doomed

via Universal We’ve seen plenty of sequels replace A-list stars and continue to thrive, but even though Steve Carell is one of the most talented comedic actors in the business, everyone was pretty convinced from the beginning that Evan Almighty was doomed to fail. Its predecessor had become an absolute monster at the box office, hauling in $484 million to become the highest-grossing release of Jim Carrey’s entire career, so it was natural that the studio would be seeking a second chapter. Of course, this was…

Asked if he had any regrets in his career, Bob Hoskins didn’t hesitate. “The worst thing I ever did? Super Mario Bros,” the actor said. “It was a f***in’ nightmare. It had a husband-and-wife team directing, whose arrogance had been mistaken for talent.”He was speaking in 2007, 14 years after starring in the notoriously dysfunctional take on the hit Nintendo video game. And yet the tremor in his voice had been unmistakable. Hoskins had graced the occasional turkey across his decades in the industry. Super Mario Bros was…

There are certain seminal roles of stage and screen that all actors crave to play in their lifetimes. King Lear. John Proctor. Lady Macbeth. Willy Loman. Hannibal Lecter. And of course, Mario.Charles Martinet, who plays the happy little plumber in the video games, was initially told in his audition to speak like “an Italian plumber from Brooklyn”. (Martinet claims his portrayal of Mario is inspired by Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew, but that’s by the by.) Then there was Bob Hoskins, who played Mario in the…

Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch: Stadia was doomed from the start, because Google knows nothing about gaming, and users hesitated to invest in it, not trusting Google to keep it alive for long — There's a lot of chatter right now about the “surprise” shutdown of Stadia, Google's game-streaming service. Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch: Stadia was doomed from the start, because Google knows nothing about gaming, and users hesitated to invest in it, not trusting Google to keep it alive for…

Built in the 1980s, the Balbina Dam is one of dozens of large dams across rivers in the Amazon Basin. Such dams might leave behind seemingly green patches of forest, but our new research has shown these disconnected patches of forest are no longer able to support thriving ecosystems.The dam created one of the largest reservoirs in South America which stretches for almost 100 kilometers northwards through largely undisturbed rainforest.As this is a relatively hilly part of the Amazon basin, more than 3,500 islands formed…

Earlier this month, Philip Pullman went on a cranky Twitter rant that made me wonder if he too was reading the new Maggie O’Farrell novel. “I don’t care how many people enjoy it, fiction in the present tense is an ABDICATION OF NARRATIVE RESPONSIBILITY,” he tweeted. “I resent having to re-calibrate my entire attitude to time whenever I open a novel in the present tense. Away with them!”The Marriage Portrait, like O’Farrell’s 2020 runaway bestseller, Hamnet, is written in a lavish if rather solemn present tense that tries…

Literary festivals could “risk waning interest” and some may no longer remain viable if they remain inwardly focused and don’t attract audiences from marginalised communities, especially in the wake of the cost of living crisis, organisers have said.This is the first year since the pandemic began that many festivals have been able to put on full in-person programmes, with some returning for the first time after reduced or postponed events in 2020 and 2021.But nervousness around the continuing prevalence of coronavirus and…

A picture provide by the Pompeii Archeological site press office, showing the latest discoveries in the ancient city of Pompeii which is enriching knowledge about the everyday lives of middle-class households. The director of the archaeological site, Gabriel Zuchtriegel, said on Saturday, Aug. 6, 2022, that excavations of rooms in a home first unearthed in 2018, revealed the environment of ordinary citizens of the city, which was flourishing before…

There’s been three attempts at making a Fantastic Four film series, and with Marvel’s first family set for an MCU release, Kevin Feige has addressed if it’ll be yet another origin story. The first two Fantastic Four film adaptations saw goofy comic book style origin stories for the superheroes, albeit with vastly different budgets. The ill-fated Roger Corman film is not without its charm, but absolutely without a budget. The Tim Story duology rode a thin line between drama and camp, which mostly failed. Then…

On 3 June 1991, the Mount Unzen volcano in southern Japan erupted catastrophically, killing 43 people, among them the volcanologists Maurice and Katia Krafft, a married couple who had become legendary for their passionate devotion to the study of volcanos; their daredevil films, photographs and books documented their breathtakingly dangerous closeup study of volcanoes in mid-flow. I first heard of them from Werner Herzog’s film Into the Inferno.But where Herzog’s film has something dispassionate, almost fatalistic in its…