Jim Carrey calls Trump ‘melanoma’
Actor Jim Carrey has called Donald Trump a “melanoma” and said that the current administration is “raping our system”. In a strongly worded attack reported by the Hollywood Reporter during a panel discussion at the Vulture festival in Los Angeles, Carrey denounced Republicans while speaking about his interest in politically oriented painting. Carrey called Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell “incredibly dangerous, a threat to homeland security. And now he has the nerve to come out a couple of days ago and ask for bipartisanship.” During the discussion, Carrey posted a painting of McConnell on social media, depicting the politician as a turtle waving a white flag on which is written the word “Bipartisanship” while a wave — an allusion to the Democratic “blue wave” in the 2018 mid-term elections — threatens to swamp him.
Carrey reportedly added, “These are not people you can deal with. You cannot be bipartisan with a criminal. A rapist needs to be removed, not negotiated with. These people are raping our system, they’re destroying it right in front of us … This corrupt Republican Congress that was … These people have to be removed from our system because they’re bad for us. Trump is a melanoma, and anybody that covers for him, including Sarah Sanders, is putting makeup on it. It shows that there’s a deeper problem in this country, and that problem is greed.” Carrey also had harsh words for the Christian right, saying: “I think they’re going to find out once and for all that the Christian right has never been about morality, it’s been about holding on to power and using morality to do so.”
Banksy works impounded in Belgium
It had been advertised as “Banksy unauthorised”, a retrospective of 58 of the street artist’s most famous works, put on display in an empty supermarket in a swanky part of Brussels. On Thursday night, a Belgian court proved just how unauthorised the exhibition may have been by ordering bailiffs to seize the art, valued at over £12m. After five hours, and some careful handling, the pieces, including a version of the famous stencil mural Girl With Balloon, were driven away at midnight to an unidentified secure location, where they will sit out of the public eye until another court hearing in January.
Stanislas Eskenazi, a lawyer for Strokar Inside, the not-for-profit organisation putting on the exhibition in the former Delhaize supermarket, said his clients had been caught up in a “crazy story”, pitting a former Banksy manager against a German go-between company whose previous speciality was selling meat. “My clients are two very nice people,” Eskenazi said. “And they have been shitting it.” The Banksy collection was offered to the gallery in the suburb of Ixelles in the south of Brussels by a German-based company called On Entertainment, Eskenazi said. The firm in Neuss said it had been running an exhibition in Berlin, but wanted to bring the show to the Belgian capital.
The show has been on a world tour organised by Steve Lazarides, a former gallery owner, who is said by some to have been the first to launch the secretive Bristol street artist into the public eye. Banksy had not given Lazarides his consent, hence the eye-catching “unauthorised” tag added to the name of the exhibition.
Disney releases The Lion King trailer
The first trailer for The Lion King, Disney’s much-anticipated remake of its beloved animation has been released. The teaser debuted on US TV during an ad break on the Thanksgiving NFL game. The film, which will be released in July 2019, is the latest CGI transfer from director Jon Favreau, whose remake of The Jungle Book in 2016 won an Oscar for its visual effects and took nearly $1bn at the worldwide box office.
A similar approach appears to have been adopted for The Lion King, with painstakingly rendered CGI motion capture of big cats lolloping about sunlit plains. Disney’s 1994 cartoon is the ninth-highest-grossing animated film of all time, and won much praise for its score by Elton John and Tim Rice. It also spawned a stage musical that is still running in New York and London. Including global productions, the show has been seen by an estimated 95 million people.
James Earl Jones, who voiced Mufasa in 1994, returns in the same role for this remake, joined by Donald Glover (as Simba), Chiwetel Ejiofor (as Scar), Seth Rogen (as warthog Pumbaa), and Beyoncé (as Simba’s friend Nala).
