Tag: Battleship

LIAM NEESON AND ALEC BALDWIN SOLVE WOMEN

HOLLYWOOD – Liam Neeson and Alec Baldwin have stepped in and solved women.

The world breathed a sigh of relief last night after news broken that Liam Neeson and Alec Baldwin had got together and solved women.

Alec Baldwin spoke EXCLUSIVELY to the Studio Exec:

It was looking a bit tricky back there. Lots of people were wondering how it was going to pan out. There’s the #MeToo movement and then there’s also #TimesUp. And what’s going on with Kevin Spacey and Woody Allen and Aziz Anzari. Luckily though I had a big think about it and I worked it all out.

Liam Neeson added:

Women are very complicated creatures. Some would say they’re deadlier than the male. But statistics actually prove that isn’t the case. It’s a myth.

What qualifies you to solve women?

LN: I have a particular set of skills.

AB: I was good on 30 Rock. And I’ve played Donald Trump to huge acclaim.

But that isn’t…?

LN: I was Zeus for crying out loud. Of course I can do it. I commanded a battleship in that film… what was it?

AB: Battleship?

LN: The A Team I think it was.

Is there a risk that a pair of privileged white men talking about this issue lack authority?

LN: You have to ask why are we privileged?

AB: Maybe we know something you don’t know.

LN: I, for instance, have a particular set of skills.

You keep saying that. But aren’t you worried people will think you are condescending? Maybe even misogynistic?

AB: How can I be misogynistic? I love women.

LN: When my daughter — DAUGHTER — was kidnapped, I not only found her, I killed about thirty guys. Then my wife and daughter – both of them women, you’ll note – got kidnapped again, I killed about thirty. I must admit the third time they tried to kidnap my wife I was thinking, how come the silly bitch keeps getting kidnapped? But I still avenged her death, with more violence.

Commuter is in cinemas. I don’t know what Alec Baldwin is doing.

HIDDEN GEMS 21. BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN

Hidden Gems brings to light little known film gems which have somehow slipped through the collective cinematic consciousness. This week SILENT movie ‘Battleship Potemkin’. You’re welcome.

I know what you’re going to say, ‘Urgh! I hated Battleship’. Fair enough. It was awful, even for Peter Berg, but did you know it was a remake of a Russian movie? No. Well, welcome to the best kept secret of the former Soviet Union.

Battleship Potemkin tells the story of Battleship and a revolt that takes place after they find that the bread is full of maggots. The officers are all absolute douche bags and when they order the soldiers to shoot the men, a general riot breaks out on-board the ship. The people in the port of Odessa support the mutiny but then Tsarist soldiers, like assholes, massacre them on the Odessa Steps. This is the heart of the movie, and a moment when a baby in a pram runs out of control down the steps is unbelievably good. One criticism might be that this part seems to be directly lifted from Brian DePalma’s Untouchables. It’s a niggle. I know.

Director Sergei Eisenstein was not only a great director but also discovered the General Theory of Relativity. Potemkin clocks in at just an hour fifteen minutes, a whole hour under Peter Berg’s Battleship. Which could be why Eisenstein is still respected for his editing and Berg isn’t.

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HUNGRY HUNGRY HIPPOS GREEN LIT

HOLLYWOOD – Liam Neeson is to complete a quadrology of board game based films with the release of Hungry Hungry Hippos to be released next year.

The Irish actor and Taken star spoke EXCLUSIVELY about the project with The Studio Exec:

It doesn’t seem like yesterday that we were talking about Operation and Battling Tops. After I decided to make those two films my agent called me up and said ‘Liam you’re not going to believe this but they’re after making a film of Hungry Hungry Hippos’. Well, I said ‘Stop the clock! I want it Barney. I want the gig. I want it more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my whole life!’

Why were you so passionate about it?

You see when I was a lad growing in in Ireland, I used to play Hungry Hungry Hippos with my cousins while the adults were all getting ripped off their arses on the porter and singing songs of the famine. I had many a happy memory of that game so it they’re going to make a film of it I want to be involved so that I know they’ll do it right.

What’s the story?

