American: The Bill Hicks Story
Blu-ray | DVD
Directed by Matt Harlock, Paul Thomas
Starring Kevin Booth, John Farneti, Bill Hicks, Lynn Hicks, Mary Hicks
BBC Warner
Release Date: June 7, 2011

Welcome America, welcome to Bill Hicks. You may have heard of this guy. We have.

And by that I mean we, English.

Not to get on my high-horse about this, but I feel somewhat proud that Bill Hicks adopted the UK as his second home, a place where his comedy seems to fit. His popularity in 1991 was evident at the peak of his career whilst filming for the iconic stand-up tour Revelations at the Dominion Theatre in London. His cynical approach and opinion on current matters and affairs that informed his comedy, cloaked in a riding coat and hat, he grieved that the death of the American Dream became too uncompromising and conflicting for the U.S. He grieved to the English people, the outsiders to the Americans.

And so, after his passing in 1994, his star could have waned. Extinguished and forgotten. He was on the verge of wider success, with interest from British TV in the works, when he fell ill with terminal cancer. But he didn’t, thanks to his effortless comedy stylings and timeless subject matter that still resonates today especially when you tie together the political climate of the late 1980s, early 1990s, and the scary similarity with ol’ Dubya… which has made it’s way online to YouTube… where it has faced new and greater audiences and will continue to do so. I would love to say more on the guy – but I implore you to discover for yourself, his words say enough, and you’ll find out more below…

Continue reading after the jump for an interview with Bill’s brother Steve Hicks. [...]

Howl
Directed by Robert Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman
Starring James Franco, Jon Hamm, David Strathairn, Bob Balaban, Jeff Daniels, Todd Rotondi, Mary-Louise Parker
UK Release date: February 25, 2011

16:10pm Screen 3 in the basement of the Cornerhouse, the missus and I alone in the dark, a screen no bigger than 15×10 feet, making this feel like a slideshow presentation and the film starts in greyscale, in a smoky basement cafe in 1955 San Fransisco…

In 1955, a 29-year-old unpublished poet realised the American Dream in a four-part poem called Howl, a poem that would become an obscene ode to the struggle of his displaced lost generation, post WWII when the creation of ‘teenager’ also created a whole slew of new problems for the new transition between child and man.

“What would my father think of Howl?” Ginsberg wondered, a typical notion of self examination and the constant need to prove to parents that, yes, you will find a job, even if it is not in their footsteps. Ginsberg would soon find out two years later in 1957 that it isn’t just what his father thinks, but the general public when the poem became infamous when his publisher was thrust into a court trial for the distribution of obscene materials [...]

Paul
Directed by Greg Mottola
Starring Simon Pegg (Graeme Willy), Nick Frost (Clive Gollings), Seth Rogen (Paul – Voice), Kristen Wiig (Ruth Buggs), Jason Bateman (Agent Zoil), Jane Lynch (Pat Stevenson), Bill Hader (Haggard)
UK release February 14, 2011
U.S. release March 18, 2011

PROBING INVESTIGATION

When considering writing a review for you, my American/worldwide cohorts, for the UK release of Paul, a whole month in advance of the U.S. screening, I had a problem. Every other bloody magazine/media has reviewed it… (and with reference to the current Empire mag, who I won’t plagiarize but I will say this: RESEARCH! Their article on Captain America was not as informed as my article. I was there man, you don’t know, I got the pictures man, 5 months before!!)

…and stole the best/cheesiest headlines: ‘Alien Nation’, ‘E.T. Rider’, and ‘Close Encounters of the NERD Kind’.

Bastards. I spent long arduous seconds creating ‘From OuterSpaced’, but that’s the kind of genius I am. I’m also an insider. Not a crew member of said film, no, I’m that type of Geek that knows enough about UFOs to be an expert. But that’s my bias, especially during the 1990s when you couldn’t avoid the stuff. And so in the course of this article, I scraped together the remnants of my vast DVD collection, including Spaced (see what I did there!?) Shaun of the Dead/Hot Fuzz boxset (£5 – Bargain) and purchased the Simon Pegg autobiography Nerd Do Well to look for clues that would lead to Paul [...]

The Dale Street Journal: The Filming of Captain America: The First Avenger in Manchester

The following is an account of the filming in Manchester, UK, of the upcoming 2011 Marvel movie Captain America: The First Avenger, which includes exclusive photos from the set. The film is directed by Joe Johnston (The Rocketeer, Jurassic Park 3) with a $140 million budget and has Chris Evans (Fantastic Four, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World) in the title role. Now readers, I will keep it informative and humorous, with the anecdotes coming think and fast, and remember — when the production needed somewhere cheap that could masquerade as 1940s New York that they could blow seven shades of shit out of… they came to Manchester, England. The Forbidden Planet store only 5 minutes walk from the set seemingly had nothing advertising the fact… strange.

‘The Buildup’

I was oblivious. I was informed by a work colleague that on the one day I had off from work was the one day I missed the article in the Manchester Evening Newspaper [Thursday September 9th, 2010, page 24] in the Northern Quarter of Manchester on Dale Street — the bohemian beatnik center of the city, iconoclastic famous and championed by the infamous ‘sons’ from the band ‘Oasis’, that filming is to begin… something I can guarantee you DOES NOT happen that regularly in the the North West of England — granted the last two movies filmed here was the Alfie remake with Jude Law and Robert Downey Jr’s Sherlock Holmes, both of which flew past without so much of a mention, not that Jude Law is worth a mention [...]

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Our UK representative gives us his spin on Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales.

Lucifer is gets a chance to redeem himself to God when he gets to inhabit the body of a struggling writer.

The actor best known as “Bill” in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure tells us about directing the Cartoon Network live-action movie Ben 10, based on the animated series, and much more!

Some updates from HonkeyFinger main-man Jonny.

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Metal Hammer magazine’s fifth annual ‘Golden Gods Awards’.

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