Remember that GHOSTBUSTERS movie from 1954?

2 comments July 30th, 2009

Here, courtesy of Cinematical, is a very imaginative fake trailer for the (never made) version of GHOSTBUSTERS from 1954. It’s a very clever collection of well-chosen clips featuring Bob Hope (in the Bill Murray role), Dean Martin (ala Dan Aykroyd) and Fred MacMurray (ala Harold Ramis).

If they really had made a GHOSTBUSTERS way back then, it probably would’ve looked almost exactly like this…

THE FANTASTIC MR. FOX trailer

2 comments July 30th, 2009

Today must be the day for eagerly anticipated trailers of movies by my favorite directors. Earlier, I posted the preview of the Coen Brothers’ A SERIOUS MAN, and now here’s the preview for Wes Anderson’s stop-motion animated epic, THE FANTASTIC MR. FOX…

I really like the low-tech, storybook feel of the thing. It’s a refreshing change from all the slicker-than-slick computer animated films out there. (In a few scenes, I think I can detect the fur moving from the animators touching it, ala the original KING KONG.) And George Clooney seems to have a voice made for animation — it has just the right bigger-than-life feeling.

What do you think?

Now here’s a bit of civic statuary I wholeheartedly support

Add comment July 30th, 2009

I had this same poster hanging over my bed in college. No kidding.

Juliet Wayne wants to see a statue in Philadelphia that honors a genuine local icon, and she makes a strong case. Here’s the beginning of her impassioned argument:

Philadelphia has a problem with its statuary: we build lavish monuments to to the wrong people while letting the right ones go unmarked. We have statues of people who polarized us (Frank Rizzo), who could have cared less about us (Charles Dickens) or who never existed (Rocky Balboa). Meanwhile, we overlook people who logged real time here and did great things.

This problem has a solution: put a big-ass statue of the title character from the movie ERASERHEAD, directed by former Philadelphia resident David Lynch, at the corner of 13th and Wood.

That’s where Lynch lived for several years in the 1970s as an unhappy undergraduate at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. But if you’ve seen any of his films, particularly ERASERHEAD, it is obvious that the city deeply inspired him, which he recalls through “vivid images—plastic curtains held together with Band-Aids, rags stuffed in broken windows, walking through the morgue en-route to a hamburger joint.”

I couldn’t agree more. In fact, if such a statue were erected, I would make a pilgrimage to Philadelphia to see it. Right there, that’s a couple of hundred tourist dollars in the city coffers.

Here’s the rest of Wayne’s essay, which has the straightforward title “David Lynch Must Be Honored in Philadelphia with a Giant Monument to the Guy From Eraserhead. For Real.

That guy, incidentally, was named “Henry.” He was played by the late Jack Nance, who also had roles in other Lynch projects, including TWIN PEAKS and BLUE VELVET.

New Coen Brothers trailer

1 comment July 30th, 2009

We haven’t heard much about the latest movie from Joel and Ethan Coen, A SERIOUS MAN. It makes its world debut in September at the Toronto Film Festival, then opens in theaters a month later.

But until then, we’ve got the trailer. And it’s strange. Wonderfully, maddeningly, gloriously strange. I’m not sure what the heck the movie is about (except for the bare-bones plot — “Jewish academi has academic and spiritual problems,” as the Onion says), but now I can’t wait to see it.