Tragedy

When one becomes a filmmaker like Christopher Nolan, you don’t necessarily sign up to become famous – that’s the job of the actors. There are surely a ton of storytellers out in the world you’ve consumed movies and TV from, but couldn’t pick out of a lineup if your life depended on it. That is, however, not the case for Oppenheimer’s Christopher Nolan, as one of his stars, Robert Downey Jr. recently poked fun at while presenting him with another award for the atomic bomb origin story and biography. Christopher Nolan has…

In any big scandal with the power to dominate the nation’s attention, there are inevitably key moments when events could have been stopped in their tracks. Yet few early warnings could have been as prescient as a seven-page memo handed to a Post Office official 25 years ago.During a fractious meeting at Newcastle rugby club in 1999, the note set out a litany of concerns from subpostmasters in the north-east of England who had been piloting the now infamous Horizon accounting system. The issues, including with balancing…

Stories about the power of stories are an easy sell; in part, I think, because they subtly ennoble the producer and the consumer of those stories, shedding a glow of valour on the profession of the former and chosen leisure pursuit of the latter. Ferdia Lennon’s debut novel, Glorious Exploits, is very much a story about the power of stories – and the spiritual and emotional succour they give – though, fortunately, too much of a clever one to fall entirely into the mode of blithe self-congratulation.It is 412BC, the…

As South Korean police on Thursday defended their aggressive investigation of “Parasite” star Lee Sun-kyun for alleged drug use, the country’s entertainment industry was reeling from his death, in part because he is the latest popular performer to die under tragic circumstances in recent years. Prior to Lee’s death Wednesday, 11 other prominent South Korean actors, musicians and other performers — most in their 20s and 30s – have died in suspected suicides, accidents and other incidents, one which was a homicide and…

The Von Erichs were the first family of Lone Star professional wrestling in the late 1970s and 1980s, a dynasty of Dallas-based all-stars who took on all comers throughout the North Texas circuit. First there was Fritz Von Erich, the patriarch who’d begun his career in the 1950s and eventually became president of the World Class Championship Wrestling organization. Then came Kevin, the second oldest of the Von Erich brood of sons (the oldest, Jack, had died as a child) who was being groomed to be the world heavyweight…

One drowned when he was a boy. Another was found dead in a hotel room. A third committed suicide. A fourth died from an overdose. A fifth shot himself in the head. Of six brothers, only one survived to confront the family “curse”.The Von Erichs were stars of professional wrestling in the early 1980s, entering the lore of Dallas, Texas, alongside the assassination of John F Kennedy, the Dallas Cowboys football team and fictional oil baron JR Ewing. Their story is told in a new film, The Iron Claw, starring Zac Efron and…

The Iron Claw, written and directed by Sean Durkin, takes its name from the signature move by Fritz Von Erich, the wrestling persona created by Jack Adkisson in the 1950s: an unmovable grip on the face, tight pressure on both temples, paralyzing an opponent to the ground. The move would certainly hurt if applied with effort but, as with most of professional wrestling, it’s hard to tell the line between feat of athleticism and performance, real pressure and theatrics.Which should be interesting territory for Durkin, whose…

When Ryan O’Neal died Friday at the age of 83, the “Love Story” actor’s troubled personal life presented challenges to those who wanted to remember his positive qualities, which family and colleagues said included his “lethal combo” of charm, humor, good looks and talent. As it turns out, one of the more surprising but “gracious” tributes to this “complex” Hollywood star came from Francis Ford Coppola, who shared a particularly painful history with O’Neal. In 1986, Coppola’s 23-year-old son Gian-Carlo was killed in a…

Classes were canceled through Sunday at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, after the campus was rocked by a mass shooting Wednesday that left three dead, as well as the gunman. The city only six years ago endured one of the worst mass shootings in U.S. history.The shooter was an academic in his 60s, according to sources familiar with the investigation, who declined to provide further details.“This is Route 91 all over again,” said 22-year-old student Olivia Stabile, referencing the 2017 Las Vegas shooting at a music…

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Kenyan photojournalist Mohamed Amin (1943-1996) rose to fame for documenting the 1984 famine in neighboring Ethiopia with powerful images of the tragedy. He also captured the Ethiopian people's suffering during the brutal reign of Mengistu Haile Mariam. These images, broadcast by the BBC, shocked the global public and had a significant international impact. They mobilized governments,…