What role do Paul Bettany, Robert de Niro, Rowan Atkinson and Max von Sydow share? Mr. Jennifer Connelly, the Oscar winner, Mr. Bean and the legendary Swedish superstar all have one kind of part in common. They have all played priests on the big screen.
In this weekend’s post-apocalyptic action horror film Priest Bettany plays the title character, a warrior pastor hunting the vampires who kidnapped his niece. Based on Min-Woo Hyung’s graphic novels the movie also features Christopher Plummer as the Monsignor, described by the legendary Canadian actor as “a horrible priest gone wrong—a lovely, stylish villain.”
In the Barry Levinson film Sleepers De Niro was Father Bobby, a Hell’s Kitchen priest who lies in court to prevent four of his parishioners from going to jail for killing a sadistic prison guard. “Most priests like to preach from the pulpit,” says one character. “Father Bobby liked to talk during the bump and shove of a pick-up game.”
Atkinson played Father Gerald, a new vicar performing his first marriage ceremony in Four Weddings and a Funeral. The tongue-tied priest has some of the film’s funniest lines, including, “In the name of the father, the son and the holy goat. Er… ghost.”
Probably the most famous movie celebrant is Father Lankester Merrin, as portrayed by Max von Sydow in The Exorcist. Von Sydow is one of the few actors to have played both God (in The Greatest Story Ever Told) and the Devil (in Needful Things) but it is as Merrin that he is best remembered (unless you are a Great White North hoser who worships his role as Brewmeister Smith in Bob and Doug MacKenzie’s Strange Brew). The statuesque Swedish actor played Merrin twice—he’s seen in flashbacks in Exorcist II: The Heretic—and Stellan Skarsgård played him in two prequels but it is the first movie and the iconic line “The Power of Christ compels you!” that is most memorable.
Many other actors have played clerics. Carl Maldan was Father Barry in the Best Picture winner On the Waterfront, George Carlin was Cardinal Ignatius Glick, the mastermind of Dogma’s ‘Catholicism Wow!’ campaign but the actor most associated with playing priests is Pat O’Brien. He became an actor only after deciding against entering seminary and his devotion to playing priestly characters was so well known it even inspired the name of band, the blues-rockers Pat O’Brien and the Priests of Love.
On a recent episode of 30 Rock, Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan) joked that he made a North Korean propaganda film directed by Kim Jong-Il rather than appear in a Kate Hudson film. It was a funny joke on a show known for its irreverent take on celebrities, but like all good jokes there’s a hint of truth to it.
Of course Hudson is still a popular actress; capable of headlining any Hollywood rom-com, but this is more a question of what might have been.
How did an Oscar nominated actress who once said, “I’m not a big fan of romantic comedies,” end up with a CV littered with toxic titles like Fool’s Gold, My Best Friend’s Girl and Bride Wars?
Sure, she has a sunny smile and girl-next-door appeal, but anyone who saw her sweet and wonderful turn as Penny Lane in Almost Famous rues the day she decided to aim for the MTV Best Kiss Awards rather than Academy Awards. Surely she can do more than stand on a beach while a shirtless Matthew McConaughey runs into her open arms.
It’s not all bad news in Kate’s career, however. This weekend she is firmly rooted in rom-com land with Something Borrowed, the kind of fluffy confection she specializes in, but lately there have been signs that she’s making some effort to stretch her comfort zone.
Cinema Italiano, her exuberantly fluffy all-singing-all-dancing tribute to 1960’s pop music and style, was one of the best things about Nine, the musical version of Federico Fellini’s classic 8 ½, and The Killer Inside Me, a violent, hardboiled crime story are both steps in the right direction, but they’re baby steps.
I want to be a Kate Hudson fan. I really do. But I need convincing that she wants me to be a fan and taking the easy route isn’t going to do that. Even her old co-star Matthew McConaughey has smartened up and realized that rom-coms are a faulty foundation to build a career on. His last film, the drama The Lincoln Lawyer, earned him the best reviews and most notice of his recent career.
I’d like to see Kate stretch in that way. Watch Almost Famous again and see the heartbreaking pathos she brings to every frame of that movie.
That’s the stuff careers and legends are built on and she has the talent and the know-how to give us more of that.
Perhaps you’ve heard there’s a wedding on Friday. But no, your invitation isn’t lost in the mail or caught in a spam folder, you’re just not on the list. When Prince William and Kate Middleton walk down Westminster Abbey’s storied aisle (where William’s uncle Prince Andrew married Sarah Ferguson in 1986) to exchange “I do’s” you’ll be at home in your pyjamas watching it on TV with a cup of tea in your hand and a crumpet at your side. The upside? You don’t have to get them a wedding gift.
