'Anna Karenina' premieres in London

LONDON: Keira Knightley and Jude Law swept along a red carpet, complete with chandeliers, at the world premiere of their new movie "Anna Karenina."

The London event Tuesday was slightly less theatrical than the film itself - an interpretation of Leo Tolstoy's epic love story, set in 19th century Russia.

Knightley portrays the title role, the tragic heroine torn between reputation and romance.

Law plays her jilted husband, while Aaron Taylor-Johnson is the man she falls for.

Knightley says one daunting aspect of playing Anna was "trying not to simplify her at all and actually go with all the complexities."

"Anna Karenina," directed by Joe Wright, opens in the UK on Friday and hits the US this November. (AP)

Red carpet premiere of 'Spy Kids 4' held in LA

LOS ANGELES: The red carpet premiere of 'Spy Kids 4' was staged in Los Angeles in which actress Jessica Alba and the director of the movie Robert Rodriguez among various personalities were also present.

The movie is the fourth in the Spy Kids franchise, but the first time Alba has had a role.

She plays the part of retired spy Marissa, who is thrust back into action along with her two step children, played by Rowan Blanchard and Mason Cook, after maniacal Timekeeper (Jeremy Piven) attempts to take over the world.

Extravagant premiere of ‘Harry Potter’ held in NY

NEW YORK: Cast and crew members of the "Harry Potter" movies reflect on their ten years in the series.

On the final big red carpet screening of the last Harry Potter movie, cast and crew members speak their minds about their ten-year ride with the boy wizard.

Cast and crew of the final Harry Potter installment, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2" braved the heat to walk the final major red carpet for the series -- the North American premiere at Lincoln Center in New York on Monday (July 11).

Welcomed by hordes of screaming Potter-fanatics, the stars graced the massive red carpet to take pictures and hand out their final autographs to fans as Harry, Hermione and Ron.

In a night filled with nostalgia, the stars took their time to speak about the past ten years with the series.
Radcliffe who is in the lead role of boy wizard Harry Potter, when asked what he would miss the most.
"So I will that, and I will also miss the crew the cast everything about what was my day to day life for ten years," he added

Director David Yates was at the helm of the last four Potter movie adaptations, and said that the red carpet event did not feel like an ending.

In the final episode Harry finally faces off with his arch enemy Lord Voldemort, and it will tie lose ends from the previous films including the the romantic relationship between Hermione and Ron. In the film the two finally share a kiss, which was a hard thing to do for both the actors according to actress Emma Watson who is in the role of Hermione Granger.

More than 400 million copies have been sold around the globe, making Rowling the first billionaire author and providing a huge support base upon which the films were built.

But for many fans the adventures of Harry Potter had a deep impact on their personal lives, such as Yarineth Pena, who spent 12 hours in the heat to catch a glimpse of her heroes.

But not all is coming to an end as Rowling has recently unveiled Pottermore, a website allowing fans to interact with the characters and storylines, and will finally retail the stories as ebooks exclusively on the site.

The movie opens in some countries on July 13, and in the key British and U.S. markets on July 15. (Reuters)

World premiere of Salman's Ready in Dubai

The world premiere of Salman Khan-starrer Ready will be held in Dubai on June 1.

The Dabangg star will be joined by co-star Asin, on the red carpet of the Grand Cineplex here, followed by an exclusive after-party at a local nightclub, said organisers.

The film also has a Dubai connection as Kubra Sait, a local model, former radio jockey and a TV presenter is making her Bollywood debut with this film.

Ready is a remake of a Telugu film and sees Khan play a romantic at heart whose mission in life is to unite lovers.

He helps Asin escape her own wedding and promptly falls in love with her. The rest of the film sees the couple unite their families into accepting their relationship.

Khan and Asin were earlier in Dubai in 2009 for the world premiere of their film London Dreams.

‘Morning Glory’ red carpet premiere

LONDON: Rachel McAdams was met with a rapturous response as she hit the red carpet in Berlin last night for the premiere of Morning Glory Dazzling fans as she made her entrance at the Berlin premiere, Rachel had opted for full-on drama in a black and scarlet Grecian-style Michael Kors gown matched with a bold red lip.

While she turned redhead for her part in Morning Glory, the Notebook-famed starlet debuted newly blonde locks for the `film's premiere last night, worked into a dramatic twisted up-do.

Rachel was joined by co-stars Harrison Ford and Diane Keaton, who play rival presenters in the new comedy about a struggling morning TV show.

The Green Hornet premiered

LOS ANGELES: Helping to fight bad guys and rid the world of crime clearly appears to have done wonders for Cameron Diaz.

The actress looked in the best shape of her life as she arrived at the premiere of her latest film in Hollywood last night.

She posed for the cameras as she walked into Grauman's Chinese theatre and showed off a very trim figure which looked toned and lean in her fitted red Azzaro dress.

Diaz, who looked tanned from her New Year's holiday to Mexico with baseball star boyfriend Alex Rodriguez, has always boasted a slimline figure since she shot to fame in The Mask in 1994 aged 21.

But Diaz, 38, looked like she could still pass for a woman in her twenties with her stunning figure giving any younger counterpart a run for their money.

She demanded the flashbulbs' attention in her asymmetrical Azzaro dress and nude Casadei shoes as she joined her co-stars for the screening.

The Green Hornet is a superhero film, based on the fictional character created by American writer Fran Striker for radio in the 1930s.

Written by and starring Seth Rogen, the Knocked Up star plays Britt Reid, the son of wealthy newspaper publisher James Reid- played by Tom Wilkinson - who inherits his father's media empire when he dies.

He teams up with his father's assistant Kato, played by Jay Chou, to become a masked crime fighting team, that, with some extra help from new secretary Lenore Case, played by Diaz, battles Russian criminal Benjamin Chudnofsky, played by Christoph Waltz, who controls the city's criminal underworld.

And most of the cast were in attendance last night, including Taiwan-born Chou, 31, and Edward Furlong, 33, who is better known for his role as John Connor in Terminator 2.

Then 14, he is now 33 and looked all grown up as he smiled for the cameras at the premiere of the film, in which he plays Tupper, one of Chudnofsky's minions.

The film is released on Friday in the US and UK and is available in 3D after having its release date pushed back from its original date of July 9 last year.

And Rogen said he found the action scenes quite tough to film.

He said: 'We tried to use as few visual effects as possible. So there's a lot of cars crashing through buildings and explosions and stuff, and I just had to try to not look as terrified as I was for the most part.

'In the action scenes, what you have to be most conscious of is not getting blown up or run over by a car. It can be dangerous.'

No One Killed Jessica premiere in Mumbai

MUMBAI: The makers of No One Killed Jessica seem to be confident of their product. Unlike most Bollywood films that are premiered just a day before the release date, the film was shown to the critics and film fraternity three days before it is to be released world wide. And as expected, it turned out to be a star-studded event.

Yes, it was celebrity galore at No One Killed Jessica premiere. Big actors like Amitabh Bachchan, Rekha and Shabana Azmi attended the premiere besides the cast of the film Rani Mukherjee, Vidya Balan and Myra Karn. Actress Kalki Koechlin and filmmakers like Yash Chopra, Madhur Bhandarkar, Shekhar Kapoor and Dibaker Banerjee also graced the premiere of the film.

No One Killed Jessica is based on model Jessica Lal's murder case. Produced by Ronnie Screwvala and directed by Raj Kumar Gupta, the film has Rani playing the role of a reporter and Vidya playing Jessica's younger sister Sabrina. It is set to hit the theatres tomorrow, January 7.

(((( TRON: Legacy ))))

TRON, the original 1982 light-show video-game thriller starring Jeff Bridges as a software programmer trapped inside a brave new computer world of his own devising, is a movie that I, like many others, found to be such a tinny, dehumanized piece of techno-kitsch that I was shocked to learn it has since become a cult film. Seeing it again, though, I think I know why. Twenty-eight years later, TRON exerts a campy-surreal, here's what the future looked like before it arrived fascination that it never enjoyed during its initial run. In 1982, when it was the closest thing Disney had to a picture for adults, it was basically a demo reel of special effects in search of a movie. Yet if you see it today, it can stand as the first prehistoric Hollywood version of cyberspace, and it's fun to behold the eager, at times shockingly primitive ways that it imagines the ''wondrous'' computer future: as a frictionless Colorforms grid that looks like the most analog of head trips. Few science-fiction films have been simultaneously so ahead of their time and so instantly, touchingly dated — so behind the eight ball of their own technology. TRON made the virtual almost leadenly literal. It was the soul of a new machine locked inside the hardware of an old one.

The cult of TRON is hardly so big that you could accuse TRON: Legacy of being a cynical attempt to cash in on a franchise. (More than just a bomb, the first TRON was a major embarrassment for Disney; out-of-print DVD copies are now about as hard to hunt down as VHS head cleaners.) That said, the studio has had a long time to ponder its mistake, and TRON: Legacy, unlike its predecessor, really does make novelty look cool. It's a sleeker, sharper, far more visually intoxicating machine dream of a movie, with a darkly liquid electronic texture all its own.

When Sam (Garrett Hedlund), the son of the now mysteriously vanished Kevin Flynn (Bridges), visits his dad's dusty, abandoned Flynn Arcade and ends up getting sucked — through a TRON videogame! — into the virtual world of the Grid, he gets outfitted for action (black uniform with neon piping), and then is thrust onto the combat stage of a gladiatorial thunderdome. There, he faces off against assorted digital soldiers, all wielding lethal Frisbees of light. The kitsch element is still there — basically, this is the story of what it's like to be turned into a kill-or-be-killed videogame icon — but the director, Joseph Kosinski, stages the extreme fighting with a fleet and threatening charge. The FX in TRON: Legacy have an almost Einsteinian elegance: They infuse light with gravity. If one of the discs hits a combatant, he'll shatter into glassy fragments, and Sam, absorbing the physics of the game, must learn to treat his body almost as part of the surrounding architecture. He becomes a ruthless digital specter.

As long as it's engaged in light-hurling bouts of force, or motorcycle chases through a landscape so ominously enveloping it looks like Blade Runner after gentrification, TRON: Legacy is a catchy popcorn pleasure. The movie has a seductive, percolating, what's-old-is-new-again musical score by the French electronica duo Daft Punk, and for lengthy swatches of it I grooved on the look and the atmosphere. Joseph Kosinski's direction is just intriguing enough to leave you hoping that when Sam finally locates his father amid all those irradiated bytes and bits, the story will really take off.

But TRON: Legacy turns out to be a little too much like one of those logy trapped-on-Planet X sci-fi movies from the 1950s: There's a lot of dramatic stasis undergirding the visual wow. It transpires that Bridges' Flynn hasn't been doing much for 20 years but sitting around — the portal that would allow him to leave has been sealed off — and his fascist nemesis, returning from the first film, is once again Clu, now played by a digitized version of the young Bridges. In his rubbery Botox-android way, he's creepy to look at (and he makes you wonder if this will be the future for aging movie stars), but there isn't much to Clu besides his telegenic blank stare. Here, as in TRON, there are limits to how much technology can really express. As Flynn, Bridges acts very beatnik Zen, like a weary cyber version of the Dude, and Michael Sheen is on hand as a sinister nightclub impresario who primps and soft-shoes like an albino Davy Jones wearing David Bowie's Aladdin Sane shag. Olivia Wilde, as Sam's cybernetic love interest, does some pretty standard punk-arm-candy posing.

One reason the original TRON was greeted with so much hostility is that it seemed, in its cheesy synthesized way, to represent a brave new world not just of digital outer space, but of movies consumed by their own effects. At the time, this was a future a lot of people didn't want to see Hollywood embrace. But, of course, it's the future that won out. And that may be the true legacy of TRON. The sequel, more successfully (if less innocently), injects you into a luminous action matrix and asks you to be happy with the ride. But it's easier now not to object. At the movies, the fantastical-synthetic has become a state of mind that we're never allowed to escape.

