I know I like to rag on Kim Kardashian a lot, but I will say this, the porn star MILF definitely knows how to dress. Here she is in Paris for Fashion Week, and even though I don’t know much about fashion, I do know that this outfit must be pretty special. Because it’s currently doing the impossible: making me actually enjoy seeing pictures of Kim for once. Bravo. » view all 20 photos Photos: WENN.com , Fameflynet Continue reading →
With “Blurred Bynes,” a group of drag queens have done the impossible, covering Robin Thicke’s summer smash and calling out troubled actress Amanda Bynes. Okay, maybe not the impossible. But didn’t see that one coming, did you? L.A. drag queens Willam Belli, Detox (both ex-contestants on RuPaul’s Drag Race ) and Vicky Vox have just released the video lampooning Amanda Bynes ‘ wild antics. Watch it in its NSFW glory below: Blurred Bynes The three queens sing seductively, “OK she smoked some weed, you know you can’t malign her. So high she tweets to Drake to murder her vagina.” Hashtag: #VAGACIDE. They continue, “Whitney, Britney, Lohan, Charlie Sheen and Russell Brand all agree that she’s the man, wait hold up she was in She’s the Man .” Nicely played. While you may say it’s uncalled for to make fun of a girl we now know is suffering from severe mental illness , the group does seem to be big fans. “We love you blurred Bynes,” the drag queen trio croons as part of the chorus. “Your tits real sexy, wig extra messy, looking real, real sketchy.” Indeed. Like the original “Blurred Lines” video , the parody features wild animals, hot models (men in this case) and exercise equipment inside a big white room. Which do you like better?
Amanda Seyfried stars in The Big Wedding , but unveils in Chloe . Bar Paly bares butt in Pain and Gain , and Naomi Watts flashes her bulbs in The Impossible .
If American Psycho ‘s Patrick Bateman were a film critic, he’d be Bret Easton Ellis. When he’s not promoting his film The Canyons — directed by Paul Schrader and starring Lindsay Lohan — on Twitter, Ellis has been blowing shotgun-sized holes in some of the awards season’s biggest films. The Less Than Zero author contends that Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow is “really overrated,” and Les Misérables makes him miserable. (According to him, it’s an “incomprehensible mess.” ) Life of Pi fares better, though Ellis would like to see that film’s young star Suraj Sharma get into porn. Oh yeah, and he also claims that the Academy “hates” The Dark Knight Rises . Below, a sampling of Ellis’ critical stylings, not necessarily in chronological order: Zero Dark Thirty: Kathryn Bigelow would be considered a mildly interesting filmmaker if she was a man but since she's a very hot woman she's really overrated.— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) December 06, 2012 Kathryn Bigelow: Strange Days, K-19 The Widowmaker, Blue Steel, The Hurt Locker. Are we talking about visionary filmmaking or just OK junk?— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) December 06, 2012 Silver Linings Playbook: “Zero Dark Thirty” might win critics awards but “Silver Linings Playbook” will win the Best Picture Oscar. This is how it always happens…— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) December 06, 2012 Les Misérables: The film version of “Les Miserables” is so bad that it made me rethink why I ever loved the stage version. 2 hours and 40 minutes of tacky.— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) December 05, 2012 The one actor surviving the incomprehensible mess “Les Miserables” is Eddie Redmayne, who should get an award for avoiding humiliation…— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) December 05, 2012 Tom Hooper blows just about every song in “Les Miserables” including “On My Own” which I didn't think possible no matter who directed it…— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) December 05, 2012 Oh yeah and I forgot: “Les Miserables” opens on Christmas Day and (spoiler alert!) just about everyone in it dies. Merry fucking Christmas.— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) December 05, 2012 Life of Pi: Life of Pi is the movie I've thought about the most in 2012. As a writer I can't reconcile with its disturbing reveal: illusion vs. reality?— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) December 04, 2012 Suraj Sharma gives an amazing and incredibly moving performance in “Life of Pi” and seriously needs to do some porn. Misspelling: my fault.— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) December 04, 2012 Killing Them Softly Based on the terrific source material “Killing Them Softly” doesn't work at all, but the actor Scoot McNairy is now officially on the radar.— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) December 04, 2012 “Killing Them Softly” starring Brad Pitt is one of only eight films in Cinemascore's history to receive an “F” grade but…”Troy” didn't?!?— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) December 04, 2012 How the Academy will vote: The Academy is going to go for Silver Linings Playbook and not Lincoln.— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) December 03, 2012 The Academy hates The Dark Knight Rises because I sat in that theater that night and listened to the banter in the lobby afterwards.— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) December 03, 2012 There's not a chance in hell that Ang Lee will win best director. That will be a fight between Ben Affleck and David O. Russell. Haneke? No.— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) December 03, 2012 I’m not sure if Ellis’ most recent tweet is a reaction to reaction to his withering perspective, but, as you might expect, he’s unrepentant: Anyone Unfollowing me should have known better and never Followed me in the first place. Wise up: pussies and snowflakes. Get the F over it.— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) December 06, 2012 Watch your back, Sandy Kenyon. Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
