LOS ANGELES (AFP) – – Astro Boy, the mythical Japanese cartoon character that has captivated generations of young people worldwide, will come out this year as an animated film by British director David Bowers.

“Without a doubt, this experience has been one of greater creative freedom. A lot of my robots, for example, were inspired by pre-Colombian characters,” said Luis Grane, the film’s Argentine character designer.

The animated feature is based on the popular Japanese cartoon series by Osamu Tezuka (1928-1989), known as the “god of manga” in its heyday in the 1960s.  Read more... (148 words, estimated 36 secs reading time)

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CANNES, France (AFP) – - Brillante Mendoza of the Philippines on Sunday picked up the best director prize at the Cannes film festival for his dark movie “Kinatay”.

“Kinatay” (meaning “massacre”) notably features corrupt cops hacking a prostitute to pieces with blunt kitchen knives.

Mendoza, at Cannes for the second year running, again split the critics, drawing both hisses and applause for “Kinatay”.

Last year’s “Serbis” was set in a Manila porn-theatre with long close-ups of festering boils and overflowing toilets, as well as the poverty and distress on the streets.

Full Story@ AFP/Yahoo PH

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TOKYO —Hardly showing any sign of jetlag after a 12-hour-plus long haul from the US, Tom Hanks sat for the following exclusive Conversation with the same cool composure with which he tackles an enviable menagerie of roles that have made him perhaps Hollywood’s most versatile actor — as the AIDS-stricken lawyer in Philadelphia which won him a Best Actor Oscar in 1994 and as a mentally-challenged guy who claims that “life is like a box of chocolates” and goes on to hurdle every challenge in Forrest Gump which won him the same award the following year, making him the first actor in 50 years to achieve that back-to-back honor; as the hopeless romantic in Sleepless in Seattle; as an astronaut in Apollo 13; as a foreigner stranded on a US airport in The Terminal; and now, reprising his role as Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon in Angels and Demons which he first played in The Da Vinci Code, the first Dan Brown best-seller to be made into a movie which raked in more than $750 million worldwide.  Read more... (288 words, estimated 1:09 mins reading time)

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LOS ANGELES, March 4 (Reuters Life!) – The creators of “Watchmen” call it a new, psychologically complex version of the superhero movie, but they are banking on it to conquer the box office the way conventional comic book movies have done.

To do that, “Watchmen”, which opens around the world this week, must attract those who have never heard of characters like Rorschach, Dr. Manhattan and Silk Spectre, and who want a thrilling joyride, box-office watchers said.

For years, filming a movie based on the sprawling 1980s “Watchmen” comic books by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons was considered impossible due to its multiple characters, violence, digressions and abundance of dialogue.  Read more... (143 words, estimated 34 secs reading time)

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An unbelievably silly movie, The Love Guru stars Mike Myers as Guru Pitka, a famous self-help author and speaker who longs to appear on Oprah in order to surpass Deepak Chopra as the world’s number-one purveyor of peace and love.

To that end, he takes on a job counselling a lovelorn hockey player whose wife wife has taken up with a well-endowed French Canadian goaltender played by Justin Timberlake (who steals the show with his moustache and hilariously-bad Quebecois accent). Then agai, in this show, that’s not saying very much.  Read more... (122 words, 1 image, estimated 29 secs reading time)

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ThunderCats is a classic battle of god versus evil. The ThunderCats are humanoids with distinct cat-like qualities, and appearances, while the Mutants are a bunch of goofy looking goons. Thundercats was set on what was called “Third Earth”. Both the ThunderCats and the Mutants are from other planets. The ThunderCats left Thundera, their home planet after it was destroyed by the Sword of Plun-Darr’s magic.  Read more... (237 words, estimated 57 secs reading time)

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Tom Hanks takes on the Vatican. Denzel Washington messes with hijackers. Will Smith pursues seven total strangers. Christian Bale leads the resistance against the machines. And the world ends… (at least on the big screen) in 2012. To the cinemas all, as Columbia Pictures unveils its sterling line-up of films for 2009!

“Angels & Demons.” Director Ron Howard and the team behind the global phenomenon “The Da Vinci Code” return in the film adaptation of another Dan Brown bestseller. Tom Hanks reprises his role as Harvard religious expert Robert Langdon, who once again finds that forces with ancient roots are willing to stop at nothing, even murder, to advance their goals.  Read more... (503 words, estimated 2:01 mins reading time)

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There are 8 films or entries in the 34th Annual 2008 Metro Manila Film Festival

Iskul Bukol: 20 years after (Tito, Vic & Joey)
Desperadas 2 (Joel Lamangan)
Shake, Rattle & Roll X (Mike Tuviera, Topel Lee)
Ang Tanging Ina Niyong Lahat (Wenn V. Deramas)
Baler (Mark Meily), One Night Only (Jose Reyes)
Magkaibigan (Jinggoy Estrada) and Dayo (Robert Quilao)

Twelve entries were submitted for this year’s festival and the four films that didn’t make the cut are:

Inocencia (Canary Films)
Here Comes The Bride (Octo-Arts)
Maldita (Focus Films)
An untitled horror movie (Star Cinema)

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