Django Unchained may be receiving attention for its excessive use of the N-Word , and the body count in this Quentin Tarantino thriller may be as high as anything the director has ever helmed, but neither of those issues gets to the heart of the film: Two men, one friendship and the way Christoph Waltz was pretty much born to recite words written by Tarantino. Waltz portrays Dr. King Shulz, essentially the same character that earned him an Oscar in Inglourious Basterds . He’s a loquacious, laid back killer who smiles through the most tense situations. Tarantino penned the part for Waltz, and the best parts of the 166-minute movie feature Shulz simply talking: to residents of a town after he kills their sheriff; to Foxx’s slave-turned-bounty-hunter, Django; to Leonardo DiCaprio’s evil plantation owner. Waltz brings Tarantino terrific dialogue to entertaining life. And Foxx is also strong, evolving from a quiet slave to “the fastest draw in the South,” obliterating foes along the way and tracking down his wife (Kerry Washington), who has been purchased by DiCaprio’s Calvin Candle. The movie is Tarantino through and through, from the unusual combination of history and absurdity… to the drawn out scenes (one involving a group of white men complaining about the holes in their KKK-like hoods)… to his need to violently murder almost everyone on screen. Due to the latter point, the film is about 30 minutes too long. Without giving anything away, it easily could have ended around the time of a certain handshake, but Tarantino just can’t resist. He had to up the body count, he had to use up all his red dye budget. Indeed, the closing handful of scenes are cartoon-like in their violence. They’re just examples of Tarantino having fun with fake bullets and slow motion and shredded corpses. But these aren’t the difficult ones to watch. There’s one moment where a man is torn apart by dogs that even Michael Vick from a few years ago would have trouble watching. Overall? Django Unchained is exactly what anyone familiar with Tarantino’s work would expect. It may push the boundaries of good taste at times, and it definitely runs longer than necessary, but it’s a fun two-plus hours. You’re in for impressive visuals, unique characters and a series of fantastic exchanges between great actors. Sound off now with your take and visit Movie Fanatic for another Django Unchained review .
Nick Cannon And Mariah Carey Celebrate Holidays In Aspen With Twins Monroe & Moroccan The holidays are all about family time and Nick Cannon was kind enough to share his family with all his friends and followers on Twitter and Instagram. Let’s get a look at all the preciousness “Dem Babies” brought this Christmas: Hit the flip for more shots
Remember, earlier this year “Lil Jojo” was killed in Chicago supposedly by “Lil Reese & Chief Keef’s Crew.” Well, things are still hot in the Chi…obviously by the death of one of Jojo’s friends, JayLoud, being killed for representing him. DNA Info Reports : A teen who was friends with slain Englewood rapper Joseph “Lil JoJo” Coleman was shot dead on Christmas Day while wearing a hooded sweatshirt honoring the deceased emcee, his family said Wednesday. Joshua Davis, 18, of the 7200 block of South Bell Avenue, was shot several times after getting into a fight with a group of men in West Englewood, said Officer Jose Estrada, a police spokesman. No one was in custody as of Wednesday morning in the shooting, which occurred shortly after 11:30 p.m. in the 2000 block of West 69th Street, police said. Neighbor Sam Agnew, 83, said he was in bed when he heard four or five shots. He looked out his front door, saw a man lying in the street directly in front of his house and called police, Agnew said. According to a law enforcement source, Davis had argued with the men on a bus. After he got off, they chased after him and one of the men unleashed several shots. “He was killed because he was wearing a hoodie and getting off the bus,” said the victim’s sister Selina Davis, 24. “He was a great boy. He was only a baby.” Police said it was not clear what article of clothing Davis was wearing at the time of the shooting or what the argument with the men on the bus was about. Selina Davis said her brother, whose rap name was JayLoud, was wearing a “JoJo” hoodie to honor his best friend, who was killed in September. Coleman, also 18, reportedly was feuding with rapper Chief Keef before his death, but it was not clear if Davis’ death was related. Joshua Davis was taken to Advocate Christ Medical Center in critical condition and died there early Wednesday morning, according to the Cook County medical examiner’s office. Johnathan Moody, a cousin of the victim, said he and other friends had warned Davis about wearing the “JoJo” sweatshirt around the neighborhood. “We would tell him, ‘That ain’t good to wear that hoodie.’ But that was his best friend,” Moody said. Moody and other family members said they heard about their loved one’s death from friends and Facebook posts. “I guess the guys he got into it with, they were with another clique,” said Moody, 18. “It’s dumb. To kill someone over a hoodie?” Moody said. “It’s pointless, man. All this murder is pointless.” On a JayLoud video posted on YouTube, the victim raps in one song that “We know them and they know us, let’s get it. Smoke ‘em like some dope when we roll up.” On Dec. 17, a tweet from Davis’ Twitter handle @JayLoud93 stated “I wear my #JOJOWORLD hoodie everywhere f— ah opp.” “Opp” is slang for opponents, rival gangs. On his Twitter account, @JayLoud93 also includes hashtag notations #069 and #BrickSquad, which police say are references to the Brick Squad faction of Gangster Disciples. Police said Coleman was affiliated with the Brick Squad faction, but it was not clear if Davis was connected to the gang. Where are all the black activist at? Why are people not angry at another black kid being killed, daily, but we will act a fool if a half hispanic man kills a black kid out of the blue? This black on black crime is not out of the blue, it’s common! What are we gonna do about it? Go Here For More Of The Story On Hip Hop Wired! youtube
Music not only serves as the subject but informs the very fabric of Not Fade Away , David Chase’s savvy ’60s-set feature film debut. Aided immeasurably by his keen ear for dialogue, Chase filters a suddenly tumultuous, transformative decade through the restrictive prism of conservative suburbia in this story of a New Jersey boy’s coming of age, as political instability, class awareness and rock ‘n’ roll break in waves over the still-inchoate consciousness of several friends trying to form a band. Though starless, save for James Gandolfini’s knockout supporting perf, this dynamic pic should resonate with auds countrywide upon its Dec. 21 release. Not Fade Away injects the past with the nervous energy and exciting uncertainty of the present, devoid of nostalgia or biopic baggage, and infused with all the wicked wit that characterized Chase’s The Sopranos and his bygone standout episodes of The Rockford Files. The move from TV to a theatrical canvas is mirrored in the picture’s very conception, presenting the New Jersey microcosm as no longer a self-contained unit. Still, the film rarely leaves its setting, where Doug (John Magaro) lives with his looming, disapproving father (Gandolfini), his quasi-hysterical mother (Molly Price), and his little sister (Meg Guzulescu), who supplies voiceover narration and performs a wonderful curtain-dropper to boot. Macrocosm first meets microcosm when Doug returns to Jersey from college sporting longer hair, Cuban heels and anti-war indignation, quitting his studies to devote himself to the rock band he started in high school. Chase’s writing shines in this intricate relationship between world events and their impact on the everyday: Drawing from his own, decidedly more lackluster experience as a band drummer, the writer-helmer surrounds Doug with friends whose talents are not necessarily congruent with their ambitions and whose class differences manifest themselves erratically. Thus, after lead singer/guitarist Gene (Jack Huston) temporarily knocks himself out by swallowing a lit joint, Doug takes over as vocalist, wowing the local crowd with his rendition of “Time Is On My Side,” a glamorous position he soon assumes permanently, to Gene’s ongoing resentment. Meanwhile, well-off Wells (Will Brill) wrestles with the philosophical implications of imminent fame, always worrying they’ll “lose the mystique” they’ve built up with their barely existent fanbase. The group covers the Rolling Stones , the Kinks and Bo Diddley with varying degrees of fidelity, but Not Fade Away pointedly refuses to follow either a difficult-road-to-success or downward-spiral-to-failure scenario. Instead, the music feeds off surrounding chaos, anchoring Doug’s existence and coloring snapshots of various stages of his youth. His questioning whether to go for a more melodic or bluesier vocalization while listening to Leadbelly equates to his deciding on different attitudes