An Australian mining firm was convicted on Friday in Darwin of desecrating a sacred outback Aboriginal site in a landmark ruling protecting the beliefs of the beleaguered minority in the country.
OM (Manganese) Limited, an Australian subsidiary of Singapore-based OM Holdings Limited, was fined $133 600 for damaging the spiritual significance of an Aboriginal rock site at Bootu Creek, north of remote Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory.
OM Manganese had previously been convicted of physically damaging the site when an overhanging rock feature known as the Horse’s Head collapsed due to nearby blasting activities in 2011, destroying the area known in English as “Two Women Sitting Down”.
But Darwin magistrate Sue Oliver on Friday ruled it had also amounted to desecration.
“The defendant did not consider damage to the site as a vague and remote possibility,” Oliver said, describing the company’s failure to do so as “wilful blindness”.
“The defendant company made decisions that involved the sacred site that favoured business and profit over the [cultural protection] obligations they had.”
Oliver imposed the fine for what the local Kunapa people said amounted to destruction of the site, forever disrupting their relationship with the land and its mythology or “dreaming”.
“It will always remain a sacred site to us, but it has been ruined and we don’t know what to do,” said Kunapa representative Gina Smith of the site which had been “there for thousands of years as part of our culture and our story”.
“It’s been significantly changed, which makes it much harder for Aboriginal people to recognise the dreaming,” she added.
“We’re not likely to use it any more.”
According to the Kunapa dreaming, a marsupial rat and a bandicoot fought over bush tucker, or native food, at the Bootu Creek site and their blood spilled over the rocks, turning them the rich red of manganese ore.
The Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority, the statutory body responsible for overseeing sacred sites in the Northern Territory which brought the case against OM Manganese, welcomed the “historic” ruling.
“When a sacred site is desecrated or damaged it tears the social fabric of the affected community, as the harmony of those people is inherently linked to that sacred site,” said AAPA chief Ben Scambary.
OM Holdings said it had contested the desecration charge on the basis that the damage was unintentional, but it accepted Oliver’s ruling.
“The company never intended to harm, damage or disrespect the sacred site. We sincerely regret the damage and the hurt caused and I unreservedly apologise to the site’s custodians and traditional owners,” OM CEO Peter Toth said in a statement to the Australian stock exchange.
Aborigines, the most disadvantaged Australians, are believed to have numbered around one million at the time of British settlement in 1788. There are now just 470 000 out of a total population of 23 million. – AFP
While discussing the banned movie Of Good Report, International Film Festival manager Peter Machen broke down in tears at a Film and Publication Board workshop in Durban, on Wednesday.
“This is something that breaks my heart. The real pornography in our society is poverty and inequality,” said Machen, responding to a statement by the board saying the film was child pornography.
“I really care about this country and I live among so many people who are so f***ed up and nothing is being done to help them and all we can do is care about this,” he said.
Machen then apologised and left to loud applause from the audience, returning a few minutes later.
Of Good Report was scheduled to open the festival, but was refused classification after a scene depicting a teacher engaging in oral sex with his Grade 9 pupil caused the classifying panel to red-flag the film.
The board held the workshop to inform film-makers about how it classifies films, and touched on the issue of child pornography and Of Good Report.
Board spokesman Prince Mlimandlela Ndamase said the board supported the message which the film “attempts to make”.
But its guidelines indicated child pornography was regarded as being any picture of a real or imaginary person under 18, or represented as being under the age of 18, engaged in any form of sexual activity.
The board’s acting chief operations officer, Sipho Risiba, said their classification guidelines were online with the Film and Publications Act.
“Now that the subject is a matter of appeal, we will continue to follow the letter of the law,” said Risiba.
Machen filed an appeal on the decision to not classify the film. The appeals hearing was scheduled to take place this weekend.
Ndamase said the appeals board, chaired by acting High Court Judge Karthy Govender, would, hopefully, announce its decision next week.
Of Good Report’s producer, Michael Auret, said the film had to be viewed in context and artistic merit considered.
“What they are saying is incorrect. Case law specifically says they have to determine whether the film is primarily designed to arouse people or is designed to do something else,” said Auret. “We will have to go back to the Constitutional Court to amend the law.” – The Mercury
Zimbabwean writer NoViolet Bulawayo is the African on the Booker longlist for a literary prize, one of the English language’s top fiction awards, which names 13 writers from seven countries.
