donturn.com

The Austinist has a short, but interesting interview with Don McKellar about his new movie Monkey Warfare.

Don is a favorite writer-director-actor from Toronto. You’re a fool if you don’t watch some his work including:

• The Red Violin: tracking a violin’s path through history with Samuel L. Jackson (but no snakes or planes), a child prodigy, a Chinese musician in the era of Cultural Revolution and a love-triangle including the violin itself.
• Last Night: an unusual “end of the world” movie with a small role by David Cronenberg as a dedicated power company employee dealing with the destruction of the planet in the only way he knows how - by thanking all of his customers (how Canadian)
• Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould : wonderful and insightful and you get to learn what Glenn Gould might eat for lunch.
• Twitch City: which recently came out on DVD and captures slacker Toronto, in the Kingston Market area perfectly. Watch this now.

Don’t ante up for the new James Bond movie.

The Reservoir Dogs (15th Anniversary Edition) DVD is out.

(Yes, it comes in a little, commemorative gasoline can.)
Included are:

• Select Scene Audio Commentary
• Pulp Factoids Viewer
• Playing it Fast and Loose: A Documentary
• Profiling Reservoir Dogs - Featurette
• Tipping Guide
• Deleted Scenes
• Classic Interviews with Quentin Tarantino and others
• K-Billy Sounds of the ’70s

How do you beat Snakes on a Plane?

With Blanks on a Blank, the film making challenge here in Austin at the Alamo Drafthouse. Check out the contest trailer too, it’s hilarious.

Note: the newest Snakes on a Plane theatrical trailer takes itself awfully seriously. I guess you can only run a joke so far, but seeing the joke played out (at length), in action, is all this movie may have going for it. It would be nice to see if they could push it even further.

From Kontroll (2004)

“A guy goes into a bar and orders ten shots of brandy.
The barman asks him ‘Ten, sir?’
‘Give them to me,’ the guy says.
The barman pours the ten shots and lines them up on the counter.
The guy takes the first and the tenth one, picks them up and pours them out
on the floor. He drinks the remaining eight, one after the other.
The barman asks with surprise, ‘Why did you pour those two shots out on the floor?’
The guy says ‘Look, sonny, the first one always tastes horrible and the last
one always makes me sick.’

From 101 Reykjavík (2000) (also a novel):

Why do Marlboro cigarettes have white filters in America, and yellow filters in Europe?
So Keith Richards can tell which continent he’s on.