This Friday, “Ender’s Game” — based on New York Times best-selling science fiction novel of the same name will hit the big screen, boasting a cast that includes Sir Ben Kingsley and Harrison…
So I screened “Gravity” earlier this week. Yes, I thought the cinematography was excellent and yes it definitely delivered on the thrills and chills. But…
Richard Matheson, a prolific and influential writer of fantasy, horror and science fiction novels, has died at the age of 87, according to news reports. Many of his works have been adapted for TV and cinema, and Stephen King has often cited him as the single biggest influence on his own work. Like King, Matheson sent shivers down the spines of readers and viewers for decades with stories like The Incredible Shrinking Man and I Am Legend . He also penned the story and screenplay for one of Steven Spielberg’s most effective films, Duel , and 16 installments of TV’s The Twilight Zone . For Richard Matheson, horror was to be found potentially everywhere: battlefields, suburban streets, a cellar, an aircraft cabin. Even a library. Matheson was born in Allendale, N.J., to Norwegian parents, and raised up in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he first set his heart on a musical career. An avid appetite for fantasy soon sparked his imagination and fired his creativity: he was only eight when his stories appeared in a local newspaper. Among other influences, he was transfixed by seeing Dracula at a local cinema and by his teens had the idea for the vampire story I Am Legend . R.I.P.
Everything is connected in Cloud Atlas , a few things more directly than others: actor Jim Sturgess portrays one heroic, kind-hearted soul through its evolution from a seafaring 19th century lawyer to a Korean freedom fighter in the futuristic Neo Seoul, many lifetimes (and some controversy-courting Asian make-up) later. When he first read the script, adapted from David Mitchell’s novel by Lana & Andy Wachowski and Tom Tykwer , Sturgess understandably had some questions. For starters: Why? “I had a million questions,” Sturgess admitted in a chat with Movieline about Cloud Atlas , which required him to play multiple characters — including the sci-fi hero Hae-Joo Chang, disguised under make-up that set critics abuzz — linked by the same soul. “Like, why would you want me to play an Asian man in your film? What reason did they have — and was that going to be okay?” The very idea of eternal souls traveling from one mortal identity to the next forms the backbone of Cloud Atlas , which waves away those raised eyebrows fairly quickly. Many of the cast play against gender, ethnicity, and even age in the film, though the person underneath always remains crucially recognizable. In the film’s Neo Seoul segment, set in the year 2144, Sturgess turns in some of his finest work to date — nearly unrecognizable under his futuristic Asian make-up, and the better for it — as Chang, a determined rebel operative who falls for his clone charge ( Doona Bae ) and helps her change the fate of humanity. Sturgess spoke with Movieline about his Cloud Atlas soul, the extended Spaghetti Western-style fight scene that didn’t make the final film, his first outing as a bona fide action star, his upcoming sci-fi romance Upside Down , and Electric Slide , an ’80s-set true crime tale by first time feature director Tristan Patterson ( Dragonslayer ) that he’s filming now in Los Angeles. When Cloud Atlas first came to you, when you first read the script, did you feel an instant connection to the material? Did you think, ‘This role must be mine’? It was kind of weird, actually. I was sent the script and was told they were maybe interested in me to play these two parts, Adam Ewing and Chang, which was pretty confusing. I didn’t understand what it was all about. So I read the script — it was while I was shooting another film so it was pretty rare, normally you’re so focused on what you’re doing that you don’t really read other scripts — but it arrived, and it was sort of just sitting in my hotel room where I was filming, and it just said “Andy Wachowski & Lana Wachowski & Tom Tykwer,” and I thought, this looks interesting. Eventually I couldn’t help but to just have a little peek, and I ended up reading the whole script. Then I met with Andy and Lana who came to London and they asked if it was something I’d be interested in doing. They hadn’t chosen me, I guess they were meeting other people, but we just had a meeting about the ideas. I had a million questions. Like, why would you want me to play an Asian man in your film? What reason did they have — and was that going to be okay? That is an interesting and important question with your portrayal of Hae-Joo Chang — one I think the film itself answers as it explores the boundaries of identity. I hope so. When it first came out that Cloud Atlas would be blurring the lines of ethnicity, the internet had some very heated discussions. Rightly so. I totally understand where it comes from. But yeah, you don’t get the full picture unless you watch the film, so just to get it from the trailer or the images that were put online could be jarring for some people. Which I understand. What were some of the bigger questions you initially had for Lana and Andy? I was just like, ‘Explain to me why I would be playing this character,’ and they explained to me the idea of the souls — that whoever was to play Adam Ewing, it was necessary, absolutely necessary, that that soul develops into the Hae-Joo Chang story. Because essentially they’re telling very similar stories, just in different paths, and Hae-Joo Chang is a progression of a soul, like Adam Ewing, who made very unconscious decisions of human kindness because it was in his make up to know right from wrong. But he had no idea he would change the course of human history. Then there’s someone like Hae-Joo Chang, who is battling the same idea of repression but in a more futuristic landscape but making very clear conscious decisions; he knows what he will do and that what he will achieve with Sonmi will alter the course of human existence. I like the idea of approaching it as an actor playing a soul through multiple lifetimes rather than simply individual characters. And there was a reason for absolutely everything. That’s what was so exciting. It wasn’t just, we want you to play this because it will be cool — no, this is the reason, this is your journey of your soul and this is how it maps out, what it represents. And, you know, Tom Hanks’ represents something very different, and Halle’s character represents something very different for her. Tom Hanks said he had a lot of fun trying to kill you. I know he did, I was there! [Laughs] I didn’t have so much fun having him try to kill me each day. He’s a force of nature, that guy. It was amazing just to meet him and work with him. How did you feel about becoming, in Cloud Atlas ‘s Neo Seoul segment, a bona fide action star for the first time — and not only that, but a Wachowski action star? It felt pretty cool, I’ve got to say! There were moments, little “pinch me” moments, just standing there clutching a gun, flying a space motorbike, knowing you were being looked after by the Wachowskis. They did make you look pretty cool. Or maybe that was you. [Laughs] No, it was all them! But it was cool knowing it could be such a sci-fi experience within a bigger film. It was just a piece of a bigger picture. Doona Bae is such a revelation in Cloud Atlas , partly because we haven’t seen her before in an American film and speaking English but also because when you think of this film, the idea of a relative unknown stealing the spotlight from the famous Hollywood “movie stars” falls right in line with the larger themes. How did you two develop your onscreen chemistry, that connection that binds your characters? I was really nervous to work with her because I was just told that she was a Korean actress who spoke very limited English. You would be amazed at how much her English has progressed since we first met. I’m so proud of her that she could do a press junket really not even using a translator. But we met and even though there was a huge language barrier, we got on instantly. Within five minutes of meeting I knew we were going to get on really well, because she’s got an awesome sense of humor. And the language barrier almost brought us closer together, in a weird way. Instead of being able to talk, we had to sort of try to make each other laugh a lot because it was our only way of connecting. So we’d just mess around most of the time. [Laughs] We grew really close. And you know, it’s about the process of making a film. I grew very protective of her in a strange way — she was so out of her regular comfort zone and she was all on her own, didn’t speak much English at all, and she was in a foreign city… I sort of felt duty-bound to look after her a little bit. We just had a lot of fun. You got a chance to play around with a Scottish accent in one of the film’s more broadly comical scenes, in which you actually get to smash Hugo Weaving over the head during a bar fight. That was cool! They cut that scene down a lot, actually. I mean, I understood why they had to. We actually rehearsed this giant kind of Spaghetti Western bar fight, and there were whole scenes where I was doing shots of whiskey and punching someone, then doing another shot of whiskey and punching someone. I was throwing people over my head! But obviously, it’s a big four-hour movie and they had to start shaving it down. Maybe the eventual director’s cut or extended cut will have all four hours intact so we can see this fight. I hope so! It was fun. I liked doing it. As it happens you have another science fiction romance story coming out — Upside Down , with Kirsten Dunst . What do you think it is that’s drawn you to sci-fi and to so many romantic figures of late? Each choice is sort of a reaction to the last thing you’ve made, and I had just done a film called The Way Back , which was a grueling, really bleak and difficult shoot — it was life-changing and amazing in so many different ways, but it was tough. It was all outdoors, no studio work. No comfort. We were out in the mountains of Bulgaria and the deserts of the Sahara, and it was really, really hard work. So the next script, I didn’t want to do anything like that at all. I’d just had that experience and I thought, what can I do that’s completely opposite to that? Then Upside Down kind of landed on my lap and it was this great, fun love story with this great idea of these two worlds, very much a CGI film but in a cool and artistic kind of way. So I thought, cool — I’ll go for that. I’m a fan of Kirsten Dunst and I knew she was going to be playing the girl, so I was really excited that they asked me to do that. I’m not necessarily drawn to science fiction stuff — I guess One Day was very much a love story, but the draw of that was to play one character that you’d stay with over 20 years, and I thought the character of Dexter was interesting. You seem like something of a natural born romantic. [Laughs] Maybe, I don’t know! There’s another project you’re about to start; how would you describe Electric Slide ? [The film, about Eddie Dodson — the ” New York Yankees Bandit ” — was previously set to star Ewan McGregor .] It’s a film called Electric Slide with a first time director called Tristan Patterson — it’s a true story, and set in the 1980s. It’s a cool period! I have to grow a mustache for it, that’s why I have the beard. Totally ‘80s, in a cool way though. Hopefully it’ll look great. I get to rob some banks! Previously: Korean Star Doona Bae On Sonmi-451 And Her Crossover Journey To ‘Cloud Atlas’ Read more on Cloud Atlas , in theaters Friday . Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
You’ll hear much of the movie stars and familiar faces that pop up again and again in Tom Tykwer and Lana and Andy Wachowski ‘s sprawling, ambitious Cloud Atlas , from Tom Hanks to Halle Berry to frequent Wachowski Starship performer Hugo Weaving. But the beating heart of the film belongs to Korean actress Doona Bae, who makes her English language debut as the luminous Sonmi-451, a genetically-engineered “fabricant” whose fierce humanity and love for a freedom fighter ( Jim Sturgess ) will change the future. Like Sonmi-451, Bae’s world opened up with an unexpected offer from a stranger. A successful model and actress in her native South Korea, she starred in Park Chan-Wook’s Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Boon Jong-Ho’s The Host — two of the most popular Korean crossover hits of the last decade, although the humble Bae is still surprised to hear that American audiences may have seen her work. Courted for the role of Sonmi-451 by the Wachowskis themselves, Bae won the part, then took a crash course in English to film her scenes. Bae’s Sonmi-451 (her name a nod to Fahrenheit 451 courtesy of author David Mitchell) inhabits the futuristic world of Neo Seoul circa 2144, where she’s broken out of capitalist enslavement by Hae-Joo Chang (Sturgess), a rebellion operative. Although the actress, like her castmates, portrays multiple characters through the film’s nested plots (including a pre-Civil War Caucasian belle with freckles and a hoop skirt), Bae commands the screen in one of the most transfixing