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At this point, we can basically assume that every person who has ever been in a Marvel movie will appear in Avengers: Infinity War, as long as they aren’t dead in the franchise—or Edward Norton. With that it mind, it looks like Tessa Thompson’s Valkyrie will be showing up. How do we know? Well, per Screencrush, Thompson posed for a selfie in Scotland, where the movie is filming.

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Chris Hemsworth and Mark Ruffalo have also been snapped traipsing around Edinburgh, and we’re betting they’re not just there to see the Sir Walter Scott monument. Indeed, the whole Thor: Ragnarok crew appears to have arrived. Whether or not it has a Valkyrie, Avengers: Infinity War is due out May 4, 2018.

The King Baggot Tribute will take place Wednesday September 28th at 7pm at Lee Auditorium inside the Missouri History Museum (Lindell and DeBaliviere in Forest Park, St. Louis, Missouri). The 1913 silent film Ivanhoe will be accompanied by The Rats and People Motion Picture Orchestra and there will be a 40-minute illustrated lecture on the life and career of King Baggot by We Are Movie Geeks’ Tom Stockman.

By 1913, the American film industry had been around for over twenty years. In 1909 Carl Laemmle, a renegade and maverick movie mogul and film distributor, founded his own company in New York — the Yankee Film Company. Laemmle also started producing movies in Fort Lee, New Jersey that same year. His first company was called the Independent Motion Pictures (Imp) Company, aka Imp Studios. Soon however, Laemmle would be making plans to journey West where he would expand his film production and in 1912 co-founded the Universal Film Manufacturing Co.

The King Baggot Tribute will take place Wednesday September 28th at 7pm at Lee Auditorium inside the Missouri History Museum (Lindell and DeBaliviere in Forest Park, St. Louis, Missouri). The 1913 silent film Ivanhoe will be accompanied by The Rats and People Motion Picture Orchestra and there will be a 40-minute illustrated lecture on the life and career of King Baggot by Tom Stockman of We Are Movie Geeks.com. This event is Free!

The most popular film actor in the world 100 years ago was a St. Louis native. Literally the first “movie star”, King Baggot was the first actor to have his name above the title and his stardom marked the first time that audiences went to see a movie because a certain actor was in that film. Born in St. Louis in 1879 and raised in a house on Union Boulevard, King Baggot attended CBC High School and at one time worked for the St. Louis Browns in ticket sales. Baggot was tall and handsome, a blue-eyed Irish boy with a distinctive white streak through his dark hair and the subject of much adoring fan mail. It’s hard to overestimate just how popular King Baggot was in his prime. He was heralded as “King of the Movies,” “The Most Photographed Man in the World” and “The Man Whose Face Is As Familiar As The Man In The Moon.” After his acting career faded, King Baggot became a successful director for Universal Studios. Most of his films are long lost and despite his one-time fame, he is now somewhat forgotten, even here in his home town.

The Missouri History Museum will shine a spotlight on the star with The King Baggot Tribute, a celebration of his career. The event will be held on Wednesday, September 28th beginning at 7pm at Lee Auditorium inside the Missouri History Museum (Lindell and DeBaliviere in Forest Park, St. Louis, Missouri). This is a Free event!

The program will consist a rare screening of the 1913 epic Ivanhoe, which runs 49 minutes. We screened Ivanhoe at the King Baggot Tribute that was part of The St. Louis International Film Festival in November of 2014. That time, we rented a 35mm print of the film from the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It had Dutch intertitles, so I had to translate them, from the podium, while the rats and People Motion Picture Orchestra accompanied the film. This time, we have transferred the film to digital format and have burned English intertitles over the Dutch ones.

Based Sir Walter Scott’s 1820 novel of romance and medievalism. Ivanhoe was filmed at Chepstow Castle in Wales, on top of cliffs overlooking the River Wye and was the first example of an American studio sending a cast and crew to Europe to film at a remote location. St. Louis native King Baggot plays Ivanhoe, the Saxon Knight who returns from the Holy Lands to England. There he teams up with Robin Hood to rescue his father Sir Cedric, who has been captured by the evil Prince John. Leah Baird plays Rebecca, the Jewish maiden who loves Ivanhoe and the film’s director Herbert Brenon co-stars as Isaac of York. The rest of the large cast was made up of local Welsh actors. The lively and ambitious Ivanhoe, filled with pageantry, lavish sets, costumed horses, epic battle scenes and swordfights was a box-office smash in 1913 and made King Baggot an international star.

Don’t miss the The King Baggot Tribute September 28th!

A Facebook Invite for the event can be found Here

https://www.facebook.com/events/1764545990458351/

The post The King Baggot Tribute Returns to St. Louis – The Missouri History Museum Sept. 28th appeared first on We Are Movie Geeks.

Recently Paramount and Hasbro announced that they’d be creating a “shared cinematic universe” for several of their toy properties, including G.I. Joe, Micronauts, M.A.S.K., Rom and Visionaries. On one hand this is a reaction to the disappointing G.I. Joe movie franchise, but on the other hand it’s another example of the business world learning lessons from Geek Culture. Call it a shared universe, team-up or a crossover – passionate superfans know and understand the power of this narrative tool.

In the early days of comics, two separate (but related) comic companies, All-American Comics and National Comics joined forces in a sort of Nerd-Glasnost to combine several of their second tier characters into one big adventure. The publication All-Star Comics showcased a club of super-heroes called the Justice Society of America. The concept took hold and captured the imaginations of fans with a tenacity that resonates to this day.

Following on from "Filth," author Irvine Welsh and director Jon S. Baird are re-teaming for a new film adaptation of Walter Scott's classic adventure tale " Ivanhoe" for Egoli Tossell Film and Thunder Road Pictures. Basil Iwanyk, Stuart Pollok, Christian Angermayer and Jens Meurer are producing.

The story follows a noble knight who returns to England after the third Crusades. He fights to restore the good King Richard, believed to be held captive in an Austrian prison, and depose Richard's wicked brother John.

Welsh and Baird reportedly have a new take on the source material, one which explores the Ptsd the knights are suffering following their battles and Saladin's successful recapturing of Jerusalem.

Source: Deadline...

Irvine Welsh is best known for his stories of modern, urban depravity, and he’s not the first person I’d think of for a medieval adventure with Knights, horseback adventure, shiny silver armour and an abundance of classic heroism. Nonetheless, that’s where he’ll be setting his compass next, teaming up with Jon S. Baird for a film of Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe.

Baird previously directed a film of Welsh’s Filth, and the result is probably the best, all-round adaptation of the novelist’s work. They can walk in step these two – apparently even when the beat of the walk is as unexpected as this.

In Deadline’s story on the project, this is being called a “bold adaptation,” which seems to imply harder-edged than previous film versions of the story. But you can’t take the story of Ivanhoe and rough it up too much without...

Exclusive- Iconoclastic Scottish writer Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting) and director Jon S. Baird (Filth) are re-teaming for a bold new adaptation of the classic Walter Scott adventure tale Ivanhoe. Jens Meurer is producing through his Berlin-based Egoli Tossell Film banner. Meurer previously worked with Welsh and Baird on Filth, which is how this latest collaboration first sparked. Basil Iwanyk and his company Thunder Road Pictures are also on-board as producers, along…...

“Gurth the Swineherd , do you not recognize me?”

“Ivanhoe ! My young master”

It’s been said that 75% of all silent films are lost – scrapped for their silver nitrate content, destroyed by fire, left to decompose, or simply abandoned by an industry so lacking in foresight that it neither knew nor cared about their own products value to the future. In the case of the silent films that St. Louis native King Baggot starred in, that number is closer to 99%. Baggot likely appeared in over 300 films during his most active period 1909 to 1916, mostly one-reelers (1000 feet of film running around 16 minutes). When Cinema St. Louis and I teamed up to plan the King Baggot Tribute night coming up November 14th, we knew we wanted to show one film featuring one of his performances and another that he directed. We chose to represent his directing career with the 1925 western Tumbleweeds starring William S. Hart.

The most popular film actor in the world 100 years ago was a St. Louis native. Literally the first “movie star”, King Baggot was the first actor to have his name above the title and his stardom marked the first time that audiences went to see a movie because a certain actor was in that film. Born in St. Louis in 1879 and raised in a house on Union Boulevard, King Baggot attended CBC High School and at one time worked for the St. Louis Browns in ticket sales. Baggot was tall and handsome, a blue-eyed Irish boy with a distinctive white streak through his dark hair and the subject of much adoring fan mail. It’s hard to overestimate just how popular King Baggot was in his prime. He was heralded as “King of the Movies,” “The Most Photographed Man in the World” and “The Man Whose Face Is As Familiar...

Basil Iwanyk of Thunder Road Pictures has boarded the European action/adventure project Ivanhoe and will co-produce the $34 million (€25 million) feature based on Sir Walter Scott‘s medieval-set classic. Iwanyk's credits with Thunder Road include Ben Affleck's The Town, Wrath of the Titans starring Liam Neeson and Sam Worthington and the upcoming Gods of Egypt from director Alex Proyas (I, Robot). He also has an executive producer credit on all three features in the Expendables franchise, including the upcoming Expendables 3. Iwanyk joins lead producers Film House Germany and Egoli Tossell on the feature, which K-Pax director

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By 1913, the American film industry had been around for over twenty years. In 1909 Carl Laemmle, a renegade and maverick movie mogul and film distributor, founded his own company in New York — the Yankee Film Company. Laemmle also started producing movies in Fort Lee, New Jersey that same year. His first company was called the Independent Motion Pictures (Imp) Company, aka Imp Studios. Soon however, Laemmle would be making plans to journey West where he would expand his film production and in 1912 co-founded the Universal Film Manufacturing Co., or Universal Film Company - the precursor to Universal Pictures in Hollywood. The studio had its sights set on bigger and better things than the one and two-reel shorts that Hollywood had been grinding out. European studios were producing big, ambitious feature productions and Universal felt the need to compete.

Sir Walter Scott’s classic novel Ivanhoe was first published in 1820. The story...

Reports came in last evening that another Hollywood legend has passed. Joan Fontaine was born in October 1917 as Joan de Beauvoir de Havilland, the younger sister of Olivia de Havilland, a legendary actress in her own right who died only a few years prior is still alive and kicking.*With a film career that spanned the 1930s to the 1960s, she'll best be remembered for a pair of extraordinary performances she gave under the direction of Alfred Hitchock. 1940's Rebecca brought her first Oscar nomination, and she would win the year later for her iconic turn in Suspicion. In 1952 she appeared in the epic Ivanhoe, cast beside Robert Taylor and Elizabeth Taylor in the retelling of the Walter Scott tale. Her last credited appearance...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

Theatre on film is so often dry and reverential. Leave it to Rushmore's Max Fischer to bring nuns, the Viet Cong and bucketloads of excitement to the stage

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First, a little personal history. I first took to the boards as a shepherd in a primary school nativity play where, aged six, I staggered around gaping upwards at a non-existent star with a teatowel on my head; my dad, in his own words, "laughed so much I nearly fell off the bench". I was too shy a schoolkid to be much use whenever the yearly show came round: mumbling a single line, or walking awkwardly across the stage for a brief cameo appearance. One year the drama teachers got a little ambitious, and put on a play about the Crimean war; the exact title escapes me,...

Note: Do Not read on if you have not yet seen Season 3, Episode 9 of HBO's "Game of Thrones," titled "The Rains of Castamere."

You're probably still reeling from the bloody "Red Wedding" that closed last Sunday's episode of "Game of Thrones," which saw the deaths of Catelyn Stark (Michelle Fairley), her son Robb (Richard Madden), and Robb's wife and unborn child in spectacularly gory fashion. The Starks -- and all of their unsuspecting soliders outside -- were murdered while the family's guard was down during a celebration of the nuptials between Edmure Tully and Roslin Frey.

But if you're thinking that author George R. R. Martin is a twisted individual for coming up with such a bloodthirsty concept, not so fast -- Martin admitted that his idea for the Red Wedding was inspired by two events from Scottish history.

"One was a case called The Black Dinner. The king of...

