Recently in Film Category

Though it seems like an age away, I'm giddy with excitement over the recent dribs and drabs of information on Tim Burton's "Alice in Wonderland" coming out next year. Aside from the principals of Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Anne Hathaway et al, we have Stephen Fry as the Cheshire Cat, Matt Lucas as Tweedledee and Tweedledum, Alan Rickman as the Caterpillar, Sir Christopher Lee as the Jabberwock, OH EM GEE!!! And Mia Wasikowska as Alice is gorgeous and ethereal. I love her character design, organdy dress, everything.

Release Date: March 2010

Official Site: Disney's Alice in Wonderland
IMDB: Alice in Wonderland
Best Source: Slashfilm.com articles tagged "Alice in Wonderland"
Other Best Source: Tim Burton Collective tagged "Alice in Wonderland"

My favorite piece of concept art is the Tweedledee and Tweedledum pic, so haunting!

Mr. Kallisti and I had already developed an affection for Jonathan Ross after watching his highly affectionate series from the 80's on cult film The Incredibly Strange Film Show that included in depths on John Waters and Russ Meyer among others.

Recently we ran across his Japanorama series. News to us, don't know how familiar non-brits are with this series, we've been spellbound all week with his presentation and enthusiasm for the subject, including eighteen episodes spanning three seasons over six years. Beneath his dapper English exterior, and charming lisp, he is a self proclained Otaku, and his enthusiasm for all things Japanese, especially robots, is contagious.

"JAPANOWAMA! LOOK! I'm widing an electwic panda!!!"

View: Japanorama on YouTube
More info: Japanorama Wikipedia

Super Dollfie (and other kewl toys) make an appearance in Series II, with a full profile excerpted below. Booya!

All content brought to you by the magic of the intarwebz. Full episodes can be found in undisclosed locations.

Best houseguests EVAR. Junk shopping, Kaiju popping, Okonomiyaki flipping happy goodness. Paul & Melissa.

Sunday was super hot so we had an impromptu Film Fest, with banana shakes and sundry other boozes. Once the sun went down Paul got to work in the kitchen and made a series of Okonomiyaki (Japanese pancake-like griddled dish) of ever increasing complexity and awesomeness. The Grande Finale was Octopus & Hamhock— or, HAMHOCKTOPUS—that bloo my mind. For real, it was superb! Whoddathunkit???

Pose Doll by Melissa! She is so dreamy, I will name her and play dress-up for DAYS. More, better pictures to come!

And last but not least, Mr. Kallisti has spent the last few months dissecting vintage Kappa, analyzing how they were made, and recreating the art of Kappa Kraft!

Film Fest for the Aging Hipsters:

Pride & Prejudice Blu-ray Edition (BBC 1995)

BOOYAH! I'm so excited. P&P prints have been notoriously bad. The Amazon page above has several nice examples of the cleanup they've done to get this print sparkle.

I've owned nearly every edition of this series, from the initial VHS, which I watched til it disintigrated, and 2 subsequent dvd editions of varying states of UGH. Vive le Hi Def! I can't wait.

What I did over the Christmas holidays... It started out with Mr. Kallisti downloading "The Devil's Whore" for me "cuz it sounded like your type of thing. Y'know, whores..." It snowballed from there as I watched Charles I beheaded three times over the two week slowdown! It has taken me 2 more weeks just to finish this post, oy!

Here's the line-up, all highly recommended, in rough chrono-order.

1638 to 1660: The Devil's Whore [IMDB]

By and large, there are two categories of period drama. The first is White Petticoat Drama, where people do a bit of frisky fan-work, have a picnic that involves a huge ham, and then live happily ever after. The second is Dirty Period Drama - where everyone is covered in boils, wees out of the window, and palpably suffers from the lack of antibiotics and/or mobile telecommunications. The Devil's Whore is definitely in the second category. John Simm's fleas should make the credit list. Oliver Cromwell clearly pongs. It makes a dirty war a very dirty war. But one that, against all the Civil War odds, makes great telly.

-Caitlin Moran, The Times

1640 to 1660: "By the Sword Divided" (1983) [IMDB] [WIKI]

A bit obvious to say, but if you liked Poldark you'll really enjoy "By the Sword Divided." Classic low budget, yet brilliantly written and performed eighteen hour series from the BBC. It also aired on Masterpiece Theater in the late 80's. One of the few period dramas to deal with the English Civil War, before and aftermath.

1660 to 1685: Charles II - The Power & The Passion (The Last King in the U.S.): [BBC] [IMDB] 2003, covers the life and adventures of Charles II of England, played by the ever roguish Rufus Sewell. Mwrowr.

1673 to 1722: The First Churchills [IMDB]

The First Churchills: 1969! Covers the period 1673 through 1722, based on the biography by Winston Churchill of his illustrious ancestors, the first Duke & Duchess of Marlborough. Susan Hampshire & John Neville are sublime.

All ya'll probably have seen this, but it is so exciting. Rawr!

Volks has posted a sentimental history of super dollfie, contests and games, and a nearly complete sketch of their events for the year! This includes TWO US Dolpas for June and November. View: Super Dollfie 10th Anniversary Events Schedule

Dolpa3 in NYC.
June 7th - 8th 2008
Fashion Institute of Technology NYC, NY

In conjunction with FDQ. Registration will be through the Volks site, when they post it. It looks like Volks is beta-testing a new store interface on the Japanese side. Neat!

Also: greatest thing about the writer's strike? It sent us scurrying for downloadable content on the internet. Yay for BBC programming! Mr. Kallisti has been on a quest to get me mostly Eastenders (I died a little when they cancelled the series on BBC America), every available costume drama and mystery thriller airing. We just transfer it over via wifi on the TiVo and blammo! Plays like TEEVEE.

New favorite show EVAR: Phoo Action

From the genius who brought you Tank Girl and Gorillaz, Jamie Hewlett. Whitey with the red hair back there is wearing Buddha's magic underpants!

(gosh it is hard to get around to posting even when I'm in the moooooood! bizzy, bizzy!)

After having lost the Volks lottery for the A&P outfit last month, I pulled myself up and made the pattern included with Volume 8 of DollyBird for the Alice & the Pirates dress. If I weren't so overwhelmed this month I'd make all three patterns... but I have stuff to do! Lulu looks fantastic, don't she? They didn't include the hat pattern, so I had to figure that one out myself. Oy! I used inkjet decals for dark fabric to get the patterns on the dress. It turned out really well, I think!

I also had the very great fortune to get invited to have dinner with the Isobe's of Baby, the Stars Shine Bright here in San Francisco a few weeks ago. I'll make more hay about that at a later date.

I just want to say though, that VIZ Media/VIZ Pictures, the lovely folks who hosted the dinner, will be building and opening the VIZ J-Pop Center in San Francisco's Japan Town some time in 2008. Including a small theater featuring anime and Japanese live action films. It sounds like it will be all kinds of amazing!

In fact, I had just been thinking how much I was enjoying the second season of HBO's "Rome."

History that hurts | Salon.com

"Rome" is incredibly entertaining, while also being incredibly shocking. It's history porn.

Mmmmm, history porn. Awesome article.

Aieeeeeeeeeeee! Available for preorder now. To be released in four months *falls over* on April 10th. I've been waiting for sooo long. Season One was out in 2001! That is a mighty long time.

We're very excited. Go order yours now. K, thanks.

Because the new year is all about making lists!

Now Playing:

Pan's Labyrinth: Almost went to see it NYE. But smacked self in head thankfully before driving into the City (it ain't playin' in the Boonies of Berkeley yet).

Didja know?!?! Heavy Metal Parking Lot DVD is available from Atomic Books.

They're cool. I wrote them once and asked them what it was like to live in Baltimore. And they answered. Very nice...

As to the video, if you haven't seen it... go. now. A classic. Every boy needs one in his xmas stocking.

This just in: From my favorite critic at Salon.com. Stephanie Zacharek always gets it.

