Odell Beckham Jr. Pictures Remember when we told you that Amber Rose may or may not be dating New York Giants wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr .? Well as those rumors continue to swirl we’d like to take time to acknowledge the aesthetics of her possible new boy toy. Odell is a 22-year-old NFLer formerly of the LSU Jaguars who made that iconic catch. Remember? And on his off days he kicks it with his mom former LSU track All-American Heather Van Norman… and his little brother Sonny Odell Beckham… and sometimes Drake. But mainly he just does typical early twenties things like lip sync to tracks while driving… and snap selfies. Oh dayum Odell. What do YOU think about this NY Giants cutie??? Hit the flip for more Odell Beckham Jr. appreciation.
When it comes to many rappers, the statement “Oh he/she is a total character!” is used to describe them. Sometimes it’s offensive, but oftentimes it’s true. Rappers embody the idea of a character – from shedding their government name to substantiating their flows with an outwardly wild personality. Oh yeah, let’s not forget their aesthetics…. Continue Continue reading →
‘I’m just tryin’ to bring a show, man,’ Mac told MTV News just before his high-energy set at Friday’s festival kickoff. By Rob Markman Mac Miller Photo: Brian Phares/MTV News ASBURY PARK, New Jersey — There’s only so much partying on Fifth Ave. that a man can do, so on Friday night, Mac Miller hit the Jersey Shore and threw an old-fashioned beach party. “I’m just tryin’ to bring a show, man. I want to bring a performance, I want to bring them into the Macadelic experience, ” Mac told MTV News hours before he took the stage at the Bamboozle music festival in New Jersey. Skrillex , Mike Posner, Incubus and Miller all took to Bamboozle’s main stage on the opening night of the three-day fest, and they didn’t disappoint. For Mac’s set, which began at 7 p.m. ET, the Pittsburgh MC brought a portion of his Macadelic Tour to concertgoers who had come to see an array of rock, rap and EDM artists. It was all high-energy when Miller, who was dressed in an “RIP MCA” tee, set things off with the title track from his #1 debut album, Blue Slide Park. From there, EZ Mac launched into “Don’t Mind If I Do” from his 2010 breakout tape, K.I.D.S. Always one to represent for his crew, Miller, his DJ, Clockwork, and hypeman Treejay bounced up and down to “My Team,” and then turned things up a notch with the rambunctious “Knock Knock,” all to the youthful crowd’s delight. While a majority of the Rostrum rapper’s catalog is centered on feel-good jams, he does show range on introspective cuts like “Angels (When She Shuts Her Eyes).” Even when he wasn’t ping-ponging frantically across the stage, the crowd responded to Miller’s more subdued tracks by waving their hands side to side, showing him that they too are capable of more than just getting crunk. Before he dove into “Best Day Ever,” Mac took a bit of a breather while old Miller family home movies played on a big screen. All the teenage girls cooed as they watched baby Mac open birthday presents and sing along to the Sugar Hill Gang’s seminal hip-hop track “Rapper’s Delight.” “I wanted to represent the music through visuals, I’ve always been a very visual person,” he explained to us before the show. “I wanted to use that to create the aesthetics of the show and show people what all of the songs mean to me and put them into that world.” Miller picked up the mood with the electric “Frick Park Market” and drew immediate crowd participation with the first line. After spitting, “My name Mac Miller,” the crowd responded right on time with a thunderous, “Who the f— are you?” It was a lesson on how to properly connect with your audience, one that’s invested in every word you rhyme. Last year when Miller dropped his now-gold-selling single “Donald Trump,” he promised to “take over the world,” and despite all of his success he still makes that vow at the end of each and every show. Last night was no different. After a 40-minute set, Mac sealed the deal with a spirited rendition of “Trump” and then marched off to continue to make good on his promise, one stage at a time. Are you hitting Bamboozle this year? Let us know in the comments! Related Artists Mac Miller
Woody Allen , whose Midnight in Paris is competing at this Sunday’s Academy Awards , will be bringing his Oscar-nominated 1994 comedy Bullets Over Broadway to the Great White Way in 2013, reports the New York Times. The adaptation has long been rumored to be in the works; Allen himself is writing the book, with songs culled from existing 1920s-era music. Cue obligatory Dianne Wiest quotes! [ NYT ]
