Nicole Kidman and Orlando Bloom have been voted the sexiest imports in the US. The Australian actress and her UK co-winner were named the hottest foreign actors working in the US in the annual "What's Sexy Now" readers' poll by US celebrity magazine In-Style. [More]

V for Vendetta, originally slated to open on Nov. 4, has been pushed back to next March, a Warner Brothers spokesperson told SCI FI Wire. In a statement, Warner said: "We have moved the release date of V For Vendetta to March 17, 2006, to accommodate the movie's post-production schedule." [More]

The stars of the hugely successful TV drama Lost gathered Tuesday night in a tropical jungle on Oahu's Turtle Bay Resort to herald the Sept. 6 release of the ABC series' first season on DVD. The setting of the party, thrown by Buena Vista Home Entertainment, was a re-creation of the plane crash that started the series. Having already "survived" that crash of the fictitious Oceanic Airlines Flight 815, the cast arrived to the tiki lamp-lit party in grand style. [More]

The Powerhouse Museum has learnt from the small towns across New Zealand that spruik their tiny part in the Lord of the Rings trilogy in order to drum up business. The Lord of the Rings: The Exhibition was the most popular paid exhibition the museum has ever held, with more than 198,000 people visiting during its three-month season. "During its run at the museum, we also recorded our highest-ever paid admissions day with more than 4100 visitors to the exhibition over one day in January," a museum spokeswoman says. [More]

From UTV: Big screen names Richard E Grant, Gabriel Byrne, Julie Walters and Elijah Wood are among those expected to grace the red carpets at some of the festival`s numerous screenings. Twelve world premieres and more than 50 UK premieres will be shown at locations throughout the city as part of the extravaganza. The launch of the film festival marks the start of what is probably Edinburgh`s busiest period during the whole festival season, coinciding as it does with the ongoing runs of the book, international and Fringe festivals. [More]

A repeat airing of Cate Blanchett on 'The Ellen Degeneres Show' will air today. Check your local listings for channel and times.

Jincey has posted the schedule for the 2005 Dragon*Con. Special guests will be John Noble (Denethor), Bruce Hopkins (Gamling), and the production crew of Ringers: Lord of the Fans! See the schedule [Here]

Hall of Fire discussions resumes this Sunday August 21 with The Silmarillion, with Chapter 11: Of the Sun and the Moon and the Hiding of the Valinor. Following the events of the kinslaying, The Silmarillion leaves the divided and scattered elvish communities, and returns to the plight of the Valar in the aftermath of the loss of the trees of light.

We ponder Tolkien’s myth-like explanation of the Middle-earth cosmos. Does it fit with your conception of Middle-earth, or does it seem contrived? How is it similar to human myths handed down from time immemorial? And how is it different? What is the reasoning and significance of the choices of Tilion and Arien as the bearers of light? [More]

Today Elijah Wood's film 'Sin City' is out on DVD. Amazon.com calls it 'Brutal and breathtaking, Sin City is Robert Rodriguez's stunningly realized vision of Frank Miller's pulpy comic books... [More]

Sûlien writes: Just thought you folks at TOR.n might want to know that Toyota has apparently adopted the Watcher in the Water for their new ad. Here's the link to view it, it's quite funny! (3MB MPEG download!) [More]

It might be a scene out of a Cinemax movie: A proper English wife succumbs to her desires and makes mad love to the burly worker in the greenhouse. But in ``Asylum,'' opening Friday, the woman in question is a doctor's wife and the worker is an inmate in a British psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane. For Marton Csokas, the film's hulking six-foot-three-inch tall Edgar Stark, an artist who murdered his wife in a jealous rage, making love to such beautiful women as ``Asylum'' heroine Natasha Richardson's Stella is a familiar day's work. [More]

More than 70 delegates from around the world have gathered at Aston University for Tolkien 2005, according to The Guardian. The events include a lecture from Professor Tom Shippey, hobbit dances, evening performances, and more. Read about Tolkien in the Land of Heroes to find out more about the mythology in Tolkien's works, and discover the biography of Tolkien with J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. [More]

When devotees of 'Lord of the Rings' re-watch the fantasy movies, many do their level best to forget the story and convince themselves they are seeing them for the first time, according to the biggest ever study of its kind, sponsored by the ESRC. 'Not knowing' the plot or the ending means they can experience as much of the full emotions and tension as possible and their pleasure is increased, says Professor Martin Barker of the University of Wales, who led the research over 15 months and in 20 countries. He found that movies such as 'Lord of the Rings III', on which the project was focussed, are not just an escape, but for many of us a place to work out a bit what might be wrong with the world. And they are more important and enjoyable to those who work in jobs where they feel they have little control over their lives. [More]

Oscar winner Jon Voight has replaced Ian Holm in the CBS miniseries about Pope John Paul II. The four-hour miniseries, working under the straightforward title "Pope John Paul II," has begun production in Krakow, Poland, and will later shoot in Vatican City. The film has also expanded its cast, adding Oscar and Emmy nominee James Cromwell. [More]

Karl Urban is in negotiations to star in "Pathfinder," a Viking epic being made by Phoenix Pictures and helmer Marcus Nispel. 20th Century Fox is distributing. "Pathfinder" is a remake of the 1987 Norwegian film by helmer Nils Gaup to which Phoenix acquired the rights to in 2001. While the original followed Norway's warlike clans around the year 1000 A.D., the new version, with a script by screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis ("Alexander"), is set in North America around the same time, when Vikings inadvertently discovered the continent 500 years before Columbus. [More]

Eien writes: CNN's Entertainment section has a small gallery talking about the ways technology has advanced movie making. It mentions MASSIVE and motion capture used for Gollum. [More]

Pippin Skywalker writes: Hello my dear hobbits, elf-friends, and all free peoples if Middle Earth! I am pleased to announce that I have managed to step out of the comfort and delight of my little hobbit hole to depart on another extraordinary adventure. Here I will tell you of my adventures and experiences in Oxford in this special year of 2005, which, quite coincidentally, is both the 75th anniversary of C.S. Lewis and the 50th anniversary of the publication of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. [More]

Celebriel writes: "Get off the road!" said Frodo. And into the Presidio Theatre, he might have added. This Thursday, August 18, from 11AM to midnight, SF Trilogy is hosting a benefit performance of everyone's favorite trilogy to raise funds for Cure Autism Now. Join us for all three films, door prizes, raffles, and our costume contest, which will be judged by award winning costumers Kathe and Philip Guste. Additional programming includes short subjects The Fellowship of the Bags and Lord of the Beans. [More]

A few years ago in this newspaper, Billy Boyd was named Scotland's Most Eligible Bachelor. Without any disrespect to the friendly, unassuming scruff before me, it's difficult to imagine him being crowned top tartan tottie prior to the release of The Lord of the Rings. But for the Glaswegian actor, Peter Jackson's Oscar-scooping trilogy changed everything. As well as sending him to the other side of the world for 18 months, Boyd's role as Pippin the hobbit has made him a pin-up for fantasy fans around the world, whose fascination with what he eats, drinks, reads, says, wears, watches and listens to shows no sign of abating. [More]

Why U ought to know him: The son of a New Zealand mother and Hungarian father, the darkly handsome Csokas (pronounced CHO-kas) is opening eyes these days for his steamy love scenes with Natasha Richardson in the psychological thriller "Asylum," which came out Friday. In the film, Csokas plays Edgar, an inmate at a mental institute in 1950s England who's been put away for killing and disfiguring his wife. But the onetime sculptor has made progress and is allowed to help out at the house of one of the resident psychiatrists (Hugh Bonneville) where he catches the eye of his lonely wife (Richardson). Then things get complicated. [More]

Elijah Wood has mercifully avoided one of Hollywood’s deepest elephant traps: once a child star, these days he is addicted to nothing more serious than coffee and cigarettes. Now the young actor needs to negotiate his way round another trap: the typecasting and obscurity that is so often the flip side of overwhelming early fame, in his case the enormous success of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Yet Wood insists he never worried that he might not escape that particular Hollywood Mordor. “My theory was always that if I continued to work and put myself in roles that were different from Lord of the Rings, people would remember I was not just Frodo, but had been in a lot of other things as well,” he says. [More]

Vintage writes: 'El sueño de una noche de San Juan' is the name of an animated Spanish film now being dubbed into English for a wider release. The story is based on Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night’s Dream, although (director) Ángel de la Cruz stresses it’s not an adaptation. “We saw our story as a sequel. We asked ourselves: ‘What would happen to the elves and fairies 400 years later in our globalised, consumerist world?'" Bernard Hill voices Theseus, while Billy Boyd is cast as Puck. [More]

Through the Middle-lands their journey took them, to the blasted place in the shadow of Mount Doom known to Elves as the Black Country. The haunt of Men, workers of great engines of smoke and fire and speakers of a tongue so strange as to be known only to the likes of Clare the Short and Frank the Skinner. And there they spoke of the Ring, and of orcs and wizards and hobbits, and of whether Mordor should be pronounced Mordor, as it always had been, or Mawdaw!, in that startled, Scottish way preferred by Sir Ian McKellen. [More]

Peter Jackson's restored version of the only film taken of the Anzacs at Gallipoli in 1915 will have its New Zealand premiere at a documentary film festival in Auckland and Wellington next month. The film Heroes of Gallipoli screens at the DOCNZ Documentary Film Festival in Auckland from September 15 and in Wellington from September 29. Jackson, a World War I buff, approached the Australian War Memorial two years ago to see if technology developed by Weta Digital could be used to restore archival film. [More]

The name is Hungarian. The man is from New Zealand. But lately Marton Csokas is a self-proclaimed gypsy, since he's been shooting near-constantly since 2001, when his career surged, thanks to a little movie from Down Under called "Rain," in which he played a drifter who's dabbling with both a lovely lady and her curious 13-year-old daughter. Csokas' penetrating stare and abundant talent have landed the former soap star roles in a stream of blockbusters — "The Lord of the Rings," "Star Wars: Episode II," "XXX," "Kingdom of Heaven, " the upcoming "Aeon Flux". [More]

Joe Utichi, Editor for FilmFocus.Co.UK writes: We had a chat on the phone with Richard Taylor the other day about just about everything Weta is working on and I thought you and your readers might be interested in it. [More]

Massive Software today announced Massive Jet, a new autonomous agent 3D animation application that enables the creation of large-scale, believable digital crowd shots "out of the box" with high quality and a low learning curve. A full-functioning package priced under $6K USD, Massive Jet leverages the company's Academy Award-winning artificial life-based technology, pre-built Ready-to-Run Agent library and GPU-accelerated rendering support to allow animators and artists at any facility to quickly and easily produce highly realistic Massive scenes. [More]

From gamespot.com: The Academy Award-winning Lord of the Rings motion pictures made novelist J.R.R. Tolkien's classic fantasy novels live again on the big screen. Last year, the team responsible for Command & Conquer: Generals brought the fantasy movies home in the form of an epic real-time strategy game. The team is now back working on a sequel, Battle for Middle-earth II, which will be built out with the full library of lore offered by Tolkien's novels now that publisher EA has secured the rights to the books to go with its movie license. In plain English, this means bigger fortresses, bigger battles, and more spectacular effects. [More]

This is not the place to expect a sighting of Viggo Mortensen, the star of “The Lord of the Rings.” Or at least it wasn't when President Bush began his annual vacation here earlier this month. But something has happened to Crawford over the last week. The sleepy summer air has been punctured by a blast of anti-war energy, with carloads of activists appearing every afternoon to join a steady vigil begun by the mother of a soldier who died in Iraq. [More]

Elvish singing ripples across the reception at Aston University, where 700 delegates from around the world have gathered for Tolkien 2005, a four-day conference to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the full publication of The Lord of the Rings. The singing comes from the substantial figure of Mole - Paul Smith in the normal world - who crams into his days a full-time job, semi-professional church singing, a "personal attachment" to Tolkien's leading dwarf Gimli and regular attendance at Discworld conventions. [More]

The latest newsletter is ready to go! Do you want to receive our free weekly newsletter? Packed with tons of info to keep you up to date on the latest? Plus filled with exclusives from time to time! Join the crowd of over 18 500 mailing list members! Sign up now! [More]

Sarah writes: To support the release of Alan Lee’s brand new project, The Lord of the Rings Sketchbook, Alan will be signing copies at these exclusive pre-publication events this month even though the book is not officially go on sale nationwide until 5th September. Alan will also be at Tolkien 2005 at Aston University from 11-12.30 today (August 13th). Click here for more dates and times. [More]

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Schleswig-Holstein Festival in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany will be the venu tonight (August 13th) for the LOTR symphony performed by the NDR Philharmonie. Be sure to click here for more concert dates and locations. [More]

After a short hiatus, Hall of Fire discussions resumes with The Silmarillion, with Chapter 11: Of the Sun and the Moon and the Hiding of the Valinor. Following the events of the kinslaying, The Silmarillion leaves the divided and scattered elvish communities, and returns to the plight of the Valar in the aftermath of the loss of the trees of light. [More]