Tron leads weak pack of newcomers at box office

LOS ANGELES: "Tron: Legacy," a costly 3D sci-fi movie that Walt Disney Co has promoted for more than three years, opened disappointingly at the weekend box office in North America, while a new comedy starring Reese Witherspoon was one of the biggest flops of the year.

The "Tron" movie, a massively hyped sequel to an obscure 1982 movie, earned $43.6 million during its first three days of release, Disney said Sunday. Industry observers had been expecting a three-day start in the $50 million range, although Disney said the opening was within its own expectations.

The effects-laden update reportedly cost $170 million to make, and more than $100 million to market worldwide. Disney never divulges budgets.

Internationally, the film earned a modest $23 million from No. 1 openings in all 26 of its markets, including Japan, Australia, Britain and Brazil. These markets represent about half of the international sales pie.

Meanwhile "How Do You Know" opened at No. 8 with just $7.6 million in the United States and Canada, far short of modest expectations in the $12 million range. The Columbia Pictures project cost about $100 million to make, with half the budget spent on salaries for Witherspoon, co-stars Jack Nicholson, Owen Wilson and Paul Rudd, and writer/director James L. Brooks. Extensive reshoots also drove up costs.

Executives at the Sony Corp unit were despondent about the opening, although the film had suffered bad buzz for some time with no help from a forgettable title.

A third newcomer did not do much better. "Yogi Bear," a live-action/animated update of the old television cartoon, came in at No. 2 with $16.7 million. Distributor Warner Bros. said it had hoped for an opening between $18 million and $20 million, but the Time Warner Inc unit expected the Christmas holiday would boost business. The $80 million film stars Dan Aykroyd as the voice of the title character and Justin Timberlake as his sidekick Boo Boo.

Critics trashed all three films, which vied for the attention of holiday-distracted moviegoers alongside national expansions of acclaimed awards-season contenders Paramount Pictures' "The Fighter" (No. 4, $12.2 million) and Fox Searchlight's "Black Swan" (No. 7, $8.3 million).

Last weekend's champion, 20th Century Fox's "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader," fell to No. 3 with $12.4 million in its second weekend.

"The Tourist," a widely mocked caper starring Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp, dropped three places to No. 5 with $8.7 million, also in its second weekend. The Columbia release tied with Disney's former chart-topping cartoon "Tangled."

The final weekend before Christmas is traditionally slow, although films often enjoy long runs as school holidays start to take effect. But overall business has been weak for some time, with year-on-year sales down for six weekends in a row.

"A malaise has crept over the marketplace," said Paul Dergarabedian, head box office analyst at Hollywood.com. "The lack of momentum is hurting everybody across the board."

But Disney was bullish about "Tron: Legacy," a project that has occupied the attention of two regimes at the studio in recent years. It has been offering tantalizing glimpses to movie fans at the annual Comic-Con convention since 2008, and raised the heat in recent months with cross-marketing efforts across its theme parks, consumer-products and cable TV wings.

Jeff Bridges returns to "Tron" as a videogame developer trapped in a virtual environment called the Grid. While the original film appealed only to male youngsters, Disney targeted the reboot at men and women of all ages.

But exit polling indicated the film skewed to men aged 18 to 30, with relatively little interest in mainstream multiplexes. Instead, the film's tech-savvy constituency thronged 3D and big-screen theaters. About one-quarter of sales -- $10.3 million -- came from Imax Corp's 234 screens. The film played in almost 3,500 theaters overall.

Tron: Legacy – Premiere held in London

Not even a streaming cold and a rather chilly evening were going to keep me from this one. Tuesday evening saw the World Premiere of Tron: Legacy light up the Empire cinema in London’s trendy Leicester Square and the stars of the show were out in force to greet a rabid public!

The fans had arrived even earlier and were screaming and waving around identity discs and home made Jeff Bridges collages.

And seeing the world of Tron in 3D on the HUGE IMAX screen, was just fantastic. can’t wait to see a light-cycle chase with the huge screen immersing in the action. The footage from the real world was presented in 2D, while the footage set inside the computer was presented in 3D.

The story of the film is about a computer expert whose father went missing 20 years back. He enters the dangerous world of the computer in search of his father.