Filmmaker George Lucas has said parents might want to think twice about taking their children to see the sixth and final Star Wars movie, news reports said last week.
"I don't think I would take a five- or a six-year-old to this," he told the CBS program 60 Minutes in an interview to be aired on Sunday.
Lucas said the movie, titled Revenge of the Sith, will be the darkest and most violent in the series. In it Anakin Skywalker makes his hugely anticipated transformation from a promising Jedi apprentice to the evil Darth Vader.
PHOTO: REUTERS
The movie shows Skywalker travelling to a hell-like planet composed of erupting volcanoes and molten lava.
"We're going to watch him make a pact with the devil," Lucas said.
The previous Star Wars films have been rated Parental Guidance in the US, but Lucas expects the final film in the series to be rated PG-13, which advises parents that some scenes may be unsuitable for children under 13. It opens in Britain and the US on May 19.
PHOTO: EPA
The film industry in Singapore is rallying to help an award-winning filmmaker still in hospital two months after losing a leg in Mumbai, fundraisers said Tuesday.
Bertrand Lee, 27, has not been able to leave Singapore General Hospital since he was transferred there from the Indian city where he was run over by a lorry while shooting a movie.
The Singapore Film Commission, supporting an appeal for funds to help meet mounting medical costs, described Lee as "one of Singapore's most promising young film-makers."
His father, Lee Kim Teck, told The Straits Times his son had suffered a bacterial infection from his wounds, and has been under intensive care twice.
A appeal letter from film industry professionals says, "We, the industry, the people of Singapore, the parents with big dreams for their young children, must ensure that whilst his body is broken, his spirit is not."
Bertrand Lee has the potential to "bring all of us to a level that sees his country competing on a world stage," it added.
Lee's 30-minute film, Birthday, won the Jameson Best Asian Short Film Award at the Bangkok International Film Festival in January.
He is also known for the short film La Conquista, made after taking a director's course in Barcelona in 2001.
The fundraising group is planning a charity screening of three of Lee's films.
A Dutch court on Tuesday rejected a bid by a Muslim association to prevent the making of a sequel to the film Submission,which led to its maker Theo van Gogh being murdered in Amsterdam by an alleged Islamic extremist.
The court ruled that member of parliament Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who is proposing to make the sequel, could go ahead, and it also refused to bar her from making further statements deemed offensive to Muslims.
Hirsi Ali, who wrote the scenario for Submission, had to go into hiding after the killing of van Gogh last November, and she then announced that she was working on a sequel.
The ANP news agency said the court judge ruled that although Hirsi Ali "went to the limits of what is tolerable," there were not for the moment sufficient reasons to prevent her making a sequel to the film.
Van Gogh was shot and stabbed while cycling in Amsterdam last November. Police allege the suspect is an Islamic extremist who killed the director because of his strongly critical stance on Islam and women.
Prospects for animated films made in Europe are good, the organizers of the seventh annual "Cartoon Movie" co-production forum said earlier this week in the Germany city of Potsdam outside Berlin.
The three-day forum brought together 50 projects from 18 European countries (six of them from the new European Union members). The films collectively had total production budgets of euros 298 million (US$401 million).
The forum organizers said the forum was a success, pointing to both the rising number of viewers for European-made animated movies and the rising quality of the films.
Considered an important gathering in the financing of projects, Cartoon Movie has seen 79 fully financed feature film productions come into being since the forum's establishment in 1999.
Around 448 producers, distributors, buyers, creative personnel and investors visited the Cartoon Movie forum.
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