Christina Aguilera talks at length about her enviable booty in Lucky magazine this month. Immediately upon hearing this, we subscribed to that publication. Proud to be bootylicious, the 31-year-old pop star and Voice judge loves her curves, which have certainly evolved since the early days of her career. Evolved in a good way, according to the singer. “Actually, the challenge I’ve always had is being too thin, so I love that now I have a booty, and obviously I love showing my cleavage,” she confesses. The singer also encourages curvy girls to flaunt their figures: “Hey, if you can work it and you can own it, that confidence is going to shine through.” Aguilera’s eclectic sense of style is on full display in her spaceship-esque chair on NBC. “I have always loved dressing up, being theatrical,” she says. Mission accomplished, Xtina. Well done. Check out how she dressed up for Lucky by clicking to enlarge some more Christina Aguilera pictures below …
Nina Dobrev is featured in the October issue of Seventeen , going into detail with the magazine on a number of important issues, from sexual abuse to Ian Somerhalder to Harry Potter. Click through photos of The Vampire Diaries below and then read through excerpts of her interview… On her character in The Perks Of Being A Wallflower : “It’s a really heavy topic, and I hope my character gives girls some perspective. I think more than anything, girls allow abuse to happen because they’re embarrassed it happened and that they allowed it to happen. They know it’s not right. There’s no excuse for it. That’s why it’s so important to show girls that they can admit that it’s not their fault.” On dating a costar : “My goal on the show was to be professional. But sometimes you can’t help who you have a connection with, and you can only fight it for so long – which I did for a really, really long time.” On her love for a certain boy wizard : “I want to go to Harry Potter Land! I actually should text Emma Watson to see if she can hook us up with a backstage pass or something.” On dealing with fame : “I try not to read best-dressed lists or anything like that. For every good thing, there will often be a not-so-nice thing people would say.” The Vampire Diaries Season 4 premieres on October 11.
As rollicking and rough as a drive down a dirt road with no suspension, Lawless is a tale of three-bootlegging brothers from Prohibition-era Franklin County, Virginia, who are, in the words of one character, some “hard-ass crackers.” Directed by Australia’s John Hillcoat ( The Road ) and written by musician Nick Cave (who’s adapted Matt Bondurant’s historical novel The Wettest County in the World ), Lawless is, like their last collaboration The Proposition , a kind of remixed Western at heart. It’s a story in which the law and the outlaws are equally outsized and dangerous — and a world in which the fighting has nothing to do with keeping order and everything to do with displays of strength. “It is not the violence that sets men apart. It is the distance that he is prepared to go,” declares oldest brother Forrest Bondurant (Tom Hardy), the hardest boiled of them all. To say that Lawless (or The Proposition ) romanticizes violence isn’t quite right — every tommy-gun bullet wound and knife wound is sickeningly visceral, and when a character gets his throat cut the man doing the deed has to saw through resisting flesh. But the film does relish and find lyricism in these tribal philosopher psychopaths who use force with the measured anticipation of an oenophile savoring a sip of wine. The sheer appreciation Lawless has for its characters and its setting makes it a pleasure to settle into, even though the film can be carelessly formless and feel like a rough draft that was never sculpted into something more meaningful. As Jack Bondurant, the youngest of the three brothers and the one most eager to prove himself, Shia LaBeouf, is both the primary focus of the film and its narrator — an unfortunate thing, since he’s also the character we least want to spend time with. Forrest is so tough he’s developed a mythology around him, that even he might believe, about being invincible — and given the ordeal he survives in this film, there might be something to that. Middle sibling Howard (Jason Clarke) is huge and half-feral, especially when he’s on one of his benders. But Jack’s been kept on the outside of the family business, allowed only to be the driver as the brothers travel the county, dispensing corn whiskey. That changes when an act of aggression by two out-of-towners gives him the opportunity to make a deal with gangster Floyd Banner (a gleeful Gary Oldman) after almost dying at his hands. At the core of Lawless is the escalating conflict between the Bondurant brothers and a corrupt Chicago lawman named Charlie Rakes (Guy Pearce) who’s coming down hard on the county to get protection money from its many moonshiners. But there are plenty of detours taken: Jack woos preacher’s daughter Bertha (Mia Wasikowska) and starts up his own stills with the disabled Cricket (Dane DeHaan). Forrest makes sparks with dancer-turned-waitress Maggie (Jessica Chastain). Lawless is really about the adventures of the Bondurants and their friends and foes during Prohibition, and the characters are so compelling it would really be enough to just spend time in their presence. Forrest in particular is a memorable contradiction: Aside from his flashes of savagery, Hardy maintains an almost grandfatherly air. Clad in cardigans and prone to muttering, he refuses to step down to anyone and yet, is utterly undone by Maggie’s arrival in his life. As Rakes, Pearce is almost too outsized for the film to contain him. With his blackened, immaculately pomaded hair, parted dramatically down the center, and his pale eyebrows, he looks like a cross between Crispin Glover and Voldemort. He wields his vague sexuality — “You’re a peach,” he croons to Jack before punching him in the face — like a threat, mincing in his flawless suit right before delivering a ruthless beating, then ceremoniously peeling off his blood-stained leather gloves. It’s a unique performance, albeit so mannered it almost rends the already accommodating fabric of the film. Factor in the prevalence of international actors in the cast and the unfocused nature of the narrative,and Lawless seems to take place in an impressionistic space rather than a historical one. It’s Charlie and Forrest that we want to see have a showdown, though it’s Jack who more often ends up in the former’s crosshairs. It’s not LaBeouf’s fault that his character is the flimsiest. The story keeps giving him foolish things to do to bring around more action, including accidentally leading the police to the family’s stills. His role as catalyst eventually becomes irritating because we don’t want the story to move along. The world that Lawless presents is so vivid and pleasing that we want to linger over the details. It’s a film that finds delicate beauty in the image of someone bleeding out in the snow, and turns a drunken, impulsive visit to church service into an overwhelming sensory experience. The appeal of Lawless is not the story it tells but rather the world that it creates. Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
Nina Dobrev is in the middle of filming The Vampire Diaries Season 4 . But the actress covers the latest Ocean Drive and tells the magazine that her ideal role goes above and beyond the character of Elena Gilbert. “I want to do a little bit of everything,” Dobrev tells the magazine. “My dream role is to do a James Bond film, or if they did another Lara Craft, or even a prequel Lara Croft, I’d want to do that, to get it out of my system. “Do you know the play August: Osage County ? They’re making it into a movie, and Julia Roberts and Meryl Streep are playing the moms. My dream role would be the daughter. I think they’re shooting it while I’m doing The Vampire Diaries , but that’s the kind of thing I love. I want to play strong characters and real people.” Can you imagine Dobrev in the role Angelina Jolie made famous? Ponder that possibility while you click through these lovely photos of the star:
‘There’s a little bit of her character in each one of us,’ actress Tika Sumpter tells MTV News alongside Houston’s castmates. By Tiffany Taylor with reporting by Kara Warner Jordin Sparks and Whitney Houston in “Sparkle” Photo: Alicia Gbur/ Stage 6 Films
‘There’s a lot left to explore there for me personally,’ Jeremy Renner tells MTV News of his character. By Kara Warner Jeremy Renner in the “Bourne Legacy” Photo: Universal Pictures
HBO’s upcoming original movie The Girl , previewed last week for the Television Critics Association, tells the story of Alfred Hitchcock (Toby Jones) and Tippi Hedren ( Sienna Miller ) making the films The Birds and Marnie . If you thought this would be a fun story about stepping in bird doodie and making it big in Hollywood , you’re in for a big shock, as Hedren spoke at length about the alleged sexual harassment and abuse she suffered at the hands of the “unusual, genius, and evil” director. As seen in the trailer for the film, The Girl alleges that not only was Hitchcock a difficult director for whom to work, he was an abusive personality. One scene from The Girl depicts Hitchcock sexually assaulting Hedren in the back of a car. Hedren has given many interviews on her Hitchcock films over the past 50 years; The Girl will expose Hedren’s little-known story to HBO audiences this fall. “People have said, ‘Was he in love with you?’” Hedren said. “No, he wasn’t. When you love someone, you treat them well. I think we’re dealing with a mind here that is incomprehensible, and I certainly am not capable of discerning what was going through his mind or why. I certainly gave no indication that I would ever be interested in any kind of a relationship with him.” Jones, who wore a prosthetic chin and age makeup to