Michael Jackson to Testify in London

(LONDON) — Michael Jackson’s lawyer says the pop star has agreed to come to London to respond to a Bahraini sheik’s $7 million lawsuit.

Jackson had asked to testify by a video link from the U.S. because of an unspecified illness. But his lawyer Robert Englehart informed the court Thursday that Jackson’s doctors had cleared him to travel in two days’ time.

Jackson is scheduled to testify Monday.

Sheik Abdulla bin Hamad Al Khalifa says Jackson reneged on a contract for an album, a candid autobiography and a stage play, after accepting millions in advances. Jackson says the money was a gift. The sheik is the second son of the king of Bahrain.

Twilight Review: Swooningly True to the Book

You needn’t read Twilight, Stephenie Meyer’s best seller, to know where its secret pulses reside. Just see the movie version and listen to the reactions of the girls in the theater. There’s an audible shiver as they first spy the teen vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), his impossibly gorgeous face caked in a mime’s pallor, sitting in biology class next to young Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart). When he holds an apple in his hands to present to her — the novel’s cover image — the girls emit an awestruck sigh, as if they’d just seen Zac Efron in the flesh or a puppy on YouTube. And when he tells Bella, “So the lion fell in love with the lamb,” you hear applause, the imprimatur of Meyer’s young connoisseurs. To judge from a preview screening, Twilight the movie is their dream of the book projected 30 feet high.

Kids have already made this love saga a multimedia sensation, with 17 million copies of the Twilight tetralogy in print and with the CD of the movie sound track at No. 1 on Billboard’s chart. Could this be a Harry Potter-like pancultural behemoth?

Maybe not; the Potter films are superproductions costing in the hundred millions, while the much more intimate Twilight, directed by Catherine Hardwicke from Melissa Rosenberg’s script, has a low-medium budget (less than $40 million) and an artless indie vibe. But just as J.K. Rowling cannily fed tween readers’ innocent lust for adventure, so Meyer smites their slightly older sisters with the adventure of innocent lust. And when the teen witches and wizards of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the sixth film in the series, vacated the prime slot of the weekend before Thanksgiving for a July 2009 opening, the vampires of Twilight moved in. It sounds like kismet, Hollywood-style.

(See 90 Years of Vampires On the Screen.)

Vamping till Ready

Is it destiny that links Bella to Edward? That’s what she feels shortly after she leaves desert-dry Phoenix, where her mother has just married a semipro baseball player, to spend time with her police-chief father (Billy Burke) in rainy, misty Forks, Wash. Bella calls herself “the suffering-in-silence type,” but instantly all the nice kids in her junior class are clamoring to be her bff. Not so Edward. His pained, brooding, utterly irresistible gaze says, I have depths you don’t want to dive in. After sitting next to Bella once, he has to take some sick days. It’s soon evident that he is fighting his fascination for her with all the strength that she is applying to getting close to him.

The word among the local Native Americans (who in movies like this are never wrong) is that Edward and his family are vampires. That doesn’t stop Bella from falling into a love whose toxicity is its lure, just as Edward is risking being with someone he’s severely tempted to devour. Her nearness is like vampire heroin; his love for her has become his religion and his sin. Edward knows he should just say no, but, as he tells her, “I don’t have the strength to stay away from you anymore.”

For any author of imaginist fiction, from J.R.R. Tolkien to George Lucas, from Rowling to Meyer, the fun is in creating the laws, folkways and architecture of the alternative universe that its more fanciful characters inhabit. The Cullens are a fastidious family of vampires; in their tennis whites, with their regal airs, they resemble the aristocratic Flyte brood in Brideshead Revisited. They call themselves vegetarians because they drink the blood of animals, not people. They can fly, move with lightning speed, scale trees in a trice. They also play baseball, which in the Cullen clan is a lot like Rowling’s Quidditch. Their ball-playing, and the scent of human snack food, will attract the notice of a trio of rogue vampires, whose leader, James (Cam Gigandet), is a demon simulacrum of the angelic Edward.

Falling in Love with Love, Again

Twilight also observes movie laws as aged as Edward, who was initiated into the realm of the undead in 1918. Defiantly old-fashioned, the film wants viewers to believe not so much in vampires as in the existence of an anachronistic movie notion: a love that is convulsive and ennobling. Bella could be any Hollywood heroine in love with a good boy whom society callously misunderstands. She’s Natalie Wood to Edward’s James Dean (in Rebel Without a Cause) or Richard Beymer (in West Side Story). Cathy, meet Heathcliff. Juliet, Romeo.

This brand of fervid romance packed ‘em in for the first 60 years of feature films, then went nearly extinct, replaced by the young-male fetishes of space toys and body-function humor. Twilight says to heck with that. It jettisons facetiousness for a liturgical solemnity, and hardware for soft lips. It revives the precept that there’s nothing more cinematic than a close-up of two beautiful people about to kiss. The movie’s core demographic is so young, its members may not know how uncool this tendency has become. But for them, uncool is hot. And seeing Twilight is less a trip to the multiplex than a pilgrimage to the Lourdes of puberty. It’s the girls’ first blast of movie estrogen.

Hardwicke, who directed the teen outsider films Thirteen, Lords of Dogtown and The Nativity Story (another fable about a special girl with a condition that’s hard to explain), is no great shakes as an auteur. She dawdles in sketching Bella’s high school chums, and her direction of the dialogue will often bore those who aren’t mouthing it from memory as the actors speak it. But she chose her leads wisely: the pretty Stewart is a questioning, questing presence; the Brit Pattinson, a sensitive-stud dreamboat. And Hardwicke is faithful to the book’s chaste eroticism. The couple must put off having sex because, well, it could kill Bella. (aids metaphors are unavoidable here.) Yet waiting has its own delicious tension.

So Twilight isn’t a masterpiece — no matter. It rekindles the warmth of great Hollywood romances, where foreplay was the climax and a kiss was never just a kiss.

BlackBerry Storm: The Novelty Wears Off Fast

It seemed like a neat idea when Research In Motion (RIM) announced it in October: the first smartphone with a clickable touchscreen. I even enjoyed the few minutes I spent playing with a pre-release version of the BlackBerry Storm, which goes on sale Nov. 21 for $200 (after the $50 rebate from wireless carrier Verizon).

But after 24 hours of actually testing the new BlackBerry side-by-side with its main competition — Apple’s iPhone 3G and T-Mobile’s G1 (the “Google phone”) — the novelty quickly wore off. I hate the click screen, and none of the handful of people I let try it had anything nice to say about it either. That’s a shame, because the Storm has a slew of handy extras that neither the iPhone nor G1 can match. But an annoying user interface is a deal-breaker.

The trouble with having to push down on the entire 3.2-inch screen every time you type a letter or confirm a menu choice is that it slows you down. The idea behind the clickable screen is that it will minimize errors by getting you to think before you press. Instead, it took much of the fun out of using the device. While some people argue that the iPhone’s touchscreen is a little too slick and imprecise — of the three devices, I tend to make the most typos with the iPhone — at least it’s fast. And while the G1’s mini chiclet-sized keys seem designed for Lilliputians, they are accurate and respond even when pressed with the edge of a fingernail. The Storm’s click screen, on the other hand, demands the strength of your entire thumb. What’s more, the screen jiggles in the phone’s casing when you press on it, which makes it feel cheap.

So, what’s to like about the Storm? Plenty. My favorite feature is the built-in video recording capability, which you won’t find on either the iPhone or G1. And, of course, no one can beat BlackBerry’s e-mail expertise. Verizon, the sole service-provider for the Storm in the U.S., has the best wireless coverage in the country. In addition to the instant delivery, or “push,” of messages that CrackBerry users have become addicted to, the Storm lets you easily search messages by sender or subject, and cut and paste to your heart’s delight. Even viewing and editing attached files are a cinch, thanks to DataViz’s Documents To Go free built-in software. You can even search for key terms inside attached Word files. Sweet. When it comes to messaging, the Storm reigns supreme.

