Written by Dennis Lam, Edited by Andric Tham

When was the last time you recall see­ing a Filipino film? Amidst curi­ous shrugs and rolling eyes, cer­tainly, the answer is, “Not that I can remem­ber, no.”

Perhaps, we’re not all strangers to Filipino tal­ent. It wasn’t so long ago that Arnel Pineda’s song­writ­ing genius – of pop­u­lar rock band Journey – graced the air­waves for the first time since “Don’t Stop Believing” was first released in the ‘80s, all thanks to hit tween show Glee.

Curiously, the impact of the Filipino film indus­try is hardly pal­pa­ble out­side of its shores.

Written by Christopher Sim, Edited by Trey Seah

Apple’s iProducts. South Korean pop music. Air. 

These things are every­where. You can’t avoid them with­out mak­ing a con­scious effort. 

In a word, ubiq­ui­tous.

That word is bandied around a lot in the doc­u­men­tary Helvetica. The film is directed and pro­duced by Gary Hustwit, and was released in 2007 to coin­cide with the fifti­eth birth­day of the font type­face family.

With the sub­ject of Helvetica seem­ing to be any­thing but com­plex, one would expect the rest of the film to fol­low suit by being sim­i­larly trans­par­ent; indeed, Helvetica is made up of footage of rant­ing old men, among other things. This, how­ever, is where the film truly shines.

Written by Sean Koh

As Hollywood wakes from a turkey-induced hol­i­day coma, we take moment to briefly remem­ber the vic­tims of last [Black] Friday’s pepper-spray frenzy, puz­zle at why ‘Breaking Dawn’ keeps its No.1 seat at last weekend’s box-office, and brace our­selves for the inevitable Cyber-Monday Apocalypse where ridicu­lously under-priced Blu-Ray movies will over­turn world economies and kill us all.

But of course, who are we kid­ding? Let’s get to the movie news that actu­ally matter.

Christian Bale Done With Batman, after ‘The Dark Knight Rises’

Says Bale, in an inter­view with the Philippine Daily Inquirer “I wrapped a few days ago, so that will be the last time I’m tak­ing that [Batman hood] off.”

This comes as no sur­prise, with Director Chris Nolan stat­ing that the next Batman movie will also be his last. This also marks the end of what was an espe­cially good run for the Batman movie series, which hasn’t always been spectacular.

As Bale also states :

“When you have the oppor­tu­nity to be a char­ac­ter so many times, you develop another rela­tion­ship with him, a more pro­found one.”

I won­der if George Clooney or Val Kilmer could say the same.

Speilberg Not Impressed With Movies Made Today:

It isn’t all that hard to imag­ine why really. The era of movies geared toward pre-pubescent ‘Tweens’, that brought us block­buster hits such as ‘Never Say Never’ and ‘Twillight’, just isn’t impress­ing Speilberg. :

“There’s not a lot of films I’d watch that are made over the past 20 years, because I’m much more of a roman­tic.
“I like to go way back to the source. I look at a lot of silent movies for inspi­ra­tion because they’re all told visu­ally and they’re all told with hyper-extended per­for­mance and with won­der­ful use of a frame. It’s a way of get­ting my engine started.”

Just as an accom­pa­ni­ment to that,David Gritten over at The Telegraph wrote an inter­est­ing arti­cle on the rise of movie crowd-pleasers for grown-ups, such as ‘Hugo’ and ‘The Decendents’, which gives us hope for the future of great films.

Bret McKenzie Hints At A ‘Flight Of The Concords’ Movie

Oh, please make this happen.

In an inter­view with The Hollywood Reporter, Bret McKenzie of the short-lived but well-loved HBO series hints at a ‘Flight Of The Concords’ movie say­ing : “We’re gonna try and do a movie,” he said. “We just need a story.” Bret McKenzie appear­ing at The Muppets movie pre­mière reunites with his for­mer co-star Kristen Schaal, and co-creator James Bobin for musi­cal work on the lat­est Muppets movie.

Speaking of which, we’re all still wait­ing for that Arrested Development movie, which I imag­ine must be in movie devel­op­ment hell right now (no pun intended).

And finally,

Box Office Earning Calls: Breaking Dawn still doing Gangbusters, And The Rise Of The Holiday Family Movies

Time for the reg­u­lar Twilight check in… and it looks like it still glit­ters. Making over $489.3 mil­lion Worldwide, ‘Breaking Dawn’ eas­ily over­shad­owed the bet­ter reviewed, family-oriented new addi­tions this week. ‘The Muppets’ which debut at $42 mil­lion over a the long hol­i­day week­end leads the pack of ‘PG-ers’ with danc­ing pen­guins in ‘Happy Feet 2’, and ‘Hugo’ com­ing in at places No.3 and No.5 [respec­tively] on the Box Office charts.

The Decendents holds steady at No.10, cap­ping off the Thanksgiving weekend.

Written by Parveen Maghera

We’ve got thou­sands of full-length fea­ture Hollywood films ready and avail­able for rent on YouTube.Existing titles for rent include : Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows Part 2, Horrible Bosses, Green Lantern and more. This rental cat­a­logue how­ever is about to expand.

YouTube will soon offer Disney movies for rent, after a new part­ner­ship between Disney and the Google-owned website.

Minjae Ormes, YouTube mar­ket­ing exec­u­tive, announced through a blog post on Wednesday that the first of hun­dreds of Walt Disney Movies would be streamed on the site. This includes pro­duc­tions from Disney, Disney Pixar and DreamWorks Studios. Among the offer­ings are Cars and Cars 2, all four instal­ments from the block­buster series of Pirates of the Caribbean as well as ani­mated Disney films such as Alice in Wonderland and the newest pro­duc­tion of Winnie the Pooh. More are yet to come within the com­ing weeks.

And not for­get­ting, the rental ser­vice also pro­vides movie extras with behind-the-scenes clips, inter­views and more.

After Sony, Warner Bros and Universal, Disney is the fourth major stu­dio to col­lab­o­rate with Youtube in the aim of “transform[ing] YouTube’s home movies image into a viable stream­ing platform.”

The movies can be watched online, on Google TV and even on your Android phone or tablet. The rentals start as low as $0.99, with the high­est at $3.99 and some are also avail­able for free.

*Walt Disney Studio YouTube rentals are only avail­able in the United States and Canada.

YouTube begins rent­ing Disney movies — Mercury News
 

Written by Sean Koh 

Hasn’t it been long since we did one of these? Scouring the Inter-webs for movie news for this arti­cle, one will be hard-pressed to find movie news arti­cles that actu­ally mat­ter. So, in between Erika Christakis’s ( Time mag­a­zine ) defence of the lat­est Twillight movie, and Hollywood earn­ing calls, we picked a cou­ple of the more impor­tant things you should prob­a­bly know about the world of movies today :

Digital Projectors to End Film Forever :
Says a new study by the IHS. Cinemas using film pro­jec­tors have slid to about 68% last year, will drop to 37% of Cinemas next year, and 15% by 2015 as Film projects become the niche. Why the quick switch to replace 35-mm celluoid?

“Avatar”

More the­aters are now push­ing for 3D and dig­i­tal movies, to sell more expan­sive tick­ets. David Goodman wrote an inter­est­ing piece about this, over at CNN Money.

——-

Scorsese’s first foray into 3D, ‘Hugo’ debuts this week :
Also, new for the esteemed direc­tor, ‘mak­ing a movie he could actu­ally watch with his daugh­ter.’. Says Scorsese, he needs to make a blood­less move after telling “…just about every gang­ster story I knew”. While not quite in the sim­i­lar vein as George Miller going from mak­ing ‘Mad Max’ to mak­ing ‘Happy Feet 2’, the switch seems sort of nat­ural, after direct­ing one too many movies, where Leo DiCaprio shoots him­self, gets shot, or goes crazy. ‘Hugo’ is out in the US and UK November 23^rd, no word yet on the world­wide release.

Locations Scout, Eva Monley, dies at 88
The leg­endary Hollywood loca­tions man­ager, known for work on clas­sics such as “The African Queen”,“Lawrence of Arabia” and “Magambo”, passed at the age of 88 in her Kenyan home, last week. Ms Monley, had been essen­tial in secur­ing many shoot­ing loca­tions in Africa, owing to her flu­ence in Swahili. Without her, Hollywood would have missed some of its most for­ma­tive years.

David Yates to Direct a Doctor Who Movie

Started out as a rumor, now we’re pretty sure another Doctor Who movie is in the works, and it will also be directed by David Yates, fresh off Deathly Hallows. Says Yetes :

“We’re look­ing at writ­ers now. We’re going to spend two to three years to get it right. It needs quite a rad­i­cal trans­for­ma­tion to take it into the big­ger arena.”.

and finally,

Breaking Dawn makes a BAJILLION {285.3 M} Dollars Despite Poor Reviews

Yeah, I know we said we fil­tered out the non­sense, but I felt this arti­cle by Kelly Torrance over at Wash. Examiner was worth the high­light. Among her observations,

“.. there’s rarely any real gen­er­al­iza­tions one can make — except that crit­ics don’t mat­ter as much as they’d like.”
 

So sadly true.

Movies on the charts this week actu­ally worth the watch “The Descendants” debut­ing at No. 10, and “Puss in Boots”, which was just recently reviewed right here on this site.

“Puss in Boots” mixes it all up, how it mixes is refresh­ing. Even more than in the “Shrek” movies, from which this likely can­di­date for a new ani­mated fran­chise is spun off, it is a cheer­fully chaotic jum­ble of fairy tale and nurs­ery rhyme char­ac­ters para­chuted into a Spanish sto­ry­book set­ting. It also looks ter­rific: brighter, with a lot more visual piz­zazz than the “Shrek” films. Even when the story loses its thread, the movie rewards your eye.

Written by Trey Seah

 We were invited to the open­ing film of the 15^th German Film Festival in Singapore, Almanya – Willkommen in Deutschland. It was a really good film. You can read our nut­shell review here. After the screen­ing, I had the chance to inter­view one of the screen writer of this film, Nesrin Samdereli.

Yasemin Samdereli (Director & Writer) and Nesrin Samdereli (Writer)