performances of the year every time the film alights back on her ethereal Sonmi. Movieline spoke with the eloquent, soft-spoken Bae in Los Angeles about her journey with Cloud Atlas and the childhood dream of traveling stateside that she couldn’t follow then, but is living now. How did you first meet the Wachowskis and hear about the vision they and Tom Tykwer had for Cloud Atlas ? They just called me! It was weird because I had no American agent at the time, and I didn’t even have a manager in Korea. I was in between managers, so it was hard to find me. [Laughs] But I got a call from my Korean friend, the film director Pil-Sung Yim [ Doomsday Book ], and he said, “Doona, some famous Hollywood filmmakers want to send you a script – do you want to read it?” I said, “Yes, of course!” I got the script and I found, “Oh my god – this is Lana and Andy Wachowski and Tom Tykwer, this must be amazing.” After you got the script, what happened next? I did some auditions and sent in a self-taped recording – my older brother recorded it, and I just read the Sonmi part at home. Which scenes did you record? The scenes with the Archivist in the interrogation room, and one with Chang after I see the slaughterhouse. Two scenes. Then we met each other in Chicago and had camera tests. Then I got the part. [Laughs] It was like a dream. I’m still dreaming. Were you already interested in doing English-language films or attempting to find Hollywood movies to cross over with before Cloud Atlas came along? Actually, no. I wasn’t looking for any parts – if so, I would have learned English earlier. I think if so, I would have prepared. But I thought it might not be possible. Here, science fiction and foreign film fans have seen your work – Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and The Host in particular played well stateside – so it felt like it would make sense for you to make that move. Really? I haven’t thought about it. Actually, I wasn’t ready, I think – but I worked hard. I worked hard on the language. My favorite subject was English and I wanted to study English abroad when I was young, when I was a kid, but my mom said “No, it’s too dangerous to go abroad by yourself.” So I gave up. Now I’m learning English. I’ve been learning English in London for six months. Jim [Sturgess] says your English has improved quite impressively, and fast. Oh, thank you Jim! So sweet. Had the Wachowskis seen your film Air Doll ? Your character follows a slightly similar path to Sonmi’s. Yes! When I first met Lana and Andy on Skype, I was so curious about it. “How do you know me?” I asked. [Laughs] And Lana said, “We saw Air Doll and The Host and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance .” “Oh, Air Doll !” I see. There is some connection between the two characters. Sonmi has such a big arc – she changes so much, from being naïve and childlike at the beginning of her story to becoming such a powerful and intelligent woman. That’s exactly what I think of her, actually. I like Sonmi because she has both purity and innocence and at the same time she’s got such a strength. When you were playing her, did you feel a moment in her journey when you felt like she changed the most on her way to becoming who she would be? Actually I don’t study the script – I didn’t analyze anything, I just emptied myself and felt Sonmi, let her into my heart. So when I first saw Yoona-939 die, it was a big shock. It was like I realized something at that time. Also when I met Chang and saw the slaughterhouse – it was gradual. There are so many actors in this cast, but beyond Jim who you spent most of your time with, who did you bond with the most ? Ben [Whishaw] . We became good friends. We actually had no scenes with each other but personally we had a good time – and actually, I was very lonely because I went to Berlin by myself, on my own. I was lonely and a little bit depressed and stressed, and Ben was so sweet. He cheered me up. I’ve got some good energy from him. You recently starred in As One , a film about a Korean table tennis team. Did you ever challenge Susan Sarandon to a match? Oh, not yet! She’s got a ping pong club in New York City, I want to go there! I trained for six months with my left hand, so I can play ping pong with both hands. I should challenge her. I can beat her! Read more on Cloud Atlas , which opens Friday . Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Just the words South Central will conjure up an image of mean streets and gangs, even by people who don’t live in Los Angeles. The neighborhood is infamous for its hardened criminals and its gang-banger imagery has permeated the popular culture everywhere. Director David Ayer returns to the neighborhood he knows well in his latest film End of Watch , starring Jake Gyllenhaal (who is also an executive producer) and Michael Peña who give gripping performances as LAPD cops Brian Taylor and Mike Zavala tackling a better armed group of very tough group – both guys and gals. Ayer grew up in the neighborhood and knows the people he’s brought to the big screen well. South Central was the setting for his first directorial feature, Harsh Times back in 2005. And LAPD cops were at the heart of his 2008 pic Street Kings . Ayer told ML that he initially wanted to move away from the cop-crime scenario after working on those films, but headed back to the genre even as he was trying to talk himself out of it. In the feature that opens wide Friday, Gyllenhaal and Peña play LAPD officers Brian Taylor and Mike Zavala. The action plays out on screen through the P.O.V. of hand-held cameras implanted on police officers with more footage “shown” by gang members, surveillance cameras, dish cams and citizen-caught images in the line of fire. While there are moments peppered throughout the feature showing moments of levity between the their characters that prompted outbursts of laughter during the film’s premiere in Toronto, the scenes quickly turn to present a mosaic of dark violent streets, human trafficking, gang confrontation and a barrage of shoot-outs. Just try and fall asleep in this movie – aint gonna happen… David Ayer chatted with ML the day after the premiere of End of Watch in Toronto the other week and gave shared why he decided to return to the cop story, they unique visual style he’s going for in the pic, and just how real all the seemingly outrageous dramas the two officers face in the film are… [ Related: Jake Gyllenhaal’s Life-Changing End Of Watch Prep: ‘Someone Was Murdered In Front Of Me’ and End Of Watch Star Michael Peña Sees Racial Barriers Coming Down In Hollywood ] I heard you wrote the script for End of Watch in six days, how did that play out? Yes, I did. It just kind of exploded out of me. It was six days by way of twenty years, you know what I mean? It’s a world I’ve spent a lot of time in. I grew up in South Central L.A. I have a lot of friends in law enforcement, so a lot of things that happen in the script happened to a close friend of mine. I have been writing down stories he told me. So the challenge of writing this story lead me to do this pseudo-documentary style that makes it really natural and not just using the usual story landmarks that you might intuitively feel. Were there certain documentaries that informed some of your style choices for End of Watch ? This one friend of mine takes cameras to work and guess what – he films things just like we all do with our phones etc anywhere. It can be riveting and it seemed like a fantastic device to tell a story, but at the same time, the “found footage” aspect can become a bit tedious if it’s not from a place of total reality. It can become like a gimmick and the allusion alters. So we brought in conventional coverage to augment that and the movie is a hybrid. There was a point where you went away from telling the Cop Stories, what made you do that and what brought you back? I really want to direct. Whenever you want to start over in Hollywood, you have to start from the bottom. I did Street Kings and it was for a studio which is a different process as a director. I tried mounting up some projects afterward including a science fiction movie and nothing was working out. The surest way I could get back on set was to do another cop movie. A friend of mine in the studios said I should do a found-footage cop [story] but I thought that I should not do that. But as I was talking myself out of it, I talked myself into it. But you didn’t want to do it from the “corrupt cop” viewpoint? No, the corrupt cop story is so freaking played out. I mean, it’s so 2003. The real challenge becomes, if you don’t have that dramatic engine of the corruption, what is the dramatic engine? What is the story? I made this movie about the friendship and the journey these guys are going through. The bad guy stuff is sort of an appendage to that story. They’re not investigators solving crimes, they’re just guys doing their jobs who end up way over their heads and that’s how it is for real cops. There’s a whole world they’re not privy too, yet they keep running into it, they keep sighting the shark fin in the water. That’s the one thing that struck me – that great rapport between Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña’s characters. There’s of course all this fantastic crazy tough shit going on in this film with the shoot-outs and grim discoveries that make for great viewing, but there’s also these hilarious moments of banter between their characters that really draw you into their lives. To write the way people talk and not just make movie dialog and to get them to pull off a breezy, natural style together and live in the history of that friendship was the real challenge as a director. It’s ironic because what appears so easy is insanely difficult as a filmmaker and insanely difficult as an actor. And it took the three of us a long time in the trenches to get them to the point to pull it off. My favorite scenes in the movie are the two guys in the car talking. Did you have a regimen in mind for Jake and Michael off the bat in order to get them to be believable cops in the lead-up to the actual shoot? A good friend of mine does martial arts training and what that does is get the mindset down of hitting people and being hit. Often it can be hard to override the instinct of not hitting someone. You have to overcome that. You have to have that ability and understanding of violence to become a cop and it starts to change everything including your body language. And there was firearms training. They were taught by a 35 year-veteran LAPD-SWAT officer who gave them training in LAPD by the numbers shooting style. We went to the same LAPD outlets to get their equipment and uniforms because I wanted everything to be incredibly accurate. And they went on an incredible number of ride-alongs with officers and I wanted them to go with a number of different agencies so they can see just how different the LAPD itself is. I think they were shocked by the cultural differences between those departments. I had an idea of a program in mind, but obviously logistics and demands evolved. I think at first they were cursing me, but once they realized they had the real skills, they appreciated it and it just made it all the more real on set. I think audiences everywhere and even in L.A. may be surprised that the Mexican drug cartels have such direct operations in the U.S. as this movie suggests. Obviously everyone knows they’re involved with drug trafficking across the border, but I think people don’t know there’s such a direct connection to day-today operations on the U.S. side of the border. Yeah, they control the wholesale of drugs in the United States and human trafficking. Nothing moves across that border without their permission. They’ll give illegal immigrants drugs and will say, ‘you’re now a drug mule.’ It’s a busy organization and they’re incredibly efficient – drugs, human trafficking, weapons. Everything that’s happening in the movie is happening now. Friends of mine in the department pull over cartel runners all the time and do multi-kilo seizures. I know someone working in narcotics just last week who took a huge haul of cartel drugs off the street. They’re here, they’re operating…I feel like people have no idea that there’s such a huge presence of the cartels not only in Southern California, but throughout the United States, even in the northern part of the country. How were you able to get under the skin in portraying the gang members in the movie? It’s a distinct subculture and it would be very easy to mis-represent that… People not from L.A. and are not familiar with the gangsters there will look at something like this and think they’re almost cartoonish, you know? But that’s how they role. This is bang on. [ End of Watch gangster] Lala, played by Yahira Garcia, is unbelievable in the movie. She’s a rapper and was brought up in that neighborhood and her brothers are caught up in the life. And she’s seen some tragic things. And “Demon” played by Richard Cabral is from a multi-generational gang family and just recently got out of it and now working in film. The only one who wasn’t a former gang-banger was Maurice Compte who plays “Big Evil.” He’s incredibly soft-spoken, incredibly smart and such a nice guy and somehow he pulled off this alter-ego “Big Evil” persona out.
People with a strong sartorial sense know the difference between what’s elegant and what’s merely elaborate. It’s not the same in the movie world, where big and overcomplicated is so often mistaken for better, when really it’s only…big and overcomplicated. Ridley Scott ’s Prometheus , designed as a sort-of prequel to the director’s 1979 terror-in-space aria Alien , is elaborate all right. But it’s imaginative only in a stiff, expensive way. Scott vests the movie with an admirable degree of integrity – it doesn’t feel like a cheap grab for our moviegoing dollars – but it doesn’t inspire anything so vital as wonder or fear, either. Prometheus has been one of the most anticipated pictures of the summer, but its lackluster payoff is summed up perfectly by one of its chief characters, a scientist who travels a long way from Earth in the hope of meeting the allegedly superior beings who created us humans: “This place isn’t what we thought it was.” [ Some spoilers follow. ] That character, Elizabeth Shaw ( Noomi Rapace ), is an archeologist who, in one of the movie’s early scenes, circa 2089, stands hand-in-hand with her partner and beau Charlie Holloway (the exquisitely, painfully dull Logan Marshall-Green ) as the two gaze in wonder upon an Earth cave drawing they’ve just discovered. The pictogram shows a couple of unearthly creatures standing tall and pointing at something-or-other. Are they gods who created us, or just random visitors? Shaw thinks they may be the former, and she’s eager for a meet-and-greet. “I think they want us to come and find them,” she says, voicing one of those really bad ideas that make the world of science fiction go ’round. Before long the two have joined a crew of 15 others, all headed to an undisclosed destination in space where they will freely and joyfully act upon yet more bad ideas, including packing a severed alien head into a space baggie and reaching out to touch a slimy tadpole-penis-head thing. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The others aboard the all-too-appropriately named Prometheus include a tall, icy businesswoman named Vickers ( Charlize Theron ), a representative of the corporate behemoth that’s funding the trip; the ship’s captain, Janek (played by the appealing, casual Idris Elba); David ( Michael Fassbender ), an android a la Ian Holm’s character in Alien , who has learned a healthy handful of ancient languages as a way of possibly communicating with whatever godlike forebears the crew may encounter; and a random Asian guy who wanders around idly in the background of a few shots until, inexplicably — mini-spoiler alert — he becomes one of the story’s heroes. (This disposable Asian is played by Benedict Wong, who also appeared in Duncan Jones’ 2011 Moon .) There are a bunch of others – including some dumb geologists/biologists (Rafe Spall and Sean Harris) and a doctory-scientist type (Kate Dickie) – but the cast of Prometheus suggests that 17 crew members on a movie space ship is about 10 too many. (The Nostromo , after all, carried 7, and Scott and writer Dan O’Bannon made it easy to distinguish one from another.) But Prometheus , both ship and movie, is overloaded in every way: Scott and screenwriters Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof have packed the picture full of noble themes, most of them having to do with the way our yearning to understand the unknown jostles uncomfortably against our desire to explain everything through science. “I just want answers, babe,” the logic-mongering Holloway tells the dreamier Shaw, though this is before – and here, take note of another mini-spoiler alert – a wriggly wormlike thing starts poking out of his eyeball. What do Shaw and the others discover on the mysterious planet to which they’ve trekked? They make their way into a cave where the air is actually breathable – they lift off their bubble helmets and take in deep gulps of the stuff, which seems inadvisable, but what the heck? Deep in the cave’s recesses they find a magnificent hallway replete with majestic murals and a large sculpture surrounded by a formation of conga drums covered with sweaty spores. Prometheus features a host of effects designed to make you say, “What the heck?” and yet none of it stirs real curiosity, awe or dread. The crew also encounters, of course, some variations on the magnificent spoodly pinky-gray creatures designed by H.R. Giger for the earlier Alien pictures. Perhaps these thingies are supposed to be bigger, more impressive and more realistic, whatever that might mean. Yet there’s a business-as-usual quality about them, and they herald their presence openly rather than lurk menacingly in the shadows, as if announcing cheerfully, “You expected to see us, and here we are!” That’s not to say there aren’t some lovely effects in Prometheus , including a sequence in which a group of hologram ghosts appear as shimmery dots and dashes of light – they rush toward and through our intrepid explorers, on their way to, or away from, something. But we never find out who they are or what they’re running toward or from. In fact, there are dozens of loose ends in Prometheus , hanging like so many squirmy, dangly tails. Fassbender’s android commits a significant, malicious act for reasons that are never made clear: We know he has no soul, and thus probably no conscience, but his actions seem like the result of some deeply human traits — Scott never bothers to explain. The geography of the ship is carelessly delineated: Creatures show up in one passageway or another – it’s never clear what room or area they’re coming from. One of these slimy, willfully malevolent wrigglers emerges at a significant climactic moment, and it’s unclear whether it’s a random critter or a larger version of a baby we’ve seen earlier – the lapse represents a missed opportunity, a possible means of fleshing out some of the movie’s ideas about the relationship between gods and the creatures they create (or destroy). Scott is trying to make sure Prometheus is about something, and his ideals may have distracted him from the more prosaic task of just getting on with the storytelling. When Brian De Palma presented, with Mission to Mars , a much more passionate, and more narratively sound, version of this sort of interplanetary spiritual idealism, it was treated as a “bad” science fiction movie. Prometheus , on the other hand, is tasteful even in the midst of all its squirm-inducing gross-outs, and that’s a liability: It’s impossible to have tasteful passion. The actors mostly seem lost here: Rapace comes off as a doll-like naïf, pretty but wholly lacking in charisma or even science-fueled ardor. Guy Pearce appears in heavy age makeup which, if you ask me, is a total waste of a perfectly good Guy Pearce. Theron and Fassbender have much more presence: Theron, at least, gets to suit up and fire a flamethrower – the vision of her big bubble-helmeted head perched upon a body that seems to consist mainly of two lily-stem legs is something to behold. And Scott gives Fassbender the quietest, most poetic sequence in the movie: Early in the picture, the robot David wanders the ship while the rest of the crew are still deep in their hypersleep dreams. He busies himself with assorted tasks, and then sits down before a massive wraparound screen, where he watches Lawrence of Arabia with rapturous admiration. David finds a physical, if not spiritual, twin in O’Toole’s T.E. Lawrence, a model for the man he’d like to be, if only he were a man at all. But Scott doesn’t, or can’t, sustain the eerie, resonant beauty of that sequence. Prometheus isn’t a piece of junk. It feels as if Scott has tried very hard to please us, his audience, in an honest if costly way. He surely knows how high the stakes are: With Alien , Scott gave us one of the great science-fiction films of all time, a picture that was at once glorious and austere; when I looked at it recently, I was struck by how wonderfully slow-moving it was, and yet every minute is taut. But Prometheus is a world apart, a far more unwieldy picture that tries hard to defy this new, noisier age of movies and doesn’t have the agility or the suppleness to do so. You can practically hear Prometheus groaning under the weight of its ambitions; it’s a far cry from the sound Scott was going for, the music of the celestial spheres. Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
He’s played cops, a count, Houdini, a time traveler, a king, and even a drag queen, but in this week’s Lockout , Guy Pearce treads new ground as an all-out action hero — not that he necessarily sees things that way. “People used to say that about L.A. Confidential ,” he recalled to Movieline recently in Los Angeles. “They’d go, ‘Wow, so you’re an action hero!’ I’d be like, action hero? It’s a ‘50s film noir!” Even still, after 20+ years of acting, most recently in a string of acclaimed supporting turns (see: The King’s Speech , The Hurt Locker , Animal Kingdom , Mildred Pierce ), it’s only now that Pearce is laying claim to the title, guns blazing. Lockout , unlike even the grittiest and bloodiest of Pearce’s films to date, falls confidently into a cinematic lineage peppered with some of the greatest wisecracking action antiheroes in movies. Like Snake Plisskin, Pearce’s government agent Snow is forced, against his will, into a dangerous solo mission in the sci-fi-tinged near-future: Save the President’s daughter (Maggie Grace, who appeared in producer/writer Luc Besson’s Taken ) from inmates running loose in a maximum security space prison, or face sentencing for a crime he didn’t commit. In the spirit of Han Solo, he winds up falling for his capable charge, with whom he exchanges no shortage of barbed banter. Pearce chatted with Movieline about the Luc Besson -produced Lockout , how his cameo and supporting turns in films like The Hurt Locker are actually more difficult than starring roles, why he’s embarrassed to be congratulated on the success of the Oscar-winning The King’s Speech , the extent of his work in Ridley Scott ‘s Prometheus , and the “odd” character he created for John Hillcoat’s Lawless (formerly known as The Wettest County ). One of the refreshing surprised about Lockout is how funny it is. Was that humor element always there from the start? I think that’s what [co-directors Stephen St. Leger and James Mather], but particularly Stephen – that’s what he wanted from the outset. He said that particularly to me: ‘I want a character that’s funny, I want a film that looks like an action movie, and feels like an action movie, and a character that looks like an action hero, but ultimately I just want him to not care and be funny.’ And I said okay, sure. Snow seems to be borne of a grand tradition of ‘80s and ‘90s action heroes – the wisecracking tough guy antihero. That’s right, and he was a big fan of those films. I think that’s what I found appealing about it because really, as a piece of entertainment, I personally don’t enjoy watching action movies just for the sake of action movies. I’d rather it be either really clever, or at the least amusing. So it’s kind of an interesting story, obviously, but I think the fact that he is amusing and he is irreverent and he doesn’t really care about the President’s daughter was quite funny in itself. I wouldn’t necessarily suggest it’s comedy – but I don’t know how you would categorize this movie. How do you categorize it, do you suppose? It’s definitely got a sarcastic comedic bent to it – or at least, the character does. Well I’m glad that works, if it works. Because you never know, and I never usually do comedies, so you never quite know how much is too much, you know? A fair amount of the set-up evokes Snake Plisskin and Escape from New York – how much of a conscious influence was that film and that character for you? Not at all. You sometimes want to go back and look at all the films that are like the one that you’re making, but in a way I think it’s better not to. You’ve got to be careful you don’t plagiarize something without realizing you’ve done it. I think sometimes by taking those things on so presently and consciously you can also inadvertently copy them more than you want to as well. I know that when we did Mildred Pierce , for example, Kate [Winslet] I think started watching the old movie and after ten minutes said, “I just don’t want to see any more!” Because it can just get in your way. So really it was just about concentrating on the script and talking with Steven a lot – and I’m sure that he was far more conscious of those films than I was. So if I have plagiarized anything, I can blame him. [Laughs] That works, because then it filters down the creative chain… That’s right, and you’re sort of creating your own version of what it is that they’re writing. How would you describe Snow’s attitude toward women? Things even out later in the film but when we first meet him – and when he first meets Maggie Grace’s character – he’s quite rough and rude. He even punches her in the face! So how does Snow feel about women – and how does this movie feel about women? I think he probably exhibits some misogynistic qualities, and some fairly typically clichéd male qualities – but in order, I think, to be put back in his place by a woman. So for the purpose of the film, yes, I don’t particularly admire him. And there was a moment in the film that I really wanted to stay in; they’re in the middle of this crisis and they’re trying to figure out how he’s going to get on the ship, and he’s trying to chat up some girl who works at the space station. So he clearly is very attracted to women, he just doesn’t hear them. But you want him to be able to sort of wake up a little bit, through the film, which is one of Maggie’s abilities in the film – to kind of go, ‘Oy, dumb guy, wake up!’ Would you consider Snow in Lockout to be your first true blue action hero role? I guess so. People used to say that about L.A. Confidential , though. They’d go, ‘Wow, so you’re an action hero!’ I’d be like, action hero? It’s a ‘50s film noir! Is that action? I don’t understand the delineation of genre. I don’t know when something moves from being a horror movie to being an action movie to… so I do not understand the categorization of movies. I know the extreme versions, obviously, but I don’t know how to categorize this film. I don’t know where you would draw the line. I would call this your most action-oriented film. Sure! You’re probably right. It’s funny though, because in every movie you seem to be running around shooting people, getting into fights. So to me, I’ve done it many times before – Count of Monte Cristo , it’s not really an action movie, it’s an adventure movie – but it also has fighting in it… it’s hard to say. Take me back to the decision to take the role and the appeal of working with Luc Besson, doing this kind of film… I was trying to remember what I’d been doing when I met Luc. I met Luc here [in Los Angeles], so I’d just done Hungry Rabbit Jumps , which is now called Seeking Justice . Whoever came up with that title needs to not continue in their job. I’d just done that in New Orleans and I was here having a break, waiting to go to New York to start on Mildred Pierce, and during that break I met with Luc. Often I’ll take something on as a real change from what I’ve just been doing or what I’m about to do, and I think to go from Mildred Pierce , this beautiful ‘30s period drama/TV miniseries with Todd Haynes and Kate Winslet, to go to a futuristic sci-fi, green-screen action-oriented type of thing seemed like a fun kind of change. In Serbia! In Serbia, that’s right! So I sat down with Luc, and I’d not met Luc before, and he gave me an outline of the story. It sounded appealing, I read the script and found it quite funny, and while I was in New York I met Stephen and James and found their attitude about the whole thing to be exactly like what Luc had talked about. Things just seemed to sort of fit. It’s not usually the kind of thing that I pursue, I suppose – you know, action-oriented kinds of films – but I liked the character and where he sat in the middle of all that, just as a variation from things that I had done. How conscious are you now or were you ever of what each project might mean for your career? Well, even if I am conscious at all you still don’t necessarily know if it’s going to work out that way — you still don’t know if a film is made well or not seen, or seen or not made well. You kind of go, well, I have no say over that anyway. So to me I have to just respond to what my internal interests are, I suppose. Like, I wouldn’t have chosen Memento to gain a whole lot of attention and yet Memento has probably gotten me more attention than any other film I’ve ever done. So you never really know what the outcome’s going to be. So I tend not to think about it too much, to be honest. I’ve had discussions; my agent has said, ‘Well, you might want to do this, this is something that might be kind of big, it’s going to be seen by a lot of people,’ and I kind of don’t really hear it, necessarily. I need to understand the character and understand the director. So I’m aware of that stuff but I just don’t know what to do with it. You’ve become well known in recent years for a number of great supporting turns, so to see you step into the spotlight is a welcome change of late. And look, it might have been from my point of view as well, because I had done a lot of cameos and supporting roles and stuff. So to actually be offered something that is carrying a film… but having said that, it can’t just be anything that’s carrying a film, it would have to work for me. It would have to feel real or have some credibility to it, etc. So it’s not just that but I think I probably was interested in doing something that carried the story through. Because it’s kind of frustrating doing cameos and supporting roles, because you never really bond with everybody. And a big part of what you feel of making a movie is the time that you have making the movie. There is the movie itself, but then there is the time you have making the movie, and to just sort of waltz into something and do two weeks and kind of not really learn anybody’s names and then leave – then a year later you go and do the promotion for the movie and you don’t really feel like you were connected to that movie… I mean, people come up to me and go, ‘Oh my God, The Hurt Locker ! Congratulations, incredible! The Hurt Locker , you, fantastic, The Hurt Locker !’ I’m like, I was there for like three days. It’s sort of embarrassing to accept the congratulations. I’m like, Jeremy Renner and Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty were slogging their guts out for months on end – you shouldn’t even be talking to me! So you get something great out of really living the experience with people when you make a film. When you just pop in and out… I had a couple of years there where I just did cameos and supporting roles, and at the end of the year I went, well, I don’t really feel like I did anything this year. You sort of feel like you maybe did a commercial or did an appearance on a talk show, you just did these little one-off quick things that haven’t really absorbed. So it’s fantastic – it’s fantastic – when you get in the trenches with people for three or four months, personally. It’s hard work as well, but then it’s a memorable experience. And that says a lot, I think , about my need to bond with people and my nostalgia. And it also takes me a while to formulate a character, and most of the time you don’t get rehearsals on film so you need a couple of weeks to really get up and running and really feel like you know who this character is. And if you only have two weeks on a movie, you’re sitting on the plane home to Australia going, ‘Still not quite sure that I got King Edward…’
On Sunday, February 26, 2012, I did one of my Q&BA live video chats on Google+ . This one was a little different than usual: it was part of the online convention Dot Con Fest 2012 , celebrating geek life. In honor of that, the topic was “The Science of Science Fiction”. I talked about time travel, faster-than-light travel, Star Trek, Contact, Ringworld, Dyson spheres, artificial gravity, and a lot… Broadcasting platform : YouTube Source : DiscoverMagazine Discovery Date : 27/02/2012 02:02 Number of articles : 2
Festival darling Brit Marling burst onto the scene last summer with the sci-fi indie Another Earth (and will be seen in the upcoming fiscal thriller Arbitrage opposite Richard Gere and Susan Sarandon), but her turn as a mysterious cult leader in this April’s Sound of My Voice is the more impressive introduction to the charismatic up and comer. Hit the jump to watch the first 10 minutes of Sound of My Voice , courtesy of Fox Searchlight, and see for yourself. As seen in the opening 10 minutes, Sound of My Voice follows a couple (Nicole Vicius and Christopher Denham) as they infiltrate a secretive cult, intending to film a documentary exposing its leader as a fraud. But when they meet said leader — in the form of Marling’s Maggie, a young woman who claims to be from the future — they fall deeper in than they ever imagined they would. Sound of My Voice , directed by Zal Batmanglij, is the second of Marling’s Sundance 2011 pics to hit screens following Mike Cahill’s Another Earth ; both were co-written by Marling and screened to acclaim on the festival circuit. Shot on a tiny budget, SOMV pulls off a tremendous amount with very little in the way of the kind of resources available to most science fiction films, and like Another Earth it’s very much an intimate-scale indie that builds a greater sense for the world around it. But between the two — not to invite comparison, but it inevitably happens — SOMV allows Marling to flex her acting muscles with one of the more complex and layered female characters in to come along in a while. That alone will be worth the price of admission come April 27. Fox Searchlight, meanwhile, needs to figure out a way to push SOMV farther than it did Another Earth , which suffered from a lack of clarity in its marketing materials and opened to disappointing box office, even for an admittedly small-scale film with no stars. This first-10-minutes clip is a good start; not only does it draw you in to the plot of SOMV and give you a sense of Batmanglij’s shrewd directing style and the magnetic allure of Marling as Maggie, it also features a handful of “interactive” bonus features that click away to expand on ideas and concepts in the film, including viral clips like this . Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Breaking Sports Video
