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.

Continue…

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?

Continue…

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.

Continue…

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.

Continue…

Hangover 2: Another Day, Another Tiger?

By Colby Cosh - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 at 2:35 AM - 18 Comments

Nikki Finke’s deadline.com carries a compelling account of Warner Brothers’ sequel negotiations with the stars of The Hangover, who received less than a million dollars between them for the unassuming comedy that became a half-billion-dollar global box-office smash. (That $1 million doesn’t count the bonus of a million apiece the studio gave them shortly before commencing talks.) Production of Hangover 2 would normally be well underway by now, but Zach Galifianakis, Bradley Cooper, and Ed Helms presented a united front. Mike Fleming calls it “a perfect storm of leverage”.

The Hangover is a divisive movie—embraced with a greedy thirst by the masses, but considered seriously overrated by some. The funny thing about this is that the most notable quality of the movie, in general, is intelligence. (Sure, there’s low humour in it; can we take as axiomatic the patronizing explanation that there are pee jokes in Shakespeare and Swift and Sterne? I mean, I’m happy to patronize you if you really need it.) I found The Hangover much more admirable than hilarious. It took the cliché of the “increasingly chaotic and risky Vegas blowout” and essentially gave it a highly original time-travel twist without recourse to outright science fiction. Though I’ll concede that its ideas about the effects of Rohypnol are a little science-y and fiction-y.

The plot is intricate, but clear and free of detectable loose ends; it has the satisfying click-clack of a Rubik’s Cube, with the end credits as the satisfying flourish that finally restores order and clarity. All four of the main characters have or develop specifiable, interesting relationships with one another. Little comedy grace notes—most memorably, Ed Helms’ “Stu’s Song” piano number—impart some of the tenor of undirected real life to the tight, logic-driven narrative that yokes the characters. There’s legitimate suspense. And the whole thing kicks off with a demonstration of in medias res technique that would give a classics professor an erection. It’s a model exercise in screenwriting, and will certainly be used as one for decades.

So how, to ask the question that’s already on the minds of 60 or 70 million audience members, can the sequel not suck? The Hangover was attractive for its originality. By definition, it’s hard to see how a sequel could possibly succeed. And it’s easy to see how it could become a wearisome exercise in revisiting gags from the original. “Oh, no, it’s Mike Tyson! This can’t be good!” Even coming up with a first approximation to a premise for Hangover 2 is difficult; actually writing the thing seems like it would be a task on the same order of complexity as a lunar landing. Everybody wants the Wolf Pack reunited, but nobody wants to walk into the theatre on opening night and hear the words “Dammit, Alan! I can’t believe you roofied us again!”

Howard Stern is a jerk—with a point to ponder

By Anne Kingston - Friday, March 12, 2010 at 4:19 PM - 42 Comments

Howard Stern can be a nasty bastard—but he’s also often the only one willing to voice unpleasant truths others won’t. So it was this week when the Sirius shock jock unleashed a tirade against the future prospects for Gabourey Sidibe, the Best Actress nominee for her role in Precious. “There’s the most enormous, fat black chick I’ve ever seen,” Stern proclaimed the day after the Academy Awards. He went on to slam Oprah Winfrey’s tribute to Sidibe during the telecast in which she called the actress “a true American Cinderella on the threshold of a brilliant new career.” Stern was having none of it: “Everyone’s pretending she’s a part of show business and she’s never going to be in another movie. She should have gotten the Best Actress award because she’s never going to have another shot. What movie is she gonna be in?”

Stern was pilloried for being racist. He was also attacked for getting his facts wrong: Sidibe has been cast in the new Showtime comedy The C Word and the upcoming movie Yelling To The Sky, though neither are leading roles. The C Word stars Laura Linney; in Yelling to the Sky Sidibe plays a bully, which is safe to say not a role Halle Barry turned down.

On Wednesday, Stern defended his comments, taking on the role of compassionate health crusader. He compared Sidibe to his co-star Artie Lange, who recently attempted to commit suicide: “Like, I kind of don’t see a difference between what our Artie did—Artie tried to kill himself. And I feel this girl, in a slower way…she’s gonna kill herself.”

