Ashton Kutcher got into a violent altercation with a security guard at the Stagecoach country music festival in Indio, Calif., according to reports. Kutcher was in the VIP area near the stage to check out Nick 13 and Dwight Yoakam when a woman approached to say hi and shake his hand. Sounds innocent enough, but when he went to greet the woman, security intervened and shoved the two of them, after which chaos broke out. Mila Kunis ‘ BF and the security guy shoved each other, and Ashton’s friends restrained him. Security demanded he leave, but Ashton left on his own. Witnesses say the actor was not the aggressor in this, and that it was the security guard who was way out of line. Either way, no arrests were made. In happier Ashton news, CBS somehow green-lit Two and a Half Men Season 11 .
The Sexiest Man Alive turns 33 years old today. Yes, folks, Channing Tatum celebrates a birthday, but don’t worry about getting this actor the perfect gift. His wife has already done so: Jenna Dewan-Tatum is pregnant ! The actor, of course, has enjoyed a memorable run over the past year. He’s starred in box office hits such as The Vow , 21 Jump Street and Magic Mike , all while women around the world desire to Channing all over his Tatum . If you know what we mean! So tip your cap, raise a glass and take off your shirt in the star’s honor today. Send in your very best birthday wishes and toggle through the following montage of Channing Tatum photos in recognition of this A-lister:
The studios want him, but, these, days Zac Efron only has eyes for indie film. After making a splash at the New York Film Festival with The Paperboy last fall , Efron is back in the Big Apple, at the Tribeca Film Festival, with At Any Price . What’s the deal? “Y’know, Dennis [Quaid] says that the only rule he sort of had for himself in his career is to do as many different types of movies as possible, and never stop stretching and trying something new,” Efron told when I talked to him about the project. I also talked to Quaid who said that he and At Any Price director Ramin Bahrani drew inspiration from Arthur Miller’s classic play: Death of a Salesman . “We talked about Death of a Salesman and the Willy Loman character a lot…[my character] is a man who’s really trying to do the best for his family but he’s corrupted himself in the process,” the actor told me. The buzz on At Any Price is that Efron will get you into the theater, but you’ll leave it talking about Quaid. Check out my full in-depth interview below: Follow Grace Randolph on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
If you think of Penn Badgley in terms of Dan Humphrey , the character he played for five years on the CW Network’s Gossip Girl , prepare to have your world rocked. The actor is about to make the transition from television to film look easy with a big performance in a small film: Greetings From Tim Buckley , which opens in New York and Los Angeles on May 3 and in other select markets later that month. Badgley plays Jeff Buckley , the remarkably talented musical artist known for his album Grace and a much-adored interpretation of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” , who, like his singer/songwriter father in the movie’s title, died much too young. Directed by Daniel Algrant ( People I Know ), Greetings From Tim Buckley is about Jeff’s attempts to get out from under the long shadow cast by his late dad (played by Ben Rosenfield ). Buckley pere died from a drug overdose at the age of 28, but, despite his short life, left behind a substantial, mostly critically acclaimed body of work, including nine studio albums. Jeff was working on his second album in Memphis, Tenn. when he drowned while swimming in the Wolf River there in 1997. He was 30. The story is a rich one, but Badgley was at a distinct disadvantage from the get-go. Greetings From Tim Buckley did not have permission to use Jeff’s music in the film — a second planned Buckley biopic, Mystery White Boy , will have that privilege — which meant that the actor had to convey the singer’s immense talent and charisma without tapping into his songs. He more than rises to the occasion thanks to a tour-de-force a cappella performance at a record store that moviegoers surely will be talking about in the weeks to come. I spoke to Badgley late last year after I saw Greetings From Tim Buckley at the Toronto Film Festival. With the movie premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival on Tuesday and opening commercially, it’s a good time to hear what he has to say. The actor spoke candidly about how he came to his interpretation of the singer, how falling in “real, true earth-shattering love” with actress Zoe Kravitz helped his performance, and why he says he’s “done” with TV. Movieline: What made you want this part so bad? Penn Badgley: Jeff was seductive and alluring and daunting and huge in my mind, but ,specifically, the story appealed to me. The film obviously doesn’t have a lot of his music in it, and there’s so much about his father whom I didn’t know anything about. But it was very clear that the screenwriters had captured his voice. They had captured his essence and his soul and his art and where it all came from. The quiet, organic snapshot of him felt very right. The scene that everyone will be talking about is your a cappella interpretation of the Led Zeppelin III album in the