MUMBAI:The Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) has announced that the 68th annual Golden Globe Awards will be held on 16 January, 2011. The show again will be broadcast live by NBC from the Beverly Hills Hotel.
The broadcast is produced by Dick Clark Prods. in association with the HFPA.
The 2010 show saw a 14 per cent audience increase from the broadcast of 2009 and delivered NBC‘s biggest non-sports audience in the last six years.
MUMBAI: Mother, the South Korean film about a mother who searches for a way to acquit her mentally-incapacitated son from a murderous charge was voted as the Best Film at the 4th Asian Film Awards (AFA) that was held on 22 March in Hongkong.
The film brushed aside the Philippine film Lola and other nominees from China (City of Life and Death), Taiwan (No Puedo Vivir Sin Ti), Japan (Parade) and Hong Kong/China (Bodyguards and Assassins).
Two days before the 4th Asian Film Awards could begin, Lola received accolades at the 24th Fribourg International Film Festival in Switzerland. The movie won the Ecumenical Jury Award, the Don Quijote Award of the FICC Jury, and a special mention from the International Jury of the FICC.
Lola director Mendoza, who was nominated in the Asian Film Awards Best Director category, bowed out to Chinese filmmaker Lu Chuan for his entry City of Life and Death (China), which deals with the Battle of Nanjing during the Second Sino-Japanese War.
The Philippines suffered a third defeat in the Best Editor category. Filipino nominee Kats Serraon (for his work in Lola) gave way to Malaysian Lee Chatameikool of Karaoke in their category.
Although Lola did not bring home trophies from the 4th Asian Film Awards, it will be screened during Hong Kong‘s month-long Entertainment Expo along with Mendoza‘s Kinatay that won for him the Best Director trophy at the 2009 Cannes Film Awards.
MUMBAI: Not to be undone by this week‘s three releases like Diary of a Wimpy Kid, The Bounty Hunter and Repo Man, Disney‘s Alice in Wonderland topped the charts showing that its strength hasn‘t died down in its third weekend.
Director Tim Burton‘s 3-D film dropped 45 per cent domestically to $34.5 million and 41 per cent internationally to $47 million that brought its worldwide ticket sales total to a massive $565.8 million.
Diary of a Wimpy Kid opened to a studio-estimated $21.8 million in the US and Canada surpassing the $21 million for The Bounty Hunter starring Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler. Jude Law starrer Repo Men bombed roping in a mere $6.2 million.
Audiences gave Wimpy Kid an average grade of A-, according to the market research firm CinemaScore. That augurs good word of mouth in the coming weeks and a final gross of at least $60 million.
Bounty Hunter had a decent debut given its budget of a little more than $40 million. The film got a B-, indicating that word of mouth will be mixed in the coming weeks.
MUMBAI: Bold Films has acquired the script of Blank Slate, an action-thriller written by Doug Cook and David Weisberg who earlier wrote films like The Rock and Double Jeopardy.
Slate, described as a female-oriented take on The Bourne Identity, involves the CIA which, in order to investigate a murdered female agent, implants the agent‘s memories into the damaged brain of a female convict. The agent‘s lethal abilities also are implanted, and soon the convict goes rogue to discover the truth about the murder.
The international sales of the film will be handled by Affinity, the foreign sales company jointly owned by Bold and OddLot Entertainment.
Bold Films recently financed and produced Legion the apocalyptic thriller directed by Scott Stewart and released by Screen Gems.
MUMBAI: Thanks to a group of German scientists who created a three-dimensional “invisibility cloak” that can hide objects by bending light waves, the magical cloak that featured in the Harry Potter series has become closer to reality.
The scientists are from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany and Imperial College London.
“It‘s kind of like hiding a small object underneath a carpet — except this time the carpet also disappears,” a spokesman of the group said.
“We put an object under a microscopic structure, a little like a reflective carpet,” said Nicholas Stenger, one of the researchers who worked on the project adding, “when we looked at it through a lens and did spectroscopy no matter what angle we looked at the object from, we saw nothing. The bump became invisible,” added Stenger.
The “cloak” hid an object from detection using light of wavelengths close to those that are visible to humans.
Now, the boffins are working to recreate the disappearing bump but on a larger scale.
MUMBAI: Publicist Jack Hirshberg, who worked on dozens of films in the golden age in Hollywood, expired on 7 March at the age of 92.
