Don't you wish you had cool actor buddies like Woody and Denzel who would write character letters for you if you did something stupid like listen to a "tax avoidance" scheme?
Actors Denzel Washington and Woody Harrelson have written character reference letters to the federal judge who is set tomorrow to sentence their pal Wesley Snipes on federal tax charges.
[. . .]
For his part, Washington compares his friend to "a tree--a mighty oak."
What a nifty new concept -- ninja buddhists! I can see the TV series now, perhaps starring Jet Li or Jackie Chan, and, of course, Steven Segall and David Carradine have to be technical consultants:
State media, meanwhile, labeled a group linked to the Dalai Lama's India-based government-in-exile a "terrorist organization" — building on claims that recent anti-Chinese protests were part of a violent campaign to overthrow Chinese rule and sabotage the Beijing Olympics in August.
I finally caught "The Illusionist" on cable, and I was very disappointed in it, for the same reason I was disappointed in "The Sixth Sense." The only reason for each to exist is the stunning shocker of an ending -- in the one case, finding out somebody is dead you thought was alive, and in the other, finding out someone you thought was dead is really alive. If you know the ending or suspect it, it pretty much spoils the movie for you.
Much has been written in the past couple of days about Charlton Heston's acting career and politics. This pretty much sums up both of them:
Writing in The New York Times nearly 30 years afterward, when the film was re-released for a brief run, Vincent Canby called it “a gaudy, grandiloquent Hollywood classic” and suggested there was more than a touch of “the rugged American frontiersman of myth” in Mr. Heston's Moses.
The Oscars are a ratings dud. Nielsen Media Research says preliminary ratings for the 80th annual Academy Awards telecast are 14 percent lower than the least-watched ceremony ever.
Reason links to a fascinating back-and-forth on "12 Angry Men," the wonderful movie set entirely in a jury room. Was the kid actually guilty, gotten off by Henry Fonda's self-rightously liberal architect character? Or was the movie deliberately unclear on whether the kid actually did it as a way to show the difference between "guilty" and "beyond a reasonable doubt"? I tend toward the latter. That movie, by the way, shows why Henry Fonda was probably the best American actor ever.
Don't you hate reviewers who won't just come out and say what they mean?
Well, it had to happen. Madonna has been a terrible actor in many, many films and now - fiercely aspirational as ever - she has graduated to being a terrible director. She has made a movie so incredibly bad that Berlin festivalgoers were staggering around yesterday in a state of clinical shock, deathly pale and mewing like maltreated kittens.
At an unmanned Redbox kiosk, you can pay your money and get a movie from the vending machine, even an R-rated one. The kiosks are at a lot of areas with high kid traffic, like McDonald's. So the fight is on:
Having received no response, Conklin is now preparing to seek a state injunction to remove the mature movies from McDonald's.
We can be ghouls:
The report that Owen Wilson, the 38-year-old comic actor known for his easygoing demeanor, had attempted suicide was shocking and sobering for both fans and the industry. And it left many people wondering how this sensitive situation will affect the in-demand actor's workload.
How it will affect his workload? He tried to kill himself.
The ghoul of legend fed on human flesh, specializing in robbing graveyards of corpses.
