Film News

Jeff Conaway obituary

2011-05-30T01:32:00.000+01:00

In the late 1970s and early 80s, Taxi was one of the best American sitcoms. It won 18 Emmy awards and its stars, among them Jeff Conaway, who has died in hospital aged 60, became household names. Conaway played the narcissistic, "resting" actor Bobby Wheeler, one of the characters working for the Sunshine cab company, all hoping for better jobs to turn up. In a way, the role mirrored Conaway's own struggle for greater recognition as an actor, which was not helped by his having been addicted to alcohol, cocaine and analgesics since he was a teenager.

In Taxi, the handsome Conaway , sporting the feathered hairstyle popular in the 1970s, had to compete with more fascinating characters in the avuncular Alex Reiger (Judd Hirsch), obnoxious Louie De Palma (Danny DeVito), sexy divorcee Elaine Nardo (Marilu Henner), unvictorious boxer Tony Banta (Tony Danza), and English-impaired immigrant Latka Gravas (Andy Kaufman). Most of the cast of the popular show went on to bigger things, while Conaway's one moment of glory in the cinema was already in his past.

He first made an impact as Kenickie in Grease (1978), released a few months before his debut in Taxi. As John Travolta's sidekick in the high-school gang called the T-birds, Conaway is a finger-snapping, leather-jacketed greaser, a comb and a witticism always at the ready. He says things like "You're cruisin' for a bruisin'?'' and "A hickie from Kenickie is like a Hallmark card, when you only care enough to send the very best!" He also does some nifty acrobatic dancing, especially in Greased Lightning, on top of a car – this resulted in a back injury that dogged him for most of his life. The cast were too old to play high-school students, but Conaway, at 28, was more convincing than most.

Conaway had already played the Travolta part in the Broadway production of Grease the year before, after starting as an understudy. In fact, Conaway had been on Broadway at the age of 10 in All the Way Home (1960) – based on James Agee's novel A Death in the Family – set in Tennessee in the early 1900s. The young Conaway, as a boy trying to come to terms with the death of his father in a car accident, was at the heart of the play. Although he was born in New York, the childhood summers spent with his South Carolina grandparents proved handy when auditioning for the part, because the director, Arthur Penn, wanted a boy with a southern accent.

He later enrolled in North Carolina School of the Arts, then studied drama at New York University. "I left three months before graduation," Conaway recalled. "There were hard feelings because I had the lead in a school production of The Threepenny Opera. But I was offered Grease on Broadway. Broadway! I couldn't turn it down."

After Taxi, Conaway was seldom out of work, though he found himself trapped in a vicious circle of trashy erotic thrillers in which he usually played a stud, and gradually, with age, detectives, fathers of teens (as in Jawbreaker, 1999) and strip-club owners as in Sunset Strip and It's Showtime (both 1993). His one directorial effort was Bikini Summer II (1992), a sex farce ending with a rock concert on the beach.

Conaway was much better served by TV, appearing in series such as Murder, She Wrote, Burke's Law and Matlock, and in 74 episodes of the science-fiction series Babylon 5 (1994-98) as Zack Allan, the tough security chief.

While he continued to act, Conaway was suffering from substance abuse problems, which came to a head in 1985 following his divorce from Rona Newton-John, the sister of Grease star Olivia, after five years of marriage. In 1990, he married Kerri Young, and had a subsequent fiery six-year relationship with Victoria Spinoza, a singer known as Vikki Lizzi. Earlier this year they filed restraining orders against each other, trading accusations of theft and violence, but were eventually reconciled.

Though Conaway sought treatment, he relapsed from time to time. In 2008 he appeared in the reality TV series Celebrity Rehab, in which he revealed his long-term addictions.

Conaway was found unconscious on 11 May due to a combination of legally prescribed painkillers to treat back problems and other medications. The adverse reaction caused him to contract pneumonia. He was put into a medically induced coma intended to aid his recovery, but was eventually taken off life support. He is survived by Vikki and his sisters Carla and Michele.

• Jeffrey Charles William Michael Conaway, actor, born 5 October 1950; died 27 May 2011

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Grease actor Jeff Conaway dies

2011-05-29T13:32:00.000+01:00

Conaway, who had a history of addictions to drugs, alcohol and prescription painkillers, was hospitalised earlier this month after being found unconscious in his Los Angeles area home.

He was suffering from pneumonia and sepsis, and had been placed in a medically-induced coma.

The actor's family took him off life support on Thursday, media reports said.

A native of New York, Conaway began his acting career on Broadway but found national fame when he starred as Kenickie in the 1978 film musical "Grease," alongside John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John.

He also became a television regular for playing Wheeler, a cab driver, on the hit comedy "Taxi."

Conaway's problems with addiction were documented in 2008 when he appeared on the TV series "Celebrity Rehab".

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Rob Lowe at Hay Festival: internet shouldn't be immune to super-injunction laws

2011-05-29T09:57:00.000+01:00

Talking to The Telegraph at the Hay Festival, Lowe, who just added his 100,000th follower on Twitter, said: “Twitter users in the US are not subject to UK laws, so that rules them out [of being pursued by the authorities]. So then we are really talking about Twitter users in the UK and if they broke the laws in their own country – then they broke the law right? I don’t think the internet should be immune to the standing laws of countries.”

He said that he was “amazed” by the concept of super-injunctions as these type of “gagging orders” would never work in the US, as they fly in the face of freedom of speech.

Lowe, who was one of the headline guests at The Hay Festival promoting his book, Stories I Only Tell My Friends, said that celebrities still deserved some level of privacy in the digital age.

“I do think there ought to be, should be and probably is, some area of privacy left over even for public figures in the digital age,” he said.

Lowe found himself at the centre of his own scandal more than 20 years ago, when a tape was leaked which showed him having sex with two girls, one of which was underage. He joked on stage at the Hay Festival to Mariella Frostrup that he was ahead of his time, as celebrity sex tapes online were commonplace now, but said it wasn’t always the best to be a trailblazer.

Lowe, who writes all his own tweets and has an iPad to access ebooks, said told The Telegraph he thought ebook sales were at the tipping point.

“We are at a tipping point. I actually just had this chat with my publisher, because everyone was very surprised that in my book sales, fully 50 per cent are ebooks.

“We are definitely at the point of huge change in publishing. I really think that a lot of the people buying my ebook might not have bought it in hardback - so I look at it like if ebooks are expanding the market share, then ebooks are a really good thing. But if they are not expanding the market – and the people who would have otherwise bought the hardback are now just buying ebooks then it is problematic – but that’s the world we live in and we have to move with the times.”

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Heartbeats – review

2011-05-29T05:47:00.000+01:00

HeartbeatsProduction year: 2010Countries: Canada, Rest of the world Cert (UK): 15Runtime: 95 minsDirectors: Xavier DolanCast: Monia Chokri, Niels Schneider, Xavier DolanMore on this film

This wispy French-Canadian comedy has an epigraph by Alfred de Musset: "The only truth is love beyond reason." It's mostly about what strange magic attracts members of the same sex and opposite sexes to each other, usually reluctantly and rarely happily. The articulate characters, all well-heeled students in Montreal, discuss it over coffee and across the dinner table. Marie, the heroine, talks about it post-coitally with a succession of boyfriends, and she becomes part of a triangle. The other members of the chaste ménage are her best friend Francis, a somewhat callow gay man (played by the film's talented young writer-director, Xavier Dolan), and the androgynous Nicolas, whom someone calls an Adonis. Together they make up a Jules et Jim trio, but with the narcissistic Nicolas as the obscure object of the others' desire. The style is nouvelle vague but more Godard than Truffaut, and it's likeable enough, though there's far too much slow motion.

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Apocalypse Now – review

2011-05-29T01:43:00.000+01:00

The 1970s was Coppola's decade. He was involved in a succession of masterly films, as screenwriter on Patton, producer of American Graffiti, director of the first two Godfather films and The Conversation, and finally, in 1979, as true auteur of Apocalypse Now. They illuminated our times, and we can now see that Apocalypse Now is not merely the greatest film to come out of the Vietnam experience but one of the great works about the madness of our times. He immediately followed the early morning preview screening of Apocalypse Now at Cannes with a press conference which he began by saying: "My film is not about Vietnam, it is Vietnam," and he went on to state that during the shooting "little by little we went insane". How brave and prophetic he was.

Apocalypse NowProduction year: 1979Countries: UK, USA Cert (UK): 18Runtime: 153 minsDirectors: Francis Coppola, Francis Ford CoppolaCast: Dennis Hopper, Frederic Forrest, Harrison Ford, Laurence Fishburne, Marlon Brando, Martin Sheen, Robert Duvall, Rpobert DuvallMore on this film

Coppola took Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad's enigmatic story about the cruelties of colonialism, and turned it into a 20th-century fable about neocolonialism in which the story's eminently sane narrator, Marlow, becomes Captain Willard, the Special Services hitman, as crazy as his assigned quarry, Colonel Kurtz. The difference is that unlike everyone else around him, from the top brass down, Willard knows he's mad. Everything about the Taliban, al-Qaida, the pressures that took us into Afghanistan and Iraq, the assault on Abbottabad and the deadly troubles that lie ahead are to be found here in Willard's journey. It's a work of genius that may falter a little towards the end, though not fatally. This newly released version is more or less the one shown at Cannes and is definitive. The half-hour of material introduced 10 years ago in Apocalypse Now Redux is of no value, it diminishes the film and is to be avoided.

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New Web Site

2011-05-27T11:02:00.001+01:00

Just a wee post to let you know I've got a new site Learn Guitar 365.

The Hangover Part II – review

2011-05-27T02:14:00.000+01:00

We all enjoyed ourselves during that first movie. But now … well, the hangover has begun. And begun so powerfully, so oppressively, that you might almost suspect the success of the original was created specifically to engender this comedown as a piece of conceptual art. Each reminder of the original, each repetition, each desperate, hair-of-the-dog attempt to recapture the party feeling: it's exactly like living through a hungover flashback-memory of what had once seemed so great.

The Hangover Part IIProduction year: 2011Country: USACert (UK): 15Runtime: 102 minsDirectors: Todd PhillipsCast: Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Jamie Chung, Justin Bartha, Ken Jeong, Mike Tyson, Paul Giamatti, Zach GalifianakisMore on this film

In Hollywood, said William Goldman, nobody knows anything. Who knew The Hangover, from fratpack comedy director Todd Phillips, was going to be such a huge hit? Nobody – perhaps not even the people involved. The story of a Vegas bachelor party that goes horribly wrong looked pretty ropey on paper, and yet it was great. Some thought it was sort of a monkey-typing-Hamlet fluke, but it's actually the sort of fluke that only happens to smart people who keep trying.

The Hangover was funny and the structure was daring. Act one: pre-party – then we jump straight to act three, post-party, and the movie is about the bleary, amnesiac guys trying to piece together act two: what the hell happened? This is not definitively revealed until the sequence of digital photos over the final credits. Brilliant! It showed the spirit of movies like The Usual Suspects or Reservoir Dogs.Bradley Cooper had the chops – he had been a forgettable, almost invisible presence in many movies before this, but he blossomed in H1. There were some cracking comedy turns. Zach Galifianakis was great as the weirdo brother-in-law Alan and Ken Jeong was a real find as the abusive comedy gangster Mr Chow. Everything came together.

Sadly, H2 can't even quite claim the credit of being the first Hangover sequel: the road-movie comedy Due Date, directed by Todd Phillips and starring Galifianakis and Robert Downey Jr, attempted to cash in on its success, none too successfully. At least it tried a vaguely different plot. Hangover Part II seeks only to repeat almost every element of the first movie. It's not a sequel, closer to a shot-for-shot remake. This time, the guys go to Thailand for a wedding, in the same shark-jumping way that the Sex and the City girls whooshed off to Abu Dhabi for their profoundly depressing sequel. It feels a bit like a feature-length Christmas special of a well-loved British sitcom.

The original's quirks have now become a formula. The grim daytime shots of Vegas at the beginning are now grim daytime shots of Bangkok; the tiger is now a monkey; there's a different sequence of photos over the final credits. Pretty much everything has its equivalent. Infuriatingly, all the fun has been drained from the movie, simply in repeating almost every trick. The same: but lame, and lame because the same.

Now it's the nerdy dentist Stu (Ed Helms) getting hitched, to a beautiful Thai woman Lauren (Jamie Chung), whose father hates Stu. Slightly insultingly for Justin Barth, his character Doug was the groom-to-be who disappeared in the first movie but he doesn't get a turn at participating in the hi-jinks now.

Stu stays in the story and Barth's nice-but-dull character is sidelined. Stu's goofiness is evidently considered more important to the action, and Phillips perhaps considers that the gang already has a handsome guy in the form of Cooper's Phil. Now it's the bride's sweet younger brother Teddy who tags along on the stag night, disappears, and has to be found at all costs, because he is the apple of his father's eye: he is played by 21-year-old Mason Lee, son of the director Ang Lee. Jeong and Galifianakis seem very subdued and under-par compared to their earlier appearances.

Then there's the question of the big non-PC cameo to match Mike Tyson's bizarre performance in the original. Rumours have been rife. We had heard about Mel Gibson (that idea was abandoned), Liam Neeson (reportedly cut) and even Bill Clinton.

Actually, Paul Giamatti makes an appearance as a bad-tempered tough guy, but this isn't the big cameo – that comes in the form of the celebrity booked to sing at Stu's wedding. You may be hoping for Liza Minnelli. Well, no spoilers, but suffice it to say, this too is a bit of a letdown.

Making The Hangover Part II must have been like going up to a great guitarist who'd just pulled off a brilliant improvised solo, and telling him he had to repeat the performance the next night, note-for-note. The result is self-conscious to say the least.

I have to admit that there are one or two nice lines. When the guys gather outside Alan's bedroom, preparing to invite him along, Jeffrey Tambor, playing Alan's father, tells them to "Go in slowly; let him acclimatise." When Stu defiantly claims: "There's a demon in me!", Alan hits him with a zinging comeback in the bad-taste spirit of the first film. Flashes of fun like this are rare. It's a sobering experience.

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X-Men: First Class reveals a series in need of mutation

2011-05-26T22:04:00.000+01:00

One can't help feeling that the X-Men movies have enjoyed a rather charmed life. Matthew Vaughn's X-Men: First Class, which opens in the UK on Wednesday, will be the fifth film about Professor X and his merry band of mutants to hit the big screen in only 11 years. That's as many as Superman, two more than Spider-Man and only one fewer than Batman. Critical drubbings for various instalments in those other "franchises" have led to drastic regime changes at the top, often coupled with years of soul searching over which direction to go in next. Yet Twentieth Century Fox cheerfully goes about its business of making sure a new film arrives in multiplexes every couple of years, even after non-starters such as 2006's Brett Ratner-directed X-Men: The Final Stand and 2009's insipid Wolverine.

X-Men: First ClassProduction year: 2011Country: USACert (UK): 12ARuntime: 131 minsDirectors: Matthew VaughnCast: James McAvoy, January Jones, Jason Flemyng, Jennifer Lawrence, Kevin Bacon, Michael Fassbender, Nicholas Hoult, Rose ByrneMore on this film

X-Men: First Class may be a prequel set in a new era (the early 60s) with a new cast, but it is not nearly as much of a genuine mutation from the norm as might be expected. Nor is it quite as good as some early reviews have suggested.

Whereas Christopher Nolan breezily ignored all the previous Batman films with his genre-defining Batman Begins, Vaughn and screenwriter Jane Goldman's script is based on a story by Bryan Singer, who made the first two X-Men movies. The film ends up being not so much a radical reinvention of the series as an affirmation of those earlier features: it has their DNA running through its system, and we're left in no doubt that events are intended to prefigure those we've already seen pan out on screen.

Had X-Men: First Class arrived back in 2000, when Singer's first film hit cinemas, it might have been revolutionary. Arriving as it does in 2011, it feels like a throwback to an earlier, simpler era where audiences were willing to accept cardboard cut-out villains and one-dimensional heroes. It's the sort of film for which the caveat "it's only a comic book movie" will be constantly offered in conversation.

There are nonetheless some excellent aspects. Vaughn convincingly introduces us to the young Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender), and shows us why the two might just as easily have been friends as enemies. Lehnsherr (the future Magneto) has a cracking stony-faced early escapade to Argentina to track down some retired Nazis, coming off like James Bond with superpowers (and a mean, lean, Daniel Craig-style 007 at that). McAvoy is typically lovable as the cocky yet earnest Xavier, the sort of geeky posh bloke who might have ended up as a charismatic, well-meaning charity boss had he not been gifted with mutant genes. Of the remaining cast, Jennifer Lawrence, January Jones and Rose Byrne all do well to flesh out meagre material, though the film rather limits their involvement to that of classy eye candy.

Kevin Bacon makes a suitably sinister villain, but it's here that the film begins to reveal its limited ambition. The 60s setting almost compels the film-makers to pay homage to Bond et al, but the villains in X-Men: First Class are like bad guys in cheap James Bond movies. They want to take over the world because they want to take over the world. There are efforts to explain their hatred of humans, but they are the same arguments used in the earlier films, and there's very little complexity to them.

I forget whether the line: "Mutant and proud" appears in the original films or comic books, but its use here by Lawrence's Mystique feels contrived and unnecessary. So, too, the scene in which Fassbender, addressed by his given name, utters: "I prefer Magneto." At these moments, it's impossible not to shudder at the cargo load of obscenely stinky, sweaty cheese that has just been driven right through the centre of the movie. Did some suit at Fox insist on these lines being used, or did Singer, Vaughn and Goldman genuinely think they were a good idea?

I've often berated studios such as Warner Bros on this blog for umming and ahhing over what to do with Superman in the wake of Singer's prosaic Superman Returns in 2006, but the opposite end of the spectrum is Fox's attitude that you don't mess with a good (or even a bad) thing. Had the money men who oversee X-Men been in charge of Batman, George Clooney would still be sporting rubber batnipples and Joel Schumacher would be planning his fifth or sixth instalment. Hence, X-Men: First Class is not so much a reboot as a gentle reroute.

For this series to reach the heights of great comic book movies, it requires a real DNA change. No more Singer, and no more idiotic one-liners, please. It's time for a genuine mutation.

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Hay Festival: When the Nazis came to Hay

2011-05-26T22:03:00.000+01:00

When I tell people this they’re often surprised. Isn’t it painful, they ask, to watch film-makers, producers and actors change, rough-handle and manipulate your novel? But, I explain, they haven’t.

No one has done anything to my book. I can see it now on the shelf above my desk. It still exists as I wrote it, with all its flaws and voice and dialogue intact. When a book is turned into a film it is the story that is manipulated, not the novel, and as such I was excited rather than anxious when the film’s director Amit Gupta asked me to co-write the screenplay with him.

We wrote quickly, aided by the fact that I was living in New York and Amit in London. This meant the script was effectively worked on for 36 hours at a time, with me sitting down to my desk there just as Amit was ending his day’s writing here. In what felt like hardly any time at all I was being sent headshots of actors Amit wanted to cast.

Suddenly we were just weeks away from filming. Everything was falling into place.

Everything, that is, except for our leading lady, for whom we were still looking. Then word came through from Sam Jones, our casting director, that Andrea Riseborough – the actress who played Margaret Thatcher to great acclaim in the television drama The Long Walk to Finchley and will soon be seen as Wallis Simpson in Madonna’s new film, WE – might be available. She was, however, about to leave the country for her home in Los Angeles. Amit didn’t waste any time. Driving out to Heathrow to meet her in the departures hall they discussed his aspirations for the film and for the part of Sarah Lewis which we hoped she’d accept.

Sarah is both the central character of the novel and the film. A young farmer’s wife, she wakes one morning a few weeks after the German invasion to discover, along with the other women in her isolated valley, that her husband has disappeared, leaving, she thinks, to join the British Resistance. A month later a patrol of German soldiers arrives in the valley.

Over the course of a harsh winter these two groups, the abandoned women and the stranded soldiers, form a fragile mutual dependency. When the snow thaws everyone must face the consequences of the blurred lines between occupier and occupied, but no one more than Sarah Lewis. As such it was a part for which we needed an actress capable of evoking a great depth of inner struggle while still maintaining a restrained performance. Andrea was the perfect candidate and, as Amit told me later, that last-minute drive to Heathrow turned out to be his most important dash to an airport ever – not to catch a plane but to catch an actress who, thankfully, a few days later, said yes.

Somehow, all through the year of working on the script, I’d never imagined that day when I’d first walk onto the set of our film.

When I did, the pure physicality of it took me by surprise. As vans and lorries unloaded props and the art team dressed the set of Sarah Lewis’s house, I felt as if it was my own imagination that was being unpacked and arranged around those rooms.

Up until then everything – notes, novel, outlines, the script from drafts one to seven – had been words on the page. Now, suddenly, we were in a different world, of things, light, sound, people and animals.

I met Andrea myself at the end of that first day’s filming. The house we were using was high on the slopes of Llanthony valley. She wore a large padded coat over her costume and was playing a guitar on a sofa in the kitchen. It felt like meeting two people at once – our female lead who I didn’t yet know, and a woman I’d dreamt up many years ago who I did.

In watching her other films I’d seen how Andrea often found character through a nuanced awareness of accent. This was the case with her depiction of Sarah in Resistance, too. The film is set in the border country near Hay-on-Wye, in the valleys and hills that often rise in Wales and fall in England. It’s a landscape that’s evolved a particular accent; a Welsh accent, but with the hint of Herefordshire burr. Andrea told me how she often uses the British Library audio archive to find the voice of her characters, not just by listening to the accent of an area, but also to the accent of a time. In the days before we began filming she told me she’d continued this line of preparation by going to aqua aerobics classes at the pool in my old school in Abergavenny.

At first I couldn’t see the link; how, exactly, was treading water and lifting foam weights with the pensioners of my home town preparation for Andrea’s part in our film? But then she started relaying the conversations of those classes in the accents of the women who took them with her, and I understood.

“No, not like that! You gotta lift them right out haven’t you? Tha’s it! There you are now. Lovely.” Suddenly, it was both Andrea Riseborough sitting before me and the old women I’d known growing up in Abergavenny who, 60 years earlier, would have been the same age and had the same voice as Sarah Lewis.

They never lived through a Nazi occupation, of course, but the organisation at the heart of my novel – the Auxiliary Units whose men make up Britain’s Resistance – was very real. I was introduced to the Auxiliary Units by a farmer called George Vater who I’d known when I was growing up in a village outside Abergavenny. In his eighties, George, like other men of a similar age, began talking about a secret they’d kept for most of their lives, about how during the war they’d been recruited by military intelligence officers and trained to be members of the British Resistance.

Around 350 underground bunkers were built by the Royal Engineers all over Britain, and around 4,000 men and women were recruited. The Auxiliary Units were to be Churchill’s last-ditch defence; a controversial and, in terms of international conventions, illegal government-funded civilian insurgency. Given the strategic importance of the area, and the possibility of an invasion via the Bristol Channel, there was a particular concentration of Auxiliary Unit bunkers in south Wales. In coalmines above Port Talbot, in the woods above Newport, on top of the Blorenge outside Abergavenny, around the village of Usk and, I’d heard rumoured, in the valleys south of Hay-on-Wye.

In Resistance, the story of the Auxiliary Units is experienced through the character of George Bowen, a young man (based upon the real George Vater) played by Iwan Rheon. George is recruited as a spy, just as George Vater was, by a mysterious intelligence officer called “Tommy Atkins”, played by Michael Sheen.

Given this narrative, Michael dropped into filming in a particularly suitable way, arriving for an intense two days of shooting with Iwan before, just as his character does in the film, leaving and abandoning the young man to the consequences of his duty. A further energy was added to these scenes by the fact that Iwan had long admired Michael as an actor and relished the opportunity of acting opposite his theatrical hero.

Before we embarked on writing the script for Resistance, Amit and I always knew that however much circumstances might influence the filming process there were two stipulations on which we wouldn’t be willing to compromise. The first was that our patrol of German soldiers should speak German rather than English with German accents.

Resistance is a story of occupation. Once uniforms are replaced by civilian clothes then language becomes the most manifest form of occupation. As film-makers, the juxtaposition of a wartime setting, German words and Welsh hills, was exactly the kind of emotional and thematic shorthand we needed.

The second stipulation was that Resistance be filmed in the landscape in which the original story is set, the Black Mountain valleys south and west of Hay-on-Wye. It was this landscape that first inspired the novel and which, we hoped, would lend the filming of it a unique charge. What I hadn’t appreciated was how practically useful filming on home turf would be.

Time and again we were saved by the generosity of local people and local knowledge when, often last minute, we found ourselves needing everything from three leather dog collars (from my parents’ neighbours), to a horse (an old friend of mine), to a vintage car (offered by the dentist when I bumped into him in the pub one night).

When we required over 200 extras for the filming of the country show, I found myself calling on the services of family friends and old school teachers, all of whom willingly showed up to have their hair cut and be dressed in Forties clothes at 5am on a cold autumn morning.

The filming of that show was a day when the story of our film felt as if it had, for a few hours, punched right through to an uncomfortable reality. Many of the extras on that day could still remember the Second World War and the real fear of a possible German invasion. One of them was the owner of a Third Reich birth certificate. Another’s grandfather and great uncle had been members of a local Auxiliary Unit Resistance patrol. One of the vintage-car owners we had approached was the grandson of the vicar who would have operated the wireless network of the Resistance in the area around my own village.

When, halfway through the day, a high-ranking Nazi officer was driven around the show ring and greeted with “Heil Hitler” salutes beneath those swastika banners, the chill that ran through the watching crowds felt remarkably genuine and sinister.

But it was on a filming day towards the end of our shoot that the translation of my story from page to screen really came full circle. The scene was the capture of an Auxiliary Unit bunker by Wehrmacht soldiers. Young local boys and old men being dragged out, beaten and shot. What made it feel like a return to the beginning of my journey with Resistance was that we were filming this scene on the site of a real Auxiliary Unit bunker outside Usk. At some point during the Second World War real farmers and gamekeepers from this area, many as young as 17, would have trained in this bunker, preparing to conduct their acts of sabotage regardless of the fact they’d been told their life expectancy was no more than two weeks. For me, watching the extras and actors film this scene provoked a double-layered sensation.

I had, by that point in our shoot, become familiar with seeing events I’d created at my desk made manifest on set. With the filming of the show I’d got a glimpse of the wider alternative world I’d created for Resistance. But with this more intimate scene, taking place on the very same ground where that alternative history would have happened (and which for those young recruited farmers was an all too possible reality) the merging of imagination, fact and recreation was invested with an even greater voltage.

The scene was, too, a potent reminder of why I’d sat down to write Resistance. I wanted to write an anti-war novel that used an alternative Second World War to bring questions of sacrifice, collaboration and occupation close to home. To create a story which tried to use that narrative as a lens through which to view and question all wars.

I hope that in translating those aspirations of the novel into a film the cast and crew of Resistance have found yet another way to keep that most crucial of questions resonant and alive.

Owen Sheers will be discussing ‘Resistance’ and showing clips from the film with Francine Stock at 7pm on Sunday May 29 and with Peter Florence at 9am on Monday May 30

For details and tickets see the Hay Festival programme

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Star Wars 3D and Live Action TV Series Update from George Lucas

2011-05-25T22:09:00.000+01:00

May 25, 2011 by B. Alan Orange

George Lucas talks Star Wars 3D and TV show delayStar Tours: The Adventures Continue has recently launched at Disneyland, and to help promote this rebooted ride, Star Wars universe creator and director George Lucas made an appearance on G4's Attack of the Show, where he talked exclusively about the 3D conversion of Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace, and why the live action Untitled Star Wars TV Series is still being delayed.

When asked why we should trust that his Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace in 3D is going to be better than the recent 3D converted films that we have seen, this is what George Lucas had to say.

"We got into the 3D field a long time ago. We've worked for years and years to build a group of people who could do this in an economic, reasonable time frame. It wasn't until the last few years that we achieved that. We had Industrial Light and Magic supervise the whole thing. They are very familiar with it. The problem is that the people doing the conversion don't know what the sets looked like, or where the people were standing. Those are critical issues. We were able to have people who were there, who knew where the actors were on set, and who were experts in the technology. They could help the company grow to a whole new level. And I think we have taken it to a level that is equal to anything that is being shot in 3D. There are two kinds of 3D. One is behind the screen, and the other is the traditional "effect" of 3D, where they poke things in your face. I am not a big believer of poking things in your face. I am a believer in watching a 3D movie, which is a better experience than watching a 2D movie. It's like going from black and white to color. It's a better way to watch it. Its three-dimensional, it feels much better. That's what you are going to get from the new Star Wars."

When asked if there were any particular moments in Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace 3D that utilize the process to an effective degree, George Lucas didn't really sell the idea as necessary.

"There are a few moments, but they aren't big moments. There are moments when a person is standing in the background that has a key piece of information. In the 2D movie, they sort of blend in with the background. You don't notice them that much. Now, in 3D, they stand out. You really get to see what they are talking about. You get the story much faster and much better. It's nothing overwhelming. It's just a better experience, and it's easier to understand the story experience."

Talk then moved onto the live action Untitled Star Wars TV Series, which has been delayed indefinitely. George Lucas explains why.

"It sits on the shelf. We have 50 hours. We are trying to figure out a different way of making movies. We are looking for a different technology that we can use, that will make it economically feasible to shoot the show. Right now, it looks like the Star Wars features. But we have to figure out how to make it at about a tenth of the cost of the features, because its television. We are working toward that, and we continue to work towards that. We will get there at some point. It's just a very difficult process. Obviously, when we do figure this problem out, it will dramatically effect features, because feature films are costing between $250 to $350 million. When we figure this out, they will be able to make a feature film for $50 million."

You can check out the entire interview in the clip below.

Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope was released May 25th, 1977 and stars Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Peter Cushing, Alec Guinness, Anthony Daniels, Kenny Baker, Peter Mayhew. The film is directed by George Lucas.

Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace was released May 19th, 1999 and stars Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, Jake Lloyd, Ian McDiarmid, Pernilla August, Oliver Ford Davies, Hugh Quarshie. The film is directed by George Lucas.

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Conviction, DVD review

2011-05-23T22:02:00.000+01:00

The true story of Massachusetts waiter Kenny Waters can be told, quite simply, in a sentence. He was jailed without parole in 1983 for murder, and served eighteen years while his sister Betty Ann dedicated her life to researching how she could prove him innocent.

Conviction feels like a loyal dramatisation of the tale, which focuses on Betty Anne (Hilary Swank), a single working mum, continuing to fight the battle, despite the forces of America’s legal system, and her family, being against her.

This small-town legal drama is rescued from blandness by the many famous names and faces in the cast, and the character-driven sub-plots that they carry: Minnie Driver plays the bored but smart British law school undergraduate who finds a much-needed project in Betty Anne; Melissa Leo is horribly wasted as a dried out and sour policewoman with a vengeance.

But it is Sam Rockwell’s Kenny, a charismatic but scarred and unpredictable man, capable of changing the way you feel about him from one scene to the next, who carries the film. He is also the only marker of time passing – his face, his eyes, the way he holds his own weight seem to tell the story of his years in prison.

Director Tony Goldwyn, who has directed episodes of popular TV series including Dexter and Law & Order, specialises in drawing out suspense in a crime story and offsetting it with a family saga. He does it well here, managing to resist temptation to spin the tale into a melodrama, even though the story hinges on a potentially spineless theme: sisterly sacrifice.

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Cannes Film Festival: Tree of Life wins Palme d'Or

2011-05-22T22:02:00.000+01:00

Gardner said when it came to the prospect of Cannes prizes, Malick had been "very sweet. He said, 'If we were that lucky, I'd like to thank my wife Becky and my parents."'

The Tree of Life, which opens Friday in the United States, stars Brad Pitt, Sean Penn and Jessica Chastain in a far-flung story of family life that plays out against a cosmic backdrop, including glorious visuals of the creation of the universe and the era of dinosaurs.

Dunst won for her role in the end-of-the-world tale Melancholia, whose director, Denmark's Lars von Trier, was banned from the festival after sympathetic remarks for Adolf Hitler at a movie press conference.

"Wow, what a week it's been," said Dunst, who plays a deeply depressed woman coping with her family's foibles as a rogue planet bears down on a possible collision course with Earth.

"It's an honor that is a once-in-a-lifetime thing for an actress," said Dunst, who thanked festival organizers for allowing "Melancholia" to remain in the competition after von Trier's Nazi remarks and offered warm words for her director. "I want to thank Lars for giving me the opportunity to be so brave."

Von Trier was not allowed to attend Sunday's ceremony.

Jean Dujardin claimed the best-actor prize for the silent film The Artist, in which he plays a 1920s Hollywood star whose career crumbles as talking pictures become the norm. In keeping with his singing, hoofing character, Dujardin did a little tap dance as he took to the Cannes stage.

Dujardin said he wanted to share his prize with co-star Berenice Bejo, who stood up and blew kisses at him on stage. The film was directed by Bejo's husband, French filmmaker Michel Hazanavicius, who also directed Dujardin in the "OSS 117" spy spoofs.

"I hope to make other silent films with you," Dujardin told Hazanavicius.

Several well-received films, among them Spanish director Pedro Almodovar's horror thriller The Skin I Live In and British filmmaker Lynne Ramsay's We Need to Talk About Kevin went home empty-handed.

Malick, who has made only five films in a nearly 40-year career, previously won the directing prize in 1979 for Days of Heaven on his last trip to Cannes. The Tree of Life was shot three years ago and festival organizers had hoped to premiere it at Cannes last year, but it was not ready in time.

Prizes were awarded by a nine-member jury headed by Robert De Niro that included actors Uma Thurman and Jude Law.

The Tree of Life was the first American film to win top honors at Cannes since back-to-back recipients in 2003 (Gus Van Sant's "Elephant") and 2004 (Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11").

De Niro told reporters choosing the top winner was difficult because of the range and "great qualities" among the 20 competing titles but that The Tree of Life ultimately fit the bill.

"It had the size, the importance, the intention, whatever you want to call it, that seemed to fit the prize," De Niro said. "Most of us felt the movie was terrific."

The second-place grand prize was shared by Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, two-time winners of the Palme d'Or, for their troubled-youth drama The Kid With a Bike, and Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan for his meditative saga Once Upon a Time in Anatolia.

The third-place jury prize went to French actress-turned-director Maiwenn's child-protection drama Polisse.

Lars Von Trier's Melancholia found favor with Cannes jurors.

"As far as I'm concerned, it's one of the best films. I think it's a great film," said French director Olivier Assayas, a juror.

Von Trier provoked a firestorm at the film's press conference when he delivered rambling remarks about his German heritage in which he said he understood and sympathized with Hitler.

He also made wisecracks about Jews, comments that brought condemnation from Jewish and Holocaust groups and prompted Cannes organizers to boot him out, an unprecedented punishment for a filmmaker who won the Palme d'Or in 2000 with Dancer in the Dark.

Another Danish filmmaker, Nicolas Winding Refn, won the directing award for Drive, his action thriller starring Ryan Gosling as a Hollywood stunt driver caught up in a heist gone wrong. Refn gushed thanks for Gosling, who producers allowed to choose which director he wanted.

"He really wanted to make the movie and he really wanted to make it with me," Refn said.

The screenplay award went to Israeli filmmaker Joseph Cedar for Footnote, his tale of rival father and son Talmudic scholars.

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Hay Festival 2011: Richard E. Grant on growing up in Africa

2011-05-21T22:02:00.000+01:00

While Grant never had a stutter, he did once have speech issues of his own. When on April 29 1982, he arrived in England to try to make it as an actor – he reels off the date instantly – he spoke the sort of Noël Coward colonial English Grant called Wah-Wah. Later, this became the title of the 2006 film which he both wrote and directed.

At this year’s Hay Festival, whose title sponsor is The Telegraph, Grant is speaking to Peter Godwin, the writer, about his own childhood in Africa, the subject of Godwin’s new book, The Fear. It immediately struck a chord with Grant. “As soon as I read it, I tried to get in touch with him. It’s a very rare feeling when you read something and you feel you know who that person is. I did get in touch and that’s how we became friends.” Although Godwin grew up in Zimbabwe and Grant in Swaziland, they’re roughly the same age – Grant has just turned 54 – and both witnessed the end of colonialism and the uneasy transition to independence.

Swaziland became independent in 1968, when Grant was 11. This was a big year for him in all sorts of ways. In particular, it was the year when he witnessed his mother having sex in a car with his father’s best friend while he lay in the back pretending to be asleep. This was the moment when he started keeping a secret diary. It was also the moment when he gave up on God. Shortly afterwards, his parents divorced and his father plunged into what he calls “extremely violent alcoholism” – so violent that he tried to shoot Grant after he’d poured away a case of whisky in a doomed attempt to stop his father from drinking.

Throughout the rest of his childhood and his adolescence Grant kept his dark secret. “I think the first person I told was my wife. I certainly never told any of my teenage friends because that would have given them ammunition. I also think I blamed myself for what had happened. I know from other children who have been through similar things – you blame yourself for seeing something you shouldn’t have seen. If you told anyone else, the floodgates of blame would open. So you censor yourself.”

All this happened a long time ago, of course, and the days when Grant kept everything bottled up are long gone too – he recreated the scene in the car for the opening of Wah-Wah. He doesn’t even have the same name any more. Back then he was Richard Esterhuysen. He changed it to Grant when he became an actor. However, the effects of what he saw and what he kept quiet about clearly haven’t gone away. Scrape a little below the surface and there they are. Grant has been married to Joan Washington, a voice coach, for the past 25 years. Does he attach a greater premium to monogamy as a result of what happened?

“Absolutely,” he says leaning forward in his wing-backed chair. “Because I saw the nuclear damage it did my father and that was the most profound marker of how to live my life. I place an enormous premium on loyalty. If someone betrays me, I can forgive them rationally, but emotionally I have found it impossible to do so.

“For instance, I had a 29-year friendship with someone that was betrayed eight years ago by this person when they accidentally copied me into an email that they sent to a mutual friend. I read it and found this poison in the middle [it was to do with what he calls “an annihilation” of his Wah-Wah script]. That ended the friendship and I was absolutely devastated. The trouble is that if you place such loyalty on your friendships, as I do, then it doesn’t really allow for much human error.”

