LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - "Sex and the City" fashioned a surprisingly strong opening at the North American box office on Sunday, as frenzied female fans used the romantic comedy as an excuse for a big party.
The movie, based on the groundbreaking HBO television series of the same name, was also the top choice in Britain and Germany, based on preliminary estimates.
In the United States and Canada, the film earned $55.7 million during its first three days, easily beating the expectations of its distributor, Warner Bros. Pictures. The Time Warner Inc unit had hoped for an opening in the $25 million to $35 million range.
Industry observers had assumed "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" would whip up a second weekend in first place. Instead, the Paramount Pictures adventure slipped to No. 2 with $46 million.
The Rogue Pictures horror film "The Strangers" kicked off at No. 3 with $20.7 million, also surpassing predictions.
If the streets seemed unusually devoid of women, that's because they were likely lining up for "Sex," which revolves around the romantic and fashion dilemmas confronted by four Manhattanites.
Coming to theaters four years after they ended their six-season run on HBO, columnist Carrie Bradshaw (played by Sarah Jessica Parker) and her gal pals unleashed a frenzy among the show's fans, who organized large gatherings to catch up with their heroines' exploits.
Warner Bros. said women made up 85 percent of the audience on Friday night.
Monday, 23 June 2008
Monday, 16 June 2008
Sunday, 15 June 2008
Johnny Depp is Britain's Favorite Actor
Hollywood hunk Johnny Depp is Britain's favorite actor, according to research by the Cinema Advertising Association (CAA).
The Pirates of The Caribbean star, 45, received the largest number of votes across all ages and genders.
He beat home-grown stars like Daniel Craig, Sir Anthony Hopkins, Sir Sean Connery and Orlando Bloom.
Depp, who has two children with longterm girlfriend Vanessa Paradis, won over mainstream film audiences with his role as Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean.
CAA spokeswoman Anna Cremin says, "Depp has such a wide appeal demonstrated by moving from serious films like Donnie Brasco to blockbusters and comedies.
"Few other actors have managed to be so versatile."
The CAA conducted the research with 3,000 people aged seven-years-old and over.
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Alanis Morissette - Flavors of Entanglement
Rating: * * * * From anger to sorrow, regret to acceptance, Alanis Morissette's seventh studio album catalogues the many emotional stages following a serious relationship break-up. Given Morissette's split from her fiance, actor...
Sublime
Artist: Sublime
Genre(s):
Rock
Alternative
Punk
Rock: Pop-Rock
Discography:
Second-Hand Smoke
Year: 1997
Tracks: 19
Sublime
Year: 1996
Tracks: 17
Pure Anus
Year: 1995
Tracks: 23
Living In A Boring Nation
Year: 1995
Tracks: 5
Robbin' The Hood
Year: 1994
Tracks: 22
40 Oz. To Freedom
Year: 1992
Tracks: 22
Stand By Your Van
Year:
Tracks: 16
40oz. To Freedom
Year:
Tracks: 22
Two EastEnders stars to quit the show
'EastEnders' stars Rob Kazinsky and Mohammed George are to leave the soap.
According to The Sun, a BBC spokesperson confirmed that both actors would be leaving their roles.
Kazinsky, who plays Sean Slater in the show, reportedly wants to move to Hollywood to further his acting career there.
A source told the newspaper: "He's desperate to be a Hollywood star. He's ambitious, which Americans love, and easy on the eye - the first thing that Hollywood producers look at."
The report also suggests that Brad Pitt's agent has already signed up to represent the actor.
A spokesperson for 'EastEnders' reportedly said: "'EastEnders' can confirm that Rob Kazinsky will be leaving later this year. We wish him all the best for the future."
Kazinsky said: "If I had done everything I wanted to do as an actor before I joined 'EastEnders' I would have wanted to stay forever."
"I have really enjoyed my time with the show - it's such a wonderful place to work and it's become more like a second home to me. I'll be sad to leave."
Mohammed George, who plays Gus Smith in the show, is also moving on from Albert Square.
A BBC spokesperson said: "As the character did not have any big plots coming up it was agreed Mohammed would leave. He is in talks with the BBC about other projects."
According to The Sun, a BBC spokesperson confirmed that both actors would be leaving their roles.
Kazinsky, who plays Sean Slater in the show, reportedly wants to move to Hollywood to further his acting career there.
