SCENEPR need films…short, long, foreign,animated..whatever you got. We’ll be launching a WEEKLY screening/networking event in January. We have a cool new space for this event that people will absolutely love. Fantastic sound system, private to only us, and we’ll be serving up some popcorn!

And if you happen to have films, motion graphics or music videos about love, sex & romance, why not be sure to enter it for our 2nd Annual Love Actually which takes place February 14th (thats right…Valentines Day 2009).

So if you are a filmmaker or motion artist or know one looking for some love, send us a note and we’ll let you know where and how to forward your works.

You know, I was content with thinking that blax-ploitation send-up Black Dynamite was merely a very creative fake trailer (we’ve included the red-band version post-jump, just to stay safe). But every indication seems to suggest that Michael Jai White’s funky fight against The Man is a feature-length affair — and one that’s been accepted to the next Sundance Film Fesitval to boot.

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Now that Tokyo Filmex is over for another year and I find myself filled with the spirit of Blue Christmas, allow me to officially reopen Ryuganji for business. Putting breaking news stories into English has become less of an essential endeavour for me since I first began this site thanks to all the cross-pollinating sites and blogs that have emerged, so from now on I’m going to concentrate less on time-sensitive news that everyone else will inevitably jump on anyway and instead turn my attention to translating a random selection of features and interviews, which will hopefully be more edifying and entertaining.

But back to Filmex, which had a touch of the surreal to it for me this year. I help out with translation of the official catalog so I got seats in the main venue beside some of the jurors and other friends of the festival, such as Kurosawa Kiyoshi, Nishijima Hidetoshi and Tony Leung Ka Bloody Fai. Naturally being a big fan of all three I didn’t have the nerve to chat them up, so instead I consoled myself with the knowledge that I could have easily put any of them in a rear naked choke. OK, maybe not Big Tony.

First of all, believe the hype about Sono Sion’s special invitation film “Ai no Mukidashi” (Love Exposure). This was its big public coming out, and I don’t think I’ve ever been to a screening that generated such palpable excitement; it truly made me feel privileged to be amongst the first in the world to see it. Not only is it a priapic hot beef inoculation against all those flaccidly soppy junai (pure love) films that have drowned multiplexes in smug crocodile tears in…

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One of the big questions that has plagued cutie funny guy Michael Cera is whether he’ll be able to find a career outside of his bumbling, awkward, mild-mannered roles. While that question is currently left unanswered, we will get to see if the guy on the screen is the same guy backstage.

The Hollywood Reporter posts that he’s part of a “semi-secret” project called Paper Hearts. Why semi-secret? This sucker, which is being described as part-documentary and part-scripted comedy, has already been made and will debut soon at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. It seems this new film will follow his real-life relationship with Charlyne Yi (the stoner girl from Knocked Up, who you can see above), and like his recent Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, be greatly influenced by music.

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The success of Ray Harryhausen Presents; The Pit and the Pendulum, a short stop motion animated film produced by Hand Made Heroes Film & Television has resulted in a comic book deal with Bluewater Productions. When Bluewater President Darren G. Davis and Director Marc Lougee of Hand Made Heroes discovered they were both producing work independently under the Ray Harryhausen Presents banner, Bluewater immediately penned a deal with director Marc Lougee to further develop film & comic book cross-over properties.

Since it’s premiere hosted by Harry Knowles of Ain’t It Cool News at the BNAT Film Festival, The Pit and the Pendulum short film has screened in over 200 film festivals and comic conventions around the world including AFI Dallas and San Diego Comic-Con. Nearly 100,000 visitors logged into the film’s website within two days of the film’s premier in Austin, TX, and has continued to garner a global fan following.
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His exclusive short cut of Nick Broomfield’s feature film Kurt & Courtney talks about the controversy surrounding Kurt Cobain’s death and the conspiracy theories that tried to implicate his wife, Courtney Love. With some insights into Kurt’s early life, before Nirvana, Broomfield touches on some of the other factors that may have contributed to Cobain’s early and tragic death.

For more about the full length film, and director Nick Broomfield check out, www.nickbroomfield.com/home.html

As the convoy of 18 SUVs pulls to a halt on the narrow road above Sanjiang, Wenchuan county, Sichuan, the gleeful shrieks of an excited crowd float upwards through the autumnal mist. The vehicles have made the three-hour journey from the provincial capital Chengdu, spending two hours of it crawling through countryside affected by the cataclysmic earthquake in May.

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Three thousand miles from where Happy, Dopey and Doc line the walls of the Walt Disney Company’s Burbank studios, the animator Bill Plympton keeps an office in one of those south-of-Midtown Manhattan buildings full of anonymous-looking steel gray doors.

Behind them could be anything from vacuum cleaner dealerships to international drug cartels. But who cares? Clearly, more fantastic things are erupting down the hall at Mr. Plympton’s: Alien marriages. Nose hairs as long as the Nile. Dogs that dream of fire hydrants. And cinema created by pencil.

A lot of pencil

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You meet Mickey, you can’t help liking him. He rescues abused dogs! He cries a lot: over his stepfather’s supposed abuse; the loss of his brother to cancer and his dogs to old age; the failure of his marriage to the actress Carré Otis. He admits he destroyed his own career, because, as he puts it: “I was arrogant. . . . I wasn’t smart enough or educated enough” to deal with stardom. He is candid about the people he has crossed paths with: Nicole Kidman is “an ice cube”; Michael Cimino, the director of “Heaven’s Gate,” “is crazy” and “nuts”; and the producer Samuel Goldwyn Jr. is “a liar.”

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We’ll be doing some work on SCENEPR over the next few days and you may experience some weirdness (pages down or site down) because of it.

We’ll be working in the evenings starting tomorrow night and hope to have all the upgrades and changes made and done by Sunday Evening.

Best,

Team SCENEPR