There have been all African-American flight crews before, but a group of black women made history recently when they became the first all African-American female flight crew! For the passengers on a recent Atlantic Southeast Airlines flight, an Atlanta based Delta Connection regional carrier, little did they know when they boarded that particular trip to their destination they were witnesses to aviation and Black history. They had boarded the first US airline flight staffed by an all African-American female flight crew comprised of Captain Rachelle Jones, first officer Stephanie Grant and flight attendants Diana Galloway and Robin Rogers. Watch their stories below: SOURCE: TransGriot RELATED: Kerry Washington Talks To Essence Magazine About Black Women’s Power New Study: Black Women Are More Confident! Meet The Ladies Of Black Girls Rock 2011
Apple has launched a brand-new TV ad which highlights the power of having iCloud on all your iOS and OS X devices. Apple Shows-Off iCloud In A New TV Advertisement is a story by AppAdvice.com AppAdvice – iPhone, iPad, iPod, App Reviews + News Broadcasting platform : YouTube Source : Apple iPhone Apps Discovery Date : 26/02/2012 23:22 Number of articles : 2
What double standard? P Diddy called for “black power” last night at the NBA All-Star Game festivities. The clenched fist is a symbol of solidarity and support used by several radical groups. Initially, black power was a vague and provocative … Continue reading → Broadcasting platform : YouTube Source : Gateway Pundit Discovery Date : 26/02/2012 04:57 Number of articles : 2
On Friday morning, DMX took time out from getting arrested to make his feelings about Drake very well known. Appearing on New York radio station Power 105.1, the controversial rapper said of his fellow artist: “I don’t like anything about Drake. I don’t like his f-cking voice. I don’t like the sh-t he talks about.” Anything else? “I don’t like his face. I don’t like the way he walks – nothing,” said DMX, concluding with the biggest shot of all: “I don’t like his haircut.” DMX gave no explanation for his hatred. In unrelated, yet hilarious news: DMX has posed for 15 mug shots . [Photos: WENN.com]
Movie’s success proves that powerful audience support can buck Oscar stereotypes. By Kevin P. Sullivan Emma Stone in “The Help” Photo: DreamWorks Of the nine films nominated for Best Picture at this Sunday’s Academy Awards , the only two that came out before the fall movie season, where Oscar bait runs rampant, are probably the most unlikely nominees. The inclusion of “The Tree of Life” on the short list, despite its loose structure, makes sense because of the prestige of its director, Terrence Malick. “The Help,” on the other hand, found Oscar success with an untested director and a racially charged subject matter. Before “The Help” was a nominated film, it was a best-selling novel by writer Kathryn Stockett. While looking to sell the novel, Stockett queried 60 agents, all of whom rejected her request for representation. When the novel finally did find a home with an agent and eventually a publisher, it became a best-seller soon afterward. But the before the novel found a wide audience, Stockett’s childhood friend and former roommate Tate Taylor agreed with the author to pen the screen adaptation and direct the eventual film. Despite pressure from DreamWorks, Stockett insisted that Taylor direct the film of her book. The connection between Stockett and Taylor was not the only one on set. Taylor and Best Supporting Actress nominee Octavia Spencer met while working as production assistants on “A Time to Kill.” As with all high-profile novel adaptations, “The Help” had a built-in audience going into its August release, but it wasn’t until strong reviews and an A+ CinemaScore that people began to realize the potential for Oscar nominations. Two of the film’s actresses, Spencer and Best Actress nominee Viola Davis , received the earliest and most unanimous accolades after the film’s release and rode that praise to Oscar nominations. They were both favorites in their respective categories, and as we head into Oscar night, they remain so. The story of the movie’s road to the Oscars demonstrates that the power of the audience can buck old Oscar stereotypes and push a loved film to the forefront of the competition. “The Help” won audiences over and in doing so, secured a big night at the Academy Awards. The MTV Movies team has the 2012 Oscars covered! Stick with us for everything you need to know leading up to the awards show, and head to Next Movie for a printable Oscar ballot . On Sunday, tune into MTV.com at 5 p.m. ET for our two-and-a-half-hour red-carpet live stream and updates on the night’s big winners. To join the live conversation, tweet @MTVNews with the hashtag #Oscars. Related Videos MTV Sneak Peek Week: ‘The Help’
