When doing pre-production on a film, one of the most important things to do before your cameras start to roll is the script read through.  The read through is a great way to not only let the actors practice their parts and get a feel for their characters; but it also gives the director and writer a chance to see if the dialogue works and feels natural.

The Dysfunctional Screenwriters Society, a screenwriting/networking group in Philadelphia is holding an event called “The Big A** Read Through” at The Free Library of Philadelphia on February 22 from 6-9pm. The event will take scripts submitted by local screenwriters and pick 4 to have read aloud by local actors. There will also be a seminar by Adam Lebovitz speaking about the pre-production process and his experience in the film industry.

So check out their official website to submit your 10-30 page script to try and get it read at the event.

The 16th annual Israeli Film Festival is back, showcasing Israeli life and culture from February 25th through April 1st.

With screenings of 9 films in venues throughout Philadelphia and the surrounding suburbs, the six-week Festival features prize-winning films exclusively by Israeli filmmakers. The Festival celebrates Israeli cinema with the aim of enriching the American vision of Israeli culture and society through film.

For a list of the films playing and advanced ticket sales check out their website at www.iffphila.com. A limited number of free tickets for high school and college students are available for each screening and can be reserved online as well.

The 16th Annual Israeli Film Festival
February 25th – April 1st, 2012
www.iffphila.com

If you’re a genre fan in Philadelphia, there are two events that have become mandatory throughout the year. The first being Exhumed Films 24 Hour Horror-thon and the second being Exhumed Films eX-Fest; now in its second year.

I attended last year’s eX-Fest, which was 12 hours of some really rare and amazing exploitation from almost every sub-genre you could possible think of… and a few I never even imagined.

Well, tickets just went on sale last week for this year’s iteration of eX-Fest and I can’t wait to see what the guys at Exhumed Films have in store for us. eX-Fest will take place at the iHouse on Sunday, April 29th from 11:00am until 11:00pm and tickets are a mere $25 for 12 hours films all projected in 35mm.

My only suggestion is if you are thinking about going, getting your tickets sooner than later. It seems like as word continues to spread about Exhumed these events they tend to sell out quicker and quicker. Get your tickets here, while they last!

 The Whitest Kids U’ Know may have ended their television run back in June on IFC, but as promised they are back. The Kids are now touring the US with their own brand of live twisted sketch comedy and they will be stopping in Philly at our very own Trocadero on Saturday, February 11th.

Tickets for 21+ show are a mere $16 and can be purchased here.

The great folks over at the Troc were nice enough to give us a pair of tickets to give away for free to one lucky reader.  Want to check the show out for free?  Simply comment with your favorite sketch by The Whitest Kids U’ Know and one lucky reader will be picked at random sometime next week. Good luck!

The saddest thing about all the recent press for Red Tails are the bitter fanboys who seem to be using it as a chance to rage against George Lucas for the recent Star Wars Blu-ray release, rather than talk about what is a very important film.

Yes, Red Tails happens to be the long-in-gestation passion project produced by the creator of Star Wars. But like The Tuskegee Airmen it portrays, George Lucas also faced great adversity… in Hollywood, to the tune of paying for the $58 million film out of pocket.

The film is a pulpy look back at the 332nd Fighter Group in World War 2, The Tuskegee Airmen, also known as the Red Tails due the distinctive paint on the tails of their planes. The Tuskegee Airmen were the first African American military aviators in the United States armed forces. This film focuses on a very specific period in the history of the Airmen to give audiences the most bang for its buck.

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Last month I chatted with Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein, the Swedish directing duo behind the fourth entry in the Underworld franchise Underworld: Awakening. The first Underworld film in my opinion was A LOT of fun and really added something new to the then tired vampire vs. werewolf sub-genre of horror.

But like all franchises you deal with the law of diminishing returns, and by the third film Kate Beckinsale was no longer starring and some people argue the franchise had gotten pretty far off the beaten track. Well, looks like for number four they are rebooting the franchise with Kate back in the lead and a firm goal to give the people what they expect from an Underworld film, and in 3D no less.

I hope you enjoy this interview with two well known Swedish directors coming into a very established US franchise, trying to breathe some fresh life into it.

So how did you guys come about directing Underworld: Awakening?

Björn: Our agent was representing one of the writers who was writing with us and working on the script. We weren’t on their list of directors they were thinking about.

But we looked at the script, read it and really liked it.

We were fans of the prior films as well and really worked on our pitch and then they got to see our little Swedish film called Storm (A great little sci-fi flick!) and pretty quickly after that we got a call from Gary Lucchesi who is one of the producers and he was really excited because they thought we hit on some of the notes that they were concerned about.

After that we had a conference call with Len Wiseman who is the creator of the series and we found we were very similar in the backgrounds of stuff that we liked with regards to films, music and things like that.  He really responded well to Storm and after that meeting we hit the ground running, scouting locations in Vancouver. These things usually take months and years, but it took us a couple of weeks.

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Being the film geek that I am, when I am not watching movies I’m probably either reading about them or listening to people talk about them.

Speaking of which, Film Versus Film is a great new weekly web series produced at our very own Temple University. The series features a different in-depth film discussion each week by a panel made up of local filmmakers, professors, critics and scholars.

While I am a fan of the series, I only wish that the shows were a bit longer, though the series looks quite polished and well produced. I highly suggest checking it out and you can see a sample episode below, enjoy!

Pulp Cinema, a little outfit that I am helping out with will be doing a free screening of Akira Kurosawa’s samurai classic Yojimbo at The Broad Street Ministry on February 6th  at 7pm. The film will be presented in 16mm and is in Japanese with English subtitles.

If you’re not familiar with story of Yojimbo it’s about a ronin (a masterless samurai), played by Kurosawa regular Toshirō Mifune. One day he arrives in a small town currently in the clutches of competing crime lords, who all make their money from gambling.

Yojimbo means bodyguard in Japanese, and the samurai craftily pits both crime lords against one another to eradicate them as they both vie to win him as their bodyguard.

Check out the trailer below!

You may not know the name Nick Murphy but if you are an avid reader of the site or just into video games in general you are more than aware of his handiwork. Nick won a Geek Award last year for his trailers for Zelda (1987) and Indie God of War, and he has now tackled the game that seems to come on every electronic device from Nooks to microwave ovens these days… Angry Birds.

I spoke with him about directing his newest trailer and what goes into creating these little viral masterpieces. You can check out his newest parody at the end of the interview.

So how did you get started doing these game parodies?

I got hired working for the company Gamervision, they were setup already and they were like a video game news site and they had some web video content. They had this idea of combining Mario Brothers, but as Inglourious Basterds since the film was to come out.

So a friend of mine worked there and was like, I know my friend is a filmmaker lets bring him on. So they brought me in and I did it and it got like 300,000 or 400,000 views so it got passed all over the place and went pretty viral.

So right after that, they paid me for my time working on that, and they were like we want to hire you full time. So we kept making shorts.

It started there and we tried to keep that momentum going. It was a lot of fun.  I love it but it is such a niche thing. I am always trying to find that guy that loves video games, but loves movies the way I do too.

What do you think goes into a good video game mash-up trailer?

It’s hard because someone else did an Angry Birds thing and it has like 11 million views. But they did it in a way where it is super over the top. It’s like Michael Bay doing it. There was this government program that manufacture these birds to fight these pigs, who are the enemy.

For us that was an easy joke. We wanted to challenge ourselves and try and incorporated it into the real world. They came out with this Mortal Kombat realistic, gritty web series, so we thought if they can come out with something like that we can make Angry Birds gritty and visceral I guess. That is what I wanted, could this be a real thing?

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When Steven Soderbergh isn’t threatening to retire from directing, he is one of the more interesting directors out there working today. This is probably because he always seems to balance his big-big budget work with smaller introspective and thought provoking films.

