I found this to be an interesting read, especially if you read the captions under the photos.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/0 ... otographer
Dennis Stone: A 'Life At The Airport' (PHOTOS)
First Posted: 9/1/11 08:05 AM ET Updated: 9/1/11 12:46 PM ET
News tidbits
Moderator: Germangirl
Would have been a good read if it hadn't so much mistakes in it 
Cowboys and agents
He might still struggle to open sauce bottles but beefing up for his latest Bond film, Daniel Craig is unleashing his inner tough guy. As aliens and wrongdoers lick their wounds, his box-office brawn is breaking down doors. So why does he fear that "everything might fall apart tomorrow"?
THIS month, Daniel Craig begins working for real — not just script meetings but hardcore training — on the next James Bond film. Twenty-third in the series, and the third he will have done, the next episode in this incomparably enduring franchise — Craig's Casino Royale was both critically lauded and a $US600 million smash — has proved itself to be the true phoenix of them all, forever inexhaustible, that licence to kill destined to be renewed for all eternity.
We're not supposed to be talking about Bond, of course. We are in Locarno, a Swiss lakeside town that every year revs up to host one of Europe's biggest film festivals, to discuss his latest blockbuster, Cowboys & Aliens, which opened in Australia on August 18, earning more than $2 million in its first week. It is directed by Jon Favreau, who also made the fantastically successful Iron Man films and thus had a ticket to do whatever he wanted. As the title immediately tells us, it mixes two distinct genres, each with its own rules; in a nutshell, tough dudes in a Wild West town have to bury their differences when a spaceship full of reptilian invaders lands in a nearby canyon. It is, according to Favreau, the first big-budget western since the '50s.
We watch Cowboys & Aliens unfold on a massive screen in Locarno's central piazza, which holds about 8000 people. It's about the right size for it; this is a big comic-book movie, for all that it takes itself entirely seriously. Craig plays a cowboy who wakes up in the desert, unable to remember where he came from but with a strange metal band around his wrist.
He makes his way to the nearest town, where Keith Carradine — almost inevitably — is the sheriff and Harrison Ford the corrupt rancher who thinks he has the sheriff in his pocket. They have to bury their differences, however, when strange flying machines swoop, lassoing half the town's inhabitants. What matters now is raising a posse to bring the captives home. "There are certain things in westerns that have to happen," Craig laughs, "even if there are aliens."
Craig was a very inexperienced rider before making this film but he looks good on a horse. "I think I've been playing at being a cowboy for as long as I can remember," he says. "I just finally got a chance to do it." He rode for three hours a day for a month, trying to get comfortable with it, took his guns home and wore them round the house.
He also went through his lines with Favreau, eliminating most of them. "When it came to it, we felt he didn't need to say anything, he just needed to do things. That was referencing Clint Eastwood, certainly, but I don't think cowboys talk about their feelings very much. They say 'let's go over there', 'let's eat' – stuff like that." Craig is good at playing gruff. His James Bond is gruff, even more so than Sean Connery's. He was initially reluctant to accept the mantle of 007, not only because he thought it would put a stop to the career he had slowly accrued — which ranged from Our Friends in the North, the excellent BBC serial about a criminal gang, to working with Steven Spielberg on Munich — but because Bond was so damn smooth. In the end, he was convinced by the retiring Bond, Pierce Brosnan, to give it a go. That he wouldn't want to spend his dotage telling people in pubs how he could have been Bond — but wasn't.
That was six years ago. Clearly his career didn't grind to a halt, since it is his 007 status that has allowed him to be billed alongside Ford in a big-budget film such as Cowboys & Aliens. I wonder, though, if he has painted himself into a rather cramped corner as an action hero. He was a star at the National Theatre, after all, before movies. His first film role was in John Maybury's Love Is the Devil, playing painter Francis Bacon's lover George Dyer. Tortured parts, as he put it himself, were his specialty before he started hitting people.
"But I've been able to mix it up," he counters, pointing to a recent stint as Red Rackham in Steven Spielberg's motion-capture version of The Adventures of Tintin and his coming role in the English-language version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. "It's just what's happening at the moment and it's very exciting for me, because I get the chance to do movies like this, which are way beyond what I would have expected to be doing four or five years ago."
Most scripts are rubbish anyway and it's not as if he's turning down loads of small dramas. "But I'm still looking," he says. "And, who knows, everything might fall apart tomorrow and I'll be begging to do smaller movies."
Of course, there are aspects of being Bond he hasn't liked. Right now, he is anticipating months in the gym. "It's really boring. So boring I can't tell you." He knows he has to be as fit as possible, however, to cope with the inevitable injuries; he's 43, after all.
Rumour has it that he wanted to throw in the towel after Quan-tum of Solace, the latest Bond film, because he was so knocked around by it; famously, he finished the shoot with his arm in a sling and eight stitches in his face. "Quantum was very physical," he says. "Probably too physical. We were suffering because there was the writers' strike and we weren't allowed to do rewrites, so the action sequences got juggled together and I personally ended up doing way too much. It was difficult."
And then there is the matter of simply being the person who plays Bond. Nothing, he has said, prepares you for the way fame — big fame, not the sort of quivering respect that comes from well-regarded supporting roles and arthouse pictures — feels. On the one hand, he was able to pay £4 million ($6 million) for a flat in Regent's Park where Bond himself might be happy to mix his nightcaps. On the other, there are the people who try to snap your picture in the toilet and the paparazzi banging on the doors of various members of his family, including his teenage daughter, in the small hours. Celebrity, he told the Telegraph newspaper in London, "is weirder and more intense than you ever imagined".
For a while it seemed he might be off that golden hook. In April last year, Bond 23 was suspended indefinitely by franchise owner MGM Studios, which was burdened with debts of more than $US5 billion. Craig filled his dance cards with other projects, including a theatre production of A Steady Rain with Hugh Jackman on Broadway, Cowboys & Aliens and Tintin. In April, he married fellow actor Rachel Weisz, in a very private ceremony in New York that they managed to keep entirely secret.
Now it's back on stream, however, as MGM has been modestly recapitalised. Sam Mendes, the British theatre director whose cinema credits include Amer-ican Beauty and Revolutionary Road, is directing. They meet regularly to chew over the script, which Craig says is "genuinely great" after the muddle of Quantum of Solace.
"Both of us said to each other, ‘Let's just try to do the best James Bond film we can.' I know that sounds like a cliche or an obvious thing to say, but I went back and reread the books and watched all the movies and I want to do something that does [Bond] justice."
He seems to take an unusually executive role in the production. "I try to," he says. "It's two years out of my life and so I kind of need to be part of it."
It's a tricky character for a serious actor, in that Bond doesn't allow much room for manoeuvre. Cool in all circumstances, he is — along with Hugh Hefner, perhaps — the last survivor of a time before hippies, anti-war demonstrations and free love made the sleek '60s playboy look square. When he first took the role, Craig said he wanted to bring more "emotional depth" to a character with virtually none but he's never going to be one of his tortured souls. "The character is set, in a way," he says now. "So it's much more about the storytelling." The real Daniel Craig, he insists, is about as different from the suave agent as it is possible to be. His dad ran a pub near Liverpool and his accent still has bits of the Wirral.
On screen there is a hint of danger in his bearing — the result, as Craig says all his performances are, of his time on Munich, when he watched how real Mossad spies moved through a room, checking for exits. But he's really not especially athletic. "I struggle with the top of the sauce bottle!" he laughs. "I hope that irony is there. Playing that kind of character is fun — and then trying to find the weaknesses and cracks in it is what the fun is. But someone that tough doesn't really exist. That's the truth of it."
Cowboys & Aliens is on general release.
source: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/mov ... 1jpmn.html
Cowboys and agents
He might still struggle to open sauce bottles but beefing up for his latest Bond film, Daniel Craig is unleashing his inner tough guy. As aliens and wrongdoers lick their wounds, his box-office brawn is breaking down doors. So why does he fear that "everything might fall apart tomorrow"?
THIS month, Daniel Craig begins working for real — not just script meetings but hardcore training — on the next James Bond film. Twenty-third in the series, and the third he will have done, the next episode in this incomparably enduring franchise — Craig's Casino Royale was both critically lauded and a $US600 million smash — has proved itself to be the true phoenix of them all, forever inexhaustible, that licence to kill destined to be renewed for all eternity.
We're not supposed to be talking about Bond, of course. We are in Locarno, a Swiss lakeside town that every year revs up to host one of Europe's biggest film festivals, to discuss his latest blockbuster, Cowboys & Aliens, which opened in Australia on August 18, earning more than $2 million in its first week. It is directed by Jon Favreau, who also made the fantastically successful Iron Man films and thus had a ticket to do whatever he wanted. As the title immediately tells us, it mixes two distinct genres, each with its own rules; in a nutshell, tough dudes in a Wild West town have to bury their differences when a spaceship full of reptilian invaders lands in a nearby canyon. It is, according to Favreau, the first big-budget western since the '50s.
We watch Cowboys & Aliens unfold on a massive screen in Locarno's central piazza, which holds about 8000 people. It's about the right size for it; this is a big comic-book movie, for all that it takes itself entirely seriously. Craig plays a cowboy who wakes up in the desert, unable to remember where he came from but with a strange metal band around his wrist.
He makes his way to the nearest town, where Keith Carradine — almost inevitably — is the sheriff and Harrison Ford the corrupt rancher who thinks he has the sheriff in his pocket. They have to bury their differences, however, when strange flying machines swoop, lassoing half the town's inhabitants. What matters now is raising a posse to bring the captives home. "There are certain things in westerns that have to happen," Craig laughs, "even if there are aliens."
Craig was a very inexperienced rider before making this film but he looks good on a horse. "I think I've been playing at being a cowboy for as long as I can remember," he says. "I just finally got a chance to do it." He rode for three hours a day for a month, trying to get comfortable with it, took his guns home and wore them round the house.
He also went through his lines with Favreau, eliminating most of them. "When it came to it, we felt he didn't need to say anything, he just needed to do things. That was referencing Clint Eastwood, certainly, but I don't think cowboys talk about their feelings very much. They say 'let's go over there', 'let's eat' – stuff like that." Craig is good at playing gruff. His James Bond is gruff, even more so than Sean Connery's. He was initially reluctant to accept the mantle of 007, not only because he thought it would put a stop to the career he had slowly accrued — which ranged from Our Friends in the North, the excellent BBC serial about a criminal gang, to working with Steven Spielberg on Munich — but because Bond was so damn smooth. In the end, he was convinced by the retiring Bond, Pierce Brosnan, to give it a go. That he wouldn't want to spend his dotage telling people in pubs how he could have been Bond — but wasn't.
That was six years ago. Clearly his career didn't grind to a halt, since it is his 007 status that has allowed him to be billed alongside Ford in a big-budget film such as Cowboys & Aliens. I wonder, though, if he has painted himself into a rather cramped corner as an action hero. He was a star at the National Theatre, after all, before movies. His first film role was in John Maybury's Love Is the Devil, playing painter Francis Bacon's lover George Dyer. Tortured parts, as he put it himself, were his specialty before he started hitting people.
"But I've been able to mix it up," he counters, pointing to a recent stint as Red Rackham in Steven Spielberg's motion-capture version of The Adventures of Tintin and his coming role in the English-language version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. "It's just what's happening at the moment and it's very exciting for me, because I get the chance to do movies like this, which are way beyond what I would have expected to be doing four or five years ago."
Most scripts are rubbish anyway and it's not as if he's turning down loads of small dramas. "But I'm still looking," he says. "And, who knows, everything might fall apart tomorrow and I'll be begging to do smaller movies."
Of course, there are aspects of being Bond he hasn't liked. Right now, he is anticipating months in the gym. "It's really boring. So boring I can't tell you." He knows he has to be as fit as possible, however, to cope with the inevitable injuries; he's 43, after all.
Rumour has it that he wanted to throw in the towel after Quan-tum of Solace, the latest Bond film, because he was so knocked around by it; famously, he finished the shoot with his arm in a sling and eight stitches in his face. "Quantum was very physical," he says. "Probably too physical. We were suffering because there was the writers' strike and we weren't allowed to do rewrites, so the action sequences got juggled together and I personally ended up doing way too much. It was difficult."
And then there is the matter of simply being the person who plays Bond. Nothing, he has said, prepares you for the way fame — big fame, not the sort of quivering respect that comes from well-regarded supporting roles and arthouse pictures — feels. On the one hand, he was able to pay £4 million ($6 million) for a flat in Regent's Park where Bond himself might be happy to mix his nightcaps. On the other, there are the people who try to snap your picture in the toilet and the paparazzi banging on the doors of various members of his family, including his teenage daughter, in the small hours. Celebrity, he told the Telegraph newspaper in London, "is weirder and more intense than you ever imagined".
For a while it seemed he might be off that golden hook. In April last year, Bond 23 was suspended indefinitely by franchise owner MGM Studios, which was burdened with debts of more than $US5 billion. Craig filled his dance cards with other projects, including a theatre production of A Steady Rain with Hugh Jackman on Broadway, Cowboys & Aliens and Tintin. In April, he married fellow actor Rachel Weisz, in a very private ceremony in New York that they managed to keep entirely secret.
Now it's back on stream, however, as MGM has been modestly recapitalised. Sam Mendes, the British theatre director whose cinema credits include Amer-ican Beauty and Revolutionary Road, is directing. They meet regularly to chew over the script, which Craig says is "genuinely great" after the muddle of Quantum of Solace.
"Both of us said to each other, ‘Let's just try to do the best James Bond film we can.' I know that sounds like a cliche or an obvious thing to say, but I went back and reread the books and watched all the movies and I want to do something that does [Bond] justice."
He seems to take an unusually executive role in the production. "I try to," he says. "It's two years out of my life and so I kind of need to be part of it."
It's a tricky character for a serious actor, in that Bond doesn't allow much room for manoeuvre. Cool in all circumstances, he is — along with Hugh Hefner, perhaps — the last survivor of a time before hippies, anti-war demonstrations and free love made the sleek '60s playboy look square. When he first took the role, Craig said he wanted to bring more "emotional depth" to a character with virtually none but he's never going to be one of his tortured souls. "The character is set, in a way," he says now. "So it's much more about the storytelling." The real Daniel Craig, he insists, is about as different from the suave agent as it is possible to be. His dad ran a pub near Liverpool and his accent still has bits of the Wirral.
On screen there is a hint of danger in his bearing — the result, as Craig says all his performances are, of his time on Munich, when he watched how real Mossad spies moved through a room, checking for exits. But he's really not especially athletic. "I struggle with the top of the sauce bottle!" he laughs. "I hope that irony is there. Playing that kind of character is fun — and then trying to find the weaknesses and cracks in it is what the fun is. But someone that tough doesn't really exist. That's the truth of it."
Cowboys & Aliens is on general release.
source: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/mov ... 1jpmn.html
There may have been some errors in it - which I missed, but I thought it was a really good interview. And she did it without any private life stuff. Just really well done with interestig quotes from him. I wish they were all like this. Thanks for finding it.Dunda wrote:Would have been a good read if it hadn't so much mistakes in it
Cowboys and agents
source: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/mov ... 1jpmn.html
I thought this was one of the most interesting print interviews.. A lot of interesting info, but really, why can't the author check some of the most basic facts? How much more time could it have taken?tampa wrote:There may have been some errors in it - which I missed, but I thought it was a really good interview. And she did it without any private life stuff. Just really well done with interestig quotes from him. I wish they were all like this. Thanks for finding it.Dunda wrote:Would have been a good read if it hadn't so much mistakes in it
Cowboys and agents
source: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/mov ... 1jpmn.html
Adele hints to Jonathan Ross she’s working on James Bond theme tune
Souce: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/ar ... z1Ws1gLvTC
Souce: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/ar ... z1Ws1gLvTC
Exactly. That's what pisses me offsf2la wrote:I thought this was one of the most interesting print interviews.. A lot of interesting info, but really, why can't the author check some of the most basic facts? How much more time could it have taken?tampa wrote:There may have been some errors in it - which I missed, but I thought it was a really good interview. And she did it without any private life stuff. Just really well done with interestig quotes from him. I wish they were all like this. Thanks for finding it.Dunda wrote:Would have been a good read if it hadn't so much mistakes in it
Cowboys and agents
source: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/mov ... 1jpmn.html
I see an article (on whatever subject) and start reading and think to myself "oh that's a good one, I like the style, it's informative and without nasty undertones , well written etc.....
And than it's full of mistakes and I don't mean those little things only hardcore fans may know, no it's something like "Our Friends in the North, the excellent BBC serial about a criminal gang" or "His first film role was in John Maybury's Love Is the Devil"
I mean it doesn't take much time and effort to at least get such simple fact straight and it's their job. If I would work like this I would get fired
Rant over
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Sylvia's girl
- Posts: 11961
- Joined: Thu Oct 08, 2009 11:57 am
It's sloppy journalism when they can't be bothered to check the facts.
I'm always amazed at how many articles are just copied and pasted until you get hundreds of blogs/articles all saying the same thing with exactly the same mistakes.
Sometimes it pisses me off so much that I just have to correct them in the comments section.
I'm always amazed at how many articles are just copied and pasted until you get hundreds of blogs/articles all saying the same thing with exactly the same mistakes.
Sometimes it pisses me off so much that I just have to correct them in the comments section.
-
Sylvia's girl
- Posts: 11961
- Joined: Thu Oct 08, 2009 11:57 am
You can see the family resemblance
Downloads take forever – 007 Daniel Craig’s father
Superspy James Bond has his pick of the latest high-tech gadgets – but his dad is struggling to even get a decent internet connection.
