Last week I posted SOPHIE SIMMONS FAT IN A BIKINI …because for some reason despite her fatness, I was kinda digging it… Historically I hate fat girls, especially the one I married, and I am only into skinny, half dead looking corpses or fit chicks…while sloppy fat just makes me disgusted by their laziness…especially when you have Gene Simmons money and can afford to pay someone to cook for you and kick your ass in the gym….there’s no excuse…making her laziness even more ugly…but I still liked it… Well after some research I call google, I saw these pics she posted to her social media and I can’t help but laugh at how relevant they are…you see she’s a fat chick according to the paparazzi shots of her, but in her selfies she’s all stretched out and at the right angles…manages to pull off not fat…reminding us of the SECRET INTERNET FATTIES and the fact that girls know their angles…and can trick us into their web of miserable lies…and whether I want in on this bitch fat or not….doesn’t matter…the fact remains she tried to trick the world…and here’s her David Copperfield Illusion….that happens everyday #nofilter.
In some cry for attention, trying to be shocking and exciting, an artist who really puts herself out there and is probably hoping people will give her the same attention they give Rihanna, because you know Rihanna is her husband’s employee, and wives always hate the younger hotter money makers in their husband’s office. Beyonce has put on a weird glitter titty shirt. If she’s going for sex appeal, Beyonce has failed, this is more of a moms gathering in the park to protest breast feeding, you know some crazy hippie celebration of the woman form and natural feeding process….but I’m gonna assume Beyonce is too into herself to bother with breast feeding, that shit’s for the wet nurse, she’s got music to make and dances to choreograph. No matter what this is, you know that Beyonce is into herself and this is obviously just an extension of that love. Now I’m sure these aren’t her nipples, and that they are just costume, because Beyonce nipples are probably much more pepperoni shaped, and aiming more towards the ground, but it’s like putting prosthetic tits on a bitch who needs tgen, the illusion is there, and even if it doesn’t do much for me or for Beyonce, it still happened…. Next stop will be her glitter covered dick suit. TO SEE THE REST OF HER CONCERT PICS FOLLOW THIS LINK
A controversial Israeli law banning too-skinny models is in effect as of January 1, 2013, prompting praise, controversy and debate over how much weight it will hold. So to speak. The law requires models to prove they have maintained a Body Mass Index (BMI) of at least 18.5 for three months prior to a fashion shoot or show. That means a 5’8” woman can weigh 119 pounds minimum. The law also requires advertisers to disclose if they have retouched or doctored photos. “This law is another step in the war against eating disorders,” said physician and law co-sponsor Rachel Adatto (with Danny Danon) of the act. Underweight models, she explained, “can no longer serve as role models for innocent young people who adopt and copy the illusion of thinness.” But critics of the law in this country say it is misguided, focusing on weight instead of health, and doomed to fail due to the muscle of the fashion industry. “I think it’s an approach that isn’t going to work,” eating disorder expert Susan Ice, V.P. of clinical services at Renfrew Center, told Yahoo! Shine . “I’ve learned that designers are really artists, and we have free speech here.” “We can’t tell anyone how to do art. If designers want women to look like boys or designers want women to look like 8-year-olds, you’re not going to change that.” But a champion of the new law, Adi Barkan, a former fashion-model agent in Israel, says the threat of eating disorders and body image issues is too great. “I became immersed in this world very quickly. I gave up the agency and photography and delved into the dark world of anorexics and bulimics,” he said. “I realized that only legislation can change the situation. There was no time to educate so many people, and the change had be forced on the industry.” “There was no time to waste, so many girls were dieting to death.” Even critics, including Ice, say there’s no denying that images from Hollywood and the fashion industry can be difficult for young women to deal with. “Certainly I don’t believe the modeling industry has caused the rise in eating disorders, but it makes it harder,” she says of the struggle faced by many. “It’s a difficult recovery environment, worshiping thinness as the beauty ideal.” One amazing upside? These Kate Upton bikini photos . No scary-low BMI worries on that page. Just a whole lot of distractions at work and school.
George Zimmerman has filed a lawsuit against NBC over the way the network edited and played a 911 call following the shooting of Trayvon Martin in February. Zimmerman claims NBC made him look like a “hostile racist.” Trayvon Martin 911 Call NBC launched an internal investigation over the Trayvon Martin 911 call after it aired the recording, which featured Zimmerman quotes outside of their original context. The tape played on the air made it sound like Zimmerman immediately told police that Martin, who he says he shot in self-defense, was black, without being prompted. In actuality, the full George Zimmerman 911 call reveals he only said Martin “looks black” when responding to a question from the dispatcher about Trayvon’s race. Zimmerman, who has been charged with second-degree murder , accuses NBC of creating a “false and defamatory misimpression using the oldest form of yellow journalism.” He cites the recording above as proof of this allegation. NBC, his lawyer says, ” manipulated Zimmerman’s words , splicing together disparate parts of the recording to create the illusion of statements that he never actually made.” Whether a judge and/or jury agree remains to be seen. Free on bail and using autograph sales to raise cash, the 28-year-old suing for unspecified damages, citing defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Zimmerman, a former neighborhood watch coordinator for his gated community in Sanford, Florida, fatally shot the 17-year-old Martin on February 26. He has claimed the shooting was in self-defense. His supporters have long held that he is a victim of media bias in the case that became a sensational national obsession, and should be exonerated.
It’s a curious truth about Tyler Perry that, when not in drag and playing the outsized role of Madea , he’s a recessive screen presence, appearing a little uncomfortable in his own body, awkward and not particularly emotive. When he gives himself a role like the one in Good Deeds, it fits as part of the character, but anchoring a potential action franchise like Alex Cross , he looks like he’d rather be somewhere else. As the title homicide detective, the protagonist of a series of books by James Patterson and one who’s been played in earlier screen incarnations by Morgan Freeman (in Kiss the Girls and Along Came a Spider ), Perry can’t summon the charisma necessary to make a role that’s essentially a melange of police and criminal profiling clichés into something that works either in a serious or schlocky mode. His ungainliness in the action sequences even provoked the odd unintentional laugh at the screening I attended, though he’s hardly the only one involved in this film who’s on the hook for that. Alex Cross is filled with accidental comedy, and while it’s a mess in any traditional movie sense, it’s has its moments of preposterous fun that come in the form of a nonsensical plot and a fabulously competent, scenery-gnawing villain. That villain, who earns the nickname “Picasso” for his habit of leaving charcoal sketches at the scenes of the murders he’s committed, is played by Matthew Fox with a near-Tourette’s style twitchiness. The guy’s a hired gun, we know from the outset, but he’s also completely cray-cray, which Fox indicates by keeping his eyes open wide enough for us to always be able to see the full circle of his sclera. With an array of tattoos and seemingly no body fat, Picasso looks to be somewhere between a meth addict and a Marine. Whatever his background, he’s not getting paid enough for the convoluted acrobatics he goes through to take down his targets. Buying his way into underground fight rings, scuba-diving through pipes, train takeovers — the dude is not one to just run up to someone on the street and shoot them in the head. In addition to his art fetish, he also has a thing for torturing people and compulsively doing pull-ups. He is, in other words, hilarious, and Fox’s over-the-top portrayal provides a curiously fitting counterbalance to Perry’s underplaying, as the two engage in a cat-and-mouse pursuit through Detroit. Picasso is targeting members of an international corporation led by Leon Mercier (Jean Reno) that plans to revitalize the city by making it a center of nanotechnology. The only detail that’s important there is that the high-ranking members of the company are all different varieties of asshole foreigners, from the slinky sadist Fan Yau (Stephanie Jacobsen) to germaphobe German Erich Nunemacher (Werner Daehn) to the smug Frenchman Mercier, with his fancy cognac and dismissive attitude. Keep your hands off our troubled city, damn international investors! Cross lives with his wife, Maria ( Carmen Ejogo , who stole Sparkle away from Jordin Sparks but is in a thankless part here), two kids and sassy mother (Cicely Tyson), and works with his best friend since childhood Tommy (Edward Burns, in a role probably described in its entirety as “Irish-American cop”). His only distinguishing characteristic is his Sherlock Holmes-worthy psychological profiling abilities, which he shows off by listing every detail of his wife’s day based on her appearance. He doesn’t put these skills to impressive use on the case, however, misreading