Entertainment Blog

Ridley Scott To Direct New 'Blade Runner' Installment For Alcon Entertainment

2011-08-18T23:17:00.000-07:00

EXCLUSIVE: After revisiting his classic Alien with the upcoming 3D Fox film Prometheus, Ridley Scott is committing to direct and produce a film that advances his other seminal and groundbreaking science fiction film from the past. Scott has signed on to direct and produce a new installment of Blade Runner. He’ll make the film with Alcon Entertainment, producing with Alcon partners Broderick Johnson and Andrew Kosove. This would be the most high profile project for Alcon since The Blind Side. They got control of the franchise earlier this year, but it's a whole different ballgame with Scott at the helm.

I’m not getting a clear sense at this point whether Scott intends to do a sequel or a prequel to the 1982 film that was loosely based on the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Also unclear is whether they start fresh or reach out to Harrison Ford. The original took place in dystopian Los Angeles in 2019, in which organic superhuman robots called replicants escaped and are hiding somewhere on earth. Ford played Richard Deckard, a burnt out blade runner assigned to hunt them down. His tired life gets altered when he himself falls for one of the replicants and struggles to keep her from being destroyed.

The film was not a blockbuster when first released--it grossed $32 million in its original run--but the film has gained esteem over time. From the bleak but breathtaking visuals to the complex storyline and themes of mortality, Blade Runner became a classic. There has periodically been talks of doing a sequel but those never really went anywhere. After injecting state of the art 3D in reviving Alien, imagine what Scott can do with Blade Runner? Now, the filmmaker is ready to engage. Alcon has its output deal with Warner Bros, which remastered and released a 25^th anniversary version on DVD and Blu-Ray in 2007. Warner Bros made the original film.

This is just the first step and the project will have to be written and it will likely evolve during that process. That's what happened on Alien, which began as a prequel to his 1979 classic. That changed when Lost's Damon Lindelof came in with a different take on the subject matter that imprinted on Scott and Fox executives. They wound up making Prometheus, which Fox considers an original but which I've heard is a cousin to the original Alien franchise. That film will be released June 8, 2012, with Charlize Theron, Michael Fassbender, Noomi Rapace, Patrick Wilson, Idris Elba and Guy Pearce starring. Scott is repped by WME.

Here is the original Blade Runner trailer:

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7 Incredibly Surprising Roles From Typecasted Actors

2011-08-18T23:14:00.000-07:00

By Ashe Cantrell

Typecasting is death in Hollywood. If you keep doing the same kinds of roles over and over A) you’ll go insane and B) people will get sick of your shit. But the sad paradox of Hollywood is that once you’ve established yourself as one kind of actor, you’re basically stuck that way because that’s all people will send you scripts for, turning the whole thing into a spiral of bullshit.

It’s extremely difficult to break out of, and it’s ended numerous careers. (Some for the better.) Some actors get fed up with it, and then you get the roles where those actors try to break out of their type (often unsuccessfully) and as time goes by they end up looking like movies from some creepy alternate dimension or something.

But what’s also weird is going back through an actor’s early filmography and finding insane gems where they’re going totally against their later-established type. For some more famous examples, just look at Keanu Reeves in the Bill & Ted movies or Sean Penn in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Neither of those guys would even put their cigarette out on those scripts now, and that’s what makes seeing them in those roles hilarious.

So now, in a far from comprehensive list, we’re going to look at some of the weirdest roles that actors have done outside of their typical repertoire.

Bruce Willis in Death Becomes Her

You may already know that pre-Die Hard Bruce Willis was a comedic television actor on a series called Moonlighting. Post-Die Hard, he was Bruce Fuckin’ Willis, action star and all-around genuine American badass. Later, thanks to Pulp Fiction, he became Bruce Willis, well-rounded dramatic actor and still occasional action/comedy star. But tucked in-between the first two Die Hard movies was an earlier attempt to break out of his John McClane-induced Hell, a black comedy called Death Becomes Her.

Again, comedy roles were nothing new for Bruce, but what’s weird about this one is the fact that his character is a massive, massive dweeb. You want to reach through the screen and give his nebbish plastic surgeon character a wedgie the minute you see him. At least when he played a shrink in The Sixth Sense, you still got the feeling he could kick an ass or two if it came down to it.

Seth Rogen in Donnie Darko

When you think of Seth Rogen, you think of the doofish guy who sold you weed in college, because Seth Rogen probably really did sell you weed in college. (This is true even if you’ve never smoked weed or been to college in your life.) He’s the best buddy character in like, 90% of comedies released in the last five years. He even made The Green Hornet into a bromance, for God’s sake.

But before all of that, he played a fairly minor role as a total jerk-ass bully in Donnie Darko. It’s such a small part that it probably wouldn’t even stand out, except that he’s the guy who ends up uttering the (in)famous line “I like your boobs,” to a girl he’s taunting. Really, Seth? Now that is some smooth talking. Get you some, big fella.

Vince Vaughn in Psycho

Vince Vaughn is a man who wears many hats: Idiot man-child in Dodgeball, guy who used to slum around in Jon Favreau movies before Favreau started doing stuff like Iron Man, guy who got to schtup Jennifer Aniston in real life, guy who’s only done like five movies since he stopped schtupping Jennifer Aniston, and so on.

But in Gus Van Sant’s ill-advised Psycho remake, Vince Vaughn got to play none other than Norman Bates himself. And the weirdest part? He’s actually really good at it. Like, holy shit, that guy is terrifying. Just seeing how weird Vaughn is in the role is pretty much the only thing about that remake that makes it kinda worth watching. Unless you like seeing otherwise talented actors trying to channel forty-year-old performances, I mean.

Betty White in Lake Placid

Betty White has seen a kind of resurgence of late, thanks to weird, nostalgic people on the internet. Before social media campaigns turned her into an odd, charming old woman, she was… an odd, charming old woman. Okay, obviously nothing’s changed. Betty White‘s pretty much always played the kooky elderly woman role, something she seems to do in real life as well. When we watch Betty White, it’s like she’s not even playing a role. That’s just her on screen, being herself.

She’s kinda like your grandma, except famous and she didn’t lock you in cupboards when you misbehaved as a kid. That’s why it’s kinda odd to see her in a movie like Lake Placid, playing a woman who claims to have murdered her husband, feeds and cares for a gigantic crocodile, calls people things like “fuck-meat”, and tells a police officer to suck her dick. That’s more like the grandma most of us know. (It’s just a joke, grandma. Don’t lock me in the cupboard.)

Michael Madsen in Free Willy

Approximately 99% of people only remember the following about Free Willy: Michael Jackson. Whale. Cover art. That’s it. That’s why it may very well blow your mind to discover that Michael Madsen is totally the kid’s dad in that movie (and then it will be further blown when I tell you that that kid is now 31 years old). And he’s not an ex-cop dad who beats his kids, or a crazy dad who sits around with a shotgun. No, he’s totally a supporting, loving foster dad. This is the same Michael Madsen who played an ear-cutting jewel thief in Reservoir Dogs and Bill’s loser brother Budd in Kill Bill.

Sadly, the only decent footage on YouTube is a 3 second scene where he punches the bad guy (played by Michael Ironside) toward the end of the film. Just watch it and pretend that it cuts away before he ties the guy up and drops a car battery on his junk for an hour.

Ronald Reagan in The Killers

Good old Uncle Ronnie’s become a bit of a legend these days. The current crop of American conservatives love to reference him and his policies to win points with the Baby Boomer generation. Naturally, no one’s forgotten that President Reagan was once a popular film star, although most folks will probably tell you that he spent a lot of time doing Westerns and kissing monkeys, nothing real crazy.

However, in 1964′s The Killers, Ronald Reagan did something he had never done before or since: he totally played a bad guy. (Keep it down, grouchy, politically-minded people. We’re all just here to talk movies.) And not just any bad guy, either– he played a ruthless, bad ass mob boss, the kind of guy who was apparently okay with giving a dame what-for when she got too mouthy or whatever. Poor examples of gender relations aside, Reagan actually did a fairly impressive job. If that whole “politics” thing hadn’t worked out for him, he could have been Robert DeNiro before there even was a Robert DeNiro.

Sir Alec Guinness in Murder by Death

Sir Alec Guinness (The “sir” is mandatory) is known for a single role more so than anyone else on this list: Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi. A father figure to millions of lonesome, sweaty nerds, Obi-Wan is the embodiment of calm, peaceful wisdom. He is Luke Skywalker’s and, by proxy the audience’s, first real glimpse at the vast universe of the Star Wars saga.

But what a lot of people outside of England don’t realize is that Sir Alec was an accomplished actor for many decades before being cast as Obi-Wan. And, in perhaps one of his oddest roles, he played a blind butler in Murder by Death, a slapstick comedy written by Neil Simon. Most of his laughs in the film come from his interactions with the deaf-mute maid, as seen in the clip above. It’s kind of disconcerting to see him unable to use Force Sight to find his way around.

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New Star Wars: The Clone Wars - Season 4 Trailer

2011-08-18T22:58:00.000-07:00

Lucasfilm and Cartoon Network have announced that Star Wars: The Clone Wars – Season 4 will premiere on Friday, September 16th at 8:00pm. The new season, referred to be the title "Battle Lines", will debut with a one-hour premiere, comprised of two episodes: "Water War" and "Gungan Attack," which are the first two parts of a three-part aquatic-themed story arc, which includes The Clone Wars debut of Captain Ackbar – before the Mon Calamari leader becomes the trap-phobic Admiral we know from Return of the Jedi.

Comic-Con: What to Expect in Clone Wars: Season 4
A new trailer for The Clone Wars has been released as well, hinting at some very epic events in the new season, including glimpses of Ahsoka vs. Death Watch and Asajj Ventress taking on General Grievous - along with more of a focus on Anakin Skywalker taking some turns that, well… We just don't think will end well. Check it out below!

More Star Wars: The Clone Wars Videos

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Spy Kids director takes film to a new dimension with Aroma-Scope

2011-08-18T22:56:00.000-07:00

DAVE McGINN

A transvestite who’s married to a pornographer may be an odd inspiration for one of the summer’s biggest kids movies, but you just have to scratch the surface a little bit more to find out what’s right under your nose.

Robert Rodriguez’s Spy Kids films have always been “a scrappily innovative series,” says the director. The premise alone made the first film a hit. The second was the first time Rodriguez gave up film to shoot in digital. The third helped to usher in the current bonanza of 3D movies. So when it came time for the next instalment, Rodriguez knew he had to kick it up a notch.

“When it came time to do Spy Kids 4, I thought, we can’t just go do 3D again. We have to keep with the [innovative nature of] the series. Like Nigel Tufnel would say in Spinal Tap, ‘One louder! We have to do one more thing and go to 11!”

And that’s when the pornographer and the transvestite entered the picture. Well, more like they wafted into Rodriguez’s mind. Thinking of ways to maintain the series’ tradition of innovation, Rodriguez says he remembered the 1981 John Waters film Polyester, about a transvestite who is married to a pornographer, yes, but more importantly a film in which the audience was able to experience various smells from the movie – including roses, flatulence, skunk, gasoline and dirty shoes – thanks to scratch ’n’ sniff cards.

Waters called the technology that accompanied his movie Odorama. Rodriguez has dubbed his Aroma-Scope.

“The idea itself was really fun and easy to do. I wanted to do something in 4D where again the audience got something for free … and it would just be an added value to the movie and an added experience,” Rodriguez says.

While Aroma-Scope is being put front and centre in the film’s marketing, even Rodriguez says it’s not something that’s likely to become a trend at the movies. Judging by the long history of failed attempts to make smells an added dimension at the movies, there’s a very good chance he’s correct. But there’s no doubt that olfactory gimmicks such as this one fit well within children’s movies, and with films reaching the limit of what’s visually possible, some believe there’s a chance smell-o-vision could become film’s next frontier – if only we could get the technology right.

“It’s a fun one-off. We’re not going to convert all of our movies and all of our cinema experience to having a smelling component any time soon,” says John Fithian, president of the U.S.-based National Association of Theatre Owners.

Rodriguez himself doesn’t expect smells to be swirling through many movies. “I think this is very particular,” he says.

But plenty of films have tried, and failed, to give a pungent push to that other dimension.

“This idea has been around since practically the inception of movies,” says Patrick Kiger, co-author of Oops: 20 Life Lessons from the Fiascoes that Shaped America. In 1906, for instance, a theatre in Pennsylvania dipped cotton wool in rose oil and put it in front of an electric fan during a newsreel about the Rose Bowl.

Waters’s film was a sly parody of Scent of Mystery, a film that introduced an invention billed as “Glorious Smell-O-Vision” in 1960. “First they moved (1895)! Then they talked (1927). Now they smell!” proclaimed ads for the movie. Various smells were pumped into the theatre during the movie: freshly baked bread, a salty ocean breeze, pipe tobacco.

Problem was, the movie wasn’t all that good, and the odours often reached viewers well after the action on screen, and was accompanied by a hissing sound.

“It’s an old idea, but it’s been difficult to find a way to do it effectively over the years,” Kiger says.

Other movies have tried, however. In 2003, the makers of Rugrats Go Wild claimed the scratch ’n’ sniff cards viewers inhaled during the movie were an homage to Waters. In 2005, Japanese theatres presented the Colin Farrell flick The New World with smell. The scents were emitted from under the audience’s seats, with a floral smell accompanying love scenes and a mixture of rosemary and peppermint hitting one’s nose during the film’s tear-jerker moments.

Aroma-Scope will see audiences given a card that has eight smells. When a number flashes on screen, you rub the corresponding number on the card and take a whiff, explains Rodriguez. “There’s some really great smells, really rich smells. And then there’s some surprising smells,” he says. “We have a spy baby and a spy dog, so you can imagine that the smells get pretty out there.”

While it’s not likely to be part of more mature movies any time soon, it’s ideal for children, especially a generation that has grown up expecting interactivity.

“This kind of helps bridge that gap I think between watching a movie and being part of it,” Rodriguez says. “Kids identify so much with these kids on screen. Anything that makes them feel more like a part of the action, more like they’re doing the same thing as the kids on screen, it really helps create that bond even stronger.”

With film pushing the limits of what’s visually possible, scent may be the next frontier, Kiger says.

“We’ve reached the point I think where there’s so much overkill with visual imagery that it’s impossible to wow people any more,” he says. “Once people reach a threshold where you can’t do anything more visual that’s going to amaze them, maybe you’re going to need all these other things.”

Rodriguez jokes that he could do a Machete movie in Aroma-Scope. And though for the moment it’s simply a neat way of making a kid’s movie a little more enjoyable, he doesn’t rule out the possibility filmmakers may be going after our noses down the road.

“This is something just really fun. It’s in the arsenal now, though.”

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6 Mind Blowing Ways 'Starship Troopers' Predicted the Future

2011-07-11T00:39:00.000-07:00

We really hope the war ends soon. For one, we want our troops home and safe, as soon as possible. But, as an on-the-side benefit, we'd really like to put an end to those damn war movies that keep coming out. From dramas like Lions For Lambs and The Hurt Locker, to gritty documentaries like Restrepo and No End In Sight, to savagely critical works like Fahrenheit 9/11 and Starship Troopers, it seems like more and more sandy and depressing war movies are taking over our cine-

What?

Yes, Starship Troopers. The campy anti-war satire about a race from a distant, desert land, who out of nowhere strikes a civilian target in a way we didn't think was possible, leading to heavy-handed patriotic propaganda, and a headlong rush into a war with a poorly thought-out strategy that results in a quagmire. You don't have to agree with the message to get that it's clearly a satirical send-up of the War on Terror. If anything, it's too on-the-nose.

What's that, you say? The movie was made in 1997, four years before 9/11? Hmmm. That is a problem. We mean, we're not saying Paul Verhoeven traveled forward in time and then traveled back to film a commentary on a future war (because that would be an absolutely HORRIBLE waste of time travel), but... well, yeah, maybe we're saying he did that. Look how they line up:

#6.

The Attack

In The Film:

The movie follows Johnny Rico, a dumb jock from a weirdly Aryan-looking Buenos Aires of the future, as he signs up for the Mobile Infantry to protect the human race from the Arachnids, hive-minded, insectoid aliens. The war Johnny is training for is purely theoretical for the first 50 minutes of the film and then, suddenly, war is declared. What's the trigger? An asteroid strike on Johnny's home city of Bueno Aires, which destroys the city and kills over eight and a half million people. This, for the humans, is an absolute shock to the system, a blow made all the more devastating by the fact that the Arachnids don't have a colony within fifty thousand light years of Earth.

In space terms, that's this much.

That they shot an asteroid from halfway across the galaxy and managed to hit, not only another planet, but the planet they actually aimed at, is not just impressive, its goddamned miraculous. Especially considering that the Arachnids don't seem to have much knowledge of math and interstellar travel -- their species spreads to other planets by shooting their spores into space and hoping for the best. In fact it's so amazing that it's either a plot hole or a surprisingly subtle plot point- there's a theory among Starship Troopers fans that the attack was either a random collision that the government used as an excuse for war, or a deliberate attack by the government on its own people to justify attacking the bugs.

Either way, humanity promptly loses its shit and declares war on all bugs everywhere.

"Well this seems easy enough."

In Real Life:

You can see right away how the plot mimics real events. Before 9/11, the threat of Islamic terror was lingering out there, but wasn't immediate -- just like the bugs in the movie. Then there's an attack on a civilian target that comes as just as much a shock to the system, as it demonstrated a capability no one thought the terrorists had. The US promptly lost its shit and declared war on the very notion of terrorism, entering into an armed conflict against an abstract concept like only America can.

"And after we beat Terrorism, we're gonna beat Drugs! Then we're going to take on Sadness!"

There are some crucial differences between the movie and real life. For one thing, plus, in war time here on Real Earth, Denise Richards is probably the last person we'd call for support, (assuming the war was not being fought by boners).

"We need at least six more boners to the frontline. Richards, get out there!"

Also, 9/11 was obviously not some random coincidence or inside job. Sure, in a shitty movie, fans will wildly speculate all the time and talk about how the government attacked Buenos Aires on purpose and blamed the bugs, but no one in real life would look at 9/11 and whip up a bunch of crazy, nonsensical, conspiracy theories about "what really happened, right?

Right?

#5.

The First Assault

In The Film:

The humans quickly mobilize to destroy the Arachnids, sending their space fleet to the Arachnid homeworld of Klendathu. They recklessly charge in, with little thought given to tactics or battle plans. And so what? The enemy is bugs. Who needs tactics?

"I need a really big magnifying glass, stat!"

Well, the bugs have other ideas. Turns out there is one breed of Arachnid that can unload a huge, steaming pile of blue plasma right on into space. Though they don't have sophisticated aiming capabilities, just squirting plasma upwards makes short work of a few human spaceships, while the Arachnid foot soldiers for the Mobile Infantry to retreat in panic from an enemy who was better prepared, better armed and in greater numbers than they expected.

"The giant, armored bugs are defending themselves somehow!"

But this movie is crazy, it was directed by the guy who directed Showgirls. No real military would be as misinformed and unprepared as the military in a move about fighting massive, shrieking bug-monsters, right?

In Real Life:

Operation Anaconda was the first major engagement of the War On Terror. The idea was to attack a force of around 200 Al Qaeda soldiers in the Shahi-Kot Valley from the west, causing them to flee into the waiting arms of more US soldiers in the east, in what's known as a "Hammer and Anvil" strategy.

Just one problem: Al Qaeda did not flee, but stood their ground.

Just one other problem: There were not 200 enemy soldiers in the valley; there were up to five times that amount.

Wikipedia

Just one further other problem: the US military planners had assumed the enemy were armed with machine guns; they actually had mortars, rifles and rockets, and the planners assumed that Al Qaeda were in the valley, (they were in caves in the mountains surrounding the valley), and a convoy broke off from the main "TF Hammer" force to reach an observation point they'd been assigned to. And an AC-130, which was supposed to be providing firing and recon support during the battle thought they were an Al Qaeda convoy and attacked them. This friendly fire battle resulted in the first casualty of the operation.

The rest of TF Hammer came under heavy mortar fire from the prepared and entrenched Al Qaeda, and their air support turned out to consist of six bombs, and their attack didn't actually make it into the valley, meaning that TF Anvil, arriving via helicopter, did not close the trap as had been intended, but instead found a trap closing around them, as they were attacked by an enemy who was better prepared, better armed, in greater numbers, and from a better-fortified position than they expected.

No word on whether they had massive pincers and exoskeletons.

#4.

Shock and Awe

In The Film:

After being unpleasantly surprised by the Arachnids' willingness to fight back and defend their home, the human military in Starship Troopers come up with a new battle plan: "Fleet glasses the planet, MI mops up." Basically, rather than wading in and fighting whatever they find, they first bombard the planet with explosives, making it easier for the Mobile Infantry to take out the survivors. We see one of these aerial bombardments in action, not on the planet they invaded originally, but on a completely different planet called Tango Urilla. The jet fighters fly overhead and drop bombs, the bugs scream in terror and try to run away, but get blown to pieces in their thousands.

Space travel has obviously not yet equipped them with super-nukes.

Johnny and his squad then walk in and successfully wipe out the remnants, before being sent off to yet another planet called Planet P, where the rest of the film takes place.

In Real Life:

Oh come on. You already know the real-life version of this, it's part of America's national language by now. Basically, after being unpleasantly surprised by the enemy's willingness to fight back in Afghanistan, the American military came up with a new battle plan for their invasion of Iraq: Shock and Awe. Essentially, they bombarded Baghdad with explosives, with the intention of demoralizing Saddam Hussein's military out of actually fighting.

In both cases, that's a disastrous first engagement as a result of underestimating the enemy, and an attempt to compensate next time around with heavy aerial bombardment.

Also? Here are those planets the military attacked in Troopers...

...aaand here we are...

Getty

#3.

Prisoners

In The Film:

Now, here's where we have to make something completely clear: the whole point of Starship Troopers is that the humans may not be the good guys. Earth's government has clearly been taken over by Fascism, and the propaganda is clearly meant to be a satirical mockery of wartime culture in the same way that Verhoven's Robocop was meant to be a mockery of the greed and violence of the Reagan 80s. When we say that Verhoven accidentally made a War on Terror parody with Starship Troopers, we're not saying that that post-9/11 America was just as bad as the Nazi uniform-wearing protagonists of that movie. It'd be like saying the Reagan administration literally turned us all into murderous psychopaths and cyborgs.

So in the film, events are broken up by propaganda newsreels which give an insight into the human society depicted in Starship Troopers, and which drop several heavy hints that these aren't actually the good guys that we're rooting for here. One of these hints comes in the form of casual prisoner abuse. Check it out at 0:50:

Yeah, that's Doogie Howser showing you how to wound and properly kill an Arachnid soldier. An enemy combatant that they have captured, and keep in a cage, and mutilate and execute live on camera. Then, look at what they do to this brain bug they catch at the end:

"After tireless research, our top scientists have discovered that the bugs hate this."

That thing outwitted the humans earlier in the movie, it's capable of planning and reasoning...

It even has a face! That or it walks everywhere backwards.

And there they are, shoving huge sharp things into its mouth(?) and broadcasting the footage with evident glee. It's only shown briefly, but these scenes of bug torture are there to tweak the audience. We're supposed to feel a twinge there -- even though this is the enemy, the good guys are still torturing their captives, without a second thought.

In Real Life:

Remember the Abu Ghraib scandal? Sure you do: that was when those photos surfaced of American soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners pretty horribly. It was a dark time for us, and the photos are pretty grim, so rather than show them here, we will instead show you these spoofs from the sitcom Arrested Development:

Of course, unlike the folks in Starship Troopers, we, the public, were horrified by this, (because we're real people, and have never been and will never be directed by Paul Verhoeven to do anything).

This is where our assertion that Paul Verhoven is a time traveler starts to look pretty good. If you were doing a movie about war in general, or doing a satire of any previous war, why would you include a bit about how the supposed Good Guys treat their prisoners at all? There's so much more prominent stuff you can cover. But if you're satirizing the War on Terror? You'd need to bring up the prisoner thing at some point. Which is weird because, again, we're talking about a movie that came out four years before the War on Terror and one which was directed by the guy who made Showgirls.