Haywire is his newest big budget entry starring Gina Carano, Channing Tatum, Michael Fassbender, Antonio Banderas and Michael Douglas. The film is the story of a freelance black ops operative Mallory Kane (Gina Carano) who is betrayed, setup, and is now out for revenge.

We have 25 GOFOBO passes for 2 to a screening Tuesday, January 17th @ 7:30PM at the Ritz East. Wanna Pass? Simply leave a comment with your favorite Steven Soderbergh film by midnight Sunday the 15^th and the first 25 will be checking the film out for free.

Check out the trailer (SFW) below and the first 5 minutes of the film here (NSFW)

No cameras, camera phones, or other recording devices permitted in screening. Seating is on a first come, first serve basis. Theatre capacity is limited and passes won do not guarantee seating. (So please show up early!) Theater is not responsible for overbooking. Ticket holder and guest must enter theater together.

After checking out Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol at the Tuttleman IMAX at The Franklin Institute, I went back a week later to take a tour of the projection booth and talk with some of the fine folks who work there. What I found was the folks that manage and work in the theater are not just IMAX geeks, but really knowledgeable film geeks in general.

I also decided to interview the projectionist Matt Lorenz about what it’s like working with the format and took some pics of the booth to share. Being as interested in film as I am, I had a lot of fun chatting with Matt about working with one of the hottest formats out there right now.

So how did you become the projectionist at the Tuttleman IMAX?

Wow, that’s interesting. I was unemployed and I had done some theater work in live performance, doing sound engineering and that sort of thing. I actually applied to be one of the ticket takers and what they call a console operator here. What the entails is essentially working in all the theaters and the planetarium, introducing the shows and that sort of thing.

A projectionist position opened up and I got it. A lot of it is very specific training. So unless you studied IMAX somewhere else, a lot of it is just having some technical know-how and being able to learn it. It’s almost like assembly line work in terms of its repetitive motion, but once you understand how it works its pretty easy.

What kind of training did that entail?

Again, it’s very specific especially with a lot of the soundtrack stuff, computer knowledge is important. Some math skills are kind of important in terms of when you are trying to sync up soundtracks you need to count frames and break it down into minutes and seconds. So not complex math but you need to think not abstractly, but when you’re assembling film there are a lot of things you have to keep in mind in terms of head and tail and emulsion.

We train for a month before we can run any film. I was trained by the chief projectionist here and pretty much just followed him and did a lot of practice running films in the off hours, so that if anything went wrong there is not a live audience in there. It’s really just getting to know the equipment here. (more…)

Contraband is the latest film from Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur, probably best known for his film A Little Trip to Heaven. The film stars Mark Wahlberg and Kate Beckinsale and is a remake of the Icelandic 2009 film Reykjavík-Rotterdam, one of the biggest budgeted Icelandic films of all time. Fun fact… it actually starred Baltasar Kormákur, Contraband’s director.

The film is the story of Chris Farraday (Mark Wahlberg) who abandoned his life of crime long ago, but after his brother-in-law, Andy botches a drug deal for his ruthless boss, Tim Briggs (Giovanni Ribisi), Chris is forced back into doing what he does best; running contraband.

Chris must settle Andy’s debt and things get heated up when Chris has only hours to reach the cash. Chris must use his rusty skills to navigate the treacherous criminal network of drug lords, cops, and hit men before his wife Kate, and their two sons become targets as well.

Wanna check out Contraband Tuesday, January 10th at 7:30PM at the Ritz Five? Simply leave a comment and the first 30 people will be checking out the film.  Passes will be sent out tomorrow morning. In the meantime checkout the trailer below.

No cameras, camera phones, or other recording devices permitted in screening. Seating is on a first come, first serve basis. Theatre capacity is limited and passes won do not guarantee seating. (So please show up early!) Theater is not responsible for overbooking. Ticket holder and guest must enter theater together.