A new Anna Karenina adaptation will include Keira Knightley as Anna and Jude Law as her husband, the dour Alexei Karenin. Count Vronsky will be played by Aaron Johnson, formerly cast as John Lennon in Nowhere Boy. The star-studded casting was generally snubbed by Russian Tolstoy fans, who viewed Knightley as too cold and Law as too young. The production will concentrate on the love triangle and skim over other storylines, said Tom Stoppard, who wrote the screenplay for Joe Wright, though he promised Kitty and Levin would share some of the spotlight.
"We've seen all kinds of Anna Kareninas drift past on the screen, from the inimitable Greta Garbo to Tatyana Drubich (let's not think about her age).* But the miscasting of Keira Knightley in the role of wife, mother, and passionate lover – that makes one nervous far before the premiere," a blogger wrote on the Livejournal community Ru-Kino.
Alexander Sokurov, whose film Faust triumphed at the Cannes film festival this year, made a surprise revelation: the movie was made possible thanks to Vladimir Putin.
The 60-year-old art house director is not a household name in Russia and his films are not the patriotic epics that usually clinch state support (Sokurov's previous, successful feature Alexandra touched the ugly subject of the Chechen war). But after receiving the grand prize, Sokurov told AFP that "the film would not have seen the light if Putin had not found the funding."
Sokurov said the Prime Minister invited him to his country house during the dark, post-crisis days for the film industry in 2009. "I was astonished and never understood why Putin, who has never been a friend of mine, decided to support the film," Sokurov said. The film, shot in German, has only one leading Russian actor (in the role of Mephistopheles), Anton Adasinsky, the founder of DEREVO theater company.
A master at shrouding himself in scandal, filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov once again tainted his reputation when Russia's Oscars Committee voted to send his film Citadel to Hollywood as the official Russian nomination for the foreign film award.
The movie, the second of two sequels to Mikhalkov's original Oscar-winning Burnt By the Sun, was an absolute flop in theaters and was relentlessly ridiculed by film critics. The movie earned back just $1.5 million of its $45 million budget (most supplied from state coffers).
When the Russian Oscars Committee delivered a majority vote to make the film Russia's entry, committee head Vladimir Menshov flipped out. "Society didn't accept this film, critics didn't accept it, but members of the committee considered it the best! How is this possible? Nobody could tell me why they are voting for it, so I concluded the decision was made in advance," Menshov said at a press-conference, after asking Mikhalkov to remove his film from the contest.
Decades after making a timeless Soviet version of Sherlock Holmes, Russia is making a new series on Holmes and Dr. Watson that is bound to surprise television audiences. Filming commenced this fall, directed by action-film and TV cop series creator Andrei Kavun. Kavun said his version will tell the story from the point of view of Watson. The young actor Igor Petrenko was cast to play Holmes.
* Tatyana Drubich was nearly 50 when she starred as Anna in a production by Sergei Solovyov that premiered in 2009 but was never properly released. Anna Karenina is about 26 in the novel.
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