Stern being Stern, he couldn’t leave it there. He went on to deride the newcomer’s acting ability, calling her a “prop” in Precious, which suggests he didn’t see the movie or slept through it. His sidekick Robin Quivers chimed in with another inaccuracy: “You don’t have to be unhealthy to do that part,” she said. But any actress playing Precious, a 16-year-old girl monstrously abused by her parents, did have to be seriously overweight. The character’s only comfort comes from scarfing down tubs of fried chicken. Her excess flesh is not only a salient class indicator but also protective armour.

Off the screen, the 26-year-old is also creating buzz for showing no indication of signing up for a celebrity weight-loss reality show. On Oprah, she revealed she has battled her weight all of her life; it wasn’t until she was in her early 20s that she finally became comfortable in her own skin, she said. That was evident on the Oscar red carpet where she was joy to watch—exuberant, confident, loving every second, very much in the character of Precious who sustained herself with fantasies of being a celebrity. The actress ordered a camera to pan back to get her entire cobalt blue Marchesa gown in the frame and told Ryan Seacrest: “If fashion was porn, this dress would be the money shot.”

Watching, one couldn’t help wish for Sidibe to luxuriate in every second because deep-down we know Stern is right: Precious was a unique role; the odds of her transitioning into an American Cinderella—at least the Cinderella created by Disney who is slender and white—are nil in today’s Hollywood where women are valued for their youth, beauty and willingness to aspire to invisibility size-wise. “Plus-sized” or “full-figured” actresses (read: anyone over size six) have a tough enough time of it. Consider Nikki Blonsky who received high praise for her performance in Hairspray but hasn’t been heard from since. The verdict remains out on Jennifer Hudson, who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Dreamgirls; she just dropped 60 pounds to play Winnie Mandela in a bio-pic.

The double-standard is so ingrained, it’s tedious: when Renée Zellweger gained 20 pounds to play Bridget Jones it was a major news story (and one suspects part of the reason she won an Oscar). Yet when Jeff Bridges packed on 25 pounds for his Oscar-winning role as washed-up country singer Bad Blake, no one asked for his weight-loss secrets. Male actors can get soft and paunchy and age and still get work—and the girl. Jack Black is allowed to play romantic lead against Kate Winslet. And nobody’s complaining that Philip Seymour Hoffman isn’t buff.

But Sidibe isn’t just “full-figured,” she’s obese—which, as Stern points out, is a hot-button topic in the U.S. and also a serious health risk. In Hollywood, morbid obesity is cheap-laugh fodder—slap a fat suit on Gwyneth Paltrow (Shallow Hal) or Eddie Murphy (The Nutty Professor/Norbit) and let the pathetic yucks begin. The 500-pound Darlene Cates who starred in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape in 1993 is an exception: she went on a few other roles, all of which hinged on her weight.

People went overboard rooting for Sidibe, Stern argues, “because she’s a big fat lady.” Maybe he’s right again. Consider it the Susan Boyle effect—the righteous pleasure of being so broad-minded to see that talent can come in different-sized packages. But the craving for change, evidenced in the first U.S. Black president, is deeper than that. Hollywood is taking tiny steps: Kathryn Bigelow broke through the male Best Director Oscar barrier. Meryl Streep is hotter at age 60 than she’s ever been. Helen Mirren is an inspiration. And non-stick figure Queen Latifah is playing a romantic lead in the upcoming movie Just Wright.

Fat, however, is more impenetrable, reflected in Stern mocking Sidibe’s for saying “I’m going to hit a Chick-fil-A,” a L.A. fast-food chain, after the awards. “That’s so sad,” he said. Of course, when the slender Best Actress winner Sandra Bullock expressed similar sentiment, it was heralded as a sign of how down to earth she is: “I just want to eat!” Bullock told the press room. “I just want to sit down and take my shoes off, and take my dress off, and eat a burger—and not worry that my dress is going to bust open.” Nobody, even Howard Stern, sees anything wrong with that picture.

