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.
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
Relations between Taiwan and the Czech Republic have flourished in recent years. However, not everyone is pleased about the growing friendship between the two countries. Last month, an incident involving a Chinese diplomat tailing the car of vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) in Prague, drew public attention to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) operations to undermine Taiwan overseas. The trip was not Hsiao’s first visit to the Central European country. It was meant to be low-key, a chance to meet with local academics and politicians, until her police escort noticed a car was tailing her through the Czech capital. The
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless