My Weblog

Friends and family of actress Brittany Murphy held a private funeral Thursday for the 32-year-old who died unexpectedly of what authorities said were natural causes.

The service at the Hollywood Hills Forest Lawn Cemetery featured Christian and Jewish clergy. It included the hymn “Amazing Grace” and a reading from “The Little Prince,” one of her favorite books.

“Today a wife, a daughter, a niece, a cousin, a family member and dear friend to thousands was laid to rest,” the family said in a statement.

“Brittany was an incredibly loving and passionate person … there are no words that can truly express the devastation felt by Brittany’s husband, mother, and everyone who attended the intimate service.”

Murphy was pronounced dead Sunday morning at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Authorities have said she appeared to have died of natural causes. No sign of foul play or trauma was found.

The often bubbly, free-spirited actress appeared in films such as “Clueless,” “8 Mile,” “Don’t Say a Word” and “Girl, Interrupted.” She also lent her voice to animated works, including the movie “Happy Feet” — in which she also sang — and a regular voice role on the animated TV series “King of the Hill.”

Murphy was best-known for her work in a string of comedies earlier this decade, including playing lead roles in “Uptown Girls” alongside fellow Georgia native Dakota Fanning, and “Little Black Book” with Holly Hunter and Kathy Bates.

She is survived by her husband, British screenwriter Simon Monjack, who also spoke at the service.

The family may have a larger public memorial early next year, but nothing is confirmed yet, spokesman Alex Ben Block said.

If you thought Rajkumar Hirani’s 3 Idiots was a cover to cover adaptation of Chetan Bhagat’s bestseller Five Point Someone, Bollywood actor Sharman Joshi would disagree. Joshi, who stars in the film, says it has no resemblance to the book in terms of the story.

“3 Idiots is based on Chetan Bhagat’s Five Point Someone but it’s not the book that you want to see in the form of a film when you go out. There are only a few points from the book in the film. Otherwise it’s a totally different screenplay and story,” Sharman told IANS on phone from Mumbai.

“Five Point Someone was an extremely popular book and loved by people and so it is very important for people to know that it’s not the book they are going to go out and see. It (the movie) is very different from what the book was,” he added.

Sharman stressed on the differences between the book and the movie and said: “There are three guys who are studying in an engineering college and there is a love interest as it is based on Chetan Bhagat’s book and so he has been given the credit for that. But the story is completely different.”

Releasing Friday, 3 Idiots has been produced by Vidhu Vinod Chopra and stars Aamir Khan and R. Madhavan alongside Sharman. Kareena Kapoor and Boman Irani also play pivotal roles in the comic-drama.

Throwing light on his character, Sharman said: “My character’s name is Raju Rastogi. He is brilliant at what he does which is engineering. He comes from a very humble background as his father is a postman.

“Because he is doing well academically they start building hopes that he will pull them out of poverty and help them enjoy the pleasures of life. And it is because of this pressure that he is not able to live his life,” he added.

Noteworthy is the predominant ‘Idiot’ tag in the film despite it being about engineering students.

Sharman explained: “The way we are interpreting idiots is quite different from what the dictionary meaning of idiots is. Our interpretation of idiots is someone who follows one’s own heart and who probably goes against the norms because it is something he believes in. And ‘I Did It On my Terms’ is the full form of it.”

Sharman agreed that 3 Idiots also carries a predominant message like Chopra and Hirani’s earlier ventures — Munnabhai M.B.B.S and Lage Raho Munna Bhai.

“Sure, it has. It’s narrated in a lighter way and there are moments which are rather dramatic. There are things which can fundamentally change the way you think. I hope it goes across to the people and they appreciate it,” he said.

The actor was also ecstatic about having re-teamed with Aamir and Madhavan for the movie after Rang De Basanti.

“It (the experience) has been special again. We partied last on the sets of Rang De Basanti and continued it on the sets of 3 Idiots,” he said.

“We all get along very well and the bond is hardly worked upon? It just kind of flows and we’ve shared a lot of special moments. We had a great time working on the film.”

Sharman’s future projects include Toh Baat Pakki and Allah Ke Bande, both slated for release early next year.

He is also hoping for more offers after 3 Idiots.

“I have been reading about two to three scripts a week and I hope the number goes up to six to eight,” he said.

We have added this section some days ago but were not able to upload movies. We have now uploaded few more movies and the number will increase on daily basis from now on. You can also download the movies which you like. For more information on viewing the movies live, follow the below link:

Live Movies on My Weblog

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen shattered the Wednesday record, raking in $60.6 million on approximately 9,700 screens at 4,234 sites (including a record 169 IMAX venues) in its first day. The former Wednesday champ, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, had mustered $44.2 million in its 2007 debut.

Among all opening days, the Transformers sequel ranks second behind The Dark Knight, which boasted $67.2 million in its first day on over 9,000 screens at 4,366 sites. Adjusted for ticket price inflation, though, Revenge of the Fallen would slot in fourth place, behind Spider-Man 3 and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.

The previous Transformers movie holds the record for biggest Tuesday gross. It made $27.9 million in its Tuesday opening on around 7,600 screens at 4,011 sites (not including $8.8 million from Monday night previews), followed by $29.1 million on its first Wednesday, which was its single day peak. In two and a half days, it had generated $65.7 million, which the sequel has nearly matched in only one day. However, with such a massive start and lacking the Independence Day holiday boost of the first movie, it would be unrealistic to expect Revenge of the Fallen to come close to its massive Wednesday haul on Thursday and beyond.

Revenge of the Fallen’s first day included an estimated $16 million from its midnight opening at around 3,000 sites. Only The Dark Knight and Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith had bigger midnight debuts, pulling in $18.5 million and $16.5 million, respectively.

THE take on Kathryn Bigelow is that she is a great female director of muscular action movies, the kind with big guns, scenes, themes and camera movements as well as an occasional fist in the face, a knee to the groin. Sometimes, more simply, she’s called a great female director. But here’s a radical thought: She is, simply, a great filmmaker. Because while it is marginally interesting that she calls “action” and “cut” while in the possession of two X chromosomes, gender is the least remarkable thing about her kinetic filmmaking, which gets in your head even as it sends shock waves through your body.

Her latest is “The Hurt Locker,” a film about men and war. Set in Iraq in 2004 and shot just over the border in Jordan, it centers on a three-man American bomb squad that sifts through the sand day and night disabling explosives. It was first shown at the Venice Film Festival in September 2008 (it opens Friday), where it was greeted with rapturous praise and some misapprehension. Mostly, it seems, because its extraordinary filmmaking, which transmits the sickening addiction to war as well as its horrors in largely formal terms, doesn’t come wedded to a sufficiently obvious antiwar position. One British critic went so far as to say that while the film had “excellent acting, camerawork and editing, it could pass for propaganda.”

“The Hurt Locker” doesn’t traffic in the armchair militarism of Hollywood products like “Top Gun” and “Transformers,” but neither is it an antiwar screed. It’s diagnostic, not prescriptive: it takes an analytical if visceral look at how the experience of war can change a man, how it eats into his brain so badly he ends up hooked on it. And, like all seven of Ms. Bigelow’s previous feature films, this new one is also as informed by the radical aspirations of conceptual art as it is by the techniques of classical Hollywood cinema.

She might live and sometimes shoot within driving distance of the major studios that have distributed if not financed her films. But in many respects she remains an industry outsider.

“I’ve never made a studio film,” Ms. Bigelow gently reminded me during a leisurely conversation here not long ago. Although most of her movies have been released by studios, they have been bankrolled by independent companies, which nonetheless don’t necessarily grant the autonomy any artist seeks. The experience of making “The Hurt Locker” — the “purity” of it, as she puts it — marks her return to liberating conditions under which she thrives. She hasn’t had this kind of freedom since her 1987 breakthrough, “Near Dark,” an erotically charged vampire movie made on the cheap, or her 1995 science-fiction thriller “Strange Days,” which came with some heavy protection courtesy of one of its producers: her former husband, James Cameron.

