Her latest movie Rendition flopped at box offices, but fans still love Reese Witherspoon. The actress proved to be the most-liked celebrity among 10 women who regularly found their way onto magazine covers and into gossip columns in 2007, according to a poll on Friday.
Meanwhile, the Screen Actors Guild said nearly all its members will refuse to cross striking writers' picket lines at the upcoming Golden Globe Awards, throwing Hollywood's award season deeper into doubt. Award nominees such as Julia Roberts and Johnny Depp would be key draws for audiences of the film and television honors on Jan. 13, and could be nominated and appear for the world's top film honors, the Oscars, next month.
Natalie Imbruglia, the singer and former Neighbours actress, has split from her husband four years after they married in a beachside ceremony in Australia. Imbruglia, 32, and Daniel Johns, 28, lead singer with the Australian rock band Silverchair, said they had "simply grown apart" after living on different sides of the world for years.
China is cracking down on "vulgar" entertainment and asked all video and audio producers to check their inventory for risque material with threats of fines and other punishment for those who do not weed it out. The new order from China's top publishing officials comes just days after Beijing slapped restrictions on Internet sites that allow users to upload video or audio, and handed a two-year film-making ban to the team behind steamy film "Lost in Beijing."
Chinese censors banned an award-winning film that depicted the seedy side of Beijing, authorities said, amid a campaign to clean up the city's image ahead of the August Olympics.
In announcing the ban on Lost in Beijing (蘋果), the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television hit out at its sexual content and its unapproved participation in international film festivals.
PHOTO: AFP
"Parts of the film violate regulations on sexual content ... while unhealthy and inappropriate promotional materials for the film were also distributed," the administration said in a notice posted on its Web site on Thursday.
The film is set in a massage parlor, with the plot centering on the rape of a peasant masseuse, played by up-and-coming starlet Fan Bingbing (范冰冰).
She is raped by the massage parlor's owner and the plot focuses on how the two deal with her subsequent pregnancy.
Massage parlors are well known in Beijing as fronts for prostitution, an illegal practice that nevertheless thrives.
The film, directed by Li Yu (李玉), premiered internationally at the Berlin Film Festival in February last year.
The film was also awarded a Special Jury Prize at the 2007 Bangkok International Film Festival. Theatres around China, including in Beijing, had already begun showing the film when the ban was issued.
In its notice, the administration said producer Fang Yi and production company Beijing Laurel Films had also been banned from making and distributing films on the Chinese mainland for two years.
Singer and songwriter Stephen Stills, best known as one-third of rock trio Crosby, Stills and Nash, has undergone successful surgery for prostate cancer and is recovering well, his wife said. "Stephen's procedure went remarkably well and he couldn't be better," Kristen Stills said in a statement late on Thursday.
Troubled actress Lindsay Lohan fell off the sobriety wagon on New Year's Eve, her lawyer said on Thursday, ending a year that saw the star check into rehab several times and land in jail for drunken driving and cocaine possession. The 21-year-old Lohan was captured on video, posted on celebrity Web site TMZ.com, sipping from a champagne bottle in Italy where she was honored at the Capri Film Festival.
The union for striking Holly-wood writers cried foul on Thursday over late-night TV comic Jay Leno writing his own jokes for his return to the air from an eight-week hiatus forced by the walkout. The Writers Guild of America said the host of NBC's The Tonight Show, who is a WGA member, violated union strike rules by preparing the monologue he delivered on Wednesday for his first new broadcast in two months which, like most other returning talk shows, saw a bounce in viewership.
Nine Taiwanese nervously stand on an observation platform at Tokyo’s Haneda International Airport. It’s 9:20am on March 27, 1968, and they are awaiting the arrival of Liu Wen-ching (柳文卿), who is about to be deported back to Taiwan where he faces possible execution for his independence activities. As he is removed from a minibus, a tenth activist, Dai Tian-chao (戴天昭), jumps out of his hiding place and attacks the immigration officials — the nine other activists in tow — while urging Liu to make a run for it. But he’s pinned to the ground. Amid the commotion, Liu tries to
A dozen excited 10-year-olds are bouncing in their chairs. The small classroom’s walls are lined with racks of wetsuits and water equipment, and decorated with posters of turtles. But the students’ eyes are trained on their teacher, Tseng Ching-ming, describing the currents and sea conditions at nearby Banana Bay, where they’ll soon be going. “Today you have one mission: to take off your equipment and float in the water,” he says. Some of the kids grin, nervously. They don’t know it, but the students from Kenting-Eluan elementary school on Taiwan’s southernmost point, are rare among their peers and predecessors. Despite most of
A pig’s head sits atop a shelf, tufts of blonde hair sprouting from its taut scalp. Opposite, its chalky, wrinkled heart glows red in a bubbling vat of liquid, locks of thick dark hair and teeth scattered below. A giant screen shows the pig draped in a hospital gown. Is it dead? A surgeon inserts human teeth implants, then hair implants — beautifying the horrifyingly human-like animal. Chang Chen-shen (張辰申) calls Incarnation Project: Deviation Lovers “a satirical self-criticism, a critique on the fact that throughout our lives we’ve been instilled with ideas and things that don’t belong to us.” Chang
Feb. 10 to Feb. 16 More than three decades after penning the iconic High Green Mountains (高山青), a frail Teng Yu-ping (鄧禹平) finally visited the verdant peaks and blue streams of Alishan described in the lyrics. Often mistaken as an indigenous folk song, it was actually created in 1949 by Chinese filmmakers while shooting a scene for the movie Happenings in Alishan (阿里山風雲) in Taipei’s Beitou District (北投), recounts director Chang Ying (張英) in the 1999 book, Chang Ying’s Contributions to Taiwanese Cinema and Theater (打鑼三響包得行: 張英對台灣影劇的貢獻). The team was meant to return to China after filming, but