REELNEWS: Unlikely as it might seem that a high-profile French director could shoot an entire film in Paris without anyone noticing, the new issue of the French movie monthly, Premiere, reports that Luc Besson shot a movie "in total secrecy" in the French capital over seven weeks this summer.
Jamel Debouzze, whose credits include Amélie and Spike Lee's She Hate Me, plays the leading role in the movie, which is titled Angel A and is reportedly a romantic comedy in black-and-white.
Beyond that, Premiere could only report that some scenes were shot at the Eiffel Tower and the US embassy in Paris, and that the movie might be in cinemas by December. Besson, who has been very busy producing movies by other directors, hasn't directed a film since The Messenger, his 1999 movie about Joan of Arc. His next project as director is the animated feature Arthur and the Minimoys, based on Besson's own series of children's books. The voice cast will include David Bowie, Madonna, Snoop Dogg and Freddie Highmore.
Mobile home of short films
What will they think of next? Shane Meadows, the director of Dead Man's Shoes, has made a short film using only his mobile phone. Meadows made the movie on a Nokia N90 phone using VHS resolution. The film, which is very short indeed at 15 seconds, is titled The Stairwell and is showing in the Nokia Shorts programme at the Raindance festival in London next month. Nokia has introduced a category for films shot on mobile phones to its annual competition for 15-second shorts. See www.nokiashorts.co.uk for more details.
Canada sweet on Jellybaby
Meanwhile, Ronan and Rob Burke's Jellybaby, which came second in the Best New Irish Short category at the Galway Film Fleadh last month, is the only Irish short selected to compete in the international category at the Montreal World Film Festival, which opens tonight.
IFI begins battle of anoraks
The IFI in Dublin starts a monthly series of film quiz nights on September 6th. Each quiz will host a maximum of 25 teams of four. The entry fee is €40 per team and there will be a prize of €400 for the winning team and runner-up prizes of €160 and €80. Questions, we are told, will be of "a reasonably high standard". Aspiring champions may register at www.irishfilm.ie, where some sample questions are on view, such as: "Who is the tallest person to win an Oscar in an acting category?" Helpful Reel News clue: It's not Al Pacino or Dustin Hoffman.
Edinburgh robbed again
For the third year in a row, the Edinburgh Film Festival has been unlucky enough to lose one of the most interesting movies on its published programme. Mystic River was cancelled in August 2003, apparently because it was showing at the New York Film Festival a month later (even though it had been seen at Cannes in May that year). Last year, 2046 had to be replaced at short notice when it wasn't finished in time for Edinburgh's closing night, because Wong Kar-wai had been re-editing it since it was shown at Cannes.
This year's festival lost Lodge Kerrigan's new US drama, Keane, starring Damian Lewis, because it is to screen at the Deauville Film Festival next month, even though it was shown last May at Cannes, and was also shown at the Toronto festival back in September 2004.
As a replacement, Edinburgh secured the world premiere of Lasse Hallström's long-delayed US rural drama, An Unfinished Life, starring Robert Redford, Jennifer Lopez, Morgan Freeman and (by coincidence) Damian Lewis.
Reviewing the film at Edinburgh, Variety began: "A film is in some kind of trouble when, despite the presence of an A-list cast and a well-regarded director, the best thing in it is a partly digitised bear . . . J-Lo struggles to regain audience sympathy by playing a victim of abuse with perfectly coiffed hair and a decorative bruise in the first reel that colour co-ordinates with her wardrobe."
