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Frankly My Dear...

    Frankly My Dear...

    A Hemsworth joins ‘Expendables’ sequel

    Posted: 20 Sep 2011 04:47 AM PDT

    Back in olden times, kids, John “The Duke” Wayne would drag in some younger talent — Frankie Avalon, Ricky Nelson, James Caan — “for the kids” to build the appeal of his later Westerns.
    Thus, that miracle of modern chemistry/surgery Sly Stallone has added Liam, brother of Chris (“Thor”) Hemsworth, star of “Hunger Games” in his own right, to the cast of his old guys with guns sequel, “The Expendables 2.”

    Netflix tumbles further over the shark

    Posted: 20 Sep 2011 04:40 AM PDT

    The announcement that Netflix would NOT be cutting its recent price hike, but would instead split its streaming and red mailer businesses in half, is not earning the company any more friends.
    Subscribers have been bailing, stock has been dropping, and the sense that a shark has been jumped is everywhere.

    The splitting of the two halves of the business is no surprise. They want to get out of the mail order business and do something with lower cost, fewer employees and a higher profit possibility.

    The good news is that even though they’re not handling this transition well, nobody else is yet big enough in the market and cheap enough to steal their streaming customers. They’ve already run all the video stores, save for Redbox, out of business pretty much. Where are people who want to rent DVDs going to turn?

    The bad news is the streaming competition is heating up. The second somebody offers me an a la carte service as convenient as a Netflix button on my Wii, I’ll have a decision to make.

    Movie Preview: J. Edgar

    Posted: 20 Sep 2011 04:08 AM PDT

    Leonardo DiCaprio doesn’t look short, though he does capture a little of J. Edgar Hoover’s pugnacious appearance in this trailer to Clint Eastwood’s bio-pic, “J. Edgar.”

    Nothing here hints at him leaning heavily on the “He was gay” theories, though J. Edgar’s longtime aide/neighbor Clyde T. (Armie Hammer) is featured prominently. Judi Dench as Hoover’s mom?

    I see context, some hint of the man, whose supposed passions were clinging to power, uprooting conspiracies and spreading gossip.

    “J. Edgar” opens Nov. 9.

    ‘Machine Gun Preacher’ draws bikers — and SWAT Team — in Winter Park

    Posted: 19 Sep 2011 07:16 PM PDT

    A movie about a biker-turned-preacher drew bikers, in leathers, to a preview screening in Winter Park And that earned the attention of a Winter Park Police Department SWAT team, six of whom interrupted the Monday night showing of “Machine Gun Preacher,” entered the crowded theater, pistols and assault rifles drawn, and arrested three0something men in biker gear.

    This happened at 8:10 p.m., and took all of seven minutes, as the police had the theater stop the film, singled out the men, cuffed them and led them out.

    The film is about Sam Childers, the biker-turned -preacher-turned-missionary turned African freedom fighter who is called, “Machine Gun Preacher.” The film hits theaters Sept. 30. Gerard Butler plays the two-fisted pastor who reverts to his violent old lifestyle to defend orphans from murderous guerrilla bands.

    Childers, who now lives in Pennsylvania, is a native of Winter Garden who sometimes ministers to bikers during Bike Week when he isn’t raising funds for his African orphanage or taking up arms to defend those children.

    UPDATED – Police identified the men as three in number (those of us in the theater saw them only take two into custody), said they were members of the Warlocks gang and that determined that no laws had been broken but asked the bikers to leave the theater.

    ‘Breaking Bad’ star Giancarlo Esposito ties his acting to activism

    Posted: 19 Sep 2011 02:51 PM PDT

    Don't try to separate Giancarlo Esposito, the actor, from Giancarlo Esposito the activist. The "Breaking Bad" star says he couldn't be one without the other.
    "I have a voice, and using that voice is a big part of who I am," he says. "We were put here to create, and create goodness, uplifting images to soothe and illuminate humanity.
    "There is a very fine line between how we carry ourselves in our creative lives as actors and having this power to lobby people to change our society for the better."
    Esposito, 53, broke through in Spike Lee's earliest movies ("School Daze," "Do the Right Thing"). He's been an in-demand character actor who turns up on many TV series and in many films — from "The Usual Suspects" to the currently filming "I, Alex Cross." He is, notes critic George Thomas of the Cleveland Examiner, an actor who "doesn’t fit any label" Hollywood might try to hang on him.
    On screen, Esposito is often bespectacled, often outspoken and always articulate. Think of his too-smart/too snobby fraternity leader in "School Daze," his many cops on film ("The Usual Suspects") and TV or the many musicians he's played, over the years — most recently in last winter's "Rabbit Hole."
    "I made a choice, early on, that I wasn't going to play any more drug dealers, no more muggers," he says. "Maybe I lost some work. But the role has to have a message to it, the character has to elevate people in some way." Even in "Breaking Bad," where his New Mexican drug impresario is a calculating, clever and fastidious man — someone who maybe "does yoga and meditates," like Esposito himself.
    His career began with stage work when he was just a child. And that was also the birth of his political awareness and the activism that has lasted a lifetime. It's why he's one of the invited guests of this year's Global Peace Film Festival, which gets underway in various Central Florida venues on Tuesday.
    "His activism comes from his heart," says festival director Nina Streich, an old friend of Esposito's.
    The son of an Italian father and African American singer-mother, Esposito remembers the inspiration his mother took from the Kennedy family, "people who had money, but who put so much effort into helping others." That rubbed off on the son, who in-between jaunts to film or TV locations, can be seen lobbying on behalf of the Creative Coalition or pushing Congress to fund the arts and art education. He works with Americans for the Arts, and spends time volunteering for Speak Truth to Power and Riverkeepers, two favorite causes of various members of the Kennedy family.
    It's why he has been an actor on call, along with David Strathairn, Gloria Reuben and others, for Theater of War, a Pentagon-backed healing-through-drama project that stages readings of classic Greek plays about wars and coming home from them by the playwright Sophocles.
    "Sophocles was a chaplain, a general and a playwright," Esposito says. "He knew war and he wrote these plays for the citizen-soldiers of Greece. 'Ajax' deals with post-traumatic stress disorder, and 'Philoctetes' deals with leaving a man behind. You do these plays and you give soldiers a chance to talk about the issues raised by these timeless plays."
    Squeezing all that between roles in a screen career that is 135 credits and counting — to say nothing of his theater work and his family life — makes Esposito a little impatient with anyone who says they "don't have the time" to get involved in making the world a better place.
    "Actors who say they have no responsibility to viewers, to humanity, in terms of aligning yourself with something worthy, are out of the loop," he says. "That's an antiquated attitude. We need to acknowledge humanity and our place in it."
    And everyone else? "Getting involved" can be as simple as attending a film festival.
    "Orlando's Global Peace Film Festival is an important part of that," Esposito says. "Showing people these films that are often first-hand accounts of other people out there making a difference can be inspiring."

    Movie Review: Senna

    Posted: 19 Sep 2011 12:42 PM PDT

    “Senna” is a racing documentary that takes us into the jittery, jumpy, nerve-wracking driver’s seat of Formula 1 race cars of the 1980s and 90s. More interestingly, it gives us access to the sometimes acrimonious driver’s meetings of the day, when track officials and the sport’s imperious rulers fielded and often brushed off testy, emotional questions from the drivers.

    No, NASCAR coverage on TV never looks like this.

    The film captures a bitter rivalry between two of its stars, a rivalry that sometimes involved very NASCAR-like behavior — guys running into each other, taking them out of a race.

    And at its center is the famed Brazilian Formula 1 driver Ayrton Senna. This ESPN/Universal documentary lets him come off as a sensitive, but sometimes prickly and always very competitive soul.”Senna” makes a fascinating subject in a pretty entertaining film about a sport that isn’t followed that closely by most Americans.  But our very ignorance of that subject helps the film and adds to its impact. We don’t know this story by heart.

    A child of wealth and privilege, Senna rose from go cart racing to Formula 1 hero in very short order, a brilliant driver who became a national hero in Brazil. We follow his career from those early days, when he took slow cars and drove them with such skill and aggression that he made them competitive, to his years at the pinnacle of the sport — models and TV stars on his arm, vast crowds of fans wherever he took off his helmet.

    The documentary gets down and dirty with Senna’s growing rivalry with the French Formula 1 champ Alain Prost, who here comes off as just as competitive and temperamental as Senna, but with a sneaky streak as well. They journey from teammates to foes to “war” in fairly short order, and dominated their sport in the ’90s. Their conflict creates the money moments in “Senna,” as they duel in cars by Ferrari, McLaren and Lotus.

    But for all the fascinating behind-the-scenes footage, the snippets of press conferences, home movies and races and the candid moments when this spiritual man who wore his Christianity on his sleeve would lose his cool, it’s not a particularly intimate portrait.

    We see only a hint of the wealth he came from and the wealth he attained. We see how even poor Brazilians embraced this child of privilege. But don’t get to know what made him tick, what made him so skilled at handling cars at high speeds, so daring that he was always a threat to win on a rainy day. Handsome, articulate in several languages, he remains a remote figure in documentarian Asif Kapadia’s entertaining film.

    At least the conflict works. Senna and Prost managed one of the great bloodfeuds in all of motorsport, and weren’t shy about showing their disdain, on and off the track. There’s also heartbreaking footage of drivers in accidents, a crumpled body on the track here and there.

    That gives “Senna,” opening Friday at The Enzian, its drama. And Senna himself gives it its heart. I just wish I’d gotten a better handle on who he was before the film’s checkered flag falls.

    MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some strong language and disturbing images

    Cast: Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost

    Credits: Directed by Asif Kapadia, written by Manish Pandey, a Universal release.

    Running time: 1:46.

    Tuesday’s interview: Joseph Gordon Levitt

    Posted: 19 Sep 2011 11:37 AM PDT

    He’s got a role in the new “Dark Knight” film. Darned if he doesn’t have a role in Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” which I will be SURE to ask him about.

    Joseph Gordon Levitt is one of the busiest young actors in Hollywood, with “50/50,” his latest, opening Sept. 30.

    That’s what I’ll be talking with him about, playing a cancer patient whose best friend (Seth Rogen) and mom (Anjelica Huston), girlfriend (Bryce Dallas Howard) and counselor (Anna Kendrick) don’t know quite what to say to him.

    But I’m game for a few wild cards, questions that take JGL out of his “plug the movie” mode. Got a question you’re dying to ask him? Comment below. I am always looking for good suggestions.

    EXCLUSIVE: Spielberg on 3D, ‘Lincoln,’ and ‘39 Clues’

    Posted: 19 Sep 2011 10:51 AM PDT

    Steven Spielberg has been talking about/promising to make a movie about Abraham Lincoln for years. And for years, he had Liam Neeson, his “Schindler’s List” star, on board to play the president.

    Now, he’s packing his bags for Virginia — Richmond and environs — to shoot “Lincoln,” which is based on a recent best seller by one of America’s most popular historians. He will own this holiday season, thanks to the big screen versions of “War Horse” and “Tintin,” the two movies America’s most successful movie maker ever has due out around Christmas

    He is shooting “Lincoln” in Richmond because “a lot of the buildings there, government buildings, look like Washington looked back during the Civil War.”

    His “Lincoln” is “not a battlefield movie,” Spielberg says. “There are battles in it, and being in Virginia, we have access to those historic battlefields. It is really a movie about the great work Abraham Lincoln did in the last months of his life.

    “We're basing it on Doris Kearns Goodwin's book, 'Team of Rivals,' but we're only focusing in on the last four months of Abraham Lincoln's life.

    “The movie will be purposely coming out AFTER next year's election. I didn't want it to become political fodder.”

    On “Tintin” and the widely reported “death of 3D”

    Spielberg says “3D isn't dead. Nooo. It's just waiting for the right film to come along that will make an audience want to see it in 3D and not pay the lesser ticket price to see it in 2D. It's always up to the audience.

    To Spielberg, “3D is just another tool in our shed. It's up to the audience to discriminate whether or not they think this or that is worth seeing in 3D. They decide "Avatar" is worth a few bucks more in 3D. They decide if 'Cars 2' is worth a few bucks less in 2D. Audiences made those choices – 'Avatar' in 3D, 'Cars 2' in 2D. And that's the way it's going to be from now on.

    “Thank goodness the audience always has the final word. In the end, we are all working for them.”

    Another project he has the rights to, the popular interactive children’s novels (games) “The 39 Clues.” Since my kids are fans of the books, I got an update.

    “Brett Ratner is directing that and we're hoping to film that next year.”

    And when is the next Spielberg theme park ride coming to Universal Studios Florida Resort? Go here for that tempting tidbit.


    Costner out of Tarantino’s ‘Django Unchained’

    Posted: 19 Sep 2011 10:09 AM PDT

    Kevin Costner may be kicking himself over the “scheduling conflicts” that will keep him from taking a role in Quentin Tarantino’s racially charged “Southern” Western, “Django Unchained.”

    With Tarantino’s rep company coming on board and the Spaghetti Western elements to this tale of racism and revenge, this had the chance to rescue a good actor from the long, slow slide to oblivion. But it’s not happening, at this point. Rumor had it he was to play a plantation owner.

    Movie Preview: ‘Oranges and Sunshine’

    Posted: 19 Sep 2011 06:31 AM PDT

    This British-Australian drama is about the mass removal of children from their British homes and their deportation to Australia, the conspiracy behind it and a heroic social worker (Emily Watson as Margaret Humphries) who helped uncover it.

    A very good cast (David Wenham, Hugo Weaving), a possibly gripping drama, “Oranges and Sunshine” opens in limited release in the US on Oct. 21.