| Lennon remembered by fans on 70th birthday A crush of fans circled a flower-graced mosaic in Central Park's 'Strawberry Fields' and sang lyrics from Imagine to honour Beatles legend John Lennon on his 70th birthday. feeds.breakingnews.ie |
Corrie stars hit out at 'ageist' acting industry 'Coronation Street' stars Sue Nicholls and Beverley Callard have hit out at the acting industry for being ageist towards women and overly concerned with looks. feeds.breakingnews.ie |
Joe Queenan's Guide to Movie Cliches: Action The classic action film features a small group of world-weary assassins or Green Berets or Navy Seals or mercenaries who assemble to pull off one last suicidal mission, after which they will retire. It helps if they are slightly over the hill. At least two of the men don't want to go on the assignment. Towards the end of the film, one of the men who stayed behind will materialise out of thin air to bail out his buddies. This man will most assuredly die. At some point in the film, the leader of the unit will tell his men: "This is my fight. You guys have no skin in this game. You're free to go." But the men will not go. Never, ever, ever.In the course of the classic action film, several large men possessing a preposterous level of upper body musculature will be betrayed, usually by somebody who does not possess an identical level of upper body musculature, but who employs lots of people who do. Ultimately, they will be stabbed in the back by bitter rivals back at headquarters, weasel-like politicians or somebody they used to work for in the CIA, which is sometimes referred to as "the firm". This is the theme of the Rambo movies – "My own country let me down, those bastards!" – but it is also the theme of such recent offerings as The Losers, The A-Team, Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Watchmen and, most memorably, 300. The only difference is that in 300 the Spartans are betrayed by a hunchbacked dwarf. That was a very nice touch because no one was really expecting it. The untrustworthy hunchback could well become a revered cliche in the fullness of time, but it is not a bona fide cliche yet.In the contemporary action film, the villains are either heavily accented Russians, Serbs, or unidentified, all-purpose eastern European sociopaths (Taken, Eastern Promises, Rob Cohen's xXx), or cigar-smoking thugs from south of the border, or untrustworthy Arabs, or villainous bureaucrats from Washington or London. The women in action films tend to be promiscuous femmes fatales or crusading journalists or medical support staff or hapless rebels or victims or miscast (Keira Knightley). They never get to drive the Humvee or trigger the portable, easily concealed nuclear weapon. The action film, Angelina Jolie and Zoe Saldana notwithstanding, has little use for women.Non-contemporary action films depend for much of their visual panache on men wearing weird headwear. Primordial brutes sporting horned helmets have been a staple since Conan the Destroyer; there is literally nothing that scares peasants more. Men with horns on their heads kick up a fuss in medieval action films, in films involving the Asiatic hordes, in films set in the Hyborian Age, and even in films that take place in 11th-century Newfoundland. As a cliche, unpleasant men with their faces painted blue runs a close second to bloodthirsty slobs with horns on their head. The most surprising thing about action films is how rarely you see men with horns on their heads who are also wearing blue paint on their faces. If the Scots had only thought to supplement the blue facial pigment with the requisite headgear, they would have kicked the English out of Scotland 300 years earlier and Mel Gibson wouldn't have had to make Braveheart.A good action film will usually include some impromptu emergency surgery, a fall from a great height, a reasonable amount of torture and a lot of rappelling. Men in action films rappel down high-rises, mountains and into the holds of ships. An action film without rappelling is like a horror movie without disembowelment: when in doubt, rappel! The principals should have lots of scars, and each scar should come with a story. A psycho with an eye patch is good, especially if he's a one-eyed giant with a machete. The hero should have lost his soul in Sarajevo, Nicaragua, Darfur or back in Nam, and is now struggling to regain just one smidgen of dignity that will help remind him of a time he didn't want to wake up every day and puke his guts out, goddamn it. Nobody drives a car in action films: off-road vehicles only. No mules, no ponies, no biofuel vehicles. At some point in an action film, a woman will get punched in the face, an arrow or bullet will rocket through a villain's skull in slow motion, and a blade or piston or spear will rip through a man's chest from behind. The surprise reverse sword, spear or knife thrust into the breadbasket is always a nice touch, as is the helicopter crashing into the tunnel arch because the pilot was too focused on the man running on the top of the train.If the film is in the martial arts genre, the hero should repeatedly run up the wall to kick somebody in the face, and ninjas should fly through the air on invisible wires and do aerial battle in the bamboo forest. One of the ninjas should turn out to be a woman. Even though ninjas descend from ceilings with great regularity in this genre, it always comes as a complete surprise to the numbskulls on the ground. The bad guys never attack in tandem in martial arts films; they always allow the hero to pick them off one by one. This is also true of samurai films. No one in a martial arts film has ever seen a martial arts film.Many cliches in action films are too obvious to mention: the pas de deux past a stream of deadly machine-gun fire, the leap away from explosions, the slide down the sloped exterior of an all-glass skyscraper, the massive tractor trailer's attempt to destroy the vehicle from behind by ramming it over the guard rail, the inability of the bad guys to hit anything with their weapons. My personal favourite among action film cliches is when the villain, asked what to do with the thronged hostages/peasants/rebels, sneers: "Kill them all." As opposed to: "Just kill some of them." Or: "Kill all the short ones." Or: "I don't care how many you kill, but for God's sake, make sure you get the hunchbacked dwarf."Classic cliched action movies: The Wild Bunch and The ExpendablesIn his latest film, Sylvester Stallone shows himself to be a director who understands how important the cliches of the genre are, but who still can't make a good movie, primarily because he's in it. The Expendables is a complete rip-off of Sam Peckinpah's classic 1969 film, The Wild Bunch. Like The Wild Bunch, The Expendables is about over-the-hill gunslingers whose enemies are Spanish-speaking. As in The Wild Bunch, the Expendables risk life and limb to save the one Spanish-speaking person they do not despise, while being tracked by a former member of their gang. As in The Wild Bunch, the Expendables succumb to a crisis of conscience that impels them to go back and finish the job they started. The Wild Bunch had a cast filled with former matinee idols well past their prime. So does The Expendables. For all intents and purposes, Stallone and Peckinpah have made exactly the same movie. The only difference: Stallone's movie sucks.Action and adventureSylvester StalloneJoe Queenanguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
The creme de la scream? Too much blood or not enough guts? Let us know what you think about our selection of the best movies for thrills, chills and killsAnd so we come to Horror, the seventh and last part of the Guardian and Observer's series to the greatest films of all time.Horror turned out to be one of the more straightforward areas to cover: we all know what a good horror film is. But like every other type of cinema, it's a tricky job disentangling classic horror from more modern developments in the genre; all the more so, as certain aspects of horror film-making – the gore, the violence, the headchopping sadism – have definitely escalated in the last two or three decades.Creditably, our critics kept torture porn and stalk-n-slash at a distance: only Halloween, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Evil Dead on our list can be considered to have even a toehold in the gorehound universe. The highly-rated modern horror films tended to be more scary than gruesome: The Blair Witch Project, Ringu, Let the Right One In.But horror has a tremendous range, reinventing itself in different forms for different decades. You can compare vampire movies in the 20s to those in the 50s, plot the rise of satanist movies from Rosemary's Baby to The Wicker Man, and try and work out whether The Haunting, from 1963, is creepier than Don't Look Now, a decade later.But horror movies have arguably the most intense aficionados of all movie genres, so there will no doubt be plenty of people out there ready to tell us what should have been on the list, and in what order. Over to you ...HorrorAndrew Pulverguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Johnny Sheffield obituary Child actor who played Boy, the foundling son of Tarzan and Jane, in eight Hollywood filmsAfter three hit Tarzan movies starring Johnny Weissmuller in the title role and Maureen O'Sullivan as Jane, MGM decided to give a son to the apeman and his mate in Tarzan Finds a Son! (1939). However, he had to be a foundling because, according to the Legion of Decency, the scantily clad jungle couple were not married, and presumably never had sex. "Boy", as he was named, was played by Johnny Sheffield, who has died aged 79 of a heart attack at his California home after falling off a ladder while pruning a tree.In the Tarzan films, the fact that the orphaned offspring of a British couple killed in a plane crash in the jungle had an American accent was never explained. Neither Tarzan, whose dialogue was limited to grunts and monosyllables, nor Boy bore much resemblance to the original characters as conceived by Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose novels portrayed both the apeman, Lord Greystoke, and his son, Jack "Korak" Clayton, as cultivated and articulate. Burroughs, however, complained all the way to the bank.In the eight Tarzan films he made, from the age of seven to 16, the curly-haired Sheffield followed Weissmuller through the Culver City backlot jungle in California (amplified by stock shots), swimming, vine-swinging and imitating the famous apeman cry. Like Weissmuller, Sheffield, who had a physical grace and a carefully arranged loincloth, had to cope with a variety of wild animals, revolting natives and dastardly white adventurers.Sheffield was born in Pasadena, California, the son of British-born Reginald Sheffield, who had also been a child actor in films, credited as Eric Desmond. His American mother, Louise, was a Vassar College graduate with a liberal arts education who loved books and lectured widely. In 1938, aged seven, Sheffield appeared in Los Angeles in the role of Pud, the juvenile lead of the sentimental Paul Osborn play On Borrowed Time, before taking over the part for a short period on Broadway. In the same year, he played Napoleon's small son in The Man On the Rock, in MGM's Historical Mysteries series of short films.It was Weissmuller who picked Sheffield for the role of Boy out of 300 applicants. Weissmuller, whom Sheffield called Big John, "was like a father to me. He was always looking out for me. We worked with a lot of live animals, and a lot of times, when they got tired, the animals would get feisty. There was this one big chimp who got pretty mad one day and was about to bite me while we were on the set. But Big John stuck his leg between me and the chimp, and he was the one who was bitten."Boy plays an important role in Tarzan's Secret Treasure (1941), when he discovers some gold and is captured by evil natives before being rescued by Tarzan and his elephants. Unusually, Boy befriends a young African lad, one of the few black people to say something more than "Yes, Bwana!" in the films. The last of the MGM Tarzan films with Weissmuller, O'Sullivan and Sheffield was Tarzan's New York Adventure (1942), which transplanted the trio from the never-never jungle to the harsh realities of Manhattan, where Boy is held, having been kidnapped.In 1942, RKO acquired the Tarzan franchise, as well as the services of Weissmuller and Sheffield. O'Sullivan left, citing boredom, to be replaced by Brenda Joyce. Boy, who had always called O'Sullivan "Mother", addressed Joyce as "Jane". "With Maureen I related more to Jane as a child," Sheffield recalled. "Then I became old enough to notice how attractive Brenda was."The first RKO feature, Tarzan Triumphs (1943), struck a topical note, pitting Tarzan against a gang of Nazi agents. He declared "Now Tarzan Make War", an unusually verbose utterance, though he might have said, "Now Tarzan Make Bs", because of the diminished production values. After Tarzan's Desert Mystery (1943), Tarzan and the Amazons (1945), Tarzan and the Leopard Woman (1946) and Tarzan and the Huntress (1947), Sheffield, by then a big Boy, was dropped by the studio.Monogram, the Poverty Row studio, picked him up for the series of quickie movies based on the books about Bomba, the Jungle Boy, written in the 1920s and 30s under the nom de plume Roy Rockwood. Sheffield appeared in 12 of them, starting with Bomba, the Jungle Boy (1949) and ending with Lord of the Jungle (1955), all directed by Ford Beebe, splicing generous stock footage from the 1930 documentary Africa Speaks into each film. The almost identical plots usually included Bomba rescuing a young woman from some beast, animal or human.At the age of 24, Sheffield retired from show business to study for a business degree at the University of California, Los Angeles, and invested his jungle money in real estate. He later spent many years working as a representative for the Santa Monica Seafood Company.He is survived by his wife, Patty, whom he married in 1959, two sons and a daughter.• Johnny Sheffield (Jon Matthew Sheffield Cassan), actor, born 11 April 1931; died 15 October 2010United StatesRonald Berganguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |