Sarah Palin is in mama grizzly mode. With Bristol Palin getting white powder sent to her on the Dancing With the Stars set, the former Republican V.P. nominee is in L.A. sticking up for her cub. After a series of alleged death threats against Bristol, Sarah traveled to California to be with her and went off on her daughter’s “haters” on Facebook, writing: “I’m sorry to see that she’s again getting those annoying death threats and more ‘mysterious white powder’ sent to her while on DWTS this All-Star season.” “These threats sure waste a lot of time, production and public resources; but do the haters really think this will stop Bristol and Mark and the producers from keepin’ on keepin’ on?” “Silly critics – after all these years of goofy antics like this we find these efforts are actually quite motivating! Bristol’s not letting this get her down.” “Hey, the haters will hate anyway; the critics will criticize, so you might as well dance!” Sarah and Willow Palin also made time for themselves, stepping out in Studio City, Calif., to do some shopping at KMart and read a little celebrity gossip . The political figure also raised eyebrows with her much slimmer figure. Between that and her casual attide, she was barely recognizable as she and Willow ate at KFC. Will this be Bristol Palin’s last week on DWTS? Don’t bet on it. [Photo: Fame/Flynet]
Meet Banger Condola Rashad We all had our eyes glued to the Steel Magnolias remake last night. And while the results were mixed we can’t deny there was a beautiful new face on the scene that had us in awe. Condola Rashad is the daughter of celebrities Phylicia and Ahmad and boy does she take after her mother’s knack for being absolutely beautiful. Condola took our breaths away. So you know how we do. We decided to grab some pics of her to get you acquainted with her best assets. Click through and see the goods.
SMH…he clocked his Public Defender in the face after he realized he wasn’t walking out the door a free man. 30-year-old Lamarcus Williamson took a cheap shot in a York County Court on Tuesday…and the whole thing was caught by courtroom surveillance cameras! After pleading guilty to robbery, assault, and drug charges, Lamarcus ended up getting a 15 year sentence…and an extra six months just got added on for contempt of court after he ruffed up his lawyer. Images via youtube
The poor girl took her teacher seriously… In a ‘what the hell was she thinking’ moment, 16-year-old high school student Samantha Pawlucy showed up to school on ‘dress down Friday’ in jeans and a t-shirt…but Samantha’s pink shirt drew extra attention because she was wearing a Robney/Lyan tee. According to NBC News… “The teacher told me to get out of the classroom, I said no,” Samantha said. “She told me to take off my shirt and said that she has another one if I need one. And then the teacher asked me… ‘Are your parents Republican?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ She said that’s like her wearing a KKK shirt.” Samantha was so embarrassed by the public criticism in front of her classmates that she told her parents she didn’t want to return to school. “I didn’t know what to think, I didn’t think it was right at all.” They requested a meeting with the principal and the teacher. The teacher apologized to Samantha and her parents saying that the statement was meant as a joke. “It was funny to her, but I was really embarrassed,” Samantha said. “If it was a joke between two adults, I can take a joke like that but (my daughter) didn’t know how to take it. She doesn’t understand, she actually thinks she did something wrong,” her father, Richard Pawlucy, said. “I can just picture her sitting there, feeling ashamed for just wearing a T-shirt,” said her mother, Christine Pawlucy. “That someone could spin that and throw it back on a 16-year-old child and make her feel so terrible.” A spokesperson for the Philadelphia School District told NBCPhiladelphia.com that the teacher was transferred to another classroom as the district investigates the incident. Now we’ve all had teachers who cracked on us back in the day. Do you think her teacher took it too far or can this girl not take a joke? Images via nbc
All decked out, Nicole Kidman received a gala tribute at the New York Film Festival Wednesday night ahead of the U.S. premiere of her latest starrer, The Paperboy , directed by Lee Daniels . Appearing like audiences have never seen her before, Kidman said she pushed her boundaries in the role in which she plays a sultry vixen who is carrying on with a convicted murderer in prison (played by John Cusack ). Kidman opened up about the role and why she decided to take on the part which required her to — among other things — spread her legs and even pee on fellow co-star Zac Efron ; she also shared why she never spoke to John Cusack on the set outside of their characters. But despite pushing herself into admittedly uncomfortable territory, there was one thing she would not do. Initially, Kidman did not think she could pull off the part. Daniels had her meet with five women who have had relationships with men in prison. Unsure of herself, she said the experience allowed her to find he way to the character with some encouragement from one of the women. “I was kind of freaking out and didn’t think I could be authentic in this role. And then, one of them said to me, ‘No, I think you can do this.’ And she kind of gave me that confidence. And after that, it sort of just flowed out of me. I didn’t want a sense of myself in any way, so I went straight into the character and never stepped out of it.” Based on a novel by Pete Dexter, The Paperboy is set in late ’60s/early ’70s Florida. Kidman plays Charlotte Bless, who sashays with a period-fabulous wardrobe, fake eye-lashes and pillowy lips. She’s the object of young Jack’s (Efron) affections. He’s a young guy who’s aimless and living with his dad and soon-to-be stepmother. His older brother (Matthew McConaughey) is a journalist who comes to town to investigate death-row inmate Hillary Van Wetter’s (Cusack) conviction, who he believes is actually innocent. Meanwhile, love-struck Charlotte is in a tither trying to get her man out of jail — and then things grow very strange… “I never got to know John Cusack through the shoot,” said Kidman. “I never knew John [at all, in fact] and that’s when I [decided] I’m not going to get to know John. I wanted to deal with him as the character and have him deal with me as the character. I never, never spoke to him through the shoot as John, and that was a great way [to do this]. At the very end of the shoot he came to my trailer and he said, ‘Hi, I’m John’ (laughs). It was great!” While playing Charlotte, Kidman was very careful not to judge her. Because of the production’s very tight budget, Kidman — an A-lister who is one of the world’s most photographed actresses — said she went to second-hand stores and picked up $5 frocks and shoes ahead of the shoot in New Orleans and physically and figuratively assembled Charlotte’s persona. After picking her accent and look, she stayed with the character even after the day’s shoot ended. And there was one physical trait filmmaker Lee Daniels wanted from Kidman. “Lee was obsessed with the butt,” said Kidman. “He wanted my butt to be bigger. I said, ‘I can do that…'” Continuing about her character she added, “I don’t see her as crazy because I see very few people as crazy. For me, she’s a woman who’s obviously very damaged. And she’s scared of intimacy, which is the common thread for people who [form] relationships with people in prison. But once they get out, it’s often very different, which was something interesting for me.” Lee Daniels, the Oscar-nominated director of Precious (2009), who is African-American, said he felt racial tension while filming Paperboy in Louisiana’s bayous. The tension prompted him to ask Nicole Kidman to use the n-word in one scene, but she drew the line there. “I didn’t think it was right for the character honestly,” she said. “And I have a son who’s African-American. But the other stuff, I think the whole thing I try to do as an actor is fulfill a director’s vision. I have opinions and I’m there to stimulate and ignite things in the director, hopefully, but I’ve never tried to pull a director off his vision. So, the spreading the legs and all that were fine because I wanted to please Lee.” The Paperboy begins its theatrical run this Friday. Follow Brian Brooks on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Taken 2 grabs everything that was surprisingly enjoyable about the original film and batters it into the ground like… Liam Neeson beating up an Albanian human trafficking ring. The brute charm that the 2008 Taken found in portraying the Irish Oscar-nominee as an ultra-competent badass has withered to kitsch, and what’s left is tinged with even more xenophobia and weird paternal wish-fulfillment. Worse, the directing reins have been handed from greater Luc Besson protégé Pierre Morel to the lesser (but, granted, more awesomely named) Olivier Megaton, of Transporter 3 and Columbiana , and he slashes the action sequences to such incoherent bits that half the fights could have been shot on a sound stage thousands of miles from any star and chopped in after the fact. Why are we watching this again? Ah, yes, novelty. It is still a kick, though with rapidly diminishing returns, to see Neeson as the tersely tough CIA operative turned security contractor Bryan Mills. Bryan’s relentless when it comes to destroying bad guys but pure pudding when it comes his apparently still teenage daughter Kim ( Maggie Grace , who at 29 isn’t entirely believable as a kid still working on getting her drivers license) and ex-wife Lenore (Famke Janssen). Bryan isn’t fazed by the prospect of facing down a gang of Balkan toughs, but learning that his little girl has a boyfriend and didn’t tell him about it leaves him stricken. Lenore and the man she remarried are separated, and Bryan gallantly offers to fly her and their daughter to Istanbul, where he’ll meet them after completing a short job, unknowingly making them all targets for the relatives of the men he killed in the last movie, led by Murad Krasniqi (Croatian Serb actor Rade Serbedzija, the go-to choice for playing sinister Eastern Europeans). Whatever the structure of this criminal ring, it’s a family business and they have great contacts, seeing as members of the local police force and staffers at the luxury hotel at which Bryan and his family are staying are in the mafiosos’ pockets. When the Albanians come to take our not-so-helpless Americans — twist! — it’s Bryan and Lenore who end up getting captured, with the former growling his “Listen to me carefully” instructions to Kim as she attempts to come to her parents’ rescue. Taken 2 is dumb and as discardable as a box of cheap tourist trinkets, and its fights go so disappointingly easy the film’s end arrives almost arbitrarily. Like its predecessor, it’s also colored with some ugly American panic — ironic, given the international cast and crew involved in making it. The world abroad is filled with foreigners who can’t wait to grab your virginal blonde daughters or take unwarranted revenge for what was an elaborately violent but, you know, totally justifiable act of familial defense. Even before Bryan cottons to the fact that people are out to get them, he sternly forbids his daughter from wandering out of the hotel while he and Lenore take a private car to the market for lunch. Later, Bryan has Kim set off grenades in the middle of the city in order to use the sound to figure out how far she is from where he’s being held. If you’re visiting a foreign city, it’s best to have as little contact with it as possible — but committing acts of sizable destruction is apparently fine in service of your fellow travelers. Taken 2, which packs in an improbable car chase through the narrow streets of an old neighborhood and a oddly anticlimactic fist fight sequence in a Turkish bath, is ultimately a simplistic bad dad fantasy about a guy getting to righteously defend his family against the masses who are eager to do them harm. Bryan may have let his old job take him away from his wife and daughter, but now he gets to make up for being an absentee father by defending them against all comers, guns a-blazing. Unruffled and an expert on everything, he guides the grateful, whimpering women in his life to safety and in exchange gets to lecture the tribal head of the gangsters about how he needs to just accept the fact that the son is dead and deserved his fate. The film doesn’t make too much of the detail that Murad and his men are Muslim, but does suggest, in moments like the one just described, that there’s no reasoning with them. Taken 2 has the unfortunate bad timing of choosing for its action movie explosion playground a country currently experiencing some serious real-world tensions with neighboring Syria. But its sense of Americans-in-a-foreign-land entitlement is nonspecific enough that this isn’t particularly uncomfortable — it’s so broad, in fact, that it approaches but never quite embraces self-parody. If this is what producer/writer Luc Besson thinks audiences are looking for these days, he has a low opinion of people indeed. God help us if he turns out to be right. Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Pop legend Whitney Houston‘s mother Cissy is releasing a memoir about her daughter. Before it even hits shelves, movie producers are searching for the right…
And then hid the dead baby in a shoebox! Via Orlando Sentinel: A Polk County girl is facing capital murder charges this week after deputies say she strangled her newborn to death shortly after delivering him in her bathroom toilet, officials said. The 14-year-old tried to conceal her pregnancy from beginning to end. She wore loose-fitting clothing, manipulated pregnancy tests and finally, delivered a baby in secret at her home. Three days later, the girl’s mother smelled something foul in her daughter’s bedroom and found the full-term infant dead in a shoe box among a pile of dirty and discarded laundry items. Polk County Sheriff’s deputies were first alerted to the case Sept. 19 when the girl went to Lakeland Regional Medical Center for treatment for a purported miscarriage. She told her mother she had pain and accidentally flushed the fetus down the toilet. But when she talked to investigators, she confessed to having gone into full labor in the bathroom. According to the sheriff’s report, she put a towel in her mouth and turned on the bathroom water to drown out any sounds she would make during delivery. The 5-foot-3, 100-pound girl delivered the the 9.5-pound, 20.4-inch baby boy into the toilet. She lifted the moving baby and saw he had a pulse. According to the Sheriff’s Office, the girl then squeezed his neck for about a minute until he was no longer breathing. The girl cleaned up the bathroom, the baby and herself before putting the dead child in a box, according to information provided by Donna Wood, a Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman. Deputies said the girl’s mother denied she was pregnant though relatives suspected otherwise due to the girl’s changing appearance. She wore sweat pants and sweat shirts throughout the summer months to hide her growing abdomen and walked around the home with a blanket around her, an arrest report said. Wanting to protect the teen’s privacy, the mother allowed her daughter to administer two pregnancy tests in private that resulted in negative readings. The teen told investigators she killed the child because she was “afraid her relationship with her parents would change,” the arrest report said. An autopsy revealed the baby died of asphyxia from strangulation and blunt force trauma, officials said. The girl was arrested Thursday and charged with first-degree murder and aggravated child abuse. She is being held at the Polk County Juvenile Detention Facility.