Hollywood’s big on psycho soldiers

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, March 4, 2010 at 1:00 PM - 6 Comments

When Col. Russell Williams, commander of Canada’s largest air base, was charged with two counts of murder and two counts of sexual assault, shock and disbelief soon gave way to another natural reflex: it’s like something out of a movie. And no wonder. Psycho soldiers may be rare in the real world, but they are remarkably common in Hollywood. Recently, the big screen has been overrun by ramrod military men whose iron discipline masks mental disturbances that range from borderline personality disorder to psychopathic cruelty. Three of the actors nominated for Oscars this year are being recognized for portraying soldiers with serious impulse-control issues—Jeremy Renner as a bomb-squad daredevil in The Hurt Locker, Christoph Waltz as a demented Nazi in Inglourious Basterds, and Woody Harrelson as a volatile sergeant in The Messenger. There’s also Tobey Maguire, who was not nominated but erupted with scary intensity in Brothers as a traumatized veteran from the war in Afghanistan whose heroic homecoming devolves into a domestic meltdown.

Hollywood’s top-ranking villain du jour, meanwhile, is Col. Miles Quaritch, the square-jawed tyrant played by Stephen Lang in Avatar. The manufacturer’s modest description for the colonel’s toy action figure describes this soldier as “a ruthless, troubled and aggressive man who has very little respect for living things, specially the Na’vi.” In fact, he’s a raving psychopath. But Quaritch is just a blunt instrument compared to Col. Hans Landa, the insidious SS officer who’s played with such perverse relish by Waltz in Inglourious Basterds.

And what is it about colonels? These are the officers whose sanity always seems to be the most precarious, in the movies at least—from Marlon Brando’s soul-destroyed Col. Kurtz in Apocalypse Now (“Horror and moral terror are your friends”) to Jack Nicholson’s pressure-cooked Col. Jessep in A Few Good Men (“You can’t handle the truth!”). Scratch a colonel and you find a psychopath—or so it goes in Hollywood’s military ranking of organized evil.

Continue…

A biopic with no leading man?

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 12:20 PM - 1 Comment

Hollywood filmmakers know all about dealing with recalcitrant stars. But making a movie about a figure who can’t be depicted for fear of enraging his 1.5 billion followers is a whole other challenge.

Earlier this month, Barrie Osborne, the American producer of such blockbusters as The Matrix and The< Lord of the Rings, announced plans for an “epic” retelling of the life of the Prophet Muhammad. The US$150-million biopic, scheduled to begin production in early 2011, is being financed by the Al Hashemi Group, a Qatari construction and petrochemical conglomerate. Their aims sound laudable: “Hopefully this film can bridge some cultural misunderstandings,” Osborne, reached in San Francisco, told Maclean’s. “Muhammed was a great man, he made incredible changes to society.” However, even aside from Islamic traditions that forbid visual or aural representations of the Prophet or members of his immediate family (a prohibition driven home by the worldwide rioting that greeted a Danish newspaper’s publication of a series of Muhammad cartoons in 2005), the project seems a fair bit more fraught than the usual studio fare. Continue…

Horror undead

By Brian D. Johnson - Monday, October 26, 2009 at 11:15 AM - 3 Comments

“The horror! The horror!” In Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad liked the word so much he wrote it twice. More than a century later, Hollywood still has the same approach. Any horror movie worth making once is worth making again. And again and again. If you want to rent a scary movie for Halloween, it’s no simple matter. Will it be the 1978 Halloween or the 2007 Halloween? Or one of their eight-sequel brood? Do you rent Hitchcock’s Psycho or Gus Van Sant’s eerily embalmed shot-for-shot remake with Vince Vaughn? Just how dead do you want your Night of the Living Dead? George Romero’s black-and-white classic, or the 1990 colour version? Should the zombies in Dawn of the Dead terrorize a ’70s mall or a 21st-century food court? Which Body Snatchers would you prefer to be invaded by? There are four, and a fifth is in the works.

