Bond is Back

The next installment in the James Bond series is set to be filmed in Italy this Thursday in the Tuscan city Siena.
The scene is slated to coincide with the traditional barback horse race of Pulio through the town. As the race winds its way through the town, Bond – played by Daniel Craig – will be chasing his villain along the cobbled streets and across rooftops.
However, Craig isn’t likely to be around during the shoot. A helicopter crew will be filming overhead and Craig will likely be inserted into shots later.

Carved: The Slit Mouthed Woman (Kuchisake-onna) 2007, directed by Kôji Shiraishi, Japan
Three decades ago, a Japanese suburb was terrorized by the vengeful spirit of a woman in a surgical mask who asked victims, "Am I pretty?" before slaughtering them. Now, children in this community are disappearing again, leaving police and teachers to discover the reason and put an end to the new wave of carnage. Eriko Sato, Haruhiko Katô and Miki Mizuno star in director Kôji Shiraishi's terrifying chiller.

Graveyard of Honor (Shin Jingi No Hakaba) 2002, directed by Kinji Fukasaku, Japan
When Rikuo Ishimatsu (Goro Kishitani), a simple dishwasher, saves the life of a notorious yakuza boss, he's rewarded with a warm welcome into the criminal fold. Before long, Rikio has become a powerful gangster with several kills to his name. But has he also become a monster in the process? Controversial filmmaker Takashi Miike helms this bloody revamp of cult director Kinji Fukasaku's Japanese classic by the same name.

This Just In: New DVD Releases

Perfidia (2007) directed by Christian Gonzalez, Mexico
Standed in a remote area, a gang of gun traffickers finds shelter at a widow's sprawling ranch in this crime thriller. The men decide to rob their wealthy host, but when strange events occur, the crooks start to lose their grip on reality. As their fear of the uknown increases, the men suspect that there's more than meets the eye when it comes to the mysterious woman. Roberto Ballesteros and Carlos Cardan star.

Falling (Fallen) 2006, directed by Barbara Albert
OK, so this isn’t a German film, it is in German with English subtitles. Five former high school friends -- now in their 30s -- reunite for a funeral. What begins as a sad gathering turns into a night of fun, bittersweet memories and surprising revelations in this drama from Austrian director Barbara Albert. The classmates --pregnant Nina, office worker Alex, prison parolee Nicole, actress Carmen and teacher Brigitte -- revisit the past, divulge present disappointments and face their fears about an uncertain future.

"Lives of Others" Star Ulrich Mühe, 1953-2007

New York TImes
July 26, 2007
Ulrich Mühe, Film and Stage Actor, Dies at 54
By SARAH PLASS
FRANKFURT, July 25 — Ulrich Mühe, a popular German actor who won acclaim as a tormented Stasi officer in cold-war East Germany in the Oscar-winning film “The Lives of Others,” died on Sunday in his family home in Walbeck. He was 54.
The cause was stomach cancer, his family said. They said he was buried Wednesday in Walbeck, in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, where he lived with his wife, the actress Susanne Lothar, and their two children.
Mr. Mühe officially confirmed he had cancer only in the last week, in an interview that first appeared in the online edition of the German newspaper Die Welt on Saturday. He said he first learned of his illness in February and underwent surgery shortly after the Academy Awards ceremony that same month, when “The Lives of Others” was named best foreign film.
The film, directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck and released last year, received many German and European movie awards, won rave reviews and attracted a worldwide audience. Mr. Mühe won Germany’s golden Lola Award as best actor.
He played Capt. Gerd Wiesler, an agent with the East German secret police, who is assigned to keep a successful playwright and his lover under constant surveillance, only to become fascinated by them and protective of them as he grows disillusioned with the Communist state.
Born in Grimma, in the eastern state of Saxony, Mr. Mühe established his acting career in East Germany’s thriving theater scene and furthered it in the reunified Germany, becoming a popular presence in television and film as well.
The East German playwright Heiner Müller, who died in 1995, discovered Mr. Mühe in 1979 while Mr. Mühe was performing in the East German city of Karl-Marx-Stadt, now Chemnitz. Mr. Müller took him to East Berlin’s renowned Volksbühne theater. Mr. Mühe later joined the ensemble at Deutsches Theater in 1983, where he became a celebrated actor.
This year, Mr. Mühe had a major supporting role in “Mein Führer: The Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler,” a comedy by the filmmaker Dani Levy, which received a mixed reaction by German critics but did well at the country’s box office.
Besides Ms. Lothar and their two children, his survivors include three other children, one of whom is the actress Anna Maria Mühe, from his two previous marriages.
Last year, Mr. Mühe lost a highly publicized legal battle waged against him about his right to continue to refer to one of his ex-wives, the actress Jenny Gröllmann, as a former Stasi informant, an accusation she denied. Ms. Gröllmann died of cancer last year at the age of 59, before the matter was resolved.
Mr. Mühe fought against the government as one of several artists demonstrating before the Berlin Wall fell. On Nov. 4, 1989, shortly before the wall fell and before a half-million people on Alexanderplatz in East Berlin, he declared the Communists’ power monopoly to be invalid.