look more like Hitchcock, agreed that the Hitchcock he portrayed was a monster. “Yes, he had a huge disproportionate amount of power over the people who worked for him and with him,” Jones said. “Yes, he was a monster but he was very human in his foibles. There’s a certain pathos to him that is very human. His weaknesses were very human.” He perhaps offered more of an objective analysis of Hitchcock than Hedren was willing to speculate. “You’re not writing a biography of Hitchcock’s whole personality, but I think that it’s my job as an actor to sympathize with the character and to try and find that,” Jones continued. “I think he’s in control of everything at that point in his life – moviemaking, every aspect of moviemaking. He’s at the height of his fame after Psycho and then there’s something he can’t control, which is this woman who’s exercising some control over him. I’m not sure that he has the internal resources to cope with that and I think that’s something everyone can relate to, the idea of an emotion that begins to have control over you. Because control over such an important issue, you only need to look at his clothes, his uniform, the way he ordered his life, the way it became very systematic the way he operated, to know that control is crucial to him.” The film seems to play like an abusive marriage. It begins with Hitchcock discovering Hedren, depicted as almost a seduction of an innocent. Once filming begins he puts threatening pressure on her. For a scene in which birds attack Hedren, Hitchcock could have shot minimal takes. As The Girl shows, the scene went on for days, the underlying assumption being that he could make it stop if Hedren would acquiesce to his advances. Of course, these are all the negative elements of Hitchcock and Hedren’s relationship concentrated into a single film, and in this case a two minute trailer at that. “There were times when it was absolutely delightful and wonderful, the times that we spent while he was my drama coach,” Hedren explained. “I hadn’t had any acting experience except in commercials. You get a good technical background for that sort of thing. But to break down a script, to delve into how you become another character, the relationship of different characters in the film was something that I didn’t know how to do, and of course, it was perfect to have someone as brilliant a genius as Alfred Hitchcock being my drama coach.” “Hitchcock had a charm about him,” she continued. “He was very funny at times. He was incredibly brilliant in his field of suspense. I learned so much from that man about motion pictures; how you make a motion picture, so there are things that weren’t able to be in the film to say, ‘Why would she stick around for all of this?’ It wasn’t a constant barrage of harassment to me. So that is the fault of any film. It can’t possibly have everything in it. But if it had been constantly the way we have had to do it in this film, I would have been long gone.” Miller joined the TCA presentation by phone from London, and shared her experience recreating Hedren’s harrowing scenes in The Birds . “It was difficult during certain scenes, but not merely as difficult as it was for Tippi,” Miller said. “The bird attack scenes took five long days for her and it was about five hours for me. So while I definitely suffered a little bit, it was nowhere near the real thing.” By the time they went on to make Marnie , Hedren was fulfilling a contract and trying to survive. Marnie was never one of Hitchcock’s most popular or acclaimed films, but having shed light on his obsession with the star, The Girl reveals a lot more. Hedren is cast as the title character, a compulsive thief whose new husband forced her to marry him and tries to cure her. “After having seen this film, it’s pretty fascinating to look at that because it’s pathologically interesting,” Jones said. “I find it to be one of the most interesting among the movies but I don’t think it’s one of the great movies.” Perhaps the film is Hitchcock’s fantasy for how he would possess Hedren herself. Looking back, Hedren sees something pathetic in his abuse. “I think he was an extremely sad character,” Hedren said. “As I said in the beginning, we are dealing with a brain here that is unusual, genius, and evil, deviant almost to the point of dangerous because of the effect that he can have on people that are totally unsuspecting.” Hedren’s might not be the only story of Hitchcock’s abuse. She knew of other leading ladies who didn’t get along with him, but back in the ‘50s and ‘60s, actors didn’t talk publicly about their issues with directors. “As far as I know, Vera Miles had a terrible time with Hitchcock, and she wanted to get out of the contract,” Hedren said. “He didn’t let her. She did Psycho , and I believe, if you look at Psycho , there isn’t one close up of Vera, not one. After that, she would never even speak about him to anyone. So I think it is common knowledge that Hitchcock had fantasies or whatever you want to call them about his leading ladies. Peggy Robertson, his assistant for so many years, and I remained friends until she died. She at one point said to me that he would have these kind of feelings for his leading ladies, and she said, ‘But he never got over you.’ I don’t know if that’s a compliment or whatever it’s supposed to be, I don’t know, but I really don’t care either.” Today it seems shocking that any director could get away with sexual harassment, and have an untarnished reputation for some 50 years after the incident. The studio system of that era was much more secretive. “I had not talked about this issue with Alfred Hitchcock to anyone because all those years ago, it was still the studio kind of situation,” Hedren said. “Studios were the power and I was at the end of that, and there was absolutely nothing I could do legally whatsoever. There were no laws about this kind of a situation. If this had happened today, I would be a very rich woman.” Even though there are sexual harassment laws and a wide open public forum for any actor to share her stories in the media, Hedren hopes sharing her story now will protect the next generation of young actors. “I hope that young women who do see this film know that they do not have to acquiesce to anything that they do not feel is morally right or that they are dissatisfied with or simply wanting to get out of that situation,” Hedren said. “You can have a strength, and you deserve it. I can look at myself in the mirror, and I can be proud. I feel strong. He ruined my career, but he didn’t ruin my life.” The Girl airs in October on HBO. Follow Fred Topel on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Also in Wednesday afternoon’s round-up of news briefs news Hawk Koch steps down from PGA presidency; A pair of film pick-ups for U.S. release; Two companies team for a “social film project” and William Hurt and Michael McDonald take on new roles. Hawk Koch Temporarily Stepping Down as PGA President Koch was elected president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences last night. He’s taking a leave of absence from the presidency of the Producers Guild of America. Co-president Mark Gordon will continue as the sole president of the group. Excuse Me for Living Headed for U.S. The film will open October 12 both theatrically and via day and date VOD platforms via DadaFilms/Required Viewing, which announced its acquisition of the title Wednesday. Starring Tom Pelphrey, Christopher Lloyd, Wayne Knight, Jerry Stiller, Robert Vaughn and Melissa Archer, the film centers on a charming, suicidal druggie must obey his rehab-clinic’s demand to lead a seniors men’s group or face incarceration and lose the love of his psychiatrist’s daughter. Sushi Girl Heads to U.S. Theaters Phase 4 Films and Magnolia Home Entertainment jointly picked up North American rights to the film directed by Kern Saxton. The revenge thriller will have a theatrical release in the U.S. and cable VOD by Phase 4 in late 2012, with Blu-ray, DVD and digital VOD handled by Magnolia in early 2013. Mark Hamill stars as Fish, who has spent six years in jail. The night he is released, the four men he protected with silence celebrate his freedom with a congratulatory dinner. The meal is a lavish array of sushi, served off the naked body of a beautiful young woman. The sushi girl seems catatonic, trained to ignore everything in the room, even if things become dangerous. Toshiba and Intel Team for The Beauty Inside The two companies are collaborating to create a social film project and has a global online casting call to audition for a starring role online . Starring Topher Grace ( That ‘70s Show ) and Mary Elizabeth Winstead ( Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter ) and directed by Sundance award-winning director Drake Doremus ( Like Crazy ), The Beauty Inside is an experiment in social entertainment. The project will engage the audience through social media and encourage them to connect and interact with Alex via Facebook. The film will be available online in weekly episodes starting on Aug. 16 and continue over 6 weeks. Around the ‘net… The Dark Knight Rises Hits $300M Milestone The final Batman installment by Christopher Nolan hit the $300 million milestone in North America Tuesday after 12 days. Only The Avengers and Nolan’s The Dark Knight have hit that figure quicker, THR reports . William Hurt Joins Winter’s Tale Hurt plays the father of a dying young woman who falls in love with a thief who breaks into her home in the Warner Bros adaptation of the novel by Mark Helprin. This will be Oscar-winning writer Adiva Goldsman’s directorial debut, Deadline reports . Michael McDonald Takes On The Heat McDonald hails from the Fox series Mad TV . He joins Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy, playing a villain in the 20th Century Fox-produced project which Paul Feig will direct, Deadline reports .
