The Star Online: Entertainment: Movies
The Star Online: Entertainment: Movies |
- Return of the muscle
- Lindsay Lohan pleads not guilty in latest court fight
- Iran to make own movie to counter 'distorted' Argo
| Posted: 16 Jan 2013 12:53 AM PST Schwarzenegger is back, and Hollywood hopes he's still a star. As he famously droned on-screen in his signature Terminator movies, Arnold Schwarzenegger is back. A year after leaving the California governor's office and becoming tabloid fodder for fathering a boy with his family's housekeeper and splitting with his wife, Maria Shriver, the 65-year-old former bodybuilder will star in no fewer than three Hollywood movies over the next 12 months. None are likely to win Schwarzenegger an Oscar. Indeed, the movies, and Schwarzenegger's own fee, are low-budget compared with his global blockbusters of yore. But studio executives are betting that overseas fans especially will once again respond to a personality whose 24 films generated worldwide ticket sales of US$3.9bil (RM11.7bil), according to boxoffice.com. "He is still a worldwide star who resonates with action audiences around the world," said Rob Friedman, the co-chairman of the Lionsgate motion picture group, which is scheduled to release his next two films. The Last Stand opens in Malaysia tomorrow and The Tomb will open in September in the United States. Ten, the third film, is scheduled for release in January 2014 by Open Road Films, a joint venture of the AMC and Regal Theatre chains. "When you have left the movie business for seven years, it's kind of a scary thing to come back because you don't know if you're accepted or not," Schwarzenegger said at a recent press event for The Last Stand. "There could be a whole new generation of action stars that come up in the meantime." The actor said he was "very pleasantly surprised" by what he called a "great reaction" to his cameo in the 2010 action film The Expendables, which featured fellow action stars Sylvester Stallone and Jason Statham. Since then, Schwarzenegger appeared in a second The Expendables film and says he will join a fifth instalment of the Terminator if it is made. Comcast's Universal Pictures wants to "do a bunch" of new films based on the 30-year-old Conan The Barbarian movie, said Schwarzenegger, in which he would reprise his role as a barbarian. He added that Universal, after 10 years of prodding by Schwarzenegger, also wants to do a sequel to the 1988 comedy Twins, in which he and Danny DeVito played mismatched twins, to be called Triplets. Schwarzenegger no longer commands the US$25mil (RM75mil) paychecks he cashed in his heyday and will get between US$8mil (RM24mil) and US$10mil (RM30mil) for each of his next three films, according to two people with knowledge of his salary but who were not authorised to speak publicly about it. He also gets a percentage of the profits, according to one of the people. The new Schwarzenegger calculus banks on his films doing outsized business overseas while operating within budgets that are a fraction of the US$200mil (RM600mil) cost of his last action film, the 2003 Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines. The budget for The Last Stand is estimated at US$50mil (RM150mil), according to movie resource site IMDB.com. "He has significant value outside the US and Canada, where he is still revered by people who have grown up with him throughout the years," said Jere Hausfater, chief operating officer of film production company Aldamisa International, which hopes to do a film with Schwarzenegger in the future. What audiences will see is an ageing star who isn't afraid of showing his drooping muscles and widening paunch, or of making fun of being past his prime. In the The Last Stand, a less-than-rock hard Schwarzenegger plays a retired Los Angeles policeman who becomes the sheriff of a small border town and is then called on to stop a violent drug lord from crossing. In Ten he plays an ageing drug agent, and in The Tomb an older prison inmate. "We all go through the same dramas, we look at the mirror and say, what happened? You once had muscles and slowly they are deteriorating," said Schwarzenegger at The Last Stand press event. "The great thing in the movie is that they we're not trying to play me as the 35-year-old action hero but the one who is about to retire, and all of a sudden there is this challenge where he really needs to get his act together." The one-time muscle man compares his career metamorphosis to that of his friend Clint Eastwood, who transitioned from his Dirty Harry days to a wiser person who was not afraid to make fun of his slipping abilities in recent films like Trouble With The Curve. "That's called evolution," said Sylvester Stallone, who stars with Schwarzenegger as ageing inmates in The Tomb. "There are no more wooly mammoths. Things change, but the one thing you cannot replace is charisma. Certain people have it, and will have it until the day they die." Schwarzenegger's infamy in fathering a son outside of his high-profile marriage to Shriver initially seemed to hurt his popular appeal. Within weeks of the disclosure, The Governator, a comic book that would feature his likeness, was cancelled. Ultimately, though, moviegoers will be less interested in Schwarzenegger's political adventures and personal scandals than in what he puts on the screen, says Peter Sealey, founder of The Sausalito Group and a former Columbia Pictures president of marketing and distribution. "The movie-going audience really don't care about things like infidelity, DUIs," added publicist Howard Bragman, vice-chairman of the firm called Reputation." They overlook a lot. Ultimately, it remains, how are the movies? Is he credible? Is he going to be a joke?" – Reuters The Last Stand, rated 18, opens in cinemas nationwide tomorrow. |
| Lindsay Lohan pleads not guilty in latest court fight Posted: 15 Jan 2013 10:23 PM PST LOS ANGELES: The troubled American actress Lindsay Lohan pleaded not guilty Tuesday to three misdemeanor charges stemming from an auto accident in a case that could send her to prison. Lohan did not attend the hearing in Santa Monica, west of Los Angeles, and did not have to do so. The judge convened the next hearing for January 30. The 26-year-old actress was charged in November with resisting and obstructing an officer, giving false testimony and driving recklessly. All this stemmed from an accident in which a Porsche hit a truck; Lohan said she was not driving the sports car in that June accident in Santa Monica. Police later concluded she had in fact been driving the Porsche. If found guilty, Lohan could go to jail for between three months and a year. That's because at the time of the crash she was already on probation for a shoplifting conviction; she had been found guilty of robbing a necklace from a jewelry shop in 2011. In December a judge revoked her probation. Tuesday's hearing was messy and could have ended in an arrest order against Lohan if her recently fired lawyer, Shawn Holley, had not shown up to defend her, showbiz website TMZ reported. It said Holley, who has shepherded Lohan through numerous brushes with the law in recent years, was dismissed in a letter sent by Lohan's lawyer in New York, Mark Heller. But Heller is not certified to practice law in California. And if the actress had had no legal counsel representing her Tuesday, the court could have issued an arrest warrant against her. Holley showed up anyway and presented a not-guilty plea on behalf of Lohan. Though Lohan, who has had problems with drugs, has been in and out of court often since 2007, she has managed to stay out of prison except for 87 minutes she spent behind bars in November of that year. She has also done community service work in a morgue but did not have to deal with dead bodies. Although she won praise for her performance in the 2004 film "Mean Girls" as a teen, the former Disney star has become better known for her drug problems, legal woes and social life than for her acting work. - AFP |
| Iran to make own movie to counter 'distorted' Argo Posted: 15 Jan 2013 03:54 PM PST TEHRAN: Iran is to make its own movie about the American hostage drama during the 1979 Islamic revolution to counter the "distorted" film "Argo" by Ben Affleck, which swept the Golden Globes awards, media said Tuesday. Iranian actor and filmmaker Ataollah Salmanian was quoted in the reports as saying the screenplay for the Iranian movie was ready. "The draft of the movie, 'Setad Moshtarak' (The General staff), has been approved by (Iran's) art centre and it awaits budget to start shooting," Salmanian said. "The movie is about 20 American hostages who were handed over to the US embassy by Iranian revolutionaries at the beginning of the (Islamic) revolution. This movie... can be an appropriate response to distorted movies such as 'Argo'." On November 4, 1979, Iranian Islamist students stormed the US embassy in Tehran and took American diplomats hostage, holding them for 444 days in an action that caused the rupture of diplomatic ties between Washington and Tehran. "Argo" chronicles the hostage drama, with Hollywood actor-director Affleck playing a CIA agent who rescues six US diplomats from the Canadian ambassador's residence in Tehran. The movie has been accused of taking liberties with history, notably by exaggerating the role of the CIA in getting the US diplomats out, at the expense of the Canadian envoy in Tehran at the time. Affleck won both best dramatic film and director awards at the Golden Globes on Sunday for the movie. "Argo" has been banned in Iran but pirated copies are being circulated in the country. Iranian media dismissed the movie's success and criticised the Golden Globes as a "political ceremony." "'Argo' is a sign of Ben Affleck's attempt to recreate Tehran in 1980. While his attempt might be ridiculous for Iranians, it has delighted American experts and critics," said the daily 7Sobh. - AFP |
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