Where is Fan Bingbing?

by Nathaniel R

Fan Bingbing in May at Cannes with other female superstars, a month before she disappeared.

We've mentioned this frightening story twice before in news roundups but since it's making another round through more mainstream websites today -- it takes the big ones time with the foreign superstars --  we should update you. 

Chinese superstar Fan Bingbing (I Am Not Madame Bovary, X-Men Days of Future Past), who we always love covering in her Cannes appearances, is STILL missing. The media started suspecting that she'd vanished in July since she isn't exactly shy about public appearances, red carpets and the like...

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Doc Corner: 'Bad Reputation' and 'Matangi / Maya / M.I.A.'

By Glenn Dunks

Biographical documentaries about dead musicians often fall into two camps: the reverential and the tragic. Films that focus too much on the latter like Amy or Whitney  pale in comparison to something like Liz Garbus’ What Happened Miss Simone?, a film that knew that to understand your subject's tragedy you first have to understand the many facets of the artist in question.

This week, however, we get two biographical documentaries about important and influential musicians who are still (thankfully) very much with us, but which nonetheless tell their subjects’ stories in wildly different ways. Bad Reputation is clearly the more traditional of the pair, a fairly standard bio-doc that charts the life and career of Joan Jett, while Matangi / Maya / M.I.A. is more a work of artistic Jenga that roams and rummages through its subject’s life with the anarchistic spirit of her music.

What strikes me as interesting about both films is how Joan Jett and Mathangi [sic] “Maya” Arulpragasam (aka M.I.A.) directly instruct the narrative of ‘their’ films...

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Showbiz History: Audrey's Wedding, Will's Birthday, Denzel's Debut

5 random things that happened on this day, Sept 25th, in showbiz history

1954 Exactly six months to the day after winning Best Actress for Roman Holiday, Audrey Hepburn marries fellow actor Mel Ferrer in Switzerland. They would divorce the year after her final nomination for Best Actress in Wait Until Dark (1967), her hit film that he produced... 

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NYFF: Christophe Honoré's "Sorry Angel"

Jason Adams reporting on the New York Film Festival

The first time they meet, after eyeing each other across the seats of a cinema, puppy-eyed 22-year-old Arthur (Vincent Lacoste) describes himself as a "reader" to the somewhat older, wiser Jacques (Pierre Deladonchamps).  Jacques, a writer, is amused by this perfect puzzle snap of self-descriptions. If only timing was as much on their side, his tired but smirking eyes seem to say. They might have made a beautiful movie together. (And hey, turns out they did.)

Some time later Jacques explains that there are four types of gay men. As he goes on to list them Arthur on the other end of the telephone hilariously grabs a notebook and a pen. As Jacques rattles off all of the big names proving his thesis (Rimbaud, Auden, Whitman oh my) Arthur scribbles away, a sponge sucking up all the wisdom that Jacques has to offer...

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Funny Girl at 50

by Tim

This past week bore witness to one of the most very important anniversaries imaginable: Funny Girl turned fifty. And if you don't know what Funny Girl is and why it matters, I'm a little shocked you found this site, but I'm happy to explain that it's a Best Picture-nominated musical directed by Oscar favorite William Wyler, and the film debut of cabaret singer-turned-Broadway star-turned embodied deity Barbra Streisand. Who also got some Oscar love, winning Best Actress in a tie with Katharine Hepburn's turn in The Lion in Winter.

Not least among the achievements of Funny Girl is that, when thus compared head-to-head with one of the grandest dames of screen acting, Streisand looks like pretty worth recipient of that honor. Funny Girl, as scripted by Isobel Lennart (who also wrote the book for the 1963 stage version, also starring Streisand), is a gift to its lead, offering pretty much everything you could want to demand of a musical theater actor: broad comedy! tear-jerking heartbreak! steel-willed fortitude! songs where you have to be manic! songs where you have to be pensive!

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