| Hands off Gorillaz songs, Albarn warns 'Glee' Damon Albarn has said he would not allow any Gorillaz songs to be used in 'Glee'. feeds.breakingnews.ie |
Badlands: No 4 Terrence Malick, 1973Terrence Malick based his peerlessly poetic debut on the real-life story of Charles Starkweather, a teenage James Dean wannabe who fled across the midwest on a killing spree, his 14-year-old girlfriend in tow. But the film couldn't be further from a pulpy true-crime tale, or a hip New Wave homage like Bonnie and Clyde. It's a true original: eloquent about the intersection of crime, romanticism and myth-making in America, and highly innovative in its use of colour, editing and voice-over. Martin Sheen, who was cast as the Starkweather surrogate, Kit, believed Badlands was the best script he had ever read. "Still is," he says. "It was mesmerising. It disarmed you. It was a period piece, and yet of all time. It was extremely American, it caught the spirit of the people, of the culture, in a way that was immediately identifiable." Sissy Spacek played Holly, the baton-twirling schoolgirl who elopes with Kit after he kills her father (Warren Oates).The film's dislocated emotional effect arises almost entirely from Holly, whose banal narration goes starkly against the grain. Traditionally, a voice-over fills in the blanks, but Badlands is defined by the contradiction between what we see and what we hear. Holly's blank reaction when Kit guns down her father makes the slaying more shocking than any amount of hysterical identification. "She isn't indifferent about her father's death," Malick pointed out. "She might have cried buckets of tears, but she wouldn't think of telling you about it. It would not be proper. You should always feel there are large parts of her experience she's not including because she has a strong, if misplaced, sense of propriety." This suggestion that we may not be getting the full story is crucial to appreciating Malick, who is more likely, at a moment of drama, to turn his camera on a quivering blade of grass. In fact, Malick's career was to be the biggest ellipsis of all, with only four more features to date (Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, The New World and the forthcoming Tree of Life) completed after Badlands. Not that this trifling fact can undermine, in any way, his place as the visionary of American film-making.CrimeRyan Gilbeyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Hobbit films 'could be on way to UK' Filming of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings prequel could move from New Zealand to the UK following an actors' union disputeThe Hobbit, Peter Jackson's two-part prequel to the Lord of the Rings trilogy, could be on its way to Britain, it has emerged.Jackson's wife and creative partner, Fran Walsh, revealed that the UK was being considered as a filming location following a dispute with an actors' union in New Zealand, where producers had originally planned to shoot the films and where sets remain from the three previous movies based on JRR Tolkien's books."They have had people in the UK taking location photographs," Walsh told Radio New Zealand. "They've got a huge studio there that Harry Potter has vacated, the ex-Rolls Royce factory, that they say would be perfect for us." Scotland has previously been mentioned as a potential location for the Hobbit films, along with eastern Europe.Yesterday, a major barrier to shooting in New Zealand was removed when New Zealand Actors Equity, which had called for a boycott of the films in a dispute over pay, annnounced it had "entered into an agreement to commence good faith negotiations for a new set of conditions". The statement followed intervention by the New Zealand government that led to meetings last week between the country's main producers' group and union representatives.However, it is clear that Jackson's team is still angry over the dispute. The film-maker appeared on New Zealand television last night to make it clear that filming may still take place elsewhere. He said the country's film industry was "on the way to being stuffed" due to the row."It's a question of confidence in our industrial relations and the damage was done within a week of the blacklist going on," Jackson said on TV One's Close Up show. "There are risks involved in movies, they have to be good films, they have to earn a profit and [studios] need the insurance factor that money is going into a stable industrial climate."Up until a month ago, no one had even thought in a million years that this movie was going to leave the country," he explained. "And then this blacklist was bought on, and the studio said 'What the hell is going on?' and we tried to figure out what the hell was going on. At that point, confidence in our country as a stable base to make movies started to erode."Shooting The Hobbit in the UK would no doubt please Tolkienistas, for whom the fantasy author's tales are the epitome of Britishness. Tolkien wrote his stories, he said, to gift the English with a mythical backstory that would stand up to Norse, Roman and Greek legends.Wherever the films are shot, production is likely to start soon. Earlier this month it was revealed that filming could begin as early as February 2011, after studios MGM and New Line, which both have an interest in the two-film project, agreed on a production schedule. Both films will be shot in 3D, with the first due to hit cinemas in December 2012 and the second arriving a year later.Peter JacksonLord of the RingsScience fiction and fantasyNew ZealandBen Childguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Dion gives birth to twins Celine Dion has given birth to twin boys. feeds.breakingnews.ie |
Q&A: Director Frank Darabont on AMC's 'The Walking Dead' Shawshank Redemption director Frank Darabont's zombie series, The Walking Dead, debuts on AMC on Halloween. Darabont talks to TIME about horror movies and the weirdness of having grisly zombies on the same network as Mad Men feedproxy.google.com |