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.
May 18 to May 24 Pastor Yang Hsu’s (楊煦) congregation was shocked upon seeing the land he chose to build his orphanage. It was surrounded by mountains on three sides, and the only way to access it was to cross a river by foot. The soil was poor due to runoff, and large rocks strewn across the plot prevented much from growing. In addition, there was no running water or electricity. But it was all Yang could afford. He and his Indigenous Atayal wife Lin Feng-ying (林鳳英) had already been caring for 24 orphans in their home, and they were in
President William Lai (賴清德) yesterday delivered an address marking the first anniversary of his presidency. In the speech, Lai affirmed Taiwan’s global role in technology, trade and security. He announced economic and national security initiatives, and emphasized democratic values and cross-party cooperation. The following is the full text of his speech: Yesterday, outside of Beida Elementary School in New Taipei City’s Sanxia District (三峽), there was a major traffic accident that, sadly, claimed several lives and resulted in multiple injuries. The Executive Yuan immediately formed a task force, and last night I personally visited the victims in hospital. Central government agencies and the
Australia’s ABC last week published a piece on the recall campaign. The article emphasized the divisions in Taiwanese society and blamed the recall for worsening them. It quotes a supporter of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) as saying “I’m 43 years old, born and raised here, and I’ve never seen the country this divided in my entire life.” Apparently, as an adult, she slept through the post-election violence in 2000 and 2004 by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), the veiled coup threats by the military when Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) became president, the 2006 Red Shirt protests against him ginned up by
As with most of northern Thailand’s Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) settlements, the village of Arunothai was only given a Thai name once the Thai government began in the 1970s to assert control over the border region and initiate a decades-long process of political integration. The village’s original name, bestowed by its Yunnanese founders when they first settled the valley in the late 1960s, was a Chinese name, Dagudi (大谷地), which literally translates as “a place for threshing rice.” At that time, these village founders did not know how permanent their settlement would be. Most of Arunothai’s first generation were soldiers
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