There was action, brief nudity, explicit language, tension, murder, gun violence and tears – the essential ingredients for many hit movies.
Simply put, that’s what it was – a movie with everything to cater to every movie-goer’s checklist, which nicely wrapped up the serious message in the film.
Opening last Friday at the Deluxe Cinemas, Frances Anne Solomon’s A Winter Tale premiered to a full house in the Paramount Theatre, which brought together a mixed audience of counsellors, teachers, media, activists, local celebrities, and other professionals. There were even a number of young people scattered in the mix.
Known more for her films and documentaries on women, writer and director Solomon created a masterpiece that examined the lives of Caribbean men living in the diaspora, honing in on the real lives of men in Toronto.
Considered a melting pot of sorts, we found every Caribbean nationality there (we all cheered when we saw the Antiguan flag in Miss G’s shop), as well as people from Africa.
Sure there were moments when you knew something was going to happen. The menacing music, increased bass, quickening of flash scenes, from the domino-playing older folks in Miss G’s shop, to the young men waiting for a “contact” you knew something was going to happen. And even when Professor (Dennis “Sprangalang” Hall from Trinidad) asked “But where me gran’ son?”, you knew something was going to happen.
At that moment, there was open fire on Mikey (Mike G. Yohannes), and the scene closed with Andrew falling to the ground. For the shocked inhalation, the camera zoomed in on the open-eyed child, Andrew, a stream of blood running from his mouth.
I admit, that it was seeing “Professa” walk through town sticking up flyers that drew tears from my eyes. Normally, we’d see the “missing” child flyers; but Professa’s flyers left a haunting unresolved question. With a picture of a smiling Andrew on the poster, it simply asked, “Do you know who killed this child?”

antiguasun.com

BIG DADDY star ADAM SANDLER has been inspired to go back to his roots as a stand-up comic after signing up to star in a new movie about comedians.
The actor plays a comedian in the currently untitled Judd Apatow-directed movie, which is due for release next year (09).
And Sandler - who started out on the comedy club circuit - insists he needs to get back to performing in front of live audiences before shooting stars later this year (08).
He tells MTV.com, “Man, I gotta write an act again. It’s been a long time. I haven’t done stand-up in, like, 10 years. Even more. So yeah, I gotta get to work this summer and start doing that again.
“That’s why I want to kill Judd Apatow right now. I was so much happier doing nothing.
“Stuff like that (stand-up shows) will happen. You will see me bomb for about 15 minutes straight, then walk off and punch Judd.”

contactmusic.com

It’s really hard to say what I expected from the new Adam Sandler movie You Don’t Mess With The Zohan. The title can be either a direct command, or perhaps a general piece of advice about life: "What is a Zohan? I’m not sure, but don’t mess with it!" We’ve all seen Sandler floating above the city, his legs splayed like "Bill the Cat" from Bloom County, aiming his hairdryers at the world. We’ve all wondered ‘what the hell that’s about?’ After seeing the movie, I’m still not entirely sure. But I do know that I laughed til tears came out of my eyes and learned that the problems of the Middle East can be solved if we all just get together to make funny noises. And if there’s enough hummus around.
Sandler has replaced his usual low concept/lowbrow humor with high concept/lowbrow humor direction in teaming with his old NYU roommate Judd Apatow, and one of his first SNL writers Robert Smigel. These three considerable comedy brains have come up with a surreal conceptual comedy that may just have enough slapstick in it to appeal to the great unwashed masses that went to see I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. Or, on the other hand, it may end up in the trash bin of history as just another gross-out sex comedy about the crisis in the Middle East.
In case you were wondering, a "Zohan" in this case is an Israeli Mossad super spy who can vanquish terrorists with ballet-like flips and kicks, catch bullets with his nose and fish with his butt. He is the object of affection for every Israeli (including a triumvirate of hot, horny Eliat honeys) and the target of scorn for every Palestinian. He spends his days barbecuing on the beach and breaking into terrorist strongholds. Nights, however, he spends alone, in an apartment festooned with posters Moshe Dayan and Gene Simmons flipping through a 1987 Paul Mitchell hairstyle yearbook as if it were a playboy. Yes, the Zohan wishes to become a hairdresser. He wants to stop fighting and just cut hair. Too ashamed to publicly announce his desire, he fakes his death during a fight with terrorist mastermind the Phantom (John Turturro) and secretly ships himself to America to pursue his hairdressing dreams.

