Movies Guide

The hilarious and talented Topp Twin’s, who play Camp Mother and Camp Leader in their show, were inducted into the New Zealand Music Hall of Fame at last night’s APRA Silver Scroll Awards in Auckland.

Jools and Lynda Topp, who’s induction makes the third in the Hall of Fame history, follow Jordan Luck and Johnny Devlin, who were inducted last year.

The award was introduced by APRA director Ant Healey, who outlined their career, which has included busking, and a comedic and protesting history, also saying that New Zealanders, whatever their politics, fell in love with them.

Whilst Healey described the twins as perhaps the most unlikely stars in New Zealand music history - “two yodelling lesbians from Huntly”, Prime Minister Helen Clark described the twins as “truly authentic Kiwi girls”.

Prime Minister Clark also paid tribute to the late Maori lesbian singer/songwriter Mahinarangi Tocker, honoured at the show’s opening, saying “Mahinarangi Tocker, so tragically taken from us - and so talented. I acknowledge and esteem her.”

An emotional tribute to Tocker was featured and her song “Forever”, featuring a string quartet, a school choir and the singers Shona Laing and Hinewehi Mohi was performed. Two screens were operating, showing images of Tocker with her fist raised in the air as she was performing at WOMAD guarded the stage. The piece ended to a standing ovation from the audience, some wiping away tears.

Out and proud lesbian musician Anika Moa was a finalist in the Silver Scroll Awards for her lovestruck tune “Dreams in My Head”, second only to  Opshop for “One Day”.

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Thriller is from Scott Wiper and John Petro

NEW YORK — Intrepid Pictures is on board to produce Scott Wiper’s Hitchcockian thriller “The Cold Light of Day.”

Wiper and John Petro’s screenplay follows Will Shaw, a young Wall Street trader whose family is kidnapped on a vacation to Spain. He’s left with only hours to find them, uncover a government conspiracy and the connection between their disappearance and his father’s secrets.

Intrepid Pictures principals Trevor Macy and Marc D. Evans will finance and produce the film, which Essential Entertainment is repping at next week’s American Film Market. Intrepid produced one of this year’s biggest hits, Rogue Pictures’ “The Strangers.” “Day” will be made outside of Universal and Rogue, which have a first-look pact with Intrepid. Uni is currently negotiating a sale of Rogue to Relativity.

Wiper co-wrote and directed the 2007 Lionsgate actioner “The Condemned.”

Brad Pitt saved a young fan from drowning in Venice, Italy.

The actor - who was in the city at the Venice Film Festival to promote his new movie ‘Burn After Reading’ - grabbed the boy as he tripped while attempting to get an autograph from the Hollywood heartthrob.

As the youngster almost fell into the canal, Brad extended his arm and pulled him to safety.

An onlooker said: “The boy was just desperate to get an autograph. There were loads of paparazzi around Brad and he was trying to get through when he tripped and almost fell. Brad put his reflexes to good use and grabbed him at the last minute.”

Following the terrifying incident, Brad signed an autograph for the eager fan before dashing off.

Brad - who welcomed twins Knox Leon and Vivienne Marcheline with partner Angelina Jolie into the world in July - recently revealed he wants to have two more children with the ‘Wanted’ actress.

When asked how the babies were, father-of-six Brad replied, “The twins are fine”, before adding, “I’ll have two more by next year.”

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Connery Comes Out Of Retirement

Former James Bond star Sir Sean Connery has reportedly come out of retirement to shoot a new film with Orlando Bloom.

The 78-year-old has turned his back on acting in recent years and has not appeared on the big screen since 2003’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

But now Connery is said to have signed up to star in Quest of Sheherzade, based on the legendary 1001 Arabian Nights tale, alongside fellow Brit Bloom.

The news was revealed by the film’s female lead, Bollywood actress Celina Jaitley, who will play an Iranian princess.

She tells British publication The London Paper, “Sean Connery is there in the film and recently Orlando Bloom was also signed. They are planning to start the shooting from January next year.”

The former chancellor Helmut Schmidt is to mark his 90th birthday, on December 23, by releasing a CD on which he performs piano works by Bach. A film is also to be released to mark the birthday of Germany’s oldest living chancellor. On the CD, Chancellor and Pianist, Schmidt is accompanied by pianists Gerhard Oppitz and Justus Frantz, and the conductor Christoph Eschenbach. In a poignant interview Schmidt has said a growing problem with deafness is slowly destroying his ability to appreciate music, particularly that of Bach and Mozart, who he said had shaped his life.

NEW YORK —

Larry Doyle, a former TV writer-producer for “The Simpsons,” was named the winner Monday of this year’s Thurber Prize for American Humor. He was cited for the novel “I Love You, Beth Cooper.”

“Clearly Larry Doyle was not the BMOC (Big Man On Campus),” Thurber judge Firoozeh Dumas said in a statement. “Had Larry been cool, he could have never written `I Love You, Beth Cooper,’ a hilarious yet painfully accurate account of high school in all its pimply glory.”

Doyle will receive $5,000. The two other finalists were Patricia Marx, for the novel “Him Her Him Again The End of Him,” and Simon Rich for “Ant Farm,” an essay collection.

The Thurber Prize, named for author-illustrator James Thurber, was founded in 1996.

YPSILANTI, Michigan (Billboard) - Bruce Springsteen concluded his three-day barnstorming tour in support of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama on Monday night with a 50-minute acoustic set for about 5,000 people in Ypsilanti.

