Reel News

Animation from North Korea in Empress Chung. PHOTO: AP

US actress Barbara Bel Geddes, best known as Ewing family matriarch Miss Ellie in the legendary television soap opera Dallas, has died at the age of 82, funeral directors said Wednesday. "I can confirm that Miss Bel Geddes has died," an official at the Jordan-Fernald Funeral Home in Mount Desert, in the eastern US state of Maine, said on condition of anonymity.

"The family has asked that we do not give out any further details," the source added.

The San Francisco Chronicle however quoted Bel Geddes' second cousin, who lives in the west coast city, as saying the actress died of lung cancer. Oscar-nominated Bel Geddes became world famous through her role as the mother of Texas oil barons JR and Bobby Ewing -- played by Larry Hagman and Patrick Duffy -- in Dallas, which ran from 1978 to 1991.

She won television's highest honor, an Emmy Award, for best actress in 1980 and was nominated in the same category in 1979 and 1981. She left the show for health reasons in 1985.

The Island: A clone of a film about clones? PHOTO: AP

Hollywood star Forest Whitaker who is playing Idi Amin in the screen version of the acclaimed novel The Last King of Scotland, says the late Ugandan dictator was no saint, but was not the monster that has been portrayed in the West. Whitaker said his research for the role in the film had changed his perception of Amin, whose brutal rule over Uganda between 1971 and 1979 was punctuated by bizarre and often pyschopathic behavior, and the deaths of up to half a million people.

Sweet Miss Ellie is no more. PHOTO: AP

"I'm not trying to defend Amin ... the Amin I found was not a good man, but not the monster as presented," he said during a break on the set as filming for the movie wrapped up at the airport town of Entebbe outside Kampala on Lake Victoria.

An independent film company is alleging that a big Hollywood studio has made a clone of its movie The Island -- a story about clones.

In the film, a young man, played by Ewan McGregor, goes on the run after discovering that he is part of a colony of clones being kept as spare parts for the rich and ailing.

In the older film, The Clonus Horror, released in 1979, a young man played by Timothy Donnelly goes on the run after discovering he is part of a colony of clones -- kept as spare parts for the rich and ailing.

The Island cost Dreamworks and Warner Brothers US$125m to make; Clonus Associates' movie cost US$250,000. One film has been derided by critics and has turned into the box-office flop of the year in the US. The other was ignored by critics but has become a cult classic.

Now the two films are to meet in a New York court after the production company behind The Clonus filed a lawsuit against the producers of The Island alleging 90 instances in which the later film was identical to The Clonus Horror.

"I went to see it and my mouth fell open," said Myrl Schreibman, co-producer of The Clonus and now a film professor at the University of California. "It's our story unfolding. On one hand it was flattering but on the other hand you have to ask where's the ethic in film-making?"

North Korea is known for producing ballistic missiles and a nuclear weapons program. But cuddly cartoon characters?

Empress Chung will be the first major feature animated entirely in communist North Korea to enjoy a wide release in a capitalist country when it opens in South Korea today.

It opens in Pyongyang on Aug. 15, the day the Korean peninsula was liberated from Japanese colonial rule but also divided into North and South by the Allied forces.

It will mark the first time a film has opened jointly in North and South Korea, and filmmaker Nelson Shin is thrilled.

"We made it together. We will watch it together. I couldn't be happier," he said.

Empress Chung was produced and directed by Shin, who also runs AKOM Production Co, the South Korean animation studio that has been animating The Simpsons since that show premiered in 1989.

The Hollywood makers of The Simpsons turned to AKOM to tap into a network of highly skilled South Korean animators who could draw the show and cut down on costs because of their lower wages.