Something like five years ago I optioned a feature script from writer James Hancock that I really liked, it took the teen slasher format and gave it a more European feel mixing up a bunch of horror essentials without cheese and with a psychological edge that just completely entertained. James and I spent quite a while developing it further, tried to get it funded, unsurprisingly failed with just a couple of tiny low budget shorts to our name and decided to come back to it a bit later in our careers.

On a quiet pedestrian street in Kars, is the run-down delapitaded house where Yeghishe Charents, (1897 - 1937) one of the greatest Armenian poets was born and lived.Both his primary and secondary schooling took place in Kars.

His patriotic pleas to unite Armenians against Stalinism ended him in prison, where he died at the age of 40.

Even though the vintage reels shown of Russian prima ballerina Anna Pavlova spooled three weeks ago in Pordenone, the aura of the dancer, her interminable legs, her precision on tip-toe and her incredible grace and femininity tinged with mystery, linger in the minds of all festival-goers who viewed them.

York Honored as the IPA's 2009 Mary Pickford Award Winner. Los Angeles, CA, October 14, 2009 --The International Press Academy today announced that actor Michael York will receive the 2009Mary Pickford Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Entertainment Industry at this year's 14th Annual Satellite Awards™ on Sunday, December 20, 2009 in Los Angeles, CA.

Spanning 45 years in entertainment, Michael York's career began on stage in his native England with the National Youth Theatre. After graduating from Oxford University, he joined Laurence Olivier's National Theatre in 1965 and made his film debut the following year in Franco "Zeffirelli's The Taming of the Shrew" with legendary screen couple Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. He also appeared as Tybalt in the Zeffirelli remake of "Romeo and Juliet".

UKULELESCOPE Film accompagnati dal vivo da / Films accompanied live by The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain (Dave Suich, Richie Williams, Hester Goodman, George Hinchcliffe, Kitty Lux, Will Grove White, Jonty Bankes) Ideazione e produzione / Created and produced by: Hester Goodman Musica di / Original music: Hester Goodman, George Hinchcliffe

The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain is a group of all-singing, all-strumming Ukulele players, using instruments bought with loose change, which believes that all genres of music are available for reinterpretation, as long as they are played on the Ukulele.

A PERSONAL GLANCE AT W.C. FIELDS

A Personal glance at W.C.Fields

Although Dr. Harriet FIELDS never got a chance to call the stage, silent film and talkies comic legend 'Grandpa' (he died shortly before she was born), as the only granddaughter of the star, she feels strongly about familiarising the world with the true persona of the artist.

Present at this 2008 edition of the Pordenone Giornate de Cinema Muto, which is showing a complete retro of Field's silent films, Dr. Fields,with a doctorate in Community Health and Nursing, Graduate of Columbia University and residing in Washington D.C., sees her mission in presenting her grandfather's work worldwide as two-fold :

The Rose of Rhodesia (1918), one of the earliest feature films made in South Africa, presented at this year's Giornate del Cinema Muto is a five-reel romance cantered on a stolen diamond, an interracial friendship, and an anti-colonial uprising, The Rose of Rhodesia impressed contemporary reviewers with its daring realism, spectacular outdoor locations, and casting of African actors in prominent roles. Considered lost for most of the last century, the film may claim to be the first fictional treatment of Zimbabwe in cinema.

Abel Gance's J'Accuse (1919), a politically an d stylistically daring anti-war drama produced while the trench warfare of World War I was still grinding up soldiers on both sides of the battle, opens with the title spelled out by the bodies of soldiers striding into formation, like a marching band at a half-time show. Then they collapse, as if dead, to startling effect. Appropriating the cry leveled by Emile Zola during the Dreyfus affair, Gance levels his accusations at war itself.

The Merry Widow (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, US 1925)is the opening night film at the 2009 Giornate de Cinema Muto 200,

The Music
When I first accompanied The Merry Widow years ago, I was totally struck by this highly creative and inventive film adaptation of the operetta, directed by the genius Erich von Stroheim. Immediately I realized that my "one" piano + singer accompaniment wasn't at all enough to serve this brilliant film. I started a serious quest to develop a score for the film, and at the same time to promote this relatively unknown von Stroheim film wherever I possibly could.

True-blue British actor, Michael York has arrived in Pordenone, Northern Italy, with his wife Pat, to introduce Mary Pickford, the Muse, a new comprehensive documentary on the silent film diva, directed by Nicholas Eliopoulos.

Alright! Back to basics! The basis of our physical life as humans, it seems, is to grow through experience or to just simply die without sensorial pleasures and conversely, discomforts, whether plainly in the mind or purely in the body. All events in one's life are present in the moment to be experienced and it is up to the perceiver to create, learn, and grow from these experiences. We exist as sponges to any and all conscious or unconscious experience through all of our senses; these are things that cannot be denied simply because all the tools we have to detect reality are channeled through our vehicle in this outer world filtered through the mind. We believe things to exist, therefore we experience them as closely as possible, or not. The philosophical flipside to that coin is that we experience things firstly, and then determine their reality. Either way, we must experience something, no?

I made it! We’ve all heard that typically American colloquialism. I know what that saying may mean to actors out there or to those of you hoping to be successful in this nearly impossible career to sustain when not “working”, but maybe you haven’t taken the first few scary steps yet. I’ll try and deflate whatever fears you may have about the outer world of the craft which is all business and not entirely “just” your business. The only business one as an actor should consider is the world we create for our portrayals. When I refer to the outer world, I mean the world the character will live in during our portrayal. Whether in a theatre or in front of the camera, you and your character must become one being, in order to know the outer world of the character, the one that has nothing to do with the business you’re attempting to break into. Let’s say you haven’t even thought about auditioning or let alone gotten your head shots done and printed… what to do as an actor? Study, read, learn, research the history and find the clues that will lead you to the source of it all, the craft of the craft. Look for the masters of acting, directing, and theatre and find their works: Shakespeare, Stanislavsky, Uta Hagen, Strasberg, Meisner, Meyerhold, Grotowski, even the Knight Sir Lawrence Olivier has such books of uncanny first-hand relations of stories in the world of acting. The history of theatre and acting is abound in all its glory, from the contemporary Western world of theatre and film to the dramatic leaps and bounds of the ancient Greeks, it is all still out there. From the many histories we get the many teachers, those who pushed the envelope with new content, new directions, and new destinations for the art.

I am now in LA, my future here much like the economy, is uncertain. But it is Los Angeles, the Mecca for actors on the lam from their respective hometowns forced to work hard to not defer their dreams. But as fate shall have its way, that’s the way it is and I’m not suffering for it. The full knowledge I had of this before I moved out here was the only proverbial brass pair I had to tug on in hopes that it would keep me confident. When I mean that I knew actors out in LA work hard, I mean I know actors who left Tinsel Town penniless and defeated, running back home with their tales so far up their asses they spit fur as they panted gaining speed towards mommy. But the working hard comes from a different place, a place that comes way before we are ever even ready to go meet with agents to one day hopefully book castings. Working hard means something different to everyone but I will attempt to clear the air as to what actually works for me as an actor.

"Why does one constantly mimic herself in front of the lens all the time? In any case, her image will appear as someone else. Photograph seems like a mirror with memory. What happens if herself never coincides with her image…"

I suppose an elaboration on the topics of the last few blog entries I've written for the precious few readers I have out there is long overdue and in order. So here it is… Firstly, this blog is aptly titled as such because being a long-winded story-telling human who happens to be an actor, I naturally ramble on just enough of things I've studied, learned, and/or have experienced personally.

Right after Mao, in Communist China early 1980s, director Buming XU recalls the situation in most households where a standard toilet was a luxury and people used "potties". A young Chinese girl Dan, lives in a stifling environment with her family in a house without toilet and has to empty her obnoxious younger brother's waste after he spends most of the day sitting on the loo.

In an extraordinary series of videos made for the Museum of the Moving Image, film critic Matt Zoller Seitz discusses the filmmakers, authors and even comic books that have shaped the films of Wes Anderson. This is surely one of the most imitated filmmakers of the 21-st Century, so it's fascinating to see where he gets his inspiration from.

Valiant French actress Rosine Deréan - from "Douce France to Ravensbrück

On April 25th, 2009, in the tiny village of Genillé (Indre-et-Loire), where she lived and died, a tribute will be held to the stylish '30's French actress and several films she starred in will be shown in 8 mm.

The Hottest Latin Film School: International School of Film and Television San Antonio de los Baños- CUBA

As a filmmaker, deciding what film school to go to is quite a difficult task. You want to pick the best place possible to prepare you for your career, and then several other things go into play, like your budget and your family situation. When I was in the process of choosing an undergrad film school, it all came down to four schools for me: USC, NYU, U of Miami and EICTV. USC was crossed out because California seemed too far from my family in NY and South America. NYU I excluded because I wanted to try living in a new place from where I had grown up, so my last two choices were

University of Miami and EICTV in Cuba.

Festival de cinema do Brasil in Paris.

The first week of this 9th two-prong event (feature competition and then documentaries) has ended at the L'Arlequin Cinema in Paris 'trendy Quartier Latin with the presence of top-knotch Brazilian filmmakers, actors and producers, flown over for the event to present each of the two dozen films in competition.

Big names of Brazil's 'cinema novo' period such as Miguel Farias, Carlos (Caca) Diegues, Sergio Rezende, Joao Batista de Andrade boasted a vigorous older-generation slate of works to compete with talented newercomers like Tata Amoral, the only female feature director, Heitor Dhalia, Karim Ainouz and Cao Hamburger.

Twilight. Seems like it's everywhere these days. It's at the store when I go buy groceries, glossy magazines with Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson staring hungrily at each other. It's on airplanes, rows and rows of noses stuck in books, the same cover showing one bright-red apple and two snow-white hands. It's on T-shirts, necklaces and billboards. It's at the mall. It seems to have taken over Hot Topic. You know, that store that used to be cool?

This is a genuine phenomenon. I won't attempt to answer why. For one thing, I haven't read the books (Stephanie Meyer has written four of them). Secondly, I think that question has already been answered, by none other than Stephen King (who's not a fan, by the way): "People are attracted by the stories, by the pace, and in the case of Stephenie Meyers, it's very clear that she's writing to a whole generation of girls and opening up kind of a safe joining of love and sex in those books. It's exciting and it's thrilling and it's not particularly threatening because it's not overtly sexual."

No, silly, not Pedro Almodóvar. Even though my last two Blogs were about master filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, this CineBlog is about a completely different Pedro. MTV's Pedro Zamorra.

Last night I attended a screening of PEDRO at the Colony Theater in South Beach. This film opened the line-up for the 2009 Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival to a sold-out crowd and a standing ovation. PEDRO is the life story of the young AIDS activist Pedro Zamorra, Miami's own Cuban American, who was part of the cast of MTV's The Real World: San Francisco, and died at the age of 22, soon after the show finished airing its last episode in 1994.

I want to elaborate on a subject I touched on in my last blog, about when I met Pedro Almodóvar the week before he won an Academy Award for All about My Mother.

My friend John is an executive at United Artists (who distributed the film for the U.S.), and he is also a close friend of Pedro. John mentioned to me that UA had arranged for him to stay with his buddy Pedro at a high rollers suite @ the MGM Grand in Las Vegas; this is so Pedro could chill at and be pampered and de-stressed before he was named the winner of his first shiny golden Oscar. Well, guess who my friend John invited to go? ME!!!

