Beck Seeing Triple On 'Guero'
In the wake of an unfinished copy of his new album leaking onto the Internet last month, Beck will offer fans a bounty of reasons to purchase the real deal. Due March 29 via Interscope, "Guero" will be released as a standard CD, a double-disc package with two videos and a 5.1 audio mix and a third edition featuring four remixes.
Videos for "E-Pro" and "Black Tambourine" will be included on the double-disc set, while Boards Of Canada, Octet, Dizzee Rascal and, as first reported here, Royksopp, contribute the remixes on the third package.
On Tuesday (Feb. 1), Beck quietly unveiled the "Hell Yes" EP on Apple's iTunes Music Store, featuring remixes of the title track and "Que Onda Guero" by 8-bit and remixes of "E-Pro" and "Girl" by Paza. A video for "Hell Yes" directed by Mumbleboy is also available on iTunes.
Beck has yet to confirm tour dates in support of "Guero," but he played his second surprise show in recent weeks last Friday at Echo in Los Angeles, which featured a number of tracks from the new album.
Weezer Mixing And Matching On New Album
Now that frontman Rivers Cuomo has completed a semester of school at Harvard University, the track list for Weezer's new album is "97% settled," according to the band's official Web site. The as-yet-untitled set is due in May via Geffen; first single "Beverly Hills" will hit U.S. radio outlets in late March.
The selection process is nearing completion thanks to "some heavy listening sessions between the band and producer/mentor Rick Rubin," the site reports. "A few songs got swapped out and switched around, and there is high confidence in the final selection, which now includes a few songs from the late '03 recording sessions that were originally left behind in favor of the new sessions in July-October '04."
Cuomo still has to complete his vocals for three songs, at which point the album will be ready for mixing.
As previously reported, Weezer earlier this week announced its first show since late 2002, which will come on the first day of the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival in Indio, Calif., on April 30. A full North American and European tour is expected to follow.
Bond Bets on "Casino Royale"
GoldenEye helmer Martin Campbell has been given the chance to try another day.
The brain trust behind the 007 franchise have tapped Campbell to direct Casino Royale, the 21st film featuring the one and only Bond. James Bond.
Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson of Eon Productions together with MGM announced the move on Thursday. The film had previously been pushed back from an anticipated November start date to sometime next year while the search for a director was underway.
"We are thrilled that Martin has accepted our offer to direct Casino Royale," Broccoli and Wilson said in a joint statement. "He is an extremely talented director and we believe he will help take our films in a new and exciting direction. He...will be joining Eon Productions shortly to work on the development of the script with our writers, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade."
Campbell is currently at work on Legend of Zorro, the sequel to The Mask of Zorro, starring Catherine Zeta-Jones and Antonio Banderas.
His first foray onto Bond turf marked Pierce Brosnan's introduction to the 007 role in 1995's GoldenEye. The Irish-born actor went on to star in 1997's Tomorrow Never Dies; 1999's The World Is Not Enough; and 2002's Die Another Day.
However, it seems unlikely that Campbell will have the chance to direct Brosnan again. In a July 2004 interview with Entertainment Weekly, the thesp sounded ready to turn in his license to kill.
"That's it," Brosnan said in the interview. "I've said all I've got to say on the world of James Bond."
Brosnan is the fifth actor to profess his preference for martinis shaken, not stirred. He follows in the footsteps of fellow Bond men Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton.
Rumors of who will be the next secret agent to keep company with the likes of Miss Moneypenny have included Hulk vet Eric Bana, Jude Law, Heath Ledger and Orlando Bloom. The BBC reported last month that one British oddsmaker has stopped taking bets on the next 007 after wagers on Dougray Scott, best known as the baddie in Mission: Impossible 2, began to increase in recent weeks.
According to Eon Productions, no decisions about Bond casting have been made.
Casino Royale was Bond creator Ian Fleming's first book and the only title not initially purchased by Eon Productions.
An unrelated spoof version of the book, starring Peter Sellers and Woody Allen, was made into a 1967 film as a mockery of the spy genre.
Founder of MP3.com to launch new MP3-based online music service
LOS ANGELES (AP) - The founder of pioneering music download website MP3.com is preparing to re-enter the digital music business with a new online music service set to debut next week.
As when he launched MP3.com in 1997, Michael Robertson's new service, dubbed MP3tunes, will sell tracks in the MP3 format, which doesn't have any copy-protection restrictions and can be played on most, if not all, digital music players.
The service, to go online next Thursday, will sell individual tracks for 88 cents and albums for $8.88 US, said Robertson.
Because major record companies don't generally licence their artists' music as MP3s, preferring to use formats that can set limits on copying and CD burning, none of the roughly 300,000 tracks initially for sale on MP3tunes will be from major label artists.
Most other major online music services are licensed to sell a million or more major label and independent acts.
Robertson, 37, said he's optimistic major record labels, despite their concerns over piracy, will eventually licence music in the MP3 format.
"The industry has changed remarkably over the last seven to eight years and I think the next step . . . is to say we'll sell a song without DRM," Robertson said. "I don't think it's such a stretch."
DRM is short for digital rights management, the industry term for copy-protection encoding.
He is also planning to eventually launch a device for the home designed to function like a computer server where users can store their digital music and access it from other computers over the Internet.
The device, dubbed MP3beamer, stems from Robertson's original "music locker" concept - a system to enable people to access their personal music collections wherever they go.
Robertson's first stab at it involved buying thousands of CDs and making them accessible in a central server run by MP3.com. That led to a slew of litigation.
"Obviously, having one big centralized system didn't work out because of the licensing issues," he said. "So this is a different approach to that same problem."
Robertson's iconoclastic entrepreneurial adventures include creating Lindows Inc. to sell distributions of the open-source Linux operating system.
He later changed the company's name to Linspire after getting $20 million US from Microsoft Corp. in the July settlement of a trademark infringement suit.
Actor John Vernon, star of Wojeck, various films, dies at 72 in L.A.
TORONTO (CP) - He was the smarmy Dean Wormer in the sophomoric cult movie Animal House.
He was a bad guy who got tossed out a window to his death by the even badder Lee Marvin in Point Blank. But Canadians may best remember actor John Vernon as a crusading coroner in the groundbreaking 1960s CBC crime series Wojeck.
Vernon, 72, died peacefully at his Los Angeles home Tuesday, his family said.
With his pockmarked face and heavy-lidded blue eyes, Vernon proved to be the ideal villain in dozens of the 85 motion pictures he made over a four-decade career. But he started as a hero in Wojeck in which his character was based on real-life Toronto coroner and politician Dr. Morton Shulman and which formed the template for future forensics-based crime series, from Quincy to Da Vinci's Inquest to CSI.
"Everybody's seen my face but nobody's sure who I am," he once told an interviewer, revealing that he had often been mistaken for Richard Burton or Robert Shaw. "People confuse me with other people and I enjoy that."
He was seen most recently on the "double secret probation" DVD edition of Animal House, in a feature that offered a tongue-in-cheek current look at the characters of the 1978 film. Vernon's Dean Wormer was a crotchety, snowy-haired senior in a wheelchair.
Chris Haddock, creator of Da Vinci's Inquest, said at the time he was surprised that Vernon was still around and agreed it was a great idea to see if he could make a cameo appearance on the series as a sort of tribute.
Vernon's other notable film roles included The Outlaw Josey Wales, Dirty Harry, Airplane II, Topaz, Brannigan, Charley Varrick, Nobody Waved Goodbye and Tell Them Willie Boy Was Here. He also starred in a short-lived ABC-TV Animal House spinoff series called Delta House and in a 1990 CBC movie that reprised his Wojeck character.
TV guest roles included The FBI, Bonanza, Mission Impossible, The Name of the Game, High Chapparall, Judd for the Defence and Quincy. He also made a pilot for a failed U.S. series called Hunter. There were more than 100 roles in Canadian TV, running the gamut from Tugboat Annie to Cannonball to Forest Rangers.
Regina-born and stage trained, the six-foot-two Vernon, whose birth name was Adolphus Raymondus Vernon Agopsowicz, spent five years at the Stratford Festival, where he met his future Wojeck co-star Ted Follows, Megan Follows' father.
Speaking from his home in Kitchener, Ont., Follows said Thursday that although he and Vernon hadn't been in touch since they made the Wojeck movie, they had been close friends for many years. He understood Vernon had had heart problems and was recently released from hospital.
He recalled how "way ahead of its time" Wojeck was as a prime-time series that dealt frankly with such issues as abortion and lesbianism.
"(Vernon) was awfully good in that show . . . he really was perfect in that role."
Follows believes that Vernon would have preferred leading-man roles during his Hollywood years but accepted being slotted in as the perennial heavy.
"John was superb. He really knew how to use the camera, and vocally he was just born to have a mike nearby."
Vernon attended London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and in London joined several repertory companies. His Broadway debut came in Royal Hunt of the Sun, and from there he moved to Hollywood for a prolific career playing all those heartless villains.
"The stars are always the good guys, so the guest stars have to be the bad guys," he said in a 1979 interview. "Even though I played a lot of heavies I was very lucky to work all the time, without getting pigeon-holed."
Vernon is survived by his former wife Nancy, his children Chris, Kate, Nan, Jim West and Grant West, and a granddaughter.
There will be a private service in Los Angeles and, at a later date, a gathering of friends to remember him in Toronto, the family said.