Pop superstar Madonna has infuriated the biological father of her adopted Malawian son David Banda by insisting the child would be dead if she hadn't rescued him.
The Vogue hitmaker and her director husband Guy Ritchie caused outrage in the African country in 2006 after she brought two-year-old Banda back to Britain, amid claims the couple side-stepped the official adoption process.
And the singer is set for more controversy after saying in the upcoming issue of U.S. magazine Interview: "He (David) wouldn't have lived if I hadn't taken him. It's not even a possibility."
But the remark has reportedly left Yohane Banda, the toddler's peasant farmer father, "stunned", with a source close to the Malawian family telling U.K. newspaper The People: "Madonna should choose her words a bit more carefully. To say these things about David's life before she adopted him is just not right."
It is possible Madonna's comment could be examined at next month's hearing at a Malawian court, where an official decision over the adoption case will be made by a human rights panel.
The Vogue hitmaker and her director husband Guy Ritchie caused outrage in the African country in 2006 after she brought two-year-old Banda back to Britain, amid claims the couple side-stepped the official adoption process.
And the singer is set for more controversy after saying in the upcoming issue of U.S. magazine Interview: "He (David) wouldn't have lived if I hadn't taken him. It's not even a possibility."
But the remark has reportedly left Yohane Banda, the toddler's peasant farmer father, "stunned", with a source close to the Malawian family telling U.K. newspaper The People: "Madonna should choose her words a bit more carefully. To say these things about David's life before she adopted him is just not right."
It is possible Madonna's comment could be examined at next month's hearing at a Malawian court, where an official decision over the adoption case will be made by a human rights panel.
- 3/9/2008
- WENN
In "The Weather Man", Nicolas Cage doesn't so much play a protagonist, warts and all, as he plays a protagonist who is all warts. While not thoroughly unlikable, Cage's David Spritz, a weatherman for a local Chicago TV station, is the kind of guy who makes eyes roll in your head. He seemingly can't avoid social blunders no matter how many warnings he gets -- and ignores. So the challenge writer Steven Conrad and director Gore Verbinski face is how to get audiences to invest emotionally in such a schmo. They don't always succeed.
Cage brings so much positive baggage to his roles these days that he can redeem even the most anti-social of anti-heroes, as he did last month in "Lord of War". But David Spritz appears to have baffled him, too, so he takes the approach that David is simply not too bright. Therefore, the challenge faced by Paramount's marketing team is to sell a film, directed by the maker of "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl" and starring Cage and Michael Caine, to mainstream audiences when the film probably should have been made by Paramount Classics. For this is a Sundance film gussied up with studio production values and big stars. It will be a hard sell.
In the opening shot, Cage wears such a sad-sack look you just know that, all superficial evidence to the contrary, David is one unhappy dude. Professionally, he is an overachiever, making far too much money working a couple of hours each day to deliver the usually bad weather news to Chicago viewers. He even has a promising feeler from a national morning show in New York. However, not too deep below this surface lies a wealth of insecurities and pain, which has little to do with the fact his "fans" love to throw the remnants of fast food at him on the street.
David is divorced and unhappily so. Despite the shrill and condescending manner of ex-wife Noreen (Hope Davis, in a continuation of her smug bitch in "Proof"), he wants to get back together with her. He struggles equally as fruitlessly to win the approval of his dad, Robert Spritz (Caine), a prize-winning novelist who might have a fatal illness. His son (Nicholas Hoult, the youngster in "About a Boy") is in counseling for marijuana use and his counselor (Gil Bellows) shows signs of being a pedophiliac. Meanwhile, his overweight daughter (Gemmenne De La Pena) feels sad and lonely most of the time. To bond with her he takes up -- archery?
The most depressing thing for David, though, is his job. With his father as a role model, he expects more of himself than being a TV weatherman. He is not even a meteorologist, for Pete's sake. A real meteorologist explains to him the risks of predicting weather: "It's just wind. It blows all over the place."
The movie blows all over the place, too, as its meandering plotlines do flesh out this portrait of a success who believes himself a failure, but never expands any further. You understand that David is absent-minded, self-absorbed and tries so hard to do the right thing that he inevitably does the wrong thing. How many illustrations of these lamentable facts do you need in a movie, though?
Somehow, at the end, clouds lift and the sun shines down and you're not sure why. David's big revelation is that it's OK to be a weatherman and not a Great Novelist. That, and his father for once speaks to him without weary disappointment in his voice.
Cage brings intelligence to his playing of a man sorely lacking in same. David often acts like an asshole, but the real problem is a lack of inner resources to confront and defeat the challenges he faces. Caine's exasperated father is his exact opposite, a man with few self-doubts and a novelist's facility for noticing the tiniest nuances in behavior. The young actors who play David's kids do wonderful jobs of expressing youthful confusions in their encounters with the pathetic world of adults.
Since the movie is set in Chicago and briefly in New York, winter weather certainly plays its role. Cinematographer Phedon Papamichael makes you feel the cold even as he finds genuine beauty in the patterns of clouds, ice on Lake Michigan and bundled pedestrian traffic on chilly streets. Designer Tom Duffield contrasts the various environments of David Life's from the sterile steel and glass of his apartment, noticeably bereft of hearth and family, with the comfy digs of his former suburban house and his dad's well-upholstered mansion. Hans Zimmer's music, often with an emphasis on the xylophone, is alternately cheerful and melancholy.
THE WEATHER MAN
Paramount Pictures
Paramount and Escape Artists present an Escape Artists production
Credits:
Director: Gore Verbinski
Screenwriter/co-producer: Steven Conrad
Producers: Todd Black, Steve Tisch, Jason Blumenthal
Executive producers: David Alper, William S. Beasley, Norm Golightly
Director of photography: Phedon Papamichael
Production designer: Tom Duffield
Music: Hans Zimmer
Costumes: Penny Rose
Editor: Craig Wood
Cast:
David Spritz: Nicolas Cage
Robert Spritz: Michael Caine
Noreen: Hope Davis
Don: Gil Bellows
Russ: Michael Rispoli
Shelly: Gemmenne De La Pena
Mike: Nicholas Hoult
MPAA rating R
Running time -- 100 minutes...
Cage brings so much positive baggage to his roles these days that he can redeem even the most anti-social of anti-heroes, as he did last month in "Lord of War". But David Spritz appears to have baffled him, too, so he takes the approach that David is simply not too bright. Therefore, the challenge faced by Paramount's marketing team is to sell a film, directed by the maker of "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl" and starring Cage and Michael Caine, to mainstream audiences when the film probably should have been made by Paramount Classics. For this is a Sundance film gussied up with studio production values and big stars. It will be a hard sell.
In the opening shot, Cage wears such a sad-sack look you just know that, all superficial evidence to the contrary, David is one unhappy dude. Professionally, he is an overachiever, making far too much money working a couple of hours each day to deliver the usually bad weather news to Chicago viewers. He even has a promising feeler from a national morning show in New York. However, not too deep below this surface lies a wealth of insecurities and pain, which has little to do with the fact his "fans" love to throw the remnants of fast food at him on the street.
David is divorced and unhappily so. Despite the shrill and condescending manner of ex-wife Noreen (Hope Davis, in a continuation of her smug bitch in "Proof"), he wants to get back together with her. He struggles equally as fruitlessly to win the approval of his dad, Robert Spritz (Caine), a prize-winning novelist who might have a fatal illness. His son (Nicholas Hoult, the youngster in "About a Boy") is in counseling for marijuana use and his counselor (Gil Bellows) shows signs of being a pedophiliac. Meanwhile, his overweight daughter (Gemmenne De La Pena) feels sad and lonely most of the time. To bond with her he takes up -- archery?
The most depressing thing for David, though, is his job. With his father as a role model, he expects more of himself than being a TV weatherman. He is not even a meteorologist, for Pete's sake. A real meteorologist explains to him the risks of predicting weather: "It's just wind. It blows all over the place."
The movie blows all over the place, too, as its meandering plotlines do flesh out this portrait of a success who believes himself a failure, but never expands any further. You understand that David is absent-minded, self-absorbed and tries so hard to do the right thing that he inevitably does the wrong thing. How many illustrations of these lamentable facts do you need in a movie, though?
Somehow, at the end, clouds lift and the sun shines down and you're not sure why. David's big revelation is that it's OK to be a weatherman and not a Great Novelist. That, and his father for once speaks to him without weary disappointment in his voice.
