Why Brittany Murphy Is Worth Remembering

The tabloids, blogs and social networks have been all a-Twitter with speculation about Brittany Murphy, the 32-year-old actress who died Sunday morning in her West Hollywood home. Were prescription drugs the culprit or hard drugs? (No illegal medication was found in her home, but, police said, large amounts of prescription drugs were in her body.) Bulimia? Depression? Is this a Heath Ledger death or a John Belushi? Long before an official report could be issued, Perez Hilton decried what he assumed to be her reckless lifestyle. Other columnists blamed the vulturous showbiz media for not heeding her pleas, however mute, and healing her wounds. In the larger world, a tandem of reactions was typical. The first thought: Isn't that a shame... The second: Who was Brittany Murphy again?

I'll tell you: she was a talented film and TV actress who, in life, didn't win the acclaim she dreamed of and might have deserved. But above all, Brittany Murphy was the immortal voice of Luanne Platter on the Fox cartoon show King of the Hill.

She is more widely known in death than she was in life. Even now, as you type BRITT... on Google, it auto-corrects to BRITNEY SPEARS. (Type one more letter and you get "Brittany Murphy death photo." Jeez.) Reports abound of erratic behavior on her recent films: she was fired from one, and on another she seemed so addled that another character had to be hastily written in to pick up Murphy's slack. No question that she had lately achieved the wraith look, and there was apparently a volcanic side to her marriage to the English screenwriter Simon Monjack — whose most prominent credit was the script for the bio-pic Factory Girl, about Edie Sedgwick, the Warhol superstar, dead of a drug overdose in 1971. Pop psychologists combed Murphy's filmography for early presentiments of her death, and found one in Girl, Interrupted, the 1999 study of young women in a mental hospital. Murphy plays a sexually abused teen who has an eating disorder, pops pills and eventually commits suicide.

As a professional movie-watcher, I try to concentrate on what an actor does on the screen. Murphy produced a lot of fine work in the 18 years since she successfully petitioned her mother to move with her to Hollywood. She made an appealing early impression in the 1995 Clueless, Amy Heckerling's update of the Jane Austen novel Emma. Murphy played the tough, gauche kid — the title character, so to speak — who is given mentoring and a makeover by Alicia Silverstone. I liked Murphy as Eminem's girlfriend in 8 Mile and in the starring role in Uptown Girls, as a rock star's daughter who becomes Dakota Fanning's nanny. She flitted memorably through Sin City and squirmed inside the romantic straitjacket of Just Married with Ashton Kutcher (who for a time was also her beau). I confess I missed a lot of Murphy's appearances before the camera.

Her work in front of the mike was a different matter. What aspiring movie star goes into cartoon voice work? One who has the comic aptitude for it. Murphy provided the voice for Gloria the penguin, the hero's gal pal in Happy Feet, as well as Tank the Eighth Grader on the Disney animated series Pepper Ann. By the time she was 20 she'd won the role of Luanne, Peggy Hill's dizzy niece, on King of the Hill — and, just because she could, she also voiced the role of Bobby Hill's best friend Joseph (until Joseph hit puberty and his voice changed, literally). Luanne appeared in 231 of the show's 254 episodes, lasting from its debut in 1997 to its demise this year. To be sure, she was a stereotype — the dumb Texas blond — but one that Murphy and the show's writers elevated to the apex of inspiration.

She comes to live with the Hills in the first episode, when her mother stabbed her father and, in the melee, their trailer home was demolished. Wearing a tank top over her bulging bosom and a blond mane over her empty head — except in the season after her hair got singed off in the great Mega Lo Mart propane explosion — Luanne worked as a beautician and, on the side, a performer on a local cable TV station with her Christian sock puppets, the Manger Babies (one of whom was an octopus). In the early years she had a feckless boyfriend named Buckley, until he died in the propane blast. She later dated a series of jerks (voiced by Matthew McConaughey, Owen Wilson, Michael Keaton) and finally married one of them (Tom Waits). But her main function was to vex her uncle, the very conservative Hank Hill (voiced by the show's co-creator, Mike Judge) — once by joining the Communist party, and mostly by having taken Hank's den as her bedroom when she moved in.

The writers provided the funny lines, as when Luanne spots a giant snake in the living room and, as it slithers her way, shouts, "It's comin' to kill me! It knows I'm a Christian!" But Murphy was the young woman's soul. Using a deep-throated, deep-fried southwestern accent (the actress was raised in Edison, N.J.), she gave Luanne a friendly but willful tone that could instantly reach hysterics of mirth or despondency. Murphy put just enough Too Much into Luanne's inane enthusiasms and her fortissimo fears. She knew that the character was deficient in self-esteem and, for all the company at the Hill house, pathetically lonely. Is Luanne a comic figure or a trailer-trash tragic one? In Murphy's superb voice work, she is both. As Luanne once told Aunt Peggy, in a blast of defiance, "I am a proud, ignorant woman, and no one is going to change that!"

So Murphy was a good and gifted actress. Now she's dead. What else can be said? I suggest that, instead of reading the bloggers, you attend to these two comments. One is from Greg Daniels, the co-creator of King of the Hill, in an e-mail to the industry web site The Wrap the day after Murphy's death: "Brittany was extremely kind, talented, funny, and in love with acting. She was a joy to be around. This is very tragic news." The other is from the actress, a while back: "I've always seen myself as one of those 'show people.' My earliest memories are wanting and needing to entertain people, like a gypsy traveler who goes from place to place, city to city, performing for audiences and reaching people."

R.I.P,, gypsy girl — and Luanne.

source:http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1949826,00.html

China to Execute 5 More over Ethnic Riots

(BEIJING) — China has sentenced five more people to death for crimes committed during riots in the western region of Xinjiang in July in country's worst ethnic violence in decades.

The Xinjiang government said five were convicted of "extremely serious crimes" and sentenced in separate trials Tuesday and Wednesday in the regional capital of Urumqi. A faxed statement Thursday didn't specify the crimes or give details.

Five others were also sentenced this week to death, but with two-year reprieves — a penalty usually commuted to life in prison. Based on their names, all those given death or suspended death sentences this week appeared to be ethnically Uighur.

Nine people have already been executed.

Hundreds were rounded up after the riots that saw Uighurs, a Turkic Muslim ethnic group linguistically and culturally distinct from China's Han majority, attacking Hans on the streets of Urumqi on July 5. Uighurs were targeted in revenge attacks two days later. Nearly 200 people, mostly Hans, were killed.

In all, 22 people were convicted of riot-related crimes in five trials this week, the statement said. Eight were sentenced to life imprisonment and four to 10 years or more in jail.

Many Uighurs resent Beijing's heavy-handed rule in Xinjiang, their traditional homeland, and the region has long been wracked by ethnic tensions that occasionally break out into acts of violence. China says it respects minority rights and has spent billions on boosting living standards and economies in minority areas such as Xinjiang.

China blames the rioting on overseas-based groups agitating for broader rights for Uighurs in Xinjiang. Five months after the violence, Xinjiang remains smothered in heavy security, with Internet access cut and international direct dialing calls blocked.

Overseas Uighur groups deny having a hand in the violence and say the trials of riot suspects are politically biased. They say judges have been ordered to issue death sentences before trial and suspects tortured into giving incriminating testimony.

source:http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1949988,00.html

The Pentagon Prepares for a Missile Attack from 'Iran'

Fake "North Korean" missiles have been hurtling over the Pacific toward the U.S. for years, providing test fodder for the Pentagon's missile-defense systems. But next month, the fake enemy missiles flying over the same ocean are going to be "Iranian." The timing of the test, however, has nothing to do with a missile test-fired by Iran on Tuesday. That was a medium-range Sajjil-2 missile capable of targeting Israel or U.S. bases in the Persian Gulf. Next month's U.S. interceptor test will, instead, be aimed at the as-yet-hypothetical threat of an Iranian intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), even though such a threat has been deemed by the Obama Administration to be unlikely in the immediate future.

The Administration announced earlier this year that the long-range Iranian threat isn't advancing as quickly as once feared. Recent U.S. intelligence assessments have concluded that "the threat of a potential Iranian ICBM had been slower to develop than previously estimated," Ellen Tauscher, the State Department's arms-control chief, told Congress. Some intelligence estimates say an Iranian ICBM might not happen until 2020. That assessment prompted the President, with Pentagon support, to scrap a land-based interceptor system based in Poland and the Czech Republic and instead to deploy ships capable of shooting down the short- and mid-range Iranian missiles that U.S. intelligence believes pose a more imminent threat — like the sort of missile test-fired by Iran this week.

Next month's missile test not only will be aimed at a threat deemed less than urgent but will also involve tougher technical challenges. Destroying a "North Korean" missile involves hitting it as it zooms from left to right across an interceptor's field of view, but the locations of the "Iranian" missile and the U.S. interceptors require more of a head-on collision. That means the closing speed between the two projectiles will be faster than in previous tests: close to 18,000 m.p.h., compared with 15,000 m.p.h. in prior exercises.