By the way, it's a minor point, but as we said, the whole latter part of Starship Troopers revolves around the humans trying to locate and capture the elusive brain bug. It became a major objective for the whole war effort. And they eventually do find it, hiding in a cave. A hole, you might say. With a bunch of critters that look like spiders. A... spider hole?

Getty

#2.

The Propaganda

In The Film:

The universe of Starship Troopers is saturated with propaganda, mainly dispensed by the newsreels, of which there are six in the movie, (here, here, here, here, here, and here). All of Verhoeven's most insultingly heavy-handed satire happens in these newsreels. They're all aggressively patriotic, so patriotic that it almost borders on strongly encouraged racism.

"The only good bug is a dead bug!"- Actual line from movie.

In Real Life:

Of course, we don't have a Fascist government, and if the American government did release cheerleading newsreels, people would just point and laugh. No, in the real world, effective propaganda has to come from someplace other than the government.

Sure, we could point out the Fox News cheerleading of the war effort, and the anchors saying the US military was simply trying to "spread love" to the Middle East:

But that's not as openly goofy and stupid as the propaganda in Starship Troopers. No, to find that, we have to go to the world of country music. Or, to quote Charlie Daniels, "This ain't no rag, it's a flag, and we don't wear it on our heads." Enjoy:

Or, we could go with the even less subtle Tobey Keith tune, "Courtesy of the Red White and Blue." Sample lyrics:

And the eagle will fly and it's gonna be hell,
When you hear Mother Freedom start ringing her bell.
And it'll feel like the whole wide world is raining down on you.
Ah, brought to you, courtesy of the red, white and blue.
Oh, justice will be served and the battle will rage:
This big dog will fight when you rattle his cage.
An' you'll be sorry that you messed with the U.S. of A.
'Cos we'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way.

Now compare those videos to the newsreels from Starship Troopers. Holy shit, they make the fictional propaganda look even-handed and intelligent.

"My only regret is that I could not fit more flags on my stage."

#1.

The End

In The Film:

The film does not end with the end of the war. It doesn't end with a peace treaty, or the bugs surrendering.

No, the film ends with Neil Patrick Harris explaining to the main character that, now that they have a brain bug, they'll soon be able to understand how the Arachnids think, and confidently predicting that this is the turning point of the war. This is followed by a final recruitment ad that ends the movie.

But not before that guard from The Shawshank Redemption saves the day.

They may say they're winning, but the final message is the government desperately begging for soldiers, with key phrases like "we need soldiers!" and the slightly desperate-sounding reminder that "Service guarantees citizenship!"

In other words, the truth is that either the humans are fighting a losing battle against the Arachnids, or they're stuck in an unpleasant stalemate: the humans too technologically advanced to be beaten back, the Arachnids too entrenched and determined to give up. The optimism of the main characters at the end of the movie amounts to nothing more than a premature, presumptuous, and ultimately false declaration of victory.

In Real Life:

Wikipedia
Ah.

Seriously now, is it just us? The events of the movie match up beat for beat, exactly the way an anti-war satirist would draw it up. But even weirder, we can't find another war that matches up as well (that is, one a non-time traveling Paul Verhoven could have had in mind). Vietnam? That war didn't kick off with a sudden attack on a civilian target. World War II? That didn't turn into an unexpected quagmire. Neither did the first gulf war (ie Operation Desert Storm). Nothing else matches up.

See, that's the thing about Starship Troopers -- to this day, lots of people don't realize it's a satire. They think it's just a really shitty action movie that does a bad job of building sympathy for the protagonists. The reason so many people don't get the satire is because at the time it wasn't clear what war it was satirizing ("A quagmire in the desert, triggered by an attack on the homeland? Shit, when has that happened?") and that's because the war it was satirizing hadn't happened yet.

Because Paul Verhoven is a time traveler

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Top 15 Seinfeld Food Related Episodes

2009-12-20T03:34:00.000-08:00

Posted by: Eating The Road

It’s been debated heavily what exactly Seinfeld is really all about. Most come to the conclusion that it’s really about nothing. I have have my own opinion. I think it’s all about food. Think about it, there is food in every single episode and in a lot of cases it plays an integral part.

You really don’t have to look any further than Jerry’s cereal stash to know that they are in love with food. They dine at Monk’s seemingly for most meals and they are constantly snacking in Jerry’s apartment. The cast does such a good job at this. Normally, due to continuity, eating on camera is avoided. That’s one of things I think made Seinfeld so great and believable.

There are literally hundreds of funny food related moments throughout the series. Here I will present to you the top 15 full episodes where food played a large role. Next week we will look at:

Kramer’s Top 20 Seinfeld Food Related Moments
Jerry’s Top 20 Seinfeld Food Related Moments
George’s Top 20 Seinfeld Food Related Moments

If you don’t see you favorite yet just wait. I will list the top food related moments that didn’t necessarily have a play in the plot (like Kramer and Newman making sausage, George eating while having sex or Jerry refusing to eat from his girlfriend’s “man hands”).

To further stake my claim that it’s all based around food, I submit the initial meeting of Kramer and Jerry. Enjoy!

15. The Big Salad
Season 6	Episode 2	September 29, 1994
George and his girlfriend, Julie, ask Jerry and Elaine to go to Monk’s with them. Jerry declines saying he’s already eaten a “big bowl of Kix”. Elaine asks George to bring her back a “big salad”. George goes on a short rant about what exactly a “big salad” is. George buys Elaine the salad but Julie inadvertently gets credit for it when she brings it back to Elaine. George goes berserk over the fact that Elaine thinks Julie paid for the salad and that he doesn’t get credit for it.
Part 2 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPAW3gVkoc4 Part 3 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqkD_cL0MQY
Memorable quote: “Big lettuce, big carrots, tomatoes like volleyballs.” – Jerry when George asks what’s in the “big salad”

14. The Gum
Season 7	Episode 10	December 14, 1995
Llyod Braun runs into George, Kramer and Jerry at Monk’s. Llyod has a pack of Chinese chewing gum which Kramer makes everyone have a piece of. George tells him that he doesn’t chew gum. They go to the movies. Elaine doesn’t want to sit next to Llyod so says she must sit next to Jerry because of her (and his) poor eyesight. BLANK SPACE George, in attempting to look inside the register at Monk’s (to determine if he was short-changed), buys a pack of gum. Llyod sees this and is surprised. Lloyd asks Jerry if he would like him to pick up some gum since he knows where to get it. Jerry doesn’t really want it but lets him. Jerry must now wear glasses around Lloyd (because of Elaine’s lie) and he has trouble seeing. Jerry mistakenly gives him $100 bill and in return gets that much worth of gum.
Part 2 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbrE4v2f94E Part 3 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_7TeTL8iEo
Memorable quote: “Now see, this is what the holidays are all about. Three buddies sitting around, chewing gum.” – Kramer

13. The Cafe
Season 3	Episode 7	November 6, 1991
A new restaurant, The Dream Cafe, opens across the street from Jerry’s apartment and he becomes interested in it’s success (or lack thereof) and why no one is dining there. He looks down from his apartment window with binoculars at it. He befriends the owner, Babu, and offers his suggestions on how to improve business. He tells him to make his authentic Pakistani dishes as the menu was a hodge podge of items before. This turns out to not work and Babu gets extremely angry with Jerry. The restaurant continues to fail. BLANK SPACE Meanwhile George gets Elaine to cheat on his IQ test for him, which she takes over to The Dream Cafe to do. She has a hard time concentrating there and fails the test. George talks her into doing it again, which she does but this time at Jerry’s apartment. She never gets the test back to George though.
Part 2 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o41E4MCwLbs Part 3 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgoix1Rf94I
Memorable quote: “Where are people? You see people? Show me people! There are no people!” – Babu yelling at Jerry.

12. The Butter Shave
Season 9	Episode 1	September 25, 1997
George, Jerry and Kramer decide to grow mustaches over the summer because they’re bored. Jerry and George decide it was a bad idea and shave them off but don’t tell Kramer. Kramer sees them without their mustaches and gets that they’re no longer growing them. He quickly shaves his as well. Kramer is not getting a good shave with regular shaving cream and tries butter and finds it to be far superior. He notices that the butter makes his skin feel so good that he begins to spread butter over his whole body. While tanning Kramer falls asleep and due to the butter starts to cook. BLANK SPACE Newman in the meantime is reading the cannibalism-themed story Alive and smelling Kramer cooking finds it appealing. He envisions Kramer’s head on a roasting turkey. Kramer accidentally get’s oregano and Parmesan cheese dumped on him and it drives Newman berserk. He chases after and bites Kramer.
Part 2 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JK2mBSBb21U Part 3 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UIvohaMA3Q
Memorable quote: “I ran out of butter so I had to borrow yours. Anything else, Mr. Nosy?” – Kramer when asked about taking Jerry’s butter.

11. The Pie
Season 5	Episode 15	February 17, 1994
Jerry gets upset because his girlfriend Audrey won’t try a bite of his pie. Jerry becomes obsessed with this. They go to eat at Poppie’s, her father’s restaurant. Jerry goes to the bathroom and runs into Poppie there. He notices that he doesn’t watch his hands. Jerry then refuses a slice of Audrey’s pizza because he saw her dad not wash after using the restroom. BLANK SPACE Jerry meets Audrey at Poppie’s later to talk. While there, the health inspector comes and arrests Poppie for unsanitary conditions. Also George gets taken to dinner my a prospective employer. George will not eat his dessert because he fears the chef (whom George “stole” a suit from) is going to taint it. George acts like Audrey did refusing Jerry’s pie. George does not get the job because of this but does not become ill as the other diners did. Jerry never found out why Audrey refused the pie in the first place.
Part 2 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pV3cqCggbK4 Part 3 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-erm-67pRFI
Memorable quote: “Poppie’s a little sloppy.” – Jerry

10. The Chicken Roaster
Season 8	Episode 8	November 14, 1996
A Kenny Rogers Roasters chicken restaurant opens across the street from Jerry and Kramer’s apartment. They have a large red neon sign to advertise and it keeps Kramer up at night. Kramer gets upset and boycotts the restaurant. Kramer can’t take it any more and gets Jerry to switch apartments with him. Newman comes over to Kramer’s (Jerry’s) with chicken from Kenny Rogers. Kramer tries it and soon becomes addicted to it but he tries to hide the fact from Jerry. BLANK SPACE Jerry runs into Newman at Kenny Roasters and notices that he bought broccoli as well. He deduces that the food cannot be solely for him as he would never eat broccoli. Jerry finds out that Kramer is addicted to Kenny Rogers. Earlier Jerry had asked an old buddy to have lunch with him, which he skipped a business meeting for, and got fired. He then got a job as the assistant manager at Kenny Rogers. Jerry effectively gets the restaurant closed down when he shakes George’s wet hat and get all the food covered in rat fur.
Part 2 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acKM4jsUXwk Part 3 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qMpJa4FaW0
Memorable quote: “Hold it, Newman, you wouldn’t eat broccoli if it was deep fried in chocolate sauce.” – Jerry

9. The Muffin Tops
Season 8	Episode 21	May 8, 1997
Elaine while at a party eats only the top of a muffin. Her former boss Mr. Lippman, sees this and decides to open a business selling only the tops, Top Of The Muffin To You! When business isn’t going as planned he asks Elaine for help and advice. She tells him that he’s doing it wrong by just baking the tops. She informs him that he must bake the entire muffin and “pop the top” from the stump. BLANK SPACE Elaine and Mr. Lippman try to discard the stumps by giving them to the homeless but even they don’t want them. Nobody will take the stumps and they are left with piles and bags full of them. Elaine tries to get Kramer to take her stumps to the dump but even the dumps won’t take them. Elaine ends up getting Newman as a “cleaner” to get rid of the muffin stumps by eating them all. It ends with Newman bringing in a cooler with 4 bottles of milk and saying that he’s got a lot of work to do.
Part 2 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXypua_KEA0 Part 3 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOwAJNL7hws
Memorable quote: “I know what you thought. They don’t have homes, they don’t have jobs, what do they need the top of a muffin for? They’re lucky to get the stumps.” – Homeless Shelter Employee

8. The Calzone
Season 7	Episode 20	April 25, 1996
While in a meeting George is eating an eggplant calzone. Mr. Steinbrenner asks him what is is and asks for a bit, which he turns out to love the taste of. He orders George to go get him one. Soon they are eating calzones every day for lunch together. George leaves a tip for the guy at the calzone shop but he does not see George put the money in the jar so George goes to fish out the money in order to re-tip him (and get recognition for his tip) but the guy catches George and thinks he’s stealing from the jar. He bans George from the restaurant. BLANK SPACE Mr. Steinbrenner continues to want calzones but George can no longer get them. He has to recruit Newman to order them for him and bring them to him during his mail route. Newman decides not to go to work because it is raining and George has to get Kramer to pick up the calzones. While there Kramer has them heat his shirt in the oven because he has become accustomed to warm clothing from the dryer. Kramer tries to pay for the calzones with pennies and the owner kicks him out. Kramer goes to George’s office and places his shirt by a vent. The smell from it wafts into Mr. Steinbrenner’s office and runs into George’s office thinking that he has calzones. George tries to pass off another restuarant’s calzone as the original but Mr. Steinbrenner doesn’t fall for it. George then gets the idea to put the Yankee’s player clothes in a pizza oven after Mr. Steinbrenner was found rummaging through his office and realized the smell was from the clothes.
Part 2 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOpixo1HoOk Part 3 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cLg9aVl_cE
Memorable quote: “From 1973 to 1982 I ate the exact same lunch everyday . Turkey chili in a bowl made out of bread . Bread bowl George. First you eat the chili then you eat the bowl . There’s nothing more satisfying than looking down after lunch and seeing nothing but a table.” – George Steinbrenner

7. The Strike
Season 9	Episode 10	December 18, 1997
George, Elaine and Jerry go to a Hanukkah party at Tim Whatley’s where Elaine meets a man and gives him a fake phone number. Elaine realizes that she wrote the number down on the back of her “Submarine Captain” card that she was using to get a free sub sandwich and captain’s hat at a local sandwich shop. BLANK SPACE Kramer hears that the 12-year strike at H&H Bagels is over (where he used to work) because minimum wage is now higher than what they were demanding. Kramer returns to work at the bagel shop. Elaine wants to get the sandwich card back and goes to where the fake phone number calls, a betting parlor. She gives them the number of H&H if the man calls for her. She waits at the bagel shop for him to call but because of the steam inside she starts to get ugly. Meanwhile Jerry’s notices that his girlfriend’s appearance changes drastically day to day and in different locales. He wants to only sit in the back booth at Monk’s because she looks good in that setting. Kramer thinks that Jerry is cheating on her because of the variances in appearance. In the end they all gather for a Festivus Dinner at the Costanza’s (Frank’s made-up Holiday) in order for George to prove that he didn’t get to have Christmas.
Part 2 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdOxBcxg1tM Part 3 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Xqq2frt7zI
Memorable quote: “H&H wouldn’t let us use their bathroom while we were picketing. It put a cramp in our solidarity.” – Kramer

6. The Chinese Restaurant
Season 2	Episode 11	May 23, 1991
Jerry, Elaine and George decide to stop in for a meal at a Chinese restaurant before going to see a showing of Plan 9 From Outer Space. Jerry had previously lied to his uncle about not being able to go to dinner with him in order to see the movie. BLANK SPACE The maître d’ continuously tells them that their table will be “5, 10 minutes”. While waiting for their table Jerry dares Elaine to eat an eggroll from a random diner’s plate offering her $50 to do so. Elaine tries to conspicuously offer them $25 if they let her do it but they don’t understand what she’s getting at. A woman runs into Jerry in the lobby who turns out is his uncle’s receptionist. Jerry ends up going to dinner with his uncle because he realizes he’ll get caught. George and Elaine decide to leave too. The maître d’ calls their party for their table as they walk out the door.
Part 2 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9MD6EASTsI Part 3 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6pj2LBYGKk
Memorable quote: “For 50 bucks? I’d put my face in the soup and blow.” – George

5. The Soup
Season 6	Episode 7	November 10, 1994
Bania, having bulked up, no longer fits into his Armani suit and offers it to Jerry. It fits Jerry and he somewhat reluctantly takes it. Bania says he can just take him out for dinner as payment for the suit. BLANK SPACE Kramer, after having kidney stones, decides to get rid of his refrigerator and only eat fresh foods. Kramer takes food from Jerry’s for his girlfriend Hildy who is a waitress at Reggie’s. Bania and Jerry go out to dinner at Mendy’s but Bania only orders a soup because he had already eaten earlier. Bania says it doesn’t count as a meal because it’s only soup and insists that Jerry take him out again. Jerry gets extremely frustrated with him. Jerry and Bania go out again and he gets a soup and a sandwich but because it’s not “a fancy restaurant” he claims it’s still not a meal. Jerry ends up giving the suit to Elaine’s boyfriend. George doesn’t want to eat at Monk’s (he doesn’t want to see one of the waitresses) so they go to Reggie’s but they don’t have an omelet or big salad that Jerry and Elaine want. Jerry runs out of food because Kramer keeps taking it for Hildy (who is upset because Kramer got her fired for calling at work too much). After Jerry and Bania continue to argue about the suit and the meal, Bania demands the suit back but Jerry tells him that he gave it away. Bania runs after Elaine’s boyfriend to get the suit. Jerry and Elaine celebrate at Monk’s with an omelet and a big salad while George eats alone at Reggie’s.
Part 2 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPHUC5epw1Q Part 3 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xwtb3tm9qLY
Memorable quote: “No, I’m sorry Bania … I’m not going over this again. Well who told you to order soup? … No! There’s no dinner. There’s not going to be any dinner. You’ve had a sandwich and 2 bowls of soup and that’s it. Good-bye.” – Jerry on the phone with Bania.

4. The Mango
Season 5	Episode 1	September 16, 1993
Kramer gets a bad peach from Joe’s Fruit Shop and attempts to return it. Joe bans Kramer from the shop and Kramer freaks out about not being able to get fruit. He talks Jerry into doing his shopping for him and requests specifics like plantains, mangoes and plums that are “red inside”. Joe notices that Jerry’s selection is unusual and realizes that it’s actually for Kramer. He then bans Jerry from the shop as well. BLANK SPACE Kramer then gets George to do the fruit shopping (which Jerry pays for because Kramer only had “hundreds”) and he is able to procure it. George, who had been having sexual performance issues, eats one of the mangoes and notices some “vibrant” effect from it. In the midst of all of this Jerry is attempting to get Elaine to sleep with him once more because he found out she had been faking orgasms when they were dating (and to “save the friendship”). Eventually she breaks down and allows it but she is still unable to orgasm. Elaine is hungry and asks Jerry if he still has any mangoes. Jerry realizes the potential power of the fruit but the episode ends there.
Part 2 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkerZHeiQf4 Part 3 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSzFfrEsv-s
Memorable quote: “They don’t have a decent piece of fruit at the supermarket. The apples are mealy, the oranges are dry… I don’t know what’s going on with the papayas!” – Kramer

3. The Non-Fat Yogurt
Season 5	Episode 7	November 4, 1993
Kramer invests in a non-fat frozen yogurt shop that is becoming increasingly popular. It is frequented by Jerry, Elaine, George and Newman, amongst others. BLANK SPACE Kramer comments that Jerry and Elaine have gained weight and they become suspicious that its due to all the frozen yogurt they’ve been eating and believe the non-fat moniker to be a lie. They pay to have it tested in a lab to find out the truth. Kramer seduces one of the lab techs and tries to get her to falsify the results and in the process contaminates, soon to be mayor, Giuliani’s blood sample causing it to be misdiagnosed with high cholesterol. The lab results turn out to reveal that the yogurt does in fact have fat in it. Giuliani vows to eliminate false advertising because he believes his high cholesterol is due to the yogurt. Business plummets and it soon closes. Newman gets extremely mad at this.
Part 2 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okZTxEDCiqI Part 3 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hL8JYwTL7g
Memorable quote: “You don’t eat Oreos? The way you break ‘em open and…. It’s like you’re having sex with ‘em.” – Kramer to Elaine

2. The Rye
Season 7	Episode 11	January, 1996
George takes his parents to have dinner at Susan’s parent’s house. On the way Frank Costanza insists that they stop and get a Marble Rye from Schnitzer’s Bakery to bring to dinner. After dinner Frank realizes that Susan’s parents never brought the rye to the table and steals it back. Susan’s parents notice that the rye is missing. Frank is also upset that they did not serve dessert. BLANK SPACE George then puts together a scheme to have Kramer distract Susan’s parents with a ride around central park in a horse-drawn carriage for their anniversary and in the meantime he’ll sneak another rye back into their home. George recruits Jerry to purchase another rye from the bakery but they sell the last one to an old lady. Jerry offers her $50 which she refuses. Jerry continues to follow her and eventually steals the rye from her and runs. Kramer had been feeding the horse cans of Beef-A-Reeno because he had large quantities of it after shopping at a wholesale food store. This caused the horse to release horrible gas and Susan’s parents demand Kramer take them back immediately. This foils Georges plan and he resorts to another plan of fishing it from Jerry from the third story window, which he is caught in the midst of by Susan and her parents.
Part 2 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yif4VKgBQkw Part 3 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVjdHcGBnFw
Memorable quote: “Your father’s absolutely right. We’re sitting there like idiots drinking coffee without a piece of cake!” – Estelle Costanza

1. The Soup Nazi
Season 7	Episode 6	November 2, 1995
Probably one of the most popular episodes of Seinfeld in general. Kramer tells Jerry, George and Elaine about a restaurant with the most incredible soup that is run by the “Soup Nazi”. So called because of his stringent ordering polices and his intolerance of fumbling customers. Part of what makes this so great is that it’s based on an actual person (as Larry David often does). BLANK SPACE During the episode George gets denied soup because he wanted bread as the customers in front of him received some, Elaine gets banned for a year because she says the Soup Nazi looks like Al Pacino from Scent of a Woman, Jerry tells Bania to go back to his spot in line because he doesn’t want to anger the Soup Nazi and Jerry picks soup over his girlfriend because she kissed him in line. The Soup Nazi offers Kramer an old armoire that he has (to replace the one he had stolen from him while watching it for Elaine) which Kramer then gives to Elaine. Finding this out the Soup Nazi declares that he never would have given it to him if he knew it was for her. Later Elaine discovers the Soup Nazi’s recipes in the armoire and threatens to release them and ruin his business. Because of this the Soup Nazi has no choice and decides to close up shop and move to Argentina.
Original here

No decrease in illegal downloading, says BPI

2009-12-20T03:33:00.000-08:00

A third of respondents who obtain music illegally do so on a daily basis

The number of people downloading music illegally is not decreasing, despite the availability of new legal services, according to a music industry research.

A survey for The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) revealed one in three consumers are using illegal sites.

BPI chief executive Geoff Taylor said the findings were "disappointing" and expressed concern at a rise in illegal downloads from blogs and newsgroups.

More than 3,000 people aged between 16 and 54 took part in the online poll.

When questioned about their future plans, current users of unauthorised services reported that they actually intended to increase their illegal activities in the coming six months.

'Great choice'

The survey showed an increase in the use of web-based, or non-peer-to-peer methods, during the last six months. Filesharing through methods like BitTorrent remained level.

Mr Taylor said: "There are now more than 35 legal digital music services in the UK, offering music fans a great choice of ways to get music legally.

"It's disappointing that levels of illegal peer-to-peer use remain high despite this and the publicity surrounding imminent measures to address the problem. It's vital that those measures come into force as quickly as possible.

"The growth in other, non-peer-to-peer methods of downloading music illegally is a concern, and highlights the importance of including a mechanism in the Digital Economy Bill to deal with threats other than peer-to-peer."

Despite the levels of piracy, the BPI was able to announce in October that we are living in "the era of the digital single", after figures revealed 2009 was biggest ever year for UK singles, with more than 117m sold.

Of those, 98.6% were purchased in digital formats. However, the BPI estimate there are still more than a billion illegal downloads every year in the UK.

Mr Taylor said that figure demonstrated how the market could "explode" if the government tackled illegal filesharing.

Original here

Inmates to sue over Christmas songs piped into prison

2009-12-20T03:30:00.000-08:00

By Simon Crisp

Christmas songs, they either make you want to sing along - or pull your own ears off and baste the turkey with them.

