TOP 100 ACTOR SITES
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| SJP stoked about 'Sex' sequel Sarah Jessica Parker can’t wait for people to see ‘Sex and the City 2’. breakingnews.ie |
Roman Polanski sues French media for invasion of privacy Photographs showing film director under house arrest in Switzerland violated his privacy, court toldThe snapshot shows Roman Polanski standing at a window, his face narrowly visible between the curtains. The French paper that published the photograph said it was a legitimate depiction of the director's life under house arrest in his Swiss Alpine chalet, but the Chinatown director's lawyers claim that this and many others invaded his privacy and that of his family.The filmmaker and his wife are suing four French publications, two newspapers and two magazines, for a total of about €150,000 (£89,660).In a hearing today, lawyer Marion Grégoire said the suits were an attempt "to put an urgent stop" to a media spotlight that has intensified since a 1977 sex case against Polanski was revived. Several photographs depict his children, Elvis and Morgane – who, as minors, are especially protected by French media law.Invasion of privacy suits by celebrities are common in France, where Polanski lived for 30 years before he was arrested in Zurich, on a US warrant, in September 2009.After two months in a Swiss jail he was transferred to house arrest in his holiday home in Gstaad on 4 December, pending a ruling on a US request for his extradition. He fled the US in 1978 on the eve of sentencing after pleading guilty to having unlawful sex with a minor in 1977.Grégoire asked for €10,000 damages from Le Journal du Dimanche for the image of Polanski at his window. The newspaper's lawyer, Christophe Bigot, held up a shot of photographers massed outside Polanski's chalet, asking: "Can you seriously claim in this context that if you stand at the window you won't get your picture taken?"Polanski's lawyers also asked for €10,000 damages from Voici magazine for a shot of the director's wife, actress-singer Emmanuelle Seigner, walking in a Swiss street, and €55,000 from VSD magazine for photographs of their children at an airport.VSD said the faces had been blurred so they could not be recognised. Decisions are expected on 19 January. A ruling on a suit, against Le Parisien newspaper, is due on Friday.Roman PolanskiPrivacy & the mediaNewspapersFranceSwitzerlandLawPrivacyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
'All About Steve' a real turkey You can’t win 'em all, even when you’re top box office draw Sandra Bullock. breakingnews.ie |
Resurrection of the Christ in the works New film about the life and death of Jesus Christ will be as much about the key players at his crucifixion as the man himselfA new film about the life and death of Jesus Christ is to go into production this July for release around Easter 2011, reports Variety.Producer Bill McKay told the trade paper that The Resurrection of the Christ, budgeted at $20m (£12m), was "as much about the key players as it is about Jesus". He added: "We want to bring in the 'Gladiator' dimension of the first century against the political milieu of the time."Dan Gordon, who wrote the Denzel Washington-starring boxing biopic The Hurricane, is penning the screenplay, which focuses on the motivations of those involved in Christ's crucifixion, specifically Pontius Pilate, Herod Antipas, Caiaphas and Judas.Jonas McCord, the man behind the religious themed 2001 Antonio Banderas thriller The Body, is in talks to direct. The film's shoot – scheduled to last 10 weeks – will take place in Israel, Morocco and Europe.The film bears no relation to Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ – a box-office revelation in 2004, it took more than $370m in the US and another $240m internationally, on a budget of just $30m.ReligionBen Childguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Why has A Prophet won so much acclaim? The appeal of some brutal arthouse crime films such as Jacques Audiard's latest may have more to do with pressing right-on buttons than touching actual nervesSome films arrive on our screens enveloped in Teflon-coated reverence – we're expected to watch them after genuflecting first. Usually they come garlanded with imposing laurels from posh festivals; generally they've managed to garner eerily universal critical acclaim. Sometimes it's obvious that they've earned such status; sometimes it's not.Well, prostrate yourself. Weighed down by awards from Cannes, London and New York and basking in gushing plaudits from all quarters, Jacques Audiard's A Prophet has at last come among us. An unforgettable experience ought surely to be ours. But how memorable will it actually prove to be?Just a few minutes out from the opening titles it's obvious that the lycée of evil into which Tahar Rahim's novice yardbird has been plunged will transform him from wide-eyed ingénu into brutalised maître de criminalité. Fair enough, let's get to it. But hang on: a discreet glance at the running time reveals that more than two and a half hours' travail stretch ominously ahead. Clearly this one will have to be a bit more than a pulp romp. It will also have to validate those highbrow festival gongs.This will surely require at least a modicum of meaning, as well as whatever cheap thrills may be on offer. The film's begetters appear to acknowledge this. "Scarface" was a good enough title for Howard Hawks and Brian De Palma, and would have fitted Rahim's Malik well enough. So, for that matter, would "A Self-Made Hero", if Audiard hadn't already used up that one himself. Malik, however, is required to be something more than a hoodlum: he's "A Prophet".In French, a "prophète" can be somebody who simply foresees the future, as well as someone who invests it with religious significance. All the same, Malik is endowed with the magical power of precognition in what otherwise purports to be a mercilessly realistic exercise. You can't help assuming there must be some deep reason for the deployment of such an otherwise out-of-place device.What's being prophesied? That France is to succumb to the kind of nihilism that's already engulfed her prisons? That her misused and vilified Arab citizens will some day rise up and overwhelm their complacent white overlords, just as Malik turns the tables on his vainglorious Corsican tormentor? Nothing in the film lends colour to any such reading, and apparently we shouldn't expect it to. When quizzed about his title by an earnest professor of cinema, Audiard explained with a laugh: "The prophet is just a prophet."The power of augury isn't the only mystical element undermining the vérité of the mise en scene. A phantasm of Malik's first victim returns to haunt him. What's his ghostly game? Once again, Audiard himself is happy to put us right. "He is a ghost! In the English tradition. A ghost is just a ghost, a common presence, banal. As banal, in fact, as a prophet," the director informed the by now perhaps disappointed professor.To another inquirer, Audiard was prepared to come over just a little more portentous. "What interests me in this tale is that it's a metaphor for society," he announced. "It's not all that different on the inside or the outside." At least that's some kind of a punt at significance. Surely, you may think, a film so lauded must at least pass muster as a searingly accurate study of the unspeakable horrors rampant in the ghastly Gallic gulag that's been dubbed "the nation's shame". Doubtless, the film portrays aspects of life in a French prison truthfully enough. Yet it hardly provides the degree of insight achieved by some other institutional dramas – compare it, for example, with Laurent Cantet's The Class, and the shortfall is all too apparent.So we're left with a conventional genre flick decked out with a tasteful amount of imaginative and well-executed violence. The acting's fine, but the roles don't demand too much of the performers. There's plenty of plot, even if it's a little over-sinuous. Stripped of an hour's worth of redundant footage, it would have been a pretty good effort. Yet it still couldn't be bracketed with The Godfather or Goodfellas, and the all-out veneration that it's managed to secure remains to be explained.Films like this one clearly press a very particular button, at least in rarefied quarters. Maybe they constitute a kind of brutality-porn for refined persons who require their fix cut with purported profundity and slicked out with subtitles. It could just be that with his fantastical furbelows, Audiard is gently mocking just such pretensions.Jacques AudiardCrimeDavid Coxguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |