Irv Slifkin
Irv Slifkin has been with Movies Unlimited for 20-plus years in different capacities with their annual catalog and website. He has also found time to write two books (Filmadelphia and Groovy Movies), review films on radio (he's currently on The Frankie Boyer show on the Lifestyles Radio Network) and recently made his debut on stage in Disney's Beauty and the Beast for the Moorestown Theater Company.
Irv's Posts
George D. Allen and Irv Slifkin | Movie Buzz, Movie Buzz Podcast
Pack your bags and prepare to join Ghouly Irv for a terrifying tour through some of filmdom's most frightening places! We all know how scary it is to take a shower. We know the water can be a horrible hazard...just when you thought it was safe. But there are a few other locales that reliably give film fans the willies:
Ladies and gentlemonsters, don't forget to catch up on some of the monster-lovin' fun you may have missed with Invasion of Terror-ific Trivia and other great videos from Irv and friends!
Irv Slifkin | In The Director's Chair, Movie Buzz
After directing three acclaimed documentaries on boxing (the Oscar-nominated Against the Ropes), film producer Robert Evans (The Kid Stays in the Picture) and teenagers (American Teen), director Nanette Burstein was finally ready to make the leap to helming a feature film.
Burstein, 40, an NYU film school grad, looked over a bunch of scripts before she settled on Going the Distance, a romantic comedy about a long distance relationship between an aspiring West Coast-based newspaper reporter and a New York City music promoter.
Playing a hand in her decision were the words of her one-time subject, super-producer Evans. “Robert Evans is all about show business himself,” says Burstein, during a stop in Philadelphia, about the former Paramount studio head behind such films as The Godfather and Marathon Man. “He’s told me all kinds of great things that are true pearls of wisdom about how the business works. I called him after American Teen screened the Sundance Film Festival and told him I wanted to make a feature. He said, ‘You have to make a love story, kid.’ He’s a big fan of love stories--after all, he did produce Love Story!”
Irv Slifkin | In The Director's Chair, Movie Buzz
Thanks to a mishap on Amtrak, Fatih Akin arrived over two hours late at Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station from New York City. Now, in a hotel room, the 37-year-old writer-director is scrambling to move furniture around, so interviewers can find their place in a cramped hotel room to ask him questions.
“And I am supposed to be the director,” he jokes.
But Akin, a man of Turkish heritage born and raised in Hamburg, Germany, is used to scrambling. That’s the nature of independent filmmaking throughout the world.
And that’s even if you have received international praise and won awards at prestigious film festivals, as the amiable Akin has. Head-On, his heady 2004 mix of tragedy, comedy and social commentary told of the unlikely marriage of two psychiatric patients: a suicidal 40-year-old widower and a twentysomething drug-and-alcohol-addicted woman who wants to get out of her strict Turkish household. It also announced a major filmmaker arrived on the scene. The director’s 2007 effort, The Edge of Heaven, tackled three different, intense stories, shifting time and countries, and delving into the lives of such characters as a Turkish freedom fighter, an elderly man and a young prostitute. Along with taking many European awards, it won Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for the festival’s coveted Golden Palm Award.
Irv Slifkin | In The Director's Chair, Movie Buzz
Neil Marshall wanted the world to know that even though his first two features were horror films—the well-received werewolf opus Dog Soldiers and the spooky girls-in-the-cave film The Descent—he was not a “horror movie director.”
“I’m a genre director,” states Marshall, 43, from a Philadelphia hotel. “I like all sort of genres. And, yes, I was scared of being pigeonholed as a horror director after those movies.”
As his next project, Marshall tackled Doomsday, a futuristic Mad Max/Escape from New York/Resident Evil mashup which met with mixed results with critics and at the box-office. But Marshall is hoping to rectify this with Centurion, his latest effort, an historical adventure epic centering on the battle that occurred in 117 A.D. between the Picts, the savage natives of Scotland, and the Ninth Legion of invading Roman soldiers, led by General Titus Virilus (Dominic West), centurion Quintus Dias (Michael Fassbender) and Amazonian mute female tracker Etain (Olga Kurylenko), who doubles as a lethal Pict assassin.
Irv Slifkin | Ask Movie Fanfare
Q: Could you tell me if WB is ever going to release more Spencer Tracy films, in particular, A Guy Named Joe, The Seventh Cross, Cass Timberlane, Keeper of the Flame and The Sea of Grass?
Also, with all of the classic films on DVD, it seems that Debbie Reynolds has been forgotten! Any chance that such films as I Love Melvin, Give a Girl a Break, Bundle of Joy, This Happy Feeling, Say One For Me, The Gazebo, It Started with A Kiss, The Pleasure of His Company, My Six Loves, or Goodbye Charlie will make it to DVD in the near future?
Irv Slifkin | In The Director's Chair, Movie Buzz
Edgar Wright envisioned the film version of Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World the minute he finished reading the first installment of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s graphic novel series.
“I was given it the week it was published, so I read it with everyone else in 2004,” says Wright, best known as the co-writer-director of such spoofs as Shaun Of The Dead and Hot Fuzz. “Making the film has been quite organic, because I’ve been in contact with the author while he was writing the other books.”
Wright, a youngish-looking 36, sought and received input from O’Malley during the six years he spent bringing Scott Pilgrim to the screen.
“He was very involved—he read every single draft and he did little polishes on scenes,” says Wright, in Philadelphia to talk about the project. “A couple of lines from the movie are in his (most recent) book, and his lines—like four or five—are in the film. He was very polite to email me and ask: ‘Can I use one of your lines in my book?’”
Irv Slifkin | Staff Notes
Does The Expendables, which is smashing into theaters with a cast that includes Stallone, Statham, Li, Rourke, Austin, Lundgren, Couture, Crews, Willis, Schwarzenegger, et al., have the toughest cast of all time?
Well, it certainly is one of the most testosterone-fueled casts in recent memory. Director-co-scripter Stallone certainly did a bang-up job recruiting pals for this revenge tale. The sweat level is about to go to “11” on the meter.
But The Expendables is one of a long line of movies in which macho, macho men unite for a cause.
Irv Slifkin | In The Director's Chair, Movie Buzz
The last time we saw Todd Solondz, he was promoting his film Palindromes. One of the story threads of the film involved a character who bombed abortion clinics. Word on the street was that members of right to life groups were going to protest Palindromes in theaters because the film depicted them as terrorists. Solondz actually welcomed the protests and the controversy. “Anything to help the movie,” he said.
Five years later, Solondz is back to his old tricks, playing the role of filmmaker and provocateur. While it’s unlikely anybody will be holding a picket sign or shouting into a bullhorn as people enter the theater for Solondz’s Life During Wartime, the film is apt to spark discussion and impassioned debate.
One of the reasons may be because Life During Wartime is, in fact, a sequel to 1998’s Happiness, Solondz’s envelope-pushing survey of the surly side of suburbia as seen by the lives of three sisters, played by Cynthia Stevenson, Lara Flynn Boyle and Jane Adams. The film, which featured extra-marital affairs, masturbation, obscene phone callers, suicide, and pedophilia, went to theaters unrated after it was dropped by its distributor, October Films, at the time.
George D. Allen and Irv Slifkin | Movie Buzz, Movie Buzz Podcast
Who goes there? Why, none other than Ghouly Irv, back to review another 10 years of terror! Which decade will the Weird Wheel dictate to be worth your attention? Tune in for another round of trivia with your humble horror host:
Never fear, fans of the fiendish! If you missed the Ghouly One's appraisals of the 1980s and the 1940s, or his charming romp through kid-themed fright flicks (with two very special guest stars), you need only click Pieces of Terror-ific Trivia, House of Terror-ific Trivia, or Ghouly Kids, and the malevolent mirth can continue!
Irv Slifkin | Coming Attractions, TV Tip Sheet
Sommers Time: Fans have long been clamoring for the DVD release of the adventures of Jamie Sommers, and now they will get it withThe Bionic Woman: Season One. In this successful spin-off from The Six Million Dollar Man, Linsday Wagner plays the title role, a tennis pro and former fiancée of cyborg hero Steve Austin (Lee Majors) , who gets her own artificial parts after a crippling skydiving accident. Now endowed with super strength, super hearing and super speed, Jamie poses as a schoolteacher but takes on secret government assignments on the side. Richard Anderson and Martin E. Brooks also star in the series which ran on ABC from 1976, then on NBC until 1978. Audio commentary and other goodies are promised.
Dysfunction Junction: One of the most acclaimed network shows of recent years, Modern Family: The Complete First Season is a laugh-filled junket through contemporary parenting and family relations. The focus is on three different (though interlocked) family units and the crises they face, which range from multi-cultural romance, gay relationship issues, adoption and more. The terrific ensemble cast includes Ed O’Neill, Sofia Vergara, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Eric Stonestreet, Ty Burrell and Julie Bowen. All 24 episodes from the series’ 2009 bow on ABC are here, along with lots of extra goodies.
George D. Allen and Irv Slifkin | Movie Buzz, Movie Buzz Podcast
Bad boys, bad boys, what'cha gonna do...when the MovieFanFare cameras spot you chatting idly about your favorite heist films? Check out the two would-be video thieves we caught with their pants down (figuratively speaking, of course), and see if you agree with their picks for the best movies about making big scores:
Why did two such insightful movie fans turn to a life of crime? I guess they figured their gigs with Movie Geeks Roadshow and picking the best Offbeat Christmas Movies didn't pay so well. They have voluntarily entered a program of rehabilitation.
Irv Slifkin | Ask Movie Fanfare
Question: Will the movie To Each His Own ever be released on DVD? I fell in love with it and haven't been able to find it.
Answer: Olivia De Havilland won an Oscar for her performance as Jody Norris, a woman who becomes pregnant by a soldier during World War I, then gives the baby up for adoption. She eventually encounters her grown-up son during World War II in this well-liked 1946 effort from "womans' director" Mitchell Leisen (Easy Living, Midnight) and frequent Billy Wilder writing partner Charles Brackett. The Paramount picture is now owned by Universal; if Uni has no immediate plans, there's hope for release with Turner Classic Movies issuing Paramount/Universal library titles of late through their manufacture-on-demand DVD program.
Question: Are there rights problems with the Fox film Margie from 1946? Are there are many requests for this film to be shown and/or released on DVD?
Answer: We don’t think there is a rights problem with the Roaring ‘20s-set comedy starring Jeanne Crain. We just think Fox has sadly overlooked it in their library and doesn't recognize the amount of people interested in this nostalgic delight.
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