Irascible British music mogul Simon Cowell is planning to branch out from the American Idol talent contest that he pioneered to produce a movie about the winner of a British talent show he organized, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The project, about the life of opera singer Paul Potts, will be called One Chance, based on the singer's last-ditch effort to make a career in music by competing on the Britain's Got Talent television show.
An amateur opera singer and cell phone salesman, Potts auditioned for the show in 2007, and after a string of sensational performances won the show and embarked on a global music tour.
PHOTO: EPA
The movie, which represents Cowell's first effort on the big screen, will be a comedy-drama that tracks Potts' hard-luck story up through his Talent performances. No details have yet been released on the cast.
Sacha Baron Cohen, Marion Cotillard, Ruby Dee and Jet Li (李連杰) have been invited to join Hollywood's most exclusive club - the group that hands out the Academy Awards.
They were among 105 actors, filmmakers, executives and others in the movie business who were asked to become members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
PHOTO: AP
Cohen is British, Dee is American and Li is Chinese.
Cotillard, who is French, won the best-actress Oscar in February for La Vie En Rose. Other actors invited into the academy were Americans Josh Brolin and Allison Janney and British film star Ray Winstone.
Dee was a supporting-actress nominee for last year's American Gangster, while Cohen had a screenplay nomination the previous year with Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Also on the list of invitees released on Monday were Jason Reitman, a Canadian who was a best-director nominee for last year's Juno, and that film's writer, Diablo Cody, an American who won the original-screenplay Oscar.
Other Americans on the list include directors Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity), Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don't Cry) and Gore Verbinski (The Pirates of the Caribbean movies); writers Judd Apatow (The 40-Year-Old Virgin), Jeff Nathanson (Catch Me If You Can) and Tamara Jenkins (The Savages); and animators Ash Brannon (Surf's Up) and David Silverman (The Simpsons Movie).
The academy has just under 6,000 voting members.
A Russian film about a teenager surprised by the sudden appearance of the father she thought to be dead won the top prize at the 11th Shanghai International Film Festival.
Vladimir Kott's directorial debut Mukha was named best feature film in the Jin Jue Awards announced late Sunday at the conclusion of the nine-day festival.
The Chinese movie Old Fish (千鈞一髮), about a bomb dismantling expert in northeastern China, won the Jury Grand Prix prize.
The Lithuanian movie Loss, a drama set in Ireland and Lithuania, won best director honors for Latvian Maris Martinsons.
Ma Guowei (馬國偉) from Old Fish, a policeman from northeast China with no previous acting experience, has won the best actor. Ma said he drew on more than a decade of experience as a police officer in the city of Harbin to play a cop who must defuse a bomb for the first time.
"I'm very nervous," Ma told the audience as he was awarded the prize at a ceremony on Sunday night, the Xinhua state news agency reported.
Emilia Vasaryova from the Czech movie Vaclav took best actress honors.
Vaclav, which follows events revolving around a village outcast, also won best screenplay for Marek Epstein.
Florian Schilling won best cinematography for the German movie My Mother's Tears. Hong Kong art-house director Wong Kar-wai (王家衛) headed this year's jury for the Jin Jue Awards.
Other members of the jury included veteran Chinese actress Joan Chen (陳沖), German producer Ulrich Felsberg, Danish director Bille August, Israeli writer Gila Almagor, Japanese director Kaori Momoi and Chinese director Huo Jianqi (霍建起).
The nine-day festival, one of the largest of its kind in Asia, also featured a tribute to British film director Anthony Minghella, who died in March and was originally going to lead this year's jury.
Italian movie distributors have baulked at the title of a new satirical screwball I've Killed Berlusconi, with producers saying screening deals have been reneged upon.
"The film's title has scared the distributors," bosses at independent Collepardo Film said. "We had a deal with a network of cinemas across Rome and Florence, but they ditched us at the last minute."
Following the zany adventures of one Matteo Luisi from a domestic dispute, the film sees its lead character knock down a man in the street who turns out to be Silvio Berlusconi, who swept back into power through elections in April.
From the fictitious death of Berlusconi, known to Italians as Il Cavaliere, flows a series of satirical reflections on politics and the media in contemporary Italy.
Just three screens are presently showing the film, in Rome, Florence and Turin. Movie theaters in Sicily and Naples are due to show it from today, while it is also slated to open a local film festival in Caserta, near Naples.
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