Selected from 151 titles, it also includes authors from Britain, New Zealand, Canada, Australia, Malaysia and Ireland. The choice supports the view that literature prizes in English are pure politics, as the Zimbabwean elections loom.
Announcing the list, the judge Robert Macfarlane said: “This is surely the most diverse longlist in Man Booker history: wonderfully various in terms of geography, form, length and subject.”
“These 13 outstanding novels range from the traditional to the experimental, from the first century AD to the present day, from 100 pages to 1 000, and from Shanghai to Hendon.”
If you thought the name NoViolet Bulawayo is an improbable one, it’s probably because hers is a handy political moniker. Born Elizabeth Tshele in 1981 in Tsholotsho, in the south of Zimbabwe, she moved to the United States when she was 18.
A previous winner of the Caine Prize, she is also the recipient of the Truman Capote Fellowship. She won the Caine Prize in 2011 for the story Hitting Budapest, included in her debut novel as the first chapter. The beautifully written story is told using a deceptively simple but mature child narrator.
It begins: “We are on our way to Budapest: Bastard and Chipo and Godknows and Sbho and Stina and me. We are going even though we are not allowed to cross Mzilikazi Road, even though Bastard is supposed to be watching his little sister Fraction, even though mother would kill me dead if she found out; we are going. There are guavas to steal in Budapest, and right now I’d die for guavas, or anything for that matter. My stomach feels like somebody just took a shovel and dug everything out.”
In total, seven women are on the list, the others being Alison MacLeod with Unexploded, Charlotte Mendelson with Almost English, Canadian Ruth Ozeki with A Tale for the Time Being, and New Zealand’s Eleanor Catton with The Luminaries.
The judges will meet again in September to decide a shortlist of six books and the winner will be announced at a ceremony on October 15 in London. – Reuters
Music streaming companies now account for 70 percent of all music bought in Sweden, home of Spotify, the world leader in the field, official industry figures revealed on Sunday.
The Swedish Recording Industry Association (GLF) said physical sales of music now stood at just 25 percent, confirming the march of digital music in the pioneering country.
The remaining five percent of consumers downloaded music to own on a hard drive.
GLF said the percentage of streamed music, where songs are downloaded but not kept permanently on computers, had risen from 57 percent in 2012.
Sales of music overall grew by 12 percent in the first half of this year and have been increasing steadily since 2008, while not reaching the heights seen at the beginning of the last decade.
“The strong growth seen in 2012 continued in 2013, and the Swedish consumer’s preference for streaming is clearer than ever,” said Ludvig Werner, director in Sweden of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. – AFP
Analysts are predicting that R.I.P.D, starring Jeff Bridges and Ryan Reynolds, will become the fourth big film in as many weeks to underperform. Hollywood is facing a summer crisis after an unprecedented series of films with budgets of more than $100 million flopped at the box office.
The costliest failure so far has been The Lone Ranger, starring Johnny Depp, which cost $250 million (£165 million) to make, and had a huge marketing budget. It was savaged by critics as a “bloated, unfunny, sometimes downright bizarre train wreck” amid a “summer of garbage blockbusters.”
Disney may have to write off up to $150 million losses on the movie, which was largely ignored by cinemagoers despite being released over the July 4 holiday weekend. It took in just $29 million that weekend in North America, losing out heavily to the animated comedy Despicable Me 2.
White House Down, starring Jamie Foxx and Channing Tatum, took just $25 million on the June 28 weekend, while Pacific Rim, a story of alien monsters, while praised by many critics, still brought in only $38 million over the July 11 weekend. More people went to see the Adam Sandler comedy Grown Ups 2.
R.I.P.D, a $130 million science fiction film about police officers fighting villains in the afterlife, is predicted to take in only around $20 million this weekend.
To be considered successful, blockbusters aim to take in about half their budget over the first weekend.
The movie is being released at the same time as Red 2, a tale of retired hitmen starring Bruce Willis and Dame Helen Mirren, which is expected to split the audience.
The series of big budget disappointments has come just a month after Steven Spielberg warned that Hollywood was facing a “meltdown” because of its over-reliance on blockbusters.
Speaking at the University of Southern California in June, Spielberg predicted “an implosion where three or four, or maybe even a half dozen, mega-budget movies are going to go crashing into the ground.”
Analysts said the failures were partly a result of competing studios trying to release too many big movies at the same time. There are more than 20 films with a budget of more than $100 million being released this summer, six more than last year.
The studios have ploughed resources in to so-called “tent pole” films, which are accompanied by costly marketing, and are expected to make large profits. But, to do so, they all need to arrive in cinemas over the summer months.
Until late June, Hollywood had been on course for a record summer, following the success of early hits including Iron Man 3, Star Trek Into Darkness. and Fast & Furious 6.
However, as fatigue set in with audiences the movie industry entered what has been labelled the “dud zone,” in which big releases have fared less impressively than lower budget productions. A slew of expensive films remain to be released in late July and August.
One exasperated studio head told The Hollywood Reporter: “You had too many $100 million-plus movies, not to mention $200 million-plus movies, jammed on top of each other. There isn’t enough play time, and the result has been more movies that wipe out.” – The Daily Telegraph
A South African movie about a schoolteacher who falls for a student has become the first film to be banned since 1994.
The film “Of Good Report” was the first not to receive classification since the Film and Publication Board was created, Sunday Times reported.
According to the newspaper, the decision was made based on the depiction of a simulated sexual act involving the 16-year-old student, who was played by a 23-year-old actress.
“The child porn thing smacks of the greatest ignorance, incompetence and downright stupidity,” director Jahmil XT Qubeka was quoted as telling the newspaper.
Board spokesman Prince Mlimandlela Ndamase reportedly told the Sunday Times the film was banned because it contained “content that carries an illegal act in it”.
“We need to emphasise that, ordinarily, we would not refuse the right of viewers to see the content, but in the interests of the protection of the child and our laws that exist in the country, child pornography is one of these things that are not legally permissible in the country.”
The film’s producer, lawyer Michael Auret, had reportedly lodged an appeal against the board’s ruling. – Sapa
Bruce Springsteen dedicated his protest song “American Skin (41 Shots)” to teenager Trayvon Martin during a concert in Limerick, Ireland.
In a video posted online, the 63-year-old singer told the crowd Tuesday: “We’ll send this as a letter back home for justice for Trayvon Martin” after noticing a fan’s sign that read “American Skin (41 Shots).”
George Zimmerman was acquitted Saturday of second-degree murder and manslaughter charges in Martin’s death. Zimmerman said he fired his gun in self-defense during a February 2012 confrontation with the 17-year-old in Sanford, Florida.
Lyrics in the song include “you can get killed just for living in your American skin.” Springsteen wrote the song about the 1999 police shooting death of Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo. – AP
South African singer Kurt Darren is recovering in hospital after breaking eight ribs in a car accident in Pretoria, Eyewitness News reported on Sunday.
“We’re very fortunate that his back is not broken,” his brother Darren van Heerden told the news station.
On Saturday night, the car in which Darren was travelling as a passenger fell into a ditch in Pretoria East.
Darren was subsequently airlifted to Milpark Hospital where he is in a stable condition, according to Eyewitness News.
The driver of the car was also injured and taken to hospital.
In a statement released by Louis van Wyk, from Music Profile Management, the singer’s condition is described as “stable” even though he is currently in ICU and seems to be experiencing “extreme pain and discomfort”.
‘It’s a disgrace that (President) Obama is more concerned with hunting down Snowden than reforming these George Bush-style eavesdropping techniques,’ the outspoken director said Thursday at a Czech film festival. Snowden is reportedly holed up in a Moscow airport waiting for a country to grant him asylum.
Controversial filmmaker Oliver Stone is looking to get in on the fracas surrounding Edward Snowden, calling the fugitive secret-leaker a “hero.”
Stone, no stranger to making contentious statements, was appearing at a July Fourth appearance at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in the Czech Republic, where he was scheduled to show two episodes of his new TV series, “The Untold History of the United States.”
Stone went on to encourage foreign countries to offer asylum to Snowden, who is reportedly holed up in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport after fleeing Hong Kong following his disclosure of confidential cellphone and Internet usage data surveillance programs run by the National Security Agency.
Edward Snowden, a former analyst with a U.S. defense contractor, withdrew his application for asylum in Russia on Monday after President Vladimir Putin said he would have to stop leaking NSA documents.
“To me, Snowden is a hero, because he revealed secrets that we should all know, that the United States has repeatedly violated the Fourth Amendment,” Stone said.
“He should be welcomed, and offered asylum, but he has no place to hide because every country is intimidated by the United States,” he added.
Snowden has applied for asylum in 21 countries and has been rejected by at least 12 of them, including Austria, Brazil, Ecuador, Finland, Germany, Iceland, India, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Spain and Switzerland.
Bolivia and Venezuela remain possible landing places for the fugitive 30-year-old, who faces espionage charges in the U.S.
Member of Iceland’s parliament Ögmundur Jónasson made a proposition to receive Snowden on Thursday morning, the last day before the 63-member legislative body begins their summer leave.
Granting citizenship to Snowden, who admits to revealing key details of U.S. surveillance activities would circumvent the rule that he must be on Icelandic soil to apply for asylum there.
The same tactic helped get eccentric chess master Bobby Fischer to Iceland from Japan in 2005 to escape U.S. prosecution for breaking sanctions imposed on the former Yugoslavia, according to 21st Century Wire.
Ogmundur Jonasson, whose liberal Left-Green Party is backing the proposal along with the Pirate Party and Brighter Future Party, put the issue before the Judicial Affairs Committee, but the idea received minimal support.
‘We wanted to do this earlier,’ wrote Pirate Party politician Helgi Hrafn Gunnarsson on his Facebook page. ‘But citizenship is an extremely delicate issue when it’s granted by parliament instead of granted through ordinary legal processes.’
Iceland’s parliament, known as Althing, saw three Pirate Party members elected in 2013. NPR billed the party as an ‘international online freedom movement.’
Jonasson argued to parliament on Thursday that Snowden ‘is now being chased and has nowhere to go,’ according to Icelandic media.
Snowden also has a friend in former Icelandic presidential candidate Asthor Magnusson, who is collecting signatures from Icelanders as part of a petition to make his a citizen.
‘I appeal to the oldest parliament in the world, the Althing in Iceland to grant a citizenship to Edward Joseph Snowden and issue him with travel documents for safe passage to Reykjavik,’ Magnusson wrote in an appeal to Parliament, according to RT News. ‘As matters have developed, I think that Icelanders should say ‘This is enough’: We support open society and human rights. It’s a basic human right to grant this man asylum in Iceland.’
The ruling Conservative and Moderate parties could halt the bill. And some have speculated that the country’s president, Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, could succumb to pressure purportedly being placed on international leaders by the U.S. government and veto the legislation. – Daily News/Daily Mail
For a black American president on a tour of Africa, it seemed an obvious opportunity for a speech about the “evils of slavery”. When Barack Obama visited Senegal on Thursday, he headed for Gorée Island.
Historians pointed out however that a crumbling fort that is said to have been the key departure point for millions of slaves shipped across the Atlantic, was probably never used for that purpose at all.
The 18th century building could therefore not have allowed Obama to “fully appreciate the magnitude of the slave trade”.
Pictures on Thursday showed Mr Obama standing with his wife Michelle at Gorée’s so-called Door of No Return, a dark passageway from where the fort’s human cargo is said to have been loaded via gangplanks onto ships.
However, despite the claims that millions of slaves passed through the door, its most likely use is now thought to have been for disposing of rubbish. Likewise, the waters it overlooks are too rocky and shallow for a slave ship to have used it as a loading bay.
“There are literally no historians who believe the Slave House is what they’re claiming it to be, or that believe Goree was statistically significant in terms of the slave trade,” said Ralph Austen, a professor at the University of Chicago who has researched the subject.
Mr Obama is not the first international statesman to have made a pilgrimage to Gorée, which lies a short boat ride from the Senegalese capital, Dakar, and which has long been a draw for both foreign tourists and African Americans seeking to discover their historical roots.
Others who have visited in recent years include Nelson Mandela, Pope John Paul II and Mr Obama’s predecessors in the White House, Bill Clinton and George W Bush.
The fort’s museum was opened in 1962 by the late Boubacar Joseph Ndiaye, a Senegalese who was a passionate advocate of the belief that it had been used to transport slaves in great numbers. Its reputation spread worldwide thanks partly to the powerful symbolism of the Door of No Return, which was said to have offered slaves a final view of their homeland before the Atlantic crossing.
Yet its historical claims to be at the epicentre of the slave trade have long been in question. Most agree now that while slaves were indeed kept at the fort, they were there not for mass onward transport but for use by the fortress’s own residents. A more likely point of departure was another fort nearby, although records suggest that at most, some 26,000 slaves were sent there – a fraction of the claims of up to 15 million touted by the museum staff.
Other slave forts along the West African coastline, such as at Cape Coast in Ghana, have much more substantial claims to being major slaving centres. However, historians who have questioned Gorée’s claims have often been accused of attempting to “deny” the extent of the slave trade. Given the amount of tourist income that the island generates for a country still living in poverty, there has been little incentive in Senegal itself to put the record straight.
The US president was visiting Senegal as part of a week-long tour of Africa, and was due to land later in South Africa, where the country’s former leader, Nelson Mandela, is now critically ill. On Friday Mr Obama, travelling with a White House press pack on Air Force One, the presidential jet, insisted he would not be seeking a “photo op” with Mr Mandela.
“The last thing I want to do is to be in any way obtrusive at a time when the family is concerned about Nelson Mandela’s condition,” he said.- The Telegraph
George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984” is enjoying a spike in sales in the wake of revelations on surveillance in the United States.
Amazon.com says the book, published in 1945, has gone from No. 13,074 to No. 193 on its selling list, and it is moving higher, The Guardian reported. To put it another way, sales are up 7,000 percent.
In the novel, Orwell imagines a world divided into three large states, all of them exercising near-constant surveillance on their subjects. The government manipulates the news, history and the language.
The novel is set in London, the city where Orwell spent much of his adult life. But his primary target appears to be the Soviet Union, although he was also concerned about trends he saw in the United States and Britain.
It was “1984” that made “Orwellian” a common adjective in English. It is one that has been used a lot since news broke of National Security Agency monitoring of Internet and telephone traffic.
“What does our Constitution mean? What kind of country do we want to be? Kids will grow up knowing that every damn thing that they do is going to be recorded somewhere in a file, and I think that will have a very Orwellian and inhibiting impact on our lives,” U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ind-Vt., said in a recent interview.
Orwell died in 1950 at the age of 46. But the book remains under copyright in Britain and the United States, so his estate benefits from its new popularity. – UPI
James Gandolfini’s lumbering, brutish mob boss with the tortured psyche will endure as one of TV’s indelible characters.
But his portrayal of criminal Tony Soprano in HBO’s landmark drama series “The Sopranos” was just one facet of an actor who created a rich legacy of film and stage work in a life cut short.
Gandolfini, 51, who died Wednesday while vacationing in Rome, refused to be bound by his star-making role in the HBO series that brought him three Emmy Awards during its six-season run and helped change the landscape of television drama.
“He was a genius,” said “Sopranos” creator David Chase. “Anyone who saw him even in the smallest of his performances knows that. He is one of the greatest actors of this or any time. A great deal of that genius resided in those sad eyes.”
Dr. Claudio Modini, head of the emergency room at the Policlinic Umberto I hospital in Rome, said Gandolfini suffered a cardiac arrest and was pronounced dead at 11 p.m. Wednesday after resuscitation efforts in the ambulance and hospital failed.
Modini told The Associated Press that an autopsy would be performed starting 24 hours after the death, as required by law.
Michael Kobold, a family friend, told reporters in Rome that a family member discovered Gandolfini in his hotel room, but he declined to say whom. NBC quoted the manager of Rome’s Boscolo Exedra hotel as saying it was Gandolfini’s 13-year-old son, Michael.
Gandolfini had been expected to receive an award at the Taormina Film Festival in Sicily this weekend, and organizers said they were scrambling to instead put together a tribute “remembering his career and talent.”
Edie Falco, who played Tony Soprano’s wife Carmela on “The Sopranos,” remembered him as a “man of tremendous depth and sensitivity.”
“I am shocked and devastated by Jim’s passing,” she said in a statement, adding that her heart went out to his family “as those of us in his pretend one hold on to the memories of our intense and beautiful time together. The love between Tony and Carmela was one of the greatest I’ve ever known.”
Joe Gannascoli, who played Vito Spatafore on the drama series, said he was shocked and heartbroken.
“Fifty-one and leaves a kid – he was newly married. His son is fatherless now. … It’s way too young,” Gannascoli said.
Gandolfini and his wife, Deborah, who were married in 2008, have a daughter, Liliana, born last year, HBO said. Michael is the son of the actor and his former wife, Marcy.
Gandolfini’s performance in “The Sopranos” was his ticket to fame, but he evaded being stereotyped as a mobster after the drama’s breathtaking blackout ending in 2007. In a December 2012 interview with The Associated Press, he was upbeat about the work he was getting post-Tony Soprano.
“I’m much more comfortable doing smaller things,” Gandolfini said then. “I like them. I like the way they’re shot; they’re shot quickly. It’s all about the scripts – that’s what it is – and I’m getting some interesting little scripts.”
He played then-CIA director Leon Panetta in Kathryn Bigelow’s Osama bin Laden hunt docudrama “Zero Dark Thirty.”
“I told him I was glad an Italian played me – swear words and all,” Panetta said Thursday. “We laughed together at the fact that tough guys can have a heart of gold. He did, and we will miss him.”
Gandolfini also worked with Chase for the ’60s period drama “Not Fade Away,” in which he played the old-school father of a wannabe rocker. And in Andrew Dominick’s crime flick “Killing Them Softly,” he played an aged, washed-up hit man.
Brad Pitt, his co-star in that film, called him “a ferocious actor, a gentle soul and a genuinely funny man. I am fortunate to have sat across the table from him and am gutted by this loss. I wish his family strength and some semblance of peace.”
On Broadway, he garnered a best-actor Tony Award nomination for 2009’s “God of Carnage.”
Deploying his unsought clout as a star, Gandolfini produced a pair of documentaries for HBO focused on a cause he held dear: veterans affairs.
His final projects included the film “Animal Rescue,” directed by Michael R. Roskam and written by Dennis Lehane, which has been shot and is expected to be released next year. He also had agreed to star in a seven-part limited series for HBO, “Criminal Justice,” based on a BBC show. He had shot a pilot for an early iteration of the project.
While Tony Soprano was a larger-than-life figure, Gandolfini was exceptionally modest and obsessive – he described himself as “a 260-pound Woody Allen.”
In past interviews, his cast mates had far more glowing descriptions to offer.
“I had the greatest sparring partner in the world, I had Muhammad Ali,” said Lorraine Bracco, who, as Tony’s psychiatrist Dr. Melfi, went one-on-one with Gandolfini in their penetrating therapy scenes. “He cares what he does, and does it extremely well.”
Gandolfini grew up in Park Ridge in New Jersey, the son of a building maintenance chief at a Catholic school and a high school lunch lady.
After earning a degree in communications from Rutgers University, Gandolfini moved to New York, where he worked as a bartender, bouncer and nightclub manager. When he was 25, he joined a friend of a friend in an acting class.
Gandolfini’s first big break was a Broadway production of “A Streetcar Named Desire” where he played Steve, one of Stanley Kowalski’s poker buddies. His film debut was in Sidney Lumet’s “A Stranger Among Us” (1992).
Director Tony Scott had praised Gandolfini’s talent for fusing violence with charisma – which he would perfect in Tony Soprano.
Gandolfini played a tough guy in Scott’s 1993 film “True Romance,” who beat Patricia Arquette’s character to a pulp while offering such jarring, flirtatious banter as, “You got a lot of heart, kid.”
Scott called Gandolfini “a unique combination of charming and dangerous.”
In his early career, Gandolfini had supporting roles in “Crimson Tide” (1995), “Get Shorty” (1995), “The Juror” (1996), Lumet’s “Night Falls on Manhattan” (1997), “She’s So Lovely” (1997), “Fallen” (1998) and “A Civil Action” (1998). But it was “True Romance” that piqued the interest of Chase.
In his 2012 AP interview, Gandolfini said he gravitated to acting as a release, a way to get rid of anger. “I don’t know what exactly I was angry about,” he said.
“I try to avoid certain things and certain kinds of violence at this point,” he said last year. “I’m getting older, too. I don’t want to be beating people up as much. I don’t want to be beating women up and those kinds of things that much anymore.”
The U.S. Embassy in Rome, which said it had learned about the death from the media, said it would be available to provide a death certificate and help prepare Gandolfini’s body for return to the United States. The Embassy said it can take between four and seven days to arrange shipment outside of Italy.
It isn’t yet known yet what caused his heart to stop beating. Sudden cardiac arrest can be due to a heart attack, a heart rhythm problem, or as a result of trauma. The chance of cardiac arrest increases as people get older; men over age 45 have a greater risk. – AP
Steven Spielberg on Wednesday predicted an “implosion” in the film industry is inevitable, whereby a half dozen or so $250 million movies flop at the box office and alter the industry forever. What comes next — or even before then — will be price variances at movie theaters, where “you’re gonna have to pay $25 for the next Iron Man, you’re probably only going to have to pay $7 to see Lincoln.” He also said that Lincoln came “this close” to being an HBO movie instead of a theatrical release.
