All Together Now: McCartney, Starr to give rare public performance
The remaining Beatles — Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr — are going to perform in public together for the first time in six years.
The pair will do a special concert at Radio City Music Hall in New York on April 4 to benefit the David Lynch Foundation, according to the foundation's website. The organization, set up by the American director of Blue Velvet and the Twin Peaks TV series, promotes transcendental meditation in schools.
The former bandmates rarely perform together. They last shared a stage in 2002, during a tribute gig for late Beatle George Harrison in London.
McCartney's latest album is Electric Arguments, a collaboration between the songwriter-singer and producer-musician Youth, and released under the moniker, the Fireman. McCartney is also slated to headline the Coachella Valley music festival in Indio, Calif. on April 17.
Starr did a tour of the U.S. and Canada in 2008 in support of his latest album Liverpool 8.
The "Change Begins Within" concert at New York's Radio City Music Hall is also scheduled to feature Sheryl Crow, Eddie Vedder, Ben Harper, Moby, Paul Horn, Bettye Lavette and Jim James. Other musicians will also be added to the bill soon.
Tickets, ranging in price from $79.50 to $500 US, go on sale March 9.
Aniston vows to quit Hollywood
Jennifer Aniston has vowed to quit Hollywood to escape the glare of the media spotlight.
The former Friends star, who is dating musician John Mayer, is hounded by the paparazzi eager to get a snap of Aniston on a daily basis.
But the actress is sick of the constant attention, and is planning to leave Los Angeles one day, to live "somewhere remote" where "nobody really cares".
And Aniston is considering taking a sabattical from acting as she ponders her future.
She tells Britain's Elle magazine, "I don't have a game plan. I don't think that in five years' time I need to be doing this or that. You set yourself up for disappointment that way. It seems unnecessary torture.
"I can see myself taking a few years off, living somewhere remote. I would miss acting.
"But... eventually, I'm not going to be living in L.A. full-time. Eventually I'm going to move somewhere nobody really cares. Just go off and be alone."
The Five Things You Gotta Know About Watchmen
It's a murder mystery! It's got superheroes you've never heard of! It's totally deep and way metaphysical! It's an '80s period piece, with Richard Nixon and a giant blue naked guy!
Graphic novel adaptation Watchmen opens this week to big buzz, even though you may know nothing about it. But don't worry. We sat down with the oddly familiar cast and director Zack Snyder to decode this antihero epic, and gather the five essentials:
1. Watchmen Is the Utimate Geek Comic: Want street cred at Comic-Con? Talk Watchmen. Anyone can go on about the X-Men, but aficionados obsess over Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' 1986 series—about how very twisted masked men and women in tights would really be.
2. The Dark Knight Was Lightweight: This isn't just a romp about beating up bad guys. Watchmen dwells on questions about the role of superheroes and the toll crimefighting takes on the psyche. Like The Dark Knight, only...darker. "You accept that Batman can walk around in a real world and that a bad guy can dress like a Joker," Snyder tells E! News. "Watchmen blows that up again. "It's time to take [those ideas] apart," he says, "and re-examine—without a smile or a wink—what the f--k this mythology is about."
3. Denny Duquette Is a Real A-hole: Izzy, don't accept any marriage proposals from The Comedian, played by Grey's Anatomy's Jeffrey Dean Morgan. He may be one of the heroes, but he's a bad dude. Seriously. "I may lose a couple of Grey's Anatomy fans," Morgan tells us, "but I'll gain some Watchmen fans, so it's an even trade."
4. You Know These Characters, But You Don't: Watchmen doesn't have a Christian Bale or Heath Ledger or even a Wolverine or Spidey. What it has are heroes you'll find familiar, but with names like Nite Owl, Rorschach, Moloch the Mystic—and Silk Spectre, actually Malin Akerman in tight yellow synthetics. "I don't know if anyone in here has a latex fetish," Akerman (maybe you know her from Entourage?) tells us. "I certainly do not after this film."
5. The Giant Blue Penis Is a Fake: Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup) is the movie's only hero with actual superpowers, an energy force who looks like a big buff guy. He's too busy analyzing particles to put on pants, but don't get too excited. "I like being nude in front of people as much as the next guy," Crudup tells us, "but no, they insisted that I remain clothed, and they do all the work in postproduction."
Playwright, screenwriter Horton Foote dies at 92
NEW YORK – Playwright and screenwriter Horton Foote, who movingly portrayed the broken dreams of common people in "The Trip to Bountiful," "Tender Mercies" and his Oscar-winning screen adaptation of "To Kill a Mockingbird," died Wednesday in Connecticut, Paul Marte, a spokesman for Hartford Stage, said. He was 92.
Foote died in his apartment in Hartford where he was preparing work on a production for next fall at the nonprofit theater, Marte said.
Foote left the cotton fields of his native Wharton, Texas, as a teenager, dreaming of becoming an actor. But realizing his gifts as a storyteller, he embarked on a writing career that spanned more than half a century and earned him two Academy Awards ("To Kill a Mockingbird" and "Tender Mercies") and a 1995 Pulitzer Prize for "The Young Man From Atlanta."
Foote was active in the theater until the end of life. His play, "Dividing the Estate," the comic tale of a Texas family squabbling over an inheritance, was presented on Broadway this season by Lincoln Center Theater.
The stories and lives of the people he loved in Texas became the bedrock for many of his plays, with the fictional Harrison, Texas, standing in for Wharton. Dividing his time mostly between Texas and New York, he kept the Wharton home in which he had grown up and did much of his writing there.
"I picked a difficult subject, a little lost Texas town no one's heard of or cares about," Foote told The New York Times in 1995. "But I'm at the mercy of what I write. The subject matter has taken me over."
Never one for urbane and trendy topics, Foote instead focused on ordinary people and how their nostalgic recollections would mislead them.
"My first memory was of stories about the past — a past that, according to the storytellers, was superior in every way to the life then being lived," Foote wrote in 1988. "It didn't take me long, however, to understand that the present was all we had, for the past was gone and nothing could be done about it."
Parents and children are treated with an even touch. While many playwrights in the 1970s and 1980s turned to the evening news and wrote issue-oriented dramas, Foote stuck with everyday people dealing with problems of the heart: children without fathers, parents without children, career failures and redemption through love.