Articles Related To My Critical & Linked Production

Three articles related to my critical investigation and linked production . . .

1. http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/showbiz/celebrity-interviews/2009/11/24/high-school-musical-star-zac-efron-i-m-putting-aside-the-teen-star-image-for-grown-up-roles-86908-21845398/

High School musical star Zac Efron: I'm putting aside the teen star image for grown-up roles

Nov 24 2009 By Siobhan Synnot

HE set young hearts aflutter with his High School Musical performances - but has Zac Efron had enough of his wholesome image? The teen heart-throb is ready to be taken seriously as an actor with his new adult movie Me And Orson Welles. And the 21-year-old admits he ditched his leading role in the remake of Footloose because he feared being stuck with song and dance numbers. "I have to shake things up because it's not good to repeat yourself. I want to be in a place where things get scary," he says.

That meant shedding Zac's squeaky clean boy-next-door image, and earlier this year he took part in a sexy, down-and-dirty photoshoot. Then he poked fun at his three High School Musical movies by appearing in a comedy skit on American TV where Troy returns to school to warn his former classmates that in the real world basketball teams do not start singing for no reason.

As an actor, Zac hopes he will eventually work with directors such as Martin Scorsese, who made The Departed, Raging Bull and Gangs Of NewYork. Some reckon Zac's attempt to grow up onscreen might be a huge risk for the good-looking actor. But he says he's prepared to do anything if he can work with heavyweight talents. "I would do any role with Scorsese," he says.
But he doesn't want to do any more musicals, which is why he recently announced he was dropping out playing the lead in a reboot of the 1984 musical Footloose.

"Me And Orson Welles is a fantastic project and a lot of people worked very hard to make it happen. But this is a crucial moment for me right now and it's an important next step," he says carefully. Dropping out meant disappointing his High School director and friend Kenny Ortega. But he reckons that this was the right thing to do. "I love musicals, but I feel like I've made my mark there. I'm looking for new challenges now," says Zac.

The three High School Musical films have made a fortune worldwide, thanks largely to the highly devoted fanbase who worship both Zac and his co-star in the series, Vanessa Hudgens, 20, who is also his real-life girlfriend. However, the signs that Zac has been keen to move on have been around for a while. A few years ago he announced he wouldn't be joining the High School Musical concert tour as he had a role in the hit movie musical Hairspray.

Around the same time, he quipped to a magazine: "If I had to hear the High School Musical songs any more, I probably would have jumped off something very tall." Earlier this year he appeared in a teen comedy, 17 Again, alongside Friends star Matt Perry, where no singing or dancing was needed or expected. Zac had never played basketball at school, so he had to learn for High School Musical. Those skills came in handy for 17 Again, for which he also learnt to spin the ball on his finger.

Now Zac is proud to have made his first arthouse movie, Me And Orson Welles, where he plays a struggling young actor in 1937 who manages to land a job working with legendary actor, writer and director Welles. The film is a fiction, but of course Orson Welles really did exist - although not all Zac's fans will have heard of Orson, who had affairs with some of Hollywood's most glamorous stars and went on to make Citizen Kane, which has often been called the greatest movie ever made.

This may not cut much ice with High School Musical fans, since Orson died long before many of them were born. "I don't think that's a problem," argues Zac. "Hopefully, they will see the film and be intrigued enough by Orson Welles to look out for his work." He says he had the kind of challenges he craved in this picture - including playing the lute (actually a disguised ukulele) and performing his first lines of Shakespeare, since his character has a part in Julius Caesar.
Zac is hoping the movie will win him a whole new fanbase.

"It's the first time I've ever watched a movie that I'm in and in the end I'm like, 'OK! I didn't check my watch once!'" he grins. "The roles that you want to play are the ones that are just out of reach and the ones you have to stretch for, that you have to work hard to achieve."

"I'm looking for people to work with who aren't afraid to get their hands dirty and push me around a little bit." Zac has also just finished work on The Death And Life Of Charlie St Cloud, about a graveyard caretaker who talks to his dead brother. "It sounds very grim, but it's a fantastic story," he says. "It's a little bit more grown-up. It deals with some heavy material." Me And Orson Welles is probably the closest to Zac's own experiences, since it deals with a young actor trying to negotiate his way through his career, and juggle a crush on one of his co-workers (played by Stardust's Claire Danes).

Most of the film was shot on the Isle of Man, where the director discovered a theatre that was almost exactly like the one Orson Welles used at the time. "Once we filled it with extras dressed in Thirties attire, the place was very believable. It even smelled like an old theatre," enthuses Zac. And he says he spent a lot of time there with leading lady Claire. "We were basically stuck there, we couldn't leave. There was nowhere to go on the Isle of Man. So we lived in that theatre for several weeks. It was fun and exciting, but it was also kind of maddening. I went a little bit insane."

But some of Zac's fans still managed to track down their hero, especially when word spread across the island that Troy Bolton from High School Musical was in town. Zac recalls: "I was looking forward to that seclusion because I'd heard it was a pretty quiet place. But they found it. We had a small crowd of young girls and boys hooraying us as we would drive up to set. I felt pretty welcome."

What Zac doesn't mention is that he also took time out of filming to visit one fan on the island.
Connor Steventon was dying of cancer, and big-hearted Zac visited the tragic youngster as a surprise guest at his 13th birthday party last March. Sadly, Connor died just 18 days later.
The quiet act of kindness shows the mature side of the young star, who has always been grateful for his fans' support.

He says: "I feel pretty blessed at this point to have one of the most devoted fanbases in the world. I'd like to embrace that and take them on to the next adventure.' Zac's down-to-earth nature has been said to come from his non-showbiz background. Born in California to an engineer father and secretary mother, he took up acting at age 11 after his parents took him to audition for a musical play called Gypsy.

"It's a big thing to overcome your first audition," he says. "My parents didn't even tell me they were taking me to an audition. I thought we were going to buy a new video game and I'd never sung in front of anybody before. "I walked into a room where there were words on a chalkboard, a guy behind a piano and about five or six intimidating producers sitting behind a desk. They said, 'All right, sing the words to the song."

"I think I blacked out. When I left, they said I'd be invited for a callback. I can never repay my parents because it's become my whole life." Now Zac is hoping that the time is right to move up from teen idol to a fully fledged actor, like his hero Leonardo DiCaprio. When he met Zac at a basketball game, Leo was happy to hand over some serious advice to the rising star. "He said to me, if you really want to mess this all up, try heroin'," recalls Zac.

"He said, 'That's pretty much the only way you're going to screw this up. You shouldn't go down that road - it will mess you up. Do not do drugs'." Ambitious Zac also reckons that making good movies means he won't be settling down to marry long-term girlfriend Vanessa any time soon. "There's no more terrifying prospect than raising a family right now," he confesses.
"I don't think I'm responsible enough. That's years and years down the road."

Me And Orson Welles is out in the UK on December 4.

2. http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/nov/24/the-lovely-bones-film-review

The Lovely Bones

Leicester Square, London

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 24 November 2009 20.00 GMT

Saoirse Ronan in The Lovely Bones. How does one make a PG-certificate film about the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl.
Director Peter Jackson provides an answer of sorts with The Lovely Bones, which leaves the murder unseen and the rape unmentioned.

The Lovely Bones
Production year: 2009
Countries: UK, USA
Directors: Peter Jackson
Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Saoirse Ronan, Stanley Tucci

His reward is a blushing mainstream entertainment that was tonight deemed fit to be introduced to polite society at a royal premiere in Leicester Square. Our reward is anyone's guess. The drama ushers us through the afterlife of Susie Salmon (Atonement's Saoirse Ronan), a small-town kid in 1970s Pennsylvania who is killed by the local pervert (Stanley Tucci) and looks down on her scattered, shattered family from her place in limbo. She sees her mum (Rachel Weisz) flee the coop and her dad (Mark Wahlberg) come apart at the seams. From this celestial vantage, she starts to fear for the safety of her little sister (Rose McIver), whose jogging route leads her regularly past the killer's suburban home.

It's not that The Lovely Bones is a bad movie, exactly. It is handsomely made and strongly acted, while its woozy, lullaby ambience recalls Jackson's work on the brilliant Heavenly Creatures, before he set forth on his epic voyage through The Lord of the Rings. Here, he audaciously conjures up heaven as designed by a teenage girl – a kitsch spread of sunflower fields, spinning turntables and the sort of airbrushed waterfalls that could have spilled straight off an Athena poster. All of which is entirely fitting, and often captivating. The problem, though, is that The Lovely Bones also gives us a real world as designed by a teenage girl. The land that Susie leaves behind is so infested with cartoon archetypes and whimsical asides that, at times, it scarcely feels real at all.

Might the fault lie with the source novel? Alice Sebold's best-selling book similarly held up Susie Salmon's innocent fancies as a kind of talisman to ward off evil. It dared to spin a sentimental fantasy out of a grisly tragedy, offsetting the tang of sulphur with the sweet taste of candyfloss. The difference was that Sebold's novel was not scared to look the central horror in the face. This ensured that it at least part earned its subsequent flights into the ether.

The screen version, by contrast, is so infuriatingly coy, and so desperate to preserve the modesty of its soulful victim that it amounts to an ongoing clean-up operation. Gone is the dismembered body part that alerts the family to Susie's fate. Gone is her anguished mother's adulterous affair with the detective who leads the case. Gone is all mention of what really transpired in that lonely 1970s cornfield. Is this really the best way to secure a crime scene and retrieve the victim? Jackson turns up with his eyes averted, spraying cloying perfume to the left and right.

