JOCE / Bauergriffin.com EJ Johnson Dons Versace For FX Premiere Of “The Assassination Of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story” EJ Johnson werked the red carpet of FX’s “The Assassination Of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story” Premiere at ArcLight Cinemas Monday night. We’re pretty sure he isn’t in the project but he certainly looked the part. Splash News The kid kinda stole the spotlight from Penelope Cruz… Check out more photos from the premiere below:
La La Land is one of the most successful movies of the year. It's evident that it's going to be a force to be reckoned with at the 2017 Academy Awards. But will it win EVERYthing? Scroll down for our predictions. 1. Best Picture: La La Land La La Land has been critically and commercially successful since it was released and for good reason. It has already racked up a string of awards and nominations. Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone have this one in the can. 2. Best Director: La La Land Damien Chazelle is up against some stiff competition in this category, but there’s no denying that La La Land was a visual masterpiece. He should have no trouble eking out the win. 3. Best Actor: Casey Affleck The only real competition in this category is between Casey Affleck and Denzel Washington. With Casey’s continued praise, he seems poised to take the win. 4. Best Actress: Emma Stone Emma turned in a riveting performance in La La Land. In fact, she turns in a perfect performance whichever movie she appears in. Trust us, this one is as slam dunk as they come. 5. Best Supporting Actor: Dev Patel Patel has come a long way since his days of playing an angsty teen on Skins. He should win this award for his performance in Lion. 6. Best Supporting Actress: Viola Davis Viola is an awards darling who continues to move from a successful movie to another. Her career has been great and her performance in Fences shows that she is showing no signs of slowing down. View Slideshow
Bill Paxton – the actor known for a wide array of roles over the course of his 40-year career in Hollywood – has passed away unexpectedly. He was 61 years old. Paxton’s family broke the news of the beloved TV and film star’s death in a statement issued just moments ago. “It is with heavy hearts we share the news that Bill Paxton has passed away due to complications from surgery,” the statement reads. Details are scarce, and the statement offered no information with regard to the nature of the surgical procedure. Paxton starred in some of the biggest blockbusters of the ’80s and ’90s, including Twister, Titanic, and Aliens. He also gave unforgettable performances in a number of highly-acclaimed films that have since come to be considered classics. Tombstone, Apollo 13, and A Simple Plan are just a few of Bill’s roles that made him one of the all-time greats in the business. In addition to his film work, Paxton was also a highly regarded television actor, especially within the last decade. He played the lead in HBO’s critically-acclaimed and fan-beloved polygamy drama Big Love for five seasons. Paxton was also nominated an Emmy for his work in the 2012 miniseries The Hatfields and the McCoys. Bill was starring in the CBS series Training Day at the time of his death. “Bill’s passion for the arts was felt by all who knew him, and his warmth and tireless energy were undeniable,” the statement from the Paxton family reads. Born in Fort Worth, Texas in 1955, Paxton was present at the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. A photo of an 8-year-old Bill being lifted onto his father’s shoulders still hangs in a museum commemorating the assassination. Paxton played a number of bit parts in low-budget films upon first moving to Hollywood before landing his big break. It was after making the acquaintance of a young director named James Cameron on the set 1984’s The Terminator that his career really took off. Paxton went on to star in some of Cameron’s best-known films, including Titanic, a movie that shattered every box office record in the books. Upon its release in 1997, no film had made nearly as much money as the epic love story, which remains a classic two decades later. Among action film fanatics, Paxton’s varied and widely successful body of work has earned him this fun distinction: View Slideshow: Celebrities Who Died in 2017: In Memoriam He is one of only two actors to be confronted by a Terminator (The Terminator), a Xenomorph (Aliens), and a Predator (Predator 2). Tributes to Paxton from family, friends, and fans began pouring in on Twitter just minutes after news of his death went public. Instantly, grieving fans have made him the world’s number one trending topic, which is a testament to the impact of his life. Paxton is survived by a wife and two children. Our thoughts are with them and all of his family and friends at this time. R.I.P. UPDATE : The actor reportedly underwent heart surgery and died of a stroke afterward, according to TMZ.
