‘I do my mixtapes just like albums, I don’t short the people, I give ’em real songs,’ Keke tells Mixtape Daily of his latest release. By Maurice Bobb Lil Keke Photo: MTV News
She says she’s not proud of using food stamps to buy food. 28-year-old Cindy Nerger and her hubby are feeling the recession and who can blame them. Nerger had to stop working because she’s been on daily 12-hour dialysis treatments for kidney failure since 2008 and is waiting for a kidney transplant. Her husband is a carpenter and owns his own business but work is on and off so she became eligible for Medicare and Social Security Supplemental Income. According to WMAZ: …Nerger went grocery shopping. When she got to the register there was a problem. “He told me I owed him 10 dollars and some change. I am not exactly sure what it was, but I told him, I said I am sorry sir, but there is nothing in my cart that is not covered by food stamps,” said Nerger. She and the Kroger employees went back and forth about this for half an hour when a manager acknowledged was right about the purchase all along. “I was upset, so, I was like, you know, I told you that it was covered under food stamps, you know, so, there was no need for all of this, you know, and he said, “Well excuse me that I work for a living and don’t rely on food stamps like you,” Nerger said. The comment humiliated her, she said. “I honestly was angry. I was angry at first, but it turned into tears because when I turned around and I saw the people there I was like, oh my goodness, and I just started crying,” said Nerger. “I didn’t want to have to go there, you know, nobody wants to have to ask somebody for for help, but it got to the point it was either ask for help or starve,” said Nerger. “We deeply regret that a Kroger customer had an unpleasant shopping experience. Kroger is conducting an ongoing investigation, and look forward to resolving the customer’s concern. We hope she will continue to shop at Kroger in the future.” Nerger said she was contacted by Kroger’s corporate office about the incident. She says they offered her a $15 gift card for her to come back. “I told them, ‘No thank you.” We wish all the self-righteous folks out there would take a seat. Images via WMAZ/Facebook
Just the words South Central will conjure up an image of mean streets and gangs, even by people who don’t live in Los Angeles. The neighborhood is infamous for its hardened criminals and its gang-banger imagery has permeated the popular culture everywhere. Director David Ayer returns to the neighborhood he knows well in his latest film End of Watch , starring Jake Gyllenhaal (who is also an executive producer) and Michael Peña who give gripping performances as LAPD cops Brian Taylor and Mike Zavala tackling a better armed group of very tough group – both guys and gals. Ayer grew up in the neighborhood and knows the people he’s brought to the big screen well. South Central was the setting for his first directorial feature, Harsh Times back in 2005. And LAPD cops were at the heart of his 2008 pic Street Kings . Ayer told ML that he initially wanted to move away from the cop-crime scenario after working on those films, but headed back to the genre even as he was trying to talk himself out of it. In the feature that opens wide Friday, Gyllenhaal and Peña play LAPD officers Brian Taylor and Mike Zavala. The action plays out on screen through the P.O.V. of hand-held cameras implanted on police officers with more footage “shown” by gang members, surveillance cameras, dish cams and citizen-caught images in the line of fire. While there are moments peppered throughout the feature showing moments of levity between the their characters that prompted outbursts of laughter during the film’s premiere in Toronto, the scenes quickly turn to present a mosaic of dark violent streets, human trafficking, gang confrontation and a barrage of shoot-outs. Just try and fall asleep in this movie – aint gonna happen… David Ayer chatted with ML the day after the premiere of End of Watch in Toronto the other week and gave shared why he decided to return to the cop story, they unique visual style he’s going for in the pic, and just how real all the seemingly outrageous dramas the two officers face in the film are… [ Related: Jake Gyllenhaal’s Life-Changing End Of Watch Prep: ‘Someone Was Murdered In Front Of Me’ and End Of Watch Star Michael Peña Sees Racial Barriers Coming Down In Hollywood ] I heard you wrote the script for End of Watch in six days, how did that play out? Yes, I did. It just kind of exploded out of me. It was six days by way of twenty years, you know what I mean? It’s a world I’ve spent a lot of time in. I grew up in South Central L.A. I have a lot of friends in law enforcement, so a lot of things that happen in the script happened to a close friend of mine. I have been writing down stories he told me. So the challenge of writing this story lead me to do this pseudo-documentary style that makes it really natural and not just using the usual story landmarks that you might intuitively feel. Were there certain documentaries that informed some of your style choices for End of Watch ? This one friend of mine takes cameras to work and guess what – he films things just like we all do with our phones etc anywhere. It can be riveting and it seemed like a fantastic device to tell a story, but at the same time, the “found footage” aspect can become a bit tedious if it’s not from a place of total reality. It can become like a gimmick and the allusion alters. So we brought in conventional coverage to augment that and the