“Hello, Michigan. Hello, Ypsilanti — glad to be here. I don’t know how to spell it, though,” Springsteen told the crowd at Oestrike Stadium on the campus of Eastern Michigan University.

The blue-collar set kicked off with “The Promised Land” and also included “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” “Thunder Road, “Devils & Dust,” “Used Car,” “No Surrender,” “The Rising” and Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.”

Earlier in the show, Springsteen said: “I was on the campaign trail four years ago. This time we’re winning.” And before “The Rising,” he made a long speech similar to those he delivered Saturday in Philadelphia and Sunday in Columbus, Ohio (the text is posted on his official Web site (http://www.brucespringsteen.net/news/index.html)).

Springsteen finished the show leading the crowd in a rhythmic chant of Obama’s campaign slogan, “Yes we can.”

He isn’t finished with his Obama activism yet. On October 16, he will join Billy Joel and John Legend for a fund-raiser on behalf of the candidate at New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom.

/Billboard

A SLOW START: The fall TV season – which we haven’t quite escaped; do I need to point that out?  - is unofficially in its second week, and the numbers aren’t looking good. According to a Variety story this week, ratings have seen a 4.3 per cent decline from last year, with NBC getting the worst battering, losing a whopping 16.3 per cent of its viewership, followed by CBS, with an overall ratings decline of 9.6 per cent.

Only Fox and the CW are showing modest gains, though a Fox executive told Variety that he basically blamed viewers. “I just don’t think the general audience was ready or prepared or aware that broadcast TV was back with new season premieres,” said Peter Liguori, chairman of entertainment for Fox. I know what he means – even I can’t help but feel nostalgic for a time when we spent half the summer getting ready for the new TV season.

As a kid, we used to scan the production notes in Variety eager for news from the sets of Happy Days and All In The Family, and would linger for hours under shady trees to escape the midday heat and imagine just what we thought was going to happen in the upcoming seasons of Rhoda and The Rockford Files. We’d even turn our backyards into the junkyard set from Sanford & Son, and fight to see who got to play Meathead or J.J. from Good Times. Kids these days – they have no respect for tradition.

Fox, true to form, has been the quickest to react, rewarding Fringe with a second season despite its disappointing performance so far, and getting ready to cancel the Sarah Connor Chronicles for dragging down the ratings for Prison Break, its lead-out show on Tuesday nights. Most returning shows are trying to regain audiences lost to the short season caused by the Hollywood writers’ strike, but many of them have been off the air for 10 months. It’s at times like this that a download marketplace instead of a seasonal broadcast schedule should start looking even more attractive to executives; it’s already inevitable, but even at times like this, it’s unwise to underestimate the entropy that rules decision-making in the TV industry.

IN THE WOODS: Food programming is probably the most constricted on the air in terms of style, but the Food Network might have broken the mold with The Wild Chef, a homegrown production debuting tonight. Hosted by Martin Picard, the bear-like chef/owner of Montreal’s Au Pied de Cochon, and his amiable sous chef Hugue Dufour, it’s a woolly, ambling travelogue through the backwoods of Quebec, as Picard searches for something he’s never eaten before, like the muskrat he barbeques in the pilot.

A highlight is Picard and Dufour standing in a blizzard, blithely telling the audience that the first ingredient they need for a recipe is a snowstorm. The show is so utterly Canadian, right to the marrow of its essence, that it practically makes up the full requirements of Cancon, and should free Food up to turn over the balance of its week to Jamie Oliver and Rachel Ray.

Rick McGinnis writes about music, movies, books and television, but not opera.
 

Michael Douglas will play a car dealer with a runaway libido in his new film ‘Solitary Man’.

According to Variety Douglas’ ‘War of the Roses’ co-star Danny DeVito will also feature in the film, along with Susan Sarandon and Jenna Fischer.

‘Ocean’s Thirteen’ writers Brian Koppelman and David Levien are directing a script written by Koppelman.

Douglas will play a former owner of a car dealership chain whose career and marriage were destroyed by his business and romantic liaisons.

Production will begin on the film in November in New York.

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Cook’s Daughter ‘Scared’ By Seinfeld’s Remarks

A chef who claims comedian Jerry Seinfeld’s wife plagiarised her cookbook has now accused the funnyman “scaring” her young daughter.

Chef Missy Chase Lapine sued Seinfeld’s wife Jessica in January, claiming Seinfeld’s bestselling cookbook Deceptively Delicious had been “brazenly plagiarised” from her own tome, The Sneaky Chef.

Both books describe how to hide healthy ingredients in children’s food.

Seinfeld’s subsequent appearance on U.S. TV show The Late Show with David Letterman - where he joked, “Many of the three-named people do become assassins” and called Lapine a “wacko” and “mentally unhinged celebrity stalker” - prompted the chef to add a defamation charge against the funnyman.

In federal court documents filed on Tuesday, Lapine says she “started feeling scared” by the incident.

She adds: “I have never felt so frightened and vulnerable as the day my daughter, seven years old, came home from school and asked, ‘Mom, what is an assassin?’

“I thought I made a big mistake talking to any reporters because now this billionaire is angry and attacking me everywhere.

“I do not suffer from any mental infirmity. I am not a celebrity stalker. I am not a violent or dangerous person.”

Seinfeld’s lawyers are vying to get the defamation suit against him dismissed, insisting “mocking the litigious nature of society” is protected by his First Amendment right to freedom of speech.