SUNDAY, MARCH 5, 2017
lifestyle
M O V I E S
Jackman slices and dices
one last time as Wolverine
A
fter eight movies over 17 years, Hugh Jackman returns
this weekend for his final hurrah as Wolverine in
"Logan," an edgier, darker take on everyone's favorite
hairy, metal-clawed mutant anti-hero. Jackman, 48, had
agreed with director James Mangold that if he was going to
reprise his iconic role as the cigar-chomping loner one last
time, it should be the first R-rated outing in the "X-Men" franchise aimed at a more adult audience. "Hugh and I didn't want
to do it if we couldn't do something very different," Mangold
said at a preview in Los Angeles of Twentieth Century Fox's
2017 slate.
Professor X in the X-Men
series’ Patrick Stewart
poses for photos with a gift
of a painting during a press
conference for the film
Logan in Taipei.
—AFP photos
"We both felt like we had made the last movie and we also
felt like... there's a slew of comic book themed films, superhero
movies-whatever you want to call them-and I, for one, am
feeling kind of an exhaustion watching them, generally."
"Logan," which takes place more than 50 years after the events
of "X-Men: Days of Future Past" (2014), sees Wolverine/Logan
aging, weary and vulnerable. Sporting an unkempt gray
beard, he drinks his days away on the Mexican border, picking
up black market drugs to treat the dying Professor X, played
for a seventh-and also final-time by acclaimed British thespian
Patrick Stewart.
Humanity
Logan is snapped abruptly out of his torpor when a mysterious woman begs him to protect a young girl-a stunning
debut by English-Spanish newcomer Dafne Keen, 11 -- who
has powers remarkably like his own and is being pursued by
dark forces. Jackman first played Wolverine in 2000's "X-Men,"
his acting debut in Hollywood, sparking a re-emergence of
superhero movies and kicking off a franchise that has so far
clocked up $4.4 billion in box office receipts.
Director Bryan Singer had considered a number of big
names for the part, including Edward Norton, Russell Crowe
and Keanu Reeves. He settled on Dougray Scott but the
Scottish star had to drop out and Jackman was brought on
board at the last minute. Since then, the Australian actor has
slipped into Wolverine's skin in "X2: X-Men United" and "XMen: The Last Stand," before fleshing out the character's back
story in the prequel "X-Men Origins: Wolverine."
There was a cameo in "X-Men: First Class" and starring roles
in "The Wolverine," and "X-Men: Days of Future Past" before
another brief appearance in "X-Men: Apocalypse." The installments have ranged wildly in quality, with "Days of Future Past"
receiving almost universally glowing reviews while "Origins"
was hammered by the critics. Jackman, however, has been
praised for consistently finding Logan's humanity beneath the
gruff, scarred exterior.
Road movie
More of a blood-spattered road movie than a traditional
superhero film, the latest installment earned its R rating mainly because of the unrelenting, visceral violence which plays
out from the opening scene. It is expected to take $65 million
over the weekend to top the domestic box office and $170
million worldwide. Filmed in the brutal summer heat of
Louisiana and New Mexico, "Logan" was heavily influenced by
"Shane," the 1953 story of a weary cowboy drawn back into
violence after trying to settle down with a homestead family.
"It's a movie about comic book characters but Westerns
were made for adults, gangster pictures were made for adults.
There's no reason that this genre can't be made, and has been
in some cases in the past, for adults," said Mangold, 53.
"Deadpool" was one such R-rated comic book film, which
raked in nearly $800 million last year. It starred Ryan Reynolds
as a fast-talking, crass mercenary who acquires accelerated
healing powers-a character he played in "Origins."
Jackman, a versatile Golden Globe and Tony Award-winning performer as comfortable in stage musicals as blockbusters, has long been open about the fact that "Logan"
would be his last Wolverine movie. "He's a warrior. He's billed
as a weapon, a killing machine, really. But as we say in the
movie-it's a quote from 'Shane'-there's no living with a killing.
There's a cost to violence," Jackman told journalists at a
screening in New York. "The movie's got something to say and
I also think we got to the real bottom of this character and
who he is." — AFP
Natalie Portman
gives birth to a girl
H
This file photo shows actress Natalie Portman arriving for the 89th Annual Academy
Awards Nominee Luncheon at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, California. — AFP
ollywood star Natalie Portman has given birth to a
girl, her representative said on Friday. It is the second child for the 35-year-old Oscar-winning actress
and her husband, French choreographer Benjamin
Millepied, six years after the birth of their son Aleph.
