Movie Mini-Reviews

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NICE, France (AP) - Brad Pitt was emotional but calm, Angelina Jolie laughed and chatted. The world's most famous celebrity couple were joined in emotion during the birth of their twins - a boy and a girl - and all "are doing marvelously well," the doctor who delivered the babies in a seaside hospital on the French Riviera said Sunday.

The Mayor of Nice, France, has personally welcomed Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s newborn twins, Knox Leon and Vivienne Marcheline, signing off on their birth certificates and offering his congratulations to the superstar couple. Jolie's obstetrician, Dr. Michel Sussmann, said he believed the baby girl's middle name was chosen in honor of Jolie's mother, actress Marcheline Bertrand, who died in January 2007 after a 7 1/2-year battle with cancer.

Mayor Christian Estrosi showed the waiting media the birth certificate of baby Knox, born on Saturday July 12 at 6:27pm, bearing Pitt’s full initials WBP - William Bradley Pitt. “On behalf of the inhabitants of Nice,” Estrosi declared, “I congratulate the happy parents, the most famous couple of the world, who have chosen our city for this happy event.”

"The father is having one of the happiest moments of his life, like any father, especially when they have the joy of having two children from such a wonderful wife as Angelina Jolie. The mother is doing fine. She is smiling a lot. She is as happy as the father," Estrosi said.

Nice Matin, the hometown daily in the Riviera city in the south of France, put the worth of the twins' photos at more than $11 million. It first broke news of the birth and reported Sunday that the couple have sold the rights for the first photo of their newly expanded family to a U.S. publication, which it did not name, and that the proceeds would go to charity.

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Photos courtesy of Reuters, MTV Newsroom, and Mail Online

Original Source: AP and The Celebrity Truth

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Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's love for children is by no means limited to their own: The couple has donated $1 million to help kids affected by the war in Iraq, the Education Partnership for Children of Conflict announced.

The organization will distribute the donation, made through the couple's Jolie-Pitt Foundation, to four organizations working on behalf of children who have lost parents, homes and schools in Iraq. Children in the U.S. who have lost parents in the conflict will also benefit.

"These educational support programs for children of conflict are the best way to help them heal," said Jolie in a written statement from Education Partnership for Children of Conflict, which she co-chairs.

"We hope to encourage others to give to these great organizations," Pitt added in the statement.

The Jolie-Pitt Foundation has given $500,000 to three groups in the war-torn country which will provide aid for some 5,700 children, said the Education Partnership for Children of Conflict.  read more »

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Groundbreaking yet familiar, part romance, part sci-fi, Pixar's latest work is wonderful and full of wonder. - Kenneth Turan, Times Movie Critic

If Pixar Animation Studios has an enviable record of consistent success -- and with a worldwide box-office gross of $4.3 billion from its eight films, it certainly does -- it's because the company has an uncanny gift for pushing things further without pushing too far. Pixar's adventurous new film, the one-of-a-kind "Wall-E," shows how it's done. Daring and traditional, groundbreaking and familiar, apocalyptic and sentimental, "Wall-E" gains strength from embracing contradictions that would destroy other films. Directed by Pixar stalwart Andrew Stanton, who co-wrote and directed the Oscar-winning "Finding Nemo," "Wall-E" is the latest Pixar film to manage what's become next door to impossible for anyone else: appealing to the broadest possible audience without insulting anyone's intelligence.

The origins of "Wall-E's" story, as related in the film's teaser trailer, go back to 1994, when Pixar honchos held a now-celebrated lunch to spitball story ideas, which became "A Bug's Life," "Monsters, Inc." and "Finding Nemo." "Wall-E" is the last of that group to get made, in part because elements of it are so unconventional. For one thing, the film's exceptional first half hour or so lives and breathes on screen with just about zero human dialogue. But with the storied Ben Burtt, who did the job on "Star Wars," creating all kinds of noise as the film's sound and character voice designer, as well as music by Thomas Newman, you won't miss those words at all. You also won't miss them because the world of "Wall-E," created by production designer Ralph Eggleston and his team, with the advice of high-powered cinematography consultants Roger Deakins and Dennis Murren, is so remarkable. The time is 800 years in the future and the setting is our own Earth, but it's not an Earth anyone would want to recognize.