Those are the Storm’s only pluses. Adventurous users can find and download thousands of BlackBerry applications from independent sites like Handango, but the built-in Application Center on the Storm comes with just eight add-on applications for you to install, including Flickr, Facebook, and AOL Instant Messenger. That’s a sore disappointment compared to the thousands of iTunes apps you can click to right from your iPhone and the hundreds of Android Market apps available for the G1. There’s no built-in music store on the Storm either, although a deal with Rhapsody is in the works, according to RIM. Worse, you can’t talk on the phone while you surf the Web (a limitation of Verizon’s CDMA network), and there’s no Wi-Fi. Sigh.

If, like many Americans, you’re planning to scrimp your way through the holidays, the Storm isn’t worth busting your budget for. Even die-hard BlackBerry fans would be better off with RIM’s new Bold, Pearl or Flip. All three have many of the same pluses as the Storm, minus the drawbacks of the unusual display. This is one storm you’ll want to steer clear of this winter.

Why Obama Wants Hillary for His ‘Team of Rivals’

To succeed at modern diplomacy, it helps to take the long view. As word trickled out that President-elect Barack Obama was considering Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State, Clinton was on the phone with the President of Pakistan. Asif Ali Zardari was calling with a long-overdue thank-you. Back in 1998, when Zardari’s late wife Benazir Bhutto was powerless and out of favor with the United States, the then First Lady had received her at the White House, over the objections of both the State Department and the National Security Council. Bhutto eventually regained her influence, and before her assassination last December, became an important U.S. ally. But she had never forgotten that act of graciousness, Zardari told Clinton on Nov. 14. “To be treated with such respect was very important.”

As he wrapped up his second week as President-elect, it was clear that Obama was taking the long view in both diplomacy and politics. How else to explain the fact that he had all but offered the most prestigious job in his Cabinet to a woman whose foreign policy experience he once dismissed as consisting of having tea with ambassadors? Or that Clinton might accept an offer from a man whose national-security credentials, she once said, began and ended with “a speech he made in 2002″? Nowhere did Obama and Clinton attack each other more brutally last spring than on the question of who was best equipped to handle international relations in a dangerous world. That they could be on the brink of becoming partners in that endeavor is the most remarkable evidence yet that Obama is serious about his declared intention to follow another Illinois President’s model in assembling a “team of rivals” to run his government, in what could be a sharp contrast with the past 40 years of American Presidents. “I’ve been spending a lot of time reading Lincoln,” Obama told Steve Kroft on 60 Minutes. “There is a wisdom there and a humility about his approach to government, even before he was President, that I just find very helpful.” (See pictures from Voting Day).

And a shrewdness as well. The surprising proffer to Clinton came the same week that Obama sat down with John McCain in Chicago and helped engineer a commutation for Senator Joe Lieberman, who had backed McCain in the election and faced possibly being stripped of his committee chairmanship. The general amnesty campaign, part of a promise to change the way Washington works, impressed some longtime partisans. “It’s brilliant,” says a senior Republican Party official. “My hat is totally off to the guy.” Viewed more cynically, bringing Clinton into the tent could co-opt a potential adversary in 2012 and put a leash on her globetrotting husband, who has a propensity for foreign policy freelancing. Which raises a question: Would this move, if it happens, be just the first manifestation of that new kind of politics that Obama was promising in his presidential campaign? Or proof that he understands the oldest kind all too well? (See pictures of Barack Obama’s family tree.)

However smart it might ultimately prove to be, the Clinton offer is likely to induce grumbling among some Obama loyalists. The job Obama dangled in front of Clinton has excited a frenzy of speculation and leaking — exactly the kind of thing the no-drama Obama operation did not tolerate during the presidential campaign. And coming amid word that Obama is eyeing an array of former Clinton officials — including former Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder for the top job at Justice — even Democrats began to ask how much change Obama really represents. “What were the last two years all about?” asks one exasperated party strategist. “The restoration of the Clintons?”