Yummy mummy time… Nicole Mitchell Murphy was snapped doing some pampering with daughters Bria, Shayne, Zola and Bella in Beverly Hills yesterday. Bria looking gooooooooood! Fame Pictures/Flynet More On Bossip! Tie The Knot: The Top 10 Engaged Couples We Can’t Wait To See Get Hitched New Couple???: 106 And Park’s Rocsi Diaz Rocks A ‘Kini And Looks Cozy With Raphael Saadiq On The Beach In Miami!! That’s Gotta Hurt: The Most Embarrassing Break-Ups Of All Time Some Afternoon Preciousness: Look At Lauryn Hill’s Daughter Selah Marley Stuntin’ Like Her Mama
Another day, another Catholic Church scandal. An assistant bishop of the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Los Angeles has resigned because he has a secret family, including two teenage children. The Vatican said on Wednesday that Pope Benedict had accepted the resignation of Gabino Zavala, an auxiliary bishop of the diocese which has been plagued by sexual scandals. A brief Vatican announcement did not give the reason for Zavala’s resignation, saying only that the pope had accepted it under the norm in canon (Church law) that says a bishop who is ill or otherwise unfit to carry out his duties should resign. But Zavala’s direct superior, Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez, has prepared a letter for the faithful in the archdiocese explaining the circumstances of the departure of Zavala, who was assistant bishop for the San Gabriel region of California. In the letter, a draft of which was obtained from a Catholic Church source in Rome, Gomez said Zavala, 60, had informed him in early December that he was the father of two teenage children who live with their mother in another state. The Catholic Church demands celibacy from its priests. “Bishop Zavala also told me that he submitted his resignation to the Holy Father in Rome, which was accepted. Since that time, he has not been in ministry and will be living privately,” Gomez says in the letter. “The Archdiocese has reached out to the mother and children to provide spiritual care as well as funding to assist the children with college costs. The family’s identity is not known to the public, and I wish to respect their right to privacy,” the letter says. Gomez asked for prayers “for all those impacted by this situation and for each other as we reflect on this letter.” Zavala’s resignation is the latest headache for the diocese, which paid a $660 million settlement in 2007 for cases of sexual abuse going as far back at the 1940. Zavala was also the latest Catholic Church official who was found to have had a secret family. The late leader of the Legionaries of Christ religious order, Father Marcial Maciel, who died in 2008 at the age of 87, lived a double life for decades that was not discovered until after his death. Maciel, a Mexican, was found to have abused seminarians. He was also discovered to have had a mistress with whom he had fathered several children. SMH… We understand that the whole celibacy thing was meant to make these men closer to God — but after all these scandals, shouldn’t they maybe at least re-think the policy??? Source More On Bossip! Tie The Knot: The Top 10 Engaged Couples We Can’t Wait To See Get Hitched New Couple???: 106 And Park’s Rocsi Diaz Rocks A ‘Kini And Looks Cozy With Raphael Saadiq On The Beach In Miami!! That’s Gotta Hurt: The Most Embarrassing Break-Ups Of All Time Some Afternoon Preciousness: Look At Lauryn Hill’s Daughter Selah Marley Stuntin’ Like Her Mama
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has released the poster for the 84th Academy Awards, and it’s… nice? I mean, Oscar looks sexy as ever, and all those foggy images of awards-night glories past recall both the champagne-fueled afterparties and the preponderance of white folks who take this hardware home every year. But isn’t something missing? Like, the host? After all that hullabaloo about Brett Ratner and Eddie Murphy that the Academy worked to deflect, and after all the lengths that the Board of Governors went to just to replace Murphy with an ultrasafe, ultrastable emcee, and after years of advertising hosts from Chris Rock to Jon Stewart to Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin to Anne Hathaway and Anne Franco, where is Billy Crystal? If I’m a casual viewer, I’m far likelier to take positive notice of the host than of the centrally positioned reminder that Driving Miss Daisy actually won Best Picture once upon a sad, sad time. Also: Can’t we get some more color in here? Sidney Poitier? Denzel Washington? Mo’Nique? If it has to be Best Picture alums, maybe Poitier and Rod Steiger from In the Heat of the Night ? Even Anthony Mackie and Jeremy Renner from The Hurt Locker . I’m not sure what this says about the young demographic that the aging Academy claims to covet; I doubt they’re watching Giant and/or The Sound of Music . Or maybe they are! Are you “young” and obsessive-compulsively watching Gone With the Wind on a DVD loop in honor of white, uptight, vaunted Academy legacies? Tell us in the comments! [via Awards Daily ]
