The Berlin Film Festival might be the first major event on the global movie business' calendar for the year with the Oscars hard on its heels a week later.
But it is rare that the Berlinale and the Academy Awards share much in common in selecting movies for their top prizes.
For the most part, the films that do well at the Berlinale, which tends to celebrate edgy and more political cinema, are not the ones that score well at the Academy Awards in Hollywood.
PHOTO :EPA
However, this year could be different with US director Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood starring Daniel Day-Lewis in the role of the ruthless but charismatic oilman Daniel Plainview emerging as the clear favorite to scoop the Berlinale's top honors.
The Berlinale's gala award ceremony tomorrow will be followed about a week later with Oscar night in Los Angeles with There Will Be Blood having been nominated for eight Academy Awards including Day-Lewis for best actor for his towering performance in the film.
The 58th Berlinale has also scored well in the race among the world's leading film festivals for solid quota of glamour with some of the top stars taking to the red carpet in Berlin.
PHOTO :AP
The Rolling Stones helped to kick off this year's Berlinale a glittering launch with Oscar-winning director Martin Scorsese's concert movie of what is one of the world's greatest pop groups, which was seen by critics more as public relations coup for the festival than cinematic success.
In fact, a large number of the about 400 films from around the world to be shown during the 10-day festival will mark career highlights of what are essentially members of rock royalty.
As a result, music icons such as Neil Young and Patti Smith have been rubbing shoulders in Berlin with actors such as Eric Bana, Penelope Cruz, Ben Kingsley, Daniel Day-Lewis and Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan.
Madonna also whipped up a media storm in Berlin with her directing debut, Filth and Wisdom, a comedy about the dreams of ordinary people and starring Richard E Grant, but which was not part of the festival's main competition.
A batch of movies has also touched on life in Muslim nations including the struggle for gay rights and the battle of a German women's football team to play in Iran.
But after a disappointing and slow start, the competition for the festival's top honors, the Golden and Silver Bears, has started to tighten as the festival enters its final days with several favorites having emerged as possible favorites for prizes.
This includes British director Mike Leigh's Happy Go Lucky, about a carefree London teacher and Japanese director Yoji Yamada's anti-war story Kabei - Our Mother as well as police political thriller Elite Squad (Tropa Squad) from Jose Padilha which has been a box-office hit in his native Brazil.
But film festival juries are notoriously difficult to predict with Greek-born director Constantin Costa-Gavras and his team having to select from more than 20 movies that have been included in the Berlinale's main competition.
The Star Wars universe, already substantially rendered by computer generated imagery, is giving in all the way to animation.
Star Wars: The Clone Wars' an animated film, will open in US theaters Aug. 15 and be followed by a TV series of the same name.
"I felt there were a lot more Star Wars stories left to tell,'' said Star Wars creator George Lucas in a statement. "I was eager to start telling some of them through animation and, at the same time, push the animation forward." Produced by Lucasfilm Animation, both the film and TV show will be distributed through Time Warner Inc, which owns TNT, the Cartoon Network and the film's distributor, Warner Bros.
Film director Kon Ichikawa, who took the lead in Japan's post-war cinema industry, died of pneumonia at a Tokyo hospital Wednesday, a film company said. He was 92.
"Director Ichikawa was hospitalized on January 24 after complaining about feeling of smothering, but passed away early today, seen by his family," film company Toho said in a statement.
After debuting as a film director in 1948, Ichikawa won the International Critics Award at the Cannes Film Festival for his documentary about the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games titled Tokyo Olympiad, Kyodo News said.
He was also known for such films as The Burmese Harp about a Japanese soldier who stays in Burma as a monk after World War II to comfort the spirits of soldiers who had died.
Ichikawa also received an award for cultural merit from the Japanese government in 1994 and received a lifetime achievement award at the Montreal World Film Festival in 2001, Kyodo said.
- agencies
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
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