It’s the weekend and a slow news day, so I thought I’d give you a brief tour of one of the theaters at the Telluride Film Festival. The Chuck Jones theater is dedicated to the famous artist responsible for the classic Looney Toons shorts. The whole place is themed around Chuck and the characters he has most famously worked with, down to the ticket passes that festival goers need for admittance. Unfortunately, photos were not allowed in the theater itself, which is lined with blow-ups of some of Jones’ parody sketches and paintings. The other 361 days a year, the theater is actually a convention center. While you’re waiting for the movie to begin, famous Chuck Jones quotes play on the screen, accompanied by sketches and short clips from some of his famous cartoons. For example, one quote read: “Painting was an art that became a business. Animation was a business that became an art.”

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One of the great new features at this year’s festival are a series of Dell network kiosks which can be found at various festival venues. The kiosks show you which movies are scheduled to play at all of the festival venues, along with an updated number of people who have gotten in line. This is extremely helpful, since travel from one venue to another could be a 45 minute trip. And I cant tell you how many times I’ve taken a one-hour journey across Park City at Sundance, only to find that I wouldn’t have had a chance to get into a film, even if I had arrived 45 minutes earlier. I’m sure many festivals will adopt such a system, and find better ways to integrate it with mobile phones.

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WARNING: This post (and potentially its title) contain MAJOR spoilers for David Fincher’s film, “Zodiac.”

Hot off the heels of Peter’s experience with a David Fincher tribute and his disappointing viewing of 20 minutes from Benjamin Button comes word that the storyline from Fincher’s last opus, Zodiac, may finally be reaching a resolution. According to CBS13 in Sacramento, the FBI is now running lab tests on the belongings of a man named Jack Tarrance, who died in 2006. Tarrance’s stepson, Dennis Kaufman, has spent eight years trying to prove that Tarrance was the Zodiac killer.

For those that don’t remember the film Zodiac, it chronicled the attempts of San Francisco Chronicle employees Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) and Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), in addition to detective Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), to find the identity of a serial killer who brutally murdered several people in Northern California during the late 1960s. The killer sent letters to the Chronicle in the form of strange ciphers and codes, hence the Zodiac moniker. One of the main suspects of the film, Arthur Leigh Allen (who died in 1992) was positively identified in a mugshot by a Zodiac murder victim during the film’s closing scene. However, other elements implicating Allen never added up and the case has remained one of the country’s most infamous unsolved murders.

Perhaps no more. While going through his late stepfather’s belongings, Kaufman discovered a number of incriminating items, including a knife covered with what could be blood, a black hood with a zodiac on it (which conceivably could have been used in the 1968 Lake Berryessa murder) as well as rolls of film, at least one of which contained gruesome images that “[a]ppeared to be people who were murdered,” according to Kaufman.

Kaufman also believes that Tarrance’s handwriting and photo match the handwriting and composite sketch of the Zodiac killer. I’ve embedded the handwriting comparison and the headshot comparison in this post, but for the full write-up and some more photos, head on over to CBS13. According to the FBI, they could get the results of their tests any day. We’ll report more updates as they become available.

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Last night the Telluride Film Festival held a tribute for director David Fincher. After an introduction by festival sponsor documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, and a package of clips spanning Fincher’s career from Music videos, commercials, to Se7en, The Game, Fight Club, Panic Room and Zodiac, Variety’s Todd McCarthy took the stage to do a 1:1 interview with the director. Here are some highlights from that conversation:

Fincher admitted that much of his early years discovering cinema consisted of Thrillers and scary movies. His favorites included Jaws, I Saw What You Did, and Rear Window.

When asked why he creates a lot of films under morbid ideas, Fincher said that he makes whatever scripts that interest him. Plus, “They haven’t offered a lot of romantic comedies,” he joked.

Fincher remembers the exact moment when he realized that he wanted to make movies for a living. He was eight years old, probably cutting school, when he came across a documentary on the making of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Fincher admitted that before that documentary, it had never occurred to him that movies weren’t made in real time, and he came away amazed at all the work that was involved behind the scenes. After watching the doc, he got into his father’ car and said “I want to make movies.”

McCarthy asked if Fincher would every make a western. “There’s animals in westerns right?” Fincher joked, before answering probably not.

Growing up in Marin County, Fincher said that George Lucas was his neighbor. They made American Graffiti on the street near his house, and he watched them film some scenes off to the side. Other films that came through his neighborhood included Godfather and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He admitted that most of his friends had their heads shaved to be in Lucas’ THX1128. His roomate who was working at Lucasfilm painting matte paintings recommended Fincher for a job, and he was hired to lad cameras on what was then titled Star Wars: Revenge of the Jedi. He worked a bunch of other productions which included Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

“It was great film school,” said Fincher. “You could spend $30,000 on film school, then spend another $30,000 on your films. I wanted to work on Star Wars movies.”

