Ever wonder what it would be like if the cult classic The Big Lebowksi was written by The Bard himself? Me neither.
But as one of our founders is a Shakespeare nut I thought this might be of some interest to at least one of our readers.
Kevin Bacon may have the ability to relate himself to anybody else within six degrees… but he’s got nothing on colored-old-nice-man Morgan Freeman.
Check out his ascension from a lowly driver all the way up to the Big Guy Upstairs.
(Questionable ladder though… shouldn’t a driver rank higher than an inmate?)
Matthew Inman from The Oatmeal wrote a humorous article with his views on the Twilight phenomenon.
Whether you agree with it or not, it’s definitely worth the read!
You can click here to see it on his site or I’ll post it below the break for those too lazy to click a link.
Great Zeus! Evidently the Muses have been busy in Hollywood, because next year is shaping up to be a mythological movie bonanza.
First up (due February 12) is Chris Columbus’s Percy Jackson & the Olympians: Lightning Thief, based on the first in Rick Riordan’s series of children’s books about a 12-year-old demigod. Then on March 26, Incredible Hulk director Louis Leterrier takes on Clash of the Titans, a remake of the 1981 mythfest with Sam Worthington stepping into Harry Hamlin’s sandals as Perseus and computer-generated giant scorpions filling in for Ray Harryhausen’s unmistakable stop-motion versions.
The question is, can box-office lightning strike twice in less than two months? There are some serious names in the Clash cast, but my money’s on Percy over Perseus. Harry Potter meets the gods and monsters of Greek mythology? You don’t need the pitch meeting to know that’s an irresistible idea.
Dear Michael Clarke Duncan,
Please let me know when you will allow me to return to you.
I miss you. I hope you miss me too.
Sincerely yours,
Your Dignity.
All washboard abs, set jaws and steely eyes, the 300 Spartans of 300 come off like the toughest sumbitches ever. Which is fitting, because their historical counterparts probably were—and none more so than their king, Leonidas, who stood with them against the vastly larger Persian army in the Battle of Thermopylae, perhaps the most famous last stand in recorded history.
Leonidas is played by Scottish actor Gerard Butler. Butler’s accent sounds more tartan than Spartan, but with his bulked-up frame topped off by an authentic ancient Greek beard and helmet-head haircut, he looks like a statue of Heracles come to life. He’s the linchpin of the entire film, and after the bleach-blond unbelievability of Colin Farrell’s Alexander the Great and Brad Pitt’s Achilles, he’s impressively convincing.
With Superman Returns, director Bryan Singer pulls off a super-rescue of his own: saving a 28-year-old film franchise from campy, crappy irrelevance.
The challenge was considerable. Superman may be the epitome of the comic-book superhero, but it’s always been the idea of Superman that has captivated people. Every realization of Superman—from DC Comics to television to film—has come up against the same problem: how do you make him interesting? With his godlike powers and goody-goody attitude, he’s somewhere between Christ and the guileless hero of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. He can sustain one great film (1978’s Superman), and maybe one good sequel (1980’s Superman II). But when the ideas run out, he ends up becoming the unwitting butt of the joke, a caricature of goodness forced to act as straight man to, say, Richard Pryor (in the wretched 1983 sequel, Superman III). And by 1987’s Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, when he’s being taunted by Jon Cryer while duking it out with a nuclear-powered adversary, all we’re left with is John Williams’ brilliant score to remind us of the original idea of Superman. So with this remake coming 20 years later, the question that comes to mind is, “Does the world still need Superman?”
How many times have you seen someone on the news (or more often on Oprah) telling everyone to live for the moment? Maybe it’s a cancer survivor, or maybe someone who has narrowly escaped death at the hands of a disgruntled ex, but the message is always the same: they never realized how important life’s little moments were. Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain is like one of those people, except less sincere. As both a love story and a meditation on life and death, it’s a film full of intellectual ideas in search of an emotional heart.
The Fountain stars Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz as what appears to be the same couple in a triptych of stories spanning 1,000 years. The first story, which takes place in about the year 1500, is about a conquistador who goes to the New World to save Queen Isabella of Spain from a bloodthirsty inquisitor bent on overthrowing the monarchy. In the second story, a modern-day drug researcher discovers a miracle drug while trying to find a cure for his wife’s brain tumour before it kills her. The third story is a beautifully trippy but mystifying bit of futuristic weirdness in which Jackman’s shaven-headed spacefarer zooms toward a dying star in a bubble-ship just big enough for him and a gnarled old tree that may or may not contain Weisz’s dormant body. Mixed into a nonlinear narrative, these three stories have elements that seem to overlap (and they have endings that could be considered similar), but we’re never quite clear about why or how.
If you wanted to grossly oversimplify what Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain is about, you could say it’s about two gay cowboys in a straight world. But once you’ve actually seen it, you won’t want to simplify it at all. One of the main reasons this is such a great film is that its love-story themes are as vast and as open as the wilderness settings where a lot of the story happens. To fixate on the film’s most obvious plot point—that the lovers are both men—is to miss the point entirely.
In fact, even calling the film “Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain” is too simple. Though some of its bigger themes of love, loss and regret in a too-rigid society are reminiscent of previous Lee films like Sense and Sensibility and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Brokeback owes its modern-Western authenticity and literary texture to a pair of Pulitzer-winning writers: Larry McMurtry, who co-wrote the screenplay with frequent collaborator Diana Ossana; and Annie Proulx, who wrote the original short story.
Walk the Line opens in Folsom Penitentiary, where Johnny Cash recorded his best-selling 1968 live album in front of a rowdy crowd of hollering, foot-stomping inmates. It’s an appropriate beginning to the story of a man who—in this film at least—spent much of his early life in a prison of self-loathing caused by his older brother’s early death and his daddy’s disapproval.
Whatever personal demons may or may not have driven the Man in Black until his death September 12, 2003, one thing is clear in both this film and in Cash’s real life: June Carter was as much his salvation as the God that Cash praised in his gospel songs.
In a lot of ways, June Carter is also the salvation of this good-but-not-great movie. Played with verve and steel by Reese Witherspoon (who grew up in Nashville), she’s more interesting than Joaquin Phoenix’s Cash—something her real-life counterpart probably was too, despite the man’s towering persona.