ugo.com

May 27 (Bloomberg) — Sydney Pollack, the actor, producer and Academy Award-winning director of “Tootsie'' and “Out of Africa'' who used love stories, politics and humor to explore loss and human frailty, has died. He was 73.
Pollack died yesterday at his Los Angeles home after battling cancer, Leslee Dart, a spokeswoman for the family, said in a telephone interview. Pollack is survived by his wife, Claire, two daughters, a brother and six grandchildren.
Pollack excelled at serious, sometimes melancholy movies that explored relationships strained by emotional and cultural differences.
The connection between man and woman is “a metaphor for everything else in life,'' he told Newsweek in 1985. In a 1990 interview with the Los Angeles Times, he said he was drawn to “love stories in which the obstacle is too great to finally be overcome.''
Though a comedy, his biggest hit, “Tootsie'' (1982) took an earnest look at gender equality by following a male actor who finds success by posing as a woman. Other movies took on press freedom and responsibility (“Absence of Malice''), lost love and the personal damage caused by McCarthyism and blacklisting (“The Way We Were'') and the dirty details of covert intelligence operations (“Three Days of the Condor'').
Pollack was in the vanguard of innovative American film directors, including Sidney Lumet and John Frankenheimer, who became disillusioned in the 1960s with what Pollack called the “straight-line melodramatic'' fare Hollywood studios were turning out, Janet L. Meyer wrote in her 1998 book, “Sydney Pollack: A Critical Filmography.''
As an alternative, Pollack said he drew on the work of European directors, such as Federico Fellini and Francois Truffaut, whose films explored a single event through the reactions of multiple characters.
Pollack was widely hailed as an actor's director, one who worked closely with his cast to find the emotions behind their characters. Twelve actors were nominated for Academy Awards for performances in his films.

bloomberg.com

No matter what your Memorial Day celebration plans are this weekend… there’s one place you can expect to see crowds all day long.
Local movie theaters are banking on the three-day weekend to pull in large numbers of people who may not want to stray too far from home to have an adventure.
But before the large crowds come, the theater must begin preparing.
Hundreds of pounds of popcorn, lines of people waiting anxiously, sash registers opening and closing.
These are some of the sights and sounds you can expect to see this weekend at the movies.
We decided to find out how a theater prepares during the “calm before the storm”.
“It’s the kickoff weekend for the movie industry,” says Great Escape 12 Theatre City Manager, Joe Turner.
Which means big bucks at the box office… But it also means lots of preparation.
“Definitely we need to have everything stocked up and ready for everybody to come in and keep things looking good. We should be able to take care of the crowd then,” says concession worker, Caleb Wemyss.
Wemyss will be tackling his second Memorial Day at the Great Escape 12.
He still vividly remembers last years 3-day weekend.
“Last Memorial Day was pretty busy. I think we were having the “Spiderman” showing and I think “Pirates of the Caribbean” was about to come out,” says Wemyss.
“Well those weekends, as with any big movie, its the excitement of coming out and seeing something that’s going to entertain you and that’s what we look forward to here,” says Turner.
A “familiar face” should make this weekend the busiest the theaters seen a long time.
“They’re predicting big things for “Indiana Jones” and we’re expecting a lot of people to come out and have a great time at the movie theater,” notes Turner.

