Although she hasn’t officially decided on it, actress and avid Democrat Ashley Judd isn’t ruling out a run for U.S. Senate in her native Kentucky. Judd lives in Tennessee and would have to re-establish residence in neighboring Kentucky before challenging Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell. The 44-year-old says she’s honored to be mentioned as a potential candidate, but sidestepped the question of whether she would actually run in 2014 . “I cherish Kentucky, heart and soul,” she said. “While I’m very honored by the consideration, we have just finished an election, so let’s focus on coming together to keep moving America’s families, and especially our kids, forward.” No Democrats have stepped forward to challenge Republican McConnell, a political powerhouse who already has $6.8 million in the bank for his re-election. In 2008, he won re-election to a fifth term and became Kentucky’s longest serving senator. McConnell spent some $20 million on his last campaign, beating Democrat Bruce Lunsford, a wealthy Kentucky businessman, by 6 percentage points. His campaign manager Jesse Benton, withheld any criticism of Judd – at least for now. “Sen. McConnell and his wife are big fans of Ashley Judd’s movies and appreciate her energy, especially when it comes to bringing young people into the political process,” he said. What do you think? Would Ashley Judd, a vocal proponent of President Obama’s 2012 reelection win , make a good candidate for U.S. Senate? [Photo: WENN.com]
Samuel Hadida is taking on the Wolfenstein video-game franchise. Considering that his Resident Evil movies made more than $500 million, that’s big news. If you didn’t spend the early ’90s introducing Nazis to bullets, Wolfenstein 3D is the grandaddy of all great first person shooters.If you’ve ever pointed a gun at a bad guy, you owe Wolfenstein royalties. The game came out a year before the similarly influential Doom , was made by the same company (id Software), and, thanks to the involvement of Oscar-winning Pulp Fiction co-screenwriter Roger Avary , who will write and direct, the movie should be much better. Reports of a Wolfenstein adaptation have been kicking around since 2002 when trade reports of video-game movies being developed were more plentiful than TSA pat-downs. Like so many of those projects, however, the film did not materialize. In 2007, news of Avary’s involvement with the film broke, although his arrest and subsequent imprisonment on vehicular manslaughter charges the following year put both the project and its director out of the public eye. But now they’re back, and there is reason to hope. Five of them, actually. 1. The Players The press release for the latest incarnation of Wolfenstein promised a blend between Inglourious Basterds and Captain America , and that’s not just an intern throwing out the only Nazi movies he could remember. Avary’s collaboration with Quentin Tarantino won the pair Oscars for their Pulp Fiction script. He also directed the neo-noir bank-heist classic Killing Zoe . If you’ve got a hero whose only personality trait is “shooting people,” which Castle Wolfenstein does, Avary is the right man to give the guy character and dialogue. He also has a long history of working with Samuel Hadida, who produced Killing Zoe. They worked together on Silent Hill and Rules of Attraction as well. Hadida’s video-game credentials also include producing three of the Resident Evil movies, the most profitable video game movie franchise out there, as well as one with fairly high production values. Which means Castle Wolfenstein won’t be another Uwe Boll -style low budget insult. 2. The Plot Many saw the Doom movie as a disaster because it messed with the plot. It’s a fair charge because Doom , the video game, is essentially “Doomguy versus the demons of hell” and Doom , the movie, had neither. The script was fun, and had a great twist, but calling it The Rock And A Gun would have been more accurate. It would also have been a better plot than most of his other movies. The plot of Wolfenstein has always been “B. J. Blazkowicz shoots Nazis”. Even his name sounds like an explosion. The simplicity of the game should actually benefit the movie. Avary can be as innovative and provocative as he likes with the plot and still easily integrate it with the fundamentals of the franchise. 