Jill Kelley, the woman who inadvertently blew the whistle on the Gen. David Petraeus scandal, claims she’s been wrongly accused … of trashing the Kardashians. Kelley, who got to know Petraeus and Gen. John Allen as the social liaison of the Tampa base where they were stationed, is rich, hot and famous for sort of no reason. For that reason, she’s been compared to Kim Kardashian and her ilk after her role in the Petraeus- Paula Broadwell scandal made her an overnight celebrity of sorts. Jill Kelley was said to have resented this comparison, deeming it “the worst thing to come out of” the scandal. But sources close to Jill are now denying that statement. Kelley views Kim Kardashian as a “beautiful and successful business woman” whom she highly respects. Insert one of many possible rebuttals right here, right now. And tell us: Who’d you rather … y’know? Jill Kim View Poll »
As any Homeland Season 2 fan knows, Mandy Patinkin is simply The Man. But viewers of Fox5’s Good Day New York discovered this for themselves last week, as the veteran actor was previewing his Showtime drama’s Sunday finale when co-anchor Dave Price had to peace out. The reason? His wife was in labor with the couple’s first child. Patinkin’s reaction? Priceless. Watch him grow exceedingly excited for the reporter now, unable to contain his enthusiasm even as Rosanna Scotto tries to bring the conversation back to Homeland … Mandy Patinkin Reacts to Anchor’s Baby
The bill given to three friends at Chilly D’s Restaurant really stung, but not because of the price, which is actually pretty affordable for dinner for three in this era. It was the description of their table at the top. “I got the bill, I looked [and] I was like, ‘Why does this receipt say ‘fat girls?'” customer Christine Duran said, recalling her Stockton, Calif., experience. The friends had dined out at Chilly D’s, part of the Cameo Casino Restaurant, on Thursday. The bill lists charges for three tri-tips with fries and three sodas, for $25.50. A bartender named Jeff had apparently typed in “Fat Girls” to keep track of their bill. When a stunned Duran asked a manager for an explanation of the receipt, he “had like a smirk on his face, like it was funny but trying not to laugh,” she said. The dining experience went from bad to worse when the restaurant demanded they still pay the bill, offering them a 25 percent discount and then a 50 percent discount. They declined both offers. In a Facebook message, Maggie Lewis, the Cameo Club Casino owner, apologized and said the treatment Duran had received is “intolerable in our establishment.” Jimmy Siemers, co-owner of Chilly D’s, didn’t work the night Duran and her friends received the offensive receipt, but has said that he is trying to clean up the mess. “I just want to tell them we’re sincerely sorry and we’ll do everything in our power to make sure this never happens to anyone again,” he said in a statement.
He liked it, so they made him put a ring on it Reggie Bush Engaged To Marry Preganant Girlfriend Lilit Avagyan A Bossip tipster has been sending us info over the past week that Reggie Bush was allegedly being coerced into buying his pregnant girlfriend Lilit an engagement ring by her family. Welp, it looks like it’s not a rumor and we have pics of the ring! According to celeb jeweler Ben Baller : My boy Bush is a dear friend of mine, so when he hit me up about proposing to his girl of over 10 years, I said, don’t worry about the price, let’s just get it the f**k in!!! We used a beautiful VS G color triple Ex cushion cut 2 carat diamond…we created our own setting Now the pics might suck because it’s hard to get a proper macros close up shot with my iphone, but I made the best that I could… but the ring does NOT suck. it’s so nice, it sparkles and what’s crazy is that I’ve made over 5 engagement rings in the past month! Damn Reg, only a lil a$$ 2 carats huh?! We know damn well Kimmy Cakes wouldn’t have gone for that isht! But we guess beggars with a gut full of Bush can’t be choosers… Hit the flipper for a gallery of ring pics Images via SpalshNews/BenBaller
Fifteen docs advanced to the final stages for Oscar consideration Monday. While the films making the cut are, of course, notable, some others that did not are also. Today’s winner of the New York Film Critics Circle for Best Non-Fiction film of 2012, Central Park Five , which made headlines recently because New York City officials attempted to gain access to the film’s outtakes related to a pending civil suit, did not make the cut. Other high profile docs also left out were Toronto’s West of Memphis and Sundance’s Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present as well as Magnolia’s The Queen of Versailles . While distributor IFC Films will likely be disappointed by the CP5 omission by the Academy, it will celebrate the inclusion of How To Survive a Plague , an AIDS doc that opened quietly, but to acclaim for its bravery. The distributor also had its Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry in the list. [ Related: Movieline’s Central Park Five