Clooney, Pitt arrive in Venice for film festival

Brad Pitt with family in tow arrives in Venice. — AP pic

VENICE, Aug 27 — George Clooney hosted a charity event last night to raise money for victims in Darfur.

Clooney, who's in Venice for the premiere of the Coen brothers' film "Burn After Reading", swept past reporters as he arrived for the fundraiser for his "Not On Our Watch" charity.

The event was expected to raise US$ million (RM6.6 million), said Manuele Malenotti, the executive director of the Italian clothing company Belstaff, which sponsored the event.

"Not On Our Watch" has raised more than US$7 million to help victims, both of the humanitarian crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan and the cyclone in Myanmar, according to executive director Alex Wagner.

The charity, which was started last year by Clooney, Brad Pitt and some of their "Ocean's Thirteen" colleagues, uses celebrity appeal to bring attention to human rights abuses, but it isn't easy to get even two of the founders together because of filming and family demands, Wagner conceded.

Pitt, who arrived in Venice earlier with sons Maddox and Pax, was expected at the event, but hadn't arrived by the time cocktail hour was over. He also appear in the Coen brothers' film.

"Scheduling is very difficult. Two of them happened to be in Venice at the same time because of the 'Burn After Reading' premiere ... so there was a brainstorming session," Wagner said of the planned joint appearance.

Inside, Clooney was discussing the issues and where the charity puts its money at the fundraising dinner on Venice's Giudecca island, where 200 industry insiders and Italian VIPs were slated to attend, Wagner said.

One recent grant by the group was US$500,000 in March to keep helicopters and airplanes flying aid into Darfur region of Sudan — topping off a US$1 million donation a year earlier for the same programme.

"We sent out a press release one day saying we were on the verge of closing it down and the next day we had US$500,000," said Bettina Luescher, a spokeswoman for the World Food Program at UN headquarters in New York. "They shine the light on the real emergencies and step up where we really need help."

Without that money, Luescher said, the World Food Program had been on the verge of shutting down the air service to Darfur, which brings 3,000 aid workers a month to the stricken region. The UN food charity fed 3.3 million people there last month.

The air service is critical given deteriorating security, which makes road convoys vulnerable. Nearly 100 World Food Programme food trucks have been hijacked this year.

Clooney has spoken for several years about the crisis in Darfur, where more than 200,000 people have been killed and about 2.5 million people displaced in three years of fighting between African rebels and government troops allied with Arab militia known as the "janjaweed".

He went on a UN technical mission including Darfur and neighbouring Chad in January, sharing his impressions with reporters upon his return to draw attention to the crisis. — AP

Venice Film Festival opens with Hollywood flash

Actors George Clooney, right, and Brad Pitt arrive for the premiere of the movie ‘Burn After Reading’. — AP pic

VENICE, Aug 28 — The Venice Film Festival opened last night with the premiere of the Coen brothers' dark comedy "Burn After Reading," giving a flash of Hollywood glamour to a festival lineup with a definite art house feel.

The 21 films competing for the coveted Golden Lion at the festival, which runs through to Sept 6, will provide a snapshot of world cinema, with entries from Ethiopia, Turkey, Algeria and a Brazilian-Chinese production.

While the lineup gives the impression of being light on celebrity-driven Hollywood fare — due both to the impact of last year's writers' strike and a late selection process for Cannes' springtime festival — festival director Marco Mueller said US films are well represented.

"This is the second time — and it is a record for the history of the festival — we have five American films in competition," Mueller said, emphasising that selections aren't based on any national criteria. "The festival is not an atlas of nations."

"Burn After Reading," starring George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Frances McDormand and Tilda Swinton, is among another five American films being shown out of competition.

The first US film vying for the Golden Lion is Guillermo Arriaga's "The Burning Plain," starring Charlize Theron and Kim Basinger as a mother and daughter trying to forge a bond. The writer of "21 Grams" is making his debut as director.

Darren Aronofsky will present "The Wrestler," starring Mickey Rourke as a wrestler forced into retirement who strikes up a romance with an ageing stripper played by Marisa Tomei. Jonathan Demme will be showing his "Rachel Getting Married" starring Anne Hathaway as a daughter whose return home for her sister's wedding brings out old tensions.

Kathryn Bigelow is bringing "The Hurt Locker," an Iraq war drama portraying soldiers who defuse bombs in the heat of war. Also among the US entries is Iranian-born Amir Naderi's "Vegas: Based on a True Story," about the family life of a compulsive gambler.

Pitt picked up an award yesterday that he won last year — the best actor's prize for "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford."

"You can run but you can't hide," Pitt joked as he accepted the award during the opening ceremony. "It was an honour to receive this last year and it remains an honour to accept this this year."

German filmmaker Wim Wenders, whose credits include "Paris, Texas" and "Buena Vista Social Club," is heading this year's jury.

"We will see 21 films and I hope — and I have a lot of confidence in Marco — that we will see 21 films that will give us the state of art of what is cinema today," Wenders said.

"Burn After Reading" is Clooney's third film with the Coen brothers — completing what he called "his trilogy of idiots" after "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" and "Intolerable Cruelty."

Pitt and McDormand play a pair of hapless gym employees who get in way over their heads when the memoirs of a failed CIA analyst, played by John Malkovich, fall into their hands and they try to peddle them as classified intelligence. Clooney plays a hypochondriac philanderer having an affair with the CIA analyst's disappointed wife, played by Swinton.

"We started writing the movie as kind of an exercise, thinking of what kind of parts these actors might play, what kind of story they might inhabit," Ethan Coen told a news conference.

The film is set within a spy story for no other reason than "we hadn't done one before," Joel Coen told reporters.

"It could have been a dog movie or an outer space movie. We just kind of landed on a spy movie," he said. — AP