Saturday, January 1, 2011

The Globe's guide to what you must see and read in 2011 - The Globe and Mail

The Globe's art critics pick their must-see events for the new year

Detroit lawyer and entrepreneur George W. Trendle and writer Fran Striker were responsible for two major radio and later television series about masked heroes and their non-Caucasian sidekicks: The Lone Ranger (which Gore Verbinski will remake for Disney in 2012) and The Green Hornet.

More related to this storyShows that rocked, shocked and taught in 2010

For our TV, theatre and concert picks in 2011, click on the interactive galleries to the left

Typically, the Green Hornet is described as “debonair newspaper publisher” Britt Reid, who fights crime as a masked superhero, along with his driver/martial-arts-expert sidekick, Kato.

Seth Rogen lost weight and got buff for the lead role in the movie, which he co-wrote with his Vancouver friend, Evan Goldberg (Superbad, Pineapple Express), but some elements of his comic character remain consistent. In this version, he's a hard-partying slacker who inherits his dad's media fortune and suddenly sees an opportunity to do good in the world.

Not to be confused with Green Lantern, another comic-book-hero movie, starring another buff Canadian star, Ryan Reynolds, which will be released in June.

In the past 40 years, the enigmatic, meticulous director Terrence Malick has made only a handful of films (Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, The New World) but has earned a reputation as a contemporary master. His long-gestating project The Tree of Life has been surrounded by mystery. What we know is that it's about a man named Jack (Sean Penn), a “lost soul” who feels divided between the generous vision of his mother (Jessica Chastain) and harsher views of his father (Brad Pitt). According to Malick's directorial statement, Jack comes to see “all that has gone into our world's preparation” and reaches a new level of acceptance. The trailer, released this month in conjunction with Black Swan, includes childhood scenes, a lonely-looking Sean Penn and images of the earth from space.

The timing of the release date suggests it will open at Cannes.

Johnny Depp made a promise to the late Hunter S. Thomson that he'd get a movie made of the Gonzo journalist's novel about love, scandal and booze among the journalistic community in Puerto Rico. Written in the early sixties, the book wasn't published until 1998, the same year Depp starred in the Terry Gillam-directed Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

The real story here is the comeback of Bruce Robinson, who wrote the screenplay and directs. He previously wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay for The Killing Fields and wrote and directed the brilliant cult comedy Withnail & I, followed by the black comedy How to Get Ahead in Advertising. Then the studio recut his American debut, Jennifer 8, into nonsense. A book of interviews with him, Smoking in Bed, established him as the wine-swigging English poster boy for the philistine horrors of Hollywood. If he has a hit with this, he's going to ruin his reputation.

Opening the Year of the Rabbit, Third Space invites three out-of-town artists, each with their own very particular idea of what constitutes “the Far East,” to invade Saint John's downtown with a series of performances and interventions.

Vancouver's Kit Sum Cheng will enact a Chinese New Year tradition of burning paper gifts (miniature money, cars, clothes and so on) for the dead, but has decided to burn art instead, because the dead need art too.

Members of the public are invited to exhibit their own art work in the gallery for the month of January, and then toss their art on the pyre during Cheng's Lunar New Year's Eve performance. Here's your chance to get rid of that ghastly watercolour your Aunt Hilda made for you. It's not mean if it's art.

Source: http://www.theglobeandmail.com

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