NEWS

CINEMA: LATEST NEWS AND REVIEWS

ENTERTAINMENT: READ THE LATEST REVIEWS,  RELEASES, FILMS, CDs, GOSSIPS AND NEWS

 

French films lead European awards

Photo: Nathalie Press (front) has been nominated for My Summer of Love

French movie Cache (Hidden) leads the field for the European Film Awards, with seven nominations, including best actress for Juliette Binoche. British indie film My Summer of Love is in the running for four awards. The nominations were announced at the Seville Film Festival on Sunday, and will be handed out at a ceremony in Berlin on 3 December...Full story

Julia Roberts tops list of highest-paid actresses

Photo: Actress Julia Roberts.

Julia Roberts, who didn't star in a film this year, is again at the top of Hollywood's highest-paid actresses - at $20 million US per movie - according to an annual power list. The 38-year-old star tops The Hollywood Reporter's annual list of the highest-paid actresses for the second straight year. Nicole Kidman is second, with a $16 million to $17 million per-film price tag, followed by Walk the Line star Reese Witherspoon and actress-producer Drew Barrymore, who each command $15 million per project. Renee Zellweger, Angelina Jolie and Cameron Diaz each have a $10 million to $15 million asking price, followed by Jodie Foster ($10 million to $12 million), Charlize Theron ($10 million) and Jennifer Aniston ($9 million). "These are bankable women," said Bob Dowling, editor and publisher of The Hollywood Reporter, which has compiled the highest-paid actresses list for four years. "They represent something quite positive and they're being paid for it." Even actresses who dropped off this year's list - including Halle Berry, Sandra Bullock and Jennifer Lopez - earn salaries comparable to male actors, Dowling said. The "biggest surprise" is Roberts, who retained the top spot after taking time off following the birth of her twins, Hazel and Phinnaeus, last year, he said. The list, which was released Wednesday on The Hollywood Reporter's website, will appear in its Women in Entertainment Power 100 issue on Dec.

It's filmed and set in Toronto with references to the Globe and Mail, suburban Scarborough, Niagara Falls, Algonquin Park and so on. It's directed by Canadian Nisha Ganatra (Fast Food High), written by Tassie Cameron (The Eleventh Hour) and produced by Miranda de Pencier (Eva Meets Felix). Graham has a small investment as an executive producer. In addition to Saskatchewan native Sutcliffe (I'm With Her), the supporting cast includes such familiar Canuck faces as Sandra Oh, Sarah Chalke and Bruce Gray. The major plot twist _ in which Pippa agrees to take over editorship of one of her ailing publishing baron father's magazines _ is based on de Pencier's real life. The magazine she's handed is, gasp, Wedding Bells, a bridal publication, but a promise is a promise and Pippa proceeds reluctantly. And of course her first issue is disastrous as her pro-feminist editorial decisions run shockingly counter to everything that Wedding Bells stands for. By the way, there really is a Wedding Bells and it is Canadian. Graham says while Toronto often plays New York City in other films shot here, for budgetary purposes, there was never any hesitation in setting this story in T.O., that there was no fear that the film's Canadian setting might damage its foreign marketability. "It was really a story that was based somewhat on Miranda and Tassie and their life. So I think they wanted it to feel like where they were from and how they live.''

Brazil to honor Carmen Miranda

Long before supermodel Gisele Bundchen exploded onto the fashion world, the original Brazilian bombshell had already detonated : Carmen Miranda. Now, on the 50th anniversary of her death, the Modern Art Museum is hosting Carmen Miranda Forever, an exhibition honouring the Hollywood star that introduced Brazil and outrageous, fruit-laden turbans to moviegoers everywhere. "Brazil has a very short memory. We don't have a culture of making myths eternal," said Kitty Monte Alto, vice president of CMG Worldwide...Full story

 

Walk the Line

It does happen. You go somewhere once, camera loaded, something amazing happens, and 37 years later, they make a movie about it. In February 1998, I wrote about the night Johnny Cash proposed to June Carter during their show in London, Ont., on Feb. 22, 1968. Recently, the phone started ringing. People who knew I was there that night said I should see the new movie, Walk The Line, because that moment provides the payoff scene in a film that was doing very well, second in box office only to some kids' movie. They wanted to know how it compared. I thought the movie was a crazy idea. Who could possibly impersonate Johnny Cash? On the other hand, I always like looking at old pictures, even my own, and I was soon back in 1968. So here are some of the differences between life and the movies: - It happened in a hockey arena, not a theatre. Even John and June were confused in later years about where in London the proposal came. (They had played London several times, since their manager, Saul Holiff, was from London.) - Johnny Cash was taller than almost everyone and personified charisma. Jaoquin Phoenix is of ordinary stature and not at all charismatic, at least not to someone who doesn't go to movies much these days. But we can't hold it against him that he's not Johnny Cash. Nobody is. John's dead. - Reese Witherspoon seems very June-like in her mannerisms, but I was continually distracted by her chin. When I should have been paying attention to her lines, I was wishing that chin was still malleable and could be gently forced back into her jaw where it belongs. This may be the first time the original characters were better-looking than their Hollywood stand-ins. - They did sing Jackson that night (``We got married in a fever...''), but the proposal came between songs. He said, ``June, will you marry me?'' She was somewhat flustered and she and her mother and sisters, who were all on stage, seemed a-twitter for a moment, but I don't recall her replying, and they certainly did not stop the show as he does in the movie, there was no kissing and hugging, and I, at least, wasn't sure it was a real proposal at all until I read in the paper a week or so later that they had been married. - In the movie John and June have a bad scene just before the show.  She tells him never to talk to her except on stage, and taunts him. Just after that moment if it was real and not just screenwriting is when I appeared at the dressing-room door, hoping to take some behind-the-scenes pictures of the stars preparing themselves. John said no way. I then had to know if that bad scene was real or not, so it was time to talk to somebody else who was there. Marshall Grant, bass player in the Tennessee Two (later Three when they added drummer W.S. Holland) is the guy in the movie who makes a bomb out of a roll of tape. (``We made more than one. In those days you could buy anything in a hardware store, dynamite, almost anything. I made one in a ball of tape the size of a basketball.''). BEGINOPTIONALCUT: He lives in Hernando, Miss., and remembered me from when I called him in 1998, not long after John's collapse on stage in Flint, Mich...``No, she did not say that,'' he told me. ``That's just Hollywood coming out, that's all. They were getting along very well at that time.'' Marshall Grant and his co-worker, Luther Perkins, once Memphis motor mechanics, go back a long way with Johnny Cash and his brother, Roy. ``Roy came by and said, `I'm going to pick up J.R. at the bus station.' He was coming in from New Jersey where he was discharged from the service. I was the first person that met him, after his brother. He came straight from the bus station to where I was working. ``I was playing rhythm guitar in those days. Luther and I, when we had nothing to do, we'd bring our rhythm guitars into the shop. Roy kept saying he had a brother in the service who played a little bit. One of the first things John said to me was, `I hear you do a little pickin'.` `I said, `Yeah, damn little!' He said, `Well, me too.' ``He went to San Antonio, Texas, and married Vivian Liberto and moved back to Memphis. We started to get together, all three playing rhythm guitar. So I decided I'd play bass and Luther decided he'd play electric guitar, and that was the beginning of it all.''``We auditioned for Sam Phillips with the song that's in there, I Was There When It Happened, just about the way it happened in the movie. Not exactly the way, but close enough. ``But it wasn't Folsom Prison. Folsom Prison Blues wasn't even born at that time. Sam Phillips simply told us to go back and if we could come up with something original, `Come back and see me,' and that's exactly what we did. ``About 30 days later we worked up a song called Hey Porter, and we wanted to put I Was There When It Happened on the back of that but he wouldn't do it, he said `Come up with another song and come back,' so we got Cry, Cry, Cry, and went back, and that's how it all started.'' BEGINOPTIONALCUT: He's not bothered by the variance between life and the movies. ``Well, they gotta sell tickets, you know? There's a lot of things in the movie that are pretty factual but a lot of things that they stretched out of proportion, but I knew that was gonna happen. ``He didn't have fights with Vivian like they showed. They had some hollering and screaming fights, but they never got down on the floor and fought and all that. It was just that he was gone all the time and when he came back he was loaded with amphetamines and so they didn't have much of a family life, and that did cause some hollering and screaming on Vivian's part, but she was very well justified at the time.'' It was reported John and Vivian's daughter Kathy walked out of a screening over the way her mother was portrayed. ``You know, I usually agree with everything the kids say,'' Marshall Grant said. ``We're very, very close and stay together, but I thought the way they portrayed Vivian in the movie was just fine. She and John were too young. They didn't know. I was right there in the middle of it when it happened, so I guess I oughtta know.'' Perhaps the second-most horrible scene in the movie is the Thanksgiving dinner where the antipathy between John and his father overflows. Marshall Grant thinks that went too far. ``That's one thing that they had no business portraying the way they did. He and his dad were very close, very close. And they stretched the thing out about (John's older brother) Jack a little too much, but that's Hollywood. John had a great relationship with his dad and all his family. Ray was a good man and he was very proud of all of his sons, but extremely proud of John because of the success that he had. ``But nobody at the studio said this was a true story. Based on truth, yeah, but they made it to sell tickets and I don't blame them for it. I have no problems with the movie.''

