02/11/2013 at 06:30 PM ET
Paul Drinkwater/NBC
Surprise: Actor John Cho is a dad again!
The Go On star and his wife welcomed a daughter recently, Cho’s rep confirms to PEOPLE exclusively.
Baby girl is the second child for the couple, who are also parents to a son. No further details are available.
Cho currently stars alongside Jason Bateman in Identity Thief and will reprise his role as Hikaru Sulu in Star Trek Into Darkness in May.
He is also well known for his roles in American Pie and the Harold and Kumar films.
– Anya Leon with reporting by Julie Jordan
The world seems surprised that an 85-year-old globe-trotting pope who just started tweeting wants to resign, but should it be? Maybe what should be surprising is that more leaders his age do not, considering the toll aging takes on bodies and minds amid a culture of constant communication and change.
There may be more behind the story of why Pope Benedict XVI decided to leave a job normally held for life. But the pontiff made it about age. He said the job called for "both strength of mind and body" and said his was deteriorating. He spoke of "today's world, subject to so many rapid changes," implying a difficulty keeping up despite his recent debut on Twitter.
"This seemed to me a very brave, courageous decision," especially because older people often don't recognize their own decline, said Dr. Seth Landefeld, an expert on aging and chairman of medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Age has driven many leaders from jobs that used to be for life — Supreme Court justices, monarchs and other heads of state. As lifetimes expand, the woes of old age are catching up with more in seats of power. Some are choosing to step down rather than suffer long declines and disabilities as the pope's last predecessor did.
Since 1955, only one U.S. Supreme Court justice — Chief Justice William Rehnquist — has died in office. Twenty-one others chose to retire, the most recent being John Paul Stevens, who stepped down in 2010 at age 90.
When Thurgood Marshall stepped down in 1991 at the age of 82, citing health reasons, the Supreme Court justice's answer was blunt: "What's wrong with me? I'm old. I'm getting old and falling apart."
One in 5 U.S. senators is 70 or older, and some have retired rather than seek new terms, such as Hawaii's Daniel Akaka, who left office in January at age 88.
The Netherlands' Queen Beatrix, who just turned 75, recently said she will pass the crown to a son and put the country "in the hands of a new generation."
In Germany, where the pope was born, Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is 58, said the pope's decision that he was no longer fit for the job "earns my very highest respect."
"In our time of ever-lengthening life, many people will be able to understand how the pope as well has to deal with the burdens of aging," she told reporters in Berlin.
Experts on aging agreed.
"People's mental capacities in their 80s and 90s aren't what they were in their 40s and 50s. Their short-term memory is often not as good, their ability to think quickly on their feet, to execute decisions is often not as good," Landefeld said. Change is tougher to handle with age, and leaders like popes and presidents face "extraordinary demands that would tax anybody's physical and mental stamina."
Dr. Barbara Messinger-Rapport, geriatrics chief at the Cleveland Clinic, noted that half of people 85 and older in developed countries have some dementia, usually Alzheimer's. Even without such a disease, "it takes longer to make decisions, it takes longer to learn new things," she said.
But that's far from universal, said Dr. Thomas Perls, an expert on aging at Boston University and director of the New England Centenarians Study.
"Usually a man who is entirely healthy in his early 80s has demonstrated his survival prowess" and can live much longer, he said. People of privilege have better odds because they have access to good food and health care, and tend to lead clean lives.
"Even in the 1500s and 1600s there were popes in their 80s. It's remarkable. That would be today's centenarians," Perls said.
Arizona Sen. John McCain turned 71 while running for president in 2007. Had he won, he would have been the oldest person elected to a first term as president. Ronald Reagan was days away from turning 70 when he started his first term as president in 1981; he won re-election in 1984. Vice President Joe Biden just turned 70.
In the U.S. Senate, where seniority is rewarded and revered, South Carolina's Strom Thurmond didn't retire until age 100 in 2002. Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia was the longest-serving senator when he died in office at 92 in 2010.
Now the oldest U.S. senator is 89-year-old Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey. The oldest congressman is Ralph Hall of Texas who turns 90 in May.
The legendary Alan Greenspan was about to turn 80 when he retired as chairman of the Federal Reserve in 2006; he still works as a consultant.
Elsewhere around the world, Cuba's Fidel Castro — one of the world's longest serving heads of state — stepped down in 2006 at age 79 due to an intestinal illness that nearly killed him, handing power to his younger brother Raul. But the island is an example of aged leaders pushing on well into their dotage. Raul Castro now is 81 and his two top lieutenants are also octogenarians. Later this month, he is expected to be named to a new, five-year term as president.
Other leaders who are still working:
—England's Queen Elizabeth, 86.
