You might wanna avert your eyes, Casper Smart . Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony took the stage Saturday night at the Mandalay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas because they brought their American Idol -like reality competition, Q’Viva! , to Sin City. A program that seeks to find the very best Latin American talent, Q’Viva! will feature a number of its top contestants throughout its run in Vegas, with J. Lo and her ex helping tickets sales by performing separate acts during the show’s opening week. As you can see above, they did come out together at certain points, holding hands and embracing. Check out the following promo to get an idea of what’s in store this summer in Las Vegas. Q’Viva! The Chosen in Vegas
You might wanna avert your eyes, Casper Smart . Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony took the stage Saturday night at the Mandalay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas because they brought their American Idol -like reality competition, Q’Viva! , to Sin City. A program that seeks to find the very best Latin American talent, Q’Viva! will feature a number of its top contestants throughout its run in Vegas, with J. Lo and her ex helping tickets sales by performing separate acts during the show’s opening week. As you can see above, they did come out together at certain points, holding hands and embracing. Check out the following promo to get an idea of what’s in store this summer in Las Vegas. Q’Viva! The Chosen in Vegas
While Phillip Phillips’ win drew a record 132 million votes, ratings were down 30 percent. By Gil Kaufman Phillip Phillips, Jessica Sanchez and Ryan Seacrest on ‘American Idol’ Photo: Getty Images It was the best of times and the worst of times for “American Idol” this week. Yes, a record 132 million votes came in on Tuesday night to help Phillip Phillips take home the top prize. But when the ratings for the finale were tallied up, well, nobody was popping corks or firing up the confetti cannons anymore. Ponder this, ratings for the season 11 finale were half of what they were during the 2003 season when Ruben Studdard and Clay Aiken duked it out in front of 38 million viewers. Half is still 21.5 million, but that number is way down (27 percent) from the 29.3 million who saw Scotty McCreery take home the crown last year. In fact, according to finale Nielsen Co. figures, Wednesday night’s “Idol” viewership is the smallest ever for the show’s finale. Not only was the tune-in number all all-time low, but the show’s 6.4 rating among the coveted adults 18-49 demographic was down 30 percent from last year as well. “Idol” can take some solace in easily beating the finale ratings for such up-and-coming rivals as “The Voice” (11.93 million viewers, 4.4 rating) and “X Factor” (12.59 million viewers, 3.8 rating). The ratings decline this year was expected, since season 10 got a bit of a boost when Jennifer Lopez and Steven Tyler were added into the mix following the departure of former lead judge Simon Cowell. Though it came into the season with the bragging rights as the #1 show on TV, “Idol” shed nearly 25 percent of its audience this year, falling below 20 million viewers for the first time since 2003. According to reports, the steepest drop-off was among viewers 18-49, the most sought-after demographic among networks. The other shoe to drop on Thursday was that for the first time in eight years, “Idol” will not finish the season as the top-rated primetime program. According to The Hollywood Reporter , NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” finished the 2011-2012 season as the dominant primetime program in total viewers and in all key audience demographics. “Football” averaged 20.7 million viewers this season and an 8.0 rating in the 28-49 demo. The Wednesday night “Idol” performance broadcasts averaged 19.7 million viewers and 18.3 million on Thursday for the season, along with a 6.2 rating on Wednesday’s. Get your “Idol” fix on MTV News’ “American Idol” page , where you’ll find all the latest news, interviews and opinions. Related Videos ‘American Idol’ Season 11 Finale Highlights Related Photos ‘American Idol’ Season 11 Finale Show ‘American Idol’ Season 11 Finale Red Carpet
Blown Away #1 again as Adele moves back up to #2. By Gil Kaufman Carrie Underwood’s Blown Away Album Cover Photo: Arista Just as the 11th season of “American Idol” is wheezing to a close , the top three contenders can take some heart in the fact that former champ Carrie Underwood is still at the top of her game. Underwood’s latest, Blown Away , will spend a second week at the top of the Billboard 200 charts thanks to sales of 120,000, according to figures provided by Nielsen SoundScan. Though sales were down 55 percent, that was enough to edge out a resurgent Adele , who may have benefitted from the Mother’s Day Bump for her unstoppable 21 , which was up 31 percent and two spots to #2 on sales of 101,000. That holiday push helped lift Adele over the 9 million mark in the U.S., with diamond status now well within reach. The rest of the top 10 was fairly stable, with buzz band Silversun Pickups landing an impressive debut at #6 with their third full-length studio album, Neck of the Woods , while Tank rumbled in at #9 with This is How I Feel (33,000). The