London's Leicester Square was getting a dose of Hollywood glamour on Wednesday with the opening of the 49th annual London Film Festival.
Stars Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz and master spy writer John Le Carre were due to walk the red carpet before the opening-night screening of The Constant Gardener, Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles' adaptation of Le Carre's novel of international diplomacy and betrayal.
The festival closes Nov. 3 with George Clooney's McCarthy-era drama Good Night, And Good Luck. In between, it will screen 180 feature films and 130 shorts from some 50 countries.
PHOTO: AFP
Spanish screen heartthrob Antonio Banderas won a coveted place on Hollywood's prestigious Walk of Fame this week, 16 years after he arrived in the US as a struggling young actor.
The 45-year-old star of blockbuster Hollywood films as Zorro made his mark on Tinseltown when his bronze-edged star was unveiled on the pavement of Hollywood Boulevard before a cheering crowd including his wife Melanie Griffiths and pal Sharon Stone.
"It is an honor and privilege, thinking that I arrived to this country and this city 16 years ago with practically no money in my pocket," said Banderas.
PHOTO: AP
France is offering financial incentives to lure Bollywood producers to its shores, a French official said.
Franck Priot, deputy director of Film France, an agency set up by the French government to attract international film shoots, said value added tax was refundable on shoots by foreign film crews.
Priot, in Mumbai, India, this week with a French delegation to meet Bollywood heavyweights, said the agency had put together hotel packages at special rates for Indian crews to film in mountain resorts.
"Six years ago no one in France thought that Indian commercial films will become so big, but now Bollywood is very big in France and lots of people are fascinated by Indian cinema," Priot told a gathering of Bollywood producers.
And on the other side of the world in Hollywood, heavyweight star Sylvester Stallone will reprise his role as a working-class boxing champ in a sixth Rocky movie, the iconic role that propelled him to fame 30 years ago, he said.
Stallone, now 59, will also direct, write and co-produce Rocky Balboa, the latest in the winning series launched with the Oscar-winning Rocky in 1976, Stallone's spokeswoman and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios said.
"Rocky Balboa is about everybody who feels they want to participate in the race of life, rather than be a bystander," Stallone said in a statement.
Actor Ashton Kutcher, whose May-to-December romance with screen star Demi Moore has riveted the tabloids for months, is producing a Fox TV sitcom pilot inspired by the couple's recent real-life marriage. The show, about a man closer in age to his eldest stepdaughter than his bride, is "loosely based" on Kutcher's new blended-family life, with some key variations, 20th Century Fox Television spokesman Chris Alexander said this week.
Nearly a thousand people and dozens of horses launched an epic city invasion in China's Inner Mongolia for a scene in a new movie starring Andy Lau, a newspaper reported this week.
Four hundred crew members captured the scene from Mozi Gong Lue (Mo Zi's Attack Strategy) with four cameras, the Apple Daily newspaper reported.
The shoot took more than 40 consecutive hours, the Shanghai Youth Daily reported.
It said Lau didn't take part in the scene and that the star is due to start filming his scenes later this week.
The film, set in ancient China and based on a Japanese comic, has drawn investments from China, Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong totaling up to US$12.4 million, the Shanghai Youth Daily reported.
Turning his attention to Japan movie legend Clint Eastwood is making two new movies about the World War II battle for the island of Iwo Jima, one from the US point of view and the other from the Japanese.
Eastwood revealed he was planning a second Iwo Jima film giving the other side of the story as told in his Flags of Our Fathers, he said in an interview in this week's edition of Time magazine.
In a rare move in Hollywood, the counter-balanced movies will be released simultaneously late next year.
Legally embattled Hollywood actor Tom Sizemore won a reprieve from jail time earlier this week when a judge suspended his 16-month prison sentence and reinstated probation imposed for a drug offence.
But Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Paula Adele Mabrey warned the troubled actor that he would find himself behind bars if he flouted the conditions of his probation.
"I have seen remarkable improvement ... I believe that you know what you need to do to stay out of prison, sir, and I believe you can do it," she said.
Judge Mabrey last July revoked Sizemore's probation and confined him to a drug rehabilitation centre for at least two months after he admitted violating probation by attempting to fake a urine drug test by using a prosthetic device.
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
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
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