21 Flavors of Bond
MGM is preparing a new box set of all 21 Bond films on DVD arriving later this year.
All the discs from the existing Bond Collector's Sets will be available with their supplemental materials as well.
All films are presented in remastered anamorphic widescreen transfers along with Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS 5.1 surround tracks.
An additional upgrade from some of the older Bond DVDs is the original burned subtitles instead of DVD created ones. The 42 disc set contains all the films from Dr. No through Casino Royale.
Arriving on November 6th, the set will be priced at $239.98.
DVD-sniffing dogs visit Canada
TORONTO (CP) - A pair of canine crimefighters who have sniffed out nearly two million illegal DVDs overseas showcased their noseworthy skills Wednesday, as an industry watchdog executive reiterated the need to remain vigilant in the fight against piracy.
Lucky and Flo, who are sponsored by the Motion Picture Association of America, are the world's first dogs specially trained to identify discs by the scent of their chemicals.
One by one, the black Labradors were unleashed to sniff among a suitcase and seven brown boxes scattered in close proximity in search of the one holding the DVDs, before flipping off the lid to unveil its contents.
Piracy cost the worldwide film industry US$18.2 billion in 2005, including US$225 million to the Canadian industry, said John Malcolm, the MPAA's executive vice-president and director of worldwide anti-piracy.
"That represents huge lost opportunities for creative artists here in Canada to get their films made and their stories told and represents a huge lost opportunity in terms of being able to showcase the talents of Canadian filmmakers," he said.
The dogs' Canadian visit comes one week after the canines sniffed out a large inventory of knock-off DVDs in the New York City borough of Queens. Three people were arrested and officials seized between 10,000 and 12,000 discs. The dogs were also recently honoured in Malaysia for helping unearth nearly two million bootleg DVDs.
In recent months, Ottawa has moved swiftly to get an anti-camcording law on the books. Bill C-59, which gained royal assent June 22, amends the Criminal Code to make recording a movie without permission a crime, punishable by two years in jail. Taping a film for future sale or rental carries a maximum five-year jail term.
The bill was introduced just two days after Prime Minister Stephen Harper promised California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger that Canada would crack down on piracy.
While Malcolm applauds the government's efforts to stem bootlegging, Canadian camcording remains a problem, accounting for about 25 per cent of the illegal recordings available worldwide, he said.
"Let's be clear: when we talk about piracy, there's nothing swashbuckling about this. It is stealing, pure and simple, no different than any other kind of theft. This is a serious criminal activity."
Neil Powell, a search and rescue dog handler based in northern Ireland, has worked with Flo and Lucky for 2 1/2 years. He was approached by a representative of the Motion Picture Association in the U.K. who asked if he was able to train dogs to find DVDs and CDs.
The training process took 12 weeks and was divided into three segments: determining whether there was a detectable odour on DVDs, teaching the dogs to find the discs and environmental training exposing the duo to different types of search areas.
Despite their ability to detect discs, they can't distinguish between the legitimate and pirated ones.
"Any searching we have to do is done where we know there are no genuine discs so they cannot tell the difference between the two," Powell said.
"So you would get them to search consignments of clothing or furniture, that sort of thing, and if the discs are then hidden away in that the dogs will most certainly find them."
The dogs were honoured in Malaysia last month following a six-month assignment dubbed "Operation Double Trouble" where they participated in 35 raids in the country and the Philippines resulting in 26 arrests.
The operations were so successful that Malaysian movie pirates reportedly placed a bounty on the dogs.
"When we started off, this was cutting-edge because it had never been done before anywhere in the world, so when I did it at first I thought, 'Well, how can this be used? Where can we actually use these dogs?' But it would seem the amount of interest around the world now is growing steadily," Powell said. "I am amazed by the impact they've made."
After a four-week break in Ireland, Lucky and Flo will be back on the road, heading to eastern Europe.
