Let's play Battlehip

Here's the first teaser trailer for Universal's sci fi blockbuster Battleship, starring Liam Neeson, True Blood's Alexander Skarsgård and Friday Night Lights' Taylor Kitsch, which is due out next year. Looks interesting.

Bond and beyond

Daniel Craig is a no-nonsense sort of guy. Currently co-starring in the sci-fi Western Cowboys & Aliens (pictured below) - apparently he was a late replacement for Robert Downey Jr - Craig's about to dive back into Bondage with no illusions about his future as cinema's favourite secret agent.

Aware that the last 007 Quantum of Solace proved something of a disappointment - "we had to cobble that one together because it was made in the midst of the writers' strike, and it has an effect on the finished product, no doubt" - Craig told the Sunday Telegraph: " Put it this way, if we mess it up, I won't be asked to do another. The contract goes both ways. I can walk away from it or they can sack me".

Craig, just married to Rachel Weisz, explained: "Success doesn't automatically confer you with impeccable taste. I still have to read scripts And think to myself, 'is this good or not?'"

Hostel the theme park ride

If you’ve ever  fancied being the star of your own torture porn flick here’s the next best thing. 

Universal Studios theme park in Hollywood will soon be offering the next best thing in the form of a Hostel-themed attraction designed by the cult horror film's director, Eli Roth.

Hostel: Hunting Season will take the form of a maze based on scenes from the 2005 film and will debut in time for the theme park's Halloween Horror Nights season this autumn. 

Visitors will presumably be able to recreate the feeling of utter panic you experience when you realise that the Slovakian youth hostel where you'd planned to get a cheap bed for the night is in fact the lair of beautiful women hired to seduce and drug tourists so they can be sold to torturers. 

Sounds like fun!

Three British films aim for gold at Venice

Three British films have been selected for screening in the competition for the Golden Lion, the premier award at the Venice Film Festival, which runs from August 31 to September 10.

They are led by Fish Tank director Andrea Arnold, whose long-gestating new film is an adaptation of Emily Brontë's classic novel Wuthering Heights, starring Skins' Kaya Scoledario.

Artist Steve McQueen is following up his debut film Hunger with a sex-addiction drama scripted by Abi Morgan called Shame, featuring Hunger's lead actor Michael Fassbender opposite Carey Mulligan.

The third British competitor is a new version of John le Carré's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, with Gary Oldman in the role made famous by Alec Guinness on TV in 1979. This has a more international flavour as the director is Tomas Alfredson, the Swedish film-maker responsible for the hit vampire movie Let the Right One In.

The opening night film is the political thriller The Ides of March, directed by and starring George Clooney, (see more below) and very loosely based on Howard Dean's 2004 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.

The closing night film is Damsels in Distress, the fourth movie from cult American director Whit Stillman, who last made a film in 1998 and whose reputation still rests largely on his debut, Metropolitan, from 1990.

Other films showing include Madonna's feature directorial debut, W.E., about the relationship between Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII; Al Pacino’s latest directorial effort, Wilde Salome, a study of the controversial Oscar Wilde play starring The Tree of Life's Jessica Chastain; Jodie Foster and Kate Winslet in Carnage, the new film from Chinatown director Roman Polanski; Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow and Winslet (again) in the virus thriller Contagion, directed by Steven Soderbergh; A Dangerous Method, David Cronenberg's study of Sigmund Freud with Viggo Mortensen; Chicken With Plums, the new film from Persepolis animators Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud; Dark Horse, from black-comedy maestro Todd (Welcome to the Dollhouse) Solondz; The Moth Diaries, a boarding-school vampire thriller from American Psycho director Mary Harron; and Faust, the latest film from Russian auteur Aleksandr Sokurov.

Food for thought

Cinema snacks contain shocking levels of calories and fat - with a single tub of popcorn exceeding a woman's entire recommended daily fat intake, a study by Which? magazine revealed today.

A standard-sized tub of sweet popcorn contains 1,260 calories and 79.6g of fat -- far more than the 70g maximum suggested for a woman each day.  A cola has up to 320 calories and a hotdog with mustard and ketchup contains 580 calories and up to 3.2g of salt.

Eating a portion of nachos provides more than half an adult's maximum salt allowance as it has 1,030 calories, 56.5g of fat and 3.1g of salt.

 

Which? is now calling for nutritional labelling on cinema snacks so consumers can make choices and know exactly what they're tucking into.

A spokeswoman said: “The results are shocking, particularly in the popcorn because it is often viewed as a light food. Many restaurant chains will be putting calorie information on their menus from September and we think cinema chains should do the same.

“We are not trying to be really boring and say that you shouldn't have these treat but it is all about making people think. Obesity rates are really high at the moment.

“If they realise what is in these snacks then they might think twice about eating them. We want people to have the information they need to make that choice.”

Triple threat from Clooney

Here's the trailer to George Clooney's latest effort as writer-director (and producer).  Don't be surprised to hear more about it when awards season begins in earnest.

Force not Art

As far as the millions of Star Wars fans are concerned the six-film saga and anything connected with it is high art.

Britain's Supreme Court judges have just (sort of) agreed about the first part but ruled rather differently in the case of the second.

This means that prop designer Andrew Ainsworth, who helped come up with the iconic Imperial Stormtrooper helmet way back in 1977 and has been selling replicas for years, could be infringing foreign copyright.

After an action brought by the series' producers Lucasfilm, M'luds concluded: "It was the Star Wars films that was the work of art that Mr [George] Lucas and his companies created. The helmet was utilitarian in the sense that it was an element in the process of production of the film."

The point is, not being a work of art means that any enforceable UK design rights in the helmets expired after 15 years. However Mr Ainsworth has been allowed to carry on selling the replica outfits at up to £1800 a throw.

He seemed delighted with the case's outcome: "I am proud to report that in the English legal system David can prevail against Goliath if his cause is right. If there is a force, then it has been with me these past five years.

Chew on this

Displaying a hitherto unsuspected sense of humour, Cowboys & Aliens star Harrison Ford goes above and beyond the call of duty in promoting his latest film, sending himself up in the process.

Spot the screen legend

One of the joys of watching old movies is spotting appearances by actors yet to achieve the superstardom we remember them for.  Take The Lavender Hill Mob, recently released to mark its 60th anniversary. In the opening scenes a young Audrey Hepburn makes an appearance as 'Chiquita' but has no lines to speak. Yet within two years she had won an Oscar for her performance in Roman Holiday.

Not so funny now

News that he was to be cast in a key role in a biopic of John Gotti, the real life Mafia godfather known as the Teflon Don, sent Joe Pesci straight into the kitchen.

Much pasta, and a couple of stone later, the actor who came to fame in Raging Bull, Home Alone and GoodFellas – and who an Oscar for My Cousin Vinny – learned his supporting role had changed to a far smaller one and his fee had consequently been cut.

Fortunately he was not  in character when he got the news, and so instructed his lawyers to sue the producers of the Gotti film, who themselves have vowed to contest the case.

Spielberg hits trouble on the beach

Steven Spielberg's summer cruise around Sardinia with his god-daughter Gwyneth Paltrow and friends has hit trouble because of vigilant Italian beachgoers and Italy's strict rules on having fun.

The Oscar-winning director anchored his 85 metre yacht off the island and his guests got on to a 10 metre dinghy and headed for the beautiful Porto Liscia beach, near the billionaires' haunt of Porto Cervo.

But sunbathers on the beach were quick to call the coastguard after noticing the glamorous landing party and accompanying bodyguards had ignored one of the many Italian beach rules that trip up the super rich each summer, The Guardian reported.