And if you want to be absolutely sure to see a movie that’s unoriginal this Halloween, go to the multiplex. There you can pick between the hard-core torture porn of Saw VI, the latest bloodbath from history’s most lucrative horror franchise, or the soft-core suspense of The Stepfather, a toothless remake of a 1987 cult movie about a man who never joined a family he didn’t want to murder. Continue…

Battleship: not just a game anymore

By Tom Henheffer - Thursday, September 3, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Basing a movie on the board game Battleship is no different than basing a movie on Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. At least that’s what studio execs would have us think.

Hasbro and Universal Studios are partnering to put the game, along with Candy Land, Monopoly, Clue and the Ouija board, up on the silver screen. It’s part of a growing trend in Hollywood—studios have fallen in love with the idea of making kids’ toys into movies. Continue…

Stevie Nicks blasts Lindsay, Britney

By Elio Iannacci - Thursday, May 14, 2009 at 11:20 AM - 29 Comments

If anyone has the right to give advice to the Britney Spearses and Lindsay Lohans of the world, it’s Stevie Nicks. In her more-than-30-year career as a solo singer and as one of the lead vocalists of the rock group Fleetwood Mac, the 61-year-old icon has paved the way for women in the music industry. And she has the war wounds to prove it. From battles with drug addiction to notorious love affairs, her life is tailor-made for a Hollywood film. Which is probably why Lindsay Lohan keeps telling reporters about her burning desire to play Nicks in a yet-to-be-made Fleetwood Mac biopic. This has Nicks a little concerned. Via phone from a presidential suite in New York City, she repeats the words “over my dead body” when the mention of a Lindsay-as-Stevie movie comes up. “That girl is the antithesis of everything that I don’t want for younger girls to be. I don’t want anyone as messy as her messing with my history.”

The legacy Nicks is so protective of is still going strong. This spring she has been busy promoting her latest two projects—a DVD called Live In Chicago and a live CD titled The Soundstage Sessions—as well as reconnecting on stage with Fleetwood Mac on its current greatest-hits North American tour. Packed with five remaining Canadian concert dates, the tour has Nicks performing more than 50 shows, many of which are sold out. Which explains why Hollywood execs have been banging on her door. “Most of them,” she says, “want to focus on when I first joined the band and the three fun, crazy years after that. Quite frankly, I don’t blame them—they were a roller-coaster ride!”

Continue…

Hollywood goes all Obama on us

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, December 18, 2008 at 4:00 PM - 6 Comments

Barack Obama hasn’t even moved into the White House yet, but already his spirit seems reflected in the changing complexion of the big screen. Although films take years to make, and are not moulded by recent events, Hollywood has a way of anticipating the zeitgeist. And what a difference a year makes. Last December, the screen was a blood-drenched landscape of unforgiving cruelty. From the hair-raising violence of No Country for Old Men and Eastern Promises to the rapacious greed of There Will be Blood and Michael Clayton, the Oscars celebrated movies that showed humanity trapped in a dark, cold place with no exit in sight. Only Juno offered a ray of hope.

This year, however, the screen is awash with tears of redemption. And if recent nominations by the Golden Globes and critics’ awards are any indication, Hollywood is now hot for movies that promote sexual tolerance, racial diversity, forgiveness and reconciliation. Among the field of Oscar hopefuls, Sean Penn has emerged as a leading contender for his portrayal of assassinated gay rights activist Harvey Milk. A paean to a community organizer who became the first openly gay man elected to public office in America, Gus Van Sant’s Milk has uncanny resonance in the age of Obama. And despite the tragic ending, it’s brimming with exuberance and hope—gay in every sense of the word.

Continue…

It's Not Cricket To Picket, Not Cricket

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, December 10, 2008 at 11:36 AM - 1 Comment

According to Nikki Finke, the Screen Actors’ Guild strike authorization vote will take place in January (75% required to pass) and the results will be in on January 23.

