Word: underworld
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...Sheen has been leading a double life. The Welsh actor has built his aboveground rep impersonating glad-handing Brit public figures: Tony Blair in The Deal and The Queen, David Frost in Frost/Nixon. Simultaneously, and subterraneanly, he's also been a wolf-man: Lucian, the half-breed in the Underworld thrillers, whose first two installments, from 2003 and 2006, grossed about $200 million worldwide. It's entirely possible that no single moviegoer has seen both the smooth Sheen and the hairy Sheen - the one in the Savile Row suits and the one who's spent enough time...
...Today he's outed. Frost/Nixon, which since early December has been tiptoeing through a few big-city theaters and yesterday garnered five Oscar nominations (including one for Best Picture), breaks out into wide release. And Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, the third in the vampire-werewolf saga, is playing on thousands of screens, hoping to end the weekend as the No. 1 box-office hit. The film's makers shouldn't hope to pick up any Academy Awards when next year's nominations are announced, since the enterprise is sluggish when it's not grinding toward the preposterous. (See Richard...
...Returning to the Underworld franchise must stir conflicting emotions in Sheen. Six years ago, when he made the first film, he was a supporting player to his then girlfriend Kate Beckinsale's Selene, a vision in pancake face, blood red lipstick and black leather. Then she went off with the movie's director, Len Wiseman - ouch. Since then, Beckinsale has played Ava Gardner in The Aviator and, more or less, Judith Miller in Nothing But the Truth; Wiseman graduated to directing the very snappy fourth Die Hard movie; and Sheen became an upmarket character star. Now he's top-billed...
...limousine, yacht and helicopter. As you conduct this princely progress, adorn your speech - as the characters are all wont to do, even if nobody in Hong Kong ever does - with copious references to "joss" (luck, from the Portuguese deus, or "god"), face (and the importance of), high finance and underworld figures with piratical names (Four-Finger Wu, Smallpox Kin). Brosnan is also liable to utter startling ejaculations that are supposed to be Cantonese. Naturally, nobody understands his blather, but in its imperious cadence and dauntless delivery you can hear the music of Hong Kong's golden...
...buff his fascist pedigree by retrieving the epic and offered the Society one million pounds for it, a staggering sum at the time. But the Society politely refused. By doing so, it seemed to say that Mumbai could also be a home for Dante's imagined voyage through the underworld and the rings of Hell. (See pictures of the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks...