Clash of the biopic titans

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, December 2, 2011 at 6:00 AM - 0 Comments

Monroe

Here’s a pretty safe prediction: when the Oscars are handed out next February, the contest for best actress will come down to a duel between two icons, a bombshell and a battle-axe—between Marilyn Monroe and Margaret Thatcher, as portrayed by Michelle Williams and Meryl Streep. Oscar has always had a soft spot for biopics, especially if Brits, royals or showbiz icons are involved. The main event at the last Academy Awards was an unfair fight between The King’s Speech and The Social Network, as King George VI handily trumped the Machiavellian Facebook guru Mark Zuckerberg. And as the current award season warms up, it looks like real-life figures will dominate the field as never before.

They are led by a trio of heavyweights: Streep’s Thatcher in The Iron Lady, Williams in My Week with Marilyn, and Leonardo DiCaprio as Hoover in J. Edgar. Bringing up the rear in David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method are Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud and Michael Fassbender as Carl Jung. The Lady adds a Nobelist wild card to the race with its portrait of Burmese opposition heroine Aung San Suu Kyi (Michelle Yeoh). Don’t count out Brad Pitt as Moneyball’s Billy Beane, the legendary manager who rewrote baseball’s bible and irrevocably changed the game. And trailing far behind the pack is W.E.’s Wallis Simpson (Andrea Riseborough), the woman who forced the abdication that gave us that stammering George VI.

In Hollywood, where making history is almost as important as making movies, the biopic craze shows no signs of slowing down. Steven Spielberg is currently shooting Lincoln, with Daniel Day Lewis carving out his own Rushmore portrait of the American president. And next year, ghostbuster Bill Murray gains gravitas as Franklin D. Roosevelt in Hyde Park on Hudson, which has FDR and Eleanor mingling with Queen Elizabeth and King George VI (him again).

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Hollywood banishes celluloid

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 at 11:10 AM - 0 Comments

Getty Images; Photo illustration by Sarah Mackinnon

At the Tate Modern gallery in London last month, artist Tacita Dean unveiled her exhibit “FILM,” an expression of fear for the future of motion picture film. “It breaks my heart to think that we’re going to lose this beautiful medium,” Dean told the Evening Standard. Not long after that, Creative COW magazine reported that several major motion picture companies, including the venerable Panavision, will stop creating new film cameras and concentrate on digital video cameras instead. It looks like all of film, not just Dean’s, may be a museum piece. “The end of film distribution is on the horizon,” says Patrick Corcoran, director of media and research at the National Association of Theatre Owners in the U.S.

It’s not that demand has completely disappeared. “Filmmakers are very much accustomed to working with film,” says Corcoran. “There are some who are going to be slow to give that up.” Wally Pfister, the cinematographer of The Dark Knight, told American Cinematographer that film can be exposed in a wide variety of ways, which gives him “infinite creative flexibility in creating images.” Steven Poster, president of the International Cinematographers Guild, has embraced digital, but says film “does have a look that’s kind of unique.” Film fans love its inherent grainy quality, and Dean’s exhibit also celebrates film processes like hand-tinting, which can’t be done with computers.

But even if some directors still want to use film, it may become harder to find anyone willing to make or process it. Film has been battered by the popularity of digital 3-D, which has no film equivalent. TV studios have mostly abandoned film for new pilots over the last two years, in part for labour reasons: Poster says “they were fighting with the Screen Actors Guild,” and digital video allows them to deal with a different union. As more producers find reasons to give up film, the cost of making and delivering film prints will go up; by 2013, Corcoran estimates, the studios are likely to conclude that “it no longer makes economic sense to ship film.”

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Movie trailers are out of control

By Brian D. Johnson - Wednesday, November 2, 2011 at 1:10 PM - 0 Comments

CP; Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Sarah Mackinnon

Cultural shorthand keeps getting shorter. There was a time when taking part in the conversation meant saying, “I haven’t read the book but I’ve seen the movie.” Now it’s: “I haven’t seen the movie, but I watched the trailer.” Or better still: “I read the review of the trailer.” These days Hollywood trailers are being premiered like blockbuster events in their own right, complete with reviews. In early October, Disney and Marvel launched the first full trailer for The Avengers, a five-superhero cluster bomb that won’t hit theatres until next May. The Hollywood Reporter jumped on it with a serious and substantial review, criticizing Robert Downey Jr.’s “two lame jokes” and the use of Thor’s Loki as a recycled villain. Although cascading fireballs send a dozen vehicles flying through Manhattan, the critic complained that “we only see one street of cars wrecked . . . Audiences are going to need a greater threat to humanity to get invested in this showdown.” He wished the trailer were more like the one for the last Transformers sequel, “which managed to convey epic drama and conflict as well as great emotional moments.” That trailer, apparently, was an instant classic, even if the movie was utter dreck.