A world of cruelty, where men are cold-blooded and women cold-hearted … The BFI begins a Roman Polanski retrospective – with extended runs of Repulsion and Chinatown – that showcases the director's fascinating pathology

Any hopes that the BFI's forthcoming retrospective – its second in less than a decade – will turn attention away from the glum key terms of Roman Polanski's life (the Kraków ghetto, Manson, statutory rape) back to the riches of his work are based on false reasoning and certain to be dashed. To watch Polanski's films is to be reminded of what produced their dazed brutality, those early experiences of the oppression of the weak that stole his innocence and distorted his sense of things. If ever there was a body of work on intimate terms with cruelty and domination, and steeped in a vision of men as cold-blooded and women as cold-hearted, this is it.

When, in Polanski's first film,...

Sam Riley has reportedly signed on to star in an upcoming adaptation of the Sir Walter Scott novel Ivanhoe. According to Screen Daily, Riley will play the title character in the movie, following the adventures of Wilfred Ivanhoe in 12th century England. Ian Softley, director of K-Pax and Inkheart, is set to helm the project. He has reportedly opted to shoot the movie in 65mm, in a bid to (more)...

While I do think it’s really coming, the “breakout” phase of Sam Riley‘s career has taken a little while to actually commence — a great performance notwithstanding, I’m afraid biopics of Ian Curtis just don’t have the widest appeal — though, for his own good, the right people are taking attention. 2012 alone will bring Walter Salles’ On the Road and (most likely) Neil Jordan‘s Byzantium; plus, in a couple of years, he’ll be seen alongside Angelina Jolie in Maleficent. All are bound to reach a wider audience than Control, Brighton Rock, or that silly 13 Tzameti remake.

Now, ScreenDaily tell us Riley is signed and ready to lead an adaptation of Sir Walter Scott‘s classic novel, Ivanhoe, for which he’ll collaborate with director Iain Softley (K-Pax, Backbeat). Unless they’ve decided to deviate from the esteemed source novel — which, of course, the “esteemed” aspect has...

Sir Walter Scott’s classic medieval novel Ivanhoe has been adapted for both the big and small screens and the stage several times through the years, most famously in 1952 by Richard Thorpe, whose film nabbed three Oscar nominations. Now Iain Softley is set to make a new version, with Sam Riley on board for the title role.Ivanhoe takes place in 1194, shortly after the failure of the Third Crusade, with King Richard a prisoner and Prince John on the throne. Wilfred of Ivanhoe is out of favour with his father, Cedric of Rotherwood, for his allegiance to Richard and his love for Cedric’s ward, Lady Rowena. Out on his own, he becomes allied with Robin Of Locksley – Aka Robin Hood – and must fight to restore himself through a series of jousts and dangerous missions.Sylvia writer John Brownlow scripted the latest adaptation, which Softley intends to shoot in 65mm for a truly epic scope.

Ever since transitioning from a music career with indie band 10,000 Things, Brit actor Sam Riley has carved out a fairly interesting CV which originated with an outstanding debut in Anton Corbijn's acclaimed Ian Curtis biography "Control" that lead to a run of flops that included sci-fier "Franklyn," action remake "13" and literary adaptation "Brighton Rock." He appears to be heading back in the right direction this year, though, starring as Sal Paradise in Walter Salles' long developing "On The Road" as well as working with Neil Jordan on mother-daughter vampire tale "Byzantium" and starring opposite Angelina Jolie in Disney's "Maleficent." Riley has now also lined up an upcoming teaming with Iain Softley ("Backbeat," "K-pax") for an adaptation of Sir Walter Scott's classic historical novel "Ivanhoe," in which he'll play the titular character....

Robocop

Jackie Earle Haley is signing on while Jay Baruchel is circling Jose Padilha's "Robocop" remake at MGM.

Haley will play Maddox, the man who dispenses the military training to Robocop (Joel Kinnaman). Gary Oldman, Hugh Laurie, Samuel L. Jackson and Abbie Cornish are also set. [Source: Deadline]

Ivanhoe

British actor Sam Riley ("Control," "On the Road") will play the title role in Iain Softley’s adaptation of Sir Walter Scott’s epic "Ivanhoe" at Morena Films and Egoli Tossell Film New GmbH. The project is being shot on 65mm with a script adapted by John Brownlow and James Jacks.

Set in 1194 after the failure of the Third Crusade, the action follows Wilfred of Ivanhoe, a Saxon who is out of favor with his father for his allegiance to the Norman king Richard I of England (aka Richard the Lionheart). What follows is a complicated story with many intersecting character arcs and subplots.