To prep for the pomp and circumstance I’ve selected a number of royal wedding movies to get you primed for the big day.
The name Marie Antoinette is synonymous with surplus and when little Ms. “Let Them Eat Cake” wed the Dauphin of France no expense was spared. Married by proxy a month before, she arrived at the site of the ceremonial wedding—at the Palace of Versailles no less—in a procession that included 48 carriages. See a recreation of the exercise in excess in Marie Antoinette, Sophia Coppola’s 2006 film. It may not get the details 100 per cent right, but if you want accuracy, watch the History Channel.
Also torn from the history books is The Duchess, the story of the 17-year-old Georgiana Cavendish (Keira Knightley), great-great-great-great-grandaunt of Diana, Princess of Wales, who weds the much older Duke of Devonshire (Ralph Fiennes).
Speaking of relatives, the life, love and marriage of Queen Victoria, (Prince William is her fourth great-grandson), are detailed in The Young Victoria starring Emily Blunt. Despite being shot by soft candlelight for a glowing historical feel, The Young Victoria isn’t Masterpiece Theatre. Accents and petticoats aside, this is a modern movie, with a modern sensibility, that mixes history, politics, romance, castle etiquette and backroom dealing into one frilly, appealing package.
In the realm of the unreal are two final reel royal weddings. Before Anne Hathaway started taking her clothes off in every movie, she was the wholesome star of The Princess Diaries. In PD2: Royal Engagement, her character, Princess Mia, must get married in order to become queen.
The most recent royal wedding to hit screens happens in Your Highness, the medieval stoner comedy starring Natalie Portman and James Franco. Prince Fabious Franco walks Belladonna (Zooey Deschanel) down the aisle but the wedding is interrupted by an evil sorcerer.
The circus is a magical blend of drama, comedy, music and wonderful things you can’t see at home, unless, of course, you live next door to Bozo the Clown.
And that’s why filmmakers look to the Big Top for inspiration. It’s a naturally cinematic place with themes as flexible as sideshow contortionists who can touch their toes with the top of their heads. For instance, Charlie Chaplin mixed comedy and romance in his classic film The Circus, while Trapeze with Burt Lancaster is a three-ring tragedy and Ten Weeks with a Circus is strictly for kids.
This weekend, Water for Elephants, an historical drama starring Robert Pattinson and Reese Witherspoon, takes us backstage at the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth.
The most famous circus movie is probably The Greatest Show on Earth, Cecil B. DeMille’s story of love, crime and clowns under the big top. Today the film—which was named one of the 100 Most Amusingly Bad Movies Ever Made by the Golden Raspberry folks—is most notable for making Charlton Heston a star and as the first movie Steven Spielberg ever saw.
If DeMille’s movie is the most famous circus movie, then Freaks is certainly the most notorious. Set in the world of a funfair sideshow, it features a cast primarily made up of actual carnival performers—like Elizabeth Green the Stork Woman and Prince Randian a.k.a. the Human Torso—to tell the story of a beautiful trapeze artist who agrees to marry a deformed sideshow performer for his money. As a young man, director Tod Browning (who also helmed Dracula) had been a member of a travelling circus and that experience brought such a horrifying realism to the story that one woman threatened to sue MGM, claiming the film had caused her to suffer a miscarriage.
And speaking of sideshow attractions, these days Benicio Del Toro is known as a serious actor, an Academy Award winner who is sometimes jokingly been referred to as the “Spanish Brad Pitt.” That’s a long way from his first role, human oddity Duke the Dog-Faced Boy in Big Top Pee-wee. Despite earning reviews like, “If there’s a lower form of comedy than circus humor I’ve yet to encounter it,” star Paul Reubens once said that “Big Top Pee-wee is “at least as good as Police Academy.”
Tourists flock to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s second largest city, to see the giant statue of Christ the Redeemer, dance the samba and cheer their favorite team at Maracanã Stadium, one of the world’s largest football arenas.
The city has also provided the backdrop for many movies, including this weekend’s animated feature Rio, the story of a domesticated macaw (voiced by The Social Network’s Jesse Eisenberg) from small-town Minnesota who follows the bird of his dreams to the carnival city.
Rio has been a go-to location for filmmakers for years. To paraphrase 70s soft rockers Pablo Cruise, “Whoa oh ohh… When my baby’s budget permits, We go to Rio. De Janeiro.” In The Producers, the crooked wannabe embezzlers plan to fly to Rio once they have bilked Broadway out of a million bucks. The city served as the background to Mickey Rourke’s erotic adventures in Wild Orchid and James Bond was famously attacked by the metal-mandibled Jaws on a cable car at the top of Sugarloaf Mountain in Moonraker.