Beginning his career as a newspaper reporter in the 1930s, Hirshberg turned a syndicated columnist with Hirshberg‘s Hollywood that ran throughout Canada.
Hirshberg also represented such notables as Frank Sinatra, Jack Benny, Gary Cooper, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Martin & Lewis and Cecil B. DeMille.
He was a founding member of the Publicists Guild of America in 1937 and worked on films like The Ten Commandments, Some Like It Hot, Play It Again, Sam, All the President‘s Men and Ordinary People.
Starting with Paramount in 1940,Hirshberg retired in 1973, but at the request of Robert Redford, he came back to handle the publicity on Redford films All the President‘s Men (1976), The Electric Horseman (1979) and two more Brubaker and Ordinary People.
A celebration of his life will take place April 24. In lieu of flowers, the family has requested donations be made in Jack‘s memory to the Motion Picture and TV Fund, the Blind Childrens Center in Los Angeles or the City of Hope.
MUMBAI: Close on the heals of him winning the best supporting actor Oscar as a Nazi officer in Inglorious Basterds, Christoph Waltz will make his feature directing debut in the German-language film Auf Und Davon (Up and Away) that is based on a script that he wrote. He might also play a role in the film.
The film is about a woman who is the ruthless host of a dating show competition. She finds herself in over her head when the show‘s romantic story line bumps into her own feelings for a contestant.
The film will be loosely based on Meike Winnemuth and Peter Praschl‘s German-language novel Auf und Davon.
Waltz will also be seen in the Fox’s Water for Elephants in the role of an animal trainer. He has also completed production in Columbia Pictures‘ The Green Hornet.
MUMBAI: The attorneys of Roman Polanski have filed an appeal asking that a special counsel be appointed to investigate alleged judicial and prosecutorial misconduct in the fugitive director‘s 32-year-old sex case.
They cited new evidence provided by the original prosecutor in the case who testified in a recent series of secret sessions that he tried to disqualify the original judge in 1977 on grounds of misconduct but was ordered by his superiors not to do so.
The attorneys also accused the current prosecutors of giving wrong information to Swiss authorities on the topic of Polanski‘s extradition to the United States in spite of knowing very well that his potential sentence did not fall within Swiss requirements to order his return.
Swiss authorities have said that they will extradite Polanski only if they know he will be sentenced to at least six months behind bars.
Polanski remains under house arrest under electronic monitoring at his chalet in Gstaad, Switzerland. The appeal noted that he has served 69 days in a Swiss prison and over 100 days in house arrest since he was picked up by authorities there last September.
MUMBAI: With the aim of developing and producing franchise films in the range of $35 million and under Granat Entertainment has teamed up with Reel FX to form Bedrock Studios.
The company also hopes to produce content for TV, publishing and digital media.
Bedrok Studios is in pre-production stage of its first project, the animated feature Turkeys that will have Owen Wilson and Woody Harrelson to voice for the two turkeys who discover a time machine and travel back to the first Thanksgiving to take themselves off the menu.
The film will be directed by Ash Brannon of Toy Story 2 fame.
Bedrock has also acquired the filming rights of Madeleine L‘Engle‘s classic young adult fantasy A Wrinkle in Time and William Joyce kids book Dinosaur Bob.
The studio to be based out of Santa Monica and Dallas will continue to operate in the animated and visual effects world, where it has almost every studio as its clients.
MUMBAI: Battling a massive decline in DVD sales, film studios including Warner, 20th Century Fox, Focus Features, Lionsgate, Rogue, Sony Pictures, Summit Entertainment and Universal have decided to toe the line of video-on-demand services.
“Having a robust digital platform for the rental of movies is good for consumers and good for the industry,” Warner Brothers Home Entertainment Group president Kevin Tsujihara said.
For years, film studios have not made an impact in their video-on-demand offerings worrying that creating too much noise would anger powerful retail partners like Wal-Mart and Best Buy that had prominence on DVD sales while film rental companies like Blockbuster could not create their own brand of video-on-demand cheerleading.
On Tuesday, Blockbuster warned in its annual report that competition and declining sales “raise substantial doubt about our ability to continue as a going concern.”
In contrast, on-demand usage rose 20 per cent last year. On-demand rentals are also more profitable for studios than traditional rental options. Blockbuster gives studios about 25 cents of every dollar spent on movie rentals; on-demand services deliver as much as 65 cents of every dollar to the studios.
Studios are of the view that a delay of days or weeks before traditional rental companies like Blockbuster and Netflix get access to new titles.