movie is a hybrid. There was a point where you went away from telling the Cop Stories, what made you do that and what brought you back? I really want to direct. Whenever you want to start over in Hollywood, you have to start from the bottom. I did Street Kings and it was for a studio which is a different process as a director. I tried mounting up some projects afterward including a science fiction movie and nothing was working out. The surest way I could get back on set was to do another cop movie. A friend of mine in the studios said I should do a found-footage cop [story] but I thought that I should not do that. But as I was talking myself out of it, I talked myself into it. But you didn’t want to do it from the “corrupt cop” viewpoint? No, the corrupt cop story is so freaking played out. I mean, it’s so 2003. The real challenge becomes, if you don’t have that dramatic engine of the corruption, what is the dramatic engine? What is the story? I made this movie about the friendship and the journey these guys are going through. The bad guy stuff is sort of an appendage to that story. They’re not investigators solving crimes, they’re just guys doing their jobs who end up way over their heads and that’s how it is for real cops. There’s a whole world they’re not privy too, yet they keep running into it, they keep sighting the shark fin in the water. That’s the one thing that struck me – that great rapport between Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña’s characters. There’s of course all this fantastic crazy tough shit going on in this film with the shoot-outs and grim discoveries that make for great viewing, but there’s also these hilarious moments of banter between their characters that really draw you into their lives. To write the way people talk and not just make movie dialog and to get them to pull off a breezy, natural style together and live in the history of that friendship was the real challenge as a director. It’s ironic because what appears so easy is insanely difficult as a filmmaker and insanely difficult as an actor. And it took the three of us a long time in the trenches to get them to the point to pull it off. My favorite scenes in the movie are the two guys in the car talking. Did you have a regimen in mind for Jake and Michael off the bat in order to get them to be believable cops in the lead-up to the actual shoot? A good friend of mine does martial arts training and what that does is get the mindset down of hitting people and being hit. Often it can be hard to override the instinct of not hitting someone. You have to overcome that. You have to have that ability and understanding of violence to become a cop and it starts to change everything including your body language. And there was firearms training. They were taught by a 35 year-veteran LAPD-SWAT officer who gave them training in LAPD by the numbers shooting style. We went to the same LAPD outlets to get their equipment and uniforms because I wanted everything to be incredibly accurate. And they went on an incredible number of ride-alongs with officers and I wanted them to go with a number of different agencies so they can see just how different the LAPD itself is. I think they were shocked by the cultural differences between those departments. I had an idea of a program in mind, but obviously logistics and demands evolved. I think at first they were cursing me, but once they realized they had the real skills, they appreciated it and it just made it all the more real on set. I think audiences everywhere and even in L.A. may be surprised that the Mexican drug cartels have such direct operations in the U.S. as this movie suggests. Obviously everyone knows they’re involved with drug trafficking across the border, but I think people don’t know there’s such a direct connection to day-today operations on the U.S. side of the border. Yeah, they control the wholesale of drugs in the United States and human trafficking. Nothing moves across that border without their permission. They’ll give illegal immigrants drugs and will say, ‘you’re now a drug mule.’ It’s a busy organization and they’re incredibly efficient – drugs, human trafficking, weapons. Everything that’s happening in the movie is happening now. Friends of mine in the department pull over cartel runners all the time and do multi-kilo seizures. I know someone working in narcotics just last week who took a huge haul of cartel drugs off the street. They’re here, they’re operating…I feel like people have no idea that there’s such a huge presence of the cartels not only in Southern California, but throughout the United States, even in the northern part of the country. How were you able to get under the skin in portraying the gang members in the movie? It’s a distinct subculture and it would be very easy to mis-represent that… People not from L.A. and are not familiar with the gangsters there will look at something like this and think they’re almost cartoonish, you know? But that’s how they role. This is bang on. [ End of Watch gangster] Lala, played by Yahira Garcia, is unbelievable in the movie. She’s a rapper and was brought up in that neighborhood and her brothers are caught up in the life. And she’s seen some tragic things. And “Demon” played by Richard Cabral is from a multi-generational gang family and just recently got out of it and now working in film. The only one who wasn’t a former gang-banger was Maurice Compte who plays “Big Evil.” He’s incredibly soft-spoken, incredibly smart and such a nice guy and somehow he pulled off this alter-ego “Big Evil” persona out.
