The Star eCentral: Movie Reviews
The Star eCentral: Movie Reviews |
- Willem Dafoe and Keanu Reeves to play hitmen
- Gil Taylor and his colours of monochrome
- Taylor Swift, Metallica and more at TIFF
| Willem Dafoe and Keanu Reeves to play hitmen Posted: The thriller – John Wick – will stage a face-off between two friends who find themselves getting back into the murder business. Keanu Reeves will play the title character in John Wick, a former hitman whose killing instincts are reawakened when a thug steals his 1969 Mustang and kills his dog, which was given to him by his late wife. In the process of tracking down his aggressor, John discovers that he is up against a well-connected man, whose crime boss father places a price on John's head. When the gangster chooses Marcus (Willem Dafoe) to take out John Wick, things get complicated: The two men were once colleagues and close friends, and Marcus supported John through the death of his wife. The feature film will be the directorial debut of two experienced Hollywood stunt coordinators, David Leitch and Chad Stahelski. Both men have each choreographed and performed stunts in several dozens of films, including The Hunger Games, The Expendables, The Wolverine and Parker. — AFP Relaxnews |
| Gil Taylor and his colours of monochrome Posted: The late Gilbert Taylor, who also shot Star Wars, was a master of black-and-white cinematography. THE British cinematographer Gilbert Taylor, who died aged 99 on Aug 23, was best known for his camerawork on the first Star Wars movie (1977). Though its special effects and set designs somewhat stole his thunder, it was Taylor who set the visual tone of George Lucas's six-part space opera. "I wanted to give it a unique visual style that would distinguish it from other films in the science fiction genre," Taylor declared. "I wanted Star Wars to have clarity because I don't think space is out of focus ... I thought the look of the film should be absolutely clean ... But George (Lucas) saw it differently ... For example, he asked to set up one shot on the robots with a 300mm camera lens and the sand and sky of the Tunisian desert just meshed together. I told him it wouldn't work, but he said that was the way he wanted to do the entire film, all diffused." Fortunately for everyone, this creative difference was resolved by 20th Century Fox executives, who backed Taylor's approach.  For Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove, Taylor had to rely on lighting that was incorporated in the sets, with little or no other lighting used. Back in Britain at Elstree studios, Taylor found John Barry's sets, particularly the Death Star, were all black and grey, with little opportunity for lighting at all. "My work was a matter of chopping holes in the walls and working the lighting into the sets, and this resulted in a 'cut-out' system of panel lighting using quartz lamps that we could put in the walls, ceiling and floors. This lighting approach allowed George to shoot in almost any direction without extensive relighting, which gave him more freedom." Despite his Star Wars fame, Taylor was a master of black-and-white cinematography. Witness the splendour of Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove, Richard Lester's A Hard Day's Night (both 1964) and Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965). Of this, Polanski wrote: "As I saw it, the only person who could do justice to our black-and-white picture was Gil Taylor, whose photography on Dr Strangelove had deeply impressed me." Gilbert (sometimes credited as Gil) Taylor was born in Bushey Heath, Hertfordshire. The son of a prosperous builder, he was expected to join the family business, but his mother was perceptive enough to persuade his father to let him take a camera-assistant job.  Gil Taylor with George Lucas (right) had a difference of opinion on how to shoot Star Wars, but 20th Century Fox ultimately resolved it in the cinematographer's favour. At 15, he worked as assistant on the last two silent films made at Gainsborough studios in London. He soon went to Elstree studios, to the north of the city, where he was clapper loader on Alfred Hitchcock's Number Seventeen (1932). Taylor's apprenticeship was interrupted by the outbreak of the second world war, when he joined the Royal Air Force volunteer reserve, his primary mission being to photograph the targets of nocturnal raids over Germany after the bombs were dropped. "This was requested by Winston Churchill, and my material was delivered to 10 Downing Street for him to view. On the opening of the second front, I took a small operational unit of cameramen to cover every kind of news story, including the liberation of the concentration camps and the signing of the armistice." After the war, Taylor returned to studio work as camera operator on two Boulting Brothers pictures. The producer-director twins, John and Roy, were impressed and gave Taylor his first job as director of photography on The Guinea Pig (1948), followed by Seven Days To Noon (1950). His use of bounced or reflected light gave the films a more naturalistic look, in contrast to the glossier direct light used by most of his contemporaries. It was particularly effective in the realistic monochrome pictures directed by J. Lee Thompson, including The Weak And The Wicked (1954), a women-in-prison drama, and Yield To The Night (1956) with Diana Dors, without makeup, awaiting execution. Away from gritty realism, but still using black and white, Taylor linked up with Lester for two groundbreaking pop musicals, It's Trad, Dad! (1962) and the Beatlemaniacal A Hard Day's Night. In the same year as Night, Dr Strangelove gave Taylor fresh challenges. "Strangelove was at the time a unique experience because the lighting was to be incorporated in the sets, with little or no other light used," Taylor explained. This strategy is exemplified by the elaborate scenes set in the war room, designed by Ken Adam, with a gleaming black Formica floor and a wide circular table lit by a ring of overhead fluorescent fixtures. When Taylor was asked to shoot Repulsion, he turned down the chance to make the James Bond movie Thunderball. "Our first day's shooting left me amazed and a bit perturbed by Gil Taylor's way of doing things," Polanski wrote in his autobiography. "He mostly used reflected light bounced off the ceiling or walls and never consulted a light meter. As the rushes were shown, however, he possessed such an unerring eye that his exposures were invariably perfect. We differed on only one point: Gil disliked a wide-angle lens for close-ups of Catherine Deneuve, a device I needed in order to convey her mental disintegration. 'I hate doing this to a beautiful woman,' he used to mutter." Nevertheless, Deneuve looks extremely beautiful in many sequences, despite Taylor shooting much of the film with a handheld Arriflex with a very wide lens. Taylor gave Richard Donner's The Omen (1976) a diffused, dreamlike look, which won him the British Society of Cinematographers award. After Star Wars, Taylor, who never made a film in Hollywood, went on various locations for Meetings With Remarkable Men (Afghanistan, 1979), Dracula (Cornwall, 1979), Escape To Athena (Greece, 1979), Flash Gordon (Scotland, 1980) and Green Ice (Mexico and New York, 1981), though the movies were not worth travelling any distance to see. Taylor retired from films in 1994, but continued to shoot commercials for a few years. Most of his retirement was spent painting and farming, but he still got a kick out of being contacted by Star Wars fans for his autograph. In 2001, Taylor, who made his home on the Isle of Wight, was presented with a lifetime achievement award by the British Society of Cinematographers, and an international award by the American Society of Cinematographers in 2006. He is survived by his wife Dee, a one-time script supervisor. – Guardian News & Media |
| Taylor Swift, Metallica and more at TIFF Posted: Top artistes and bands keep the music tradition rocking at the international film festival. Over the last few years, the Toronto Film Festival (TIFF) has had a tradition of attracting major musical talents: Bruce Springsteen hit the town for a documentary and conversation in 2010, and U2 opened the festival with their own documentary the following year, to name two notable examples. This year you might count Taylor Swift, who showed up for the party to celebrate the August: Osage County premiere – but the heaviest rockers were Metallica, members of whom were in town on behalf of Metallica Through The Never, part-concert film and part-apocalyptic flick about a band roadie who leaves the gig to run an errand, only to find himself in the middle of city-wide anarchy. The concert film about last December's Hurricane Sandy benefit, 12-12-12, was also screened at TIFF, making it the rare work that could show at a film festival the same week it wins an Emmy. (It was simulcast on a number of stations in the United States and is up for variety-special directing at this weekend's Creative Arts Emmys.) Just as Hendrix himself was notoriously evasive and inarticulate when asked about his life and music, Ridley's film is determinedly vague, telling its story in flashes and bursts that focus on Linda Keith, the girlfriend of Keith Richards, who was so impressed by Hendrix that she took him to manager Chas Chandler, and to Kathy Etchingham, who became his girlfriend when he went to London. Ridley also wrote the festival's most acclaimed film, 12 Years A Slave, but this is a very different piece of history that glancingly touches on black experience but is more focused on the process of personal and artistic transformation.  Metallica's Lars Ulrich (left) and Robert Trujillo fool around at the European premiere of their 'Metallica: Through the Never' docufilm in Berlin, Germany, on Sept 12. The movie is also screening at the Toronto film festival. -- EPA/Britta Pedersen Actor and rapper Andre Benjamin, of Outkast fame, makes a convincing Hendrix in look, speech and manner; the trickier part comes when he plays guitar, because Hendrix was so inimitable that every attempt to capture his sound and style is pretty much destined to fail. A group of veteran rock session musicians, including guitarist Waddy Wachtel, try valiantly, but Jimi is Jimi. And because the Jimi Hendrix estate is fractured, difficult and notoriously resistant to any attempts to put the story on film, Ridley couldn't use any of the music Hendrix wrote. That gave him the unenviable task of charting an artistic progression only through soundalike versions of the cover songs Hendrix performed, which is essentially impossible. Still, the personal stories are what connect in this bold and impressionistic work. And I even give Ridley a pass after he violates one of my pet movie-music peeves, which is when characters put a record on a turntable and we see the needle drop on the first track but hear a different song from the album. That happens here with Bob Dylan's Blonde On Blonde album – but it goes with a scene where Hendrix first drops acid, so I completely forgive Ridley for skipping the real first track, the thuddingly obvious Rainy Day Women #12 And 35 (aka Everybody Must Get Stoned) in favour of the far cooler and weirder Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat. Hendrix also makes a couple of appearances in actor and comic Mike Myers' directorial debut, Supermensch: The Legend Of Shep Gordon, a playful chronicle of and affectionate tribute to the rock manager best known for his decades-long stewardship of Alice Cooper's career. "It's as if Brian Epstein, Marshall McLuhan and Mr Magoo had a baby," explains Myers, not entirely helpfully, of the manager who came to be known through Cooper's carefully-calculated outrage and his own habit of wearing a T-shirt with the indelible rock catchphrase "No head, no backstage pass". Gordon comes across not just as a schemer and a playboy (though he clearly is both of those) but also a good guy, a moral businessman and a would-be family man, though he's had no children of his own.  Andre Benjamin as Jimi Hendrix in All Is By My Side. One priceless moment comes when Gordon describes meeting a famous French chef at a party at the Cannes Film Festival; Gordon says the chef was sitting at a table with Pablo Picasso, whereupon an onscreen title explains that Picasso had actually died by then, and Gordon was probably too stoned to realise that he wasn't partying with the artist. Of course, the laughs in that scene also raise the nagging thought that maybe a few more of these fabulous yarns are a little embroidered. But the film's title admits that this is the legend of Gordon – so it's close enough for rock 'n' roll, and for comedy. — Reuters |
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