NICK + ATTACK OF THE SHOW = THIS

http://chud.com/nextraimages/g4chud.jpgHey, look what idiot is getting back into the TV arena a year and change after the CNN Headline News days?

No, not Bud Dwyer. Me!

G4’s Attack of the Show featured an interview with myself about this weekend’s flicks and I’ll be flying to Los Angeles in two weeks to do a live segment in studio. You never know, it just might end up being a regular thing.

Here’s last night’s segment. I apologize for my lack of great. It’s been a while since I did this and there was a bit of trouble with the earpiece in my head, so it started off a little rocky. It’s a fun show and Kevin’s a really bright and fun guy to chat with. I can imagine the segments getting looser and looser in subsequent attempts.

Attack of the Show’s website is here. It’ll keep you busy for about a million years.






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LEAK LETTERS #34

Mailbagsukidoji:

Your letters. My smartass replies.Hey folks,

You have a comment and don’t want to send a letter? Please click HERE and pipe up on the message boards. Please?

So, as I get rended anally by the film business I figured it’d be nice to contribute a little to the site that made me a hundredaire. Granted, most of the mail I get is addressed to Devin but who better to answer his mail than me?

Seriously, I’d love to do this column a lot more often. So send mail. About anything!

Here you go…

If CHUD Ran the Movies:


All apologies to the makers of LARRY THE CABLE GUY: HEALTH INSPECTOR, but not to anyone who bought a ticket to see it.

Come around here often?

The Fact This Exists Is Hilarious.


I have a rule. Never eat anything taller than myself. As a result, I will never eat the 6 foot Blimpie Blast. Or Peter Dinklage.

Gojira!

Mitch to the left!Don writes:

Thanks for the review of the new Godzilla double-dip, but I didn’t see
any mention of picture/audio quality. Is there a new transfer?
Or sound mix? Just wondering, as an improved picture might
tip me off the fence I’m on regarding whether or not to purchase it…

You think YOU were excited to see that film in 1998… I wrote a Unix shell
script that emailed me and my friends each morning with a "Godzilla countdown".

I bought tickets for my friends to the preview screening, made hand-drawn
Godzilla-shaped sleeves for the tickets, and ran to Toys R Us to by figures
right after I saw it. I played that initial museum-themed teaser trailer on my
computer over and over and over. And, when it was all over, I had about the
same reaction you did.

I still love the effects, but man, what a lousy job of casting. Maria Pitillo,
while semi-cute and perky, was WRETCHED. Give me the whining Japanese kid in a
baseball cap any day over her performance.

Anyway, thanks for all the work you do on the site. I hit it every day.

Nick’s Reply: There’s been a lengthy discussion on the CHUD boards, but almost none of it really has much to do with my review. I assume they read it. Godzilla was a misstep, but a great learning experience for Hollywood because the "larger is better" policy doesn’t work. That said, I guess it isn’t a learning experience because they didn’t learn a goddamn thing, as evidenced by The Day After Tomorrow (my brilliant DVD review). It sounds like I’m picking on Roland Emmerich, but I’m not. He makes BIG movies. It’s what he does. He didn’t write the check or anything. It’s a studio’s job to make sure the film they’re making is a good one. Godzilla could have easily been terrific and we’d have seen a lot more monster movies come out. It wasn’t and we haven’t, King Kong being the exception but it’s also ina different class because of the Jackson factor and the fact that King Kong is still an icon. Here’s the funny thing about Pitillo: I loved her in Bye-Bye Love. I was sort of excited to see her in Godzilla based on that flick (Matthew Modine is awesome in it. McDonald’s is not). Now I’d like to see Godzilla in her. Sexually.

(SEND A LETTER)

Come around here often?

Book Reviews.

Mitch to the right.Rob writes:

I just saw in your most recent Leak Letters round-up that you’re
interested in bringing back book reviews.

I’d love to be your man on that. I dig the hell out of the site –
it’s one of my escapes when I’m trying to ignore work – and I’ve been
a reader for years. I wrote a few Chewer Columns when they first
started.

I’m an avid reader, tear through a bunch of books a month, and the
majority of them are contemporary.

If you’d like me to put a test review together or something, I’d be
more than willing. I hail from NYC and I’m a political reporter, so
I’m pretty good at meeting deadlines.

Interested? Let me know. Even if not, the site still has a dark
little spot in my heart. Thanks for taking the time to read this.

Nick’s Reply: Send a sample to THIS LINK. We are actively looking for folks like you as well as one new news editor with balls and style.

(SEND A LETTER)

Come around here often?

Funny how?

Mitch to the left!Kevin writes:

Where have you been? I miss your particular brand of humor. Your wit is quick, dry, and coarse. Not to be confused with pork barbeque rub.

Nick’s Reply: Thanks for the nice words. I have plans to rejoin the site on a semi-regular basis because, frankly, the stuff I’ve been doing is a pain in the ass and totally unrewarding in terms of instantaneous results and I’m so tired of the politics of the behind the scenes part of movies. I’ll of course still do it, but I cannot abandon my home here any longer.

(SEND A LETTER)

Come around here often?

MCProblems.

Mitch to the right.Jon writes:

What happened to the MCP Columns? You made a passing
reference to it in the most recent edition of Leak Letters (#33),
but I was curious if its demise was due lack of reviewers,
subject material to review, general lack of interest, etc.?

I enjoy the site a great deal, so thank you for what must be a massive
effort in maintaining it.

Best of luck,

Nick’s Reply: I thought we had a video game crew to make the column work. I was wrong.

(SEND A LETTER)

Come around here often?

Muslim? I Barely Knew Him!

Mitch to the left!Nashrid writes:

Just to let you guys know, I’m Muslim and I read the site pretty damn frequently so anytime you guys want to take a jab, just go right ahead. It’s not like we’re not gettin used to it by now. You know that feeling when everyone is talking about you like ur not even in the room? That’s kinda how it feels bein Muslim these days. Great site guys. Keep up the good work.

Nick’s Reply: Much appreciated. Devin’s main contributions to the site have been threefold. 1.) He took the heat off me as the resident cocksucking asshole prick bastard son of a fucking bitch cockjerk fuckface poo-head. 2.) He elevated the film reviews to a new level, eclipsing in my mind even the legendary SJR’s stuff (though not his ‘paying for the movies’ stuff). 3.) He brought (like it or not) politics to CHUD. Instead of being known for obscure references and silly shit we’re now known for obscure references, silly shit, and a constant stream of venom and virtue dished out with a political slant. I think Devin’s work on that matter has made the site smarter and more relevant, but also a little more exclusionary at times. It’s the precence of folks like yourself that make me feel the sacrifice was worth it. Go Muslims!

(SEND A LETTER)

Come around here often?

The Board Ultimatum.

Mitch to the right.Dave writes:

Hi i’m dave ______ and i’m from western massachusetts.

I sent you an email a couple months ago about your worst of 2005 list
because i loved that someone else hated emily rose and the
interpreter as much as me.
You’re my favorite guy on the site. You have a GREAT site and i read it once a
day. I love movies and i don’t really like aicn, so i’ve become a chewer. But
you aren’t alone, the boards SUCK.

I read the sarcastic jabs that the posters write and you’re right, they just
want attention. EPSPECIALLY when devin, dave or you starts a board. Then it
becomes a 100 yard dash to who can WOW devin with something clever.

Your board was great. I think that even though you caught some backlash, a
handful of geeks might change their ways due to your rant.

The site’s blend of movie info and humor is great, then i read the boards and
excluding about 4 people, they are all really lame and pretty mean.

I wrote this kinda late at night, I hope it makes sense.


Nick’s Reply: I recently posted
THIS in an effort to get things in order because I personally felt that a handful of message board posters were doing their part to make the boards soggy. This isn’t like those obvious character who can simply be ignored but people who just clog the arteries of the boards with useless shit that can easily be tweaked. Those folks I feel have somethignt o contribute but need guidance. They aren’t trolls or anything, just younger folks who need a little less volume and more quality. Of course, people used the thread as a pulpit because when the site’s creator starts a topic like this it’s going to be read. As a result some folks showed their ass. It’s all good though. Maybe it’ll work and maybe it won’t. If it doesn’t, I’m fucking done with it. No more boards for me.

(SEND A LETTER)

Come around here often?

Gay Stuff.

Mitch to the left!Jefferey writes:

I’m not really sure who exactly I should be sending my two cents to, since it’s a response to something Nick wrote (a response to), yet it’s about Devin (in a round about way). So I decided to be redunadant and address it to the both of you. What I’m refering to is the Leak Letters #33 column on 3.24.06, specifically "Answering Dev’s Mail II: The Hardening", and what CHUD-reader Michael had to say. I don’t even know where to start with this guy. When he askes "Do you ever watch a movie for the enjoyment of it?" I (almost) want to question if this is a retorical question Michael is proposing. Man, he seemed really steamed ("!!"). I also got a kick out of his polite request at the end of the letter to "please just tell us about the movie" (that in no way shows genuflections towards views and ideas that are not my own, nor am i ready to accept). The meat of what I’m writing about concerns what Michael had to say about Devin’s comment in the Brokeback review. To quote Michael: "…comparing being a homosexual to being black! [sic] You can’t even be a closet black guy. That is the dumbest thing I ever heard." I have to agree with Michael’s sentiment "that is the dumbest thing I ever heard." Except I think the sentiment applies to what Michael said. Sadly Michael needs to open his eyes a little more and realize that are such thing as "closeted" black guys. Amazingly, over hundreds of years black men and women have socially developed a stigma to in relation to their skin color. I, for the life of me, couldn’t tell you why. This stigma is so ingrained that they even persecute among themselves o n order of lightness or darkness of skin tone. Okay, enough sarcasm. Honestly, the first example I thought of off the top of my head regarding a "closeted" black man was Dave Chappelle talking about how he got the idea of Clayton Bigsby -the infamous first episode Blind Black White Supremecist sketch- from his own grandfather. Apparently Chappelle’s grandfather was light skinned enough to pass as a white person, and had one specific event where he was mistaken for a white person during an event with racist overtures. Interesting…? Maybe. But I know that sometimes people don’t sit well when you refute their aruments or points of view with tidbits about comedians personal lives. So I decided to google some info about light skinned black people passing as white people. Interestingly enough, the first thing I came accross was a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article about that very subject from March of 2003 (here’s a link if you’re interested in reading it). The article seems to have come about in syncronation with the film The Human Stain based on the Philip Roth novel (it mentions both in the article). I had completely forgotten about the movie and the book. Now I have an idea for a stocking stuffer for Michael. What I’m getting at is this, I love what you guys do with your site. Please keep it up. I know it helps that I happen to agree with a lot of Devin’s stated political views, and that they don’t incense me enough to keep me from reading his movie reviews. I would hate to see your site change because of too many letters with views like Michael’s, and not enough appreciative letter’s being sent in. I’m also very much looking forward to see what you have in store for your new book review columns. Art, movies, and books are what I subsist on, so if I can centralize my some of my habits (I haven’t found any online book review sites that appeal to me yet), that would be great.

Nick’s Reply: Wow. Nice letter. Informative as fuh. Also, it looks like we really need to start book reviews. Pronto. Consider it done. I have about a zillion I want to do.

(SEND A LETTER)

Come around here often?

Adil of the Century.

Mitch to the right.Adil writes:

Just wanted to shout out some Muslims do read CHUD. And in response to the highly articulate letter (Thats sarcasm by the way) by JSG – you really are an idiot aren’t you? Seriously read a book that doesn’t have pictures in it sometime. Start with basic history and theology and you may be able to better appreciate why most American’s aren’t so hot in the Muslim World. I certainly don’t remember Muslims invading a Western country in the recent past to spread "democracy" (cough cough need more oil) but hey what do I know? I need to lighten up. We have our extremists just like everyone else but don’t expect all Muslims to love you cause you invaded one of our own and then covered up your incompetence behind a ‘whiteman’s burden’ defense. The whole cartoon controversy was nothing but a cheap racist gimmick that unfortunately worked iniciting such a response. Lets not even debate how we can apply Western standards of conduct and protest to a largely illiterate and poor population for whom basic survival is an issue and for whom religon is the only thing that gives them a shred of diginity in a world constantly seeking to marginalize the poor – a concept alien to the Republican party. Seriously try reading a book and understanding that there must be 2 sides to any conflict.

PS. I will not even dignify the derogratory remarks about my religon from a person who obviously has no idea what he is talking about. Go on continue to get your info from Pat Robertson and his ilk, your kind aren’t even worth a response. This note is just to let people know that CHUD is good.

Nick’s Reply: Heck yeah CHUD’s good. It’s great. Two Muslims agree!

(SEND A LETTER)

Come around here often?

Political CHUD.

Mitch to the left!Max writes:

Long time reader … Just wanted to salute CHUD for not being cowed by people who can’t deal with your reflection on movie themes. I don’t always agree with you politically or otherwise, but I shouldn’t expect to since I am reading a review site, which by its nature suggests I’ll be getting something to pry my brain open a little. Readers who complain that you are becoming more political than usual should note that the movies you are reviewing have political themes. I’d suggest that they read a backlog of CHUD so they can realize that you’ve never been afraid to reflect on ANY theme of a movie, be it the nature of the presidency or the sexuality of mollusks. It would be disappointing if you dodged the issues as they seem to want you to do. I say write on!

Nick’s Reply: Much appreciated, and we will!

(SEND A LETTER)

Come around here often?

Clarification please…

Mitch to the right.Kimberly writes:

Thanks so much for this review!

Your captions are absolutely HILARIOUS!!!!

Nick’s Reply: She didn’t refer to a particular review so I’ll just say that she loves them all! To read our fine and informative DVD reviews, click here.

(SEND A LETTER)

Come around here often?

SPAM OF THE DAY!

Mitch to the left!

Bathtubs HQ writes:

I manage a website called bathtubshq.com and I think
your site would be of interest to the visitors that regularly
browse my site.

I have gone ahead and given you a link plus a description of
your site from my page at
http://bathtubshq.com/infinitybathtubs
and I’m just contacting you to check it is ok to have done this
for you?

I would greatly appreciate a link back to my site and if you
are happy to do this then to make it easy for you I have
included the following code…

<a href="http://bathtubshq.com">Bathtubs HQ</a>
Everything Bathtubs, from 1800’s Bathtubs to Wooden Bathtubs.

Feel free to change the suggested code if you would like to.

I look forward to a mutually beneficial link partnership and I
wish you all the best with your site for the future. Please let
me know if there is anything else I can do for you.

Kind regards

John

P.S. Keep up the good work!

Disclaimer: If this email has reached you in error or if you
would not like to be contacted again then please accept my
sincere apologies. Let me know by sending an email to
remove@bathtubshq.com if this is the case and I will make
sure bathtubshq.com never contacts you again.

Mr. Grunt and Point’s Reply: There is a website for bathtub enthusiasts. I can die now.

Discuss this new feature on our message boards.






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ONE DINKLAGE UNDER DOG

 I’m about as interested in a live-action Underdog movie as I am in being the owner of randomly imploding molars, but at least a decent actor will wring his hands as diminutive villain Simon Barsinister, whose name is probably the only entertaining aspect of the whole thing.

Disney has pocketed Peter Dinklage for the pernicious part in this pointless project. Apparently the genius/madman will be trying to steal the world’s water supply, while the CG-realized superhound of the title assures you there is no cause for alarm due to his presence, or something along those lines. Rumored names to provide the vocals of Underdog himself include Dane Cook, Nic Cage and Steve Martin.