It’s hard to imagine Ms. Bigelow letting anyone push her around. She’s unfailingly gracious — and tends to speak in the second person, preferring “you” over “I” — but there’s a ferocious undercurrent there too, as might be expected. She works to put you at ease, but even her looks inspire shock and awe. Because she was early for our interview and already tucked into a booth, I didn’t realize how tall she was until we both stood up, and I watched, from a rather lower vantage, her unfurl her slender six-foot frame. It was like watching a time lapse of a growing tree. Like a lot of tall women she describes herself as shy, but she has learned to take up space.

At first that space wasn’t on screen but on a canvas. An only child, she was born in 1951 and raised in a town, San Carlos, 25 miles south of San Francisco, where she first nurtured a lifelong love of art and horses. (When we meet again her arms are flecked with bruises after a perilous ride on her mare.) She was a student painter at the Art Institute of San Francisco and later the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program, where she studied with Vito Acconci and Susan Sontag. She joined a conceptual art group, appeared in the feminist movie “Born in Flames” and earned her master’s in the film division of the Columbia University School of the Arts, where she immersed herself in theories about signs and meaning and the cinematic spectacle.

“Film,” she says, “became the interchange where all these ideas were intersecting.”

As she moved between uptown and down, she also made her first film, “The Set-Up” (1978), a short in which two men (Gary Busey included) fight each other as the semioticians Sylvère Lotringer and Marshall Blonsky deconstruct the images in voice-over. Although she now plays down the film, it seems like a template for much of her later work, with its emphasis on men, masculinity, violence and power. A few years ago she elaborated on its themes: “The piece ends with Sylvère talking about the fact that in the 1960s you think of the enemy as outside yourself, in other words, a police officer, the government, the system, but that’s not really the case at all, fascism is very insidious, we reproduce it all the time.”

That enemy lurks in the anomie of the motorcycle biker (Willem Dafoe in his screen debut) who motors through her 1982 debut feature “The Loveless” (made with Monty Montgomery) and in the bloodstream of the young cowboy initiated into a gang of vampires in “Near Dark,” the western-horror hybrid that made her a cult favorite. It sneaks into the head of the undercover F.B.I. agent in “Point Break” (1991) who’s philosophically seduced by the koan-spouting leader of some bank-robbing surfers. And it slips into the rigid body of a devout 19th-century immigrant wife in “The Weight of Water” (2000), who, after sharing a chaste bed with another woman, responds to her awakened sexual desire with a murderous swing of an ax.

Much as she does in her far-out 1990 feminist freak-out “Blue Steel,” about a female cop (Jamie Lee Curtis) literally seduced by a male killer who fondles her gun with lethal results, Ms. Bigelow isn’t just playing with genre. She’s having her unruly way with gender, sometimes by inverting traditional masculine and feminine roles, as in “Strange Days,” a future shock love story that also explores voyeurism and the pleasures of violent spectacle. Shot in a Los Angeles still hurting from its 1992 civil unrest, it features Angela Bassett (whose bare, sculptured arms outmuscle those of Michelle Obama) rescuing a hapless white man (Ralph Fiennes) who, despite being the narrative’s center, never becomes its hero.

“Strange Days” originated with Mr. Cameron, who wrote the first draft before handing it over to her. With Jay Cocks, she finished the script and made the film her own. (She and Mr. Cameron divorced in 1991; she’s now in a relationship she prefers to keep private.) It was poorly released by its studio, which seemed unsure of how to sell it (kinky sex? millennial meltdown?), and it flopped. “The Weight of Water,” a trickily plotted drama that toggles between two bad marriages in separate time periods, and notably her only movie to touch on matrimonial life, followed and disappeared on impact. Two years later, in 2002, she returned to blockbuster form with “K-19: The Widowmaker,” an unnerving, very human thriller about the first Soviet nuclear submarine. It too died a quick box-office death.

She had to scale back for the next one. “I definitely wanted to have full creative control and final cut,” she says of “The Hurt Locker,” which was written by Mark Boal and based on his experience working as an embedded journalist in Iraq. She wanted up-and-coming actors who weren’t so famous that their characters couldn’t die, even if their names wouldn’t mean much in the ads. She also wanted to shoot in the Middle East. Her security detail talked her out of filming in Iraq, though she inched close to the border. Given her demands and the scant interest that American audiences have expressed in fiction films about the war, she looked outside the country for financing. The French company Voltage Pictures gave her money and control.