—Abdullah bin Abd al-Aziz al-Saud, king of Saudi Arabia, 88.
—Sabah al-Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sabah, emir of Kuwait, 83.
—Ruth Bader Ginsburg, U.S. Supreme Court associate justice, 79.
__
Associated Press writers Paul Haven in Havana, Cuba; David Rising in Berlin; Seth Borenstein, Mark Sherman and Matt Yancey in Washington, and researcher Judy Ausuebel in New York contributed to this report.
___
Marilynn Marchione can be followed at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks ended a quiet session with slight moves on Monday as investors found few reasons to keep pushing shares higher following a six-week advance, though the longer-term trend was still viewed as positive.
The benchmark index is up more 6.4 percent in 2013, putting both the S&P 500 and Dow industrials near multi-year highs. The S&P is less than 4 percent from its all-time intraday high of 1,576.09, hit in October 2007.
"This is still a market that looks terrific, but when you're up for six weeks in a row, everyone is going to want to take a pause going into the seventh week even if there is no bad news out there," said Eric Kuby, chief investment officer at North Star Investment Management in Chicago.
Volume was light, with about 4.812 billion shares changing hands on the New York Stock Exchange, the Nasdaq and NYSE MKT, well below the daily average so far this year of about 6.48 billion shares.
Wall Street was modestly lower throughout the session but regained some ground in the final hour of trading as Google Inc
Also in the tech space, Apple Inc rose up 1 percent to $479.93 after the New York Times reported the iPhone maker was experimenting with the design of a device similar to a wristwatch.
The Federal Reserve's Vice Chair Janet Yellen, seen as a potential successor to Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke next year, said the Fed is still aggressively stimulating an anemic U.S. economic recovery that has failed to bring rapid progress on employment.
The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> was down 21.81 points, or 0.16 percent, at 13,971.16. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> was down 0.92 points, or 0.06 percent, at 1,517.01. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> was down 1.87 points, or 0.06 percent, at 3,192.00.
Upbeat U.S. and Chinese data last week helped the S&P 500 extend its weekly winning streak to six. The index gained about 8 percent over that period.
Equities have been strong performers lately and many investors have used any declines in the market as opportunities to buy.
"Everyone wants to buy on a dip in this market, but if you're on the sidelines right now, the decline we're seeing today just isn't the kind you would jump in on," Kuby said.
President Barack Obama will describe his plan for spurring the economy in his State of the Union address on Tuesday. He is expected to offer proposals for investment in infrastructure, manufacturing, clean energy and education.
Opposition has grown to the $24.4 billion buyout of Dell Inc
Dell shares hovered near $13.65, the buyout offer price.
Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc
Moody's Corp
About 53 percent of stocks traded on the New York Stock Exchange closed lower while slightly more Nasdaq-listed stocks closed in negative territory.
(Editing by Nick Zieminski)
JERUSALEM — Rabbi David Hartman, an American-born Jewish philosopher who promoted a liberal brand of Orthodoxy and created a study center that expressed his commitment to pluralism by bringing together leaders from all strains of Judaism, died on Sunday at his home here. He was 81.
His son Donniel said the death came after a long illness.
Rabbi Hartman, who was a professor at Hebrew University for more than 20 years, was a leading advocate of the idea that Jews are partners with God in a covenant, and that they should therefore adapt religious observance to modern values in a multicultural world.
A charismatic teacher and prolific author, he encouraged students to question tradition and urged people of different backgrounds and ideologies to pore over Jewish texts together, a practice more common in his native United States than his adopted country.
“At the center of his thinking was a kind of counter-religious idea, where religious life is a life of affirmation, not a life of denial,” said Moshe Halbertal, a professor of philosophy at Hebrew University and Rabbi Hartman’s former son-in-law. “If human life is not denied by the force of revelation, but it’s actually a participant in revelation, then human life has to come to its full fledge, with its moral convictions, with its encounter with the world.”
The Shalom Hartman Institute, which Rabbi Hartman founded in his father’s name in 1976, has become a theological and cultural landmark, particularly for the thousands of Diaspora Jews who attend conferences or spend summers studying there. With an annual budget of $18 million and a staff of 125, the institute has sponsored two Jerusalem high schools, runs a research center, opened a branch in Manhattan and trained more than 1,000 Israeli military officers. In the last year, according to the institute, more than 5,000 people across North America participated in a Hartman learning series called iEngage.
But Rabbi Hartman’s progressive, universalistic approach was embraced more in the United States than in Israel, where some challenged his status as Orthodox and shunned his open-mindedness as heresy. He received honorary doctorates in the United States but — to his painful regret, people close to him said — not the coveted Israel Prize.
