The Malaysian Insider :: Showbiz
The Malaysian Insider :: Showbiz |
| Film-noir ‘Drive’ shifts Cannes into high gear Posted: 21 May 2011 02:46 AM PDT  Canadian actor Ryan Gosling and Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn pose during the photocall of 'Drive' presented in competition at the 64th Cannes Film Festival on May 20, 2011 in Cannes. – AFP pic Canadian actor Ryan Gosling stars in Danish auteur Nicolas Winding Refn's tale of a solitary Hollywood stunt-car driver and part-time wheelman for armed robbers who morphs into a cold-blooder killer after a pawn-shop heist gone bad. Based on a James Sallis novella, it's one of the few films up for the Palme d'Or – the coveted top prize to be awarded tomorrow when the festival wraps – that doesn't dwell on dysfunctional families or sexual deviants. Refn, 40, who calls "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" his all-time favourite movie, has a strong track record for crime flicks, including the ultra-violent 2006 Sundance festival opener "Bronson". "Drive," however, owes something to the Grimms' fairy tales which Refn said he has been telling his own young daughter. "While I was reading them, I thought it would be interesting to make a movie just like a fairy tale," he said, albeit one about a "psychotic" man of few words who drives the streets like a knight "looking for someone to save". Refn is one of two Danes in the running for the Palme d'Or. The other is veteran Lars van Trier, who was barred Thursday from the festival over remarks he made about Hitler, although his "Melancholia" remains in competition. "Drive" makes the most of its bleak La La Land setting and an all-American cast of wheels including a plain-vanilla Chevrolet Impala, a pimped-up Monte Carlo and an elephantine Chrysler 300 that Gosling totals with a Ford Mustang. "The film had to be shot in Los Angeles because the book is very much about movie mythology," said the director, who ironically has no driver's licence. "And my wife wasn't going to live in Detroit." Oscar nominee Carey Mulligan co-stars as the innocent next-door neighbour befriended by Gosling's character, known simply as Driver, and Oscar Isaac is her husband whose early release from prison turns the plot. Christina Hendricks of television's "Mad Men" appears briefly as a robber's accomplice who is among the first of many to be blown away in graphic Quentin Tarantino-style fashion. Cannes jury president Robert De Niro will no doubt see something of Travis, his legendary "are you lookin' at me" character in Martin Scorcese's Palme d'Or winner "Taxi Driver", in Gosling's crisp portrayal of Driver. Fellow juror Uma Thurman should likewise feel at home with the shotgun blasts and gushing blood that recall her work with Tarantino in another Cannes winner, "Pulp Fiction". Refn, whose director-editor father Anders Refn is a major figure in Denmark's close-knit film industry, shoots his scenes in chronological order and thus found that "Drive" "dictated the way it wants to be made". "When you make a film like this, it's like working in freefall – like, 'let's see what happens'," he said of his "hyper-realistic fairy tale". – AFP Full Feed Generated by Get Full RSS, sponsored by USA Best Price. |
| Lady Gaga finally hatches ‘Born This Way’ Posted: 20 May 2011 10:08 PM PDT  The cover art from the "Born This Way" album. — Reuters pic Early reviews for "Born This Way," which has already leaked onto the Internet ahead of the official May 23 release, have been modest. But a publicity blitz and Gaga's social media power should produce strong sales regardless of whether it is any better than her first studio album "The Fame", say music experts. "The first-week sales figures are going to be pretty massive; after that, it will be up to the people to decide whether it really has legs," Leah Greenblatt, music critic for Entertainment Weekly told Reuters. "But doesn't she win either way? Clearly, we can't stop talking about her, and we won't any time soon." Ensuring the 25-year-old New York singer's chances, Greenblatt noted that Interscope Records, part of Universal Music Group, was "blanketing the album at every retail outlet short of Baskin Robbins." Billboard said Gaga would likely oust British singer Adele's "21" — the biggest selling album of the year with 1.7 million copies and counting — from her eight week reign at the top of the Hot 200 album charts. "Born This Way," could be set for first week US sales in the range of 450,000 to 750,000 copies, according to Billboard. One fan website is devoted to getting the album to sell one million copies in its first week.  This proposed cover design was lampooned by fans and critics. Although the first four singles from "Born This Way" were already released, all fourteen tracks were streamed in Europe this week. Early reviews have been positive, if not glowing. Rolling Stone magazine said she still threw in some surprises. The single, "Born This Way," which moved one million iTunes downloads in just five days in February, "sounds different in the context of the album that shares its name: like an experiment in the audacious plus-sizing of Eighties dance-pop," Rolling Stone said. The Los Angeles Times review was less enthusiastic, noting with every style on the album from flamenco to blues, the "overriding influences are 70s disco and glam-rock". But although there were interesting moments, the album wasn't groundbreaking. "If Gaga had only spent as much time on pushing musical boundaries as she has social ones, 'Born This Way' would have been a lot more successful." Such is Gaga's influence that she ousted Oprah Winfrey to claim No. 1 in Forbes' annual "The Celebrity 100" list that measures power by entertainment-related earnings, media visibility and social media popularity. "To make this record successful, all she needed to do was produce something — almost anything — bold enough for people to react to. And 'Born This Way' is, from the cover on in, a fire hose of such things," New York Magazine said Gaga, whose real name is Stefani Germanotta, is a master of managing her quirky image with flamboyant fashion choices and uniting a range of fans with messages of self-expression, feminism, sexual freedom and inclusiveness. Greenblatt said Gaga, who has 32 million Facebook fans and 10 million Twitter followers, had "relentlessly hyped" the album for months. "She first came at us three years ago in this very sneaky way; her debut album sort of crept in the side-door of pop culture and just built this incredible, organic momentum. So in a lot of ways 'Born This Way' is the opposite of that." And she hasn't shied away from again encouraging the eccentric image she promotes. Asked what she does with all her costumes, she told entertainment news show EXTRA: "They go to that planet G.O.A.T. The place I was in the 'Born this Way' video — the Government Owned Alien Territory in space. I just send it all there. It's in a giant archive just in sort of a centrifugal gravity situation." Then again, she sometimes sounds more homely. She has received "a bunch of emails about how much the fans loved," her album, she told EXTRA. "I was so happy. You know what I did? I went into the kitchen and I made spaghetti with mussels and shrimp and a white wine sauce." — Reuters Full Feed Generated by Get Full RSS, sponsored by USA Best Price. |
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