Before there was Django Unchained , there was Django , and the star of that 1966 spaghetti western, Franco Nero, can be found in the 1970 surreal comedy Compañeros, which also inspired Quentin Tarantino’s upcoming anti-slavery opus. The Film: Compañeros (1970) Why It’s an Inessential Essential: With Django Unchained on the way, it’s a good time to revisit the films that inspired Quentin Tarantino’s upcoming pastiche. The winningly surreal action comedy Compañeros is the third installment of a trilogy that spaghetti-western director Sergio Corbucci’s shot with Franco Nero, the star of the original Django (1966) and the mysterious man who makes a prominent cameo at the end of the Django Unchained trailer. Like most spaghetti westerns, Compañeros is a mish-mosh of narrative tropes that takes the kind of mercenary outsider made popular in the genre by A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and Django and places him in the political, revolutionary-centric context of “Zapata westerns” like Tepepa (1969) and Duck, You Sucker! (1971). Compañeros stars Nero as “The Penguin,” a Swedish mercenary who blows into town and is instantly plied with requests to join two warring factions: the current political regime and the revolutionaries. Soon enough, he bumps into the effusive Vasco, played by spaghetti-western staple Tomas Milian, a shoe-shine man who accidentally becomes a captain in the revolutionary cause. Through a series of convoluted events that inevitably involve double- and triple-crosses, Vasco and the Penguin team-up to help protect a scientist (Fernando Rey!) who knows the combination to a hulking bank vault that everyone suspects houses a huge bounty. But to get to the safe, the trio has to avoid Jack Palance’s mustachioed, pot-smoking baddy. (Did we mention that his character keeps a pet falcon? ) Almost everyone betrays everyone else along the way, making the film’s uplifting finale a welcome one. How the DVD Makes the Case for the Film : Blue Underground has re-released Compañeros in a very tempting box set with three other spaghetti westerns starring Milian: the middling Lucio Fulci’s Four of the Apocalypse (1975) and the manic Sergio Sollima’s Run, Man, Run (1968). The box set is basically a re-issue of their previous editions of the films, but there are some worthwhile special features, including commemorative featurettes on the films, that nicely complement the collection. The 17-minute documentary included on the Run, Man, Run DVD boasts some entertaining soundbites — such as when Milian proudly exclaims, “If there’s one thing in this life I’m sure of: I am fucking talented.” The “In the Company of Compañeros ” featurette is especially informative. In it, Nero and Milian look back at their work in the film and even music composer Ennio Morricone talks a little about the main theme he composed (“a kind of joyful requiem, but also dramaticit was a kind of reggae with a Gregorian theme.”). Milian’s anecdotes are the juiciest of this bunch. He explains that the way he he wore his beret in any given scene indicated how his character was feeling in that sequence. He also hilariously describes Jack Palance: “The way you see him behave in the movie? That’s the way he behaved on the set. He knows he has a scary face and he uses it.” Other Trivia: Milian and Nero joke about their rivalry during the production of Compañeros and how they went on to become great friends. Milian has an especially funny anecdote about the time he showed up to the set of Compañeros an hour and a half before filming started, only to discover that Nero had already been there two hours prior to his arrival! According to Milian, Nero would get to set early so that he could have crow’s feet applied to his face to make him look older. When a younger Milian asked Nero why he did this, Nero supposedly replied, “30 years from now, people are going to say: he never ages.”
The halls of Seattle Grace are about to get a whole lot less steamy. McSteamy, that is, as star Eric Dane has announced his intentions to leave Grey’s Anatomy. “I am extremely grateful to everyone at Grey’s, ABC and Shondaland for the experience and memories I have had over the course of this run,” Dane told TV Line in a statement. “It has been wonderful to work alongside and learn from a creative force such as [creator] Shonda Rhimes.” Dane will stick around to finish off his character’s storyline – Season 8 concluded with Mark Sloane’s long-time love, Lexie, dying in a plane crash – as Rhimes said the actor “did not come to this decision lightly,” adding: “We’re a big family here at Grey’s with a long history together and Eric will always remain an important part of our family. I wish him the best and I look forward to watching him as he continues to steam up the big and small screen.” Grey’s Anatomy Season 9 premiere on ABC September 27. This move should free Dane up with more time to film another naked movie .