It’s affected his moral outlook in other ways too, he thinks. Once his judgmental needle swings into position, it seldom budges. “When I meet a couple, I’m always interested to know if they have been together for a long time, or how loyal they are, because I know that will impact on how much I’m prepared to trust them. If I know someone is really promiscuous, that will certainly temper how close I allow myself to get to that person.”

So he inherently disapproves of them if they are promiscuous?

“Disapprove… hmm. That’s a strong word. But often on location when people are married or with a long-time partner and they’re bonking someone else on the cast and crew, and then you have to pretend it’s not going on when the other person turns up – I hate that. On two occasions, I have absolutely refused to collude with it.” What? He’s actually told the other person? “No, because you can’t play God and that would be so hurtful. But it does change my attitude towards that person. If that’s being old-fashioned, my hand goes up into the sky to accept that.”

Here again, if you were prone to flip journalistic analysis, you might detect a dislike, an abhorrence even, of keeping secrets – his own or anyone else’s. Oddly enough, the one person Grant has been able to forgive is the least likely of all: his mother. “As soon as I knew something about my mother that she didn’t know I knew, that completely warped any possibility of a normal relationship. At least it did until it was confronted and that didn’t happen until I was 42 years old. We had a very long face-to-face and there was one area which hadn’t been touched upon which was the car-seat stuff. When I brought it up, she said, ‘Please forgive me.’ I think for a parent to say that to a child, even though I was middle-aged by that point, is about the most powerful thing they can do. And of course you forgive them.”

Partly because of his performance in Withnail & I, his breakthrough film, in which he played a bitter out-of-work actor, I’ve always had this image of Grant as a Great Hater, someone who nurses a deep loathing of anyone who has crossed or slighted him. When I put this to him, he gives a shout of incredulous laughter. “A Great Hater? My God… I am very aware there is not much moderation in how I see things or do things. It’s kind of all or nothing with me. If I love someone it’s to the nth degree. And if I dislike them I suppose it’s the same. A Great Hater? That’s hilarious. I’m going to have to work on that.”

On the day we met, Grant had just returned from spending a weekend with Bruce Robinson, writer and director of Withnail and How to Get Ahead in Advertising, which Grant also starred in. They’ve been close ever since. Indeed, Grant says, they’ve been close pretty much from the moment they met. “As soon I met him I had this strange sense of being plugged into something very familiar, almost as if we already knew one another.”

Like Grant’s father, Robinson was a combustible drunk – he’s given up booze now. “I suppose what Bruce shares with my father is this combination of being enormously vulnerable and vituperative at the same time. That makes for incredible comedy. My relationship with Bruce is very cut-and-thrust jibey, but he makes me laugh more than anyone else. I’ve never really thought about it before, but yes, there is something about the best of my father in him.”

Robinson has recently returned to directing after almost 20 years, with an adaptation of Hunter S Thompson’s novel The Rum Diary, starring Johnny Depp. However, there’s no part for Grant in it. “It’s an American story so it never crossed my mind that I might get a part. But if Bruce made The Gin Diary and it was set in England and I wasn’t in it, then, yes, I’d be asking what had gone wrong.”

Grant’s relationship with Hollywood can’t have been helped by the publication of his engagingly/suicidally frank diaries about his experiences there. Bruce Willis, for one, is unlikely to include him on his Christmas card list after Grant complained about his self-centred behaviour – they were in the megaflop Hudson Hawk together. However, he says he was never aware of doors slamming shut in his face afterwards. “I don’t think I was sufficiently famous or powerful for that to be a problem. It’s true that Joel Silver [producer of Hudson Hawk] or Bruce Willis have never employed me again, but I didn’t expect them to because that whole shoot was absolute chaos.” For a judgmental, morally rigorous person, Grant seems to have an astonishing number of friends, including fellow Hay headliners Nigella Lawson and Rob Lowe.

“That’s just because of my age,” he says. Is he sure? “Well, it’s true that I’ve never been solitary, although I spend a lot of time alone. I’ve never felt lonely or been shy. I suppose I also feel that you only have one shot in your life, so if you read something you really like, or admire someone’s work, it’s worth letting them know. I do seem to have met a lot of people that way.”

On the list of Grant’s screen credits that I was sent prior to interviewing him, it says: “Lanky British player who has had some success in mainstream Hollywood features.” Accurate enough, I suppose, although it seems a bit grudging. He’s actually been in some excellent films – working with Scorsese, and Coppola – and he’s just finished what must be one of his weirdest-ever jobs, playing Michael Heseltine to Meryl Streep’s Margaret Thatcher in the film The Iron Lady. Does he find acting as fulfilling as he did, say, 20 years ago? “Do you find journalism as fulfilling as you did 20 years ago?” he shoots back. “It depends,” I say cautiously.

“Exactly. It depends what you’re doing. When you’re around someone like Meryl Streep then every fibre of excitement you had about being an actor comes hurtling back at you. But it doesn’t happen very often, regrettably. Some people of my age still have the focus and drive they had when they were younger. I know actors who are out there on the streets of Soho ready to rottweiler their way into a casting session at any cost. But with me, I’m much more interested in where I’m going to go on holiday.”

When he was in his forties, Grant went into psychoanalysis. “I remember the therapist saying to me, ‘Although your father is dead and your parents are divorced, in the heart of you, as a child, you want them to be together again and you want them to be alive.’ But that’s what we all have, isn’t it? It’s the Wizard of Oz – click your heels three times and you’ll go home. And home is where you want to be. So, did what happened to me define me? Yes,” he says. “I suppose in a way it did.”

Richard E Grant will be talking to Peter Godwin at Hay on June 3. For tickets and information see the Hay Festival programme.

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Insidious calls forth the wrong demons

2011-05-02T23:35:00.001+01:00

Slashers slash you, psychotics torture you and monsters eat you. Vampires and zombies require you to share their unappetising fate. Demons, however, are something else: they can possess your very soul. Yet they pose a problem for the fright-seeking filmgoer: what are they?

InsidiousProduction year: 2010Country: USACert (UK): 15Runtime: 102 minsDirectors: James WanCast: Andrew Astor, Angus Sampson, Barbara Hershey, Leigh Whannell, Lin Shaye, Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne, Ty SimpkinsMore on this film

During the heyday of big-screen demonic horror, from the mid-60s to the mid-80s, this wasn't much of a problem. Fiends still enjoyed a respectable pedigree in the canon of organised faiths. Not just The Exorcist, but other landmark titles such as Rosemary's Baby and The Omen drew upon timeless dogma that even unbelievers could appreciate. Thereafter, however, the great religions began to go off hell and its damnable denizens. Understandably, horror films started to rely more heavily on flesh-and-blood bogeymen.

Nonetheless, there seems to be something about the demon's allure that has survived ecclesiastical relegation. The last couple of decades have seen a revival in its cinematic fortunes. However, it's been expected to move with the times. Some of the recent wave of demonic films, like The Rite, The Exorcism of Emily Rose and The Last Exorcism, have tried to root their devilry once more in a Christian context, but it's not these that have taken off. The big hitters have been The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity, and both of these chose to secularise their fiends.

Insidious too has little time for the first estate. A would-be clerical exorcist is quickly shown the door in favour of geeky ghostbusters armed with complicated equipment and led by a new age seer. All goes scarily enough so long as the hobgoblins are engaged only in that teasing foreplay that seems to amuse them so much. As usual, doors slam themselves, books rearrange themselves and mysterious imprints appear, all to suitably creepy effect. Yet eventually we have to be told what's generating these phenomena; as soon as we are, everything goes to the devil.

The film-makers deserve credit for creating a logically consistent universe. It's just that without roots in any genuine residual fears, the world they conjure becomes merely farcical. Nowadays, demons who depend on cadaverous complexions, grand Guignol makeup and Miss Havisham's cast-off togs for their spookiness, and whose lair features dry ice and gothic candlesticks in place of the torments of hell, just can't be expected to cut it.

In the face of today's glumly materialist attitudes, you can't help worrying that our so recently disinterred fiends may be forced to give up the ghost, and with it their comeback ambitions. One of the most enterprising of recent demonic titles was the Spanish found-footage shocker [REC]. Yet when Hollywood remade the film as Quarantine, the supernatural prime mover was stripped out in favour of a mere rogue virus.

Still, we have to acknowledge that in the first half of Insidious, the demons deliver the goods. As unexplained shadows, they conjure up a brand of dread that no other bogeyman could have managed. Fortunately for them, we seem to continue to harbour sufficient fear of unspecified, menacing malevolence; it's just when it declares its hand that it falls flat.

You can see why this might be. We're still afraid that we or those around us may become possessed by evils – but by disease, dementia, mania, depression or rage, rather than satanic imps. In the early stages of Insidious, the diabolic atmosphere is knitted to real-life torments. Renai and Josh fear that their child has fallen prey to an incurable medical disorder. Renai fears that she's growing old and that her husband is becoming a different kind of man. He fears that she's becoming mentally ill. Such are our real terrors; nowadays, hints of the demonic can underscore them, but not surpass them.

As is customary in a film such as this, Renai experiences spooky happenings while Josh is away. When she recounts them he doubts her sanity, but when the spookiness confronts them both at once he's forced to come round. In fact, Insidious might have worked better if the spooks had stayed within Renai's mind.

Of all demonic films, some consider The Shining the most chilling. Yet while The Overlook may indeed be haunted, the demons that really matter are those summoned up by Jack's own mind. In the future, fiends should perhaps settle for a merely supporting role, as metaphors for the terrors that have outlasted them.

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Jack's Black: Osbourne junior to direct Black Sabbath film

2011-04-28T19:39:00.000+01:00

Jack Osbourne is to direct his first feature film, Black Sabbath, according to reports.

Not to be confused with Mario Bava's 1963 Italian portmanteau, from which the band fronted by Jack's father, Ozzy, took their name, Black Sabbath will be an original horror film featuring the group's music.

While this will be Osbourne's first directing job, it is not his first foray into the world of film; he co-produced concert documentary God Bless Ozzy Osbourne, which premiered at the Tribeca film festival last weekend. Osbourne Jr is again joining forces with producer Marc Weingarten, who co-produced the recent documentary. Shooting is to begin by the end of the year.

Plot details have yet to be released but it is thought the film may be the same project that Sabbath's lead guitarist, Tony Iommi, was linked to a few years ago, along with Texas Chainsaw Massacre producer Mike Fleiss, who directed God Bless Ozzy Osbourne. Whether Iommi is involved this time is not clear, though he was to score the original project and was the only member of Black Sabbath to be present throughout all of the band's personnel changes.

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Alan Partridge film to shoot next year in Norwich

2011-04-28T16:04:00.000+01:00

Steve Coogan has told interviewers that a big-screen version of Alan Partridge is set to shoot next year. Speaking at the Tribeca film festival, where a feature-length version of his BBC series The Trip is screening, Coogan said Borat's Pete Baynham and In the Loop's Armando Iannucci were currently working alongside him on the screenplay.

"We left it behind for a while, but we came back to it because we got a few ideas," Coogan told The Playlist. "We're writing it right now, going to shoot it next year. Don't know who will direct it."

Partridge began life on the BBC Radio 4 comedy programme On the Hour in 1991, graduating to the series' TV iteration The Day Today in 1994. He also had his own show, Knowing Me, Knowing You ... with Alan Partridge on Radio 4 and that series also transferred to TV in 1994.

Iannucci refuted suggestions that the new film might be set – Borat-style – in the US. "We don't see Alan, for example getting Simon Cowell's spot on American Idol and going over there. That's too good for Alan,' he said. "Alan's future is always brighter in his head than it is in the real world."

He later tweeted: "The Partridge news is that we've now agreed a story for the film. It's NOT Alan goes to America."

The Playlist said the film would be set in Norwich, the city where Partridge was working during his last TV outing, I'm Alan Partridge, two series of which screened in 1997 and 2002. The DJ then worked for the fictional Radio Norwich, but may be forced to find new employment this time around: on 29 June 2006, a new radio station for Norwich, owned by the Tindle Radio Group, launched under the name of 99.9 Radio Norwich.

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Fast and Furious 5 blazes a trail to the top of the box office

2011-04-28T11:54:00.000+01:00

Over the past couple of weeks, distributors and cinema owners have been quick to blame the sunshine for the depressed box office. But this column has always maintained that if there's a film audiences really want to see, they will forego the pleasures of a sunny afternoon or a warm summer evening for a couple of hours.

Fast & Furious 5Production year: 2011Country: USACert (UK): 12ARuntime: 130 minsDirectors: Justin LinCast: Chris Ludacris Bridges, Dwayne Johnson, Jordana Brewster, Paul Walker, Tyrese Gibson, Vin DieselMore on this film

The latest film to storm the box office despite an unseasonally warm Easter is Fast & Furious 5. The latest entry in the popular cars-and-crime franchise took a stonking £5.33m including £1.32m in Thursday previews. Add in Easter Monday takings, and that figure rises to £6.37m over five days.

The figures are in line with the opening of fourth picture, Fast & Furious, over the Easter 2009 weekend. That took £4.93m over the Friday-Sunday period, and £6.01m including Easter Monday. At the time, no previous entry in the F&F franchise had debuted above £3m, the best result being 2 Fast 2 Furious' £2.75m including previews of £321,000, in June 2003. The original The Fast & the Furious was relatively lacklustre in the UK, since it had the misfortune to open in September 2001, three days after 9/11.

Given Russell Brand's popularity at home, the UK might have expected to prove a bright spot for the actor's remake of 1981 hit Arthur. Sadly, for distributor Warner Bros, that has not proved to be the case. A US debut of $12.2m indicated a UK opening around £1.2m, whereas in fact the comedy achieved £764,000 over Friday-Sunday, and just over £1m including Easter Monday takings. The contrasting results of Arthur and Fast & Furious 5 would seem to indicate that, while sunshine may prove a small handicap for a must-see title, sunny skies do deter audiences when their interest is moderate and non-urgent. The danger for Arthur is that its audience will soon face rival temptations: Thor is hardly direct competition, but its arrival on Wednesday may nevertheless push Arthur further down people's Want To See lists. In other words, your opening weekend is your best shot, and it only gets tougher going forward.

Beastly, starring Alex Pettyfer and Vanessa Hudgens, landed in fifth place with a mediocre £553,000, and £655,000 including Easter Monday. On closer examination, it's much worse than that, with a hefty £268,000 coming from previews, meaning that the film in fact earned just £285,000 from the three-day weekend period, ie ninth place. Red Riding Hood, another example of Hollywood's current vogue for fairytale reinvention, debuted with a much stronger £842,000 the previous weekend. The industry is rife with rumours that Pettyfer has already developed major movie-star attitude – a status that, as far as box office is concerned, he has yet to earn.

Two new 3D documentaries both landed in the top 15. Isle of Man motorbike flick TT3D: Closer to the Edge, bravely going up against the scripted testosterone thrills of Fast & Furious, opened with £313,000 from 79 screens, boosted by extensive previews totaling £182,000. Thanks to those previews, it achieved the second highest screen average of any film on release, £3,962, behind Fast & Furious, of course. The third highest site average belonged to fellow 3D documentary Pina, about the Pina Bausch dance troupe, which debuted with £72,000 from 19 screens, including modest previews of £10,000. The films could hardly be more different in subject matter. Following the success of Werner Herzog's cave painting doc, Cave of Forgotten Dreams (£500,000 to date), it's clear that audiences of many different stripes have an appetite for non-fiction in 3D.

TT3D's opening number is the biggest for a documentary since Justin Bieber's Never Say Never in February. Leaving aside concert films, it's ahead of the debuts of strong performers such as Waltz With Bashir (£113,000), Man On Wire (£99,000) and Touching the Void (£115,000), but behind the bar-setting opening of Fahrenheit 9/11 (£1.30m).

Now that the Easter holiday is over, the industry is carrying out a postmortem on the family-film offer. It was, in a word, disappointing. Despite its status as top title, biggest letdown is surely Twentieth Century Fox's Rio, with £8.33m so far (after 18 days), and just £1.23m over the four-day Easter weekend. OK, it's not quite over yet for the picture, but when you compare with the recent Tangled (£20.33m), Despicable Me (£20.04m) and Gnomeo & Juliet (£15.51m), it's a serious under-performance. The result is even more troubling when contrasted with the top performers in the Ice Age franchise, from the same director and animation studio. Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs maxed out at £35m, while second entry The Meltdown managed just shy of £30m. The original Ice Age grossed just over £15m.

Also failing to set tells ringing is Hop, from Universal's Illumination Entertainment, which got off to a flying start with Despicable Me. Hop's £6.12m to date is a big step down from that earlier picture. Hop's mix of animation and live action makes Alvin & the Chipmunks a fairer comparison, but the last one of those exceeded £23m.

Then there's Disney's Winnie the Pooh, with £402,000 so far, and Mars Needs Mums, with £268,000. Regarding the latter calamity, kindest thing to say is: look away, people, look away, nothing to see here.

Every holdover title on our chart fell by at least 40%, but the wooden spoon goes to James Franco medieval stoner-comedy Your Highness, which falls out of the top 10 after just one week, with a drop of 68%. With a screen average of just £504, the picture is likely to lose many of its sites and showtimes from Friday.

Following seven consecutive weekends when box office lagged the 2010 equivalent frames, in many cases by significant amounts, the good news is that, at last, weekend takings are up on 2010. Of course, the equivalent frame in 2010 did not benefit from the boost of Easter traffic, since the holiday that year fell 2-5 April. Exactly a year ago, cinemas were already suffering a post-Easter comedown, with new entrant Date Night leading a weak field. A week later, Iron Man 2 arrived to inject box-office Viagra, and cinemas will be hoping for a similar effect this weekend from Marvel adaptation Thor, which has already picked up a handy sum in Easter Monday previews, and has more preview slots on Wednesday and Thursday. Competing against Thor are horror flick Insidious, which has done well in the US, and indie comedy Cedar Rapids.

1. Fast & Furious 5: £5,332,096 from 437 sites (New)

2. Rio, £886,669 from 519 sites. Total: £8,017,662

3. Arthur, £764,468 from 434 sites (New)

4. Scream 4, £730,963 from 415 sites. Total: £4,046,069

5. Beastly, £553,069 from 250 sites (New)

6. Hop, £466,676 from 492 sites. Total: £5,940,142

7. Red Riding Hood, £345,421 from 404 sites. Total: £1,901,603

8. Source Code, £331,988 from 346 sites. Total: £5,276,549

9. TT3D, £312,998 from 79 sites (New)

10. Limitless, £282,879 from 309 sites. Total: £7,685,395

Dum Maaro Dum, 67 screens, £91,711

Pina, 19 screens, £71,809

Adèle Blanc-Sec, 28 screens, £29,869 + £10,546 previews

Ko, 15 screens, £27,103

Dharti, 8 screens, £13,420

How I Ended This Summer, 10 screens, £8,005 + £3,635 previews

Island, 1 screen, £2,253

Taxi zum Klo, 7 screens, £1,743

Sweetgrass, £263 + £765 previews

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Pinewood backs Peel takeover bid

2011-04-28T07:50:00.000+01:00

Pinewood Shepperton, the studios where films including the latest Harry Potter movie and the James Bond franchise were shot, has given its backing to an improved takeover offer from Peel Holdings following rival interest from former Harrods owner Mohamed Al Fayed.

