The MPAA and the BBFC - how the US and UK deal with sex and violence in films

The Venice film festival (which is the oldest film festival in the world and remains one of the most prestigious) came to an end the week before last and it was Ang Lee's Lust, Caution that won it.
While this might seem irrelevant to the topic of this post, I assure you it's not ;) The trailer should give you an idea where I'm going with this:


Anyway, the film has received an NC-17 certificate from the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America). Focus Features, the distributors of "Lust, Caution", have not appealed it or made any cuts for the American release which is very unusual. The NC-17 certificate is usually not regarded as an option even for less commercial films because this means many cinemas will not show it, many DVD rentals and stores will not stock it and many newspapers will not advertise it. While some art house films in the past have gone ahead with this certificate, it's the first time that such a mainstream director and a film that won such an important festival is going to be released as NC-17.

All the talk surrounding this has made me want to take a closer look at the MPAA and how the BBFC (British Board of Film Classification) compares. The MPAA has often been accused of double standards (Hollywood films can get away with more than art house or foreign films, sex is treated much more severely than violence).
Perhaps the strangest thing about the MPAA is that nobody knows exactly who rates the films. All the names are kept anonymous. In fact, the whole thing is so fishy that last year a documentary was made about the MPAA in an attempt to shed some light on it (they even hired a private detective to find out who was sitting on the board!). See the trailer for this documentary here.

Apart from being very secretive about their members, the feedback they give to both the filmmakers and the general public about why films received certain ratings is very limitted comparing to what the BBFC does these days. Check out the quote below from one of the MPAA FAQs:
CARA does provide explanations to the submitter of each motion picture of the reasons for the rating assigned to that picture. However, any such discussions concerning a particular motion picture will be only with the submitter and are also considered confidential. Thus, the substance of discussions about a movie being rated by CARA cannot be discussed with the press or anyone else other than, where appropriate, the submitter of the particular motion picture.
Unfortunately, the level of detail given to submitters often isn't enough for their needs. This timeline of MPAA controversies describes many cases, but one stood out to me in particular. In 1983 Brian De Palma edited his "Scarface" three times to get a lower rating, but none of those three cuts passed. Clearly if they had given him the information he needed, the first cut would have passed their requirements (and oh irony, in the end he received the rating he wanted for his original unedited version!).
In contrast, the BBFC lists quite detailed reasons for the rating and cuts made to each film on their website (the older ratings are less detailed, but the more recent ones are usually very much so) and it also invites the public to "make its views known to the Board at any stage of the classification process".

I have two of my own theories about the MPAA (which you can take seriously or laugh at - whatever ;-P). My first is a conspiracy theory - I think they're consciously giving indie and foreign films harsher ratings and that it's one of their methods of ensuring the domination of the big Hollywood flicks on the US market.
Before you roll your eyes at me (actually you probably have already, but before you do it again ;-P), check out how the MPAA is funded. Here's a quote from the FAQ on one of the MPAA's official pages:
The movie rating system is a voluntary system sponsored by the Motion Picture Association of America and the National Association of Theatre Owners
Since you're probably not familiar with these organizations, I'll "translate". You might already be confused how the MPAA can be funded by the MPAA, so maybe I'll start with clarifying that. For whatever reason, when one talks of the American rating system, one talks of the MPAA giving the ratings (that's how imdb has it for example), but actually the ratings are done by a smaller body called CARA (Classification and Rating Administration) which is part of the MPAA. The MPAA itself is an older and bigger body - you can read about it in more detail here, but it's basically a body created to defend the interests of the major American film production companies - you can see the list of MPAA members (the six biggest studios in Hollywood) on their official site.
The National Association of Theatre Owners is an association of all the movie theatres in the US - most of which are part of cinema chains owned by the six companies already mentioned.
This puts the accusations of bias against foreign and independent films in a totally different light, doesn't it? Clearly it is in the interest of the sponsors of the rating system for films made outside of the six big studios to be given harsher treatment. Wikipedia actually says that Miramax had lots of problems with the rating system while they were an independent company, but now that Disney has bought them out, their problems have ceased!

