Film at Eleven

The Guardian reports that Martin Scorsese is planning to make a documentary about European aircraft manufacturer, Airbus.

According to the Iberian film magazine Fotogramas, the film will draw parallel between the building planes and cathedrals, recording the contribution of a factory worker, engineer and architect.

Okaay…

Twitch reports that Dario Argento will be shooting one third of a trilogy along with Tobe Hooper and Monte Hellman. Scripted by Dennis Bartok, this will be the first time that Argent will direct something he didn’t write.

According to Dark Dreams

Completely out of the blue came the news that Dario had signed to do a new horror portmanteau picture with Tobe Hooper and Monte Hellman. We all knew he had joined Hooper, John Landis, John Carpenter, Roger Corman, Joe Dante etc. for the 13 one-hour TV series MASTERS OF HORROR. But the so-far-untitled anthology (THREE EVIL EYES?) being financed by Japanese backers was a total surprise. Due to start shooting in September, the terror trilogy has been scripted by Dennis Bartok, programme director of the American Cinematheque and one of those people endlessly thanked on such ‘Making Of’ DVD extras for EVIL DEAD, THE FOG, THE HOWLING and TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. Hooper was represented at Cannes by a promo reel for MORTUARY and posters for his next outing ZOMBIES. Monte Hellman is the bombshell in the package. Although famous for the cult movies RIDE THE WHIRLWIND, THE SHOOTING and TWO-LANE BLACKTOP, his only real horror credit apart from THE TERROR is SILENT NIGHT DEADLY NIGHT 3: BETTER WATCH OUT. As the schedule clashes with the TV movie one, and Dario has never directed anything he hasn’t written, let’s see what happens to this. Am I being overly cynical or is Dario determined to do anything but THE THIRD MOTHER?

Shooting is scheduled to start in September 2005.

Twitch reports that Danny Boyle has given the okay for a remake of his 1994 film, Shallow Grave.

“If you are going to remake Shallow Grave you would make it in Shanghai,” Boyle said. “What a brilliant place to do it — it’s bursting with capitalist frenzy. We made Shallow Grave at a time in Britain when everyone was sick of the corruption of the Tories. Shallow Grave was really a very cynical look at what that obsession with money did to people. Now there is an explosion in Shanghai and it seems really worthwhile to remake the film. This is a case where the idea for the remake is an even better one than the original.”

Ooh! I hope so!

Finally, a promotional poster for Terry Gilliam’s upcoming The Brothers Grimm which stars Matt Damon and Heath Ledger as travelling con-artists who encounter a genuine fairy-tale curse which requires genuine courage instead of their usual bogus exorcisms.

I’m looking forward to this one!

The BBC reports that the Sin City directorial duo, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez are to team up again, this time to make a horror film for Bob and Harvey Weinstein’s new production company.

Each director is to write and direct a sixty minute film. The two films will then be packaged together under the umbrella title of Grind House.

According to Time Out, the inspiration for this project is the old New York cinemas that became famous for programming genre pictures back to back. The filmmakers are hoping to inspire a whole new generation of grind house movies.

According to Movieweb, Clive Barker - the novelist whose twisted visions brought us the likes of Hellraiser and Nightbreed - has teamed up with Jorge Saralegui to launch The Midnight Picture Show.

The venture intends to release two films a year, based on the either Barker’s short stories published in the six volumes of The Books of Blood, or on his original ideas.

“We hope our advantage will come from my own body of work of really intense horror stories that are original,” Barker said. “We will not be reheating old films, freshening up old ideas. … Even forgetting the sequels we hope to make, I’ve got enough here for 20 movies of varying budget scales.”

But best of all is the last paragraph of the story…

“Jorge and I want to wind up with a library of pictures that will reflect my sensibilities, which are decidedly R rated,” Barker said. “In fact, the moment I make a PG-13 horror movie, you can take me out and shoot me. Our desire is to leave you feeling that we’re a little crazy.”

Fantastic!

If surrealism floats your boat, and you happen to be in Edinburgh between the end of May and the middle of July, you should give yourself a bit of time to head over the the Edinburgh Filmhouse who have a Luis Buñuel Season running for the start of summer.

One of the most influential and strikingly original filmmakers in the history of cinema, Luis Buñuel (1900 – 1983) enjoyed a long and astonishingly prolific career. From his incendiary surrealist collaborations with Salvador Dalì in the late 1920s through to his final film made more than half-a-century later, the cinema of Buñuel, despite often having female characters at the narrative core, is preoccupied with the representation and interrogation of male desire. Like Fellini or Hitchcock, Bergman or Ozu, Buñuel’s name alone immediately evokes a distinct tone and style. Stripped free of artifice, his films are strikingly honest in exposing human deceit and decadence but are always dipped in mischievous, delicious black humour.

Filmhouse will showcase the work of Bunuel in an unmissable selection of films stretching across his fifty-year career. His surrealist roots are represented by the lacerating Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L’Age D’Or (1930) and his Mexican period by the hugely-controversial Viridiana (1961) and The Exterminating Angel (1962). His fruitful, long-standing collaboration with screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière is represented by the French productions The Diary of A Chambermaid (1963), Belle de Jour (1967), The Phantom of Liberty (1974) and That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) - all featuring the cream of European acting talent including Catherine Deneuve, Jeanne Moreau, Monica Vitti, Michel Piccoli and Fernando Rey.

Tickets are £12/£7.50 concessions, or you can get a pass for all seven films for £21/£14 concessions.

FilmStew have managed to get hold of some of the plot details for Aardman Animation’s future film, Crood Awakening.

Set in the Stone Age, Crood Awakening is a comedy about a big man in a small village called Crood. His position as Leader of the Hunt is threatened by the arrival of a prehistoric genius who comes up with revolutionary new inventions … like fire.

The film is being co-written by comedy icon, John Cleese and Kirk DeMicco.

Darkly humorous Danish crime feature, Last Exit is to be officially released on DVD in US & Canada through Heretic Films.

The scheduled release date is 20th September 2005. There will be extras on the DVD - which will be announced closer to the release.

You can visit the Last Exit official site here.

The Guardian reports that, once they have finished rebuilding their installation Hell - which was destroyed in the Momart warehouse fire last year, Jake and Dinos Chapman are set to write and direct a horror film for FilmFour.

Other than “a porn film and some puppet films” this will be the Chapmans’ first foray into the medium, at least in terms of a mainstream feature.

Peter Carlton, head of the FilmFour Lab, said: “Jake has said he doesn’t want it to be an art film - he wants it to be the sort of film where it’s on the shelves of Blockbuster as a DVD so he can show his children.”

Unsurprisingly, given the nature of their art, the Chapmans are big fans of horror. “When Jake and I were growing up one of the most interesting and extreme areas of culture was horror films,” said Dinos. “They coloured a lot of people’s experience. A lot of 1970s horror films had a nihilistic and bleak outlook on life compared with contemporary ones. They didn’t portray a world of hope.”

A genuine horror film at Blockbuster. That’ll be a first.