“Marine jailed after trust game turns deadly - The Chronicle Herald” plus 4 more

Marine jailed after trust game turns deadly - The Chronicle Herald
Ford's 'Single Man' premieres at Venice - Skynews.com
Larry Gelbart, comedy writer for TV, film, and Broadway - Philadelphia Daily News
"Sorority Row" movie review: Cliches, horror, horrible ending - Chicago Tribune
Us Weekly shares plot points from 'Sex and the City' movie sequel - Chicago Tribune

Marine jailed after trust game turns deadly - The Chronicle Herald

Posted: 12 Sep 2009 02:18 AM PDT

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RALEIGH, N.C. — Lance Cpl. Patrick Malone was relaxing on his bunk at an Iraqi combat base when a direct superior interrupted his late-night movie. It was time for a game marines sometimes play to build confidence in colleagues: Point a gun at a ...

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Ford's 'Single Man' premieres at Venice - Skynews.com

Posted: 12 Sep 2009 12:38 AM PDT

Updated: 17:24, Saturday September 12, 2009

The man credited with turning around Gucci before launching his own design line has traded fashion for film.

Tom Ford's debut feature 'A Single Man' stars Colin Firth as a middle-aged gay professor, mourning the loss of his younger lover.

Ford based the movie on a novel of the same name by Christopher Isherwood.

Following its world premiere at the Venice film festival on September 11, several critics have praised the movie and tipped Firth to win best actor prize.

Despite the storyline, Ford said he did not want the movie to be labelled a gay film.

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Larry Gelbart, comedy writer for TV, film, and Broadway - Philadelphia Daily News

Posted: 12 Sep 2009 12:16 AM PDT

LOS ANGELES - Larry Gelbart, 81, the award-winning comedy writer best known for developing the landmark TV series MASH, co-writing the book for the hit Broadway musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and co-writing the classic movie comedy Tootsie, died yesterday.

Mr. Gelbart, who was diagnosed with cancer in June, died at his home in Beverly Hills, said his wife, Pat Gelbart.

Comic actor Jack Lemmon once described the quick-witted Mr. Gelbart as "one of the greatest writers of comedy to have graced the arts in this century."

Mr. Gelbart's more than 60-year career began in radio during World War II when he was a 16-year-old student at Fairfax High School in Los Angeles. He wrote for Duffy's Tavern and radio shows starring Eddie Cantor, Joan Davis, Jack Paar, Jack Carson, and Bob Hope, with whom he traveled overseas. He moved into television with Hope in 1950 and spent the next few years writing for the comedian as well as for Red Buttons' comedy-variety series.

In 1955, Mr. Gelbart joined the fabled writing staff of Caesar's Hour, Sid Caesar's TV comedy-variety series. After he went to work there, Hope contacted Caesar to say, "I'll trade you two oil wells for one Gelbart."

Moving to Broadway in 1961, Mr. Gelbart bombed with the musical The Conquering Hero, for which he wrote the book. He returned to Broadway in triumph in 1962 with the hit Stephen Sondheim comedy musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, starring Zero Mostel. It ran on Broadway for more than two years and won a Tony Award for best musical, as well as a Tony for Mr. Gelbart as coauthor.

Mr. Gelbart received an Oscar nomination for his screenplay for Oh, God, the 1977 comedy starring George Burns. He shared a screenwriting Oscar nomination with Murray Schisgal and Don McGuire for Tootsie, the 1982 comedy starring Dustin Hoffman and Jessica Lange.

But most famously there was MASH, the long-running series whose blend of laughter and tragedy made TV history. Set in the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the Korean War, TV's MASH grew out of director Robert Altman's hit 1970 movie written by Ring Lardner Jr.

Writing the pilot, Mr. Gelbart recalled in his 1998 memoir, Laughing Matters, that he knew it "was going to have to be a whole lot more than funny. Funny was easy. How not to trivialize human suffering by trying to be comic about it, that was the challenge."

He told the New York Times: "It was a time - it still is the time, to some degree - of great disillusionment. And the characters filled a hero vacuum." A sense of disillusionment, he said, was part of his own personality.

"I'm not a comfortable person," he said. "There are a lot of elbows inside me bumping up against one another. I think that if you're a reasonably well-informed, caring person, you think life is basically sad ... that this is a sad world we live in."

Besides his wife and two children, Mr. Gelbart is survived by his stepchildren, Gary Markowitz and Paul Markowitz; six grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.