Que Cera, Cera

My interview with Michael Cera - star of Juno, Superbad and now, Scott Pilgrim vs The World. From Day and Night mag in Irish Indo.

Geek hero
Sharp-witted Michael Cera breaks out of the supernerd mould and beefs up for his latest role, writes Susan Daly, who chats to him about school, being cool and coping with fame.
Friday August 20 2010

The first thing you notice about Michael Cera are his glasses. They are thick, plastic-rimmed and out-sized: the perfect accessory to hide behind. I've been told to expect Cera to be a reticent interviewee.

He's been dubbed the nerd-next-door, the king of Generation Y geekdom for his note-perfect gawky teen roles in Juno and Superbad. This could be an awkward half-hour.

"Well," he points out reasonably, "I was a teenager when I made Juno and Superbad." He's 22 now and oddly mature. He says he's "shy, but not painfully so" -- after all, he's been working as an actor since he was nine. He was already a cult comedy figure by 14 when he played George Michael Bluth in black TV sitcom Arrested Development. George Michael was a smart, straight-laced teen, vaguely horrified by the carry-on of his dysfunctional family.

The TV series was prematurely axed after three series, but it laid a blueprint in comedy fans' heads of Cera as a clued-in but slightly oddball kid. His breakthrough movie roles as bewildered baby daddy to Ellen Page's whip-smart Juno and a high-schooler on the margins in Superbad cemented this image in 2007.

In fact, Cera's not a nerd and neither were those characters, not really. Paulie Bleeker in Juno was awkward but not angsty. As Evan in Superbad, he was quiet but thoughtful. When he followed up the next year with Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, Cera made the earnest indie kid a plausible romantic lead.

Cera has no truck with tags such as geek and nerd. "They are just words," he says. If anything, he gently opted out of the trials of being labelled a jock or a swot, the science nerd or the class clown.

"I went to high school for a year and got the gist of it," he says wryly. "It was nice, I had my friends and we all played poker at lunch and got in a lot of stupid trouble. Oh my gosh, just tried to survive -- it's scary going to public school; there are some scary characters."

And for a minute he does sound like any vulnerable teen worrying about making it through the battleground of high school. As it turns out, he's being quite literal.

"A kid was murdered in my high school the year I was there," he says unexpectedly at the end of our interview. "It was a guy I had met and the guy who killed him was a guy a few of my friends knew -- sorry, this is depressing -- he actually went and turned himself in afterwards." (I check the story out later and it's true. A 14-year-old was convicted of first-degree murder for strangling a classmate with his belt in Cera's Canadian high school in 2003. Cera would have also been 14 at the time.)

There is nothing dramatic in the way Cera retells the story and he almost seems sorry he mentioned it. But it's clear there are worse fates in those unsteady teen years than being considered on the margins of the in-crowd.

Cera himself is not entirely unhip. Those glasses are less of a mask than part of a personal style, best described as 'young fogey'. Cera once cited his comedy hero Larry David as his style icon. Today he wears the kind of green cords and button-down shirt combo one might expect to see on a 60-something-year-old man, but he's also sporting a pair of scuffed but classic Adidas Superstars. It's not a studied look, but it's cute.

He's self-aware, not self-conscious. He laughs at himself going through intense physical training for his new movie, Scott Pilgrim vs The World. Based on a comic-book series, it's part fantasy, part superhero epic with Cera required to fight off the Seven Evil Exes of his new girlfriend, cool indie chick Ramona.

"We had to build up some endurance," he says. "It wasn't even about specific moves but learning the language of that physical stuff because for anyone who hasn't done anything like that, those movements are unnatural."

He says he loved doing what comes unnaturally -- but won't suddenly become the next Jason Statham, flexing his pecs in the way he's spent the past 10 years buffing his comedy muscle. "I got a glimpse of it and, man, it's hell." He describes himself as kind of average. "I hang around a lot of short people to make me look good," he deadpans.

Cera does a lot of this, making sure we know he doesn't take himself too seriously but not exactly being self-deprecating. Scott Pilgrim, for example, looks set to consolidate Cera as an alternative hero for gamers and comic-book fanboys, but he's not willing to set the character up as a god.

"Scott's a bit of a Homer Simpson character -- he's a bit of a dope. You can tell with certain gags -- the spinning wheel in his head, 'What am I going to say?' It was just fun to play a total idiot. Like Homer (he gets the girl). Like how did Homer get Marge?"

In Cera's mind, the movie is played out through how Scott sees the world. "Even the evil exes, maybe they're not that evil, they're just against him. It's him against the world, you know? It feels like he's the hero of his own movie in his mind."

Cera's a pretty clear-sighted guy. Growing up in the suburbs outside Toronto with parents who he has described as "funny, funny people", he takes his growing fame as it comes. He even finds he can laugh at the absurdities of LA, where he now lives.

"They have everything in LA. They have dog hotels, which is not something you'll find in Toronto." And what do people do in Toronto when they go on holidays? Tie their pets up in the back yard? "Yeah," he says, cracking a grin, "You just leave him tied up with a bowl of food and tell him everything's going to be fine."

Maybe it's the relaxed Canadian vibe or maybe he just likes taking the Michael. Either way, Cera is fun, in a very gentle sort of way.

Not that he's always entirely at ease with being the centre of attention. "I've been scared before," he says of the growing recognition he gets from movie fans. "The first time I really felt weird about being recognised was at the Toronto Film Festival when I was there for this movie Nick and Norah. For some reason, maybe because Toronto's my home town, it just seemed very intense. Just the amount of people coming at you."

But he's learning -- and from a master schmoozer. "It's really nice when you work with someone who is so much more famous than you are because it makes you realise it could be worse. Jack Black is one of the most famous people I've worked with (in Year One) and he's like Santa Claus. We'll go to a restaurant and people will be lining up to meet him like Santa Claus in a mall."

He also thinks one of his Scott Pilgrim co-stars, the laconic Kieran Culkin, is "a very cool guy; if there's cool, whatever that means, he's got it".

You're not so uncool yourself, I tell him. He smiles and shakes his head, but in Scott Pilgrim he looks as comfortable as Jack Black, rocking out on a bass guitar. He has co-written a score to a small independent film that was well-received at the Sundance festival. Last year he had a short story published in Dave Eggers' cult literary journal, McSweeney's Quarterly.

"Dave Eggers was really nice to me, he sent me a nice email about it," he says modestly. Michael Cera: redefining cool.


Le geek, c'est chic - movies where nerds rule

- THE NET (1995)

Sandra Bullock strikes a blow for computer geeks by fighting shady corporate entity The Praetorians when they steal her identity. She does, however, look unfeasibly hot for someone who supposedly spends 24/7 in front of her computer, eating pizza.

- PIRATES OF SILICON VALLEY (1999)

Relates the early IT battles of Steve Jobs and Apple, and Bill Gates and Microsoft. Noah Wyle (Dr Carter from ER) was so convincing as Jobs that Jobs had Wyle impersonate him on stage at the 1999 Macworld Expo.

- X-MEN (2000)

Labelled freaks by 'normal society', it is actually their mutations that give the X-Men their super powers. It's also based on a Marvel comic book -- nerd heaven.

- NAPOLEON DYNAMITE (2004)

Teen geek Napoleon wears high-waisted jeans and the only sport he plays is tetherball (although he boasts of his martial arts prowess with 'numchucks'). Then he blows away his high-school doubters with a funktastic dance.

- SUPERBAD (2007)

Cera stars in this tale of high-school awkwardness with Jonah Hill, but the movie belongs to Fogell/McLovin'. He's a geek to rival Booger from 1984's Revenge of the Nerds, but a geek who (almost) gets the girl.

FIRST PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/day-and-night/geek-hero-2305065.html

Prayers for Bobby

WHEN Mary Griffith was a teenager in the 1960s, she never heard the words gay or homosexual. “People would be described as sissies,” she says. “That was the word we used – and I wasn’t even sure what that meant.”

Astonishing then that Mary would later become a leading figure in the American gay rights movement - and more astonishing still for the fact that when her own son Bobby told her he was gay, she thought it was an “evil” of which he could be “cured”. She sent Bobby to Bible school and a Christian counsellor in the hope that her God would turn him away from, as she saw it, a road that would lead to hell.
At the age of 20, Bobby Griffith threw himself from a freeway bridge in front of an 18-wheel truck.

Prayers for Bobby, a movie starring Sigourney Weaver, chronicles this tragic story and how Bobby’s suicide led Mary to re-examine the homophobic values she had been brought up with. The film shows tomorrow (that was August 1) in Dublin, one of the highlights of the 18th annual GAZE Lesbian and Gay Film Festival.

It is based on a book that Washington Post journalist Leroy Adams wrote with Mary on her journey from blind intolerance to becoming an advocate for parents supporting their gay children. When the film was first aired on American TV last year, Mary said it was incredibly difficult to watch Weaver’s portrayal of the person she used to be.

“Daniel (Sladek, executive producer) brought the film to us and we went to my friend’s house to show it,” says Mary, on the phone from her home in Walnut Creek, California. “My granddaughter turned to me and asked, ‘Were you really like that?’ And I said, that, yes, that was the truth. I thought I was doing the right thing at the time. She has only known me after Bobby died and I’m so happy that I am who I am now for her.”

Who Mary is now – an active member of the American organisation PFLAG, which helps parents to support their gay and lesbian children – is far removed from Mary, the suburban mom whose world imploded when her 16-year-old son Bobby told her he was gay.

“It frightened me,” she says. “Gay people were invisible for me; I had no context for them. We lived in Danville, California at the time in a close, religious community. I was very confident that God was going to cure Bobby. I thought he’d go to a Christian counsellor and be cured.

“Bobby didn’t go there very long – he felt it was a waste of time. I still remember what he said: that he wanted to be the kind of person God wanted him to be. Looking back on it now, he already was what God wanted him to be. He was perfect but I couldn’t see that.”

This was the early 1980s and the sort of “conversion therapy” that Mary describes was beginning to take a foothold in evangelical Christian America. Groups like the Love in Action ministry purported that sexual orientation was a choice and that gay people could be “turned off” homosexuality through counselling and the power of prayer.

In some cases, horrific aversive treatments have been used in an attempt to “convert” gay people; electric shocks and nausea-inducing drugs administered at the same time as showing the “patient” homoerotic images.

The American Psychiatric Association and the Canadian Psychological Association have both stated that “conversion” is mentally impossible as being gay is not a learned behaviour. Just this month, the British Medical Association branded gay conversion therapy as thoroughly harmful.

Mary Griffith says that it took a few years after Bobby died before she could leave the dogma of her religious upbringing behind her to understand who her son had been. “God didn’t cure Bobby because there was nothing wrong with him,” she says simply.

Most heartbreaking of all was her discovery of Bobby’s old diary, in which he records his anguish at being misunderstood and alienated.
“The most outstanding thing that Booby wrote was that he was always so afraid and angry that people didn’t understand him and that he was frightened young man and angry at the world,” says Mary.

“It wasn’t of comfort to read the diary but it helped me realise why he was so angry and so upset. I could see that everything I was doing was pushing him away.”
She spoke to other religious ministers outside her own evangelical Christian community, including those of the Metropolitan Community Church which was open to gay members of the congregation. She discovered that Bobby had even attended a few of their meetings.

“I had a dream after Bobby died of Bobby as a small baby. In the dream, I was focused on his head and it came to me that this is what I had been missing. It is all there, our psychology, our personality, our sexuality, when we are born. Bobby hadn’t changed and become gay, he was born that way and it was natural.”

By the time Bobby died, he had moved to the larger city of Portland in Oregon where he had found a boyfriend and was living openly as a gay man. He had become estranged from his family back at home, something that Mary, now 74, still bitterly regrets almost 30 years on. “I just wouldn’t give in and I’ll always have a problem with that,” she says.

“Lies destroyed Bobby, and ignorance. It has gotten easier with time and I can sense Bobby’s presence every now and then. But the thing I want other parents of gay children to know is that they are a lifeline. Their children need their support, they need their family behind them.”

After years of campaigning to help young gay people in the way she hadn’t managed to help Bobby, she feels some sense of peace. “I just felt I had to do that. I felt that it’s never too late to right an injustice done to another human being.”

When she was approached about the possibility of turning her story into a movie, she saw it as an opportunity for others to learn from her mistakes. Oscar-winning actress Sigourney Weaver was moved enough to visit Mary in her Californian home.

“I had a lot of questions,” says Weaver. “I wanted to be sure that I could tell Mary's story, that I understood it. I needed to sit down with her myself and ask, ‘Who were you that you could so close your eyes and ears to what Bobby was suffering?’ She was very generous with me, very forthcoming.”

At the end of the film, as Sigourney leads a gay pride march for PFLAG in San Francisco, Mary and her husband Bob have a cameo role as supporters in the crowd. It’s ironic, thinks Mary, because she used to watch those marches on the television news before she lost Bobby and wondered how those parents could support their children in being gay.

When she eventually joined PFLAG, some of her extended family had a problem with it. “I had to question the Bible and it was a very scary thing for me. But nothing happened, God didn’t strike me down.”

Movie review: Inception

My review, in 700 words, of Christopher Nolan's Inception from the Irish Independent's Day and Night magazine:


INCEPTION (12A, General release) ****
Summer season at the cinema is not traditionally a good time to go looking for smart, original films. Expectations have weighed heavily on Christopher Nolan’s Inception to cut a swathe through the sea of insipid sequels and till-ringing remakes.

This is a director who doesn’t deal in the predictable and generic. Ten years ago, he reinvented the psychological thriller with Memento, which didn’t so much tamper with the normal rules of narrative as completely dismember them. When he got his hands on the Batman franchise, he remoulded the tired superhero flick into that rare creature, an intelligent blockbuster.

Inception is Nolan’s follow-up to The Dark Knight (2008). The buzz surrounding it has been stoked by the director’s insistence on keeping the most minor details of the plot under wraps.

The basic outline isn’t revolutionary. Leonardo di Caprio plays Dom Cobb, mastermind of corporate espionage. He steals secrets from one side and sells to the other. He has tired of his lonely, risky lifestyle and agrees to a final big job that will free him to go home and become a Normal Dad to his two children.

Yet this is anything but a typical one-last-job heist movie. Cobb is no ordinary thief. He and his team of egghead accomplices invade the dreams of their targets and prise secrets from their subconscious. This being Nolan’s world, dream-snatching is not as simple as waiting for their man to fall asleep. Cobb and right-hand-man Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) construct entire dreamscapes designed to lure the subject into a fantasy world that they control.

Recently though, Cobb’s own guilt-ridden subconscious has been throwing a spanner in the works. A sinister projection of his dead wife Mal threatens to sabotage the missions. Marion Cotillard is riveting as Mal although it is hard to forget her Oscar-winning performance as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose, mostly because Nolan has bizarrely chosen to use Piaf’s torch song ‘Je ne regrette rien’ as a key narrative trigger here.

Di Caprio, however, is brilliant as the haunted Cobb. As in the recent Shutter Island, Leo looks like he has the world on his shoulders and his fingertips barely clinging to reality. He is no position to refuse the escape hatch cracked open by powerful businessman Saito (Ken Watanabe). Saito offers to clear up Cobb’s personal problems if Cobb and company abandon the usual business of ‘extraction’ in favour of an ‘inception’: implanting an idea into the mind of a business rival.

Apparently this is a near-impossible task. We know this because straight-laced Arthur keeps protesting along the lines of, “This is a near-impossible task.” Instead it is the jumping-off point for Nolan’s mind-bending sci fi proposal involving multiple planes of consciousness and the sketchy human grip of reality over fantasy.

Cobb bolsters his team of operatives with wideboy fraudster Eames (Tom Hardy) and narcolepsy-inducing chemist Yusuf (Dileep Rao). Nolan favourite Michael Caine dispenses a few bon mots as Cobb’s father but these auxiliary characters don’t really have heart. They seem to exist just to jolly the plot along by pressing the right button to blow up the right fantasy universe at the right time.

Our own Cillian Murphy succeeds in injecting Saito’s rival Robert Fischer with a pathos that fleshes out his role as the hapless ‘mark’ and Ellen Page brings some smarts to dreamworld architect Ariadne.

Mercifully, Ariadne also serves the function of helping the audience navigate the densely-layered fabric of Nolan’s plot. There are dreams within dreams, and dreams within those dreams and – frankly – it can get confusing. When Cobb explains the logic underpinning his intricate theories to new gal Ariadne, he is simultaneously explaining it to us.

The dreamscapes are gorgeously realised. The visuals are there to be marvelled at, a cityscape folding over onto itself, a snow-crusted fortress imploding into ice crystals at the blink of the mind’s eye.

Nolan masterfully ratchets up the tension as the film’s denouement plays out on four different stages. Inception lacks a deep emotional core but it messes with the mind. It is a bold vision that takes its cue from Eames who declares: “You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger.”

FIRST PUBLISHED HERE (in truncated form): http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/day-and-night/movies/movies-inception-2261052.html

When Johnny played Ozzy...

By SUSAN DALY (from last Saturday's Weekend mag in the Irish Independent
WOMEN who look like Scarlett Johansson, wisdom has it, can pretty much do what they like. But even Scarlett might be pushing it with her latest demand. She has decided that she would be just perfect to play wild woman rocker Courtney Love in an upcoming biopic of Love’s tragic husband Kurt Cobain.

Johansson has flirted with a music career previously, recording her breathy vocals on a solo album two years ago. But does that qualify the cushion-lipped actress to play bad girl singer Love? Say what you like about Love but she’s got a wild, passionate energy that it’s hard to imagine the louche, laidback Johansson doing justice to.

Mind you, Love seems to have given her the stamp of approval, already sending the actress the script of the film. But then who – even Courtney Love – doesn’t fantasise about a gorgeous A-lister playing them in the movie of their life? Ozzy Osbourne, for example, recently decided that Johnny Depp is the only man to play him in a biopic. Clearly the drugs have done some lasting damage to Ozzy’s grip on reality.

Who knows? Perhaps Johnny Depp would be on for playing the Prince of Darkness. There is something about movie biopics that is catnip to Hollywood stars. They recognise the whiff of guaranteed Oscar glory if they get them right, as happened for Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles, Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf, Ben Kingsley as Gandhi. Naomi Watts and Michelle Williams must both surely be eyeing the glittering prize when they take on the role of Marilyn Monroe in upcoming rival movies.

Movie bosses are all for the biopic, knowing there is nothing we love more than to watch a famous person play another famous person. When it’s good – Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison, Benicio del Toro as Che Guevara, Angela Bassett as Tina Turner – it’s very, very good. But when it’s bad it’s, well, Hilary Swank as Amelia Earhart.

Last year’s movie Amelia was a hit – on paper: Oscar-winning actress plays free-spirited legendary aviator. On the big screen, it was a dud, with most of the talk of Berry’s wan performance centering on her bad hair and teeth day.

Miscasting movie roles is easily done – Denise Richards as a nuclear scientist in The World is Not Enough, anyone? – but it’s most embarrassing and obvious when it happens in biopics. The 2008 movie How to Lose Friends and Alienate People had a pop at inappropriate casting when sexpot Megan Fox’s actress character lands the role of a lifetime as… Mother Teresa.

Sometimes the travesty is down to a star’s ego being unable to accept that they are wrong for the role. Madonna kept knocking on Alan Parker’s door until she persuaded him to cast her as Eva Peron in Evita, “the role I was born to play” as she called it. Sadly, although Madonna is a great businesswoman and pop hitmaker, she’s not much of an actress. Evita, a musical, also showed up her limitations as a singer.

It could have been worse. In the 1980s squeaky-clean Olivia Newton John was touted to play the manipulative Peron, as was Liza Minnelli – in a blonde wig.
Wigs and fake teeth don’t necessarily fool an audience. Nicole Kidman’s prosthetic nose landed her an Oscar as suicidal author Virginia Woolf in The Hours (2002) but there surely isn’t enough Latex in the world to transform Kidman into soul queen Dusty Springfield. That idea was put about two years ago but the idea of poker-faced Kidman tackling Dusty’s bisexual, drugs-and-drink lifestyle has subsequently sunk without trace.

That’s the problem with getting white-bread stars to play iconic roles. Invariably your average Botoxed, protein-shake-personal-trainer-regime star is never half as interesting as the exciting life they are being asked to portray. All-American boy
Chris O’Donnell as macho, boozy, bullfighting author Ernest Hemingway? Please. Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig as doomed poet Sylvia Plath and womanizing Ted Hughes had, as one critic put it, “all the sexual chemistry of a couple of bored professors”.

Paltrow in particular is guilty of getting ideas above her station. The yoga bunny is being talked about to portray Marlene Dietrich, a bisexual cabaret-cruiser who had more lovers than Paltrow has had wheatgrass shots.

Then there are those actors who can’t bear the thought of ‘uglying up’ enough to accurately portray a real-life person. Hollywood reimagining ‘plain Jane’ Austen as the doe-eyed Anne Hathaway in Becoming Jane. Children’s author Beatrix Potter got a bosom-heaving turn from Renee Zellwegger in Miss Potter.

Julia Roberts apparently intended to persuade us that she was feminist icon Andrea Dworkin in a 2005 film. (Yes, Pretty Woman Julia Roberts, whose most famous role insisted that becoming a prostitute was a valid way to bag a rich husband, as a feminist icon.)

When an icon is dead and half-forgotten for long enough, it should theoretically be easier to get an audience to believe in an actor’s portrayal of them. Scottish freedom fighter William Wallace will always be Mel Gibson in a kilt to me, for example.

Even so, it’s remarkable how we know when something is just not right even when a historical figure is hidden in the mists of time. We might be a bit hazy on the feats of Alexander the Great, but we’re fairly sure he wasn’t a mummy’s boy with blond highlights a la Colin Farrell.

The best thing is probably for a star to play it safe and portray someone whose life is extraordinary but largely unknown until a film is made about them. Ms Roberts finally got it right when she won an Oscar for playing single-mom campaigner Erin Brockovich, as did Sean Penn when he portrayed gay rights activist Harvey Milk.

And yet, as sure as Tom Cruise will one day decide he wants to play L Ron Hubbard in Alien 5: The Story of Scientology, there will always be bad casting decisions. We don’t have far to look: Kate Winslet is being tipped to play Natascha Kampusch, the Austrian girl kidnapped and kept in a cellar for 8 years. Winslet is a good actress but playing a 10-year-old girl? She’s not that good.

SPITTING IMAGE – Who should play who in the movies of their lives…
NELSON MANDELA
Who has played him: Morgan Freeman in Invictus (2009).
Who should play him: Morgan Freeman. Invictus was too lacklustre to do the role any justice. We say: give Morgan another script – and another chance.
COURTNEY LOVE
Who wants to play her: Scarlett Johansson in upcoming biopic of Kurt Cobain.
Who should play her: Courtney Love. There is no-one else wild enough to play her and she has already proven she can bring a real person to life with her electric performance as Althea, wife to porn boss Larry Flynt. Johansson in turn could play Marilyn Monroe – she has the curves that Naomi Watts and Michelle Williams don’t in their upcoming biopics of her.
EVA PERON
Who has played her: Madonna in the musical movie Evita (1996)
Who should have played her: Cher. No, really. In movies like Moonstruck and Mask, she was equally able to portray vulnerability and strength, a cocktail of which is what made Peron so charismatic. And it’s easy to picture her belting out Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina from a balcony, albeit in a spangly leotard.
DUSTY SPRINGFIELD
Who has been touted to play her: Nicole Kidman, Amy Winehouse.
Who should play her: Winehouse would be a good choice apart from concerns over her ability to turn up on set every day. Chloe Sevigny does troubled yet kinky very well – and she does look well in a beehive.
ELVIS
Who has played him: Kurt Russell, playing Elvis in a 1979 movie, wouldn’t even have come fifth in an Elvis lookalike contest in Vegas.
Who should play him: He already has – our own Jonathan Rhys Meyers earned plaudits for playing a young Elvis in a TV series recently. Let’s see that curled lip and snake hips on the big screen.

When Sarah Met Carrie

By Susan Daly
Friday May 28 2010

To the casual observer, the career of Sarah Jessica Parker begins and ends with a tutu. The alpha tutu is the short pink one she wore in the opening titles to the Sex and the City TV series. The omega tutu -- a grown-up, shin-length affair -- was borrowed from the Royal Ballet of London for her character Carrie Bradshaw to wear in the final episode of the show in 2004.

For the majority of fans who will pay this weekend to Sex and the City 2, the marketing behemoth-come-movie, Parker is synonymous with Carrie. She may have been a working actress since the age of eight, but real A-list fame only came at 33 with SATC. It took those six short years as the clotheshorse sex columnist to bounce her from quirky movie support act to household name.

Her late career blossoming has been described -- by The New York Times, no less -- as the ultimate Revenge of the Nerd. Glam, streetwise Carrie was not the career-defining role Parker was supposed to have. She played earnest urchin Annie as a child on Broadway. She was the geeky, gangly heroine for awkward pubescents everywhere in 80s TV teen drama Square Pegs. When she made it to the movies, she was the academic, mousy-haired sidekick of wild and sexy Lori Singer in Footloose.

Surprising then that the show that made her a power player was one equally obsessed with the exterior appearance as with the interior lives of its characters. "I have no illusions of who I am or what I look like or what I have to offer," said Parker in 2000, two years into her role as style icon Carrie.

She has spoken before of losing out on roles because she isn't traditionally beautiful. "I'm not particularly proud of how I look," she once said. "I've never been what Hollywood considers beautiful. It would be so great to look like Andie Macdowell. She beat me for the part in Four Weddings and a Funeral."

Parker might have her detractors but none are as deprecating as she is about herself. She has suggested that even Johnny Depp looked better than her in biopic Ed Wood (1994), where she played transvestite director Wood's girlfriend. "That was depressing because in drag he was more beautiful than me," she said.

In fact, the roles she took in her 20s were already teeing Parker up to be able to convincingly play a rom-com icon such as Carrie. The wickedly funny LA Story (1991) gave her licence to play ditsy, sexy blonde SanDeE* -- a persona she took out of the box again as trophy girlfriend Shelly Stewart for The First Wives Club five years later.

In Honeymoon in Vegas in 1992, she proved she could carry a romantic lead as she was fought over by Nicolas Cage and James Caan. Here though, her character was somewhat objectified and only given a first name, Betsy -- Parker was still a bit player.

When the Sex and the City script arrived in her lap, Parker actually thought it signalled the death knell to her career. A year into the series, when SATC was proving to be a hit, she admitted that she had been "terrified" of signing up to a TV show. "I was very nervous about doing a television series," she said, "It sounded depressing to me." She explained that she thought a return to TV was a last pit-stop before retirement. "That you'd never get better, you'd just get comfortable, and that's it."

Her husband, actor Matthew Broderick, convinced her otherwise, telling her that the worst-case scenario would be that it would be successful. "And in fact he was right," she says.

Was he ever. Purely measured against the benchmark of cold, hard cash, Sex and the City made Parker a player in the entertainment business. Her personal stock as an actress went up. Before SATC, she was not commanding outrageous fees for her movie roles. When she played Nell in a tame family movie called Dudley Do-Right in 1999, she earned her first $500,000 pay cheque because SATC had just made her a star.

She was also smart enough to translate Carrie's popularity (she was easily the most fleshed-out character compared with the archetypes of tough Miranda, prissy Charlotte and sex-mad Samantha) into a producer credit. It created some rancour among her castmates, and this apparently had much to do with the four-year delay in bringing the first movie version of SATC to the screen after the series ended.

Sarah Jessica Parker is herself as much a brand now as Carrie Bradshaw. There was a blip when Gap dropped her as their brand ambassador in 2005 in favour of singer Joss Stone, but otherwise she's raked in millions in endorsements, her own clothing line, Bitten, and in the lucrative fragrances industry.

Ironically, she insists that she is really a homebody mother of three. She had two high-profile relationships in her 20s -- with Robert Downey Jr and John Kennedy Jr -- but said "my single life was never as colourful as that [of Carrie's]. I've never been a drinker really, never gone to clubs and dances all night and been irresponsible, even as a young person". As such, she is a blank canvas for fans and advertisers to project their fantasies on.

So complete is the transformation from journeywoman theatre actress to star brand that her new perfume is simply called SJP NYC, putting her star wattage on a par with the Big Apple itself.

In the long run though, has Parker shot herself in her Jimmy Choo-shod foot? She claims that the reason she put an end to Sex and the City, the TV series, was because she was too comfortable there. "I felt it was really incumbent upon me at this time in my life to do something new and challenging," she said.

Those words came in 2005, just after she had a modest critical and commercial success as the highly strung businesswoman Meredith in dramedy The Family Stone. In truth though, none of the rom-coms she has chosen since she left SATC have raised her up the acting star league. Smart People (2007) was a small independent black comedy that was shorter on laughs than its trailer would have suggested. Failure to Launch with Matthew McConnaughey, one of her first forays into movies after her TV show ended, was disastrously titled and badly reviewed.

What is often forgotten about the first two series of Sex and the City -- perhaps most of all by Parker herself -- is that they made much use of her sharp comic instincts. This was before the writers got distracted by 'fabulousness', product placement and attempts to flesh out two-dimensional characters such as Mr Big into likeable people.

For all that, Parker appears to be as popular as ever after the demise of SATC the TV series -- it has to be noted that she only made the Forbes Celebrity 100 power list for the very first time in 2008. This was due mainly to the success of Sex and the City: The Movie -- the other movies she had made in the intervening four years hadn't put her there.

