Barenaked Ladies "Give Back" To The Community
Barenaked Ladies (BNL) have not forgotten about the virus that hit their native Canada this past year. The group recently visited Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital and contributed more than $66,000 to SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) relief. The donated money was raised at one of the group's summer concerts.
Barenaked Ladies lead singer Steven Page told the Canadian Press, "People in lab coats are the real heroes. During the SARS crisis some of the attention was put on people like the Barenaked Ladies or (actor-comedian) Mike Myers, but these are the people who were dealing with it every day." Mount Sinai Hospital treated the most Canadian SARS victims during the outbreak.
This is not the first time BNL has come to the support of Canada and the SARS epidemic. The group appeared in a series of commercials that ran across North America aimed at reviving Toronto's tourism industry.
In related news, the group's next album, Everything To Everyone, will be released in one week's time (October 21). Barenaked Ladies begin their North American tour in Boston that same night.
Couple check: Who's together, who's not
We now take a break (very temporary, we assure you) from Bennifer. Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez are together (who could miss them at Saturday's Red Sox-Yankees game?), even if baseball is more important at the moment than marriage. But with the hysteria over the couple's postponed nuptials, it has been easy to overlook other celebrity couplings and bust-ups of late. USA TODAY's Karen Thomas updates the scorecard.
Ethan Hawke, 32, and Uma Thurman, 33
They hooked up: On the set of 1997 futuristic thriller Gattaca
Time together: Six years (married for five)
Why it ended: Hawke reportedly was seeing Canadian model Jenny Perzow, 22, while filming Taking Lives in Montreal.
Halle Berry, 37, and Eric Benet, 33
They hooked up: At a party in 1999 for Berry's HBO movie, Introducing Dorothy Dandridge
Time together: Four years (married for nearly three)
Why it ended: Benet had checked in to a clinic for sex addiction last year; People magazine reports that another indiscretion was the final straw for Berry.
Heath Ledger, 24, and Naomi Watts, 35
They hooked up: On the Australian set of Ned Kelly
Time together: 16 months
Why it ended: Busy career paths kept the Aussie couple on separate continents more often than not, and career not love looks to be the priority right now.
Nicole Kidman, 36, and Lenny Kravitz, 39
First sighting: In June at Manhattan's Soho House and days later at P. Diddy's birthday bash
Time together: About four months
The buzz: The Aussie beauty and her music man were photographed arriving together at Lincoln Center for a performance of La Traviata at the Met. The big rock she was wearing sparked rumors this week in the British press that they're engaged. But her publicist, Catherine Olim, says it's just a ring Kidman owns.
Britney Spears, 21, and Columbus Short, 21
How they met: He was hired to be a backup dancer for her upcoming tour
Time together: About three weeks
The buzz: He's married with a child on the way, and he denied in Star that there's any fire between him and Britney. Still, pictures of them hanging out continue to pop up and the tour hasn't even started.
Salma Hayek, 37, and Josh Lucas, 32
First sighting: At a party in L.A. in early August
Time together: Two months
The buzz: The Frida star is fresh off a long relationship with Edward Norton, but it looks to be getting hot and heavy fast with Lucas. She was his date when his Wonderland premiered Sept. 24, and rumor is Lucas recently took his new sweetie home to Washington state to meet Mom.
Killer Knowledge: A Fistful of Essential Lessons About Blood, Cartoons and Cereal
This you know: Bill dies--hence the title. That's no secret. Other things you know already about the intense, kitschy revenge movie Kill Bill: Volume 1: It's packed with kung fu, samurai swords, Uma Thurman and the big comeback of '90s film-geek savant Quentin Tarantino.
But what you don't know about Kill Bill could fill a Tokyo skyscraper. The flick's stuffed with obscure film lore, cameos aplenty, loving odes to Asian cinema--and just a whole bunch of weird stuff. Here's a taste.
Ball & chain: Gore-hungry Go Go (Chiaki Kuriyama) and her toy.
1. The Grindhouse Doesn't Sell Meat: Tarantino's big buzzword these days--he calls Bill a "grindhouse" movie--is a toss to run-down theaters from the '70s. These grindhouses would show the gruesome, out-there and too foreign flicks you couldn't find in the megaplex. Here, Tarantino gorged on horror, import kung fu and blaxploitation marathons, cooking up Bill's blood-spurtin', music-screechin' over-the-top vibe.
2. Warren Beatty Was Supposed to Be Bill: But that didn't work out. So, David Carradine took the part, which makes sense since he starred in the Kung Fu TV series and not, like, Ishtar.
3. The Bride's Getting Old: The opening credits say the movie is based on "The Bride, created by Q&U." That would be Quentin and Uma, you see, who cooked up the concept of a wedding-day massacre--and the revenge that follows--on the Pulp Fiction set. That was a decade ago. In the meantime, Tarantino wrote a WWII epic (actually, three WWII epics) called Inglorious Bastards, and Uma married (and separated from) Ethan Hawke and had two kids.
4. Computers Were Used, Like, Once: Unlike today's rash of slick Matrix-ized action flicks, Bill has only a few tiny CGI shots (to remove wires from fighters flying through the air). "If I'd wanted all that computer-game bulls--t," Tarantino tells Britain's Empire magazine, "I'd have gone home and stuck my d--k in my Nintendo."
5. Kung-Fu Roots Go Deep--Like to the '70s: The movie's packed with sly shout-outs to Hong Kong's Shaw Brothers Studios. Never heard of it? Strange, as the family has squeezed out hundreds of kung-fu classics, all with fountains of blood and such names as Five Deadly Venoms. Bill even opens with a faux title card declaring it's filmed in "ShawScope," and Shaw legend Gordon Liu (surely you know him from Eight Diagram Pole Fighter) shows up in a black mask, yelling and kicking.
6. The Bride Has a Name: Whenever Thurman's character (billed only as the Bride) is mentioned, her name's beeped out. Why? Nobody will say. What are the actors actually saying? Vivica A. Fox, who plays badass assassin Vernita Green, tells us: "Beatrix." Really, it's that easy? Yep. But then she adds, "Did you just get me in trouble?"
7. Quentin Rips Himself Off: The director fills Bill with playful references to his own movie universe, like:
The Bride, at one point, walks past a mural-size ad for Red Apple cigarettes, the brand smoked by Bruce Willis in Pulp Fiction and seen in the Tarantino-directed segment of Four Rooms.
Michael Parks plays the shades-wearin' Texas Ranger Earl McGraw, same as in the Tarantino-written From Dusk Till Dawn.
8. The DiVAS Code Names Are Snakes: The Bride was part of the five-member Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (DiVAS), which should sound familiar. Thurman's character in Pulp Fiction had shot a TV pilot for Fox Force Five, a five-member team of, yes, assassins! In Bill, their handles are all venomous reptiles: Cottonmouth, Sidewinder, Black Mamba, Cobra, California Mountain Snake.
9. The Japanese Version Has More Blood: Despite gallons of spilled red corn syrup and dozens of sliced-off body parts, Kill Bill: Volume 1 managed an R rating. But the cut seen in Tokyo probably wouldn't. What's different? For one thing, one guts-soaked sequence--shown in cringing black-and-white in the U.S. version--will remain in vivid color.
10. Don't Mess with Sonny Chiba: The longtime Japanese superstar plays a sword master who has sworn off the trade but helps the Bride get her revenge. Unlike in his many Street Fighter flicks, he's low-key here, making fine swords--and fish.
11. On Set, Uma Pigged Out on Tamales: Seriously. She told us.
12. Julie Dreyfus Really Is Big in Japan: The French-born, Japanese-fluent actress plays Sofie Fatale, an ice-cold Yakuza crime-lord associate. Never seen her? You probably don't live in Japan, where she's such a big deal she was one of the judges on Iron Chef.
13. Cartoons Can Hurt: One of the film's many chapters is a startling and stark 10-minute anime segment. Again, this'll be familiar to hard-core nerds who'll recognize the animation by Production IG, the Japanese house responsible for Ghost in the Shell and Blood: The Last Vampire.
14. Beware: Zamfir Is Involved: Yeah, that's right. The master of the pan flute joins Nancy Sinatra, Quincy Jones and Isaac Hayes on the soundtrack. Word is the Wu-Tang Clan's RZA, who composed the original music, heard Zamfir's haunting melodies in a restaurant and thought they'd be perfect.
15. Uma Took Bruce Lee's Clothes: Does that yellow- and black-striped jumpsuit the hero wears look familiar? Then you're one of those people who've seen Game of Death, a Bruce Lee movie in which the martial-arts master has the...same jumpsuit!
16. Quentin Loves His Cereal: During one fight scene, Vivica A. Fox takes out a box of old-school cereal called Kaboom!--which leads to a lethal joke. This continues an odd trend that's part of this nutritious breakfast: Both Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction featured long-discontinued sugary pops called Fruit Brute.
17. There's a Volume 2, Remember? The first installment ends in a cliffhanger, so here's what we know so far about part two.
It's less of a samurai movie and more of a spaghetti western in the tradition of Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars.
There's another animated sequence.
There's more of what we expect from Tarantino: talky dialogue, chopped-up and out-of-order narrative. Plus, plenty of Carradine's face, which we don't actually see in Volume 1.
Tarantino has a small role, and he fights.
Bill dies.
18. Tokyo's Done Godzilla Style: Again avoiding computer imagery, Tarantino filmed the scene of an airplane landing in Tokyo using old-school miniature models. And that skyline? It's the same one used in the last Godzilla movie from director Ishirτ Honda.
19. Johnny Knoxville Is Now Officially a Muse: Tarantino admits that, yes, he took inspiration from modern "cinema" as well. After watching Jackass: The Movie, he changed what he calls "a brutal bitch fight" in Volume 2 to be...slightly grosser.
20. The Pussy Wagon Gets Around: Tarantino likes the movie's signature car--a truck painted with flames and the words Pussy Wagon--so much he has been driving it around Los Angeles, including to last week's premiere.
Film Actors Join the Fray Against 'Screeners' Ban
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Several top actors and past Academy Award winners are joining the battle against a controversial ban on Oscar movie "screeners" by voicing their opposition in a newspaper advertisement, a film industry source said on Tuesday.
Signers of the ad, which will appear in the Wednesday edition of industry papers Daily Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, include Oscar winners Adrien Brody and Susan Sarandon as well as "Matrix" star Keanu Reeves, said the source who is connected to IFP/Los Angeles, a group helping spearhead the drive against the ban.
The ad will ask the Motion Picture Association of America, which represents Hollywood's major studios, to reverse their decision to issue screeners to Academy members who vote on the awards.
The ban on "screeners" -- videotapes and DVDs of movies vying for awards -- has raised a major outcry by filmmakers, directors and now actors who say it will limit the number of people who will see contending films and discriminate against smaller independent studios.
The MPAA instituted the ban out of concern the videos and DVDs will be illegally copied and sold on black markets or distributed for free over the Internet, which happened last year.
The MPAA and member studios currently are waging a major campaign against movie piracy, especially on the Web.
But filmmakers worry that the ban will give studio movies an unfair advantage over low-budget and independent films when they all begin competing for a slew of awards given out in coming months, culminating in the U.S. film industry's top honors, the Oscars, to be awarded in February.
The actors' ad follows a similar "open letter" by famed directors such as Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman that ran in newspapers last week and called the ban an "unwarranted obstacle" in Hollywood's annual awards race.
MANY VOICES, MANY ISSUES
Other groups such as film critics and award shows organizers have voiced concern, too.
Last week, Kathy Connell, producer of the Screen ActorsGuild Awards said, "we are concerned that if screeners are not made available, our members will not be able to view all eligible performances." The Screen Actors Guild represents 118,000 actors.
The Writers Guild of America West, which represents screenwriters, issued a statement on Monday saying "to place a gag order on 'screeners' is to tilt the playing field from small films to large."
A spokesman for the MPAA stuck to their statement issued last week, saying it welcomed new thoughts and ideas on the issue but that for now, the screener ban remains intact.
Within the industry, the issue is hotly contested because awards and nominations get more people into theaters and have a direct impact on sales of videos, DVD and television fees.
Major studios have the marketing muscle and money to get the attention they need, whereas independent filmmakers depend on publicity from awards. Actors and directors argue they might not make low-budget films without the hype awards season brings.
But the issue has perplexed Hollywood insiders, too, because many fear piracy and a future filled with the sort of declining sales that have played havoc with the music industry.
"We have to look for a solution that will suit all interests," said another source who asked to remain anonymous. "Piracy is a huge problem, and everybody is interested in protecting intellectual property."