Appropriately, Stallone has gone Rambo yet again with the making of this fourth instalment in his popular action-hero series, charging headfirst into the roles of writer, director and star of the film, not to mention dragging hundreds of cast and crew members into the steaming jungles of Myanmar (formerly Burma) with the objective of setting as many things on fire as possible.

The result is a movie that, on one hand, boasts tons of solid action sequences, but on the other hand includes a script that sounds very much like it was written not just by Rambo, but Rambo after a heavy meal, a round of steroids and a few tokes of something else.

Take the following:

“We believe all lives are special,” says Christian missionary Sarah (Julie Benz, of Dexter), in an effort to convince Rambo to take her, her sissy hubby and the rest of their gang up the river to help the citizens of Karen, who are being tortured by the Burmese military.

“Trying to save a life isn’t wasting your life … is it?” Sarah adds, rambling on about how the world needs him.

His response?

“F*** the world.” Cue close-up of Stallone’s meaty, 61-year-old lower lip…aaand cut.

Wicked.

It’s the kind of dialogue that must be accepted with bandana-clad irony, the kind that has so little substance or value it just goes straight through the audience’s system without any need for digestion, like the screenplay equivalent of a Twinkie.

This can be a good thing, however, as it allows for the action to take centre stage.

The predominant theme here is decapitation: At least 80 per cent of the characters who die get their heads blown off by a grenade, shot off by a machine gun or chopped off by a knife. One of the best sequences, in a slight variation on this theme, involves a villain getting shot through the face with an arrow, then tripping and falling onto a land mine before exploding in a mess of blood, guts and swampy stuff.

Right after this transpires, one of the mercenaries who’s turned up on the scene looks over at Rambo and, in a whisper, says, “Who are you, boatman?”

The answer, as fans will know, is John Rambo, a Vietnam War veteran with a chip on his shoulder and a thousand-mile stare, who may be puttering around in river boats and cursing the world now but has spent the past few decades running between Bangkok and Afghanistan, kicking ass, looking tough and generally putting the hard in hardcore.

After decades of this, he’s actually in pretty decent shape. It’s hard to tell if there’s been any dalliances with tanning beds or Botox injections, but regardless, there’s a lot of muscle under that strategically tattered shirt and he appears to be able to jump, kick, dive and roll just as readily as the twentysomethings alongside him.

Artistically, Stallone isn’t quite up there with the likes of Francis Ford Coppola, but there are nods to Apocalypse Now with, for example, the shot of a burning landscape reflected in Major Tint’s aviators, or that of the billowing clouds of red smoke emerging quietly from the windows of a mess hall.

Speaking of mess, this is what the film turns into by the last half hour. The entire cast, it seems, is running around, shooting at everyone and everything, bamboo stretchers are miraculously constructed in 10 seconds or less and Rambo, in a last-ditch attempt at something poetic, is uttering ultimatums like, “Live for nothing, or die for something.”

But, in a way, it’s an organized mess, and once all the baddies have been killed off, we know it’s time for the good guys to wrap things up with some weary hugs and a let’s-go-home montage. In fact, this is probably what audiences will be doing, too, because as fun as Rambo may be, there comes a time when the bandana just needs to come off.

Rambo

Forest Glade, Lakeshore, Palace, SilverCity

(18A)

Rating: Two stars out of five

Both Tia Lessin and Carl Deal’s Trouble the Water, which won the documentary Grand Jury prize, and Courtney Hunt’s Frozen River, which won the dramatic Grand Jury prize, are small, personal films that reel back independent filmmaking’s more recent, polished and well-financed art-house star vehicles to the early days of Sundance social realism, where women, blacks and native Americans have to walk a tightrope to survive.

Trouble the Water mixes home-video footage shot by New Orleans wannabe rapper Kim Roberts in the days leading up to Katrina and into the teeth of the storm with footage from co-directors Lessin and Deal of Roberts and her husband’s return a year later.

Frozen River plays out in the failing economy of upstate New York as a stand-in for small-town USA, and tells a story of two women, one white working class the other Native American, sneaking illegal aliens in from Canada who want a piece of the very American Dream that has collapsed for their smugglers. Sony Pictures Classics picked up the film at the festival for release in the USA.

Many of the films that took home awards from the American and World juries Saturday night flew under the radar of buzz. They were not, for the most part, the films talked about by the industry pros and critics, who were largely underwhelmed at the vintage.

The competition also sandbagged films with recognizable stars, with the exception of a special jury prized given to the ensemble cast of Sam Rockwell, Anjelica Huston, Kelly MacDonald and Brad Henke in Choke, director Clark Gregg’s adaptation of Chuck (Fight Club) Palahniuk’s novel.

