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British director Martin Campbell (Casino Royale, Goldeneye), is in talks to direct Jackie Chan in a new thriller that was previously titled The Foreigner. The movie, from China-backed STX Entertainment, revolves around “a restaurant owner in London’s Chinatown who is tracking down a group of Irish terrorists responsible for the death of his daughter.”

The movie did have actor/director Nick Cassavettes at the helm, but he doesn’t seem to be attached to the project at all now. The movie, which is being produced by China-based backers STX Entertainment, is based on a book named The Chinaman by Stephen Leather, which was first published back in 2008.

Source: The Hollywood News

Serta’s lead creative agency, Doner, worked with director John Hamburg (Along Came Polly, I Love You Man) and Aardman animation director Peter Peake to launch “It’s Over” for the brand, in time for Memorial Day.

The 30-second “We Need to Talk” mixes selling points, animated sheep and sexual innuendo with not-so-hilarious results. Counting sheep in a mattress ad is a tired device to say the least. Doner plays with the idea a bit here, but something about the attempts at humor fall flat, and the woman holding up a tablet with the five common sleep problems Serta helps solve is painfully forced. The sheep return for “You’re Not Helping,” a 15-second spot that takes a more minimal approach.

Continue viewing on Adweek.

Last night, at the 36th annual Sports Emmy Awards, We Could Be King—a collaboration between Tribeca Digital Studios and The DICK’s Sporting Goods Foundation—won the award for Outstanding Sports Documentary. Released last August, the film, directed by three-time Emmy-nominated documentarian Judd Ehrlich (Magic Camp, Run For Your Life), takes an in-depth and intimate look at urban America’s education crisis, specifically in Philadelphia. Due to minimized budgets, Philly’s Germantown High School was absorbed into their biggest rival, Martin Luther King. Through football, the MLK Cougars move past the longstanding rivalry aside and motivate an entire community.

We Could Be King was produced as part of The DICK’s Sporting Goods Foundation’s first-ever Sports Matter program. More than 180 youth athletic teams from across the country were awarded funds through The DSG Foundation toward their athletic programs, including MLK. Learn more at sportsmatter.com.

Continue reading at Tribeca Film.

By Joshua Rothman

There were many books I read this year and expected to love—Elena Ferrante’s “The Days of Abandonment,” Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle: Book Three”—and I read them and loved them, as expected. But “Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed” took me by surprise. It’s a six-hundred-page book of interviews with the German director, in which decades’ worth of conversations have been edited down into a dozen seamless exchanges. Herzog’s interlocutor, the film scholar Paul Cronin, asks innocuous questions (“Could any of your films be categorised as ethnography or anthropology?”), and Herzog replies by telling incredible stories from his life in filmmaking. He talks, for example, about a near-death experience in a snow cave on Cerro Torre, about a plane crash narrowly avoided in Peru, about forging the documents that allowed him to make “Fitzcarraldo.” The stories are riveting—often, it seems as though Herzog is trying to top himself—and, if you want, you can try out his Bavarian accent as you read. The book is full of useful advice about the creative life; it has a self-help quality. “May I propose a Herzog dictum?” he asks at one point. “Those who read own the world. Those who watch television lose it.”

Continue reading on The New Yorker.

Cannes 2014: The Salt of the Earth review – photographer Sebastião Salgado is a magnetic subject. A documentary portrait of the renowned Brazilian photographer by Wim Wenders and Juliano Ribeiro Salgado manages to be both illuminating and uplifting.

Sebastião Salgado is the Brazilian photographer whose nightmarish pictures of teeming, dirt-swamped gold miners electrified the world’s media in the mid-1980s. Now 70, Salgado has had his life story told by the joint force of his own son Juliano and Wim Wenders, and it’s a story that has turned out to have its own uplifting dynamic and character arc.

From his early years growing up on a Brazilian farm and a brief career as an economist, through his increasingly large-scale, and time-consuming, photographic projects that took him to many of the world’s most hostile and dangerous conflict zones, his timeline ends with a late-life return to his homeland and a determination to connect with the ravaged natural environment. This, at least, is the outline, and Salgado makes a magnetic subject – seeming, in his reflective, autumnal mood, a little older than he actually is. You do get the impression someone unswervingly focussed on his photography, to the extent of sacrificing large chunks of his family life to spend years on the road.

One obvious paradox is that Salgado’s pictures benefit from, and indeed are distinguished by, his habit of befriending and connecting with his subjects; that obviously was less the case with Juliano. That particular byplay is glossed over in the film, with Wenders’ reverential voiceover nudging things along. It’s testament to the strength of Salgado’s purpose, and the brilliance of his work, that the reverence never seems out of place, as his career is tracked from the gold mines, through the Sahel and the Gulf war oil fires, and into the death-frenzy of mid-90s Rwanda. It’s made clear that here, in the Rwanda-Congo border country, that Salgado came to the end of something; not compassion, exactly, but the ability to force himself into the lives of utterly miserable and desperate human beings; his subsequent retreat into environmental activism and nature photography making perfect sense.

Continue reading on TheGuardian.com.

The Barbican’s City Visions film season opens with Wim Wenders’ Cathedrals of Culture, a collection of short films by a star-studded line-up of directors.

Guardian writer, Chris Michael, catches up with Wim Wenders about his home city, Berlin.

Continue reading on Guardian.com.

Starring in the Australian real estate company’s latest campaign called Australia Lives Here, Arnold Schwarzenegger draws on his signature sense of humour and Austrian accent to deliver the sell.

Walking onto a staged movie set and approaching his assistant named Dylan, the Terminator actor seems to have plans of making a move Down Under.
‘Dylan, I’ve decided it’s time for me to move back to Austria,’ the actor told his assistant.

‘I’ve been looking at realestate.com.au and Austria has some great places,’ he continues, mistaking Australia for his home country of Austria.
‘Realestate.com.au is Australia sir,’ Dylan politely interrupts, but the former Governor of California maintains his confidence and certainty.

‘Dylan you pronounce things so funny, that’s what I like about you,’ he laughs.

And getting even more passionate about his relocation plans, he points to his phone and says, ‘but look at these places here. Sydney, Wagga Wagga.’

‘But no Vienna right?’ Dylan enquires, hoping the celebrity will realise his mistake.

‘I know so much has changed,’ Arnold says, completely oblivious to his employee’s hints.

And he goes on to truly deliver his marketing pitch, outlining the favourable features of the website.

‘This gives me the tools, the information, the market data, I mean this is fantastic,’ he exclaims, before adding: ‘Book me some inspections, alright?’

And it seems that the star is so eager to jet set across the world that he decides to skip filming his flick, relying on his body double.
‘Hello, how are you doing?’ he cheekily says, staring at his reflection in the mirror.

realestate.com.au Group Manager Marketing Strategy, Natalie Feehan says, ‘Through Arnie’s discovery of realestate.com.au, we get to see other parts of the site that are helpful for consumers like suburb profiles, sold price information, investment data and editorial content.’

Continue reading on The Daily Mail

Director Michael Apted — whose work has spanned features such as the James Bond filmThe World Is Not Enough and documentaries including the Up series — turns the camera on photographers and their lenses in his new documentary, Bending the Light, which is scheduled to premiere this weekend at Michael Moore’s Traverse City Film Festival.

Canon commissioned the documentary, in part to mark its production of lenses — it has produced more than 90 million of them, a statistic, it claims, that is higher than other lens manufacturers.

Apted had creative control over his unique look at Canon’s iconic lenses as he explored the art of photography through the words of photographers themselves, as well as through interviews with the craftspeople who lovingly make the glass at Canon’s Utsunomiya, Japan factory.

“I didn’t want to make it a technical film; I wanted to give it human context,” Apted tells The Hollywood Reporter.

Continue reading on Hollywood Reporter.

In order to examine the art of photography, you have to start by looking at the glass. “It’s the heart of the camera,” explains one lens-maker in director Michael Apted’s (The Up Series) latest documentary Bending the Light.

Apted’s film gives audiences a rare glimpse inside a premier Japanese lens factory and features interviews with celebrated photographers and cinematographers like Stephen Goldblatt, Greg Gorman, Richard Barnes, and Laura El-Tantawy in his study of the relationship between the artist and their tools.

Insider movies on EW.

Peter Sorcher, an award-winning San Francisco based director and editor has joined Saville for commercial and branded content representation in North America. Peter is best known for his storytelling style, which blends cinematic filmmaking with branding, creating a unique visual language.

Peter’s visually stunning ad for photo app SpeakingPhoto was recently featured as Adweek’s “Ad of the Day.” His ability to seamlessly interweave the stories of three diverse characters creates a beautiful piece of genuinely human storytelling.

Peter’s powerful and inspiring documentary short “I Want to Say,” a Goodby Silverstein & Partners and Hewlett-Packard collaboration, shows his ability to weave hours of footage into a poignant piece. As part of the Autism Speaks initiative, the documentary chronicles the lives of autistic children, focusing on the use of innovative technology to empower and give those with autism a voice. The film was short listed for the Platinum Lion Award in Cannes in 2012 and the AICP Next Awards.

His feature directorial debut “Eat the Sun,” a full-length documentary film about the ancient practice of sungazing, screened at film festivals around the world. The film went on to win the Jury Award for best documentary at the Chicago United Film Festival.

Saville’s Executive Producer Rupert Maconick adds, “Peter’s work spotlights his excellent ability to connect a branding message to real people and their stories. Brands are moving away from traditional advertising, transitioning into docu-style spots. Peter is a great addition to the team as brands are looking for real imagery and authentic moments to connect to their consumer base.”

SourceECreative