Her latest movie Rendition flopped at box offices, but fans still love Reese Witherspoon. The actress proved to be the most-liked celebrity among 10 women who regularly found their way onto magazine covers and into gossip columns in 2007, according to a poll on Friday.
Meanwhile, the Screen Actors Guild said nearly all its members will refuse to cross striking writers' picket lines at the upcoming Golden Globe Awards, throwing Hollywood's award season deeper into doubt. Award nominees such as Julia Roberts and Johnny Depp would be key draws for audiences of the film and television honors on Jan. 13, and could be nominated and appear for the world's top film honors, the Oscars, next month.
Natalie Imbruglia, the singer and former Neighbours actress, has split from her husband four years after they married in a beachside ceremony in Australia. Imbruglia, 32, and Daniel Johns, 28, lead singer with the Australian rock band Silverchair, said they had "simply grown apart" after living on different sides of the world for years.
China is cracking down on "vulgar" entertainment and asked all video and audio producers to check their inventory for risque material with threats of fines and other punishment for those who do not weed it out. The new order from China's top publishing officials comes just days after Beijing slapped restrictions on Internet sites that allow users to upload video or audio, and handed a two-year film-making ban to the team behind steamy film "Lost in Beijing."
Chinese censors banned an award-winning film that depicted the seedy side of Beijing, authorities said, amid a campaign to clean up the city's image ahead of the August Olympics.
In announcing the ban on Lost in Beijing (蘋果), the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television hit out at its sexual content and its unapproved participation in international film festivals.
PHOTO: AFP
"Parts of the film violate regulations on sexual content ... while unhealthy and inappropriate promotional materials for the film were also distributed," the administration said in a notice posted on its Web site on Thursday.
The film is set in a massage parlor, with the plot centering on the rape of a peasant masseuse, played by up-and-coming starlet Fan Bingbing (范冰冰).
She is raped by the massage parlor's owner and the plot focuses on how the two deal with her subsequent pregnancy.
Massage parlors are well known in Beijing as fronts for prostitution, an illegal practice that nevertheless thrives.
The film, directed by Li Yu (李玉), premiered internationally at the Berlin Film Festival in February last year.
The film was also awarded a Special Jury Prize at the 2007 Bangkok International Film Festival. Theatres around China, including in Beijing, had already begun showing the film when the ban was issued.
In its notice, the administration said producer Fang Yi and production company Beijing Laurel Films had also been banned from making and distributing films on the Chinese mainland for two years.
Singer and songwriter Stephen Stills, best known as one-third of rock trio Crosby, Stills and Nash, has undergone successful surgery for prostate cancer and is recovering well, his wife said. "Stephen's procedure went remarkably well and he couldn't be better," Kristen Stills said in a statement late on Thursday.
Troubled actress Lindsay Lohan fell off the sobriety wagon on New Year's Eve, her lawyer said on Thursday, ending a year that saw the star check into rehab several times and land in jail for drunken driving and cocaine possession. The 21-year-old Lohan was captured on video, posted on celebrity Web site TMZ.com, sipping from a champagne bottle in Italy where she was honored at the Capri Film Festival.
The union for striking Holly-wood writers cried foul on Thursday over late-night TV comic Jay Leno writing his own jokes for his return to the air from an eight-week hiatus forced by the walkout. The Writers Guild of America said the host of NBC's The Tonight Show, who is a WGA member, violated union strike rules by preparing the monologue he delivered on Wednesday for his first new broadcast in two months which, like most other returning talk shows, saw a bounce in viewership.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist