The nominations for the 32nd Annual Genie Awards were announced by the Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television on Jan 17th, with a simultaneous news conferences in Toronto and Montreal. The 32nd Annual Genie Awards will be broadcast on Thursday, March 8 at 8 p.m. (8:30 p.m. NT) on CBC Television.

Director Jean-Marc Vallée’s Café de Flore received 13 nominations and David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method received 11 nominations—both films are nominated for Best Motion Picture and Achievement in Direction.

Rounding out the Best Motion Picture category are the awardwinning Monsieur Lazhar; the suspenseful The Whistleblower and the crowd-pleaser Starbuck.

BEST MOTION PICTURE
A DANGEROUS METHOD – Martin Katz, Marco Mehlitz, Jeremy Thomas
CAFÉ DE FLORE – Pierre Even, Marie-Claude Poulin, Jean-Marc Vallée
MONSIEUR LAZHAR РLuc D̩ry, Kim McCraw
STARBUCK РAndr̩ Rouleau
THE WHISTLEBLOWER – Christina Piovesan, Celine Rattray

ACHIEVEMENT IN DIRECTION 
DAVID CRONENBERG – A Dangerous Method
STEVEN SILVER – The Bang Bang Club
JEAN-MARC VALLÉE – Café de Flore
PHILIPPE FALARDEAU – Monsieur Lazhar
LARYSA KONDRACKI – The Whistleblower

The full list of nominees are locate at Hye’s Musings Blog   http://hyemusings.blogspot.com/2012/01/32nd-genie-awards-nominees.html

The Case For Being Anti-Anti-Piracy by Peter Bart VARIETY Online

I know it’s wrongheaded, but I’m beginning to be anti-anti-piracy.

Wherever you turn these days, the anti-piracy mafia has become ever more shrill. There’s a new White House initiative, there are new bills in the House and Senate — and then, of course, there are Hollywood’s awards-season screeners. The DVDs sent to voters do not begin with a cheerful invitation to enjoy the film, but rather with a litany of legal threats that each year grow longer and more dire.

Talk to the anti-piracy professionals, of course, and they’ll acknowledge these admonitions consist of useless legal rhetoric. Each year, essentially the same percentage of vids end up getting pirated anyway.

There are growing signs that the copyright-protection lobby is pissing people off rather than converting them to the cause. Political leaders and the Silicon Valley elite all seem alarmed by new bills with virtuous-sounding titles like the Protect Intellectual Property Act — bills that, as the Wall Street Journal observed, could “strangle the Internet with regulation.”

The fear is that, if these bills pass, a single infringing link on a single page of a website could result in the entire site being shut down.

In Hollywood, the release of screeners each year plays out like a ritual of ambivalence. The studios want voters to view the screeners — but not really. They’d prefer we go to theaters. So would filmmakers, who resent seeing their artistry squeezed onto a TV screen. Even the Academy’s furtive experiments with digital downloads make filmmakers edgy because streamed images look more like standard-def DVDs than like high-def Blu-rays (the same for iTunes streaming).

I’ve been an Oscar voter for many years and relish the annual avalanche of screeners, but I nonetheless find the threats and admonitions tiresome. Further, a substantial number of TV sets cannot recognize the “enter” instruction on the vids that certify your “acceptance” of the threats, so you never get to see the movie anyway.

Historically, screeners have always seemed to drive the Academy to distraction. One year voters were even sent a device that scanned the screeners, but many were defective and were soon discarded.

For the studios, dispatching screeners is an expensive exercise — the whole production and marketing process comes to as much as $400,000 a film. Voters may receive a DVD and a Blu-ray but distributors are not supposed to send more than one screener to a voter.

To save costs, a few studios have tried to develop exclusionary lists of “retired” Academy members — those who do not pay their $250 annual fee and thus cannot cast votes. No one knows what percentage of the 6,000 Academy members is “retired” but it could run into the thousands as a result of the bad economy and the Academy’s AARP-plus demographics.

As a voting member, I still find it gratifying to watch a screener in the quiet of my den to admire the individual components of the filmmaking process — art direction, cinematography, etc. With that in mind, it’s doubly jarring to be instructed at the outset that I must break the screener in half immediately upon viewing and feed it into the nearest inferno.

I don’t like destroying movies. I also don’t like breaking videos in half (there must be myriad lawsuits over cuts and bruises). Finally, what if the voter wants to rerun a DVD just before the final vote to reassess a performance or even a musical score?

The anti-piracy zealots aren’t interested in aesthetic considerations such as these. They want to protect their copyright even if they have to badger you and send you to jail to do so.

For those of us who love film festivals but don’t really care for the line-ups the rush line or the sudden fear of not getting tickets while they are still available can now relax and enjoy festivals like New York’s Tribeca from the comfort of home. The Tribeca Film Festival (April 20th to May1st) will simultaneously share several of its 2011 premiere titles on video-on-demand, including The Bang Bang Club, The Bleeding House, Last Night and Neds.

