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Welcome to The B-Side, from The Film Stage. Here we talk about movie directors! Not the movies that made them famous or kept them famous, but the ones that they made in between.

Today we’re honored to chat with iconic director John Sayles, whose essential crime epic Lone Star is now available from The Criterion Collection in both 4K Uhd + Blu-ray.

Our B-Sides today include Limbo, Amigo, and Go For Sisters. We also discuss Sayles’ parallel careers as a screenwriter and a novelist. He talks about the work he did on the Toshirô Mifune/Scott Glenn actioner The Challenge (director John Frankenheimer asking him to write new draft over a weekend before an impending strike); he discusses what he learned working for Roger Corman early in his career; which genre he’s still itching to direct; his love of the recent Godzilla Minus One; and the slew of scripts that never got made.

Brian De Palma’s 1983 saga of hoodlum Tony Montana is an exceptional remake that’s become a classic almost by default — it’s too strikingly original to ignore. De Palma did the Latin male stereotype no favors, while bringing attention to the outrageous drug trafficking aided by law enforcement and criminal banks in a shameful decade of excess. Al Pacino added a page to his catalog of great performances, and the careers of Michelle Pfeiffer and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio were duly launched. De Palma gives this one ‘classical’ direction: he skips his former film school cinema games and homages to Hitch the Master.

Scarface

“The World is Yours” Limited Edition

4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

Universal Pictures Home Entertainment

1983 / Color / 2:39 widescreen / 170 min. / Street Date October 15, 2019 / 57.22

Starring: Al Pacino, Michelle Pfeiffer, Steven Bauer, Robert Loggia, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Miriam Colon, F. Murray Abraham, Paul Shenar, Harris Yulin, Pepe Serna, Victor Campos,...

In possibly the most interesting film news of the day (if not the week), stalwart American indie writer/director John Sayles (Brother From Another Planet, Lone Star, Passion Fish) will be writing and directing Django Lives!, the third installment of the Django series, once again starring Franco Nero. As reported on A.V. Club, the film is set 50 years after the first film, with Django now working as a horse handler and extra on the set of D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation. This seems to tie in with the themes of much of Sayles' indie films dealing with race relations in the Us. Sayles is one of my favourite American directors, creating films such as those above and others like Men With Guns and Go...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

Disney has been more than a little coy when it’s come to Brad Bird’s take on “Tomorrowland.” The things we did know were a disparate group of information. Let’s see what we had... • George Clooney was a former child genius who lives alone in a high-tech house. • Britt Robertson is a girl who acquires a magic Tomorrowland pin. • Britt Robertson is “The One” who can save the future. • Men with guns want to stop Britt Robertson from saving the future. • Steampunk rocket ships. • ??????? Not a lot to go on. Then the international trailer introduced some meta elements involving Walt Disney and the Tomorrowland parks. Which made sense since you can see Space Mountain in the trailer. A couple of deleted animated sequences solidified the future-past 1950s Disney feel. But now the big guns are out. The latest trailer is less about retro-future hope and more about creepy...

Retrospective of 10 Sayles films includes Go For Sisters and The Return of the Secaucus Seven.

John Sayles will be honoured with a retrospective at the 54th Cartagena Film Festival (Ficci) and he will also participate in a March 18 roundtable discussion at the festival.

The festival will screen 10 of his films, including the recent Go For Sisters, Lone Star, Casa de los Babies, Men With Guns, Sunshine State, City of Hope, SIlver City, Matewan, Eight Men Out and his directorial debut The Return of the Secaucus Seven.

Actor Clive Owen will be a Guest of Honour at the festival, which will show the Latin American premiere of his latest film, Guillaume Canet’s Blood Ties on March 14. Owen will be presented with the India Catalina prize and then will be publicly interviewed by Ficci director Monika Wagenberg.

World Bank study recommends 51 films using development as a plot device - sometimes at expense of accuracy and complexity

International development is just about at the bottom of the list of things that the average westerner thinks about each day. News organisations are closing their foreign bureaus. One of the big Us television networks turned down more money for global health reporting after a series, entirely funded by grants, led to a dip in viewers. In other words ratings were so bad that the network turned down millions of dollars. It is that tough.

Aside from advocacy efforts like (the much-criticised) Kony 2012 and Oxfam advertisements, how do people learn about the world around them? The answer could be Hollywood. Reporting on Africa does not get much attention in the Us, but a film staring Leonardo DiCaprio about Sierra Leone does.

