Woody Allen’s ex-girlfriend Mia Farrow and his wife Soon-Yi Previn will not be called to testify at a trial pitting the movie director against American Apparel, a lawyer for the clothing company said on Thursday. Allen sued the US clothing company for false advertising more than a year ago seeking more than US$10 million after the American film director’s image appeared on billboards in New York and Los Angeles. Allen says his image was damaged and used for profit without his consent.
Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s Nobel Prize-winning author, said he may face new compensation claims for remarks he made about the World War I-era killing of Armenians, despite an earlier acquittal in a criminal trial, the Anatolian news agency said on Saturday. Turkey’s Court of Appeals this week overturned a lower court decision that had dismissed the claims of personal damages against Pamuk, 56, paving the way for a new case.
Actor Charles “Bud” Tingwell, who starred in more than 100 films and television programs in his native Australia and in Britain, has died aged 86, his family said on Friday. Tingwell, whose career spans some 60 years, died in a Melbourne hospital with his daughter Virginia and son Christopher at his bedside. A statement on his Web site said he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer and took ill two weeks ago.
A dying Farrah Fawcett is caught in the middle of a legal battle between her longtime companion, Ryan O’Neal, and a producer who has worked with the Charlie’s Angels star during her fight with cancer. The dispute centers on the TV documentary Farrah’s Story, which aired on NBC on Friday. Fawcett collaborated with producer Craig Nevius on the video diary that makes clear she is nearing the end of her life.
Emotional Korean tale Mother of a woman’s relentless fight to save her mentally challenged boy won a standing ovation for cult The Host director Bong Joon-ho at the Cannes festival on Saturday.
Starring veteran actress Kim Hye-ja as a mother convinced of her son’s innocence in a murder case, the movie brought the audience to its feet after premiering as one of the films running for the Un Certain Regard prize for fresh upcoming talent.
“A mother can be a noble figure or a savage beast,” the director said.
In the audience were fellow South Koreans at Cannes, director Park Chan-wook, whose movie Thirst is competing for the coveted Palme d’Or and writer-director and former minister Lee Chang-dong, who is a member of this year’s Palme jury.
Crowds hoping to glimpse the stars on the Cannes festival’s red carpet got an eye-popping surprise on Saturday as a team of nude Belgian cyclists paraded down the Riviera seafront.
Director Felix van Groeningen and four of his actors straddled bicycles and careened down the Croisette and back under warm spring sunshine, in a remake of a scene from La Merditude des Choses (The Misfortunates).
The comedy, which tells the story of a family of drunkard brothers, seen through a teenagers’ eyes, premiered on Saturday at the Directors’ Fortnight, one of two high-profile sidebars to the main Cannes film festival.
For China’s Lou Ye (婁燁), the journey to the red carpet on the Riviera is fraught with risk.
Lou is at the festival with a movie made undercover after he was barred from working by Chinese authorities.
Lou tackles subjects that make officials at home uneasy — gay relationships in Spring Fever (春風沉醉的晚上).
Lou, 44, was banned from filmmaking in China for five years after he brought his last film Summer Palace (頤和園) — about the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests — to Cannes in 2006 without permission. He shot Spring Fever, a moody and sexually explicit drama that tracks the romantic entanglements of five characters over the course of a torrid spring season, with a small camera and without authorization in the city of Nanjing.
“I was worried I might be stopped from working — worried I might get a call from the Chinese Film Bureau,’’ he said on Friday.
During the Japanese colonial era, remote mountain villages were almost exclusively populated by indigenous residents. Deep in the mountains of Chiayi County, however, was a settlement of Hakka families who braved the harsh living conditions and relative isolation to eke out a living processing camphor. As the industry declined, the village’s homes and offices were abandoned one by one, leaving us with a glimpse of a lifestyle that no longer exists. Even today, it takes between four and six hours to walk in to Baisyue Village (白雪村), and the village is so far up in the Chiayi mountains that it’s actually
The Taipei Times reported last week that housing transactions fell 15.3 percent last month, to under 20,000 units. However, the market boomed for the first eight months of the year, and observers expect it to show growth for the year as a whole. The fall was due to Central Bank intervention. “The negative impact of credit controls grew evident for the third straight month,” said Sinyi Realty Inc (信義房屋) research manager Tseng Ching-ter (曾敬德), according to the report. Central Bank Governor Yang Chin-long (楊金龍) in October said that the Central Bank implemented selective credit controls in September to cool the housing
It’s a discombobulating experience, after a Lord of the Rings trilogy that was built, down to every frame and hobbit hair, for the big screen, to see something so comparatively minor, small-scaled and TV-sized as The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim. The film, set 183 years before the events of The Hobbit, is a return to Middle-earth that, despite some very earnest storytelling, never supplies much of an answer as to why, exactly, it exists. Rohirrim, which sounds a little like the sound an orc might make sneezing, is perhaps best understood as a placeholder for further cinematic
These days, CJ Chen (陳崇仁) can be found driving a taxi in and around Hualien. As a way to earn a living, it’s not his first choice. He’d rather be taking tourists to the region’s attractions, but after a 7.4-magnitude earthquake struck the region on April 3, demand for driver-guides collapsed. In the eight months since the quake, the number of overseas tourists visiting Hualien has declined by “at least 90 percent, because most of them come for Taroko Gorge, not for the east coast or the East Longitudinal Valley,” he says. Chen estimates the drop in domestic sightseers after the
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