Hollywood eyes $70 zombie movie wowing Cannes

A budding British director is enjoying success on a shoestring at Cannes with "Colin," a new zombie feature that cost a scarcely believable $70 to make.

Japanese distributors are currently in negotiations for the rights to the film and buzz around the no-budget zombie chiller has attracted interest from some major American distributors -- all of which is a very nice surprise for the team behind "Colin."

"We were almost fainting at the list of people who were coming [to the final market screening of the film]," said Helen Grace of Left Films who is helping the film's director Marc Price publicize the film in Cannes. "Representatives from major American distributors -- some of the Hollywood studios."

"When we say it's a low budget film, people presume a couple of hundred thousand [dollars]. People can't figure out how it's possible. What Marc's achieved has left people astonished."

It was by advertising for volunteer zombies on social networking site Facebook, borrowing make-up from Hollywood blockbusters and teaching himself how to produce special effects that thrifty director Price was able to make the film for less than the price of a zombie DVD box set.

"The approach was to say to people, 'OK guys, we don't have any money, so bring your own equipment,'" the the 30 year-old director said.

With help from a makeshift band of friends and volunteers, Price shot and edited the feature -- which ingeniously spins the zombie genre on it's head by telling the story entirely from the zombie's perspective -- over a period of 18 months while working nights part-time as a booker for a taxi company.

Online social networking was an invaluable tool in both generating buzz and cheaply sourcing the undead: "We went on Facebook and MySpace and said 'Who wants to be a zombie?'" Price said. "We managed to get 50 brilliantly made up zombies and stuff them into a living room."

In keeping with Price's beg and borrow approach, most of the zombie make-up in the make-up artists' cases was inherited from other movies. "One of our make-up people came off 'X-Men 3,' so we were having the same latex that was put on Wolverine," he said.

Price says he came up with the idea to make a no-budget film because he realized that he and his friends would never be able to scrape together enough money to make even a low-budget film.

"A couple of friends were round a few years ago watching Romero's 'Dawn of the Dead,' recalls Price. "And we were lamenting the fact that we could never make a zombie film -- we wouldn't be able to acquire a budget."

"Then I just woke up before everyone else -- I was probably a bit hungover -- and I wondered if a zombie movie from a zombie's perspective had been done before."

The end result is "Colin," a zombie film "with a heart," Price says, shot using production values cribbed from endless re-watching of making-of featurettes and director's commentaries from his personal DVD collection.

Zombie fan Web site zombiefriends.com called it "as original, compelling and thought provoking as [George] Romero's 'Night of the Living Dead,'" while horror magazine SCARS predicted it would "revolutionize zombie cinema."

Price hopes that the film will generate enough interest to kick-start his career and allow him to make another film. "Hopefully we'll be able to generate some interest and maybe try to get some kind of a budget for our next film -- maybe a bigger budget, £100, I don't know."

Price's cost-effective filmmaking may make him the envy of film executives sweating over whether their latest projects will break even, but even "Colin" may suffer at the market: "In a strange way it's kind of counter-productive." admits Price.

"Anyone involved in sales will say, 'Oh, it cost [$70], well how much do you expect us to pay for that?' but with the current economic climate it seems to be a great way to make movies."
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So, what exactly did Price spend the famous $70 on?

"We bought a crowbar and a couple of tapes, and I think we got some tea and coffee as well -- not the expensive stuff either, the very basic kind," Price said "Just to keep the zombies happy."

Keanu Reeves disses Canada

AAAAAND The LEAST likely to host the Juno awards issssssss.....

Nevermind that Keanu Reeves was born in Lebanon to a British mother and a half-Hawaiian, half-Chinese father. He is a Canadian, and proud of it...... Isn't he?
The 45-year-old was asked by Vogue Homme International why he keeps his Canadian citizenship. Sorry to break it to you true north but he didn't exactly stand on guard for thee.

"I sometimes wonder," he says. "I've even regretted not having American citizenship, especially at election times." But the Toronto-raised action star isn't going full Yank yet. "Ideally, I would take out dual nationality," he says. In case of intergalactic warfare, called dibs!

Fox News columnist "let go" after review of leaked Wolverine movie

In a related story to the posting dated Saturday, April 4, 2009 @ 12:17 AM :

Fox News columnist Roger Friedman is out after posting a review of a leaked, full-length work print of X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

Fox News said Monday that the company's representatives and Friedman "mutually agreed to part ways immediately."

Friedman had been an entertainment writer who has contributed to FoxNews.com for 10 years. He wrote in his Fox 411 column Thursday that downloading the 20th Century Fox superhero prequel was "so much easier than going out in the rain" and that the movie "exceeds expectations at every turn."

