Entertainment [5]

Of the many musical virtues Phish has to offer, funkiness isn't among them. The mighty mass-cult band from Burlington, Vermont, know how to accommodate a wide range of styles -- from country hoedown to knotty prog-rock throw-down -- but whenever they've tried to get on the good foot, they've stumbled.

He's toured with Dylan, sat behind the console for everyone from Los Lobos to Counting Crows, and intermittently made his own albums, on which his pinched voice and off-center songwriting forever doomed him to cult status.

After eight doctors and two years of misdiagnoses, Fran Drescher, who played the brassy title character on ''The Nanny,'' discovered she had uterine cancer -- and found she really did have something to whine about.

Movie stars, as they get a bit older, tend to retain their essential disposition -- the quality that made us fall for them in the first place. (Often, they retain it to the point that they feel locked into it.)

A funny thing happened on the way to the Oval Office. And Helen Thomas was there to witness it.

When we last saw Lauryn Hill, basking in the justly deserved accolades for her debut as a solo act, ''The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill,'' she didn't seem at all unhappy. Little did we know. ''I had created this public persona, this public illusion, and it held me hostage,'' we hear her tell a small audience on MTV Unplugged No. 2.0, her first new work since ''Miseducation.''

A small-town mystery is solved by the amateur sleuthing of a cat. It sounds like the premise of a children's book. Indeed, the style and tone of Catch as Cat Can seem geared toward a younger audience.

Moby called an early album ''Everything Is Wrong,'' but with the release of ''Play'' three years ago, everything began to go shockingly right. Now, for the first time in his decade-plus-long career, he finds himself faced with public expectations, and he's savvy enough not to fix something that isn't even remotely broken.

In the middle of his new memoir, Rick Moody dishes about some folks he knew at a psychiatric hospital in Queens. He had been a drunk and a paranoid. He checked himself in. He describes the ward (a spot familiar to readers of his 1992 novel Garden State), laying out the scene in high-style word-jazz (the prose familiar to readers of The Ice Storm and Purple America), and he mentions, in passing, th...

P. Diddy and Bad Boy Records Present: We Invented the Remix

How can an actor who attempts to convey every conceivable emotion by quickly blinking his eyes maintain a career for 25 years?

In his latest evaporating doodle, Hollywood Ending, Woody Allen plays Val Waxman, a two-time Oscar-winning director who, having fallen on hard times, agrees to direct an explicitly commercial studio picture.

When Sheryl Crow went to Hawaii to shoot the video for Soak up the Sun, the debut single from her fifth album, C'mon, C'mon, the song title proved less than prophetic. The first day of shooting was a washout.

A galaxy of stars turned out for the London premiere of the latest addition to the Star Wars stable, Attack of the Clones.

A galaxy of stars turned out for the London premiere of the latest addition to the Star Wars stable, Attack of the Clones.

Jeffrey Katzenberg, the movie mogul co-founder of DreamWorks SKG, says he wanted to make an animated movie with an animal as the lead character. An admirer of horses -- there's a majesty about them, he says -- he finally settled on a story about a wild horse named Spirit who comes of age during the taming of the American West.

It was the chess computer Deep Blue of its time, a turban-wearing automaton that defeated all comers.

Maybe it's stretching the truth to say that Les Paul invented the electric guitar.

R.A. Salvatore has seen the future. And he is not telling what is in it.

It is one of the most iconic images in film history: A bespectacled man in a boater hat hangs from a skyscraper clock over a busy Los Angeles street. As he dangles, the clock is slowly pulled out of its moorings, and he risks falling to his doom.

One of the most enduring cliches in the automotive industry is that, from DNA to exterior design, cars reflect the people who create them.

It seems like yesterday that we were reliving fond Star Wars memories with the re-release of the original films -- and then again when Episode I: The Phantom Menace was unleashed.

Though many people aren't aware of it, there are two movies opening this weekend. One is about an immature male learning about love, pride, and how to be a man. The other, of course, is Star Wars: Episode II -- Attack of the Clones.

Tobey Maguire is in a strange limbo. The Hollywood powers-that-be know who he is. Hard-core film fans recognize him for his amazing work in numerous well-made, low-key movies. He's even got his share of screaming young female groupies (and he's one of Leonardo DiCaprio's best friends).