But he eventually left to do television commercials. However, he found that no one would hire a young guy to direct commercials. Thankfully a thing called MTV came along, and music videos were a thing that he had made all through his high school years. He actually admitted that aside from a couple commercials, he didn’t make a narrative film until his first Hollywood feature.

On who he enjoyed working with over his music video career, Fincher admitted that “the most famous people are usually very good at what they are.”

Fincher said that with the music videos he always tried to have fun while making them. “They’re like making toilet paper, here today gone tomorrow… so lets have fun making em.”

He recalls a piece of advice from Joel Schumacher, who early into his feature career told him that he was giving the movie studios too much power. Joel taught him that he should be ready, everyday, to walk off a project, to quit, in order to fight for the vision he believes in.

When he got the script for Se7en, he told Mike Deluca that he needed to work on it some more before going into production. Duluca told Fincher “If we give anyone the time to realize the kind of movie we want to make for $30 million, they won’t want to make it.” So with that Fincher rushed Se7en into production.

On the controversy behind Fight Club: “I always though of it as ridiculous,” Fincher said about the plot of the book. “So I never got what everyone was upset about. But I’m an Asshole,” Fincher concluded, who admitted that he was laughing out loud while he read the book the film was based on.

About making movies in San Francisco: “It’s too hard to make films in San Francisco. It’s like making films in Paris. Paris looks beautiful because film crews didn’t have the chance to mess it up.” He said that when he made Zodiac, San Francisco wanted him to film in the city, but as is very typical of the city, they weren’t willing to accommodate any changes (I think Fincher joked that a SF official said to him “You can’t turn that street light out”) which lead him back to filming in-front of green screens on a sound stage.

Fincher’s favorite San Francisco films include: Vertigo, Bullet and Dirty Hairy, even though Fincher admits that film could have taken place in any city.

When asked about how he usually makes films with multiple layers and long running times, Fincher admitted “I have a problem with keeping things simple.”

Talking about Robert Downey Jr.’s recent fame, Fincher said “I think it’s great that Marvel comes in and eats Hollywood’s lunch.” When a friend of his told him the news that Downey had been cast as Iron Man, Fincher said “That’s genius.”

On working with Robert, Fincher said “There are actors who are worth taking everyone’s time and energy from moving on.” And Robert is one of them. If he has an idea, you need to get in on film, no matter how many takes.

He first got to read the script for Benjamin Button eight years ago. The screenplay was incredible but it required the audience to have a love and knowledge of Jazz. The project didn’t get made for years, and then one day Fincher received a call from his friend Spike Jonze who had good news, he was going to direct Ben Button. “Great! Fuck You!” Fincher said in reply. Jonze apparently quit because he had a specific vision and the studio wanted to go to writer Eric Roth to redraft the script. So Fincher was asked to come in and do a pitch to Paramount, but he refused, even though he wanted the project. The studio went to another director, but that didn’t work out. Roth called Fincher and begged him to come into Paramount and do his “tap dance” for the studio. He came in and explained his vision. They wanted test footage, so Fincher produced footage of Ben Button using the aging effects. The studio decided that the film would cost too much money and it fell into development heck That is until Brad Grey took over Paramount and asked “do we have any Brad Pitt projects laying around?” Fincher described the film as about the “dents people make in your life.”

They then screened 20 minutes of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Most of the people I talked to following the screening were underwhelmed or disappointed. You can read my first impressions of the footage in my previous posting.

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Writer/director Lance Daly described his film Kisses as a story about “how to escape if you can’t escape”. More specifically, it’s about two kids who run away from home and spend a “night of magic and terror on the streets of inner-city Dublin.” Sprinkled with realistic improvisational moments, Kisses is Lost in Translation but with two irish 10-year-olds.

Daly cleverly uses the saturation and desaturation of color from the frame to visually convey the children’s emotions. A woman on the gondola ride home, also aptly compared the use of the technique with The Wizard of Oz. And I think many comparisons could be made between both of these stories.

Kelly O’Neill, who plays Kylie in the film, is incredibly natural and has the charisma of a young Drew Barrymore. If it weren’t for her accent, I would predict a huge career for her in American film. Kisses is a sweet and wonderful indie. The film earns your admiration even though it can be unbelievable (the boat sequence) and self indulgent at moments (one too many minute long close-ups of the young leads homeless on the streets of Dublin). And at only 72-minutes in length, it leaves you wanting more.

/Film Rating: 7.5 out of 10

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I just got out of the David Fincher tribute (which I will write about at length later) but for now I just wanted to share my first impressions on the 20 minutes of footage from Fincher’s new film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which was screened at the event. First off, I want to say that I’m a die hard Fincher fan. I’ve loved everyone of his film, with the slight exception of Panic Room. Fight Club is in my top 10 all time favorite films. Like many others, I was amazed at the trailer for Benjamin Button. It was probably the best  trailer I had seen for a dramatic film in years. So to say that I’m excited about Benjamin Button would be an understatement.

Then rumors began to circulate about a three hour plus long movie, and an angry studio which was battling with Fincher to turn in a shorter film.  And then Paramount dropped Fincher’s Heavy Metal, which was set up at the studio. The official reason given was that Fincher’s vision of the project was too dark and sexy for the studio. But if one were to connect the dots, you see a connection to the supposed feud behind the scenes over the Ben Button running time. Last I heard, the film was cut down to around two hours and forty five minutes, and rumor had it that the studio was still unhappy with the length. Again, this is all hearsay. Nothing confirmed, just things you hear around Hollywood.

I’m all for conserving the director’s artistic vision, and I’ve enjoyed most of Fincher’s work, even if Zodiac could have been 30 minutes shorter on the back end. So when I first heard rumors of the studio pushing Fincher to cut back, my first response was to write it off as another movie studio exec that just didn’t get it. But as it turns out, they might be right.

The footage I screened tonight was met with disappointment and concern. There are moments of magic and wonder, but interrupted and surrounded by moments which had me questioning, “Is this really the best footage he has?” The 20-minute package contained bits and pieces of scenes which spanned from the beginning of the film, probably past the half way mark. It was made clear that the film is bookmarked with Cate Blanchette’s character as an an older lady in a hospital bed being read the life story of Benjamin Button by a younger woman, presumably her daughter. But the whole framing device seemed rather confusing. Why is she being read the story of Ben button’s life? It’s hard to understand without context.

We see how Benjamin’s mother died during childbirth, and how his father ran away with the newborn and left him on the steps of a house, for a black couple to discover. A young black woman decides to take Benjamin in, giving him his name. A doctor explains that the child is going through overall body failure, similar to that of an 80-year-old man. This doesn’t scare Queenie off, as she believes he is a miracle. Benjamin is brought to one of those traveling churches with a tent set-up and a preacher who claims to cure people through faith. A 7-year-old Button is brought on stage to be healed. The Preacher gets him to rise up from his wheel chair and walk. But instead, Button slams face first into the floor, prompting a weird moment of laughter from the audience at Telluride. There are many of these moments of comedy that abruptly interferes with the dramatic flow of the scenes exhibited.

Years later, Benjamin is now working on a boat, when his Captain asks him if he has ever been with a Woman, which he had not. So he is brought to a whorehouse and shown the power of a regular income. The moments that really didn’t work for me involved Benjamin’s romantic relationships with the characters played by Cate Blanchette and Tilda Swinton. And sure, it might have helped to have seen these films in a better context, but the way they were presented, I felt myself becoming univolved with the story every time either one of them appeared on screen. I have a strong feeling that if the romantic relationships in this film don’t work, the film might not work. There is even a scene later on where Benjamin watches Cate dance sexily for him in the moonlight. It was one of those sequences which has you wondering, where is this going, when is it going to end, hasn’t it gone on long enough, hoping for the next scene to begin sooner rather than later. I talked to a bunch of festival-goers after the screening, and they seemed to agree that there were quite a few elongated  uninteresting moments which might benefit from some trimming.

The cinematography was beautiful yet subdued from Fincher’s usual flash. Brad Pitt delivers a performance that will make you forget that he’s behind the make-up. The transformation will make you believe that a man can age backwards. I’m still excited to see the finished product, I’m just a little disappointed. Could it be that the film wasn’t what I expected, or maybe not what I wanted?

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WEEKEND UPDATE: Okay. So, I just witnessed a press copy of Disaster Movie. Let’s up the ante. If you really, really want bad things to happen to the movie’s directors/hacks, Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer Water, paste the following in the comments: Necronomicon Xmortis Juno. Thanks. If they die this weekend, we’ll update/celebrate. Disclosure: I’ve had this post/hex blessed by a perturbed employee of Marie Laveau’s House of Voodoo in New Orleans. The /Film Effect is in effect!!! (No, I’m not kidding.)

Okay. So, who braved the shallow waters today and paid to see Babylon A.D., a Vin Diesel comeback movie repeatedly wedgied by its director, or Disaster Movie, a national disgrace released on the friggin’ anniversary of Hurricane Katrina that has the power to shutdown Slashfilm if it grosses over $20 million?