The BBFC is funded in a much more independent way. See the quote below from their policy (avaliable on their official website):
The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) is an independent, non-governmental body funded through the fees it charges to those who submit films, videos, DVDs and digital games for classification.
On the one hand this means that British distributors have extra costs (unlike in the US, every film in the UK must be rated or else it is illegal to show it to the general public), but clearly it is a system less open to bias.

My other theory is a cultural one - I honestly believe Americans have a different attitude towards sex than we do here in Europe. Just as in India the general attitude towards sex and sexual behaviours seems to be a lot more prudish than in the West (kissing in public is considered obscene and even hand holding can be seen as vulgar), so in the US it seems certain things are a lot more taboo than they are in Europe.
I thought that it was fascinating to compare reactions to Daniel Radcliffe doing a nude scene in Equus (which I covered extensively on this blog ;) - just click on the Equus tag below this post). In the UK it was a big thing, but at no point did I feel there were any moral judgements about it. It was amusing, maybe shocking, but I don't think many people felt that it was somehow morally wrong of him to be doing it. The voices from the US were different though. Just reading through imdb there were many people who felt this amounted to pedophilia and were wondering how his parents could allow him to do such a thing. There were also those who said they would boycott the "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" film. I'm not saying that all the responses from the US were like that, but certainly it did seem to be somehow "a bigger thing" over there.
In this context, I also found it very interesting to read William H. Macy's comment about the reactions to "The Cooler" (this was one of the few art house films that was released with an NC-17 rating):
William H. Macy said that when the film was shown in European film festivals, afterward people mostly discussed the script and the characters, but when the film was shown at American film festivals, people mostly discussed how good Maria Bello looked in her nude scenes.
I think these different attitudes are reflected in not just the decisions of the MPAA and BBFC, but also their guidelines. I did a sort of comparison of the guidelines for each certificate, which you can download here. I wanted to put it straight up in my post, but the formatting I wanted wasn't possible (it's not a big file, don't worry :) ). Most of the guidelines have been just copied and pasted. Pretty much all the MPAA guidelines I found are in that file, but I only put up part of the BBFC guidelines since there were many which couldn't really be compared against anything in the MPAA ones. The full BBFC guidelines are here.

Finally, two random things that I didn't manage to fit anywhere else in this post. Firstly I thought this article was a great read - particularly the list of silly rating reasons (my favourite was "“PG-13 for intense depiction of very bad weather”).
And also I found it amusing to hear about Alfonso Cuaron's protest against what various rating bodies around the world were doing to Y tu mama tambien.

"Om Shanti Om" - Shahrukh's next release

So the marketing campaign for Shahrukh Khan's next film has started!
It's already run into some controversy, as it will release on the 9th of November - the same day as Bhansali's "Saawariya" (which was mentioned in more detail in one of my other posts) and Bhansali is angry with Farah Khan (the director of "Om Shanti Om" and "Main Hoon Naa") because he says she has ridiculed his mother.

So anyway, below is an episode of "Koffee with Karan" with Shahrukh and Farah in which amongst many hilarious answers, you will also see the supposedely offending comment about Bhansali's mother. The interview is in 5 parts - but it's really worth the watch!

Srk in KwK 2007 Teil 1 - MyVideo


Srk in KwK 2007 Teil 2 - MyVideo


Srk in KwK 2007 Teil 3 - MyVideo


Srk in KwK 2007 Teil 4 - MyVideo


Srk in KwK 2007 Teil 5 - MyVideo

And below are some more clips promoting the film.

This is another exclusive trailer (quite similar to the one they showed during Koffee with Karan):


And here's an opportunity to see the 6-pack that SRK and Farah were promising during the interview. Is it just me or is it really weird to see Shahrukh do this sort of thing? lol


Finally a trailer for one of the more romantic songs in the film which for some reason sounds totally like Japanese popular music to me (even though I'm sure it's not ;-P):

Some Indian box-office news (that will probably bore you, but I'm fascinated ;-P)

Last week, the Indian box-office saw possibly the biggest flop of recent times.
Ram Gopal Varma has remade Sholay, the 1975 classic with Amitabh Bachchan in the lead. In the new version Mr Bachchan stars as the villain of the film.
Reviews have been terrible and there's been a general uproar against re-making "Sholay" (it's a bit like doing a remake of "Citizen Kane"). The film has been taken off screens after just one week!
Ram Gopal Varma, though he did seem somewhat shaken by the reactions, took it with his characteristic cynicism:
"The messages have been pretty vocal and direct about their dislike for what I've done. I've been called names and treated to the nastiest comments. But I've enjoyed the backlash, far more than people enjoyed Aag" laughs Ramu.

