| Supermodel Heidi Klum to host kids show FORMER Victoria's Secret model and mother-of-four Heidi Klum will host an unscripted TV series on Lifetime featuring funny insights from children. news.com.au |
This much I know: Morgan Freeman The actor, 73, on wearing an earring, being a good sailor, and dreaming bigEverything I've ever done for love has been crazy. I got married twice. I love a lot, you know? Love friends, love kids, love women. It means being loved, too.You walk down the street and people yell your name. That's how you know you're famous. That's what I live for, and I still like it. I just don't like having no privacy.Dreams come true, and without a dream, there's no life. So what you want to instil in your kids (and I'm a great grandfather now) is to dream – and dream big. Make plans for yourself, and then aim yourself in that direction. Because what you want is what you're gonna get.Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That was my parents' central message. It worked for me.I'm not looking to do a comedy after a drama or an action movie after a love story – that's not the way I choose roles. Whatever good comes along is what I do.I would like to succeed as a producer. The challenge you face – even when you have a track record, even when you are Steven Spielberg – is that every new thing that you set out to do has to ride on its own merits. The rest is meaningless.I always wanted an earring. It has to do with my attachment to the sea. When I was around 35 I was separated from my wife and she said, "I'm going to pierce your ear." I'm an avid sailor, a dyed-in-the-wool blue-water man.You know why sailors used to wear a gold earring? It's enough money to bury you in a foreign country.There are two or three tricks to being a good sailor. One is courage. You have to be willing to face the sea. And the rest is just knowledge – you can learn a lot by listening to other sailors about how to survive almost unsurvivable situations.I've been in dangerous storms. There comes a moment when you think you may not get through, and in that moment there's a peacefulness that settles over you and you're no longer afraid. That's also the moment when you have to say, "I'm going to face this demon. I'm going to stand up and I'm going to do what I have to do. Not just by lying down and letting the sea wash over me, but by fighting it."After you've been in mortal danger, you don't look at the world differently – you look at yourself differently. The world is just the world – it's the same, nothing's changed. But you have a different idea of yourself. You think, I did it. I survived it.I'm easily tickled. Charlie Chaplin. Jackie Gleason. Peter Sellers – Sellers was a very, very funny man. And I remember the first time I saw Richard Pryor on Johnny Carson's show. He wasn't the Richard Pryor we all know and loved; he hadn't found his voice yet, but once he found it, he was hilarious. That man could make me laugh until I wept.Waking up every day, that's as far as I go with thinking about getting older. It's foolish to think you're gonna live for ever, but I do think I'm going to live until I die.Retirement is not part of my lexicon.Morgan Freeman's latest film, Red, is released on 22 OctoberTo read all the interviews in this series, go to guardian.co.uk/lifeandhealth/series/thismuchiknowMorgan Freemanguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
'The real popular hit at the LFF' This handsome movie about the abdication crisis and George VI's stammer is a clever anti-PygmalionIf this is to be the UK Film Council's swan song it's gone out on a high note, or rather a regal flourish of trumpets. Tom Hooper's richly enjoyable and handsomely produced movie about George VI's struggle to cure his stammer is a massively confident crowd-pleaser. What looks at first like an conventional Brit period drama about royals is actually a witty and elegant new perspective on the abdication crisis and on the dysfunctional quiver at the heart of the Windsors and of prewar Britain. It suggests there was a time when a member of the royal household experimented with psychoanalysis – disguised as speech therapy.Colin Firth gives a warm and sympathetic performance as Bertie, the Duke Of York, an introverted and uncomfortable stammerer, bullied by his father George V, played by Michael Gambon, and overshadowed by his charismatic playboy older brother, David, a role dispatched with some style by Guy Pearce, incidentally putting to rest the overpowering memory of Edward Fox in the part. Helena Bonham Carter is Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, his robustly supportive wife who, with her intuitive sense of when and how to dispense with her own reverence for protocol, engages a new Australian speech therapist to help her despairing husband. This is the eccentric and undeferential Leonard Logue, played by Geoffrey Rush. Logue is a man who must cure his own demons – a sense of failure over never having made it as a professional actor – and who is everywhere patronised as a colonial.The movie is a clever anti-Pygmalion. Where Henry Higgins had to get Eliza Doolittle to smarten up and talk proper, Logue finds his pupil has gone too far in the other direction: Bertie is too constrained, too clenched, too formal and too miserable. To untie his tongue he has to relax, but also to talk about what makes him unhappy, as he has never done with anyone in his life before. David, effortlessly debonair and stubbornly set on a marriage to Mrs Simpson, is going to thrust upon Bertie's shoulders the awful burden of kingship, which, in the new era of radio, depends on public speaking as never before.When Logue's methods get results, Bertie is delighted, and Logue becomes a sensational new royal favourite whose intimacy with the duke astonishes and infuriates the palace establishment, particularly the Archbishop of Canterbury, played by Derek Jacobi (himself a legendary screen stammerer in I, Claudius). Hooper's film subtly suggests that Bertie has defiantly learned one thing from his ne'er-do-well brother: Logue is to be his very own Mrs Simpson, a commoner who has to be tolerated by the royals. Of course, Logue gets it wrong. He presumes too much.Bertie's royal arrogance and coldness are not so easily unlearned and Logue is spurned: a morganatic bromantic lovers' tiff.There are many incidental pleasures in David Seidler's screenplay. On being thanked for some small service, Logue asks: "What are friends for?" "I wouldn't know," snaps the duke. After watching the newsreel of the coronation, the new royal family finds itself mesmerised by the sight of Hitler at Nuremberg. "What's he saying?" asks one of his daughters. "I don't know, but he seems to be saying it rather well," says the new king thoughtfully. (As it happens, the movie skates tactfully over Queen Elizabeth's enthusiasm for appeasement, passing more or less straight from the abdication to the outbreak of war.) There is strong support from Anthony Andrews as Baldwin and a jowl-wobbling portrayal of Churchill from Timothy Spall. Fans of TV's Outnumbered will be very pleased to see nine-year-old Ramona Marquez cast as Princess Margaret, although I wonder if she shouldn't really have been Elizabeth. This was the real popular hit at the London film festival.Rating: 4/5London film festivalPeriod and historicalUK Film CouncilDramaColin FirthPeter Bradshawguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Keith Richards says Mick Jagger enraged him By 2010-10-24T17:10:06ZLONDON (AP) -- Keith Richards says the Rolling Stones almost imploded because Mick Jagger thought he was "bigger than the Stones."... hosted.ap.org |
'Megamind' Beats 'Due Date' to Win Weekend Box Office The blue meanie rules: the splashy 3-D comedy Megamind won the weekend box office, with Due Date coming in second and For Colored Girls in third feedproxy.google.com |