My man!!! Denzel Washington keeps it all the way trill when discussing who his friends are, and they ain’t of the White Hollyweird assortment… According to Yahoo! Movies: Some actors make a point of hob-nobbing with famous and high-profile folks in the industry and getting their picture in the tabloids as often as possible. Then there’s Denzel Washington. In an interview with Xan Brooks published on The Guardian.co.uk, Washington announced, “Actually, even within the industry, I don’t have any actor friends. My friends are old friends. One’s an ex-music guy, the other’s a restaurant owner and the other’s an ex-pro ballplayer.” When asked why he didn’t have many friends among his colleagues, Washington snapped, “Because I don’t make friends! Maybe I’m not a butt-kisser, maybe I’m not a schmoozer. I’m not about to go to a party to try to get a job. And then when you have children, the other friends become other parents. We’d coach baseball or basketball. My wife and I were raised right. I don’t want movie-star friends. And being African American, there were no big movie stars to hang out with anyway, not when I was starting out, they were just the third guy from the back! For whatever reason, I never befriended any white actors.” (One of Washington’s public relations representatives later offer a clarification on the Guardian story, “I sat in on this interview,” the rep said. “The part they failed to mention was after he said ‘never befriended any white actors’ he mentioned ‘except,’ and then listed Tom Hanks, Mel Gibson, Julia Roberts, etc. They cut the rest of the thought out. The rest is fine though.”) As the interview went on, Washington’s seem to clarify that his attitude had less to do with his opinions of his fellow thespians and more with the current culture of celebrity in America. “I’m a working actor!” he declared. “What’s a celebrity anyway? Paris Hilton’s a celebrity. I’m just a working actor.” While Washington didn’t go into deep detail about his private life in the interview, the well-grounded and publicity-shy actor alluded to his religious scruples and the role they play in his life and his work. When asked about his character’s plea for help from God in “Flight,” Washington replied, “That line, ‘God help me,’ was very important to me. As an arc as much as anything. You see this butt-naked, coke-sniffing, weed-smoking guy finally get to the point where he can say: ‘God help me.’ He gets his life back.” Love it, way to keep it all the way 100, Denzel!!!! WENN
The Catholic church is in crisis …. Pope Resignation Linked To Gay Blackmail Scandal Via Gawker reports: A new report outlining a network of gay Vatican officials might have been behind the Pope’s resignation earlier this month, a claim the Vatican neither confirms or denies. Italian newspaper La Repubblica reports that gay Vatican prelates were being blackmailed by people with knowledge of their network, which met and had sexual encounters in “a villa outside the Italian capital, a sauna in a Rome suburb, a beauty parlour in the centre, and a former university residence that was in use by a provincial Italian archbishop.” The network was supposedly detailed in a 300-page report to the Pope put together by three cardinals who were looking into the “Vatileaks” affair, a series of Papal dispatches which were stolen and leaked by Pope Benedict’s butler last May. The report was given to the Pope on the same day he reportedly decided to resign. The cardinals found that “various lobbies within the Holy See were consistently breaking” the sixth and seventh commandments (no adultery, no stealing), and were influencing the Vatican. Pope Benedict alluded to the affair in his Ash Wednesday homily, when he railed against vague internal “divisions.” Let’s pray the successor has not only more intellectual competence but will also have greater moral fiber. The scandal of avoiding defrocking pedos and their enablers undermined the ethical character of the Roman Catholic denomination.
