Eideard

 
Thanks, honeyman

Hungarian police have seized a stockpile of weapons that was shipped to the Hungarian capital for the production of a film about zombies starring Brad Pitt…

Weapons expert Bela Gajdos, who has worked on the filming of zombie movie “World War Z” to ensure the safe handling of the weapons used, told national news agency MTI that each firearm had been converted to restrict its use to blank ammunition. Gajdos added that the weapons were completely harmless and had already been used on a shoot in London…

“We had a police permit to bring these guns into the country,” Gajdos told MTI, adding that the production had contracted arms experts to establish whether the guns complied with Hungarian laws. But the guns were seized before experts could inspect them…

Janos Hajdu, the chief of the Hungarian Anti-Terrorism Center on Monday said the agency seized a large stockpile of weapons, which arrived from England on a chartered plane…Hajdu said the firearms had not been properly disabled and could not be allowed into the country less than two weeks before a national holiday commemorating the 1956 uprising, MTI reported.

Anti-terrorism laws and the coppers chartered to enforce them are damned close to being as demented as the terrorists they say they’re fighting.

Corporate headquarters in Westport, Connecticut

A 1969 documentary by Ken Loach, made for and later banned by Save the Children, has been shown to an audience of critics and colleagues in London. The untitled film will have its public premiere on 1 September and forms part of a major retrospective of the British director’s work at BFI Southbank.

The film took a critical view of the charity’s work in the UK and Kenya that its backers felt subverted its aims.

“There was a showing and not much was said,” the 75-year-old Loach remembers. “People left the room, and then we heard from the lawyers.”

The 53-minute film was co-funded by Save the Children, then celebrating its 50th anniversary, and London Weekend Television. “We assumed LWT would support the independence of a critical eye,” said Loach on Monday. “But they just backed away.”

As a result, the piece was consigned to the British Film Institute’s National Archive “and the key thrown away”.

That’s the version the Brits get to deal with. During my years in performing arts in among other places – Fairfield County in Connecticut – there were several happenings like this in the same time period.

Of course, films can be strange beasts. I saw the first cut of “Carry it On” and Joan Baez liked to have a fit on the spot with so much portrayed of her hubby, David, walking away from pacifism after he spent serious time in prison with folks from mean streets. The version that made it to nicey-nicey film festivals had lots of changes.

Is a woman in a 1928 film who appears to have a cell phone glued to her ear in fact a time traveler? That’s what some conspiracy theorists think this eerie scene (video below) from Charlie Chaplin’s 1928 film, “The Circus” is telegraphing, or rather phoning, and that the woman — who looks about as time-traveler-ish as Martha Stewart, is indeed a voyager from the vortex of time and space.

Belfast filmmaker George Clarke, a Chaplin fan, says he was watching the “behind the scenes of ‘The Circus’ ” and was “stumped” at what he saw.

“I kept winding it back, playing it; winding it back, playing it back, and I couldn’t explain this,” he says.

Watch the video. I clearly see her (?) holding something with the letters “K-y-o-c-e-r-a” on it. What else could it be?

The course is being offered by the University of Baltimore and will be taught by the author Arnold Blumberg, who wrote a book on zombie movies, and the curator of Geppi’s Entertainment museum, which specialises in American pop culture.

Students taking English 333 will watch 16 classic zombie films and read zombie comics according to the Baltimore Sun. As an alternative to a final research paper they may write scripts or draw storyboards for their ideal zombie flicks.

Jonathan Shorr, chairman of the university’s school of communications design told the newspaper it was introduced to meet a demand for “interesting, off-the-wall” courses…

“They think they’re taking this wacko zombie course, and they are. But on the way, they learn how literature and mass media work, and how they come to reflect our times.”

Just in case anyone wondered why American education is held in such low regard.

Bollywood is to make its first film about the childhood of Jesus.

Director Singeetham Srinivasa Rao said his production will be narrated in four languages and feature an all-Indian cast of child actors and seven devotional songs.

Producer Konda Krishnam Raju said that the film focuses on the childhood of Jesus, a contrast with other movies that depict the later years. “This is the first presentation of this type in Bollywood history,” he said.

While the movie has special significance for Christians, it is “intended for a global audience,” Rao said.

Christians in India number 24 million, or about 2.3 per cent of the country’s population.

Religious Indian films have traditionally used child actors to highlight the “innocence, sanctity and divinity” of religious figures, the director said. Rao’s film will follow that tradition, using the child actors to depict adult characters as well as children.

American makeup artist Christien Tinsley, who earned an Academy Award nomination for his work on The Passion of the Christ, will also be involved in the film.

Aditya Productions plans to release the movie next year in English and three Indian languages – Telugu, Hindi and Malayalam. South Indian star Pawan Kalyan will narrate the Telugu and Malayalam versions, while other well known actors will narrate the English and Hindi versions, the filmmakers said.

You can be assured that questions of youth and sex will be handled with the same innocence and gentleness as any Hindu film. And that won’t make the least little bit of difference to American fundamentalist hypocrites.

Har!

Took six days to film

Hong Kong director Christopher Sun is currently filming his $3.2 million ’3-D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy’, which is due for release in May, but Italian director Tinto Brass has already announced he will produce a 3D remake of his 1979 erotic film Caligula.

Although mainland Chinese censors are almost certain to block the movie’s screening, it has sparked wide interest in other Asian markets, including Japan and South Korea, as well Europe, and the United States.

Producer Stephen Shiu said: “This is the future of the movie business — it’s human nature to want to see things in 3D.”

Adding to the pressure, the American company Hustler is making a pornographic spoof of 3D science fiction blockbuster Avatar, the highest-grossing movie of all time and the film that heralded the beginning of the mainstream 3D boom.

Are we supposed to be gullible enough to believe it takes more than a week or two to produce, edit and turn out a porn film? 3D or otherwise?

It is to laugh.

Hollywood’s faith in the power of 3D movies to deliver a bright future of packed cinemas and spectacle-wearing audiences has been jolted by figures that show the high-tech format may already be floundering.

Seven months ago James Cameron’s science fiction epic Avatar burst onto the screen in three dimensions, taking in $2.7 billion and becoming the highest grossing film of all time…

But now, with the tally of major films released in the new format expected to reach 22 by the end of the year – with up to $7.50 extra being charged per ticket – there are signs that 3D may not, after all, be the panacea for falling ticket sales…

When Avatar came out in December, 71 per cent of Americans who went to see it on opening weekend – often the peak moment for a new release – opted for a cinema showing the 3D version. In March, when the animated fantasy How to Train Your Dragon was released, 68 per cent of the audience chose to see the film that way. By May that figure for Shrek Forever After was down to 61 per cent. At the beginning of this month only 56 per cent saw The Last Airbender in 3D, and a week later the proportion fell even lower, to 45 per cent, for the newly-released animation Despicable Me…

Critics say part of the problem may be the technology itself. While Avatar was specifically made in the new format, studios have hurriedly converted films that were originally made for two dimensions. The process…can be done in a matter of weeks, allowing for a quick release. However, a lot of the time it simply doesn’t work and delivers murky pictures…

After seeing director M.Night Shyamalan’s…The Last Airbender…Roger Ebert said it “looked like it was filmed with a dirty sheet over the lens”. He said Hollywood’s current infatuation with 3D was just an excuse to add surcharges to already expensive cinema tickets…

Some of those who know the film industry best are convinced the latest trend will go the same way as the 3D fads of the 1950s and 1980s. “3D is a waste of a perfectly good dimension and Hollywood’s current crazy stampede toward it is suicidal,” according to Ebert.

I can’t speak from personal experience. I haven’t found the potential interesting enough to drag me to the nearest whoop-de-doo cinemaplex. And no way would I bust my personal budget for entertainment hardware for a 3D replacement for my existing HDTV sitting happily in our living room.

Might get a bigger set, some day. That’s always a worthwhile investment. Especially if we get more proper football matches in HD.

Dr Brett Mills’ study ‘Television wildlife documentaries and animals’ right to privacy’ analyses the making of documentaries that accompanied the BBC wildlife series Nature’s Great Events (2009). Exploring the debates on ethics, animal welfare and rights and human rights, Dr Mills suggests that animals have a right to privacy but this is turned into a challenge for the production teams, who use newer forms of technology to overcome species’ desire not to be seen…

“This is an important debate for two reasons. Firstly, wildlife documentaries are usually seen as important pieces of public service broadcasting, and it’s therefore worth us thinking about the ethical contexts within which such productions exist. Secondly, such documentaries are the key way in which many people ‘encounter’ a range of species from all over the globe, and so they therefore contribute to how we think about other species and human/animal interactions. By exploring what wildlife documentaries do, and how they do it, I hope to contribute to environmental debates at a time when the global effects of human behaviour are rightly under scrutiny.”

At the heart of the documentary project is the necessity for animals to be seen. Dr Mills suggests that this necessity itself raises a series of ethical concerns, but these seem to be sidelined in the moral debates surrounding wildlife documentaries. The use of sophisticated aerial technology to film animals, for example, is justified because it does not disturb them, yet the question of whether it is appropriate to film animals in this way is not raised. Underpinning such action is an assumption that animals have no right to privacy, and that the camera crew have no need to determine whether those animals consent to being filmed.

Unlike human activities, a distinction of the public and the private is not made in the animal world. There are many activities which animals engage in which are common to wildlife documentary stories but which are rendered extremely private in the human realm; mating, giving birth, and dying are recurring characteristics in nature documentaries, but the human version of these activities remains largely absent from broadcasting.

Dr Mills said: “It might at first seem odd to claim that animals might have a right to privacy. Privacy, as it is commonly understood, is a culturally human concept. The key idea is to think about animals in terms of the public/private distinction. We can never really know if animals are giving consent, but they often do engage in forms of behaviour which suggest they’d rather not encounter humans, and we might want to think about equating this with a desire for privacy.

Anthropomorphism carried to a logically absurd extreme.

Young movie addict

Smoking in youth-rated movies has not declined despite a pledge two years ago by Hollywood studios to encourage producers to show less “gratuitous smoking,” according to an anti-smoking group.

The American Medical Association Alliance has been trying to get movie studios to make smoking-free films.

The American Medical Association Alliance, pointing to research that big-screen smoking leads teens to pick up the tobacco habit, called for an R rating for any movie with smoking scenes….

“Research has shown that one-third to one-half of all young smokers in the United States can be attributed to smoking these youth see in movies,” said Dr. Jonathan Fielding, head of the Los Angeles County Public Health Department.

Fielding cited another study that he said “found that adolescents whose favorite movie stars smoked on screen are significantly more likely to be smokers themselves and to have a more accepting attitude toward smoking”….

Joan Graves, who chairs the Motion Picture Association’s movie rating committee, offered her own statistics, based on all of the 900 films rated each year, not just the top movies included in Fielding’s numbers.

The association has given no G ratings in the past two years to a movie with smoking, Graves said….

“Any movie with smoking should be rated R,” [Fielding] said. “And if they worry about an R rating hurting their profits, then they should work with studios to remove smoking from films that hurt youth.”

I have a feeling that I could go to lunch with members of the AMA Alliance and the Motion Picture Association and walk away not liking any of them.

Can’t we find some clerical jobs for these guys or something?