All-natural blonde babe Betsy Rue is permanently burned into the memories of Skin Fans everywhere thanks to her scorching hot nude debut in My Bloody Valentine 3D (2009). A film featuring a full MINUTE AND A HALF scene of totally naked Betsy running from a murderous madman. So spec-rack-ular, so ass-tonishing was the moment, that she nabbed herself an award for Best 3D Nudity at Mr. Skin’s 11th Annual Anatomy Awards . She’s also brought her charms to plenty of hit boob tube series including CSI, 90210, Bones, True Blood , and the perennial skin favorite Femme Fatale s . Now Betsy is playing a porn star opposite Mad Men ‘s Jay Paulson in the upcoming thriller Lucky Bastard (2013), and it looks like we’ll be the lucky ones considering the MPAA just handed down a rare NC-17 rating for the flick. Betsy graciously took some time to talk to Mr. Skin about her sexy new role and her philosophy on nude scenes : Read the Skinterview after the jump!
With the sixth season of Mad Men set to premiere in just a few weeks, the big release on Netflix this week is the complete fifth season. It’s technically non-nude, but with Jessica Par
Nutritional or not, this sounds gross Holly Madison Plans To Eat Her Plancenta Via USMagazine Waste not, want not! Like many mothers before her, nine-months-pregnant Holly Madison has plans for her placenta after she delivers her baby daughter. “This might sound gross, but I’m totally planning on having my placenta turned into pills I can take after giving birth,” the former Playboy model, 33, wrote on her blog on Wednesday, Feb. 27. Sharing clip art of said placenta pills in a glass jar, the Girls Next Door star (who will share her daughter with boyfriend Pasquale Rotella) added: “I heard it helps women recover faster and I want to recover as quickly as I can!” Due March 5, Madison is not the first Hollywood celeb to consume so-called placenta pills, in which a woman’s placenta is cleaned, cooked, processed and put into capsule-type pills, said to help new moms nourish their bodies after chilbirth and potentially curb postpartum depression. Mad Men actress January Jones also opened up about consuming placenta pills after welcoming her son Xander in September 2011. Ladies, where do you stand on this whole placenta-eating thing? Image via WENN
Park City saw plenty of pink in 2013 with Amanda Seyfried stripping down seven times in Lovelace, Dakota Fanning’s fanny in Very Good Girls, and January Jones showing her mad mams in Sweetwater. Back at home the boob tube was keeping pace with a scintillating nude debut from Maggie Grace on Californication.
Save the Date , the new film from director Michael Mohan ( One Too Many Mornings ), is a neat, lightweight little hipster romance about commitment issues between people barely ready to confront what they want, much less tell others about it. (I hate to use the h-word, but there’s really no avoiding it when talking about a film in which an artist/bookstore employee breaks up with a guy in a band and starts dating a marine biologist who’s been mooning over her at work.) Written by Mohan alongside Jeffrey Brown and Egan Reich, the film follows two sisters and the men they’re involved with. Sarah ( Lizzy Caplan ) and Beth ( Alison Brie ) are dating a pair of guys in an indie group called Wolfbird. The most sensible Beth and drummer Andrew ( Martin Starr) are getting married, while responsibility-averse Sarah and lead singer Kevin (Geoffrey Arend) have just moved in together. It’s a tidy arrangement that’s blown to bits when, in a fit of euphoria during a successful hometown show, Kevin decides to propose to Sarah in front of the crowd despite Andrew’s warning that the timing’s not right. She’s horrified, doesn’t accept, and soon Wolfbird’s off on tour with a broken-hearted frontman while she moves into a new place and tumbles too quickly into a relationship with the sweet Jonathan (Mark Webber), who’s been ordering books for his master’s degree at Sarah’s store just because she works there. Beth expects this to be a rebound relationship that will catapult her flaky sister back into Kevin’s arms, but as time goes on it starts to seem like that has everything to do with what she wants and not what Sarah does. Save the Date , which belongs to a recent rash of films, from (500) Days of Summer to The Freebie and Celeste & Jesse Forever , that have showcased Los Angeles as an actual warm, distinctive city, manages its modest pleasures because of its likable cast. Arend, who may be best known as the spouse of Mad Men ‘s Christina Hendricks , makes a convincingly charismatic/smothering musician, and Freaks and Geeks alum Martin Starr is a pleasure to see in anything, particularly a role in which he’s a disheveled rocker. And actor and filmmaker Webber brings vulnerability to a character who’s initially a little too good to be true, until he finally calls Sarah on her skittishness. All three are playing painfully nice guys (“I want to make sure I’m not stepping over any boundaries!” Jonathan protests as Sarah drags him to bed) who are at the mercy of the women in their lives — Beth is deep into planning a wedding Andrew has little interest in, and Sarah threatens to smash both Kevin and Jonathan’s hearts in her quest for happiness. Brie’s a talented comedienne, but she plays things straight here, bringing nuance to a potentially shrill character so caught up in her own nuptials that she starts to see her sister’s issues as interference. And Caplan carries the bulk of the film, her Sarah a girl for whom some things, like guys and her comic-style artwork, come easy, while longer-range decisions and plans remain intimidating and to be avoided. “It makes me think that