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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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"Eye" spies a reshoot

By EdwardHavens

August 2nd, 2007

Last week at Comic-Con, Jessica Alba made sure to talk up how great an experience it was working with French directors David Moreau and Xavier Palud on their English-language remake of the Pang Brothers' "The Eye." Maybe this is because Alba is about to begin two plus weeks of additional shoots on the film next week, with a new director at the helm.

According to an anonymous source, the film, which stars Alba as a blind violinist who finds she is seeing far more than she should after an experimental surgery restores her sight, will start twelve to fourteen days of shooting in Vancouver starting next Thursday, August 9. (The original shoot occurred mostly in and around Albuquerque in February and March of this year, and we all know how much Albuquerque and Vancouver look exactly alike.)

The reshoots will be directed by Patrick Lussier, longtime film editor who also directed "Dracula 2000" and its sequels. It is not known why Moreau and Palud will not be participating in the shoot. The additional shooting does not appear to be making any radical changes to the film (unlike the Wachowski-led reshoots of "The Invasion" earlier this year), and are likely to be a few additional short scenes to amp up the supernatural aspects of the storyline.

"The Eye" is expected in movie theatres February 1, 2008