A source told the newspaper: "He's desperate to be a Hollywood star. He's ambitious, which Americans love, and easy on the eye - the first thing that Hollywood producers look at."
The report also suggests that Brad Pitt's agent has already signed up to represent the actor.
A spokesperson for 'EastEnders' reportedly said: "'EastEnders' can confirm that Rob Kazinsky will be leaving later this year. We wish him all the best for the future."
Kazinsky said: "If I had done everything I wanted to do as an actor before I joined 'EastEnders' I would have wanted to stay forever."
"I have really enjoyed my time with the show - it's such a wonderful place to work and it's become more like a second home to me. I'll be sad to leave."
Mohammed George, who plays Gus Smith in the show, is also moving on from Albert Square.
A BBC spokesperson said: "As the character did not have any big plots coming up it was agreed Mohammed would leave. He is in talks with the BBC about other projects."
Ken Hensley and John Wetton
Artist: Ken Hensley and John Wetton
Genre(s):
Rock: Hard-Rock
Discography:
More Than Conquerors
Year: 2002
Tracks: 9
Lords Of The New Church
Artist: Lords Of The New Church
Genre(s):
Rock: Punk-Rock
Discography:
Killer Lords
Year: 1985
Tracks: 19
Formed in 1981, the Lords of the New Church had a formidable intercontinental toughie rock pedigree. Singer Stiv Bators and guitarist Brian James were institution members of Cleveland's Dead Boys and London's the Damned, respectively, both successful and influential punk rocker pioneers. (Annotation: Much like Keith Richard(s), Stiv spelled his surname both with and without a terminal "s" at various points in his career. Throughout his meter with the Lords, however, he was billed as Bators.) Bassist Dave Tregunna and drummer Nick Turner were veterans of Sham 69 and the Barracudas, which were less seminal simply still long-familiar. But while the Lords' music had elements of toughie, it was more than melodic, better-produced, and played with a higher degree of professionalism. This alienated some of the hard-core kindling audience, just brought the Lords a much wider and more than diverse fan base.
The generation of the Lords was in 1980 when Bators and James, having schism from their late bands, renewed an aqcuaintance that began when the Dead Boys opened for the Damned on CBGB dates and an English go. The two experimented for a metre with different round sections, rehearsing shortly with ex-Generation X bassist Tony James and ex-Clash drummer Terry Chimes (how's that for a punk rocker john Rock supergroup?). A batting order of Bators, James, Tregunna, and Damned drummer Rat Scabies played a single 1980 gig as the "Utter Damned Sham Band." But by the meter the Lords' self-titled debut record album appeared in 1982, Turner had replaced Scabies to form the card that would stay fixed passim the band's to the highest degree productive geezerhood.
Though the album was well-received, the Lords became more infamous for their live shows, or more than specifically for Bators's crazed give up as a performer. A fan of Iggy Pop, Bators had in his Dead Boys years developed a reputation for being unafraid to danger his life in pursuit of rock and roll & roll glory. He suffered unnumberable onstage injuries during his calling, the most illustrious being the time he reportedly closely hung himself during a Lords show. As the tale goes, a front-runner stunt of Bators' where he looped the mic cord approximately his neck went askew, resulting in his organism clinically dead for several minutes. Nonetheless, Bators survived to phonograph recording 2 more successful albums with the Lords, 1983's Is Nothing Sacred? and 1984's The Method to Our Madness. After this, though, the Lords appeared to lose their originative impetus.
They continued to disc periodically including an amusing single where they violated Madonna's "Care a Virgin" and two first-class new tracks for the best-of Killer Lords, just by 1985, the Lords had slowly begun to disintegrate. Tregunna left, was replaced for a time by Grant Fleming, and then returned. A arcsecond guitar player, Alistair Simmons, was added and then pillaged. Turner stop and was replaced by Danny Fury. After 1988, Bators back injury light-emitting diode James to advertize for a permutation singer -- a impermanent one, he claimed -- the Lords rip acrimoniously, simply not earlier Bators played the encore of his last designate wear a T-shirt that eagre an expansion of James' paper ad. Possibilities of whatever future Lords reunions were quashed when Bators died in 1990 of injuries sustained when he was smitten by a car in the streets of Paris.
