Pakistan Couple Fatally Pours Acid On 15-Year-Old Daughter In ‘Honor Killing’ A couple in Pakistan is rightfully behind bars after doing the unthinkable to their teenage daughter. The duo of dummies poured acid on the 15-year-old, killing her, because they said she needed to be punished for looking at a boy. via Huffington Post A Pakistani couple accused of killing their 15-year-old daughter by pouring acid on her carried out the attack because she sullied the family’s honor by looking at a boy, the couple said in an interview broadcast Monday by the BBC. The girl’s death underlines the problem of so-called “honor killings” in Pakistan where women are often killed for marrying or having relationships not approved by their families or because they are perceived to have somehow dishonored their family. The girl’s parents, Mohammad Zafar and his wife Zaheen, recounted the Oct. 29 incident from jail. The father said the girl had turned to look at a boy who drove by on a motorcycle, and he told her it was wrong. “She said `I didn’t do it on purpose. I won’t look again.’ By then I had already thrown the acid. It was her destiny to die this way,” the girl’s mother told the British broadcaster. Stories like these make it a whole lot easier to appreciate your own country…..and your own parents. SMH. Image via Shutterstock
Also in Thursday afternoon’s round-up of news briefs: Val Kilmer will receive kudos from the Dallas Film Society; Jodie Foster takes on Money for her next directorial project. Also, Tribeca Film Festival names a new Deputy Executive Director and the Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP) launches a major new initiative; Dallas Film Society to Fete Val Kilmer Kilmer will be honored by the Dallas Film Society at their annual fall fundraiser, “The Art of Film” on November 16th. He will be presented with the Dallas Star Award November 16th followed by a conversation during the event by film critic Elvis Mitchell. Nicholas Apps Joins Tribeca Film Festival As Deputy Executive Director Tribeca named Apps Deputy E.D. effective October 15rh. He will report to Executive Director Beth Janson spearheading individual giving and corporate sponsorship initiatives, and marketing and communications efforts for Tribeca Film Institute, the year-round nonprofit founded by Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal, and Craig Hatkoff. IFP to Develop and Operate “Made in New York” Media Center Independent film advocacy group Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP) will develop and operate a new Media Center in New York City. Bringing together traditional media and emerging technologies, IFP aims to make the Media Center “a hub for filmmakers, content creators, and entrepreneurs to work together under one roof.” Located in DUMBO in Brooklyn, it is set to open in spring 2013. More information can be found at their website . Around the ‘net… Cinematographer Harris Savides Dies Harris Savides, the acclaimed cinematographer who worked frequently with Gus Van Sant and David Fincher, has died at 55. Savides died Wednesday night, his representatives at The Skouras Agency confirmed Thursday. Savides was known for vividly recreating the hazy hues of 1970s cinema in films like Fincher’s Zodiac , Ridley Scott’s American Gangster and Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere , and for mesmerizingly fluid, long takes with Van Sant in movies including Last Days , ‘ Elephant and Gerry , A.P. reports . Ben Affleck Eyes Live By Night as Next Directing Gig The director/actor is in talks with Warner Bros. to make Live By Night which, like Argo , he will write, direct, produce and star in. The story is based on the novel by Dennis Lehane. Set during Prohibition, the focus is on Joe Coughlin, the black sheep son of a police captain who gets involved in escalating levels of organized crime, Deadline reports . Jodie Foster to Direct Money Monster Foster will direct the drama about a TV personality whose insider trading tips have made him the money guru of Wall Street. A viewer, however, loses all his money on a tip from the insider and takes him hostage on air. Ratings soar as the country is gripped by the drama. Production is set for early 2013, Deadline reports .
While there’s no shortage of burly action hero types in Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty , it’s Jessica Chastain who’s front and center hunting down Osama bin Laden in the first trailer — and that in itself is worth noting as you mark your calendars for the December Oscar contender. I mean, how fantastically striking is the above image of Chastain, her shadow, and the American flag? Chastain plays a CIA operative attempting to locate the al-Qaeda leader, who was killed while in hiding in Pakistan nearly ten years after the 9/11 attacks. Chastain is joined by Mark Strong, Kyle Chandler, Chris Pratt, Joel Edgerton, and more in the tale of how a global network of operatives joined forces to bring bin Laden down. Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal’s research for the film had come under scrutiny by right wing watchdogs , though that flap has died down in recent months. Expect buzz to start back up again, only of the gold statue kind. Zero Dark Thirty hits theaters December 19. Watch it on YouTube Synopsis: For a decade, an elite team of intelligence and military operatives, working in secret across the globe, devoted themselves to a single goal: to find and eliminate Osama bin Laden. Zero Dark Thirty reunites the Oscar(R) winning team of director-producer Kathryn Bigelow and writer-producer Mark Boal (The Hurt Locker) for the story of history’s greatest manhunt for the world’s most dangerous man. [via iTunes ]
More Muhammad pics are in the planning stages and this time, they may include cinematic quality. By now, just about every filmmaker or aspiring filmmaker knows that it’s a full-on major taboo to depict the Prophet Muhammad in a movie. That rule doesn’t just apply to the recent low-budget video that appeared on YouTube, Innocence of Muslims , which didn’t exactly depict the Muslim prophet in the best of light, but any depiction is absolutely forbidden among Muslims or anyone else for that matter, at least according to the raging crowds that have rioted for the past two weeks in front of American missions around the Muslim world. But while depictions of Muhammad have remained mostly absent in Hollywood and Western movies throughout the decades, the anti-Islam pic may have had the unintended (or not) effect of opening up a floodgate – or at least a trickle – as at least two filmmakers are looking to make separate pics featuring the prophet, and if all goes according to plan, their budgets will likely be higher. Leading the next possible wave of Muhammad projects are two ex-Muslims who are developing biopics that will give critical takes on Muhammad, according to the Los Angeles Times . L.A. based Palestinian filmmaker Mosab Hassan Yousef told the paper he has cast a “prominent Hollywood actor” to play Muhamad in a project he says has a proposed budget of $30 million. The story would center on the prophet from age 12 until his death and would be reminiscent of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ . “My goal is to create this big mirror to show the Muslim world the true image of its leader,” Yousef is quoted as saying. The one difference with the depiction of Jesus Christ, however, is that Yousef’s take may be less of a glorified account of Muhammad than Gibson’s Passion . Yousef’s book Son of Hamas tells of his journey from a “terrorist to Israeli spy to born-again Christian,” according to L.A.T. He claims to not be ‘anti-Muslim,’ and says his mother is still a practicing member of the religion that claims 1.5 billion followers worldwide, but he apparently converted under the guidance of a radical Egyptian Christian – Father Zakaria Botros Henein – who has criticized Muhammad as a “pedophile and buffoon.” Even further along the way to becoming reality is another film by an atheist raised in Iran, Ali Sina, which is said to be in pre-production and claims to have $2 million secured so far. Sina hopes to raise a total of $10 million for the project. Still untitled, the story will liken Muhammad to cult leaders Jim Jones or David Koresh. The Canadian resident plans to begin shooting the pic next year. “We can bypass theaters completely and sell the movie online with a profit to a large number of people, especially Muslims,” Sina said. “They can download it and watch it even if they are living in Karachi or Mecca or Medina.” Innocence of Muslims was actually not the first depiction of Muhammad in the West that incited violent reaction in the Muslim world. In 2005 and 2006, Danish publication Jyllands-Posten published a dozen cartoons that later sparked massive protests resulting in more than 100 deaths and the bombing of the Danish embassy in Pakistan in addition fires being set at the normally placid Scandinavian country’s embassies in Syria, Lebanon and Iran. Its prime minister at the time described the controversy as Denmark’s works international crisis since World War II. [Source: Los Angeles Times ]
As protesters in Pakistan, Indonesia and Afghanistan raged against the anti-Islam film Innocence of Muslims over the weekend, the media was also awash with photos and video of the Egyptian immigrant first tied to the crude inflammatory video, Nakoula Basseley , as he was escorted from his Southern California home looking like the Elephant Man so that he could be questioned by police. (See the video after the jump.) Basseley, who was first identified as Sam Bacile — a pseudonym that calls to mind the word “imbecile,” — covered his face with a white scarf and wore a newsboy’s cap on his head to protect his identity. His appearance didn’t remain hidden for long, however. Both the New York Daily News and the New York Post have run a picture of Basseley, sans disguise, sitting with one of the actors in Innocence of Muslims , Anna Gurji, who has been talking to a number of media outlets, and wrote a letter to the horror/fantasy writer Neil Gaiman about how she and her fellow cast members were duped by Basseley. (Gurji also notes in her letter to Gaiman, which he posted on his website, that The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood helmsman Alan Roberts (a.k.a. Robert Brownell) was the director of Innocence of Muslims.) Basseley, who’s reportedly a 55-year-old Coptic Christian who immigrated from Egypt, does not have the face of a man who sparked a wave of violence that led to the deaths of U.S. Ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stevens and three other American diplomatic staffers. What’s that they say about the banality of evil? Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
Lil Wayne has a knack for making it rain. This is unquestioned. No matter the timing, no matter the circumstances, the rapper wants to throw dat cash! Hey, when you gots insane amounts of bank, flaunt it. With that in mind, The Chive created this amazing photo gallery of Weezy making it rain in all sorts of interesting situations … ones you might not typically associate as the most natural fits for his notorious strip club behavior. For instance, here’s him right after the royal wedding … … and in President Barack Obama’s Situation Room, during the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan last year. Someone’s gotta lighten the mood: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton looks understandably shocked, but the rainmaker does what he’s gotta do. Follow the link above for a dozen more of these gems.
