Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2015 i Empire Australasia

THIS FUCKING, FUCKING, fucking submarine,” mutters Ben Mendelsohn as the film crew of Black Sea re-set to shoot the fictional crew under the black sea. On the middle of E Stage at Pinewood, the unit has constructed an engine room and a corridor (with galley), but at the moment are holed up in the control room, all gauges, pipes, valves, shooting a key dialogue scene between Jude Law’s captain Robinson, Mendelsohn’s diving expert Fraser, Scoot McNairy’s money man Daniels and a mixture of Brits and Russians. Earlier in the day, Mendelsohn has been singing to himself — so far we’ve had renditions of Buffalo Springfield’s For What It’s Worth, ABBA’s Super Trouper and Ernie K. Doe’s Here Come The Girls — but suddenly the novelty of shooting in a dark,…

THE 1969 MOON LANDING, some would have you believe, was baloney. Russia was on the verge of getting there first, and rather than risking global humiliation, the US government hired Stanley Kubrick, fresh off 2001: A Space Odyssey, to film Armstrong and Aldrin bouncing about in a studio. Playing on this whole gubbins, action comedy Moonwalkers finds a grizzled CIA agent (Ron Perlman) sent to London to track down the elusive Kubrick for the job; failing, he instead meets a somewhat seedy music manager (Rupert Grint), and together they attempt to get it done. Today, somewhere in a dry ice-smothered warehouse in deepest Brussels, Empire lurks in the shadows as Antoine Bardou-Jacquet, a French music video/ commercials director with an eye for the absurd, calls action. Up some stairs shuffle…

IT’S BEEN 18 YEARS SINCE TIM BURTON directed a live-action film that didn’t star Johnny Depp and/or Helena Bonham Carter. But the absence of those two is just one of the ways in which his latest, Big Eyes, is different. “I wanted to try to do something low budget,” he explains of the $10 million movie, in his London office. “It was a tighter schedule; just the actors, moving quickly, a couple of locations a day, mostly. Ed Wood was a bit that way. There are no effects, really.” Big Eyes is the wouldn’t-believe-itif-it-wasn’t-true story of Walter (Christoph Waltz) and Margaret Keane (Amy Adams), husband-and-wife painters who, in the 1960s, were the biggest thing in the art world. Their sad-eyed paintings of young children spawned an artistic movement and sold…

“I THINK IT’S ONE OF THE MOST ENTERTAINING films Zemeckis has made in a long time,” says Tom Rothman, CEO of TriStar Productions, about The Walk. “You are going to believe the World Trade Center is there and Joseph Gordon-Levitt is standing on the Twin Towers. It takes a master to be able to do this.” For Robert Zemeckis’s latest, Gordon-Levitt is French daredevil Philippe Petit, who famously walked across the Twin Towers on a tightrope on August 7, 1974. The Walk will detail Petit’s early life and stunts — he crossed Notre Dame and Sydney Harbour Bridge — building to the moment he and his team infiltrated the World Trade Center to create one glorious moment of inspired madness. This is a heist movie with a head for heights.…

LOOK CLOSER NO.1 Emmanuel Lubezki didn’t use movie lights. The lights you see in the shots are the lights that are illuminating the action. NO.2 In the battle of the long takes, Michael Keaton and Edward Norton kept a running tally of actors’ flubs. Emma Stone led the way, Zach Galifianakis came top of the class. NO.3 Broadway’s St. James theatre was used in the movie. NO.4 Composer Antonio Sanchez purposefully detuned the drums to suggest they hadn’t been played in years, to match the dirty, gritty Broadway theatre. RELEASED JANUARY 15 RATED MA15+ DIRECTOR Alejandro González Iñárritu SCREENWRITERS Alejandro González Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, Armando Bo CAST Michael Keaton, Emma Stone, Edward Norton, Naomi Watts, Andrea Riseborough, Zach Galifianakis RUNNING TIME 119 minutes PLOT Riggan Thomson (Keaton), the…

