Thursday, January 28, 2010

“Mel Gibson returns to screen after 7 1/2 years - San Francisco Chronicle” plus 3 more

“Mel Gibson returns to screen after 7 1/2 years - San Francisco Chronicle” plus 3 more

Mel Gibson returns to screen after 7 1/2 years - San Francisco Chronicle

Posted: 28 Jan 2010 04:28 PM PST

That was 7 1/2 years ago. Since then, Gibson has become a cultural firebrand, directing the controversial 2004 box-office hit "The Passion of the Christ" and the violent 2006 action epic, "Apocalypto."

He also became a cultural pariah in July 2006 when, after being pulled over in Malibu, outside Los Angeles, for speeding and driving under the influence, Gibson made obscene, anti-Semitic remarks to the arresting officer after being handcuffed and put inside a police car.

Gibson largely disappeared after the incident but returns to theaters Friday with a new movie, "Edge of Darkness," a thriller about a Boston police detective seeking revenge for the murder of his 24-year-old daughter. Receiving lukewarm reviews so far, the movie is similar in tone with past blood-drenched Gibson films such as "Ransom" and the "Lethal Weapon" franchise.

"It was time," Gibson, 54, tells The Associated Press. "I felt like getting back in the saddle. I felt like I was getting stale about seven or eight years ago. Stepped back, did some things I wanted to do. Did a few things I didn't want to do. And then time to come back."

"I don't think Mel eases his way back into anything," says "Edge of Darkness" producer Graham King. "Sure, we discussed very early on, `Is this the right role for him to come back in?' I think it is, and hopefully moviegoers will agree."

Will they? Hollywood.com box office analyst Paul Dergarabedian believes Gibson picked the right movie for his comeback.

"In revenge roles, Mel Gibson has few peers," Dergarabedian says. "If you've been away for awhile, it's smart to go back to what people are comfortable seeing you do."

Some, though, question whether Gibson's public standing has not suffered permanent damage.

"I think that drunk-driving tirade confirmed a lot of people's suspicions about the kind of person Mel Gibson is," says Matthew Traub, managing director at Dan Klores Communications.

Traub, who specializes in crisis management public relations, believes people are willing to forgive celebrities for substance abuse or sexual indiscretion but draw the line at bigotry.

Publicist Michael Levine, whose agency has represented Bill Clinton and Michael Jackson among others, agrees.

"I think he's done," Levine says of Gibson's career prospects. "He'll work, he'll exist, but I think he's seared his obit for life."

Gibson defiantly rejects the notion that he's damaged goods.

"It's 30 years ago that I lost my own personal anonymity," Gibson said. "And it's 30 years ago that the public humiliation began. And sometimes it reaches a global level. And what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. And I'm telling you right now, I'm one strong motherf----- because I'm right back at you."

Gibson also insisted his past notoriety will not affect his ability to work with Hollywood studios in the future.

"What scandal?" he says. "That's mostly newspaper hype, OK?! I can get in with the studio, work with them, or work independently as I wish. And I'll go on as I always have."

Gibson has been tentatively making the rounds to promote his new movie. He attended the Golden Globes on Jan. 17 and good naturedly played along when host Ricky Gervais brought a pint of beer on stage and jokingly introduced Gibson, saying, "Honestly, I like a drink as much as the next man — unless the next man is Mel Gibson."

He also was seen cheerfully working the phone bank at last week's all-star "Hope for Haiti Now" telethon.

But there have been missteps, too. A brief TV interview with KTLA entertainment reporter Sam Rubin turned tense when Rubin told Gibson: "Some people will welcome you back, some people will say you should never come back."

Gibson, defensive, leaned forward and asked, "Why?" Rubin replied: "Because of what happened before." Gibson: "What happened before?" Rubin: "The remarks that were attributed to you." Gibson: "The remarks that were attributed to me that I didn't necessarily make."

After the interview aired, Rubin questioned whether Gibson was ever truly sorry for the anti-Semitic remarks he made in 2006, particularly when he now contests the comments for which he widely apologized in the aftermath of his arrest.

While some may question Gibson's remorse, there's no doubting that people are still happy to make movies with him. Gibson just completed filming the offbeat comedy, "The Beaver," directed by longtime friend Jodie Foster, who plays Gibson's wife in the movie.

He has written a prison drama, "How I Spent My Summer Vacation" and will star in that movie later this year.

And he plans to direct Leonardo DiCaprio in a Viking epic that will employ Old Norse dialogue, a movie Gibson says will "put the V in Viking."

If that sounds a little out there, that's one reason why many are eager to welcome Gibson back in the fold.

"As a Jew, I have to say Mel Gibson's my favorite anti-Semite," says veteran film reporter Lewis Beale. "He's an incredibly talented guy both behind and in front of the camera."

Adds film historian David Thomson: "Gibson's not a tidy person. There's an authenticity to the unhinged characters he plays that sets him apart. Whether you like him or not, there's a daring there that makes him compelling."

