Category: International

MUMBAI: Leonardo DiCaprio will play a con man in his next The Wolf of Wall Street. The film will be an adaptation of real life white collar criminal Jordan Belfort`s memoir of the same name, it is understood.

Belfort spent years in the 80`s and early 90`s as a Wall Street trader, racking up both millions of dollars and a serious drug addiction, before a 1994 conviction for shady trading practices that lost clients hundreds of millions.

While Martin Scorcese was said to be directing the film, when it was announced in February last, but as of now, no filmmaker has committed to helm the film.

DiCaprio will also soon star as another millionaire, Jay Gatsby in the literary classic The Great Gatsby.
 

MUMBAI:With the opening of a state-of-the-art film and television studio, said to be the largest facility in the United States outside Hollywood, Chicago has been touted as a new ‘world class film destination’.

Joined by Emmy Award-winning actor Kelsey Grammer and the producers of the new Chicago-inspired TV series “Boss,”

Illinois governor Pat Quinn announced that the state was investing five million US dollars into the new privately-owned Cinespace Chicago Film Studios. “We want to make sure that Chicago, Illinois, is a place where when you come to make a TV show or a movie, you get a great studio space,” Quinn has reportedly said.

The new Chicago studio will eventually be expanded to 1.2 million square feet (111, 000 square meters) of space that can accommodate three to six productions at the same time, potentially creating thousands of film industry jobs, according to Betsy Steinberg, director of the Illinois Film Office (IFO).

Quinn also announced a record 161 million dollar in spending on film and television projects for 2010 in Illinois that would create around 8,000 jobs. “That‘s what this is all about, real jobs for hardworking men and women who know how to do tough, challenging things on deadline,” Quinn added.

The five million dollars that Illinois was investing to construct Cinespace, comes from the Illinois Jobs Now! capital programme which is only a small percentage of the 80 million dollars in private investment by Toronto-based studio owner Nick Mirkopoulos.
 

MUMBAI: 47-year-old singer-and-actress, Whitney Houston, who has battled alcohol and cocaine addictions in the past is reuniting with her former Waiting to Exhale cast mates to create a sequel to the 1995 hit film which had her playing an unlucky-in-love television producer Savannah Jackson.

It is said that director Forest Whitaker is in the process of altering author-and-screenwriter Terry McMillan‘s follow-up of the film.

Confirming here comeback, Houston said, “It‘s preliminary, but it‘s going to happen, Waiting to Exhale 2. McMillan wrote Getting to Happy and she‘s written the screenplay while Loretta Devine, Lela Rochon, Whitney, Forest. Forest is working on the script now.”

Meanwhile, it is known that Warner Cros will be remaking the 1992 hit film The Bodyguard that starred Whitney and Kevin Costner. Whitney will, however, not be part of the film.
 

MUMBAI: The 64th edition of the Cannes Film Festival will open with Woody Allen‘s new film, Midnight in Paris.

Some of the film‘s stars including Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Adrien Brody and Michael Sheen are expected to walk down the red carpet at the opening ceremony.

Sheen, who played football manager Brian Clough in The Damned United, is cast as a pompous intellectual in the film, a romantic comedy set in the French capital. Singing praises of the Newport-born star, Allen has been reported as saying, “Michael had to do the pseudo-intellectual, the genuine intellectual, the pedant, and he came in and nailed it from the start.”

A number of big Hollywood names are expected with Johnny Depp and Penelope Cruz, stars of the Pirates of the Caribbean alongside Angelina Jolie, Dustin Hoffman and Jodie Foster.

The festival, to run till 22 May, will screen around 50 films from 33 countries, including India. Forty-four will be world premieres and 20 will vie for the famed Palm D‘Or to be decided by a nine-member Robert De Niro-led jury that will have among others, Jude Law and Uma Thurman.

Shekhar Kapoor‘s, Bollywood, The Greatest Love Story Ever Told, the sole Indian movie in the festival‘s official sections will, however, not, be part of the competition lineup.
 

MUMBAI: Construction of Laemmle Theatres, situated near the Metro Red Line station is set to begin this week.