rest of the top 10: Lionel Richie continues his remarkable late-career roll with Tuskegee , which moved up three spots to #3 (71,000) as sales passed the 750,000 mark. NOW 42 held in at #4 (65,000), followed by Norah Jones , Little Broken Hearts (60,000), One Direction , Up All Night (#7, 40,000), Jack White , Blunderbuss (#8, 34,000) and Luke Bryan , Tailgates & Tanlines (#10, 26,000). It was a swift trip in, and out, of the top 10 for B.o.B , whose Strange Clouds fell seven spots in week two to #12 as sales dipped by 67 percent to 25,000. Further down the line, British soft rockers Keane were in at #17 with Strangeland (19,000), while “SNL” musical guests and Internet sensations Karmin snuck into the top 20 at #18 with their debut EP, Hello (19,000). Underwood also topped the iTunes album chart, acing out Silversun Pickups, who were followed by Adele, B.o.B, One Direction, Karmin, Keane, Gotye ‘s Making Mirrors , White and Jones. On the iTunes singles chart, Maroon 5 locked down #1 with “Payphone,” beating out Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know,” Carly Rae Jepsen ‘s “Call Me Maybe,” Justin Bieber ‘s “Boyfriend” and fun. ‘s “We Are Young.” Flo Rida was at #6 with “Wild Ones,” Nicki Minaj just behind with “Starships,” then One Direction’s “What Makes You Beautiful,” Jennifer Lopez ‘s “Dance Again” and 2 Chainz ‘s “No Lie.” The top 10 will get shaken up next week with the arrival of Adam Lambert ‘s second major-label album, as well as new discs from Beach House , Godsmack , the “Glee” Cast Graduation album and the newest slab of rockitude from Tenacious D . Related Artists Carrie Underwood Adele
Many questions can be raised about last night’s American Idol finale. To wit: Should Phillip Phillips have defeated Jessica Sanchez? Should Diana DeGarmo have accepted Ace Young’s proposal ? How incredible is Jennifer Holliday?!? But THG is focused on the truly important issue of the night: With both Rihanna and J. Lo taking to the stage and performing a couple sexy, scantily-clad singles, the topic can no longer be ignored. Which of these beauties would you prefer to bang? Study their finale outfits and vote now.
Women Of Color In Maxim’s Hot 100 You won’t believe who’s not on the list… Maxim just released its annual hot 100 list and they’re trippin’. The highest they put a black woman was Zoe Saldana at 45! The highest woman of color was Eva Mendes and she didn’t even come close to the top. Here are all the ladies of color that made the list…and a couple that we can’t believe didn’t make it. Maxim needs some help. But enjoy the cakes until then.
Dutch singer also teases the song’s ‘mad’ video to MTV News. By Jocelyn Vena Eva Simons Photo: MTV News For his song “This Is Love,” will.i.am enlisted Dutch singer Eva Simons to add some powerhouse vocals to the raging party track. The searing dance production is highlighted by Simons’ diva-tude as her voice soars over will’s creation, full of big chants, bumping beats and dirty synths. Simons had already proved she had hook potential appearing on Afrojack’s 2010 dance-floor anthem “Take Over Control,” and given will’s history of enlisting female pop singers to add a bit of sexy flair to his songs, Simons was a perfect muse to help shape his latest dance-pop track. “He is super creative, and we kind of have the same energy: We can’t sit still. We were in the studio, and he had this track,” Simons recalled to MTV News about working with the Black Eyed Peas mastermind. “And he’s like, ‘Yo, Eva, would you like to do this song with me?’ And we had been recording a couple tracks before, so he knows what I’m capable of and he trusts me, and we don’t really know each other for that long, but he trusts me. “I recorded it,” she continued. “And he mixes it straight away from his laptop … and it’s done. That’s so beautiful — not only is he super creative and knows what he wants, but he also sees when other people are creative as well. He’s not afraid to collaborate.” This particular collaboration also included Swedish House Mafia’s Steve Angello. “It’s really a club-banger,” Simons said, adding that will included “some piano intro in there and violins. … He’s always creative. It doesn’t [just] work for the clubs, it works for the radio, it’ll also work on a big festival, like him on the piano, some strings, some live drums.” will and Simons recently shot a video for the track, and she had this tease for fans when asked to give some hints: “Fireworks. Just like, ‘What world is this? Like, where are we?’ and ‘What season is this?’ ” she said. “It’s mad. It’s pretty awesome.” Much of that awesomeness, she adds, stems from will directing the clip himself. “I’m just surprised. I’m not surprised, actually, ’cause that’s him,” she said. “He is also a super-geek. I’m a super-geek. I love technology, and he was like, he was directing the video and he was doing the motion-control of the camera and everything. He knows his stuff. It was pretty awesome to see.” Simons continued that it was refreshing to see that even with all his years in the industry, he still loves to do it. “I just admire him,” she said. “After all those years he still has that fire, and that’s just beautiful. But I feel like — ’cause I was big fan of the Black Eyed Peas, and I still am — and he seems like he’s the same guy still that I see before.” Their song is expected to appear on will’s long-teased solo album, #willpower, which also features Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez, Mick Jagger and Nicole Scherzinger. No release date has been set for the album. Related Artists Eva Simons Will.I.Am