I play Brian McHare, an explorer in the African Congo at the turn of the century. I’m hoping to discover a passage but in the meanwhile there are these diamond smugglers who are looking to kill the local natives and do away with the treasure. We all fall in together and that’s when we come across the titular Hungry Hungry Hippos. have you seen Jaws?

Yes. 

Of course you have. Well, it’s like that, but with hippopotami. And in the jungle. Ridley Scott’s going to direct it. Denzel Washington is playing the fiendish diamond smuggler and One Direction – in their first dramatic film roles – are playing the innocent African villagers.

But aren’t they…

I know but Ridley wants to make a point.

Hungry Hungry Hippos will be released in 2016. 

LIAM NEESON SIGNS ON FOR OPERATION

HOLLYWOOD – Liam Neeson is a busy actor at the moment and he’s just added to his roster signing up for Alan Parker’s new film Operation.

Based on the world famous skill game, Operation will center on the story of an surgeon who must operate on the President of the United States of America after his body has been implanted with a twelve mini-nuclear bombs.

Liam Neeson spoke EXCLUSIVELY to the Studio Exec about the project:

I can’t begin to tell you how excited I am about this one, lads. I mean the way they’ve weaved terrorists and imminent thermonuclear destruction into what once was a table top game for kiddies is utterly fan-bloody-tastic. I can’t believe I wasted all that time with that Oscar Schindler crap when I could’ve been doing this.

Alan Parker – the director of Angel Heart and Midnight Express – who has come out of retirement spoke of his renewed taste for making films.

Liam is a versatile actor who can literally do anything. He is one of our finest character actors, but his commitment to making money has led him to also appear as an action star in the Taken series, single-handedly invent the board game genre and of course, who else would have dared to taken on Hannibal and pull of a performance that George Peppard would have been proud to own. Operation will be high drama and tension. Think of it as The Hurt Locker mixed with House. It’s political and dark, thrilling really and there is a moment of humor when the president’s nose glows red and a buzzer sound is heard. Don’t worry, it’s a false alarm caused by a mobile phone left on vibrate and POTUS’s alcoholism.

Operation: the Motion Picture will be released in 2016.

LIAM NEESON TO STAR IN BATTLING TOPS

HOLLYWOOD – Liam Neeson confirmed today that he will be starring in Peter Berg’s forthcoming Battling Tops based on the popular skill game.

Liam Neeson told the Studio Exec EXCLUSIVELY that he was excited at the prospect of teaming up once more with the creative geniuses who brought us Battleship:

For sure, the lads have got a great concept going. What you do is take one of them there games you remember playing with your cousins at Christmas while the adults got sauced, and you turn it into a movie. It’s fantastic. Special effects galore and it’ll make sacks of money. It is literally child’s play.

What’s the story?

Oh lord knows. I mean there isn’t a story as such but I can probably guess. There’s an alien invasion and our last line of defense are these weird spinning vehicles which have to fight it out with the aliens and their weird spinning vehicles. There’ll be a young guy played by Chris Pine or Chris Pratt, one of those Chrises. I’ll be the old sea dog type who they bring in and I’ll die near the end. I’ll have a smoking hot daughter who is probably Beyonce or one those warblers. Money meet Mr. Neeson’s bank account.

Can you see future collaborations of this nature?

Oh yes, we’ve got a whole series of ideas mapped out which I hope to be announcing in due time. Listen, I know I get a lot of flak for basically wasting my time on what is essentially crap, but if I can earn the big bucks on this sort of fluff then it gives me the time to choose more artistically valid projects down the line.

Such as?

Taken 4!

Battling Tops will be released in 2016.

IS THE LEFTOVERS COMPLETE SHIT?

HOLLYWOOD – With the Rapture all the rage, the new Damon Lindelof and Tom Perotta scripted drama, The Leftovers on HBO asks the question couldn’t God have taken Damon Lindelof and Tom Perotta as well.

The pilot sets up its premise with alacrity. One day a bunch of people disappear, skip to a few years later and everyone is post-9/11ing the shit out of it, including a maudlin Sheriff (Justin Theroux), whose wife has joined the Guilt Remnant, a religious cult and whose daughter is a hockey cheat and whose son has run away to follow a messiah type figure. There’s a crackpot Christopher Eccleston and the small town mayor played by Amanda Warburton.

