US actress Renee Zellweger has obtained the annulment of her marriage to country singer Kenny Chesney, according to court documents released Wednesday.
The 36-year-old Oscar winner had asked for the marriage to be declared void in September, four months after the marriage in the Virgin islands. Zellweger, star of the Brigitte Jones series and Cold Mountain met the country superstar in January during a concert for Asian tsunami victims.
The documents said the couple are again considered single people.
PHOTO: AP
The Berlin Film Festival announced last week the first seven films in the running for its Golden and Silver Bears awards in February along with two US films that will be screened out of competition.
Syriana, a political thriller starring George Clooney, and The New World with Colin Farrell about a 17th century English explorer, are the two US films featured in the 26-film main programme for the 56th annual Berlinale that runs Feb. 9 to Feb. 19, 2006.
Both Syriana and The New World were already released in the US but have been included in the festival that hopes to attract the celebrity actors of those and other films.
PHOTO: AFP
Six of the nine films selected so far will have their world premieres in Berlin. The rest of the program will be announced by mid-January, according to festival director Dieter Kosslick.
"We are extremely pleased to be able to present new films by famous directors as well as productions by young film-makers," he said in a statement.
The Berlinale is the first of Europe's three major festivals in the new year and considered after Cannes and alongside Venice to be one of the world's most prestigious film showcases.
Making the Berlin festival unique are the 400,000 tickets sold to about 1,000 screenings of films in the competition and various sidebar events to ordinary cinema-goers, many of whom spend hours in long queues for tickets.
Two German directors will be competing for honors with world premieres. Oskar Roehler will present his adaptation of Michel Houellebecq's successful novel The Elementary Particles about two brothers set out to uncover the meaning of life.
Two films from Asia are in the programme: a psychological thriller Invisible Waves by Thai director Ratanaruang Pen-ek portrays a contract killer; Chen Kaige's The Promise is a love story of a princess between three men and at US $35 million is called the most expensive Chinese film ever made.
Super Size Me filmmaker Morgan Spurlock plans a documentary on conser-vative US politicians' treatment of science, Hollywood press reported last week.
Spurlock has purchased the film rights to adapt a book, The Republican War on Science, according to the entertainment industry newspaper Daily Variety.
The book by Chris Mooney argues that Republican stances on stem-cell research, global climate change and sex education, among other topics, show a conservative bias on environment, health and security issues.
"There was a time when science was respected by politicians and government officials and when the information obtained through unbiased scien-tific exploration was used for the betterment of society," Spurlock told Variety.
"Today, all of that is being ignored, manipulated and used incorrectly to further political agendas. We need the real answers to the big questions," he said.
The hit documentary Super Size Me examined US eating habits and the health effects of fast food and traced Spurlock's one-month diet exclusively of McDonald's offerings.
In that time, Spurlock gained 12kg against the advice of his doctors.
Some 250 pieces of vintage animation work from classic Walt Disney films have been discovered at a Japanese university, the US entertainment company said last week.
The huge collection features work from Flowers and Trees, the world's oldest color animation, which was released in 1932.
It also includes original painted work, drawings and background pictures from movies such as Sleeping Beauty, Fantasia, Bambi and Cinderella.
"We are truly surprised that a collection of this size has been found," Tokyo-based Disney spokeswoman Erika Nakajima said of the discovery at the faculty of engineering at Chiba University near Tokyo.
The collection travelled to Japan in the early 1960s for exhibits at department stores and museums.
Disney donated the collection to the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, which later gave it to an animation scholar at Chiba University for education and research use.
The value of the collection came to light recently, when the school planned to digitize the images and contacted Disney about copyright issues.
"We were keeping them as very important items. We consi-dered it so important that not many people knew about this," said Hiroyuki Kobayashi, professor at the Department of Information and Image Science at the university.
March 24 to March 30 When Yang Bing-yi (楊秉彝) needed a name for his new cooking oil shop in 1958, he first thought of honoring his previous employer, Heng Tai Fung (恆泰豐). The owner, Wang Yi-fu (王伊夫), had taken care of him over the previous 10 years, shortly after the native of Shanxi Province arrived in Taiwan in 1948 as a penniless 21 year old. His oil supplier was called Din Mei (鼎美), so he simply combined the names. Over the next decade, Yang and his wife Lai Pen-mei (賴盆妹) built up a booming business delivering oil to shops and
Indigenous Truku doctor Yuci (Bokeh Kosang), who resents his father for forcing him to learn their traditional way of life, clashes head to head in this film with his younger brother Siring (Umin Boya), who just wants to live off the land like his ancestors did. Hunter Brothers (獵人兄弟) opens with Yuci as the man of the hour as the village celebrates him getting into medical school, but then his father (Nolay Piho) wakes the brothers up in the middle of the night to go hunting. Siring is eager, but Yuci isn’t. Their mother (Ibix Buyang) begs her husband to let
The Taipei Times last week reported that the Control Yuan said it had been “left with no choice” but to ask the Constitutional Court to rule on the constitutionality of the central government budget, which left it without a budget. Lost in the outrage over the cuts to defense and to the Constitutional Court were the cuts to the Control Yuan, whose operating budget was slashed by 96 percent. It is unable even to pay its utility bills, and in the press conference it convened on the issue, said that its department directors were paying out of pocket for gasoline
On March 13 President William Lai (賴清德) gave a national security speech noting the 20th year since the passing of China’s Anti-Secession Law (反分裂國家法) in March 2005 that laid the legal groundwork for an invasion of Taiwan. That law, and other subsequent ones, are merely political theater created by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to have something to point to so they can claim “we have to do it, it is the law.” The president’s speech was somber and said: “By its actions, China already satisfies the definition of a ‘foreign hostile force’ as provided in the Anti-Infiltration Act, which unlike
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