People & Places

NEWS/FEATURESARAB TIMES, SUNDAY, MARCH 20, 2016

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Henry Cavill stars as the Caped Crusader and Ben Affl eck as Gotham’s Dark Night the characters’ fi rst big screen pairing sets up the coming ‘Justice League’ and ‘Wonder Woman’ movies. (AFP)

Nia Vardalos and Elena Kampouris attend the Mamarazzi Screening of ‘My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2’ on March 18, in New York City. (AFP)

Santos Drake

PRAGUE: Czech film director Jan Nemec, one of the most talented members of the Czech “New Wave” of filmmakers, who rose to world acclaim in the 1960s, died on Friday after a long illness, local media re-ported. He was 79.

Nemec proved his skill already with his 1964 feature debut, “Diamonds of the Night”, — a tale of two Jewish boys escaping from a transport during the Nazis’ attempt to wipe out all European Jewry, the Holocaust.

After his second fi lm, “A Report on the Party and the Guests,” from 1966, was considered offensive by the coun-try’s then-Communist rulers, Nemec was prohibited from further fi lm work and moved to television.

A complete ban came after the Soviet-led troops invaded the former Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Nemec smuggled out his footage of tanks roll-ing the streets of Prague. (RTRS)

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LOS ANGELES: Joe Santos, known as Lt Dennis Becker on “The Rockford Files”, died Friday morning at the age of 84, according to multiple reports.

TMZ reports that Santos suffered a heart attack Wednesday at his Los Angeles home, according to his son, Perry Santos. He was put on life support at a hospital in Santa Monica, where he passed away.

The actor played Becker, a frustrated Los Angeles policeman, on the NBC show for eight years, appearing in 112 episodes. Santos received an Emmy nomination for his work in 1979 for outstanding supporting actor in a drama

Variety

Television personality and producer Ryan Seacrest (foreground left), and sing-er Taylor Swift (center), join young patients at a ribbon cutting ceremony for the new Seacrest Studio, on March 18, at Monroe Carell Jr Children’s Hospital at

Vanderbilt in Nashville, Tenn. (AP)

O’Brien injured on‘Maze Runner’ setNEW YORK, March 19, (AP): Dylan O’Brien has been injured on the set of “Maze Runner: The Death Cure” dur-ing production in British Columbia.

20th Century Fox said in a state-ment Friday that O’Brien was imme-diately transferred to a local hospital after being injured Thursday. The stu-dio said shooting will be shut down while the actor recovers.

A representative for O’Brien didn’t immediately respond to messages Friday. The 24-year-old is the star of the dystopian science-fi ction series. “The Death Cure” is the third in the franchise.

Trish Knight Chernecki, spokes-woman for the provincial occupa-tional health and safety regulator WorkSafeBC, said an investigation offi cer has been dispatched to the set to investigate. WorkSafeBC Preven-tion Offi cers are on-site at a fi lm set at Cache Creek airport — about 215 miles northeast of Vancouver.

series.Santos built a career around play-

ing in police-themed shows including

“Magnum P.I.” and “Police Story”. Taking a break from being the good policeman everyone loved in “The

Rockford Files”, he played a bad guy on “The Sopranos”.

Santos’ big screen appearances

included roles in the 1971 fi lm “Panic in Needle Park”, where he starred op-posite Al Pacino, and the 1968 Frank Sinatra fi lm “The Detective”. Other fi lm appearances include “Blue Thun-der” (1983) and “The Last Boy Scout” (1991). (RTRS)

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LOS ANGELES: Emmy-winning actor Larry Drake, who played Benny on “L.A. Law”, died Thursday, his rep confi rmed. He was 66.

A cause of death has not yet been revealed. According to TMZ, which fi rst reported the news, Drake was found dead by his friend in his Hollywood home.

Drake played the developmentally disabled offi ce assistant Benny Stul-wicz on “L.A. Law”, which was praised for handling Benny’s odyssey in a very progressive fashion, especially for the time, as he gets the job, fi nds his own apartment and gets a girlfriend over time, sometimes having to fi ght for his legal rights with the help of the attor-neys who employ him. Drake recurred on the series from 1987-94.

He was Emmy nominated for the role three times, in 1988, 1989 and 1990, winning the fi rst two times out. He reprised the role for “L.A. Law: The Movie” in 2002. (RTRS)

Film yields unlikely female hero

‘Batman v Superman’ clash for justiceLOS ANGELES, March 19, (Agen-cies): Superheroes have long existed in a world of their own, but as two iconic caped heroes battle in “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice,” both are brought crashing down to reality as the ramifi cations of their actions catch up with them.

“Batman v Superman”, out in US theaters on March 25, opens with the climax of 2013’s “Man of Steel”, in which Superman’s battle with alien General Zod causes mass-scale de-struction in Metropolis.

In the city’s streets, Bruce Wayne, Batman’s alter ego, sees his company building crumble and blames Super-man for the deaths of civilians, which sets up the clash of superheroes.

“I’m a big advocate of the conse-quences of these movies,” director Zack Snyder told Reuters. “Without the consequences, they’re slightly ir-responsible in that it’s unconditional violence.”

An older, wearier Batman (Ben Af-fl eck) sets out to destroy Superman (Henry Cavill), crossing paths with the psychotic technology entrepre-neur Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg) and elusive Diana Prince, the alter ego of Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot).

Superman meanwhile battles a growing public discourse against his actions, and a senator is determined to hold him accountable.

Fight“There’s always been that little tete-

a-tete with Batman and Superman and there has always been that question by fans — who will win in a fi ght?” Cav-ill said.

Fear also permeates the superhero

fi ght, Affl eck said.“The way that we get afraid, how we

react, sometimes that turns us into the worst version of ourselves ... there’s no place to go from there but to con-fl ict,” he said.

Warring heroes will also feature in Walt Disney Co’s “Captain America: Civil War” in May, where Captain America and Iron Man face off. It offers a new angle to the superhero ensemble fi lms such as Marvel’s “Avengers,” which have generated billions at the box offi ce in recent years.

Warner Bros’ “Batman v Super-man” sets the stage for 2017’s “Won-der Woman” and “The Justice League Part One”.

Superhero stories sometimes hold a mirror to society, with Superman’s 1938 comic book debut often per-ceived as answering America’s need for a hero during the Great Depression.

Eisenberg said “Batman v Super-man” could be seen as a refl ection of current American society, particularly with the Machiavellian Luthor, whom he described as “a classic xenophobe” who instills public fear against the al-ien Superman.

“I think if you look at some of the more nasty, political discourse in at least our country today, you’d see shades of that,” Eisenberg said.

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“Batman v Superman: Dawn of Jus-tice” sees two iconic superheroes do battle on the big screen but a female character — Wonder Woman — is the real role model for youngsters, star Gal Gadot said Friday.

The 30-year-old former Miss Israel

said ahead of the March 25 US release of the hotly anticipated blockbuster that she had never planned to be an ac-tress and felt grateful to be telling her character’s “amazing story.”

Save“I have a four-year-old daughter

and she adores princesses. At the same time she would tell me ‘the princess, she’s so weak.’ She falls asleep, the prince will come and save her and kiss her and he’s the hero,” Gadot told re-porters in Los Angeles.

“So I am so happy I’m going to be the one who’s going to tell the Wonder Woman story. It’s such an important story ... But I also think it’s so impor-tant for girls — and boys — to have a female, strong superhero to look up to.”

Starring Ben Affl eck as Gotham’s Dark Knight and Henry Cavill as the Caped Crusader, the characters’ fi rst big screen pairing sets up the coming “Justice League” and “Wonder Wom-an” movies.

Fearing the actions of a superhero left unchecked, Gotham’s formidable vigilante takes on Metropolis’s re-vered savior, while the world wrestles with what sort of hero it really needs.

And with Batman and Superman at war with each other, a new threat quickly arises, putting mankind in greater danger than it has ever known.

Warner Bros opened its Los Ange-les studios to the world’s media Fri-day, showcasing its stellar cast, which also features Jesse Eisenberg as the eccentric villain Lex Luthor and Amy Adams as Superman’s love interest Lois Lane.

It is Cavill’s second go as Super-

man, three years after “Man of Steel” saw him pitted against the planet Krypton’s villainous military com-mander, General Zod.

“It’s a tough outing for him, because it’s against a psychological enemy as opposed to a physical enemy, like Zod was,” the 32-year-old said of the new fi lm.

“We see him make mistakes, and we see him grow from those mistakes and learn from them”.

Affl eck, 43, who has already direct-ed critical and commercial hits “The Town” and “Argo”, revealed he had felt “emboldened” watching director Zack Snyder work and would con-sider making a big-budget superhero movie in the future.

“I’ve wondered about directing movies like this before and it was a re-ally valuable learning experience for me to watch Zack do it and see how he did it,” he said.

“For me as a director it’s about the material and the characters, so if I found the right material I would defi -nitely throw my hat in the ring to direct something on that scale.”

Affleck, a fan of graphic novels, recalled buying Frank Miller’s 1986 Batman miniseries “The Dark Knight Returns” in his home town of Boston.

“That was the fi rst comic that really took my appreciation of this genre to another level. It was right when people were innovating in that way. ‘Watch-men’ came out around the same time,” he said.

“Newer, more adult, sophisticated, complicated ways of looking at this world started to be developed within the comic genre.

Film

Music‘Concert surprise’

UK singer toheadline festLOS ANGELES, March 19, (Agen-cies): Adele will headline this year’s Glastonbury Festival, the singer announced at a London con-cert Friday night.

“Don’t tell anyone I told you”, she said during a performance at the O2 Arena. “I think it’s a secret.”

But it’s no longer a secret, as reps for the festival confi rmed the news via Twitter just after the singer belt-ed out the news to the arena.

The “When We Were Young” singer will be headlining the Pyra-

mid Stage, the show’s most p r e s t i g i o u s venue, on June 25. This will be the fi rst time Adele has per-formed at the music festival.

But this isn’t the fi rst time the singer has revealed a mid-concert

surprise. Just two days ago, the 27-year-old emotionally opened up to her fans during her concert that her 3-year old son, Angelo, was watching her perform.

BeautifulOn another night, as she sang

“Make You Feel My Love”, she spotted a marriage proposal in the crowd and interrupted her song to point out that a couple had just got-ten engaged. She then invited them onstage and thanked them for “the most beautiful thing” she’s ever witnessed at her shows.

The “25” singer will be conclud-ing her eight-night residency at London’s O2 Arena on April 5.

The Glastonbury Festival runs June 22-26 in Somerset, England. The US leg of her tour begins July 5 in St Paul.

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Pop star Taylor Swift made a surprise appearance at a Nashville, Tennessee, children’s hospital to help “American Idol” host Ryan Seacrest open a broadcast studio for patients.

Swift on Friday met with children at Monroe Carell Jr Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt University Medical Center following the rib-bon cutting on the new Seacrest Studio built at the hospital.

She told the crowd that she vis-ited one of the now 10 studios that Seacrest’s foundation had built at children’s hospitals across the country and wanted to be involved when he opened the latest one in Music City.

“What I saw when I went there was an opportunity for the kids to fi nd excitement and to express their creativity and to learn about what it is to create content, whether you would like to make your own ra-dio show or whether you want to record,” Swift said. “It was so ex-citing to see the excitement that it brought to this one hospital.”

It wasn’t the fi rst time that Swift made a surprise visit to a children’s hospital: She previously visited others, including Hasbro Children’s Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island. She said she has visited the children at the Nashville facil-ity before and the studio gives the city’s many singers and songwriters a place to reach all the children at the hospital.

“Can you imagine the artists and the songwriters and the entertainers who are going to be stopping by the hospital?” she said.

The fully functioning studio lets children learn how to record, do in-terviews, broadcast to the rooms in the hospital and play songs.

Seacrest said he hears back from patients all over the country who have felt inspired by the studios.

“I get the coolest letters and emails from parents and kids talk-ing about how they want to be a tech engineer or they want to be a deejay or they really want to be in music in some capacity,” Seacrest said. “And this gives them a chance to technically learn how to do all of it too.”

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Radiohead pledged Friday to put in place extra measures to pre-vent scalping after tickets for the arthouse rockers’ upcoming tour quickly sold out.

Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke commiserated with fans over social media after tickets to the 13-date tour of major arenas sold out in minutes.

The band warned that venues would scrutinize many tickets at the door, ejecting people without identifi cation that matches the listed names.

“Strict rules are in place to try and reduce online touting, but in-evitably some will fi nd their way onto secondary ticketing sites at infl ated prices,” the band said in a statement.

“We hope you understand the need to put such measures in place to give more fans a chance to get to the shows,” it said.

Adele