He doesn't think of himself as just a singer. R&B star Usher calls himself an entertainer. And he's finally packed up his bags and hit the road for his 2002 tour.

Okay, maybe blondes have more fun. But Kirsten Dunst is here to say that redheads have more 'tude. To play Spider-Man sweetie Mary Jane Watson, the actress dyed the front of her hair red and used a wig for the rest. It looked a little punk-rockish, she says. I sent out a tougher, cooler vibe.

All those readers who respond to critics dissing blockbuster summer movies by saying ''Hey, man, we don't want heavy drama and deeper meaning -- we just want to be entertained,''well, those readers just don't get it. Critics and media snarks like me certainly DO want to be entertained -- we just want to be entertained competently.

If you're one of the 35 million Americans who watched the ''Friends'' finale, you were witness to yet another of its now-infamous cliffhangers. In this go-round -- the show's eighth -- new mommy Rachel (Jennifer Aniston) accepted what she assumed to be a marriage proposal from Joey (Matt LeBlanc), all in a fussy fit of postpartum confusion and domestic desperation.

It has been said that the Star Wars films are critic-proof.

Star Wars fans are crowding into cinemas around the world following the release of the latest blockbuster in the sci-fi series, Attack of the Clones.

Star Wars: Episode II -- Attack of the Clones opened to a record-breaking $30.1 million Thursday, according to 20th Century Fox, which is distributing the George Lucas film.

How hot was L.A. Law? Cast members got to speak at American Bar Association conventions. The show took home 15 Emmys during its eight-year run (1986-'94), and law school applications soared.

The king of salsa, Marc Anthony, is back with his second English language album. Called Mended, the eagerly-anticipated album follows his 1999 triple platinum breakthrough, Marc Anthony.

George Lucas's latest Star Wars episode is to be shown at Cannes -- on the same day as it is released in the United States.

Al Franken is a funny guy, but he takes politics very seriously -- and isn't shy about his liberal politics or taking digs at the Republicans. Here's Franken on a variety of topics.

Spider-Man broke box office records over the weekend, grossing an estimated $114 million. But on May 16, it gets some stiff competition. Star Wars: Episode II -- Attack of the Clones hits theaters, and it may have an even bigger opening, not to mention a bigger summer.

Brian Williams will succeed Tom Brokaw in 2004, NBC announced Tuesday, making Brokaw the first of the big three evening news hosts to set a firm departure date.

Martin Scorsese's long-awaited and still unfinished epic, Gangs of New York, debuted on Monday at the Cannes Film Festival in the south of France.

Glitz, glamour, controversy, Bond and Star Wars are all on offer as the 55th annual International Cannes Film Festival opens.

There's an old joke: Who has been present at the conception of more children than any other person?

The Chemical Brothers have come up with yet another magic formula. The group's new album, Come with Us, sees the duo mixing things up and creating more of those spacious instrumental dance tracks that groove enthusiasts love to hear in nightclubs from Miami to Milan.

German supermodel Claudia Schiffer was booed by fans as she arrived at the church to marry British film producer Matthew Vaughn.

The final curtain has fallen on Cats, the record-breaking British musical that gave the world the hit tune Memory.

American Bandstand started out as a local dance party show in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1952. Four years later, Dick Clark became the host, and in 1957 it went national on ABC. On Friday, the show that made a catchphrase of It's got a good beat and you can dance to it celebrates its 50th anniversary with a special.

Legendary pop singer and psychic friend Dionne Warwick was arrested at Miami International Airport Sunday for possession of marijuana, police said.

In season 5, The X-Files was still at its creative peak (if only for another year or so) and full of surprises. And many of them added significant twists to the show's mind-bending mythology.

Singer/songwriter Enrique Iglesias recently sat down with CNN's The Music Room to reveal a few secrets about his passion for writing and how he deals with screaming female fans when he goes on stage. Here's part of the transcript.

It's an often-told tale that has taken on the aura of myth. No, not Star Wars -- the life of its creator.

Oscar-winning American actress Gwyneth Paltrow has received mixed but not unflattering reviews for her London West End debut.