Break a leg, Spider-Man

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 at 12:20 PM - 0 Comments

Getty Images; Joan Marcus; Photo illustration by Bradley Reinhardt

A Sunday matinee of Spider-Man, Turn Off the Dark is going smoothly. Too smoothly. Unlike the performance where a stuntman fell 20 feet onto the floor, or the one where actress Natalie Mendoza suffered a concussion that forced her to quit the show, this one pulls off the complicated stunts and moving sets that caused writer-director Julie Taymor (The Lion King, Titus) to run up a $65-million budget. But then, with only one more number left to go in the second act, the prop people lower a giant spiderweb that looks very much like an old gym net—and it gets stuck on the way down. The musicians keep playing, stagehands come out onto the stage to fix it; Spider-Man, or perhaps it’s one of the many stunt Spider-Men, is pacing around in the wings with his mask off. Finally, a sheepish offstage voice announces that the show is experiencing a delay. The audience bursts into some of the most enthusiastic applause of the afternoon. There hasn’t been much clapping for the songs by U2’s Bono and the Edge; this is what they paid to see: something going wrong at a legendary showcase for theatrical disasters.

That may be a typical moment from the longest and most lucrative tryout period in the history of musical theatre. Spider-Man keeps delaying its official opening; it’s been in previews since November, and last week the producers pushed the date back by another month, to March 15. And why should it actually open? If the previews end, it’ll have to contend with critics—and the only critic who seems to like it for the moment is Glenn Beck. He called it “by far the best show I’ve ever seen,” and argued that it has a conservative message because the villainous Green Goblin is “an atheist, godlike scientist who’s in bed with the giant government.” On the other hand, as a show “trying out,” where things can go wrong and an executive producer has to walk out to assure us that the New York Labour Department has declared the show safe for the actors, it’s doing great: last week the New York Times reported that it “played to full houses” and managed to gross more at the box office than Broadway’s biggest hit, Wicked.

Some shows, particularly those that try out in New York like Spider-Man, can be hurt by nasty gossip during the preview period. But the bad word of mouth in this case seems to have been good for the show, because of all the publicity it’s generated. Spider-Man has been a target for late-night comedians (like Conan O’Brien, who regularly features parodies of the musical on his show) ever since it ran out of money during rehearsals. The original producer pulled out, replaced by Michael Cohl, the Canadian concert-tour producer who has handled the Rolling Stones and Michael Jackson—and also had a hand in Canada’s most expensive musical flop, Lord of the Rings. But Lord of the Rings’ inflated budget just made it a bad joke; Spider-Man’s problems are actually pulling in people who aren’t theatre fans. Jeremy Gerard, the theatre critic for Bloom­berg News, told Maclean’s that “sales did spike after the reports of the injuries.”

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Going up against Hitler, with a stutter

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, December 9, 2010 at 3:20 PM - 0 Comments

he film’s screenwriter overcame his own childhood stutter after hearing recordings of King George VI’s wartime broadcasts | Alliance Atlantis

No movie this year seems more assured of Oscar recognition than The King’s Speech, starring Colin Firth as a monarch struggling to overcome his stammer. It does, after all, have the full set of attributes that define Oscar pedigree—stocked with Brit thespians, it’s a period film that is about royalty and presents an inspirational true story of an underdog overcoming a disability. The movie is also a proven crowd-pleaser, having won the Toronto International Film Festival’s audience award, a predictor of Academy success. It doesn’t hurt that the engagement of William and Kate has thrown British royalty back into the spotlight.

Although Hollywood’s timing is not that prescient, some cynics have even suggested that The King’s Speech was tailor-made for an Oscar coronation, which U.K. director Tom Hooper finds outrageous. “It makes me laugh to read in the press that this film obeyed some recipe for success,” he said by phone from Los Angeles last week. “When we were financing it, I can promise you, it didn’t seem obvious to people at the time.” Asking an audience to watch a lead actor stammer his way through an entire movie does, in fact, seem like a risky proposition. “There were so many pitfalls,” says Hooper. “It could have been comedic in the wrong way. It could have been so painful as to be unwatchable. It could have been so slow that at the end of 100 minutes, you’d be only three scenes in.”

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Second life

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, December 9, 2010 at 12:00 PM - 0 Comments

Jennifer Grey, Fidel Castro, Betty White | Alberto E. Rodriguez/Sven Creutzmann/Mambo Photo/Getty Images

ELIOT SPITZER
Spitzer’s political career collapsed in 2008 when he resigned the governorship of New York after a prostitution scandal. But even bad publicity was good publicity for the struggling CNN, which seized on his name value and hired him to co-host a show with columnist Kathleen Parker. Parker Spitzer debuted to terrible ratings, but that’s CNN’s disgrace, not Spitzer’s.