Although shot completely on location at Paramount Studios on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, Road to Rio, the fifth of the Bob Hope – Bing Crosby “road” pictures, makes good use of stock footage and set decoration to create a suitably exotic setting.
This time out, the guys are vaudevillian stowaways on a Brazilian-bound ocean liner who rescue heiress Dorothy Lamour from an unwanted arranged marriage.
The movie is notable for the music (it contains the last on-screen singing performance by The Andrews Sisters) and Der Bingle’s English lessons to the Portuguese street performers. To help them pass as American he teaches them the hipster phrase, “You’re in the groove, Jackson.”
A grittier look at the Brazillian city is offered in City of God (original title: Cidade de Deus), named after one of the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods. Following the stories of two boys—one who becomes a photographer, another who adopts a life of crime—it was shot on location in the violent favela. Director Fernando Meirelles later said if he knew the dangers of filming in the Rio favela in advance he wouldn’t have made the film.
Finally, a sunnier look at Rio life comes in Blame it on Rio, a 1984 Michael Caine film Roger Ebert described as having “the mind of a 1940s bongo comedy and the heart of a porno film.”
It’s a dangerous business trying to recapture movie magic, but Hollywood execs keep trying.
Thirty years ago, Dudley Moore introduced us to Arthur, a lovable but drunken millionaire playboy about to married to a wealthy heiress he did not love. “I race cars, play tennis, and fondle women,” he said, “but I have weekends off, and I am my own boss.”
The movie, Arthur, was a giant hit, coming in fourth in the year’s box office, earning four Oscar nods, winning two and spawning the number one hit Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do). It’s available on DVD and holds up very well, which is why it is a bit baffling that a remake of the same name is hitting theatres this weekend starring Russell Brand.
Remakes, of course, are nothing new. Hollywood has been recycling ideas since the beginning. For example, Cecil B. DeMille remade his own 1915 film The Golden Chance as Forbidden Fruit just six years later. The difference is that back then there was no portable archive of movies available on Blu-ray or streaming video. Take a good story, repackage it and hopefully do well at the box office. Later, in the pre-home video years, remakes were a way to breathe some life into older movies.
But times have changed. Now, via Netflix, On-Demand and Blu-ray, it’s easier and cheaper than ever to seek out and see movies like the original Arthur. So what’s the point of the remake? Well, for one thing, it’s a perfect role for the impish Russell Brand and, for another, it’s always great to see his co-star, Helen Mirren, on screen. And who knows? Maybe it’s better than the original. It wouldn’t be the first time.
With so many remakes — past, present and future — perhaps philosopher Raoul Vaneigem was right when he said, “Our task is not to rediscover nature but to remake it.”
Recently a poll found that more than one in five British cinema-goers preferred comedy to any other film style. Action/adventure films placed second, with romantic comedies rounding out the top three. That trio of genres eats up most of the space at the movie theatres, but there are hundreds of other kinds of films.
This weekend, Sucker Punch opens in theatres, a women-in-prison film directed by 300 helmer Zach Snyder, reviving a genre thought to have gone the way of nunsploitation and Pauly Shore movies.
Of all the sub-sub genres, the women-in-prison movie has to be one of the least appreciated… at least in recent years. There was a time when these stories of women in lock up, at the mercy of cruel prison guards, proudly took up screens in drive-ins and second-run houses. With names like Caged Heat and Barbed Wire Dolls, these movies, along with kung fu and blaxploitation flicks, kept many a grindhouse in business.
WIP films have been around since the 1930s, but didn’t become popular until the 1950s when cautionary tales like Agnes Moorehead’s Caged and Ida Lupino’s Women’s Prison mixed and matched hardened criminals with sadistic guards.
It wasn’t until Spanish exploitation filmmaker Jess Franco hit upon the misogynistic recipe of mixing babes, bars and bondage, however, that the subgenre was officially born.
His first WIP movie, 99 Women (featuring the voice of the demon child in The Exorcist, Mercedes McCambridge), sparked a revolution in sexploitation films.
One of the early stars to emerge from the WIP heyday was Pam Grier. Starring in The Big Bird Cage and The Big Doll House—“Their bodies were caged, but not their desires. They would do anything for a man. Or to him.”— Grier became, as Quentin Tarantino called her, “the first female action star.”
No WIP exploitation film ever won an Academy Award, but at least one of their filmmakers did. Today, Oscar -winner Jonathan Demme is known as the man behind Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia, but buried deep down on his resume is his big screen debut, Caged Heat. In addition to the obligatory violence and nudity, Demme added a storyline about prisoner abuse through medical experiments.