I’m an outlier among other insufferable snobs on the Internet: I actually want Khan to be the villain of Star Trek Into Darkness . This isn’t because I desperately want the films to touch every base that the original series did. After nearly 30 years on television and 10 movies of highly uneven quality, the Star Trek universe prior to JJ Abrams’ Star Trek was suffering horribly from internal rot, not to mention a growing reliance on awful time travel plots and constant nods to series continuity. A fresh start was desperately needed if it was going to remain relevant, even if it came at — sniff — the expense of Captains Picard and Sisko*. But if Star Trek was a successful fresh start (and it was), it also brought with it some terrible baggage from the previous continuity, specifically the fact that its plot was motivated by the same time-travel bullshit that caused the TV universe to finally collapse under the weight of its own pretentions. Thank the founders that Abrams movie focused squarely on the Holy Trinity of Kirk, Spock, and Bones, or we would have noticed how awful Nero really was. But as we’ve already learned with Iron Man 2 , a successul sequel needs to do more than coast on the chemistry of its leads. With Kirk and co. firmly established, STID needs a strong conflict with high stakes, and a memorable villain (or at least a prime mover) connected to that conflict. To pull that off, you can’t force the audience to consult a Trek lore guide. Superturbonerd Trek Fans like me might want to see Harcourt Mudd, Cyrano Jones, Gary Mitchell, The Horta, or that horrible psychic kid played by Ron Howard’s brother but frankly, that’s inside baseball. Ask the legions of moviegoers for whom for whom Star Trek is essentially Kirk bangs space hotties-Spock lectures him about the logic of using a condom-Bones grumpily administers penicillin ,”the only villain they’ll recite from memory is Ricardo Montalban’s Khan Noonien Singh. Is that a problem? Only if you think that the Joker’s appearing in The Dark Knight was a problem. Iconic characters linger in the public memory for a reason, and that makes it easy for a skilled storyteller to take them and make them over into something later audiences can appreciate anew. Do it right and you can get away with anything, even making a horribly lame villain like Bane look bad-ass. And for better or for worse, Khan is Kirk’s Joker. So milk that shit, I say. Use him well and firmly ground STID in its own past, and save less exploited territory for future sequels, when you’ve solidified the audience’s loyalty. But is Khan the villain of Star Trek Into Darkness ? Who the hell can tell? The new trailer certainly doesn’t want us to know for sure. But damned if it isn’t teasing the hell out of us. It’s already been confirmed that the villain will be canon. And now we know that whatever character is blessed with Benedict Cumberbatch’s crisp, Public School tones, he’s really angry and looking to exact some revenge – sorry, vengeance, which is way classier than mere revenge – on the people of Earth. That sounds like Khan to me! Unless Cyrano Jones is angry that the Klingons wiped out the Tribbles. There’s also the fact that the American trailer lacks one crucial scene present in the Japanese trailer (see it right before the end): a deliberate homage to the moment of Spock’s Death in Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan . Even if it’s just a dodge (something Abrams does very well,) the reference can’t be a coincidence. And if this means we get to see Cumberbatch doing is best Ricardo Montalban impression, that’s fine by me. Just so long as it doesn’t mean we have to endure another go at The Search For Spock . Some additional thoughts: -If you think it’s ridiculous that a lily-white Briton like Benedict Cumberbatch could even pretend to play an Indian, it’s worth noting that Gabrielle Anwar and Ben Kingsley both have Indian fathers. -Notice the ship rising out of the water? If it isn’t the SS botany Bay, I wonder if it’s the same starship we see crashing into the San Francisco Bay later in the trailer. -The interesting thing about the trailer is just how much of Earth we’re seeing in it. Star Trek was originally pitched as Wagon Train to the stars, but of course, the wagon train had to start somewhere. The original series and subsequent iterations barely feature earth as anything other than a reference. For all we know, the only thing people do back home is build more Enterprises. Also, whenever I watch a western, I always want a scene of what people are up to back in Boston or London. It’s interesting that in the space version, we’re getting exactly that. *Truth: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is inarguably the best series. YEAHISAIDIT. Read More: ‘ Star Trek Into Darkness’ Explodes An Early Tease Star Trek 2 Gets A Title: Where Does It Rank In The Franchise? Ross Lincoln is a LA-based freelance writer from Oklahoma with an unhealthy obsession with comics, movies, video games, ancient history, Gore Vidal, and wine. Follow Ross A. Lincoln on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
There’s a question that The Impossible , the new film from Juan Antonio Bayona ( The Orphanage ), demands be asked, and that is — is it easier for audiences to relate to tragedy when it’s filtered through white characters? This is not a new issue. The movies have a long tradition of approaching stories about people of color, both at home and abroad, through the experiences of Caucasian protagonists, a habit that speaks to both (probably not unfounded) ideas about audience preferences and prejudices and the linked reality of what most of our movie stars still look like. The Impossible is set during the 2004 tsunami that hit South East Asia the day after Christmas, killing over 230,000 people and devastating Indonesia, India, Thailand and other countries, but it’s about how one expat family on holiday weathers the tragedy, an uplifting tale of survival and endurance amidst the ruin. On one hand, yes, it feels undeniably strange and selective to approach the worst tsunami in history by way of vacationing foreigners, with representatives of the local Thai population limited to those who come to their aid. The film begins with the family — Henry (Ewan McGregor) and Maria (Naomi Watts), and their sons Lucas (Tom Holland), Simon (Oaklee Pendergast) and Thomas (Samuel Joslin) — arriving on a turbulent flight, and ends with their worse for the wear departure on another one, and the relief that accompanies that trip to safety comes with an awareness that many of the other people left behind do not have a home elsewhere to go back to. On the other hand, The Impossible , which was written by Sergio G. Sánchez, is based on the true story of a Spanish family (transformed here into a British one) who were some of the many visitors to the area whose trip abroad turned into a nightmare. Their experiences aren’t unworthy of being dramatized simply because they’re not representative of the underreported norm, and the film recreates the horrifying saga in ways that are startlingly visceral, including a masterful sequence in which the first wave arrives like a monster in a horror flick. This story being told doesn’t mean that others are silenced, and The Impossible benefits from taking a limited perspective on an awful larger incident rather than try for something more panoramic. What may be a more relevant question for The Impossible is what its aims are as a movie. It’s a thoroughly and effectively sappy effort about a family searching for one another after an incredible catastrophe in the trappings of traumatic gore film — or vice versa, but either way the two halves sit uneasily beside one another on screen. As in The Orphanage , Bayona demonstrates he has a talent for the disturbing or flat out frightening and a taste for the sentimental, and it’s perhaps because this is a film about a real and recent disaster that both feel amplified, the shock and suffering turned up to apologize for or counterbalance the unabashed drippiness that follows. From a pure filmmaking perspective, it’s the first half that really impresses and perturbs, as Henry, Maria and the kids arrive from Japan to spend their holidays in a gorgeous beachside resort in Khao Lak. They film themselves on Christmas morning opening presents on the veranda, they release a paper lantern on the beach at night, and they sit poolside getting sunburns with other Western tourists and talking about their careers while the boys frolic in the water. The tsunami takes them completely by surprise, as it did almost everyone affected, rumbling from the horizon and taking out everything in its path. We stay with Maria as she’s swept away in the chaotic mass of water, the camera sticking with her as she clutches a tree and howls in pain and upset, then cutting over to Lucas as he’s pulled in the current, the two trying to reach each other in a world suddenly upended. It’s a tour de force sequence, and one that manages to outdo a similar one in Hereafter with little effort. But it’s what follows that’s enough to evoke a physical reaction, as Maria trudges through the wreckage, too stunned to notice the tattered muscles exposed in the gaping wound in her leg. The suffering Watts portrays — she climbs, dripping blood and crying in pain, into a tree and in a later scene coughs up what looks like lung tissue — looks all too agonizingly real, and enabling that requires a committed and deeply believable bit of acting. But watching her ordeal is enough to make you feel shaky, and almost as troubling are the sequences that follow in which Henry trudges through the splintered remains of their hotel, looking for the rest of his family, either alive or dead. The Impossible drops you into the