GORDON LIGHTFOOT
When a media outlet reported that singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot had died, there was an outpouring of grief on blogs and Twitter. It turned out that the report was based on a hoax; when reached for comment, Lightfoot said that he was “quite surprised to hear it” and that his death had caused his music to be played much more often on the radio.

GEORGE WASHINGTON’S LIBRARY BOOK
In 1789, George Washington took out the book The Law of Nations from the New York Society Library and never returned it. In 2010, after the library confirmed the book was still missing, the caretakers of Washington’s home sent over “a copy of the same edition” to replace it. But they said nothing about paying 221 years’ worth of overdue fees.

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A year of new faces, returning heroes, and that golden goal

By macleans.ca - Thursday, December 9, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Chris O'Meara/AP

How long does it take to be named Maclean’s Newsmaker of the Year?

For Sidney Crosby, it took about four seconds. That was all Crosby needed to beat Team U.S.A. defenceman Brian Rafalski to the puck along the boards, poke it to Team Canada teammate Jarome Iginla, break for the net, corral the give-and-go back from Iginla and shoot the puck underneath goaltender Ryan Miller’s outstretched stick and between his legs.

Crosby’s gold-medal-winning overtime goal was the perfect ending to a tremendously successful 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics—itself an event 14 years in the making, as Games organizing committee CEO John Furlong notes in this week’s Maclean’s Interview. The Games brought all Canadians together and were the capstone event of the year. We celebrated our ability to put on a show and proved we could compete against the best that the world has to offer. We demonstrated our organizational skills and hosting talents, as well as a fiercely competitive streak that, as a nation, we often keep under wraps. We mourned as a nation with figure skater Joannie Rochette over the death of her mother, Thérèse, and marvelled at her courageous bronze-medal performance, the epitome of grace under pressure.

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Look mom, no hands!

By Chris Sorensen - Thursday, December 2, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Ted S. Warren/AP

Microsoft has sometimes been called a one-trick pony, albeit a very successful one. Its Windows operating system is used on 90 per cent of the world’s computers. But nothing lasts forever, which is why the Redmond, Wash.-based company has been desperately trying to come up with a repeat hit.

Yet despite rolling out an avalanche of new products over the years—Zune media players, Windows Mobile and its Bing search engine, among others—only Microsoft’s Xbox video game console has been an unqualified success. And now, just in time for the holiday shopping season, Microsoft has upped the ante with an optical motion control system called Kinect that leapfrogs the motion sensing controllers of rivals Nintendo and Sony. That’s because it doesn’t require a controller at all. Instead, it’s an optical sensor that is placed atop your TV set to follow your physical movements. Microsoft says it sold one million of the devices in the first 10 days and is on track to sell five million by year’s end.

While Kinect is certain to give the Xbox a sales boost, Microsoft has its eyes on a much bigger prize: the entire living room. Both Microsoft and Sony in particular are keen to make their consoles all-in-one entertainment systems, playing movies and offering content from the Web, including streaming video. Dennis Durkin, the chief operating and financial officer of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business, recently said that 40 per cent of Xbox Live members in the U.S. use their consoles for activities other than gaming, including streaming movies on Netflix, listening to music or following friends on Facebook.

Kinect promises to help further this trend by shedding the Xbox’s image as a platform solely for hard-core gamers, while also solving the problem of comfortably using your television set to access the Web. Suddenly, the need for a cumbersome keyboard or remote controls festooned with buttons—needed for Google TV and other rival products—is a thing of the past.

Dick Van Dyke rescued by porpoises

By macleans.ca - Thursday, November 11, 2010 at 12:43 PM - 12 Comments

Actor Dick Van Dyke (The Dick Van Dyke Show) was surfing on his local beach when he fell asleep; when he woke up, he found the board had drifted “out of sight of land,” and the 84 year-old actor wasn’t sure he could get back to shore. But luckily the fins he saw swimming around him turned out not to belong to sharks, but to porpoises, who pushed him back to shore. Proving that if humans haven’t forgiven Van Dyke for his Cockney accent in “Mary Poppins,” the aquatic mammals have.

