TMZ updated their post ]with a statement from the FAA: “TMZ does not have FAA authorization to fly an Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS), and we have no record that TMZ ever requested or inquired about an authorization.” TMZ has denied they are pushing to own drones. The gossip site responded to earlier reports that they put in a request with the FAA for the unmanned aircraft. The Web site#39;s plan to own drones was first reported by The San Francisco Chronicle. “TMZ is NOT getting in the DRONE
The “is Kate Middleton pregnant” rumor mill continues to be set ablaze this month, with a new report saying she hopes to make THE ANNOUNCEMENT around Christmas! According to Us Weekly , a source close to the royal couple says, “They’re excited at the prospect of becoming parents,” and confirms they’re “working on it.” Not sure what this celebrity gossip mole means by that. Next time draw us a picture! “In a dream situation, they would love to be a step closer at Christmas,” the source adds. “They have been on such a high since getting married.” Basically, Prince William has been seeing plenty of Kate Middleton topless and bottomless , and hopes the fruits of his labor will mean an heir in 2013. And heir and a spare down the line, if they have their way and nature cooperates. Just like Will, Kate wants two children, according to a longtime friend of hers, and their home in Kensington is undergoing a seven-figure renovation. Hmm! Whether it’s a boy or a girl, he/she will be the heir(ess) to the throne behind Princes Charles and William, thanks to the recent change in succession rules. The alleged insider then adds that if in fact she is pregnant, she will not make an announcement until after her first trimester … well after Christmas. Unless she’s already 7-8 weeks along and her baby bump is on the verge of showing. In any case, let the speculation and over-analysis of Kate Middleton photos continue!
He famously stuck his finger in the peanut butter many years ago as a cast member on Real World: San Francisco , but now David Rainey is in serious trouble. The man best known as “Puck” kicked off his stint in prison this month, following a No Contest plea in April to charges of stalking. TMZ reports that Rainey committed the crime on February 22, though details behind it are unclear at the moment. He was sentenced to over a year in prison, however, which implies a court order violation of some kind. Rainey turned himself in to the Wasco State Prison on November 8 and was credited with 401 days served; he has approximately 300 remaining. We wish Puck the best of luck behind bars, and we encourage readers to browse through our gallery of celebrity mug shots .
Quick, name your favorite Alfred Hitchcock movie and scene. With the Master of Suspense getting a lot of attention this fall, thanks to the HBO movie, The Girl , and the theatrical feature Hitchcock , which opens in limited release on Friday, Movieline decided these would be good questions to ask of the celebrity contingent that showed up for the New York premiere of the latter film on Sunday. Hitchcock , which stars Anthony Hopkins in the title role and Helen Mirren as his better half Alma Reville, is set during the making of Psycho and depicts the filmmaker in a more cuddly light than the manipulative misogynist he’s made out to be in The Girl . The comic drama is built around Hitchcock’s relationship with wife and the helpful role she played in his career. And though Hopkins didn’t attend the premiere at the Ziegfeld Theater, I spoke to him via satellite on Saturday. Based on his answers, he’s clearly spent some time with Vertigo. Movieline: What is your favorite Hitchcock film and your favorite scene? Anthony Hopkins , the star of Hitchcock . Movie: “ Vertigo is one of my all-time favorites. I think it’s the haunting music of Bernard Hermann and James Stewart’s romantic obsession for this young woman who is a mystery. She’s beautiful, blonde, inaccessible. He falls madly in love with her, and she’s killed halfway through or a quarter way through the film. She just falls out of the window or commits suicide. Then she reappears on the street in San Francisco.” Scene: “That scene particularly, when he follows her across the street to her hotel. That late afternoon light in the San Francisco street, 54 years ago when it was made. And the moment when he leaves her room, he says, “Can I take you for dinner,” and Kim Novak, as he goes out, turns towards the camera and you see the whole plot. You’re let in on the secret that this was a setup and James Stewart is the victim