Loverboy back with new album
TORONTO - OK, so the tight leather pants are now just plain too tight and the bandana headband would only serve to hide a receding hairline.
But that cheeseball grin is spread wide across Mike Reno's face and it's obvious that this Loverboy still loves a good party, and even relishes the '80s shmaltz that has come to define him.
The iconic performer, whose bombastic delivery with rock band Loverboy dominated the charts for a good chunk of that decade, is ready with the zingers when asked if he still has the red leather pants he was once known for.
"Absolutely, I have them on right now," Reno quips while seated at a downtown lounge, suggesting they are under the faded jeans he's wearing with a black cowboy shirt, half open to reveal a black wife-beater.
"They're actually red leather cut-offs."
It's been a quarter century since such attire actually induced screams of approval, but Loverboy's hefty catalogue of '80s anthems have kept the Canadian band on a steady tour circuit of casinos and state fairs on both sides of the border.
Hits such as "Turn Me Loose," "The Kid Is Hot Tonite," "Working for the Weekend," "Lovin' Every Minute of It" and "Heaven in Your Eyes" continue to pop up in movie soundtracks and TV shows, making sure a new generation of beer-swilling college kids learn how to do the rock 'n' roll swagger right, complete with crumpled-rock-singer-face.
Today, Reno says he's excited to be talking about new material for a change - Loverboy's first new album in a decade.
"Which is a long time," he admits. "I think we were ready for it because we had some things to say and we needed to get it out.
"There's a lot of water under the bridge, we lost a couple guys along the way, a few wives have come and gone between the bunch of us. A lot of things happened but we've settled into a nice place. We feel good."
The 10-track "Just Getting Started" covers familiar territory for the straight-ahead rock group, also made up of guitarist Paul Dean, keyboardist Doug Johnson, drummer Matt Frenette and bassist Ken (Spider) Sinnaeve.
Reno says they were conscious of maintaining Loverboy's distinctive sound while seeking a fresh edge.
At the same time, he admits it's been tough for the band to survive in the face of changing tastes and rocky times.
They enjoyed a quick ride to the top when they formed in Calgary in 1980, unleashing a steady stream of hit albums that kept them soaring through most of the decade.
But then radio dropped the rock 'n' roll classic format and the band was forced into a "break" in the early '90s, Reno says. Things hit bottom with 1997's failed album "Six" - a mistake in many ways, Reno admits.
"We did a record that we didn't really believe in and the timing was kind of all wrong," he says. "It was almost like it was a forced issue and we really didn't put a lot of effort into it, not enough effort for it to be a substantial hit."
Reno gripes that the record company they used - now defunct - was more interested in adding Loverboy to its roster than supporting any kind of lasting work.
"We were kind of tired and it showed. Sometimes when you get exhausted you don't even know you're exhausted, you just go, 'OK, let's do it and get it over with.' "
Tensions in the band were also making things difficult. Several attempts to make an album over the past decade failed.
"It never really worked. Everybody's patience wore out and everybody had little temper tantrums and it just didn't happen. Somebody didn't like that and somebody didn't like that and by the end of the day you just went, 'Well this isn't really working because you don't like his songs and he doesn't like your songs.' And I said it's like going to kindergarten, almost. But we're grown men having squabbles over whose songs are better and I said, 'You know what? I don't like doing this anymore.' So I ended up starting working with other people."
As a result, most of the new songs are Reno's collaboration with other songwriters, producing tracks that were later brought to the rest of the band.
The first song they tackled was "Stranded," an ode to Loverboy's late bassist Scott Smith, who was lost at sea in a 2000 sailing accident off the coast of California.
"That was real hard to come back from because it's such a tragic loss," Reno says. "I still think of him as being on an island, you know, with a coconut guitar made out of bamboo and coconut. ... That was probably the hardest thing I've had to deal with in a long time."
Loverboy's new disc comes out Tuesday.
FULL DVD PACKET
10-DISC SET CAPTURES THE SPIRIT AND GENIUS OF STANLEY KUBRICK
October 21, 2007 -- To perfectly capture the quality of French soil, Stanley Kubrick brought actual samples of earth home with him for screen tests. But that level of obsessive preparation is what you would expect from a great director prepping "Napoleon," a biopic starring Jack Nicholson in the title role.
Unfortunately, that movie never got made. But you'll hear about it in the many hours of extras included in "Warner Director's Series: Stanley Kubrick."
The 10-DVD set features remastered and mostly widescreen versions of "2001: A Space Odyssey," "A Clockwork Orange," "The Shining," "Full Metal Jacket" and "Eyes Wide Shut," as well as a documentary called "Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures." "Full Metal Jacket" is the only film without a complete second disc of extras.
