A Los Angeles judge gave Irish Hollywood star Colin Farrell hope earlier this week that he still might be able to block distribution of a sex tape he made with a former Playboy pinup girl.
The judge rejected arguments by Playboy Playmate of January 2002 Nicole Narain, who wanted Farrell's suit to block distribution of the tape dismissed, according to a court official.
Narain, then Farrell's girlfriend, said she has the legal right to copy and market the tape they made together three years ago, portions of which have shown up on the Internet in recent months.
Similar sex tapes involving personalities like Pamela Anderson, Paris Hilton and Tom Sizemore have proven highly lucrative when marketed to the public.
Farrell, 29, a rising star with roles in Oliver Stone's Alexander and Steven Spielberg's Minority Report in his pocket, maintains that the two had agreed the tape would remain private, his lawyers said, and filed suit last July claiming violation of an oral contract and of his privacy.
Narain said as "co-producer" of the video she has the backing of copyright laws to make money by selling it.
Legendary Scottish actor Sean Connery sued a California golf club earlier this week for breach of contract, saying its managers cheated him out of more than US$500,000.
The former James Bond star joined the Sherwood Country Club of Thousand Oaks, a Los Angeles suburb, in 1990.
According to the lawsuit, Connery, 75, considered the US$35,000 dollars a year he was paying in dues an investment, and that he could recover 80 percent of it after three years, while the club's owners capitalized on his fame to attract new investors.
But the club refused to repay Connery when he canceled his membership in 2004, according to the suit filed by his lawyers in a Los Angeles court on Monday.
Oscar-winner George Clooney took a prominent US political commentator to task on Wednesday for posting on her Web site a blog made to look like it was written by the superstar.
Clooney denied writing the blog on Arianna Huffington's www.HuffingtonPost.com, which includes commentaries from celebrities, politicians and experts.
The blog turned out to be a compilation of remarks Clooney made in media interviews. The actor, a liberal, said he had given Huffington permission to use the quotes, but complained that they were made to look like his own blog.
"Miss Huffington's blog is purposefully misleading and I have asked her to clarify the facts," Clooney said in a statement. "I stand by my statements but I did not write this blog."
John Travolta and Jennifer Lopez have been offered starring roles in a big screen adaptation of the 1980's television series Dallas, the industry newspaper Variety reported Tuesday.
Travolta, star of Pulp Fiction and Get Shorty, has been asked to play the show's villain, J.R. Ewing, while Lopez has been offered the part of Ewing's wife, Sue Ellen, in a production being planned by 20th Century Fox, Variety said.
Luke Wilson has been proposed to portray Bobby Ewing, and Shirley MacLaine for the role of the family matriarch, Eleanor Ewing.
With production due to begin at the end of the year, Australian Robert Luketic, who directed Lopez in Monster-in-Law and Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde, has been named as the director.
Airing on US television from 1978 to 1991, the Dallas prime time soap opera series about love and betrayal among Texan oil magnates was exported around the world.
Young film star Scarlett Johansson will take the title role in an adaptation of the novel The Nanny Diaries, film industry press reported Monday.
The Nanny Diaries, by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus, follows a New Jersey girl to upper-class New York, where a couple hires her to care for their children.
Sept.16 to Sept. 22 The “anti-communist train” with then-president Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) face plastered on the engine puffed along the “sugar railway” (糖業鐵路) in May 1955, drawing enthusiastic crowds at 103 stops covering nearly 1,200km. An estimated 1.58 million spectators were treated to propaganda films, plays and received free sugar products. By this time, the state-run Taiwan Sugar Corporation (台糖, Taisugar) had managed to connect the previously separate east-west lines established by Japanese-era sugar factories, allowing the anti-communist train to travel easily from Taichung to Pingtung’s Donggang Township (東港). Last Sunday’s feature (Taiwan in Time: The sugar express) covered the inauguration of the
The corruption cases surrounding former Taipei Mayor and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) head Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) are just one item in the endless cycle of noise and fuss obscuring Taiwan’s deep and urgent structural and social problems. Even the case itself, as James Baron observed in an excellent piece at the Diplomat last week, is only one manifestation of the greater problem of deep-rooted corruption in land development. Last week the government announced a program to permit 25,000 foreign university students, primarily from the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, to work in Taiwan after graduation for 2-4 years. That number is a
This year’s Michelin Gourmand Bib sported 16 new entries in the 126-strong Taiwan directory. The fight for the best braised pork rice and the crispiest scallion pancake painstakingly continued, but what stood out in the lineup this year? Pang Taqueria (胖塔可利亞); Taiwan’s first Michelin-recommended Mexican restaurant. Chef Charles Chen (陳治宇) is a self-confessed Americophile, earning his chef whites at a fine-dining Latin-American fusion restaurant. But what makes this Xinyi (信義) spot stand head and shoulders above Taipei’s existing Mexican offerings? The authenticity. The produce. The care. AUTHENTIC EATS In my time on the island, I have caved too many times to
In a stark demonstration of how award-winning breakthroughs can come from the most unlikely directions, researchers have won an Ig Nobel prize for discovering that mammals can breathe through their anuses. After a series of tests on mice, rats and pigs, Japanese scientists found the animals absorb oxygen delivered through the rectum, work that underpins a clinical trial to see whether the procedure can treat respiratory failure. The team is among 10 recognized in this year’s Ig Nobel awards (see below for more), the irreverent accolades given for achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.” They are not