On the bus home from a night out at a lesbian club, Fort Greene teenager Alike (Adepero Oduye) swaps her tomboyish outfit for earrings and a pink t-shirt, something clearly not of her own choosing, something selected to appease her mother. Alike is 17 and closeted, at least at home. Her mom Audrey (Kim Wayans) is uptight, religious and almost quivers with the effort of seeing her daughter as she wants her to be and not as she actually is. While Alike’s closer to her father Arthur (Charles Parnell), a cop, he’s chosen to step back from the tensions at home and in his marriage. Liking boys and makeup comes naturally to her younger sister Sharonda (Shamika Cotton) — our heroine is alone in her own personal form of camouflage, trying to blend into the background wherever she goes. What sets writer/director Dee Rees’s sensitive feature debut Pariah (expanded from her 2007 short of the same name) apart from the standard coming out story is that Alike is just as much an outsider at the club as at home, adrift and uncomfortable while her more outgoing best friend Laura (Pernell Walker) picks up girls on the dance floor. She hasn’t found the place in which she feels she can be herself. Alike knows that she’s gay, but her understanding and acceptance of that fact doesn’t mean she knows where she fits, in the scene or out of it — she doesn’t easily fall into the divisions of butch and femme, and she doesn’t seems to do any better at school, where she’s a good student in whose writing a teacher has taken a special interest, but other dangles outside the established social groups. Pariah is a coming of age story that’s uncommonly aware of just how heartbreakingly important the trappings of fashion, of music choices, of hobbies are when you’re young — they’re symbols of everything you think you are or aspire to be, even as they’re woefully inadequate shortcuts to establishing your identity. Alike’s journey take place in a larger landscape of shifting identities — just as the lesbian community isn’t a monolithic entity, neither is the black neighborhood in which the majority of the action is set. Her family has worked its way into the middle class, and Audrey’s consciousness of this achievement informs her stiffness around the coworkers she clearly feels she’s a cut above and her overall fussy propriety. It’s this sense of the type of people with whom her family belongs that leads her to insist Alike hang out with the daughter of an acquaintance from church, Bina (Aasha Davis), as if enough time in each other’s proximity would make a friendship inevitable. Alike begrudgingly walks to school with Bina and hangs out with her on the weekends, and finds a connection with the girl she never expected, one that blossoms into a possible romance when Bina gives our heroine her first kiss. Bina’s the opposite of Alike in many ways, bold where the latter is shy, but also uncertain where she’s fully decided, and the halting tenderness with which their relationship builds is tinged with the knowledge that Bina is probably going to break her heart. Pariah wouldn’t work without Oduye’s luminous performance, capturing the emotional nuances of a character not prone to letting her emotions show. She makes Alike’s vulnerabilities clear through her defenses — Alike’s convinced she has the world fooled, but isn’t anywhere near as in control as she’d like to believe. It’s a lovely, subtle portrayal that’s deservedly been getting a lot of attention for Oduye, who originated the role in Rees’s short and who may also be familiar as the grocery store clerk Louis C.K. awkwardly follows home to try to ask out in the first season of Louie . It’s a performance that good enough to smooth over the fact that the film’s gears grind as it arrives at an ending that feels neat, with Alike finally confronting her parents and encountering the results we’ve been primed to expect from the outset. Pariah is a small story of a painful, formative era in its protagonist’s life, and it sometimes feels roughly hewn to fit into an arc it doesn’t necessarily need. It’s the intimate, unforced details — an exchange between Arthur and his friends at a store, the way Laura chooses to shut Alike out after feeling betrayed by her new relationship — that speak volumes more than the film’s obvious butterfly metaphor, and that attest to a filmmaker and actress worth keeping an eye on. Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
There is a group of individuals whom Movieline would like to salute: The passionate, faceless people who lovingly record, in surprising detail and with confounding care, the full plot summaries for horrible movies on Wikipedia. Wikipedia movie plot historians, your day has come. I first recognized this phenomenon last month. While researching several pivotal roles in Kirsten Dunst’s career for the actresses’s 9 Milestones in the Evolution of… feature, I noticed (and greatly appreciated) that an Internet user had heroically outlined the entire plot of her long-forgotten and laughable 1998 television movie Fifteen and Pregnant . The plot summary is delivered in four straightforward paragraphs which remarkably do not acknowledge the ridiculousness of this poorly-scripted and self-righteous project. Here is just a taste… “The film opens with fourteen year old Tina having sex with Ray. A few days later Tina is sitting in the car with her mother and Tina’s mother asks her if she knows anyone who is sexually active at her age, or if she has ever been sexually active, and Tina nods her head yes, although her mother doesn’t know what she is admitting.” Granted, the person who was so moved by the melodramatic play-by-play of Fifteen and Pregnant that he/she rushed to his/her computer and tapped out a painfully accurate recap, is by no means a scholar. But skill or grasp of the English language is not the point here: The dedication is. For example, do you know how much you’d have to pay me to watch Troll 2 again and compose an entire 11 paragraph summary without a single critical inflection? (The most derogatory statement about the film in its Wikipedia entry is that it is “widely considered to be of poor quality.”) Do you know how severely you would need to threaten me before I typed out 1,000 words on the detestable Rob Reiner film North ? Do you know how many Target gift cards you would have to hire Woody Harrelson to strew onto a hotel bed Indecent Proposal -style before I agreed to not only view New Year’s Eve but to pen an earnest six-paragraph summary of this particular Garry Marshall’s holiday disaster-piece ? (The answers to these three questions are “a ton,” “very severely,” and “like, $10,000 worth.”) The heroic Wikipedia users who composed the above plot summaries may not have saved any lives. But they did save brain cells — brain cells that could have met a similar fate as the millions of those left to be swept up along with the neglected candy and self-respect on the floor of every Jack and Jill -screening multiplex auditorium in America last month. Because hopefully, some smart moviegoers elected to just read the Wikipedia plot summary of the film so that they could appropriately rag on it at the water cooler without paying for a partial Adam Sandler-performed lobotomy. Or maybe a few intelligent viewers decided against seeing the film after its detailed Wiki page informed them that the “comedy” would feature “cameos” from Bruce Jenner, Regis Philbin and Drew Carey. Or maybe that is all just wishful thinking and Wikipedia plot summary movie-going prevention is just a hope for the future. Either way, I am thankful for the bold Wiki user who dared to recount every minor plot twist in Showgirls so that I never have to re-watch the film to rediscover how much Cristal and Zach paid Nomi for a lap dance at the Cheetah ($500). So please, in honor of these Wikipedia movie plot historians, take a moment and scan through a few detailed recaps of your least favorite movies of all time. Recognize the effort, thank the faceless writers in whichever way you deem fit and maybe consider tapping out a few future plot summaries of your own. For without these loving recaps, human beings might actually have to sit through a screening of Gigli to fully recognize the film’s atrociousness. Follow Julie Miller on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
There is a group of individuals whom Movieline would like to salute: The passionate, faceless people who lovingly record, in surprising detail and with confounding care, the full plot summaries for horrible movies on Wikipedia. Wikipedia movie plot historians, your day has come. I first recognized this phenomenon last month. While researching several pivotal roles in Kirsten Dunst’s career for the actresses’s 9 Milestones in the Evolution of… feature, I noticed (and greatly appreciated) that an Internet user had heroically outlined the entire plot of her long-forgotten and laughable 1998 television movie Fifteen and Pregnant . The plot summary is delivered in four straightforward paragraphs which remarkably do not acknowledge the ridiculousness of this poorly-scripted and self-righteous project. Here is just a taste… “The film opens with fourteen year old Tina having sex with Ray. A few days later Tina is sitting in the car with her mother and Tina’s mother asks her if she knows anyone who is sexually active at her age, or if she has ever been sexually active, and Tina nods her head yes, although her mother doesn’t know what she is admitting.” Granted, the person who was so moved by the melodramatic play-by-play of Fifteen and Pregnant that he/she rushed to his/her computer and tapped out a painfully accurate recap, is by no means a scholar. But skill or grasp of the English language is not the point here: The dedication is. For example, do you know how much you’d have to pay me to watch Troll 2 again and compose an entire 11 paragraph summary without a single critical inflection? (The most derogatory statement about the film in its Wikipedia entry is that it is “widely considered to be of poor quality.”) Do you know how severely you would need to threaten me before I typed out 1,000 words on the detestable Rob Reiner film North ? Do you know how many Target gift cards you would have to hire Woody Harrelson to strew onto a hotel bed Indecent Proposal -style before I agreed to not only view New Year’s Eve but to pen an earnest six-paragraph summary of this particular Garry Marshall’s holiday disaster-piece ? (The answers to these three questions are “a ton,” “very severely,” and “like, $10,000 worth.”) The heroic Wikipedia users who composed the above plot summaries may not have saved any lives. But they did save brain cells — brain cells that could have met a similar fate as the millions of those left to be swept up along with the neglected candy and self-respect on the floor of every Jack and Jill -screening multiplex auditorium in America last month. Because hopefully, some smart moviegoers elected to just read the Wikipedia plot summary of the film so that they could appropriately rag on it at the water cooler without paying for a partial Adam Sandler-performed lobotomy. Or maybe a few intelligent viewers decided against seeing the film after its detailed Wiki page informed them that the “comedy” would feature “cameos” from Bruce Jenner, Regis Philbin and Drew Carey. Or maybe that is all just wishful thinking and Wikipedia plot summary movie-going prevention is just a hope for the future. Either way, I am thankful for the bold Wiki user who dared to recount every minor plot twist in Showgirls so that I never have to re-watch the film to rediscover how much Cristal and Zach paid Nomi for a lap dance at the Cheetah ($500). So please, in honor of these Wikipedia movie plot historians, take a moment and scan through a few detailed recaps of your least favorite movies of all time. Recognize the effort, thank the faceless writers in whichever way you deem fit and maybe consider tapping out a few future plot summaries of your own. For without these loving recaps, human beings might actually have to sit through a screening of Gigli to fully recognize the film’s atrociousness. Follow Julie Miller on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Selena Gomez has spoken out for the first time since a family tragedy. A week after her mother’s miscarriage went public, Gomez posted the following message on her Facebook page last night: “Belated Merry Christmas everybody.. I can’t thank you enough for all of your thoughts and prayers. We appreciate every one of you.. I love you all so much and we hope you and your family had a beautiful Christmas! Love, Me, Momma, Brian and our guardian angel Scarlett.” Our thoughts go out to Selena and her family. It’s little comfort in this time of sorrow, but Gomez did crack our top 10 celebrities of 2011 list. She sits at number eight . [Photo: WENN.com]
On the last episode of “Love & Hip Hop,” Teairra Mari coaxed girlfriend Emily B, into going on a “social date” with her and some colleagues. Unbeknownst to Emily, she was really being thrown into a blind date with Jeris Higgins. The 28 year-old, Video Editor admits that he is looking for a woman with a New York swag with a southern lady’s hospitality. Some may feel that Jeris was “played” by Emily B. but he sees it as loyalty and respects Em for being a down chick! “She was really giving me a hard time, I was just trying to converse a little,” says the bachelor before acknowledging her “cake.” Just like Emily, Jeris seeks the love from a counterpart which he hasn’t found yet. Traits you look for in a woman: I love to laugh, so a sense of humor. You have to be able to laugh with me. I love long hair, not that I don’t like short hair. Any skin color is fine with me. Family orientated, I’m from the south so that is very important to me. How she gets along with her mother is a big thing. If you don’t get a long with your mother that tells me a lot. If you’re cute, funny and love your family then we can date! What will you bring to a relationship? I’m offering 100 percent truthfulness. You never have to worry about the next chick, cause if there is one I will tell you. I bring confidence to that person. I love building a woman up, that’s what a relationship is about. I want her to learn stuff from me. I also bring my southern hospitality. They say chivalry is dead but I open doors… I make you feel like a lady! Your occupation? I’m known as Jeris from “Love & Hip Hop” now, I need people to know that I’ve been in this business for 10 years–editing and directing. I’m out here really doing my thing. Ironically one of the first videos I worked on as a Production Assistant, nine years ago was Fabolous’ first video. The one on the train…his first video was my first video. The perfect date: If money was no issue…we would wake up, go go-Kart racing, or something crazy like sky-diving. I would take you and have drinks and ask you one thing you would love to do, because it’s all about having fun. I’d ask what she wants, or what she hasn’t done and that’s what we are going to do! Other Specs: Jeris has no children and wants to be married before he has any! Hit him up ladies… Follow Jeris on Twitter @ JayMegga Emily B: “Adrienne Bailon & Fab Are Just Friends” Emily B. Shows Off Her Massive Louboutin Collection For Pynk Mag!
In 2005, when Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was published, Walter Kirn, writing in the New York Times Book Review , summed up the book’s “grand ambition” this way: “To take on the most explosive subject available while showing no passion, giving no offense, adopting no point of view and venturing no sentiment more hazardous than that history is sad and brutal and wouldn’t it be nicer if it weren’t.” Kirn couldn’t, at that point, have seen Stephen Daldry’s film adaptation of the book. But with that sentence, he pretty much wrote the review in advance. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close tells the story of Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn), a perpetually wan 9-year-old New Yorker struggling with his father’s death in the events of 9/11. Dad Thomas (Tom Hanks, playing a particularly insufferable kind of ultra-reasonable dadness) was a jeweler by trade, but only because he wanted to make a decent life for himself, his wife Linda (an efficient but bloodless Sandra Bullock) and young Oskar. In reality, he was a science-nerd know-it-all type who would send Oskar out on field expeditions to discover new things about the city, and, it turns out, to get him comfortable talking to people. Oskar is a bit awkward in that department — at one point he precociously announces that he was once tested for “Asperger’s Disease,” but that “the results were inconclusive.” But of course. Oskar is obviously traumatized by his father’s death, not least because in the last minutes of his life dad left several increasingly doomy messages on the family’s home answering machine, messages Oskar heard when he was sent home early from school on that fateful day. But he never tells his mother about them; instead, he turns inside himself, trying to hang onto scraps of memories of his father. Until, one day, rooting around in his parents’ closet he finds (and breaks) a vase. Inside is a small envelope, marked with the name “Black” and containing a key. Oskar takes it upon himself to locate every person named Black in the five boroughs, paying each a personal visit (on foot — the subway, along with most other things in the city, makes him anxious). He catalogs these names and visits meticulously, pasting mementos of his search in a scrapbook. He also scratches at his skin, lashes out at his mother, and indulges in a never-ending stream of obnoxious-whiz-kid quips and insights, including a breathless interior monologue about the multitudinous things in New York (people eating, sneakers wrapped around phone lines, and so forth) that give him the heebie-jeebies. Poor little Oskar! Such an adorable, pint-sized heap of neuroses. What better mouthpiece for an author, or a filmmaker, to use as a way of exploring the personal cost of a great communal tragedy. Do you get the idea that Oskar must emerge from his own teeny-tiny personal prison and, yes, embrace the world? Never has the tragedy of 9/11 been made so shrinky-dinked. Daldry has made a career out of taking acclaimed works of literary fiction ( The Hours , The Reader ) and transforming them into snoozy, self-congratulatory, assertively tasteful movies, the equivalent of book clubs that pride themselves on choosing only “quality” books. But he’s outdone himself with Incredibly Close ; there’s something cloistered and cushy about it, as if it were a movie made by Upper East Siders for Upper East Siders (the Park Avenue sort, not the 86th-and-Lex sort). Oskar isn’t supposed to be rich; though it’s not clear what his mother does, his father is a rather modest sort of jeweler. But the family does live in a building with a doorman (played by a gruff, grumpy John Goodman) and a big, clean, well-lit marble lobby — I don’t need to tell you what that kind of real estate generally costs in New York. And when Oskar is let out of school early on that horrific day, he seems to be far enough uptown that that mythical downtown, where all the terrible stuff was happening, really does seem miles away. You may also be interested to note that many of the Blacks Oskar encounters in his investigation are, yes, actually black. (Those would include Viola Davis and Jeffrey Wright, playing two people who may or may not hold the answer Oskar is looking for. Their performances are as believable as possible, considering their characters, as written, are practically made of cardboard.) That means Oskar gets experience talking to actual black people , some of them from the lower classes. How wonderful! You can’t buy that sort of education at the Browning School. Mostly, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close isn’t even offensive. It’s too dull and spineless to get much of a rise out of you. Shot by Chris Menges, it does give us a lush, rich, patchwork-style view of New York. But even then, there’s something too novel about the workaday food-cart vendors and pedestrians who people the movie’s universe — it’s all a bit too sparkling, too easy. Alexandre Desplat gives us one of his scribbled-on-a-napkin scores, as opposed to one of his great ones: It’s timid and nice and tiptoeing, a lot like the movie itself. In fact, even though the subject matter is very different, the picture Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close most closely resembles is Peter Jackson’s botched version of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones . Like that movie, it offers a view of childhood that comes from an adult who’s constantly looking over his shoulder, rather than from a real — even a fictitiously real — child. The only bright spot in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is Max von Sydow, as a mysterious, and mysteriously mute, older gent who, as Oskar tells us in one of his incessant voiceovers, lived in Dresden during the war and “went through some really bad stuff.” Like, maybe even 9/11 bad. If you’re the kind of moviegoer who ducks when you see an extremely loud metaphor headed your way, you don’t need me to tell you that that one is coming incredibly close. Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Urban Media powered by Mixtapes.tv Music video for “The Motto” by Drake featuring Lil Wayne & Tyga, off that Take Care album. Mistah F.A.B. and the mother of the late Mac Dre make appearances. Directed by Lamar Taylor & Hyghly Alleyne. Rating: 0.0/5 (0 votes cast) Rating: 0.0/ 5 (0 votes cast) Broadcasting platform : Vimeo Source : Hip Hop Music Discovery Date : 22/12/2011 03:54 Number of articles : 2