James Bond actor Daniel Craig’s family live in Hindford near Oswestry and, according to the Hollywood star’s father Tim, the whole area needs an injection of up-to-date technical wizardry. Mr Craig said his broadband connection has never been great and it has become worse since he switched to BT last month.
He says what adds to his frustration is that he lives just a few miles from BT’s telephone exchanges in Whittington, one of the biggest in the country.
Mr Craig said: “Recently we have signed up for a new BT home hub in the vain hope we could achieve better connection speeds – sadly this is not the case. It has got worse.
BT spokesman Chris Orum said: “BT is sorry that Mr Craig is getting such slow broadband speeds. We have been in touch with him and are working to see if there is anything we can do to speed things up.”
Read more: http://www.shropshirestar.com/news/2011 ... z1WtHeBC26
Downloads take forever – 007 Daniel Craig’s father
Superspy James Bond has his pick of the latest high-tech gadgets – but his dad is struggling to even get a decent internet connection.
James Bond actor Daniel Craig’s family live in Hindford near Oswestry and, according to the Hollywood star’s father Tim, the whole area needs an injection of up-to-date technical wizardry. Mr Craig said his broadband connection has never been great and it has become worse since he switched to BT last month.
He says what adds to his frustration is that he lives just a few miles from BT’s telephone exchanges in Whittington, one of the biggest in the country.
Mr Craig said: “Recently we have signed up for a new BT home hub in the vain hope we could achieve better connection speeds – sadly this is not the case. It has got worse.
BT spokesman Chris Orum said: “BT is sorry that Mr Craig is getting such slow broadband speeds. We have been in touch with him and are working to see if there is anything we can do to speed things up.”
Read more: http://www.shropshirestar.com/news/2011 ... z1WtHeBC26
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cheryl1700
- Posts: 9682
- Joined: Mon Sep 06, 2010 8:25 pm
I always found BT on customer service, they have always bent over backwards for me, when i have lost a telephone wire, internet stopped working (my hubbies's fault that one) always really nice. Now Sky pain in the butt depends on who u get and if they are interested in their job or not they would tell u anything to get u off the phone, just my experience.
http://www.hindustantimes.com/Craig-is- ... 41134.aspx
‘Craig is the best Bond’
He defined Ian Fleming’s classic and cool British spy James Bond on the big screen and as the secret agent’s franchise completes its golden jubilee this year, the original Bond Sean Connery says two Bond flicks old Daniel Craig is the perfect 007. “As James Bond completes his golden
jubilee on the screen, I will define him not as a mere Casanova, who loves to kill but a suave and intelligent saviour of mankind, who has battled life in every aspect valiantly,” the 81-year-old says over telephone from California, adding, “Daniel Craig is the best James Bond I have witnessed — confident and reflexive.”
Ask him about his other successors and Sir Sean, who portrayed the suave spy in six installments says Roger Moore “was too stylised”. The octogenarian also talks about his success post Bond.
“Performing James Bond was certainly not my greatest histrionic challenge. But it established me surely as a star of merit and helped me to achieve a strong foothold in Hollywood. As Bond, I had to practice a lot of action, martial arts and swift movements to match the secret agent’s skills,” he says, while naming Dr. No, From Russia With Love and Thunder Ball his favourite Bond flick.
Prod him about his love scenes as Bond and he says, “Love scenes in Bond films were just meant to be.” As told to Ranjan Das Gupta
‘Craig is the best Bond’
He defined Ian Fleming’s classic and cool British spy James Bond on the big screen and as the secret agent’s franchise completes its golden jubilee this year, the original Bond Sean Connery says two Bond flicks old Daniel Craig is the perfect 007. “As James Bond completes his golden
jubilee on the screen, I will define him not as a mere Casanova, who loves to kill but a suave and intelligent saviour of mankind, who has battled life in every aspect valiantly,” the 81-year-old says over telephone from California, adding, “Daniel Craig is the best James Bond I have witnessed — confident and reflexive.”
Ask him about his other successors and Sir Sean, who portrayed the suave spy in six installments says Roger Moore “was too stylised”. The octogenarian also talks about his success post Bond.
“Performing James Bond was certainly not my greatest histrionic challenge. But it established me surely as a star of merit and helped me to achieve a strong foothold in Hollywood. As Bond, I had to practice a lot of action, martial arts and swift movements to match the secret agent’s skills,” he says, while naming Dr. No, From Russia With Love and Thunder Ball his favourite Bond flick.
Prod him about his love scenes as Bond and he says, “Love scenes in Bond films were just meant to be.” As told to Ranjan Das Gupta
