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‘The Simpsons’ all-star lineup next season

admin — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 20:02:21 +0000

This fall, the 22nd season of The Simpsons, the longest-running television comedy in the US, Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie will feature stars of film and television on the award-winning cartoon show. Performers from the musical hit Glee – Lea Michele, Cory Monteith and Amber Riley – will make vocal appearances on the premiere, September 26. Also scheduled for the new season’s first episode is Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie, the stars of HBO’s cancelled cult show, Flight of the Conchords. Actors Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter) and Hugh Laurie (House) will make cameos for the 21st annual Treehouse of Horror Halloween special. Other guest stars this coming season include: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Jon Hamm (Mad Men), Oscar-winning actress Halle Berry, Paul Rudd (I Love You Man), Ricky Gervais, and Rachel Weisz, and comedienne Kristen Wiig (How to Train Your Dragon). The comedy duo of Cheech and Chong will show up and from the sports world, legendary basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and racecar driver Danica Patrick. Media mogul Martha Stewart will lend her voice in The Simpsons Christmas episode which will also include live-action puppets for the first time.

Source: Independent.co.uk

British Airways fights back with new bed arrangement

admin — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 18:33:57 +0000

In a bid to attract high-end customers to its flight service, British Airways (BA) has put together a brand new offering for travellers, making key improvements to beds, mattresses and their surroundings. BA revealed its contemporary improvements at the same time as a number of other competitors announced their decision to instead focus on economy travel in a bid to attract more individuals while also keeping their heads above water during the downturn. None other than Rachel Weisz, the blockbuster actress, was brought in to promote the launch of the design, which is supposedly inspired by classic British luxury car brands including Jaguar and Aston Martin. BA explained that the first-class seats fold into a flat bed, providing 60 per cent more shoulder room and a leather-bound writing desk/dining table conversion, a USB port for personal electronics and even a personal wardrobe. Source: Silentnight.co.uk

Rave reviews for ‘too beautiful’ Weisz

admin — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 21:45:22 +0000

British film actress Rachel Weisz, star of The Mummy and About a Boy, has received glowing reviews for her London stage performance as Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, with the Daily Telegraph’s theatre critic Charles Spencer calling it “by some distance, the best Streetcar I have seen”. Weisz rises to the challenge of playing DuBois “magnificently”, says Spencer, who admits he had thought the Oscar-winning actress would “almost certainly fail” in the role of the fragile widow who leaves home to join her sister and brother-in-law in New Orleans. “She has had relatively little stage experience and surely, I reasoned, she was too young, and too beautiful, to play the now fading, hard-drinking and wildly promiscuous Southern belle on the edge of complete breakdown,” Spencer writes in his four-star review. The Guardian’s Michael Billington, noting that the role was made famous by Vivien Leigh in Elia Kazan’s 1951 film version, also gave the Donmar Warehouse production, directed by Rob Ashford, four stars. “What Weisz brings to the role is a quality of desperate solitude touched with grace,” he said. Many of the critics focus on Weisz’s beauty and relative youth, though as Michael Coveney of the Independent explains, the author specified her age as about 30, so Weisz, now 39, can hardly be accused of being too young for the part. However, Coveney went out on a limb to criticise her performance. “Weisz starts vague and wispy, with that glinting, cunning deceptiveness of the dedicated drinker,” he wrote, “but she misses an awful lot of the role’s cutting cruelty and sheer drag queen bitchiness.” It is Weisz’s third play for the Donmar. Last year she appeared in another Williams play, Suddenly Last Summer, as well as Noel Coward’s Design for Living. A Streetcar Named Desire runs until October 3.
What they are saying Charles Spencer, the Daily Telegraph: “The role of Blanche DuBois has defeated many a celebrated actress. Over the years I have seen Jessica Lange, Glenn Close, and the late Natasha Richardson attempt to come to terms with Blanche’s extraordinary poignancy, variety and depth, and fine actresses though they are, or were, none quite penetrated its heart.”
Benedict Nightingale, the Times: “Let me be ungentlemanly enough to be gentlemanly about Rachel Weisz. Her performance as the cracked belle at the centre of Tennessee Williams’s great play is so impressive that I must point out that in one vital respect she’s miscast. Why does her Blanche DuBois feel impelled to hide her age and her looks from anyone, least of all the nice but dim suitor played by Barnaby Kay? Even when she’s clinging precariously to the remnants of her sanity this gorgeous, gifted actress is a bright light in a dark world.”
Michael Coveney, the Independent: “The good thing is that Weisz is so aptly young – Williams specifies her age as about 30, and her sister Stella, beautifully played here by Ruth Wilson, as 25-ish. This is how it must have come across with Vivien Leigh in the first London production.” Thanks to TheFirstPost.co.uk!

Theatre preview: A Streetcar Named Desire, London

admin — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 03:38:33 +0000

Rachel Weisz returns to the Donmar Warehouse where, 15 years ago, her appearance in Noël Coward’s Design For Living – with Clive Owen and Paul Rhys – won her a best newcomer award. Since then she has appeared there in Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer (and more recently won film kudos and awards for The Constant Gardener), and it is to another Williams hothouse drama that she returns for her latest role. Following in the footsteps of Glenn Close at the National in 2002, Weisz plays Blanche DuBois, the slightly deranged, ageing southern belle who arrives at the home of her sister in downtown New Orleans, where her delusions and veneer of respectability are smashed by her brutal brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski (Elliot Cowan). Rob Ashford, the choreographer who made his directorial debut with the Donmar production of Parade, takes charge again.