No one-time teenager has suffered more from the cruelty of history's gossip mill than Marie Antoinette. When she was told the peasants were starving for lack of bread, the Marie Antoinette of lore shot back, "Let them eat cake!" -- a great line, straight out of "Mean Girls," except that the real Marie Antoinette never said it. Imported to France from her native Austria at age 14, she was the brokered bride of a future king, a bargaining chip with a womb. Her purpose was to cement peace between, and solidify the power of, the two nations. Marie Antoinette landed in a country, and a court, that eyed her with suspicion and contempt: She was a callow, uneducated foreigner, barely worth the disdain of oh-so-civilized France, and the fact that she couldn't immediately produce an heir didn't help. But because she was a future queen, she had access to -- and availed herself of -- the grand and costly buffet of opulence that had been the norm in Versailles long before she arrived. To paraphrase a lyric from another Lesley Gore song: You would shop, too, if it happened to you.

There is shopping in Sofia Coppola's buoyant, passionately sympathetic dream-bio "Marie Antoinette" (which plays the New York Film Festival Friday night, and opens in New York and other cities on Oct. 20). But this is not -- as you might have believed if you trusted the reviews out of Cannes, scrawled by critics from the garretlike confines of their hotel rooms as they clutched their Mao jackets tighter to protect themselves from the threat of beauty, pleasure and decadence -- a movie about shopping. Nor is it a straightforward biopic or a history of the French Revolution (it never purports to be either of those things).

"Marie Antoinette" is Coppola's silk-embroidered fantasy sampler of the inner life of a queen we can never really know: It's a humanist comedy-drama decked out not in sackcloth but in ribbons -- instead of flattering our ideas of our own virtuousness, it asks our sympathy for this doomed queen even as we can't help envying her privilege.

Read on...

Swoon and die.

I've updated Décolleté with my review of Marie Antoinette, half way down the entry.

I'm now accepting comments on Décolleté, you can also add a news feed subscription via this link. Here's the Livejournal ready feed, add me!

I don't know how I feel about this. Article at New York Times.

I just don't know why they can't do something more rock 'n' roll and keep the costumes more traditional. Or something. I'm not that stuffy, I've loved some non-traditional adaptations. But they have to be good. Like "Titus." Yarm, yarm!

But I really haven't liked much of the recent Tudor pix or series, and one of the reasons is their modernist approach and all that "must get the ignorant masses to relate to crazy tudor england" stuff. I love Jonathon Rhys Meyers though. And Jonathon Rhys Meyers in gold lame even better.

I guess after Anne of the Thousand Days it is all downhill.

Also, why "The Tudors"? Looks like it is just one Tudor to me. Meh.

I'm just sayin'.

We go to The City infrequently. So it is always the awesome to run into someone unexpectedly. This time it was Augie! We were picking up a wee blobpi for Mr. Kallisti's birthday (mwah!) at Super 7. And in walks Augie with flyers/posters for his latest: "Shock It To Me" Halloween Horrorfest at the Castro. I jumped all over him and whisked him off to din-din around the corner at that really good ramen place that we hadn't been to yet. Yay!

We were friends when I was in HS. And roommates briefly when I first moved to The City. Last time I saw him he was putting on Godzilla fest. He's just written a book (editing) and got bitten by a brown recluse earlier this year... eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek! For real.

So yeah, the fest is the same weekend as the Volks party, but we'll try to make the Friday night Hammer fest. Aaaaah!

I also brought up the Cerrito Theater happening a couple blocks away, since it will be run by the folks at the Parkway in Oakland. He says they currently have plans to move Thrillville to El Cerrito! Swoon & die! Totally stumbling distance from our house.

EDIT: Read my review here ^_^

Ok, I've waited to watch the trailer til just now. I love suspense. Like pretending Christmas isn't next week.

And I have to admit I got shivers. Opens October 20th. I am a-quiver.

My passion for history and rococo in general, and the French Revolution in particular, need not be explained. I really adore Sofia. I super crush on Dunst and the little spaces between her teeth (boing!). And I really love the 80's. If it doesn't suck, I will so win.

*flutter* Shirley Hendersen, Marianne Faithful, Judy Davis... wah!

And this is as good a time as any to make the announcement official: Décolleté 2.0 is up! The Severed Head Gallery is TEN YEARS OLD! Can you stand it? It originally went up in the winter of 1996, when I was under-employed and living in New Orleans. I've now officially moved it from Chapel Perilous to Blastmilk.com. Home is where the heart is, eh?

Check out the Marie Antoinette galleries. And the Guillotine Galleries too! I will need to add an entry for Coppola's film I'm sure... unless I hate it. Which I hope I don't. Woo!

Warning: Working out some display issues in Firefox! I'm still working on expanding the galleries, links, and references. I have so, SO much material that is not posted. Hence my whinging about movable type and photogalleries the other week. Well, I've made it work, for the nonce. Feedback, corrections and suggestions very much welcomed! Just don't tell me it sucks in Firefox. I know...

Egads, had a bad day. Going to soothe the savage soul by seeing The Illusionist. 1) It happens to be playing down the street, and 2) they have killer autentico mexican across the street, and nothing says "soothing" like a big plate of carnitas. Haven't heard anything about it, but my favorite critic is sold, so I'm giving it a go.

This is to keep me from sitting down with a bucket of fried chicken and six hours of the third season of "24." Which is very sadly my instinct under stress. *stab*

Sometimes you can be perfectly aware of everything that's wrong with a movie as you're watching it only to discover, minutes or hours or days later, that the look and the mood of the thing have flooded in and blurred all its flaws. Neil Burger's somber fairy-tale romance "The Illusionist," adapted from a short story by Steven Millhauser, is an extremely self-conscious picture: It moves along with the utmost certainty that we'll be dazzled by it, as if enchantment were a thing that could be enforced. But in the end, "The Illusionist" got me. The picture, set in fin de siècle Vienna, Austria (and filmed in Prague, Czech Republic), is so beautiful to look at that it practically feels like a drug, a little something that you might sip from a miniature crystal glass. I have vague recollections of some of the actors' trying too hard, and of places where the story dragged like a tired peacock's tail. But ultimately, by God, I succumbed to the picture's faux-laudanum haze.

And, wtf, Marie Antoinette isn't released until October 20th!?!?! I thought with all the reviews, the Vogue cover, the world going Rococo MAD that surely opening night was nigh. But no... I am punished for another two months. Ugh!

Apparently last month was Waugh Month in the UK, and I'm missing it! *cry!*

I'll be stalking the following programs, that's for sure. Mr. Loveday's Little Outing. Meh. Please note the delicious David Warner. Is there a fan club? He vies for my heart with the likes of Oliver Reed.

Dude, wtf, they redid the Quatermass series??? My inner Hammer Whore might just have to order that. I've been watching Viva Blackpool. Not sure if I've warmed up to the karaoke numbers yet. But it is otherwise fun/creepy mystery drama.

We also have upcoming BBC drama Beau Brummel, let's see if James Purefoy can out beau 1954's Stewart Granger. Mwowr.

For the Victorian how-to enthusiast we have The Life of Mrs. Beeton.

And holy cow! Another Jane Eyre! Whodda thunk it. This feisty young Victorian heroine looks fun too.

Aw, and just when you thought they'd do Mansfield Park or Northanger Abbey we get another Sense & Sensibility instead. Not that I mind, mind you. Just thought there was territory less explored.

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

From the genius that brought you Nurse Betty.

Just looking at the Castro Theater schedule for Godzilla Fest info (more later) and ran across this! "The Nomi Song" a documentary on Klaus Nomi. Wah. It is playing the night the mother in law arrives.

"THE NOMI SONG: He looked an alien, sang like a diva-Klaus Nomi was one of the 1980's most profoundly bizarre characters: a counter tenor who sang pop music like opera and brought opera to club audiences and they LOVED it. A story of fame, death, friendship, betrayal, performance, and the greatest New Wave rock star that never was. Featuring: performance artist Ann Magnuson, Gabriele Le Fari, and David Bowie. Germany (2004) 99m. US Premiere.
Co-presented with Frameline."