I have to assume Dinklage got the Barsinister role because of his stature and not his considerable acting ability, and that he probably didn’t first consult Rocky and Bullwinkle heavy Robert DeNiro about the potentially toilet-swirling direction his career might take after it. Even though his sci-fi show Threshold (which had a great cast and a limp premise) was swiftly swept into the television graveyard, Dinklage is also taking another shot at the small screen with a pilot for Ultra, based on the female superhero comic.


Speaking of little things, Underdog is set to film in
Rhode Island of all places, and is being directed by Frederik Du Chau, which sounds just a bit too French.






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DAILY GRABOID 3.31.06

What is this? Every single day of the week (almost), a new "Graboid", a single moment grabbed from a random movie, appears on this site for you to guess the name of the film, share with your officemates, or discuss on our message boards. Sometimes the Graboid will be very easy and sometimes it’ll be as obscure as obscure gets. So read the news, read the reviews, and enjoy a screencap each and every day for your guessing pleasure.


Guess and discuss today’s Graboid on the Message Boards.
Send an email about this feature.





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EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: JAMES GUNN (SLITHER)

http://chud.com/nextraimages/slitherint1sht.jpgI
don’t know if I have ever been prouder of the CHUD home page two days
in a row. Yesterday we had our exclusive interview with Rian Johnson,
the director of Brick, a movie that announces him as a major new talent. Today we have our exclusive interview with James Gunn, whose Slither
opens this weekend and confirms what the folks who have been paying
attention always knew: this is one funny, twisted and talented guy.

Gunn’s been around for a while – you might remember him as the writer of the incredible Tromeo and Juliet, or the guy behind the Scooby Doo movies, or most controversially the man who reimagined Romero for the Dawn of the Dead remake. And of course there’s The Specials,
the sublime superhero comedy Gunn wrote and stars in as Minute Man
("My-noot man! Do I look like a soldier from the revolutionary war? I
don’t think so! Am I wearing a three-cornered hat?! No! I turn small!
Think!").

Slither is pure Gunn, though, as he sits in the director chair for the first official time (the “Who directed Tromeo
controversy lives!). Pure Gunn, it turns out, is damn funny, and more
than a little slimy. In real life pure Gunn is just as funny, and
slightly less slimy. I had a chance to sit down with him the morning
after the Slither
premiere, a rollicking affair where I bumped into Joss Whedon coming
out of a toilet stall. (For the record: I don’t know if he remembered
me, and if he did, whether he connected my face with my infamous
anti-Browncoats editorial. As usually happens in real life I didn’t say
anything witty or interesting at the time; later Collider’s Mr. Beaks
gave me the line I should have used: “Did you just drop a hate bomb in
there?”)

The interview went twenty minutes, but it could have
just as easily gone twice or three times as long. Gunn’s got a lot to
say, but what makes him a good interview is that he says it in such an
entertaining way.

Q: There were some cool people at the premiere. What were the reactions from some of the filmmakers who came?

Gunn: I
don’t trust anything anybody says, because you just don’t know. But I
did trust a couple of things, and the person I trusted the most was
Judith O’Dea, the star of the original
Night of the Living Dead, because she was sitting across from me. I saw her laughing for casthe
whole movie, and that was awesome. We talked earlier about favorite
horror movies, and man, Night was right up there. It was a huge movie
for me when I was a kid, and to see her laughing so hard, sitting right
across from me, the circle closed. The people who entertained me are
now being entertained by me. That was exciting.


That
was a great moment, and then Tobe Hooper was extremely complimentary.
He said it was the best movie he had seen in a couple of years. He
hadn’t had a better time in a theater for a long time, so that was a
great compliment. And I’m friends with Eli [Roth], and I know Eli’s not
lying to me and he had a great time. Zack Snyder. The guy whose
opinions I really care about. I would say that Eli and Zack, I care
about their opinions about as much as anyone out there. So to have both
those guys respond so positively was just a huge compliment.

Q: So I guess I have to ask about Night of the Creeps. It keeps getting brought up by people.

Gunn: Yeah. I didn’t see it until after [the movie was finished].

Q: Really? Not that I think you were ripping it off, but I’m surprised you didn’t see it.

Gunn: Listen, I ripped off plenty of other movies, so there’s no reason for me to lie. The truth is that Night of the Creeps is probably inspired by a lot of the stuff that I’m inspired by – basically, It Came From Within; Shivers.
Which is a huge inspiration to me, it’s one of my favorite horror
films. It’s very strange to me that people keep going on about
Night of the Creeps when there’s a much earlier precedent. It seems like they have a shallow history of horror.

Q: I think that people just only go back so far.

Gunn: I guess. There’s Shivers, and the things in Night of the Creeps looked like the things in Shivers, which look like the things in Slither. And also The Puppet Masters the novel, by Heinlein, because it has a similar sort – there have been a few things, there was an Outer Limits episode
too that has a similar thing. I love parasites and I love these
parasites that sort of drive humans. It’s a pretty old idea. Also
The Blob. The beginning of my movie is completely taken from the original Blob.

Q: Right, where Grant Grant is poking the alien with the stick.

Gunn: Totally. 100%. I loved that scene when I was a kid, and that’s what I thought of when I did that scene. Same thing with Night of the Creeps.
But the one thing that’s really uncannily strange is that [Fred] Dekker
named his cops after directors and I did the same thing. That is weird.

And I liked [Night of the Creeps]. I liked it quite a bit.

Q: And it has that great line – “The good news is your dates are here. The bad news is they’re dead.”

Gunn: It has a lot of great lines in it.

Q: Speaking of great lines, you have a bunch in Slither. How do you balance the great, funny lines with being gross and scary?

Gunn:
I was just trying to entertain myself as I was writing the script, and
I was trying to create something creepy. I think the line between
creepy and funny is very thin. Creepy iscsa
funny, and funny can be creepy. I also think that one of the things we
tried to do was have the actors play it straight, so they’re reacting
to everything as if it was real. And because it’s so absurd that’s
exactly what makes it funny and that’s also what makes it scary –
they’re treating it real and at the same time it’s ridiculous when
Starla is talking to her deformed husband out in the field, telling him
that maybe he can get a little help and he’ll be OK. Like there’s some
ointment that will clear up the fact that he’s a giant slug.

Q: And is that also how you keep it from going into Scream territory? Is that how you keep it from making fun of the material?

Gunn: I
never wanted to do that. I never wanted to comment on the material
itself. For me the humor is from the characters – the characters are
funny. I think the only way in which I’m post-modern, where I go
outside of the film itself, is that I reference a lot of movies
throughout, whether it be shots or scenes or character names or streets
or bars. I wanted to have something that would stand up to repeated
viewings by horror fans, where they could pick out those little
touches. There are hundreds of things – every street sign, everything
is named after a character from a horror movie or something.

Q: The mayor is named after Kurt Russell in The Thing. As a fan, do you think MacReady is The Thing at the end of the movie?

Gunn: No, I don’t think he is. Do you think he is?

Q: I don’t know.

Gunn:
Sometimes there’s obviously no reality to whether he is or not, because
it exists in the mind of the viewer. So if you believe he is, he is.

Q: There’s been talk of a remake. I doubt they would leave it so open in a new version.

Gunn: Strangely, Romero wants to remake it.

Q: Would you direct a remake?

Gunn: Depends
what it is. Most likely not. I pretty much want to create original
stuff. If I did remake something, I would do it the way I did with
Dawn of the Dead, which is to change everything besides the central premise and the title. But for the most part, Dawn of the Dead
allowed me to do this movie. That’s why I’m grateful for Dawn of the
Dead, it gave me the ability to do something I wouldn’t have otherwise.

Q: Were you nervous about Dawn of the Dead? You had to know the response was guaranteed to be negative in advance.