On the other side of the spectrum, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995) has just completed its 615th week in Indian cinemas (that's almost 12 years!) and it's still going really strong. In August when four Yash Raj productions were being shown in Mumbai, it was DDLJ that was the biggest earner! The film is a world phenomenon - no other film in the history of world cinema has played this long since its initial release (it has beaten the previous record holder - "Sholay (1975)" by about 7 years).

And finally, something I'm finding quite shocking is that Chak De! India which I thought would be a god-awful film and worth seeing only for Shahrukh, is not only a blockbuster, but is getting terrific reviews! After the first trailer came out, I was (like many people) convinced it would be horrible, but it's now going strong in its 4th week.
Reviews aside, perhaps the most surprising reaction to the film is that of the Academy (the Academy in the US that gives out the oscars ;-P) who have asked for a copy of the script for their permanent script collection.
Shahrukh has also received surprising reviews for his role as hockey coach. It's not just that they're good (which is rare in itself), but anyone who has watched him knows that "understated" or "restrained" are not adjectives that are usually associated with him.
Check out the first teaser trailer for "Chak De India" below (it promises none of the above, does it? lol):

The theatrical trailer looks a bit better, but is still far from promising the kind of reaction the film has received:

Initial promotion for Tim Burton's "Sweeney Todd"

It's still going to be a long wait before Sweeney Todd comes out (no release date set for Poland yet, but I think we'll be lucky if it comes out any earlier than February 2008). But even though we don't have a trailer yet, the temptation to write about it is too big - I've been extremely excited for this film ever since I first heard about it!
I mean you've got a very gory Broadway musical translated to film with Tim Burton as director - that's got to be interesting in itself, right? But once the plot and cast is put in place it gets better!
It's about Benjamin Barker (Johnny Depp) who is a barber in 19th century London. He has a wife and a very young daughter, Johanna. And then one day, with the purpose of er... taking the barber's wife for himself, judge Turpin (Alan Rickman) imprisons Benjamin Barker on false accusations. Many years later (by which time the judge is lusting after Johanna, who is now 16), Benjamin Barker comes back as Sweeney Todd and decides to revenge himself on the world for the injustice that has happened to him and proceeds in cutting the throats of all who come his way. He has help in Mrs Lovett (Helena Bonham-Carter) who uses the corpses to make meat pies.
We're also going to get Timothy Spall (he'll be playing some sort of accomplice to judge Turpin) and Sacha Baron Cohen (who will be playing a rival barber).
All of them are going to be doing their own singing which is particularly interesting in that this is supposed to be one of the most difficult Broadway musicals to sing. Some go as far as to call it an operetta rather than a musical.

The poster is out, but more interestingly just recently the first clip of the film was shown to an audience. This was at the Venice festival. Unfortunately, it hasn't surfaced on-line, but hopefully this means we won't have to wait for a trailer too long. The clip (in which Johnny Depp is psychotically singing to a razor) has gotten rave reviews, here's one of them.
And here's Stephen Sondheim (the author of the musical) teaching Guildhall School students the song in question:

It's going to be really fab, isn't it? :-D

Bollywood and Hollywood together - it's happening!

It seems like every 2-3 months is bringing stronger reasons to believe that Bollywood and Hollywood want to have a working relationship!
The first time I posted about this was in February and then again in May.
Well, now it's August and there's loads more to report :)

Hollywood is starting to take the Indian market very seriously. In other words they've realized that there's a billion people in India, that the country's economy is developing very fast, the people of India are veeeery interested in cinema and Hollywood only has about 8% of the market... oooops...
The problem is that the way they've dominated Western markets just isn't going to work in India. In the words of Gareth Wigan, vice chairman of Columbia TriStar - "The importing of American films into India is not filling a gap (...) You're not bringing a dish to a bare table. You're bringing a dish to a table where you have to move a lot of other dishes to fit in, and that's not true in a lot of other countries."
Disney, Warner Bros and Columbia/Sony in particular seem to be seeing this 8% market problem and there's no longer any doubt - they're looking for opportunities!

So a number of things have been happening...
Disney have made a deal with Yash Raj films (which is one of the biggest production companies in Bollywood) to make animated films for Indian audiences.
They've also apparently been in touch with Shahrukh Khan, hoping to invest in his production company - Red Chillies Entertainment. And they're not the only ones either, apparently Sony and Fox are considering the same move!

There's also a number of projects which are essentially Bollywood films, but with some of the money coming from Hollywood.
The first of these to come out is Saawariya, with Columbia/Sony Entertainment behind it. It will be released this November. It's directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali (the director who also did Devdas) and will star Rani Mukherji and Salman Khan. The first teaser trailer is looking absolutely stunning. See it here.
Warner Bros is venturing out into Bollywood with "Made in China", which will be directed by Nikhil Advani (the director of Kal Ho Naa Ho) and will star Akshay Kumar.
Perhaps most excitingly, both of these films will have mainstream American distributors which makes their chances in the international box office much better! :)

But also Bollywood stars are being offered Hollywood movies!
Shilpa Shetty is rumoured to be in talks for the next James Bond movie, as well as possibly starring in a movie with Keanu Reeves. But there have been a number of other Bollywood stars approached for various projects, this article lists most of them.
Less dynamically, but Hollywood producers also seem to be thinking about Bollywood directors for their Hollywood projects. Santosh Sivan (the director of Asoka) has been approached with a script set in a colonial background.

Finally, perhaps less energetically, but Bollywood is making its own attempts at venturing into Hollywood and making use of their talents.
They have roped in a leading Hollywood VFX man into Pixion - a post-production studio in India. David Crawford is behind films like "Titanic", "Spiderman" and "Mission Impossible II"!
UTV is trying to make a big World War II movie with Vishal Bharadwaj (Omkara) as the director, hopefully bringing together Uma Thurman and Hrithik Roshan, but at the moment the project will remain in pre-production for a while yet.
UTV has also ventured into co-production with Fox on a Hollywood film - it will be Shyamalan's next film.

Not bad, huh? :-D

P.S. Not strictly related to the Hollywood-Bollywood issue, but I'll put it in anyway ;-P Danny Boyle's next film is set in India and he's supposed to have met Shahrukh Khan about it.

The Wroclaw Film Festival (19-29 July)

I've been horribly neglecting my blog this past month :-/

There's lot of things to write about, but I'm going to start with my impressions from the Wroclaw film festival cause otherwise I'll totally forget them (that was at the end of last month!).

It was the 7th time this festival took place (the 2nd time that it took place in Wrocław - it's been moving to bigger cities as it's been growing). I've been attending this festival ever since the very first edition when it took place on just 4 screens in Sanok (now it's 14 screens!) and I guess one of the strongest impressions I got this time round is how important this festival has become. It's by far the biggest festival in Poland now (probably the biggest in this part of Europe actually). This year they showed 460 films of which 231 were full length feature films. I don't think there are any audience numbers available but it was definitely well over 100 thousand people.
When 4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days opened the festival (it's the Romanian film that won the Cannes film festival this year), it struck me how respectfully the makers of the film were treating this festival and how interested they were in our response to the film. It's very much an international scale festival now!

But lets get to the films... I saw a lot of them obviously ;-P So I'll just cover the ones that got the strongest reactions from me (in no particular order - or rather in more or less the order I watched them).

The story of 4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days is a girl in communist Romania trying to get an abortion. But it's actually not about abortion or communism at all. The real topic of the film is women and how little emotional support they have from men. I don't think it paints a saintly picture of women or anything like that. For most of the film they don't tell their men anything of what's bothering them and then when finally the men pressurize them to find out what's wrong it comes out in a way that if I were a man I wouldn't understand either ;-P And I think that's quite a fair portrayal of women (I think many of us are like that). But on the other hand you understand exactly why the women are so guarded. The atmosphere that men create just doesn't allow for that kind of openness and I think the film is an amazing portrayal of male chauvinism and it's awsome that a film like this was directed by a man :)

As my criteria for writing about a film is strong feelings, here's a film I had strong negative feelings about ;-P As the Shadow is an Italian film about an Italian woman (Claudia) who is learning Russian. She develops a crush on her teacher, Borys (a Ukrainian). They sort of end up together (although it's hard to say really) and then he asks a favour of her. His cousin (Olga) from the Ukraine is coming to Italy and as he's going to be out of town for a while, he wants Olga to stay at Claudia's house. Claudia finally agrees reluctantly and then finds that actually Olga is quite a nice guest. One day Olga goes out for the night and doesn't come back.
The director of the film was at the screening and I knew I wouldn't like the film the moment she started talking. She came out and said that she's glad that so many people came to the screening (in the standards of the festival it was actually rather empty) and then started saying that this film has traveled to many important festivals and won many awards (I checked - imdb lists just one festival and award and it's a very obscure one!). The whole way she approached us was with this air of superiority, which particularly struck me because just the day before Cristian Mungiu had been so modest and genuinely interested in how the Polish audience would react (and he was presenting a film that won the Golden Palm!!). I fully expected that the Italian director would approach her topic with the same air as she did her audience and was not disappointed.
I rolled my eyes when during a conversation about alcohol between Claudia and Olga, Olga says that in the Ukraine they drink because they're unhappy or because it's cold. Not to mention the names of the Ukrainian characters - Borys and Olga? er... great... (and guess which part of the Ukraine they were from - yes, you guessed right, Kiev) And that's not the worse part... The film has lots of Russian in it, but the director didn't even bother to make it sound right. Her Borys was an Italian and spoke with such a strong accent that even I heard it (and honestly, my Russian is almost non-existant!). Her Olga was a part Polish, part Italian actress who spoke with a slightly smaller accent, but still one I thought I could hear.
The catalogue description suggested that the point of the film was to de-stereotype Eastern Europeans, but instead the director didn't do even some basic homework on the Ukraine!

I also got to see two of Guy Maddin's films :D I developped an interest in him at previous editions of the festival. He's a Canadian director who is strongly influenced by German expressionist films from the silent era and has such bizzarre storylines that I feel unable to explain or repeat them ;-P They showed Brand Upon the Brain which is one of Maddin's more recent films. I don't feel able to convey to you what the film is like in any other way but by linking to the trailer:

The other Maddin film they showed was a 1992 one called Careful which was just as enjoyable and crazy :)

A hilarious and warm film that I saw was Irina Palm. It's a big European co-production about a middle aged lady who desperately needs money because her grandson is ill and so she starts earning money in the Soho area by wanking men off...

One of the biggest discoveries of the festival for many people was Hal Hartley (there was a full retrospective of his films). He was also present for the entire festival (and apparently doing lots of film watching as well :) ).
They actually had to move his films to a bigger screening room because all the people that were interested weren't managing to get in.
I didn't have particularly strong feelings about him myself, but he's definitely an American (independent) director worth discovering. His films have great dialogues and are very amusing portrayals of American society.

They had a small section of "cinema of dance" at the festival this year. While most of what I sat through was boring enough for me not to continue with that section, the first screening made a huge impression me. It was a a few films by the DV8 Physical Theatre - they're a British dance group and the way they approach both dance and film was fascinating for me.
As this is also something that has to be seen to be explained, here's the trailer for The Cost of Living:

And here's a scene from the film:


Disappointingly, there was only one Bollywood film this year and I'd already seen it on DVD, but it was still awsome to see it on the big screen. Omkara is an adaptation of Shakespeare's "Othello". It's a film where a lot of stars are acting against their image - especially Saif Ali Khan who is the ugly villain with yellow teeth (Saif usually plays cute romantic heroes :D ). Here's the trailer:


Another fun film was I'm a Cyborg, but that's Ok (Park Chan-Wook's latest film). It's a Korean film about a girl who thinks she's a cyborg.

