The Star eCentral: Movie Reviews |
- Laurie Holden in 'Dumb And Dumber To'
- Colin Firth is the voice of Paddington Bear
- 12 Years A Slave wins at Toronto film fest
Laurie Holden in 'Dumb And Dumber To' Posted: [unable to retrieve full-text content]The Walking Dead alum will be joining original stars Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels in the sequel. |
Colin Firth is the voice of Paddington Bear Posted: The Oscar-winning actor has been chosen to play the voice of the lovable bear in a new movie. British actor Colin Firth will provide the voice for Paddington Bear in a new movie about the marmalade-loving children's character, he revealed last weekend. Firth, who won an Academy Award for his portrayal of Britain's stuttering king George VI in The King's Speech, told the Daily Mail newspaper the Peruvian bear would be computer-generated, with the rest of the characters played by real actors including Hugh Bonneville, Sally Hawkins, Jim Broadbent, Julie Walters and Nicole Kidman. "Paddington will be computer-generated, and I will speak his lines with, I suspect, a slight Peruvian flavour," Firth, 53, told the Mail. "Every other character in the film will be real live human beings. "But the idea is that Paddington will have something of me in his DNA because I'm going to do some sessions wearing one of those helmets with cameras to capture my face muscles, and all that data will somehow be incorporated into Paddington." Bonneville plays Mr Brown, Paddington's "adoptive father", in the movie spearheaded by David Heyman, the producer of the Harry Potter movies. One of the best-loved characters of classic English children's literature, Paddington is known for his duffle-coat, battered suitcase and love of marmalade sandwiches. He is unfailingly polite, but has a knack for getting into trouble. He first appeared in 1958 in Michael Bond's book A Bear Called Paddington, in which the Brown family find him sitting in London's Paddington train station, having made his way there from "darkest Peru". The family adopt the bear – who carries a sign reading "Please Look After This Bear" – and he goes on to have 20 books' worth of adventures. Heyman had announced last year that he was teaming up with France-based film studio Studiocanal to update Paddington's adventures for the big screen. Filming starts this month and it is due in cinemas in November 2014. Paul King, director of the British TV comedy series The Mighty Boosh, is to direct the film, according to the film trade magazine Screen Daily. The Hollywood Reporter said Kidman would play "an evil taxidermist out for revenge". The stories have previously been adapted in cartoon form and using puppets. — AFP Relaxnews |
12 Years A Slave wins at Toronto film fest Posted: Steve McQueen's drama about slavery may well be an early Oscar contender. 12 Years A Slave, the true story of a free black man sold into slavery in 1840s Louisiana in the United States, won the top prize at the Toronto International Film Festival last weekend. The film, by Shame director Steve McQueen and starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, took home the BlackBerry People's Choice award for best film at the 38th edition of the festival in Toronto, Canada. Based on the 1853 memoir of Solomon Northup, the film has won widespread acclaim from critics and audiences in both Toronto and at the Telluride Film Festival, and has been touted as a top early contender for Oscars. The Toronto award, which has in the past gone to Oscar best picture winners such as The King's Speech and Slumdog Millionaire, and last year went to multiple award winner Silver Linings Playbook, will likely only increase the buzz around the film. "It was just one of those stories that I felt needed to be told," McQueen, who like Ejiofor hails from Britain, told Reuters last week. "The reason I got into the idea of the free man is that you could identify with him. ... When he is captured and put into slavery, you go on this journey with him," he said. The runner-up for the prize, which is selected by festival audiences, was Stephen Frears' Philomena, which stars Judi Dench as an Irish woman searching for the son she was forced by nuns to give up in the 1950s. The People's Choice award for top documentary went to Jehane Noujaim's The Square, which follows activists in Cairo's Tahrir Square in the wake of the 2011 overthrow of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. The film, which also won an award at the Sundance Film Festival in January as a work in progress, follows a handful of activists over the course of two years as what initially appears to be a clear road to democracy in Egypt instead turns into a battle of competing forces looking to take control. "This is a film about people who relentlessly are fighting for their rights, even when there seems to be absolutely no hope and no light at the end of the tunnel," Noujaim told an audience of filmmakers, reporters and critics at the awards presentation. The People's Choice award for top film in the Midnight Madness programme – which tends to focus on horror or extremely offbeat films – went to Sion Sono's Why Don't You Play In Hell?. The best Canadian feature award went to Asphalt Watches, directed by Shayne Ehman and Seth Scrivers. Started in 1976, the Toronto festival now ranks with Cannes and Sundance as one of the world's top movie gatherings. The festival often serves as a launching point for films and performances that go on to win Academy Awards, as well as international films seeking distribution deals. Even before its People's Choice win, 12 Years A Slave was garnering Oscar buzz, with critics praising both McQueen and Ejiofor, but also Michael Fassbender's turn as a brutal slave owner. Other films that have impressed critics during the 11-day festival include Alfonso Cuaron's astronaut thriller Gravity, the star-laden August: Osage County, and Dallas Buyers Club, for which Matthew McConaughey dropped 14kg to play an AIDS-afflicted homophobic Texas rodeo cowboy. — Reuters |
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