Bruce Willis in Neuromancer?

Movie rumor #1: Willis is on board for an adaption of William Gibson's classic cyberpunk novel:

http://blastr.com/2011/11/rumor-of-the-day-bruce-wi.php

"Red": Cynical, idiotic -- and a total blast

http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/andrew_ohehir/2010/10/15/red/index.html

Friday, Oct 15, 2010
"Red": Cynical, idiotic -- and a total blast
Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich and Helen Mirren take down the CIA in a gleeful, violent farce
Andrew O'Hehir

Helen Mirren and John Malkovich in "Red"Film critics always run the risk of digging for deeper meanings below the surface of crap entertainment products (although heaven knows I would never do anything like that). In the case of a campy, clever, intentionally dumb espionage caper like "Red," which is based on an obscure DC Comics graphic novel, it's safe to say that ideology is beside the point. Still, "Red" arrives in the same year as "Salt," "The A-Team" and "Knight and Day," and tells a strikingly similar story: The military-intelligence complex has become a nexus of bureaucratic evil, and only the outcasts, retirees and traitors are fighting for truth and justice. (Yes, of course this is just this year's model of the age-old tale about individuals battling a corrupt system.)

"Red" features Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich and Helen Mirren as an improbable quartet of ex-spooks who break out the costumes and hardware for one last go-round against the powers of darkness, those being represented by the United States government. (The title is a supposed CIA acronym: Retired and Extremely Dangerous.) Whether you see screenwriting duo Erich and Jon Hoeber's anti-government paranoia as left-wing or right-wing probably depends on your own perspective, but either way it's a highly contemporary blend of cynicism and idealism.

But the cheerful nihilism of the plot, which involves buried atrocities from the 1980s "dirty war" in Guatemala and at one point sets former CIA hit man Frank Moses (Willis) on a quest to assassinate the vice president, is just a frame for the cast of aging cut-ups and director Robert Schwentke's lovingly rendered gunplay and explosions. The Hoeber brothers' list of gags range from the totally canned to the cackle-inducing, but their script is just good enough that the actors can follow its idiotic twists and turns with aplomb.

Frank Moses is one of the better ultra-deadpan tough-guy characters of Willis' mid-late career (or is it late-mid career?), and Willis finds a terrific screwball partner in Mary-Louise Parker, playing a customer-service agent he abducts into a life of dazzling espionage and violence because ... well, just because. Because he digs her, I guess. Freeman's character is an elderly lech, who's busy dying of liver cancer and ogling the female staff in a New Orleans nursing home, Malkovich plays a stereotypical off-the-grid nutjob (although he has a vastly better time here than he does in "Secretariat") and Mirren runs a B&B in rural Maryland, when she's not doing freelance assassination gigs on the side.

All those guys are a blast, and the dark-hearted idiocy of "Red" is mostly quite enjoyable. But in a sense they're all upstaged by 93-year-old Ernest Borgnine, who gets two brief scenes as a record-keeper deep in the bowels of CIA headquarters. He's seen spooks come and seen 'em go, and has no hesitation in aiding the aging renegades against the blow-dried new generation (nicely represented by Karl Urban and Rebecca Pidgeon). He clearly sends the message at the heart of all the violent and silly fun in "Red," which may not be historically accurate but is nonetheless widely shared: Things have really gone to hell, and this place ain't what it used to be.

Stallone says 'Velcro muscles' made old-school stars expendable

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/herocomplex/2010/07/comiccon-2010-expendables-stallone-willis-schwarzenegger.html

COMIC-CON 2010: Stallone says 'Velcro muscles' made old-school stars expendable
July 18, 2010

The lights were down low in Sylvester Stallone's Beverly Hills office on a recent afternoon, so it was impossible to see the 64-year-old movie star's eyes behind his plum-tinted sunglasses. His snug Italian suit emphasized his still-muscular frame as he sat ramrod straight. His face doesn't move much. So he seemed like a statue, until he started recounting the moment when he knew he was becoming expendable.

"It was that first Batman movie," he said, referring to the 1989 film starring Michael Keaton, an actor never known for biceps. "The action movies changed radically when it became possible to Velcro your muscles on. It was the beginning of a new era. The visual took over. The special effects became more important than the single person. That was the beginning of the end."

