Let’s dream the crow black dream. I’m Niki Minter and this week on the Eric Draven files, we have The Crow: Stairway to Heaven. This is the first time we have a series that I feel lukewarm about. However, this is one that does have its fans and there’s a reason, aside from the upcoming reimagining, that we’re discussing it. This should be a fun time.
Okay, so, I caught Stairway on the Sci-Fi channel a few times here and there during its initial run. It caught my interest but never enough to start it from the beginning. What’s interesting about this is that it’s based on the 1994 movie adaptation which was pulled from James O’Barr’s original comic. Mark Dacascos would be the one and only person ever to fill the role once held by Brandon Lee. This is an interesting take, right?...
Okay, so, I caught Stairway on the Sci-Fi channel a few times here and there during its initial run. It caught my interest but never enough to start it from the beginning. What’s interesting about this is that it’s based on the 1994 movie adaptation which was pulled from James O’Barr’s original comic. Mark Dacascos would be the one and only person ever to fill the role once held by Brandon Lee. This is an interesting take, right?...
- 6/24/2024
- by Niki Minter
- JoBlo.com
Now that English Canada has made a real war drama (Passchendaele), Quebec will follow with a war drama of its own. In fact, La cité, Kim Nguyen's latest film, will hit Quebecker theatres on April 9, 2010.
The film takes place in 1885 in Algeria at a time when it was a French colony. Dr. Max Orswell (Jean-Marc Barr) just went through a war that lasted 8 years. Now that the war is over, he's to be taken to a port by a caravan, because he plans to go back to France. However, that caravan doesn't come. Besides, the village Max lives in is struck by a strange plague and is forced to be isolated.
This war drama was produced with a budget of $4.8 million Cdn and it's a co-production between Canada, Switzerland and Tunisia. Moreover, it was shot in Tunisia and Italy.
The movie also stars Claude Legault, Pierre Lebeau, Lotfi Abdelli,...
The film takes place in 1885 in Algeria at a time when it was a French colony. Dr. Max Orswell (Jean-Marc Barr) just went through a war that lasted 8 years. Now that the war is over, he's to be taken to a port by a caravan, because he plans to go back to France. However, that caravan doesn't come. Besides, the village Max lives in is struck by a strange plague and is forced to be isolated.
This war drama was produced with a budget of $4.8 million Cdn and it's a co-production between Canada, Switzerland and Tunisia. Moreover, it was shot in Tunisia and Italy.
The movie also stars Claude Legault, Pierre Lebeau, Lotfi Abdelli,...
- 3/30/2010
- by anhkhoido@hotmail.com (Anh Khoi Do)
- The Cultural Post
Film review: 'Battlefield Earth'
Published in the twilight of his career as a prolific science fiction writer, Lafayette Ronald Hubbard's 1982 novel "Battlefield Earth" was a best seller in that heady, post-"Star Wars" era of the genre. Published, fatefully, the same year that brought us Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner" -- which announced the next trend of dark and stylish films about the future -- Hubbard's James Michener-size book (1,050 pages) was first touted as a coming feature film at least 15 years ago.
Now starring John Travolta as 9-foot alien security officer Terl, stationed on a conquered Earth in the year 3000, Warner Bros.' "Battlefield Earth" is upon us, 14 years after the controversial and mysterious death of Church of Scientology founder Hubbard, two years after "Armageddon" grossed a bundle utilizing brutally fast cutting (with not many shots lasting longer than a few seconds) and one year after audiences flocked to "The Matrix", the studio's artfully inspired and masterfully distributed worldwide hit.
The weekend's most auspicious new wide release, "Battlefield" stands a good chance of posting big boxoffice numbers, but word-of-mouth and reviews will range from severely uncharitable to highly derisive to varying levels of fan appreciation. Heavyweight competitors later this month look to have greater leverage with audiences, and Scientology follower Travolta's dream project should drop out of the limelight quickly.
Laughable and poorly mounted in terms of coherent storytelling and compelling characters -- recalling such recent genre duds as "The Fifth Element", "The Postman", "Soldier", "Bicentennial Man" and "Mission to Mars" -- director Roger Christian's pricey epic does blast through its nearly two-hour running time and keeps one awake with its baffling excuse for a plot and ridiculously excessive or deliriously misconceived stylization.
Bearing some resemblance to Hubbard's book but missing the old-school sci-fi tone and pulp rhythms that the author refined over four-plus decades of work, "Battleship" is not a hip revision of the original like the Paul
Verhoeven-directed version of Robert A. Heinlein's "Starship Troopers". It's a flat-out mess, by golly, with massive narrative sinkholes, leading to moments of astounding disbelief in the muddled writing and shockingly chaotic mise en scene that's accompanied by ear-pummeling sound and bombastic music.
Originally wanting to play the human hero Jonnie Goodboy Tyler (Barry Pepper), longtime "Battlefield" fan Travolta opted to play Terl, and it's destined to be remembered as a career low point in many circles. From the trite barbarian look of the Psychlos -- with huge manes of hair, big heads, monster-claw hands and the habit of picking up pint-size humans and choking them like a combination of the Mummy and Bigfoot -- to Travolta's woefully unsuccessful attempt to strike terror into the viewer as the evil-eyed laughing villain, "Battlefield" on a fundamental level flops.
As with "Postman", this film assumes we're automatically accepting of any half-baked post-apocalyptic scenario as long as there are vistas of ruined cities and a stirring tale of raggedy humans banding together to combat the bad guys. In "Battlefield", the remnants of Denver, partially enclosed in a dome for the non-air-breathing Psychlos, is a heap of rubble and amazingly well-preserved artifacts of humanity, considering the aliens overpowered humanity in a matter of moments some 1,000 years earlier and our race has dwindled to a few lonely and unhealthy outposts near uranium deposits.
Uranium causes the atmosphere the Psychlos breathe to explode. This is an important fact to remember when the humans-turned-
miners led by Tyler launch a very successful mission to destroy every Psychlo in sight. Indeed, the fairly spectacular ending, involving the destruction of the dome and a ridiculously easy scheme to blow up the bad guys' home planet, is relatively a bonus, after the ungainly bulk of the movie.
Pepper ("Saving Private Ryan"), sporting long hair and nomad attire in a style best described as Vanilla Geronimo, is meant to embody the archetypal noble human -- resourceful, revengeful, able to outthink and outleverage the bureaucratic Psychlos. The actor is at the center of many scenes that make little or no sense -- Tyler is allowed to live after killing two Psychlos, set free, recaptured, almost executed, recaptured, set free, and on and on -- but in fairness, he's not the one to blame.
Likewise, Forest Whitaker ("Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai"), as Terl's sidekick, comic foil and eventual adversary, is just plain silly under mounds of makeup and nearly inert in Patrick Tatopoulos' uninspired biker-wrestler costume. Most of the other performers, as humans or Psychlos, barely inhabit characters that swirl around willy-nilly in this mangled version of Hubbard's scenario. Sabine Karsenti is wooden as Tyler's sweetheart Chrissie; Shaun Austin-Olsen is appropriately a dithering annoyance as the corpulent Planetship, Terl's boss; Michael MacRae plays a malevolent Psychlo district manager who condemns Terl to 50 more "cycles" on "disgusting" Earth.
As for subliminal messages in the widescreen imagery, one is more likely to get the giggles a lot over the performances, lines of dialogue and the excesses of genre vets Christian ("Nostradamus") and cinematographer Giles Nuttgens' visual scheme, which employs tilted camera angles and other tiresome tricks to try to jazz up this disastrously uneven project.
BATTLEFIELD EARTH
Warner Bros.
Morgan Creek Prods. and Franchise Pictures
A Franchise Pictures/Jonathan D. Krane/JTP Films production
Director: Roger Christian
Screenwriters: Corey Mandell, JD Shapiro
Based on the book by: L. Ron Hubbard
Producers: Elie Samaha, Jonathan D. Krane, John Travolta
Executive producers: Andrew Stevens, Ashok Amritraj, Don Carmody
Director of photography: Giles Nuttgens
Production and costume designer: Patrick Tatopoulos
Editor: Robin Russell
Music: Elia Cmiral
Visual effects supervisor: Erik Henry
Casting: Lynn Stalmaster
Color/stereo
Cast:
Terl: John Travolta
Jonnie Goodboy Tyler: Barry Pepper
Ker: Forest Whitaker
Carlo: Kim Coates
Robert the Fox: Richard Tyson
Chrissie: Sabine Karsenti
Planetship: Shaun Austin-Olsen
District manager Zete: Michael MacRae
Running time -- 116 minutes
MPAA rating: PG-13...
Now starring John Travolta as 9-foot alien security officer Terl, stationed on a conquered Earth in the year 3000, Warner Bros.' "Battlefield Earth" is upon us, 14 years after the controversial and mysterious death of Church of Scientology founder Hubbard, two years after "Armageddon" grossed a bundle utilizing brutally fast cutting (with not many shots lasting longer than a few seconds) and one year after audiences flocked to "The Matrix", the studio's artfully inspired and masterfully distributed worldwide hit.
The weekend's most auspicious new wide release, "Battlefield" stands a good chance of posting big boxoffice numbers, but word-of-mouth and reviews will range from severely uncharitable to highly derisive to varying levels of fan appreciation. Heavyweight competitors later this month look to have greater leverage with audiences, and Scientology follower Travolta's dream project should drop out of the limelight quickly.
Laughable and poorly mounted in terms of coherent storytelling and compelling characters -- recalling such recent genre duds as "The Fifth Element", "The Postman", "Soldier", "Bicentennial Man" and "Mission to Mars" -- director Roger Christian's pricey epic does blast through its nearly two-hour running time and keeps one awake with its baffling excuse for a plot and ridiculously excessive or deliriously misconceived stylization.
Bearing some resemblance to Hubbard's book but missing the old-school sci-fi tone and pulp rhythms that the author refined over four-plus decades of work, "Battleship" is not a hip revision of the original like the Paul
Verhoeven-directed version of Robert A. Heinlein's "Starship Troopers". It's a flat-out mess, by golly, with massive narrative sinkholes, leading to moments of astounding disbelief in the muddled writing and shockingly chaotic mise en scene that's accompanied by ear-pummeling sound and bombastic music.
Originally wanting to play the human hero Jonnie Goodboy Tyler (Barry Pepper), longtime "Battlefield" fan Travolta opted to play Terl, and it's destined to be remembered as a career low point in many circles. From the trite barbarian look of the Psychlos -- with huge manes of hair, big heads, monster-claw hands and the habit of picking up pint-size humans and choking them like a combination of the Mummy and Bigfoot -- to Travolta's woefully unsuccessful attempt to strike terror into the viewer as the evil-eyed laughing villain, "Battlefield" on a fundamental level flops.
As with "Postman", this film assumes we're automatically accepting of any half-baked post-apocalyptic scenario as long as there are vistas of ruined cities and a stirring tale of raggedy humans banding together to combat the bad guys. In "Battlefield", the remnants of Denver, partially enclosed in a dome for the non-air-breathing Psychlos, is a heap of rubble and amazingly well-preserved artifacts of humanity, considering the aliens overpowered humanity in a matter of moments some 1,000 years earlier and our race has dwindled to a few lonely and unhealthy outposts near uranium deposits.
Uranium causes the atmosphere the Psychlos breathe to explode. This is an important fact to remember when the humans-turned-
miners led by Tyler launch a very successful mission to destroy every Psychlo in sight. Indeed, the fairly spectacular ending, involving the destruction of the dome and a ridiculously easy scheme to blow up the bad guys' home planet, is relatively a bonus, after the ungainly bulk of the movie.
Pepper ("Saving Private Ryan"), sporting long hair and nomad attire in a style best described as Vanilla Geronimo, is meant to embody the archetypal noble human -- resourceful, revengeful, able to outthink and outleverage the bureaucratic Psychlos. The actor is at the center of many scenes that make little or no sense -- Tyler is allowed to live after killing two Psychlos, set free, recaptured, almost executed, recaptured, set free, and on and on -- but in fairness, he's not the one to blame.
Likewise, Forest Whitaker ("Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai"), as Terl's sidekick, comic foil and eventual adversary, is just plain silly under mounds of makeup and nearly inert in Patrick Tatopoulos' uninspired biker-wrestler costume. Most of the other performers, as humans or Psychlos, barely inhabit characters that swirl around willy-nilly in this mangled version of Hubbard's scenario. Sabine Karsenti is wooden as Tyler's sweetheart Chrissie; Shaun Austin-Olsen is appropriately a dithering annoyance as the corpulent Planetship, Terl's boss; Michael MacRae plays a malevolent Psychlo district manager who condemns Terl to 50 more "cycles" on "disgusting" Earth.
As for subliminal messages in the widescreen imagery, one is more likely to get the giggles a lot over the performances, lines of dialogue and the excesses of genre vets Christian ("Nostradamus") and cinematographer Giles Nuttgens' visual scheme, which employs tilted camera angles and other tiresome tricks to try to jazz up this disastrously uneven project.
BATTLEFIELD EARTH
Warner Bros.
Morgan Creek Prods. and Franchise Pictures
A Franchise Pictures/Jonathan D. Krane/JTP Films production
Director: Roger Christian
Screenwriters: Corey Mandell, JD Shapiro
Based on the book by: L. Ron Hubbard
Producers: Elie Samaha, Jonathan D. Krane, John Travolta
Executive producers: Andrew Stevens, Ashok Amritraj, Don Carmody
Director of photography: Giles Nuttgens
Production and costume designer: Patrick Tatopoulos
Editor: Robin Russell
Music: Elia Cmiral
Visual effects supervisor: Erik Henry
Casting: Lynn Stalmaster
Color/stereo
Cast:
Terl: John Travolta
Jonnie Goodboy Tyler: Barry Pepper
Ker: Forest Whitaker
Carlo: Kim Coates
Robert the Fox: Richard Tyson
Chrissie: Sabine Karsenti
Planetship: Shaun Austin-Olsen
District manager Zete: Michael MacRae
Running time -- 116 minutes
MPAA rating: PG-13...
- 5/12/2000
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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