James Cromwell was arrested yesterday for reportedly interrupting a University of Wisconsin Board of Regents meeting because he was protesting animal testing on campus. The former Oscar nominee – who played a role this year in American Horror Story Season 2 – was ticketed on a misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct, according to University police Sgt. Brent Gruber. Cromwell and another animal rights activist held up signs that depicted a cat with metal implanted in its head at the school’s lab, while yelling about the treatments of cats yesterday morning. But the director of the university’s Research Animal Resources Center refers to federal agriculture officials as proof that Cromwell’s assertions are false. The 73-year old actor has appeared in such films as The Green Mile and Babe .
James Cromwell was arrested yesterday for reportedly interrupting a University of Wisconsin Board of Regents meeting because he was protesting animal testing on campus. The former Oscar nominee – who played a role this year in American Horror Story Season 2 – was ticketed on a misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct, according to University police Sgt. Brent Gruber. Cromwell and another animal rights activist held up signs that depicted a cat with metal implanted in its head at the school’s lab, while yelling about the treatments of cats yesterday morning. But the director of the university’s Research Animal Resources Center refers to federal agriculture officials as proof that Cromwell’s assertions are false. The 73-year old actor has appeared in such films as The Green Mile and Babe .
James Cromwell was arrested yesterday for reportedly interrupting a University of Wisconsin Board of Regents meeting because he was protesting animal testing on campus. The former Oscar nominee – who played a role this year in American Horror Story Season 2 – was ticketed on a misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct, according to University police Sgt. Brent Gruber. Cromwell and another animal rights activist held up signs that depicted a cat with metal implanted in its head at the school’s lab, while yelling about the treatments of cats yesterday morning. But the director of the university’s Research Animal Resources Center refers to federal agriculture officials as proof that Cromwell’s assertions are false. The 73-year old actor has appeared in such films as The Green Mile and Babe .
James Cromwell was arrested yesterday for reportedly interrupting a University of Wisconsin Board of Regents meeting because he was protesting animal testing on campus. The former Oscar nominee – who played a role this year in American Horror Story Season 2 – was ticketed on a misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct, according to University police Sgt. Brent Gruber. Cromwell and another animal rights activist held up signs that depicted a cat with metal implanted in its head at the school’s lab, while yelling about the treatments of cats yesterday morning. But the director of the university’s Research Animal Resources Center refers to federal agriculture officials as proof that Cromwell’s assertions are false. The 73-year old actor has appeared in such films as The Green Mile and Babe .
Even as the U.S. Senate continues to inquire about what it says are misrepresentations of the use of torture in the successful hunt for Al Qaeda mastermind Osama Bin Laden in 2011, filmmakers Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal defended their Oscar hopeful Zero Dark Thirty at the New York Film Critics Circle Monday night. “I thankfully want to say that I’m standing in a room of people who understand that depiction is not endorsement, and if it was, no artist could ever portray inhumane practices,” Bigelow is quoted as saying in Huff Post, while accepting the organization’s Best Director award. “No author could ever write about them, and no filmmaker could ever delve into the knotty subjects of our time.” Senator John McCain of Arizona and Diane Feinstein of California have criticized the pic as showing water-boarding and extreme isolation among other tactics as being instrumental in the U.S. government’s decade-long search for Bin Laden. “We believe the film is grossly inaccurate and misleading in its suggestion that torture resulted in information that led to the location of [Osama] bin Laden,” Feinstein, McCain and Michigan Senator Carl Levin wrote to Zero Dark Thirty ‘s studio, Sony in December. Writer/producer Mark Boal said he was proud of the film Monday night and is unmoved by criticism which has also come from Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney. I stand here tonight being extremely proud of the film we made,” he said Monday, while accepting the prize for Best Picture with Bigelow and producer Megan Ellison. “In case anyone is asking, we stand by the film. I think at the end of the day, we made a film that allows us to look back at the past in a way that gives us a more clear-sighted appraisal of the future.” He added jokingly, “Apparently, the French government will be investigating Les Mis .” Jessica Chastain, who plays the CIA operative who tracks down Bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, which lead to the Navy Seals raid on the compound that resoled in the Al Qaeda head’s death, told David Letterman in a recent appearance that she believes in the film’s accuracy, though acknowledged they had to shorten a decade-long hunt into a feature-length movie “Mark Boal is the investigative journalist so he’s the one who got all the information and I just went and did my job and did my research,” said Jessica Chastain to Letterman who joked that she’s not going to be arrested. “I’m afraid to get called in front of a Senate committee…” laughed Chastain. “In my opinion, this is a very accurate film… I think it’s important to note the film is not a documentary. So of course, there has been some things…We took 10 years and put it in two-and-a-half hours…” [ Sources: Huffington Post , THR ]
In university,Catherine Young joined the sorority Delta Delta Delta, where she met some amazing young women with whom she shared similar goals and aspirations. Through the sorority she was able to participate in philanthropic endeavors through fundraising and volunteering, raising large amounts of money for Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Tennessee. Catherine has always cherished family and friends in her life. One of her personal mottos is “everything
Claudia Scali started a fundraiser through the Sick Kid’s Foundation to support children with disabilities. Any time she is tempted to stray from her nutrition or workout regime, she remembers her cause and feels motivated to keep going. Claudia enjoys volunteering in her community and helping others. Her various endeavours have given Claudia many opportunities to give back to her community and create awareness for meaningful causes. She currently participates and organizes fundraising activ
Running a dense two hours thirty, before credits, Zero Dark Thirty reunites director Kathryn Bigelow with reporter-turned-scenarist Mark Boal in re-creating the hunt for Osama bin Laden , rejecting nearly every cliche one might expect from a Hollywood treatment of the subject. Far more ambitious than The Hurt Locker , yet nowhere near so tripwire-tense, this procedure-driven, decade-spanning docudrama nevertheless rivets for most of its running time by focusing on how one female CIA agent with a far-out hunch was instrumental in bringing down America’s most wanted fugitive. Spinning the pic as a thriller, Sony could beat the 9/11-movie curse when the Dec. 19 limited release goes wide in January. Opportunely held for release until after the presidential election had played out, Zero Dark Thirty arrives shrouded in nearly as much mystery as bin Laden’s whereabouts before news broke that a team of Navy Seals had successfully terminated his life on May 2, 2011. The title, military-speak for half-past midnight, refers to the Al Qaeda leader’s time of death, theoretically promising a flashy first-hand account of the raid itself. But Bigelow and Boal reduce the spectacular assault on bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, to the last half-hour in order to dedicate the rest of the film to the lesser-known backstory. By forcing partisan politics into the wings (President George W. Bush goes entirely unseen, while auds’ only glimpse of President Obama is during a 2008 campaign interview), the filmmakers effectively give gender politics the whole stage: The pic presents the highest-profile U.S. military success in recent memory as the work of a single woman, “Maya” ( Jessica Chastain ), inspired by a real CIA analyst Boal discovered during his research, and presented here as the only government official convinced that bin Laden wasn’t “hiding in some cave” (Bush’s words), but somewhere she could find him. Stepping up from a year busy with supporting roles, Chastain may at first seem an unusual choice for the lead. But she shows she has the chops to embody the pic’s iron-nerved protag, holding her own in the testosterone-thick world of CIA black sites and top-level Washington boardrooms. She first appears as witness to a military interrogation in which a colleague resorts to extreme measures to force information from an Al Qaeda money handler (Reda Kateb). Compared with her wild-eyed cowboy of a colleague, Dan (Jason Clarke), Maya’s body language suggests a little girl, clearly uncomfortable with the waterboarding and sexual humiliation that were common practice in the morally hazy rendition era. When Dan leaves the room for a moment, the desperate prisoner tries to appeal to her humanity. She wavers for only a moment before firing back, “You can help yourself by being truthful.” Unlike, for instance, Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs , Chastain plays Maya as fragile on the outside, Kevlar-tough beneath the skin. After narrowly surviving one terrorist attack and seeing another promising lead literally blow up in a female colleague’s face, Maya grits her teeth and swears, “I’m gonna smoke everybody involved in this op, and then I’m going to kill bin Laden.” Like Bigelow herself, Maya realizes that actions — or action movies, in the director’s case — are the surest way to combat a tradition in which society doesn’t believe women to be capable of getting the job done, and Zero Dark Thirty follows the character through every significant step along her 10-year journey to hold bin Laden accountable for 9/11. The film opens with audio of a terrified victim of the World Trade Center attack playing over a black screen and uses the emotional power that clip dredges up to fuel everything that follows. The result is neither particularly entertaining nor especially artful, as the filmmakers take a lean, All the President’s Men -style approach to dramatizing an investigation that took nearly a decade to bear fruit. But Boal has clearly constructed this as a more journalistic alternative to a generic gung-ho approach. The script’s blood runs thick with observational detail and military jargon, skipping forward years at a time between scenes to focus on one of two types of incident. The first concerns the slow but steady progress in Maya’s investigation, which hinges on her conviction that any clues they can discover about bin Laden’s courier will eventually lead them back to UBL (the military acronym for bin Laden) himself. The second type involves an ongoing series of terrorist attacks that continue to claim lives as long as bin Laden goes free (never mind that they will not stop once he’s dead). Bigelow keeps her audience on its toes by alternating between the two, allowing virtually no room for subplots or superfluous character baggage beyond what’s needed for the task at hand. With its handheld camerawork, naturalistic lighting and dialogue-drowning sound design (especially heavy on ambient helicopters), the film reflects the latest fashion in cinematic realism, compromised only slightly