It makes you wonder what Pauline Kael would think. Brian Kellow’s delicious biography of the legendary New Yorker critic, who championed the ’70s wave of American film, reveals that Kael was no snob; her palate included an avid taste for entertaining trash. But by the ’80s, she despaired that marketing was eating cinema alive. Now, a decade after her death, there’s no better example of her worst nightmare than the trailer blight that ravages the ecology of film. It’s the pine beetle of the movie business.

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A Hollywood agent for conjoined twins Krista and Tatiana

By Ken MacQueen - Monday, April 25, 2011 at 12:20 PM - 2 Comments

Photograph by Roman Cho/Getty Images

We meet at the Magic Castle—a private club for magicians, in a rambling mansion off Hollywood Boulevard. It’s Friday night, and the valet attendants are dealing with a line of cars disgorging sharp-dressed folks in suits and ties or cocktail dresses. This is old Hollywood—exclusive and a touch bizarre—and even if you wrangle an invite, you don’t get in looking like a bum. We’re here because this is Chuck Harris’s kind of joint, and because he knows the owner, naturally. And because Stoil & Ekaterina, one of Harris’s many, many incomparable acts, is headlining in the castle’s main theatre.

In the mansion’s entrance alcove, Harris points to a statue of a gilded owl sitting on a walled bookcase. “Say ‘open sesame,’ ” he says. With that, the bookcase swings wide, and we enter the buzz and chatter of the Grand Salon. That’s what Chuck Harris does: he opens doors.

Harris is an agent, just not a typical one. Oh, he’s got the cigar, and the patter; he’s got glasses the size of cruise ship portholes, some big-money clients and contacts around the world. It’s just that a significant portion of his client base is…way out there. “I am the conductor,” he has said, meaning it in the kindest possible way, “of a symphony of wackos.” You want a man who dances with four puppets and can do a one-man recreation of the Jackson Five? He’s got Christopher, who recently did a command performance for Mexico’s Carlos Slim, considered the world’s richest man. He’s got a one-armed juggler and a guy who balances a car on his head. You want Wolf Boy, Rubber Girl, or the world’s smallest Elvis imitator? He’ll have them on a plane the moment the contract is signed. The same with the Regurgitator, who swallows coins and brings them up in order. And he’s got Mr. Methane, who for safety reasons probably shouldn’t be double-billed with Electricity Girl.

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Elizabeth Taylor, dead at 79

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, March 23, 2011 at 1:00 PM - 0 Comments

Elizabeth Taylor, one of the most famous movie stars of all time both for her onscreen and offscreen lives, has died of congestive heart failure at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. Born in England to American parents, she moved to California at an early age and was signed up as a child actress by the Hollywood studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. She soon became one of America’s biggest child stars, playing the lead role in the hit movie National Velvet. After developing into a beautiful young woman, Taylor appeared in movies like Father of the Bride and became a major adult star when she was loaned out to Paramount for the movie A Place In the Sun, where her role as an irresistibly beautiful, wealthy socialite defined her public image for most of her career. In the late ’50s she started to get new acclaim as an actress in hits like Giant, Suddenly Last Summer, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; in the ’60s she won two Oscars, for Butterfield 8 and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Offscreen, she was married multiple times and her private life was a favourite subject of tabloid journalists: the death of her producer husband Mike Todd in a plane crash (and the cold that kept her from getting on that plane with him); her famous breakup of the marriage between America’s-sweetheart couple Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, and the even more famous breakup of her marriage to Fisher when she met Richard Burton on the set of Cleopatra. Her tumultuous relationship with Burton played out in two separate marriages and many screen and stage appearances together. After a string of flop movies in the ’70s, Taylor reduced her film appearances but continued to make news for her marriages (including Virginia Senator John Warner), and her friendships (particularly with Michael Jackson). She was also an early advocate for AIDS research and gay rights, campaigning to raise awareness of AIDS after the disease killed her friend and co-star Rock Hudson. She was also a well-known collector of jewelry, whose husbands frequently presented her with expensive jewels, and launched a best-selling perfume, “White Diamonds.” She was 79.

