Amber Rose Criticized For Teaching Baby Sebastian Incorrect Word Amber Rose has been showing off her adorable baby boy Sebastian on Instagram pretty much since the day he was born. Now that her son is learning to speak, she’s sharing their language lessons to fans on the ‘gram. But Amb hit a little hiccup with her last Mommy & Me video when she taught Sebastian to say “conversate,” instead of “converse.” Unfortunately, Amber got so many negative comments about teaching her baby boy “hood English” that she eventually just deleted the post altogether. She’s upset that people can’t understand the value in her teaching her kid colloquialisms and slang terms… Via TMZ : Amber Rose knows the word “conversate” is not in the dictionary, but everyone needs to chill out. She’s teaching her kid a variety of language skills, including common parlance. Amber is pissed at all the criticism on social media, telling friends she knows “conversate” is slang, but here’s the thing — people speak slang! So she says … what, people aren’t supposed to teach kids words like “fleek,” “turnt,” etc? Amber caught flak when she posted a video of her son showing off his impressive vocab … especially for a 2-year-old. Sebastian’s actually a little brainiac … he can already name the planets and identify types of dinosaurs. Props to Sebastian … and Amber. Hmmm…well, the word “conversate” does get on our nerves a bit…but we can definitely understand where she’s coming from. Would you teach your baby a word you know is “wrong?” Does it matter? Hit the flip for more cuteness from little Bash and “Muva.” Instagram
Django Unchained had its New York City premiere last night, and like me you probably weren’t there. Sorry on all our behalves, everyone! Luckily we can console ourselves with the ongoing reveals of tracks from Django ‘s soundtrack. The latest is Unchained (The Payback/Untouchable) , a mashup of James Brown’s The Payback and Tupac’s Untouchable . Ready for a listen? You guys, I really want to love this. But despite the fact that James Brown and Tupac are both insanely dope, the track sounds like exactly half of awesome. Blame for that goes to Swizz Beats, who produced Untouchable for the 2006 album Pac’s Life , AKA the moment when the dead horse that is Tupac’s posthumous career was finally flogged into its component atoms. Tupac was a genius, but that doesn’t mean he’s a cipher that can be fitted into whatever era wants him. His flow was built on bomb-squad influenced beats and g-funk. Warping his rap style around the bob-free beats that popped up in the aughts is like releasing a disco remix of Paul Whiteman’s version of You’re The Tops . Frankly, Untouchable is in strong contention for the absolute worst of Tupac songs. Particularly hilarious is the fact that Swizz looped Pac to make him fit the track, so we get Tupac shouting “Y’all know me Y’a-Y’all know me” like a Shep Pettibone remix from 1988. Meanwhile, James Brown’s music was tailor made for a remix like the one used to make Unchained (The Payback/Untouchable) , and the combination only makes the molestation of Pac sound even worse. I wish they’d just requested access to Pac’s original vocals instead mashing up a superior song with an inferior song. Luckily, the beats and the remix of “The Payback” are great, and once you get used to how Tupac is criminally misused, you can enjoy the other more solid moments unfettered. No doubt it’s going to sound even better when it plays over scenes of blood-spattered cotton fields, so I’m in. RATING: The original Tupac track: 10 out of 100 black coffins for making one of the greatest MCs in the game sound wack. This mashup: 80 out of 100 black coffins for proving once again that James Brown’s music can always be used to make everything sound cool, despite the wackness. The original version of “Untouchable”: “The Payback”: [Source: A.V. Club ] READ MORE ON DJANGO UNCHAINED : REVIEW: Tarantino’s Django Unchained A Bloody But Bloated Affair From ‘100 Black Coffins’ To ‘Casa De Mi Padre,’ 5 Oscar Best Song Dark Horses We’re Rooting For Quentin Tarantino Tackles Slavery: ‘You’re Going to Want to Talk After’ Django Unchained Ross Lincoln is a LA-based freelance writer from Oklahoma with an unhealthy obsession with comics, movies, video games, ancient history, Gore Vidal, and wine. Follow him on twitter (@rossalincoln). Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Promised Land is not the first nor even second collaboration between filmmaker Gus Van Sant and actor Matt Damon . Van Sant helped usher in the age of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck with their Oscar-winner Good Will Hunting back in 1997 and Damon and Ben’s younger brother, Casey Affleck worked with Van Sant in Gerry . Fast forward nearly a decade and a script Damon had been collaborating on with John Krasinski from a story by Dave Eggers set in a small town needed a director. Damon, who had originally planned to direct the feature, realized he could not because of his packed schedule, so he reached out to his old friend Gus Van Sant and the result, which will head to theaters later this month, has caught the wind of Oscar chatterers. Van Sant discussed his latest pic and why he “always wants to work with Matt” during a NYC screening of Promised Land . “The genealogy of this is that John Krasinski was observing a mining operation in Alaska and spoke to Eggers later about writing a screenplay about installing wind power,” Van Sant said at the post- Promised Land screening. “Matt Damon was going to direct [ Promised Land ] himself but then decided he didn’t have time. They thought the project might go away, but then he contacted me – and a year ago, I said yes…” Van Sant said Damon packed schedule had once kept him from playing in one of the director’s most celebrated recent films. He had originally been slated to play Dan White in the 2008 Oscar-winner Milk , but again the actor’s long queue of roles interfered. But, Promised Land posed the next opportunity and the planets aligned. “When you work together you become friends and you wonder what else you can do together again and Matt and I became friends,” said Van Sant. “I felt like we’ve had successful collaborations so the idea of doing something again was really interesting… Working with Matt on this film – I always wanted to work with him on every film.” Set in a fictitious Pennsylvania town that could represent much of small town America that has taken economic blows due to de-industrialization, agribusiness consolidation and the fallout from globalization generally, the story revolves around Steve Butler (Damon) a former farm boy turned big city business guy who teams up with Sue (Frances McDormand) to sell financial prosperity to the struggling town. The sales execs offer up easy cash in return for drilling rights on their property. Though economically hard pressed, the town, along with many others across Rust Belt states, sit atop a rich resource of natural gas once thought unreachable. But through the controversial advent of fracking (fracture drilling) the resource is recoverable though at what ecological cost is not fully known. Steve and Sue think their stay in the town will be short, but a respected schoolteacher (Hal Holbrook) complicates what they think will be an easy sell when he questions the environmental risk. Steve meets a local school teacher (Rosemarie DeWitt) as they bunker down to sway in the town and things get really sticky when an environmentalist (John Krasinski) shows up and raises the stakes. “When we arrived in Pittsburgh during [pre-production] the hydraulic manufacturing companies were moving in and just happened to be having a convention at the hotel we were staying at,” Van Sant said. “So right away we had some sources we could go down and talk to. Also the people in contract talks were also the people we wanted to [scout] for locations.” The tracking process at the center of Promised Land ‘s plot has been hailed by some economic prognosticators as a short cut to energy independence while even cutting carbon emissions. But it has been criticized by others for polluting underground water-tables and even causing earthquakes in areas where they’re almost nearly unknown. Documentaries such as GasLand (2010) and others have depicted frightening scenarios of ecological degradation in the race for plentiful energy, which is not lost on Van Sant though he also sees the film as describing an even larger topic about corporations. “By default its playing into discussions that are political having fracking as a topic,” he said. “But I think the emotions of the story are about corporate maneuvering and inner corporate personnel maneuvering and it could relate to any corporation’s maneuvering including mine or Focus Features. [The film] will obviously play into politics…” [ Promised Land opens December 28 via Focus Features, trailer below.] Follow Brian Brooks on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
While the first trailer for James Bond pic Skyfall won’t hit until next week (!), official site 007.com has a treat in the form of a teaser poster for the November release. And while there’s precious little to glean from the black and white composition, there’s something surprisingly compelling in the simplicity of Daniel Craig , front and center, striding towards us from inside the Bond gun barrel . The juxtaposition of what looks like a drainage tunnel with Craig’s dapper, Tom Ford-tailored coolness gives us the sense that he’s unafraid to walk into the world’s dirtiest, grimiest underbelly in his fancy lad haberdashery. What’s more: He’s not shooting at us in the classic Bond gun barrel scenario, which traditionally envisioned the suave spy aiming and firing at the camera; look at his placement and you see he is the bullet. By my count this is the first of the Craig Bond flicks to use the iconic gun barrel motif in its poster designs; some form of it was employed here and there in the Bond films of Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan, though not so much in the artwork of the golden era of Bond (i.e. the Connery-Moore years). That said, this 1980 German re-release poster from the O.G. Bond pic Dr. No utilized what you might consider a variant of the gun barrel motif. (Side note: Is there another gun in Connery’s pocket or is he happy to see us?) Skyfall hits theaters November 9. [via 007.com ]
Some days you just need to see, as SCTV’s Farm Film Report guys Big Jim McBob and Billy Sol Hurok used to put it, stuff blowed up real good. If you’re having one of those days, Peter Berg’s Battleship is as good a choice as any. Beyond that, you should know a few things going in: Battleship is allegedly based on the Hasbro game of the same name, but never in the film is the line “You sunk my battleship!” uttered, so don’t expect a refund. Also, one of the invading aliens – spoiler, sorry! – looks a little like the guy from that ’90s Swedish band Stakka Bo . Now you’re ready for Battleship . Or maybe you’re not. Actually, the picture is perhaps not quite as painful as you might be expecting, though probably not as enjoyable, either. Plotwise, it’s as reasonably well-executed as these messes generally are. Actor-director Berg has made a few not wholly uninteresting films in the past ( Hancock , The Kingdom ), and while it’s easy enough to compare Battleship cavalierly with a Michael Bay movie, Berg does have a few more brain cells to work with, and here and there in Battleship they twinkle admirably. Also, the picture features a not entirely soulless specimen of beefcake, Taylor Kitsch, veteran of the TV show Friday Night Lights (which was created by Berg, adapted from the movie of the same name, which he directed). Kitsch wasn’t half-bad in the unjustly maligned John Carter , which only proves that we prefer to blast aliens to oblivion rather than land inexplicably on their planets and fall in love with their princesses. What that says about us as a people I prefer not to contemplate. Kitsch is quite winning in Battleship , a believable human presence in the midst of lots of metal stuff getting blasted to smithereens. His character is a young ne’er-do-well named Alex Hopper who, in one of the movie’s early scenes, scores a burrito for a good-looking (and hungry) blonde after the local watering hole has closed its kitchen. That blonde, played by Brooklyn Decker, also happens to be the daughter of stern bigwig Admiral Shane (played, with convincing stoniness, by Liam Neeson). And when Alex is forced by his more responsible brother Stone (Alexander Skarsgård) to join the Navy – Stone hopes it’ll straighten his goofball brother out – Alex of course runs afoul of Admiral Shane. All of this is before alien forces from an Earth-a-like planet called Planet G send their well-armed minions to wreak death and destruction, focusing chiefly on Hawaii, where they hope to take over a state-of-the-art interplanetary communications outpost. Dizzy yet? Just wait until the big graphite Planet G thingie lands in the ocean just off Hawaii, where Alex’s ship is engaged in some fun-for-all, low-risk naval maneuvers. Alex actually boards the thingie as Petty Officer Cora “Weps” Raikes (Rihanna) looks on, training a big gun on it just in case. It’s not giving too much away to tell you that massive kabooms ensue – among the weapons in the alien arsenal are flaming rondelles that saw through metal as if it were chunks of butter – to the point where the explosions become an abstraction: There are so many of them they begin to mean nothing. Have I mentioned the subplot in which a veteran with two prosthetic legs — played by Gregory D. Gadson, a real-life soldier and double amputee — reclaims his lost pride? Gadson brings a great deal of conviction to the role, and Berg uses his metal limbs as a great punchline to an alien-related