MOVIES

'Playlist' star is Hollywood's hottest awkward teen

2008-10-12T05:36:00.000-07:00

Michael Cera always seems to be pining for something: booze and a popular classmate in "Superbad"; the sly soul mate he impregnated in "Juno"; a lovely but forbidden cousin in TV's "Arrested Development."

One thing the modest, soft-spoken Cera does not pine for is celebrity, but he's got it anyway. As Hollywood's favorite awkward teen, Cera has just turned 20 with an enviable list of hits and critical favorites behind him.

He's back in full heartache mode in "Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist," starring as a high school senior whose obsession over a shallow ex-girlfriend vanishes during an all-night romp through New York with a new dreamgirl (Kat Dennings).

With back-to-back $100 million hits in "Superbad" and "Juno," Cera has quietly jumped to the forefront of young Hollywood actors. He has two movies due out next year and another starting production soon in Toronto, near his hometown of Brampton, Ontario.

Steady, enjoyable work, not stardom and commercial success, is what he aims for, however.

"I never really had expectations either way. It doesn't matter to me. I just like the work," Cera said in an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival, where "Nick and Norah" premiered. "I like being on the set and that's what's important to me about being an actor. Things change and come and go, and whatever happens happens. As long as I like it and I'm working with people I like, I'll be happy."

"Nick and Norah" is a boy-meets-girl story that plays out over one wild night. The film opened Friday and had a successful weekend at the box office.

Cera's Nick is so smitten with his ex-girlfriend he devotes endless hours to making and packaging music compilations for her, CDs she thoughtlessly discards. But they have magically found their way to Dennings' Norah, who adores the song selections.

After Nick and Norah share a memorable introduction at a club, they wind up on a quest to find a missing drunken friend while dodging their past romantic partners, at the same time tracking the next guerrilla gig of their elusive favorite band.

It's the second all-nighter Cera has pulled on the big-screen, following last year's "Superbad," which followed the adventures of three underage pals on a hunt for alcohol.

"The one-night idea, I think it's something that people like. Whenever people go to a party or something, they're kind of hoping it will be a memorable night," Cera said. "It's a cool idea. Those nights are great when things just keep happening and leading to other things. It just feels like you're living."

Cera got into acting as a child after he and a friend enrolled in a class that taught improvisational games. One of the teachers told Cera's mother that the family should get an agent for the boy.

After doing some commercials, Cera began landing TV roles in Canada and then Hollywood, eventually winning the part of hemming-and-hawing teen George-Michael Bluth on the critically adored comedy "Arrested Development," the story of a dysfunctional rich family trying to make do after their assets are frozen.

Oliver Stone: Bush's life 'bigger than fiction'

2008-10-12T05:33:00.000-07:00

George W. Bush's ascent to the presidency was "bigger than fiction," director Oliver Stone told "Larry King Live" Monday night, describing his soon-to-be released biopic, "W."

Stone, whose film opens October 17 -- less than three weeks before the November 4 presidential election -- said he was fascinated by Bush, "a bum at the age of 40 years old."

"He turned his whole life around and through evangelism and through his faith and his family and he became president," Stone said.

"It's a great fantasy and it happened. It's bigger than fiction," said Stone.

Stone said while he supports Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee in the presidential race, his personal politics didn't influence the film.

"I couldn't make a movie with hate or malice. There is none in this movie. I see the guy as more like John Wayne, which is to say I don't like his politics but he's endearing in a strange, goofy, awkward way, and he did capture the imagination of the country," he said.

Stone, a Vietnam veteran, is known for his critically acclaimed, yet politically charged films. He's received Best Director Oscars for "Platoon," which also won an Oscar for Best Picture (1986), and "Born on the Fourth of July" (1989). He also won an Academy Award for his screenplay adaptation of "Midnight Express" (1978).

From "JFK" to "Natural Born Killers," Stone's films have made him a lightning rod for controversy -- and "W" is unlikely to change that. In the film, he draws a contrast between President Bush and his father, former President George H.W. Bush, whom Stone says was a "far more diplomatic" commander in chief.

"We went to war in Iraq and he did not go all the way," referring to the elder Bush. "So that becomes a big issue in the movie. He didn't get rid of Saddam then and the son has to be -- feels that he has to act stronger than the father because of emotional reasons and there's a lot of father-son subcurrent in the movie. He is challenged by his father and he wants to outdo him, he wants to be stronger than him."

Stone and Bush started their freshman years at Yale University together, but Stone said he didn't graduate with Bush because he went to Vietnam. "I met him years later," Stone said.

During the interview, Stone drew parallels between Bush and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, now Sen. John McCain's Republican running mate.

"I think she's -- she's along the lines of 'Dubya' [George W. Bush] a bit. That same kind of folksy, common man approach," he said. "And she -- it got Dubya elected. He did very well with that."

And, even though he and McCain are both Vietnam veterans, he opposes McCain's views on war and disagrees with the candidate's positions on Iraq and Afghanistan.

Still, Stone said, "Whoever wins this, Obama or McCain, it's going to be living in the shadow of Dubya. I think he changed the world. I think we're going to be with him for a generation."

Stone noted that Bush has earned a historically low approval rating -- only 24 percent, according to the most recent CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll. "He's a young man, Mr. Bush. He's not -- he's not leaving the scene. He may have low polls, but he's going to be around."

Esquire names 'Sexiest Woman Alive'

2008-10-12T05:24:00.000-07:00

Alongside a photo spread that shows her in little more than a T-shirt, Halle Berry talks about being the sexiest woman alive, a title Esquire magazine gives her in its November issue.

"I don't know exactly what it means, but being 42 and having just had a baby, I think I'll take it," says Berry, who gave birth to her daughter, Nahla, in March.

"Sexiness is a state of mind -- a comfortable state of being," she says. "It's about loving yourself in your most unlovable moments."

But Berry, who won an Oscar for her role in "Monster's Ball," can't claim the sexiest-woman honor all to herself.

"I share this title with every woman, because every woman is a nominee for it at any moment," she says.

Struggling With Faith and Gentrification

2008-10-12T05:21:00.000-07:00

THE Feast of San Gennaro, the celebration of the Neapolitan saint that transforms Little Italy in Manhattan into a tourist-thronged street fair every September, has made a few memorable movie appearances over the years. It was the bustling backdrop to Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets,” and the scene of a couple of violent crimes in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Godfather” trilogy. This year another Italian-American filmmaker took his turn: Abel Ferrara, chronicler of the downtown underbelly and lately a resident of the neighborhood.

On the final night of the feast last month — also the final night of shooting for his documentary about the event and the personalities in its orbit — Mr. Ferrara was racing up and down Mulberry Street, weaving through the bemused crowds and past the sausage and zeppole stands, looking for things to shoot and people to talk to, and finding material everywhere he turned.

“I didn’t want to shoot during the feast,” Mr. Ferrara said. “But it’s when the talent comes out.” Sure enough, the actor Danny Aiello was signing head shots in the back of one restaurant. In front of another the former Hell’s Angel and “Oz” star Chuck Zito was having dinner. In the restaurant La Mela the owner, Frankie Cee, who has appeared in a few of Mr. Ferrara’s films, was hosting the doo-wop singer Dion and his wife, Susan.

Watching Mr. Ferrara at work — a blur of continuous motion but a lot more in control than he lets on — you can almost see what gives his films their hallucinatory ambience. His movies thrive on a kind of hypnotic chaos, and Mr. Ferrara seemed to be feeding off the din and disarray of San Gennaro, actively looking for digressions. He tried to get a deli owner to reveal who he was voting for in the presidential elections (while a policeman watched warily), stopped for a snack at a falafel restaurant and struck up a conversation with the waiter (“Anyone ever tell you you look like Christopher Walken?”), and bantered with a neighborhood old-timer who goes by Skinny Vinnie. (For reasons unknown the encounter left Mr. Ferrara in possession, briefly, of a pineapple.)

Mr. Ferrara and Shanyn Leigh, an actress who has appeared in his films, have been living for the past few months in an apartment above La Mela. For Mr. Ferrara, 57, the San Gennaro project is a matter of some urgency, a way to reconnect with a neighborhood and a cultural heritage. “If I didn’t do this I would have to come back as a ghost,” he said.

Throwing Incaution to the Wind, Stone Paints Bush

2008-10-12T05:18:00.000-07:00

IMAGINE these fantastical sequences from “W.,” the Oliver Stone portrayal of President George W. Bush that opens on Friday: The president is not alone with his dogs when he chokes on a pretzel and tumbles from the sofa; Saddam Hussein is in the White House family quarters with him. Later Mr. Bush flies over Baghdad on a magic carpet as the bombs rain down. And finally Mr. Hussein returns for another cameo, this time to shout insults at the president and his father.

These depictions would hardly be a reach for a director who is fond of monkeying with history. In “JFK” Mr. Stone suggested that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by a cabal of gay anti-Communists. In “Nixon” he made that president so epically loathsome that even his Irish setter turned on him.

But “W.” contains no airborne Bush; Mr. Stone cut the scene. And the pretzel incident has no Iraqi dictator, only the two first dogs, Barney and Spot.

“It was wacky stuff that at the end of the day took us out of the movie,” Mr. Stone said in a recent interview in a back corner of the restaurant at the Royalton Hotel in Manhattan. “We wanted to focus on the mind-set of this man. We don’t change anything in his true story. Don’t have to, because it’s a great story. Dickens would do it. Mark Twain would write a great book. This guy who is basically a bum becomes president of the United States.”

The surprise about “W.” is that its left-wing creator made a movie that is not so much operatic or hysterical as utterly plausible.

Revolutionary Hero, Relentless Heroine

2008-10-04T04:56:00.000-07:00

Hollywood meets Havana as the 46th New York Film Festival glides and sometimes stumbles into its second week. In “Che,” Benicio Del Toro, wearing a jaunty beret and wispy tufts of beard, wages war against Yankee-supported states in Steven Soderbergh’s 257-minute (with a 30-minute bladder break) historical epic. Meanwhile in “Changeling,” Clint Eastwood’s 141-minute period drama, Angelina Jolie, wearing a jaunty cloche and bloody slash of lipstick, does battle against the patriarchs of 1920s Los Angeles. “Che” and “Changeling” were first shown in May at the Cannes Film Festival, where they were swaddled in hype and hysteria and anointed with tears of critical joy and fury. Other similarities: both were directed by men who have always maintained a distance from the studios for which they profitably work. Both also hinge on bankable Hollywood stars — Mr. Del Toro as Che, Ms. Jolie as Christine Collins — and feature recognizable faces in supporting roles. Lou Diamond Phillips plays a sissy Communist leader in “Che,” in which a distracting Matt Damon pops up as a man of peace. I didn’t notice any pinkos in “Changeling,” but John Malkovich goes all righteous and solemn as a man of the cloth.
Divided into two sections — once called “The Argentine” and “Guerrilla” — the now monosyllabically titled “Che” tracks the guerrilla leader over mountains and through his tactical successes in Cuba before moving on to his catastrophic bid to bring revolutionary socialism to Bolivia. The movie has been described as dialectical, but two parts do not a dialectic make: something meaningful has to happen between those parts. Throughout the movie Mr. Soderbergh mixes the wild beauty of his landscapes with images of Che heroically engaged in battle, thoughtfully scribbling and reading, and tending to ailing peasants and soldiers. Che wins, Che loses, but Che remains the same in what plays like a procedural about a charismatic leader, impossible missions and the pleasures of work and camaraderie — “Ocean’s Eleven” with better cigars.

Rachel Getting Married (2008)

2008-10-04T04:53:00.000-07:00

The problem in “Rachel Getting Married” — not the problem with the film, mind you — is that even though Rachel is the one getting married, it’s all about Kym, her younger sister. Kym, played by a decidedly un-princessy Anne Hathaway, is furloughed from rehab for the happy event, arriving at her father’s rambling Connecticut clapboard house on a toxic cloud of snark, cigarette smoke and wounded narcissism. With her pale, slack features and dark-rimmed eyes framed by severe bangs, Ms. Hathaway resembles the silent film star Louise Brooks in “Pandora’s Box,” except that Kym is less like the curious maiden of Greek mythology than like the box itself: a bottomless repository of guilt, destructiveness and general bad feeling.And yet she is also an undeniably magnetic figure, drawing the attention of her father (Bill Irwin) away from Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) and pulling both the film’s and her family’s center of gravity toward the self-loathing, self-pitying core of her damaged personality. And like the family the film, directed by Jonathan Demme from a screenplay by Jenny Lumet, both accommodates Kym’s need for recognition and struggles against it.
The themes of dependency and recovery that Kym brings home in her overnight bag are familiar, even banal. Every unhappy family may be unique, but every addict is fundamentally the same, and if “Rachel Getting Married” had surrendered its story completely to Kym, it would have risked becoming as drab and familiar as a made-for-television 12-step homily.
But Mr. Demme protects the film against such an unsatisfying fate. He is certainly sympathetic to Kym, even as he and Ms. Hathaway conspire to show her at her appalling worst. But he has never been one to restrict his sympathies, and the wonderful thing about “Rachel Getting Married” is how expansive it seems, in spite of the limits of its scope and the modesty of its ambitions. It’s a small movie, and in some ways a very sad one, but it has an undeniable and authentic vitality, an exuberance of spirit, that feels welcome and rare.

Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist (2008)

2008-10-04T04:50:00.000-07:00

As thin as an iPod Nano, as full of adolescent self-display as a Facebook page, “Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist” strives to capture, in meticulous detail, what it’s like to be young right now. Working from a popular novel by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan (and an idiomatically spot-on screenplay by Lorene Scafaria) the director, Peter Sollett, spins a shy, sweet romance around a carefully chosen soundtrack with music (and cameo appearances) by such emblems of up-to-the-minute hipster credibility as the singer-songwriter Devendra Banhart and the band Bishop Allen, among others.Nick and Norah, New Jersey high school students bouncing through the rock clubs of New York, are drawn together by their shared musical passions (in particular for an enigmatic band called Where’s Fluffy). The tunes that play alongside their nocturnal adventure express longing, sadness, anxiety and joy with more intensity than they can muster themselves. Nick, played by the wet-noodle heartthrob Michael Cera (“Juno,” “Superbad”) and Norah (Kat Dennings, who has a hint of Kate Winslet’s soft, smart loveliness in her face) are, like so many kids these days, most comfortable with diffidence, understatement and a deadpan style of address that collapses the distinction between irony and sincerity.
Norah’s wary, pouty manner and Nick’s odd mix of timidity and sarcasm are both strategies of self-protection. He has recently been dumped by Tris (Alex Dziena), a schoolmate of Norah’s and one of her social oppressors. She has a sometime boyfriend (Jay Baruchel) and, behind her mask of indifference, a lot of self-doubt. The daughter of a recording industry big shot, Norah is never sure if anyone likes her for herself. Nick, for his part, seems unsure about whether he likes himself at all.

