Recently in the Film News Category

Actors replacing departed stars are announced

By Daniel Kreps, Rolling Stone

The Broadway musical Spider-man: Turn Off the Dark, featuring original music by U2's Bono and the Edge, will finally debut this winter, after production delays led to the departure of its two marquee stars. Producer Michael Cohl said today that preview performances start November 14th at Broadway's Foxwoods Theatre, and that opening night is scheduled for December 21st. Jennifer Damiano will fill the role of Mary Jane Watson, and Patrick Page will play both Norman Osborn and the villain Green Goblin. The actors join Reeve Carney, playing Peter Parker.

Production for Turn Off the Dark shut down in August 2009 due to "unexpected cash flow problems," ultimately bumping the musical out of its scheduled February 2010 preview run. Because of the delays and the uncertain nature of the production, both actress Evan Rachel Wood, who was to star as Mary Jane, and Alan Cumming, in the Green Goblin role, quit. Wood's replacement, Damiano, has rock-on-Broadway roots thanks to her Tony-nominated role in Next to Normal. Page, the new Green Goblin, has experience behind a mask, having played the Grinch in the Broadway musical of The Grinch Who Stole Christmas.

By Ellen Gamerman, Wall Street Journal Blog

More bad news for the Broadway musical "Spider-Man Turn off the Dark": Alan Cumming, cast as the villainous Green Goblin, now joins Evan Rachel Wood on the list of actors who have left the show citing scheduling conflicts.

Cumming said in a statement Monday night that the "Spider-Man" team could not resolve conflicts with his dates taping what has become a regular role on "The Good Wife," a CBS TV drama that shoots in New York.

Last month, Wood, cast as love interest Mary Jane, also quit the musical citing a scheduling conflict. The show, with a score by U2's Bono and the Edge and directed by Julie Taymor ("The Lion King"), originally was meant to open this season.

by Brandon DuHamel, Blu-rayDefinition

International supergroup U2 have officially announced on their website U2.com that they will be releasing their U2360° at the Rose Bowl concert on Blu-ray and DVD in the UK on June 7 2010 and the US on June 3, 2010 through Mercury Records.

Captured live in front of 97,000 fans at Pasadena's Rose Bowl in 2009 in support of their tour for the Grammy-nominated album No Line on the Horizon, the full-HD production utilized 27 HD cameras and was directed by Tom Krueger who had previously worked on U23D, the first live action 3D concert movie taken from U2's Vertigo Tour.

The release will be available in four different iterations:

Los Angeles Times

This just in from U2 headquarters: The Irish band will release a DVD of last year's massive Rose Bowl concert sometime in 2010, according to U2's website. Details remain foggy, but apparently they want the info out immediately, before they finalize the decisions: "The band are still working on the content of the DVD," reads a note on their site, before asking fans to register to get the latest updates.

The news isn't a big surprise, considering the band partnered with YouTube to stream the concert live.

Do you need the DVD? Times pop critic Ann Powers, in her review of the show, suggests maybe yes:

Rolling Stone

The delayed Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark Broadway show featuring music by U2's Bono and the Edge will have to find a new Mary Jane. Producers have confirmed that Evan Rachel Wood, the actress originally cast in the role of Peter Parker's love interest, has left the musical, Variety reports. Wood exited the production due to a "scheduling conflict"; financial troubles pushed Turn Off the Dark's opening well beyond its original February 25th preview premiere date. Variety writes that Spider-Man will likely begin its preview run in late summer and open around Halloween, though those dates remain unconfirmed by the show's production team.

"She's the greatest actor of her generation, she's the one to watch," Bono said of Wood after her casting was announced. "She happens to sing like a bird, it's like a true voice. She's a very pure spirit and a very bright mind and she brings the part of MJ to life, really."

U2's Larry Mullen Jr. will lend his voice to a pair of characters in the upcoming season of the Family Guy spin-off The Cleveland Show. According to the BBC, Mullen Jr. reached out to producers about guest voicing on the show's second season, and producers were only too happy to oblige. The drummer will voice two characters: a mobster and a bad Elvis impersonator.

Springfield Rocks: check out photos of music's biggest stars on The Simpsons.

"He came in and we hung out for a couple of hours. We just recorded him doing a couple of different parts and he was very funny," Mike Henry, who voices Cleveland, told the BBC. "It's a thrill for me to do all this. U2 is my favorite band of all time and David Lynch the film director plays a part on our show." (In other Cleveland Show news, David Lynch will also guest voice!) As for recording Mullen Jr.'s part, Henry said, "He's got his own studio so we just record it from Dublin. You don't have to record at a certain time. It's an easy gig and one that people like to do. It's very cool to have all these people from different walks of entertainment participating in what we're doing."

By Maureen Coleman, Belfast Telegraph

A tour bus pulls up in Belfast's Lower Donegall Street with a big-haired band on board. Screaming teenage girls, in neon brights and leather jackets, greet the denim-clad rockers as they disembark. Nearby a market stallholder in pink pixie boots rubs her hands to fend off the cold.

Visitors to the Cathedral Quarter yesterday could be forgiven for thinking they had stepped back in time to the late 1970s/early 1980s, when new wave groups, red double-deckers, Ford Cortinas and pleated trousers were de rigeur.

Instead, it's a scene from music-comedy Killing Bono, being filmed in the city.

Starring Chronicles Of Narnia's Ben Barnes, the movie is set during U2's formative years in Dublin and London.

BBC News

Plenty of schoolchildren dream of becoming famous singers, but when a boy on the other side of the classroom goes on to become one of the most famous rock stars in the world, you could end up feeling a little overshadowed.

That is exactly what happened to Neil McCormick, who went to school with a boy called Paul Hewson - better known these days as U2's Bono.

So could it be jealously then that inspired the title of the new movie 'Killing Bono', which is based on Mr McCormick's memoirs?

Filming of the story, which is set around U2's formative years in a north Dublin comprehensive school, is set to begin in Northern Ireland early next year.

Belfast Telegraph

While Northern Ireland was in the grip of the Troubles in the late 1970s, something was happening south of the border which would have a global impact on music.

In 1976, a band was formed in Dublin after a young drummer posted on the school noticeboard looking for other musicians to join him. That band was U2.

Now a new movie is to reminisce about that time -- from the unusual perspective of a rival band.

Filming will get under way in Northern Ireland next month on Killing Bono -- a story about two Irish brothers chasing a dream of being rock stars.

The Sundance Channel's interview-performance series gets out of the gate fast in its second-season opener.

By Randy Lewis, Los Angeles Times

Upping the ante on any TV show that got off to as auspicious a start as the first season of the Sundance Channel's music interview-performance series "Spectacle: Elvis Costello With..." is a tall order.

After all, the first episode featured a conversation with Elton John -- not coincidentally, one of the executive producers and a key mover behind the series -- before pairing its deeply knowledgeable, erudite and witty host with subsequent guests, including Tony Bennett, Smokey Robinson, Lou Reed, Norah Jones, Rufus Wainwright, Renée Fleming and former President Clinton.

But out of the gate on tonight's second-season opener, Costello does impressively ratchet things up in a wide-ranging session with U2 singer Bono and guitarist the Edge.