The latest James Bond movie Casino Royale has become the highest-earning 007 thriller of all time, it was reported on Wednesday.
The critically-acclaimed film, featuring Daniel Craig playing the British superspy for the first time, has passed the previous box-office record held by a Bond movie, the US$431 million earned by 2002's Die Another Day.
So far, Casino Royale has raked in US$448 million worldwide since its opening last month, Variety reported.
PHOTOS: AP
The film has won rave reviews for its gritty, back-to-basics rebooting of the Bond format, doing away with the impossible gadgets and implausible storylines of recent years in favor of a character-driven plot.
Die-hard fans had been appalled by the decision to hand the role of their hero to the blue-eyed, fair-haired Craig. But the actor has won over the skeptics with a gritty performance that have earned him comparisons with Sean Connery, often regarded as the quintessential Bond.
Nomination ballots for next year's Oscars were mailed on Tuesday to the 5,830 people who will decide the winners of the film world's most prestigious awards.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences members must return their ballot papers to auditing giants PricewaterhouseCoopers by 5pm on Saturday Jan. 13 ahead of the nomination announcement in Beverly Hills 10 days later.
A second round of ballots will be mailed out after the nomination announcement where Academy members will cast their decisive votes to determine the Oscar winners at next year's Feb. 25 awards in Hollywood.
Next year's Oscars are promising to be a close fought affair, with several movies all jostling for awards honors in several categories.
Among the front-runners for the coveted best picture honor are Martin Scorsese's bloody crime drama The Departed and Clint Eastwood's World War II epic Letters from Iwo Jima.
Both Scorsese and Eastwood are expected to be among the contenders for best director honors, replaying their duel from the 2004 awards when Eastwood with Million Dollar Baby pipped Scorsese's The Aviator.
The late James Brown will rise again — on screen.
Spike Lee has signed on to direct a feature film about the singer produced by Brian Grazer and Imagine Entertainment, Paramount Pictures announced this week.
"It's an authorized biography done with the cooperation of Mr. Brown before his passing,'' Paramount spokeswoman Nancy Kirkpatrick said.
Lee will rewrite a draft by Jezz and John Henry Butterworth, the trade paper Variety reported on Wednesday. The script has been through several drafts since Steve Baigelman wrote the original. The movie could be in production by late next year, Variety said.
"Having known him well, and after spending lots of time with him and researching his life, it's somehow not surprising that he died on Christmas Day. He was the ultimate showman, all the way to the end,'' Grazer told Variety on Tuesday.
Messages left Wednesday for Grazer at his Los Angeles office were not immediately returned.
Brown, whose legendary brand of soul and funk influenced hip-hop, disco and rap, died of congestive heart failure on Christmas morning in Atlanta at age 73.
Bollywood icon Amitabh Bachchan, whose star and sex appeal remains undiminished by age, has been voted Indian of the Year, the Times of India reported this week.
An opinion poll in the newspaper said 15 percent of Indians voted for the 64-year-old actor as the most popular citizen, far ahead of the five percent who backed star batsman Sachin Tendulkar and ruling Congress party president Italian-born Sonia Gandhi.
Bachchan got maximum votes from housewives — 19 percent — and those in the 35 to 45 age category in the survey of 1,005 people in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai and Bangalore.
He was also the overwhelming choice in the Indian capital, where he completed college, where 31 percent voted for him.
Tendulkar, currently playing for India in a cricket series against South Africa, was second ranked, despite a slump in form over the past year.
Gandhi, who pipped Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in the survey was the second most popular choice along with Tendulkar despite Hindu nationalist politicians questioning her foreign birth.
Singh, steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal — who is of Indian origin — and Bollywood actors Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai each followed with four percent votes each.
Abhishek is Amitabh Bachchan's son.
Bachchan has several new films lined up for next year. In 2002, he was voted as the most popular screen and stage icon of all time on a BBC online survey.
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
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
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s