Catching the Heartbeat and Fragmented Poetry of the Delta

2008-10-01T06:08:00.000-07:00

There isn’t much talk and not a drop of cynicism in “Ballast,” Lance Hammer’s austerely elegant, emotionally unadorned riff on life and death in the Mississippi Delta. Shot with a sure hand and a cast of unknowns, the film doesn’t so much tell a story as develop a tone and root around a place that, despite the intimate camerawork, remains shrouded in ambiguity. Mr. Hammer puts in the time, but never asserts that he knows this world and his black characters from the inside out, a wise choice for a white boy playing the blues.

Taken on its own, “Ballast,” which has been making the international festival rounds with great success since its premiere at Sundance in January, offers plenty to chew on. Shot on 35-millimeter film by the British cinematographer Lol Crawley, it opens with a hand-held camera trailing after a boy of around 12, James (JimMyron Ross), looking and then walking toward — and soon running at — hundreds, thousands, of geese noisily taking flight into the blue winter sky. The boy doesn’t say a word as he watches this screeching mass, yet a feeling of loneliness, thick as a winter coat and every bit as palpable as those darkly swirling birds (surging like storm clouds, like waves), settles around him.

More moody skies follow, interspersed with words that, with few exceptions, sound as unrehearsed as life. Through a series of short, elliptical scenes, fragments of beauty caught as if on the fly, you learn that James lives in a cramped trailer with his single, hard-working mother, Marlee (Tarra Riggs), though mostly what he does is drift. Visibly bored, seemingly friendless, he putt-putts across his unnamed township on a small motorbike and sniffs around the local bad element, adolescent thugs offering perilous companionship and crack cocaine. Despite all this drifting, the film remains grounded, tethered to a great mass of humanity named Lawrence (Micheal J. Smith Sr.), who increasingly fills the screen and gives this exceptionally fine feature debut both its title and heart.

Mr. Hammer developed “Ballast” with his mostly untrained actors over several months of rehearsal. Although the results generally look and sound more authentic, more real (whatever that means!) than even most American independent fare, the film nevertheless ebbs and flows like fiction. It builds on a series of incidents — a suicide, an attempted suicide, some bloody hooliganism and a misfired gun — any one of which would have given most of us enough excitement (and barroom anecdotes) to last a lifetime. It’s the kind of dramatic pileup that bodes ill in many films, but here feels natural as air largely because Mr. Hammer’s visual style — at once spare and detailed, restless and anchored by a classic sense of film space — tempers the story and keeps it from boiling over.

Believers, Skeptics and a Pool of Sitting Ducks

2008-10-01T06:00:00.000-07:00

There is no arguing with faith. As the comedian and outspoken nonbeliever Bill Maher travels the world, interviewing Christians, Jews and Muslims in the facetiously funny documentary “Religulous,” you begin to wonder if there might be two subspecies of humans.

The skeptical minority to which Mr. Maher belongs constitutes 16 percent of the American population, he says, citing a survey. For many of them, including Mr. Maher, the tenets of Christianity, Judaism and Islam (Eastern and African religions are ignored) are dangerous fairy tales and myths that have incited barbarous purges and holy wars that are still being fought. A talking snake? A man who lived inside a fish? These are two of Mr. Maher’s favorite biblical images offered up for ridicule.

The majority of Americans, however, embrace some form of blind faith. But because that faith by its very nature requires a leap into irrationality, it is almost impossible to explain or to defend in rational terms.

Mr. Maher has already established his position as an agnostic in his HBO comedy series, “Real Time With Bill Maher.” A recent clash on the program with his frequent guest the blogger and author Andrew Sullivan, who is a Roman Catholic, illustrated how believers and those who doubt might as well be from different planets. They can argue with each other in fairly reasonable voices about politics, but not about faith.

“Religulous” is directed by Larry Charles, whose credits include “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan” and many episodes of HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” And the movie has the same loose, on-the-road structure as “Borat.” Much of Mr. Maher’s film is extremely funny in a similarly irreverent, offhanded way. Some true believers — at least those who have a sense of humor about their faith — may even be amused. But most will not.

Shamita dances to kids tune

2008-09-27T07:17:00.000-07:00

You did a song for Hari Puttar... It is a fun song?
Yes, but let me clarify that it was a promotional video and not part of the movie. The producers came to me after the film was shot. I liked the concept and took it on.

How was the experience shooting with little kids?
I enjoyed every moment. The idea was very cute. And I had to dance with kids. I found it interesting and so took it up. I think it is a fun song.

The media has been terming it an item number.
It is a masti number where I play myself. The song is peppy and Punjabi -- a fun song. To term it an item number is not fine. It is a kids film.

What motivated you to do a kids film?
I have never done a kids film. I wanted to do the song as like I said, the cuteness appealed to me.

How was it working with Zain?
Zain is a good actor. It was fun working with him.

We don't see you much on the silver screen. What is reason for being selective?
I am running my production house now. And it takes up a lot of my time. I do not get much time to do films and besides, I need something that I enjoy to take it up.

It is said that Shilpa Shetty is making a film with you and AkshayKumar in the lead roles?
I wish I get these newsbreaks before you do. No, Shilpa was never making a film with me and Akshay Kumar. These stories are made up by media.

Television. No, I haven't thought about it. I live one day a time. I don't know what the future holds for me. I would like to do a great job at what I have taken on right now. And if in the future, I get
interested then well, it is a matter of that moment.

What do you feel is the USP of Hari Puttar – A Comedy of Terrors?
Why does anyone go to the theatre after buying a ticket? To be entertained. Hari Puttar – A Comedy of Terrors has that entertainment value. It is a fun film and I am sure that is one reason why everyone must see it.

Talking of kids films, one parting question. How does it feel to see
Taare Zameen Par being chosen for the Oscars?
Taare Zameen Par is a film that everybody loved. It is a brilliantly made film. I am very happy it has been chosen for the Oscars. And I am sure it will win.

Tahaan is going global

2008-09-27T07:15:00.000-07:00

Since its grand debut at Cannes, ‘Tahaan’ has been invited to participate in a number of esteemed film festivals across the globe. Tahaan has been selected in competition at the prestigious Rome International Film Festival (Oct 22, 2008) in Italy, CineKid International Film Festival (Oct 23,2008) in Amsterdam, Amazonas Film Festival (Nov 11-15, 2008) in Brazil, Dubai International Film Festival (Dec, 2008) in U.A.E, and Stockholm International Film Festival (Mar 2009) in Stockholm.

Tahaan has been invited for official selections at the Pusan International Film Festival (Oct 8, 2008) in South Korea, BFI London International Film Festival (Oct 15-30,2008) in the U.K, and Palm Springs International Film Festival (2009) in the US.

IDream Production’s ‘Tahaan’ directed by internationally acclaimed, award winning director and ace cinematographer Santosh Sivan made it’s global debut at the Cannes Film Market in 2008 to packed houses. Tahaan started its journey at Pusan in 2007 when the script was awarded a coveted place in the prestigious Pusan Promotional Plan, a dynamic project market focused in Asian cinema that provides financers and producers an opportunity to discover top quality projects.

Starring the enthralling, talented and versatile child actor Purav Bhandare, ‘Tahaan’ is a fable-like journey which revolves around an 8 year-old boy’s pursuit of purpose in his little world. Besides a truly spell-binding performance by Purav, the film also boasts of a strong ensemble cast consisting of some of the greatest veterans of Indian cinema such as Anupam Kher, Sarika, Rahul Bose, Victor Banerjee and Rahul Khanna.

Rafoo Chakkar (Comedy)

2008-09-27T07:12:00.000-07:00

This one's a comedy that never takes off. Unless you find fine actors like Mita Vashisht and Archana Puran Singh playing 45-year-old brides to twenty-something chokras in order to hang on to their father's fortune. The chopsucky girls are simply in a marriage of convenience and try their best to hold onto their truant dulhas by using their fists, chops and kicks.

Doesn't work, because the aunties deserve better. Maybe, if they had a few funny lines, it might have helped. Or maybe, if the boys did not look as if they had lost their way and landed on the sets, the film would have had a story. But right now, it's time for a Rafoo Chakkar on the part of the viewer.

Welcome to Sajjanpur (comedy)

2008-09-27T07:09:00.000-07:00

SHYAM Benegal's been to the Indian village, long years ago. Then, at the helm of the parallel film movement, he had given us films like Ankur , Nishant , showcasing the seamier side of rural India. The films still remain milestones in celluloid history. Benegal goes back to the village once again, this time with a breezy outlook and a buoyant tone. Of course, you do miss the stark realism and the social concerns of his earlier films. But hey, hasn't the national mood changed too? Isn't India several notches higher on the global happiness index. So smile. Sajjanpur's sweet, simple, sylvan bliss, where widows still aren't allowed to be remarried...but that's just a fleeting reference; where superstition, ritualism still rule...but that's funny, not sad; where politics and governance is a messy business...but that's comic business. So what if India's foremost filmmaker who pioneered hard-hitting realism in films is now somewhat soft and flossy; at least he's still around, unlike most of his contemporaries.

Hence, the importance of Welcome to Sajjanpur , a light-hearted sojourn into an archetypal gaon that's on the fringe of modernity. The leader of this pastoral pack is Shreyas Talpade, the educated postman who dreams of being a writer and writes letters instead. And as he pens postcards for the bunch of illiterate villagers, he gives us a peep into their lives. Like a master craftsmen, Benegal not only introduces you to the sundry characters -- the child widow, the abandoned wife, the harried mother, the corrupt neta, the romantic compounder -- he also helps you connect with them. You almost wish the postmaster's love story reaches a happy end, even as you hope the seductive widow finds her soulmate.

It's simple, uncomplicated storytelling that leaves a smile on your face.

Hari Puttar: A Comedy of Terrors (Comedy)

2008-09-27T06:58:00.000-07:00

In an industry starved of children's films, any attempt to create a full blown entertainer aimed at the tween audience needs to be lauded. Unlike Hollywood, which treats its young audience very seriously, Bollywood really doesn't have much to boast about in this department. Hence the importance of a film like Hari Puttar which doesn't try to talk to adults through a tween protagonist. It talks to all. The film focuses on the heroics of a ten-year-old hero and is sure to have everyone -- under 10s and over 10s -- chuckling with glee with its generous splattering of slapstick masala and message. For behind all the bluster and pranks, there is the sweet little homily on the great Indian family. A happy family is the antidote to all evils. Amen!

Hari Puttar is a cute Punjabi munda who, like all pre-pubescent kids, feels awkward, out of place and almost neglected in his kingsize family. In a fretful moment, he just wishes they would disappear. And they do. The puttar is left alone with his young cousin, Tuk Tuk (Swini Khara) and hopes to do everything he's not allowed to do. Like, rummaging through his elder brother's possessions, exploring his dad's study, shaving like a man....Until, the intruders arrive. Then, it's a full blown war to save a microchip, that has national importance, from the goons (Saurabh Shukla, Vijay Raaz).

It's here, in the second half, that the film really picks up and evokes peals of laughter, as the bumbling baddies end up bruised, battered and Hari weary. The fulcrum of the zany show is young Zain Khan who manages to create a winsome picture of a strong, yet vulnerable kid, longing for his mom in the midst of the mayhem. Cute.

Name Game: A Tale of Acknowledgment for ‘Despereaux’

2008-09-27T06:56:00.000-07:00

As Universal readies “The Tale of Despereaux” for release in December, Sylvain Chomet, the acclaimed director of the Oscar-nominated animated feature “The Triplets of Belleville,” is raising a plaint about its handling of the last issue, if not all four.

In both an e-mail message and a telephone interview this week, Mr. Chomet — who was fired as the director of “Despereaux” more than two years ago — accused both the studio and the film’s producers, Gary Ross and his wife, Allison Thomas, of using his designs and concepts in the movie without acknowledging his contribution. It is a claim the filmmakers strenuously dispute.

Mr. Chomet’s unusually open challenge may simply point to a gulf between European practices, which grant artists enduring “moral rights” in their work, and an American approach that says, in effect, a deal is a deal.

That hard-nosed attitude is especially so in Hollywood, where battles over authorship can be particularly ferocious. Still, it is an unwanted embarrassment for Universal, which is ramping up its efforts in animated features, a genre it has recently left to others. And it offers a glimpse at the tensions that sometimes afflict the business of creating family fun.

The French-born Mr. Chomet, who is working at his studio in Scotland, stopped short of contending that anyone had violated his contractual rights; he acknowledges having been fully paid for his work.

But he expressed outrage at seeing promotional materials for the movie, based on a hugely popular children’s book by Kate DiCamillo, that omitted any mention of him. “I feel utterly disgusted that someone else is going to take credit for all my visuals and concepts on this film,” he said in an e-mail message.

“We’re making a film for kids, a film that has a moral,” Mr. Chomet added in a telephone interview on Friday, “and behind it is such aggressive action about lawyers and legal things — there are no human relationships. I felt like a lemon; they got the juice out of me and threw me away.”

Shakira's 'Barefoot' to focus on poverty worldwide

2008-09-26T06:24:00.000-07:00

Shakira said Barefoot, known as Pies Descalzos in her native Colombia, will start focusing on children worldwide later this year.

"We have a model that works. Under less than $2 a day, we can provide a kid with top quality education and the nutrition that they need to be able to function and be able to learn because a kid with an empty stomach cannot learn," said the singer, a multiplatinum superstar known for hits like "Hips Don't Lie."

"So this model that has been so successful in my country, now I want to bring it to other countries in my small way."

Shakira made the comments Wednesday after appearing at Columbia University with Spanish singing sensation Alejandro Sanz and the presidents of Mexico, Argentina, Paraguay, El Salvador and Panama. The event focused on the importance of education, nutrition and health intervention for Latin American children. The singers asked the presidents to adopt an agreement on combating child poverty during the upcoming Iberoamerican Summit in late October.

"The presidents seem very committed and that's what we need. We need all the leaders of Latin America to have a definite commitment toward our children (because) the children of Latin America are waiting for opportunities," said Shakira in an interview after conference.

"Where I come from every child who is born poor will die poor and we have to change this, and this is the moment to do it. We are at the threshold of a new wave of awareness and sensibility toward our children's issues. But early childhood development should be at the top of our priorities and at the top of every president's agenda."

In attendance were Mexican President Felipe Calderon; Argentinian President Cristina Fernandez; the president of Paraguay, Fernado Lugo; El Salvador's president, Tony Saca; and Panamanian President Martin Torrijos. Also on hand was Dominican-born baseball star Sammy Sosa, Panamanian musician Ruben Blades and English rocker Roger Waters of Pink Floyd fame, along with Nobel Prize-winning economist James J. Heckman and Luis Alberto Moreno, president of the Inter-American Development Bank.

