BIRTHDAY
September 28, 1968
Shoreham, England

RECENT CREDITS
Dream House (FILM) Feb. 18, 2011
Fair Game (FILM) Nov. 5, 2010
You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (FILM) Sep. 22, 2010
Mother and Child (FILM) May. 7, 2010
The International (FILM) Feb. 13, 2009

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My Man Godfrey (1936) is one of the 1930's most delightful, classic screwball comedies. It was directed by Gregory La Cava for Universal and is now considered the definitive screwball comedy, with its social commentary on life during the 30s. The film, filled with marvelous character actors (Alice Brady, Eugene Pallette, Gail Patrick, and Mischa Auer), resonated with Depression era audiences for its statements on morality and class. [On a side note, the real-life divorced couple of Powell and Lombard were married previous to the film's making, from 1931 to 1933.] The screenplay by Morrie Ryskind (a co-screenwriter for the Marx Bros.' A Night at the Opera (1935)) and Eric Hatch was based on Hatch's own short novel 1011 Fifth Avenue.

The film displays the mad-cap personalities of a wildly rich, eccentric family. One of its members - a flighty socialite/heiress, finds a down-and-out "forgotten man" tramp in a hobo colony during a scavenger hunt, and hires him as the family's butler. The bum teaches them the realities of life, ultimately regenerates their confused, scattered lives, and reverses the nobility of rich and poor.

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Short who-dun-its in the 1930s and 40s featured the B-movie, Canton-born, Honolulu-based Oriental sleuth Charlie Chan, derived from Earl Derr Biggers' works, and based on real-life Hawaiian cop Chang Apana (very unlike the movie version). The round-faced, meticulous sleuth was one of the screen's most prolific detectives, with 46 Chan films and one serial from 1926 to 1949. [Charlie Chan was never played on the screen by a Chinese actor.]

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Although technically a series of 28 films stretching over a period of twelve years (1938-1950), the series of Blondie films somewhat qualifies as a feature-film serial. Columbia Pictures produced this popular and wholesome series of low-budget situation comedies with a blonde character named Blondie Bumstead, after acquiring the film rights to the story.

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By the time Republic Studios had created all of its Dick Tracy serials--60 episodes altogether, after its initial 15-episode entry Dick Tracy (1937) with lead actor Ralph Byrd as the square-jawed shamus, it had become the longest-running series in serials history (the other films in the series were the 15-chapter Dick Tracy Returns (1938), 15 cliff-hanging episodes in Dick Tracy's G-Men (1939), and 15 crime-fighting episodes in Dick Tracy vs. Crime, Inc. (1941)).

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Supernatural Films: These are films that have themes including gods or goddesses, ghosts, apparitions, spirits, miracles, and other similar ideas or depictions of extraordinary phenomena. They may be combined with other genres, including comedy, sci-fi, fantasy or horror. Interestingly however, until recently, supernatural films were usually presented in a comical, whimsical, or a romantic fashion, and were not designed to frighten the audience. There are also many hybrids that have combinations of fear, fantasy, horror, romance and comedy.

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Director D.W. Griffith's expensive, most ambitious silent film masterpiece Intolerance (1916) is one of the milestones and landmarks in cinematic history. Many reviewers and film historians consider it the greatest film of the silent era. The mammoth film was also subtitled: "A Sun-Play of the Ages" and "Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages." Griffith was inspired to make this film after watching the revolutionary Italian silent film epic Cabiria (1914) by director Giovanni Pastrone.

After the widespread controversy surrounding his racist masterpiece The Birth of a Nation (1915), Griffith attempted to defensively answer his critics with this work. He took a smaller feature film that he was working on about the contemporary, Progressive Era struggle between capital and labor [titled "The Mother and the Law"] and the theme of social injustice and combined it with three new stories to create a more spectacular, monumental, dramatic epic. All of the stories, spanning several hundreds of years and cultures, are held together by themes of intolerance, man's inhumanity to man, hypocrisy, bigotry, religious hatred, persecution, discrimination and injustice achieved in all eras by entrenched political, social and religious systems.

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Cast
Johnny Depp as Frank Tupelo
Angelina Jolie as Elise Clifton-Ward
Paul Bettany as Inspector John Acheson
Timothy Dalton as Chief Inspector Jones
Steven Berkoff as Reginald Shaw
Rufus Sewell as The Englishman
Christian De Sica as Colonnello Lombardi
Alessio Boni as Sergente Cerato
Daniele Pecci as Tenente Narduzzi
Giovanni Guidelli as Tenente Tommassini
Raoul Bova as Conte Filippo Gaggia
Igor Jijikine as Virginsky
Bruno Wolkowitch as Capitaine Courson
Marc Ruchmann as Brigadier Kaiser
Julien Baumgartner as Brigadier Ricuort
François Vincentelli as Brigadier Marion
Shashidhar as Shz
Nino Frassica as Maresciallo Cecchini
Neri Marcorè as the receiver of the hall

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Cast:

Michael Douglas, Demi Moore, Donald Sutherland, Caroline Goodall, Roma Maffia


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Soon after Naomie Harris confirmed her role as the new Miss Moneypenny, the sassy assistant to Bond's Boss M, played by Judi Dench, First Showing reported on Amazing Spider-Man villain Rhys Ifans joining the upcoming Bond 23.

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