Gunn: I
wasn’t scared. Before I took it on I had no idea. I had no idea. I
don’t think about those things when I am deciding what to do. I am
blessed by idiocy at times. It has served me throughout my career. I
did
Scooby Doo, which I thought nobody would give a shit about, it was just a job. Then I wrote a novel [The Toy Collector]
in which the protagonist was my own name. My family and friends freaked
out on that, but I never thought about it once when I was writing the
whole novel. Then I did
Dawn of the Dead,
thinking, “Sure, I’ll rewrite this movie, what a good idea.” I never
thought about it until the backlash started. And it was hard, and it
was hard because I really cared about the screenplay. I had more fun
writing that screenplay than any writing experience ever. I was very
passionately invested in that script. When I care about something so
much and people perceive it as something that’s crass, it’s hard. I’m a
human being, so I don’t like it.


But
honestly, the truth is, certain people we know have great power. I’m at
peace with Harry [Knowles]. I can say that now. But the truth is that
he wrote a scathing thing that I was writing Dawn of the Dead and people flipped out. I got death threats.

Q: Really?

Gunn:
Oh yeah. “Put a gun in your mouth, Gunn.” “Shoot yourself in the head,”
“You’re better off dead.” All this shit. It’s like, fuck! And then a
few weeks later he read the script and he gave it a really positive
review on the same site and honestly, everything died out by 95%. Which
is weird. So it really did come from that one thing.

Q: That’s so weird that in this fanbase that people can be so passionate and yet so horrible.

Gunn:
The internet breeds a sort of negativity. I love going to the sites
that celebrate stuff. I actually think that’s one of the cool things
about MySpace right now. I think I just became your friend there.

Q: You did.

Gunn: It’s
a positive place. Positive for child molesters. [laughs] No, but
honestly, it’s got a different type of feeling. And I would that CHUD’s
a pretty positive site in the bigger scheme of things
[editorial note: LOL]. But
certain places, man, it’s frustrated people at home getting negative.
Everybody I know will on occasion read the message boards, and it’s
just so negative.


csaFrom
an outside perspective it’s interesting to see how, personally for me,
things have changed over the years. Things have changed a lot,
especially post-Dawn of the Dead. Because even though there are still
those people who are so angry about Dawn of the Dead… I went to the
Chicago FangoCon last weekend, and one of the first things someone
screams out was, “Fast zombies suck!” People are always trying to
discuss this with me – fast zombies versus slow zombies. They can’t run
because they’re fucking zombies! Of course they can’t run, they can’t
even walk slowly, there’s no such fucking thing! What are you talking
about? Why do you care? Plus, I didn’t invent that, Return of the Living Dead did!

Q: It’s unreal that no one ever remembers that.

Gunn: These people who consider themselves huge horror fans, they know Night of the Creeps, but they don’t know fucking Shivers? It’s a classic, classic horror film. They don’t know that? That’s sad.

When I was a kid I watched everything – I watched the stuff from the 30s, the 40s, I like the silent films. Haxxon is
one of my favorite fucking movies of all time. I wish people had a
better sense of the history of stuff. But I don’t want to complain
about stuff.

Q: I think
that availability of movies on DVD actually hurts. Once upon a time you
had to work to see something, so it was special. Now you just Netflix
it.


Gunn: And
I think that because we grew up in the cable era there was only so much
stuff. You’re going to get trapped. You may not really want to watch a
Hammer film that much,
The Devil Rides Out
may not be that interesting to you, but it’s the only horror movie on
for two days, so you have to watch it! But then you watch it and you
get something out of it. I’m the type of guy who’s a voracious
filmgoer. I watch a lot of movies, still. I’m different because I do
see movies from a filmmaker’s perspective, so if I see a movie that has
something in it that I think is awesome, then I like that movie, even
if 90% sucks. If it had one thing in there that I think is awesome,
then it’s worth seeing that movie for me.


Have you ever seen Penn and Teller Get Killed?

Q: Yes!

Gunn:
It’s not a great movie by a long shot, and I can’t believe those guys
did some of the things they did in that film. But the ending –


Q: Everybody kills themselves.

Gunn: It’s this incredibly dark ending after something that’s like Weekend at Bernies! Therehttp://chud.com/nextraimages/gunn3.jpg he is, shooting himself in the head, and my God, that made the movie worth watching! For me that makes that a great movie.

My
brother, Brian, is different. He likes all these movies that are well
made. Like Jonathanemme – he makes good movies that are well made and
whole together, but there isn’t much about them that jumps outside the
box and does something incredibly interesting. They’re just really well
made movies. That’s not something that turns me on. I’d much rather see
something that was extremely flawed but had something extremely great
in it.


Q: Is the Troma stuff more your speed? Or are you more into the grimness of Eli’s Hostel?

Gunn: I like it all, man. I love Hostel, I love Devil’s Rejects.

Q: Rob Zombie is in Slither.

Gunn: Rob Zombie played the voice of Dr.Carl. The film I’m writing now is much darker. It’s not like Hostel, though. I like all kinds of movies. I joke about Slither being like Capote all the time, but I really like Capote.

For
me what I really like doing is dealing with stuff where it kind of
pushes things into a deeper realm of imagination, that has a little bit
of fantasy to it. Stuff that is dark and yet imaginative. That’s why as
a kid I liked Stephen King so much. I was a huge Stephen King fan, and
I met him a few times as a kid, I was very fortunate. His career was a
real inspiration – and it still is an inspiration to me. He’s got hits
and misses, things that are great and not so great, but his imagination
is always going 1000% and he doesn’t stop it. It keeps going and going.
Some of his ideas are great and some are not so great, but most of it
is entertaining. So I like to do that. I like to create worlds. And I
like to work with special effects.

Q: How much is CGI and how much is practical in Slither?

Gunn: It’s
always hard to say. People ask me that all the time, but you can’t give
a percentage. If you give a percentage of shots, it’s almost 90%
practical because we have tons of practical stuff. I love the fact that
the question comes up because it means you can’t always tell.


We
have a lot of practical stuff, and what we did a lot of was puppeteer
removal, which is one of my favorite things to do because you’re still
dealing with something practically. You can’t really tell, like all the
Grant stuff in the field was all practical stuff, but if you watch the
original take there are these 12 guys dressed in black ninja costumes
working him. They looked so ludicrous in person. And that was hell
because we had to remove all those guys from between all those reeds,
and they were jumping in front of Grant. But I love the effect because
it may not look real, but you don’t know what the hell it is. You can’t
quite figure it out, and that makes it a lot of fun. And the
craftsmanship, the sculpting of what the creature really is, is a lot
fun for me to watch, so I love that part of it.


But
the tentacles at the end, we had those done in the same exact way and
they ended up looking awful, so I had to replace the tentacles, almost
all the tentacles with CGI tentacles. http://chud.com/nextraimages/gunn5.jpgSo
the tentacles are for the most part CGI at the end of the movie. And
for the most part the slithering things are CGI with some exceptions.

Q: What is the darker movie you’re working on now?

Gunn: I’m
writing a movie about Satan. I think the guy deserves a break, so I’m
trying to give it an objective point of view, see it from his point of
view more and not be so one sided as most Satanic films have been.
Let’s give him a break.

Q: It’s going to be set in Hell or on Earth?

Gunn: On Earth, yeah. I’m part of the way through it so I don’t want to talk about it too much.

Q: Are you directing it?

Gunn: Yeah.

Q: Are you directing from now on, or will you still write screenplays for other people?

Gunn:
I’m going to direct as much as I can. I like it, I really do. I’ve run
into problems being a screenwriter, and I almost feel like directing is
like writing the final draft of the script. I really don’t find it that
different from writing, it’s just taking the people and arranging them
visually in a way that is the final draft of the script. It’s always
been very frustrating for me to have other directors… fortunately I’ve
worked with some good ones, Zack in particular, who was able to have
his own vision of what I had written but keep the core of what I had
written. That was exciting for me. But a lot of times it’s hard, and
almost always people don’t know how to direct my dialogue. Never ever
has anyone known how to direct my dialogue.


Q: Did it come naturally to the actors on Slither?

Gunn:
I got to cast the movie so I got to cast people who understood the
dialogue. And I got to work with them, to explain where we were going
with everything. A lot of times I find that directors make people speak
too slowly. I wanted stuff fast.

Q:
I am always amazed that people want to be screenwriters, because
everything gets taken from you at the end. Would you want to write
another novel?


Gunn: It takes a long time. I really like movies. Movies are my first love. I think that if you csalook
at what happens to old screenwriters, it’s not a pretty picture. If you
look at these guys who were great screenwriters, they all end up doing
rewrite work for twenty years. Robert Towne, William Goldman, they do
rewrite work. And they’re mega-rich, because they get paid a lot to do
rewrite work, but man, I got into this business to tell stories and
create. So I won’t do it.


I
did rewrite work a couple of times, but now I won’t take it. I mean, if
someone comes to me with a script that’s bad and they want it
completely rewritten and I get into the idea, maybe I would rewrite
that, but I’m never going to do these two week rewrite things I get
offered all the time. I keep telling my agent I’m not going to do it.
It’s easy for them to make a lot of money that way, but I don’t like
it. I don’t like doing it to another writer, first of all. They’ve come
all this way and there’s this weird studio mindset that you have to
baptize a script by putting a high price writer on at the end. It’s
happened to me and I don’t like it. And also, listen, I want credit for
my fucking jokes. Maybe it’s just me, but I go in there and think,
“This is pretty funny. Maybe I should save this for something with my
name on it.”






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CLASH OF THE TARTANS: SUSPICIOUS RIVER

 BUY IT AT AMAZON: CLICK HERE!

STUDIO: Tartan Video
MSRP: $14.99
RATED: R
RUNNING TIME: 92 Minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:
Commentary by the director
Theatrical trailers


The Pitch

Bored hotel clerk turns working girl by giving guests a little company in their rooms.

The Humans

Molly Parker, Callum Keith Rennie, Michael Shanks and Don S. Davis

The Nutshell

Leila Murray was born and raised in Suspicious River and has never strayed far from it. She works a menial job at a local hotel and goes home at night to a slowly crumbling marriage. When a customer offers to pay to sleep with her out of the blue, Leila goes along with it. Word quickly spreads about the special services that this hotel offers and soon Leila is entertaining several customers a day. One customer in particular has taken a keen interest in her and seems willing to move their relationship beyond a customer/merchant situation.

One of Leila’s non-male visitors at the hotel is a little girl. The girl’s home life closely resembles Leila’s own childhood and the two quickly recognize that they are kindred spirits. Both wish to leave the town but neither have the means or will necessary to do so. Leila’s life begins to take on a parallel with the girl’s as both of them inch ever closer to disaster.


What is this crap? Awful shading, no sense of form and deplorable hatching. My daughter is dead to me now.


The Lowdown

In Pretty Woman a street wise and charming prostitute shared a romantic relationship with a rich handsome man. In Suspicious River a creepy rugged pimp slaps around a part time hooker and then rapes her. They’re both romances you see. Okay, the latter isn’t very romantic (and neither is the first to be quite honest), but it isn’t really meant to be. Leila forges a romantic bond with one of her clients out of desperation more than romance. She isn’t really naïve enough to believe he’s a good guy and that he’ll rescue her from her life. She’s just so sick and tired of her life that she’s willing to buy into his charade and go along with him.

To make the audience at least understand where Leila is coming from and why she acts the way she does, a little girl is introduced as her friend. This little girl just happens to be experiencing the same type of upbringing that Leila did. Her father is absent all the time on business trips and her mother is having an affair with another man. You see, Leila was just like the little girl when she was young, but now she’s acting almost like her mother did, creating a circle of self-destruction that threatens to unravel space and time and plunge the world into an eternity of darkness.

Unfortunately nothing exciting like that happens. If you enjoy watching characters with crippling personality flaws and abandonment issues make wrong choice after wrong choice then this is the feel bad movie of the year for you. The film is well made and there’s nothing overtly bad about it, it’s just that the characters make such stupid choices that you want to break through the television and throttle them. It’s not because the character motivations make no sense, it’s that they’re so believable and true to life.


When he’s not banging Lexa Doig, Michael Shanks enjoys shanking hookers in dirty hotel rooms.


Suspicious River
is an unfortable film to watch because the characters are easy to identify with and no one wants to see them suffer. Once it’s established that the lives of these characters are going straight into the gutter, the only reason to stick around is to see if they can possibly pull themselves back up. If any of this sounds like quality entertainment to you then you’re made out of strong stuff. Otherwise, Suspicious River will just leave you feeling hollow and sad.

The Package

The only noteworthy special feature on the disc is a feature length commentary by writer and director Lynne Stopkewich. She talks about the difficulties in adapting the source material into a film and the usual production process jibber jabber. Other features boasted about on the packaging include chapter selections and closed captions. Yes, you read that right. You can be whisked away to several predetermined points in the film with the push of a remote button thanks to the wondrous invention known as a chapter selection. Perhaps the idea for this innovative special feature came from the fact that the source material for the film was a book and also had chapters. We may never know.


Good god. Can’t you Stargate rejects can get some tail at Sci-fi conventions and leave me alone?


Tartan is a money making organization and as such they have included an advertisement for A Tale of Two Sisters under the guise of a trailer. Feel free to watch it if you want to rub your own face in the fact that you could have been watching a better film than this one.

5.0 out of 10





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EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: JAMES GUNN (SLITHER)

http://chud.com/nextraimages/slitherint1sht.jpgI don’t know if I have ever been prouder of the CHUD home page two days in a row. Yesterday we had our exclusive interview with Rian Johnson, the director of Brick, a movie that announces him as a major new talent. Today we have our exclusive interview with James Gunn, whose Slither opens this weekend and confirms what the folks who have been paying attention always knew: this is one funny, twisted and talented guy.

Gunn’s been around for a while – you might remember him as the writer of the incredible Tromeo and Juliet, or the guy behind the Scooby Doo movies, or most controversially the man who reimagined Romero for the Dawn of the Dead remake. And of course there’s The Specials, the sublime superhero comedy Gunn wrote and stars in as Minute Man ("My-noot man! Do I look like a soldier from the revolutionary war? I don’t think so! Am I wearing a three-cornered hat?! No! I turn small! Think!").

Slither is pure Gunn, though, as he sits in the director chair for the first official time (the “Who directed Tromeo” controversy lives!). Pure Gunn, it turns out, is damn funny, and more than a little slimy. In real life pure Gunn is just as funny, and slightly less slimy. I had a chance to sit down with him the morning after the Slither premiere, a rollicking affair where I bumped into Joss Whedon coming out of a toilet stall. (For the record: I don’t know if he remembered me, and if he did, whether he connected my face with my infamous anti-Browncoats editorial. As usually happens in real life I didn’t say anything witty or interesting at the time; later Collider’s Mr. Beaks gave me the line I should have used: “Did you just drop a hate bomb in there?”)

The interview went twenty minutes, but it could have just as easily gone twice or three times as long. Gunn’s got a lot to say, but what makes him a good interview is that he says it in such an entertaining way.

Q: There were some cool people at the premiere. What were the reactions from some of the filmmakers who came?

Gunn: I don’t trust anything anybody says, because you just don’t know. But I did trust a couple of things, and the person I trusted the most was Judith O’Dea, the star of the original Night of the Living Dead, because she was sitting across from me. I saw her laughing for casthe whole movie, and that was awesome. We talked earlier about favorite horror movies, and man, Night was right up there. It was a huge movie for me when I was a kid, and to see her laughing so hard, sitting right across from me, the circle closed. The people who entertained me are now being entertained by me. That was exciting.

That was a great moment, and then Tobe Hooper was extremely complimentary. He said it was the best movie he had seen in a couple of years. He hadn’t had a better time in a theater for a long time, so that was a great compliment. And I’m friends with Eli [Roth], and I know Eli’s not lying to me and he had a great time. Zack Snyder. The guy whose opinions I really care about. I would say that Eli and Zack, I care about their opinions about as much as anyone out there. So to have both those guys respond so positively was just a huge compliment.

