Cinema Suicide

Turns out that I had heard about Albert Pyun’s Streets of Fire project before. I saw something on Twitch Film a while back about it, I guess they’re all big-ass fans of Albert Pyun (I had the balls to knock him in their comments and took some flack for it). I hadn’t made the connection between the two, though. I think the furthest my mind went with it was, “Wow, Michael Pare is still acting? Good for him.” Before I moved on. I think I remarked briefly about the Sin City qualities of the poster design. But this is it. I got some hits from Road To Hell website yesterday and it turns out that Road To Hell is the next in the Streets of Fire series, if they’re even pursuing it as part of that canon. Details at the Road To Hell website.

I’ve been following the news about Ong Bak 2 and the trials of Tony Jaa over at Twitch Film since the earliest news about Tony retreating to a cave and practicing black magic started circulating. The story has a real Dave Chappelle quality to it where it’s fraught with crazy rumors and conjecture but the very foundation of this story is about Tony Jaa’s inability to finish shooting Ong Bak 2, a reported nervous breakdown and legendary production problems (like going way, way over budget). The latest rumors out of Thailand were that after a press conference where he broke down into tears on TV, he was whisked away in a car having been kidnapped. I don’t think he has been kidnapped, but he did issue a list of demands in order to finish Ong Bak 2.

He wants a lot of money to finish it, he wants Panna Rittikrai involved, a bigger share of the profit and an end to his contract with Sahamongkol. His production company, apparently, was not pleased and how they dealt with it is a mystery but Jaa turned up in a police station reporting that he was being followed by a car full of guys in safari suits. Sahamonkol head, Sia Jiang, turned up at the police station to talk to Jaa, who then promptly dropped the demands and agreed to finish the movie.

You know? I was really looking forward to this movie and at one time I was calling Tony Jaa the new Jackie Chan what with the high energy martial arts movies and his acrobatic skills that had the ability to thrill even the most jaded martial arts fans. I’m not so sure we’re going to be seeing much of Tony in the future.

Edit: Scratch that.  I’m still looking forward to this.  Look at this promo reel!

I realize that I’m probably the only guy on earth who actually likes this movie and I spend way too much time trying to legitimize it to people that challenge my opinion but I’ll never back down. I love this fucking movie. I read some really strange news today over at Ain’t It Cool News about what may or may not be a sequel to Walter Hill’s rock and roll box office bomb.

It would seem that schlockmeister supreme, Albert Pyun, is taking a break from his scabby post apocalypse productions for a feature that looks suspiciously like Streets of Fire. From AICN:

A soldier who has been fighting a long war is driven mad because he no longer believes in any purpose or righteous truth behind the killing. He comes home to a surreal world looking for his first and only love from his youth, believing she will rescue him from his demons. On the road to Edge City he encounters two seductive spree killers who oppose his efforts to find his love and the redemption he desperately seeks.

No big deal, right?  Check it: Michael Pare stars as the lead, a character named Cody.  Deborah Van Valeknburgh is there as his sister.  There’s a woman named McCoy as Cody’s sidekick and a woman named Ellen who will probably turn out to be a rock star belting out studio outtakes from Bat out of Hell.  Pretty strange, if you ask me.  Still no title. Can’t say I’m disappointed.  The original Streets of Fire was supposed to be the first in a trilogy of musical neo-noirs.  I can only hope that Lee Ving shows up and that Dave Alvin and Jim Steinman supply the music.

I have to tell you, I’m such a snobby bastard and I hate CG animated kids movies.  I really do (not really).  I haven’t really seen one in a while and I can’t remember the last one I watched but to me they always seem like they’re multi-million dollar hyper-marketing ads to sell your children t-shirts and pajamas and toys and bed sheets and just about anything they can slap the logo on.  Take a walk through Walmart sometime and tell me how many of these you see.  I can’t believe it, but they’re still marketing the hell out of Cars!  Well, enough bitching.  I can admit this: Monsters vs. Aliens, though doomed to live in the shadow of its own marketing hype looks extraordinarily funny.  I’ve been seeing posters for it for a while on this feed or that but until now I wasn’t sure what it was.  It’s Dreamworks’ latest CG Animated feature.  You get Reese Witherspoon, Seth Rogen and Will Arnett (who I can’t get enough of), monsters, aliens and the ever-so elusive funny.

Boy, I was pretty sure that this was a sci-fi flick that would never happen.  Last I knew, slick-ass music video director, Chris Cunningham, had his hands on this and given his track record for really fucking trippy music videos (Bjork, Aphex Twin, Leftfield), I thought something cool might actually come of it but then it went off the radar and I thought that was it.

For the uninitiated, Neuromancer is, for my money, the premier cyberpunk novel.  For me it was the rite of passage that led me to Bruce Sterling and, later on, Neil Stephenson (whose novel Snow Crash may be the greatest cyberpunk novel ever).  It’s flawed as fuck and as much as I like it and William Gibson, Gibson has a tendency to build and build and build and then resolve everything in twenty or thirty pages.  It drives me crazy.  But I digress.