It’s nice to see a bigot get a taste of his own medicine. As you may have heard, the “don’t say gay bill” legislator in Tennessee, State Senator Stacey Campfield, was booted out of a restaurant in Knoxville, The Bistro at the Bijou, by the owner for his recent remarks about gays and the origin of AIDS. Broadcasting platform : YouTube Source : Firedoglake Discovery Date : 30/01/2012 22:02 Number of articles : 2
On Monday, as President Obama was answering questions during an interview conducted by several Americans through a Google+’s “hangout” group video chat feature, he acknowledged publicly the use of US drones and airstrikes inside Pakistan. read more Broadcasting platform : YouTube Source : CommonDreams.org Discovery Date : 31/01/2012 07:18 Number of articles : 2
In a career spanning three decades Michael Biehn has notched a number of iconic roles in beloved genre fare, from future freedom fighter Kyle Reese in The Terminator to Corporal Hicks in Aliens to one of his personal favorites, Tombstone villain Johnny Ringo. And that work has borne him witness to his share of tense, chaotic sets under some of the strongest personalities in the business. But no shoot of Biehn’s was as intense as the friction-filled production of this week’s The Divide , Xavier Gens’ bleak horror tale about strangers trapped in a basement after the apocalypse, which Biehn says was fueled by the “hatred” and “bitterness” of combative actors turning on each other under claustrophobic conditions. “The actual film shoot was absolutely brutal… the actors hated each other,” Biehn admitted to Movieline in Los Angeles, describing a set atmosphere seemingly designed by director Gens, Biehn says, to encourage conflict among performers. (Among Biehn’s castmates: Milo Ventimiglia , Lauren German, Rosanna Arquette, Courtney B. Vance, Ashton Holmes, and Michael Eklund, who play an assortment of neighbors in an NYC apartment building that quickly lose their humanity, and their sanity, down below.) Bickering over script changes, on-the-fly adjustments, and dueling egos all factored into the strife, which got so heated the actor says producers had to be called to intervene. “I’ve worked with [William] Friedkin , I’ve worked with Michael Bay ,” Biehn said pointedly, “and there was more tension on this set than any set that I’ve ever been on.” Yet it all worked out in the end — at least for Biehn, who’s proud of the film and happy that Gens allowed his actors to help shape their characters extensively, even if that’s what led to clashing interests on set in the first place. For Biehn that meant having the freedom to give his bigoted antagonist character Mickey a 9/11-themed backstory and a shot at redemption — not to mention a relatability in the face of what Biehn perceives as real-world terrorist threats. (“I think something like this could happen very easily, in my lifetime, where something bad happens… I mean, go on YouTube and look at the video of what they were doing to Qaddafi.”) And ultimately, Biehn says, the final film was satisfying enough that all the bitter infighting, stress, manipulation, and conflict was worth it. “It worked,” he smiled. “I think it worked — and I enjoyed it.” You’ve played so many iconic characters over the years, but at any point did you feel like you needed distance from Kyle Reese or Corporal Hicks? What’s your relationship to those characters now? I didn’t realize they were really iconic until recently. I now have 15-year-old boys and girls that approach me and go, “Johnny Ringo is my favorite character of all time,” or “Hicks is my favorite character,” or “I’m in love with Reese” –- and they weren’t even born when I made the movie. So I’ve come to realize that those three movies are, call them what you call them, they’re classics. My son, who is eight years old, and his boys the other day, at school they were playing The Terminator ! One was the Terminator, one was Kyle Reese, one was Sarah Connor. And he went over and said, “My dad was in The Terminator !” Does that mean he automatically gets to call dibs on Kyle Reese? [Laughs] Yeah! It’s just kind of rewarding to have a young kid come up and say that, so it’s not something that I shy away from at all. They’re great movies and I owe a lot to Jim Cameron and I’m proud to be in them, and they’ll always be around. Do you have a favorite? I have two favorites, and that’s Kyle Reese and Johnny Ringo. Kyle Reese to me is the great hero because he not only was a hard-fighting tough guy, he was also a lover at the same time, so much in love with Sarah. And Johnny Ringo to me was just the best antagonist that I’ve ever played, because I played him as a guy who has a death wish and had done everything that he wanted in life. As far as he was concerned, a gun fight was about as exciting as it was going to get. There’s this moment I have with Val [Kilmer] at the end of the movie where he says he’s serious, and I look at him and say “All right,” and there’s a look in my eye which I think is one of my best moments on film. Like “Oh, this is exciting. This is going to be fun.” It’s not sitting around a bar drinking, it’s not cows, it’s not women, it’s just excitement. From that great antagonist to your latest, your character in The Divide is the firebrand who ratchets up the tension from the start – and this is a movie that