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Michael J. Fox is a famous TV and movie star. He is witty. He is charming. A few years ago, we learned he has Parkinson's disease. PD is a slowly progressive neurological disorder, characterized by tremors, shuffling gait, a masklike facial expression, "pill rolling" of the fingers, drooling, intolerance to heat, oily skin, emotional instability and defective judgment (although intelligence is rarely impaired). PD is currently incurable, although there are several methods to slow its advancement, including drug therapy and surgery. PD is tragic, particularly in Fox's case, because it rarely afflicts persons under 60 years old. Yet everyone faces...

Call off the manhunt, we have a Wesley Snipes spotting. A Namibian film official has announced that the actor, currently wanted on charges of tax fraud in the U.S., has been in the African country for the past two months shooting a movie. "It is confirmed," Edwin Kanguatjivi, chief executive officer of the Namibia Film Commission, told Reuters. "He has been in Namibia since the end of August." According to the wire service, Snipes has been filming Gallowwalker in the desert near Swakopmund, the same coastal town that was home to a prenatal Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt in the...

The fifth most viewed vid today (as of now) at YouTube is one posted by CBS itself (fully sanctioned) that serves the purpose of telling people to watch NCIS because it has hot chicks rolling around on the floor ripping at each others' clothing. I have no idea how that has anything to do with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Now, I'm no prude at all (I like watching hot chicks on TV as much as the next heterosexual guy), it just struck me as odd that a corporation so concerned about political correctness would put this out on youtube...

Students of history know that over the millennia, great civilizations crumbled not from without, but from within. The Visigoths may have crushed the Romans in 476, but long before the Roman Empire had begun to disintegrate internally, its social fabric slowly shredded apart and ultimately it became a paper tiger unable to sustain itself. In our own lifetime, it’s quite apparent that we are witnessing an increasingly rapid and equally worrisome descent in the moral mean. Here’s one spectacular, depressing example. In the 1970s, one of the most celebrated family shows on TV was "Little House on the Prairie." One...

Los Angeles - Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber always had a moral message in their long-running "Veggie-Tales" video series. But now that the vegetable stars have hit network television, they can't speak as freely as they once did, and that's got the Parents Television Council steamed. The conservative media-watchdog group issued a statement Sept. 20 blasting NBC, which airs "VeggieTales," for editing out some references to God from the children's animated show. "What struck me and continues to strike me is the inanity of ripping the heart and soul out of a successful product and not thinking that...

NEW YORK - The father of "American Idol" winner Fantasia Barrino has filed a $10 million libel suit against the publisher of a book about his daughter, alleging that it contains "false, exaggerated, sensational, intentional and malicious untruths." In papers filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, Joseph Barrino is seeking damages from Simon & Schuster, which released "Fantasia: Life Is Not a Fairy Tale" in 2005. The book was made into a TV movie, starring Fantasia, that aired on the Lifetime network in August. Among the details disputed by Joseph Barrino: that he was hostile to the music...

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Mel Gibson has returned to the spotlight to promote his upcoming movie "Apocalypto," and to criticize the war in Iraq, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Almost two months after he railed against Jews when he was arrested for driving drunk in Malibu, the actor made a surprise appearance Friday at Fantastic Fest, an event in Austin, Texas, devoted to new science fiction, horror and fantasy films, the trade paper said in its Monday edition. He presented a work-in-progress screening of his Mayan adventure tale, and then took questions. About one-third of the full house gathered for...

TORONTO (Reuters) - Some of the biggest names in Hollywood had their egos bruised at this year's Toronto International Film Festival. Critics and film buffs at the festival, which ended on Saturday, took special aim at Steven Zaillian's "All the King's Men," starring Sean Penn, Jude Law and Kate Winslet. Several major reviewers declared their disappointment in the most controversial film at the festival, "Death of a President," a fictional documentary about the assassination of President George W. Bush

LOS ANGELES - Mel Gibson's only daughter, Hannah, married blues-rock guitarist Kenny Wayne Shepherd this weekend. Gibson, 26, and Shepherd, 29, of Benton, La., exchanged vows in California on Saturday, People magazine reported on its Web site. Shepherd's albums include "Ledbetter Heights" and "Live On." He proposed to Gibson on New Year's Eve 2004 in Rome, according to The Times of Shreveport, La. Gibson, 50, and his wife, Robyn, have seven children. Hannah is their oldest child and only daughter. The wedding came almost two months after Gibson, 50, star of the "Lethal Weapon" movies and director of "The Passion...

LOS ANGELES - Mickey Hargitay, the actor and world champion bodybuilder who was married to 1950s sex siren Jayne Mansfield and whose daughter is Emmy-winning winning actress Mariska Hargitay, has died. He was 80. Hargitay died Thursday in Los Angeles, according to a family statement issued Monday through publicist Gary Mantoosh. The cause of death was not released. "Words cannot express how saddened we are by the loss of Mickey," the statement said. "At the same time, we are so grateful for who he was and is to all of us, and for the love he gave us in our...

