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Jennifer Hudson, Taylor Swift, James Corden and Ian McKellen have been cast in Working Title’s upcoming movie version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s smash musical “Cats.” Tom Hooper, the Oscar-winning director of “The King’s Speech,” will direct “Cats,” which is set to begin shooting in Britain in November. The screenplay by Lee Hall (“Billy Elliot”) is based on Lloyd Webber’s musical, which was itself adapted from a book of children’s poems by T.S. Eliot. Hudson, who won an Oscar in 2007 for her breakout role in “Dreamgirls,” will play Grizabella, the former “glamour cat” who falls on hard times and gets...

Social-media giant waits 5 years before taking action.

Stage and screen star Sir Ian McKellen has spoken out about the sex scandal in film and theatre,claiming women are partly responsible because some tell directors they'll sleep with them to win roles. 'People must be called out and it's sometimes very difficult for victims to do that,' the Lord Of The Rings star said in a talk at the Oxford Union recently. 'I hope we're going through a period that will help to eradicate it altogether. But from my own experience, when I was starting acting in the early Sixties, the director of the theatre I was working at...

Some 10,000 people turned out in Stratford, central England, to see a parade revved up by a New Orleans jazz band.Prince Charles joined top British actors live on stage in a surprise crack at playing “Hamlet”, as thousands of William Shakespeare fans packed The Bard’s hometown for the 400th anniversary of his death on Saturday. The heir to the throne joined the likes of Judi Dench, Benedict Cumberbatch, Ian McKellen and David Tennant at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon for the culmination of a day of parades, dancing and fireworks.et” was set.

Two days after the Supreme Court affirmed gay marriage as a fundamental right, New York City’s pride parade began, appropriately enough, with a wedding. Presiding over the same-sex ceremony, which took place in front of the historic Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village on Sunday afternoon, was New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, according to Newsday. Cuomo, who noted he was officiating his first wedding ceremony, wed Human Rights Campaign staffer David Contreras Turley, 36, and UBS financial analyst Peter Thiede, 35, while a crowd of onlookers cheered and The Beatles’ “Love Is All You Need” played, Newsday reported. The Stonewall...

Attention, hotels…if you’ve got a “Sir Ian McKellen” on your list of incoming guests, you should probably remove the Bible from the bedside table drawer in his room and read this recent Q&A with Details magazine (quoted on PopEater): “The openly gay ‘Lord of the Rings’ star admits to a habit of tearing out the Bible passage that condemns homosexuality — (“Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.” – Leviticus 18:22) — every time he finds one in his hotel room.[…] “I’m not proudly defacing the book,” he asserts, “but it’s a choice between removing...

...Part spy adventure, part science fiction dystopia, and part counter-culture influenced social critique, The Prisoner was groundbreaking television when it debuted in the fall of 1967.... And now, after decades of speculation and anticipation, of deals struck and scrapped, the British cult classic is about to become the latest pop-cultural institution to submit itself to reinterpretation. On November 15, AMC will debut its own version of The Prisoner staring Jim Caviezel and Ian McKellen.... ...The question we see playing out on cable news, in blogs, in town-hall meetings, and public demonstrations is "Who do we imagine ourselves to be? What...

While Muslims were busy threatening to kill the Pope, Rosie O’Donnell – talk-show host, constitutional scholar and celebrity airhead – was busy comparing conservative Christians to Islamo-fascists. On ABC’s “The View” last week, O’Donuts smeared committed Christians while trivializing the suffering of Islam’s many victims. Responding to the comments of her co-host that militant Islam is a threat to free people everywhere, O’Donnell – famous for her keen intellect – shot back: “Just a minute. Radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America where we have separation of church and state.” Actually , we...

 WELLINGTON, New Zealand, July 17, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Profits from the Lord of the Rings film trilogy are being used to fund destructive human embryonic research at the University of California, reported the Mainichi Daily News. Filmmakers Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, who brought the J.R.R. Tolkien epic to the screen, together donated US $310,000 last Saturday to fund research using the stem cells of human embryos. “Stem cell therapy has the potential to treat a multitude of diseases and illnesses which up until now have been labelled ‘incurable,’” the pair said in a statement released by the University of...

OK, people, the early reviews could have been a little better, so Dan stepped in to do some rewrites, and he and I have come up with some minor tweaks.

by Mark Finkelstein May 18, 2006 After a couple days in which the only people that the Today show offered the opportunity to comment on the controversy surrounding the Da Vinci Code were the movie's director and cast members, this morning an outside expert and Catholic officials finally got their shot. The result was an oddly ambivalent reaction, in which the movie was simultaneously praised as offering an opportunity to teach about the Church, and condemned as filled with lies. A quick recap on the state of play at Today. Matt Lauer has been "On the Road with the Code"...

While promoters of "The Da Vinci Code" have tried to downplay the film's challenge to Christianity, actor Ian McKellen took a shot at the Bible in an interview with the "Today" show, saying Scripture should carry a disclaimer that it is "fiction." McKellen, who played Gandalf in "The Lord of the Rings" triology, was responding to a question from host Matt Lauer about the requests by some Christian groups to insert a "fiction" disclaimer at the beginning of the controversial film, which suggests Jesus and Mary Magdalene were man and wife and that the divinity of Jesus was an invention...

by Mark Finkelstein May 17, 2006 If the Da Vinci Code was already feeding the flames of controversy with its challenge to the basic tenets of Christianity, actor Ian McKellen managed to throw a refinery tank's worth of gasoline on the fire on this morning's Today show, asserting that the Bible should carry a disclaimer saying that it is "fiction." Matt Lauer, on his second day "On The Road With The Code," was in Cannes for the film festival, where the Code will have its debut. It has already been screened to some critics, who have given it decidedly mixed...

DIALOGUE ON LEVITICUS From: Elizabeth Elizabeth: I recently read in Citizen magazine (published by Focus on the Family) that you tear out pages of Bibles because of verses you find offensive to your homosexual lifestyle. . . . Sir Ian: I'll let slide the slur that my God-given sexuality is a mere lifestyle, and say yes, I do remove the page containing Leviticus 18:22 where it is asserted that "To lie with a man as with a woman is an abomination." I know there is some confusion amongst you Christians as to what an abomination is, but it sounds abominable...

Gay Pride Parades Held Around U.S. Sun Jun 30, 8:25 PM ET By MARGIE MASON, Associated Press Writer SAN FRANCISCO - Thousands of rainbows appeared under the blue sky Sunday as an estimated half million people lined the streets to celebrate diversity and progress during the city's 32nd annual gay pride parade. The people were just as colorful as the flags they waved — gay, straight, young and old. Some wore leather, feathers, or held balloons while others sported little more than a smile. The Dykes on Bikes, a rumbling motorcade of several hundred women on motorcycles, kicked off the...