Director Oliver Stone's film on the Sept. 11 World Trade Center attack opened to tears and torment in the US on Wednesday, reviving memories ahead of the fifth anniversary.
World Trade Center sparked debate about whether Americans are ready for a film focusing on the Twin Towers attack, where 2,749 people died, but moviegoers at an early New York screening commended it.
About 50 people attended a matinee screening at a Midtown Manhattan cinema. Many wept or were visibly shaken.
The movie, starring Nicolas Cage, is based on the true story of two policemen who raced into the World Trade Center to save people, but were trapped in the rubble of the collapsed buildings for 12 hours before their rescue.
“I can understand why people are not ready to see it yet, but I think that they will be surprised at how powerful and personal it is,” said Leslie Friedman, a New Yorker who said she was not in the city on the day of the attacks.
Reviewers have said the often-provocative Stone had shown respect, restraint and patriotism in the film, but box office experts said the test would be whether people were willing to see it or considered the subject too sensitive.
Famed US actor and comic Robin Williams has checked into an alcohol recovery program, his publicist said Wednesday.
“After 20 years of sobriety, Robin Williams found himself drinking again and has decided to take proactive measures to deal with this for his own well-being and the well-being of his family,” his publicist Mara Buxbaum said in a statement.
“He looks forward to returning to work this fall to support his upcoming film releases,” Buxbaum added in the brief statement.
Williams, 55, won a best supporting actor Oscar for Good Will Hunting in 1998 and has enjoyed successful career from films like Dead Poets Society and Good Morning, Vietnam and the 1970s and 1980s television sitcom Mork and Mindy.
He has been married since 1989 to producer Marsha Garces, with whom he has two children.
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, the sixth movie based on JK Rowling's hugely popular fantasy series, will hit theaters round the world in November 2008, Warner Bros has announced.
The movie will be based on the 672-page book that arrived on shelves last summer and sold a whopping 6.9 million copies its first day in US bookstores.
The upcoming fifth installment in the series Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is due out on July 13 next year.
Movie studio 20th Century Fox and Walden Media, the company behind The Chronicles of Narnia films, have formed a joint venture to produce and market family friendly films, the companies said.
Tuesday's move gives Walden, which has been producing films with a number of studios, a permanent home for future projects while giving Fox the means to expand its reach into the lucrative family entertainment sector.
Walden, which is owned by Denver billionaire Philip Anschutz, will remain an independent entity under the deal with its own production staff. Current projects under development with rival studios, including The Walt Disney Co, Paramount Pictures and New Line, also will remain in place.Seventeen short films from 15 countries will compete for the best short film at the Venice Film Festival, organizers announced Tuesday.
South African producer and director Teboho Mahlatsi, winner of the 1999 best short film award, will chair the jury of the Corto Cortissimo section dedicated to short films, which opens Sept. 7.
“Never more than this year has the Corto Cortissimo section focused on pure intuition and bet on the future, dodging the attraction of noted names, to concentrate exclusively on formal rigor and the striking nature of emotions expressed in just a few minutes,” organizers said in a release.
May 6 to May 12 Those who follow the Chinese-language news may have noticed the usage of the term zhuge (豬哥, literally ‘pig brother,’ a male pig raised for breeding purposes) in reports concerning the ongoing #Metoo scandal in the entertainment industry. The term’s modern connotations can range from womanizer or lecher to sexual predator, but it once referred to an important rural trade. Until the 1970s, it was a common sight to see a breeder herding a single “zhuge” down a rustic path with a bamboo whip, often traveling large distances over rugged terrain to service local families. Not only
Ahead of incoming president William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20 there appear to be signs that he is signaling to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and that the Chinese side is also signaling to the Taiwan side. This raises a lot of questions, including what is the CCP up to, who are they signaling to, what are they signaling, how with the various actors in Taiwan respond and where this could ultimately go. In the last column, published on May 2, we examined the curious case of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) heavyweight Tseng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) — currently vice premier
The last time Mrs Hsieh came to Cihu Park in Taoyuan was almost 50 years ago, on a school trip to the grave of Taiwan’s recently deceased dictator. Busloads of children were brought in to pay their respects to Chiang Kai-shek (蔣中正), known as Generalissimo, who had died at 87, after decades ruling Taiwan under brutal martial law. “There were a lot of buses, and there was a long queue,” Hsieh recalled. “It was a school rule. We had to bow, and then we went home.” Chiang’s body is still there, under guard in a mausoleum at the end of a path
Last week the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) released a set of very strange numbers on Taiwan’s wealth distribution. Duly quoted in the Taipei Times, the report said that “The Gini coefficient for Taiwanese households… was 0.606 at the end of 2021, lower than Australia’s 0.611, the UK’s 0.620, Japan’s 0.678, France’s 0.676 and Germany’s 0.727, the agency said in a report.” The Gini coefficient is a measure of relative inequality, usually of wealth or income, though it can be used to evaluate other forms of inequality. However, for most nations it is a number from .25 to .50