An Australian newspaper mocked Russell Crowe for smoking and shoveling down a fatty meal during a recent bike ride, so the notoriously salty actor set out to prove he is still in gladiator shape — by challenging the paper’s gossip columnist to a duel by bicycle.
Crowe, who has been photographed looking slimmer in recent months, was apparently none too pleased by a column published in Sydney’s the Daily Telegraph on Tuesday entitled “Smokes and fatty foods the fitness regime for Rusty.” The paper mocked Crowe after he was photographed pausing during a recent bike ride with his personal trainer to puff on a cigarette and chow down on three tacos and a soft drink.
In a story published on Friday, the paper said Crowe’s spokesman called up gossip columnist Annette Sharp the next day and said, “Get on your bike. Russell wants you to go riding with him. Are you ready to die?” Sharp accepted the challenge and the pair met a dawn for a 20km ride through the city. Video of the race shows Sharp struggling to keep up while Crowe zooms along unfazed.
At one point, Sharp fell off her bike.
Still, Crowe gave Sharp some credit, telling her she was a better biker than Australian director Baz Luhrmann. “You’re twice the man Baz is,” he said.
Crowe’s manager Grant Vandenberg had no comment. “I think everything’s been said in the paper,” he said.
Much ink is being spilled in a war of words over a “remake” of the 1992 Harvey Keitel film Bad Lieutenant.
Actor Nicolas Cage plays a deranged, drug-addicted detective in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, re-visiting the corrupt cop role made famous by Keitel 17 years ago.
Despite the similarity in title to Abel Ferrara’s cult classic Bad Lieutenant, and Ferrara’s obvious displeasure at the idea of a remake, Cage and German director Werner Herzog say their movie is not connected.
“It would be unfair to compare the two movies,” Cage said in an interview in Venice, where the picture is in competition at the annual film festival.
“Harvey’s trajectory is really dealing with guilt and all of that, and perhaps fits more into that [Judeo-Christian] program, so to me it’s a completely different story and a different cop,” added the 45-year-old, who won a best actor Oscar for playing an alcoholic in Leaving Las Vegas.
“This is a New Orleans cop, it takes place in New Orleans, it’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, it’s not Bad Lieutenant.”
Ferrara has criticized the idea of a remake, and was quoted in the media as saying: “I wish these people die in hell.”
Former supermodel Stephanie Seymour, who has been in relationship hell recently, has come to a closed-door agreement with a security guard who was accused of shoving her into a door at her Connecticut home.
Seymour got into a dispute with guard Joseph Babnik in June when he was watching the Greenwich estate of her estranged husband, billionaire newsprint magnate Peter Brant.
Babnik told police Seymour had taken documents from him and he was trying to get them back. The former New York City police officer was arrested and given a misdemeanor summons on a disorderly conduct charge.
But the state’s attorney on Friday declined to prosecute the case. The charge will be dismissed in a year if Babnik stays out of trouble.
Not many actresses get a career-changing chance at 68. For Julia McKenzie, already a successful stage and TV performer, it came when she was chosen as British television’s new Miss Marple, Agatha Christie’s famous amateur detective. The new series, first broadcast on the commercial ITV channel yesterday, has already been shown in the US, Canada and Ireland, underlining the international appeal of one of Christie’s best-loved creations.
At home, though, critical attention is likely to be at its most intense, with McKenzie seeking to fill the shoes of previous popular interpreters like Margaret Rutherford, Joan Hickson and, most recently, Geraldine McEwan.
“It’s the prize,” McKenzie said of her high-profile role.
“And to come at this time in my career, which normally is tailing off,” she said in a recent interview. “I would have retired, I think, because I don’t want to end up saying ‘The carriage awaits.’”
Actor Tom Selleck has been awarded more than US$187,000 after a California jury found the actor was duped into buying a lame horse.
Selleck —Selleck is best known for his role on TV’s Magnum, P.I. in the 1980s — accused equestrian Dolores Cuenca of trying to pass off a show horse with a medical condition as fit to ride in competitions.
The defense had argued that Selleck didn’t check the veterinarian records of the 10-year-old Zorro.
Jan. 6 to Jan. 12 Perhaps hoping to gain the blessing of the stone-age hunter-gatherers that dwelt along the east coast 30,000 years ago, visitors to the Baxian Caves (八仙洞) during the 1970s would grab a handful of soil to bring home. In January 1969, the nation was captivated by the excavation of pre-ceramic artifacts and other traces of human habitation in several caves atop a sea cliff in Taitung County. The majority of the unearthed objects were single-faced, unpolished flake tools fashioned from natural pebbles collected by the shore. While archaeologists had found plenty of neolithic (7,000 BC to 1,700
When the weather is too cold to enjoy the white beaches and blue waters of Pingtung County’s Kenting (墾丁), it’s the perfect time to head up into the hills and enjoy a different part of the national park. In the highlands above the bustling beach resorts, a simple set of trails treats visitors to lush forest, rocky peaks, billowing grassland and a spectacular bird’s-eye view of the coast. The rolling hills beyond Hengchun Township (恆春) in Pingtung County offer a two-hour through-hike of sweeping views from the mighty peak of Dajianshih Mountain (大尖石山) to Eluanbi Lighthouse (鵝鑾鼻燈塔) on the coast, or
Her greatest fear, dormant for decades, came rushing back in an instant: had she adopted and raised a kidnapped child? Peg Reif’s daughter, adopted from South Korea in the 1980s, had sent her a link to a documentary detailing how the system that made their family was rife with fraud: documents falsified, babies switched, children snatched off the street and sent abroad. Reif wept. She was among more than 120 who contacted The Associated Press this fall, after a series of stories and a documentary made with Frontline exposed how Korea created a baby pipeline, designed to ship children abroad as quickly as
Famed Chinese demographer Yi Fuxian (易富賢) recently wrote for The Diplomat on the effects of a cross-strait war on demography. He contended that one way to deter the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is by putting the demographic issue front and center — last year total births in the PRC, he said, receded to levels not seen since 1762. Yi observes that Taiwan’s current fertility rate is already lower than Ukraine’s — a nation at war that is refusing to send its young into battle — and that its “demographic crisis suggests that Taiwan’s technological importance will rapidly decline, and
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