Q: So I guess I have to ask about Night of the Creeps. It keeps getting brought up by people.

Gunn: Yeah. I didn’t see it until after [the movie was finished].

Q: Really? Not that I think you were ripping it off, but I’m surprised you didn’t see it.

Gunn: Listen, I ripped off plenty of other movies, so there’s no reason for me to lie. The truth is that Night of the Creeps is probably inspired by a lot of the stuff that I’m inspired by – basically, It Came From Within; Shivers. Which is a huge inspiration to me, it’s one of my favorite horror films. It’s very strange to me that people keep going on about Night of the Creeps when there’s a much earlier precedent. It seems like they have a shallow history of horror.

Q: I think that people just only go back so far.

Gunn: I guess. There’s Shivers, and the things in Night of the Creeps looked like the things in Shivers, which look like the things in Slither. And also The Puppet Masters the novel, by Heinlein, because it has a similar sort – there have been a few things, there was an Outer Limits episode too that has a similar thing. I love parasites and I love these parasites that sort of drive humans. It’s a pretty old idea. Also The Blob. The beginning of my movie is completely taken from the original Blob.

Q: Right, where Grant Grant is poking the alien with the stick.

Gunn: Totally. 100%. I loved that scene when I was a kid, and that’s what I thought of when I did that scene. Same thing with Night of the Creeps. But the one thing that’s really uncannily strange is that [Fred] Dekker named his cops after directors and I did the same thing. That is weird.

And I liked [Night of the Creeps]. I liked it quite a bit.

Q: And it has that great line – “The good news is your dates are here. The bad news is they’re dead.”

Gunn: It has a lot of great lines in it.

Q: Speaking of great lines, you have a bunch in Slither. How do you balance the great, funny lines with being gross and scary?

Gunn: I was just trying to entertain myself as I was writing the script, and I was trying to create something creepy. I think the line between creepy and funny is very thin. Creepy iscsa funny, and funny can be creepy. I also think that one of the things we tried to do was have the actors play it straight, so they’re reacting to everything as if it was real. And because it’s so absurd that’s exactly what makes it funny and that’s also what makes it scary – they’re treating it real and at the same time it’s ridiculous when Starla is talking to her deformed husband out in the field, telling him that maybe he can get a little help and he’ll be OK. Like there’s some ointment that will clear up the fact that he’s a giant slug.

Q: And is that also how you keep it from going into Scream territory? Is that how you keep it from making fun of the material?

Gunn: I never wanted to do that. I never wanted to comment on the material itself. For me the humor is from the characters – the characters are funny. I think the only way in which I’m post-modern, where I go outside of the film itself, is that I reference a lot of movies throughout, whether it be shots or scenes or character names or streets or bars. I wanted to have something that would stand up to repeated viewings by horror fans, where they could pick out those little touches. There are hundreds of things – every street sign, everything is named after a character from a horror movie or something.

Q: The mayor is named after Kurt Russell in The Thing. As a fan, do you think MacReady is The Thing at the end of the movie?

Gunn: No, I don’t think he is. Do you think he is?

Q: I don’t know.

Gunn: Sometimes there’s obviously no reality to whether he is or not, because it exists in the mind of the viewer. So if you believe he is, he is.

Q: There’s been talk of a remake. I doubt they would leave it so open in a new version.

Gunn: Strangely, Romero wants to remake it.

Q: Would you direct a remake?

Gunn: Depends what it is. Most likely not. I pretty much want to create original stuff. If I did remake something, I would do it the way I did with Dawn of the Dead, which is to change everything besides the central premise and the title. But for the most part, Dawn of the Dead allowed me to do this movie. That’s why I’m grateful for Dawn of the Dead, it gave me the ability to do something I wouldn’t have otherwise.

Q: Were you nervous about Dawn of the Dead? You had to know the response was guaranteed to be negative in advance.

Gunn: I wasn’t scared. Before I took it on I had no idea. I had no idea. I don’t think about those things when I am deciding what to do. I am blessed by idiocy at times. It has served me throughout my career. I did Scooby Doo, which I thought nobody would give a shit about, it was just a job. Then I wrote a novel [The Toy Collector] in which the protagonist was my own name. My family and friends freaked out on that, but I never thought about it once when I was writing the whole novel. Then I did Dawn of the Dead, thinking, “Sure, I’ll rewrite this movie, what a good idea.” I never thought about it until the backlash started. And it was hard, and it was hard because I really cared about the screenplay. I had more fun writing that screenplay than any writing experience ever. I was very passionately invested in that script. When I care about something so much and people perceive it as something that’s crass, it’s hard. I’m a human being, so I don’t like it.

But honestly, the truth is, certain people we know have great power. I’m at peace with Harry [Knowles]. I can say that now. But the truth is that he wrote a scathing thing that I was writing Dawn of the Dead and people flipped out. I got death threats.

Q: Really?

Gunn: Oh yeah. “Put a gun in your mouth, Gunn.” “Shoot yourself in the head,” “You’re better off dead.” All this shit. It’s like, fuck! And then a few weeks later he read the script and he gave it a really positive review on the same site and honestly, everything died out by 95%. Which is weird. So it really did come from that one thing.

Q: That’s so weird that in this fanbase that people can be so passionate and yet so horrible.

Gunn: The internet breeds a sort of negativity. I love going to the sites that celebrate stuff. I actually think that’s one of the cool things about MySpace right now. I think I just became your friend there.

Q: You did.

Gunn: It’s a positive place. Positive for child molesters. [laughs] No, but honestly, it’s got a different type of feeling. And I would that CHUD’s a pretty positive site in the bigger scheme of things [editorial note: LOL]. But certain places, man, it’s frustrated people at home getting negative. Everybody I know will on occasion read the message boards, and it’s just so negative.

csaFrom an outside perspective it’s interesting to see how, personally for me, things have changed over the years. Things have changed a lot, especially post-Dawn of the Dead. Because even though there are still those people who are so angry about Dawn of the Dead… I went to the Chicago FangoCon last weekend, and one of the first things someone screams out was, “Fast zombies suck!” People are always trying to discuss this with me – fast zombies versus slow zombies. They can’t run because they’re fucking zombies! Of course they can’t run, they can’t even walk slowly, there’s no such fucking thing! What are you talking about? Why do you care? Plus, I didn’t invent that, Return of the Living Dead did!

Q: It’s unreal that no one ever remembers that.

Gunn: These people who consider themselves huge horror fans, they know Night of the Creeps, but they don’t know fucking Shivers? It’s a classic, classic horror film. They don’t know that? That’s sad.

When I was a kid I watched everything – I watched the stuff from the 30s, the 40s, I like the silent films. Haxxon is one of my favorite fucking movies of all time. I wish people had a better sense of the history of stuff. But I don’t want to complain about stuff.

Q: I think that availability of movies on DVD actually hurts. Once upon a time you had to work to see something, so it was special. Now you just Netflix it.

Gunn: And I think that because we grew up in the cable era there was only so much stuff. You’re going to get trapped. You may not really want to watch a Hammer film that much, The Devil Rides Out may not be that interesting to you, but it’s the only horror movie on for two days, so you have to watch it! But then you watch it and you get something out of it. I’m the type of guy who’s a voracious filmgoer. I watch a lot of movies, still. I’m different because I do see movies from a filmmaker’s perspective, so if I see a movie that has something in it that I think is awesome, then I like that movie, even if 90% sucks. If it had one thing in there that I think is awesome, then it’s worth seeing that movie for me.

Have you ever seen Penn and Teller Get Killed?

Q: Yes!

Gunn: It’s not a great movie by a long shot, and I can’t believe those guys did some of the things they did in that film. But the ending –

Q: Everybody kills themselves.

Gunn: It’s this incredibly dark ending after something that’s like Weekend at Bernies! Therehttp://chud.com/nextraimages/gunn3.jpg he is, shooting himself in the head, and my God, that made the movie worth watching! For me that makes that a great movie.

My brother, Brian, is different. He likes all these movies that are well made. Like Jonathanemme – he makes good movies that are well made and whole together, but there isn’t much about them that jumps outside the box and does something incredibly interesting. They’re just really well made movies. That’s not something that turns me on. I’d much rather see something that was extremely flawed but had something extremely great in it.

Q: Is the Troma stuff more your speed? Or are you more into the grimness of Eli’s Hostel?

Gunn: I like it all, man. I love Hostel, I love Devil’s Rejects.

Q: Rob Zombie is in Slither.

Gunn: Rob Zombie played the voice of Dr.Carl. The film I’m writing now is much darker. It’s not like Hostel, though. I like all kinds of movies. I joke about Slither being like Capote all the time, but I really like Capote.

For me what I really like doing is dealing with stuff where it kind of pushes things into a deeper realm of imagination, that has a little bit of fantasy to it. Stuff that is dark and yet imaginative. That’s why as a kid I liked Stephen King so much. I was a huge Stephen King fan, and I met him a few times as a kid, I was very fortunate. His career was a real inspiration – and it still is an inspiration to me. He’s got hits and misses, things that are great and not so great, but his imagination is always going 1000% and he doesn’t stop it. It keeps going and going. Some of his ideas are great and some are not so great, but most of it is entertaining. So I like to do that. I like to create worlds. And I like to work with special effects.

Q: How much is CGI and how much is practical in Slither?

Gunn: It’s always hard to say. People ask me that all the time, but you can’t give a percentage. If you give a percentage of shots, it’s almost 90% practical because we have tons of practical stuff. I love the fact that the question comes up because it means you can’t always tell.

We have a lot of practical stuff, and what we did a lot of was puppeteer removal, which is one of my favorite things to do because you’re still dealing with something practically. You can’t really tell, like all the Grant stuff in the field was all practical stuff, but if you watch the original take there are these 12 guys dressed in black ninja costumes working him. They looked so ludicrous in person. And that was hell because we had to remove all those guys from between all those reeds, and they were jumping in front of Grant. But I love the effect because it may not look real, but you don’t know what the hell it is. You can’t quite figure it out, and that makes it a lot of fun. And the craftsmanship, the sculpting of what the creature really is, is a lot fun for me to watch, so I love that part of it.

But the tentacles at the end, we had those done in the same exact way and they ended up looking awful, so I had to replace the tentacles, almost all the tentacles with CGI tentacles. http://chud.com/nextraimages/gunn5.jpgSo the tentacles are for the most part CGI at the end of the movie. And for the most part the slithering things are CGI with some exceptions.

Q: What is the darker movie you’re working on now?

Gunn: I’m writing a movie about Satan. I think the guy deserves a break, so I’m trying to give it an objective point of view, see it from his point of view more and not be so one sided as most Satanic films have been. Let’s give him a break.

Q: It’s going to be set in Hell or on Earth?

Gunn: On Earth, yeah. I’m part of the way through it so I don’t want to talk about it too much.

Q: Are you directing it?

Gunn: Yeah.

Q: Are you directing from now on, or will you still write screenplays for other people?

Gunn: I’m going to direct as much as I can. I like it, I really do. I’ve run into problems being a screenwriter, and I almost feel like directing is like writing the final draft of the script. I really don’t find it that different from writing, it’s just taking the people and arranging them visually in a way that is the final draft of the script. It’s always been very frustrating for me to have other directors… fortunately I’ve worked with some good ones, Zack in particular, who was able to have his own vision of what I had written but keep the core of what I had written. That was exciting for me. But a lot of times it’s hard, and almost always people don’t know how to direct my dialogue. Never ever has anyone known how to direct my dialogue.

Q: Did it come naturally to the actors on Slither?

Gunn: I got to cast the movie so I got to cast people who understood the dialogue. And I got to work with them, to explain where we were going with everything. A lot of times I find that directors make people speak too slowly. I wanted stuff fast.

Q: I am always amazed that people want to be screenwriters, because everything gets taken from you at the end. Would you want to write another novel?

Gunn: It takes a long time. I really like movies. Movies are my first love. I think that if you csalook at what happens to old screenwriters, it’s not a pretty picture. If you look at these guys who were great screenwriters, they all end up doing rewrite work for twenty years. Robert Towne, William Goldman, they do rewrite work. And they’re mega-rich, because they get paid a lot to do rewrite work, but man, I got into this business to tell stories and create. So I won’t do it.

I did rewrite work a couple of times, but now I won’t take it. I mean, if someone comes to me with a script that’s bad and they want it completely rewritten and I get into the idea, maybe I would rewrite that, but I’m never going to do these two week rewrite things I get offered all the time. I keep telling my agent I’m not going to do it. It’s easy for them to make a lot of money that way, but I don’t like it. I don’t like doing it to another writer, first of all. They’ve come all this way and there’s this weird studio mindset that you have to baptize a script by putting a high price writer on at the end. It’s happened to me and I don’t like it. And also, listen, I want credit for my fucking jokes. Maybe it’s just me, but I go in there and think, “This is pretty funny. Maybe I should save this for something with my name on it.”






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OLMOS THERE

 Using some of the mad cash stacks they made from licensing Star Wars and Alien vs. Predator, Dark Horse Comics is knuckling their way through Hollywood with a handful of self-funded indie films, including a new crime thriller called Splinter.

The story involves a Latino LA gangbanger with a bullet lodged in his cabeza which, along with some pesky cops, complicates matters while he seeks revenge for the murder of his brother. The movie stars Enrique Almeida, insurance nightmare Tom Sizemore, ex-wrestler "Diamond" Dallas Page (who also wrote a pretty good yoga book, no lie!), Battlestar Galactica commander Edward James Olmos, and many, many people of Hispanic heritage, all kickin’ it to some boomin’ tracks from Cypress Hill’s B-Real.

Makes me proud to be Latino. Or wherever the hell my ancestors are from. The flick is the feature directing debut of Adama spawn Michael D. Olmos. Check out the trailer HERE!






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DVD REVIEW: JOLLY BOYS LAST STAND, THE

Buy me!BUY IT AT AMAZON.CO.UK: CLICK HERE!
STUDIO: Spirit Level Films
MSRP: £14.99
RATED: 15
RUNNING TIME: 88 Minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:
• Director/Cast commentary
• Cast auditions

The Pitch

"It’s Jackass meets Saving Silverman, with all the heart of Stand By Me. God, that sounds like an awful movie. Let’s just say it’s like Ricky Gervais in a younger generation. At least the Americans won’t care."

The Humans

Andy Serkis (King Kong, The Lord of the Rings), Milo Twomey (Band of Brothers), and Sacha Baron Cohen (Ali G).

The Nutshell

A club of fun-time boys approaching their thirties, led by Spider (Serkis), begins to dissolve in the wake of Spider’s engagement to a girl named Annie. As a present, Spider’s best friend Des starts to compile a documentary about all the fun they had when they didn’t worry about chicks or jobs. It doesn’t take long for the project to go sour, though, as perennial jackass Des uncovers the truth about their Jolly Boys club: just about everyone is tired of their college-era pranks and benders. Everyone wants to grow up, and the friendships that they thought they had find very little room for survival amid the compromises of adulthood.


Did you know they swing with the wrong end of the club in England? S’truth.

The Lowdown

The conceit of Jolly Boys isn’t a hard one to swallow. Des takes his camcorder around, letting people record their well-wishes for Spider and Annie. The project gradually morphs into Des’ personal crusade to show Spider why he’s a fool for getting married, and from there becomes a sort of video diary of Des’ somewhat impotent schemes and self-reflections.

In other words, its not exactly a plot-based flick. It moves with at an easy pace from the antics of the Jolly Boys, to the stresses of engagement, to the disintegration and reformation of friendships, and all hitched firmly to Des’ believable personality. Milo Twomey deserves recognition for his performance as the British equivalent of a frat boy who never grew up; he’s funny, angry, sympathetic, and, most importantly, natural.

