Ed White, Jimmy Stewart inducted in Aviation Hall

Astronaut Edward White, who gave his life as part of man's race to the moon, was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame on Saturday along with the first female shuttle pilot and the late Hollywood actor Jimmy Stewart.

White, who made America's first spacewalk in 1965 but was killed in a spacecraft fire two years later, was presented for enshrinement by the man who first set foot on the lunar surface.

"Ed had an acute dedication to his work," Neil Armstrong said. "And he was committed to superiority in the conquest of space."

Joining White as enshrinees in Saturday night's ceremony, which hundreds of people attended, were Eileen Collins, the first woman to command an American space mission; Russell Meyer Jr., former head of the Cessna Aircraft Co., and Stewart, who was a bomber pilot during World War II before starring in such classic movies as "It's a Wonderful Life" and Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window."

On Friday night, the hall presented its Spirit of Flight Award to the Apollo astronaut crews for their roles in the moon missions.

White, who grew up in Washington D.C., flew in the Air Force and was among the second group of astronauts selected. His first mission was as pilot for Gemini IV, the first long-duration flight for the Gemini program.

During White's 21-minute spacewalk on the mission in 1965, he maneuvered on the end of a 25-foot tether using a handheld gas gun.

He died Jan. 27, 1967, when a flash fire swept through their Apollo I spacecraft during a pre-launch test at Cape Kennedy, Fla. Virgil "Gus" Grissom and Roger Chaffee also perished in the blaze.

Stewart, born in Indiana, Pa., was a private pilot who enlisted in the Army in 1941 at the age of 33. He sought posting to a flying unit and was assigned to the U.K.-based 445th Bomb Group, first as a squadron operations officer and then as its commander.

He flew 20 combat missions in B-24s, earning the Distinguished Flying Cross twice, the Croix de Guerre and the Air Medal with three oak leaf clusters.

Continuing his post-war service with the U.S. Air Force Reserve, he achieved the rank of brigadier general in 1959, retiring from active duty in 1968. He remained an American airpower advocate until his death in 1997.

Jimmy Stewart Museum president Carson Greene said Stewart was "a good guy _ devoted to family, country and craft."

"If Jimmy were here, and I believe he is tonight," Greene said, "he would be honored to be among these inductees."

Collins, born in Elmira, N.Y., was the Air Force's first female flight instructor and was chosen to be an astronaut in 1991.

In 1995, she became the first woman to pilot a space shuttle, and she became the first to command an American space mission when she served on a shuttle in 1999. She flew four shuttle missions, logging 872 hours before retiring in 2006.

She said she discovered the space program when she was in fourth grade.

"I fell in love with the astronauts, the Gemini astronauts," she said. "I wanted to be just like them."

Collins defended the space program, telling the people in attendance that if they ever hear someone say NASA is adrift or no longer inspirational, that's not true.

"We have the most focused, passionate, motivated and skilled employees," she said.

Meyer, who's from Davenport, Iowa, was a fighter pilot in the Air Force and Marine Reserves from 1955-61. In 1974, he joined the Cessna Aircraft Co. as executive vice president and a year later was named chairman and CEO. He led the development of a program that created more than 50,000 new licensed pilots.

"For somebody who knew at the age of 4 that he wanted to be an aviator," Meyer said, "joining the National Aviation Hall of Fame with all the pioneers that created this great industry is an absolute dream come true."

The aviation hall was founded in 1962 in Dayton, hometown of the Wright brothers, and later was chartered by Congress. Wilbur and Orville Wright were the first inductees.

Other enshrinees include Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, who landed on the moon together on July 20, 1969, and William Boeing, the entrepreneur who established the company that became the Boeing Airplane Co.

Potter - conjures up $159.7 million in 5 days

Harry Potter has returned with some princely returns at the box office. The new big-screen adventure "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" took in $79.5 million domestically over opening weekend and $159.7 million since debuting last Wednesday.

That's the second-highest start ever for a movie premiering on Wednesday, trailing the $200 million five-day opening for last month's "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen."

Jackie Chan praises kung fu of Will Smith's son

Jackie Chan says "Kung Fu Kid" co-star Jaden Smith's dedication to martial arts puts his own son to shame.

The 11-year-old son of Hollywood stars Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith has been training under Chan's stunt co-ordinator for his role in the China Film Group-Columbia Pictures remake of the 1984 hit "The Karate Kid," which kicked off filming in Beijing on July 11.

In a diary entry on his official Web site, Chan said he was deeply impressed by the younger Smith's progress when he visited Los Angeles last month.

The veteran Hong Kong action star said Jaden Smith learned the Chinese phrases for different kung fu moves, responded to orders in Mandarin, and treated his teacher, Wu Gang, according to traditional Chinese custom.

"When he was thirsty, he gave the traditional hand gesture, putting one fist into the palm of the other, bowed and asked permission to drink some water," Chan said.

Chan said Smith even learned the drunken fighter routine he made famous in his 1978 film "Drunken Master."

"He put my son to shame! I provided my son with the best martial artists in the world, and he could not be persuaded to try it. In just two months, Jaden had learned so much. He is truly a talented boy," he said, adding he felt Smith was ready to perform his own stunts in "Kung Fu Kid."

Chan's son, Jaycee, is a singer and actor but has not followed in his father's footsteps as an action star.

Chan posted several photos with the diary entry showing him with Jaden Smith and his father.

He said he was skeptical at first of Jaden Smith's work ethic because he was born into a privileged family.

"Training in martial arts is hard work. It takes years to perfect even one punch or kick. Jaden's father is a famous celebrity, and Jaden probably knows he could get away without having to work very hard. If I couldn't get my own son to train in martial arts, how could anybody else succeed?" Chan said.

Chan said he suggested to Will Smith that he send his son to China for a few years of kung fu training, predicting "when he returns, his martial arts will be truly incredible."

Jaden Smith costarred with his father in the 2006 movie "The Pursuit of Happyness" and appeared in the 2008 Keanu Reeves sci-fi movie "The Day the Earth Stood Still."

Bruno 2009 movie

Cast: Sacha Baron Cohen, Gustaf Hammarsten
Director: Larry Charles
Genres: Satire, Mockumentary, Comedy


Bruno, who has no known surname, is a homosexual Austrian fashionista claiming to be a reporter from an Austrian television station. Sacha Baron Cohen who plays Bruno interviews unsuspecting guests about topics such as fashion, entertainment , celebrities and homosexuality, with an emphasis on the latter as each interview progresses.




Brüno, the latest character to be pulled out of Sacha Baron Cohen's closet, is a comic subversive of such wild extremes that brother Borat has got to be blushing his way out the backdoor in disguise.

If you find yourself in a similar flush, do resist the urge to flee. Like a wayward love child of Lenny Bruce and the Three Stooges, Brüno is an idiot savant of penetration -- breaking through borders, boundaries and anything that resembles good taste on his way to whipping up as much cultural anarchy as he can. I would guess Brüno is holding on to an R rating for this sublimely spicy soufflé by the skin of his, well, let's just not say.

As a towering gay Austrian fashionista who's been waxed stem to stern, Baron Cohen brings a multiplicity of stereotypical sins to bear as he searches out the line between social satire and garden-variety sacrilege. Though I'm sure if he ever found the actual "line," he would immediately flounce across it, possibly in some fetching bondage wear, with director Larry Charles and the rest of the guerrilla camera crew in tow.

It's the subtext running through all of Baron Cohen's work: Whatever naked truth I'm exposing, it's only for the greater good; if you're uncomfortable, that's your problem. Besides, the whole boundary-pushing business is historically ever so thankless a task, just ask martyrs, comics and politicians. So let me take a moment to thank Baron Cohen, our very own hall monitor for humanity, for all the necessary havoc he's wreaked for the rest of us.

Like Borat, Brüno is on a journey. Technically his destination is Hollywood, where fame perfumes the air, but really that's just a ruse for more rounds of the gotcha game Baron Cohen always plays to brilliant effect. Watching is akin to that horror film feeling: the cringe as the unsuspecting soul approaches the trap, the wince as it snaps closed and the hysteria-tinged laughter as the flailing begins. It's strangers Brüno has his eye on, but sometimes I think the unsuspecting soul might be us.

The film opens with a "What would Larry, Curly and Moe do?" moment, if they were X-rated, gay and had a lot of playtime on their hands. There is mostly unmentionable usage of equipment and substances accompanied by a lot of broad physical naked silliness in an extensive sex scene featuring Brüno at the opulent height of his European television talk show career. Ah, the glory days.

But as so often happens, excess brings a fall from grace, and the rest of the film is spent as Brüno tries to resurrect his career. That is, of course, if you buy into the idea that simply being famous is a career, which the ubiquitousness of the Kardashians, the Bachelorettes, the Housewives and the Hills would most definitely attest to. Sigh.

If Brüno is to be believed, what a heart of darkness the pursuit of fame has become. This is apocalypse now. Fortunately for Brüno, camouflage is still a viable fashion option, so it's a jungle he can thrive in.

Baron Cohen, Anthony Hines, Dan Mazer and Jeff Schaffer are responsible for the stun gun of a script that really starts as Brüno wonders how he might become as famous as that other Austrian offspring, Hitler, just in case they haven't shocked you into submission with the earlier bacchanal.

To reach this new low, Brüno stumbles through the anorexia of Milan's fashion week, adopts a black African orphan he names O.J., creates a talk show with Mexican gardeners as benches for B-list celebrities, meets with the head honcho of a terrorist cell that specializes in suicide bombings, does a casting session with stage parents who are almost as scary and, in a final bid at stardom, undertakes a gay-to-straight makeover that takes him into "Deliverance" country where tempers are short and guns are loaded.

Pushing the hot buttons of racism, sexism, egoism, fill-in-the-blank-ism has always been Baron Cohen's specialty. Easy targets picked for maximum impact -- it doesn't take Jon Stewart to know that beer-soaked cage-fighting fans will throw chairs if the combatants start kissing. Yet when the target is an actual terrorist with armed bodyguards, you have to wonder whether it's really worth the risk for Baron Cohen to get that laugh.

The actor, an awkwardly tall British comic who always seems shy as himself, is fearless when he strips down as someone else. As Brüno, he's at his most naked: a guy who can comfortably order TV porn in his hotel room by clenching a remote control in his lower cheeks; or can turn his penis into a full-frontal swinging trapeze act of sorts, a multifaceted member that can also sing out the word Brüno on cue. So clearly we're talking about someone with, um, talent.

Baron Cohen's talent is actually part of the problem. One of the questions dogging the film has been how it can top the pure invention and surprise of Borat. The answer? Go worldwide, go celebrity, go more outrageous and, as often as possible, go naked. That will buy you giant waves of laughter, but hanging out fame's dirty laundry does not trump Kazakhstan's cultural education, if for no other reason than we've had front row seats to the celebrity mess for years.

Ultimately, we're left searching for those moments when the film succeeds in revealing something about ourselves and the times that we don't already know -- though I guess the stage mother who agreed to get her toddler liposuction might qualify.

Lenny Bruce famously said that "satire is tragedy plus time. You give it enough time, the public, the reviewers will allow you to satirize it." It explains why the words that bought Bruce obscenity trials in the '60s are many of the same ones that will no doubt soon be funding a lap pool or some other nicety in Baron Cohen's backyard.

But will a swinging, singing penis buy anything more than a pack of cigarettes and cough 40 years hence? I don't think so.

In Brüno, Baron Cohen tries to serve up an interactive, down-market street version of the provocative intellectual freestyle that Bruce mastered in comedy clubs before they started banning him. Both comics succeed in eliciting laughter and discomfort in equal measure.

But it often seems with Baron Cohen that we're only getting the first half of the joke. Yes, people will look shocked in an airport terminal if your baggage turns out to be a black baby in a box. But maybe it's not only the boxed baby that's horrified them but also the film crew.

And does the outrage from a largely black audience to the O.J. baby on a Dallas talk show speak to their stupidity, as the film suggests, or is Baron Cohen being punked by a group that understands its role as part of this absurdist theater better than he does?

With Bruce there was always a biting moral to the story. With Larry, Curly and Moe, the message was delivered with a bruising bop on the head. Brüno is easy to dismiss as salacious comedy on the cheap, and at times that's what it feels like. But in a world where mercy is a celebrity adoption and the only pain an adulterous governor feels is his own ("Do Cry for Me Argentina"?), Baron Cohen's instincts for outrage are spot on. It's not insight we need at all right now, but a very sharp bonk on the head.

Transformers Ice Age tie for No 1 at $42.5M

Prehistoric creatures and robots are in a photo finish for the Fourth of July box-office crown.

The studios behind "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" and "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs" are reporting their movies in a tie for the No. 1 spot with $42.5 million in ticket sales each.

Numbers reported over the weekend are estimates based on the studio's projections for how much business the movies will do on Sunday. Final numbers Monday will sort out which movie actually came in first, Paramount's "Transformers" or 20th Century Fox's "Ice Age."

Johnny Depp and Christian Bale's gangster epic "Public Enemies" debuted a solid No. 3 with $26.2 million.

Watchmen movie (2009) Critic Review

Alan Moore was right. There isn't a movie in his landmark graphic novel Watchmen -- at least not a really good one. What we get instead is something acceptable but pedestrian, an adaptation that is more a prisoner of its story than the master of it.

The difficulty is not with a lack of fidelity to this dark tale's narrative about an apparent plot to eliminate costumed superheroes from the alternative reality America they've protected and defended. The changes to the story, including updating its 1985 situations to include a subplot about the energy crisis, are so nonessential that you might wonder why Moore has, in addition to taking his name off the project, vowed to "spit venom all over" the film version.

Director Zack Snyder's nonstop public pledges of fidelity to the story notwithstanding, the core of what made Watchmen Watchmen, what turned it into the only graphic novel to land on Time magazine's list of the 100 best English-language novels, is by its nature next to impossible to re-create on screen, even with a 2-hour and 41-minute running time.

For Watchmen on the page has the kind of structural denseness and complexity, a heft and texture that are difficult for film to deliver. Moore and his co-creator, artist Dave Gibbons, added layers on top of layers to the story, for instance ending each of the 12 chapters with different kinds of printed textual material, including book chapters and psychiatric reports. There is even a comic-within-a-comic, "Tales of the Black Freighter," now scheduled to become a separate animated piece with its own DVD release.

All these elements, and more, inform, expand on and comment about the core story in an almost Talmudic way. As Gibbons himself has said, the graphic novel "became much more about the telling than the tale itself. The plot itself is of no great consequence . . . it just really isn't the most thrilling thing about Watchmen."

To be fair, on the other hand, Watchmen's plot is in no way chopped liver, and reverentially sticking to the source material, as the first Harry Potter films did, is the only thing that gives this film what watchability it has. Even if you haven't read the book, even if your first exposure to the story is in this denatured form, you can at least sense the power of the original, and that's what will stay in your mind, not what's on the screen.

The story, as scripted by David Hayter and Alex Tse, begins, as all good mysteries do, with a murder. A man named Edward Blake, otherwise known as the superhero the Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), is brutally killed in October 1985, and lots of people want to know why. This murder takes place in an alternative universe very much like our own but with key differences. Richard Nixon is an American president in both, but in the Watchmen world he's been elected to five terms. This universe has a tradition of masked crime fighters. A group of them banded together in the 1940s as the Minutemen, and another group was formed decades later.

Since the 1977 passage of the Keene Act, this new generation of so-called vigilantes has been forced to retire, and that's what Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman), Ozymandias (Matthew Goode) and Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson) have done. Still active, each in his own way, are the most compelling of the group, Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup) and Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley).

Dr. Manhattan, once physicist Jon Osterman, is the only being in the Watchmen world with true superpowers, courtesy of your standard scientific experiment gone horribly wrong. Often seen pale blue and naked (don't ask), the good doctor is a master of space and time, capable of bending matter to his will. He works for the government now, serving, among other things, as a one-man shield against the ever-increasing possibility of Russian nuclear attack.

At the other end of the spectrum is the hunted Rorschach, the sociopathic terror of the group, given to writing things in his journal like "the night reeks of fornication and bad consciences." With his face a mask of shifting inkblots, he is the first to suspect that "somebody's gunning for masks" and the first to investigate what that might mean.

Given that this is just the hint of an outline of Watchmen's complexities, it's not clear what any director could have done with the material, though many big names, including Terry Gilliam and Paul Greengrass, were given a shot. Though Snyder does not exactly embarrass the material, his selection has not had inspiring results.

For one thing, Snyder has been unable to create a satisfying tone for the proceedings. While the graphic novel played everything as realistically as it could, the film feels artificially stylized and inappropriately cartoonish. That, in turn, undercuts the film's key point that these superheroes have very human flaws and limitations.

With only Dawn of the Dead and 300 in his feature background, Snyder does not have a lot of experience with emotional reality and, except for Haley's bravura performance as the lunatic Rorschach, that hurts everyone.

Unlike 300, which was visually striking (albeit moronic dramatically), Watchmen plays it safe cinematically. Despite being prematurely canonized by the film's publicity apparatus, Snyder stands revealed here as more of a beginner than a visionary in his uncertain approach to making an on-screen world come alive. His decision to up the novel's violence quotient to at times grotesque levels doesn't help.

Ultimately, however, it's hard to fault anyone for this Watchmen's disappointments. It's not a wasted opportunity; it never should have been turned into a film in the first place. But when hundreds of millions of fanboy dollars are at stake, that is not going to happen. Maybe in an alternative reality, but not in ours.

The Hangover (2009) movie

Download The Hangover movie

Cast: Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis, Heather Graham, Justin Bartha, Jeffrey Tambor
Director: Todd Phillips
Genres: Farce, Absurd Comedy, Buddy Film, Comedy

Two days before his wedding, Doug and three friends drive to Las Vegas for a wild and memorable stag party. In fact, when the three groomsmen wake up the next morning, they can't remember a thing; nor can they find Doug. With little time to spare , the three hazy pals try to re-trace their steps and find Doug so they can get him back to Los Angeles in time to walk down the aisle.

The Hangover Critic Reviews:
Amid all the debris of The Hangover, and it is considerable -- the tooth, the Taser, the tiger, the puke, the police, the stripper, the shots and so very much more -- there is a sort of perverse brilliance or brilliant perverseness to be found in this story of a bachelor party gone terribly wrong.

The basic conceit is nothing new: Guys go to Vegas to give groom one last night of debauched fun. But in The Hangover, director Todd Phillips and the screenwriting team of Jon Lucas and Scott Moore have created a heart-of-darkness comedy running naked and wild through the streets. Hysterically and embarrassingly black, The Hangover nevertheless is filled with moments as softhearted as they are crude, as forgiving as unforgivable. And it all begins when they lose Doug.

Doug is the groom played by Justin Bartha. He and BFFs Phil (Bradley Cooper) and Stu (Ed Helms) and brother-in-law-to-be Alan (Zach Galifianakis) make up this wolf pack, as the slightly cracked Alan puts it during a rooftop toast over shots of Jägermeister. At one point, Phil nods in Alan's direction and asks Doug, "Should we be worried about him?" The correct answer would be "Yes," if for no other reason than Galifianakis steals the show.

There is far more than 300 miles of desert separating the two worlds of The Hangover.The sumptuous perfection of wedding cakes, lush flowers and an even more luscious bride back in L.A. is the one the pack is running from. The neon glitz of the Las Vegas Strip with its "we won't tell" promise is the dream they're heading toward, that and a $4,000-a-night suite in Caesars Palace where Alan can wear a man purse while chanting "Who Let The Dogs Out" and seem almost normal.

Doug, the straight arrow in a designer suit with the rich fiancée on his arm, is the one who drew the success card years ago. Since he's lost for much of the film, we really don't get to know him; just as well since he's basically just a nice guy in a bad spot.

Stu, a dentist, is the nerd of the group and hasn't colored outside the lines since the first grade. That he's got a controlling girlfriend is no surprise, though Rachael Harris' Melissa creates a whole new level of acerbic, as in scar-you-for-life acerbic. She's just one of the women that this movie doesn't like. In fact, except for Heather Graham's stripper, Jade, and I would remind you she is a stripper, you get the feeling the filmmakers don't like women at all. That might be more of an issue if they were anything more than window dressing, particularly the bride, Tracy (Sasha Barrese), whose main job is to look great while doing her nails and occasionally frown and pout during phone calls. I think "Where is Doug?" and "Where the hell is Doug?" might be her only lines of dialogue.

Phil, a married schoolteacher with a kid, is the cool guy conflicted by how conventional his life has become. He's supposed to be the leader of the pack, Mr. Confident, we're adults, we can figure this out. His arrogance is hard to take at times, but he does get things going after the guys wake up to a morning-after of what utter mayhem must look like. Their luxury suite is awash with bodily fluids and floating blow-up dolls; clothing, food and empty bottles are strewn everywhere; there's an unidentified baby in a closet, an unidentified tiger in the bathroom and blinding headaches you can almost feel. What there isn't, yet, is any shred of regret.

Like the chicken that is picking its way through this mess, Phil starts trying to get the guys to help reconstruct the night they can't remember.

If you're a gambler, and we're in Vegas after all, the friend to bet on is Galifianakis' Alan, the most complex and strangely likable one of the bunch. Socially awkward, completely inappropriate, genuinely innocent and prescient at the same time, he's like having an R-rated kid on your hands.

When you tire of Stu whining over his missing tooth, or the endless invective of a small, naked, gay Chinese high-rolling mobster named Mr. Chow (Ken Jeong) representing every possible cliché and racial slur rolled into one angry body, Alan is there doing the hard emotional work of The Hangover. While his scenes with the baby are priceless (and sometimes tasteless), Alan turns out to be the one with the emotional depth.

Piece by sordid piece, the night starts coming back to them: the hospital, the police station, the wedding chapel, and, in keeping with its theme of overindulgence, much more. Some bits are better than others, but one of the best comes when former heavyweight champ Mike Tyson enters the picture, his right hook still deadly and his version of Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight" already a YouTube classic.

Another saving grace is the soundtrack. The music provides its own narrative score, whether an oldie such as "It's Now or Never" that has that born-in-Vegas feel, or Kanye West's "Can't Tell Me Nothing" that plays as Vegas' neon skyline unfolds in front of us.

And of course Alan is in there too, finding his inner absurdity and delivering yet another deft touch that lifts the film beyond the ordinary. His best musical moment comes in the back seat of the classic Mercedes convertible his father (Jeffrey Tambor) lent them for the trip. Bruised and nearly broken, both the car and the boys, they are heading toward what they hope will finally be Doug.

It's a simple sing-song that goes something like this, "We're the three best friends that anyone could have, we're the three best friends that anyone could have . . . " Which is also what passes for the moral of this story -- in spite of everything that does happen in Vegas, you could do worse than having friends like these.