| Al Pacino to play Phil Spector in new biopic Godfather star apparently saw 'a very interesting character' in music producer currently serving life sentence for murderAl Pacino will reportedly take on the role of Phil Spector in a film about the music producer's life. According to the New York Times, HBO Films plans to capture Spector's life in an as yet untitled movie, with Rain Man director Barry Levinson and writer David Mamet at the helm.Spector was behind some of the biggest pop songs of the 1960s, notably the Ronettes' Be My Baby and the Righteous Brothers' You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'. However, the producer, now aged 70, was found guilty in 2009 of murdering actress Lana Clarkson, for which he is serving a sentence of 19 years to life.Clarkson was shot and killed at Spector's Los Angeles mansion in 2003. The producer was charged with her murder but a mistrial followed before he was eventually found guilty and sentenced last year. During the 2009 trial, Spector racked up column inches for his outlandish choice of wigs and propensity for offering controversial soundbites, allegedly telling one reporter "she (Clarkson) kissed the gun".Al Pacino, also 70, is perhaps best known for roles such as Michael Corleone in the Godfather trilogy and Tony Montana in Scarface. Asked about his attraction to playing Spector, Pacino's agent John L Burnham told the New York Times: "He just saw a very interesting character to play, and he likes the sensibility of David and Barry." Burnham also represents Mamet and Levinson.The film is said to be in development stages and no projected release date has been given.Phil SpectorAl PacinoDavid MametRosie Swashguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Easy A is, like, so intellectual With the release of Easy A, an adaptation of The Scarlet Letter, Stuart Heritage digs out some further reading for the makers of teen moviesThis week's Easy A might look like your standard issue Hollywood teen romcom – full of webcam confessionals, cliquey rich girls and wildly unrealistic house parties full of whooping O-Town wannabes – but it's actually an adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. This means it isn't just a teen movie, but a teen movie based on Important Literature; just like Cruel Intentions (Les Liaisons Dangereuses), Clueless (Emma), and Ten Things I Hate About You (The Taming Of The Shrew). However, several works of literature remain unadapted for this vital demographic. Here's what should be next …The Twanterbury Twales (Based on Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales)During a 45-minute limo ride to new LA mall The Cathedral, a group of wealthy young teens (Vanessa Hudgens, Miley Cyrus and Demi Lovato) entertain themselves by tweeting stories, like the one about the Glee cast members who deliberately poisoned each other and the one that ends with Nick Jonas doing something unspeakable to Zac Efron with a red-hot poker.Missy's Angry Chihuahua (Based on Herman Melville's Moby Dick) After her friend's chihuahua wees up her new jeggings, Vanessa Hudgens gathers together a ramshackle crew of nice-haired tween starlets and becomes consumed by dark thoughts of murderous vengeance. However, the physical heft and somewhat temperamental behaviour of the chihuahua means that it eventually becomes an unwitting allegory for man's relationship with God; a fact that Vanessa Hudgens doesn't cotton on to at all, not even once.Atlas Gets All, Like, Whatever (Based on Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged) Vanessa Hudgens simply can't believe it when the world's greatest minds down tools to voice their fury at the supposed evils of governmental collectivism, because it means she can no longer buy her favourite brand of chihuahua shampoo. A fun-filled romp mixing madcap adventure with the crushingly lonely indifference of fundamentalist rightwing philosophy.For Whom The Bell LOLs (Based on Ernest Hemingway's For Whom The Bell Tolls) Almost exactly the same as Hemingway's classic, except it takes place in an American high school instead of the Spanish civil war, and the themes of death and sacrifice have been replaced with several slow-motion close-ups of Taylor Lautner as he runs through a meadow in the rain. Other than that, completely identical.ths txtd zrthstra ;) (Based on Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra) Prolific texter Vanessa Hudgens attempts to convince her friends that God is dead and mankind is merely a gateway between the animal kingdom and a new form of idealised radical individual she's termed "Ubermensch", but then she gives up and sends everyone a picture of herself instead.A Handbag For An Airhead (Based on Barry Hines's A Kestrel For A Knave) Vanessa Hudgens briefly finds meaning in her miserable, poverty-ridden existence when she realises her love of training and breeding expensive designer handbags in a field near her house. However, her joy is cut short when her brother deliberately kills her handbag and Brian Glover makes her play football or something.Easy A is out on FriStuart Heritageguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Which omissions leave