Picasso as someone who’d be uninterested in chasing down the cops pursuing him — a judgment call that causes him a world of grief. Alex Cross was directed by Fast and the Furious and Stealth director Rob Cohen, who approaches the film with a bewildering haphazardness. Whenever Fox’s character gets angry, the picture splinters like he’s the can’t-look-directly-at-him baddie from Danny Boyle’s Sunshine. A climactic fight scene gets so chopped up that it’s impossible to place the characters participating in it, while seemingly mundane sequences of a character researching something on a computer are livened up by the camera being shaken as if we’d get bored if something weren’t moving. And boring is something that Alex Cross , for all of its problems, is not. Despite the rebuilding-of-Detroit angle, there’s little specific to the city depicted in Cross and his team’s investigation. And there’s certainly no attempt to tie in how sorely understaffed the actual Detroit Police Department is. The film does finds a few spectacular repurposed locations that it puts to good use — a church-turned-MMA-ring and an old theater that’s been converted into a parking lot both serve as striking backdrops for mostly silly combat sequences. Alex Cross is a misfire, but it’s sometimes an entertaining one — enough to make you curious about who else Perry could go up against in another installment, and just how much overacting would take place. Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
It’s a curious truth about Tyler Perry that, when not in drag and playing the outsized role of Madea , he’s a recessive screen presence, appearing a little uncomfortable in his own body, awkward and not particularly emotive. When he gives himself a role like the one in Good Deeds, it fits as part of the character, but anchoring a potential action franchise like Alex Cross , he looks like he’d rather be somewhere else. As the title homicide detective, the protagonist of a series of books by James Patterson and one who’s been played in earlier screen incarnations by Morgan Freeman (in Kiss the Girls and Along Came a Spider ), Perry can’t summon the charisma necessary to make a role that’s essentially a melange of police and criminal profiling clichés into something that works either in a serious or schlocky mode. His ungainliness in the action sequences even provoked the odd unintentional laugh at the screening I attended, though he’s hardly the only one involved in this film who’s on the hook for that. Alex Cross is filled with accidental comedy, and while it’s a mess in any traditional movie sense, it’s has its moments of preposterous fun that come in the form of a nonsensical plot and a fabulously competent, scenery-gnawing villain. That villain, who earns the nickname “Picasso” for his habit of leaving charcoal sketches at the scenes of the murders he’s committed, is played by Matthew Fox with a near-Tourette’s style twitchiness. The guy’s a hired gun, we know from the outset, but he’s also completely cray-cray, which Fox indicates by keeping his eyes open wide enough for us to always be able to see the full circle of his sclera. With an array of tattoos and seemingly no body fat, Picasso looks to be somewhere between a meth addict and a Marine. Whatever his background, he’s not getting paid enough for the convoluted acrobatics he goes through to take down his targets. Buying his way into underground fight rings, scuba-diving through pipes, train takeovers — the dude is not one to just run up to someone on the street and shoot them in the head. In addition to his art fetish, he also has a thing for torturing people and compulsively doing pull-ups. He is, in other words, hilarious, and Fox’s over-the-top portrayal provides a curiously fitting counterbalance to Perry’s underplaying, as the two engage in a cat-and-mouse pursuit through Detroit. Picasso is targeting members of an international corporation led by Leon Mercier (Jean Reno) that plans to revitalize the city by making it a center of nanotechnology. The only detail that’s important there is that the high-ranking members of the company are all different varieties of asshole foreigners, from the slinky sadist Fan Yau (Stephanie Jacobsen) to germaphobe German Erich Nunemacher (Werner Daehn) to the smug Frenchman Mercier, with his fancy cognac and dismissive attitude. Keep your hands off our troubled city, damn international investors! Cross lives with his wife, Maria ( Carmen Ejogo , who stole Sparkle away from Jordin Sparks but is in a thankless part here), two kids and sassy mother (Cicely Tyson), and works with his best friend since childhood Tommy (Edward Burns, in a role probably described in its entirety as “Irish-American cop”). His only distinguishing characteristic is his Sherlock Holmes-worthy psychological profiling abilities, which he shows off by listing every detail of his wife’s day based on her appearance. He doesn’t put these skills to impressive use on the case, however, misreading Picasso as someone who’d be uninterested in chasing down the cops pursuing him — a judgment call that causes him a world of grief. Alex Cross was directed by Fast and the Furious and Stealth