21 March

King Kong (2005) Wraps

Filming of Peter Jackson's new movie, the remake of King Kong, has finished. Post-production will start within a couple of weeks. If you haven't visited it yet, the site Kong is King gives a production diary straight from the set, showing and interviewing the cast and crew and giving a very close look at the different aspects of the movie making. Highly recommended.

The Fountain (2005) Wraps

Less than a month ago, filming of Darren Aronofsky's new movie, The Fountain wrapped. On the right you can find 2 new photos. The first one shows Hugh Jackman in the movie and the second is taken from a swimming pool that was turned into a set for one week. Click to see full size.

15 March

Howard Shore Keeps Busy

Composer Howard Shore is currently working on an opera version of David Croneberg's The Fly. The opera is planned for a 2007 premiere in Los Angeles. In addition to composing the score to A History of Violence, Shore is also busy composing for Peter Jackson's upcoming movie - the remake of the classic King Kong. The movie will be released in December. You can read two recent interviews with Howard Shore here: Conversation with Martin Scorsese and Howard Shore Composer Howard Shore Working on Opera

More Updates about The Fly SE DVD

Here are some more updates about The Fly Special-Edition DVD, currently in the making. The following comes directly from the man in charge of this project - DVD producer David Prior: Quick clarification regarding the transfer: As I suspected, neither Cronenberg nor Mark Irwin had seen the new HD transfer Fox had done for the previous DVD release. Cronenberg's completely justified objections to the transfer were aimed at the earlier VHS releases. Screenings were set up for both of them and they both approved the current transfer with no changes, so that's what will be on our Special Edition. All that existed of reel 8B (the monkey-cat sequence) was a dirty dupe of the cut workpicture, presumably created for the screening. As a dupe, there were no edge numbers and the cut workpicture is lost. The image was pretty ugly so we've gone back into the boxes of o-neg and telecined the takes that were used (which we had to figure out by seeing which takes were missing from the dialies rolls) and conformed it to the dupe by eye. I'm actually still doing that now and believe me, it's worse than it sounds. The other problem was the audio. The dupe reel had a mixed mono track that included very crude sound effects and temp music that a) would be too costly to clear for release and b) frankly didn't work very well and didn't fit the tone of the film. I re-scored it with Howard Shore's music (which Cronenberg thought worked very well, by the way), but then that also meant re-building the entire soundtrack from scratch. I had Fox send me a DME so I could isolate things like the telepod sounds and computer display noises, and the rest is just a lot of laborious sound editing. It's an enormous amount of work, but in the end it will look and sound better than it ever did. The monkey-cat lives.

Double Happy Birthday!

Happy Birthday to David Cronenberg for his 62nd birthday and for another year of creativity. We are all looking forward to the release of A History of Violence and see what is next for you. And another Happy Birthday goes to The Plasma Pool itself, which is already 3 years old. While most of the other Cronenberg sites were almost frozen in the past year, I try to keep this site up and updated for your enjoyment. I still keep Cronenberg as the main focus, but also devote a lot of effort to movies and cinema in general. Recently I try to "spice" it up a bit with some more subjects that I find interesting (the audio and video clips) and soon I'll add a small art section. I hope you keep enjoying visiting the site. DK.

7 March

DK's Commentary for The Machinist (2004)

As a token of my appreciation to The Machinist, which I consider to be the best movie made in 2004, I recorded my own commentary track for it. The Machinist (2004) - Fan Commentary Track by DonkeyKong Format: mp3, 96kbps CBR, Stereo Language: English Running Time: 1:37:19 (intended for the DVD that runs at 25 fps) Size: 67MB This is the second commentary that I'm recording, after The Fly (which you can find in the specials section). I did it in one take and what you hear is the very first try. Bare in mind that making a commentary is harder than it seems - it's not easy to concentrate on all the details (including prepared stuff) and talking (in a non-native language, I might add) while focusing on the movie. I hope you enjoy it. DK.