Expecting no more than light chit-chat about ballroom dancing, reporters in Tokyo were startled when actor Richard Gere launched into a condemnation of Europe's plans to lift an arms embargo against China. After promoting his new film, Shall We Dance? in which he co-stars with Jennifer Lopez, Gere grabbed a microphone to denounce plans by the European Union to lift the embargo imposed after China's bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protests in 1989.
The race-relations comedy Guess Who, starring Bernie Mac and Ashton Kutcher, debuted atop the US and Canadian weekend box office, according to studio figures released on Monday.
The remake of the Spencer Tracy, Katherine Hepburn and Sidney Poitier civil-rights movie Guess Who's Coming to Dinner earned US$21 million to see off the challenge of Sandra Bullock's sequel, Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous, which opened in second place with US$14.5 million.
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The Ring 2 dropped to third with US$13.8 million followed by the animated movie Robots and family comedy The Pacifier. Hitch was in sixth spot followed by the Bruce Willis thriller Hostage and Ice Princess.
John Travolta's Be Cool was in ninth place with Oscar winner Million Dollar Baby closing out the top 10.
Neopets, the wildly popular children's Web site that lets kids nurture digital pets, is making the move from the Internet to the big screen.
PHOTO: AP
According to the Hollywood Reporter Warner Bros has closed a deal with Neopets to make CGI-animated features using 50 different pet species from the kids Web site.
The report said that the studio and Neopets have already firmed a concept for the first film and have begun talks with an animation director they would not name.
Created in 1991, NeoPets has a global following of about 25 million members who log on regularly to create and care for their own virtual pets.
PHOTO: AP
Cable channel USA Network has unveiled its remake of the hit 1970s detective series Kojak, which featured actor Telly Savalas as a lollipop-sucking detective, with Ving Rhames, an actor who has appeared in hit movies like Pulp Fiction and Mission: Impossible.
USA Networks hopes its new series will be a hit domestically and around the world with Rhames in the starring role. Rhames, like Savalas, is bald.
The two-hour long premier aired over the weekend and featured the new Kojak on the trail of a serial killer of prostitutes. But although the tough detective eventually got his man, he was less successful in capturing positive reviews. USA Today said the show was "for suckers only," while the Chicago Tribune said the show goes from "bald to worse".
Actress Cameron Diaz, who is on a protracted break from movie making, is keeping in front of the cameras with a new eco-tourism show on MTV.
Trippin', which debuted Monday on the popular music channel, featured Diaz and celebrity friends like rappers DMX and Redman, actresses Eva Mendez and Jessica Alba and pro surfer Kelly Slater as they head to environmentally sensitive spots around the world and seek to discover ways to preserve them.
Orlando Bloom has been tipped to play a young James Bond in a movie series designed to endear the suave British master spy to younger viewers, according to press reports Monday.
The series, which is backed by Miramax and DreamWorks would be based on a new series of young 007 novels which began this year with Silverfin.
In the book set in the 1930s, a teenage James Bond spends a holiday at a remote castle where he soon comes upon a mystery involving killer eels and an arms tycoon conducting dangerous genetic experiments.
In a blow to Michael Jackson's defense, prosecutors in his child molestation trial can introduce evidence of "past sexual offenses" by the pop star involving five young boys, a judge ruled on Monday. The decision by Santa Barbara Superior Court Judge Rodney Melville means that jurors will hear testimony about a 1993 case that Jackson settled out of court for about US$23 million.
The artist best known for pickling a shark and slicing up a cow admits he's had some pretty silly ideas over the years. But Damien Hirst, the aging enfant terrible of the British art world, is optimistic that museums will still be showing at least some of his work in 200 years' time.
Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) and the New Taipei City Government in May last year agreed to allow the activation of a spent fuel storage facility for the Jinshan Nuclear Power Plant in Shihmen District (石門). The deal ended eleven years of legal wrangling. According to the Taipower announcement, the city government engaged in repeated delays, failing to approve water and soil conservation plans. Taipower said at the time that plans for another dry storage facility for the Guosheng Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s Wanli District (萬里) remained stuck in legal limbo. Later that year an agreement was reached
What does the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) in the Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) era stand for? What sets it apart from their allies, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)? With some shifts in tone and emphasis, the KMT’s stances have not changed significantly since the late 2000s and the era of former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九). The Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) current platform formed in the mid-2010s under the guidance of Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), and current President William Lai (賴清德) campaigned on continuity. Though their ideological stances may be a bit stale, they have the advantage of being broadly understood by the voters.
In a high-rise office building in Taipei’s government district, the primary agency for maintaining links to Thailand’s 108 Yunnan villages — which are home to a population of around 200,000 descendants of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) armies stranded in Thailand following the Chinese Civil War — is the Overseas Community Affairs Council (OCAC). Established in China in 1926, the OCAC was born of a mandate to support Chinese education, culture and economic development in far flung Chinese diaspora communities, which, especially in southeast Asia, had underwritten the military insurgencies against the Qing Dynasty that led to the founding of
Artifacts found at archeological sites in France and Spain along the Bay of Biscay shoreline show that humans have been crafting tools from whale bones since more than 20,000 years ago, illustrating anew the resourcefulness of prehistoric people. The tools, primarily hunting implements such as projectile points, were fashioned from the bones of at least five species of large whales, the researchers said. Bones from sperm whales were the most abundant, followed by fin whales, gray whales, right or bowhead whales — two species indistinguishable with the analytical method used in the study — and blue whales. With seafaring capabilities by humans
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