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Bolshoi ballet chief heads to Germany after attack

MOSCOW (AP) — The artistic director of the Bolshoi ballet says he will fly to Germany to continue treatment following an acid attack that caused severe burns to his face and eyes.

An unidentified attacker threw sulphuric acid in Sergei Filin's face in Moscow on Jan. 17, as he was returning home from work.

Filin, who spoke Monday after checking out from a Moscow hospital where he underwent several operations, said he suspected who was behind the attack but wouldn't name any names as the probe ...

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Actress Bynes charged in NYC in accused bong tossComments Off

NEW YORK (AP) — Actress Amanda Bynes was charged with reckless endangerment after police say she heaved a marijuana bong out of an apartment window in New York City.

She appeared in Manhattan court Friday wearing sweats and a long, disheveled blonde wig.

The incident happened at her apartment building on West 47th Street at about 7:40 p.m. Thursday.

Police say a building official called police to complain that Bynes was smoking marijuana and rolling a joint in the building’s lobby.

The officers went to Bynes’ apartment where they saw heavy smoke and a bong, which Bynes then threw out the window in front of officers.

Her attorney says she absolutely denies the incident.

Bynes rose to fame starring in Nickelodeon’s “All That” and has also starred in several films, including 2010′s “Easy A.”

Seen and heard at the Cannes Film FestivalComments Off

CANNES, France (AP) — Associated Press journalists open their notebooks at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival:

KEANU REEVES STEPS BEHIND THE LENS

The transition from actor to director was not an easy one for Keanu Reeves.

Reeves, who showed clips from his upcoming film “Man of Tai Chi” to a select crowd on Monday, said it took him a while to get into the director’s mindset.

“The first day of that was not too much fun,” he laughed during an interview.

“As an actor you are concerned with your role, you are concerned with your story,” he said. “The director’s side is much more other, it is looking out. … The first day I just didn’t quite have it. It wasn’t pleasurable.”

Reeves describes the movie, in which he also stars, as “a contemporary Kung Fu film.” The film is in Cantonese and English.

Reeves said he didn’t want to try his hand at directing until he had the right story. He found it while he was working on “The Matrix” franchise and was working closely with Chen Hu, a martial arts specialist.

“He is who the story is based around. He has a traditional past, he was a young person, Tai Chi champion, National Chinese champion,” Reeves said. “On the other hand, he is also a stunt man who has worked in Beijing and Hong Kong and Hollywood. He has gone out into the world.”

Reeves was one of many who grew up attracted to martial arts movies.

“For me, it was attractive in the sense of the physical-ness of it, maybe the independence, maybe the community,” he said. “For the Kung Fu it is the right and wrong, or the struggle that the characters often face, like ‘They’re going to shut down the temple’ or ‘They have killed your brother’ or ‘You’re being attacked’ and you have to defend or explore. And the exoticness of it, and they look cool.”

“Man of Tai Chi” is set for release in China this summer, with release dates in other countries pending.

— Sian Watson, http://www.twitter.com/sianwatson

AISHWARYA RAI‘S ROLES AS MOTHER, ACTRESS, MODEL & AMBASSAADOR

After taking time off to become a mother, Aishwarya Rai says she’s ready to sink her teeth back in to her movie career — as long it’s for the right role.

Rai, who gave birth to a daughter in 2011, said her time away from film has “flown by.”

Rai says her career choices from here on in will also have to fit in with her new family, even when it comes to doing press interviews.

“Right now I am talking to you while she is taking a nap,” she said during her interview at The Martinez Hotel in Cannes on Monday

“You just naturally discover how to do it because even, like everything else in my life you are just multi-tasking, you just figure out a way to schedule your life and that’s what I have been doing ever since motherhood.”

This is Rai’s 12th visit to the Cannes Film Festival. Beside being a L’Oreal brand ambassador, she was asked to be guest of honor at a special event to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Indian cinema.

“It’s very gracious of the festival to acknowledge it, to have an evening dedicated to celebrating it,” she said.

— Adam Egan, http://www.twitter.com/adamegan

A VERY INTIMATE PARTY IN HONOR OF JAMES FRANCO

The late-night party for James Franco’s “As I Lay Dying,” held in the compact luxury men’s clothing store Smalto, already promised to be a tight-knit affair. But the event became even more intimate with guests rubbing elbows — and much more — as the soiree went well above its capacity limit on Monday night.

Franco didn’t seem to mind the cramped quarters. Dressed in a tuxedo, he held court on a black leather couch, huddled up with good friend Ahna O’Reilly and others, laughing at one point as they looked at their phones.

The event was put on by the charity Art of Elysium, which provides entertainment for sick children in hospitals.

— Nekesa Mumbi Moody, http://www.twitter.com/nekesamumbi

Steely Cotillard shines in ‘The Immigrant’Comments Off

CANNES, France (AP) — Actress Marion Cotillard has given her all and even learned another language to play a Polish woman struggling with the realities of 1920s New York in James Gray‘s terse movie, “The Immigrant.”

The drama, premiering Friday at the Cannes Film Festival, was filmed at Ellis Island where millions of immigrants arrived from Europe in search of a better life.

Cotillard, whose character’s hopes are dashed when she is forced into prostitution, delivers a steely performance, of which large chunks are delivered in Polish, a language she learnt for the role.

She says that learning Polish spurred her on artistically.

“I … create characters that have their own approach, their own physical language. When you have a different language to learn, it somehow helps to create that,” she says.

Kid Rock, Rolling Stones on scalping, summer toursComments Off

NEW YORK (AP) — Kid Rock is a scalper.

The 42-year-old Grammy winner, who is launching a summer tour where most tickets are priced at $20, said he’s scalping about 1,000 tickets from each show to make up for the cheaper regular price.

“I’m in the scalping business, but you know what? We told everyone. A lot of artists have been doing this for years behind fans’ backs, taking all these backdoor deals,” he said. “We look at StubHub and other places and see what they’re selling them for and we just undercut them.”

Kid Rock’s “$20 Best Night Ever Tour” kicks off June 28 in Bristow, Va., and the Detroit native, who released his debut album in 1990, said he likely scalped secretly on past tours.

“I’m sure we have,” he said. “I can’t say for sure, but I’m not going to say that we haven’t. I wouldn’t be surprised if we did.”

Kid Rock’s discount ticket pricing is leading a change in tours where scalpers play a major role as the marketplace for secondary sources for tickets continues to grow, especially in a summer when key acts like The Rolling Stones, Beyonce, Paul McCartney, Taylor Swift, Justin Timberlake and Jay-Z are on the road.

“If I see a scalper, I’ll scalp him,” the Rolling Stones‘ Keith Richards said, laughing.

He said he would like to play free shows to balance the high cost for tickets; The Rolling Stones’ “50 & Counting Tour” has a range of ticket prices, and Pollstar reported that the average price of a ticket among the tour’s seven shows was $355.14.

“I’d do some free shows. I’d work my butt off and I don’t care how much. But these are set up above my head, man,” Richards said in a recent interview. “You’re kind of locked in a thing here whether you like it or not. I wish it was five bucks a ticket.”

The Rolling Stones did play a secret show at the Echoplex club in Los Angeles last month, where fans got in by winning a lottery and had to be ID’d and given photo bracelets to eliminate the chance of scalping the tickets, which were just $20.

But Mick Jagger said there isn’t much the artists can do about scalping and secondary sources for tickets.

“The artist is totally powerless in this. People have made a lot of fuss about it before, but on the other side, some people are like, ‘We might as well participate in it.’ And you can’t really blame the artist for participating in it because why shouldn’t they in a way?” he said. “I know we don’t participate in it, but nevertheless, I don’t blame people if they wanted to do it.”

“You can look at it like, ‘Well, no one’s making any money except these secondary ticket selling companies and they’re making more money than anyone,’” Jagger continued. “It’s completely legal so until it’s illegal, there’s nothing much anyone can do about that.”

Ticketmaster‘s North American President Jared Smith said Kid Rock’s deal, which he completed with Ticketmaster partner Live Nation, is a first of more to come, though they might not be as risky as Kid Rock’s plan, which also includes $4 draft beers and $20 T-shirts.

“I absolutely believe that we’re starting to see the real acceleration of some really healthy things in pricing that are going to create new opportunities for fans to come and experience it in a really special way,” Smith said.

A small way that artists have been able to control scalping is through paperless tickets, which only allows the buyers of the tickets to use them at shows and are not allowed to resell them. Smith said paperless tickets, which launched five years ago, accounts for “about 1 percent” of the tickets at Ticketmaster.

“It hasn’t grown necessarily as a percentage of the total tickets that we sell, but we certainly see more artists employing it,” Smith said. “When it really first started, it was kind of looked at as a tool to use across the entire seats in the arena, but it’s really become a tool for the best seats in the house. Increasingly we see artists using it very, very targeted for like the top 500 seats in the house or the top 1,000 seats.”

Bruce Springsteen, Keith Urban, New Kids on the Block, Radiohead, Rascal Flatts, Selena Gomez, Muse, Miley Cryus, Iron Maiden, Atoms for Peace and Eric Church are among the acts using paperless tickets.

On his “Wrecking Ball World Tour” last year, Springsteen used paperless tickets for 20 percent of the seats, and Ticketmaster said its data showed that Springsteen’s decision helped reduce scalping by 75 percent. (New York is the only state where Springsteen couldn’t offer paperless tickets because the state does not allow nontransferable tickets).

StubHub, the largest reseller of tickets, said business is booming thanks to the top acts on the road as well as summer festivals. But the company, which has a partnership with AEG, knows the idea of paperless tickets hurts their business.

“That limits a person’s right to resell or transfer or to just give away their ticket. We do not support that because we believe in a fan’s right to do whatever they want with their tickets,” said Alison Salcedo, the head of U.S. Communications for StubHub. Fan Freedom, an organization that supports the rights of ticket holders, echoed StubHub’s thoughts on paperless tickets.

“I don’t see any reason why nontransferable tickets need to be the solution,” said Joe Potter, the CEO of Fan Freedom, which is financially supported by StubHub. “Scalpers get tickets through pre-sale and fan club memberships.”

Ticketmaster isn’t against the idea of reselling tickets, in fact they resell concert tickets online.

“More often or not tickets are underpriced, that’s why you see so much resell activity,” Smith said. “What we try to do is make sure it’s done very transparently.”

Ticket holders are allowed to sell tickets at any price on sites like StubHub and ticketsnow.com, that’s why Kid Rock isn’t selling tickets for the first two rows at his shows. He’s randomly pulling fans from the nose bleed sections to enjoy his concert from the venue’s best view. And the first 20 rows at his shows are seats offered through paperless ticketing.

“We really don’t know what we’re going to make yet. We were doing estimates on it and they’re already going through a lot of these numbers, and it looks like it’s going to be a good summer,” he said of what his potential tour earnings.

Kid Rock, whose tour openers include ZZ Top, Uncle Kracker and Kool and the Gang, is playing the same venues he’s performed at in the past, but he said he’s filling up more seats and selling tickets faster. Even scalpers have approached the performer to cut deals.

“I’ve had people in the scalping business come at me already and try to make side deals like, ‘I can make you thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash if you’ll just flip a few of these tickets our way for certain shows,’” he recalled.

_____

Follow Mesfin Fekadu at http://www.twitter.com/MusicMesfin

At Cannes’ movie palace, talk of TV’s riseComments Off

CANNES, France (AP) — The annual Cannes festival on the French Riviera is the grandest platform in the world for the highest ambitions of film, a place where the art form is worshipped with wild passion and adoring reverence. Movies are projected pristinely in regal theaters, where they’re greeted by the world’s cinephiles with feverish excitement.

But even at this bastion of the big screen, director after director has come through preaching the opportunities of the small screen. Up and down the Croisette, talk of TV’s ascendance is rampant.

“The way that things are moving because of the financing of films, television has almost become where a lot of people seek creativity,” said Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn, who premiered at the festival his Bangkok noir “Only God Forgives,” starring Ryan Gosling. “It’s opened up a whole new arena.”

Danish TV’s current quality has spread internationally (including “The Killing,” which was remade in America). Refn, the director of “Drive,” is working on his television debut, a version of the 1969 French science fiction film “Barbarella” for France’s Canal Plus.

Refn said that in the past 10 years, TV has leveled the field, creatively, and is now “sometimes much more satisfying than anything around.”

“I love television,” he said. “I love the size of it. I love to touch them. I like to watch them. I love the remote control. I love the power of the remote control. I love everything about the television.”

One of this year’s most notable films in competition won’t even be released theatrically in the U.S.: Steven Soderbergh‘s Liberace melodrama “Behind the Candelabra.” Hollywood studios passed on the film, which stars Michael Douglas and Matt Damon, suggesting that it was too gay to play at the box office. HBO picked up the $23 million film and will air it Sunday.

Soderbergh, long considered one of America’s finest filmmaking talents, is stepping away from moviemaking, but is enthusiastically moving into television. He’ll reportedly make a 10-episode series about a turn-of-the-century New York hospital, starring Clive Owen. (Soderbergh also produced the 2003 Washington, D.C., drama “K Street.”)

“There’s a lot of great stuff being made,” said Soderbergh. “You can go narrow and deep, and I like that. And this is all (“Sopranos” creator) David Chase. He single-handedly rebuilt the landscape. Anything that’s on now that’s any good is standing on his shoulders.”

“I don’t hear anybody talking about movies the way they talk about TV right now,” said Soderbergh.

But Cannes remains one of the great arguments for the vibrancy of movies. Year after year, it gathers together many of the world’s best films, and this year’s festival, the 66th, has been no different in that respect.

Audiences have been wowed by the Coen brothers’ wry melancholy (“Inside Llewyn Davis”), the classical skillfulness of James Gray (“The Immigrant”), the shambling grandeur of Paolo Sorrentino (“The Great Beauty”) and many other sensory feasts. At Cannes, cinema is utterly alive.

But there are economic forces at work that have contributed to the shift. As audiences have becoming increasingly fractured, studios have concentrated more on enormous blockbusters. While advances in film equipment have made making a movie easier, getting it seen has become harder.

Director James Toback premiered at Cannes his “Seduced and Abandoned,” a documentary he made with Alec Baldwin. The two filmed their sometimes humiliating efforts to find financing — and the necessary marketing budget — for an adult drama. With appearances from Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Roman Polanski, the movie often feels like a funeral for the days of popular, dangerous movies.

“The movie business is tough, and it’s tougher now than ever,” said Baldwin, who largely stepped out of film to star in Tina Fey’s acclaimed sitcom “30 Rock.” ”Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever make another movie again.”

“Seduced and Abandoned,” fittingly, was picked up not for theatrical release, but by HBO. (The network will also broadcast another film at Cannes playing out of competition, Stephen Frears’ documentary “Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight.”)

David Fincher‘s entry to television with the political thriller “House of Cards” for Netflix sent reverberations through the business, partly because Fincher is such a widely respected filmmaker.

But talent is increasingly flocking to TV because of acclaimed shows like “Mad Men,” ”Downton Abbey,” ”Girls,” ”Breaking Bad” and many others. The medium allows for more novelistic storytelling and, often, greater exposure.

“It’s nice for actors because more people see it,” said Kristin Scott Thomas, who stars in “Only God Forgives.” ”You can spend weeks and weeks and weeks making a film that very few people will see, and that’s sort of dispiriting.”

“It’s very satisfying when millions see something,” she added. “It’s as simple as that.”

Not everyone, though, endorsed TV at Cannes. The 87-year-old Jerry Lewis barked: “Never watch television, if you can help it.” Henri Behar, the moderator of Lewis’ press conference, noted that that was an appropriate sentiment at a film festival.

___

Follow AP Entertainment Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jake_coyle

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