PARK CITY, Utah—The publicist for comedian and cast member of NBC’s “30 Rock,” Tracy Morgan, says the actor suffered from a combination of exhaustion and altitude when he collapsed at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah. Publicist Lewis Kay says Morgan is grateful to the medical center staff for their care Sunday in Park City, where the elevation is 7,000 feet. Morgan was escorted from the Creative Coalition Spotlight Awards ceremony Sunday night at the festival. Kay says Morgan is seeking medical attention and is with his fiancee. He says hospital officials report no drugs or alcohol were found in Morgan’s system. Morgan is attending Sundance in connection with the comedy film “Predisposed,” one of the 100 films at the festival, in which he plays a drug dealer named Sprinkles.
‘Red Lights’ actress also updates MTV News on ‘Avatar’ sequel status. By Josh Wigler, with reporting by Josh Horowitz Sigourney Weaver at Sundance 2012 Photo: Getty Images PARK CITY, Utah — Even at the Sundance Film Festival , genre icon Sigourney Weaver just can’t stay away from the supernatural. The actress has a lead role in director Rodrigo Cort
‘I got to bring together every pop star and fold it into one person,’ actress tells MTV News. By Josh Wigler, with reporting by Josh Horowitz Elijah Wood and Emma Roberts Photo: MTV News PARK CITY, Utah — Emma Roberts has always been a friend to MTV News, particularly at the Sundance Film Festival . Last year in Park City, we were fairly sure that we got Emma to drop a massive “Scream 4” spoiler — namely that she wasn’t going to survive her encounter with Ghost Face — and we were right … partially. At this year’s Sundance, our conversation with Emma was not so grim. The up-and-coming actress has a starring role in “Celeste and Jesse Forever,” a comedy about a divorcing couple struggling to maintain their friendship during an intense period of transition. In the film, which also stars co-writer Rashida Jones , Roberts goes against type as a pop star named Riley, who is an amalgamation of various musical icons. But according to the actress, there’s one particular singer she took her cues from. “I got to bring together every pop star and fold it into one person,” she told MTV News about her role in the film. “[But] my hair is definitely Ke$ha . I have these fabulous long, blond, slightly ratty extensions. I miss those dearly.” Of course, hair alone does not make a pop star. Roberts had to sing and dance to get into the role, rocking out with a dance anthem that was co-written by Jones herself. “We recorded a song that Rashida co-wrote with a bunch of people, and it’s just wildly entertaining and inappropriate and it’s kind of a dance anthem. It was fun,” she said. “You know when you listen to songs and they yell at you to have fun? That’s kind of what we decided to do, because I love being yelled at to have fun and dance!” Who doesn’t? The 2012 Sundance Film Festival is officially under way, and the MTV Movies team is on the ground reporting on the hottest stars and the movies everyone will be talking about in the year to come. Keep it locked with MTV Movies for everything there is to know about Sundance. Related Videos Sundance 2012: Interviews From Park City Related Photos Celebrities Hit The Ground At Sundance 2012 Film Fest Sundance 2012: MTV Celebrity Photo Booth
The actor also spoke with MTV News about the ‘very subtle’ use of 3-D in ‘The Great Gatsby.’ By Josh Wigler, with reporting by Josh Horowitz Joel Edgerton Photo: MTV News PARK CITY, Utah — Joel Edgerton could tell you about Kathryn Bigelow ‘s untitled Osama Bin Laden movie, but then he’d have to kill you. OK, perhaps it’s not as dramatic as all of that. Still, the “Wish You Were Here” actor spoke briefly with MTV News about starring in the Navy Seal thriller alongside Chris Pratt and Jessica Chastain , and while he’s “very excited” to start shooting the film, his lips are sealed on the top-secret op. “I can’t really tell you anything about it,” he told MTV during the Sundance Film Festival . “I don’t know that I can’t tell you anything about it, but I’d be very ill informed to talk about it at this point. But I’m just excited to work with all of those guys.” Edgerton was much more inclined to talk about “The Great Gatsby,” Baz Luhrmann ‘s upcoming adaptation of the F. Scott Fitzgerald classic. The Australian actor, who stars in “Gatsby” as drunken socialite Tom Buchanan, spoke at length about Luhrmann’s “very subtle” use of 3-D in the film. “3-D is absolutely the right thing for [the film],” said Edgerton. “I’ve seen sections of the movie and it sort of invites you in. It’s not like spectacle 3-D; you’re not being confronted by things blowing at your head. But it invites you in. What it does psychologically is very interesting, and I think you’ll forget you’re watching 3-D.” “Also, it’s lavish,” he continued. “That era was so lavish. The ’20s was about excess, so why not add a bit of excess to the filmmaking as well?” For those who remain skeptical of the use of 3-D in “Gatsby,” Edgerton expects negative opinions to change when the movie is released this December. “Baz knows absolutely everything he’s doing,” he said. “I’m really excited for all the people [groaning] about 3-D to see the movie. I hope everybody is crossing their arms and frowning to begin with, because I think they’ll unfurl by the time they see it.” What do you think of the use of 3-D in “The Great Gatsby”? Sound off in the comments! The 2012 Sundance Film Festival is officially under way, and the MTV Movies team is on the ground reporting on the hottest stars and the movies everyone will be talking about in the year to come. Keep it locked with MTV Movies for everything there is to know about Sundance. Related Videos Sundance 2012: Interviews From Park City Related Photos Sundance 2012: MTV Celebrity Photo Booth Celebrities Hit The Ground At Sundance 2012 Film Fest
