Assistant director who gave actor prop gun did not know it was loaded with live rounds, search warrant says
Alec Baldwin was handed a loaded weapon by an assistant director who indicated it was safe to use in the moments before the actor fatally shot a cinematographer, court records released on Friday show.
The assistant director did not know the prop gun was loaded with live rounds, according to a search warrant filed in a Santa Fe court.
Continue reading...As we reach the 20th anniversary of the magical British blockbusters, the real magic lies in the way its young stars have stayed on the rails – unlike many before them
There are many magical things about the Harry Potter film series, which marks its 20th anniversary this month with a re-release of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Perhaps the most miraculous one, though, is that its three stars – Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint – are still alive, apparently content, and not noticeably addicted to class A drugs.
Each continued acting, occasionally even starring in bona fide hits: Radcliffe in The Woman in Black; Watson, who is also a UN women goodwill ambassador, in Beauty and the Beast. Grint, star of the M Night Shyamalan series Servant, also became a father last year – his partner is another former child actor, Georgia Groome of Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging – and celebrated by joining Instagram. Even there, he has shown a characteristic level-headedness by posting a mere six times in 11 months.
Continue reading...Cinematographer Halyna Hutchins airlifted to hospital, where she died, while director Joel Souza also injured
Alec Baldwin fired a prop gun on a movie set in an accident that killed the film’s director of photography and injured its director, authorities in New Mexico have said.
A statement from the Santa Fe Sheriff’s office said Baldwin, who is acting in and producing the film Rust, had fired the prop gun in an incident on Thursday.
Continue reading...The artist and film-maker remembers the pioneering documentary producer behind films such as RBG, The Square and An Inconvenient Truth, who has died aged 66
Diane has left. When someone close passes away, we feel that a part of ourselves left together with them. A part of our understanding of the world, a link in our interpersonal network, our previous value judgment and actions in the past have all been misplaced because of the passing of a close friend.
This sense of misplacement is sometimes very strong and clear, almost like the lack of a lit candle on the shore of a river or a pile of extinguished charcoal in cold weather. We cannot envisage it before people disappear from our life. When they do disappear, we suddenly become aware of the fact that the light and warmth, which vanished with their passing, are lost for ever. They are irreplaceable and will never return. No matter what happens in the future, whatever is lost is lost for ever.
Continue reading...Tired of Tinseltown, the pair have turned instead to shilling for the UAE. Oddly, their YouTube advertorial micro-features are actually really good
If you’ve been paying attention, you will have noticed that neither Jessica Alba or Zac Efron are very good at hiding their disdain for Hollywood. It has been a decade since Alba has acted in anything approaching a high-profile role, preferring instead to concentrate on her consumer goods company. Efron, meanwhile, made a Netflix documentary last year in which he repeatedly slated Hollywood and its practices.
However, despite this they are both attractive, well-known actors. And this means, if they’re tired of Hollywood, plenty of other outlets are available to them. And by “plenty of other outlets”, I mean “the Dubai tourist board”’.
Continue reading...Slew of walkouts by tech workers, unthinkable mere years ago, shows workers ‘now understand their labor power’, expert says
Employees at Netflix halted work on Wednesday and staged a protest outside the company’s Los Gatos, California, headquarters to condemn the streaming platform’s handling of complaints against Dave Chappelle’s new special.
The actions – which hundreds participated in – are the latest in a string of highly visible organizing efforts in the tech sector, as workers increasingly take their grievances about company policies and decisions public.
Continue reading...Villeneuve’s take on the sci-fi classic starring Timothée Chalamet, Oscar Isaac and Zendaya has been given room to breathe, creating a colossal spectacle
If there can ever be a moment of triumph for a director, when the anxiety of influence is vanquished – for a bit, anyway – then Denis Villeneuve might have achieved it. This eerily vast and awe-inspiring epic, a cathedral of interplanetary strangeness, is better than the attempt a generation ago by an acknowledged master.
David Lynch’s Dune from 1984 was an interesting, rackety, flawed movie that attempted to cram the entirety of Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi novel into its running time – the result was like Flash Gordon without the laughs. Villeneuve, with his co-writers Jon Spaihts and Eric Roth, has used less than half the book (with a second episode to come) and allowed it room to grow: to breathe and drift through unimaginably vast reaches of fictional galaxies, with images of architecturally enormous spacecraft moving into view, or delicately lowering themselves on to alien landscapes of parched and austere beauty, particularly the ravishingly pure desert landmass of “Dune”, the contested planet itself. Star Wars’ debt to Dune, and now Dune’s debt to Star Wars, has been extensively discussed (amusingly, Dune gives us moving holograms rather like the one in which Princess Leia first begged Obi-Wan Kenobi for help). But this blockpulverising film feels more like TE Lawrence’s imperious version of The Phantom Menace. This is how it ought to have been.
Continue reading...Fans of the YA After series should find something amid the tangled mess of plot, daytime-soap acting and inanimate passion – everyone else should look away
If you don’t identify as an Afternator or recognise the hashtag #Hessa, a short explanation is necessary. After is a clutch of bestselling YA romance novels once described as “Fifty Shades of Grey for teens”. US author Anna Todd started writing stories as fan fiction for the boyband One Direction and Harry Styles is the inspiration for broody-eyed bad-boy Hardin Scott; he’s the on-off boyfriend of bookish virginal college student Tessa Young. This film is the stupendously wooden and humourless third in the series. It’s heading straight to Amazon and should come with a warning to viewers: contains extremely boring sex.
If you’re new to the franchise, don’t even bother trying. The script works on the basis that everyone watching has read the books, seen the previous movies and bought the T-shirt (sloganned versions available on Etsy: “Mentally dating Hardin Scott”). No attempt whatsoever is made to introduce us to the tedious tangle of relationships. That said, all you need to know about Tessa and Hardin is that they can’t live without each other.
Continue reading...With Steven Spielberg’s remake almost out, the 1961 original still feels thrillingly contemporary, a tough act to follow
It’s the opening credits that do it right away. Following three eerie whistles over a black screen, West Side Story explodes into a full screen of poster-paint colour – shifting from orange to red to magenta to royal blue – as Leonard Bernstein’s four-minute overture brassily clatters into action. Over the colour, a stark design flourish: seemingly random brigades of parallel vertical black lines, only coalescing at the overture’s end into the tip of Manhattan, viewed from the air, cuing a vertiginous bird’s-eye montage of New York City in motion. That chipper yet chillingly disembodied whistle returns; by the time we finally see a human face, six coolly riveting minutes has passed.
This whole title sequence – from the graphics to the aerial photography – was visualised by Saul Bass, the distinctive graphic designer then favoured by such aggressive stylists as Alfred Hitchcock and Otto Preminger. It still seems, perhaps even more than anything that follows in West Side Story, sleekly and breath-catchingly modern: a coup of expensive minimalism at the outset of a splashy Hollywood production. That was no accident: in 1961, United Artists set out for the film to be something bracing and new in the movie musical, an industry staple that was looking increasingly out of step with a youth culture turning toward rock’n’roll.
Continue reading...The giant Italian pie was the centrepiece of the star’s Big Night film. Now he’s invited me round to his house to make it
• Now try cooking Tucci’s timpano yourself
Getting your homework marked by Stanley Tucci is terrifying. Not because he is scary. On the contrary. He has impeccable, courtly manners. It’s terrifying because of what is at stake. I prise off the lid to the plastic box and turn its contents towards him, shyly. Tucci plucks a single chilled meatball from the one kilo throng, each the size of a large marble, and pops it into his mouth. He nods slowly, then smiles. “Perfetto,” he says, simply. Thank Christ for that. The meatballs, made to his own detailed recipe, are a key part of a grandiose cooking adventure we are embarking upon today, here in his kitchen. They need to be right.
In 1996, Tucci introduced the world to one of his family’s great culinary traditions, courtesy of the movie Big Night, which he starred in, co-wrote and co-directed. In the film, set in 1950s America, Tucci plays a recent Italian immigrant who, along with his chef brother, runs a struggling Italian restaurant on the shore not far from New York City. To raise its profile, they decide to stage a special dinner which, they have been told, will be attended by the great American-Italian singing star Louis Prima. The centrepiece of this magnificent, delirious feast will be a timpano.
Continue reading...A huge equality gap in top jobs and pay has been highlighted between women TV documentary-makers and male colleagues
Television documentary teams in Britain today are full of ambitious and capable women but most of them have to wait much longer than their male colleagues to become directors and earn a bigger wage.
The findings of the campaigning group We Are Doc Women (WADW), released this weekend, have revealed that gender equality is still a goal, not a reality, in factual programme-making.
Continue reading...Actor and director land safely in Kazakhstan after spending 12 days on the International Space Station shooting the first movie in orbit
A Russian actor and a film director have returned to Earth after spending 12 days on the International Space Station shooting scenes for the first movie in orbit.
Yulia Peresild and Klim Shipenko landed as scheduled on Kazakhstan’s steppe early on Sunday, according to footage broadcast live by the Russian space agency.
Continue reading...Since 2006, the acclaimed writer has lived in fear for his life, following publication of his exposé on the criminal gangs. The Observer takes a trip back to Naples with him and his minders
On a Friday in autumn 2006, local newspapers and prosecutors in Italy’s south-western region of Campania received the same anonymous letter. Computer-typed and delivered by hand in the early morning, it detailed the Neapolitan Mafia’s plan to execute a 26-year-old Italian writer. His name was Roberto Saviano and his book, Gomorrah, a devastating denunciation of the Camorra’s criminal activity, was on its way to becoming a bestseller.
The unpublished letter, seen by the Observer, refers to a meeting held in a betting office in Casal di Principe, Saviano’s hometown, in which local bosses, known as some of the most violent in the Camorra, decreed that Saviano must die, saying that his murder would take place “when the waters are calm”.