In recent years he had been critical of the growing influence of the ultra-Orthodox on public life. He described as “insane” an ultra-Orthodox boycott of a military ceremony in which women sang.
“What is happening today with religion is more dangerous than what’s happening with the Arabs — the Arabs want to kill my body, the Jews are killing my soul,” Rabbi Hartman said in a 2011 interview with the Israeli daily Yediot Aharanot. “I want to return the Torah to the Labor Party, to the entire people of Israel. I don’t want religion to be the private property of certain people. I don’t want the length of the sidelocks to be the determining factor.”
David Hartman was born on Sept. 11, 1931, in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, one of six children of Shalom and Batya Hartman, Hasidim who had moved to New York from Israel. Donniel Hartman said that the family was poor — Shalom peddled sheets and pillowcases door to door — but that the four boys became rabbis and the two girls married rabbis.
Rabbi Hartman was ordained by Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, perhaps the most important Orthodox thinker of the 20th century, and received a doctorate of philosophy from McGill University in Montreal. He was a pulpit rabbi in the Bronx and Montreal before moving to Israel in 1971 as part of a generation of Zionists inspired by the Israeli victory in the Arab-Israeli war of 1967.
Rabbi Hartman published several books in English and Hebrew, including two about his own spiritual evolution. He was an adviser to Ehud Olmert, the former prime minister; Teddy Kollek, the longtime mayor of Jerusalem; and Zevulun Hammer, Israel’s education minister from 1977 to 1984.
“He was a public philosopher for the Jewish people,” said Michael J. Sandel, a professor of political philosophy at Harvard who has written about Rabbi Hartman’s work. “As Maimonides drew Aristotle into conversation with Moses and Rabbi Akiva, so Hartman renovated Jewish thought by bringing the liberal sensibilities to bear on Talmudic argument.”
Besides his son Donniel, who replaced him as president of the Hartman Institute, Rabbi Hartman is survived by four other children, including a daughter, Tova, who helped found Shira Hadasha, a feminist Orthodox congregation in Jerusalem; 16 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. He is also survived by his former wife, Barbara; the couple had married twice and were divorced twice.
Yedidia Z. Stern, a law professor and vice president of the Israel Democracy Institute, said Rabbi Hartman’s charisma and curiosity were apparent even a few weeks before his death, during a Sabbath meal at Donniel Hartman’s home.
“He was ignoring the adults at the table; he was talking to my kids,” Professor Stern said. “He was asking them about school: Do they like the curriculum, what do they think should be different? Even when he was very sick, you can see the life coming out.”
LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – From killing off film prints to designing fantastical CGI worlds, movies are going digital in every way except one – storytelling.
Unlike the eras when the advent of photography inspired the fine arts to embrace abstraction, or when the rise of mass-media pushed writers into modernist and eventually post-modern terrain, movies remain largely impervious to the narrative techniques employed across the internet.
Hollywood views videogames and the web as an existential threat, but instead of radically altering its approach, most movies unfold over the course of two hours in a linear fashion, just as they have done for a century. Over the course of its history the medium has had no problem embracing change in film as long as its technologically driven, hence the shift from silent movies to talkies, or black and white to color. It has remained more precious, however, about how it spins its celluloid fantasies.
Today’s top directors are more interested in aping classical cinema than forging a new filmmaking vernacular. That’s in contrast to 10 years ago when movies like “The Matrix,” “Memento,” or “Being John Malkovich” turned cinematic storytelling on its head, gleefully experimenting with an inter-textuality that mirrored our hyperlinked world.
With a few exceptions like Joe Wright’s “Anna Karenina,” which re-imagined Leo Tolstoy’s tragedy as a series of intersecting operas, or Martin McDonagh’s “Seven Psychopaths,” a bloody crime movie that is also a comment on the art of screenwriting, that flowering of experimentation is over.
“The films of early aughts engaged with virtuality in a way they don’t today,” Alissa Quart, a cultural critic and the author of the forthcoming “Republic of Outsiders,” told TheWrap. “You had people like Steven Spielberg working on ‘Minority Report,’ now you have ‘Lincoln.’ Or Paul Thomas Anderson going from ‘Magnolia’ to ‘The Master.’
“Those movies engaged with multiplicity and technology and surveillance, and now those same filmmakers are looking at these huge commanding triumphal figures in stories set in the past that look antique.”
Films like “The Master” or “Zero Dark Thirty” or “Django Unchained” are referential, but their influences lie in film’s history, mimicking the wide vistas favored by John Ford or the atmosphere of exquisite paranoia in 1970s thrillers like “All the President’s Men.” The directors gaze lingers in the past and rarely looks toward the future.
“A way to get serious as a filmmaker is to be very clearly dealing with your influences,” Kurt Anderson, host of the arts and culture program “Studio 360,” told TheWrap. “Now, I have no doubt that ‘Pulp Fiction’ was full of Quentin Tarantino’s influences, but at the time it seemed like a new way of telling stories. When you get to ‘Django,’ it becomes all about his cinematic influences.”
Even the methods that Hollywood has kicked up to convince teenagers to give up their game consoles and hit the multiplex are bizarrely retro.
Souped-up theatrical exhibition offerings like 3D are a throwback to the 1950s, when Hollywood was facing a different, though no less grave incursion from television. Likewise, what is IMAX and its mammoth projections but a reincarnation of Cinerama, the colossal wide-screen format the flourished in the Eisenhower era?
In contrast, television shows like “Lost” or “Once Upon a Time,” which are set in fantasy worlds and tease out mysteries in episodic fashion, are more akin to what players expect from videogames.
That’s not to say there isn’t some cross-pollination. Flint Dille is a game designer on the likes of “Dead to Rights” and the screenwriter of movies like “An American Tail: Fievel Goes West.” He says that both mediums steal from one another, claiming that the plot of 99 percent of videogames is derived from ‘80s action movies starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.
In turn, today’s action movies design their set pieces to appeal to audiences who grew up with “Mass Effect” and “World of Warcraft.”
“When you look at ‘The Hobbit’ – that escape from the goblins’ lair is a Nintendo game,” Dille said. “It’s like a videogame in its velocity. Or a movie like ‘Jack Reacher’ is like a game in that the main character arrives with no back story, and that’s something we’ve been conditioned to accept from playing games where the protagonist is a cipher.”
To be sure, studios have shown an appetite for persistent experimentation when it comes to using apps and viral marketing to generate excitement for tent pole films like “The Dark Knight” or “Star Trek Into Darkness.” Yet the emphasis is on promotion, not narrative.
So why is it that, while computer technology has opened up brave new worlds in terms of special effects and advertising, it has not altered storytelling?
The culprit is a hodgepodge of commercial realities and artistic preferences.
“I’ve been spending a lot of time pondering the question what is a modern film?” Howard Suber, professor of film history at UCLA, told TheWrap. “I’ve come to the conclusion that it is basically everything that was made after the 1960s — but that’s 50 years. The reason why that’s still modern is that not a hell of a lot has changed.”
Suber said that when he shows a movie in his class from earlier eras, his students are unable to deal with the slower pacing and editing, but they have a less difficult time adjusting to anything made after that date.
“The entire field of modern film is 50 years long, which is staggering when you compare it to any earlier age films,” he said. “The films of the ‘20s looked antique to audiences in the ‘30s, and the same was true with the way audiences in the ‘50s viewed films from 10 years earlier.”
Quart thinks that the kind of cultural permanence that Suber describes may be a conscious choice by artists who are looking to create spaces that are distinct from the fragmented world wrought by social media.
In a recent piece in the New York Times, Quart argued that “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad” are popular in part because they allow viewers to take a break from Twitter, texts and other technologically enabled forms of multi-tasking.
She argues the same appeal underlies movies.
“My gut tells me that filmmakers are trying to give viewers respite from what the virtual world is offering,” Quart said. “It’s motivated by an esthetic defensiveness because we are inundated with all these modes of communication.”
It hasn’t helped that films that have exploded conventional approaches to storytelling sunk at the box office.
Sure, “The Matrix” was a worldwide blockbuster, grossing $ 463 million and spawning two sequels, but “Magnolia” ($ 48.4 million) and “Adaptation” ($ 32.8 million) were lucky to break even. More recent mind-bending films like “Anna Karenina” ($ 49 million globally), and “Synecdoche, New York” ($ 4.3 million globally) continued the trend of hardly making a ripple at ticket counters. Studios’ obsession with tentpole films that can cross language and cultural barriers to appeal to global audiences have likely made them less receptive to films that revel in narrative complexity.
That could change. If filmmakers like J.J. Abrams get their way, blockbuster films will seep off the screen and into other platforms, rivaling the sprawling nature of the web.
The big shake up could come with Transmedia – the notion that stories should be told over various mediums ranging from comic books to videogames. This approach to popular culture has been a buzz word for over a decade, but its adherents believe the film industry is poised to take a dramatic leap forward.
“They’re are a lot of film purists who believe their job is to get the script shot and make it beautiful,” Jeff Gomez, president of Starlight Runner Entertainment and a trans media consultant on films like “Avatar,” said. “But there’s also a growing number of young people, who were weaned on videogames and immersed in multiple media platforms, for whom these new kinds of storytelling are intuitive.”
Gomez notes that Joss Whedon’s decision to set his upcoming ABC show “S.H.I.E.L.D.” in the world of “The Avengers” films is a perfect example of a platform-agnostic approach.
It’s a boundary that could keep eroding when Abrams gets hold of the “Star Wars” franchise. The director already has experimented with transmedia in television shows like “Lost,” but the saga of the Skywalkers and new owner Disney’s consumer products heft could open up whole new galaxies in terms of storytelling – ones that jet from games to toys to movies, creating a vast universe of narrative possibilities.
In 1977, “Star Wars” gave birth to the modern blockbuster. Nearly 40 years later when “Star Wars Episode 7″ is scheduled to hit theaters, will it change the face of film again?From killing off film prints to designing fantastical CGI worlds, movies are going digital in every way except one – storytelling.
Unlike the eras when the advent of photography inspired the fine arts to embrace abstraction, or when the rise of mass-media pushed writers into modernist and eventually post-modern terrain, movies remain largely impervious to the narrative techniques employed across the internet.
Hollywood views videogames and the web as an existential threat, but instead of radically altering its approach, most movies unfold over the course of two hours in a linear fashion, just as they have done for a century. Over the course of its history the medium has had no problem embracing change in film as long as its technologically driven, hence the shift from silent movies to talkies, or black and white to color. It has remained more precious, however, about how it spins its celluloid fantasies.
Today’s top directors are more interested in aping classical cinema than forging a new filmmaking vernacular. That’s in contrast to 10 years ago when movies like “The Matrix,” “Memento,” or “Being John Malkovich” turned cinematic storytelling on its head, gleefully experimenting with an inter-textuality that mirrored our hyperlinked world.
With a few exceptions like Joe Wright’s “Anna Karenina,” which re-imagined Leo Tolstoy’s tragedy as a series of intersecting operas, or Martin McDonagh’s “Seven Psychopaths,” a bloody crime movie that is also a comment on the art of screenwriting, that flowering of experimentation is over.
“The films of early aughts engaged with virtuality in a way they don’t today,” Alissa Quart, a cultural critic and the author of the forthcoming “Republic of Outsiders,” told TheWrap. “You had people like Steven Spielberg working on ‘Minority Report,’ now you have ‘Lincoln.’ Or Paul Thomas Anderson going from ‘Magnolia’ to ‘The Master.’
“Those movies engaged with multiplicity and technology and surveillance, and now those same filmmakers are looking at these huge commanding triumphal figures in stories set in the past that look antique.”
Films like “The Master” or “Zero Dark Thirty” or “Django Unchained” are referential, but their influences lie in film’s history, mimicking the wide vistas favored by John Ford or the atmosphere of exquisite paranoia in 1970s thrillers like “All the President’s Men.” The directors gaze lingers in the past and rarely looks toward the future.
“A way to get serious as a filmmaker is to be very clearly dealing with your influences,” Kurt Anderson, host of the arts and culture program “Studio 360,” told TheWrap. “Now, I have no doubt that ‘Pulp Fiction’ was full of Quentin Tarantino’s influences, but at the time it seemed like a new way of telling stories. When you get to ‘Django,’ it becomes all about his cinematic influences.”
Even the methods that Hollywood has kicked up to convince teenagers to give up their game consoles and hit the multiplex are bizarrely retro.
Souped-up theatrical exhibition offerings like 3D are a throwback to the 1950s, when Hollywood was facing a different, though no less grave incursion from television. Likewise, what is IMAX and its mammoth projections but a reincarnation of Cinerama, the colossal wide-screen format the flourished in the Eisenhower era?
In contrast, television shows like “Lost” or “Once Upon a Time,” which are set in fantasy worlds and tease out mysteries in episodic fashion, are more akin to what players expect from videogames.
That’s not to say there isn’t some cross-pollination. Flint Dille is a game designer on the likes of “Dead to Rights” and the screenwriter of movies like “An American Tail: Fievel Goes West.” He says that both mediums steal from one another, claiming that the plot of 99 percent of videogames is derived from ‘80s action movies starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.
In turn, today’s action movies design their set pieces to appeal to audiences who grew up with “Mass Effect” and “World of Warcraft.”
“When you look at ‘The Hobbit’ – that escape from the goblins’ lair is a Nintendo game,” Dille said. “It’s like a videogame in its velocity. Or a movie like ‘Jack Reacher’ is like a game in that the main character arrives with no back story, and that’s something we’ve been conditioned to accept from playing games where the protagonist is a cipher.”