Yes, even action heroes get misty-eyed at times. In the 1980s, Stallone was one of the biggest names in Hollywood in movies in which he punched, shot or (in a film rightly called "Over the Top") arm-wrestled his way past overpowering odds as an especially sinewy everyman. And, despite the arrival of an era when actors such as Keaton, Johnny Depp or Tobey Maguire could play the action hero, Stallone never really went away. He didn't become small; Hollywood's collective bench press did.

"I wish I had thought of Velcro muscles myself," Stallone mused. "I didn't have to go to the gym for all those years, all the hours wedded to the iron game, as we call it," he said, a reference to weight training.

But Stallone is back in the heavyweight game this week, at least for a day. On Thursday, he will be in San Diego at Comic-Con International, the pop-culture expo that runs through Sunday at the convention center and where Velcro muscles are practically handed out at the door. He's not going there to get vengeance on the nerd heroes (although that might actually be entertaining), he's going to promote his ridiculously retro film "The Expendables," due in theaters next month.

The movie is a low-tech, deliriously un-ironic return to the sort of commando movies that were a popular cinematic sector during the Reagan era. Movies just like it get relegated to the small ballrooms at Comic-Con all the time, but "The Expendables" will be front and center in Hall H, the 6,500-seat hangar of a room where Angelina Jolie, Nicolas Cage, Will Ferrell and Jeff Bridges will be part of a celebrity parade during the four-day expo.

How did Stallone's paramilitary exercise rate? Simple: He drafted an army of new friends and old rivals into "The Expendables" for a sort of "Magnificent Seven" approach to his battle-zone fantasy. Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger appear in the film (briefly). So do Mickey Rourke and Eric Roberts. And British tough-guy Jason Statham and Chinese superstar Jet Li. There's also a former NFL player (Terry Crews), a pro-wrestling icon (Steve Austin), an Ultimate Fighting Championship star (Randy Couture) and Dolph Lundgren, whom Stallone enjoyed punching back in the good ol' Cold War days of "Rocky IV." Not every hot-shot he-man actor participated; Jean-Claude Van Damme, Forest Whitaker and Ben Kingsley demurred.

Stallone plays Barney "The Schizo" Ross, a mercenary who has assembled a team of paid killers who look like the models for a "United Colors of Harley-Davidson" ad campaign. Statham plays Schizo's second-in-command, Lee Christmas. A mission takes the team to South America where nasty surprises await. Rourke plays a tattoo artist and sometime spiritual advisor; Roberts is the bad guy.

In the eyes of a certain Sacramento politician, the lineup looks like a dream team. "The movie is fantastic with a terrific cast," Schwarzenegger said. "It’s like 'The Magnificent Seven' or 'The Dirty Dozen' — every character is totally believable because of their natural real-life personas."

Willis and Schwarzenegger play mysterious kingpins who meet with Stallone's character for a fleeting underworld summit staged in a church — perhaps they are the trinity of American action-movie heroes for fans of a certain age. The three actors have a history — they were partners in the 1991 launch of Planet Hollywood, the theme-restaurant chain, and seeing them meet on-screen is the tantalizing lure of the movie's trailers and posters. Stallone said his old screen rivals showed up for no pay as a gesture of support.

Stallone, who co-wrote the screenplay with Dave Callaham, said he was "a nervous wreck" on the day of the shoot. And, as a reflective director, it got him thinking about the three actors he would be guiding.

"Each of us chose a different style. Arnold was king of the one-liners. Bruce was witty and talkative; he had all these verbal pirouettes. And I was pretty silent. My guys seemed haunted, a lot of the time, but Bruce's guys were usually Teflon. Arnold was relentless, like this perfect machine. People asked if I could have played the Terminator. Are you kidding? Not a chance, I never could have played the Terminator."

Stallone didn't complete the corollary, but Schwarzenegger could never have inhabited the role of everyman Rocky Balboa, the neighborhood lug with hound-dog eyes and a heart full of sadness who never gives way to surrender.

