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19 Jan 2011

Chris Hemsworth or Brad Pitt ... do I have to choose?!

Yes, Aricia, you have to choose, because unless we're talking about The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, which is a very special case, you can only have ONE actor playing the same part in he same movie at the same time! (Well, Doctor Who can be played by up to five actors at once, but only when there's a temporal screw-up and the universe is about to collapse. So that doesn't count. Right.)

And The Mighty Thor is the part to end all parts ... and it went to another emerging Aussie, a lad by the name of Chris Hemsworth:

Part of me (and a large part -- which isn't fair to Chris. But still, see below) wants to say, "Durnitall, I wish they'd twisted Brad Pitt's arm a bit harder, or maybe offered him some more money."

But the fact is, that's rather a daft thing to be saying in any case, because before I saw The Fellowship of the Ring, I was saying, "Viggo who? Orlando what--?" And a week before Avatar a lot of us, self included, were saying, "Sam, who-d'you-say?"

So to speak, give the lad a chance for goshsakes, because ... well, pictures speak louder than words, so let me clam up and show you a few!

And you have to admit ... if you couldn't get Brad ... about which, whimper, but they couldn't, obviously, for reasons undisclosed. Maybe Brad is too sleep deprived with all those babies running amok in the house? And just maybe he's had quite enough of living in the gym, pumping enough iron to build the Sydney Harbor Bridge, and eating like a rabbit while he does it! Don't be fooled, kids -- that's what it takes to get the ripped physique. It don't happen in nature, only in the gym where the salad bar is your only comfort. Gak. Where did I put my Mars Bar?

As I was saying, if you couldn't get Brad, get someone who'd easily pass for Brad in dim light, and especially if he can act as well. And it turns out, the lad can! The official trailer is playing across the www right now, so check this out: (click on the little icon to PLAY FULL SCREEN ... it looks great that way...)

So don't be deterred by the Bradlessness of The Mighty Thor, because I have a feeling the Aussie assault on Hollywood is about to continue with a vengeance. The late Heath Ledger, plus Hugh Jackman, Sam Worthington, Eric Bana, and before them it was Russel Crow, Sam Neill, Geoffrey Rush, and these are just the mega-stars. There's also hosts of slightly-lesser stars without whom movies just wouldn't be the same. In recent years, Sam Worthington in particular has impressed the heck out of me. He was brilliant in Terminator Salvation, and it was so cool to actually hear him in Clash of the Titans, where they let him "do" it in his own voice. Yes!! Go Aussie!! [Waves flag till somebody throws beer cans]

So I do expect to be well and truly impressed by Chris Hemsworth in this one, and I think that after May 11 you'll have a hard time visualizing anyone else in the part. Still, though, I can help thinking back on Brad Pitt in Troy, and I know I've said elsewhere on this blog that Achilles looked more like Thor than Thor does! Would I kid you? You want the evidence? Here you go:

From the trailer, it seems to me that Marvell is gifting The Mighty Thor with all due gravitas, and this is great. The one thing that had concerned me was that the project would get trivialized in the translation to the big screen. Needn't have worried, and after Iron Man, it was probably never something to waste worries on. Roll on May 6!

Chris Hemsworth Wallpapers

Chris Hemsworth (born 11 August 1983) is an Australian actor

13 Jan 2011

Annette Bening Wallpapers

Annette Francine Bening (born May 29, 1958) is an American actress.

10 Jan 2011

Tim McGraw Wallpapers

Samuel Timothy "Tim" McGraw is an American country singer and actor.

8 Jan 2011

Taylor Kitsch is headed for Mars!

There you are, you see? And you didn't believe in Santa! Turns out, dreams do occasionally come true after all ... and I have no idea how this one blew by me till I was surfing around a few hours ago, and I thought, "I wonder if you can download the John Carter of Mars books as ebooks?" So I searched on "John Carter of Mars ebooks," and came up blank ... but what did show up was "John Carter of Mars (2012)," with a URL at IMDB attached --

Hold it right there! Say -- what?

Do you remember being a little kid and stumbling backwards into the most amazing fantasy worlds, sandwiched between paperback covers? I mean, back in the days when people used to actually read. Well, John Carter of Mars is like that. It's a series of fantasy novels written around 100 years ago (in fact, 2012 will make the centenary of the publication of A Princess of Mars) by Edgar Rice Burroughs. And discovering these novels was 14-year-old heaven on a stick...