The treasures to be found here are both trivial and grand, including lots of from-the-set tidbits. While filming "A Clockwork Orange," for example, star Malcolm McDowell tells how, when preparing to shoot the horrific "Singing in the Rain" attack scene, Adrienne Corri - the actress he would soon brutalize on camera - approached him and said, "Well, Malcolm, now you're gonna find out that I'm a real redhead."
On "The Shining" disc, we get a behind-the-scenes doc that shows Nicholson getting into character by bouncing around the set swinging an ax, mumbling, "Ax murderer, kill!"
We learn that the grand opening of "2001" was actually crafted from still photographs, and that Kubrick directed the photographers by phone using the coordinates on a map because of his paralyzing fear of flying.
We also get an in-depth glimpse of the man himself, with a gallery of pictures he took for Look magazine while still in high school.
Directors who worked with, and were inspired by, Kubrick - Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Sydney Pollack and others - extoll his achievements, as if confirming that film may never gotten where it is today without the vision of this very private man from The Bronx.
Vampires sink teeth into movie audiences
LOS ANGELES - The horror tale "30 Days of Night" had three days of box-office bite. The Sony fright flick, with Josh Hartnett leading Alaskans against ravenous vampires that turn up for the prolonged winter darkness, debuted as the weekend's No. 1 movie with $16 million, according to studio estimates Sunday.
Audiences continued to choose merriment over misery as the latest crop of sober Academy Awards hopefuls, among them Ben Affleck's "Gone Baby Gone," Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal's "Rendition" and Halle Berry and Benicio Del Toro's "Things We Lost in the Fire," debuted with so-so to dismal numbers.
Whether it's the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, deadly news out of Pakistan and Myanmar or Friday's stock market tumble, moviegoers seem disinterested in more bad news at theaters with films about child-kidnapping, torture, widowhood and heroin addiction.
"Fall is the season of the serious movie, and it seems like audiences in a way are resisting the serious movie right now," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office tracker Media By Numbers. "Audiences are finding their horror or their intensity in real life, and they're not looking for it in the movies."
Other escapist fare joined "30 Days of Night" at the top of the box-office chart. "Tyler Perry's Why Did I Get Married?", the Lionsgate release that was the previous weekend's No. 1 flick, slipped to second place with $12.1 million, raising its total to $38.9 million.
Disney's family comedy "The Game Plan" held up well at No. 3 with $8.1 million, lifting its four-week total to $69.2 million.
Affleck made his directing debut with Miramax's "Gone Baby Gone," which debuted at No. 5 with $6 million. The critically acclaimed movie stars the filmmaker's brother, Casey Affleck, as a private detective trying to solve a young girl's abduction.
Coming in on par with "Gone Baby Gone" was Fox Atomic's "The Comebacks," a lowbrow spoof of sports movies that opened at No. 6 with $5.85 million.
New Line's "Rendition," starring Witherspoon and Gyllenhaal in the story of an Egyptian-born man detained and tortured under suspicion of terrorism, premiered at No. 9 with $4.2 million.
The DreamWorks-Paramount release "Things We Lost in the Fire," with Berry as a widow who takes in her husband's drug-addicted best friend (Del Toro), opened far outside the top-10 with $1.6 million.
Further proof that movie fans want fun over adversity: a 3-D version of Disney's Halloween perennial "Tim Burton's the Nightmare Before Christmas" was No. 8 with $5.1 million and had a better rate of return per-theater than any of the new wide releases.
Playing in 564 cinemas, "Nightmare Before Christmas" averaged $9,122, compared to $5,604 in 2,855 locations for "30 Days of Night;" $3,503 in 1,713 sites for "Gone Baby Gone;" $1,856 in 2,250 theaters for "Rendition" and $1,405 in 1,142 cinemas for "Things We Lost in the Fire."
"There's just so much serious fare. We have overloaded the marketplace with this highbrow, serious product," said Chris Aronson, senior vice president of distribution for 20th Century Fox. "The audience is saying, `Give me something to have some fun with.'"
While fun movies ruled, the overall box office skidded for the fifth-straight weekend. The top-12 movies took in $79.7 million, down 10 percent from the same weekend last year.
Here are the estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Media By Numbers LLC. Final figures will be released Monday.
1. "30 Days of Night," $16 million.
2. "Tyler Perry's Why Did I Get Married?", $12.1 million.
3. "The Game Plan," $8.1 million.
4. "Michael Clayton," $7.1 million.
5. "Gone Baby Gone," $6 million.
6. "The Comebacks," $5.85 million.
7. "We Own the Night," $5.5 million.
8. "Tim Burton's the Nightmare Before Christmas," $5.1 million.
9. "Rendition," $4.2 million.
10. "The Heartbreak Kid," $3.9 million.