The early review of the film, which 20th Century Fox described as a "stolen, incomplete and early version," was later removed from the website Friday.

The movie, which focuses on the beginnings of Hugh Jackman's clawed Marvel superhero Wolverine, is not scheduled for release until May 1, but the leaked version began appearing online last week. 20th Century Fox promised that the source of the film would be prosecuted and said the FBI and Motion Picture Association of America are investigating the leak.

Anyone with any information is asked to contact MPAA the Federal Bureau of Investigation or FOX Studios.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine movie posters

Salma Hayek one smart mamacita

Salma Hayek has opened up about pregnancy and motherhood, revealing she is glad to be an older mom.


Salma Hayek says waiting to have a baby made her a better mother.

The 42-year-old actress - who has an 18-month-old daughter Valentina with husband Francois-Henri Pinault - thinks her life experience prepared her for the trials and tribulations of parenthood.

She said: "I thought I was going to need help getting pregnant, and I didn't."

"I feel that I've done enough things in life where I can appreciate the time I spend with her as my number one priority and not feel I'm missing out on something. I feel I'm a lot more patient."

"I'm a more fulfilled human being now, and I probably wouldn't have been 10 years ago. She gets a better mother for being born now."

Salma also revealed she was diagnosed with gestational diabetes during her pregnancy - after 'Match Point' actor Paul Bettany advised her to see a doctor when she experienced unusual cravings.

She explained to WebMD magazine: "I was nauseous for the whole nine months, and the only thing I craved was fruit - cold mango, watermelon. And then later on, I was saying that I didn't know why I was getting so big. Paul Bettany said something about too much fruit and gestational diabetes, and I thought, 'What does he know?' "

While Salma had the support of Paul and his wife Jennifer Connelly, she admits the attitudes of other stars amazed her.

She explained: "An actress I knew said, 'You're still breastfeeding? You're crazy!' Valentina wasn't even one yet, and she was like, 'Why would you do that? That's for India!' I was shocked at the level of ignorance. The best thing you can ever do for your child in your lifetime is to breastfeed."

Actress Natasha Richardson dead at 45

Natasha Richardson, a gifted and precocious heiress to acting royalty whose career highlights included the film "Patty Hearst" and a Tony-winning performance in a stage revival of "Cabaret," died Wednesday at age 45 after suffering a head injury from a skiing accident in Quebec.

Alan Nierob, the Los Angeles-based publicist for Richardson's husband Liam Neeson, confirmed her death in a written statement.

"Liam Neeson, his sons (Micheal and Daniel) and the entire family are shocked and devastated by the tragic death of their beloved Natasha," the statement said.

"They are profoundly grateful for the support, love and prayers of everyone and ask for privacy during this very difficult time."

Neeson was reported in Toronto at the time of Richardson's accident, filming the movie "Chloe" with Julianne Moore.

Producers confirmed that Neeson immediately left the Toronto set upon news of his wife's accident.

The statement did not give details on the cause of death for Richardson, who suffered a head injury when she fell on a beginner's trail during a private ski lesson at the luxury Mont Tremblant ski resort in Quebec. She was taken to hospital Tuesday in Montreal and later flown to a hospital in New York.

Family members had been seen coming and going from the New York hospital where Richardson was taken.

Vanessa Redgrave, Richardson's mother, arrived in a car with darkened windows and was taken through a garage when she arrived at the Lenox Hill Hospital on Manhattan's Upper East Side about 5 p.m. ET on Wednesday. An hour earlier, Richardson's sister, Joely, arrived alone and was swarmed by the media as she entered through the back of the hospital.

It was a sudden and horrifying loss for her family and friends, for the film and theatre communities, for her many fans and for both her native and adoptive countries. Descended from at least three generations of actors, Richardson was a proper Londoner who came to love New York, an elegant blonde with large, lively eyes, a bright smile and a hearty laugh.

If she never quite attained the acting heights of her Academy Award-winning mother, she still had enjoyed a long and worthy career. As an actress, Richardson was equally adept at passion and restraint, able to portray besieged women both confessional (Tennessee Williams' Blanche DuBois) and confined (the concubine in the futuristic horror of "The Handmaid's Tale").

Like other family members, she divided her time between stage and screen. On Broadway, she won a Tony for her performance as Sally Bowles in a 1998 revival of "Cabaret." She also appeared in New York in a production of Patrick Marber's "Closer" (1999) as well as 2005 revival of Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire," in which she played Blanche opposite John C. Reilly's Stanley Kowalski.

She met Liam Neeson when they made their Broadway debuts in 1993, co-starring in "Anna Christie," Eugene O'Neill's drama about a former prostitute and the sailor who falls in love with her.

