Nightclubs aren’t big enough for both Chris Brown and Drake. It’s a lesson many of them seem to have learned after 2012, and this week, Drake was turned away at the door of an L.A. hotspot because Brown was already inside . The club, Playhouse in Hollywood, sent Drake on his way Wednesday night as Chris was partying at a table inside and they wanted to avoid any brawls. Brown was inside celebrating an anniversary party for the clothing brand Popular Demand, with Rihanna also due to make an appearance later, no less. Amazing that this is even a consideration, but probably a smart move. Obviously aware of the Chris Brown-Drake fight at NYC’s W.i.P. nightclub last year – a brawl they are now suing each other over – they told Drake to party elsewhere. He handled the rejection like a man and left without incident. Interestingly, Rihanna did show up but exchanged nary a word with Chris, prompting speculation that the newly-reconciled couple is once again on the rocks . Also interestingly, NBA star Tony Parker is suing W.i.P. for injuries he suffered during that brawl, claiming it should have known better than to let Chris in. Clearly Playhouse got that memo.
Reeva Steenkamp, Oscar Pistorius’ slain girlfriend, spent her final minutes hiding behind a bathroom door before he shot her to death, a new report alleges. The South African double-amputee Olympic sprinter pumped four bullets through the door and into the helpless blond beauty, a neighbor has claimed. Details of their Valentine’s Day fight, after which Oscar Pistorius was charged with murder , began to emerge as police piece together what happened. Or what they believe happened. Pistorius’ family, while offering prayers for Reeva Steenkamp , say they “strongly dispute” the alleged murder charge. In any event, the gorgeous model was found dead two hours after police were called to Pistorius’ upscale home over a loud fight involving the couple. Steenkamp reportedly fled in fear to the bathroom in her boyfriend’s house before she was shot through the closed door with a 9-mm. handgun. She was struck in the head, chest, pelvis and hand, local media reports say. Security guards in Pistorius’ gated Pretoria community found him sitting alongside the bloody body in the bathroom with the four bullet holes obvious in the door. The pair were alone in the house at the time of the killing; there were no eyewitness accounts. The suspected murder weapon was recovered at the scene. Prosecutors, in a stunning move, announced the six-time Paralympic gold medalist faced charges of premeditated murder in the predawn shooting. Pistorius wept in court but did not enter a plea ; he remains in custody. Steenkamp and the Olympian began dating about four months ago. The shooting reverberated across South Africa, where Pistorius is a national hero, and the world, where he was a symbol of courage and determination. An ex-girlfriend of Pistorius took to Twitter to defend the 26-year-old sprinter-turned-suspect, insisting he had no history of violence toward women. “I would just like to say, I have dated Oscar on/off for 5 YEARS, NOT ONCE has he EVER lifted a finger to me, made me fear for my life,” said Jenna Edkins. His former girlfriend added: “All I am saying is let him speak, let his side be heard without jumping to conclusions. Love and thoughts to Reeva’s family.” However, another former ex called Pistorius a “player” and “certainly not what people think he is.” Samantha Taylor said he had “way with women.” Taylor’s father also weighed in on Pistorius’ dark side. “I have no sympathy for Oscar. I am just glad that my daughter is safe and that she got out of the relationship in time,” Henry Taylor was quoted as saying.