After months of humiliating posters and destabilizing trailers , the big-screen “adaptation” of Heidi Murkoff’s megahit advice tome What to Expect When You’re Expecting has finally arrived at multiplexes nationwide. Critical reactions are about as chilly as you might expect for a film that turns one of the most influential books of the last quarter-century into a kitchen-sink ensemble romcom; while director Kirk Jones’s film does seem to have its following ( 21 percent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes! Even A.O. Scott is into it ! Sort of!), the overriding sense seems to be one of vague — or maybe not so vague — loathing. Let’s cool off with a refreshing dip in the bile. 9. “The best seller What To Expect When You’re Expecting has been around for 28 years, making the book much newer than most of the jokes in this all-star movie.” — Farran Smith Nehme , NY Post 8. “The cheerily childless out there don’t get any screen time, not just because this is a film about having kids but because they wouldn’t fit into the overall worldview, which is that you haven’t lived until you’ve spawned, or, barring that, snagged a cute infant from Ethiopia.” — Alison Willmore , Movieline 7. “In a year when women’s reproductive freedoms are constantly in the political crosshairs, What to Expect When You’re Expecting feels like just another affront to anyone who owns and operates a uterus.” — Alonso Duralde , TheWrap 6. “Any movie that opens with Cameron Diaz tossing her cookies on the set of a Dancing with the Stars -esque reality show can’t be all bad, right? That’s the mother of all rhetoricals, and speaking of mothers: This mostly laugh-free pregnancy comedy, adapted from Heidi Murkoff’s pop-parenting best-seller, is at least a slight step up from director Kirk Jones’s last effort, 2009’s claw-your-eyes-out-awful Robert De Niro vehicle Everybody’s Fine .” — Keith Uhlich , Time Out New York 5. “I guess this picture should get some novelty points for providing a theme song to a miscarriage scene. David Gray’s ‘Forgetting,’ in case you were wondering. Get it? Because there’s always a next time? Despite the small pleasures the movie’s performers strive to provide, I sincerely hope that no siblings are considered.” — Glenn Kenny , MSN Movies 4. “Nutshell, meet review. Review, meet nutshell. I can sum up my feelings about What to Expect When You’re Expecting in a single word: Ugh. Ugh, because of the acting. Ugh, because of the dialogue. Ugh, because of characters doing ridiculous things and acting the way no reasonable human being on this planet would act/react. It’s a comedy with few laughs, a romantic tale with zero sizzle, and, supposedly, it’s a movie for both sexes. I say it’s for neither. And stay away… stay far, far away… from this one on date night if you ever again hope to convince your partner it’s your turn to choose a movie.” — Rebecca Murray , About.com 3. “Sure, it’s just a silly, stupid Hollywood chick-flick, but the movie’s attitude is so repugnant that it deserves its own special warning: This movie may cause you to seek an immediate vasectomy . There is hardly a shred of believable human behavior in this film. Granted, I haven’t hung out with a pregnant woman for nine months straight, but Banks’s and Diaz’s inanely hyperbolic performances sure do feel like the sort of caricatures that exist only in a Hollywood type’s head. (By the way, it goes without saying that just about everybody in this movie is well-off enough that a baby will present no great financial burden to them. Too bad if you’re sitting in the audience and can’t afford a child — you’re probably not worthy to be a parent anyway.)” — Tim Grierson , Deadspin 2. “The movie reads like an extended Caroline Hax ‘Tell Me About It’ column of petty complaints so stunningly self-involved, irresponsible, and selfish that what the movie needs most is a representative of Child Protective Services to take all the babies to better homes. It is another measure of the movie’s disregard of its audience that we go back to the Dudes so they can reverse everything they said the first time. It is not that they have learned anything. The movie is just lazy enough to hope some warm ‘parenting is wonderful’ comments will erase the synthetic waste of celluloid (pixels?) that has gone before. No such luck.” — Nell Minow , BeliefNet 1. “‘End of day, family’s all that matters,’ says Quaid, never mind that his character’s abusive fathering made his son into an obese neurotic. ‘Kids—that’s all we really leave behind.’ If that’s true, and if millions of years of biological, intellectual, and technological evolution must yield to shallow-field American family values, the least we can do is cop to our shoddy legacy. Let’s start with this disdainful, demoralizing, grimly unfunny bastard of a film.” — Eric Hynes , The Village Voice [Reviews via Rotten Tomatoes ]
‘The Avengers,’ ‘The Vow,’ Katy Perry and Adele also land multiple nods. By John Mitchell Paul Wesley, Nina Dobrev and Ian Somerhalder in “The Vampire Diaries” Photo: CW The
Hollywood, a humble request? I realize that abortion is has become too divisive a topic these days to drop into a mainstream movie product like What To Expect When You’re Expecting , especially in what’s an overall innocuous ensemble comedy based, somehow, on a bestselling pregnancy guidebook (between this and Battleship , it’s one strange week for source material). It’s also a tough topic from which to wring laughs. And in something carefully calculated to be as broad in appeal as possible, any mention of the option of terminating a pregnancy is just going to be one more thing that could isolate potential movie audiences, like an ugly poster, being in a foreign language or attempting analysis of the Iraq War. But when you have a young female character who gets pregnant, who’s not in a stable relationship and who’s in an economically tenuous position, can’t you slip in some mention of why she wouldn’t consider the A-word? Religion, personal conviction, future fertility concerns due to some inherited condition, story revealed to be actually taking place in an alternate universe in which Roe v. Wade has been overturned and women are given no choice but to have Chace Crawford’s impeccably handsome babies? Just something to save her from looking nuts, which is the case for Rosie (Anna Kendrick), a 23-year-old food truck worker (guessing that doesn’t come with health insurance) who lives with two roommates and ends up with a little surprise after a spontaneous hookup with former high school classmate and fellow foodie Marco (Crawford). Naturally, those crazy kids decide to stick it out, and things briefly bumble along in Knocked Up -lite fashion until Rosie loses the baby. She has the misfortune of being stuck with What to Expect When You’re Expecting ‘s miscarriage storyline — the other three Atlanta-based and one Los Angeles-located couples in the Kirk Jones-directed film each shoulder a different first-time child-bearing experience, from a post-35 pregnancy (Cameron Diaz and Matthew Morrison) to twins (Dennis Quaid and Brooklyn Decker) to adoption (Jennifer Lopez and Rodrigo Santoro) to a physically taxing gestation (Elizabeth Banks and Ben Falcone). Also checked off the list are issues of whether or not to circumcise, of money, of breastfeeding, of fertility, of balancing work and of being a good father. It’s a lot to fit into one film, and some of these themes, particularly in the case of Rosie and Marco’s thread, get such short shrift that Jones might have done better to leave them by the wayside — it’s hard to have a serious contemplation of post-miscarriage depression slotted in next to a gag about how pregnancy gives you cankles. It’s not impossible to make an engaging film out of an advice tome — Think Like a Man managed to be lively and funny , because its characters emerged as more than just vehicles for its source book’s ideas. That doesn’t happen here, though the ensemble is at least notably odd in its spread of professions, which include a breast-milk advocate, an aquarium and baby photographer, the aforementioned food truckers, a NASCAR driver and the host of a Biggest Loser- style weight-loss show. The variety seems there to make up for the fact that in other ways, the film’s showing a fairly narrow range of childbearing experiences — these are all straight, working couples in the middle- to upper-class range. It’s only in Lopez’s story that the economic crunch of preparing for a child is mentioned, and even then it’s an issue of having to keep living in a fab apartment rather than moving into an even more fab house. What to Expect When You’re Expecting centers on the belief that having children is the only way to know real fulfillment in life. “When I was young, I thought I was so happy. Now I know that I’m happy,” says Chris Rock, the leader of a weekly gathering of dads who walk around the park enjoying their no-judgment zone. This leads to moments in which the film touches on fears of feminine inadequacy that it doesn’t have the space or depth to process — Banks’s character being so sure she’d have that “glow” and instead finding herself waddling, gassy and miserable; Lopez getting drunk and crying about how she isn’t able to do “the one thing a woman is supposed to do.” The cheerily childless out there don’t get any screen time, not just because this is a film about having kids but because they wouldn’t fit into the overall worldview, which is that you haven’t lived until you’ve spawned, or, barring that, snagged a cute infant from Ethiopia. In the realms of pregnancy comedy, What to Expect When You’re Expecting doesn’t find new laughs, just layers on attempts at the tried-and-true ones — think one scene in which a woman howls and makes funny faces during labor is funny? How about many of them together? Its sharpest segment is the opening, in which we see Diaz’s celebrity trainer compete on Morrison’s dance show, writhing through ridiculous choreography next to fellow contestants Whitney Port and Dwyane Wade. The film’s skewering of reality show competitions is far more surefooted than any of its celebrations of the joys of parenting, which seem, despite the specificity of the manual that inspired it, more theoretical than sincere. Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
