Johansson ‘putting off wedding’


Scarlett Johansson is reportedly postponing her wedding until the birth of her baby.

The 29-year-old actress is engaged to Frenchman Romain Dauriac, and the couple are currently expecting their first child.

Despite reports the pair were rushing down the aisle before Johansson’s due date, a source now tells E! News the actress has decided to put the nuptials on hold for now.

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Is Kiefer Sutherland a good or a bad boy?


Kiefer Sutherland’s 24 co-star Louis Lombardi says he’s “one of the most professional actors ever”.

Lombardi’s comments come after Freddie Prinze Jr. launched an astonishing attack against Kiefer on Monday, admitting the actor’s supposedly unprofessional attitude on the set of the show in 2010 nearly caused him to quit acting.

But

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Bloom ‘throws punch’ at Bieber


Orlando Bloom supposedly threw a punch at Justin Bieber.

The superstars were seen at Cipriani restaurant in Ibiza early Wednesday morning and TMZ reports they got into a physical altercation with each other.

The outlet published a video which seems to have been recorded from a mobile phone, showing men who appear to be Bloom, 37, and Bieber, 20, angrily shouting at one another. Although this was not captured in the video clip, apparently Bloom threw a punch at the Baby crooner.

Bodyguards, handlers and restaurant staff were breaking up the shoving match as diners at the busy eatery clamoured in the background.

According to the website, Bieber may have shouted, “What’s up b***h” to Bloom nearly halfway through the 30-second clip.

A purported eyewitness tells TMZ several celebrities were present during the scuffle, including Diddy, Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan.

When Bieber “fled” the restaurant soon after his supposed blow-up with Bloom, the insider claims diners clapped their hands in thunderous applause.

Many suspect the feud was sparked by love triangles. Justin famously partied with Miranda Kerr in 2012 after a Victoria’s Secret fashion show in New York City. And just months ago in April, Bieber’s ex Selena Gomez hung out with Bloom frequently, sparking romance rumours.

The Pirates of the Caribbean actor has been single since the breakdown of his marriage to supermodel Kerr last year, and Gomez’s on/off relationship with Bieber is thought to be over for good as well.

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The Voice winner ‘hasn’t heard’ her own album


It’s been a busy few weeks for Anja Nissen –

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Rich pickings in Mexico City


In Mexico City’s Centro Historico are the remnants of the Templo Mayor, one of the main Aztec temples of their capital Tenochtitlan. You can see six layers of the temple’s walls – the temple rebuilt six times, each time bigger to cover the last as it started to sink into the unstable earth.

The temple and its artefacts formed the centre of the excellent Aztec exhibition at Te Papa last summer. Seeing it however is something else altogether again.

The remarkable archaeological excavation that began 35 years ago, and continues today itself required the demolition of a block of grand buildings of the Spanish colonial era.

This is a space of great architectural beauty. Modern Mexico’s architecture has followed this heritage. A visit to this city is made to many outstanding buildings. That buildings might provide identity is deeply embedded here. It is how they are placed and how you experience them, which gives you an appreciation of how form operates in space.

These are things we lack in New Zealand. Much celebrated architecture in Mexico City acknowledges a rich indigenous past, while making a modernist statement of strength, independence and of being at the vanguard. Different artistic media have traditionally always been far more melded and part of public space. Buildings are spoken of as sculpture. Through the work of last century’s muralists (most famously Mexico’s Diego Rivera), painting is part of the urban fabric. It’s easy to see why the city might now accept easily contemporary artists’ interest in working across media, and making their work in its concerns more of the world.

The gods being honoured today, however, are the corporate kings. If Templo Mayor is the heart of the old centre, the Soumaya Museum – Museo Soumaya – in the Nuevo Polanco district is a stake in the ground, asserting a new centre. This astonishing building was opened in 2011 for the art collection of the world’s richest man Carlos Slim, head of, among other things, Mexican telecommunications company Telmex. It cost US$70 million (NZ$81m), boasts more than 66,000 pieces of art – mostly European works from the 15th to mid 20th century – and has had more than 2.6 million visitors.

