We are ever vigilant here at Skin Central as we monitor the nefarious activities of the Parents Television Council , the most killjoy group of no-fun flesh haters this side of the MPAA. The funny thing is, they’re probably doing the same thing to us. (Hi, guys! Good job setting up that Google alert!) The PTC’s newest assault on all things nude is a formal complaint about the prevalence of pixelated nudity on prime time TV, but not because of the confusion it sparks amongst sheltered youngsters who think women’s breasts get all fuzzy as soon as they take off their bras. Their beef with pixelation is that it leaves too little to the imagination, showing the ” full body of flesh tones ” and thus leading to all sorts of impure thoughts. Some sort of “slippery slope” thing. ” [Pixelation] could be perceived to be a closer simulation of complete frontal nudity given that the viewer is seeing all flesh tones ,” the PTC says. We aren’t fans of pixelation either, but for completely opposite reasons. So whaddaya say, PTC? Truce? After all, the enemy of my enemy is my something something boobs. Check out the forbidden flesh the PTC doesn’t want you to see with prime time nip slips from Nicki Minaj , Janet Jackson and more right here at MrSkin.com!
Show about gay men in New York has taken on ‘a life of its own,’ write/director/actor Goldman tells MTV News. By Vaughn Trudeau Schoonmaker Adam Goldman appears on “The Outs” Photo: Adam Goldman is the writer, director and an actor on his own hit series, “The Outs.” If you are young, gay and Internet-savvy (as most young gay men are these days), then you have probably heard of his show since the first three episodes are already out. If you are not any of those things, you should still check out the show. Once the gay blogs (Out.com, Queerty, Towleroad, etc.) caught on to “The Outs,” the show took on “a life of its own,” according to Goldman, with viewers begging for more. The most interesting thing about the show, aside from its surprisingly high production value and its well-written dialogue, is that “The Outs” is an independently produced Web series that’s making a sizable impact on a generation of viewers who are watching more and more of their entertainment online. This six-episode dramatic Web series is funded entirely by successful Kickstarter campaigns and out-of-pocket expenses from the 26-year-old Bard College graduate and the creative team he assembled. “The Outs” tells the story of a couple of recent exes in New York and a good friend of theirs. The exes just so happen to be gay men. Goldman explained the void he aimed to fill when he created the show. “I asked people, ‘What’s your favorite TV show about gay people?’ Or ‘name me a TV show [exclusively] about gay people,’ ” Goldman recalled. “Nobody really has an answer, and I think that’s just sad.” Goldman noted that while TV has become more LGBT-friendly in the last few years, with a handful of excellent gay characters on “Modern Family,” “Glee,” “Smash,” “True Blood,” “American Horror Story” and more, none of these shows is centered around a gay story line. “I think that what we’ve seen from the moment we started the project is a desire for it, and there’s an audience for it,” Goldman shared. “We just want to prove that there’s space in media for stories like this. It’s a story about people who happen to be gay, and we’re super-proud and pleased to appeal to a gay audience.” As far as being on the edge of the online entertainment frontier, Goldman described his stance on the exciting position: “We’re just trying to stretch the definition of what a Web series can be, so we’re trying to shoot it as a TV show that happens to be online.” As HD camera technology continues to improve and the costs of the equipment drop, piecing together a quality show is not the impossible dream that it was only several years ago, though the process is not easy to fund alone. With the viewer base growing rapidly, Goldman and his team just surpassed their latest Kickstarter goal in just 48 hours. That puts the team ahead of its budget for the production of the show’s upcoming fourth episode. Now is the time to keep an eye on Goldman and independent producers like him who are leading the new “TV on the Internet” movement. And if you haven’t already, check out “The Outs” at www.theouts.tv .
‘You can rewind it. You can hit play. You can pause,’ famous frog tells MTV News of the Blu-ray, available Tuesday. By Josh Wigler Walter and Kermit the Frog Photo: MTV News It’s time to play the music, it’s time to light the lights! It’s time to meet “The Muppets,” available on Blu-ray this Tuesday (March 20)! OK, our rhyming skills could use some work, clearly. Perhaps it’s best to leave those kinds of hijinks to the Muppets themselves. Thankfully for all of us, we did just that when Kermit the Frog and Walter , the newest member of the pint-sized gang, swung by the MTV Newsroom last week to tell us all about their imminent home-video release. According to the frog and his new pal, “The Muppets” comes with all sorts of special features, some that you normally wouldn’t think to mention when pitching Blu-ray and DVD discs to the folks at home. “You can rewind it. You can hit play. You can pause,” Kermit offered not so helpfully when we asked him about some of the features we’ll find on the “Muppets” Blu-ray. “Another thing I want to tell you: One special feature about Blu-ray is that you can use it as a coaster, and it’ll still play. It works very well!” On a more serious note — as serious as things get with Kermit and Walter, that is — the Blu-ray comes packed with extra features including an intermission sequence that’s activated when the viewer hits pause. “The intermission is great,” Kermit gushed. “We all jump in and do silly things for you during the intermission … and we’ve never done silly things before!” The coming “Muppets” release also hosts some deleted scenes, including one that expands upon the film’s villain, Tex Richman, and his reasons for hating the Muppets so darn much. “It’s this whole big music video,” Walter explained. “In the final cut of the film, you just see a couple of minutes. But on the DVD, you get the whole shebang!” Though this week’s home-video release is the next place you’ll be able to see the Muppets, it won’t be their last appearance. Both Kermit and Walter are quite convinced that further adventures are coming our way very soon. In fact, Walter’s already pitching sequels! “One script I’m pitching now: ‘Extremely Short and Incredibly Cute,’ ” he joked. “We feel certain there will be another movie,” Kermit said. “And who knows? We might have the opportunity to bring something back like ‘The Muppet Show.’ That would be fun! But we’re taking it one step at a time.” Tell us what you think of “The Muppets” in the comments section and on Twitter ! Check out everything we’ve got on “The Muppets.” For breaking news, celebrity columns, humor and more — updated around the clock — visit MTVMoviesBlog.com . Related Videos MTV Rough Cut: ‘The Muppets’
Movieline is pleased to present the first installment of One-Sheet Wonder , a new column on the best, worst, weirdest and other milestones of contemporary movie-poster art. — Ed. We’re a little more than two months away from the debut of the Cannes Film Festival opener Moonrise Kingdom , Wes Anderson’s first live-action film in five years, and the promo push is on. The first trailer hit a while back, and the first poster was revealed last week. And while the trailer is an exhilarating promo clip, on first glance it’s easy to dismiss the poster. It feels minimal and rather meh overall, like a starving-artist, Bob Ross knock-off masquerading as a one-sheet (“Look at that happy little waterfall…”). But since The Life Aquatic , posters for Anderson’s films have trended to a less-is-more approach. The Darjeeling Limited , for example, focused on, essentially, a snapshot of the three leads in a moment of quiet introspection, whereas Rushmore is all about bombastic (Photoshopped) revolution. The reason for this change is Anderson’s movies, increasingly, have been sold to his fans rather than audiences at large. Not surprisingly, this began with The Royal Tenenbaums as Anderson established his unique visual style. Since then, his posters have become more conceptual and more for his acolytes. ( Fantastic Mr. Fox — aimed squarely at kids with its kooky, busy everything-but-whackbat design — is the exception.) Moonrise Kingdom is the zenith (so far) of this marketing strategy. It’s not very active, but it picks up many of Anderson’s trademarks. Sam and Suzy, the film’s leads, are in full-on Anderson mode — Sam carries a popgun and pulls his best young Bud Cort impression while Suzy is loaded down with a travel record player and Margot Tenenbaum-esque style/ennui — and their straight-on confrontation of the viewer is an Anderson trademark. And while the foreground is fairly flat, there’s a world of depth and texture in the background, a staple of Anderson’s cinematography. The poster also continues