Filmgoers also get a vote at this festival, and audience awards went to Josh Tickell’s documentary Fields of Fuel, which travels the arc of U.S. oil dependence from Rockefeller to Iraq; and to Jonathan Levine’s fictional The Wackness, a love-it or hate-it film with a wild and woolly Ben Kingsley exchanging therapy sessions with high school grad Josh Peck for pot. Sony Pictures Classics is said to be close to a deal for the film.

Said Levine: “I just accepted an award from William H. Macy in a cowboy hat. That is so (expletive) weird.”

As for other winners in the American competition, Nanette Burstein (2002’s The Kid Stays in the Picture) won best documentary director for American Teen, which waves together the stories of four throwback archetypal seniors in the all-white, all-middle class 2006 graduating class in Warsaw, Ind. Paramount Vantage paid a reported $1 million for the film.

Novice director Lance Hammer was named best dramatic film director for Ballast, an artfully shot story in the Mississippi Delta about a fractured family stumbling its way forward after the suicide of the family head. Lol Crawley also won the best cinematography award for his muted greens and grays in a year that was haunted by stories filmed in desaturated monotone color palettes.

Sleep Dealer writer/director Alex Rivera and co-writer David Riker won the screenwriting award for their sci-fi story about agua profiteers, terrorist cells and the Internet, set in the near future in Mexico. The film also won the $20,000 Alfred P. Sloan prize for films with a scientific theme or characters.

Director Steven Sebring and cameraman Philip Hunt won best documentary cinematography for their dreamscape collage of color and black-and-white images in Patti Smith: Dream of Life, about the ’70s New York underground poet-punk rocker.

Documentary editing went to Joe Bini for Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired.

The festival also handed out awards to overseas films, including best documentary to British director James Marsh’s Man on Wire, a breathtaking minute-by-minute account of French daredevil Philippe Petit’s August 1974 high-wire walk at the top of the World Trade Center. The film also won the World Audience Award. “I saw the towers born, I married them with my wire, and I saw them die,” Petit said, after a late-week screening “And when they died, it pulled out something alive inside me.”

Jordanian director Amin Matalqa’s Captain Abu Raed, about an Amman airport janitor posturing as a pilot to all the neighborhood urchins, won the best world fiction award. It’s the first feature film to come out of Jordan in half a century.

And Swedish commercials director Jens Jonsson’s first feature, King of Ping Pong, about a dysfunctional family, was named best world dramatic film and won the foreign documentary cinematography award.

Other World awards:

Documentary directing: Nino Kirtadze (France) for Durako: Village of Fools

Dramatic directing: Anna Melikyan (Russia) for Mermaid

Screenwriting: Samuel Benchetrit (France) for I Always Wanted to Be a Gangster, which premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland last August.

More special jury prizes went to Lisa F. Jackson for Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, Ernesto Contreras for Blue Eyelids and Chusy Haney-Jardine for Anywhere, USA.

The film’s directors, Barnaby Thompson, who acquired the studios seven years ago, and Oliver Parker, who directed the first Ealing movie in almost 50 years with The Importance of Being Earnest in 2000, have been keen to bolster the star power with names including Rupert Everett, Colin Firth, Russell Brand, Stephen Fry and Girls Aloud. Barton plays J. J. French, a former head girl who has moved to the US and prospered in the media world, before returning to St Trinian’s to help the girls in their bid to save the school. “The idea is that J. J. went into PR and became very sassy and quite ruthless,” she says. “She gives the girls some advice, and it turns into a bit of a treatise on pop culture as she decides to teach them all the tricks of her business.

“It is supposed to be rife with funny clichés. I don’t want to give too much away, but let’s just say that it hones in on the superficiality of the business, and all the silliness. I was considering playing one of the main characters in the film. But it didn’t work out and Barnaby wrote the cameo for me,” Barton says.

“I was originally talking to Barnaby about playing Annabelle, the lead girl, but then this is a very English film,” adds the 21-year-old actress.

“My family’s English, I have seen the films, and I thought that they meant a lot to a lot of people, so it just seemed more appropriate to come in and do a cameo role, rather than play an established British character that people really love.”

She may speak with an American accent, but Barton was born in the UK to an Irish mother and English father. She has fond memories of growing up in London, moving to New York with her parents and two sisters, Hania and Zoë, when she was six years old. Yesterday, she donned a St Trinian’s uniform for a photo-shoot and, she chuckles, it took her back to her childhood.

After breaking into theatre when she was 9 – co-starring in the off-Broadway production of Tony Kushner’s Slavs! – Barton is inured to the silliness and superficiality of show-business. And as soon as she was cast as the troubled belle Marissa Cooper in The OC, which ran from 2003 until this year, Barton became a pop-cul-ture icon and tabloid favourite.

