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A not-so-funny thing happened to Amy Tan back in 1993 on the day of a gala premiere of The Joy Luck Club, the film adaptation of her phenomenally successful 1989 first novel. “Annette Bening was introducing the screening,” Tan recalls, seated in the elegant eight-room condominium decorated in what she jokingly calls “Marco Polo Chinese,” in San Francisco’s Presidio Heights, where she and her husband Louis De Mattei have lived for nearly 11 years.
Soupy Sales, a comedian from the golden era of television, died Thursday. He was 83.
It was a glass half-full, glass half-empty kind of weekend at the box office for "Funny People," writer-director Judd Apatow’s comedic meditation on fame, humor, life, and death.
Comedy is hard; dying is easy.
“If a kangaroo accidentally gets hit by the train, you don’t really feel it,” conductor Scott Fels informs me as the scrublands and giant termite mounds of the Australian Outback whisk by. “But if the train drivers see a camel on the tracks, believe me, they get away from the windows.” Camels in the Outback Yes indeed. There are estimated to be over a million of these ungulates roaming at will through the desert, descendants of the original camel caravans led by Afghan drivers in the 1860s and 1870s
It’s tough to find a foreclosure sign in Bismarck, N.D. Banners announcing “Now Hiring” are much more common
When a film cast includes names like Ben Stiller, Robin Williams and Owen Wilson, a bit of improvisation on set is to be expected. “I think the movie is really only 25 percent scripted, maybe even less than that,” said Shawn Levy, director of the new film “Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian,” which boasts those comedic actors and several others. “It just so happens that the scenes that get some of the biggest laughs are the improvised scenes, so it feels like more than that, but we had a very good script and it’s still very much there.” The sequel to 2006’s “Night at the Museum” welcomes back the trio and director as well as other original cast members, including British actor Ricky Gervais, while also adding fresh faces such as Hank Azaria (as a villainous pharaoh) and Amy Adams (as Amelia Earhart)
You know things are getting weird when Britain’s largest mass-market daily, the Sun, co-opts a regicidal 17th century republican who shut down Parliament at gunpoint as an avatar of democracy. But Oliver Cromwell’s angry exhortation to MPs supplied the paper’s front-page headline yesterday: “In the Name of God, Go.” British voters — or at any rate, those voters who work for Britain’s robustly opinionated media — are calling for heads to roll as each day brings new revelations about MPs’ overblown expense claims. Today, Michael Martin, the Speaker of the House of Commons, became the scandal’s highest-profile victim, announcing that he will stand down in June, the first time a Speaker has been forced out in 300 years.
It seemed like a good idea at the time: Skip the "Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience" — the only major wide release this weekend and more or less review-proof — and check out the new releases down at the local DVD store instead. I was up for this assignment. We all know how close “Slumdog Millionaire” came to bypassing theatres
Matt Groening laughs — a lot. Sometimes it’s a chuckle of uncertainty, as when he talks about the fact that his weekly comic strip, “Life in Hell,” is being dropped by its flagship newspaper, LA Weekly, after 22 years.