Mick Jagger, the 62-year-old Rolling Stones frontman, is repor-tedly considering making a film about the life of Vaclav Havel, the former Czech president.
The two first discussed the idea a year ago, Havel told a Prague daily. Havel, 68, is a close friend of Jagger, co-owner of Jagged Films production company.
In 1990, Hollywood star Jane Fonda approached him with a similar idea, the civil rights activist said.
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"She wanted to film my life and that of my former wife Olga, with herself playing Olga. Maybe it's not a bad thing that nothing came of it," Havel said.
The film studio Dreamworks has also unveiled plans for a new movie last week with the announcement that it will produce a sequel to the animated film Madagascar, one of the summer's biggest box office hits.
The sequel should be released in 2008 with Ben Stiller and Chris Rock reprising their roles as the voices of Alex the Lion and Marty the Zebra, said Jeffrey Katzenberg, the CEO of the Dreamworks Animation studio, at a press
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conference.
The computer-animated film, which was released in May in the US, tells the story of a zebra, lion and a hippopotamus who escape from their zoo in New York and find themselves in Madagascar in the company of some neurotic penguins.
The original film has earned more than US$500 million at the international box office, making it the company's most profitable movie ever.
Film pundits with an eye of the future were watching closely last week as Tsotsi and Look Both Ways won the top awards at the Toronto International Film Festival, while David Burke's Edison got set to close out the 30th edition of the event often seen as the kickoff to Oscar season.
Tsotsi, a joint UK/South African production about a Johannesburg gangster who steals a car and finds an infant in the back seat, won the People's Choice award, voted on by regular moviegoers.
The prize is often an indicator of future Academy Award nominations, with past recipients including Oscar winners American Beauty, Life is Beautiful and Chariots of Fire. Last year's winner was Oscar-nominated Hotel Rwanda.
The movie narrowly edged out the Finnish/Swedish film, Mother of Mine, and more high-profile entrants Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story, and Brokeback Mountain, which has received Oscar buzz for its telling of a taboo love affair between two cowboys.
Australian film Look Both Ways won the event's Discovery award. The prize is chosen by the hundreds of journalists who attend the festival, which ranks with Cannes, Venice, Berlin and Sundance as one of the world's most influential.
The event screened 335 films, 84 percent of which were either world, international, or North American premieres.
Meanwhile, Hong Kong director Stanley Tong and the University of California at Los Angeles will launch a bilingual Chinese-English film school in Shanghai next year, the director is reported as saying.
The school will start out with 500 graduate students in September 2006 and will eventually expand to an undergraduate program, Tong said.
The school would bring together Hong Kong's business savvy and China's large pool of talent. Hong Kong is known for its sophisticated movie productions while China boasts many successful art-house directors, such as Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige.
``I want to combine Hong Kong's, Hollywood's and mainland China's systems of video production,'' Tong said. ``When the students graduate, they'll be able to take on any project.''
Tong's directing credits include the US. TV series Martial Law and Rumble in the Bronx, starring Jackie Chan.
UCLA is known for its prestigious film program. Its graduates include Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola, The Shawshank Redemption star Tim Robbins, and A Few Good Men director Rob Reiner.
And in Hong Kong, Bruce Lee will be cast as a bronze statue to mark what would have been his 65th birthday in November after thousands of his fans around the world voted for their favorite pose of the late martial arts legend.
More than 57,000 fans took part in the Internet vote organized by the Bruce Lee Club in Hong Kong.
They chose a barechested Lee dressed in black kung fu trousers and shoes in a pose taken from the 1972 classic Fist of Fury in which he plays a martial arts student fighting against the Japanese in China to take revenge for the death of his teacher.
The 2.5m statue, which will cost HK$600,000 (US$77,000) to build, will be unveiled on Nov. 27.
It will be the first statue of Lee to be erected in Hong Kong, where the San Francisco-born kung fu master was brought up and died.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
A fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile dating to 202 million years ago that appears to have been among the largest animals ever on Earth. Researchers said on Wednesday the bone, called a surangular, was from a type of ocean-going reptile called an ichthyosaur. Based on its dimensions compared to the same bone in closely related ichthyosaurs, the researchers estimated that the Triassic Period creature, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, was between 22-26 meters long. That would make it perhaps the largest-known marine reptile and would