coverage ] Tribeca’s Bully , which opened to controversy for its R-rating from the MPAA to pushback from distributor The Weinstein Company, also made the cut. The 15 films are listed below in alphabetical order by title, with their production companies (information provided by AMPAS): Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry , Never Sorry LLC Bully , The Bully Project LLC Chasing Ice , Exposure Detropia , Loki Films Ethel , Moxie Firecracker Films 5 Broken Cameras , Guy DVD Films The Gatekeepers , Les Films du Poisson, Dror Moreh Productions, Cinephil The House I Live In , Charlotte Street Films, LLC How to Survive a Plague , How to Survive a Plague LLC The Imposter , Imposter Pictures Ltd. The Invisible War , Chain Camera Pictures Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God , Jigsaw Productions in association with Wider Film Projects and Below the Radar Films Searching for Sugar Man , Red Box Films This Is Not a Film , Wide Management The Waiting Room , Open’hood, Inc.
We’ve come to expect high-concept portrayals of the human condition from the Sundance Film Festival , but next year, virtual humans will get some art-house love, too. I’m talking about G.J. Echternkamp’s feature-film debut, Virtually Heroes , which will get a Park City at Midnight premiere at the festival in January. This is the Sundance synopsis for the film: Two self-aware characters in a Call of Duty -style video game struggle with their screwy, frustrating existence. To find answers, one abandons his partner and mission, seeking to unravel the cheat codes of life. Soldiers searching for meaning as they try to escape an endless cycle of pointless violence? If screenwriter Matt Yamashita set the story in Eastern Europe and Echternkamp shot it in black and white, you’d probably already be hearing Oscar buzz. But Virtually Heroes is set in a video game, which is why it will be a lot more fun. I’m going to see as soon as physically possible for the following four reasons: 1. Produced by Roger Corman Roger Corman has propagated the careers of a a remarkable array of filmmakers via his prolific B-movie production. I’m talking such little-known directors as James Cameron , Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese and low-level actors Jack Nicholson , Dennis Hopper and Robert De Niro . So when he decides that Virtually Heroes director Echternkamp and screenwriter Matt Yamashida are worth a chance, you should too. 2. Expert Video Gamers You know a film is low-budget when it doesn’t have a trailer. But like any upcoming video-game release, the producers have been flooding the Internet with screenshots, many via the movie’s Facebook page . And these shots show they know what they’re talking about. You also know the director knows video games when he laments that he couldn’t afford as many rocket launchers as he wanted. Also, Virtually Heroes doesn’t just incorporate the standard gaming status display on the screen, which you can see in the above shot. That display features a baseball bat with the infinity symbol, which is a classic shooter-game conceit. Every other weapon has limited ammunition, but the melee weapon — in this case, the bat — can be used forever. Oh yeah, and anyone who includes teabagging in a live-action movie knows what they’re doing. For those who haven’t been beaten in Halo , teabagging is a gamer taunt that involves repeatedly crouching your character over the body of a defeated enemy. That’s the closest you can come to sexual innuendo when your character has a smooth armored crotch and a “crouch” button. 3. Parody Plot Virtually Heroes isn’t set in a specific shooting game, which means it can effectively be set in all of them. With no established canon to respect, it can hop from setting to setting, reference to reference — each scene in a different level in video game lingo — to make whatever jokes it wants. The movie’s settings range from Vietnam to the Old West to Pirate-themed combat and it appears that the damsel in distress is immediately re-kidnapped every time the soldiers in question save her. This requires them to trek through another level, questioning their existence while taking the piss out of Nintendo’s Mario. The parody theme is continued with Mark Hamill turning up as “The Monk”, a wise, brown-robed hermit the heroes consult in search of true wisdom. When you can ask Luke Skywalker to make fun of Obi-Wan Kenobi, and he says yes, that’s worth the price of admission alone. 4. The Director Knows His Satire This may be Echternkamp’s first feature film, but his directorial debut was another sharp parody project. His 2002 short Resurgence II is about an inept film director dedicated to creating an avant-garde masterpiece by using, it’s revealed, a mail-order “Art Film Flo-Chart” Corman must have seen that and thought: Yes, this man is ready for the B-movie big time. I agree. Luke McKinney loves the real world, but only because it has movies and video games in it. He responds to every tweet . Follow Luke McKinney on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter .
I don’t know if this is a reminder of Russia in the 80s…during the Cold War…when Levis Jeans…Coca Cola…and McDonalds were all the fucking rage and people would pay 10 times the price to get at them….you know all while listening to 10 year old American music and watching 10 year old American movies…totally 10 years behind their relevance or peak in the Western world….you know a little too late to apologize…a little Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell have been retired for 10 fucking years here…but now getting work there…situation…Or maybe it has to do with them being BFFs and Naomi Campbell having tight Russian ties cuz she’s married to a Russian billionaire….but either way…it is awesome…cuz seeing these models I grew up on…and with…topless in their 40s…like they were still in their 20s…posing together…like they aren’t rivals but friends…is erotic as hell to me…but then again…I like all things past their prime…especially expired breast milk.
When Anderson Cooper isn’t dodging explosions in Gaza (see video below), he’s going off on Twitter followers who accuse him of covering the Israel-Hamas conflict unfairly. Pamela Weiss found this out first hand earlier in the week when she ripped his reporting from the Middle East. In response, he dropped a Twitter bomb of sorts on her. Bomb Explodes Near Anderson Cooper Weiss, a self-described “social media junkie” and “foodie,” criticized his story an Israeli air strike on a media center, writing “Report a fair story. Report facts.” Amazingly, AC noticed and responded: “ummmm…. I just did that and have been doing that repeatedly on twitter and on tv. Do you actually think before you tweet?” Ouch, and oh, it continued! Cooper later added, “perhaps spend less time tweeting about coconut flan and more time actually following the news.” The comeback earned props from many of Anderson’s 3.3 million Twitter followers. “Damn man, you just dug into her tweet history for that burn. Respect,” one wrote. Cooper said. “nothing funnier than looking at a dull tweet history for specifics.” Zing again! One fan did urge him to “Go easy on her, @andersoncooper. Coconut flan is pretty delicious.” Cooper later expressed regret that he let it go that far, saying on his CNN show: “I get obsessed with somebody who says something that is completely inaccurate. Like they’ll say to me, ‘You never report about stuff that’s happening in Israel,’ which is just not true.” “Nothing against coconut flan and I’m sure she’s a very nice person. I kind of felt bad to be honest.” If anyone has any recipes for that, please let us know … we hear it’s best served cold.
Former Price is Right model Brandi Cochran sued the show for allegedly firing her for getting pregnant in 2010. This week, a jury sided with her to the tune over $777,000. The long-running game show maintained that many models have gotten pregnant while working on the show. Nonetheless, Cochran (left) won her lawsuit going away. That sum may still grow, in fact. The jury was swayed by Cochran’s claim that producers made comments about her pregnancy, including calling her derogatory terms such as “wide load.” If the jury determines that the comments of staff members were “malicious,” as opposed to merely negligent, she could be due an even bigger payday. It’s unclear what the timetable is for awarding additional damages in this case, but a representative of the production company says the case was flawed. The court didn’t even get to hear some favorable information that would lean toward the production company’s side, they say, and their side will still come out. How that could be the case after she’s already been awarded over three quarters of a million dollars, we have no idea. But don’t diss pregnant women, people. To use one of our favorite Happy Gilmore quotes , the price is WRONG, b!tches! Well, if you’re the show, anyway. Brandi’s probably pretty happy right now.
If you haven’t noticed, there’s a fierce battle being fought out there for the right to heft a gold statuette at the Dolby Theater on Feb. 24 and forget to thank some vital member of your family. And though more than a half dozen pictures and performances that the blogosphere is touting as Oscar-worthy have yet to be seen by the public (and, in some cases, the very bloggers who are touting them), the virtual home office at Movieline has decided it’s time to throw open the doors to the Institute For the Advanced Study of Kudos Forensics and start up the Oscar Index . How The Oscar Index Works This year, Movieline’ s Oscar Index will be presented differently than it has been in the past. We’ll soon add the now-iconic graph that tracks the weekly rise and fall of the candidates based on fluctuations in the Institute’s extremely sensitive media seismometers. What will be different is that, with each award category that we track, we’ll present four different rankings. Movieline Executive Editor Jen Yamato , Managing Editor Brian Brooks and myself will each provide our personal weekly rankings of the movies and actors in the running, and then those results will be weighted and averaged to determine an official Movieline ranking for each category. This week, we begin with the Best Picture category. Next week, we’ll weigh in on the Best Director, Best Actor, Actress and Best Supporting Actor and Actress races. Oscar for Best Picture 2013 Right now, Lincoln is the picture to beat with its heart-and-soul performance by Daniel Day-Lewis — his world-weary slump-shouldered walk alone is worth the price of admission — a beautiful script by Tony Kushner and some pitch-perfect scenery chewing by Tommy Lee Jones and James Spader. The picture finishes at the top of two of our three lists, and Awards Daily calls it “Arguably, the best film of the year so far,” adding: “Films this thoughtfully created don’t come around very often.” The consensus at a number of blogsites, such as Indiewire , is that Ang Lee’s Life of Pi, Ben Affleck’s Argo and David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook are also going to be nominated for Best Picture. Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master has also been mentioned, but the film opened so early in the race and, with the exception of Joaquin Phoenix’s comments about how he really feels about Oscars, the movie could use a second wind unless The Weinstein Company is shifting its weight to a Silver Linings push. But coming up fast is Tom Hooper’s Les Misérables , which our own Ms. Yamato notes, is “scaring” a lot of the other contenders. Meanwhile, Michael Haneke’s Amour and Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild are long shots, but still in the race. Indeed, the latter film finished in the number 10 spot on each Movieline editor’s list. An even darker horse is Skyfall , but I (alone) agree with Deadline that the movie’s critical and box-office success and its popularity among Academy members bode well for a best-picture nomination. Here’s the rundown of each Movieline editor’s Best Picture picks in descending order: Frank DiGiacomo’s Picks 1. Lincoln 2. Silver Linings Playbook 3. Argo 4. Les Misérables 5. Life of Pi 6. Skyfall 7. Zero Dark Thirty 8 . Flight 9. The Master 10. Beasts of the Southern Wild — Jen Yamato’s Picks 1. Les Misérables 2. Lincoln 3. Silver Linings Playbook 4. Argo 5. Life of Pi 6. Zero Dark Thirty 7. Anna Karenina 8. The Master 9. The Hobbit 10. Beasts of the Southern Wild — Brian Brooks’ Picks 1. Lincoln 2. Silver Linings Playbook 3. Les Misérables 4. Argo 5. Life of Pi 6. Amour 7. Django Unchained 8. Anna Karenina 9. The Dark Knight Rises 10. Beasts of the Southern Wild And the winners are…
