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.
In the March 9 edition of the Taipei Times a piece by Ninon Godefroy ran with the headine “The quiet, gentle rhythm of Taiwan.” It started with the line “Taiwan is a small, humble place. There is no Eiffel Tower, no pyramids — no singular attraction that draws the world’s attention.” I laughed out loud at that. This was out of no disrespect for the author or the piece, which made some interesting analogies and good points about how both Din Tai Fung’s and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) meticulous attention to detail and quality are not quite up to
April 21 to April 27 Hsieh Er’s (謝娥) political fortunes were rising fast after she got out of jail and joined the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in December 1945. Not only did she hold key positions in various committees, she was elected the only woman on the Taipei City Council and headed to Nanjing in 1946 as the sole Taiwanese female representative to the National Constituent Assembly. With the support of first lady Soong May-ling (宋美齡), she started the Taipei Women’s Association and Taiwan Provincial Women’s Association, where she
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) hatched a bold plan to charge forward and seize the initiative when he held a protest in front of the Taipei City Prosecutors’ Office. Though risky, because illegal, its success would help tackle at least six problems facing both himself and the KMT. What he did not see coming was Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (將萬安) tripping him up out of the gate. In spite of Chu being the most consequential and successful KMT chairman since the early 2010s — arguably saving the party from financial ruin and restoring its electoral viability —
It is one of the more remarkable facts of Taiwan history that it was never occupied or claimed by any of the numerous kingdoms of southern China — Han or otherwise — that lay just across the water from it. None of their brilliant ministers ever discovered that Taiwan was a “core interest” of the state whose annexation was “inevitable.” As Paul Kua notes in an excellent monograph laying out how the Portuguese gave Taiwan the name “Formosa,” the first Europeans to express an interest in occupying Taiwan were the Spanish. Tonio Andrade in his seminal work, How Taiwan Became Chinese,
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