To be sure, studios have shown an appetite for persistent experimentation when it comes to using apps and viral marketing to generate excitement for tent pole films like “The Dark Knight” or “Star Trek Into Darkness.” Yet the emphasis is on promotion, not narrative.
So why is it that, while computer technology has opened up brave new worlds in terms of special effects and advertising, it has not altered storytelling?
The culprit is a hodgepodge of commercial realities and artistic preferences.
“I’ve been spending a lot of time pondering the question what is a modern film?” Howard Suber, professor of film history at UCLA, told TheWrap. “I’ve come to the conclusion that it is basically everything that was made after the 1960s — but that’s 50 years. The reason why that’s still modern is that not a hell of a lot has changed.”
Suber said that when he shows a movie in his class from earlier eras, his students are unable to deal with the slower pacing and editing, but they have a less difficult time adjusting to anything made after that date.
“The entire field of modern film is 50 years long, which is staggering when you compare it to any earlier age films,” he said. “The films of the ‘20s looked antique to audiences in the ‘30s, and the same was true with the way audiences in the ‘50s viewed films from 10 years earlier.”
Quart thinks that the kind of cultural permanence that Suber describes may be a conscious choice by artists who are looking to create spaces that are distinct from the fragmented world wrought by social media.
In a recent piece in the New York Times, Quart argued that “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad” are popular in part because they allow viewers to take a break from Twitter, texts and other technologically enabled forms of multi-tasking.
She argues the same appeal underlies movies.
“My gut tells me that filmmakers are trying to give viewers respite from what the virtual world is offering,” Quart said. “It’s motivated by an esthetic defensiveness because we are inundated with all these modes of communication.”
It hasn’t helped that films that have exploded conventional approaches to storytelling sunk at the box office.
Sure, “The Matrix” was a worldwide blockbuster, grossing $ 463 million and spawning two sequels, but “Magnolia” ($ 48.4 million) and “Adaptation” ($ 32.8 million) were lucky to break even. More recent mind-bending films like “Anna Karenina” ($ 49 million globally), and “Synecdoche, New York” ($ 4.3 million globally) continued the trend of hardly making a ripple at ticket counters. Studios’ obsession with tentpole films that can cross language and cultural barriers to appeal to global audiences have likely made them less receptive to films that revel in narrative complexity.
That could change. If filmmakers like J.J. Abrams get their way, blockbuster films will seep off the screen and into other platforms, rivaling the sprawling nature of the web.
The big shake up could come with Transmedia – the notion that stories should be told over various mediums ranging from comic books to videogames. This approach to popular culture has been a buzz word for over a decade, but its adherents believe the film industry is poised to take a dramatic leap forward.
“They’re are a lot of film purists who believe their job is to get the script shot and make it beautiful,” Jeff Gomez, president of Starlight Runner Entertainment and a trans media consultant on films like “Avatar,” said. “But there’s also a growing number of young people, who were weaned on videogames and immersed in multiple media platforms, for whom these new kinds of storytelling are intuitive.”
Gomez notes that Joss Whedon’s decision to set his upcoming ABC show “S.H.I.E.L.D.” in the world of “The Avengers” films is a perfect example of a platform-agnostic approach.
It’s a boundary that could keep eroding when Abrams gets hold of the “Star Wars” franchise. The director already has experimented with transmedia in television shows like “Lost,” but the saga of the Skywalkers and new owner Disney’s consumer products heft could open up whole new galaxies in terms of storytelling – ones that jet from games to toys to movies, creating a vast universe of narrative possibilities.
In 1977, “Star Wars” gave birth to the modern blockbuster. Nearly 40 years later when “Star Wars Episode 7″ is scheduled to hit theaters, will it change the face of film again?
Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News
02/10/2013 at 08:00 PM ET
Lester Cohen/WireImage
Bump, there it is!
With only three weeks left until baby boy’s big arrival, Amber Rose and her fiancé Wiz Khalifa graced the red carpet in coordinated black and white ensembles during Sunday’s Grammy Awards at the Staples Center in Los Angeles.
“[I'm feeling] good. It’s different, it’s weird,” Rose, 29, whose budding belly was front and center in her black floor-length Donna Karan gown, told E! News.
“I want her to stay pregnant forever,” quipped Khalifa, 25.
And while the couple are staying mum on their son’s name — “We haven’t told anybody,” says the dad-to-be — they’re not shy about sharing their birth plan.
“We watched The Business of Being Born with Ricki Lake and we just got inspired. We’ve got a pool, everything,” explains Rose.
“We’ve been taking classes, we got a doula, midwife — we’re going the whole thing,” says Khalifa, who adds he’s looking forward to taking part in the delivery process.
