By Earl Dittman

The lavish 1998 bio-pic Elizabeth was a turning point in the careers of both director Shekhar Kapur, who had previously worked exclusively on Hindi films, and his star Cate Blanchett, until then best known as a stage actor in her native Australia. The historical costume drama earned seven Oscar nominations, including a Best Actress nod for Blanchett.

And yet, when Kapur suggested they return to the life of England’s iconic Virgin Queen for a sequel, Blanchett scoffed at the idea.

“Shekhar mentioned he had always thought of the story of Elizabeth’s life as a trilogy, and [asked] if I would be interested in doing a second film,” recalls the Melbourne-born actor in a recent New York interview. “I said, ‘No, because I think I’ve done it, I don’t need to do it again.’”

But Kapur had brought Blanchett’s Elizabeth co-star Geoffrey Rush to the meeting as reinforcement and the two insisted that she at least consider the project.

But the more she spoke with Kapur, the more she was convinced he was someone with whom she needed to work. Someone who was destined to “do great things,” as Blanchett puts it.

Although the Best Actress Oscar went to Gwyneth Paltrow that year for Shakespeare in Love, Blanchett took home a Golden Globe for her performance. “I suppose if I hadn’t drawn the line at opening a supermarket during the Oscar campaign, I would have won,” jokes the 38-year-old, now married to businessman Andrew Upton, and the mother of two young sons.

“Regardless of awards, doing Elizabeth brought me to the attention of the Hollywood hierarchy, which meant I began to work almost non-stop.”

That work included the Elf queen Galadriel in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, an Oscar-winning turn as Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator, an Oscar-nominated performance in Notes on a Scandal, and a role in the upcoming, fourth Indiana Jones movie.

The Golden Age stops short of depicting Elizabeth’s final decades, leaving that for a third film. While Kapur has already started to write Elizabeth 3, the project has yet to get the green light and Blanchett has yet to confirm her participation.

“I think all that will depend on the reception The Golden Age receives,” says Blanchett. “Obviously, I would read the funny pages for Shekhar, but I think economics will dictate if there is a third one, because this is show business.”

Earl Dittman is a Houston-based entertainment writer.

By Earl Dittman

It’s not an entirely unique story, as Hollywood movies go.    

A mild radio host wounded in a brutal attack transforms into an urban vigilante who tracks down and kills violent criminals on the streets of New York.

What is unique is that the vigilante is a woman. This is Jodie Foster’s new role in the Neil Jordan thriller
The Brave One.

“I like taking mainstream movies that I feel have a real heart to them and having extremely unlikely directors from a different walk of life come in and approach them,” says Foster. “I think it’s fun to mix things up. It was like Inside Man, where you had Spike Lee directing a bank heist movie. I found that so artistically challenging and exciting to me. For The Brave One, there’s Neil Jordan, who is known for the quirky, gender-bending Irish movie, doing something that’s a real mainstream thriller. I mean, I think that you get the best of both worlds doing that.”

As for her controversial character —  judge, jury and executioner Erica Bain — Foster explains the role this way: “I play a woman who has been victimized in a horrible crime, and she can’t quite get over it, so becomes a vigilante…. To help get the attack off her mind, she finds herself mowing criminals down so what happened to her doesn’t happen to anyone else.”

That doesn’t excuse Bain’s actions. But there’s no denying that she is a strong female character, for good or bad. And that is just the type of role Foster is famous for playing.

“I do tend to play strong women,” says Foster. “I mean, I play different kinds of strong women. I’ve played dumb blondes. I’ve played morally bankrupt strong women. I’ve played good girls. I’ve played straight-laced, straight arrows. I’ve played wild women. Yet they are always strong. I honestly feel like sometimes that’s my Achilles heel as an actor. I don’t really know how to play weak characters. I think that if I played a weak character, you might not believe me.”

Earl Dittman is a Houston-based entertainment writer.

By Bob Strauss

After an expected period of keeping the subject at arm’s length, Hollywood is becoming more comfortable with addressing the hottest issue of the day: the War on Terror, and its dire consequences.

Jake Gyllenhaal, not surprisingly, is at the forefront of this still dicey film movement. The 26-year-old actor already made a kind of contribution to the cause by starring in Jarhead two years ago, and the critically lauded film paid a box-office price for even obliquely addressing U.S. problems in the Muslim world (it took place during the first Gulf War with Iraq, not the current one). Gyllenhaal followed that film, of course, with the much more successful Brokeback Mountain, which, despite great controversy and resistance, brought gay love mainstream movie acceptance like never before.

Now, with Rendition, Gyllenhaal represents thoughtful Americans’ moral confusion over what’s being done to combat international terror.

“I think it’s a story that needs to be told,” says Gyllenhaal during a recent L.A. interview. “I really respected the director’s last movie [South African Gavin Hood’s Oscar-winning Tsotsi], and it’s got an amazing cast of characters and cast of actors.

Gyllenhaal plays a young CIA analyst who’s troubled after being present for  an interrogation at a covert, offshore detention centre. When the distraught American wife (Reese Witherspoon) of an Egyptian national who’s gone missing comes to Washington seeking answers, Gyllenhaal’s turmoil reaches crisis stage.

Gyllenhaal’s taste is also influenced by a family of socially committed filmmakers: older sister Maggie and her fiancé, Peter Sarsgaard, both actors; director dad Stephen and screenwriter mom Naomi Foner.

“There are five people in my family who are all in that world,” he notes. “You really get a great perspective from that…. Some really believe in something that others don’t. You just get tons of input, and it’s wonderful.”

And it certainly seems to be working. Gyllenhaal is now pretty much the go-to guy whenever a producer needs a thoughtful (yet hunky) young lead for a movie with a point to make. That Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for Brokeback didn’t hurt, either. At the same time, though, the actor seems refreshingly relaxed about how his movies are received. Whether or not Rendition finds a wide audience, his main concern is that it was made, not what it makes.

“Y’know, creative expectations should be high, the results of those expectations should be low,” he says. “I hope people want to see these movies, but the focus should be on the fun you had doing it. I learned that from Brokeback Mountain. We made it for hardly anything and it earned about $200-million worldwide. That was just kind of nice.”

Bob Strauss is an L.A.-based entertainment writer.

So what if you love movies and don’t live in or around Toronto, home of the attention-grabbing Toronto International Film Festival (September 6 to 15, www.tiff07.ca for more information)? There are still plenty of great film festivals unspooling this month across Canada that cater to the needs of film aficionados. Here’s a sampling.

Debuting in 1989 as a three-day event, Northern Ontario’s premiere film festival is now a nine-day affair known for attracting Canadian filmmakers and actors coming from either, or both, the Toronto and Montreal fests. This festival includes the unique CTV Videomakers’ Competition, which awards prizes (first place collects $5,000) for the best amateur videos submitted by Northern Ontario residents.

www.cinefest.com

Ottawa International Animation Festival

North America’s largest — and most well-respected — animation festival offers screenings for fans of the art form, but also caters to industry types with a plethora of panels, talks and workshops. This is a festival where a Teletoon TV executive rubs shoulders with a Croatian claymation director and they both feel welcome.

www.ottawa.awn.com

Boomtown residents can enjoy some cinematic culture during the eighth annual CIFF. Last year the festival screened 365 features and shorts, and introduced the well-received Cowboy Cool initiative, which celebrates the western genre with screenings in its Into the Western retrospective program, panel discussions and lectures.

www.calgaryfilm.com 

Don’t look for the latest Joel Schumacher flick at this Victoria, B.C.-based event, which bills itself as the anti-Hollywood, anti-censorship festival dedicated to “imaginative, volatile, entertaining and critical works that exist outside of the mainstream.”

www.antimatter.ws

West Coast film fans flock to downtown Vancouver to check out more than 350 films and shorts screened at this late-month cinematic extravaganza. This being an environmentally friendly town, it makes sense the fest would usher in a new film program this year: Climate for Change. This series includes dramatic features and documentaries and offers a $25,000 juried prize for best environmental-themed film.

www.viff.org

Sure, the Oilers pre-season is underway and the Eskimos are playing football, but there’s more than sports to entertain Edmontonians. The 21st annual Edmonton Film Festival (which was called Local Heroes up until 2004) screens about 40 features over its nine days. One neat element of this fest is the 24/One competition, which sees regular folks complete a movie on video in 24 hours. All filmmaking teams are given a prop by the festival five minutes before they can begin filming, and the prop must be seen in every shot to ensure no footage was pre-recorded.

www.edmontonfilmfest.com

—Ingrid Randoja