Washington, Oct 25: Brad Pitt reveals that his reluctance to travel around the world with his kids stems from the fact that the children keep getting cameras shoved into their faces.

Pitt and Jolie are a target for the media wherever they go, and their every move is closely watched.

However, the actor reveals that his children – Maddox, Pax, Zahara and Shiloh - are now being affected by all the media attention.

"They have this view that anytime they go round the world there's this sea of people with cameras. This is their idea of the world they live in," Contactmusic quoted him, as saying.

Pitt also admits that of all the kids, it’s Zahara who hates the attention the most.

"My two-year-old (Zahara) hates it. Hates the cameras. It's a strange idea," he said.

In the meantime, Pitt and Jolie are getting set to team up professional once again by donning the producer’s hat for a new series for HBO.

The series is set to revolve around the workings of an international aid organization and will tell the stories of humanitarian workers who risk their lives to help others.

Pitt and Jolie will serve as executive producers on the project. (ANI)

Source: Top News.

Some absolute weirdo has paid £300 on eBay for a dental cast of Angelina Jolie's teeth taken when she was at drama school to fit her teeth for some fake vampire fangs.

We told you this weekend that the sock worn by the photographer Britney ran over fetched over £500, while an old tissue Brit had used sold with a starting price of £750 and that's just the start. Star Trek star William Shatner sold his own kidney stones for a whopping £14,000, which he then donated to charity.

Seriously, what kind of psycho pays the equivalent of a deposit on a house for a jar of someone else's kidney stones? It's sick and wrong we tell you!

Other whacky sales include chairs sat in by Kurt Cobain (£7,000), the coathanger which help the suit Elvis was buried in (£7,500) and Frank Sinatra's wig which fetched £2,000.

Hmm...anyone want to buy this...biro, which was used by...Madonna to...write her latest 'best selling' children's book? No? Didn't think so!

Source: New Woman.

The 'Sex and the City' actress thinks it is incredible Angelina has opened her home to three underprivileged children - Maddox, 6, Pax, 3, and Zahara, 2, - and admits she can't even imagine doing the same.

Sarah - who has a five-year-old son, James, with husband Matthew Broderick - said, "It's too late for me to have a big family - I can't imagine it now. But I do think that what people like Angelina Jolie do is amazing. I love being a mother and I would be thrilled if my family were larger but I can't imagine having eight children."

The 42-year-old star admits she finds it hard to balance motherhood with being an actress because of all the attention it brings.

She added to Britain's OK! magazine, "The loss of privacy scares me, that's why you don't hear me complaining about that stuff and that is why you can't trap me into talking about the paparazzi.

"I don't know if I have found a happy balance with the cultural phenomenon of celebrity, especially what has happened over the last five years. I don't think I will ever understand or strike a balance with that."

Source: AZ Central.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The widow of slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl has dropped a lawsuit against al Qaeda, other groups and a Pakistani bank over her husband's kidnap, torture and murder, court records show.

Lawyers acting for Mariane Pearl filed the lawsuit in July. It sought unspecified damages against "those terrorists, terrorist organizations and the supporting charitable and banking organizations for the senseless kidnapping, torture and murder of Daniel Pearl."

A notice of voluntary dismissal was filed late on Tuesday in federal court in Manhattan that stated Pearl had decided not to pursue the case.

"The withdrawal was done for personal reasons that had nothing to do with the merits of the lawsuit," a spokesperson for Pearl's lawyers Motley Rice said.

Daniel Pearl was the Journal's South Asia bureau chief when he was kidnapped in Karachi in January 2002 while seeking an interview with suspected Islamist militants. After several days in captivity he was beheaded on video.

Among those sued was Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who was convicted and sentenced to death in a Pakistan court for his role in the murder. Three others were jailed for life.

Another defendant, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, an alleged masterminded of the September 11 attacks, told a U.S. military tribunal in March that he beheaded Pearl, the military said. Following that, Mariane Pearl said the way to fight terrorism was self-control over feelings of "disgust and horror."