What I’ve described of the story so far doesn’t sound much like a comedy, unless you’re into that whole "comedy is tragedy plus timing" equation. And, really, Jolly Boys is a comedy more in the tradition of Wes Anderson than David Zuckerman — a mix of pathos and irreverence that doesn’t necessarily mirror life, but is close enough to our fantasies of how life should be that we don’t really notice. When it’s funny it’s never gut-bustingly so, because those kinds of jokes generally need more preparation than real life affords. Instead, it’s that kind of "Hey, I heard this one story" humor that plays well in a group of friends, and, as luck would have it, to a film audience who likes feeling as if they’re part of the in-crowd.


Happiness…

For as successful as the film is with its humor, it’s doubly so with the drama. There is a natural elegance to the balance between the two genres. Sometimes, they feel as if they’re playing tug-of-war, but sometimes they’re intertwined. The film is most successful in the latter cases, when the characters don’t separate the humor from the rest of their lives. The best example is the stag weekend that Des and the other Jolly Boys take Spider on, prior to his wedding day. Events conspire to put everyone on edge, and a trip that should have been boisterous, juvenile, and soaked in alcohol instead functions as the boys’ feeble clutching at a part of the lives that can’t be resurrected. It’s embarrassing and sad, yet played with a note of desperation that sells the few bitter jokes perfectly.

The acting all around is impressive, with Twomey and Andy Serkis leading the charge with aplomb. In the aftermath of the stag weekend, the friendships between the Jolly Boys really begin to fall apart, and believably so. The meat of the story is in the melancholia of childhood friends realizing that their relationships as adults require more and different effort to sustain. The Jolly Boys were friends in the common bond of juvenalia, but, one by one, they’re growing up. The audience is interested in which ones will discover new things to root their friendships in, and which ones will let the past lie down and die.


There are forty-eight men in this picture. Only two of them can be seen.

When Des finds a new path for his friendship with Spider, the revelation comes a bit too abruptly. It’s exactly what the audience hopes for — their sympathies having been thrown in with hapless Spider and jilted Des — but it leaves the distinct impression that there should have been more of a journey. The reversal in Des’ character that brings about the conclusion is smoothed over by Twomey’s acting, but could have been written with a bit more depth.

Fortunately, the emotion of the last few minutes escapes the slight stumble unscathed. This isn’t a movie that descends to false sentimentalism, but it would be a mistake to say it avoids sentiment entirely. From Spider’s wedding on through the credits, there is a sweetness to the characters and their interactions that feels natural and, best of all, earned.

The Jolly Boys Last Stand is a careful blend of the real and the fantastic inasmuch as each applies to mundane life. From time to time, it seems more drama than comedy, but it never misplaces its identity. As it turns out, I’m fine with calling this a comedy because, like good Victorian lit, it ends with a marriage. God bless British sensibilities.


Just so you know the reviewer isn’t the only pretension associated with this film:
Art School Film Clips!

The Package

Following the convention of the film’s conceit, the audio and video are pretty much high-end camcorder quality. Much of the camera work is handheld, and suffers from the lack of audio and video clarity as a result. The video never sinks as low as Blair Witch levels, however, so it’s only the audio that might trouble some viewers. Some dialogue/effects seem clearly edited in during post-production, and sound out of place, and a few of the actors’ lines get swallowed up by ambient noise.

There are only a couple of bonuses, but they’re both good ones. The cast and director provide a funny, friendly commentary on the feature, full of enough British-isms to make an uncultured yank feel like a native speaker. The processes of evolving the characters and writing/filming the story are touched on, with some funny and charming anecdotes. It may not be the most informative, but it has plenty of personality.

You also get a series of cast auditions, which are gloriously unintelligible, thanks to the unique patois of the actors. They’re not reading lines, but instead spontaneously creating characters having relationship arguments. It’s fun to watch how quick on their feet the actors are.

7.8 out of 10






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REVIEW: DEVIL AND DANIEL JOHNSTON, THE

http://chud.com/nextraimages/devil_and_daniel_johnston.jpgWas The Devil and Daniel Johnston supposed to make me this depressed? I can’t tell if the movie means to leave us somewhat hopeful or utterly devastated by the way God treats his own geniuses. I know that there’s a moment where Johnston’s father breaks down crying while recounting the small plane crash that his utterly insane son instigated where I knew no happy ending would make up for how I felt.

I was never a big Daniel Johnston fan, although I have always appreciated his minimalist pop majesty. Johnston’s an acquired taste, with his irritating voice and clumsy instrumentation, but his music is always brutally honest, especially about the mental illnesses that have ruined his life and left him a fat, old before his time man living with his parents.

The mental illness that destroyed him probably also made this film possible – Johnston obsessively documented his life, putting even Tarnation’s Jonathan Caouette to shame. But where Caouette’s recording of seemingly every moment of his life smacks of a serious narcissistic disorder, Johnston’s feels more desperate, like he’s looking for proof of his own existence, and a need to communicate that existence to anyone who will listen. At one point he’s taping himself getting into a fist fight with members of Sonic Youth and you have to wonder what the hell he’s thinking – but the next moment, as he breaks down in tears while powerfully performing in a small record store, makes you realize you’ll never know. In some ways the self-documentation fails; we see and hear what happened, but we’ll never know exactly why.

Johnston’s story begins as a young man in a religious household, where he exhibits the kind of shiftlessness and unhappiness and shyness so familiar to so many creative people. Later he leaves home and tours with a carnival; providence brings him to Austin, Texas, the most bizarre place in all the American South, sort of a rock and roll version of the Island of Misfit Toys. Johnston’s innate genius is understood here, and it briefly seems like the new Bob Dylan is coming. His timing is impeccable, since Austin’s music and film scene was on the verge of blowing up in a major way. But one night he dosed acid at a Butthole Surfers show. While I don’t generally buy into the concept that a single drug experience can change someone so much – well, let’s just say that spending eight hours with Locust Abortion Technician playing on headphones while exploring alternate realities on mescaline makes me believe that the Surfers are the only band in history who can drive you crazy.

Of course Johnston was always ill, but it’s at this point that things go downhill in a dramatic fashion, and his psychotic religious mania and occasional violent outbursts lead to a series of institutionalizations that make him possibly the only artist to get a major label deal in the nuthouse. And it’s here where the discussion of the line between genius and madness stops being so academic. As Johnston gets crazier and more dangerous, his music might be getting better, but the medication that keeps him from killing himself or others stupefies him to the point that he can’t create. It’s heartbreaking to watch.

One aspect that the film never explores adequately for me is the line between appreciation and exploitation – even when he was young and “sane,” Johnston’s music and performances were extravagantly oddball and outsider at best. And while the construction of his songs are pop classical, the presentation is anything but, so are the hipsters who adopted him enjoying Johnston for his truly unique yet traditional take on music, or is it a lark based on how completely weird the guy is? And how does that extend to me, watching the film, or other audience members who will be drawn to this film by the story and not Johnston’s music?

The film isn’t just made up of Johnston’s own recordings and footage; director Jeff Feuerzeig finds the key players in the musician’s life and interviews them. Their recollection, tempered by the years of tragedy Johnston has lived through, create a thoughtful coloration for the story. Occasionally they’re worth seeing on their own – Butthole Surfer Gibby Haynes denies giving Johnston that acid, and he’s interviewed literally while he’s getting his teeth drilled.

I hope that those who see this movie because it seems like a freak show, like it’s the indie rock version of your favorite dysfunctional reality TV show, come away with an understanding of the sometimes tragic cost of real genius. Late in the film Johnston is compared to Brian Wilson, and I think that’s fair, as is a comparison to other self-destructive artists as Van Gogh. So many of those who have been gifted so incredibly end up in bad shape because of their own insanity and addictions. Some manage to become incredibly famous, changing the face of the world with their art, before their own defects devour them. And some, like Daniel Johnston, come so tantalizingly close.

8.7 out of 10





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