A film like Blood Diamond, setting aside its problems, brings...

The relationship between Mexico and the U.S. serves as a continual inspiration to director John Sayles, it seems. Someone asked him about this recurring theme after the Go for Sisters screening at SXSW earlier this year, and it shows up in that film as well as earlier works Hombres Armados (Men with Guns) from 1997 (all right, that movie is only based in Mexico, but still), and the 1996 movie Lone Star.

Lone Star takes place in fictional Frontera (that's Spanish for "border"), Texas. Since it's the late '90s, this is before any border walls were up, and you didn't need a passport to travel between the countries. Which is not to say that there aren't border politics in this film. 

Sayles, as in his later Sunshine State, attempts here to give voice to those whom we don't typically see in film as he portrays issues endemic to our state.

Brand-new footage gives fans terrifying insight into Bane, who may be Batman's most menacing enemy ever.

By Kevin P. Sullivan

Tom Hardy as Bane in "Dark Knight Rises"

Photo: Warner Bros.

After weeks of waiting, never-before-seen footage from "The Dark Knight Rises" debuted at the 21st annual MTV Movie Awards, and no matter how much awesomely new material we saw, the clip could never be long enough.

Christian Bale, Gary Oldman, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and director Christopher Nolan were on hand to present the footage, and they did not let us down. The montage included brand-new scenes with Catwoman, more footage of the aerial vehicle, the Bat, and a terrifying shot of Bane, sure to stay burned in the collective memory of Batman fans.

Here's our take on the new "Dark Knight Rises" footage.

The Batcave

It may seem like a silly thing to look forward to when you consider all...

Brand-new footage gives fans terrifying insight into Bane, who may be Batman's most menacing enemy ever.

By Kevin P. Sullivan

Tom Hardy as Bane in "Dark Knight Rises"

Photo: Warner Bros.

After weeks of waiting, never-before-seen footage from "The Dark Knight Rises" debuted at the 21st annual MTV Movie Awards, and no matter how much awesomely new material we saw, the clip could never be long enough.

Christian Bale, Gary Oldman, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and director Christopher Nolan were on hand to present the footage, and they did not let us down. The montage included brand-new scenes with Catwoman, more footage of the aerial vehicle, the Bat, and a terrifying shot of Bane, sure to stay burned in the collective memory of Batman fans.

Here's our take on the new "Dark Knight Rises" footage.

The Batcave

It may seem like a silly thing to look forward to when you consider all...

Lois (Erica Durance) plans the wedding and tells Clark (Tom Welling) that her guests are in danger of recognizing his 'super' friends. Then sees Clark as the Blur outside of Big Ben in London. (Hey England no longer uses those sirens here and especially not for police cars.) Upon his return to Metropolis, Lois calls him 'Smallville' so Clark immediately knows he's in trouble again; oh and those Brit accents on the TV were awful! with a capital Aw! She warns Clark is in danger of being recognized as the Blur. But Clark feels he's okay, he didn't get into any sort of trouble. He then says he spellchecked his story after Lois shows him the paper (Clark and his spellchecker comments, he used those for Lois last time.) Lois has to spell out, 'heroes' and circles Clark's photo next to it. He needs a new disguise, which...

For his 17th feature film, writer/director John Sayles performs one of his periodic 180 degree shifts. Throughout his 33-year directing career, the gifted chronicler of the histories and familial legacies of small-town Americana (in films such as Lone Star and Honeydripper) has occasionally ventured outside that comfort zone. The Irish-set Secret of Roan Inish and the Spanish language, Latin American-set Men with Guns are among Sayles’s best-reviewed works. In Amigo, his most ambitious film yet, the filmmaker heads to the Philippines, circa 1900, for an old-fashioned yet all-too-resonant portrait of U.S. imperialism run amok. There’s an aesthetic stiffness to certain elements of Sayles’s picture, which concerns the drama that plays out in a fictional village during the Philippine-American war. The camerawork is stately and largely of the front-and-center medium shot variety, while the limited, spare jungle setting exudes a sort of abstract theatricality. It’s not always the most vibrant enterprise as it charts...