---

And just got an email from an old friend that he is putting on Godzilla Fest at the Castro Theater in November. SO EXCITED. A seven day fest to celebrate the beastie's 50th anniversary. Woo!

Scroll all the way down to November 17-23 to see the full line-up!

Here's the blurb from Augie!

GODZILLAFEST: CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF MONSTROUS MAYHEM!

NOVEMBER 17th-23rd, 2004

CASTRO THEATRE
429 Castro Street
San Francisco, California 94114

GODZILLAFEST is San Francisco's seven-day, twenty-film celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the world's most famous monster. GODZILLAFEST is not only showcasing five decades of monster cinema, at the 1400-seat Castro Theatre [http://www.thecastrotheatre.com], but is also dedicated to the talented artists who brought these films to life. GODZILLAFEST will feature displays on the films and public addresses by several Guests of Honor, from Japan and the US, who were involved in the making of the series. GODZILLAFEST's Guests of Honor include actors HIROSHI KOIZUMI (Mothra, Ghidrah, Godzilla: Tokyo SOS), AKIRA KUBO (Monster Zero, Son of Godzilla, Destroy All Monsters), TSUTOMU "TOM" KITAGAWA (Godzilla in Godzilla 2000, Godzilla: Tokyo SOS, Godzilla Final Wars), RUSS TAMBLYN (West Side Story, War of the Gargantuas, Twin Peaks), JERRY ITO (Mothra, The Last War, The Manster), ED KEANE (Atomic Rulers of the World, Battle in Outer Space, Mothra)... and the hosts of the KTVU's legendary "Creature Features," BOB WILKINS and JOHN STANLEY. GODZILLAFEST also has the backing of Toho Co., Ltd., Sony Pictures Entertainment, the Consul General of Japan, and has been accepted as part of the Consul General's 150th Anniversary Celebration of US-Japan Relations [http://www.cgjsf.org].

In conjunction with the Bay Area Film Events, the Castro Theater, Toho Co. Ltd., Sony Repretory and Henshin! Online (incoporating Kaiju Productions), GODZILLAFEST is proud to present our Big Movie Lineup: Godzilla: the Uncut Original (1954), Godzilla: King of the Monsters! (Raymond Burr Version), Rodan (1956), The H-Man (1958), Battle in Outer Space (1959), Mothra (1961), King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962), Ghidrah: The Three-Headed Monster (1964), Monster Zero (1965), War of the Gargantuas (1966), Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster (1966), Son of Godzilla (1967), Destroy All Monsters (1968), Godzilla vs. Megalon (1973), Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah (1991), Godzilla vs. Destroyah (1995), Godzilla 2000 (1999), GMK: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (2001), Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla (2002) and Godzilla: Tokyo SOS (2003). The Castro Theatre will also host autograph sessions with the Guests of Honor, Q&A, lectures, Godzilla-related vendors and events (check out the official website for
showtimes and events). GODZILLAFEST promises to be the Biggest Godzilla Event of the 50th Anniversary!

Bay Area Film Events will also be hosting at coordinating several GODZILLAFEST-related events, before and running concurrent with the Film Festival and Guests of Honor at the Castro Theatre, held at the Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Northern California, located at 1840 Sutter Street in San Francisco's Japantown [http://www.jcccnc.org].

November 3rd-23rd, 2004: IMAGINE GODZILLA!
Imagine Godzilla, allows a rare, first-hand, chance to see original pre-production art from the archives of director Ishiro Honda and art director Yasuyuki Inoue.

November 13th, 2004: THE BIG G's 50-YEAR BASH!
This event will include a Videogame Tournament of Atari's new "Godzilla: Save the Earth" (soon to be released on the Playstation, X-Box and Gamecube platforms), while the Model-Building Contest will showcase the talents of local modelers. In addition, there will be a variety vendors booths, offering a wide array of Godzilla goods, food and more!

[listens to the Mothra theme]