| Princess Leia did cocaine on Star Wars set ACTRESS Carrie Fisher tells of drug culture behind the scenes of The Empire Strikes Back. news.com.au |
Joe Queenan's guide to romance cliches According to popular lore, the romantic film is based on a simple formula: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl again. But that is not true. For the most part, the boys have nothing to do with it. The cliche that actually serves as the infrastructure of the classic romance is that the female lead almost never ends up with the man she was originally supposed to spend the rest of her life with. That has been true ever since Cary Grant starred opposite Rosalind Russell and Katherine Hepburn in The Front Page and The Philadelphia Story, and it runs straight through Notting Hill and The Runaway Bride and Sweet Home Alabama and (500) Days of Summer. Romances are constructed around the idea that love is an obstacle course, but if you keep your nose to the grindstone, the rewards can be immense.That is actually the theme of every Jane Austen novel, and of every movie based on a Jane Austen novel. Romances are built upon the idea that Prince Charming actually exists, but he may be a bit rough around the edges or temporarily unavailable, like Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre or the long-lost boyfriend in A Very Long Engagement, or the weird guy who keeps popping in from the future in The Time Traveller's Wife. It helps a lot if the woman initially hates the man – 10 Things I Hate About You is an obvious example, as is Guys and Dolls. And it also helps if Prince Charming finds the female lead a bit annoying, as Heath Ledger does in 10 Things I Hate About You and as Matthew McConaughey does in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days and as Dudley Moore ultimately does in Ten. There is something about movies with the number 10 in the title that always deals with unlikely pairings. Nobody knows why.Romantic films wend their way to the altar as inevitably as action films lead nowhere. Powerful, ubiquitous cliches associated with the genre include the bride or groom suddenly getting ditched at the altar (The Philadelphia Story, The Graduate, Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Runaway Bride), and the hovering presence of the faithful sidekick, who secretly worships the male lead from afar. Romances depend on the traditional belief that opposites attract: retiring, tongue-tied bookseller Hugh Grant and glamorous movie star Julia Roberts in Notting Hill; obsessive-compulsive nutcase Jack Nicholson and harried single parent Helen Hunt in As Good As It Gets; hotshot journalist Kate Hudson and jocky ad-man Matthew McConaughey in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. Not to mention crass yuppie lawyer Richard Gere and saucy call girl Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. A variant on this are films about people separated by a seemingly insurmountable cultural gulf, like Jennifer Lopez and Ralph Fiennes in Maid in Manhattan or Kristen Scott-Thomas and Robert Redford in The Horse Whisperer. Then there is the special case of movies like Manhattan, where middle-aged men prey on women young enough to be their daughters. But that is Woody Allen. Actually, that is also the theme of Crazy Heart and numerous other movies, but mostly it is a Woody Allen trademark.Romantic films frequently feature the pushy but lovable mother, the harried, befuddled father, the fat, mouthy but highly supportive girlfriend who wears glasses and has never had a date, and the gay neighbour or co-worker who knows what you're going through because he's had his heart broken so many times himself. In a number of contemporary romances, the male lead has a best friend who is a lovable slob. Not until he can ditch this slob friend is he ready for the big time, relationship-wise. For romances to work, the heroine should initially be involved with a possessive creep, a catatonic Wasp, a perfectly harmless fellow she's been dating for years, or Mr Wrong. It is never clear to the audience what she sees in him. The guy she replaces him with may work with his hands or live in Montana or raise bees. The quiet loner who dances to the beat of a different drummer is a very popular cliche – Mark Ruffalo plays exactly that role in The Kids Are All Right – as is the single mother seeking a man who is not a complete jerk (About a Boy, Jerry Maguire, Crazy Heart).Teen romances have their own separate cliches. Actually, they have one separate cliche: teens from out of town find it hard to fit in so they start hanging around with social misfits or goths or beatniks or vampires suffering from social anxiety disorders. In teen romances, the jocks are invariably portrayed as cruel, self-absorbed idiots.Over the years, dance has become a crucial element in romantic films. Dance can save a relationship, save a marriage, save an inner-city school. Teen romances often contain the scene where the rich white kid is exposed to vibrant inner-city culture, often through dance. Without hip-hop, the various races might never meet. That, presumably, would be sad.Misfortune frequently brings lovers together, whether in Twister or Titanic or Once. So do financial reverses, car crashes and sudden divorces. No tear-jerking romantic film is complete without the musical montage where the lovebirds start cooking, or cuddling on the couch, or taking the statutory walk through Central Park, or rowing a boat around St James Park. Another battle-tested cliche is the scene at the airport or in the taxicab or at the important business meeting where the hero realises he could be making the biggest mistake of his