Willis, for his part, has promoting to do for his big film called "Red," based on the comic, in which he portrays a former black-ops agent, but says he enjoyed "The Expendables" so much he'd like to work with Stallone again. "He's a very efficient and creative director; the experience on 'The Expendables' was great."

Schwarzenegger, whose return to Hollywood is a growing topic of interest, has enjoyed being back on a movie set: "Sly was so well-organized on the set with the way he communicated, not just with the actors but also with the crew. It was amazing how smooth the whole operation was."

The word from the state capital is that the governor will not be at Comic-Con, but Willis will appear with Stallone on Thursday, which will surely send the genre-loving fans of Comic-Con into delirium. Director Edgar Wright, who was going to Comic-Con to promote "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World," said he got goose bumps thinking about the reception that the old war horses would get. "It's going to be like when 'Rocky' won the Oscar for best picture. I can't wait."

The trio's work in "Die Harder," "T2: Judgment Day" and Stallone's "Rocky III" helped propel Hollywood down the path of franchise obsession, for better or worse. (Below on the right is a photo of Stallone back in the day, on the set of "Rambo III.") The high-concept, high-explosives approach to cinema makes him a founding figure of sorts at Comic-Con, where action heroes never die, they just become video-game characters.

As robust as the Comic-Con reception might be, it might not even be the highlight of Stallone's day. He and other "Expendables" cast members will stop Thursday night at Camp Pendleton to screen the movie for Marines.

Here are some things you will encounter if you sit in the dark with "The Expendables": compound fractures, stab wounds, an abusive boyfriend beat down, bodies flying over sandbags in slow motion, testicle jokes, fiery debris, tropical airstrips, a major amount of C4 explosives, cocaine kilos stacked in a cave, water torture, cigarette-burn torture, tough love and tattoos. The movie reeks of cordite and is drenched in testosterone — there are women in it, but they're treated pretty much as props.

There's a scene in which a villain is engulfed in flames and staggers toward death. The director wasn't satisfied with it, so, despite the expense, Stallone went back to shoot more footage and ordered up some CG effects. Now, he proudly explains, the immolation has an exclamation point, and "The Expendables" is the first film in history in which a good guy goes up to an on-fire bad guy and punches him in the face.

Stallone is candid that the movie lurches and stalls a number of times. It was supposed to be a comedy, but then, after seeing early footage, he realized directing a commando comedy was a lot harder than it sounded.

"I think it would have been a disaster," he said, adding that a documentary team recorded much of the production, for posterity. "The Expendables" ended up as a straight-forward wolf-pack adventure that recalled some textures of the old "Missing in Action" films (which starred Chuck Norris, who somehow didn't get called to duty).

Stallone is a man of action but also has aspired to be a warrior poet, in his own way. Critics have savaged him through the years, with some notable exceptions (he was praised for his nuanced turn in the 1997 film "Cop Land," for instance). He got decent reviews in "Rocky Balboa" (which dropped the Roman numerals for the digital age), but his retro commando film may be marching to a beat that leaves young audiences confused.

Sitting in his office — next to shelves full of action figures, prop weapons and a latex decapitated head plucked from the set of a Rambo film — Stallone explained the mindset of the characters in his new film, but he seemed to be talking about more than movies.

"When the battle is on, that's easy. When boxers are in the ring, they're simple. It's when the fight is over, that's when the other fight, the real fight, begins. That's the problem. It's like Frank Capra said in his book: Reality started when he drove through the gates of Paramount. The surreal life started when he drove back home. Why do some actors want to do nine films a year? It's their element. They're more comfortable in the unreal world."

"Expendables" is a curious film to handicap, commercially. The cast and Comic-Con will stir interest, but will the film win over young fans whose word-of-mouth is essential? Lionsgate saw the hard-knuckle comic-book movie "Kick-Ass" spark public interest and press but fail to deliver any big bang; the studio picked up the Stallone project, which, conceivably, could be a rerun.

Stallone doesn't seem fazed. He's more interested in chewing on the story of the film and the old lions who reload for one more mission. "People that spend time in a foxhole — they're never going to find that relationship anywhere else again. … Everything else pales next to that. When you think about the second World War vets — more than even the Vietnam vets — there's a brotherhood. They're 90 years old now, and they're still wearing the hats. The way they feel about each other. Time stopped. That was the ultimate of life. Everything after it was anticlimactic. After that it just wasn't the same."

Stallone paused, going back to statue mode. Then he found the metaphor he was searching for, behind those shades. "After that, their life was straight-to-video."

-- Geoff Boucher

EW Names 'Die Hard' Best Action Movie Ever

http://news.aol.com/entertainment/movies/articles/_a/ew-names-die-hard-best-action-movie-ever/20070615065909990001

EW Names 'Die Hard' Best Action Movie Ever
Reuters

LOS ANGELES (June 15) -- "Die Hard," starring Bruce Willis as a tough cop battling terrorists, was named the best action film ever by Entertainment Weekly magazine -- two weeks before the series' fourth installment, "Live Free or Die Hard," hits theaters.

The magazine on Thursday unveiled a list of top 25 action movies picked by its writers and editors spanning a wide range of films: from 1938's "The Adventures of Robin Hood" to director Akira Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai" in 1954 (No. 6) and the 2004 computer-animated film, "The Incredibles" (No. 25).

Space adventure "Aliens" followed "Die Hard" in the No. 2 slot with "Raiders of the Lost Ark" at No. 3 and "The Road Warrior" and "The Matrix" at No. 4 and No. 5, respectively.

But it was 1988's "Die Hard," starring Willis as tough-as-nails New York cop John McClane who battles terrorists in a Los Angeles high-rise, that blew the biggest Hollywood fireball for the magazine's staff.

Back in summer 1988, "Die Hard" was notable mostly for its gun battles and explosions, including blowing up an L.A. high-rise. The movie raked in $138 million worldwide and made Willis a major movie star.

Two sequels, "Die Hard 2: Die Harder" and "Die Hard With a Vengeance," followed in 1990 and 1995, respectively.

The fourth film, "Live Free or Die Hard," lands in theaters on June 27, and this time McClane is saving the world from a mad genius mounting a digital attack on computer networks.

An Entertainment Weekly spokeswoman said the list was picked without any regard to "Live Free's" opening date or its interview with Willis that hits newsstands on Friday.

"After we finalized the list, we asked for interviews with key players in the movies we picked," the spokeswoman said. "'Die Hard"' was going to be No. 1 anyway."

Some of the more recent films making the top 25 included "Spider-Man 2" and "Kill Bill -- Vol. 1," while older titles ranged from 1964 James Bond movie "Goldfinger" to 1973's martial arts flick "Enter the Dragon," starring Bruce Lee.

JFK News

JFK News
By Kenn Thomas
SteamshovelPress.com

Developments in the study of JFK’s assassination occur in the media right about at the same time cute animal stories and Loch Ness monster sightings begin to appear as well. It signifies that not much else is left to say about the war, since the sea change in the US political landscape has ended all but the fighting now, and even audience tolerance for the tiring tales of celebrity misbehavior has been exhausted.

So these developments get tossed in the media mix and many readers never get a chance to actually see them pulled together in one spot. To remedy this, following is list of recent JFK news:

Scientists at Texas A&M conducted a new forensic analysis of bullets from the batch used by the sixth floor assassin. These new tests established that the JFK assassination bullet fragments could have come from more than three separate bullets. While critics scoff at the “could have” nature of the news, it nevertheless ends the certainty with which the notion that all the major damage was done by bullets from the same gun. The paper reporting these results appears online at:

http://imstat.org/aoas/next_issue.html

Howard “St. John” Hunt surfaced a January 2004 taped confession from his father E. Howard Hunt that presented an LBJ-did-it theory, with Cord Meyer as point man for the overall operation. Cord Meyer was at one time married to JFK’s last mistress, Mary Pinchot Meyer, whose exploits (possibly including dropping acid with JFK at the White House) and strange murder once comprised a four-part series in Steamshovel. As Hunt puts in on the tape, which aired on Coast to Coast on April 28, 2007: “I think that LBJ settled on Meyer as an opportunist (like himself) and a man who had very little left to him in life ever since JFK had taken Cord's wife as one of his mistresses. I would suggest that Cord Meyer welcomed the approach from LBJ, who was after all only the Vice President at that time and of course could not number Cord Meyer among JFK's admirers—quite the contrary.”

Two other JFK connected obituaries happened. Jack Valenti, the film industry lobbyist responsible for the movie ratings system, also happened to be riding in the Dallas motorcade that day. Most recently he, the late president Gerald Ford and PBS commentator Bill Moyers pressured the History channel into censoring one of its “Men Who Killed Kennedy” programs. Interestingly, like Hunt’s deathbed confession, the program involved an LBJ-did-it-theory.

The other significant death was that of John K. Lattimer, a urologist and lone nutter who also supposedly owned the remains of Napoleon’s penis.

Charles Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi has written a 1600 page book that answers all questions about the assassinations and resolves every doubt about the lone nut hypothesis—not. Also, Tink Thomason summarized Bugliosi’s book well in the June 3 edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

“What is crystal clear, however, is that more than 43 years after the event we don't know what happened. From the very beginning, the event has been left to advocates of one view or another. The Warren Commission put together a case for the prosecution against Oswald. It failed when critics showed its conclusions were not justified by the evidence it considered. The same could be said for the House Select Committee, which reached a conclusion diametrically opposed to that of the Warren Commission. What this case doesn't need is more advocacy on the part of lawyers like Posner and Bugliosi. They squeeze the evidence into one mold or another, offering opinions on this or that, buttressed by whatever they choose to tell us, ignoring the rest….What this case does need is some old-fashioned, historical scholarship. It's a shame and a waste of great time and effort that Bugliosi decided to contribute to the problem and not to its solution.”

Of Bugliosi’s book, Real History blogger Lisa Pease notes: “Seriously, every page I’ve flipped to by searching or randomly browsing so far is fraught with lies, errors, and omissions -- the very things he accuses the research community of doing. Is he just an anti-conspiracy zealot, out to defend a world view he can’t afford to have shaken? Or is something more sinister at work? Maybe a look into his past would give us some answers.”

( http://realhistoryarchives.blogspot.com )

Before all of this, actor Bruce Willis apparently got caught up with the work of the conspiracy research community. According to:

http://www.infowars.com/articles/us/jfk_bruce_willis_says_jfk_killers_still_in_power.htm

Richard Linklater, who had an animated Alex Jones in his 2001 movie A Waking Life, passed around various “9/11 Truth” DVDs, including Jones’ Terror Storm, on the set of his 2006 movie, Fast Food Nation, which had Willis in the cast. Whether that happened or not, Willis wound up telling the New York Post that “They still haven’t caught the guy that killed Kennedy. I’ll get killed for saying this, but I’m pretty sure those guys are still in power, in some form. The entire government of the United States was co-opted.”

And with that, the JFK business got thrown back into the media mix.

Bruce Willis Says JFK Killers Still In Power

Bruce Willis Says JFK Killers Still In Power
Actor tells Vanity Fair he's skeptical of lone shooter theory
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Monday, May 7, 2007
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/may2007/070507brucewillis.htm

In a new magazine interview, Bruce Willis spills the beans on his skepticism that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the assassination of JFK, and suggests that the some of the same criminals who killed Kennedy are still in power today.

"They still haven't caught the guy that killed [President] Kennedy," Willis told Vanity Fair's June issue, according to the New York Post.

"I'll get killed for saying this, but I'm pretty sure those guys are still in power, in some form. The entire government of the United States was co-opted," adds the Die Hard star.

So from where did Willis, a former die-hard champion of Neo-Con policy, receive his sudden wake-up call?

As we reported last year, Hollywood director Richard Linklater said he had handed out 9/11 truth DVDs on the set of Fast Food Nation, including Alex Jones' Terror Storm and Martial Law documentaries, and that they completely changed Willis' political paradigm.

"He said it put him in such a head space that he will be quiet on issues of national policy," Linklater told the Alex Jones Show.

Is Willis' comment that the people who killed Kennedy are still in power a reference to the fact that George H.W. Bush was photographed at the scene in Dealy Plaza?

Either way, it's refreshing to see that Willis, who was vehemently pro-war and pro-Bush in the months after 9/11, has seen the light and realized that patriotism is about love of one's country, not worship of government.