Free Republic

Since the California Supreme Court lifted the ban on gay marriages, Ellen DeGeneres has announced her plans to wed Portia de Rossi soon. The two have been going together since December of 2004. Is the viewing audience of Ellen ready for that? Or will they be ready to divorce Ellen for putting gay rights front and center?

At Ron Burkle's mansion... ON A BALMY evening this week, the crowd at billionaire Ron Burkle's Beverly Hills estate was a mixture of high-level academia and high-level Hollywood, none higher than Robert Redford, actor, director, Sundance guru and the industry's über-environmental activist. Serious gatherings like this at Burkle's begin with a Champagne reception in the foyer, an intimately lavish space where presidents, generals, senators and Los Angeles' moneyed elite mingle and discuss the pressing issues of the day. (Half the town has portraits of themselves with former President Bill Clinton there.) When Redford entered the foyer from the inner sanctum...

Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi are making it official. Hours after Thursday's landmark ruling by the California Supreme Court striking down a state law banning gay marriage, the 50-year-old daytime host announced during a taping of The Ellen DeGeneres Show that she and the 35-year-old former Ally McBeal star plan to swap vows. In the episode scheduled to air later today, studio audience members greeted DeGeneres' news with thunderous applause and a standing ovation as De Rossi watched from the sidelines. The show's publicist was unavailable for comment. Separately, in an interview with The Advocate Thursday, DeGeneres said she...

Time may be running out for the CW network. Two years after CBS Corp. and Time Warner Inc. combined their second-tier networks UPN and WB into the youth-oriented CW to pool young viewers prized by advertisers, the network's hopes of surviving are looking increasingly bleak. Despite the buzz about "Gossip Girl," a prime-time soap opera about a group of rich kids on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the network has lost about 28% of its target audience of 18 to 34 year olds so far this season. Its ratings during this month's "sweeps" period -- the all-important measure upon...

LOS ANGELES - A Hollywood private investigator was convicted Thursday on charges that he schemed to dig up dirt for his well-heeled clients to use in lawsuits, divorces and contract disputes against the rich and famous. Anthony Pellicano, 64, was accused of wiretapping stars such as Sylvester Stallone, and running the names of others, such as Gary Shandling and Kevin Nealon, through law enforcement databases to help clients in legal and other disputes. Pellicano was convicted of racketeering and racketeering conspiracy counts. Verdicts on dozens of other counts were still being announced in court. The indictment charging Pellicano and his...

Michael Moore is taking America's temperature again. Moore, who won the top honor at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival with "Fahrenheit 9/11," plans a followup to resume his examination of the nation's status in the world in the years since the Sept. 11 attacks. "Fahrenheit 9/11," the only documentary to top $100 million domestically at the box office, was a harsh, hilarious critique of George W. Bush and his administration in the wake of the attacks. The as-yet-untitled followup will have a longer-term approach, film executives overseeing the project said Wednesday. "That movie was about a moment in time, a...

Sensing that the time may be ripe for a pompous Hollywood blowhard to enter congress, Actor Alec Baldwin, best known for his buffoonish antics on “Saturday Night Live” and “30 Rock,” says he is seriously thinking about running for political office. “I’ve always had an interest in politics,” Baldwin said. “It was when I did an ‘SNL’ sketch parodying Barney Frank, that I thought—if a lisping pansy like him can get elected to congress, why not me?” Baldwin was undaunted by the potential negative effect on his prospects of a widely circulated voice-mail message in which he called his daughter...

Telegraph - Print Version Sean Penn warns Barack Obama at Cannes Film Festival opening By Anita Singh, Showbusiness Editor Last updated: 8:05 PM BST 14/05/2008 The Cannes Film Festival got off to a lively start with Sean Penn, president of this year's jury, sounding off about US Presidential hopeful Barack Obama and the opening movie almost being upstaged by a bunch of performing pandas. Penn joined fellow judge Natalie Portman on the red carpet for the premiere of the first night film, Blindness, a thriller starring Julianne Moore. At a press conference beforehand, the actor, an outspoken critic of the...

Excerpt - LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Actor James Garner, best known for starring in the classic television series "Maverick" and "The Rockford Files," underwent surgery this week after suffering a minor stroke, his spokeswoman said on Tuesday. Garner, 80, who built a six-decade career playing ruggedly charming, good-natured anti-heroes, suffered a stroke at home last Friday and was admitted to a Los Angeles-area hospital, publicist Jennifer Allen said. The actor underwent surgery on Sunday, and his prognosis following the operation was described as "very positive," Allen said, adding that Garner's vital signs were good and that he was conscious and...

Michael Moore is making a sequel to "Fahrenheit 9/11" for Paramount Vantage and Overture Films, who will shop the project to international buyers when the Cannes Film Festival and market get under way today. The two companies are co-financing and co-producing the untitled documentary, which will be released in 2009. Overture will distribute the film domestically, while Vantage will handle international. Moore may be leaving the Weinstein Co. -- where he made his last two films, including "Fahrenheit" -- but Overture and Vantage are no strangers to the filmmaker. Overture CEO Chris McGurk and COO Danny Rosett were both at...

Stephen Baldwin, Gary Sinise, Robert Duvall, Namrata Singh Gujral lead Fest Line-upArlington, Virginia – Indo-American actress, Namrata Singh Gujral, will present the American Pride Films Award for “Encouragement of Films that Salute the heroism of the Armed Forces�, just one of the few highlights of the Second Annual GI Film Festival, which will be held May 14-18, 2008 at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, DC. Fellow actors Gary Sinise, Stephen Baldwin and Robert Duvall are all scheduled to attend the 2008 star studded festival line-up. Overall, the five-day festival will present both classic and premier films honoring the...

Hollywood—In what could only be referred to as a historic event, Hollywood is shutting down its doors to save “Mother Earth.” The move comes after years of trying to reach an unsympathetic Bush administration, and decades of attempts at inculcating the American populous. The historic decision—based largely on the overwhelming evidence of the plight of polar bears, spotted owls and tropical insects—has forced the inevitable activist outcome, an outcome designed to promote a greener planet. Over the last year, article after article has emerged, detailing the destruction to the planet via one species or another. The evidence has only fallen...

For decades, this has been the week for network television to strut its stuff. But not everyone is in the mood to party this year. Typically, the major broadcast networks -- Fox, ABC, CBS and NBC -- have spent about $5 million each to whip up excitement among advertisers for their new fall schedules. They would fly hundreds of stars and executives to New York for extravagant presentations at tony Manhattan venues, followed by lavish parties. The five networks, including the upstart CW, rounded up $9.3 billion in prime-time commercial sales in the weeks after last year's "upfront" presentations. But...

The fortunes of Hollywood actor Tom Cruise have suffered a blow with the news that his next big film has been postponed until 2009. The release of Valkyrie, which tells the story of the 1944 assassination plot against Hitler, was first postponed from this summer to the autumn and is now not expected to appear until next year. “We were originally expecting the film to be released in June,” said a senior executive at one of Britain’s leading cinema chains. “I know there have been all sorts of problems with this production and we will not be screening it at...

The fortunes of Hollywood actor Tom Cruise have suffered a blow with the news that his next big film has been postponed until 2009.The release of Valkyrie, which tells the story of the 1944 assassination plot against Hitler, was first postponed from this summer to the autumn and is now not expected to appear until next year. “We were originally expecting the film to be released in June,” said a senior executive at one of Britain’s leading cinema chains. “I know there have been all sorts of problems with this production and we will not be screening it at all...

You can watch it here: R.C. Sproul interviews Ben Stein

"Oliver Reed, Richard Burton, Richard Harris and Peter O'Toole were men inextricably linked in the public mind - by their outrageous talent and their pure, unbridled excess...Bound together by mutual rivalry and interlocking friendships, their story encompasses drunken binges of epic proportions, broken marriages, riotous brawls and wanton sexual conquests."