“Jonathan took that assignment,” remembers producer Roger Corman, “and said: ‘This is gonna be the best one ever made.’ Jonathan took the genre, worked with it, and made something exceptionally good.”
Usually, on-screen E.T.s are presented as either nurturing, evolved beings from another planet, sent here to help mankind, or vicious world domination types, intent on colonizing or destroying Earth. But movies often encounter a third kind of movie alien, the goofy intergalactic visitor.
In this weekend’s Paul, nerd superstars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost play Brit sci-fi geeks on a pilgrimage to some of America’s UFO hot spots. Along the way they help Paul (voice of Seth Rogen), an irreverent alien with a taste for silly gags and Bob Dylan jokes, get back to his home planet. Think of it as E.T. for frat boys and you get the idea.
In the world the movie creates, the idea of a wisecracking alien makes perfect sense, but adding an E.T. doesn’t always fit so well. Take Meatballs Part 2, for instance. The addition of Meathead, a grey, rubber-skinned alien sent to Camp Sasquash to earn an Earth merit badge, hardly improves on the original Bill Murray classic.
The fun -loving aliens of Earth Girls Are Easy are put to better use. The movie’s plot is best summed up by manicurist Valerie (Geena Davis) as she enlists her friend Candy (Julie Brown) to give the aliens a makeover: “A UFO landed in my pool and they captured me but we made friends and I fed them Pop-Tarts and… we’ve got to cut their hair.”
Once shaved, the former red, blue and yellow-furred wookies look a lot like Jeff Goldblum, Jim Carrey and Damon Wayans and are ready to hit the L.A. clubs in search for love. They may be aliens, Candy says, “but they can still be dates!”
In Phil the Alien, Rob Stefaniuk plays a stranded space-shape-shifter who hides in plain sight on Earth as the singer of a Christian rock band. Best line? “I’m staying with a beaver,” says Phil, “down by the brook.”
One of the most memorable movie aliens is Mathesar, the haute-contre voiced Thermian leader played by Enrico Colantoni in Galaxy Quest. Learning everything he knows about Earth from television transmissions, he turns to the cast of a cancelled sci fi show to help save his planet.
Favourite scene? When one of the actors, Gwen DeMarco (Sigourney Weaver), explains that TV shows are not “historical documents” she says, “Surely, you don’t think Gilligan’s Island is a…”
“Those poor people,” Mathesar interrupts, moaning in despair.
Superstar astronomer Carl Sagan once said, “Mars has become a kind of mythic arena onto which we have projected our Earthly hopes and fears.”
For more than a hundred years, the idea that life could exist on the fourth planet from the Sun has been a sci-fi staple. In 1898 H. G. Wells wrote the most influential Martian invasion novel of all, The War of the Worlds, later adapted by Orson Welles into the most famous radio show ever. In a less serious vein, Marvin the Martian, a cartoon character voiced by Mel Blanc, gave us the catchphrase, “This makes me very angry. Very angry, indeed.” Years after Marvin’s 1948 debut he made another appearance as the mascot on the Spirit rover sent to Mars.
This weekend, Martians invade movie theaters in Mars Needs Moms, the story of little green marauders who kidnap human moms, joining a long list of Mars movies.
The 40-foot tall Martian in The Angry Red Planet, a low budget 1959 flick, was actually a 15-inch tall puppet made from elements of a rat, bat, spider, and crab. The campy creature was later featured on the cover of the Misfits’ album, Walk Among Us.
A few years later, Robinson Crusoe on Mars used Death Valley as a substitute for the barren terrain of Mars and was so low budget it recycled props from other movies. The aliens are seen dressed in the spacesuits from Destination Moon and Martian spacecraft were borrowed from The War of the Worlds.
The year 2000 was a big one for Martian movies. Red Planet, starring Val Kilmer, Carrie-Ann Moss, and Benjamin Bratt as astronauts sent to Mars when Earth’s efforts to colonize the planet are disrupted, features cinema’s first computer voice to be completely computer generated.
Also released that year was Mission to Mars, the Brian De Palma film about the first manned mission to Mars. The movie flopped domestically—it only has a 25 per cent Rotten Tomatoes rating—but was chosen as one of the top pictures of 2000 by Les Cahiers du cinema.
Not all Mars movies are actually set on Mars, however. Despite its title, Abbott and Costello Go to Mars, the comedy duo never actually makes it to the red planet. First their rocket lands in New Orleans, then Venus, where the Venusian women are all played by Miss Universe contestants.
What role do Paul Bettany, Robert de Niro, Rowan Atkinson and Max von Sydow share? Mr. Jennifer Connelly, the Oscar winner, Mr. Bean and the legendary Swedish superstar all have one kind of part in common. They have all played priests on the big screen.