the practice (begun on Darjeeling ) of placing the credit block at the top of the poster, above the title, drawing our eye (and consideration) to an image rather than text. When you factor in the font-type similarities to the invitation script at the beginning of Tenenbaums , it could be that Anderson is finally establishing a design continuum for his ad art to complement the one in his films. Visually dazzling? Maybe not to the motion-poster (blech) crowd, but for Anderson devotees it’s exciting. It picks up on his filmmaking sensibilities like no poster before it — and it aesthetically establishes Moonrise Kingdom ’s place in Anderson’s legacy vis-à-vis the Criterion Collection. Criterion’s releases of Bottle Rocket , Rushmore , Tenenbaums , Aquatic and Darjeeling are whimsical, but they eschew studio publicity shots for a handcrafted, Andersonian representation of a scene or the essence of the film. (Criterion’s Tenenbaums and Aquatic releases had studio art slipcovers over the hand-drawn ones because they were the only official releases of the films, Buena Vista didn’t likely want to scare off the normals with childlike illustrations.) Moonrise Kingdom is the first theatrical poster for an Anderson film to similarly disregard poorly edited stills (a la Rushmore or Bottle Rocket ) for a painted distillation of what we can imply is the film’s spirit. Ultimately, it might seem this poster is selling Anderson’s sensibility more than the film, but that’s because they’re one and the same. The poster says, “Wes Anderson has a new movie coming out,” and that will either sell people on it or drive them away. Such is the plight of an auteur. Focus Features understands the audience for this film — the cinephile who genuflects at the Wes Anderson altar — and the studio absolutely reaches it with this poster. It might not be the flashiest of Anderson’s ads to date, but it’s certainly the most authentic. Dante A. Ciampaglia is a writer, editor and photographer in New York. You can find him on Twitter , Tumblr , and, occasionally, his blog .
Achievers’ Club is a series of 12 episodes that will draw the viewer into the glossy, glittering, glamorous and fabulous lives of self-made achievers.Through each one hour episode, the show aims to tap in to the real lives of self-made achievers who are an inspiration to India. We will look at what motivated them to succeed and what drives them today. In this episode, Vir Sanghavi interviews Deepak Chopra, who has penned down over65 books with 19 New York Times Best sellers. http://www.youtube.com/v/mtFwm6dS8NQ?version=3&f=videos&app=youtube_gdata Read the original: Teacher’s Achievement Awards presents Achievers’ Club – Deepak Chopra
Film narration carries the dubious reputation of being a fallback trick for lesser directors, a device to trot out when other more classically visual narrative devices fail. In the same way that long, unbroken takes supposedly signify expertise, the use of narration often serves lazy critics with an easy indication that the director has lost the plot. Still, even the most anti-narration snob would have to concede that the larger film canon contains some pretty notable exceptions to this rule. The Naked City, A Clockwork Orange, Sunset Boulevard, GoodFellas, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, The Big Lebowski, The Shawshank Redemption — all use narration, and far from stalling story or characterization, with them it pushes everything forward. Rather than quibbling over the merits of the device itself, acknowledging those notable examples of its effective use would at least seem to necessitate deeper analysis. If some filmmakers have successfully used it, serious students of film should probably take a closer look, if only to better understand the exceptions that prove the rule. To that end, we could loosely categorize film narration into four different groups according to two distinctions: the distance of the narrator’s involvement with the film’s conflict and themes, and the directness with which the narrator addresses the viewer. The first distinction is represented on one end of the spectrum by films like Taxi Driver , where the narration directly clues the viewer in to the motivations of a certain character or elaborates on the conflict that drives the film forward. Taxi Driver is an especially good example of the so-called involved voiceover, because it gives a first-hand view to the inner workings of the main character Travis Bickle’s demented psychology, fleshing out his odd behavior with an equally discomfiting internal monologue. Watching Bickle talk to his own reflection while parading an arsenal of homemade weapons is certainly harrowing, but to hear him detail the skewed reasoning behind his plotting with talk about “a real rain that will wash the scum off the streets” only adds another level to his menace. On the other end of this “involvement spectrum,” we see films like The Royal Tenenbaums , which feature a totally detached third person narrator who nonetheless comments meaningfully on the film’s action from afar. Played with a perfect mixture of somber knowingness and monotone disinterest by a heard-and-not-seen Alec Baldwin, the voiceover for Tenenbaums still adds layers of thematic meaning to much of what goes on. Whether by adding back-story, as when the narrator informs the audience of the divorce of Royal and Ethel Tenenbaum in the first scene, or character insight, as when he explains in one scene that Royal “didn’t realize what he had said was true until after he had said it,” the voiceover’s apartness actually serves as a useful perspective from which to view the action along with the audience and insert helpful cues along the way. The second distinction, having to do with the directness of address, or the level of audience engagement of the narration, involves how forcefully the narration is meant to appeal to the viewer. With films like High Fidelity or Annie Hall , for instance, the narrator grabs the viewer by the lapels and demands attention, speaking directly into the camera with vocal inflections suggesting conversation rather than monologue. This is probably the trickiest sort of voiceover to pull off, and the one that grates the worst when done wrong. The other end is represented by narrators who speak with an authoritative, almost historical tone, rattling off characters’ back-stories with seemingly little consideration of who may be watching or why. I found the tone of the initial voiceover by Cate Blanchett as Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring especially removed in this sense. Galadriel is involved in the goings on of the film’s story, interceding at several key moments throughout the saga, and yet she could not be more tonally remote from the audience. In fact, that is half the pleasure of Galadriel’s narration: She sounds like she’s speaking to the viewer from another world. The importance of this relative level of audience engagement reveals itself most in unreliable narration. For instance, the main character from Memento narrates intimately, always invoking the viewer’s sympathies, and yet because of Leonard’s particular character quirks, this closeness proves false by film’s end. If a diversity of type speaks anything to the value of a particular storytelling device, then film narrators definitely don’t deserve their bad reputation. Then again, if the domination of last weekend’s Oscar ceremony by The Artist shows anything, those purely visual filmmaking elements still very much strike the critical fancy, as they should. The simplest and best criterion for judging the effectiveness of narration will always be its facility to complement the moving pictures themselves. Nathan Pensky is an associate editor at PopMatters and a contributor at Forbes , among various other outlets. He can be found on Tumblr and Twitter as well.
By many accounts — okay, mostly just the filmmakers’ — this week’s commando pic Act of Valor marks a new kind of filmmaking on account of it’s a Navy SEALS actioner starring real active duty soldiers that takes the viewer along on a near-firsthand experience of what it’s like to fight terrorists and baddies. From the looks of the film’s new redband featurette this means audiences will get to see what it looks and sounds like to drop dome shots left and right in the heat of battle, because nothing says “valor” better than shooting strangers in the head with automatic weapons. I’m sure there’s a fair amount of weightiness and responsibility within Act of Valor , since the filmmakers do seem to have a genuine respect for the members of the armed forces who risk their lives to serve and protect. But a clip like this — which debuted on gamer-leaning IGN , where it could easily get lost within a gaggle of first person shooter promos — doesn’t do much besides glorifying the awesomeness of battle, as seen partially through helmet-mounted cameras. I count no fewer than eleven, maybe 12 exploding head shots in the span of this two-minute video, but what makes this even freakier is the fact that the majority of the cast is culled from active duty Navy SEALS who may have had similar skirmishes in the field. Watching people who have been trained to kill pretend to kill people who may resemble people they’ve actually killed in real life is a tricky thing to digest. It’s one thing to witness the brutality and heroism of actual military life via the movies (see: Restrepo ); it’s another to embrace the glossy, redband-worthy violence as pure entertainment. But maybe you disagree? Check out the clip below and leave your thoughts in the comments. More Act of Valor Videos