3. The Nazis As villains, Nazis are almost as tired as zombies. They’ve been trudging around the cinema screens for even longer, and are popular for the same reason: you can do anything to them without fear of political repercussion. (Especially when you combine them, as in Dead Snow .) The 2001 game reboot, Return to Castle Wolfenstein , rejuvenated the franchise with the awesome idea of the SS Paranormal Division, an enhancement expanded on in the 2009 sequel Wolfenstein . That’s right, psychic Nazis! This explained the undead mutants of earlier games and allowed the introduction of all kinds of new monsters and events. It’s also an aspect of the game that should have special effects coordinators salivating. 4. No Baggage Wolfenstein is the perfect video game franchise for a Hollywood scriptwriter. The game is famous, but it doesn’t have a complicated canon to get in the way of the storytelling. The franchise has also never suffered from the sequelitis that has, for instance, bedeviled Resident Evil . There’s no massive cast, no reality-flouting retroactive continuity and no convoluted twists and turns. Instead, you’ve got a good guy, bad guys, explosions, and… 5. Mecha Hitler The greatest game villain of all time, and we’ll get to see it come to life on the big screen via big-budget, special-effects. Mecha Hitler is Castle Wolfenstein ‘s secret weapon. In addition to being an armored cyborg and probably a clone, it (he?) is a viral advertising bonanza. Luke McKinney loves the real world, but only because it has movies and video games in it. He responds to every tweet. Follow Luke McKinney on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
Miranda Lambert, country star and wife of Blake Shelton, is 29 today. Happy birthday, Miranda! Young Miranda Lambert first gained fame as a finalist on the 2003 season of Nashville Star , where she finished in third place and later signed to Epic Records. Hit albums Kerosene (2005), Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (2007), Revolution (2009) and Four the Record (2011) followed, making her one of the biggest names in her genre. Miranda and Blake, 36, a fellow country star and coach on The Voice , wed in 2011. They make beautiful music together, in the studio, on stage and in life. The duo recently won Song of the Year at the CMAs for their collaboration “Over You,” with Blake’s acceptance speech moving his wife to tears on stage. It was a sweet moment, one of many from this talented and popular artist. Happy birthday again to one-half of one of our favorite celebrity couples ! Blake Shelton, Miranda Lambert Acceptance Speech (2012 CMAs) Miranda Lambert – “Fastest Girl in Town” (CMA Performance) Miranda Lambert and Blake Shelton – America The Beautiful Miranda Lambert Slams Chris Brown
SPOILER ALERT : Jason Brock was eliminated from The X Factor last night. The contestant lost a sing-off with CeCe Frey for the final spot in the Top 12, as the judges were split on who to save, but America made its voice known. Jason Brock – “Total Eclipse of the Heart” After receiving the bad news, Brock spoke to reporters and said he wasn’t sure why he got the boot… but wondered if his flamboyant style played a role. “I think that being gay is a wild card in itself,” he said. “When you’re gay, some people still aren’t okay with you being gay. So there are actually people in the country – I don’t know how many – who think it’s actually wrong. So I wouldn’t doubt it if that does hurt in a way.” Does he have any regrets? Nope. “I wanted people to know me as a gay person. A connection with the community that I feel is important.” Does he feel a sense of relief? Yes. “I don’t have to try to win anymore. It’s so hard to try and win a competition like this, but I am proud that I made it this far.” Did you agree with Brock’s elimination? Yes, but he did very well! No, totally should have been CeCe! No, it should have been someone else! View Poll »
It was only a matter of time. Conservative, outspoken rocker Ted Nugent responded to the 2012 election results as only he can, lambasting President Obama’s victory and his supporters. After Obama won reelection over Republican Mitt Romney Tuesday night, Nugent was beside himself … and aired his pointed displeasure on Twitter: “Pimps whores & welfare brats & their soulless supporters have a president to destroy America,” he wrote, and was nowhere near done with 50.4% of the nation. Nugent went on to rip Obama voters, asking, “What subhuman varmint believes others must pay for their obesity booze cell phones birth control abortions & lives.” The Twitter monologue went on a while longer. Read the whole thing below: Considering that this year he urged attendees of an NRA convention to ” chop heads off , “a remark that earned him a visit from the Secret Service, this wasn’t too bad. Nugent, Donald Trump, Victoria Jackson and Stacey Dash should form some kind of support group. Preferably one that encourages bow-hunting.