wbko.com

By Borys Kit
LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - “Iron Man,” which opens across North America on Thursday night, not only kicks off Hollywood’s extended summer movie season, it supercharges what is shaping up as the biggest season ever for comic book-to-film transfers.
“It’s not a fad,” Marvel Studios president of production Kevin Feige said of the onslaught of movies built around comic book avengers. “It’s the new archetype for the summer blockbuster. Everybody loves special effects, everybody loves epic entertainment, and that’s what comics have been delivering for decades and decades.”
“Iron Man” will be followed by “The Incredible Hulk” and “Wanted” on June 13 and 27, respectively, both from Universal. “Hellboy 2: The Golden Army” unleashes July 11, again from Universal, while “The Dark Knight,” Warner Bros.’ Batman sequel, alights July 18. Lionsgate releases “Punisher: War Zone” September 12.
On July 2, Sony opens its Will Smith-starrer “Hancock,” which is not actually based on an actual comic but does promise to turn superhero conventions on their head with its tale of a depressed, alcoholic, bumbling hero.
It speaks to the vitality of the genre that Hollywood can schedule all these movies in the same time period without fear that they will cannibalize each another. “Iron Man” is a Marvel action movie featuring a man in a super-powered armor, while “Wanted” is an R-rated action movie about a society of super-assassins. “Hulk” is a Marvel monster movie set amid a realistic backdrop, while “Hellboy” aims to take audiences to underground worlds fertilized by Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro’s imagination. “Dark Knight” is expected to offer another dark, psychological exploration from director Christopher Nolan.
“If they were all about a guy who runs into an alley and changed into a costume or into a phone booth to put on a mask, they would have come and gone in a year or two,” Feige said.

reuters.com

‘Nidhi’ Prasad had earlier directed several films. Despite good experience behind the camera eye, he is still committing mistakes giving jitters to the audiences. Before going to the sets, he had a fantastic storyline in mind.
However, while developing the story, he got confused and made mistakes in succession. The timing of songs is abrupt and especially the duets between Srikanth and Charmme should have been limited.
Though the title of the film had a similarity of an earlier film in which Kamal Hassan played the hero, it has nothing to do with the story. While Kamal played triple roles in that movie, in this film, the roles of Michael, Madan and Kamaraju were shared by Prabhudeva, Srikanth and Sunil. These were supported by Charmme and Mayuri in the female lead.
The director woven the story as a triangular love story. The hero of the film Madan (Srikanth) is a fashion designer and he conducts a fashion show where several models from different colleges across the country walk on the ramp at Goa. Archana (Charmme) is also a fashion designer and the costumes designed by her were on display by models from Vizag.
Madan and his brother-in-law Kamaraju (Sunil) meet Archana and Mandira (Mayuri @ Asha Saini) at Goa. While Madan takes Archana with him and employs her in his company, Kamaraju tries to marry Mandira. While returning from Goa, Madan tells Archana that he hates love. Though Madan loses his heart to her after some time, he could not reveal it due to ego problem. In order to make him reveal the love, Kamaraju arranges a fake wedding card of Archana with the photograph of Michael (Prabhudeva).
Madan gets depressed and at that time accidentally meets Michael, who was infant a vagabond. Learning all this, Michael decides to cheat Madan and marry Archana to bequeath the property of Archana. The hide and seek game between Michael, Madan, Archana and Kamaraju begins. Whether Madan was able to prove that Michael was a fake? How Kamaraju helped Madan in winning the love of Archana? What is the role of Kota Srinivasa Rao in the whole drama? Answers to all these questions form part of the climax.

