One of my favorite kung fu flicks, 1978's 7 Grandmasters, screens Tuesday at 7:45 at the Hollywood Theatre (4122 NE Sandy). Dan Halsted from the Grindhouse Film Festival sums it up nicely:

A kung fu teacher sets out to prove that he is the greatest fighter by finding and defeating the 7 Grandmasters. One by one, he fights their wide variety of animal styles (tiger, leopard, mantis, monkey, etc.) He also puts a young student through elaborate training, and is followed by a mysterious kung fu villain in a weird hat. Featuring all the best old school sound effects, fighting styles, martial arts weapons, and silver haired villains with maniacal laughter (plus the best monkey-style kung fu fight ever put on film).

Want two free tickets? Sure you do. You know the drill: Email me no later than 2 pm on Monday, November 9, and make sure the subject line of your email is "Pai Mei." On Monday at 2, I'll pick a winner at random* and email them to let 'em know how to pick up their tickets. Have at!

*Flattery, as always, helps.

The Northwest Film & Video Festival opens today with a little-bit-of-everything program of shorts at Whitsell Auditorium and an after-party at Cravedog Studios (412 NW Couch, Suite 203) at 9pm.

Here’s the festival trailer, which on the one hand is not very informative, but on the other hand is an endearing short in itself. Respect the owl!

I wrote a little preview for this nine-day inundation of regional film, but I couldn’t squeeze in everything. Things got lost, but I share my over-word-count hit and miss picks after the jump. Or, skip my editorial and go straight for the information overload.

Tonight and tomorrow night, the 99W Drive-In (3000 Portland Road, Newberg) is hosting a truly fantastic double feature: Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and Zombieland. First feature starts at dusk, second feature follows. Stock up on some Twinkies beforehand and enjoy.

So I have a vague suspicion that those selling this film are trying to make it look just a teensy bit epic. This trailer is about as subtle as shouting "HOLY SHIT NEW JAMES CAMERON IT'S SO INSANE IT'S GONNA MAKE YOUR DICK EXPLODE ARE YOU READY HELL YES YOU'RE READY!!! PANDORAAAAAAAAH!!!!" (Which is a good thing, as far as I can tell; so far, the marketing department at Fox hasn't seemed to know what he hell to do with Avatar, but at least now they're trying to convey the sense that it's a Big Deal.)

Via AICN. (A site which also inspired the look of the Film section in this week's Halloween dress-up issue.)

Following Funny People—in which he played a sell-out comedian who stars in movies like Merman, My Best Friend Is a Robot, and Re-Do—Adam Sandler's next movie will be Jack and Jill, in which he'll play not only Jack, but also (wait for it...) Jill. Variety manages to keep a straight face about this news, but FilmDrunk puts it best:

You can say Funny People was overlong and self-indulgent, it was still the best thing Adam Sandler’s done in 10 years. It was honest, he was actually trying, and he made you remember, oh yeah, this guy’s actually really funny. And how did we reward him? With his first box office flop, pretty much ever. So now we get Adam Sandler playing Jack and Jill in a script from the writer of Paul Blart Mall Cop.

Goddammit.

The next entry in the Old School Kung Fu Masters series, Fatal Flying Guillotine, screens at 9:45 on Tuesday, October 27, at the Hollywood Theatre. The pitch, via festival organizer Dan Halsted:

Following the Shaw Brothers' Flying Guillotine film, and Jimmy Wang Yu's classic Master of the Flying Guillotine, came this lower budget batshit-crazy production. A young student is out for revenge for his mother's death, while a group of Shaolin monks search for a kung fu book. All roads lead to an old evil master who fights with dual motorized flying guillotines, beheading anyone who challenges him. This movie seems to have been written in some sort of drug fueled haze, and gets crazier by the minute. Protect your neck!

Dan was kind enough to donate two tickets to the screening for a Blogtown giveaway, and here's how you can win 'em: Email me no later than 1 pm tomorrow (Friday, October 23), and make sure your subject line is "Age of Consent." (Bonus points for anyone who guesses how I arrived at that phrase from Fatal Flying Guillotine.) Shortly after 1 pm on Friday, I'll email the winner to tell 'em how to pick up their tickets.

Sound good? Good. Go.

• Photograph by Martin Schoeller, via the New Yorker.

This is how the New Yorker's "Man of Extremes: The Return of James Cameron" begins:

The director James Cameron is six feet two and fair, with paper-white hair and turbid blue-green eyes. He is a screamer—righteous, withering, aggrieved. “Do you want Paul Verhoeven to finish this motherfucker?” he shouted, an inch from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s face, after the actor went AWOL from the set of True Lies, a James Bond spoof that Cameron was shooting in Washington, D.C. (Schwarzenegger had been giving the other actors a tour of the Capitol.) Cameron has mastered every job on set, and has even been known to grab a brush out of a makeup artist’s hand. “I always do makeup touch-ups myself, especially for blood, wounds, and dirt,” he says. “It saves so much time.” His evaluations of others’ abilities are colorful riddles. “Hiring you is like firing two good men,” he says, or “Watching him light is like watching two monkeys fuck a football.” A small, loyal band of cast and crew works with him repeatedly; they call the dark side of his personality Mij—Jim backward.

Holy shit. Dana Goodyear's piece is a fascinating profile of Cameron, and it's loaded with insane details about the making of Avatar. ("This film integrates my life's achievements," Cameron says at one point. "It's the most complicated stuff anyone's ever done.") If you have any interest in popular cinema, read the whole thing ASAP.

Check out this funny and fairly awesome trailer for Black Lightning—a Rooskie movie about a nerdy kid and his crappy car that turns out to have all sorts of wicked cool super powers. It's like Spider-Man except Spider-Man's car was bitten by the radioactive spider instead of him.

(If this was filmed in Portland, the movie would be about a super-powered bike. Sigh.)

In this week's Mercury, I wrote a short story about the Old School Kung Fu Masters film series, which is starting this weekend at the Hollywood and will, most likely, be several different kinds of awesome.

But wait—THERE'S MORE! Now you can win tickets to the first two films! Thanks to festival organizer Dan Halsted, I have a pair of tickets for the legendary The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (screens Sat Oct 17 at 7:30 pm) AND a pair of tickets for the slightly less legendary Shaolin vs. Lama (screens Tues Oct 20 at 7:45 pm).

I'm gonna give each pair out separately, so you'll need to pick which film you want to see the most before you enter. Once you decide, email me no later than 4 pm today (October 15), and make sure that your subject line is either "36th Chamber" or "Lama," depending on which film you want to see the most. At 4 pm I'll randomly pick two winners*, one for each film, and I'll email 'em back to let them know how to get their tickets.

OH, AND: Please don't enter twice in an attempt to win both pairs of tickets, 'cause I wanna spread the wealth, etc. However, if you don't care which film you win tickets for—if you just wanna see some big-screen kung fu, dammit, and don't care either way if it has to do with chambers or lamas—then just make your subject line "Bring da Ruckus." When I draw winners for each film, I'll also draw from any emails with the "Bring da Ruckus" subject line.

Have at!

*Flattery helps.

The internet was burning up this weekend like a case of chlamydia with rumors that a sequel to Joe Eszterhas' crapsterpiece Showgirls was on it's way. The feature will reportedly be called Showgirls 2: A Story of Hope and will focus on the brother of (Rena Riffel's non-character) Hope, who is "searching for revenge following the stripper's death from a dose of contaminated cocaine."

All of this is being spurred on by a really weird website featuring what an alien might believe movie trailers to be. That is to say, pictures move and words appear.

This raises a lot of questions: is it real? Is it a bizarre hoax? What will a Showgirls sequel be without Jesse Spano? What do you guys think?

Via Topless Robot.

Thanks, FilmDrunk.