"Natalie Portman and her husband Benjamin Millepied
welcomed a baby girl, Amalia Millepied, on February 22.
Mother and baby are happy and healthy," her representative said in a statement circulated to US media.
Portman attended the Golden Globes and Screen
Actors Guild Awards in January but skipped Sunday's
Oscars, where she was nominated for best actress for her
performance in "Jackie," about the late US First Lady Jackie
Kennedy. Critics raved about how accurately Portman managed to capture Kennedy's voice and personality. Portman
won a best actress Oscar for 2010's psychological ballet
thriller "Black Swan," and it was on the set of the movie that
she met Millepied. — AFP
Paula Fox, prize winning author, dead at 93
P
aula Fox, a prize-winning author who created high art out of imagined chaos in
such novels as "Poor George" and
"Desperate Characters" and out of the real-life
upheavals in her memoir "Borrowed Finery," has
died at age 93. Her daughter, Linda Carroll, said
that Fox died Wednesday at Brooklyn Methodist
Hospital. She had been in failing health.
Abandoned as a girl by her parents, a single
mother before age 20, Fox used the most finely
crafted prose to write again and again about
breakdown and disruption, what happens under
the "surface of things."
In "Poor George," her debut novel, Fox told of
a bored school teacher and the teen vagrant
who upends his life. "Desperate Characters," her
most highly regarded work of fiction, is a portrait
of New York City's civic and domestic decline in
the 1960s, a plague symbolized by the bite of a
stray cat. "It seems to me that in life, behind all
these names and things and people and forces,
there's a dark energy," Fox said in 2011.
Her work was out of print for years, but she
enjoyed a late-life revival thanks to the admiration of such younger authors as Jonathan
Franzen, David Foster Wallace and Jonathan
Lethem. She lived for decades in Brooklyn and
was a revered figure in the New York City borough's thriving literary community. Her other
books included the novels "A Servant's Tale,"
"The Western Coast" and a memoir about living
in Europe after World War II, "The Coldest Winter."
Fox also wrote more than a dozen children's
books, including "The Slave Dancer," winner of
the Newbery medal in 1974. "Borrowed Finery,"
published in 2001, was nominated for the
National Book Critics Circle award. She might
have written more novels, but a head injury sustained from a mugging in Jerusalem in the 1990s
left her unable to write long fiction. She instead
began working on memoirs and shorter pieces.
Born in New York City in 1923, Fox was the
daughter of novelist-screenwriter Paul Fox and
fellow screenwriter Elsie Fox.
In this photo, author Paula Fox poses for
a portrait in New York. — AP
Paula Fox remembered her father as a drunk
given to "interminable, stumbling descriptions
of the ways in which he and fellow writers tried
to elude domesticity." Her mother was a
"sociopath" who kicked her out of the house as a
young girl. Fox lived everywhere from a plantation in Cuba to a boarding school in Montreal.
"My life was incoherent to me," Fox wrote in
"Borrowed Finery." "I felt it quivering, spitting out
broken teeth."
Overlooked masterpiece
If only she could have gathered all the people
she met and placed them in a single room.
Living in Hollywood in the 1930s and '40s, she
danced with John Wayne and encountered John
Barrymore, "yellowing with age like the ivory
keys of a very old piano." Marlon Brando was a
friend and Courtney Love is her granddaughter,
born to the woman Carroll, whom a 19-year-old
Fox gave up for adoption. Her brother-in-law,
Clement Greenberg, was among the 20th century's most influential art critics.
Although a devoted reader since childhood,
she didn't publish until past 40. She worked for
years as a teacher and as a tutor for troubled
children and was married briefly for a second
time, to Richard Sigerson, with whom she had
two sons. She finally settled down with her third
husband, translator and Commentary editor
Martin Greenberg, whom she met after he had
rejected a story she submitted for the magazine.
In "The Coldest Winter," Fox wrote that living
abroad had liberated her mind, "showing me
something other than myself." Her early fiction
included the stories "Lord Randall" and "The
Living," narrated in colloquial style by black characters and published in the mid-1960s by Negro
Digest. In "The Slave Dancer," a young boy is captured and forced on to a slave ship. "I've never
been a slave. I've never been black. I was never on
a ship. But I have a certain narrow understanding
of certain kinds of characters, and of evil and kindness and goodness and tenderness," Fox said.
But by the 1990s her work was forgotten by
all but her most determined admirers - one of
them was Franzen. The future author of
"Freedom" and "The Corrections" came upon
"Desperate Characters" while at the Yaddo writers colony in 1991. In a Harper's magazine essay
about American fiction, he called "Desperate
Characters" an overlooked masterpiece.
Author Tom Bissell, then a paperback editor at
W.W. Norton, read the essay and wondered why
he hadn't heard of the novel. He looked in stores,
without luck, and finally got in touch with Fox,
who sent him one of her copies. Norton has since
reissued all of Fox's adult novels, with introductory essays by Franzen and others. "I'd never heard
of Paula Fox, except as an author of children's
books, before an editor pushed 'Desperate
Characters' at me three years ago. Three years later she's a favorite, and an influence on my own
work," Lethem wrote in his introduction to "Poor
George," re-published in 2001. — AP
Australian actor Hugh Jackman looks at a gift of a Wolverine puppet during a press conference for the film Logan in Taipei.
Miriam Colon, iconic US Latina
movie, theater actress, dies
M
iriam Colon, a pioneering actress
in US Latino New York Theater who
starred in films alongside Marlon
Brando and Al Pacino, died Friday. Her husband, Fred Valle, told The Associated Press
that Colon died early Friday in a New York
hospital because of complications from a
pulmonary infection. She was 80 years old.
Colon - whose image appeared on posters
throughout the American Southwest for
her role in the 2013 movie adaptation of
quintessential Chicano novel "Bless Me,
Ultima" - had been active as late as 2015
with a cameo appearance on the AMC-TV
series "Better Call Saul."
Born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, Colon participated in the theater during her school
years and was allowed to audit classes in
the drama department at the University of
Puerto Rico before she graduated from
high school. She came to New York City in
the 1950s to study at the Actors Studio
and later moved to Los Angeles where she
earned small roles in various television
shows and films, Valle said. Her roles
included appearances in "One-Eyed Jacks"
with Brando and in "The Outsider" with
Tony Curtis.
In 1967, she founded the Puerto Rican
Traveling Theater in New York, where she
helped cultivate young Latino actors and
writers and staged work that would later
be read in Latino Studies classes across the
Americas. During her career, she appeared
in more than 90 films and more than 250
television episodes on programs including
"Bronco," "Bonanza" and "Law & Order." But
Colon is widely known as the CubanAmerican mother of Tony Montana, played
by Al Pacino, in the 1983 movie "Scarface."
Her voice later appeared in underground
hip hop songs as her character chided
Pacino for his role in the drug trade.
Beautiful role
Colon would go on to star as Tejana
restaurateur Mercedes Cruz in the 1996
film "Lone Star." In that film, she played a
former immigrant living in the country illegally who lived near the Rio Grande and
was quick to call federal immigration
authorities on immigrants crossing the
border. Colon earned wide acclaim for her
role as the New Mexico Hispanic healer
Ultima in the movie "Bless Me, Ultima"
based on the novel by Rudolfo Anaya. Her
character mentored a young boy and
taught him about traditional methods of
healing and the New Mexico desert.
Posters advertising the popular movie
with Colon's image were seen throughout
New Mexico. When the movie finally was
screened in Albuquerque, audiences were
heard crying in reaction to one of the
film's final scenes as the film's young boy
asked Colon, "Bless me, Ultima." "That was
her most beautiful role in my opinion,"
Valle said. "I saw the movie three times.
She was la gran madre in the film." In 2015,
President Barack Obama presented the
National Medal of Art to Colon for her
work as an actress and theater founder. It
was an honor Colon cherished, Valle said.
"We were married more than 40 years,"
Valle said. "I was so proud of everything
she accomplished." — AP
In this file photo, President Barack Obama awards the 2014 National Medal of
Arts to actress, theater founder, and director Miriam Colon of New York during
a ceremony in the East Room at the White House in Washington.-AP