Then there's the music.

``Fox sent me a soundtrack and it's absolutely incredible. There's been a lot of bass players that have tried to duplicate every note that I played on those records, with the slap and everything, but nobody ever did it. But this guy (Dennis Crouch) did it. Whoever played bass on this thing is absolutely incredible. It's scary to listen to, because they played every note exactly at the same position on the neck as I played. The slap and everything is there, clean, crisp and clear. The soundtrack is absolutely fantastic.'' And seeing himself portrayed on the screen? ``Considering where we came from and where we went in the business, which I guess is as far as you could go, yeah, it is a great honour seeing somebody portraying me, and also for Luther and for John. They're both gone now, and on their behalf I think it's absolutely fantastic. Not many people in this world, whatever they do in life, ever see that, and for me it's one of the highlights of my life. ``I'm very proud of how he (Larry Bagby) did it. I understand from some other people that he worked at it awful hard. He couldn't play bass and they hired a music teacher from Memphis State University that worked with him for a month. They watched old films of us. He did a good job. He's a nice guy and I was honoured to have him play me. ``After that night in London, things began to change for the Tennessee Three very quickly. ``The album At Folsom Prison was the last record Luther played on. The next album, Johnny Cash at San Quentin, Carl Perkins and Bob Wooton played on that. Luther died (in a house fire) in August of `68.'' ENDOPTIONALCUT: Of the adults who appear in Walk The Line, Marshall Grant is one of the very few still living: ``It's sorta like an empty house,'' he said. Back in 1998, he and Saul Holiff both predicted Johnny Cash would rise from his sickbed once again. And in fact he put out three more albums and lived another five years. ``I always said John was like a cat with nine lives and he hadn't used up but 12 of 'em, and I'll stick with that. When people would count him completely down, then along would come a song like Ring of Fire or A Boy Named Sue or One Piece At A Time. We did have a little trouble getting him into the studio, but we always squeezed something out of him. You could never, ever, ever count him out, and that would be true today, if he was still alive, too.'' The surprise to everyone was that June died before John. ``No, that wasn't supposed to happen. She had to have a heart operation before they could give her a gall bladder operation, and something went dreadfully wrong and so she had a massive heart attack and died.'' That was in 2003, and John died four months later, but Marshall Grant says it's wrong to think John had just given up. ``No, John never lost his will to live, or his will for anything. (June's death) had an effect on him, but he had gathered himself back together. We talked a lot, and he was looking forward to the future. But he knew without any shadow of a doubt that his time was just around the corner, and, unfortunately, it came. ``It was a combination of a lot of things. He had double pneumonia so many times it took a toll on his lungs and his resistance was just ripped apart and he couldn't fight nothin' anymore.'' If Walk The Line has failings, Marshall Grant thinks Hollywood may get a chance to redeem itself. ``I honestly think and nobody has told me this but I think there'll be a sequel to this movie. They almost have to pick up in `68 and go farther with it, because this has been so successful.'' And that happens, too.