director Rob Cohen, who approaches the film with a bewildering haphazardness. Whenever Fox’s character gets angry, the picture splinters like he’s the can’t-look-directly-at-him baddie from Danny Boyle’s Sunshine. A climactic fight scene gets so chopped up that it’s impossible to place the characters participating in it, while seemingly mundane sequences of a character researching something on a computer are livened up by the camera being shaken as if we’d get bored if something weren’t moving. And boring is something that Alex Cross , for all of its problems, is not. Despite the rebuilding-of-Detroit angle, there’s little specific to the city depicted in Cross and his team’s investigation. And there’s certainly no attempt to tie in how sorely understaffed the actual Detroit Police Department is. The film does finds a few spectacular repurposed locations that it puts to good use — a church-turned-MMA-ring and an old theater that’s been converted into a parking lot both serve as striking backdrops for mostly silly combat sequences. Alex Cross is a misfire, but it’s sometimes an entertaining one — enough to make you curious about who else Perry could go up against in another installment, and just how much overacting would take place. Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
With Deadline reporting that Ivan Reitman is expected to begin filming a Ghostbusters reboot next summer, sans Bill Murray , and Dan Aykroyd saying that he and Harold Ramis will hand over the original crew’s Proton Packs to a new generation, it’s time to start dreamcasting a new team of spectre battlers. Famous Monsters of Filmland , cites an August appearance by Aykroyd on comedian Dennis Miller’s radio show in which the O.G. (Original Ghostbuster) explains that Tropic Thunder screenwriter Etan Cohen has written a great script from a story by The Office writers Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky in which a blind-in-one-eye Dr. Ray Stantz (Aykroyd) and a rather portly Dr. Egon Spengler — “who’s too large to get into the harness” — decide to recruit a new team of Ghostbusters. According to the site, Aykroyd is looking for “three guys and one young woman” to pick up the mantle, which is sure to have a lot of agents working the phones for their actor clients. In 2009, I interviewed Ramis for a Vanity Fair.com piece I did on the Ghostbusters video game and he told me a similar story. He and Aykroyd, who wrote the first two Ghostbusters scripts, were consulting with Eisenberg and Stupnitsky on the third, and he told me that the idea was that the original slime-fighting crew were going to be ‘the mentors, the emeritus Ghostbusters” and pass the torch to “a new set of actors that can actually carry the franchise forward without wearing girdles and fake hair.” At the time, Ramis told me that his Year One, co-star Michael Cera was a “huge fan” of Murray’s Venkman character and that he’d learned from a third party that Cera carried “a Ghostbusters wallet.” All these years, I still like the idea of Cera joining a new Ghostbusters crew that would also include Seth Rogen, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Jay Pharoah from Saturday Night Live and Madeleine Martin from Californication . Now tell me which actors you’d like to see christened the new Ghostbusters. Pick four actors you’d like to see cast in the reboot. You don’t have to follow Aykroyd’s “three guys and one woman” comment as a guideline, but it would be nice. If you don’t see your choices in the poll below, leave it in the comments section, and if I think they’re plausible, I’ll add them to the list of potential candidates. Take Our Poll Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
After spending six years playing hero on ABC’s LOST , Matthew Fox crossed over to the dark side for role in the James Patterson adaptation Alex Cross , in which he plays a master assassin named Picasso whose perverse precision and meticulous skill make him a deadly foil to Detroit cop/psychological profiler ( Tyler Perry ). [ Read Movieline’s review of Alex Cross ] In addition to training for months to develop the sinewy, lethal physique of his ruthless character (who sports the actor’s own semi-recent array of body tattoos, which make quite an impression in the film’s opening MMA fight scene), Fox underwent an unusually severe emotional preparation for the isolating role, partly by design and partly due to overlapping schedules with World War Z which required him to fly back and forth for a period of time filming two movies at once. As a result, Fox and co-star Tyler Perry barely interacted with one another on the Alex Cross set, save for when they came face to face for the film’s fight scenes. (Director Rob Cohen would deliver Fox’s and Perry’s lines to the other during the majority of their characters’ telephone conversations.) Subsequently, Fox told Movieline, he only felt like he really got to know Perry the day they reunited with Cohen and their cast mates in Los Angeles to speak with press: “I felt like I was really looking at Tyler with my eyes, and he was looking at me with his eyes, and we were friends who’d been through this kind of crazy experience