CHILDREN'S television favourite Mr Benn is heading for big-screen stardom - and a Blackburn-born movie boss is behind him.

Gary Smith, chief executive of Winchester Films, has already had hits with the romantic comedy Shooting Fish and drama Divorcing Jack.

Now he is hoping to raise £9million to finance two new movies being produced through a new arm of Winchester, UK Films Group plc.

Several big names have already been signed up for the projects.

Mr Benn is based on the BBC children's cartoon series about a man who has exciting adventures whenever he tries on the costumes in the mysterious Shopkeeper's shop.

John Hannah, star of Sliding Doors and Four Weddings and a Funeral, is to play Mr Benn.

Ben Kingsley, star of Gandhi and Schindler's List, will play the Shopkeeper.

Anyone else know a cartoon that should have been made into a film

If you stand silently and expressionlessly, people project their own thoughts and feelings on to you. If you do that at a funeral, people might think you are sad. If you do it in a restaurant, people might think you are hungry.

This principle of projection is exploited in feature films and is named “The Kuleshov Effect” after Lev Kuleshov who first experimented with it in Soviet Russia in 1918. If you show an image of a man’s face followed by an image of a bowl of soup, the audience assumes that the man is looking at the bowl of soup. If you show the same image of the man’s face followed by different images -  a pretty woman, a corpse, a painting - the audience assumes that the man is looking at those things.  But that isn’t all: they also think his expression has changed because the different objects chosen by the film-makers cause different thoughts and resonances in the mind of the viewer.

Kuleshov’s remarkable discovery was first cinematically exploited by Sergei Eisenstein’s montage techniques, as in the films Strike and Battleship Potemkin, but they are an absolute mainstay of almost any filmed work now. Every time you get a shot of Inspector Morse‘s blank face, The Kuleshov Effect is being exploited. It is part of the basic language of cinema; the key is what was shown before and what is shown afterwards. The human mind links images that are shown in succession and so the choice of succession of images can be used to direct (or even manipulate) the viewers mind and so tell a story, without words.

True cinematic art is poetry with images. Image after image in a carefully chosen sequence that have a cumulative effect on the viewer. It’s no surprise that the supreme cinematic artist Andrei Tarkovsky combined actual poetry (often written by his father) with his images for even greater effect. His film Mirror works on a different level to most films. It is a selection of his own personal memories that also have an effect on the viewer. Tarkovsky said “This is a film about you”. He made a film about everyone by making a film about himself and his own memories. It is deeply personal and simultaneously about each and every one of us. The film reflects our own thoughts back at us. We use our own past to interpret his past

The art of the Film-maker is to choose the right sequence of images that tell their story, to communicate to the viewer the emotions and details they want to convey. There are some who believe that this art was diminished when sound films came along, because words could be used to tell the story without having to rely on a sequence of images. How many films or telly programmes have you seen where a character gets a phone call and shouts something like:

“What! The whole building is in flames!”.

Every time that happens, the distant rumbling sound you can hear is Kuleshov turning in his grave. Most makers of modern, mainstream films seem to have forgotten Kuleshov’s discovery and assume that the audience are all idiots who need everything explaining in simple language. Chris Marker made the brilliant film “La Jetee” using a sequence of still photographs (and this inspired Terry Gilliam’s excellent film 12 Monkeys). Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece “2001: A Space Odyssey” is 2 hours and 40 minutes long but only contains 40 minutes of dialogue; the whole first section contains no speech at all, just one caption. The modern cinematic vogue for: explanatory dialogue followed by a load of action followed by a bit more explanatory dialogue followed by a load more action etc. etc. is lazy film-making and is also treating the audience like fools. If given the chance, most film watchers are capable of understanding far more than the mainstream film-makers give them credit for.

Cheers, Tom.

Hi, just a quick reminder if anybody has Sky Indie....Water by Deepa Mehta is on at 10...the second in the trilogy...Earth has been on before and is already showing now before it, so catch if you can...Earth was excellent...Great big hugs...

My worst list would be:

Herculese in New York
Hell night
Piranna
Broken
The Hulk

It's good for sure, perhaps even really good although i think a few more viewings might be needed to decide. What really comes across in this moreso than in Batman Begins is scale and grit. By scale i'm thinking of scenes like the hospital being blown up (and that's not much of a spoiler before you think i've spoiled something... and anyway they did actually blow up the building for the film, so it looks awesome) and the traffic piled up on the roads trying to get out of Gotham. Then there's the grit. Batman was quite nice in batman Begins - he goes off learns ninja uses his money to make a cool suit beats up bad guys and falls in love; here he kicks the shit out of the joker. It's not just batman though, the magic trick The Joker does with a pencil is funny and nasty all at the same time, same for the demonstration of how he got his looks. And a guy gets hit by a bus early on. Which for me makes for some good no-brainer entertainment, and that's the problem. When the film tries to suggest it's alright to torture bad guys to save good people it feels tacked on, clumsily, distractingly so - this is a comic book film not a fuckin polemic. And even then, when people are being beaten up and the Joker is being just plain evil, the film stops at the pg level of offscreen violence. I reckon it would have been much stronger, darker and more powerful if the violence was onscreen in your face where you cant pretend you didn't just see that. To keep that PG rating the film goes only so far then stops short of the mark, repeatedly, although i guess the filmmakers wanted to get the biggest audience possible without too much compromising, so the balance almost works to a reasonable extent. I havent even mentioned Ledger yet, well that's because he is good - but only because his character is the only one with something to it, the only one that's interesting and has any decent lines (the stuff between Batman, Dent and George about heroes deserved and needed seems really lame mostly), i liked the performance - the flicks of the tongue and other mannerisms were great but i think its as much down to the writing as Ledger's performance itself. He'll definitely get an oscar for it. Oh, a final thought, the film ends about three times - a bit like LOTR: Return Of The King; why cant films end these days without 3 or 4 epilogues? 7/10

