Hollywood Bollywood News & Gossips

New Delhi, Action star Akshay Kumar will have the pulses racing in his latest Thums Up ad, in which he plays two characters - each leaping into the air to grab a bottle of the soft drink.

"The new campaign comes with loads of action, adventure, drama and humour. This time, my fans are sure to have double the fun," said Akshay, the brand ambassador of Thums Up, in a statement released here Thursday.

Shot by Australian director Jon Gwyther in Sydney, the advertisement will see the two avatars of the actor competing with each other to be the first one to grab the bottle of the soft drink without letting their feet touch the ground.

While, the first avatar will be shown to be an intense character, the other will be a fun loving person.

On big screen, the actor portrayed a double role for the first time in the 1997 movie "Aflatoon".

Thanks to www.bollywoodworld.com

Celebrity makeup artist Paul Starr was found dead in his L.A. apartment yesterday at the age of 48. Starr's A-list clients included Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Garner, and Jessica Alba. His extensive work in the fashion industry includes collaborations with Jean Paul Gaultier and Dolce & Gabbana.
In his 2005 book Paul Starr on Beauty: Conversations With Thirty Celebrity Women, Jolie says, "During the time we have spent in the make up chair, we talked about everything but the photo shoot; global issues, babies, human rights."

Police broke down Starr's door yesterday after he had been missing for days. The cause of death is still unknown.

source: http://www.nymag.com/

Bipasha Basu is missing from the Bachna Ae Haseeno promotions in Salman Khan’s10 Ka Dum that has Ranbir Kapoor along with Deepika Padukone and Minissha Lamba. A birdie chirps that Bips must have stayed away due to obvious reasons Sallu has a problem with her beau John Abraham! But the Bengali bombshell says that as she was busy elsewhere due to a prior commitment and could not attend. Excuses, excuses…

source: www.gobollywood.com

Aziz Mirza's Kismat Konnection is not even remotely connected to your entertainment needs. If Contract appears unrealistic in its starkness, this one is just as false in its glitz.

To cut it short, we're in an NRI world of Raj Malhotra who lives in Canada, only among Batra, Gill and Mehras. Everyone speaks Hindi, even if the character is gora. You get the picture. But it's another ball game to make this fun.

There is only joylessness around here, not just on the screen, but more importantly, on the screenplay, and in its dull writing.
Raj Malhotra, the stud-boy of his college, is now a failing architect. The boy talks to God and believes in kismet. He finds an occultist called Haseena Bano Jaan, or some such.

She guides him to a lucky charm. This is a girl he bumps into quite often, that's Vidya Balan. Theirs, you'll think, is supposed to be a romantic story, a love triangle where the third one is a hurtful philanderer. Except you can't tell any romance between the lead couple anyway.

The film you may believe is about the rise of this boy, as he takes up tough loans for his first design assignment.

All those portions are forgotten somewhere along as well. You then feel this film is probably about a mall coming up that will take away an old-age home.

This is a premise from Aziz Mirza's Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman or even Lage Raho Munnabhai. You learn that isn't the film either.

In fact there are very few movies such as these that have absolutely nothing to say, and take up so much of your time doing just that. Somewhere I think I even heard the words global warming too. What remains then are merely some fake moments!

Thaks to http://www.ndtvmovies.com

After five years, director Aziz Mirza returns to the film world to tell the story of an architect struggling for his big break in Kismat Konnection, which is releasing this Friday.

Mirza's daughter Rahila has scripted the film that mainly talks about the role that luck plays in one's life.

In the film, luck plays an important role in shaping up Shahid Kapur's career. The film also has Vidya Balan who becomes Shahid's lucky mascot. Mirza's favourite Juhi Chawal too plays an important role.

Raj Malhotra (Shahid) is a bright young man who cleared his architecture course with flying colours. Despite a best-student trophy from his college, he's struggling for his big break. It's almost as though some negative kismat (luck) is following him around because whenever something good is about to happen, it seems doomed to fail.

Desperate to fight this cussed kismat, Raj meets a quirky oracle Hasina Bano Jaan (Juhi Chawla). She tells him that soon his stars will change and make everything work in his favour, but for all this to happen, Raj has first to find his lucky charm and never let go of it.

But she refuses to give details, leaving Raj mystified, trying to figure out what this charm could be.

But after his meeting with Hasina, Raj finds his life going on the right track. He not only manages to convince top builder Sanjeev Gill (Om Puri) to give him a prestigious project, he also meets Priya (Vidya), an idealist who sees life in black and white.

Shades of grey have no role for her. She will give her all to her causes, her people and her love and expect nothing less in return.

Raj manages to win her heart and also opens her eyes to her philandering fianc (Amit Verma).

Are all these positive things an indication that Raj has unwittingly discovered his lucky charm?

This is for the first time that Shahid and Vidya are working together. Their pairing has generated curiosity in the film circuit, which is going to help the movie.
Pritam Chakraborty has composed the music and some of the songs are already chartbusters.

Mirza's last venture Chalte Chalte with Shah Rukh Khan and Rani Mukerji was a big hit. So expectations from this maker of light-hearted romantic comedies are high.

