The latest in a string of big budget studio movie lawsuits has been lobbed at the makers of Men in Black 3 , with extra Danika Gerner claiming that she was outfitted with a costume that led to her suffering “serious bodily injuries” during filming last May. The curious part: Reports give no clues as to just how Gerner’s costume injured her, or which background character she played. More on the litigious wardrobe malfunction after the jump. Per THR : “Gerner alleges that the costume department provided her with a costume in a ‘defective and dangerous condition’ and that the defendants were ‘negligent in failing to take suitable precautions’ for her safety.” Gerner claims her injuries still prevent her from working, which really makes me wonder – what kind of costume could put you out for over a year? My money’s on an outfit from MIB3 ‘s 1969-set Warhol party, teeming with go-go dancing refugees from the Austin Powers movies. Or maybe… [ THR ]
Don’t worry, no Prometheus spoilers here, just a peek into the brain of Sir Ridley Scott , who opened an interview with press by musing on… tape recorders. And Star Trek . And light speed. Naturally. From Bloody Disgusting : Ridley enters and sees our tape recorders. “Look at this technology. Jesus Christ. 40 years ago when Kirk said ‘Beam me up, Scotty’ we used to think that was fucking ridiculous, remember? Seriously, that’s been 40 years and then when he says the ‘disintegration’ of his matter into the ‘reintegration’ of his matter in the next space, that right there is light speed. So they touched on light speed. I’ve talked to NASA about this and they’ve said that’s light speed. So ‘Can you do it?’ They said ‘Yeah. Have you got seven glasses of water?’ I go ‘Not the seven glasses of water trick, please.’ There were all scientists in the room and he started to explain to me the relativity and the speed of light. ‘Can you do it?’ ‘Yeah.’ He said the only barrier is ‘us.’ He said, I can mathematically explain how, but we haven’t gotten there with that.” Actual Prometheus spoilers and hints , discussion of the film’s evolution from Scott’s idea called Alien: Paradise , and the moment when he forgets Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s name (you know, “the Frenchman”) in the full chat courtesy of Bloody Disgusting, if you dare… [ Bloody Disgusting ]
Mickey (Michael Biehn), the paranoid building superintendent unwillingly responsible for allowing the characters in The Divide to survive the apocalypse, didn’t plan for or want company. And who can blame him? These people are awful . Like so many groups left in a survival situations (at least in movies, books and MTV reality shows), they shed their veneer of civilization with alarming rapidity as their lives take a turn for the worse. Written by Karl Mueller and Eron Sheean and directed by Xavier Gens, who earned a place for himself in the New French Extreme movement with his 2007 Frontier(s) before heading to Hollywood to make Hitman , The Divide is a stylish and would-be shocking variation on a familiar scenario, in which the horrors isolated survivors inflict on each other turn out to be worse than those lurking outside. Gens has talent, if also tendencies to steer the visuals into the music video realm, but he treats the characters here like mobile props and nothing more — the curve of a shaved skull or a tear trickling down a cheek just another bit of nice art direction on the gradual path toward the inevitable destruction of everyone on screen. What happened to the outside world is left to speculation — what looks like a bomb hits the city in the first scene, sending the inhabitants of a New York apartment building scrambling downstairs in search of shelter. Eight people force their way into Mickey’s shelter in the basement before he locks the door. There’s angular heroine Eva (Lauren German), her whiny French fiancé Sam (Iván González), Delvin (Courtney B. Vance), Bobby (Michael Eklund), brothers Josh (Milo Ventimiglia) and Adrien (Ashton Holmes), and Marilyn (Rosanna Arquette) and her daughter Wendy (Abbey Thickson). Mickey has food and water saved up, though not enough — at least not after strange men in hazmat suits barge into the underground shelter, kidnap the little girl, and weld the door shut on the remaining inhabitants. Hell may be other people, but it can also be scenarios in which people endlessly bicker their way to certain doom (this is why I find The Walking Dead so hard to watch). Power games, alliances and divisions break out as time passes with no hope of rescue or an end, and as the characters grow more unstable and unhealthy, teeth falling out, hair growing patchy as they sit in the dark. Josh establishes himself as the alpha male, sharing Marilyn with Bobby in a scenario that degrades into violent sexual slavery — Arquette deserves either kudos or condolences for the degree to which she surrenders to a role that finds her being chained up, continually degraded and humiliated, treated like a dog, and smearing makeup on her face like some kind of crazed goth dolly. Eva is forced to protect Sam, who’s at the bottom of the totem pole, though she’s