RELEASED JANUARY 29 RATED M DIRECTOR Bennett Miller SCREENWRITERS E. Max Frye, Dan Futterman CAST Steve Carell, Channing Tatum, Mark Ruffalo, Sienna Miller RUNNING TIME 134 minutes PLOT When Olympic wrestler Mark Schultz (Tatum) is hired by athletics enthusiast billionaire John du Pont (Carell) to lead a team to glory, it seems the chance of a lifetime. But once Mark’s brother Dave (Ruffalo) joins him and du Pont’s behaviour grows increasingly odd, life changes in a very different way. STEVE CARELL HAS DONE ‘SERIOUS’ before. In the otherwise breezy Little Miss Sunshine he was bearded and suicidal, while in the Anchorman films, he memorably essayed a tragic weatherman struggling desperately with his cripplingly limited intellect… Okay, so Steve Carell hasn’t really done ‘serious’ before. He’s dabbled. Yet, once you adjust…

RELEASED JANUARY 29 RATED PG DIRECTOR James Marsh SCREENWRITER Anthony McCarten CAST Eddie Redmayne, Felicity Jones, Charlie Cox, David Thewlis, Harry Lloyd, Emily Watson RUNNING TIME 123 minutes PLOT Stephen Hawking (Redmayne) is a gifted but unfocused graduate student in physics when he meets Jane (Jones). Their romance, however, must survive his devastating diagnosis of motor neurone disease as he begins the work that will consume him. WHAT? TWO FILMS ABOUT astrophysics in four months? Go, cinema! For those who found Interstellar a little cold or a little overwhelming, this biopic of Professor Stephen Hawking, may be the more human option. This is a fairly straightforward account. The young Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) is a graduate student working towards his doctorate. When we meet him, he is remarkable as much for…

RELEASED OUT NOW RATED M DIRECTOR Ridley Scott SCREENWRITERS Jeffery Caine, Bill Collage, Adam Cooper, Steven Zaillian CAST Christian Bale, Joel Edgerton, Ben Kingsley, John Turturro, Maria Valverde, Aaron Paul, Sigourney Weaver RUNNING TIME 150 minutes PLOT Kin to the future Pharaoh and enjoying a life of luxury, Moses (Bale) is rather shocked to discover he’s actually a member of the Hebrew people ‘his’ family have kept in slavery for 400 years. And that God wants him to lead them to freedom… THE BIBLE SHOWS US GOD CAN TALK through killing or through allowing his son to be killed. It’s the weird, confusing and sometimes wonderful contrast between the Old and New Testaments. The achievement of Ridley Scott’s take on the most famous story of exile, imprisonment and escape is…

He is constantly moving, constantly changing, never in the place you thought he was going to be, because he is more in demand than any other actor you might get to name right now. Just in the two weeks that Empire has been trying to speak to him he has been on location playing Richard III, in a green studio playing The Hobbit’s Necromancer, crawling round a fake jungle as Shere Khan and in his head contemplating Hamlet. Empire finally manages to still him for two seconds at Heathrow Airport, about to jump onto a flight bound for the Toronto Film Festival, where he will present to the assembled masses his latest transformation, as World War II codebreaker Alan Turing in The Imitation Game. Such is the constant rush of…

PLAYING A DECISION-PHOBIC, arrested-development twentysomething in Say When, Keira Knightley was meant to show off a very un-adult talent — skateboarding. Only… she doesn’t. Not really. “I took lessons! I wasn’t great but I was actually alright — but then they realised that the only time we could do it was right in the middle of the shoot, and the insurance wouldn’t cover it if I fucked myself up. So I couldn’t do the actual skate thing I’d been practising, I could only flip the board.” She pauses. “Please tell everyone I’m actually an amazing skateboarder. The film doesn’t do my skills justice.” Growth is hard to come by for Knightley’s character, who bails on her boyfriend for a week to move in with a teenage girl she’s only just…