The event was sponsored by the Earth Institute at Columbia, led by economist Jeffrey Sachs.

Shakira and Sanz are members of Latin America in Solidarity Action (the Spanish acronym is ALAS, or "wings"), a nonprofit coalition founded by Latin American artists, intellectuals and business leaders to promote social communities and early childhood development programs in Latin America.

Earlier this year, ALAS held all-star fundraising concerts in Mexico and Argentina that helped secure $200 million in donations.

"I belong to a generation that is learning new ways to get involved in these issues. We are not a passive generation, we're very proactive," Shakira said. "We want to see all those brutal contrasts in our world disappear, we want to see poverty eliminated because we believe it is possible."

She also talked about the upcoming U.S. presidential election, and urged Latino voters to use their voice and vote.

"I'd like to invite the Latino community to come out and make themselves present during this election because they can really make a difference," she said. "I care deeply about this country and I think everyone does because America's economy is so crucial for the rest of the world. The rest of the world's economy depends on the economy of this country and world peace depends on the policies of this country."

Viggo Mortensen and his shotgun in 'Appaloosa'

2008-09-26T06:19:00.000-07:00

As an Old West lawman, Mortensen packs a booming eight-gauge shotgun in "Appaloosa," which reteams him with "A History of Violence" co-star Ed Harris, who also directed and co-wrote the Western.

Fifty inches long and weighing 11 pounds, the eight-gauge initially was a turnoff for Mortensen when shooting began on "Appaloosa."

"When I first had it, I said, `Do you really need it to be an eight-gauge, Ed?"' Mortensen, 49, said in an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival, where "Appaloosa" premiered in advance of its theatrical release Friday.

"It's not that manageable, it's not going to be accurate at much distance. I said, `I'm not going to shoot that thing off a horse, because I'd get blown off the horse, realistically."'

After a day or two, Mortensen started looking at the eight-gauge as an ally, a handy reminder to bad guys that the law can always outgun them.

At that point, Mortensen started lobbying for a bigger role for the gun, which sent dogs and horses running the first time he shot it outdoors and which rattled the windows and floorboards when he test-fired inside a saloon.

"I said, `Ed, you know, I think I should even have it indoors. Even if I'm being friendly or if I were buying some fruit or getting a haircut, I always have it with me,"' Mortensen said. "It's just an intimidation thing, just like our larger-than-the-other-horses horses are. So once you've seen it fired, you don't need to see it being shot again."

"Viggo handles props great, and he loves detail, so that thing was his baby," said Harris, who compared the eight-gauge to an elephant gun.

Co-star Renee Zellweger said Mortensen and his eight-gauge became inseparable.

"He had it everywhere, all day, every day," Zellweger said. "There's a scene that's not in the film where he carries my luggage out of the diner, the cafe, and he had to figure out a way to open the door, grab the suitcases, close the door, and all the while hold that gun."

Adapted from Robert B. Parker's novel, the film is the story of two old trail buddies, Virgil Cole (Harris) and Everett Hitch (Mortensen), itinerant lawmen who sign on to clean up the town of Appaloosa, where a murderous rancher (Jeremy Irons) runs the show.

Cole and Hitch's efforts are complicated by the arrival of widow Allie French (Zellweger), who begins a capricious romance with Cole.

Harris pitched the story to Mortensen while they were at the Toronto festival in 2005 to promote "A History of Violence," the first of a number of smaller projects Mortensen took on after completing "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy and the epic "Hidalgo."

They had been on opposite sides of the law in "A History of Violence," Mortensen a diner owner trying to protect his family and Harris a savage gangster trying to suck Mortensen back into his violent old ways.

"I just really enjoyed working with him," Harris said. "He's a really decent guy, a wonderful actor, a great-looking actor. I thought the two of us could capture this kind of unspoken love, appreciation that these guys have for each other. And his sense of humor. He's got kind of a weird sense of humor I like."

A best-actor Academy Award nominee for 2007's "Eastern Promises," Mortensen follows "Appaloosa" with two more films this fall. In "The Road," adapted from Cormac McCarthy's novel, Mortensen plays a man struggling to survive with his young son in a bleak post-apocalyptic landscape.

In "Good," which also played the Toronto festival, Mortensen stars as a novelist, professor and all-around decent man who is gradually lured into Nazi complicity in 1930s and '40s Germany.

2008 HONORARY MAVERICK AWARD WINNER: KEVIN SMITH!

2008-09-26T06:16:00.000-07:00

The Honorary Maverick Award was derived from its symbolic meaning to the Woodstock arts colony, representing an individual whose life and work is based on creativity, independent vision and social activism. Director/screenwriter/ actor/ editor/comic book writer Kevin Smith fits the bill like a glove! One of the most unique voices to emerge during the American independent filmmaking renaissance of the 1990’s, Smith made his first film Clerks, in 1994, for $27,575, based on his experiences as a New Jersey convenience store clerk. It was soon followed by, Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Jersey Girl, Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back, Dogma and Clerks II. He is currently preparing a horror film, entitled Red State and an untitled comic book/sci-fi movie.

2008 Woodstock Film Festival full line-up

2008-09-26T06:14:00.000-07:00

The Woodstock Film Festival celebrates its ninth year with another outstanding collection of nearly 150 “fiercely independent” films, panels, concerts and special events, Wednesday October 1 through Sunday October 5, 2008.

The exceptionally diverse program takes place in the arts colony of Woodstock and the neighboring towns of Rhinebeck and Rosendale.

Tickets are on sale online and at the new Box Office location at 13 Rock City Road, just across the street from Festival Headquarters at the Colony Café, in the heart of the most famous small town in the world! The full schedule of events will be available on-line at www.woodstockfilmfestival.com.

The 2008 festival presents 44 premiere films, the highest number since the festival began in the year 2000, consisting of 10 world premieres, 4 North American Premieres, 8 National Premieres, 13 East Coast Premieres and 9 New York premieres.

More than 2100 films were submitted from around the world, another record for an event that has become known in independent film circles as one of the foremost regional independent film festivals on the planet.

“Each year brings with it a new crop of extraordinarily talented filmmakers who offer fresh and exciting approaches to filmmaking,” said WFF Executive Director Meira Blaustein, “We are proud to celebrate the work of those who take on issues that effect our lives as they try to illuminate, in their own singular way, what lies in the dark, and what is hidden from our eyes and our hearts.”

Senior WFF Programmer Ryan Werner has been working with WFF for more than seven years and notes that the industry has clearly recognized the festival’s accomplishments:

“Our strategy at Woodstock has always been about attracting quality films, not just scoring premieres, “ said Werner, who is the Vice President of Marketing, at IFC Entertainment. “As it happens, this year we do have more premieres than ever before and they are of superb quality, so I think we are starting to see people realize just how special Woodstock is. It's our most diverse line-up ever, and I think one of our best."

Safeguarding a Japanese Master’s Place in Film

2008-09-26T06:13:00.000-07:00

For many critics and cinephiles who came of age in the 1960s and ’70s, Nagisa Oshima, now 76, has long held the mantle of Japan’s greatest living filmmaker. Younger viewers, for the most part, have had to take them at their word since his films are scarcely available on home video and rarely revived for repertory screenings.

With this once-towering figure almost in eclipse, it is hard to overstate the significance of “In the Realm of Oshima,” his first major retrospective in the United States in more than 20 years. The series, which runs from Saturday through Oct. 14 as part of the New York Film Festival, includes all 23 of his fiction features. Its title alludes to “In the Realm of the Senses,” a 1976 hard-core provocation and the one Oshima film whose notoriety survives.

The retrospective, which will travel to about a dozen other North American cities, is a labor of love for its curator, James Quandt of the Cinematheque Ontario, who has worked on it for 10 years, tracking down obscure print sources and negotiating a tangle of rights problems. In the context of an amnesiac film culture, it is also a heroic intervention, a bid to safeguard a master’s place in the canon.

Richard Peña, the program director at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, which organized the show jointly with the Cinematheque Ontario, said he realized that a retrospective was long overdue when he taught a seminar at Columbia University a few years ago on “Cruel Story of Youth,” Mr. Oshima’s breakthrough second feature, from 1960, and found that none of his students had heard of the filmmaker.

He added that Mr. Oshima’s reputation had suffered from the increasing timidity of art-house tastes: “For a while there was a kind of hostility to the radical experiments in form that Oshima came to incarnate.”

If Mr. Oshima’s legacy now seems a bit murky, it is partly because he was, by design, a tough filmmaker to pin down. Several thematic threads run through his movies — sex, crime, an alertness to the social and political dimensions of his characters’ transgressions — but there is no stylistic signature. Mr. Oshima swerved between extremes, reshaping familiar genres (family epics, youth films) and inventing new ones (freely mixing modes like documentary realism and avant-garde surrealism), always searching for radical forms to match radical content.

Born into a family with samurai ancestry and socialist leanings, Mr. Oshima studied law at Kyoto University, where he became active in the left-wing student movement. His youthful ideals extended into his film career, and his interest in cinema as a revolutionary tool — along with his gift for acid polemics and his pop touch with political material — earned him repeated comparisons to another ’60s titan, Jean-Luc Godard. (Tired of being called Japan’s answer to Mr. Godard, Mr. Oshima suggested that Mr. Godard be considered the Oshima of France.)

Miracle at St. Anna (2008)

2008-09-26T06:11:00.000-07:00

At the beginning of “Miracle at St. Anna” an old man sits in his apartment watching a movie on his black-and-white television set. The film is “The Longest Day,” the sprawling 1962 World War II drama starring John Wayne and nearly every other white movie star of the era, and it provokes a bitter reaction. “We served our country too,” says the viewer, a postal worker and Army veteran named Hector Negron.At the beginning of “Miracle at St. Anna” an old man sits in his apartment watching a movie on his black-and-white television set. The film is “The Longest Day,” the sprawling 1962 World War II drama starring John Wayne and nearly every other white movie star of the era, and it provokes a bitter reaction. “We served our country too,” says the viewer, a postal worker and Army veteran named Hector Negron.

“Miracle at St. Anna,” directed by Spike Lee and based on a novel by James McBride, who wrote the screenplay, exists in part to make the obvious, overdue point that men like Hector (Laz Alonso) — Latino and in particular African-American soldiers — fought as bravely and as hard as the characters in those Hollywood combat epics. But setting the record straight after so many years and so many movies is not necessarily a simple undertaking, and this film sometimes stumbles under its heavy, self-imposed burden of historical significance.

Like the French director Rachid Bouchareb, whose “Days of Glory” followed Arab soldiers fighting for France against the Nazis, Mr. Lee sticks to the sturdy conventions of the infantry movie, adapting old-fashioned techniques to an unfamiliar, neglected story. And the cinematic traditionalism of “Miracle at St. Anna” is perhaps its most satisfying trait. At its best, this is a platoon picture, and if it’s not exactly like the ones Hollywood made in the late ’50s and early ’60s, that’s part of Mr. Lee’s argument: it’s the movie someone should have had the guts or the vision to make back then. Better late than never.

It should not be surprising that “Miracle at St. Anna” is occasionally corny and didactic. Every now and then, the action slows down to make time for a speech or a carefully staged argument about racial injustice. But if you’re tempted to roll your eyes, recall that such speeches — on the subjects of liberty and democracy and the mortal threat to those ideals posed by Hitler and his army — have always been a staple of all but the most hardboiled and cynical World War II movies. And in this one, as in “Days of Glory,” the high-minded talk and theme-announcing scenes illuminate a thorny and crucial paradox, namely that the countries fighting against totalitarian race-hatred had some serious race problems of their own.

Learning to Be the Future of France

2008-09-26T06:09:00.000-07:00

The young bodies crowding “The Class,” an artful, intelligent movie about modern French identity and the attempt to transform those bodies into citizens through talk, talk, talk, come in all sizes, shapes and colors. With their cellphones and pouts, these bored, restless junior high students look pretty much like the fidgety progeny of Anytown, U.S.A. One difference being that these African, Arab and Asian Parisians live in a country that insists its citizens have only one cultural identity, even if it is an identity— as France’s smoldering suburbs vividly suggest — many of these same young people don’t feel welcome to share.

“The Class” isn’t directly about civil unrest and French identity as a republican ideal, though these issues run through it like a powerful current, keeping the children and adults (and the filmmaking) on edge. Rather, the director, Laurent Cantet — using a small team and three high-definition video cameras — keeps a steady eye on the children, these anxious, maddening little people flailing and sometimes stalling on the entryway to adulthood. He shows them giggling, arguing, boldly and shyly answering questions. He marks their victories and failures and, with brutal calm, shares some of the other lessons schoolchildren learn on their way to the office, factory, shop, unemployment line and perhaps even prison: sit down, raise your hand, stand up, get in line, keep quiet.

That’s tough stuff, but “The Class” slides its points in at an angle, letting them emerge from the children’s chatter instead of hanging its politics around these tender necks like placards. For audiences accustomed to big-screen pedagogical imperatives soaked in guilt and deep-fried in piety, this makes for an exotic change (though the HBO show “The Wire” covered similar ground) and might sound perilously dry. But “The Class,” which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in May and opens the New York Film Festival on Friday night, is as much an emotional experience as a head trip. Mr. Cantet would prefer you to think (he is a French filmmaker, after all), but he’s enough of an entertainer to milk an occasional tear.

Quasi-Reality Bites Back

2008-09-26T06:07:00.000-07:00

In some of these, ordinary people play versions of themselves. In others, historical events are reconstructed with uncanny immediacy and fidelity. And there are still others that use highly refined tricks and techniques to strip away the veneer of artifice and immerse the viewer in the syncopated rhythms and rough textures of daily life. One festival selection that is indisputably and self-avowedly a documentary, Ari Folman’s “Waltz With Bashir,” is also a cartoon, using animation to reconstruct nightmarish scenes of actual war as well as the dreams of some of the men who fought it.

The blurring of boundaries between performance and captured fact, or between fiction and whatever its opposite might be, characterizes this festival (which opens on Friday and concludes on Oct. 12) from start to finish. The opening slot, frequently reserved for a picture expected to infuse the high seriousness of the event with a touch of patron-pleasing, show business glamour, belongs to “The Class,” Laurent Cantet’s warm and gritty chronicle of a year in the life of a high school in a tough Paris neighborhood. The film arrives in New York with Cannes’s top prize, the Palme d’Or, as part of its pedigree. (Of the 28 entries in the New York festival, 18 were previously screened last May in Cannes.) It is at once the most formally daring and the most populist opening-night selection in many years.

The main character, a teacher named François, is played by François Bégaudeau, an actual teacher and the author of “Entre les Murs” (“Between the Walls”), the autobiographical novel on which Mr. Cantet based this movie. François’s pupils — young faces of the melting pot that France has, with some reluctance and anxiety, become — are played by nonprofessionals, which is to say by young people pretending to be some version of themselves.

Lakeview Terrace' debuts in top spot at box office

2008-09-25T06:35:00.000-07:00

Jackson's tale about a cop terrorizing his new neighbors, released by Sony's Screen Gems banner, led a rush of new wide releases that generally did only so-so business.

"Obviously, as compared to like the summer season, the bar has definitely been lowered in terms of what movies are making," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office tracker Media By Numbers. "This definitely is a slowdown period, as is typical for this post-summer malaise we always seem to run up against."

Debuting at No. 3 with $8.3 million was Lionsgate's romantic comedy "My Best Friend's Girl," starring Kate Hudson as a woman who comes between best buddies played by Dane Cook and Jason Biggs.

Opening in fourth place with $8 million was MGM's animated comedy "Igor," featuring the voices of John Cusack and Molly Shannon in a story of a hunchbacked lab gofer trying his hand at being a mad scientist.

Couturier Valentino shows softer side in new film

2008-09-25T06:32:00.000-07:00

That was when American journalist Matt Tyrnauer first met Valentino Garavani.

Tyrnauer was profiling the fashion designer for U.S. magazine, Vanity Fair but admits he "wasn't a fashion writer" and didn't know what to expect.

But as he settled in with Valentino and Giancarlo Giammetti, his business partner of 50 years, he became enchanted by their relationship -- the heart and soul of Valentino's fashion success.

The idea of filming the spry Italian pair -- Valentino is 76, and Giammetti is five years his junior -- struck him later on when he was writing the article.

"I thought you know what, this could be a movie and it wasn't the fashion element, it was the relationship, it was the love story," Tyrnauer tells CNN at the Venice Film Festival.

This was Tyrnauer's great discovery: Prior to his Vanity Fair profile, little was known about Valentino's relationship with Giammetti.

The friendship between Valentino, fussy as royalty and a stickler for detail and the shrewd and eternally patient Giammetti dates back to 1960, a year after Valentino opened his first fashion house in Rome, Italy.

Soon after, Giammetti dropped out of university to rescue Valentino's business from bankruptcy. In 1962 Valentino made his international debut in Florence, Italy's fashion capital at the time.

"People say Valentino and Giancarlo are like a marriage and I say it's bigger than a marriage," says Tyrnauer, "But I think it's bigger than love, I think it's friendship in the platonic sense and that's the story I wanted to tell.

" ... And they happen to build an enormous fashion empire and change fashion along the way," he continues.

So, Tyrnauer floated the idea of capturing everything in a documentary to the pair. Valentino's response: " ... I say why not."

Thrilled, Tyrnauer rushed to gather a camera crew and headed for Rome.

September 23, 2008 -- Updated 1316 GMT (2116 HKT) * Share this on: Mixx Digg Facebook del.icio.us reddit StumbleUpon MySpace S

2008-09-25T06:24:00.000-07:00

"Somehow it mentioned in the article that 'the late Abe Vigoda' was not [there]," Vigoda recalls.

The error was corrected, but the damage had been done. Vigoda's "Barney Miller" character -- the decrepit, downcast Det. Phil Fish -- didn't help the image. Never mind that the real Vigoda was a vigorous man just turning 60 at the time; the question of whether he's shuffled off this mortal coil has followed him around ever since. There's even a Web site devoted to his life-or-death status.

But Vigoda takes the attention with good humor (and occasional appearances on "Late Night with Conan O'Brien"). Now 87, he can look back on a successful career with at least two immortal characters: Fish and the "Godfather" lieutenant, Sal Tessio.

Vigoda was a successful New York stage actor when "Godfather" director Francis Ford Coppola came calling. (Among his credits: Robert Shaw's 1968 play "The Man in the Glass Booth," with F. Murray Abraham.) Though he hadn't read the book -- and was Jewish, not Italian -- he had a presence Coppola liked, and was finally cast as Tessio.

Publisher Who Fought Puritanism, and Won

2008-09-25T06:21:00.000-07:00

In its heyday during the 1960s, Grove Press was famous for publishing books nobody else would touch. The Grove list included writers like Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, William S. Burroughs, Che Guevara and Malcolm X, and the books, with their distinctive black-and-white covers, were reliably ahead of their time and often fascinated by sex.

The same was, and is, true of Grove’s maverick publisher, Barney Rosset, who loved highbrow literature but also brought out a very profitable line of Victorian spanking porn.

On Nov. 19 Mr. Rosset will receive a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation in honor of his many contributions to American publishing, especially his groundbreaking legal battles to print uncensored versions of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer.” He is also the subject of “Obscene,” a documentary by Neil Ortenberg and Daniel O’Connor, which opens on Friday at Cinema Village.

Mr. Ortenberg and Mr. O’Connor are themselves refugees from book publishing, and this is their first film. “Barney was basically my idol, my mentor and my role model for most of my publishing career,” said Mr. Ortenberg, who used to run Thunder’s Mouth Press, publisher of, among other books, “The Outlaw Bible of American Literature.” “I just thought, here was a great story about a major cultural impresario most people don’t know about. It was just dumb beginner’s luck, I guess. I had had a lot of experience with intellectual content, and I knew something about editing, and the movie was small enough that whatever mistakes we made, they didn’t wind up costing huge amounts. We learned as we went along.”

The documentary has a literary rock score — songs by Bob Dylan, the Doors, Warren Zevon and Patti Smith — and includes, in addition to the usual talking heads, some surprising archival footage. There’s an excerpt from Al Goldstein’s old cable television show, “Midnight Blue,” in which Mr. Goldstein quizzes Mr. Rosset about his four marriages and in general interviews him not as a major cultural figure but as a fellow smut peddler. There are clips of Europe that Mr. Rosset filmed as a teenager (his father, unfortunately, instructed him to keep the camera moving constantly), some footage he took during World War II and some poignant home movies of Mr. Rosset cavorting with his family on his Hamptons estate. Mr. Rosset, who made and squandered several fortunes, eventually had to unload the place to cover his losses.

Into the Mennonite World to Explore One Man’s Test of Faith

2008-09-25T06:19:00.000-07:00

The sun floods the wide sky in “Silent Light” like a beacon, spilling over the austere land and illuminating its pale, pale people as if from within. A fictional story about everyday rapture in an isolated Mennonite community in northern Mexico — and performed by a cast of mostly Mennonite nonprofessionals — the film was written, directed and somehow willed into unlikely existence by the extravagantly talented Carlos Reygadas, whose immersion in this exotic world feels so deep and true that it seems like an act of faith.

Mr. Reygadas’s faith may be more rooted in his own gifts than in God, but it’s the sheer intensity of this belief — which he confirms with every camera movement — that invests his film with such feeling. This stubborn, passionate intensity is evident in the mesmerizing, transporting opener, in which the seemingly unmoored camera traces a downward arc across a nearly pitch-black night sky dotted with starry pinpricks. Accompanied by an unsettling chorus of animal cries and screams (what’s going on in there?), the camera descends from its cosmic perch into the brightening world and then, as if parting a curtain, moves through some trees onto a clearing that effectively becomes the stage for the ensuing human drama.

If you haven’t fled for the exits (cowards!), you will be hooked, as much in thrall to the harmonious beauty of the images as to the foreignness of their setting. Yet strange as this world initially seems, with its quiet rhythms and obscure German dialect, its conflicts soon prove familiar: Johan (Cornelio Wall Fehr), a farmer with seven towheaded children and a devoted wife, Esther (the Canadian writer Miriam Toews), has fallen in love with another woman, a neighbor, Marianne (Maria Pankratz). Though tormented by the affair, Johan feels that Marianne is his truer match, the woman who will correct the mistake he made by marrying Esther, whom he also loves and from whom he has, with tragic, unintended cruelty, hidden nothing

Fuzzy Renaissance

2008-09-23T07:37:00.000-07:00

POOR Miss Piggy. Like most aging stars in Hollywood, that prima donna pig, along with most of her Muppet pals, has struggled to find substantial roles. Almost nobody under the age of 30 remembers “Pigs in Space.” All everyone wants to talk about is this Hannah Montana person. What’s a down-on-her-luck puppet to do?

The Walt Disney Company feels her pain. Since it bought Miss Piggy, Kermit and crew in 2004, executives have struggled to figure out how to put them to work. Efforts in 2005 to rejuvenate the furry creatures created by Jim Henson sputtered as the Muppets got lobbed between corporate divisions, and a new television series — a parody of “America’s Next Top Model” called “America’s Next Muppet” — died in the planning stages.

Now Disney is giving it another go by revving up the full power of its culture-creating engines. Instead of the take-it-slow approach, this time the Muppets are getting the “Hannah Montana” treatment, being blasted into every pop-culture nook and cranny that the company owns or can dream up. The balcony blowhards Statler and Waldorf would be impressed with the ambitiousness of the plan — even if it does come with equally outsize challenges.

“We think there is a Muppet gene in everybody,” said Lylle Breier, a Disney executive who is the new general manager of Muppets Studio.

Disney Channel is presenting new specials — the first ran last month, the second will be shown in October — in which Muppets interact with “High School Musical” stars and the Jonas Brothers, among other teenage wunderkinder. A stream of comic videos is in production for Disney.com, where a new Muppet channel recently made its debut, and viral videos have been unleashed on YouTube. NBC will broadcast a Christmas special in December, and special skits will arrive on certain ABC DVD releases. (One skit with the working title “Desperate Housepigs” is on a coming “Desperate Housewives” DVD.)

A new feature film, still untitled, is planned for 2010, with more in development. Meanwhile the Muppets will work overtime elsewhere, appearing on a new float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, on “Nightline” interviewing political candidates and on various talk shows. More Muppet-theme attractions are being discussed for Disney theme parks.

And then there is the merchandise. Coming soon: Muppet clothing at Urban Outfitters and Limited Too stores; Muppet-theme items like stuffed animals and tote bags, at Macy’s; and a Muppet boutique at the New York flagship of F. A. O. Schwarz.

Disney does not want to create a flash in the pan; it sees the Muppets as a franchise that can sit side by side with, say, Winnie the Pooh. But creating any flash at all is the challenge. With the exception of a guest appearance here and there, the characters have largely been in cold storage for the last three years. And because the Muppets have been without a regular television gig for more than a decade, many children and younger teenagers don’t know them.

Ms. Breier said recent focus groups indicated that some children could not even identify Kermit and Miss Piggy, much less ancillary characters like Fozzie Bear and Gonzo the Great. The wisecracking, irreverent Muppets (a combination of puppets and marionettes) also don’t fit that neatly in the Disney culture, as they differ from most of the company’s bedrock characters in two big ways: Kermit and coterie were primarily created to entertain adults, and they live in the real world. Henson was so insistent that they stand apart from his “Sesame Street” creations in personality and tone that he (misleadingly) titled the 1975 pilot that would boost their careers “The Muppet Show: Sex and Violence.”

Undeterred, Disney expects the Muppets to expand their fan base beyond nostalgic older generations to the age group between 6 and 12 that has powered “Hannah Montana” and “High School Musical” into international blockbusters. But how do you make 50-year-old puppets, even those as beloved to many people as these, relevant in a “Wall-E” world?

The Muppets are hardly moribund, but they do represent one of the most striking examples of franchise fumbling in Hollywood history.

“The Muppet Show” made its debut on CBS stations in 1976, introducing the classic characters Disney owns today. (The Muppet characters that populated the inaugural season of “Saturday Night Live” a year earlier were different.) “The Muppet Show” was full of song-and-dance numbers and skits, often featuring absurdist humor, along with backstage antics. Dancing chickens were thrown in for good measure.

Some of the biggest names in entertainment at the time populated each episode. Rudolf Nureyev and Miss Piggy, clad in towels, sat in a sauna and sang “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”; a bejeweled Elton John performed “Crocodile Rock” with Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, the show’s house band.

Witty, somewhat subversive dialogue and the hilarious-looking Muppets themselves quickly won audiences over. The show, which ran for five seasons, at one point was syndicated in 100 countries. The ubiquitous franchise spawned hit movies (“The Muppet Movie”), hit songs (“The Rainbow Connection”), loads of merchandise and, eventually, an animated series called “Muppet Babies.”

But those glory days are long gone. After Henson’s death from a rare bacterial infection, at 53, in 1990 his five children took control of the company. They set about working on new adventures for the Muppets — but not before dragging them into a nasty court fight with Disney over terms for a Muppet attraction Henson had completed for Walt Disney World. And the franchise’s pop-cultural resonance slipped; the last Muppets movie, “Muppets From Space,” sputtered at the box office in 1999.

In Hollywood, Credit Remains, at Least for a Few Big Names

2008-09-23T07:35:00.000-07:00

LOS ANGELES — Hollywood, apparently, is still in the money.

The crisis on Wall Street is roiling companies around the globe, but bank-financed credit is continuing to flow into the movie business, albeit on a much more moderate basis.

On Friday, as government leaders cobbled together a historic rescue of the American financial system, Media Rights Capital, one of Hollywood’s most prominent independent production companies, closed on a $350 million revolving credit fund led by JPMorgan Chase and Comerica. The financing effort began just six weeks ago, said Asif Satchu, co-chief executive of the film company.

“In a credit climate that on its surface has completely shut down, this deal proves that there is money available,” said Marni Wieshofer, a senior vice president of Media Rights Capital. Mr. Satchu added that “banks are still in the business of putting money to work; they’re just making many fewer bets.”

The new financing will be used to expand the production company deeper into film, television and digital projects and will be used in conjunction with the company’s initial $425 million capitalization. Media Rights Capital has helped to finance such films as “Babel,” starring Brad Pitt, and is behind a high-profile digital video collaboration between Seth MacFarlane, the creator of the “Family Guy” television series, and Google.

The deal follows the announcement last week that Steven Spielberg had secured $700 million in credit through JPMorgan to start a new production company in partnership with Reliance Big Entertainment of India.

Movie companies have looked to complex financing deals with private money in the last two years to offset risk and help cover sharply higher production costs. But in recent months that pipeline has slowed to a trickle because of the credit meltdown, with even the likes of Paramount Pictures becoming unable to find acceptable financing terms.

Last week, as the economic crisis escalated, Hollywood started to fret anew. But the Media Rights Capital deal, in partnership with Mr. Spielberg’s money, indicates that film companies considered to be low risk can continue to tap the credit market.

‘THE GODFATHER: THE COPPOLA RESTORATION’

2008-09-23T07:31:00.000-07:00

Many of Francis Ford Coppola’s films, including the recent “Youth Without Youth,” have been haunted by the passing of time and an acute awareness of its destructive handiwork — the sense that once a treasured moment has been lost, nothing can be done to recover it.

