It’s that time of the year again, and as the Christmas adverts roll out, Asda have bagged themselves a big Hollywood star for their festive offering.
Using classic footage from the 2003 movie, Will Ferrell stars as Buddy the Elf, undertaking a trial day in the store in the run-up to Christmas.
With plenty of nods to the original film, the 90-second advert shows Buddy dodging trolley disasters, gobbling pigs in blankets and singing on the store tannoy system.
Despite decorating the supermarket in fairly lights, renaming the self-checkout “elf-checkout” and falling into a Christmas tree, Buddy gets the job.
The ad ends with the tag line, “Have your Elf a Merry Christmas”.
If you’re wondering, Farrell didn’t actually prance his way around the store in real life – instead a process called rotoscoping was used to take Buddy out of the original film and place him into newly filmed scenes in the supermarket.
The advert was shot by multi-award-winning director Danny Kleinman who has designed every title sequence for the James Bond movies since GoldenEye in 1995, except for Quantum of Solace.
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He’s also directed music videos for stars including Madonna, Fleetwood Mac, and Adam Ant.
Asda’s advert premieres on Friday 4 November at 8.45pm on ITV during Coronation Street and has already been released online.
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Lidl will also be premiering their Xmas advert in the same break, featuring a deadpan teddy bear who becomes an unlikely global celebrity.
Refreshingly, the supermarket won’t be selling the Lidl Bear in their stores, instead using it as the inspiration for their Christmas charitable drive – Lidl Bear’s Toy Bank – which encourages customers to donate unwrapped toys and games which will be given to children across the UK through the Neighbourly community network.
Meanwhile, Sainsbury’s too will be squeezing into the same Coronation Street slot, with This Morning presenter Alison Hammond starring as a medieval countess who doesn’t like Christmas puddings.
And M&S reunites comedians Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders, playing Fairy and her new pal Duckie in their advert, which reimagines the fairy at the top of the Christmas tree.
The long-awaited John Lewis Christmas advert – which has become something of a national obsession in recent years – is expected to come out next week, although formal timings are yet to be released.
Kris Kristofferson, the country music legend and A Star Is Born actor, has died at the age of 88.
The singer-songwriter died peacefully at his home in Maui, Hawaii, on Saturday, family spokesperson Ebie McFarland said.
No cause of death was given but the musician had been suffering from memory loss since he was in his 70s.
Born in Brownsville, Texas, Kristofferson started his music career in the mid-1960s.
Despite being a singer himself, many of his songs were best known as performed by others, including Ray Price’s US number one hit For the Good Times and Janis Joplin’s 1971 single Me And Bobby McGee.
In the mid-1980s he joined forces with Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings to create the country supergroup The Highwaymen, releasing three albums before all four returned to their solo careers.
Former bandmate Nelson said there was “no better songwriter alive” when talking about Kristofferson during a 2009 award ceremony.
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“Everything he writes is a standard and we’re all just going to have to live with that,” Nelson said.
Kristofferson won a Grammy Award for hit Help Me Make It Through The Night and was indicted into the county music hall of fame in 2004.
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As an actor, he won the 1976 Golden Globe Award for Best Actor after his performance in romantic drama A Star Is Born opposite Barbra Streisand.
The film was a remake of the 1937 original with Janet Gaynor and Fredric March, and was later adapted into a musical starring Judy Garland and James Mason and subsequently again in 2018 starring Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper.
Kristofferson also appeared opposite Ellen Burstyn in Martin Scorsese’s 1974 film Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and acted alongside Wesley Snipes in Marvel’s Blade in 1998.
Before the stage and screen, Kristofferson was a boxer with US organisation Golden Gloves, he also gained a master’s degree in English at the University of Oxford, later turning down an opportunity to teach at a US military academy in New York to pursue songwriting in Nashville.
Hoping for a break into the industry, he worked as a part-time caretaker at Columbia Records’ Music Row studio.
In a 2006 interview, Kristofferson said he might not have had a career without Cash, who he said put him on stage for the first time.
Joplin, who he had a close relationship with, changed the lyrics to make Bobby McGee a man and cut her version just days before she died in 1970 from a drug overdose. The song became a posthumous number one hit for Joplin.
In 1973, Kristofferson married fellow songwriter Rita Coolidge who he had a successful duet career with, earning them two Grammy awards until they divorced in 1980.
Saoirse Ronan has become one of the Academy Awards’ anomalies after being nominated four times without taking home a statuette.
The American-born Irish star received her first Oscars nod at the age of just 13, when she featured in the best supporting actress category for her role in Atonement.
Since then, despite being shortlisted three times for best actress for Brooklyn, Lady Bird and Little Women, she has never won.
Now, the 30-year-old is set to compete in both the lead and supporting actress categories at the 2025 awards for her new films The Outrun and Steve McQueen’s Blitz.
If she secures one or both nominations, she would become the youngest actor to receive five, or six, nods.
Directed by Nora Fingscheidt, The Outrun, which is inspired by the life of writer Amy Liptrot, follows a Scottish woman struggling with alcoholism while living in fast-paced London.
In a bid to maintain her sobriety, she returns home to Orkney and finds herself in the process.
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“Nora really wanted us to have our input in terms of who these characters were and situations that we would find them in”, Ronan told Sky News.
“We had a script that was written and the structure of it was there, but we were sort of able to fill in the gaps a little bit.”
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The Scottish drama marks the first time Ronan has worked as a producer on a project and she says she took a lot from the experience.
She said: “There is a lot going on behind the scenes that actors are protected from, and sometimes I think it would be valuable for an actor to know the drama that exists when they’re not around.
“I think it might make people behave a little bit better and to know that it is sort of like a domino effect when there’s one thing that’s out of place, it really will affect everything else by you not getting on to a call at a certain time.”
She said it gave her a new appreciation for the craft.
“It’s very difficult to get an independent movie made and to try and source the money needed to just even pay people is difficult sometimes.
“So, yes, it’s just having an awareness of and the graft involved and that has definitely made me appreciate the movies that I’m on so much more where I am just an actor and I don’t have to worry about any of that stuff at all.”
The film also stars The Lazarus Project’s Paapa Essiedu as her boyfriend Daynin.
Battling with the person she has become, her character Rona returns to the Orkney Islands to try to reconnect with nature.
The Oscar nominee said sea swimming at a remote location was therapeutic for the cast and crew.
“We finished [shooting] on Papa Westray, where we had to have a micro crew. There’s 90 inhabitants on the whole island.
“We stayed in people’s homes because there’s no hotels or anything like that. We ate together every night. We walked to work like it was a very stripped back experience in terms of filmmaking.
“And I think that was sort of felt like art imitating life a little bit after all the chaos of the beginning of the shoot. To have that at the end was wonderful.”
Pop star Lana Del Rey has married her alligator tour guide partner in Louisiana, according to reports.
The singer, 39, and Jeremy Dufrene, 49, are said to have obtained a marriage licence in Lafourche parish on Monday and had their wedding three days later.
Footage obtained by the Daily Mail appears to show Del Rey, whose real name is Elizabeth Woodridge Grant, wearing a white dress where Mr Dufrene works as a tour guide in Des Allemandes, south of New Orleans.
Del Rey has not commented on the reported wedding.
She met Mr Dufrene in 2019, posting pictures of her on one of his tours with the caption: “Jeremy lemme be captain at Arthur’s Air Boat Tours x.”
Arthur’s Air Boat Tours gives guided tours through the local swamps, where its website says visitors are likely to see “300 species of birds” and “alligators up close and personal”.
Mr Dufrene’s profile page says he previously worked seven days a week at a chemical plant – when he would “shrimp on vacation days”.
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“After a little convincing by his family, he got his captain’s licence and started running tours,” it adds.
“Jeremy’s a great airboat captain and loves interacting with wildlife & customers.”
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