Cage brings intelligence to his playing of a man sorely lacking in same. David often acts like an asshole, but the real problem is a lack of inner resources to confront and defeat the challenges he faces. Caine's exasperated father is his exact opposite, a man with few self-doubts and a novelist's facility for noticing the tiniest nuances in behavior. The young actors who play David's kids do wonderful jobs of expressing youthful confusions in their encounters with the pathetic world of adults.
Since the movie is set in Chicago and briefly in New York, winter weather certainly plays its role. Cinematographer Phedon Papamichael makes you feel the cold even as he finds genuine beauty in the patterns of clouds, ice on Lake Michigan and bundled pedestrian traffic on chilly streets. Designer Tom Duffield contrasts the various environments of David Life's from the sterile steel and glass of his apartment, noticeably bereft of hearth and family, with the comfy digs of his former suburban house and his dad's well-upholstered mansion. Hans Zimmer's music, often with an emphasis on the xylophone, is alternately cheerful and melancholy.
THE WEATHER MAN
Paramount Pictures
Paramount and Escape Artists present an Escape Artists production
Credits:
Director: Gore Verbinski
Screenwriter/co-producer: Steven Conrad
Producers: Todd Black, Steve Tisch, Jason Blumenthal
Executive producers: David Alper, William S. Beasley, Norm Golightly
Director of photography: Phedon Papamichael
Production designer: Tom Duffield
Music: Hans Zimmer
Costumes: Penny Rose
Editor: Craig Wood
Cast:
David Spritz: Nicolas Cage
Robert Spritz: Michael Caine
Noreen: Hope Davis
Don: Gil Bellows
Russ: Michael Rispoli
Shelly: Gemmenne De La Pena
Mike: Nicholas Hoult
MPAA rating R
Running time -- 100 minutes...
- 11/17/2005
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Screened
Sundance Film Festival
PARK CITY -- If director Ernest Dickerson and writer James Gibson (adapting a story by cult novelist Donald Goines) missed a cliche of the urban gangster genre in "Never Die Alone", it wasn't for lack of effort. Inspiring walkouts at a festival where virtually no one walks out, "Never Die Alone" will do exactly that by its second weekend.
Routinely but unconvincingly directed by Dickerson, the movie possesses not a single character with the brains to get through a day without creating a huge mess. The hopelessly contrived plot has heavy-drinking white writer Paul (David Arquette), living in downtown Los Angeles to "research" his tales from the dark side of life, witness a brutal knife attack outside his favorite bar on a much-hated drug dealer named King David (DMX). For absolutely no reason, Paul climbs into the dying man's car and rushes him to the hospital.
We are next asked to believe the dead man's last act was to bequeath to Paul his car, which contains stacks of drug money and audiotapes of him reciting the sorry story of his crimes and murders. While Paul listens to these tapes -- and we witness David Life's in flashbacks -- hoods ruled by drug kingpin Blue (Antwon Tanner) set out to eliminate not only Mike (Michael Ealy), the knucklehead who finished off David, but also Paul.
As we watch David Life's unfold, we learn that when not selling drugs, he amused himself by enslaving his lovers to drugs by sneaking heroin into their cocaine. If a girlfriend threatened to go to the police, he made certain she went nowhere. The pattern began a decade before on the East Coast with Edna (Keesha Sharp) and continues in Los Angeles, first with TV actress Janet (Jennifer Sky) and then college student Juanita (Reagan Gomez-Preston).
The actors tear into each scene with terrific energy, but these roles are so hollow that it might have been better if at least one or two chilled. Arquette is lost in this nonsensical role, but who could make sense of such an idiot? DMX struts through the movie like the rap star he is. Ealy manages to convey a modicum of introspection, but given what is later revealed about his past, his hotheaded approach to a man he detests seems like very poor judgment.
Matthew Libatique's gritty, kinetic cinematography gamely tries to convince us that "Never Die Alone" lies within the rich tradition of film noir. Alas, this is just film ugly. At the end of the movie, when an editor finally gets a look at Paul Story's about King David, he slams the manuscript shut and says, "I don't believe a word". Amen to that.
NEVER DIE ALONE
Fox Searchlight
Fox Searchlight and ContentFilm present a Bloodline Films productionin association with White Orchid Films
Credits:
Director: Ernest Dickerson
Screenwriter: James Gibson
Based on the novel by: Donald Goines
Producers: Alessandro Camon, Earl Simmons
Executive producers: Edward R. Pressman, John Schmidt, Angelo A. Ellerbee, Rudy "Kato" Rangel, Marc Gerald, Dion Fearon, Cameron Casey
Director of photography: Matthew Libatique
Production designer: Christiaan Wagener
Music: George Duke
Costume designer: Marie France
Editor: Stephen Lovejoy
Cast:
King David: DMX
Mike: Michael Ealy
Paul: David Arquette
Blue: Antwon Tanner
Edna II: Drew Sidora
Moon: Clifton Powell
Jasper: Luenell Campbell
Janet: Jennifer Sky
Juanita: Reagan Gomez-Preston
Running time -- 89 minutes
MPAA rating: R...
Sundance Film Festival
PARK CITY -- If director Ernest Dickerson and writer James Gibson (adapting a story by cult novelist Donald Goines) missed a cliche of the urban gangster genre in "Never Die Alone", it wasn't for lack of effort. Inspiring walkouts at a festival where virtually no one walks out, "Never Die Alone" will do exactly that by its second weekend.
Routinely but unconvincingly directed by Dickerson, the movie possesses not a single character with the brains to get through a day without creating a huge mess. The hopelessly contrived plot has heavy-drinking white writer Paul (David Arquette), living in downtown Los Angeles to "research" his tales from the dark side of life, witness a brutal knife attack outside his favorite bar on a much-hated drug dealer named King David (DMX). For absolutely no reason, Paul climbs into the dying man's car and rushes him to the hospital.
We are next asked to believe the dead man's last act was to bequeath to Paul his car, which contains stacks of drug money and audiotapes of him reciting the sorry story of his crimes and murders. While Paul listens to these tapes -- and we witness David Life's in flashbacks -- hoods ruled by drug kingpin Blue (Antwon Tanner) set out to eliminate not only Mike (Michael Ealy), the knucklehead who finished off David, but also Paul.
As we watch David Life's unfold, we learn that when not selling drugs, he amused himself by enslaving his lovers to drugs by sneaking heroin into their cocaine. If a girlfriend threatened to go to the police, he made certain she went nowhere. The pattern began a decade before on the East Coast with Edna (Keesha Sharp) and continues in Los Angeles, first with TV actress Janet (Jennifer Sky) and then college student Juanita (Reagan Gomez-Preston).
The actors tear into each scene with terrific energy, but these roles are so hollow that it might have been better if at least one or two chilled. Arquette is lost in this nonsensical role, but who could make sense of such an idiot? DMX struts through the movie like the rap star he is. Ealy manages to convey a modicum of introspection, but given what is later revealed about his past, his hotheaded approach to a man he detests seems like very poor judgment.
Matthew Libatique's gritty, kinetic cinematography gamely tries to convince us that "Never Die Alone" lies within the rich tradition of film noir. Alas, this is just film ugly. At the end of the movie, when an editor finally gets a look at Paul Story's about King David, he slams the manuscript shut and says, "I don't believe a word". Amen to that.
NEVER DIE ALONE
Fox Searchlight
Fox Searchlight and ContentFilm present a Bloodline Films productionin association with White Orchid Films
Credits:
Director: Ernest Dickerson
Screenwriter: James Gibson
Based on the novel by: Donald Goines
Producers: Alessandro Camon, Earl Simmons
Executive producers: Edward R. Pressman, John Schmidt, Angelo A. Ellerbee, Rudy "Kato" Rangel, Marc Gerald, Dion Fearon, Cameron Casey
Director of photography: Matthew Libatique
Production designer: Christiaan Wagener
Music: George Duke
Costume designer: Marie France
Editor: Stephen Lovejoy
Cast:
King David: DMX
Mike: Michael Ealy
Paul: David Arquette
Blue: Antwon Tanner
Edna II: Drew Sidora
Moon: Clifton Powell
Jasper: Luenell Campbell
Janet: Jennifer Sky
Juanita: Reagan Gomez-Preston
Running time -- 89 minutes
MPAA rating: R...
- 2/18/2004
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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