Early Poster For The Informers

From the book by Brett Easton Ellis, directed by Gregor Jordan and set to star Billy Bob Thornton, Brandon Routh, Winona Ryder, Kim Basinger, Mickey Rourke and Lou Taylor Pucci. Here's the first piece of promo art.

Official Poster For Sex And Death 101

Directed by Daniel Waters and, even more excitingly, written by Daniel Waters. Here's the first official poster for Sex and Death 101.

Click upon it to hugify it.

Can You Unlock The Sex And Death 101 Trailer?

A trailer for Daniel Waters' Sex and Death 101 is available on the Arclight website... if you have a password. And passwords are only being issued to film buyers.

Are you a film buyer? Do you know one? Can you convincingly pretend to be one? Or are you just a good hacker? I want to see this trailer bad and, budding Jims of the world, I'll love you forever if you can fix it for me.

Anchor Bay To Release Sex And Death 101 Theatrically

Daniel Waters' Sex and Death 101 is making bigger steps towards the cinema. The latest news is that Anchor Bay will be releasing the film both theatrically and then on DVD in the US. You should be happy about this - I'm very, very confident about this film.

There also appears to be screening scheduled for Fantastic Fest but the page is a little confusing, not giving any screening date or time. Can anybody shed any light on this for me?

Direct Download Link For Nice, Clear Unrated Trailer For The Ten

Download the new The Ten trailer from David Wain's site.

Nikki Had A Little Lamb

Remember the scene in Heathers where Winona Ryder's character places her fingers in her ears and sings Mary Had a Little Lamb so loud that she can't hear what is being said to her? So she won't have to face the reality she's being confronted with?

This story will probably remind you of that.

It started when Nikki Finke called Hostel 2 disgusting without ever having seeing it. This blatant display of prejudice stoked my ire, so I posted the following:

Why not be outraged and e-mail her a challenge? Such a venomous spitball of reactionary hate deserves some kind of rebuttal.

She then e-mailed me, and I replied - both parts of which can be read in a previous post.

And of course, the conversation went on from there. She e-mailed me saying:

[EDIT: I have deleted the content of her e-mail as it was offending some readers that I had included it (they'd rather her replies be deleted and replaced only by my comments on them. Weird). Suffice to say, she accused me of failing any mature dialogue between the two of us and remarked that she was amazed by my inability to believe people are offended by torture porn. Of course - her mistake there is twofold: one, I can most definitely believe it; two: she has categorised Hostel 2 as torture porn. Which is a daft label for any mainstream horror film at best, innacurate at worst and - definitely - applied without her even having seen the film. You can infer the rest of what she said from my reply e-mail which follows in a few lines]

And as far as I'm aware, I can reproduce the above as I please because, frankly, relevent excerpts are valid reportage. [EDIT: So I did reproduce her e-mail until people wanted it gone, so I removed it rather than offend readers]

I replied to her e-mail with the following:

As far as I can see it, Nikki, you are most definitely free to do the following:

a) be offended by torture porn
b) urge people to not reward that kind of disgusting moviemaking

What you have done, and have (here at least) damaged your reputation by doing, is

a) declared a film 'disgusting' and insinuated it is without merit, without even seeing it first

b) attempted to prejudice other people similarly

Go see Hostel 2, then review it however you wish. That simply won't be the same thing as slurring a film you haven't even bothered to watch before slamming it with a very serious label.

And some (many? most?) would say, slamming it with this label most innacurately.

The end to this I would recommend is your actual review of Hostel 2 based upon a viewing of the film and an admission that all of your previous comments were not based upon the film at all, but rather your prejudiced assumptions.

Meanwhile, one reader of this site sent her the following:

Dear Nikki Finke

I'd like to submit my future review of the last ever Harry Potter film. It's not yet finished, but it is disgustingly magical. Almost magic porn. I've not seen it, but it is amazing. It puts me in mind of Hostel 2 save the violence is swapped with fluffy owls, the blood with magic dust and the boobies with pulsating long wands. I hope Warner don't mind my advance review, but it seems that you don't mind reviewing films before they've been seen. You've lost all credibility in our eyes.

The final e-mail - so far at least - has come from Ms. Finke. Here's the important bit:

[EDIT: Of course - I deleted this also. She said it was shameful that I reproduced her e-mail - seems that she too would simply like me to report her opinions without actually allowing her a quote. Then she said that her reputation was 'fine' - well, not (as I said) with me. I don't presume to speak for anybody else. And then she announced that she'd filtered my e-mail address so that anything I sent her would go staright to her trash folder. And... er... as far as any of you know she could have called me a motherf*cker, threatened death to Muslims/Christians/Hindus everywhere (delete as appropriate) or implied that anybody with homosexual urges should be gutted, turned inside out and worn as a hat - but you'll never know exactly what she said, only my version of it, because the world has voted and that was their preference. Anyway... the key bit was her trashing any correspondance from me, ensuring my e-mail went straight to her trash]

But, readers, your e-mails will not. You can drown out Mary Had a Little Lamb. But please, please don't spam her or send her anything thoughtless. This is only worth doing if you argue your case logically and sensibly.

The point has been made now and Nikki Finke has had her prejudice exposed. She is a woman with a platform from which her opinions of films and filmmakers are broadcast far and wide and, as far as she's concerned, it's okay for those opinions to be nothing more than unsubstantiated attacks. Her perjurious rants can spread and discolour public opinion of a film and, sure, most people won't see anything wrong with that but I'm afraid I do.

If Ms. Finke requests, I think I will remove all of the content of this post that comes from her e-mails. Instead, I'll just paraphrase her comments and print my recounting of her points instead. Maybe she'll go that way and sacrifice her own voice in this debate, let me substitute a second-hand version of her reactionism. Perhaps she thinks that will in some way undermine my argument.

Back to the real issue: readers, why not go see Hostel 2 when it opens next weekend and form your own opinion after you've actually seen it? According to those that have seen it, it's really very good. I've seen the first one and, as I'm sure you know, I found it to be one of the best films of 2006.

Eight Out Of Ten For The Ten

I really quite like this new poster for The Ten, especially the tagline. Click on the image to make the text big enough to read.

Note that the film is being released by ThinkFilm, so try to see it in cinemas if you're interested - there's every chance the DVD will be a horrendous botch job.

Oswalt On Sex And Death

Sci Fi Wire were listening to Patton Oswalt chat about Ratatouille when he slipped in a few morsels regarding Sex and Death 101, the dust-gathering latest from Daniel Waters. Waters was the screenwriter of the greatest script ever written.

Yep. He wrote Heathers.

Oswalt said of Waters "I guess he's going to take it to some film festivals and show it to distributors. I hope it comes out. It was really good. I mean, it's not like anything, so why not put it out there?"

He described his character, Fred, as "a supreme being controller of the universe" - though that's probably going to give you the wrong idea, if I know Waters.

I've discussed Sex and Death 101 before, but if you can't bother using that wee search box uptop, here's the basic premise: Simon Baker plays Roderick Blank, a nearly-married man who, one week before his big day, receives an e-mail list of all the women he has ever slept with. As if this wasn't curious enough, the list goes on, apparently naming all of the women he will go on to sleep with in the rest of his life. This includes a formerly-lesbian astronaut and a younger girl from a private school.

Winona Ryder's character, Gillian 'Death' Nell, is on the list too, which is a serious problem for Blank because, somehow, everybody who ever lies down with her goes into a coma...

Frankly, I find it criminal that a film with this kind of line-up is having to go looking for distributors, that they aren't bowing and scraping at Waters door and begging to come in.