Jennifer Lopez will be able to call on her newly acquired parenting skills for her latest film role, where she plays a professional thief posing as a nanny, it was reported on Tuesday.
Daily Variety reported that "7" has confirmed bagging a lead role in romantic comedy The Governess, her second movie project since giving birth to twins earlier this year.
The 39-year-old music and acting diva will play a robber planning a bank heist who pretends to be a nanny for children of a wealthy widower, the report said. Filming gets underway later this year.
Lopez, whose last film was 2006's El Cantante, is already working on another project, Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, due for release in 2009.
This year's Venice film festival showcasing new offerings by the Coen Brothers, Takeshi Kitano and Hayao Miyasaki, will be dedicated to the late Egyptian director Youssef Chahine, organizers said on Tuesday.
The central figure in post-war Arab cinema, Chahine died Sunday aged 82 after spending several weeks in a coma.
"The 65th Mostra will be dedicated to Youssef Chahine, a unique filmmaker: who else could have succeeded in mixing the philosopher Averroes with Fred Astaire? That's what cinema should be about," festival director Marco Muller told a press conference in Rome.
The film to which he was referring, Destiny, which won the Cannes film festival's 50th anniversary award in 1997, is set in 12th-century Andalusia, with the Arab philosopher Averroes, a harbinger of the Enlightenment, as its dancing hero.
Egyptian screen stars were among around 1,500 mourners who gathered at a Cairo church on Monday to bid farewell to Chahine.
Hundreds of celebrities and officials were crammed into the Roman Catholic Church of the Resurrection, with hundreds more gathered outside as the controversial director's coffin was carried in, draped in the Egyptian flag.
His protege and colleague Khaled Youssef, who co-directed Chahine's latest film Chaos in 2007, was among the pall bearers.
The congregation included many of the biggest stars of Egyptian cinema - for decades the Arab world's most popular - alongside officials from the ruling National Democratic Party which was often targeted in Chahine's films.
Representatives from other parties across the political spectrum were also in attendance, along with dozens of journalists.
Japanese directors Kitano, with Achilles and the Tortoise, and Miyasaki, with his animated feature Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, are among the favorites for the festival's coveted Golden Lion award.
Other strong runners include US director Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, starring Mickey Rourke, and French filmmaker Barbet Schroeder's thriller The Beast in the Shadows.
The festival opens on Aug. 27 with an out-of-competition world premiere for Joel and Ethan Coen's Burn After Reading, which unites perennial Coen favorite George Clooney with John Malkovich, Brad Pitt and Oscar-winning Scottish actress Tilda Swinton.
Australia has hired filmmaker Baz Luhrmann to make ads touting the nation as a tourist destination after Prime Minister Kevin Rudd labeled the previous campaign a "disaster.''
Luhrmann, director of the upcoming film Australia starring Nicole Kidman, will use footage from the movie in television ads running in Europe, Asia and North America starting in October until the middle of next year.
"These are challenging times for the tourism industry and I hope this campaign will motivate people around the world to visit Australia,'' said Tourism Minister Martin Ferguson.
The earlier campaign highlighted the nation's beaches and indigenous culture in television ads that finished with a bikini-clad model asking viewers "Where the Bloody Hell Are You?'' The campaign was a "rolled-gold disaster,'' Rudd said in June.
In 1990, Amy Chen (陳怡美) was beginning third grade in Calhoun County, Texas, as the youngest of six and the only one in her family of Taiwanese immigrants to be born in the US. She recalls, “my father gave me a stack of typed manuscript pages and a pen and asked me to find typos, missing punctuation, and extra spaces.” The manuscript was for an English-learning book to be sold in Taiwan. “I was copy editing as a child,” she says. Now a 42-year-old freelance writer in Santa Barbara, California, Amy Chen has only recently realized that her father, Chen Po-jung (陳伯榕), who
Famed Chinese demographer Yi Fuxian (易富賢) recently wrote for The Diplomat on the effects of a cross-strait war on demography. He contended that one way to deter the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is by putting the demographic issue front and center — last year total births in the PRC, he said, receded to levels not seen since 1762. Yi observes that Taiwan’s current fertility rate is already lower than Ukraine’s — a nation at war that is refusing to send its young into battle — and that its “demographic crisis suggests that Taiwan’s technological importance will rapidly decline, and
Jan. 6 to Jan. 12 Perhaps hoping to gain the blessing of the stone-age hunter-gatherers that dwelt along the east coast 30,000 years ago, visitors to the Baxian Caves (八仙洞) during the 1970s would grab a handful of soil to bring home. In January 1969, the nation was captivated by the excavation of pre-ceramic artifacts and other traces of human habitation in several caves atop a sea cliff in Taitung County. The majority of the unearthed objects were single-faced, unpolished flake tools fashioned from natural pebbles collected by the shore. While archaeologists had found plenty of neolithic (7,000 BC to 1,700
When the weather is too cold to enjoy the white beaches and blue waters of Pingtung County’s Kenting (墾丁), it’s the perfect time to head up into the hills and enjoy a different part of the national park. In the highlands above the bustling beach resorts, a simple set of trails treats visitors to lush forest, rocky peaks, billowing grassland and a spectacular bird’s-eye view of the coast. The rolling hills beyond Hengchun Township (恆春) in Pingtung County offer a two-hour through-hike of sweeping views from the mighty peak of Dajianshih Mountain (大尖石山) to Eluanbi Lighthouse (鵝鑾鼻燈塔) on the coast, or
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