The Guardian

James Bond—in the buff

By macleans.ca - Friday, November 5, 2010 at 11:42 AM - 0 Comments

A nude painting of former James Bond star Sir Sean Connery has been discovered in his native Scotland. Should you care to see what Connery once looked like in the nude, the painting will soon be part of an exhibition in the UK. Before launching his acting career, Connery acted as a nude model for art students. The newly-discovered work was created in 1951, 11 years before his debut as 007. The painting was discovered among a pile of works by artist Rab Webster, who lived in Selkirk, Scotland until his death last month. “He said Connery treated it just as a job and that he didn’t say very much,” explains Nick Bihel, a relative of Webster. “I have no idea how much the painting of Sean Connery would be worth. At the moment we are just taking stock of the situation but we would like to put them on display in Selkirk in the near future.”

Daily Express

Fiddler On the Roof composer dies

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, November 3, 2010 at 5:20 PM - 0 Comments

Jerry Bock, often considered one of the greatest Broadway musical composers of the ’50s and ’60s, has died at the age of 81. Bock’s career took off in 1958 when he was teamed with lyricist Sheldon Harnick; they were chosen to write the score for Fiorello!, a musical about the former mayor of New York. The show ran for two years and won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. Bock and Harnick went on to write She Loves Me, often considered one of the best romantic-comedy musicals, but their biggest hit was Fiddler On the Roof, which won them many awards and gave them several enduring hit songs, including “If I Were a Rich Man.” The Bock-Harnick team wrote two more shows together, The Apple Tree and The Rothschilds, both moderate successes but not on the level of Fiddler; during the run of the latter show, the two fell out over arguments about who should be the director. They broke up soon after that, though they reunited to write a new song for a 2004 Fiddler on the Roof revival. Bock went into semi-retirement after that, living off his earnings from Fiddler, but he occasionally wrote film scores and won an Emmy for Best Children’s Song in 2006.

New York Times

Stardom and politics

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Friday, October 15, 2010 at 4:00 PM - 0 Comments

Rush Limbaugh; Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin; Christine O'Donnell/ Mark Peterson/Redux/ Nicholad Kamm/AFP/Getty Images/ Jessica Kourkounis/The New York Times

Politics and entertainment have always been close cousins—both pursuits require a measure of charisma and a talent for self-promotion. Ronald Reagan was an actor before he was a president. So was Arnold Schwarzenegger before he was “the governator.” Hollywood stars have long made appearances on Capitol Hill—where Angelina Jolie has testified about the plight of refugees and where in 2002 the House of Representatives education appropriations subcommittee took testimony on funding for school music programs from the Muppet Elmo. But this political season has seen the rise of a new hybrid of celebrity politics that blurs the lines between politician and entertainer, and the line between hustling for votes and hustling for dollars.

Exhibit A is Sarah Palin, who, after rising to celebrity on a failed vice-presidential bid, resigned her job as governor of Alaska to become a full-time celebrity. She looks and sounds like a politician, and raises money (her political action committee, Sarah PAC, raised $1.2 million in the last quarter). But since leaving the $125,000 (all figures in U.S. dollars) per year governor’s office, Palin is making a bigger personal fortune—an estimated $12 million—selling books, appearing as a commentator on Fox News, hosting her own reality television show, Sarah Palin’s Alaska, and giving speeches for up to $100,000 a pop.

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Porn film actor tested positive for HIV

By macleans.ca - Thursday, October 14, 2010 at 1:19 PM - 0 Comments

Two well-known adult film production companies in Los Angeles have shut down after a performer tested HIV-positive on Tuesday. Individuals exposed to the active performer—whose name and gender are undisclosed—are being tested and quarantined, according to a spokesperson for the Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation. The infection is the first known local case in over a year and has renewed calls by AIDS activists for increased regulation and state-mandated condom use on porn sets. Wicked Pictures and Vivid Entertainment have suspended operations as a precaution.

Los Angeles Times

J-Lo to join American Idol

By macleans.ca - Friday, September 3, 2010 at 11:54 AM - 0 Comments

Jennifer Lopez is in the final stages of negotiations to serve as a judge on the upcoming season of American Idol, according to the website TMZ. The report of a J-Lo deal comes with rumours that Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler, 62, is another top choice for the show’s 10th season. Also, contrary to earlier reports, a source told TMZ that the diva did not overwhelm Fox executives with drama and demands. Instead, the Idol source said, “It’s been typical negotiating.”

Herald Sun

Alanis Morissette five-months pregnant

By macleans.ca - Thursday, August 12, 2010 at 12:43 PM - 0 Comments

“Yes, happy news—I’m pregnant,” Alanis Morissette Tweeted to the world Wednesday. The 36-year-old singer, known best for her record-setting 1995 album Jagged Little Pill, is five months along. The father is rapper ‘Souleye’ Tredway, who she married in May after dating for just eight months. In an interview yesterday, she said she was shocked but excited when the doctor told her she was pregnant. Morissette smiled for the cameras recently as she was swarmed by paparazzi looking at her “bump” while leaving the set of Weeds. Asked whether she’s had to kick any habits in preparation for the baby, she said she “enjoys [marijuana] sometimes,” but won’t smoke while pregnant.

Daily Mail

Another bomb

By macleans.ca - Friday, August 6, 2010 at 1:13 PM - 0 Comments

Earlier this year, Shareef Abdelhaleem was convicted for his role in a terrorist plot to detonate three truck bombs in downtown Toronto. One of the core members of the so-called “Toronto 18,” Abdelhaleem was caught on police wiretaps talking about ammonium nitrate, mass murder—and how to play the stock market to profit from the attacks. During his trial, Abdelhaleem tried to portray himself as the hapless victim, telling the judge that he was only playing along with his co-conspirators in an attempt to minimize their damage. The judge called his story “nonsensical” and declared him guilty (he will be sentenced next month). But in a new play now on stage in Toronto—a production funded in part with federal dollars—Abdelhaleem is once again portrayed as a victim of overzealous spies and a slow-moving justice system. The playwright describes Homegrown as a “true story.” It is anything but.

The Globe and Mail

Indonesians told to tune out the gossip

By macleans.ca - Thursday, July 29, 2010 at 1:48 PM - 0 Comments

It’s the latest in a series of contentious edicts: Indonesia’s highest Islamic authority—the Indonesian Ulema Council—says Muslims be barred from watching television gossip shows. The shows are said to be ruinous to society because they give away too much information about people’s private lives. The crack-down was sparked by a celebrity sex clip scandal that dominated TV news in the past month.

Washington Post

New York Times

Maury Chaykin, dead at 61

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, July 27, 2010 at 4:26 PM - 0 Comments

Canadian actor Maury Chaykin has died. Chaykin, whose career spanned 35 years, could most recently be found starring in the HBO Canada series Less Than Kind. His 1994 turn in Whale Music landed him a Genie award for best supporting role, while Chaykin’s other award-winning performances include roles in La Femme Nikita and At the Hotel, both of which earned him Geminis. Chaykin was 61.

Toronto Star

Justin Bieber on Oprah, Kobe Bryant and his own fame

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Wednesday, July 21, 2010 at 3:00 PM - 0 Comments

Dana Romanoff/GETTY IMAGES/ KC Armstrong/ Lucas Jackson/Reuters

The sign on the door says “Mozart,” but it’s a safe bet that Wolfgang Amadeus never had a dressing room equipped with leather recliners, a super-sized flat-screen TV and an Xbox console. Nor, presumably, did his tour rider call for loaves of Wonder Bread, Cool Ranch Doritos, Fruit Roll-Ups and candy Swedish Fish.

Still, something is missing. Justin Bieber’s mom, Pattie Mallette, looks at the choice of Pop Tarts—strawberry and apple strudel—and clucks, “Where are the grape ones?” before scurrying off down the hall. The day has enough complications already. Pop’s reigning prodigy is suffering greatly from Denver’s thin mountain air. Dizzy with a splitting headache, the Stratford, Ont., teen has been snarling at anyone brave enough to enter his darkened tour bus, pull back the Spider-Man bedsheets, and try to wake him for a scheduled 2:30 p.m. interview.

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Swiss authorities won't extradite Polanski

By macleans.ca - Monday, July 12, 2010 at 2:50 PM - 0 Comments

Switzerland will not extradite film director Roman Polanski, who was convicted in the U.S. of having sex with a 13-year-old girl in 1977. Polanski took a plea bargain in the case, but left the country before he could be sentenced and never returned. He was taken into custody last year after traveling to receive a lifetime achievement award at the Zurich Film Festival, though he has since been moved from a prison to his chalet in Gstaad. Swiss authorities rejected U.S. requests for extradition, saying American officials didn’t provide the right information. Polanski is the director of Rosemary’s Baby and The Pianist.

BBC News

Lindsay Lohan sent to jail

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, July 7, 2010 at 5:10 PM - 0 Comments

Actress Lindsay Lohan was sentenced to 90 days in jail by a Los Angeles Superior Court judge on Tuesday for failing to attend alcohol education classes as part of her plea bargain from two 2007 DUI arrests. Judge Marsha Revel gave Lohan 30 days for reckless driving and 30 days apiece for two DUI busts. On Dec. 15, Revel ordered Lohan to attend one class a week—no excuses—after the actress was lagging in attendance. Lohan went on to miss classes during seven separate weeks, as well as counseling and a court date in late May when she was at the Cannes Film Festival and allegedly lost her passport. Lohan burst into tears after hearing her sentence, but Deputy District Attorney Danette Meyers told Revel that the only way to send a message to the actress was to put her behind bars.

