Welcome to THG’s Week in Review! Below, our staffers look back at the stories, stars and scandals that made the last seven days some of the craziest ALL MONTH. If you don’t already, FOLLOW THG on Twitter , Google+ and Facebook for 24/7/365 news. Every day, week and year, let us be your celebrity gossip source! Now, a rundown of the week that was at The Hollywood Gossip : American Idol Winner: Announced! After a nail-biting, emotional and close American Idol finale Tuesday night … … Phillip Phillips prevailed , making him the fifth straight WGWG to win. Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan tied the knot after FB went public. Miley Cyrus’ outfit at the Billboard Music Awards didn’t involve pants. Miles also weighed in on how sex is beautiful and necessary. Kate Gosselin on Today Show Kate Gosselin has made peace with Jon somehow. So she says. Chris Brown fans lost their $h!t at critics of his lip-synching. Their reaction? Sending Chrissy Teigen death threats . Also getting death threats: Dog the Bounty Hunter . Timothy Busfield was accused of sexual battery. John Travolta was not this week, for a change. Donald Driver & Peta Murgatroyd – Freestyle (DWTS Week 10) Donald Driver won Dancing With the Stars after a terrific finale. A spat with Whitney’s family left Ray J exhausted, hospitalized . Aishwarya Rai Bachchan’s weight continues to spark debate. Ditto Ali Lohan … for every different reasons. Lady Gaga really wants a fake Rolex . Snooki is having a boy . The Great Gatsby Trailer The trailer for this year’s The Great Gatsby was released (above). The Anchorman 2 trailer (or at least a tease for it) is also out. The Bachelorette spoilers have been on the money so far. Arsenio Hall won Celebrity Apprentice over Clay Aiken. Kim Kardashian was named the World’s Hottest Woman . Kanye West proposed to her too … in her dreams. Anderson Cooper CRUSHES ‘Human Barbie’ Mom Anderson Cooper just owned Human Barbie on his show (above). Lauren Odes got fired for being too hot. At a lingerie company. An old literary bio says President Obama was born in Kenya . Usher and Tameka Foster continue to fight it out in court. Desmond Hatchett owes child support for 30 kids. Yes, 30. An arrest was made in the Etan Patz case , 33 years later: Etan Patz Case: Pedro Hernandez Arrested What was the highlight of the week for you? Did we leave anything out?
A year after Lars von Trier was publicly castigated for making a Hitler joke at Cannes , the festival has banned a controversial comedy by French comedian/provocateur Dieudonné. Entitled The Anti-Semite , the film was scheduled to play not in the official festival but in the Cannes Film Market, but outrage over its content — including mockery of Auschwitz and Dieudonné in Nazi dress — led the organization to scrap screenings. According to Agence France-Presse, the film includes “images deriding Auschwitz,” “Dieudonne’s violent and alcoholic character dressed as a Nazi officer for a fancy dress party,” and “Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson [appearing] as himself.” Produced by the Iranian Documentary and Experimental Film Center, The Anti-Semite stars Dieudonné, who has been charged numerous times for violating European laws with his controversial statements and performances, including one recent show in France that was halted mid-performance by authorities “for breaking local defamation laws.” As for the Cannes screening, the Cannes Film Market’s Jerome Paillard explained the move thusly: “Our general conditions ban the presence of all films threatening public order or religious convictions, as well as pornographic films or those inciting violence.” [ AFP via The Wrap ]
The premise of Chernobyl Diaries , in which a group of twentysomething tourists are menaced by malevolent beings while paying a visit to Pripyat, the abandoned Ukrainian town that used to house workers at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, has been described by some as uncomfortably exploitative of a real-life tragedy. But real-life tragedies bleed through into horror cinema all the time — the genre is frequently a reflection of subconscious dread and anxiety, from the nuclear detonation-born Godzilla menacing a Japan less than a decade after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the monster that attacked New York in Cloverfield , 54 years later, in a wash of imagery reminiscent of 9/11. The problem with Chernobyl Diaries isn’t that it’s offensive, it’s that it’s dumb — a run-of-the-mill low-budget flick focused on killing off stupid, pretty young things slowly enough to fill out 90 minutes. Directed by Bradley Parker, who worked as a visual effects supervisor on Let Me In , Chernobyl Diaries is produced and based on a story by Oren Peli, the creator of the Paranormal Activity franchise and ABC series The River . With the exception of an intro and a clip found on a camera explaining what happened to two of the characters, it isn’t part of the found-footage subgenre Peli has made his own, though sometimes it could use the excuse — the film has loose, jerky camerawork that sometimes seems meant to evoke something shot by a panicky observer, though the effect is more likely a practical one meant to obscure the baddies from full view. The monsters are mutants twisted by radiation, as far as we’re told, and it’s for the better that we don’t ever get a good look at them. They lurk in the darkness, outlined in doorways and briefly illumined in flashlight beams, and they’re creepy enough to seem worthy of the film’s greatest effect, its setting. Composed of abandoned brutalist tower blocks and industrial areas, the film’s version of Pripyat (it wasn’t shot there, though you can indeed take a tour of the actual town these days) is ghostly, all remnants of abruptly abandoned lives and packs of wild dogs roaming the streets. “Nature has reclaimed its rightful home,” tour guide Uri (Dimitri Diatchenko) intones to his customers, but there’s no sense of renewal, only of a place burnt out and forever warped. Uri is the best of the batch of Pripyat wanderers, a solid former special forces soldier turned extreme-tourism business owner. Diatchenko conveys the reassuring professionalism needed to convince visitors of his trustworthiness while also making it clear that his gig is a little sketchy. But the tourists themselves are just awful mutant-fodder. There’s the primary four Americans, brothers Chris (Jesse McCartney) and Paul (Jonathan Sadowski) along with Natalie (Olivia Dudley) and Amanda (Devin Kelley), plus Australian backpacker Michael (Nathan Phillips) and his Scandinavian girlfriend Zoe (Ingrid Bolsø Berdal). They have their sibling and romantic tensions, which aren’t really worth describing — all you need to know is that these are the type of characters who always go into the darkest, scariest room because they need to see what’s there, who split up and who stop to bicker or indulge in a freak-out instead of running away as any sane person would. They are, in other words, the interchangeable, irrational characters who invariably populate horror movies, the kind so cleverly mocked in Cabin in the Woods , and despite the specificity of Chernobyl Diaries ‘ setting, it is really just another generic horror movie reliant on jump scares and ridiculous behavior to carry the action through to the end. The only noteworthy aspect of the film’s three travelers and one dedicated expat is that they aren’t especially ugly Americans. They’re entitled and rude at times, sure, but there’s not the sense of panicked paranoia that fed the likes of Hostel and Turistas , that feeling that everyone in the rest of the world secretly does want to kill us. In Chernobyl Diaries , the only sentiment that lingers is one of grinding practicality — that the film is set in Eastern Europe not because it has any larger point to make about the area or the tragedy it uses as a jumping-off point, but simply because it’s so affordable to shoot movies there. Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Come on, admit it: You are going to miss The Twilight Saga when it’s over — especially the delectably, heavily airbrushed countenances of the films’ Big Three stars, glowering out from an eternity of repackaged DVD/Blu-ray sets, Twilight fan cruises, B-action notoriety , story-driven nudity and whatever else awaits beyond the horizon. I know I am! Forever, indeed. That is a very long time. I can barely finish this post conveying the new Breaking Dawn – Part 2 character posters, it is all so wrenching. OK, I’m finished. [ via ]
Director Barry Sonnenfeld exudes a nervy confidence that extends from his blithe dismissal of reported troubles in the making of Men in Black 3 (“The story is if the movie works when it’s finished…”) to the navy blue stingray leather cowboy boots he rocked as he sat with Movieline for a chat (“They’re fish. Feel ‘em!”). And with the sci-fi comedy threequel earning pleasing grades from critics, marking box office titan Will Smith ’s return to the screen, Sonnenfeld is already basking in another coup — his first, effective, foray into 3-D filmmaking : “I think this is — I’ll just say it — the best use of 3-D.” In a landscape dominated by James Cameron ’s groundbreaking advances in 3-D, and with filmmakers like Peter Jackson and Douglas Trumbull pushing technology further, Sonnenfeld’s triumph comes from the impressive new way in which he uses the added dimensionality. Most surprising: He did so, by choice, via post-conversion. “Up until I think this movie, everyone thinks conversion is a second hand citizen,” he said recently in Los Angeles. “We shot a lot of tests with a lot of 3-D rigs, and I actually decided on conversion. Because I use wide lenses, I feel that the audience physically thinks they’re in the room with the actors. If you look at Michael Mann movies or Michael Bay or Tony or Ridley Scott, they use long lenses and they’re really good filmmakers, but I always feel very slightly emotionally removed and distant, like I’m watching something.” The major difference in Sonnenfeld’s approach is in where depth appears to the viewer — the former cinematographer filmed in ways that brought his actors forward out of the screen, rather than taking the audience beyond it. “Unlike every movie you’ve seen in 3-D, we’ve put the convergence at the screen and put most of the depth in front of the screen,” he explained. “A lot of the new 3-D stuff, the aesthetic was kind of created by James Cameron, and if you think about everything James is — how he likes to go underwater and look through small holes, deeply underwater — the 3-D depth in those movies feel that way. The depth is in the back of the screen. So to me, I think this is — I’ll just say it — the best use of 3-D, because the actors are actually with the audience.” Sonnenfeld sat for a chat with Movieline about coming back to his Men in Black franchise ten years after Men in Black II , why those reports of catastrophic delays in the film’s production are moot, his most inspired casting choices, memories of shooting the Coen brothers’ Raising Arizona 25 years ago, and more. When did plans to make a third installment, after so long of a gap, really start coming together — and why did you feel Men in Black 3 should be made? Well, I was not involved in that decision; I came in after a script had been written, so I’ll guess that Sony felt that even though it had been a long time between the movies that it’s shown so often on DVDs and cable television and network television that, even though it had been ten years, even young kids were aware of the franchise. That they weren’t saying ‘It’s been way too long and no one will remember this stuff’ because it’s on so often. The challenge for them was how to make it both similar to the first two so that we love Will and Tommy and all that, for instance, but fresh enough so that it didn’t feel stale or old. And that’s where Will’s idea came in. You know, the idea for Men in Black 3 is based on something Will said to me one night, one late, cold night on some ranch in the valley when we were shooting Men in Black II . Will said, ‘You know, I have an idea for Men in Black 3 — something happens in the beginning of the movie and Tommy’s character is gone, and I realize that an alien has traveled back in time and done something to Tommy and I have to go back to some other era where I have to save him.’ I mean, it was that simple and basic of an idea. Did you love the idea back then? Well, what I said to Will was, ‘Can we just finish this movie?’ I thought it was a good idea, but time travel is both interesting and incredibly challenging. How would you describe the creative dynamic between you and Will and your other collaborators, hashing out where the Men in Black 3 story would go given the unusual, highly publicized development process you went through? There was a script that Will and I read, and we started early pre-production, which means working on the script and hiring crew and all that. Will has really good ideas, but so does a writer, so do I, so does a producer… and we were a team, trying to make the best version of the script possible. But it was never a Will ego or ‘Will says we have to do this’ situation. Will is a really good collaborator with me, we get along incredibly well and totally see the same movie, so that was really easy to do. And I think without knowing how every movie gets made, every movie goes through stages where you’re re-writing the script, you’re throwing out scenes, you’re putting scenes back in that you had taken out… the first Men in Black , we totally changed the plot after we shot it, in post-production. On Addams Family , a week and a half before we were shooting, the entire cast rebelled and demanded that Fester be the real Fester and not an imposter. And you’ve said that, in retrospect, you think that was the right decision. In retrospect, that was the right decision. Scott Rudin and I were wrong, and luckily Christina Ricci, who was 10 at the time, was incredibly articulate and convinced us. So I think there’s not a story there. I think the story is if the movie works when it’s finished. Well, particularly in the wake of John Carter , reports of troubled productions make you wonder. Right, but I’ve never heard more horrible stories coming out of production than what a disaster Titanic was going to be. So my feeling is it doesn’t matter how it gets there, it matters if the movie works or not works when people see it — not if it took longer, if it was written on a Mac on a PC… That’s why I find those stories intriguing, because I’ve been to events that I’ve read about in the New York Times that I go, ‘That’s not what happened.’ You mentioned there was some studio concern about Josh Brolin playing the Tommy Lee Jones character, how that would come off, until they saw the first dailies… It was not about Josh Brolin, it was about the writing of the character. That some people felt that the young Agent K should be much happier and much different than older K. My feeling was that if you do that, and it’s totally different, then you start to go, ‘Well, what happened to Tommy Lee Jones?’ Yet by Brolin being very similar to Tommy but being more optimistic, you think you’re still watching Tommy Lee Jones. So for me, I felt — and Josh felt — that we should not have a huge difference in personalities. Some other people felt there should be bigger differences between old and new K, but once they saw it, it went away. Brolin’s a great fit in the role, but he’s just the latest in a line of some great casting moves you’ve made during your filmmaking career. That said, you’ve credited your wife with the idea of casting Will in Men in Black in the first place. Yeah, Sweetie’s pretty smart! Will Smith was Sweetie’s idea for the first movie, Tommy Lee Jones was mine… Josh Brolin was my idea. We’ve had some other great castings. But here’s the funny thing; [John] Travolta is fantastic in Get Shorty but the person I wanted to play that role was actually Danny DeVito. Weirdly. And Danny ended up producing the movie, but I saw Danny in that role. He wasn’t available and had to take a smaller role. But you know, casting is so important, and the chemistry between Will and Tommy both on the set and off the set is pretty tremendous. They’re very relaxed and funny together. In Men in Black 3 you cast two actors who’ve recently worked with the Coen brothers — Josh Brolin and Michael Stuhlbarg. Was there any deliberate connection in that, or was it purely coincidental? Oh, Stuhlbarg! No, I met Josh through Joel and Ethan because we were at some award shows together and stuff, so that’s how I physically met Josh, which was great. Stuhlbarg is totally accidental, but I will say that I thought Michael was extraordinary in A Serious Man for Joel and Ethan, and he’s pretty great in our movie, too. He’s a lovely actor. He’s my new favorite alien. Speaking of your work with the Coens, we’re coming on 25 years for Raising Arizona . I think Raising Arizona would be a really good movie to convert to 3-D. [Laughs] You know, it was a lot of fun working with Joel and Ethan on that movie – I shot their first three movies, Blood Simple , Raising Arizona , Miller’s Crossing — and you look at Nic Cage, Fran McDormand, who was in Blood Simple … you look at Joel and Ethan’s career, and it’s pretty extraordinary. But I’ll always resent how the grips and the electricians were paid more than I was on that movie. How was that possible? Ask Ethan! Now, the 3-D is a huge component in Men in Black 3 , and it looked amazing. I have to admit I was surprised at how well it was used — and in a way that 3-D is not frequently utilized. Thanks. I think that this looks a lot different than most 3-D movies, because most 3-D movies put all the 3-D behind the screen. And I thought, ‘What a waste’ — because that distances you. And also the way I see movies, just like with Raising Arizona , is that I use very wide lenses which invites the audience in. But I’m really proud of the 3-Dness of it. I think it helps the movie. Men in Black III is in theaters Friday. Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Of the stellar actors assembled for Ridley Scott ‘s Prometheus , Noomi Rapace, Charlize Theron, and Fassy alone are worth the price of admission. But the lesser known cast member that I’m most looking forward to watching navigate Prometheus ‘s space terrors is one Logan Marshall-Green , whom I previously declared the American Tom Hardy on account of his doppelganger status, and whom you may also recall from such prior milestones as being the hot (but totes bad news) Trey on The O.C. Well, finally Marshall-Green (who also starred on TNT’s Dark Blue and popped up in Brooklyn’s Finest and Devil ) gets his own close-up in the ongoing spoiler-tease that is the Prometheus PR campaign trail. He plays the plum role of Holloway, the scientist lover to Rapace’s Elizabeth. And, judging from this not terribly-spoilery behind the scenes video, he sees whatever it is the crew is doing out there as some form of extreme sports. And juuuuust because I can’t help myself, let’s take a trip down memory lane to the Trey-centric climax of The O.C. , Season 2 (AKA the scene that inspired an SNL -Shia LaBeouf classic): [via ShockTilYouDrop ]
On the eve of his Cannes debut in David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis , Robert Pattinson spoke with Metro France about a host of topics, most notably his fear of being fired from the film and his eagerness to reunite with the director on a “really weird” film about the film industry. And, oh yes: His balls. More specifically, how Cronenberg really wanted to get them in a shot for one particularly revealing scene… [ GALLERY: Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart, and more at the Cannes Film Festival ] Granted, the nuance of language gets a bit lost via Google Translation (hat tip to fan blog Robert Pattinson Life for their translated version). Either way, temper your expectations: The Pattinson junk did not make it to the screen as planned. “Five minutes before we filmed, David told me, ‘I want to see the bottom of your balls on the top of the frame.’ At the moment, I reminded myself that I would do anything for him. So I went back to see him and told him that wouldn’t happen. He took it really well. At the start, it’s a very bizarre scene that you won’t see again in another movie, I promise.” Oh, that Cronenberg! Pattinson also told Metro France about the film he hopes to reunite with Cronenberg on after he hunts Saddam Hussein in Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s Mission: Blacklist : “I don’t know when exactly we’re going to shoot. It will be David’s first movie in America. In Los Angeles, to be exact. It will be about the film industry and I promise that it’s going to be really weird.” As it should be. Read more here and here , and follow Movieline’s Cannes coverage as Cosmopolis debuts tomorrow.
It would be very easy to show up here and report that Men in Black 3 has no reason to exist, that it’s just another threequel that didn’t have to be made. The truth is a little more complicated: Men in Black 3 — which was, like its two predecessors, directed by Barry Sonnenfeld — is neither as much fun as the first picture in the series nor as totally useless as the second. It has an actual story line, one that’s quite moving in places. And it features a bit of casting that’s pure genius. Men in Black 3 is almost good enough to make you care about its existence. And yet not quite. Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones return as Agents J and K respectively, and their partnership is no more harmonious than it ever was: Agent J accuses K, quite justifiably, of barely being able to communicate on any human level. Agent K responds with yet more evasiveness: He’s a man of few words who appears to be carrying a great deal of baggage beneath his eyes alone. He has secrets, dammit, things that Agent J might be better off not knowing. Which makes Agent J that much more eager for some sort of connection with his partner-slash-father-figure. Meanwhile, Boris the Animal (Jemaine Clement, from Flight of the Conchords , doing his best Tim Curry imitation), a goggle-eyed alien villain whose dastardly plan was foiled years ago by Agent K — the episode also cost him an arm — escapes from prison with the goal of traveling back in time to kill Agent K before that arrest, and that arm-hacking, can happen. Simultaneously, Agent J wakes up in world where Agent K has been dead for years; he too travels back in time, to 1969, aiming to save the life of his taciturn hound dog of a partner, a guy who, as J aptly puts it, has “kind of a surly Elvis thing happening with him.” Outside of an early scene in which J and K show up at a Chinese restaurant to investigate a health-code violation that involves noodle dishes laced with alien eyeballs and such, Men in Black 3 is pretty low on the silly, clever creepie-crawlies that were the mainstay of the original. (The script is by Etan Cohen, based on the comic-book characters created by Lowell Cunningham.) And because this is a costly summer blockbuster, released in 3-D no less, its last third is cluttered with the usual manic action, which is undistinguished and unmemorable. But Men in Black 3 does have its charms, partly thanks to some first-rate second-banana players: The luminous Emma Thompson and the radiant Alice Eve play older and younger versions of the same character, and their presence helps tone down some of Will Smith’s unbearable “Love me!” rays. Jones is barely in the movie, but at least he makes an impact: It’s fascinating to look at his face, aging apace in the normal fashion — how has it gotten to the point that it’s such a wonderful thing to watch an actor grow into the face he was meant to have? But most wonderful of all is Josh Brolin as the young Agent K. It’s so easy to believe that Brolin could turn into Jones, given a couple of decades. Brolin mimics Jones’s phrasing perfectly, capturing the essence of his easy drawl, getting those Southern-fried pauses just right. His features even carry that half-worried, half-exasperated look that Jones’ Agent K has always worn so well. The plot of Men in Black 3, once you strip away the silly action and 3-D falderal, is relatively simple and straightforward, and even though, in essence, it’s not anything you haven’t seen before, it still manages to strike a semi-meaningful chord. Its effects, particularly a sequence that takes place near the very top of the Chrysler Building, atop one of those majestic art deco eagles, are reasonably impressive. But somehow, its actors end up mattering more. Is that a strength or a liability in a summer blockbuster? It ought to be the former, but these days, who can tell for sure? Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Jonas Brother and co-star Michael Urie, who end their Broadway run Sunday, tell MTV News the fans ‘say some pretty wild things.’ By Jocelyn Vena Nick Jonas Photo: MTV News Nick Jonas will end his run in “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” when the Broadway show closes Sunday. The singer, along with his co-star Michael Urie, will no longer play business rivals on the Great White Way, but do continue to hold fond memories of their time in the show. When MTV News caught up with the actors recently, they recalled some of their favorite fan encounters during their tenure in “How to Succeed.” “The craziest fan encounter? The great thing about the fans is that they are polite during the show,” Jonas said. “At the beginning of the show, they have an opportunity get excited, and then throughout the show, they are very polite.” Everyone’s polite — at least, until Jonas got his smooch on. “Occasionally, they’ll have little outbursts of craziness,” he remembered. “It usually comes for me during the kissing moment during the show. They can say some pretty wild things I can hear out of the corner of my ear. It’s fun.” Urie joked, “I actually stand offstage during the kiss and scream things like, ‘Nick, Nick, oh Nick,’ with about that [deep] inflection.” All joking aside, Urie did have some warm, fuzzy encounters with the show’s fans before every performance. “Before the show, it’s fun to come into the theater every night, because there are people waiting. Sometimes there are people camped out waiting that aren’t even there to see the show,” he said. “They’ve already seen the show or they’re seeing the show in the future, and they’ll be like, ‘Hey Michael, good show.’ And they’re very cool and easygoing.” Both Jonas and Urie joined the show in January. Their run was expected to go until July 1, but they’re closing a bit early. With the show ending Sunday, Jonas will now devote more time to recording a new album with his brothers. The Jonas Brothers are currently hard at work on their follow-up to 2009’s Lines, Vines and Trying Times . Have you seen “How to Succeed”? Share your review in the comments below! Related Artists Nick Jonas & The Administration
A year after he put “birther” rumors to rest by releasing his birth certificate , President Obama’s background is back in the news again … with a twist. An old bio of Obama from his former literary agent says he was born in Kenya, renewing debate over the authenticity of his own account(s) of his past. You could essentially call this “reverse birtherism.” In 2011, Obama proved born in the U.S., but did he lie in the past about being Kenyan-born to craft a more exotic, interesting-sounding background? According to a booklet produced by Acton & Dystel, to showcase its roster of writers, Obama was “born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.” Obama’s former literary agency says they merely misidentified his birthplace as Kenya while trying to promote the then-Harvard Law grad in 1991. Miriam Goderich edited the text of the bio; she is now a partner at the Dystel & Goderich agency, which lists Obama as one of its current clients. “This was nothing more than a fact checking error by me – an agency assistant at the time,” Goderich wrote in an emailed statement to Yahoo News. “There was never any information given to us by Obama suggesting he was born in Kenya and not Hawaii … [it was] a simple mistake and nothing more.” Breitbart.com, the site founded by the late Andrew Breitbart, broke this story as part of ” The Vetting ,” its ongoing series about Obama’s past. Breitbart died in March, shockingly at age 43, but beforehand, he set out to do what he felt mainstream media would not during the 2008 election. Essentially, that being to ask tough questions about Obama’s background, rather than accepting the Presidential candidate’s two memoirs as gospel. Breitbart.com published a lengthy disclaimer with the brochure and this story, saying it does not believe Obama was actually born outside of the U.S.: “Andrew Breitbart was never a ‘Birther,’ and Breitbart News is a site that has never advocated the narrative of ‘Birtherism,'” the site clarified. “In fact, Andrew believed, as we do, that President Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on August 4, 1961. Yet Andrew also believed that the complicit mainstream media had refused to examine President Obama’s ideological past, or the carefully crafted persona he and his advisers had constructed for him.” “It is for that reason that we launched The Vetting, an ongoing series in which we explore the ideological background of President Obama (and other candidates) – not to re-litigate 2008, but because ideas and actions have consequences.” “It is also in that spirit that we discovered, and now present, the booklet described below – one that includes a marketing pitch for a forthcoming book by a then-young, otherwise unknown former president of the Harvard Law Review.” “It is evidence – not of the President’s foreign origin, but that Barack Obama’s public persona has perhaps been presented differently at different times.” While this publication will no doubt fuel “birthers” who refuse to believe Obama was born in the U.S., but the point is actually entirely separate. Is it really possible that the full bio below would never have been proofread by Obama in the 16 years it was used (it was corrected in 2007)? Make of it what you want, but if that’s an error, as the publisher claims, it’s a pretty bad one, and raises some rather legitimate questions. We cannot know whether the publisher and/or Obama himself were aware of the error, but the idea that one or both allowed the “mistake” to slide to make his biography more compelling is not entirely far-fetched. The broader questions: Has Obama’s biography, which also included a “composite” of past girlfriends (one of which was Genevieve Cook ) shifted to meet his needs over time? If so, what are the implications of that on his ability to be President? Does it make him different from any other politician? Does that matter? Here’s Obama’s full bio from the 1991 brochure: Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii. The son of an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister, he attended Columbia University and worked as a financial journalist and editor for Business International Corporation. He served as project coordinator in Harlem for the New York Public Interest Research Group, and was Executive Director of the Developing Communities Project in Chicago’s South Side. His commitment to social and racial issues will be evident in his first book, Journeys in Black and White . NOTE: This report is NOT connected to the new book about Obama, called The Amateur by Ed Klein. A story about Obama’s near-divorce , excerpted from that new and unauthorized biography, surfaced late last week.