toward life. Even movies and TV shows are defined through their music: The Twilight Zone announcing its presence to the protag through its signature theme, while Blow-Up confounds him with its silence. Doug’s evolving relationship with wealthier girlfriend Grace (Bella Heathcote) forms the film’s other throughline and, like his interaction with certain band brothers, brings up issues of economic disparity. But Chase excels at diverting attention from the obvious and foregrounding the particular, as in how Doug’s cramped kitchen contrasts with Grace’s Toulouse Lautrec-wallpapered rec room, where his band plays parties. And when Doug is shown digging ditches at Grace’s country club, the scene’s focus stays completely on Doug’s failed attempt to musically bond with Lander (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), a conservative black co-worker who only likes church music. The young thesps play their characters, interestingly, as socially inept, with varying levels of self-assertion and intellectual pretension. Magaro’s Doug, maturing in fits and starts, contrasts strikingly with Gandolfini’s brilliant turn as a father undergoing a late-blooming epiphany. Chase often matches and sometimes even betters Cameron Crowe or Floyd Mutrux in granting present-tense immediacy to the rock ‘n’ roll on the soundtrack, never smothering it with hindsight. In this endeavor, he was undoubtedly greatly assisted by exec producer/music supervisor Steven Van Zandt. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
Rihanna might not have a man but she’s got a man-sion! Via TMZ reports : Rihanna’s moving on after her leaky Beverly Hills home disaster last year — plunking down $12 million on a brand new mansion in the Pacific Palisades … just a few miles away. The 11,000 sq. ft. house features 7 bedrooms, 9 bathrooms, a cutting edge kitchen, a dining room with a 14-foot ceiling, an outdoor BBQ and bar, a swimming pool, a sun deck, 4-car garage, and a 6,000 sq. ft. backyard. Not bad, considering Rihanna’s last L.A. real estate venture was a nightmare. As we first reported, Rihanna filed a lawsuit last year against the person who sold her a Beverly Hills mansion, claiming the place was a leaky piece of crap. Rihanna purchased the home for $6.9 million — and sold the place last December for a measly $5 million. Congrats on the new crib RihRih! Check out more pics on the flip… Photo Credit: MLS
End of days … Man Open Fires In Alabama Hospital Via HuffPo : BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Authorities say an Alabama police officer who was shot after a triple killing and a two-county chase is improving. The Heflin Police Department says officer Jackie Stovall was removed from a breathing machine on Sunday and is stable. Interim Police Chief A.J. Benefield says Stovall asked whether officers had stopped the shooting suspect, and he wanted to know about his own parents and grandchild. Benefield provided the update on the police department’s Facebook page. Cleburne County Sheriff Joe Jacks says authorities are still trying to verify the identities of three people shot to death Saturday in a mobile home in eastern Alabama. Jacks says the man believed responsible for the slayings led officers on a chase that left Stovall severely wounded and the suspect dead about 25 miles away. Easy access to guns in a country as violent as ours makes as much sense as an open bar at an AA convention. Gun control is a discussion that NEEDS to happen…
What is thought to be the world’s most valuable movie poster along with eight others sold to a film memorabilia collector for $1.2 million. The Metropolis poster by German Expressionist Heinz Schulz-Neudamm was purchased as part of a lot in a Los Angeles bankruptcy court Thursday. Schulz-Neudamm created the poster in 1927 for the German Expressionist science-fiction film of the same title by Fritz Lang. New Jersey resident Ralph DeLuca, who owns film memorabilia company Movie Archives Inc., won the bidding over three other bidders, Reuters reports . Bidding for the poster started at $700,000. “I honestly feel that the ‘Metropolis’ poster is worth more than the whole lot,” DeLuca told Reuters. A collector bought the futuristic poster for a record $690,000 back in 2005, which had been a record. Some speculated when it was filed with the bankruptcy court last summer that it c ould fetch as much as $1 million . “I think I’ll keep the poster unless I get overwhelmed with a ‘Guinness Book of Records’ offer,” said DeLuca. “I believe it will be the first to go past $1 million and even hit $2 million.” Schulz-Neudamm’s painting of the artificial woman, or the Robot, is used by a mad scientist to seduce an race of workers in a totalitarian futuristic urban city. Made in Germany during the Weimar Period, Metropolis is set in the year 2026 in a dystopian society in which a wealthy elite rules from vast tower complexes, oppressing the workers who live in the depths below. The silent film was written by Lang and his wife Thea Von Harbou, and starred Brigitte Helm, Gustav Fröhlich, Alfred Abel and Rudolf Klein-Rogge. In 2008, a print of Lang’s original cut of the film was found in Argentina. [ Source: Reuters ]
