“Movie flop could still cost Paris Hilton - Globe and Mail” plus 4 more

Movie flop could still cost Paris Hilton - Globe and Mail
Review: Quentin Tarantino's 'Inglourious Basterds' is bloody, giddy ... - St. Petersburg Times
Blockbuster and Motorola to offer on-demand phone movies - T3.com
ZELLWEGER TOOK ROAD TRIP WITH MOVIE SON - PR Inside
France's Annaud to direct 'Wolf Totem' movie - Idaho Statesman

Movie flop could still cost Paris Hilton - Globe and Mail

Posted: 18 Aug 2009 11:55 PM PDT

Paris Hilton's movie Pledge This! was a colossal flop, but a Miami judge says she won't have to pay more than $8-million (U.S.) because of it.

A lawsuit by investors in the film sought that amount, attributing the 2006 movie's poor showing to a failure by Hilton to promote it. Hilton claims she did everything she could to plug the film.

U.S. District Judge Federico Moreno says Hilton could still have to repay some of the $1-million she was paid to make the film. The judge yesterday ordered lawyers to file more legal papers in the coming weeks on that issue.

There was no immediate response yesterday to requests for comment from Hilton's publicist or lawyer, or the lawyer for investors.

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Review: Quentin Tarantino's 'Inglourious Basterds' is bloody, giddy ... - St. Petersburg Times

Posted: 19 Aug 2009 01:35 AM PDT

By Steve Persall, Times Film Critic
In Print: Thursday, August 20, 2009

By STEVE PERSALL

Times Film Critic

Nobody has giddier fun making movies than Quentin Tarantino, and it's contagious. Even when scenes run long and static, violent spasms intrude or too many characters are introduced, watching a Tarantino flick unfold is one of American cinema's pleasures. You sense him behind the camera, giggling at his handiwork, winking conspiratorially.

No exception is Inglourious Basterds, the neo-grindhouse auteur's rewrite of World War II with a spaghetti western vibe, a bloody valentine to pulp war fiction: vengeance, resistance and a cinephile fantasy that a movie theater could defeat Hitler. It is The Dirty Dozen on crystal meth, Defiance without conscience, presented by a cocksure filmmaker for whom no project is "only a movie."

Even the film's final line — "I think this just might be my masterpiece" — sounds like the writer-director boasting through an actor. Inglourious Basterds doesn't deserve that mantle, but it does reaffirm Tarantino as an audacious dude who'll err, but never on the side of caution.

Divided into five chapters, Inglourious Basterds is Tarantino's most linear work and at times his most static, with rewards. Take the opening sequence, a visit to a French dairy farm by the film's villain, Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz, a mesmerizing presence). Landa is known as "the Jew Hunter," with keen instincts to find and kill them.

Landa believes the farmer is hiding a Jewish family, and toys with the man for 15 minutes, just sitting at a table. Tarantino loves writing deadly intimate confrontations — for example, his True Romance faceoff between Christopher Walken and Dennis Hopper — with telltale tough talk and violent punctuation. The payoff is usually worth the wait, but Inglourious Basterds contains a handful of such conversations, bloating the 152-minute running time.

The next chapter introduces the titular heroes, a platoon of Jewish-American soldiers assigned to kill as many Nazis as possible. Brad Pitt gets top billing for a supporting role as Lt. Aldo Raine, a Tennessee stud leading the Basterds, demanding 100 Nazi scalps from each soldier. Pitt juts his jaw and drops his "g's" in a cartoon Southern accent, making mutilation sound downright friendly.

Chapter 3 leads to Nazi-occupied Paris, where Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent) owns a movie theater showing German propaganda films. Shosanna has a connection to Landa, who'll be ordered to kill the Basterds, who'll plan a war-changing mission at the theater, as Tarantino pulls plot threads together, disregarding history, logic and sometimes good taste. An international cast speaking native languages veers toward authenticity — until a screwy subtitle sneaks in (a German exclaims "Wunderbar!" with an identical translation beneath).

After one viewing — and Tarantino movies demand more — I don't think Chapter 4, detailing a parallel British mission, is necessary at this length. But it does provide another of those extended stretches of quietly delightful tension. Inglourious Basterds will be loved and hated, sometimes in the same scene, eventually leading to at least grudging admiration.

Obsession with film propels Tarantino (and repels his detractors), spilling off the screen whether you get the references or not, from Leni Riefenstahl and Emil Jannings to a German Audie Murphy becoming a movie star. By the time the flammable nature of nitrate film becomes Tarantino's key weapon against tyranny, you can practically hear him cackling. Inglourious Basterds is flawed, yet proves that the former enfant terrible and now Wellesian myth still has impudence to burn.

Steve Persall can be reached at persall@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8365. Read his blog, Reeling in the Years, at blogs.tampabay.com/movies.

. Review

Inglourious Basterds

Grade: B+

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Cast: Brad Pitt, Mélanie Laurent, Christoph Waltz, Michael Fassbender, Eli Roth, Diane Kruger, Daniel Bruhl, Til Schweiger, B.J. Novak, August Diehl, Omar Doom

Screenplay: Quentin Tarantino

Rating: R; strong violence and profanity, brief sexuality

Running time: 152 min.

Note: Much of Inglourious Basterds is shown with English subtitles.

[Last modified: Aug 19, 2009 04:30 AM]

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Blockbuster and Motorola to offer on-demand phone movies - T3.com

Posted: 19 Aug 2009 02:25 AM PDT

Small screen could mean big bucks for rental giant

Movies on mobiles is nothing new, with titles being distributed (with limited success) on memory cards and by hooking your phone up to your PC for download. So it will be interesting to see if Blockbuster can bring anything new to the party when it launches its own on-demand movie service for phones.

Blockbuster has been struggling with the recession and a shift in the market from traditional rentals to online services. That's forced the company to look for new revenue sources - and phones are one such source. How it will offer these movies isn't clear. So far, movie distribution to phones hasn't been an easy nut to crack - Sony Ericsson's Play Now Arena Movie service requires you to download to a PC, then transfer the downloaded file across to a handset via USB. A PC in the mix isn't exactly the most convenient way of getting your portable media. If Blockbuster can remove that obstacle, it could be onto a winner.

That could depend on its partner in this venture, Motorola, with movies being offered via Motorola handsets exclusively in the first instance. Speaking about the move, Blockbuster senior vice president of digital entertainment Kevin Lewis said: 'People are increasingly relying on their mobile phones to stay connected to the things they love the most - including their favorite movies and TV shows.' He added the on-demand service with Motorola's phones will provide users with access to thousands of movies, but crucially, he didn't say how they will do it.

No doubt that will become clear in the coming weeks and months - and could be a feature of the forthcoming Motorola Android handsets when they hit the market. If it can offer them over-the-air, that could be a seriously big feather in both Blockbuster and Motorola's caps.

Link: Blockbuster (via CNN)

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ZELLWEGER TOOK ROAD TRIP WITH MOVIE SON - PR Inside

Posted: 19 Aug 2009 12:45 AM PDT

2009-08-19 09:42:10 -

RENEE ZELLWEGER so enjoyed playing mum to young star LOGAN LERMAN in new film THE ONE & ONLY, she took her movie son off on a road trip to Washington, D.C. after filming had wrapped.
The actress admits the pair bonded immediately on the set and she treated him to movie screenings and a John Mayer concert during the shoot.
But when it came to ending the film, she had trouble letting go.
She says, "We had so much fun last summer and I got used to my little sidekick. When we wrapped, I thought, 'Now what am I gonna do?' I wanted to go on another road trip.
"We went to D.C. and took pictures of all the monuments." And now Zellweger, who is currently dating actor Bradley Cooper, is convinced she's got what it takes to be a good mum: "I turned into a mom somewhere between Baltimore and the White House. It was really hot and sunny so I kept reaching into my purse for sunscreen and globbing it on his face."

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France's Annaud to direct 'Wolf Totem' movie - Idaho Statesman

Posted: 19 Aug 2009 02:32 AM PDT

HONG KONG — The French director of "Seven Years in Tibet," Jean-Jacques Annaud, will direct an adaptation of the best-selling Chinese novel "Wolf Totem" - the story of the relationship between Mongolian nomads and wolves seen by some as a critique of Communist rule.

Production company Beijing Forbidden City Film Co. made the announcement in a statement obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press.

Annaud, whose credits also include "The Bear," "The Lover" and "Enemy at the Gates," will bring to the big screen one of China's most popular and widely debated books in recent years.

Written under the pseudonym Jiang Rong, "Wolf Totem" is about a Beijing intellectual who moves to the grasslands of China's Inner Mongolia region, where he comes to appreciate the adversarial and codependent relationship between the wolves and Mongolian herders. But Han Chinese settlers upset the ecological balance when they exterminate the wolves, leading to a rat plague and overgrazing by wild sheep that turns the grasslands barren.

The settlers are a metaphor for China's rapid economic development without regard for the environmental fallout while the wolves are a symbol of individualism, according to Penguin Books, which bought the English rights to the book.

"The wolf means freedom, the mother of democracy, and China opposes freedom more than anything else," Jiang said in a 2005 interview with The New York Times.

But "Wolf Totem," first published in 2004, escaped censorship and went on to sell more than 3 million copies in China - and likely many more pirated copies - counting among its fans businessmen who saw parallels between hunting and corporate strategy.

The novel, which was translated into 30 languages, won the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2007 - an aspiring Asian counterpart to Britain's Booker Prize.

Adding to the intrigue, Jiang, who spent six years on the novel, drawing from his own time in the Inner Mongolian grasslands, refused to reveal his real name for years. He was later identified as Lu Jiamin, an activist involved in the 1989 pro-democracy protests at Beijing's Tiananmen Square, which the military dispersed, killing at least hundreds.

Annaud will have to make an apolitical interpretation of the novel to pass Chinese film censorship. The Beijing Forbidden City Film Co. statement avoids the novel's political overtones, describing it as "an environmental protection-themed novel about the relationship between man and nature, man and animal."

The choice of Annaud is also interesting because he directed "Seven Years in Tibet," starring Brad Pitt. China was upset by his portrayal of harsh Chinese rule in Tibet in the story of an Austrian explorer's relationship with a young Dalai Lama. The Beijing Forbidden City Film Co. statement does not mention the movie in Annaud's biography.

It said the French director read "Wolf Totem" and approached the Chinese production company about making the film. Annaud, who won a best foreign film Oscar for his 1976 debut "Black and White in Color," was also hired because of his prior experience in working with animals on "The Bear," a cub's coming-of-age story, and "Two Brothers," the story of twin tiger cubs, the statement said.

Annaud was quoted as saying that he plans to spend a year and a half training wolves and sheep, six months on shooting and another year on editing and special effects.

The film's budget was not announced.