Free Republic

NEW YORK (AP) — Despite critical acclaim and two years-worth of anticipation, Steven Spielberg’s lavish “West Side Story” revival made little noise at the box office, debuting with $10.5 million in ticket sales, according to studio estimates Sunday — a worrisome result for a movie industry struggling to recapture its finger-snapping rhythm. A dazzling widescreen adaptation and Spielberg’s first musical, “West Side Story” was one of the year’s most eagerly awaited titles. With a script by Tony Kushner and Rita Moreno returning to her breakthrough film 60 years later, the $100-million “West Side Story” epitomizes a grand-scale prestige film that...

Transience is the very essence of the entertainment business, unpredictability its warp and weft. Early this month, the market research and data analytics firm YouGov published the results of a startling poll. According to interviews with 1,254 adult Americans, 30 percent of millennials have no best friends, 27 percent have no close friends and 22 percent have no friends at all. Not surprisingly, the report named them “the loneliest generation.” But loneliness is all around and perhaps nowhere more profoundly than in Hollywood. Here’s what surprised me: that the statistics weren’t worse, for older people as well as millennials. Look...

November 28, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – As swiftly as the advertising campaign for Celine Dion’s new “gender neutral” children’s clothing line launched, judgment –– which sees intrinsic evil being inflicted upon these innocent babes – has crashed upon the ill-advised effort. The commercial, intended to be humorous, is dark. Dion, in what appears to be an act of sorcery, blows a handful of black dust in a hospital nursery filled with babies dressed in pastel pink or blue. Suddenly, black crosses hang in the air over the children as they find themselves clothed in drab black and white onesies covered in...

Comedian Michelle Wolf's Netflix talk show,"The Break With Michelle Wolf," will not be returning to the streaming service for a second season. Deadline reported on Friday that Wolf's Netflix series had been canceled only about three months after its first episode aired. The show's last episode was released on July 29. Wolf has not yet made a statement about her show's cancellation. The "Daily Show" star gained widespread notoriety earlier this year after giving a speech during the White House Correspondents' Association (WHCA) dinner in which she repeatedly slammed White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. "I actually really like...

He prowled the streets of Manhattan looking for attractive young women, usually in their early 20s, sometimes college students, on occasion a high schooler. He approached them in Central Park, standing in line at a bank or drug store or at a copy center while they worked on their resumes. His opening line had a few variations. One went: “My name’s James Toback. I’m a movie director. Have you ever seen ‘Black and White’ or ‘Two Girls and a Guy’?” Probably not. So he’d start to drop names. He had an Oscar nomination for writing the Warren Beatty movie “Bugsy.”...

Mere seconds into the celebrity-filled benefit concert for victims of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma did these stars turn the ostensible charitable event into a platform for left-wing sermonizing. Stevie Wonder, who kicked off the show, began with call for unity, but then turned to mock anyone who questioned the global warming theory. "When love goes into action, it preferences no color of skin, no ethnicity, no religious beliefs, no sexual preferences, and no political persuasions," Mr. Wonder began. "It just loves. As we should begin to love and value our planet." But after calling for love, he singled out skeptics...

Award-winning author Joyce Carol Oates came under intense fire from social media users on Sunday after tweeting that she has only heard “puritanical & punitive” things about the Islamic State and wonders whether there is anything “celebratory & joyous” about the terrorist group. "All we hear of ISIS is puritanical & punitive; is there nothing celebratory & joyous? Or is query naive?"

Jack Larson, the playwright and librettist who, as he often predicted with good-natured resignation, will be remembered best as the actor who played the cub reporter Jimmy Olsen on the television series “Adventures of Superman,” died on Sunday at his home in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. He was 87.

Former “Baywatch” beauty Pamela Anderson said she was gang-raped by seven boys in high school — including her then-boyfriend — and was also subjected to sexual molestation by a babysitter between the ages of 6 and 10. Ms. Anderson, speaking during the launch of her Pamela Anderson Foundation, said she was raped, too, at the age of 12 by a 25-year-old, NBC News reported. “My first boyfriend in grade nine decided it would be funny to gang-rape me, with six of his friends,” she said, NBC reported, citing a transcript of her speech that was posted on her foundation’s website....

Kevin Sorbo is sick of what he calls Hollywood's intolerance to those who believe in God. "There's a negativity towards Christians in Hollywood," Sorbo told FOX411. "And a negativity towards people who believe in God." ADVERTISEMENT It's not just faith that Hollywood is intolerant of. Sorbo, who has spoken out against President Obama's policies, feels the backlash from the entertainment industry for his political affiliations. "There's also a negativity towards people who aren't liberal. There's no question that it has hurt me in Hollywood that I didn't vote for Obama." Sorbo said he doesn’t understand why his religious or political...

It’s okay, the 1 percent only pays 41 percent of California’s income taxes. And half the state pays no income tax at all. No one will even notice they’re gone. Prop. 30, approved by voters in November 2012, raised state income taxes retroactively to Jan. 1, 2012, on singles making more than $250,000 and married couples making $500,000. It raised rates by one, two or three percentage points through 2018, bringing the top rate on incomes above $1 million to 13.3 percent, the highest in the nation. Bryan Goldberg, who founded the Bleacher Report sports website and sold it to...

A new book from filmmaker Oliver Stone offers a scathing critique of President Barack Obama’s time in office. Stone, who wrote “The Untold History of the United States” with historian Peter Kuznick, puts forth a liberal interpretation of American history from the turn of the last century to present day. The 618-page book, slated for release Tuesday - a week before Election Day - from Gallery Books, slams Republicans and Democrats alike, and the authors’ assessment of Obama’s presidency is tinged with disappointment. “The country Obama inherited was indeed in shambles, but Obama took a bad situation and, in certain...

Anyone in Hollywood who's dreamed of hosting the Oscars telecast never imagined that the qualifications would eventually include creating cartoon dogs that love "pukesicles" and cartoon babies that eat horse sperm for breakfast. That crashing sound you heard was the collapse of the final vestiges of taste, civility, respect, decency — whatever you want to call it - after the allegedly classy Oscar producers named "Family Guy" creator Seth MacFarlane as the host of the 85th annual Academy Awards next February. MacFarlane used to be the highest-paid sleaze ball in television. He is now the King of Hollywood. Hollywood, bow...

A $100 million annual tax break for California motion picture companies would be extended under legislation headed to Gov. Jerry Brown.

Hollywood consistently churns out movies that are filled with very graphic and gory violence. While I'm not blaming them for what this sick killer did, let's face it: we live in a culture that embraces violence. How do we embrace it? By paying our hard earned money to see movies where people are shot with guns, mutilated, killed and blown up on a regular basis.

High box office expectations for The Dark Knight Rises, the final film in Warner Bros' Batman franchise, were clouded on Friday by a shooting at a Colorado midnight screening of the film which killed 12 people. The incident, in which a masked gunman opened fire on moviegoers, including children, brings a tragic conclusion to one of Hollywood's most-enduring franchises, as Warner Bros bids to find a new movie franchise capable of matching Batman's box office success. The Time Warner-owned studio has been Hollywood's King of Franchises for years. Over the last decade, it generated worldwide ticket sales of $12 billion...

Sources on staff at “Dancing With the Stars” say the producers at the hit show have been very surprised by the outpouring of negative reaction to the casting of Chaz Bono as a contestant on the new season — launching Sept. 19 on WLS-Channel 7. “Of course, they knew there would be some anti-Bono calls and emails,” said a longtime “DWTS” insider. “But this has been more vicious and in larger volume than was anticipated. … Some of the comments are downright scary,” the source added. It seems some of the negativity may be coming from ABC viewers in the...

Liam Neeson has caused controversy by suggesting that Aslan, the Christlike character in C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books, could represent the prophet Mohammed or Buddha. The actor who voices the lion in the film adaptations of the books has angered some fans of the stories, who claim he is distorting Lewis’s intentions to be “politically correct”. Aslan the lion features in all seven Narnia books, guiding children away from evil and harm and encouraging them to do good. Lewis was clear that the Aslan was based on Christ, and once wrote of the character: “He is an invention giving an imaginary...

In Team America: World Police, the first Hollywood-financed movie inspired by the U.S. invasion of Iraq and its attendant political controversy, South Park's Trey Parker and Matt Stone dispatched a squad of U.S. guerrillas — all in marionette form — to take down an Axis of Evil dictator and, in the process, slaughter the real villains of the piece: a bunch of self-important celebrities who had publicly opposed the U.S. policy. One of these stars is Matt Damon, who is portrayed as such an idiot that all his dialogue consists of is his grinning stupidly while saying, "Matt Damon!" The...

After all of Hollywood's Iraq movies have flopped (even the Oscar-garlanded "The Hurt Locker" earned only $15 million at the box office), one studio thinks it has the following secret to success: The previous films didn't insult the United States enough. "Green Zone," opening Friday, is a $100 million slime job that conjures up a fantastically distorted leftist version of the war and wraps it around a frantic but preposterous action picture. (Spoilers about the plot follow.) Matt Damon plays Miller, an Army "chief" (chief warrant officer) assigned to searching for weapons of mass destruction in Baghdad in the opening...