Thanks to Movie City News for turning me on to this fascinating, too-much-detail-but-really-not-enough article on "The Wilhelm Scream," which was first heard in 1951's "Distant Drums" and has since popped up in "Star Wars" movies, theme parks, video games, and a lot of Peter Jackson and Quentin Tarantino movies. Make sure you hit the link to the sound clip.
Also screaming is director Tarsem Singh, who made the 2000 Jennifer Lopez horror oddity "The Cell," then spent several years of his life making "The Fall," a very strange, gorgeously shot fantasy film (see photo above) that got critically drubbed at Toronto last fall and has since failed to pick up a distributor. The L.A. Times' Patrick Goldstein has the story, and you have to feel for the filmmaker, who made an uncategorizable movie in a category-obsessed time. Though who says "Pan's Labyrinth" fits in a neat box? "The Fall" at times plays like a much lumpier version of the Guillermo del Toro cult fave, but when I saw Singh's film at the fest, I found it oddly bewitching, even when it patently didn't work. It deserves to be seen, warts and all.
