Category: 5. Entertainment

Robert Charles Hunter, former CEO of PepsiCo Food Systems, author and the third husband of three-time Oscar-nominated actress Diane Ladd, has died. He was 77.

Charles died Thursday in Fort Worth, Texas, while visiting his children, his family announced. 

Hunter worked at PepsiCo (home of Pizza Hut, Taco Bell & KFC restaurants) for 23 years, serving as CEO for 11 of those.

He and Ladd co-founded Ojai-based Exxcell Entertainment in 1999 — they were married in February of that year — to produce films. Later, he played Detective Hutchinson in David Lynch’s 2006 thriller Inland Empire, which featured Ladd and her daughter, Oscar-winning actress Laura Dern.

Born in Germany on April 2, 1948, Hunter also wrote the 2008 novel Curious Journey: Origins and a 2011 follow-up, Curious Journey: Energy, which “tapped into his intellect and curiosity about the world,” his family said. 

“Robert always loved Texas,” they added. “The wide skies, the bold spirit and the warmth of Fort Worth were part of his soul. Returning home brought him peace and joy — a feeling he often described as ‘like coming back to the rhythm of my heart.’”

Hunter and Ladd first met in Sedona, Arizona. She wrote in her 2023 memoir that he was there for self-introspection as he had been divorced two years at the time and had retired at age 50.

In addition to his wife and stepdaughter, survivors include his children, Brandon, Amy and Emily, and his 10 grandchildren. 

Ladd, 89, earned her Academy Award nominations for her turns in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990) and Rambling Rose (1991).

She was also married to two-time Oscar-nominated actor Bruce Dern from 1960-69 and to businessman William Shea Jr. from 1973-76.

Hulk Hogan never met his grandchildren prior to his death on July 24.

The late wrestling legend, who passed away at the age of 71, due to a heart attack, had “no interest” in meeting his estranged daughter, Brooke Hogan’s twins, Oliver Andrew and Molly Gene, as per the son-in-law, Steven Oleksy.

Former NHL player Oleksy told PEOPLE magazine, “I sent text messages once again to kind of gauge where he was at, but there was no interest.”

He even proceeded to explain how he and Brooke moved to Florida in order to be closer to Hulk as he “was getting older” and struggling with poor health.

“She (Brooke) was there for every surgery leading up to the last two years. She would fly down on her own dime, take care of her dad, and it just made a lot of sense,” he said, adding, “No one understood his body, procedures, medications and everything else more than my wife.”

This comes after Brooke posted a tribute to her father on Instagram to address “a few things” regarding their estrangement and bond.

“It was a series of private phone calls no one will ever hear, know, or understand. My father was confiding in me about issues weighing on his heart, both personal and business. I offered to be a life raft in whatever capacity he needed. I told him he had my support. I begged him to rest, to take care of himself,” she wrote.

Brooke, who is Hulk’s eldest child from his marriage to first wife, Linda Hogan – added: “We had been through almost 25 surgeries together, and then all of a sudden he didn’t want me at surgeries…everything started getting covered in a thick veil. It was like there was a force field around him that I couldn’t get through. (sic)”

“He was telling me these things, being so vulnerable with me and heard my pleas, then suddenly something shifted, and he made a choice to walk the path that clearly tore at his spirit. I felt a disconnect. What followed were respectful disagreements that took an emotional toll on me,” she concluded, explaining what created distance between the father-daughter duo. 

Pamela Anderson and Liam Neeson have been the talk of the town for a couple of moons with their young love – and the fans can’t help but gush over the unprecedented but iconic pairing. As the reports of the early stage romance charm the internet, the actress recently revealed that she watched their newly released film ‘The Naked Gun’ with the actor in an empty theatre.

Pamela Anderson watched the film alone with Liam Neeson

In an appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers, the 58-year-old revealed that she saw her film once without any audience with Neeson. Furthermore, the host asked whether she watched the film anxiously, or the scenes felt funny when she watched it, as she played a silly character. Anderson claimed that she finds it hard watching herself objectively, and her new love interest, Neeson, feels the same way. “It’s hard to be objective, I guess, but you play it straight. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be funny,” she said.

About Pamela Anderson and Liam Neeson

Earlier this week, the sources revealed that the co-stars struck a chord with each other while shooting the film. “It’s a budding romance in the early stages. It’s sincere, and it’s clear they’re smitten with each other,” the source said to People, adding that they are enjoying each other’s company. “With Pamela, first off, I’m madly in love with her. She’s just terrific to work with,” Liam Neeson said in October 2024, and added, “I can’t compliment her enough, I’ll be honest with you. No huge ego. She just comes in to do the work. She’s funny and so easy to work with.” Meanwhile, Anderson added that he is just a perfect gentleman, who brings out the best in you with respect, kindness and depth of experience. “It was an absolute honour to work with him,” she concluded.

Skims

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‘Chip away at self-esteem’

Skims

‘Look beyond buzzwords’

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Armoured vehicles were lined up across the lawn of Dhaka’s premier arts institute, the Shilpakala Academy, when I visited in May. Soldiers had slung camp beds across the ground floor galleries of the fine arts department. The bronze and stone artworks that dot the sculpture garden were overshadowed by the army-green livery of the 1st East Bengal Regiment. It’s been like this since last year’s “monsoon revolution”, when former prime minister Sheikh Hasina ordered the army into the academy, as a base from which to crack down on protests over jobs across the Bangladeshi capital. After more than a thousand were killed in the unrest, Hasina resigned and fled the country. But, a year later, the soldiers are still there; Bangladesh has yet to return to normal. 

The army shares the space with artists and curators tasked with rejuvenating the country’s arts scene. Amid uncertain political circumstances, they have begun to uncover a trove of 20th-century art few have ever seen. 

The Shilpakala Academy’s then director of fine arts, Mustafa Zaman, took me round his basement storage unit. In one room, he pulled out trolleys bearing the close-stacked remnants of a unique — and little known — form of global modernism. There were daring abstract works by Murtaja Baseer, who studied in Florence and came of age in the febrile political climate of Dhaka during the run-up to the war that won Bangladesh its independence from Pakistan in 1971. There were huge but faint canvases by SM Sultan, whose deteriorating pigments marked out a highly stylised, richly symbolic record of Bengali rural life in the 20th century. And then there were a series of black-and-white ink sketches by Zainul Abedin, depicting the victims of a cyclone that struck what was then East Pakistan in 1970; their bold black lines still have a harrowing, virtuosic power. 

They were also in terrible condition, never having been exhibited before. Thousands of important works belonging to state collections have languished for decades in institutional storehouses. 

“All our master painters’ works were just dumped in storerooms, because our culture ministers never knew what their job was — they didn’t care,” said filmmaker Mostafa Sarwar Farooki, who now runs the culture ministry as part of economist and Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus’s interim government. “They didn’t know how to protect and preserve our cultural heritage.” Zaman agrees: “These people just wanted to please the national leader.” 

Over her 15 years in power, Hasina had fostered a cult of personality dedicated to the ruling family. Across Bangladesh, hundreds of millions of dollars were reportedly spent on statues and billboards of Hasina’s father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the country’s independence leader. Arts budgets were drained dry for years, Zaman told me. In another storage unit, I saw abandoned portraits of Hasina and her relatives, gathering dust like a fallen autocrat’s Terracotta Army.

The interim government has appointed the architect Marina Tabassum to take over the governing body of the National Museum: “We gave her a mandate and complete freedom to prepare a reform plan”, said Farooki, who will hold his position until Bangladesh holds elections next April. “Even if it takes years, whoever comes to power after us will have to see it through.” 

They didn’t know how to protect and preserve our cultural heritage. They just wanted to please the national leader

Tabassum has a number of socially conscious architectural projects to her name, building emergency housing in the vast, impoverished Ganges delta. This year, she designed the Serpentine Pavilion in London’s Kensington Gardens, drawing on a tradition of Bengali canopies. She told me about her mission to overhaul Bangladesh’s approach to cultural heritage: “Our primary goal is to see how things are being kept,” she said. “The museums have such rich collections but they are not seen in public, because 90 per cent is kept in reserve.” She wants to put these paintings on permanent display, but, first, she said, “we need to find proper curation”.

It’s a daunting task: there has never been a comprehensive catalogue of the government’s art collection, nor any specialist curation or conservation. “Do these paintings actually exist?” wondered Bangladeshi collector Durjoy Rahman. “Or are they missing or completely damaged?” Several arts professionals told me they feared it might be too late to save some of these works, which have been stored for decades without air conditioning in the Dhaka humidity. 

Meanwhile, there has been “significant market growth for Bangladeshi modern art”, according to Manjari Sihare-Sutin, head of Indian and South Asian art at Sotheby’s in New York. Last year, the auction house sold an ink work by Zainul Abedin from the series I saw at the Shilpakala for over £500,000, one of several works by the artist to have made six-figure sums in the last couple of years. That sort of valuation might encourage some to see Dhaka’s neglected storage units in a different light. 

Perhaps the country’s foremost artist, Zainul Abedin was born near Dhaka in 1914, and trained in Kolkata during the dying days of British India. His most famous works date from the 1943 Bengal famine: ink sketches of the starving people he encountered every day on his way to work. The art school he founded in Dhaka after the Partition of India in 1947 absorbed disparate global influences, including cubist-inflected social realism, nascent abstract expressionism, and Japanese print-making.

Today, Abedin’s designs adorn Bangladeshi banknotes, but his work is on public display in just one room in Dhaka. His often socially conscious work sat uncomfortably with Hasina’s jingoistic, dynastic brand of nationalism. “We were always afraid of her attitude towards my father’s work,” said Abedin’s son Mainul, who lives in his father’s old house, its walls lined with canvases of half-a-century ago.

Now Tabassum says her job is made easier because there is finally the political will to show off modern art. No one can say how long that will last. The walls of government offices still bear the pale white imprints where portraits of Hasina and her father had hung before last year’s uprising.

Nevertheless, Tabassum is determined: “It’s our identity, and we have to preserve it before it’s lost.”

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Floors carpeted in animal print, tables crawling with snakes and lanterns dancing with butterflies: the London home of 81-year-old art collector Pauline Karpidas was a surreal smorgasbord of art and objects. Chair arms morphed into golden swans, and a glass-topped coffee table played host to a copper cabbage propped up on chicken legs. Eyes and noses floated in paintings, hung three-high, by the likes of Warhol, Magritte and Picasso. 

“It was literally like being hit in the solar plexus when you went in,” says Thomas Boyd-Bowman, a senior director and head of evening sales at Sotheby’s London. “Just mind-blowing, the quality of the pictures, the arrangement, the whole thing was extraordinary.” He is helping to bring the assemblage of Karpidas’s apartment, from which she recently moved, to auction: the two-day September event will feature 250 lots with a total estimate of more than £60mn, the highest price Sotheby’s has ever placed on a single-owner sale in Europe. Highlights include The Hour of the Angelus, by Leonora Carrington (estimate £600,000-£800,000), and Andy Warhol’s silkscreen of Man Ray (£400,000-£600,000). 

The collection was amassed by Karpidas and her late husband, the Greek shipping magnate Constantinos Karpidas, who died in 2005. It’s not the first time it has made headlines. In 2009, Karpidas sold the Andy Warhol painting 200 One Dollar Bills that they’d bought 23 years earlier for $383,000; it fetched $43.8mn at Sotheby’s New York. In 2023, the artworks from the couple’s home on the Greek island of Hydra were sold by Sotheby’s Paris for a total of €35,590,282 – more than double the high estimate. 

She is of a lineage of great grande dame collectors like Peggy Guggenheim and Dominique de Menil

Karpidas, who no longer gives interviews, has a somewhat fantastical life story. Born Pauline Parry to a working-class family in Manchester, she trained as a secretary, worked as a model, then moved to Athens in the 1960s and opened a fashion boutique called My Fair Lady. It was a prescient name: it was while she was working in the shop that she met her wealthy husband. In 1974, she had a chance encounter with Greek gallerist Alexander Iolas, who had “discovered” Andy Warhol and championed the surrealists. Using her considerable charm, she persuaded him to come out of retirement, and he became her adviser, introducing her to a circle of artists and dealers that would later expand from the New York art scene of the 1970s and ’80s to London’s YBA movement in the 1990s. “It’s not an exaggeration to say that she is of a lineage of great grande dame collectors like Peggy Guggenheim and Houston heiress Dominique de Menil,” says Oliver Barker, chairman of Sotheby’s Europe, who has worked closely with Karpidas over the past 25 years.

While the couple’s Hydra home was full of works by contemporary stars such as Nan Goldin and Tracey Emin, their two-storey apartment overlooking Hyde Park was populated by a roll call of 20th-century greats. “There’s an absolutely amazing Picabia of a pair of women on a sofa,” says Boyd-Bowman of Les Deux Amies, one of the artist’s “pin-up pictures” from the 1940s (£2.2mn-£2.8mn). Two Picasso sculptures, meanwhile, were bought from the artist’s granddaughter Marina (£300,000-£500,000 each).

But the top draw is the landmark grouping of surrealist work. “Pauline thinks like a surrealist,” says Barker. “She has a very whimsical kind of mind.” The sale includes Salvador Dalí drawings (from £150,000); paintings by Yves Tanguy (from £1mn-£1.5mn) and Dorothea Tanning (from £300,000); and a collection of Max Ernst sculptures (from £50,000). These pieces are coming to market at an auspicious moment, following the centenary last year of André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto. “Their value has risen hugely in the past few years alone,” says Boyd-Bowman. 

Karpidas worked with interior designers Jacques Grange and Francis Sultana, and gallerist David Gill, on her homes, and her collection of design was structured around pieces by Mattia Bonetti, André Dubreuil and Les Lalanne, the French husband-and-wife duo. More than 60 works by the couple in the sale include a bronze daybed entwined in leaves and branches, on one of which an owl perches (£200,000-£300,000), which Karpidas had made up with a tiger-print cover. Jodi Pollack, Sotheby’s chairman and co-worldwide head of 20th-century design, has a personal favourite in the “delectable Choupatte”, the chicken-legged cabbage designed by Claude Lalanne. “Like many of these pieces, it’s unique, expressly commissioned for Pauline,” says Pollack. 

Next month Sotheby’s New Bond Street HQ will bring the collection to public view, many pieces for the first time, in an exhibition. It offers a glimpse into the whimsical world of a collector who is “still buying art”, says Barker, “still supporting young new artists”. And one who knows that animal print goes with everything – Picassos included. 

Pauline Karpidas: The London Collection is on view from 8 to 16 September. The auction will be held on 17 and 18 September at Sotheby’s New Bond Street, London

The Jurassic World franchise registered another box office victory with Jurassic World Rebirth in July, once again proving that there appears to be no end in sight for the 32-year-old dinosaur-centric franchise. Starring Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Bailey, and Mahershala Ali, Jurassic World Rebirth acted as a soft reboot for the franchise, introducing a fresh cast and new narrative.

Rebirth brought the franchise back to its more streamlined story roots, focusing on two small groups trapped on an island full of dangerous dinosaurs and powerful mutant hybrids instead of the globe-spanning action adventure narrative that the previous Jurassic World trilogy evolved into.

That return to the franchise’s roots made up some ground with critics after the abysmal Rotten Tomatoes scores of the series’ last two entries, but in reality critics’ opinions have never had an impact on the success of the Jurassic Park/Jurassic World franchise. As long as the movies include plenty of dinosaur screen time, audiences are on board to check them out on the big screen.

The Jurassic World trilogy immediately returned to the “park” concept before eventually going so far down the nostalgia rabbit hole as to bring back the original movie’s cast. That meant that Rebirth‘s setup with no park, a new island, a new cast, and only the vaguest remnants of plot baggage from its predecessors was a legitimate risk for the franchise’s future if it didn’t work.

Jurassic World Rebirth Is Another Huge Box Office Hit For The Franchise

Universal Pictures’ proverbial roll of the dice with Jurassic World Rebirth certainly paid off, as the summer blockbuster was a huge box office success, just as the entire Jurassic World trilogy was. Currently sitting at well beyond $740 million after less than a month in theaters, Jurassic World Rebirth could still threaten $1 billion at the global box office depending on its legs.

Even if it left theaters today, it would be considered a financial success, given that its lower budget (low for the Jurassic World franchise, at least) means it needs to hit a much lower benchmark for profitability. Jurassic World Rebirth needed to churn out at least $500-$550 million at the box office to turn a real profit, and it blew well past that mark in just a few weeks.

The movie’s strong opening was certainly buoyed by positive early reviews from both critics and moviegoers. Even if the actual critical consensus settled much lower than what one would normally consider good, the bar was so low after Jurassic World: Dominion that any word of mouth declaring Rebirth “watchable” or better was enough to send people to the theaters.

Jurassic Movies Will Keep Coming As Long As Audiences Want Them

If something as experimental in structure as Jurassic World Rebirth is still able to churn out $800-$900 million in a summer in which it goes head-to-head with F1: The Movie, Superman and The Fantastic Four: First Steps, then the dinosaurs will simply never die. It’s

As long as Universal can stomach the initial budget and turn a legitimate profit, then writers will find a way to keep sending people to islands loaded with dinosaurs and genetic experiments. The concept simply works for audiences, even if it is in a “turn your brain off and enjoy” sort of fashion. Like any average grade-schooler, people are still fascinated by real dinosaurs.

The appetite simply hasn’t faded, and likely won’t any time soon. Universal smartly put the dinos on ice after the train wreck of Jurassic Park III, but all that time off did was create more interest in the franchise. The Jurassic World trilogy, as over-wrought as it wound up, simplified the formula into “dinosaurs + bankable action star = box office success”.

Jurassic World Rebirth basically put that formula to the test, swapping out Chris Pratt for franchise cornerstone-level veteran Scarlett Johansson and putting some new dinosaurs into the mix in a fresh yet familiar setting. It all but proved that people will still show up for the Jurassic World franchise no matter what happens.

By the end of Jurassic World Rebirth‘s box office run, it’s likely that it will have cracked the top 10 highest-grossing movie franchises of all time, with well over $2.2 billion to its credit. With profitability at that level, Universal would almost be silly NOT to wring the sponge until it’s dry, and that’s what the franchise’s future holds.

We will continue to get Jurassic World movies until they stop making massive profits. That’s simply the nature of the business in this day and age, and Jurassic World Rebirth stands as the latest example of why the franchise isn’t going anywhere any time soon.

Jurassic World Rebirth

7/10

Release Date

July 2, 2025

Runtime

134 minutes

Director

Gareth Edwards

Writers

David Koepp

Producers

Frank Marshall, Patrick Crowley

And Just Like That…, the reboot of 90s and early noughties show Sex and the City, will come to a close after its third season, HBO has announced.

Show runner Michael Patrick King shared the news on Instagram, saying that as he wrote the last episode, “It became clear to me that this might be a wonderful place to stop.”

Named after its heroine Carrie Bradshaw’s catchphrase, the series followed its characters’ lives, clothes and romances in New York in their 50s.

A two-part finale is yet to air and King said he and Sarah-Jessica Parker, who plays Bradshaw, “held off announcing the news until now because we didn’t want the word ‘final’ to overshadow the fun of watching the season”.

Parker, known as SJP, shared a poem and photo montage in honour of “this chapter complete” on Instagram.

Her co-star Kristin Davis, who plays Charlotte York, posted “I am profoundly sad.”

The franchise, originally based on books by Candace Bushnell, has already been made into two films. But King clarified that, “The ongoing storytelling of the Sex and the City universe is coming to an end,” denying fans the hope of another spin-off.

Viewership has progressively declined over the three seasons, according to Samba TV, a viewing data tracker. Its first episode saw 1.1 million US households tune in, with the latest generating less than half of that initial number.

Criticism has plagued the reboot, in particular regarding its cast’s diversification. Elle magazine wrote that the “attempts to diversify fell flat” while The Guardian called it a “heavy-handed overcompensation” that was “atoning for SATC’s history of racial cluelessness”.

Apparent plot holes have also been spotted by viewers – including the father of one of the main characters seemingly dying twice. Character Lisa Todd Wexley referred to the period when her “dad died last year” in season one but in season three he appeared to have resurrected before suffering a fatal stroke.

The show’s production crew cleared up the rumour, telling The Hollywood Reporter that the first death was in fact of Todd-Wexley’s step-father.

And Just Like That’s final season also saw the character Che Diaz, dubbed the “worst character on TV” by The Daily Beast, replaced by a character who works at the BBC.

Fans have weighed in on the show’s end with comments beneath the cast and crew’s announcements.

“I wanted this show to run until all the characters were in assisted living and retirement communities in West Palm Beach” wrote one.

“We don’t want it to end. We want it to be better,” posted another.

Liam Neeson is clearly smitten with his Naked Gun co-star Pamela Anderson. The seasoned actor opened up about their growing connection during a SiriusXM Town Hall event in New York City, where he spoke fondly of their first meeting. 

“Well, you know, we had never met before and I remember thinking: ‘Wow, she is gorgeous’ but she had this wonderful sense of silliness and just humanity about her,” Neeson shared, describing the moment he met Anderson.

What seems to have drawn Neeson in wasn’t just Anderson’s looks, but her playful and down-to-earth energy. 

“I don’t want to blow her head up, but it was like I just felt an ease with her, you know, and we discovered a silliness with each other, which was terrific,” he said. 

The ease and lighthearted connection they found on set seem to have laid the foundation for something deeper.

Anderson, for her part, admitted to feeling nervous before meeting Neeson. 

“You’re always nervous the first day on the set,” she explained. Wanting to make a warm impression, she brought him homemade treats, sourdough bread, cookies, and muffins. 

“It kept me busy. Kept me outta trouble… It’s a very special [muffin] recipe. It’s very good for you. Let’s just say that,” she added with a smile.

Neeson was clearly impressed. He described her sourdough as “phenomenal” and praised her muffins for being not only tasty but also healthy, saying they had “a lot of bran.” 

Those small but thoughtful gestures seemed to charm him even more.

Their on-set friendship has reportedly blossomed into a budding romance. While PEOPLE reported that things are still “in the early stages,” a source told Page Six that the two stars are “figuring things out” as they continue to grow closer.

John Cena has apparently seen the error of his ways.

The WWE Champion came down to the ring to start off the show but was immediately cut off by his SummerSlam opponent Cody Rhodes. Cena did most of the talking in the promo, stunning everyone by saying that after he had been attacked on SmackDown, he only had one thing to say to Rhodes: “Thank you.”