Peel, the commercial property group which leased part of Salford's MediaCityUK site to the BBC, upped its original bid by around £8m, valuing the business at £96.1m. It already owns 29.8% of Pinewood.

The board of Pinewood, led by former ITV executive chairman Michael Grade, said Peel had been a supportive shareholder and the takeover proposal provided the business with the "long-term stability it needs to build on the success of the past few years".

"In the context of increasing illiquidity in the trading of Pinewood shares, the Pinewood independent directors believe that this stable time in a volatile industry offers shareholders an opportune moment to realise value," Grade said.

"Peel has been a most supportive shareholder, committed to our strategy and vision for the group. The board is satisfied that the long-term future of these assets, which make such a contribution to the growth of the UK's creative industries, will pass into safe hands."

Peel will pay 200p in cash per Pinewood share, up from an offer of 190p per share on 7 April. Al Fayed confirmed last week that he was considering making a bid for Pinewood.

Pinewood shares, which have gained more than quarter in value since Peel's initial offer, were down 1.4% at 210p at 8.25am on Wednesday.

The 75-year-old business is planning an ambitious £20m Project Pinewood expansion at its studios in Buckinghamshire that will see it build new facilities and sets on a par with Hollywood.

Its television studios have shot Dancing on Ice, Dragons' Den, My Family, Piers Morgan's Life Stories and Ant & Dec's Push The Button.

Peel said it expected Pinewood to operate independently of its own media assets, which include the new home for the BBC, ITV, Coronation Street and the University of Salford at the MediaCityUK development at Salford Quays.

The group invests in infrastructure, transport and real estate in the UK and has nearly £6bn of assets. It recently sold the Trafford Centre to Capital Shopping Centres for £1.6bn and is chaired by billionaire investor John Whittaker.

"Peel is a long-term investor in Pinewood and the wider media sector through its MediaCityUK investment and looks forward to supporting the Pinewood management in growing its operational business and developing its unique Project Pinewood proposal," Whittaker said.

"Peel represents a long-term strategic partner for Pinewood in continuing to grow and develop the business."

Grade added: "For 75 years the names Pinewood and Shepperton have been iconic in the global screen industries.

"The current management has advanced the business, investing to re-establish it as a world-class centre for all creative industries and expanding internationally with Pinewood representation now in five key regions around the world.

"We have developed a digital infrastructure to support our UK studios and Pinewood is planning for the next 75 years with innovative schemes such as Project Pinewood."

'I'll be back': Arnold Schwarzenegger to reprise Terminator role

2011-04-28T03:25:00.000+01:00

A bidding war is expected among studios for the rights to a film that would mark the 63 year-old's return as an action hero. A script has yet to be written but Justin Lin, who is best known for his work on The Fast and the Furious franchise, has been lined up to direct. Schwarzenegger hinted last month that he was ready to step back into a role he first played in 1984 and which coined his catchphrase: "I'll be back."

"I can step very comfortably into the entertainment world and do an action movie with the same violence that I've always done," he said.

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Abel, DVD review

2011-04-27T23:15:00.000+01:00

Cert 15, 82 mins, Network Releasing

There's a streak of bravado at the core of Abel. Rather than play it safe in his debut feature film as director, Diego Luna – best known as the actor who played one of the testosterone-teens in Y Tu Mama Tambien – chooses to use not just child actors, but picked-from-the-wilderness amateur child actors.

It's a snort of derision in the face of the adage 'never work with children', and it turns out to be wholly justified. Luna shows himself an eminently capable director in this slim and elegiac film, and he unearths a genuine talent in 10-year-old first-time actor Christopher Ruiz-Esparza.

Ruiz-Esparza plays Abel, a young boy who returns home from a mental health institute to a family without a father figure. For a matter of days Abel surveys the scene with intense muteness. He sees his brother and sister quietly run amok while his mother strains under the economic pressure of bringing up a family.

And then Abel bursts into action. He fixes the toilet, hangs pictures in the hallway, castigates his sister, interrogates her boyfriend, and gets into his mother's bed. In other words, he becomes the patriarch.

Problem is, he also thinks he's the patriarch. Abel believes he's the father of his siblings and the husband of his mother, and any challenge to this new world order immediately sends him into a fit (presumably the type that first put him in the hospital – we are never definitively told).

Madness swarms at the edges of this film, much like the Buñuelian symbol ants pouring from a hole that Luna borrows early on. But the tension between Abel's reality and that of his surroundings is often played for laughs, especially when Abel's father returns to the house and turns out to be far more childish than young Abel, who is actually quite a successful parent.

The joke does wear a little thin – not least for Abel's mother, who has to suffer the inevitable bedroom scene – but there's an intriguing air to Abel and a well-paced finale that prove Luna's direction is mature beyond his years.

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The Tourist, DVD review

2011-04-27T19:11:00.001+01:00

This confused thriller-romance serves as a reminder that expensive ingredients do not necessarily make for a satisfying dish. Johnny Depp phones in his performance as Frank, a bemused American tourist unwittingly caught up in the schemes of mysterious action-woman Elise (Jolie, floundering as so often when asked to do more than look sexy). In his infamous Golden Globes speech, comedian Ricky Gervais said that in 2010 "it seemed like everything was in 3-D. Except the characters in The Tourist." He was being kind.

After much wistful sighing and preposterous plot twists, it emerges that Elise is a British spy on the trail of a renegade financier. He is wanted by Interpol (led by a wasted Paul Bettany) for robbing the British taxpayer, and also by an unscrupulous gangster (Steven Berkoff) whom he defrauded. As the handsome stars leap around various pieces of lavish scenery, the plot draws towards a conclusion that is at once nonsensical, predictable and unsatisfying. A couple of comic thrills and sumptuous cinematography from Oscar-winner John Seale do not make up for inconsistent tone, an unsatisfactory ending and a remarkable lack of chemistry between the leads.

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Are the Saw creators returning to their low-budget roots with Insidious?

2011-04-24T04:41:00.000+01:00

Even outside the horror circuit, you wouldn't read an article about the four Scream movies that didn't mention director Wes Craven or scriptwriter Kevin Williamson. You wouldn't read an article about the Halloween movies – one groundbreaking original and nine more, including sequels and remakes – that didn't mention John Carpenter. But it's quite possible that you've read about the Saw movies, all seven, with their increasingly outré, gory set-pieces, without having heard a single word about their creators: director James Wan and scriptwriter-actor Leigh Whannell.

InsidiousProduction year: 2010Country: USACert (UK): 15Runtime: 102 minsDirectors: James WanCast: Andrew Astor, Angus Sampson, Barbara Hershey, Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne, Ty SimpkinsMore on this film

"It's nuts!" laughs Whannell. Both 34, he and Wan are the last unsung impresarios of horror, no mean feat in a genre which claims Rob Zombie as an auteur. But these two didn't set out to take that world by storm. Though without them, Saw has become a multimillion-dollar byword for trashy, amoral, multiplex fodder, their first instalment – a far cry from the six that followed – is really a neat indie horror thriller. They certainly don't bristle at it, but then Wan and Whannell are now cheerfully inured to the phrase "torture porn".

"People who've seen the original Saw don't usually use that term," notes Wan. "They'd maybe use it to describe the sequels and the imitators. I was approached to do the sequel, but I felt that I'd already told the story I wanted to tell and I didn't want to repeat myself."

With their third film together – after the little-seen puppet chiller Dead Silence – the hip, funny Melbourne-based duo are trying to reclaim some of the ground that's been denied them. Produced by the backers of the Paranormal Activity franchise, Insidious sees Wan and Whannell returning to their low-budget roots with a tale of a suburban couple (Rose Byrne and Patrick Wilson) who are blighted by ghosts when their little boy falls into a coma. Says Wan: "I took some time off, and I knew that I wanted to come back with a movie that Leigh and I had complete creative control over. So I said to him, 'Look, we've always loved ghost stories. Let's write a really small, contained film … but one that is fucking scary.'

"We didn't want to make just another haunted house film," he continues. "In the same way Saw was a serial killer movie with a twist, what Leigh and I wanted to do was take a well-known subgenre in the world of horror films and turn that on its head."

Made for just $1m, Insidious doesn't reinvent the wheel but it does deliver clever and effective shocks, with a spooky twist that Wan expressly asks to be withheld. Like the original Saw, which most people forget debuted at the Sundance film festival in 2004, it's both an exercise in limitation (a single location), and a testament to their fertile imaginations. Asked about that franchise-spawning milestone, though, even now the pair still can't seem to believe it.

"Well," says Whannell, "I guess the end result exceeded our goal. Don't you think?"

"Our goal?!" laughs Wan. "What goal?"

"If I remember correctly," says Whannell, "it was just to shoot it and have a good-looking demo reel. We never went around saying, 'Hey, won't this be cool when it gets released on 2,000 screens in the States?' Our goal was very modest. We were like the guy whose dream in life is just to be an understudy on a Broadway show and then he suddenly lands a lead role. That was us."

"So what Leigh is saying is that we're lucky fuckers," says Wan.

For those that don't know, the first Saw film introduced the world to Jigsaw (Tobin Bell), a crazed inventor who puts not-so-innocent citizens in extreme life-or-death situations. And, as was the case with the Nightmare On Elm Street movies, the ensuing franchise turned a shady sadist into a glib antihero.

"A lot of people talk to us thinking that we came up with Jigsaw first and worked back from there," says Whannell. "But the first idea we had was of two people trapped in a room. And a great twist at the end. That's all we had. So when I went off to write the script I suddenly thought, 'All right, now I've got to figure out how they ended up there.' So I was racking my brain, thinking, 'Who would possibly do this?' And I hit upon the idea of somebody with terminal cancer who had lost their mind and was subjecting people to a literal version of the short time limit that he had on his life. But we never called him a serial killer. He was a psychopath, obviously …"

"… But he never punished people for their sins," adds Wan. "He's not one of those killers. He goes after people who don't appreciate their lives. I think some of that was lost along the way. But we can't really bitch about it, because we did step away from it."

So the question must be asked: will Insidious start another franchise, this time with its creators' names very much to the fore? "Leigh and I don't talk about sequels," laughs Wan. "I know that sounds weird coming from the guys who created the Saw franchise. But we never intended the first Saw film to have a sequel – capitalism dictated that! Which is cool with us, by the way, because now there are dolls and toys and even a rollercoaster, which, as film fans, we love."

As for recognition, though, they won't say no. "I want people to be able to recognise a Wan-Whannell film," beams Whannell. "I want people to get to the point – like a Tim Burton movie or a John Woo movie – where they can just tell."

"And we've started to get there," says Wan. "I think."

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Jeremy Renner cast in Bourne Legacy

2011-04-24T01:06:00.000+01:00

Jeremy Renner has been offered the lead role in The Bourne Legacy, the latest instalment of the spy saga which made Matt Damon a worldwide superstar, reports Deadline.

The Bourne UltimatumProduction year: 2007Country: USACert (UK): 12ARuntime: 115 minsDirectors: Paul GreengrassCast: David Strathairn, Joan Allen, Julia Stiles, Matt Damon, Paddy ConsidineMore on this film

Renner – if he chooses to accept his mission – arrives at a funny old time for the Bourne series. With Damon leaving the franchise and his character reaching the end of a story arc in The Bourne Ultimatum, the Hurt Locker actor will play a new role. Reports suggest it will be another brainwashed operative on the run from those who trained him. There will be a new covert government programme to replace Treadstone, Bourne having brought that organisation to its knees at the denouement of the last film.

Another important change for the new movie is that Tony Gilroy, who wrote the first three films, is stepping up to the director's role this time around. Paul Greengrass, the British director who took charge for the two most recent films, decided not to return in November 2009. Damon soon made it clear that he would not return without the film-maker's involvement.

Renner's name had been high on the list of rumoured candidates for the lead role in The Bourne Legacy, and appears to have just edged out the Australian actor Joel Edgerton, who starred in grubby Melbourne-set gangster thriller Animal Kingdom. According to Deadline the twice Oscar-nominated actor won the part after eight weeks of screen testing by producers. Other contenders were An Education's Dominic Cooper, Tron: Legacy's Garrett Hedlund, Luke Evans, Taylor Kitsch and Renner's Hurt Locker co-star Anthony Mackie. The film is due out in cinemas on 3 August 2012.

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Tom Cruise Set for Dan Fogelman Pitch at Warner Bros.

2011-04-23T20:56:00.000+01:00

Tom Cruise is attached to star in Dan Fogelmans' nextWarner Bros. has picked up the untitled Dan Fogelman pitch which has Tom Cruise attached to star.

Written by the Crazy Stupid Love scribe, the pitch has Tom Cruise attached to play a politician who gets caught in an affair. With his reputation in tatters, the politician retreats to his hometown to lick his wounds, repair relationships and confront his past.

No production date has been set.

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This Arthur remake is one too many

2011-04-23T16:52:00.001+01:00

No one has been asking for a remake of Arthur. The 1981 screwball comedy that starred Dudley Moore as a drunken English heir falling for a working-class New Yorker is fondly remembered – and is worth delaying going to bed for when it shows up on late-night television – but it's hardly a comedy classic that demands revision or reinterpretation. Still! Russell Brand needs a vehicle to break America!

Directed by Jason Winer and written by Peter Baynham, this Arthur begins with the perpetually piddled playboy revving through the streets of Manhattan in a Batmobile. It's an image that grabs for your eyeballs – Batmobiles look great; who wouldn't want to get in one – but it's gimmicky, trying too hard. Would someone like Arthur, no matter how blotto or posh he was, be so stupid?

The film's premise – an English toff has to marry the stiff, terribly proper woman his parents desire or have his inheritance cut off – seemed dated 30 years ago: would an aristocratic family really behave like that? In 2011, it seems positively absurd. Wouldn't Arthur just parlay his errant, blue-blooded ways into a money-spinning turn on a transatlantic version of The F---ing Fulfords?

The new version does ring some changes. Gone is the Jeeves and Wooster-style relationship that John Gielgud and Moore double-acted so endearingly. Now Arthur's being looked after by his nanny (Helen Mirren); the women he beds aren't sweet-hearted hookers, but cold-hearted party girls who steal the contents of his uptown apartment; the pressure for him to marry comes not from his father, but his mother Vivienne (Geraldine James); his would-be wife Susan (Jennifer Garner) is an eyes-on-the-prize social climber: Arthur's problem is women at least as much as it is alcohol.

In Steve Gordon's original, Arthur was an unrepentant lush. He may have got the girl, but that didn't mean he had to give up the bottle. New York in 1981 was barely stumbling out of recession, with whole blocks and neighbourhoods resembling war zones: the film could have played like a despicable ode to lofty living and conspicuous consumption, a sister fantasia to that seen in Woody Allen's Manhattan (1979), had it not been for the charming grace notes that Moore brought to the role.

This time round, in a nod to Puritanism, Brand's Arthur winds up in an AA clinic. He mouths pieties about the latest recession, and in one of many mirthless set-pieces, withdraws a stack of dollars from a cash machine which he throws towards a crowd of hangers-on. This stab at soft moralism is not just all of a piece with modern-day Hollywood's obsession with personal redemption, but it's also mushy and insincere.

Of course Brand has his own history of debauchery, one whose eloquent, witty retelling fed into his role as a washed-up rock star in Get Him To The Greek. He'd appear to be made for Arthur. He tries hard. He even sheds all his clothes save his Y-fronts towards the end.

But that trying is itself trying. He preens and yammers away like a spivvier Jim Carrey, smart-talking with phrases closer to those he delivers in his stand-up show or to his prose style than to the kind of character Arthur is meant to be. A typical line – "Hello Vivienne. I remember you from when I used to live in your womb" – may possibly be funny, but it's not at all charming.

Without charm, Arthur is just a spoilt baby, a narcissistic kidult who deserves a slap. It's hard to believe that Mirren's Hobson wouldn't smack him around the chops; instead, she gets kinder and sweeter to him, especially in those scenes where, ailing in bed, she's given a sentimental back story about the men she's loved and the reason she's so fond of her charge.

It's even harder to believe that he has a future with local girl Naomi (Greta Gerwig). Not so much because he's loaded and she's eking out a living as an unlicensed tourist guide at Grand Central, but because of the different ways in which they move and talk. Gerwig is a mistress of minor chords and idiosyncratic rhythms; Brand prefers thespy whoops and hysterics. That she would fall for an idiot like him makes her an idiot, too.

There are many things to lament about this film – its excessive length, a fine comic actress like Garner reduced to playing a one-dimensional monster, Luis Guzman being given a half-cooked role as the chauffeur – but the biggest sin is that Arthur, who was such a soulful, delightful, oddly life-affirming character when played by Dudley Moore, is here merely a boring drunk. Where's the fun in that?

On its first release, Taxi Zum Klo (1980) was seized by US Customs. The film (its title translates as "Taxi to the Toilet") was written and directed by Frank Ripploh, who also takes the lead role of a schoolteacher who likes sex. He marks student essays while sitting on cottage toilets, picks up garage attendants, tells his homebody boyfriend that he's going to clubs to pick up strangers.

These adventures, intercut with scenes of vintage porn, are shot naturalistically with (literally) warts-and-all candour and a good deal of droll humour. The film, far from being degenerate filth, is a loving document of pre-Aids Berlin, and a touching comedy about the human desire for and struggle to achieve intimacy.

Sweetgrass – "recorded" rather than directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash – is a tenaciously observed and a quietly absorbing ethnography about a pair of shepherds leading some 3,000 sheep on a 150-mile journey up into Montana's Absaroka-Beartooth Mountains for summer pasture.

There's no narration and for long sections no sounds except for the surprisingly melodious bleating of the sheep. Some of the shots last a good while, giving you time to soak in the beautiful landscapes and ponder on the kinds of experience and graft that underpin this seasonal migration. It's a powerful testimonial to a fading way of life.

T Rating: * * Arthur

T Rating: * * * Taxi Zum Klo

T Rating: * * * Sweetgrass

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Terry Gilliam - five must see films

2011-04-22T13:49:00.000+01:00

Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)

The second film spin-off from the popular Monty Python BBC television series, The Holy Grail completed Gilliam's progression within the rambunctious troupe – from animator, to sketch actor, to co-director (alongside Terry Jones). Parodying the legend of King Arthur with entirely fresh material, to which Gilliam also contributed, the film still routinely ranks highly on "All-time Greatest Comedy Films" lists.

Gilliam's first notable solo directorial success was a fantastical affair following 11-year-old Kevin's (Craig Warnock) twilight adventures in a medieval parallel reality. Produced on a budget of just $5 million, it went on to gross over eight times that amount at the box office. Co-written by fellow Monty Python alumnus Michael Palin, who appeared among a raft of stars – Shelley Duvall, John Cleese, Sean Connery – who had minor roles in the film.

The Fisher King (1991)

Jeff Bridges starred as the arrogant shock-jock who suffers a crisis of confidence after his comments prompt a depressed caller to commit multiple murders in a Manhattan bar. He achieves redemption by seeking out the "Grail" – a simple trophy – for homeless man Parry (Robin Williams), in a sideways nod to Gilliam's work on Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Gilliam's redemption for a moderate box office return came in the form of the film's five Oscar nominations, with Mercedes Ruehl winning Best Supporting Actress.

