Entertainment Shorts

‘Tiger King’ Joe Exotic says he has ‘aggressive cancer’

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP):

The man known as ‘Tiger King’, who gained fame in a Netflix documentary following his conviction for trying to hire someone to kill an animal rights activist, says he has cancer.

“It is with a sad face that I have to tell you ... that my prostate biopsy’s came back with an aggressive cancer,” Joe Exotic, who is being held at a federal prison in Fort Worth, Texas, wrote on a Twitter post on Wednesday.

The blond mullet-wearing former Oklahoma zookeeper, whose real name is Joseph Maldonado-Passage, is known for his expletive-laden rants on YouTube and a failed 2018 Oklahoma gubernatorial campaign.

He was prominently featured in the popular documentary Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness.

He was sentenced to 22 years in prison in 2020 after being convicted for violating federal wildlife laws and a failed murder-for-hire plot targeting Carole Baskin, who runs a rescue sanctuary for big cats in Florida.

In July, a three-judge panel for the US Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit in Denver ordered Maldonado-Passage be resentenced to a shorter term, finding that the trial court wrongly treated the two convictions separately in calculating his prison term.

The panel said his advisory sentencing range should be between 17-1/2 years and just under 22 years, rather than between just under 22 years and 27 years in prison used by the trial court.

Maldonado-Passage wrote on Twitter asking for prayers and “the world to be my voice to be released”, saying there is no evidence he committed crimes.

‘Rust’ film armourer says someone may have put bullet in gun

The woman in charge of weapons on the movie set where actor Alec Baldwin fatally shot cinematographer Halyna Hutchins said Wednesday night that she had inspected the gun Baldwin shot but doesn’t know how a live bullet ended up inside.

“Who put those in there and why is the central question,” Hannah Gutierrez Reed, the armourer for the movie Rust, said in a statement issued by one of her lawyers, Jason Bowles of Albuquerque, New Mexico. “Hannah kept guns locked up, including throughout lunch on the day in question (October 21), and she instructed her department to watch the cart containing the guns when she was pulled away for her other duties or on a lunch break.”

The statement goes on to say that “Hannah did everything in her power to ensure a safe set. She inspected the rounds that she loaded into the firearms that day. She always inspected the rounds.”

The statement adds that she inspected the rounds before handing the firearm to assistant director David Halls “by spinning the cylinder and showing him all of the rounds and then handing him the firearm”.

“No one could have anticipated or thought that someone would introduce live rounds into this set,” Gutierrez Reed’s statement said.

The statement also noted that “she did firearms training for the actors as well as Baldwin, she fought for more training days, and she regularly emphasised to never point a firearm at a person”.

On October 29, attorneys for Hannah Gutierrez Reed said she doesn’t know where the live rounds found there came from and blamed producers for unsafe working conditions.

Iconic western starring Clint Eastwood dubbed in Navajo

WINDOW ROCK, Arizona (AP):

An iconic western starring Clint Eastwood has been dubbed in the Navajo language.

The movie, A Fistful of Dollars or Béeso Dah Yiníłjaa in Navajo, will be screened for free this month on or near the reservation that extends into Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.

A premiere for the cast and crew is scheduled for November 16 at the movie theatre in Window Rock, Arizona. Limited seats are available to members of the public who are vaccinated against COVID-19 and consent to a rapid test on-site.

The 1964 western is the third major film available in the Navajo language. Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope was released in 2013, and Finding Nemo came out in 2016 as a way to preserve the Navajo language.

A Fistful of Dollars was supposed to be released last year, but the coronavirus pandemic pushed it back. Eastwood plays a man with no name who enters a Mexican village amid a power struggle between families.

Navajo Nation Museum Director Manuelito Wheeler said a Western film has been a popular request among Navajo elders.

“It only makes sense to make a movie for them since they are the primary speakers of Navajo,” Wheeler said Wednesday. “I know they’ll have a great time watching it.”

The museum teamed up with the New York-based Kino Lorber film distribution company and the Indigenous-owned Native Stars Studios in Gallup, New Mexico, for the film. It features an all-Navajo cast of voice actors.

S African Damon Galgut wins Booker Prize for ‘The Promise’

LONDON (AP):

South African writer Damon Galgut won the prestigious Booker Prize for fiction on Wednesday with The Promise, a novel about one white family’s reckoning with South Africa’s racist history.

Galgut had been British bookmakers’ runaway favourite to win the 50,000-pound (US$69,000) prize with his story of a troubled Afrikaner family and its broken promise to a black employee – a tale that reflects bigger themes in South Africa’s transition from apartheid.

Galgut took the prize on his third time as a finalist, for a book the judges called a “tour de force”. He was previously shortlisted for The Good Doctor in 2003 and In a Strange Room in 2010, but lost both times.

Despite his status as favourite, Galgut said he was “stunned” to win.

Galgut said he was accepting the prize “on behalf of all the stories told and untold, the writers heard and unheard, from the remarkable continent that I’m part of”. He noted that this year’s Nobel literature laureate, Zanzibar-born writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, was also African.

“Please keep listening to us – more to come,” Galgut added.