It's hard to watch France's political and cultural elite rush to support filmmaker Roman Polanski against extradition to the United States on a decades-old sex charge and not wonder exactly how they interpret the national motto "liberté, égalité, fraternité." It's tempting to ask whether they're defending the liberty to break the law and skip town, respecting the equality of all before the law and championing a brotherhood of artists who can do no wrong.

(Photo: Roman Polanski, 19 Feb 2009/Hannibal Hanschke)

Here in Paris, Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner declared the arrest was "a bit sinister ... frankly, (arresting) a man of such talent recognised around the world, recognised in the country where he was arrested -- that's not very nice." He and his Polish counterpart have written to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about the issue. Culture Minister Frédéric Mitterrand said "just as there is a generous America that we like, there's also an America that scares us, and that's the America that has just shown us its face." Directors, actors and intellectuals have been signing a petition demanding Polanski's immediate release.

Almost all the focus is on the argument that Polanski is a brilliant director, the charge of unlawful sex with a 13-year old dates back to 1977 and the victim herself says she wants the whole issue to be forgotten.  Almost completely ignored is the fact that he fled the U.S. to escape sentencing, which added a crime to the original crime. There is such a widespread assumption that all artists and intellectuals would automatically support Polanski that Paris papers today -- both the left-of-centre Libération and the conservative Le Figaro -- wrote with an air of surprise that Hollywood was not storming the barricades to back him.

The French Greens leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit made headlines by bucking the trend and saying he was "ill at ease" with the rush to absolve Polanski of raping a minor and the culture minister should have been more cautious in his comments.

Across the Atlantic, by contrast, Hollywood's hometown paper, the Los Angeles Times, reviewed the objections by Polanski's supporters and concluded: "Plausible or preposterous, these arguments are eclipsed by a simple fact: Polanski fled the country ... the Justice Department and L.A.'s district attorney are right to seek extradition."

And almost nobody in the media here in France asks the tough questions that Fr. Tom Reese, S.J. (photo at right) did in his Washington Post blog post entitled "Father Polanski would go to jail":
"Polanski's defenders ... argue that he should not be punished. They say that the girl was willing and sexually experienced and she has forgiven him (after receiving a settlement). They even cite his tragic childhood and life as an excuse. And besides, it is ancient history. Such arguments from paedophile priests would be laughed out of court and lambasted by everyone, and rightly so...

"The Catholic Church has rightly been put under a microscope when 4 percent of its priests were involved in abuse, but what about the film industry? The world has truly changed. Entertainment is the new religion with sex, violence and money the new Trinity. The directors and stars are worshipped and quickly forgiven for any infraction as long as the PR agent is as skilled as a saintly confessor. Entertainment, not religion, is the new opiate of the people and we don't want our supply disturbed.

"Is there a double standard here? You bet."

There's a lot to say about the different ways Americans and French approach the law. But let's go right to Tom Reese's question. Do you think Polanski's supporters cut him slack they wouldn't think of permitting for a paedophile priest? Is the entertainment industry setting our values?

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For anyone who has seen the hit film District 9, it’s no surprise a Nigerian minister would be upset by it.

The science fiction film, set in South Africa, is an allegory on segregation and xenophobia, with alien life forms cooped up in a township of the type that grew up under apartheid and victimised and despised by humans of all descriptions.

No section of human society comes across particularly well, but the Nigerians are crudely caricatured as gangsters, cannibals, pimps, prostitutes and dealers in guns and addictive drugs (in this case cat food). The gang leader’s name sounds exactly like the surname of Nigeria’s former President Olusegun Obasanjo.

It’s just a film of course and the slurs needn’t overly detract from the entertainment. (They didn’t for the Nigerian half of my family anyway).

But this does raise a question as to why Nigerians should be seen as fair targets and casually turned into comic book gangsters? Would the film makers have got away with showing other nations or groups in this way? Would they have feared the backlash?

It also raises the question as to what Nigeria can do about really changing its image – beyond rebranding and advertising campaigns.

It could be argued that the immense and undoubted talent of law-abiding Nigerians, the vast majority at home and abroad, does not get the recognition it deserves in the rest of the world despite the acclaim for the greatest Nigerian writers, musicians, footballers and athletes.  Nor may the sacrifice of Nigerians who have given their lives as peacekeepers in Africa and elsewhere.

But we can’t forget that there are still plenty of Nigeria’s 150 million people who have no qualms about giving their country a bad name.

What about the Nigerians imprisoned in Asia and Europe for smuggling drugs? The ‘419’ fraudsters with their email appeals? The kidnappers and oil thieves of the Niger delta? Those politicians who rig elections with fraud, intimidation and bribery? Those officials who see their positions merely as a chance to fill their boots and may be all too ready to subvert the courts or obstruct people struggling to do business fairly?

And how can Nigeria’s image improve while it cannot regularly light up the homes of its people - despite enormous energy resources and billions of dollars spent?

Does Nigeria suffer unfairly from an image problem or will it improve its image once it deals with its problems?

We’re off.

After weeks of planning, the Venice film festival finally launched today with a lengthy, sentimental Italian entry as the opening film, “Baaria.” It is the first home-made movie to start the annual festival in around 20 years, and, if the budget is anything to go by, it should do well. The movie, which is more than two-and-a-half hours long, cost a whopping 25 million euros to make.

Directed by Giuseppe Tornatore (of Oscar-winning “Cinema Paradiso” fame), “Baaria” is set in Sicily and spans the 1930s to the 1980s. It tells the story of Sicily, and more broadly of Europe as a whole, through three generations of the same family.

Critics are divided. One I spoke to hated it, another I have just read liked it. Venice could do with an Italian hit, after so many have failed to impress in recent years.

I’ve just come out of a screening of “The Road”, starring Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron, in an interpretation of Cormac McCarthy’s grim novel about a man and his son trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. The father-son relationship at its heart is tough to watch for a dad of two young boys like me, and it’s not what I would call an easy watch. But then the acclaimed book was not an easy read either. I’ll be interested to see what the critics say about the movie, and how Mortensen found the shooting when he speaks to us in an interview.

After years of adulation over the hilarity of their genre-spawning rockumentary This is Spinal Tap, screenwriter Christopher Guest and the other actors of the much-loved spoof band Spinal Tap decided it was time to pay a visit to the prehistoric monument behind one of the hit movie’s funniest scenes - Stonehenge.

News of the visit comes courtesy of Canadian indie rock outfit Metric, who, like Spinal Tap, were fresh off a performance at Britain’s Glastonbury music festival when they made a pit stop to check out the landmark.

Upon arriving at the monument, Metric frontwoman Emily Haines and her bandmates were disappointed to find the entrance closed. But as she recounts on her band’s blog, their sightseeing detour was about to get a lot more exciting.

“We were staring at the stones through the fence and halfheartedly watching various generic families wander toward their cars when Joules said the words we will remember forever: ‘Um, guys, that’s . . . Spinal Tap!”

The irony drenched Rob Reiner-directed “This is Spinal Tap,” which apes a documentary film style, follows a fictionalized heavy metal band as it blunders its way through one career misstep after another. Most notably, in one scene the band unveils a stage prop modeled on Stonehenge during a concert, only to find out at that moment their set designer had made the model a mere 18 inches tall.

At the real Stonehenge, Haines and her bandmates approached the actors and managed to catch up with their favorite, Harry Shearer, as he and the others were on their way to a nearby parking lot. Shearer even posed for a picture with the group, which you can see on the blog.

“The best part is, it was Spinal Tap’s first trip to Stonehenge as well,” Haines enthuses. “According to Shearer, they were just making their way back to London when they spotted the source of their most memorable joke in the distance and decided, ‘this would be the time to see the full-scale version.’”

Since its original release in 1984, “This is Spinal Tap” has developed a sizeable cult following and influenced other filmmakers looking to document the ups and downs of life in a rock band.

Watch the Stonehenge scene from the film below.

After exposing a Church cover-up in "The Da Vinci Code," symbologist Robert Langdon returns to the big screen as an unlikely Vatican ally in the latest movie adaptation of a novel by author Dan Brown.

"Angels & Demons," again starring Tom Hanks as Langdon and directed by Ron Howard, premieres in Rome on Monday at a theatre a mile (0.6 kilometer) away from Vatican City. It's due to open in the United States on May 15.

(Photo: Tom Hanks, Ayelet Zurer and Ron Howard (L-R) at a photocall at CERN near Geneva, 12 Feb 2009/Valentin Flauraud)

In the film, Langdon is recruited by the Vatican after the pope dies and four cardinals tipped  to succeed him are kidnapped. Langdon races through the "Eternal City" deciphering clues linked to a centuries-old secret society, the Illuminati.

"He is not the man the Vatican trusts -- he is the man the Vatican needs," Howard said in production notes for the movie.

The Vatican deeply disapproved of" The Da Vinci Code," especially its portrayal of the life of Jesus, and the Archdiocese of Rome refused permission for "Angels & Demons" to be filmed in historic churches there, forcing the crew to recreate them in Los Angeles. The Vatican has declined to comment on reports it would call for a boycott of the new film.

When "Angels & Demons" actor Ewan McGregor and actress Ayelet Zurer posed for a photocall in Rome with actors dressed as Swiss Guards, they had to do it in a deconsecrated church.

(Photo: McGregor and Zurer at photocall in Saint Marta Church in Rome, 15 Feb 2009/Alessia Pierdomenico)

But director Howard says it's not anti-Catholic and thinks that "Catholics, including most in the hierarchy of the Church, will enjoy the movie for what it is: an exciting mystery, set in the awe-inspiring beauty of Rome."

Will this Dan Brown movie go down better at the Vatican than "The Da Vinci Code"? Read the whole story here, plus our film Factbox.

Remember the Singing Nun? If you're old enough to recall the song "Dominique", you might want to see a new Belgian film"Soeur Sourire" ("Sister Smile") about the nun whose hit song topped the charts in Europe and North America in 1963. Then again, you might not ... The song was far more upbeat than the sad story behind it.

Jeanine Deckers, or Sister Luc Gabrielle -- better known by her pseudonyms Singing Nun in English and Soeur Sourire in French -- was a Belgian Dominican sister who scored a one-hit wonder with "Dominique" in 1963. The record was released under her pseudonym. But the song became such an international hit that she finally went public and even appeared on "The Ed Sullivan Show" in the United States She never had another hit and the 1966 film "The Singing Nun" starring Debbie Reynolds ended with her giving up music to work in Africa. Deckers later described that film as "fiction". "Soeur Sourire" sticks closer to the facts

(Photo: film poster for Soeur Sourire/Ocean Films)

As the film depicts it, the rebellious Deckers enters the convent to find refuge from her heartless mother and her youthful confusion at advances by male and female admirers. She has trouble adjusting to convent life but her singing catches the attention of Belgium's Catholic television and her mother superior is persuaded to let her record "Dominique." Celebrity goes to her head, she leaves the convent and moves in with Annie, the female admirer. When she tries to launch a new career, she cannot not use the pseudonym Soeur Sourire because it belongs to her order.

Things go downhill from there, with pill popping and binge drinking becoming more frequent. During a disastrous tour of Canada, the local Catholic hierarchy gets a Montreal concert series stopped because she sings a song in praise of contraception, "Glory be to God for the Golden Pill". The final straw comes back in Belgium, where the authorities demand back taxes due on her royalties from "Dominique". She had handed them all over to the order, but has no receipt. Overwhelmed, she and her partner Annie commit suicide. Director Stijn Coninx has found a way to put a soft spin on the ending, but it still ends tragically.

The film is mostly in line with the facts. It starts off well, recreating the atmosphere of late 1950s Belgium, but takes too many shortcuts once Deckers's life starts going downhill. There are some strange Church-related scenes (for example, a bishop who scrambles to don his zucchetto when a phone call wakes him in bed in the middle of the night) and the cars all seem to date from the late 1950s and early 1960s despite the passing years. Deckers lived until 1985.

(Photo: Cécile de France as the Singing Nun/Ocean Films)

The film has already won two awards at a film festival in Valenciennes, a French city just across the border from Belgium. It opened on Wednesday in Paris in a multiplex at the Forum des Halles, one of the ugliest places in this beautiful city. It was a midday showing, so it was difficult to say if the nearly empty cinemreflected its box office prospects. Most of the moviegoers were, like me, old enough to remember the Singing Nun and wonder what became of her.

Could a film like this cross the Channel and the Atlantic as easily as "Dominique" did?

Here's a trailer for the film "Soeur Sourire":

In one of the biggest surprises on Oscar night, the animated Israeli documentary Waltz with Bashir did not walk away as many expected with the famed statuette in the Foreign Film category, which instead went to Japanese film Departures.

Even the star of Departures acknowledged he was expecting Waltz with Bashir to win the Academy Award.

The hype in Israel surrounding the movie- which won a Golden Globe earlier in the year - had provided a spark of optimism in the country where politics, regional relations and the economy have been weighing heavily on the public mood.

Some are already suggesting the failure of Waltz on Hollywood's biggest night was some form of censure for the recent Israeli offensive in Gaza.

An editorial cartoon in the Israeli press made the connection - showing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert presenting director Ari Folman with a consolation prize and saying "We made you a statuette out of Cast Lead". Operation Cast Lead was the Israeli code name for the Gaza offensive launched late last year with the stated aim of countering militant rocket fire from inside Gaza. It provoked much international criticism of Israel, notably over hundreds of civilians killed and wounded.

Echoing the glum mood elicited by Waltz's failure - another cartoon in Israel's leading Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper has a man reacting to the headline "Disappointment at the Oscars" saying "There's another failure of the Lebanon War" - a reference as much to the broadly unpopular and inconclusive 2006 battle with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon as to the 1980s invasion of Lebanon that is the subject of Ari Folman's astonishing animated flashback.

A more nuanced view, perhaps, comes from Israeli commentator Bradley Burston who says in this article that Waltz's failure was primarily down to Hollywood's unwillingness to move beyond its portrayal of Jews as either Holocaust victims and survivors, "cutesy, comic Yiddishers" or "noble, chiselled, ascetically moral kibbutzniks".

Folman's depiction of an angry, tortured, anti-war former soldier certainly does not fall in to any of those categories.

Burston recalls a 2005 episode of the edgy British comedy series Extras where Kate Winslet, playing herself playing a nun in a World War Two movie, prophetically explains backstage to an extra wearing a German military uniform that Holocaust movies are Oscar gold dust.

"I noticed that if you do a film about the Holocaust, you're guaranteed an Oscar. I've been nominated four times. Never won. The whole world is going, 'Why hasn't Winslet won one?'....That's why I'm doing it," she says.

Four years on and guess what - the Best Actress Oscar in the 2009 ceremony went to Kate Winslet for her role as a former Nazi prison guard in The Reader.

(Photo Credit: 'Waltz with Bashir' director Ari Folman at the 81st Academy Awards ceremony. REUTERS/Jason Reed)

Michelle Pfeiffer said she felt like “an alien” before discovering a home in acting.

At another one of the Berlin Film Festival’s notoriously entertaining news conferences with all sorts of unusual questions and answers (who can forget George Clooney calling one journalist a jerk for criticising his film at one press conference a few years ago), the American actress also revealed she only bothers taking care of her appearance when she’s out of the house but otherwise doesn’t really care what she looks like.

“I once heard an actor give this bit of advice to young people: If there isn’t anything else in the world that you would be good at and want to do, then yes, go ahead and try to be an actor. But if there is any other choice you can make … For me, there was no other choice I could make. The first time I walked into an acting class, I felt at home. For the first time in my life I didn’t feel like an alien.”

Pfeiffer appeared to blush when asked by a young woman from a German television network managed to remain attractive at the age of 50: “What’s your secret?” the German reporter wanted to know.

“Um, when I’m working I take good care of myself. When I’m not working I stay out of sight and, like everyone else, I let myself go. I eat very well and exercise. The fact that I’m happy and enjoy my life really helps too. And I have good genes. I stopped smoking when I was 30 and that helped.”

Pfeiffer, who plays an ageing courtesan who falls in love with a far younger man in “Cheri”, said turning 50 last year was easy: “If you think hitting 40 is liberating, wait until you hit 50. I was surprised how liberating it was. The anticipation is always much worse than reality. There is the anticipating of turning over that big number, then you turn 50 and go ‘okay’. If anything, it makes you more grateful for what you’ve got.”

Now this is a cultural exchange. Sundance kid Robert Redford has said that his Sundance Film Festival is engaged in early talks to lend its name to a sister film festival in Abu Dhabi.

“It makes total sense we would extend our mission into the Middle East,” Redford told reporters at a news conference ahead of the festival’s opening on Thursday night. He said festival organizers have been approached by people — although he did not say whom — in the United Arab Emirates city about holding a festival there. “We are in discussions, but nothing has been signed,” he said.

What makes it most interesting is that Sundance is known as the No. 1 festival for U.S. independent film, and it has long embraced movies about outsiders and people who live on the edge of society. Sundance champions gay and lesbian films and filmmakers. It’s not exactly the type of image many Americans would like portrayed overseas, especially in the Middle East. Or, is it?

Another thing that Redford, a long-time activist for liberal causes, did was slam the Bush administration for cutbacks to funding for the arts during his tenure in the White House. Redford said he was optimistic that President-elect Obama will restore a favorable climate for public funding of the arts after he is inaugurated next week.

“I think we are going to see art and culture return to the national agenda and that’s very exciting to me,” Redford told reporters.

But it begs age old questions: What exactly is art? Should taxpayer dollars be used to fund an art project that some might view as inexplicable or even trash? And who makes the judgement call? Or, should there even be a judgement call? All good questions and ones that impact you because, after all, it’s your money the U.S. government is spending.

Depending on who you listen to or read, Guy Ritchie may look to get up to $260 million in any divorce settlement with his wife Madonna, or he may try to get nothing and live off his own fortune,  variously estimated at anywhere between $30-50 million.

When big celebrity divorces are announced, as Ritchie and Madonna’s was on Wednesday, a frenzied bout of speculation by media and lawyers alike tends to follow, and more often than not it ends up being a load of rubbish.

You only have to look back to the divorce between Paul McCartney and Heather Mills to see how wide of the mark the theories generally are. Some lawyers were confidently predicting McCartney would have to pay out $350 million to Mills. (It is only fair to point out that one such expert was quoted by none other than Reuters at the time.) The actual sum? Less than $50 million.

Still, perhaps it is true that the bigger the amount in the headline, the more copies a newspaper sells. Surely the press wouldn’t be so cynical?