Twelve Monkeys (1995)

Inspired by Frenchman Chris Marker's 1962 film La jetée, Gilliam's second foray into science fiction (after 1985's Brazil) cast Bruce Willis as a convicted criminal living in a virus-ravaged post-apocalyptic world who is sent to the past to confront the terrorist organisation behind the virus. The thinking-man's action epic became Gilliam's most successful film, grossing $168 million, and earned supporting star Brad Pitt a Golden Globe for his performance.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)

Gilliam's adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's classic autobiographical novel of the same name saw him return to the fantasy-comedy ground which has been a staple of his career. Johnny Depp took the plaudits for his portrayal of hedonistic (and permanently intoxicated) anti-hero Raoul Duke, although the film was initially a critical and commercial disaster. Gilliam remained unperturbed – "I want it to be seen as one of the great movies of all time, and one of the most hated movies of all time", he said – and Depp and Benicio Del Toro's psychedelic road-tripping has since achieved cult status.

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Terry Gilliam timeline

2011-04-22T10:37:00.000+01:00

Terry Gilliam's life and works

1940 – Born in Medicine Lake, Minnesota.

1963 – Meets John Cleese in New York while the latter is on tour with a Cambridge Footlights revue show entitled Cambridge Circus.

1967 – Works with future Pythons Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin creating animations for TV series Do Not Adjust Your Set.

1969 – Monty Python's Flying Circus hits TV screens, with Gilliam’s animations used to link sketches. His unique style of blending surreal drawings with Victorian cut-outs defined the look of the show and made it completely original. Gilliam also took some minor roles in the show, including the Knight in armour who occasionally closes a sketch by hitting a fellow Python over the head with a rubber chicken.

1973 – Marries Maggie Weston.

1975 – Co-directs Monty Python and the Holy Grail with Terry Jones, Gilliam also played Patsy in the film. This became the inspiration for the musical Spamalot.

1977 – Directs his first solo feature film Jabberwocky, a medieval, slapstick adventure starring Michael Palin. The film was not a commercial success.

1981 – Directs Time Bandits, an inter-dimensional, comic fantasy which he co-wrote with Michael Palin. It starred Sean Connery, Ian Holm and Jim Broadbent and made over $40 million at the US box office.

1985 – Co-writes and directs Brazil with Charles McKeown and Tom Stoppard. The film is a dystopian satire set in a totalitarian future. It was influenced by Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times and George Orwell’s 1984 and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay

1988 – Directs The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, a fantasy epic based on an 18th Century, German fairytale. The film is rumoured to have cost more than $45 million to make but only took $8 million at the box office, despite star turns from Sting, Oliver Reed and Uma Thurman.

1991 – Directs The Fisher King, the first film on which he did not also write the screenplay. It follows a radio shock-jock who tries to find redemption by helping a homeless man. Gilliam reportedly wanted to direct it because he was tired of working on big-budget epics. The film was warmly received by critics.

1995 – Directs 12 Monkeys, a science fiction thriller starring Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt. The film was a critical and commercial success grossing $168.4 million worldwide.

1998 – Directs Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, an adaptation of the Hunter S Thompson novel of the same name. The film was a box office flop but became a cult hit following its DVD release.

1999 – Begins an abortive attempt to film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote starring Johnny Depp and Jean Rochefort. It was budgeted at $32.1 million but during the first week of filming Rochefort suffered a herniated disk and the set was severely damaged by a flood causing the film to be cancelled. Discussions about a revival of this production continue.

2005 – Directs The Brothers Grimm and Tideland, both are met with a mixed response from critics.

2009 – Reunites with Charles McKeown to co-write and direct the Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, a fantasy which follows a theatre troupe whose leader has made a pact with the devil. The lead, Heath Ledger, died during filming and was recast with Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell playing different incarnations of the character. It was nominated for two Academy Awards.

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Junebug, DVD review

2011-04-22T06:27:00.000+01:00

Phil Morrison’s Junebug is a film that gradually gets under your skin. After the swift opening – shrewd Chicago art dealer Madeleine falls for perfect Southern beau George and goes to stay with his suburban family – not a great deal happens. But like a Raymond Carver story, the power lies in the detail and deep emotional truth.

Late-30 something Madeleine (Embeth Davidtz, Schindler’s List) specialises in outsider art. When she needs to clinch a deal with an eccentric North Carolina artist, her new husband George (Alessandro Nivola, Goal!) takes her to stay with his family – the Johnstens, who live in the same neighbourhood. A product of privilege and an affected art scene, Madeleine has faith in her own charm. But her touchy-feely banter and habitual "sweethearts" fall flat in George’s Southern Baptist family –despite her excruciatingly sincere attempts to win their approval.

George's brittle mother Peg takes an immediate dislike to her: "She's too pretty. And she's too smart and that's a deadly combination." Taciturn dad Eugene withdraws to his workshop basement where he makes wooden birds. And the inarticulate brother Johnnie (Benjamin McKenzie of The O.C.) grunts with simmering rage whenever his ingratiating sister-in-law approaches him. Beset by bitterness at his golden-boy brother, Johnnie is a kidult who retreats to his den to watch videos of meerkats, rather than confront the difficulties in his own relationship.

His heftily pregnant wife Ashley stands out from the other Johnstens in her warm acceptance of Madeleine (Junebug is the name of her unborn child). Nominated for an Oscar for supporting actress, Amy Adams is enchanting as Ashley, who welcomes her “new sister” with openness and a childlike lack of self-regard. Junebug is also the name of a nocturnal beetle; and like a firefly, Ashley flitters about the urbane art dealer (who she sees as an embodiment of womanhood), playing with her hair, painting her nails her favourite colour -Cinnamon Fizz.

Junebug is about outsiders and the intersection of two dissonant worlds, but it doesn't ram home these themes; they evolve from the wholly convincing characterisations. Brought up in North Carolina, Phil Morrison and scriptwriter Angus MacLachlan are attuned to a Southern pace, but the film never slips into the solemn or patronising. Lingering shots of suburbia catch a quiet rather than a static life and avoid the self-conscious stylisation of Sam Mendes’s infinitely less authentic Revolutionary Road. But what makes this independent film cherishable is its generosity of spirit; we quietly root for all of the characters, including the earnest Madeleine. Accompanying the Johnstens through the everyday, we gradually get under their skins, so that when tragedy besets the family it is surprisingly painful, but not maudlin, coloured, as it is, by Ashley’s precious optimism.

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Five clasic motor racing movies

2011-04-22T02:23:00.000+01:00

It has all the ingredients of a classic Bruckheimer film: Tom Cruise as a young, rebellious ingénue, the wise older man who comes out of retirement to train said ingénue (preferably via a montage) in whatever death defying stunts the film requires, the enemy who later becomes a friend, the real enemy and a sophisticated love interest. Days of Thunder was made in 1990 and centres around the Nascar Winston Cup Series, think Top Gun on wheels.

This time it’s Jeff Bridges’ turn to play a naive stock car driver who gets in over his head. It tells the true story of Junior Johnson, one of the early stars of Nascar racing. He developed his driving skills while running moonshine and is credited with inventing the “bootleg turn” in which a driver escapes a pursuer by doing a 180 degree turn in a speeding car on the highway.

A 1968 comedy in which a Volkswagen Beetle with a mind of its own triumphs over lots of bigger, faster cars. Dean Jones plays a down-at-heel racing driver who has been reduced to competing in Demolition Derby. His fortunes change when he buys Herbie, the adorable, anthropomorphic car. The film spawned a raft of sequels including the dire Herbie Fully Loaded starring Lindsay Lohan.

Driven

It seems the producers of this 2001 offering blew the entire budget on special effects leaving nothing to spend on the actual plot. Once again a talented, rookie driver benefits from the advice of a wise, former racing star, this time played by Sylvester Stallone (who also wrote and produced the film, which explains a lot).

Le Mans

This film centres on a 24 hour race on the world’s hardest endurance course: Le Mans in France. Steve McQueen plays Michael Delaney who returns to the race having caused a horrific accident the previous year. There’s very little dialogue but lots of iconic cars doing lots of racing.

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Robert Zemeckis Directing Flight

2011-04-21T21:58:00.001+01:00

Robert Zemeckis is heading back to live-action projects, and is in talks to direct Flight, a Paramount drama in which Denzel Washington is loosely attached to star.

Written by John Gatins, the story centers on a alcoholic and drug-addicted pilot. When his plane's engine malfunctions, the pilot manages to rescue the aircraft and its passengers, becoming a hero in the process. When the FAA investigates and finds evidence of drug abuse, it tries to sweep it to the side to help preserve the image of the captain, who is trying to change the course of his life.

No production date has been set.

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Pirates of the Caribbean 4 to Release in China May 20

2011-04-21T01:35:00.000+01:00

Walt Disney Co. will release Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides in China on May 20, which is the same day-and-date as U.S. and most of the world, playing in all formats, including 3D and IMAX-3D.

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides will be one of the 20 imported titles allowed to recoup between 13-17 percent of its box office gross in China each year, where the state-run duopoly of the China Film Group and Huaxia Film Distribution control Hollywood imports and distribution despite a World Trade Organization ruling that says the practice is illegal.

China's box office jumped 64 percent in 2010 to $1.5 billion and Hollywood studios are ever more keen to get their biggest titles into the market that, with an explosion the sale of premium 3D and IMAX tickets, saw Avatar gross more than $200 million in China alone.

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides comes to theaters May 20th, 2011 and stars Johnny Depp, Geoffrey Rush, Penélope Cruz, Ian McShane, Richard Griffiths, Judi Dench, Stephen Graham, Gemma Ward. The film is directed by Rob Marshall.

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James Bond film studio Pinewood Shepperton gets fresh takeover approach

2011-04-20T21:10:00.000+01:00

The identity of the new bidder has not been disclosed, but shares in Pinewood Shepperton have risen 16pc since the approach from Peel Holdings a fortnight ago. They were trading at 190.9p at the close on Tuesday.

Peel's bid was at 190p per share, which would value the film studios at about £88m.

Peel, which has a 29.78pc holding in Pinewood, increased its holding in its target last month after buying 1.4m shares in the group, worth an estimated £2.1m.

The second largest shareholder is activist investor Crystal Amber, led by Richard Bernstein, which has a 28.29pc stake.

The company's management has been under pressure from Crystal Amber in recent months as it has called for the removal of Pinewood's chairman, Lord Grade. Peel, which has also amassed a stake in UK Coal, has supported the board.

The property magnate’s approach interest comes as the group is a pushing for Project Pinewood, a 100-acre, £200m complex with sets including a Venetian canal and a typical New York street.

A public inquiry into its expansion plans has begun, as permission for the ambitious project was refused by the local council.

In recent years, the group, chaired by former ITV chief executive Lord Grade, has expanded its brand globally through a series of joint venture partnerships. It has created Pinewood Toronto Studios and Pinewood Studio Berlin Film Services, while Pinewood Iskandar Malaysia Studios is under construction. Pinewood Indomina Studios was its most recent announcement. The group will open a 35-acre studio complex in the Dominican Republic to serve South America.

Pinewood saw pre-tax profits rise 31pc to £5.8m last year.

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Lip Service Gets Christian Serratos

2011-04-20T16:45:00.000+01:00

Christian Serratos, who will next be seen in The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1, has landed the lead role in the upcoming music-themed romantic comedy Lip Service.

The actress will star as a talented young singer named Roxie who is convinced by a record company executive to lend her voice to a new song by a famous celebrity named Sienna Monetz, who plans on lip-syncing from Roxie's voice. Ross Thomas (Soul Surfer) will play the record executive, although casting hasn't been announced yet for the Sienna Monetz role. Rachele Brooke Smith and Eric Roberts also star, although it isn't known what roles they will play.

Carlos Portugal will direct from his own original screenplay, with George Caceres executive producing. Production is expected to begin in the near future.

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Lay the Favorite Adds Joshua Jackson

2011-04-20T13:10:00.000+01:00

Joshua Jackson has joined the cast of Lay the Favorite, for director Stephen Frears.

Bruce Willis, Rebecca Hall, Justin Timberlake, and Catherine Zeta-Jones have already joined the cast for this gambling drama, which is based on the memoir written by Beth Raymer. Rebecca Hall will star as Beth Raymer, a Las Vegas cocktail waitress who became one of the best sports gamblers in the world, although she questions her career choices after falling in love.

Bruce Willis will play Raymer's mentor, Dink Heimowitz, Justin Timberlake is set to portray a Long Island bookie who Raymer used to work for, and Catherine Zeta-Jones will play Heimowitz's wife. It isn't known what role Joshua Jackson will have.

Stephen Frears is directing Lay the Favorite from an adapted screenplay by D.V. DeVincentis. It isn't known when production will start on Lay the Favorite.

Lay the Favorite comes to theaters in 2012 and stars Bruce Willis, Justin Timberlake, Rebecca Hall, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Joshua Jackson. The film is directed by Stephen Frears.

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The Expendables 2 Will Not Be Directed by Sylvester Stallone

2011-04-20T09:00:00.000+01:00

Sylvester Stallone will not be helming The Expendables 2, despite a recent report claiming he will return as the sequel's director. Sylvester Stallone is, though, currently compiling a list of names that he'd like to see take control of this action sequel.

Back in March, a report surfaced that Sylvester Stallone would be stepping down as director of The Expendables 2. Then, earlier this month, a new story revealed that he would actually come back to direct, since his new acting project Headshot had lost director Wayne Kramer. It was believed that Sylvester Stallone was returning to direct The Expendables 2 because Headshot was going into limbo. However, Walter Hill is now directing Headshot, and the project is once again moving forward with Sylvester Stallone and Thomas Jane attached to star.

David Agosto and Ken Kaufman wrote the screenplay for The Expendables 2, and Bruce Willis will have an expanded role as a "super villain."

The Expendables 2 is in development and stars Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis. The film is directed by Sylvester Stallone.

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Pride and Prejudice and Zombies Confirms Director Craig Gillespie

2011-04-20T04:56:00.000+01:00

Fright Night director Craig Gillespie is officially set to direct Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, finalizing a deal we first reported on a few weeks ago.

David O. Russell was originally set to direct Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and Mike White also signed on as director before leaving the project earlier this year. There was also talk last month that Seth Grahame-Smith, who wrote the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies novel and adapted the screenplay, was being considered to direct. Here's what Alli Shearmur, Lionsgate's president of production, had to say about Craig Gillespie joining the project.

"We are so excited to have Craig Gillespie on board this film. His sensibility spans from genre bending horror to elegant character driven comedy, which is perfect for this movie."

The story is set in the same world as the classic Jane Austen novel, although the main characters Elizabeth Bennett and James Darcy are fighting off a zombie infestation.

It isn't clear when production will begin on Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, although with a director finally locked in, it seems they are ramping up to start filming soon.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies comes to theaters in 2011. The film is directed by Craig Gillespie.

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The Avengers Begins Production a Week from Monday

2011-04-20T00:31:00.000+01:00

The Avengers will start shooting a week from MondayDirector Joss Whedon revealed that production on The Avengers will start one week from today. Here's what he had to say about this superhero ensemble below. "We're just a hardscrabble bunch. Guerilla filmmaking. I start production a week from Monday. I'm going to get started on the script now. Apparently that's a thing. I don't get it. Improv stunts are always way more exciting-looking."

We reported last week that The Avengers will hire 2,000 extras for their shoot in Cleveland, Ohio. That portion of filming won't commence until August. It isn't clear where The Avengers will first start shooting next week.

for the full interview with Joss Whedon.

The Avengers comes to theaters May 4th, 2012 and stars Robert Downey Jr., Scarlett Johansson, Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Samuel L. Jackson, Don Cheadle, Clark Gregg, Tom Hiddleston. The film is directed by Joss Whedon.

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Kenneth Branagh: from Shakespeare to comics

2011-04-19T20:06:00.000+01:00

Although not a name associated with big budgets and 3D special effects, Branagh said that he is relishing the release of the Hollywood blockbuster.

"This amount of interest in your film ahead of time, that's rare, that's thrilling," he said.

"Are you expecting it to please everyone? No. Are you expecting it to entertain everyone? Yes. And maybe they'll argue about everything they argue about anyway."

Australian actor Chris Hemsworth, who plays Thor, gave a ringing endorsement to his director's contribution to the film.

"I think what is so special about Ken taking on a film like this is you know the story and the character is taken care of," he said.

"Marvel is such a machine and the budget, the special effects and everything are going to be there.

"But he was also incredibly involved in that and his ideas of how to shoot through things and make the 3D work was hugely impressive."

Also starring Anthony Hopkins, Natalie Portman and Stellan Skarsgård, Thor opens in UK cinemas on April 29.

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Meet the Parents: Little Fockers, review

2011-04-19T16:02:00.000+01:00

Meet the Parents, from 2000, had quite a lot going for it. Its central theme - the pitfalls of meeting a fiance's dreadful in-laws - was broadly appealing, and this was lifted by some strong performances. Ben Stiller, as perplexed husband to be Greg Focker, offered just the right mixture of charm and slapstick haplessness, while Robert De Niro as Jack, the ex-CIA agent father of the bride, showed that his comic timing in Analyse This was not just a one-off. The tone was a mix of bad-taste puerility and real warmth, and was surprisingly likeable.

This sort of family comedy - slightly risqué without being even slightly risky - is one Hollywood finds difficult, so it was no surprise that a sequel popped up soon after. No surprise, but still a bit sad. Meet the Fockers, in 2004, in which Stiller's parents were thrown into the mix, offered little new in the way of subject or tone, but did at least introduce Barbara Streisand and Dustin Hoffman as his hippyish, liberal ma and pa, with diverting if not quite hilarious consequences.

This third in the series, however, does not so much scrape the barrel as lick its underside. Greg and wife Pam (Teri Polo), having overcome both sets of awkward parents, are now happily married with five-year old twins. Worn down by the stress of his other daughter Debbie divorcing her husband Bob (Thomas McCarthy), Jack decides that Greg should take the family reins for a while. Focker must sort out the family's finances, build a new house and manage his wayward colleague Andi Garcia (pretty but completely vacant Jessica Alba), while keeping an eye on his children. Moderate disruption ensues, with few laughs. Greg finally proves himself by saving Jack's life when the latter suffers a heart attack. One can't help but wonder if De Niro would have preferred his character - and this increasingly sorry series - to have been allowed to fall quietly off the twig.

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The Tiger of Eschnapur & The Indian Tomb: Two Films by Fritz Lang, DVD review

2011-04-19T11:37:00.001+01:00

The Tiger of Eschnapur & The Indian Tomb: Two Films by Fritz Lang

PG, Eureka Masters of Cinema, DVD £22.99

One of the cinema’s most marvellous oddities (or two for the price of one), Der Tiger von Eschnapur and Das Indische Grabmal (both 1959) are films so luridly intense you think you may just be dreaming them.