joke. Other supporting players don’t fare as well: Rihanna has the face of a tough little streetcat, appealing and self-reliant, but the movie gives her very little to do (other than hold that big gun). The finest section of Battleship may be the last 20 minutes, the point at which the movie’s title begins to make some semblance of sense. It’s at that point that a real-life World War II-era ship, the U.S.S. Missouri , stationed at Pearl Harbor, is pressed into action against the alien forces. The hotshot young soldiers do not, of course, know how to work the thing — it’s all analog, and they’re digital as heck. Luckily, there are a bunch of geezer vets on hand, and they’re thrilled to have a chance to spring to action. The last section of Battleship is sort of like Antiques Roadshow meets Armageddon , albeit with way too much of the latter and not nearly enough of the former. But at least it brings a low-tech, human touch to a picture whose special effects, skillful as they are, are so excessive that after a while they just stop registering. Early in the film, a character makes a distinction between a battleship and a destroyer. A destroyer is designed to “dish it out like the Terminator.” Battleships, on the other hand, are “dinosaurs.” It’s funny that Battleship is ostensibly based on such a supremely simple, elegant and satisfying board game. As movies go, it’s really more of a destroyer. It’s entertainment as punishment, or perhaps the other way around. Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Ridley Scott’s teaser, featuring Noomi Rapace and Charlize Theron fighting for their lives, is reminiscent of ‘Alien’ and ‘Blade Runner.’ By Kara Warner Photo: 20th Century Fox If you’re a fan of movie trailers, consider your holiday wants and wishes fulfilled now that the teaser for Ridley Scott’s “Prometheus” has dropped. It’s the fourth trailer released this week for a hugely anticipated 2012 film, following “The Dark Knight Rises,” “Wrath of the Titans” and “The Hobbit.” Here’s a look at five key elements that deserve MTV News’ over-analysis: Plot Tease We still don’t know a lot about the story line in this film, but this one-minute spot sheds a lot of light on what the action will center around: a team of explorers, scientists and anthropologists sets out on a journey to find clues to the origin of our species. “What they found could be our end,” we’re told in cold, blue type, before quick cuts of what looks to be death and destruction. And although the prequel rumors have been shot down by those involved, there is room here to interpret it as such. Not to mention the title: In Greek mythology, Prometheus is the titan who stole fire from Mt. Olympus and gave it to humans. If the humans in the film are searching for their origin, maybe it is Prometheus, in some way, shape or form. Lost in Space/Discovery of Life on Other Planets Unsurprisingly, there are several gorgeous shots of space vehicles, spaceships, spacesuits, etc. that help properly accentuate the size and scope of what it would be like to be up/out there, as well as how big this film really is. Director Ridley Scott shot the film in 3-D and serves up a few hints to the beautiful technology at play, though there is still a grittiness to it all. This is not friendly, bright and shiny unexplored territory; it’s dark, dangerous, deep space. And then there are the scenes at the end of the trailer that look to take place on another planet, in another galaxy. There is dry, dusty terrain and ancient-looking symbols, a towering horseshoe-shaped totem of some sort, that looks to be either crumbling to the ground, or it is moving of its own accord, beginning a small war between the natives and the humans who’ve discovered them. The New Ripley(s) It’s hard to talk about Ridley Scott and an “Alien”-esque movie without thinking about Sigourney Weaver as Ripley, one of the most bad-ass protagonists in film history. There’s no replacing Ripley, but Scott has enlisted two very capable ladies to carry the torch: Noomi Rapace and Charlize Theron. From what the trailer shows, both women will be fighting for their lives, but Rapace seems to be the most Ripley-esque, particularly in one shot where she is hanging upside down, being held by someone or something. The resemblance is uncanny. And let’s not forget about the rest of the cast, of whom we get only brief glimpses: Michael Fassbender, Idris Elba, Guy Pearce and Rafe Spall. That Ridley Scott Touch The trailer is cold, calculated and just too cool. Just like Scott has said himself, if “Prometheus” isn’t an “Alien” prequel, the two films definitely share