experience of living through the tsunami in specific, achingly realized detail, then pulls back to provide a happier ending. After so much anguish, the need to balance it out with something positive is understandable, but it’s difficult not to be aware of just how much Bayona is yanking on heartstrings as he arranges for near misses and hospital misunderstandings, teary phone calls and kindly old women (Geraldine Chaplin!) providing companionship to forlorn children. Any glimpses of good amidst the destruction are welcome, but after that jarring, unforgettably immediate account of the tsunami, the latter half of The Impossible is so disappointingly movie -ish, tying a bow on the events after portraying them too vividly to allow them to be wrapped so neatly. It wrings out tears with an industrious efficiency that leaves you feeling manhandled after the exhilarating, terrifying footage that’s unfolded before. Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Real talk, y’all: The first domestic trailer for Juan Antonio Bayona’s disaster drama The Impossible made me a little misty-eyed. Get ready to get your hearts touched by Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts as parents on vacay with their children who get separated by the devastating 2004 tsunami and attempt to find their way back to each other amid the destruction and chaos. Sniff. The first Spanish language teaser and posters caught our eye with their startlingly frightening imagery, but Summit’s trailer takes a different route with effective results, focusing more on the human drama and bonds at the center of the film. The Impossible marks director Bayona’s English-language debut after impressing with 2007’s The Orphanage . [Trailer debut in HD at Apple .] Based on the true story of one family’s survival of the 2004 tsunami, THE IMPOSSIBLE stars Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor and is directed by J.A. Bayona (THE ORPHANAGE). Maria (Naomi Watts), Henry (Ewan McGregor) and their three sons begin their winter vacation in Thailand, looking forward to a few days in tropical paradise. But on the morning of December 26th, as the family relaxes around the pool after their Christmas festivities the night before, a terrifying roar rises up from the center of the earth. As Maria freezes in fear, a huge wall of black water races across the hotel grounds toward her. THE IMPOSSIBLE is the powerful and unforgettable account of a family caught, with tens of thousands of strangers, in the mayhem of one of the worst natural catastrophes of our time. But the true-life terror is tempered by the unexpected displays of compassion, courage and simple kindness that Maria and her family encounter during the darkest hours of their lives. Both epic and intimate, devastating and uplifting, The Impossible is a journey to the core of the human heart. The Impossible will be released December 21. Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Real talk, y’all: The first domestic trailer for Juan Antonio Bayona’s disaster drama The Impossible made me a little misty-eyed. Get ready to get your hearts touched by Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts as parents on vacay with their children who get separated by the devastating 2004 tsunami and attempt to find their way back to each other amid the destruction and chaos. Sniff. The first Spanish language teaser and posters caught our eye with their startlingly frightening imagery, but Summit’s trailer takes a different route with effective results, focusing more on the human drama and bonds at the center of the film. The Impossible marks director Bayona’s English-language debut after impressing with 2007’s The Orphanage . [Trailer debut in HD at Apple .] Based on the true story of one family’s survival of the 2004 tsunami, THE IMPOSSIBLE stars Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor and is directed by J.A. Bayona (THE ORPHANAGE). Maria (Naomi Watts), Henry (Ewan McGregor) and their three sons begin their winter vacation in Thailand, looking forward to a few days in tropical paradise. But on the morning of December 26th, as the family relaxes around the pool after their Christmas festivities the night before, a terrifying roar rises up from the center of the earth. As Maria freezes in fear, a huge wall of black water races across the hotel grounds toward her. THE IMPOSSIBLE is the powerful and unforgettable account of a family caught, with tens of thousands of strangers, in the mayhem of one of the worst natural catastrophes of our time. But the true-life terror is tempered by the unexpected displays of compassion, courage and simple kindness that Maria and her family encounter during the darkest hours of their lives. Both epic and intimate, devastating and uplifting, The Impossible is a journey to the core of the human heart. The Impossible will be released December 21. Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
