All articles by Colin Brown – Page 4
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News
Dresdner Kleinwort explores European 'fund of funds'
Having pumped more than $4.6bn into a variety of Hollywood slate deals in the past two years, German bank Dresdner Kleinwort is now looking at Europe to see whether a similar co-financing structure could enable a portfolio of European films from different production sources. The bank's New York-based media and ...
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News
Ledger and Williams join Haynes' Dylan project
Hot off their Academy Awardnominations, Heath Ledger and Michelle Williams have both joined thestar-studded cast of I'm Not There,Todd Haynes' $25m portrait of Bob Dylan that finally starts shooting inMontreal this July.Ledger, who replaces ColinFarrell, will be one of six top-flight actors to play the iconicsinger-songwriter in his different life-guises. ...
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Ismail Merchant dies in London, aged 68
Ismail Merchant, whoseprodigious 44-year filmmaking partnership with James Ivory became synonymouswith sumptuous period dramas and literary adaptations, died in London onWednesday after a brief illness. He was 68.Over the years,Merchant's films garnered thirty-one Oscar nominations, including three forBest Picture. Among his best knownfilms were A Room with a View, ShakespeareWallah, ...
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Haynes' Dylan biopic lands at Celluloid Dreams
The international financingfor Todd Haynes' $25m star-studded biopic of Bob Dylan has started to fall intoplace now that Celluloid Dreams has been engaged as the film's internationalsales agent.With the Paris-based outfiton board, the necessary pre-sales can now be secured to allow Haynes to closecasting for I'm Not There, inwhich the ...
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Curse holds key to second Wallace & Gromit film
Wallace& Gromit could soon be the subject of a second full-length feature filmfrom Nick Park, assuming the first, The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit, is a big box office hit forDreamWorks when it is released in North America on Oct 7.Ifgreenlit, the Wallace & Gromit sequel might even be squeezed into ...
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Euro films struggle to attract non-local audiences
Some of Europe's leadinggatekeepers to the $257m-plus (Euros 200m) of public money being handed outannually across the continent to support film production are now wonderingwhether too many European films are being made. Is all this state-supported aidis being spread too thinly'Some 750 theatrical featureswere produced in Europe in 2003. While ...
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Berlinale unveils European Film Market plans for 2006
Next year's European Film Market will comfortablyaccommodate as many as 300 film companies as it decamps to its spacious newhome at the historic Martin-Grobius-Bau, a ten-minute walk away from thefestival's Palast nexus.Atpresent, 170 sales outfits and umbrella organisations are housed in crampedquarters at the Debis building, with another fifty or ...
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Warner Bros: a very local engagement
The popular image ofHollywood as an American superpower steamrolling over the interests ofEurope's local filmmaking industry with one-size-fits-all global products wasgiven a sharp rebuke yesterday by Warner Bros. top international executive. Delivering the keynotespeech at Screen International's third annual European Film FinanceSummit in Berlin, Richard Fox, Warner's executive vice ...
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Reviews
Forty Shades Of Blue
Dir: Ira Sachs. US. 2004. 107minsThe winner of this year'sGrand Jury Prize for best American dramatic feature at the Sundance FilmFestival, Ira Sachs second full-length film certainly lives up to its title. Anentire spectrum of loneliness is explored in this intimate, naturalistic studyof a young Russian mother's cultural and emotional ...
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Reviews
Inside Deep Throat
Dirs/scrs: Fenton Bailey,Randy Barbato. US. 2004. 90mins It has been thirty-threeyears since Deep Throat first went down on one of Time Square's triple-Xfleapits in Manhattan and came up a pop-cultural landmark that reverberates tothis day. The lasting impact, both personal and societal, of this seminal pornflick is now chronicled in ...
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Reviews
Happy Endings
Dir/scr. Don Roos. US. 2004. 128mins A full seven years since making a splash at Sundance as a filmmaking debutant, Don Roos returns to Park City with this year's opening night attraction. Happy Endings, his third directorial outing, promises a benign beginning to the Park City festivities, if only because ...
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The Sundance gamble
Coinciding as it does withthe western New Year, the Sundance Film Festival has always found itself in afortuitous slot. This event kick-starts the industry calendar like no other.Those who flock to Park City do so with that January zeal for renewal; whetherthey are distributors, agents or critics, they all feel ...
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Choice few set AFM buying pace
Buying interest among studiodistributors and leading territorial indies is starting to coalesce around aprized handful of projects being touted here by script packages and promoreels.Acquisition appetites have beenwhetted by a remake of the 1966 crime caper Gambit, scripted by the Coen brothers, which GrahamKing's Initial Entertainment Group is fully financing ...
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News
Insurance group buys Milstein's completion bond outfit
HCC Insurance Holdings haspaid an undisclosed sum to acquire cineFinance, Fred Milstein's LA-based movieunderwriter that also brought Hollywood-style completion bond financing to HongKong and Korean cinema.Based in Houston, HCC is aninternational insurance holding company with offices across the US, and inBermuda, England and Spain. HCC has assets of more than ...
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News
IFTA chief optimistic over US tax break
The US tax break just signedinto law by returning President George W Bush could prove to be a windfall forindependent producers worth up to 16% of their movie budgets, claim the organisersof the American Film Market.The production incentive,which was written into the Jumpstart Our Business Strength Act(JOBS), allows films of ...
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News
Valenti bids tearful farewell to ShoWest
Hollywood figurehead JackValenti bade a tearful farewell this morning to ShoWest, the assembly oftheatre-owners that he has addressed as chief executive of the Motion PictureAssociation of America (MPAA) for the past 37 years.A packed room of exhibitorsin Las Vegas put side any differences they may have had with their sometimenemesis ...
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Newmarket goes Bush-whacking with Sayles
Indie hothouse NewmarketFilms has acquired North American rights to John Sayles' Silver City, a star-studded political satire about the state ofAmerican democracy that will be released this autumn to coincide with the final weeks of this year's USpresidential race.Written, directed and editedby John Sayles, Silver City wasproduced by Maggie Renzi ...
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Reviews
Trauma
Dir: Marc Evans. UK. 2003. 93minsActor Colin Firth goes some way to rescuing his screen persona from being forever enslaved to his romantic alter ego Darcy with his morose presence in Trauma, in which he plays the spooked survivor of a car crash. Dishevelled, disorientated and anything but dashing, Firth's ...
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Reviews
Super Size Me!
Dir: Morgan Spurlock. US. 2003. 98 minsSundance buyers were drawn to this highly entertaining documentary like kids to candy and Big Macs for good reason: director Morgan Spurlock does to McDonalds fast food what Michael Moore did to both General Motors and the National Rifle Association in his canonical documentary ...
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Reviews
Napoleon Dynamite
Dir: Jared Hess. US. 2004. 86mins.Napoleon Dynamite, which was met in Park City by raucous cheers and bursts of unsuppressed chuckling, is exactly the kind of off-beat comedy that delights otherwise earnest festivals such as Sundance. Within hours of its first screening, word on this occasionally-inspired portrait of Loserville, Idaho, ...