Justin Bieber and Barack Obama don’t look anything alike … or do they? The answer is no. No they do not. And yet somehow, a photo posted by Madison Beer has the Internet wondering if the singer was lucky enough to spend a magical evening with the mythical hybrid being known Jurack Biebama. In the spirit of The Dress or that photo that in which Bill Murray looks like Tom Hanks , social media is freaking out over this pic that looks a lot like Justin … and yet also looks like a blonde Obama. “WHY HE LOOK LIKE OBAMA WITH BLONDE HAIR LMFAOOO,” commented one Instagram user. “He looks like the child of Justin Bieber and Barack Obama!” wrote another. You get the idea. It makes zero sense, but for some reason, from that one angle, under that exact lighting, Justin Bieber looks like SoCal Obama. It’s disturbing thought to contemplate, but we couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if Obama and the Biebs did manage to meld their minds and bodies, a la that movie with Jeff Goldblum and the fly. We want to say it was the Powder . Obviously, there would certainly be some downsides: Storming out in the middle of the State of the Union every time some jerk-ass congressman called him a liar; stubborn insistence on referring to Angela Merkel as “girl.” But believe it or not there would be some perks, too. For one thing, Biebama would’ve had no trouble passing a universal healthcare bill. (“It’s how we do it in Canada, girl.” *pouts, pops, locks* *nation swoons*) And you know the President of the United States sparking a giant blunt to celebrate the assassination of Bin Laden would’ve gone down as one of the great moments in US history. View Slideshow: Miley Cyrus Keeps Posting Photos of Justin Bieber & It’s Kinda Creepy Of course, things would have gotten messy when Donald Trump demanded to see President Biebama’s birth certificate, but Jurack could’ve simply assured Trump that despite his accent, he’s actually white. That would’ve certainly been enough to get the Donald to back off.
Walmart Pulls Rick Ross Album For Assassinate Donald Trump Reference Rick Ross’ Black Market album was yanked from Walmart’s website after a “media analyst” snitched to Walmart about a line on the album about “assassinating Donald Trump like [George] Zimmerman.” Do you think Walmart’s right to remove the album? Walmart has apparently pulled Rick Ross’s new album Black Market after media analyst Mark Dice called them to bring to their awareness that the first track on the album ‘Free Enterprise’ calls for the assassination of Donald Trump. Is it only right? Or is Ross’ freedom of speech being infringed upon?
Walmart Pulls Rick Ross Album For Assassinate Donald Trump Reference Rick Ross’ Black Market album was yanked from Walmart’s website after a “media analyst” snitched to Walmart about a line on the album about “assassinating Donald Trump like [George] Zimmerman.” Do you think Walmart’s right to remove the album? Walmart has apparently pulled Rick Ross’s new album Black Market after media analyst Mark Dice called them to bring to their awareness that the first track on the album ‘Free Enterprise’ calls for the assassination of Donald Trump. Is it only right? Or is Ross’ freedom of speech being infringed upon?
Offering a more straight-faced brand of idiocy than its cheerfully dumb 2009 predecessor, G.I. Joe: Retaliation might well have been titled G.I. Joe: Regurgitation , advertising big guns, visual effects and that other line of Hasbro toys with the same joyless, chew-everything-up-and-spit-it-out efficiency. Largely devoid of personality, apart from a few nifty action flourishes courtesy of helmer Jon M. Chu , Paramount’s late-March blockbuster, pushed back from a 2012 release (ostensibly to allow for a 3D conversion), may have trouble matching G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra ’s $302 million worldwide gross. But with no shortage of merchandising and other cross-promotional opportunities, it should still score significant attention from targeted male viewers. Appreciably rougher and grittier in feel than the Stephen Sommers-directed The Rise of Cobra , Retaliation makes any number of ham-fisted bids for topical relevance, and naturally almost every one of them represents an affront to good taste. Among other things, the film is a sort of accidental comedy about nuclear warfare, as much of the silly plot concerns a global summit where the hope of mass disarmament soon gives way to the threat of mass annihilation. Elsewhere, the script (by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick) finds our trusty Joes raiding a North Korean compound shortly before they head to Islamabad, where they wind up framed for the assassination of Pakistan’s president. All this geopolitical mayhem is being orchestrated by the U.S. commander-in-chief (Jonathan Pryce) — or rather, the dastardly doppelganger who’s impersonating him with the aid of super-sophisticated “nanomite” technology (because latex is just a little too Mission: Impossible ). The president’s stand-in is a high-ranking member of Cobra, a secret network of megalomaniacs bent on wiping out the G.I. Joes once and for all, and in the early going, they come perilously close. Tatum Channing’s Screen Time Is Brief Probably aware that no one in the audience could possibly care about any sense of continuity with The Rise of Cobra and its eminently forgettable characters, the filmmakers have opted to retain just a few key players this time around. In what feels like an odd miscalculation given the actor’s recent popularity, Channing Tatum’s Duke is around for only about 10 minutes to pass the baton to a fresh G.I. Joe unit led by the physically imposing Roadblock ( Dwayne Johnson ) and rounded out by Flint (D.J. Cotrona) and Lady Jaye (Adrianne Palicki), both of whom evince far less charisma than the military-grade weapons provided them by Gen. Joe Colton ( Bruce Willis , phoning it in). Actor To Watch: Byung-hyun Lee Providing a bit more interest is the Joes’ ninja faction, chiefly Snake Eyes (Ray Park), whose inexpressive mask stands in marked contrast to the piercing gaze of his longtime nemesis, white-clad swordfighter Storm Shadow ( Korean star Byung-hyun Lee ). Along with newcomer Jinx (Elodie Yung), these returning characters figure prominently into the picture’s finest moment, a fight scene in the Himalayas that employs wirework and stereoscopy to highly vertiginous effect. The visual grace of this sequence is no surprise coming from Chu, who demonstrated a real flair for staging in the two Step Up pics he directed. But as in those movies, sustaining a narrative or transcending a patchy script seem beyond his abilities. One of the least savory aspects of the franchise is the unseemly pleasure it takes in the wholesale destruction of foreign cities, which goes hand-in-hand with its jingoistic portrait of American military might. Audiences who thrilled to the sight of Paris under biochemical attack in Cobra will be pleased to watch London endure an even more horrific fate here, although the sequence is tossed off in quick, almost ho-hum fashion, with no time to dwell on anything so exquisitely crass as the spectacle of the Eiffel Tower collapsing. Meatheaded and derivative as it is, G.I. Joe: Retaliation is hardly the nadir, as hollow corporate products go; certainly it’s nowhere near as aggressively off-putting as the Transformers movies, the other action-figure adaptations in the Hasbro universe. The dialogue has improved markedly since the earlier outing, and the lensing and editing, while hardly models of coherence, just about manage to avoid excessive jumpiness. Andrew Menzies’ production design, with sets standing in for everything from a Tokyo skyscraper to a Nepalese monastery, proves resourceful within the confines of a largely New Orleans-shot production. With the exceptions of the often mesmerizing Lee and the ever-reliable Johnson, the performances are merely serviceable. Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Not this again: “The eye behind such films as No Country for Old Men and The Assassination of Jesse James , [Roger] Deakins takes Bond into the digital age . Mendes promises his darker tone will bleed directly over to the physical look of the movie. ‘I’ve worked with Roger twice [on Jarhead and Revolutionary Road ], so I feel very comfortable in that relationship. There’s a shorthand. You look at each other and know what you’re thinking. He’s a true artist. Right from the start of directing, I realized the most important two relationships were with my leading actors and the director of photography. You’ll see in the teaser trailer that it has a very distinct look that does have elements of noir and British ’60s. It’s very English — a lot is set in England.'” [ Hollywood.com ]
From her support of the Tamil Tigers to her politically charged music videos, M.I.A. has never shied away from controversy. By James Montgomery M.I.A. performs at the Super Bowl XLVI Halftime Show Photo: Jeff Kravitz/Film Magic M.I.A.’s middle finger may currently be the most-discussed digit in America, dominating the post-Super Bowl chatter and earning swift rebukes from NBC and the NFL. But for those who’ve covered her career from the beginning, well, let’s just say this is basically par for the course. Because ever since M.I.A. first broke through in 2004, she’s courted controversy, first for her outspoken support of the Tamil Tigers , the Sri Lankan separatist organization that engaged in acts of terror and has been linked to the assassination of Sri Lankan and Indian leaders. That support and her overtly political lyrics led to her being denied a travel visa by the U.S. government and earned her a spot on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s risk list in 2006. So, really, a middle finger is no big thing. And over the past few years, she hasn’t exactly mellowed. In 2010, she raised eyebrows with the graphic video for “Born Free,” a clip that saw security forces (with American flags prominently displayed) round up red-headed citizens and summarily execute them in brutal fashion. It was a savage bit of socio-political commentary, though most missed that message entirely, focusing instead on the blood and guts, which earned the video a measure of YouTube ignominy and had < href=" http://"www.cnn.com/2010/SHOWBIZ/Music/04/27/mia.music.video/index.html?iref=allsearch" target="_blank"> critics howling . Her outspoken ways also drew the ire of both Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber fans, after she called Gaga “a good mimic” and said the content of “Born Free” was no less offensive than anything Bieber had churned out. And then, she launched a lengthy (and much-covered) offensive against New York Times writer Lynn Hirschberg, posting her phone number on Twitter and releasing a diss song called “I’m a Singer” after reading what she believed to be an unflattering feature in the Times . Though Hirschberg remained largely silent on the matter, the Times did eventually admit that a pair of M.I.A.’s quotes were rearranged in the piece. Finally, earlier this month, she unveiled the video for “Bad Girls,” which re-teamed her with “Born Free” director Romain Gavras and is loaded with socially (and politically) charged imagery, like women cloaked in burqas doing stunts in expensive cars as men in keffiyeh look on, smoldering oil fields and assault rifles. Were you offended by M.I.A.’s halftime gesture? Leave your comment below. Related Photos Infamous Middle Fingers Super Bowl XLVI Performances: Madonna And Kelly Clarkson Related Artists M.I.A.
