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Friday, April 24, 2015
Sequels multiply in summer movie season
NEW YORK — “I’ll be back,” the line Arnold Schwarzenegger first uttered more than 30 years ago in that indelible manly monotone, belongs to the Terminator, of course. But it also might as well be the official slogan of the summer movie season. It’s the time of year when Hollywood’s older, reliable brands, with the tenacity of Schwarzenegger’s lethal cyborg, claw their way back onto the big screen in a popcorn parade of big-budget sequels, reboots and re-dos. That’s nothing new, but the extent of the sequel spinning is.
Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP
Tom Cruise, star of the upcoming film “Mission: Impossible: Rogue Nation,” addresses the audience during a surprise appearance at the Paramount Pictures presentation at CinemaCon 2015 at Caesars Palace on Tuesday, April 21, 2015, in Las Vegas.
Cruise wows CinemaCon with look at ‘Mission’ stunts
LAS VEGAS — Tom Cruise revealed Tuesday at a surprise appearance at CinemaCon in Las Vegas that he actually hung off the side of an airplane in the film “Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation.” The actor said he performed the stunt, which involved a massive Airbus A400M taking off and flying to 5,000 feet (1,500meters), eight times with a harness attaching him to the aircraft. Cruise said he was terrified throughout, having to worry about particles from the runway, jet fuel fumes and even birds. “I want to keep audiences on the edge of their seats,” he said. Cruise introduced two new clips from the film as part of Paramount
Pictures’ presentation to the nation’s theater owners previewing its upcoming movies. The first shows Cruise escaping from captivity with skillful martial arts moves alongside Rebecca Ferguson. The second is a comedic car chase with co-star Simon Pegg in the passenger’s seat. Ferguson and Pegg joined Cruise on stage but neither wore a microphone, making it even more clear that Cruise was the main event. The film is set to pen on July 31. CinemaCon is a preview of some of the year’s most anticipated fare and an assurance to the people who own the theaters that the big films will be making money for them. (ap)
The sequel expansion — as headlong as Tom Cruise in the “Mission: Impossible” movies — runs in all directions, stretching into prequels, second-try reboots, spinoffs and franchises that are less linear, roman-numeral progressions than (as in the brimming Marvel world) whole universes of overlapping characters: fantasy realms to visit, not just stories to follow. To fuel the proliferation, Hollywood is dipping ever deeper into its vaults: 10 of this summer’s most anticipated blockbusters have origins dating back more than three decades, including “Fantastic Four,” ‘’The Man From U.N.C.L.E.,” ‘’Mad Max: Fury Road” and “Terminator: Genisys,” the fifth film in the series created by James Cameron in 1984. Schwarzenegger is back to say that he’s back. Nostalgia and familiarity mingle with updated special effects and new cast members in these films to render something that hopefully feels fresh to moviegoers. As the “Fast and Furious” series (more profitable in its seventh installment than ever before) has proven this spring, the lifespan of the sequels no longer adheres to the old rules of inevitable decay — at least for now. The ever-lengthening life of franchises can make for
some strange off-screen realities, and not just for 67-year-old Terminators. “Mad Max: Fury Road” (May 15), is returning decades later with its original creator, the Australian director George Miller. “One of the most jolting experiences of my life was to go to SXSW and watch ‘Road Warrior: Mad Max 2’ in a newly minted print for the first time in 32 years and then showing scenes from ‘Fury Road’ all these years later,” says Miller. “It was a kind of a time travel. It was a strange but powerful experience.” There is blunt mathematics behind the proliferating franchises. The top six summer films at the box office in 2013 were sequels. Last summer, all of the top 10 movies were sequels, reboots or hailed from well-known properties. This summer, the box-office seems nearly certain to be led by “Avengers: Age of Ultron” (May 1), the sequel to the 2012 superhero team-up original, the highest grossing-summer movie ever. With $1 billion-plus in box office assured, the financial imperative is, of course, enormous. “Age of Ultron” writer-director Joss Whedon says “making more money would be swell,” but a creative purpose is still necessary.
“Magic Mike,” made for just $7 million, opened in June 2012 with a remarkable $39.1 million and went on to gross $167 million worldwide. A male stripper romp that winks to the real past of producer-star Channing Tatum, it returns July 1 with “Magic Mike XXL.” It’s the classic kind of sequel — a road trip — albeit one with an especially untraditional destination: a Florida stripper convention Tatum attended before his acting career took off. The premise still makes director Gregory Jacobs chuckle. “Magic Mike XXL” is joined by a handful of sequels that come from fairly recent films: the teen musical “Pitch Perfect 2” on May 15; the “Despicable Me” spinoff “Minions” on July 10; Seth MacFarlane’s comedy “Ted 2” on June 26. But the bulk of the summer season will depend on older franchises, some of which are counting on moviegoer amnesia. (ap)
This image released by Paramount Pictures shows Jason Clarke, left, and Jai Courtney in a scene from “Terminator: Genisys,” the fifth film in the series created by James Cameron in 1984.