Former Bond girl Olga Kurylenko recently did a great spread for Complex involving a bunch of yoga poses. And if you ask me, there’s nothing hotter than a woman doing yoga — it shows they’re flexible, usually involves spandex, and always gives you a great view. But try telling that to the people at my local yoga studio. Apparently you’re not allowed to just sit in on classes, which totally isn’t fair. Some of us just learn better by watching than doing. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to studying Olga’s form.
Also in Tuesday afternoon’s round-up of news briefs, Tribeca Film’s War Witch has been selected to represent Canada in the Oscars race. CBS has set a date for the People’s Choice Awards. And Gong Li will star as a Chinese Empress in a new U.S.-China co-production. War Witch Selected by Canada for Best-Foreign Language Oscar Consideration Kim Nguyen’s War Witch has been selected to represent Canada in the foreign-language category by TeleFilm Canada, which serves as the pan-Canadian selection committee. Set in Sub-Saharan Africa, War Witch (Rebelle) revolves around Komona a 14-year-old girl who tells her unborn child growing inside her the story of her life since she has been at war. Everything started when she was abducted by the rebel army at the age of 12. Tribeca Film will release the film in the U.S. in 2013. Around the ‘net… Clint Eastwood Reveals Social Liberalism and Fiscal Conservatism on Ellen He joked on GMA , “If somebody’s dumb enough to ask me to go to a political convention and say something, they’re gonna have to take what they get.” And revealed more later on Ellen , “The condition of society right now, with the high unemployment rates and the tremendous debt we’re increasing and the government spending,” he said, “we’d think there’d be [many more worthy issues] to think about [rather] that worrying about gay marriage,” THR reports . People’s Choice Awards Set for January 9th CBS will air the fan-chosen nods January 9th in a telecast from the Nokia Theater in L.A. at 9pm E.T., Deadline reports . Captain America Gets a New Job Title: President of the United States One of Marvel Entertainment’s best-known heroes will trade in his NYC apartment for the White House in the pages of The Ultimates , a series set in a U.S. torn apart by factionalism, out of control mutant hysteria and secessionist support, A.P. reports . Gong Li Eyes The Last Empress Gong Li will star in the project which tells the story of Empress Cixi’s life and her complex relationships with Emperor Guang Xu and an American Imperial advisor. The U.S.-Chinese co-production is set to begin production in the final quarter of 2013, Deadline reports .
Jamaica Offended By Mugabe’s Remarks On People Being Drunk And Lazy Comments by an African leader portraying the men of Jamaica as chronic drunkards and unambitious pot smokers have become the talk of towns across this Caribbean island. People are debating the matter on street corners, in letters to the editor and on radio talk shows. In unscripted asides during a roughly three-hour speech last week at a research exposition, Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe said Jamaican “men are always drunk,” have no interest in higher education, and people freely smoke chronic. “The men want to sing and do not go to colleges, some are dreadlocked. Let us not go there,” Mugabe told the crowd at the University of Zimbabwe in Harare. His comments in a mixture of both English and the Shona language were corroborated by The Associated Press after speaking to several reporters who attended the gathering. Over the years, Mugabe has repeatedly made disparaging remarks about dreadlocked Rastafarians, whom he once described as having “moths and mud” in their hair. Rastafarianism, best known for its ritual use of chronic and the dreadlock hair style worn by followers, emerged in Jamaica in the 1930s out of anger over the oppression of blacks. A small minority of Jamaicans are adherents. Glen Harris, a laborer and father of two children, said he felt irritated when he heard about the Zimbabwean president’s chiding remarks on a local radio program. Like the large majority of Jamaica’s population, Harris is black. “This is an African leader talking like this? Black man should stick up for each other. We’re all Africans,” he said on a Kingston street of low-slung concrete buildings and sheet metal fences. Although some foreigners have an image of Jamaica as a laid-back, sun-soaked slice of paradise where unhurried people smoke marijuana without a care, marijuana use is illegal and many islanders are socially conservative churchgoers who quietly endure stereotypes of their country. Still, a few Jamaicans aren’t aggrieved with Mugabe, who received a top government honor during a 1996 visit. They note that their island is the largest producer of marijuana in the Caribbean and that far more women graduate from university than men, and say Mugabe may have a point, even if he was being overly broad by disparaging Jamaican men. “Is President Robert Mugabe really on to something? Certainly, his observation that our ‘universities are full of women’ while our ‘men want to sing and do not go to colleges’ is a truism, which none can deny,” Northern Caribbean University administrator Vincent Peterkin wrote in a letter to the editor of The Jamaica Gleaner newspaper. Jamaican Information Minister Sandrea Falconer said Wednesday that the foreign affairs ministry, led by A.J. Nicholson, was still trying to confirm if Mugabe made the remarks. “I know his ministry is still trying to authenticate the source, and after we will respond,” Falconer said in a brief phone interview. In a written statement, Nicholson stressed that “Jamaican men and women from all walks of life have made valuable contributions to national development and have made their mark on the world stage.” Thoughts?? Source
“Everything is connected,” reads the tagline for Cloud Atlas . As it is with life and the history of time and humanity, so it is with film reviews; sharply divided reactions have been coming out of Toronto, where the ambitious, history-spanning epic had its world premiere. Seldom do movies garner such polarizing critical reads: Is Cloud Atlas a triumph of ambition or, as one critic spat, ” a unique and totally unparalleled disaster ?” [ PHOTOS: First Images From The Wachowskis’ Cloud Atlas ] That biting reaction comes courtesy of The House Next Door ‘s Calum Marsh ( full review here ), whose beefs — and there are many — range from technical shortcomings to wider structural issues… which, in the case of a film about human interconnectivity and spirit, which interweaves six disparate storylines set in different eras that are filmed in varying tones and genres and feature the same actors in multiple characters (and, sometimes, in yellow- and white- and whatever-face), can be a problem: “‘What is an ocean,’ one character asks smugly, ‘if not a multitude of drops?’ And what’s Cloud Atlas if not a multitude of terrible details and unwatchable moments? The problem isn’t that this is one of the worst films I’ve ever seen in my life; the problem is that it’s seven of the worst films I’ve ever seen in my life glued together haphazardly, their inexorable badness amplified by their awkward juxtaposition. Tom Tykwer and Andy and Lana Wachowski wanted to make a movie unlike any other, and they certainly did: Cloud Atlas is a unique and totally unparalleled disaster.” But one critic’s disaster is another’s transcendent cinematic opus. Devin Faraci, reviewing in Badass Digest ( full review here ), gives high marks to Lana Wachowski, Andy Wachowski, and Tom Tykwer’s reach as scripters and co-directors, arguing that while imperfect, Cloud Atlas is “one of the great pictures of the 21st century so far”: ” Cloud Atlas is sometimes silly, and it’s sometimes pretentious and it’s sometimes overstuffed. But every single one of those things, to me, is a positive. It’s an exceptional piece of filmmaking, one of the bravest works I have ever seen. The Wachowskis have followed the poorly received final two Matrix films and the bomb of Speed Racer with a three hour meditation on the nature of human interaction, featuring a few actors in many make-ups. Some may see that as self-destructive, but I see it as incredibly heroic.” Most early reviews thus far fall at various points between Marsh and Faraci ( Cloud Atlas is currently at 60 percent on Rotten Tomatoes with 10 reviews counted * ). That’s not too surprising, given the difficulty of the undertaking at hand; adapting David Mitchell’s 500+ page novel into their own structure, no less, can be a tricky feat; doing so while pushing a sentimental theme, even moreso. Critics may agree on how the parts fit, but whether or not they see the larger picture congealing is another story. Cloud Atlas jumps around from narrative to narrative, from an 18th century sea voyage to 1970s San Francisco to the dystopian “Neo Soul” future and beyond. At least it has stars Tom Hanks and Halle Berry, who appear in multiple characters throughout, to lend some star wattage. (Jim Broadbent, Jim Sturgess, Hugh Jackman, Ben Whishaw, Doona Bae, Susan Sarandon, and Hugo Weaving fill out the cast.) Did I mention it’s three hours long? The strange thing about these early reviews is that I’m inclined to believe them all. Both sides of the coin: Triumph and, perhaps, disaster. (Then again, I loved Speed Racer . That turned out to be both at once.) * The film’s Tomatometer rating is now up to 73 percent with 15 total reviews, 11 fresh and 4 rotten. Goes to show how quickly the tide can shift so early on. We’ll be keeping an eye on the critical reaction as it builds toward week of release . Stay tuned for more on Cloud Atlas , in theaters October 26, and catch up on Movieline’s coverage of the Toronto Film Festival. Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Before Twilight and even before Kristen Stewart was first approached to be in On The Road by Brazilian-born director Walter Salles, the young actress read the Jack Kerouac novel for school. She told Movieline that she picked up the book because it was an assignment given, but her experience with the now American classic evolved. “I found the book fun,” she said. But after reading and studying it more, it became much more compelling and taught her personal life lessons about growing up, making choices and dealing with inhibitions. She also emphasized that while she played the comparatively wild Marylou, she does not judge her uninhibited character. [ PHOTOS: Kristen Stewart, Garrett Hedlund, and Kirsten Dunst Go ‘On The Road’ in Toronto ] “I learned through the book that you really have a choice about who you surround yourself with. [As a young adult] you realize you can choose who you’re surrounding yourself with,” Stewart told ML in Toronto where On The Road debuted over the weekend. “Up until that point you’re really circumstantially with your family or whatever but at some point you can ‘choose’ your family. “I have a great family by the way, but you need to find people who can pull something out from you that might be otherwise unseen. And when I read the book, I thought, ‘Gosh I need to find people like that.’ I’m definitely not the Marylou type. But as I continued reading it as I got older, the weight of it started to mean something more.” In the film version of the book, Stewart plays Marylou who was first married to, then divorced from, and ultimately a lifelong companion/lover/fellow free spirit to Dean Moriarty. The story centers on Dean (based in real life on Neal Cassady) who meets up with close friend Sal (writer Jack Kerouac’s own stand-in) as the two travel across the U.S. as well as into Canada and Mexico. Like Dean, Marylou is anything but monogamous and she dabbles in pleasures that are alien to the wholesome fun of the prevailing culture of the conservative 1950s. Stewart and the rest of the cast, including Garrett Hedlund (Dean), Sam Riley (Sal) and Kristen Dunst (Camille), met and spoke with relatives of the real-life characters they played in addition to other research before embarking on On The Road . Stewart said that she didn’t want to simply approach Marylou as a rebellious young woman with loose morals, but explained that while she gained understanding of her, she remained, to some degree at least, an enigmatic figure. “To play a part like Marylou, she’s very vivid and colorful but also