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from Photographers Blog:
Over your shoulder
Cannes, France
By Yves Herman
“Over your shoulder, look at me, straight ahead, dead center, ooh la la, give me eye contact, sir, madam, on your right, big smile, show me your dress, you look gorgeous!” It's all you can say to catch their attention, you need them to look straight in to the lens of your camera.
Yes, we are talking about the stars, the real ones, the big ones but also those who fill the pages of magazines. They can be actors, models, TV hosts or even socialites. They are popular and bankable for 1,000s of photographers standing on the red carpets in Cannes.
The annual Cannes Film Festival on the French Riviera is the biggest film festival in the world. Running for 12 days, it garners the attention of thousands of reporters and the entire world of cinema fans. Press photographers from everywhere gather in the south of France, equipped with a bunch of cameras and all their lenses and flashes, searching to immortalize celebrities.
THE PHOTOCALLS
At Cannes, a film needs to be advertised and the cast members must be seen. The photocalls are organized especially for photographers, helping to promote the cast and the film. The stars know that it is part of their job to play the game and give us something to photograph. It can be an attitude, a gesture or sometimes even a little show, spontaneous or maybe prepared in advance by the cast.
from Photographers Blog:
The old Cannes clapper-board
Cannes, France
By Eric Gaillard
In 1987, I covered my fifth Cannes Film Festival. I really wanted to find THE original and exclusive photo to announce its opening.
“The cinema Clap” - An idea which became evidence: Take a photo of the President of the Jury holding a cinema clap. The show begins for another 12-day festival.
from India Masala:
Gippi: The pains of growing up
(Any opinions expressed here are those of the author and not necessarily of Reuters)
Sonam Nair’s “Gippi” is the coming-of-age tale of a teenage girl who stumbles through life dealing with the typical crises of adolescence. Boys, parents, body image, acne and Shammi Kapoor come together to form the crux of this story, one that was probably written with the help of a handbook on how to script a teen movie.
from Photographers Blog:
Bollywood dreams
Mumbai, India
By Danish Siddiqui
The Hindi film industry or Bollywood can make a star, a household name out of anyone overnight. It can bring instant money, fame and the fan-following of millions from across continents.
Bollywood is an addiction for many that attracts thousands of aspirants to the breeding grounds, the city of Mumbai, everyday. I was keen to look at this other side of the glamour world. The side that entails the struggle to enter the world of aspiring dreamers and their struggles to become a star.
from Breakingviews:
Comcast ad-libs on winning NBC Universal script
By Jeffrey Goldfarb
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
Comcast has smartly ad-libbed on an already winning script. Back in 2009, the U.S. cable operator engineered a complex, multi-step deal with General Electric to buy NBC Universal. It has now smoothly accelerated and slightly rejigged the acquisition of the 49 percent of the TV and film group it doesn’t own for $16.7 billion. With the financial side of things now sorted, Comcast boss Brian Roberts must prove he’s the right owner.
from India Insight:
‘Vishwaroopam’ and Tamil Nadu’s cinema of politics
(Any opinions expressed here are those of the author, and not necessarily of Thomson Reuters)
The most unfortunate aspect of the censorship controversy over Kamal Haasan's new movie "Vishwaroopam," which came out on Thursday, is that it is happening in Tamil Nadu. India's southernmost state has a history of using cinema as a tool of political dissent and expression, particularly regarding the Dravidian movement, but that spirit seems to have vanished with the decision to release a truncated version of the film after Islamic groups said certain scenes offended them.
from The Great Debate:
Why Zero Dark Thirty divides the media in half
The thriller Zero Dark Thirty has exposed a wide gap between film critics and their counterparts in politics. Nearly every American film critic has lauded and rewarded it, including the New York Film Critics Circle, which tapped it as the best film of the year, making it a front-runner for Oscar nods. In sharp contrast, a number of major political writers have reviled the film, including New Yorker writer Jane Mayer and Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald, while Senators Dianne Feinstein, John McCain and Carl Levin wrote a letter of complaint to the film's distributor, Sony Pictures, calling the movie "grossly inaccurate and misleading in its suggestion that torture resulted in information" that led to the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. The division between political writers, politicians and critics only got more pronounced as the CIA’s acting director, Michael Morell, published an unusual disavowal of the film. When it comes to torture, Morell wrote, “the film takes significant artistic license, while portraying itself as being historically accurate.”
All these skirmishes make me wish we could weave these two forms of commentary — film criticism and political thought — together again more strongly. In the postwar decades, the best reviewers of the day saw addressing the politics within the cultural works they reviewed as part of their jobs. Such writers included Dwight McDonaldMacdonald, Mary McCarthy, James Agee, Parker Tyler, Robin Wood and even Pauline Kael, whose critique of films on the right (the classic The Deer Hunter, of which she said, "It has no more moral intelligence than the Clint Eastwood action pictures, yet it's an extraordinary piece of work ...") and on the left (Missing) didn't cleanse them of their political agendas.
from Breakingviews:
Penguin in bondage hides real risks in media M&A
By Quentin Webb
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own
Three deals from 2012 will reshape the book, music and film industries in 2013: Penguin's merger with Random House, Universal's $1.9 billion purchase of EMI's recorded-music business, and Walt Disney's $4.1 billion takeover of Lucasfilm. There are sound business reasons for all three. There are also reasons for artists and consumers to fret.
from Photographers Blog:
A different political film
By Jim Young
The political game always seems the same to me, only the players change.
This is my third Presidential campaign and I have always been fascinated with U.S. politics. This time around it was the early impact of the Tea Party and Sarah Palin, all the way to Romney's run up to election day that intrigued me.
It all began 18 months ago when I was based in Washington D.C. and started shooting with a Hasselblad x-pan panoramic film camera while covering President Barack Obama. I had never used a rangefinder before and had to remember how to manually focus a camera.
from Breakingviews:
Disney puts faith and $4 bln in power of the Force
By Antony Currie and Rob Cox
The authors are Reuters Breakingviews columnists. The opinions epxressed are their own.
Bob Iger and George Lucas are either flaunting their California roots, or they’ve got something to hide. The Walt Disney boss unveiled a $4 billion purchase of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones creator’s homegrown studio, Lucasfilm, on a day when Wall Street and stock markets were shut down by Hurricane Sandy. It’s just as well: Iger is asking his shareholders to put lots of faith in the power of the Force.