aspirations are just totally overrated,” she tells Jonathan on a date as she describes her friends’ career and complaints about their busy lives, but her arty slackerdom reveals itself to be a kind of cowardice. In Gone Girl , former Entertainment Weekly writer turned novelist Gillian Flynn’s hit thriller, the character Amy describes an archetype she calls the “Cool Girl,” an aspirational creature who’s just one of the guys, “who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex,” but who is, of course, also “hot and understanding.” It’s a type that Caplan’s become a queen at playing (I’d put Olivia Munn in second place), beautiful and hip and slovenly and all over the place, an attractive mess — see Bachelorette , 3, 2, 1… Frankie Go Boom , Party Down and Hot Tub Time Machine . In the history of female roles on screen, there have been far worse types to play, despite Amy’s condemnation, but Caplan, who’s always a winning presence, is most interesting when she provides peeks behind the Cool Girl mask — as in how her character in Bachelorette was on the verge of being repulsive, her carousel of partying and hookups starting to wear on her, to look less like fun she’s having and more like self-destruction. Sarah’s most intriguing when she’s an accidental monster, part of her power a certain inherent narcissism that allows her to act on impulse but also to be blithely unrecognizing of the reactions of others when she’s caught up in her own feelings. She and Jonathan have a cute and sometimes cutesy courtship (one Mohan likes to mark with periodic shots of their feet), but it’s when he stands up to her and demands to know what it is about intimacy she’s so afraid of, and when Andrew has his own showdown with Beth, that the film really coheres. That’s when it delineates how the very qualities that can be appealing in someone can also be problematic. Mohan’s film may not manage anything out of the ordinary, but it does present a convincingly contemporary depiction of relationships and dating when the goalposts have been moved, or when we’re at least trying to pretend they have. Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Nominations for the 2013 Golden Globe Awards were announced this morning, with Les Miserables picking up seven and Homeland a bunch and… … yadda, yadda, yadda. Who cares?!? Tina Fey and Amy Poehler are hosting the event! We’d watch even if The Newsroom was nominated for Best Drama over Mad Men . (Wait… WHAT?!?) This pair of uproarious actresses star in the following Golden Globes promo, which teases the January 13th ceremony as especially classy: Golden Globes Promo: Hilarious!
Even Jean-Luc Godard , the bad boy of the French New Wave, loved a good car crash. And Mel Brooks loves sitting down with an erudite interviewer just as much as he loves a good fart joke. Together these auteurs climb the peaks and plumb the depths of this week’s High and Low with new DVD releases that belong on the shelf of any film lover who enjoys a good Marxist dialectic leavened with the occasional showtune-singing Nazi. HIGH: Weekend (The Criterion Collection; $29.95 DVD, $39.95 Blu-Ray) WHO’S RESPONSIBLE: Written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard. Starring Mireille Darc, Jean Yanne, Juliet Berto. WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT: A fairly despicable bourgeois couple (Darc and Yanne), who are both cheating on and planning to kill each other, travel to the country to attempt to get money from the wife’s dying father, even if that involves patricide. They get stuck in a mammoth traffic jam and auto accident that appears to run the entire length of France. The further along they travel, the closer they seem to get to the end of civilization itself. WHY IT’S SCHMANCY: A brutal satire on capitalism that tests its audiences with repeated musical cues and a lengthy static shot of workmen eating sandwiches while the narrator goes off on a lengthy tangent about colonialism — the “I Am John Galt” speech for the far left — Weekend is one of Godard’s most daring and entertaining movies, with the always-provocative auteur throwing everything at the screen. (The film’s final title card declares “ fin du cinema .”) WHY YOU SHOULD BUY IT (AGAIN): Besides marking the film’s Blu-Ray debut, this Criterion release features a thicker-than-usual booklet with color artwork, an essay by Gary Indiana and excerpts from a 1969 Rolling Stone interview with Godard. There are also archival interviews with cast and crew members, excerpts from a French TV show about Godard that was filmed partially on the Weekend set by filmmaker Philippe Garrel, and other goodies. LOW: The Incredible Mel Brooks (Shout Factory; DVD/CD $89.93) WHO’S RESPONSIBLE: This five-DVD, one-CD collection features some of the many highlights of Mel Brooks’ career in film, television and recordings. WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT: This is one-stop shopping for fans of Melvin Kaminsky (Brooks’s given name). The set includes a five-part documentary about his filmmaking career ( Mel and His Movies ), interviews (vintage and contemporary) with Dick Cavett, hilarious appearances on The Tonight Show and Mad About You , episodes of programs he created ( Get Smart and When Things Were Rotten ), and much, much more. WHY IT’S FUN: This compilation makes it into “Low” only because Brooks himself famously noted that his work “rises beneath vulgarity.” But while he’s always been a rule-breaker — has anyone dared to satirize racism as sharply and hilariously as Brooks did in Blazing Saddles ? — his comic genius has made him an icon of 20th-century popular culture. WHY YOU SHOULD OWN IT: Like Shout Factory’s recent box set