Don’t worry readers, we will not hire Osama bin Diesel to track you down (or your innocent friends) using IP addresses. Please confess below: How did either of these “films” make you feel? Shock the cowards among us and rip into the soon-to-be infamous twist ending to Babylon A.D. below. Feel free to exaggerate, lie or simply imagine. Feel free to not even identify which travesty you are referring to, it will make things that much scarier. We await to vicariously experience these winners via your comments by candle light with a bag of Cape Cod jalapeno potato chips and an airplane pillow to muffle our screams.

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We’ve known for some time now that Slither director James Gunn is working on producing a series of ”Horror Meets Comedy” shorts for Xbox Live, along with a contribution of his own for that project, Humanzee. Today he’s teased us even further by tweeting the cast for a future project—a list which includes Firefly’s Nathan Fillion and Alan Tudyk, along with porn starlets Belladonna, Aria Giovanni, Jenna Haze, and Sasha Grey.

He’s currently being coy about specifics, but I think he may actually be alluding to The Belcoo Experiment, a project which he’s been talking about since last year. As described via his MySpace:

The Belcoo Experiment is a script I wrote on spec.  It’s an ultra-violent thriller with a lot of action.  It has to do with a group of 83 American expatriates who work in a building in Sao Paulo, Brazil.  At the beginning of what is at first a regular, boring day, walls close up around the building, trapping them inside.  A voice emits over the speaker system, forcing them through a series of murderous moral decisions.

A synopsis like that will obviously require many actors, and I could easily see him fitting in porn stars who may be able to hide their lack of acting talent by blending in with the other characters. While somewhat Saw-like, it’s also a premise that could work extremely well if handled correctly, and Gunn has certainly proven himself to be an able caretaker of genre material. If you’re a horror fan and haven’t yet seen Slither, his criminally under-appreciated 2006 film starring Fillion and Elizabeth Banks, do so now.

His decision to cast Fillion and Tudyk together again is surely born out of Firefly fanboyism, but I’m not exactly complaining. Both Fillion and Tudyk deserve to be far greater stars than the fates have dealt them, and I can only hope that this project works out well for them and Gunn. Genre projects probably won’t get any of them recognized among general audiences, but it’s certainly a nice treat for their current fans.

Discuss: Are you a fan of Gunn’s work? Are you excited for a semi-Firefly reunion with porn stars?
via Chud

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A great little fan made clip of Gremlins taking over a PVR and invading the movies themselves. When the screen glitches, just keep watching it. You will see that its part of the video.

This is made of awesome. I miss the Gremlins.

James C Strouse has yet to hit the mainstream, but I’m sure that audiences will someday find his relate-able indie dramas. After writing the 2005 Casey Affleck indie Lonesome Jim (netflix it), he went on to direct John Cusack in Grace is Gone. The big sale and hit of the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, was dumped into theaters during a time when movie-goers were tired of Iraq-war related films.

MTV has word that Strouse has signed Sam Rockwell to star as a alcoholic girls high school basketball coach, in a dramatic film Rockwell describes as Bad News Bears meets Half Nelson meets Hoosiers. It’s worth mentioning that Strouse’s semi-autobiographical first screenplay Lonesome Jim involved a story line where Jim (played by Casey Affleck) has to take over his brother’s girls youth basketball team.

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Even Bruce Wayne is beginning to think Max Payne will be a sizable hit and worth seeing. A new theatrical trailer for Fox’s video game adaptation contains even more shots of the hypnotic angels-of-death that continue to puzzle the games’ followers. We learn herein that the winged beings are referred to as “valkyries,” and reward people who “die in violence.” Clarification, meh. Backed by the vocals of Marilyn Manson (our second reference today, k), the new trailer better emphasizes a brooding, escalatory tone that plays the right notes of fanboy nihilism. Also present are the high-charged visuals that wowed our staff at Comic Con. For a PG-13 video game gun-porn flick with many doubters, my latest impression? For what it is, Max Payne clicked.

Current comparisons online to the R-rated, totally cheeseball Hitman are predictable and warranted, but the confidence expressed in the press by Mark Wahlberg and John Moore—once attached to X3—doesn’t seem like a contractual shill-routine to me. This trailer’s vague mix of occult imagery and organized crime recalls past genre fare like The Crow and middling efforts like End of Days, and Constantine, but there’s also the sense that TDK’s rating boundary-pushing was a real inspiration. And, c’mon, Mila Kunis firing a machine gun is equal doses ridiculous and hormone-tickling. I hereby move my chips over from Punisher: War Zone to Max Payne; admittedly, this is not a major gamble, but Payne does feature Ludacris in a fedora. Hope I’m right.

Max Payne opens on October 17th.

Discuss: Will Max Payne be a hit? What’s your impression of the final theatrical trailer? Is it cool or stupid or both? Are the valkyries symbolic or real?

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