  There’s destruction aplenty — as usual — in director Roland Emmerich’s 2012. Even the Sistine Chapel blows up real good. |
He’s already got a reputation for destroying landmarks in his apocalyptic films — the White House in Independence Day, the Statue of Liberty in The Day After Tomorrow. So it’s not a stretch that director Roland Emmerich would annihilate the Vatican in the upcoming 2012.
It’s not exactly a spoiler, since it’s in the trailers. Moviegoers have seen sneak peeks of a seismically mad world where L.A. falls into the ocean and the Sistine Chapel splits in half, separating the hands of God and man before all hell breaks loose.
“We already had in the script the Sistine Chapel and Adam and God’s fingers and this gets destroyed,” Emmerich told a news conference following a sneak peak of the movie in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. “So I said, ‘We’re already there. Why not show the church fall on people’s heads? I’m against organized religion, that’s the thinking behind it. So the message is pray by yourself.
“There was this funny thing where you had one angle where you saw the pope in the background. These shots were done in England by the same guys who (created the Vatican FX) in Angels And Demons. And I said, ‘You have to see a little bit of the pope. He’s German, after all.”
So why stick to Christian iconography, someone asked. Why not destroy the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem? “I wanted to do that, I have to admit,” Emmerich said, “but my co-writer Harald (Kloser) said, ‘I will not have a fatwa on my head because of a movie.’ And he was right. In the Western World we have to think about this. You can show that kind of Christian symbol fall apart, but if you do that to an Arab symbol, you’d have a fatwa. Which says a little bit about what the state of the world is.”
1-2 PUNCH: Edward Norton still marvels at the bruising he and Brad Pitt received 10 years ago this week.
The reason? David Fincher’s Fight Club, the delirious, nihilistic satire about a white collar drone who devises an underground arena for socially-emasculated men to bash their brains in.
The movie opened Oct. 15, 1999 to both praise and venom — much of the latter from middle-aged critics offended by the black comedy’s violence and sadistic streak of anti-corporate humour.
To this day, Norton still isn’t sure why. “It was like, ‘Did someone fail to let you in on the joke?’ Obviously it’s a funny movie,” the 40-year-old actor tells Sun Media.
“We made it to be a funny movie. I never understood how the mainline baby-boomer critic set took it so seriously. I think they felt indicted by it.”
Of course, time heals all wounds — and allows a movie to discover an audience.
“Fight Club, objectively, has become a touchstone for people my age and younger. For so many people, it’s become a really zeitgeist movie for all of us who have grown up in the world of franchising.”
Fight Club wasn’t the only great movie released in 1999 — far from it. Those 12 months also gave filmgoers The Matrix, Election, Magnolia, Being John Malkovich, Office Space, American Beauty, South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, and Three Kings as a fresh generation of directors — Spike Jonze, Alexander Payne and Sam Mendes among them — announced their presence.
WHEDON’S CABIN DELAYED: The new horror thriller from Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon is apparently being fitted for new specs. The Cabin in the Woods was expected out in February, but, according to website ShockTillYouDrop.com, the studio is so pleased with the results, it has decided to convert the movie to 3D. The movie, about — quite literally — a cabin in the woods and the terror unleashed within its walls, will now open in January 2011.
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