“I want to have a role in it, too. I wanted to get taken on a ride,” he admits.
– Anya Leon
NEW YORK (AP) — The worst of the flu season appears to be over.
The number of states reporting intense or widespread illnesses dropped again last week, and in a few states there was very little flu going around, U.S. health officials said Friday.
The season started earlier than normal, first in the Southeast and then spreading. But now, by some measures, flu activity has been ebbing for at least four weeks in much of the country. Flu and pneumonia deaths also dropped the last two weeks, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.
"It's likely that the worst of the current flu season is over," CDC spokesman Tom Skinner said.
But flu is hard to predict, he and others stressed, and there have been spikes late in the season in the past.
For now, states like Georgia and New York — where doctor's offices were jammed a few weeks ago — are reporting low flu activity. The hot spots are now the West Coast and the Southwest.
Among the places that have seen a drop: Lehigh Valley Hospital-Cedar Crest in Allentown, Pa., which put up a tent outside its emergency room last month to help deal with the steady stream of patients. There were about 100 patients each day back then. Now it's down to 25 and the hospital may pack up its tent next week, said Terry Burger, director of infection control and prevention for the hospital.
"There's no question that we're seeing a decline," she said.
In early December, CDC officials announced flu season had arrived, a month earlier than usual. They were worried, saying it had been nine years since a winter flu season started like this one. That was 2003-04 — one of the deadliest seasons in the past 35 years, with more than 48,000 deaths.
Like this year, the major flu strain was one that tends to make people sicker, especially the elderly, who are most vulnerable to flu and its complications
But back then, that year's flu vaccine wasn't made to protect against that bug, and fewer people got flu shots. The vaccine is reformulated almost every year, and the CDC has said this year's vaccine is a good match to the types that are circulating. A preliminary CDC study showed it is about 60 percent effective, which is close to the average.
So far, the season has been labeled moderately severe.
Like others, Lehigh Valley's Burger was cautious about making predictions. "I'm not certain we're completely out of the woods," with more wintry weather ahead and people likely to be packed indoors where flu can spread around, she said.
The government does not keep a running tally of flu-related deaths in adults, but has received reports of 59 deaths in children. The most — nine — were in Texas, where flu activity was still high last week. Roughly 100 children die in an average flu season, the CDC says
On average, about 24,000 Americans die each flu season, according to the CDC.
According to the CDC report, the number of states with intense activity is down to 19, from 24 the previous week, and flu is widespread in 38 states, down from 42.
Flu is now minimal in Florida, Kentucky, Maine, Montana, New Hampshire and South Carolina.
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Online:
CDC: http://www.cdc.gov/flu/
NEW YORK (Reuters) - US Airways Group Inc
Under terms of a deal that are still being finalized, US Airways Chief Executive Doug Parker would become CEO, while AMR's Tom Horton would serve as non-executive chairman of the board until spring of 2014, when the combined company holds its first annual meeting, the sources said.
The deal would come more than 14 months after the parent of American Airlines filed for bankruptcy in November 2011, and would mark the last combination of legacy U.S. carriers, following the Delta-Northwest and United-Continental mergers.
The all-stock merger is expected to value the combined carrier at between $10.5 billion and $11 billion, and would give AMR creditors 72 percent of the ownership in the new company and US Airways shareholders the rest, they said.
The board of each airline is expected to meet in the middle of the coming week to vote on the proposed deal, and an announcement would likely come in the latter part of the week, the sources said, asking not to be named because the matter is not public.
Negotiations are continuing and could still be delayed or fall apart, they cautioned.
The companies had initially tried to schedule board meetings for Monday, the day that AMR's creditors committee planned to convene, and had aimed to announce a deal as soon as Tuesday, sources told Reuters previously.
But AMR needed more time to finalize details and the boards of the two airlines are now not expected to gather until around Wednesday, the sources said.
The AMR creditors committee is still meeting on Monday in New York, as initially scheduled, and will continue discussions as the airlines finalize negotiations, they added.
A lawyer for the creditors committee declined to comment. Representatives for AMR and US Airways declined to comment.
A combination with US Airways would create the world's top airline by passenger traffic and help the two carriers better compete with rivals United Continental Holdings
A near-$11 billion valuation of the combined American-US Airways compares to some $12.4 billion market capitalization for Delta, and $8.7 billion for United Continental.
The currently planned equity split ratio between AMR creditors and US Airways shareholders implies a roughly $3 billion valuation for US Airways and some $7.5 billion to $8 billion valuation for AMR.
NEW AMERICAN AIRLINES
US Airways will follow through on its agreement with AMR labor unions last year that the combined carrier would be branded American Airlines and be based in Fort Worth, Texas, where AMR is currently based, sources said. US Airways has its headquarters in Tempe, Arizona.
As part of the merger, US Airways will also leave the Star Alliance to join the oneworld global airline alliance, of which American Airlines is an anchor member along with British Airways, the people familiar with the matter said.
The airlines are estimating that a merger will bring about $1 billion in revenue and cost benefits, they said.
Horton rebuffed an aggressive takeover push from US Airways early in the bankruptcy process, saying the airline preferred to exit court protection on its own and consider a deal later. But after several months of talks with its own creditors as well as with US Airways, Horton has softened his approach and agreed to consider all options.
A combined American-US Airways would provide the scale to match bigger rivals that are upgrading service and expanding international routes. The merged company would have revenue of $38.69 billion based on 2012 figures, ahead of United Continental which had revenue of $37.15 billion last year.
The new American would have a solid presence on the important U.S. East and West coasts and on North Atlantic routes, given American's revenue-sharing joint venture with British Airways
(Reporting by Soyoung Kim in New York, additional reporting by Nick Brown and Karen Jacobs; Editing by Sandra Maler)
Goran Tomasevic/Reuters
Fighters from the Free Syrian Army's Tahrir al Sham brigade look at a Syrian Army base in the Arabeen neighborhood of Damascus.
DAMASCUS, Syria — Unkempt government soldiers, some appearing drunk, have been deployed near a rebel-held railway station in the southern reaches of this tense capital. Office workers on 29th of May Street, in the heart of the city, tell of huddling at their desks, trapped inside for hours by gun battles that sound alarmingly close.
Soldiers have swept through city neighborhoods, making arrests ahead of a threatened rebel advance downtown, even as opposition fighters edge past the city limits, carrying mortars and shelling security buildings. Fighter jets that pounded the suburbs for months have begun to strike Jobar, an outlying neighborhood of Damascus proper, creating the disturbing spectacle of a government’s bombing its own capital.
On Sunday, the government sent tanks there to battle rebels for control of a key ring road.
In this war of murky battlefield reports, it is hard to know whether the rebels’ recent forays past some of the capital’s circle of defenses — in an operation that they have, perhaps immodestly, named the “Battle of Armageddon” — will lead to more lasting gains than earlier offensives did. But travels along the city’s battlefronts in recent days made clear that new lines, psychological as much as geographical, had been crossed.
“I didn’t see my family for more than a year,” a government soldier from a distant province said in a rare outpouring of candor. He was checking drivers’ identifications near the railway station at a checkpoint where hundreds of soldiers arrived last week with tanks and other armored vehicles.
“I am tired and haven’t slept well for a week,” he said, confiding in a traveler who happened to be from his hometown. “I have one wish — to see my family and have a long, long sleep. Then I don’t care if I die.”
For months, this ancient city has been hunched in a defensive crouch as fighting raged in suburbs that curve around the city’s south and east. On the western edge of the city, the palace of the embattled president, Bashar al-Assad, sits on a steep, well-defended ridge.
In between, Damascus, with its walled Old City, grand diagonal avenues and crowded working-class districts, has remained the eye of the storm. People keep going to work, even as electric service grows sporadic and groceries dwindle, even as the road to the airport is often cut off by fighting outside the city, and even as smoke from artillery and airstrikes in suburbs becomes a regular feature on the horizon.
But after rebels took the railway station 10 days ago in a city district called Qadam and attacked Abassiyeen Square on an approach to the city center on Wednesday, a new level of alarm and disorder has suffused the city. Rebels have pushed farther into the capital than at any point since July, when they briefly held part of a southern neighborhood.
Near the Qadam railway station last week, many of the government soldiers, their hair and beards untrimmed, wore disheveled or dirty uniforms and smelled as if they had not had showers in a long time. Some soldiers and security officers even appeared drunk, walking unsteadily with their weapons askew — a shocking sight in Syria, where regimented security forces and smartly uniformed officers have long been presented as a symbol of national pride.
The deployment appeared aimed at stopping the rebels from advancing past Qadam, either across the city’s ring road and toward the downtown or to suburbs to the east to close a gap in the opposition’s front line.
But even stationed here in Damascus, the heart of the government’s power, the soldier at the checkpoint — who was steady on his feet — said he felt vulnerable.
“It is very scary to spend a night and you expect to be shot or slaughtered at any moment,” he said. “We spend our nights counting the minutes until daytime.”
The government has hit back hard, striking Qadam with artillery and airstrikes. It has also made pre-emptive arrests in Midan, the neighboring district, closer to downtown, where rebels gained a temporary foothold in July and which they said was their next target.
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