The Duck Dynasty clan is happy, happy, happy to get back in the hunting blind and the reality show grind on A&E, according to CEO Willie Robertson. The Round Mound of Duck Sound appeared on Fox News’ New Year’s Eve special last night with wife Korie, and touched on the recent controversy: Willie and Korie Robertson Interview “We got a new season coming up in a couple weeks, and we’re really excited about that. We got a couple episodes filmed… and we’re ready to move on.” “A&E and us are fine. We’re looking forward to getting back to making some funny shows. It’s a new year, so we’re ready to break in a new year and start it all over again.” Phil and Miss Kay’s third-eldest of four sons joked about how he had been away from the family’s Duck Commander business and figured no one was working. “I think we all learned a lot and we’re just ready to move on, and the family’s happy, and we’re ready to go. I’ve got to make sure my guys are back there building duck calls.” “I got to get back and crack the whip.” “I’m just glad the family is back together,” Korie Robertson added in the interview before the ball dropped in Times Square. “We’re all happy happy happy.” Duck Dynasty returns with Phil Robertson on January 15, and all appears right with the network and the family now, despite a contentious few weeks. Phil made coarse anti-gay comments and questioned the necessity of the civil rights movement in an interview with GQ that earned him a brief suspension. He likened gays to sinners and homosexuality to bestiality, and said that African-Americans in the Jim Crow era South were more “godly” and “happy.” Willie and Korie didn’t reveal too much under questioning from Bill Hemmer and Elisabeth Hasselbeck about his father, other than that he was likely in bed. “I reckon he’s asleep,” Willie said of the patriarch. “This is duck season so he’s getting up in a few hours. New Year’s Eve is just another night for him.” “He’ll be getting up soon and hopefully getting some ducks.” Earlier in the week, Willie admitted on Twitter that Phil can be crude at times but insisted that his heart is good and that his old man is “the real deal.” National media firestorm aside, Hasselbeck and Hemmer also had some fun with Willie and Korie, having them “practice” their midnight kiss for the cameras. They obliged … as Luke Bryan popped in to say hello.
James Avery, who played the beloved Uncle Phil to Will Smith’s character on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air in the 1990s, died Tuesday at the age of 65. His co-star Alfonso Ribeiro tweeted news of Avery’s passing. “I’m deeply saddened to say that James Avery has passed away,” Riberio tweeted of the news. “He was a second father to me. I will miss him greatly.” Avery’s publicist confirmed the actor’s death . Avery recently had open heart surgery, and died from complications from the procedure. Wife Barbara was by his side before leaving for a moment to get food. Upon her return, he had passed away. A classically trained actor and poet, Avery grew up in Atlantic City, N.J., where he was raised by a single mother, according to CNN and IMDB. He served in the Navy during the Vietnam War and first appeared on screen as a dancer in an uncredited role in the 1980 classic The Blues Brothers . After he completed his military service, James moved west to San Diego, Calif., where he began writing television scripts and poetry for PBS. James Avery on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air “I knew I loved the arts,” Avery recalled in an interview. “I knew I wanted to be a writer, but the theater was something I had been involved in before.” A successful character and voice actor, Avery appeared in multiple TV shows and films including as the voice of Shredder in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles . His most famous role, of course, was that of Phillip Banks. The stern but loving uncle to the iconic title character on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air , he made for a classic foil for Smith and Riberio for six seasons. R.I.P. James Avery Dead at 65
I feel I have to confess to a certain partisanship. I grew up listening to Les Misérables . I’ve seen it performed twice and as a girl had the original Broadway cast recording down cold . It’s been years since I’ve heard it, but watching Tom Hooper ‘s adaptation of Claude-Michel Schönberg, Alain Boublil, Jean-Marc Natel and Herbert Kretzmer’s musical I realized with amusement and discomfiture that I could still sing along to just about every damn word, at least until whomever was sitting near me took it upon themselves to murder me for the greater good. These songs — and the bridges in between, for Les Misérables is a sung-through affair with almost no spoken dialogue — are permanently etched in my psyche, and I am as far from being able to look at this material with critical distance as a highly trained stage star is from an actual consumptive 1800s