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TRANSFORMERS / ICE AGE Tie at the Box Office?

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (above, top photo) and Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (above, lower photo) tied for the No. 1 spot at the North American box office this weekend with $42.5 million each, according to studio estimates Sunday.
While Michael Bay’s sequel lifted its domestic total to an impressive $293.4 million after only a little more than a week in release, the third installment in the Ice Age series brought its total to $67.5 million.
Playing at 4,099 locations, Dawn of the Dinosaurs scored an average of $10,360 per theater, while Revenge of the Fallen pulled $10,038 per theater at a total of 4,234 locations.

Michael Mann’s [...]

Los Angeles Film Festival 2009: CARMEN MEETS BORAT, 35 SHOTS OF RUM, PUBLIC ENEMIES

Carmen Meets Borat (top); 35 Shots of Rum (middle); Johnny Depp, Marion Cotillard in Public Enemies (bottom)

Los Angeles Film Festival, Tuesday, June 23:

In Mercedes Stalenhoef’s Carmen Meets Borat (The Regent, 2 pm), a Romanian teenager dreams of going to Spain to escape the backwards town in which she lives. (The place is so backwards that she’s called "granny" because she remains unmarried at 17.) Inadvertently, Sacha Baron Cohen and his Borat crew change her life after they arrive in town to portray the locals as backwards Kazakhs. TV crews follow suit, and so do lawyers with the promise of hefty lawsuits. Will the adolescent’s Spanish Dream be able to come true?
Brent Meeske’s Branson, about struggling artists in the "Entertainment Capital [...]

PUBLIC ENEMIES: Johnny Depp, Christian Bale Photos

Johnny Depp

Christian Bale, Billy Crudup

Christian Bale

Johnny Depp
PUBLIC ENEMIES Photos I
Photos: © 2009 Universal Studios
Click on the images to enlarge them.

Johnny Depp, Christian Bale, Marion Cotillard in PUBLIC ENEMIES Photos

Johnny Depp

In Michael Mann’s period crime drama Public Enemies, Johnny Depp plays John Dillinger, the Depression Era bank robber who became the top target of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. Christian Bale plays Dillinger’s nemesis, investigator Melvin Purvis; Marion Cotillard is Dillinger’s gal, Billie Frechette; and Billy Crudup is Hoover the (Gay?) Man. (Previously, Leonardo DiCaprio had been connected with the project.)
Also in the cast: Channing Tatum as Pretty Boy Floyd, plus Leelee Sobieski, Emilie de Ravin, Giovanni Ribisi, Stephen Dorff, James Russo, and Lili Taylor. (And I’m assuming that Myrna Loy will be spotted in Manhattan Melodrama somewhere in the film.)
Previous versions of Dillinger’s story, include those starring Lawrence Tierney (1945, directed by [...]

Cannes 2009: Heath Ledger in THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS

Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian:
"Heath Ledger takes a poignant final bow in Terry Gilliam’s loopy, sweet-natured but madly self-indulgent fantasia The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, showing here at the Cannes film festival out of competition. Halfway through shooting, Ledger had made a desperately sad early exit, so the director ingeniously re-invented his character as a series of personae. Jude Law, Colin Farrell and Johnny Depp gamely stepped into the breach.
…
"When Gilliam shoots off into his surreal wonderland, his film has a kind of helium-filled jollity and spectacle. … But the film’s convoluted curlicues are tiring, insisting too loudly on how ‘imaginative’ everything is. And when it descends into the real world – Lucy [...]

Golden Globes 2009: Tom Cruise, Jake Gyllenhaal, Emma Thompson

Tom Cruise © HFPA / 66th Golden Globe® Awards

Jake Gyllenhaal © HFPA / 66th Golden Globe® Awards

Emma Thompson, Dustin Hoffman © HFPA / 66th Golden Globe® Awards

Johnny Depp © HFPA / 66th Golden Globe® Awards

Oscar 2008: Nicole Kidman, Johnny Depp, Harrison Ford, Keith Urban

Keith Urban, Nicole Kidman

Harrison Ford, Calista Flockhart

Johnny Depp
Photos: Matt Petit (Depp, Kidman), Richard Harbaugh (Ford). All photos: © A.M.P.A.S.

2008 Golden Globes Ceremony II

2008 Golden Globes Ceremony: Part I
Among the predictable winners were Julie Christie as best actress in a drama for her performance as a woman suffering from Alzheimer’s disease in Sarah Polley’s Away from Her (right, with Gordon Pinsent); Daniel Day-Lewis as best actor in a drama for his star turn as a greedy oil baron in Paul Thomas Anderson’s widely praised There Will Be Blood; and Johnny Depp as best actor in a comedy or musical for his singing serial-killing barber in Sweeney Todd. (Depp was the only American actor to win in the feature-film categories.)
Also, Brad Bird’s Ratatouille, the story of a French rat with gourmet inclinations, as best animated film; and best supporting actor Javier Bardem for his [...]

Golden Globes 2008

2008 Golden Globes
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s 2008 Golden Globe nominations: December 13, 2007
2008 Golden Globe Award winners: January 13, 2008
("*" denotes the winner in each category)
 

Keira Knightley, James McAvoy in Atonement
 

MOTION PICTURES
Best Motion Picture – Drama
American Gangster, Imagine Entertainment/Scott Free Productions; Universal Pictures
* Atonement, Working Title Productions; Focus Features
Eastern Promises, Kudos Pictures — UK Serendipity Point Films — Canada A UK/Canada Co-Production; Focus Features
The Great Debaters, Harpo Films; The Weinstein Company/MGM
Michael Clayton, Clayton Productions LLC; Warner Bros. Pictures
No Country for Old Men, A Scott Rudin/Mike Zoss Production; Miramax/Paramount Vantage
There Will Be Blood, A Joanne Sellar/Ghoulardi Film Company Production; Paramount Vantage and Miramax Films
Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy
Across The Universe, Revolution Studios International; Sony Pictures Releasing
Charlie Wilson’s War, [...]

NATIONAL TREASURE: BOOK OF SECRETS Tops Box Office

National Treasure: Book of Secrets topped the North American box office this past three-day weekend with an estimated US$45.5 million.
The Jon Turteltaub-directed sequel to the 2004 smash hit National Treasure opened at 3,832 theatres on Friday, beating the opening weekend gross of its predecessor by $10 million. Starring Nicolas Cage, Ed Harris and Helen Mirren, the film follows the adventures of treasure hunter Benjamin Franklin Gates, who travels the world to uncover the truth behind the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

Last week’s box office winner I Am Legend dropped to No. 2, collecting $34.2 million from ticket sales at 3,620 locations. The post-apocalyptic thriller directed by Francis Lawrence and starring Will Smith lifted its cumulative gross to $137.5 million after [...]

2007 Critics’ Choice Awards: Nominations

There were quite a few surprises among the nominees for the Broadcast Film Critics Association’s 2007 Critics’ Choice Awards.
Both Todd Field’s psychological sex drama Little Children (above, with Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson) and Clint Eastwood’s Japanese-language Letters from Iwo Jima were nominated in the best film category, but Eastwood’s highly praised Flags of Our Fathers was not.
Letters from Iwo Jima also showed up in the best foreign language film shortlist (a first at the Critics’ Choice Awards), along with Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, which has been both panned and praised (sometimes in the same review).

Leonardo DiCaprio received two best actor nods (another first), for Blood Diamond and The Departed, while Ben Affleck (above, with Diane Lane) was [...]

Oscar 2006: Best Makeup Longlist

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced the seven films being considered for Achievement in Makeup for the 2006 Academy Awards.
The films in consideration are listed below in alphabetical order:

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (above, top photo)
Cinderella Man
A History of Violence
The Libertine (above, middle photo)
Mrs. Henderson Presents
The New World
Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith (above, lower photo)

Ten-minute clips from each of the seven films will be screened for the Makeup Award Nominating Committee on Saturday, January 28. Only three of the seven films may be nominated.
The 2006 Oscar nominations will be announced on Tuesday, January 31, at 5:30 a.m. Pacific Time. The awards ceremony will [...]

FINDING NEVERLAND: J. M. Barrie and PETER PAN

Initially, Miramax wouldn’t even consider German-born director Marc Forster for Finding Neverland. "My agent called and said, ‘They don’t see the relationship between this and your dead-baby movie,’" Forster later recalled, referring to his first feature film, Everything Put Together, a 2000 drama about a mother whose baby dies of sudden infant death syndrome. (Radha Mitchell, who plays Mary Barrie in Finding Neverland, has the lead in Everything Put Together.) Source: Newsweek.
***
Finding Neverland was originally scheduled to be released in the fall of 2003. However, Columbia Pictures had the rights to James M. Barrie’s play for their film version of Peter Pan (directed by P. J. Hogan), which was to be released in December 2003.
Columbia refused to allow Miramax [...]

FINDING NEVERLAND – Johnny Depp, Kate Winslet

Finding Neverland (2004)
Direction: Marc Forster
Screenplay: David Magee; from Allan Knee’s play The Man Who Was Peter Pan
Cast: Johnny Depp, Kate Winslet, Radha Mitchell, Julie Christie, Freddie Highmore, Dustin Hoffman, Joe Prospero, Ian Hart, Kelly Macdonald
 

 

Back in 2001, German-born director Marc Forster brought a much welcome touch of non-Hollywood flavor to the independently made psychological drama Monster’s Ball. Besides the daring (if way overlong) sex scenes, that film imparted a refreshingly realistic atmosphere that was much enhanced by Forster’s minimalist touch.
As the title implies, Finding Neverland, also directed by Forster, and adapted by David Magee from Allan Knee’s play The Man Who Was Peter Pan, has absolutely nothing to do with reality, whether James M. Barrie’s or anyone else’s. Still, [...]

Ed Wood’s NECROMANIA Found

Fans of cult favorite Ed Wood (aka Edward D. Wood, Jr), unjustly labeled The Worst Filmmaker of All Time, now have one more Wood "classic" to check out: the 1971 release Necromania: A Tale of Weird Love!, a sexually explicit film about the erotic awakening of a young couple through the assistance of a coven of witches.
Necromania, Wood’s last film project as a director, was made over a period of two or three days on a budget that totaled about US$7,000. Reportedly, the only prints went missing shortly afterwards, though several copies of the film have surfaced in varying degrees of completeness in the last couple of decades.
This particular print was found by Wood biographer Rudolph Grey [...]

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL – Johnny Depp

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)
Direction: Gore Verbinski
Screenplay: Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio; from an original screen story by Stuart Beattie and Jay Wolpert
Cast: Johnny Depp, Geoffrey Rush, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley, Jack Davenport, Jonathan Pryce, Lee Arenberg
 

 

WHEN KEITH MET ZASU
Pirate films were a popular Hollywood staple for about three decades, from the mid-1920s (The Sea Hawk, The Black Pirate) to the mid-1950s, when the genre, by then relegated to mostly B films, began to die down. Sporadic resurrections in the last two decades have been disastrous (Pirates, Cutthroat Island), something that didn’t bode well for Disney’s "film adaptation" of one of their theme-park rides. However, Neptune and assorted sea gods have apparently been in [...]

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