Thanks to http://www.ndtvmovies.com

Many parents watch the news or other shows as children play nearby. But new research shows that even when the television is just background noise, it may be disruptive to a child’s normal development.
It’s estimated that 75 percent of very young children in the United States live in homes where the television is on most of the time, even though the kids often aren’t watching it. University of Massachusetts researchers recently studied how TV background noise might affect young children. The study, published in the current issue of the journal Child Development, looked at 50 1-, 2- and 3-year-olds. Each child came to a lab with a parent and was allowed to play for an hour with various toys. For half the time, a television was on in the room, showing an episode of the adult game show Jeopardy! as well as commercials. During the other half hour, the TV was turned off.
As expected, the children paid little attention to the adult television show, glancing at it for less than a few seconds at a time, and less than once a minute. Even so, the distraction of the background noise had a significant effect on how children at every age played. When the television was on, the children played for significantly shorter periods of time, and focused play was also shorter compared to how they played when the TV was off.
Researchers said that even though the children weren’t interested in the show, background TV is an “ever-changing audiovisual distractor'’ that disrupts their ability to sustain various types of play. The finding is important because many well-meaning parents who wouldn’t let their young children watch television may not realize that even adult programs that don’t interest children still can have an effect.
“Background TV is potentially a chronic environmental risk factor affecting most American children,'’ said Marie Evans Schmidt, a research associate at the Center on Media and Child Health at Children’s Hospital in Boston and lead author of the study. “Parents should limit their young children’s exposure.”

It seems like Miley Cyrus's controversial Vanity Fair shoot won't be her last foray into the world of sex. She wants to do it again, but a little tamer this time.

Miley told TV Guide, "I'd love to do a younger, cleaner version of 'Sex and the City.' "

She had admitted during her Vanity Fair shoot that HBO's series starring Sarah Jessica Parker is her favorite show, but later clarified that she only has watched the watered-down TBS version.

Even though the TBS run of "Sex and the City" cuts out all the really racy scenes and titillating language, it still refers to, jokes about, and constantly questions sex. So can a 15-year-old, who like each of the Jonas Brothers, wears a purity ring, make a show anywhere near the likes of "SATC"?

Well, Miley thinks she can, and she stands firmly by her virginal commitment.

"I like to think of myself as the girl that no one can get, that no one can keep in their hand," she said.

"Even at my age, a lot of girls are starting to fall," she continued, "and I think if [abstaining] is a commitment girls make, that’s great."

So even though this Vanity Fair girl may be a hottie, late night phone calls and flirtatious notes passed in class will probably be the bulk of her future dating series.

Thanks to http://www.nydailynews.com

Mumbai: Around 200 feature and short fiction films from around 40 countries are to be screened at this year's Osian Film Festival.

Filmmaker Mrinal Sen and author and screenplay writer Jose "Pete" F. Lacaba from the Philippines received the Lifetime Achievement Awards for their contribution to cinema and writing respectively during the grand opening of the Tenth Osian's-Cinefan Festival of Asian and Arab Cinema.

The two received the awards from Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit and veteran filmmaker Basu Chatterjee respectively in the presence of Osian's Connoisseurs of Art chairman Neville Tuli, Festival joint directors Latika Padgaonkar and Indu Shrikent, and festival founder Aruna Vasudev.

Sen said in his acceptance speech that he was receiving the award with quiet dignity. This was because he felt that he could still do a lot more to justify the honours bestowed on him.

Lacaba said after receiving the Aruna Vasudev Lifetime Achiement Award that it was very rare for a script writer to get acknowledged for his work, since the credit for a film went either to the director or the stars.

Members of the six juries were also presented to the audience during the ceremony. Three audio-visuals were shown on the occasion, on Osian's, the Mumbai festival last month, and on actor Shammi Kapoor who was honoured with the Lifetime Achievement award in Mumbai.

The opening of the festival at Sirirfort auditorium also marked the formal handing over of the responsibility of running of the festival by Vasudev, who had functioned as director until last year, to the two new Joint Directors.

Dikshit, who has been associated with the festival since its inception in 1999, declared the Festival open. She paid a tribute to Vasudev for running the festival until now and said she was confident it would grow from strength to strength.

In his welcome address, Tuli said the need today was to venture out into new projects without being too worried about the results, if the conviction was there. Paying a tribute to Vasudev, he said it was this conviction, which made her join up with him for this festival. Introducing the concept of Osianama film complex in Mumbai, he said there was need to synthesize art and cinema to give them respectability.

In the programme compeered by actor Rajat Kapur, Tuli presented Vasudev with a shawl as a mark of respect.

Vasudev said when she had launched the 'Cinemaya', the world's first film quarterly on Asian cinema in 1988 people had been skeptical. She later launched the Cinefan Film Festival of Asian Cinema in 1999 on a meager budget of Rs 600,000 given by the Delhi Government. Joining hands with Osian's did not mean a surrender of independence, but the coming together of minds.

The two joint directors, Padgaonkar and Shrikent, said the festival was expected to raise awareness about the best in Asian and Arab cinema. They said the Festival now has a new look and a new feel with several sections being introduced for the first time.

The awards for the films will be presented during the Festival being held at Siri Fort complex and Alliance Francaise in New Delhi from 10 - 20 July. The award money this year would be over Rs One Crore for the Competition Sections and Lifetime Achievement Awards. The winners of the Lifetime Achievement Award were presented Rs. 800,000 each.

Thanks to http://businessofcinema.com