life so he'd better cancel the flight or adjourn the meeting. Otherwise, he'll lose Julie Delpy forever.The dead or near-dead make excellent partners in romances. That is the theme of Ghost, City of Angels and assorted other motion pictures. It seems to suggest that the dead make better company than the living, even though the sex is a drawback. Lovers separated in some way by the space-time continuum can be found in The House by the Lake and Just Like Heaven, the film where Reese Witherspoon plays a woman who does not let being legally dead get in the way of a relationship. All of these movies drive home the idea that a good man is hard to find, as is a good woman. Usually, a good man is harder to find, though. Except in the movies.The classic cliched romance: Dirty DancingDirty Dancing is an exquisite tapestry of film cliches. It pairs a sheltered, coddled rich girl with a diamond in the rough, a charismatic illiterate from the wrong side of the tracks. It is set in a society on the very cusp of immense social change. It features an overbearing, disapproving father and a shrinking-violet heroine who must rebel against her parents and the confining mores of her class by taking a chance on a lug. It is a film about following your heart, not your head. It is a film about the cathartic, liberating power of dance. It is a film about uptight rich people learning to let it all hang out. It is a film that reaffirms that there are no romances like summer romances. It is a film about finding that one special person who can turn the caterpillar into the butterfly, the wallflower into the vixen. It signs off with a memorably happy ending, because it is, after all, a film about having the time of your life. For a rich girl to have the time of her life in a romantic film, she really has to pair off with a bona fide, hardcore working-class hero. Just the way rich people do in real life.RomanceJoe Queenanguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Andrei Rublev: No 1 Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966Viewers and critics always have their personal favourites, but some films achieve a masterpiece status that becomes unanimously agreed upon – something that's undoubtedly true of Andrei Rublev, even though it's a film that people often feel they don't, or won't get. It is 205 minutes long (in its fullest version), in Russian, and in black and white. Few characters are clearly identified, little actually happens, and what does happen isn't necessarily in chronological order. Its subject is a 15th-century icon painter and national hero, yet we never see him paint, nor does he do anything heroic. In many of the film's episodes, he is not present at all, and in the latter stages, he takes a vow of silence. But in a sense, there is nothing to "get" about Andrei Rublev. It is not a film that needs to be processed or even understood, only experienced and wondered at. From the first scene, following the flight of a rudimentary hot air balloon, we're whisked away by silken camera moves and stark compositions to a time and place where we're no less confused, amazed or terrified than Rublev himself. For the next three hours, we're down in the muck and chaos of medieval Russia, carried along on the tide of history through gruesome Tartar raids, bizarre pagan rituals, famine, torture and physical hardship. We experience life on every scale, from raindrops falling on a river to armies ransacking a town, often within the same, unbroken shot.With Andrei Rublev, Tarkovsky was consciously crafting a language that owed nothing to literature, and it's a pity so few others followed him. In today's cinema, we're still served up linear, cause-and-effect biographies of artists as if, by doing so, we'll understand the person and be able to make sense of their art. Andrei Rublev operates according to a different understanding of time and history. It asks questions about the relationship between the artist, their society and their spiritual beliefs and doesn't seek to answer them. "In cinema it is necessary not to explain, but to act upon the viewer's feelings, and the emotion which is awoken is what provokes thought," wrote Tarkovsky in 1962.Despite its apparent formlessness, Andrei Rublev is precisely structured and entirely aesthetically coherent. Acts of creation are mirrored by acts of destruction, there are themes of flight, of vision, of presence and absence; the more you look, the more you see. And then there are the horses, Tarkovsky's perennial favourite: horses rolling over, horses charging into battle, swimming in the river, falling down stairs, dragging men out of churches. At times the screen resembles a vast Brueghel painting come to life, or a medieval tapestry unrolling. We're always conscious of life spilling out beyond the frame, and never conscious of the fact that this was made in 60s USSR. In Tarkovsky's own turbulent time, the film lit all manner of controversy. Its Christian spiritualism offended the Soviet authorities; its depiction of Russia's savage history upset nationalists like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and its challenging form led to various cuts. After opening in Moscow in 1966, it was suppressed until the 1969 Cannes film festival, and didn't reach Britain till 1973.We don't necessarily know, or need to know, how Andrei Rublev works or what it's telling us, but by the end we're in no doubt it's succeeded. When in the final minutes, the film pulls off its most famous flourish: the screen bursts into colour and we're finally ready to see Rublev's paintings in extreme close-up – coming at the end of this epic journey, they can reduce a viewer to tears. As the camera pores over the details, the tiny jewels on the hem of a robe, the lines forming a pitiful expression on the face of an angel, the tarnished gilding of a halo, we feel like we understand everything that's gone into every brushstroke. We're reminded of what beauty is. It is as close to transcendence as cinema gets.DramaWorld cinemaSteve Roseguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Mark Ruffalo: the 'journeyman' who's impressed Martin Scorsese, David Fincher and Michel Gondry The Kids Are All Right star almost gave up on acting altogether. Now he's bringing an amiable awkwardness into sex scenes with Julianne Moore, and looking forward to becoming The HulkLate for our brunch at New York's Bowery Hotel, Mark Ruffalo arrives amid a flurry of apologies. "I am so sorry," he says. "So, so, sorry.""Don't worry," I say. "It's always worse for the person being late.""Yeah because they're the asshole," he says, and laughs.That's Ruffalo: the anti-asshole of American movies, the un-jerk, whose brand of mellow rebellion in films such as Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind and You Can Count On Me has long set him apart from Hollywood's power-drivers and uptightniks. Wherever Tom Cruise comes from in the moviemaking universe, Ruffalo comes from the opposite end: masculine without being macho, a little rough around the edges but boyish. The kind of guy you suspect of still having a skateboard or two in his closet. He exudes much the same rumpled amiability in person."I consider myself a journeyman actor," he says. "If you want someone to serve the film, you don't want too much bullshit. You want someone who's committed, who's is going to show up on time, who's gonna be in your corner. When you need someone, I'm the guy."Such modesty seems to have paid off handsomely. His new film, The Kids Are All Right, already the biggest indie comedy hit of the year and talked about for Oscars, is all about two teenagers (Mia Wasikowska and Josh Hutcherson), raised by lesbian moms (Annette Bening and Julianne Moore), who decide to look up their biological father. With the kind of luck for which teenagers everywhere can only pray, Dad turns out to be a raffish, motorbike-riding restaurateur played by Ruffalo, whose loose, relaxed masculinity has rarely been better used. It's hard to imagine another actor in Hollywood content to support two strong female leads as he does here."What I love about this character," says the actor, who has waited his share of tables, "is he's so unapologetically himself, with so much verve and joy, that even if you don't exactly agree with what they're doing you just love them. As much as they have in the world, there's always something slightly tragic about them."'I consider myself a journeyman actor. If you want someone to serve the film, who's committed, who's going to show up on time, I'm the guy'He's acted opposite Moore before, in 2008's Blindness, "which was a heavy movie, like surviving a train wreck with someone. You get very close." The pair's ease around one another proved invaluable while shooting a sex scene for the new film, quite possibly the best sex scene of the year for its touching mixture of lust, gusto and awkwardness. "My wife trusts Julianne, which is always good, believe me," says Ruffalo. "I've done a lot of sex scenes, for good or bad, in my career. It's very hard to capture that sort of awkwardness; a lot of people don't want that human quality. Its too well lit or well choreographed. Sex is not the most elegant thing between human beings. We dip right back into caveman times, you know?"Such humanity is a Ruffalo speciality. In some ways his performance in The Kids Are All Right is a sequel of sorts to the role that first brought him to Hollywood's attention, as Laura Linney's ne'er-do-well brother in the 2000 indie hit You Can Count On Me."I always remember Mark in that movie," says Lisa Cholodenko, the writer-director of The Kids Are All Right. "It was one of the few movies in my life I remember sobbing, walking out of the theatre just being wrecked. I thought, 'Wow. Who is that kid? That guy is so affecting.' There's something so sympathetic about him. And he's a kind of a knucklehead in that movie. I always thought he was a great, underused leading man."If the quality of the A-list directors who want to work with him is any guide, then Ruffalo has had a dream career, working with everyone from Jane Campion (In The Cut), to Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind), to David Fincher (Zodiac), to Michael Mann (Collateral), and Martin Scorsese (Shutter Island). And yet if you'd approached Ruffalo just a few years ago he would have told you he'd quit acting for good. He'd just made his directorial debut, Sympathy For Delicious, about a paralysed DJ, only to see it receive a kick in the teeth from American critics. It's still to find a distributor in the UK. Then, in 2008, his brother Scott was murdered in mysterious circumstances at his condo in Los Angeles."2008 was a pretty rough year for me," he says. "I lost my brother. That doesn't go away. The days I was acting I was cringing at every moment. So I took a year off. I got rid of everybody. Agents, managers, people I'd been with for years. I said, 'I'm done'. I'd pretty much had it with acting, I'd had it with the business." He packed up his apartment in the West Village and moved to upstate New York with his wife and kids, bought an old farmhouse, got into local political activism, and started protesting against the Iraq war. "Everyone thought I was crazy," he says. "Probably I was a little crazy."'Some of the best acting happens when the scene is over, because