Sundays are a good time for soul-searching — which makes it a good time to check in with filmmaker Alex Gibney , whose chilling documentary about sexual abuse in the Catholic church, Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God , is a must-see for anyone interested in the subject as well as the larger issue of what happens when religion becomes big business. Gibney’s documentary, which is in its second week of theatrical release and will run on HBO in February, begins with the headlines-making case of Father Lawrence Murphy, who, in a letter to the Vatican in 1998, admitted to abusing some 200 boys since the 1950s at the St. John’s School for the Deaf in St. Francis, Wisconsin. Although the Vatican had been aware of Murphy’s actions since 1963, he was never defrocked and, in fact, was allowed to remain at the school until 1974 (when he was transferred). Mea Maxima Culpa , which translates to “My Most Grievous Fault,” takes Gibney all the way to the Vatican, and in this interview, the filmmaker talks about the surprisingly integral roles that the late Pope John Paul II and his successor Pope Benedict XVI (then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger) played in this tragic tale as well as his doubts that the church will ever openly confront this issue in a way that will bring some measure of peace to its many victims. Movieline: After seeing Mea Maxima Culpa , I thought that it shares a theme with Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer . On one level, this is about a giant corporation quashing someone those who dare to challenge its ethics. Gibney: That’s right. It’s an abuse of power of sorts. The Vatican is a corporation. It’s religion that’s become a corporation and therein lays the rub. The Vatican has become too seduced by its own power and money. Vatican City is its own state. What struck me about Mea Maxima Culpa is the arrogance that the church has shown towards those who have suffered sexual abuse at the hands of Catholic priests. For somebody like Pope Benedict, I don’t think it’s an arrogance born of malice. I think that the hierarchy intuits itself as a kind of holy order, which is innately better than everyone else and, therefore, can’t fathom the idea of punishing one of its own. It’s like ratting on a family member. If you find out a brother has committed a crime, you don’t go running to the police. But once you’ve started to believe your own hype, even if it’s illogical hype, it can take you to some dark places. And then you’re in the position of maintaining the illusion that you have done nothing wrong, which entails silencing anyone who says otherwise. I think many of these people are true believers — even somebody as sick as Father Murphy: In those therapist’s notes he talks about why he did what he did with those children. He said, “Well, I was taking their sins upon myself.” Doesn’t he also say that he was “fixing” rampant homosexuality at the St. John’s School for the Deaf by having sex with the students there? Right. “I was fixing it.” I think rationalizations like that are made because people like Murphy believe in their essential holiness. It’s not necessarily Machiavellian where they’re sitting there thinking, “Okay, here’s the strategy. We shall employ X, Y, or Z.” Although recently, I do think there’s some of that as well. Tell me what’s going on with Cardinal Dolan , for example, and his maneuvers with the cemetery fund in Milwaukee. I wasn’t aware of that until I saw your film. Wasn’t that wild? After the deaf victims spend years trying to hold Murphy to account, imagine the vicious irony of the idea that when they petition the church for redress, the church moves its money into the cemetery account so it can continue to protect the grave of Father Murphy over and above the victims. There’s also remarkable home-video footage you use in which a group of the deaf men confront