But now a piece of Mr. Coppola’s own youth, which also happens to be one of the greatest works in American film, has been recovered, and spectacularly so. On Tuesday Paramount Home Entertainment is issuing the three films that make up Mr. Coppola’s “Godfather” saga, miraculously rejuvenated by a team of digital restoration experts under the supervision of the film preservationist Robert A. Harris. Offered both in high-definition Blu-ray and standard DVD editions, Mr. Coppola’s three films seem to have reclaimed the golden glow of their original theatrical screenings — a glow that has been dimmed and all but extinguished over the years through a series of disappointing home video editions.

Michael Moore’s Election-Year Freebie

2008-09-23T07:15:00.000-07:00

Mr. Moore at the University of Central Florida in 2004

Instead he is placing the film on the Internet for free viewing, at SlackerUprising.com. Mr. Moore said the unorthodox rollout is a gift to his fans and a rallying cry for the coming election.

“At times there’s nothing wrong with preaching to the choir,” he said in a telephone interview from his office in Traverse City, Mich. Liberals have been “pretty beaten down over the last 28 years.”

“The choir, especially on our side of the political fence, is often fairly dejected,” he observed, “and could use a good song every now and then.”

The song in this analogy is a 100-minute look at Mr. Moore’s tour of college campuses during the fall of 2004. Cameras followed him to 62 cities as he urged young people to vote for John Kerry. The resulting footage sat on the shelf for a few years before Mr. Moore spliced together a version of the film, then titled “Captain Mike Across America,” and showed it at the Toronto International Film Festival a year ago.

After the festival screening Mr. Moore returned to the editing room to give the film “more heft and substance,” he said. It includes exchanges with Mr. Moore’s detractors and their attempts to interrupt his tour, raising free-speech issues and creating some comedic moments. Some critics (including those for The Michigan Daily, at the University of Michigan, and Inside Toronto) have said the film amounts to little more than a “highlight reel” of Mr. Moore’s trip, suggesting that its theatrical prospects were dim. Mr. Moore disputes that, saying that his agent, Ari Emanuel, believed the film could net $20 million to $40 million. (“Sicko” brought in $24.5 million domestically.)

“I prohibited him from contacting any studios to ask them whether they were interested,” Mr. Moore said. “I just said straight up, ‘I want to give this away for free.’ He thought I should have my head examined.”

The Weinstein Company owned the distribution rights to the project, so Mr. Moore bought back the North American rights for an undisclosed amount. “The irony is that I believe people should see movies in theaters,” Mr. Moore said, praising what he called the communal experience. “You get so much more out of it, emotionally, cathartically.”

Perhaps for that reason Mr. Moore said he hoped fans would set up screenings and use the film to raise money for candidates. Visitors to the Web site will be able to stream and download it free, thanks to Mr. Moore’s partnership with Blip.tv, a company distributing online videos; additionally a $10 DVD will be distributed, and free copies can be requested for libraries.

Robert Greenwald — another member of the small fraternity of advocate filmmakers, whose production company specializes in tying video projects to off-line organizing — said a supporter in Alaska was already planning a screening. The film is “quite an adrenaline boost, even though it’s got a sad ending,” he said.

The ending, of course, is the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004. The film notes that voters under the age of 30 were the only demographic that Mr. Kerry won outright. “Unfortunately,” reads a graphic at the end of the film, “their parents voted for Bush.”

Mr. Moore suggested that the 2004 election results were a prelude to the Obama movement, which was “ignited by young people.”

“The road to getting where we want to be has to be filled with a certain amount of failure,” he said, drawing a parallel to the United Auto Workers’ labor movement 70 years ago.

Mr. Moore remains coy about the subject of his next movie, although he said filming was well under way. He has denied rumors that it will be a sequel to “Fahrenheit 9/11,” but he has not quashed reports that his next film will explore what he views as American imperialism. The recent turmoil of the financial markets may be giving him even more material.

Like Its Heroine, a Movie Encounters Savage Treatment ..

2008-09-22T07:07:00.000-07:00

IT was known as the "Dakota Fanning rape movie" at the Sundance Film
Festival in 2007. The press screening for "Hounddog" elicited actual
boos, not to mention eviscerating reviews. Even before that,
evangelical groups protested the film after someone involved in its
early financing alleged publicly (and erroneously) that Ms. Fanning
was naked in it.

Few movies recover from such a hostile reception, especially a
low-budget Southern-gothic tale set in 1959 about a 12-year-old
motherless girl obsessed with Elvis Presley who seductively sings for
a teenager in exchange for tickets to a concert of the King's. But
thanks to a radically different cut of the movie and the coffers of a
new independent film company listed on the Nasdaq's over-the-counter
market, "Hounddog" will finally make its way into 22 theaters across
the country on Sept. 19.

Sitting in the Cupcake Café in Clinton this month, the film's
director, Deborah Kampmeier, sipped tea and reflected on the journey
of her film, which cost just under $4 million. "The whole process was
challenging from the beginning," she said. "It's a story about a girl
whose voice and spirit are silenced, and then it's about her
reclaiming her voice on a deeper, truer level. It's very interesting
how the story that I'm trying to tell has been paralleled by the
actual events of the making of the film.

Bridging Generations and Hemispheres

2008-09-22T07:05:00.000-07:00

IN Wayne Wang's first feature, "Chan Is Missing" (1982), two taxi
drivers go looking for an absent friend in San Francisco's Chinatown.
As they piece together contradictory testimonials from those who knew
the missing man, what emerges is almost a composite sketch of
Asian-American identity. But the film, which still feels fresh and
insightful after all these years, is a mystery without a solution. Its
conclusion, unencumbered by the foggy rhetoric of identity politics,
is that identity is hard to pin down, up for grabs, something you make
up as you go.

The point applies equally to this versatile director's unpredictable
career. For more than 25 years Mr. Wang, now 59, has reinvented
himself time and again with apparent ease, zigzagging between America
and Asia, big and small movies, safe bets and wild risks, insider and
outsider status.

Breaking Ground With a Gay Movie Hero

2008-09-22T07:03:00.000-07:00

As the culture wars rage anew between social conservatives and their liberal counterparts, Hollywood is preparing to break fresh ground by releasing a high-budget epic film in which the lead character - a classic, and classical, action hero - is passionately in love with a man.

In Oliver Stone's three-hour drama, "Alexander," Colin Farrell, as the fourth-century Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great, has a number of tender love scenes with his best friend, Hephaistion, played by a long-haired Jared Leto. In the film, which cost about $155 million to produce, Alexander is also married to Roxane, played by Rosario Dawson, but the marriage takes a back seat to his passion for his boyhood friend.

In decades past, Hollywood hinted at classical homosexuality in major films like 1960's "Spartacus." And it has dealt with the contemporary subject comically in films like "The Birdcage," the 1996 adaptation of the French film "La Cage aux Folles." But the film industry has never risked quite so much on a blockbuster film that depicts a leading man as gay or bisexual.

In breaking with that historical reticence, "Alexander," set for release by Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Brothers studio next Wednesday, may redefine what is acceptable to mass audiences when it comes to heroic portrayals on the silver screen

'Dark Knight' may be tough sell at Oscar time ..

2008-09-22T06:56:00.000-07:00

The last time a movie topped a half-billion dollars at the domestic box office, it sailed away with most of the Oscars

That was "Titanic" 11 years back.

This time, it's "The Dark Knight," a critically acclaimed film but a genre picture that will be a tougher sell to Academy Award voters, except for the performance delivered by Heath Ledger.

As Hollywood enters the prestige season, when studios unveil most of their awards contenders, Ledger seems a solid bet for an acting nomination as the maniacal bad guy the Joker.

The role has been classified as one of the best villains in Hollywood history, a remarkable turn by the actor who died in January of an accidental prescription drug overdose.

While "The Dark Knight" also should score well in technical categories, its Oscar prospects are slim for other key awards, among them an acting honor for Christian Bale, reprising his "Batman Begins" lead role with an exceptional delivery as the comic-book superhero.

Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai In

2008-09-22T06:41:00.000-07:00

Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan will paired in another
movie together. This one is a remake of Abhimaan, in which his father,
Amitabh Bachchan and mother, Jaya Bhaduri, starred opposite each
other. The movie will be made by Rajiv Menon, who have given us movies
like Sapnay and the Tamil, Kandukonde Kandukonde. Currently the couple
are shooting for Mani Ratnam's Ramayan (Ravana) (2008) and upon it's
completion they will start to work on Dhun (2009) .

Packing Up the Plantation and Finding Distant, Unexpected Connections

2008-09-15T01:54:00.000-07:00

Partly a family memoir, partly a historical essay and partly the record of an improbable feat of engineering, Godfrey Cheshire’s documentary “Moving Midway: A Southern Plantation in Transit” tells a fascinating and complicated story of regional identity. Mr. Cheshire, a longtime film critic (and as such an acquaintance of mine), connects his longstanding interest in American popular culture with the lore attached to his ancestral home, a North Carolina plantation called Midway.

Ranbir's most adorable fan!

2008-09-15T01:52:00.000-07:00

Bachna Ae Haseeno is a hit not only amongst the youngsters but also people above 30! However given Ranbir's cute Casanova image in the film he has scored more with the ladies and one lady who is absolutely in love with Ranbir is none other than his mother! We spoke to the gorgeous Neetu Singh recently and the proud mother had no qualms in showing off her son's success... example being her caller tune! Jabse Tere Naina used to be Neetuji's caller tune for all this while but now that Bachna Ae Haseeno is Ranbir's latest release one can hear its title track on Neetuji's phone! "You can call me Ranbir's PR", joked Neetuji and continued "I absolutely loved him in Bachna Ae Haseeno! In fact I have seen the film thrice already. Ranbir is as cute as you all are finding him in this film! He is naughty and absolutely notorious."

New York Film Festival plans a China focus

2008-09-15T01:51:00.000-07:00

The New York Film Festival has announced plans for its 2009 programme just two weeks before its 2008 edition starts, Reuters reported.
The 47th annual festival will focus on the 60th anniversary of the People's Republic of China and feature a retrospective of movies made between 1949, when the Communists gained power, and the Cultural Revolution in 1966, revisiting the best-known films from that period as well as works less known outside China.
The programme will include the first major American screening for a collection of about 20 films made in the early years of the country's state-run studio system. The 2008 festival begins on September 26 and runs through October 12.

Sir Paul defiant on Israel show

2008-09-15T01:48:00.000-07:00

Sir Paul McCartney has insisted his first show in Israel will go ahead, despite pressure from campaigners who want him to cancel it.
The 65-year-old will perform some of his biggest Beatles and solo hits at the Tel Aviv gig later this month.
But protesters asked him to reconsider over Israel's occupation of the West Bank and its Gaza Strip blockade.
He told newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth: "I refused. I do what I think, and I have many friends who support Israel."
The Israeli government pulled a Beatles concert in 1965 on the grounds it could corrupt the nation's youth.
When asked how the band members felt about the decision, he said it was "a bit insulting".
He added: "The Beatles had a pretty positive influence on the world and only regimes that wanted to control their peoples were afraid of us.

David Lean, Perfectionist of Madness

2008-09-15T01:46:00.000-07:00

DAVID LEAN was famous for his perfectionism, and like every director afflicted with that quality he didn’t — couldn’t — make perfect movies. His films betray the anxiety of their making. He also couldn’t make many. He completed just 16 in his long career, a paltry 4 in the 30-plus years that followed the great international success of his wartime epic “The Bridge on the River Kwai” (1957). That movie ends, after nearly three hours of conflict, peril, courage, violent death and decidedly mixed motives, with a single summarizing word, spoken twice: the word is “madness.”

A No. 1 Film for the Coen Brothers

2008-09-15T01:45:00.000-07:00

The top four films at the box office over the weekend were new releases, with “Burn After Reading,” the new comedy from the filmmaker brothers Joel and Ethan Coen, starring Brad Pitt and George Clooney, right, leading the field. Earnings of $19.4 million made for a record opening for a Coen brothers film and a Focus Features release, according to Media by Numbers, a box office tracking firm. Coming in second was “Tyler Perry’s The Family That Preys” (LionsGate), written and directed by Mr. Perry, which made $18 million. The police action drama “Righteous Kill” (Overture Films), starring Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, earned $16.5 million for third place, and “The Women” (Picturehouse), based on both the 1936 play by Clare Boothe Luce and the 1939 film directed by George Cukor, came in fourth with $10.1 million. The only holdover from last week’s Top 5 was “House Bunny” (Columbia), which made $4.3 million over the weekend, good enough for fifth place, and has earned $42.15 million in four weeks.

Aishwarya Rai And Rajnikanth Shooting For Enthiram

2008-09-09T04:15:00.001-07:00

Shankar's Robot (Enthiram) (2008) is now Enthiram (2008) (Tamil forRobot). The title of the movie had to be changed since Shahrukh Khan's Red Chillies has already registered the movie name Robot withAssociation of Motion Pictures and TV Programme Producers (AMPTPP) inMumbai . Now that the name has been resolved, the crew left for theUSA last week to start to shot two songs composed by AR Rahman,starting September 8. Other details provided by Producers AyngaranInternational Films Pvt Ltd and Eros International include Mary E Vogtwill design the futuristic outfits, Stan Winston Studio (USA) will dothe animatronics and Yuen Woo Ping is in charge of the stunts. Visualeffects (VFX) will be provided by Hollywood companies ILM, Tippet,Cafe EFX and Centro and Menfond based out of Hong Kong. The moviestars Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and Rajnikanth .

Sherlyn Chopra New Album Dard e Sherlyn

2008-09-09T04:14:00.000-07:00

Sherlyn Chopra has just released a new album, it's called Dard eSherlyn. The album has caused quite a stir in the music industry withthe racey video and the songs. Special security measures has been inplace for all her promotional events since Sherlyn could come up withthe diamond encrusted bikini top and golden hot pants that have beenworn during the video.

New DVDs: ‘How the West Was Won’

2008-09-09T04:13:00.000-07:00

The best reason for buying a Blu-ray player right now is Warner HomeVideo's high-definition version of "How the West Was Won," a film made46 years ago in the highest-definition moving picture medium the worldhad seen: Cinerama. With its three strips of 35-millimeter filmprojected side by side with a slight overlap on a gigantic, curvedscreen, Cinerama offered six times the resolution — which is to say,six times as much visual information — of the standard film of 1952,when it was first used commercially.

Offstage, a Beastie Boy Enters the World of Independent Film

2008-09-09T04:12:00.000-07:00

Every day the Beastie Boy known as MCA, who spent years rapping aboutgirls and parties and the five boroughs, goes to work in an office.Sure, it's a cool one: the former headquarters of the Benjamin Moorepaint company, it is a loftlike space filled with surfboards,skateboards, flea market paintings and his fellow Beastie Mike D.'srecords; the attitude is dot-com casual. In this atmosphere of dudes,MCA has become the Boss

An Assassin Arrives to Turn Off the Lights

2008-09-09T04:11:00.000-07:00

Of all the shoddy, insipid qualities of "Bangkok Dangerous," the mostegregious is the most fundamental: The film is simply dreadful to lookat. We have at long last reached the nadir of the Malnourished Mood atthe cinema, that sickly palate of grimy greens and blues, ubiquitoussince "The Matrix," employed by thrillers with atmosphericpretensions.

