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.
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
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
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
A fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile dating to 202 million years ago that appears to have been among the largest animals ever on Earth. Researchers said on Wednesday the bone, called a surangular, was from a type of ocean-going reptile called an ichthyosaur. Based on its dimensions compared to the same bone in closely related ichthyosaurs, the researchers estimated that the Triassic Period creature, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, was between 22-26 meters long. That would make it perhaps the largest-known marine reptile and would