of an appalling tragedy—a woman’s murder. Then, he sees her on the street and becomes obsessed with repossessing Madeleine. He makes her have her hair done and the skirts and the shoes and everything. He’s obsessed, as Hitchcock was about the costuming, about the dressing of his female stars. He’s waiting in her hotel room and she’s finally persuaded to have her hair done the way Madeleine had it. She comes out and she’s come back from the dead. I mean, that’s the kind of mystical genius of Hitchcock. I think that has now become the top, number one film of all time. The critics destroyed it when it came out. They just said it was rubbish. Now, it’s number one. Top movie, above Casablanca and all those. So, the guy’s genius lives on, many years after his death.” Sacha Gervasi , the director of Hitchcock Movie: “Hel-lo, Psycho . With many filmmakers there’s perhaps two or three masterworks, but with Hitchcock there’s ten or twelve. That’s very rare. I also love Vertigo , because it’s so romantic. I think it’s sort of unintentionally revealing of the man himself.” Scene: “How could I not say the shower scene? It’s so revolutionary and so shocking and surprising.” Scarlett Johansson , Janet Leigh in Hitchcock Movie: “ Strangers on a Train . As a kid, I liked the look of it. I liked the cinematography. I liked the suspense. I liked everything about it.” Danny Huston , Strangers on a Train screenwriter Whitfield Cook in Hitchcock Movie: “ Strangers on a Train — only because I wrote it. [Laughs] I suppose Psycho because of those memorable moments; because it all came together in such a terrifying way and it’s just such a deeply psychological film.” Scene: “I don’t know whether it’s my favorite, but the one I just can’t shake, especially when I get soap in my eyes in the shower is the Psycho shower sequence. It’s just something that stays with me. And, if you’re somewhere around birds and the birds get a little too close to you, then you have that memory, too. It’s a subconscious thing.” Toni Collette , Peggy Robertson in Hitchcock : Movie: “It’s too hard. I mean, do you know how many movies he made? Jesus. I always go for Rear Window . Psycho is probably the most famous, which is why [Hitchcock] is so enlightening. He’s the master.” Scene: “I’m too jetlagged to recall.” Michael Stuhlbarg , Lew Wasserman in Hitchcock : Movie: “It’s impossible to choose between them. Each one accomplishes a different feat. I am particularly taken by Rope , especially because of the technical achievement of shooting the story so that it appeared to be a single continuous shot and how he creatively found ways to hide that.” Scene: “When that biplane comes after Cary Grant in North By Northwest and how close it gets to him — that’s an iconic scene that has stayed with me.” Jessica Biel , Vera Miles in Hitchcock : Movie : “I actually just saw Dial M for Murder , which I quite loved a lot. That and The Birds , of course.” James D’Arcy , Anthony Perkins in Hitchcock Movie: “I think the best one is the last one I watched, because the minute you see it you’re struck by his genius and you forget the other ones. Then, you watch the next one. The last one I saw was Foreign Correspondent , which is a 1940 piece of war propaganda. It’s utterly mesmeric. It’s got one of the best plane crashes I’ve ever seen. That wasn’t even on my radar before I’d seen it. Now it’s my favorite Hitchcock film.” Scene: “Wow. That is a difficult question. That shower scene in Psycho . That had people running out of cinemas when it was first screened. It’s just so iconic.” Jon Voight , actor: Movie: “I don’t have any favorites. I liked what he did for cinema, you know? And everybody who makes a film has learned something from Hitchcock and the way he made films. So, every film I see reminds me. ‘They took that from Hitchcock, they took that from Hitchcock.’ The things he employed became ingested by everybody in filmmaking.” Amanda Setton , actress, Gossip Girl Movie: “I don’t want to be cliché, but I have to say Psycho . We shoot on the Universal lot in L.A. and the Bates Motel and the Psycho house are on our back lot, so I kind of feel a very personal relationship to the ‘epicness,’ if you will, of that space. Ralph Macchio , actor: Movie: “Right now, it’s Rear Window . I just wrote a short film that I’m going to direct this December and there’s a voyeur-esque element to it. Scene: “Certainly the shower scene in Psycho . There’s a zillion of ’em.” Steve “Lips” Kudlow, frontman, Anvil Movie: “It would probably be Dial M for Murder . It was really brilliant that there was virtually nothing but one room. That and Rear Window . Those two movies. Wow.” Nell Alk is an arts and entertainment writer and reporter based in New York City. Her work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Manhattan Magazine, Z!NK Magazine and on InterviewMagazine.com, PaperMag.com and RollingStone.com, among others. Learn more about her here. Follow Nell Alk on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
