BRAD PITT BLENDS POLITICS INTO CRIME DRAMA

Brad Pitt’s Killing Them Softly — he’s both the producer and star — premiered at the Cannes Film Festival today (Tuesday) and promptly courted controversy from both the right and the left. The film is set in 2008 during the presidential election and features clips of president-to-be Obama promising reforms that never came about. As […]

ARGENTINE TV: OLYMPICS CAN’T ESCAPE POLITICS

Once again, the Olympics, which is supposed to be a politics-free zone, has been used for political gamesmanship — this time by Argentina, which secretly produced a TV ad showing one of its athletes, hockey player Fernando Zylberg, training there. It aired on Argentine television stations on Wednesday. “To compete on English soil, we are […]

IRANIAN OSCAR WINNER: ABOVE POLITICS?

Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation, which won the best foreign language Oscar Sunday night, has become a huge hit in Israel, a country that regards Iran as its most dangerous enemy, the Associated Press reported on Sunday. The wire service quoted Yair Raveh, film critic for Israel’s Pnai Plus entertainment magazine, as saying, “It’s […]

BERLINALE JURY MEETS THE PRESS

The ever-provocative British director Mike Leigh (Secrets and Lies, Vera Drake, Happy-Go-Lucky, Another Year) showed that he has not dampened his sometimes incendiary sentiments as he appeared with the other members of the Berlin Film Festival’s jury at a news conference today (Thursday). Leigh, who is this year’s jury president, remarked at first that the […]

PIRATE PARTY A SURPRISE WINNER IN BERLIN

The Motion Picture Association of America was no doubt left reeling by results of Sunday’s elections in Berlin that saw Germany’s Pirate Party win 8.9 percent of the vote to take 15 seats in the Berlin house of representatives. In an interview with the New York Times, Christoph Bieber, a professor of political science at […]

CONAN WRITER ASSESSES THE MOVIE’S CRASH

Working on a movie that flops is like working on a political campaign in which the candidate is trounced, according to Sean Hood, who worked as a script doctor on last weekend’s turkey, Conan the Barbarian. In an amusing yet poignant article that was picked up in its entirety by Nikki Finke’s Deadline.com website after […]

DANCING WITH POLITICS

A day before the winner of Dancing with the Stars is due to be announced, the show appears to have entered the realm of extremist politics. Bringing to mind the anthrax scares of 2001, it was reported over the weekend that a letter addressed to finalist Bristol Palin contained white powder. Although it turned out […]