indiaglitz.com

Do you remember this article or this one or this one from back in the day when nobody knew the plot, cast or even the title of "Cloverfield"?
It was one of 2008’s first cinematic surprises, and all that secrecy paid off with a huge opening at the box office. It was an even nicer surprise when "Cloverfield" actually turned out to be a good new-school monster movie. Now the shaky-cam instant classic is on DVD, and director Matt Reeves was happy to answer all the severely spoiler-heavy questions he wouldn’t go near four months ago.
If you’ve seen the movie, read on for answers about the fate of Marlena, whether the little monsters are babies and the potential sequel setups. If not, go grab the DVD and then come on back.
MTV: Matt, it must be nice finally being able to talk about the movie and knowing that it did so well.
Matt Reeves: It’s very exciting, yeah. It’s also cool because when the movie came out here, it didn’t come out all over the world on the same day, so I ended up getting to travel with it a bit. Finally, about two weeks ago, it came out in Japan, which was really fun because I was promoting a movie inspired by "Godzilla," so it was really fun to see how they responded.
MTV: When Hud gets eaten by the monster, Rob risks his life to grab the camera, rather than responding the way most of us would: ducking your head and running for the friggin’ hills. Why?
Reeves: I think it really becomes a tribute. Rob is losing his best friend. What seemed to him to be Hud’s crazy commitment to the documentation of this evening, first with the party, and then an importance on [chronicling] what might be a testament to their last moments on Earth, becomes not only a way to do that but to also honor his friend. That’s always what I felt, and that’s what [myself and the actors] talked about. It’s an unstated thing that some people might get and some people might not.

mtv.ca

HE LISTENED to heavy metal and played drums and violent video games, but it was a list naming those who had teased or wronged him that caught the attention of students at his Catholic private school.
“The list consisted of people who were mean to him who he wanted to kill,” one of his year 11 classmates said yesterday. “It was quite long. He’d had it since year 8. People didn’t take the list seriously. [It] was just another thing to tease him about.”
This was the 16-year-old in north-western Sydney who was charged yesterday with the stabbing murder of his father, 57, and the attempted stabbing murder of his mother, 50.
The boy’s mother saw her son allegedly stab her husband in the neck and stomach at 7am. She called 000 for an ambulance. By the time it arrived, her husband was dead and she had been violently attacked. She was taken to Westmead Hospital and was in a critical but stable condition late last night.
Police found the couple’s son in the front yard, his schoolbag full of books. He allegedly clashed with an officer as he tried to escape. He did not have a weapon with him, police said, but a knife was found at the house. It was “a pretty horrific crime scene”, said Superintendent Sue Waites.
There were reports that the so-called death list or hate book was found inside his backpack.
The teenager was the couple’s only child, but his father had two adult children from an earlier marriage. His oldest son, 33, spent the day with his father’s family on Monday, visiting his recently married sister. He told the Herald he noticed nothing that would suggest any problems with the family or his half-brother. “They were fine. He’s a pretty quiet boy. I think he was under a lot of pressure. Just stressed out all the time with his homework.”

smh.com.au

ATLANTA, Feb. 26 /PRNewswire/ — Allure Global Solutions, Inc. (Allure Global) announced today the completion of a successful installation of its dynamic Digital Menu Boards, Digital Movie Posters, Digital Auditorium Signage and Digital Box Office (DigiBox(C)) in The Silverado 19 IMAX Theatre, a new Santikos Theatre located in Houston, Texas.
"This installation is a showcase location for our digital media products," stated Rodrick Glass, EVP of Business Development for Allure Global. "Santikos has been a great digital signage partner for us. Their vision and use of a complete digital solution creates a special opportunity to deliver messaging and impact behavior at the ‘point of consumer.’ By integrating DigiBox and Auditorium Signs to the POS, we provide real-time information updated automatically. Santikos builds beautiful theatres and The Silverado is no exception."
"All of us at Santikos Theatres are excited about the Allure Global products we have installed," stated Richard Cieplechowicz, Director of Business Development for the San Antonio based theatre chain. "This theatre has 19 auditoriums with Digital Film Projection, Digital 3D and Sound, as well as curved screens, a full service restaurant, 2 mezzanine bars, a Gelato and Coffee bar, and state of the art gaming area. This is our first location in Houston and we wanted to really make it special with all the newest digital merchandising technologies. The Allure Global products make the entire theatre come to life. We couldn’t be more pleased."

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