RELEASED JANUARY 22 RATED MA15+ DIRECTOR Jean-Marc Vallée SCREENWRITER Nick Hornby CAST Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern, Thomas Sadoski RUNNING TIME 115 minutes PLOT Crippled by grief, addiction and empty sex, desolate twentysomething Cheryl Strayed (Witherspoon) decides to hike the arduous Pacific Crest Trail, with zero preparation for the emotional and physical hardships ahead. FILMS ABOUT FINDING YOURSELF should often get lost. On paper, the prospect of Reese Witherspoon producing and starring in a misery memoir about recovering from grief and divorce sounds like so much Eat Pray Vomit. But as much as she’s now Hollywood royalty, Witherspoon grew up in Tennessee, and this is a film that hasn’t forgotten what it’s like to struggle. Adapting from Cheryl Strayed’s bestselling book, screenwriter Nick Hornby resists platitudes, or a trite three-act redemption.…

LOOK CLOSER NO.1 David O. Russell was originally in line to direct the project prior to Steven Spielberg and Eastwood. NO.2 The decal on Kyle’s backpack is from The Punisher comic book. NO.3 Navy Seal sniper Kevin Lacz, who taught Cooper how to shoot, cameos in the film as himself. NO.4 As well as Morocco, the production recreated Iraq at the Blue Cloud Movie Ranch in Santa Clarita, California which has a standing set of a Middle Eastern town. RELEASED JANUARY 22 RATED MA15+ DIRECTOR Clint Eastwood SCREENWRITER Jason Hall CAST Bradley Cooper, Sienna Miller RUNNING TIME 134 minutes PLOT Based on the life of Chris Kyle (Cooper), a crack shot who became a US sniper in Iraq, the film charts his brutal training, his romance of tough-talking Taya (Miller),…

RELEASED OUT NOW RATED M DIRECTOR Peter Jackson SCREENWRITERS Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson, Guillermo del Toro CAST Martin Freeman, Orlando Bloom, Andy Serkis, Elijah Wood, Hugo Weaving, Ian McKellen, Cate Blanchett, Richard Armitage, Jed Brophy, Adam Brown, John Callen, Stephen Fry, Ryan Gage, Mark Hadlow, Peter Hambleton, Stephen Hunter, William Kircher, Sylvester McCoy, Bret McKenzie, Graham McTavish, Mike Mizrahi, James Nesbitt, Dean O’Gorman, Lee Pace, Conan Stevens, Ken Stott, Jeffrey Thomas, Aidan Turner RUNNING TIME 144 minutes PLOT Smaug the dragon has risen from his slumber and been unleashed upon Laketown, leaving his vast hoard up for grabs. A quintet of mighty armies descend on the dwarven city of Erebor to battle it out for wealth, power and the fate of Middle-earth. HAVING NAVIGATED THE BARRELS, spiders, riddles…

RELEASED JANUARY 15 RATED G DIRECTOR Robert Connolly SCREENWRITERS Robert Connolly, Steve Worland CAST Ed Oxenbould, Sam Worthington, Deborah Mailman, David Wenham, Peter Rowsthorn RUNNING TIME 96 minutes PLOT Country boy Dylan (Oxenbould) discovers he’s a paper plane maker extraordinaire, a skill that takes him to Sydney to compete, and then Tokyo for the world championships. It’s an unlikely door to possible love and a reconnection with his grieving Dad (Worthington). CAN YOU REALLY MAKE A MOVIE ABOUT the art of paper plane flying involving? Exhilarating, even? You bet your trusty paper dart you can. In an Outback town, young Dylan (Oxenbould) is fascinated by flight and a dab hand at making paper planes. So good, he qualifies for the junior championships in Sydney, though it’s a wrestle trying to…

