Actor Russell Crowe stormed out of a BBC radio interview on Thursday after suggestions that he had made the quintessentially British legend Robin Hood sound Irish in his latest movie. New Zealand-born Crowe, who was raised in Australia, has been the target of criticism in the British media for his accent in the Robin Hood action adventure movie, which opened last week with its world premiere held at the Cannes film festival.
Another actor who could do with some accent training is Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson as she is set to star in a biopic of former South African president Nelson Mandela’s ex-wife Winnie, whose lawyers have already contacted the film’s makers threatening to block it. Winnie, which also features Terrence Howard as Nelson Mandela and is based on a book by Anne Marie du Preez Bezdrob, starts shooting in South Africa on May 31 and could be ready for theaters by spring next year.
KISS bassist Gene Simmons on Friday denied brushing up against a make-up artist and “grinding” against her, saying his codpiece-style stage costume made that impossible. Simmons’ legal team filed court papers in Los Angeles asking a judge to declare that accuser Victoria Jackson has suffered no harm from the star of costume rock and reality television.
The Rolling Stones are revisiting their creative heights by releasing one of their greatest albums with 10 extra tracks, and reminiscing about their chaotic days in a grainy new documentary. The British rockers have remastered Exile on Main Street, a 1972 double album that boasts such concert favorites as Tumbling Dice and Rocks Off. It comes out tomorrow in the US, and today everywhere else.
The new documentary, Stones in Exile, released on June 22, offers snapshots and voice-overs of current and former band members and friends from the time when the group left Britain and its crippling income taxes for France, and recorded in the dank basement of Keith Richards’ French villa.
The period was rich with old material that was easily salvaged and turned into new songs, Mick Jagger and Richards said in New York last week.
“We forgot about them,” Richards said, laughing about why the band had waited so long to dig up the material.
Stones in Exile is more than an hour long, using old black-and-white footage and photographs from French music photographer Dominique Tarle, whose visit to the villa one afternoon turned into a six-month stay.
He, and others including Richards’ old girlfriend Anita Pallenberg, former bassist Bill Wyman and producer Marshall Chess, recall the days where they drank whiskey and recorded in the basement with a mobile recording truck parked outside and parties raging above.
Richards and Jagger, both 66, downplayed legendary tales of drugs, sex and setting the house on fire.
“The first thing on your mind was the songs and the music, everything else was like gravy,” said Richards, who was also consumed at the time with a heroin addiction.
“Writing songs in the afternoon, recording them in the evening , you had no time for debauchery, even me,” he joked. “You had your breakfast, you had your dope.”
Richards did recall some memorable moments. After an entire night of recording, “whoever was left standing” would often jump in his speedboat and “zoom” past Monte Carlo and “go to Italy for breakfast, just for the fun of it,” he said. “I don’t know how we didn’t sink.”
Despite the recession, top models are raking in millions of
US dollars, with Brazilian Gisele Bundchen, German Heidi Klum and Briton Kate Moss the biggest earners.
Bundchen, the 29-year-old beauty who is married to US football player Tom Brady is the world’s highest-paid model, making US$25 million last year, according to forbes.com.
Klum, the 36-year-old mother of four and host of the television show Project Runway, came in second with US$16 million in earnings, followed by fashionista Moss, also 36, who made US$9 million, through modeling campaigns and the launch of her own fashion line and a new fragrance.
It is the second year the same three models topped the list, which is largely because of a risk-averse fashion industry that was not looking for new faces in the unstable economic climate, said Steve Bertoni, of Forbes.
“These are the tried and true supermodels of the last decade ... the household names of the industry,” Bertoni said.
The list represents earnings made from June 2009 to July 2010.
If one asks Taiwanese why house prices are so high or why the nation is so built up or why certain policies cannot be carried out, one common answer is that “Taiwan is too small.” This is actually true, though not in the way people think. The National Property Administration (NPA), responsible for tracking and managing the government’s real estate assets, maintains statistics on how much land the government owns. As of the end of last year, land for official use constituted 293,655 hectares, for public use 1,732,513 hectares, for non-public use 216,972 hectares and for state enterprises 34 hectares, yielding
The March/April volume of Foreign Affairs, long a purveyor of pro-China pablum, offered up another irksome Beijing-speak on the issues and solutions for the problems vexing the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the US: “America and China at the Edge of Ruin: A Last Chance to Step Back From the Brink” rang the provocative title, by David M. Lampton and Wang Jisi (王緝思). If one ever wants to describe what went wrong with US-PRC relations, the career of Wang Jisi is a good place to start. Wang has extensive experience in the US and the West. He was a visiting
The small platform at Duoliang Train Station in Taitung County’s Taimali Township (太麻里) served villagers from 1992 to 2006, but was eventually shut down due to lack of use. Just 10 years later, the abandoned train station had become widely known as the most beautiful station in Taiwan, and visitors were so frequent that the village had to start restricting traffic. Nowadays, Duoliang Village (多良) is known as a bit of a tourist trap, with a mandatory, albeit modest, admission fee of NT$10 giving access to a crowded lane of vendors with a mediocre view of the ocean and the trains
One of the challenges with the sheer availability of food in today’s world is that lots of us end up spending many of our waking hours eating. Whether it’s full meals, snacks or desserts, scientists have found that it’s not uncommon for us to be mindlessly grazing at some point during all of our 16 or so waking hours. The problem? As soon as this food hits the bloodstream in the form of glucose, it initiates the release of the hormone insulin. This in turn activates a switch present in every one of our cells, which is responsible for driving cell
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