Online piracy of movies at sites such as Peakvid.com And, In A Related Story...
This is too good -- you'd think I had made it up. The star of the new James Bond movie "Casino Royale", Daniel Craig, was offered an illegal copy of the 'Casino' DVD while in a Beijing market. Stay tuned... THR Digital Spy
Ropeofsilicon has "The Simpsons Movie" clip. But, wait! There's more! Yes! More! They also have 10 clips from "Casino Royale"! That's right! 10 clips!
Fur 
As reported last week on The Reeler, there's been a lot of weirdness surrounding director Steven Shainberg's latest film Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, which opens today in New York. There's lead actress Nicole Kidman absent at her own premiere, Robert Downey Jr. covered in hair, a combustible exchange or 10 between Shainberg and his critics, and God knows what else I'm missing. But set all of that aside for a second and just consider the film, which is actually a well-made little fairy tale about Arbus' transition from loyal housewife and her husband's photography assistant to being a internationally acclaimed photographer in her own right. It has its narrative flaws, agreed, but it also wields its titular imagination in wildly revealing and magnanimous ways, and should be considered on its own terms rather than those demanding a Behind-the-Musicesque concession to bloodless melodrama.
But enough of me: I asked Shainberg about where Fur came from, where he tried to take it and what he makes of the reaction it has received since its festival roll-out late last summer. It's an intriguing listen.
November 13, 2006
Mel Gibson's new movie, Apocalypto, opens on December 8.
The film is performed entirely in a Mayan dialect and has not stars. So its distributor, Walt Disney Company, faces quite a marketing challenge.
Gibson is hoping to generate support for his project through a grass-roots movement among Latino audiences.
As far as Bond's erotic life goes, the movie retains one important element from Fleming's 1953 novel: Bond gets tortured - in the nude! - by Le Chiffre, who whips his scrotum with knotted rope after commenting that he has "looked after his body". It's a gamey scene that has caused generations of Bond readers to nurse and then uneasily suppress certain wonderings about the nature of 007's fanbase. These wonderings will not, I have to say, be quashed by Daniel Craig's pert swimming costume. But Craig strikes some very erotic sparks from Vesper Lynd, with some loaded bantering over dinner in a first-class railway compartment, and finally, from him, a dead-straight passionate declaration of love. Sweetly, Bond doesn't have sex with anyone else in the film. Vesper is to break his heart, though, and the movie cleverly shows that all Bond's mannerisms and steely reserve grow from this prehistory of doomed romance.
It is all ridiculously enjoyable, because the smirking and the quips and the gadgets have been cut back - and the emotion and wholesome sado-masochism have been pumped up.
I was one of those at the London screening of Casino Royale last Friday and can confirm that Daniel Craig does indeed prove the sceptics wrong. Credit to the filmmakers for going back to basics with the Bond character whilst crafting an entertaining action thriller.
