| Can Ridley Scott's Alien prequels be a new species of follow-up? Too often are much-loved franchises flogged to death by suits keen to eke out returns. Will Scott's efforts be any different?There are, perhaps, two obvious prisms through which to view a long-running movie series. The first posits the view that they inevitably suffer from the law of creative diminishing returns, hence the increasing poverty of the Alien series, which culminated in the execrable Aliens vs Predator films. The second view suggests, in a sort of monkeys-with-typewriters twist, that the longer studios go on making movies in a series, the more chance there is that they will eventually get it right. Studios, unfortunately, can always count on cinemagoers thinking to themselves: "I'll go and see 7, because I liked the first film. And they might just have got it right this time."The reality can be rather different from either perspective. After three terrible Predator sequels, the Robert Rodriguez-produced Predators was a definite upturn earlier this year, if only because the series had previously plumbed the depths of tortuous banality. As a standalone movie, it had very little of the first film's B-movie charm and felt like too much on a homage – one of these fan-led films with too many obvious references to earlier pictures.I strongly suspect Ridley Scott's two new Alien prequels will plough similar territory, being neither a return to the quality levels of the first two films in the series nor an abomination to compare with the last three. On the other hand, Damon Lindelof, who is writing the screenplay, is clearly a talent, while the two actors said to be vying for the female lead would both make interesting choices.New York magazine's Vulture blog reports this week that the first of the new Alien films, set 35 years prior to the original, has a script in place from Lindelof that studio Fox is happy with. That at least is positive news, since the company managed to ruin Alien 3 with constant interference and hiring of new screenwriters.I'm also encouraged by the suggestion that Lindelof's story may tone down the action that has been part of the series since James Cameron's Aliens, but which wasn't so prominent in the first film. Vulture reports that there are no expensive set-pieces in the film, suggesting that we could be looking at more of a claustrophic, minimalist and suspenseful yarn. There are even suggestions it might be made for a PG-13 certificate in the US. "The thinking," an insider tells Vulture, "is that if the original Alien were released today minus the F-bombs, you could still get a PG-13. Alien is a very Jaws-ian movie: there's no sex, and while there's lots of violence most of it is off-camera. Maybe you'd have to cut away from certain scenes two seconds earlier, but it could be done."That might sound like a concession, but if it means more dialogue and characterisation then few outside their teens are going to complain. "The later Aliens movies were action movies, but the original Alien was a horror-suspense film," continues Vulture's spy. "This returns the franchise to its roots." Scott himself said last month, in an interview with the Independent: "The film will be really tough, really nasty. It's the dark side of the moon. We are talking about gods and engineers. Engineers of space. And were the aliens designed as a form of biological warfare? Or biology that would go in and clean up a planet?"On to those casting rumours for the female lead, which we'll label "the Ripley role". The first is Natalie Portman – very interesting because such a decision would mean casting her against type. Portman's roles often fall into the "vulnerable beauty" category and it would be interesting to see her playing someone with a bit of backbone.The second rumoured possibility is the wonderfully monikered Noomi Rapace, the Swedish actor who starred in the homegrown adaptations of Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy. While Rapace is picking up plenty of interest in Hollywood, she still seems like an outside bet since few American filmgoers are likely to have seen those films – and the Ridley Scott venture would be her first English language role. On the other hand, her Lisbeth Salander character in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its sequels bears more than a passing resemblance to Ellen Ripley in terms of her tough outlook and rigidly cynical worldview.Fox is clearly doing its best to talk the new film up as a continuation of Scott's Alien adventure rather than the dross that came later. "It's not in any way a reboot of Alien or the Aliens franchise; it's really meant to be viewed as Scott's second Alien movie," says Vulture. I'm not sure what that really means, but if the end result is a film with half the original's brooding menace and pinpoint pacing I'll be first in the queue to see it. Provided, of course, that Scott has filled the studio with enough monkeys and typewriters.Ridley ScottScience fiction and fantasyHorrorThrillerBen Childguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
The Conversation: No 12 Francis Ford Coppola, 1974The finest of the four great paranoia thrillers of the 70s – alongside The Parallax View, All the President's Men (both from director Alan J Pakula), and Sidney Pollack's Three Days of the Condor – The Conversation drew attention because it was Coppola's first movie after his hugely successful The Godfather, but also because it dealt, quite coincidentally, as it happened – with wiretapping and surveillance at exactly the moment the Watergate crisis was reaching its climax. Not that Coppola was making a movie about Nixon; he was reflecting – in the movie's fatefully ambiguous phrase "he'll kill us if he gets the chance" – on the critical response to The Godfather's perceived amorality. He wanted to show there are two ways of seeing everything (and one of them may prove fatal). Gene Hackman's bug-man Harry Caul is a guilt-ridden, sex-phobic Catholic haunted by the murder of two former targets and determined to prevent another killing. But in this universe of dislocation and paranoia, made up of half-heard sound fragments and deconstructed images, nothing is as it seems.CrimeFrancis Ford CoppolaJohn Pattersonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
2001: A Space Odyssey: Archive review From the Observer, 5 May 1968A mere dozen years ago, fairly typical of the science-fiction film as a whole, a pathetically tatty epic called King Dinosaur wobbled unsteadily across our screens, its cardboard spaceship wilting visibly whenever touched, its astronauts emerging one by one because the budget obviously couldn't rise to space suits for them all. Since then the genre has acquired not only its lettres de noblesse, but a lot of money to play with: and the first thing to be said about Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (Casino Cinerama) – several years in the making and costing heaven knows how much – is that it looks quite simply stunning. It may be safely left to small boys and astronauts to quibble or enthuse over the reputed accuracy of its facts and equipment. What matters for the lay spectator is that Kubrick's vision of space is as endlessly fascinating as a vast toyshop of intricate, superbly photogenic working models. […] Kubrick is plainly fascinated by the impedimenta and implications of space travel, and apart from a sequence involving an endearingly sulky computer, so offended by a suggestion that it has made a mistake that it announces in the silkiest of tones its intention of taking over command, there is remarkably little plot to 2001. The film, in fact, might be best described as a factual philosophical speculation, rather than as the drama it sets out as but never develops into: and like all good speculations, it leaves the spectator up in the air with a tantalising vision as food for thought.As the film opens, we are in pre-historic times. Apemen scrabble for food in a rocky wilderness, cowering in fear of wild beasts, screaming abuse at rival tribes from a discreet distance. Suddenly a strange black monolith, smooth and menacing, appears in their midst: and as if inspired, one of the apemen discovers the secret of killing with a bone club. Triumphantly he tosses the bone into the air. As it turns in lazy slow motion against the sky, it is metamorphosed into a spaceship, and we are off in the year 2001 to the moon, where a strange, menacing black monolith has just been unearthed. Mystery... More mystery, almost panic, when the monolith proves to have been buried four million years earlier, evidently with ulterior motive, by some extraterrestrial intelligence centred on the planet Jupiter. An expedition to Jupiter is mounted (the one almost sabotaged by the computer), and when the one surviving astronaut reaches his destination, he finds no monsters, nothing tangible, but simply a kind of philosophical conundrum … himself past, present and future, all things at all times.One can, if one feels unkindly, say so what? But this is, I think, to miss the point of the film […]. If we conquer both time and space, then what? The final sequence of 2001 is speculation through imagination, positing a new Xanadu, a world of wonders where time and space no longer exist, just as the rest of the film speculates on various levels, exploring the new vistas opened up by the encroaching space era. […] With the whole screen glittering in an ever-changing pattern of diagrams and equations from instrument panels and monitor screens, a ballet of spacecraft performing lazy orbits in the sky to the strains of the Blue Danube Waltz, and its astronauts wrapped up like jelly-babies for long-distance hibernation in blue mummy-cases, this really is a brave new world of the machines. As such, not to be missed.Science fiction and fantasyStanley Kubrickguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
A new film presents a revealing portrait of the comedian Joan Rivers Hard work and insecurity drive outspoken comic with a career that spans five decadesYou would think that there is nothing that Joan Rivers can do to shock any more. She started her career making jokes about abortions, and has made cracks about her husband's suicide. She is famously potty-mouthed (she was thrown off the daytime show Loose Women in 2008 after describing Russell Crowe as a "fucking shit") and there is nothing outrageous that can be said about her extensive cosmetic surgery that she hasn't already said herself.So it comes as a bit of a shock to find that in person she is so surprisingly quiet. The rasp to her voice that can make her vitriolic and brassy on stage is softer; she seems gentle and excessively polite, offering coffee from a silver pot before sitting down, primly straight-backed, on a sofa in one of the glamorously formal rooms at the Ritz.It is obvious why she always stays here when she is in London once you have seen how she has decorated her grand, ornate New York apartment in a new documentary, A Piece of Work. "Marie Antoinette would have lived here," Rivers says at one point, "if she had the money."Throaty cackleThe film, which follows Rivers over 14 months, and was directed by Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg, whose previous films include a documentary on Darfur, has already won critical praise and an award at the Sundance film festival. "I went there with two speeches," she says. "The first was, 'look, I had nothing to do with it' and then we started to win awards, so I changed my speech to 'I always knew. It was all me'." She laughs, a low throaty cackle. Why did she agree to do the film? The only reason, she insists, was that she knows Stern's mother. It may turn out to be one of the best decisions of her life.It isn't a pretty portrait, but it is bracing and a slap in the face to anyone who thinks Rivers has lost her edge, and and is merely a target for ridicule with her cosmetic surgery and costume jewellery range. The Rivers that we get to see is vulnerable, ruthless, ambitious, caring, bitter and relentlessly sharp.Her humour pushes at the limit of acceptability, and occasionally falls over it: at one point, she runs one joke – is it OK to refer to Michelle Obama as "Blackie O"? – past her entourage (answer: no). How much control did she have over what went in the film? "None," she says, although she admits she asked them to remove some things she said about her husband's suicide because her daughter, Melissa, had asked her to.Rivers makes a fabulous interviewee – one anecdote begins "I was at a dinner with Laurence Olivier" – and her face is fascinating; her eyes disappear beneath the contours of her unnaturally smooth, plump skin, like raisins sunk into dough. She is flawlessly made-up, dressed all in black.The overriding impression that comes across in the film is how hard she works, and how terrified she is that the work is about to disappear. "Constantly," she says now. "Things can be taken away – my Fox show was taken away overnight. There is insecurity but that's what keeps you on your toes." It's the reason she appears to say no to very little – she still performs standup most weeks, she peddles her jewellery on the shopping channel QVC, she has a show called How'd You Get So Rich? in which she interviews self-made millionaires, and she has just finished a reality show called Mother Knows Best? with Melissa.At 77, there is no sign that she will slow down. "I'm one of the lucky ones," she says. "It's what I love. A painter can go and paint, a cook can still make a cake. But what, am I going to tell a joke to myself? If they are not wanting to come and listen to me then I don't have it any more, it's gone, and that would be sad because I adore that. I love the performing and the creating."In the documentary, Melissa, Rivers's only child, describes The Career as being like a sibling. "Totally," says Rivers. "It was Melissa first, the career second, and my husband probably third. But it also supported us." She smiles. "It was a child with a big trust fund."Jokes come from everywhere and can strike at any moment. She rummages in her handbag and pulls out an old airline ticket. "I was thinking about memorial monuments," she says, looking down at writing scrawled on the