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.
My friends and I have been enjoying the last two weeks of revelation after revelation of the financial and legal shenanigans of Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) head and recent presidential candidate Ko Wen-je (柯文哲). Every day brings fresh news — allegations that a building had purchased with party subsidies but listed in Ko’s name, allegations of downloading party subsidy funds into his personal accounts. Ko’s call last December for the regulations for the government’s special budgets to be amended to enforce fiscal discipline, and his September unveiling of his party’s anti-corruption plan, have now taken on a certain delightful irony.
President William Lai’s (賴清德) vision for Taiwan to become an “AI island” has three conditions: constructing advanced data centers, ensuring a stable and green energy supply, and cultivating AI talent. However, the energy issue supply is the greatest challenge. To clarify, let’s reframe the problem in terms of the Olympics. Given Taiwan’s OEM (original equipment manufacturer) roles in the technology sector, Taiwan is not an athlete in the AI Olympics, or even a trainer, but rather a training ground for global AI athletes (AI companies). In other words, Taiwan’s semiconductor ecosystem provides world-class training facilities and equipment that have already attracted
The number of scandals and setbacks hitting the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) in such quick and daily succession in the last few weeks is unprecedented, at least in the countries whose politics I am familiar with. The local media is covering this train wreck on an almost hourly basis, which in the latest news saw party chair Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) detained by prosecutors on Friday and released without bail yesterday. The number of links collected to produce these detailed columns may reach 400 by the time this hits the streets. To get up to speed, two columns have been written: “Donovan’s
During her final years of high school, Chinese teenager Xu Yunting found an unusual way to make some pocket money: transforming herself into male video game characters and taking their female devotees on dates. The trend, called “cos commissioning,” has gained traction in China recently, with social media posts garnering millions of views as an increasing number of young women use their purchasing power to engineer a meeting with their dream man in real life. One early morning in Shanghai last month, Xu carefully inserted contacts to enlarge her irises and adjusted a tangerine wig to transform into “Jesse,” a character from