MILLA JOVOVICH and SHARON OSBOURNE are set to head to Haiti after bidding $25,000 (Ј16,600) at a charity auction to visit a school built after the devastating 2010 earthquake.

The Artists for Peace and Justice organisation, which has Ben Stiller, moviemaker Paul Haggis and Olivia Wilde on the board of directors, has helped raise funds for the nation in the wake of last year’s (10) disaster.

Volunteers have worked tirelessly to build a school in Haiti, and the charity bosses donated a trip to the site as part of a fundraiser in Los Angeles on Thursday (13Jan11).

Producer Ryan Kavanaugh teamed up with organisers to offer a flight on his plane to anyone who bid $25,000 for the trip – and the elite audience flocked to win the prize.

Five people offered up the cash for the trip, including Jovovich and Osbourne, reports the New York Daily News.

Haggis was also honoured for his dedicated work for the organisation at the benefit.

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•Public apperances > apperances 2011 > 68th Annual Golden Globe Awards on January 16

There’s two types of video game movie. The first kind has complete and utter disregard for the source material to the point that fans can comfortably ignore its existence.

Then there’s the other kind; the video game movie that sits in between the creatively negligent film and the oh-so-rare excellent game adaptation.

The one which – depending on who you ask – will receive reviews ranging from ‘a fun romp’ to ‘it destroyed my love for (insert franchise name here)’.

Paul W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evil films happen to fall into that category. While most fans can separate the films from the games and enjoy them for what they are, others will curse anyone and everyone involved.

As the star of these films Milla Jovovich – who plays Alice – knows a thing or two about this. We sat down with the Hollywood A-lister and had a chat about Resident Evil: Afterlife, the series and fan response.

Alice is now stripped of her T-Virus powers and made more human. Did you ask for this change?

Not at all. It was a huge fight. I was like: “I want my superpowers! How dare you take them away from me!” Paul [WS Anderson, director] said: “Trust me, where do we have to go if all she does is psychic-blast everything. You need to start fighting again like a real person.”
So I was like: “Okay, fine. As long as I’m still a badass.”

Is it a challenge evolving a character based on a game?

Well, Alice was never part of the Resident Evil videogame world. When I first met with Paul for the first Resident Evil, I said I wanted to be Jill Valentine.

He said: “Yeah, but people don’t know who Jill Valentine is. Only a small group of people play this game and there’s a potentially huge audience out there.

But if we have to talk about the history of Jill, there’s such a storyline for those characters – you don’t want to get stuck having to use Capcom’s storylines.”

Capcom changes a VP and suddenly the storyline changes. So he needed to create a character that was a bit more like the audience.

The innocent coming into this who they can relate to without needing to know her history..

Was there a backlash from hardcore fans who were upset that Alice didn’t originate in the game?

Oh yeah, there are, like, 15 people in the world that spend all day really hating me. Like horrifically hating me with a passion. They’re always writing.

I tell them: “Why don’t you just write a script?” But if you ask one hardcore fan about something, they’d disagree with that hardcore fan over there.

Another hardcore fan might think the hunters should have been in the movie. And what are the hunters? They’re big frogs. There are a lot of characters in the Resident Evil games that are not very photogenic.

Do you think you’ve won them over at this point?

All I can tell from my twitter page is that there are a lot of fans of Resident Evil that love Alice and the franchise who feel that, if you want the game, play the game. The game is such a sprawling world.

You can’t please everybody and hardcore fans are hardcore fans and you’re never going to please them, no matter how many oversized frogs or giant bees you put in.

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•Public apperances > apperances 2011 > 2011 Art Of Elysium “Heaven” Gala – Red Carpet January 15

‘When we ran into him at the otherworldy affair known as the Bulgari-Burkle party on Thursday, Ryan Kavanaugh wouldn’t comment on his unsuccessful attempt to get a producer’s credit on David O. Russell’s “The Fighter.

But he did manage to slip in how much he’d worked on the film.

“I was on the set many times,” he said. “I was in the editing room with David for tens of hours, we did a page one rewrite together. The script that we originally got was a much harder script, and we really kind of wanted to turn it into ‘Rocky’ for our generation. So David and I and the other producers and Mark all worked really closely together, and literally did a page one rewrite, obviously with Scott” Silver, one of the three credited screenwriters.

“It’s obviously not the lightest movie in the world,” Mr. Kavanaugh said, “but we wanted it to be an inspirational movie.”

Mr. Kavanaugh, the brash founder of Relativity Media, a production company and studio, was out to be inspirational, or collaborative, or at least public, himself on Thursday. Without getting out of his seat during the auction to raise funds for the designated charities, Save the Children and Artists for Peace and Justice, he repeatedly offered the use of his plane for trips up for bidding. Mr. Kavanaugh also bid $25,000 for a lot that included a few nights stay at the Soho Grand hotel in New York and a drink with the director Paul Haggis, a member of Artists for Peace and Justice. Later, still from his chair, he shouted out an offer of $10,000 for Mark Shriver, the vice president of Save the Children, to drop what the clean-spoken Mr. Shriver — of the Kennedy Shrivers — called “the f-bomb.” (It worked, to the pleasure of the crowd.)

By the end of the night, when Ricky Martin performed, Mr. Kavanaugh, in a loose tie, jeans and Converse, was hitting the dance floor, with a parade of women including Maria Bello and Milla Jovovich, twirling and dipping with a drink in his hand. Who needs a producers’ credit?

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•Public apperances > apperances 2011 > Private BVLGARI Charity Event Honoring Paul Haggis on Jan 13