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| Mark Nugent obituary Our friend Mark Nugent, who has died of a heart attack aged 48, was a prolific British and Canadian filmmaker and digital artist. Born in Newcastle upon Tyne, Mark moved to Canada with his family when he was seven. He graduated with a BFA (bachelor of fine arts) in film production from Concordia University, Montreal. He went on to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago on a scholarship and obtained a master's in fine arts for film production.As a multimedia artist, Mark found- ed and toured with Roughage, a Montreal-based mixed media performance group. He also briefly worked for Chicago's H-Gun, producing commercial music videos. His art occupied a genre that rarely (and sadly) attracted critical attention from anyone other than his peers. In the late 1980s, Mark travelled with the Canadian band Fat to Morocco and collected super 8 footage that would later be used to create notable and dramatic videos for the British band Coil and Elliott Sharp's Carbon.Mark produced a large number of critically acclaimed hallucinatory films in the early 1990s, combining his acute ability optically to process seemingly abstract images and colours. With super 8 footage and film sources he explored some of his fascinations: the realms of consciousness, perception, alchemy, mysticism and quantum physics.Mark also created films for a number of post-industrial bands and projected his work live, to great effect, on the Download tour of Europe in 1996. He had an enthusiastic spirit that enlivened the internet for many years.In 1997 he founded the website Psilence Image Environments. For the past 10 years he had worked tirelessly on an endless stream of digital images and cut-up writings, collaborating on several projects such as the film Alchemical Conversations (2001), along with numerous websites and commercial CD releases.Mark was an intelligent, joyous, warm-hearted and articulate man who maintained his joie de vivre despite the numerous setbacks that he encountered. He is survived by his mother, Margaret, and brothers Paul and David.guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Terminator rights to change hands again Halcyon Holding Group's auction of the Terminator intellectual rights could trigger a fifth film in the franchiseIt's the plot-twist staple that has kept the Terminator franchise going since 1984: just when you think it's dead, suddenly it flickers back into life ready to wreak more havoc. And the same is true of the rights to the story itself, which will shortly change hands once again and most likely trigger production of a fifth Terminator film. The current owner of the franchise, the Halcyon Holding Group, is planning to auction the Terminator this month after it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in August 2009.The financial history of the Terminator series has almost as many twists as the movies themselves. Each instalment in the series was made by a different company after a corporate acquisition of intellectual rights. The first film was made by James Cameron in 1984 for pioneering independent outfit Hemdale (after Cameron notoriously sold his half-share to producer Gale Ann Hurd for $1, or about £0.60), but the company began to struggle financially in the late 1980s and sold its half-share for $10m in 1990 to Carolco, a company owned by producers Mario Kassar and Andrew Vajna, who had struck pay-dirt with the Rambo films. Carolco immediately rehired Cameron and spent a then-record $102m on making the sequel – which, setting a pattern for Cameron's future career, turned out to be a solid investment, as T2 delivered a worldwide gross of $519.8m.What nobody expected was that Carolco would itself then run into financial trouble in the mid-90s, wrecked by the fiascos that were Cutthroat Island and Showgirls. The rights were again sold off before Kassar and Vajna set up a new entity called C2 and reacquired all of the Terminator rights for $15m in 1997. C2 set up Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines and released it in 2003 – but without Cameron in the director's chair it was only a modest success, scoring $433.3m worldwide against a $200m budget.C2 sold the rights again, to Halcyon, in 2007 for $25m and the new owners immediately went into production on Terminator Salvation. Again, Cameron was not involved, with directing duties handed to McG. Although the film was critically lambasted, it performed reasonably well at the box office, earning $372m worldwide – considerably less, however, than the previous instalment.When the identity of the new owners of the Terminator becomes clear, there is a good chance it won't be one of the major studios, who have never managed to get complete control of the rights. The current favourites – the "stalking horse" bidders – are Lionsgate, the Canadian company who, ironically, now own parts of Carolco that were sold off in the 1990s when it began to founder. And the price it goes for will interest the film industry: Halcyon, it is rumoured, wants $60m (£37m), similar to the amount Nickleodeon paid for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in October 2009.Science fiction and fantasyJames CameronFilm industryAndrew Pulverguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Golden Globes: Fashion on the red carpet Who wore what to the Golden Globes? Rachel Dixon rounds up the hits and the missesRachel Dixon guardian.co.uk |
The view: Haiti's Ciné Institute proves that film still matters Haiti's only film school was destroyed in the earthquake, but the mini-movies that its students have made since are a living chronicle of the still-unfolding crisis and will serve as enduring testaments to the power of cinema to inform and moveIn recent days it's been possible to see the medium film at its most vital and powerful, the results hard and often heartbreaking viewing but hinting at one possible future for the whole shooting match. That glimpse has come through the work of the Ciné Institute – Haiti's only film school, whose students have spent the last ten days using its equipment to record and bring to the world high-quality documents of the fresh hell unfolding in the country. Tracing a visual line from the aftermath of the first quake to the chaos which then consumed all in sight to the current queasy mix of despair and erratic aid deliveries, the short films of the Ciné Institute students carry with them a uniquely raw authority. These, after all, are mini-movies made by the same people whose own homes and families have been laid waste, not western news crews who will, sooner rather than later, pack up their kit and catch the plane home. Shot by shot, moment by moment, the footage builds into a living chronicle that leaves you unclear of what the point of film in the 21st century could be if it doesn't at least partly involve ordinary people taking up cameras in times of crisis. (A precedent here is Burma VJ, the documentary of the crushed Burmese uprising of September 2007 built around handheld video footage filmed by "citizen reporters"). But there is an uncomfortable irony here, in that this should be happening while in numberless western Multiplexes, cinema is apparently being "revolutionised" by the age-old means of a showman-type shouting at a large cast and crew through a megaphone (or whatever the space-age equivalent might be). Because the ongoing triumph of Avatar is also a triumph for the whole idea of films as three hour sagas made with technology so expensive as to be inaccessible to all but film-makers with the clout of James Cameron, purpose-built for the audience to almost literally get lost in – to wilfully disconnect from reality. And the chasm between the world in which we grow misty-eyed at the uncorrupted beauty of the Na'vi and the one where women give birth by the side of the road in Port-au-Prince remains horribly wide from whichever angle you look at it. The same sense of unease crops up when considering the vast, near-abstract sums being stacked up by Cameron's film (not to mention what it cost to make) compared with the impossible poverty of Haiti even before the earthquake (quite aside from what it would now cost to bring anything halfway like stability to the country). The contrast is especially glaring not because Avatar revels in its role as cinematic spectacle – that's a noble tradition responsible for many films I myself hold dear. The problem is the attempt to make that spectacle more "meaningful" with the worst kind of self-serving Hollywood message – a brick-over-the-head affirmation of things no-one watching would conceivably argue with (militarism bad, nature nice), designed so as to mean we can all feel good about ourselves for agreeing, as if that in itself was enough. It is, in other words, all all right really; whereas as Haitit has proved, for much of the world, it's really not. The fine American short story writer Deborah Eisenberg once wrote of 9/11 as having ripped open the "heavy painted curtain" that we in the west had looked at as if it were the real world while the actual real world with its harsh inequities was kept safely on the other side – so that even once the curtain was repaired, it was now impossible to forget what was going on behind it. I'd venture that a similar curtain still exists – with on one side 2010 as it is, and on the other those things sold to us as radical and thought-provoking but which are actually just made to keep us in our seats with our gobs hanging open. I leave it up to you to decide on which side you'll find Avatar, and which the films of the Ciné Institute. In the meantime, you can watch the latter here.HaitiDanny Leighguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Boss exhibit to stay at Cleveland's rock hall CLEVELAND (AP) -- A Bruce Springsteen exhibit is sticking around for an encore at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.... hosted.ap.org |