Napoleon Dynamite's about to get a new little tater tot to call his own. Jon Heder and wife Kirsten are expecting their first child together, the actor's rep, Nicole Chabot, confirmed to E! News. It'll be the first stork delivery for the 28-year-old star and his wife. There's no word yet on the sex of the baby or due date. The rep confirmed the baby news after Heder let slip his impending papa status at a press conference promoting his upcoming comedy remake, School for Scoundrels, in Los Angeles Thursday. The couple met while attending Brigham Young University in Utah...

As the Crocodile Hunter, Steve Irwin made a name for himself around the world. But at the end of the day, he was just an "ordinary bloke." In the first public remarks from Irwin's family since his death on Monday, his father, Bob Irwin, said the family would probably decline the Australian government's offer of a state funeral for his son, because Irwin would not have wanted the fuss of such a formal proceeding. "The state funeral would be refused, because he's an ordinary guy, he's just an ordinary bloke," the elder Irwin said at a press conference at Australia...

LOS ANGELES - Ronald Isley has been sentenced to three years and one month in prison for tax evasion. The 65-year-old R&B singer was also ordered to pay $3.1 million in back taxes to the Internal Revenue Service, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Conte. Isley was convicted last year of five counts of tax evasion and one count of willful failure to file a tax return. During Friday's hearing, defense attorney Anthony Alexander argued that Isley should receive probation instead of prison time because of complications from a stroke and a recent bout with kidney cancer. Alexander also pleaded for...

Paris Hilton is no stranger to self-promotion. But when she asked DJs to play songs from her upcoming debut album, "Paris," last spring, she wasn't so confident. "People go crazy," the 25-year-old socialite/reality TV star/singer says in an interview in the September issue of Blender, on newsstands Tuesday. "They love it. Everyone's like, `Who is this?' I don't tell. Because I don't want someone putting their phone up and recording it and making a ring tone off of it. "I think when people don't know it's me, they won't judge it. But if they know it's me, then they'll be...

Some 84 movie stars, film industry members sign statement condemning Hizbullah, Hamas activities in Middle East Heads of the film industry in Hollywood and prominent movie stars have signed a statement blaming Hamas and Hizbullah for terror activities in the Middle East, the war in Lebanon, and for harming innocents.  Some 84 senior film industry members signed the statement, published in the Hollywood Reporter newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, and the Variety newspaper.  Among the signatories: Sylvester Stallone, James Woods, Bruce Willis, director Ridley Scott, tennis player Serena Williams, Nicole Kidman, WASHINGTON - Heads of the film industry in Hollywood...

LONDON - The U.S. publishing company Ignatius Press has refused to sell any works by Welsh singer Charlotte Church after she called German-born Pope Benedict XVI a Nazi and mocked the Catholic Church. The directors of Ignatius Press said they were offended when the Welsh singer mocked the Catholic Church in the pilot of a proposed eight-part television chat show. Church, dubbed the "Voice of an Angel" before she turned her talents to popular music, also dressed up as a nun and pretended to hallucinate while eating "communion" wafers imprinted with smiling faces signifying the drug Ecstasy. She smashed open...

Child actress Dakota Fanning is set to shock fans in new movie 'Hounddog.' The film features Dakota semi-nude in child rape scenes. The controversial film written and directed by Deborah Kampmeier is a dark and violent story set in American's rural south and the 12-year-old's mother and agent are convinced her gritty performance is Oscar-worthy. Agent Joy Osbrink was quoted in the New York Daily News, "It's not just the rape scene the whole story is challenging Dakota as an actress. And I've never been so proud of her in my life. I've seen the dailies, and in every scene...

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. - An unfinished statue of Barney Fife apparently won't be heading to Don Knotts' hometown after all. Knotts' widow endorses a statue but says the monument should be of her husband, not of the bumbling deputy he made famous on "The Andy Griffith Show." Knotts died in February at age 81. "We consider the dissemination of his image to be a big responsibility that we take very seriously," Francey Knotts and Andy Griffith said in a statement. "No one cares more about Don's image than we do. It would be wonderful to have a statue in Morgantown, W.Va.,...

In his July 6 weekly newspaper column, Fox News talkmeister Bill O'Reilly wrote about "Superman and the Culture War." He pointed out, as I did last week, that in the movie "Superman Returns," the Perry White character asks about Superman, "Does he still stand for truth, justice and all that stuff?" O'Reilly asks right back, "And all that stuff?" The original line from the 1950s TV show was "truth, justice and the American way," and O'Reilly explains how the studio, Warner Bros., didn't "want to tee off any foreign viewers with pro-U.S. sentiment," so it excised "the American way." Turns...

PASADENA, Calif. - Mr. T has given himself a makeover. The former television action star shed the piles of gold chains that were his signature look after witnessing the destruction from Hurricane Katrina. "As a spiritual man, I felt it would be a sin against my God for me to wear all that gold again because I spent a lot of time with the less fortunate," the actor said Thursday at the Television Critics Association's summer meeting. "I saw some, I call it `sorry celebrities.' They'll go down there and hook up with the people to take a photo-op. I...