Basil Rathbone, in the 40s; Peter Cushing, in the 50s and 60s, plus a last gasp in the 80s; Jeremy Brett, in the 80s and 90s; and now Benedict Cumberbatch, edging out Robert Downey Jr in the 21st century. Everyone’s favourite Sherlock Holmes is surely one of the above – at the expense of so many other of their deer-stalking, pipe-puffing, violin-scraping kin, who almost always get overlooked. To attempt to fix that terrible problem, Alan Barnes, author of Sherlock Holmes On Screen, which comes out this week, presents, in chronological order, ten criminally under-rated Great Detectives for your reconsideration. Click through to check out his picks, and let us know your own favorite incarnation of the famous sleuth in the comments!
Welcome to “Trailer Park,” our regular Friday feature where we collect the week’s new trailers all in one place and do a little “judging a book by its cover,” ranking them from worst to best and taking our best guess at what they may be hiding. We’ve got six new trailers this week, including new vehicles for The Rock, Kristen Stewart, and Jonah Hill (and an old one for Eddie Murphy); check ‘em out after the jump. Read More »
“The best research for playing a drunk is being a British actor for 20 years,” says Michael Caine. That hasn’t stopped plenty of American actors from giving it a shot. This week, Johnny Depp appears in The Rum Diary, based on a typically boozy (not to mention druggy) book by Hunter Thompson. Even if you try to ignore the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, Depp has had years of experience to hone his on-screen stagger. But he’s not the first – and definitely not the craziest – actor to bring the party to work. Below, we revisit some of the best drunken performances committed to film.
A 2011 Oscar winner, another nominee, an acclaimed director, and the writer/star of one of TV’s most delightfully subversive comedies couldn’t convince audiences to see Your Highness, which opened last weekend to odious reviews and bad box office. What went wrong? Well, it is certainly possible that the target audience for a stoner parody of sword-and-sorcery movies was a little too narrow to justify a $50 million budget. Or it could just be the execution; “Like members of some post-Dadaist collective,” Time’s Richard Corliss notes, “the filmmakers have dedicated themselves to memorializing every first, wrong impulse that popped into their heads, while ruthlessly excising any vestige of wit or narrative niceties as being too linear, dude.” Whatever the reason, it certainly seems like yet another strange choice for Natalie Portman, whose first release after her Oscar nomination was a dopey, formulaic “friends with benefits” sex comedy. (As for James Franco, we’ve given up on guessing his motives for doing anything.)
Putting together a filmography is always a crap shoot for actors; the process of assembling a major studio production involves so many variables, from studio interference to directorial whims to budgetary concerns to a million other little things that sometimes you just can’t know what the final product will be. But in some cases, you just can’t imagine what a seemingly intelligent, acclaimed actor saw on the page, and how he ever imagined it could be a good movie — and we’re not talking about early on, when a hungry actor takes any role available. We’re talking post-fame, sometimes post-Oscar. After the jump, we’ll take a look at some of our favorite actors, and some of their most absolutely inexplicable choices.
Photographer David Bailey began working for Vogue in 1960 and it was there that his lens helped shape and capture what has become known as “Swinging London.” Actors, musicians, supermodels, and royalty were his subjects and social pals. His iconic images of Mick Jagger, Michael Caine, Paul McCartney and John Lennon, Jane Birkin, Jean Shrimpton, Andy Warhol, and Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski defined the decade.
Bailey was such a popular figure of the time that film director Michelangelo Antonioni based the character of Thomas, a sexy fashion photographer in the 1966 movie Blow-Up, on him. Dubbed the “Godfather of cool,” when he was named a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) for his contribution to photography in 2001, Bailey is now being honored with an exhibition of his celebrated ‘60s photos in the exhibition Pure Sixties. Pure Bailey, which runs through April 7, at Bonhams in London.