Peter Jackson-produced documentary, premiering Friday at Sundance, contains new info about the murders. By Josh Wigler, with reporting by Josh Horowitz Peter Jackson at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival Photo: Larry Busacca/Getty Images PARK CITY, Utah — The Peter Jackson -produced documentary ” West of Memphis ” premieres at the Sundance Film Festival on Friday (January 20), chronicling the conviction, imprisonment and eventual release of West Memphis Three defendants Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley, who were convicted in 1994 of brutally murdering three young boys in Arkansas, despite an overwhelming amount of reasons to believe otherwise. Though Echols, Baldwin and Misskelley were released from prison in August, they have still not been exonerated for the murders. “West of Memphis” aims to present new revelations about their innocence and another man’s role in the crime, and as such, the documentary is something of an ever-evolving work — so much so that a new, crucial interview was just shot and added to the documentary in the last week. “Some witnesses came forward a very short time ago,” Jackson told MTV News about the new revelations. “[Director Amy Berg ] was able to interview them about six days ago. We only just managed to get that particular interview with two young men into the movie, in time for the screenings today. It’s some fairly serious eyewitness statements that I think are going to hopefully push the resolution of the case a little bit further.” Though the documentary is set to make its world premiere at Sundance, Jackson insists that the story is far from over. “This is a story that has not come to an end yet. In fact, it’s very much not ended,” he said. “We have three guys that were released from prison but not exonerated, even though they did not do the crime. We have three young boys who were murdered in 1993, and the killer still walks free. So absolutely, this is not the end of the story. It’s ongoing. It’s literally developing on a daily basis right now.” “West of Memphis” isn’t the first documentary about the trial. The “Paradise Lost” trilogy of documentaries — the last of which made its TV debut last week on HBO — also aimed to prove the West Memphis Three’s innocence. The 2012 Sundance Film Festival is officially under way, and the MTV Movies team is on the ground reporting on the hottest stars and the movies everyone will be talking about in the year to come. Keep it locked with MTV Movies for everything there is to know about Sundance. Related Videos Sundance 2012: Interviews From Park City Related Photos Celebrities Hit The Ground At Sundance 2012 Film Fest
The great Fifth Generation filmmaker Zhang Yimou has gone from having films like Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern banned in his homeland of China to directing the lavish opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, his more recent work taking place in the safer territory of the grandiose historical melodrama of Curse of the Golden Flower and the Nicholas Sparks-worthy sentimentality of Under the Hawthorn Tree . Zhang has insisted that he’s not interested in politics, a tack that certainly seems to have its benefits: With an estimated budget of around $90 million, The Flowers of War is one of the most, if not the most, expensive Chinese production to date, it stars Christian Bale and it’s China’s Oscar submission. But that doesn’t mean that Zhang’s latest output should be dismissed offhand as nationalist propaganda. That the accusation’s been tossed at The Flowers of War , a big, button-pushing, brutally effective World War II-era drama, may be due to unfamiliarity with the atrocity during which it’s set — the Nanjing Massacre, during which hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed and tens of thousands raped by Japanese soldiers after the capturing of the city in December of 1937. It’s a horrific incident that remains relatively unexplored in popular culture, though Iris Chang’s bestselling book The Rape of Nanking , Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman’s 2007 documentary Nanking , and Lu Chuan’s excellent City of Life and Death , which played in a few U.S. theaters last year, have brought it recent attention. Given that the massacre remains a painful point in China-Japan relations, and that certain far-right Japanese ultranationalists (like Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara) like to claim the massacre never took place and was invented to tarnish