Until recently Nuevo Polanco was warehouses and factories. Now office towers and shopping centres are mushrooming. They all gather around the glittering Soumaya, designed by Mexican architects FR-EE.

Like Frank Gehry’s buildings, its 3-D wave shape with silver scaled surface owes much to what is now possible with new materials, digital technology, and lots of money. As eye-popping in reality as in the photographs, its skin reminded me of the snakes that adorn the Templo Mayor.

Mostly, though, it simply sets out successfully like a glitter ball, in the presence of straight lines, to wow you. Inside it’s both glorious and functional. You ascend, as in Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous Guggenheim, by exterior hugging spiral, viewing Slim’s extensive art historical collection. It ranges from da Vinci and Botticelli near security check-in, to a large Rodin sculpture court at the top.

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Across the road is Museo Jumex, which opened last year and is funded by Mexican Juice barons the Jumex group. Designed by David Chipperfield, the building neatly and modestly visually references the factory, the juice box and Aztec architecture, yet ultimately inside it’s as dull as a juice box .

Around these museums the signs read Costco, Cinemex, Starbucks, Nestle and Saks Fifth Avenue. An aquarium has sprung up. There is plenty of parking below the shopping centres. It’s the antithesis of what I saw of the rest of Mexico City.

At the base of Soumaya is, of all things, a rose garden. I’m reminded of a work I saw a day earlier by British artist Olivia Plender. On an embroidered banner is an image of Britannia holding an Edwardian shopping centre with the words emblazoned “Britannia Receiving Her Newest Institution”.

Plender’s work features in an excellent international group show Theatre of the World at Museo Tamayo exploring architecture’s role in political and social representation. As this exhibition bears out, architecture often represents power, and too often offers shallowness, built to make an impression of progress and prowess for a moment in time.

Alexander Apostol has photographed the impressive concrete skeletons of large hotels in Venezuela, begun during a property boom but never completed. Gardar Eide Einarsson looks at the fake North Korean “Peace Village” on the border with South Korea. Kjong-Dong looks like it houses many, when in reality the buildings are well- maintained shells, for the viewing benefit of those looking over from South Korea.

On my travels I’ve seen grand follies, remnants from world fairs and games, old statements of national prowess. I can’t think of any New Zealand examples. We don’t need great monuments and our modest low-lying Kiwi way has much to recommend it.

Our most interesting piece of museum architecture, the Adam Art Gallery in Wellington, ingeniously utilises the empty space between existing buildings. It’s dynamic yet un-monumental. Yet we need to be far better at valuing our built environment.

I’ve barely scratched the surface of Mexico City – fast being talked about as a “new Berlin” in terms of its emerging contemporary art energy. There’s a surge in artist-run spaces, pop- up enterprises and artists moving here from elsewhere. New Zealand artist Kate Newby has just arrived as I write, with a show opening at Lulu, a small space, this coming weekend.

MUST SEE

Wunderruma: New Zealand Jewellery, Dowse Art Museum, Lower Hutt, until September 28. Curated by two wunderkinds themselves, Warwick Freeman and Karl Fritsch, this exhibition of 75 interesting contemporary New Zealand jewellers and artists was first shown in Munich and promises much.

– The Dominion Post

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Headline exhibition reveals Bard habits


What’s in a headline

“Shakespeare, usually,” says Russell Armitage.

Armitage, who describes himself as an avid patron of the performing arts, is organising an exhibition of Shakespeare quotes as used in newspaper headlines. The exhibition accompanies Apocalypse Lounge’s production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which premieres at the Meteor Theatre tomorrow night

Titled Shakespeare in Headlines, the exhibition opens at 6.30pm, and is open to the public.

Armitage – who Waikato Times readers may recognise as a frequent and enthusiastic letters to the editor correspondent – says the exhibition is a fantastic record of the huge influence Shakespeare has had over non-fiction writing and the English language.

