Wednesday 8 December 2010

Hollywood Babble On & On #643: Randoms Drippings From My Brain Pan

Welcome to the show folks....

RUSSELL MAKES A FUSSELL

Russell Crowe wants a sequel to his seafaring adventure Master & Commander: The Far Side of the World. I can understand that, he hasn't had a real substantial hit in a long time, and people are starting to wonder about his status as an A-List movie star, especially after his last film The Next Three Days lasted less than three days at the box office.

But what makes Russell so unpopular. He is a good actor, but he does have this image as a prickly and cantankerous bloke, and the whole toss the phone at the hotel worker incident didn't help, but it shouldn't be fatal to a career. So far he hasn't killed anyone or trashed a hotel room with a porn star hiding in the closet.

And it can't be because he's "difficult" in the old Hollywood parlance. If you look at his filmography filmmakers tend to work with him again and again, chiefly Ridley Scott and Ron Howard. These aren't people who are going to waste time with someone who is hard to work with.

Maybe it's a case of expectations. When he first exploded into Hollywood in the 90s he came across as an old school tough guy with some serious acting chops who was capable of playing classic heroic parts. People had high expectations, and maybe that incident with the phone-toss scarred those expectations. Maybe he should have started out as a coked-out drunken asshole, like Charlie Sheen, and then he'd have been immunized.

MPAA GIVES HARVEY WEINSTEIN A VALENTINE FOR HANUKKAH

The Motion Picture Association of America's ratings board has changed their mind about the Weinstein Company film Blue Valentine. The film was originally rated NC-17 over some sexual content, which made people who actually saw the film go "WTF?" but now it will be rated "R" which folks are saying is more reasonable.

Now I could go on about the inanity of some of the MPAA's ratings decisions, but I'll bet dollars to donuts that they'd give the Justice League porn parody a PG-13 if it could get a bulldog like Harvey Weinstein off their backs.

Which only just shows how broken and in need of reform the rating system really is.

1 comment:

  1. Furious D you often write that the movies are obsessed with youth and their likes and dislikes.Crowe is a fine actor who doesn't do super hero/comic book/raunch humor characters. His Robin Hood was accused of being ,"not fun enough." I suppose had Scott done RH like Ritchie had done Sherlock Holmes , well then it would have been in line with the times.Also a bunch of critics actually thought that Rh was a salute to the Teaparty movement and Sarah Palin. These are people who write interpretations as if they were facts.This take on Crowe comes from within Hollywood from cinema bloggers who like to stir things up.Crowe isn't so fond of a lot of the media and who can blame the guy.It's not as if the media is exactly ,"filled with the milk of human kindness." As for Master and Commander , the sequel, well that would be great. O'Brien,author of 20 books or so certainly left an abundance of material to draw on and those books have a following around the world.But hey there aren't any squid faced creatures, supernatural,amusement park elements in those stories. Most people I know like Crowe's films and Crowe's performances. By the way The Next Three Days is a good film.

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