together.” Fox spoke further with Movieline about the emotionally taxing job of playing Picasso, one of the darkest and most unhinged villains of the year, how much of the cold-blooded killer’s severe nature lives inside of him (and how he shook him off), and what compelled him to stay so busy following the end of the long-running LOST . You filmed World War Z and Alex Cross at the same time, then started Peter Webber’s Emperor just three months later. Why pack it in so much? When you find the things you want to be a part of, you want to be a part of them. You get to the point, for me anyway, where once you click over to a certain point you’re like, I have to do this, and I felt that way about both World War Z and Alex Cross . I was bummed that there was so much overlap just because of how crazy it was going to be to travel. But it didn’t end up being too bad, it was doable. Picasso is such a clearly strenuous character to play. There’s so much energy coming out of you off the screen in every scene. That must have taken such effort to even prepare mentally for, but how exhaustive was it to add the travel back and forth and switching out of Alex Cross into your World War Z character? It was, and I had moments where I was a little like, oh my god. But I don’t know – I kind of enjoy that kind of intense load. I think I get excited by it and inspired by it. I’m not going to lie to you, I was very excited when I was done with both of those projects and got to go home and be with my family again and not get on an airplane again for a while. But both of the experiences were amazing. The World War Z experience with Marc Forster and the whole crew over there, that whole cast, and the kids in that movie, and Brad [Pitt] and Mireille [Enos], everybody – it was just great. And then the Alex Cross experience, my experience with Rob [Cohen], was one of the best I’ve ever had. Our collaboration on this guy and how much I felt like he was in it with me – how much he had my back in the whole thing. It was a very lonely role to play. It seems fairly emotionally isolating, to live in the mind of this guy. Yeah, it was. I mean, the character of Picasso creates that for himself. He’s the most supremely arrogant person and holds himself above everyone, so he creates that emotional isolation. So to walk in that and try to figure that out… but I always felt like Rob was right there with me. Rob explained that while filming, you and Tyler actually didn’t interact very much on set, including the telephone conversations your characters share, mostly due to scheduling. At what point do you feel you actually got to know Tyler? Right downstairs after the press conference when we hugged each other and we both were a year away from the characters we were playing, and the circumstances, and those two guys and how they were trying to kill each other. That was the very first time I felt like we’ve both hung out in a moment when were getting to know each other. I felt like I was really looking at Tyler with my eyes, and he was looking at me with his eyes, and we were friends who’d been through this kind of crazy experience together. That seems quite unusual, no? I’ve never been part of a story where my entire interaction with another actor was onscreen, moments where we’re trying to kill each other. I’ve never had that experience. It kind of makes sense to me that it turned out that way, but if I ever went and did another film where it was a villain vs. hero, I would wonder if there was a way to do it and still have moments in between when we just hang out and talk about our families. But I kind of think on some level sometimes it’s necessary to do it like we did it. Many folks have drawn the conclusion that you following your years playing Jack Shephard on LOST with a villainous role like Picasso might have been out of a desire for extreme change, but is that how you feel about that decision now? I’ll put it to you this way: I never, ever think about the things that I get involved with on a macro means-to-an-ends scale. Never. So am I happy that it worked out that way? Yeah, I think it’s pretty cool. But it was purely motivated by an inside-out thing. I love Rob, I met Rob, and I felt like we “got” each other. Him offering me this opportunity that I knew was going to require an enormous amount and be really challenging and require me to figure out so many things – I’m scared shitless, I’m not sure I can pull it off – that’s a good reason to want to do this. Now looking at it objectively I can see that coming off of a six-year television show, and I haven’t been in anything since then, and this being the first film coming out after that, it’s cool that it’s such a change. When you look at the characters you’ve played throughout your career, do you see yourself in every one of them – and if so, what does that say about Picasso? Is there a hidden darkness inside of you that this enabled you to tap into? [Laughs] I think that there’s a hidden darkness in all of us! I’m a big fan of the book The Heart of Darkness , and the notion that we are much more in the areas of gray than we are either a good person or a bad person. We all have the capacity for potentially very dark things, and we all have the capacity for incredible hope and compassion and goodness to each other. I think that’s the more challenging way to look at us as a species, because it requires you to actually make those choices. So yes – to answer your question directly, I think there’s a lot of me in everything I play. I hope. That’s important; I think all actors, to a certain degree, bring parts of themselves to every role that they’re playing, and my own taste is when they bring a lot, and they’re not hiding behind the thing that they’re playing but actually are revealing the thing that they’re playing. So, yes – are there parts of me that are Picasso? Am I capable of doing those things? I mean, no. I’m not that person. I am a parent of two children that I love more than anything in the universe along with my partner in crime, my wife, and I’m really a very gentle and warm person. But I do believe that we all have a capacity for those things, and that’s what you have to do as an actor – find those things and exaggerate them and use them to try to create this illusion. While you were living in the skin of Picasso, during the shoot, would you find you took him home with you at night? Are you an easy person to live with during times like these? I would say I’m not a tremendously easy person to live with. I think I’m very aware of that, though, so I do my very best. I’m just one of those people, that – and I’ve worked with people in both camps, people who can emotionally just shine in front of a camera and the minute they say “Cut” they’re like, “Let’s grab a Coke!” And then there are people that I’ve worked with who, to bring that emotional intensity to the screen it bleeds over for a while. I’m definitely of the latter camp, but I’m also very aware of that. And so is [wife] Margherita. So it’s just one of those things; it takes me a little while for the emotional stuff to bleed out, and then I’m good. If you’re conscious of it and are aware of it, I think it’s fine. Read more on Alex Cross here. Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
After spending six years playing hero on ABC’s LOST , Matthew Fox crossed over to the dark side for role in the James Patterson adaptation Alex Cross , in which he plays a master assassin named Picasso whose perverse precision and meticulous skill make him a deadly foil to Detroit cop/psychological profiler ( Tyler Perry ). [ Read Movieline’s review of Alex Cross ] In addition to training for months to develop the sinewy, lethal physique of his ruthless character (who sports the actor’s own semi-recent array of body tattoos, which make quite an impression in the film’s opening MMA fight scene), Fox underwent an unusually severe emotional preparation for the isolating role, partly by design and partly due to overlapping schedules with World War Z which required him to fly back and forth for a period of time filming two movies at once. As a result, Fox and co-star Tyler Perry barely interacted with one another on the Alex Cross set, save for when they came face to face for the film’s fight scenes. (Director Rob Cohen would deliver Fox’s and Perry’s lines to the other during the majority of their characters’ telephone conversations.) Subsequently, Fox told Movieline, he only felt like he really got to know Perry the day they reunited with Cohen and their cast mates in Los Angeles to speak with press: “I felt like I was really looking at Tyler with my eyes, and he was looking at me with his eyes, and we were friends who’d been through this kind of crazy experience together.” Fox spoke further with Movieline about the emotionally taxing job of playing Picasso, one of the darkest and most unhinged villains of the year, how much of the cold-blooded killer’s severe nature lives inside of him (and how he shook him off), and what compelled him to stay so busy following the end of the long-running LOST . You filmed World War Z and Alex Cross at the same time, then started Peter Webber’s Emperor just three months later. Why pack it in so much? When you find the things you want to be a part of, you want to be a part of them. You get to the point, for me anyway, where once you click over to a certain point you’re like, I have to do this, and I felt that way about both World War Z and Alex Cross . I was bummed that there was so much overlap just because of how crazy it was going to be to travel. But it didn’t end up being too bad, it was doable. Picasso is such a clearly strenuous character to play. There’s so much energy coming out of you off the screen in every scene. That must have taken such effort to even prepare mentally for, but how exhaustive was it to add the travel back and forth and switching out of Alex Cross into your World War Z character? It was, and I had moments where I was a little like, oh my god. But I don’t know – I kind of enjoy that kind of intense load. I think I get excited by it and inspired by it. I’m not going to lie to you, I was very excited when I was done with both of those projects and got to go home and be with my family again and not get on an airplane again for a while. But both of the experiences were amazing. The World War Z experience with Marc Forster and the whole crew over there, that whole cast, and the kids in that movie, and Brad [Pitt] and Mireille [Enos], everybody – it was just great. And then the Alex Cross experience, my experience with Rob [Cohen], was one of the best I’ve ever had. Our collaboration on this guy and how much I felt like he was in it with me – how much he had my back in the whole thing. It was a very lonely role to play. It seems fairly emotionally isolating, to live in the mind of this guy. Yeah, it was. I mean, the character of Picasso creates that for himself. He’s the most supremely arrogant person and holds himself above everyone, so he creates that emotional isolation. So to walk in that and try to figure that out… but I always felt like Rob was right there with me. Rob explained that while filming, you and Tyler actually didn’t interact very much on set, including the telephone conversations your characters share, mostly due to scheduling. At what point do you feel you actually got to know Tyler? Right downstairs after the press conference when we hugged each other and we both were a year away from the characters we were playing, and the circumstances, and those two guys and how they were trying to kill each other. That was the very first time I felt like we’ve both hung out in a moment when were getting to know each other. I felt like I was really looking at Tyler with my eyes, and he was looking at me with his eyes, and we were friends who’d been through this kind of crazy experience together. That seems quite unusual, no? I’ve never been part of a story where my entire interaction with another actor was onscreen, moments where we’re trying to kill each other. I’ve never had that experience. It kind of makes sense to me that it turned out that way, but if I ever went and did another film where it was a villain vs. hero, I would wonder if there was a way to do it and still have moments in between when we just hang out and talk about our families. But I kind of think on some level sometimes it’s necessary to do it like we did it. Many folks have drawn the conclusion that you following your years playing Jack Shephard on LOST with a villainous role like Picasso might have been out of a desire for extreme change, but is that how you feel about that decision now? I’ll put it to you this way: I never, ever think about the things that I get involved with on a macro means-to-an-ends scale. Never. So am I happy that it worked out that way? Yeah, I think it’s pretty cool. But it was purely motivated by an inside-out thing. I love Rob, I met Rob, and I felt like we “got” each other. Him offering me this opportunity that I knew was going to require an enormous amount and be really challenging and require me to figure out so many things – I’m scared shitless, I’m not sure I can pull it off – that’s a good reason to want to do this. Now looking at it objectively I can see that coming off of a six-year television show, and I haven’t been in anything since then, and this being the first film coming out after that, it’s cool that it’s such a change. When you look at the characters you’ve played throughout your career, do you see yourself in every one of them – and if so, what does that say about Picasso? Is there a hidden darkness inside of you that this enabled you to tap into? [Laughs] I think that there’s a hidden darkness in all of us! I’m a big fan of the book The Heart of Darkness , and the notion that we are much more in the areas of gray than we are either a good person or a bad person. We all have the capacity for potentially very dark things, and we all have the capacity for incredible hope and compassion and goodness to each other. I think that’s the more challenging way to look at us as a species, because it requires you to actually make those choices. So yes – to answer your question directly, I think there’s a lot of me in everything I play. I hope. That’s important; I think all actors, to a certain degree, bring parts of themselves to every role that they’re playing, and my own taste is when they bring a lot, and they’re not hiding behind the thing that they’re playing but actually are revealing the thing that they’re playing. So, yes – are there parts of me that are Picasso? Am I capable of doing those things? I mean, no. I’m not that person. I am a parent of two children that I love more than anything in the universe along with my partner in crime, my wife, and I’m really a very gentle and warm person. But I do believe that we all have a capacity for those things, and that’s what you have to do as an actor – find those things and exaggerate them and use them to try to create this illusion. While you were living in the skin of Picasso, during the shoot, would you find you took him home with you at night? Are you an easy person to live with during times like these? I would say I’m not a tremendously easy person to live with. I think I’m very aware of that, though, so I do my very best. I’m just one of those people, that – and I’ve worked with people in both camps, people who can emotionally just shine in front of a camera and the minute they say “Cut” they’re like, “Let’s grab a Coke!” And then there are people that I’ve worked with who, to bring that emotional intensity to the screen it bleeds over for a while. I’m definitely of the latter camp, but I’m also very aware of that. And so is [wife] Margherita. So it’s just one of those things; it takes me a little while for the emotional stuff to bleed out, and then I’m good. If you’re conscious of it and are aware of it, I think it’s fine. Read more on Alex Cross here. Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
To even describe The Expendables 2 as a movie seems to do both the medium and this strange, smirking effort a disservice. It isn’t a movie — it’s more like the world’s most expensive, elaborate viral video, making a detour to the big screen before being broken up into more easily consumable segments to be consumed on YouTube. 2010’s The Expendables , directed by its star Sylvester Stallone , was built around the meta-joke of its cast being a who’s who of past and current action stars, particularly ones associated with the more iconic of ’80s muscle movies. But it also had characters with rough personality designations, it had settings and a plot that actually crescendoed toward its violent conclusion. Helmed by Con Air ‘s Simon West, The Expendables 2 has none of these things. Instead, what it has is Chuck Norris making a cameo as a character named Booker (a hat tip to Good Guys Wear Black ) to shoot a few dudes and then recount a Chuck Norris fact (it involves a king cobra). It has Arnold Schwarzenegger, who also briefly appeared in the first film, showing up to joke about being back and terminating people, and ending a bickering session with Bruce Willis by muttering “Yippee-ki-yay.” Whatever throwback charm the first film had has been utterly Snakes on a Plane -d by this sequel, which from the start is far more pleased with itself than audience members are ever given a chance to be. So Stallone is back as Barney Ross, leader of the mercenary group of the title, who’ve become (with one key exception) hammily invincible in the time since the last film ended. Along with his bantering best bud Lee Christmas ( Jason Statham ), Ross heads his team up on a mission to rescue a Chinese billionaire in the opening scene, a sequence that turns into an orgy of automatic weapon fire, armored vehicles smashing through walls and a chase that eventual takes to the water, no element of which sustains even the illusion of putting the preening main characters in harm’s way. If you’ve been in the game this long, it seems, you no longer need to even pretend you could get shot by those extras gamely firing blanks. Dolph Lundgren is still on board as Gunner Jensen, gone from turncoat to comic relief, while Jet Li has a fight scene or two before making a shrug of an exit. Terry Crews and Randy Couture are given little to do other than flex their biceps and fill in the background in this iteration. And Liam Hemsworth shows up as the new team sniper, whose place as “the kid” in a film that’s all about decidedly grown (and slightly creaky) men suggests he’s in a position of peril even before he ends up taking one last gig before retiring to start a new life with his girl. The Expendables are given a mission by Willis’ CIA agent Mr. Church, and head off to retrieve a valuable object from a downed plane at the direction of token female Maggie (Yu Nan), a motorcycle-riding Chinese agent who charms Ross with her ability to efficiently torture information out of informants. When the plan goes awry, Ross and company set out for revenge, targeting a swaggering villain who’s actually named Vilain, and who’s played by a scene-chewing Jean-Claude Van Damme in sunglasses, a duster and a Satanic neck tattoo. In an age of overabundance of CGI, in which neither physical presence nor prowess is required to take the lead in an action film, the appeal of something like The Expendables is clear. Stallone and his buddies aren’t just waving the banner of nostalgia, they’re a stand-in for practical effects and martial arts training, for being able to hold the camera with bulk and charisma (if not necessarily acting range) while delivery cheesy one-liners with a dearth of irony. They represent an outmoded form of the blockbuster, one that’s become replaced by something even more slick, calculated and forgettable — consider the new Total Recall versus the feature on which it was based, the remake a film in which everything is possible and yet nothing seems to matter. The longing for more tangible entertainments is what makes The Expendables 2 feel so damnably lazy — it trades on the quirk of being able to assemble cast-members who’ve devalued enough over the years to become affordable in a single movie, and then barely bothers to actually make that movie. It’s not a joyless effort, but it’s one in which (with the exception of the always admirably present Statham) most of the joy feels self-directed — just a group of guys pounding each other on the back between takes and reassuring themselves that they’ve still got it. Maybe they do, but there’s little evidence of the fact on screen here, in this smug attempt to power a franchise on novelty value alone. Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