the image of Japan, it’s surprising that the Japanese soldiers don’t come off even less one-dimensional in Zhang’s film. The Flowers of War starts off with less context than I’ve given above, offering up a title card about “an especially dark chapter in human history” before dropping right into a destroyed Nanjing through which a scattering of schoolgirls runs, looking for shelter. Also scurrying through the wreckage and the piles of bodies is John Miller (Bale), an American mortician hired to bury the head of the local Catholic cathedral. While the ragged remains of the Chinese forces, led by Major Li (Tong Dawei), exchange fire with the Japanese troops, John discovers to his dismay that only students remain at the church — a group of adolescent convent girls and George (Huang Tianyuan), the orphan boy trying to serve as their caretaker. Finding no money for his fee, John settles into the late Father Engleman’s quarters to get trashed on Communion wine when a group of prostitutes arrives at the gates, having been promised sanctuary by the church’s cook, long since fled. Bale’s presence in the film is a kind of misdirect, a calculated element intended to better its international commercial prospects — his character makes a clumsily predictable journey from cynical drunken expat to hero willing to sacrifice a chance to escape the country in order to care for the children who’ve ended up in his charge. It’s the relationship between the famous “women of the Qinhuai River” and the frightened, sheltered girls that’s the stealthy heart of the film, the prostitutes sauntering in like brightly plumed birds and taking over the basement despite the protests of the cathedral’s scandalized remaining inhabitants, settling in to gamble and gossip. Yu Mo (Zhang discovery Ni Ni), the “top girl,” sets out to seduce John, knowing that as a Westerner he’ll be spared by the invading troops and might be able to help them escape. Meanwhile, the girls’ experience is filtered through Shujuan (Zhang Xinyi), who refused to leave the city without her schoolmates, and whose father (Cao Kefan) is now working for the Japanese in order to stay nearby. Despite the church’s supposedly being protected, Japanese soldiers break down the door (“We’re got virgins!” one yells), and it’s only due to the intervention of Major Li, hiding nearby, that the girls are spared gang rape and that only two are left dead. The Flowers of War never errs on the side of the overly nuanced — a soaring chorus accompanies moments of grace, and beyond a setup based on the looming threat of sexual violence to 12-year-old girls, the film features multiple characters sacrificing themselves to protect the youngsters, from Major Li, who fends off a platoon singlehandedly in an over-the-top but masterfully shot action sequence, to John, in his trek toward redemption, to the prostitutes, who end up offering themselves in the place of the children. A particularly harsh digression in which two of the latter travel back to their brothel to retrieve precious items they left there seems included only to reinforce the terrible fate awaiting any women who fall into the hands of the Japanese soldiers. Colonel Hasegawa (Atsuro Watabe), is the lone Japanese officer who’s not portrayed as a complete savage, though he’s still bound to follow orders, no matter how distasteful. But while it’s as blunt as any typical big-budget war epic would be, the film finds plenty of moments in which Zhang’s skill as a filmmaker and his deft handling and interest in female characters shines, from the way Shujuan serves as a far-too-young witness to these horrors, the camera often closing in on her gaze through a fracture in the cathedral’s rose window, to a sequence in which John cuts the prostitutes’ hair as they sleep (he knows how to work on people only when they’re lying down), so that they rise fresh-faced, with schoolgirl bobs. The enchantment with which the film views the Qinhuai ladies goes beyond any simple hookers-with-hearts-of-gold conceit — an imagined moment in which they sing while strolling through the church finds in them a magic that circumvents the victimization of their circumstances, a vision of lost decadence amidst the devastation. Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
If you think that free love and freer funbags were a skinvention of the 1960s, then you’ve got another think coming, mister. Sexual liberation has been swinging since the early days of the 20th Century, when Josephine Baker made bananas dance with her topless “banana dance” and Clara Bow bared boobage in the first-ever Oscar winner, Wings (1927). The provocative doc Legendary Sin Cities (2005) chronicles Shanghai’s heyday as a center for skinternational sin, but you don’t have to step into a time machine to experience the intoxicating decadence of the city once called “the Whore of Asia”. You just have to get your ass to Manhattan, where on January 25 Shame co-stars and masters of burlesque Calamity Chang (right) and DeeDee Luxe (left) proudly present Les Fleurs de Shanghai , a new revue that combines bump n’ grind with the exotic romance of Old Shanghai. Find out more about Les Fleurs de Shanghai , including where to RSVP, after the jump!
‘He was just being a mean, negative person, and that’s one of the main reasons why I’m not with him,’ model tells ‘RapFix Live.’ By Rob Markman, with reporting by Sway Calloway Amber Rose on “RapFix Live” Photo: Natasha Chandel/ MTV News Kanye West admits his flaws — well, in song at least: On his 2011 single “Runaway,” the Louis Vuitton Don was apologetic about how he treated ex flame Amber Rose, owning up to his wrongs. He took things a step further during his Watch the Throne Tour with Jay-Z, giving the audience love advice while performing the song. During the November 2 stop, ‘Ye sent a special shout to ex-girlfriend Amber Rose in the model’s hometown. “To the city of Philly, I want to thank y’all for making the incredible person that this song was made for,” he said while performing “Runaway” in Philadelphia. “At first, I was like, ‘Wow, maybe he is sorry for just not being a good guy and not treating me the way I want to be treated and talking down to me,’ amongst other things,” Rose said on last week’s “RapFix Live.” “I instantly was like, ‘I forgive him.’ ” To her, it all seemed very sincere. “When I first saw it, I was like, ‘Yo, I forgive him.’ I let that go. I went through the crying and the heartbreak and all that stuff, and I moved on, and I’m so happy now that I actually have a gentleman, a great guy that I love so much,” Rose said of current boyfriend Wiz Khalifa . “Then after he called me an incredible person in my hometown, he said, ‘Never find love in a strip club.’ And that’s when I was like, ‘You know what? Take your apology and shove it up your ass, because I don’t want to hear it.’ ” The “Never find love in a strip club” line wasn’t from the Philly concert, though it is a Yeezy lyric from the Throne’s “New Day,” in which West passes life lessons to his unborn son. “New Day” was actually released in August, months before the concert, and in the song, Kanye makes no mention of Amber’s name, but it still rubbed the beauty the wrong way. According to Amber, who feels the lyric was a shot at her, the ex-couple didn’t meet in a gentlemen’s club. “He didn’t meet me in a strip club; he knows he didn’t meet me in a strip club,” she said. “He was just being a mean, negative person, and that’s one of the main reasons why I’m not with him. He’s that; I don’t want that negativity in my life. Don’t apologize and then say something like that. It’s just rude, and it’s mean, and it’s not true.” Later in her “RapFix Live” interview , Rose broke down crying because of the way some of ‘Ye’s overzealous fans have treated her in public. “I have people throwing things at me in the street because they’re fans of Kanye,” Amber said before she started to cry on set. “I’m just crying because I don’t deserve to be bullied like that. I’m a nice girl. I don’t bother anybody. I keep my mouth shut because I don’t want any trouble.” Related Videos ‘RapFix Live’ With Amber Rose And Yo Gotti Related Artists Kanye West
DJ Scream, Future and Verse Simmonds team up with Atlanta MC, who tells Mixtape Daily, ‘I was put here to be great.’ By Rob Markman, with reporting by FLX Rocko Photo: Prince Williams/ Getty Images Mixtape Daily: Main Pick Headliners : Rocko and DJ Scream Representing : Atlanta Mixtape : G.O.G. (Gift of Gab) Real Spit : Rocko got that gift of gab. The “Umma Do Me” rapper first made his name with his 2007 single and then went on to release his major-label debut, Self Made, a year later. There have been some hiccups along the way, but through it all the Atlanta rapper has remained one of his city’s most-beloved figures. The A1 Entertainment CEO has been instrumental in Future ‘s burgeoning career, but is still focused on his music as well. Need proof? Just check his latest, G.O.G. Throughout the mixtape, Rocko crafts bouncy tracks with hit potential, while at the same time sharing his real-life experiences. On “Balance,” Rocko teams with Verse Simmonds, and together they sing and rap about the tightrope walk they conduct when mixing business with their personal lives. The Zaytoven-produced “The Choice is Yours” is equally as enlightening. Rocko raps about moving from an illegal life to the legal music business. Future appears on “Take U Away,” “Squares Out Your Circle” and “Power of That P,” on which he and Rocko employ tons of alliteration, using the letter “p” to speak about the many ways in which power manifest. Over the course of 19 tracks, Rocko provides an even-keeled listen; with no noticeable dips, the DJ Scream-helmed mixtape bangs throughout. Then again, we expected nothing less. Joints to Check For
Councilman Fidler (Photo: Facebook) Councilman Lew Fidler, who’s running for the State Senate in the special election to replace Carl Kruger, went onto Assemblyman Dov Hikind’s radio show late Saturday night to make his case before the program’s primarily Jewish audience. The guest host, Joe Lazar, who once ran for the City Council himself with Assemblyman Hikind’s backing, asked Councilman Fidler… Broadcasting platform : YouTube Source : The Politicker Discovery Date : 16/01/2012 02:29 Number of articles : 2