We're only in the third month of the year, and already we've seen high-profile remakes of three different horror movies: My Bloody Valentine, Friday the 13^th and, most recently, The Last House on the Left. What's surprising about these movies isn't the fact that they're all remakes. Nothing is sacred in Hollywood, not even The Host and Oldboy - easily two of the best films of the decade, both slated to be streamlined and repackaged thanks to Tinseltown's recycling plant. No, what's surprising is that exploitation movies have entered the mainstream at all.

Hello from afar, my fellow bloggers. I write my final Oscar-themed blog of 2008 from the capital of the best coffee in the world, Quindío, Colombia. On my week away from the Openfilm headquarters (located in an undisclosed Cyberfilm Paradise), I had two major topics running through my head. #1: Coffee, and #2: the 81st annual Academy Awards. As a Colombian filmmaker, I was in heaven this week. First of all, because I came to this beautiful country to shoot a video of the entire coffee cultivating-to-packaging process, from growing the coffee beans on the lavish Colombian fields 1400 feet above sea level in the beautiful lands just above the vast Amazon, and finally to the final smile of happiness of the java junkies sipping some of the best coffee in the world.

Alright, so you're a decently trained and young inexperienced actor and you finally got headshots you can live with. Then you got some more done. Now you got an entire book filled with a face only a mother could love and you even went so far as to land a reputable SAG licensed agent who also has the same taste as your mother. You are ready to be sold on the open market, but your agent hasn't had the time to give you the entire run-down. Well here it is. Most people in the biz will tell you never to listen to other actors... this is true, but there are some things that are a part of the starter set you should know. Before you start going out on the castings you've been so fortunate enough to be called on (thanks to those wonderful pictures), there are some necessary things you must have in your bag and in your car (or whatever transport you got) at ALL times. In your bag, you should have:

8:40

The show is off to a great start. Hugh Jackman sure is a versatile guy - not only can he grow knives out of his knuckles, but he can sing and dance with the best of ‘em.

8:47

Penelope Cruz wins Best Supporting Actress - hooray! She created the most hilarious portrait of an artist in Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which proved once and for all that Scarlett Johansson couldn't act her way out of a paper bag.

If you're an actor, I think it's in your best interest to know this, especially if you're about to leave your hometown to take a shot at the big time. Let's say you live in Michigan... never mind, let's just say you live anywhere else in the country, anywhere but New York and Los Angeles, and you're an actor who's going out into the city or the ‘burbs, or what-have-you, and you're looking for any type of work. You know, the everyday type of job: waiter, bartender, gas station attendant, Don of the Mob, etc. When you mention that you're an actor, it usually illicits the most surprised of responses, like "Wow, we have a star in the making here," or it may even garner the old "let me tell you my story" kind of dialogue with whoever's doing the hiring... and that's nice. Yeah, it's nice and everything that you have the same chances as anyone else of getting that position, and you may very well get hired... God bless America, right? But were you to mention that in NY or L.A., all you'll be getting out of that interaction is a "thank you but we're not hiring right now" as they flip the Now Hiring sign over.

The 81st Annual Academy Awards are two days away. Going in, I'm fairly ambivalent about the outcome. Unlike last year, when There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men duked it out for the top prize, there are no masterpieces. I deeply admired Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire, Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, Andrew Stanton's WALL-E and Gus Van Sant's Milk. These would have been my nominees for Best Director and Best Picture, but many of them got gypped.

Still, I'll definitely be tuning in. I've watched every awards show since 1990, when I was 9 going on 10. All 9-year-olds who watch the Oscars naturally assume they'll be making it to the podium someday. I'm sure if I looked hard enough I'd find a few acceptance speeches, written in chicken-scratch and tucked away for safekeeping. I'm more cynical and realistic about all that now - instead of 30, now I'm giving myself until 40 to win an Oscar. Now and then I'm forced to look away to avoid being blinded by all the Great and Important People basking in their own sense of self-worth. But mostly the Oscars give me a giddy feeling in the pit of my stomach.