all the talking is out of the way. You're having this really honest reaction to what just happened'When I ask what brought him back into the acting fold, he points to his role in The Kids Are All Right as being instrumental. "That's when I sort of came into balance and realised: I am an actor. Maybe I can do it in a way that's right for me and I'm not chasing it, and I don't have financial burdens pushing me toward it, and I kind of saw again what I loved about it." He had seen Cholodenko's previous films Laurel Canyon (2002) and High Art, (1998) and could tell that "she really loved actors"."What she does is let the scene run on," he continues. "When you see that a director is letting a scene run after it's done you know that she's interested in human behaviour. In a lot of ways some of the best acting happens when the scene is over, because all the talking is out of the way. You're having this really honest reaction to what just happened. Actors are really beautiful before you call 'cut'. Something magical happens while they're waiting. Only some directors know who to use that."Seeing how the movie played at Sundance clinched the deal for him. "You know it's funny. You have that very cool, jaded film crowd. Everyone's got a lot of attitude, because it's a competition, and so everybody's puffed up, like puffer fish, their spikes are out. And there's this attitude of, like, 'show me'. And then we watch the movie, and the collective, communal experience of cinema strips all that away and you just get people having a common experience. The only other time I'd felt the room change like that was You Can Count On Me. And I remembered: this is what I want. This is what I want to be."Next year, he takes his first step into the bizarro world of franchise film-making, when he takes over the role of The Hulk from Edward Norton in Joss Whedon's The Avengers. It's not the kind of part he would never have taken on before, but Robert Downey Jr's Iron Man performances have helped change the perception of such roles."You're taking a flying fuck at a rolling donut in these movies," he says, "because you don't exactly have a finished script. The only thing that you have any understanding of is the people you're going to work with, that's the only quantifiable factor. But Robert calls me, and he's like, 'This is gonna be fun.' Because we worked together on Zodiac, and I grew up with The Hulk, especially the Lou Ferrigno Hulk.""But you're so amiable," I say."That's why it's going to be interesting," he says.• The headline of this article was amended on Saturday 23 October 2010 to correct a reference to Michael Scorsese.guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Spider-Man left hanging on Broadway Despite $65m budget and music by Bono, musical's preview hit by problems including a superhero dangling above the audienceHow do you convert the whizz-bang acrobatics of Spider-Man – easy to draw in a Marvel comic and almost as easy to put on the big screen via digital technology – into a live Broadway show? With difficulty, judging by last night's preview show.Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark lived up to its reputation as one of the greatest gambles in musical history when it gave its first public performance to a packed audience of 1,900 at the Foxwoods theatre in Manhattan. The problem was that its record-breaking budget of more than $65m (ÂŁ42m) was not enough to prevent some pretty glaring glitches.The show – directed by the award-winning creator of The Lion King, Julie Taymor, and with music by Bono and The Edge of U2 – had to be stopped five times to correct faulty technical equipment. The dramatic cliff-hanger at the end of the first half, in which Spider-Man saves his girl Mary Jane and then flies through the air across the auditorium to make an exit ground to a halt when Reeve Carney, playing the superhero, was left swinging helplessly above the audience.It took stage hands almost a minute to catch Carney by the feet to drag him down, and later there was some heckling.The convention of Broadway has traditionally been to maintain a blackout on all previews to give shows time to iron out their wrinkles before opening to a blaze of publicity on press night. That's particularly important for a show like Spider-Man that has been beset by funding problems, technical nightmares and multiple delays.But in the age of Twitter and blogging, and with huge interest revolving around the first preview, there was no way that the producers were going to keep chatter at bay until opening night on 11 January.Several of the New York papers were in the audience, breaching the agreement over treating previews as non-events. The New York Post's Michael Riedel, who has taken delight at bating the hapless production over many months, declared the preview an epic flop, with dull score, baffling script and "confusing plot".The New York Times was a little more generous, reporting that most of the main flying sequences were successful, "with children and some adults squealing in delight".Audience members also gave their instant feedback on Twitter. "Promising but needs work," was the verdict of @joedrape. "1st act slow. 2nd act is beautiful, but ends on whimper. Music OK, they are trying."The film producer Ira Deutchman tweeted that the set pieces were spectacular and that the flying looked genuinely dangerous, "but the music isn't good enough to hold it together. Definitely needs work in the 6 weeks until it opens. It's incoherent, a pageant of Taymore imagery."BroadwayMusicalsTheatreBonoU2New YorkComics and graphic novelsUnited StatesEd Pilkingtonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |