Image via Bobby Bank/Getty Images Dennis Hof, Bunny Ranch Owner, Dead At 72 Dennis Hof and his world famous Bunny Ranch in Nevada became a major part of the American pop sex culture and now part of that culture has died. According to TMZ , Hof was pronounced dead at his renowned house-of-ill-repute after emergency crews received a 911 call around 11AM this morning. Hof had been found unresponsive and was unable to be revived, no foul play is suspected. Hof’s birthday was just two days ago on October 14 and he spent it celebrating with Flavor Flav, Ron Jeremy, the LA Lakers’ Jhonny Buss and a performance by Afroman of all people. Obviously, part of Hof’s legacy is Lamar Odom’s infamous overdose but that didn’t stop him from mastering publicity. Hof was in the midst of running for state assembly in Nevada and had recently won the Republican primary. Hof used to say “There’s no business like ho business”, not sure how that will play at the pearly gates, bug Godspeed.
Looks like Justin Bieber just took his graffiti hobby to the next level with his latest tattoo! It looks to be inspired by “Balloon Girl,” a work by notorious British street artist Banksy. (Yeah, we saw “Exit Through The Gift Shop.” #what). Read the rest here: Internationally Renowned Graffiti Artist Justin Bieber Gets A Banksy …
Forget the denials and explanations about how they are ” working on projects together .” The new issue of Us Weekly makes it clear: the only thing Kris Jenner and Ben Flajnik are working on is each other… naked… in bed. If you know what we mean! “They started hanging out. It got romantic right away,” an insider tells the magazine of Jenner and Flajnik . “They’ve been hooking up.” Following 22 years of marriage, Kris announced her separation from Bruce Jenner this summer. No divorce filing is imminent by either side, but each is also free to date whomever he/she desires. In early October, a source told In Touch Weekly that Jenner was crushing on the former Bachelor star and photos have since surfaced of the two at Ben’s winery in California. But Flajnik there is nothing romantic going on. “Here we go again,” he Tweeted last night. “Hey @usweekly maybe put a call into me once and a while for some fact checking. Sincerely, #TheTruth.” The tabloid actually says it did reach out to the former reality star before running its cover story and he replied via email with the following: “Oh, jeez, ha. I’m over this.” But is he bending Kris Jenner over a bed? That’s the question!
Comedian and Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes is known for being funny and controversial. His “How to Fight a Baby” video will likely generate both reactions. In the clip, he demonstrates how to take on cute little baby (his cute little 10-month-old, specifically). Tickling is included as one of the ways to win a “fight.” However, he notes, “There are a lot of different moves you can do to kick a baby’s ass.” He demonstrates some of them, too. Does he go too far? Watch: How to Fight a Baby “You’ve got to be more careful,” wrote one critic of McInnes. “You can accidentally hurt a baby throwing him like that. My 14 month old son broke his collar bone after climbing onto a kid’s chair and jumping onto a pillow.” In response to the critics, McInnes told Today , “I would hate if child services took [mine] away, but outside of that, I’m not concerned if it makes people mad or not.” Well, there you have that. And it’s not really surprising. He certainly isn’t new to pot-stirring , or averse to it. Although the renowned “bad boy” seems to be showing a softer side in this particular video, do you think it’s funny or just taking things too far? Tell us what you think in the survey below … Funny! Fail. View Poll »
Comedian and Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes is known for being funny and controversial. His “How to Fight a Baby” video will likely generate both reactions. In the clip, he demonstrates how to take on cute little baby (his cute little 10-month-old, specifically). Tickling is included as one of the ways to win a “fight.” However, he notes, “There are a lot of different moves you can do to kick a baby’s ass.” He demonstrates some of them, too. Does he go too far? Watch: How to Fight a Baby “You’ve got to be more careful,” wrote one critic of McInnes. “You can accidentally hurt a baby throwing him like that. My 14 month old son broke his collar bone after climbing onto a kid’s chair and jumping onto a pillow.” In response to the critics, McInnes told Today , “I would hate if child services took [mine] away, but outside of that, I’m not concerned if it makes people mad or not.” Well, there you have that. And it’s not really surprising. He certainly isn’t new to pot-stirring , or averse to it. Although the renowned “bad boy” seems to be showing a softer side in this particular video, do you think it’s funny or just taking things too far? Tell us what you think in the survey below … Funny! Fail. View Poll »
Spike Lee talking about basketball and the New York Knicks will always be entertaining. For the latest spot in the NBA’s BIG campaign, the renowned director stars and directs a commercial called “The King Of New York” that praises NBA great Bernard King…. Continue
We’ve come to the point where hand-drawn animation almost seems like a forgotten art, lost in the gaudy shuffle of motion-capture slickness a la The Adventures of Tintin and the sleek technical sophistication of pictures like Rango and Kung-Fu Panda 2 . That’s why it’s such a glorious relief to greet the arrival of an old-school -– but very grown-up — animated picture like Fernando Trueba, Javier Mariscal and Tono Errando’s Chico & Rita , a romance that opens in late-1940s Cuba and uses a thumbnail history of midcentury Latin jazz as its backdrop. It’s gorgeous to look at — the images are stylized and detailed at once, as fluent in capturing the movement of human bodies as they are in portraying the luxe deco excitement of ‘50s Havana, New York and Las Vegas. And the story, sultry and bittersweet, is bracingly adult: This is the kind of sophisticated storytelling you rarely get even in live-action movies these days, full of unexpected turns and unruly human complications. There is also, of course, the music, much of it performed by Cuban jazz pianist, bandleader and composer Bebo Valdés, whose own life provided the rough inspiration for the film. Chico & Rita is the story of aspiring jazz pianist Chico (voiced by Emar Xor Oña) who meets the woman of his dreams one evening in a Havana club. Rita (Limara Meneses) is a singer, and Chico falls hard both for her voice and for her knockout figure, but he comes on too strong for her liking — she immediately brands him a country boy. Before long, though, they’ve tumbled into bed and into an on-again, off-again affair as well as a professional partnership. Together, with the help of Chico’s pal and manager, the charming, level-headed Ramón (Mario Guerra), they win a talent contest and embark on a blazing career as a duo, complete with a hit record. But Rita is lured away to New York with big dreams of success, and though she wants Chico to accompany her, a misunderstanding separates them. Chico eventually does make his way to New York on his own, where he slips into divey basement clubs to bask in the presence of his idols, people like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. (Their cartoon versions are wonderful and charmingly accurate, even if Parker is drawn playing a tenor and not an alto.) There, Chico also joins the ranks of other Latin artists like Chano Pozo and Machito, performers who made their way to New York and met with quick and explosive fame during the midcentury Latin jazz craze. Chico and Rita’s careers occasionally intertwine, only to once again veer off into separate corners. The plot doesn’t follow the standard rags-to-riches template (though it wouldn’t be a liability if it did). Instead, the story — the script is by Trueba and Ignacio Martinez de Pisón — treads softly but boldly into unexpected places, touching upon, for example, the fast living and violent death of Chano Pozo, and giving some sense of what the Jim Crow laws of the pre-Civil Rights-era South meant for black jazz musicians. Trueba is the director of the 1992 Belle Epoch; he also made the 2000 Latin jazz documentary Calle 54 , the development of which brought Valdés to his attention. (Like so many musicians of his generation — and like so many from his culture — Valdés had, by the 1990s, lapsed into obscurity: He was forced out of Cuba after the revolution and moved to Sweden, where, years later, he was rediscovered playing piano in a Stockholm restaurant.) Calle 54 also marked the beginning of Trueba’s professional partnership with Spanish artist and graphic designer Mariscal. (Mariscal designed Cobi, the half-bear, half-possum mascot of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.) Together with animator Errando, Trueba and Mariscal worked out the look and feel of the film, reconstructing a vision of the vibrant, long-lost 1950s Havana (with the help of archival photographs kept by the city government) and re-creating a grayish, bustling ‘50s New York whose chief source of color is an aural one — in the movie’s vision, it’s a place where the music flows from basement clubs like a life-giving river. The music in Chico & Rita is just as vital as the visuals are: When Chico sits down at the piano, it’s Valdés’s notes that stream out, leaping and shimmering like trout in a stream. Idania Valdés (no relation to Bebo) provides Rita’s singing voice, luminous and smoky at once. The music that these characters make, separately and together, is as much a part of them as their own blood, and the drawing in Chico & Rita captures that essence: Just after their first meeting, Chico takes Rita to a bar that’s been closed for the evening and sits at the piano, ready to prove himself to her. She likes what she hears and begins to dance — her yellow dress swirls around her legs, her swiveling hips. Chico keeps playing, but he can’t, of course, keep his eyes on the keys. How do you portray something as delicate as a sexual frisson in a cartoon? Somehow, Chico & Rita pulls it off. The picture has a seductive, casual eroticism. Chico & Rita – which was released in Europe last year but is only just now appearing in the United States — has been nominated for an Academy Award, in a category that has snubbed much more lavish features like Cars 2 and Rio ; a recent Hollywood Reporter article suggested that we may be seeing a backlash against motion-capture and other kinds of computer animation. ( Chico & Rita is mostly hand-drawn, though it does use some computer imaging.) There may be no need to draw such a stark dividing line in the sand: Computer animation certainly has its uses and benefits, and the spirit of any piece of animation depends so much on the guiding sensibility behind it, anyway. But Chico & Rita is organic and vital in a way that it might not be had it been fully composed on computer screens. There’s so much depth and warmth in both the story and in the drawing: This is animation that implies movement instead of merely showing it. It also keeps the spirit of this one particular branch of the jazz canon burning in its heart. Chico & Rita may, in its deceptive simplicity, be the wave of the future. At the very least, it’s something to be grateful for in the present, a picture that conjures new life out of old grooves. Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
The filmmaker clarifies: “We’re still in discussions about whether it should be a prequel or sequel. It’s an interesting conversation. I’m meeting with writers and I’ve also gone back to [ Blade Runner co-writer] Hampton Fancher and he still speaks the speak. He’s right there. I spoke with him this week. But we don’t even have a script yet. I’m not sure that that’s going to be a story point, so I don’t know. But if it were, nothing would please me more. Honestly.” [ EW ]
Based on a true story out of World War II-era Lvov, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine), In Darkness seeks to distinguish itself from the painfully distended genre of Holocaust movies with relentless “you are there” realism. It’s not quite Smell-o-vision, but the idea seems to be to try and make the experience of the 12 Polish Jews who hid in a sewer for 14 months as uncomfortable for the audience as it was for them. It seems significant that even a movie like The Reader paused in the midst of its “I was deflowered by a war criminal” melodrama to acknowledge that there is nothing to be learned from the Holocaust. Because its stories of annihilation and survival have taken on the ritual interplay of genre, often they have as much to tell us about current narrative appetites as they do about history. In Darkness , currently nominated for a Best Foreign-Language Feature Oscar, is foremost a Holocaust movie that asks to be measured against all the others; its primarily lessons are directed toward the genre itself. Not all of the victims, for instance, are noble or even particularly nice. Director Agnieszka Holland ( Europa, Europa ) seems so enamored with her own resolution on this account that little more is offered in the way of characterization. But making the victims “human” does not necessarily make them complicated, or well drawn; in fact it leaves them vulnerable to cliché. So here we have the upper-class couple (Maria Schrader and Herbert Knaup) and their two small children, the resourceful hero (Benno Furmann), the rogue (Marcin Bosak), the pretty sister (Agnieszka Groshowska), the wanton redhead (Julia Kijowska), and a few others who never really emerge from the sewer’s shadows. Crammed together into a miserable crevice of the Lvov underground after a pogrom destroys the city’s Jewish ghetto, they all behave badly some point. There are fights over food, space, noise — and though bitter religious recrimination occasionally erupts, it feels more like a requirement of the genre than a reflection of deteroriating inner lives. In Darkness is based on the story told in a 1991 book called In the Sewers of Lvov , by Robert Marshall (adapted here by David F. Shannon). Its central figure is also one we have come to recognize on film: the benevolent gentile. Leopold Socha was a Catholic Pole and prolific thief when the war broke out; he also worked in the sewer system, and offered to help hide the group of Jews in exchange for payment. Robert Wieckiewicz, an enigmatic performer with a tough potato face, plays Socha as a Polish Tony Soprano by way of Graham Greene, with all the charisma, martyr issues and ambivalence about his own better nature that suggests. In Darkness is most successful when it follows Socha through a city where life goes on despite the nightmares unfolding in plain view and underfoot. The opening scenes use an effective contrast to set up the question: What kind of times are these? Socha and his sidekick (Krzysztof Skonieczny) shake down a couple of teenagers in what appears to be a middle-class family home; during their getaway they cross paths with a group of naked women racing through a forest, pursued to their death by nattily uniformed gunmen. From there Holland continues to effectively exploit the tension between Lvov’s ominous sense of suspended reality and the denial human beings are capable of when not directly threatened themselves. Socha and his wife (Kinga Preis) speak about the massacres that take place in their streets like they have just read a report about a country halfway around the world. Though the tensions are not addressed in depth, the fact that German, Yiddish, Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian are spoken more or less interchangeably evokes the clashing ethnic currents that made Poland the Holocaust’s crucible, a better host than most of the region for genocide. Absolutely everyone is on the take, and the sudden perishability of human life has only heightened the instinct for self-preservation. That that instinct is more acutely felt in the character of Socha and his life above ground suggests the overriding misery emanating from the film’s depiction of life in the sewer. With a few exceptions — including cinematographer Jolanta Dylewska’s bravura depiction of a flash flood that threatens to drown the stowaways — Holland cannot make the group’s determination felt because she’s so intent on making us feel the mortification of their suffering. The squeaking and scampering of rats becomes a motif over two and a half hours — it ends almost every scene with one last dash of disgust — and the seemingly high incidence of sewer sex gets lingering attention as well. Rather than beginning with the assumption that there is no possibility of our coming to know that kind of suffering exactly and using imagination and insight to truly take us inside the Lvov Jews’ plight, Holland makes the base conditions of their confinement a narrative as well as aesthetic priority. And frankly it’s boring as shit. Follow Michelle Orange on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Safe House is a twisted claw of a movie, a picture so visually ugly that, to borrow a line from Moms Mabley, it hurt my feelings. Let’s forget, for a moment, about the sub-sub-sub- Training Day plot, in which a wily old-coot operative played by Denzel Washington simultaneously annoys and educates spring-chicken CIA agent Ryan Reynolds. The plot mechanics don’t matter much. What does matter is the inexplicable horror of how lousy this film looks. Movies aren’t strictly a visual medium — they’re too complicated for that — but there’s something wrong when the only thing you can think of while watching a picture is, “Damn! My eyes!” Where to lay the blame? It’s hard to say, but let me unwrap these gauze bandages and I’ll try. The director of Safe House is Swedish-born director Daniel Espinosa, who made a 2010 crime caper called Easy Money . Are the horrors of Safe House completely his fault? Probably not. The script, by David Guggenheim, seems serviceable enough, if generic: Washington’s character, a fugitive smoothie named Tobin Frost, is brought in by the CIA for questioning and a little waterboarding. It’s all in a day’s work, right? Frost has info the organization desperately wants. Of course, other people want it, too: The joint where Frost has been locked up is suddenly overrun by Middle Eastern-looking baddies, who try to kill him. Poor Matt Weston, Reynolds’ character, has been entrusted to watch Frost and needs to spirit him away to safety, thus giving Frost many opportunities to chuckle derisively at the antics of this plucky little greenhorn. Meanwhile, somewhere at CIA headquarters, a bunch of people in suits — played by Sam Shepard, Brendan Gleeson and Vera Farmiga, among others — call up info on Frost on big computer screens, loudly reciting Important Facts about this Very Dangerous Man. Through it all, Frost and Weston have to run around. A lot. They also have to shoot people. A lot. And they also get shot at. A lot. All of these things are standard in contemporary action thrillers — by themselves, they’re not enough to make or break a picture. Washington and Reynolds don’t seem to give particularly bad performances — in fact, they run around, shoot people and get shot at with actorly proficiency. The problem is, it’s just so hard to look at them. Like many features these days, Safe House was shot with a handheld camera. But while smart filmmakers have learned to chill out with the camera jiggling, the Safe House cameras are partying like it’s 2009: This isn’t just shaky-cam, it’s super -shaky-cam. The camera moves back and forth, up and down, just because it can. Craving a bunch of wholly unnecessary circular pans? Safe House has ’em! The tonal palette consists mostly of ochre yellows and greeny grays — cataract colors. And the editing is razor-sharp, meticulous and rapid-fire — so razor-sharp, meticulous and rapid-fire that you can’t really see anything. It’s like eating vegetables that have been sliced so thin they barely exist. Safe House is, I guess, pretty violent, from what you can actually see: There’s some ewky business in which flesh is stabbed with a shard of glass. Yet despite the presence of this sort of brutality, the picture has no pulse. It’s so crappy looking it anesthetizes you — the story it’s trying to tell dissolves away to vapor. So who’s holding the bag for this stinkbomb? The cinematographer, Oliver Wood, has shot plenty of other movies that look perfectly fine, including Surrogates and Fantastic Four , as well, as perhaps most tellingly, the Bourne movies. The editing is by Richard Pearson, who cut The Bourne Supremacy , as well as other cogent features like Quantum of Solace and United 93 . Moviegoers are divided, of course, on the way the Bourne movies have been shot and edited: For some, they’re too crazy, too disconnected, too frenetic. I think they generally work, coasting on their sheer peripatetic energy — but it’s possible their time has passed. It’s also possible that Safe House , while borrowing its style from the Bourne movies, is simply missing some key ingredient: What if every shot were held just one or two seconds longer? What if the camera jiggle was controlled even by just a few centimeters at the top, bottom and sides of the frame? What if the colors didn’t look as if they’d been run through the washer and dryer on the extra-hot setting, every day for three months straight? Then, maybe, it would be possible to look at Safe House directly without having to immediately remedy the experience with two Tylenol. Extra-strength. And throw in some Codeine, too. Please. Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