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Friday, April 24, 2015
Memories haunt both sides of Gallipoli tragedy, 100 years on Page 6
Hernandez goal puts Real Madrid into Champions League semis Page 8
Rebels launch new offensive in northwestern Syria Page 13
EU leaders discuss more and faster action on Med migrants
BRUSSELS — European Union leaders could double their spending on saving lives in the Mediterranean and use military resources to capture and destroy vessels that they suspect will be used for trafficking, according to a draft agreement prepared for an emergency summit Thursday called after hundreds of migrants drowned in the space of a few days. The latest draft statement, obtained by The Associated Press, would pledge the 28 nations to “increase search and rescue possibilities” and to “undertake systematic efforts to identify, capture and destroy vessels before they are used by traffickers.” It said EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini would immediately start preparing an operation that would likely have a military component. “We will take action now. Europe is declaring war on smugglers,” said the EU’s top migration official, Dimitris Avramopoulos, who was in Malta to attend the funeral of 24 migrants who perished at sea. Italian Premier Matteo Renzi agreed. “European Union naval operations in the Horn of Africa have successfully fought piracy — and a similar initiative must be developed to effectively fight against human
trafficking in the Mediterranean,” Renzi wrote in a New York Times opinion piece. “Trafficking vessels should be put out of operation.” A civil-military mission to do the job would face many legal hurdles and already proved controversial ahead of the summit. The draft statement also said the nations want to “set up a first voluntary pilot project on resettlement, offering at least 5,000 places to persons qualifying for protection.” That resettlement plan would amount to about half of the number which arrived in just the last week and a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands likely to arrive this year. The draft statement also proposes cutting the time needed to process would-be migrants, which can now take up to a year before a person is processed and deemed
legitimate to stay. Under the plans that would be cut to as little as two months. The leaders are under great pressure to react after more than 10,000 migrants were plucked from seas between Italy and Libya in a week. EU President Donald Tusk urged the summit “to agree on very practical measures,” including “strengthening search-and-rescue possibilities, by fighting the smugglers and by discouraging their victims from putting their lives at risk, while reinforcing solidarity.” The leaders are also to assess a concern raised by U.N. secretarygeneral Ban Ki-moon, who called for a stronger EU search-and-rescue operation and more legal migration channels. “We all have a moral imperative to act swiftly,” Ban says in a letter to Tusk obtained by The Associated Press. EU officials say the leaders will commit to doubling the size of the European border agency effort in the Mediterranean, but those operations are designed for monitoring migrant movements, not necessarily saving lives. Amnesty International
and Doctors Without Borders want a multinational rescue effort launched to help the thousands fleeing conflict and poverty from places like Syria, Eritrea and Somalia. “The stakes are very high. The number of hours, literally, that it takes to take action will make the difference between life and death,” Iverna McGowan, acting director of Amnesty’s European Institutions Office told The Associated Press. Some lawmakers are concerned that the leaders may stump up rescue assets while the media spotlight is on their summit, but that commitments to solidarity could quickly fade away, as they have in the past. “I fear that what will happen ... is that they will try to water down a few of the points and the actual reason why they are meeting — to urgently seek solutions to what is happening today — will not be the focus of the deal,” Roberta Metsola, the leading EU parliament lawmaker on migration, told the AP. According to the UN’s refugee agency, 219,000 refugees and migrants crossed the Mediterra-
nean last year, and at least 3,500 died trying. More than 1,000 are believed to have died already this month alone. Critics blame the increased deaths on the phasing-out of Italy’s big rescue operation in 2013-14, Mare Nostrum, which worked close to the coast of Libya — the biggest migrant transit route. A smaller EU mission dubbed Triton was left to fill the vacuum. It has no mandate for rescue work, although it does respond to distress calls under international obligations and has saved thousands of lives since its launch late last year. Currently, five of the 28 member states — Italy, Greece, Malta, Germany and Sweden — are handling almost 70 percent of the migrants coming in.(ap) News can also be heard in “Bali Image” at Global Radio FM 96.5 from 9.30 until 10.00 am. Listen to Global Radio FM at http:// globalfmbali.listen2myradio.com or live video streaming at http://radioglobalfmbali.com and http:// ustream.tv/channel/global-fm-bali.
Alessandro Di Meo/ANSA via AP Photo
In this photo made available Thursday, April 23, 2015, migrants crowd and inflatable dinghy as rescue vassel “ Denaro “ (not in picture) of the Italian Coast Guard approaches them, off the Libyan coast, in the Mediterranean Sea, Wednesday, April 22, 2015.