Anne Becoming Jane

"Anne Hathaway has said she might have to quit acting if her performance in new film "Becoming Jane" is attacked by critics. Anne had to use an English accent to play write Jane Austen in the film and told Grazia that she worked hard to perfect it: “If [I knew if] I messed this up, I’d never forgive myself. I might have to stop acting. The key thing was the accent because everybody will be listening for it.”

“I had really bad dreams about being chased around and stabbed to death with a quill by Austen.” "I was having panic attacks and would wake in the middle of the night sweating and breathing very heavily because it would have really broke my heart to have messed this one up."
”Anne considered staying in her new accent for the whole time during filming to avoid having to relearn it every morning but her boyfriend Raffaello Follieri wouldn’t let her: “He begged me to stop. I really immersed myself in it, but when I talked to Raffaello, he said, ‘Please! It’s bad enough you’re abroad and I can’t see you, now I can’t even hear you!’ So I spoke as myself with him.” Source: http://Fametastic.co.uk

Loving Cola

Jake holding a Coca-Cola bottle.

Kirsten Dunst in the ShoWest Award Ceremony
(16 March 2007)


Kirsten signing at the "Coca-Cola Green Room".
Kirsten enjoying her Cola glass and Coca-Cola can.

Reese Witherspoon.
"Coca-Cola bottles portrait" by Andy Warhol.
Rachel Bilson wearing an Edie Sedgwick-printed shirt.
Sienna Miller as Edie Sedgwick in "Factory Girl" (2006)
The real Edie Sedgwick (1943-1971).
"We are in 1966. The elevator wails reaching the fourth plant. In the middle of the silverplated refuge [The Factory], Edie Sedgwick is sitting on a huge quilted red sofa, her visage is warm but severe, her eyes alive. She smokes a cigarette, sips one pepsi." -"Stargazer: Andy Warhol's World and His Films" (1974) by Stephen Koch.

Ruffalo and The Fountain

"There are a number of things that make David Fincher’s "Zodiac" a masterpiece. I can’t go into them all here, but one of the main weapons Fincher has is his cast, and one of the best performances in that cast comes from Mark Ruffalo.

He’s always been a great actor, but he’s been flying just under the mainstream radar for years, and if there’s any justice, "Zodiac" is going to do a lot to change that. And maybe "The Brothers Bloom" will help as well. Ruffalo has just signed on to

join Rian Johnson’s incredibly awaited follow-up to "Brick", playing the older of the titular con man brothers. Adrien Brody plays the younger brother, while "Babel"’s Rinko Kikuchi plays a woman who helps the duo in their scams.

Also on board is the beautiful Rachel Weisz." -By Devin Faraci.

Download "The Fountain" Soundtrack
"Perhaps what makes THE FOUNTAIN Mansell’s best score, and Aronofsky’s best film (until its indecipherable ending), is that this is a love story through all of its grand sci-fi illusions.
Mansell, once again joined by the poignant strings of The Kronos Quartet (as well as the alt. artist Mogwai), instantly convey the undying bond between Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz’s time-crossed couple.

It’s an approach that firmly connects his scoring for THE FOUNTAIN in a straight, conceptual line with PI and REQUIEM
as music looks into the face of God (real or chemically-induced) to learn some fantastic truth." -By Daniel Schweiger.
Sources: www.Chud.com and www.Ifmagazine.com/

On "Rendition" set

Source: www.Realmovienews.com

Commenting "Rendition"

Rendition: Previews 2007 New Line

"Emotionally riveting and politically relevant, "Rendition" is a daring film that isn’t afraid to ask tough questions. With an

all-star cast that includes Oscar winners Reese Witherspoon

and Meryl Streep and Oscar nominee Jake Gyllenhaal, "Rendition" paints a vast yet intimate canvas of a world in crisis and a family in peril.

Thematically, the film bears some resemblance to "Syriana" and "Bourne Identity," as it's both a cautionary tale and a taut political thriller. "Rendition" walks a fine line between interrogation and torture, between working for the greater good in a post 9/11 world and violating basic codes of decency--between fighting terrorism and becoming a terrorist.

The film's protagonist is Anwar El-Ibraim, a Canadian scientist of Egyptian decent. Caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, he is about to find out what happens when that line is crossed. Anwar is anxious to get home and see his family after a business trip in Rio de Janeiro. Unfortunately, his homecoming is delayed.

Thousands of miles away, in Cairo, a suicide bomb has just rocked the heavily populated Sadat Plaza. Thirty-six are dead, one an American. Rashid Silime, a well-known terrorist and head of the El-Hazim Brigage, a Hezbollah splinter cell, has claimed responsibility. Restitution is needed. Enters Anwar, who happens to be a biochemist with bomb-making experience and family ties to Egypt.

Anwar boarded his plane in Rio as a businessman; he lands in New York a terrorist. As he gets off the plane, Anwar is bound, hooded and taken away. In a few hours he finds himself naked and alone in a barren cell in Cairo. His troubles are just beginning. Anwar is the subject of “Extraordinary Rendition,” a program that authorizes the US government to seize and transfer terrorism suspects to their countries of origin, where they can be “interrogated” without legal protections or restraints.

To the outside world there is no trace of Anwar. The airline claims he was never on the plane from Rio, immigration has no record of his arrival in the U.S. No one seems to know where he is; no one is talking. In desperation, his wife (Reese Withersoon) turns to the only man she can trust, Alan Smith (Peter Sarsgaard), an old friend and Washington insider. Jointly they try to piece together what has happened to her husband.

On the other side of the world, there are people who know exactly what is happening to Anwar. One of them is Douglas Freeman (Jake Gyllenhaal), a National Security Agent stationed in Cairo, who has just been assigned to oversee Anwar’s rendition. Unlike the rest of his colleagues, however, Douglas isn’t convinced that the man had anything do with horrific bombing, nor is he convinced Anwar will survive what is turning into a brutal interrogation.

Driven by conflicting forces of duty and conscience, loyalty and morality, Douglas must ultimately make a choice, a choice that propels "Rendition" to its disturbing and inevitable conclusion.

Written by Kelley Sane, "Rendition is directed by Gavin Hood, who won the Best Foreign-Language Oscar for "Tsotsi." It stars Oscar winner Reese Witherspoon (Walk the Line, Legally Blonde), Oscar winner Meryl Streep (Devil Wears Prada, Adaptation),

Oscar nominee Jake Gyllenhaal (Brokeback Mountain, Jarhead),

and Peter Sarsgaard (Jarhead, Flightplan).

New Line plans to release "Rendition" in late fall/early winter.
Source: http://emanuellevy.com

Web Slinger

"Jake Gyllenhaal may soon collect an awfully big paycheck as America's latest superhero. We hear New Line execs are keen to have the "Brokeback Mountain" hunk play Captain Marvel in "Shazam!" Based on the DC comic, the movie is New Line's bid for a franchise on the order of "Batman" and "Superman." "They're ready to spend up to $200 million to get it started," an insider tells us. Sources say director Peter Segal and his fellow producers want to nab Gyllenhaal before "Spider-Man" director Sam Raimi does - with "Spider-Man 3" due to open on May 4, star Tobey Maguire has said he may let someone else play the web slinger."

Source: From the New York Daily News newspaper.

Two "Zodiac" reviews

"What David Fincher has accomplished is to remind the audience why serial-killers scare us so deeply – it's that they can exist in the real world, that they creep among us and could strike at any moment. [...] The acting across the board is terrific – faithful to the period without sinking into kitsch, restrained without being intentionally dull or "lifelike," and in the case of Jake Gyllenhaal, a real show of range that may even outdo his "Brokeback Mountain" performance.

Gwyneth Paltrow in New Line Cinema's Seven - 1995

I never liked "Seven" because I thought Fincher spent too much time glorifying the sleazy world he'd conjured up, but this movie feels like a rethinking of an earlier film as dramatic as the later violence-is-bad Eastwood movies. (Tellingly, there are very few showy shots in the entire film.) I can always do without scenes of a beleaguered wife whining to her hard-working husband, but there's no question the movie agrees with her. Fincher is as obsessed as his characters are about the crime –the laying-out of the case is fascinatingly detailed but still riveting – but he's smart enough not to fall apart with them. This is a 159-minute treatise on the futility of obsession that never takes it easy on its characters – even when Gyllenhaal’s Robert Graysmith finally gets his wish to “uncover” the truth about the killer at the end of the film, he realizes how empty a dream it really was. It's absolutely tragic and utterly brilliant. I can't think of a crime drama I've loved so completely." Source: www.Thesimon.com

"Zodiac is a meta-thriller: it comments on itself and other serial killer movies, and in a broader sense, on our obsession with real life and fictional serial killers -" -by Randall A Byrn.
Read the full review Source: http://Blogcritics.org