Who the Hell is Matt?

So sometimes I’m a late comer to the party… But then again, late or not if the party ROCKS than my motto is better late than never.

So what am I talking about? Witnessing something that has been witnessed by millions of people (8,534,749 before me to be exact). Matt Harding is a Filmmaker and world traveler who fusing both skills (hobbies, whatever) created an amazingly brillliant short film.

So what’s it about? Matt dancing a wacky jig in all corners of the globe. So what’s so cool about this. Easy… How the simple act of dancing a silly dance with strangers at different places in the world. A simple act that unites these strangers. A simple act that shows how damn easy it is to find common ground, be a uniter.

Whether it’s Matt Dancing or Laker Guard Jordan Farmar teaching basketball to Jewish and Palestinian kids in Israel and the West Bank (together not separate - Jordan Farmar to go on peace mission to Middle East) bringing the world closer should be the simple mission!

Matt’s movies are so compelling that the folks at Yahoo! invited him over for a filming session (View here - And Now We Dance)

So where was I? Oh yeay… over 8 milllion folks have seen this video - hopefully 8 million more will be watching soon. It will touch your heart and hopefully move you to some “simple” action. Enjoy!

14 months in the making, 42 countries, and a cast of thousands. (Please notice the High Quality embed…)

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Vicious Circle is a Winner!

Winner of the NY Latino Film Festival Best Picture!

A great indy film that I had the pleasure to work on in 2006 with my great friend, Director, Paul Boyd (I was the UPM/1st AD) had it’s world premier at the NY Latino Film Festival and took home best picture honors!

Set on the streets off modern day Venice Beach California, Vicious Circle is a tragic “Punk Rock” Latino love story; a raw edgy, teenage Romeo and Juliet with a murder mystery twist. The Film Follows 18 year old RJ (Skater, Paul Rodriguez Jr.) as he runs through the streets of Los Angeles with a blood stained shirt and a gun in his backpack. Leaving the audience to wonder, “What happened?”

RJ is an artist and skater with a heart of gold. He dreams of moving to New York City to pursue his aspirations to create comic books. His handmade sketchbook demonstrated his unique talent and acts as a portal between fantasy and reality. A strong inffluence of the game of chess from RJ’s incarcerated father flows through his art and life… RJ lives by the rules of the game.

Soon, RJ meets his first love Angel (Sundance award winner - Emily Rios), a rebellious singer in a local teenage punk band. Their unexpected story of true love causes the tides to turn in both lives, and RJ reveals a secret that will cost the life of new love.

Directed by Paul Boyd, and starring Paul Rodriguez Jr., Emily Rios, Robert Zepeda, Richard Edson, Perrey Reeves, Paul Rodriguez.

Visit the Vicious Circle official site.

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No Joke! The Dark Night

The Dark Night just had the biggest 1 day box office ever. This movie is huge in a lot of respects. Did you know that 20 minutes of the movie is shot in the ultra huge IMAX format?

There are too many articles to mention, but this piece on whether to pony up the extra cash for the “IMAX experience” is certainly worth a read.

With opening-weekend Imax showings of The Dark Knight already selling out in many cities, is it worth waiting a couple of days — or waking up at four in the morning — to pay extra money and see Batman on the biggest of big screens? Or should you just see it in a regular theater, since after all, only twenty minutes of the movie are shot in Imax anyway?

Why see The Dark Knight in an Imax theater? As P-Funk front man George Clinton once succinctly explained to us, “Cuz that shit is motherfuckin’ huuuuuge.”

A Warner Bros. executive says the Batman sequel “The Dark Knight” has set a single-day box office record by taking in $66.4 million on opening day.

The movie’s Friday haul surpasses the previous record of $59.8 million set last year by “Spider-Man 3.” “The Dark Knight” also might break the opening weekend record of $151.1 million that also was posted by “Spider-Man 3.”

Warner Bros. head of distribution Dan Fellman says the death of co-star Heath Ledger and the buzz about his frenzied performance as the Batman villain Joker was a big part of the movie’s allure.

Check out Yahoo’s Dark Knight page for tons of good stuff! Or the Dark Knight’s Official Site - With a memorial for Heath Ledger.

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Update: 7/20/08

Batman has sent Spidey packing as king of Hollywood’s box-office superheroes.

“The Dark Knight” took in a record $155.34 million in its first weekend, topping the previous best of $151.1 million for “Spider-Man 3″ in May 2007 and pacing Hollywood to its biggest weekend ever, according to studio estimates Sunday.

“We knew it would be big, but we never expected to dominate the marketplace like we did,” said Dan Fellman, head of distribution for Warner Bros., which released “The Dark Knight.” The movie should shoot past the $200 million mark by the end of the week, he said.

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Home Made Fight Scene

2 creative kids beating the crap out of each other in this home made fight scene.

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Springfields and the ‘Simpsons’

How about that, 18 seasons and then a feature film. That’s cool. But when your show takes place in the fictional town of Springfield, where do you go for the premier? Now, 16 Springfields in U.S. want to host ‘Simpsons’ movie premiere.

Springfield, the Oregon one, is on a list of like-named towns competing for the big-screen debut of Homer, Bart and the rest of the TV Simpson family this summer.

City officials accepted an invitation from 20th Century Fox to compete for the honor of hosting the premiere screening of “The Simpsons Movie” in July.

Fox publicist Gwyne Ortiz said Fox has asked 16 Springfields from Oregon to Massachusetts to participate.

Fox will pick the winner after reviewing short film entries showcasing the community’s positive aspects and links to the Simpsons, who live in their own fictional Springfield.

The prime-time animated series created by Oregon-born Matt Groening is now in its 18th season.

“There’s plenty of serious issues to talk about, but this is something that we might as well try to have a little fun with,” Springfield Mayor Sid Leiken told the Register-Guard newspaper.

Newsweek once called the Simpsons’ Springfield “America’s Crud Bucket,” hardly an honor worth fighting over.

The cartoon Springfield has a nuclear power plant and several prisons, amenities Oregon’s Springfield lacks.

Groening has said he chose “Springfield” because it’s one of the more common city names in the United States.

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300 and the Art of Loyalty

Director Zach Snyder is about to unleash an amazing looking film call 300. If you haven’t seen the trailer, see below.

About 14 years ago when I was just starting my career as an AD, I had the good fortune to be Zach Snyder’s 2nd AD. Danny Weisberg (who is now an award winning commercial director himself) was the 1st AD tht I worked with. When Danny left the AD world to start directing commercials, my hope was to move up as Zach’s 1st AD. This is where the loyalty part comes in.

Zach’s best friend Kurt Johnstad became Zach’s 1st AD. He had been working as Zach dolly grip on every comercial that Zach did. And when the spot became available, he moved Kurt into it. Sure, I wanted that spot, but he gave it tto his trusted friend, who learned on the job and collaborated well with Zach. Now Kurt is the co-writer of Zach’s new movie "300". To me, that is cool!

Now this story of loyalty doesn’t stop here. Zach’s 2nd unit director on both his features Dawn of the Dead (2004), and 300 is a director named Clay Staub. Clay and Zach were both directors at a (no longer in existence) production company here in Los Angeles called The End. They have stayed fiends and Zach still works with him.

Round 3: The Cinematographer on 300 is Larry Fong. I first met Larrry while working with Zach almost 15 years ago. Great DP. He has been one of the cinematographers on Lost and is now back with Zach.

So loyalty does still exist. It’s a great commodity. If you can find it, do everything you can to hold on to it.

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Brokeback Mountain — Review

You go into a movie like this and obviously you are going to have some preconceptions. Well my preconceptions were misconceptions. . .

This movie is a love story pure and simple. Maybe that’s where some people have difficulty. They expect to see queeny men in superficial relationships. Isn’t that how Holywood usually does it? Take a difficult subject and inject humor into it to make it tolerable? (Will & Grace, La Cage aux Folles). Ang Lee doesn’t do that, the writer’s (Larry McMurtry, Diana Ossana) don’t do that, the short story by Annie Proulx, doesn’t do that.

What you get is a really beautiful, albeit, tragic story of 2 people have have a very deep love for each other but simply cannot act upon it. This story could very easily be an opposite sex story, think of the film “Same Time Next Year” as an example. 2 People in love living separate lives except for some stolen moments each year. That’s tragic.

