…is this Brett Kimberlin business. In case our readers aren’t aware of who this guy is, he’s extremely bad news. Kimberlin, a marijuana dealer, was convicted of planting eight bombs in six days in Speedway, Indiana, in 1978 and served 17 years in federal prison for that. Among the effects of the bombs (from Kimberlin Broadcasting platform : YouTube Source : The Hayride Discovery Date : 25/05/2012 08:06 Number of articles : 2
Whenever I throw away one of those large round plastic lids from an orange-juice jug, in my head I hear my mother saying, as she would have said to my 8-year-old self, “That would make a great table-top for a doll’s house.” As an adult I don’t have a dollhouse, but I still have a hard time throwing away those orange-juice lids; the mentality dies hard. So why — with one luminous exception — can’t I love the movies of Wes Anderson, the most dollhousey of all filmmakers? Why, specifically, can’t I love Moonrise Kingdom , a sweet-natured picture set in 1965 on a mythical New Englandy island, in which two oddball kids run away together and pledge undying love? Moonrise Kingdom, like all of Anderson’s films, has been made with a master miniature-cabinetmaker’s care and specificity: It opens with what we might now call an Anderson special, a dollhouse-cutaway tracking shot that distills, in the space of a few minutes, the texture of one family’s life in their grand, ramshackle home. We see a bunch of little boys clustered around a mini record player (they’re spinning Benjamin Britten’s A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra , conducted by Leonard Bernstein), a distracted dad stomping around in madras pants (this would be that glorious deadpan peacock Bill Murray), a young girl who arrives from elsewhere in the house to sit near, yet apart from, her brothers, settling into a window seat with a book. There’s tension in that opening, as well as a sense of comfort: It turns out that the girl, Suzy (Kara Hayward) — a groovy nerdling in the making who loves François Hardy and has a collection of beloved library books she has failed to return — has been corresponding with a boy, whose faux-Boy Scout troop is stationed elsewhere on the island during this late-summer idyll. The boy, Sam (Jared Gilman), is an orphan who’s been bouncing from foster home to foster home, and he doesn’t fit in very well with his scout troop, either: Along with his badges he wears an ornate costume-jewelry brooch — it’s short a few scratchy pearls. For indiscernible yet understandable reasons, at least in the cruel logic of kids, the other boys don’t like him. He leaves a resignation letter for his ultra-conscientious Scout master (played earnestly and quite wonderfully by Edward Norton) and treks off to meet Suzy for the sojourn they’ve planned, an escape from all the grown-ups and kids who just can’t comprehend their weirdo world of wonder. That means, in this old Yankee version of The Blue Lagoon , that Sam and Suzy camp out on a deserted beach (where he makes earrings for her out of fish hooks and dead beetles; it’s a minor complication that her ears haven’t been pierced — yet). Eventually, there’s even a marriage of sorts, performed in the eyes of God and of Anderson regular Jason Schwartzman (as a disreputable but hardly heartless Scout master). It should all be so lovely, and yet… Anderson — who co-wrote the script with Roman Coppola — can’t forget for a minute how lovely it all is, and he reminds us with every detail: The aluminum ashtray into which Norton’s cigarette-smoking Scout Master Ward tips his ash; a record player that’s operated, impractically but wonderfully, by battery; Suzy’s shift dress, knee-sock and saddle-shoe getups, as if she were a ghost doomed to wear the perennial back-to-school outfit. These relics from a vanished childhood that we either lived or wish we’d lived are all designed to impart a shared intimacy, a response of “Oh! I remember that too!”, whether we actually remember it or not. And perhaps that’s why the picture’s exceedingly manicured quality works against it. All of Anderson’s pictures are stylized, and stylization is one of the great tools of moviemaking — its very broadness can capture nuances that naturalism fails to detect. But what’s the tipping point between “mannered” and “stylized”? Is a mannered movie simply a stylized one you don’t really like? Maybe. It could also be that most of the true emotion in Moonrise Kingdom exists in the world outside of the kids, a world Anderson dips into only occasionally: He shows us how the marriage between Suzy’s parents, played by Murray and Frances McDormand, is efficient yet frayed at the seams. (Oddly, and marvelously, the essence of this marital frustration is telegraphed best by a bit of shorthand dialogue from Murray, delivered as he grasps an axe in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in another.) The children, on the other hand, are relatively unformed and uncharismatic — they’re a little weird, a little cute, but they’re just not finished yet. They’re dream kids, too wispy to hold down a whole movie, and it’s not their fault. There are some wonderful things in Moonrise Kingdom : Bruce Willis plays yet another law-enforcement person with deep regrets, the kind of role he can do in his sleep and probably has, yet he infuses the performance with a cartoon melancholy that works — he’s the guy who’s never recovered from having an anvil dropped on his head. Alexandre Desplat provides a score that’s delicate where it needs to be and jaunty everywhere else. There’s a kiss that is, literally, electric. And the whole thing, shot by Anderson regular Robert Yeoman, looks characteristically gorgeous — its color palette is semi-psychedelic and dreamily pearlescent at the same time. So why can’t I love Moonrise Kingdom ? For all the movie’s technical meticulousness, the storytelling still has a wiggly-waggly quality, like a dangly loose tooth. In fact, while I appreciate the brashness of Rushmore , there is only one Wes Anderson movie I truly love, and I know I’m not alone: My informal investigations over the past few years have identified Fantastic Mr. Fox as the Wes Anderson Movie for People Who Hate Wes Anderson Movies. In addition to being a marvel of stop-motion animation, Fantastic Mr. Fox is joyous in trillions of unspoken ways — in the way the texture of the characters’ rangy fur changes in accordance with whatever they’re feeling at the time, in the way it finds such rapscallion pleasure in antiestablishment actions such as digging a tunnel into a rich fatcat’s storehouse. (I’m only just now realizing that Fantastic Mr. Fox was an unwitting precursor to Occupy Wall Street.) Maybe Anderson’s live-action movies don’t work as well because he’s asking real actors to do the work of puppets — human beings can’t help buckling beneath the thunderous burden of his precocious, overrefined ideas. And that’s Moonrise Kingdom in a tiny, mousebed nutshell: It’s oddly ambitious and weightless, a movie made with great care and, probably, love, that still sounds hollow when you thump it. Fantastic Mr. Fox explains why I want to save the orange-juice lids. Moonrise Kingdom explains why I steel myself and throw them away. Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
‘He’s been to comedy what Marlon Brando was to acting,’ director Larry Charles tells MTV News. By Kevin P. Sullivan Sacha Baron Cohen in “The Dictator” Photo: Paramount Pictures For each of Sacha Baron Cohen’s onscreen conquests, one man has been there every step of the way. Larry Charles made a name for himself as supervising producer and occasional writer for “Seinfeld,” but his work directing Baron Cohen’s films brought him a new kind of recognition. Baron Cohen asked Charles once again to helm his film with “The Dictator,” and MTV News spoke with the director in the lead-up to the film’s release. One of the biggest challenges posed by their new film was the creation of an entirely new character. Unlike Baron Cohen’s previous films, which came out of his work on “Da Ali G Show,” the writers of “The Dictator” created the concept for General Aladeen with the comedian in mind. This meant that Baron Cohen had to work through the specifics of Aladeen to make him as fully realized. “Unlike the other movies, where Sacha had a character that he had been working on for years and years and years and was to hone, he knew how this character walked and talked and reacted to every situation when it came to Bruno or Borat or Ali G, but this is a brand-new character,” Charles said. “He had to create this character from the ground up, from the accent to the look to the body language. We needed to give him as much time as possible to evolve that character to where he was ready for the camera.” Additionally, “The Dictator” did away with Baron Cohen’s old format of real-life people interacting with the character. The more traditional structure allowed Charles to get additional takes with Baron Cohen for the first time. “I had never had a second take with Sacha in any of the movies,” he said. “We would do one take. Now that one take may last eight hours for some of the scenes we did in ‘Borat’ or ‘Bruno.’ Eight straight hours of him having to do a character. Eight straight hours of filming it. Here we didn’t have to do that.” Considering that some of the “Borat” and “Bruno” interviews resulted in lawsuits and physical threats, Charles said the “Dictator” set was indeed much safer, but that security came at a price. “It’s certainly physically safer, no question about it,” Charles said. “To be in the United States with a full crew and security and have some kind of permission to be there and not encounter the hostility that we have encountered all over the world and here. At the same time, the danger here is complacency.” The real reason Charles has been willing to work with Baron Cohen repeatedly is that he genuinely believes him to be a comedic genius. “I really classify him in that rare company of comic geniuses. I think there have been a handful of them in film and television history,” Charles said. “He has changed the face of comedy like few other people have. He’s been to comedy what Marlon Brando was to acting. Comedy will be different after him. You can’t go back to some of the old-fashioned ways after you’ve seen Sacha do his thing at his best.” Check out everything we’ve got on “The Dictator.” For breaking news, celebrity columns, humor and more — updated around the clock — visit MTVMoviesBlog.com .