Continue reading “IS THE LEFTOVERS COMPLETE SHIT?”

M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN SIGNS ON FOR ‘TWISTER’

ATHENS – Famed ‘genius’ and ‘film’ ‘director’ M. Night Shyamalan is looking to rescue the twisted wreckage of his career after After Earth with a new project, which seeks to combine a commercially viable idea with his penchant for a certain trade mark narrative technique.

Following on from the massive success of Battleship and There Will Be Blood, Twister is the latest popular game (this time from MB Games) to get a big screen conversion and Shyamalan hopes that it will save him from twin dollops such as The Happening and The Last Airbender.

The game – which involves placing hands and feet (and in the Bangkok version sexual organs) on different colored circles at the whimsical behest of a spinning arrow controlled by a laughing idiot – does not immediately suggest a narrative, but Shyamalan is both optimistic and desperately unhappy.

I think this is a marriage made in heaven between my films and the game. On the one hand you have an inane, truly ridiculous series of contortions which will inevitably collapse to the sound of derisive laughter and on the other you have the game, Twister.  

Twister will be released in 2015 and will star Will and Jandapus Smith.

[SPOILER] LONE [SPOILER] SURVIVOR: REVIEW

AFGHANISTAN – Lone Survivor is a war film which asks the important question: which Mark Wahlberg will survive?

The film begins with footage of the real life and arduous training of Navy frogmen with lots of shouting and ferociousness, if you were being cynical you might think of it almost as a recruiting video but we can put a pin in that. 

Then we’re in Afghanistan where the trivia of home – picking out the color scheme for redecoration – mixes with the gung-ho rituals of on base military life. The professional soldiers prepare for a mission with power point presentations and a close attention to detail – and then four of the squad (Wahlberg, John Carter, Into the Wild and Ben Foster) are dropped into hostile territory where things begin quickly to go wrong. 

Accusing a true story of cliché might seem a bit rich, but US foreign policy has a tendency to repeat its mistakes with such grinding regularity that familiar ground is hard to avoid. For some this will be a patriotic piece of action cinema, a stirring tribute to the fallen. To others it might be a piece of pernicious propaganda which manipulates the suffering and death of the American soldiers for maximum effect while utterly disregarding the suffering and death of everyone else. Hoping for geopolitical nuance from the director of Battleship might be asking too much, but his action sequences are much better and clunking clichés and lachrymose coda aside, there’s a punchy  and tense war film here.

BREAKFAST WITH ASSHOLES: 3. LIAM NEESON

 

DUBLIN – Liam Neeson sits across from me staring. I shift position nervously but he looks like he is measuring me up, trying to decide on the best way to kill me, whether to break my neck, or throttle me, or drive my nose bone deep into my pulpy brain flesh. He’s been sitting here in silence for twenty minutes.

When I first sat down, I sensed something was wrong. ‘You can’t sit there,’ Neeson growled in his famous Irish burr. ‘It’s Taken.’
I sat in the other chair. 
‘You can’t sit there either,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘That’s Taken 2,’ he roared with laughter.
In order to join in with the mood, I said, ‘Are you Taken the piss?’
At which point he stopped suddenly and stared at me. And that’s where we came in. Him staring at me for twenty minutes. 
Finally he sighs and begins to devour his food with something like savage grace. 
‘So,’ I say. ‘When George Lucas first approached you for the role of Qui Gong did you…’
‘Money,’ Neeson growls.
‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Were you a big fan of the TV show The A Team?’
‘Money,’ says Neeson.
‘Battleship?’
‘Money.’
‘The Grey?’
Neeson smiles. ‘That was the catering.’
‘I…’
‘I don’t know who you are’ Neeson says.
‘I’m Chad…’
‘I don’t know what you want. If you are looking for quotes, I can tell you now I don’t have them. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let me daughter go…’
‘What?’
‘That’ll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you, but if you don’t… stop crying Chad, if you don’t, I will look for you, I will find you and I will kill you.’
At which point I ran for it.

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