Well, it finally happened. The line separating America from America: The Movie found a way to arrange itself into a stick figure and walk off the scene in disgust. In Act of Valor , an elaborate branding exercise for the U.S. Navy SEALs in the form of a Hollywood action blowout, the two mingle freely and openly at last. The movie opens with a statement from directors Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh. They describe the importance of casting real Navy SEALs — “the greatest action heroes of them all,” according to the film’s press notes — to give the film that much-desired feeling of “authenticity.” It was all for us, McCoy and Waugh agree. They wanted to show the audience what it really feels like to fire an automatic weapon and burst someone’s head open from 50 feet away. And so they dragged two chiseled specimens (uncredited, they appear as “Dave” and “Rorke”), out of active duty and in front of the camera and forced them to perform in a really bad war movie. Act of Valor was produced with an unprecedented level of Pentagon cooperation. Four years ago, when the film was conceived, the Navy was looking for 500 new recruits, and a movie seemed like just the thing. Top Gun famously boosted recruitment by 500 percent, and the military now uses popular entertainment vehicles to make its pitch as a matter of course. America’s Army , the 2002 video game created by the military to mimic war games like Call of Duty , now seems like a strategic part of the run-up to the Iraq war. So by “the audience” McCoy and Waugh mean American boys. And the goal of showing them how it feels to be a SEAL means combining the aesthetics of war they know from movies and gaming with the exhilaration of showing off actual American might. And yet there is a larger “us” addressed by the thickly written narration (the script, by 300 screenwriter Kurt Johnstad, gives new meaning to the phrase “fog of war”). All of Valor is designed to emphasize the direct impact of military action on American safety, from the opening rescue of a female CIA agent (Roselyn Sanchez) who is being tortured to within an inch of her life (and the integrity of her tank top) in the Costa Rican jungle to the interception of high-tech suicide vests making their way to major American cities. The plot might be summed up this way: America’s having a war, and everybody’s invited! Everybody, oddly enough, except Iraq and Afghanistan. After an unexplained explosion kills an American diplomat and a whole mess of children in Manila, we meet a SEAL platoon on a San Diego beach, where they are preparing for deployment. “Chief Dave” has already passed his Tom Brady genes on to five kids; “Lieutenant Rorke” is about to have his first child. Being a dad comes up a lot. They never turn to each other between kill shots and swap parenting tips, but if they did it would fit right into the script’s awkward attempt to jam characterization into these two beefy avatars. You can’t help thinking these guys got hosed: All that lethal know-how and they’re bested by dopey dialogue. A lack of continuity, both within and between scenes, makes a fairly simply set-up weirdly difficult to follow. The bad guys are childhood friends Abul Shabal (Jason Cottle), a Ukrainian convert to Islam who is mad about Chechnya, and Christo (Alex Veadov), an arms dealer with unclear motivations. But they are desultory villains, there to provide minimal narrative hinge action. The bigger story is that we are battling a global enemy with weapons connections and no respect for their own lives or the lives of anybody else. From the Philippines and Costa Rica we stop in Somalia, Mexico, and parts of Eastern Europe, and they hate us everywhere. We also have a couple of enemies within our borders: “the media” and “the economy” are cited as key allies in any terrorist plan to take down the United States. Each location provides a stage for some serious military peacocking: The opening rescue has some thrilling shots of an amphibious operation — boats dropped from helicopters! — and the surfacing of a nuclear submarine is so colossally breathtaking it’s hard to believe it’s not an act of nature. Much gadgetry is wielded to no discernible purpose, and at almost every stop live ammunition discharges like a five-cent slot machine on somebody’s lucky night. But there is little sense of how these teams work and strategize together, all the stuff that might actually make for an interesting story. The finale is a first-person-palooza on the Mexican border, a crescendo of incoherent carnage that requires one of the SEALs to perform his own death. The sacrifice and ceremony of that performance is most sickening when it penetrates the protective layer of numbness that builds up over the course of any movie with a body count this high. To feel something means the ignoble plan is working. Yeah, it’s just another movie with things blowing up in highly realistic fashion, and yet it embodies the insidiousness of a culture seduced by sensation and jingoism. Because although the last decade of war has done much to convince us otherwise, this country is not a movie we are watching, and people really do die in the end. Follow Michelle Orange on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
The soon-to-be Brooklyn Nets may not be NBA elite, but if you’re amongst the wealthy that can score one of the eleven event level suites that Jay-Z is reportedly extremely hands on with, you will feel like a winner. The Nets part-owner is not playing when it comes to luxury in what will be called “The Vault At Barclays Center” as Hov is involved with the aesthetics which include the minute details of what kind of forks to use and which champagne will be poured in the 11 event-level suites that carry a hefty price tag of $550K with a minimum lease term of three years… Continue
As part of our Fall Movie Preview, Shawn Levy reveals how he created the sci-fi sports drama’s authentic boxing matches. By Josh Wigler A scene from “Real Steel” Photo: Dreamworks Summer may be over, but the fall season still holds plenty of hot movies worth looking forward to. We’re celebrating the coming months of fantastic films all week long with MTV News’ Fall Movie Preview, starting with a sports drama mixed with a sci-fi twist: “Real Steel,” the robot boxing movie starring “Wolverine” leading man Hugh Jackman and “Lost” babe Evangeline Lilly, which opens on October 7. Click for exclusive photos from Fall’s biggest flicks. “Real Steel,” which takes place in a future where robots have replaced human athletes in the boxing arena, marks a serious departure for director Shawn Levy, in more ways than one. The director of the “Night at the Museum” films and “Date Night” is most commonly associated with the comedy genre. In “Real Steel,” he’s stepping into the ring with significantly more dramatic fare. MTV News chatted with the director about his experiences exploring a new genre, how the giant robots of “Real Steel” were constructed (hint: they’re more human than you realize) and much more. MTV : This movie feels like a big departure for you in a lot of ways, Shawn. Your past work has focused mostly on comedy, but “Real Steel” takes on a decidedly different tone. Was that the appeal for you, trying on something new? Shawn Levy : You know, comedy has been really good to me, but this was a deliberate departure. This is the kind of movie that I’ve been waiting to do. When I was editing “Date Night,” the call came in from [“Real Steel” producers] Steven Spielberg and Stacey Snider, and they said, “We’ve got this underdog sports movie with boxing robots.” Already when you have [those two] on the other line, you’re inclined to nudge towards “yes.” But I’ve always loved sports movies, I’ve always loved that kind of iconic underdog story which sports movies tend to service so well. This was a deliberate step and an exciting chance to stretch some new muscles. MTV : Well this definitely does fall into the sports drama category, but when you’re throwing giant robots into the mix, you’re getting something just a little bit different than what we’ve seen from the genre before. Was it tricky trying to service that sports drama audience while keeping the sci-fi elements in the forefront as well? Levy : Honestly, it was an every day balancing act, from the six months of working on the script, the eight months of preparing the movie and the four months of shooting it, and another six editing it. It was every day, making sure you’re servicing just the crazy, balls-out action of robots wailing on each other — and thankfully we had [boxing legend] Sugar Ray Leonard as our consultant for the fights, which was a really great guarantor [of quality]. I’ll digress for a moment, but what’s cool about this movie is that this isn’t computer animation. This is motion capture with real fighters in a real ring, consulting in the ring with me and Sugar Ray, wailing on each other in full contact. We took that captured fight as data and we converted it into robot avatars. That was a big thing. To do the movie as mo-cap instead of animation was a big choice. Mo-cap allows the director to direct a performance; it’s not left to the imagination of an animator that sometimes you don’t even meet. It was huge. Every day we were making sure the robots were cool-looking in terms of design and full-contact fighting. On the flip side, we could never forget that the movie is about Hugh Jackman’s character, first, last and always. The movie is really only 30 to 35 percent robot-based fighting, but it’s 100 percent anchored in Hugh Jackman playing this bot corner man and how he uses these machines to eventually get a shot at redemption. MTV : Which is interesting, because when you see Hugh in these movies with huge action elements, he’s