Blech! Okay, it's not really blood in a bottle.
Building on the hype of its popular series (and apparently, viewer requests), HBO is releasing a beverage, packaged as the beverage the vampires like to swill on True Blood.
The idea of it sounds fairly disgusting until you find out that a carbonated, blood orange soda is what will be inside, not type O negative.
August is proving to a pileup of big-time movie premieres in Austin, with Robert Rodriguez' kiddie film Shorts getting a big to-do – including a downtown carnival – on Aug. 16 and Mike Judge's workplace comedy Extract premiering Tuesday, Aug. 18 with Judge and star Jason Bateman in attendance. Beating them both to the punch is the just-announced premiere of Inglourious Basterds on Aug. 15 at the Alamo Ritz. Basterds is, of course, the rabidly anticipated new film from Quentin Tarantino, which stars Brad Pitt as the leader of a Nazi hunting brigade during WWII.
There's no word yet on if any of the film's stars will be in attendance (totally crossing our fingers for Michael Fassbender), but Tarantino will be there for the showing and as a guest curator for Fantastic Fest's Cinemapocalyse, a dusk-til dawn movie marathon. Inglourious Basterds will kick off the marathon and will be the only title preannounced to the public; Tarantino's picking the first two films, and the rest of the lineup will presumably be determined by the Alamo Drafthouse's mishmash of mad-genius programmers. (Zack and Lars previously took their Terror Tuesday and Weird Wednesday shows on the road under the moniker of Cinemapocalypse in the spring for a West Coast tour.)
Tickets go on sale for Austin Film Society members and 2009 Fantastic Fest badge holders only on Thursday, July 30 at noon; go to fantasticfest.org for more info. A simultaneous VIP screening, including dinner and a simulcast of the next-room-over Q&A, will be offered to AFS members for $100 a ticket; see austinfilm.org for more.
Despite our officemate Kate Messer's entreaty yesterday that people need to stop, like, dying this summer, today we lost another: Les Lye of Nickelodeon's You Can't Do That on Television. Lye portrayed some of the Canadian sketch show's most memorable characters, including dirty burger joint owner Barth Bagge and the ever-thwarted firing squad captain El Capitano. Fansite barthsburgery.com has a sweet little photo gallery of Lye's roles here – and lest you get too misty-eyed, the accompanying soundtrack of a Casiotoned "Mmmbop" ensures you'll only remember the good times.
Slime on, Les Lye.
This one's for all the Guitar Hero fanatics out there who don't really feel like leaving the thrashing at home. This week's waste of time is Flojte Hero (Flute Hero for those of you who don't speak Danish and English). And if Grammy Award-winning Jethro Tull taught us anything, it's that a flute can rock in a renaissance faire afterparty kinda way.
So moisten your blow stick and warm up your fingers for some high-caliber flouting. Half of the directions are in Danish but just click on "Nyt Spil" then choose a level and the cheesy techno ensues. Use the number keys (all 10 of them) to hit the right notes at the right time and send the blonde flutist into spasms of musical ecstasy. I kid you not, she really gets into it – it's all in the eyes.
The game doesn't have the replayability of Guitar Hero as there's really only one decidedly awful song, but it should keep you from being productive for a while.
Let's get one thing straight: We love, love, love Rube Goldberg. The Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, author, engineer, and inventor is probably best remembered to a certain age group for his ingenious drawings of maniacally complicated labor-saving devices such as this self-operating napkin which was appropriated by fan Tim Burton for Pee Wee's Big Adventure (variations on similar rude, meal-time mechanicals appeared in Charles Chaplin's Modern Times and Woody Allen's Sleeper.
Goldberg also invented the über-cool board game Mouse Trap and, as if that weren't enough to ensure his permanent position in the pantheon of people who, thank god, never bothered to grow up, he also scripted the great Three Stooges feature Soup to Nuts, and deeply influenced both Chuck Jones's Wile E. Coyote 'toons and Antonio Prohias's classic Mad Magazine comic series Spy vs. Spy. It's like Goldberg cornered the cool market and then redesigned it to fit his own wonderfully complex worldview. The guy even had his own United States postage stamp, for Chrissakes!
