More details emerge about ol Georgy Porgy and his “interesting” family past… Did George Zimmerman’s Retired Judge Father Help Keep Him Out Of Jail? Robert Zimmerman, a former Orange County magistrate judge, recently wrote a letter to The Orlando Sentinel defending his son, who’s been dragged through the mud for shooting the unarmed 17-year-old last month. In the letter, the senior Zimmerman asks people not to jump to conclusions and insists that his son didn’t follow the young boy home as he walked through their gated community. “He would be the last to discriminate for any reason whatsoever. The media portrayal of George as a racist could not be further from the truth. At no time did George follow or confront Mr. Martin. When the true details of the event became public, and I hope that will be soon, everyone should be outraged by the treatment of George Zimmerman in the media,” wrote Robert Zimmerman. Now more info is being dug up on his “victimized” son through public records and revealing his checkered past. According to a records search on George, he was previously arrested for domestic violence, resisting an officer without violence and most shockingly, resisting an officer with violence — a felony charge that surely could have landed him in prison. All three of those arrests, however, were mysteriously closed with no semblance of charges for the Florida resident. So how was someone with a violent past including that of battery against an officer able to carry a 9 mm handgun? Maybe that’s a question Robert Zimmerman should answer. This is a lil’ TOO convenient if you ask us! All these people going on TV vouching for this guy must have never heard about their “friend” and his violent past. Do you think Zimmerman’s family intervened to keep him out of the whoscow? Source Hit the flip to find out the latest news about the Black Panther leader that put the hit out on Zimmerman… Image via WENN
Critics are a bit grossed out by the raunchy comedy but still charmed by leading man Paul Rudd. By Kara Warner Paul Rud and Jennifer Aniston in “Wanderlust” Photo: Universal Fans of the big-screen pairing of Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd have likely been waiting for the two likable actors to reunite since their 1998 romantic dramedy “The Object of My Affection.” At long last, that wait is over with the release of “Wanderlust,” a comedy in which Aniston and Rudd play a stressed-out Manhattan couple who end up traveling through a hippie-ish community that teaches them a lesson or two about what’s really important in life. The critical response is at 55 percent “Fresh” over at Rotten Tomatoes , with some folks enjoying the awkward humor and unflappable charm of Paul Rudd and others having issues with Rudd and Aniston’s schtick. Read on as we frolic through the “Wanderlust” reviews! The Irresistible Charm of Paul Rudd “Paul Rudd is the best friend a movie comedy can have. He always delivers the goods and something extra, usually something wild and weirdly wonderful. In ‘Wanderlust,’ Rudd lets the funny fly. Like the movie he’s in, Rudd only seems normal. Inside, it’s all deliriously unhinged. Rudd plays George, an uptight Wall Street suit squeezed into a Manhattan micro-loft with his documentarian wife Linda (Jennifer Aniston) until the recession shuts them both down. Off they go to Georgia where his idiot brother (Ken Marino, the film’s co-writer) offers him a job in his porta-potty business. Unacceptable. So George and Linda take shelter in Elysium, a commune where craziness reigns along with pot, acid, dodgy hygiene and free love. When the luscious Eva (Malin Akerman) offers to get it on with him, George unravels his straight laces. Here comes the Rudd time capsule moment: In a mirror, George rehearses talking dirty to Eva, taking the word ‘dick’ and stretching it into syllables of near-pornographic hilarity. It helps that Rudd is once again working with director and co-writer David Wain, as he did in ‘Role Models’ and the immortal 2001 indie ‘Wet Hot American Summer.’ ” — Peter Travers, Rolling Stone The Comedy and Quirk Factors “In sophisticated comedy, what’s funny is the tension between proper manners and the nasty or sexy subtext. Whereas in low comedy, there are no manners, and the nasty or sexy subtext is right there on the surface. And then there’s ‘Wanderlust,’ in which the subtext is blasted through megaphones — the characters say so insanely much you want to scream. The satire is as broad as a battleship and equally bombarding. But it takes guts to do a comedy this big without gross-out slapstick, and the writers and the actors are all in. … You say it sounds like a bunch of stereotypes — and 40-year-old stereotypes? The defense concedes the point. It’s not fresh terrain. But this tribe of hippies is also a tribe of marvelously inventive comic actors doing a fair amount of inspired improvisation and grooving on the mindset.” — David Edelstein, NPR The Final Word, Pro-Con-Pro Style “The role of an uptight fish out of water is what Rudd was born for, and he plays George with the congeniality and improvisatorial brio for which he’s become deservedly famous. He and Theroux, who’s barely recognizable beneath a thatch of long hair and a beard, deliver the most well-earned laughs in ‘Wanderlust,’ which otherwise traffics in tired jokes about menstrual cycles, placenta soup and rubbing your fingers together instead of clapping. … Between this film and last summer’s ‘Horrible Bosses,’ Aniston’s coyness — starring in explicit movies without having to be explicit herself — seems to be becoming her stock in trade. It’s not a particularly commendable one, and ‘Wanderlust’ does little to disprove that she’s still a star more suited to TV rather than the big screen. As for Rudd, he still has charm to burn, even playing a type he’s long since outgrown. Like George observing the overgrown children of Elysium, it might be time for Rudd to move on.” — Ann Hornaday, The Washington Post “The production has all the style and subtlety — and, admittedly, the exuberance — of TV sketch material. A psychedelic sequence makes Madonna’s halftime show look like high art. Both the straight and hippie realms are populated by parallel groups of fevered eccentrics; the cast includes Mr. Marino, Justin Theroux, Malin Akerman, Joe Lo Truglio, Kathryn Hahn, Kerri Kenney, Lauren Ambrose and Linda Lavin. Alan Alda is the commune’s venerable founder, Carvin, whose brain long ago failed the acid test. ‘Wanderlust’ is nothing if not strenuous, strident and gross, and most of it fails the comedy test.” — Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal “There are so many things to feel guilty about liking in the pure and prurient guilty pleasure that is ‘Wanderlust.’ Starring Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston, this is a comedy of no manners about finding your bliss and escaping the modern grind. The laughter is served up naughty and nice, and frequently au naturel, earning it an R rating when perhaps RR (really raunchy) would have been more appropriate. Appropriateness, however, has pretty much been jettisoned by the filmmakers, who have opted instead for the good-fun-found-in-bad-taste tradition of ‘The Hangover.’ Directed by David Wain and co-written with his frequent comic collaborator, Ken Marino, the film is, overall, a very wobbly affair starting with all the dangling naked body parts that greet George (Rudd) and Linda (Aniston) when the couple pulls into a free-love commune they mistake for a B&B.” — Betsy Sharkey, Los Angeles Times Check out everything we’ve got on “Wanderlust.” For breaking news, celebrity columns, humor and more — updated around the clock — visit MTVMoviesBlog.com . Related Videos MTV First: Paul Rudd & Jennifer Aniston Related Photos ‘Wanderlust’
If Kim Novak sincerely thought that hearing music cues from Vertigo in The Artist was tantamount to artistic “rape,” then wait until she gets a look at the expropriation binge underway at Press Play . The site, known for its terrific video essays on all things film, is in the waning hours of a ” Vertigo ed” contest that has found Bernard Herrmann’s celebrated “Scene D’Amour” theme applied to everything from Star Wars to Freddy Got Fingered to — praise God — Jackass 2 . Check out the latter, priceless, obviously NSFW clip below, and find dozens more (and/or submit your own) videos over at Press Play. Happy Friday! You were done working for the most part anyway, right?