Pearl also sued Habib Bank Limited, one of Pakistan's biggest banks, accusing it of knowingly conducting financial transactions for charities linked to extremist groups. The bank denied this, saying it had never supported terrorism.

A spokesperson for Pearl said she was traveling and could not be reached.

Mariane Pearl's story was the subject this year of the film "A Mighty Heart," which starred Angelina Jolie and recounted the events leading up to and following Daniel's death when Mariane was around six months pregnant.

By Christine Kearney

Source: Knau Arizona Public Radio.

Beowulf used to be a Hollywood punch line, the cry agents uttered when confronted by arty screenwriters with an idea: "Oh God, just tell me it's not Beowulf!" So it was a particular triumph when two such scribes, indie filmmaker Roger Avary and graphic novelist Neil Gaiman, took the stage at Comic-Con last summer to introduce Beowulf, Robert Zemeckis' retelling of the primordial Anglo-Saxon monster epic — in 3-D. "It's the oldest story in the English language," Gaiman declared. "Told," Avary interjected, "with the most modern technology available."

Wearing special glasses that looked like Ray-Ban Wayfarers, the crowd of comic geeks sat rapt through scenes of menace and mayhem that rivaled anything in The Lord of the Rings. But the spine-tingling moments weren't when Ray Winstone, playing Beowulf, thrusts his sword at the audience — a 3-D clichι from the '50s. They came when he faces a digitally enhanced Angelina Jolie playing the mother of the monstrous Grendel, in a dank, forbidding cave. Jolie makes for a stunningly seductive sorceress, so it's all the more terrifying when her features momentarily morph into a death mask. A 3-D sword can make you jerk back in your seat, no question. But 3-D is even better when it draws you in — into the endless shadows of a cave, or into the vortex of a shrieking face.

The following day, the screenwriters were ecstatic. "It was like a third eye opened up in my forehead," gushed Avary, who was already plotting out Beowulf when he wrote Pulp Fiction with Quentin Tarantino more than a decade ago. "It's so large and extraordinary and hyperreal that I can't be anything but giddy. When I left the theater, I wanted the rest of the world to look like that."

Hollywood is betting that audiences will feel the same way. More than 50 years after its first run, 3-D is staging a comeback — this time in digital hi-def. Once a nausea-inducing fad, it's now touted as the biggest gun yet in Hollywood's ever-growing arsenal of f/x. When Beowulf comes out in November, it will premiere on nearly 1,000 3-D screens — the most ever. (A standard performance-capture version — think motion-capture but better — that's not 3-D will be released simultaneously.) And nearly every major studio has a 3-D project slated for release in the next few years. DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg has even announced that every release from his shop from 2009 on will be in 3-D. "It's a bigger quantum leap than talkies," declares Fox cochair Jim Gianopulos. "Talkies were an evolution of the medium. This is a complete transformation of the medium."

A half-century ago, when Hollywood first pinned its hopes on the third dimension, studio chiefs were desperate to win audiences back from television. So they tricked out a run of B pictures — Bwana Devil, It Came from Outer Space, Vincent Price's House of Wax — with what was then the latest gimmick. It worked for a while, but the novelty faded because the herky-jerky analog technology sent audiences home with throbbing heads and queasy stomachs.

Now Hollywood is once again up against new media — videogames, the Internet, home theater systems — and struggling to dazzle a moviegoing public accustomed to multimillion-dollar computer-generated effects. This time around, a handful of blockbuster directors are driving the action: Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, Robert Zemeckis, and James Cameron. "They're all feeding off each other," says Steve Starkey, Zemeckis' longtime producing partner. "Jim dreams in 3-D, but they're all pushing for it."