"The astonishing Natasha Richardson...gives what may prove to be the performance of the season as Anna, turning a heroine who has long been portrayed (and reviled) as a whore with a heart of gold into a tough, ruthlessly unsentimental apostle of O'Neill's tragic understanding of life," New York Times critic Frank Rich wrote.

"Miss Richardson, seeming more like a youthful incarnation of her mother, Vanessa Redgrave, than she has before, is riveting from her first entrance through a saloon doorway's ethereal shaft of golden light."

Her most notable film roles came earlier in her career. Richardson played the title character in Paul Schrader's "Patty Hearst," a 1988 biopic about the kidnapped heiress for which the actress became so immersed that even between scenes she wore a blindfold, the better to identify with her real-life counterpart.

"Natasha Richardson...has been handed a big unwritten role; she feels her way into it, and she fills it," wrote the New Yorker's Pauline Kael.

"We feel how alone and paralyzed Patty is - she retreats into being a hidden observer."

Richardson was directed again by Schrader in a 1990 adaptation of Ian McEwan's "The Comfort of Strangers" and, also in 1990, starred in the screen version of Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale."

She later co-starred with Neeson in "Nell," with Mia Farrow in "Widow's Peak" and with a pre-teen Lindsay Lohan in a remake of "The Parent Trap." More recent movies, none of them widely seen, included "Wild Child," "Evening" and "Asylum."

She was born in London in 1963, the performing gene inherited not just from her parents (Vanessa Redgrave and director Tony Richardson) but from her maternal grandparents (Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson), an aunt (Lynn Redgrave) and an uncle (Corin Redgrave). Her younger sister, Joely Richardson, also joined the family business.

Friends and family members remembered Natasha as an unusually poised child, perhaps forced to grow up early when her father left her mother in the late '60s for Jeanne Moreau. (Tony Richardson died in 1991).

Interviewed in 2001, Natasha Richardson said she related well to her family if only because, "we've all been through it in one way or another and so we've had to be strong."

"Also, we embrace life. We are not cynical about life."

Richardson always planned to act, apart from one brief childhood moment when she wanted to be a flight attendant - "wonderful irony now since I hate to fly and have to take a pill in order to get on a plane. I'm so terrified."

Her screen debut came at age four when she appeared as a flower girl in "The Charge of the Light Brigade," directed by her father, whose movies included "Tom Jones" and "The Entertainer." The show business wand had already tapped her the year before, when she saw her mother in the 1967 film version of the Broadway show "Camelot."

"She was so beautiful. I still look at that movie and I can't believe it. It still makes me cry, the beauty of it. I could go on and on - in that white fur hooded thing, when she comes through the forest for the first time. You've never seen anything so beautiful!" Richardson said.

She studied at London's Central School of Speech and Drama and was an experienced stage actress by her early 20s, appearing in "On the Razzle," "Charley's Aunt" and "The Seagull," for which the London Drama Critics awarded her most promising newcomer.

Although she never shared her mother's fiercely expressed political views, they were close professionally and acted together, most recently on Broadway to play the roles of mother and daughter in a one-night benefit concert version of "A Little Night Music," the Stephen Sondheim-Hugh Wheeler musical.

Before meeting up with Neeson (who called her "Tash") Richardson was married to theatre producer Robert Fox, whose credits include the 1985 staging of "The Seagull" in which his future wife appeared.

She sometimes remarked on the differences between her and her second husband - she from a theatrical dynasty and he from a working-class background in Northern Ireland.

"He's more laid back, happy to see what happens, whereas I'm a doer and I plan ahead," Richardson told the Independent on Sunday newspaper in 2003.

"The differences sometimes get in the way but they can be the very things that feed a marriage, too."

She once said Neeson's serious injury in a 2000 motorcycle accident - he suffered a crushed pelvis after colliding with a deer in upstate New York - had made her really appreciate life.

"I wake up every morning feeling lucky - which is driven by fear, no doubt, since I know it could all go away," she told the Daily Telegraph newspaper in 2003.

Warner Bros. cancels preview screenings in Canada

Future promotional screenings of Warner Bros. movies will no longer be available in Canada citing piracy concerns.

Hollywood studio Warner Bros. Pictures is cancelling promotional previews of its movies in Canada, citing rampant, unauthorized pirating of new releases north of the border.

The studio will immediately stop all "promotional and word-of-mouth screenings" of new releases, starting with Ocean's Thirteen and including the much-anticipated Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

"We regret having to cancel our screenings in Canada, but our studio must take steps to protect not only our branded assets but our commitment to our filmmakers and to our distributors," Dan Fellman, the studio's president of domestic distribution, said in a release.

Warner Bros. and the other major Hollywood studios have been calling on the Canadian government to take a harder line on those caught illicitly filming new releases for pirating worldwide.

"We have a serious issue that the industry is trying to address," Darcy Antonellis, Warner's senior vice-president of worldwide anti-piracy operations, said on Tuesday afternoon.

Antonellis suggested that Canada could benefit from legislation similar to that enacted in the U.S. in 2005 that made it a felony for an audience member to illicitly film a movie inside a theatre.

"It's proven quite effective," she said.

She also specified that the canceled screenings do not affect the usual advance press or critics' screenings held in advance of a new movie's release.

In February, the U.S. International Intellectual Property Alliance put Canada on a watchlist of countries it believes responsible for illegal filming and copying of movies. The group alleged that the recording, movie and software industries lose $225 million a year due to illegal trafficking in Canada.

Heath Ledger fans demand the Joker be retired from film

A group of Heath Ledger fans have taken their reverence for the late "The Dark Knight" star to a whole new level....

Followers of the actor, who electrified audiences with his chilling reinvention of the Joker in the second Batman blockbuster, are calling for the character to be retired from the movies permanently.

Ledger supporters at new Web site, The Ultimate Joker, launched a petition last week calling for studios to remove the Joker from any future Batman movies. The petition currently has 2,431 supporters.

"We think Heath deserves this honor," says the site's team leader, Fer Barbella, Buenos Aires, Argentina. "He is the ultimate Joker."

"We truly believe Ledger's performance as Joker is the best an actor could ever do,"

"We are Batman fans from the comics and from the movies," he said, "After we saw 'The Dark Knight,' we thought this Joker was really the best. It deserves to be withdrawn from any Batman sequels."

"When Michael Jordan retired, they withdrew the number 23 jersey as an honor. It's the same thing with Heath."

Barbella said he thinks any new performance just won't be able to top Ledger's.

"He upgraded the character in a thrilling way," he said. "Although a lot of actors would love the chance to play the Joker, as Batman fans and now Heath Ledger fans, we think no one could ever perform it as well as he did."

The Web site is the brainchild of Barbella, 34; Nico Pimentel, 33; and Natalia Rodoni, 33, all advertising creatives in Buenos Aires.

"Any other performance will be below expectations for sure, so we want to forever keep Ledger's Joker as the one," added Barbella, who launched The Ultimate Joker site last week with his colleague Nico Pimentel.

The trio say that if they collect enough names, they may go to the studio to present their petition.

"As soon as we start seeing that we have more than 50,000 names on our Web site, perhaps we will go to the Warner Brothers gate and do a bit of activism," Pimentel said.

The huge buzz around Ledger's performance as the Joker last year stemmed from his update of the iconic character played by camp comedian Cesar Romero and as a hateful clown by Jack Nicholson.

Ledger's Joker was a very different proposition from those that had come before: In a ripped, stained suit, with clown makeup smeared across a scarred, twisted mouth, his Joker was a nihilistic, sociopathic prankster. "Why so serious?" he sneered in a performance that received rave reviews from critics globally.

From Jack Nicholson and Cesar Romero to Larry Storch, Mark Hamill and the underrated Kevin Michael Richardson, Batman's nemesis has been brought to life by some seriously talented actors. Banning Joker from the silver screen might seem like an unreasonable request on its garish face, but the team at The Ultimate Joker is standing by it, and no doubt will be aided if Ledger takes home a posthumous Oscar later this month for his portrayal.

The actor was found dead after overdosing on prescription drugs at his apartment in New York on January 22, 2008, shortly after concluding work on "The Dark Knight."

Ledger has been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of the Joker, having been awarded a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor and a BAFTA for Best Supporting Actor.

Barbella says that the Web site and petition are their award: "The Academy gives an Oscar," he said. "This is a new award from the people. A user-generated award."

In addition to the online petition, The Ultimate Joker site operators have fired up an Ultimate Joker Flickr pool and posted downloadable web graphics to let others show their support.

Barbella says his crew is only interested in film portrayals, though.

"Television and animation is off our radar," he says. "And we like Jokers like Cesar Romero or Jack Nicholson, and even the voice of Mark Hamill. But we think this psycho in scarred whiteface is the best ever. No one can improve it. So please, Hollywood, use other enemies in the sequels to come."

It is perhaps a plea that Hollywood will ignore in pursuit of profit. After all, the buzz created by the conundrum of who will follow in Ledger's footsteps could be worth hundreds of millions on its own.

Heath Ledger's flawless acting, and tragic passing, immortalized his portrayal of the Joker in Christopher Nolan's Batman blockbuster The Dark Knight.

But it's a fair question: Should Hollywood retire the Joker from film? Was Heath Ledger the greatest Joker of all time? Why so serious? Should Ledger's killer clown be the last Joker to grace the big screen? Thoughts?