interview with Mr Brooks director Bruce Evans

Whereas a typical psycho killer film concentrates on the actual deeds, Mr. Brooks is about “what goes on with a serial killer between the killings,” director and co-writer Bruce A. Evans says in a phone interview.
Evans penned Mr. Brooks, with his writing partner Raynold Gideon, as a spec script. Over the years the pair have written films as diverse as Stand By Me, Starman, Cutthroat Island, and Evans directed Kuffs in 1992. Mr. Brooks “was written with Kevin Costner in mind,” Evans mentions about the script. On the strength of its propulsive twists and intense characters the script also attracted a strong cast.
The movie begins with titles telling us something is going on in the mind of Mr. Brooks. Brooks first appears along with his reflection in a mirror. He’s getting the Businessman of the Year award in Portland and while the action shows him confident in manner we soon meet Marshall (William Hurt), the evil id part of Brooks. The actors frequently appear in two-shots and display perfect timing in their laughter and palpable tension as Marshall pushes the correct buttons that turn Brooks into a serial killer. Unlike Fight Club where the twist at the end shows that the two actors are the same guy (Tyler Durden) here the duality device comes in the first ten minutes. “Before filming I had a week of rehearsal with Hurt and Costner where we were able to explore things like the timing,” says Evans.
Brooks drive an inconspicuous early 1990s Volvo 240 DL. Evans had another car written in the script. “I’m a smaller guy, I had them in a small car.” Both actors are over six foot, and the Volvo provided the space needed for the actors and camera placement, yet doesn’t draw suspicion on the road when he’s stalking his victims.
Demi Moore plays a tough nails homicide detective and Dane Cook surreptitiously sees Mr. Brooks committing his crime. Cook, calling himself Mr. Smith, blackmails Brooks, not for money, but to go along on the next kill. The real substance of the story follows different plot threads that eventually knit together. Brooks’ daughter arrives home to announce she’s dropped out of college; only she’s got two bigger secrets. And Moore’s stalked by another serial psycho, the Hangman Killer, who’s just escaped from prison with the vow to kill her. That’s just the first half of the film.
Mr. Brooks was shot in Shreveport. With a fairly low budget production compared to mainstream studio fare, Evans found ways to stretch creativity when he couldn’t get what he’d envisioned. A hallway shootout between Moore and the Hangman was scripted for a very long hallway. Instead they had a normal hallway, so Evan has Moore shooting out the overhead fluorescent lights, and the sound of gunfire vanishes and is replaced by the stylistic soundtrack from Hans Zimmer protégé Ramin Djawadi. It’s truly a cinematic moment.

is HOT FUZZ best film in 2007 so far?

Looking over the last month at trends in movies some truths are obvious while others are revealing. It’s no surprise that huge films unwinding worldwide simultaneously make lots of cheese. But think about it, those films have a short lifespan compared to films that achieve true cult status. Movies like The Big Lebowski and Kill Bill will still be making the rounds well after we’re gone, while instant hits like Spiderman 3 will be forgotten long before the sheen on their DVD surface has eroded.
Most surprising were the success of Disturbia and the mordant humor of Georgia Rule. Shia LaBeouf rules the roost as the new It Boy. Disturbia was okay as a thriller but not exceptional and its studio certainly didn’t think it was capable of dominating for nearly a month. The only way to ascribe it’s being numero uno for three weeks is Shia, soon to be seen in Transformers and Indy Jones 4; directors like him and he has a fan base, many of which are teens. At one point in the movie a character has broken into the garage of the next-door neighbor who may be a killer. “It smells like the corpse of a rotting hottie,” says he. Kind of says it all.
Being for or against a particular actor accounts for why some watch a certain movie. You may avoid movies with certain stars because you don’t like the glow of their wattage. Lindsay Lohan, currently in Georgia Rule, is one of those types, but to disdain her (or Jane Fonda) merely means you’ll miss out on some good laughs. Lohan has solid acting chops, and they’re on display in Georgia Rule, an odd duck of a film that wavers between melancholy and sweetness even as it struggles with issues of child molestation. The funny stuff unfolds with the serious stuff, only the serious stuff has a lining of seditious humor.
But comedy can be so much more as seen in Hot Fuzz, my personal favorite film of the year. Hot Fuzz is funnier than Knocked Up, which is a laugh riot.
Hot Fuzz isn’t strictly a comedy. Directed by Edgar Wright and written by Wright along with lead actor Simon Pegg, Hot Fuzz banks on the stylized humor from their previous effort Shaun of the Dead. There are visual laughs, physical slapstick laughs, clever dialogue laughs, and some insane gore (car accidents, church steeples falling on people) thrown in for good measure.
Firm in its social satire, Hot Fuzz actually falls into the genre deconstruction camp as it progresses from breezy English countryside comedy to suspense thriller to a balls out buddy film with a snide tip of the bobby’s cap to such American actioners as Bad Boys 2 and Point Break. Occasionally Hot Fuzz lifts a few bits from the previously mentioned films with Pegg muttering “This shit just got real,” or his country bumpkin cohort Nick Frost recreating a male bonding scene from Point Break.
The ads proclaim: From the guys who’ve watched every action film ever made. You’ll believe it after seeing the intensity Wright uses in the editing of chase scenes. The feeling Wright gets with his transitional montages evokes Aronofsky in Requiem For A Dream (one of over a dozen film references sprinkled liberally throughout). But Wright uses sounds and rhythm in a way of his own, so much that you can identify it like a signature. The way Sam Raimi’s films used to look (think Evil Dead or The Quick and the Dead).
Pegg plays police Sergeant Nicholas Angel, such an A-type personality that the London division transfers him to an idyllic crime free village in the country. Angel fits in like a square peg with the usual line-up of eccentric Brit characters that populate the police service and town. Jim Broadbent and Timothy Dalton co-star but keep your eye peeled for cameos from Cate Blanchett, Peter Jackson and Steve Coogan. Increasingly violent and gory but in a manner that balances its primary comic tone Hot Fuzz would be a worthy alternative to the summer spate of tentpole uberfilms.
A British film by birth that’s been a huge hit in Europe, by the time Hot Fuzz opened domestically last month it had made over 40-million internationally. Projections have the fuzz reaching 30-mill domestic. Consider the film Perfume, which had grossed over 100-million internationally only to land in America without a campaign of any kind. Perfume limped away with less than a couple of million domestic a few weeks later.
Knocked Up provides plenty of situational laughs. KU should be a breakout part for Seth Rogen whose work with writer/director Judd Apatow extends backwards to 40 Year-Old Virgin, beginning with Freaks and Geeks. Rogen has a Borgnine grasp on playing the regular guy type. There’s a shroom scene and close-up shots of the birthing process.
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End closes with fighting pirates swinging back and forth between two ships, while the boats are swirling in a maelstrom. There’s an additional epilogue set ten years afterwards, but that’s after the lengthy credit roll. The theater had emptied by that point save for yours truly and the guy from comingsoon.net and his posse. The print I caught was digitally projected (house # 12 at the Edwards Grand Palace) in one of the theaters Disney has upgraded with such equipment. The image was consistently sharper that film projection, which says more about the condition of the projectors than the films.
The first one was okay, the second not so much, but the third Pirates has a steady dark tone (hanging women and children, purgatory scenes) that doesn’t vacillate between wacky and serious like its forebears. The Keith Richard cameo appears during a pirates round table that also features many international actors that will attract some attention in their respective countries. Ironically the main reason At World’s End opens all-at-once worldwide (industry reports peg the number of screens at over 25,000) is to combat video piracy.
An act of brotherly bonding, The Wendell Baker Story opens on June 8 exclusively at the Angelika Film Center. Directed by Andrew and Luke Wilson, and starring Luke as a happy go-lucky guy who can’t help but get into trouble the film delivers a laid back comic charm. Luke scores a triple double, carrying the film with a manic energy not apparent in his typical leading man roles. Owen Wilson pops up as a twisted bully running a health scam (reporting fake deaths) at a nursing residence. Will Ferrell, Eva Mendes, Eddie Griffin, Harry Dean Stanton, Seymour Cassel, and Kris Kristofferson supply back up. At the film’s world premiere at SXSW in 2005, Owen mentioned that the movie was as close to a sequel to Bottle Rocket (in tone) as we’re likely to get.

BEE here now

So what is up with the honeybees? Nobody really knows the answer to reports of honeybees disappearing and chronic colony collapse from all points in the world, but there are plenty of theories. Of course you could keep your own posse of honeybees in your living room in the manner that a bee colony is displayed in the Cockrell Butterfly Center at the Houston Museum of Natural Science.
The beehive is mounted on a stand and enclosed behind clear panels through which you can view the bees on both sides. At the bottom a wooden duct leads out of the tropical environment of the butterfly center, through the wall and spills outside. A quick glance through the window shows bees coming and going around the tunnel entrance. The honeybees fly off and gather pollen that they bring back to the colony and apply to the octagonal cells of the hive. The entrance to the bee tunnel is guarded against errant wasps or other invaders by a couple of beefy bees.
“The tunnel entrance was much bigger but our bee keeper told us to make it smaller to make it easier for the them to defend” HMNS staffer Nancy Greig tells Free Press Houston.
“Bees were brought to America in the 1600s by Europeans,” Greig continues. The Indians called the buzzing insect white man’s flies. There are several kinds of bees, not just honeybees, but bumblebees and carpenter bees among many others. Greig notes that there is no such thing as a killer bee, just strains of bees that are more aggressive than normal. Because of the recent missing bee occurrences whenever swarms are reported, say in abandoned buildings, the hives are relocated instead of being destroyed.
Continuing to look at the hive the sameness of all the bees begins to fade and individual bees begin to appear unique. Some of the honeybees are doing the waggle dance, where they wiggle their rears back and forth. The speed and direction of their movement communicates to their brethren how far and where the pollen is located. Some of the honeybees carry visible crumbs of pollen that they are putting in the cells.
The queen seems mired among the thousand or so insects on view in the observation hive. Eventually she stands out due to her large abdomen. She’s laying eggs in one of the cells. The males can be spotted with their large thorax region; the females a thousand to one outnumber them.
Nobel prize winner in medicine Karl von Frisch studied bees and a link to one of his Nobel lectures on the language of bees can be found on the web resource after this article.
“People don’t realize how important bees are to the food system,” notes Greig. Bees pollinate most of the foods we eat. We discuss the news stories that attribute the honeybee disappearance to everything from pollution and insecticide to cell phones. Nobody really knows, and maybe it’s combination of all of the above.
An alternative food source, perhaps not for the squeamish, are edible insects. Near a separate basement display of bees is a vending machine with larvae, crickets and other munchable insects. Will America’s love affair with burgers and fries be supplanted with crispy scorpions and bread with butter and ants? The local restaurant Hugo’s (1602 Westheimer) serves crickets. One of their managers explains by phone that such appetizers are a treat at high-end restaurants in Mexico. Surely you know about the worm at the bottom of the bottle. Hugo’s crickets are imported.


Internet Bee Resource:

nobel lecture on bees