George Lucas agreed that massive changes are afoot, including film exhibition morphing somewhat into a Broadway play model, whereby fewer movies are released, they stay in theaters for a year and ticket prices are much higher. His prediction prompted Spielberg to recall that his 1982 film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial stayed in theaters for a year and four months.
The two legendary filmmakers, along with CNBC anchor Julia Boorstin and Microsoft president of interactive entertainment business Don Mattrick, were speaking at the University of Southern California as part of the festivities surrounding the official opening of the Interactive Media Building, three stories high and part of the USC School of Cinematic Arts.
Lucas and Spielberg told USC students that they are learning about the industry at an extraordinary time of upheaval, where even proven talents find it difficult to get movies into theaters. Some ideas from young filmmakers “are too fringe-y for the movies,” Spielberg said. “That’s the big danger, and there’s eventually going to be an implosion — or a big meltdown. There’s going to be an implosion where three or four or maybe even a half-dozen megabudget movies are going to go crashing into the ground, and that’s going to change the paradigm.”
Lucas lamented the high cost of marketing movies and the urge to make them for the masses while ignoring niche audiences. He called cable television “much more adventurous” than film nowadays.
“I think eventually theLincolns will go away and they’re going to be on television,” Lucas said. “As mine almost was,” Spielberg interjected. “This close — ask HBO — this close.”
“We’re talking Lincoln and Red Tails — we barely got them into theaters. You’re talking about Steven Spielberg and George Lucas can’t get their movie into a theater,” Lucas said. “I got more people into Lincoln than you got into Red Tails,” Spielberg joked.
Spielberg added that he had to co-own his own studio in order to get Lincoln into theaters.
“The pathway to get into theaters is really getting smaller and smaller,” Lucas said.
Mattrick and Spielberg also praised Netflix, prompting Boorstin to ask Spielberg if he planned to make original content for the Internet streamer. “I have nothing to announce,” said the director.
Lucas and Spielberg also spoke of vast differences between filmmaking and video games because the latter hasn’t been able to tell stories and make consumers care about the characters. Which isn’t to say the two worlds aren’t connected. Spielberg, in fact, has teamed with Microsoft to make a “TV” show for Xbox 360 based on the game Halo and he is making a movie based on the Electronic Arts game Need for Speed.
According to the Mail Online, Hollywood actress Sharon Stone has reached a settlement in a legal dispute involving a former nanny for her children. The 55-year-old Basic Instinct star was being sued by Filipino nanny Erlinda Elemen, who was fired in February two years ago.
Elemen claimed the actress made insulting comments about her country and heritage and called her people “stupid”. She also claimed Stone criticised her frequently and even stopped her from reading the Bible in her room. The Oscar nominee (Best Actress in a Leading Role for Casino (1995)) apparently also instructed her not to speak to her children – Roan Joseph Bronstein, Laird Vonne Stone and Quinn Kelly Stone – because she didn’t want them “to talk” like Elemen.
Stone initially used Elemen only as a back-up nanny and she was only promoted to head nanny in 2008. That was the year she claims she moved in to Stone’s residence and began travelling with her and her sons, until she was fired in 2011.
Elemen was finally fired for “stealing” overtime pay, despite working seven days a week.
“Because abuses in overtime pay are common for household employees it seems ironic that Ms. Stone initially did the right thing and paid Mrs. Elemen overtime wages and then terminated her for accepting those same wages,” Solomon Gresen, Elemen’s lawyer stated.
Stone’s spokesperson called the complaint a “frivolous lawsuit” and said the “absurd claims” were made up, when the nanny filed her complaint in May 2012.
Stone Denies Wudyka Dating Rumours
Meanwhile, Stone’s representatives have denied she is in a relationship with hotelier Michael Wudyka. According to the Mail Online, the two were spotted together at a Creative Coalition event in Washington DC. Creative Coalition is a non-profit advocacy group formed by members of the American entertainment industry. However, in a statement released to E! the actress claims Wudyka is only “a dear friend”.
Stone was previously believed to be involved with 28-year-old model Martin Mica.
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An Australian mining firm was convicted on Friday in Darwin of desecrating a sacred outback Aboriginal site in a landmark ruling protecting the beliefs of the beleaguered minority in the country.
