The Star Online: Entertainment: Movies
The Star Online: Entertainment: Movies |
| Posted: 27 Dec 2013 08:00 AM PST Johnny Depp poses a threat to humanity in Transcendence. JOHNNY Depp is in a movie but there is no makeup, crazy hair or costumes involved? He must have really been drawn to the character Dr Will Caster in Transcendence to accept playing a normal person on screen. This a huge departure from his eyeliner-crazy Captain Jack Sparrow and Tonto days. In the trailer for Transcendence – a directorial debut for Wally Pfister, who is also Christopher Nolan's go-to cinematographer – we see Depp in a very different light, one that is so different that it actually takes a few seconds for viewers to realise it's the real deal. The trailer introduces Caster as an artificial intelligence researcher, who with his wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) and friend Max Waters (Paul Bettany) work towards creating a machine that possesses more analytical power than the collective intelligence of every person in the history of the world. Caster's plans to acquire more knowledge and power comes to a halt when he is gunned down by a member of a radical anti-tech group. In a vegetative state, Caster physically loses the battle, although his active mind connects with Evelyn through artificial intelligence, forcing Max to wonder if it really is his best friend reaching out to his loved ones or a machine trying to take over the world. Opens in cinema in April 2014. |
| Posted: 26 Dec 2013 08:00 AM PST Michael Fassbender continues to look for his big breakthrough. This movie season, Michael Fassbender seems to keep getting lectured on the ways of the world. By an unlikely teacher. The German-born, Ireland-raised actor plays cruel plantation owner Epps in the period drama 12 Years A Slave, in which Brad Pitt, as a morally scrupulous carpenter, admonishes him that a more enlightened way of thinking is about to leave him in the dust. And as the in-over-his-head lead character in The Counselor, Ridley Scott's drug-trafficking thriller based on Cormac McCarthy's first original screenplay, Fassbender is a lawyer set straight by Pitt's world-weary smuggler. "Brad seems to be telling me like it is a lot lately," Fassbender said with a laugh. "I don't seem to listen." All that screen time with one of the world's most famous people highlights the trust filmmakers have these days in the by-his-instincts Fassbender. Yet, the pairing simultaneously throws into relief how the 36-year-old actor continues to live in a kind of A-list shadow. Despite potential career-making turns as a coolly composed young Magneto in X-Men: First Class and a candid android in Scott's Prometheus the last few years, Fassbender hasn't exactly become a household name. Yet, he still manages to land some of the juiciest roles in moviedom. Steve McQueen has cast him in all three of his films, including IRA prison tale Hunger and sex-addiction drama Shame, and Fassbender has regularly worked with directorial royalty like Quentin Tarantino and David Cronenberg. Fassbender often elicits critical praise – the Los Angeles Times' Kenneth Turan said he "mesmerise(d)" as Carl Jung in Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method in 2011 – yet has never been nominated for an Oscar. Fassbender has a kind of turn-it-on intensity that's in stark contrast to the so-called method approach favoured by a number of other dramatic actors (think Daniel Day-Lewis' living as Abraham Lincoln to play the 16th president in Steven Spielberg's 2012 film). He has developed a reputation for doing things like joking around with the crew, then snapping into the scene. "Michael is blessed with a great crystal intuition. He'll say, 'I don't want to practice; I just want to do it,'" Scott said. "And five minutes later he's giving you a fantastic scene. It's like watching Federer or Nadal. You don't know how they do it. You just like watching it." On the set of the sex-addiction drama Shame, several co-stars, including Carey Mulligan, described a man who could have been mistaken for one of the crew before takes; in one scene he even took a quick tequila shot before transforming into a tortured man grimly exorcising sexual demons. (Don't be fooled by the transformations, he said; those intense scenes can overwhelm him. In one particularly difficult 12 Years moment, he recalled, he became so invested he briefly passed out. And in Counselor, he found himself unexpectedly breaking down crying during a scene where a jefe is telling him what's about to befall him. "It just happened. I'm still not sure how," he said.) Fassbender's style with interviewers has a similar switch-flipping quality. The actor spends much of the conversation in earnest analysis of his characters' motivations. But he bursts out in comedic song after saying he and McQueen may next collaborate on a musical (really) before quickly going back to discussing the sociology of the antebellum South and how a man's psyche might be affected by slave ownership. – Los Angeles Times/McClatchy-Tribune Information Services 12 Years A Slave is showing at GSC International Screens. |
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