WHITE DEATH 1939-1940: Fighting in the Winter War against the Soviet Union, Finnish sniper Simo Häyhä lurked in snow-bound landscapes alone for hours and notched 505 confirmed kills — making him the deadliest ever sharp-shooter. Nicknamed ‘White Death’, he was eventually stopped by a bullet in the face... but survived, living until the age of 96. OPERATION CHARIOT March 1942: Hoping to destroy German battleship Tirpitz while it was in dry dock at St. Nazaire, the British rammed an old destroyer packed with explosives into the dock gates — while commandos swarmed out to blitz other buildings. Many were killed or captured, but the raid was a strategic triumph. PAVLOV’S PLATOON September 1942: Soviet Sergeant Yakov Pavlov lead a platoon into a Nazi-occupied apartment building in Stalingrad... And all but…

PITCHING A MOVIE WHOSE MAIN PROTAGONIST IS a physicist, neurosurgeon, test pilot and rock musician — complete with his own band/vigilante gang called The Hong Kong Cavaliers — was never going to be an easy sell to audiences. Nor was the fact they battled ‘interdimensional Red Lectroids from Planet 10’, a race that for some inexplicable reason all had the first name ‘John’. Nor was a tone that shifted from philosophical sci-fi to adventure to comedy — often all within the same scene. Defying its confusing premise, the meddling of a mad, mercurial executive producer and box office failure, The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension has gone on to become an unlikely cult hit that boasts such high profile fans as Joss Whedon, Wes Anderson and Kevin…

ALIEN: THE ARCHIVE Mark Salisbury PLANET OF THE APES: THE EVOLUTION OF THE LEGEND Joe Fordham and Jeff Bond ROBOCOP: THE DEFINITIVE HISTORY Calum Waddell THE WORTH OF A MAKING-OF BOOK HAS LITTLE to do with the quality of the movie it’s detailing. A five-star belter with a smooth production would likely be a dry old read, but a stinker on which everyone had a miserable time? That’s a book. These collections have varying degrees of success, largely dependent on where their directors sat on the loopiness spectrum and how confidently idiotic the studio execs were at each stage. The Alien saga is a consistently rich acid spring of disgruntled directors, panicking studios and monsters on the fritz, which is why this is far from the series’ first investigation, but…

Rated M / Director/Screenwriter Rawson Marshall Thurber / Cast Ben Stiller, Christine Taylor, Vince Vaughn SETTING THE SCENE Rawson Marshall Thurber’s comedy sees pumped-up prat White Goodman (Ben Stiller) take on Peter LaFleur (Vince Vaughn) in a sweaty battle royale. Here, White attempts to seduce bank employee Kate Veatch (Christine Taylor, Stiller’s real-life wife) using his ultimate weapon: an inflatable codpiece. INT. GLOBO GYM (GOODMAN’S OFFICE) — DAY As Kate enters, Goodman is pretending to read a dictionary. Goodman: Oh hello, Katherine. Good to see you. I didn’t know you were dropping by. Kate: You asked me to come over. Goodman: Did I? Kate: Are you reading the dictionary? Goodman: You caught me. I like to break a mental sweat too. Grab a chair. So, I trust everything’s going swimmingly…

STRAIGHT TO THE POOL ROOM I would like to congratulate Empire in providing an awesome year of magazines as I have just finished my very first subscription. Please continue with the all the great movie reviews, news, articles and posters for my pool room. Connor Isaksen, via email Thanks for the kind words, Connor, and rest assured there will be plenty more posters coming in 2015 to plaster your pool room with. Judging from what you’ve got there, we’ll presume you’d like a few posters from the approximate 1,896 superhero movies set to hit screens in 2015? We’re on it! EVERY letter printed this month receives a Blu-ray of The Equalizer , the remake of the hit ’80s TV show (shout out to Edward Woodward!) starring Denzel…

