Chances are the first movie assassin names that pop into your head are The Jackal, Martin Q. Blank or El Mariachi. What do they have in common, other than flashy names and a predilection for gunning down their on-screen enemies? They’re all men.
What about the ladies? Beatrix Kiddo, Charlie Baltimore or Jane Smith?
Jean Luc Goddard said, “All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun,” and often these days filmmakers are placing that gun in the hands of female film assassins. Nikita is back on the tube and earlier this year Saoirse Ronan played a deadly 16-year-old in Hanna. This weekend, Avatar’s Zoe Saldana is back as a stone-cold killer in Colombiana.
As Charlie Baltimore, Geena Davis created one of the screen’s most loved female assassins in The Long Kiss Goodnight. Suffering from amnesia, when her past catches up with her she flip flops from suburban mom to killer. Best Line? “They’re gonna blow my head off, you know. This is the last time I’ll ever be pretty.”
Angelina Jolie’s deadly demeanour has pumped up several action movies. Lara Croft was a gun-slinging super-heroine, but she’s also played assassins in two movies.
In Mr. and Mrs. Smith she’s a hitlady assigned to kill her own on-screen (and future real life) partner, Brad Pitt. “Still alive, baby?” she purrs after trying to shoot him through a wall.
Also, as Fox in Wanted she was a member of the Fraternity, a deadly group of killers with the useful ability to shoot around corners. Best line? “We kill one, and maybe save a thousand. That’s the code of the Fraternity.”
The highest body count must go to Beatrix Kiddo, played by Uma Thurman in Kill Bill. As a bride done wrong by her former Deadly Viper Assassination Squad colleagues, (including Vivica A. Fox who plays Vernita Green and Lucy Liu as O-Ren Ishii), Kiddo slices and dices her way through more than 100 opponents.
But the two most unlikely female assassins on film were found in Leon: The Professional and Kick-Ass. In the former, Natalie Portman was a 12-year-old who learns how to kill from her teacher, Léon (Jean Reno), a skillful but sensitive hitman.
In Kick-Ass, a 2010 action-comedy starring Nicolas Cage and Chloë Moretz, Hit Girl (Moretz) asks her father (and assassin mentor) for a Benchmade model 42 butterfly knife for her eleventh birthday.
Sword and sorcery movies are easy to spot. Look for a bare-chested hero, damsels in distress, big swords and at least one character described as “a mysterious warrior of dark magic.” You’ll also see an epic story, a hint of romance, some fantasy and, of course swashbuckling battle scenes.
On film, the genre had its heyday with two 1980s cheese fondues starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Brigitte Nielsen (as the She-Devil with a Sword) respectively— Conan the Barbarian and Red Sonja.
This weekend, Hollywood hopes to breathe new life into the genre with a reimagining of the Schwarzenegger saga. Stepping in for Arnold, Jason “Game of Thrones” Momoa will battle monsters, evil henchmen and a powerful witch, played by Rose McGowan in Conan the Barbarian.
Critics have always had an ambivalent relationship with sword and sorcery. The 1982 Conan the Barbarian was described as “both exciting AND unintentionally amusing,” while Red Sonja was dismissed as “pure silliness, but not silly enough to qualify as amusing.”
The Beastmaster, a 1982 film starring the Canadian-born Marc Singer as Dar, a warrior with a mystical control over all animals, only has a 50 per cent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but has become a cult classic over the years due to near constant exposure on television. TBS played the movie so often it earned the nickname The Beastmaster Station. Ditto HBO, which one writer joked stood for “Hey, Beastmaster is On.”
Also dismissed by critics but worth a look is Atlas In the Land of the Cyclops, a 1961 film starring muscleman Gordon Mitchell, whose first showbiz gig was as a strongman in Mae West’s beefcake revue, and sex symbol Chelo Alonso as the prerequisite beautiful but evil queen. Strangely, no character named Atlas actually appears in this Italian import—Mitchell plays Maciste, a hero made famous in silent Italian cinema, but unknown to American audiences—and Cyclops is only onscreen for about two minutes. Still, it’s good Saturday matinee fun.
No mention of sword and sorcery films could be complete without Hercules. There are dozens of films starring the Greek demigod but Hercules Against the Moon Men must be the silliest. This grade-Z flick is so bad, its director, Giacomo Gentilomo, who also made Slave Girls of Sheba and Goliath and the Island of Vampires, quit the film business shortly after the movie was completed.
When the first Final Destination movie was released in 2000, no one could have predicted the success of the horror franchise. No one that is, except for maybe Devon Sawa, the Canadian-born actor who played Alex Browning, the film’s character gifted with second sight.
At the bloody heart of each of these gory horror movies is a character with premonitions of the future. Usually he or she has forewarning that all his/her good-looking friends will die in the most terrible way imaginable. When the vision comes true—usually preceded by the tell tale line, “Something’s wrong!”—whoever survives ends up dying anyway, in increasingly complicated ways. With Final Destination 5 opening this weekend it seemed like an appropriate time to look back at other movie characters that have had creepy visions.
In The Gift, the movie Sam Raimi directed just before spinning the web for his Spider-Man trilogy, Cate Blanchett plays a psychic who helps the police locate a missing girl.
Billy Bob Thornton, Blanchett’s co-star and the movie’s screenwriter, based the character on his mother, Virginia Thornton Faulkner. Like the character in the movie, the psychic Mrs. Faulkner was a widow who raised three boys and used her extra sensory ability to make extra money.
In the hauntingly surreal Don’t Look Now, John Baxter (Donald Sutherland in a curly wig) has a premonition that something awful is about to happen to his daughter. Sure enough, seconds later she falls in a pond and drowns. Later in Venice, John and his wife (Julie Christie) meet an elderly psychic who claims to see apparitions of the dead daughter which triggers John’s own otherworldly visions.
Adapted from a short story by Daphne Du Maurier, the psychic thriller has become a cult classic since its release in 1973, inspiring filmmakers like Danny Boyle, who cites it as one of his favorite movies and E=MC2 a Top Twenty hit by Big Audio Dynamite.
Finally, some call these premonitions ESP, others, like author Stephen King, call them The Shining. In King’s novel, Stanley Kubrick’s film and the television movie of the same name, both Danny Torrance, the telepathic son of the winter caretakers of the remote Overlook Hotel and chef Dick Hallorann (Scatman Crothers) have visions and premonitions. King says the title was inspired by the Plastic Ono Band’s song, Instant Karma which features the chorus, “We all shine on.”
There have been plenty of real flesh and fur movie monkeys.
Peggy the Chimp starred alongside future president Ronald Reagan in Bedtime for Bonzo and of course, the Tarzan movies made a superstar out of Cheeta the Chimp. But for me the best moving picture primates were actors dressed up in monkey masks.
Long before computer generated special effects made digital apes like the ones featured in this weekend’s The Rise of the Planet of the Apes possible, a makeup artist named John Chambers pioneered primate makeup. His work on the original Planet of the Apes was based on a technique he developed during World War II to give disfigured veterans a natural look.
Later, his makeup work earned him a special Academy Award (his statue was presented by a tuxedo-clad chimpanzee) but before the movie rolled he had to persuade the studio his techniques would look convincing. To do so he shot a test scene with actor Edward G Robinson, who found the makeup sessions too gruelling and left the movie as a result. Won over, the studio approved the makeup budget — an astronomical, for the time, $1 million — almost one sixth of the entire budget.
Chambers put together a team of more than 80 people, delaying several other movies by causing a shortage of makeup artists in Hollywood.
On location in the Arizona desert, the lead actors spent three to four hours in the makeup chair every day. Because the applications took so long to apply the actors couldn’t take them off until the very end of the day. Since they were encased in makeup 12 to 18 hours at a stretch they had to “eat” liquefied meals through straws, and, as star Roddy McDowell found out, they couldn’t sneeze. He achoo-ed one day and blew half his chimp face off.
The makeup process was so intense that Kim Hunter, who played chimpanzee psychologist and veterinarian Zira, had to be prescribed valium to keep her calm during the sessions. She spent so much time made up that when her co-star Charlton Heston saw her sans make-up for the first time he didn’t recognize her.
Some of the actors had fun with the makeup, however. McDowell liked driving home still made up just to see the surprised faces of the drivers on the freeway.
The following four Apes sequels featured actors in makeup, but for me, the original contains the best monkey business.
When we think of westerns, images of cowboy hats, stagecoaches and John Wayne usually come to mind. I say usually because while those may be the most common icons associated with the genre they’re not the only ones.
This weekend, Cowboys & Aliens adds spaceships, extraterrestrials and laser guns to the existing formula. To research the movie’s western half, director Jon Favreau watched classic movies like Stagecoach and Destry Rides Again. Then he spent time with Alien, Predator, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind to find the sci-fi feel he was after.
“If you do it right,” he said of the film, “it honours both, and it becomes interesting and clever and a reinvention of two things that people understand.”
So call it a spacetern or neo-western if you like, but it isn’t the first movie to mix and match sci-fi with horse opera.
Michael Crichton wrote and directed Westworld after a trip to Disneyland. The Pirates of the Caribbean ride inspired him to imagine an amusement park where vacationers pay $1,000 a day to interact with robots programmed to replicate life in different periods of history. When a computer malfunction sends Yul Brynner’s black-hatted cyborg gunslinger (the actor wears the same costume he wore in The Magnificent Seven) on an animatronic rampage through the western theme park the old west becomes a place of high tech terror.
Sci-fi westerns aren’t always set on Earth, however.
The animated feature Bravestarr: The Legend sets the action on the planet of New Texas, located 1,956 light-years from Earth. Bashing together the best bits of Star Wars and traditional oater plots, the movie features cool western space toys like rocket scooters with fairings shaped like horses’ heads and a villain named Tex Hex. When Hex invades New Texas the town must get a new lawman. Enter Galactic Marshall Bravestarr. “We needed a hundred lawmen to tame New Texas,” reads the film’s tagline. “We got one. You know something? He was enough.”
Outland, the 1981 Sean Connery space thriller isn’t exactly a sci-fi western, but it is based on one of the most famous cowboy movies of all time, High Noon. A critic for the Boston Globe wrote, “Outland marks the return of the classic western hero in a space helmet,” and noted that its themes of loyalty and betrayal echoed High Noon.
Justin Timberlake is many things: music superstar, a booze baron (he owns a brand of tequila called 901), and all round mogul with a clothing line, restaurants and a record label. All that at just thirty years of age, but like so many singing stars before him, it seems what he really wants to do is act.
In fact he once said he believes it was always in the cards for him to be an actor.
“I got a phone call when I was 14 saying that there’s a record company that’s going to sign me. But two weeks before that, the plan was to drive to Los Angeles for TV pilot season. So I guess everything works out the way it’s supposed to.”
Fate aside, is his desire to act justified?
From his film debut in the 2000 Disney Channel movie Model Behavior to this weekend’s Friends with Benefits there have been the highest of highs and the lowest of lows.
He’s earned praise from his co-stars. “I only had a couple of scenes with him but he did a really great job,” said his Alpha Dog co-star Bruce Willis. But critics and bloggers haven’t always been so kind. “Dear Justin Timberlake,” read a 2010 blog headline, “STOP ACTING!”
Forgettable supporting roles in flops like Edison, Black Snake Moan and Southland Tales did little to enhance his reputation, but didn’t hurt it much either. Casting director Billy Hopkins said, “The way he’s handling his career is smart. If a movie fails, it’s not just his failure.”
Everything changed when he was cast in The Social Network. His take on the fast talking Sean Parker, inventor of Napster and an early supporter of facebook, was his breakthrough and won praise from critics.
That inspired performance, coupled with hilarious guest shots on Saturday Night Live (“Put any grown man in a leotard and that’s already funny,” he says.) have earned him the respect of the industry and fans, but he still doesn’t have his pick of roles.
Even though he didn’t get the lead in The Green Lantern, a part that went to Ryan Reynolds, (“I don’t think I’m the superhero type,” he joked.) he wants everyone to know he’s willing to put himself out there.
“I make no bones about the fact that I have always wanted to work in the forum of film.” he says. “I take this seriously.”
In 2005 when the fourth installment of the Harry Potter films hit screens, I wrote, ‘The Harry Potter phenomenon is so powerful that you could have called this Harry Potter Drinks a Goblet of Water and presented an Andy Warhol-style film of young Harry chugging a glass of H2O for two hours and Potterheads would still wear their wizard hats and line up to see it.’
Astonishingly, six years later, the same holds true for the final installment of the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2.
It’s not uncommon for movie franchises to span years and hang on to loyal fans. But to have the seven films in the series so far gross an average $909,906,449 each is astounding.
That kind of number speaks as much to the ferocity of the Potterheads as it does to the quality of the movies. The next highest grossing movie series is the James Bond franchise, which originated in 1962.
The super spy has shot and seduced his way through 22 official 007 releases for a worldwide box office total of $5,029,014,110.
Interestingly Harry Potter-player Daniel Radcliffe expressed interest in taking on the role of the teenaged James Bond in a planned film based on the Young Bond series of books.
Perhaps he can bring some of his magic to the part and create another successful franchise.
The Potter films are unique in the sense that the cast has stayed unchanged. Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint were all magically transformed into multi-millionaires playing Harry, Hermione and Ron.
Their presence in the films has provided a sense of continuity from one film to the next, but it’s not always necessary for actors to be yoked to characters in multiple sequels and spin-offs. There have been six James Bonds and Batman – the highest grossing superhero series – and they’ve seen everyone from Michael Keaton to Christian Bale wear the crusader’s cape.
