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| Anderson and boyfriend 'break up' Pamela Anderson has reportedly dumped her boyfriend. breakingnews.ie |
Spider-Man 4 is a win-win scenario Sam Raimi's departure from the Spider-Man franchise has sent shockwaves through the geekosphere. But he can go back to doing what he does best, and we can forget the disastrous third filmThis Spider-Man 4 kerfuffle has already prompted all kinds of panic from concerned fans. Who'll direct the new movie now that Sam Raimi's gone? Who'll take over from Tobey Maguire? Will Spider-Man 4 still be called Spider-Man 4, or will it get a new name like Spider-M4n or Spider-Man Begins or Spider-Boy or Crazy Days at Spider High?But the bulk of the panic seems to come from Sony's line that the rebooted Spider-Man would focus on Peter Parker as a "teenager grappling with contemporary human problems and amazing super-human crises". To some, the implication seems to be that Sony wants Spider-Man to be a little more like Twilight – to the extent that Taylor Lautner and Robert Pattinson have already emerged as favourites to fill the vacant Spidey Suit.Now, obviously, the thought of making a movie where a brooding Spider-Man does little more than bite his lip, listen to bad emo music and stare into the middle distance without a top on is both terrifying and extraordinarily cynical on Sony's part. But even if that does turn out to be the case, the gibbering internet fanboys seem to be forgetting something important – a Spider-Man reboot of any kind might not be such a bad thing.Whatever your thoughts on the sudden personnel change, you can't deny that the old team faced its fair share of problems. On one level there were practical concerns: by Spider-Man 4's scheduled release next year, for instance, Tobey Maguire would have been a few weeks shy of his 36th birthday. That would have either called for an unconvincing impersonation of a teenager, or for the inclusion of a more age-appropriate plot strand where Spider-Man grumbles about interest rates during a Sunday morning trip to Habitat's soft-furnishings department.Then there's the sense that Sam Raimi was becoming less and less comfortable behind the wheel of a $2.5bn studio juggernaut – why waste time trying to please everyone by slotting together an unmanageably large focus-grouped monolith like Spider-Man when he could go out and throw something as tremendously satisfying as Drag Me to Hell together for comparative peanuts instead? Now that he isn't being weighed down by Spider-Man, Raimi has the opportunity to cut loose and be as daft as he likes – which is fantastic news for anyone who's ever grinned their way through Evil Dead 2 or Darkman.The most convincing argument for the Spider-Man reboot, though, must be Spider-Man 3. Wrong in just about every way imaginable – too long, too many baddies, too many queasy lurches in tone, too many musical numbers, too many emotions signposted by the protagonist's ever-changing haircut, too many scenes of Kirsten Dunst frying eggs and dancing the twist – Spider-Man 3 has become shorthand for unfocused studio bloat. It was one set of rubber nipples away from being Batman and Robin – and look at what an overhaul did for Batman's fortunes.It might be the unpopular opinion at the moment, but starting Spider-Man 4 from scratch could be the best option for all concerned. If it works, great: it undoes some of the mental anguish that Spider-Man 3 caused. If it fails, great: that way Sam Raimi was right all along, and we've all got another reason to mistrust Hollywood studios. Whatever happens, everyone wins.Unless Spider-Man 4 turns out to be that Twilight rip-off, of course. Then nobody would win.Science fiction and fantasySam RaimiTwilightStuart Heritageguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Filmmaker: Movie about balloon dad could clear him LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Once Richard Heene admitted in court that he wrongly sent authorities on a wild goose chase across Colorado to save the son he thought was aloft in a runaway balloon, friends and supporters seemed to take off just about as fast as that balloon.... hosted.ap.org |
'Jersey Shore': Kevin Smith, Joel Stein Watch MTV Show Joel Stein gets together with the bard of the Garden State, Kevin Smith, to assess the merits of MTV reality show Jersey Shore feedproxy.google.com |
How The Killer Inside Me got inside the mind of Michael Winterbottom The prolific, mercurial British director has unveiled his latest film, a truly disturbing film noir, at the Sundance film festivalHe's directed everything from high-end literary adaptations to science fiction, contemporary comedy to family drama, a Gold-Rush western and a lesbian psycho-killer road movie. So it was only a matter of time before the prolific, mercurial Michael Winterbottom directed a film noir. And this most no-nonsense, hardboiled of genres fits the director's sensibility perfectly.Winterbottom's adaptation of Jim Thompson's 1952 crime novel The Killer Inside Me had its world premiere at Sundance this week. The film features a superbly cast Casey Affleck as the Texas small-town deputy sheriff who happens, himself, to be a serial killer, Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson as the unfortunate women in his life, and mouth-watering character support from Elias Koteas, Ned Beatty and Bill Pulman. Shooting for the first time in the US, and dipping his bread into 50s Americana, Winterbottom has made an assured, stylish film, visually unlike anything he's produced so far.It's also truly disturbing. The film immediately elicited some ruffled reactions here (the first question to the director after the screening was along the lines of, "How dare you? How dare Sundance?"). But it's not surprising. Stanley Kubrick, for whom Thompson wrote The Killing and Paths of Glory, famously described the novel as "probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered". Not only does the main character, Lou Ford – all southern decorum on the outside; malice and contempt within – talk us through his tortured machinations, he also describes in grotesquely vivid detail the murders he commits.And Winterbottom, in line with the overall fidelity of his adaptation, is equally explicit. That Lou's chief victims are women makes these attacks even harder to bear. When these scenes played out in the auditorium, it felt as though the whole of my row of seats was buckling under the sitters' collective discomfort. It's tough material."It's a brilliant book. And it is shocking. And I felt that we had to keep that element in the film," Winterbottom tells me later. "If you're going to tell a story told from the point of view of a killer who is crazy, and it's in that noir tradition anyway – a melodramatic, hardboiled kind of story – I think the audience should be shocked. If you make a film about murder that isn't shocking, that's far worse; there are too many films with violence for people to enjoy."In any case, this was not the reason why the novel captured the director's imagination. "Because Lou has a close relationship with these women, there's an added perversity about what he does, which also makes it more uncomfortable to watch. So the novel is also quite tender and complex. Thompson is almost being Shakespearean, in the way he's created a character who's not connected to the world, hates himself, goes around destroying people he loves, whom you feel embodies a lot of the flaws that everyone has."There are a number of Thompson adaptations, including two versions of The Getaway, After Dark, My Sweet, and an earlier version of The Killer Inside Me (which Winterbottom elected not to see). Along with fellow Brit Stephen Frears' The Grifters, this new film is one of the best.Lest one should think that he's taken his foot off the pedal, Winterbottom has another film playing at Sundance: The Shock Doctrine, co-directed with Mat Whitecross and based on Naomi Klein's incisive book on the free market. And while here, it's been announced that he's cast rising star Jim Sturgess in his next film, Promised Land, about events leading to the 1948 partition of Palestine. No doubt we can expect a few more ruffled feathers.Sundance film festivalMichael WinterbottomDemetrios Matheouguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |