John Fogerty firms up summer plans
John Fogerty has announced dates for a North American summer trek, with all but two of the shows taking place in Canadian venues.
The veteran rocker, who currently has no new product to promote, also announced on his website that he would be going into the recording studio this spring to begin work on a new album, tentatively scheduled for release later this fall.
Fogerty will launch an extensive European tour in June before kicking off his North American run July 17 in Montreal. The former Creedence Clearwater Revival frontman will also make another domestic appearance before the 12-date July outing when he tackles a May 20 slot at the Doheny Blues Festival in Dana Point, CA.
Fogerty's complete European tour plans can be found at his website; his North American itinerary is below.
Fogerty's most recent release was last June's concert DVD "The Long Road Home--In Concert." The video was captured during Fogerty's 2005 tour in support of his 2004 album, "Deja Vu All Over Again."
May 2007
20 - Dana Point, CA - Doheny Blues Festival
July 2007
17 - Montreal, Quebec - Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier
18 - Ottawa, Ontario - Scotiabank Place
20 - Toronto, Ontario - Molson Amphitheatre
21 - London, Ontario - John Labatt Centre
22 - Kettering, OH - Fraze Pavilion
24 - Milwaukee, WI - Riverside Theatre
26 - Winnipeg, Manitoba - MTS Centre
28 - Calgary, Alberta - Pengrowth Saddledome
29 - Edmonton, Alberta - Rexall Place
31 - Kelowna, British Columbia - Prospera Place
August 2007
1 - Victoria, British Columbia - Sav On Foods Centre
2 - Vancouver, British Columbia - Deer Lake Park
'Mummy' Sequel: Fraser In, Weisz Out
Star Brendan Fraser will return for "The Mummy 3," but the same can't be said for the franchise's leading lady.
According to Variety, Fraser has reached a lucrative deal for the Rob Cohen-directed "Mummy 3." He'll have to find a new love interest, though, because Rachel Weisz is out.
The first two "Mummy" films have earned comfortably over $800 million worldwide, with "The Mummy Returns" opening in 2001, two years after the original. Production on "The Mummy 3" will begin at the end of the summer, giving Universal a big release for the summer of 2008.
Miles Millar and Alfred Gough wrote "The Mummy 3," which is set in China and features Jet Li as the main villain. The trade paper reports that the scribes will do a new pass on the script to take Weisz's absence into account.
Weisz won an Oscar last year for "The Constant Gardner" and has lined up roles in "The Brothers Bloom" and "Dirt Music," filling her schedule.
Fraser, meanwhile, has "Journey 3D" and "Inkheart" on tap for 2008, with both films coming from New Line. The "George of the Jungle" star was most recently seen in "Crash" and "Looney Tunes: Back in Action."
Thrillers chasing skaters at becalmed box office
LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Consider this weekend at the box office a kind of last call before the bar closes.
Summer blockbuster season is fast approaching -- "Spider-Man 3" comes out on May 4 -- and then the competition for screens will become intense. Hollywood is taking advantage of the lull to drop a lot of midrange movies into the marketplace.
Five new wide releases enter the fray on Friday, but only two -- the dueling thrillers "Perfect Stranger" and "Disturbia" -- seem to have a chance of ending the two-week reign of the Will Ferrell comedy "Blades of Glory," which made $22 million last weekend.
"Stranger" boasts the starriest cast of the weekend. Halle Berry plays a reporter who goes undercover to investigate an ad exec ( Bruce Willis) whom she suspects is guilty of murder. The last time the Oscar-winning Berry ventured into suspense waters, the result was 2003's "Gothika," which bowed to $19 million. Given all the competition, "Stranger" probably won't hit that mark but will be looking to achieve $15 million or better. James Foley ("Glengarry Glen Ross") directed the R-rated Columbia film, which is targeting older audiences.
"Disturbia," a teenage riff on "Rear Window," stars Shia LaBeouf as an angry kid under house arrest who suspects that one of his neighbors ( David Morse) is a murderer. With a PG-13 rating, the Paramount Pictures release, directed by D.J. Caruso ("The Salton Sea"), is looking to lure teens, and should open somewhere around the $15 million mark as well.
The rest of the new arrivals are expected to battle it out below the $10 million mark, some of them significantly below.
"Redline" stars Nathan Phillips ("Wolf Creek") and Nadia Bjorlin in a series of car chases. The film's financier, real estate mogul and high-end auto aficionado Daniel Sadek, is distributing the PG-13 release himself, a risky move.
20th Century Fox is serving up "Pathfinder," an R-rated Vikings-and-Indians movie starring Karl Urban.
Lionsgate is chasing after moviegoers with the R-rated, urban-themed "Slow Burn," in which D.A. Ray Liotta faces off against gang leader LL Cool J.
For sheer novelty, there is First Look Pictures' launch of "Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters." The R-rated animated movie about fast-food friends Master Shake, Frylock and Meatwad is a spinoff of Cartoon Network's Adult Swim series. It's sure to have some cult appeal, which could allow it to trump some of the surrounding movies.
Let's hate Toronto, Canadian documentary says
TORONTO (Reuters) - The dislike of Canada's biggest city, Toronto, in the rest of the country runs so deep that a filmmaker has made a documentary about it.
"People in Toronto are soulless, one-eyed corporate zombies," Joey Keithley, of the Vancouver punk band D.O.A., says in the film, "Let's All Hate Toronto."
The 73-minute film, which premieres at Toronto's Hot Docs documentary festival next week, follows a character called Mister Toronto, who embarks on a cross-Canada trip brandishing a sign that reads "Toronto Appreciation Day" and steels himself for the onslaught.
His tour leads from Newfoundland on the Atlantic Coast to the Pacific city of Vancouver, where feelings against Toronto -- usually acknowledged as the country's financial center and the cultural capital of English Canada -- run deepest of all.
"There is something different (about hating Toronto). People are more passionate about it," filmmaker and co-director Albert Neremberghe said in an interview.
"People have a grudging respect for New York outside of the city, and have a grudging respect for London. But people outside of Toronto don't have that for Toronto, they really don't."
Neremberg, who is from Montreal, got the idea for the film from a 1956 publication with the same name as the movie.
He said collective dislike of a city is not unique to Canada, and said he might like to make similar films on other countries' love-hate relationships with major cities.
Influential author Vonnegut dies at 84
NEW YORK - Kurt Vonnegut mixed the bitter and funny with a touch of the profound in books such as "Slaughterhouse-Five," "Cat's Cradle," and "Hocus Pocus."
Vonnegut, regarded by many critics as a key influence in shaping 20th-century American literature, died Wednesday at 84. He suffered brain injuries after a recent fall at his Manhattan home, said his wife, photographer Jill Krementz.
Vonnegut's more than a dozen books, short stories, essays and plays contained elements of social commentary, science fiction and autobiography.
"He was sort of like nobody else," said fellow author Gore Vidal. "Kurt was never dull."
A self-described religious skeptic and freethinking humanist, Vonnegut used protagonists such as Billy Pilgrim and Eliot Rosewater as transparent vehicles for his points of view.
He lectured regularly, exhorting audiences to think for themselves and delighting in barbed commentary against the institutions he felt were dehumanizing people.
"He was a man who combined a wicked sense of humor and sort of steady moral compass, who was always sort of looking at the big picture of the things that were most important," said Joel Bleifuss, editor of In These Times, a liberal magazine based in Chicago that featured Vonnegut articles.
Some of Vonnegut's books were banned and burned for suspected obscenity. He took on censorship as an active member of the PEN writers' aid group and the American Civil Liberties Union.
The American Humanist Association, which promotes individual freedom, rational thought and scientific skepticism, made him its honorary president.
Vonnegut said the villains in his books were never individuals, but culture, society and history, which he said were making a mess of the planet.
"I like to say that the 51st state is the state of denial," he told The Associated Press in 2005. "It's as though a huge comet were heading for us and nobody wants to talk about it. We're just about to run out of petroleum and there's nothing to replace it."
Despite his commercial success, Vonnegut battled depression throughout his life, and in 1984, he attempted suicide with pills and alcohol, joking later about how he botched the job.
"I will say anything to be funny, often in the most horrible situations," Vonnegut, whose watery, heavy-lidded eyes and unruly hair made him seem to be in existential pain, once told a gathering of psychiatrists.
Vonnegut was born on Nov. 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, and studied chemistry at Cornell University before joining the Army. His mother killed herself just before he left for Germany during World War II, where he was quickly taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge. He was being held in Dresden when Allied bombs firebombed the city.
"The firebombing of Dresden explains absolutely nothing about why I write what I write and am what I am," Vonnegut wrote in "Fates Worse Than Death," his 1991 autobiography of sorts.
But he spent 23 years struggling to write about the ordeal, which he survived by huddling with other POW's inside an underground meat locker labeled slaughterhouse-five.
The novel that emerged, in which Pvt. Pilgrim is transported from Dresden by time-traveling aliens, was published at the height of the Vietnam War, and solidified his reputation as an iconoclast.
After World War II, he reported for Chicago's City News Bureau, then did public relations for General Electric, a job he loathed. He wrote his first novel, "Player Piano," in 1951, followed by "The Sirens of Titan," "Canary in a Cat House" and "Mother Night," making ends meet by selling Saabs on Cape Cod.
Critics ignored him at first, then denigrated his deliberately bizarre stories and disjointed plots as haphazardly written science fiction. But his novels became cult classics, especially "Cat's Cradle" in 1963, in which scientists create "ice-nine," a crystal that turns water solid and destroys the earth.
He retired from novel writing in his later years, but continued to publish short articles. He had a best-seller in 2005 with "A Man Without a Country," a collection of his nonfiction, including jabs at the Bush administration ("upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography") and the uncertain future of the planet.
He called the book's success "a nice glass of champagne at the end of a life."
Vonnegut, who had homes in Manhattan and the Hamptons in New York, adopted his sister's three young children after she died. He also had three children of his own with his first wife, Jane Marie Cox, and later adopted a daughter, Lily, with his second wife, Krementz.
Vonnegut once said that of all the ways to die, he'd prefer to go out in an airplane crash on the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro. He often joked about the difficulties of old age.
"When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life; old age is more like a semicolon," Vonnegut told the AP.
"My father, like Hemingway, was a gun nut and was very unhappy late in life. But he was proud of not committing suicide. And I'll do the same, so as not to set a bad example for my children."