record store. I understand that was part of your audition tape. Well, yeah, it was included among the audition scenes that they sent to everybody. And I remember reading it and thinking Jesus, this is certainly bizarre and specific. I couldn’t imagine that many people knew what to do with it. But, there was something about that scene that spoke to his voice and spoke to his qualities so beautifully. I knew that if I didn’t do it for my audition scene I would still have to do it later if I remained in the running for the role. So, I just knew: I’ve got nail this. You certainly do in the movie. It’s one of those performances that you really can’t rehearse. It has to be vulnerable and exposed and unabashed. I did it in the audition the way I did it in the film because there’s really no other way to do it. And when I finished, I remember thinking, “Holy shit, I might have just gotten this thing.” How many takes were required during filming? We did three takes total. They were all different but all evoked the spirit of that scene. And there really was no way to prepare for it. Thankfully, the thing that saved me is that I knew the material. I went through a Led Zeppelin phase as a teenager, and I was really familiar with that stuff. Honestly, if the scene had required me to sing something that I didn’t really know, I don’t know how I would have done it. Buckley had a five-octave range. I’m not musically trained, but you seemed to be moving through the octaves without any trouble. Do you have a similar range? I think I might. I don’t know my actual range but it’s similar. I just happen to have a deeper voice. So, Jeff could go higher than I can. But I can go lower than he could. In terms of the speaking voice you use in the movie, you’re interpreting Buckley, not mimicking him. I knew that I couldn’t mimic him, because Jeff had this beautiful, high, lilting speaking voice. If I had to do just three minutes of Jeff Buckley, I guess I could have tried to do more of an impersonation, but I felt that if I had to augment my voice in every scene I wasn’t going to be able to be that free. So, I thought, okay, why is it important that he has a high speaking voice? If he had a low voice, people would have said he had a beautiful, low, lilting voice. So, I chose to figure out what was it about him that made people respond the way they did and work with those qualities in a way that was totally honest with myself. What did you end up deciding was essential about Buckley? He was a quiet, ecstatic, gentle and, yet, full of rage. He was also in some ways very immature. The way that he seemed to interact with people was infinitely endearing but, at the same time, on paper, it should have been almost annoying. It’s like he was always on a tightrope as an artist and as a person. I think because of the talent that he clearly had, he believed in himself so much that he almost had this certain arrogance. At the same time he was painfully, painfully self-conscious and self-aware. Everybody is full of contradictions but he was an extreme case of that. It’s like all of those strange contortions of his voice and his body and his face were expressions of the tension between those contradictions. It was him acting out, and so we’re telling part of the story through my body language and voice, too. It was like adopting he body language of feral cat. Is there a musical album in the cards for you? You’ve got the chops. It’s something that I’ve been madly in love with and dreaming about for two decades, but until recently, I didn’t really know any other musicians. What’s beautiful about this movie is that, because of it, I now have a lot of friends who play. In fact, almost all my friends in Brooklyn are musicians and they’ve been inviting me to play little opening sets for them – just unannounced little gigs. And I definitely am going to pursue it. I’ve always been quietly writing and playing in private, and it’s like everything that I was experiencing before and during the shoot allowed me to finally realize some of my own music. So, yeah, I think I will definitely be doing something soon. I don’t know about an album. I mean, the music industry is in a weird state. What I really want to do is play live and create an experience in a room that you can’t necessarily capture and play again. The first time you and I talked, you said that falling in love with Zoe Kravitz at the time you were playing Buckley helped you really put yourself out there for the part. How so? At that time I was falling madly in love in a way that was changing me and opening me up. And it was an integral part of playing Jeff. Technically, I could probably play guitar and sing better now because I have a year of consistent experience under my belt, but, at the time, I was kind of going through what Jeff was going through emotionally in the movie in the sense that the worlds of music and love and women and art were opening up to me. Honestly I needed it. It was like this cosmic intervention where, if you’re going to play somebody like Jeff you’ve got to at least be in love, you know? The universe answered you. Yeah, very much. And being in love, real, true, earth-shattering love – even though it sounds hyperbolic I really was going through it — helped me be as good as I could be. I suspect this role will lead to more film offers for you. After so many years in television, are you now concentrating on movie roles? For me, this movie is a beautiful step forward. Gossip Girl has given me everything that I have now. It gave me the opportunity to live in New York and to be in a position to get this role. It also put me in New York City so I could meet Zoe. And it’s put me in a place where I haven’t had to do a bunch of other shit just to make money. I’m super grateful for it, but this movie has come at the right time to take a step forward. I have been working in television for 13 years now, and you know, I’m just done with it. I have nothing against television, but I’m done. More on Penn Badgley: Anthrax’s Frank Bello Says Penn Badgley ‘Blew Me Away’ In Greetings From Tim Buckley Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
The large-scale destructiveness he has previously wrecked upon public and private property (including entire cities), Michael Bay visits on the human body in Pain & Gain , a pulverizing steroidal farce based on a bizarre-but-true kidnapping-and-murder case. Suggesting Fargo by way of the Three Stooges , Bay’s latest certainly proves that the Transformers auteur does have something more than jacked-up robots on his mind: specifically, jacked-up muscle men who will stop at nothing to achieve their deeply twisted notion of the American dream. With a very fine ensemble cast recruited to play an array of overtly despicable characters, this unapologetically vulgar, sometimes quite funny, often stomach-churning bacchanal will surely prove too extreme for great swathes of the multiplex crowd. But the marquee value of topliners Mark Wahlberg and Dwayne Johnson , plus the pic’s reportedly modest $25 million pricetag, spells more gain than pain for Paramount’s box office pecs. Given that every Bay film is something of a stamina test, marked by passages of intense exhilaration and paralyzing fatigue, with Pain & Gain the director may have lucked into the most fitting subject matter of his career: the world of obsessive bodybuilders and the trainers who push them beyond the brink of exhaustion. Adapted by screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely ( Captain America: The First Avenger, the Narnia trilogy) from a series of articles originally published in the Miami New Times by Pete Collins , the film tells of one such muscle mecca, Miami’s Sun Gym, where staff and clientele include a liberal mixture of strippers, ex-cons and small-time scam artists. One such hustler is Sun Gym manager Danny Lugo (Wahlberg) who, in the fall of 1994, decides to abduct one of his clients, wealthy Colombian-American businessman Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub) — and defraud him of his net worth. To aid in the scheme, Lugo recruits two accomplices: personal trainer Adrian ( Anthony Mackie ) and former Attica inmate Paul (Johnson), a recovering alcoholic and junkie who found Jesus during his last stint in the slammer. After a couple of near-misses (in real life, there were several more), the trio — decked out in ridiculous Halloween costumes — succeed in nabbing their mark, who they sequester in an abandoned dry-cleaning plant and, over the next 30 days, force to sign over all of his worldly assets, including cars, a local deli franchise and a gaudy McMansion in a posh gated community. In Collins’ reporting, the story of the Sun Gym gang reads like an inordinately malicious bid for the good life by a bunch of overcompensating he-men whose musculature vastly outpaced their intellect — their staggering incompetence rivaled only by that of the Miami-Dade Police, who, when Kershaw (in reality, Marc Schiller) miraculously survived to tell his tale, initially refused to believe him. While sticking largely to the facts, Bay and the writers are clearly aiming for something bigger: a commentary on American self-entitlement and, to an extent, the very sort of ra-ra, macho posturing Bay has proffered without irony in many previous films. In contrast to the unconscionable thug he seems to be on the page, the movie’s Lugo is more of a harebrained dreamer who sees himself as one of life’s “doers,” high on self-help mantras and a sense of his own inviolability. Wahlberg’s deft performance, which plays on his innate likability to conceal his character’s ultimate menace (a side of the actor little seen onscreen since his fine turn as the psycho boyfriend in James Foley’s Fear ), is one of the film’s (few) unqualified pleasures. But the movie’s cynical subtext, and whatever Bay is ultimately hoping to say with it, remain mostly undeveloped. To its credit, Pain & Gain never succumbs to glamorizing its characters or their crimes, keeping things rooted in a constant, grim tension. For all its absurdist accents, the long middle section, in which Kershaw is beaten and bludgeoned by means that wouldn’t have seemed out of place in Zero Dark Thirty , is punishing to behold and dilutes much of the frantic energy the movie has built up during its opening act. And at 129 minutes, there’s much more to come, including severed digits, penile injections, a spinning weight plate to the neck and, in one unforgettable extreme-close-up, a cargo van’s rear tire backing up over a human face. At his best, particularly in the two Bad Boys movies, Bay can be a master of exuberant chaos, but here the violence mostly lands with a sickening thud, which is fitting, one supposes, but