Belen Rueda and Edurne Ormazabal will be hosting the opening gala of the 56th San Sebastian Film Festival on Thursday. The gala, that will start at 20.00 in the Kursaal, will take place on a constantly changing stage that will be including some surprises during the show.

The team that made Vicky Cristina Barcelona: Woody Allen, Javier Bardem and Rebecca Hall, will also be at the opening gala.

Source: eitb24

Barcelona Lovers Javier Bardem and Rebecca Hall
The stars of ‘Vicky Cristina Barcelona’ steam up the screen when they’re not channeling Woody Allen’s tragicomic neuroses.

Woody Allen’s latest outing, the sensually sun-drenched Vicky Cristina Barcelona, charmed critics at Cannes with its return to what Woody does best — typically neurotic, upwardly mobile protagonists caught between what they want and what they think they want.

Vicky (Rebecca Hall) has her life all mapped out, down to her impending nuptials with the nebbishy Doug (Chris Messina). Her best friend Cristina, on the other hand, is a restless and nubile wanna-be boho only certain of what she doesn’t want. When the two jet off to Barcelona for their last summer of freedom, they expect to spend a few months resting and enjoying the art of Barcelona. But when the dashing painted Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem) makes them an offer they can’t refuse (no matter how much Vicky might want to), their lives become much more complicated indeed. When Juan’s ex-wife, Maria Elena (Penélope Cruz), shows up on his doorstep fresh from a suicide attempt, things get even more confusing, volatile, and sexy.

Fresh off his Oscar-winning turn in No Country For Old Men, Javier Bardem chats exclusively with Premiere.com about working with Woody, why he is nothing like his sexually direct playboy character, and why you won’t see him as Pablo Escobar any time soon. British stage and TV actress Rebecca Hall, who recently had heads turning for her role opposite Christian Bale in The Prestige, talks about acting opposite Hollywood’s sexiest leading man, why her character fears unleashing her passion, and her upcoming role in Ron Howard’s Oscar-bait Frost/Nixon.

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Javier Bardem remembers the time from his childhood when he realised he was a performer.

“I was playing make-believe like any other kid,” the 39-year-old actor recalled in a phone conversation from his Madrid home. “And there was a moment when something clicked inside that made me aware of myself, that allowed me to watch myself playing from the outside. Up to then play had been unconscious.

“The difference between an actor and anyone else is that awareness of the playing.”

He has been playing ever since, immersing himself in roles so disparate that a casual observer might not realise they’re all done by the same man.

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Vicky Cristina Barcelona was released last friday, here are the box office results!

Opening in just under 700 theaters, Woody Allen’s romantic comedy Vicky Cristina Barcelona (MGM/Weinstein), starring Scarlett Johansson, Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem, rounded out the Top 10 with $3.7 million, becoming Allen’s biggest opening movie since 2000’s Small Time Crooks as well as the second-biggest opening of his 35-year career.

1. Tropic Thunder
2. The Dark Knight
3. Star Wars: The Clone Wars
4. Mirrors
5. Pineapple Express
6. The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
7. Mamma Mia!
8. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2
9. Step Brothers
10. Vicky Cristina Barcelona

The film is now up to $4,699,842 in it’s entire days of release.

Source: ComingSoon.net

Javier has been busy lately, taking a break from his “break” to promote “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” which is being released in the US on August 15, 2008. Here is a mass upload of pictures from premieres and the press conference. He looks great and I believe all the guys will agree is the luckiest man alive standing next to Penelope Cruz and Scarlett Johansson!

Javier Bardem plays the lover, Woody Allen–style.

It’s fitting that Javier Bardem, still enjoying his work-free post-Oscar life, calls us from Barcelona: The city provides the setting for Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, starring Bardem, Penélope Cruz and Scarlett Johansson. In Allen’s latest, Bardem plays a Spanish painter entangled in a love quadrangle with two American women and his ex, played by Cruz.

Javier Bardem may not exactly enjoy doing press, but there was no evidence of any such disdain as the gregarious and cheerful Spanish Oscar winner chatted about his role in the latest Woody Allen-directed, Barcelona-shot romantic comedy “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” - the actor’s first major film since his Oscar-winning turn in “No Country for Old Men”.

Its been quite the rollercoaster ride for the actor, including months of self-promotion in the hope of capturing cinema’s ultimate prize. Looking back, Bardem is pragmatically philosophical. “I’ve said that it was nine months of tension,” Bardem says laughingly in a Beverly Hills hotel room. “I mean it was pleasurable, and I feel truly thankful and honored, really thankful and grateful for the recognition, but I guess when you come to the Oscar night, you come with a lot of things on your back,” the actor recalls. “It was a month of tension - of promoting - of being eight of nine months out of your home, speaking a foreign language, being in No Man’s Land, in the sense of, ‘Where am I?’. So you are like out in space and then everything comes to that very night and when it happens, you feel like a lot of things come to an end. That’s why people get so emotional and that’s why the value of the statue itself is so big, because it represents a lot of things,” he exclaims, sighing deeply. “Six months later you have that golden bald man there, you look at it and what I feel is like, thankful, grateful and lucky that I truly won the lottery, that it was my name and not another actor’s name that was in that envelope because it can’t measure any kind of talent, because the talent of all of those actors there is un-measurable. But I won the lottery,” he says smilingly.

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Unfortunately Javier Bardem is not present at the Cannes Film Festival to promote “Vicky Cristina Barcelona.” I would guess this is because of the reported exhaustion, he probably wants to take time off from the spotlight, which I respect. We now know that Javier’s character is called Juan Antonio. You can view a video clip of the movie here.

Variety offers some quotes of the film and Javier’s performance:

“Vicky Cristina Barcelona” is a sexy, funny divertissement that passes as enjoyably as an idle summer’s afternoon in the titular Spanish city. With Javier Barden starring as a bohemian artist involved variously with Scarlett Johansson, Penelope Cruz and Rebecca Hall, pic offers potent romantic fantasy elements for men and women and a cast that should produce the best commercial returns for a Woody Allen film since “Match Point.”

Even if the film provides a strictly tourist’s view of the city (a perspective justified by the scenario, in fact), and one just as upscale and heedless of money as ever for Allen, “VCB” is by several degrees more hot-blooded than his usual norm, thanks especially due to the palpable chemistry of Bardem and Cruz in the second half.

Looking macho but speaking mostly in a tender, sincere way to his women, Bardem is a thoroughly convincing and likable ladies’ man.