Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova Split
Musical sweethearts Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova have ended their romantic relationship. In 2007's indie fairytale film 'Once,' the pair charmed audiences with their portrayal of an Irish busker (Hansard) who falls for a young Czech immigrant (Irglova). The two Oscar-winners carried the budding romance off-screen, while continuing to perform music together as the Swell Season.
In a recent interview, however, Hansard states that he and Irglova are no longer romantically involved.
"It did become a real relationship," Hansard admits. "I think it was just a very natural part of what we were doing together. We had made the film. We had gone through so much with the Oscar. Of course, we fell into each other's arms. It was a very necessary part of our friendship but I think we both concluded that that wasn't what we really wanted to do. So we're not together now. We are just really good friends."
Having fallen for the duo ourselves, Spinner named the film's poignant ballad, 'Falling Slowly,' the Best Song of 2007. A few months after performing for the Interface, Hansard and Irglova took home the Oscar for Best Original Song for that tune. Thankfully, the pair will continue to make beautiful music together, at least in the literal sense. They have a few upcoming gigs overseas (as the Swell Season) and are considering releasing a newly-recorded album independently.
Billy Bob calls Oscars 'horses---'
PARK CITY, Utah -- Wild prediction: Billy Bob Thornton's new movie won't be up for any Oscars this time next year.
Not that the 53-year-old actor and filmmaker -- as well as Academy Award winner, for 1996's Sling Blade -- sounds like he'd care. "I keep up with the Oscars about as much as I do the Miss America pageant," he says. "I think it's just a dog and pony show. It's horses---."
The film in question, The Informers, premiered at Sundance Thursday night. It's a hedonistic chronicle of sex, drugs and excess circa 1983, adapted from Bret Easton Ellis's short story collection. Although it will offend some sensibilities, Thornton offers no apologies.
"A movie or a record or a book, they don't jump in your shopping cart. They don't have a brain. You have to buy it. So if somebody has anything bad to say about something, they shouldn't have gone."
He's similarly cynical about the struggle to make character-driven films. One such movie, Peace Like a River, has languished for years despite having Thornton attached as the star and Brad Pitt producing.
"The hardest movie to get financed right now is a character drama," he says. "It's come (to the point) where audiences only want to see videogames ... They don't want to see our movies anymore. They want to see us get arrested for DUI on TMZ. It's kind of sad."
Author John Updike dead at 76
NEW YORK — John Updike, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, prolific man of letters and erudite chronicler of sex, divorce and other adventures in the postwar prime of the American empire, died Tuesday at age 76.
Updike, best known for his four “Rabbit” novels, died of lung cancer at a hospice near his home in Beverly Farms, Mass., according to his longtime publisher, Alfred A. Knopf.
A literary writer who frequently appeared on best-seller lists, the tall, hawk-nosed Updike wrote novels, short stories, poems, criticism, the memoir “Self-Consciousness” and even a famous essay about baseball great Ted Williams.
He released more than 50 books in a career that started in the 1950s, winning virtually every literary prize, including two Pulitzers, for “Rabbit Is Rich” and “Rabbit at Rest,” and two National Book Awards.
Although himself deprived of a Nobel, he did bestow it upon one of his fictional characters, Henry Bech, the womanizing, egotistical Jewish novelist who collected the literature prize in 1999.
His settings ranged from the court of “Hamlet” to postcolonial Africa, but his literary home was the American suburb, the great new territory of mid-century fiction.
Born in 1932, Updike spoke for millions of Depression-era readers raised by “penny-pinching parents,” united by “the patriotic cohesion of World War II” and blessed by a “disproportionate share of the world’s resources,” the postwar, suburban boom of “idealistic careers and early marriages.”
He captured, and sometimes embodied, a generation’s confusion over the civil rights and women’s movements, and opposition to the Vietnam War. Updike was called a misogynist, a racist and an apologist for the establishment.
On purely literary grounds, he was attacked by Norman Mailer as the kind of author appreciated by readers who knew nothing about writing. Last year, judges of Britain’s Bad Sex in Fiction Prize voted Updike lifetime achievement honours.
But more often he was praised for his flowing, poetic writing style. Describing a man’s interrupted quest to make love, Updike likened it “to a small angel to which all afternoon tiny lead weights are attached.”
Nothing was too great or too small for Updike to poeticize. He might rhapsodize over the film projector’s “chuckling whir” or look to the stars and observe that “the universe is perfectly transparent: we exist as flaws in ancient glass.”
Author Joyce Carol Oates, a friend of Updike’s, said there was a “luminosity in John’s style that was just extraordinary. He also had a wonderful, warm, sympathetic sense of humour which people didn’t always notice.”
In the richest detail, his books recorded the extremes of earthly desire and spiritual zealotry, whether the comic philandering of the preacher in “A Month of Sundays” or the steady rage of the young Muslim in “Terrorist.”
Raised in the Protestant community of Shillington, Pa., where the Lord’s Prayer was recited daily at school, Updike was a lifelong churchgoer influenced by his faith, but not immune to doubts.
“I remember the times when I was wrestling with these issues that I would feel crushed. I was crushed by the purely materialistic, atheistic account of the universe,” Updike told The Associated Press during a 2006 interview.
“I am very prone to accept all that the scientists tell us, the truth of it, the authority of the efforts of all the men and woman spent trying to understand more about atoms and molecules. But I can’t quite make the leap of unfaith, as it were, and say, ‘This is it. Carpe diem (seize the day), and tough luck.’ “
He received his greatest acclaim for the “Rabbit” series, a quartet of novels published over a 30-year span that featured ex-high school basketball star Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom and his restless adjustment to adulthood and the constraints of work and family. To the very end, Harry was in motion, an innocent in his belief that any door could be opened, a believer in God even as he bedded women other than his wife.
The series “to me is the tale of a life, a life led by an American citizen who shares the national passion for youth, freedom, and sex, the national openness and willingness to learn, the national habit of improvisation,” Updike would later write. “He is furthermore a Protestant, haunted by a God whose manifestations are elusive, yet all-important.”
Other notable books included “Couples,” a sexually explicit tale of suburban mating that sold millions of copies; “In the Beauty of the Lilies,” an epic of American faith and fantasy; and “Too Far to Go,” which followed the courtship, marriage and divorce of the Maples, a suburban couple with parallels to Updike’s own first marriage.
Updike’s “The Witches of Eastwick,” released in 1984, was later made into a film of the same name starring Jack Nicholson, Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer and Susan Sarandon.
Plagued from an early age by asthma, psoriasis and a stammer, he found creative outlets in drawing and writing.
Updike was born in Reading, Pa., his mother a department store worker who longed to write, his father a high school teacher remembered with sadness and affection in “The Centaur,” a novel published in 1964.
The author brooded over his father’s low pay and mocking students, but also wrote of a childhood of “warm and action-packed houses that accommodated the presence of a stranger, my strange ambition to be glamorous.”
For Updike, the high life meant books, such as the volumes of P.G. Wodehouse and Robert Benchley he borrowed from the library as a child, or, as he later recalled, the “chastely severe, time-honoured classics” he read in his dorm room at Harvard University, leaning back in his “wooden Harvard chair,” cigarette in hand.
While studying on a full scholarship at Harvard, he headed the staff of the Harvard Lampoon and met the woman who became his first wife, Mary Entwistle Pennington, whom he married in June 1953, a year before he earned his A.B. degree summa cum laude. (Updike divorced Pennington in 1975 and was remarried two years later, to Martha Bernhard. He had four children).
After graduating, he accepted a one-year fellowship to study painting at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts at Oxford University. During his stay in England, a literary idol, E.B. White, offered him a position at The New Yorker, where he served briefly as foreign books reviewer. Many of Updike’s reviews and short stories were published in The New Yorker, often edited by White’s stepson, Roger Angell.
“No writer was more important to the soul of The New Yorker than John,” New Yorker editor David Remnick said in a statement. “We adored him. He was, for so long, the spirit of The New Yorker and it is very hard to imagine things without him.”
By the end of the 1950s, Updike had published a story collection, a book of poetry and his first novel, “The Poorhouse Fair,” soon followed by the first of the Rabbit books, “Rabbit, Run.”
Praise came so early and so often that New York Times critic Arthur Mizener worried that Updike’s “natural talent” was exposing him “from an early age to a great deal of head-turning praise.”
Updike learned to write about everyday life by, in part, living it. In 1957, he left New York, with its “cultural hassle” and melting pot of “agents and wisenheimers,” and settled with his first wife and four kids in Ipswich, Mass, a “rather out-of-the-way town” about 48 kilometres north of Boston.
“The real America seemed to me ‘out there,’ too heterogeneous and electrified by now to pose much threat of the provinciality that people used to come to New York to escape,” Updike later wrote.
“There were also practical attractions: free parking for my car, public education for my children, a beach to tan my skin on, a church to attend without seeming too strange.”
In recent years, his books included “The Widows of Eastwick,” a sequel to “The Witches of Eastwick,” and two essay collections, “Still Looking” and “Due Considerations.” A book of short fiction, “My Father’s Tears and Other Stories,” is scheduled to come out later this year.
His standing within the literary community may never have been greater than in 2006, when he delivered a passionate defence of bookstores and words, words on paper, at publishing’s annual national convention.
Responding to a recent New York Times essay predicting a digital future, he scorned this “pretty grisly scenario” and praised the paper book as the site of an “encounter, in silence, of two minds.”
“So, booksellers, defend your lonely forts,” he concluded.
His speech was applauded, discussed and widely quoted, far more than the talk given at the same breakfast gathering by then-Senator Barack Obama.
THE BOSS HAS LANDED
Not only does Working on a Dream hit stores today, but our daily planner just filled in, in a big way. After a few scattered spottings yesterday, today we've got a bigger picture: Springsteen and the E Street Band's official Working on a Dream Tour intinerary from the beginning of April to the beginning of August, consisting of a two-month North American leg and a two-month European leg.
The first arena leg begins on the West coast of the U.S. on April Fools Day and hits a few markets bypassed by the Magic tour -- howdy, Colorado! -- as well as regular strongholds (two in Boston, two in Philly) before wrapping up with two shows at the Meadowlands. No Garden dates, alas, but a third NYC-area show is at Nassau Coliseum. A small stadium sneaks in there, too, with a return to Hershey, PA. The vast majority of these go on sale the morning after the Super Bowl, February 2.
The European stadium leg begins with Hollan's Pinkpop festival on May 30, wrapping up with five Spanish shows in five different cities. We do expect additional dates to fill in, England being a conspicuous ommision at the moment, but here's the initial official itinerary. Onsale date/status in parentheses. We'll fill in the Tour/Ticket Info page with links, etc., as the day goes along.
Apr 1 - San Jose, CA - HP Pavilion at San Jose (Feb 2)
Apr 3 - Glendale, AZ - Jobing.com Center (Feb 2)
Apr 5 - Austin, TX - Frank Erwin Center (Feb 7)
Apr 7 - Tulsa, OK - BOK Center (Feb 7)
Apr 8 - Houston, TX - Toyota Center (Feb 7)
Apr 10 - Denver, CO - Pepsi Arena (Feb 2)
Apr 15 - Los Angeles, CA - LA Memorial Sports Arena (Feb 2)
Apr 21 - Boston, MA - TD Banknorth Garden (Feb 2)
Apr 22 - Boston, MA - TD Banknorth Garden (Feb 2)
Apr 24 - Hartford, CT - XL Center (Feb 2)
Apr 26 - Atlanta, GA - Philips Arena (Feb 2)
Apr 28 - Philadelphia, PA - Wachovia Spectrum (Feb 2)
Apr 29 - Philadelphia, PA - Wachovia Spectrum (Feb 2)
May 2 - Greensboro, NC - Greensboro Coliseum (Feb 6)
May 4 - Hempstead, NY - Nassau Veterans Mem. Col. (Feb 2)
May 5 - Charlottesville, VA - John Paul Jones Arena (Feb 2)
May 7 - Toronto, ONT - Air Canada Centre (Feb 6)
May 8 - University Park, PA - Bryce Jordan Center (Feb 2)
May 11 - St. Paul, MN - Xcel Energy Center (Feb 2)
May 12 - Chicago, IL - United Center (Feb 2)
May 14 - Albany, NY - Times Union Center (Feb 2)
May 15 - Hershey, PA - Hersheypark Stadium (Feb 2)
May 18 - Washington, DC - Verizon Center (Feb 2)
May 19 - Pittsburgh, PA - Mellon Arena (Feb 2)
May 21 - E. Rutherford, NJ - Izod Center (Feb 2)
May 23 - E. Rutherford, NJ - Izod Center (Feb 2)
May 30 - Landgraaf, Holland - Pink Pop Festival (March 7)
June 2 - Tampere, Finland - Ratinan Stadion (ON SALE)
June 4 - Stockholm, Sweden - Stockholm Stadium (SOLD OUT)
June 5 - Stockholm, Sweden - Stockholm Stadium (SOLD OUT)
June 7 - Stockholm, Sweden - Stockholm Stadium (SOLD OUT)
June 9 - Bergen, Norway - Koengen (SOLD OUT)
June 10 - Bergen, Norway - Koengen (SOLD OUT)
July 2 - Munich, Germany - Olympiastadion (ON SALE NOW)
July 3 - Frankfurt, Germany - Commerzbank Arena (ON SALE NOW)
July 5 - Vienna, Austria - Ernst Happel Stadion (ON SALE NOW)
July 8 - Herning, Denmark - Herning MCH (ON SALE NOW)
July 11 - Dublin, Ireland - RDS (Jan 30)
July 16 - Carhaix, France - Festival des Vielles Charrues (Jan 30)
July 19 - Rome, Italy - Stadio Olimpico (ON SALE SOON)
July 21 - Turino, Italy - Olimpico di Torino (ON SALE SOON)
July 23 - Udine, Italy - Stadio Friuli (ON SALE SOON)
July 26 - Bilbao, Spain - San Mames Stadium (ON SALE SOON)
July 28 - Benidorm, Spain - Estadio Municipal de Foietes (ON SALE SOON)
July 30 - Sevilla, Spain - La Cartuja Olympic Stadium (ON SALE SOON)
Aug 1 - Valladolid, Spain - Estadio Jose Zorrilla (ON SALE SOON)
Aug 2 - Santiago, Spain - Monte Del Gozo (ON SALE SOON)