Other festival films will also be available on VOD, including Dax Shepard’s Brother’s Justice and Zach Braff starrer The High Cost of Living.

Tribeca Enterprises’s Geoff Gilmore says: “We are excited to be able to present a spectrum of specialty films that will simultaneously premiere at the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival and on demand in over 40 million homes, giving those not at the Festival in NY a chance to enjoy these quality films.” Details on the films below.

Tribeca Film’s initial VOD offerings feature notable stars such as Ryan Phillippe, Zach Braff, Keira Knightley, Taylor Kitsch, Sam Worthington and Eva Mendes. Film and television star Dax Shepard gets behind the camera for his directorial debut as he takes viewers on his journey to become an internationally-renowned martial arts star. These films will introduce audiences to the world of conflict photography, the violent side of 1970s Glasgow through the eyes of a bright young boy on the brink of adolescence and the life-changing consequences and relationships that can result in the course of one night.

The Tribeca Film website http://www.tribecafilm.com/ has an easy-to-use guide on where to find all films.

Source: http://blogs.indiewire.com

 Hollywood action stars Denzel Washington and Ryan Reynolds were photographed on location on the streets of Cape Town this week as they continue to shoot scenes for their new action thriller, Safe House.

Much of the city centre was blocked off to traffic for the shoot. One photograph shows Washington, who reportedly plays a villain in the movie, walking along Strand Street. 

Denzel Washington and Ryan Reynolds shooting in Cape Town

In one scene he is wearing a hat and a pair of spectacles, a costume reminiscent of his role as civil rights leader Malcolm Xin the Spike Lee movie from 1992. In the movie, Reynolds plays Matt Weston, a CIA agent who must protect prisoner/rogue ex-agent Tobin Frost (Washington) from assassins when their safe house is hit. Reynolds was photographed shooting scenes on a balcony with the beautiful and on the rise French actress Nora Arnezeder. He was also spotted at a U2 concert in the city on Friday.

Production on Safe House is expected to continue in Cape Town into March. The movie has been slated for a February 2012 release by Metro-Goldwyn Pictures

Hollywood loves discovering new talent. But its passion for developing emerging filmmakers has lately strayed into large-scale, downright risky terrain.

"Tron: Legacy"

Case in point: Universal is in the process of handing director Carl Rinsch a $170 million budget for 47 Ronin, a 3D samurai revenge story starring Keanu Reeves that will begin shooting March 14 in Budapest. Rinsch’s résumé includes a popular short film and a Heineken commercial (below) — but no features.

And he’s far from the only fresh-faced director stepping into the big-budget fray. Disney gave commercials helmer Joseph Kosinski close to $200 million for Tron: Legacy. Universal recently hired first-timer Rupert Sanders to helm the $100 million-plus Snow White and the Huntsman. Relative newbies Marc Webb, who’s shooting Sony’s The Amazing Spider-Man, and Daniel Espinosa, who’s helming Universal’s action thriller Safe House, took on the potential blockbusters with little previous feature work.

It’s not an entirely new phenomenon, but for several reasons the scale and justifications behind the hires have changed. During the 1990s, commercial and music video directors such as David Fincher (Alien 3, 1992), Michael Bay (Bad Boys, 1995), Gore Verbinski (Mousehunt, 1997) and McG (Charlie’s Angels, 2000) made the jump to features, but most of them did so with comparatively modest budgets.

During the past five years, though, technology has enabled rookie directors to hone their skills via FinalCut Pro, digital-video cameras and other state-of-the-art effects tools from a young age, prompting budget-cautious studios to salivate over what they can put on screen for a price. Gareth Edwards, for instance, made his indie sci-fi film Monsters for a few hundred thousand dollars, even though it looked much more expensive. He’s now up to direct Godzilla for Warner Bros.

“It’s a reflection on the innovation of emerging filmmakers,” says Anonymous Content manager Michael Sugar, who reps Webb and Kosinski. “You’re looking at people like Fede Alvarez, who made a short film (Panic Attack!) for $300, put it on YouTube, and it looks like it was made for $20 million.” Alvarez, an Anonymous client, was hired by Sam Raimi’s Ghost House Pictures to develop a sci-fi feature. 

More than ever before, the short film and commercial environment has become a playground to use up-to-the-minute tech to create feature-film calling cards. Sanders, District 9 co-writer-director Neill Blomkamp and Noam Murro — recently hired by Fox to direct the fifth Die Hard — all did spots for recent Halo video game campaigns, a gig that has become as coveted as any debut film job because it often becomes a higher-profile entry into features.

To read more visit The Hollywood Report (http://bit.ly/h9LEyj)

Article written by Jay A. Fernandez

 Carl Rinsch Heineken commercial!