'Rings' trilogy gets revalued second to top

The movie trilogy The Lord Of The Rings, being filmed in New Zealand, will cost $623 million to make - about $263 million more than previously reported, according to the American magazine Vanity Fair.

The budget blowout, if correct, would make the trilogy the second-most expensive movie production ever, after the three new Star Wars films, which cost about $736 million.

Rings production company, Three Foot Six, did not respond to requests to confirm the Vanity Fair story.

The magazine's October issue features several photographs of the Rings stars in costume, including Liv Tyler and Sir Ian McKellen.

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New Zealand director Felicity Morgan-Rhind's film Donuts for Breakfast will screen at the New York Film Festival.

It was one of only 11 short films chosen from more than 500 submissions to screen at the September 22-October 9 festival, and one of only three New Zealand short films ever to be invited to it.

Festival director Richard Pena had described the film as being "imbued with the colourful mannerisms found in edgy shorts from New Zealand, but this one dishes out a stinging note of uncomfortable honesty."

The film screened this year at the Auckland and Melbourne film festivals.

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Shooting has finished on the next instalment of the Star Wars epic, but fans should not expect to see the movie in theatres any time soon.

The sophisticated special effects needed for the film means that the producers are planning to shoot an entire computer-generated version to be meshed in with the live action shots.

The all-digital film will be the second of three planned prequels and is expected to debut in the summer of 2002, producer Rick McCollum said. The live action shots took place in Tunisia, Australia and England.

The as-yet-unnamed movie is set about a decade after The Phantom Menace and traces the developing relationship between young Jedi Anakin Skywalker, played by Hayden Christensen, and Queen Amidala, portrayed by Natalie Portman.

Superheroes have become Hollywood's hottest commodity as the usual stars have failed to excite the box office in the past few months.

Hoping to build on the success of films like X-Men, studios are now planning a movie based on the 1960s comic book hero Iron Man.

Other comic-inspired movies in production include a Superman revival, a Spiderman epic, a Batman sequel and a film called Ghost Rider, featuring a motorbike rider with a flaming skull for a head.

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Call it suspension of disbelief: Jean Claude Van Damme, the Muscles from Brussels, plays a bearded, Hasidic Jew in a scene from his latest action movie, The Order, filming now in Jerusalem.

The movie's American director, Sheldon Lettich, says the film is a thriller in which Van Damme plays a roguish art thief who goes on a search for his archaeologist father, missing in the Holy Land. During his hunt for his dad, Van Damme's character disguises himself as a black-garbed Hasidic Jew to give the bad guys the slip.

- NZPA