Let’s also talk about the acting here, really wonderful. Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger are both really compelling to watch, truly bringing these characters to life. Jake’s “Jack Twist” is a light on the surface and dark on the inside character, struggling to answer the question: “Who am I?” Aren’t we all asking this question? The context might be different but the question remains. . . Heath Leger’s portrayl of tough, quick hitting and hard working Ennis Del Mar is really nothing short of breathtaking! There is such depth in this character and Health rings it all out of him. (And out of the audience as well.) Randy Quaid’s turn as the Rancer/Boss Joe Aguirre is short but impactful, foreshadowing what will be the thoughts behind stares to come.

My suggestion, go see this movie. It may just open your eyes and open your heart, if you let it. . .

So back to where I began. The filmmaker’s were very brave to make this film. People who are viewed as “different” are still beaten to death with tire irons in this day and age. Not in Iraq, here. A film like this, made honestly, performed honestly and speaking honestly, offers us all a glimmer of hope. When we as a people, become comfortable with a group, ethnicity, or sexual preference, we, as a whole, become more tolerable. Will and Grace is a safe answer, but Brokeback Mountain is far more honest. . .

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Actor Jack Palance Dies

Oscar-Winning Actor Jack Palance Dies

I just got this news on Yahoo

Jack Palance, the craggy-faced menace in “Shane,” “Sudden Fear” and other films who turned successfully to comedy in his 70s with his Oscar-winning self-parody in “City Slickers,” died Friday.

Palance died of natural causes at his home in Montecito, Calif., surrounded by family, said spokesman Dick Guttman. He was 87.

When Palance accepted his Oscar for best supporting actor he delighted viewers of the 1992 Academy Awards by dropping to the stage and performing one-armed push-ups to demonstrate his physical prowess.

“That’s nothing, really,” he said slyly. “As far as two-handed push-ups, you can do that all night, and it doesn’t make a difference whether she’s there or not.”

That year’s Oscar host, Billy Crystal, turned the moment into a running joke, making increasingly outlandish remarks about Palance’s accomplishments throughout the show.

It was a magic moment that epitomized the actor’s 40 years in films. Always the iconoclast, Palance had scorned most of his movie roles.

“Most of the stuff I do is garbage,” he once told a reporter, adding that most of the directors he worked with were incompetent, too.

“Most of them shouldn’t even be directing traffic,” he said.

Movie audiences, though, were electrified by the actor’s chiseled face, hulking presence and the calm, low voice that made his screen presence all the more intimidating.

His film debut came in 1950, playing a murderer named Blackie in “Panic in the Streets.”

After a war picture, “Halls of Montezuma,” he portrayed the ardent lover who stalks the terrified Joan Crawford in 1952’s “Sudden Fear.” The role earned him his first Academy Award nomination for supporting actor.

The following year brought his second nomination when he portrayed Jack Wilson, the swaggering gunslinger who bullies peace-loving Alan Ladd into a barroom duel in the Western classic “Shane.”

That role cemented Palance’s reputation as Hollywood’s favorite menace, and he went on to appear in such films as “Arrowhead” (as a renegade Apache), “Man in the Attic” (as Jack the Ripper), “Sign of the Pagan” (as Attila the Hun) and “The Silver Chalice” (as a fictional challenger to Jesus).

Other prominent films included “Kiss of Fire,” “The Big Knife” “I Died a Thousand Deaths,” “Attack!” “The Lonely Man” and “House of Numbers.”

Weary of being typecast, Palance moved with his wife and three young children to Lausanne, Switzerland, at the height of his career.

He spent six years abroad but returned home complaining that his European film roles were “the same kind of roles I left Hollywood because of.”

His career failed to regain momentum upon his return, and his later films included “The Professionals” “The Desperadoes” “Monte Walsh,” “Chato’s Land” and “Oklahoma Crude.”

When he appeared as Fidel Castro in 1969’s “Che!” about Latin American revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara, he told a reporter: “At this stage of my career, I don’t formulate reasons why I take roles the price was right.”

He also appeared frequently on television in the 1960s and `70s, winning an Emmy in 1965 for his portrayal of an end-of-the-line boxer in “Requiem for a Heavyweight.”

He and his daughter Holly Palance hosted the oddity show “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” and he starred in the short-lived series “The Greatest Show on Earth” and “Bronk.”

Forty-one years after his auspicious film debut, Palance played against type, to a degree. His “City Slickers” character, Curly, was still a menacing figure to dude ranch visitors Crystal, Daniel Stern and Bruno Kirby, but with a comic twist. And Palance delivered his one-liners with surgeon-like precision.

Through most of his career, Palance maintained his distance from the Hollywood scene. In the late 1960s he bought a sprawling cattle and horse ranch north of Los Angeles. He also owned a bean farm near his home town of Lattimer, Pa.

Although most of his film portrayals were as primitives, Palance was well-spoken and college-educated. His favorite pastimes away from the movie world were painting and writing poetry and fiction.

A strapping 6-feet-4 and 210 pounds, Palance excelled at sports and won a football scholarship to the University of North Carolina. He left after two years, disgusted by commercialization of the sport.

He decided to use his size and strength as a prizefighter, but after two hapless years that resulted in little more than a broken nose that would serve him well as a screen villain, he joined the Army Air Corps in 1942.

A year later he was discharged after his B-24 lost power on takeoff and he was knocked unconscious.

The GI Bill of Rights provided Palance’s tuition at Stanford University, where he studied journalism. But the drama club lured him, and he appeared in 10 comedies. Just before graduation he left school to try acting professionally in New York.

“I had always wanted to express myself through words,” he said in a 1957 interview. “But I always thought I was too big to be an actor. I could see myself knocking over tables. I thought acting was for little … guys.”

He made his Broadway debut in a comedy, “The Big Two,” in which he had but one line, spoken in Russian, a language his parents spoke at home.

The play lasted only a few weeks, and he supported himself as a short-order cook, waiter, lifeguard and hot dog seller between other small roles in the theater.

His career breakthrough came when he was chosen as Anthony Quinn’s understudy in the road company of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” then replaced Marlon Brando in the Stanley Kowalski role on Broadway. The show’s director, Elia Kazan, chose him in 1950 to for “Panic in the Streets.”

Born Walter Jack Palahnuik in Pennsylvania coal country on Feb. 18, 1919, Palance was the third of five children of Ukrainian immigrants. His father worked the mines for 39 years until he died of black lung disease in 1955.

In interviews, Palance recalled bitterly that his family had to buy groceries at the company store, though prices were cheaper elsewhere.

Yet, he told a Saturday Evening Post writer, he had “a good childhood, like most kids think they have.”

“It was fine to play there in the third-growth birch and aspen, along the sides of slag piles,” he said.

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Chris Cornell & Casino Royale

Chris Cornell Performing Casino Royale Title Song

In case you missed, Chris Cornell, Audioslave lead singer has recored the theme song for the new James Bond Film. The acclaimed singer-songwriter, whose upcoming release with Audioslave marks the 11th album of his career, has also enjoyed success with the groups Soundgarden and Temple of the Dog, as well as his own critically acclaimed solo album in 1999, “Euphoria Morning.” He has also collaborated with such groups as Alice in Chains and made contributions to other soundtracks.

“I’ve always loved Chris’ work, both as a writer and as an artist, and had hoped someday to find the right film to inspire him,” said Lia Vollack, President, Worldwide Music for Columbia Pictures. “His music is both soulful and tough. It was the perfect complement to Daniel Craig and “Casino Royale”.

Cornell joins other performers such as Madonna, Sheryl Crow, Paul McCartney & Wings, Carly Simon, Shirley Bassey, Tom Jones, Tina Turner, Gladys Knight, Sheena Easton, Duran Duran and Garbage who have performed title songs for previous James Bond adventures, though he will be among the select few who have both written and performed an “007″ title song (others include McCartney & Wings, Crow and Madonna). Other songs were written by composers as varied as Anthony Newley & Leslie Bricusse, Lionel Bart, John Barry, Bono & The Edge and Marvin Hamlisch. Daniel Craig stars as the new “007″ in “Casino Royale” directed by Martin Campbell. The film will be released worldwide by Columbia Pictures on November 17, 2006.

I had the chance to work with Chris earlier this year on a Music Video for his band Audioslave. This video for the song “Original Fire” was directed by P.R. Brown. See the video below.

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