That's why we find ourselves in the strange position of (almost) feeling sorry for US prisoners who are being subjected to a non-stop Christmas playlist.

Jail bosses in Maricopa County, Arizona, have started playing a selection of Christmas music and hymns into the prisons, and will continue to do so for the rest of the holiday period.

While they say the annual tradition is intended to give "a little Christmas cheer" to the incarcerated crooks, many of the prisoners claim it is an added punishment.

Some have even filed lawsuits claiming cruel and unusual punishment and forced participation in religious celebrations - we guess it all depends on how often they play Cliff.

The sheriff's office has said it expects courts to dismiss the lawsuits.

Original here

'Avatar' raises the bar in so many ways

2009-12-20T03:26:00.000-08:00

By Elizabeth Guider

The word is enveloped. That's what the movie did to me, however long it was into it, when those little jellyfish-like creatures came floating down. I was in the seventh row at Grauman's and automatically turned my head to brush one of them off my shoulder. I'm sure "Avatar" will do similarly for millions and millions of others -- this is, if it need be said at all, the weekend of its opening -- and not just for 14-year-old males.

Fox can almost certainly breathe an initial sigh of relief as Jim Cameron's movie essentially recalibrates filmmaking, without, I'm going to hazard, breaking the bank. So obviously has the creative bar been raised that I heard one young writer-director at the premiere say to his friends, "What do we do now?"

The 3D thing has been taken to a new level and will surely quicken the embrace of the technology. But more important, Cameron's mastery of it was almost completely at the service of the storytelling -- call it emotion-capture: I was taken out of myself (which I suspect is the whole point of having an avatar) and entered that collective experience of seeing a movie in a darkened room and of reconnecting to that collective unconscious we all share. Think Wordsworth or Rousseau, but without any overt reference or any pretentiousness, the pic taps into the longing for innocence in all of us and riffs on that enduring noble savage ideal.

Although ignored or relegated to the sidelines in so many contemporary movies, women are front and center in this saga, from the cigarette-smoking scientist Sigourney Weaver, to the fierce but fragile Neferti, to the plucky pilot played by Michelle Rodriguez.

And yes, there is a love story: To my mind, just a twitch of a Na'vi ear was as evocative as a sex act in countless other pics.

Downsides? A tad too long? Perhaps. Its political messages too simplistic? In some quarters (like say News Corp.'s own Fox News?)they could be interpreted as anti-American, certainly anti-corporate establishment. On the other hand, foreign viewers will likely relish seeing the manaical colonel get his come-uppance from a bow and arrow. Objections enough to shun the movie? Please.

As is obvious, I'm no film reviewer, but what else I took away from the evening was just how beautifully timed this movie is. To embellish on another metaphor from the film, it's been, like the hero in the movie, a crippled, stymied year in so many ways -- the sluggish economy, the layoffs, the stridency of our politics and, more pertinently to us here in Hollywood, presumably broken business models.

Somehow through it all, though, brashly commercial and bravely artistic movies have come out of the gate, with "Avatar" capping one of the best and most varied of recent film cycles -- from "Precious" and "Up in the Air" to "The Hurt Locker" and "Sherlock Holmes." Our own boxoffice specialist here at the paper tells me 2009 will close out at a record tally, nudging the $10 billion mark for the first time. Internationally, too, American movies are doing gangbusters, from the "Ice Age" sequel and "Up" to "2012" and the latest "Transformers" flick.

The day-and-date openings around the globe for "Avatar" will seal the deal. And no doubt the second weekend will be the telling one for "Avatar" as the percentage drop-off will be dissected to the nth degree by News Corp. bean counters and financial analysts to project the long-term value of the movie. DVD sales and their impact on the studio's bottom line are the tricky part.

Already one hard-nosed Wall Streeter has had a change of heart: Pali Research analyst Richard Greenfield shifted his rating on News Corp. from sell to neutral based primarily on his own enjoyment and assessment of the movie. I can't remember the last time a single movie moved the needle at one of the Hollywood heavyweights in any way.

In an analyst's note Thursday, he said: "We can gripe about the unnecessary length of the film and a typical Hollywood ending, but the honest truth is that nobody in the world has ever seen a movie like 'Avatar.' Fox's potential to generate a profit on 'Avatar' remains unclear given its cost and whether a film so closely associated with 3D filmmaking will translate into (2D-only) DVD/Blu-ray sales during 2010. That being said, we do not walk away believing Fox is in danger of losing a massive amount of money on the film."

In short, Greenfield concludes, "the movie will not be a disaster profit-wise, with the Fox film slate set to notably outperform expectations this year."

Driving in to work Thursday, I heard the results on the radio of some poll suggesting that more than 50% of Americans believe that China will soon surpass the U.S. as the most powerful country in the world and the biggest exporter of goods. OK. I know they're fixing their roads and bridges much more quickly than we are, and they don't seem to have a national obesity problem like we do, so in certain respects their strides are notable and impressive. But creatively?

Aside from the handful of art films that trickle out and make it to international film festivals, and Zhang Yimou's admittedly spectacular choreography for the Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony, practically nothing from China (or anywhere else?) movie-wise resonates beyond borders the way Hollywood fare does. I'm betting "Avatar" will widen that gap in the short term and then hopefully inspire others, from wherever, to build on the achievement.

The film's producer Jon Landau talked a little Thursday about what he thinks a key effect of the movie will be, pointing to something that surprised me. So much has been written about how expensive the movie is, but he put the accent on how much cost-savings in technology were attained even in just the four-year span in which the picture was shot. If $1 million was spent per terabyte when "Titanic" was made, that price has been now brought down enormously, he explained.

His point? This should, he told me, crack open the door for filmmakers to be able to apply amazing technology to unlock stories in their heads that otherwise couldn't be realized.

Like Cameron, they'll also have to imbibe some of that thing called Eywa.

Original here

'Harry Potter' star is decade's most profitable actress

2009-12-20T03:19:00.000-08:00

By Phil Han, CNN

Emma Watson has been crowned the most profitable actress of the decade, earning $5.4 billion for her films.

London, England (CNN) -- It wasn't Julia Roberts, Angelina Jolie or even Meryl Streep that was named the most profitable actress of the decade -- instead, 19-year-old British actress Emma Watson took the title.

Films that the young actress has appeared in have made more money than those of any other Hollywood starlet, despite her being in only the "Harry Potter" series and voicing a character in an animated film.

Over the course of the decade, films that Watson was involved in made $5.4 billion worldwide and these boasted the highest average box office earnings, making roughly $900 million per film.

More notable actresses like Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet were beaten in the list conducted by the Guinness Book of World Records.

Watson got her start at the age of ten, playing a young wizard in the first "Harry Potter" film back in 2001.

Since then, she has starred in five subsequent Potter movies and voiced the character of a young princess in the animated film, "The Tale of Despereaux."

Ali Jaafar, International Editor at Variety Magazine said it was notable that Watson was a big grosser, but it would be interesting to see how her career progressed.

"She's untested apart from the Harry Potter franchise, but these are young actors and it'll be interesting to see how they develop their careers," Jaafar told CNN.

"It's always hard for child actors to develop."

Orlando Bloom was named the highest grossing actor of the decade, taking in more than $7 billion for his role in movies like "Lord of the Rings" and "Pirates of the Caribbean."

Original here

Rock anthem outselling X Factor winner Joe McElderry

2009-12-20T03:15:00.000-08:00

The band headlined last year's Reading and Leeds festivals

Rock band Rage Against The Machine is ahead of X Factor winner Joe McElderry in the race for the Christmas number one, early sales figures suggest.

A Facebook group aiming to get the band's 1992 hit Killing In The Name to the top of the festive chart has attracted more than 750,000 members.

But McElderry's debut The Climb, out on CD on Wednesday, is expected to catch up by the weekend.

The Official Charts Company (OCC) said it is "a very exciting battle".

Campaign criticism

It is understood that there is a 10% margin in sales between the two singles after Sunday and Monday.

McElderry's song was only released digitally after his victory in the X Factor final at midnight on Sunday, giving it less time to rack up sales for this week's chart than Rage Against The Machine.

X Factor judge Simon Cowell has criticised the internet campaign, calling it "stupid".

Prior to the final of the ITV talent show, he said: "I think the campaign's aimed directly at me."

The Facebook page includes a link to homeless charity site Shelter, which has raised nearly £30,000 in donations.

Rage Against The Machine, meanwhile, are signed to Epic Records, which is part of Sony BMG, the same label as McElderry.

Ladbrokes has re-opened its betting for the number one Christmas single just 24 hours after closing it.

Ladbrokes spokesman, Nick Weinberg, said: "Earlier this week it looked a done deal. Now Joe appears to be facing an almighty battle for top spot.

"This Christmas could be the first time in a long while that we see a genuine competition."

McElderry is at 1/3 with Rage Against the Machine at 2/1.

The OCC's Martin Talbot said "two different records have captured the nation's imagination".

"According to our initial sales estimates, there is no doubt that this tussle is far from over," he added.

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Millionaire Filmmaker Michael Moore: ‘Capitalism Did Nothing For Me’

2009-10-04T10:24:00.000-07:00

By Nicholas Ballasy, Video Reporter
(CNSNews.com) -- Documentary film director Michael Moore, who has become a millionaire thanks to the profits from his movies, told CNSNews.com that “capitalism did nothing” for him.

CNSNews.com spoke with Moore on the red carpet at the Uptown Theatre in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday night before the premiere of his upcoming documentary, “Capitalism: A Love Story."

CNSNews.com asked: “Critics may say, when they see this movie, Michael Moore has amassed a fortune of over $50 million, some have said and –”

Moore said: “Really? Are you kidding me? Seriously? Wow. Where did it go?”

CNSNews.com then asked Moore: “Critics would say he’s [Moore] been very successful under a capitalist system. How would you justify making a movie where you paint capitalism as evil?”

Moore said: “Well, capitalism did nothing for me, starting with my first film.”

“You know, I had to pretty much beg, borrow and steal,” he said. “The system is not set up to help somebody from the working class make a movie like this and get the truth out there.”

“In fact, in Fahrenheit 9/11 if you remember, capitalism, the Disney Corporation, tried to kill that film--tried to make it so that people couldn’t see it,” said Moore. “My book Stupid White Men--Harper Collins tried to kill that book so that people couldn’t see it. It's only because I put the light of day on it and told people what was going on did people get the chance to see these things.”

According to Fortune Magazine, Moore’s films have grossed over $300 million worldwide. His highest grossing film was “Fahrenheit 9/11,” which critiques the Bush administration’s handling of the war in Iraq and earned over $200 million worldwide.

Moore reportedly was paid $21 million by Disney for producing, directing and creating the film.

Moore also earned 50 percent of the profits of his 2007 film “Sicko,” totaling $25 million plus DVD sales, according to Vanity Fair.

The Los Angeles Times reported that Moore would receive all of the profits made from DVD sales of “Sicko,” sales of which have been estimated at over $17 million.

“Look, you know, I mean, I make documentary films,” said Moore. “So, clearly, I’m not loaded in the way you described. But I do well, obviously because my films do well.”

“So, that means I have an extra responsibility to make sure I spend my time trying to make things better for the people that don’t have what I have, right? I mean, everybody should do that,” he said.

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The 17 Coolest G.I. Joe and Cobra Animal Sidekicks

2009-09-16T23:30:00.000-07:00

By Kevin J. Guhl

Both G.I. Joe and Cobra are very diverse organizations, allowing in pretty much any species that wants to join their ranks. Sure, it makes sense that the occasional Cobra or Joe would learn to work with a dog or a falcon, but once they started adding various aquatic life and other random animals, things got pretty god-ri-damned-diculous. Each team's headquarters must have started to look like Noah's Ark! Still, the inclusion of an animal sidekick with a G.I. Joe figure automatically made that toy 250% more desirable, even if the actual human figure was a waste of plastic. Here are the 17 coolest animal sidekicks in the G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero toyline.
17 & 16) Falcon and Condor (tie)

Two Cobra guys in really dumb costumes equals two very embarrassed avian sidekicks. Voltar was a plain old nut who happened to be a good military commander and for some reason liked dressing up in hilarious armor straight out of Buck Rogers and carrying around a condor. Raptor was insane, too, and didn't even have successes that made up for it. He not only attempted to train an army of falcons to attack G.I. Joe; he loved dressing in the falcons' image and hanging around in a birdcage. He probably loved pooping on car windshields, too. Oh, and he's an accountant. These are two clear cases of bird abuse, and that's just for being forced to be in the presence of these psychos.

15) Barracuda

Okay, it's a nifty accessory. But exactly what function does a barracuda serve in combat? Can you train it to munch on command? Undertow, one of Destro's frogmen, was probably just a big fan of Heart.

14) Scorpion

According to G.I. Joe lore, dropouts from the Cobra Viper program had to go sharpen their skills in hot, sandy environments as Desert Scorpions, where the troopers spent a lot of time with their namesakes. But where the hell is the desert these guys were training in? The Mesozoic Era? Those scorpions are HUGE!

13) Boar

According to the filecard of Gnawgahyde, this Dreadnok poacher likes to grease himself up with rancid hog-fat before going on a hunt, as the horrible scent will mask the chemical additives from processed foods that are in his body and could scare off animals. Translation: The poor boar packaged with Gnawgahyde isn't long for this Earth, his destiny to become Dreadnok cologne!

12) Manta Ray

Cobra Hydro-Vipers are apparently all like Aquaman, summoning the beasts of the sea to do their bidding. It's not clear what exactly these genetically-engineered Cobra troopers use the black mantas for, aside from having them swim curiously around members of the Joe underwater team.

11) Sandstorm

Late in the G.I. Joe toyline, Hasbro decided that established G.I. Joe desert trooper Dusty would get a pet coyote named Sandstorm that shared his proclivity for being a desert survivalist. That's all well and good, but it's hard not to picture Sandstorm running off to try and drop an anvil on the Roadrunner.

10) Max

Okay, who here really believes a bobcat can be adequately trained to be of any use whatsoever in G.I. Joe desert operations? Even the filecard pretty much implies that insurance salesman-turned-point man Spearhead brings along his bobcat Max as a mascot. Thankfully, Max was so cute that we were willing to overlook any lack of practicality on his part.

9) Robot Shark

While not a living animal, the Cobra Eel's mechanical shark pal bested any other fish companion, mainly due to its ability to fire a spring-loaded torpedo from its mouth.

8) Order

If you were a drunken Joe sneaking back into the PITT after lights out, the attuned senses and loud bark of Order (the German Shepherd belonging to M.P. Law) were sure to alert his master and get your Real American ass thrown in the brig.

7) Kangaroo

Brazil took the animal sidekick idea even further and introduced a line of exclusive figures called Force Fera. The animals looked suspiciously like the cheap plastic beasts you would get a in a bag of zoo critters at the grocery store, as evidenced by the tiny lion, tiger and bear that the Joes and Cobras were paired with. The most inspired combination, though, was of Cobra boxing instructor Big Boa (called Kangor in this set) with a kangaroo. Even better, the kangaroo was given Big Boa's boxing gloves! How fantastic is that?! Imagine yourself as a Joe running across the battlefield on Cobra Island and suddenly being confronted with a boxing kangaroo hopping your way. You'd be KO'ed before you could figure out where and when you popped the LSD.

6) Gold Cobra

The gold cobra that came with Serpentor was perfect not just as the terrorist organization's mascot, but as a toy that allowed you to re-enact two key scenes from G.I. Joe: The Movie. The cobra can serve as the snake javelin that Serpentor almost killed Duke with, and can also serve as Cobra Commander in his snake state when he persistently annoyed poor Roadblock by repeating, "Was once a man!"

5) Freedom

Freedom was the bald eagle teamed with Spirit, the Native American tracker. He was also the living mascot of the Joe team's American spirit, perfect for those posed, patriotic group shots the Joes liked so much.

4) Alligator

In what is apparently a running joke, every version of Cobra henchman Croc Master comes with a pet alligator. "Alligator Master" doesn't have the same ring, we suppose. Either way, it's still a pet alligator on a leash, and that is awesome.

3) Polly

Polly the talking parrot managed to fly a fine line between being annoying and endearing, but he earns a high spot on this list because he was an integral part of the whole package of greatness that was G.I. Joe sailor Shipwreck. Shipwreck's look and personality seemed patterned after Jack Nicholson in the Last Detail (and he also unfortunately looked like a lost member of the Village People). He was the team's wiseass and Polly was his foil. Polly even turned a bit creepy during Shipwreck's extended drug-induced hallucination in "There's No Place Like Springfield."

2) Junkyard

Just for the record, Junkyard was the Joe team's resident Rottweiler and Mutt was his even more vicious human trainer. They also had the distinction of being the first human/animal pair in the Real American Hero toyline, back in 1984. A fixture of both the cartoon and comics, Junkyard sadly went to Doggie Heaven in the comics due to old age, but his son, Junkyard, Jr., entered the fray with Mutt to take a bite out of Cobra's butt. And yes, they were probably both doing the biting.

1) Timber

There have been many Snake-Eyes figures over the decades, but the prize gems are the instances when the Joe team's mute ninja came packaged with his pet wolf, Timber. They are a dynamic pair, one clothed all in jet black and one sporting stark white fur. (Sometimes Timber is painted black, too, and that's just a shame.) They go together like the two halves of a black and white cookie and rival Constable Fraser and Diefenbaker of Due South for best human/wolf pairing. Timber played a role in Marvel's G.I. Joe comic book series and died of old age in the Devil's Due series, but not before siring a litter of little Timbers.

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Coldplay Settles Joe Satriani Lawsuit

2009-09-16T23:28:00.000-07:00

Coldplay and Satriani have settled their legal disputes and the guitarist’s lawsuit alleging copyright infringement has been dismissed.

Last Winter guitar virtuoso Joe Satriani, sued Coldplay for ripping off his 2004 track “If I Could Fly” for their own Grammy-nominated hit “Viva La Vida.” According to court documents obtained by Justia News, the lawsuit was dismissed “upon Stipulation” by Judge Dean D. Pregerson, and “each party bears [their] own cost.”

More than likely the two have agreed on some sort financial conclusion to get this train wreck of a case over with. I actually feel bad for Coldplay on this one. It’s just a melody line and similar ideas come close to overlapping all the time. I mean come on, everyone writes in the same keys using the same scales (major, minor, blues) over similar tempos.

It’s doubtful but even if Coldplay does listen to Satriani, anyone who writes music knows that some things can come out on a subconscious level without you having a clue. It’s not usually intentional and a lot of times it may be too late before you realize that it is similar to a song you have listened to before. If anyone should know this, it’s Satriani who seems to be writing the same songs over and over again since “The Extremist“. Then again maybe he doesn’t realize it if it is being done on subconscious level. Oh man we’re getting deep here.

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The Ten Greatest Films of Steven Soderbergh

2009-09-16T23:26:00.000-07:00

Posted by Turk182 in Lists, Features

With Steven Soderbergh's latest slice of cinematic greatness hitting theaters this week in The Informant!, we thought we'd take a look back at the amazing career of one of the most important filmmakers of the last two decades. With as impressive a range of films as anyone working today, what's remarkable about Soderbergh is his ability to go from completely mainstream blockbusters like the Ocean's franchise to much smaller films like Bubble to something in between like The Good German (cast was mainstream but concept was definitely not). He's completely unpredictable and his work ethic should be inspiring to everyone. The one thing his films have in common is that you can tell that Soderbergh loves making film. How else do you explain releasing Che, The Girlfriend Experience, and The Informant! in less than a year's time? He's passionate about his craft and inspiring in his refusal to deliver anything predictable.

Most directors don't have three films that diverse on their ENTIRE resume and the fact that all three are excellent is all-the-more amazing. Soderbergh has already had three periods of brilliance. The first came when he changed the face of independent cinema with Sex, Lies and Videotape and followed it up with an amazingly unique series of films including Kafka and King of the Hill. The independent film movement was decidedly different in the late 1990s as it was in the late 1980s when Soderbergh first came on the scene, so Steven went mainstream but brought his own energy and talent to a ridiculously good string of popular films like Out of Sight, Traffic, and Erin Brockovich. To this viewer, Soderbergh entered his darkest period in the mid-2000s by going too much "Inside Hollywood" with films like Full Frontal and the first Ocean's sequel. But in the last few years, Soderbergh has perhaps pulled off his greatest feat by blending all the different directorial personas of his past from the independent maverick who might have made a film like The Girlfriend Experience to the more mainstream filmmaker who puts Matt Damon in The Informant! And he's doing some of the best work of his career.

Skipping the TV work and his part of Eros, Steven Soderbergh has given us twenty complete films (viewing Che as one) to choose from and it was actually very difficult to whittle this list down to ten. Despite some respected critics who claim otherwise, Ocean's Twelve is Soderbergh's biggest misstep in my eyes. One man's "subversive" is another's "narcissistic, boring, and stupid." Full Frontal and Schizopolis can be immediately scrapped for most of the same reasons. But everything else should be seen and would be recommended. Gray's Anatomy doesn't have the impact that makes me remember it well enough to include (besides, Swimming to Cambodia is a better Spalding Gray film anyway) and The Good German was undeniably flawed, even if I think it got unjustly slammed by most people.

As for true runner-ups – Kafka was a daring choice for a second film; King of the Hill is perhaps the most underappreciated-by-the-public film in his career; Ocean's Thirteen was a lot more fun than it was given credit for being; Erin Brockovich probably would have made the list if I hadn't seen it recently and thought it looked extremely dated; and as much as I truly want to love Solaris, I just don't. Perhaps it is being too familiar with the original but there's something about Soderbergh's Solaris that strikes me much like Van Sant's Psycho – I'd rather see the original.

by Brian Tallerico

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10. Ocean's Eleven (2001)

Probably the most straight-up popular film on this list (if you gauge popularity by being played on basic cable interminably), Ocean's Eleven represents Soderbergh playing with a classic representation of the essence of cool (in the rat pack) that clearly had an impact on him personally, but also just trying to deliver a film that will leave audiences smiling on their way out the door. After the incredibly serious one-two punch of Erin Brockovich and Traffic, which had both come out only the year before, could you blame a director for wanting to get together with an amazing ensemble and have some fun in the city of sin? When the Ocean's films work, which is in most of the first and third and some of the second film, that's what they do best, create an infection of the joy of the con and the beautiful men and women involved in the game.

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9. The Underneath (1995)

God, I wish Soderbergh would make another noir (although he arguably would again in the neo-noir The Limey, which you'll find further up this list). 1995's The Underneath is an underrated attempt at the genre fueled by a great performance from the always-excellent William Fichtner and turns from Peter Gallagher and Elizabeth Shue before they became so predictable. The final act holds it back from greatness but The Underneath proved that Soderbergh could make movies for the masses. After Sex, Lies, and Videotape; Kafka; and King of the Hill, it looked like Soderbergh might always be a director who appealed more to the arthouse than the mainstream. The Underneath was when I realized that Soderbergh would eventually not be just a Sundance darling but someone who would probably take the stage at the Oscars (which he would just a few years later). It's not that The Underneath is Oscar-caliber filmmaking, but it's where I think Soderbergh really developed into the director who would make most of the films on the rest of this list, including the blockbusters, independent experiments, and award-winners.

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8. The Girlfriend Experience (2009)

Proof that Soderbergh isn't concerned about expectations and simply makes the films he WANTS to make can be seen in the excellent The Girlfriend Experience from earlier this year. This is evidence of Soderbergh telling the stories that interest him; ones he wants to tell by experimenting with the form. TGE is about the life of a high-priced escort (Sasha Grey) and is shot on digital video with almost entirely unbroken takes. It looks both amazingly refined and feels voyeuristic at the same time. The design of Girlfriend is subtle but remarkable and Soderbergh proves to have an eye for talent as Grey is simply great, bringing a genuine quality to the role that so many actresses would have turned into melodrama or missed entirely. I love Girlfriend because it shows Soderbergh taking chances with subject matter and style. Track it down on DVD on September 29th.

