Print

Mail

wiki links

Reel News

Hollywood director Steven Spielberg is joining the planning team of the opening and closing ceremonies for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, according to press reports.

Spielberg, whose last movie, Munich, was based on the 1972 Olympic Games terror attack, will act as consultant to the design team led by Chinese director Zhang Yimou (張藝謀), whose best-known films include Raise the Red Lantern and costume epic Hero.

"Our one goal is to give the world a taste of peace, friendship and understanding," Spielberg said. "Through the visual arts, the art of celebration of life, we are dedicated to making this the most emotional opening ceremony ever."

The opening ceremony is scheduled to take place in the Chinese capital on Aug. 8, 2008.

The most wanted man in the Balkans is being portrayed on the big screen this month as a vindictive army captain obsessed with gardening in a tragicomic film set during the dying days of Yugoslavia.

Fugitive Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladic, indicted for war crimes by the UN tribunal in The Hague, has been caricatured as Captain Rade Orchid in the film Karaula (Border Post) by Croat director Rajko Grlic.

The film has attracted attention across the Balkans as the first co-production by republics of the former socialist federation since its collapse in the 1990s.

Newsreels have shown Mladic as the bombastic commander of the Bosnian Serbs in the 1992-95 Bosnia war, smiling as he gave sweets to the children of Srebrenica hours before 8,000 of their fathers and brothers were massacred.

Movie-goers in Skopje, Belgrade, Sarajevo and Zagreb who went to see Karaula this month saw Mladic portrayed as a neurotic army captain obsessed with gardening, who forces soldiers to tend to his orchids and weed his lawn.

Audiences were unaware that Captain Orchid was based on Mladic until former conscript Jurica Pavicic wrote an article about having to do weeding for the obsessive gardener.

Oscar-winning star Al Pacino is set to play King Herod in a movie version of Oscar Wilde's biblical drama Salome, reprising a role he has played on stage, the enter-tainment press said Tuesday.

Pacino, 65, will also direct the tragi-comedy Salomaybe? while taking on the Herod role he has played on stage in both New York and Los Angeles, according to Daily Variety.

The privately-funded movie to be made this year will interweave behind-the-scenes footage from a current Los Angeles staging of Wilde's Salome with fictional elements.

Top US film director John McTiernan, the maker of such blockbusters as the Die Hard action movies, pleaded guilty Monday in a fast-spreading Hollywood wire-

tapping scandal.

McTiernan, 55, was charged in earlier this month in a snowballing criminal investigation that has threatened to envelope some major stars over alleged phone bugging carried out for Hollywood heavyweights by now-jailed private-eye-to-the-stars Anthony Pellicano.

A federal criminal complaint said McTiernan, the director of 1988's Die Hard and 1990's The Hunt For Red October, lied to investigators about hiring Pellicano to tap the phone of a Hollywood producer, Charles Roven.

"In fact I had ... asked Anthony Pellicano to wiretap Charles Roven in ... the summer of 2000," McTiernan said in court Monday. "I spoke with him about it, I never received a report ... After approximately two weeks, I paid him off and fired him."

It wasn't clear why McTiernan ordered the wiretap on his Rollerball co-producer Roven, who also produced last year's The Brothers Grimm and Batman Begins.

Kate Winslet has come to the rescue of the long-languishing plans for an Elton John movie called Gnomeo and Juliet, according to Variety.

The animated movie will feature a soundtrack by the flamboyant recording star as it transports Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet into a zany world inhabited by tacky garden gnomes.

This story has been viewed 1298 times.