For the first three hours and 20 minutes, I was totally with Savages . During the middle two hours and 25 minutes, I was reasonably intrigued to see how it would all turn out. But through the final six hours and 48 minutes, I kept sneaking glances at my watch, just wishing that Oliver Stone would hurry up and cap off this wiggly-waggly tale of two marijuana-entrepreneur buddies, their shared girlfriend, and a host of Mexican drug baddies led by Salma Hayek wearing a black bobbed wig that’s half Cleopatra, half Bettie Page. Savages isn’t really 12 hours and 33 minutes long – it’s actually only 8 hours and 22 minutes long – but there’s just no shaking the feeling that it would be so much better if Stone had made it trimmer and more taut and limited himself to the use of only 12 different types of film stock. It’s also not clear, exactly, why the movie exists in the first place: That creaky-wheel groan you hear throughout is the sound of Stone anxiously trying to have fun again, after several years of making desperately serious documentaries (the 2009 South of the Border ), useless sequels (the 2010 Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps ) and observant but ultimately toothless semi-biopics (the 2008 W. ). Savages is, in places, brutal in an old-school way, as if Stone were exercising muscles that have long been out of use. But if the movie is sometimes desperately alive, it’s also cluelessly shallow. Perhaps Stone wanted to make a violent entertainment that speaks to our current age, a time when ruthlessness and greed have reached irreversible proportions, a picture in which characters grow and change but perhaps do so too late. But Stone’s moralism, coupled with discreet but bloody beatings, shootouts and all manner of tawdry goings on, rings hollow. The picture is neither entertaining nor preachy – it is simply very loudly meh. Taylor Kitsch and Aaron Johnson star, respectively, as Chon and Ben, best pals who grow pot for a living in California and also willingly share the same girlfriend, a modern-day rich-hippie-girl free spirit known as O, short for Ophelia ( Blake Lively ). Chon is a war vet who does business by the tooth-and-claw method. Ben is a gentle sort who likes the pot business because it’s “green,” and he spends whatever money he makes doing good deeds in other parts of the world. (To suggest this, Stone treats us to images of Ben, with his ropy hair and razor-averse facial whiskers, teaching the alphabet or something to little naked tropical children.) Though Ben and Chon have been friends since high school, they appear to have little in common temperamentally. It’s O who connects them. Chon is a “baddist,” O explains in voice-over, while Ben is a “Buddhist.” “For me, together they are one complete man,” she goes on to explain. “The one thing they have in common is me. I’m the home they’ve never had.” Trouble brews when Ben and Chon run afoul of some potential business associates, simply because the two refuse to bow to anyone’s bullying. By the time Benicio Del Toro shows up, looking puffy and dissolute and ill-tempered, you know some very bad things are gonna go down. John Travolta also shuffles in, intermittently, as a fast-talking, wheeler-dealer DEA guy with a shaved-stubble hairdo. And Hayek, as drug queenpin extraordinaire Elena, provides heavy doses of eye candy, lounging languidly in her extravagant south-of-the-border headquarters as she devises nasty punishments for anyone who might dare cross her. Savages , based on the novel by Don Winslow, holds the essence of a compact, brutal little thriller. But somewhere along the way – perhaps the problem begins with the screenplay, written by Stone, Winslow and Shane Salerno – the story becomes unwieldy and overstuffed, taking not-very-surprising turns it doesn’t need to take. (The dialogue also includes some classic Stone-style howlers, as when del Toro asks to see Ben’s hands and then pronounces them “soft – like a woman’s!”) The key actors, particularly Kitsch and Johnson, try to give their characters a degree of roundness that doesn’t appear to have been written into those characters in the first place. And for people involved, at any level, in the drug trade, they come off as shockingly naïve. There’s a point at which Johnson’s Ben suddenly realizes he and Chon have become mixed up with some very bad people, and you want to ask where on Earth he’s been for the past 20 years. In fact, even though Savages is a supremely macho tale of drug-dealing and extreme business practices, it’s actually the women who make it worth watching. Hayek makes the kind of villainess who’d be right at home in a late-’40s noir or a ’50s exploitation extravaganza – she purrs through her role like a take-no-prisoners kitten with very sharp teeth. And Lively continues her run as a young actress with an undeniable spark of something. She keys into O’s vulnerability and her rich-girl guilelessness: When O is mistreated (to put it mildly) by Hayek and her gang, she seems certain that her rich mommy can make it all better. We see how ridiculous that belief is, but it makes sense that O would cling to it, and Lively channels that wispy callowness as opposed to just playing a list of character traits. She’s touching, but in the lightest possible way, a sunbeam in the midst of Stone’s heavy-handed universe. O is the most civilized character in Savages , and Lively gives the most open, unstudied performance here. She’s an actress who’s sophisticated in ways she probably doesn’t even realize. Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter . 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