usually very much at the center of those scenes. But that’s not exactly the case in this film, is it? Levy : Without giving too much away, he’s at the center in that … our hero robot, he ain’t the biggest, he ain’t the newest, he’s not state of the art. What he has is this connection that I won’t give away to Hugh’s character, such that Hugh plays a former boxer [named Charlie] whose knowledge of the human sport that used to exist is the advantage that his robot has over the others. Every robot in the movie is built with one gear: full-on ground and pound. This robot fighter is informed more by Charlie’s boxing history. So there’s a nuanced human flair, resulting in this robot and his connection to Jackman, who’s able to win fights he has no business winning. MTV : As a director, how did you establish that connection between Hugh and his fighter? These are the two leads of the film, really, but only one of them is played by an actual person — unless you leaned on motion-capture for most of the robot’s appearances? Levy : Well, this is where it gets really cool. In my first meeting with Steven Spielberg, he said to me, ” ‘Jurassic Park’ was a long time ago, before computers could do everything. We built real dinosaurs that moved. I know it’s an old-fashioned notion, but consider building real, fully animated animatronic robots.” So that’s one big difference on this movie: We built real robots. In the fight scenes, it’s me and Ray directing human boxers. But in every scene in the movie where Hugh is interacting with one of his robots, if that robot isn’t walking or boxing, it was a real, big, massively tall robot in the room on set and in the movie. It’s unreal. What happens is, whether you’re 10 or 40 years old, if you’re a guy, and you’re face to face with this robot that’s literally shadowing everything you do — it’s actually robotically operated from a remote feed — it’s just unbelievably cool, and it affects the performances in a way that you just don’t get … if you’re acting opposite a tennis ball on a stick. There’s no comparison. That was really the co-star. ATOM in particular was in the room with us every day. I’d direct ATOM, his puppeteer, in much the same way that I’d direct Hugh. It was really cool to work with [something practical] in this day and age, where everything that can be computer-generated usually is computer-generated. MTV : We’ve talked a lot about the technical side of making “Real Steel,” but let’s go back to the beginning: You wanted to carve out a different type of movie for yourself. How did you find the experience of going from the comedy world to something significantly more dramatic? Levy : The irony is that though I’ve made thankfully a number of successful comedies, if I were to name my top 20 favorite movies, maybe you’d find one comedy on there. My career has gone one way, but my tastes have always run another. Those tend to be dramas, action, sports. So what was really amazing was to do a movie where the pacing, tone and, most importantly, the aesthetics and performances, where all those elements were not in the service of the almighty laugh. They were in service of themselves. When you do comedy, the laugh always comes first. Maybe you’ll find a scene or sequence — and I can point to this in “Date Night” — where you’ll bracket it off and slow down the movie with something a bit more poignant. But to do a whole movie that was not first and foremost in the service of laughs was very, very different, and very, very liberating. From “Abduction” to “Muppets, “Moneyball” to “Breaking Dawn,” the MTV Movies team is delving into the hottest upcoming flicks in our 2011 Fall Movie Preview. Check back daily for exclusive clips, photos and interviews with the films’ biggest stars. Check out everything we’ve got on “Real Steel.” For breaking news, celebrity columns, humor and more — updated around the clock — visit MTVMoviesBlog.com . Related Photos Exclusive Photos From Fall’s Biggest Flicks
Photos: Courtesy of Monochrome. It’s no news that buying second-hand anything is greener than getting something new, as you’re not using more energy and raw materials for another product. However, not everything used is good looking enough for the aesthetics inclined. With Monochrome Recycled Bikes , however, you get the best of both worlds: a previously owned bike that looks as cool as a new one. Find out more inside…. Read the full story on TreeHugger
Here's another one for you! Build extremely precarious towers. Height is your goal here – try not to get too caught up in the aesthetics of the thing. View
Gaga says her epic video is more about B than it is about her. By Jayson Rodriguez Lady Gaga and Beyonce on the set of the “Telephone” video Photo: Eric Ford/ On Location News Lady Gaga said that when she joined forces with Beyonc
