Funny. Moulin Rogue! (2001) is playing in the background and lo and behold the first trailer for the new film by Baz Luhrmann after seven years is right HERE!

It looks like a cross between Tarsem’s The Fall (2008) and the Nicolas Roeg masterpiece Walkabout (1971- “Just about the most different movie you’ll ever see.”) Throw in some sensational romance with Hugh Jackman (The Prestige, 2006 - currently at #88 in the IMDB) and Nicole Kidman (Dead Calm, 1989), add operatic music, shake it up, and I’m there!

“We should be lovers!”

“We can’t do that…”

Whoops…got carried away. AUSTRALIA opens November 14th.

The Sundance Channel is releasing Green Porno sex-pisodes (available in the US and will be made available elsewhere in July), a collection of short films starring, co-directed, produced, conceived and written by Isabella Rossellini (Blue Velvet, 1984). Rossellini, she of the sexy bottom lip, is so joyfully perverse here. Against purposefully small-scale sets that are simple, colorful and textured, she is dressed as an insect and describes what her sex life would be like as a bug. Yes, you just read that. Here! Watch the ‘Earthworm’ episode! It’s very educational!

Rossellini, bless her soul, has been hanging around David Lynch (Inland Empire, 2007) and Guy Maddin (Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary, 2002) too much. Lucky bum!

Which reminds me about this DVD tidbit…

The Criterion Collection, always a class act, is releasing the DVD (#440) of Brand Upon The Brain! (2007) by cult Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin. Brand Upon the Brain! (watch the trailer here) was one of my personal favorites when given a limited release last year. Isabella Rossellini (King of the Corner, 2004) takes her madness to overdrive whilst crashing into a basket full of kittens with her vocal narration (”The Past! The Past!!!”). Rossellini is as fearless as when she and Maddin last collaborated on The Saddest Music In The World (2003), where she played a morbid brewery owner who had her legs replaced with prosthetics made of glass and filled with her very own beer. You have to see it to believe it.

Brand Upon The Brain! is another twisted homage to silent pictures and Luis Bunuel (L’ Âge d’or, 1930) with Maddin’s stylistic fingerprints smeared all over it. This one is a surreal memoir to Maddin’s childhood where he lives on a remote island with his family. His mother (Gretchen Krich - Henry Fool, 1997) is forever watching young Guy Maddin from her Gothic lighthouse tower with an ungainly periscope. She communicates through a speaker that like deranged gargling. Title Cards stand in for much of the dialogue - “Guy, come home for supper or I’m selling your island!!”. Maddin’s father stands in as a mad scientist practicing ghoulish experiments in his dungeon. I get so giddy every time I read the words “orphan nectar”.

And it’s much funnier than E. Elias Merhige’s ‘Begotten’!

Special screenings of Brand Upon the Brain! were performed by live orchestras and narration read aloud by either Isabella Rossellini, Crispin Glover (Back to the Future, 1985) Laurie Anderson, John Ashbery, Guy Maddin, Louis Negrin, and Eli Wallach (The Ugly, 1966). Also included is a new documentary featuring interviews with the director and crew members, deleted scenes, trailer, a new essay by film critic Dennis Lim, and two new Maddin-directed short films: It’s My Mother’s Birthday Today and Footsteps. The DVD will be released in early August. I can’t wait!

The rest of Criterion’s August slate includes Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (an upgrade of #17 - 1975), Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger’s The Small Back Room (#441 - 1949) and Keisuke Kinoshita’s Twenty-hour Eyes/Nijushi no hitomi (#442 - 1954). One day I’ll defeat the gag reflex and watch Salò, and while I’m at it I’ll also see Dusan Makavejev’s Sweet Movie (#390 - 1974).

American indie favorite Jim Jarmusch (Stranger Than Paradise, 1984) is currently filming his new thriller The Limits of Control in Spain. Bill Murray (Rushmore, 1998), Tilda Swinton (Best Supporting Actress for Michael Clayton, 2007) and Jim Jarmusch are reunited after their splendid collaboration with Broken Flowers (2005). In that film, Murray played an emotionally paralyzed and middle aged Don Juan whose odyssey involves revisiting past lovers and finding the mother to his estranged son.

The Limits of Control centers on the trademark Jarmusch loner, played by Jarmusch regular Isaach De Bankolé (Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, 1999), this time plotting a heist. Other actors involved are John Hurt (Love and Death on Long Island, 1998), Gael Garcia Bernal (The King, 2006), Hiam Abbass (The Syrian Bride, 2004), Paz de la Huerta (Chelsea Walls, 2001), Alex Descas (Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes, 2003), Youki Kudoh (Jarmusch’s Mystery Train, 1989), Luis Tosar (Miami Vice, 2006) and Jean-Francois Stevenin (The Man on the Train, 2002).

Release date is Q1 2009. More as this develops.

The latest installment of the beloved Chronicles of Narnia series opened Friday, May 16th. Prince Caspian drew the largest audience over the weekend, raking in over $56 million and a multitude of teenage girls in line for heartthrob Ben Barnes. Following the flock of hormonal adolescents was a multi-generational gathering deeply familiarized with the story’s Biblical themes. The targeted audiences did not leave disappointed.

The sequel follows much of the same formula of the first film, opening with an action sequence that is quickly explained by short bursts of dialogue. The director, Andrew Adamson, relies heavily on an actor’s facial expressions to communicate drama, a technique that adds dimension to the character, minimizes expository narration, and advances the plot towards the next sword fight.

The brief respites in between battles do little to rally the audience for another round of random dueling, a common mistake among sequels that need an excuse to use special effects and fencing choreography that didn’t meet the running time constraints of the first film.

The screenplay is faithful to C.S. Lewis’ novels and the Christian themes therein, however its suspense and stimulation are often tempered by the occassional metafictional character adapted for comic relief. The end result serves as a reminder that the film is a broad literary stroke on screen, and you admit you have to read the book to know what’s really going on.