Again, if the actors vote to authorize a strike, that doesn’t mean there will be a strike immediately, just that the union’s leaders will have the power to call a strike if they want to. This means that if a strike does happen, it’ll probably be some time after the end of January — since negotiations will have to break down completely before that can happen. This suggests the possibility of a weird sort of stalling process; if the producers don’t think SAG’s demands are acceptable, it’s still in their interest to draw out negotiations as long as possible so they can get as much material in the can as possible. An actors’ strike is more immediately damaging than a writers’ strike, because there’s no possibility of continuing production after the strike begins (so if the actors go on strike in, say, March, shows can still write the scripts for the rest of the season, but a fat lot of good it’ll do them), but it won’t be quite as damaging if TV shows have a chance to complete their season orders before it happens, so I could see a scenario where you get a lot of false starts and stops to the negotiations, until they finally break down in April or something.

The most disruptive actors’ strike in recent memory was the 1980 strike, which started after the end of the TV season but ran into the fall, delaying the beginning of the TV season and causing every show to end up with smaller-than-usual episode orders. That strike was about, you guessed it, new media — the actors demanded a cut of the proceeds from commercial videotapes and pay TV re-broadcasts.Of course that strike was easier to sustain because AFTRA, the other actors’ union, was in on it, whereas this time it won’t be.

Of course, if there is an actors’ strike in 2009, the picket lines will be on the whole a lot prettier than the writer pickets of 2008.

Deja Strike

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, November 24, 2008 at 6:57 PM - 0 Comments

I haven’t said much about the news that the Screen Actors’ Guild will ask for a strike authorization vote because, well, I don’t have much to say about it. Like many people, I’m skeptical that there will be a strike in the current climate, but on the other hand, that’s what the producers are counting on, and believe it or not, they’re occasionally wrong. (The AMPTP feels free to drive a hard bargain, in part, because they figure that the actors would never go on strike at a time like this and therefore they have to be bluffing. But the SAG people also know that the producers are terrified of another work stoppage, so they must be bluffing. And scary things happen when both sides assume the other is bluffing.)

Mark Evanier is very good at explaining these things, though, and in this post he explains the situation in terms so simple that even I can understand them. And in a later post, he also has a good explanation of the difference between a strike vote and a strike authorization vote (which is as much a bargaining tool as anything else).

Witchy women

By Lianne George - Friday, August 22, 2008 at 6:45 PM - 0 Comments

A new study from the University of Derby claims that, for the past 20 years, more than 50,000 women a year have left the Church of England because they don’t feel it speaks to them. But here’s the strange part, the study’s author, sociologist Kristin Aune, concluded that many of the younger British women leaving the church are instead taking up…Wicca. Why Wicca? Three words, Aune says. Sarah Michelle Gellar:

“Because of its focus on female empowerment, young women are attracted by Wicca, popularised by the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

“Young women tend to express egalitarian values and dislike the traditionalism and hierarchies they imagine are integral to the church.”

Huh. Clearly, Buffy was a very powerful (and sassy!) spiritual muse. But I was under the impression that Hollywood was after us to take up Scientology and yoga and Catholicism and Kabbalah and The Secret.

Make up your mind, TV and movies!

It's In the SAG

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, June 20, 2008 at 1:16 PM - 0 Comments

Will the Screen Actors’ Guild go on strike? I still lean toward “no,” but Hollywood is certainly getting nervous. The studios tried to use the same method they used with the Writers’ Guild, reaching a deal with another, smaller union (in this case AFTRA, the other actors’ union) that would then become the basis for a deal with the bigger group. But SAG is taking the position that AFTRA settled for a bad deal, and it wants something better. The studios will make another offer to SAG before its contract expires at the end of the month, and then….

The tension here is heightened by the fact that, because the last strike did so much economic damage to Hollywood, both parties are undoubtedly certain that the other will back down rather than risk being blamed for another strike. You’d think that the potential disaster of two consecutive strikes would make the parties less likely to play hardball, but it may actually make the studios feel more emboldened to make take-it-or-leave-it offers and SAG feel better able to demand something better than the previous deals.

The last actors’ strike was in the summer of 1980, and it delayed the start of the season by a month or two — which is why any show from the 1980-1 season is short a few episodes. Time Magazine wrote about the actors’ strike in August 1980, and it gives some idea of what could happen if there’s a strike this time around.