Last week, the Internet lit up with news that one of the great actor-director teams might reunite to remake one of their classic films.
Rumours (since debunked) had Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro set to give Taxi Driver the sequel treatment.
It seemed too good to be true — De Niro is busy overseeing the Tribeca Film Festival and Scorsese is occupied with new muse Leonardo DiCaprio — and the rumor turned out to be just that — a rumour.
But for a tantalizing moment it seemed there might be a new film from one of the most dynamic director-actor pairings since Bogart and Huston or Mifune and Kurosawa.
Not that there are any shortage of director-actor teams. Scorsese and DiCaprio’s newest bit of teamwork, Shutter Island, opens this weekend and the latest Pedro Almodóvar-Penélope Cruz film, Broken Embraces, was recently nominated for a Golden Globe.
“I think you find, when you talk about a collaboration between a filmmaker and an actor, that it’s always evolving,” said Shutter Island producer Brad Fischer. “I don’t think it begins and ends with any one movie.”
Diane Keaton cites the evolution of collaboration with Woody Allen — they made seven films together, including the classic Annie Hall, between 1973 and 1993 — with elevating her from a “novice who had lots of feelings but didn’t know how to express herself” to someone who “can be braver and more spontaneous.”
Penélope Cruz is more effusive when discussing her mentor Pedro Almodóvar, who made her an art house darling, international star and claims to have “saved her from Hollywood.”
“He changed the way I looked at the world before I even knew him,” she says.
“There is something that works really well in our relationship that combines both our friendship and the professional side,” says Almodóvar. “We operate like lovers. So while we don’t have the pleasures of sex, we don’t have the complications of sex either. We work really well as a couple who don’t sleep together.”
Sometimes the director- actor relationship extends past the movie set. Four years after shooting The Life Aquatic in Italy, Wes Anderson regular Bill Murray (five films together) asked the director to deliver 10,000 Euros in cash to his former landlord.
“It’s not as weird as it sounds,” said Anderson on paying the rent a little late. “Bill can be a little weird with time.”
At first glance, director Chris Columbus’s new film seems like a callback to his earlier work.
This weekend’s Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief is based on a popular book series about a teenager with special powers who must battle supernatural forces.
Can you say “Harry Potter?” Sure, just don’t say it near the filmmaker, who directed the first two films in the J.K. Rowling series and produced the third.
“It’s nothing like Harry Potter,” he told the New Zealand Herald. “I wouldn’t have gotten involved in a picture that was too similar to Potter. I hadn’t seen a film like this before, and that was the reason I wanted to do it.”
In fact, other than with sequels, he rarely repeats himself.
His resume as a writer (Gremlins), producer (Jingle All the Way) and director (Rent) reveals a variety of styles and topics. He’s no stranger to comedy, having helmed the Home Alone movies; no stranger to romance, as he proved with Only the Lonely, no stranger to teen fare or musicals, and in between those he’s covered most other genres.
Nestled among his blockbusters are a number of deserving lesser known titles.
In the comedy Heartbreak Hotel, he added a chapter to the mythology of Elvis Presley.
Starring Tuesday Weld — The King’s Wild in the Country co-star — and David Keith as Elvis, the movie centers on Johnny Wolfe’s (Charlie Schlatter) scheme to kidnap the singer and bring him home to cheer up his ailing mom (Weld).
It’s very silly, but Elvis fans will enjoy the sly tributes sprinkled throughout — Weld’s motel is called The Flaming Star — and a soundtrack ripe with new versions of Elvis chestnuts like That’s All Right and Hound Dog performed by David Keith and polka kings The Bavarian Village Band.
As a writer Columbus prepped himself for eventually helming the Potter movies by penning Young Sherlock Holmes and the Pyramid of Fear.
Directed by Barry Levinson, the story of young Holmes and Watson meeting and solving a boarding school mystery is primarily notable as the first movie to feature a completely computer-generated character in the form of a knight created from a stained glass window.
Columbus is a restless storyteller who can’t be pinned down.
He’s someone who blazes his own path and tales chances.
I mean, who else would cast Uma Thurman as a snake-haired Medusa?
There are two kinds of romance movies. There’s the standard rom com—unlikely couple meets, overcomes obstacle, gets together, breaks up, realizes they are perfect for one another, gets back together, roll credits—and then there’s the tearful romance that doesn’t work out happily-ever-after. Of the latter category author Nicholas Sparks is the undisputed king of the three-hanky drama.
The former pharmaceutical salesman has wracked up an impressive, if tearstained, list of 14 best sellers including The Lucky One and Dear John, which comes to the big screen this weekend starring the sad-eyed Amanda Seyfried.
His best known work is The Notebook, a cross-generational love story that spent over a year as a New York Times hardcover top seller. Inspired by the story of his wife’s grandparents sixty year marriage, the novel became a 2004 movie starring Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams. The tale of love and Alzheimer’s is emotionally manipulative—writer Gary Panton called this passionate tearjerker “mushier than a mushed-up bowl of mushy peas that’s just been mushed in an industrial-strength mushifier”—but opening weekend it surfed a wave of tears to the box office top five.
Less seen was Nights in Rodanthe, a gusher about a doctor who courts an unhappily married woman. Summed up as “the cinematic equivalent of a Harlequin novel with a pack of tissues shoved into the back cover,” the movie reunited Diane Lane and Richard Gere after joint appearances in The Cotton Club and Unfaithful.
Critics haven’t warmed to Sparks’s stories on film— A Walk to Remember only has a 27% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes—but audiences can’t seem to get enough of his weepy tales of unrequited love, lost love, mature love and love in a time of trouble. Four of his books have already been adapted for the movies, two more are being released this year and there is one each scheduled for 2011 and 2012.
How hot he is in Hollywood? Disney hired him to write The Last Song screenplay for their biggest star Miley Cyrus.
His style of romance has caught on, but don’t call him a romance writer. “I write dramatic fiction. If you go into a further subgenre, it would be a love story, but it has its roots in the Greek tragedies. This genre evolved through Shakespeare. He did Romeo and Juliet. Hemingway did A Farewell to Arms. I do this currently today.”
According to Italian director Federico Fellini, “Rome is the most wonderful movie set in the world.” A quick IMDB check reveals thousands of movies shot in the ancient city—everything from forgettable fare like The Exorcism of Baby Doll to classics like The Bicycle Thief. The latest movie to use the Eternal City as a backdrop is When in Rome, a new Kristen Bell rom com opening this weekend.
The most famous Rome scenes in cinema are arguably Gregory Peck teasing Roman Holiday’s Audrey Hepburn by putting his hand in the Mouth of Truth, which purportedly bites off the hands of liars, and La Dolce Vita’s iconic image of Anita Ekberg standing in the Trevi Fountain but for my lira the famous last scene of Fellini’s Roma is the most spectacular.
The sight of a gang of motorcyclists driving through the city, past such landmarks as the Colosseum, the Capitoline Museum and the Forum, is breathtaking. Actress Claudia Ruspoli says it was an eye opener for Italians as well.
“Rome used to be a dark city; the monuments unlit,” she said. “When Fellini shot Roma that summer, the monuments were all lit and we saw them at night for the first time. Beautiful!”
A grittier vision of Rome appears in Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City. Mixing documentary footage of German troops on Rome’s streets with a fictionalized story of Italian resisters on the lam from the Gestapo Rossellini created a new film genre—Italian neo-realism—and by moving the camera outside studio walls, using real locations, available light and nonprofessional actors, provides a real life glimpse of war ravaged Rome.
More polished than Rome, Open City is Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thief. It’s still neorealist, but where Rossellini struggled to cobble together bits of film stock to complete his film, resulting in an uneven look, Bicycle Thief is beautifully photographed. The story of a poor man searching for the person who stole his bike plays like a walking tour of late 1940s Rome.
Since then hundreds of films have shot on the streets of Rome and while the city has been kind to the movies, the movies have also been kind to Rome. Patrizia Prestipino, head of Rome’s provincial department of tourism views any film set in Italy as “free advertising” and notes that the release of movies like Angels and Demons has created a new industry in the country—movie tourism.
You can blame (or thank, depending on your point of view) Vincent K. McMahon for movies like Mr. Nanny and Abraxas. Both starred wrestlers — Hulk Hogan and Jesse Ventura respectively — and while WWE chief McMahon didn’t write or direct either of the films, he understood the promotional importance of allowing his wrestlers to make the leap from the ring to the big screen.
It wasn’t always that way however.
Although wrestlers have been appearing in movies for decades—wrestler Lenny Montana played The Godfather’s Luca Brazzi and Tor Johnson, the Super-Swedish Angel, made 31 movies including the legendary Plan 9 From Outer Space — initially the powerful McMahon family actively tried to keep their wrestlers off the screen.
For instance, the elder McMahon, Vincent J., who originally hired Hulk Hogan, refused him permission to appear in Rocky III.
He resolutely believed wrestlers should fight, not act. It wasn’t until Vince Jr. stepped in and gave Hogan the go-ahead that the heyday of wraslin’ movies began in earnest.
After that, many of McMahon’s bigger-than-life wrestlers tried their hands at Hollywood stardom, including Dwayne Johnson, a.k.a. The Rock, who headlines this weekend’s The Tooth Fairy.
Most of the movies in the wrestler genre aren’t great—filmjunk.com called Hulk’s Santa with Muscles a “crapterpiece”—but there are a couple of notable exceptions.
One of the more prolific wrestlers-turned-actors, Canadian-born Rowdy Roddy Piper has dozens of movie credits, but his high point came in 1988’s They Live, where he delivered the now classic line, “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubblegum.” It’s his “Hasta la vista, baby!,” and is one of the great action quotes of the decade.
And while it is unlikely that WWE Hall of Famer Stone Cold Steve Austin could ever receive any kind of acting award unless he did his trademarked Axe Handle Elbow Drop on the entire Academy, he has held his own in The Longest Yard and The Condemned, and has three films coming out in 2010.
Recently Triple H, Stacy Keibler and Goldberg have all tried for acting careers, and why not? McMahon calls his wrestlers “entertainers” and The Wrestler director Darren Aronofsky asked rhetorically, “Why aren’t wrestlers in SAG? If you really think about it, the Screen Actors Guild should organize them.”
Whether it’s Denzel Washington dining on a meal of hairless cat in this weekend’s The Book of Eli or Knowing’s Nicolas Cage screeching, “How can I stop the end of the world?” grisly images of post apocalyptic lifestyle have recently been dominating movie screens.
Perhaps it’s the recession or the result of the anxious times we live in, but end-of-the-world stories are all the rage, but they are not new. Whether it’s nuclear fallout, an unexpected ice age or a zombie holocaust that brings about the end, filmmakers have peddled post apocalyptica for years.
In 1959 Gregory Peck headlined a dystopian drama that set the date for the end of the world just after World War III in 1964. In On the Beach nuclear war has destroyed all life on the planet save for a small enclave in Australia, but even they will succumb once the radiation clouds drift by. “We’re all doomed,” says Julian Osborne (Fred Astaire). “Doomed by the air we’re about to breathe.” As doomsday dramas go this one is particularly depressing—for example people gobble up “suicide pills”—but its Cold War commentary led one contemporary writer to label it “the most important film of our time.”
Several years later the post-atomic war film Panic in Year Zero! opened with one of filmdom’s great understatements. While on a fishing trip Harry Baldwin (Ray Milland) and his family see a mushroom cloud over Los Angeles. “We’ve had it; haven’t we dad?” says son Rick (Frankie Avalon). Well, not quite Rick, but the world as you know it is over. Made on a shoe-string, Panic in Year Zero! is notable not for its special effects—there aren’t any—but for its take on the difficult decisions Milland’s character must make to ensure his family’s survival in a world where old principles of humanity are obsolete.
Finally, to end the end-of-the-world list, fans of post apocalyptic fantasy will find a payday in the form of Rock & Rule, an animated film featuring Deborah Harry and Lou Reed’s voice work. In it the world has been destroyed and “legendary super-rocker” Mok—whose record went “gold, platinum, and plutonium in one day”—tries to use a demonic code to rule what’s left of the world.
With such a range of dystopian stories to mine it seems filmmakers could make post apocalyptic movies until the end of the world comes for real.
Who knew there were so many fang bangers out there? The success of HBO’s True Blood and the Twilight franchise is proof that vampires have risen from the dead, driven a stake through the very heart of popular culture and won over new fans in unprecedented numbers.
Never before have bloodsuckers done such boffo box office, but how can this newfound popularity be called a comeback when the vampires never went away?
No amount of garlic, it seems, can keep vampires out of the theatre. This weekend Daybreakers, a film about a world where vamps outnumber humans, joins the list of vampire films which dates back to the 1900s.
In the 101 years since audiences first sunk their teeth into a vampire movie — 1909’s Vampire of the Coast — vamps have come in all shapes and sizes. There’s The Vampire Effect, a Chinese martial arts vampire movie (guest starring Jackie Chan), Thomas Dolby’s vampire musical comedy Rockula and the self explanatory Gayracula to name just a few.
E
ven stranger than any of those is Dracula Blows his Cool, a 1979 German comedy featuring the Count as the proprietor of a disco in his ancestral castle. It’s quite awful, but worth a rental (if you can find it) to hear the disco “hit” Rock Me Dracula (Suck! Suck!).
More traditional is another German film made the same year. Roger Ebert called Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre, “the most evocative series of images centered around the idea of the vampire” since 1922’s Nosferatu.
It cannot be said that this is a particularly scary movie, but Herzog’s emphasis on slowly building tension and atmosphere rather than simply smearing the screen with blood is disquieting and decidedly eerie.
