Actualités

“Oslo,” the new HBO film about the back-channel negotiations between the Israeli government and the Palestine Liberation Organization that led to the milestone Oslo Peace Accords, arrives as tensions are at a high in the Middle East.

It’s a moment where the hard work of peacemaking that the film dramatizes is in noticeably short supply, but Bartlett Sher, who makes his feature directing debut with “Oslo,” believes that the message of the movie is even more resonant. Religious, cultural, and political differences will never be bridged if adversaries can’t find a way to have a constructive dialogue, he argues.

Making “Oslo” required a new set of skills for Sher, an acclaimed Broadway director who has guided the stage version of the play to critical acclaim during its New York and London runs and has also overseen Tony-winning productions of “South Pacific,” “The King & I,” and “To Kill a Mockingbird.

Daniel Walber's series on Production Design. Click on the images to see them in magnified detail.

Yul Brynner, who were celebrating this week for his centennial, was in a lot of very expensive movies. His biggest year was 1956, with The King & I, Anastasia and The Ten Commandments - a combined budget of over $20 million. But there were plenty to follow. Studios saw Brynner as a generic racial and ethnic “other,” which got him cast in all sorts of bloated historical, international, orientalist pictures. Which also means, of course, that many of his movies are entirely worthy of consignment to the dustbin of Hollywood history.

Intriguingly, though, he did occasionally work beyond Hollywood. In the late 1960s he joined Orson Welles, Sergei Bondarchuk, Franco Nero and Curd Jürgens in Yugoslavia for The Battle of Neretva. A World War Two Partisan film directed by Veljko Bulajić, a Partisan veteran himself, it...

Link time. Here we go...

Screen

/Film Deadpool 2 and X-Men Dark Phoenix have both wrapped, both due in 2018

/Film Turns out Beyoncé was offered Plumette before Gugu in the recent Beauty & The Beast movie. Insane that they offered Beyoncé a teensy part when Belle was right there. Wtf, Bill Condon?

Coming Soon Gong Li will lead Martin Campbell's next thriller Ana -- the tone is said to be similar to La Femme Nikita.  We'd be super excited because Gong Li is always welcome in leading roles but Campbell's new one The Foreigner with Jackie Chan isn't exactly winning raves

Film Society Helen Mirren named as the honoree at next spring's Chaplin Award Gala in NYC. Robert De Niro was the honoree earlier this year

 

Into Todd Haynes talks about Wonderstruck and about meeting with Barbra Streisand to talk Gypsy !!!

Variety it's official The Current War has moved to...

This year's little-film-that-could came from a most unlikely source. The writer of The King's Speech, David Seidler, has amongst his credits two commercial animated flops (1998's Quest for Camelot and 1999's The King and I) and was fortunate his film found the perfect audience before it was made. The story of King George VI's overcoming of a speech impediment took a cast of eccentric actors, and turned them into a compellingly proper and structured English monarchy. But in reopening the history of the UK pre-World War II, Seidler has found himself stung historical accuracy; in neglecting the House of George's debated Nazi sympathies, is the oft-excoriating criticism of the film's writer due to his own willful neglect, or are we making a charming film about personal battles into a memorandum on Nazism? Is the King's Speech Oscar-worthy, or is it merely a product of the outdated preferences of the Academy itself?...

Director Tom Hooper (John Adams, The Damned United) has been working on a period drama that focuses on the father of Queen Elizabeth II, King George VI.

The film will follow George as “he reluctantly assumes the throne after his brother, Edward, abdicates. Considered unfit to rule and cursed with a nervous stammer, the unprepared monarch turns to an unorthodox speech therapist, Lionel Logue. The two men form an unlikely friendship as King George finds his voice and leads the country into war against the Nazis.”

Currently filming for a 2010 release, The King’s Speech has been written by David Seidler, who has scripted a range of things, from Tucker: The Man and His Dream to The King and I.

Colin Firth has already signed onto the cast as King George VI, along with Geoffrey Rush, who will play Logue. Now being added to the cast are Helena Bonham Carter (Alice in Wonderland,...