San Francisco residents may soon be forced to wear clothes outside of their homes, and some activists are displeased by this proposed public nudity ban. City lawmakers are set to vote Tuesday on an ordinance that, if passed, would make it illegal for anyone over age 5 to expose their genitals in public. Hilariously, this is not currently against the law in San Francisco. Exemptions may be made for parades or festivals with a city permit, according to the ordinance. Just the same, a group of activists has already filed a lawsuit. One of the plaintiffs, Mitch Hightower , has organized an annual “nude-in” demonstration over the past several years in protest of the public nudity ban. “The ‘Nude In’ is intended to promote a spirit of tolerance, peace and fellowship among the attendees,” the lawsuit said, citing a constitutional right of free speech. “It attempts to criminalize nudity even when engaged in for the purpose of political advocacy.” George Davis, who ran for mayor in 2007 and District 6 supervisor in 2010 as the “nude candidate,” joined the suit, claiming he uses nudity “as part of his political expression.” If the ordinance is enacted, first time offenders would be fined $100. The fine increases to $200 for a second offense within 12 months. The third time a nudist is caught, they could be hit with a $500 fine and charged with a misdemeanor. So basically, Rihanna nude would be jailed in about two weeks. Just not right. Hopefully a judge strikes down this egregious affront to American freedom.
Via SF Gate: When Californians voted to outlaw same-sex marriage four years ago, one factor – both revealing and alarming to the civil rights community – was African Americans’ support for the ban. Proposition 8, which passed with a 52 percent majority, had 58 percent support among black voters. It was a different story Nov. 6 in Maine, Maryland and Washington state, where voters endorsed marriage rights for gays and lesbians, and in Minnesota, where state law already prohibits same-sex marriage but voters rejected a Prop. 8-style ban in their state Constitution. Surveys show a majority of African Americans now support those rights, said Ben Jealous, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which campaigned hard for same-sex marriage. In Maryland, where blacks make up almost 30 percent of the voters, their backing was crucial. “We’re talking about it as a civil rights issue,” and people are listening, Jealous said in an interview last week during a visit to San Francisco. He also said President Obama’s endorsement of same-sex marriage rights in May, followed shortly afterward by an endorsement from the NAACP, was a “game changer.” If the issue reached the ballot again in California, “we would see majority black support,” Jealous said. “I’m very confident that … we would win.” San Francisco’s NAACP leader, the Rev. Amos Brown of Third Baptist Church, agreed. “People are enlightened,” said Brown, a member of the NAACP’s national board who took part in the Maryland campaign. A different view came from the Rev. Maurice Scott of Oakland, one of many African American clergy members throughout the state who vocally supported Prop. 8. “People of African descent are very religious people,” said Scott, pastor at the Great St. John Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church. “I think that many are supportive of the president but not supportive of homosexuality.” Even today, he said, all the parishioners with whom he has spoken “would not vote for (a) man-and-man, woman-and-woman relationship.” Not all assessments of the Nov. 6 vote in Maryland agreed with Jealous’ assessment of African American support of same-sex marriage. The NAACP leader said surveys just before the election found majority backing for the measure among blacks, but the Washington Post said an exit poll pegged support at 46 percent, compared with 52 percent of all voters. The surveys agree, however, that attitudes toward same-sex marriage among African Americans and other racial minorities have changed even more rapidly than the views of the general population. In Maryland, supporters of same-sex marriage sought to turn the issue of religion in the black community to their advantage. One of their leading ads featured the Rev. Delmon Coates, African American pastor of the 8,000-member Mount Ennon Baptist Church, telling viewers, “I would not want someone denying my rights based upon their religious views; therefore, I should not deny others’ rights based upon mine.” The Baltimore Sun said tests with focus groups found that the ad was a hit with voters of all races and helped the campaign raise crucial funds. Jealous said he was particularly heartened by exit polls in four states – Florida, Ohio, Georgia and North Carolina – reporting that a majority of African Americans in each state would favor a measure establishing same-sex-marriage rights. “When we’re polling majority black support in Georgia,” he said, “the issue has changed permanently across the country.” Discuss…
The 49ers and Rams played to a 24-24 tie on Sunday, the first in four years in the NFL. The tie brought the 49ers to 6-2-1 while the Rams moved to 3-5-1. Ties count as a half win and half loss, which could make the standings interesting come playoff time. The game was particularly damaging to San Francisco, which lost quarterback Alex Smith to injury. Colin Kaepernick was solid in relief, CBS Sports noted. “Kap did a very good job,” said 49ers head coach Jim Harbaugh. “He came in, good focus
Through a pair of live X Factor episodes, the best thing about Khloe Kardashian as host is clear: Her nipples. They were the talk of Wednesday night, as Simon Cowell pointed out the clear view he had of these body parts from the judges’ table, and they were also the topic of conversation yesterday when Khloe spoke to reporters. “I was supposed to wear this yesterday,” Kardashian said, referring to the blue dress she donned for the Results Show . “And it was not tailored enough, annnnd I wore the other thing…” But the San Francisco Giants’ swept of the World Series, Fox changed around its schedule a bit and Mother Nature even interfered. “With the hurricane, all the stuff I wanted to wear was stuck on the east coast. We did not have time to do a full dress rehearsal in our clothes,” Khloe explained, saying she had “no idea” her breasts would be that apparent. Kardashian added that the incident stressed her our. She wondered: ‘Am I gonna be fired because of my boobs?’ Silly, Khloe. Of course not. You basically got hired for them. What do you think of Kardashian so far? Grade her as host: A B C D F View Poll »
The Vatican has apparently caught wind of Skyfall mania and it even gave its opinion through its official l’Osservatore Romano newspaper. The 23rd James Bond pic even nabbed a rare review, calling it one of the best in its 5 decades. l’Osservatore Romano ‘s Skyfall green light is a sea-change for the publication which only has a print circulation of 15,000. Its influence is far higher, however, when its editorial which reflects Vatican policy, is splashed in papers and websites around the world. For Skyfall l’Osservatore Romano published five articles, according to Reuters . The paper noted in its main article “007 License to Cry” that the latest installment presents the British super-operative in a less cliché manner, and “more human, capable of being moved and of crying: in a word, more real.” In another article, the paper compares the lineage of Bond actors from Sean Connery to the current Daniel Craig. Craig told the paper he feels “very different” from his predecessors, but noted that Connery is a “point of reference.” The Catholic Church famously condemned Federico Fellini’s classic La Dolce Vita when it debuted in 1960 through l’Osservatore Romano, which viewed a scene from the film as a parody of Christ’s second coming. It was subject to widespread censorship including a full ban in Spain until after the death of dictator Francisco Franco in 1975. The first Bond film, From Russia with Love came out in 1963. [ Source: Reuters ]
