Eideard

Angry Birds, the hugely popular mobile phone game, is played by 30 million people every day for a total of 300 million minutes, its creators have revealed.

The simple game, which is made by Rovio, a Finnish company, is played by around 130 million people every month.

The figures were announced by Andrew Stalbow, Rovio’s American chief at the annual Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco…

Stalbow said that company was now focusing building a “next generation digital entertainment company” and growing the game into a “big entertainment franchise”. Rovio’s new ventures are set to include an Angry Birds cookbook of egg recipes. In Angry Birds, the birds are angry because their eggs have been stolen by the pigs.

Stalbow also confirmed to The Telegraph that the Angry Birds movie is slated for release in 2014, after a series of cartoons have been released…

The company’s second largest market after the US is now China, where both the game and merchandise such as toys and jumpers are hugely popular.

Obviously, with this number of people enjoying the game instead of their job or studies – it must be the work of the AntiChrist. Or at least someone who doesn’t vote Republican/Tory/Conservative.

Click to enlarge!

A new piece of artwork by Richard Sargent, featuring a huge crowd of robots from movies, television and more. Can you find WALL-E among them?

You might win a signed poster print of Richard’s ‘Where’s WALL-E?’ art! How many characters can you identify? Use the guide picture to name as many as you can. The most correct answers will win a poster. Answers to richard@hopewellstudios.com. Closing date for entries 31st August 2011. Entries will be judged by name and origin of each character; in the event of a tie a winner will be chosen at random.

Thanks, Ursarodinia

 
‘In the old days all the movie songs were recorded right there on set,” remembers Asha Bhosle, the quintessential Bollywood singer. Now 77, Bhosle was just 11 when she performed her first song on a movie soundtrack, Chala Chala Nav Bala from Majha Bal in 1943. In the 68 years since, she has provided the on-screen singing voice for generations of actresses unable to capture and deliver a song as brilliantly as she could, singing around 20,000 tunes in 14 languages, as well as recording with Robbie Williams, Michael Stipe and the Kronos Quartet, and lending her name to Cornershop’s Brimful of Asha, one of the landmark No 1 hits of the 1990s.

“My son Anand first heard that song in San Francisco and told me all about it,” she says, via a friend and translator, from Australia where she is appearing in concert. “I was at the immigration counter at Heathrow Airport once and the young officer read the profession listed in my passport as ‘singer’. He was intrigued, so I told him I was the Asha from Brimful of Asha, and he was so excited he left his post and called his friends over to meet me. So I guess, at the very least, that song helped me clear UK immigration faster than usual.”

When Bhosle thinks back to the start of her career she remembers dusty movie sets, people running around, lights and cameras. “And there was little me,” she says, “falling asleep and being woken up to sing my part. I think of that time fondly – it was pre-independence India. Only my sister Lata [Mangeshkar, a hugely popular singer in her own right], Manna Dey [the 91-year old Bengali singer] and I are left from those who began their careers in what was British India…”

Bhosle became particularly well known for her ability to change her voice for each role and a huge amount of film work, alongside established male singing stars such as Dey, Kishore Kumar and Mohammad Rafi, followed…

“Rahul Dev’s music was way ahead of its time,” she says. “He had so many different styles and rhythms in his music. You can hear jazz, Latin, that John Barry, super-spy sound, some blues, calypso and pop in there; 17 years after he died, he’s more popular than ever.”

RTFA. Learn to love some of the best pop music ever to reach out to the whole world.

This movie was generated from 600 individual still images captured by the Visual Monitoring Camera (VMC) on board Mars Express during the 8194th orbit on 27 May 2010 between 02:00 and 09:00 UTC (04:00-11:00 CEST) and were transmitted to Earth a few hours later via ESA’s 35m New Norcia deep space station in Australia.

The portion of the movie where the planet beneath the spacecraft was dark has been largely removed since no detail was visible.

The images show the spacecraft’s slow descent from high above the planet, speeding up as closest approach is passed and then slowing down again as the distance increases. Towards the start of the video, the giant Martian volcanoes can be seen followed by the beginning of the ice coverage around the South Pole as the spacecraft crosses over to the night side of the planet. Shortly after emerging back onto the day side of the planet, the beautiful North Pole can be observed, followed by the long climb away from the planet over the equator. Finally, at the end of the movie, the disk of Phobos can be seen crossing from top to bottom of the image.

I’d love to see this in person, in place.

Valentine’s Day is coming! And with it the usual traditions that include an outrageous price hike in roses, an outrageous price hike in restaurant dining, and the well-timed rom-com. The role of the latter belongs to a flick to be released on Feb. 12, “Valentine’s Day.” (What a clever title, eh?)

However, from the posters and trailers for the film it is hard to know that the infamous “McSteamy” is in the film. Eric Dane’s name appears on the movie posters, but, unlike the rest of the cast, his face is not present on the actor-compiled heart. In the trailers for the film Dane is not shown in any of the scenes extracted from the movie, he is just shown alongside his name. So what is Dane’s role? Narrator?

Nope. In reality Dane is a victim of advertisement editing that eliminates the trace of homosexual relationships in a film, even though they are central to the storyline. In other words, the film’s advertisements have been “de-gayed.” (And yes that means that Dane’s character is shacking up with another one of the male desirables in the film.)

In “Valentine’s Day,” Dane plays Bradley Cooper’s closeted football-player boyfriend. Would learning this info from the trailers and posters for the film have made you more or less interested in seeing it?

Unfortunately, regardless of your reaction, those in charge of marketing have already decided for you. Instead of playing on the publicity of a dreamy Cooper and Dane partnership – “Brokeback Mountain,” anyone?, the advertisers of the film have decided to disguise it.

Most of the folks running promotion, distribution, marketing for the wonderful world of American mass media haven’t made it past Chickenshit 101, yet. They should be in Congress.

Creation, starring Paul Bettany, details Darwin’s “struggle between faith and reason” as he wrote On The Origin of Species. It depicts him as a man who loses faith in God following the death of his beloved 10-year-old daughter, Annie.

The film was chosen to open the Toronto Film Festival and has its British premiere on Sunday. It has been sold in almost every territory around the world, from Australia to Scandinavia.

However, US distributors have resolutely passed on a film which will prove hugely divisive in a country where, according to a Gallup poll conducted in February, only 39 per cent of Americans believe in the theory of evolution…

Jeremy Thomas, the Oscar-winning producer of Creation, said he was astonished that such attitudes exist 150 years after On The Origin of Species was published.

I’m not. Understand we are “led” by politicians who in general will fall to their knees in fear of religious claptrap in order to stay in office. Clinton did it when his surgeon-general acknowledged that masturbation was normal – and fired her. Obama has discovered that “God bless the United States of America” is the best way to end every speech. The Talibaptist Republicans? – well, they’re in a league of their own.

“The film has no distributor in America. It has got a deal everywhere else in the world but in the US, and it’s because of what the film is about. People have been saying this is the best film they’ve seen all year, yet nobody in the US has picked it up.

“It is unbelievable to us that this is still a really hot potato in America. There’s still a great belief that He made the world in six days. It’s quite difficult for we in the UK to imagine religion in America. We live in a country which is no longer so religious. But in the US, outside of New York and LA, religion rules…”

No doubt, cable TV and the satellite networks will move beyond the cowardice of the theatrical distribution mafia. I expect I’ll get to see the film either downloaded to my DVR – or from iTunes – and circumvent the mob of peasants and villagers with torches.

Thanks, Cinaedh

Founding a successful website is normally a story that would interest only a handful of computer obsessives. It would certainly not be the subject of a million-dollar publishing deal and a Hollywood movie brimming with A-list talent. But then Facebook is no ordinary website.

A book about the beginnings of the globally popular social networking site, which now has more than 200 million users, is set to hit American bookshelves on 14 July. And far from being a story of bespectacled nerds, it promises to be a tale of sex with Victoria’s Secret models, hard-partying champagne bashes and the dark deeds of the rich and powerful.

The cover of the book, The Accidental Billionaires, sets the raunchy tone. It features an overturned cocktail glass and a discarded bra next to the blurb: “A tale of sex, money, genius and betrayal.” The exposé is written by the Boston-based author Ben Mezrich, who has previously, and controversially, chronicled the deeds of Las Vegas gamblers, high-powered financiers and Japanese gangsters.

Purporting to tell the story of Facebook’s founding by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg and his friends, it charts the site’s rise from a private project aimed at judging the attractiveness of his fellow students to a way for classmates to keep in touch, and eventually to a global phenomenon valued at billions of dollars.

Along the way Mezrich paints a story of backstabbing, wild sex, hard drinking and, at one stage, feasting on roasted koala on a yacht owned by a Silicon Valley millionaire. “No one has really succeeded in making Silicon Valley sexy. But this book might,” said Caroline McCarthy, a journalist for the technology website CNET, who has reviewed a rare advance copy.

Perhaps no wonder, then, that The Accidental Billionaires is the subject of a major movie deal after actor Kevin Spacey signed on to produce it. Spacey even wrote a review of the book on its Amazon page, calling it “a captivating story of betrayal, vast amounts of cash, and two friends who revolutionised the way humans connect to one another – only to have an enormous falling out and never speak again”.

That’s about as much of the pre-release crappola I can stand. RTFA if you want more.

Like – is this what Social Networking is all about?

Especially if they worked for Countrywide Mortgage Company, this is what is going to happen to them!

Daylife/Reuters Pictures

Vikas Swarup, the author of the novel “Q and A” on whose story the Oscar-winning movie “Slumdog Millionaire” is based, said he hopes Chinese readers will relate to his story and explore a “common destiny”.

Indian writer Vikas Swarup says, “The book was a success even before the film came out, but suddenly the tremendous success of the film which won 8 Oscar awards including the Best Picture, has taken the book to a different level. Because even though the story is set in India, the theme indeed is universal — the theme of love and loss, the friendship, the betrayal, and above them all, the theme of underdog, trying things over the odds and winning. I think that’s the theme that people all over the world love to celebrate.”

“Not only ‘Q and A”, but also “Six Suspects”, will appear before the Chinese mainland’s readers and I am really excited about it. Because I know Chinese readers are great readers, and I hope they will feel a lot related to the book because we are both developing nations, and I think we can find a lot of common things in these stories.”

“Basically I think India and China are the two great civilizations of the world, and both of us can explore our common destiny together.”

Increasing shared experiences, shared struggle for a proper place on the world’s stage – is a natural for the people of India and China.

A judge locked up killer Clifton Bloomfield for 195 years, but now the multiple murderer is out–on video–in a movie role he filmed between homicides.

Bloomfield described himself as trustworthy and reliable a year and a half ago when casting director David Córdova was auditioning extras for the Sony Pictures movie ” Felon ” starring Steven Dorff and New Mexico resident Val Kilmer.

And he got the movie role he was seeking playing a convict in a violent prison drama. He already had killed two people, and a month after “Felon” wrapped he resumed his real-life killing spree.

“We’re expecting actors to come to our casting calls,” Córdova told KRQE News 13. “I’m not expecting the real thing to come through. I don’t think anybody else was actually aware that we had cast a mass murderer on the film.”

Córdova says he can’t afford to background check the thousands of background actors he uses but he wishes he could.

Now serving five life sentences Bloomfield won’t be auditioning for any more movies after being cast in the permanent role of a prison inmate.

Unless, of course, someone in the prison system does something really stupid like let him out by mistake. It happens here.