on the periphery,” said Stewart. “You don’t know her heart and head and the how and why she does what she does. By the time that it came to film, I didn’t want to play her simply as this character that is just a wild and sexy girl. With the research we were able to do, applying the whys and getting to know the people behind the characters makes you think about the book differently.” Stewart continued, “It’s not easy to live a life like that and that’s what makes these people remarkable. I did always wonder how she could take it. How deep is that well? How much can you have taken from you? What I found about her is, that uniquely to her — and not to the time she lived in — was her capacity to see through people’s flaws and see past them, which was unbelievable. She was just such a wonderful woman. She was infectious. And, no, I did not judge her.” Kristen Stewart appeared at some moments very pensive and at other moments playful in describing her role and unusually long attachment to On The Road . The period coincided with being catapulted to the height of fame through the Twilight franchise, which morphed into zealous attention from so-called Twi-hards who lived vicariously through her and her equally lauded co-star and real-life boyfriend, Robert Pattinson. And as the world now well knows, that relationship hit the skids in the glare of legions of fans through an onslaught of media spectacle . Just weeks after the tidal wave of attention, Stewart bravely faced media for On The Road , though handlers were clear before assigning interview time — the subject needed to remain “on topic.” Still, Stewart talked about herself personally, saying that the experience she had with On The Road had provided her some life lessons both professionally as an actor and also as an individual. “If this has taught me anything, it’s just that if you stop thinking and just breathe through it, you’re such a better actor. You just have to do the work initially and then trust that you’ve already done that work and not get too analytical. You have to trust that you’ve already completed that effort,” she said. And beyond the work, Stewart said she now has more confidence to say what she thinks with less fear than in her earlier years. “It’s opened me in a way that’s probably more appropriate to my age. I think I’m a bit less inhibited, and not thinking too much before speaking. It’s not about being shameful, I’m just a bit more unabashedly myself because of this thing, and it probably started at age 15. I can be around people and say what I think without fear.” Previously: Kristen Stewart Talks ‘Hard Love’ In Toronto For On The Road Read more from the Toronto Film Festival. Follow Brian Brooks on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
According to Heidi Klum, her ex Seal is a muhfuggin liar! Heidi Klum has spoken out for the first time since her divorce from Seal turned nasty when he accused her of “fornicating with the help,” insisting, “When we were together, I never looked at another man.” The German supermodel and TV host broke her silence in an exclusive TV interview with Katie Couric, recorded last week. The interview will be broadcast on Couric’s new daytime show, “Katie.” Sources tell us Klum was devastated after Seal made the mean-spirited comment, which suggested his ex-wife’s alleged cheating with her bodyguard caused their split. Seal told TMZ just over a week ago, after news of her becoming close to bodyguard Martin Kristen broke: “I preferred Heidi would have showed a little bit more class and at least waited until we separated first before deciding to fornicate with the help.” While she has become close to her bodyguard of four years, friends insist this has happened only since her split from Seal. The pair separated in January and filed for divorce in April after nearly seven years of marriage. The “Project Runway” host and hunky Australian Kristen were spotted in New York a few weeks ago and on the beach in Sardinia with her children. Seal also added in an interview with TMZ, “I guess you now all have the answer that you’ve been looking for the past seven months.” Hinting that British-born singer Seal had used strong words during their marriage, Klum told Couric about Seal’s comments, in an excerpt revealed exclusively to Page Six: “It was a unique choice of words . . . I’m used to it. Other people aren’t. When we were together, I never looked at another man.” We’re told that Klum, who also said she was trying to mend her friendship with Seal, had already agreed to the interview with Couric, whose show debuts tomorrow, before Seal made the comment. The interview will air Wednesday. Hopefully both parties will be able to move on amicably, but we know Heidi will be okay…since Seal wifed that up when she was knocked up with another dude’s baby. SMH. Source
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