of Steve Martin’s television work, this is a meticulously curated collection of an extraordinary artist. (Where else are you going to find a 60 Minutes segment on the same DVD collection as sketches from The Electric Company and vintage Mad Men –era TV spots directed by Brooks before he took his vision to the big screen?) In addition to all the digital treats, there are also essays by Leonard Maltin, Gene Wilder and Bruce Jay Friedman. Here’s as good a glimpse into the wonderfully warped mind of a director-writer-actor-producer-songwriter as you’re probably ever going to find. Alonso Duralde has written about film for The Wrap, Salon and MSNBC.com . He also co-hosts the Linoleum Knife podcast and regularly appears on What the Flick?! (The Young Turks Network) . He is a senior programmer for the Outfest Film Festival in Los Angeles and a pre-screener for the Sundance Film Festival. He also the author of two books: Have Yourself a Movie Little Christmas (Limelight Editions) and 101 Must-See Movies for Gay Men (Advocate Books). Follow Alonso Duralde on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
” Chapter One: He adored New York City .” As images and reports rolled in from Hurricane Sandy ‘s destructive tour through the Big Apple I thought of my East Coast friends and family affected by the storm, and of Manhattan , Woody Allen ‘s great cinematic ode to the city — his city: Tough, romantic, and everything in between. All those terrifying images of flooded streets and New York at an unimaginable standstill reminded me of happier times, by way of the magical moments the movies have seared into my consciousness over the years. This photo for example, taken Monday near the 59th Street Bridge as Sandy approached New York, depicted surging waters looming near where Allen and Diane Keaton shot Manhattan ‘s iconic bridge scene — one of the most beautiful, dreamy moments of New York there is. The New York that was beaten up, wind-whipped, and deluged over the past few days is a scary, unrecognizable New York. But the spirit of New York (and New Jersey, not to mention other affected cities and states along the East Coast) endures as folks begin rebuilding. I go back to the New York — romanticized, yes, but alive and bustling the way that NYC should be and will be again — of Manhattan ‘s opening scene, which flashes through the city as Allen’s voice-over and George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” bring it to life. Even if only brief respites from the reality of what folks have to deal with out there, the movies can remind us of what makes life worth living; feel free to add your own indelible NYC movies and moments below. Meanwhile, NYC Movieliners Brian Brooks, Frank DiGiacomo, and Alison Willmore are powering through the insanity, as you’ll see in the coming days. Send good vibes and warm thoughts their way. Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Glee ‘s Chris Colfer returns to high school in new feature, Struck By Lightning , but instead of singing and dancing, his character is a ruthless aspiring journalist extraordinaire and he needs help from his fellow students on a project. The problem is, he’s very unpopular, but their cooperation may mean the difference between getting into Northwestern University or not and his wider plans at literary world domination. The log line for Struck By Lightning : High school senior Carson Phillips (Chris Colfer) was destined for bigger things than his close-minded small town could ever offer. He was on a path to greatness, but destiny had a different plan when he was suddenly killed by a bolt of lightning in his school parking lot. Demonstrating that life is what happens while you’re busy planning your future, Carson recounts the last few weeks of his life via witty, insightful flashbacks, including a blackmail scheme targeting the popular kids in school that he concocts with his best friend (Rebel Wilson, Bridesmaids ), and a home life that includes a mother (Allison Janney, Juno ) who’s more interested in the bottle than her son’s future and an estranged father (Dermot Mulroney, My Best Friend’s Wedding ) who suddenly appears with a pregnant fiancée (Christina Hendricks, Mad Men ). The film also features Sarah Hyland ( Modern Family ), Angela Kinsey ( The Office ), Polly Bergen ( Desperate Housewives ), and Ashley Rickards ( American Horror Story ). Watch the video on YouTube
Christina Hendricks Blasts Critics For Calling Her “Full-Figured” ‘Mad Men’ actress Christina Hendricks, who is well known for flaunting her tig ole’ bitties and curvaceous body on and off the red carpet, now says she’s offended when people refer to her as “full-figured.” via Fox News She has never shied away from the topic in the past, but it seems that questions for ‘Mad Men’ star Christina Hendricks about her figure may now be off limits. That’s what an Australian interviewer found out the hard way when she asked Hendricks, in town to promote the Specsavers 2012 Spectacle Wearer of the Year competition (yes we don’t know what that is either): “You have been an inspiration as a full-figured woman, what is the most inspiring story that you can remember?” Hendricks sputtered “I don’t know” before looking off camera, peeved. Hendricks reportedly said off camera that “I think calling me full-figured is just rude.” Hendricks’ distaste for the line of questioning was probably a surprise to the interviewer as, outside of her role on “Mad Men,” the actress is perhaps best known for bringing a fuller figure back into vogue in Hollywood, and is never shy about flaunting her figure on red carpets. Do you think Christina should be offended by her borderline chubby-lumpkins title?