LONDON FILM FESTIVAL

HOW GOOD ARE THE BRITISH FILMS?
As the London Film Festival draws to a close on Thursday, the BBC's Rob Winder reflects on the British film-making talent on offer at this year's festival.

More than 180 films from 50 countries have been presented at this year's event but there were only eight British feature length films on display. This is half the number that France presented at the festival and disappointing given that the event is sponsored by the British Film Institute. "British talent is involved in the other films like the Constant Gardner and I'd argue we are presenting the best of new British film-making talent in our New British Films strand," said Michael Hayden of the LFF. Highlights: So British talent is reflected in a number of films from all over the world but what of British films themselves? ...Read the full article

CINEMA: LATEST NEWS AND REVIEWS

THE BAD BAD MOVIES OF THE WEEK: 1-Just Friends: It only looks like a stupid teen comedy. 2-The Ice Harvest: Laughs are a little cool in this crime romp. 3-Yours, Mine & Ours: Total chaos then a syrupy finish. Read the reviews

The  serious side of Clooney. His physical nightmare started with the filming of the controversial scene in which Clooney, in the role of a veteran CIA agent, is tortured by a Middle Eastern thug. Clooney is strapped to a chair during the brutal interrogation and at one point jerks it over onto the floor. That spontaneous gesture was his big mistake. "That's what did it," he remembers. "And it's my fault. I said, 'Tape me to the chair,' because I wanted it to look really ugly and bad -- and it did. I sort of flung myself over, but I obviously couldn't protect myself when I hit the floor."...Read full article

French actor Gerard Depardieu says he's ending his film career

'Judging Amy' actress shot to death

"Karate Kid" star Pat Morita dies at 73. Actor Pat Morita, whose portrayal of the wise and dry-witted Mr. Miyagi in "The Karate Kid" earned him an Oscar nomination, has died. He was 73. Morita died Thursday at his home in Las Vegas of natural causes, said his wife of 12 years, Evelyn. She said in a statement that her husband, who first rose to fame with a role on "Happy Days," had "dedicated his entire life to acting and comedy."...Read full article

“What A Wonderful Place” to be Opening Night film at The 21^st Annual Israel Film Festival. DAVID LINDE, JAMES SCHAMUS OF FOCUS FEATURES; AMOS GITAI ADDED AS HONOREES   ON OPENING NIGHT DECEMBER 1, 2005. LOS ANGELES, California- Focus Features Co-Presidents David Linde and James Schamus and Israeli Filmmaker Amos Gitai will be honored at the Opening Night Gala of the 21st Annual Israel Film Festival, it was announced today by Festival Chairman Meyer Gottlieb, COO of Samuel Goldwyn Films.  The festival’s opening night film is “What A Wonderful Place,” written and directed by Eyal Chalfon....Read the full article

SPINNING INTO BUTTER

Spinning into Butter is currently filming on Governors Island in New York City.  Sarah Jessica Parker will be joined by Beau Bridges (The Ballad of Jack and Rose, The Fabulous Baker Boys), Miranda Richardson (The Hours, The film version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera) and Mykelti Williamson (Forrest Gump, Waiting To Exhale, Ali) in the film adaptation of SPINNING INTO BUTTER, based on the hit play by Rebecca Gilman. The cast also features: James Rebhorn (Independence Day, The Talented Mr. Ripley), Peter Friedman (I Shot Andy Warhol, Ragtime on Broadway), Victor Rasuk (Raising Victor Vargas), and Paul James (Cry Wolf). The film is directed by Mark Brokaw. Set in a New England college, SPINNING INTO BUTTER tells the story of Sarah Daniels (Parker) a Dean of Students who is thrust into a racial hate crime investigation against an African-American student. As the campus is thrown into an uproar...Read the full article

________________________________________________________________________

ROBERT OSBORNE: MAN OF THE YEAR. Nowadays, an avalanche of film historians and critics rolls over and over on out TV sets. But only one cinema historian and story-teller extraordinaire captured my full attention: TCM's Robert Osborne. Many other film "introducers and historians" are nothing more than a scenarioed  projection of pompous, pretentious and irritating talkers. Mr. Osborne distinguished himself by his warmth, graceful humility, friendly persona, abundance of behind the scene touching and captivating description of what happened back then, on stage, off stage, on location, in the studio and beyond. This very fine gentleman and cinema expert knows what and where are the buried or unknown, unusual and informative movies cosmos stories  and how to bring them to his audience...Read full article

Actress Kim Novak leads rustic life. "What would I be doing if I still lived here?" Kim Novak mused. She supplied her own answer: "I'd be spending my afternoons shopping on Rodeo Drive." Instead, she has chosen to live in a wooded paradise near Ashland, Ore. Called Windsong, it's a place she and her husband, Bob Malloy, share with golden eagles, geese, deer, elk and a host of other wild fauna, not to mention a barnyard full of farm animals. "We have two or three hundred acres (80 to 120 hectares), including two large islands," she reported. "The main channel of the (Rogue) river runs past the islands. A smaller tributary passes in front of our house...Read full article

REVISITING  SUPERSTARS AND LEGENDS: ANN MILLER. Once upon a time, she was number 1. The star of forty motion pictures and Broadway shows, national tours and innumerable television appearances, Ann Miller has been tap dancing since her earliest childhood days. Ann began her Hollywood career at age eleven, and with her vibrant personality, great legs and her tap dancing, won a seven year contract with R.K.O. at the age of thirteen (claiming to be eighteen). She was so remarkable that by age fourteen, she played Ginger Roger's dancing partner in "Stage Door", which started a Motion Picture Career that spanned 20 years. During that period, Ann appeared in more than 40 films. At fifteen, Ann was "borrowed" by Columbia to appear with James Stewart and Jean Arthur in "You Can't Take It With You" which won the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1938. That same year, back at R.K.O., she appeared with the Marx Brothers in "Room Service". She left R.K.O. and starred on Broadway in the George White Scandals of 1939 and 1940. Following her initial contract with R.K.O., Ann came back to appear in the Rogers and Hart musical...Read full article

Outrageous gossips & insults by and about movies stars and celebrities : Bette Davis, Barbra Streisand, Judy Garland, Madonna, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Katherine Hepburn,  Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, Lauren Bacall, Marlene Dietrich, Ingrid Bergman,  Joan Crawford, Joan Collins, Bo Derek, Mia Farrow, Frank Sinatra, Phyllis Diller, Ernest Borgnine, Montgomery Clift, Gary Cooper, Robert Redford,  Steve McQueen, Clark Gable, Steve Martin,  Mickey Rooney, Walter Matthau, Cole Porter, Warren Beatty, Elvis Presley, Robert Mitchum, Clint Eastwood, Marlon Brando, Liberace, Sarah Bernhardt, etc., Read full article

THE HOLLYWOOD FILE: THE MOST REMEMBERED CINEMA DIVAS, ICONS AND LEGENDS. Icon' -- like 'diva,' 'legend' and 'genius' -- has become a bastardized term, a cliché applied by hack publicists to everyone from faded disco queens to Suzanne Somers. In a cultural sense, what does 'icon' really mean? Consider the differences between Marilyn Monroe and Meryl Streep, Elvis Presley and Elton John. An icon is not just a star but the blueprint for scores of imitators. Icons touch, dazzle and mystify each new generation, very often for tragic reasons. How compelling it is to watch people dance closer to the flame than most of us would ever dare; to take what we covet -- fame, beauty, riches -- and disdain it or destroy it...Read full article

THE MEGA DOLLAR WOMEN. THE MOST EXPENSIVE STARS IN HOLLYWOOD.  What so special about these women? Are they the most intelligent and captivating human beings in the world? NO! Have they contributed the most essential and the most needed help, knowledge and wisdom to the society and world of excellence, humanities and human science? NO! So why are they so expensive? Why they are making so much money,  millions and millions of Dollars, when so many talented artists, creative singers and entertainers, devoted teachers, academicians and much more intelligent, fascinating and brilliant minds and bodies are barely surviving?  Find out!  Read full article

NEWEST NEW YORK'S FILM MAKERS. Jessica Burstein is the living example of the modern, ambitious, creative and fascinating American woman of our time. She is the newest promising and bursting film maker of the year. She had the talent, the vision and the guts. She had to prove it to her peers and to cinema goers on a large scale. One way to do it: Make the movie, write the script, direct the picture and star in it. And she did! Jessica had no hesitation about her talent and abilities to make a movie. She  did it before. She was a teacher's assistant at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York and  the script supervisor of 2003 Tom Donahue "Thanksgiving"...Read full article

THIS WEEK 10 TOP FILMS

CINEMA FESTIVAL

CINEMA: Israel Film Festival

The mission of the Israel Film Festival is to spotlight Israel¹s thriving film and television industry, to enrich the American vision of Israel¹s social and cultural diversity and to advance tolerance and understanding. In the last two decades, more than 540 films have been enjoyed by over 550,000 film enthusiasts in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Miami....Read full article

PREVIOUS REVIEWS

CINEMA: MOVIES REVIEWS: Two For the Money: Dramatic tension never quite fulfilled

Photo: Al Pacino is the gamblers' god in Two For the Money. (Universal Pictures)

Wall Street meets Las Vegas -- the middle of Vancouver -- in Two for the Money, a slick and stylish reel that attempts to recreate Al Pacino as the modern Gordon Gekko, with a post-millennial lump of pathos. Pacino plays Walter, a reformed gambling addict who's turned his destructive habit into a profitable advisory service for other players. Give Walter money, and he'll give you his expert picks on what's a lock for the weekend. Walter isn't allowed to gamble anymore, but when he brings in a young buck named Brandon Lang (Matthew McConaughey)... Read the full article

In Her Shoes: Strong acting lifts it above standard chick-flick

Photo: Maggie (Cameron Diaz, left) and Rose Feller (Toni Collette), with nothing in common but size 8 feet in "In Her Shoes." (Twentieth Century Fox/ Sidney Baldwin).

There's a scene in In Her Shoes in which Cameron Diaz and Shirley MacLaine sit around a TV set with some neighbours at a Florida retirement community, watching Sex and the City and sipping that show's signature cocktail, the cosmopolitan. In Her Shoes seems to be striving for that series' same mix of witty insights into female relationships and romance with weighty tearjerker moments. Everything about the film cries out to the same core audience: the source material (Susannah Grant's script is...Read the full article

SCREENING OF SISTER ROSE'S PASSION

At  Edmond J. Safra Hall at  the Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust.  36 Battery Place, New York, NY 10280. Sunday, October 16 at 2:30 p.m. Sister Rose Thering To Discuss Her Life Spent Fighting Anti-Semitism ...Read the full article

ENTERTAINMENT: READ THE LATEST REVIEWS,  RELEASES, ARTICLES ON FILMS, CDs, GOSSIPS AND NEWS...MORE ARTICLES: REVISITING THE STARS, THE GOSSIPS AND RUMORS OF THE YEAR

____________________________

Downfall Foreign Rated MA15+     Batman Begins (2 Disc) Action Rated TBA     Amityville Horror The (2005) Horror Rated MA15+     Kingdom Of Heaven The (2 Disc) Drama Rated M     Wedding Date The Comedy Rated TBA

_________________________