you breathless? This list of all-time greats will no doubt have some readers flinging their cappuccinos in disgust. Which choices put the sin in cineaste?There will be blood. Today's list, more than any other in our series of seven guides to the 25 best films in each genre, is guaranteed to ruffle feathers and provoke punch-ups, even of the online kind. As my colleague Michael Hann wrote yesterday in the action blogpost thread, we didn't intend it to be so: we'd have liked 21 supplements so every genre could be given the space and respect they all undoubtedly deserve. But sadly we could only stretch to seven, hence a few mash-ups, like the one today (kudos to Jason Solomons for an admirable wrangle of a definition from our picks).So: how much of a triumph or a travesty is the final list? Myself, I'm unconvinced The Graduate should be that high (more of an influential film than a straightforwardly brilliant one?). I'm mourning the absence of Au Hasard Balthazar and Head-On, and something, anything (Lacombe Lucien, maybe?) by Louis Malle. Maybe a little Rohmer would have been nice (though My Night with Maud did make an appearance in the romance 25). Or, how about that great recent British arthouse movie Unrelated? I'm still slightly sad about Dogville being spurned in favour of Breaking the Waves. And, speaking of that one-director rule, I'd have probably taken Persona or Wild Strawberries or Winter Light over Fanny and Alexander.Which other mysterious gems have we missed out? How many of you have now been inspired to see Andrei Rublev? Or have we put you off it for life?DramaWorld cinemaCatherine Shoardguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Before Africa United: Life, death and lessons in human kindness Rhidian Brook took his family on an epic journey through Aids-torn Africa. Their experiences inspired him to write a film that's been dubbed the new Slumdog MillionaireIn 2005, I was writing an episode of Silent Witness, the BBC drama, when I received an email from a friend asking me if I would consider writing a book about the Salvation Army's response to HIV/Aids around the world. I knew little about Aids beyond the grim statistics and not much more about the Salvation Army beyond soup and trombones. I was about to bin the email when I made the mistake of mentioning it to my wife, Nicola, who suggested I follow it up.A few days later, I called Dr Ian Campbell, who was the Salvation Army's international health programme consultant and something of a legend in the world of HIV/Aids response – one of the first people to see and identify a case of HIV/Aids infection in Zambia in the 1980s and a pioneer of the communal response to the pandemic."What exactly will this entail?" I asked."It'll mean fully immersing yourself in the life of a community affected by HIV/Aids," he said."But I know nothing about it.""There are enough experts already. Your ignorance will be an asset.""How long will it take?""Give it a year.""What about my family – the wife, the kids?""Take them with you. You'll see more as a family. And the kids will be a way into the story."The decision to go was more about faith than reason. Reason said: what about malaria? What about the children missing school? What about lost work opportunities? And can you live without fresh milk with your muesli? Faith said: You can't see it yet but this could be a life-changing experience that you and the children will never forget.Ian's prediction would later prove right: the kids would be the way into the story in ways I could not have guessed, eventually helping me to write a film about Africa's children, Africa United, which is out this week. But I needed my own kids to agree to go. In the end we put it to a vote, which turned out to be unanimously in favour.In January 2006, we set off with our two children, Gabriel and Agnes (then aged nine and six), on a nine-month journey that would take us to 11 countries on three continents, in search of what Ian Campbell described as "the hidden stories of hope and change in the midst of the pandemic".Our biceps were still aching from the final round of jabs when we arrived in the rural Kenyan town of Kithituni, where the Salvation Army had pioneered a communal response to HIV/Aids. We had been inoculated against a host of deadly diseases. We had learned all about the pandemic, explained to Gabriel and Agnes how HIV passed from one person to another, read books and talked to people trying to get a sense of what life would be like in the communities we were going to. Most of what we knew about Africa lay between the dualities of safari and catastrophe, between the writings of the starry-eyed accounts of settlers, naturalists, hunters and alarming news reports, movies and documentaries. None of it really prepared us for what we found.There were immediate cultural adjustments to make and material discomforts to face: no cars, a "goat-powered" internet, pit latrines for toilets, no fridge (we only had power for three hours a day), no running hot water, and a limited amount of food produce consisting mainly of scrawny chicken, beans, rice and the maize breeze-block otherwise known as ugali. There were big bugs to