"The Scarlet Worm" brutal, original Western on DVD December 6

Highly Original Western 'The Scarlet Worm' Hits Home Video Same Day As 'Cowboys & Aliens' - Proves The Genre Doesn't Need To Resort To Outrageous Hybrids DVD available December 6

On December 6, two competing Westerns hit store shelves, and they offer two very different possibilities for the genre's future. Cowboys & Aliens is a big studio Western that mixes in sci-fi, CGI and noisy blockbuster elements, seeming distrustful that today's audiences will accept a straight-ahead Western. The Scarlet Worm (on DVD and Blu-Ray from Unearthed Films/MVD), on the other hand, is a glowingly reviewed independent Western that proves a horse opera can still capture the public's imagination - even on a low budget - as long as its story offers something fresh and original within the traditional framework. "We feel there is still new ground to break with an old plow," says the film's associate producer Mike Malloy. "But if you look at the recent major-release Westerns, they have either been remakes like True Grit and 3:10 to Yuma or genre hybrids like Jonah Hex and Cowboys & Aliens. We wanted to make a film that resorted to neither extreme. Plain and simple: Make a straight Western with a story you haven't seen before." Exactly how original is the Scarlet Worm story? "It's the first Western ever to center around abortion, insofar as we know," says screenwriter David Lambert. But he's quick to add, "This is not an advocacy movie that makes any generalizations about the abortion controversy. I wasn't interested in writing a message movie." The plot of The Scarlet Worm has a gentleman assassin named Print (Aaron Stielstra) hired to rub out a cruel brothel owner (Spaghetti Western veteran Dan van Husen) who mandates abortions on all his whores. Considering himself an artist, Print normally has style and flourish to all his killings, but this latest job presents two challenges: He is being told by his employer to get it done "quick and dirty," and he is forced to train a young understudy while working. While it's a story set-up that allows for crowd-pleasing traditional elements of gunplay (replete with real practical squibs) and romance (which includes some whorehouse nudity), the film also has plenty of room for highbrow prestige elements, as introduced by the intelligent, highly original script. And those elements are getting noticed, both in the form of festival selections and advanced praise. With this press and word of mouth, The Scarlet Worm has cut through the throng of other low-budget Westerns, which are mainly just direct-to-video shootemups. Although Scarlet Worm's cast includes a fistful of veteran Spaghetti Western actors - Dan van Husen, Montgomery Ford, Mike Forest and Ted Rusoff - the film is not a Spaghetti homage. It instead seeks to recapture the gritty realism of the early '70s American Westerns - films like Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid or Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller. "We aspired to be like those intelligent Westerns," says Lambert, "And while The Scarlet Worm delivers plenty of traditional genre excitement, we're so pleased that we're not being lumped in with the low-budget action Westerns coming out these days." Judging by the latest advanced review, the Scarlet Worm filmmakers hit their mark: "Lambert's script rises above ... by investing depth and texture into the characters, their relationships and the serpentine history they all share. He also invests much time in crafty dialogue, bringing a wordsmith's touch to the expected profane, macho insults but also weaving in exchanges that are shockingly philosophical." (Schlockmania.com)

‘Tintin’: A beginner’s guide to the European classic

By Robert Lloyd
November 23, 2011
http://herocomplex.latimes.com/2011/11/22/tintin-a-beginners-guide/

Description: Tintin (Jamie Bell) and Snowy in The Adventures of Tintin. (WETA Digital Ltd.)

Tintin (Jamie Bell) and Snowy in "The Adventures of Tintin" (WETA Digital Ltd.)

Los Angeles Times television critic Robert Lloyd is a longtime “Tintin” fan and he will be writing a series of posts on the heritage of the character. This installment explores: Who is Tintin?

Tintin is a young Belgian reporter of somewhat indeterminate age, the central figure in Hergé’s world-beloved comic-strip/comic-book series “The Adventures of Tintin.” I say “reporter,” because he is at times described as one, but apart from asking a lot of questions he is almost never shown at work. (Indeed, in the stories he is more reported upon than reporting.) Nevertheless, the notion of the job gives the character a reason to travel and frames a life of investigation and adventure; it also made him, for a while, a figure both in and of the newspaper that first published “Tintin,” Belgium’s Le Vingtième Siècle, in its children’s supplement, Le Petit Vingtième.

A cousin of such 20th century American young-adult heroes as the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift, Tintin is no longer a boy, nor quite yet a man. (“It’s difficult to say,” Hergé once told a teenaged interviewer who asked  the character’s age, and then settled on 17.) But he is manly in a way that boys were once told to strive to be: athletic, brave, loyal, cool-headed, polite. In any case, neither his friends nor foes, all his senior, treat him as a child; practically speaking, he is more adult than any of them. His virtues are, essentially, Boy Scout virtues — Hergé had enthusiastically been a Scout himself  — and in early drawings Tintin markedly resembles his predecessor Totor, the star of a strip Hergé had written for Le Boy-Scout Belge.