The Revolution Is Dead, Long Live the Revolution

2008-09-09T04:08:00.000-07:00

INDEPENDENCE in the movies is a cri de coeur and an occasionallyprofitable branding ploy, but mostly it's a seductive lie. For much ofAmerican movie history it has been shorthand for more aestheticallyadventurous films, bolder in form, freer in spirit and at times moreovertly political than those churned out by the Hollywood studios.Once we were one nation under the movie screen, indivisible, withliberty and Shirley Temple for all, but independent film gave us newways of looking, or so the story goes. Never mind that JohnCassavetes, the patron saint of independent cinema, struggled forattention and dollars for much of his filmmaking career

Bhatts' next, “RAAZ -THE MYSTERY CONTINUES”, confirmed for January 2009

2008-09-09T04:06:00.000-07:00

While the mystery is continuing in production and on celluloid, thereis one major clue that has been solved. Yes, the date for thetheatrical release of the next blockbuster thriller from Bollywood –'RAAZ – THE MYSTERY CONTINUES'– is now no more a secret. This spinechilling movie from Vishesh Films is going to hit worldwide screens on23rd January 2009. This is the most anticipated release of 2009, withabsolutely no other film to match up to its theme and style. It'sdefinitely going to be a chilly winter that will keep you shuddering!!'RAAZ – THE MYSTERY CONTINUES' is being directed by Mohit Suri andstars Emraan Hashmi, Kangana Ranaut and Adhyayan Suman.

A coup by SRK [shah rukh khan er chobi dibi]

2008-09-08T00:21:00.004-07:00

The "Temptation" tour is captained by none other the king of BollywodShah Rukh Khan and no efforts are being left to go free in order tomake it much gigantic than the just concluded tour led by Big B.And this time SRK has done what was thought as impossible and this isreally a surprise.To increasing the audience pulling power and shooting up the khanpower to truly make "Temptation" a unique affair, guess what SRK hasdone.

For Michelle Williams, It’s All Personal

2008-09-08T00:21:00.003-07:00

MICHELLE WILLIAMS has an Academy Award nomination, the open adulationof major filmmakers and a résumé that is striking in its worldlinessand creative ambition. But if her career has seemed to progress almostinconspicuously, it is partly because of its introspective bent —small movies, subtle performances — and partly because it has latelyexisted in the shadow of her personal life.

For Michelle Williams, It’s All Personal

2008-09-08T00:21:00.001-07:00

Murky days again for Ram Gopal Varma

2008-09-08T00:20:00.001-07:00

Just when we thought that Ram Gopal Varma's lucky stars have startedto shine again after the over whelming success of 'Phoonk', anotherheavyweight problem has surfaced for the maverick film maker to dealwith.Film financier Bharat Shah has filed a complaint against Ramu accusinghim of breach of contract.As a result the Indian Motion Pictures Producer's Association (IMPPA)has forwarded a letter to the film maker asking him for explanation.

Newbie Anant Narayan opposite Deepika in a film

2008-09-08T00:19:00.002-07:00

Officially, he may not even be a film old in B-town, but the mediaspeculation and conjecture surrounding this Bollywood newcomer isalready that of an established star. No prizes for guessing this one –we're talking of entertainment journalist turned Bollywood actor AnantNarayan who's in news yet again for allegedly refusing to do a cameoin Nikhil Advani's soon-to-be released Chandni Chowk to China'.Just a day after Anant got back from Beijing, where he was attendingthe 2008 Summer Olympic Games as a proud representative of hiscountry, Anant found himself amidst yet another controversy

Salman Khan to do a show with Wizcraft for Bihar flood relief

2008-09-08T00:19:00.001-07:00

Film industry came together to appeal to the public to help the 3million people who suffered from the devastating flood in Bihar.People who attended the press conference were Prakash Jha, ShatrughanSinha, Shekhar Suman, Manoj Bajpai and Neetu Chandra, along with thepolitician Sanjay NirupamPrakash Jha has set up a rescue and relief operation, PUNARWAAS, FloodRelief Mission, Bihar, in collaboration with PRAYAS, headed byShatrughan Sinha, with the help of an NGO working in Bihar.The relief camp —22 RD will provide complete care for 5000 people inthe village Kattaiya.

Savior or Sinner? It Can Be Tough to Tell

2008-09-08T00:18:00.000-07:00

In "Babylon A.D." Vin Diesel, the slowest-moving action hero inmovies, travels over land and under water from somewhere in the formerSoviet Union to New York City in the company of a nun (Michelle Yeoh)and a young woman named Aurora (Mélanie Thierry). Aurora is eithersome kind of biological weapon or some kind of messianic figure.I won't say which, though this odd, solemn disaster has made itselfspoiler-proof by refusing to make any sense at all. The onlyexplicable thing about "Babylon A.D." is that it was not screened inadvance for critics. Our judgments, in any case, may be superfluous,since the director, Mathieu Kassovitz, has already publicly describedit as "pure violence and stupidity."

Akriti to connect more with her fans

2008-09-08T00:17:00.000-07:00

Akriti Kakar has carved a niche for herself in the highly competitivemusic industry by giving voice to hit songs like "Dil Vich Lagiya Ve"from the movie 'Chup Chup Ke', "Inshaallah" from 'Welcome' and thechart buster "Move Your Body/Freaky Freaky Raat" from 'KismatKonnection".She is going to add another feather to her hat by singing live for thesoon to be aired show of Zee Music titled as Rock Baby Rock.Some of the forthcoming films in which we will be hearing more of thissinger's soulful voice are 'Golmaal Returns', 'Kidnap', 'HelloDarling', 'Cinema' and 'Harry Puttar'.

War May Be Hell, but Hollywood Is Even Worse

2008-09-08T00:09:00.000-07:00

Despite what you may have read lately, the biggest target of ridiculein "Tropic Thunder," a flashy, nasty, on-and-off funny and assaultivesendup of the film industry, is not the mentally retarded. Rather, thetrue targets of this extreme comedy's free-flowing contempt are thestars, makers, brokers, miscellaneous supplicants and even die-hardfans of the movies, who are all portrayed as challenged in somefashion: intellectually, ethically, aesthetically, sartorially,chemically, longitudinally, you name it.

Revisiting Coen Country for Odd Men

2008-09-06T01:27:00.000-07:00

The sound of hysterical laughter is heard.That line of dialogue and the stage direction that follows could have plausibly been found in many of the 13 major movies created by the Coen brothers: black comedies like "Blood Simple," "Barton Fink" or "Fargo" where invariably something does go horribly wrong. Here, however, the speaker is Joel Coen, and the laughter is provided by Ethan, his younger brother (by three years). They were responding to the question of whether their big night at the Academy Awards last February — four Oscars for "No Country for Old Men," including best picture — changed the brothers' outlook on the film industry, or their place in it, or in any way represented an apotheosis of their 24-year career as darlings of art-house cinema.

The Pool (2007)

2008-09-06T01:21:00.001-07:00

In "The Pool," a recurrent image that develops into a symbol of thegap between affluence and poverty shows the waiflike Indianprotagonist, Venkatesh (Venkatesh Chavan), perched in a tree, gazinglongingly at a private swimming pool on the other side of a hedge. Askinny, 18-year-old man-child who longs to dive into the water,Venkatesh ekes out a living cleaning hotel rooms and selling plasticbags on the street with his 11-year-old sidekick, Jhangir (JhangirBadshah). The shimmering pool, in which no one seems to swim, is awindow onto a world he can hardly imagine.

At Movies, Fewer Eyes, Bigger Haul

2008-09-06T01:17:00.000-07:00

Fewer people went to the movies this summer than last, confirmingHollywood's fears that this year's slate of pictures would not matchthe crowd pleasers of 2007.But luckily for an industry that cares mostly about the money, higherticket prices and a Batman sequel delivered near-record revenue to themajor studios.

Chipmunks With Rabies? That Is So L L Not Cool J

2008-09-06T01:15:00.000-07:00

"Disaster Movie," the latest disposable parody of disposable Hollywoodmovies, has a shelf life of about five minutes, tops, which may beslightly longer than it took to come up with most of its gags.Scribbled and slapped together by Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer,this flailing free fall through recent pop culture begins with aparody of "10,000 B.C." featuring "Amy Winehouse" as a saber-toothedtiger who pulls a crystal skull from her beehive hairdo. It winds upwith "Kung Fu Panda" (dude in a furry suit) and "Beowulf" (naked dudewho keeps yelling, "I am Beowulf!") running amok through "Night at theMuseum."

A Nostalgia for New York, by Way of the Toronto Film Festival

2008-09-06T01:08:00.000-07:00

If all goes according to plan this weekend at the TorontoInternational Film Festival, voices caught on tape at a Manhattan rapsession more than 33 years ago will introduce a film about the makingof "A Chorus Line."Those voices, and others from a handful of movies at this sprawling,10-day film festival opening on Thursday, are also likely to rousesome serious nostalgia for a New York that somehow got away.

A bang-up summer movie season ends with a whimper

2008-09-02T23:03:00.000-07:00

The R-rated comedy "Tropic Thunder" held on to the top box-office slot for the third weekend in a row, ending a summer popcorn movie season dominated by superheroes.The DreamWorks/Paramount action comedy, starring Ben Stiller, Jack Black and Robert Downey Jr., grossed an estimated $14.3 million over the long weekend, beating out 20th Century Fox's sci-fi thriller "Babylon A.D." and trouncing Lionsgate Films' comedy "Disaster Movie," which ranked No. 7 in weekend estimates.

Another Blast From ‘Tropic Thunder’

2008-09-02T22:55:00.000-07:00

The summer movie season came to an end with another big week for "Tropic Thunder," which earned an estimated $11.5 million Friday through Sunday to lead the box office for the third straight week. The Paramount Pictures movie, starring Ben Stiller, Robert Downey Jr. and Jack Black, has earned more than $83 million in three weeks, according to Reuters. The sci-fi thriller "Babylon A.D." (20th Century Fox) took the No. 2 spot with $9.7 million in its first weekend. Coming in third was the box-office powerhouse "The Dark Knight," whose $8.8 million take gave it a total of $502 million in seven weeks, making it the second film to top $500 million at the domestic box office. ("Titanic" holds the record with $601 million.) In fourth place was "The House Bunny" (Columbia Pictures), which took in $8.3 million, followed by "Traitor," with $7.9 million. The box-office tracker Media By Numbers reported that total summer revenue for the movie business would be about $4.2 billion, a new record but just slightly better than last summer's $4.18 billion, and that the number of tickets sold, about 587 million, represented a decline of about 3.5 percent

Anniversary for Slamdance

2008-09-02T22:54:00.000-07:00

The Slamdance Film Festival will celebrate its 15th anniversary with a series of events, beginning with screenings in Los Angeles and New York of two indie films that originally showed at the festival. Christopher Nolan will host the screening of his film "Following" (1998) on Friday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (tickets at slamdance.com) and Steven Soderbergh will be the host for his film "Schizopolis" (1996) on Sept. 16 at the IFC Center in Manhattan (ifccenter.com). Both films will be followed by question-and-answer sessions

Director and Star Defend Tsunami Thriller

2008-09-02T22:53:00.000-07:00

The French actress Emmanuelle Béart and Fabrice Du Welz, the director of her latest film, "Vinyan," a thriller centered on the 2004 Asian tsunami, defended it from critics in an interview with Reuters on Sunday. "I don't want to be unpleasant to people who have really suffered from the tsunami," said Mr. Du Welz, who is Belgian. "I tried to be as respectful as I can." The film, which had its debut at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday, has been criticized by families of people who died in the tsunami. It tells the story of a couple who refuse to believe that their son was a victim of the disaster and set out to search for him. Ms. Béart said that the tsunami itself was not its main subject. "The story is that they lost their son," she said of the couple at the center of the film's story. She plays the mother of the child who is presumed lost.

In an unusual move, Fox Searchlight Pictures and Warner Brothers Pictures Group are coming together to release the next movie from Danny Boyle, direct

2008-09-02T22:51:00.000-07:00

In an unusual move, Fox Searchlight Pictures and Warner Brothers Pictures Group are coming together to release the next movie from Danny Boyle, director of "Trainspotting" and "28 Days Later." "Slumdog Millionaire" was originally a Warner Independent Pictures release, but last May, Warner Brothers closed its two independent divisions, Picture House and Warner Independent, in an effort to cut costs. Now the company will work with Fox Searchlight Pictures to distribute Mr. Boyle's film in North America. In a statement from Fox Searchlight, Jeff Robinov, president of Warner Brothers Pictures Group, said Warner was working with Fox Searchlight to release the film because of the studio's crowded calendar. "With the recent additions to our slate, it became impossible for us to release 'Slumdog Millionaire' in this calendar year," Mr. Robinov said. "Danny very much wanted to get it released this year," said Peter Rice, president of Fox Searchlight, "and we have a long relationship with him." The movie is based on the novel "Q&A," about an 18-year old orphan from the slums of Mumbai. "Slumdog Millionaire" is scheduled to be released on Nov. 28 and will have its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival next month.

Flush With Cash, Bollywood Glows

2008-09-02T22:49:00.000-07:00

"WHO gives us clout?" Shahrukh Khan, the actor also known as King of Bollywood, asked during a recent interview here. He quickly answered the query himself. "It's the last mile, the audience. My logic is this: Can you beat me at the box office?"In the last 15 years few have challenged Mr. Khan at the top of the Bollywood box office. His string of blockbusters has given him such clout — as well as wax statues in his honor at Madame Tussauds in London and the Musée Gravin in Paris — that India Today, one of the country's leading newsmagazines, placed the 42-year-old Mr. Khan at No. 6 in its annual power list in February. He may have ranked below the billionaire Ambani brothers, but he came in ahead of the former president A. P. J. Abdul Kalam. And it was no accident that that the most powerful man in the Hindi film industry is an actor. In Bollywood the motion picture industry remains resolutely star struck, even as special effects have helped to reduce Hollywood's dependence on big-name actors. "There is a variety of ways in which a picture gets made in Hollywood, but I can say without qualification that in Hindi pictures stars are the determining factor much more than they are in Los Angeles," said Michael Lynton, the chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment, which helped produce "Saawariya" ("Beloved"), the first Hollywood-Bollywood studio collaboration. Five men dominate the business in Bollywood: Shahrukh Khan, Aamir Khan, Salman Khan (the Khans are not related), Akshay Kumar and Hrithik Roshan. Each of these stars function almost as a one-man studio, with an in-house production company. Two of the most successful films in 2007 — "Om Shanti Om" and "Tare Zameen Par" ("Stars on Earth") — were produced by the companies of Shahrukh Khan ("Om") and Aamir Khan ("Tare"). The last holdout to the production game, Mr. Kumar, co-produced his latest release, "Singh Is Kinng," which set a Bollywood record by making $15 million in its opening weekend earlier this month.Revolving around these stars are favored directors, producers, writers and stylists. And if their films aren't playing in cinemas, the actors are on television selling products or presenting shows. (Mr. Kumar, Shahrukh Khan and Salman Khan are among India's highest-paid television hosts.) "A star guarantees the first weekend box office, and it is this business which decides all the other revenue streams," said Kishore Lulla, chief executive of Eros International, Bollywood's largest overseas distributor. "Without a star it's too risky." Eros plans to produce and finance 50 films over the next year. The company raised $100 million from the Alternative Investment Market on the London Stock Exchange and another $100 million from Citibank and is redirecting substantial funds into several star-led "business adventures," to use Mr. Kumar's expression.

Sunil help the flood victim

2008-09-02T22:41:00.000-07:00

We all know that actor Suniel Shetty has turned producer and heads his production house Popcorn Entertainment. What many do not know is that the actor via his company H2O, which has trained sea-men, has been helping the needy for some years now.. These men have been helping the BMC with relief work in and around Mumbai since the dreadful July 2005 floods when the city was drowning. Not just the BMC but also firemen. And now, Suniel's team is back in action! When Indiatimes Movies got in touch with the actor, he revealed that his men are all set to go to Bihar and help with the relief work. Suniel tells us, "A team of 60 men armed with about 30 boats and jet skies is ready. Half of the members are going from Mumbai and others from Goa and they are just waiting to be airlifted."

The Longshots (2008) Movie

2008-08-31T00:59:00.000-07:00

Formulaic, tired, and for sure something that we have all seen before in a inspiring sports movie, The Longshots still has good intentions and the likeable presence of Ice Cube and upcoming star Keke Palmer. The film is inspired by the true story of an 11-year old girl from Illinois, who was the first girl to play quarterback in the Pop Warner national championship game.

The film takes place in Minden, Illinois, though the film was shot in Minden, Louisiana and follows the lonely middle school student of Jasmine (Keke Palmer). Minden is a tight knit small town that has hit an all time low financially ever since a local factory closed and left many of the community unemployed. Included as one of the factory’s lay offs is Jasmine uncle Curtis Plummer (Ice Cube), who spends his days moping, drinking, and carrying around a football to relieve his high school playing days. After Jasmine’s mother picks up more work to cover the expenses, she asks Curtis to watch after each afternoon, in which he reluctantly accepts. With the bookworm Jasmine and the lazy Curtis the two clash over everything, but find a similarity in each other once they start to throw the football around. Curtis teaches Jasmine how the throw like a poised quarterback within a few weeks and begs the local football coach (Matt Craven) to give her a try out despite being a girl. Thinking that Curtis is insane at first, Jasmine’s natural talent is quickly endeared by the coach as she works her way into being the starting quarterback in a all-male football world. Trials and tribulations ensue for Jasmine’s new talent as well as when the local media attention brings back her no-go father back to Minden.

Death Race (2008) Synopsis:

2008-08-31T00:56:00.000-07:00

It is evident that we are officially in dump season with the arrival of the lousy and stupidly contrived Death Race. Dump season usually occurs from the end of August to November each year, in which studios dump films that they do not deem to worthy, hoping to make money on them, but most usually end up being some of the worst films of the year. Case and point with Death Race, which is an ultra-violent action race film that is based off of the Roger Corman’s 1975 cult film Death Race 2000.

The film takes place in 2012 and the economy is in an all time low. Jensen Ames (Jason Statham) is an ex-Nascar driver and dedicated family man that has just be laid off from a local factory. The same night, he is framed for his wife’s murder and his baby girl is left fatherless as Jensen is taken to Terminal Island prison. The prison is run by the collective, but slithering warden Hennessey (Joan Allen), who has tapped into the local pay-per-view medium to earn money. The prisoners now participate live in Death Race, in which the contestants race in industrial areas and close-in tracks with cars loaded with machine guns, napalm, smoke, oil, rocket launchers, etc. The goal is for a prisoner to win five races, and Hennessey will let them go free. The audience loves the smashing action and gory deaths of the contestants, which occurs more often than ones that win. Hennessey makes Jensen a deal to take on the identify of a fame masked driver named Frankenstein. The real Frankenstein met his death in the last race, but it was kept away from the public. Hennessey informs Jensen that Frankenstein already had won 4 races, and all that Jensen needs to do is win one more to get his life back. Hesitant at first, but with no real choice Jensen joins the race under a different identity, but gains a trusty pit crew leader in Coach (Ian McShane) and a sexy navigator in Case (Natalie Martinez). Jensen biggest competition is not only racer Machine Gun Joe (Tyrese Gibson), but the obstacles themselves, in which Hennessey controls combat, fire, and when the participants can use their weapons.

HOLLYWOOD

2008-08-31T00:45:00.000-07:00

comedian Ricky Gervais got the fright of his life when publicity for his new movie was ruined by paranormal activity in a Hollywood Hotel.

Extras star Gervais was recently hosting a series of press junkets for his new movie, Ghost Town, at the Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles, but left in a hurry when spooky happenings scared him and his co-workers.

A terrified movie executive revealed that their work was disrupted by a string of supernatural occurrences.

The exec tells British newspaper the Daily Star, "We wanted the junkets at the Roosevelt because of its ghostly reputation. But we got so much more than we bargained for. A photoshoot we prepared was wrecked and two runners say they saw the figure of a lady in the full-length mirror.

Film spanning South Asian countries on the cards

2008-07-10T00:03:00.000-07:00

When the time comes for an idea, nothing can stop it, so goes the saying. This is precisely what happened when directors from South Asia, including Bangladesh, gathered in the Indian coastal state of Goa, a paradise for international tourists, on the last day of June to give wings to a joint venture film production.Bangladeshi filmmaker Tanveer Husseini, Buddhi Kiritisena of Sri Lanka, Pakistan's Siraj-ul-Haque, Abdul Hameed Latifi of Afghanistan have joined hands to make a film which is likely to be a love story across five South Asian countries.The occasion was the concluding day of the third edition of South Asian Film Festival organized by South Asian Foundation.From India, the director in the joint effort would be either actress-producer Pooja Bhatt or director Sudhir Mishra, according to Manoj Srivastava, Chief Executive Officer of the Entertainment Society of Goa which hosted the South Asian festival.Siraj-ul-Haque said the story idea was still in development stage. "We are yet to decide which country the protagonist will be from. It will be a love story which will track one person from the eyes of five different filmmakers from five countries," he said.Latifi said the script for the proposed movie should be ready in two months. "We have all agreed to be in touch with each other to take forward the story idea. A concrete idea should take shape in two months," he added.Secretary General of South Asia Foundation Rahul Barua said the film would be produced under the banner of of the Foundation, which will organise the funds.

Actress Subarna Mustafa marries TV play director Soud

2008-07-10T00:02:00.000-07:00

Renowned actress Subarna Mustafa, 48, and TV play director Badrul Anam Soud, 32, got married last Monday, according to sources. The denmohor was set at Tk 10 lakh.Soud is currently co-directing Doll's House, the ongoing daily soap on ATN Bangla, in which Subarana plays a central role. The wedding, according to Muslim traditions, took place at the Uttara residence of Subarna's mother. The low-key affair was attended by a few of the near and dear ones of the bride and groom.This puts to rest all speculation on Subarna's second marriage, which went on for quite a while.Subarna has recently divorced Humayun Faridee. The hugely popular actor duo were married to each other for over two decades.

Guru Dutt: Incorporating artistic sensibility in commercial films

2008-07-10T00:01:00.001-07:00

July 9 marked legendary Indian filmmaker Guru Dutt's 83rd birthday. Dutt is often credited with ushering in the golden era of Indian cinema. He made the quintessential 1950-'60s classics such as Kaagaz Ke Phool, Pyaasa, Sahib Biwi Aur Ghulam and Chaudhvi Ka Chaand.He is most famous for making brilliant lyrical and artistic films within the context of popular Indian cinema of the 1950s, and expanding its commercial conventions, starting with his 1957 masterpiece, Pyaasa. Several of his later works have a cult following. His movies go full house when re-released; especially in Germany, France and Japan. Today, no world cinema class is complete without inclusion of Guru Dutt. Pyaasa was rated as one of the best 100 films of all time by the Time Magazine.

Guru Dutt: Incorporating artistic sensibility in commercial films

2008-07-10T00:01:00.000-07:00

Bangladesh Film Archive moves to new building

2008-07-10T00:00:00.000-07:00

The government organisation yet to win confidence of the filmmakers
Ershad Kamol
Prints preserved at the vault of Bangladesh Film Archive; a technician is cleaning a print (left) Photo: AFPBangladesh Film Archive (BFA), under the Ministry of Information, has moved from its rented office at Mohammadpur to the National Broadcasting Authority Building (NBAB) at Shahbagh this month. In the last 30 years BFA has preserved only 2169 films in its vaults. In the library of the archive 3053 books, 14575 photographs, 6677 posters, 1986 screenplay, 9950 film journals and other film related objects and documents have been preserved.Upon investigating at BFA's previous office at Mohammadpur, it was found that temperature is not properly controlled at the four chambers. Even the temperature and humidity indicators did not work. Ensuring proper temperature and humidity level are very important when preserving negatives and prints of films are concerned.Director General (DG) of BFA, Dr. Mohammad Jahangir Hossain claims that the air-conditioning system at the vaults of the new BFA venue will be better. "Moreover, as the previous venue was rented, we will save Tk 2 lakh every month," he said.Can BFA function properly in a restricted zone like NBAB? The DG replied, "There will be a few temporary problems, especially during the weekly film screening sessions, however, we will try to co-operate the interested visitors.""We will continue our activities at NBAB until we can shift to our proposed own building at Sher-e-Banglanagar. Though the allotted 1.86 acre plot for the building is currently illegally occupied by Mamota Bahumukhi Samabay Samity, an organisation of employees of Public Works Department," the DG added. BFA has moved several times in the last 30 years. The archive is yet to win the confidence of filmmakers. Most filmmakers do not submit the prints and negatives of their films to the archive, though according to 16 (2) section of Copyright Act 2005, a director must submit a print to BFA within two months of releasing the film. Renowned filmmaker Tareque Masud addressed the issue: "It's true that the current DG is giving his best possible effort, however, I'm not sure that the prints of my films will be preserved properly at the BFA vault. I have documents that prints of several classic films made in the '60s has turned brittle in the vaults, as the standard humidity and temperature are not maintained there.""Though the scenario is changing gradually, but unless the archive has its own building with properly working vaults, I'm reluctant to submit my prints and negatives to BFA," he added."We have not taken any drastic action as per the Copyright Act 2005, which reads that in case of not submitting the print within 60 days of the film's release, the director will get six months of imprisonment or a fine of Tk 50,000 or both," said the DG, "But we want that the filmmakers to realise the importance of the value of archive." However, the DG claims that the scenario is changing. "The rate of submitting films at BFA has increased in the last few years. In addition to preserving and collecting prints and negatives, at BFA we have taken a project of collecting available DVDs of films. We have also initiated some research-based programmes," he said. The DG also informed that three research-based works are almost complete. The researches carried out under BFA are: "Children's Film in Bangladesh: A sociological survey" by Taposhi Burman and Imran Firdaus, "Women on Screen: Representing Women by Women in Bangladesh Cinema" by Bikash Chandra Bhowmik and "Interrelation Between Mainstream Cinema and Cine-journalism: The Current Perspective and Future Prospect" by Aditi Falguni Gayen. Moreover, BFA is going to publish journals regularly.The current initiatives taken by BFA are highly appreciated by the filmmakers, who are involved with BFA from the beginning. But, they have particular suggestions regarding the government organisation.The filmmakers suggest that an autonomous body including the involved persons in film industry headed by a curator should run BFA. According to the filmmakers as per functions of the archive the head of BFA should be a curator instead of a DG. For better services, BFA should review its programmes involving the experts, filmmakers commented. They also demand for a permanent building for the archive."Besides preserving prints and negatives, the archive should regularly arrange film appreciation courses. Moreover, they should screen films to generate interest amongst the masses," said filmmaker Manzar-e Hasin Murad. Murad further said, "Like the museum, the archive should display its collections and should also initiate exchange programmes with film archives overseas."Filmmaker Morshedul Islam demanded for training of the BFA employees. He said, "Print of my film Aagami has been destroyed at the vault of the archive. I know things are improving because of the helpful attitude of the current DG and Secretary to the Ministry of Information. However, technical training of the employees is urgent to preserve the films properly."DG Dr. Mohammad Jahangir Hossain said, "We have already submitted Bangladesh Film Archive Act '08 for approval from the government. If the government continues its support, we will be able to provide better service."

