Small MPU – Page 927
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Reviews
Welcome To The Sticks (Bienvenue chez les ch'tis)
Dir Dany Boon. Fr. 2008. 106mins.A last-minute English title change for Dany Boon's soaraway French box office success (it was to be called Welcome To The Land Of The Ch'tis) should help this broad-based, amiable comedy attract audiences looking to find out what le tout France is talking about.Butthat is ...
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News
German box office makes strong start to 2008
Box-office takings and cinema admissions in Germany are up 30% year-on-year for the first quarter of 2008, according to figures collated by Nielsen EDI.In the period from January 3 to March 23 2008, German cinemas have been experiencing an unexpected, but welcome revival in popularity after the disappointing results of ...
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News
MIPCOM: TV-Loonland acquires Sony Wonder
German animation group TV-Loonland has bought the television production and distribution assets of Sony Wonder - a division of Sony Music Entertainment specialising in children's and family programming - and its subsidiary Sunbow Entertainment for $20.5m.Sony Wonder handles a catalogue of 1,200 half-hour episodes. The division started out as a ...
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News
Horton chases down $100m at international box office
With only scattered new openings scheduled in the wake of the Easter holiday, marketplace leaders Horton Hears A Who! and 10,000 BC are set to dominate the international box office again this weekend. Fox International's Horton opens in three smaller territories - Taiwan, South Africa and Croatia - before entering ...
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News
Becky Sloviter rejoins Parent in MGM's production group
Mary Parent's aggressive recruitment drive to build a production team at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) continued yesterday with the news that she had hired Becky Sloviter as vice president of production at MGM Pictures.Parent, who is chairperson of MGM's Worldwide Motion Picture Group, yesterday named former New Line executive Cale Boyter as ...
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News
Summit options screenplay The Tomb for Jeff Wadlow to direct
Summit Entertainment has optioned the action screenplay The Tomb by Miles Chapman which is currently in development.Jeff Wadlow will direct the project and Jason Keller has been hired to rewrite. The Tomb marks Summit's second collaboration with Wadlow after Never Back Down. He also directed Cry_Wolf for Rogue Pictures.The Tomb ...
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News
Lionsgate acquires film rights to Einstein thriller The Last Equation
Lionsgate has acquired film rights to The Last Equation, the debut novel by screenwriter Stuart Gibbs.The novel is about the mystery surrounding Albert Einstein's last equation which he named Pandora. The Pandora equation had the potential to solve the world's energy problems but Einstein either hid or destroyed the equation ...
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News
Rome may replace public jury with industry jury at next fest
One of the Rome Film Fest's most defining elements - its popular jury - may be set to change if comments made by Leandro Pesci, the regional president of ANEC, Italy's national exhibitor organisation hold true. Leandro Pesci made comments at a Rome cinema promotional forum yesterday called Cin ...
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News
Doerrie's Cherry Blossoms leads German Lola nominations
Doris Doerrie's Berlinale competition film Cherry Blossoms - Hanami has attracted six nominations for this year's German Film Awards - the Golden and Silver Lolas - which will be presented in a gala ceremony in Berlin on April 25.German Film Academy president Senta Berger and State Minister for Culture and ...
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News
Editorial - A World-class film-maker
If there was ever a director who could be described as international, it was Anthony Minghella. His career, tragically cut short by his death last week at the age of just 54, was one unhampered by restrictive national borders - a worldview Screen has always sought to serve.Yes, he was ...
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Features
In focus - Closing the deal
Although box office is still booming in many parts of the region, the Asian film market presents unique challenges to Western sales companies. Local product has a market share of at least 40% in the major territories, and as US studio product is also strong, there is little room for ...
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Features
Reaction - Brother, poet and 'realistic romantic'
The news of Anthony Minghella's death, on March 18, aged 54, the result of a haemorrhage following surgery, brought a flood of tributes.HARVEY WEINSTEIN, THE WEINSTEIN COMPANY"I am shocked and heartbroken that we have lost Anthony. He was my mentor, my partner and, most of all, my brother. The grace, ...
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News
Sky Perfect to raise $1bn in IPO
Japan's Sky Perfect Communications, which operates the Sky PerfecTV communications satellite platform, expects to raise more than $1.019bn (Y110bn) via its initial public offering (IPO) scheduled for October 20.Sky Perfect intends to list its shares on the MOTHERS market of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. If it reaches its target figure, ...
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News
Abuse and accountability: Errol Morris on Iraq doc
Errol Morris had a simple starting point for his latest documentary Standard Operating Procedure. Intrigued by the infamous snapshots taken by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison depicting Iraqi detainees who had been forced to form naked pyramids and adopt other sexually degrading poses, the acclaimed US director of The ...
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Features
United Kingdom - Making his beds
In 2005, "a bit exhausted" by the script development on his new feature, Unmade Beds, writer-director Alexis Dos Santos travelled to his native Argentina to shoot an experimental project.A 17-page storyline and improvised performances from teenage actors turned into the $314,000 (EUR200,000) feature Glue, a Spanish-language naturalistic tale of small-town ...
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News
Going into battle: Interview with Vertigo's Rupert Preston
Vertigo may be best known for its lad-friendly hit productions by Nick Love, including The Football Factory, The Business and Outlaw, but that is only one part of the story.The financing, production and distribution company, founded in 2002 by producers Allan Niblo and James Richardson, distribution veteran Rupert Preston (formerly ...
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News
Dark Prince: Luis Cook directs Aardman film
Macabre is not generally a word used to describe Aardman Animations projects, but Luis Cook's blackly comic The Pearce Sisters is certainly dark by the standards of the Bristol-based animation powerhouse.The 10-minute short tells the story of a pair of elderly spinsters who resort to extreme methods in their search ...
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News
Spanish piracy- gearing up for a fight
Uzbekistan, Bangladesh, Belarus ... and Spain. Spain' How does a western European country with such a long-established tradition of cinema-going and a rich history of film-making find itself on a watch list of the worst offenders for intellectual property theft, alongside states with virtually no film industries of their own ...
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Features
Spain - Box office - Biting back at the bootlegs
Whether the problem lies with piracy or mediocre product, Spanish admissions and DVD revenue took a tumble last year as audiences found other ways to fill their leisure time. Although the territory's annual per capita cinema admissions remain higher than in the UK, Italy or Germany, they plunged by 18% ...
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Features
Spain - On Location - Studio could be breakthrough
Spanish locations earned the attention of Woody Allen (Vicky Cristina Barcelona) and Steven Soderbergh (The Argentine and Guerrilla) in 2007. This year Universal and Working Title's Iraq-set The Green Zone, directed by Paul Greengrass and starring Matt Damon, is shooting on location around the country.Now the Spanish capital of Madrid ...