“After we finished the first season of The OC I started running into paparazzi all over the place,” she laughs. “And I became popular with the tabloids, so I knew straight away that I’d need to make a few changes in my life.”

These involve keeping a lower profile when she and her friends venture out for the evening. “The media is so quick to pick up on things, so you can’t go around dancing on tables and drawing lots of attention to yourself. If you do anything, they will try and paint as you this wild party girl. That really isn’t me.”

Did she have a St Trinian’s-style schooling? “When I was at school I wasn’t out all the time. Maybe I wasn’t quite head girl material, but I worked hard. Because I was working as an actress, there was always that sense of a normal schooling being taken away from you. Since then I’ve always kept things very focused on my family and my career.”

That career has spanned more than half her life. She was offered modelling work when she was only 11 years old, shooting a campaign for Calvin Klein jeans, she made her film debut in Lawn Dogs (1997), and appeared in The Sixth Sense and Notting Hillin her early teens. It was The OC, however, that propelled her to stardom. Following her departure after the third season last year, the show’s ratings tumbled; it ran for only one more season.

“Of course I’m grateful to The OC,” she says. “It has opened up a lot for me. Ever since I did that first off-Broadway play I knew that acting is what I wanted to do with my life.”

She’s happy to deal with the media pressure. “You read about all these different guys that you are supposed to be dating, while really I’ve only had a couple of boyfriends in my entire life.”

Last year the gossip press tracked Barton’s romance with rocker Cisco Adler from the band Whitestarr. Before that she dated Brandon Davis, the oil heir and former MTV star. She will not be drawn on any current romances, but does admit that she is always “very careful”.

“I’m not one of those girls who likes bad boys who are going to treat them badly, and I’m also not sure about dating another actor. I can’t remember meeting any actor and thinking that I must get him to take an interest in me. I also have to spend far too long looking in the mirror, so it wouldn’t be a good idea to share my life with a man who has to care about his looks, too!”

Anyway, she says she has been too busy of late. She has recently finished filming the dramas You and I (Finding tATu), Don’t Fade Away, and the comedy Assassination of a High School President, in which she stars alongside Bruce Willis. Her next project, Malice in Sunderland, is, as the title suggests, set in the UK.

“It’s been great coming back to England,” she says. “I still have family here. My dad’s with me today on the St Trinian’s set and I’m sure people will like the new version.”

And she has a good idea what it is about the films that people like: “Looking at the older girls, they are really sexy,” she says smiling naughtily. “I was watching them strutting around, and we all know how boys feel about girls in school uniforms.”

And speaking of Toronto After Dark, Alone is screening there in about … oh, two hours or so. If you rush, you can make it.

Over the past year the one-time Mouseketeer shaved her head, spent time in rehab, went through an ugly divorce, lost custody of her children and attacked a photographer’s car.

And in an odd habit yielding endless tabloid references to the title of her biggest album — “Oops!… I Did It Again” — she kept getting photographed without her underwear.

Now Spears is hoping that the release of “Blackout,” her first studio album in four years on October 30, will revive her reputation. The album has already produced “Gimme More,” which topped U.S. digital charts and critics expect a hit.

But some critics who have heard her latest opus say the album’s likely success has little to with her abilities and more to do with the producers.

The New York Daily News noted all the “studio trickery” made her sound like a “Brit-Bot” machine.

“If a blow-up sex doll could sing, this is what she’d sound like,” wrote Jim Farber. “In terms of studio trickery, Paris Hilton’s album was practically ‘unplugged’ compared to this.”

“How wonderful it is that, in the world of slick pop, even if stars can’t deliver, the machine behind them still can,” he said, adding that her personal woes don’t mean “Britney Spears can’t turn up on some slammin’ new songs.”

The film brings together what at first seem three separate story lines, playing out simultaneously, to look at the sacrifice of U.S. soldiers, the relationship between politics and the media, and the need for young Americans to take a stand.

The first strand has an up-and-coming Republican senator, played by Cruise, trying to sell an “exclusive” over Washington’s new strategy in the war in Afghanistan to a television journalist, interpreted by Meryl Streep.

Meanwhile in California, Redford is a university professor confronting a gifted but lazy student to shake him out of political apathy.

Thousands of miles away, in Afghanistan, two U.S. soldiers who used to be Redford’s students are part of a small advance group sent out into the mountains to fight the Taliban.

Presenting his film in Rome on Tuesday, Redford, who returned to the director’s seat after a seven year break, was candid about his views but said “Lions for Lambs” did not attempt to give answers and only raised questions.

“Our country has hit a point where we have lost so much — we have lost lives, we have lost sacred freedoms, we have lost financial stability, we’ve lost our position of respect on the world stage.”