the same DNA — not to mention a few “Blade Runner”-esque elements thrown in for good measure. And as is the case with most of Scott’s films, the effects are far more practical than CG. The world of “Prometheus” is set in a distant future, but not too distant. It’s big, bold and, very likely, terrifying. The Alien(s) As much as we might have hoped to see some big, bad aliens in this trailer, all we get are hints of an unidentified, menacing force out there. In one brief scene, the team happens upon an area full of small, perfectly arranged casings that could be artifacts or alien eggs, we don’t know. But we do see one of the humans’ helmets enveloped by a mysterious gas, followed by a loud, painful scream. There is a quick shot of the head of something being examined in a lab, what looks like it might be an alien ship of some sort hovering over dusty terrain, followed by brief shots of human suffering at the hands of something we can’t quite make out. Yet. “Prometheus” hits theaters June 8, 2012. Check out everything we’ve got on “Prometheus.” For breaking news, celebrity columns, humor and more — updated around the clock — visit MTVMoviesBlog.com . Related Videos Experts React To The ‘Prometheus’ Trailer
D.J. Caruso and stars Alex Pettyfer and Timothy Olyphant discuss which is the better fantasy character. By Kara Warner Alex Pettyfer and Teresa Palmer in “I Am Number Four” Photo: DreamWorks If one were to pinpoint a particular fantasy character that has dominated pop culture over the past few years, most people would agree that vampires have taken center stage as the mythological figure of the moment. However, with extreme popularity often comes a point of overexposure. Not that we’ve reached that point yet with the fang fixation, but there are other creatures waiting in the wings. Take the new alien-adventure movie “I Am Number Four,” for example, which showcases a sexy new take on the stereotypical green Marvin the Martian-type aliens. When MTV News caught up with the film’s director, D.J. Caruso, and stars Alex Pettyfer and Timothy Olyphant recently, we posed them an important question: Are aliens the new vampires? “I didn’t notice aliens kind of going in and out of fashion,” said Olyphant, who plays mentor Henri to Pettyfer’s Number Four (John Smith). “Where vampires kind of come and go, aliens, in general, it’s a broader palette, so they’ve been around,” he explained. Caruso said: “I’d take aliens over vampires any day. Aliens are much more intriguing.” The “Disturbia” director agreed with Olyphant’s sentiments about extra-terrestrial longevity. “Aliens have always been around,” he said. “Vampires: They’re wearing out.” Plus, while vampire stories are based in fiction, we can’t say for certain whether life exists on other planets or in other galaxies. On the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe, Pettyfer said, “There’s got to be something out there — one way or another.” Caruso agreed: “I think there’s something else out there. I can’t imagine that God’s just allowing this one planet to function; I think he’s got a bunch of experiments floating around.” Check out everything we’ve got on ” I Am Number Four.” For breaking news, celebrity columns, humor and more — updated around the clock — visit MTVMoviesBlog.com .
‘We knew exactly what we were doing when we made this album,’ hip-hop pioneer says of Boogie Down Productions’ 1987 breakthrough. By Shaheem Reid, with additional reporting by Sway Calloway KRS-One Photo: MTV News Making The Moment: Criminal Minded KRS-One is both known for dropping jewels to cultivate minds and dropping bombs to blow minds. The Bronx bred hip-hop pioneer has lived up to both his titles — The Teacha and The Blastmater — over his almost 25-year career. T was considered Hall of Fame/ Greatest of All-Time list over ten years ago. Over the past decade, KRS has been expanding his artistic reach, releasing the gospel-tinged album Spiritual Minded in 2002 and the book “The Gospel of Hip-Hop: First Instrument” in 2009. But as the title of his most recent album, Back To The L.A.B. (Lyrical Ass Beating) , shows, he’s still down to tear the lining out of the sound booth walls. This summer KRS joins a slew of mic icons on the Rock The Bells tour. Snoop Dogg, Rakim, A Tribe Called Quest, Slick Rick and the Wu-Tang Clan are the headliners on the outing, which has a different twist this time around: Each act is performing a classic album from their catalog. KRS picked the first album he performed on, Boogie Down Productions’ 1987 debut Criminal Minded . The album, which had instrumentals by the late DJ Scott La Rock, set off a new era in battle rap with timeless tracks like “South Bronx” and “The Bridge Is Over.” It also introduced KRS as one of the new mic stars of the era, alongside Big Daddy Kane, Kool G Rap and the aforementioned Rakim. Right after his set at the Rock The Bells kickoff, KRS gave us some insight into his starmaking first LP: “This may sound arrogant, but it’s the truth and it’s honest. We knew exactly what we were doing when we made this album. If you notice, all the away up to ‘Return of the Boom Bap’ — I stopped doing it after ‘Return of the Boom Bap’ — I used to say things like, ‘We will be here forever! Forever and ever!’ I used to always speak into the future: ‘I got rhymes for the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s.’ This was the ’80s. So yes, as a metaphysician, as a philosopher, you know what you are doing. We didn’t make mistakes. We still don’t. That’s why the albums are out the way they are. I say that humbly. I don’t say that with no arrogance; ‘Yeah, we knew what it was.’ No, we didn’t. What we knew was hip-hop. We knew if we came out with what our people wanted to hear, that’s just what it is. It wasn’t on the radio, there’s no videos for it. We just said what we knew the block wanted to hear at the time. We knew we were changing the game. “The song ‘Criminal Minded,’ the idea is so ironic. Big up to Ced Gee. He’s the one that programmed the drums. Scott would come with the records and Ced Gee would program the drums. We were working at the Power Plant studio in Queens. The idea was revolutionaries. If you look at the cover of Criminal Minded , that’s what we were saying modern-day Black Panthers are. I had the gun belt going over the shoulder, grenades. That wasn’t hood. It wasn’t like [we] had guns on the table like we were drug dealers — we had grenades. Real paramilitary stuff was on the table. We were showing ourselves to be revolutionaries. Gangsters are really intelligent. We’re Black Panthers. We’re not just dudes on the corner. Then when Criminal Minded came out — and I said it all over the record — ‘I am a teacha!/ Others are gangs. It’s the teacha, the teacha, the teacha!’ Cats said, ‘Oh no. You’re the father of gangster rap.’ “On top of that, it wasn’t our life that was gangster at all. We weren’t selling drugs or none of that stuff. We were in the hood, we knew everybody. That wasn’t our thing. Scott LaRock was a social worker; I was in the shelter. Even Just Ice, as wild as he was, he was still a Five Percenter. So he was following some kind of discipline. All of us were. But what happened, the record came out and because of the battle with MC Shan, everybody thought, ‘We’re coming out hardcore now. We’re coming out like this.’ And we did have a large crew. We had a couple of hundred people down with us and BDP at one time. “After Scott was killed, I clarified the message with [the] Malcolm X [pose] on the [cover of BDP’s 1988 album By All Means Necessary ]. Trying to clarify, this is not about gangsterism, this is what revolutionaries look like. If you go back to the some of the revolutionary pictures of the Black Panthers, you’ll see that same thing on Criminal Minded ‘s album cover. It’s just that over time, people didn’t look at it for Black Panthers, they saw us in the hood with the gat and people started mimicking that, unfortunately.” Related Artists KRS-One Boogie Down Productions
Find out why the Na’vi have only four fingers and more, directly from James Cameron and Jon Landau. By Eric Ditzian, with additional reporting by Kara Warner “Avatar” Photo: 20th Century Fox Two hundred fifty-three days have passed since “Avatar” first unveiled its blue-skinned magic on the big screen, and still we find ourselves bewitched by burning questions — intoning “What about…?” and “How come…?” like some demented incantation. Does that mean we have issues?
A brief list of arguments that each refute the notion that the community should be scared by the idea of global warming.The Swindle The Great Global Warming Swindle Sea Levels Not Rising….. Except In The Lies of the IPCC Solar Cycles,…Not CO2 Determine Climate…Global Climate Explained (If you Want To Worry) Suspend Disaster…The Myth Of Global Warming A Load Of Hot Air…Climate Change Hysteria is Costing Us The Ice Age Cometh…The Real Danger Of An Ice Age Global Warming…Messy Models, Decent Data, and Pointless Policy Hot Politics… Doctoring Of Reports By UN Experts Cool Climate…The Absurdity Of Trying To Control Climate A Pagan Fantasy…The Effect Of Accepting Popular Paranoia As Truth http://www.ourcivilisation.com/aginatur/moregw.htm added by: congoboy