Dish Network subscribers will be able to catch Amy Cook: The Spaces In Between, featuring local musician Amy Cook, starting July 22.
The new film, directed by Todd Robinson, follows Cook on tour across the Southwest and includes live performances, in-depth interviews, a glance at the recording process, off-stage antics, and even an explosion or two.
Linked to hotelier Liz Lambert, Cook is making a name for herself with music that is a combination of folk, pop, and alt country. Her newest CD, Let the Light In was produced by Alejandro Escovedo and features guest artist Patti Griffin, among others. Cook was among the handful of musicians featured in Out Magazine's Top 100 of 2008.
I know, last week's game was a bit of fluff, but now I'm back from vacation and bringing an all-out brawl. Any self-respecting quarter-lifers are familiar with the Street Fighter franchise (hopefully not from the Van Damme movie), and Street Fighter II still sits as the quintessential iteration.
I'll be the first to admit that the recently released (relatively speaking) Street Fighter IVlooks pretty cool but there's no doubting that it's merely an update to the original and brilliant fighting game. Before Mortal Kombat bloodied things up and future games took fighting into the third dimension, Street Fighter drew crowds at arcades and later saved quarters but added the ability to obsess in private on the Super Nintendo.
And now it's free to play online (you can thank Capcom later). The game has some slowdown issues, but not much more than the original. Pick a character (I was always a Zangief man) and start jet-setting around the globe from one fight to another.
If the Austin Film Festival is playing six degrees of separation with this year’s honorees, it’s going to have to try a little harder: director/prodcuer Ron Howard, the just-announced recipient of the Extraordinary Contribution to Filmmaking Award, is just one lousy degree removed from Mitchell Hurwitz, who was revealed last week as the 2009 Outstanding Television Writer Award recipient. Howard of course produced Hurwitz’s show Arrested Development, and narrated, too: That alone earns our most warm-hearted congratulations. But wait – there’s more!
A lot more – and no, we’re not referring to Howard the actor’s lasting cultural contributions via his pint-sized scamp Opie on The Andy Griffith Show and his more recent, third-billed turn in Jamie Foxx’s music video “Blame It” (but seriously: what range). Nope, we’re thinking of the astonishingly varied and consistently good work Howard’s done behind the camera: children’s fantasy (Willow) and romantic comedy (Splash), summer blockbuster (the Da Vinci movies) and fall Oscar bait (Frost/Nixon). But the sentimental fave has to be Parenthood: Steve Martin and Mary Steenburgen, so funny and believable as exhausted parents; Jason Robards as the gravel-voiced grandpa from hell; high-school-aged Keanu Reeves sexing up Martha Plimpton and Joaquin Phoenix locked in his room with a bag of porn.
AFF runs 16th Annual Austin Film Festival & Conference, October 22-29, 2009. For more info, see austinfilmfestival.com Full press release after the jump.
It may be hotter than hades outside but the news from Fantastic Fest 2009 is cool, chilling, and guaranteed to make your blood run cold. (And didn't Fantastic Fest 2007 feature The Last Winter, like, totally predict what's now happening in the real, hot world? Oh hell yeah it did.)
At the top of the list of films that have just been announced for this year's festival (Sept. 24 - Oct. 1 at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar) is Jared Hess's (Napoleon Dynamite) Gentleman Broncos, a promising slice of sci-fi nerd weirdness (with heart, natch) featuring jet-pack-wearing stags and the longhairs that love them. Yes! Read that last sentence again: "jet-pack-wearing stags!" Our minds are all squirmy in anticipation.
Also of major note are Tom Shankland's creepy kid-flick The Children ("Jabs an icicle in your eye!") and a lifetime achievement award will be presented to legendary Spanish director Jess Franco! If you haven't seen a Franco flick, well, you've got over 200 to choose from, but we'd recommend the hypercolorful Eugenie...the Story of her Journey into Perversion as a nifty starting point. (We're also big fans of Vampyros Lesbos, but you probably already figured that out for yourself.)
The complete, unexpurgated, titillating bombshell gore-o-tronic master list of first-wave Fantastic Fest films (and all relevant tickets/badges info) can be found here. Full press release after the jump.