A little more rock’em sock’em is The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, the 1974 collaboration between Britain’s Hammer Studios and the Hong Kong based Shaw Brothers Studio. Peter Cushing is vampire hunter Prof. Van Helsing who battles Dracula and six disciples in a remote Chinese village. It’s weird and wacky, but as one critic said it gets by “on sheer novelty alone.”
So many vampires, so little time. How have vampires survived when other film fads are dead and buried? Adaptability. Just as every generation has placed a hero on the pop charts, cinematic vampires have shapeshifted over the years, bending to the times.
How else can you explain Dracula Blows His Cool’s disco dancing Drac?
In the gap between James Cameron’s last theatrical feature, Titanic, and his new film, Avatar (in theatres this weekend) Clint Eastwood directed 11 movies, Michael Bay made six and even Uwe Boll, a director so reviled an on–line petition demands he stop making films, has made 15 in the time it took Cameron to make just one.
So what’s the hold up?
Some suggest Cameron takes so long between gigs because his commitment to his projects is so intense he wants to be sure he is on the right track before camera starts to roll.
“I want you to know one thing,” he allegedly told one producer, “once we embark on this adventure and I start to make this movie, the only way you’ll be able to stop me is to kill me.”
Also, Cameron isn’t bound by the same considerations as most directors.
He wrote the script for Avatar in 1994 and was prepared to wait until special effects technology caught up with his vision.
The luxury of having time is what happens when you make the highest grossing movie in history, a fact he celebrates, wearing a t-shirt that reads “Time Means Nothing in the Face of Creativity.”
Like Cameron, Stanley Kubrick spent more time off movie sets than on. In a career that spanned 46 years he made only 13 movies but spent years developing pictures that never went into production — like Napoleon, an epic look at the life of the French Emperor that he expected to be “the best movie ever made.”
Others choose long lay-offs between projects for different reasons. Actor Casey Affleck (Ben’s younger brother) had three movies released in 2007 but nothing else scheduled until 2010. Why the break?
“To be perfectly honest, I don’t really enjoy playing anybody,” he says, “except Casey Affleck lying on the couch watching the Red Sox … usually, when I’m working, I’m not really having a good time.”
Then there’s Daniel Day-Lewis, an actor whose lapses between projects makes Affleck look like a workaholic. The There Will Be Blood star routinely takes years off between films, once disappearing from the big screen for five years.
When asked why he doesn’t work more often he said, “I like to cook things very slowly. I learnt early on that I couldn’t jump from one kind of work to another. I did it a couple of times and it didn’t work.”
Christopher Isherwood was a literary rock star with a taste for booze, much younger men and both spiritual and sexual experimentation. He palled around with thinkers like E. M. Forster and Aldous Huxley and turned his exploits into a string of semi-fictionalized novels, essays and plays. His best known work remains a collection of short stories called Goodbye to Berlin, which provided the basis for the Oscar winning movie Cabaret.
This weekend, forty-five years after it was first published, another of his books, A Single Man, hits the big screen. Directed by former fashionista Tom Ford it stars Colin Firth as George, a gay English professor contemplating suicide after the sudden death of his longtime lover.
“The gay aspect of A Single Man certainly wasn’t what drew me to make the film,” said Ford. “It was its human aspect, that unifying quality.”
That human characteristic is the thing that makes Isherwood’s best work so timely and, conversely, timeless. The work of his that translated best to the screen told stories that were specific in their setting, but universal in their themes.
Cabaret, for instance, was set in the last days of the Weimar Republic in Pre-Hitler Germany and features a healthy dose of decadence and perversion, but underneath the shiny surface is a sense of desperation. Roger Ebert wrote, “the context of Germany on the eve of the Nazi ascent to power makes the entire musical into an unforgettable cry of despair.” The setting and people may be unfamiliar, but the fear of the unknown is the universal element.
Less known is Isherwood’s script for The Loved One, (co-written with Dr. Strangelove scribe Terry Southern). It is a devastating satire on the funeral business which was advertised with the tagline “The motion picture with something to offend everyone!” The movie was a little too mean spirited for audiences in 1965, but has since gained a cult following among fans of dark humor. Sharp eyed viewers will also spy Isherwood as a mourner in the funeral scene.
A more up close and personal look at Isherwood can be found in Chris & Don: A Love Story a 2008 documentary chronicling the thirty year relationship between Isherwood, his much younger lover, artist Don Bachardy and their struggles as one of the first openly gay couples in Hollywood.
Last week, the Internet lit up with news that one of the great actor-director teams might reunite to remake one of their classic films.
