A few years ago in this newspaper, Billy Boyd was named Scotland’s Most Eligible Bachelor. Without any disrespect to the friendly, unassuming scruff before me, it’s difficult to imagine him being crowned top tartan tottie prior to the release of The Lord of the Rings. But for the Glaswegian actor, Peter Jackson’s Oscar-scooping trilogy changed everything. As well as sending him to the other side of the world for 18 months, Boyd’s role as Pippin the hobbit has made him a pin-up for fantasy fans around the world, whose fascination with what he eats, drinks, reads, says, wears, watches and listens to shows no sign of abating. [More]
Category: Old Main News
Why U ought to know him: The son of a New Zealand mother and Hungarian father, the darkly handsome Csokas (pronounced CHO-kas) is opening eyes these days for his steamy love scenes with Natasha Richardson in the psychological thriller “Asylum,” which came out Friday. In the film, Csokas plays Edgar, an inmate at a mental institute in 1950s England who’s been put away for killing and disfiguring his wife. But the onetime sculptor has made progress and is allowed to help out at the house of one of the resident psychiatrists (Hugh Bonneville) where he catches the eye of his lonely wife (Richardson). Then things get complicated. [More]
Elijah Wood has mercifully avoided one of Hollywood’s deepest elephant traps: once a child star, these days he is addicted to nothing more serious than coffee and cigarettes. Now the young actor needs to negotiate his way round another trap: the typecasting and obscurity that is so often the flip side of overwhelming early fame, in his case the enormous success of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Yet Wood insists he never worried that he might not escape that particular Hollywood Mordor. “My theory was always that if I continued to work and put myself in roles that were different from Lord of the Rings, people would remember I was not just Frodo, but had been in a lot of other things as well,” he says. [More]
Vintage writes: ‘El sueño de una noche de San Juan’ is the name of an animated Spanish film now being dubbed into English for a wider release. The story is based on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, although (director) Ángel de la Cruz stresses it’s not an adaptation. “We saw our story as a sequel. We asked ourselves: ‘What would happen to the elves and fairies 400 years later in our globalised, consumerist world?'” Bernard Hill voices Theseus, while Billy Boyd is cast as Puck. [More]
Through the Middle-lands their journey took them, to the blasted place in the shadow of Mount Doom known to Elves as the Black Country. The haunt of Men, workers of great engines of smoke and fire and speakers of a tongue so strange as to be known only to the likes of Clare the Short and Frank the Skinner. And there they spoke of the Ring, and of orcs and wizards and hobbits, and of whether Mordor should be pronounced Mordor, as it always had been, or Mawdaw!, in that startled, Scottish way preferred by Sir Ian McKellen. [More]
Peter Jackson’s restored version of the only film taken of the Anzacs at Gallipoli in 1915 will have its New Zealand premiere at a documentary film festival in Auckland and Wellington next month. The film Heroes of Gallipoli screens at the DOCNZ Documentary Film Festival in Auckland from September 15 and in Wellington from September 29. Jackson, a World War I buff, approached the Australian War Memorial two years ago to see if technology developed by Weta Digital could be used to restore archival film. [More]