3. http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/dec/19/film-review-twilight-teen-vampire

Twilight

Girl meets vampire. Girl loves vampire. Girl and vampire go to the Prom ... Peter Bradshaw enjoys this unorthodox but sweet and satirical take on the teen vampire movie

Peter Bradshaw
The Guardian, Friday 19 December 2008

Mad, bad and deeply unwholesome to know ... Twilight. Let's be honest. Which of us, in our impressionable teenage years, has not displaced an irrational horror of sex into a freaky emo crush on a moody vampire with sky-high cheekbones and a taste for human blood? I mean, haven't we all - in a very real sense?

Production year: 2008
Country: USA
Cert (UK): 12A
Runtime: 121 mins
Directors: Catherine Hardwicke
Cast: Billy Burke, Elizabeth Reaser, Kristen Stewart, Nikki Reed, Peter Facinelli, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner

Since her celebrated 2003 film Thirteen, director Catherine Hardwicke has accumulated some expertise in the dark side of adolescence and puts it to good use in this wildly enjoyable new film, an adaptation of the bestselling young-adult novel by Stephenie Meyer. Twilight is mad, bad and deeply unwholesome to know, and perhaps, in its serious way, the most entertaining teen film since 10 Things I Hate About You. It is certainly a new twist on the time-honoured nice-girl-bad-boy storyline. Virginal lovelies from the right side of the tracks have been conceiving the hots for unsuitable guys since Olivia Newton-John in Grease, Jennifer Grey in Dirty Dancing and Claire Danes in TV's My So-Called Life. But this is something else: an outrageous story of young love played absolutely straight, and actually better and more convincingly acted than many of the ponderous grown-up "relationship" movies we have to sit through. It sports with the high school genre and America's pro-abstinence True Love Waits movement. But it's got something other than satire on its mind.

Kirsten Stewart plays Bella, a winningly pale girl who is the child of a broken home: she has been living with her divorced mom in Phoenix, Arizona, but now proposes to live with dad, a police chief in a small northwestern town near a snowy landscape which vampire connoisseurs will instantly notice is a little reminiscent of the Carpathian mountains of Transylvania. (I am incidentally waiting for a post-modern vampire story to pay homage to Dracula's relationship with Yorkshire.)

Bella shows up for her first day at her new school and instantly establishes herself as a bit of a klutz, but not outrageously so, and she is certainly enough of a babe to get plenty of acceptable-looking guys to want to make friends. But it is Bella's destiny not to be attracted to these nice, normal people and, near the movie's climax, we see her looking poignantly from the window of a speeding car at these very same nice, normal people emerging from a diner, a veritable tableau of the nice, safe normality that could have been hers.

For Bella is instantly attracted to a gaunt and charismatic hottie called Edward Cullen, played by the young British star Robert Pattinson. Edward is one of a super-cool bunch of standoffish kids who seem to have dark hair, pale skin and a very great aversion to sunshine. Edward spends a good deal of his time looking at Bella intensely, up through his eyelashes, as if in homage to Princess Diana. Pretty soon Edward is using what appear to be superpowers to save Bella from various scrapes - and then he confesses his feelings for her and the truth about himself. Edward is undead, from a family of semi-nice vampires who live in the forest, and who have vowed to be "vegetarians" - that is, live only on animal flesh.

Edward and Bella are in agonies. However much he wants to give in to his feelings for Bella in the bedroom department - and however much Bella wants him to - he cannot, because he will become, ahem, carried away. The quaint niceties of conventional penetrative sex will not be sufficient. In the heat of the moment, Edward will need some old-school neck munching and blood slurping and he will therefore condemn Bella to an eternity in the vampire's twilight - and he, of course, loves her too much for that. Edward shows up in Bella's bedroom and they try a little innocent making out before Edward has to wrench himself away, mastering himself with as much virile self-control as a 19th-century curate. Edward is enough of a gentleman to take Bella to the prom, traditionally the venue at which America's young women decide to surrender their virginity to some profoundly unworthy suitor. They smooch a little on the dancefloor, but then he inclines his teeth towards her ivory throat, before whispering a question with infinite gentleness: is she ready?

Of course, all this parodies conservative America's preoccupation with Just Saying No - but it also, in a strange and unexpected way, responds to the Just Say Yes movement. When anything and everything is sexualised in the media, when women and women's bodies are obsessively presented in sexual terms, then what happens if you don't fit in? To many intelligent young people, the world of the sexually active may indeed seem like an unlovely vampiric cult. Is there any romance, any fervency, any rapture at all that has nothing to do with any of this commercially determined sexiness?

Twilight offers its own uproariously weird and engaging answer. It is, in its unworldly way, sweetly idealistic with a charm all of its own: a teen romance to get your teeth into.