it will be very interesting to see how the audiences react to the movie - will the vision put forth in Precious be embraced widely as was the case with Slumdog Millionaire? If so, what does that mean? Will people love it as a freak show or will they love it as a story of hope? Or maybe a little bit of both? We'll have to see.

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Adam Hartzell on Warrior Boyz

"Film Festival Smackdown" - that's Michael Hawley's budding meme coined for the surfeit of special film screening events here on Frisco Bay in November, which he has admirably attempted to cover in this roundup. Rather than looking at this logjam of festivals as something intimidating, I hope local cinephiles feel comfortable sampling the selections like attendees at an overstuffed thanksgiving of diverse goodness. Take a healthy helping of ethnic appetizers from Latin America, Italy, indigenous North American communities, etc. Select main courses from the substantial offerings from the latest Pacific Film Archive or Stanford Theatre calendars. Wash it down with something from the Prime Pacino '71-75 series at the Castro, and enjoy some animation or "CineKink" for dessert. Or switch up the order of your cinematic meal- it all ends up in the same place, in this case not the stomach but a brain and heart well-nourished by the effects of art and culture.

One of the festivals opening tonight is the Frisco-wide favorite 3rd i International South Asian Film Festival, expanded to four days including two at the Roxie and two at the Castro. Both Hawley and Frako Loden have filed previews of the festival for The Evening Class, and now I'm proud to present Adam Hartzell's take on a 3rd i film called Warrior Boyz, screening tomorrow at the Roxie Theatre. Be sure to check out Hartzell's sf360 preview of Taiwan Film Days, a San Francisco Film Society-sponsored festival opening opening tomorrow at the Opera Plaza Cinema. Adam:

I think it?s is fair to say that, in the mind of the average U.S. citizen, Canada is seen as a Liberal oasis (or, depending on your political predilection, ?nightmare?). As someone more oasis-leaning, I find much to admire about Canada. But as I?ve done more and more reading of and listening to Canadian media, I?ve found much to nudge away ever so slightly whatever naïve views I previously held about our neighbors to the north.

Ali Kazimi?s documentary Continuous Journey was perhaps my first big oasis evaporator. That documentary was about the Komagata Maru, a ship of 340 Sikhs, 24 Muslims, and 12 Hindus, who as British subjects had every right to settle anywhere in the Empire, were denied entry in Canada and forced to stay in Vancouver Bay for several days while court hearings considered their plight. The film exposed me to Canada?s history of racism, a different image from the multicultural apex I was imagining Canada to be at the time. (In 2006, it was announced that Deepa Mehta was scheduled to make a fictional film about the tragedy, casting Akshay Kumar in the lead role in 2008.)

Similarly, if Bowling for Columbine had you thinking violence was only something Canadians experienced from watching U.S. television shows and movies (shows and movies filled with Canadian actors and filmed in Canadian locales hidden as U.S. cities), Warrior Boyz will have you recasting your Canadian (national) character as well. Like Continuous Journey, it?s a documentary about Sikh-Canadians that is the impetus of this adjustment of Canada as a country.

I had heard about the gang problems in the Sikh-Canadian community of Surrey, British Columbia through an interview with the director of Warrior Boyz on Q - The Podcast on the CBC and an article in The Walrus magazine. Both had me anxious to see this documentary, so I was happy that the folks at 3rd i have brought it to us. (They will also be bringing Director Baljit Sangra to discuss the film after the screening.) The film primarily follows four real-life characters, a Vice Principal and a former gang member each on personal crusades to keep kids from joining gangs or helping them find a way out, and two gang members of polar trajectories. It?s not a brilliant documentary, but it is decidedly engaging, particularly when the former gang member reveals his motivations for joining the gang. He didn?t fall into it like in so many after-school specials. He actively sought his way into gang life. Thankfully, he actively sought his way out before he died.

As powerful is the one active gang member?s inability to look into the camera throughout the documentary. When we first meet him, his accidental gaze at the lens, and by extension us, is the only time he startles, running away from the returned gaze of the camera. It is the strongest statement of all about the paradoxes of gang life. It gives him a confidence that hides the insecurity still visible in his inability to make eye contact with his imagined audience, his existential jury. Even more topical with the recent attack on Jagdish Grewal, an editor of a Punjabi newspaper in Brampton, Ontario, this documentary definitely brings a third eye to an oft-filmed topic, demonstrating the tremendous value festivals like 3rd i consistently provide.

Read The Full Article:
http://hellonfriscobay.blogspot.com/2009/11/adam-hartzell-on-warrior-boyz.html

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Nicole Kidman's Kenyan Mission To Fight Domestic
Violence

Nicole Kidman is taking the stage in Kenya in a bid to raise awareness of women affected by domestic violence. Just last month, the star testified before lawmakers at the U.S. Congress to talk about violence against woman[...] Read more!

Read The Full Article:
http://www.starpulse.com/news/index.php/2009/11/05/nicole_kidman_s_kenyan_mission
_to_fight_

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Ben Silverman's New College Buddy

As an NBC president, Ben Silverman once mingled with true media titans. But now the fallen mogul rolls with a different crowd; we hear he's besties with CollegeHumor editor-in-chief Ricky Van Veen. Now they might be in business together.

The New York Post reports that Silverman might take over CollegeHumor at the behest of Barry Diller, who bankrolls both CollegeHumor and Silverman's new online venture. Van Veen, meanwhile. is transitioning out of CollegeHumor and into his own Diller-funded media startup, Notional, which sounds a lot like Silverman's Electus (both have something to do with online video production).

We're told Silverman and Van Veen have been working very closely together and talking to each other every day. Perhaps a grander merger is in the works that would combine Electus, Notional and CollegeHumor into one venture. Silverman may have been ousted from old media, but he could still be lord of the new media flies. Especially within a venture that actually celebrates a refusal to mature, an inability to grow emotionally and a proclivity for partying to excess. Those are Ben Silverman's specialties, right there.

(Pics: via Getty, Webbyist)

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