Based on William Gibson’s seminal cyberpunk novel, Hayden Christensen stars as Cage, a petty future Tokyo thief whose trade is jacking his brain directly into computer systems. When this skill is taken away from him, it seems his life is destined to end in an explosion of violence and drugs… until the mysterious Armitage offers redemption – at a price. Revelation follows revelation as Cage discovers that no one is in control of his or her own destiny and a new form of sentient technology is taking over. It’s down to Cage to face Neuromancer and do something he never has before: make the right choice.

Maybe it’s a misprint but the protagonist of the novel is named Case.  It’s going to be interesting to see how this book is interpreted, too.  It’s a fantastic story full of incredibly cool ideas and it’s the sort of setting that visual effects designers dream of.  Everything is either slick and slightly ahead of the tech curve or dingy, shitty and slightly out of date.  Chiba City was directly inspired by the cramped but visually rich sets from Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner.

For all my optimism, the director is Joseph Kahn who has directed nothing but music videos.  His only feature credit is Torque which I never saw but was described to me as a 90 minute ad for Mountain Dew.The poster may, in fact, turn out to be the best part of the movie.

Click the image for a better look at the already incredibly sweet poster.

I’ve heard the movie is actually a complete fucking disaster and reviews that come down can be measured in various shades on unkindness but I still have to see it for myself.  This clip came down the series of tubes a little while ago and I’m still not wavering in my unreasonable enthusiasm for a movie that I’m told is uniformly terrible.

I always wondered what happened to Alex Winter (aka Bill S. Preston, Esquire!).  Seems like he made that flick Freaked back in the 90′s and dropped off the face of the earth forever.  Turns out that he’s been directing ads in England and just recently Howard Stern pulled him in for a director’s stint on a remake of the Corman classic, Rock ‘N Roll High School that showcased the acting chops of The Ramones.  Maybe you remember, maybe you don’t but there is a sequel to this flick that more or less acts like a remake called Rock ‘N Roll High School forever which featured not the Ramones but a band headed up by Cory Feldman in full-on Michael Jackson garb.  Heavy, I tell you.  I don’t know who let that guy into wardrobe but he did the same thing in the sequel to Dream A Little Dream.

I should probably shut up now.

I’m perplexed as to what band could possibly head up a high school rebellion since just about every facet of hard music has been neutered these days.  I vote for the Dirty South Revolutionaries.  According to Winter,

This movie seemed so ripe for a remake.

Says you, dude.

Source: Variety

Dave’s been tearing his hair out waiting for me to get my shit together and post this, but the store is open and ready to receive your moneys.

http://www.cinema-suicide.com/store/

Back around April we made a bunch of plans.  Many of them crashed and burned by a matter of a few factors, some having to do with us aiming too high others had to do with people not giving a shit.  The one that did happen and I’m very happy that it did, is this project.  What started as a knock off of the sort of shirts that Rotten Cotton is best known for, transformed into a line of entirely original shirts by a handful of artists. We’re kicking this series off with a favorite of ours and a guy who has been an absolute pleasure to work with, Tom Whalen (http://www.strongstuff.net).

Tom has a distinct style all his own and came up with a pair of designs for us (as well as the incredibly awesome Cinema Suicide Film Society logo that we also hope to put on a shirt).  There is either the faux daikaiju flick, The Tianic Monster Beast From Planet Zero on either black or brown shirt or the slasher movie that never was, Slasher Night 2 on either black or green shirts.

You, too, can own one or both of these shirts in your choice of size and color for the paltry sum of $16 plus shipping.  You’ll be helping us and Tom.

Order now.  Supplies are limited, and when I say that, I mean that.  When Slasher Night and Titanic Monster Beast are gone, they are gone, never to be seen again.

http://www.cinema-suicide.com/store/

Just a heads up to all of you. I’d like to point you to my latest blog over at Bloody Good Horror, a diatribe in defense of the Friday the 13th remake and why I consider this upcoming flick not a remake, not a reboot, but another real sequel in the series.

I’m Okay With a Friday the 13th Remake

It’s not something I talk about often because I usually don’t ever get the opportunity to explain that I’m not so much a conspiracy theorist as I am a conspiracy enthusiast. I find the shit fascinating to read about and JFK Assassinations, the New World Order, 12th Planet UFO theories and secret societies send my imagingation soaring. So I know a little bit about a lot of conspiracy theories. Enough, in fact, to talk for about 10 minutes about one of my favorite facets of the New World Order, the Bohemian Grove.

Download the latest Tank Riot podcast, the third in their series of fun conspiracy themed episodes. Therein you will hear about HAARP, the murder of John Lennon, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and my overview of summer camp for the New World Order, The Bohemian Grove.

http://www.tankriot.com/2008/055/