Film

Donna Summer's family says the singer died of lung cancer even though she wasn't a smoker. TMZ says the diva believed she contracted the disease by breathing in toxic air after the Sept. 11 attacks in New York. Summer, who died Thursday at 63 in Naples, Fla., lived near ground zero. Summer's family rep, Brian Edwards, also said on Friday that the singer's funeral would be private and declined to disclose a time or place for the event. J-Lo: I'm undecided Jennifer Lopez denies she's already quit American Idol.

COLWYN POLICE Cpl. Trevor Parham said the movie he was making with his identical-twin brother would be "like the black ‘Godfather.' " After his arrest Thursday, he may be gaining the right experience to make the film. Parham, 40, of Drexel Hill, was charged with simple assault and official oppression for an April 24 incident in which he shot a juvenile with a stun gun while the boy was shackled in a holding cell, according to court documents. Parham turned himself in to county detectives and was released on $25,000 unsecured bail.

Though he started out as the youngest member of the first British Conceptual Art group in the 1960s, London-based artist John Stezaker quickly gravitated back to picture-making, first appropriating media images and, later, film-derived ones in his collages. He is perhaps best known for his series "Marriage," collage portraits in which he cuts and overlaps two Hollywood publicity shots of two film stars to create one familiar but also strangely distorted face (his closest American counterpart would be Cindy Sherman)

It's rare, in the course of interviewing movie stars about their new film, that one of the actors leans over and smacks another in the head, then rips a soggy bagel out of his mouth. It's simply not done in most proper social settings, even among pampered film actors. But then, most movie stars aren't Jacob and Adam Worton, the blond, blue- eyed, 19-month-old identical twins who make their acting debuts - actually, their crawling, grinning and drooling debuts - in the new comedy Baby's Day Out. "WWAAAAAHHH!

IN AN EERIE TWIST of fate, an 18-year-old was gunned down Monday afternoon on an East Frankford corner, steps away from where scenes from "Dead Man Down," a mob thriller starring Colin Farrell , was scheduled to be filmed Tuesday morning. At least six shots rang out at Tackawanna and Kinsey streets about 4 p.m., just after the youth stepped outside a corner grocery store, cops said. He was hit three times in the torso and staggered about half a block to the Kinsey and Ditman streets before collapsing.

"Today is Black Thursday," Channel 6 cameraman Bob Kravitz said yesterday, the day Saddam Hussein had threatened a "rain of fire. " After almost a week in Saudi Arabia, Kravitz and Action News reporter Dann Cuellar have decided to sleep during the day and remain awake at night because "that's when he starts peppering us with his Scuds," Kravitz said in a telephone interview from eastern Saudi Arabia. "This was the first morning we didn't get a 'wake-up' call. We call it Scud awake," he said.

The movie market in Cannes, France, this week is such a dramatic sideshow that this year it's getting its own film. Director James Toback and actor Alec Baldwin are running along Boulevard de la Croisette, filming a documentary on the feverish deal-making that surrounds the film festival. The industry hatches deals in hotel rooms, over drinks at evening parties, and aboard yachts just off the beach. Toback, director of Fingers and Tyson, will document the process of selling a film at Cannes while also trying to land financing for a fictional film.

In another sign of the lure of precious metals in a tight economy, two local hospitals announced Friday that thieves stole scrap X-rays last month, presumably to harvest silver from them. Thomas Jefferson University Hospital and Lankenau Medical Center said they were concerned about the thefts primarily because of patient privacy issues. Some of the stolen films may have included patients' names and birth dates, although they did not include Social Security numbers, addresses, or financial information.

This week's DVD releases have a real manly quality. Albert Nobbs , Grade B-plus: Some of the most powerful moments in films are those without dialogue and with little action. It's in these moments that you can tell the difference between those hired to act in movies and those who really act. Oscar nominee Glenn Close shows in Albert Nobbs her superlative acting skills by turning scenes where the camera just lingers on her face into emotionally explosive moments.

The man responsible for bringing the controversial film, "Hail, Mary," to Philadelphia pondered the dozen religious protesters who were praying the rosary on the street below and felt a certain sense of relief. "We think this is the easier part now," film programmer Ray Murray, a Roman Catholic, said yesterday afternoon in his second-floor office as the French movie began a one-week run at the Theatre of the Living Arts on South Street. "We've been under a lot of tension with the letters and calls . . .," Murray said.