Almost a decade ago, Cameron, flush with profits from Titanic and bored with conventional moviemaking, began developing a stereoscopic camera system he would later use to shoot undersea documentaries for Imax. Then, when Zemeckis was making an Imax 3-D version of The Polar Express, Jackson stopped by his facility in Santa Barbara and was wowed by what he saw. Zemeckis' friend Spielberg soon became a convert, too. Now Spielberg and Jackson are planning a 3-D trilogy based on the Belgian book series The Adventures of Tintin, Zemeckis is working on a 3-D performance-capture version of A Christmas Carol, and Cameron is deep in production on Avatar, a live-action 3-D sci-fi flick that he boasts will be Titanic in space.

For A-list directors like these, 3-D is a cool new tool for storytelling. Like light and sound, it can alter a mood or highlight a moment — once you learn how to use it, that is. "It's a new frontier," Cameron declares. "Everybody's doing it differently. Peter Jackson's doing it his way, I'm doing it my way. There's no right or wrong. Do you feel ill after a screening or do you feel pretty good? We now know how to achieve the latter."

Audiences at a live-action 3-D movie are watching two images that have been shot with two cameras and then projected simultaneously. (If it's a performance-capture flick, the original footage is run through software that splits the image in two for a 3-D effect.) Polarized specs enable moviegoers to see one image with one eye and the other image with the other. In the past, if those images were shot or projected even slightly out of synch — as often happens with analog 3-D setups — the brain would get disoriented. With digital 3-D, however, a rig housing two separate, synchronized cameras shoots "in stereo" and a digital projector displays the results. (Several companies, like Real D and Dolby, are developing different systems.) The result is sharp, eye-popping images — minus the 3-D hangover.

Cool tech, but for 3-D movies to be blockbusters, studios need to be able to show them on thousands of screens across the country. Which means theaters have to switch to digital projection systems, an overhaul they have long resisted. That's changing. After years of arguing over expense, studios have agreed to shoulder a portion of the cost to convert theaters to digital, and the prospect of a big box-office take for 3-D films gives multiplex owners the motivation to pick up the rest of the tab. "Once theater owners realize there are enough huge filmmakers releasing 3-D content," says Starkey, "digital cinema will expand, and 3-D will be everywhere."

A warm fall day in Montreal finds James Cameron on a bustling soundstage at Mel's Citι du Cinιma, checking out the shoot of Journey 3-D. The Jules Verneinspired production is the first live-action feature film to be made with the latest incarnation of the stereoscopic camera system Cameron has spent years developing. In 1993, when he was shooting his first stereoscopic film, a 12-minute Universal Studios theme park attraction called T2 3-D: Battle Across Time, he used a rig that was so ponderous, Arnold Schwarzenegger's stunt double had to run at half-speed so the camera could keep up. Today, Cameron has a lightweight dual-camera system that's much easier to use.

Cameron is here to find out if his camera system is capable of executing a 3-D blockbuster. He has been in preproduction on the $195 million-dollar Avatar, a sci-fi action flick that pits humans against aliens in a deathmatch on a distant world. "We're trying to field a tool set to solve any situation, from underwater to hero close-ups," he explains. "So this is an interesting beta test."

And a wild ride. Affixed to a wall at the other end of the soundstage is the bottom half of an enormous, toothy, fiberglass dinosaur skull. Strapped inside are the star, Brendan Fraser, and two other actors. The script calls for the skull to be shot like a rocket from inside a volcano — and then to fall back in again. To capture this, director Eric Brevig has mounted the camera units from Cameron's rig onto a golf cart, which will be driven at top speed toward the wall, then thrust into reverse to simulate the fallback. On cue, the cart hurtles forward as the actors thrash about. Inches away from them, it halts abruptly, then slowly pulls back. The camera operator adjusts not just the focus but the convergence — the point at which the right and left camera eyes come together.

This scene looks straightforward, but it's actually revolutionary. When they had to rely on analog film cameras, including the refrigerator-sized units used to shoot in 3-D for theme parks and Imax releases, directors couldn't see where the dual images converged until the film was developed. As a result, shots had to be mathematically plotted far in advance, making the process slow and expensive. But with these new cameras — whether the stereo rig developed by Cameron and videocam designer Vince Pace or a rival system developed by Cameron's former associate, Steve Schklair of the Burbank firm 3ality Digital — directors can see the convergence in real time and forget the math. "Jim's edict is, throw out the rules," Pace says. "If it looks good onscreen, don't tell me the math is wrong."

While Cameron was working on the technology for live-action 3-D, trolling the ocean floor to shoot Ghosts of the Abyss and Aliens of the Deep in 3-D for Imax, Zemeckis has been pioneering a technique called performance-capture. Because the actors' performances are captured in three dimensions by those Gollum-style motion-capture suits, the process of rendering them into 3-D is relatively simple and easy to implement after the fact: When Zemeckis was already well into production on The Polar Express, Imax asked if he'd do a 3-D version. After a screen test, he eagerly agreed, and along with Sony Pictures Imageworks created a 3-D version of the film. The audience loved it: When the movie opened in November 2004, the regular theaters were half full, but people were standing in line to see the Imax version, which brought in a fifth of the domestic box office receipts, even though it accounted for fewer than 2 percent of the total screens.

As long as 3-D was limited to a few dozen specially-configured Imax theaters, though, most people would never see either directors' work. While developing his camera, Cameron realized that most digital projectors being installed in cinemas were capable of displaying dual images. He took his discovery to 3-D software and hardware company Real D, which developed a stereoscopic system theater owners could add on to their existing digital projectors. Cost? $25,000.

So in March 2005, Cameron got Zemeckis, George Lucas, and Robert Rodriguez to join him onstage at the ShoWest convention in Las Vegas wearing polarized 3-D shades to promote the technology. They screened footage from Ghosts of the Abyss and The Polar Express, plus versions of 2-D releases like Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings. Peter Jackson pledged his support via video from New Zealand, where he was working on King Kong. Lucas announced he wanted to convert the entire Star Wars epic — "that old group of films I did so long ago in a galaxy far away" — to 3-D. Not everybody was impressed: "It's a fad," sniffed one studio distribution chief.

But proof is in the ticket sales, and every 3-D picture that has come out since then has done eye-popping business. When Chicken Little — Disney's first 3-D film in more than 50 years — opened in November 2005, it played at about 100 digital multiplexes. Those theaters — with pricier admissions — did nearly three times the box office of the conventional theaters. Sony's Monster House, a 3-D performance-capture feature produced by Zemeckis, Starkey, and Spielberg, did even better. The 3-D release of Disney's Meet the Robinsons accounted for roughly a third of its $98 million domestic gross — even though it played on only about 15 percent of screens. The 3-D treatment of Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas averaged more than $24,000 per screen its opening weekend — impressive, considering it was originally released more than a decade ago.

By the time Avatar and Monsters vs. Aliens open in spring 2009, there will be 4,000 3-D screens across the country. And the home theater market is getting into the action, as well: Samsung just released hi-def flatscreen televisions with 3-D capability. So the question is not how much 3-D can we get but how much 3-D can we take. Beowulf is getting major buzz, but can the thrill ride last? "Over time," says Fox's Gianopulos, "there's no reason why every film couldn't be in 3-D, any more than you would make a silent movie." Or it could disappear all over again.

Digital technology has eliminated 3-D's most egregious side effects — the nausea, the eye strain, and the impulse to flee the room. But one relic still remains: those dorky glasses. The basic technology that would do away with them was patented in 1908, but no one has yet figured out how to make it work — and by most accounts, it will be years before they do.

Then there's the question of what will happen when 3-D trickles down to lesser filmmakers. "Bob Zemeckis instinctively shoots in 3-D," Starkey says. "But if you do it improperly, it can feel gimmicky. The subtler the better, I think." Hollywood, however, has never been much for subtlety — so when the lights go down, be ready to duck.

By Frank Rose

Source: Wired.

Angelina Jolie and Jennifer Aniston are set to battle it out on the cover of W magazine.

Jennifer - whose marriage to Brad Pitt ended shortly after he starred in 'Mr. and Mrs. Smith' with Angelina - and the 'Tomb Raider' actress both star on separate covers of the November edition of the glossy publication entitled The Art Issue.

