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SUNDAY, APRIL 14, 2013
LIFESTYLE M u s i c
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“Gangnam Style” star Psy performs during his concert “Happening” in Seoul yesterday. — AP photos.
“G
angnam Style” star Psy said he and 50,000 fans would give a “shout out” to the people of North Korea at his concert yesterday when he unveils the all-important dance video for his new single “Gentleman”. At a press conference before the concert, the 35-year-old
Psy poses at a press conference before his concert.
South Korean rapper also acknowledged the “enormous pressure” of following a global phenomenon like “Gangnam Style, but argued he had been singing too long to be called a one-hit wonder. Some 50,000 fans packed Seoul’s World Cup stadium for the concert, which comes at a time of soaring military tensions with North Korea, and with South Korea’s armed forces on heightened alert for an expected missile test. Describing the division of the Korean peninsula as a “tragedy”, Psy said he wanted North Koreans to share in the “fun and happiness” of his music. “Tonight me and 50,000 Korean people... we are going to sing out loud. We are going to shout out loud and
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reaking out of a famous parent’s shadow can be daunting, but Brandon Cronenberg, son of Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg, is rising to the challenge with his first feature film, the sciencefiction “Antiviral.” Opening in US movie theaters on Friday, “Antiviral” was written and directed by the 33-year-old Cronenberg and satirizes society’s obsession with celebrity with a horrific twist. The film stars Caleb Landry Jones as Syd March, an employee at a clinic that harvests viruses from sick celebrities and sells the injections to obsessed fans. When Syd becomes infected with a virus that killed a popular starlet, he has to solve the mystery of her death to save his own life. Critics are comparing “Antiviral” to David Cronenberg’s early work, which
Brandon Cronenberg included such classic sci-fi horror films as “Videodrome,”“The Fly” and “Dead Ringers.” While Brandon Cronenberg acknowledges the connection, he says some of it “is very legitimate and some of it is kind of overstated. “This film has horror science fiction elements, technology elements, bodily elements so I get why people make those comparisons,” he said. However, he noted that his father’s filmography also includes the crime thrillers “The
we are really close to them, so they can hear,” he said. “Hopefully with my ‘Gangnam style’, ‘Gentleman’, and my music video, choreography... hopefully they might enjoy it too,” he added. “Gentleman”, the long-awaited follow-up to “Gangnam Style”, hit online stores Friday in a midnight rolling release across 119 nations. In a move that surprised some industry experts and frustrated a lot of fans, it was released without the music video which had been the main focus of anticipation and speculation. It was the video of “Gangnam Style”, and in particular Psy’s signature horse-riding dance, that pushed him to global stardom last year after it was posted on YouTube and turned into a viral sensation. A satire on the luxury lifestyle of Seoul’s upscale Gangnam district, it has become the most-watched YouTube video of all time, registering more than 1.5 billion views since it debuted last July. The “Gentleman” music video was expected to be posted on YouTube at 9:00pm (1200 GMT) after Psy debuts the song’s dance moves at yesterday’s concert. “Gangnam Style” was always going to be a hard act to follow, and “Gentleman” has had a mixed reception as Psy acknowledged, although he was happy with its initial chart showing. “Many expressed disappointment, saying I made too many calculations and I should have remade some of the songs I did in the past. But this is the best song, best work and the best choice I could possibly do,” he said. “I made the song feeling enormous pressure,” he added. “Gentleman” went straight into the top five of the iTunes charts in South Korea and other Asian markets like Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia, but could only manage 90th spot in the crucial US equivalent. In Britain, it rose quickly to number 25, but elements of the British music press were scathing in their assessment. “Like a seven-year-old on a Casio,” was the judgment of the Times newspaper, while the underwhelmed Guardian critic called it “a fairly standard issue, pop-dance single”. The song-a satire of a self-proclaimed “gentleman” trying to woo women at a party-contains more English lyrics than “Gangnam Style” in a clear nod to the singer’s newfound global audience. “Let me tell you about myself. I’m such a charmer with guts, vigour and humor,” Psy sings in Korean
before launching into the song’s English catch-line: “I’m a mother-father gentleman.” “Gonna make you sweat. Gonna make you wet. You know who I am? Wet Psy!” he sings in English. Already an established artist in South Korea with six albums under his belt, Psy has been building and polishing his own style of quirky, explosive music and his flamboyant stage persona since his debut in 2001. “I’ve been doing this for 12 years. Would it be fair to call me a one-hit wonder just because my next song falls flat?” Psy said yesterday. “I gained international fame almost by accident but that does not mean that I will make desperate efforts to maintain that global popularity. “I will just continue to do what I have been doing for all these years. If it satisfies people’s appetite it will. If not, it won’t.” — AFP