Israeli American film director Oren Peli took theaters by storm with Paranormal Activity in 2009, a micro-budget, do-it-yourself haunted-house story that became an international phenomenon. He puts his screen smarts to good use as creator of the ABC horror/fantasy television show The River, an engaging, exciting supernatural adventure about a scientist and Steve Irwin-esque TV show host, Dr. Emmet Cole (Bruce Greenwood), who goes missing while searching in the Amazon for magic.

This week's DVD selections offer different looks at male bonding. The Grey, Grade B: A group of survivors of a plane crash must battle a pack of hungry wolves. Liam Neeson stars. Unlike the traditional horror film, The Grey doesn't allow for passive viewing. Joe Carnahan shot the film in sub-zero weather, giving it an authentic feel. From the men struggling to make their way through waist-deep snow to the dramatic curl of their frozen breath, The Grey reaches out with icy fingers to pull the viewer into the ordeal.

Repertory Films Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University 1900 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy.; 215-299-1000. www.ansp.org . Mega-Bad Movie Night: Sharktopus (2010) $15. 5/31. 8-10 pm. The Barnes Foundation - Philadelphia 2025 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy.; 215-278-7000. www.barnesfoundation.org . The Collector. 5/26. 10 am. WHYY Documentary on the Barnes Foundation. 5/26. 7:30 pm. Entr'acte (France, 1924) 5/26. 9:30 pm. Midnight Film Series: Philadelphia Film Society.

Homeland Security Committee Chairman Peter King, R-N.Y., charged Wednesday that the CIA and Defense Department jeopardized national security by cooperating too closely with Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal on their movie about the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. King first raised questions about the bin Laden movie last summer. But referencing new documents obtained by Judicial Watch in a Freedom of Information Act request, King said the filmmakers received "extremely close, unprecedented and potentially dangerous collaboration" from the Obama administration.

The movie market in Cannes, France, this week is such a dramatic sideshow that this year it's getting its own film. Director James Toback and actor Alec Baldwin are running along Boulevard de la Croisette, filming a documentary on the feverish deal-making that surrounds the film festival. The industry hatches deals in hotel rooms, over drinks at evening parties, and aboard yachts just off the beach. Toback, director of Fingers and Tyson, will document the process of selling a film at Cannes while also trying to land financing for a fictional film.

This week's DVD releases have a real manly quality. Albert Nobbs , Grade B-plus: Some of the most powerful moments in films are those without dialogue and with little action. It's in these moments that you can tell the difference between those hired to act in movies and those who really act. Oscar nominee Glenn Close shows in Albert Nobbs her superlative acting skills by turning scenes where the camera just lingers on her face into emotionally explosive moments.

There's no end to movie books — star memoirs, critical career overviews, coffee table "making of" commemorations (The Art of John Carter: A Visual Journey — really?!), sex-laden, scandalous tell-alls. Heck, somebody's even written a book about movie stars on bikes. But is that a bad thing? Of course not. For the serious film addict, watching movies is never enough. We crave more information, more insight, more dirt. So here are three compelling, original, cinema-inclined new books: The Astaires: Fred & Adele, Kathleen Riley (Oxford University Press, $27.95)

This week's new DVD options include a romance, classic Westerns, and a religion-meets-science offering. The Vow, Grade B: A woman (Rachel McAdams) wakes up from a coma with no memory of her marriage. The romance film is loosely based on a true story. Rachel McAdams and Channing Tatum are the film's biggest assets. She has the kind of angelic face and sweet personality that make it easy to fall in love with her. Tatum brings both a rough physicality and surprising vulnerability to the role.

PHILADELPHIA NATIVE Rel Dowdell had a fairy-tale baptism in the world of independent film. While at film school at Boston University, Dowdell pitched his idea for a student short film to Esther Rolle, expanded that to a feature called "Train Ride," released it on DVD and saw it heralded as one of the top 10 titles of the year for 2000. That's the good news. The bad news: Dowdell had exhausted his lifetime supply of good news. He was about to discover firsthand just how hard it is to make and distribute a truly independent movie.