Robert Altman is often described as a maverick, an iconoclast, idiosyncratic in his filmmaking and, as a result, films can look unstructured. That’s because the bits he likes best are the mistakes, he tells Suzie Mackenzie.
Matt Damon hit big with <i>The Bourne Identity</i> two years ago, and now he’s back once more as the ex-CIA assassin taking aim at his former employers. Here he talks about the role and the film.
For his new thriller <i>Collateral</i>, starring Tom Cruise, the director Michael Mann has ditched the first two acts — and jumped straight in at the denouement. He tells Dan Glaister why.
It’s a matter of official record: matric exams are becoming easier. This was confirmed last week by Peliwe Lolwane, CEO of Umalusi, the independent body tasked with certifying the matric exams. A report released on September 21 on Umalusi’s research into standards of the matric exams stated that ”higher pass rates are not a sign of examinations becoming easier”.
An African National Congress document circulating in the Eastern Cape has warned that the province is entering ”a phase of political instability” that threatens the social and economic development programmes of the poverty-stricken province.
A puppeteer who has been putting on his Punch and Judy show for English children for the past 15 years is likely to have his show banned by councillors in the Cornish town of Bodmin in southwestern England. Bodmin’s Women’s Rape and Sexual Abuse Centre had bombarded Reg Payn (48) the town’s officially licensed puppeteer with leaflets on domestic violence, The Times reported on Friday.
In what the Scorpions described as an ”historic development” the elite unit registered the Western Cape’s first racketeering and money laundering conviction against the ”Marx syndicate”. Members of the notorious perlemoen smuggling gang were convicted in the Hermanus Regional Court on Thursday afternoon, said Scorpions spokesperson Sipho Ngwema.
Zimbabwe’s civic and electoral groups on Thursday said they were concerned over a proposed electoral law that would give President Robert Mugabe the power to appoint key members of a commission overseeing elections. The groups told a parliamentary committee in the capital they were also worried that the law did not adequately address issues around electoral violence, conflict resolution and voter education.
Gaye Derby-Lewis, the wife of one of the two men jailed for the murder of Chris Hani, is suing Minister of Safety and Security Charles Nqakula for about R1,4-million, alleging wrongful arrest and malicious prosecution. Derby-Lewis was arrested in November 2002 as part of a police crackdown on alleged Boeremag members or sympathisers. She spent a weekend in jail.