Jason Segel hopes to bring the Muppets back to the glory days of the Muppet Show era. Disney has hired Segel to write a new theatrical film. Nick Stoller will direct.
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Muppets Will Soon Return to the Big Screen
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Charade
More than 40 years old, and still better than most current movies: Charade.
Audrey Hepburn plays a Parisienne whose husband is murdered and who finds she is being followed by four men seeking the fortune her late spouse had hidden away. Cary Grant is the stranger who comes to her aid, but his real motives aren't entirely clear--could he even be the killer?
The 1963 film is directed by Stanley Donen, but it has been called "Hitchcockian" for good reason: the possible duplicities between lovers, the unspoken agendas between a man and woman sharing secrets. Charade is nowhere as significant as a Hitchcock film, but suspense-wise it holds its own; and Donen's glossy production lends itself to the welcome experience of stargazing. One wants Cary Grant to be Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn to be no one but Audrey Hepburn in a Hollywood product such as this, and they certainly don't let us down.
According to the IMDB, this film is public domain due to the failure to put the then-required copyright notice in the released print. Check this out on DVD tonight, you will be glad you did!!!
Oscar-winning director Anthony Minghella dies
LONDON - Anthony Minghella, a screenwriter, opera director and the Oscar-winning filmmaker of “The English Patient,” died of a hemorrhage Tuesday at age 54.
Minghella’s death came five days before the British TV premiere of his final film, “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency.”
Spokesman Jonathan Rutter said Minghella died early Tuesday at London’s Charing Cross Hospital. Rutter said Minghella underwent surgery last week for a growth in his neck. He said the operation “seemed to have gone well. At 5 a.m. today he had a fatal hemorrhage.”
Britain’s arts community reacted with shock to the loss of one of its best-known and best-liked figures. Tributes poured in from people as diverse as movie star Jude Law, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the president of Botswana.
Law, who appeared in three of Minghella’s films, said he was “deeply shocked and saddened.”
“He was a sweet, warm, bright and funny man who was interested in everything from football to opera, films, music, literature, people and most of all his family whom he adored and to whom I send my thoughts and love,” said Law, who appeared in Minghella’s films “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” “Cold Mountain” and “Breaking and Entering.” “I shall miss him hugely.”
Blair, who became friends with Minghella after the filmmaker directed a Labour Party election commercial in 2005, said Minghella was “a wonderful human being, creative and brilliant, but still humble, gentle and a joy to be with.”
“Whatever I did with him, personally or professionally, left me with complete admiration for him, as a character and as an artist of the highest caliber,” Blair said.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Minghella was “one of Britain’s greatest creative talents, one of our finest screenwriters and directors, a great champion of the British film industry and an expert on literature and opera.”
Minghella was in Botswana recently filming an adaptation of Alexander McCall Smith’s novel “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency,” which the BBC plans to broadcast Sunday. A spokesman for Botswana’s President Festus Mogae said Minghella’s death was a “shock and an utter loss.”
The project was the latest of Minghella’s literary adaptations, which also included the Italy-set thriller “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” the U.S. Civil War saga “Cold Mountain” and the World War II-era story “The English Patient,” which came out in 1996 and earned the Academy Award for best picture, with Minghella winning an Oscar for best director.
But Minghella, who began his career as a writer, confessed he was not sure of his place as a director.“I am a writer who was able to direct the films that I write,” he said recently. “It is a naked thing to admit, but I feel very strongly that I want people to appreciate that I am not just a flash in the pan.”
Minghella also turned his talents to opera. In 2005, he directed a highly successful staging of Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” at the English National Opera in London — choreographed by Minghella’s wife, Carolyn Choa.
The following year, he staged it as the season opener of New York’s Metropolitan Opera.
Minghella was working with composer Osvaldo Golijov on a new opera titled “Daedalus,” for which he was to write the libretto and direct. It was to have premiered in the Metropolitan Opera’s 2011-12 season.
Met general manager Peter Gelb remembered how the chorus invented its own award to present to Minghella during “Madama Butterfly.”
“He was a brilliant renaissance man. This wasn’t just a gifted filmmaker,” Gelb said. “He was a musician, played the piano, was a playwright. It’s a tremendous loss. It’s very sad for me and the Met. He was deeply loved by everybody he came into contact with at the Met, from the performers to the stage crew. They respected him and his clarity of thinking and his kindness.”
Born in 1954, Minghella grew up on the Isle of Wight, a holiday island off England’s southern coast where his Italian parents ran an ice cream factory, and studied at the University of Hull in northern England.
Minghella came to moviemaking from a playwrighting career on the London “fringe” and, in 1986, on the West End with the play, “Made in Bangkok,” a hard-hitting look at the sexual mores of a British tour group in Thailand.
He also wrote for radio and television, penning episodes of the BBC kids’ drama “Grange Hill” and the popular detective series “Inspector Morse.”
Film was a natural progression.
“I was never happy writing plays just set in rooms,” Minghella told The Associated Press in a 1996 interview. “I wanted the plays to move and for time to shift — a more liquid way of storytelling.”
He made his film directing debut in 1990 with “Truly, Madly, Deeply,” a comedy about love and grief starring Juliet Stevenson and Alan Rickman.His biggest hit was “The English Patient,” a romantic epic set against the backdrop of World War II that won nine Oscars and became such a part of pop culture, it inspired an entire “Seinfeld” episode.
The success of the film, which also starred Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas, was evidence of Minghella’s strengths. It was adapted from a poetic, multi-stranded novel by Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje that many considered unfilmable. In Minghella’s hands it was lush, evocative and epic.
Minghella typically wrote and directed his films — to acclaim, in the cases of “The English Patient” and “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” less successfully with “Breaking and Entering,” an underpowered 2006 drama set in London’s gritty King’s Cross district.
The 1999 movie “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” starring Matt Damon as a murderous social climber, was based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith and earned five Oscar nominations, including best screenplay for Minghella.
His 2003 “Cold Mountain,” based on Charles Frazier’s novel of the U.S. Civil War, brought a best supporting actress Oscar for Renee Zellweger.
“The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” was based on the first in a series of novels about the adventures of Botswanan private eye Precious Ramotswe. HBO recently commissioned a 13-part TV series.
Minghella is survived by his wife, his actor-son Max Minghella and his daughter Hannah, who recently was named president of production at Sony Pictures Animation.
2001 Arthur Clarke Dies
From CNN-- Science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who co-wrote the epic film "2001: A Space Odyssey" and raised the idea of communications satellites in the 1940s, has died at age 90, an associate said.
Visionary author Arthur C. Clarke had fans around the world.
Clarke had been wheelchair-bound for several years with complications stemming from a youthful bout with polio and had suffered from back trouble recently, said Scott Chase, the secretary of the nonprofit Arthur C. Clarke Foundation. He died early Wednesday at a hospital in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he had lived since the 1950s, Chase said.
"He had been taken to hospital in what we had hoped was one of the slings and arrows of being 90, but in this case it was his final visit," he said.
Clarke and director Stanley Kubrick shared an Academy Award nomination for best adapted screenplay for "2001." The film grew out of Clarke's 1951 short story, "The Sentinel," about an alien transmitter left on the moon that ceases broadcasting when humans arrive.
As a Royal Air Force officer during World War II, Clarke took part in the early development of radar. In a paper written for the radio journal "Wireless World" in 1945, he suggested that artificial satellites hovering above fixed spot above Earth could be used to relay telecommunications signals across the globe.
He is widely credited with introducing the idea of the communications satellite, the first of which were launched in the early 1960s. But he never patented the idea, prompting a 1965 essay that he subtitled, "How I Lost a Billion Dollars in My Spare Time."
Clarke wrote dozens of novels and collections of short stories and more than 30 non-fiction works during a career as a writer that began in the 1950s. He served as a television commentator during several of the Apollo moon missions and co-wrote a 1970 account of the first lunar landing with the Apollo 11 crew.
He was knighted in 1998. E-mail to a friend
Sunday, March 16, 2008
All future DreamWorks Animation movies to be made in 3D
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