Probably the most political film I watched at the festival was AFR. It's a Danish film made to test freedom of speech (or so the director told us :) ). When the Muslim cartoon issue came about in Denmark, the Danish (right wing) prime minister defended the right of Danish papers to publish such things. So the director of this film decided to test freedom of speech in Denmark and using all sorts of clips from TV, doing his own interviews with politicians (though not being entirely truthful with them about how the material would be used) and using actors to conduct other interviews, he created a film in which the Danish prime minister had been assassinated by his gay lover. He also made the film version of the prime minister an alter-globalist fighting for the rights of Third World countries (which is of course totally against what the right wing Rasmussen believes in). The director of the film was not punished in any way, so in his opinion Denmark passed the test ;)

A really nice Australian film that I saw was Japanese Story which is a sort of romance between an Australian girl and a Japanese businessman.

Something I really recommend people see once it releases is Persepolis. It's an animated film about a girl growing up in Iran and then emigrating to Europe. There's a lot of humour in it, but it's also packed full of Iranian history and culture. Here's a teaser trailer:

Order of the Phoenix publicity in full throb

The new Harry Potter film has now released and the publicity for it is going on in full throb, which means there's loads of great interviews with the Trio (and Daniel Radcliffe in particular) floating around.

Here's a long interview with Daniel Radcliffe from Entertainment Weekly. He talks a lot about Equus in it. My favourite bit from it is:

The publicity photos for the play were extremely provocative, and spread all over the Internet as soon as they were released. What was it like shooting them?
I remember being a little bit hyper that day. At that point, we'd just done the nude scene in rehearsals [for the first time]. And I was basically wanting to get my kit off as much as I possibly could, to try and get used to the idea, and in front of as many strangers as I could. I'd be like, ''Ready now? Is this where I take them off?'' And they'd be like, ''Dan! Hold back! Wait! Just give us 10 minutes, please!''


Daniel Radcliffe on Regis and Kelly:


Daniel Radcliffe on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno:


Daniel Radcliffe on the Late Night with Conan O'Brien (part one):


And here's part two:


Here's the whole Trio on Unscripted. It's a little stiff at the beginning, but gets hilarious by the end :D


And this is a bit of Emma Watson doing publicity on Extra:


And here's a longer interview on the David Letterman show. I was actually shocked at how patronizing Letterman was at the beginning especially. But maybe I'm oversensitive or something. She handled it well at any rate :)


And finally, this is Rupert Grint on the Craig Ferguson show:


Post edited to add another article from Entertainment Weekly. It talks a bit about some on set stuff, for example:
A few hours later, Oldman has nailed his scene, decompressed, and begun bantering naughtily with his castmates. ''Have you noticed,'' he asks Isaacs, ''how long my wand is?'' ''Yes,'' Isaacs volleys back, ''it expands in the warm, doesn't it?'' Radcliffe listens and grins broadly. He asks Oldman for advice on a tough role he's signed on for in Equus, a London revival of Peter Shaffer's 1973 play about a troubled stable boy, for which Radcliffe will appear naked eight times a week. ''You'll have to shave,'' Oldman tells him. Radcliffe's wide eyes open even wider: ''What — down there?'' Oldman nods, eyes closing. ''Especially down there.''

Macaulay Culkin in "Party Monster"

I always love it when someone does something drastically against their image and while I'm not a particular fan of Macaulay Culkin, I'm amazed that he did a film like Party Monster. How much further from his Home Alone image can you go? lol No idea about the quality of the film as a whole, but seeing the clips of him in it is hilarious - check them out, they're below.

J. K. Rowling on the Jonathan Ross show

You can download the interview here. It's fun :D

Why Polish figure skating is fun ;)

Here's a clip from I think an old exhibition in Oświęcim. There's Mariusz Siudek (European and World Championship medalist) skating with Bartosz Domański (or at least I think that's him in the dress ;-P, he was Polish National Champion twice) and eventually a third guy takes the ice, but I don't know much about him.
At any rate - it's fun ;-P

The EU in youtube sex controversy

My ponderings about whether it's possible to put down clear guidelines as to what is obscene seem to be relevant yet again...

Here's the article. The EU put together a short clip of sex scenes from famous European films that were funded by them and it has received a surprising amount of attention with many people terming it "soft porn".
Polish politics make an appearance in the story as well of course *rolls eyes*
A Polish MEP from the conservative League of Polish Families has accused the commission of using "immoral methods" to promote itself.
European Commission spokesman Martin Selmayr said there had been a flood of complaints from Poland about an intimate scene between two men - but refused to accept there was anything controversial about the film.

If you want to make your own mind up about it then see below:

For the other EU European cinema clips see here.

The protests start - more on "Gandhi, My Father"

I'm following up one of my previous posts. While Gandhi, My Father will be out in about a month, we've already got the first attempt to stop its release.

The more I find out about Harilal, Gandhi's oldest son, the more I understand how heavy the material can potentially be. Check out this article and also the short wikipedia article about Harilal.

More Order of the Phoenix promotion

I'm putting it up because whenever Daniel Radcliffe talks about nudity or kissing I giggle (sad, I know).

Here's a news clip from the first press junket which I think was in the UK:


And here's the Japanese press conference (the world premiere was in Japan this year):

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix clips

11 scenes from the new Harry Potter film as well as some cast interviews and backstage clips have been released here.

Some of the best in my opinion are:

• "I see them too"
  It's the first proper glimpse we've had of Luna. It's just 2-3 lines, but she's perfect! (and very funny ;) )
  
• "How long have you worked here?"
  Umbridge is probably also going to be a lot of fun ;) I so love that Snape is like twice taller than her on that clip ;)
  
• "I will attempt to penetrate your mind"
  Occlumency lessons were something I've been really looking forward to seeing and while I'm not sure I entirely like it (and am fully anticipating to hate the worst memory scene), at least the intensity of the scene hasn't fallen below my expectations.
  
• "Hand me the prophecy"
  Now this is something for which my expectations were rather low (probably because I'm not a big fan of the climax of book 5), so I'm positively surprised!

P.S. (edited June 30th) You can also access those clips here

Indian film releases I'm excited about...

So there's Chak de India, the new Shahrukh release in August, which I'm anticipating to be rather awful judging by the trailer (though of course because it's a Shahrukh release I'm still a little excited ;)). The premise of the film is Shahrukh's character coaching a women's field hockey team. The first teaser is below:


But I also think it's high time to introduce the topic of Akshaye Khanna onto this blog (yes, there are in fact Indian actors other than Shahrukh that I'm a fan of lol). Some of you may have seen Akshaye in Dil Chahta Hai. Otherwise he's not a Bollywood star that has gotten much attention before this year really. But recently his career seems to have taken off. His style of acting is rather rare in mainstream terms (I'd say he's usually a very subtle actor even in Western standards) and I think he's quite into experimenting with different things, so with the recent surge of interest in him, he seems to have had some interesting film offers to choose from. The result is that I'm quite excited about a few films with him him attached that are coming up ;)

So firstly, there's Gandhi, My Father which is probably going to release in August and is getting even some international focus. While Gandhi as a character has featured in a huge amount of films, this film seems to be a very unique (and controversial) take on him. You might like to read up on this film a little here. But if you don't - then well basically it's about Gandhi's family and the conflict he had with his son (Akshaye plays the son). They never got on well and apparently Gandhi forbade him to become a lawyer which is what his son really wanted to do. The film tries to paint both Gandhi and his son in grey colors and tells the story of how Gandhi's sacrifice for the nation was very difficult on his family. Below is one of the first trailers for this film:


On a lighter Akshaye Khanna note, there's Naqaab. I don't know when this is going to be released, but I assume probably soon as the trailers have started coming out. I've no idea what this film is about ;-P But it's probably totally crazy, as the directors of it (Abbas-Mustan) are the ones responsible for films such as Baazigar (1993) and Baadshah (1999). The difference is that now they have the special effects to pull off a silly James Bond type movie with James Bondy type effects if they really wanted to ;) Trailer is below:


Finally, on a rumoured Akshaye Khanna note, he may be part of a much talked about and controversial film (I think it's Western financing), which has been in pre-production for a very long time. Even though When Kiran met Karen seems to be appearing in news articles quite a lot considering how early the stages of its production are (for all we know it might not even get made), there's hardly any info about its plot. What mainly gets repeated is that it's a "lesbian flick".