Tony Scott’s dramatic and still-mysterious leap to his death in August has grounded the Top Gun sequel . The New York Times reported that the film, which was being planned by the filmmaker, the star of the original, Tom Cruise, and producer Jerry Bruckheimer, has “fallen apart” in the wake of Scott’s suicide . If there is a silver lining to the story, it’s that a 3D version of the original Top Gun may be released in February 2013. Earlier this year, Legend3D, which specializes in converting two-dimensional films into the more eye-popping format, completed a conversion of the film, which, the Times notes, “as a way to whet the world’s appetite for a sequel.” Since Scott leapt to his death from the Vincent Thomas Bridge in Los Angeles on Aug. 19, however, Paramount, the studio behind both the original Top Gun and its sequel, is “considering a release in February, perhaps beginning with a one-week exclusive showing on domestic Imax screens.” [New York Times] The paper also reports that the studio is treading carefully because it does not want to seem insensitive or exploitative. Although the Los Angeles coroner officially ruled Scott’s death a suicide, questions remain about his reasons for taking his own life. According to the Times , the filmmaker’s brother, Prometheus director Ridley Scott has asked a number of people who knew and worked with his sibling not to discuss his “life or demise.” Tony Scott’s last work appears to be the below Diet Mountain Dew commercial featuring Dallas Mavericks and HDNet owner, billionaire Mark Cuban . Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
It’s easy to draw parallels to President Obama in Steven Spielberg ’s historical Oscar hopeful Lincoln , a portrait of the 16th American President who stood tall, orated well, united a divided nation across color and party lines, and was re-elected to office for a second term. But Spielberg insists he had no specific political agenda in mind when the long-gestating Lincoln came to fruition. “I would have been very glad to have made Lincoln in the year 2000,” Spielberg explained recently in Los Angeles, “the year after I met [author Doris Kearns Goodwin, whose book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln was adapted by Lincoln scribe Tony Kushner]. It took her a couple years to write the book. It took us more than a couple years to get the screenplay written. So, I wasn’t waiting for a certain time.” The divided politics of Lincoln’s presidency, as explored at length in Spielberg’s film, find pointed parallels in President Obama’s tenure in the White House: A President with a humanistic streak tasked with bringing war to an end, Lincoln is depicted wrestling with military crises, huge wartime losses of life, moral questions of personal freedoms, Constitutional history-making, all-too eager rivals, and, notably, his own family issues at home. Still, Spielberg says the Obama-Lincoln parallels have nothing to do with it. “At one point I flirted with coming out on the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth, but we weren’t ready to make the picture then,” said Spielberg, who spent years wooing star Daniel Day-Lewis and had even resigned himself to not making Lincoln without the actor. “People say ‘Oh, you made it because of what’s happening in politics today.’ No, we were ready to make it during the Bush administration. It had had nothing to do current politics.” That’s not to say no inference at all should be drawn into Lincoln ’s messaging as a reflection of modern politics; it’s just that, despite “tremendous similarities” between politics in the time of Lincoln and today, reading too much into the details might be confusing because of how much the intervening 14 decades have altered America’s political system. “There’s a lot of confusion about the political ideologies of both parties, [which] have switched 180 degrees in 150 years,” he explained. “It’s just too confusing. Everybody claims Lincoln as their own. And everybody should claim Lincoln as their own, because he represents all of us, and what he did basically provided the opportunities that, that all of us are enjoying today.” So while a theatrical release on Friday should bring President Lincoln and his legend to vivid life in the wake of Tuesday’s Obama re-election, those few extra buffer days allowed Spielberg to get some distance from the real-life Presidential race. “I just wanted people to talk about the film, not talk about the election cycle. So I thought it was safer to let people talk about film during the election cycle in