Real Science Guide

Monday, July 1, 2013

The decline of reality singing shows

NEW YORK — As The Voice ends its third season, tell us if this scenario sounds familiar.

A give-it-your-all reality competition becomes a national fascination. Other shows mimic its formula — and eventually another show becomes the nation’s reality spectacle of choice. It outpaces its predecessor and makes many of us forget just how original the original once seemed.

We aren’t just talking about American Idol, but also Mark Burnett’s Survivor, the show that may be most responsible for launching the reality genre in the US. Just as The Voice has surpassed Idol, Idol once overcame Survivor.

Survivor debuted in 2000, two years later came Idol, which went on to rule US television for eight years, dwarfing its predecessor and everything else in the ratings.

Idol owed its success partly to the brutal honesty of Simon Cowell, who was every bit as shrewd as Survivor’s first-season winner, Richard Hatch.

Viewers also tuned in for the watch-through-your fingers performances of aspiring stars like civil-engineering student William Hung.

In the 2011-12 TV season, Idol got competition from The Voice, which unlike Idol didn’t succeed by playing rough. The singing competition, which closed its third season in the US on Tuesday night, took a more encouraging approach (subbing in “coaches” for “judges”).

In the process, it replaced Idol on the list of Emmy contenders for Outstanding Reality-Competition Program last year, leaving the original singing show out of the category where it had been a staple for nine consecutive years. The Voice has finally bumped Idol as the top singing show — though neither sing-off now scores the outsized ratings Idol once did.

To hear Burnett tell it, The Voice owes its success to being “a kinder show.”

No matter how much of a role they truly play, the judges behind the table — or coaches in the spinning chairs — always get the credit or blame for a show’s success or slide. It’s true that Idol began to lose its bulletproof status when Cowell departed for X Factor. And though his new show earns respectable ratings, they lag those of Idol and The Voice. On the other hand, Cowell may have miscalculated when he decided to turn his X Factor, which debuted in 2011, into a higher-stakes, tougher Idol.

So, do musical competition shows need to get nicer? Or nastier? The much-hyped Idol rivalry this year between Nicki Minaj and Mariah Carey didn’t produce as much ratings heat as Fox may have hoped for. And the lower X Factor ratings despite the much-hyped addition of Britney Spears in Season Two suggests that big names can’t guarantee better numbers.

Is it possible that the shows really are, as the judges and producers always insist, really about the contestants? If so, no one’s going to to blame those contestants for singing shows’ slide. More likely, some viewers think they’ve seen it all. Reuters

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Sunday, June 30, 2013

Movie review: Monsters University (PG,107min) | 3.5/5

SINGAPORE — Making a prequel to a successful film is considered one of the hardest things to do. Double that (plus five) when you’re talking about Monsters Inc, which, in this reviewer’s book, stands as one of the most enjoyable and ingenious animated movies of all time.

It was a monstrous (pun fully intended) hit back in 2001 for Pixar, which raised the animation bar so high with the likes of Toy Story, Finding Nemo and The Incredibles.

So where does the new generation of Pixar film-makers start?

Right at the very beginning. Stepping up to the plate to direct is Cars and Toy Story 3 storyboard artist Dan Scanlon, a brave soul who’s up for tackling the legacy of Sully and Wazowski.

Scanlon knows exactly what the necessary core elements are for a Pixar hit: Hilarious running gags, memorable characters, heartfelt story. And he mostly delivers.

Monsters University works as both a frat house comedy and a coming-of-age tale, recalling all the recognisable Revenge Of The Nerds movie tropes. Our two lovable but obviously flawed heroes aren’t exactly mates when they first meet in university, but they must rally together a team of misfits to win a big competition and keep their dreams alive.

But for all of the plot’s familiarity (it is a prequel after all), extra props must be given to the screenwriters for throwing in some surprising detours on the two “scare-rs”’ journey to Monsters Inc.

Billy Crystal and John Goodman are, of course, more than excellent as they reprise their roles of Mike Wazowski and James P Sullivan, respectively. They continue to do no wrong with their comedic rapport. Helen Mirren as Dean Hardscrabble, the cold-as-ice headmistress of Monsters University is also spot-on, along with a host of A-list voices like Steve Buscemi and Alfred Molina.

It’s a fun outing at the movies, no doubt about it. Yet, there seems to be a little something missing. Perhaps the absence of any human characters for the monsters to play off against (like the awww-so-cute Boo in Monsters Inc) means it lacks the emotional payoff that the first movie had.

