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.
Sept.16 to Sept. 22 The “anti-communist train” with then-president Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) face plastered on the engine puffed along the “sugar railway” (糖業鐵路) in May 1955, drawing enthusiastic crowds at 103 stops covering nearly 1,200km. An estimated 1.58 million spectators were treated to propaganda films, plays and received free sugar products. By this time, the state-run Taiwan Sugar Corporation (台糖, Taisugar) had managed to connect the previously separate east-west lines established by Japanese-era sugar factories, allowing the anti-communist train to travel easily from Taichung to Pingtung’s Donggang Township (東港). Last Sunday’s feature (Taiwan in Time: The sugar express) covered the inauguration of the
The corruption cases surrounding former Taipei Mayor and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) head Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) are just one item in the endless cycle of noise and fuss obscuring Taiwan’s deep and urgent structural and social problems. Even the case itself, as James Baron observed in an excellent piece at the Diplomat last week, is only one manifestation of the greater problem of deep-rooted corruption in land development. Last week the government announced a program to permit 25,000 foreign university students, primarily from the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, to work in Taiwan after graduation for 2-4 years. That number is a
This year’s Michelin Gourmand Bib sported 16 new entries in the 126-strong Taiwan directory. The fight for the best braised pork rice and the crispiest scallion pancake painstakingly continued, but what stood out in the lineup this year? Pang Taqueria (胖塔可利亞); Taiwan’s first Michelin-recommended Mexican restaurant. Chef Charles Chen (陳治宇) is a self-confessed Americophile, earning his chef whites at a fine-dining Latin-American fusion restaurant. But what makes this Xinyi (信義) spot stand head and shoulders above Taipei’s existing Mexican offerings? The authenticity. The produce. The care. AUTHENTIC EATS In my time on the island, I have caved too many times to
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