The Venice Film Festival opened Wednesday 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 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 U.S. 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, emphasizing 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.

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.

The first U.S. 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.

Darren Aronofsky will present "The Wrestler," starring Mickey Rourke as a wrestler forced into retirement who strikes up a romance with an aging 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 U.S. entries is Iranian-born Amir Naderi's "Vegas: Based on a True Story," about the family life of a compulsive gambler. (Colleen Barry, Associated Press)

Look hard enough and you can usually find a Pittsburgh connection to almost anything. That holds true for two movies playing here.

Paul McGill, a 2006 graduate of Northgate High School and a former Bellevue resident, plays the young Philippe Petit in some of the flashbacks in "Man on Wire," the story of the Frenchman who walked across a cable strung between the World Trade Center towers in 1974.

Paul, son of Paul and Shari McGill of Bellevue, just finished a two-year run as Mark in the Broadway revival of "A Chorus Line." Only 21, he's been performing on Broadway since age 17 and will appear in the remake of the 1980 musical "Fame."

McGill trained at Rosalene Kenneth Professional Dance Studio from ages 3 to 12 and with Pittsburgh Musical Theater from age 10 until his departure for Broadway. His educational path was unconventional, to say the least, but all roads seem to lead to New York or, soon, Los Angeles.

Josh Gad, starring alongside Rainn Wilson in "The Rocker," may look familiar, too. He played the young neurotic news director on the Fox sitcom "Back to You" and was part of the ensemble in "21," about MIT students on a roll in Vegas.

A 2003 Carnegie Mellon University graduate, Gad worked with the speech and debate team at Mt. Lebanon High School from 1999 to 2003. He had been a national champion as a high school student in Florida, excelling in humorous interpretation and original oratory.

George Savarese, a history teacher at Mt. Lebanon who doubles as speech and debate coach, says Gad's "mental wires" are simply crossed differently. "His sense of humor is bizarre but brilliant. ... Our kids loved him."

Savarese said Gad has kept Pittsburghers posted on roles he landed. "We knew it was just a matter of time," he said, because Gad is both funny and tenacious. (Barbara Vancheri, PG movie editor)

Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios, will accept the first Randy Pausch Prize from Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology Center next month.

The prize, which carries a $2,500 cash award and lecture opportunity, will honor entertainment industry experts who embody Pausch's interdisciplinary spirit, which celebrated a marriage of technology and art. Pixar, of course, pioneered a new generation of animated movies, with "WALL-E" just the latest of an unbroken string of successes.

Pausch, who touched millions with "The Last Lecture" in person, through the Internet and in book form, was a CMU professor who died July 25 at age 47 from pancreatic cancer.

Catmull will give the keynote address at the seventh annual International Conference on Entertainment Computing on Sept. 26 at 9:15 a.m. He will be in McConomy Auditorium, the very space where Pausch's parting words made people laugh and cry and think.

In a release announcing the news, CMU's Don Marinelli recalled: "Eleven years ago, when the ETC was just a vision that Randy and I were trying to make a reality, Ed generously shared with us his thoughts about how to prepare students for the new world of interactive digital media. His suggestions, including the idea of having everyone in the program study improvisational acting, were priceless."

Catmull co-founded Pixar, was one of the architects of RenderMan software used in movies such as "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" and previously worked for Lucasfilm Ltd. He is among a handful of prominent speakers expected to attract 300 researchers to the Sept. 25-27 event. (Vancheri)

More than four decades after he starred alongside Jimmy Stewart in "Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation" and "Dear Brigitte," Fabian Forte will receive the Harvey Award from the Jimmy Stewart Museum.

Rich Little, long a supporter of the museum and a former Harvey recipient himself, will serve as host for the Oct. 24 event at Chestnut Ridge Resort in Blairsville with the singer-actor.

The James M. Stewart Museum Foundation created the Harvey Award (named for the invisible 6-foot rabbit) to honor the integrity, creativity and values of the actor from Indiana, Pa., who died in 1997 at age 89.

Tickets are $85, for dinner and a public reception at 6 p.m., or $125, which grants access to a 5 p.m. private reception.

The museum also will host a sneak preview of the film "Adopt a Sailor" on Nov. 1. Writer-director Charles Evered is scheduled to attend along with actor Ethan Peck, grandson of Gregory Peck. The movie, which began life as a short play about a sailor invited to dinner by upscale New Yorkers, also stars Bebe Neuwirth and Peter Coyote.

Space is limited for the preview and a reception. Tickets are $50.

Call 724-349-6112 for reservations for either event. (Vancheri)

The Metropolitan Opera is expanding its high-definition opera transmissions to 11 this season, beginning with a live presentation of its gala (at 6 p.m. on Sept. 22) celebrating its 125th anniversary and starring soprano Renee Fleming.

During the season, live operatic performances will occur at 1 p.m. on Saturdays, with a repeat presentation at 7 p.m. the second Wednesday after. Locally, the operas can be viewed at the Cinemark at Pittsburgh Mills mall in Frazer and Showcase Cinemas West in Robinson. Visit www.FathomEvents.com for times and ticket information. (Andrew Druckenbrod, PG classical music critic)

If watching "Mamma Mia!" makes you want to sing from your seat, now you have permission. As long as you attend a special sing-along edition of the Meryl Streep musical, opening today at the AMC-Loews at the Waterfront, where you can have the time of your life. (Vancheri)