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A Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano , has issued a posthumous pardon to John Lennon for his ‘offensive’ declaration forty years ago that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus.
The paper described the remark as “showing off, bragging by a young English working-class musician who had grown up in the age of Elvis Presley and rock and roll and had enjoyed unexpected success”.
John Lennon, wherever he is, must feel so relieved that the Pope’s people are cool with him again… or then again, maybe he doesn’t give a crap.
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Tupac Shakur linked with Why do people consider Tupac Shakur to be less of an icon than Elvis Presley?
Donald Trump likes sticking his mouth in other people’s business.
The ‘Apprentice’ boss, who famously feuded with Rosie O’Donnell, is taking on another Hollywood woman. This time it’s ‘Get Smart’ star Anne Hathaway, MSNBC reports.
Trump thinks it was wrong of Hathaway to leave her boyfriend Rafaello Follieri just days before he was arrested for fraud.
“She hasn’t remained very loyal to him, has she?” Trump tells Access Hollywood.
“So when he had plenty of money, she liked him, but then after that, not as good, right?” he added.
Trump adds his thoughts on the disgraced businessman, who lived in one of Trump’s buildings.
“I’ve heard he’s very nice,” Trump said. “According to the help, no problems. But he’s got himself in a jam.”
Follieri, an Italian businessman who dated Hathaway for over 4 years, was arrested in June on charges he posed as a representative of the Vatican to fleece wealthy investors in a real estate company that sought to buy and redevelop Roman Catholic Church property.
Bail was set at $21 million. Federal prosecutors said they have “overwhelming” evidence that he improperly spent up to $6 million from investors, much of it on a lavish lifestyle, including privately chartered jet travel with his girlfriend and others, expensive meals and clothing and that apartment in one of Trump’s buildings.
source: Trump lashes out at Anne Hathaway [msnbc]
Anne Hathaway’s ex-boyfriend, Raffaello Follieri, has been arrested in NYC.
She dumped him just in time!!
The Italian businessman has been charged with wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering charges. What a douche.
Raffello is accused of falsely telling an investor that he had been appointed as the chief financial officer of the Vatican. The pope will not be pleased.
As a result of that connection, he claimed others could obtain properties of the Catholic church in the United States, at a substantial discount to fair market value.
People actually fell for that?
source: [associated press]
Jack Valenti, who singlehandedly revolutionized the movie business, died yesterday.
Jack Valenti, who became a confidant of President Lyndon B. Johnson and then a Hollywood institution, leading the Motion Picture Association of America and conceiving of a voluntary film-rating system that gave new meaning to letters like G, R and X, died [Thursday] in his home in Washington. He was 85. The cause was complications of a recent stroke, his family said.
For 38 years, Mr. Valenti was the public face of the movie and television production industry and one of its fiercest advocates. He lobbied Congress to protect filmmakers’ intellectual property from piracy and to ease trade barriers overseas. And he fended off lawmakers’ recurring campaigns to curb violence and sex on the screen, arguing for free expression. He devised the film-rating system precisely to avoid censorship by local review boards.
[...]
As a Houston political consultant, he was in the motorcade when President John F. Kennedy was shot on Nov. 22, 1963, and he watched as Johnson was sworn in beside Jacqueline Kennedy aboard Air Force One.
Mr. Valenti soon became known, and for a time mocked, for his unfailing loyalty to Johnson, if not outright idolatry of him. “I sleep each night a little better, a little more confidently because Lyndon Johnson is my president,” he once said in Boston, inviting guffaws nationwide. Even after leaving a senior post at the White House in 1966, Mr. Valenti remained at Johnson’s service, secretly arranging the president’s surprise detour to the Vatican to meet with Pope Paul VI on the way back from Vietnam in December 1967.
[...]
In 1966 Mr. Valenti took his talents for personal politicking — and lionizing his bosses — to Hollywood, heeding the request of Lew Wasserman and Arthur Krim, then chairmen of MCA/Universal and United Artists respectively, that he take over the Motion Picture Association. “If Hollywood is Mount Olympus,” Mr. Valenti once said of his new liege, “Lew Wasserman is Zeus.”
At the time Hollywood was still officially operating under the Hays Production Code, the industry’s draconian and increasingly outmoded self-censoring rules that flatly barred nudity, profanity, miscegenation and even childbirth scenes from being depicted on film. Mr. Valenti was soon confronted with two films in 1966 that convinced him that the code had become obsolete. He dealt with one, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” by negotiating a compromise in which three out of four particular vulgarisms were cut.
Later that year, M.G.M. released Antonioni’s “Blowup” even though that film, showing brief scenes of nudity, lacked Production Code approval. Sensing that other films would also begin flouting the code and in turn create a vacuum into which local politicians and censorship boards might rush, Mr. Valenti decided to act. “I knew I had to move swiftly, and I did,” he later recalled. “I was determined to free the screen from anything like the Hays Code. But I also emphasized that freedom demanded responsibility.” So by late 1968 he persuaded the national theater-owners association to buy into a system of voluntary ratings, based on an ascending scale of adult content, that would be enforced at the box office: G, M (later PG), R and X.
The system was not without flaws and detractors, and it required some tinkering. In 1984, after receiving complaints about frightening parts of PG-rated movies (“parental guidance suggested”) like “Gremlins,” the association added the PG-13 category (“parents strongly cautioned”). Though the other ratings were trademarked, the X was not, and pornographers quickly co-opted it. In 1990 the association replaced the X with NC-17 (no one 17 and under admitted), hoping it would be embraced, but distributors have mostly spurned it for commercial reasons, leaving many filmmakers to make wrenching cuts to adult-themed films in pursuit of an R rating.
An amazing life. That he was so controversial is a sign that he was both interesting and at the cutting edge of so many key debates.
While I’m not a fan of self-censorship, preferring to let the market decide what’s “appropriate,” the rating system is far preferable to the government censorship that would have filled the vacuum otherwise. Ironically, though, changing standards of decency have rendered the system almost meaningless in recent years, as there is now plenty of profanity and rather graphic violence even at the “PG” level, while otherwise innocuous films get an “R” rating if they use a certain ubiquitous swear word.
Photo via DECLAN MCCULLAGH PHOTOGRAPHY
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OTB linked with » Outside The Beltway
Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise were never married. At least, not as far as the Pope is concerned.
 How did Nicole Kidman, one-time spouse of Tom Cruise, get re-married in a Catholic church if she didn’t have an annulment? Clue: she wasn’t actually married before. Nicole Kidman’s wedding to country singer Keith Urban in Sydney at the weekend drew plenty of media attention. But some Catholics will have looked on perplexed at how the former bride of actor Tom Cruise managed to tie the knot for a second time, in a Catholic church.
It was widely reported in the run up to the weekend wedding that Ms Kidman had received an annulment for her previous marriage - the Catholic Church’s procedure for allowing a follower to wed again.
[...]
 In fact, Kidman didn’t need an annulment for one simple reason: in the eyes of the Catholic Church her 10-year union with Tom Cruise, a renowned Scientologist, never happened. The original wedding was performed in the Church of Scientology and wasn’t recognised by the Catholic faith. The divorce granted to the couple in 2001 was a legal rather than religious procedure for Kidman.
[...]
According to the Holy See, 43,153 straightforward annulments were granted worldwide, almost 29,000 of which were issued in north America in 2003. This compares with 511 in Great Britain and 304 across Ireland. Many of these were later overturned by the Vatican. Rome has long been concerned that priests in the US are handing out too many annulments. The Vatican argues that American culture demands maximum self-fulfilment and that includes what can be expected from a marriage. As a result, more annulments are granted in the US, leaving Rome worried that the Americans are, essentially, letting divorce in through the back door.
For Kidman, however, such difficult questions never needed to be answered.
Hat tip to Doug Mataconis. Of course, as I noted in his comments section, this means Kidman spent ten years fornicating with a Scientologist.
UPDATE: ASL thinks Catholics might be a wee bit too technical.
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