Category: International

MUMBAI: Edward Norton will walk the red carpet when the 46th Chicago International Film Festival opens on 7 October with John Curran‘s crime drama Stone which has Robert De Niro as a parole officer reviewing the case of Norton‘s imprisoned murderer. 

The opening-night gala, with ticket packages ranging from $35 to $150, is returning to the Harris Theater after last year‘s move to the AMC River East multiplex, where the rest of the two-week festival will take place.

Festival founder/artistic director Michael Kutza said he was excited to welcome Norton back to the city where he filmed Primal Fear He also expressed his excitement to see De Niro in a significant performance.

MUMBAI: Hollywood is showing fewer smokers in films, according to a report. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in its report released recently shows that scenes of smoking incidents in high-grossing films fell to 1,935 last year, down 49 per cent from 3,967 in 2005. 

The study described an incident as the use or implied use of a tobacco product by an actor, with a new incident occurring each time a tobacco product went off-screen and then came back or a different actor was shown using tobacco.

Critics have been pushing Hollywood to do away with smoking scenes, arguing that young viewers use their favourite actors and film characters as role models.

The study estimated that 30 billion to 60 billion in-theatre tobacco impressions were delivered annually from 1991 to 2001. The figure dropped to about 17 billion last year.

One impression was defined as one person seeing one smoking incident.
 

MUMBAI: Fairport native Philip Seymour Hoffman‘s directorial debut Jack Goes Boating will premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) next month. The film, adapted from Bob Glaudini‘s acclaimed off-Broadway play, is a story about two working class New York City couples that explores love, betrayal, friendship and grace.

The festival that runs from 9 to 19 September will also feature Malcolm Venville‘s Henry‘s Crime. The film starring Keanu Reeves is a story about a man wrongly convicted for bank robbery who decides to pull a heist for real after he‘s released from prison was shot in Buffalo.

Films of other actors-turned-directors premiering at the festival include Ben Affleck‘s The Town; Robert Redford‘s The Conspirator, David Schwimmer‘s Trust and Emilio Estevez‘s The Way. Also premiering will be Miral by Julian Schnabel that has Freida Pinto in the tale of a girl growing up in war-torn East Jerusalem.

TIFF has long been a showcase for potential Academy Awards contenders and big fall releases.

MUMBAI: The annual WorldFest of Houston- International Film and Video festival has opened its doors for entries for its 44th edition that will be held from 8 to 17 April, next year. The early bird discount deadline for submission of entries is 15 November 15 while the main entry deadline is 15 December.

WorldFest, the emphasis of which will continue to be on American and International independent feature films will screen 55 to 60 feature films and 100 short films in its 2011 edition. The festival will offer competition in several categories like TV production, documentary, corporate & business films, student & experimental, TV commercials, film & video production, music videos, new media and unproduced screenplays.

The last edition of the festival received more than 4,500 entries from 37 countries while it organised 12 major competitions in more than 200 categories.
 

MUMBAI: The Screen Actors Guild (SAG), in its annual awards presentation on 30 January, 2011, will honour Ernest Borgnine with a lifetime achievement award. Borgnine, who won a best actor Oscar for the 1955 film Marty has appeared in nearly 200 films and TV shows that includes From Here to Eternity and the series McHale‘s Navy.

“Whether portraying brutish villains, sympathetic everymen, complex leaders or hapless heroes, Ernest Borgnine has brought a boundless energy which, at 93, is still a hallmark of his remarkably busy life and career,” said SAG president Ken Howard.

This year, the lifetime-achievement award was presented to Betty White.

MUMBAI: Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp- starrer The Tourist will release on 10 December.

Tourist shot in Venice and Paris by German filmmaker Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck centers on an American tourist (Depp) who becomes involved with an Interpol agent (Jolie).
It will face competition from films like Fox‘s The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and Paramount‘s boxing drama The Fighter.

Jolie‘s Salt, that has grossed $103.4 million domestically, remains to run successfully in theaters even today. This year, Depp had featured in Disney‘s Alice in Wonderland.
 

MUMBAI: Days before his film Avatar is set for a worldwide special edition re-release on 27 August, James Cameron has already revealed his plans for a sequel.

The next instalment of the Avatar franchise will explore Pandora’s Oceans. Revealing this to the media, Cameron said that his fictional planet’s aquatic life was equally rich and “diverse and crazy and imaginative” as its colourful land-based equivalent.

According to Cameron, many of the scenes would actually require underwater filming. “I think what we should do there – because we’ll have to have characters that are in and under the water – is that we should actually capture them underwater. It’s not the same as going diving, but I like to keep my diving, which I do for pleasure, separate from work,” Cameron averred.
 

MUMBAI: Michelle Carey, head of programming of the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) has been promoted as its artistic director.

Since the last four years Carey has been working with MIFF executive director Richard Moore as co-coordinator of the accelerator programme and also as head of programming at Australia’s largest film festival.

Earlier this year, Moore announced that he was stepping down from his position at MIFF, after the Board of the festival said that it would split the role into two. It later appointed Petrina Dorrington as general manager at the beginning of this year‘s festival late July and also announced Carey’s appointment.

Dorrington said, “We are thrilled to appoint Michelle as the artistic director – she has extensive experience in film programming, and has been a member of the MIFF programming team for the last four years. She understands both the festival’s diverse audiences and the ethos of the festival as a whole.”

Besides her role in the MIFF, Carey is currently the president of the long-running Melbourne Cinémath?que and editor for film festivals at online film journal Senses of Cinema.

Moore will now relocate to Brisbane this month where he will join Screen Queensland as the organization’s new head of screen culture.

In Moore’s four-year tenure MIFF’s Premiere Film Fund, supported by the Victorian government was introduced and its 37° south market and accelerator programme were expanded for emerging filmmakers.
 

MUMBAI: MGM‘s TV distribution has inked a multi-year renewal agreement with ITV for the James Bond movies, by which the latter will keep the franchise on the British commercial network and its family of channels for several years.

The deal that includes the over-the-air premiere of Quantum of Solace, has the entire Bond films including Casino Royale, Goldfinger, From Russia With Love and Diamonds Are Forever. These films will be shown on ITV1 HD.

No details were available of the value involved in the renewal deal.

Annual revenue from licensing the MGM library domestically and internationally to TV outlets, including moneys for the Bonds, is said to be in the range of $300 million.

Bond films typically rate well on European TV stations in their first airing and are often shown during holidays.

“James Bond is a British cinematic icon loved by ITV‘s audience, and we‘re delighted to continue the franchise‘s long association with ITV as well as the chance, for the first time, to show every Bond feature film in fantastic HD,” ITV director of digital channels and acquisitions Zai Bennett said.

ITV‘s broadcasting business is made up of ITV1, the country‘s largest commercial channel in terms of audience share, and several digital channels. Every year the network invests about ?1 billion ($1.57 billion) in content for its channels and the website itv.com.

MUMBAI: Having taken the biggest opening weekend for any of the films he directed with his new film ‘The Expendables’, an old fashioned action film, Sylvester Stallone is already thinking of a sequel.

During an interview to the media, Stallone said that the sequel was plotted out in his mind and what needed to be done was for the group which fought in ‘The Expendables’ to evolve, same faces would not do. Hence, the challenge, according to him, was to introduce new faces on to the scene as naturally as possible and, at the same time, create a plausible for some older people to leave.

‘The Expendables’ boasts of top action stars of a generation back. As Stallone puts it, if one is a star, even a faded one, the light never goes out. It just needs to be rekindled.