As is often the peril with movies of giant ambition, Cloud Atlas walks a crooked line between the glorious and the ridiculous, its reach unencumbered by sensible decisions or restraint. Adapted with reasonable faithfulness from a novel of equally epic sweep by British author David Mitchell, the film spans eras and genres, intertwining tales of men at sea in the 1850s with a 1970s conspiracy-based mystery with a dystopian future Seoul. Through these settings and the characters that populate them, the movie highlights themes of reincarnation and of the warring nature of mankind as empathetic and self-sacrificing versus competitive and brutal. Directed by Tom Tykwer and Lana and Andy Wachowski , Cloud Atlas matches the scope of its settings and its motifs with an equally bold filmmaking choice: it reuses its actors in different roles in the different story threads, recasting them with the help of make-up and prosthetics across ethnicities and sometimes genders. Halle Berry plays the Jewish wife of a 1930s Belgian composer in one storyline and an African-American journalist in San Francisco in another. Hugo Weaving plays a female nurse working in a modern British old age home and an incarnation of the devil in a distant future version of Hawaii. Tom Hanks is a duplicitous 19th century doctor picked up in the Chatham Islands and the thuggish Cockney author of a popular novel in the present day. It’s a wild choice that underscores the film’s suggestion of the transmutation of souls. As the main character — who’s marked by a comet-shaped birthmark and played by various actors — makes his/her way through the eons and different lives, the recurrence of performers provides a visual reminder of this theme, tying together narratives that are wildly diverse in tone and content. It’s also a technique that provokes some unavoidable amusement. Despite the quality of the production, there’s only so much that can be done to plausibly turn Korean star Bae Doona into a freckled white aristocrat, Ben Whishaw into a blonde woman or Jim Sturgess into an Asian rebel leader. And yet, there’s something fiercely admirable about the film’s dedication to this particular type of color-blind casting, even when it fails. (Well, almost color-blind — the black characters are all played by black actors.) Its hero, after all, is a soul, so why stand on ceremony about the malleable bodies in which it, and others, are housed? That protagonist starts off, in the earliest story, as a villain — Dr. Henry Goose (Hanks), who treats the naive Adam Ewing (Sturgess) on their trip to San Francisco by ship in the mid-1800s with a medicine that is quite deliberately making him worse. He is reborn, in the ear between World Wars, as Robert Frobisher (Whishaw), an English composer whose love affair with another man gets him disinherited, he leads to him working for an established talent named Vyvyan Ayrs (Jim Broadbent) who’s not as benign an employer as Frobisher would like. In the 1970s, he’s become a she — Luisa Rey (Berry), a Californian journalist whose investigation into a nuclear plant cover-up lands her in danger. In 2012, she’s Timothy Cavendish (Broadbent), an aging publisher who gets both lucky and unlucky with a hit book and who finds himself committed to a militant nursing home from which he’d like to escape. In New Seoul in the near future, he’s become Sonmi-451 (Bae), a cloned waitress at a chain restaurant who experiences an awakening from the conscripted life that labor “fabricants” are intended to have. And in the far-flung reaches of the film’s timeline, she’s become Zachry (Hanks), one of a small community of peaceful villagers living in Hawaii after the collapse of civilization and trying to avoid the savage cannibalistic faction the remaining humans on the island have become. These stories connect within each other and, unlike the nesting doll structure of Mitchell’s novel, they’re intercut. The film stays with one story for long minutes or dips into another for a brief glimpse. Every thread is, in essence, about the powerful oppressing the powerless and what it takes to put oneself at risk to help others, whether it be an escaped slave stowaway or a manufactured corporate server. Despite the showiness of the structure, it’s the films smaller moments that leap out as emotionally wrenching: an encounter with an old love at the top of a cathedral, a man carrying his sick friend out to sit in the sun, a rallying cry at a pub. Cloud Atlas strives continually for transcendence and only sometimes grasps it, but the sincerity with which it pursues the emotion and the very idea of the reverberating impact selfless actions can have is quite moving. It’s rare, these days, to see a movie declare its aims for greatness so openly and without a leaden sense of self-importance. And though the film doesn’t achieve all of its goals, it does offer an indelibly powerful vision of a throughline from the past to today and on through the end of things, that expresses faith in the ability of people to overcome animalism. It’s spiritual but entirely humanistic, and salvation, when it comes, arrives from within or from other people — an outrageous, silly and beautiful ode to the better nature of mankind. Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