Twickenham Film Studios' sad end, gunfight at a vacant lot near the Ok Corral and Joely Richardson's family semaphore habit

✒ Round where we live we're very sad indeed about the likely closure of Twickenham Film Studios. Many great British and foreign films have been made there, including the Beatles movies, Alfie, The Italian Job, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Fish Called Wanda, Blade Runner and more recently My Week with Marilyn and War Horse. The studio, which occasionally brought a faint dusting of star glamour to our suburb, has been on the site for 99 years. Now there's a petition to save it, signed by among others Steven Spielberg, Colin Firth and John Landis.

There is some puzzlement about why it has gone into administration. Someone who works there told me this week that it had been badly managed for years. Now comes the horrible news that Taylor...

Joan Fontaine in Alfred Hitchcock's Suspicion Joan Fontaine, who turned 94 last October 22, shines on Turner Classic Movies' tonight. TCM will be showing five Fontaine movies: Jane Eyre (1944), The Constant Nymph (1943), Born to Be Bad (1950), Suspicion (1941), and Ivanhoe (1952). I've yet to check out The Constant Nymph, which had been unavailable for decades until TCM presented it a few months ago. In the film, 26-year-old Fontaine plays a 14-year-old infatuated with a composer (Charles Boyer) married to her older cousin (Alexis Smith). Edmund Goulding directed. Enough members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences must have found Fontaine quite believable as a lovestruck teen, for The Constant Nymph earned her her third (and final) Best Actress nomination. Jane Eyre has been made and remade about a zillion times in the last century or so. Fontaine's version, directed by Robert Stevenson (later of Mary Poppins fame) and co-starring Orson Welles as Rochester,...

London, Jan 30: Sir Walter Scott's 'Ivanhoe', which was considered too ponderous and wordy for the tastes of modern readers, has been controversially rewritten to make it easier to read.

The works of the early 19th century author recently fell out of favour even though his epic novels used to be required reading for generations of schoolchildren.

Now, a Scottish academic is hoping to revive the novelist's reputation by abridging Ivanhoe, one of his best known books, to make the work less "tedious" for a public raised on Jk Rowling and Dan Brown.

David Purdie has spent 18 months cutting the classic, set in 12th century England,.

Hello, Zoners!

I’m on vacation—but I would never miss my Fantasy League post! Fortunately, because I’m relaxing at my sister’s home, I have access to everything I need to write.

Last week brought us Stephen tramping through the Letterman set, discoursing on Donald Trump’s “wisdom,” and coining the phrase “journalistic grintegrity.” Of course, nothing is likely to equal the incredible news that dominated headlines and provided plenty of fodder for both Jon and Stephen. Nonetheless, the week ahead looks like fun to me, as Stephen welcomes a socially conscious rapper, an Oscar-winning actor, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and an expert on man’s best friend.

By the way, even though Stephen’s our man, I would like to give a big thumbs-up to Jon, who I think was truly at the top of his game last week. Now…let’s go!

Monday, 5/9: Lupe Fiasco

After four years,...

Were you forced to read the noble tale of Ivanhoe in high school, too? Because it just so happens that the rights to Sir Walter Scott’s novel are in the public domain in the U.K., and Fairbanks Productions is fast-tracking an 80 million dollar version of the classic story.

Read more on Big budget version of Ivanhoe on the fast track…...

Fairbanks Productions has shelved plans to shoot a £75 million new take on "The Scarlet Pimpernel" in favour of a £50 million new adaptation of Sir Walter Scott's classic 1820 adventure "Ivanhoe" says The Hollywood Reporter.

With a change in European Union copyright laws extending them from 50 to 70 years, film adaptation rights to Baroness Orczy's classic Scarlet Pimpernel are no longer in the public domain in the U.K., which means the company's plans have been put on hold for around five years until the rights become freely available again.

Brit actor Neil Jackson ("Upstairs, Downstairs," "Quantum of Solace") is producing and currently writing a draft of "Ivanhoe", which is in the public domain, and the family adventure-focused Fairbanks Productions is fast tracking it to shoot at Twickenham Studios in London late next year.

