Free Republic

Celebrated filmmaker Quentin Tarantino is facing criticism for candid comments he made about actors in Marvel movies not being legitimate stars. [snip] “I don’t love them,” Tarantino said of Marvel films. “No, I don’t. I don’t hate them. But I don’t love them. I mean, look, I used to collect Marvel comics like crazy when I was a kid.” “There’s an aspect that if these movies were coming out when I was in my twenties, I would totally be f***king happy and totally love them. [But] they wouldn’t be the only movies being made, they would be those movies amongst...

Newly unsealed court documents put Harvey Weinstein’s Rolodex on full display. The fallen movie mogul - who is now a convicted rapist facing up to 29 years in jail and will be sentenced Wednesday - once tried to save his career by emailing his famous peers, including billionaires, powerful agents and Hollywood titans. In emails, reviewed by Variety on Tuesday afternoon at the New York City criminal courthouse, where roughly 1,000 pages of documents were unsealed, Weinstein wrote to the likes of Michael Bloomberg, Quentin Tarantino, Netflix’s Ted Sarandos, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Apple’s Tim Cook and Eddy Cue. The...

Quentin Tarantino will not recut “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” to placate Chinese censors, Variety has confirmed. The decision likely means that the Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt buddy dramedy and ode to late sixties Tinseltown won’t be making an appearance in China — at least in non-pirated form. Tarantino previously ran afoul of higher ups in the country with “Django Unchained” and ultimately agreed to make some excisions that eliminated scenes of graphic violence and nudity after the film was yanked from release. It didn’t matter much. When it was re-released in edited form, the film went on...

Sharon Tate’s sister has condemned Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt, the stars of Quentin Tarantino’s upcoming film about the Manson murders, “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” “To [celebrities] it’s a paycheck and these people just don’t care,” Debra Tate told TMZ Thursday. “They are terribly hurtful to the actual family and all the living victims. They don’t give a s—t.”

This month marks 50 years since eight black-clad hippies snuck into a series of upscale Los Angeles homes and carried out the nine killings now known as the Manson Family Murders. Between July 25 and Aug. 9, 1969, the followers of cult leader and failed musician Charles Manson murdered pregnant starlet Sharon Tate and her four guests, stabbed a supermarket executive and his dressmaker wife, and gored a Ph.D candidate with a sword. Half a century out, the attacks continue to resurface in pop culture. Last month, Quentin Tarantino reimagined the Manson murders in his ninth feature, Once Upon a...

I Was a Stooge for a Communist Terror Group That Murdered Americans The allies of a Communist terrorist group are running the country. August 1, 2019 Daniel Greenfield 99 Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism. There is a scene in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino's revisionist take on the Manson murders, in which the fictional members of the family blame movies for their crimes. The real answer is less cinematic and more political. The Manson family’s crimes were part...

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is quite the comeback for Quentin Tarantino. After the stillborn Hateful Eight and the loss of his mentor Harvey Weinstein into the maw of #MeToo, the writer-director is all on his own with his ninth film; he’s off-the-leash, flush with 90 million of Sony’s dollars, and what did he deliver…? A straight-up masterpiece. If this isn’t the movie Tarantino was born to direct (that was probably Pulp Fiction) OUATIH is unquestionably the movie his 27-year career has been chugging toward, the one where it all comes together: a passion for forgotten B-movies, for correcting history, for all things pop culture...

Mia Farrow and Ronan Farrow didn't hold back their disdain for Woody Allen on Twitter Sunday evening. The mother and son tweeted out against the tribute to the director at the 2014 Golden Globe Awards. "Time to grab some ice cream & switch over to #GIRLS," Mia tweeted when Allen's tribute began to start. Diane Keaton accepted the Cecil. B. DeMille Award on behalf of the Hollywood heavyweight—extolling the director's work with actresses, dropping a few curse words and even singing during her monologue. But Ronan's tweet made it clear that he wouldn't be offering any tributes at his house....

In 2009, Samantha Geimer was watching the daytime talk show "The View" from her then-home in Hawaii when the panel took up the topic of her encounter at age 13 with director Roman Polanski. Polanski had just been arrested in Switzerland, more than three decades after the day in 1977 that changed both their lives. "It wasn't rape-rape," co-host Whoopi Goldberg said, setting off a firestorm of criticism. In fact, it was "rape-rape" by nearly any definition except the charge to which Polanski pleaded guilty (unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor) — the underage Geimer was drugged and verbally resistant,...

The Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has voted to expel actor Bill Cosby and director Roman Polanksi from its membership ranks. The move comes a week after Cosby was convicted of three counts of aggravated indecent assault brought against him by Andrea Constand, and after disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein was first expelled from the organization last year. Polanski has been on the lam for 40 years, ever since fleeing the country while awaiting sentencing for statutory rape in 1978. The decision to remove Cosby and Polanski from the membership was made Tuesday,...

Orson Scott Card, whose science-fiction book Ender's Game is being released as a film, is a conservative Mormon with a long history of attacking gay people and their rights. He's also one of the most respected sci-fi writers of all time. This has really got sci-fi fans and gay rights activists in a moral dilemma as the momentum for the film builds up to its November 1 release. Orson Scott Card has gone far beyond opposing gay marriage. In 1990, he wrote in Mormon publication Sunstone Magazine, “Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books, not to be indiscriminately...

Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson in Saving Mr. Banks If you were browsing news sites yesterday, you may have come across Meryl Streep’s rant about what a racist Nazi anti-semite that Walt Disney was and what an amazing human being Emma Thompson is.It’s easy to take shots at a dead man, but Walt Disney’s character was framed by angry left-wing union members in a town where mildly conservative politics led to cries of “Fascist”.The evidence that Walt Disney ever supported the Third Reich is flimsy and hearsay. There’s far more evidence that his critics supported the USSR.And the evidence for...

Back around Halloween we once again narrowly missed a chance to drag confessed pedophile and child rapist Roman Polanski back to the United States to face justice for his monstrous crimes when Poland refused to honor our requests. That was undoubtedly a frustrating experience for many observers, but it won’t hold a candle to how most of us will feel if celebrity attorney Alan Dershowitz has his way. He is seeking to throw the case out entirely so that the known sex offender can freely travel back and forth to America. Alan M. Dershowitz, a lawyer whose celebrity clients...

Convicted child rapist and pedophile Roman Polanski found himself once again briefly detained by authorities in Poland this week. And yet again, he was released despite requests from the United States to hold him for extradition. But before getting to the details, it’s worth pausing for a moment to note how CNN chose to describe the situation. Famed film director Roman Polanski, wanted in the United States for having sex with a minor in the 1970s, was questioned this week by Polish authorities but allowed to leave after the interview. Yes, I suppose you could choose to say that he...

Film director Roman Polanski is to attend an extradition hearing in court after the US lodged a request with Poland to have him brought back. Polish-born Polanski has been wanted by US police since 1977, when he fled the country after being charged with having sex with a 13-year-old girl.

Wednesday saw Roman Polanski spend nearly nine hours in Krakow District Court giving testimony connected with the latest attempt by US authorities to have him extradited over charges of having unlawful sex with a minor in the 1970s.

WARSAW, Poland – Poland will not extradite Oscar-winning filmmaker Roman Polanski to the U.S. in an almost 40-year-old case after prosecutors declined to challenge a court ruling against it. Prosecutors in Krakow, who had sought the extradition on behalf of the U.S., said Friday they found the court's refusal of extradition to be "right" and said they found no grounds to appeal it.

WARSAW—Poland’s Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that Roman Polanski can’t be handed over to the U.S., ending the Polish conservative government’s bid to extradite the filmmaker.

Poland's Supreme Court rejected a government request to return the extradition case of filmmaker Roman Polanski to a Krakow court. "Even if we agree with certain views contained in the appeal, we found that the ruling issued by the Krakow Court didn't violate the law," Judge Michal Laskowski said Tuesday. Polanski, a French-Polish director who is Jewish, fled the United States nearly four decades ago after being convicted of raping a 13-year-old girl. An October 2015 ruling in a Krakow court blocked his extradition. Attorney General Zbigniew Ziobro said the ruling violated Poland’s extradition agreements with the U.S. Ziobro said...

Fugitive director Roman Polanski will reportedly attempt to have his decades-long child rape case resolved so that he may return to the United States without fear of arrest or incarceration. According to TMZ, the 83-year-old director’s attorney, Harland Braun, has asked a Los Angeles judge to review what it reports is a “long-secret transcript” of the prosecutor’s testimony during Polanski’s trial. The attorney claims the transcript proves that the Pianist director had agreed to a plea deal to serve just 48 days in jail, and that the judge had agreed to the deal. Polanski was convicted of raping a child...