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7. Bubble (2005)

Probably the least seen film on this list, Bubble is disturbingly underrated. It's probably unlikely to become your favorite film but there's a mastery of craft on display in Bubble that's mind-blowing to this viewer and I think the reason I rank it so high is because I see it as the opening act to the latest chapter of Soderbergh's career, a step back from the mistakes I think he made in the mid-2000s. Made for under $2 million, shot on digital video, largely improvised, and released on DVD four days after being released in theaters, Bubble represents Soderbergh experimenting with the form in much the same way he did with his breakthrough Sex, Lies, and Videotape. He's not only playing with the delivery structure of film but he's playing with the expectations of what an audience brings to a film when they see a director's name above a title and driving home that you should have none when it comes to his films.

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6. Che (2008)

Oh, Che. The lengthy, heated debates I've gotten into about Soderbergh's epic about the failure of revolution are one of the reasons I love it. When someone tells me they hated Che, I smile. It's one of the few films of the last few years that I think is honestly worthy of discussion. You were bored during the second half of Che? What if you were supposed to be? It's a film about the fizzling out of the passion required for revolutionary action. I think Che is remarkable in its construct with each driven action of the first half matched by apathetic failure in the second half. With Benicio Del Toro giving arguably the best performance in all of the Soderbergh films (if it's not this one it's probably the one he gave in Traffic), I find Che mesmerizing. With critics and movie goers constantly telling me that they wish more filmmakers would take honest risks, I feel like we need to support experiments like Che. You say Che was a difficult film? What if it was supposed to be? Shouldn't the life of someone as complex as Che Guevara be more than disposable entertainment?

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5. The Informant! (2009)

Soderbergh's newest is a wonderful comedy that gets richer in memory and discussion, as all great films do. Damon gives the performance of his career as Mark Whitacre, a man who is so delusional that he basically lives inside his own head. Like a lot of Midwesterners, Whitacre has read a few too many Crichton and Grisham novels and when he becomes involved in an international, billion-dollar investigation, he makes mistake after mistake. Damon is simply perfect in the role and Soderbergh's direction is masterful, making for a film that's almost jarringly unusual at first. But once you get on the wavelength of this nearly screwball story of a man who poisoned nearly everything around him with his own delusions, it is a wonderfully brilliant examination of high-level greed and stupidity. (Come back for more on The Informant! with our full-length review on Friday.)

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4. The Limey (1999)

Terence Stamp simply rocks in The Limey. Giving one of the most driven, remarkable performances of his career, Stamp stars as Wilson, a violent Englishman who heads to the city of angels to get revenge for the death of his daughter. Thrilling from beginning to end, The Limey transcends its genre by hinting at how Soderbergh would later experiment with the form through unusual editing and flashback techniques. The Limey is one of my personal favorites because it brilliantly displays Soderbergh's multi-faceted abilities as a director. A lot of directors can make a taut thriller but very few can make one with a performance as complex as Stamp's in the lead role and break so many of the traditional rules of the genre while still providing an intense, riveting experience.

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3. Out of Sight (1998)

Nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Editing, Out of Sight is an underrated classic, a film that turned George Clooney into the modern Cary Grant and a film that thoroughly entertains from first frame to last. I grew up on films like North by Northwest and Charade, films with charming leads, gorgeous women, and intriguing mysteries and those films defined my love for the medium. That love is there in Out of Sight. Out of Sight is a direct descendent of those films, a masterpiece of cool style and clever dialogue. It is one of Soderbergh's best-directed films by far, a movie that gets better every time I see it, feeling more like a modern classic with each passing year.

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2. Traffic (2000)

What more is there to say about Traffic? It's ambitious, flawless, and riveting filmmaking and probably Soderbergh's most universally-acclaimed film ... for good reason. Traffic worked different, related narratives into a full experience long before the narrative structure had reached the point of over-saturation. With a massive running time, huge ensemble, and daring subject matter, Traffic was a risk in every way and it paid off with four Academy Awards, including Best Director, Supporting Actor, Editing, and Adapted Screenplay. (And it should have won Best Picture over Gladiator.) Soderbergh had displayed incredible technical and storytelling ambition with small films like Kafka and The Limey but Traffic proved that the scope of the film wouldn't dictate his willingness to take risks. All directors should follow his lead.

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1. Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989)

What criteria should be used to pick a director's best film? If we're talking influence, nothing touches Sex, Lies, and Videotape, a movie that really changed the game when it came to the potential of independent film. If we're talking performance, no one in the cast was ever better than they were here. And if we're talking storytelling, Sex, Lies, and Videotape is as timelessly riveting as anything the man has made in the twenty years since. Yes, it looks a bit like a product of its time, but that's not as much of an issue as with other films because it's an essential part of the film. Sex, Lies, and Videotape put a stamp on the end of the selfish era of the 1980s and ushered in an era where technology, whether it be videotape, computers, or your damn Facebook page, would become a major part of the way men and women interact. Witty, clever, honest, and fascinating, Sex, Lies, and Videotape won several major awards, including the Palme D'Or, and became a cultural touchstone for the generation that would follow. Seeing Sex, Lies, and Videotape made me want to become a writer in the hope that I could somehow bring work this good to a wider audience. No film by one of my favorite directors was more personally motivating, and, so, I can't claim any was better.

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Burt Reynolds In Rehab, Found Lying In Pool Of Blood

2009-09-16T23:22:00.000-07:00

Burt Reynolds has checked into rehab in West Palm Beach to be treated for an addiction to painkillers, following an allegedly grisly and bizarre incident in late August. He was found semi-conscious and covered in blood in his Hobe Sound, Florida, home, the National Enquirer reports.

"The houseman found Burt lying in a pool of blood. He'd fallen and was badly cut. The houseman drove him to the hospital. But this time, Burt was behaving strangely, and doctors were so concerned about his state of mind that they sent him to the county mental health facility in West Palm Beach," a source told the tabloid.

His admission to rehab may not have been entirely voluntary. The facility allegedly refused to release Reynolds unless he agreed to head straight to rehab.

"He's been increasingly abusing booze and prescription drugs, mainly painkillers. There have been many times recently when he's been completely out of it, and twice in the last few months he's ended up at the ER," the source said. "...Burt wasn't happy about it, but he checked in, went through detox and then joined a regular 30-day rehab program."

Take what you want from the Enquirer's report, but the tabloid has gotten it right before. Reynolds' manager, meanwhile, has put forth a less colorful version of the events that landed the 73-year-old actor in rehab.

"After a recent back surgery, Mr. Reynolds felt like he was going through hell and after a while, realized he was a prisoner of prescription pain pills," he said in a statement to People. "He checked himself into rehab in order to regain control of his life. Mr. Reynolds hopes his story will help others in a similar situation. He hopes they will not try to solve the problem by themselves, but realize that sometimes it is too tough to do on their own and they should seek help, as he did."

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Misdirection: When Hollywood Directors Take Credit For Movies They Didn’t Direct

2009-09-16T23:20:00.000-07:00

Hollywood is a self-congratulatory industry. It devotes millions in time and money to constantly patting itself on the back. But it's even more unbelievable to be self-congratulatory about a project you had virtually nothing to do with. Increasingly, famous Hollywood directors are "presenting" movies. They neither directed nor produced these movies, but for the sake of clout, marketing, and getting more people in the theatre, 'presenters' seem to be needed. Too bad if the real director did all the work and now their name is eclipsed by Spielberg, Scorsese or Tarantino. Here is a list of the biggest names in Hollywood's “misdirection.”

1. Steven Spielberg

You'd think the (arguably) most successful director of all time would have his plate full. Apparently not. The films Spielberg has leant his name to are impressive: An American Tail, Tiny Toon Adventures, or Animaniacs to begin. While Spielberg acts more as an executive producer, rather than the common presenter, it must suck to direct the classic The Goonies or The Gremlins, and no one remembers your name. Richard Donner and Joe Dante anyone?

2. Quentin Tarantino

Tarantino is talented, famous and revered by audiences. He's one of the few directors (often) more famous than the actors in his films. Yet, he is not shy to "present" films he had absolutely nothing to do with. Usually Tarantino attaches his name to Asian action films he loves. Tarantino "presented" Hero directed by Zhang Yimou and The Protector directed by Prachya Pinkaew. The best job he did of presenting was Iron Monkey, a film from Hong Kong director Yuen Woo-Ping. This movie was released in 1993. Tarantino presented this film in its US release in 2001. Nothing like an 8-year-gap to really hone your presenting skills. Tarantino spread his love to some Americans, as well. He was the executive producer, for example, on Eli Roth's Hostel.

3. Francis Ford Coppola

Creating The Godfather franchise and Apocalypse Now wasn't enough for Coppola - he had to start presenting movies himself. Even though 1987's Barfly was directed by Barbet Schroeder, written by Charles Bukowski and starred Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway, it apparently needed Coppola's presenting skills to really get some name recognition. Although Coppola's executive producer credit didn't do much to help Chatrichalerm Yukol's The Legend of Suriyothai, an epic Thai historical drama. Not that anyone saw it. Then again, Coppola's last film as director was Youth Without Youth. Nope, no one saw that one either.

4. Martin Scorsese

Scorsese's name is synonymous with gritty, crime films so when he presented 2008's Italian modern mob drama Gomorrah at least that made some sense. But who thinks Shakespeare when they hear the name Scorsese? Love's Labour's Lost directed by renowed Shakespearean actor/director Kenneth Branaugh and produced by Miramax was presented to US audiences by Martin Scorsese? Maybe any attempt at Shakespeare starring Alicia Silverstone should take any help it can get.

5. Michael Bay

While Bay's summer has been consumed with the massive success of Transformers 2 not to mention the idiotic ramblings of its hottie lead Megan Fox, Michael Bay had time to lend his name to Horsemen, a Seven-ish ripoff starring Dennis Quaid. Horsemen is directed by Jonus Akerlund and also stars Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon star Ziyi Zhang. Maybe if Akerlund is lucky, Zhang will be as nutty as Fox and get his name out there since he actually did all the work for the film. Bay must want to do to horror/thriller films what he did to action films, which was make them big and sucky, because he recently produced The Unborn, starring Meagan Goode who bears an uncanny resemblance to Megan Fox. The Unborn was written and directed by David S. Goyer, but who cares. Michael Bay needs his name on everything in 2009.

6. Ron Howard

It's easy to understand every man's secret desire to be an astronaut, especially if you made Apollo 13 and got to use all of NASA's official stuff. Apparently the 16 executive producers of In The Shadow of the Moon were not enough, neither was the participation of real astronauts, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. They needed Ron Howard to "present" this film.

7. Spike Jonze

Ever since Spike Jonze brought audiences the very original, quirky Being John Malkovich his name brings a certain coolness to projects. However, it's questionable that his name helped Tarsem Singh's visually stunning The Fall, although the poster looked really cool.

8. Robert Zemeckis

Zemeckis, best known for directing all the Back to the Future films, not to mention the little indie film Forrest Gump, also presented the world to a little known New Zealand director, Peter Jackson. Zemeckis must feel pretty good about himself, or maybe he just taught Jackson a lesson about filming trilogies all at one time. Zemeckis first 'presented' Jackson's film The Frighteners starring Michael J. Fox. See, it's all coming full circle now.

9. Spike Lee

When Spike Lee isn't picking fights with Clint Eastwood or watching the NY Knicks, he's usually directing or producing films. But even Lee is not afraid to get in the presenter game. He leant his name to Kevin Willmott's C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America a British 'documentary' that takes a satirical and scary view if the South had won the Civil War. There isn’t an embeddable version of it, but you can view the trailer to CSA here.

10. Joe Roth

While Joe Roth's early successes came producing movies such as Young Guns, Bachelor Party, and Major League, somehow the studio releasing The Exorcist III, totally NOT in the same genre mind you, needed Joe Roth as presenter. He was also an executive producer on The Exorcist III, which seems normal, but presenter? Who even knows Joe Roth? Well, he did direct Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise.

11. Jonathan Demme

Jonathan Demme, who won an Academy Award for directing The Silence of the Lambs and most recently directed Rachel Getting Married, for some reason needed to present 1997's Ulee's Gold directed by Victor Nunez. It didn't seem to matter that the lead actor, Peter Fonda, was one of the most highly regarded actors of his generation or that the film featured a young but still sexy Jessica Biel. No, the studio called for the virtually nameless Jonathan Demme to step up to bat, and step up the bat he did.

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TARANTINO RULES SET WITH AN IRON DILDO

2009-08-14T11:32:00.000-07:00

Apparently there was a running joke on the set of Inglourious Basterds, whereby if a castmember was caught sleeping, they would get their picture taken with a giant purple dildo, and that giant purple dildo was named Gerry. I would’ve called it “Danny Masterson.”

Actor Michael Fassbender admits he was one of the only castmates not to make the board - because he found ways of sleeping in secret. He tells WENN, “Big Gerry was a giant purple dildo, very large in girth and length. Basically, anybody that was caught going to sleep would get photographed with Big Jerry the dildo somewhere near their face and put up on the Board of Shame. The idea was three strikes and you’re out. This kind of really worried me because I have a tendency to nap. If I have 10 or 15 minutes you’d find me in a corner underneath something but I never got caught. Brad (Pitt) was up there once on the Board of Shame, Gedeon Burkhard got caught twice, Diane (Kruger) was on the board… There was a lot of people on that board.” [ONTD]

Well isn’t that cute. It’s nice to see that even people living the dream, making the kind of movies most people can only dream of making, with some of the biggest stars in the world can still find the time to have fun. Heartwarming, really. It’s kind of like how sometimes I shower just to put on pajamas, and only because I can’t stand the smell of myself. Blogging is so glamorous. Hey, know who else has a wall of dildos? You guessed it, your mom.

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EXCLUSIVE: Jerry O'Connell Enrolls in Law School

2009-08-14T10:54:00.000-07:00

Jerry O'Connell has gone back to school, his rep confirms to Usmagazine.com.

The actor, 35, recently enrolled at Los Angeles' Southwestern Law School.

"I had always planned on continuing my education at some point and because my wife is working on Eastwick, which is on Wednesday nights at 10 p.m. this fall, and I'm home all day with the girls, I figured I would take a couple of classes at night," O'Connell tells Us. "It was either that or play video games until 2 a.m."

Do these stars look smarter with glasses?

O'Connell "is very excited to be starting his law school education here at Southwestern," Leslie Steinberg, the school's Assistant Dean of Public Affairs, tells Us. "He just had orientation last week, and he started classes this week."

See celebs' high school year book photos.

Steinberg says that even though O'Connell -- who welcomed twins with wife Rebecca Romijn last January -- has "been out of school for awhile," he's "very excited and enthusiastic" about his studies.

See which other stars have twins.

She adds that O'Connell decided to enroll there because he was "very impressed with the faculty and the vibe here. This is brand new to him as well. He's very much looking forward to his education.

A fellow student posted on Twitter's CelebSightings earlier this week: "Actor Jerry O'Connell is at orientation @ Southwestern Law School. He is an entering night student, mingling @ mixer."

Join Us on Facebook and Twitter for even more up to the minute celebrity news and photos!

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Sean Bean to star in HBO's 'Thrones'

2009-07-21T08:41:00.000-07:00

This is great news for an eagerly anticipated series.

By Borys Kit and Nellie Andreeva

Sean Bean has nabbed the lead in "Game of Thrones," HBO's adaptation of the George R.R. Martin fantasy-book series. Tom McCarthy is directing; David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, who wrote the screenplay, are executive producing.

Mark Addy is in final negotiations to also join the production. Kit Harrington, Jack Gleeson and Harry Lloyd also have come aboard.

The books revolves around a battle among seven kingdoms and between two ruling families for control of the Iron Throne, the possession that ensures survival through a 40-year winter to come.

Bean will play Lord Eddard "Ned" Stark, known for his sense of honor and justice, who becomes closest adviser to King Robert (Addy).

Harrington will play Jon Snow, Bean's bastard son, and Lloyd will play Viserys, a powerless ruler who seeks to marry off his sister to a powerful king. Gleeson will play Joffrey, King Robert's son.

Peter Dinklage also is in the cast for the production, which is in the pilot stage and begins shooting in October in Ireland.

Guymon Casady, Carolyn Strauss, Vincent Gerardis and Martin also are executive producing.

"Thrones" marks the latest fantasy epic-style production for Bean. He recently wrapped shooting on "Percy Jackson & the Olympians," an adaptation of Rick Riordan's children's book. Bean, repped by CAA, also has "Black Death," a supernatural thriller set during England's first bubonic plague, in postproduction.

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McCartney Makes History at Citi Field With Billy Joel, Beatles Hits

2009-07-21T08:39:00.000-07:00

Photo: Bill Bernstein/MPL Communications Ltd/Getty

Forty-four years after the Beatles‘ legendary show at Shea Stadium, Paul McCartney returned to Flushing Meadows, Queens, last night to perform the first concert at Citi Field, Shea’s replacement. The sold-out crowd was clearly nostalgic for the Beatles’ heyday, but not as much as McCartney himself. “These occasions are so cool,” he said early on in the show, as he walked to the front of the stage to absorb the crowd’s adoration. “I’m just going to take a sec to soak it all in.”

During the first encore McCartney spoke about his most recent appearance in the area, guesting with Billy Joel during his Last Play At Shea concert. “That gentleman is with us tonight,” he said as Joel ran onstage, sending the audience into hysterics. He played piano and sang a rollicking duet with Macca on “I Saw Her Standing There.” Joel, currently on tour with Elton John, looked extremely sunburned, but clearly relished the opportunity to play again with his hero again.

For the rest of the show McCartney stuck to his tried and true concert formula: a smattering of new songs in the beginning, a handful of Wings hits and a fuckload of Beatles classics. Each time he’s toured recently he’s revived a couple Fab Four songs that haven’t been played since their original recording. This time around he dug out “Day Tripper,” and “A Day In The Life.” “Day Tripper” was scorching and clearly should have been unearthed years ago, while “A Day In The Life” was surprisingly effective and emotional considering that the original was a product of so much studio magic. At the end of the Wings cut “Let Me Roll It” the band played a snippet of “Foxy Lady,” followed by a story about McCartney seeing Jimi Hendrix cover a track from Sgt. Pepper in London days after it came out.

The middle section was heavy on material from McCartney’s recent Fireman album, and obscurities like “Flaming Pie” and “Here Today.” It also began raining, and one could feel the energy being sucked out of the stadium as masses of people begin sitting down to huddle under umbrellas and makeshift hats. When McCartney sat down at the piano for “Live And Let Die,” however, the rain stopped and the booming pyrotechnics instantly brought the crowd into the game. From here it was one Beatles song after another: “Lady Madonna,” “Yesterday,” “Get Back,” “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and the inevitable crowd sing-along on “Hey Jude.” Best of all was “Helter Skelter,” which managed to nearly sound as hard and menacing as the original.

The Beatles’ 1965 and 1966 Shea Stadiums gigs were certainly landmark cultural moments, but as musical events they were quite lousy. The sound was run through the stadium’s public address system, rendering it all but inaudible — regardless of the fact that the girls spent the entire time screaming at the top of their lungs. They only did a dozen songs during a barely 30-minute set. Last night, McCartney played for nearly three hours, in a voice that sounds remarkably unaffected by the passage of time. The only song played at both the 1965 and 2009 shows was “I’m Down.” While nothing could beat this version (watch John Lennon play the keyboards with his elbows), the 2009 rendition was light years better than you’d expect from a man three years short of his 70th birthday.

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Metallica’s Lars Ulrich is Proud of Napster’s Destruction

2009-07-21T08:37:00.000-07:00

Written by enigmax

Just days after the BPI’s Geoff Taylor said that the industry screwed up in its handling of Napster, Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich indicates he has no such regrets, declaring his pride for his hand in the destruction of the file-sharing pioneer but giving credit to the Napster management for painting the band as greedy luddites.

In recent times it’s become something of a trend in the music industry to admit that its handling of Napster left a lot to be desired. Of course, everyone was telling them this exact same thing 10 years ago.

While some, such as the BPI’s Geoff Taylor, have shown at least some sign of regret (although not necessarily backed up by actions), others are adamant that crushing the file-sharing pioneer was the right thing to do.

Despite making some uncharacteristically pragmatic comments about P2P last year when his album ‘Death Magnetic’ appeared on the Internet, and despite trying file-sharing himself fairly recently when he downloaded the album using BitTorrent, Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich has no regrets over his part in the neutering of Napster.

Ulrich and Metallica generated years of hate with their aggressive anti-Napster stance in the early part of the century, after discovering their entire back catalogue was available through the service.

But now, speaking with Kerrang!, Ulrich says he did the right thing in bringing Napster down, standing firmly behind his decision, expressing pride where others today are expressing cautious regret.

“Being right about Napster doesn’t mean that much to me. I don’t find any particular glory in being proved right about it,” he said.

Turning to Napster’s management, Ulrich said he admired them for managing to paint the band as greedy rock stars who were behind the times, although it hardly seems fair to give Fanning and friends all the credit for that - the band did more than enough to nurture that impression too.

“You have to give props to the other side because they did run a brilliant campaign, and they did portray me and Metallica as being greedy rock pigs and luddites who were completely behind what was happening technologically,” said Ulrich.

“But I am proud of what we did, and what we stood up for,” he added.

Indeed, today’s file-sharing community owes a debt of gratitude to Ulrich and Metallica, because without their efforts to destroy Napster there wouldn’t have been the massive effort by others to create the many improved replacements available today.

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Steven Sommers Dismisses G.I. Joe Firing Rumors as 'Complete Lies'; Sienna Miller Admits It Isn't the 'Best Acting Work We've Ever Done'

2009-07-21T08:36:00.000-07:00

Written by Seth Abramovitch

Any movie based on a line of boys’ attack-Barbies, directed by the man who brought you Van Helsing, and starring Marlon Wayans and Joseph Gordon-Levitt without the least bit of irony has turkey written all over it, and nothing in the trailer for G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra suggests otherwise. Indeed, the signs were there early on, after a number of stunt mishaps narrowly averted serious disaster — though resulted in at least one cleavage-singeing for star Sienna Miller. She confirmed as much to Australian press at a stop on the movie’s worldwide promotional tour, saying, “Luckily it wasn’t my breasts, it was the bit in-between. It got a bit burnt when an explosion got a bit close.”

But it would take more than some barbecued boobies to get Paramount to eject the man behind it all from the production. Denying widespread rumors that he’d been dismissed by the studio after some disastrous test screenings, Sommers said:

‘It’s complete lies. I have always had final cut of the film. People just make stuff up. You have to really screw up to get fired from a movie. The stigma of that would kill it. This is not the case.’

Meanwhile, newly married star Channing Tatum explained how his position as an opinionless patriot nearly prevented his involvement — until he read the script, and realized that what Sommers and Paramount were trying to do was create a military strike-force movie, without the military:

‘When I was first approached about the role I thought, ‘Aww man, how are you going to make a movie about G.I. Joe in a time of war?’

‘Then I read the script and it was nothing to do with the military at all. ‘I’m a big supporter of the soldiers and the military and I don’t have a view on the war at all, I’m not a political person.

In the end, the film’s stars seem to want to keep expectations realistic:

Actor Channing, 29, said: ‘I hope it does OK’, while a less tactful Sienna added: ‘You know, GI Joe, it’s not going to be the best acting work we’ve ever done.’
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Growing Pains: When Child Stars Become Adults

2009-07-21T01:20:00.000-07:00

Growing up isn't always easy, so imagine having to grow up on movie screens in front of an audience of millions. Sure, the money probably eases the burden... but we digress.

Watching the Harry Potter kids as Half-Blood Prince rolls out seems to reveal a relatively well-adjusted trio of stars who've avoided the pitfalls of celebrity life and kept their wits about them (though not always their clothes, as Daniel Radcliffe showed in his Equus theatre debut).

But how will the kids fare post-Potter? Will they transition successfully into adult roles? We decided to take a look back at 25 memorable child stars -- and the courses their careers took.

Natalie Portman

A 12-year-old couldn't ask for a cooler film debut than that of a gun-toting, Lolita-esque muse to a hardened New York hit man. In 1994's Leon, Natalie Portman gets to swear, smoke, wear hot pants and learn how to take out a target -- only Luc Besson would dare get away with it -- thus preparing herself for a successful adult career as the muse of a Sith Lord, a terrorist, and Devendra Banhart. But really, Natalie -- what the hell was with Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium?

