Thor only knows

Special effects seem to muffle rather than quicken [director Kenneth] Branagh's interest, and, besides, there is no CGI in existence that could cope with the difference between [Natalie] Portman, a practicing sylph, and [Chris] Hemsworth, who looks to me like six and a half feet of corned beef. At one point, he takes his shirt off, and she stands beside him, a bit dazed, with the top of her head not quite parallel with his nipples. At the end - and I am giving away no secrets here - they kiss. But how? Is he holding her up, with her little toes kicking his kneecaps? Thor only knows.

- Anthony Lane reviews Thor, New Yorker, 16 May 2011

Clockwork cricket

"Well, I've got my cricket gear in the car. We could try that" - Malcolm McDowell explains the inspiration behind one of the most iconic outfits in movie history, the white suits and codpieces worn by Alex and his Droogs in A Clockwork Orange. McDowell recalled this week how he and the film's director Stanley Kubrick were struggling to come up with a costume for the lead character.

"I was over at his house, you know, looking for stuff to do. And I didn't like anything there, really. They had a big box of hats, some with feathers. I thought that was pretty lame. So I went to the car and got my cricket gear. And he says, 'Oh yeah, I love the white.' And so I put it on. And Stanley goes, 'Oh put the protector on the outside.' So I wore the box on the outside like a codpiece. He goes, 'This could be like the middle ages. I like this look.' And that's how the look of the Droogs came; because I had my cricket stuff in the back of my car."

- Andy Bull, The Spin cricket newsletter, Guardian, 24 May 2011

Just say no to bow ties

"It's the truth that you should never trust anybody who wears a bow tie. Cravat's supposed to point down to accentuate the genitals. Why'd you wanna trust somebody whose tie points out to accentuate his ears?"


- Doc Wilson, in David Mamet's State and Main, 2000

Potentially dangerous levels of Katherine Heigl exposure

'We understand that exposure to this amount of Katherine Heigl is dangerous for anybody, even somebody who doesn't hate her...' - Sony Pictures


In Freak Accident, 34 Katherine Heigl Films Released At Once

"I'm a hypocrite, but not an idiot"

From Film 2011's questionnaire slot, Stephen Merchant offers the movie that he "just doesn't get":

The Lord of the Rings trilogy. I just can't get into it - I'm bored out of my mind. Someone made me watch the director's cuts - I think it goes on for nine or ten hours. You can get to Tokyo in that time! And there's just this endless journey that goes on and on and on for hours. And he destroys the ring and you think "brilliant", and then you go, "well how are they going to get home?", and a giant bird turns up and they fly home. Where was the bird at the beginning?!

But if Peter Jackson offers me a role in any of his films obviously I will take it. I'm not an idiot. I'm a hypocrite... but not an idiot.

- Film 2011 with Claudia Winkleman, BBC1, 2 March 2011

Rosamund Pike spices up the Baftas

From last night's Bafta ceremony in London, actor Rosamund Pike falls victim to an autocue fault and stumbles perilously close to revealing the name of an award winner before the nominees have even been announced. Great edge-of-the-seat television, but Pike is a properly savvy actor with a good head on her shoulders, so it just goes to show that mishaps like this can happen to anyone under that sort of pressure. And Mr Dominic Cooper, you weren't much help!

Rhyming Sigourney with horny

Simon Pegg still can't believe he's appearing in a film alongside his childhood crush Sigourney Weaver.

The Alien star plays a "crackpot" woman in the Brit's new alien comedy Paul, and meeting her for the first time brought back plenty of adolescent memories.

Pegg reveals he was so smitten with Weaver, he once wrote a sexy poem about her.

He says, "I’ve fancied her since I was 10. I actually wrote a poem about her at university. She found out about it. She asked me if I could remember it and I pretended I didn't. I rhymed Sigourney with horny."

- IMDB.com, 9 February 2011

Kermode on The Dilemma

The BBC's Mark Kermode reviews Ron Howard's The Dilemma, which I saw in a pre-release audience appraisal preview back in October. Unsurprisingly, he likes it even less than I did, saying that it's '...not so much filtered by as infested by Vince Vaughn'.

The least plausible science fiction movie of all time

Nasa scientists have named John Cusack's blockbuster 2012 as the most "absurd" sci-fi film of all time.

Experts at America's National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) and Science and Entertainment Exchange have put together a list of the least plausible science fiction movies ever made, and the big budget 2009 picture came top.

The film, which depicted Earth besieged by natural disasters, featured ahead of two more 'end-of-the-world' movies - 2003's The Core and 1998's Armageddon.

Donald Yeomans, head of Nasa's Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous mission, says of 2012, "It's absurd. The film-makers took advantage of public worries about the so-called end of the world as apparently predicted by the Mayans of Central America, whose calendar ends on December 21, 2012.

"The agency is getting so many questions from people terrified that the world is going to end in 2012 that we have had to put up a special website to challenge the myths. We have never had to do this before."

Staff at the organisation also compiled a list of the top 10 most realistic sci-fi films, with 1997's Gattaca, starring Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman as space agency workers, winning the highest praise from the scientists. Nasa experts also named dinosaur movie Jurassic Park and Jodie Foster's Contact among the most realistic sci-fi films.

- Imdb.com, 3 January 2011

Moviegoers' Code of Conduct

The BBC's Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo surveyed their listeners for the basic rules of decent and courteous behaviour in cinemas. Here, then, is the bottom line. Read and obey, bag rustlers, phone-checkers and mutterers! (You bastards!)

Whales stuck in traffic

What do Cher and Christina Aguilera share, other than top billing in this double diva musical? Foghorn vocals, for a start: a large part of Burlesque sounds like whales stuck in traffic. Immobile faces, also: Cher's has been sanded into death mask perfection, while Aguilera's seems simply glazed with vacuity, frozen in a semi-pout, half-human, half-dolly, unshakably impassive beneath a permanently sunlit bouffant.

- Catherine Shoard, Guardian, 25 November 2010

Oh Superman!

'Time to clear up and clean up before Danny Aykroyd, Rosie Shuster and friend Margot Kidder drop in ... 'What a well-vacuumed house,' Danny comments. Danny and Rosie have come over on Laker's Skytrain, and say it's grim but cheap.

Margot Kidder is playing Lois Lane in the Superman movie (which is still shooting, over a year after they pulled out of Shepperton).

Apparently most of her work involves hanging in a harness alongside Christopher Reeve whilst people do strange things to them. They have to fight an eagle on the top of the Empire State Building. The first 'eagle' they got was from Taiwan and looked so un-eagle-like, with a funny red crop on its head, that it was sent home and it was decided instead to use large falcons. The falcons would only fly after chicken bones, so Margot and Superman were suspended, with wind machine blowing them, between one man hurling falcons towards another man holding chicken legs.

As Superman perspired heavily, leaving tell-tale patches around the armpits of his costume, one member of the crew was standing by to blow-dry his armpits.

The length and design of Superman's cock was the subject of much controversy, which culminated in Superman appearing at a photo-session with a large metal dong down his tights. Margot said she got so fed up with this thing digging into her leg that she took to flicking it with her fingernail, causing a light but noticeable metallic ting every time she touched his shorts'

- Diary entry for Saturday 6 May 1978, in Michael Palin, Diaries 1969-1979, London, 2006.

Wanted: one actress with Princess Leia hair

Must have New York subway Metrocard.



[Via Going Underground]

Pesky M

James Bond is having a spot of bother with M, who keeps ringing him up to discuss Shakespeare. Jolly inconvenient, what?

Hate muffins?

So do these well-known movie characters:



[Via /film]

Silent comedy heroes

Here's some clips of two of the superstars of early cinema comedy featured in Paul Merton's Weird and Wonderful World of Early Cinema: a 1912 Pathe film featuring Andre Deed demonstrating the best way to get dressed in the morning and the benefits of a quick boxing lesson, and a 1909 Max Linder film, Juggling For Love. Linder was a strong influence on the later work of Charlie Chaplin, who in a signed photo dedicated to Max called himself Linder's 'disciple'.

Get me a P with an H of G!

Kira Cochrane on the 20th anniversary re-release of Pretty Woman:

...[O]ne of the project's best qualities is Roberts's saltiness and steel: you never really believe she is less than Gere's equal. But still, her character is the ultimate example of that oldest, most noxious of movie cliches, the prostitute with a heart of gold ("Get me a P with an H of G!" the legendary film producer, Samuel Goldwyn, apparently shouted when a script came up short). It's a stereotype that's popular for two reasons. One, it depicts women as bodies to be bought and sold. Two, it depicts them as moral saviours. Completely available; ­completely redemptive. Ker-ching: you've hit the womanly jackpot!

- Guardian, 9 February 2010

Morgan Freeman Chain of Command

Morgan Freeman: seemingly omnipresent for a while, and doubtless a nice fellow. Now someone's mapped out the career hierarchy of the major characters he's played, from a deity in Bruce Almighty down to Miss Daisy's driver. Warning: upon seeing this graphic you will immediately waste your precious, precious time disagreeing with the order in which the various Freemans have been placed. Inmate, Freed Slave, Driver?! A Sergeant Major outranking a judge?! I'm writing to my MP to complain.

The Morgan Freeman Chain of Command (img)

Chaplin on cocaine

The sale and distribution of cocaine has been illegal in America since 1914. This scene from Charlie Chaplin's classic 1936 film Modern Times illustrates the importance of avoiding hard drugs, or imprisonment, or something like that.



[See also: Never do cocaine with Woody Allen]

The greatest vampire film ever

'Yes I saw Twilight - my granddaughter made me watch it, she said it was the greatest vampire film ever.  After the 'film' was over I wanted to ... smack her across the head with my shoe, but I do not want a book called Grannie Dearest written on me when I die, so instead I gave her a ... DVD of Murnau's 1922 masterpiece Nosferatu instead and told her, now that's a vampire film'

 

- Screen legend Lauren Bacall on Twitter (Quoted in Guardian, 28 October 2009)