Movie Minesweeper - The Dance X Versus Sing It Back Edition

- Sergio Leone's Dollars Trilogy Man with No Name is comics courtesy of Dynamite. How apt.

- As previously discussed, Andrew Davies has adapted Fanny Hill for the BBC. It will star Samantha Bond, Hugo Speer and Alison Steadman, the greatest of which is undoubtedly Steadman. She's a genius.

- A clip from I'm Not There is knocking around the wonderful world of YouTube. I saw the link at AintItCool.

- Aaron Eckhart is no fun.

- Nayo Wallace is now one of the Speed Racer crowd, playing Minx, Racer X's girlfriend.

- The Guardian have slammed AintItCool. Personally, I think Knowles' site has a lot of really strong points - and a whole lot of great contacts. So many people submit news bits to them first, how can they help but get the Lion's share of genuine scoops? Obviously, I think I'm doing a pretty good job here at film ick - why else would I bother? I'm getting about 1 hit for every 100,000 at AintItCool however. And to be honest, I'm not sure why I'm not doing a fair bit better.

- Naomi Watts and Clive Owen are the set leads for Tom Tykwer's The International. Oh, Tom Tykwer, Tom Tykwer. Sigh. What can I say about Tom Tykwer? The nearly-Nearly Man? I'm always, always disappointed by his films.

- Baz Luhrmann has answered public questions about Australia (the film, not the country).

- Ray Wise, Bru Muller and Brooke Nevin (I can vouch for one of them) have joined the cast of Infestation.

- Mandy Lane has been pulled from all American release schedules just a week before the expected bow because the theatrical rights have been flogged off by Dimension to Senator. While it shifts over to a new theatrical distributor, we'll be left waiting in confusion for the new date to be set.

- Josh Flitter is Ace Ventura Jr.

- Tartan are going Blu-Ray in the UK with Black Book, Oldboy and The Seventh Seal. It's the worldwide Blu-Ray debut for each.

- My Name is Bruce has proven unfeasibly popular.

- Angelica Huston will be popping up in Choke, as Sam Rockwell's character's mum.

And now I want my dinner. Yep - I eat.

Nikki Finke Slurs Oldboy

Nikki Finke has written a piece that not only notes a possibly spurious link between the Virginia Tech shootings and Chan Wook park's Oldboy but also lays into the film pretty squarely and with little or no real basis for argument. here she goes:

...the pic received amazingly good and even great reviews from critics in the U.S. and around the world who (for reasons that escape me) loved its unsettling and terrifying tale of revenge told with relentless energy. Wrote Carina Chocano of the Los Angeles Times: "It says something when you come out of a film as weird and fantastical as Oldboy and feel that you've experienced something truly authentic. I just don't know what. I can't think of anything to compare it to." Well, now we know to compare it to real life, don't we? I just don't understand how critics with even a shred of humanity keep supporting films that celebrate violence in all its awfulness. Makes me nauseous.

Now we know to compare it to real life? First of all, Nikki, surely we can compare almost all films to real life. Even Eraserhead - just to take one example - is cleary a film associated with real life. Indeed, Eraserhead is more closely linked to David Lynch's experiences with baby Jennifer than Oldboy is to the Virginia Tech shootings - and, yes, this is mainly because it is a film made to relate to this moment in life, and Oldboy was not made to relate to any massacre that hadn't happened yet but - this is the key part - the massacre was not made to relate to the already existing film either.

Was Cho Seung-Hui motivated in simply trying to live out Oldboy? Where's the evidence for that? Did he see images in Oldboy that he could use to indulge himself, to feed into his own power plays and fantasies? Well, maybe he did, it seems probable to me. But that's something a whole lot of people do every day, isn't it, with all kinds of sources, not just Oldboy? Indeed, The Bible wouldn't be one-half as well selling if people couldn't use it to fuel their fantasies and induglences. Remove the drama - and even non-dramatised documentary narratives - that can't be used in this way and... bookstores would be virtually empty, TV would have to go off of the air and cinema would disappear in a puff of smoke.

Motives can't be called upon exclusively to explain Cho Seung-Hui's actions. I'm motivated to pay my rent, put food on the table and keep the cinema tickets and DVDs rolling in - but I don't go out mugging old people to boost my coffers. Motive isn't enough when a moral line has to be crossed. The first person to even find a shred of real evidence that Oldboy, or any other film, can actually lead to a moral breakdown in a viewer wins everything I own, including my Chan Wook Park DVDs. Countless times it has been suggested that such evidence was uncovered... and then the investigation is revealed as flawed, biased, faulty or just plain irrelevant.

As I commented in the piece about Dark Matter a few days back, the world needs films that deal with difficult and painful human experience. Dark Matter may well be one such film, Oldboy certainly is. And it's a moral film, and a wise one, and, sure, it features people doing a lot of horrendous things but it doesn't conclude that these things should be done. Do I really have to bring up Macbeth, say, and the horrible things enacted in that most revered, canonised masterpieces of drama?

Cyborg Just Okay

As was expected, Chan Wook Park's I'm a Cyborg, But That's Okay did indeed go straight to the top of the Korean box office this last weekend - but with relatively humble ticket sales. Around 351,000 seats were filled, bringing in something like 2.1 million dollars, and compared to showings from the director's previous films this represents quite a slow burn beginning.

Sadly, it's doubtful that the film will end up enjoying the same kind of monstrous box office enjoyed by JSA and Oldboy, nor in fact, the same kind of international profile. Romantic comedies set around asylums can be rather hard sells - whereas bloody revenge, military investigations, curious mysteries and shocking violence can pretty much be depended upon to appeal in certain quarters.

I'm still hoping that the Chan Wook Park name is enough to convince Tartan to give the film the big push it needs here in the UK and across the US, but more than any of his recent revenge trilogy, I dare say they'll be aiming more for a risk-free DVD success than letting it all ride at the theatrical box office for too long with Cyborg.