News

This article is part of IndieWire’s 2000s Week celebration. Click here for a whole lot more.

The 21st century has seen any number of films about the stories people tell themselves in order to rationalize and reconfigure their trauma, but none have been more raw or powerfully true to life than “Mysterious Skin.”

Nineties indie icon Gregg Araki took great risk in adapting Scott Heim’s 1995 novel, the story of a teen hustler who, drawn exclusively to older men as an adult, comes to terms with the fact that his Little League coach groomed and raped him as a child over one summer in 1981 Kansas, and how his sexual behavior later in the ’90s was shaped by those encounters as a result. While Neil McCormack (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) engages in reckless sexual activity, elsewhere a fellow teammate, Brian Lackey (Brady Corbet), who was also abused by the same coach, retreats...

The Morrissey memoir show soon will arrive in the U.S. Penguin Random House announced Tuesday that Morrissey's Autobiography has been acquired jointly by three of its imprints. G.P. Putnam's Sons will publish the hardcover Dec. 3, and Penguin Classics will handle the paperback edition on a date to be determined. The book is a No. 1 best-seller in England. British reviewers have been divided over the book by the Smiths' former frontman. Rock critic Neil McCormack gave Autobiography a five-star review in the Daily Telegraph. He compares it favorably to Bob Dylan's Chronicles. But The Independent's

read more...

You know how everyone hates Bono? Well, Neil McCormick hated him first. He hated him so much, in fact, that he has a gun pointed at his face. This is Neil’s story.

Flashing back to 1970s Ireland, lax journalist Neil (Ben Barnes) is eager to set up a band of his own after rival Paul “Bono” Hewson (Martin McCann) joins high school rockband The Hype. Using his relationship with Bono to ensure his younger brother’s (Robert Sheehan) rejection from the band, Neil and Ivan instead set up their own group, quickly falling into The Hype’s – now U2 – ever growing shadow. Borrowing money from the local gangster (Stanley Towsend), the McCormack brothers move to London where they begin a near-year-long search for a willing record label. Despite finding an albeit lesser success with producer Hammond (Peter Serafinowicz) and band Shook Up!, Neil continues to undermines his own luck...

Nick Hamm’s comedy could have provided material for a dissection of bitter rivalry and the fates of two equally ambitious friends but takes the road more travelled by offering a knockabout farcical comedy instead.

Killing Bono, with a script from Dick Clement and Ian Le Frenais, is simply invested in the tried and tested narrative following the highs and many lows of a guy who thinks he’s ‘it’ when really he isn’t. And we’re not talking about Paul Hewson aka Bono aka St. Bono.

The film is most noticeable for being the last screen appearance of the great Pete Postlethwaite, here playing an extended cameo as a gay landlord. It’s an incredibly broad and flamboyant performance but poignant nonetheless.

Ben Barnes and Robert Sheehan play Neil and Ivan, childhood friends of U2’s Bono and The Edge. Both are in rival bands and Bono even...

London – A couple of idiots trying to outdo rock band U2, a 3D animated young barbarian with low self-esteem and a movie about four girls, three days, two cities and one chance are three titles from European shores vying for attention amid the hustle and bustle of this year's American Film Market.

The duo trying to outdo U2 are self-proclaimed idiots in Killing Bono, a movie that sees rising stars Ben Barnes and Robert Sheehan as hapless brothers Neil and Ivan McCormick who set up a band in Dublin, Ireland in the late 1970s.

Sadly for them, so did their classmates and rivals, who go on to become the global phenomenon U2. Based on a true story and grounded in Neil McCormack's book of the same name Stateside, the screenplay is written by British comedy writing royalty Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais alongside Simon Maxell. Nick Hamm directs.

The...

More devastating than a potato famine, the U2 biopic Killing Bono is set to start filming mid-month in Ireland. It tells the tale of U2's rise to fame from their early start. You know, back when they actually made real music. I've grown to loathe U2 with a seething hatred you can only find in ol' backwoods racists. I can't stand Bono and his faux activism and his keening wails over increasing electronica. As far as I'm concerned, if their plane crashed into the ocean after War and The Joshua Tree, the world would have been the better for it.

But this biopic actually sounds promising, based on Neil McCormack's biography Killing Bono: I Was Bono's Doppelganger. McCormack and his brother were classmates with Edge and Bono, attempting to start a high school jam band but with decidedly less iPod commercial results. The script comes from Ian La Frenais...

Ben Barnes (The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, Dorian Gray) has been announced to star in 'I Was Bono's Doppelganger', a comedy film from director Nick Hamm (Godsend) that is based on Neil McCormack's autobiography of the same name. 28 year old Barnes will replace fellow British actor Charlie Cox (Stardust) who was originally cast. The production will star Barnes alongside previously announced Irish actor Robert Sheehan (Cherrybomb, Summer of the Flying Saucer).