A few years ago I found that some of them had passed into the public domain, which doesn't bear thinking about. It's crass. It means the works have been abandoned. And then ... well, see above: Taylor Kitsch, who played Gambit in Wolverine, is playing the southern gentleman, John Carter, who is somewhat magically teleported to a Mars that never existed -- but by golly, there's about five generations of fantasy fans who wish it did!

Here you go -- John Carter, mostly nekkid, all ripling muscles and swords -- put Taylor Kitsch into this costume and let your imagination rip! And the similarly almost nekkid Dejah Thoris, who's being played by Lyn Collins, also out of Wolverine. In fact, Wolverine is the only movie I've seen her in, but I liked what I saw.

Now, loooong before all this headed for the movie screen (and you just know it's going to be done in 3D, right? At least, I'm hoping and praying it will be) this whole "universe" was created down to the last exotic moon hurtling through the tropic skies of this fantasy Mars. Burroughs wrote 11 of these volumes as the "Barsoom Series" (there's actually a round dozen, but the last two were short -- they came out in SF magazines of the day -- and were later published under one cover. Check out the Wikipedia page for the series.)

And bringing this to the screen will have been a job on about the same scale as Avatar, because ... this is where it gets interesting. Taylor Kitsch and Lyn Collins have got it easy. All they have to do is live in the gym, look great in skimpy costumes, and run about being athletic in front of big green screens...

...and I'm pretty sure they can manage to do that! But consider the part of Tars Tarkas:
For a start, he has four arms and is about ten feet tall, and green. And here's where the production starts to run along the same lines of Avatar, because (yowzer!) Willem Dafoe is going to play Tars Tarkas, and he can only be doing it the way Sam Worthington played Jake Sully's avatar. You've seen the "making of Avatar" movie, right? It's runs 104 minutes and it packed on Disk 3 of the Special Collector's edition of Avatar that was stacked up under about ten million Christmas trees around the world, along with the aftershave and curling wands and RC trucks.

You saw Willen Dafoe as the Green Goblin in Spiderman. And you actually won't see him in John Carter of Mars --

-- because the character of Tars Tarkas looks nowhere near human. It's not like putting Sam Worthington's face on a Na'vi. It's more like Andy Sirkis playing Gollum -- in fact, Sirkis also did the motion capture for King Kong, which was an interesting switch of roles. From the smallest character to the biggest. Neat.

I would have to say, I think it takes vast courage for an actor to play these parts, because he's going to be utterly invisible, yet he can't just "phone it in," like an actor doing a voice part -- say, Johnny Depp voicing Rango the lizard. Any actor doing performance capture is going to be on the set, flinging himself around in front of the big green screen, taking all the falls, and yet he's going to be utterly invisible. My hat's off to Willem Dafoe, same as it was to Andy Sirkis.

So now I'm going to be on tenterhooks for a year and a half, because Disney Pixar has John Carter slated for release in June 2012. So long? Waaaaah! I believe I shall spit the dummy.

But a dream is in the process of coming true. The movie also stars Mark Strong and Thomas Haden Church. These might not be names that ring bells with you, but you saw Strong as the villain in the Sherlock Holmes movie (the Robery Downey Jr. and Jude Law version), and you must have seen Church as the villainous, vile Lyle van der Groot in George of the Jungle. No? Really?! Then you missed one of the major treats of our time -- Brendan Fraser at age 28, buff-naked, having just walked out of the gym. (Buff -- what? You forgot the shower scene, with the bar of soap? Shame on you. Go rent the movie. Now.)

So I'll just have to be patient, and make do with the move is that are coming along in a few months: Johnny Depp is back as Jack, and word is, it's 3D. Then Anthony Hopkins is Odin in The Mighty Thor -- which is definitely 3D. And the next Star Trek movie is also due ... but if it's 3D, by golly, I hope they NAIL THE CAMERA TO SOMETHING and stop it jiggling around, because if they do the jiggly camera thing from the previous movie, and add 3D too, AG will be in the bathroom, tossing her popcorn.

Patience, my children.