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.
It starts out as a heartwarming clip. A young girl, clearly delighted to be in Tokyo, beams as she makes a peace sign to the camera. Seconds later, she is shoved to the ground from behind by a woman wearing a surgical mask. The assailant doesn’t skip a beat, striding out of shot of the clip filmed by the girl’s mother. This was no accidental clash of shoulders in a crowded place, but one of the most visible examples of a spate of butsukari otoko — “bumping man” — shoving incidents in Japan that experts attribute to a combination of gender
The race for New Taipei City mayor is being keenly watched, and now with the nomination of former deputy mayor of Taipei Hammer Lee (李四川) as the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) candidate, the battle lines are drawn. All polling data on the tight race mentioned in this column is from the March 12 Formosa poll. On Christmas Day 2010, Taipei County merged into one mega-metropolis of four million people, making it the nation’s largest city. The same day, the winner of the mayoral race, Eric Chu (朱立倫) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), took office and insisted on the current
Last week the government announced that by year’s end Taiwan will have the highest density of anti-ship missiles in the world. Its inventory could exceed 1,400, or enough for the opening two hours of an invasion from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Snark aside, it sounds impressive. But an important piece is missing. Lost in all the “dialogues” and “debates” and “discussions” whose sole purpose is simply to dawdle and delay is what the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) alternative special defense budget proposal means for the defense of Taiwan. It is a betrayal of both Taiwan and the US. IT’S
March 16 to March 22 Hidden for decades behind junk-filled metal shacks, trees and overgrowth, a small domed structure bearing a Buddhist swastika resurfaced last June in a Taichung alley. It was soon identified as a remnant of the 122-year-old Gokokuzan Taichuu-ji (Taichung Temple, 護國山台中寺), which was thought to have been demolished in the 1980s. In addition, a stone stele dedicated to monk Hoshu Ono, who served as abbot from 1914 to 1930, was discovered in the detritus. The temple was established in 1903 as the local center for the Soto school
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