Chris Brown and Rihanna raised more than a few eyebrows this week with their remixes of her hit “Birthday Cake” and his “Turn Up the Music” this week. Those two surprise collaborations have been followed by rumors that the singers may soon be collaborating in other ways, if you know what we mean. We mean sexually. If you’re wondering who put the reunion in motion (musically, that is), The-Dream, who produced the “Birthday Cake” remix , would know: Rihanna. “It was Rih’s idea,” he tells Billboard . “[Rihanna] is a friend of mine.” “It’s like, ‘You wanna do something? Then cool, let’s do it.’ I don’t know how she got the logistics, how it happened; maybe she’ll talk about it one day.” “I showed up at the studio, and it was like, ‘All right, cool, let’s finish this record,’ which we probably should have finished the first time we did it.” According to The-Dream, he approached the project solely on its musical merits and ditched any of the controversial baggage that may come with it. “For me, it’s just music: two talented people doing two records together, that’s what it was,” he says. “It wasn’t about an incident that happened.” He does acknowledge that the remixes’ controversy, however … “I think [the topic] that should be more on the tongues is: How do we proclaim to be a nation of forgiving … but we can’t actually do it?” he asks. “It actually makes you look weaker than your adversary, in a way, if you don’t have the power to forgive but you lie and say that you did.” “If [Rihanna] can forgive,” he says of Brown’s assault on her three years ago, “that’s where she is mentally. As a friend, it’s like, ‘OK, cool. Let’s roll.'” Fair. But do you think it’s smart for Rih and Chris to date again?
Travis Porter is in New York City and stopped by Power 105.1′s The Breakfast Club where they discussed group member Strap’s recent arrest. As we previously reported, Strap’s trip to NYC was delayed after he was arrested for having a loaded gun in his carry-on bag as he tried to board a flight at Atlanta’s Hartfield-Jackson International Airport. In addition to discussing Strap’s arrest, Travis Porter talked about groupies, mixtapes and their long-awaited debut album, which they said should be out in June. WARNING: EXPLICIT CONTENT RELATED: Travis Porter Calls Strap’s Arrest A “Mistake” [VIDEO] Travis Porter’s Strap Out Of Jail, Performs In NYC With Fabolous & Jeezy [VIDEO] Travis Porter’s Strap Arrested At Hartsfield Airport With Lo aded Gun How The Glock Became Hip-Hop’s Favorite Gun [AUDIO] Memphitz On Arrest: “I Was Looking Around Like What Fool Brought A Gun” Travis Porter Turn Birthday Bash 16 Into A Strip Club! [EXCLUSIVE VIDEO] Travis Porter Turns Down Diddy, Signs With Jive [EXCLUSIVE]
Today is the next-to-last day of competition screenings here at the Berlinale , which means people are speculating about a possible winner – to the extent that speculation is ever possible. This year’s jury is headed by Mike Leigh, and at dinner the other night some friends and I were playing the “WWMLL” – What Will Mike Leigh Like? – game. Voting for prizes is a democratic process, but the jury president can set the tone. Even so, it’s hard to say, rummaging around in the Berlinale 2012 bag, what Leigh and co. might possibly go for. The critics’ favorites so far seem to be Christian Petzold’s Barbara , an unusual, slow-building drama set in 1970s East Germany, and Miguel Gomes’ Tabu , an inventive melodrama that uses old-school movie conventions – and sensuous black-and-white cinematography – to weave a story of love and loss. But critics’ favorites and a jury’s choices don’t necessarily align. At this point, the field is fairly open. I’m wondering what a Mike Leigh-led jury will think about Postcards from the Zoo , by the young Indonesian filmmaker who goes by the name Edwin. Postcards is a gentle story, with a loose-jointed, somewhat impressionistic narrative structure, about a young woman, Lana (Ladya Cheryl), who spends her life in a Jakarta zoo, though she doesn’t officially work there. She helps bathe the zoo’s baby tiger; she knows many facts about the zoo’s giraffes, which she shares authoritatively with the zoo’s visitors; and, one day, she takes up with another zoo denizen, a magician-cowboy who turns her into his assistant and accomplice. (She dons an Indian-girl outfit and takes her place in his knife-throwing routine.) During this meandering journey of self-discovery, Lana also becomes a massage girl at a spa, serving men who nonchalantly stop in for full-service satisfaction, complete with a happy ending (if they’re willing to pay for it). The picture is gorgeously filmed – the early section really is a series of postcards, a gentle meditation on the zoo’s peaceful, inspirational nature, including shots of a mother and baby hippo idling in a pool, and a droll little sequence in which Lana muses aloud about why one of the tigers won’t eat. (She surmises that he feels sorry for the hens that become his dinner.) Postcards , Edwin’s second feature, is so low-key that its emotional effects don’t really linger – the picture is inconsequential, but it’s also reasonably enjoyable, particularly for its pensive, low-key aura. Wang Quan’an’s White Deer Plain, on the other hand, is anything but low-key. This nearly-three-hour Chinese epic includes no real battle scenes and very little pageantry, but it does something that’s perhaps harder to pull off: It wrestles with the changes and hardships that the country endured between 1910, the end of Imperial China, and 1938, the time of the Japanese invasion. The story, an adaptation of a controversial historical novel by Chen Zhongshi, uses the power struggle between two village families – a struggle that’s intensified by the woman, played by an expressive actress named Kitty Zhang Yugi, who enters their midst – as a means of talking about sweeping and painful change in China during the first half of the last century. The picture is gorgeous to look at — well, not the famine sections, but pretty much everywhere else. Wang has a weakness for showing, over and over again, the shimmering golden wheat fields that play a key part in the story, and they are beautiful. The human characters, unfortunately, often take a backseat to the scenery. They’re cogs in the machinery of the country and in that of the movie, too – perhaps that’s intentional, but it does keep White Deer Plain from being as involving as it might be. So who knows, from what we’ve seen so far, what the Berlinale 2012 jury will go for? (The group also includes François Ozon, Jake Gyllenhaal, Anton Corbijn and Charlotte Gainsbourg, as well as Asghar Farhadi, the director of last year’s Golden Bear winner A Separation .) A Hungarian picture that screened this morning, Bene Fliegauf’s Just the Wind, draws its subject matter from recent real-life horrors, in which several Romany families were murdered in their homes, the targets of racial hatred. The picture is harrowing, yet it’s also somewhat detached – Fliegauf often works harder than he has to, maybe, to underscore the fear and anxiety visited upon the community in the wake of these murders. But the picture is topical, and that’s sometimes a quality that makes a jury sit up and take notice. We’ll see what happens on Saturday, by which time I’ll have bid the Berlinale adieu for another year – though before that, I’ll be checking back in with a look at Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod’s Bel Ami , featuring the Pale One himself, Robert Pattinson. Read more of Movieline’s coverage from the 2012 Berlinale here . Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Simply put, “start getting excited.” So Tweeted Dave Matthews Band bassist Stefan Lessard today, following the announcement that his group would once again take to their bus and tour the country this summer. When will DMB, the highest-grossing concert band of last decade, be playing in a city near you? We’ve posted the dates and locations of the upcoming tour below. Tickets go on sale to the general public on March 9. 5/18 Woodlands, TX Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion
The white bricklayer from Virginia defied stereotypes and centuries of racist laws when he married Mildred Jeter, who was black and Native American. Convicted of violating a law against interracial marriage, the Lovings fought for their rights and won a landmark 1967 Supreme Court case that struck down such bans nationwide. Read: Black Love Their lives are explored in a new documentary, “The Loving Story,” which premieres Tuesday on HBO. Today, there are more than 4 million “mixed marriages” in the United States, and roughly one in seven new marriages are between people of different ethnicities. But in 1958, when the Lovings’ marriage was ruled illegal and they were banished from their native Virginia, 21 states outlawed interracial unions. “The Loving Story” details the couple’s nine-year battle to live in Virginia as man and wife. Using evocative photographs, newly unearthed footage and interviews with the Lovings’ daughter and lawyers, the film reveals the power of love to overcome bigotry.