Parker appears to be making the wise choice to evolve behind the camera -- she has recently produced a comedy series for HBO called The Washingtonienne and an art reality show. She must realise that while slick SJP is no longer square peg Sarah Jessica, it's every bit as much of a pigeonhole.

Sex and the City opens in cinemas today
FIRST PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/day-and-night/features/when-sarah-met-carrie-2198190.html

Movie review: Hot Tub Time Machine

As published in last Friday's Day and Night magazine with the Irish Independent:

HOT TUB TIME MACHINE
***
Does anyone really want to relive the 1980s? The disastrous hair, Maggie Thatcher and Mr Big: there are so many reasons not to go back.

Hot Tub Time Machine revels in ’80s nostalgia right down to its ludicrous, neon-lettered title. For Adam (John Cusack) and his estranged buddies Lou and Nick - all stuck in depressive, dead-end adulthood - the era of Ronald Reagan and legwarmers were the best years of their lives.

When Lou (an insanely funny Rob Corddy) almost comes a cropper thanks to a cocktail of booze, exhaust fumes and Motley Crue, Adam and Nick (Craig Robinson) decide a restorative road trip is in order. The trio travel to the ski resort of their hedonistic late teens.

Like the lead characters, the resort has seen better days and there’s a rotting dead animal in their hotel hot tub. Enter repairman Chevy Chase (funny again for the first time in decades – a sure sign we’re heading back in time), add a dash of male bonding in the titular time-bending tub and the boys are rocketed back to 1986.

There is a nod to a Back to the Future style plotline, but this isn’t the place to come looking for a treatise on the time-space continuum. This is a movie having fun with itself and the era it parodies, where Don Johnson is a style icon and tape cassette Walkmans are the zenith of audio technology.

Directed by Steve Pink, who wrote Cusack’s Grosse Pointe Blank and High Fidelity, the script isn’t what it should be, relying a lot on visual gags, some toilet humour (literally, in the case of a catheter) and pop culture references that will be lost on audience members under 30.

Saying that, there are enough laugh-out-loud moments – especially a running gag about how Crispin Glover’s bellboy loses an arm – to keep things ticking over. As for the title, like much of the 1980s, it’s so bad, it’s good.

(Film) location, location, location

Film and TV companies are always scouting for new locations and your home, be it a stately pile or a semi-d, could be the perfect backdrop to the next Irish production. Susan Daly reports

Friday May 07 2010

NOT everyone has a face for showbiz, but when it comes to providing a backdrop for film and TV, even a modest family home can have real star quality.

Andrew Tighe and his wife Dara were astonished when they received a letter in the door of their three-bedroom bungalow in Sandyford, Co Dublin. It was from a company scouting locations for the BBC thriller The Silence, which is directed by Emmy-winning Irish director Dearbhla Walsh and due to air this month.

"It ended up being between us and another house," says Andrew, "but I think they picked us because there is a big car park next door for all their trucks. The other house was also further up the mountain. They have a great view of Dublin from their lounge, but the series is meant to be set in Bristol so it was probably a bit too identifiable."

Andrew, Dara and their daughters Ellen (12) and Ariane (10) had to move in with nearby family members for a month but Andrew says the excitement livened up a chilly and dreary January this year.

"The girls got great enjoyment, being able to come down and watch the filming -- they were very popular in school!" he laughs. Filming only lasted for six days but the crew spent over a week on either side painting and wallpapering some rooms to suit the strong filming lights, and then to return the house to its owners' preferences.

"I'd say the fee just covered our costs really but we got a makeover for free too," says Andrew. "In the sitting-room they did a lovely contemporary wallpaper but after a few days we asked them to come back and remove it again because it had a feeling of closing in the room a bit. They were very good about it."

The experience of the Tighes to find their 'normal' family home in a starring role is not unusual. Mags O'Sullivan, Deputy Film Commissioner at the Irish Film Board, says that there are up to 15 location managers working in Ireland and they are always scouting for a wide range of properties.

"The list of requirements is endless and depends on the project they are working on," she says. "They can require anything from a stately home to a disused property. In fact, all these empty apartment blocks lying around the place at the moment can be popular because disturbing other residents during filming is not an issue.

"And a script might call for a property not to be in pristine condition at all."

That is exactly what surprised David Wright after he was approached about the use of his state-of-the-art riverside house for last summer's RTE/ITV drama Father and Son. The three-storey Swan Lake property overlooking the banks of the River Liffey boasts some incredibly luxe features. There are floor-to-ceiling windows, underfloor heating and intelligent lighting in each room.

A dedicated cinema room is fitted with electric recliner seats and the car port houses an industrial turntable so residents don't have to bother with all that reversing malarkey when setting off for work in the morning.

"The Apprentice show had been interested in using the place but ultimately it was too small to fit all the contestants," says David. "It was between leasings when the director of Father and Son came out and saw the place and he went mad for it. They made me an offer I couldn't refuse!"

But the script for the three-part drama actually required that the property undergo a (temporary) make-under. "The story was that this guy and his wife lived here and she gets killed on the lawn," explains David. "I wasn't too sure about that bit when they first offered to me! Anyway, he comes back 10 years later and the place is all boarded up and overgrown."

The film crew "transformed" Swan Lake in a matter of days, replanting the garden and shifting in tons of earth and plants. When filming finished, they restored the garden and exterior to its previous immaculate condition. David, who currently has a tenant living in Swan Lake, says he would rent a property as a filming location again "in a heartbeat".

He adds: "They were very respectful, in and out with their blue shoe covers. And even if I won't ever be famous, at least my house has been on film."

There is of course still plenty of moonlighting opportunities for those properties at the upper end of the spectrum. The Earl of Meath, Jack Brabazon, says his family have become very used to film crews at the ancestral pile of Killruddery House, Co Kildare.

"It brings in much-needed revenue that goes back into the historic buildings and gardens," he says. "It's jolly useful from that point of view. We've been able to put a lot of new lead on the roof and put in new windows, things that would have been impossible otherwise."

The Brabazons have a longstanding relationship with nearby Ardmore Studios, which means they have hosted filming of 'The Tudors' and this summer will be the setting for new Canadian period drama Camelot. Other films to have shot scenes at Killruddery in the past range from The Magnificent Ambersons and Lassie to Far and Away and The Count of Monty Cristo.

The Earl says he's never been tempted to wander into shot. "I have one daughter, Serena, who is an actor though and she was an extra in The Tudors with a speaking part," he says. "She was a lady-in-waiting to Anne Boleyn. It's quite fun seeing parts of the garden or the estate on film."

Despite the continuing popularity of large properties like Killruddery, the Irish Film Board has a huge range of locations registered on their website, at www.irishfilmboard.ie.

"We don't get involved in the negotiation of how much a property will earn for being featured," says Mags O'Sullivan, "that is between the owner and the location manager and it can depend on a film's budget, the inconvenience to the owner and so on."

FIRST PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/property-plus/our-home-on-location-2168578.html

Tara! Home! I'll go home!

Coolmore House, the Donegal mansion that is thought to have inspired the iconic Tara in Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind, has been fully restored and is on the market for €850,000, writes Susan Daly

Friday April 23 2010

WHEN Barry Sharkey first saw Coolmore House about 10 years ago it was "dark, dingy and depressing" and had been uninhabited for several years.

"I shook my head and walked away," said the Co Donegal businessman. In 2005, he took a second look and this time decided to buy and restore the Georgian mansion.

His initial cold feet were understandable. The house had never even been connected to a water supply -- the previous occupants had simply drawn from a freshwater well in the back garden.

"It was a lost property," says Sharkey, "You couldn't even see it from the road."

Even so, Coolmore exuded considerable charm. The interior of the house had not been modernised at all, a fact which Sharkey and his partner Susanna Friel found "quite wonderful".

It meant that all original features such as fireplaces, ornate plasterwork, sash windows and shutters were intact.

Friel saved samples of the original wallpaper in each room. "They were badly damaged, but I thought it would be a nice record," she says. "That file will remain with the house -- it's part of its history."

The house also has a literary history. Irish-American author Margaret Mitchell is said to have stayed there in

the 1920s when she visited Ireland to research our Civil War experiences for her bestseller, Gone With The Wind.

"The story is that she came here to do research and to look for her family roots," says Sharkey. "Coolmore was owned by the Mitchell family and she came to see if she was related.

"She supposedly got the inspiration for Tara, the big plantation house, from here. I can't say how accurate the story is!"

The project of restoring Coolmore to the grandeur Margaret Mitchell would have experienced was an epic one.

It took two years to complete structural restoration on the house, and another year to bring the garden and interior décor up to scratch. The ground level around the house was lowered to flood what was originally a half-basement with natural light. External walls were rendered and blue Bangor tiles used in extensive re-roofing.

Sharkey, who is from nearby Killybegs, describes himself as a "serial restorer", having previously returned to glory three other period properties in the area.

The interior has been sympathetically redecorated. "I had the tiles from the original fireplaces to work from so I took my inspiration for the colour scheme from them," says Friel.

Elegant sash windows dominate the main reception rooms and four airy bedrooms to take advantage of panoramic views of Donegal Bay, Slieve League and the Bluestack Mountains.

Sharkey was also keen to take a view to the future. The house has been connected to the main water supply, but also to that old freshwater supply outside the back door, a boon at a time when domestic water charges are proposed. Solar panels have been installed along with a commercial-size wood-pellet burning boiler and 600-litre hot-water storage tank.

"Insulation-wise, it has been dry-lined on the inside so it's a very easy house to heat," says Sharkey. "People are afraid of old houses because they think they can't keep them warm." There is even a prepared site for a residential wind turbine on the hill behind the house.

These facilities make the house a comfortable residence, but also open up possibilities of making commercial use of the site.

The house comes on four acres of land, but there are another 10 acres available for sale alongside.

"The site has been selected as an opportunity site for a local enterprise," says Sharkey. "We have structurally finished the outbuildings and have planning for the coach house to be two self-catering apartments.

"I could see it as a small hotel, a holistic centre, an outdoor pursuits centre."

The proximity of blue-flag Rossnowlagh beach is a fantastic amenity -- Sharkey and Friel had friends over for horse-riding parties on St Stephen's Day and New Year's Day to ride the 10 miles of perfect, sandy coastline.

"It was intended to be my permanent home and we will miss it," says Sharkey. "But we have some properties in Italy that we would like to restore and my five children are adults now.

"I have just completed the sale of my marine engineering business so now is the time to go."

It may also be the beginning of a new chapter in the story of Coolmore.

First published here: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/property-plus/house-of-epic-influence-2149444.html

Breaking the sex code

I adore researching these essays on classic Hollywood. From Saturday's Review section in the Irish Independent.

Red hot in black & white
As Liam Neeson's new film is slammed as 'a porno farce', Susan Daly looks back at Hollywood's more innocent age -- or was it?

Saturday April 10 2010

The opening of a movie starring Liam Neeson and Julianne Moore should be cause for celebration. So why the tightly pursed lips among film critics?

Chloe, a tale of sexual obsession in which a housewife hires a high-class prostitute to seduce her husband in order to test his fidelity, was the movie Neeson was shooting when his wife Natasha Richardson died in a skiing accident last year. Despite the goodwill out there towards Neeson for this reason, Chloe was not well received when it opened in the US this past week.

The New Yorker called it a "porno farce"; the New York Post "a Skinemax movie cloaked in art house fancy dress".

When Chloe did the rounds here a few weeks earlier -- perhaps testing this side of the Atlantic first because we're, you know, European and supposedly more blasé about the kinky stuff -- it didn't do much better.

Chloe does, however, serve the purpose of showing how far we've moved from the censorious age of cinema.

Seventy years ago, at the height of the notorious Hays Code for films, married couples weren't even allowed to sleep in the same bed on screen, never mind indulge in a ménage à trois.

This has not been so much a gradual descent into a sexual free-for-all on screen, as the movies coming full circle.

The Victorian era, stereotyped as an age in which folk went around trussing their piano legs in frilly ankle-warmers, was quite libertarian about moving pictures. George Melies, a famous pioneer of cinema, was quick to churn out an "adult" film, After The Ball, in 1897, featuring a racy nude scene.

The new century then found itself enthralled to film's first sexpot, Theda Bara. It was the era of the silent movie but words were made redundant by Bara's transparent outfits, nipple tassels and sexually-voracious expressions.

But the excesses of Hollywood in the Roaring Twenties culminated in a series of scandals, the most notorious of which saw actor Fatty Arbuckle accused of raping and killing the starlet Virginia Rappe. The calls to clean up 'Sin City', as Los Angeles was being labelled, were getting louder.

Will Hays at the Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA) came up with a list of 'Don'ts and Be Carefuls' for movie-makers in 1927. No excessive (over 3 seconds) and lustful kissing -- and if it happened anywhere in the vicinity of a bed, at least one of the parties had to have a foot on the ground.

Hollywood studios, heading into the Depression of the 1930s and desperate to attract audiences, pretty much ignored the cautions. The response of the censors was to introduce an expanded Hays Code in 1930. Sex was for married people only, and where affairs had to be mentioned, they should not be "presented attractively".

Sex was not "the proper subject for comedy" (no Carry On . . . movies, then). Dance moves that encouraged "movement of the breasts" were regarded as pure filth. The new, iron-cast code was formulated by a Jesuit, Fr Daniel Lord.

The Hollywood Reporter asked in 1931: "Does any producer pay attention to the 'Hays Code'?", knowing no one did. At this time, Jean Harlow was still getting away with asking, "Would you be shocked if I put on something more comfortable?" in Hell's Angel (1930), while Maureen O'Sullivan's Jane went skinny-dipping with Tarzan in the 1932 and 1934 loincloth-and-vine films.

Resistance to the censorious overlords was futile, however. By 1933, the powerful Catholic League of Decency had launched a 'down with this sort of thing' crusade on the movies. In 1939, Gone With The Wind producer David O Selznick was fined $5,000 for leaving the final word intact in what is now cinema's most quotable lines: "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."

Not everyone could afford to do a Selznick but, this being an industry of wheeler-dealers, creative ways were found to circumvent the code. Mae West films were jam-packed with double entendres, the brazen blonde firing off lines like "I feel like a million tonight -- but one at a time".

And where would Bogie and Bacall be without word play? "You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together -- and blow." (To Have and Have Not, 1944).

West was particularly crafty. She used to write outrageous "decoy" scenes into risqué movies like I'm No Angel (1933) so that the moral guardians would focus on cutting those and let other, more subtly raunchy, material slip through.

A great deal of nod-nod, wink-wink was employed to keep the audience in on the joke. No one was under any illusion that Bette Davis's "nightclub hostess" in Marked Woman (1937) was a euphemism for prostitute. Similarly, Claire Trevor's woman of the night in Dead End (1937) is said to be suffering from consumption when it is clear from her implied occupation it was more likely to be syphilis.

Where the explicit was no longer allowed, the implicit became a loaded currency. Metaphors were everywhere, from Bela Lugosi's blood-sucking kisses in Dracula (1931) to the shared cigarettes that acted as a substitute for sex in Now, Voyager (1942).

By the 1950s, Alfred Hitchcock was the master at breaking the code. From James Stewart's phallic, voyeuristic telephoto lens in Rear Window (1954) to the provocative question, "Do you want a leg or a breast?" during a picnic in To Catch A Thief (1955), his films were seething with what the League of Decency would probably call ulterior motives.

He had been practising for some time -- the famous kiss between Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant in his 1946 film Notorious appears to ignore the three-second rule as they move through the apartment in a marathon snog. In fact, Hitchcock had Bergman and Grant kiss briefly but repeatedly while Grant took a phone call. The illusion is that the kiss goes on and on, but no actual rules were broken.

Others used more brazen tactics to titillate. The code enforcers were gentler on a film if it purported to purvey a moral message. This resulted in a sudden demand for films in the "sexual hygiene" genre, many of which were of dubious educational value.

Ultimately, as foreign films (not bound by the code) made inroads into US theatres and some distributors began to break links with the MPPDA, the code lost its grip and was scrapped in 1968. The new "golden age" of American cinema of the 1970s could not have flourished otherwise.

Even so, some of Hollywood's greatest movies were made within the confines of the code. Even the cartoonists were in on it. In Tweety Bird's first screen appearance in 1942, one cat trying to catch him says to another, "Give me the bird! Give me the bird!" The second cat replies: "If the Hays office would only let me, I'd give him the bird, alright!"

One imagines the reference to sticking up one's middle finger sailed over the heads of watching kiddies -- but hit Hays where it hurt.

ULTERIOR MOTIVES: Films with hidden meanings
King Kong (1933): The finished film was heavily edited but still managed to raise hackles for its perceived inter-racial love story (banned by the Code) as represented by the beauty and the beast. Kong was punished by falling off the most phallic-looking erection in New York, the Empire State Building.
It Happened One Night (1934): Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert chastely share a bedroom by hanging a blanket (“the wall of Jericho”) between their single beds. In the final scene, when Colbert signals her love for Gable, there is no literal consummation – but the blanket is seen to fall to the floor as a trumpet sounds out.
The 39 Steps (1935): As mentioned, unmarried couples were not permitted to sleep in the same room. So Alfred Hitchcock – who else? – inserted a plot device that had Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll handcuffed together and forced to share a bedroom. It was out of their control, see?
Citizen Kane (1941): Kane’s lost sleigh, inscribed ‘Rosebud’, was at face value a metaphor for loss of innocence. Director Orson Welles happened to know it was also a pet name that newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst – lampooned by the film - had for his mistress’s nether regions.
Red Dust (1942): Jean Harlow is in a love triangle with Clark Gable and Mary Astor. In the final scene, while reading a children’s story, Harlow mutters: “A chipmunk and a rabbit. Hey, I wonder how this comes out?”
The Big Sleep (1946): Humphrey Bogart shares a drink with a bookshop assistant during a rainstorm, and she removes her spectacles. Next thing we see, Bogie is leaving the bookshop. As the rain has completely stopped, we can assume he had lots of time to… buy some books. A similarly suggestive fadeout is used when Ilsa visits Rick’s flat, alone, in Casablanca (1942).
The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946): The 1980s version of the movie didn’t skimp on kitchen-table knee-tremblers, but the original had to make do with lingering shots of a “Man Wanted” sign in the diner window, sizzling meat on the grill and wild cats playfighting to signal sexual tension.
Rebel Without A Cause (1955): James Dean wasn’t the true rebel here – it was Sal Mineo’s Plato with his crush on Dean and a picture of movie star Alan Ladd in his school locker. Of course, true to the Code, the ‘sexual deviant’ (as homosexuality was then classed) was punished by death.
North By Northwest (1959): Alfred Hitchcock excelled his own history of sexual innuendo by getting Eva Marie Saint to tell Cary Grant: “You’re a big boy now” before sending the couple off into a blatantly phallic closing shot of a train carrying the newlyweds off into a tunnel.
Kiss Me, Stupid (1964): Dean Martin shows streetwalker Kim Novak around the house where she is to pose as his wife with the comment: “It’s small, but it’s clean.” Cue a knowing giggle from the worldy Ms Novak.
Goldfinger (1964): The Hays Code was on the way out but the 007 movies were establishing the penchant for double entendres that allowed them to moonlight as family movies, despite the sexual undertow. This one was hardly subtle though, with its Bond girls Pussy Galore and Holly Goodhead.


FIRST PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/film-cinema/red-hot-in-black-white-2132690.html

Rollers on, elbows out

I recently went to see Ireland's first women's roller derby team during one of their hair-raising training sessions and reported on it for the Irish Independent. They might look sexy but, they say, roller derby is not about titillation for a male audience; it's feminism on wheels and, more importantly, a valid sport.
See what you think (Pic by Martin Maher).