For an ode to pretentious, up-your-own-ass, "artistic" indie shit, there's nothing quite like the opening minutes of Baghead. The protagonists are at a film festival, where the film "We Are Naked" is having its world premiere. It's shot in grainy black-and-white, the dialogue is ludicrous, and just before the end-credits roll, the lead couple take off all their clothes and have sex. On their feet. In the front yard.

Latinos in the 2009 Award Season

The only quasi Latino thing to celebrate on the Oscar nomination list is Penelope Cruz's performance as best supporting actress in Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona, as you can read about in my previous blog, "Will Penelope Be Wearing Gold?" But even though Cruz is the only Hispanic name on the list, we come to consider if the Academy is being a bit racist in not nominating any more Latino talent in the recent year's Latin cinema. Is it because there is no other Latin talent out there? Nope, because talent there sure is! The Sundance Awards were recently announced, giving six Awards to Latino filmmakers and Latino films! How come none of these were recognized by the Academy?

When you look at this year's Academy Award nominees for Best Actress, one thing that sticks out is the number of nude scenes the actresses have appeared in. Anne Hathaway (Rachel Getting Married), Angelina Jolie (Changeling), Kate Winslet (The Reader) - these are beautiful and mega-talented young women who have never shied away from on-camera nudity. Their nominations got me thinking about the nature of female sexuality in films.

Oscar Gold that is....! This is the first time that Penelope appears to be one of the favorite contenders for the best supporting actress Oscar in an English-language film.

After Dark Horrorfest sounded like a good idea - take eight independent horror films that deserve to be seen and given them theatrical distribution. Launched in 2006 by the Canadian filmmaker Courtney Solomon (An American Haunting), the annual event has unfortunately devolved into a weeklong shitfest. Every year I go, hoping the festival will build on the promise of its initial run, which showcased some solid fright flicks like The Abandoned and Wicked Little Things. And every year I go home sorely disappointed.

So you want to be an actor? You heard of the term "shoot", right? Photographers, Directors, Cinematographers, Cowboys – they all use this term. Now, to get the term right, when it comes to acting it means you need to know that without having your head shot in the right way you are D-E-A-D in this town (or any other town, for that matter). I mean, shot like it matters, the actor's attitude matters, their hair and make-up matters, the clothes matter, the colors matter, why even the manner in which you get it to the right agent or manager or casting director MATTERS. Alright, so I had a small head-start, I've had headshots done by four other photographers before and only two out of a million shots were chosen to be what my then agents in Miami thought could actually sell me. After showing my manager out here in LA the headshots that had gotten me decent work over the years on the east coast, he laughed, burped, farted, and then asked me to burn them. Which after much suffering... I did. Suffering from the gaseous response, I mean.

It really has been a complicated and difficult year for Spanish film, without any blockbuster success in the billboards, different than in 2007 when The Orphanage or [REC] made box office smash numbers very close to Hollywood super productions.

A list of Spanish movies were added in the first quarter of 2008, international productions like Asterix at the Olympic Games and The Oxford Crimes that made some waves and increased the number of spectators attending premieres.

Following this wake some co-produced films were added as national films like Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Che, the Argentine, Transsiberian or El Greco, but their box office figures turned out to be really regrettable. These are not 100% Spanish produced, so they don't really count as exclusively Spanish films in my Opinion. Anyway, as 2008 is just past us, I made a couple of lists of 5- 100% Spanish films that, in my opinion, represent the best and the worst films of 2008. In this Cineblog you will read the Best and in the next Cineblog I will bring you the Worst.

Is there anything worse than a movie that's been made for only one purpose: to win Oscars?

I'm talking, of course, about Ron Howard's Frost/Nixon and David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Here are two handsomely mounted productions that take no risks, offer no insights, and are just polite enough to win the Academy's favor. That's not to say these movies are bad, but they ARE boring. Don't let anyone tell you any different.

After many years spent in my bed dreaming as a child, the only walk in life that could suffer me was the entertainment business. I studied, worked, ate, drank, and slept theatre, photography, art, and film all the live long day while growing up and now that I'm in it... I'm not content... I'm not fully satisfied with my work up until now, which reminds me of a famous quote I was given once by a dear professor of mine in college. It comes from a letter written by Martha Graham to Agnes De Mille:

"There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all Time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine: how good it is; nor how valuable it is; nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open ... no artist is pleased...there is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction; a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others."

When it comes time to hand out the best-of-the-year awards, movies released in December get all the love. This is partly due to the fact that studios have been saving some of their best products for the holiday season, but sometimes it seems like movie critics and members of the Academy Awards of Arts and Sciences suffer from memory loss. So I thought it might be fun to see what the first 11 months of the year had to offer and make a best-of-the-year list from that. Keep in mind that I still haven’t seen some of the most anticipated films of the season, including The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon and Milk. I’ll write about those movies in future blogs. For now, here’s my nowhere-near definitive look at the best movies of 2008, listed in order of preference:

We all know filmmaking is a team effort. Nowadays almost everybody's seen the DVD features and the behind-the-scenes of their favorite movies and perhaps been overwhelmed by the number of people who are involved in the filmmaking process. Camera teams, lighting teams, post-production teams, stunt teams, wardrobe teams, animal wranglers and so on, we are all aware of the seemingly infinite amount of names and titles that keep scrolling up during the credits. Unfortunately, most people choose this time to stop sucking on those unpopped-popcorn seeds and start walking out of the theater (or turn the TV off, if you were already home), even though it's probably the only real public moment of acknowledgement that the "rigging gaffer" or the "second-second-second-assistant director" will get!

I started working in projection booths in 1999, the year Fight Club came out. As FC fans know, Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) has a night job as a projectionist, which he uses as an opportunity to splice frames of pornography into Disney flicks.

Searching the Internet on a daily basis for high quality short films & videos can be an arduous & strange task at times. Let’s face it: there’s a lot of crap out there. On average, you have to watch about 50 bad videos in order to find just one good one. From tutorials on how to make a peanut butter & jelly sandwich to a man giving his dog a haircut, there are no shortages of completely pointless, unwatchable videos populating the Internet today.

It was about 5 years ago when I first learned that the term "VJ" could be used to describe someone other than a person on MTV telling me what videos to like. I had always loved movies, animation, electronic music and the visual arts. So the concept of a person that mixes video images live in the same way a DJ mixes music was very appealing to me. Since then, I've put together my own VJ setup and have had the opportunity to perform alongside some great musicians. I joined a band, and even went on tour a few times. As my ambitions and skills as a VJ have grown, I've realized that this could very well be the perfect job for me in the long run.

For a lot of people, filming movies and shorts is something they do as a hobby on their time off from "real" work, whenever they can gather enough friends to donate time and efforts into working as crew or actors. But those who have chosen to expand that passion and take on film and video production as a career might find it hard to figure out where to start. There are many paths one can take to making filmmaking an actual paying career. One isn't more adequate than the other. It all depends on what speaks to you the most.

Welcome one, and Bienvenidos Todos(Welcome All) to the most original Spanglish Cine Blog, exclusively on Openfilm.com. This CineBlog is called "Junior's CineBlog", Junior being yours truly, Me!...... and "...CineBlog" meaning "...FilmBlog" in our neighboring tougue, and second official language of the United States, Spanglish! That is right. This unique bilingual film blog is going to bring you the latest scoops on the hottest topics in the Hispanic film industry, bringing you stories on film releases, Latin film personalities as well as film events all over the world, all with the particular thread of the Spanish/Latin/Hispanic inclination.