worry about and an over-neurotic application of Deet at sundown, but we adjusted quickly and the kids seemed to be enjoying it as much as we were. It was the people who made it easy.Every day, the chief patriarch and matriarch in the area – Jonathan and Agnes (every other woman seemed to be called Agnes in Kithituni) – would swing by on their way to market to check that we were OK; hordes of children would come to play football with our children (with a football made from plastic bags and string) or play with Gabriel's Gameboy until the power ran out. George the baptist would stop off for tea, deliver his home-grown onions and discuss some finer theological point. Lelu showed us how to kill the army ants that walked in through the front door at exactly 7pm every night. And on the 45-minute walk to market we'd learn Swahili by practising the local greetings 100 times a day. By the time we had bought the children two goats at Friday market (we called them Malarone and Larium after the malaria tablets) we were well and truly part of the community and able to thank God in three more languages.After a few weeks, Agnes asked me: "Dad, where are all the sick people?"HIV/Aids is like an iceberg; its fatal bulk lies hidden below the surface, and it was just a matter of time before we'd start to come across the wreckage it had already caused. It turned out that the children hanging around the house all day were Aids orphans – the old widows across the road were saving money to buy a cow to provide milk for them. The people walking on along the road in their Sunday best were heading to the funeral of a man who had died of an Aids-related illness. I couldn't hide the truth from Agnes. Sooner or later she and Gabriel were going to see it. Death was a fact of life as verifiable as Mount Kilimanjaro being 19,341ft. Most of the children they played with now had been to funerals and heard the mournful ululations of mothers and grandmothers, or sung songs and told stories about Aids in a way that our own children recited the times tables.Before setting off on this journey people had said, as if to reassure us I think, that this trip would be a great education for the children. They were certainly experiencing an unusual syllabus. In the morning they might study geography or maths with Mum; in the afternoon they might walk miles with us and the response team to see a woman unable to get antiretroviral drugs or meet a child-headed family; or learn songs while sitting in the back of pick-up trucks before meeting a group of HIV-positive sex workers.Ian Campbell had said the kids would be the way into the story, and he was right. Communities welcomed us precisely because we had children with us. The children also kept us honest, asking the right questions at the right time: "Dad, what's a prostitute?"; "Dad, why is no one crying at this funeral?" Just when we thought we should protect them from some unpleasant reality, with the clarity that comes of innocence, they would show a capacity to see exactly what was what.There were certainly moments when I wondered if bringing them had been a terrible mistake. Apart from a low-grade anxiety about getting seriously sick (we all got stomach bugs at some point), once we moved on from Kenya, the travel became tiring and adjusting to new communities hard. There were some hairy moments too: a demented man following us through the back streets of the Kibera slum, a stoned man in Rwanda grabbing Agnes's hand and pulling her away from me and, perhaps most frightening of all, having to suddenly get out of Zimbabwe, fearing that the authorities had discovered I was doing some broadcasts for the BBC and having to get a night bus that broke down and limped over the Limpopo river to safety and the South African border.I sometimes wondered if it was a good thing exposing my children to some of the things we encountered – the sickness, pain and loss caused by Aids – but even the most uncomfortable situations seemed to have a redeeming quality. There was a day when I took Gabriel to a funeral with the response team and we stopped off to visit a sick woman. On the way he slipped and fell into some excrement, and there was no immediate way of cleaning it off. He was distressed and as we stood around the woman with our heads in a cloud of flies, I stood there feeling bad for Gabriel, his discomfort and my inability to do anything about it, and I could hear those sceptical voices questioning my reasons for bringing my family on a trip such as this. Just when I was about to take him away to look for some water to clean him, the sick woman beckoned him forward. With great effort she fetched a container that held her only water supply. She then asked one of the men to pour the water on Gabriel's leg while she washed it off. The woman didn't stop until my son's leg and shoes were completely washed clean. Her capacity for kindness despite her circumstances was a living lesson; the kind of thing you can't teach. It was precisely the unquantifiable thing we hoped would make this trip worth it for all of us.Coming home after nine months brought a mixture of emotions. The first day back, Gabriel and I walked up the road to