That reduced shoot-down window means the interceptor will have to work more quickly to do its job. "Whenever we have a situation where we're taking on a missile more head-on than from the side, that increases the challenges," Army Lieut. General Patrick O'Reilly, the U.S. missile-defense chief, told a defense gathering sponsored by Reuters on Monday. The test is expected to send an interceptor missile from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California at a fake Iranian missile, fired from the Marshall Islands.

The U.S. currently has 23 ground-based interceptors based in Alaska and California, and they could be used against missiles launched — for real — from either North Korea or Iran. "They can go both ways," O'Reilly told Congress in October. "If you look at the earth from the North Pole, you'll see that the closest part of the U.S. to Iran is Alaska." He added that the U.S. has other ways of destroying such weapons, including attacking them during the several days it takes to ready them for launch. "All ICBMs right now associated with Iran and North Korea are pad-launched," added General James Cartwright, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, at the same session. "They're very visible, they're up above the ground, and you can go after them before launch if you so desire. We're not advocating pre-emptive, but it is a physical capability that we possess."

It may, of course, make sense for the U.S. to hedge its bets on what it knows about Iran. Two years ago, the U.S. intelligence community declared that Iran had, in 2003, halted its secret push to build nuclear weapons. But last weekend a document, purportedly from inside Tehran's nuclear program, surfaced in a London newspaper suggesting that Iran has been busy developing the sophisticated devices necessary to trigger a nuclear explosion. Some intelligence officials believe that the undated document was written in 2007 — the same year U.S. intelligence said Iran had frozen its weapons program. Then again, neither the U.S. nor other Western intelligence agencies are able to verify the document's authenticity.



source:http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1948070,00.html

Major Volcanic Eruption Feared in Philippines

(LEGAZPI, Philippines) — The Philippines' most active volcano could have a huge eruption within days, officials warned Sunday after detecting a drastic surge in earthquakes and eerie rumbling sounds in surrounding foothills. Tens of thousands of villagers have been evacuated as a precaution.

Scientists raised the alert level for the Mayon volcano after 453 volcanic earthquakes were detected in a five-hour span Sunday, compared to just over 200 Saturday, said Renato Solidum, chief of the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology.

The five-step warning system was raised to level four, meaning a hazardous eruption "is possible within days." Level five is when a major eruption has begun.

Army troops and police will intensify patrols to enforce a round-the-clock ban on villagers moving within a five-mile (eight-kilometer) danger zone around the 8,070-foot (2,460-meter) mountain, said Gov. Joey Salceda of Albay province, about 210 miles (340 kilometers) southeast of Manila.

More than 40,000 villagers have been moved to school buildings and other emergency shelters, but some have still been spotted checking on their farms in the prohibited zone. Salceda said about 5,000 more villagers were being evacuated away from the volcano.

The cone-shaped volcano began emitting red-hot lava and puffing columns of ash last week. It belched a plume of grayish ash half a mile (nearly a kilometer) into the sky Sunday, and lava has flowed about 2.8 miles (4.5 kilometers) down the mountainside, Salceda said.

A major eruption can trigger pyroclastic flows — superheated gas and volcanic debris that can race down the slopes at very high speed, vaporizing everything in their path. There can be more extensive ejections of ash, which can drift toward nearby townships.

In Mayon's major eruptions in recent years, such pyroclastic flows have reached up to four miles (six kilometers) down from the crater on the volcano's southern flank — a farming region where most residents have been evacuated, Salceda said.

Army checkpoints have been set up and patrols have been intensified to ensure residents will not sneak back to check on their homes and farms, as some have done in recent days, Salceda said.

"I have set a very high bar, which is zero casualty," Salceda told The Associated Press. "If there's a lull and you step back into the danger zone, you'll immediately be escorted out."

The evacuations were unfortunate, coming so close before Christmas, but authorities will find ways to bring holiday cheer to displaced villagers in emergency shelters, he said.

He said residents are used to playing a "cat and mouse" game with Mayon, a popular tourist attraction because of its near-perfect cone shape.

Residents who briefly returned to their homes within the danger zone Sunday morning to check on their belongings reported hearing eerie rumbling sounds. Some were seen by journalists tending to their farms within the prohibited zone near Guinobatan township.

In 1991, Mount Pinatubo exploded in the northern Philippines in one of the world's biggest volcanic eruptions of the 20th century, killing about 800 people.

Mayon last erupted in 2006, when about 30,000 people were moved. Another eruption in 1993 killed 79 people.

The first recorded eruption was in 1616 but the most destructive came in 1814, killing more than 1,200 people and burying a town in volcanic mud. The ruins of the church in Cagsawa have become an iconic tourist spot.

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Associated Press writer Jim Gomez contributed to this report from Manila.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1949035,00.html#ixzz0aJV3KyV1