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Relax, James Woods fans; the actor is not retiring just yet. (But he still wants you to buy his house). Those reports that he announced his retirement in a real estate listing? Fake news. "The reports of my retirement are greatly exaggerated," the 70-year-old Oscar-nominated actor, known for movies such as Once Upon a Time in America, Ghosts of Mississippi and Disney's Hercules, tweeted on Sunday, alongside a tribute to the late Mark Twain, who once coined a similar phrase in response to a death hoax.   Last week, a real estate agent who worked with Woods put out a press release that stated the actor is selling his family's Rhode Island...

Link love time.

• Vulture Michelle Pfeiffer's ten essential roles

• Prizeo Lin-Manuel Miranda offers up the chance to win VIP tickets and a meet and greet at the opening night of Hamilton in Los Angeles with a donation to "Immigrants Get the Job Done Coalition". (And Fyi two former Tony nominees Joshua Henry as Aaron Burr and Rory O'Malley as King George are in the company)

• Vanity Fair on how difficult it is to get a gay film made in today's Hollywood. The headline to this is a bit misleading since it's like "in a post-Moonlight world" but let's be reasonable. Moonlight only made its dent a handful of months back. So most of the films cited didn't have Moonlight to point to when seeking financing

• THR More dirt on what happened behind the scenes on the troubled Han Solo movie

• Nerdist Why Megara is the Mvp of Disney's Hercules...

Holy Crap Yes! It has been announced that Danny DeVito and Jeff Goldblum will be working together on a series for Amazon. This brings me such peace. I love both of these actors. They are both funny, talented, and weird. They are also so unique and to see them paired up makes me so happy.

In the series, DeVito and Goldblum will play Matt Downey (Goldblum) and Arlo Finkleman (DeVito), an iconic music duo from the past (like Hall and Oates or Simon and Garfunkle), who hate each other, but have to reunite. It will deal with these two crazy artists trying to get along with each other as well as all their loved ones, who are equally crazy.

I think what excites me more than the casting is the thought of them as an iconic music duo. Goldblum has a beautiful if not odd singing voice, and DeVito I recall singing in Disney's Hercules,...

Feature Simon Brew 26 Jun 2013 - 06:34

It took over a decade for Carl Sagan's Contact to become a film. It turned out to be one of the most intelligent blockbusters of the 90s...

One of the key achievements of Ronald D Moore's Battlestar Galactica TV reboot, not withstanding the fact that it came in for something of a bumpy landing in its final season, was its willingness to not swerve big issues. At its peak, it was mixing in religion, politics and science, and trying to do so intelligently, with a lot of success. The balance arguably overtipped by the end in favour of the former, but Battlestar Galactica always had courage engrained throughout it.

As does Robert Zemeckis' adaptation of Carl Sagan's novel, Contact. Contact arrived in the summer of 1997, otherwise known as a blockbuster graveyard smeared with some of cinema's most notorious failures and disappointments.

Birthday shoutouts go to Sean Maher (above), who is 38, Ellen Barkin is 59, and Dusty Springfield would have been 74. Jeremy Irons: "I Wish I'd Buttoned My Lip." Ian McKellen on Margaret Thatcher. In ratings news, Defiance was Syfy's most watched series debut since Eureka in 2006. Darren plays pocket pool at Coachella.

David and Neil attend the 2013 Point Honors Gala in NYC.

Below you can see the latest trailer for Star Trek Into Darkness, in which we finally see what Benedict Cumberbatch's villain is packing.

Introducing our new feature - The Weekly ShoutOUT™. Each week we're going to focus on one out athlete/performer and feature a daily pic and career timeline. We'll be showcasing the big names, but also the lesser-known gay celebs who deserve more recognition. This week we give a ShoutOUT to ... Will Young. After winning the first Pop Idol, Will continued his music career, but also branched out into acting,...

Odd List Simon Brew 26 Mar 2013 - 06:44

A superb character actor James Woods has turned in some remarkable performances. Here are a few of his underappreciated roles...

If you're looking for an actor who's far more interested in being a character than a hero, then surely James Woods is your man. He's built up a body of work over several decades that has rightly brought him a degree of acclaim - Videodrome, the brilliant Cop, Ghosts Of Mississippi, Contact, Salvador, and his growing collection of excellent TV roles - but in the 80s and 90s, he popped up in lots of films that are rarely talked about now.

There are so many seemingly lost great James Woods roles, that it seemed long overdue we try and right that particular wrong. So here's a collection of perhaps the lower profile, yet brilliant, performances from his career. And this is just a few of them.

Die Hard 2 director Renny Harlin is to make a 3D Hercules movie.

The Finnish filmmaker, whose credits also include Deep Blue Sea and The Long Kiss Goodnight, will helm the fantasy epic for Millennium, says The Hollywood Reporter.

The movie is being targeted for release before MGM and Paramount's rival Hercules blockbuster, which is being directed by Brett Ratner with Dwayne Johnson in the lead role for release in August 2014.

Harlin's Hercules, penned by Sean Hood and Hanna Weg, is described as a revisionist take on the Greek myth.

"It's not a comic book, cartoony fantasy thing. It's closer to Gladiator than flying horses," he said.

The filmmaker added of the potential rivalry between the two Hercules projects: "I think these are very different kinds of movies in their approach to this legendary character.

"Obviously, Hercules has been portrayed in many different films, such as the Disney animated movie.

A screening of Tarsem Singh’s Immortals inspires James to write a paean to other gods of the big-screen…

Gods, in my humble opinion, are great. I’m willing to put my hand on my heart and then – in scenes resembling my favourite moments of Alien and The Thing – rip open my chest to put said heart on my sleeve and admit that I’m a huge fan of gods.

It’s just a shame for the Thuggee cult that I wasn’t cast as Willie Scott in Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom. Kali would have received my sacrificed organs and cinemagoers would have got to savour even more delicious nastiness in the darkest Indy flick. I’m cool with giving up body parts for the greater cosmological good and for the audience’s entertainment, and reckon Willie should reconsider her priorities, both as a stage performer and a human being.

Josh Keaton appears to have a growing monopoly on the comic book voice acting industry. His extensive list of credits includes pulling double duty as The Flash and Aquaman in Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths, was the voice of Young Hercules in Disney's Hercules and is perhaps best known as the voice of Spider-Man, voicing everyone's favorite web slinger in the critically acclaimed The Spectacular Spider-Man animated series as well as in the popular video games Marvel vs. Capcom 3, Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions, and the upcoming Spider-Man: Edge of Time. Interestingly, Keaton didn’t have an extensive history with Green Lantern before landing the role. “With something like Spidey, I’ve had over the course of a couple decades a voice in my head when I read the comics. I’ve had...

With the Spider-Man franchise about to be restarted on the big screen under the direction of the aptly-named Marc Webb, all talk has focused on who might play the next Peter Parker and other key characters.

The reboot was triggered by the collapse of Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 4 after he fell out with the studio over which villains should be in the story. Raimi wanted Vulture, the studio wanted Black Cat (possibly changed into the newly-created Vulturess), while fans seemed to want other baddies such as Lizard, Kraven and Mysterio.

Which villains - and actors - will end up in Marc Webb's new film is unconfirmed at present, although Zac Efron has been linked to the lead role in at least one report.

With such a tangled web of possibilities, who better to ask for an expert opinion than actor Josh Keaton, who voices Peter Parker/Spider-Man in The Spectacular Spider-Man animated series.

Vox Femina Los Angeles hosts An Intimate Gathering with Susan Egan. Guests will socialize with Susan Egan, the Tony Award? nominated Belle of Broadway and star of theatre, film, television and music, and enjoy a Q&A conversation with Susan and Dr Iris S. Levine, Artistic Director of La's premier women's chorus, Vox Femina. Susan will perform a set, which includes some of her well-known "standards" as well as new repertoire performed for the first time at this gathering. When: Saturday, February 21, 2009, 5 - 7:30 Pm Where: A private estate in Beverly Hills (Address to be given upon ticket purchase) Tickets: $75 per person by calling 310-922-0025 or at www.voxfeminala.org or via E.mail at vfla@voxfeminala.org Susan Egan starred on Broadway in Thoroughly Modern Millie, winning critical acclaim as Broadway's (longest running) Sally Bowles in Cabaret, and received Tony Award and Drama Desk nominations for Best Actress...

Pop beauty Britney Spears has decided to live in the true lap of luxury when she buys her next home - she's eyeing one of the new California houses Donald Trump plans to build. The Toxic singer - who lives in Malibu, California, with her new husband Kevin Federline - and former Hercules star Kevin Sorbo are both interested in one of the $5.2 million villas Trump plans to build in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, according to the 58-year-old property tycoon himself. Trump tells the Wall Street Journal that he and Sorbo discussed the proposed 260-acre The Estates at Trump National Golf Course in Rancho Palos Verdes while golfing in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, last summer.

The stars of Xena: Warrior Princess and Hercules are suing Universal Studios in a pay dispute. Actors Kevin Sorbo and Lucy Lawless are claiming they should have been paid more profit when Universal increased distribution expenses and production costs, and allege they improperly reduced the profits to keep money from them. Sorbo is asking for 8 percent and Lawless is claiming 5 percent. A Universal spokesperson said the company had not seen the lawsuits yet and had no comment. Xena, which became a huge cult hit, ended in 2001. It was originally a spin-off from mythical series Hercules.

Charlie's Angels star Lucy Liu loves being able to flex her muscles in action films because it gives her the chance to show off martial arts skills she learned as a kid. The actress was desperate to jump into fight scenes when she was starting out in Hollywood but she was never allowed to get involved until Mel Gibson championed her for a fight scene in Payback. And now there's no stopping the former Ally McBeal babe. She says, "I started doing stick fighting as a hobby when I was a kid. I enjoyed it, but like an aerobics class or a yoga class I didn't go every day. Then I was unemployed at the beginning of my career, so I could go four or five times a week. I became quite good. I did it really to stay in shape, but as I started progressing in my career I did this episode of Hercules and I took my sticks with me and showed them some of the tricks I could do. I got the job. Then I came up with a few moves with Mel in Payback. It looked good. I like being accepted by the audience as the action woman."...