'I'm basically a brand'
He is famous for playing wise-cracking slackers. But, John Cusack tells Ryan Gilbey of the British website Guardian Unlimited Arts, that's only because those are the parts he gets offered - and it drives him crazy
'I've made 10 good films'... John Cusack, Hollywood's Mr Honesty.
John Cusack wastes no time getting down to business. "I've made 10 good films," says the 41-year-old actor shortly after striding into the Berlin hotel room in a backwards baseball cap and sprawling in an armchair. "I'm sure you know which ones they are. The ones that suck I tend to blank out. It's like I never even made them." I'm slightly taken aback at his honesty, though his tally is in the right ballpark. Here's my list: The Sure Thing, Eight Men Out, Say Anything, The Grifters, Bullets Over Broadway, Grosse Pointe Blank, The Thin Red Line, Being John Malkovich, High Fidelity, Max - that pretty much covers it. But has he really made 40 movies that suck? He mulls it over. "Well, there aren't 40 that are great, put it that way." He pauses for an eternity, eyes widening. "But that's fine. Ten is a good batting average, don't you think?"
To that hallowed 10 he now adds his latest picture, a claustrophobic chiller called 1408. What a happy coincidence, you might think: the movie he happens to be promoting this week is one about which he is cock-a-hoop. But it doesn't take long in Cusack's company to realise he's a straight-shooter. Isn't that why audiences respond to him? Whether he's playing chirpy and idealistic (Say Anything) or amoral (The Grifters, Grosse Pointe Blank), he cuts through the celebrity fog that surrounds so many performers of his stature and generation; you feel you're getting something real, even if another of his selling-points is paradoxically that you can never be sure of its precise nature. "This John Cusack guy: I always see something going on in there, and I don't know what it is," remarked the late Robert Altman. And if Altman couldn't define it, what hope the rest of us?
Not only has Cusack learned a lot about the way the industry works in his 20-plus years as an actor, but he is eager to share his findings; and to shatter any illusions I might have about how an actor such as him comes to make the films he does - only 20% of which, don't forget, are actually any cop. So it's unlikely he would beat around the bush if he had reservations about 1408. It is adapted from a Stephen King story (Cusack's second: he was the hero's idealized older brother in Stand by Me) about a hack who checks into a malevolent hotel room as research for a book on haunted hostelries. What he encounters there is a radio clock that only plays the Carpenters, eerie paintings that spill free of their frames and a hammer-wielding assailant with a scary receding hairline.
He falters somewhat talking about the finished film. "If I'm in something that I think is kinda good, it stays with me like a fever dream for a long time afterwards. I don't recall the finished product so much as the feeling of making it." Working largely on his own altered the typical film-making dynamic: if being on a movie set is like living in a bubble, then Cusack was in a bubble within that bubble. "It was all so intimate," he enthuses. "The director, the cinematographer and I created our own little world, with its rules and internal logic that only we understood. I loved it because it was a high-wire act. I knew that if it worked, it would be great, and if it didn't, I'd fall on my ass real hard. It's insane doing something where you don't know whether it's going to work on any level, but it's so exciting." His long face crinkles into a grin.
Only a handful of actors have ever been entrusted with the lion's share of an entire film - think of Tom Hanks shooting the breeze with a basketball for most of Cast Away, or Philip Baker Hall prowling the Oval Office alone as Nixon in Secret Honour. But to this elite breed we can now add Cusack, who dominates 1408. Samuel L Jackson is there to hand over the key, and various bit-players drift in and out of Cusack's ensuing hallucinations, but for the most part we are alone with him and his distinctive brand of rumpled, smart-aleck cynicism.
When I ask him about how consciously he has cultivated this persona, he gives an easy-going shrug. "I suppose I have a certain thing I do well that people seem to like. Not everyone likes it, of course. The guy in the Guardian last week certainly didn't." Cusack is referring to a negative review of 1408, in which Joe Queenan wrote that the actor's "wise-cracking slacker persona is starting to wear thin". He seems both amused and quietly irritated by this remark. "So there you go," he smiles. "Some people like it, other people don't." Yes, I insist, but what exactly is it that you do well? He's laughing now. "Well, you see I'm trying to avoid answering that question."
With films like The Sure Thing, Say Anything and High Fidelity, Cusack developed a knowing, slightly nerdy screen image that was a forerunner of what Seth Rogen is flogging in Knocked Up. In these movies, Cusack became a symbol of hope, both for those men who figured it might not be so bad being a nerd after all, and for those women who found themselves dating one. "I'm aware of the affection those characters inspired," he says. "I feel close to Lloyd in Say Anything. He was like a super-interesting version of me. Only I'm not as good as him. Whatever part of me is romantic and optimistic, I reached into that to play Lloyd. Of course, now it's all gone. Now I'm just bitter."
There seems to be some discomfort involved for Cusack in articulating what he's good at, but he gamely has a go anyway. "I think I'm pretty brave," he says seriously. "I'll take risks. I can look at my career and point to the movies that were risky." He singles out Max, in which he played a fictional gallery-owner who urges the young Adolf Hitler to channel his rage into his painting, and Being John Malkovich, where his down-at-heel puppeteer charged customers to enter Malkovich's head via a clammy hole behind some filing cabinets. "Being John Malkovich worked out great, so people tend to forget what a risk it was - first-time writer, first-time director and so on. I read that screenplay four years before it got made. I'd said to my agents: 'Show me scripts that are fantastic and crazy.' I love getting up on that tightrope. I wish I could do it more, but I have to balance what I want to do with what people want me to do."
Who are these "people"? "People who offer me work," he says. "There's this brand that they think I am, and I get sent stuff that corresponds to that. I have to do it. It's not like there are 10 projects on offer at any one time, and six of them are brilliant." I'm astonished that Cusack hasn't earned the right to pick and choose, given his track record. "It's absolutely true," he says. "No one cares. The movies have got more corporate, they're making fewer movies in general, and those they are making are all $200-$300m tent-pole releases that eat up all the oxygen."
This may seem rich coming from a man who profited from exactly that species of movie when he appeared as an FBI agent in the Jerry Bruckheimer-produced blockbuster Con Air. Yes, his character wore sandals and quoted Dostoevsky, but he still ended the film wrestling the bad guy atop a speeding fire engine. At the time, Cusack claimed he did Con Air because it had come time for him to be a businessman. "You know: get my name above the title, my face on a billboard," he told me in 1997. "I use those kinds of films to get leverage," he says now. "You wouldn't think Con Air had anything to do with Max, but in my career it does. It's doing Con Air, or doing romantic comedies, that makes Max possible. The bad stuff you just try to make as good as you can."
It may be pragmatic, but isn't it also depressing? "Sure, it's depressing." Another long, wide-eyed pause. "But you aren't gonna talk about that in the press. 'Poor John, he's depressed because he can't have it all his way' - you know, with everything going on in the world that's going to sound ridiculous." He hoots at the thought. "I get to do the stuff I want. I have a good voice, I think, and it comes through in my work."
To illustrate this, he cites two upcoming films concerned in varying degrees with war: Grace Is Gone, in which he plays a man whose wife is killed in Iraq, and War, Inc, a "spiritual cousin to Grosse Pointe Blank", and partly inspired by Naomi Klein's article Baghdad Year Zero.
You can see the strategy in juggling such disparate projects, but from the outside it resembles a kind of personality crisis. When the same actor who throws himself into writing, producing and starring in War, Inc or Grosse Pointe Blank turns up in featherweight romantic daydreams such as Serendipity or Must Love Dogs, it's as though there are two John Cusacks walking the earth.
To his credit, he retains a palpable sense of mystery on screen and off; the most diligent showbiz reporter would be hard-pressed to fill a paragraph about him. "The thing about John," says Mikael Hafstrom, the director of 1408, "is that he is full of secrets. You never read anything about him in the gossip papers, he doesn't talk about his private life, so you never feel you've had enough of him." Cusack calls it his survival instinct. "It seems like common sense to me. When I was growing up, I never wanted to know what my favourite musicians or artists ate for breakfast, or who they were dating. I found out what they felt about the world from their work."
On the downside, there is the real possibility that he will get taken for granted - that he'll always be there, being wry and enigmatic, and is destined never to receive proper approbation. He was daring in The Grifters and Being John Malkovich, and droll in Bullets Over Broadway, and yet on all those occasions he had to stand by as virtually everyone associated with those films, from the caterer upwards, was nominated for Academy Awards while he - the leading man, no less, in all three cases - was overlooked. Doesn't he want an award? "Do you have one?" he shoots back, mock-excitedly. "If you wanna give me an award, I'll take it. Just don't make me go to the party afterwards."
Pam Splits from Real-Life Jim
Pam Beesly knows a thing or two about thwarted romance. Unfortunately, Jenna Fischer is now familiar with the concept, as well.
The Office star and hubby James Gunn are separating after almost seven years of marriage, People reports.
"We are sorry for any pain this causes family and friends," the couple said in a joint statement to the magazine that's now posted on Fischer's MySpace page.
"The enthusiasm we have expressed for each other's lives, spirits and careers is real—we have been each other's cheerleader and friend during the past six years and continue to be so now and in the future."
So the split appears to have been amicable.
The duo were introduced by Gunn's brother, Gilmore Girls actor Sean Gunn, a longtime friend of Fischer's, and they tied the knot in October 2000. They do not have any children.
Fischer, who during her myriad talk show appearances in recent years always spoke affectionately of her man but never failed to mention that the two spent lots of time apart due to work commitments, costarred last year in Gunn's feature directorial debut, the horror flick Slither. Before that, he had penned the 2002 Scooby-Doo movie, its 2004 sequel and the remake of George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead.
In another note on MySpace, Fischer asked that their fans respect their privacy and refrain from mudslinging, however well-intentioned.
"We appreciate your support over the years, and would be overjoyed to have you continue supporting us both," she wrote. "You might be tempted to make one of us 'feel better' by putting the other one down in a post. Please don't—we still have the utmost respect for one another, and we'd have to delete you.
"We aren't taking questions or doing interviews about this particular aspect of our lives. We're also avoiding reading any press on the subject, so don't send us any clippings or links about the split. Thank you in advance for respecting our privacy.
Fischer, who scored a supporting actress Emmy nod this year for her role as half of the as-yet star-crossed Jim-and-Pam on The Office, was also in Blades of Glory and appears in the upcoming comedy The Brothers Solomon. Next, she costars with John C. Reilly in Judd Apatow's mock biopic Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, in theaters Dec. 21.
Pavarotti's condition reportedly worsens
ROME - Luciano Pavarotti's health has deteriorated and the tenor was in very serious condition, suffering kidney problems and losing consciousness, a local Italian TV station reported Wednesday.
Television station E' TV Antenna-1 in Modena reported that the 71-year-old tenor, who has pancreatic cancer, had lost consciousness and was suffering from kidney problems at the Modena home where he has been recovering following a hospital stay.
The ANSA news agency, citing medical sources, said Pavarotti was believed to have lost consciousness for brief moments in recent days. The AGI news agency said Pavarotti was in "very serious condition." It didn't name its sources.
Modena hospital spokesman Alberto Greco confirmed Pavarotti was at home, but said he had no further information.
Pavarotti's manager, Terri Robson, did not deny the reports; an associate answering Robson's phone said she had no comment.
Pavarotti was released from the hospital Aug. 25, more than two weeks after he was admitted with a high fever. At the time, Robson denied Italian news reports that he had been treated for pneumonia.
The opera star had surgery for the cancer in July 2006 in a New York hospital.
Pancreatic cancer is one of the most deadly forms of the disease, though doctors said the surgery offered improved hopes for survival.
At the time of the operation, Pavarotti had been preparing to resume his farewell tour. He has made no public appearances since then.