Quentin Tarantino continues his quest to fight history’s great oppressors by way of the movies in Django Unchained . Inglourious Basterds conjured up a squadron of tough Jewish-American soldiers who took Nazi scalps and chased down Hitler with the help of a French Jewish theater owner, a British film critic turned lieutenant and a Allies-affiliated German movie star. Django Unchained doesn’t literally bring the forces of cinema to bear against slavery in the same fashion, but it does use tropes of Spaghetti Westerns and exploitation films to build the character of a former slave who learns to shoot and eventually faces down the residents of a plantation in order to retrieve his wife. There’s something inarguably rousing about Tarantino’s exuberant revisionist history, about the way he rewrites wretched eras in the past so that those who suffered are able to have their bloody revenge. And yet, Django Unchained and Inglourious Basterds are my two least favorite works in Tarantino’s oeuvre, not because of their concepts but because of their expansive, unhurriedly indulgent qualities. Don’t get me wrong — he’s still able to offer up scenes set to music that are the cinematic equivalent of a velvety slice of rich cheesecake, he has a facility with and takes an unbridled glee in dialogue in a way that’s unequalled among filmmakers working today, and he comes up with unforgettable characters that feel intensely modern but also like they’ve walked out of some long forgotten but incredible film. It’s possible that no one does momentary pleasures like Tarantino, and Django Unchained has no insignificant amount of instances of sheer enjoyment, from an introductory sequence in which a scene-stealing Christoph Waltz as Dr. King Schultz liberates the titular slave (Jamie Foxx) from traders to one in which Django rides onto an estate to some anachronistic hip-hop. But the film also comes across like a rough cut that was never looked at as a coherent whole, and some segments that start off as promising become interminable while others feel entirely unnecessary. There’s no pressure on or expectation for Tarantino to please anyone other than himself, and the film feels overstuffed with ideas that should have been pruned. That sense of fun needed to power something this outsized wanes before the film reaches its ending, two hours and 45 minutes later — it’s not a feature that you want to last forever, but one that seems to take it for granted that you feel that way. There’s a good movie inside Django Unchained , maybe even a great one, but it hasn’t been carved out of the lopsided excess. Django Unchained begins two years before the Civil War in the wilds of Texas, where German dentist-turned bounty hunter Schultz pulls up alongside a line of slaves being transported across the state. He hates slavery, but needs the help of Django in order to identify a trio of murderous brothers who once worked on the plantation from which he came, and so he buys the man with a promise to free him and give him a share in the reward once the deed is done. Cheerful, eloquent and dryly funny — “If there are any astronomy aficionados among you,” he tells a group of slaves suddenly facing the possibility of freedom, “the North Star is that one” — Schultz gets many of the best lines, and the segment in which he takes Django under his wing and shows him the ropes of being a bounty hunter are outrageously enjoyable, as they enact a Southern Western, face down an angry town from the confines of a bar, venture onto a plantation owned by Big Daddy (Don Johnson) to find their targets in a confrontation that splatters blood across the cotton growing in the fields, and face down the Klan in a scene that’s pure Mel Brooks. Waltz and Foxx are terrific together, the verbose, flowery Schultz balancing out the taciturn Django as he shakes off his former identity as a