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[caption id="attachment_2182" align="alignnone"]Jonathan M. Parisen[/caption]

Indie filmmaker Jonathan M. Parisen, 40, of East Orange, NJ, who wrote, produced and directed “Stairwell: Trapped in the World Trade Center” was charged Monday with trespassing and endangerment in New York City.

According to published reports, an intoxicated Parisen jumped onto the Staten Island Railway tracks early Sunday to retrieve a lost shoe. When he struggled to get back up, good Samaritan Steven Santiago jumped on the tracks to help and was struck in the head by a train.

Parisen and Santiago are both being treated at Staten Island University Medical Center.

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[caption id="attachment_2066" align="alignnone"]Christian Bale in The Flowers of War[/caption]

Actor Christian Bale who is in China for the premiere of his latest movie, “The Flowers of War,” was reportedly roughed up by Chinese government-backed guards on Thursday when he tried to visit lawyer, Chen Guangcheng who has been  imprisoned in his home by authorities, along with his wife and child, since his release from prison in September 2010.

The incident was captured by a CNN camera crew who accompanied Christian Bale on the eight-hour drive from Beijing to Dongshigu village, to visit Chen Guangcheng who is blind.

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“What I really wanted to do was to meet the man, shake his hand and say what an inspiration he is,” Mr. Bale said.

According to the NY Times, Mr. Chen, a self-taught lawyer, crossed Chinese authorities after he took on the case of thousands of local women who had been the victims of an aggressive family planning campaign that included forced sterilizations and abortions. In 2006, he was sentenced to four-and-a-half years during a trial that his legal defenders described as farcical. The charges included destroying property and organizing a crowd to block traffic, crimes allegedly orchestrated while he was under house arrest.

The whole incident may prove tricky for Chinese authorities as Christian Bale is currently starring in the Chinese film, The Flowers of War, which is also the Chinese official foreign film submission for the Academy Awards. Directed by Zhang Yimo, the film depicts Japanese atrocities during their 1937 occupation of Nanjing; and  Christian Bale plays a Catholic priest who tries to save young Chinese women who have taken refuge in a Catholic boarding school during the Japanese invasion.

The film opens this week in China, and on December 23 in the United States and Europe.

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Legendary Bollywood actor Dev Anand, the ‘Evergreen Romantic Superstar’ of Indian cinema, died after a heart attack in a London hotel on Saturday night. He was 88.

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Haskell Wexler, an 89 year-old Academy Award Winning cinematographer, is turning his camera on the Occupy LA movement for his latest political and social documentation.

The groundbreaking cinematographer and film director has been in the business since the early 1960s, starting out with documentaries, then breaking into Hollywood with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, for which he won his first Oscar. He went on to shoot such famous and well respected films as In the Heat of the Night and One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest. But healso continued to make documentaries and socially relevant films, such as Medium Cool, which he directed, and stands out as a lesser-known film renowned for its realistic and almost journalistic style in capturing the atmosphere leading up to the The Democratic National Convention in 1968.

Now Wexler has seemed to found a new subject of inspiration and filmmaking with the Occupy movement spreading throughout the country, focusing on LA, where he lives. He has already generated press for his videos (which are being posted online, on various sites) from such publications as The Huffington Post and the LA Times. Vimooz looks forward to what could turn into a full-length documentary. Although Wexler is older and seemingly at the end of a long and great career, it seems he is by no means ready to sit back and stop filming. As he told the LA Times, “You can take that insulation and figure you’re an old guy and you [already] did your thing, and then something inside me gets reminded that my ‘thing’ is what makes me alive — to be able to have a camera and an idea and an urge that gives me pleasure.”

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[caption id="attachment_1798" align="alignnone"]Richard Gordon, left, with actor Bela Lugosi, in 1952. [/caption]

Richard Gordon, producer and executive producer of science fiction and horror films died Tuesday at New York-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City, reports the LA Times. He was 85.

Gordon’s career included such credits as a “Fiend Without a Face” and “The Haunted Strangler,”; he also ecutive-produced movies such as “Corridors of Blood” with Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee, “The Haunted Strangler” with Karloff, “Island of Terror” with Peter Cushing and “Fiend Without a Face” and “First Man Into Space,” both with Marshall Thompson. He later produced films such as “The Cat and the Canary,” “Horror Hospital” and “Inseminoid.”