gets intense immediately, from the start, as doomsday erupts outside this apartment building. How do you view your character in moral terms? First of all, Xavier [Gens] let us do whatever we wanted with our characters, so I wrote that character. What was on the page to begin with? A bad guy, a crude guy, a racist who’s racist against all creeds. Very negative, cursing all the time. Just a pig who ends up being the antagonist and ends up doing bad things to other people and so forth. Xavier basically brought all of his actors together at the beginning of the making of this movie and said, “You can do whatever you want. This is a sandbox for you to play in.” You could do improv, you could write scenes, you could change your characters -– you could do anything you want. I made that character go from a guy –- everybody was losing their humanity, and I wanted to take this character who originally had no humanity and try to give him back a little humanity. That’s what I tried to do. Basically I wrote with a writer that was helping all the actors write for about three or four days, a week or so, and I kept sending back material. He finally said, “Michael, just write it yourself.” So I basically kind of wrote the character, created the whole back story of the wife and 9/11 and the firemen and all that kind of stuff. That’s an element that I feel is significant, because we open on the New York cityscape being destroyed in a fiery attack. From the very first seconds the film triggers a visceral familiar reaction, and then we find out that Mickey’s a former NYC fireman who’s lost his way. Yes. Basically it’s post-traumatic stress disorder. This is a guy who took one of his teams into the Twin Towers and it came down and he was the only one left standing. He loses, like a lot of men do who are under such wartime circumstances, and he loses his wife and children and starts drinking. He loses his job and turns into this paranoid survivalist and that’s where we find him at the beginning of the movie. You have some understanding of why he’s a racist and why he is the way he is, because of what happened to him. That was his back story, and he is a guy that really down deep was a good person but circumstances just destroyed him. Do you see The Divide as a bleak film, ultimately? Yeah, it’s bleak! It’s about as bleak as it could possibly get. I call it dark, I call it a psychological horror movie. I think what we’re looking at in life right now is bleak. I think everybody should open up their eyes, because this country and this world is not the same one that I grew up in. There’s a lot of stuff going around that is scary, and the world is getting smaller and smaller. I think something like this could happen very easily, in my lifetime, where something bad happens. So I think people should be aware. Is there any way, do you think, to truly prepare oneself for what would happen if placed in the situation characters face in the film? No. No, not really. You could move to Idaho and build yourself a bunker but sooner or later somebody’s going to get you and your family, or your children or your grandchildren, or your grandchildren’s children. It’s crazy to think how entirely possible it feels for human beings to devolve so extremely under circumstances like these. It is, and I think we’re this close. I mean, go on YouTube and look at the video of what they were doing to Qaddafi. I can’t even bring myself to do that. Well, it’s pretty nasty stuff. When you see that, you see what mankind is capable of. That was in the spirit of anger pent up for years and years and years, but they were raping him with a fucking metal rod and shit. Mankind, you know. And it’s not just there; it’s Afghanistan, it’s Pakistan, it’s Africa, it’s in a lot of places that stuff’s going on. And North Korea -– who knows what’s going on with that situation. Do you feel like films like these are a necessary reflection of life? I think that they’re not necessary, but to look at a movie like this and go ‘My God, that was horrible – nothing like that would ever happen’… I think something like that could happen very easily and you have to be prepared to know how you would react, and try to go out with a little bit of humanity. Did the actual film shoot mirror this sort of tension? The actual film shoot was absolutely brutal. The actors hated each other. Why? Was that a product of the filming environment, being stuck in a bunker for so long? It was a product of the fact that Xavier basically said, “If you want to improv something, you can improv something; if you want to write something, write something.” Basically, people would do improvs and somebody would be doing a scene that they thought was their scene for the day and somebody else would be doing an improv and the camera would move over on them and the other actors would get mad. Some actors were more physical than other actors and the other actors were upset with that. Some people felt like their roles were being taken away from them, that they were being upstaged, and they absolutely hated each other. They broke into groups. I’ve worked with [William] Friedkin, I’ve worked with Michael Bay, and there was more tension on this set than any set that I’ve ever been on. Producers were continually called down to the set to break up fights -– not fistfights, not real