slave (just as he casts off his blanket in extravagant slow motion, bearing a scarred back) and becomes a confident force to be reckoned with. But the film slows its pace to a crawl as the pair travel to a giant Mississippi estate owned by Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) called, naturally, Candyland, where they come up with a plan to buy back Django’s wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington). Samuel L. Jackson is there too, playing a canny house slave named Stephen even more concerned with enforcing the power structure than his owner seems to be. If the first part of the film is Schultz’s, the second is Django’s, but he’s competing with big, talky performances from DiCaprio and Jackson that diminish his presence in comparison, as Tarantino lets a pair of scenes at a club and later at a dinner spin out endlessly like a virtuoso playing his instrument past his audience’s threshold of enjoyment and, eventually tolerance. The film is so in love with certain elements, like DiCaprio’s monstrous preening, his sister’s (Laura Cayouette) exaggerated Southern belle simpering and Jackson’s toadying, that the suspense of the ruse that’s being played gets lost in the clutter. By the time the film ends, and then ends a second time, it feels exhausted, not electric. Django Unchained is filled with film geek touches, including a cameo from Franco Nero, who played the title character in the 1966 Spaghetti Western Django , music from Ennio Morricone, the presence of both Russ and Amber Tamblyn in a town scene, and Zoe Bell and Tom Savini playing two of a group of trackers. They’re classic Tarantino — but the film’s not short on auteurist touches. It’s an unfortunate example of a director disappearing so far into his own vision that he’s lost interest in taking a step back and looking at it in its entirety. Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
For three decades, we’ve been treated to numerous looks-back on the Dan Aykroyd -John Belushi comedy team, and the one perfect film they managed to make, 1980’s The Blues Brothers . So much dirt has already been dished over the decades that it almost feels like we know everything we’ll ever need to about the hard-partying tendencies that ultimately killed Belushi in 1982. We would be mistaken, as a new Vanity Fair profile will no doubt demonstrate that however many skeletons you think might have been unearthed, there’s always room for one or two more in the mass grave of a dead celebrity’s life story. The January issue features a new and very detailed look into the making of The Blues Brothers . Part fond remembrance, part cautionary tale, and part “Jesus H Christ, seriously. You seriously did all that,” it delivers absolutely delicious — and absolutely tragic — stories from Belushi’s friends, family and former coworkers about that film’s troubled production. We’ve culled a few choicer nuggets from the online preview: * The ’70s were even more decadent than we think. According to Dan Aykroyd, “We had a budget in the movie for cocaine for night shoots” during the making of > em> The Blues Brothers. And just like that, films like Zardoz suddenly begin to make more sense. * Belushi’s drug problem had gotten so out of hand that they actually asked Carrie Fisher – Carrie Fisher! – to keep him from consuming. I wonder if they also asked Chevy Chase to keep Dan Aykroyd from making bad decisions about the roles he intended to take during the late ’80s and early ’90s. * Belushi and Robert Downey, Jr. have a lot in common: Apparently Belushi disappeared from the set one night, and Aykroyd found him at a nearby home where, the homeowner told him, Belushi had just showed up, raided the man’s fridge like it wasn’t even a thing, and passed out on the couch. Obviously, this thing just became required, end-of-the-year reading. It goes without saying also that we’re very glad this kind of addiction is no longer enabled so blatantly. [ Source: Vanity Fair ]
Draya Michele Launches ‘Fine A** Girls’ Clothing Line BBW L.A. banger Draya Michele has decided to make the most of her 15 minutes and recently launched the website for her clothing line “Fine A** Girls.” The line, which currently features clothing only, is now available for purchase,however, most of the items appear to have sold out just the day after the site went live. The colossal-caked Cali gir l is expected to expand the collection to include jewelry in the near future. Hit the flip to check out the line and let us know whether you hate or love it .