Michelangelo Antonioni dead at 94

ROME (AP) -- Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, whose depiction of alienation made him a symbol of art-house cinema with movies such as ''Blow-Up'' and ''L'Avventura,'' has died, officials and news reports said Tuesday. He was 94.
The ANSA news agency said that Antonioni died at his home on Monday evening.
''With Antonioni dies not only one of the greatest directors but also a master of modernity,'' Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni said in a statement.
Antonioni depicted alienation in the modern world through sparse dialogue and long takes. Along with Federico Fellini, he helped turn post-war Italian film away from the Neorealism movement and toward a personal cinema of imagination.
In 1995, Hollywood honored his career work -- about 25 films and several screenplays -- with a special Oscar for lifetime achievement. By then Antonioni was a physically frail but mentally sharp 82, unable to speak but a few words because of a stroke but still translating his vision into film. The Oscar was stolen from Antonioni's home in 1996, together with several other film prizes.
His slow-moving camera never became synonymous with box-office success, but some of his movies such ''Blow-Up,'' ''Red Desert'' and ''The Passenger'' reached enduring fame.
His exploration of such intellectual themes as alienation and existential malaise led Halliwell's Film Guide to say that ''L'Avventura,'' Antonioni's first critical success, made him ''a hero of the highbrows.''
The critics loved that film, but the audience hissed when ''L'Avventura'' was presented at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival. The barest of plots, which wanders through a love affair of a couple, frustrated many viewers for its lack of action and dialogue, characteristically Antonioni.
In one point in the black-and-white film, the camera lingers and lingers on Monica Vitti, one of Antonioni's favorite actresses, as she plays a blond, restless jet-setter.
''In the empty, silent spaces of the world, he has found metaphors that illuminate the silent places our hearts, and found in them, too, a strange and terrible beauty: austere, elegant, enigmatic, haunting,'' Jack Nicholson said in presenting Antonioni with the career Oscar. Nicholson starred in the director's 1975 film ''The Passenger.''
Antonioni was born on Sept. 29, 1912, in the affluent northern city of Ferrara. He received a university degree in economics and soon began writing critiques for cinema magazines.
Antonioni's first feature film, ''Story of a Love Affair'' (1950) was a tale of two lovers unable to cope with the ties binding them to their private lives.
But Antonioni grew more interested in depicting his characters' internal turmoil rather than their daily, down-to-earth troubles. The shift induced critics to call his cinema ''internal Neorealism.''
After the international critical acclaim of ''L'Avventura,'' which became part of a trilogy with ''The Night'' (1961) and ''Eclipse'' (1962), Antonioni's style was established. He steadily co-wrote his films and directed them with the recognizable touch of a painter. His signature was a unique look into people's frustrating inability to communicate and assert themselves in society.
On Oscar award night, his wife, Enrica Fico, 41 years his junior, and ''translator'' for him since his 1985 stroke, said: ''Michelangelo always went beyond words, to meet silence, the mystery and power of silence.''
The first success at the box office came in 1966 with ''Blow Up,'' about London in the swinging '60s and a photographer who accidentally captures a murder on film.
But Antonioni with his hard-to-fathom films generally found it hard to convince Italian producers to back him. By the end of the 1960s, he was looking abroad for funds. American backing helped produce ''Zabriskie Point'' (1970), shot in the bleakly carved landscape of Death Valley, California.
Asked by an Italian magazine in 1980, ''For whom do you make films'' Antonioni replied: ''I do it for it an ideal spectator who is this very director. I could never do something against my tastes to meet the public. Frankly, I can't do it, even if so many directors do so. And then, what public? Italian? American? Japanese? French? British? Australian? They're all different from each other.''
Using sometimes a notepad, sometimes the good communication he had with his wife and sometimes just his very expressive blue eyes, Antonioni astonished the film world in 1994 to make ''Beyond the Clouds,'' when ailing and hampered by the effects of the stroke.
With an international cast -- John Malkovich, Jeremy Irons, Irene Jacob, and Fanny Ardant -- the movie wove together three episodes based on Antonioni's book of short stories ''Quel Bowling sul Tevere'' (''Bowling on the Tiber'') to explore the usual Antonioni themes.
Worried that Antonioni would be too frail to finish the movie, investors had German director Wim Wenders follow the work, ready to step in if the Italian ''maestro'' couldn't go on. But Wenders wound up watching in awe and letting Antonioni put his vision on film.
Antonioni is survived by his wife. He had no children. ANSA said that a funeral would be held Thursday in Antonioni's hometown of Ferrara in northern Italy.