SKIRTS, SKATES AND SCRAPES:
The rollerskate revival is uniting the sisterhood. Susan Daly on the sport that's sexy and tough.

A group of kids has just finished a sports session at a Dublin inner city community centre but they are reluctant to go home. They jostle for space on the staircase that overlooks the central gymnasium, peering through the glass for a glimpse of what is about to be unleashed below.

At exactly 7.30pm, the source of their excitement reveals itself. The door to the gym flies back and a line of women stream in on retro four-wheel rollerskates. They whizz around the polished wooden floor in tiny tartan skirts, hot pants and fishnet tights, their bulky knee and wrist pads giving them the air of a tribe of battle-ready warriors.

These are the Dublin Roller Girls, Ireland's first -- and so far, only -- rollerskate derby team. Banish all thoughts of roller discos. Roller derby originated in the US in the 1930s as a sort of skate marathon, and gained huge followings in the 1940s and '50s, but had fallen out of fashion by the 1970s. In its current state -- since it was revived in Austin, Texas in 2001 -- roller derby is a tough amateur sport.

There are now more than 400 leagues around the world. Although the Dublin Roller Girls (DRG) have only been training together since October of last year, they might soon be part of an all-Ireland league. A group is currently setting up in Belfast, with women in Galway, Cork, Tipperary and Limerick expressing interest in following in their tracks.

It's hard to describe the game, other than to say it will look like hell on wheels to those of a sensitive nature. Irish audiences will have a better grasp of it when the new Drew Barrymore-directed film Whip It! hits cinemas today.

The movie stars Juno's Ellen Page as a young Texan called Bliss, whose mom wants her to be a beauty pageant queen. But Bliss wants to break out of her small-town existence -- she finds her escape in the "skirts, skates and scrapes" sorority of roller derby in nearby Austin.

Self-expression is a huge part of the attraction to roller derby. All roller girls pick a personalised name. These nicknames, along with the punk-rock-cute outfits, help them climb into their on-track alter-egos.

So when she laces up her skates, Eilise, a wine importer employee, suddenly becomes Alice En'Rage. Teacher Christine is transformed into Scarlet Macabre. Grad students Dee and Sarah become Lil' Edee and Lady Axe-A-Lot; a Belladonna Blitzin' (psychology student Vivienne) and a Sue Killfester (aka facilities manager Eimear) shout to each other across the hall.

"There is a huge mixture of girls playing this," says Liz Clonan -- sorry -- Agent Provocative. "In the leagues internationally, you have some really crazy girls and you have some really girly girls and that all fits into their alter-egos.

"The names are just a bit of playfulness but they're also a bit provocative. I like to freak people out a bit on the track." Liz, by day, is a legal secretary.

The skirts might be short and the fishnet tights give track burn, but there is a sense the owner wears the outfit rather than the other way round. The tights are often accessorised by punked-up legwarmers; one helmet bears a 'Bite Me' sticker; another has a pair of handprints painted on the backside of her shorts. The effect is sexy-tough.

"They are hot girls and there is a derby style," says retail manager Ruth Hirsch (aka Feline Rowdy), one of the founders of the DRG, "but it's not about that. It's a sport.

"But it can get us attention and that's good because if you're saying, 'Oh, grassroots sport, all girls', some people will think that sounds a bit lame.

"The thing I love about derby is you literally have the tattooed punk girl with the piercings who has never been on a team, the girl who ducked out of PE in school. Then you have the girl who loved sport, playing side by side."

If this sounds like a reinvention of sisterhood, it might well be. On the night I visit, the DRG is hosting two Texan Roller Girl stars, Heather Villalobos (formerly Crasher) and Bloody Mary, aka Julianna Gonzales, executive director of the governing Women's Flat Track Derby Association. These are huge stars but, as goes with the spirit of the sport, when they met the Dublin girls at a boot camp in London they offered to drop in to their home town.

Tonight, Mary is gliding around the "starstruck" Dublin girls, offering tips and advice; Heather is showcasing some of her signature blocking moves.

Heather rejects the stereotype of foxy catfighting that might attract, say, a hopeful male spectator. "I have had experience of women who don't get along with other women and then find themselves in the middle of 16 other women running a business and they have to learn how to get along," she says, "That just has to be a good thing for women."

It is a no-man zone on track but there is room for men to help out in the backroom. Kitty Cadaver -- children's book buyer Christine O'Connor -- has gotten her fiancé Christopher Goggins (Coach Puppetmaster, to you) on board as coach alongside Alan Flaherty.

But essentially, sisters are doing it for themselves. "I do think there is more of a bond in derby because you eat, sleep, drink it," says Ruth. "It's not just a kickaround on a Saturday afternoon. I love the mix of girls and that the age group is so wide (the girls range from 21 to 30 but girls over 18 are welcome on 'freshmeat Sundays')."

The derby is self-funding -- through typically inventive ways like a metal music and cake sale evening -- and democratic.

Some of this camaraderie is reflected in Whip It!, which, naturally, the DRG has already seen a preview of. "But every one of our girls and other roller girls we've spoken to have had real goosebumps at the bit in the film where Bliss goes, 'You don't get it -- I am in LOVE with this'. It sounds corny -- but you just fall for it."


NOT FOR THE FAINT-HEARTED:
They might love roller derby, but even the Dublin Roller Girls will admit that love can hurt -- a lot.

The basic set-up of roller derby is that two teams of five skate in formation around an oval track. Each team has one jammer whose job it is to outskate the four 'blockers' on the opposite team, and vice versa.

How they do this is subject to a number of rules but it's fair to say that heavy elbow action, jostling and body blocking are par for the course.

"My mother doesn't want to know about it," says Liz Clonan, "She just asks, 'Are you going rollerblading?' and I say, 'Yeah, I am'. You learn to fall properly, but you know, this is all at speed, so yes, you'll get a couple of bruises, but it's like your war wounds and you wear them proudly."

FIRST PUBLISHED HERE:
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/health-fitness/skirts-skates-and-scrapes-meet-our-roller-derby-girls-2127533.html
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/not-for-the-fainthearted-2127532.html

Quiet time with Cillian

Cillian Murphy is down at the Dingle Film Festival this weekend - and so am I. Wonder what our reunion conversation will be like... This is an interview from when I met him in Dublin last week...

http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/day-and-night/features/defying-murphys-law-2104305.html

Defying Murphy's law

Cillian Murphy doesn't do TV chat shows because, he says, he'd be no good at them. That's probably true. The Cork-born actor isn't one to embroider an anecdote just to entertain his interviewer.

It's not that he is rude or unfriendly, but he's just not that comfortable talking about himself. And that's not even the personal details; his wife, his two toddler sons, his 'real' life. We're discussing his more outlandish roles -- the transsexual Patrick 'Kitten' Braden in Breakfast on Pluto, the psychotic Jackson Rippner in Red Eye -- when he blushes and breaks off.

"I hate talking about my own stuff," he says. But as we're not ensconced in this nice suite in the Merrion Hotel to talk about me, he gathers himself.

"I enjoy playing characters who are as far away from me as possible," he says. "I guess that role in that plane film, Red Eye, playing this guy who was seemingly nice and then flips -- I really enjoyed that."

The cliché that acting is a mask behind which one can hide is true in some ways for Murphy, but the interesting thing is that he doesn't actually seem that shy. The last time I saw him, about six months ago, he was on a makeshift stage in a barn in the middle of field in Monaghan. Pat McCabe, author of Breakfast on Pluto, had roped him into performing at his Flat Lake Arts Festival outside Clones. Murphy was either supposed to be playing guitar with his old rock band (more of that anon) or doing a reading with playwright Enda Walsh.

"It didn't work out, so in the end I said, 'Oh feck it, I'll just DJ' and I just played tunes off my computer," he says. Completely unabashed, Murphy took to the stage armed with just a can of beer and his Mac.

Wasn't he a bit embarrassed? "It was great fun," he laughs. "That night, even playing tunes and having people dance, there's that need to perform, you know?" Although he does admit that in the end he got down off the stage and started dancing with the crowd because he felt like "a gawl", a particularly Munster term for 'eejit', up there.

"I wasn't a hugely extroverted kid growing up," he says, "but that performance thing was always there."

At first it expressed itself through music: he and his younger brother formed a rock band, which was at one point on the cusp of signing a five-record deal with a London music label. Their parents had reservations -- his brother, Paidi, was still in school, and Cillian in his first year of law at UCC at the time -- and they turned down the offer.

Shortly afterwards, he turned a fledgling interest in acting into his first professional performance as the charismatic lead of Enda Walsh's Disco Pigs. I saw him in that first stage run in Cork in late 1996 and, although it's easy to say this in hindsight, the raw, visceral power of his performance seemed prophetic.

Murphy didn't see it like that -- at first anyway. "I didn't know any better, I didn't see any future in it [acting]. I just thought, it's a great laugh, you only have to work an hour at night and you can sleep all day and you get to go touring."

Only a run in Dublin and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival finally convinced him that there might be a future in this acting lark. "I was so lucky to get a play that was so brilliant and so successful," he says. "I began to realise that this was a bit more serious and it was making a proper impact."

So out went college -- "Law was the wrong match, definitely. There is a very narrow potential for creativity" -- and in came a profession where the performer in him took full flight. He might be reserved and unassuming in person, but there has been nothing tentative about his choice of roles.

His Batman baddie Scarecrow used the cool intensity of his striking blue eyes to chilling effect; in Breakfast on Pluto, those same wide eyes are key to the portrayal of the sensitive and innocent Kitten.

His reluctance to tread the chat-show circuit hasn't done him any harm in Hollywood -- his CV of independent 'European' films is interspersed with big-bucks works such as Danny Boyle's Sunshine, the aforementioned Red Eye, Girl With A Pearl Earring, 28 Days Later and, somewhere between the two worlds, Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes The Barley.

Next week sees his latest film, Perrier's Bounty, opening in cinemas nationwide. It's Murphy's first Irish film in a few years.