by the bare-minimum mood setting from Alexandre Desplat’s Middle East-inflected score. Chastain’s presence reminds us we’re watching a movie, and yet, this slight degree of self-consciousness serves to reinforce the point that it’s a woman pushing the process forward. Maya may not be made of the same stuff as her male colleagues, but that’s essential to the operation’s success. While those around her equivocate and refuse to take action, she sticks to her guns and keeps track, in dry-erase marker, of the bureaucratic delays since they’ve located bin Laden. Finally, when the off-camera Obama gives her mission the green light, Maya stares down a pair of cocky Navy Seals (Chris Pratt and Joel Edgerton) and tells them in no uncertain terms that she has no patience for their macho B.S. Only then does Bigelow offer auds what they paid to see: a re-construction of the raid on bin Laden’s compound. Virtuoso as the sequence is to behold, it lacks both the detail of Matt Bissonnette’s bestselling insider memoir No Easy Day and the visceral immediacy of this year’s earlier Seals-supported indie, Act of Valor , as well as the satisfaction of seeing the dead bin Laden’s face (also withheld by the U.S. goverment). Dramatically speaking, the raid feels almost anti-climactic — an epilogue to a personal crusade that ends the moment Maya is taken seriously. Still, considering how seldom female storytellers have been given a chance to operate on this scale, it’s fair to let Bigelow overturn narrative expectations to some degree. The ultra-professional result may be easier to respect than enjoy, but there’s no denying its power, both as a credible reimagining of what went down and a welcome example of distaff resolve prevailing in an arena traditionally dominated by men. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
What are they tryin’ to say?!?! We all know someone who likes to have a drank at the end of a long day but cotdayum…these statistics are pretty crazy. Americans get too many calories from soda. But what about alcohol? It turns out adults get almost as many empty calories from booze as from soft drinks, a government study found. Soda and other sweetened drinks — the focus of obesity-fighting public health campaigns — are the source of about 6 percent of the calories adults consume, on average. Alcoholic beverages account for about 5 percent, the new study found. “We’ve been focusing on sugar-sweetened beverages. This is something new,” said Cynthia Ogden, one of the study’s authors. She’s an epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention which released its findings Thursday. The government researchers say the findings deserve attention because, like soda, alcohol contains few nutrients but plenty of calories. But a liquor trade association said the findings indicate there’s no big problem. “This research shows that the overwhelming majority of adults drink moderately,” Lisa Hawkins, a spokeswoman for the Distilled Spirits Council, said in a statement. The CDC study is based on interviews with more than 11,000 U.S. adults from 2007 through 2010. Participants were asked extensive questions about what they ate and drank over the previous 24 hours. The study found: –On any given day, about one-third of men and one-fifth of women consumed calories from beer, wine or liquor. –Averaged out to all adults, the average guy drinks 150 calories from alcohol each day, or the equivalent of a can of Budweiser. –The average woman drinks about 50 calories, or roughly half a glass of wine. –Men drink mostly beer. For women, there was no clear favorite among alcoholic beverages. –There was no racial or ethnic difference in average calories consumed from alcoholic beverages. But there was an age difference, with younger adults putting more of it away. For reference, a 12-ounce can of regular Coca-Cola has 140 calories, slightly less than a same-sized can of regular Bud. A 5-ounce glass of wine is around 100 calories. Here’s a thought. Maybe they should throw up the same calorie count on drinks as they do on everything else? LLS…do you think it’d make a difference? Images via shutterstock
Must be nice… A Gallery Of Photos Of Jerry Rice’s California Home Via Realtor San Francisco 49ers great Jerry Rice has re-listed his Hall of Fame home in Atherton, CA. The prolific wide receiver, considered by many to be the greatest NFL player of all-time, has had the 13,908-square-foot estate on and off the market since mid-2009 and now asks $10.5 million for the luxe property. Built in 2001 by Lencioni Construction, the three-story French chateau-style design features a total of six bedroom suites, seven full baths and three half baths, and a wealth of modern conveniences befitting a perennial All-Pro. Of its amenities (which range from a state-of-the-art movie theater to a game room to a full bar and wine room) nothing stands out more than Rice’s personal training facility. Those who followed the more intimate details of Rice’s career are well aware of the wideout’s epic conditioning program, a training regimen that included daily runs up the Bay Area trail gauntlet known simply as ‘The Hill’. So it comes as no surprise to learn that the Niners great’s home gym comes fully stocked with over $500,000 worth of weights and training equipment, a sauna, and a steam room complete with cold-plunge. “That has been the most important part of the house for me,” Jerry told Haute Living in a 2001 interview. “If I’m up late and can’t sleep, I can just trot downstairs for a workout and then relax in the sauna or rejuvenate with the cold plunge. I love it for privacy reasons, too. I love being able to get into my workout without having to consider the social aspects of going out to a gym.” Rounding out Rice’s grand, 1.2-acre abode are such backyard luxuries as a pool, spa, covered veranda with a stone fireplace, a dog kennel, and, finally, an additional guest quarters with a kitchenette and full bath. Classy guy, with a classy crib, check out the pics after the flip. Images via Realtor
