The Star Online: Entertainment: Movies
The Star Online: Entertainment: Movies |
- The Heat not your typical macho buddy cop film
- Rising star: Andrea Riseborough
- Movies Coming Soon - The Lone Ranger and Despicable Me 2
| The Heat not your typical macho buddy cop film Posted: 28 Jun 2013 02:16 AM PDT The Heat gleefully breaks the rules of the macho buddy cop film. The Heat has all the elements you'd expect from a buddy cop movie – the oil-and-water partnership, the car chases, the wisecracks – and a few you wouldn't. For instance, a scene involving Spanx. Faithfully conforming to the macho genre made famous by movies such as Bad Boys and Lethal Weapon, The Heat is also – curiously – summer's only studio film built around female leads: Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy. "If someone asks what you wanna do and you don't really wanna work, you pick the most far-fetched thing," Bullock said. "This was it, a pairing where everyone was equal and you had these storylines that weren't girly. ... It had depth and humour and balls and action. It was just something I saw the boys getting to do." Directed by Paul Feig (Bridesmaids) from a script by Parks And Recreation writer Katie Dippold, The Heat pairs Bullock as Sarah Ashburn, an uptight FBI agent in ill-fitting suits, with McCarthy as Shannon Mullins, a brusque Boston cop who dresses like a 1980s lady rapper. Instead of romantic pining, the story's emotional undercurrent comes from the loneliness of women who are very good at their jobs. "It wasn't a movie written for two guys," Feig said. "It was funny in a way women are funny and touched on themes of female friendship, professional women in the workplace who have chosen career over family and kids." On-screen, Bullock and McCarthy play goofy but capable everywomen, and in a joint interview, they slipped easily into their public personae, sharing photos of their young children, bickering about texts – "You don't answer, that's just a fact," Bullock said. "I'm better at texting than anything else I do," McCarthy responded – and assessing how much teasing a reporter could withstand. "I bet we could push you pretty far," Bullock said, with a twinkle. Were it not for the presence of enough publicists behind the hotel room door to launch a presidential campaign, it would be easy to forget that these are two of the most powerful women in Hollywood, with the ability to get movies greenlighted and to approve their directors and co-stars. Once they attached themselves to The Heat, the project went from script to shooting in a matter of weeks – an accelerated progression in a town where even favoured scripts linger in development for years. That both women are older than 40 – a demographic Hollywood typically ignores – and that McCarthy's body doesn't conform to Size 0 industry norms makes their shared success that much more unusual. Bullock, 48 and McCarthy, 42, have both risen on that ineffable quality that creates movie stars and sometimes presidents – they seem like they'd be fun to get a beer with. Bullock, the Virginia-born daughter of a Pentagon contractor and an opera singer, came up in the 1990s, propelled by a tomboyish charm in movies such as Speed and Miss Congeniality before winning an Oscar for playing the brassy Southern mother in 2009's The Blind Side. McCarthy, raised on a farm in Illinois, performed in the LA-based improv comedy group Groundlings and has appeared on TV shows such as Gilmore Girls and her current programme Mike & Molly but is a more recently minted star on the big screen. She emerged in a breakout role as a rambunctious and occasionally lewd member of a wedding party in 2011's Bridesmaids and solidified her status this year as a star who can open a movie by playing a crook who plagues Jason Bateman's character in the surprise hit Identity Thief. For Bullock, the increasingly prominent role of women in big-screen comedies is a heartening change from when she emerged in Hollywood 20 years ago. Much of that change she attributes to the rise of writer-performers such as Dippold and McCarthy, who is shooting and starring in a comedy for Warner Bros called Tammy, which she co-wrote with her husband, actor Ben Falcone. "It does still feel Wild West-ish. Carol Burnett was doing all her writing. You had those iconic women who did it, but they were the exception," Bullock said. "I hope one day we don't say 'Women in comedy', 'Men and comedy', they just go 'Who was in it?'." The actresses had never met until Bullock called McCarthy in her trailer on the Identity Thief set to see whether she was interested in playing Mullins. As in any screen pairing, chemistry would be critical – The Heat calls for their characters to evolve from elbow-flinging rivals to glass-clinking buddies over less than two hours. "You have to instantly bond, instantly create a relationship in this weird world that we're in," Bullock said. "She was game for anything," McCarthy said. "It was fun to poke and jab at her." "We had a safe word," Bullock said. "Peaches." In person, Bullock was the alpha female, McCarthy more reserved – in stark contrast to the naughty, all-id characters she often plays. One thing both women share is a willingness to wield their bodies on-screen in unflattering ways: In The Heat, Bullock is all angles – elbows and knees and pin-straight hair, and McCarthy is a lady linebacker, barrelling after criminals in MC Hammer pants. "It's those weird quirks to me that make someone who they are," McCarthy said. "A lot of times, especially for women, all of the tools are taken away. You have to look perfect, act perfect, you're perfectly poised, you're always appropriate. I don't know anyone who's like that, but also you've taken away all the tools to be funny or to be odd." In one scene, Ashburn and Mullins drunkenly dance in a bar – Feig provided a choreographer, but the actresses dismissed the idea, fearing the dance would not be sufficiently awful. "We have to be the butt of the joke," McCarthy said. "If you're outside commenting or winking ... no, you're the ass. You are the joke. You have to take the hit. "The more you can take the hit, the funnier it is for people watching ... just out of sheer relief that, 'I'm not the one who ripped her pants'." – Los Angeles Times/McClatchy-Tribune Information Services |
| Rising star: Andrea Riseborough Posted: 28 Jun 2013 01:22 AM PDT It's been hard to avoid Andrea Riseborough on the big screen this year. The 31-year-old British actress, who first gained notice in this country in Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky and Madonna's W.E., has had four films released in the space of two months – Oblivion, Welcome To The Punch, Disconnect and the thriller Shadow Dancer. "Every job is a milestone," Riseborough says, fresh from the New York set of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's all-star comedy, Birdman. "That first chance to work with Mike Leigh, or just taking a day of work in a Roger Michell movie (Venus), joining Birdman to work with Inarritu, I'm adding up the milestones, the steps along the path. An actor's career is always a work in progress, nothing that you should ever let yourself get caught up in as it's happening." Riseborough, having cut her teeth working with the improvisational Leigh, is a writer as well as actress. But when documentary filmmaker James Marsh pitched her the fictional feature Shadow Dancer, which has her playing a damaged, dedicated IRA member in 1990s Belfast whom British agent Clive Owen sets out to "turn", the writer in her became an eraser. "I was unclear about who Collette was, because in the original script, she talks an awful lot. Too much, I thought. "I had a grasp of the situation she was in but not the person that she was. I think I took the role just to figure out who she was. If I didn't commit to the film, I'd never do the research and I'd never figure her out." Her research made her realise "she should speak less and less and do more with her eyes. In that part of the world, even now, people are very economical with their words. They lived in a very dangerous and paranoid place for a very long time. Her silences give her an authenticity. People didn't talk. Talking could get you killed." With cop thrillers, science fiction, period-piece dramas and contemporary dramas on her resume and a quartet of projects at various stages of completion, one credit that stands out is Birdman, a comedy about a washed-up screen superhero who stages a Broadway show to make his comeback. Emma Stone, Zach Galifianakis and ex-screen superheroes Edward Norton and Michael Keaton also star. Can Riseborough hold her own in a comedy? "Oh, I've been doing comedy since I was, what, nine? I did Magicians (2007). Well, that didn't work as well as it should have, but it was supposed to be a comedy." – McClatchy-Tribune Information Services |
| Movies Coming Soon - The Lone Ranger and Despicable Me 2 Posted: 28 Jun 2013 12:00 AM PDT The Lone Ranger – Armie Hammer and Johnny Depp update the 1949 TV series, with director Gore Verbinski behind the camera. Lawyer John Reid turns into a masked vigilante with the help of Native American warrior Tonto. Despicable Me 2 – Like the 2010 movie, the sequel is filled with comic talents including Steve Carell, Kristen Wiig, Russell Brand and Steve Coogan. Everyone's favourite villain, Gru, must now help the Anti-Villain League to take down a super-criminal. |
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