"We were called to the scene after being told that a dinghy had come within 300 metres of the shore with its engine on, which is a fineable offence," said coastguard Commander Vincenzo Petrella. "We have a special hotline and get a lot of calls like this every summer, particularly after a swimmer was killed by a propeller recently at Porto Cervo."

Last month, the coastguard ejected a British TV crew who were setting up sofas for a shoot on a Sardinian beach in a nature reserve without a permit, an offence which prompted Italy's junior culture minister to complain to David Cameron.

And the winners are ... ?

It’s bad enough when the new football season starts up all over again just as Test cricket is getting into full swing.

So the idea of predicting next year’s major film award winners barely a month into the summer blockbusters seems almost as weird.

However, that’s just what The Guardian has done with a Top 50 list of the movies the paper thinks will figure most prominently in the prizegiving for 2011/12.

At number 1 is Tomas (Let the Right One In) Alfredson’s big-screen version of the book/TV spy classic Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, followed by My Week with Marilyn – an account of Marilyn Monroe’s UK-set Fifties clash with Brit icon Laurence Olivier as they filmed The Prince and The Showgirl together in the Fifties, co-starring Michelle Williams and Kenneth Branagh – and The Descendants, George Clooney’s latest comedy drama directed by Alexander (Sideways) Payne.

Cut out and keep this so you can judge in a few months time just how wrong they probably are.

Top 20 in full

1.    Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
2.   My Week with Marilyn
3.   The Descendants
4.   The Iron Lady – Streep as Maggie Thatcher
5.   The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo – David Fincher’s reboot of Swedish thriller
6.   The Ides of March - Clooney directs himself
7.   War Horse – Spielberg’s live action version of puppetry stage hit
8.   J Edgar – DiCaprio as FBI boss
9.   Carnage – Polanski directs theatre hit    
10.   The Tree of Life – Pitt and Penn in father-son drama 
11.   Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close – Hanks & Bullock in post 9/11 drama 
12. Young Adult – comedy/drama from Jason (Up in the Air) Reitman 
13.  Albert Nobbs – set in late 19^th Century Ireland 
14. Dangerous Method – Keira Knightley is patient in psychiatry drama 
15. Hugo – Scorsese on the birth of the movies 
16. The Deep Blue Sea – Adultery in Fifties’ Britain 
17. The Rum Diary – Johnny Deep revisits Hunter Thompson 
18. On the Road – Jack Kerouac bestseller goes big screen 
19. W.E. – Madonna’s directing debut 
20. The Whistleblower – Rachel Weisz in post-war Bosnia drama

Why are Hollywood trailers such rubbish?

There's a great talent in Hollwood for making a $200 million movie look cheap, tacky and ugly, says David Gritten in an interesting article in the Daily Telegraph today.

You can read it by following this link:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-news/8652956/Why-are-Hollywood-trailers-so-rubbish.html

I'll take a DNA test to prove I'm Indian, says Slumdog star Freida

Slumdog Millionaire actress Freida Pinto as said she is willing to take a DNA test to prove that she is Indian.

Pinto, who was born in Mumbai, says she is constantly mistaken for other ethnicities when travelling abroad.

"The Portuguese people love to claim me as one of their own, and I don't like that," she told Interview magazine at the annual Comic-Con fan convention in San Diego where she was promoting her new film Immortals with Superman actor Henry Cavill.

"I also came from Mangalore, which is in the southern part of India, where you have a big Catholic population. Some of them were forced conversions by the British and Portuguese. So I may not necessarily have that kind of lineage.

"I could pretty much be a Hindu from India... I'm going to do the DNA testing because I''m very curious."

 

World's most famous headline writer (and film buff) retires

The man who wrote one of the most famous newspaper headlines of all time

has retired after 40 years with the New York Post. Vincent Musetto "was given an affectionate send-off by his colleagues" last week.

He was running the paper's newsroom in 1983 when he wrote the lauded front page heading, But Musetto told his colleagues that it wasn't the favourite of his many headlines. He preferred "Granny executed in her pink pajamas."

Musetto has spent the last 25 years as the Post's film editor. So what was his favourite movie? It's Jean-Luc Goddard's Breathless, which includes that wonderful scene where aspiring young journalist Jean Seberg is shown on a Paris street selling, not the Post, but the New York Herald Tribune.

Taking the Michael

 Although at 78 he’s at an age when some might be thinking of comfortable retirement, Sir Michael Caine entertains no such thoughts.

“If you’re in the movies you don’t retire,” he states, “the movies retire you. I started out as a repertory actor playing different parts and my mentality is still that of a repertory actor. I’ll just keep going until no offers come in.

“The great thing about being an actor, is you don’t ever have to retire because someone’s got a movie with a 90 year old bloke in it.”

His latest role sees him voicing the evocatively named character Finn McMissile in Pixar’s latest Car 2.  And soon he will be seen playing Bruce Wayne’s loyal butler Alfred once more in The Dark Knight Rises.

But it’s a sign of how very long Caine’s career is that some of his biggest hits have been remade for new generations, though not always with the best results.

Anyone looking to enjoy Get Carter and The Italian Job would be well advised to seek out the earlier versions than the remakes made in 2000 and 2003.

What, we wonder, would modern filmmakers do with a re-boot of his dour everyman spy character Harry Palmer?  Caine, it seems, is not averse to the idea.

“There was one novel that Len Deighton did that we didn’t film, with a great title. It was set in Paris, and it was called An Expensive Place to Die. I would buy that novel, make that first then go backwards: Billion Dollar Brain, Funeral in Berlin and Ipcress File.

“But I think you should only remake crap films. I did one, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, was a real crap film that starred Marlon Brando and David Niven – called Bedtime Story. It was a disaster. We made it and we called it Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.

“And my first movie in America when Shirley MacLaine was Gambit. It’s very interesting who’s remaking that – the Coen brothers, who’ve cast Colin Firth and Cameron Diaz in it. I think that could be a very good remake with their pedigree.”

Huston, we have a problem

Every actor has at least one skeleton in his or her CV closet. In the case of Oscar-winning Anjelica Huston (Prizzi's Honor, The Witches, The Addams Family), it dates back more than 40 years to her starring debut as a teenager in the medieval stinker, A Walk with Love and Death.

What perhaps makes it even more galling in retrospect for Huston, just 60, was that it - a sort of Romeo and Juliet (pictured below) set during the 100 Years War - was directed by her father, John, whose track record before and after was mostly so fine.

Huston, currently starring as headmistress Miss Battle-Axe (above) in Horrid Henry - The Movie, told The Guardian: "I was 16 and rebellious like any teenager. I also didn't really respond to the script and that's a fundamental problem for me, then and now.

"But my father wasn't really interested in hearing my complaints. The idea that I might know what constituted good writing was anathema to him, And pretty arrogant on my part. It was like being under lock and key with your father making you learn your lines. Exactly the opposite experience of what I was hoping for."

Trailer for Aardman's The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists

Here's the first trailer for Aardman Animations' The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists, due out on March 30 next year. It features the voices of Hugh Grant, Martin Freeman, David Tennant, Imelda Staunton, Jeremy Piven, Salma Hayek, Brian Blessed, Brendan Gleeson, Russell Tovey and Ashley Jensen.

Aardman's first Arthur Christmas trailers posted

Here's the first two trailers for the Aardman Animations/Sony Pictures Animation 2011 seasonal 3D offering Arthur Christmas, due out on November 11 and starring a stellar British cast, including James McAvoy, Hugh Laurie, Jim Broadbent, Bill Nighy, Imelda Staunton and Ashley Jensen.

 

First trailer for The Amazing Spider-Man revealed

Almost a year before its official release date of July 4, 2012 Sony Pictures have uncovered the first trailer for The Amazing Spider-Man and pretty good it looks, too.

A pair of shorts

At 3ft 6ins, Warwick Davis is the shortest star in the Harry Potter series. But reprising his two roles -  as malevolent goblin Griphook and Hogwarts' Professor Flitwick - in the final instalment, he has arguably made one of the saga's biggest marks.

The 41-year-old, Surrey-born actor also holds another enviable record - to have appeared in two of cinema's most successful franchises. Long before young Harry was even a twinkle in JK Rowling's eye, Warwick played Wicket in Return of the Jedi, third in the original Star Wars trilogy.

And cinema buffs may recall that the title role in Ron Howard's Willow, made way back in 1988, was written specifically for him.

The father of three will next be seen in Bryan Singer's Jack the Giant Killer - not in the title role this time, that belongs to Nicholas Hoult - nor the classic tale's Giant (you won't be surprised to hear). He will doubtless, though, make a big impression as usual.

.

Banned Ken Loach film to be shown after 42 years

Veteran film director Ken Loach is used to having his works banned, but none has previously had to wait 42 years for a public showing.

His television documentaries on trade unions in the 1980s were pulled from broadcasting and his film Hidden Agenda found few cinemas willing to show it. But in September, an hour-long documentary he made in 1969 for the charity Save the Children  is finally to get an airing as part of a major retrospective at the British Film Institute.

The reasons for the ban remain obscure. It seems to have had something to do with the director's pugnacious take on race, class and charity in a capitalist society, or perhaps the quotation from Engels that prefaced what was supposed to be a celebration of the charity's 50th anniversary, The Guardian reports.

Now Save the Children has finally lifted its embargo. There are still legal problems to sort out, but the BFI is confident it will be screened before an audience, as opposed to a handful of archivists, on  September 1.

Loach said: "It is a good story, but I have been told to button my lip for a while longer."

Hammer strikes back

Between the Fifties and the Seventies, Hammer Films carried the banner for British horror. Now, more than a quarter of a century after the company was last active, Hammer seems set for a successful resurrection under new management.

After tipping its toes back in the water with two American productions, The Resident and Let Me In, the next phase looks to have true Brit written all over it.

Being readied for release next year is Daniel Radcliffe's first post-Potter starrer, The Woman in Black (pictured) , based on the hugely successful stage chiller by Susan Black, while company boss Simon Oakes also confirmed in the latest edition of MovieScope that a remake of the sci-fi classic The Quatermass Experiment was also on the cards.

As for other projects in the pipeline he remained tightlipped, only adding, "Hammer must always make sure its output has a British slant. On the other hand, film is a global medium; to be specifically British is a mistake. If a property comes along and we think it can work under the Hammer ethos, you'd be crazy not to do things."

Harry conjures up a box office record

Harry Potter has cast his biggest spell yet with a record-breaking first day at the UK box office on Friday, with Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows: Part 2 conjuring up £9.17 million – the biggest single day ever for a movie in Britain. 

And it was a record at the US box office, too, where the film took $92.1 million (£57 million) on Friday. That is nearly $20 million more than the previous record-holder, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, which took $72.7 million US dollars (£45 million) in its first day two years ago.

The film added $75 million (£46.4 million) in 57 overseas (ie non-US) countries on Friday, raising its international total to $157.5 million (£97.6 million) since it began rolling out on Wednesday. That gives it a worldwide total of about $250 million dollars (£154.9 million) making it already the 316th highest-grossing film ever, just between High School Musical 3 and just ahead of The Truman Show. Not bad for one day!

The finale of the Harry Potter saga also set a record for midnight screenings in the US, taking in $43.5 million  (£26.9 million). That topped The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, which pulled in about $30 million (£18.6 million) in its first midnight shows last year.

Box office tracker Hollywood.com has now predicted that Deathly Hallows: Part 2 could also break the opening-weekend record of $158.4 million  (£98.2 million) in America held by The Dark Knight.

 

In a single day, Deathly Hallows: Part 2 took in more money than four of the previous seven Harry Potter films did over their entire opening weekends.