I saw them on TV as a teenager, and have never forgotten them: both the exotic world they conjure up – part grand, dazzling sun-soaked Indian locations (palaces, forts, temples, lakes), part astonishing studio fantasy of glittering costumes and interiors, vast underground temples and labyrinthine cave-systems; and Lang’s lush colour evocation of extravagant ceremony and fermenting passions and cruelty – with the aid of jodhpurs, scimitars, crocodiles, lepers, tigers (of course) and, most memorably of all, some astonishingly erotic dancing by Hollywood star Debra Paget as Seetha the temple dancer.

They have much more visionary magic than Spielberg’s comparable but rather flat and nasty Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom – and indeed were very successful on their release. They’ve lost none of their spell.

In the 1920s, Fritz Lang made several films in pairs: Die Spinnen (1919 & 1920), Dr Mabuse: the Gambler (1922), the Niebelungen films, Siegfried and Kriemhild’s Revenge (1924). But when he originally co-wrote these Indian films with his then-wife Thea Von Harbou (later his co-writer on Metropolis), he was considered too junior to direct them, and in 1921 the powerful producer-director Joe May had taken the helm, with the great Conrad Veidt as the insanely jealous Maharajah whose passion for a woman drives the plot. So the 1959 project – nursed into being by a remarkable German producer called Arthur Brauner – is the realisation and vindication of a long-nurtured project, and with its extraordinary atmosphere and visual impact, and ferocious unconcern for psychological nuance in its pursuit of primal, archetypal patterns of emotional significance, it recaptures the panache and melodramatic strangeness of Lang’s silent masterpieces. Which is not to say that it lacks control: the enchantment of Lang’s composition of these garish adventures lies in the sense that underneath the sensational, often gasp-making surface the director of M (1931), The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1933), Fury (1936), You Only Live Once (1937), Scarlet Street (1945) and The Big Heat (1954) has lost none of his sense of seething passions, human perversity, and the grim inexorability of fate.

Doubtless some will find these works uncomfortably ‘Orientalist’ – they’re undeniably filled with the clichés of the romantic India of the 1920s (exotic dancers, sinister priests, sexual passion, torture, dungeons, lepers, gurus, elephants aplenty etc.). But the comic-book blatancy of the genre trappings makes one want to postpone feeling any qualms, and mostly we’re closer here to the delirious India of Powell and Pressburger’s gloriously stylised, studio-shot Black Narcissus (1947) than to the more observed, actual subcontinent of Jean Renoir’s superbly poetic, documentary-feeling, location-shot The River (1950). The trancelike pleasure of the storytelling, in fact, is quite majestic – and these unique films could even be felt to resemble late Shakespearean romance – The Tempest, Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale – in their shrugging off of worries about realistic plausibility and Lang’s profound reversion to the roots of creativity.

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Mia Wasikowska's rise continues

2011-04-17T04:36:00.000+01:00

British film producer Trudie Styler is planning a remake of The Harder They Come, the Jamaican thriller which made a star of Jimmy Cliff. She is producing with Justine Henzell, daughter of Perry Henzell, who directed the original film.

It wouldn’t surprise me if Styler corralled the talent to improve on The Harder They Come, which is now 40 years old. Cliff starred as a young singer struggling to make it in Kingston’s music industry, but it was a creaky, rudimentary movie.

Her greatest challenge will be emulating the film’s music; its soundtrack remains one of the greatest ever. One imagines she’ll be seeking out younger artists – but talent like Cliff, Desmond Dekker and Toots and the Maytals doesn’t come along every day.

Mia Wasikowska is only 21 and had a great year in 2010 with the title role in Alice in Wonderland and a nice turn in The Kids Are All Right. Yet her rise continues.

I’ve seen her in Cary Fukunaga’s forthcoming Jane Eyre, and she makes a splendid Jane.

But there’s more: she stars as a terminally ill teenager in Gus van Sant’s new film Restless, which will premiere in Cannes next month. She’ll also reunite with director Rodrigo García, who began her career in the TV series In Treatment, and will join Vera Farmiga and Sam Neill in the film adaptation of Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge. There’s no stopping her.

Two names I never thought I’d write in the same sentence: Sienna Miller and Algerian director Rachid Bouchareb. Yet they’ll soon join forces on his first American film, Just Like a Woman; she plays (get this) a Chicago housewife who runs off to Las Vegas to compete in a belly dancing competition.

Bouchareb made his name with Days of Glory, a searing account of the discrimination suffered by four north African soldiers serving in the French army during the Second World War. His excellent and controversial new film Outside the Law, about three brothers involved in the Algerian resistance movement, opens in Britain May 6.

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Closer to the Edge: the sweat, the dirt, the danger

2011-04-17T01:00:00.000+01:00

The worst cinematic sporting sequence I have ever seen comes from the 1952 British movie The Card. It features a centreforward who runs the length of the field, riding what appears to be 15 tackles, before coolly – and ridiculously – beating the goalkeeper to score.

But there is plenty of competition for this title. The difficulty in crafting a decent sports movie is that athletes spend many years perfecting skills that an actor is expected to master in six weeks. In the age of saturation television coverage, with every shot, serve or kick replayed in super slow motion, it is embarrassingly simple to spot the difference between Roger Federer’s forehand and that of Paul Bettany in Wimbledon.

These issues may explain the growth market in sporting parodies over the last decade, most of them starring Will Ferrell (Semi-Pro, Blades of Glory). This year, though, has turned up a more interesting phenomenon. We are seeing the renaissance of the sporting documentary.

Over the next two months, four new “jock docs” will be released in our cinemas. Two of them concern cricket: From the Ashes (about Ian Botham’s great Aussie-bashing series of 1981) and Fire In Babylon (which puts the great West Indian side of that same era into a political context).

The other two are set in the world of motorsport: Senna – a biography of Formula One’s most gifted driver – and TT3D: Closer to the Edge, which will be the first of the quartet to go on general release when it opens on Friday.

TT3D presented perhaps the greatest technical challenge, as it was filmed at a live event last summer, whereas the others retell stories from the last century. The cameras followed a group of absurdly fearless motorcyclists, led by Wolverine lookalike Guy Martin, as they negotiated what many petrol heads believe to be the greatest racetrack on Earth: the Snaefell Mountain Circuit on the Isle of Man.

“It is very difficult to make a decent sports movie,” says TT3D’s producer Steve Christian. “I had a go with a biopic of George Best a few years ago but it was a long way from the real thing. Because I’m a producer from the Isle of Man, I get six to eight scripts for the TT race every year but I’ve never yet seen one that would do justice to it. So rather than fake it, we decided just to cover it as an event, because something spectacular always happens.”

There are few dramas that match TT3D when it comes to thrills and sickening spills. The on-board helmet-cams and the helicopter shots bring home just how narrow the margins are, especially around the 170mph Ballagarey corner. Make a mistake, and the safety barriers won’t help out, because there aren’t any – just stone walls, trees and fields.

Although the project was always conceived to run in 3D, Christian says he was keen not to overdo the effects. “I didn’t want bikes jumping out of the screen, because that would have been gimmicky,” he says, “and I didn’t want too much on-board footage because people would have been sick in their seats.

“The idea was to use the 3D as an invitation to the trackside, in all its gritty glory. Most motorsport films look like corporate videos, full of gleaming bodywork and 'brolly dollies’, but we wanted ours to be more authentic.”

Despite covering events that took place two decades ago, Senna achieves a similar sense of immediacy through images drawn entirely from contemporary footage. The director, Asif Kapadia, did not shoot a single reel, although he did record some interviews to lay over the visuals.

“I didn’t use talking heads because that gives you a feeling of hindsight,” he says. “I wanted the viewers to feel that they were watching events unfold in front of them, because uncertainty is the essence of sport. That’s why I loved all the glitches in the footage and the dirt on the camera: they make it real.

“Something happens to sport when you dramatise it,” Kapadia believes. “You could show Liverpool coming back to win the 2005 Champions League final from a 3-0 deficit and suddenly no one would believe it.”

This exact problem afflicted last year’s boxing saga The Fighter. Mark Wahlberg (playing the real-life welterweight Micky Ward) went out and won his fights in such an unlikely manner that many viewers came out scoffing at what they thought was typical Hollywood exaggeration.

But when I went back over the original footage, I realised that the actors had mirrored every punch and movement with impressive accuracy. What had seemed risible in the cinema was compelling in its original state.

The Fighter, which won Oscars for best supporting actor (Christian Bale) and actress (Melissa Leo) was actually highly watchable for the most part, confirming that the close-quarters sport of boxing is far easier to bring to life than team games like football and rugby.

But a hack director can twist any sport into the same familiar formula: a talented slacker twigs that hard work can turn him into a champion, hires a craggy, gum-chewing coach and goes through a montage training sequence before lifting the trophy in the final reel.

The desire to escape such clichés may explain why directors like Kapadia (who normally works in drama) is turning to real life for his inspiration. As Senna proves, the best tales from sport are not just stranger than fiction; they are richer too.

TT3D: Closer to the Edge is out on Fri, followed by From the Ashes on May 10, Fire in Babylon on May 20 and Senna on June 3

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Odd Thomas Adds Gugu Mbatha-Raw

2011-04-16T21:25:00.000+01:00

on director Stephen Sommers's upcoming adaptation of the Dean R. Koontz novel series Odd Thomas continues to roll along. Today, Gugu Mbatha-Raw has joined a line-up that also includes Anton Yelchin, Willem Dafoe, Patton Oswalt, and Addison Timlin.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw will play Viola, best friend to Thomas' (Anton Yelchin) girlfriend (Addison Timlin). Thomas is a short order cook who can see the dead. He becomes mixed up with a mysterious man linked to the dark forces, as well as helps Viola, a waitress who is raising two young girls after their junkie mother dies.

Odd Thomas will begin shooting next month in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Odd Thomas comes to theaters in 2012 and stars Anton Yelchin, Addison Timlin, Willem Dafoe, Nico Tortorella, Patton Oswalt. The film is directed by Stephen Sommers.

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Lone Ranger Eyes Ryan Gosling

2011-04-16T17:15:00.000+01:00

Walt Disney Pictures is currently in talks with Ryan Gosling to co-star in their upcoming reboot Lone Ranger. The actor will appear opposite Johnny Depp, whose Tonto will actually be the lead, if he decides to take the part.

Ryan Gosling has already signed onto appear in Logan's Run, which may keep him from accepting the role of John Reid, aka the Lone Ranger. Logan's Run is scheduled to shoot in the fall, but it isn't quite clear when Lone Ranger will begin production. Johnny Depp is first shooting Dark Shadows, which is ramping up at this very moment.

Walt Disney's Lone Ranger will be told through the point-of-view of Tonto, while the masked man himself will become more of a sidekick. Timothy Olyphant and George Clooney have also been mentioned for this role.

Lone Ranger is in development and stars Johnny Depp. The film is directed by Gore Verbinski.

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The Dark Knight Rises Brings Back Nestor Carbonell

2011-04-16T13:11:00.000+01:00

Carbonell is confirmed to be reprising his role as Mayor of Gotham City in The Dark Knight Rises. He first took on the part in 2009's The Dark Knight.

It isn't known what role Nestor Carbonell's Mayor will play in the storyline of The Dark Knight Rises, as the script is being kpt under lock and key at this time.

Christopher Nolan will shoot The Dark Knight Rises this summer from a script that he penned with his brother Jonathan Nolan.

The Dark Knight Rises comes to theaters July 20th, 2012 and stars Christian Bale, Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Tom Hardy, Anne Hathaway, Marion Cotillard, Joseph Gordon-Levitt. The film is directed by Christopher Nolan.

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George Clooney Wants to Direct The $700 Billion Man

2011-04-16T05:14:00.000+01:00

Clooney and Grant Heslov's production company is set to produce a Wall Street bailout film based on the 2009 Washington Post article The $700 Billion Man, with George Clooney having an eye to direct.

The film is based on Laura Blumenfeld's article about TARP mastermind Neel Kashkari, a top official under then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, who helped develop the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, which bailed out the big banks following the economic collapse in 2008. Neel Kashkari subsequently left Washington and moved to an isolated cabin in Northern California.

Zach Helm has been tapped to write the pic.

No production date has been set.

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Robert Zemeckis to Adapt How to Survive a Garden Gnome Attack

2011-04-16T01:39:00.000+01:00

Pictures Animation and Robert Zemeckis have picked up rights for the humor book How to Survive a Garden Gnome Attack.

Robert Zemeckis is not committed to direct the film, which is being developed as an R-rated live-action/CG-hybrid budgeted in the $20 million-$30 million range. No screenwriter is attached.

Written by Chuck Sambuchino, "How to Survive a Garden Gnome Attack: Defend Yourself When the Lawn Warriors Strike (and They Will)," is a tongue-in-cheek survival guide to help garden gnome-owners prepare for and ward off an imminent invasion from the menacing lawn statues.

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Your Highness, review

2011-04-15T21:29:00.000+01:00

In the trailers Your Highness looked great. After all, it’s usually fun, and maybe even a tiny bit flattering to us, when Americans decide they want to spoof English movies. It’s especially happy-making to see Americans take such delight in adopting hoity-toity English accents as they hoof around pseudo-medieval forests cack-handedly trying to wield their mighty swords.

There’s an intriguing cast – Pineapple Express co-stars James Franco and Danny McBride: the former so cute, the latter so cutting; plus Natalie Portman, hot on the heels of Black Swan, in a larkier, less anguished role than she usually plays. There are enough rude jokes and stoner gags to satisfy the inner Seth Rogen in all of us.

And looking after the whole gleefully tawdry shebang is David Gordon Green, whose early films George Washington and All the Real Girls made him the poster-boy of neo-poetic realism, but whose strange, zig-zagging career ended up with him helming the wildly silly, stupidly funny Pineapple Express. Really, there was no way Your Highness could disappoint.

Wrong! It’s bad. It makes Mel Brooks’s Robin Hood: Men in Tights look like a masterpiece. Plodding where it should gallop, crude more than lewd, provoking shrugs rather than thigh-slaps, it should be called Your Lowness.

The plot? Oh, OK then. So there’s this big, leering chump of a prince called Thadeous (McBride) who likes making out with dwarves’ wives and has never performed an act of gallantry in his life. His handsome and obviously homosexual brother Prince Fabious (Franco) is about to get married to Belladonna (Zooey Deschanel), but she is stolen by an evil warlock (Justin Theroux) who wishes, you know, to sire a dragon with her.

The time has come: Thadeous has to man up. Act like aristocracy. Redeem himself. Off he embarks on a big ol’ quest alongside Fabious and valet Courtney (Rasmus Hardiker), who plays Baldrick to his Blackadder. En route they team up with fearsome warrior Isabel (Portman). All that stands in their way is a paedophilic warlord, bare-breasted forest-dwellers acting as honeytraps, monsters galore, and the fact that Thadeous is a dope-smoking scaredy-pants.

What really stands in their way is that McBride, who co-wrote the script and who can be brilliant as a scene-stealer in films such as Tropic Thunder, is so cold and wooden. He delivers half-funny lines so contemptuously that they become zero-funny. He also seems to think that ending every other line with a bit of swearing is hilarious.

Perhaps everyone on set had a good time. Perhaps they were stoned. That would explain why the story is so lazy and full of holes, why key characters like Belladonna go missing for long stretches, why the action sequences are so half-cooked, why Franco appears to have modelled his Fabious on Joey from Friends. Really, how hilarious can a film be when its best comic performance comes from Natalie Portman?

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Zeta Jones spoke of being enveloped by a 'dark cloud'

2011-04-15T17:25:00.000+01:00

The Welsh actress hinted at her illness in August, the month that her husband, Michael Douglas, was diagnosed with throat cancer.

Asked about her family life, she said: "I'm lucky, but that's not to say I don't get down on myself. I try and stay positive.

"I don't just bring myself down, I bring everyone around me down. It's like a dark cloud, 'Uh oh, here we go', and I have to snap out of it."

A month later, as Douglas was undergoing chemotherapy, she gave another emotional interview. "I can't bear even to watch him being treated.

"I know maybe I should be stronger but emotionally I just don't want to see the man I love hooked to a chemo IV or lying motionless on a radiation table under a positioning mask," she said.

Her fragility was evident during an appearance at the Ryder Cup golf tournament in south Wales in September, when she gave a tearful speech about her husband's recovery.

Zeta Jones, 41, was admitted to the Silver Hill Hospital in Connecticut for five days earlier this month to be treated for Bipolar II disorder. The clinic specialises in treating psychiatric illnesses and substance abuse.

Her spokesman said the actress was now "in top form" and ready to begin work on her new film, Playing The Field. Her parents, Pat and Dai, were reported to have flown to the United States to help care for the couple's two children, Dylan, 10, and Carys, eight.

Douglas, 66, announced in January that his tumour had gone. However, the couple are also contending with the strain of a legal battle involving Douglas's former wife, Diandra, who is making a claim on his earnings.

Experts praised Zeta Jones for speaking about her diagnosis. Sue Baker, director of Time to Change, which combats the stigma surrounding mental illness, said: "By being so frank about her diagnosis and treatment, Catherine will have helped to lift some of the burden of stigma which causes so much damage to so many lives."

Prof Nick Craddock, the professor of psychiatry at Cardiff University School of Medicine, said: "It is very helpful in breaking down stigma when celebrities talk about their illness."

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Tron: Legacy, DVD review

2011-04-15T13:00:00.001+01:00

Even on the small screen, Tron: Legacy is a dazzling spectacle. The computer world of “The Grid” – somehow dark and bright simultaneously – is beautifully realised with a technical audacity that constantly tests the limits of what’s visually possible.

First-time director Joe Kosinski had been determined to get his hands on the very latest equipment and shot Tron Legacy on cameras more advanced even than those used by James Cameron on his groundbreaking Avatar, released only 12 months earlier.

But, curiously, what spoilt Cameron’s film also spoils Kosinski’s: neither has an engaging narrative.

In the same way that no one came out of Avatar wiping away tears of emotion, so the underwhelming plot of Tron:Legacy never grabs at the heart – even though the potential is there, as the twentysomething hero is reunited with the father he hasn’t seen for decades.

Jeff Bridges reprises his role as Flynn, the computer whiz sucked physically into the digital metropolis of The Grid, with its super-fast lightcycles and gladiatorial bouts fought with what look like neon-glowing Frisbees. Twenty years on, Flynn’s son Sam (Garrett Hedlund) unexpectedly finds himself in The Grid, where he encounters not only his old dad but also an evil – and much younger looking – clone of Flynn.

The visual effects are spectacular, but it’s hard to care what happens to anyone.

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UPDATE: Matthew Vaughn Will Not Direct X-Men: First Class

2010-05-02T22:57:00.000+01:00

Matthew Vaugn to direct X-Men: First Class?UPDATE: 5/1/10 1:20 PM PSTDeadline New York has updated their original story and are now reporting that Matthew Vaughn will not be directing X-Men: First Class.

The site now reports the studio has a list of directors that include Timur Bekmambetov, Louis Leterrier, David Slade, Daniel Espinosa and Carl Rinsch. It was also said that the studio would make a decision on the director next week, to gear up for a summer start date on the film. We'll be sure to keep you posted on these X-Men: First Class developments as soon as more information comes in.

Original Story: We reported a month ago that director Bryan Singer was not going to be directing an upcoming superhero film and now it seems that Fox has zeroed in on their top candidate to replace Singer. Deadline New York is reporting that Kick-Ass director Matthew Vaughn is the leading studio choice to direct X-Men: First Class.

