Names and faces

• More than 20 years after his death, the last film of actor River Phoenix is finally getting a release. Cinemavault announced Friday that it has sold the North American distribution rights of Dark Blood to Lionsgate. The film has been in limbo since Phoenix died of a drug overdose in 1993. The movie was in production at the time. Dark Blood was left unfinished, and most expected it would never see the light of day. Director and co-writer George Sluizer, however, pushed to complete it, despite spending years battling an insurance company that made a claim about Phoenix's drug use. In 2012, Sluizer edited together an unfinished version that premiered last year at the Berlin Film Festival. Lionsgate is planning to release the film on video-on-demand. In Dark Blood, Phoenix played a young widower who retreats to the desert after his wife dies of radiation sickness after nuclear tests near their home.

• What started as a tweeted "selfie" of Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto with actor Kevin Spacey has devolved into a debate about politicians paying for positive coverage on social media. In the self-taken photo, Pena Nieto beams next to the grinning star of the Netflix television drama House of Cards, in which Spacey plays Frank Underwood, a fictitious politician who moves into the White House. "One of these Presidents is real. With President Enrique Pena Nieto in Mexico last night," Spacey posted on Twitter. Pena Nieto's office later offered the photo to the news media, saying the two had run into each other at a tourism expo in Cancun, the Caribbean resort city. But it wasn't long until a blogger for Forbes magazine reported that the meeting between the two was no accident. Spacey had been paid by the Mexican Tourism Board to attend the event and appear with Pena Nieto. That's when some Mexicans took to social media to lambaste both the actor and the president. Forbes blogger Dolia Estevez said the head of the tourism board, Rodolfo Lopez Negrete, denied a news report that Spacey had been paid $8 million to attend the event, declaring the sum "wrong and without a source." A spokesman for the tourism board, Eduardo Regules, did not respond to messages seeking the actual cost. A day after Spacey's original post, he tweeted again, saying that in the photo, "I was in character as Francis Underwood in House of Cards! I don't know jack about Mexican politics. I should have made that more clear."

A Section on 05/18/2014

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