FanFare

[TRAILER] Peter Jackson's expansive remake of the 1933 classic follows director Carl Denham (Jack Black) and his crew on a journey from New York City to the ominous Skull Island to film a new movie. Accompanying him are playwright Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody) and actress Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts), who is whisked away by the monstrous ape, Kong, after they reach the island. The crew encounters dinosaurs and other creatures as they race to rescue Ann, while the actress forms a bond with her simian captor. [more inside]
posted by DirtyOldTown on May 15, 2024 - 15 comments

[TRAILER] A forgotten Peter Jackson film? Yep. Co-written and co-directed by Jackson and Costa Botes, this mockumentary purports to tell the story of "forgotten" New Zealand filmmaker Colin McKenzie, and the rediscovery of his lost films, which presenter Peter Jackson claims to have found in an old shed. McKenzie is presented as the first and greatest innovator of modern cinema, single-handedly inventing the tracking shot (by accident), the close-up (unintentionally), and both sound and color film years before their historically documented creation. The film also shows fragments of an epic Biblical film, Salome, supposedly made by McKenzie in a giant set in the forests of New Zealand, and a "computer enhancement" of a McKenzie film proving that New Zealander Richard Pearse was the first man to invent a powered aircraft, several months before the Wright Brothers. [more inside]
posted by DirtyOldTown on Mar 16, 2023 - 6 comments

Wealthy and precocious teenager Juliet (Kate Winslet) transfers from England to Christchurch, New Zealand, with her family, and forms a bond with the quiet, brooding Pauline (Melanie Lynskey) through their shared love of handsome big screen tenor Mario Lanza and games of make believe. But when their parents begin to suspect that their increasingly intense friendship is becoming unhealthy, the girls decide to run away to America, hatching a dark plan for those who threaten to keep them apart. [more inside]
posted by DirtyOldTown on Aug 9, 2022 - 11 comments

Once an architect, Frank Bannister (Michael J. Fox) now passes himself off as an exorcist of evil spirits. To bolster his facade, he claims his "special" gift is the result of a car accident that killed his wife. But what he does not count on is more people dying in the small town where he lives. As he tries to piece together the supernatural mystery of these killings, he falls in love with the wife of one of the victims and deals with a crazy FBI agent. [more inside]
posted by DirtyOldTown on Feb 25, 2022 - 13 comments

On the recording of Let it Be, directed by Peter Jackson, with access to lots of unseen 1969 footage. Trailer, show, review, review, interview. 'Books included,' because there are no spoilers with The Beatles.
posted by box on Nov 27, 2021 - 86 comments

Employing state-of-the-art technology to transform audio and moving image archive footage more than a century old, Peter Jackson brings to life the people who can best tell the story of World War I: the men who were there. [more inside]
posted by ppl on Nov 13, 2018 - 8 comments

Last Week Tonight S03E01 Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia dies at age 79. Chipotle restaurants face federal investigations over food safety. (LWT produced a small commercial for them.) Main story: Voting (YouTube 14m), and the increased obstacles put in place to make it harder for US citizens to vote in elections. And Now: Newscasters Using Entirely The Wrong Tone. New Zealand's Prime Minister Steven Joyce is smacked in the head by a thrown phallus and is thereafter nicknamed by the New Zealand Herald "Dildo Baggins." Joyce tweeted to send it the GIF to John Oliver to get it over with -- and so they put the image on a flag, and gave the flag to Peter Jackson to wave. And then things got weird.... Yes that's right: Last Week Tonight is back! [more inside]
posted by JHarris on Feb 15, 2016 - 22 comments

A young man's mother is bitten by a Sumatran rat-monkey. She gets sick and dies, at which time she comes back to life, killing and eating dogs, nurses, friends, and neighbors. AKA Braindead [more inside]
posted by DirtyOldTown on Oct 2, 2014 - 11 comments

It pains me greatly to call something from 1992 a "retro" movie, but I couldn't call it "recent" with a straight face, so working within our parameters, it's "retro." [more inside]
posted by DirtyOldTown on Sep 25, 2014 - 6 comments