The long-expected movie theatre complex in North Hollywood will have a seven-screen cineplex that will include second-floor office space and a restaurant at ground level. The 34,000-square-foot building at 5240 Lankershim Blvd. is expected to be completed before the end of this year.

The developer of the North Hollywood Redevelopment Program, J.H. Snyder Co., contributed land and parking for the theatre as well as nearly $500,000 in development funding. He also secured city entitlements for the project and provided Laemmle Theatres with a $2.6-million construction loan.

The Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency gave Snyder three acres of land in 2008 that included the theatre site.

The theater is the capstone to the third and final phase of the 10-year North Hollywood project intended to improve the blocks around the northern terminus of the subway.
 

MUMBAI: Former child star, Jackie Cooper, who enjoyed renewed fame years later as the editor of Daily Planet, Perry White in the Christopher Reeve Superman film has expired. He was 88.

After a stint as a television executive during the 1960s and as a TV director in the 70s, Cooper won over a new generation of fans playing grizzled newspaperman Perry White in the 1978 film Superman and its three sequels.

He rose to fame as a prominent cast member of Hal Roach‘s Our Gang short comedy films, appearing in such notable releases as Teacher‘s Pet and Love Business.

He holds the record as the youngest actor to receive an Oscar nomination for his title role, at age 9, in Skippy, an adaptation of the comic strip about a lively youngster.

Later that year, he co-starred in The Champ as the innocent son of a washed-up boxer played by Wallace Beery.

He co-wrote his memoirs, ‘Please Don‘t Shoot My Dog‘ in 1981.

MUMBAI: In his first, Hugh Grant will voice for the lead role in The Pirates! Band of Misfits, the 3D, animated film being produced by Aardman Animations for Sony Pictures Animation.

This is for the first time when Grant will be voicing for the bearded Pirate Captain – a boundlessly enthusiastic, terror of the High Seas.

The film will also have voiceovers by Salma Hayek, Jeremy Piven, Martin Freeman, Brendan Gleeson, Russell Tovey, Imelda Staunton, David Tennant and Ashley Jensen.

The Pirates! Band of Misfits is being directed by Peter Lord and co-directed by Jeff Newitt. The film, which will be distributed by Columbia Pictures, will be released on 30 March next in North America.

MUMBAI: Warner Bros. is considering to cast Keanu Reeves in its adaptation of Katsuhiro Otomo‘s anime film Akira.

It is said that the production house has had talks with Reeves regarding the role, though the role has not been offered to him.

In 2008, the company had revealed that it would partner with Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Appian Way studio to produce the film. Lately, in March, stars including Justin Timberlake and Robert Pattinson were signed.

Reeves is already attached to produce and star in a live-action adaptation of the Sunrise anime series Cowboy Bebop, although in his most-recent comment on the project he was uncertain whether it would move forward.

MUMBAI: John Edgerton would be playing an assassin of sorts in Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow‘s untitled film on Osama bin Laden.

The project was originally conceived as a smaller-scale production, but has expanded into an in-demand actioner after last Sunday‘s killing of the Al-Qaeda leader. 

Bigelow re-teams with her Hurt Locker writer Mark Boal (who also took home statues for the 2010 Best Picture winner) for the film, which is an international thriller about a team of Black Ops soldiers.

Source s indicate that the script is being updated to conclude with Sunday‘s secretive operation that led to the killing of the man behind the September 11th attacks.
The film is expected to roll this summer.

Edgerton has earlier starred in films like Star Wars: Attack of the Clones and Smokin‘ Aces, Animal Kingdom and Warrior.

MUMBAI: Danny Boyle is in talks with Michael Fassbender to be on board his next film Trances.The film is remake of a 2003 British movie directed by Joe Ahearne and centers on an art heist.

An assistant at an auction house masterminds the heist and teams up with a gang of thieves, but suffers a blow to the head and wakes up with amnesia. He is the only one who knows where the painting’s location is and after his continued failure to remember, the gang begins to suspect duplicity on his part and hire a female hypnotist to get into his brain.

If everything goes well, Fassbender would play the shady leader of the gang who partners with the assistant.

Boyle, who is producing the film with Christian Colson plans to shoot the film before tackling the Summer Olympics in 2012.