Weezer cancels remaining tour dates
Weezer has canceled all of the remaining tour dates on its schedule, including the band's planned shows next month, as singer Rivers Cuomo continues to recuperate from injuries suffered in a bus crash earlier this month.
The January dates, scrubbed "on doctor's orders," according to a press statement from the band's publicist, consist of shows in San Francisco (1/9); Irvine, CA (1/11); La Jolla, CA (1/13) and Phoenix (1/15). Refunds will be available at point of purchase for all canceled shows, including the previously canceled December dates. At present, none of the canceled shows have been rescheduled.
Cuomo was injured Dec. 6 when the tour bus carrying the singer, his family and his assistant, Sarah Kim, hit a patch of black ice about 40 miles west of Albany, NY, and careened off of Interstate 90, according to the band. Kim fractured two ribs and sustained back injuries, and is expected to need 3-4 weeks to recover, while Cuomo's wife and baby daughter, who were also on the bus at the time of the crash, were unharmed.
Cuomo was released from a New York hospital last weekend, according to Weezer's longtime webmaster, Karl Koch. The singer--who suffered three broken ribs in the crash, along with a small cut on his spleen and puncture in one lung--remains grounded from flying by his doctors, and had to climb on another bus for a 48-hour ride home to Los Angeles.
"Raditude," Weezer's seventh studio album, surfaced last month. The set boasts a slew of co-production credits, including Jacknife Lee (U2, R.E.M.) and Butch Walker (Saosin, Katy Perry), as well as Cuomo.
The album's first single, "(If You're Wondering If I Want You To) I Want You To," hit radio waves in August, debuting at No. 21 on both the Billboard Rock Songs and Alternative Songs charts, and eventually peaking at No. 2 on the latter.
'Up in the Air,' 'Precious,' 'Basterds' lead SAG noms
If the Golden Globe nominees shook up award season two days ago, then the Screen Actors Guild provided a mild aftershock today.
While most of the contenders are the same, there are some notable exceptions.
Up in the Air, which led the Globe nominations with six, was among the top contenders for the SAG Awards, too. It tied with Inglourious Basterds and Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire with three each.
But while Basterds and Precious both received bids for best ensemble, the acting guild's version of best picture, Up in the Air was snubbed in that category.
The other contenders were the 1960s London coming-of-age story An Education, the musical romance Nine and the brutal Iraq war bomb-defuser saga The Hurt Locker.
With actors making up the largest voting bloc for Oscars, the Holy Grail of awards season, being left out of their guild's choice of best picture is a disappointment for Up in the Air. Nonetheless, writer-director Jason Reitman's story of a corporate downsizer trapped in a life of constant travel picked up more individual nominees than any other film.
A lead actor nomination went to star George Clooney, while supporting actress bids were given to co-stars Anna Kendrick and Vera Farmiga.
Precious, a drama directed by Lee Daniels about an overweight, abused black teenager trying to survive amid horrible circumstances, split its other two nominations between newcomer Gabourey Sidibe for lead actress and Mo'Nique, who played her psychotically abusive mother, for supporting.
Sidibe's competition for lead actress is Sandra Bullock for The Blind Side, Helen Mirren for The Last Station, Carey Mulligan's independence-seeking teenager in An Education, and Meryl Streep as Julia Child in Julie & Julia.
All were nominated for Globes, except Streep was in that award's musical/comedy category for Julie & Julia.
Meanwhile, Clooney will face off for a lead-actor award with Jeff Bridges' alcoholic country singer in Crazy Heart, Colin Firth as a gay professor in A Single Man, Morgan Freeman's take on Nelson Mandela in Invictus, and Jeremy Renner as a bomb-squad technician on the edge in The Hurt Locker.
Those nominations were exactly the same as the Globe contenders for lead-drama actor, except for Renner. Instead, a Globes nomination went to Tobey Maguire in that category for Brothers.
Basterds, Quentin Tarantino's history-bending romp through World War II, collected a supporting-actress mention for Diane Kruger's German starlet working as an American double-agent, and Christoph Waltz's bon vivant villainous Nazi.
In addition to Kruger, Kendrick, Farmiga and Mo'Nique, Nine's Penelope Cruz is also in the supporting-actress race. The difference from the Globes was again only a single nominee — Kruger got the bid instead of Julianne Moore, who is up for a Globe for A Single Man.
In the supporting-actor race, the two award shows matched up precisely. Waltz's opponents in both are Matt Damon for Invictus, Woody Harrelson for The Messenger, Christopher Plummer for The Last Station, and Stanley Tucci for The Lovely Bones.
Directors Tarantino, Daniels and Reitman are not among the nominees, but it's not a snub. The Screen Actors Guild only recognizes performers, not the other contributors to the filmmaking process.
The 16th annual Screen Actors Guild Awards will be simulcast nationally on TNT and TBS on Jan. 23.
Dan O'Bannon 1946-2009
Dan O'Bannon, the sci-fi and horror screenwriter behind some of the genres' most recognisable titles, has died in Los Angeles following a short illness. He was 63.
A USC graduate in the same year as John Carpenter, O'Bannon was instrumental in Carpenter's cracking (and crackpot) first feature Dark Star, serving as co-writer, FX supervisor, production designer and editor, and playing Sgt Pinback (who turns out not to be Sgt Pinback at all). O'Bannon is the one who chases the beachball alien all over the spaceship; an idea that would sort of resurface later...
O'Bannon did some FX work on Star Wars in 1977, but is best known for kickstarting a different franchise. While authorship of Alien as we know it today is down to a number of people, there's no question that O'Bannon's Star Beast screenplay set the ball rolling, and he brought many of his colleagues from Alejandro Jodorowsky's aborted Dune to the project. The rest is movie history.
He wrote Blue Thunder and Life Force, and had two cracks at Philip K Dick, adapting We Can Remember It For You Wholesale and Second Variety into Total Recall and Screamers. Some say his Moebius-illustrated Heavy Metal comic The Long Tomorrow was a big visual influence on Blade Runner.
His Soft Landing and B-17 segments of the 1981 Heavy Metal movie were well-received, And he directed twice, fronting the fondly-remembered George Romero knock-off/parody Return of the Living Dead in 1985, and The Resurrected in 1992: an adaptation of HP Lovecraft's The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.
His screenplays were often reworked, much to his chagrin (particularly Blue Thunder, which lost most of its politics) but his legacy is without doubt. Just like Pinback, he had something of value to contribute to this mission.