Word: stunt
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...Director F. Gary Gray, whose Italian Job is an update of a 1969 caper, says he strove for "a retro, fresh approach. I wanted to be able to communicate the danger, and that meant I had to do it the old-fashioned way." He's proud that "virtually every stunt we did could have been done in the original Italian...
That's why those fearless--or foolhardy--stunt folk aren't likely to be replaced by machines. "Stuntmen are more vital than ever to provide the impetus for the CG work," says McG. "In The Matrix Reloaded there's a lot of CG in the freeway chase, but that scene probably employed more stuntmen for a longer period than any action sequence in the history of cinema." Besides, CG is expensive. "Given the amount of time and money that it takes to get it right in the computer," says Jonathan Mostow, director of Terminator 3, "you might as well have...
...real, directors also want stars to do some of their own stunt work. A few old icons did. Steve McQueen, a true car nut, often took the wheel in Bullitt and Le Mans. But most actors have taken more lessons at the Pasadena Playhouse than at the Richard Petty Driving Experience. On the Hollywood Homicide shoot, Hartnett fouled up a chase by crashing into a fake police car. Mos Def, a Brooklyn native who co-stars in The Italian Job, didn't even have a driver's license. Mark Wahlberg, the film's lead, threw up five minutes into driving...
...Thailand's terror crackdown hasn't been well received in some quarters, however. Critics in the country claim that the arrest of the three Thais, announced just hours before the Thaksin-Bush meeting, had the whiff of a publicity stunt. In the Muslim south, an area already weighed down by corruption, poverty and violence, the arrest of three prominent citizens has been met with suspicion. "People down here are shocked and angry," says Chid-chanok Rahimula, a political scientist at the Prince of Songkhla University in Pattani in southern Thailand and an acquaintance of one of the accused, Dr. Waemahadi...
...trains, Ramo also tries to figure out what drives him to pursue such an arcane, expensive and deadly pastime. "What is extreme flying for me but a kind of dialogue?" he asks himself. "A conversation with myself about what I am capable of." Ramo's reverence for his fellow stunt pilots borders on the religious--he compares them variously with Yukio Mishima, John Coltrane and Pablo Picasso--and his lyrical flights sometimes lose the reader in the clouds. But when he's in the cockpit performing feats of gritty derring-do (and occasionally derring-don't), his airplane groaning...