There aren't many directors like John Sayles. The man may have begun his career working for Roger Corman, and he has made a living doing studio rewrite gigs (many uncredited) over the years. But he has also carved out a unique career as a director of films that aren't quite like those made by anyone else. He had a great run of films from the mid-'80s to the late '90s (Matewan, Eight Men Out, City of Hope, Passion Fish, The Secret of Roan Inish, Lone Star and Men With Guns) and has made several films with the great actor Chris Cooper. Their latest is Amigo, set during the Philippine-American war. The film premiered to mixed reception at Tiff last year, and now you can see the latest trailer below. Sadly, this trailer is pretty terrilbe -- the voiceover is awful, and the way the footage is cut underscores...

I'm totally stealing one of Dustin's gimmicks, because I'm lazy.

Here are four posters. As many may realize, the art of the movie poster is a dying breed, much like the art of the trailer. There's a certain verve involved with a great poster, a sense of artistic panache, an understanding of space and placement, and making something intriguing without being too obvious. These days, we see very few great ones -- in fact, the best movie poster's you're likely to see are the unofficial ones done by independent artists. Sometimes the marketing and PR folks get it right. Sometimes it's such a shit movie that no poster can save it. Sometimes, it's somewhere in between.

This? This is an utter waste of Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz. Still, it's not a bad poster, just wasteful.

Another Very Serious Movie, again featuring Rachel Weisz. I was planning to see this at Iffb,...

Sometimes, news stays under the radar enough that months later, you run across a title at IMDb and hurriedly start researching in frenzied fan panic. While perusing John Sayles' roster for my latest movie club pick, I came across Amigo, a new Sayles feature in post-production. It seems this project got cooking earlier this year, had a marketing trailer at Cannes, and is currently getting put together in the editing room.

Sayles' first mixed-language film since 1997's Men with Guns, Amigo details the Phillippine-American War (1899-1902), and boasts a cast you are definitely not going to expect -- especially if you're a Sayles fan. Hit the jump for all the goodies.

Filed under: Drama, Casting, Scripts, War

Continue reading John Sayles' Next Film: 'Amigo' & Its Off-the-Radar Website

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Like many filmmakers, John Sayles got his start in horror, writing scripts for Piranha, Alligator, and even The Howling. But where others used modest beginnings to springboard into superstardom, Sayles continued modestly, becoming the leading name in indie film and creating a relatively small but wildly diverse catalog of films. He merged wacky aliens with racial commentary in The Brother from Another Planet, tackled sports history for Eight Men Out, detailed Latin America struggles in Men with Guns, and even offered some George Dubya satire with Silver City. Yet within that diversity, he became known for his ability to weave a myriad of disparate characters into one solitary and dynamic plot.

But Limbo is a film of an utterly different sort. Shot in 1999, it took the same ideas that have always interested Sayles -- real people and environments free of the rosy Hollywood sheen -- and didn't allow the web to be woven together.

In The Tempest, one of the last plays William Shakespeare fully authored, the character of Prospero is a conundrum. For 12 years he's been marooned on an island with his young daughter, Miranda. Struggling to survive, he blackmails the spirit Ariel into being his servant and compels the mortal Caliban to be his slave. For reasons equally simple and complex, Prospero is hero and antihero, protagonist and antagonist. Perhaps it's those contradictions that make him the perfect role for Mandy Patinkin to play.For seven months Patinkin has enjoyed a luxury afforded very few actors: He's done little but prepare to play perplexing Prospero, in this case for Classic Stage Company's Off-Broadway production of The Tempest. For the first three months, he logged three to four hours a day, including Saturdays and Sundays, meeting with Shakespeare scholar Rachel Chavkin and analyzing each line of the play, "translating it into English,...

"The Other Conquest" (La Otra Conquista), a Mexican film about the Aztecs' struggle against the Spanish conquerors in the 16th century, is getting a second chance at a theatrical release -- seven years after its first bowed theatrically in the U.S.

Indie distributor Union Station Media, the new joint venture between Canada's Alliance Atlantis Motion Picture Distribution and Australia's Arclight Films, will rerelease the film May 4 on 50 screens in Texas, Nevada and Fresno, Calif., as well as in New Mexico. On May 11, it will open in New York and go wider in Texas, moving on in subsequent weeks to markets where there is a significant Hispanic population. There are no plans to play the film in Los Angeles, where it appeared during its first release.

Written and directed by Salvador Carrasco and produced by Alvaro Domingo, the film stars Damian Delgado ("Men With Guns"), Elpidia Carrillo ("Tortilla Heaven"), Jose Carlos Rodriguez and Inaki Aierra. Placido Domingo is executive producer and is featured on the soundtrack singing an aria composed for the movie.