___

AP Television News reporter Ryan Pearson contributed to this report from Los Angeles.

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March of the Peacocks - New York Times

Posted: 28 Jan 2010 09:00 PM PST

Last week, the Center for American Progress, a think tank with close ties to the Obama administration, published an acerbic essay about the difference between true deficit hawks and showy "deficit peacocks." You can identify deficit peacocks, readers were told, by the way they pretend that our budget problems can be solved with gimmicks like a temporary freeze in nondefense discretionary spending.

One week later, in the State of the Union address, President Obama proposed a temporary freeze in nondefense discretionary spending.

Wait, it gets worse. To justify the freeze, Mr. Obama used language that was almost identical to widely ridiculed remarks early last year by John Boehner, the House minority leader. Boehner then: "American families are tightening their belt, but they don't see government tightening its belt." Obama now: "Families across the country are tightening their belts and making tough decisions. The federal government should do the same."

What's going on here? The answer, presumably, is that Mr. Obama's advisers believed he could score some political points by doing the deficit-peacock strut. I think they were wrong, that he did himself more harm than good. Either way, however, the fact that anyone thought such a dumb policy idea was politically smart is bad news because it's an indication of the extent to which we're failing to come to grips with our economic and fiscal problems.

The nature of America's troubles is easy to state. We're in the aftermath of a severe financial crisis, which has led to mass job destruction. The only thing that's keeping us from sliding into a second Great Depression is deficit spending. And right now we need more of that deficit spending because millions of American lives are being blighted by high unemployment, and the government should be doing everything it can to bring unemployment down.

In the long run, however, even the U.S. government has to pay its way. And the long-run budget outlook was dire even before the recent surge in the deficit, mainly because of inexorably rising health care costs. Looking ahead, we're going to have to find a way to run smaller, not larger, deficits.

How can this apparent conflict between short-run needs and long-run responsibilities be resolved? Intellectually, it's not hard at all. We should combine actions that create jobs now with other actions that will reduce deficits later. And economic officials in the Obama administration understand that logic: for the past year they have been very clear that their vision involves combining fiscal stimulus to help the economy now with health care reform to help the budget later.

The sad truth, however, is that our political system doesn't seem capable of doing what's necessary.

On jobs, it's now clear that the Obama stimulus wasn't nearly big enough. No need now to resolve the question of whether the administration should or could have sought a bigger package early last year. Either way, the point is that the boost from the stimulus will start to fade out in around six months, yet we're still facing years of mass unemployment. The latest projections from the Congressional Budget Office say that the average unemployment rate next year will be only slightly lower than the current, disastrous, 10 percent.

Yet there is little sentiment in Congress for any major new job-creation efforts.

Meanwhile, health care reform faces a troubled outlook. Congressional Democrats may yet manage to pass a bill; they'll be committing political suicide if they don't. But there's no question that Republicans were very successful at demonizing the plan. And, crucially, what they demonized most effectively were the cost-control efforts: modest, totally reasonable measures to ensure that Medicare dollars are spent wisely became evil "death panels."

So if health reform fails, you can forget about any serious effort to rein in rising Medicare costs. And even if it succeeds, many politicians will have learned a hard lesson: you don't get any credit for doing the fiscally responsible thing. It's better, for the sake of your career, to just pretend that you're fiscally responsible — that is, to be a deficit peacock.

So we're paralyzed in the face of mass unemployment and out-of-control health care costs. Don't blame Mr. Obama. There's only so much one man can do, even if he sits in the White House. Blame our political culture instead, a culture that rewards hypocrisy and irresponsibility rather than serious efforts to solve America's problems. And blame the filibuster, under which 41 senators can make the country ungovernable, if they choose — and they have so chosen.

I'm sorry to say this, but the state of the union — not the speech, but the thing itself — isn't looking very good.

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Should 'Avatar' get an asterisk in the box-office record books? - Los Angeles Times Blogs

Posted: 28 Jan 2010 09:00 PM PST

Everyone in the world in the past couple of days has been writing about how "Avatar" has now surpassed "Titanic" to become the highest-grossing film of all time. But most of the stories have left out the tricky part: You can only make the claim for "Avatar" being the all-time box office champ if you leave out a few prickly little particulars, like the ones my colleague Claudia Eller mentioned in a recent post: namely ticket price inflation, foreign currency fluctuations and surcharges on 3-D movie screens.

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So when is a box-office record really a record? And should "Avatar," like so many modern-day movies that have benefited from the steep rise in ticket prices, especially in the new 3-D era, carry an asterisk next to their name? After all, if we were writing about the all-time box-office champ in terms of actual ticket admissions, it would still be "Gone With the Wind," David O. Selznick's 1939 sweeping historical romance that has riveted moviegoers for generations. If you put together an all-time box-office chart, adjusted for inflation, "Gone With the Wind" remains the undefeated, unrivaled champion, having earned an astounding $1.45 billion in ticket sales over the years. As box-office guru, Hollywood.com's Paul Dergarabedian, told me yesterday: "You never want to say never, but that's a record that I don't think will ever be broken."

In an adjusted for inflation all-time box-office Top 10 (compiled by Dergarabedian), "Gone With the Wind" is the easy winner, with George Lucas' 1977 "Star Wars" in the No. 2 slot, with $1.26 billion in grosses, followed by 1965's "Sound of Music," 1982's "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" and 1956's "The Ten Commandments."

Jim Cameron's "Titanic" comes in at No. 6 on the chart (with $955 million) while "Avatar" doesn't even come close to making the Top 10, with a mere $558 million in grosses. To give you an idea how different the adjusted gross box-office chart is from the all-time box-office chart we normally follow, "Gone With the Wind" doesn't even make the Top 50 all-time box-office leaders chart--the one that now has "Avatar" on top.

To say that the chart we normally use is weighted toward modern-day movies would be an understatement. When Dergarabedian compiled the all-time box-office chart (the one that is not adjusted for inflation), only 5 of its top 50 films were released before 1997--Lucas' original "Star Wars" trilogy, Spielberg's "E.T." and 1990's "Home Alone." The vast majority of films on the list were released in the past half-dozen years. But when you turn things around and check out the adjusted gross Top 10 list, it has only one film--"Titanic"--that was released in the past 30 years.

It feels as if something here is out of whack. To make a comparison with our other statistic-obsessed national pastime--baseball, of course--the movie industry's box-office charts look suspiciously like baseball's steroid-plagued all-time home run list. In most career baseball records, from pitching wins to hits to RBI's and even stolen bases, there are plenty of representatives in the upper reaches of the record book from both ancient and modern times. But in the all-time home run leaders, the Top 20 list is crammed with players from the Steroid Era--i.e., players who played most of their career in the 1990s and first half of the 2000s.

Baseball purists are pretty unhappy about this development, so much so that when it comes to Hall of Fame consideration, many of the Steroid Era sluggers are being shunned. (Mark McGwire has 583 home runs, normally a number that would easily qualify a hitter for the Hall of Fame induction, but the St. Louis Cardinals slugger has barely earned 25% of baseball writers' votes since he became eligible for induction, not even close to enough votes for his selection.)

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying "Avatar" or any of other modern-day box-office behemoths are unworthy of their money-making honors. But because of ticket price inflation, which has now quietly taken a giant leap forward, thanks to the extra dollars moviegoers are paying to see 3-D movies, the all-time box-office charts are even more heavily weighted than ever toward 21st century films. And with even more 3-D films in the pipeline, in a few years the top of the charts will be even more dominated by current films.

The solution? Why not switch over to box-office charts that are based on attendance, not grosses, which would give us a more realistic portrait of how many people actually saw a film, not just how much moola its studio made? I don't know about you, but when I think of how much cultural heft a film has, I'm more interested in how many people enjoyed the communal delight of being in front of the big screen, not simply how much money they had to pay to see it.

Photo: "Avatar" Photo credit: 20th Century Fox

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Going for gold, with a heart to match - Minneapolis Star Tribune

Posted: 28 Jan 2010 07:34 PM PST

"It was 18 months of hell," said Plys, who owns a food brokerage. "You can either be scared to death, or you can take every part of your being and your spirituality and fight as hard as you can. We as a family had a great support network around us with our church community and our friends, and we were going to fight."

Patrick, who introduced Chris to curling when his oldest son was 11, was too ill to attend the 2008 world junior championships in Sweden. Chris skipped his Duluth-based team to the U.S. team's first world junior title since 1984. When Olympic skip John Shuster asked him to be the alternate for Vancouver, he wanted to make sure his dad and his mother, Laura, would be there.

Chris had heard about a new reality-TV show called "Bank of Hollywood," in which people ask a panel of wealthy celebrities for money to finance their dreams. He sent in an audition video; once he was selected, a crew came to film an interview with his family, and Chris headed to Los Angeles to appear on the show.

Pussycat Dolls singer Melody Thornton, Wilhelmina President Sean Patterson and socialite Candy Spelling gave a thumbs-up to Plys' request for $6,500. "Do chicks dig curlers?" Patterson asked him. "Oh, yeah," Plys replied, as a gaggle of audience members in tube tops and leather pants applauded wildly.

On his team and on camera, Plys plays the outgoing, fun-loving jokester. He also is unusually thoughtful for a 22-year-old athlete, leaving his father touched but not surprised by his gesture.

"To think beyond yourself at that age is a phenomenal thing," Patrick Plys said. "He gives all of himself to everything he does. He's excelled in a lot of areas, but he wants to put others first."

Patrick and Laura Plys will pay it forward in Vancouver. They will spend three weeks there, serving coffee and hot chocolate to tourists during the Games and working with the homeless afterward.

In a sport that rewards maturity and experience, Plys already has compiled a gaudy résumé. Along with his 2008 world junior championship, he has won five U.S. junior titles, a gold medal with Shuster at the World University Games in 2007 and a bronze at the 2009 world junior championships.

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