FilmJerk Favorites

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

||| Sergio Leone |||
Sergio Leone

Leone’s career is remarkable in its unrelenting attention to both American culture and the American genre film, exploring the mythic America he created with each successive film examining the established characters in greater depth.

Only his second feature (a remake of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo), Leone's landmark "spaghetti western" caused a revolution and features Clint Eastwood in his breakthrough role as "The Man With No Name". This classic brutal drama of feuding families wasn’t the first spaghetti Western, but it was far and away the most successful up to that time.

Plot is of minimal interest, but character is everything to Leone, who places immense meaning in the slightest flick of an eyelid, extensively using the extreme close-up on the eyes to reveal any feeling, as demonstrated by Clint, who squints his way through this slam-bang sequel to A Fistful of Dollars as a wandering gunslinger that must combine forces with his nemesis to track down a wanted killer.

The final chapter in the groundbreaking trilogy follows Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach as they form an uneasy alliance to find a stash of hidden gold. Leone focuses on his central theme as they find themselves facing greed, treachery, and murder, showing that the desire for wealth and power turns men into ruthless creatures who violate land and family and believe that a man’s death is less important than how he faces it.

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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.