Celebrity News:

Making a movie can be like throwing a rock in a pond. You never know how big a splash it will make, or how far the ripples will travel.
But can a movie change the world?
Yes, though not always in the ways filmmakers imagine.
We've all seen how movies can change attitudes in superficial ways, such as fashion. Clark Gable goes without an undergarment in "It Happened One Night" and suddenly T-shirt sales plummet. Jennifer Beals wears a sweatshirt with the collar ripped off in "Flashdance," and a legion of girls follows suit.
But some stars and filmmakers have always strived for something more, thankfully ignoring Samuel Goldwyn's advice, "If you want to send a message, call Western Union."
Gregory Peck illuminated the prejudice of anti-Semitism in "Gentleman's Agreement" in 1947. Stanley Kramer directed movies about the perils of nuclear war ("On the Beach," 1959) and the human cost of racial acceptance ("Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," 1967). The list is endless.
Look at Utah's own Robert Redford. In the 1970s, he tried to reveal the flaws in American politics in such movies as "The Candidate" and "All the President's Men." In the '90s, he examined media power, successfully with "Quiz Show" and less so when he played a TV news producer in "Up Close and Personal." Next month, he's directing "Lions for Lambs," a sure-to-be-controversial

United States' involvement in Afghanistan.
No doubt the knives will be out for Redford when "Lions for Lambs" opens Nov. 9, courtesy of the right-wing hot-air machine. You can already imagine the all-too-familiar rant: Another "limousine liberal" shoving his pinko politics down our throats, revealing his hatred for the Bush administration and our troops overseas, and so on.
That diatribe is usually paired with another one, which says movie stars are bed-hopping egomaniacs from the Sodom and Gomorrah of the Pacific, Hollywood - people who care only about pampering themselves and maintaining their bloated self-image, not the touchy-feely causes they claim to support. Such criticism follows Leonardo DiCaprio as he talks about the environment, or Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt as they perform their world-saving work.
Those well-worn talking points ignore the ways star power can be used for good, if applied properly. Actor Don Cheadle makes that point persuasively in "Darfur Now," an uplifting documentary (opening Nov. 2 in New York and Los Angeles, Nov. 16 in Salt Lake City) that follows six people battling in different ways to stop the government-sanctioned genocide in that region of Sudan.
Cheadle is one of the six people profiled. He has co-authored a book on Darfur and what everyday people can do about it. And he has traveled the globe (the movie spotlights a trip to China and Egypt he took with his "Ocean's Eleven" cohort George Clooney, another politically savvy movie star) beseeching governments to take action to help the people of Darfur.
In the film, Cheadle talks about the opportunity for change that comes with being a movie star. "I am a celebrity. People stick a mic in front of me," Cheadle says. "I can talk about George Clooney and Brad Pitt, and I can talk about Darfur."
Does using celebrity clout this way pay off? It depends. Get too hectoring, or too downbeat, and you lose the audience. Look at the lackluster reception for "The 11th Hour," co-produced and narrated by DiCaprio, which preached environmental doom to an audience already on board the biodiesel-powered bandwagon.
But if the right mixture of positive message and movie-star charisma can be found, the results can be amazing. The best example is the most unlikely one, Al Gore's climate-change slide show "An Inconvenient Truth."
Love Gore or hate him (and both sides will be well-represented in my inbox Monday morning), there's no denying that his movie struck a chord with audiences, and a couple of Oscars for the film isn't too shabby, either. The fact that Gore's movie shifted the global-warming debate from "Is it happening or isn't it?" to "It's happening - now what are we going to do about it?" is a stunning achievement, one acknowledged by Gore's receiving a share of the Nobel Peace Prize last week.
So, of course, a movie can change the world. Gore's movie already has. The path has been opened for another movie to do the same.