"I don't have a system where I do 'one for them, one for us', but I think it's important to make films about your own country. And to have loyalty towards the industry at home. Take Vincent Cassel; he'll make films in America and then he'll go back home and make a huge amount of films in France."

As a younger actor -- he's now 33 -- he says he was keen to seek out roles where he wasn't defined as an Irish person. "As you get older, you worry less about that, it's more about the quality of the stories."

In Perrier's Bounty, he is Michael McCrea, a "bottom-feeder in the criminal world", playing opposite Brendan Gleeson, Liam Cunningham and Jim Broadbent. Broadbent plays Michael's father and it is the relationship between the two of them, as much as the "fun" shoot-'em-up scenes, that attracted Murphy to the job.

"No matter how old you are, you revert to being a surly teenager," he says, "you never, ever meet your parents totally as adults. You'll always be the child, they'll always be the parent, there's this friction and I thought that was really well played by Jim.

"What Mark [O'Rowe, the writer] does really well -- and he did this in Intermission [in which Murphy starred with Colin Farrell] -- he writes Irish males brilliantly. The inability to express one's feelings and the inability to say to the girl what he's feeling about her. The inability to sort this shit out with his parents. I recognise that in myself and in my friends."

If that sounds like a bit of a personal insight, well, it's only a glimpse. He admits that sometimes he can go home to wife Yvonne in London with the "residue" of a character hanging about at the end of an intense filmshoot, but that ultimately, "I'll say I'm just cooling off and getting back to 'Cill'; to myself."

He's been at home since filming on the new Christopher Nolan film, Inception -- also starring Leonardo DiCaprio -- wrapped in December. "I'm sure there's a way of working all the time, but that doesn't really interest me," he says.

Going out on the town doesn't interest him either -- he's anxious to keep his family out of the papers. And probably because of this low profile he keeps, the paparazzi don't bother with him. "I think it's fair game with me but it's not very nice when they do it with the kids. It hasn't happened much and there's not very much you can do about it, but as a dad your animalistic, protective instinct is to get angry."

He also has a professional reason for retaining an air of mystery. "It's very hard to retain any sort of distance from people nowadays, but if you can retain any of that, you should, so that when you do a play or film, people will be able to believe the character a bit more. There are some actors I don't know anything about and I'm glad because I can enjoy their performances more."

Again, he's probably right. And if that's what it takes for him to keep surprising audiences with his chameleon characters then, Cill, it's nice not knowing you.

Perrier's Bounty is released on March 26th

CILLIAN CHAMELEON – Murphy’s biggest on-screen transformations
28 DAYS LATER (2002): Trainspotting director Danny Boyle spotted Murphy in Kirsten Sheridan’s movie version of Disco Pigs and brought the indie darling to mass international attention.
RED EYE (2005): This was Murphy’s year of the baddie in which he proved those stunning baby blues could transform him in a split-second from romantic lead to chilling terrorist.
BREAKFAST ON PLUTO (2005): Certainly his greatest physical transformation, playing transvestite ‘Kitten’ Braden in this Neil Jordan film also brought him his greatest critical acclaim – and a Golden Globe nomination.
THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY (2006): Ken Loach cast Murphy as a young Corkman caught up in the horrors of the Irish War of Independence and the Civil War in this Cannes award-winning saga. It was a personal revolution for Murphy, who said he found it challenging to be playing a character close to his own personality (“only braver”).

Angie, Aaaaaaangie

I was very nearly christened 'Angela' but my mother was put off by my father's insistence that he would call me 'Angie'. Mother hates diminuitives in names, for some reason. So I was named Susan instead (because clearly, Susan, can't be shortened to anything... er... Sue, Susie, Suze etc.?)
If you're the type who believes in nominal determinism, you might wonder how differently I might have turned out if my name was Angie...

From today's Irish Independent:
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/celebrity-news-gossip/would-you-trust-your-man-with-angelina-2095055.html

Would you trust your man with Angelina?
Susan Daly on Hollywood's number one femme fatale

Thursday March 11 2010

Who's afraid of Angelina Jolie? It's now apparently the turn of Johnny Depp's missus. Vanessa Paradis, his partner of 12 years, was reportedly unhappy to discover that Depp's latest film The Tourist requires him to film a long and steamy sex scene in the shower with La Jolie.

Either Ms Paradis has environmental concerns about water wastage or she is worried Jolie will try to take a bite out of Johnny. Perhaps the whole story is trumped-up publicity for the movie but it says something about the widespread belief in Angelina Jolie's magnetism. French songbird Paradis might have the second-sharpest pair of cheekbones in showbiz (after those of her paramour) but Jolie is, we are constantly reminded, a maneater. Ooh oh, here she comes, and she's coming for her co-star.

What is it about Angelina Jolie that -- six children later -- she is still considered Hollywood's top vamp? Clearly, the looks have something to do with it. Vanity Fair readers have crowned her the most beautiful woman on the planet. The perfect symmetry of her facial features has been used by scientists to illustrate the ideal of female beauty, and its proportions directly compared to those of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti.

Jolie has admitted that she looks a bit odd. "I sometimes think I look like a funny Muppet," she once said. Her beauty is so extreme, it is almost cartoonish. From the moment in 2001 when she was poured into rubber and Lycra to bring to life the pneumatic video game heroine Lara Croft, she has become fetishised. The poster for her 2004 film Taking Lives took for granted that she has one of the most scrutinised faces in the world -- it featured only a close-up of her instantly recognisable lips.

Jolie's other-worldly appearance tips over from being every man's fantasy into the realm of the merely fantastical. Jennifer Aniston, the woman she will forever be pitted against as long as she remains with Brad Pitt, is arguably the more conventionally desirable star. Women imagine that with the right personal trainer, dietician and stylists, they could come close to emulating Jennifer. Men imagine that in similar circumstances, they might be in with a chance.

The idea of being Angelina Jolie -- or being with her -- doesn't seem a possibility for mere mortals. No wonder we feel that should Jolie want something, or someone, not a person on earth is powerless to stop her. The alleged Paradis paranoia we have seen before: in 2004, pop star Kylie Minogue -- again a much-desired woman in her own right -- felt the need to fly to the set where her then-lover Olivier Martinez was filming with Jolie and hang out just off-camera.

What is surprising is that Jolie still has the power to make tongues wag six years later -- it was claimed recently that she once had an affair with Mick Jagger while he was married to Jerry Hall -- despite being in the most settled relationship of her life.

In recent years, especially since the trauma of her mother's death from cancer three years ago, Jolie's slim frame has grown terribly gaunt. Too rich? Not when you and your lover are passionate philanthropists; but too thin? Probably.

Also playing against the old 'homewrecker' perception is the fact that her personal likeability is supposed to be on the up. Her Q score -- a US index used to decipher how positively the public feels towards a celebrity -- has increased since her union with Brad Pitt, the creation of their family and her high-profile work for the UN. Jennifer Aniston or Laura Dern (who was dumped in favour of Jolie by her fiance Billy Bob Thornton) may not consider Jolie to be a friend to women but feminist writer Naomi Wolf has given the actress her influential stamp of approval.

Her paean to Jolie as the new embodiment of 'having it all' graced the cover of Harper's Bazaar last summer. "Polls show that her appeal and magnetism play at least as powerfully in the fantasy life of females," argued Wolf.

It is true that Jolie has thrown off some of the scent of crazy danger that she used to trail through her early to mid-20s. Back then, she spoke freely about bisexuality, her knife collection and self-harming. Her short marriage to Hackers co-star Jonny Lee Miller was notorious chiefly for her wedding outfit of skin-tight leather trousers and a white shirt with Jonny's name written on it in her own blood. The second marriage, to Pushing Tin co-star Billy Bob, was written in tattoos, vials of each other's blood worn around the neck and public displays of groping.

Her new role as matriarch of a family of eight seems Brady Bunch by comparison. Yet the frisson of distrust remains. The Pitt-Jolie relationship is still tarnished by the "uncool" (Jen's word) revelation by Jolie not too long ago that she and Pitt fell in love on the set of Mr and Mrs Smith, while he was still married. She might claim the pair didn't get "intimate" until after Aniston and Pitt separated, but the notion of her homing in on her alpha-male mate like a heat-seeking missile is hard to shake.

Jolie hasn't entirely lost her mystique by becoming a mother. When she was married all those years ago, she was far from a Stepford wife. In the same way, now that she is apparently 'settled', she is still subverting societal norms by not marrying Pitt.

Like her or loathe her -- and few have no opinion at all on Jolie -- she is undeniably a woman of power. That, even more than her pillowy lips, is most seductive of all.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE FEMME FATALE:
DELILAH: The emasculation of the male is a big hobby of the femme fatale -- Delilah managed it by giving her husband Samson a bad haircut.

She's just one of many Old Testament temptresses but the only one Tom Jones ever sang about.

THEDA BARA: The film industry loves its femme fatales and every star from Rita Hayworth as seductive cabaret singer Gilda to Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction has Theda Bara to thank for the blueprint.

Her predatory roles popularised the term 'vamp' (short for vampiress) in the silent cinema era.

AVA GARDNER: As sexually notorious off-screen as on was La Gardner. An excellent biography by Lee Server, Love is Nothing, detailed Gardner's insatiable carnal appetites.

She had countless lovers and a callous attitude towards those obsessed with her beauty -- including her third husband Frank Sinatra.

MATA HARI: The Dutch exotic dancer picked up her sexy moves while married to an army officer in Java, and exploited them when she moved to Paris in 1903.

She manipulated her rich lovers to pay for her luxurious lifestyle but in World War 1 she was tried for spying for the Germans and executed.

Then one by one, the stars would all go out...

For Oscars weekend, I had a look at the fading star system for the Irish Independent's Review section.
http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/film-cinema/star-wars---its-the-final--showdown-2090776.html

Actors will battle with computer-animated sprites for tomorrow's Oscars as technology threatens the big names, writes Susan Daly

PICTURE three A-lister actors in a room together. Sandra Bullock, the star whose movies made most money in 2009; Morgan Freeman, the actor who has just crowned a career of playing wise, dignified men by playing wise, dignified Nelson Mandela; and Jeff Bridges, hotly tipped to take the Best Actor Oscar for A Crazy Heart.