Photographers arrested after Spears chase
Biscayne
Artist: Biscayne
Genre(s):
Rock: Punk-Rock
Discography:
You'd Build A Robot
Year: 2001
Tracks: 10
K-Fed and Brit: Again ... Who's Got the Kids?
Myleene Klass to host Classical Brits
Former Hear'Say singer Myleene Klass is set to host this year's Classical Brit Awards in London.
Speaking about the announcement, the presenter said: "The Classical Brits is the biggest event in the classical calendar. To be the host is a personal highlight in my career."
"I'm really looking forward to presenting a ceremony that is so close to my heart and I'm sure it will be a magical evening."
Klass, who is a classically trained pianist, has just released her latest album 'Music For Mothers'.
The Classical Brits will take place at the Royal Albert Hall in London on 8 May.
Speaking about the announcement, the presenter said: "The Classical Brits is the biggest event in the classical calendar. To be the host is a personal highlight in my career."
"I'm really looking forward to presenting a ceremony that is so close to my heart and I'm sure it will be a magical evening."
Klass, who is a classically trained pianist, has just released her latest album 'Music For Mothers'.
The Classical Brits will take place at the Royal Albert Hall in London on 8 May.
Sylvie Simmons meets the Fleet Foxes
"Seattle is getting expensive," says Robin Pecknold, Fleet Foxes' lead singer and songwriter, opening the front door to a small wooden house painted Teletubby purple. There are tulips in the front yard and a few tufts of grass in the roof tiles currently being watered by a shower of rain. "Like, I had to move out of my apartment in Capitol Hill - which is, like, the cool neighbourhood, it's where all the venues were and my job was - because my rent went up from $450 a month to $600 and it was tiny. So I moved into my girlfriend's place."
This is not Seattle's hippy quarter, he says; his girlfriend's place is an exception, it's more a "dogs-and-babies place with a lot of organic toy stores area. But this year I'm going to be on tour so much it's just good to have time with my girl."
Fleet Foxes have just got home from a US tour and, I was told, were pretty burned out. Not a long tour by US rock standards - just two or three months, including the South by Southwest festival-conference, where they got buzz-band status and accolades from the press. (Mojo magazine hailed them as "America's next great band".) Nor can they blame their age for being so fried. It's more that they're new to this. As 22-year-old Pecknold, when pondering something I've asked, says: "I've never been interviewed until a couple of months ago." It's not been that many weeks since they signed a record deal - with Seattle indie label Sub Pop in the US and, in the UK, former Cocteau Twin Simon Raymonde's Bella Union. Their self-titled debut album, which they recorded late last year, paying for the sessions on Pecknold's credit card, doesn't come out till June, preceded by a self-made EP, Sun Giant, last month. Both were made at home.
You quickly gather that home and community are a big deal to Pecknold. Though Seattle's population has expanded greatly since the 1990s - more from the impact of Starbucks and Microsoft than the city's other successful export, grunge - Pecknold makes it sound like a small town, with a close-knit musical community, where everyone knows each other and are often as not in multiple bands. Two of Fleet Foxes, Casey Wescott and Christian Wargo, have their own group, the mellow, electronic Crystal Skulls. And newest member Joshua Tillman is also a solo singer-songwriter.
There's a very strong sense of family, too. Robin's sister Aja, 29, a music journalist, also works as a facilitator for the band, and his brother Sean, 27, a film-maker, is shooting their first video. Their father Greg, who in the 60s played in Seattle soul-garage band the Fathom, bought each of his kids an identical guitar for Christmas one year and taught Robin some chords. Robin in turn taught his high school friend, Skye Skjelset, "who took off way beyond me, he's awesome". Skjelset duly became Pecknold's musical companion as they stumbled towards their calling.
There are, apparently, a lot of people of Nordic stock in Seattle. Pecknold and Skjelset are two of them. Pecknold, who looks as much Norwegian fisherman as neo-hippy with his beard, woolly hat and sleeveless jacket, relates how he, Aja and Sean took a trip to Norway last year and visited the island of Hidra, where there was a village named after his mother's side of the family, Valaas. "But when we got there it had been torn down to build vacation condos for all these German people who want to live there. The Hidra that my mum remembers was just sheep." The rest of the country, he says, laughing, "looked just like Seattle". His childhood, he says, was "like, rad. My mum was a school teacher - she worked on a commune in Israel once - and my dad used to build guitars and boats. My brother's five years older than I am and my sister seven years, but we would hang out and were like as good of buddies as you'd allow yourself to be as a kid when there's that age difference."