New York Post

He hates your favourite movie

By Jaime J. Weinman - Wednesday, July 7, 2010 at 10:40 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Steve Simon

Meet the film critic who hates Toy Story 3 and calls Josh Brolin’s Jonah Hex “beautiful and brilliant.” Armond White used to be unknown beyond readers of the alternative weekly he writes for, the New York Press. But that changed when fans of movies like The Dark Knight, There Will Be Blood, and Wall-E began to notice that White was the only critic who disliked their favourite films. That made him famous, even feared: he was banned from a screening of the Ben Stiller vehicle Greenberg because he’d wished “retroactive abortion” on the film’s director. Though Village Voice critic Vadim Rizov calls him a once-interesting critic who has “collapsed into self-parody,” White has found a way to make criticism relevant again: write reviews that strike people as crazy.

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Justin Bieber's North Korean tour

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, July 6, 2010 at 2:16 PM - 0 Comments

The latest in a string of Internet pranks on Justin Bieber: a conspiracy to send the 16-year-old crooner to play a concert in North Korea. Unfortunately for the young singer, a contest on his ‘My World Tour’ website, which asks fans to vote which country he should play in next, proved too tempting for internet pranksters to resist. Users from the popular web forum ‘4chan’ conspired to vote up North Korea—which was included on the unedited list of possible countries—pushing it to the top of the list. Israel sits several thousands votes behind in the number 2 spot, and the contest closes on July 7. While it’s highly unlikely that Bieber would be granted entry to North Korea, a spokesman for the North Korean Embassy in London told BBC News that any application to tour would be dealt with by its mission to the United Nations, and then referred to Pyongyang. The BBC tartly notes that it isn’t known if Kim Jong-Il is a fan of Justin Bieber’s music.

BBC News

Christopher Plummer: On drugs vs. drinking, Stratford, and why he’s no longer a monster

By Kate Fillion - Sunday, July 4, 2010 at 12:00 PM - 8 Comments

Armando Gallo/Retna/Corbis

Over the past 60 years, the acclaimed Montreal-born actor has appeared in hundreds of films and television shows, won a slew of awards for his stage work, and poked fun at his own iconic portrayal of Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music, which he refers to as S&M. Plummer’s most recent projects are too numerous to list, but include voicing the villain in Up, playing the lead in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, writing a bestselling memoir, and playing Tolstoy in The Last Station, for which he received his first Oscar nomination earlier this year. He is currently appearing in The Tempest at Stratford.

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Sandra Bullock and Jesse James divorce final

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, June 29, 2010 at 10:17 AM - 0 Comments

Both Sandra Bullock and Jesse James signed the final documents for their divorce last week, TMZ reported. Sealed documents have been filed with the clerk’s office in Travis County, Texas, and these papers are said to make the divorce final. Bullock filed for divorce in April, saying the marriage “has become insupportable because of discord or conflict of personalities.”

TMZ

Marilyn Monroe is attractive from the inside-out

By macleans.ca - Monday, June 28, 2010 at 12:34 PM - 0 Comments

Forty-five thousand dollars: the amount paid at auction on Sunday for a set of three Marilyn Monroe chest X-rays from a 1954 hospital visit. Julien’s Auctions, which sold the the X-rays at the Hollywood Legends auction at Planet Hollywood Resort and Casino in Las Vegas, estimated that a view of the inside of Monroe’s chest would fetch only $3,000. Other “Monroe-abilia” sold included a chair from her last photo shoot for $35,000—less than the price of the chest pictures.

Toronto Star

Lady Gaga to bring death to the stage

By macleans.ca - Thursday, June 24, 2010 at 5:02 PM - 26 Comments

Singer Lady Gaga has already acted out her own death on stage, and now plans to outdo that performance by including dead bodies in an upcoming show. She is now said to be in talks with scientist Gunther Von Hagens—best known for his Body Worlds—about ways to use his knowledge in her Monster Ball tour. She reportedly asked Gunther to create a set for her shows in Las Vegas for March next year. “She is fascinated by Gunther’s work and life. He grew up in Germany, a country she loves,” a source told British newspaper The Sun. “They’ve spoken over email and it’s gone well. She is keen to have some Body Worlds element in one of her shows, with Vegas being the obvious fit.”

Stuff.co.nz