Murphy, and his caretaker, who knows sign language, is telling one of the men that he should drop this because he’s a Catholic above all. It’s Murphy’s helper. She had been a helper at the school and, yes, she’s signing furiously saying you are Catholic, you are Catholic. As if to say, you know, the church is more important. You can cut this guy some slack because we don’t want the enemies of the church to have access to any of this information. Put your religion ahead of your petty grievances — the fact that you and so many other children have been abused. Petty. Right. There’s a technical aspect of the film that I wanted to ask you about: Your interviews with the deaf men, who are using sign language to communicate, have an almost 3D quality. Yeah, we did something. We used a variable shutter — it’s what Spielberg used in Saving Private Ryan — so that there’s a kind of flutter to the hands that makes them resonate more. It does. I really felt the emotion and the pain behind their gestures. We actually shot those interviews with three, sometimes four cameras because we wanted to have one camera that took a complete record of their signing, which included their facial gestures and their hands. We wanted another camera that was more impressionistic in terms of being able to move in from the face to the hands, and so forth. We wanted a side angle, of course, and sometimes we would use a fourth camera just to get more details because we really wanted to bring that world to life for the hearing audience. There’s something so rich about their language that it’s very powerful to capture, particularly because their deafness was so much at the heart of this story. They were the voices that could not be heard. Yet, they made themselves heard by dint of their determination. You also use recreations in Mea Maxima Culpa to depict aspects of the Father Murphy story. What led to your decision to take that route? Frankly I was a little nervous about it. We shot some pretty extensive recreations on this one. I hate that word — recreation — but it just seemed that there’s something so poignant about the way Murphy entered that dorm room. I wanted to capture that hallucinatory quality, because the aspect of the story that most people found so haunting is that these children couldn’t hear him coming. That’s how vulnerable they were. Like the fox in the henhouse, he had them available to him at any time. You quote a letter from one of Murphy’s victims in which he says that he used to lay in bed shaking at night. Yeah, because you never knew when he was going to come in and touch you or one of your friends. In the film, you indicate that while Pope John Paul II was on his deathbed, the future Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Ratzinger, who oversaw all of the sex abuse cases at the Vatican, sent his chief prosecutor to New York and Mexico City to gather evidence about alleged sexual abuses by Marcial Maciel Degollado , who ran the Legion of Christ and raised a lot of money for the Vatican. As John Paul is dying, Cardinal Ratzinger, who is the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which oversees all of the sexual abuse cases, sends his chief prosecutor to New York and Mexico City to take testimony so they can build a case against Maciel. Ratzinger was legitimately furious at Maciel, but Maciel had very powerful protectors, notably John Paul and Cardinal Angelo Sodano. Ratzinger becomes Pope but Maciel was never tried under canonical law. It shows that — Even the Pope is not all powerful. That was a revelation to me. That is in essence the banality of evil. Pope Benedict has to play these political games instead of assuming the mantle of God and rendering punishment to somebody. He doesn’t. We don’t know if some kind of deal was cut by Sodano, or if Benedict was simply doing an Obama-like thing and saying we’re going to go forward, not backwards.
