February 10th, 2009
Writer Ron Rosenbaum, who has written extensively about Nazi Germany, called the Best Picture nominee THE READER “the worst Holocaust movie ever made”…
“The fact that it was recently nominated for a best picture Oscar offers stunning proof that Hollywood seems to believe that if it’s a “Holocaust film,” it must be worthy of approbation, end of story. And so a film that asks us to empathize with an unrepentant mass murderer and intimates that “ordinary Germans” were ignorant of the extermination until after the war, now stands a good chance of getting a golden statuette.”
Read his essay at Slate.com here.
February 10th, 2009
Over at his Web site, artist Lebbeus Woods posts some drawings he made back in 1990 for a never-filmed version of ALIEN 3. That movie eventually became notorious as (Oscar nominee) David Fincher’s debut film, which was taken from him by the studio and re-edited, then released to a largely appathetic audience. The version Woods worked on would’ve shared some similarities — the plot still involved a religious colony, for one thing — but according to Woods, “the story of the (director Vincent) Ward movie was radically different.”
 If you’re a fan of ALIEN 3, ALIEN movies in general or just fascinating conceptual art, check out Woods’ work here.
And, as Woods stresses (to avoid any legal hassles), “The drawings made by me that I reproduce with this post, and their copyrights, are the property of the Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation; I reproduce them here under my rights of fair use, for educational purposes only; copying or reproducing the images of these drawings for any commercial purposes, without the explicit permission of Twentieth Century Fox is strictly forbidden by law.”