this run-up with ads on TV and posters going up and all that, but the actual debut of the film should happen after the election’s been decided. That was my feeling.” Despite peeling the curtain back on Lincoln — the film reveals intimate glimpses of his home life and career, but leaves ambiguous the fringe theories of his sexuality, as hinted at by Kushner in an interview with Metro — Spielberg is happy to continue letting people talk and wonder at any deeper messages seeded within what he otherwise says was meant only to be a portrait of a great figure in American history. “I’m really excited to see how deeply people will reach to contemporize our film,” he said with a smile, “far beyond how it deserves to be contemporized.” Read more on Lincoln , in select theaters Friday . Lincoln closes the 2012 AFI Fest on Thursday. Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
All these pics are the fucking same….so whether I have posted them before or not is almost irrelevant…because I can tell you with certainty that I have…sure the may or may not have featured Candice Swanepoel…but the dozens of other models they have recruited over the last 10 years…but I am sure they were essentially the fucking same…because I guess you run out of ideas for a catalog shot for a panty line… It is the Victoria’s Secret fashion show today….it is an informercial…that will be as dull as all the times before it….but that people will talk about..cuz corporations buying an hour Time slot to showcase babes in underwear is a big fucking deal in America…. First show is at 4 pm….maybe some pics will be leaked…but in the meantime…here are the dull photoshopped bullshit you’ve seen so many times before.
Barack won before Ohio, Virgina, and Florida’s votes even came in tonight! With his voice strong but quivering with passion, Barack gave a heartfelt speech after a long night of waiting for the electoral votes to come in. POTUS let us know that “The role of citizens of our democracy does not end with your vote” after he thanked US ALL for campaigning and voting during the last few months. According to The Huffington Post : President Barack Obama did not just win reelection tonight. His victory signaled the irreversible triumph of a new, 21st-century America: multiracial, multi-ethnic, global in outlook and moving beyond centuries of racial, sexual, marital and religious tradition. Obama, the mixed-race son of Hawaii by way of Kansas, Indonesia, Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, won reelection in good part because he not only embodied but spoke to that New America, as did the Democratic Party he leads. His victorious coalition spoke for and about him: a good share of the white vote (about 45 percent in Ohio, for example); 70 percent or so of the Latino vote across the country, according to experts; 96 percent of the African-American vote; and large proportions of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. The Republican Party, by contrast, has been reduced to a rump parliament of Caucasian traditionalism: white, married, church-going — to oversimplify only slightly. “It’s a catastrophe,” said GOP strategist Steve Schmidt. “This is, this will have to be, the last time that the Republican Party tries to win this way.” The GOP chose as its standard-bearer Mitt Romney, whose own Mormon Church until recent decades discriminated officially against blacks. His campaign made little serious effort to reach out to Hispanics voters, and Romney hurt himself by taking far-right positions on immigration during the GOP primaries. He made no effort whatsoever in the black community. Obama reached out not only racially and ethnically, but in terms of lifestyle. Analysts made fun of, and Republicans derided, his campaign’s focus on discrete demographic and social slices of the electorate, including gays and lesbians. But the message was one about the future, not the American past. U.S. Census numbers tell the story. In the first decade of the new millennium, the Asian-American population rose 43.3 percent, the African-American population 12.3 percent, the Latino community 43 percent — and the white population just 5.7 percent. To be sure, the president won because of his stand on the issues — health care reform, Wall Street regulation, the auto industry bailout, among others. But his victory is something more: a sense that we are all in this together as a society, no matter who we are or how we live our lives. I saw this new America at the heart of the Obama reelection effort, in their campaign offices. In one office in