Kate Upton poses nude in the new issue of Contributor magazine. Whatever Contributor magazine is, you gotta tip your hat to it. Proving once again that anybody who thinks this she needs to lose weight is just insane, or bitter, the 20-year-old sported some lovely pieces from the Guess Marciano Collection during a revealing new photo shoot. Behold … While she has yet to go full-frontal in her career, we previously saw Kate Upton nude in Muse , and close to it in Sports Illustrated and GQ . Contributor ‘s photos differ somewhat from those publications. The gorgeous blonde’s legs are the true star of this spread, along with her enviable curves (which real women have, you anorexic haters). Click to enlarge more Kate Upton pictures below … [Photos: Contributor]
Lena Dunham, creator and star of HBO’s Girls , posted a picture and caption on Twitter recently that some of her followers were offended by. Wearing a scarf resembling a Muslim hijab (below), Dunham wrote “I had a real goth / fundamentalist attitude when I woke up from my nap.” Lena certainly didn’t mean to insult anyone by it, but in the wake of the Wisconsin Sikh temple shooting , many were not amused: After people went crazy, Lena Dunham apologized, saying she hadn’t even heard about the shooting: “Been in production and completely not reading the news.” “Didn’t realize what a bad time it was to make a joke like that. Not a good excuse, but an excuse nonetheless. I’m glad you keep me informed and I’m deleting those tweets.” “Will spend tonight reading my pile of old NY Times, contemplating the boundaries of humor. I try and learn something new every day.” Then, after some fans came to Lena’s defense and said she shouldn’t be criticized for the joke/photo, the 26-year-old insisted she deserved it … while mocking Kristen Stewart’s apology for cheating on Robert Pattinson with Rupert Sanders : “You SHOULD apologize if you make a mistake! I mean, not to the K Stew level, but … ” Ouch. Point Lena?
Lena Dunham, creator and star of HBO’s Girls , posted a picture and caption on Twitter recently that some of her followers were offended by. Wearing a scarf resembling a Muslim hijab (below), Dunham wrote “I had a real goth / fundamentalist attitude when I woke up from my nap.” Lena certainly didn’t mean to insult anyone by it, but in the wake of the Wisconsin Sikh temple shooting , many were not amused: After people went crazy, Lena Dunham apologized, saying she hadn’t even heard about the shooting: “Been in production and completely not reading the news.” “Didn’t realize what a bad time it was to make a joke like that. Not a good excuse, but an excuse nonetheless. I’m glad you keep me informed and I’m deleting those tweets.” “Will spend tonight reading my pile of old NY Times, contemplating the boundaries of humor. I try and learn something new every day.” Then, after some fans came to Lena’s defense and said she shouldn’t be criticized for the joke/photo, the 26-year-old insisted she deserved it … while mocking Kristen Stewart’s apology for cheating on Robert Pattinson with Rupert Sanders : “You SHOULD apologize if you make a mistake! I mean, not to the K Stew level, but … ” Ouch. Point Lena?
In second episode, Lena Dunham’s HBO series continues to highlight emotionally fraught encounters. By Amy Wilkinson, with additional reporting by Kara Warner Lena Dunham in “Girls” Photo: HBO If last week’s “Girls” premiere — in which Hannah (Lena Dunham) and Adam (Adam Driver) got uncomfortably coital on a couch — raised a few eyebrows, then Sunday’s “Vagina Panic” likely blew them clean off. The episode opened on Hannah and Adam naked and frantically in the throes of something we think might be passion — an awkward hook-up made even more so when Adam insisted upon a fantasy in which he was a drug dealer and Hannah was an 11-year-old girl he found on the street carrying a Cabbage Patch lunch box. That scenario likely told you everything you needed to know about the encounter, which ended with Adam offering Hannah an orange Gatorade. If audiences felt uncomfortable during the intimate moment, Dunham did her job, which she recently told MTV News is to examine the often emotionally fraught relationships we embark upon in our 20s. “It’s definitely going to evoke the feeling like, ‘Why is this self-respecting woman doing this, and if so, is she a self-respecting woman?’ But I do think that relationship statuses are becoming more and more ambiguous in our modern Facebook, texting, Twitter world,” she said. “And those relationships need to be explored because those relationships can be really interesting and can also be damaging, to have these relationships with someone who you don’t understand how invested in you they are.” But even emotionally invested relationships have their nadirs, including the fizzling romance between Marnie (Allison Williams) and Charlie (Christopher Abbott). In stark contrast to Hannah and Adam’s energetic display, the longtime couple couldn’t have been less enthused about what they were doing between the sheets. “It’s like I don’t even know how to make love to you anymore,” Charlie lamented the next morning. “He’s so busy respecting me, he looks right past me,” Marnie later confided to Hannah. But Hannah had other concerns besides Marnie’s lackluster love life. With her persistent “Forrest Gump”-based fear of AIDS and Adam’s admission that he didn’t always use condoms, Hannah decided she should get an STD test while accompanying Jessa (Jemima Kirke) to her abortion — an abortion, it turned out, Jessa didn’t need, as she got her period while being felt up by a random guy in a bar. Hannah did have her STD test, though, and we’ll find out those results next week. But perhaps the most intriguing sex story line from “Vagina Panic” was the one that didn’t involve sex at all. Visibly embarrassed, Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet) confided to Marnie that she is, in fact, a virgin. “Seriously, it’s like everyone and their mother has had sex but me,” she complained. “I hit a puppy once with my car. I only had my learner’s permit,” Marnie offered, not sure what else to say. And so it would seem that whether you’re having lots of sex or none at all, sex is and always will be a messy, complicated affair. Related Videos South by Southwest 2012
Critics praise HBO show while questioning whether it will connect beyond urban audiences. By John Mitchell Lena Dunham in “Girls” Photo: HBO HBO’s new comedy “Girls” is easily the most buzzed-about series debut so far this year. From the almost uncomfortably realistic sex scenes and sharp dialogue to series creator/producer/writer/star Lena Dunham’s Louis C.K.-style multitasking — not to mention the show’s similarities to and differences from that other landmark show about four single females in New York — people cannot stop talking about “Girls.” Luckily for everyone involved, most of the things being said range from good to rave. “Girls,” which premieres Sunday at 9 p.m. on HBO, has critics using words like “groundbreaking” and “revolutionary” to describe the series, about four friends (Dunham and co-stars Allison Williams, Jemima Kirke and Zosia Mamet) in their early 20s trying to get their lives off the ground in NYC. Here in the MTV Newsroom , we’re as enraptured with the show as everyone else seems to be, but in her otherwise rave review in Salon , Willa Paskin makes an observation about “Girls” that has come up often during chatter about the new series: that its specificity, minus the fantasy element that made middle America fall in love with “Sex and the City,” may make the show unrelatable to those outside East Coast urban centers. “My concern was that ‘Girls’ speaks so specifically and accurately to the experience of me and my census buddies — and to be clear, that’s urban white girls with safety nets; have at us in the comments — that people would either write it off as navel-gazing, snark at the innate privilege undergirding the whole thing, or find it unrelatable,” Paskin writes. That concern doesn’t diminish the show’s quality, though, and the site goes on to call the show “smart, bracing, funny, accurately absurd, confessional yet self-aware.” “Few series come out of the box as brilliant as ‘Girls’ does,” Tim Goodman rhapsodizes in The Hollywood Reporter. “The new HBO series from Lena Dunham (‘Tiny Furniture’) is one of the most original, spot-on, no-missed-steps series in recent memory. For her part, Dunham, who writes, directs, stars in, created and executive produces the series, is a talent as unique and refreshing to the medium as Louis C.K. — high praise indeed, as FX’s ‘Louie’ is one of the most critically acclaimed series on television.” Sex factors heavily in “Girls,” but unlike the glamorized romps we saw on its HBO foremother “SATC,” the sex acts depicted here are graphic, button-pushing and realistic but not gratuitous. According to Verne Gay in Newsday, the sex serves as a visual manifestation of the characters’ internal issues. In a four-star review, Gay writes, “Hannah [Dunham’s character] and the show are all about internal conflict and so is the humor, while sex — and fair warning, it’s pretty graphic here, which may be the handiwork of Apatow — is the metaphor for all that conflict. It’s grotesque, malignant, unpleasurable and a particularly devious torture chamber, at least for the women, who still submit to it.” The Los Angeles Times isn’t as unconditional in its praise, calling the show “nothing short of revolutionary” but “hard to love.” “There is a cool cleverness to the show that is both attractive and off-putting,” Mary McNamara writes. “The characters are flawed and hyper-aware of their flaws, the stories so bent on covering every angle of self-examination that there is no real role for the viewer to play. Which makes watching it an intellectual rather than emotional experience.” The show positions itself as being a far more realistic version of the girls in the big city trope that “SATC” glamorized, which the Atlantic Wire ‘s Richard Lawson sees as a reflection of the times the two shows premiered in. ” ‘SATC’ was fantasy and fable, with a few bits of relatable relationship stuff thrown to the commoners like chum. ‘Girls’ is something else; it’s a very particular, very of the moment dissection of mundanely funny minutiae, of boredom and anxiety in these brownly grim times,” Lawson writes. “Though I guess it’s possible the difference really is merely generational — the rich late ’90s gave us Sex, while the wobbly ’10s give us Girls, a witty and occasionally touching glimpse into our immediate neighbors’ lives. They’ve got something here, it just remains to be seen how big a thing it is.” That “Girls” could be the next big things seems like the consensus opinion of critics, but will this story of a group of friends struggling to discover themselves and succeed in the big city connect with audiences in Peoria, Illinois? Lawson seems to think it may. “Who knows, it could be that soon enough young women the nation over will be saying they’re ‘such a Hannah’ or ‘totally a Marnie,’ ” he writes. “Maybe fabulous is officially out. Maybe the new aspiration in these punishing times is, simply, to aspire.” Are you excited for the series premiere of “Girls” Sunday on HBO? Let us know if you’ll be watching in the comments below!
Another Oscars promo video, another vain attempt to show some personality and pep by the Academy; this time around the Oscars have tapped Mike Myers to do an uppity butler type straight out of the discards of the Austin Powers supporting character brainstorming boards, who teaches Oscar winner Kevin Kline the proper way to hold his statuette. If this kind of humor tickles you silly and makes you set your TV calendar for Sunday, then hold on to your pants and chill a few cans of Ensure! We are in for a riot , people. I mean, what says hilarious and relevant more than KEVIN KLINE and MIKE MYERS?? Sigh. It’s not even funny to joke about how unfunny these bits are. I refuse to believe this is really the best that Funny or Die could do with the Oscars. Given the choice, I vote “Die.” Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
It’s awfully simplistic to say so but with Lena Dunham ‘s forthcoming HBO dramedy series GIRLS , which marks the latest milestone in her rapidly ascending career, the comparisons draw themselves — comparisons to Dunham’s own prior work and to all that’s come before in attempting to mine the modern single female experience for insights and laughs in film and television. But whether you’re a fan or a Dunham skeptic, it’s worth taking a look at the show’s first trailer to see for yourself what to expect from the developing filmmaker, especially with folks like Judd Apatow shepherding her post- Tiny Furniture . Dunham’s career-starting indie pic Tiny Furniture (her sophomore feature) earned equal shares of praise and criticism upon release in 2010, but it unquestionably put her brand of wry, neurotic comedy on the radar and demonstrated Dunham’s willingness to expose herself, warts and all, as a writer and performer. GIRLS , also set in New York and concerned with young women on the brink of figuring out their lives, very much expands on the Dunham brand but shows a marked maturity; Dunham stars in front of the camera in addition to writing and directing, and she’s joined by three strong supporting actresses (Allison Williams, Jemima Kirke, Zosia Mamet) who flesh out the series’ circle of twentysomething friends. The similarities to Sex and the City can be found, but they’re also deliberate; characters fully acknowledge that they’re of a generation weaned on SATC ‘s fantasy, just one of the many pop references they cite as somewhat (painfully) self-aware New York transplants. Truth be told, I was sold after previewing the first three episodes, especially given where GIRLS falls in the vast range of female-slanted shows on the air of late; it debuts on HBO this April and bridges the gap between the current class of girl-oriented network fare and the more daring stuff found on cable these days, but also captures a range of interests and talent so innately of this generation. For example: The trailer below teases appearances by Chris Eigeman ( Metropolitan ) and Peter Scolari ( Bosom Buddies )! What’s more, an upcoming episode features a particularly juicy turn by Lonely Island’s Jorma Taccone that I’ve been thinking about repeatedly since. This is TV (HBO’s scheduled a 10-episode season to run) but more important than this or that format is the idea that Dunham’s developing her voice as a storyteller in line with what we’ve seen previously. She’s seemingly been given a considerable amount of rope to keep doing her thing (Apatow’s involvement as a producer likely has something to do with that) and it should be interesting to watch as she keeps one foot in television and one in film. GIRLS debuts at SXSW next month and premieres April 15th on HBO.
This felt like a fait accompli from the moment it was announced , but, hey: HBO has picked up Lena Dunham’s Girls from executive producer Judd Apatow. The show, which will begin shooting in the spring, will follow the lives of a group of girls in their 20s. “Lena Dunham quickly established herself as an important young talent with [ Tiny Furniture ]” said HBO president Sue Naegle in a release. The countdown to Dunham being announced as a cast member in Apatow’s untitled 2012 Paul Rudd-Leslie Mann reunion starts now. [ HBO ]