fights, but it got close. Were you involved in any of this? Well, no. The thing that was good about me is that I didn’t take sides. I didn’t have any sides, I was my own person. So basically I as an elder actor on this set tried to keep some peace between the other actors, and said, “Listen –- just fucking calm down, it’s just a movie.” But there was a lot of hatred and a lot of bitterness on that movie. It was nasty, and we were working in a confined space and everybody stayed in that space because they wanted to be there. These guys, like Michael [Eklund] and Milo [Ventimiglia], they went for it, man. They lost weight; they lost 20 pounds because they didn’t eat, they didn’t shave, they didn’t shower. And they were, you know… you look at Milo’s performance and it’s out of this world, I think, to see the breakdown of his character. And Rosanna [Arquette] is so good in it. It’s just the best ensemble movie I’ve ever been in. So despite the chaos, do you think the final film was worth all of that trouble? Yeah, I do. I think that basically Xavier was smart enough to set it up that way. I think he realized from the beginning that if he did this, he was going to piss off some actors and turn some actors against other actors. I think he knew from the very beginning that the actors weren’t going to get along very well and it went downhill from there. The producers kept having to be called down to set… it was crazy. As a performer, how do you feel about that kind of directorial manipulation? It worked. [Smiles] I think it worked, and I enjoyed it. I was given full freedom to take a character and do anything I wanted with him. He basically said, “Michael, if you don’t like what’s written you write what you want to write,” and I wanted to show a guy that was not just a bad guy all the way through. Michael Eklund, who basically didn’t have hardly anything in that movie -– there was nothing really written in the script for him, not much, maybe a few lines here and there –- was so good that he ends up kind of turning into the bad guy. That was from doing improvs, from writing stuff, and from Xavier just loving his work so much that he ends up turning into the antagonist. Then I was able to take my role and turn him from being the antagonist into somebody that had kind of redeemed himself. And it happened while we were shooting -– I mean, the movie was moving off in different directions as people were improvising and doing different things, and nobody knew what was going on from day to day. That’s somewhat fascinating as a deliberate choice on Xavier’s part, but it seems like it might be scary… It was scary! It wasn’t scary to me, but there were people on set that were scared, that’s for sure. Did you ever worry about how the film would end up? Well, I never worry. It could be either good, or it could not be so good. People like it or they don’t like it. But I’ve done like 60 to 70 movies, and some are good, some aren’t. This one I’m pretty proud of. I like the comparison of the Divide set as being more tense than any you’ve been on, considering the directors you’ve worked with. Yeah, and that’s Billy Friedkin. That’s Jim Cameron. That’s Michael Bay! Speaking of directors, you’ve recently made a foray into directing. What’s the latest with your film The Victim ? We just got picked up by Anchor Bay today, so we’re real excited about that. We were talking to a few different companies for a while and negotiating, then Anchor Bay stepped up and they gave us a deal we’re really happy with. We’re going to release the movie on 50 college campuses; every college has got a movie theater. It’s getting a lot of attention! Congratulations! You’ve described it as a sort of grindhouse movie. Can you elaborate? It’s basically a little grindhouse movie I shot in 12 days, wrote it in three weeks, and did pre-production, cast it, crewed up, went to the Screen Actors Guild, did locations -– did all that stuff in three weeks while I was writing it, then we rolled it into a 12-day shoot. And we got The Victim ! I think we got lucky, people seem to be enjoying it. Now we’ve got people that are going to sell it for us, and that are happy to sell it for us. Lastly, I’ve wondered — of all of the iconic and memorable roles that come up for you with fans, does anybody ever bring up Coach [Biehn’s 1978 starring debut, about a high school athlete who has an inappropriate love affair with his lady coach]? No! I mean, people talk to me about Coach , but not as an iconic piece. Well, consider this a first. There’s something about Coach that is so great, so of an era… [Laughing] These days, she’d go to jail for that! The Divide is in limited release this Friday. Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . 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File photo of the front page of a newspaper covering the death of Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden on May 2, 2011. Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was shot dead deep inside Pakistan in a night-time helicopter raid by US covert forces, ending a decade-long manhunt for the mastermind of the September 11 attacks. In the aftermath of the secret U.S. raid to kill Osama bin Laden, Pakistani officials want a detailed agreement spelling out U.S. rules of engagement inside Pakistan, officials in both cou