That said, Monsters University is still sweet, entertaining and satisfying as far as hard-to-get-right prequels go. It respectfully continues Pixar’s tradition of delivering films that focus on character, mirth and merriment. But like a younger brother, it will always have to stay under the mighty shadow of the superior, timeless classic that was the original.

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Tucking in

SINGAPORE — It has been quite a while since we saw Chris Tucker in what was probably his most memorable gig: The three Rush Hour films, playing detective James Carter opposite Chinese superstar Jackie Chan.

But fans here will get a chance to see him once again when Tucker pops into Singapore as part of his stand-up comedy world tour, The Return Tour, on June 25 at the Kallang Theatre. Don’t expect him to reenact scenes from his movies though.

“I do a lot of improvisation and tell stories about my life. There is a lot of that. And I get to do a lot of characters. It’s different from a movie, when you have to play only one character throughout and there’s a script for you to follow,” he said over the phone, although he added that he would often ad lib his lines in the movies.

“Oh yeah, I do. I mean, I would try to make the character mine, and I think that doing stand-up, because I act a lot in stand-up, actually prepared me for doing movies.”

Tucker started being interested in comedy ever since he was in school. “I was always the class clown. Some of my friends said I was like Eddie Murphy and I didn’t understand the implications of that at the time, I just wanted to be funny and be the class clown,” he said.

While he may be Mr Funny Guy in the movies and on stage, don’t be surprised to find that he’s not quite like that if you bump into him on the street. “I mean, sometimes you’ll find that I’m not that funny in real life. Because you can’t be all the time. There has to be a balance, I think,” he said, adding that he tries to keep his private and public personas very separate.

Tucker certainly has his work cut out for him this year. Apart from completing his tour, he has a film being made about the tour coming out later this year, and he’s looking to do more cinematic features as well. “I’m going to be busy for the next six months or so,” he quipped.

For the full story, visit http://tdy.sg/christuckerdream.

Chris Tucker’s The Return Tour is on June 25, 8pm at Kallang Theatre.

Tickets from Sistic.

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5 James Gandolfini moments

SINGAPORE — James Gandolfini, of The Sopranos acclaim, has died of an apparent heart attack while holidaying in Rome. He was 51.

The award-winning actor was best known for his role as the violent but emotional mob boss Tony Soprano in the successful HBO series, which critics have called one of the best television dramas of all time.

Gandolfini also appeared in films such as Zero Dark Thirty, Killing Them Softly and The Taking of Pelham 123, and was nominated for a Tony Award in 2009 for his role in Broadway production God Of Carnage.

We take a look at some of the actor’s most memorable moments in film and television.

***

EMMY WIN. James Gandolfini’s role as Tony Soprano won him many accolades during his career, including this Primetime Emmy award for best actor in 2000. He went on to win the Emmy two more times for the same role - in 2001 and 2003.

Watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plcPPTrb2Pc

THE MEXICAN. Gandolfini also won an LA Outfest Award for Best Supporting Actor as the gay assassin Leroy in The Mexican, which also stars Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts.

Watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GanDtOcF0M0

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE. The actor lent his voice to the Wild Thing Carol in this fantasy drama.

Watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEFypVPbqJc

ALIVE DAY MEMORIES: HOME FROM IRAQ. Gandolfini also produced this Emmy-nominated HBO documentary on injured Iraq War veterans in 2008.

Watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mstpgpe070U

FINAL SCENE OF THE SOPRANOS. We salute you, Mr Gandolfini.

Watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqpDxCo2vic

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World War Z director Marc Forster takes his zombie cue from animals

NEW YORK — As a boy growing up in Switzerland, director Marc Forster was obsessed with the way fish and birds, moving together, gracefully coalesced into a single organism, the multitudes swarming seamlessly as one.

From such pastoral visions comes the zombie tsunami threatening humanity in Brad Pitt-starrer World War Z.

Once bitten, the victims frenetically convulse and join an undead horde that sprint through city streets like rabid cheetahs, clicking their teeth malevolently and at times swarming terrifyingly en masse.

“They’re like this force of nature coming at you,” Forster said. “I felt like the more I could base it in nature, viscerally, the more scary it will be.”

The animal kingdom figured heavily into his conception of the zombies. In addition to birds and fish, the filmmakers also paid careful attention to the movements of ants. The mandibular mechanics of the zombie bite were informed by police dogs, specifically the way they lead with their mouths and “then bite forward”, Forster said.

As for the clacking teeth, which seem to evoke gorillas or an insect plague, Forster said that aspect was actually his one nod toward the gothic.

“It’s like an empty shell — you feel a hollowness because they’re not human anymore,” he said. “Their souls have left them.” THE NEW YORK TIMES

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Movie review: World War Z (PG, 116min) | 2/5

LONDON — The first problem you encounter with World War Z, the new action blockbuster starring Brad Pitt, is how to pronounce the damn thing. Should the last letter be said “zee”, to sound like “three”, or “zed”, to sound like “dead”, or “zzz”, to sound like the audience?

Whichever phoneme you plump for, the Z stands for zombie, and the film contains, on a rough estimate, hundreds of thousands of them. It is based on a novel by Max Brooks, son of the filmmaker and humourist Mel, and it follows Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt), a flaxen-haired former United Nations action man who is recalled to the line of duty when a mysterious pandemic turns citizens of various countries into walking, chomping corpses.

Brooks’s novel was a thinly-veiled parable about American foreign policy and post-millennial anxiety, told from several points of view: in fact, it had much in common with Steven Soderbergh’s terrific 2011 medical thriller Contagion. Marc Forster’s film junks the satire and multiple perspectives, and instead recasts the story as an uncomplicated globe-trotting thriller. On one side we have Lane and a roster of temporary sidekicks, and on the other, an inexhaustible supply of the living dead.

What we get is a collection of moderately violent action set-pieces untroubled by humour or broader coherence. Lane travels from Philadelphia (played on-screen by Glasgow) to Nova Scotia via New York, New Jersey, South Korea, Israel and Wales, and almost nothing that happens along the way has the slightest effect on the film’s final outcome. Perhaps this should come as no surprise: Shortly after filming on World War Z was thought to be complete, seven weeks of extra shooting took place in Budapest, which was followed by the writing and filming of an entirely new third act later in the year. Whatever direction the film was originally headed in, someone important obviously thought better of it.

Forster, who directed the Bond film Quantum Of Solace, has done his best to piece together a story from these incompatible parts, but the final product has an elaborate uselessness about it, like a broken teapot glued back together with the missing pieces replaced by parts of a vacuum cleaner.

The Welsh finale, in particular, looks spectacularly cheap, and the screen-stretching vistas and computer-generated hordes from earlier in the movie are nowhere to be seen. In their place is Peter Capaldi, who plays a World Health Organisation director hiding out in a bunker near Cardiff, and when you first glimpse him in an otherwise empty office you wonder if Malcolm Tucker has somehow saved the day by swearing the zombies into submission.

By that point you’re well-primed for such silliness, as many of the film’s key dramatic moments wouldn’t feel particularly out of place on a horror-themed edition of The Thick Of It. In one early sequence, when Lane tries to creep past a crowd of zombies on a military base, his cover is blown when his wife Karen (Mireille Enos) unexpectedly rings his mobile. Moments earlier, an important character trips up and accidentally shoots himself in the head, and you start to question whether the planet might in fact be safer in the hands of the zombies.

At least the film has one neat trick: in the Israel sequence we see Boschian wide-shots of zombie hordes coursing down streets and sluicing over barriers like a great, monstrous flood. This chimes with the footage of swarming insects in the opening titles, and suggests that the film may have once had a point to make before the rot set in. But there’s no heart to be found amid the guts. THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

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China through David Beckham’s eyes

SINGAPORE - David Beckham’s been busy post-retirement – he’s currently on a week-long tour in China as ambassador to the Chinese Super League.

And, oh, he’s also posting selfies on his brand new Sina Weibo account.

The 38-year-old’s posts range from photos of himself looking dapper in a private jet – “Landed in Nanjing, a city I have never been to before. I’ve been told it’s 95 degrees!” – to simple observations about his trip – “Love Beijing, although not his traffic jam. Had a good day so far”.

Beckham also held a question and answer session with followers on Weibo, responding to fan queries about his trip and his favourite sports-related hobbies.

But the former England captain denied reports that he’s been approached by NFL (America’s National Football League) scouts.

“That is not true. In terms of rugby, I think I may be too old now,” he posted in reply to a fan’s question.

Even though the football superstar’s only been microblogging for two days, he already has close to half a million followers.

Beckham’s also following six other Weibo users at the moment, including the Chinese Super League and his wife Victoria Beckham, who has more than 1.3 million followers.

Click on the photos for a glimpse of Beckham’s Weibo posts.

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