“Still Life” by artist Scott Garner is an interactive picture that can be tilted by the viewer, causing the objects in the picture to be tossed about the frame (video). Garner created the effect with a framed TV, swivel mount, spatial sensor, and 3D software. via MAKE Broadcasting platform : Vimeo Source : Laughing Squid Discovery Date : 26/01/2012 20:01 Number of articles : 2
Brand-new clip finds the band trapped within a nightmare of its own invention. By James Montgomery Evanescence’s Amy Lee on the set of their “My Heart Is Broken” video Photo: Matt Elias/MTV News After nearly a month spent touting its various ethereal qualities , on Tuesday (January 24), Evanescence premiered their video for “My Heart Is Broken,” a dark, dreamlike thing that pushes Amy Lee’s claustrophobic musings to the next level. And somewhere beyond that too. As Lee told MTV News back in December, the look and feel of the “Broken” clip was very much influenced by the British fantasy/horror flick “Paperhouse,” about a young girl who creates vivid dream worlds to escape the harsh reality of everyday life, only to eventually realize she’s stuck in those dreams — inspiration that certainly resonates with the song’s lyrics, which are very much about being trapped in a dark, desolate place and trying to free one’s self despite mounting evidence to the contrary. Working with director Dean Karr, and aided very much by fiber-optic technology, Evanescence have created a video that is both haunting and haunted. It opens with Lee suspended in an inky void, a single light projecting from her finger. While her bandmates bash away in the blackness, she slowly begins to fill her emptiness by creating a dream world — a fallow field, a sea of stars, a crumbling room — until she eventually realizes that, in spite of her attempts, she is just as trapped as she was before. At clip’s end, the viewer is left to wonder whether she has the power to escape (though a cracked mirror seems to indicate she can), which, in a way, only further connects the video to the song itself: Like Lee sings, each of us have within ourselves the ability to free ourselves from any situation; whether we do or not is largely our decision. The first step seems to be realizing that the walls we surround ourselves with are largely of our own creation. The rest is up to us. What do you think of the “My Heart Is Broken” video? Share your reviews in the comments! Related Artists Evanescence
Brand-new clip finds the band trapped within a nightmare of its own invention. By James Montgomery Evanescence’s Amy Lee on the set of their “My Heart Is Broken” video Photo: Matt Elias/MTV News After nearly a month spent touting its various ethereal qualities , on Tuesday (January 24), Evanescence premiered their video for “My Heart Is Broken,” a dark, dreamlike thing that pushes Amy Lee’s claustrophobic musings to the next level. And somewhere beyond that too. As Lee told MTV News back in December, the look and feel of the “Broken” clip was very much influenced by the British fantasy/horror flick “Paperhouse,” about a young girl who creates vivid dream worlds to escape the harsh reality of everyday life, only to eventually realize she’s stuck in those dreams — inspiration that certainly resonates with the song’s lyrics, which are very much about being trapped in a dark, desolate place and trying to free one’s self despite mounting evidence to the contrary. Working with director Dean Karr, and aided very much by fiber-optic technology, Evanescence have created a video that is both haunting and haunted. It opens with Lee suspended in an inky void, a single light projecting from her finger. While her bandmates bash away in the blackness, she slowly begins to fill her emptiness by creating a dream world — a fallow field, a sea of stars, a crumbling room — until she eventually realizes that, in spite of her attempts, she is just as trapped as she was before. At clip’s end, the viewer is left to wonder whether she has the power to escape (though a cracked mirror seems to indicate she can), which, in a way, only further connects the video to the song itself: Like Lee sings, each of us have within ourselves the ability to free ourselves from any situation; whether we do or not is largely our decision. The first step seems to be realizing that the walls we surround ourselves with are largely of our own creation. The rest is up to us. What do you think of the “My Heart Is Broken” video? Share your reviews in the comments! Related Artists Evanescence