History of Violence” and “Eastern Promises” and the biographical “A Dangerous Method,” which are not in the sci-fi genre at all. “My dad has had a very broad varied career and it would be very hard for me to make a film that didn’t touch on anything that he hasn’t touched on,” Cronenberg said. Celebrity obsession The concept for “Antiviral” came to Cronenberg while he was studying film at university and caught the flu. “I was obsessing over the fact that I had this thing physically in my body that had come from someone else’s body and how that was a weirdly intimate thing,” the filmmaker said. Cronenberg wondered if a fan obsessed with Angelina Jolie would want the actress’s cold “as a way of physically feeling connected to her.” He said he thought it would make “an interesting metaphor for discussing the (celebrity-obsessed) culture” fueled by 24/7 websites such as TMZ.com and magazines like Us Weekly. Chuck Wilson from The Village Voice wrote that with “Antiviral,” the younger Cronenberg “proves to be just as hide-your-eyes yucky” as his father was in early films. Kevin Jagernauth, a critic at Indiewire.com’s movie blog The Playlist, called the film “exactly the oddball and crooked tale you’d want and expect from a Cronenberg with all the gratuitous blood, pus, bone and multiple close ups of needles piercing skin you could ask for.” Brandon Cronenberg decided to pursue film in his early twenties after trying his hand at writing fiction, the visual arts and playing in bands. While in film school, he made a number of shorts, making a conscious effort to “ignore as much as possible (my father’s) career and to just do what was interesting to me.” He said he’s not trying to “embrace deliberately or avoid deliberately” topics that his father might do. —Reuters
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US actress who sued the owners of the IMDb film industry online database for revealing her real age vowed Friday to appeal, after her lawsuit was rejected. Huong Hoang, who goes by the professional name Junie Hoang, said it was “hurtful” to have her age revealed to every prospective employer in Hollywood, where she said ageism was widespread. The 41-year-old, who was initially referred to only as “Jane Doe” in the legal action, launched the suit for
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damages and interests in 2011 against online retail giant Amazon, which owns the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). The Vietnam-born actress alleged fraud, breach of contract and violation of her private life, as well as her consumer rights. But on Thursday the court in Seattle ruled against the actress, whose IMDB profile shows her in regular work since the late 1990s with credits including “Ungirlfriendable” and “Gingerdeadman 3: Saturday Night Cleaver.”—AFP
omedian Jonathan Winters, whose manic, improvisational genius never seemed to take a rest, has died at the age of 87 after a more than 50-year career in stand-up comedy, on television and in film. The burly, moon-faced Winters, a major influence on contemporary comedians like Robin Williams and Steve Martin, died on Thursday of natural causes at his Montecito, California home, surrounded by family and friends, said long time family friend Joe Petro III. Winters had standout roles in 1960s comedy films “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” and “The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming.” He also made regular appearances on “The Tonight Show” with hosts Jack Paar and then Johnny Carson, “The Andy Williams Show” and his own TV variety shows, “The Jonathan Winters Show” and “The Wacky World of Jonathan Winters,” in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Winters’ outlandish riffing style and repertoire of madcap characters made him a leading stand-up performer in the late 1950s but the pressure of being on the road led to a mental breakdown in 1959. He spent time in mental hospitals and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
Dancers perform during the concert “Happening” by “Gangnam Style” star Psy.
moment of movie history: Perhaps the greatest spoof film of all time was 1980’s”Airplane!” which mocked a trope of a previous decade (1970s disaster movies) by parodying a 23-year-old movie (1957’s “Zero Hour!”). By contrast, “Scary Movie V” goofs on “Mama,” which was released 12 weeks ago. And the remake of “Evil Dead” which came out last week. Thirty-three years later, we’re still quoting “Airplane!” whereas almost no one is going to remember “Scary Movie V” after, oh, Monday. Given the steady decline of the sequels, it’s easy to forget that the first “Scary Movie,” released in 2000, was a mostly funny parody of “Scream” mixed in with lots of outrageous sight gags and random spoofy moments. This fifth entry, however, reeks of desperation, with anything and everything thrown at the wall and almost none of it sticking. It’s a movie where stop-motion vacuum cleaners and model train tunnels get the few big laughs there are to be had, but these objects, sadly, take second billing to the human cast. “Scary Movie V” opens with Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan; in happier times, these performers got laughs by earning them rather than exploiting their own personal tragedies for no comic payoff. Charlie’s missing children turn out to be living in a cabin in the woods as feral creatures, leading to their adoption by Charlie’s brother Dan (Simon Rex) and his wife Jody (Ashley Tisdale), and they... Seriously, do you even care? The movie exists as a framework on which to hang obvious jokes about “Mama,” “Evil Dead,” “Paranormal Activity 4,” “Black Swan,” “The Help,” “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” “Inception,” “Fifty Shades of Grey,” and so on, ad infinitum.—Reuters
Winters was a comedian who rebelled against telling jokes and entertained in a stream-of-consciousness style that could veer into the surreal. “I love improvisation,” he told Reuters in an interview nearly 13 years ago. “You can’t blame it on the writers. You can’t blame it on direction. You can’t blame it on the camera guy. ... It’s you. You’re on. You’ve got to do it, and you either sink or swim with what you’ve got.” Actor Robert Morse, who starred with Winters in the 1965 movie “The Loved One,” marveled at the agility with which Winters could transform an ordinary object into an instrument of rapid-fire gags. “”Most of us see things three-dimensionally,” Morse once mused in The New York Times. “”I think Jonny sees things 59-dimensionally. Give me a hairbrush and I see a hairbrush. Give Jonny a hairbrush and it will be a dozen funny things.” Steve Martin paid tribute on Twitter on Friday: “Goodbye, Jonathan Winters. You were not only one of the greats, but one of the great greats.” —Reuters
Jonathan Winters