Edward Furlong

Ah, Eddie. He burst onto screens wearing a Public Enemy T-shirt, robbing ATMs and teaching killer robots how to high five as the young k.d. Lang -- sorry, John Connor -- in 1991's Terminator 2: Judgment Day, but the ensuing years have been anything but 'eeeasy money'. 1998's trio of Pecker, American History X and Detroit Rock City looked promising, but Furlong's battle with drugs sidelined his CV -- and meant we had to deal with Christian Bale as John Connor in Terminator Salvation. Uh, thanks for that. Still, at least Uwe Boll's giving him work.

Dakota Fanning

There are those who'll insist Dakota was never really a child actress -- just an adult trapped in a miniature body. True, there's something eerily preternatural about her performances, even going back to 2001's I Am Sam -- when she was just seven -- and she was definitely too old to be playing with pigs and spiders in Charlotte's Web. But the world wasn't ready for Dakota to grow up, as the rape-gate controversy over the quickly-shelved Hounddog illustrated. Now, she's ready for proper young adult, starring in Twilight: New Moon, and as proto-punk '70s riot grrl Cherie Currie in The Runaways. Hello daddy, hello mom...

Linda Blair

To be fair, Linda Blair was never going to live up to -- or live down -- her portrayal of The Exorcist's Regan, a... 'troubled'... child given to decorating her bedroom with projectile vomit, descending staircases upside-down, and telling men of the cloth exactly what their mothers liked to suck in Hell. Her roller-skating teenage return in the train wreck Exorcist II quickly gave way to a rut of straight-to-video B-movies in the 1980s, while she later spoofed her most famous role with 1990's Repossessed!, resurfaced for a cameo in Wes Craven's Scream, and recently appeared in an episode of TV's Supernatural. Fitting enough.

Haley Joel Osment

Teenage growth spurts can be painful at the best of times, but when your awkward years are captured in a police mugshot for a DUI, it's all the worse. That 2006 photo of Haley Joel Osment's post-car accident arrest stunned everyone who remembered him as the silent, ethereal little boy who saw dead people in The Sixth Sense, played a creepy kinder-droid in Spielberg's A.I. and then, well... it's not that HJO disappeared exactly, but did anyone see Home of the Giants? He's only 21, so let's give his body time to align and then we'll see where he goes...

Elizabeth Taylor

Hard to imagine the fabulously over-the-top 77-year-old icon was once a child star, but there it was: baby-faced Liz cuddling up to a border collie in 1943's Lassie Come Home and a prized horse in 1944's National Velvet. Her adult career is legendary, of course, with two Best Actress Oscars, star turns in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Giant; not to mention an infamously stormy marriage to Richard Burton and a collection of husbands almost as long as her list of film credits.

Ke Huy Quan

He got his break trying to pick Dr. Jones' pockets and went on to become the adventurer's trusted sidekick in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom -- proving useful in a lop-sided fight against evil henchmen and wicked Maharaja's with voodoo dolls -- but Ke Huy Quan may just be as fondly remembered as Data, he of the malfunctioning booby-trap gadgets in 1985's The Goonies. Seems his fight-training paid off, too: he's since worked as a stunt choreographer on X-Men and Jet Li's The One.

Kristen Stewart

Okay, so she wasn't exactly stretched to do much of it in Twilight, but we all knew Kristen Stewart could act -- cast your memories back to the barely 12-year-old's petrified turn as Jodie Foster's diabetic daughter in David Fincher's Panic Room and you can see a child actress with an intense range... of fear, at least. No doubt her ex-child prodigy co-star offered her some tips because Kristen's career has been on a sure and steady climb ever since -- with the obligatory kids' films (the underrated Zathura) giving way to parts in Into the Wild and the Twilight Saga, which has made her one of the world's most recognizable stars. Next up: loving rock and roll as Joan Jett in The Runaways. Yowl.

Drew Barrymore

Drew's rise and fall and rise again is the oft-told stuff of pop culture legend: a descendant of the famous Barrymore acting clan, the 7-year-old with the blonde pigtails melted the world's heart as Gertie in E.T. and, just a few years later, had succumbed to the abyss of Hollywood's party drugs. Yet what looked like a classic case of child-star burnout turned around in the '90s -- we're saying precisely at the moment she appeared as a Swedish receptionist in Wayne's World 2; or gave a 'revealing' interview on Letterman -- and, post-Charlie's Angels, Barrymore is a successful producer (thank her for Donnie Darko) and about to be first-time director, with Ellen Page's all-girl roller derby Whip It! due later this year.

Macaulay Culkin

It's a filmic image as enduring as Mйliиs rocket in the Moon, Citizen's Kane's Rosebud or Godard's Breathless jump cuts: yes, we're talking about 10-year-old Mac's hands clasped to his face in Edvard Munch-like horror in Home Alone -- arguably the greatest ever moment in cinema history. (What? We poll experts on these things, you know.) Culkin was the biggest thing in child stardom since Shirley Temple and for a brief moment in the early '90s he reigned supreme: a hit sequel, hangin' with Michael Jackson; a pretty moving turn in My Girl. But age and -- dare we say, a limited acting range -- caught up with Culkin, whose roles in the likes of Party Monster required more than cute McCallister face-pulling. We'll always have his weirdly hot Sonic Youth video, though.

Winona Ryder

"My whole life is a dark room," deadpanned Winona Ryder as the comically morbid kid in Tim Burton's Beetlejuice. "One big, dark room." Okay, so things haven't gotten quite so grim for "Wino Forever" (as ex Johnny Depp renamed his tattoo of her), but after an opening resume that included Heathers and Edward Scissorhands -- and an Oscar nomination for 1994's Little Women -- the actress appears to have steadily drifted sideways, appearing most recently in stuff that's missed theatrical release altogether. We could make some easy wisecrack about kleptomania here, but whatever she's doing to keep her looks -- it's clearly working.

Leonardo DiCaprio

Hey, Mr. Serious Scorsese Muse and Eco-Crusader -- you were in Critters 3! Yep, Leo's less-than-auspicious debut predicted little of what his career would become; yet the guy quickly demonstrated his electric talent as a teen in What's Eating Gilbert Grape? and The Basketball Diaries. Titanic teen-idolatry, running with the so-called "Pussy Pack" and overexposure almost finished him, so DiCaprio wisely removed himself from the public eye for a couple of years, reemerging with Spielberg (Catch Me If You Can), Scorsese (Gangs of New York, et al) and Ridley Scott (Body of Lies). What we wouldn't give to see the dude lighten up a little, though...

Christian Bale

Ben Stiller said that, while working on Empire of the Sun, he conceived the idea for Tropic Thunder, his war-movie satire rife with maniacal, egotistical actors who love to shout a lot. Could he have been reminiscing about his 13-year-old co-star Christian Bale, who hurled perfectly eloquent obscenities at incompetent director Steven Spielberg and ordered John Malkovich to get out of his shot? We'll never know, but Bale's performance -- based on J.G. Ballard's memoirs -- shows a kid with already enormous intensity. The rest is history -- Patrick Bateman, Bruce Wayne, Reign of Fire. What's that, you don't remember that movie? Helicopters and dragons -- together? Bale is next up in Public Enemies, and is filming The Fighter with David O. Russell.

Judy Garland

Dead at age 47 from a drug overdose, Judy Garland's was a tumultuous career marked by dizzying highs -- and tragic lows. Already a child star at MGM in the '30s, she may have been 17 by the time she stepped down the Yellow Brick Road as Dorothy, but her role in The Wizard of Oz is immortalized among the great childhood performances. Garland's adult career was marred by pills and alcohol abuse -- some claimed the studios insisted she was overweight, leading to her self-destructive binges -- and the actress attempted suicide several times. Yet with 1954's A Star Is Born she emerged triumphant -- only to be gone, sadly, just a few years later.

Jodie Foster

Stick with psychos, kids, and you'll do just fine. 13-year-old Jodie Foster's big break (and first Oscar nomination) came as Travis Bickle's obsession -- a preteen prostitute in Taxi Driver -- and she would go on to win her two adult Oscars playing a rape victim in The Accused and matching wits with Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. (On the other hand, a Foster-fixated wackjob did attempt to assassinate ex-President Ronald Reagan by claiming the actress made him do it.) Still at the top of her game, Foster will next direct Mel Gibson in The Beaver (jokes after class, please). But would everything have been different if Disney had released her from her contract for a shot at Princess Leia?

Jake Lloyd

You kinda have to feel a bit bad for Jake Lloyd: aside from his CGI Rasta pal Jar Jar Binks, the young Anakin Skywalker copped a large percentage of the flak from incensed fan-boys demanding a refund for their violated childhoods in the fallout from Star Wars: Episode I -- The Phantom Menace. And that was more or less it for Lloyd, who seemed none-too-fussed about the whole thing -- as this candid interview reveals -- and headed off to college (as a film major, no less). Then again, we're sure the merchandising royalties from one of the ten highest-grossing films of all time will ease his bad memories.

Natalie Wood

Her role in 1947's holiday classic Miracle on 34th Street would have sealed her movie memory, but child star Natalie Wood was only beginning -- it was her roles as a young woman that will be best remembered. Over the next two decades she starred opposite James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause, headlined musical gem West Side Story, and appeared alongside Warren Beatty in Splendor in the Grass (both from 1961). Her later career was less eventful, save for the fact that, well, she drowned -- at just age 42, having filmed her last role opposite Christopher Walken in the sci-fi Brainstorm.

Kirsten Dunst

"I want some more," hissed Kirsten Dunst's tortured bloodsucker in Interview With the Vampire, all golden tresses and dripping red fangs like some Shirley Temple of the underworld. And she got it: after doing kid duties in films like Jumanji and Small Soldiers, she transitioned elegantly into quality teen roles both haunting (The Virgin Suicides) and archly bubble-headed (Bring It On). Spider-Man, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Marie Antoinette would follow, confirming her place as one of her generation's most talented.

Shia LaBeouf

"Who is this guy and how does he seem to be everywhere all of a sudden?" exclaimed some as the teenager apparently groomed by Dreamworks for instant stardom started opening number one films with Disturbia and Transformers and landing the plum role as Jones Junior Junior in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Shia's success wasn't quite overnight, however: he'd done his time on Disney's TV series Even Stevens, appeared in kids' film Holes, and guested on episodes of The X-Files and Freaks and Geeks. Now, he's the more or less the biggest star in the universe -- whether you like it or not.

Christina Ricci

Miss Ricci's always had a thing for the dark side -- she was, after all, the sardonic face of Wednesday Addams in the two films of the classic TV series, before taking the Tim Burton rite-of-passage opposite Johnny Depp in Sleepy Hollow. But even that couldn't prepare us for the emotionally dark places the actress was drawn to: from her precocious role in Ang Lee's The Ice Storm to her lascivious entrapper in The Opposite Sex, Ricci has shown she's willing to bare her soul -- and, in Black Snake Moan, everything else -- for her art. Plus, her haircut might have been the best thing about Speed Racer...

Anna Paquin

Winning an Oscar at 12 -- the second-youngest actress to do so -- for The Piano in 1994 was either a ticket to a downhill ride or the beginning of something illustrious. In truth, Anna Paquin's career since has been a mixed bag, her most visible work being her role as Rogue in the X-Men trilogy. Beyond the franchise, though, she's shown range in smaller films (Almost Famous, the excellent The Squid and the Whale) and her current gig headlining TV's True Blood has seen her maintain her profile. Not so sure about the hair.

Corey Feldman

As one half -- the more charismatic half, you say? -- of late '80s teen heartthrobs the Coreys, Feldman and his screen pal Haim were cemented onto bedroom walls and into a time and place that it was always going to be tough to escape from (just try to watch 1995's Dream A Little Dream 2 -- we dare you). Long before that particular dreamboat ran aground, though, Corey Feldman had appeared in a bunch of the '80s most cherished films: there he is playing with Gizmo in Gremlins, shooting his mouth off in The Goonies and coming of age in Stand By Me. The Lost Boys should have made him a star. So what happened? May we direct you to last year's Lost Boys: The Tribe, perhaps?

Carrie Henn

Who could forget wide-eyed, pint-sized lost urchin Newt in Aliens? (Well, who but David Fincher, anyway, who decided to reintroduce her as a frozen corpse in Alien 3). In many ways she was the soul of James Cameron's revered sci-fi sequel, compelling Sigourney Weaver's Ripley to motherhood instinct action and inspiring the movie's great line: "Get away from her, you bitch!" So, with just the one movie to her credit -- and what a movie at that -- it makes you wonder where she vanished to. The answer: Henn, now 33, is a school teacher. (Thanks to Cplbeaudoin for the photo).

Tatum O'Neal

Sorry, Anna Paquin: Tatum O'Neal was all of 10 when she won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in Paper Moon, the 1973 hit in which she played a diminutive grifter opposite her dad, Ryan. Unfortunately it was to be the high point of her career. After a couple of teen turns in The Bad News Bears and International Velvet, Tatum became better known for her marriage to tennis bad-boy John McEnroe, and -- if Michael Jackson's 2002 reminiscence is to be believed -- she was the raunchy starlet who attempted to deflower the shy young music star. O'Neal's recent drug busts for crack possession put her a long way from the glory child actor days, though she continues to get TV work.

Shirley Temple

The Queen Bee of child movie stars, Shirley Temple began her acting training at age three, and was a star at six, going on to appear in a string of popular hits during the 1930s. In 1935 -- now the ripe old age of seven -- the golden-curled one received a special 'miniature' Oscar from the Academy for her contributions. Now that's one good ship lollipop. You can't blame her from retiring from movies in 1949 -- aged 21.

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GEORGE LUCAS IS H’WOOD’S HIGHEST PAID

2009-07-21T01:19:00.000-07:00

Forbes’ list of Hollywood’s highest-paid dudes came out recently, and not surprisingly, the biggest fat cat is the big fat cat-eater himself, George Lucas. My question: if George Lucas is making $170 million a year and Jerry Bruckheimer $100, why are their movies still such sucky, shameless cash grabs? Once you’ve made more money than you could ever spend, wouldn’t you want to do something that you can actually be proud of? In Bruckheimer’s case, I think he’s just really lazy. “A movie about guinea pig secret agents? Sure. F*ck it, why not. I mean, we’ve already done rapping kangaroos.” As for George Lucas… I think it’s pretty clear that he’s a robot. A machine being controlled by others whose mission is only to make more money. And the pilot sits in his bullfrog chin.

Here’s the top 10:

(numbers are from June 2008 to June 2009)

1. George Lucas - $170 million
2. Steven Spielberg - $150 million
3. Jerry Bruckheimer - $100 million
4. Jerry Seinfeld - $85 million
5. Tyler Perry - $75 million
6. Dick Wolf - $75 million
7. Harrison Ford - $65 million
8. Adam Sandler - $65 million
9. Larry David - $55 million
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Chewie, Darth Vader, Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, Leia and R2D2

2009-07-21T01:17:00.000-07:00

20 Most Incredible Cartoon Cars Of All Time

2009-05-04T00:48:00.000-07:00

Posted in Cartoon Cars, Pop Culture

At RideLust, we’re all big fans of cartoons. So we decided to have some fun and put together this list of the most incredible cartoon cars of all time. The reason we use the term “incredible” here is that some of the items on this list wouldn’t be classified as “great” or “amazing” - some of them are incredible for other reasons (i.e. they are obnoxious, or major FAILs compared to the show they were featured in).

With that brief introduction, let’s raise a toast to the great memories of cartoon past…

Cartoon: Super Friends

Although Batman’s Batmobile went through more design changes then Michael Jackson (yeah, I went there) the most impressive of all the (animated) Batmobiles was the winged, wheeled avenger seen in the Super Friends cartoon. Like all the Batmobile models before it, the Super Friends Batmobile came heavily equipped with several on-board computers and a military-grade weapons artillery rivaled in coolness only by the machine-gun equipped Jeep in the The Rat Patrol.

Cartoon: The Tick

Unlike many of his superhero, comic book brethren, The Tick takes a much more environmentally, realistic approach to crime-fighting by carpooling whenever evil is afoot. Watch the video above to see The Tick use a rare moment of quiet in The Tick Mobile to explain in his own words why the superhero car is just as important as the superhero himself. Honk if you love justice!

Cartoon: Scooby Doo

As a kid I loved Scooby-Doo, but I was always mildly annoyed by the fact that Fred never seemed good for much other than making sure his ascot was always perfectly tied. My irritation with Fred as an efficient sleuth was also eased, however, when I realized that Fred was actually an integral part of Scooby’s gang. Since I suspect Shaggy was always high, without Freddy, the iconic Mystery Machine would never leave the garage, and thus it would never have become a vehicle famous for transporting the likes of everyone from the Harlem Globe Trotters to Sonny and Cher (yeah, I watched a lot of Scooby Doo).

Cartoon: Speed Racer

Although the company that oversaw the production of Speed Racer made a valiant effort to include a viable storyline in every episode, the plot was almost always the same. Inevitably, some evil force would attempt to squelch Speed Racer’s dream of, well, racing, and in order to thwart the ne’er do wells, Speed Racer would be forced to engage in an action-packed, high-intensity car race. Fortunately, the under 12 audience didn’t really care if episode 12 was not immediately distinguishable from episodes 13-86, we just wanted to see Speed Racer take the Mach-go through the jaws of animated hell again and again and again.

Comic: Wonder Woman

Despite her superior ability to fight crime and still be home in time to cook dinner for Superman, Wonder Woman was still plagued by the human inability that prevents women from driving with any sort of skill. Thus, seeking to avoid the nightmarish traffic female drivers in a hurry are wont to cause, Wonder Woman’s creators at DC Comics equipped her with the Invisible Jetplane. Acknowledging that a jetplane (even an invisible one) would be difficult to park when Wonder Woman ran to pick up the Super Friends’ dry cleaning, the Invisible Plane was also given the impressive ability to morph into whichever type of transportation Wonder Woman desired, be it a motorcycle, a submarine, or a minivan. Over the years Wonder Woman’s powers evolved to eventually include the ability to fly and the Invisible Plane began to appear less and less in the storyline.

Cartoon: Inspector Gadget

For an incredibly accident prone police detective that was probably the subject of many an internal investigation, Inspector Gadget still somehow managed to score the coolest cruiser on the force: the Gadgetmobile. The Gadgetmobile was essentially your run of the mill, totally awesome crime-fighting vehicle and as such, included the quintessential bad-guy-banishing features like a smoke screen, ejector seat, glue rockets (which were exactly what they sound like), and the Gadget Claw. All of the Gadgetmobile’s accessories (as well as the Gadgetmobile itself) could be immediately readied for use with a simple cry from the Inspector of “Go-Go Gadget [insert accessory here].” Despite Inspector Gadget’s status as the Steve Urkel of Special Ops, Inspector Gadget was still a huge favorite among elementary aged children, even if for no other reason than the extremely hilarious schoolyard chant in inspired: “Do-do-do-do-do, inspect my gad-get, do-do-do-do-do-do-doooo.”

Cartoon: The Thundercats

Ironically enough, Lion-O’s “Thundercat-mobile” made this list not because it was incredibly impressive, but rather because it wasn’t. For those of you who are old enough to remember, like every other action-packed cartoon airing at the time, Thundercats spawned its own line of action figures. Unfortunately, for whatever reason the marketing department in charge of the official Thundercats vehicle was asleep at their post, because Lion-O’s super-powered racer had about as much commercial appeal as the county school bus. Even though the Thundercats’ massive metal tank looked like it was prepared to wage serious war, it never really did much more than drive the Thundercats from point A to point B (though I do recall it made an occasional u-turn, and it did prove to have an impressively tight turning ratio). In spite of the fact that it was thoroughly unexciting, however, I still remember roughly 50% of the Talbot Park Day School kindergarten class carried a Thundercats tank-shaped thermos…go figure.

Cartoon: G.I. Joe

As far as badass quotient is concerned, the only fictional character that can even stand in G.I. Joe’s shadow is Captain America, but even the Cap’ wore a unitard. In addition to the fact that G.I. Joe was a superhero without the benefit of super powers, he also appeared to purchase his clothing from the J.C. Penny casual men’s section rather than from where all the other superhero’s apparently shop at, “Big Gay Al’s Costume Emporium.” G.I. Joe is/was a realistic hero and the fact that he was limited by the same laws of physics as his fans were made him wildly popular. In keeping with the humanistic theme, G.I. Joe’s official Jeep also spawned a legion of followers for the simple fact that all the stunts it performed on screen, it was more than capable of performing in reality as well (I mean for crying out loud, it’s a Jeep, even Chuck Norris bows his head in reverence).

Cartoon: Transformers

Oh right, as if this one needs any explaining. To summarize, this is how awesome the Transformers were: your sister has an old picture of you wearing nothing but Optimus Prime-themed tighty whities and a t-shirt that reads “More than meets the eye,” and you don’t even care when she shows it to your girlfriends.

Cartoon: Wacky Races

Inspired by the 1965 film The Great Race, the Wacky Races cartoon was essentially an animated, G-rated version of The Gumball Rally. It was a short-lived series with only 17 episodes produced with each episode featuring two separate races and the campy hi-jinks of the 23 different racers. There were 11 race cars total, and each racing team was competing against each other in pursuit of the ultimate prize, the title of “World’s Wackiest Racer.” Shying away from the typical cartoon formula, what made Wacky Races so notable was the fact that the “evil” racers were often the stars of the show, and even inspired their own spin-offs later on.

Cartoon: Jem

The plot of the cartoon Jem essentially revolved around a popstar singer, Jem, and her band, the Holograms. It was kind of like a less-slutty precursor to the Bratz musicals Nickelodeon occasionally airs today, only with significantly less blatant marketing. The typical Jem episode usually involved Jem and the Holograms competing in some manner of musical contest against their arch-rivals, the Misfits (no relation to Glen Danzig’s little freak show), and the band-on-band sabotage that inevitably ensued. Although the Misfits were supposed to be loathed by the Jem fan base, it was incredibly difficult to feign hatred for them. Not only the Misfits rock way harder then Jem and the Holograms, but they were also prone to making their grand entrance on guitar-shaped motorcycles. Hardcore chicks on hardcore bikes, what’s not to love?

Cartoon: Mr. Magoo

An oldie but goodie, most of us probably missed Mr. Magoo the first time it came around in 1949. In fact, most of us probably missed it altogether unless we had incredibly nostalgic parents who turned us on to silver screen gold mines likes Gilligan’s Island and CHiPS. Although Mr.Magoo wasn’t a cartoon that could hold our undivided attention for quite as long as the current weekend morning lineup, we did kind of get a kick out of him. In addition to the campy mischief the bumbling Magoo was prone to inspire, it was also a rare treat for us kids to have the opportunity to watch a grown-up get into more trouble tying his shoes then we did during an entire period of recess.

M.A.S.K. Mobile Armed Strike Kommand

M.A.S.K. was another one of those cartoons that sprung immediately sprung up in the ’80’s after the Federal Trade Commission deregulated children’s television in 1984 - so you know it was good. Specifically targeting American children who couldn’t wait to beg their parents for more toys, the Japanese creators of M.A.S.K did very little to disguise their obvious intent to duplicate the astronomical commercial success of the Transformers action figures. Even as a members of the non-discriminatory 12-and-under crowd, however, most kids were quick to pick up on the knock-off nature of M.A.S.K.. Despite a keen intuition that told us M.A.S.K. was really no different then our beloved Transformers, we remained enraptured just the same. I mean really, blatant market manipulation aside - can anyone among us offer a valid argument solidly refuting the badass factor of the red Chevy Camaro G3 Thunderhawk? Yes, I thought not…

Cartoon: Speed Buggy

The Speed Buggy cartoon was basically the best of two entertainment worlds: Scooby-Doo and Herbie The Love Bug. Centered around the crime-solving talking car, Speed Buggy, the cartoon itself was, quite simply, the animated version of every unrealistic quality children were prone to give their toys (::holds toy Speed Buggy upright on rear axles, bounces it up and down:: “Beep-beep! I’m here, Malibu Barbie! Don’t you shed one more tear, you just hop in and we’ll get right to work solving the case of the Haunted Dreamhouse!”

Cartoon: Biker Mice From Mars

For all those of you aged 25 years and up, unless you had a younger sibling you probably missed the Saturday morning delight that was Biker Mice From Mars. It originally aired in 1993 and followed the same anthropomorphic crime-fighting rubric that had been established by the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The only remaining survivors of there Mars-based culture of Motorsports enthusiasts, Biker Mice Throttle, Modo, and Vinnie are charged with saving Chicago (and the rest of Earth) from the evil Plutarkians. The entire plot of the show was heavily based around the motorcycle culture, so not only was there an abundance of gratuitous chase and/or stunt scenes, but you also got the benefit of the ubiquitous hot female mechanic, Charlene “Charley” Davidson (get it?).

Cartoon: Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors

Kids like Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors so much primarily because it was just one giant 30-minute long commercial for cool toys, literally. Created by Mattel as a support vehicle (groan) for their toy line “Wheeled Warriors”, the plot for Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors was basically identical to that of M.A.S.K., only there was even less of a story line. Since boys (and at least one girl) aged 2-10 years don’t tend to make for the most discerning audience, the show ended after running from Setp-December 1985 (as planned) and was abandoned by Mattel marketing so abruptly, it didn’t even bother to air a season finale. While Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors definitely didn’t achieve the inonic status that Transformers did, it still provided rides like “Battle Base” (pictured above) that were just as cool as Optimus Prime.

Cartoon: C.O.P.S. (Central Organization of Police Specialists)

Set in the year 2020, the cartoon C.O.P.S. only ran from 1988-89 but despite its brief run it, still managed to provide us with some of the most legendary crime fighting action vehicles of the generation. Pictured above in the lower left, The Ironsides was the official tactical assault vehicle of the C.O.P.S. unit, and was usually driven by rookie officer Hardtop, a guy who a had a crush on a network new anchor and was afraid of heights. Directly opposite The Ironsides is the Bluestreak Motorcycle. Riden by C.O.P.S. member “Highway”, a former patrolman with the San Francisco, CA Highway Patrol, the Bluestreak Motorcycle was a super-performance machine that occasionally possessed the ability to fly (depending on whether you were watching C.O.P.S. in the U.S. or in Britain). It was also perhaps the gayest thing since spandex.

Cartoon: The Ambiguously Gay Duo

TV Funhouse’s Ambiguously Gay Duo is as crime fighting cartoon as interpreted by guys who grew watching the same Saturday morning specials you did, and you also like you did, began to suspect that something was just off with the hero/sidekick relationship. Of course you don’t devote entire mornings to watching cartoons anymore (though only because your girlfriend insists on dragging you to these excruciatingly boring yard sales - but I mean what are you gonna do? She’s great in the sack…), but you do still make time for the Ambiguously Gay Duo. Not only is it vaguely nostalgic, but it also provides some validation for those many sleepless nights you spent as a kid, wrestling with the inner suspicion that despite his awesome crime fighting powers, Batman was still kind of a fruitcake.

Cartoon: Saber Rider and the Star Sheriffs

Calvary Command was Earth’s law enforcement arm dispatched to space in to maintain law and order in the final frontier. The Star Sheriffs were a branch of the Calvary Command, charged with battling the Command’s most formidable foe, the Outriders. The Outriders were non-human, and were thus impossible to defeat without the Saber Rider and the Star Sheriff’s secret weapon, the Ramrod Equalizer Unit. Usually referred to by the Star Sheriff’s as simply “Ramrod”, Ramrod was a specially designed craft that could transform from a space ship to a galactic crime-fighting robot in order to battle the Outsiders on equal terms.

Comic: Captain America

In stark contrast to many super heros that have reigned the animated world, Captain America is a superhero that does not have the benefit of any super powers, but he did have a super badass bike. Customized especially for Captain America by S.H.I.E.L.D. (originally stood for Supreme Headquarters, International Espionage, Law-Enforcement Division; currently stands for Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division), the official Captain America Harley Davidson became so wildly popular as a symbol of red-blooded Americans, it very nearly eclipsed the famous G.I. Joe Jeep.

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Regarding The Jonas Brothers

2009-05-04T00:46:00.000-07:00

Joe Jonas displays his package while brothers Kevin and Nick play with their instruments in a way that would make even Freud blush.

I am angry that I am writing about The Jonas Brothers on this blog.

I am angry because their existence as a "musicians" does not deserve recognition. 'N Sync was a manufactured "band," but they also made adult pop songs (if aimed at teens), several of its members displayed exceptional vocal talent (Timberlake especially, of course) and their existence in pop canon can be justified. At the time, as a teenager listening to late 90's "socially conscious" hip-hop, I hated 'N Sync. As a thoughtful adult today, their legitimacy is obvious.

But the Jonas Brothers are worse, a cultural sin of much greater, more significant magnitude. If 'N Sync was a punk rocker's Abu Ghraib then The Jonas Brothers are the punk rocker's Auschwitz. They were bred in the Corporate Disney Clone Vats. Their music is unadult and yet mainstream media outlets cover them as though they were U2. They represent some of the worst hypocrisy of our society.

The subtext of The Jonas Brothers is an American morality horror. They were child performers at single-digit ages, indicating the tradition of greedy parents who use their children to obtain a fortune and vindicate their own professional failures in adult life. The Jonas Brothers wear purity rings, an ignorant contrivance of the same backwards, healthy sexual attitude-damning, radical evangelical culture that champions Purity Balls, a twisted ceremony where a father asserts his dominion over a daughter's virginity and sexual freedom until a time of his choosing. The life of a Jonas Brother is never publicly presented to their fans as anything other than a life of material wealth and glamor. (And in fact, they reportedly made $62 million dollars in 2008.) And nothing about The Jonas Brothers suggests the rich ethnic diversity of America.

The Jonas Brothers are a flagship weapon in the culture wars. They feign conservative social values while romping around the bizarre hyper-sexual Disney meta-verse where young kids dress like Madonna and Mick Jagger and live the rock n' roll lifestyle, promising to America's young, malleable minds a life of glamor and cool that can never be obtained, while diverting these child automatons from healthy creative engagement, imaginative play, and intelligent thought.

(This is the same sexual dynamic that occurs when Ann Coulter flashes leg while decrying sexual promiscuity, or when Fox News is so horrified at a "disgusting" sexual photo or video clip that they decide to show it to you over, and over, and over.)

Little girls' hands innocently reach toward the Jonas Brothers' crotches.

The ubiquity of the Jonas Brothers is so enormous that parents are left with little choice but to submit or ostracise their child. The Jonas Brothers, Hannah Montana and The Cheetah Girls (The Pussycat Dolls for tweens) are the only mainstream option for preteens to participate in rock culture and though I am focusing on the way this is damaging to young girls, let it be said that Disney's hyper-sexed musical offerings and the confusing sexual message they carry are no less dangerous to young boys.

Disney is selling sex to kids, pretending they're not, and making a fortune while forcing their audience into cultural bankruptcy. South Park covered it quite well:

When I saw South Park's dressing-down of The Jonas Brothers I did not for a minute believe that the Jonas Brothers sprayed their fans with white foam canons. I just assumed that was a hyperbolic joke of sorts, an outrageous caricature.

Oh, no. It is quite real:

My mind reels trying to accept that as reality. It is Idiocracy made true, something that should come from the sick and twisted minds of Warren Ellis or Grant Morrison and presented in fiction, not a factual reality.

After subtly massaging the budding sexual urges of thousands of pre-teen worshipers who have worked themselves into a lusty frenzy, The Jonas Brothers ejaculate their horrid metaphor into the gaping maws of their Hannah Montana harem who have now completed their souls, having received the warm, foamy jism of their young male slavemasters.

And the hyper-conservative adults who were outraged -- outraged! -- that the word "SEX" might have appeared for a half-second in The Lion King look on with glowing approval and happily shell-out hundreds of dollars to provide their kids with "wholesome" entertainment. At it's core this is no less sexual or subversive than commercial hip-hop, but you know, it's not... (whispers) black.

The problem is not that The Jonas Brothers are making their young fans sexually aware; I would praise The Rolling Stones for accomplishing the same feat. (And doing so with important music that displayed exceptional proficiency and intelligence.)

Quite the contrary; teenage life is sexual emergence and rock music often times is sex. The problem is that The Jonas Brothers conceal sexuality under the guise of sex-free fun.

When the Rolling Stones came to prominence (when the music mattered) there was no purity pretense to their promiscuous metaphors. They may have been lyrically subtle as to pass censorship, but there was no question as to what Mick Jagger was about. The Rolling Stones (and most other, real rock bands) confronted sexuality with honesty, a moral trait that supercedes any kind of sexual restraint. They took a part in a sexual revolution that has led to a liberation and better understanding of our sexual nature.

The Jonas Brothers are lighting sexual fires with ignorant sparks, hypocritically extinguishing the flames of knowledge, the wealth of understanding we have about ourselves as sexual beings. The 'Stones never once sold a lie. The Jonas Brothers have sold their fans the world -- their fans' world, their bodies, their minds, their souls. And Disney's young stars have made a promise that no purity ring can keep.

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Why Pirates Buy More Music and Music Labels Fail

2009-05-04T00:45:00.000-07:00

Written by Ernesto

In the past we’ve documented studies that showed how the majority of artists sell more music thanks to piracy and that those who download (more) also buy more. Last week another study was added to this ever growing list, arguing that pirates are 10 times more likely to buy music than those who don’t.

So why do pirates buy more music? The simplest explanation for this finding might be that people who are not interested in music don’t have the need to pirate or buy it. I have to agree that it’s not the the sexiest, most controversial or inspiring answer, but it does tell us something about the core of the piracy ‘problem’.

The real reason is in fact very simple. The true music enthusiasts simply want to consume, sample and discover as much new music as they possibly can, and the most straightforward and convenient way to do this is through file-sharing networks. Music pirates are just regular consumers really, and they love music just as much as anyone else.

Music fans share more.

Although I personally believe that the ability to sample music through file-sharing has a positive effect on music sales, much of the correlation between piracy and sales is simply caused by a third factor - a passion for music. This is one of the main reasons why most users of music oriented BitTorrent sites love an initiative such as Spotify where they have access to one of the largest music libraries online.

Although piracy can breed consumers, it’s generally happens the other way around. The Internet has freed music and the music labels’ greed and abuse of copyright is the only barrier that stands between the artists and millions of potential fans. Creative business models where consumers have instant access to unprotected and high quality music are the future.

The labels of course fail to see this all too obvious connection and continue to exploit their acquired (copy)rights.They would rather pump yet more millions into overpaid pro-copyright lobbyists and expensive lawyers trying to keep their outdated business model alive - the model where the artist gets 1 to 10% of the total music sales while the labels are filling their pockets. No wonder the passionate music fans flee to BitTorrent.

What we can learn from the studies is that true music fans buy and pirate more music. The labels are fighting against those who generate a large chunk - perhaps even the largest - of their yearly revenue. The labels should understand that piracy is merely a signal that they are on the wrong track.

The Internet makes it possible to offer unlimited access to music cheaply with virtually no production and distribution costs. Unlimited access is exactly what most consumers want. It’s an opportunity not a threat.

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Have You Heard the One About the Rapper That Mooned The Nazis?

2009-05-04T00:43:00.000-07:00

By Keegan Hamilton in LOLZ

The National Socialist Movement (the American Nazi Party) held a rally in St. Louis on April 18 under the Gateway Arch, and in response, a large crowd gathered to protest the Nazis. Police and park rangers erected barricades to separate the two groups.

Photo: David Walthall

Park Rangers and St. Louis police kept the two groups on opposite sides of the Arch, but it was a distance that couldn't stop a moonrise.

Several media outlets, including the RFT, covered the event. Here's the slideshow that was posted on the Daily RFT, to give you an idea of what the crowd and atmosphere was like.

Among the protesters was Tef Poe, a hip-hop artist from St. Louis. This fact might have gone unnoticed, if not for the caption on this picture submitted to the website for the Post-Dispatch:

http://stltoday.mycapture.com

Intrigued, we called up Tef Poe to hear his Nazi mooning story. Here it is, verbatim save for a bit of minor editing for clarity and conciseness:

When I went to go down there I was amped. I woke up early in the morning, caught the bus like three hours beforehand. I got dressed up like I was going to a job interview. I was looking forward to it.

When the rally actually started about there were about 150 of 'em [Nazis]. They started marching and I went into go mode.

I started yelling all kinds of stuff. It was mostly funny to me that these guys are dedicating their lives to come out and do this. It's idiotic but noble at same time. I don't agree with views at all but I respect their dedication.

Anyhow, I started having direct, back and forth conversations with them. Before I knew it every media outlet was talking to me...They said we're going to follow you around cause you're the only entertainment.

Tef Poe
I had the crowd chanting 'Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart' and stuff like that. One of the main Nazis started talking and when he stopped to take a breath I yelled 'Your breath smells like hot dog water!'

Then he hung his hand out and made a noose. And I'm like 'Ooh I'm scared.' I was heckling the heck out of them dudes.' I came out to make their lives a little harder and have fun and laugh at 'em.

Eventually I yelled something and he said 'You shut your black ass up!' And then I said 'I got a black ass for you!' And turned around and mooned him.

Then cops came over. They were park rangers or something. I could tell they weren't from St. Louis because they had a country twang accent-- they from part of Missouri that calls it Mizz-urr-UH. He said 'Son, if you drop your trousers one more time I'm going to ask you to leave.'

I went to actor mode. I figured if he did something it'll be on caught on camera. I said 'You need to be asking them to leave. They're spreading this hateful bullshit.' People clapped and applauded.

He didn't do nothing. He turned around and said 'If you drop those trousers again I'll ask you to leave.'

After a while I was like 'I better chill out. He's looking for somebody to get ignorant on.'

All in all, the rally was fun. I wish I could go to one every day. I could travel with them and have some fun.

You can download Tef Poe's latest release Glory 2 God: The Mixtape for free by clicking here. He performs with his older brother Black Spade Friday night at the Black Label Gallery Lounge.

More photos from the rally:

Photo: David Walthall

Flippin' the bird.

Photo: David Walthall

Police discouraged shooting photos of them convening under this overpass just south of the Arch, but this photo was snapped from a car outside the rally.

Photo: David Walthall

It rained steadily throughout the protest.

Original here

X-Men Origins: Wolverine Review

2009-05-04T00:41:00.000-07:00

by Dave

It is generally accepted that one of the biggest burdens of a comic book adaptation is the hero's origin story. Instead of focusing on high-flying, ass-kicking adventure, the film has to get bogged down with radioactive spiders and frantic escapes from Krypton. Luckily, after two fantastic X-Men movies (and one that's not worth really mentioning), one would think that Wolverine's character would need no more significant back story. One would, unfortunately, be sadly mistaken, as the execrable new film, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, focuses all its energies on a trite, boring back story for a character who would be better off with a shadowy past.

The film begins in rural Canada in the early 1800s. Young Wolverine is sick in bed and his playmate, Victor (aka Sabertooth), is keeping him company. They comment about how they were/are both sick frequently, a point that seems important and yet never resurfaces. Speaking of plot points that go nowhere, in the very same scene Wolverine's father is murdered by his friend's dad, a fellow sideburn enthusiast, who is in turn murdered by kid-Wolverine. Only then do we learn that the murderer is actually Wolverine's dad, and that Victor is his brother. Nothing is ever made of Wolverine's true father either, so we must presume that it's being saved for the sequel.

Churning up convenient plot-points only to forget about them minutes later is one of the films biggest problems, and that's saying something, considering most of this movie is an exercise in how not to tell a story.

The opening credits are without a doubt the high point of the film: a highly stylized montage that shows Wolverine and Victor as young men participating in a series of cinematic wars, from the US Civil War, through both World Wars, and finally ending in Vietnam where, after some hi-jinks, the mutant brothers are to be executed by firing squad. The execution, as one might imagine, is ineffective, and soon they are put into an elite, secretive squad of mutants under the Army's Department of Evil, in which they go around breaking stuff and killing people with reckless abandon. When our hero decides that all this shadowy villainy isn't for him, he leaves the unit, finally setting the movie's plot into motion, but not before we spend a seemingly endless amount of time watching Wolverine and Mrs. Wolverine living happily as a blue-collar family deep in the forests of Canada.

From here, things just get worse. Wolverine borrows a few things from the later Rambo movies wherein the hero is given some comfort and companionship, just so that it can be taken away to send him on a killdozer-like rampage. The bad guys are boring, unsympathetic, and, worst of all, stupid at almost a retarded level. The fight scenes, which should have made this movie worth while, looked more like elaborate dance sequences, with bits of action frequently interrupted so that the characters could pose, presumably for the fashion photographs lurking somewhere out of frame. The less said about the writing, acting, special effects, and camera-work, the better.

The real tragedy of X-Men Origins: Wolverine is that it was going to finally feature Gambit, a character who was mysteriously absent from the previous films. Instead of the cocky Cajun we've grown to love, the actor playing Gambit decided to eschew the accent and make him just another stock character who just so happened to walk around with a sweetass pimp cane and throw playing cards at people.

Unless you're looking to have you intelligence insulted, don't waste your time or money on X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Need more proof? How's this: adamantium bullets become a fairly major plot point near the film's disappointing ending, which is set at Three Mile Island for some reason.

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New Trailer For District 9 Promises Sci-Fi Greatness

2009-05-04T00:36:00.000-07:00

Posted by Rob Hunter (rob@filmschoolrejects.com)

Neill Blomkamp’s feature debut, District 9, hits theaters this August. Could it be the science fiction film to beat this summer? Check out the trailer below.

Watch the trailer in High Definition on Apple.com

Pretty cool, eh? Especially for a film you’ve probably heard next to nothing about beforehand. Blomkamp has made a handful of commercials and short films including Alive In Joberg (watch it here) which is the basis for District 9. Peter Jackson saw the short and famously brought Blomkamp onboard to direct the big screen adaptation of Halo… which just as famously fell apart due to budget concerns and squabbling with Microsoft. Watching that project crumble, Jackson and Blomkamp decided to move forward with District 9.

The film is done documentary style and tells the story of an alien race that comes to Earth for an unknown reason. They attempt to settle in South Africa but encounter fear, anger, and racism (speciesism?) from the locals. Like the short it’s based on, District 9 plays as a not-so-subtle analogy for past and present human race relations and segregation.

The effects in the trailer look quite good, and while it may not be as flashy as a Star Trek or Transformers it may still be the most intelligent and thought provoking science fiction film of the year. Well, second most anyway… go see Moon!

What do you think of the trailer?

Original here

EXCLUSIVE BREAKING NEWS: David Hasselhoff Alcohol Poisoning; Rushed To Hospital

2009-05-04T00:34:00.000-07:00

The Hoff nearly off’d himself this time!

David Hasselhoff -- the former Baywatch hunk -- was rushed to Los Angeles’ Cedars-Sinai Medical center Saturday after his distraught daughter Hayley, 16, found him unconscious on the floor of his home in Encino, California RadarOnline.com has learned exclusively.

For Hasselhoff, it was yet another case of alcohol poisoning and an emergency rush to the hospital to save his life.

This time the rescuer was his ex-wife actress Pamela Bach from whom he’s been bitterly estranged.

Hayley called her mom, who lives 10 minutes away in the Hollywood Hills and she rushed to the rescue and drove him to the hospital where doctors yet again saved his life.

This time the vodka-guzzling “America’s Got Talent” judge registered a staggering .39. alcohol level. Drunk driving in California is 08.

A source said a frightened Hayley kept “slapping her dad’s face” to keep him alive. “He was barely breathing when they got him at the hospital.

“He’s recovering. Pam was his bedside till 4a.m. this morning. This is about the 7th time he’s been taken to a hospital over the last few years with alcohol poisoning. How many visits will it take before he dies?”

A source also tells RadarOnline.com exclusively that Hoff has been hospitalized at least 10 times over the last few years – many unreported.

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Matrix director Larry Wachowski now walks as a woman in

2009-05-04T00:33:00.000-07:00

by Daniel Herrera

Matrix co-director Larry Wachowski has often told of his affection towards his female characteristics, and wanting to be one as well. It is now that Larry Wachowski, brother of Andy Wachowski is showing his inner female as he has been photographed throughout Los Angeles dressed from head to toe as a woman.

The Wachowski Bros. are notorious for the privacy and their reluctance to the press, so its a big step with this half of The Matrix and Speed Racer duo to show his true colors. No word as to how far the talented director will take the change, if to include gender transformation, but it does show an added confidence the man has now.

The Wachowski Bros. currently have Ninja Assassin as their latest production. “Assassin” is being directed by V for Vendetta director James McTeigue. The directors have no films lined up as of yet for their follow up to Speed Racer.

Source: Hollywood Elsewhere

Hugh Jackman Drops $4300 on Breakfast

2009-05-04T00:32:00.000-07:00

by TMZ Staff

Hugh Jackman knows the best way to a fan's heart is through his or her stomach -- that's why he dropped $4308.87 to stuff 800 faces in Arizona.

TMZ has obtained the receipt from Paradise Bakery in Tempe, Arizona -- where Jackman bought 67 breakfast trays and 80 gallons of coffee for a pack of "Wolverine" fans who had camped out in front of a theater the day before Monday's big premiere.

Once Jackman heard about the fans, he promised to buy them breakfast and placed the order late Sunday. We're told Jackman wanted to keep the food order simple and bought platters of bagels, muffins, and croissants.

No word if Jackman left a tip -- we're gonna assume he did ... 'cause he can do no wrong.

Original here

The World's Most Influential Person Is...

2009-05-04T00:30:00.000-07:00

By TIME Staff

In a stunning result, the winner of the third annual TIME 100 poll and new owner of the title World's Most Influential Person is moot. The 21-year-old college student and founder of the online community 4chan.org, whose real name is Christopher Poole, received 16,794,368 votes and an average influence rating of 90 (out of a possible 100) to handily beat the likes of Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin and Oprah Winfrey. To put the magnitude of the upset in perspective, it's worth noting that everyone moot beat out actually has a job.

Since moot launched 4chan.org in 2003, the site has given birth to Internet memes as diverse as Lolcats and Rickrolling. 4chan averages 13 million page views a day and 5.6 million visitors a month; by some estimates it is the second largest bulletin board in the world.

See the world's most influential people in the 2009 TIME 100.

For proof of moot's influence on the Web, one need look no further than the TIME 100 poll results. While Filipino boxer Manny Pacquiao got a larger vote total (20,391,818), the runner-up for the title of World's Most Influential Person, Malaysian politician Anwar Ibrahim, received a mere 47 on the influence scale. Moot denies knowing about any concerted plan by his followers to influence the poll, though TIME.com's technical team did detect and extinguish several attempts to hack the vote. (See the full results here.)

Undoubtedly, many people will question moot's worthiness of the title World's Most Influential Person. TIME.com managing editor Josh Tyrangiel says moot is no less deserving than previous title holders like Nintendo video-game designer Shigeru Miyamoto (2007) and Korean pop star Rain (2006). "I would remind anyone who doubts the results that this is an Internet poll," he says. "Doubting the results is kind of the point."

Original here

What pop music tells us about JG Ballard

2009-04-21T09:48:00.000-07:00

Joy Division: Ian Curtis (second left) was a Ballard fan

By Stephen Dowling
BBC News Magazine

Author JG Ballard, who has died aged 78, cast a huge influence over the literary world. But for those who have never picked up one of his novels there's another forum for learning about his work - pop music.

Through his books and essays JG Ballard was said to have predicted the melting of the polar icecaps, terrorism against tourists and Ronald Reagan's ascent to the White House.

His science fiction of the almost-normal - based around suburbia and urban hinterlands, fixations on celebrity and car crashes - became best known through the film Crash, and the surreal semi-autobiography Empire of the Sun.

But his feverish imagination, stoked by pre-lunch whisky and sodas in his study, found an unlikely appeal among pop musicians - many of whom liked to invoke a bit of Ballard in their work.

JOY DIVISION

The 1980 album Closer - the band's last record before the death of singer Ian Curtis - included the track Atrocity Exhibition, a chilling glimpse into psychosis. The track is based on Ballard's 1970 short-story collection The Atrocity Exhibition, in which a psychotic mental hospital doctor tries to make sense of world events surrounding him. Curtis had written most of the song before reading Ballard's book, but the song - anchored round the oppressive chorus "this is the way, step inside" - is still heavily informed by Ballard's tale of a man restaging world events in his mind.

COMSAT ANGELS/EMPIRE OF THE SUN

Not the film, but the group...

