Nikki Finke breaks the rumor:

Chris Hemsworth, a virtual unknown to American audiences, had just been approved to play the lead role in Thor
by Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige and the film’s director Kenneth
Branagh. Hemsworth can currently be seen as “George Kirk” in J.J.
Abrams’ Star Trek reboot and also just snagged the lead in Red Dawn for United Artists last Thursday. (He’s currently filming Joss Whedon’s horror flick Cabin In The Woods
for UA, and I heard the studio was so hot on him that’s why it cast
Hemsworth in the action pic.) The 25-year-old hunk played “Kim Hyde” on
171 episodes of Home and Away, the successful Oz TV series where Heath Ledger started. Marvel Studios has scheduled Thor
for a May 20, 2011, release. The way Chris Hemsworth got the part of
Thor is one of those great Hollywood stories that happens only once in
a blue moon.

She goes on to explain how he (allegedly) got the part:

[ROAR Management partner William Ward] had
found Chris during one of the manager’s many scouting trips to
Australia. Ward brought him to Los Angeles and really put him out there
to casting directors and production executives. As for the major
agencies, I hear CAA passed on the meeting, Endeavor took it but passed
on repping him, and ICM was interested but dragged their feet. But
Ilene Feldman understood his appeal immediately. 

Chris
had read for the part of Thor but wasn’t given a test because a casting
director had nixed him early on. I’m told Chris’ younger brother Liam
(who’s also a ROAR client) then tested for the role of Thor, but Marvel
Studios President Kevin Feige passed. Then, after a conversation with
Ward (“You’ve got to reconsider Chris, he’s your guy”), Feige decided
to let Chris read again. And once Marvel put him on tape, it was “Oh my
god”. Branagh came to town last week and saw the Chris test and made
the final casting decision today.

What a week for Chris since, on Thursday, UA picked him as the Red Dawn
lead. Brother Liam, who’s only been in Los Angeles for 3 weeks and
doesn’t even have an agent yet, just got cast the male lead in Last Song
opposite Miley Cyrus in the Disney film based on the Nicholas Sparks
novel. Both brothers live in William Ward’s guest house. Unreal!

I thought he was great as George Kirk in Star Trek— short scene, but very powerful.

The Western movie genre is something most of us consider a relic from the 1950s, and yet, two of the better regarded films – The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
and El Dorado
– are products of the 1960s, even though they feel older given the changes to American cinema in that decade. Both movies, coming out Tuesday as part of Paramount Home Video’s Centennial Collection, are both solid and entertaining.

The former may be best recalled for line, “This is the west, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” It stars James Stewart and John Ford playing entirely different kinds of men of the west. Wayne was a rancher, a fairly decent sort but narrow-minded, prone to jealousy, and believed using a gun was essential to surviving on the frontier. Stewart, a lawyer by training, came west to start his career. Both loved Hallie (Vera Miles) and had no stomach for the cruel bandit Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin). The story involved the battle over the unnamed territory becoming a state and climaxed at a nominating convention, where the learned lawyer was named to represent the locality putting him on a path to his becoming a senator and governor.

We learn all this from the framing device, which has the older Stewart and Miles coming back to Shinbone to attend Wayne’s funeral. Stewart is coaxed into telling the local newspaper editor why this man meant so much to the Senator. We then go back to when things were rough and education was a luxury few could afford to devote time to.

John Ford’s black and white production barely moves the camera but his characters are so full of life that you can’t take your eyes off them. He makes certain that everyone who speaks is full of life or quirks, adding a subtle energy to the overall production. The values of the old west are clear although we never do know why Wayne kept calling Stewart, “[[[Pilgrim]]].” Wayne allows his Tom Doniphon to be shaded, and downright unlikeable in some sequences, but fair-minded, especially when it came to treating others, including the African America farmhand played by Woody Strode.

On the other hand, Howard Hawks’[[[El Dorado]]], shot five years later and in full color, is a bigger story, played out on location and feels entirely different. His characters, though, are stoics and barely exhibit much emotion.  When John Wayne accidentally kills Luke McDonald (Johnny Crawford), the McDonald family barely nods in acknowledgement. This story is also about land rights, as the black-hatted Ed Asner hires gunmen to force the McDonalds into giving up their water rights. The Sheriff (Robert Mitchum) has become a drunk over an ill-fated romance and it takes his old friend, mercenary John Wayne, accompanied by the tyro James Caan to help maintain law and order.  The professional rivalry theme plays out between Wayne and Mitchum, both showing their age here, but also between Wayne and Christopher George, the gunhand newly arrived to aid Asner.

This is far more of an ensemble story, similar to [[[Rio Lobo]]] and [[[Rio Bravo]]], considered today a Hawks trilogy, but at least the two female leads play strong characters. The actresses – Michele Carey and Charlene Holt – are both quite good and new to me. Nelson Riddle’s score also gives the film a more contemporary feel.

While a country struggled through the 1960s with social and political upheaval, people flocked to the movies to get away from their troubles, and delighted in seeing America when things were simpler and the issues were pretty clear. Ford and Hawks, both in the twilights of their careers, both rise to the occasion.

Each disc comes with a multi-part documentary on the making of the movie and pay tribute to the directors. El Dorado also has a short archival film, [[[The Artist and the American West]]], along with A.C. Lyles reminiscing about Wayne. Both come with still galleries including the lobby cards and publicity surrounding both features.

Some people stay in the same place their entire lives: joining the family business, marrying their childhood sweethearts, growing old in the bosom of their loved ones underneath the spreading chestnut tree their grandfathers planted. But they’re boring, so there aren’t many manga about them.

People who go different places and do new things, on the other hand, are much more popular…

Cirque Du Freak, Vol. 1
By Darren Shan; Art by Takahiro Arai
Yen Press, June 2009, $10.99

Let’s get a couple of notes out of the way – first, this book calls itself just Cirque du Freak everywhere on the actual volume, but online stores think it’s named Cirque du Freak: The Manga. (Probably because there’s a long series of books for young readers under the “Cirque du Freak” umbrella title, of which this volume adapts the beginning of the first book, A Living Nightmare.) Secondly, “Darren Shan” is a pseudonym, and I know that definitively, because this is the story of a young boy named…

Darren Shan – who loves soccer and spiders, is inseparable from his best friend Steve, and goes to a uniform-requiring elementary school in some unspecified place. But then one day the circus – the strange, mysterious, dangerous, secret circus – comes to town, and Darren and Steve get tickets. The show is creepy and surprising, mesmerizing and faintly evil, in the way of a thousand fictional circuses since Dr. Lao and Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Steve is sure that one particular performer, a Mr. Crepsley, is more than he seems, and sneaks off to beg to be allowed to run away with the circus. That doesn’t work out, but Darren soon has an unexpected transformation from the same source. By the end of the book, Darren’s been torn away from everything he ever knew (and so on; you know the drill), given dangerous and ill-defined new powers, and made a mortal enemy out of Steve.

Cirque du Freak shows its origins as a mildly creepy story for grade-schoolers in everything from the I-am-telling-you-my-true-story bunkum of the author credit to dumb names like “Vur Horston, the Vampire” to the moral simplicity of the choices that the characters make. Arai has an energetic but clean-lined shonen style, full of close-ups of distressed faces and overly-dynamic bodies, but that can only go so far – this is essentially a story for ten-year-olds, and so those of us substantially older than that will inevitably find it thin gruel.

(more…)