FilmJerk Favorites

A group of unique directors and the essential works that you've got to see.

||| David Lean |||
David Lean

Honored with the American Film Institute Life Achievement Award in 1990, Lean’s body of work (ranging from the intimate film to the grandiose epic) demonstrates an obsessive cultivation of craft and a fastidious concern with detail that has become the very definition of quality British cinema.

Adapted from Noel Coward’s one-act play, Lean takes a potentially boring story of middle-age flirtation and tenderly creates one of the most enduring and poignant romance films ever made. Brilliantly underplayed, two happily married strangers meet by chance in a railway station and fall desperately in love, but never physically express the undercurrent of passion that exists between them, even during their final gut wrenching separation – if your heart doesn’t ache, you’re just not human!

Demonstrating moments of intimacy through gigantic display, Lean sets up the greatness of Pip’s expectations with the magnitude of his frightful encounters; one with an escaped convict, whose emerge into the frame reminds us what it’s like to be a child in a world of oversized, menacing adults, and another with the meeting of mad Miss Havisham, in all her gothic splendor.

Peter O'Toole made an enigmatic and lasting impression in his debut role as British officer T.E. Lawrence, who helped Arab rebels fight the Turks in WWI, and Omar Sharif has perhaps the greatest cinematic intro of all time as he magically appears through the ghostly waves of the desert heat, achieving Lean’s compulsive drive to create the perfectly composed shot. Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Jose Ferrer, and Claude Rains round out this incredibly talented and magnetically charged cast.

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Alien 5, Bye Bye Bye

By EdwardHavens

December 3rd, 2001

For the twelve of you who have been waiting for the next installment of the Alien franchise are going to have to wait a little longer. A source who wishes to call himself "Darryl Zanuck's Revenge" sends word to us that Fox shot down a supposed final draft script of Alien 5: Invasion on Friday afternoon.


Now, Sigourney Weaver has been very coy with the press about doing a part five, saying she was going to be meeting with Ridley Scott about possibly collaborating on this. Well, someone forgot to tell Sigourney that she does not decide when the next Alien movie gets made... especially if Ripley doesn't even appear in the latest script.

What? Yes, you read that right. Fox decided to give the franchise a spin with Annalee Call as the main focus of the story. Now why would Fox do that? DZR says because Sigourney is just holding out for that one last big paycheck she will never get from anyone else, and Winona Ryder is busting at the tits to do the movie. Since Annalee was an android in Resurrection, there are twenty different ways her reappearance could be explained away with nothing more than a one sentence script explanation.

Keeping this franchise alive has been a major priority at Fox for a long time. But they just can't get anything going on it. The Aliens Vs. Perdator film got bogged down not because of a bad story but because they couldn't get the various producers from the competing franchises to agree on all the rights issues. And now this attempt at keeping the original franchise alive is going nowhere. Fox is now ready to sell the Alien franchise to another studio.