And then the family moved, with his mother's job, to a "boring" town east of the city, and his brother and sister both left to go to college. "So I was almost like an only child, which was kind of weird, and I wasn't really making new friends at school, until I met Skye," who by Pecknold's description sounds a lot like himself - "soft-spoken and kind of deep". Pecknold gives a shy laugh. "I was, like, the fat kid on my own, reading Lord of the Rings, and that was when I started playing music and went into the guitar."
The first song he learned to play was The Times They Are A-Changin' - partly because it was simple, mostly because it was Bob Dylan, whom Pecknold describes as "an obsession. He was such a comfort to me. Those were the only records I would listen to late at night or doing homework."
One of the teachers at his junior high school - "the greatest guy and really into Yes and ELO" - let Pecknold and Skjelset hang out in the science room during their lunch break, where the pair would talk music and practice guitar. Pecknold says they took it seriously from the outset. "We always thought of it as a band. We'd say, 'Let's have band practice now,' although it was just us two sitting around watching movies or whatever, or I'd say, 'Let's record music this week.'" They recorded just about everything they wrote. Pecknold listened back to their old tapes recently and says that "if music is a language, they sound like a toddler making up their own words".
Over time, as they grew tired of the limitations of their group being just the two of them, it turned into a full band. When Pecknold was 18 he left home and got a job in a Capitol Hill restaurant called Bimbo's, staffed almost entirely by Seattle musicians. Says Pecknold, "John Atkins from 764-Hero worked there, and for a kid growing up in Seattle, if I could just talk to John Atkins it was mind-blowing." It also made it very easy to find people to play in the band that now had a name: Pineapple. Only it was also the name of a 70s US punk band who sent them a cease-and-desist email. "I'm like, 'You can take it, we're not really using it anyway.' " Pecknold renamed the band Fleet Foxes.
"I just love the word 'fleet' as an adjective," he shrugs, "and I love England. So much English music is just so great - Fairport Convention, Pentangle, Steeleye Span, they're so good, I can't get enough of them. I read online that the girl in that band, Maddy Prior, works at some Wellness centre and gives classes." He beams. "You can pay to have a class with Maddy Prior!"
Fleet Foxes' heady sound leans heavily on the records of the late 60s and early 70s - you can hear the English folk revival groups he has mentioned, the American artists who were turning towards folk and gospel, such as Karen Dalton, and harmony rock from both sides of the Atlantic (the Beach Boys, Crosby, Stills & Nash, the Association, the Zombies and Fleetwood Mac) - but it is as filtered through the brains of a generation raised on computers. On the band's MySpace page they describe their music as "baroque pop, music from fantasy movies, Motown, block harmonies, hymns, a couple moments approaching shaggy rock stuff, but mostly rather tempered and restrained. Not much of a rock band."
Harmonies play an enormous part in Fleet Foxes' music - four, sometimes five, male voices, sometimes churchy and a capella, other times woven into the music alongside the other instruments (which include banjo, piano, mandolin, autoharp, cello and guzheng, an oversized Chinese zither). It is oddly timeless - the sound of an imagined, perfected America that never existed - without ever sounding dated. It shares with REM's Murmur the sense of having emerged fully formed from the backwoods, without ever sounding like the Georgia band.
Leafing through the stack of vinyl albums beneath the turntable, I spot LPs by Van Dyke Parks, Procol Harum, Karen Dalton, Joni Mitchell, Simon & Garfunkel, as well as Renaissance harp music - all music that came out long before Pecknold was born. His tastes, he says, were informed partly by his parents' record collection but more so by stuff he discovered on Napster. A bootleg of the then unfinished Beach Boys' album Smile, for instance, that "just blew my mind. For me it was Bob Dylan and then after that Brian Wilson."
For Pecknold, the best part of being in a band is "singing with people. It's so super fun we would just want to incorporate it more. It's ..." he searches for the word, "human. There's a certain sense of togetherness. Because a guitar is, like, your hands and your brain, but four people singing is just as close as you can get musically, because you're all standing next to each other and you're all just an interval away. It just reminds me," he smiles warmly, "of family."
· Fleet Foxes tour the UK from June 9 to June 18. Their album Fleet Foxes is released on June 2, and the Sun Giant EP is out now, both on Bella Union
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