They are gathered for Newsweek magazine’s annual Oscar nomination shortlist discussion. And they are not entirely happy. They have just been asked what they think of motion-capture acting, the method used in the blockbuster Avatar to capture actors’ facial expressions and map them onto computer-generated images.

Avatar, the most commercially successful and technologically advanced film in
cinematic history, has been nominated for nine Academy Awards.
Not one of those nominations is for an actor.

Freeman looks stern. “I think it’s a bit faddish,” he says. “Because it’s really cartoons.” Bullock maintains she hasn’t seen it yet. Jeff Bridges plays the diplomatic card. “It was a little uncomfortable,” he says, “but there’s something exciting about it too. It’s where it’s all going.”

Mind you, Bridges would say that – he had his face animated by the same technique for the upcoming sequel to his 1982 science fiction hit Tron.

Their unease is understandable. Avatar suggests that a film can make actors a secondary concern and still be nominated for Best Picture. It may even win – Hollywood does like a movie that shows the industry can still churn out $2 billion-dollar blockbusters.

It’s clear that motion-capture still requires an actor to emote the incredibly accurate range of expression that appears on screen – they just don’t need to be big name stars. Sam Robinson and Zoe Saldana are the actors behind the blue-skinned ‘avatars’ of the movie. If you haven’t heard of them, you are in excellent company.

The Avatar outcry is interesting because this technology has been making inroads at the box office for a few years now. The hideous Gollum creature in Lord of the Rings was created through motion-capture (dubbed MoCap by the industry, don’t you know). The actor he was based on was the very excellent but not at all well-known character actor Andy Serkis. Serkis was also the face emoting the tantrums of King Kong in the 2005 CGI remake of that movie. At least that’s one actor making a few bob out of the new technology.

The hugely successful Pixar animation films started off using stars to voice their movies. Toy Story in 1995 had Tom Hanks and Monsters, Inc (2001) had Billy Crystal, John Goodman and Steve Buscemi. As time went on, the stellar line-ups largely disappeared but success continued. No Pixar film has ever made a loss. Its latest – and also a runner for Best Picture at this year’s Oscars – is Up. The voice actor with the highest profile attached to the project is probably Ed Asner, best known for playing TV’s Lou Grant.

By contrast, a huge star doesn’t guarantee big box office. Last summer’s record for star-cast movies was bad enough: Julia Roberts, the first Hollywood actress to be able to command a $20m cheque for her ability to lead movies to box office receipts of $100m or more, had a deflated return to the screen with the loss-making Duplicity. Denzel Washington and John Travolta made a disappointing profit of about $50m with The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3. Even Eddie Murphy, the so-called critic-proof star, saw his fans turn their nose up at his comedy, Imagine That. It cost around $55m to make and took in around $22m. Imagine that.

The bigger picture looks no better. The lead actors in the highest-grossing movies of the decade included Elijah Wood (the Lord of the Rings trilogy), Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter), Tobey Maguire and Christian Bale (Spider-man and Batman), Shia LaBeouf (Transformers). Johnny Depp also gets a look-in based mainly on his participation in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Mike Myers is there mostly in voice alone, for the animated Shrek series. In fact, you have to go to No.25 to find a bona fide star, Tom Hanks, with The Da Vinci Code – and that film arguably traded off the bestselling book it was based on.

We speak of George Clooney as the successor to Cary Grant. Clooney, however, has only just tasted what it is to be the lead of a $100m film as Up In The Air has nudged over that mark. (The Oceans series made over the $100m, but he was sharing the limelight with Brad Pitt and Matt Damon.) Tom Cruise, formerly the actor with the longest consecutive runs of $100m opening weekends, only managed a $22m opening weekend with Valkyrie – although it has taken over $200m since its Christmas 2008 launch.

So here’s the situation: franchise movies and movies based on comics, books and video games are hot, hot, hot. Franchise actors are not. In the so-called golden age of Hollywood in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, John Wayne, Bing Crosby or the aforementioned Grant hardly knew what it was to flip-flop between hits and misses. (See the panel for the all-time biggest box office draws). Their names were franchises in the way the new Harry Potter film is now, guaranteeing a sellout opening weekend.

Individual star wattage shone even more brightly in accepted franchise pairings – Tracy and Hepburn, Bogie and Bacall, Astaire and Rogers, Crosby and Hope, Crawford and Gable, Powell and Loy, Garland and Rooney. Certain actor-director combos were also surefire winners – Grant and Hitchcock, Wayne and Ford spring to mind.

Some of the most popular actors did consistently well because they were contained within the studio star system which, when it identified a genre that was working well for their starlets, tended to want them to stay in it. Screwball comedy and westerns produced some of the biggest stars because that’s what the audience wanted to see. If you think about it, genre films continue to be the biggest draw at today’s box office: comedy, action, horror and teen franchises like Twilight or Harry Potter. It’s just that the demographic of the audience has changed to a much younger one and so the genres they prefer have too.

All is not entirely lost for our dwindling pack of A-list stars. It is true that they have had more trouble justifying the $20m pay cheque if their films consistently fail to attract box office heat. But there are still some stars who can do it – after that modest opening weekend, Tom Cruise’s Valkyrie ended up taking $200m worldwide and he’s taking no chances by signing up to Mission Impossible IV.

Either way that one turns out, he can either claim a success based on his brand name, or a failure that shows franchises are not the always a winner. Brad Pitt is acknowledged as a still substantial draw – that’s why the promotion for Inglorious Basterds focused largely on him, even though he’s only in half the movie.

There is also the argument that technology has been threatening to overtake the star system for about, oh, three decades now, from the introduction of CGI in the early 1980s. And what happened there? Actor and CGI managed to peacefully co-exist. In fact, would Titanic have made stars of Leonardo diCaprio and Kate Winslet in 1997 had they been forced to ‘keep it real’ and make it on a ferry?

Morgan Freeman shouldn’t worry too much about being made redundant – but he might want to think about getting fitted for a MoCap face mask.

PANEL:
PULLING POWER – The definitive list of box office stars
The A-list star is not yet extinct but the cold, hard facts of cash show that they don’t have the same wattage at the box office as the stars of yesteryear.
The Quigley Publishing Company has been reliably compiling a list of Hollywood’s top money-making stars every year since 1932. The annual Quigley Poll is based on the revenue a star’s movies generate - but also on the votes of movie theatre owners on who they know will attract an audience.

Last summer, Quigley’s compiled their all-time top 20 of the past 77 years, carefully weighted by the number of annual lists a star appeared on during their career. It is interesting to see how few of this generation’s A-listers appear in the top score. Even the few who do – Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts, Eddie Murphy, Harrison Ford and Mel Gibson – are all on the wrong side of 40.

And the all-time box office big-hitter? John Wayne, a man who appeared in over 150 films but only won one Academy Award, for True Grit.

Quigley’s All-Time Top Money-Making Stars:
1. John Wayne: He became a star in John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) and their partnership endured over 20 further successful movies. Wayne was consolidated as an icon of American masculinity, notwithstanding the variety of hairpieces he wore from the late 1940s onwards to hide his balding pate.

2. Clint Eastwood: Eastwood was another star embedded on the public consciousness by the western thanks to his role in the TV series Rawhide from 1959-64. Shortly afterwards he transferred that recognition to the big screen and created an unbeatable niche as the tough guy anti-hero.

3. Tom Cruise: His break with Paramount Pictures in 2006 and his much-mocked interest in Scientology was heralded as the beginning of the end for the star system. That same year, however, he still topped Forbes magazines list of 100 most influential celebrities. News just broke in the past week that he is on board for the fourth installment of Mission Impossible – it can’t hurt these days to stay hitched to a franchise that has raked in $1.4bn worldwide.

4. Gary Cooper: He once said that “The general consensus is that I don’t act at all.” Luckily for ‘Coop’, the strong, silent type proved to be very suitable to the westerns (yes, those again) adored by the vast movie-going audiences of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s. It helped that he nearly always played the good guy.

5. Clark Gable: Even though he had already been nominated twice for an Oscar before Gone With The Wind came along in 1939, Rhett Butler sent him stratospheric in the same way Titanic would anoint Leonardo diCaprio 60 years later. Gable’s appeal was such that he was second only to Shirley Temple in popularity in the 1930s – and she’s the film star who apparently helped pulled America out of the Depression.

6. Bing Crosby: The ultimate crossover star, Crosby reinforced his movie star status by being one of the most successful recording artist for 20 years from the mid-1930s onwards. He was the person who did most to boost GI morale in World War II, according to Yank magazine. As a multimedia artist, he was almost unprecedented and certainly unrivalled.

7. Paul Newman: How to explain the enduring appeal of Old Blue Eyes? Was it his
beauty, his talent, his contrary choice to play loners and outcasts that played against his looks? Whatever it was, when he died in 2008, Kevin Spacey remarked: “An era just ended.”

8. Tom Hanks (tie): Hanks might be more of a powerhouse producer these days, but as an actor he has brought in $3bn in box office receipts. If ever there was a test of star power, it was his ability to seduce audiences to watch him play with a volleyball on a deserted island for the best part of the huge 2000 hit, Castaway.

Bob Hope (tie): Hope had a mutually beneficial screen partnership with best friend Bing Crosby that yielded the seven hugely successful ‘Road’ movies from 1940 to 1962. At that time he began his 18-time stint as host of the Academy Awards and a career in broadcasting: no wonder his name could sell a film or two.

Mel Gibson (tie): Like Tom Cruise, his off-screen antics have tarnished his personal reputation, but for the 13 years during his career when he was a top ten powerhouse, he’s earned his place in the pantheon.

The top twenty is rounded out by: Burt Reynolds, Doris Day, Rock Hudson, Julia Roberts, Eddie Murphy, Cary Grant, Abbott & Costello, Harrison Ford, Shirley Temple and James Stewart.