Land of the Meek, and Home of the Deeply Blue

2008-07-05T23:52:00.000-07:00

It is tempting to overpraise “Kabluey,” a bittersweet indie comedy whose hapless protagonist, Salman (Scott Prendergast), spends a good part of the movie waddling along the side of a highway in a blue foam-rubber suit. Dressed as Kabluey, the corporate mascot of BlueNexion, a failing Internet company in Texas, Salman is paid $6 an hour to attract attention.
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As motorists stop to gawk at this featureless blob with a giant round head, Salman’s job is to distribute fliers advertising office space in BlueNexion’s sleek, nearly deserted headquarters. Because he can’t hold the fliers in his inflated paws, Salman has to keep them tucked under one arm, from which they are continually slipping and scattering onto the road.
To be trapped all day inside this costume with the sun beating down on him may be hell. But as enraptured children cling to Kabluey as if he were a cartoon legend sprung to life, Salman finds an odd kind of transcendence in the work. He becomes two people: one a lost 32-year-old boy cowering inside the suit, the other the adorable, bobbing and shuffling Kabluey who inspires cuddly affection.
Midway through the movie Salman meets another professional buffoon, a man outfitted as a giant Gouda cheese who dispenses tidbits in front of a supermarket. Together the two, fully costumed, eventually engage BlueNexion’s sleazy, womanizing chief executive (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) in a slapstick brawl.
Mr. Prendergast, an alumnus of the Groundlings comedy troupe, wrote and directed “Kabluey,” which is very funny in a ghastly way. All the characters — be they the gossipy, backbiting Austin, Tex., equivalents of television’s desperate housewives or Salman’s morose fellow passengers on the bus to work — suffer from excruciating boredom. It is a malaise that rises like steam from the flat, Middle Western landscape in which the corporation’s emptied offices symbolize an economy going bust.
Salman is the nerdy brother-in-law of Leslie (Lisa Kudrow), an overstressed mother bringing up two hellions, Cameron (Cameron Wofford) and Lincoln (Landon Henninger), while her husband, a National Guardsman, fights in Iraq. When informed that her husband’s tour has been extended by several months, Leslie visibly crumples. No one is better than Ms. Kudrow at playing emotionally bedraggled women hanging on by their fingernails, and your heart goes out to her, even when she behaves atrociously.
Enlisting Salman as a live-in baby sitter is the solution of last resort for Leslie, who is forced to take a job at BlueNexion to pay for her children’s health insurance. Salman, unemployed and homeless after losing his last job as a laminater in a copy shop, nervously accepts the invitation. In the recent epidemic of comedies about 30-something men in the throes of severe arrested development, he is one of the most pitifully incompetent losers.
Cameron and Lincoln hate Salman on sight. “I’m going to kill you,” hisses Cameron, the older and meaner of the two. And their pranks, like sprinkling cleanser on Salman’s eyes and mouth while he is asleep and putting thumbtacks in his breakfast cereal, show they mean business.
Salman takes the harassment in stride. He leads the rampaging little monsters on leashes to the supermarket and ties them up outside the store like dogs.
If Salman suggests an Adam Sandler character, Mr. Prendergast plays him like a long-suffering Buster Keaton stumblebum; he is so far beyond misery he is practically mute. Mr. Prendergast gives him the wide vacant eyes of a silent clown who is so resigned to a life of humiliation that his face has lost any expression, save for his mouth, which gapes in an attitude of befuddled amazement.
The plot of “Kabluey,” which operates on surreal cartoon logic, doesn’t bear close scrutiny. There are holes everywhere. When Salman gets the job as Kabluey, which Leslie finds for him, the crisis that brought him into the family is nearly forgotten. Who is caring for the boys? Toward the end the movie takes a queasy turn toward the saccharine.
The film’s distance from factual reality oddly enhances its bleak underlying vision. It portrays a demoralized American work force fearfully going through the motions of life while waiting without much hope for things to get better.
“Kabluey” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has some strong language and sexual situations.
KABLUEY
Opens on Friday in Manhattan.
Written and directed by Scott Prendergast; director of photography, Michael Lohmann; edited by Lawrence Maddox; music by Roddy Bottum; production designer, Walter Barnett; produced by Rick Rosenthal, Gary Dean Simpson, Rhoades Rader, Jeff Balis and Doug Sutherland; released by Regent Releasing. At the Cinema Village, 22 East 12th Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes.

Elves and Killer Beanstalks From Director’s Personal ‘Hell’

2008-07-05T23:50:00.000-07:00

The common thread running through the films of Guillermo del Toro, from his 1993 horror feature debut, “Cronos,” to his 2006 Oscar-winning parable, “Pan’s Labyrinth,” is his deep affection for gruesome-looking beasts. “There’s nothing I enjoy more than creating fables about monsters, human or otherwise,” Mr. del Toro said in a recent phone interview from London.
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His latest movie, “Hellboy II: The Golden Army,” which opens Friday, gave him plenty of new monsters to play with. In the follow-up to his 2004 comic-book adaptation, he imagines a collision of the natural world and a world of magic hidden in the fringes of urban life. “What if tooth fairies were illegally imported in containers to work menial jobs in garbage collection?” Mr. del Toro said. “What would happen if trolls were just bag ladies collecting stray cats for eating?”
The result is a tale of good versus evil in which Hellboy, a heroic demon who works for a secret government agency, squares off against a ruthless elf prince determined to destroy humanity.
The creatures of “Hellboy II” did not spring fully formed from Mr. del Toro’s head; they began as drawings in his diaries, accompanied by annotations in Spanish (he was born in Mexico) and English. He has kept similar journals for all his films (except for his forthcoming adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s “Hobbit,” whose characters are controlled by the author’s estate; for legal purposes he confines those sketches to loose papers or napkins).
Someday, Mr. del Toro said, he may publish his artwork, or he may pass it along to his daughters, Mariana, 12, who also appreciates monsters, and Marisa, 6, who prefers Hello Kitty — “which I still think is a hydrocephalic mutant of a cat,” Mr. del Toro said.

Displaced and Adrift in Los Angeles

2008-07-05T23:48:00.000-07:00

“THE Exiles,” a film about American Indians living on the edge of downtown Los Angeles in the 1950s, is both a chronicle and a casualty of neglect: a movie about a forsaken community that itself became a lost object. Directed by Kent Mackenzie, a first-time filmmaker who had just graduated from the University of Southern California, it is a poetic and empathetic hybrid of fiction and documentary. The nonprofessional actors play versions of themselves: young Indians, newly relocated from reservations and adrift in working-class Bunker Hill.
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Milestone Films
A scene from Kent Mackenzie’s “Exiles” (1961), about American Indians in Los Angeles. Shot over three years, the film, opening in New York on Friday, mixes documentary and fiction in the Robert Flaherty tradition.
“The Exiles” was shown at the Venice International Film Festival in 1961 and won plaudits (from Pauline Kael, among others) during its brief run on the festival circuit. But it quickly faded from view, as did Mr. Mackenzie, who directed only one other feature, “Saturday Morning” (1970), and died, at 50, in 1980.
The revival of interest in “The Exiles,” which opens in New York with a restored print on Friday, dates to its inclusion in “Los Angeles Plays Itself,” a 2003 video essay by Thom Andersen about movie depictions of Los Angeles. Devoted largely to debunking misrepresentations of the city, Mr. Andersen’s film also called attention to a forgotten local tradition of underdog, neo-realist cinema that included “The Exiles” and Charles Burnett’s “Killer of Sheep.”
Like “Killer of Sheep” (1977), which had its theatrical release last year to widespread praise and considerable success, “The Exiles” was restored by the Film and Television Archive at the University of California, Los Angeles, and is being released by Milestone, the boutique distributor that has made a specialty of salvaging lost classics. Seen today, Mr. Mackenzie’s film appears to uncover a history not so much secret as occluded: a subculture and a way of life that has been virtually invisible.
Filmed on nights and weekends, it took three years to complete. “It was designed to be shot in eight weeks, but we kept running out of money,” said John Morrill, one of the cinematographers. (It was Mr. Morrill who located the original negative of “The Exiles” at U.S.C., where he taught cinematography.) The production was also delayed when cast members were arrested and Mr. Morrill and Erik Daarstad, another cinematographer, were drafted.
Mr. Morrill said “The Exiles” was an attempt to return documentary to the tradition of Robert Flaherty, whose films incorporated staged elements, and Humphrey Jennings, whose dramatized documentary about the London blitz, “Fires Were Started,” was a major influence. “We never thought documentaries had to be newsreels, and we didn’t have any compunction about using narrative techniques,” Mr. Morrill said.
“The Exiles” follows a group of urban American Indians over a 12-hour period from dusk to dawn. While the main female character wanders the streets alone, her husband and his buddies, awash in booze, look for trouble and a good time, drifting from bar to liquor store to dance hall. The night ends high in the hills above the city lights, as the soundtrack’s jukebox rock ’n’ roll gives way to ceremonial chanting and drumming.
Mr. Mackenzie prepared for the shoot by hanging out with the residents of Bunker Hill he had befriended and from whom the cast was drawn. “He spent a year and a half researching, and he just sat with them night after night after night,” Mr. Morrill said. “There was never any script.”
A portrait of a vanished community, “The Exiles” retains a contemporary relevance. “Seventy percent of Natives live in urban areas now,” said Sherman Alexie, the American Indian novelist and filmmaker who is helping Milestone present “The Exiles.” “We might have better jobs or be college educated, but the struggle to maintain your Native identity in a city is the primary struggle today.”
In focusing on the first wave of Indians relocated in the 1950s by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, “The Exiles” documents a displacement that Mr. Alexie says has received scant notice from a younger generation of Indians. “None of us made that movie,” he said. “Nobody writes about the relocated anymore. In a sense that first generation has been abandoned even by other Natives.” He added: “They were the immigrants, and by and large everybody in America loves to pretend they’ve always been here, even the people who’ve always been here. Ignoring the first generation of immigrants makes you feel like you’ve always belonged.”
Despite its compact time frame the film conjures a powerful sensation of purgatory: a night like many others. As one of the characters says, pondering the threat of a jail sentence: “Time is just time to me. If I’m doing it outside I can do it inside.”
“It’s ‘Groundhog Day’ for the relocated,” Mr. Alexie said. “That feeling of repetition makes it feel like a ceremony. The thing about poverty is that it’s relentless and the film’s not afraid of that.”
“The Exiles” is attuned equally to everyday moments of tenderness and to the brutal toll of alcoholism and family neglect, apparently to the discomfort of some viewers. “Whenever I showed it to my students, they would attack me for making a stereotyped film about drunken Indians,” Mr. Morrill said.
But Mr. Alexie said the movie’s harshness felt true to life. “This was before the political revolutions of the late ’60s and before Native pride,” he said. “The dominant mode for Natives was shame.”
He added: “It’s a little problematic in that it’s a white guy’s movie about us. But in learning how the film was made, I think people will discover it was truly collaborative. The filmmakers ended up in the position of witness as much as creator.”

BOLLYWOOD MOVIES HISTORY

2008-06-24T21:46:00.000-07:00

Bollywood (Hindi: बॉलीवूड, Urdu: بالی وڈ) is the informal term popularly used for Mumbai-based Hindi-language film industry in India. Bollywood is often incorrectly used to refer to the whole of Indian cinema; it is only a part of the Indian film industry. Bollywood is one of the largest film producers in the world.[1]

The name is a portmanteau of Bombay (the former name for Mumbai) and Hollywood, the center of the American film industry. However, unlike Hollywood, Bollywood does not exist as a real physical place. Though some deplore the name, arguing that it makes the industry look like a poor cousin to Hollywood, it seems likely to persist and now has its own entry in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Bollywood is commonly referred to as Hindi cinema, even though Hindustani, understood as the colloquial base common to both Hindi and Urdu, might be more accurate. There has been a growing presence of Indian English in dialogue and songs as well. It is not uncommon to see films that feature dialogue with English words and phrases, even whole sentences. There is a growing number of films made entirely in English.

A LITTLE HOLLYWOOD HISTORY

2008-06-24T21:42:00.000-07:00

The tradition of grand Hollywood premieres was pioneered by master showman Sid Grauman. The very first gala premiere took place in 1922 with the grand opening of Grauman's Egyptian Theatre and the spectacular premiere of "Robin Hood," a silent screen version starring Douglas Fairbanks.
That first premiere at the Egyptian featured all the bright lights and hoopla which we've now come to associate with movie premieres - and the basic form has been repeated ever since. (Five years later, in 1927, Grauman topped himself by opening his new Chinese Theatre with the star-studded premiere of DeMille's "King of Kings.")
Over the years, Hollywood premieres grew more and more elaborate.
When "The Wizard of Oz" premiered at Grauman's Chinese Theatre in 1939, over ten thousand spectators showed up to greet Judy Garland, the entire Oz cast, and other M-G-M stars. The studio even recreated the Yellow Brick Road and a small cornfield in the famous Grauman's courtyard, and populated it with a scarecrow and several Munchkins in full costume.
Three years later, in 1942, fear of enemy attack during World War II led to all Hollywood premieres (and their bright lights) being banned for the duration. The last pre-war premiere was held on August 19, 1942, for "Pride of the Yankees" at the Pantages Theatre, and was attended by (among others) Bob Hope, Ginger Rogers, Ronald Reagan, Jack Benny, Mickey Rooney, Ava Gardner, Charles Boyer, Rita Hayworth, Victor Mature, Hedy Lamarr, Irene Dunne, Dorothy Lamour and Sam Goldwyn.
But once the war was over, the Hollywood premieres resumed. And many of the modern movie premieres are still exciting events. And occasionally, there's still a a jolt of Hollywood public excess.
For the 2006 premiere of "Ice Age 2", the actually covered the forecourt of Grauman's Chinese with snow, had ice skaters perform for the crowd, and brought the stars (including Ray Romano) in riding on snowmobiles - all right on Hollywood Boulevard!
At the premiere of "Lethal Weapon II", a giant video screen showed arrivals; and providing entertainment for the crowd of 2,000 fans was a Chinese dragon, ceremonial drummers, and a dozen acrobatic wushu martial artists engaging in mock combat with swords & spears. Stars Mel Gibson and Danny Glover arrived in the beaten-up car used in the action movie, while co-stars arrived in police squad cars, sirens wailing. Danny Glover got his hand and footprints put in wet cement outside of the Chinese Theatre, then the arrivals started, with the stars including Joe Pesci, Rene Russo, Kirk Douglas, Chris O'Donnell, Steven Seagal, Neve Campbell, Chris Rock, Tim Burton, Clint Black, Lisa Hartman Black, Jamie Le Curtis, Nick Nolte, Antonio Sabato Jr., Lisa Marie, James L. Brooks, James Coburn, Eriq La Salle, Sean "Puffy" Combs, Sydney Pollack, Joel Schumacher, Oliver Stone, Keenen Ivory Wayans, Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans and Robert Zemeckis.
The star-studded premiere of Fox's $200 epic "Titanic" drew a big crowd of fans to Grauman's Chinese Theatre, attracting celebrities such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Mel Gibson, Maria Shriver, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Dustin Hoffman, Rod Stewart, Jennifer Tilly, Ashley Judd, Fran Drescher, David Hyde Pierce and Nathan Lane.A week later, another premiere at the Village, this one for the comedy "As Good As It Gets" drew a celebrity parade that included Jack Nicholson, Helen Hunt, Greg Kinnear, Johnny Depp, Cuba Gooding Jr., Roger Daltrey, Anthony Edwards, Jennifer Lopez, Paul Reiser, Matthew Perry, Jack Klugman, Winona Ryder, Helen Slater and many others.
In 1995, Warner Brothers took over both the Village and the Bruin theatres in Westwood for a giant world premiere showing of "Batman Forever." Even the usually blasé Westwood college crowd got excited about this one. A crowd of over 2,000 star-gazers packed the streets hours in advance to catch a glimpse of such stars as Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Val Kilmer, Tommy Lee Jones, Jim Carrey, Faye Dunaway, Rosie O'Donnell, Drew Barrymore... even "Superman" (Dean Cain) showed up to see "Batman"!The Cinerama Dome occasionally sees a huge world premiere too. For instance, in 1997 the Dome was the site of the premiere for "Men In Black," and drew such celebs as Will Smith, Jada Pinkett, Antonio Sabato Jr., Linda Fiorentino, Noah Wyle, Steven Bochco, Gina Gershon & Jennifer Lopez.
During these major Hollywood screenings, the public is free to stand outside the theatre and watch all the hoopla around the arrival of the stars. Most of the celebs will stop and say a few words to the crowd before they walk up the red carpet and go inside to see the film. The police usually rope off the area with makeshift barricades for crowd control, so you may be forced to watch from across the street. But if you get there early, you should still have a good view of the activities. (They even erect bleachers for some of the bigger premieres.)

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