Yesterday’s announcement that Jason Lee had been added to cast of Kevin Smith’s currently in production comedy A Couple Of Dicks turns out to be not the last such announcement.

Variety is reporting that Buffy, The Vampire Slayer and Gossip Girl star Michelle Trachtenberg has been added to the cast as star Bruce Willis’s daughter and Jason Lee’s step-daughter.

Comic Jim Norton has confirmed via Twitter that he has filmed a small role for the film as well. Norton is a cast member of the XM Satellite Radio show “The Opie And Anthony Show,” on which Smith has appeared several times.

A Couple Of Dicks is still filming in New York City and is scheduled to hit cinemas on February 26, 2010.

Via SlashFilm.

Hot on the heels of them expanding the Best Picture nominees to 10 nominees, AMPAS has instilled another change to their nominating procedures. This time, the focus is on Best Original Song. But, instead of expanding the list of nominees, we could be seeing the end of Best Original Song as a regular Oscar category.

The new rules, according to Billboard.biz and as reported by RollingStone.com, deal with the way song nominees are selected. Academy members rate each possible song on a scale from 6 to 10. In previous years, a song had to have an average score of 8.50 to be considered for nomination. Under the new rules, a song must only average 8.25.

While this might seem like an opportunity to open up the field to more songs, it’s not. The old rules stated that there must be at the very least 3 nominees per year (with a maximum of 5) regardless of the average score. Now, if no songs average 8.25, none will be nominated. Therefore, there is the very real possibility that some years there will be no Best Original Song category in the ceremony.

I’m sure no tears will be shed by the Academy over not having a Best Original Song category. That particular Oscar has been a problematic one for the Academy. It is usually the most time consuming category, being that each nominee usually gets at least a perfunctory performance on the show, adding to the length of the telecast each year. Since the length of the broadcast is an annual complaint, and having no Best Original Song nominees could cut around a half hour from the show, this could be seen as a good thing for the Academy.

Also, the Academy regularly receives criticism for the performances themselves. Most notably, from their habit of replacing the original performer of the nominated song with one they consider more ratings friendly. This is exemplified by the now legendary 1985 telecast where Ann Reinking gave her rather unique interpretation of “Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now)” while the songs writer and performer, Phil Collins, watched on from the audience in horror. Of course, this will not be a problem if the category takes a hiatus.

Yet, in a confusing addendum, if only one song in a given year receives an average of 8.25, the the next highest rated song will also be nominated to give the air of competition. Which kind of defeats the purpose of the rule change if you ask me.

If you felt that director Sam Raimi was too restrained with the gallons of fake blood he splashed through his classic horror comedy Evil Dead 2, you may find Vampire Girl Vs Frankenstein Girl to be more to your liking. As goofy as its camp title suggests, directors Yoshihiro Nishimura and Naoyuki Tomomatsu’s film is a manic and blood-drenched satire on school-girl crushes and high school cliques. But within the over-the-top excess, they still manage to surprise with a couple of well executed scares and a couple of moments that make you cringe. Sure it’s low budget, but that doesn’t mean it cheaps out on fun.

Mizushima is just an average student at Tokyo High, who catches the eye of new girl Monami. This does not go over well with Mizushima’s somewhat pushy girlfriend Keiko, who really sees red when Monami gives Mizushima a box of chocolates for Valentine’s Day. Mizushima also sees red, but it’s because the chocolates are filled with blood. Specifically, Monami’s blood. And since she is a vampire, Mizushima starts to fall under her thrall after eating one of the chocolates. Keiko isn’t going to take this lying down and turns to her mad-scientist father for help, who promptly turns her into a fighting machine to get her boyfriend back using the body parts of various classmates. Keiko and Monami clash in a battle for the ages that ranges from the school gym to the sides of Tokyo Tower.

Think of this as Twilight filtered through a crazed, splatter punk filter without all the moping.

A majority of the film’s effect work may not be completely convincing, but that really isn’t the point here. The over-the-topness is what it is all about, laughter evoked from the audacity of it all. This is definitely the type of film you want to watch with a group of friends, possibly with a few choice liquid stimulants to help lubricate the experience.

A note about Ganguro Girls – When the Japanese embrace an aspect of pop culture, they do so with an almost aggressive whole-heartedness that can appear obsessive to westerners, and Gangura Girls are an example of this. Fans of US hip-hop, they not only dress like the rap artists they see in music videos, they actually apply makeup to darken their skin. Nishimura and Tomomatsu satirize this trend by exaggerating these girls’ mimicry to include lip implants and ear jewelry. To US viewers, though, it makes decoding these characters a little tougher. Anyone familiar with the racial implications of blackface entertainers from the days of vaudeville would be tempted to read this as Nishimura and Tomomatsu commenting that Gangura Girls are actually cluelessly racist for showing their love for hip-hop in this manner. But I don’t think so. I think Nishimura and Tomomatsu are just mocking them by taking their actions to an exaggerated extreme. Given the comedy through extremism that is pervasive throughout the film, I don’t think that the directors have any deeper intention beyond pointing a finger and laughing at something they regard as silly.

It just doesn’t really feel like a Kevin Smith movie until he casts one of the group of actors who routinely show up in his comedies. And now his latest film, the crime comedy A Couple Of Dicks, really is starting to feel like a Kevin Smith the addition of actor Jason Lee to the cast.

Smith made the announcement yesterday during an appearance  on Kevin Pollack’s internet Chat Show. As Pollack is also a cast member in Dicks, Smith was probably an easy get for the show.

Smith gave Lee his first major acting role in the writer/director’s sophomore film Mallrats. Although the film received a poor reception from the critics, it has grown in estimation among Smith’s fans in large part due to Lee’s performance. Lee has appearaed in every Smith film ince, with the exception of last year’s Zack And Miri Make A Porno.

Dicks marks the first time that Smith is not directing from his own script, instead working from a screenplay by Robb and Marc Cullen. Currently shooting New York City, the film stars Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan as two veteran police detectives who, while tracking down a stolen 1952, mint-condition baseball card, become involved with a sport-memoribilia crazed crime boss. Adam Brody, Ana de la Reguera and Sean William Scott round out the cast.

A Couple Of Dicks is set to hit theaters on February 26, 2010.

It looks like some legal action will stop what the outcry of thousands of Asian film fans could not- the proposed English language remake of Korean director Park Chan-Wook’s 2003 classic Oldboy. The film was set to

The film, the middle installment of the director’s thematic trilogy examining revenge, was adapted from a manga created by Nobuaki Minegishi and Garon Tsuchiya. The manga’s publisher, Futabasha has filed suit against Show East, the production company that financed Oldboy, claiming that the Korean company did not have the right to sell the film’s remake rights.

Show East has had no response to this, because they have apparently shut down due to bankruptcy, and their CEO, Kim Dong-Ju has gone missing. Big Egg, who co-produced the film with Show East, have also closed down. However, Rueters is reporting that it was actually Cineclick Asia who negotiated the remake rights deal between Show East and Universal Studios, though they are not named in the suit.

For their part, Futabasha doesn’t really believe that Show East is broke, having initiated legal proceedings last week. “”We haven’t been able to confirm that Show East is bankrupt, and at this stage we’re not sure what effect this will have on the legal case,” said a Futabasha spokesperson in Tokyo.

As of right now, Universal and Dreamworks has no official statement on the lawsuit, and I wouldn’t be surprised if all development on the project has been halted until the suit is setteled. Back at the beginning of the year, the release of Watchmen was almost scutteled when 20th Century Fox filed suit against the comic book adaptation’s producers Warner Brothers, claiming that they, Fox, still owned the rights to distribute such any film created from the graphic novel. If an agreement hadn’t been reached, Warners could have concievably been out the film’s $130 million dollar budget. It would be wise for them to hold off until the legal dust overseas has setteled,

When it was first announced that Spielberg and Smith were looking at remaking the film, fans of the film were, to put it mildly, not enthused. The film, in which a man is kidnapped and kept locked in a cell for 15 years with no explanation before being just as suddenly released, is a dark story and features a plot point at the end that no Hollywood film would ever dare try to replicate. (I won’t reveal it here, but instead encourage you to seek out the film on DVD.) Spielberg has stated that his and Smith’s version of the film would be more faithful to the original manga, which didn’t incorperate the climactic, shocking plot point. As the finale is what really drives the film’s overall impact, both on a thematic and very visceral, viewing experince level, it seems odd that one would choose to not use it. But then again, it is such a shocking element, I can see where Spielberg and Smith would not want to harm their relatively squeeky-clean public images with it.

If you’re like me, you probably hate when people ask you to compile a list of your top ten favorite movies. If you’ve seen a good number of a wide variety of films, your Top Ten list is probably fairly fluid, constantly fluctuating, seemingly dependent on whatever mood you may happen to be in when asked to compile your list.

The new website Flickchart, though, is looking to help you compile the ultimate list of films you like.

The premise is simple. The site presents you with two films and you pick the one you like more. If you haven’t seen either one or both, you click on a button and a new choice is presented. As you go begin to vote more and more, the site analyzes your results, compiling a list of what should be your all time favorite films. And remember, you’re voting on which film you liked more, not which is the better film. There are a number of films that I like, even though I know that they are flawed. My Top Ten list of Best Films would probably be very different from my favorite films.

Although many of the pairings are easy to vote on (12 Monkeys vs Aliens Vs. Predators is no contest), but some of them can really force you to think. Although they’re two radically different films, I like both Boogie Nights and Sin City and having to choose between them took more than a quick gut check. Ultimately, what makes some of the decisions hard comes down to when you first saw a film. I liked both Beetlejuice and Wall-E, but there is two decades separating when I first saw each one. When faced with realizations such as this, you start think about how the process of how you may have evaluated films has changed over time.

While the site is still in beta testing, you’ll need an invitation to sign up. If you can’t score an invite, the folks over at Cinematical have a link to sign up without one.

I will have to admit that I don’t quite understand how the site compares the results for the rankings. Currently, Army Of Darkness is at my number one spot, based on one vote, yet Once Upon A Time In America is at number 2, based on winning eight votes. At one point, Blade Runner was number three on my rankings list after voting for it a couple of times. Yet, when I choose The Sting over it, the first time that The Sting had appeared to be ranked, Blade Runner dropped down to fourth place and The Sting moved in to Blade Runner‘s number three spot. How does The Sting‘s one win outweigh Blade Runner‘s multiple wins?

I would also like to see more foreign language films tossed into the mix. (Especially in light of the number of foreign language movie posters that I’ve seen.) Out of the first 150 rankings I did, I only was asked about two non-English language films- Run Lola Run and Amores Perros. The same goes for films produced before the mid-1970s, with Casablanca and Citizen Kane being the only two films that one could consider a classic from Hollywood’s golden era.

Now granted the site’s faq does state that they start new users off with more popular films before filtering into the mix more obscure films. But many of the titles I’ve voted for probably wouldn’t even make it into my Top 200 list over older films like The Maltese Falcon, Forbidden Planet, The Thin Man or anything by the Marx Brothers or foreign fare like the original Godzilla or many of the films of Hayao Miyazaki or John Woo. After 300 pairings, I have started to see a few more classic films – Citizen Kane and Some Like It Hot – but no additional foreign fare.

Now, since these rankings are ultimately the product of the aggregate data, it stands to reason that the more you vote of pairs of films, the more statistically correct the ultimate list will be. That is certainly the site’s hook, that you’ll keep coming back to try and refine your list. Will that be enough for Flickchart to survive on? We will see…

Michael Jackson passed away Thursday, June 25, 2009 in Los Angeles, California from an apparent cardiac arrest. He was 50 years old.

Known primarily as a music superstar of global proportions, the world of film has played a role in his life and career.

His first major, post-Jackson 5 project was a co-starring role in the 1978 film, The Wiz. He played The Scarecrow in the adaptation of the Broadway musical. His role in the film created an identity for him as a solo artist and gave him a bit of separation from his famous siblings.

Jackson rose to superstardom after the release of his 1982 album, Thriller, and this rise correlated with the rise of the music video. Jackson was one of the first stars to embrace this means of promotion, and often worked with big-name Hollywood directors on his videos.

The most famous pairing might be with John Landis on the video for the title track off his breakthrough album, “Thriller.” Clocking in at 13 minutes, it was more movie than video and is remembered even today as one of the landmark examples of the early days of music video.

Jackson would reteam with Landis for the video for “Black and White”. He would also team with Martin Scorsese for the video for “Bad,” Spike Lee on “They Don’t Care About Us,” and John Singleton on “Remember the Time.”

Although we first ran this review when Surveillance screened at the Philadelphia Film Festival, we’re reposting it for the beginning of its theatrical run.

At first glance, it would be easy to draw parallels between director Jennifer Lynch’s film Surveillance and her father David Lynch’s magnum opus television series and film spinoff Twin Peaks. In both you have FBI agents, in this case Bill Pullman and Julia Ormand, arriving in a small town protected by quirky police officers to investigate the latest in a series of serial killings, a case which they may know more about than they initially let on. But as Lynch’s two agents interrogate the three survivors of the killer’s most recent attacks, it is slowly revealed that these are definitely not her father’s FBI agents.

Arriving at an unnamed, sleepy Santa Fe desert town’s police station, Agents Hallaway (Pullman) and Anderson (Ormand) almost immediately set the local constabulary, led by always reliable character actor Michael Ironside, on edge. They aren’t happy that their investigation is being taken over by outsiders, especially when one of their own happens to be one of the killers’ victims. Placed into three separate rooms, the three survivors of a roadside attack by the killers each give their version of what happened. But the various pieces of the puzzle they supply start to reveal a far more disturbing picture than first presumed.

While the film’s script ensemble actor orientation doesn’t seem to give any character a star turn over the others, Pullman’s work as the twitchy, slightly off-kilter Agent Hallaway, stands out. It is an interesting and subtle performance, far distanced from his normal leading man work. As he observes and directs the three different interrogations via video, he slowly becomes more unnerved, as if the testimony were affected him on a deeper level than one would expect from a federal agent.

The cast also boasts two actors primarily known for their comedy work- French Stewart of the sitcom Third Rock From The Sun and Cheri Oteri, alumnus of Saturday Night Live. Stewart’s police deputy is a stronger, darker comedic character than audiences usually equate with the actor, which perhaps helps to amplify the shock one feels while watching him and his partner acting out thuggish little mind games with pulled over motorists. Oteri plays a typical mom, happy to be on vacation with her family and not about to let the boredom-fuelled antics of her two children in the backseat of the family station wagon ruin things. There’s not much to the role – the biggest acting moment comes when she is reacting in terror when the masked serial killers make their appearance – but she handles it well. It is a definite switch from the oft times antic characters she played on Saturday Night Live.

Narratively, Lynch has taken the now timeworn Rashomon structure of multiple viewpoints of an incident to create a whole picture and applied it to a psychological horror story. It’s a difficult juggling act to do, as you have to ensure that each viewpoint helps to increase and not undercut the mounting suspense, but Lynch manages to keep from dropping the balls. In fact, Lynch opens up a fourth avenue of mounting tension within the police station itself as the interrogations progress.

Interestingly, the film ends in thematically similar territory as does some of her father’s films, though Jennifer Lynch seems to have found herself there on her own. Perhaps the apple didn’t fall as far from the tree as one would first think.

It might be just me, but I think 300  is a fairly self-contained film. The adaptation of the Frank Miller graphic novel retelling the Battle of Thermopylae, where 300 Spartan soldiers faced off against Persian king Xerxes million man army, pretty much cover all there was to the event. But according to Zach Snyder, a sequel is well underway.

Miller, never one to pass up an opportunity to despoil his own legacy (Too harsh? He did give us The Dark Knight Strikes Back, you realize), is writing a comic sequel to his original graphic novel. So says Snyder, making the rounds to promote the Watchmen DVD and the 300 Blu-Ray releases.

It looks like the sequel will be broader in scope, showing what was going on in Athens and on the Aegean while the events of the first movie took place.

Once the graphic novel is completed, Snyder presumably will helm the film adaptation, using the same green screen process he used on the first film.

1. My Sister’s Keeper (Warner Brothers, 2,606 Theaters, 109 Minutes, Rated PG-13): For those of you still reeling from the deaths of all those famous people in the past few days/weeks, here’s something to get your mind off things–a film about kids with cancer! Yay! Fun!

But, wait! It gets worse! The trailers make this out to be a heartwarming story of a whole family that comes together when one of the children of the family gets cancer. As anyone who has read the novel the film is based on knows that is not the plot.

What this film is really about is a second child, born to a perfect genetic match for the older, cancer stricken one, who balks at being an organ donor for her sister when the older sibling’s kidney fails. The younger sibling, played by Abigail Breslin, sues for the right to choose what to do with her own body. Takes the film from maudlin to gut wrenching, doesn’t it?

I wonder how many patrons will walk out of the theater after seeing this, thinking a bait and switch was done on them?