His origins are never discussed. He comes into being at the moment we meet him, in 1929, on a railroad platform, bound for Moscow, and dissolves, almost metaphysically, into the series of sketches that make up the last panels of “Tintin and Alph-Art,” unfinished at the time of Hergé’s death in 1983. He does not age, but he does evolve, becoming more and more of a fleshed-out, one might almost say “ordinary” human being as the years go on. In the last books, it has been noted, he is as much acted upon as acting, less keen to go adventuring, but still willing to do what’s necessary.

Visually, too, he becomes more lifelike with time, his at-first spherical head stretching into an oval, his body language and features growing ever more expressive. Some basic elements maintain: the button nose, the dotted eyes, the back-swept quiff Hergé gave his hero to make him easily recognizable from frame to frame, and he wears his increasingly old-fashioned plus-fours almost to the end of the series, when he finally gets a pair of jeans. (One byproduct of the translation of Hergé’s drawings into a  more conventionally realistic “three-dimensional” figure for Steven Spielberg’s computer-animated “The Adventures of Tintin” is that the movie-related merchandise features a Tintin who bears only the faintest trace of his creator’s hand.)

He has no parents, but he is not an orphan, and lives independently with his dog, Snowy. His friends are his family; eventually, he will share a house with some of them. He has no romantic life, real or imagined, but this is true of nearly every character in “The Adventures of Tintin.” His closest relationships are with Snowy, and the irascible, imaginatively profane, whiskey-drinking (later not-drinking) Captain Haddock. And he has a sort of transcendental affinity with Chang Chong-Chen (Tchang Tchong-Jen in the French original), a Chinese boy he saves from drowning in “The Blue Lotus” (1936) and, on the evidence of a dream, goes looking for in the Himalayas in “Tintin in Tibet” (1960).

He is, of course, good — pure of heart, mind and deed, yet neither a prude or a prig. (Offered alcohol, he will politely demur; as a European, he has no issue with drinking, only impatience with drunkenness.) He is comfortable in other cultures and around different ways of thinking. A hero in an age of accelerating travel, he can drive, fly or pilot any machine that comes to hand, but he’s also at home on a horse or a camel. He is slow to anger, but not immune to it, and though he can be too trusting for his own good, he is usually the first to notice the out-of-place thing or strange behavior that signals something wicked his way comes.

Next: Who was Hergé?

EON PRODUCTIONS, METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER STUDIOS AND SONY PICTURES ENTERTAINMENT ANNOUNCE 7th NOVEMBER IS START OF PRODUCTION FOR 23rd JAMES BOND FILM “SKYFALL”

LONDON, UK, November, 2011 – Producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli today presented the cast of the 23rd James Bond adventure, entitled SKYFALL.  The film, from Albert R. Broccoli’s Eon Productions, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, and Sony Pictures Entertainment, is directed by Academy Award® winner Sam Mendes and stars Daniel Craig, who returns for his third film as James Bond 007.  The screenplay is written by Neal Purvis & Robert Wade and John Logan.  SKYFALL, which goes into production on Monday, November 7th, will begin its worldwide roll-out in the UK and Ireland on October 26th 2012 and in North America on November 9th 2012.

Joining Michael G. Wilson, Barbara Broccoli and Director Sam Mendes were members of the cast of SKYFALL, including: Daniel Craig, Javier Bardem, Dame Judi Dench, Naomie Harris and Bérénice Marlohe. The filmmakers also announced Ralph Fiennes, Albert Finney and Ben Whishaw.

In SKYFALL, Bond’s loyalty to M is tested as her past comes back to haunt her.  As MI6 comes under attack, 007 must track down and destroy the threat, no matter how personal the cost.

“We’re so delighted to have Sam Mendes direct SKYFALL and be working once again with Daniel Craig.   We've a great script, an extraordinary cast and an incredibly talented creative team for this latest James Bond adventure,” said Wilson and Broccoli.

The Director of Photography is Roger Deakins, a nine-time Oscar® nominee who previously shot the films Jarhead and Revolutionary Road for Mendes.  The Production Designer is Oscar® winner Dennis Gassner, who previously designed Quantum of Solace and collaborated with Mendes on the films Road to Perdition and Jarhead.  The Editor is Stuart Baird, A.C.E., whose many credits include Casino Royale.  Jany Temime, whose many credits include the Harry Potter series, In Bruges, and Children of Men, is the Costume Designer. Action specialist Alexander Witt is the 2nd Unit Director.   Gary Powell is Stunt Co-ordinator, Chris Corbould is SFX Supervisor and Steve Begg is Visual Effects Supervisor, all of whom have worked on previous Bond films.

007 fans can learn more about SKYFALL at the James Bond franchise Facebook page at www.facebook.com/JamesBond007. 

7500

“7500” will be released by CBS Films on August 31, 2012

Directed by Takashi Shimizu (The Grudge), 7500 follows a group of passengers who encounter what appears to be a supernatural force while on a transpacific flight. Leslie Bibb (Zookeeper), Ryan Kwanten (TV’s True Blood), Amy Smart (Crank), Jamie Chung (The Hangover Part II), Christian Serratos (The Twilight Saga) and Scout Taylor-Compton (Halloween) star in this thriller written by Craig Rosenberg (TV’s Lost) and produced by Taka Ichise (The Grudge) and Roy Lee (The Ring). John Middleton and Tracy McGrath are serving as executive producers.