George Lucas Bumming Everyone Out on The Crystal Skull
“Curb it, punks.”
Can one of our commenters suit up as “The Internet” and have a wrastlin’ match with George Lucas already? The Star Wars poobah is back to his “let’s be realistic” and “most of you will probably hate it, but so what?” schtick, but this time he’s voicing his (non)concern about expectations for May’s Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. And he goes on to take a jab at all of the preceding Indiana Jones movies as well. Why not? I mean, the title to the latest sequel shouldn’t conjure any fantastical event film notions in the minds of fans at all, right? Why not call it Jones and a Kingdom, Maybe an Alien, Too? Here’s what he shrugged to USA Today…
“When you do a movie like this, a sequel that’s very, very anticipated, people anticipate ultimately that it’s going to be the Second Coming,” Lucas says. “And it’s not. It’s just a movie. Just like the other movies. You probably have fond memories of the other movies. But if you went back and looked at them, they might not hold up the same way your memory holds up.”
And I have a theory that the U.S. government suped-and-purpled up a new $5 bill because Lucas is just over money. It’s like living in a world with only one stripper, I guess. Purple helps. The co-creator of one of the great American adventure characters insists that, for whatever reason, Indiana Jones can no longer make money him in today’s (i.e. “my”) world.
“We came back to do (Indy) because we wanted to have fun,” he says. “It’s not going to make much money for us in the end. We all have some money. … It would make a lot of money if you weren’t rich. But we’re not doing it for the money.”
So, does Lucas think the new film, which he co-wrote and produced, is just five out of ten cracks of the whip? He leaves fans with this drool-worthy sentence.
“It was really a blast. And it turned out fantastic. … I like to watch it.”
Michel Gondry on Creating A Never-ending Movie and Working at MIT
I’ve always wondered what director Michel Gondry (Enternal Sunshine, Science of Sleep, Be Kind Rewind) worked on while being an artist-in-residence at MIT . In the new issue of WiReD Magazine, Gondry talks about some of the crazy science experiments during his time serving as an MIT AIR.
Gondry spent 2005 as an artist-in-residence at Nerdland. That’s the name his 16-year-old son bestowed on MIT, which invited Gondry there to pursue his interest in neuroscience. “They understand the connection between science and the arts,” Gondry says of the school. “It’s very blurry. It was brainstorming all the time.” At MIT, Gondry tried out some unusual notions about special effects. His idea was to combine digital technology and chemistry. “People are always thinking to make everything digital,” Gondry says. “The key would be to do an interface between the digital, for the control, and the chemical, for the reaction. If you can get the two worlds together, you can make the best effects ever.” In one experiment, for instance, Gondry mixed up a paste of cornstarch and water. He placed the paste on a plate and wired it to a speaker, then added a strobe light. By changing the speaker’s frequency, he created reverb on the plate, and the concoction bubbled and spewed into strange and beautiful shapes.
Gondry also talks about a film which he wrote (but never shot).
It was one long special effect. “A single scene would be played twice, identically,” Gondry says. “But in the context of the beginning it would mean one thing, and in the context of the ending it would mean something completely different.” The film is a loop, a device Gondry used in Eternal Sunshine and which he draws on again in the structure of Be Kind. “I make a loop because when you reach the end, you come back to the beginning.” He grabs a scrap of yellow paper, tears off a long piece, and bends each end in a different direction, creating a Möbius strip. “You fold a 2-D space into a 3-D space,” he says, holding up the looped paper. “You create a depth that doesn’t exist. It becomes something much closer to what’s in your head.”
Sounds interesting, but could it work? With Gondry at the helm, anything is possible.
Anne Hathaway Ditches Good Girl Image
Anne Hathaway Ditches Good Girl Image
If you were under the impression that Princess Diaries actress Anne Hathaway was a goody-goody, you may want to cover your eyes. She’s dispelling those notions in a recent interview with Marie Claire magazine.
The Havoc star says that she doesn’t mind shedding her clothes for the camera. “I don’t actively search for (movies) that I can get naked in. It’s not the most fun requirement of the job, but nor is it something that I would ever NOT do a job because of. It is what it is. Some people choose not to do it on moral grounds; I think that’s a shoddy argument.”
In fact, Hathaway went topless in both Havoc and Brokeback Mountain, but turned down the lead role in Knocked Up because, “it was going to show a vagina – not mine, but somebody else’s. And I didn’t believe that it was actually necessary to the story.”
Hathaway enjoys making people cringe by sharing how “not a prude” she is. “I love (the band) Peaches. When people are all like, ‘Do you think you have a squeaky-clean image?’ I’m like, ‘Could a squeaky-clean girl know all the lyrics to ‘Teaches of Peaches’? I mean, my favorite song is called (Eff) the Pain Away.’”