also ultimately numbing. For better or worse — arguably both — Bay remains one of the most distinctive visual stylists at work in American movies today, and Pain & Gain is nothing if not an orgy of swooshing, swooping movements, super slo-mo, blazing pastels (for the exteriors) and glowing neon (for the interiors), all captured on an array of pro and prosumer cameras, both film and digital, that give the movie a luxurious array of visual textures. Bay, who previously shot Miami very well in his two Bad Boys movies, here turns it into a shimmering oasis of sin. One image, glimpsed late in the film, even feels like its maker’s entire career condensed into a single shot: wads of $100 bills laid out on a UV tanning bed. The pic’s home stretch gets a welcome boost from veteran Bay player Ed Harris as the seasoned private eye who ended up blowing the lid off the Sun Gym case. He’s only around for a few scenes, but he slips into them with such masterly ease that the character seems fuller and richer than many with double the screen time. Women, unsurprisingly, are mostly expendable here, reduced to sex objects and convenient surfaces for snorting coke, though the resourceful Rebel Wilson manages to steal a few scenes as Adrian’s clueless nurse girlfriend. Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Justin Bieber has a pair of major celebrities in his corner. At last night’s premiere of Pain & Gain , both 50 Cent and Mark Wahlberg responded to the controversy surrounding Bieber and his recent Anne Frank comments , with the rapper echoing the sentiment that has landed Bieber in trouble: “She probably would have been [a belieber],” Fiddy said of the Holocaust victim. Wahlberg, meanwhile, thinks JB just needs a break. “I think it’s best to put down the phone and Twitter and all that stuff, and just be a little more low-key right now,” the actor said. “Because they’re watching every move he makes, everything he says, and less is more. Go take a vacation.” This advice comes on the heels of Bieber Tweeting an odd cartoon photo of himself and a fan in bed . He really might wanna turn the phone and computer off for awhile.
Actor tells MTV News that ‘all bets are off’ for the upcoming reunion of Earth’s mightiest anchormen. By Josh Wigler, with reporting by Josh Horowitz Steve Carell Photo: Steve Granitz/ Getty Images
Foxx’s pal Mike Tyson talks to MTV News about the actor ahead of the Movie Awards on Sunday, airing on MTV at 9 p.m. ET. By Jocelyn Vena Jamie Foxx in “Django Unchained” Photo: The Weinstein Company
Ryan Gosling has inspired a coloring book, so why not some poetry? If Baby Goose’s portrayal of a motorcycle-riding, bank-robbing daddy in Derek Cianfrance’s impressive The Place Beyond The Pines intrigues you, then keep reading. Movieline has a cool music-oriented prize pack to give away to the contestant who impresses me the most with a haiku about the actor’s role and/or performance. All you need to do is be a resident of the United States and write a haiku (in the 5-7-5 format) that addresses Gosling’s performance in some way. And, okay, if you’re more obsessed with Bradley Cooper or Eva Mendes’ roles , I’ll consider entries about them as well. Please leave the your haiku in the comments section below, and one other request: If you’ve seen the movie already, please, no spoilers . One (1) winner will receive: · Official Soundtrack CD (scored by Mike Patton ) · Official Soundtrack on Vinyl · T-Shirt · Shure Earphones Deadline for entries is 6 p.m Pacific Time on Thursday, April 11. I’ll pick a winner on Friday, April 12 when The Place Beyond The Pines Opens nationwide. The trailer is posted below for inspiration. Now, get on your bike and ride. Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
Former NBA player Javaris Crittenton was indicted Tuesday on charges of murder and gang activity. He and his cousin were charged in a 12-count indictment. The Fulton County D.A. said Crittenton, 25, and Douglas Gamble are charged with the death of an Atlanta woman and the attempted murder of another man. Julian Jones was shot and killed in Atlanta while walking with a group of people in 2011. Authorities say that incident and a second shooting were gang-related. Officials say the shootings may have been retaliation after Javaris Crittenton was the victim of a robbery in which $50,000 worth of jewelry was stolen. Crittenton, a former Georgia Tech guard, was drafted by the Lakers in 2007 and has also played for the Washington Wizards and Memphis Grizzlies. He is best known, of course, for being suspended for 38 games during the 2009-10 season for pulling a gun on Gilbert Arenas in the Wizards’ locker room. While nursing an injury, Crittenton and Arenas apparently were involved in some sort of gambling dispute stemming from a card game on a team flight. Arenas brought four guns to the locker room and set them in front of Crittenton’s locker with a sign telling him to “PICK 1.” Crittenton then took out his own gun. The rest, as they say, is gang-related history, although Crittenton’s attorney, Brian Steel, maintains that his client is not guilty in the 2011 shooting: “Mr. Crittenton and I are looking forward to proceeding to a jury trial , where the jury will be able to hear and see all of the evidence in this case.” He predicted “a lawful, just, and proper verdict of not guilty.” A trial date has not been set.