I still remember the day the “Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” was released; I was the first in line, with my adult son. It was a marvelous masterpiece of a movie. I know that Prince Caspian will be even better. I told Doug during our interview, that I am so excited about seeing this film that I feel like a child again. He laughed and told me I will be thrilled. He continued “...the enemy has tried to steal the film industry, but he has not succeeded. Many in our day seem to think that it is political leaders...

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- Actresses Blythe Danner and Gwyneth Paltrow are at it again, asking abortion advocates across the country to donate money to the nation's largest abortion business. In an email Friday prior to Mother's Day, the mother and daughter Hollywood stars primped the pump for more donations for Planned Parenthood. "We are Blythe Danner and Gwyneth Paltrow, and this is the third time we've written a Mother's Day letter to people like you who support Planned Parenthood," they wrote in the email LifeNews.com received. The pair apparently believe promoting abortion is the best way to honor mothers. "We...

Now that actor Alec Baldwin is 50 years old, he might run for political office. Baldwin talks to 60 Minutes correspondent Morley Safer about that and other aspects of his life, including his very public divorce and custody battle, in a profile to be broadcast this Sunday, May 11, at 7 p.m. ET/PT. A decade ago, Baldwin was interested in politics, but said he was only 39 and all the people who ran the world were in their fifties. Since then, he has publicly dismissed the notion of running for office. A few weeks ago, he changed his mind. "There's...

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Buoyed by the blockbuster success of "Iron Man" over the weekend, Marvel Studios on Monday announced plans for a string of superhero properties, including an "Iron Man" sequel set for April 2010. "Iron Man 2" will be followed in June 2010 by the big-screen adaptation of another of Marvel's popular comic book characters, "Thor," the mighty, hammer-wielding hero based on the Nordic god of the same name, the company said. "Captain America" and "The Avengers" are next in line for the summer of 2011. The nearly $99 million opening weekend of "Iron Man," Marvel's first fully...

IRON MAN, Batman, Big Angry Green Man — to judge from the new popcorn season it seems as if Hollywood has realized that the best way to deal with its female troubles is to not have any, women, that is. Not that it hasn’t tried to make nice with the leading ladies, in films like “The Invasion” (with Nicole Kidman) and “The Brave One” (Jodie Foster). Yet, after those Warner Brothers titles fizzled, the online chatter was that the studio’s president for production, Jeff Robinov, had vowed it would no longer make movies with female leads. A studio representative denied...

WILL: I was at the Truman library in Independence, Mo., last week, and was looking at a black-and-white photograph of Harry Truman giving a speech in a stadium in Los Angeles during the '48 campaign. Seated next to the lectern, right next to Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, is a man who had introduced Truman, and it was a 37-year-old Ronald Reagan. That was probably the last time he voted for a Democrat. And so Sean's right, he was the first Reagan Democrat, but what really made Reagan Democrats were Democratic policies. One of the worst things that ever happened...

".....if you revisit that roll call of yesterday's greats [pre-1970]on a regular basis, you're likely to run across a few flicks that don't stand up to the test of time....The following 10 titles are all commonly name-checked as films of high quality and lasting value; we'll respectfully suggest that their status may need to be re-evaluated.....1. "Gone With the Wind" (1939) - 2. "Giant" (1956) - 3. "Easy Rider" (1969) - 4. "The Ten Commandments" (1956)

In an obvious attempt to be ignored for a while, Tom Hanks with no fanfare, news release or hoopla, late tonight put up a video on his MySpace page endorsing Illinois Sen. Barack Obama for president. Had it come on, say, a Monday morning, the endorsement by the popular and widely-respected Hanks would have caused seismic shifts on those rock shelves that underlie Hollywood and promise to slide the place into the ocean someday. Thanks to The Times' dauntless Tina Daunt, The Ticket, however, is right on top of this major international political story. "BEWARE," says the headline on Hanks'...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - John Cusack is outraged over the Iraq war, so the U.S. actor channeled his anger into a low-budget political satire -- complete with a chorus line of scantily clad female amputees -- that he hopes will offend. Inspired by anger about the war and questions about the political power held by global corporations, "War, Inc" is set in Turaqistan, a fictional nation occupied by a private U.S. company called Tamerlane and run by a former American vice president. Cusack helped write the screenplay and also stars with Sir Ben Kingsley, Marisa Tomei and Hilary Duff in...

OK Freepers, Iron Man is now out, and is getting great reviews in the press. BUT- Iron Man has always been a political beast. And the reviews mention things like "social commentary" and infer that "Tony Stark changes his opinion on being an arms dealer". Those things tend to be red flags for a FReeper FRiendly Movie. SO- Can anyone who's actually seen Iron Man give a good spoiler-free review, including any political hack work done in the flick?

At first sight, Iron Man, which hits theatres today, appears to be just another superhero movie. His gimmick? He's a modern day Sir Lancelot in high-tech armour that brings him enormous powers, ideal for slaying the villainous dragons of the comic-book universe. But there's much more depth to the Iron Man character than first meets the eye. In fact, he may be the superhero best fitted for the post 9/11 era -- a politically contentious hero for politically contentious times. In a new book, Iron Man: Beneath the Armor, by Andy Mangels, comic artist Jorge Lucas is quoted describing Iron...

There was a momentary groundswell at the San Francisco International Film Festival gala Thursday evening when somebody - OK, it was me - asked Warren Beatty if he'd run for president and pry his beloved Democratic Party out of its stalemate. "That would be a barrel of laughs," said Beatty, who flirted with a run for the White House in 2000. He had come to the party at the Westin St. Francis to present the Kanbar Award for screenwriting to Robert Towne who, in turn, proclaimed that he would vote for Beatty. A couple of people in the crush surrounding...

(CNN) — Actress Elizabeth Taylor urged voters in next week’s Democratic primaries to back Hillary Clinton's White House run, saying in a statement released Friday that the New York senator was “not a flibbertijibbet.” “It would be magnificent for our country if Senator Clinton won the votes, hearts and minds of the people in Indiana and North Carolina on Tuesday. She’s a brilliant teacher and powerful leader. We all know what she’s about. We know what she isn’t. Senator Clinton is not a flibbertijibbet [sic]. She’s strong,” said Taylor. “It’s also important for great leaders to have a sense of...

Because California, and Hollywood in particular, have been the punch line for so many jokes over the years, I suspect that people who don’t live out here assume we can’t possibly be that wacky. They don’t know the half of it...

John Cusack is outraged over the Iraq war, so the U.S. actor channeled his anger into a low-budget political satire -- complete with a chorus line of scantily clad female amputees -- that he hopes will offend. Inspired by anger about the war and questions about the political power held by global corporations, "War, Inc" is set in Turaqistan, a fictional nation occupied by a private U.S. company called Tamerlane and run by a former American vice president. Cusack helped write the screenplay and also stars with Sir Ben Kingsley, Marisa Tomei and Hilary Duff in the film, which premiered...

BEIRUT (Reuters) - American films and TV dramas shot since the September 11 attacks have reinforced screen images of Arabs and Muslims as fanatics and villains, ingraining harmful stereotypes, argues an author on the subject. In his book "Guilty -- Hollywood's Verdict on Arabs after 9/11", Jack Shaheen praises some post-September 11 films for offering a more sympathetic image of Arabs and Muslims, who he argues have been castigated for decades by Hollywood.

Wesley Snipes had only been convicted of misdemeanors concerning his failure to file income tax returns. And the action movie star had submitted written character testimonials from Denzel Washington, Woody Harrelson, and television's Judge Joe Brown to assist him in the judge’s consideration of his sentencing. Through his attorneys, Snipes asked for probation rather than prison, which is the normal sentence with a conviction of someone without a criminal history. Still, in spite of it all, U.S. District Judge William Terrell Hodges sentenced Snipes to three years in prison. Why did this happen? Well, in February 2008, a federal jury...

Thanks to Libertas, I noticed a New York Times interview in which “Iron Man”’s Tony Stark, Robert Downey, Jr., admitted that though he doesn’t say it too loudly at dinner parties, he’s a conservative. This is a pretty big catch for our side: consider that Downey’s father, who made the radical underground film “Putney Swope,” was one of the most celebrated leftists in the film world in the 60s. Says Downey Jr: “I have a really interesting political point of view, and it’s not always something I say too loud at dinner tables here, but you can’t go from a...

Is there still money to be made from “Matlock”? Within the last few months, television distributors have opened up their libraries of classic content online, making thousands of episodes of programs like “The Twilight Zone” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” available free. On Monday, Warner Brothers is expected to add a new twist, announcing the rebirth of the WB broadcast network as an Internet destination and offering programs like “Everwood” online. In putting old episodes online, broadcasters are tapping into the “long tail” of niche content that the Internet has monetized. While executives are reticent about the costs involved,...

LOS ANGELES (AP) - The honeymoon is over for Gary Coleman and his new bride. The 40-year-old actor and his 22-year-old wife, Shannon Price, are set to appear on TV's "Divorce Court" on May 1 and 2. The couple wed in August after meeting on the set of the 2006 comedy "Church Ball." Among the problems the pair discusses with Judge Lynn Toler are Coleman's anger and intimacy issues. Coleman and Price agree they have "ugly" monthly fights.

Seth Kleg is a Hollywood casting director who has founded The Christian Studio to produce films that have a positive moral vision. The end result will be a nonstop stream of excellent movies released with budgets ranging from $100,000 to $25,000,000. There are a lot of good people working in the motion picture industry who are working to make it better. However, the messages in most of the PG-13 and R-rated movies reflect a total disregard for God and His commandments. The numerous times God’s name is taken in vain, the use of four-letter words, exploitation of sex and violence,...

ERNEST Hemingway and Hollywood had a tempestuous relationship - but his utter hatred of the movies made from his famed novels is now just coming to light. In "The Good Life According to Hemingway," out next month, A.E. Hotchner, who traveled the globe with him, bares a series of never-before-published slaps Hemingway took at the film business. When producer David O. Selznick crowed that his wife, Jennifer Jones, was starring in "A Farewell to Arms" and he'd pay Hemingway a $50,000 bonus from any profits, the novelist wrote back: "If by some miracle, your movie, which stars 41-year-old Mrs....

Mocked and belittled Interview: Ben Stein’s new documentary may give macro-evolutionary theory a deserved hard time, and he plans to have fun with it along the way | Megan Basham Bebeto Matthews/AP Though audiences probably know Ben Stein best as the economics teacher from Ferris Bueller's Day Off, the actor had a distinguished career preceding the classic '80s movie—just not in the entertainment industry. Long before ad-libbing the world's most famously boring free-market lecture, Stein was a Yale-trained trial lawyer, a professor at Pepperdine University, an economist, and a speechwriter for presidents Nixon and Ford. Even today, along with his...

Darwin critics know Ernst Haeckel as the German philosopher whose faked embryo drawings helped generations of clueless students accept Darwinism – "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" and all that. But there is still another problem with Haeckel, a darker one than mere fraud. Critics of the Ben Stein film, "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," apparently do not know this. If they had, they would not have savaged Stein for daring to connect Adolf Hitler to Charles Darwin. In Scientific American, for instance, editor John Rennie describes this connection as "heavy-handed." In Reuters, Frank Scheck calls it "truly offensive." In reality, it is neither....

A planned fourth pay-TV channel could leave CBS' Showtime without movies. Viacom, Lions Gate Entertainment and MGM announced that they will no longer sell their movies to Showtime and instead will launch a new, fourth pay-TV channel. The announcement leaves Showtime, the current owner of rights to films from Viacom, Lions Gate and MGM, without the rights to output from any of the major movie studios. This move would affect many companies in the entertainment industry, including the owners of the current pay-TV services, Time Warner (HBO and Cinemax) and Liberty Entertainment (Starz and Encore). Time Warner would also be...