French urchin. That said, can we admit that Les Misérables is an absolute beast of a musical? It faces the impossible task of compressing Victor Hugo’s 1500-page novel into three hours (the screen version running a leaner 157 minutes), starting in a prison in the south of France in 1815 before leaping ahead to the town of Montreuil in 1823 and then Paris in 1832, where the main action takes place against the backdrop of the June Rebellion. It’s the story of ex-convict Jean Valjean ( Hugh Jackman ), but it has a notable array of other significant characters to be dealt with, ones who love and suffer and (quite frequently) die, and all with musical accompaniment. The signature staging of the play involved a giant turntable that allowed for more fluid scene changes. On screen, that can be accompanied efficiently with an edit, but then you have to deal with the fact that smooshing a whole storyline about Valjean giving up a chance to let a stranger go down for his crimes and choosing to go on the run again (“Who Am I? / The Trial”) looks incredibly rushed when taken out of the abstract. In staging Les Misérables for screen, Hooper has taken a relatively naturalistic and grounded approach to the musical, a choice that’s better suited to the subject matter of the story than to the fact that it takes place entirely in song. The vocals were recorded live on set, the backdrops are grimy in a poetic period Gallic style and the big numbers are frequently recorded in close-up, the camera holding on intimate shots of the performers as they stand or sit and sing. The film (which was shot by Danny Cohen, who also served as cinematographer on The King’s Speech ) treats its songs as it would dialogue, except that dialogue rarely involves spouting about one’s feelings at length out loud to no one, a tic that makes much more sense set to music. It’s an infuriatingly static way to shoot musical numbers, and it diminishes the bombastic grandeur many of these songs have. Éponine (singer and stage actress Samantha Barks) belts out her anguish about her unrequited love while huddled against a pillar; on the big sequence “One Day More” we cut abruptly between different faces as if everyone’s in their own individual music video. It’s only Russell Crowe in the role of Javert, the police inspector who’s devoted his life to chasing down Valjean, who gets the kind of grandiose staging the material demands in his two big songs, as he wanders along prominent Parisian landmarks and the camera swings out to take in the city. Crowe is, perhaps not coincidentally, the weakest singer, and despite his musical side career looks uncomfortable in the role of Javert, his concentration all seeming to go toward his serviceable warbling rather than acting. But much of the rest of the cast is terrific, particularly not-so-secret theater geeks Jackman and Anne Hathaway , who settle into their roles like they’ve spent their lives waiting for this opportunity. Hathaway’s in fact so good as Fantine, the factory worker forced into prostitution to support her daughter Cosette near the start of the story, that the film staggers a bit after her character departs, her killer rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” one of its emotional highlights. Eddie Redmayne’s a pleasant surprise as Marius, the idealistic student torn between his love for the grown Cosette (Amanda Seyfried) and his desire to join his friends at the barricades for the uprising — the lovers tend to be the two blandest characters in the ensemble, but he finds a genuine gallantry and sweetness to the would-be revolutionary. Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter , on the other hand, play designated comic relief couple the Thénardiers even broader than that description would suggest — though “Master of the House” is one of the most dynamically staged of the songs, the tonal difference between their appearances and the rest of the film is jolting. Even at a generous running time that matches this season’s other giant award candidates, Les Misérables seems like it’s in a hurry, skittering from one number to the next without interlude. After Hathaway’s early high point, it starts to feel numbing, an unending barrage of musical emoting carrying us through Valjean’s adopting of Cosette, the latter’s first encounter with Marius, the battle at the barricade and a last hour that can feel like it’s a non-stop series of death arias. But even if this isn’t a great screen adaptation of the musical, there’s no resisting the ending, which pairs the film’s two brightest stars and then has everyone join in on a reprise of “Do You Hear The People Sing?” Say, do you hear the distant drums? Maybe not, but at that moment the voices coming from the screen and the tune they’re crooning are rousing enough to draw a few tears. Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