“It was a no-note experience,” she says, referring to the suggestions that movie executives like to issue — and enforce — “absolutely zero interference.” She laughs when I ask if she might become addicted to the freedom, much as the bomb tech played by Jeremy Renner in “The Hurt Locker” becomes hopped up on war. It’s a ludicrous comparison, granted. But moviemaking is littered with broken spirits, and there’s something improbable about the longevity of her career in the mainstream. Partly because, yes, she’s working in an sexist field where even female studio chiefs are loath to hire female directors, but also because of the stubborn persistence of her artistic vision and intellectualism. She’s still investigating signs and meaning, but now through genres she deconstructs and sometimes immolates.

It’s telling, then, that after she made “The Loveless” a postmodern motorcycle movie in which she stretched narrative to the limit, she started receiving scripts for high school comedies, which she quickly realized was considered a suitable subject for her gender. “It was an intersection of absolutely inappropriate sensibilities,” she said, though I would love to see what havoc she could wreak on that genre. She was living in New York in a condemned building without heat and electricity. A juvenile comedy might have paid the bills, but instead she accepted an offer from her friend, the artist John Baldessari, to teach at the California Institute of the Arts, just north of Los Angeles. Hollywood was the inevitable next step. Through the director Walter Hill, she landed a deal at a studio, but it led to nowhere.

It was at this point, she said, that she understood “if I had a prayer of shooting something that intrigued me, I was going to have to be the architect of my own fate.” She went off and made “Near Dark,” a vampire film steeped in the kind of hot, sticky, shocking violence that’s alternately exciting and appalling. It was the perfect vehicle for a director discovering that we go to movies for what they do to our bodies and not just the ideas they plant in our heads. She wants to take you on a mental journey: “To transport you to an event or a physicality or a location or an experience or an emotional odyssey that is purely experiential.” Her use of the word odyssey seems significant. I can’t imagine her sitting at home and weaving.

If anything, her refusal to make the types of movies most associated with women suggests that in American movies, at least, genre is destiny, to repurpose a familiar Freud maxim about gender. She’s steered clear of the industry ghetto to which female directors are usually consigned, bypassing the dreaded chick flick for stories and archetypes traditionally if reductively seen as the province of men. She still makes relationship movies, but the relationships evolve both through the chatter at which women are supposed to excel and the contact of bodies, often male, sometimes female, running, surfing, parachuting, living and dying out in the world. She learned from the masters — De Kooning, Peckinpah, Goya, Pasolini, Rembrandt and on and on — in order to become her own woman.

The number of male mentors and aesthetic influences seems instructive as does her seeming discomfort when I ask why she likes to make movies about men. It’s one of the few times when she searches for her words. She mentions Richard Serra, whom she’s known for years, and “Torqued Ellipses,” his curvilinear steel sculptures that weigh about 40 tons apiece and which she describes as “real statements of power.” Suddenly I’m reminded of the moment in “K-19” when the camera glides between two submarines sitting parallel on the surface of the water, a glorious image of heavy metal that is itself a statement of power. When she was painting, she says, she loved “big, gestural, visceral, raw, immediate pieces.” She starts to move her fingers, as if she were sewing.

“Nothing really struck me,” she says, of the art she first loved, “that was tight and precise and patient and careful and perhaps more introspective. Perhaps,” she laughs, “it’s just a sensibility defect.”

Watch the exclusive trailer of Terminator: Salvation… 4th part of the legendary sequel…

It seems interesting! The new summer expected blockbuster to be Transformers again. I have not been impressed by the movie releases this year. Apart from one or two major strengths at box office the movies haven’t been exciting at all. This one however, seems something good at last. Check the exclusive trailer.

I am adding a movie section in the blog. The section will provide the download links of various movies. I also thought to provide the streaming of the movies as well but it will be done in near future. However, I will try to add up one streaming movie every week. For the start I am adding movies of my favorite star. With time I will try to add up other movies as well. If you want a movie, post a request.