Los Angeles Times

The incredible hunk

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, January 7, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 4 Comments

Bardem with Penélope Cruz at the Cannes film festival in May 2010, Bardem unleashes the most powerful performance of his career in ‘Biutiful’ | Yves Herman/Reuters, Everett Collection

Hollywood is thick with fine actors and glamorous stars, but there’s one thing that’s even rarer than a good original script: the kind of strong leading man who takes your breath away. One contender after another has proved lacking. Tom Cruise has become a freak, a machine-like movie star whose vanity overrides his sex appeal. Johnny Depp is adorable, but seems content to play a pirate for life, and when given a shot at cracking Angelina Jolie’s cool in The Tourist, he looked like he couldn’t wait to get back to his ship. Jolie’s mate, Brad Pitt, seems strangely neutered. Canada’s Ryan Reynolds inherited the title of Sexiest Man Alive, but he has yet to prove it onscreen, and now even Scarlett Johansson isn’t buying it. Leonardo DiCaprio shook off his stigma as Titanic’s teen heartthrob, and matured into a formidable actor, but he seems allergic to romantic roles. Same deal with George Clooney. For a while, he appeared to be the Great White Hope, so boldly debonair and adult, until we began to notice that his career was virtually devoid of love scenes.

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Horrifically good movies

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, December 17, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 6 Comments

ILLUSTRATION BY BRADLEY REINHARDT

In True Grit, the Coen brothers’ new remake of the classic 1969 John Wayne western, the heroine—a hard-headed 14-year-old girl on a mission to avenge her father’s murder—tumbles into a collapsed mine shaft, where a snake lurks coiled in the rib cage of a decayed corpse, ready to strike. That’s a fitting image for the kind of year it’s been at the movies. If Hollywood is the Dream Factory, 2010 was the year of dreaming dangerously, a year when horror films had no monopoly on nightmares. Scan the lists of award-pedigree movies, and a striking trend emerges: time and again we’re dropped into a snakepit of fear and loathing, paranoia and paralysis, isolation and loss. Almost all the good movies played like bad dreams.

You have to address the nation with a monumental stutter (The King’s Speech); you’re hit by a tsunami while shopping for trinkets in paradise (Hereafter); you fall for a nice guy who turns out to be the bank robber who held you hostage (The Town); the older brother who’s training you to be a boxing champ is a crack-addict pimp (The Fighter); you’re dancing the lead in Swan Lake and something weird is growing out of your back; or, in the best worst dream of all, you’re trapped by a boulder and have to cut off your arm with a blunt penknife (127 Days). Even children’s fantasy was not immune. In Toy Story 3, a utopian daycare centre turns out to be a prison camp that tortures toys; The Nutcracker in 3-D gave us a Nazi Rat King whose stormtroopers feed toys into industrial ovens that blacken the sky.

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Gulliver's Traumas

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 3:00 PM - 1 Comment

20th Century Fox

The new movie Gulliver’s Travels, opening Dec. 22, is yet another opportunity for Hollywood to ruin a classic book. This time, Jonathan Swift’s 18th-century bestseller has been updated to modern times, with Jack Black playing the title character. Black enthusiastically said that the best idea they had for the production was that instead of Gulliver being a traveller who gets shipwrecked in fantasy lands, “we have him going through an inter-dimensional portal to an alternate, not altogether different place.”

English professors are used to this by now. There have been many film versions of Gulliver’s Travels, but few have much to do with the original book, a satire that Dutton Kearney (a professor at Aquinas College who edited a critical edition of the work) calls a story of “misanthropy and self-hatred.” If Black’s version fails, it might be a slap in the face to Swift, but it’ll be well within the tradition of a beloved book that Kearney calls “difficult to adapt successfully.”

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One nut-cracked ballerina

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, December 2, 2010 at 12:20 PM - 1 Comment

A young ballerina (played by Natalie Portman) is pushed by a diabolical director to express a dark side she has never explored | 20th Century Fox

Hollywood has not been kind to ballet. If we believe what we see in the movies, classical dance is a world of sadistic directors, tortured ingenues, back-stabbing divas and overbearing stage mothers. Cinema’s most revered ballet film, The Red Shoes (1948), climaxes with its heroine fleeing her dressing room and falling from a window into the path of a train that runs over her feet. The most memorable scene in The Turning Point (1977) is an alfresco cat fight between Anne Bancroft and Shirley MacLaine, as washed-up ballerinas in evening gowns who clobber each other with their purses.

No wonder director Darren Aronofsky considers his new dance movie, Black Swan, a companion piece to The Wrestler. The high art of ballet may seem far removed from the trashy spectacle of a staged brawl. And Black Swan’s delicate Natalie Portman could not be more unlike The Wrestler’s brutish Mickey Rourke. But wrestling and ballet are both insular worlds full of arcane ritual and physical torture. And as actors, Portman and Rourke were not content to simulate athletic technique; they submitted to gruelling regimes, incurring injuries in the name of art.

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Is 'Outsourced' really that offensive?

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, December 1, 2010 at 9:40 AM - 11 Comments

Lewis Jacobs/NBCU Photo Bank/CP

From the reaction to Outsourced, you’d think it was the most offensive portrayal of India since Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The half-hour comedy, which airs on Global at 9:30 p.m. on Thursdays, is about an American (Ben Rappaport) who is forced to take over a call centre in India—or at least a Hollywood sound-stage version of it. Rizwan Manji, the Canadian actor who plays the hero’s scheming assistant Rajiv, says he thought the show would be criticized for making light of outsourcing and “the unemployment rate in the United States.” Instead, critical reaction to the pilot mostly ignored economic issues and focused on racial ones; Joshua Ostroff in the Toronto alternative newspaper Eye Weekly wrote that it “pushes the offensive line toward out-and-out racism,” while zap2it.com declared that the jokes about “timid women” and Indian food are familiar to “people with senile, racist grandparents.”

Most of the complaints have been about the mocking of Indian customs and names. There are jokes about the name “Manmeet,” and Manji’s character tricks his boss into thinking that vindaloo is a god as well as a food. In response, the writers have argued that comedy is based on exaggeration, and that the Americans are also treated stereotypically. “It’s a comedy first,” Manji says, while head writer Robert Borden told the Kansas City Star that “we have to have the right to make the Indian characters out to be as silly as the white ones.”

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A romantic comedy—plus sex. Lots of it.

By Brian D. Johnson - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

The studio trailer conveniently omitted any mention of the story’s premise—Anne Hathaway’s character has Parkinson’s disease | David James/Twentieth Century Fox

Now here’s something you don’t see everyday: a romantic comedy from a Hollywood studio featuring ample nudity from two beautiful Oscar-nominated stars who perform a lot of hot-blooded sex scenes. Got your attention? The actors are Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal, who first appeared together as a sexless married couple in Brokeback Mountain but are now tearing each other’s clothes off in Love and Other Drugs.

The film presents one of the most sporting displays of sexuality between two glamourous, big-eyed A-list movie stars since . . . well, you have to go back to the 1970s to find anything like it. R-rated studio rom-coms these days are rare. And those that do come along (There’s Something About Mary, Wedding Crashers, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, It’s Complicated) tend to earn their scarlet letter “R” with jolts of gross-out profanity and flashes of shock-and-awe nudity—the male frontal variety being the latest gimmick.

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Teflon Charlie

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 at 12:40 PM - 10 Comments

TMZ.com/Splash News, BuzzFoto/Keystone Press, CBS/Everett Collection

Is there anything Charlie Sheen can do to make himself unpopular? Last Monday, the star of the world’s most-watched sitcom, Two and a Half Men, was removed from the Plaza Hotel in New York after trashing his room because of a missing watch; it led to a stay in the hospital, reports that he was on drugs (his retinue called it “an allergic reaction to medication”), and his abrupt decision to divorce his estranged current wife, Brooke Mueller. That’s just the latest in a long line of unpleasant stories about the 45-year-old actor, many of which revolve around his treatment of women. His ex-wife, Denise Richards, claimed that she underwent “a cycle of abuse.” In 2009, Sheen was arrested for reportedly holding a knife to Mueller’s throat. And at the Plaza, TMZ.com reported that he was with “a 22-year-old porn star” who hid in the bathroom to avoid his rampage after he thought his watch had been stolen. Yet he’s emerging from this new scandal the way he emerged from all the others: looking terrible, but otherwise unscathed.

Sheen was back at work on Two and a Half Men last week (TMZ said he was greeted with “fist pumps and hugs”), and Radaronline.com reported that he was “partying wildly” as soon as he got back to Los Angeles. His network, CBS, stood by him as usual; an anonymous insider told the New York Post that CBS is “quietly thrilled” because the publicity “will open up the show to a whole new segment of young viewers.” Dylan Howard, who talked to Sheen for Radar Online, told Maclean’s that “there are people around Charlie who are under no illusions that he needs to check himself into rehab and get himself clean once and for all.” Even Sheen’s father, Martin Sheen, told the Post that he hoped to separate his son “from the people he’s been around,” but there’s no indication yet that it will happen.

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In conversation with Glee’s Cory Monteith

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Monday, November 15, 2010 at 12:20 PM - 4 Comments

Splash News/GQ, Ture Lillegraven/Corbis Outline, Jason Kempin/Getty Images

The first time Cory Monteith ever sang for a live audience was at the White House last Easter. The second occasion was later that same week on Oprah. By the time he and his cast mates from the Fox TV hit Glee completed a live tour with five sold-out performances at New York’s Radio City Music Hall in late May, it was becoming old hat.

Less so, the kind of teenybopper adulation that saw the 28-year-old Victoria native get chased down Fifth Avenue. Or the buzz-name status that convinces tabloid editors to turn a night out bowling in L.A. with a group including the singer Taylor Swift into cover stories about their “romance.” But that’s the kind of thing that happens when you’re one of the stars of the hottest thing on television. A multi-platform commercial juggernaut that draws 12 million viewers a week, Glee has spawned more charting singles on Billboard’s Hot 100 than the Beatles, sold five million albums, 13 million digital downloads, and launched a clothing line at Macy’s. It’s a campy satire about a high school choir that has improbably convinced millions of teens worldwide that singing show tunes and classic rock ballads is cool. A show that is only six episodes into its second season and is already a certified cultural phenomenon.

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'Girl with the Dragon Tattoo' goes Hollywood

By Brian D. Johnson - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 2 Comments

James Atoa/ The Everett Collection/ Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

Dear David Fincher:

So glad that you’re the one who’s doing the Hollywood adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. At this point, I guess there’s no going back to Larsson’s original title, Men Who Hate Women. People might mistake it for a Mel Gibson movie. Anyway, it’s hard to imagine a more suitable director. You, after all, are a specialist in complicated movies about diabolical predators and men who hate women, from a serial killer freak in Se7en to the Facebook geek in The Social Network. With Zodiac, you’ve already shown you can make an insanely detailed crime thriller about a journalist trying to crack a homicidal riddle. As for casting female targets who fight back, you did a bang-up job with Jodie Foster in Panic Room.

But the whole Swedish thing has me a little worried. When you began shooting in Sweden last month, you made it clear right off the bat that you are not remaking the Swedish-language movie, but doing your own adapation of the novel. You called your approach “Swedish noir” with “an atmosphere reminiscent of Chinatown.” Weird. You’ll have actors speaking English in a dark, creepy Scandinavia that’s more Swedish than Sweden.

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Is Randy Quaid abusing Canada’s refugee system?

By Jason Kirby, John Geddes, and Jamie J. Weinman - Friday, October 29, 2010 at 9:30 AM - 0 Comments

Stuart Davis/MCT/Landov/ Darryl Dyck/CP

When actor Randy Quaid asked authorities in Vancouver for asylum last week, one day after his arrest in the city’s posh Kerrisdale neighbourhood on an outstanding U.S. warrant, he claimed he’d simply come here to accept a movie award and start a new life. Oh, and to escape a shadowy cabal of Hollywood assassins out to kill him and his wife, Evi. Quaid touched off a media frenzy as only a Hollywood actor on the lam suffering paranoid delusions can. But local movie reviewer Ian Caddell, a member of the Vancouver Film Critics Circle—which named Quaid best supporting actor in 2009 for his role in a little-known Canadian flick, Real Time—figured he should be prepared just in case. “We’re ready to print up an award certificate if he really wants to come and get it,” says Caddell. (The Oscar-nominated actor missed the ceremony, held in January of that year at a dimly lit pub atop a downtown 7-Eleven.) “If he comes, he comes. If not, it’s only five bucks.”

Caddell may be willing to give Quaid the benefit of the doubt, but there’s little sign the rest of the world is ready to be so understanding. The bizarre refugee ordeal is just the latest twist in the couple’s descent into apparent madness over the past couple of years. “What the hell happened to Randy Quaid?” a New York Post headline blared.