Virgina, for example, the local campaign manager was Pakistani-American, the volunteers were of every race and background, the people heading out to handle the signup drive were Hispanic, and the event they were working on was a concert by Bruce Springsteen. Not only did Barack and his mayne man Joe win the electoral vote, they also won the popular vote too. While Mitt won the white vote (SMH), he failed to bring in votes with minorities. Barack also brought in votes from more than 60% of young voters (those ages 18-29) and, even though he fell from 44% to 39% of the overall white vote this election year, he still stomped Robney with a huge lead. To quote CNN “This is a crisis amongst the Republican Party”. Crisis or not, we’re pretty sure POUTUS can get a lot more isht done than Mittens would’ve been able to over the course of the next four years. Images via facebook
Steel yourself, cinephiles: A sequel to the 1942 classic Casablanca , one of the greatest films of all time , could happen in the near future. But while practically 99 percent of all Hollywood sequels and spin-offs seem like cash-grabs that have no good reason for existing, is there a case to be made for revisiting the saga of star-crossed lovers Rick and Ilsa in Casablanca 2 ? Consider the source of said would-be sequel, per the New York Post : Original Casablanca screenwriter Howard Koch, who shared the Oscar for Best Writing with fellow scribes Julius J. Epstein and Philip G. Epstein. Blacklisted a few years after Casablanca became a hit, Koch penned a sequel in 1980 revolving around the grown son of Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) and Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman), who goes searching for his father in the Middle East. Unearthed by The Post ‘s Lou Lumenick, Koch’s 1960s-set Return to Casablanca synopsis goes a little something like this: “[Laszlo and Ilsa] attempt to locate Rick after he and Renault left to join the Free French forces opposing Rommel in North Africa. They have had no success. After leaving Casablanca for America, Ilsa learned she was pregnant. She gave birth to a boy who grew up in America. The real father of the boy, it turns out, was not Laszlo but Rick. He was conceived the night Ilsa came to Rick’s place to plead for the Letters of Transit . . . The secret was not kept from Laszlo, but being the kind of man he was and owing so much to Rick, he adopted the child and treated him as his own son. The boy was named Richard, and he grew up to be a handsome, tough-tender young man reminiscent of his father. He had been told the truth about his origin and has a deep desire to find his real father, or at least more about him, since Rick’s heroic at actions in Casablanca have become legendary. Richard finds himself very much a stranger in the Arab world, a world now under Arab rule since the expulsion of the Germans and Vichy French who occupied Casablanca during the war.” Richard becomes involved with an Arab guerilla fighter named Joan as he searches out the truth of his father’s fate in the script, which Warner Bros. passed on in 1989. Producer Cass Warner, grand-niece of Jack Warner, took up Koch’s cause and brought it back to the studio, who turned it down again – but, she says, left open a window of opportunity. “Warner Bros. passed on it a year, a year and a half ago,” Warner told The Post. “But they indicated they were willing to revisit this if I could find a filmmaker they were interested in working with.” And who in young Hollywood could play the son of Rick and Ilsa today? Let Casablanca expert Aljean Harmetz weigh in: “Certainly not Robert Pattinson , though maybe that guy who’s popping up everywhere, Joseph Gordon-Levitt .” Yes, “that guy” Joseph Gordon-Levitt would be a solid choice. He could even sing an acoustic cover of “As Time Goes By” for the sequel soundtrack! Or, you know, David Thomson’s pick : Tom Hardy . But seriously, as perfect as Casablanca ‘s wonderfully ambiguous, utterly romantic unhappy ending is, don’t we all wonder what became of Rick and Ilsa? (And their respective chosen life partners, Laszlo and Renault?) A part of me loves the idea of finding out that they waited out the war and found their way back to one another again, the way we always hoped deep down inside that they would, pulled by that invisible thread that time, place, and violent world-changing upheaval couldn’t sever. Or maybe, probably, that wouldn’t be nearly as satisfying as it sounds now. How would you like to see a Casablanca follow-up unfold, if at all? [ New York Post ]