Not to put too fine a point on it, our planet is a disaster, a bleak and disheartening ruin where every available surface is covered by towering skyscrapers of trash. It got so bad that Buy n' Large, the conglomerate that has somehow taken charge of the planet, leaned on the entire human population to leave with a "space is the final fun-tier" campaign that featured slogans such as, "Too much garbage in your face? There's plenty of space out in space." Though not likely the main reason the film was made, "Wall-E" can't help but send out a powerful and even frightening environmental message. Though G-rated, its dystopian vision (shot by Jeremy Lasky and Danielle Feinberg) of what the perils of consumer excess have in store for the planet is unnerving without trying too hard.

One reason "Wall-E" is as audience-friendly as it finally is is the presence of the endearing title character, whose name is an acronym for Waste Allocation Load Lifter -- Earth Class. What that means in practical terms is that Wall-E is a robotic trash compactor who has been quietly doing his job attacking Earth's endless mountains of refuse for 700 years. Unless you count his pal, a nameless but convivial roach, Wall-E is the only thing still moving on the entire planet. Given all that, it's to be expected that Wall-E, whose large binocular eyes and narrow neck turn him into a squat, mechanical E.T., has developed a few personal eccentricities over the years. For one thing, he's quite the collector, squirreling away everything from old Rubrik's Cubes to light bulbs to an actual living plant.

More than that, this set-in-his-ways old bachelor robot has developed a fixation with the movies. Not really the movies, but one movie in particular, the only video he's got. It is, of all things, "Hello, Dolly!" and screenwriters Stanton and Jim Reardon had the shrewd idea of opening the film with the jaunty lyric, "Out there is a world outside of Yonkers," as the camera somberly pans both the universe and the ruins of Earth. What really entrances "Wall-E" about "Hello, Dolly!" is the spectacle of people expressing emotion and connection by holding hands. Not a word is spoken, but we understand that this lonely Robinson Crusoe, like so many movie creatures before him, would like nothing better than to hold hands with another entity. And then it happens. A spaceship lands in Wall-E's neighborhood and leaves behind a sleek white oval-shaped probe-droid with bewitching blue eyes named Eve (for Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator), sent to Earth to find signs of life. High tech and armed with a laser weapon that pulverizes anything in sight, Eve fascinates Wall-E and he nervously scuttles around after her, fearful but intoxicated by her every move.

Though this wordless section of the film, punctuated only by Wall-E's frequent and idiosyncratic croak of "Eve," is in some ways merely a set up for the second half, it is easily the most memorable and distinctive part of the film. This segment, a kind of song without words, is a world-creating work of pure imagination that has been thought out to the nth degree.

"Wall-E's" second half involves the dauntingly overweight humans who have sent the probe (and who are shrewdly not pictured in any publicity material.) They've lived for centuries on a cruise liner-type spaceship called the Axiom run by a barely functional captain (Jeff Garlin) in thrall to a Hal-type eminence called Auto, voiced, in a nod to "Alien," by Sigourney Weaver. This part of the story gets increasingly familiar and sometimes borders on the predictably sentimental. But along with these inevitable elements of calculation, "Wall-E" never loses its sense of wonder: wonder at life, wonder at the universe, and even wonder at the power of computer animation to create worlds unlike any we've seen before. How often do we get to say that in these dispiriting times?

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Images courtesy of Disney/Pixar, mlive.com, hamptonroads.com

Original Source and Video: LA Times

Special Gallery:Showbiz 7s: Movies that inspired 'Wall-E'

Related Article: :'Wall-E' draws design inspiration from Apple

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Is he or is he not ill? While sources make contradictory reports and we’re all left to wonder whether legendary Hollywood actor Paul Newman is indeed battling lung cancer at 82 or in fact “doing nicely,” as he has stated, let’s just wish him good health and many years to come.

Last year, Newman announced that, at 82, acting was just not the same and that he would retire. He said it was “pretty much a closed book” for him, as aging meant “you start to lose your memory, you start to lose your confidence, you start to lose your invention.”

He was still set to direct “Of Mice and Men,” a stage play of the John Steinbeck novella. Earlier this year, Newman cited unspecified health issues as he announced he would withdraw from the project.

The star’s career spans a remarkable five decades, has starred in movies such as “Hud,” “Cool Hand Luke,” “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “The Verdict” and many others.

In recent years, he has starred in “Road to Perdition” opposite Tom Hanks, appeared in the HBO miniseries “Empire Falls” and lent his voice to an animated race car in the Disney/Pixar hit “Cars.”