Sundays are a good time for soul-searching — which makes it a good time to check in with filmmaker Alex Gibney , whose chilling documentary about sexual abuse in the Catholic church, Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God , is a must-see for anyone interested in the subject as well as the larger issue of what happens when religion becomes big business. Gibney’s documentary, which is in its second week of theatrical release and will run on HBO in February, begins with the headlines-making case of Father Lawrence Murphy, who, in a letter to the Vatican in 1998, admitted to abusing some 200 boys since the 1950s at the St. John’s School for the Deaf in St. Francis, Wisconsin. Although the Vatican had been aware of Murphy’s actions since 1963, he was never defrocked and, in fact, was allowed to remain at the school until 1974 (when he was transferred). Mea Maxima Culpa , which translates to “My Most Grievous Fault,” takes Gibney all the way to the Vatican, and in this interview, the filmmaker talks about the surprisingly integral roles that the late Pope John Paul II and his successor Pope Benedict XVI (then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger) played in this tragic tale as well as his doubts that the church will ever openly confront this issue in a way that will bring some measure of peace to its many victims. Movieline: After seeing Mea Maxima Culpa , I thought that it shares a theme with Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer . On one level, this is about a giant corporation quashing someone those who dare to challenge its ethics. Gibney: That’s right. It’s an abuse of power of sorts. The Vatican is a corporation. It’s religion that’s become a corporation and therein lays the rub. The Vatican has become too seduced by its own power and money. Vatican City is its own state. What struck me about Mea Maxima Culpa is the arrogance that the church has shown towards those who have suffered sexual abuse at the hands of Catholic priests. For somebody like Pope Benedict, I don’t think it’s an arrogance born of malice. I think that the hierarchy intuits itself as a kind of holy order, which is innately better than everyone else and, therefore, can’t fathom the idea of punishing one of its own. It’s like ratting on a family member. If you find out a brother has committed a crime, you don’t go running to the police. But once you’ve started to believe your own hype, even if it’s illogical hype, it can take you to some dark places. And then you’re in the position of maintaining the illusion that you have done nothing wrong, which entails silencing anyone who says otherwise. I think many of these people are true believers — even somebody as sick as Father Murphy: In those therapist’s notes he talks about why he did what he did with those children. He said, “Well, I was taking their sins upon myself.” Doesn’t he also say that he was “fixing” rampant homosexuality at the St. John’s School for the Deaf by having sex with the students there? Right. “I was fixing it.” I think rationalizations like that are made because people like Murphy believe in their essential holiness. It’s not necessarily Machiavellian where they’re sitting there thinking, “Okay, here’s the strategy. We shall employ X, Y, or Z.” Although recently, I do think there’s some of that as well. Tell me what’s going on with Cardinal Dolan , for example, and his maneuvers with the cemetery fund in Milwaukee. I wasn’t aware of that until I saw your film. Wasn’t that wild? After the deaf victims spend years trying to hold Murphy to account, imagine the vicious irony of the idea that when they petition the church for redress, the church moves its money into the cemetery account so it can continue to protect the grave of Father Murphy over and above the victims. There’s also remarkable home-video footage you use in which a group of the deaf men confront Murphy, and his caretaker, who knows sign language, is telling one of the men that he should drop this because he’s a Catholic above all. It’s Murphy’s helper. She had been a helper at the school and, yes, she’s signing furiously saying you are Catholic, you are Catholic. As if to say, you know, the church is more important. You can cut this guy some slack because we don’t want the enemies of the church to have access to any of this information. Put your religion ahead of your petty grievances — the fact that you and so many other children have been abused. Petty. Right. There’s a technical aspect of the film that I wanted to ask you about: Your interviews with the deaf men, who are using sign language to communicate, have an almost 3D quality. Yeah, we did something. We used a variable shutter — it’s what Spielberg used in Saving Private Ryan — so that there’s a kind of flutter to the hands that makes them resonate more. It does. I really felt the emotion and the pain behind their gestures. We actually shot those interviews with three, sometimes four cameras because we wanted to have one camera that took a complete record of their signing, which included their facial gestures and their hands. We wanted another camera that was more impressionistic in terms of being able to move in from the face to the hands, and so forth. We wanted a side angle, of course, and sometimes we would use a fourth camera just to get more details because we really wanted to bring that world to life for the hearing audience. There’s something so rich about their language that it’s very powerful to capture, particularly because their deafness was so much at the heart of this story. They were the voices that could not be heard. Yet, they made themselves heard by dint of their determination. You also use recreations in Mea Maxima Culpa to depict aspects of the Father Murphy story. What led to your decision to take that route? Frankly I was a little nervous about it. We shot some pretty extensive recreations on this one. I hate that word — recreation — but it just seemed that there’s something so poignant about the way Murphy entered that dorm room. I wanted to capture that hallucinatory quality, because the aspect of the story that most people found so haunting is that these children couldn’t hear him coming. That’s how vulnerable they were. Like the fox in the henhouse, he had them available to him at any time. You quote a letter from one of Murphy’s victims in which he says that he used to lay in bed shaking at night. Yeah, because you never knew when he was going to come in and touch you or one of your friends. In the film, you indicate that while Pope John Paul II was on his deathbed, the future Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Ratzinger, who oversaw all of the sex abuse cases at the Vatican, sent his chief prosecutor to New York and Mexico City to gather evidence about alleged sexual abuses by Marcial Maciel Degollado , who ran the Legion of Christ and raised a lot of money for the Vatican. As John Paul is dying, Cardinal Ratzinger, who is the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which oversees all of the sexual abuse cases, sends his chief prosecutor to New York and Mexico City to take testimony so they can build a case against Maciel. Ratzinger was legitimately furious at Maciel, but Maciel had very powerful protectors, notably John Paul and Cardinal Angelo Sodano. Ratzinger becomes Pope but Maciel was never tried under canonical law. It shows that — Even the Pope is not all powerful. That was a revelation to me. That is in essence the banality of evil. Pope Benedict has to play these political games instead of assuming the mantle of God and rendering punishment to somebody. He doesn’t. We don’t know if some kind of deal was cut by Sodano, or if Benedict was simply doing an Obama-like thing and saying we’re going to go forward, not backwards.
Wait… what now? An Arizona judge has ruled that Tuscon schools must change the way they’ve been teaching Mexican-American history in the schools because the current curriculum is too inflammatory. An administrative law judge found the program’s curriculum was teaching Latino history and culture “in a biased, political, and emotionally charged manner,” and upheld state officials’ findings that it violated a state law passed in 2010. The Tucson Unified School District had appealed a decision by the law’s principal backer, then-state schools superintendent Tom Horne, to shut down the program. Horne left office at the end of 2010, but his successor, John Huppenthal, backed Horne’s ruling in June. Huppenthal said Tuesday’s ruling shows “that it was the right decision.” “In the end, I made a decision based on the totality of the information and facts gathered during my investigation — a decision that I felt was best for all students in the Tucson Unified School District,” he said in a written statement. Under the law, the state can withhold 10% of its funding for the school district — about $15 million a year — until the district changes the course. In a written statement, Tucson Superintendent John Pedicone said the school board’s lawyers are reviewing the ruling, and board members will discuss it at their January 3 meeting. During their appeal, district officials pointed out that an audit commissioned by Huppenthal praised the program and found “no observable evidence” that the classes violated state law. A witness for the school system argued that teaching students “historical facts of oppression and racism” was less likely to promote “racial resentment” — something specifically banned by the 2010 law — than ignoring that history. In Tuesday’s ruling, administrative law judge Lewis Kowal said the auditors observed only a limited number of classes. He added, “Teaching oppression objectively is quite different than actively presenting material in a biased, political, and emotionally charged manner.” “Teaching in such a manner promotes social or political activism against the white people, promotes racial resentment, and advocates ethnic solidarity, instead of treating pupils as individuals,” Kowal wrote. He cited a lesson that taught students that the historic treatment of Mexican-Americans was “marked by the use of force, fraud and exploitation,” and a parent’s complaint that one of her daughters, who was white, was shunned by Latino classmates after a government course was taught “in an extremely biased manner.” The 2010 law also bans courses that “promote the overthrow of the United States government,” are “designed for a specific ethnic group” or advocate “ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.” What’s the point of teaching kids history at all if we’re going to sugarcoat it? Are we going to stop teaching about slavery next? None of this even begins to sound like democracy… Source
‘Glee’ actor taking over for ‘Harry Potter’ star in ‘How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.’ By Kara Warner, with reporting by Josh Horowitz Daniel Radcliffe Photo: MTV News After a very successful and critically acclaimed run on the Great White Way, Daniel Radcliffe will very soon be ending his run in “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” and passing the torch to “Glee” star Darren Criss , who will take over on January 3. When MTV News caught up with Radcliffe — who we named as the actor we’re most thankful for in 2011 — we asked for his thoughts on his successor and whether he had any decision or veto power in Criss being added to the cast. “Oh God, no. I don’t have any power over those things at all, nor should I,” Radcliffe said. “I think it’s fantastic. I’m actually kind of thrilled. He went to the same high school as a couple of the guys in our show did. I think he’s really talented. I’ve not met him yet, but I’m sure he’s very nice. He’s a very, very talented guy, and I’m sure he’ll do a great job.” Radcliffe is bummed for Criss that he only gets to perform the “Succeed” role for three weeks, due to his busy “Glee” work schedule. “I feel slightly sorry for him in a way,” Radcliffe said. “I needed time with it to get it right, and you don’t have that, because obviously he has to go back to ‘Glee.’ I’m sure if it was up to him, he would have liked to do a longer run.” Although the two stars have yet to meet, they share a mutual admiration for each other. “I’ve seen a few episodes [of ‘Glee’],” Radcliffe admitted. “I haven’t seen [Criss] in it, but I’ve seen three or four episodes probably. I liked it. My girlfriend is really into it.” Related Videos Actors We’re Thankful For 2011
Miss Universe 2011, the 60th anniversary of the Miss Universe pageant, will be held at the Credicard Hall, in São Paulo, Brazil on September 12, 2011. Ximena Navarrete of Mexico will crown her successor. Contestants from 89 countries and territories are participating in this year´s pageant, surpassing the previous record of 86 contestants in 2006.
Nicolas Cage returns as Johnny Blaze in Columbia Pictures’ and Hyde Park Entertainment’s Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance. In the successor to the worldwide hit Ghost Rider, Johnny – still struggling with his curse as the devil’s bounty hunter – is hiding out in a remote part of Eastern Europe when he is recruited by Broadcasting platform : YouTube Source : [Geeks are Sexy] Discovery Date : 19/08/2011 18:46 Number of articles : 5
Takeshi Shudo was a very popular name among the people of all ages due to his contribution in the making for the “Pokemon” series and “Minky Momo” series. With interesting storylines and characterizations, Takeshi Shudo had entertained the audiences worldwide. Other than “Pokeman”, Takeshi Shudo was involved in “Idol Tenshi Youkoso Yoko”, “Martian Successor” and “Legend of the Galatic Heroes”. Recently, the talented writer Takeshi Shudo had also created two new characters namely Dogakobo and G
Passengers rest and sleep on the floor of Narita airport, near Tokyo Saturday, March 12, 2011. Passengers were stranded in the airport after public transport systems were shut down following a massive earthquake Friday. Narita Airport has been closed following an 8.9 magnitude earthquake in Japan, according to reports from the country. Japan#39;s Kyodo news agency says that Narita Airport, the main international gateway into Japan, has been closed to flights following Friday#39;s massive ear
