Quentin Tarantino's Next Film: "It's a Western"

Quentin Tarantino has revealed on Jay Leno's The Tonight Show that his next film will be another Western. He didn't give much more detail, other than that it won't be a sequel to Django Unchained. With that announcement we can also probably rule out that it will be the trilogy-capping Killer Crow project that he had mentioned last year. I'm not disappointed he's doing another Western, but given his recent talk of retirement, I would prefer to see him branch out and tackle other genres -- especially horror -- or even return to a more restrained and emotionally mature mode of a film like Jackie Brown. Here's the Jay Leno interview:

Fatso Christmas Watchlist

Need a movie to watch over the Christmas holidays with the whole family? Here's a handy list of recent, new and upcoming Christmas-themed releases you can rent from Fatso...

Almost Christmas
Abominable Christmas
The Wiggles - It's Always Christmas With You/Santa's Rockin'
Chilly Christmas
Nativity 2: Danger in the Manger!
Peppa Pig - A Christmas Compilation
A Christmas Without Snow
A Christmas Wish
Scrooge
Mistletoe Over Manhattan
Christmas Comes Home
The Chase for Christmas
The Christmas Colt
K-9 Adventures: A Christmas Tale
Saving Santa
3-Day Christmas
A Christmas Tree Miracle
Golden Winter

Lifeforce Pulled from Release... Again

It pains me to report that Tobe Hooper's totally nutty '80s cult space vampire flick Lifeforce has received another blow for a possible NZ home video release. Triton had this movie on their DVD schedule a couple years ago but it was yanked, and now the Blu-ray, which was due to come out last week from Shock, has suffered a similar fate. Shock cited "rating issues" as the reason. Other Blu-rays from the same Cinema Cult line were also withdrawn, including City of the Living Dead, Lisa and the Devil/House of Exorcism and Vampyres. Bummer news for genre fans.... anywho here's the Lifeforce trailer to remind you of its awesomeness:

Trailer: Noah

The first trailer for Darren Aronofsky's retelling of the biblical tale Noah has landed, and as expected, it's loaded with CGI animals, catastrophic weather changes and epic battles, which on the surface, doesn't make it look that far removed your last cheesy Roland Emmerich disaster picture. I'm still curious though, to see what Aronofsky (Black Swan) can do on a large-scale blockbuster-level production, and let's hope the recent news of fights with the studio haven't impacted too heavily on his vision. The film stars Anthony Hopkins, Russell Crowe, Ray Winstone, Jennifer Connelly and Emma Watson, and is due for release March 28 next year.

Horror, Wes Anderson-ized

This superb SNL horror send-up of Wes Anderson popped up around Halloween but I haven't been able to find a non-geo-blocked clip until a friend alerted me to this site a couple of days ago. It's done amazingly well, aping Anderson's character types, colour schemes and symmetrical compositions to bring us a version of a slasher movie if had been made by Anderson himself. Click here for an in-depth breakdown of how it was all achieved.

Teaser Trailer: The Raid 2: Berandal

When The Raid came out last year, it knocked all our socks off here at Fatso. This Indonesian  actioner raised the martial arts genre to a whole new level of bone-breaking bad-assery, and made a star out of its lead Iko Uwais, a dazzling silat expert. Naturally, a sequel was announced not long after, with writer/director Gareth Evans promising the scale of the action to be much larger and more ambitious than before. Based on the teaser that's just gone online, I don't think we'll be disappointed. Although it's fairly brief, the flashes of action that we do see is enough to get us freakin' excited. Click below for a wall-punchingly intense glimpse of The Raid 2: Berandal:

Leonard Maltin vs. The Multiplex

Maybe Leonard Maltin's not so cool anymore, I dunno, but his 1995 Movie Guide remains one of my most frequent go-to books for quick film reviews. Anywho he's recently set up his own Youtube channel, and just made this rant against underwhelming service in movie theatres, particularly addressing how the digital era has automated everything and ushered out the requirement of any human presence behind the scenes. Call him an old-fashioned coot or whatever, but he makes some points which in my experience, are entirely valid and common today. If theatre owners are going to charge crazy prices for tickets these days, the least they could do is make sure every aspect of the movie-going experience is worth every penny, including checking little things like focus, audio, etc.