His folio of newspapers spans the globe, collected during his travels throughout New Zealand, Australia, Britain and Europe.

Everywhere people speak English, Shakespeare is in their papers. Even the Waikato Times.

“Words are the food of newspapers, and they love to play on them,” he said. “There’s nothing a headline-writer likes better than a pun, or a play on a famous phrase, and Shakespeare’s writings are full of these.”

All the Shakespeare-inspired headlines are presented with the context of the actual articles that accompanied them.

Quotes vary in quality. Some are quite brilliant. Others aren’t. They range from the painful (“Winter of Discontent hits vege prices hard”), to the obvious (“To buy or not That is the question”) to the amusingly inexplicable (“Much Ado about his Hair Do”).

Armitage cites some of his favourite examples as “Utu, brute”, “Exit Milosevic, pursued by Blair”, and “Little love for Labour’s lost.”

“Some quotes, naturally, are walking shadows of Shakespeare,” Armitage said. “Others are the stuff dreams are made on.”

While there will be plenty of great wordplay on display, Armitage said he hoped, and expected, to see much more in the future.

“There is more wordplay in heaven and earth,” he said, “than journalists dream of in their newsrooms.”

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– Waikato Times

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Nothing kinky on Fifty Shades website


Fans expecting to see some titillating new images on the Fifty Shades of Grey website will find the exercise an anticlimax.

Those who didn’t get enough of a Christian Grey fix can head to the film’s website greyenterprisesholdings.com, and work for the man himself.

According to Collider, if you enrol online in the internship program at Grey Enterprises Holdings Inc and complete tasks such as create an ID and share the trailer on social media, you can unlock rewards including stills from the film.

But don’t expect to see any steamy shots of Ana (Dakota Johnson) or Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan).

The pics instead look like they’ve come out of a pamphlet for Grey Enterprises.

One has two young women behind the sleek counter in the main office, with the Grey Enterprises name on the wall and a large Apple computer on the desk (product placement anyone).

The second is a shot of Christian’s company helicopter, who any fans from the book would realise the significance of.

It would appear that those wanting more of Fifty Shades of Grey will just have to satisfy themselves with watching the trailer again.

With more than 36 million YouTube views in its first week, The Hollywood Reporter says it’s now become the most viewed trailer of 2014.

Fifty Shades of Grey releases in New Zealand cinemas on Valentine’s Day, 2015

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– AAP

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Beyonce’s answer to break-up rumours


Beyonce Knowles has once again put rumours to rest her marriage is on the rocks.

The diva and rapper Jay-Z have been subjected to reports for months they’re headed for a split as soon as their On the Run Tour ends in September, despite putting on a united front on stage.

The gossip reached a fever pitch this week after the New York Post reported Beyonce was spotted house-hunting with the rapper nowhere in sight.

But Bey appears to be more in love than ever with her spouse of six years, and took to Instagram, seemingly in a bid to shut down the gossip once again.

“My favorite hue is JayZ Blue,” she captioned an image of the rapper walking along the beach, with their daughter, Blue Ivy, in his arms.

As MTV News reports, the message also quotes a lyric from Jay’s 2005 single Go Crazy.

Beyonce has been known to address rumours with cryptic Instagram messages in the past. Earlier this year, following a highly-publicised physical altercation between the star’s sister, Solange Knowles, and the rapper, Bey posted several photos of herself with her sibling on the photo-sharing app.

Beyonce’s latest post follows on the heels of reports she scoped out a 4,045 sq ft, $21.5 million apartment in the Chelsea neighbourhood of Manhattan last month.

“She was very quiet, as if she was looking on the sly,” a source told the Post.

“There’s no way a $20 million apartment is for her mother or her sister. That would be wildly unlikely,” the source said.

The superstar couple currently reside in an 8,309 sq ft home in Tribeca with their two-year-old daughter.

A spokesperson for the pair had not commented publicly on the latest claims at press time.