drawn to Adrien, who holds on to his sanity as the situation falls apart. These characters are at best doodles, and none of the performances are able to tease more depth out of them — the hints at history between them, like how Sam and Eva met, or the strained relationship between Josh and Adrien, are so sparse that when they’re thrown in they confuse more than they illuminate. The sprinkles of political relevance are clunkier and more problematic. Any film these days that includes the destruction of the New York skyline is going to calls up echoes of 9/11, but The Divide strongly suggests that Mickey was a firefighter working that day whose issues and isolation are all related to that trauma, from his convictions that “the ragheads” are responsible for bombing the city to his creation of the underground bunker, decorated with an American flag. (Admittedly, Gens makes the Frenchman the least likable character — if the film’s a rough metaphor for a world in decline, the U.S. isn’t alone in taking on the chin.) At two hours, with its elegiac tone and deliberate pacing, The Divide may lose gorehounds before it gets around to the finger chopping and corpse dismemberment. While there certainly are moments that will have the sensitive covering their eyes, the film’s most disturbing imagery isn’t actually related to carnage. A segment in which Josh heads outside to attempt to figure out what the suited-up soldiers are up to has a hallucinatory, medical nightmare feel to it, rich with the promise of terrible things going on just beyond our comprehension. Later, two characters shave their heads and eyebrows and transform themselves into near-alien figures out of a Matthew Barney video. Gens’s deftness with these visuals, and with the claustrophobic glide of his camera through the dim warrens of the underground space in which The Divide is almost exclusively set, is undeniable. It’s his apparent disinterest in the people filling it that makes the film such an uphill battle, in which the world ends and you can’t wait for the survivors just kill each other off already. Follow Alison Wilmore on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
‘I wanted [Taylor] to perform a very natural way, to make her look very European,’ says Yoann Lemoine. By Jocelyn Vena Taylor Swift in “Back to December” Photo: Big Machine Records In her video for “Back to December,” Taylor Swift finds herself and her home covered in snow while she contemplates the best way to apologize to her former beau, played by model Guntars Asmanis , for breaking his heart. Director Yoann Lemoine tells MTV News that he had a certain aesthetic he wanted to capture for the chilly clip, which was shot partly in Nashville (for Swift’s scenes) and Upstate New York (for Asmanis’ scenes) in December. “I wanted the video to be very simple and metaphorical at the same time,” the Frenchman explained. “I wanted to work on the coldness of feelings in a very visual way, playing with the snow, the distance and sadness. [Taylor] really liked it. The winter theme was very interesting to me — the snow, the ice. I even wanted the guy to go swim in frozen lakes at some point. It was not possible, but I wanted to translate how you feel sometime when your heart is broken. The snow in the apartment is supposed to show how connected she is to him. He is outside, in the cold, but somehow she is connected to him.” Swift pretty much let Lemoine have control over the clip’s look and feel, although it was her idea to have her character leave the letter for her beloved. As for Swift’s look in the video, Lemoine says he was focused on making sure that it all felt real and that she came off as accessible. “I have been going through a lot of videos and pictures of her on the Internet trying to find the best angle and style for her. I wanted people to feel like they would get to know her very intimately, and really trust in what she was saying,” he explained. “I wanted her to perform a very natural way, to make her look very European. This was the main challenge to me. All of Taylor’s world is very far away from my culture, but I saw something in her that could be very rough and heartbreaking; far from the princess glittery outfits and glam that she often goes for.” As for Asmanis, the duo agreed that he was the perfect fit for the part. “I wanted a boy that was fragile and beautiful. I didn’t want to go for a hunk or a perfect cheesy boy that would have killed the sincerity of the video,” Lemoine said. “I just imagined a face that would enhance the fragility of the video. We did cast a couple of boys and both Taylor and I loved Guntars.” Related Artists Taylor Swift
Christian Audiger who? Jon Gosselin, who loves his Ed Hardy t-shirts almost as hard as he does his bluetooth headset and Hailey Glassman, says he’s launching a clothing line. “I’m doing a line called Gosselin Gear, Jon said while hanging out at the Hotel on Rivington during the House of Hype post-VMA party (of course).
It’s a bit of a sad day here at E! Online. We just got confirmation that it doesn’t look like our favorite Frenchman, Gilles Marini, will be reprising his role as Samantha…