A source said, "It's like a rematch between Angelina and Jennifer. Angelina might have won Brad but who will sell more magazine covers?!"

Brad and Angelina posed for a W magazine photoshoot as the perfect suburban couple playing with their children in June 2005, even though the actor was still officially married to Jennifer.

Brad and Jennifer finalized their divorce in October 2005.

After her break-up from Brad, Jennifer posed for numerous magazine covers bearing headlines such as "I'll survive" and "I'm OK."

Brad and Angelina have three adopted children, Maddox, 6, Pax, 3 and Zahara, 2, and 16-month-old biological daughter Shiloh.

Source: AZ Central.

Angelina Jolie and costar John Malkovich film scenes on the San Dimas set of their upcoming police corruption drama The Changeling on Tuesday in Los Angeles, Calif.

This is the second week of filming for the Clint Eastwood-directed film.



Source: Just Jared

Ding dong. Are the bells of the wedding variety about to chime?

Maybe so and we'll have our naffest confetti at the ready.

Because Brad Pitt has hinted that he may want to tie the knot with Angelina Jolie.

Yeppers, we caught a whiff of the matrimony chat, and we're already planning to buy a new hat.

Let's face it - a splicing between these two would be the icing on the cake.

Brad said: "I still want to kiss the bride, wear the ring, wear my suit and wake up in the morning and say 'Good morning wife'."

The cynic in us wonders whether once was not enough... remember that Jennifer Aniston chick?

But our fluffy bunny on heat side is willing to step in if Ange isn't having any of it.

It's up to you, Brad.

Source: Sky Showbiz.

What is next for Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie? It certainly won't be a romantic evening one insider tells In Touch. "Brad and Angelina are starved for romance," says the insider. "He usually plans theses romantic nights, but it just doesn't seem to be a priority for Angie. They usually end up either fighting of getting sidetracked by the kids." The report notes that while their four young children – Maddox, 6, Pax, 3, Zahara, 2, and 17-month-old Shiloh – keep them united, they also deprive them of time together.

"We hang out. We try to talk over the swing set," Angelina said in a recent interview. "We'll have a date night once everybody's settled." But the kids' needs are most important. "Angie's concerns are different than Brad's," says an insider. "The kids come first, then her brother, James, her causes and then maybe Brad." Adds another insider: "She just can't see why romantic dates are important when she has so many other demands on her time."

In Touch notes that Angelina, 32, has never been a romantic girl, preferring motorcycle rides to candlelit dinners. "Angie always says she's never been on a real date in her life, and that she would rather drink a couple of beers than talk about her feelings," continues the insider.

The insider then seems to take a pretty good shot at Angie - or two of Brad's exes, depending on your perspective. "But Brad has always been with girlie-girls, like Jennifer Aniston and Gwyneth Paltrow, so it's hard for him not to take her rejection personally."

By Christi Hall

Source: National Ledger.

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have a new joint production in the works.

The globe-trotting couple is teaming up to produce a new series for HBO, based on the inner workings of an international aid organization and the stories of humanitarian workers who risk their lives to help others, a spokesperson for the cable network confirmed to E! News.

Pitt and Jolie will serve as executive producers on the project. Scott Burns, who cowrote The Bourne Ultimatum and was a producer of An Inconvenient Truth, will also executive produce and will write the pilot.



The as-yet untitled drama is described as Jolie's "passion." The actress and mother of four has served as a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations Refugee Agency since 2001 and previously starred in 2003's Beyond Borders, about relief workers in countries devastated by war.

The project marks Jolie's first return to HBO since her breakthrough performance in 1998's Gia, which earned her a Golden Globe. Pitt is already working with the network as a producer of the miniseries Undaunted Courage, currently in development.

After spending time in New York this fall, where Pitt was filming the Coen brothers caper Burn After Reading, the Jolie-Pitt clan recently returned to Los Angeles, where Jolie is currently shooting The Changeling with Clint Eastwood.

by Sarah Hall

Source: E! Online.