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– Cover Media

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Ripping and real – it’s how we like to see ourselves


By about a third of the way through Sunday’s stirring docu-drama Pirates of the Airwaves, TV One, it became fairly obvious that this would have been better done as a movie.

Trouble is, it already has been – albeit fictionalised. Three Mile Limit, released in cinemas earlier this year, turns the original Radio Hauraki pioneers into made-up characters, but tells the same cracking story, of how some determined young men forced the protectionist government of the mid 60s to relent its state protectionism of radio broadcasting. If it’s worth doing once, is it worth doing over again Pirates came first but its screening was delayed because of the clash with the film.

Its great advantage was the access to glorious old photos and footage, and the accounts of all but one of the original radio pirates – who have aged well and spoke with great brio.

The disadvantage was that the dramatised bits, though lively and well-conceived, began to get a little irritating. The story was “narrated” through the character of Rick Grant, the pirate who tragically fell overboard at the 11th hour, when the rogue broadcast ship Tiri II was on the way home, the Hauraki team granted a broadcasting licence at last.

The character is glib, cocky, smart-alecky – as these guys undoubtedly had to be. But the to- camera smugness grated after a while. On the other hand, the dramatised bits told more effectively than an expository narration could have done the enormity of what the team was up against.

The government was highly authoritarian, state broadcasting arguably more so, with a penchant for banning and rationing popular music.

The broadcasting minister privately sympathised with the Hauraki pioneers, saying as a lifelong farmer, he would have become a pirate farmer had the state controlled his industry. But, he pleaded, you couldn’t just turn around the massive tanker that was the Broadcasting Corporation. It needed time to adjust.

Today we’d find this risible. But that was an era of great paternalism.

What followed was a real-life ripping yarn, including tumultuous scenes of civil disobedience at the wharf the night the first Tiri set sail, and several nasty scrapes at sea.

The story was also imbued with “No 8 wire” ethos through to the hull, both the ships and the transmission equipment conjured from unpromising source material. The music was spirited in from overseas.

It’s such an inspiring, classic story of New Zealand-as-we-like-to- think-of-ourselves that, on reflection, it is probably worth seeing two versions of it.

ONE TO WATCH

Ray Donovan, SoHo, 8.30pm

In an echo of The Sopranos, the Hollywood fixer tries to get his daughter into a toney school in this edgy drama starring Liev Schreiber.

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– The Dominion Post

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McBoing Boing captivates the kids


This was a kids concert and the Opera House was full of excited youngsters who never tempered their enthusiasm over what was, for such a youthful audience, a longish affair. I went with my six-year-old granddaughter, and she loved it to bits.

The longest piece was Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf (here called, for some reason, ‘Pita’) and it used the amusing device of having the theatre cleaner, a brilliant Dave Fane, filling in for an absent narrator. Using the items from his cleaning cart to illustrate the characters in the story, he rather upstaged Prokofiev, but, to be fair, the orchestra was at times a little dim from behind the proscenium arch.

Bret McKenzie narrated the popular adaptation of Dr Seuss’ Gerald McBoing Boing, using a youngster from the audience to be Gerald, which he did to the manor born. The music used was by Gail Kubik from the prize-winning cartoon from 1950, but we remember it most from radio in the recording made by radio veteran Harold Peary with music by Billy May. Aided by great percussion from Jeremy Fitzsimmons, beautifully apt narration from McKenzie and that sterling youngster as Gerald, it went brilliantly.

So did the opening Tane and the Kiwi with music by Thomas Goss and narrator Aroha White, setting the stage for a splendid afternoon.

What made the concert long was a great deal of instrument shuffling between items, but it didn’t seem to matter. My granddaughter left fully satisfied, along with a myriad other children. Great entertainment.

MUSIC

Orchestra Wellington conducted by Marc Taddei with presenters Aroha White and Dave Fane and guest presenter Bret McKenzie

Pita and the Wolf, Tane and the Kiwi and Gerald McBoing Boing

Opera House, Wellington, July 27

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– The Dominion Post

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