During a recent appearance on Boston talk-radio star Reese Hopkins’ program, Phil Donahue waxed indignant about the way the Dixie Chicks were treated during the weeks preceding Operation Iraqi Freedom. Donahue, the producer of the new antiwar documentary Body of War, claimed that the Dixie Chicks and other celebrities who condemned the impending war were silenced by conservatives and forced off the airwaves by the mainstream media. The former TV star insisted that American broadcasting executives were nervous about strongly expressed antiwar views on their programs, and placed a muzzle over the mouths of those opposed to “Bush’s war.” Hopkins...

“Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,� the pro-intelligent design documentary featuring actor Ben Stein, made history this weekend as it propelled full speed into the top 10 box office. It opened as the widest and one of the most commercially successful releases for any documentary film. In an impressive opening weekend, the film debuted at No. 9 at the box office, earning a respectable $3.2 million while only appearing on 1,052 screens. “Leatherheads,� the story of a struggling football team based in Duluth, Minnesota, and written and directed by George Clooney, trailed the new documentary film, placing at only No. 10 its...

Gore Won't Ask Wealthy Hollywoodans to Alter Lifestyle to Save Planet Photo of Noel Sheppard. By Noel Sheppard | April 20, 2008 - 22:45 ET If you needed a better example of the hypocrisy involved in Nobel Laureate Al Gore's global warming hysteria, read this delicious segment from an article just published by the British Sun (emphasis added throughout): The man who is now as much part of the Hollywood Establishment as he was a political player with the Democratic Party is very careful not to upset any of his celebrity friends. He wouldnÂ’t dream of suggesting that their lavish...

April 19, 2008 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - Darwin...Darwin...Darwin...you can almost hear Ben Stein muttering to himself as this subversive little documentary, "Expelled - No Intelligence Allowed," unfolds. Having opened only yesterday it has already left the piggies that feed at the trough of big science foaming at the mouth and staggering about in near apoplexia. So outraged are the fascisti intelligentsia by Stein's work that as the film's website makes clear, "...the National Center For Science Education has taken the extraordinary and unprecedented step of building a website devoted solely to discrediting the...film..." an overtly political act....

A line for the 7:10 p.m. premiere showing of "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" at the Varsity II theater on Lincoln Way stretched back five storefronts to the Bali Satay House Friday. The documentary film, narrated by actor and former Nixon speechwriter Ben Stein, explores the relationship between science and religion in academia, juxtaposing images of the Berlin Wall with footage shot for the film to suggest scientific freedom is being stifled by hostile views toward religion. It features interviews with Guillermo Gonzalez, assistant professor in astronomy at Iowa State University, who claims he was denied tenure for his outspoken views...

Jackie Chan and Jet Li may be getting old, but they packed a lot of punch into the box office this weekend. The Forbidden Kingdom, the first movie to pair the martial arts legends, fought its way to a victory, while the R-rated romantic comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall finished a strong second in a hotly contested race that helped boost the cumulative box office to its best result in several weeks. The Asian action fantasy grossed a better-than-expected $20.9 mil, according to Sunday's estimates.snipBen Stein's political/science documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (No. 9) earned $3.2 mil. That's a very respectable...

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama's first Hollywood fundraiser was co-hosted by a supporter of the terrorists in Iraq. The Hollywood bibleVariety reported that Code Pink's Jodie Evans co-hosted the Obama event with her ex-husband Max Palevsky and Dreamworks partners Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen in February 2007.In 2005 while attending the World Trbunal on Iraq in Istanbul, Evans gushed approvingly of the terrorists in Iraq in a statement originally published on the Code Pink website:"We must begin by really standing with the Iraqi people and defending their right to resist. I can remain myself against all forms...

I like rebels, especially ones who go against type. Take Ben Stein in his latest film, Expelled, which comes out this Friday. Dressed in a sport coat, tie, and tennis shoes, he’s not who you expect — the deadpan, monotone-voiced but ever-likable teacher he portrays in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Wonder Years. Stein retains his characteristic deadpan affect, but this time he’s playing himself — a deceptively erudite and well-educated interviewer, who is passionately skeptical of evolutionary biology and its leading proponents. The film’s endeavor is to respond to one simple question: “Were we designed, or are we...