Director Bryan Singer told Deadline yesterday that Emmy-winning actor Peter Dinklage will play a “key role” in X-Men: Second Class Days Of Future Past . This is, of course, great news for the spiffily dressed but not terribly interesting Mad Men mutants. Fans of Game of Thrones , Elf , 30 Rock , and The Station Agent have long known that Dinklage brings intelligence, gravity, and a scary-sharp wit to every production. In fact, I’d go so far as to declare that Dinklage is such a valuable asset every tentpole this year should add him to its cast. The Words of Peter need to spread far and wide. Here are four roles in 2013’s biggest sequels that Dinklage would tyrannize, or is that Tyrionize? : The Mandarin in Iron Man 3 : It’s time for a real challenge to Tony Stark. The first two installments had the billionaire superhero playing rock’em, sock’em robots, and The Avengers portrayed Stark as the coolest guy in the room. The trilogy-closer should give Robert Downey Jr. a truly worthy foe – one who’s smart enough to launch both a physical attack and a charm offensive. Because as awesome as his high-tech salute to the San Francisco 49ers is, Iron Man’s real weapon is his crinkly-eyed charisma and all the things it can get him, like Gwyneth Paltrow’s attention. Dinklage’s past performances suggest he’s Downey’s equal in the smart-ass and getting-ass departments, so the perfect showdown for Iron Man 3 would pit Iron Man’s quips against The Mandarin’s drollness in a game of pwns so amazing it’ll create a whole new level of snark. (Yes, Dinklage isn’t Chinese, but neither is Ben Kingsley or that indeterminate accent he’s working in the trailers.) Beetee in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire : Strength, speed, and cunning won Katniss her first Hunger Games, but that won’t be enough to clinch a second victory in Catching Fire . With the Capitol out for blood — sigh , aren’t they every year? — our ponytailed heroine needs alliances, even with total dorks like Peeta, to win the 75 th Games, an all-star challenge that pits previous winners against each other. Dinklage’s lack of physical threat makes him perfect for the role of Beetee, a middle-aged electrician who’s formidable precisely because he doesn’t seem like it (and because he didn’t go to school in pouty archery). The Hunger Games trilogy is, among other things, great strategy porn, and the sight of Dinklage using what his mama gave him – those full, luscious brains – would make compulsive voyeurs of us all. Tad Fawn, sensitive ladies’ man, in Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues : After Veronica Corningstone brought women’s lib to San Diego, the tides have turned on Ron Burgundy and his pelted goons. Southern California’s most-laid local celebrity is now Tad Fawn, the fuzzy sweater-loving, Stevie Nicks-adoring host of a popular PBS show about pet care. It’s frustrating enough to Ron that Cuddle Buddies is beating Channel 4 Evening News in the ratings, but now Tad is threatening to steal Ron’s greatest career achievement: the 1979 Playgirl ’s Burt of the Year title and centerfold. Dinklage’s best roles have allowed the actor to play the wounded bad boy, plus his real name is dirty enough to be his porn name . Dinklage is long overdue for a showcase for his sexy beast, and what better a forum could there be than a man-off with a soft, confused Will Ferrell ? Guy who slaps around Adam Sandler and his friends in Grown Ups 2 : That’s it. That’s the whole movie. I would, in fact, jump at the chance to get on a bus for half an hour, fork over $12 to the hungover teenager behind the counter, and suffer through a bunch of trailers I’ve already seen online but LOUDER just for the privilege of watching Dinklage slap the smirks off Adam Sandler, Rob Schneider, David Spade, and Kevin James for whining about how being a straight white guy in an America where women they don’t find attractive have the gall to exist is just so hard, man . ( Chris Rock gets a pass because it’s his first Happy Madison flick. He won’t be in the sequel.) When Dinklage gets tired, he can put on a snazzy suit and start throwing them around the room. He’s kind of the king of that . Inkoo Kang is a film critic and investigative journalist in Boston. She has been published in Indiewire, Boxoffice Magazine, Yahoo! Movies, Pop Matters, Screen Junkies, and MuckRock. Her great dream in life is to direct a remake of All About Eve with an all-dog cast. Follow Inkoo Kang on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
The quest to predict this year’s Oscar winners with the same mathematical precision that fivethirtyeight blogger Nate Silver called the 2012 presidential election has got a new contestant. The filmmaking website The Credits has teamed up with the social analytics and monitoring company Brandwatch, to create a predictive data visualization that it has dubbed ” Social Oscars .” East Coast Editor Bryan Abrams says the algorithm, which was created by British quant Edward Crook, predicts the Oscar front-runners by focusing on the positive mentions that nominated films, directors and actors generate via critics and social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Abrams explains that the algorithm is created to filter out mentions that are negative or that don’t specifically pertain to a nominated film or an actor’s performance in it. “If there’s a positive story about Best Supporting Actress nominee Anne Hathaway having lunch at The Ivy, that’s not going to be counted,” he says. The editor also estimates that, by the time the Academy Awards are handed out on Feb. 24, the algorithm will have evaluated more than a million mentions that it has evaluated on the Internet. The Social Oscars works differently than, for instance, The Huffington Post’s Oscar Predictions Dashboard , which incorporates box-office results and Rotten Tomatoes critics and audience scores. For one thing, it predicts frontrunners via two categories: Public Choice and Critics Choice. So, for instance, as of Feb. 15, Robert De Niro is the Critics Choice favorite for Best Supporting Actor, while Christoph Waltz is leading in the Public Choice category. In the Best Actress category, Jennifer Lawrence is far and away the public’s choice, but she’s virtually tied with Jessica Chastain with critics. And though some pundits are pushing a scenario in which Amour actress Emmanuelle Riva walks away with the prize, the French actress is a distant third in the Social Oscars race (but a rising number two on HuffPo’s dashboard). And for those rooting for Argo to upset Lincoln as Best Picture, there’s good news. The Ben Affleck-directed picture is the clear frontrunner, according to the Social Oscars algorithm. (See the graphic above.) Stay tuned. [ The Credits , Huffington Post ] Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
1-Year-Old Child Swallows 42 Refrigerator Magnets A 1-Year-Old boy is reportedly in recovery after being rushed to the hospital for swallowing 42 magnets taken off of the refrigerator when his mother “briefly” turned her back. The x-ray above was taken once the toddler and his mother arrived at the hospital. via Huffington Post When a Russian mother noticed a “large shortage” of magnets from her refrigerator, she pinned her 16-month-old son as the culprit. Except the boy hadn’t just taken the magnets off the kitchen fridge– he’d swallowed them, according to the Austrian Times Doctors had to surgically remove an alarming 42 toy magnets from the baby’s stomach on Tuesday, said spokesman Olga Terekhina in a Chelyabinsk Oblast Children’s Hospital announcement. The mother rushed her son to a local clinic, where an ultrasound revealed dozens of marble-sized magnets filling up his abdomen, according to the Daily Mail. He went straight to the operating room, and was reportedly in recovery on Tuesday. Pediatric surgeon Nikolai Mikhailovich said he’s extracted as many as two dozen magnets or foreign objects at one time, but 42 pieces was a “record” for him, according to the release. Toddlers are very busy and get into things all the time, but 42 magnets? This lil crumb snatcher was going for a world record. Thank goodness he’s ok! Photo Credit: Shutterstock/ CEN
At the risk of sounding ungrateful for a fresh Die Hard sequel, Russia needs its own John McClane movie the way Uncle Sam needs a bright red babushka. On the flimsiest of pretexts, Bruce Willis’ obstinate hero travels all the way to Moscow to find trouble in A Good Day to Die Hard , teaming up with his never-before-seen son to stop a generic terrorist from stealing weapons-grade uranium from Chernobyl — a subpar plot that feels suspiciously like someone tried to plug McClane into a preexisting screenplay. Fox’s shaky bid to boost this installment’s international appeal could backfire domestically. Between this and 2007’s PG-13-rated Live Free or Die Hard , the studio seems determined to test audiences’ definition of a Die Hard movie. Is it enough to air-drop a bruised and bloody Bruce Willis into any old action movie and hope fans follow? Can the series keep trotting out half-forgotten family members — a daughter played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead in the last one, and now Jai Courtney as McClane’s estranged son Jack — to draw him into the fray? Enticed by either the attractive Russian market or the even more appealing incentives Hungary dangled for shooting in Budapest, someone decided to send McClane abroad, where the NYPD detective has no jurisdiction — and no qualms about using his usual brute-force tactics to stay alive. Considering the original Die Hard pitted its modern-day cowboy against a squad of arch Nazi stereotypes four decades after World War II ended, perhaps it follows that the series should dredge up an old Cold War adversary this time out, conveniently ignoring the fact Chernobyl is as far from Moscow as Three Mile Island is from Detroit. And so the pic, which runs a full reel shorter than its predecessors, sends McClane to the former Soviet Union with a ridiculous plan to spring Jack from jail. (McClane literally saunters up to the courthouse at precisely the moment huge armored vehicles arrive to blow the place apart.) Little does he realize that Jack has things under control, having been arrested as part of an elaborate CIA mission to arrange the defection of a well-connected political prisoner, Yuri Komarov (Sebastian Koch), who claims to have a file with incriminating details on high-ranking government officials. Though not much of a MacGuffin, it’s more than enough to get things rolling, and director John Moore ( Behind Enemy Lines ) delivers an elaborate, logistically daunting car chase around the capital, featuring Jack and Komarov in a van, a squad of heavily armed assassins in pursuit, and third-wheel John bringing up the rear — a surly papa bear determined to protect his endangered cub, whether Jack wants his help or not. The entire sequence works like gangbusters, giving the new Dolby Atmos super-surround system (debuted on Brave ) a real workout, though it borrows a bit too heavily from other films in which Westerners have laid waste to rival cities. Generally speaking, the action elements aren’t the problem here. They’re certainly loud enough. It’s the obligatory intra-family squabbling and preposterous plotting that threaten to derail this nonsensical sequel, especially a series of swapped allegiances between Komarov and his daughter Irina (Yulia Snigir), a lethal stunner with her own share of daddy issues. Things go bang, the McClanes get their share of battle scars and the trauma of it all proves the perfect bonding experience to heal old wounds. “Need a hug?” dad sarcastically asks his stand-offish son, who seems to have inherited his sense of humor from the other side of the family. Willis still packs that rapscallion charm, balancing his wisecracking, reluctant-hero shtick with the unstoppable, all-American quality that earned the original film its title. But the chemistry between him and Courtney is nonexistent, with the younger thesp, who makes co-star Cole Hauser look expressive, adding so little to the equation, one can only hope the studio doesn’t plan to pass the franchise on to him. Watching this expendable, action-packed sequel, it’s impossible not to think in such cynical terms. To Fox’s credit, the series is permitted to return to its original R rating, which means McClane can once again cuss freely. (Oddly, cutting back on language, rather than violence, earned the previous pic a PG-13.) Still, the closest thing to a new catch-phrase screenwriter Skip Woods can muster is the exasperated, “Some fuckin’ vacation!” — a line that openly contradicts the reason the film sent him to Russia to begin with. What vacation? If this is McClane’s idea of time away from the office, they’d better send him back to work before he hits retirement age.
The battle rages on between Drake and Chris Brown but this time in the courtroom! The two rapper/singers have filed suit against each other over that bottle bustin’ brawl at w.i.p. nightclub last summer. Via TMZ reports : Chris Brown and Drake are going after each other in court over their gargantuan brawl last June at W.i.P. nightclub in New York City … TMZ has learned. A guy named Romain Julien — a French model — filed suit against Brown, Drake and the club for the injuries he claims he suffered during the bottle-throwing fight. Now both Drake and Brown have filed legal docs — obtained by TMZ — in which they point the guilty finger at each other. It’s a little technical, but each is asking the judge to pin the blame on the other. Drake and Brown each claim they were not responsible for the fight and want the other to pay any damages in the event the model wins his suit. It’s the first time Brown and Drake — both of whom have been linked to Rihanna — have gone after each other in court. SMH… These two are just trying to avoid being held responsible. Hit the flip for pics of Breezy and Rihanna’s night out Wednesday.
The battle rages on between Drake and Chris Brown but this time in the courtroom! The two rapper/singers have filed suit against each other over that bottle bustin’ brawl at w.i.p. nightclub last summer. Via TMZ reports : Chris Brown and Drake are going after each other in court over their gargantuan brawl last June at W.i.P. nightclub in New York City … TMZ has learned. A guy named Romain Julien — a French model — filed suit against Brown, Drake and the club for the injuries he claims he suffered during the bottle-throwing fight. Now both Drake and Brown have filed legal docs — obtained by TMZ — in which they point the guilty finger at each other. It’s a little technical, but each is asking the judge to pin the blame on the other. Drake and Brown each claim they were not responsible for the fight and want the other to pay any damages in the event the model wins his suit. It’s the first time Brown and Drake — both of whom have been linked to Rihanna — have gone after each other in court. SMH… These two are just trying to avoid being held responsible. Hit the flip for pics of Breezy and Rihanna’s night out Wednesday.
Is The Bachelor star Sean Lowe a virgin? A new tabloid cover insinuates this, but it’s not totally accurate. The more appropriate way to put it is that the 29-year-old Texan is a “born-again” virgin. Basically, he “no longer believes” in premarital sex, even though he has had it before, and is waiting until his wedding night to get his freak on again. The Bachelor spoilers totally didn’t mention that, although we did hear that he will forego overnight dates in the fantasy suite because of his beliefs. Apparently he takes this seriously and it will be addressed as The Bachelor winds down the home stretch of its 17th iteration, Chris Harrison says. “Sean doesn’t want to have sex until he’s married. It’s very important to him,” says a source, who adds that his future bride is respectful of this, too. Sean Lowe is engaged to one of the final four women from this season, but they are waiting until walking down the aisle before they go down that road. Who is it? Follow the above link to find out, but the lucky final rose recipient, who will remain nameless in this post, is reportedly having a hard time waiting. No wonder they’re allegedly planning to wed this summer. “She wasn’t celibate going in to The Bachelor , so it’s a big change,” adds the source of Sean and future Mrs. Sean. “She’s dying to do it. Waiting is tough!” Indeed. The final contestants vying for Lowe’s love are Catherine Giudici, 26, AshLee Frazier, 32, Desiree Hartsock, 26, and Lindsay Yenter, 24. Who do you think he should pick? Catherine Giudici Desiree Hartsock AshLee Frazier Lindsay Yenter View Poll »
Is The Bachelor star Sean Lowe a virgin? A new tabloid cover insinuates this, but it’s not totally accurate. The more appropriate way to put it is that the 29-year-old Texan is a “born-again” virgin. Basically, he “no longer believes” in premarital sex, even though he has had it before, and is waiting until his wedding night to get his freak on again. The Bachelor spoilers totally didn’t mention that, although we did hear that he will forego overnight dates in the fantasy suite because of his beliefs. Apparently he takes this seriously and it will be addressed as The Bachelor winds down the home stretch of its 17th iteration, Chris Harrison says. “Sean doesn’t want to have sex until he’s married. It’s very important to him,” says a source, who adds that his future bride is respectful of this, too. Sean Lowe is engaged to one of the final four women from this season, but they are waiting until walking down the aisle before they go down that road. Who is it? Follow the above link to find out, but the lucky final rose recipient, who will remain nameless in this post, is reportedly having a hard time waiting. No wonder they’re allegedly planning to wed this summer. “She wasn’t celibate going in to The Bachelor , so it’s a big change,” adds the source of Sean and future Mrs. Sean. “She’s dying to do it. Waiting is tough!” Indeed. The final contestants vying for Lowe’s love are Catherine Giudici, 26, AshLee Frazier, 32, Desiree Hartsock, 26, and Lindsay Yenter, 24. Who do you think he should pick? Catherine Giudici Desiree Hartsock AshLee Frazier Lindsay Yenter View Poll »
