US comedian Chris Rock's new film detailing the frustrations and temptations of married life strangely reflects persistent rumors his real-life marriage is in trouble.
But even after such scrutiny in life and fiction, one of America's most popular comedians says he is no marital expert.
"I know nothing about marriage," Rock said in a recent interview for his cinematic look at modern matrimony, I Think I Love My Wife, which opened Friday in the US.
PHOTOS: AP
Rock, 42, dismissed media reports from late last year that he was filing for divorce as "all rumors, I am happy." His 10-year marriage succeeds due to being tactful, he said.
"I know it helps if you are wrong all the time and when you are right, just say you are wrong," he joked. "It helps to smooth things over. That is pretty much it. Just be wrong."
In his new romantic comedy, a lighthearted remake of the 1972 acclaimed French film Chloe in the Afternoon, Rock plays a successful investment banker devoted to his wife and two kids — who is sexually tempted by an attractive female friend.
It is his second directing effort and displays the same humor that helped him rise through the comedy circuit ranks in the 1980s to a film and television career using comedy that pokes fun at both romance and class.
"It is just the weird world I live in," he said, commenting on a scene in the film which sends up the lack of black Americans in his character's firm and corporate America. "The reality is, I went to one of these brokerage houses and there were two black guys out of 800 people, like six out of 5,000, wow!"
His comedy sought to poke fun at his own life rather than deliberately crossing racial barriers, he said.
"Look at James Brown, what's blacker than James Brown? There was no real effort to cross over into a wider audience," he said. "If you do anything good, everybody will buy it."
Condolences flowed for US comedian Sinbad after the online encyclopedia Wikipedia announced his death on Thursday, but it turned out the grieving was premature and the comic was alive and well.
The hoax entry said the 50-year-old entertainer, who appeared in several television series and starred in films including Houseguest, and Jingle All the Way, had died of a heart attack on the morning of March 14.
The news was quickly picked up by an Internet user who forwarded the e-mail link and prompted widespread mourning.
But Wikipedia spokeswoman Sandra Ordonez said the Sinbad entry had been vandalized and although the error was quickly caught and changed, some Internet users had sent e-mails with a link to the old version.
"This caused people to inadvertently change the entry throughout the day to the vandalized version," said Ordonez.
"We are currently looking into who made this edit, and have protected the page. We regret any confusion or distress this may have caused Sinbad and his fans everywhere."
And in the UK, police have warned Heather Mills McCartney, the estranged wife of former Beatle Paul McCartney, about using the emergency phone number 999 too often.
The 39-year-old, in the middle of a bitter divorce battle that has thrust her into the media spotlight, has complained of harassment by paparazzi since the split was announced 10 months ago.
Chief Superintendent Kevin Moore, of Brighton and Hove Police on the southern English coast where Mills spends much of her time, said there was a risk that officers may take her calls less seriously if she contacted them too often.
"We are having to spend a disproportionate amount of time on one particular person," he said. "We are duty-bound to respond, but clearly people who make lots of calls to the police run the risk of being treated as the little boy who cried wolf," he added. "Officers who have attended previously to find there have been no grounds might not take any claims seriously, and that's the danger we face."
A police spokesperson would not say how many emergency calls Mills made.
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