P.S. This month my blog has been rather neglected, the reason is that June is my busiest school period, but now that's almost finished, there's hope I'll improve ;) (though I'll be off-line for about 2-3 weeks in the second half of July - first bit of August).

Experimental Travel

As the summer holidays are approaching, you might want to find out a bit about experimental travel (see the definition on wikipedia).
There are many very creative ideas to follow, for example what is known as Blind Man's Buff Travel:

Hypothesis
Explore and experience a new place without seeing it.

Apparatus
A friend to guide you and a blindfolding mechanism of some kind.

Method
Spend 24 hours blindfolded in a new location.

You will find many more ideas of how to travel the world in an experimental way here. I also recommend looking at the stories of people who followed some of these ideas, which you will find on the home page of the experimental travel website (the four featured experiments).

And I thought Poland had it bad...

This is a short follow-up to my big pornography post. While Polish politicians have been debating about a total ban on pornography, Iran seems to have taken their politic debates muuuuch further. If the proposal passes, anybody involved with the making, distribution (including websites) or production of porn films in Iran could be sentenced to death.

Order of the Phoenix set report

The Harry Potter Lexicon is one of the most amazing Harry Potter sites on-line. It's a total encyclopedia of everything to do with the world in the books, compiled from a huge range of sources. It is so good that J.K.Rowling admits to using it when she needs to check on some small fact somewhere.
Anyway, they've put up the first part of a report from the set of the new film and since it's in their own detailish style I found it a great read :)
Here's a small, random quote which apart from being amusing also relates to a conversation I once had with one of you about the appropriateness of fan fiction about real people:
interviewing Jason Isaacs wearing leather head to toe (Jason, not me) and discovering that he reads fan fiction about himself and gets a huge kick out of the more far-out stuff
I really hope we're going to get the whole interview once the film is out lol

Teletubbies and the profound effect they might be having on Polish children

Apparently Polish officials are worried that Teletubbies promote homosexuality. The reason they think this is because Tinky Winky carries a woman's handbag. They are considering taking the show off public TV if their psychologists confirm these very terrible fears.
(For those who can't read Polish - I swear, I didn't make this up! That is really what the article says!)

A cinema boycott in Poland?

There is a cinema boycott this weekend in Poland (not that I think many people know this ;-P). It is a reaction to the closure of napisy.org - a site which distributed Polish subtitles to films illegally.
They make a couple of valid points. ZAIKS (which is the body that deals with copyright in Poland) indeed charges too much and have often been the cause for rising prices of cinema tickets. I also think that it should be ok to copy your own CDs and DVDs that you have bought legally for your own use (does anybody who owns an mp3 player not do this?). And having people who do nothing more than translate dialogues in films sued and threatened with prison is a bit extreme - it's not them who should be in the first line of fire when it comes to piracy (particularly when they're translating stuff that wasn't even released in Poland although that is of course not always the case). But the people boycotting also seem to fail to see that piracy is stealing. The film industry really needs a lot of money (more than most other industries) to be able to make professional films. Even outside of the USA making a feature film usually costs millions of dollars and that money has to come from somewhere. If everyone pirated films then the film industry would not be possible to sustain at all.

Yes, I'll agree that we need changes in the law (and that goes not just for Poland), but no, piracy is not ok and people should stop pretending it is. I mean if you don't have enough money to buy a book you want to read then you don't just go and steal it, do you? I guess what frustrates me about piracy is not just that people do it (I understand why people do it and even though I'm a lot stricter about it than most, I could find faults with myself as far as this goes). What annoys the hell out of me is that most people do it without any sort of feeling that it's wrong.
Unfortunately, for these reasons I rather take a sarcastic view point on this boycott - people who don't go to the cinema boycotting cinemas... *rolls eyes*

Anyway for those of you who can read Polish you can read more about it here and here.

Some day, I will probably follow up this post with something longer since I've been collecting links on this topic in one of my many draft posts for a while now. But I want to look at copyright in a much broader light than this (including the software industry which faces somewhat different threats than the film industry) and therefore it's going to take me a rather long time to write ;-P

If you think differently about this then I do, let me know :) I'm up for having my opinion on this challenged.