The site reports that negotiations have been going on all week and it seems that Vaughn beat out other directors such as Daniel Espinosa (Snabba Cash), Rupert Sanders (The Low Dweller) and Jonathan Mostow (Surrogates).

Interestingly enough, Vaughn was set to direct Fox's X-Men: The Last Stand before leaving the project. We'll be sure to keep you posted on any new developments on X-Men: First Class as soon as we have more information.

X-Men: First Class comes to theaters in 2010. The film is directed by Matthew Vaughn.

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Princess Kaiulani

2010-05-02T20:57:00.000+01:00

May 14, 2010 - Set against the dramatic island backdrop of Hawaii and based on the inspiring true story, Princess Kaiulani is a breathtaking romance about an unlikely heroine and her unwavering fight to defend the independence of her people.

Go to FilmJabber.com to see Princess Kaiulani movie information.

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Daddy Longlegs

2010-05-02T18:57:00.000+01:00

May 14, 2010 - After months of being alone, sad, busy, sidetracked, free, lofty, late and away from his kids, Lenny, 34 with graying frazzled hair, picks his kids up from school. Every year he spends a couple of weeks with his sons Sage, 9, and Frey, 7. Lenny juggles his kids and everything else all within a midtown studio apartment in New York City. He ultimately faces the choice of being their father or their friend all with the idea that these two weeks must last 6 months. In these two weeks, a trip upstate, visitors from strange lands, a mother, a girlfriend, "magic" blankets, and complete lawlessness seem to take over their lives. The film is a swan song to excuses and responsibilities; to fatherhood and self-created experiences, and to what it's like to be truly torn between being a child and being an adult.

Go to FilmJabber.com to see Daddy Longlegs movie information.

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Solitary Man

2010-05-02T16:57:00.001+01:00

May 7, 2010 - A car magnate (Michael Douglas) watches his personal and professional life hit the skids because of his business and romantic indiscretions.

Go to FilmJabber.com to see Solitary Man movie information.

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Martin Lawrence Talks Bad Boys 3

2010-04-22T10:01:00.000+01:00

MTV caught up with Martin Lawrence who said that Bad Boys 3 is definitely happening, despite nearly seven years since Bad Boys II and 15 years since the first Bad Boys, which co-starred Will Smith and Martin Lawrence and was directed by a relatively unknown Michael Bay.

"It's real realistic," the comedian revealed to MTV News recently, addressing rumors that he'll re-team with Bay and the former Fresh Prince once again. "We've talked about 'Bad Boys 3.' "

"Any time you can get Big Willie to come out and talk about doing a third installment of a hot movie like 'Bad Boys,' you have to take notice," Lawrence explained. "I met with Michael Bay, and he said he's onboard too - so it's real."

"I got Big Willie to come down and see me about the movie. I felt special," Lawrence said of a visit Smith paid to his friend recently to talk about getting the band back together, adding that at this point, the green light is in the hands of the franchise producer. "We're just waiting on Jerry Bruckheimer to let us know when it's really real."

Peter Craig is putting together a script for Columbia.

Production most likely wouldn't start until next year as Michael Bay readying production for Transformers 3.

Bad Boys 3 is in development and stars Martin Lawrence, Will Smith. The film is directed by Michael Bay.

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Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones Set for Men in Black 3D

2010-04-22T08:01:00.000+01:00

Barry Sonnenfeld confirms Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones for Men in Black 3D It seems that Agents J and K will be returning in those snazzy black suits once again. Showbiz 411 recently spoke with director Barry Sonnenfeld who revealed that both Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones will return for Men in Black 3D.

It was said that Sony is eager to get the film rolling, hoping to fill the void left by Spider-Man 4 being replaced by Untitled Spider-Man Reboot. It was believed that the studio is aiming for a Memorial Day 2011 release for Men in Black 3D.

We reported back in October that Etan Cohen (Tropic Thunder) was writing the script for the film and it seems that a draft could be expected in the near future. We also reported last month that actors such as Josh Brolin, Sacha Baron Cohen and Jemaine Clement were up for roles in the sequel as well, but we don't have any further, official casting information at this time.

Men in Black 3D comes to theaters in 2011 and stars Will Smith, Tommy Lee Jones. The film is directed by Barry Sonnenfeld.

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Marmaduke

2010-04-22T06:01:00.000+01:00

June 4, 2010 - Brad Anderson created the decades-running newspaper comic strip, about a mischievous Great Dane who lives with the Winslow family, in 1954. The big dog then appeared in several animated episodes of "Heathcliff" and "Garfield and Friends."

Go to FilmJabber.com to see Marmaduke movie information.

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Get Him to the Greek

2010-04-22T04:01:00.001+01:00

June 4, 2010 - "Get Him to the Greek" reunites Jonah Hill and Russell Brand with "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" director Nicholas Stoller in the story of a record company intern with two days to drag an uncooperative rock legend to Hollywood for a comeback concert. The comedy is the latest film from producer Judd Apatow ("The 40-Year-Old Virgin," "Knocked Up," "Funny People").

Go to FilmJabber.com to see Get Him to the Greek movie information.

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Ondine

2010-04-21T09:14:00.000+01:00

June 4, 2010 - "Ondine" is the enchanting story of Syracuse (Farrell), a lonely fisherman who one day pulls a beautiful woman named Ondine (Bachleda) out of the sea in his nets. His young daughter Annie is convinced that she is a "selkie" —a creature from Irish folklore much like a mermaid. Syracuse has his doubts, but as Ondine brings some luck and joy to his otherwise downcast life, he starts to come around as well. "Ondine" deftly blends romance and fantasy with the realism of modern life in an Irish seaside town.

Go to FilmJabber.com to see Ondine movie information.

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Splice

2010-04-21T08:04:00.000+01:00

June 4, 2010 - Clive and Elsa are superstars of the genetic engineering world. They specialize in splicing together DNA from different animals to create fantastical new hybrids. The charismatic couple wants to use human DNA in a new hybrid – something that could yield astronomical medical benefits. The pharmaceutical company that funds their research, however, is more interested in exploiting their earlier triumphs for easier, short-term profit. Clive and Elsa secretly conduct their own experiment. The result is Dren: an amazing creature who exhibits an array of unexpected developments, both physical and intellectual. Dren exceeds their wildest dreams... and, ultimately, their most terrifying nightmare.

Go to FilmJabber.com to see Splice movie information.

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Killers

2010-04-21T06:54:00.000+01:00

June 4, 2010 - Trying to recover from a sudden break-up, Jen Kornfeldt (Katherine Heigl) believes she’ll never fall in love again. But when she reluctantly joins her parents on a trip to the French Riviera, Jen happens to meet the man of her dreams, the dashing, handsome Spencer Aimes (Ashton Kutcher). Three years later, her seemingly impossible wish has come true: she and Spencer are newlyweds living the ideal suburban life – that is, until the morning after Spencer’s 30th birthday when bullets start flying. Literally.

Go to FilmJabber.com to see Killers movie information.

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Greg Mottola Directing Brad Pitt and Natalie Portman in Important Artifacts

2010-04-21T05:44:00.000+01:00

Brad Pitt According to , Paramount Pictures has set Adventureland director, Greg Mottola, to adapt and direct Important Artifacts, in which Brad Pitt and Natalie Portman are both attached to star.

Based on the book "Important Artifacts and Personal Property From the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion and Jewelry" by Leanne Shapton, the author the story follows the fictional estate auction catalog full of personal items and photographs from the four-year romance between a male photographer and a younger food columnist. Here's an excerpt:

"Auction catalogs can tell you a lot about a person-their passions and vanities, peccadilloes and aesthetics; their flush years and lean. Think of the collections of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Truman Capote, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. In Leanne Shapton's marvelously inventive and invented auction catalog, the 325 lots up for auction are what remain from the relationship between Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris (who aren't real people, but might as well be). Through photographs of the couple's personal effects-the usual auction items (jewelry, fine art, and rare furniture) and the seemingly worthless (pajamas, Post-it notes, worn paperbacks)-the story of a failed love affair vividly (and cleverly) emerges. From first meeting to final separation, the progress and rituals of intimacy are revealed through the couple's accumulated relics and memorabilia. And a love story, in all its tenderness and struggle, emerges from the evidence that has been left behind, laid out for us to appraise and appreciate. In an earlier work, Was She Pretty?, Shapton, a talented artist and illustrator, subtly explored the seemingly simple yet powerfully complicated nature of sexual jealousy. In Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris-a very different yet equally original book-she invites us to contemplate what is truly valuable, and to consider the art we make of our private lives."

Greg Mottola directed Superbad and The Daytrippers and is currently in postproduction on the comedy Paul, written by and starring Nick Frost and Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead).

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Mark Hamill to Direct Adaptation of The Black Pearl?

2010-04-21T04:34:00.000+01:00

The Black Pearl According to The Wrap, actor Mark Hamill is setting up to direct an adaptation of a comic book he wrote. Apparently Hamill's partners won't allow him to announce the project yet as they they want to wait until the Cannes Film Festival in May.

Based on the few facts that Hamill has let slip, The Wrap believes the project surrounds the comic miniseries The Black Pearl.

"It's based on a comic book that Hamill wrote, it's set in the real world, and "at first glance it's a drama, but it has dark humor."

The story of The Black Pearl, Hamill told the New York Daily News a while back, is "a crime thriller, fairly raw in terms of violence about tabloid journalism and sensationalism and all the things that thrillers come from."

"My two co-writers wrote a David O. Russell film for Paramount," he said, "and now they've very hot. So now there are people who are willing to give us $30 million to make the movie. But if we took that deal, I wouldn't get to direct.

"If you go over about $8 million, you have to start getting foreign sales before you start shooting. But if you stay in the $5-to-$7 million range, you don't have to do presales and you can maintain much more creative control.

The goal is to make a movie the studios wouldn't make."

The official announcement should come next month, in France.

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Stretch Armstrong Finds a Director in Rob Letterman

2010-04-21T03:24:00.001+01:00

Universal Pictures has hired Rob Letterman to direct and Nicholas Stoller to rewrite Stretch Armstrong, the big screen adaptation of the action figure, to be played by Twilight star Taylor Lautner.

Hasbro's action figure was popular around the world beginning in the 1970s and re-launched in the 1990s.

Letterman directed 20th Century Fox's upcoming Gulliver's Travels, which was co-written by Stoller. Letterman also co-directed Monsters Vs. Aliens, while Stoller co-wrote and directed Universal's Get Him to the Greek. Stoller also directed the studio's Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

Steve Oedekerk wrote the original screenplay for Stretch Armstrong.

Imagine Entertainment's Brian Grazer is producing with Brian Goldner and Bennett Schneir for Hasbro. Kim Roth is executive producing for Imagine.

Stretch Armstrong comes to theaters in 2012 and stars Taylor Lautner. The film is directed by Rob Letterman.

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Dark Horse Comics and Hammer Films to Bring Out Let Me In Graphic Novel

2010-04-20T08:05:00.000+01:00

Dark Horse Comics and Exclusive Media Group's Hammer Films announced today they are partnering to create a series of co-branded original graphic novels and comic books. Their first collaboration will be inspired by Hammer Films' upcoming suspense thriller Let Me in. The film, based on the 2008 widely acclaimed Tomas Alfredson directed Swedish film Lat den ratte komma in a.k.a. Let the Right One in, is being produced by the legendary British film brand Hammer Films, and written and directed by Matt Reeves (Cloverfield. While the storyline of the companion graphic novel is being kept under wraps, Dark Horse Comics and writer Marc Andreyko (Manhunter, Predators) are working with Hammer to create a chilling and exciting comic that will incorporate some of the film's characters and mythology with some fresh themes. The Let Me in graphic novel will be distributed in stores in conjunction with its theatrical release from Overture Films in October 2010.

Let Me in, tells a terrifying tale about an alienated 12-year old boy named Owen (Kodi Smith-McPhee) who is viciously bullied by his classmates and neglected by his divorcing parents. Achingly lonely, Owen spends his days plotting revenge on his middle school tormentors and his evenings spying on the other inhabitants of his apartment complex. His only friend is his new neighbor Abby (Chloe Moretz), an eerily self-possessed young girl who lives next door with her silent father (Oscar nominee Richard Jenkins). A frail, troubled child about Owens's age, Abby emerges from her heavily curtained apartment only at night and always barefoot, seemingly immune to the bitter winter elements. Recognizing a fellow outcast, Owen opens up to her and before long, the two have formed a unique bond.

"From the beginning, Dark Horse has always eyed the most inventive stories and creators" said Dark Horse Publisher, Mike Richardson. "The existing Hammer Films library represents some of the most exciting horror stories ever told. Let Me in is easily one of the most chilling and exciting horror stories to come along in years. As we have learned time and time again, comics provides the perfect place to expand on the storyline."

"I am excited that Dark Horse is working with us on this project. They have assembled an incredible creative team, and I can't wait to see it progress" said Matt Reeves.

"Mike and I have known each other for over 20 years, and we are delighted to be in partnership with him and Dark Horse. We are in very capable hands" said Nigel Sinclair, Co-Chairman and CEO of Exclusive Media Group.

"Dark Horse has a fantastic track record of creating amazing characters and stories, as well as adapting and re invigorating Intellectual Properties," said Simon Oakes, Vice-Chairman of Exclusive Media Group and President & CEO of Hammer Films. "I am thrilled that Hammer has found a partner in Mike Richardson and Dark Horse to explore Let Me in."

Let Me in comes to theaters October 1st, 2010 and stars Richard Jenkins, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Chloe Moretz, Jimmy Pinchak, Sasha Barrese, Chris Browning, Cara Buono, Seth Adkins. The film is directed by Matt Reeves.

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Scream 4, Real Steel and A Very Harold and Kumar Christmas Filming in Michigan

2010-04-20T07:05:00.000+01:00

Michigan It seems that the state of Michigan could be the new hot-spot for film productions, as a new story has indicated. The Detroit Free Press has run a story that indicates such films as Scream 4, Real Steel, A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas, Salvation Boulevard and Vamps will be filming in the state. Here are some excerpts from the article, indicating when and where these productions will take place.

Dimension Films confirms that it plans to shoot Scream 4 in Michigan. Shooting is expected to begin in mid-June and take place in and around Ann Arbor.

The biggest movie on the horizon is Real Steel, the futuristic robot-boxing drama from DreamWorks starring Hugh Jackman. The project has production offices in metro Detroit and is scheduled to begin filming in June. Steven Spielberg is one of the executive producers.

A new installment of the Harold & Kumar stoner-buddy comedies has been approved for the state's filmmaking incentives.

Salvation Boulevard, a comedy with former James Bond star Pierce Brosnan, is set to start shooting in Michigan in May.

Vamps, a vampire-themed romantic comedy with Alicia Silverstone and Sigourney Weaver, is expected to film here in June.

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New Iron Man 2 Stark Expo Viral Website Launches

2010-04-20T06:05:00.000+01:00

Paramount Pictures has launched a second Stark Expo viral website in support of their upcoming summer release Iron Man 2. This comes just a few weeks after Accutech was launched in support of the film.

The new site, which can be accessed at Stark Expo 2010: CordCo, a subsidiary of Stark Industries, focuses on "Science serving people serving science". When visiting the site, fans will get to experience the full presentation from CordCo's own Karl Oakley, who demonstrates the importance of Sonic Fire Extinguishers. Both viral sites are rumored to be leading up to something big in the world of Tony Stark in the coming month.

Iron Man 2 comes to theaters May 7th, 2010 and stars Robert Downey Jr., Scarlett Johansson, Mickey Rourke, Samuel L. Jackson, Paul Bettany, Sam Rockwell, Don Cheadle, Gwyneth Paltrow. The film is directed by Jon Favreau.

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Star Wars Blu-ray Box Set Information Revealed

2010-04-20T05:05:00.000+01:00

The first details arrive for the anticipated box set It seems that we will be exploring our favorite far, far away galaxy in high definition in the near future. IGN attended the Chicago Comics and Entertainment Expo over the weekend and LucasFilm director of fan relations Steve Sansweet revealed that a new Blu-ray set featuring all the Star Wars films is in the works.

"We have been at work for a couple of years working on-I won't call it the Ultimate Set because we keep finding stuff-but, a very full set of all six movies on Blu-ray with lots of extra material. We're finding all kinds of scenes from dailies that have never been seen before. Beyond all of those things that you know about... there are some real treasures."

When will the set come out? Sansweet says, "We're not ready to announce exactly when it's coming out, but it won't be in the too distant future."

However, The Digital Bits has also heard from their industry sources who are saying that the tentative release plan for this BD set is for October 2011. Of course, this hasn't been confirmed by LucasFilm and this date could indeed change.

We'll be sure to keep you posted with any and all news on this highly-anticipated Star Wars Blu-ray set as soon as we have more information.

Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope was released May 25th, 1977 and stars Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Peter Cushing, Alec Guinness, Anthony Daniels, Kenny Baker, Peter Mayhew. The film is directed by George Lucas.

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Zoe Saldana on Star Trek 2's Start Date

2010-04-20T04:05:00.000+01:00

While we patiently await news on when a sequel to J.J. Abrams summer blockbuster will start filming, it seems one of the actresses in the film expects that news soon. Inquirer.net recently spoke with Zoe Saldana who revealed she should know a Star Trek 2 start date very soon.

"Within a month, we'll have specific filming dates for Star Trek 2. So we have to do whatever we have to do before the Enterprise comes calling."

She also talked a bit about a sequel to her other 2009 blockbuster, Avatar.

"I think he already knows what he's going to do with Avatar 2. He just needs to rest first. I kept telling him, 'Jim, you really need to get away and rest.' But now he's in the Amazon in Brazil. He's a prophet. He's like a little machine."

Star Trek 2 comes to theaters June 29th, 2012 and stars Zoe Saldana, Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Anton Yelchin, Simon Pegg, Karl Urban, John Cho.

Avatar was released December 18th, 2009 and stars Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Joel Moore, Giovanni Ribisi, Michelle Rodriguez, Laz Alonso. The film is directed by James Cameron.

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Lewis Gilbert shares his Bond girl secrets

2010-04-20T03:35:00.000+01:00

Lewis Gilbert directed more than 40 acclaimed films, including Reach For The Sky, Alfie, You Only Live Twice and The Spy Who Loved Me. Now, at 90, in his new book All My Flashbacks, he shares some of his secrets. In this exclusive extract, he reveals how he had to tame war hero Douglas Bader and coax a reluctant Bond beauty to deliver her lines.

Reach For The Sky was my first big hit. It was the story of Douglas Bader, the brave RAF pilot who, despite losing both legs in an accident before the war, went on to become a squadron leader who played an important role in the Battle of Britain.

Very early on, we had to think about who was to play Bader. When your hero actually exists, getting the casting right is even harder than usual. Laurence Olivier turned us down and even suggested Bader play the part himself. We didn't go for that and tried Richard Burton. He was interested enough but a big Hollywood picture, Alexander The Great, came up and off he went to do that.

At this point, we started talking about Kenneth More. Kenny had left the Navy with no idea of what to do with himself. All he knew was that he had enjoyed reading the news for his ship's radio station because he had been able to throw the odd joke in.

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Summit Entertainment Picks Up Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus

2010-04-20T03:05:00.000+01:00

Summit Entertainment has acquired worldwide film and television rights to the entire Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus franchise based on the book series written by John Gray, Ph.D. The initial book, which was the launch of more than a dozen Mars-Venus titles, was originally published by Harper Collins in 1992. Gail Berman and Lloyd Braun will produce the film project via their BermanBraun banner.

Erik Feig, Summit's President of Production, stated, "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus is not just the title of a book, or what we know will become an amazing film and TV franchise - it is a pop cultural mainstay and comically, sadly, romantically, all too often still true these many years after first being published. We are thrilled to have the opportunity to work on a franchise whose name everyone knows and whose reality everyone lives!"

Gail Berman and Lloyd Braun, partners in BermanBraun, stated, "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus is the most enduring relationship franchise in the world and the Rosetta Stone for understanding the opposite sex. While men and women may never truly speak the same language, we're thrilled to explore their perpetually hilarious, painful and romantic conflicts on the big screen."

The book series Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus assesses marital and relationship problems in terms of distinct and pervasive gender differences. The Mars-Venus series has sold over 50 million books in 45 territories worldwide. Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus is the #1 bestselling book of the last decade and the #1 relationship book of all time. It was on The New York Times Bestseller List for nearly seven years and is #6 on USA Today's list of the 25 Most Influential Books. In addition to his publishing success, Dr. Gray's video/DVD lecture series has earned over $100 million.

Feig and Meredith Milton, Summit's Vice President of Production, will oversee the project for the studio. Andrew Mittman, head of feature film development at BermanBraun, brought the project into the company. He will spearhead the production for BermanBraun.

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Geoffrey Reeve obituary

2010-04-20T02:35:00.001+01:00

The film director and producer Geoffrey Reeve, who has died aged 77, contributed polished examples of mainstream British cinema in a variety of forms over several decades.

He was born in Tring, Hertfordshire, the son of a compositor who would cycle each day to the printworks in nearby King's Langley. A bright pupil at the local primary, Reeve won a county council scholarship to Berkhamsted school where he excelled in sports, academic subjects and school plays. He was also a notable chorister, an experience he would put to good use for the subplot of the film Shadow Run 50 years later.

After national service with the 7th Royal Tank Regiment in Hong Kong, he went to Exeter College, Oxford, in 1953 to read law. His singing voice and his gift for comic acting made him a useful addition to Oxford's drama and revue companies, and he was apparently set on a theatrical career until parental disapproval intervened.

After his marriage to Gina Gurney in 1956, Reeve left for Canada and a job with ICI, making promotional films for the company. On his return to the UK, he made TV commercials. He joined the writer/producer/director Carl Foreman's Open Road Films as an associate producer, and it was while he was investigating the film rights to several Daphne du Maurier books that he met the thriller writer Alistair MacLean. MacLean had bought Jamaica Inn, the coaching house on the borders of Bodmin Moor that Du Maurier immortalised in her 1936 novel.

MacLean supplied the screenplay for Reeve's directorial debut, Puppet On a Chain (1971), based on a MacLean novel and involving drug smuggling in the Netherlands. At a difficult time for British cinema, thrillers were safe bets, and Caravan to Vaccares (1974), based on another MacLean novel, was in a similar vein. An Anglo-French project co-produced by Reeve, it starred Charlotte Rampling and revolved around skulduggery in the Camargue, with a climax in a bullring.

In 1984, Reeve was producer of the successful TV miniseries The Far Pavilions, a melodrama based on MM Kaye's novel about 19th-century India, with a cast including Christopher Lee, Omar Sharif, John Gielgud and Rupert Everett. The following year saw the release of The Shooting Party, which took place in 1913 on a Derbyshire estate and sought to offer an elegiac portrait of an England about to be swept away by the first world war. It offered a deeply felt central performance by James Mason, who died shortly after the film's completion. Gielgud was again in the cast, as were Dorothy Tutin and Edward Fox.

As a producer, Reeve's subsequent films dealt with aspects of contemporary life, and he began a long collaboration with Michael Caine. Half Moon Street (1987), based on Paul Theroux's novel Doctor Slaughter, ventured into the demimonde where sex and politics overlap, and managed in the process to achieve wit rather than prurience.

The Whistle Blower (also 1987) was an exploration of harder-edged thriller territory, tapping into topical fears about rogue elements in the security services and traitors in high places. Gielgud appears as the aristocratic "mole"

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James Bond 23 Put on Indefinite Hold

2010-04-20T02:05:00.001+01:00

007 producers, Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli of EON Productions, today announced they have suspended development on the next James Bond film previously scheduled for release 2011/2012.

"Due to the continuing uncertainty surrounding the future of MGM and the failure to close a sale of the studio, we have suspended development on Bond 23 indefinitely. We do not know when development will resume and do not have a date for the release of Bond 23," stated Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli jointly.

EON Productions have produced twenty two James Bond films since 1962. In 1995, Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli took over the 007 franchise from Albert R. Broccoli and are responsible for producing some of the most successful James Bond films ever, including Casino Royale and more recently Quantum of Solace. The James Bond franchise is the longest running in film history. EON Productions and Danjaq LLC are affiliate companies and control all worldwide merchandising for James Bond.

James Bond 23 is in development and stars Daniel Craig, Judi Dench. The film is directed by Sam Mendes.

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Sacha Baron Cohen tipped for Walter Mitty remake

2010-04-20T01:35:00.002+01:00

Sacha Baron Cohen could be set to take the lead role in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, a new remake of the comic tale of a small-town fantasist and the elaborate daydreams he concocts. The British comedian is currently in talks with the film's backers, 20th Century Fox, according to the movie website Pajiba.com.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a short story by the US humourist James Thurber, first published in the New Yorker magazine in 1939. This formed the basis for a 1947 Hollywood outing starring Danny Kaye, although Thurber disapproved of the ways in which the film deviated from his original tale.

A remake has been stalled at various stages of development since 1994. Numerous directors, including Steven Spielberg and Ron Howard, were tipped to oversee the update, with the lead role shuttling between the likes of Mike Myers, Owen Wilson and Jim Carrey. The script was recently rewritten by Peter Morgan, of The Queen and Frost/Nixon fame.

Having cut his teeth on British TV, Baron Cohen scored a worldwide hit with his 2006 feature Borat. He is now poised to play a supporting role The Invention of Hugo Cabret, a magic-realist drama to be directed by Martin Scorsese.

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The films to flatten those American retreads

2010-04-19T03:55:00.001+01:00

Those hoping for something fresh or dangerous from Cannes this year should focus on the international entries, and ignore the blockbuster American retreads rolled in to suck up some desperately needed kudos on the sidelines.
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David Duchovny is not quite the man next door

2010-04-19T02:55:00.001+01:00

David Duchovny, Hollywood star, husband and father of two, is in the throes of a new relationship — and, to tell the truth, which he usually does, it has left him with mixed feelings. On the one hand, his new setup makes perfect sense, especially given his occasionally nomadic lifestyle. And, of course, we all have to move on and can’t live in the past. But he is something of a traditionalist and doesn’t enjoy leaving loved ones behind. Yes, like many, Duchovny is facing up to one of mankind’s great questions: just how do we feel about the Kindle?

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The Market | Film review

2010-04-19T01:55:00.002+01:00

In his second movie set in Turkey, the British film-maker Ben Hopkins focuses on Mihram, a handsome loser from the country's eastern borders forever devising get-rich-quick schemes, usually connected with smuggled or stolen goods. The movie, set in the mid-90s, artfully observes a society so endemically corrupt that Mihram seems like an honest man. Trying to do well by doing good, he undertakes to help a local doctor by finding black market replacements for some stolen drugs, then tries to make a little for himself on the side. Things go both right and wrong and, as a result, he ends up in the hands of the organised criminals who robbed the doctor in the first place. A satisfying if uncomfortable fable.

Martin Compston: ‘It’s top off, sex scene, the usual’

2010-04-18T05:41:00.001+01:00

Martin Compston’s looks are becoming a problem. The 25-year-old Scottish star of the home-grown classics Sweet Sixteen and Red Road, as well as the American indie hit A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, has lost the dimple-faced baby chops of old and in their place have emerged the razor cheekbones and brushstroke eyes of a lady-killer.

Babies

2010-04-18T04:41:00.000+01:00

May 7, 2010 - Everybody loves... "Babies." This visually stunning new movie simultaneously follows four babies around the world - from first breath to first steps. From Mongolia to Namibia to San Francisco to Tokyo, "Babies" joyfully captures on film the earliest stages of the journey of humanity that are at once unique and universal to us all.

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Just Wright

2010-04-18T03:41:00.000+01:00

May 14, 2010 - "Just Wright" revolves around a sports trainer (Latifah) who finds herself falling in love with a professional basketball player (Common) while rehabilitating him from a career threatening injury. Things are further complicated because her closest friend (Patton) is also pursuing him.

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Micmacs

2010-04-18T02:41:00.001+01:00

May 28, 2010 - Bazil (Danny Boon), a man whose father was killed by a roadside bomb, is hit by a stray bullet in a freak drive-by shooting incident. When he gets out of the hospital without a job or any money, he falls in with an ex-con who lives in a scrap dump and makes plans to get revenge on those responsible.

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MacGruber

2010-04-17T10:23:00.000+01:00

May 21, 2010 - Only one American hero has earned the rank of Green Beret, Navy SEAL and Army Ranger. Just one operative has been awarded 16 purple hearts, 3 Congressional Medals of Honor and 7 presidential medals of bravery. And only one guy is man enough to still sport a mullet. In 2010, Will Forte brings "Saturday Night Live's" clueless soldier of fortune to the big screen in the action comedy "MacGruber."

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Boogie Woogie: film review and trailer

2010-04-17T09:23:00.000+01:00

Boogir Woogie is a failed attempt at the kind of all-star, multi-story ensemble that became a trademark of the late Robert Altman.

Sadly director Duncan Ward is no Altman and this satire on the pretensions of the London art scene is thumpingly obvious and well past its sell-by date.

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Films out this week

2010-04-17T08:23:00.001+01:00

The Manchurian Candidate (12A)
(John Frankenheimer, 1962, US) Laurence Harvey, Frank Sinatra. 126 mins

Reissue of the cold war classic, about a plot to turn soldiers into assassins.

City Of Life And Death (15)
(Lu Chuan, 2009, China) Liu Ye, Gao Yuanyuan. 135 mins

Drama about the 1937 occupation of Nanking.

Boogie Woogie (15)
(Duncan Ward, 2009, UK) Danny Huston, Heather Graham. 94 mins

Flabby art world satire with a cast of thousands.

The Market (NC)
(Ben Hopkins, 2008, Ger/UK/Turk/Kazakh) Genco Erkal, Tayanç Ayaydin. 93 mins

Offbeat drama about an aspirant Turkish trader.

Paathshaala (NC)
(Milind Ukey, 2010, Ind) Nana Patekar, Shahid Kapoor. 138 mins

Bollywood's answer to High School Musical.

Give Me Your Hand (15)
(Pascal-Alex Vincent, 2008, Fr/Ger) Alexandre Carril, Victor Carril. 77 mins

Gay-themed French drama about conflicted brothers.

OUT FROM FRIDAY

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Furry Vengeance

2010-04-17T07:23:00.001+01:00

April 30, 2010 - "Furry Vengeance" is a live action family comedy in which an ambitious young real estate developer, Dan Sanders, faces off with a band of angry animals when his new housing subdivision pushes too far into a pristine part of the wilderness. Led by an incredibly clever raccoon, the animals stymie the development and teach our hero about the environmental consequences of man's encroachment on nature.

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Mother and Child

2010-04-17T06:23:00.000+01:00

May 7, 2010 - Three women's lives share a common core: they have all been profoundly affected by adoption. KAREN (Annette Bening) had a baby at 14, gave her up at birth, and has been haunted ever since by the daughter she never knew. ELIZABETH (Naomi Watts) grew up as an adopted child; she's a bright and ambitious lawyer, but a flinty loner in her personal life. LUCY (Kerry Washington) is just embarking with her husband on the adoption odyssey, looking for a baby to become their own.

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Happiness Runs

2010-04-17T05:23:00.000+01:00

May 7, 2010 - A young man named Victor realizes the shortcomings of the utopian ideals on the hippie commune where he was raised. Victor's mother is funding the commune where the guru Insley hypnotizes and seduces women with a technique he calls "running." Insley manipulates the minds of these women so that they give him their bodies and all their worldly possessions.

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Casino Jack and the United States of Money

2010-04-17T04:23:00.000+01:00

May 7, 2010 - High rollers in Indian casinos, hookers in Saipan, a murdered Greek tycoon, Cold War spy novels, plush trips to paradise... and the United States Congress. These are among the intriguing clues that add up to the epic mystery behind one of the greatest attempted heists in American history.

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The Ghost Writer: film review and trailer

2010-04-17T03:23:00.000+01:00

Notoriety is so firmly associated with Roman Polanski that it should probably be his middle name.

His critics may be surprised to discover that his screen version of the Robert Harris novel The Ghost is an efficient, almost anonymous, old-school political thriller that a weary Alfred Hitchcock might have made in the Sixites.

The film is polished and deliberately paced with Polanski's professionalism and a strong cast compensating for a plot that doesn't stand up to close scrutiny.

Ewan McGregor's cynical hack known throughout as The Ghost is hired to salvage the dull memoirs of former British prime minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan).

His predecessor at the word processor died in mysterious circumstances but the hefty fee is irresistible. His arrival at Lang's retreat on an island off the eastern seaboard of America coincides with an announcement that The Hague may try Lang for war crimes.

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City Of Life And Death: film review and trailer

2010-04-17T02:23:00.000+01:00

This film is an extraordinary recreation of Hell on Earth.

In December 1937 Japanese troops laid siege to the Chinese capital of Nanjing.

Their approach was merciless and shocking in its barbarity. Soldiers and civilians were beheaded, torched, shot or buried alive in mass graves.

Director Chuan Lu's impressive, carefully balanced film places the viewer in the front line of events. The rubble-strewn streets, guerrilla tactics and sniper assaults are as intense as Saving Private Ryan.

The black and white cinematography has all the impact of a Robert Capa photo as we witness a field of bodies stretching as far as the eye can see.

Characters such as Japanese soldier Kadokawa (Hideo Nakaizumi) and Chinese boy Xiaodouzi (Bin Liu) provide a thread of continuity through the chaotic tapestry of the massacre.

There are touching pin pricks of humanity as a soldier covers a child's eyes and translator Mr Tang (Wei Fan) gives his wedding ring to his wife before reporting to the Japanese commanders.

A harrowing, unflinching epic.

VERDICT 4/5

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Crying With Laughter: film review and trailer

2010-04-17T01:23:00.001+01:00

Stephen McCole is stand-up comedian Joey Frisk.

You might think that his career, ex-wife and self-destructive impulses would provide sufficient plot but apparently not as Joey's old pal Frank (Malcolm Shields) pops up to involve him in his dastardly scheme.

The psycho drama is (unintentionally) much funnier than any of the comedy and none of it is remotely plausible.

VERDICT 2/5

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Letters to Juliet

2010-04-16T03:53:00.000+01:00

May 14, 2010 - When a young American (Amanda Seyfried) travels to the city of Verona, home of the star-crossed lover Juliet Capulet of Romeo and Juliet fame, she joins a group of volunteers who respond to letters to Juliet seeking advice about love. After answering one letter dated 1951, she inspires its author (Vanessa Redgrave) to travel to Italy in search of her long-lost love and sets off a chain of events that will bring a love into both their lives unlike anything they ever imagined.

Go to FilmJabber.com to see Letters to Juliet movie information.

Holy Rollers

2010-04-16T03:23:00.000+01:00

May 21, 2010 - The film is ripped from true-crime headlines and follows an impressionable youth (Eisenberg) from an Orthodox Brooklyn community. He's lured into becoming an Ecstasy dealer by a friend (Bartha) with ties to an Israeli drug cartel. Newcomer Danny Abeckaser is set to play the owner of a club where they do their decidedly unkosher business.

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A Nightmare on Elm Street

2010-04-16T02:57:00.000+01:00

April 30, 2010 - Warner Bros.' New Line Cinema has hired veteran screenwriter Wesley Strick to pen the relaunch of the "A Nightmare on Elm Street" series.

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Robin Hood

2010-04-16T02:53:00.000+01:00

May 14, 2010 - Oscar winner Russell Crowe stars as the legendary figure known by generations as “Robin Hood,” whose exploits have endured in popular mythology and ignited the imagination of those who share his spirit of adventure and righteousness. In 13th century England, Robin and his band of marauders confront corruption in a local village and lead an uprising against the crown that will forever alter the balance of world power. And whether thief or hero, one man from humble beginnings will become an eternal symbol of freedom for his people.

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I Love You Phillip Morris

2010-04-16T02:27:00.000+01:00

April 30, 2010 - Based on a book by Houston Chronicle crime reporter Steve McVicker, the fact-based film casts Carrey as Steven Russell, a married father whose exploits landed him in the Texas criminal justice system. He fell madly in love with his cellmate, who eventually was set free, which led Russell to escape from Texas prisons four times.

Go to FilmJabber.com to see I Love You Phillip Morris movie information.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

2010-04-16T02:23:00.000+01:00

From the team that brought the "Pirates of the Caribbean" trilogy to the big screen, Walt Disney Pictures and Jerry Bruckheimer Films present "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time," an epic action-adventure set in the mystical lands of Persia. A rogue prince (Jake Gyllenhaal) reluctantly joins forces with a mysterious princess (Gemma Arterton) and together, they race against dark forces to safeguard an ancient dagger capable of releasing the Sands of Time—a gift from the gods that can reverse time and allow its possessor to rule the world.

Go to FilmJabber.com to see Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time movie information.

Harry Brown

2010-04-16T01:57:00.000+01:00

April 30, 2010 - Set in modern day Britain, "Harry Brown" follows one man's journey through a chaotic world where teenage violence runs rampant. As a modest, law abiding citizen, Brown lives alone. His only companion is his best friend Leonard. When Leonard is killed, Brown reaches his breaking point. "Harry Brown" is a powerful, character driven thriller starring two-time Academy Award® winner Michael Caine in a tour-de-force performance.

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George A. Romero's Survival of the Dead

2010-04-16T01:53:00.000+01:00

Immediately following the events of Diary of the Dead, SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD is the 6th film from George A. Romero to look at a world where humans are in the minority and the zombies rule.

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The Good Heart

2010-04-16T01:27:00.001+01:00

April 30, 2010 - Brian Cox stars as Jacques, the curmudgeonly owner of a gritty New York dive bar that serves as home to a motley assortment of professional drinkers. Jacques is determinedly drinking and smoking himself to death when he meets Lucas (Paul Dano), a homeless young man who has already given up on life. In the hopes of keeping his legacy alive, Jacques deems Lucas is a fitting heir and takes him under his wing, schooling him in the male-centric laws of his alcoholic clubhouse: no new customers, no fraternizing with customers and, absolutely no women. Lucas is a quick study, but their friendship is put to the test when the distraught and beautiful April (Isild Le Besco) shows up at the bar seeking shelter, and Lucas insists they help her out.

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