Continue reading...A gift of a camera inspired Belmaya Nepali to rise above poverty and abuse to make documentaries
Belmaya Nepali’s life changed for ever when, at 14, she was given a camera.
The British film-maker Sue Carpenter had come to Pokhara, a tourist city in central Nepal, to run a photography project with disadvantaged girls living in an institution. One of those girls was Belmaya.
Continue reading...Khadar Ayderus Ahmed, who directed the acclaimed drama, reveals the struggle to portray his community ‘with dignity and compassion’
“I am Somali and I made this film for Somali people to watch a film in their mother tongue without needing subtitles,” says film director Khadar Ayderus Ahmed. Ahmed made his feature debut with The Gravedigger’s Wife, and after premiering in May at the Cannes film festival’s Critics’ Week, it made headlines as the first film from Somalia to be put forward for the Oscars.
“As a film-maker, I felt a sense of responsibility to tell the story of how I view my Somali community and to tell this story with dignity, tenderness and compassion – all the qualities I’ve been raised with,” says Ahmed, who was born in Somalia before moving to Finland as a teenager.
Continue reading...The controversial film’s first Tasmanian screening was described as ‘like going to a funeral’. How will it be received in a town that won’t speak the killer’s name?
There were no posters advertising the Tasmanian premiere of Nitram at the independent State Cinema, which took place on Thursday night.
Justin Kurzel’s new film dramatising the lead-up to 1996’s Port Arthur massacre, opened to a quiet, small crowd in the mass shooter’s home town of Hobart. Its trailers were not included in any other scheduling, and the film’s opening lagged two weeks behind its national release.
Continue reading...Competition opens to find six young creators in sub-Saharan Africa who will be funded to produce movies for 2022
For Nelson Mandela they were “morsels rich with the gritty essence of Africa but in many instances universal in their portrayal of humanity, beasts and the mystical.”
Passed down through the generations, whispered at bedtimes and raucously retold by elders, folktales have long been a mainstay of African cultural heritage.
Continue reading...Andreas Fontana’s debut feature is an unnervingly subtle drama about a Swiss private banker visiting clients in Argentina during the period of the military junta and ‘disappearances’
Pure evil is all around in this unnervingly subtle, sophisticated movie; an eerie oppression in the air. Andreas Fontana is a Swiss director making his feature debut with this conspiracy drama-thriller, shot with a kind of desiccated blankness, about the occult world of super-wealth and things not to be talked about. The title is a Swiss banker’s code-word in conversation for “Be silent”.
It is set in 1980 in Argentina, at the time of the junta’s dirty war against leftists and dissidents, and you could set it alongside recent movies including Benjamín Naishtat’s Rojo (2018) and Francisco Márquez’s A Common Crime (2020), which intuited the almost supernatural fear among those left behind when people they knew had vanished and joined los desaparecidos, the disappeared ones. But Azor gives a queasy new perspective on the horror of those times, and there is even a nauseous echo of the Swiss banks’ attitude to their German neighbours in the second world war.
Continue reading...A new trailer has surfaced for Home Sweet Home Alone, which looks to be a sequel that’s also a carbon copy of an original that doesn’t need bettering
The trailer for the Disney+ movie Home Sweet Home Alone is really quite something. In it, a large and chaotic family tie themselves in knots ahead of a holiday to Tokyo only to discover that, in their haste, they have accidentally left one of their children behind. While they scramble to return to their home, the boy is left to fend for himself – a danger that is only compounded when two sly burglars pick his home to be robbed. What follows is an orgy of cartoonish violence as the abandoned boy jerry-rigs a selection of household items to cause maximum damage to the intruders. Brilliant.
Basically, then, Home Sweet Home Alone appears to exist in order to answer one simple question: what if Home Alone was, um, Home Alone?
Continue reading...This gorgeous and moving melodrama finds two women in 1950s Rio under suffocating family expectations – and sees what happens when they are defied
‘What do you want from life?” a husband drunkenly yells at his wife in Karim Aïnouz’s gorgeous and very moving melodrama set in 1950s Rio de Janeiro. The man’s wife is Euridice (Julia Stockler) and what she wants is to be a classical pianist. Her husband is angry and hurt: why can’t she just be happy in the kitchen? Adapted from a novel by Martha Batalha, this is the story of Euridice and her sister Guida (Carol Duarte): their inner conflicts and rebellion against the suffocating patriarchy of home.
The film beings a few years earlier: Euridice is 18 and applying to study music in Vienna. Her heart is broken when boy-mad Guida runs away with a no-good sailor to Greece, promising to write when she is married. Predictably, she returns with a baby bump and no wedding ring. There’s an appalling homecoming scene when their dad, a baker, violently shoves Guida out of the house; she’s nine months pregnant at the time (and the film never lets us forget that violence can be done to these women at any time of a man’s choosing). Unforgivably, Guida’s dad says that Euridice has left Rio and is living in Vienna. The truth is she’s up the road, married to an insightless oaf.
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