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Randy Quaid and wife fear "Hollywood star whackers"

By macleans.ca - Saturday, October 23, 2010 at 7:41 PM - 0 Comments

Actor Randy Quaid and his wife feel their lives are in danger, and have told an immigration hearing in Vancouver that they need asylum in Canada. This followed the Thursday arrest of the couple in Vancouver’s Kerisdale neighbourhood, where the pair were brought in on outstanding warrants from the United States. Brian Tsuji, the Quaids’ lawyer, read a single-line statement to reporters after the hearing: “We are requesting asylum from Hollywood star whackers.” The pair, who were released after each paid $10,000 bail, say that eight of their friends—including Heath Ledger and David Carradine—have been killed in mysterious ways and they fear that they are next.

Matt Damon sees dead people

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, October 15, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Ken Regan/Warner Bros. Entertainment

As an actor, Clint Eastwood made his name playing an angel of death, the iconic cop and laconic cowboy who would take grim pleasure in blowing the bad guys to kingdom come. But as a director in the twilight of his career, Hollywood’s elder statesman has now levelled his squinting gaze at what lies beyond. Eastwood’s latest film is a contemplative drama about the mystery of the afterlife, but the greater puzzle is the existence of the movie itself. Hereafter marks a bizarre departure for the 80-year-old filmmaker—and also for Matt Damon, who stars as a closet clairvoyant, and screenwriter Peter Morgan, who strays far from the historical fare of The Queen and Frost/Nixon to create fiction that requires us to believe Damon sees dead people.

But Hereafter has little in common with M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense. It takes a modest approach to metaphysics, with no mind-bending plot twists, and after some early scenes of harrowing action, it settles into a remarkably understated drama.

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What Oscar likes in a woman

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, October 14, 2010 at 3:00 PM - 0 Comments

In Conviction, Hilary Swank plays another working-class warrior—a dropout who gets a law degree to exonerate her brother; George Pimentel/Getty Images

Meryl Streep used to routinely complain about the dearth of strong female roles. Those days are long gone. In fact, Hollywood seems to have adopted a new double standard, by which women have a monopoly on outsized heroic virtue. Over the past decade, the Best Actor winners have included two psychopaths (Training Day, There Will Be Blood), a mass murderer (The Last King of Scotland), a prima donna journalist (Capote), a philandering junkie (Ray), and a shambling alcoholic (Crazy Heart). Only one actor was awarded for playing a righteous crusader: Sean Penn in Milk. With the women, it’s another story. Of the past 10 Best Actress winners, just one played a psycho: Monster’s Charlize Theron. Among the other roles are a beloved queen, a string of noble martyrs, and two stubborn crusaders—Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich and Sandra Bullock in The Blind Side.

Real-life heroines tend to dominate Oscar-pedigree roles. And though it’s early to start handicapping the awards, the trend seems stronger than ever—with the notable exception of Natalie Portman’s sensational tour de force as a ballerina in the melodrama Black Swan. Lately I’ve seen a glut of powerhouse performances by actresses cast in true stories of underdog crusaders triumphing over long odds—Diane Lane in Secretariat (opening Oct. 8), Hilary Swank in Conviction (Oct. 15), Naomi Watts in Fair Game (Nov. 5), and Rachel Weisz in The Whistleblower (release date pending). Each of these roles fits a particular mould: a working mother who tests her family’s patience by taking the world by storm.

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James Cameron in Alberta's oil sands

By Colby Cosh - Monday, October 4, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Jeff McIntosh Ready, action!: Cameron toured a wetland that was once a Syncrude bitumen mine

Nature versus the machine: it’s the great theme of James Cameron’s visual poetry. He would have appreciated the vantage point that journalists and photographers had for his Hollywood-style arrival at Syncrude’s South Bison Hills reclamation area on Tuesday morning. As Cameron’s helicopter swooped in like a predator, showing off with lazy circles around the helipad, it set a nearby cluster of wood bison dashing off at a full-speed lope. Their brute power, as they fled nature’s self-appointed protector, was breathtaking. The contrast could not have been more Cameronian if he had been there, yelling, “Action!”

The man himself, clean-shaven and cheerful in his lime green Syncrude safety chapeau, disembarked from the chopper for a brief hike through Syncrude’s top environmental showcase. What was once a bitumen mine of the type that inspired the nickname “Canada’s Mordor” is now a mix of humdrum boreal forest, grassland and wetland. A modest little lake on the site teems with life. Once a traveller leaves the road behind, only the pen separating the Syncrude bison herd from their disease-bearing free-range fellow ungulates suggests a human presence on this land—land that, not long ago, was utterly eviscerated by petrocrats.