Set in 1194 after the failure of the Third Crusade, the story follows Wilfred of Ivanhoe, a Saxon...

The film legend is about to turn 80

Age: 80 tomorrow.

Appearance: Hewn from the living rock.

Ah, happy birthday, Sean Connery. The ultimate man's man. The original James Bond and best. Except he very nearly wasn't, according to a biography due out next month.

What do you mean? Was he actually born a girl and subjected to horrifying experimental surgery and hormone treatment in an underground Gorbals laboratory? A Gorbalatory? No, fool. I mean he very nearly wasn't James Bond at all. And it would have been a laboratory hidden under the Sir Walter Scott monument – Connery's an Edinburgian. Ian Fleming apparently took against the man he referred to as "that fucking truck driver" and producers were also looking at Patrick McGoohan and Roger Moore for the role.

You mean, somewhere there's a parallel universe in which Moore is the first Bond? I do not want to go to there. So...

Director Ridley Scott's Robin Hood is billed as 'the untold story of how the man became a legend', replacing romanticised notions with a gritty dose of historical realism.

In the big-screen 'reimagining', Russell Crowe plays Robin Longstride, an archer in the Third Crusade who returns home and takes the identity of dying knight Sir Robert Loxley. In the tale, he clashes with King John and his tax-collecting, warmongering henchman Sir Godfrey.

Since Douglas Fairbanks played the legendary outlaw in the 1922 silent film Robin Hood, the character has been endlessly modified, with screen portrayals from altruistic outlaw to defecting nobleman, to mischievous forest-dwelling gang leader.

So is Russell Crowe's depiction really any more the true story than previous incarnations?

Not according to author David Crook, who is writing a book Outlaw And Evil-doer Of Our Land: The Original Robin Hood.

Dr Crook (pictured), a retired former archivist at the...

Deborah Kerr, Robert Taylor in Mervyn LeRoy’s Quo Vadis Robert Taylor on TCM: Quo Vadis, Ivanhoe, the Atomic Bomb Schedule and synopses from the TCM website: 3:00pm [Comedy] Personal Property (1937) The bailiff charged with disposing of a financially strapped widow’s estate pretends to be her butler. Cast: Jean Harlow, Robert Taylor, Reginald Owen, Una O’Connor Dir: W. S. Van Dyke II Bw-84 mins. 5:00pm [Epic] Quo Vadis (1951) A Roman commander falls for a Christian slave girl as Nero intensifies persecution of the new religion. Cast: Robert Taylor, Deborah Kerr, Leo Genn, Peter Ustinov Dir: Mervyn LeRoy C-175 mins. 8:00pm [Epic] Ivanhoe (1952) Sir Walter Scott’s classic tale of the noble knight torn between his fair lady and a beautiful Jew. Cast: Robert Taylor, Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Fontaine, George Sanders [...]...

Ridley Scott claims his new film starring Russell Crowe will be the most historically accurate ever. But what do we actually know about the real outlaw and his merrie men?

In pictures: men in tights from Errol Flynn to Russell Crowe

'Robin Hood was almost certainly a pedestrian," David Crook, the retired former assistant keeper of public records at the Public Record Office, tells me over tea one afternoon at his home in Grantham. Robin, in other words, had no horse. This is significant, because, as I settle down to try to unravel the eight centuries of myth and legend that have accreted around the outlaw, I am looking at a still from the new Ridley Scott movie, which will open the Cannes film festival on 12 May. Russell Crowe – looking the spit of Maximus, the hero of Gladiator, with cropped hair, bloodied cheek and an expression of furious determination – is astride a horse.

Berlin -- Walking around the European Film Market you hear just about as many accents as there are sellers. But step inside the screening rooms and it's hard to mistake a new lingua franca emerging from the foreign films on display: English.

Whether it's double Oscar nominee "The Last Station," produced by Berlin's Egoli Tossell Film; "Brighton Rock," StudioCanal's adaptation of the Graham Greene novel starring Helen Mirren and Sam Riley; or Joel Schumacher's "Twelve," co-produced by Gaumont, the trend is clear. European production companies from Madrid to Munich are moving into English-language features in a big way.

