News Archive: July 2002

Quick Ones

Some quick updates:

• ashbrg (neural-surged) tells us that Cronenberg is rumored to arrive to the Sitges film festival in Spain (in the beginning of October) to receives a special honorary award.

• Check out Cronendrome for some updates.

P.S.: Technical question on the poll today - I need this to know your browser capabilities. Please vote.

Drugs Killed Entwistle; 4th Austin Powers; Reality TV

Some quick headlines:

• The death of The Who bassist, John Entwistle, was a result of a massive cocaine overdose.

• Mike Myers enjoyed working on his new Austin Powers movie and says he would like to make a 4th movie in the series.

• After the success of The Osbournes on MTV, expect a wave of "reality TV" shows. It starts with Liza Minnelli on VH1 and Anna Nicole Smith.

Ed Wood DVD Delayed
According to DVDFile, Buena Vista announced yesterday that the upcoming special edition of Tim Burton's *Ed Wood* has been postponed until further notice. It was originally scheduled for release on August 13. No new date has been announced. (Thanks to Surfchan)

Aronofsky's New Movie Greenlighted

Warner Bros. has officially given Darren Aronofsky's new movie The Fountain (formerly The Last man) a greenlight. Filming starts this coming October in

Australia.

The budgeted is given as more than $70 million. Let's recall the growing budget of Aronofsky's films, shall we:
1998 - Pi: $0.06m ($60,000)
2000 - Requiem for a Dream: $4.5m
2003 - The Fountain: $70m

In addition to the confirmed Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett and Ellen Burstyn, it's possible that Johnny Depp would join the cast too.

The script, which is kept under wraps, is about the journey of one man (Pitt) in the present as well as both 500 years in the past and into the future. Among the issues it tackles are love, death and immortality.

Jude Law is the New Superman
The excellent British actor Jude Law has been chosen to play Superman in Wolfgang Petersen's *Batman Vs. Superman. Law has beat off competition from Johnny Depp, Christian Bale* and Colin Farrell (which might still get the role of Batman). Law has been chosen because the producers wanted "to get away from the mega-muscled action stars".

Spider Premieres in UK

Although the UK release date for Spider has been reported as November 1st, some of you UK guys might have been lucky enough to catch its premiere in Cambridge, on Sunday (yes, the day before yesterday).

Here's a review of such lucky guy.

Also, according to Gazza's Movie Page, the release date has been postponed to 3 January 2003.

Ozzy Vows to go Bald with Sharon
According to IMDB, Ozzy Osbourne has vowed to shave off his trademark long hair for charity, to raise money for cancer research. He'd do it as a gesture to support his wife Sharon's battle with cancer. Sharon has been diagnosed with cancer of the colon and the chemotherapy she now faces is likely to result in her losing her hair. The diagnosis was made after the Osbournes were signed for a second season on *MTV*. Sharon has already agreed to have her struggle on camera, in order to support other people with cancer.

Danny Elfman Receives the BMI Award

Better late than never. On May 15, composer Danny Elfman received the BMI award for Outstanding Career Achievement. This prestigious award is given annually to the composer who has made significant contributions to film and TV music, and is usually given to much older composers.

Read about it here and here and see a 2-minutes clip of Danny in the award ceremony: Choose low or high (thanks to kat). Notice that - like at the Oscars - he refuses to wear a tuxedo.

And while we're on the Elfman subject, happy birthday to actor Bodhi Elfman (Danny's nephew and Jenna Elfman's husband).

Cronenberg at Cannes

Added 2 more photos of Cronenberg at the Cannes Film Festival in May.

More Spider Release Dates

Thanks to Ashbrg (neural-surged) for the following info about Spider release dates:

Canada:
"Canadian director Atom Egoyan's latest film, Ararat, will open the Toronto International Film Festival in September, marking the third time the acclaimed filmmaker has kicked off the prestigious film festival, the largest in North America, Reuters reports. Other gala films in the festival this year include the premieres of director David Cronenberg's Spider, and White Oleander with Michelle Pfeiffer and Renee Zellweger. The festival runs September 5-14."

Spain:
Some claim that Spider will be shown in San Sebastian Film Festival or in Sitges Film Festival, in September.

All the release dates known up until now are in the FAQ.

Gnutella Developer Gene Kan, 25, Commits Suicide

Gene Kan, one of the key programmers behind the popular file-sharing technology known as Gnutella, has died in an apparent suicide. He was 25.

More info on Reuters and Gnutella.com.

Milla Jovovich to Release another Album?

According to Cinema.com, Milla Jovovich might release some more of her music: "I have 200 minutes of my music on the shelf but I don't have time to go through it all... I may release it on the internet... I don't want to make any money from it".

For those of you who aren't familiar with Milla's music talent (and might be laughing right now to the suggestion of her releasing songs), I suggest to check out her 1994 debut album, The Divine Comedy. Milla wrote, played and sang all the songs on the album (except for the last one, which is traditional) and they are all simply magnificent. The album is very relaxing, the music is great, and she has the most beautiful voice.

Milla is not only one of the most beautiful actresses alive and she's far, far away from being just another pretty-face, airhead model. She is a multi-talent that can simply do magic in every field she steps into: modeling, acting, singing, writing music and playing instruments.

P.S.: Yes, the Peopletree Sessions album was a big disappointment.

DK's Recommendation: Nineteen Eighty-Four

>> See December 22, 2002 and January 10, 2003 for updates <<

Are you ready for the longest review I've ever written?

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) is, in my opinion, one of the best novel-to-screen adaptions ever made, for the best novel ever written (and don't get philosophized with me about "the other book", because I don't believe in god ).

If you've read the book, you already know that you should expect a very depressing movie. And indeed, this is one of the most depressing movies I've ever seen (yes, it's even more depressing than Dead Ringers). I guess that might explain why this astonishing gem is so underrated. So underrated that, as far as I know, it hasn't been released on DVD (only on VHS and LaserDisc).

Another reason (apart from being a very non-commercial and non-mainstream movie) is that the book is quite hard to "get". The way I see it, everyone sees and understands something else from it. The "outer layer" is a political satire and most people see it only as a "negative prophecy". But for me it's a much more complicated creation, which works on so many levels. It deals with the basic and most important issues in life, society, government, wars, religion, education, brain-washing, the place of the individual, the hardship of being alone (physically and mentally), the concept of holding two contradictious thoughts at the same time, the position of the individual in history, the nothingness of being human, love, family, loyalty and betrayal, the instinct of any animal in nature to survive, and so much, much more.

Being so complicated, I think it's impossible to bring all the concepts of the book to the big screen (Naked Lunch, anyone? Heh, maybe Cronenberg should have handled 1984 too). So don't expect to find everything in the movie (this is the point to mention that several minor changes were made for the movie). If you like it, I recommend you to read the book. I think that together they "complete" each other, in the sense that the former "brings life" to the latter: When I read the book (at least 4 times by now) I "see" and "hear" the characters as they appear in the movie. I can't imagine how the reading would be without it.

Back to the movie, which, by the way, was shot on exactly the same dates (up to the day!) and locations as imagined by author George Orwell. It stars John Hurt, my favorite British actor, in what might be his best performance ever. Very few actors can give so much realism to such a demanding and difficult role (especially the torture scenes).

This is also Richard Burton's last movie, and it's dedicated to him. Burton is excellent in his role, and his casting is perfect. His voice and speeches will stay with you for a very long time.

All the other actors are excellent too: Suzanna Hamilton as Julia, Gregor Fisher (which you might recognize from the TV Bean-like comedy "The Baldy Man") as Parsons, Cyril Cusack as Charrington, and more.

Dominic Muldowney did a fantastic job with the music and songs, and the Eurythmics contribution works well here, especially Annie Lennox's heavenly voice (but keep their CD-soundtrack aside - it's so much different from the movie's atmosphere, except for the end-credits song, "Julia"). Muldowney's score, titled Nineteen Eighty-Four - The Music of Oceania, was finally released in 1999. It's 54 minutes long and contains 24 tracks.

Roger Deakins' cinematography and film-processing is excellent, giving the film the required atmosphere and aging look.

And of course, Michael Radford, who also made the adaption, directed the movie flawlessly.

Well, if you read this review up to here, you understand how good I think the movie and novel are. I can't recommend them enough. But be warned - both are extremely depressing and require a lot of thinking. Oh, don't read it in any language other than English!

One last word - the rip itself is quite poor. It's from a bad VHS with Danish subtitles (I'm not kidding...) and the quality in the last few minutes is horrible (picture jumps, audio is slowed down). But since this is the only rip that currently exist on eDonkey, it's better than not having the movie at all.

You can find some images and audio-clips from the movie on newspeakdictionary.com.

DK's rating: 10/10

Buy the VHS
Buy the novel
Review of Dominic Muldowney's score
Buy the Eurythmics' song soundtrack

Download VHS rip, English with Danish subtitles (bad quality)

US Release Date for Spider

"Bad" news, people. You'll have to be quite patient until you actually see Spider: The US release date is 25 December 2002 in LA and NY, and will expand wider in 2003... a long wait. Sony Pictures Classics has picked the movie for distribution, with plans to release it on Christmas - perhaps to attract award considerations (Cronenberg at the Oscars, anyone?)

We can only hope that the Europen release won't lag too much behind France and UK (November).

On the good side, IMDB's rating for the movie currently stands at 8.8/10, based on 27 votes, and other sources give good reviews too. Therefore, there's much to look forward to. Can you wait?

Poll Mixup

Sorry about that, but for the first time, there was a mistake in the poll, which caused the results to get mixed (that explains some of the unexpected numbers

). Here are the correct results:

5 votes for Jennifer Connelly
5 votes for Sarah Polley
4 votes for Milla Jovovich
1 votes for Uma Thurman
1 votes for Mia Sara
1 votes for Juliette Lewis
0 votes for Alicia Silverstone
0 votes for Robin Wright-Penn
0 votes for Phoebe Cates
0 votes for Christina Ricci
17 votes in total

P.S.: Thanks to the idiot who voted 20 times for the same name. If you haven't done that, I would never have noticed the mistake on the poll . Don't forget to read the June 14 message.

Site Statistics
Some statistics about the site and its visitors: • The site contains 733 files, weighing 10.8MB. • It had 76 polls so far. • It had visitors from at least 37 countries. • It currently has about 19 unique visitors daily. • Most of the known (that also means excluding US) visitors are from (in order, from left to right): As always, you can take a look at the News Archive (link is at the bottom of this page) to see the site's history.

News Archive - July 2002