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Director Roman Polanski attended the 7th Zurich Film Festival to accept the lifetime achievement award that was intended for him two years ago, to honor his outstanding career achievements as a filmmaker. Almost two years to the day, Polanski was arrested on his way to the festival ceremony to receive the award.

The World Premiere of a full-length non fiction film followed the ceremony. In the documentary, Polanski reportedly briefly addressed the sexual assault case, with the bulk of the film dedicated to his childhood in German-occupied Poland, including his escape from the Warsaw ghetto and his early life and career.

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Greek-cypriot film director Michael Cacoyannis died in Athens on Monday aged 89, his cultural foundation said reports AFP.

Cacoyannis shot to fame with the triple-Oscar winning “Zorba the Greek” in 1964, an adaptation of the Nikos Kazantzakis-penned novel which starred Anthony Quinn, Alan Bates and Irene Pappas among others. He was also know for his film “Electra”, based on the Euripides tragedy, which received two awards at Cannes in 1962.

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[caption id="attachment_1407" align="alignnone" width="560"]Leonard Kastle stands in front of a poster of The Honeymoon Killers[/caption]

One-hit writer and director, Leonard Kastle, of his first and only film, “The Honeymoon Killers,” reportedly died May 18 at his home in Westerlo, N.Y., after a brief illness, said Tina Sisson, a friend. He was 82.

“The Honeymoon Killers,” released in 1970, is described as a “grimly realistic, low-budget, black-and-white crime drama about a lowlife lothario and his overweight nurse lover whose partnership in conning lonely women leads to murder.”

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Actress Jane Seymour reportedly said to CNN at the red carpet premiere of her new IFC movie “Love Marriage Wedding” on May 17 that she believed “there will be lots of information coming people’s way…I heard about two more [out of wedlock kids] somebody else knows about. I even met someone who knows him well.”

Yesterday on “The View” Friday, Seymour regretted her remarks, saying, “I’m so beyond sorry and appalled that I found myself even talking on the subject at all.”

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Love Marriage Wedding is directed by Dermot Mulroney and stars Mandy Moore, Kellan Lutz, James Brolin, Jane Seymour, Jessica Szohr, Michael Weston, Sarah Lieving, Joe Chrest. In the film, Mandy Moore is a marriage counselor whose life as a newly wed married to Kellan Lutz is turned upside down when she discovers her parents’ happy marriage is unexpectedly headed for divorce. Determined to reconcile her parents for their 30th anniversary surprise party she stops at nothing plunging from one compromising situation to another.

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[caption id="attachment_1382" align="alignnone" width="560"]Bruce Ricker (that’s him on the left, with Clint Eastwood and Quentin Tarantino) [/caption]

Bruce Ricker — a Cambridge, Massachusetts -based director and producer of documentaries whose best-known film, “The Last of the Blue Devils’’ (1979), is a jazz classic — died of pneumonia Friday in Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge.

He was 68.

Mr. Ricker specialized in documentaries about jazz, popular music, and film history.

Read more in Boston Globe

image via Boston Globe

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Donald Krim, a film distributor, president of’ Kino International, a company founded in 1977 and acquired by Mr. Krim in 1978, died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 65.

Among the films imported by Kino as a result of Mr. Krim’s festival explorations were Percy Adlon’s “Zuckerbaby” (1985), Mitsuo Yanagimachi’s “Himatsuri” (1986) and Michel Khleifi’s “Wedding in Galilee” (1988). Mr. Krim also helped to introduce the work of such art-house stalwarts as the Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai (“Days of Being Wild,” 1990), the Austrian Michael Haneke (“The Piano Teacher,” 2001) and the Israeli Amos Gitai (“Kadosh,” 1999).

Three Kino releases received Academy Award nominations in the best foreign-language film category: Joseph Cedar’s “Beaufort” (2007), Scandar Copti’s “Ajami” (2009) and Giorgos Lanthimos’s “Dogtooth” (2010).

Read more in the NY Times

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[caption id="attachment_1311" align="alignnone" width="533"] Jackie Cooper in SUPERMAN III (1983)[/caption]

Jackie Cooper, Emmy-winning director of “M*A*S*H” and other hits, plus known to moviegoers as Perry White, editor of The Daily Planet, in four “Superman” films died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 88.

His agent, Ronnie Leif, said Mr. Cooper died in a hospital after a short illness.

Read more in NY Times

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