Some of the hottest new projects at the Efm this year are English-language features financed out of Europe.

Take "Ivanhoe," a new big-screen adaptation of Walter Scott's classic medieval tale that Egoli Tossell and Spain's Morena Films are producing. The Euro shingled picked up the project, which has Iain Softley attached to direct,...

Michael Caton-Jones's 1995 yarn trod a Braveheart-like path in its attempt to ennoble another Scottish folk hero. Unfortunately, where context was needed, they inserted sudsy romance

Director: Michael Caton-Jones

Entertainment grade: D+

History grade: D

Robert Roy MacGregor, known as Rob Roy, was an outlaw and a folk hero at the time of the Jacobite risings.

International relations

Hairy, sturdy-thighed Highlanders swarm manfully through the glens, hunting cattle thieves. Meanwhile, the English-accented Scottish aristocracy – the Duke of Montrose (John Hurt) and his fictional sidekick Archibald Cunningham (Tim Roth) – mince around in lace and curly wigs. "It is years, your grace, since I buggered a boy," simpers Cunningham. "I thought him a girl at the moment of entry." So far, so Braveheart: the baddies are English and queer, the goodies are Scottish and ruggedly hetero. And by "Scottish", the film means "American". There's even an irrelevant subplot about one...

Oh what a tangled web we weave, when we put our lives on reality TV. Apologies to Sir Walter Scott, but a new version of his old adage seems appropriate in the wake of the scandal surrounding Jon and Kate Gosselin, the stars of Jon & Kate Plus 8. The show, which chronicles the lives of the Pennsylvania couple and their brood (8-year-old twins, 5-year-old sextuplets) started its fifth season Tlc Monday night, following a flood of speculation about whether the Gosselins' marriage is on the rocks and who's cheating on whom. (Various reports connect him with a teacher; her with their family's bodyguard. Other reports claim Kate made Jon sign a marriage contract that allows him to date as long as he shows up for tapings of their show.) While the premiere's presumed focus was the sextuplets' fifth birthday party, it...

When referring to a movie that nabbed a second life, typically home video is the savior. There are countless movies that didn’t fare well in their original theatrical runs but have earned a so-called second life thanks to profitable video sales and rentals that make them much stronger than they ever were when they first arrived. Examples of this trend vary greatly, whether you’re referring to genre, era, proliferation (or magnitude of the “second life”) and, of course, how deserving it is. Most that get a boost long after its premiere got where it is now slowly, spread wide by word of mouth and critical re-analysis. Most of them were not well received during the initial run, and many are re-evaluated, and mistakes are mended. Among them: 2001, The Princess Bride, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Big Lebowski, Fight Club, Office Space and Dazed and Confused. These...

Well! Here I had my question already written to submit to Parade Magazine -- "I love Naomi Watts. Can you tell me what's coming up next for this talented actress?" -- and now I've stumbled across the answer myself. Thanks anyway, Walter Scott's Personality Parade!

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Watts is in negotiations to star in My Name Is Jody Williams, a biopic about the anti-land-mine activist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997. Williams, a Vermont-born schoolteacher and aid worker, shared the Nobel with the group she worked for, the International Campaign to Ban Land Mines, whose efforts paid off in 1997 with the Ottawa Treaty, which has been signed by more than 150 countries pledging not to make or use anti-personnel land mines.

Williams is apparently a feisty character, famous for calling Pres. Bill Clinton a "weenie" for not signing the treaty (and surely not the only time...

Filed under: Celebrities and Controversy

Long-time readers of Cinematical, or those thoroughly entranced in the world of Sean Connery, might know that before the man hit it big, he made a living with odd jobs, from junior horseman to milkman for one pound a week. If you're curious about all that hard work and pre-Bond life, CNN reports that Mr. Connery has written an autobiography called Being a Scot, which he's launching today in Scotland.

However, you won't get a lot of backstage secrets and celebrity gossip, which I must say is a welcome change in the world of celebrity memoirs and gossip writing. Connery focuses on his beginnings in a two-room home in industrial Edinburgh to his time as a milkman, and discusses "many aspects of Scottish culture and life, including sport, architecture, and of course the gothic tendency in Scots literature" featuring the likes of Robbie Burns and Sir Walter Scott.