MONEY, SEX AND VIOLENCE — THE motivations at many a powerful magazine institution — drive the delinquents in The Riot Club. Except these young boys behaving badly aren’t your standard troubled cinema yoofs — they’re the next generation of the ruling class (or so they believe). The titular society has a yearly drink-up for its exclusive student membership, who traditionally trash the pub they’re patronising, knowing they can always pay for the damage. Played by some of the finest rising young actors in British cinema, they are a force to be reckoned with — and here, in exclusive bios, Laura Wade, who adapted the movie from her play, Posh, introduces them. THE RIOT CLUB IS OUT LATER THIS YEAR. ED MONTGOMERY (JOSH O’CONNOR) PUPPY POSH Aspires to be…

1 BOYHOOD One member of Team Empire has seen Linklater’s coming-of-age epic five times. Not bad for a 165-minute movie with no explosions, no giant robots, no dinosaurs and just one Star Wars reference. This is a genre-transcending once-in-a-lifetime film about a child and his fragmented family, and how they both grow up over the course of an 11-year period, shot piecemeal under a shroud of relative obscurity by a team of loyal Linklater lovers — a minor miracle, in other words. The young star Ellar Coltrane plays impeccably off veterans like Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke in an unassuming, authentic fashion, while Linklater’s muso-friendly soundtrack complemented the ongoing tales of love, loss and artistic endeavour. The whole enterprise could come across…

RELEASED January 29 RATED M DIRECTORS/SCREENWRITERS Richard Glatzer, Wash Westmoreland CAST Julianne Moore, Alec Baldwin, Kristen Stewart, Kate Bosworth, Hunter Parrish RUNNING TIME 101 minutes PLOT When a few lapses in memory turn into a diagnosis of early onset Alzheimer’s for linguistics professor Alice (Julianne Moore), she and her family must learn to cope as the person they once knew slowly disappears. IF YOU ASKED PEOPLE TO NAME THEIR worst fear, losing their mind would be up there. It’s the terror of trying to hold on to what you know while, piece by piece, everything that defines you slips away. One minute you’re there, the next you’re… well, still there, but also not. “I wish I had cancer,” Still Alice’s titular tells her husband (Alec Baldwin). At least then people…

RELEASED JANUARY 15 RATED M DIRECTOR Angelina Jolie SCREENWRITERS Richard LaGravenese, Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, William Nicholson CAST Jack O’Connell, Domhnall Gleeson, Garrett Hedlund, Finn Wittrock, Jai Courtney, Alex Russell, C.J. Valleroy RUNNING TIME 137 minutes PLOT Olympic runner Louis Zamperini (O’Connell) had an eventful war, crash-landing in the Pacific, then surviving being adrift, captured by the Japanese, interned in a POW camp and hauling coal as a slave. ANGELINA JOLIE’S SECOND FILM BEHIND the camera, written in part by the Coen Brothers, begins somewhere over the Pacific. We dart amongst the crew of a B-24 bomber as they repel enemy fighters, with attention given to spry, blue-eyed bombardier Louis Zamperini (Jack O’Connell). Assisted by seamless CG and Roger Deakins’s godly cinematography, it’s a thrilling declaration of intent: young men…

RELEASED OUT NOW RATED PG DIRECTOR Rob Marshall SCREENWRITER James Lapine CAST Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt, James Corden, Anna Kendrick, Chris Pine, Johnny Depp RUNNING TIME 125 minutes PLOTCharacters from the Brothers Grimm meet on their separate quests. A Baker and Wife (Corden, Blunt) seek to undo a Witch’s (Streep) curse, while Cinderella (Kendrick), Rapunzel (Mackenzie Mauzy) et al learn to be careful what they wish for. JOHNNY DEPP IN A ZOOT SUIT AS THE lascivious Wolf. It’s so perfect. Even if he still can’t sing but croons, “Hellooooo, little girl,” you have to laugh. Since Little Red Riding Hood (Lilla Crawford) is that particularly obnoxious Broadway breed of precocious belter, he can’t eat her up fast enough for us. But fairy tales are like sci-fi; apparent death isn’t necessarily…