“For me the film is about the effect and the consequences of the last several years in my country and how that plays out in the area of the media, education and politics,” he told reporters.

If the guards had caught anyone taping the film they could have kicked the patron out of the theatre. But getting a court conviction would have been tough, requiring proof of the pirate’s intent to sell the recorded film.

This year, things are different.

As the Toronto film festival unspools this week, anyone caught just recording a movie without permission can be charged with a criminal offence, punishable by two years in jail. Taping copyrighted material to later sell or rent it can carry a sentence of up to five years.

Covert operations like night-vision goggles might seem a little extreme to some, but consider that Hollywood says it loses around $6 billion each year from piracy, and blames about half of that on camcorder recordings.

Ottawa moved swiftly this summer to get an anti-camcording law on the books. Bill C-59, which gained royal assent June 22, amends the Criminal Code to make recording a movie without permission a crime.

It was a visit from California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had said Montreal has a reputation for being the video piracy capital of North America, that prompted Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the federal government to get going on film piracy legislation. Before that, it was hardly on Ottawa’s radar.

For organizers of the Toronto film festival, the issue has been a constant concern, said Natalie Lue, director of operations and theatres.

The festival has put in place “stringent policies, procedures and protocol” that staff, participants and volunteers must comply with, Lue said.

Among other things, the festival posts signs stating that camcorders and recording devices are forbidden. The festival has also run brief reminders before select films to discourage piracy.

The policies got the thumbs-up from the Motion Picture Association of America, which represents Hollywood’s major studios, as well as from the Canadian Motion Picture Distributors Association, helping ease any potential tension between festival organizers and distributors.

Still, the stakes are high for pre-release titles, especially when they feature marquee celebrities like Brad Pitt in “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” and “Margot at the Wedding,” which stars Nicole Kidman and Jack Black.

A movie pirated before its official release date could quickly appear on the Internet and show up for sale on DVD for pocket change on streets around the world.

“In general, film festivals are a big source of this kind of piracy,” said Paul Hoffert, a fine arts professor at York University and a longtime observer of film piracy trends.

“Instead of a (single) theatre where you have access to a few films in a week, you have theatres that have access to a hundred films in one week.”

The Toronto festival will be screening 349 films from 55 countries before it wraps up Sept. 15, offering a buffet of cinema that will appeal to tastes for every genre in languages from around the world.

Keeping all of that content secure might seem like mission impossible, but in the past the festival has risen to the challenge.

Lou said there haven’t been any pirated titles traced back to a Toronto film festival screening.

“Our record is very good, and I think it’s a combination of us being aware and alert, and our audience, which are supporters of film,” she said.

“They are here to encourage the experience and the industry - not to bring it down.”

Well, you might ask what exactly did Amrita Rao do to warrant emulation by Sneha.

The answer is Ms Rao acted in Telugu film, ‘Athidi’, in the company of superstar Mahesh Babu . It has become a smashing hit.

Obviously, Sneha has followed suit by hopping over to Tollywood to do a film, which is yet to be titled.

Sneha made her Bollywood debut by playing macho hero Salman Khan ’s female interest in Hindi film, Lucky – No Time For Love .

Why Tollywood is preferred by Bollywood heroines? The reason is very simple. The remuneration is better than in other southern states.

Well, here is hoping that Sneha’s southern sojourn will prove as fruitful as Amrita Rao’s did.

Asked what role he would have in the Allen feature, to be shot this summer in Barcelona, Bardem said “It’s something of a secret. It’s (Allen’s) philosophy and the way he works.”

Bardem was nominated for an Oscar in the 2000 feature “Before Night Falls” and had the starring role in Alejandro Amenabar’s 2004 Oscar-winning “The Sea Inside”

“I can’t talk about almost any of it but Woody Allen works via improvisation in many respects. The script I have read will be open, I imagine, to many changes,” he told the newspaper in an interview.
Reuters Pictures
Photo

Editors Choice: Best pictures
from the last 24 hours.
View Slideshow

“I like the creation of characters .. and of different ways of seeing life, but Woody Allen forces you to go back to the beginning in a way, to tell a story. At the moment that appeals to me a lot,” he added.

Bardem has recently finishing working with Mike Newell in “Love in the Time of Cholera” as well as with the Coen brothers in “No Country for Old Men.”

Much of Bardem and Cruz’s professional reputations were built starring opposite each other in Bigas Luna’s 1992 “Jamon Jamon”, a funny, sexy and very Spanish drama.

Allen has shot two of his last features in London — “Match Point” and “Scoop” — and announced some time ago that he would film in Barcelona, without giving further details.

His latest film, “Cassandra’s Dream”, starring Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell, will be released later this year.