Brad Pitt and George Clooney hit the red carpet on Wednesday with their latest movie Burn After Reading, a satirical comedy by Oscar winners the Coen brothers, which opens this year’s Venice film festival.
The actors lead the list of A-list star power to the 11-day event which features everything from obscure Asian art house cinema to Hollywood heavyweights.
Although there are five US films in the main competition lineup of 21, they all represent lower-budget, “independent” cinema as opposed to the big studios, which are not in Venice this time around.
Festival director Marco Mueller brushed aside concerns that Venice, which faces stiff competition from the Toronto film festival starting next month and the Rome film festival in October, was struggling to secure top titles and talent.
Mueller, who with his team saw around 3,000 films, which were whittled down to 55 in the official selection, said the lighter Hollywood studio presence was partly down to the 14-week writers’ strike that ended in February, and added: “American cinema is very much at the center of the program.”
The US lineup includes Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married, starring Anne Hathaway and Debra Winger. The other US films in the main contest are all by lesser-known or first-time directors, including The Burning Plain with Kim Basinger and Charlize Theron and The Wrestler, with Mickey Rourke in the lead role.
Italy and Japan loom large over the rest of the 21-film competition, with four and three movies respectively. Two of the Japanese offerings are animation films, including Ponyo on Cliff by the Sea by cult director Hayao Miyazaki.
Hollywood’s Warner Bros, which owns the rights to the Harry Potter movies, is suing an Indian production company whose new film is called Hari Puttar: A Comedy of Terrors, the studio said on Wednesday.
The studio had started proceedings against the makers of Hari Puttar over similarities to the international film and literary phenomenon, said Warner Bros spokeswoman Deborah Lincoln.
The producers of Hari Puttar said they had registered the title more than two years ago and the film bore no resemblance to the Harry Potter franchise.
“All I can say is that the title is not at all similar to Harry Potter and nor is our story line,” said Munish Purii, chief operating officer of the film’s producers, Mirchi Movies.
Hari Puttar, slated to open in cinemas on Sept. 12, is the story of a young boy fighting two criminals who are trying to steal a secret formula devised by the boy’s scientist father.
In China, Warner is planning to release Connected, a remake of the 2004 New Line Cinema thriller Cellular starring Kim Basinger, on Sept. 25. The film is being made in conjunction with Chinese partners. Cellular is about a kidnapped woman who makes a random mobile phone call for help.
Connected changes the setting to Hong Kong and switches the cast to Chinese-speaking actors — Hong Kong’s Louis Koo (古天樂), China’s Liu Ye (劉燁) and Taiwan’s Barbie Hsu (徐熙媛).
While Hollywood has remade Asian movies for years — Martin Scorsese’s The Departed and the horror films The Ring and The Grudge are based on Asian movies — Connected is billed as the first Chinese remake of a Hollywood movie.
Hong Kong’s Benny Chan (陳木勝), who directed New Police Story (新警察故事) and Rob-B-Hood (寶貝計劃), says Connected improves on Cellular by injecting Hong Kong-style action sequences.
“In my movie, I added many elements that Hong Kong action movies do best — human combat, action, flying cars,’’ Chan said.
Chan added that he had no problems doing a remake.
“What the world lacks most is good stories. If there’s a story that investors think will work in the market and that I like, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with remaking it,’’ Chan said.
Twelve movie extras are seeking US$11 million in damages from Tom Cruise and his production company after suffering broken bones, cuts and bruises in the filming of World War II picture Valkyrie in Berlin last year.
The extras were injured on Aug. 19, 2007, when the side panel of a period German army truck burst open as it drove around a corner in central Berlin.
A lawyer for the extras said on Tuesday that witness statements indicated the truck’s side panel had not been properly secured. Cruise was not on the set at the time.
Valkyrie is named after the codename for a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler concocted by senior German military officers during World War II. Cruise plays ringleader Claus von Stauffenberg.
The film’s original release date has been postponed to Dec. 26 from July 4 this year.
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
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
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
A fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile dating to 202 million years ago that appears to have been among the largest animals ever on Earth. Researchers said on Wednesday the bone, called a surangular, was from a type of ocean-going reptile called an ichthyosaur. Based on its dimensions compared to the same bone in closely related ichthyosaurs, the researchers estimated that the Triassic Period creature, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, was between 22-26 meters long. That would make it perhaps the largest-known marine reptile and would