Alternative Film Guide

Bob Fosse’s 1979 Best Picture nominee All That Jazz will be the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences‘ next film in the "Great To Be Nominated" series on Monday, May 7, at 7:30 p.m. in the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills.
Several members of the cast and crew, including actors Deborah Geffner, John [...]

Colleen Moore can’t believe her ears. Her Wild Oat has been found and restored.
Photos are courtesy of the Joseph Yranski Collection ©
Last March 29, I went to an Academy-sponsored Hollywood screening of the long-thought-lost 1927 Colleen Moore vehicle Her Wild Oat. This formulaic — working-class girl gets handsome prince charming — but agreeable [...]

The New York Public Library’s Donnell Media Center is presenting The Two Faces of Wakefield Poole on Sat., April 28, at 2:30 p.m.
Wakefield Poole began his career in Salisbury, N.C., where he was a professional dancer with the Ballets Russes. He later became a Broadway chorus dancer, appearing in such hit shows as Finian’s Rainbow [...]

Via the ABC News blog The Blotter:
Anna Schecter reports that the case of the missing ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz may be coming to a close.
The ruby slippers were stolen from the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minn., (that’s Garland’s hometown) in Aug. 27, 2005. The thief is [...]

Marcus Tucker in Shadow Waltz:
“More than likely you have seen Nancy Carroll’s face but very seldomly any of her films. Nancy Carroll was one of the biggest box office attractions in the early 1930’s and probably the first woman whose career benefited from talking pictures. But her reputation as a hellcat helped bring what is [...]

Also at the 50th San Francisco International Film Festival, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival organizers will screen three silent films:

A restored print of The Iron Mask (April 28), Allan Dwan’s 1929 Three Musketeers swashbuckler, notable as Douglas Fairbanks’s last silent film;

Victor Sjöström’s (aka Victor Seastrom) 1921 classic Körkarlen / The Phantom Carriage (April 27), [...]

The 50th San Francisco International Film Festival — according to its organizers, the first such event in the Americas to turn 50 — will take place between April 26 - May 6, 2007.
Among the scheduled films are:

On opening night, Emanuele Crialese’s Nuovomondo / Golden Door (above), Italy’s submission for this year’s best foreign-language film Academy [...]

The Los Angeles Conservancy will present the 21st Annual Last Remaining Seats series every Wednesday at 8 p.m. from May 23 — June 27, 2007. The series is held at historic movie palaces in the Los Angeles area — the precious few still in existence, that is.
This year, the following film classics will be screened:
North [...]

Vacancy (2007)
Director: Nimród Antal. Screenplay: Mark L. Smith. Cast: Luke Wilson, Kate Beckinsale, Frank Whaley

Be sure to double-check the amenities before checking into Vacancy, because what may sound like your average gory thriller in which psychopaths butcher helpless victims is in fact quite a different experience.
Vacancy first introduces us to David (Luke Wilson) [...]

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has been reluctant to add another award category to its already long list — not to mention its four-hour-plus telecast — but the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) has apparently found a way to honor stuntmen and women without adding many — perhaps without adding any — minutes [...]

Alan Riding in “A Role About Winter for Julie Christie, a Star in Eternal Spring” in the New York Times:
“For moviegoers who fell for Julie Christie in the 1960s (and they were legion), she will always be the tousle-haired blonde with the dazzling smile who lit up the screen in Darling, Doctor Zhivago and Far [...]

Director Shane Meadows in “An 18 for This is England? This is an outrage” in The Guardian’s film blog:
“It’s almost two years since we started shooting This is England and at last the film is nearly out, hitting cinemas here this weekend. I suppose it’s my most personal film to date as the main character, [...]

Hot Fuzz (2007)
Director: Edgar Wright. Screenplay: Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg. Cast: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost

By Franck Tabouring
If you are seeking an uproarious and explosive action comedy, Hot Fuzz is your pick of the week. Directed by Edgar Wright, and written by Wright and Simon Pegg, who brought us the hilarious 2004 [...]

The two top nominees for the 61st Nastri d’Argento Italian Cinema Awards presented by the National Union of Italian Film Journalists (Sindacato Nazionale Giornalisti Cinematografici Italiani) are Giuseppe Tornatore’s suspense drama La Sconosciuta / The Unknown Woman (above, lower photo) and Nanni Moretti’s anarchic political satire Il Caimano / The Caiman (above, upper photo), each [...]

61st Nastri d’Argento Italian Cinema Awards - 2006-2007
The 61st Nastri d’Argento (Silver Ribbons) were presented by the Sindacato Nazionale Giornalisti Cinematografici Italiani (National Union of Italian Film Journalists) to Italian films — or, at times, to Italian talent in foreign films — released between Jan. 1, 2006, and March 31, 2007.
The 61st Nastri d’Argento Italian [...]

W.C. Fields’s co-stars, friends, and family members will talk about the comedian on Friday, May 11, at 7:30 p.m. at the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills. The discussion will be followed by a screening of a new print of Fields’ 1934 comedy The Old Fashioned Way. The event will be hosted by film [...]

A remake of Alexander Hall’s much superior 1941 supernatural romantic comedy Here Comes Mr. Jordan, Warren Beatty and Buck Henry’s 1978 Best Picture nominee Heaven Can Wait will be screened as the next feature of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences‘ "Great To Be Nominated" series.
Heaven Can Wait will screen on Monday, April [...]

Pathfinder (2007) NO STARS
Director: Marcus Nispel. Screenplay: Laeta Kalogridis, from Nils Gaup’s screenplay for the 1987 film Ofelas / Pathfinder. Cast: Karl Urban, Russell Means, Moon Bloodgood, Jay Tavare

One man with a big sword challenges a horde of ruthless butchers in Pathfinder, a movie undermined by an excessive amount of gruesome slaughter and [...]

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958)
Director: Nathan Juran. Screenplay: Ken Kolb. Cast: Kerwin Mathews, Kathryn Grant, Richard Eyer, Torin Thatcher

By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica
Perhaps I was five or six when I first snuck into one of the cheapo movie theaters off of Myrtle Ave., in Queens, to see The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958). Or [...]

On Saturday, April 28, the Academy’s Science and Technology Council will launch its “Sound, Camera, Action!” series at the Linwood Dunn Theater with a screening of John Frankenheimer’s 1966 all-star racing-car melodrama Grand Prix.
“Sound, Camera, Action!” will highlight eight commercially successful films from the past four decades that have earned Academy recognition for sound. “While [...]

Two acclaimed documentary features, David LaChapelle’s Rize (above) and Jeff Zimbalist and Matt Mochary’s Favela Rising, will be screened on Wednesday, May 9, as the next installment in the 2006–2007 Contemporary Documentaries series, presented by the Academy Foundation of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the UCLA Film & Television Archive. The [...]

Tomorrow, April 18, the Toronto International Film Festival for Children will screen Don McBrearty’s Canadian drama Luna: Spirit of the Whale.
Written by Elizabeth Stewart — whose screenplay was “inspired by real events” — Luna: Spirit of the Whale shows “how the plight of an orphaned orca impacts the lives of a man and a boy [...]

Danielle Darrieux in Nouvelle Chance
According to their press release, the French-language cable channel TV5Monde USA will be the only TV channel in the U.S. to air live coverage of the opening and closing ceremonies at the 60th Cannes Film Festival. Additionally, Didier Allouch, the Los Angeles-based film correspondent for Canal Plus, will be reporting from [...]

Slow Burn (2007)
Director: Wayne Beach. Screenplay: Wayne Beach, from a story by Beach and Anthony Walton. Cast: Ray Liotta, LL Cool J, Mekhi Phifer, Jolene Blalock, Chiwetel Ejiofor

By Franck Tabouring
Filmed in 2003 but kept on the shelf until now, Slow Burn smells a lot like a flimsy version of The Usual Suspects. While [...]

Are We Done Yet? (2007) NO STARS
Director: Steve Carr. Screenplay: Hank Nelken, from Melvin Frank and Norman Panama’s screenplay for Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, which was based on a novel by Eric Hodgins. Cast: Ice Cube, Nia Long, John C. McGinley, Aleisha Allen, Philip Bolden
 

Desperate to save Are We Done Yet? from [...]