Category: Movies

MUMBAI: The Houston-born Patrick Swayze who starred in hits like Ghost and Dirty Dancing has expired following a battle with pancreatic Cancer. He was 57.

Swayze enjoyed heartthrob status for his romantic performances in Ghost and Dirty Dancing and used his classical ballet training and experience as a Broadway

dancer to notable effect in Dirty Dancing.

He earned the respect of teenage males, too, with winning turns as the surfing bank robber in Kathryn Bigelow‘s thrill ride Point Break, as well as The Outsiders for Francis Ford Coppola and Red Dawn.

He is survived by his wife Lisa Niemi, brother Don, and his mother.

MUMBAI: Overture Films has acquired the distribution rights of Antoine Fuqua‘s crime thriller Brooklyn‘s Finest.

The deal was almost arrived at in Venice when the film‘s financier Avi Lerner along with former WMi head Cassian Elwes negotiated the transfer with Overture CEO Chris McGurk. McGurk is currently in Toronto with the North American premieres of The Men Who Stare At Goats and Michael Moore‘s Capitalism: A Love Story.

Overture had been one of the companies initially wanting to take over Brooklyn‘s Finest when it premiered in Sundance last January, before Senator‘s former president Mark Urman got into a deal worth around $3m plus a substantial P&A commitment.

Senator‘s difficulty in coming up with substantial P&A funds for its slate was a critical factor in the company‘s demise. Matters came to a head last spring with the ill-fated release of The Informers, which failed at the box-office and precipitated Urman‘s departure.

The former THINKFilm head is in Toronto scouting titles for his new venture Paladin.

MUMBAI: Tel Aviv mayor Ron Huldai has defended the right of filmmakers and artistes to protest a controversial Israeli film at the Toronto International Film Festival.

“If they protest, let them protest. We are for freedom of speech,” Huldai told a gathering of Israeli filmmakers in Toronto. The Israeli mayor took the high road as TIFF‘s spotlight on films and directors from Tel Aviv got under way in Toronto.

“To represent a democratic, pluralistic city, with a creativity and film community such as we have, if that‘s a shame, I take the blame,” Huldai added.

He was responding to a growing artiste-led protest over the Tel Aviv program in Toronto that includes support from actors Jane Fonda and Danny Glover, British director Ken Loach and around 1,000 signatories to an open letter to the Toronto festival.

Israeli filmmakers in Toronto to showcase their latest work expressed disappointment that the online protest was undermining the film festival and their premieres.

Other Israeli films in and out of the City-to-City spotlight in Toronto deal with war and religion that include Eytan Fox‘s The Bubble and the Venice award winner Lebanon, by Samuel Moaz, which has its North American premiere here on Monday.

MUMBAI: The 3D Entertainment Summit(TM) has announced its full speaker

list for the 2009 event that will be held at the Hilton Los Angeles in Universal City on 16 and 17 September.

The two-day conference will focus on all aspects of 3D business from the theatre to the home. Virtually all 3D films, consumer technologies and video games will be examined at this year‘s summit.

This year‘s event will open with a keynote discussion between David Cohen,features editor, Daily Variety and director and screenwriter Henry Selick and Academy award winning vfx supervisor Brian Van‘t Hul.

More than 70 speakers will present every aspect of 3D in the entertainment world from film, television, home entertainment, gaming and alternative programming. Presenters include: Jeffrey Katzenberg, chief executive officer and director of DreamWorks, animation SKG, Michael Lewis, chairman, CEO and co-founder, RealD, Sandy Climan, CEO, 3ality Digital, LLC, David Hill, A.M., chairman & CEO, Fox sports television group, Greg Foster, chairman and president, Filmed Entertainment, IMAX, Bob Dowling, co-producer and conference chairman, Peter Bart, Vice President and editorial director, Variety.

Topics that will be discussed will focus on a multitude of topics ranging from the financial impact of 3D on the entertainment industry, the status of the digital cinema roll-out and top trends in 3D gaming.

MUMBAI: Tyler Perry‘s I Can Do Bad All By Myself turned out to be the seventh consecutive low-cost film that opened successfully when it sold an estimated $24 million worth of tickets in the US and Canada last weekend.

Produced at less than $20 million, the movie tops in the box-office chart of US and Canada.

Perry‘s films appeal primarily to black women on whom not many movies in Hollywood are targeted. I Can Do Bad followed that pattern, with the movie attracting 75 per cent of female ticket buyers and 80 per cent African American, it is understood.

Focus Features‘ quirky animated film 9 got off to a healthy start. 9 marks Focus‘ second offbeat animated film this year, after Coraline released in February that had a solid if not stellar $10.9-million opening weekend.

Inglourious Basterds continues to be at No. 3 on its third weekend with $6.5 million domestically. Overseas, the movie grossed $9.4 million and brought its foreign total to $99 million with several major territories including Italy, Spain, Brazil and Mexico left to go.

Warner Bros.‘ horror movie The Final Destination collected $17.3 million from international markets, bringing its foreign total to $55.3 million and worldwide ticket sales after less than three weeks to an impressive $113.5 million.

Summit Entertainment‘s horror film Sorority Row sold $5.3 million worth of tickets over the weekend while Dark Castle Entertainment‘s thriller Whiteout, which stars Kate Beckinsale and was distributed by Warner Bros, grossed $5.1 million.

Both films were disappointments, although the news was worse for Dark Castle because the production cost of Whiteout was $35 million while Sorority Row cost only $12.5 million.

MUMBAI: Jim Carroll, who chronicled his wild teen years in The Basketball Diaries expired of a heart attack at the age of 60 yesterday.

Carroll‘s most famous work, The Basketball Diaries was published in 1978 in which he wrote of his wild youth as both a basketball star and a drug abuser during his teen years at Manhattan‘s private Trinity school.

The book was made into a film starring Leonardo DiCaprio in 1995.

Carroll also worked with rockers from Lou Reed and The Doors to Pearl Jam and Rancid.

Carroll, a fixture on Manhattan‘s downtown punk-rock scene, saw his poetry lauded by icons including Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. His work was published in The Paris Review.

MUMBAI

: In a move that confirmed its status as ‘the Mecca of film production in the Caribbean, Puerto Rico has extended its 40 per cent film tax credit until 2019.

Announcing the extension of Law 362, Governor Luis G Fortuno said that investors could also look forward to less red tapism as they went through the process of acquiring credits.

So far this year four films – The Rum Diary, starring Johnny Depp, Stone Of Dreams, Meant To Be, and One Hot Summer – have shot in Puerto Rico, injecting roughly $32.6m into the local economy according to Puerto Rico Film Commission sources.

Warner Bros‘ superhero saga The Losers is being currently shot in a newly launched studio launched DC Entertainment division.