Even though George Clooney’s installment, Batman and Robin, was a critical and financial disaster — Clooney himself called the film “a waste of money” and volunteered to personally refund money to audience members — it didn’t stop the franchise. Eight years later Batman was reinvented by Christopher Nolan as The Dark Knight, which grossed $1,001,842,429 at the box office.
Not sure if recasting and reimaging Harry Potter would work, but, who knows? Maybe 10 years from now Hollywood will have a Potter new cast and new stories for a new generation.
Bob Dylan sang “I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.” But Johnny Paycheck said it best for all people with evil employers when he snarled, “Take this job and shove it.”
This weekend, a new movie takes hatred for bad bosses to a new level. The guys in Horrible Bosses, a new comedy starring Jason Bateman, Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis, hate their supervisors, and try to solve their employment problems…permanently.
Not all movie bosses are in such danger. Often movie characters find more creative ways to get even with their bosses.
Remember Office Space’s Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston)? He hated his nitpicking boss, Bill Lumbergh (Gary Cole), so much he created a computer virus to steal money from the company. Too bad he got the decimal point wrong.
Gibbons didn’t go to prison for his revenge scheme but another agitated employee did. In Wall Street, Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) allows his boss, Mr. Gordon “Greed is Good” Gekko, to lead him down a moral and professional rabbit hole.
His revenge was simple: He recorded Gekko’s admission of guilt. Trouble was, to do so he had to implicate himself.
Going to jail was too good for Guy’s (Frank Whaley) boss in Swimming with Sharks. The up and coming writer thought he had it made when he got a job as the assistant to hot shot producer Buddy Ackerman (Kevin Spacey) but soon found out that being low on the food chain in Hollywood means putting up with a constant stream of abuse and humiliation.
Instead of quitting he does what any slightly psychotic Tinsel Town wannabe would do: he breaks into Buddy’s house, kidnaps him and tortures him. In a twist, the extreme behaviour earns Buddy’s respect and Guy gets a promotion.
Usually in the movies, it’s men who are the bad bosses but there are two glaring examples of distaff evil employers. In The Devil Wears Prada, Meryl Streep was Miranda, a boss who redefines the word demanding.
She’s bad, but the worst female boss ever is Working Girl’s Katharine Parker (Sigourney Weaver). Miranda was belittling and arrogant, but at least she was upfront about it. Parker, on the other hand, is two faced, passing off her trusted secretary Tess McGill’s (Melanie Griffith) ideas as her own. In the end, Tess teaches her a lesson about honesty…and gets her fired.
Detroit columnist Bob Talbert once wrote, “Good teachers are costly, but bad teachers cost more.”
Of course he wasn’t talking about actual dollars, but the emotional cost of a sketchy education. He could also have been talking about the new Cameron Diaz movie, Bad Teacher, in which she plays – you guessed it – a bad teacher! More concerned with hooking up with a wealthy co-worker (played by her real life ex Justin Timberlake) than with her students, she doesn’t make much of an effort to actually educate until she learns there’s a cash bonus for the teacher with the highest classroom grade average.
Bad teachers are nothing new on the big screen.
In Animal House, Donald Sutherland played stoned-out college professor Dave Jennings. Sutherland said he has regrets about the film.
Not that he had to parade around dressed only in a shirt and effectively moon the audience, no, he bemoans that he didn’t accept a percentage of the box office as payment. “(Director John) Landis phones up and says, ‘I’m going do this movie called Animal House, and they want to give you two-and-a-half per cent of the profits.’
“And I said, ‘No way! I’ve got to have my daily salary everyday.’ So I got paid for one day’s work and threw way $2 million!”
Probably the worst teacher ever appears in Class of 1984, a trashy school drama starring Roddy MacDowell as Terry Corrigan, a fed up teacher who threatens his unruly class with a loaded gun.
Director Mark L. Lester claims the scene was based on a real event, although a follow-up sequence showing an unbalanced Corrigan attempting to run down his students was pure fiction.
Due to excessive violence the movie was banned in several countries but is of interest to Canadian audiences for a performance by Hamilton, Ont. punk band Teenage Head.
One bad movie teacher actually redeems himself. When we first meet Fast Times at Ridgemont High’s Mr. Hand (Ray Walston) he’s prone to saying things like, “What is this fascination with truancy?” to his students, but near the end of the movie he softens and even pulls out all the stops to help his worst student, Spicoli (Sean Penn), graduate.
Ray Walston, so memorable as the uptight Mr. Hand, almost didn’t get the part, however. It was originally offered to Munster’s star Fred Gwynne who declined over objections to the film’s sexual content.
Chances are the first movie assassin names that pop into your head are The Jackal, Martin Q. Blank or El Mariachi. What do they have in common, other than flashy names and a predilection for gunning down their on-screen enemies? They’re all men.