This week marks the big screen return of Will Smith — Hollywood’s most bankable star — after a four year absence from acting, during which time the erstwhile Fresh Prince refocused his personal pursuit of happiness: namely, producing the burgeoning entertainment careers of kids Jaden and Willow Smith, while fine-tuning his own career. So where do you go when you’re already on top — or were, a few films ago? Back to the blockbuster well, if you’re Smith, whose Men in Black 3 headlines the latest step in a lifetime career plan that, he describes, began when he was just a kid himself. “I like big movies,” admitted Smith to journalists at the Men in Black 3 press day in Los Angeles, “and the adjustment I’m making in my career right now is the clarity of what we’re saying with the movie. There has to be an idea, there has to be some message or some statement, for me.” Even, say, in a threequel about aliens wreaking havoc on earth? Despite widespread reports of the chaotic Men in Black 3 production — filming without a finished script, for starters — Smith insists these essential messages are there to be found as viewers watch his Agent J traipse back in time to the 1960s to save the younger version of his partner, Agent K (played by Josh Brolin , channeling Tommy Lee Jones with uncanny aplomb). “With Men in Black 3 we connected to the destructive nature of secrets,” he explained. “That idea whether you get that or not, when you look at it or think about it, that’s what we’re displaying, and how a relationship can get repaired and go to another level through the exposure of a secret.” At the age of 43, the Oscar- and Golden Globe-nominated Smith is almost twice as old as he was when he first rose to popularity on his TV show The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air . And though he’s still got those baby faced looks and an effervescent energy about him, he espouses the kind of philosophical musings of someone who’s managed to avoid the pitfalls of fame through sheer determination. “I control every interaction with every human being that I’m with,” he proclaimed. “That a person isn’t just an asshole, or a person isn’t crazy; if I’m aware, I can actually manage any situation with 98 percent of the people on Earth.” Of course, there’s the odd fan who’ll go in for one too many kisses on the red carpet — like the Ukrainian journalist at the center of last week’s widely reported Men in Black 3 premiere incident (which occurred after this interview). “There are some lunatics that you just can’t do nothing with them,” Smith said with a smile, “but for the most part you play a part in every aspect of your life going the way you want, or not going the way that you want.” That self-determining secret to success is something that Smith also says he and wife Jada Pinkett-Smith try to impart to their children, Willow and Jaden. “The idea of failure is a label,” said Smith. “It has no bearing on what actually happened. What actually happened can turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to you if you decide that it’s the best thing that ever happened to you. So for me, the big thing with my kids is you have to control how you label things, because they’re going to become what you say it is. It’s very important to me that they understand the power they have to create the lives that they want.” “Willow, for example — we were getting flack for letting Willow cut her hair,” he said. “If I teach her that I’m in charge of whether or not she can touch her hair, she’s going to replace me with some other man when she goes out in the world. Now, she can’t cut my hair! [Laughs] But that’s her hair. To me it’s more about lumping the responsibility on them for their lives, as much weight as they can hold without breaking… that’s what we try to give them until they can hold the full weight of their lives.” [To son Jaden, with whom Smith co-starred in The Pursuit of Happyness and appears in M. Night Shyamalan’s After Earth : “I tell him all the time, ‘Son, I’m going to teach you everything that I know — and if you work hard, you can be the second biggest movie star in the world.’”] This brings Smith full circle, in a way, with the roots of his own success, which he credits to soaking up the pop cultural trifecta of Star Wars , hip-hop, and TV’s Dallas as a child. “It just felt like somehow the limits got knocked off after I saw [ Star Wars ],” Smith recalled. He was 10 years-old when he first saw the sci-fi classic. “It coincided right with the time that ‘Rapper’s Delight’ came out, so it was the introduction to rap music and Star Wars in the same year. Rap music was something that only people in New York did, and it was separate and you couldn’t get it, but part of the experience of Star Wars made me think, ‘Oh, I can rap.’ My mind got expanded in a way that’s really hard to explain.” Add to that the sprawling estate that the Ewing family lived on in Dallas and Smith’s lifelong inspiration was set. “Grown people lived on the property and came to breakfast and everybody worked in the family business, and I was like, ‘I want that!’” he exclaimed. “So I’ve been like a mad scientist trying to build Dallas through Star Wars and rap music.” Men in Black 3 is in theaters Friday. Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
ABC’s new reality singing show puts seasoned superstars onstage with amateur singers. By Christina Garibaldi Kelly Clarkson Photo: MTV News At first glance, “Duets” may just seem like another reality singing competition, but the new ABC show couldn’t be more different. Because this time, the superstars are not behind a judging panel, but onstage with the contestants. The show, which premieres Thursday (May 24), pits pop star Kelly Clarkson , Sugarland singer Jennifer Nettles and R&B crooners Robin Thicke and John Legend against one another as they pair up with two amateur singers, whom they found before the show. Each week the stars will battle it out, duet style, in front of a live audience to ultimately win the grand prize for the amateur singer: a recording contract with Hollywood Records. “I basically just found my two people on my own,” Kelly Clarkson told MTV News recently at an event announcing ABC’s fall lineup. “[Robin] found them a completely different way and John found his a completely different way, it’s kind of really random, but it’s cool though.” Going into the competition, Clarkson figured she had a slight advantage given her experience on “American Idol,” which she won during the first season. But as soon as cameras started rolling for “Duets,” she realized she had her work cut out for her. “It’s a lot of fun, but it’s a lot of work,” Clarkson admitted. “I totally thought I had a one-up from ‘Idol’ … It is way harder.” “I’m just going to try and do kind of what I did on ‘Idol’ and hopefully that will help my people,” Clarkson said. “It’s not really as much up to us, the stars on the show, it’s more for the kids that really just need to make sure they are bringing their A-game every week.” Are you excited for “Duets”? Let us know in the comments. Related Artists Kelly Clarkson
Look, we know that self hate is alive and prevalent, but we are not sure this is the case with this young lady. She seems to be fed up with… well, with “your people.” Turn the page and peep what she has to say.
I never cared for the Olsen twins in a sexual fantasy kind of way. I was one of those guys who agreed with people when they said the Olsen twins were at their hottest in Full House…not because I am a pedo who likes 3 year olds…but because they hadn’t grown into obscure looking creatures from the same uterus….Sure I always liked their skinny and I always like that Ashley was better looking and well put together while the other looked tormented and like death…my favorite part of twins is always thee insecure one….but I just could never really get into it….but now that Ashley Olsen got into a bikini, showed off a decent looking ass with no cellulite, I figure I could easily be into K-Fed-ing her…and if you saw the kind of trash I stick my dick in….you’d understand why…. weird alien ass.
Apparently the Billboard Music Awards were on last night…and I had no idea….proving yet again that I am not a celebrity gossip blogger or industry insider in any way…I just post the hot pics of the bitches everyone praises…you know bitches who are over paid, over hyped, annoying egos that we’d all fuck but that aren’t as good as the media wants us to think…. Not to mention, that even if I did know the Billboard Music Awards were on, I wouldn’t watch them, cuz only shitty commercial, radio pop music I hate is celebrated in the shit, the scripting is bad, and the fact that rich people giving nonsense awards to other people, with no real value, other than that it makes money to celebrate idiots who have already pretty much won the lottery….. I think the highlight hof the red carpt was Miley’s hot new body….with no bra….in a blazer….wearing a chain that is designed as some titty decoration….but that’s just because I’m really digging Miley’s fitness lately….. TO SEE THE REST OF THE PICS FOLLOW THIS LINK
The non-governmental group B’Tselem released footage Sunday of a seemingly deadly stand-off that occurred Saturday between Israeli settlers and Palestinian men near the settlement of Yitzhar and the town of Asira al-Qibliya. In the video, a group of presumed Palestinians is throwing rocks at what… Broadcasting platform : YouTube Source : The Blaze Discovery Date : 20/05/2012 22:58 Number of articles : 3
On Sunday, Newark, NJ, Mayor Cory Booker grabbed headlines by criticizing the Obama camp for its attacks on Mitt Romney’s time at Bain Capital. “To me, we’re just getting to a ridiculous point in America,” he said on “Meet the Press” Sunday morning. “Especially, I know, I live in a state where pension funds, unions and other people are investing in companies like Bain Capital. If you look at the totality… Broadcasting platform : YouTube Source : The Blaze Discovery Date : 21/05/2012 00:12 Number of articles : 5