“ That was excruciating,” exhaled director Kieran Darcy-Smith as the lights came up on the Sundance opening night premiere of his first feature, the Australian dramatic thriller Wish You Were Here . The theater buzzed with appreciation, sure enough, and the film’s emotional blows strike as sharply thanks to strong performances by Joel Edgerton and Felicity Price. But movies like these almost always prompt that irksome question: Are we all at risk of suffering a case of the film festival goggles? Wish You Were Here follows two Aussie couples (Edgerton and Price, Antony Starr and Teresa Palmer) who go on holiday in Southeast Asia only to see one of their party go missing, with ramifications that ripple out like shockwaves when they return home with fried nerves and secrets galore. Shot beautifully in Australia and Cambodia, it’s a slow-burn character drama that begins as a missing persons tale before switching gears to domestic drama/paranoia thriller in its rapidly escalating last act, doling out bits of information about what really happened on that last drug-fueled night. It’s easy to see why Wish You Were Here was chosen to open the festival; just two years ago the Aussie import Animal Kingdom premiered at Sundance, leading the charge for a new wave of Australian cinema. Wish You Were Here unites Animal Kingdom actors Darcy-Smith and Edgerton, whose star has risen considerably in the past few years, under the Blue-Tongue Films banner they founded with Edgerton’s brother Nash. But while there’s a lot to like in Here , it doesn’t live up to David Michôd’s explosive 2010 feature debut. The film flashes between moments in time: Married couple David and Alice (Edgerton and Price) and Alice’s sister Steph (Palmer) struggle to adjust to normal life but are plagued by memories of the night Steph’s boyfriend Jeremy (Starr) disappeared. Are there clues to his fate in their foggy recollections? Did he willingly leave everything behind, or did something awful happen to him? What begins as a somber exploration of survivor’s guilt – inspired by a similar event that happened to mutual friends of Price and Darcy-Smith when two couples went on vacation and returned minus a member of their party – unfolds into a far less realistic thriller that throws almost every cliché imaginable at the screen. Still, the performances are so uniformly impressive that they often overshadow the plot machinations, if only for those times when we’re lost in the crush of a devastated face, or a desperate, tragically human moment. Edgerton in particular does great subtle, tortured work; his David is a family man roiling with conflicting emotions, slowly losing his grasp on his own psyche. Price, who co-wrote the script with husband Darcy-Smith, admitted to writing the film partly to give herself a great role; as a result Wish You Were Here ably highlights her talents as Alice, who finds her marriage to David unraveling in the wake of their friend’s disappearance. Unfortunately, in the service of giving the leads meaty acting bits to play out, the film relies too heavily on soap opera-like plot devices, shortchanging characters like Palmer’s reckless Steph in favor of upping the dramatic complications. (Palmer nevertheless does her best with a role that deserves more exploration and explanation.) Some of these moments hit hard, and effectively, but it says something that with an 83-minute runtime Wish You Were Here feels exhaustively laden with too many twists and turns and melodramatic events. In the immediate afterglow of Sundance’s opening night (which saw three additional films premiere to mostly positive reactions: Searching for Sugar Man , Hello I Must Be Going , and Queen of Versailles ) the audience reaction to Wish You Were Here was quite warm, with Twitter reactions ranging from mixed to positive over its performances and cutting emotional impact. But fast-forward to an eventual release and I can see it being mashed, wrongfully, into the couples-on-holiday-thriller subgenre previously populated by your Turistas and Perfect Getaways . It’s possible the “From the stars of Animal Kingdom ” tag bumps it beyond simple genre categorization, but does it deserve to be placed into the same terrain as that vicious breath of fresh air? Not quite. Here is a beautifully made but flawed directorial debut for Darcy-Smith and certainly an acting showcase for its cast, but it demonstrates the cardinal rule of watching movies at festivals, where anticipation and atmosphere can inflate a film’s profile: Don’t blow your wad on a film that’s not quite up to snuff when the festival’s just starting. Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter . Find all of Movieline’s Sundance 2012 coverage here .
Here is a video featuring Artist wonder dog and awards-season gadabout Uggie telling viewers what movie made him cry and offering some insights on his Oscar chances. Some guy named George Clooney is in it, too. Did I mention that it’s Friday ? [ W Magazine via PeoplePets ]
In one of the strangest movie moments in 2012, it appears that George Lucas may be pulling off something he hasn’t done in at least 20 or so years—releasing a movie that appears to be, well, good. That’s right, Lucas has produced and helped fund Red Tails, the upcoming film about the Tuskegee Airmen, the Broadcasting platform : Vimeo Source : ScreenCrave.com Discovery Date : 11/01/2012 18:44 Number of articles : 2
Via The Playlist , here’s your chance to finally weigh in on seven minutes of the George Lucas-produced, Anthony Hemingway-directed Tuskegee Airmen biopic Red Tails . The film opens Jan. 20, but your jaw drops effective immediately. Here: Jen and I will go first (Lucas quote via USA Today ): Your turn:
In a new campaign video, Gingrich praises George Washington: Keep reading this post . . . Broadcasting platform : YouTube Source : The Corner Discovery Date : 26/12/2011 15:14 Number of articles : 2