Cameron said little, but seemed impressed at how Syncrude had handled the problem of re-establishing biodiversity from scratch—a movie-director kind of problem, as he pointed out. After deflecting a few questions (“I’m still . . . finding out how all this works and getting my arms around it”), he was whisked off to view more oil sands vistas, ones carefully chosen to appeal to his green conscience.

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Tony Curtis dies at 85

By macleans.ca - Thursday, September 30, 2010 at 11:33 AM - 0 Comments

Hollywood movie star Tony Curtis has died of cardiac arrest in his Las Vegas home at the age of 85. Curtis, who changed his name from Bernard Schwartz to a more Hollywood-friendly name, became a matinee idol in the ’50s in costume films like “The Black Shield of Falworth.” After his marriage to actress Janet Leigh, whose good looks were a match for his own, they became one of the most popular couples in gossip magazines. Wanting to stretch himself, Curtis started to take more challenging parts, giving a memorable performance as a seedy agent in the classic film noir “Sweet Smell of Success.” In 1959, he also found a new popularity in romantic comedies with his starring role in “Some Like It Hot” (where he said that kissing co-star Marilyn Monroe was “like kissing Hitler”). He continued to be popular throughout the ’60s, moving into television and character parts in the ’70s. He was married six times and had several children, including his younger daughter with Janet Leigh, actress Jamie Lee Curtis.

New York Times

Scott Pilgrim loves Toronto

By Jaime J. Weinman - Monday, August 23, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Illustration by Adam cholewa; Paul Hillier

The disappointing fifth-place box-office opening of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World means that Universal probably shouldn’t have spent $60 million on a Michael Cera movie. But most of all, it means things aren’t looking good for the future of U.S. films set in Canada.

Scott Pilgrim, based on Bryan Lee O’Malley’s graphic novels, takes place in Toronto just like the books do; the filmmakers shot all around the city to retell the story of a Canadian slacker (Cera) who becomes a video-game-style action hero when his new girlfriend’s ex-lovers try to kill him.

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Un-Happy meals

By Rachel Mendleson - Monday, May 10, 2010 at 11:57 AM - 1 Comment

Getty Images

For more than three decades, Hollywood studios have benefited from their happy marriage with fast-food restaurants: movie-themed trinkets have become a staple of kids’ meals. But last month, in a bid to fight childhood obesity, Santa Clara County, Calif., passed a law to keep toys out of meals that don’t meet basic nutritional standards, becoming the first U.S. jurisdiction to restrict the relationship. “This ordinance breaks the link between unhealthy foods and prizes,” county supervisor Ken Yeager told CNN. So what could this mean for Hollywood?

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King of divorce

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Friday, April 30, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 8 Comments

RGA/ ZOJ

Tonight’s topic: men who love too much.

Forget David Letterman fishing off the company pier, the low-bräu tastes of Sandra Bullock’s tattooed husband, or Tiger Woods’s all-thumbs mastery of text messaging. America’s senior swordsman is without question a stooped and suspendered 76-year-old from Brooklyn: Lawrence Harvey Zeigler, a.k.a. Larry King.

Fifty-three years into a broadcasting career that has taken him from a tiny AM radio station in Miami to living rooms around the globe, courtesy of a nightly platform on CNN, the host of Larry King Live is said to be closing in on his 50,000th interview. But these days it is a different set of numbers that has captured the public imagination—his eight marriages to seven different women, and strong indications that he might soon be in the market for another bride.

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This Week: Good news/ Bad news

By macleans.ca - Friday, April 30, 2010 at 9:30 AM - 0 Comments

Eric Gaillard/Reuters

Face of the week
A Thai protester chants anti-government slogans while wielding a photo of King Bhumibol Adulyadej

A week in the life of Randy Quaid
Talk about legal trouble. On Friday, the actor filed a lawsuit alleging his former lawyer, Lloyd Braun, improperly used his access to Quaid to obtain photos and information, which he then posted on an Internet gossip site he owns. On Monday, Quaid and his wife, Evi, were arrested for failure to appear in court on charges stemming from an unpaid $10,000 tab at a California guest ranch. They were placed in pink handcuffs—a colour apparently intended to shame suspects.

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