RELEASED: May 14 DIRECTOR: George Miller STARRING: Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Hugh Keays-Byrne IS IT A SEQUEL OR A REBOOT? Both — it takes place after the events of Beyond Thunderdome (sequel), but features Tom Hardy’s younger but no less mad Max (reboot). AND TOECUTTER’S BACK? Ah, not really. Hugh Keays-Byrne, who played that villain in the original film, is back here as new baddie Immortan Joe. Just so you know. “YOU’RE LOOKING FOR THAT VERY INTENSE KIND OF INTUITIVE RESPONSE,” George Miller says of replacing Mel Gibson who, for the generation that elevated Mad Max into the pop-cinema pantheon, is the leather-panted loner as much as Harrison is Indy or Arnie the T-800. “That frisson when that person walks into the room. It’s a very intuitive process.…

EDDIE REDMAYNE HAS AGED. Well, part of him. You have to be pretty close to see it. “These muscles started shifting on my face,” he points out, explaining that much of his physical expression as Stephen Hawking was focused on the right-hand side of his visage. “Subsequently,” he shows us, “this side is much more lined.” Indeed it is — the area around his right eye now seems a few years older than the rest of him. Not that you’d notice; at 32, Redmayne still looks 21, the age at which we first meet Hawking in The Theory Of Everything, a biopic spanning more than 25 years of the über-physicist’s life. Adapted from Jane Hawking’s (Stephen’s first wife) memoir, Travelling To Infinity: My Life With Stephen, the film begins with…

RELEASED: Jan 29 DIRECTOR: Bennett Miller STARRING: Steve Carell, Channing Tatum, Mark Ruffalo, Sienna Miller, Vanessa Redgrave BASED ON… The real-life tale of eccentric gunpowder tycoon John du Pont (Carell), who hired celebrated wrestlers Mark and David Schultz (Tatum and Ruffalo) to train the US Olympic wrestling team to success from a gym facility he’d set up on his own Foxcatcher Farm estate. It was an endeavour which ended in tragedy. SO IT’S NOT FUNNY? Not at all. Despite the presence of Carell, this ain’t no Evan Almighty. Thankfully. IN RETROSPECT, IT SEEMS FITTING THAT John Eleuthère du Pont — who died aged 72 in a Pennsylvania prison on December 9, 2010, having served 13 years of a 30-year sentence for a crime involving a .38 pistol — should owe…

LAIKA, THE ANIMATION STUDIO BEHIND CORALINE and ParaNorman, is back with The Boxtrolls. Adapted from Alan Snow’s book Here Be Monsters!, it’s a mad, funny, charming adventure about beasties who live beneath the streets of the strange town of Cheesebridge. Misunderstood and maligned, they eventually have the chance to prove they’re more than just sewer-dwelling rubbish collectors. Here, directors Anthony Stacchi and Graham Annable discuss their toughest scene, the quest to find the perfect voices and how to make puppets waltz in stop-motion… THE STORY “The first step after we decided to adapt the book is to start the script,” says Stacchi. “The screenplay goes through many iterations, just like everything we’ve worked on.” Another big part of generating the plot and characters is the storyboard team,…

DENOTES ALSO AVAILABLE ON BLU-RAY DENOTES ALSO AVAILABLE ON 3D BLU-RAY DENOTES ALSO AVAILABLE FOR DIGITAL DOWNLOAD DENOTES ALSO AVAILABLE FOR ULTRAVIOLET WITH THE SUNNY EUPHORIA of the World Cup slowly fading from memory, revisiting Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund’s brutal debut feature is a sobering experience. The name Rio de Janeiro invariably conjures postcard images of Sugarloaf mountain and the Christ statue of Corcovado gazing benignly down on the city’s sweeping bay and endless stretches of golden sand, teeming with beautiful people sipping pisco sours and playing volley-soccer to a samba beat while the lilting strains of Astrid Gilberto seep from the sound systems. The reality is not so far from the cliché. Rio is, without doubt, one of the most beguiling cities on Earth. But there is a…