The American Film Institute gave its selections for the best of 2012. The recent New York and Boston critics darling Zero Dark Thirty . AFI Awards selections are made through AFI’s jury process in which scholars, film and television artists, critics and AFI Trustees determine the most outstanding achievements of the year, as well as provide a detailed rationale for each selection. This year’s juries – one for film and one for television – were chaired by producers and AFI Board of Trustees Vice Chairs Tom Pollock (former Vice Chairman of MCA, Chairman of Universal Pictures) for the movies and Rich Frank (former Chairman of Walt Disney Television, President of Walt Disney Studios, President of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences) for television, and includes award-winning artists such as Angela Bassett, Brad Bird, Chris Carter, Marta Kauffman and Octavia Spencer ; film historian Leonard Maltin; scholars from prestigious universities with recognized motion picture arts programs (Syracuse, UCLA, University of Texas, USC, Wesleyan); AFI Board of Trustees; and critics. “AFI AWARDS celebrates America’s storytellers as collaborators,” said Bob Gazzale, AFI President and CEO in a statement. “We are honored to bring together artists as a community, without competition, to acknowledge the gifts they have given the world in 2012.” AFI will honor the creative ensembles for each of the selections on January 11th in Los Angeles. AFI Movies of the Year: Argo Beasts of the Southern Wild The Dark Knight Rises Django Unchained Les Misérables Life of Pi Lincoln Moonrise Kingdom Silver Linings Playbook Zero Dark Thirty AFI TV Programs of the Year: American Horror Story Breaking Bad Game Change Game of Thrones Girls Homeland Louie Mad Men Modern Family The Walking Dead
For three decades, we’ve been treated to numerous looks-back on the Dan Aykroyd -John Belushi comedy team, and the one perfect film they managed to make, 1980’s The Blues Brothers . So much dirt has already been dished over the decades that it almost feels like we know everything we’ll ever need to about the hard-partying tendencies that ultimately killed Belushi in 1982. We would be mistaken, as a new Vanity Fair profile will no doubt demonstrate that however many skeletons you think might have been unearthed, there’s always room for one or two more in the mass grave of a dead celebrity’s life story. The January issue features a new and very detailed look into the making of The Blues Brothers . Part fond remembrance, part cautionary tale, and part “Jesus H Christ, seriously. You seriously did all that,” it delivers absolutely delicious — and absolutely tragic — stories from Belushi’s friends, family and former coworkers about that film’s troubled production. We’ve culled a few choicer nuggets from the online preview: * The ’70s were even more decadent than we think. According to Dan Aykroyd, “We had a budget in the movie for cocaine for night shoots” during the making of > em> The Blues Brothers. And just like that, films like Zardoz suddenly begin to make more sense. * Belushi’s drug problem had gotten so out of hand that they actually asked Carrie Fisher – Carrie Fisher! – to keep him from consuming. I wonder if they also asked Chevy Chase to keep Dan Aykroyd from making bad decisions about the roles he intended to take during the late ’80s and early ’90s. * Belushi and Robert Downey, Jr. have a lot in common: Apparently Belushi disappeared from the set one night, and Aykroyd found him at a nearby home where, the homeowner told him, Belushi had just showed up, raided the man’s fridge like it wasn’t even a thing, and passed out on the couch. Obviously, this thing just became required, end-of-the-year reading. It goes without saying also that we’re very glad this kind of addiction is no longer enabled so blatantly. [ Source: Vanity Fair ]
Legendary auteurs, they’re just like us! When iconic filmmaker Ingmar Bergman passed away in 2007, he left behind one of the greatest bodies of work known to cinema — and a vast, meticulously catalogued VHS collection, the subject of the upcoming Swedish documentary Bergman’s Video . Among his tapes, somewhere between the Bunuel and the Tarkovsky: Jurassic Park , Ghostbusters , and The Blues Brothers , which at least partially explains the ghosts and Jake/Elwood-esque sibling dynamic in Fanny and Alexander . The dinosaurs, not so much. [ Cineuropa via Movie City News ]
Thirty years after Jake and Elwood Blues went on their mission from God, the Vatican has issued an endorsement of The Blues Brothers as “recommended viewing for Catholics everywhere.” The brothers’ mission to raise money for the orphanage where they were raised apparently took on a little more weight than the wrist-slapping “penguin” nun in the final judgment, but there you have it. Newt Gingrich, eat your heart out . [ THR ]
Weird Al is in it. And it's an homage to/remake of a sequence from The Blues Brothers . And it's Hanson. If that's not a recipe for success, I don't know what is. Watch