Two bands who took their names from Ballard's work. Sheffield post-punkers the Comsat Angels, who enjoyed a brief flourish of cult success in the 1980s and have recently reformed, named themselves after a late-1960s short story. Sleepy Jackson frontman Luke Steele named his new band, Empire of the Sun, after Ballard's best-known novel, which was based on his own experiences as a child in war-torn China.

THE KLAXONS' MYTHS OF THE NEAR FUTURE

Mercury Prize winners The Klaxons named their debut album Myths of the Near Future after Ballard's short story collection published in 1982. One of its tracks, Golden Skans - "Light touch my hands, in a dream of Golden Skans, from now on, you can forget all future plans" - marries the psychedelic lights of a concert to the planet scouring rays which transform the Earth in the short story Myths of the Near Future. Ballard alluded to environmental devastation often in his work, exploring how man-made landscapes and the retreat from the natural world might affect humanity.

BUGGLES' VIDEO KILLED THE RADIO STAR

JG Ballard: Lyrics influenced by his violent surrealism

Producer Trevor Horn's 1979 single Video Killed the Radio Star ushered in the MTV age - it was the first song played on MTV when it launched in 1981. Horn admits the song - about a radio star whose career is cut short by TV - is based on a Ballard short story The Sound Sweep, in which a mute boy obsessed with collecting music discovers an opera singer hiding in a sewer. It taps into Ballard's interest in the hold of mass media on people's lives, especially the influence of television, beamed into the same suburban homes that used to listen in their millions to radio.

RADIOHEAD'S OK COMPUTER

Not a band to simply knock out two-minute pop songs on unrequited love, Radiohead condensed Ballard's preoccupation with the spectacle of tragedy - most famously explored in the story Crash - into some of their most celebrated work. OK Computer, their 1997 album, includes two songs influenced by Ballard's worldview. Opener Airbag describes a car crash almost in slow motion - "In a fast German car/ I'm amazed that I survived/An airbag saved my life" - while the haunting Lucky relates a near-death experience in a crashing airliner. Singer Thom Yorke, never one to wear his esoteric pursuits lightly, blogged excerpts of Ballard's anti-consumerist novel Kingdom Come in the run up to the release of the band's 2007 album In Rainbows.

HAWKWIND'S HIGH RISE

Space-rock pioneers Hawkwind released a song called High Rise on their 1978 album PXR5, which they said was inspired by the author. Ballard's 1975 novel High Rise is set in a futuristic high-rise building that offers its pampered inhabitants everything they need - closing them off from the wider world. After intermittent power failures within the sealed-off building, the closed society begins to fragment, leading to a brutal, violent tribalism. Ballard believed an urban life aided by technology might warp the human psyche in unexpected ways.

MANIC STREET PREACHERS

Manic Street Preachers have also relied on Ballard's words

The Welsh band's lyricists Nicky Wire and Richey Edwards were both fans of Ballard's work. Their bleak, unsettling 1994 album The Holy Bible included the song Mausoleum, a dystopian nightmare which included a sample of Ballard talking about his book Crash: "I wanted to rub the human face in its own vomit, I wanted to force it to look in the mirror..." Elsewhere, the capital punishment treatise Archives of Pain and the Intense Humming of Evil - which describes the horrors of the Holocaust through the emptiness of modern day Auschwitz - connect with Ballard's dystopian themes.

GARY NUMAN's DOWN IN THE PARK

New wave synth-pop man Gary Numan's Tubeway Army song Down In the Park is a Ballard-influenced dystopian nightmare. The lyric relates a story of humans raped and killed by androids for entertainment, viewed by a crowd in a nearby club - a fear and fetishism of technology that was a Ballard staple. Asked about his inspiration, Numan cited Philip K Dick and, of course, Ballard. The concrete futurama of other Numan songs contains much Ballardian imagery, with the twin themes of technological improvement and alienation explored succinctly in the 1979 hit Cars "Here in my car/Where the image breaks down/Will you visit me please?/If I open my door/In cars".

SUEDE

You don't need to cite Ballard to have worn his influence. Suede, who always had a dash more pretension than most of their Brit Pop peers, paid homage to Ballard - knowingly or otherwise - with the cover image of their 1997 B-sides compilation, Sci-Fi Lullabies. Its picture of a scrapped RAF English Electric Lightning jet fighter lying on desolate moorland is the perfect Ballardian image; the writer repeatedly used downed or crashed aircraft in his work. Suede's lyrics often touched on a Ballardian conceit of urban life, rich with allusions to concrete, traffic and ennui.

Below are some of your comments.

Strangely 'Warm Leatherette' was also covered by Grace Jones. Also not mentioned was that High Rise was set in a tower block built where The Canary Wharf Tower now stands. He obviously foresaw that that run-down area would become prime real-estate.
Robin, Medway, UK

Bowie's "Always Crashing in the Same Car" from "Low" is also supposedly influenced by "Crash". A lot of Throbbing Gristle's stuff also evokes a Ballardian landscape, although they were more influenced by William Burroughs - but hey, Burroughs provided the introduction to a reprint of "Atrocity Exhibition" and Ballard did the same for "Naked Lunch", so perhaps the cross-fertilisation of influences is no surprise.
Mark Edwards, Taunton, Somerset

I totally concur with the previous comments about John Foxx and The Normal - how could they have been ignored? As a musician myself, i think Ballard's influence lies in the types of extremes he explored - they are immediately identifiable to anyone who has ever been in a band! Being on a motorway or in a concrete car park at 5am, or dealing with macho bouncers in clubs playing 'alpha male' mind games is pure Ballard! Rest in peace Jim. Your legacy is to have refined and updated that 'Orwellian' dystopian future into a 'Ballardian' present. You might not like it, but you were right.
Martin Swan, London

See also Burial's albums and Kode9's 'Memories of the Near Future' for the sonic equivalent of the underwater London Ballard imagines in The Drowned World.
P, London

There are many, many lesser known artists that have used Ballardian imagry or inspiration in their work. Two that come to mind are the UK band The Greywolves- they did a tape called "The Atrocity Exhibition" in the late '80s. Each piece is titled after a chapter in the collection. Another is the Japanese guitarist, Kazayuki K. Null (also part of ANP, under the name 'Null', in this case) who did a CD titled "The Terminal Beach". This is pretty obscure stuff, hard to find, and not likely to appeal to many. But for diehard Ballard fans, it's worth a hunt. Ballard always said he didn't much care for music. I've always wondered what he would've thought of this stuff - Radiohead, it isn't. Check the blogs- or be prepared to spend quite a bit on eBay.
Krw, Denver, Colorado

I know it was partly based on an abandoned adaptation of Orwell's 1984, but when I first heard David Bowie's Diamond Dogs I thought it was the most Ballardian rock music I'd ever heard. I still think it's probably the most Ballardian I ever will hear.
Guy Lawley, London, England (a minor city nestling on the outskirts of Shepperton)

Always Crashing in the Same Car by David Bowie, in fact all of Bowie's Low lp, is suffused with Ballard. The instrumention throughout co-ops human warmth with synthesised machinery, and despite never explicitly referencing Ballard, it moves in his world.
Stephen, Sheffield, UK

I'm more than a little suprised you haven't mentioned what to my mind is the number 1 Ballardian track, 'Warm Leatherette' by The Normal from 1978 - 'see the breaking glass, in the underpass'...what a great piece of dystopian post-punk electronica directly inspired by JG Ballard. Ah, you don't hear toe-tappers like that these days!
Nigel Jackson, Manchester

The English Motorway System by Black Box Recorder is definitely Ballard-influenced.
Alex, London

That's strange I was listening to Comsat Angels this morning looking forward to their reunion gig, thinking of Ballard's influence in their songs from the My Minds Eye album like They come from the sun and Red Planet, the songs are full of a tense atmosphere.
Karim, London

The Human League (and fellow Sheffield electronic musicians Cabaret Voltaire) were also heavily influenced by Ballard, especially in their Ware/Marsh period (though Phil Oakey was an enormous fan of Ballard, and fellow dystopian stalwart Philip K. Dick). But one could go on for hours talking about all the musicians he's influenced, few other authors have left such an indelible mark on music, especially on 'darker' music, than he.
Mark Allen, Dublin, Ireland

I loved Ballard's books so much I named my solo recording project 'Ballard'. Sadly, it nowhere near evokes his startling imagery and genius, but it is pretty disposable and I guess disposable culture was a running theme throughout his work.
Darren Riley, Bolton, UK

He Thought of Cars - Blur. Very chilly and spooky little number from when dystopian was Damon Albarn's word du jour
Janine, St Albans - UK

Ballard's influence on musicians was by no means limited to brits. American band jawbox made numerous ballard references over the course of years, the lyrics to their song "motorist" and the title of their album "my scrapbook of fatal accidents" being the most obvious examples.
Ian, USA

And then there is Warm Leatherette by The Normal, virtually a musical adaptation of "Crash". The repetitive music and the vocalist's deadpan delivery excellently evoke a world of Ballardian alienation.
Ian Moore, Dublin, Ireland

The most Ballard album of all - John Foxx Metamatic is missing.
Mark Jacobs, London

Freaky! I had just started playing Joy Division's Atrocity Exhibition as a minor personal tribute to Ballard when this article dropped in my RSS reader.
Ian, Glasgow

Original here

LA Weekly Coachella Awards 2009: The Best and Worst of the Festival

2009-04-21T09:45:00.000-07:00

By Randall Roberts in coachella

Timothy Norris

Coachella 2009, at the awards ceremony

Weirdest Between-song Banter: Paul McCartney, bless his heart, played an epic set, staked a claim on a body of work that only fools would ignore. But between his songs, when he was trying to communicate with us, he talked like we were little children, uttered the word "Coachella" a few too many times, then said, "Woo!"

Best Brush-With-Fame Moment: Chris Holmes used to play in a Chicago band called Yum Yum. Then he started DJing and producing. Paul McCartney heard him DJ in South America, called him up, asked Holmes to do something prior to his Friday set, and suggested the Stax Does Beatles collection of Memphs r&b artists covering Macca's former band. Holmes dropped a nice mix of old Beatles' covers, mixed in a little bit of Macca's "Temporary Secretary," and basically made the preamble party-ready. If you're wondering why there was an "Ashtar Command" logo on either side of the stage prior to his Friday warm up for McCartney, it's because Holmes' long-incubating Ashtar Command project is apparently coming to fruition.

Best, but Most Torturous, Cameo: Johnny Marr showed up to perform with the former singer of a popular British post punk outfit. Unfortunately, it wasn't who we'd hoped it would be -- Morrissey. Instead, Marr got up onstage with Paul Weller.

Timothy Norris

Ida No of Glass Candy, leaving just enough to the imagination -- barely.

Best Use of Unitard: Ida No of Glass Candy, whose form-fitting pink/yellow/orange/red outfit was a big hit.

Timothy Norris

Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs: Best Outfit

Best Outfit: Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' mirror suit with wings.

Worst Outfit: Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' mirror suit with wings.

Timothy Norris

Does Morrissey smell burning flesh? It better be human flesh.

Best Between Song Banter: Morrissey, a strict vegetarian, on sniffing the BBQ wafting across the polo field, spat at the crowd, "I smell burning flesh. It better be human flesh."

Timothy Norris

Pink Eye of Fucked Up gets fucked up.

Taking a Bullet for the Team Award: Fucked Up Singer Pink Eyes cracked his head during the band's incendiary set. Blood started dripping down his face. It got ugly. He reassured the house that he'd been tested, and was HIV negative. Then the blood started flying. Eight hours later, side stage at Throbbing Gristle, the wound had healed, but there was a nasty bump.

Coachella fan of the year: The dude in the totally furious pit at Mastodon's Saturday night guitarfest. The pit in the middle of the crowd at the Gobi tent was about the size of a boxing ring, and raging men were marching in circles and beating the crap out of each other within. During Mastodon's set, they moved around the pit like stock cars at the Taledega 500.

In the middle: A shirtless fella, husky, is losing his mind. Eyes wild, he stands there and bellows. Wait. He doesn't have any pants on. Just bikini briefs, this bear of a man, a little flabby but who the fuck cares when Mastodon's doing what they're doing. So the guy's in the pit banging into other men -- and he's in his undies. They're dark blue. His belly hangs over them just a little bit. His butt crack is smiling from above his stretchy-band. He's moshing. He's pummeling other shirtless dudes. He doesn't have a boner as far as I can tell ... Hold on a sec. Half boner. Not bad. It'll happen to anyone banging into sweaty bare skin, regardless of gender.

Worst fan of the Year: M.I.A. invited half the crowd up onto the stage during one of her songs (forgot which). There were probably 100 people up there. The big screen showed the blissful group dancing along with Maya, overjoyed and experiencing a moment they will always remember. Then, up on the big screen, a quick shot of a guy standing there with a drink in his hand talking to a friend, like he happened upon a cocktail mixer at the country club. YOU ARE ON THE MAIN STAGE AT COACHELLA WITH M.I.A.! WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING STANDING THERE? Dance, motherfucker. (Side thought: he had to scale a barrier, move past the hulking security guards, climb onto the stage; he did this with a drink in his hand. He may suck at being a fan, but give him a silver medal in the Cocktail Olympics.)

Timothy Norris

Parents: You will hurt your childrens' ears at My Bloody Valentine.

Worst Parenting Award: The parents who brought their children to My Bloody Valentine show, and listened to it with them without ear plugs. We saw parents of two children exposing the toddlers to the extreme volume, and contemplated calling family services.

Best Editorial from VIP dude: "Thank GOD that's over!" He said it after My Bloody Valentine's set. He continued: "That was the worst thing I ever heard."

Timothy Norris

Robert Smith: a stylist can help you with that lipstick problem of yours. And that hair? Honey, call her!

Worst Lipstick Application: Robert Smith of the Cure.

Timothy Norris

Genesis P Orridge has some awesome gold grillz.

Best Grillz: Genesis P-Orridge, of Throbbing Gristle

Timothy Norris

Amanda Palmer crowd surfed her way off stage.

Best Orchestrated Crowd Surf: Amanda Palmer, for an encore, crowd surfed from the stage to the back of the Gobi tent, where a ukulele was waiting for her. She then covered Radiohead's "Creep," with the crowd singing the chorus.

Best Performance of Song About Los Angeles: X did a screaming, scowling version of their classic "Los Angeles." The crowd, many Angelenos, of course, screamed along.

Timothy Norris

Tinariwen

Best Set of the Festival: Tinariwen, whose Saturday sunset show at the Gobi stage was transformative.

Best use of the F-word: Warrior Queen, whose Friday set with the Bug was nasty, raw, funky and bass heavy. At one point the Queen, a Jamaican rapper, was humping the monitor whispering into the microphone, "fuck ... fuuuuuck ... fuuuuck." It was very hot. Ten minutes later she was screaming, "I'm going crazy" and writhing on the ground.

Best Sing-Along: The Ting Tings' doing "That's Not My Name" in the Gobi Tent.

Best Use of Isley Brothers:
Girl Talk, who ended his way-packed and drenched with sweat set with a sampled version of the Isley Bros. "Shout," bridging generations and musics. Sounds cheesy, but it totally worked, and the crowd even got low during the quiet parts, ultimately bringing it way up during the "little bit louder" part. Now if Girl Talk would stop ending his sets with Journey's "Faithfully."

Timothy Norris

Best Organ Solo: Who else: Booker T. Jones, who somehow figured out new ways to perform the melody to "Green Onions."

Best Scott Joplin Shout-Out: M. Ward did a cover -- on guitar, with band -- of the ragtime genius's "The Entertainer." It was a strange choice, and it totally worked.

Timothy Norris

Antony: struggled with sound problems, bailed early. He was gracious through the whole thing.

Most Disappointing Set: Antony and the Johnsons with Matthew Herbert. Not because of anything they did. It was disappointing because sound problems marred the show -- like, screaming, unhealthy broken feedback. It was painful for everyone, and incredibly disappointing. Antony ended up stopping 15 minutes before his scheduled end time. And though Herbert arranged the music, he didn't actually perform with Antony. Bummer.

Timothy Norris

yes.

Best Use of the Sunset: Tie between Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" moment, and Tinariwen's light to dusk Saharan epiphany.

Original here

19 Most Embarrassing Crossover Hip Hop Attempts

2009-04-21T09:38:00.000-07:00

It’s no secret that hip hop has gone mainstream, become popular and for many, it can be very profitable. As a result, for musicians, performers and athletes, this genre of music offers an additional opportunity to prove one’s talent and subsequently to make some cold, hard cash. And while very few have been successful in crossing over to hip-hop, the track record for most has been failure. The following is a list of some of the worst failed attempts at crossing over to hip hop, by people that should have never tried in the first place.

Macho Man

Source

Before, Be A Man, was released, there hasn’t been a more unnecessary hip-hop album released since Tom Hanks and Dan Akroyd rapped in order to promote their movie Dragnet in the 1980’s. The reported inspiration for this commercial flop was Macho Man’s disdain for former friend and WWE superstar Hulk Hogan. Hmmm, lets see the inspiration for your WWE character, you promote beef sticks, and you wear outfits more flamboyant than a gay pride parade. Admit it Macho Man, you don’t hate Hogan, you downright love his greased up 24 inch python.

Shaquille O’Neil

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Despite the fact that Shaquille O’Neil boasted about selling millions records as a hip-hop artist, I have yet to meet one person who has actually purchased his music. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out he has been purchasing his own records to boost his own sales; Lord knows he has enough money to make himself the best selling hip-hop artist of all time.

K-Fed

Source

In 2005, Moments before the idea came for K-Fed to begin his rap career, his baby is heard screaming in the background. K-Fed then began to shout in his BBQ stained wife beater, “hey, sugar tits!…How’s about I release a hip-hop record, and then wrestle in the WWE to promote it?” He paused for a second to stare deeply into his own reflection (on a rhinestone-encrusted mirror) and then continued, “Oh, and can I barrow a couple million to produce it baby?” Britney Spears then looked up from the couch downstairs, took a swig of her Miller High Life, rubbed her pregnant belly, and responded, “That’s a great Idea…now can you rub my swollen ass feet as I finish my beer!”

Deion Sanders

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Not only was Deion Sanders a decent professional baseball player, he was one of the best cornerbacks in the history of the NFL. Athleticism aside, Sanders ventured into the music business with his debut, Prime Time, with high hopes of extravagant record release parties and platinum records. He got the extravagant record release parties right, but the platinum records never followed. His record proved to be more piss poor than prime time, and it ended up becoming a critical and commercial failure.

Ron Jeremy

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Ron Jeremy has not only stared in nearly 2000 porno flicks, directed over 300 porn movies, written a bestselling autobiography, and lectured on college campuses all over the United States, he has also released the most god awful rap song to ever reach the Billboard charts. In the early 2000’s, Jeremy partnered up with the classy hip-hop producer DJ Polo to produce the steaming pile of poop called, “Freak of The Week.” Thankfully his interest in hip-hop stardom was short lived, and he soon returned to play his usual lovable role as an ugly pig-man that has sexual intercourse with hundreds of seemingly attractive women.

Tila Tequila

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Tila Tequila is not real. She is a digital concoction dreamed up by the perverted old men who run MTV. The one executive who has a thing for underage Southeast Asian children introduced the idea for Tila Tequila when he started a MySpace page for her in 2003. Apparently, Americans are more gullible than ever, because she continues to have a presence in pop culture. She released her record in 2007 to limited fanfare, which boasted hip-hop rhymes that sounded like a childish version of Fred Durst (oh, rearry?). MTV should apologize for inventing her, and hold a one-hour reality show that literally roasts Tila Tequila over an open flame.

Kobe Bryant

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Kobe is the kind of guy who believes he is the greatest at everything he does. He might be, with two exceptions: white girls from Colorado; and rap music. Kobe released a record entitled K.O.B.E. in the year 2000, although he believed it was the greatest record of all time, it proved to be a dismal failure. Maybe if Shaq makes a cameo on his record he might be able to go platinum, lord knows he can’t win a title without him. (”Yo Kobe - Tell me how my ass tastes!”)

Mr. T

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At the height of Mr. T’s fame, he and his agent decided it would be a great idea to produce two urban-inspired public service announcement Rap Albums. What followed were the cheesiest, most campy rhymes ever committed to tape. For all of Mr. T’s endeavors over the years, this was by far his worst, and thankfully he decided to leave hip-hop to the youngsters from New York. This was the right move, because if he and his agent continued their onslaught on hip hop, the genre may have never been able to advance from its infant stages.

John Cena

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Notably, John Cena is a bad ass. But why the hell did he feel the need to follow in the footsteps of Macho Man Randy Savage into the abyss of post-Wrestlemania hip-hop (anti-) stardom? Not only does Cena spend money uselessly on producing wrestling-inspired rhymes, he also spends his time free-styling and battling with fans. I guess John Cena doesn’t understand that steroids can’t help with everything.

Gary Payton

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When Gary Payton retired from basketball in 2007, everyone remembered the greatness he brought to the game. When Gary Payton released a single in 1994 entitled “Livin’ Legal And Large”, everyone couldn’t wait to forget this. In 1994 some idiot thought it would be cool to have popular basketball players record a bunch of rap songs for a compilation. The result of these efforts yielded the worst rap album in history

Joaquin Phoenix

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Supposedly, Joaquin Pheonix has retired from acting to pursue a career in hip-hop. From his terrible debut performance in Vegas, to his horrendous interview on the Late Show with David Letterman, one can only hope this awkward white guy gets run down by some gangstas and taught a lesson about the consequences for disrespecting hip hop.

Elvira

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When I was a kid I could remember having funny feelings when Elvira was on television. Regrettably those funny feeling went away when Elvira decided to expand her resume in 1988 by writing and performing, “The Elvira Rap” and “The Monster Rap.” Thankfully, her effort to expand her entertainment resume failed to communicate a point, and the horror world was gifted with the death of Elvira’s hip hop career soon after it launched. (Note: the picture displayed is not the cover of either of her rap singles)

Andre Rison

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Given, Andre Rison never released a hip-hop record himself; he did date the crazy bitch from TLC. So of course, at the peak of their relationship, Left Eye released a single featuring Andre Rison spiting the most cliché rhymes ever. After all was said and done, the only thing Andre had to show for his performance was the ashes of his multi-million dollar mansion. Bummer, man .

Brian Austin Green

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Brian Austin Green’s 90’s heartthrob status was off the charts when he played Donna’s Boyfriend on Beverly Hills 90210. In the midst of his popularity, he decided to follow his first passion, Rap music. In 1996, Green released is debut record, “One Stop Carnival”, which coincided with his character beginning to rap on 90210. Thankfully his rap career was short lived, and the public was sparred anymore hyped releases of his records. Rumor has it, Megan Fox found out about this album and called off their engagement later that same day.

Roy Jones Jr.

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At the age of 32, while on top of the boxing world, Roy Jones Jr. released his first hip-hop record called Round One: The Album. Jones Jr. cited the inspiration for the title of his record came from his amazing ability to, “…knock foos out in the first round.” Regrettably his album failed to knock out his most earnest of fans. Thankfully he had an amazing boxing career to fall back on, until he lost to Tarver three times in a row. Ouch…

Omar Epps

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With his staring roles in critically acclaimed films and television series’, Omar Epps has become one of the most talented actors of his generation. Unfortunately, in 2004 he decided his fans needed more of Omar and he released a hip-hop record called, The Get Back. Critics lampooned his effort and told fans they would never be able to GET BACK the time wasted listening to his record.

Dee Dee King (Ramone)

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In the late 1980’s, Punk Rock Godfather Dee Dee Ramone decided to follow his dream of becoming a rap star. Shortly after, critic Matt Carlson wrote that the album, “…will go down in the annals of pop culture as one of the worst recordings of all time. This of course, makes it one hell of a great punk rock collector’s item.” Collectors item or not, it is at this point looked at as an embarrassment by all parties involved, as well as the entire Ramones’ fan base.

Tony Parker

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Yes, Tony Parker is from France. Yes, Tony Parker hits it with Eva Langoria. And, yes his music is absolutely terrible. Parker is known for being an avid fan and connoisseur of hip-hop, but this in no way qualifies him for putting out a rap record. To make matters worse, the album was recorded entirely in French, therefore it would have been more appropriate for him to have put out a dance record.

Paris Hilton

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Though Paris Hilton, to my knowledge, has never aspired to be a hip-hop star, she was caught on some television show trying to rap with Snoop Dogg. As you will see, Snoop Dogg encourages this disrespectful behavior and therefore has sold out whatever cred he had left. Snoop we know you want to hit that but did you really have to sell out the genre like that. And Paris, go back to making homemade pornos…that’s all you were ever almost decent at.

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Movie Stars Who Die the Most

2009-04-21T09:34:00.000-07:00

By: Eric Alt

Mostly Unscathed

Will Smith (2 Deaths)

Death Toll: Seven Pounds, I Am Legend
Close, But No Flatline: Smith “died” temporarily in Hancock, but was revived – therefore, it doesn’t count.

Harrison Ford (2 Deaths)

Death Toll: The Mosquito Coast, What Lies Beneath
Cheater: Ford was made immortal (albeit briefly) in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Mel Gibson (3 Deaths)

Death Toll: Mrs. Soffel, Hamlet, Braveheart
Glutton for Punishment: Although he only notched three deaths, Mel’s torture numbers are bigger: Lethal Weapon, Conspiracy Theory,Braveheart, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, Payback.

Tom Cruise (4 Deaths)

Death Toll: Taps, Vanilla Sky, Collateral, Valkyrie
Death Before Dishonor: Cruise’s most violent offing was definitely Taps. At the end of the movie where he played the military academy hothead, he lost his shit, opened fire with an M-60, and got thoroughly perforated by National Guard artillery. (“It’s beautiful, man!”)

Check the Pulse

Robert Downey Jr. (5 Deaths)

Death Toll: Less Than Zero, Natural Born Killers, Richard III, The Gingerbread Man, U.S. Marshalls
Doppelkiller: Downey was killed – by himself – in The Singing Detective, but it’s a hallucination sequence.

George Clooney (5 Deaths)

Death Toll: Return to Horror High, Red Surf, The Perfect Storm, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Syriana
In the Can: Although Clooney notched a couple of early B-movie deaths, his character actually survived in Return of the Killer Tomatoes.

Denzel Washington (7 Deaths)

Death Toll: Cry Freedom, Glory, Heart Condition, Malcolm X, Fallen, The Preacher's Wife, Training Day, Man on Fire
Count It: We gave Denzel half an entry for both Heart Condition (he played a ghost) and The Preacher’s Wife (he played an Angel).

Dead and Loving It

Christian Bale (8 Deaths)

Death Toll: Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna, Henry V, The Secret Agent, Mary Mother of Jesus, Shaft, Harsh Times, The Prestige, 3:10 to Yuma
Dual: Bale got to have it both ways in The Prestige. Those who saw it know what we're talking about.

Dustin Hoffman (9 Deaths)

Death Toll: Midnight Cowboy, Who is Harry Kellerman and Why is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?, Lenny, Death of a Salesman, Billy Bathgate, Hook, Wag the Dog, Perfume, Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium
Most Creative Death: In Hook, Hoffman was eaten to death by a reanimated crocodile.

Jack Nicholson (9 Deaths)

Death Toll: Easy Rider, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Passenger, The Shining, Batman, Hoffa, Mars Attacks!, The Departed, The Bucket List
R.I.P.: Nicholson’s deaths all tend to be horribly violent – shot to death, dropped from high places, beaten to death – with the exception of The Bucket List, where his character was beaten to death with a bucket. Or so we heard.

Al Pacino (9 Deaths)

Death Toll: Scarface, Dick Tracy, The Godfather: Part III, Carlito’s Way, Donnie Brasco, Insomnia, People I Know, The Recruit, Righteous Kill
Funny How? Al has twice been killed by comedians (John Leguizamo in Carlito’s Way and Robin Williams in Insomnia).

Brad Pitt (9 Deaths)

Death Toll: A River Runs Through It, Kalifornia, Legends of the Fall, The Devil’s Own, Meet Joe Black, Troy, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Burn After Reading, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Nice Try: Brad “died” in two additional movies: Cool World and Fight Club. But in one he’s instantly revived as a cartoon and in the other he never actually existed.

Johnny Depp (9 1/2 Deaths)

Death Toll: A Nightmare on Elm Street, Platoon, Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, Ed Wood, Dead Man, The Astronaut’s Wife, From Hell, The Libertine, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (This one gets a half because he comes back to life in the third movie.)
Red Sea: Johnny holds the honor of bloodiest death on this list – in his debut movie, he played an Elm Street teen who was sucked into his bed by Freddy Krueger and turned into a giant plasma fountain.

Bruce Willis (11 Deaths)

Death Toll: Billy Bathgate, Mortal Thoughts, Death Becomes Her, Twelve Monkeys, The Jackal, Armageddon, The Sixth Sense, Hart’s War, Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, Sin City, Grindhouse: Planet Terror
Till Death…: Bruce was killed twice by his ex-wife, Demi Moore (Mortal Thoughts and Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle).

Robert DeNiro (14 Deaths)

Death Toll: Bloody Mama, Bang the Drum Slowly, Mean Streets, Brazil, The Mission, Cape Fear, This Boy’s Life, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Heat, The Fan, Jackie Brown, Great Expectations, 15 Minutes, Hide and Seek
You, You’re Good: DeNiro was killed by Pacino in Heat, and Pacino was killed by DeNiro in Righteous Kill.

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How Much for That 'Slumdog' Kid in the Window?

2009-04-21T09:32:00.000-07:00

by TMZ Staff

Being part of an Oscar winning movie can up your asking price in Hollywood. Apparently it can also up your asking price should your father decide to try and sell you.

Rubina Ali, the nine-year-old girl who was featured prominently in the Oscar winning "Slumdog Millionaire," was offered up for sale by her father to undercover reporters working for News of the World, the paper is reporting.

The young child star's asking price was roughly $295,000. According to the paper, the price started off much lower when he first began negotiating the deal. Maybe the father forgot to take DVD sales into account.

UPDATE -- Rubina's dad is flatly denying the whole thing, telling the BBC News it was just a "dirty" operation by News of the World.

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World Excl: Jackson/Del Toro Talk Hobbit

2009-04-21T09:30:00.000-07:00

And the world exclusives from our 20th birthday issue – guest-edited by Steven Spielberg – continue to pile up…

We’ve known for a while that Peter Jackson and Guillermo Del Toro’s eagerly-awaited adaptation of the Lord Of The Rings prequel, The Hobbit, would comprise two movies, due in December 2011 and 2012. But the make-up of those two movies has been up for debate… until now.

We spoke exclusively to both Del Toro and Jackson for our birthday issue, and they told us the latest, which is…

“We’ve decided to have The Hobbit span the two movies, including the White Council and the comings and goings of Gandalf to Dol Guldur,” says Del Toro.

“We decided it would be a mistake to try to cram everything into one movie,” adds Jackson. “The essential brief was to do The Hobbit, and it allows us to make The Hobbit in a little more style, if you like, of the [LOTR] trilogy.”

So there you go. The second film will not, as had previously been suggested, a film that will bridge the 60-year gap between The Hobbit and the start of Fellowship Of The Ring.

For much more from Jackson and Del Toro on their plans for the return to Middle-earth, pick up the 20th birthday issue of Empire, on sale next Thursday (23rd April) - or you can pre-order your copy here.

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Playboy names University of Miami top U.S. party school

2009-04-21T09:27:00.000-07:00

San Diego State University ranked number three on Playboy's list of the top party schools in the U.S.

Photograph by: Photos.com,

Playboy magazine on Friday named the University of Miami as the top party school in the United States based on five criteria that included a nod to brainpower.

The adult magazine, which has only occasionally published the party college list in the past but will now turn it into an annual feature, ranked the schools on campus life, sports, sex and academics, or "brains," as Playboy put it.

As a last criteria, Playboy included "bikini" which combined weather, guy-to-girl ratio and cheerleaders.

But absent from the credentials were college bars and parties that exist on the fringe of campus life.

"In order to make the list, you had to be a school where fun happens, so we threw that out and went to other criteria," said Playboy Assistant Editor Rocky Rakovic.

Rakovic also said it was hard to quantify just exactly what made a good bar scene from campus to campus, because each location had its specific attributes.

"You can't say keg party at Arizona State is much better than bar crawl at (University of) Wisconsin," he explained.

On the subject of brainpower, Rakovic said that criteria was important because, after all, "you are in college for a reason, to get an education."

Judging the intelligence of U.S. university students turned into a rather scientific equation, too, using things like grade point averages, freshman retention and Princeton academic reviews, then giving them a numerical weight and averaging results.

The one surprise, Rakovic said, could be the No. 6 school University of Wisconsin because the "bikini" ranking favored schools with warm weather climates.

Playboy began ranking party colleges 20 years ago. The full list is in the magazine's May issue and on the Internet at www.playboydigitalcom.

The top 10 party schools are below in order of rank:

1) University of Miami

2) University of Texas (Austin)

3) San Diego State University

4) University of Florida

5) University of Arizona

6) University of Wisconsin (Madison)

7) University of Georgia

8) Louisiana State University

9) University of Iowa

10) West Virginia University

Will Ferrell's urine refreshment

2009-04-21T09:26:00.000-07:00

(BANG) -

Will Ferrell drank his own urine to survive in arctic conditions.

The 'Stepbrothers' star spent 48 hours in the far north of Sweden with TV survival expert Bear Grylls, who showed the Hollywood funnyman what extremes they needed to go to in order to last in the harsh weather.

Talking about his stint in the freezing temperatures, Ferrell said: "It was the thrill of a lifetime, even though I did get urine drunk, which is sad".

During the two days - which will be documented in a special episode of Grylls' TV show 'Man vs. Wild' - Will also had to abseil down a 100-foot waterfall, sleep in a snow shelter and eat reindeer eyeballs.

Speaking of Ferrell's achievements, Grylls said: "He did an amazing job in sub-zero, very unforgiving conditions. He trusted me when it mattered and we survived. He should be very proud of how he performed."

Jackie Chan: Chinese people need to be controlled

2009-04-21T09:22:00.000-07:00

AP – Hong Kong actor Jackie Chan, right, gestures as he speak while Chinese actress Lin Peng look on during …

By WILLIAM FOREMAN, Associated Press Writer

BOAO, China – Action star Jackie Chan said Saturday he's not sure if a free society is a good thing for China and that he's starting to think "we Chinese need to be controlled."

Chan's comments drew applause from a predominantly Chinese audience of business leaders in China's southern island province of Hainan.

The 55-year-old Hong Kong actor was participating in a panel at the annual Boao Forum when he was asked to discuss censorship and restrictions on filmmakers in China. He expanded his comments to include society.

"I'm not sure if it's good to have freedom or not," Chan said. "I'm really confused now. If you're too free, you're like the way Hong Kong is now. It's very chaotic. Taiwan is also chaotic."

Chan added: "I'm gradually beginning to feel that we Chinese need to be controlled. If we're not being controlled, we'll just do what we want."

The kung fu star has not been a vocal supporter of the pro-democracy movement in his hometown of Hong Kong. Since the former British colony returned to Chinese rule in 1997, voters have not been allowed to directly elect their leader. Several massive street protests have been held to demand full democracy, but Beijing has repeatedly said Hong Kong isn't ready for it.

The theme at Saturday's panel discussion was "Tapping into Asia's Creative Industry Potential," and Chan had several opinions about innovation in China.

He said that early in his career, he lived in the shadow of the late martial arts star Bruce Lee. He said that during his first foray into Hollywood, he struggled to establish his own identity, so he returned to Hong Kong. After spending 15 years building his reputation in Asia, Chan finally got rediscovered by Hollywood, he said.

Chan said the problem with Chinese youth is that "they like other people's things. They don't like their own things." Young people need to spend more time developing their own style, he added.

The action hero complained that Chinese goods still have too many quality problems. He became emotional when discussing contaminated milk powder that sickened tens of thousands of Chinese babies in the past year.

Speaking fast with his voice rising, Chan said, "If I need to buy a TV, I'll definitely buy a Japanese TV. A Chinese TV might explode."

Original here

Perry Still Embarrased By Shyamalan Mix Up

2009-04-21T09:20:00.000-07:00

By Celeb Stink

Actor Matthew Perry was once left red-faced after spending a whole evening talking to director M. Night Shyamalan - before realizing the man was a look-a-like.

The former Friends star first met the filmmaker at a Hollywood awards show during promotion for 1999 movie The Sixth Sense, and he was delighted when he encountered the man he was convinced was Shyamalan on another night out years later.

Perry struck up a friendship with the Shyamalan doppelganger that night and started dreaming about the prospect of working with the director - before he realized his mistake and bailed on his new pal.

He explains, "I was at the People's Choice Awards a while back and that night I met all the Sixth Sense people; M. Night Shyamalan, Haley Joel Osment. So I met them, I spoke with them for a few minutes. Then a few years later I was out at this place in Hollywood and M. Night Shyamalan walked up and said hello. I was like, 'Oh my God, come sit down, please join us.' We sat there for a few minutes and everybody sort of filtered out and it was just me and M. Night Shyamalan. Pretty great, great guy, very talented."

"We talked for a little while, and then I started to realize, you know, he likes me. Laughing at everything I say, really enjoying me. We're not really talking about show business, just sort of bonding. At one point, about an hour into it, he says, 'You know, I know this other place, it's opening night', and so we go to the carpool, he gets his car and I get my car and I follow him all the way across town. On the way there, I started to think, 'Ok, this guy really likes me.' Like in the Hollywood way where I'm going to be the lead in his next movie. I'm like, he's going to make a movie about aliens who come down and there's a trick ending, and it's gonna be me! We go to the next place, we're hanging out. ...Another hour passes, he goes to the bathroom, he comes back, and then... I realize it's not M. Night Shyamalan. It's just an Indian guy who looks a lot like M. Night Shyamalan! I hightailed it out of there. I felt dirty."

But Perry is still embarrassed by his case of mistaken identity and is reminded of it every time he runs into the unnamed man: "The problem is, I see this guy out, now, and we look at each other like jilted lovers." (MT/WNVLET/IG)

Copyright 2009 WENN

Oprah gets pwned by Shaq on Twitter

2009-04-21T09:18:00.000-07:00

by Matt Hickey

(Credit: Twitter)

Your first day on Twitter can be rough. Twittering's still a brand new thing to a lot of people, and a lot of people have Twitterfails. Nobody on Twitter on Friday, though, got as much attention as Oprah, who tweeted for the first time.

Sadly, her inaugural tweet was all in caps. Thankfully, Shaquille O'Neal was there to remind the talk show host that her caps were on. We'd like to congratulate Shaq for having Oprah's back. That's what Twitter friends do for each other.

With more than 15 years experience testing hardware (and being obsessed with it), Crave freelance writer Matt Hickey can tell the good gadgets from the great. He also has a keen eye for future technology trends. Matt has blogged for publications including TechCrunch, CrunchGear, and most recently, Gizmodo. E-mail Matt.

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Let the Joker Win

2009-03-29T14:01:00.000-07:00

by Gabe Medina

The Joker. Quite simply: the greatest villain of all-time.

He is such a great character that I often find myself rooting for the Joker to win instead of the hero. His motivation is simple: insanity. Most villains are bent on world domination but not Mr. J. He does things simply because it amuses him. His complicated death traps, poison squirting boutonnières, and signature purple suit don’t just intimidate his victims and puzzle his adversaries. They make him laugh. In every incarnation of the Joker, from films, cartoons, or comic books I always find myself disappointed when he isn’t triumphant.

In Batman: The Killing Joke we find the Joker trying to make one simple little point: The only difference between normalcy and insanity is just one bad day. He goes to great lengths to prove his point by kidnapping the Commissioner and shooting his daughter. And through the course of events I started to realize that maybe The Joker is right? After all, Batman is clearly insane. Why else would he dress up as a flying rodent and hide in the dark?

And before I could put the pieces together myself I see the Joker deduce something clearly obvious to him: Batman once had a bad day too. Needless to say I was disheartened when that infernal Batman foiled Mr. J’s plans. And people can say what they want about the ending, I for one like to believe it was simply too adversaries with mutual respect for one another sharing a good laugh.

The next time I found myself rooting for The Clown Prince of Crime was in an underappreciated gem of an episode from Justice League Unlimited titled: “Wild Cards”. Placing bombs through the Las Vegas Strip daring The Justice League to try and find them. He dispatches The Royal Flush gang to further complicate the League’s efforts. All while having his own personal TV crews broadcast the showdown live on the air.

And Mr. J isn’t really trying to kill the League, he’s only trying to boost ratings for his show and get as many viewers as possible. When the Joker’s real plans are revealed I can do nothing more than applaud his masterful schemes. Creating mayhem is more than a labor of love for him, its artwork. And while I’m hooting and hollering because Mr. J is finally going to be victorious; he is betrayed someone very close to him.

The last time I believed The Joker would finally have his day in the sun was in The Dark Knight. Heath Ledger’s brilliant performance as an agent of chaos had me questioning my own sanity. After witnessing his “pencil trick” I too wanted to die my hair green and wear a lavender coat. Every step of the way The Joker’s plans got bigger and more grandiose. Kidnapping the DA and his girlfriend, assassinating the mayor, and blowing up hospitals.

Most of the time we are led to believe The Joker is doing this for monetary compensation. But I knew better. I knew that when Mr. J finally got his hands on all that loot he was going to show those mob bosses that he is more than just a mere street thug. He’s an idealist. A man of principle. When we finally get to see his true plans for Gotham City it was like a crescendo of events. Unfortunately, once again The God Damned Batman shows up to ruin all the fun.

The Joker transcends the comic book medium and is easily on par with the likes of Dr. Hannibal Lector, Professor Moriarty, and Darth Vader. I hope someone at DC Comics is listening. Give the Joker his due! Create an Elseword’s story! Show me a parallel universe where The Joker’s vision is finally realized. Give me a hypothetical look into a dystopian future laid out in a 12 issue maxi-series. Do something, anything. Please DC, make my dreams come true: Let The Joker Win!

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Discovery's 'Universe' promises to rule History

2009-03-29T13:58:00.000-07:00

Property of History Discovery

Discovery Channel announced Thursday a new project that aims to do for outer space what "Planet Earth" did for polar bears. "Stephen Hawking's Universe" is a multi-million-dollar three-part special that uses the physicist's theories and expensive-looking CGI to tell you everything that scientists highly suspect about our galaxy and beyond.

"You got the greatest living mind in the universe and we’re taking his knowledge and presenting it to people with fabulous computer graphics," says Discovery president and general manager John Ford. "We start at the beginning of time, then go into whether time travel is possible, whether we are alone and some of the great questions."

Which sounds awesome for us astronomy buffs, and will probably be another content cash machine for Discovery. Can't you already imagine the "Universe" Blu-ray DVD selling like crazy on Amazon.com? Wait ... it's already listed on there. How did ... oh, that's a DVD of the History Channel's "Universe."

See, Discovery's cable rival has a series in its third season that's also called "Universe" that likewise explores the mysteries of the cosmos in high-def with snazzy computer graphics.

But Discovery promises their "Universe," which comes out next year, is going to wipe the floor with History's "Universe."

"'Universe' is a good show, but it's a weekly series on a weekly series budget," Ford says, laying it down. "What we’re doing is a multi-million-dollar investment ... We plan it to be truly an immersible experience. When we take you to Mercury you’re going to feel like you’re on Mercury."

Damn straight.

1. Discovery has Hawking. And Hawking, man, he has a string theory about antimatter that History doesn't even know about.

2. Though Hawking will lend his theories to Discovery's project, he won't be narrating, which is ideal.

Hours of listening to Hawking's synthetic voice would, let's be honest, take away from the fun of whooshing between Saturn's rings. An actor who has played Hawking in previous projects will narrate instead. (It should be noted here that Hawking could sound like Ian McKellen nowadays if he wanted to. He reportedly still uses the same Speak & Spell robot voice to communicate because he considers it to be his trademark. It's odd that the GPS in your car uses more advanced voice technology than the world's most famous theoretical physicist, but there you go. Though even if Hawking's voice was used, the man still manages to project more warmth than "Planet Earth" narrator Sigourney Weaver.)

3. As Ford points out, they're going to spend a bunch of money.

History's "Universe" is pretty good, but the experts interviewed on the show seem like they're the people at their respective institutions who give tours to the fourth-grade classes on their field trips. Yet as hard as they try to talk down to History's audience, they don't always succeed and sometimes blurt out incomprehensible tidbits. The result is feeling like you're being condescended to by somebody who is legitimately way too smart for you (see Clip 1, below). How does Discovery spending more money on their project solve this issue? Dunno, but it can't hurt.

4. Discovery's "Universe" will be much shorter than History's.

As fun as History's "Universe" is to watch while doing crunches in your living room, the show seems like it's starting to run a bit dry of material despite having infinity to play with (see Clip 2, the "Sex in Space" episode).

"If we pull this off, this will do for the universe what 'Planet Earth' did for here," Ford says. "We hope to scorch the earth for anybody who wants to follow us, at least for a few years."

I love that the president of a natural-world cable network is willing to scorch the earth with his project's planned supremacy. At this point I'm picturing Ford with blue face paint rallying his CGI team for battle. Discovery vs. History. The universe isn't big enough for the both of them.

PREVIOUS: Buzz Aldrin's freaky space travel story

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The Sorry State Of Music Startups

2009-03-29T13:57:00.000-07:00

by Michael Arrington

Online streaming music startups are in one very sorry place. On demand streaming rates range from .4 cents to 1 cent per stream - this is what the startups pay to the labels every time they play a song for a user. Add bandwidth and storage costs on top of that, which aren’t trivial for services that want to stream music quickly on demand. The result is hundreds of millions of dollars flowing from venture funds to startups to labels. Little of it makes its way to artists, and advertising revenues only cover a tiny portion of the fees.

The labels don’t care if the startups make money, lose money or go out of business. All they want is to make enough money to extend the ultimate surrender date as long as possible. That’s when we’ll finally see the economic reality dictated by the Internet impose itself irrevocably on the music industry. Unless draconian laws are created and enforced that put people in jail, or worse, for file sharing. And even that probably won’t work.

Anyway, these crazy economics are making the music startups skittish. MySpace Music, the biggest player in this space, may be spending $2 million or more per week to the music labels based on their own statistics that they’re streaming over a billion songs a week. Their streaming rate is likely to be the best in the industry, and it almost certainly isn’t lower than .4 cents per song. There is no way that they’re making that much in advertising revenue.

The hope is that downloads, ticket sales, merchandise and ring tones will make up the difference, but what we’re hearing is that very little incremental revenue is being made from these other revenue sources.

That means there’s no chance for these startups to work until the labels reduce, significantly, the streaming rates they’re charging. Or agree to radically different business models. There’s no sign that is happening any time soon.

These crazy economics are making startups do odd things. I emailed one startup recently to suggest a post here on TechCrunch noting that they seem to be doing well - recent setbacks with partners didn’t hurt traffic as much as it may have, and I wanted to note that. The startup flat out asked me not to post, because they didn’t want positive press to impact their negotiations with labels. They had to present as desperate a situation as possible.

Read that again: streaming music startups don’t want more people using their service, because they lose money from every one of them, and the perceived success from having more users makes it harder for them to plead with the labels to give them better deals.

Then there’s imeem. A few days ago I had multiple conversations with the startup around rumors that they owed significant amounts of money to the labels that they couldn’t pay, and that they had failed to raise money or sell themselves. Not much information was shared, other than to say that the rumored $30 million owed to labels was too high. Now they tell VentureBeat that the number is in the single digit millions.

Whatever the number - $30 million or $1 million - imeem can’t pay it. Their business model doesn’t work and it is going to continue to not work until the labels let it work. And they aren’t going to be doing that any time soon.

Big Music Doesn’t Like Streaming Music

The big music labels don’t like streaming music because it doesn’t help them offset declining CD sales, and the evidence now suggests that streaming doesn’t lead to music downloads. Everything we’re hearing says that the labels would like to see streaming music startups just go away for now so that they can focus on maximizing paid downloads and extend that ultimate surrender date.

So when you hear about labels renegotiating streaming deals to help out music startups, be skeptical. They’re likely lowering the rates from 1 cent down to something closer to .4 cents per stream. And all that means is that these startups will bleed a little slower. But they’re still going to go out of business, because the venture firms are done investing in them.

Original here

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