Laszlo Kovacs, Hungarian Cinematographer

Legendary cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs, a Hungarian, has died. He was 74.

His films included Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, Paper Moon, Shampoo, Ghostbusters, The Karate Kid, Frances, Mask, and Miss Congeniality. He also worked on The Last Waltz and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Recently he was working on the documentary Torn from the Flag, about the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.

Kovacs died in his sleep at his Beverly Hills home on Sunday. He is survived by his wife, Audrey, Julianna and Nadia; and a granddaughter.

His family and friends are in our thoughts.

This Just In: New DVD Releases

Cinema, Aspirins and Vultures (Cinema, Aspirinas e Urubus), 2005, Mexico
To distance himself from Adolf Hitler and a war he philosophically opposes, a young German (Peter Ketnath) moves halfway around the world to Brazil, where he meets a hitchhiker (João Miguel) with his own motivations to keep moving. Together, they drive across the country making pit stops in various villages to sell the locals a "miracle" drug. Marcelo Gomes directs this multilingual Cannes Film Festival selection.

Django, 1966, Directed by Sergio Corbucci, Mexico/Italy
In a lawless frontier, a master gunman carries a dark secret -- and a coffin filled with chaos. Franco Nero stars as Django, a mysterious stranger caught up in the violent crossfire between Mexican bandits and sadistic vigilantes. This landmark classic is packed with indelible images and some of the most shocking brutality of any Spaghetti Western ever made. Fully restored from original camera negatives.

Morisma, 2006, directed by Edin Alain Martinez, Mexico
Throughout the Mexican states of Zacatecas and Jalisco, the Moors continue to hold traditional and religious celebrations that date back to medieval times; this documentary explores the rich history of these largely unknown Franciscan rituals. Following Moorish leader Hilario Espinosa, the film reveals a spiritual heritage that remains cherished and vital. The presentation also includes two documentary shorts, "Bracho" and "Burrito de Agua-Miel."

Sangre Costena (Coastal Blood ), 2002, directed by Amado Portillo Ortega, Mexico
Obsession and forbidden love spark a series of tragic events in the story of Isabel, a beautiful woman whose passionate nature tempts those who meet her. Having traveled from her small hometown to Mexico City, Isabel finds work as a maid for a powerful politician who soon becomes obsessed with her. The attraction is mutual, and Isabel surrenders herself to an illicit affair that leads to dangerous consequences.

The Guerrilla and the Hope: Lucio Cabanas (La Guerrilla y la esperanza: Lucio Cabañas), 2005 directed by Gerardo Tort, Mexico
Director Gerardo Tort's compelling documentary explores the life of Lucio Cabanas, a guerrilla leader who headed one of the most significant peasant revolts in Mexican history and became a figure of inspiration for the poor of southern Mexico. Revealing interviews from companions, family members, former guerrilla fighters and historians make obvious that Cabanas's story of courage and hope continues to live on.