Hi to everybody....I've just watched the Milos Forman film made in 2006 called 'Goya's Ghost'.
It was a superb study of Spain in the time of Goya and the Spanish Inquisition. It's a tragic film in that the main character played wonderfully by Natalie Portman is the hapless victim of the Inquisition and Javier Bardem as the chief Inquisitor. Stellan Skarsgård plays Goya and everybody gives an outstanding performance.
The story is about her and what happens to her after she is taken into custody and tortured, then charged with the crime of practising Judaism because she wouldn't eat pork in an inn. I won't tell you anymore about the film in order not to spoil it if you do decide to watch it, but there's a lot of the history of Spain at the time going on all around her and Goya.
Hope you do get a chance to see it...it will probably be shown again on Sky Movies at some future date, but isn't on again this week unfortunately...

Morgan Freeman is critically ill after a car crash, a US hospital has confirmed.

A spokesman for the Regional Medical Centre in Memphis, Tennessee, said the 71-year-old The Dark Knight actor's condition was "serious".

Mississippi state troopers told showbiz website TMZ.com that Freeman was involved in the crash at around 11.30pm local time on Sunday (5.30am BST), north of the small town of Ruleville. He was airlifted from the accident scene to the hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, where he is being treated.

An unidentified female passenger was also in the car and her condition was not known.

The hospital, commonly known as The Med, is an acute-care teaching facility which serves patients within 150 miles of Memphis.

Ashley Norris, manager of the Ground Zero Blues Club in Clarksdale, Mississippi, which is owned by Freeman, confirmed the actor was in an accident but said she had no other details.

Clay McFerrin, editor of Sun Sentinel in Charleston, said he arrived at the accident scene on Mississippi Highway 32 soon after it happened about four miles west of Charleston, not far from where Freeman owns a home with his wife.

Mr McFerrin said it appeared that Freeman's car was airborne when it left the highway and landed in a ditch. "They had to use the jaws of life (hydraulic cutters) to extract him from the vehicle," he said. "He was lucid, conscious. He was talking, joking with some of the rescue workers at one point."

Mr McFerrin said bystanders converged on the scene trying to get a glimpse of the actor.

Freeman won an Oscar in 2005 for best performance by an actor in a supporting role for Million Dollar Baby.

Such sad news, hes one of my fav actors, and i just love his voice.

I'd like to open a discussion about credits, specifically related to film editing. Should a film that has been heavily re-cut be credited to the original editor or to the re-editor, or both? I only suggest this discussion should open since film historians are apt to connect to IMDB for their information, much of which could be incorrect. There are many cases in which films have been re-cut by other (uncredited) editors. I have been a film 'doctor' and there must be hundreds of films that have been heavily re-edited by uncredited editors. This also may apply to other grades.

Hi to everybody...Sky Premiere is showing 'Die Hard 4' this week, and, if you haven't seen it, it's a damned good adventure...Bruce Willis and Justin Long team up to beat Gabriel, played by Timothy Oliphant. It's all action and chaos and just a great ride...I've seen all the Die Hards now and this one I think is the best...mind you, I enjoyed them all...and am a fan of Bruce Willis in any case...
Catch it if you can if you haven't already seen it...great big hugs to one and all...

Hi to everybody...watched a film last week on Sky Arts called 'Earth' an Indian film by Deepa Mehta made in 1996 and yet to be shown in India because of the sex in it...If you get a chance to see this film, I can highly recommend it but it's also a tragedy. There are some very graphic scenes in it towards the end, which are truly shocking.
It's a love story interwoven around a little crippled girl who everybody calls Lenny Baby...she has a leg brace on and is about nine or ten. A group of male friends of her Ayah and her parents who are Parsi, look after her and take great care of her. They are of different religions with Moslems, Sikh, Hindu and Parsi....the Ayah has caught the eye of two of the group one a Hindu the other a Moslem. It takes place in 1946/7 when the British left India and partitioned it and created Pakistan for the Moslems. It shows the gradual disintegration of the relationships between the friends and the terrible outcome leaves you terribly saddened and shocked...
It's a beautifully paced film with fine acting and a real little gem, so, if you get a chance to see...do...it's well worth it....great big hugs to one and all...

hi has anyone seen the new film adulthood, i watched it the other day and im so dissapointed, iv got the first one kidulthood on dvd and tht was great, so i was so happy when they advertised th new film, and then when i saw it, it was a let down. it was just dull it wasnt exciting or shocking like the first, its right what they say sequals are never as good as the first.

I am a huge "X-PHILE" i used to love it as a kid and have found myself insanely engrossed int he first season again. Has anyone seen the new movie yet? i havent seen it and was wondering peoples opinions on it? (especially fellow x-philes)

'The Dark Knight' has performed so well at the box office that producers are already working on casting the next instalment of the Batman story, once again to be directed by Christopher Nolan. In a frankly inspired piece of casting it is rumoured that they will be approaching Johnny Depp to play the role of the Riddler and attempt to breathe life into a character hammed to death by Jim Carrey in the truly awful 'Batman Forever'.