see what it felt like to use a cash machine, buy a paper and spend a day not thinking about or being confronted with the poor state of the world. As we passed Gabriel's primary school (whose head had agreed to his nine-month sabbatical) he said: "Looks exactly the same. Nothing's really changed."We had been away having our most basic assumptions challenged, and it seemed life in this little patch of west London had continued unruffled. It was, as the author of The Innocent Anthropologist, Nigel Barley, said of coming home after living in a mud hut for a year "positively insulting how well the world functions without one". Yet home's predictable normality was precisely what we wanted home to be. It was what we had longed for when we were scrabbling by torchlight to a pit-latrine in the middle of the night; or throwing up into an Indian Airways sick-bag; or when we no longer had the energy to explain ourselves to a gathering of orphans in a village and a Jeep ride really felt 100 miles too far.As quickly as we had adapted to life there, we retuned to life here. The children – who are better at living in the present – adjusted seamlessly. And we were all swallowed whole by work and school, the multiple, sophisticated concerns that make our privileged lives here so complicated. There were things we missed but they were parts rather than the whole: the simplicity but not the poverty; the walking but not the bad roads; the children laughing but not the lack of schools; the sunshine but not the drought. It was the people we thought about most.When we thought about what we had learned (the question most commonly asked) it came down to some things we already knew: The world is in terrible shape, money isn't the answer, mankind gets its priorities badly wrong, as well as some things we had always suspected and kind of hoped were true: gratitude is one of the most important things anyone – adults and kids – can learn; a good small community can make a huge difference to a culture; and that much of the world is being held together not by money, power, guns or celebrity but by small, often hidden, acts of kindness. If my children can take even one of these things on board for life, the journey will have been worth every mile.And me? As Ian Campbell said five years ago: "The kids will be the way into the story." I don't think I would have been able to write a fIlm about children making an epic 3,000-mile journey through Africa had my own wife and children not been willing to make an epic journey of their own.Rhidian Brook's account of his family's journey, More Than Eyes Can See, is published by Marion Boyars, £8.99. His film, Africa United, is on general cinema release from this weekendFamilyHIV infectionAfricaCharitiesguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Leslie Nielsen: the doyen of deadpan From Forbidden Planet to Scary MovieFor those who grew up on the Airplane! and Naked Gun series – by which I mean "watched these films about 10 billion times when they were 12"– it is something of a shock to learn that Leslie Nielsen was not originally a comic actor. He was not only a straight leading man, but a very handsome one, too. It's a concept almost as bizarre as Nielsen not being funny, not because he was not a handsome older man, but because he so subsumed his good looks beneath the deadpan mask. (For the ultimate example of this, look up on YouTube the time Nielsen farted on air while being interviewed on breakfast TV. He managed to keep a gloriously straight face. Lorraine Kelly was less successful.)Nielsen's early career highlights, though that's something of a misnomer, included Forbidden Planet and The Poseidon Adventure, and when he was hired for Airplane!, he essentially played the very same upright parts, just with more knowingness. In other words, he shticked his own shtick which, as Mike Tyson proved in his recent misguided grasp at a comic role in The Hangover, is not so easy to do. And it is to Nielsen's eternal credit that when most people think of the Naked Gun series, I'd wager that they think of him and not his co-stars, OJ Simpson, Priscilla Presley and Anna Nicole Smith. Whoever the casting agent was there, hats off.Personally, my favourite of Nielsen's roles was as Lucas, Blanche's uncle and Dorothy's boyfriend on The Golden Girls, providing the world with the blessed opportunity of watching Nielsen and the equally wonderful Bea Arthur share not only the screen but also several embraces.Comedies are now more about personalities than the sight gags of Airplane! and The Naked Gun films. But one can see their influence in movies such as Zoolander (Nielsen finding the bingo card in Naked Gun is reminiscent of Owen Wilson's misunderstanding of the term "in the computer"), Scary Movie and other genre spoofs.Nielsen was the essence of a jobbing actor, which is Latin for "made a lot of crap". The world would probably have continued to spin had he not made Dracula: Dead and Loving It or Scary Movie 4. But with Airplane! and Naked Gun, he achieved comic immortality.Leslie NielsenComedyScience fiction and fantasyAction and adventureHadley Freemanguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |