Get cash from your website. Sign up as affiliate

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

“Madonna Gets Advice From Royal Family Over New Movie - Sound-Check Music” plus 2 more

“Madonna Gets Advice From Royal Family Over New Movie - Sound-Check Music” plus 2 more


Madonna Gets Advice From Royal Family Over New Movie - Sound-Check Music

Posted: 11 Oct 2010 01:26 AM PDT

Madonna has received advice from the Royal Family about her new film, it's been reported.

The singer and occasional director is currently shooting W.E., which tells the story of King Edward VIII's romance with US divorcée Wallis Simpson.

Madonna's production company contacted the entire Royal Family when researching the role, according to The Sun.

The Duke and Duchess of Gloucester were apparently among those who took up the offer to meet the star.

"Some senior figures turned it down," a source said. "But others, including Princess Michael of Kent, Prince Edward and the Gloucesters, jumped at the chance."

W.E., which is Madonna's second attempt at directing, is due to open in 2011.

Musicians Turned Movie Stars

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php
Five Filters featured article: Beyond Hiroshima - The Non-Reporting of Falluja's Cancer Catastrophe.



image

This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

No Stopping Movie View of Mark Zuckerberg - New York Times

Posted: 03 Oct 2010 06:03 PM PDT

Millions of the moviegoers who made "The Social Network" the top box-office draw of the weekend saw an unflattering portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder and chief executive of Facebook.

To many viewers, Mr. Zuckerberg comes off as a callow, socially inept schemer who misled fellow students who had wanted to build an online social network at Harvard and who also pushed out a co-founder of the company. With only a few exceptions — girlfriends and a prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firm — the names have not been changed to mask identities.

The film's truthfulness, however, has been strongly questioned in forums like Slate, the online magazine, and The New Republic.

Many of those who know Mr. Zuckerberg argue that it is inaccurate in significant ways. David Kirkpatrick, who wrote a company-authorized history of Facebook titled "The Facebook Effect," said, "The reality is, it's a really good movie — however, it's not a true story." Mr. Kirkpatrick has written critically about the movie on the Web site The Daily Beast.

And that raises a question: how can filmmakers take liberties with the story of a living person, and does that person have any recourse if the portrayal upsets him? After all, many movies run a legal disclaimer in the credits that says, "Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental."

There is nothing new about film biographies, though hagiographies are far more common than hatchet jobs. A movie in the works on Chesley B. Sullenberger III will focus on landing a plane in the Hudson, not on recreating a scene in a college bar where a girl called the protagonist a bad name — an important moment in the Facebook film. Studios will often seek the cooperation of subjects, paying them for the use of their life stories.

When it comes to public figures, lawyers say, appropriating someone's life story for a movie is not so different from telling such details in a news article or printed biography. Politicians have grown used to harsh onscreen treatment, having learned that there is a degree of latitude for inaccuracy and strong protection against libel suits.

Eugene Volokh, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, law school, said that if Mr. Zuckerberg sued and was declared a public figure, he would then "have to show that the filmmakers knew the statements were false, or were reckless about the possibility of falsehood."

David L. Hudson Jr., a scholar at the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, agreed that "it would be pretty difficult" for a person like Mr. Zuckerberg, with a good likelihood of being found a public figure, to successfully sue over a movie he believes to be libelous.

The legal standard was set in the realm of journalism, in cases like New York Times v. Sullivan, said Floyd Abrams, a leading First Amendment lawyer, but "a moviemaker is not going to get less protection than a journalist. If they've got sources and depositions and the like, and they use it in a reasonably fair way, they are likely protected."

Scott Rudin, one of the film's producers, said that in fact, the filmmakers worked hard at discerning the truth in conflicting versions of events and telling it straight. "Where the plaintiffs and defendants don't agree in life, they don't agree in the movie," he said.

The result, he insisted, is accurate. "The movie is thoroughly vetted," he said. "I'm very comfortable that we got the facts right."

Mr. Zuckerberg and his company, it seems, are not taking a benign view of the new film, and issued a statement that plays up the sense that the portrayal is fictional and shouldn't be taken all that seriously.

"They do a wonderful job of telling a good story," the company said in the statement. "Of course, the reality probably wouldn't make for a very fun or interesting movie." The company also quoted the screenwriter, Aaron Sorkin, who told New York Magazine, "I don't want my fidelity to be to the truth; I want it to be to storytelling."

However, on the movie's opening day, the staff at the company's Palo Alto, Calif., headquarters bought two theaters' worth of seats to catch an early screening. If the film's audience continues to grow, and it begins to attract awards, it could prove a more nagging problem for a young company that has already come under attack from privacy advocates. In such a case, companies have chosen a forum more favorable than the United States to sue, Mr. Abrams said. "If he wanted to sue, he ought to sue in London, where the law is so very pro plaintiff and so very indifferent to what we consider to be free speech rights," he said.

But any courtroom would hold other risks for Mr. Zuckerberg, Mr. Abrams said. "The last thing he'd want is to bring a lawsuit on his whole life," a headline-grabbing ordeal in which depositions and withering cross-examination could make anyone look bad.

The company will most likely just let things stand. If the film, for all its critical acclaim, turns out to be a pallid performer at the box office, it could be out of the multiplex in a short time. Its opening weekend was solid, with $23 million in receipts. Any legal action against the film would bring more attention to it.

There is some precedent in Silicon Valley for the image-conscious subject of such a film to bury the hatchet. "Pirates of Silicon Valley," a TV movie that appeared on TNT in 1999, told the bits-to-riches stories of Bill Gates and Steven P. Jobs. It portrayed Mr. Gates as a nerdish conqueror and Mr. Jobs as a revolutionary creep.

The film did not seem to leave hard feelings, though. At an Apple product unveiling in 1999, the actor who portrayed Mr. Jobs in the movie, Noah Wyle, pretended to be the "iCEO," stepping onto the stage in Mr. Jobs's signature black turtleneck and jeans and telling the crowd about the "insanely great" products to be announced that day.

Steve Jobs himself then came out to whoops and cheers, and told the crowd that he had invited Mr. Wyle because "he's a better me than me."

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php
Five Filters featured article: Beyond Hiroshima - The Non-Reporting of Falluja's Cancer Catastrophe.



image

This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Movie Review: Ben Affleck and a Team of Nuns with Guns Rob The Town - Associated Content

Posted: 08 Oct 2010 03:41 PM PDT

At this point, Doug begins to take an interest in her romantically, following her to a laundromat where their first meeting takes place and it does so in a scene so expertly shot and written, it makes you want to stand
up and clap. From here on out, the two get to know each other and the film gets down to its core point: Claire exposing Doug's mind to the joys of life and all that it has to offer, the very crucial things which he was denied during his upbringing. This is what causes Doug to slowly attempt to drift away from his life of crime throughout the rest of the film. The Town rides a fine line between Heat and The Departed, featuring three neatly filmed robbery sequences in which our robbers are dressed as creepy skeletor figures, then as nuns, and finally, as policemen and EMTs. Throughout the course of the film, the grips of Agent Frawley and the FBI tighten as the conclusion nears and you can feel it too. These guys have a rough sketch of who they're after but they need the concrete evidence required to act upon it.

Ben Affleck depicts a newfound muse for directing in The Town which throws so many suspenseful scenes at us that we are encouraged to participate. One particularly when Jem unexpectedly joins Doug and Claire at a lunch table, he didn't know they were seeing each other up to that point, but meanwhile Claire recalls one of the robbers having a tattoo on the back of his neck (Jem), God forbid she sees the back of this guy's neck. Doug is anxious and so are we, he wants this guy to get away from the table and so do we, but of course he wants to be a hard-head and not listen. Lesson learned? If you plan on robbing banks or committing any type of crime, don't ever get a tattoo. Anyway, point being, the anxiety within many of the film's scenes is unrelenting, and that's how you know the director is doing something right here. In today's cinema, The Town is a gemstone in a pile of feces.

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php
Five Filters featured article: Beyond Hiroshima - The Non-Reporting of Falluja's Cancer Catastrophe.



image

This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

0 comments:

Post a Comment