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Posted: 11 May 2013 03:12 AM PDT

LOS ANGELES, May 11, 2013 (AFP) - The next chapter in the wildly successful "Star Wars" movie franchise will be produced in Britain, Disney's Lucasfilm announced.

"Star Wars: Episode VII" will be the first in the series since Disney bought the studio from George Lucas in 2012 for $4 billion. It is scheduled for release in 2015.

All of the six previous "Star Wars" movies have included production "in such famed (British) studios as Elstree, Shepperton, Leavesden, Ealing and Pinewood Studios," Lucasfilm said in a statement Friday.

"We've devoted serious time and attention to revisiting the origins of Star Wars as inspiration for our process on the new movie," said Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy. Britain, as well as France and other European nations, offer tax credits to attract movie production, especially work from Hollywood studios.

British Chancellor of the Exchequer (finance minister) George Osborne said he was "delighted" that production "is coming back to Britain."

The announcement is "great news for fans and our creative industries," he said in the statement.

Sci-fi and action filmmaker J.J. Abrams will direct "Episode VII," while Oscar-winning writer Michael Arndt will write the screenplay.

Lucas - who launched the saga in 1977 and directed four of the six films to date - will serve as a creative consultant for the three new films, which are expected to come out every two to three years. -AFP

Spielberg brings Hollywood eye to Cannes Croisette

Posted: 10 May 2013 09:18 PM PDT

LOS ANGELES: Steven Spielberg will bring a Hollywood veteran's eye to the more art-house Cannes Film Festival next week - but he insists he has no preconceptions and will be a strictly "democratic" jury head.

The legendary filmmaker, who first came to Cannes for the premiere of "E.T." in 1982, says he is looking forward to being on the Croisette, even if he is a little "rusty," not having served on a festival jury for over 25 years.

The 66-year-old - the third American to head the Cannes jury in four years - chairs a panel that also includes Nicole Kidman and Oscar-winning director Ang Lee to pick who wins the coveted Palme d'Or at the May 15-26 festival.

The prospect of watching and critically assessing 19 films in 12 days might be daunting to some, but Spielberg is unfazed.

"Not me! Every weekend I watch between four and six movies. I catch up on what I've missed during the working week. So two films per day in Cannes, I'm rather looking forward to it," Spielberg said in a pre-Cannes interview.

"It's a great honor, but it's above all the promise of great pleasure," he told the French arts magazine Telerama, in comments published in French.

The director, who has won only once at Cannes - best screenplay for 1974's "Sugarland Express" - has had a disappointing run of late on the awards front, with his two latest Oscar entries "War Horse" and "Lincoln" coming up short.

But over the years Spielberg has made some of the biggest blockbusters and award-winning films of modern cinema, including "Jaws" (1975), "Jurassic Park" (1993), "Schindler's List" (1993) and the "Indiana Jones" movies.

Asked if as jury head he would reward films with popular potential, or "more difficult" works, he demurred.

"I believe that, before they are shown, all films are equal. Whether they are small or big, they are a sum of the personal visions and collaborative efforts.

"Each time the filmmaker's intentions are the same, whether it is Christopher Nolan or Michael Haneke: to express what he has inside," he said, referring to the blockbuster "Dark Knight" director and Haneke, whose understated "Amour" won last year at Cannes.

The possibility of a cultural clash between Spielberg's Hollywood sensibility and those of his fellow jurors - an international bunch, to say the least - has not gone unnoticed.

The jury also includes Indian actress Vidya Balan, Japanese director Naomi Kawase, Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay, French actor Daniel Auteuil, Romanian director Cristian Mungiu and Oscar-winning Austrian actor Christoph Waltz.

"No roster of Cannes jurors in recent memory has been as stacked with influential, distinctive, high-profile global film industry figures," wrote film critic Jon Frosch, in a piece published by The Atlantic online.

"The common strand running throughout Spielberg's body of work is the filmmaker's palpable desire to reach directly for the viewer's emotions. Cannes fare, on the other hand, is often cooler, less accessible."

"Spielberg and the Cannes Film Festival should be a fascinating confrontation of cinematic and cinephilic tastes and tendencies," he wrote.

Spielberg has been tight-lipped about what kind of jury chairman he will be when he takes his seat in the Palais des Festivals, where stars will hit the red carpet on Wednesday.

"Democratic!" he said, when asked by Telerama. "But give me a bit of time. I haven't been on a jury since the Avoriaz festival in 1986, when we gave the prize to 'Carrie,' by Brian de Palma. I'm a little rusty," he said.

US jury heads at Cannes are not rare: there have been three or four per decade since the 1960s, before which they were French. Figures on Spielberg's level have included Martin Scorsese in 1998, and Francis Ford Coppola in 1996.

Two of the last three were Americans: Tim Burton in 2010 and Robert de Niro in 2011. In that year the Palme d'Or went to "Tree of Life," one of two American films in competition, but hardly a crowd-pleasing blockbuster. - AFP

Small wonders

Posted: 11 May 2013 03:33 AM PDT

Fly into the gorgeous world of Epic, where the heroes and heroines are tiny but their mission is huge.

THE idea of a tiny civilisation existing in the lush trees and bushes is something that initially came to director Chris Wedge when he attended an art exhibition of 100-year-old paintings that depicted intricate realms existing in the woods.

It occurred to him that this would be an interesting concept for a movie. About the same time, author William Joyce, who had collaborated with Wedge on his animated feature Robots, had written a children's book called The Leaf Men And The Brave Good Bugs. In it, Joyce introduced Samurai-like warriors called the Leafmen, who fight against those bent on destroying the greenery.

With advances in animation, Wedge started conceptualising this unique world and characters consisting of the Leafmen, and the result is Epic.

To mesh this fantastic world with the real one, we meet 17-year-old Mary Katherine, or MK as she likes to be known as. She comes to live with her estranged father after the passing of her mother. Just at the back of her father's house is vast green, where he is convinced exists a community made of tiny people.

In an interview transcript provided by Twentieth Century Fox, actress Amanda Seyfried – who voices MK – says: "When we meet Mary Katherine, she's just lost her mother, so she's coming from a dark and traumatic place. (At this point) she's holding on to some hope and trying to rekindle a connection with her father, which is what her mother would have wanted."

Alas, the father is too obssessed with his own project to actually pay attention to MK, so the latter decides to run away.

"But in a random turn of events, she ends up chasing after their dog one night in the middle of a thunderstorm and somehow awakens to find herself transported to another world. She meets the Leafmen, the people her father has been looking for, and realises he's not crazy. So her story throughout the rest of the movie focuses on giving her father a second chance and really believing in him. It's quite beautiful," adds Seyfried.

In the journey to return home, MK befriends one of the younger (and former) member of the Leafmen, named Nod (Josh Hutcherson). Nod is trying to find his own place in the world after discarding the ideals that Leafmen is built upon – teamwork and unity. His biggest problem, he thinks, is the Leafmen's leader, Ronin (Colin Farrell).

Meanwhile, the community's way of life is being threatened by forces of darkness known as Boggans. They are malevolent creatures – creators of decay, not unlike the cancer-like knob growing out of a tree.

Boggans is led by Mandrake (Christoph Watlz) who has the ability to bring destruction to anything he touches, and his goal is to claim the woods he believes should have always been his. Mandrake knows he'd win the fight if he attacks Leafmen's ruler, Queen Tara (singer Beyoncé Knowles).

Other than getting a chance to see her animated self for the first time, Seyfried is impressed with the A-list actors participating in Epic. However, she admits being "super weird" to have never met many of them. "We've all been involved for a year and a half at least and I've only met Josh twice. I'd love to say that I've done a movie with Christoph Waltz, but I'm not sure it counts since I haven't met him."

She is also very proud of the message Epic is conveying. "I am obsessed with mountains, the forest, anything green. Even as a child, it feels like a safe place and also a place where anything can happen. I still feel that way about the trees, the flowers, everything growing around us, that it gives us some kind of hope about the world.

"It's a great setting for this story since you have so much freedom when it comes to creating the miniature world with all the different plants and colours. I hope kids will see this movie and go out in their backyard and try to find the Leafmen, see how they fit into this world, and what they can do to save the environment."

> Epic opens in cinemas nationwide May 23.

Kredit: www.thestar.com.my

Sabtu, 11 Mei 2013

The Star Online: Entertainment: Movies

The Star Online: Entertainment: Movies

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