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plus 4, Hannah Montana Movie Leads Oscar's Best Song List - Post Chronicle

Hannah Montana Movie Leads Oscar's Best Song List - Post Chronicle

Posted: 17 Dec 2009 08:00 AM PST

Reel Movie Trailers: Nine - Reel Movie News

Posted: 17 Dec 2009 03:09 PM PST

Daniel Day-Lewis heads up an all-star cast in Nine, the new musical from Chicago director Rob Marshall. Day-Lewis plays the famous Italian filmmaker Guido Contini, who struggles to find harmony in his professional and personal lives, engaging in dramatic relationships with his wife, his mistress, his muse, his agent, and his mother, all while all while fighting an uphill battle on the set of a movie he is about to shoot.

Nine is a musical adaptation of the classic Federico Fellini movie 8 1/2. Also starring are Marion Cotillard, Kate Hudson, Penelope Cruz, Nicole Kidman, Sophia Loren, Judi Dench, and Fergie.

Nine opens limited this weekend and expands wide on Christmas Day. Take a look at the trailer below and see stills from the cast in our Nine pictures gallery!

fivefilters.org featured article: Normalising the crime of the century by John Pilger. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.



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FBI arrests New York man for `Wolverine' piracy - WTOP Radio

Posted: 16 Dec 2009 08:29 AM PST

LOS ANGELES (AP) - The FBI has arrested a New York man indicted for illegally distributing pirated copies of the movie "X-Men Origins: Wolverine."

FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller says in a statement that Gilberto Sanchez was arrested at his Bronx home early Wednesday without incident. The 47-year-old Sanchez was indicted Dec. 10 by a Los Angeles federal grand jury for violation of federal copyright law.

He's expected to appear Wednesday before a U.S. magistrate judge in New York.

The indictment, unsealed after Wednesday's arrest, says Sanchez uploaded the copyrighted "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" to an Internet site last spring. He faces a possible three years in prison and a $250,000 fine, or twice the gross gain or gross loss attributable to the offense, whichever is greater.


(Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)

fivefilters.org featured article: Normalising the crime of the century by John Pilger. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.



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'Avatar -- Big money doesn't mean good movie - NWI.com

Posted: 17 Dec 2009 11:30 PM PST

You would think that a half-billion dollars could buy you a halfway decent screenplay. But as James Cameron proves in "Avatar," his first film since the Oscar-winning "Titantic" (1997) and reportedly the most expensive movie ever made, that isn't necessarily the case.

This long-awaited science-fiction adventure, with a production budget that has been estimated between $300 and $500 million, features some of the most impressive digital effects ever rendered. Cameron conjures up a digital universe populated by elongated blue aliens, flying pterodactyl figures and snarling beasts -- it's a strange, visionary alien paradise.

But no matter how pretty the pictures, the eco-friendly, New Age-y story here remains trite and uninvolving. Even the most easily wowed moviegoers will likely be fidgeting in their seats, feeling as if they've seen this supposedly state-of-the-art concoction a million times before.

Set in the year 2154 on a distant planet on the brink of war against humans from Earth, "Avatar" introduces us to Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a Marine paralyzed from the waist down. His twin brother, who was part of a top-secret research project, was recently killed, and Sully is recruited to take his place by the company leader Parker (Giovanni Ribisi).

Sully will be transformed into an avatar -- a version of himself as a tall, slim, blue alien who looks and sounds like one of the natives of the enemy planet. Once he's welcomed into their ranks, the hope is that he will be able to negotiate some sort of peace treaty. (The company wants access to a coveted ore buried beneath the planet's surface.)

You would have thought the disappointment of George Lucas' "Star Wars" prequels would have taught Cameron a lesson: Enough with the elaborate sci-fi movies built around arcane land-use disputes. Instead, the director (who also wrote the stilted, often cringe-inducing screenplay) invests himself completely in this tedious scenario. In his avatar form, Sully befriends and soon falls in love with an alien named Neytiri (Zoe Saldana).

Meanwhile, a bellicose Marine colonel (Stephen Lang, who looks and acts as if he's just stepped out of "G.I. Joe's" central casting office) wants Sully to get close to the aliens and learn their whereabouts and habits, so he can eventually launch an offensive against them.

The story of a man torn between two different cultures might have been interesting (it worked for Kevin Costner in "Dances with Wolves"), but Cameron shows no interest in any of the characters. The love story between Sully and Neytiri is embarrassing -- a thinly imagined tale of a hesitant and proud woman slowly won over by the rakish charms of a cocky man. (Think "Titantic" with bouncy blue tails.)

The conflict between the headstrong Sully and the by-the-numbers head researcher on the project, Grace (Sigourney Weaver), is similarly one-note. A better filmmaker might have realized that screenwriting isn't his strong suit and hired someone else for the job -- but Cameron's "King of the World" hubris once again gets the best of him. He's determined to prove that he can do it all.

The plot mostly seems like an excuse for the director to show off his latest visual inventions. That means we watch Sully escape the clutches of snarling, territorial animals, and attempt to tame a violent winged creature, and journey deeper and deeper into a cartoonish wonderland rendered in pinks, purples and blues. It's a genuinely plausible and striking alternative universe, but it's also sterile-looking and unvarying. By the second hour of this nearly three-hour, 3-D effort, you feel as if you're trapped inside a video game from which there is no escape.

The Australian-born Worthington ("Terminator: Salvation") has a round, handsome face and a narrow, penetrating gaze -- it's a classic movie star look that both invites you in and holds you at bay. But as much as you want to root for him as a kind of cocky, space-opera successor to Tom Cruise in "Top Gun," the movie never allows him to develop a personality.

Once he's in avatar form, he makes no impression at all (Cameron filmed the actor's movements, and then used his computer to turn them into aliens). The same goes for all of the actors playing the aliens, including CCH Pounder and Wes Studi -- each one is indistinguishable from the next.

The final section is little more than a belabored screed against the imperialist, oil-scavenging impulses of modern America. This enemy planet, it turns out, is sitting on the universe's largest supply of energy, and the only way the Earth can carry forth is to plow down all the trees and suck the planet dry. Cameron's "Titantic" also won no points for subtlety, but "Avatar" enters its own realm of bluntness. (Seriously, if Cameron's so worried about energy consumption, maybe he shouldn't be spending hundreds of millions of dollars on digital effects.)

Besides, there was a fervent, beating heart at the center of "Titanic" -- a romance so intense it felt as if the world hung in the balance. At the center of "Avatar" is merely the hard drive of James Cameron's computer.

'Avatar'

CAST: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Stephen Lang, Sigourney Weaver, Giovanni Ribisi

DIRECTOR: James Cameron

RATED: PG-13 (action, mild sexual content)

2 stars (out of 5)

fivefilters.org featured article: Normalising the crime of the century by John Pilger. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.



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Movie review: The Young Victoria etches family dysfunction in the ... - Vancouver Sun

Posted: 17 Dec 2009 09:14 PM PST

The Young Victoria

Starring: Emily Blunt, Rupert Friend, Paul Bettany

Directed by: Jean-Marc Vallee

Written by: Julian Fellowes

Parental advisory: adult themes

Running time: 100 minutes

Rating: Three and a half stars out of five

It seems odd that Jean-Marc Vallee — the Quebec director best known for the dysfunctional family film C.R.A.Z.Y. — has been put in charge of The Young Victoria, a costume epic of much royal intrigue, sumptuous sets and stiff British formality.

However, it turns out not to be as strange as that, because the movie, about the early years of Queen Victoria when she was hot enough to be played by Emily Blunt, is actually a dysfunctional family film. That's true in several senses: family, as in the bickering Hanovers, evidenced in a scene where King William IV (Jim Broadbent) goes into a drunken rant at his sister-in-law at a fancy dinner, prompting the Duke of Wellington to mutter, "Families. Who'd be without them?" and families in the more modern sense of shifting loyalties among the powerful. When the teenage Victoria finally ascends the throne, you wait for her to dispatch her enemies just as Michael did when he took over the Corleones.

She does, too, although with less bloodshed.

The Young Victoria is thus part historic drama and part character study, the story of the teenage Victoria being buffeted by the winds of politics and love as she is prepared to take over as England's next queen. Waiting in the wings is her handsome Belgian cousin Albert (Rupert Friend).

Beautifully designed and mounted, this is the story of Victoria and Albert before they were a museum: You feel the film straining to avoid that stuffy feeling and the staginess of most royal epics. But there's still an air of stiff formality in the narrative; for all its intrigue, the romance is slightly predictable.

It begins with Victoria as the unlikely heir to the throne, being manipulated by her own mother, the Duchess of Kent (Miranda Richardson), and her adviser Conroy (Mark Strong), an ambitious bully. He wants Victoria to sign a regency agreement — the manipulations in the movie are fairly arcane, although Julian Fellowes' script keeps most of it straight — that would give the power to him and the duchess. Victoria, though, refuses: There's iron under those corsets and Blunt's performance is a teasing combination of toughness and vulnerability.

After King William dies, Victoria begins to get her revenge, although it's an elegant one. She chooses Lord Melbourne (Paul Bettany) — a handsome and somewhat cynical prime minister — as her adviser, and he dispatches Conroy with the words, "You played the game and you lost," tossed off with a casual flippancy of the natural aristocrat.

Such politics, which include a constitutional crisis created when Victoria refuses to appoint ladies-in-waiting loyal to Robert Peel, the new prime minister, make The Young Victoria something of a cerebral exercise, filled with people rushing to and fro along the polished wood corridors of this or that castle. Buckingham Palace was just built at the time, and scenes of dances and dinners are breathtakingly staged, with much glitter, knowing glances, and lords nodding their heads slyly at one another to indicate some subtle political victory or loss.

Meanwhile, in Belgium, the king has sent his nephew, Albert (Rupert Friend) to woo Victoria and win English support for Belgian interests, whatever they might have been. Albert arrives as a combination of ambassador and prospective husband, and his relationship with Victoria is viewed first as a contest to win her over — "Do you ever feel like a chess piece yourself, in a game played against your will?" she asks, just before he checkmates her — and a budding romance. Albert's main rival is Melbourne, who has the queen's confidence, but perhaps not her heart: Albert is an idealist to Melbourne's cynic, filled with ideas about public housing and support for the arts. He's the New Democrat in a house of Tories, which seems to suit the new queen just fine.

Much of The Young Victoria is told in the letters written by Victoria and Albert, and in suggestive feints in the direction of overt courtship. "I would so like to be useful to you if there is ever an opportunity," Albert says — the rogue! — and eventually, of course, he gets to be. They had quite a large family of their own, whose offspring went on to to become part of many royal houses throughout Europe. Albert died young, Victoria grew old and unamused and the British crown continued to be the cause of controversy. Dysfunctional families, it seems, are forever.

For Jay Stone's weekly movie podcast, go to www.canada.com/moviereviews.

jstone@canwest.com

canada.com/stonereport

fivefilters.org featured article: Normalising the crime of the century by John Pilger. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.



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