He has also been involved in charity, raising more than $200 million from his Newman's Own brand of dressings, pasta sauces, popcorn and salsa.  read more »

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If Mr. Pollack, who died on Monday at 73, could be compared to a major figure from the Old Hollywood, it would not be to one of the great individualists like Howard Hawks or John Ford, but more like William Wyler: highly competent, drawn to projects with a certain quality and prestige and able above all to harness the charisma of movie stars to great emotional and dramatic effect.

Just about any film by Robert Altman or Martin Scorsese, for instance, will be immediately and primarily identifiable as such, no matter who’s in it. But if you think of “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?,” you’ll remember Jane Fonda, so desperate and defiant and sad as she pushes herself through a Depression-era dance marathon. “Tootsie” is Dustin Hoffman’s movie. “This Property Is Condemned” will conjure up Natalie Wood and Robert Redford, oddly cast but nonetheless generating Southern Gothic heat in an overripe Tennessee Williams scenario. And it is Mr. Redford who defines Mr. Pollack’s oeuvre nearly as much as the director himself. Over nearly 25 years, from “This Property Is Condemned” to “Havana,” they worked together on westerns (“Jeremiah Johnson,”); love stories both sweeping (“The Way We Were”) and intimate (“The Electric Horseman”); paranoid thrillers (“Three Days of the Condor”); and high-toned literary adaptations (“Out of Africa.”)  read more »

Original Source: CNN

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CANNES, France (AP) -- Fur might be a politically incorrect fashion statement on the red carpet at the world's most-prestigious film festival. Not when you're the star of a movie called "Kung Fu Panda," though. DreamWorks Animation, whose past Cannes entries include the first two "Shrek" flicks and "Over the Hedge," put its adorable martial-arts hero alongside the festival's highbrow cinema entries Thursday with the premiere of the action comedy whose voice cast includes Jack Black, Angelina Jolie and Dustin Hoffman.

While Black hammed it up with some kung fu poses, he wisecracked that the incessant camera flashes could go a long way to solving the energy crunch. "If you harnessed all that electricity, it would probably be enough to take a small unmanned ship to the moon and back," Black said. "It's got to be 1.21 gigawatts of light flashes. It's just going to be sick. Do we really need that many pictures? Where are all those photos going?"

Black provides the voice of Po, a panda in ancient China who idolizes his country's martial-arts heroes but is too slow and clumsy to emulate their moves, stuck instead toiling in his family's noodle shop. A twist of fate lands Po under the tutelage of a revered kung fu master (Hoffman), who must train the klutzy panda to battle an evil snow leopard (Ian McShane) intent on marauding and vengeance. Po's allies include a tiger (Jolie), a viper (Lucy Liu) and a monkey (Jackie Chan), whose graceful martial-arts skills put the lumbering panda to shame.

"I do think that Po the panda is going to give Shrek a run for his money, because I think that Po in a very different way is without question the most lovable character we've ever created," Katzenberg said. "Shrek's an anti-hero hero. Po is an unlikely hero. He is more in tune with what we are ourselves. He actually has to find the hero within, and I think we all have a hero within us. "So it's just very relatable to find this kind of average guy who's working in his dad's noodle restaurant suddenly have an ambitious fantasy to be something great, only to learn that being the best version of yourself is greatness."

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Black also let slip that his co-star, Jolie, and her partner Brad Pitt are expecting twins, who would be the fifth and sixth children for the couple, joining siblings Maddox, Pax, Zahara, and Shiloh. Jolie confirmed the news, mentioning she may decide to give birth to the twins in France.

Images courtesy of AFP and EPA/GUILLAUME HORCAJUELO

“There is pleasure in the pathless woods;
There is rapture on the lonely shore;
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more.”

Above excerpt from poem by Lord Byron (1788–1824) is the beginning of the movie based on a true story, of a young top student and athlete Christopher McCandless from Emory University, who donated his savings (all $24,000) to charity and abandoned his car, walked by himself, alone, “Into the Wild”, into Alaska. He burned his social security card, all personal IDs, and family photos, leaving no clue for his well-off family to find him. A very sad journey of a young man at 24 to disconnect himself entirely from society from the moment he burnt the remaining cash in his wallet, a “new birth”, in his words… The perceived hypocrisy in his parents’ and family relationships that he hates most has buried, in a little boy’s heart, a secret bomb of pain, not unlocked in time. He did not make one phone call even to his younger sister, nor did love from acquaintances on the road stop him from a journey obviously leading an innocent to apparent danger. Does the young man “love not man the less, but Nature more”?

Released by Paramount Vantage. Running time: 140 minutes. Starring Emile Hirsch, Marcia Gay Harden, and William Hurt. (screenshots) -

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