International

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[Thanks to goodfella for bringing this to my attention…

…and dedicated to JasonTodd and Kash, or, more appropriately in this context, Two Face — Qalandar]

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Salman Rushdie all set for movie debut
ANI
ACTING OUT: Salman Rushdie will be playing a fertility doctor in the Helen Hunt directed film.

Washington: Award-winning author Sir Salman Rushdie is all set to make his acting debut - playing a fertility doctor.

The author has signed on to star in the new romantic comedy titled Then She Found Me, after successfully auditioning for the part.

The movie will be directed by Helen Hunt, and marks her directorial debut.

April 10, 2008
What’s Big and Green, and Desperate to Be a Hit All Over?
By BROOKS BARNES

LOS ANGELES — Bad buzz. Creative infighting. Superhero gridlock at the multiplex. For Marvel Studios, handling gamma rays is starting to look like a cakewalk compared to turning “The Incredible Hulk” into a movie franchise.

The unjolly green giant, born from a botched gamma bomb experiment in a 1962 comic book, belongs to an elite class of superhero. In Marvel’s stable of characters, which includes the X-Men and the Silver Surfer, only Spider-Man outsells him. The Hulk, along with his emotionally withdrawn alter ego, Dr. Bruce Banner, has spawned television shows, theme-park rides and best-selling toys.

So Bollywood offered another stale week, hence I thought why not I turn myself to Hollywood for a change. This is a movie site, and I bet there would be some people interested in Hollywood movies as well, so here I am with the review of Chronicles of Narnia.

Actually I went to see the movie 10,000 BC. why?? because an extremely hot chick told me its a good movie, but hey I should have known she got a poor taste, as she chose that ugly dork over me :p. But as I reached 10 minutes before the start, therefore got to watch the trailers of the upcoming movies. And there I saw the trailer of Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, and hence here I am with the review of part 1.

As a matter of fact I never saw Narnia in a hall, because Narnia has an inclination towards Christianity and I think that children’s books, movies, cartoons, should not be used as a tool to spread religious propaganda. But after listening to some great word of mouth, I caught it on a DVD. Though there were messages like Jesus’s resurrection, Christmas, Santa Claus, subtly added in the movie, but the keyword was subtle.

Movie starts with scenes from world war 2. German planes dropping bomb on England cities and straightaway you are introduced to the cast of 4 siblings, 2 boys, Edmund and Peter, and 2 girls, Lucy and Susan. Edmund is the eldest, whereas Lucy is the youngest. Peter is shown as a typical middle child, who craves for attention and a bit more importance. He is a kind of rebellion. Edmund, like every big brother, has an attitude, though he wants good for everyone. Susan is the second child, mature, and loving, like every girl, and Lucy is very cute and very honest.

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Hollywood and India partner up
Studios work locally to create original content
By PATRICK FRATERLooking at the pages of a newspaper in Mumbai, a foreign visitor will not be starved of gossip about Hollywood celebrities or news of upcoming releases. Copious entertainment sections may often run to a page of Hollywood coverage. But such appearances in English-language papers are deceptive and should not be taken as indicators that Indian auds are ready to give up on their Hindi, Tamil or Telegu favorites.
And Hollywood studios and their corporate parents are no longer stressing about expansion of the niche that exists for Western films. These days their mantra is about becoming part of the mainstream Indian entertainment biz.

“Many of these companies have been looking at India for quite a while. But there is only so far you can go with Hollywood content. Indian audiences want local,” says Siddharth Kapur, director of UTV Motion Pictures, a company that has worked with Fox Searchlight, Disney and Will Smith’s Overbrook Entertainment on various film productions.

That understanding arrived over time. Time Warner subsid Turner Channels has been distributing channels such as Cartoon Network and HBO in India for more than a decade and is still stepping up its involvement. “We made mistakes. We entered the market in 1995 with American content and the attitude ‘it worked in the U.S. after all,’” says Sunny Saha, senior VP and g.m. of Turner Entertainment Networks Asia.

“But we learned about localization and that localization means more than dubbing, and more too than (acquiring) local programs. It also means getting into original content. That’s what we did in 2004 with (live-action kids net) Pogo and the original production unit.” The outfit produced 150 hours in 2007.

Godard’s CONTEMPT is playing at the Film Forum in NYC through March 27; Jonathan Rosenbaum’s excellent piece on this film provides a number of useful points of entry into an engagement with this magnificent, mysterious, film. (All that and Brigitte Bardot too…)
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Critical Distance
Contempt; Directed and written by Jean-Luc Godard

With
Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli, Jack Palance, Fritz Lang, Giorgia Moll, and Godard.

Rating
* * * *
Masterpiece

Why they made it showbiz

The Oscar Academy has honoured movies that are greyer, more complex and with individual voices.
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Why did George Clooney, the dishy actor who played the lead role in the same movie and the one who was supposed to take the Oscar away from Day Lewis, not make it?
Shubhra Gupta

A question a TV anchor asked me as we analysed the winners and losers at this year’s Oscar awards spilled over later into a discussion about the kinds of movies which make it, and those which don’t.

So, do you like these bad characters, she asked. The reference was to Daniel Day Lewis and Javier Bardem, who won the best actor and best supporting actor awards on a night which bowed to grimness and grit, rather than glitter and shine. There was tha t too, on the red carpet, where all the lovelies in their designer gowns preened and pirouetted for the paparazzi, and the fashion police.

FIFTH COLUMNDemocracy in a dangerous neighbourhood
Tavleen SinghPosted online: Sunday, February 24, 2008 at 2307 hrs Print Email

It’s always a joyous occasion when a dictator falls, but even more joyous when it is a democratic process that ends his reign. In many years of covering political events, one that remains etched in my memory is the night Indira Gandhi was defeated in March 1977. I remember how ordinary, apolitical people stayed up all night dancing in the streets of Delhi in celebration of her fall. I was not in Pakistan when the results of the election came last week, but I am certain that there would have been celebration in the streets and a general sense that a bad time was coming to an end.

Like all dictators, Pervez Musharraf has a distorted sense of his importance, so he may hang on like a limpet as long as he can, but he is finished. There is no question that he was the main issue in last week’s election and Pakistani voters have shown clearly that they want him to go. It’s time to write his requiem and there are few good things to say. Let me begin with them. When I returned to Pakistan last month, after having been denied a visa for six years, I did see some things that had changed for the better. I saw restaurants in which people could drink a glass of wine without a mullah breathing down their neck and I saw evidence of a large middle class that had not been there before. Islam was less visible in the public square and as someone who thinks religion has no place in the public square I saw this as a good sign.

But the price the Indian sub-continent and the world have paid for these small improvements has been too high. The western media last week was full of articles describing Pakistan as the most dangerous place in the world, and it is. Under Musharraf it became the terrorist capital of the world and only the naive can continue to believe that Musharraf had nothing to do with this. We in India suffered more than any other country as a result of Musharraf’s polices. From the time he failed to conquer Kashmir via his undeclared, cowardly Kargil war, he tried to do it through even more cowardly means — terrorist attacks on unarmed civilians.

February 24, 2008
The World
A Wandering Kazakh, Before Borat
By DAVID L. STERN

ALMATY, Kazakhstan

AND you thought Genghis Khan was just the scourge of nations, the slayer of millions. Little did you know that he was, as a young man, a sensitive, enlightened husband and doting father.

That, at least, is how Kazakhstan’s new burgeoning film industry presents him in “Mongol,” one of five films vying tonight for the Oscar for best foreign-language film.