My Cult Characters #3: The Truck Nazi in Raiders Of The Lost Ark

Posted on Monday April 14, 2008, 11:16 by Nick de Semlyen

Of all the many magnificent set-pieces in the Indiana Jones series to date, my personal favourite is the horse/truck/car/motorcycle-and-sidecart chase in the third act of Raiders. It’s heartpounding class all the way, from Indy’s ‘screw the odds’ gallop down a sheer slope towards the Nazi convoy transporting the Ark, to his cheeky grin as he twists the hijacked truck’s steering wheel and nudges the motorbike off a cliff.

But amid all the dusty mayhem and genius gags — check out the panicked fruit-picker falling onto the windscreen — there’s one element of the sequence that stands out. I’m talking about the daredevilry of one particular German officer, and how damn close he gets to despatching our hero for good.

The Nazi, more genial-looking than your average movie henchvillain, sits in the rear of the truck with the rest of his unit, all of them charged with guarding the crated Ark at any cost. He appears to be the leader, judging

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My Day As John McClane

Posted on Monday October 29, 2007, 13:59 by Nick de Semlyen

A couple of weeks ago, an intriguing but somewhat ominous email winged its way into Empire Towers. From the 20th Century Fox publicity team, it was an invitation for one of our journalists to embark on a trip to New York, tied in with the DVD release of Die Hard 4.0.

Almost all promotional events like this follow the same pattern — fly into a foreign city, check into a hotel and wait around for your allotted interview times with actory folk. This one, however, sounded different. According to Fox, Empire would be treated to “a day in the life of NYPD cop John McClane”, and on the actual home turf of the dirty-vested super-cop. This sounded awesome, but also disturbingly vague. What exactly would it involve? Would we be forced to leap off the roof of a high-rise clutching only a hose? Maybe use a lorry as a surfboard? Or walk through Harlem holding

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My Cult Characters #2: Mike LaFontaine From A Mighty Wind

Posted on Thursday October 4, 2007, 16:09 by Nick de Semlyen

“He’s made of funny stuff. The first time I saw him, I laughed when I saw the back of his head. He was 50 feet away and made a gesture to someone, and I laughed at the back of his head and his hands going up. He’s made of a funny ingredient. And that’s it, really.”

Talking to Empire to promote For Your Consideration earlier this year, this was Ricky Gervais’ take on the man who plays my second Cult Character. And he’s dead right. Fred Willard is ‘funny’ in its purest form, capable of creasing audiences up with a mere wrinkle of his nose or big, sloppy grin. He’s a veritable typhoon of comic energy, flinging out hilariously random non-sequiturs at his hapless co-stars and reducing even the most hardened comedians to helpless giggles.

It’s Christopher Guest who has best harnessed the formidable powers of this jolly jackass. There’s Willard’s early turn as a clueless Air Force colonel meeting

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Milk And The Movies

Posted on Thursday August 30, 2007, 15:48 by Nick de Semlyen

Good news, dairy fans! Now available online is the next instalment of the ever-popular Got Milk? campaign, in which famous people simper at the camera while sporting a ‘milk moustache’. This time, the poster features Hayden Panettiere, the cheerleader from TV’s Heroes, who joins a vast roster of sloppy-drinking celebs — including Ron Howard, Zhang Ziyi, Jackie Chan, Jessica Alba, Angelina Jolie and Brandon Routh.

Now, I like milk as much as the next guy. Enjoy putting it on cereal; enjoy mixing it with Nesquik; hell, sometimes I throw caution to the wind and pour myself a long, cool glass of the white stuff. But the very existence of this campaign throws up a few questions. Firstly, who’s paying for these lavish ads (the latest of which was shot by world-famous snapper Anne Leibovitz)? Secondly, if every actor in Hollywood loves moo-juice, how come they hardly ever get the answer right in Empire’s Pint Of Milk quiz? And thirdly, does milk really need the

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The Summer Of Plot Holes

Posted on Wednesday August 22, 2007, 12:15 by Nick de Semlyen

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!

Now, I’m not one of those pedants who watches films in micro-detail so they can complain about the amount of fur on a Hobbit’s foot changing from shot to shot. But quite honestly, as we near the end of 2007’s summer blockbuster season and the heat haze clears, we’re left with some hard questions that need to be asked about the year’s big-hitters. Read on and please tell me: were people sleeping on the job this year, or am I just being dim?

TRANSFORMERS: I’m no Transformers nut, but the basic rule seems to be that they each have two forms: a specific vehicle and their robot shape. So how in the name of Cybertron does helicopter Blackout get from a Middle Eastern desert to America’s West Coast in roughly 20 minutes? After Megatron thaws out and the Decepticons rally, we see Blackout flying above a landscape strikingly similar to the earlier Qatar sequence,

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