THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: PRINCE CASPIAN

Director: Andrew Adamson
Stars: Ben Barnes, Skandar Keynes, Georgie Henley
Studio: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

The Plot: The Pevensie children return to Narnia one year after their first adventure in the magical land. Soon after entering the kingdom, however, they learn that 1,000 years has passed here, and all is not well since an evil king ascended to the throne. The children and allies both old and new band together to help restore the kingdom to its rightful heir, Prince Caspian (Barnes).

READ REVIEWS OF “PRINCE CASPIAN” 

REPRISE

Director: Joachim Trier
Stars: Anders Danielsen Lie, Espen Klouman-Høiner, Viktoria Winge
Studio: Red Envelope Entertainment

The Plot: A look at what happens — and also what could have happened — after best friends Phillip (Lie) and Erik (Klouman-Høiner) drop their respective manuscripts into the same mailbox, both of them hoping their first novels will be picked up for publication.

READ REVIEWS OF REPRISE 

HOW THE GARCIA GIRLS SPENT THEIR SUMMER

Director: Georgina Riedel
Stars: Elizabeth Peña, America Ferrera, Lucy Gallardo
Studio: Maya Entertainment

The Plot: Residents of a sleepy Arizona town find plenty to gossip about when three generations of women from a local family experience sexual awakenings over the course of a summer.

Justin Timberlake will act as a producer for a forthcoming new reality TV show on MTV.

The show, entitled ‘The Phone’, will involve two mobile phones ringing in a city, with members of the public who answer them then choosing if they want to take part in the show. They will then have to complete a mission within a time limit to win a cash prize, reports BBC News.

MTV executive vice-president Tony Disanto claimed the show would be “genre-busting”. He added that “each week will be an action-packed mini-movie”.

MTV have not announced when the show will be filmed or broadcast.

Cate Blanchett’s reputation as a tireless promoter of films and fashion stepped up another notch at the opening of the Cannes Film Festival.

The svelte actor dominated the red carpet on the French Riviera, a mere month since the birth of her third son, Ignatius, on April 13.

Blanchett is in Cannes to promote the world premiere of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull on Sunday with fellow cast members Harrison Ford and Karen Allen, producer George Lucas and director Steven Spielberg.

(The Australian)

Lucky me. I’ve got an advance copy of the new Woody Allen film, Cassandra’s Dream, so I invite friends rounds for tea and a private screening. We’re all Woody fans, and as usual there is a starry cast, this time including Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell. We turn down the lights, and sit back in expectation.

And it is an absolute shocker. One of the worst films I’ve ever seen. This was supposed to be a treat, and I feel embarrassed that I’ve made people sit through it. The lights come up, and nobody knows what to say.

(The Guardian UK)

With the release today of What Happens in Vegas…, the Cameron Diaz–Ashton Kutcher comedy that proves romance isn’t dead in American cinema (”There isn’t anything to say other than to note its insulting ugliness and ineptitude” —Manohla Dargis), we see that Hollywood has once and for all moved past its once blinkered view of movie titles — that they must be a funny pun or a witty turn of phrase, or the name of the main character in the movie, or come from a deathless line of dialogue, or Shakespeare/the Bible, or maybe at worst a classic-rock song lyric. What Happens in Vegas… signifies that it is totally okay for a screenwriter to think of just a thing that people say — maybe sort of an advertising catchphrase! — and then write an entire movie around it.

Well, why stop with What Happens in Vegas…? Here are ten other sayings we hope Hollywood adapts into movies soon.

(New York Magazine)

Bill Clinton, it turns out, doesn’t have a lock on being the comeback kid. Let me offer up Brad Grey, the Paramount Pictures chairman vilified last year as the movie studio exec who chased away Steven Spielberg. That’s still a major league problem for Grey, who will probably see Spielberg shuttle off to another studio any day now. But give the Paramount biggie some credit for a summer lineup that could produce Hollywood’s heftiest box office for parent Viacom.

By now you know the Iron Man story. The turbocharged Robert Downey Jr. flick about a man and his suit has turned comic book company Marvel into a movie production phenom. But less well-known is that Paramount, which distributed the film under a 2005 deal with Marvel, will most likely pocket a cool $60 million profit—with just about no risk, mind you. Add that to the almost certain boffo performance of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which Paramount releases on May 22, as well as Dreamworks Animation’s Kung Fu Panda (opening June 6), and Paramount’s studio $104 million operating earnings are likely to jump by 60% this year and double by 2009, figures Bernstein Research analyst Michael Nathanson

(Business Week)

When the 61st Cannes Film Festival opens here on Wednesday, all the customary glamour, spectacle and high Gallic seriousness will be in place: the red carpet, the hatchet-faced guards, the shouting paparazzi, the promenading stars and bleary-eyed journalists. If the Americans look a little more anxious than usual, it’s not just the enfeebled dollar.

Everyone may be expecting the bounty of good and even great films from around the world over the next 12 days, but the excitement is tempered by a sense that those films are facing unusually difficult prospects back in the United States.

(New York Times)

Outside the Carlton Hotel, workmen have pasted a giant poster of Robert Downey Jr. in blackface, promoting his part in the upcoming Ben Stiller comedy, Tropic Thunder. The garish image is a reminder that Cannes is in the business of selling what most people call movies as well as what cinephiles call cinema.

Each year, headlines out of Cannes treat the event as an improbable David and Goliath showdown between art cinema and Hollywood, but increasingly the festival is bridging the gap. When the 61st festival gets under way tonight, the glitterati and press of the movie world will gather to watch a darkly allegorical film called Blindness, about an epidemic that takes away people’s sight and leaves them stumbling about in a hellish world of violence and deprivation.

(The Globe and Mail)

So you’re sitting in a restaurant and James Stewart walks in and sits down at the next table. Do you feel (a) Excited that a major movie star is here? (b) Fluttery at the thought that one of the world’s greatest actors is just 5 feet away? Or (c) Glad to see Jimmy?

If you answered C, you just explained both why he was a major movie star and why he was a great actor.

(San Francisco Chronicle)

The latest news reporting is a remake/sequel/adaptation story call it what you may to bring 21 Jump Street to the big screen, yes that is right the popular television series being made into a movie. The Superbad actor Jonah Hill who in the picture below looks a little rough and should have a shave is in negotiations with Sony to develop a movie remake of the highly popular 1980’s television show 21 Jump Street.

(In Entertainment UK)