ticket, "so I was going to say: 'after my husband's suicide, I loved him so much I wanted to get a beautiful memorial stone so I spent $250,000'." She holds out her ring finger. "'And here it is!'" We both laugh (luckily). "I never throw anything out of my bag because everything has crap written all over it."Is there anything she won't joke about? In the film, she is shown being heckled at a show by a man, clearly distressed, who has taken offence at a joke about Helen Keller. He shouts to Rivers on stage that his son is deaf. At the show, Rivers goes on the attack. "I rarely get heckled, that's why I reacted so strongly," she says now. "I was shocked when I saw it. Why did he show up at my show? I'm not an unknown commodity. You know when you see me, it's going to be outrageous or whatever you want to call it. We tried to find him after the show and we couldn't."She shakes her head. Did she feel bad about it? "Oh my God. I was beyond upset. The pain he must have been coming from – to take a stupid Helen Keller joke and put it all the way back to your son."But jokes, she says, are "my whole philosophy in life, that's what keeps me going. The worst moments: if you can laugh about something you can deal with it. It shrinks it. I laughed at my mother's funeral. The hairdresser was appalled – I said to him, 'if you don't do my hair right, you'll be doing my mother's by tonight'." She laughs to herself. "But that's how I dealt with my mother's death, which I'm still not over 25 years later." At this moment, her eyes brim with tears though she recovers quickly enough.In 1987, Rivers's husband and manager, Edgar Rosenberg, killed himself. It was the final, violent episode of a turbulent few years. In the early 80s, Rivers was one of the most successful comedians in America. She was poached from NBC, where she was Johnny Carson's guest host on The Tonight Show, by Fox, who gave her her own late-night show, but as producer Rosenberg battled with their new bosses until Rivers was fired a few months later.With her career in freefall – for a long time Rivers was blacklisted by the US networks – and after their marriage collapsed, Rosenberg overdosed on pills. "I started laughing as soon as I could because it was so unbearable," she says quietly. "That's the way I get through things. It was horrific. Suicide is such an unnatural act and it's so out of the blue. There are no chances to say goodbye. The anger that sets in … "Suffered depression She is quiet for a moment. After Rosenberg's death, Rivers suffered depression, her relationship with Melissa disintegrated and she even considered suicide. "It was a terrible, horrific time. You just get through it, like you get through everything. I was making jokes." She gives a recent example: "My dog had a leg amputated and my eyes well up when I'm doing jokes about it. At the same time I'm crying."Now, it's the deaths of good friends which fuel a lot of her coping-mechanism humour. "That's the horror of Act Three as I like to call it. You don't get to make 40-year friendships again. There's nobody to say 'do you remember … ?' That's terribly sad. Then you write jokes. People say 'he's gone to a better place'. I say 'that's impossible because he had a house in the Hamptons'."In recent years, she hasn't been given the critical recognition that other comedians with a career spanning five decades get. Does that bother her? "I think it keeps me going," she says with a fixed smile, although in the documentary she is clearly riled by it. "They got me in a sad mood," she says. "No, I'm so lucky. I'm making a life. You always get awards right before you're going to die. I always say 'if they give you a standing ovation, they've spoken to your doctor'."But still, without Rivers, we might not have had Kathy Griffin, Tina Fey, Sarah Silverman. Recognition comes from younger female comics, she says, but she has no time for that. "It's like you're holding on and you're hitting everyone [who is coming up] behind you, going 'Not yet!'" When they tell her she paved the way for them, it makes her angry. "I want to go, 'no, I'm paving. Look at what I'm doing now'."Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work premiers at Sheffield Doc/Fest on 3 November and will be broadcast on More4 on 9 November at 10pmTelevision industryComedyTelevisionSheffield Doc/FestJoan RiversEmine Sanerguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Staggering Picasso trove turns up in France PARIS (AP) -- Pablo Picasso almost never stopped creating, leaving thousands of drawings, paintings and sculptures that lure crowds to museums and mansions worldwide. Now, a retired electrician says that 271 of the master's creations have been sitting for decades in his garage.... hosted.ap.org |