Snooki and JWoww will not be welcome in Toms River or Point Pleasant, New Jersey, during the second season of their Jersey Shore spinoff show. The Point Pleasant Beach Council unanimously voted against a request to tape the Snooki & JWoww there; Toms River negged a similar request. Guess they gotta need to keep the quota of overly tanned girls with giant fake boobs saying inane things to a minimum … or at least limit the traffic. Season 1 was filmed in Jersey City, N.J., after Hoboken negged them . Jersey Shore itself is filmed in Seaside Heights, further down the Atlantic coast. Although it doesn’t have a location yet, Season 2 of Snooki & JWoww will be an entertaining ride to say the least, given all that should transpire. “It would probably be up to my labor and [my baby] being born,” Snooki told E! News, though she adds that things won’t be too intimate. Thank goodness. “[Fianc
Charlie Sheen has made it the tiniest bit harder to hate him now. The actor announced today that he will donate 1% of his profits from Anger Management – which is off to a solid start on FX – to the USO, guaranteeing that military organization at least $1 million and leaving the final donation figure uncapped. It’s a record donation from one individual. “The USO would like to thank Charlie Sheen for his very generous $1 million donation to our Operation Enduring Care Campaign and his interest in helping us lift the spirits of those who have endured so much to protect the freedoms we enjoy daily,” said General John I. Pray, Jr., Executive Vice President and Joint Chief of Staff, U.S. Air Force.
Oh, the sexy irony. Rihanna posted new bikini pictures of herself and assistant Melissa Forde over the weekend, during the same time period when she also announced her first-ever clothing one, one we presume will cover a lot more of the body than the outfits donned by the singer in these photos: I’ve been wanting to design my own collection for some time,” Rihanna said of the fashion endeavor, which will involve the company River Island and debut in 2013. “River Island is the perfect partner for me to collaborate with and working with a British, family run business also really appealed to me. I find London really inspiring and River Island loves to have fun with clothes. I’m looking forward to working with them and creating something really special.” It’s unclear when the images above were shot, but they were just released and snapped in Sardinia. Click on each for an enlarged version.
Wow! After months of investigations, the City Council of Bastrop, Texas, has decided to let a homeless man named Timothy Yost keep the $77,000 worth of cash and collectible gold coins that he found by the Colorado River earlier this year, Fox 7 News reports. “It means everything to him. He has a whole future ahead of him. He has the opportunity to make plans and have a real future,” Aleta Peacock, Yost’s attorney said after the City Council’s announcement. Yost was washing his feet in the river this January when he spotted the bag full of $100 bills and Kruggerand coins (gold collector coins from South Africa worth more than $1000 each) in a Bastrop park. The homeless man had brought the cash — which was wet — to a bank to trade them in for dry bills. But the bank teller, thinking that a crime might have been committed, called 911. The loot was quickly seized and a lengthy investigation began. According to KVUE.com, Yost has been fighting to reclaim his find from the city ever since. This week, after a long period of uncertainty, Yost will finally be reunited with the money. Bastrop police, with the help of the FBI, have determined that the bag is not linked to a crime and the rightful owner has not been found. Reminiscing over the challenges he’s faced as a homeless man, including having to eat out of a garbage can, Yost told Fox 7 News that he is keen to start a new chapter in his life — complete, of course, with a few new purchases. “I’ve been walking for so long, the first thing I want is a vehicle,” he said. This is such an inspiring story!
The alleged UFO seen on the Washington, D.C. Beltway on Wednesday night was actually a military drone on the top of a flatbed truck, according to reports. Many drivers saw it – and some photographed it, against the hands-free law – around 11 p.m. on I-270 and I-495, on the perimeter of the U.S. capital. Alas, the UFO was really an X-47B Unmanned Combat Air System being transported from Edwards Air Force Base in California for military testing. It was en route to the Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland. UFO on Beltway in Washington, DC? During its travels through the D.C. area , local station WTOP reported a flurry of activity on Twitter about the strange-looking, UFO-like object. Given how foreign that thing looks compared to most people’s conventional idea of what airplanes look like, the hullabaloo is somewhat understandable. Just imagine if those things cruised around during broad daylight! This not the first time a drone was mistaken for something alien. Last year, a drone being transported by flatbed to Pax River for practicing aircraft carrier takeoffs and landings was also mistaken for a UFO.
Throughout the ’70s and into the first part of the ’80s, it was hard to ignore singer/songwriter/actor/sometimes talk show host and best-friend of the Muppets Paul Williams. He won Grammys and even an Oscar for hits he wrote including “We’ve Only Just Begun,”, “Rainy Days on Mondays,” “Evergreen,” “Just an Old Fashioned Love Song” and “Rainbow Connection.” Barbra Streisand, The Carpenters and even Kermit the Frog are among the artists he wrote super-hits for. Below, Paul Williams gives us his top ten movie songs of all time and dishes insight on Stephen Kessler’s documentary about him, Paul Williams Still Alive , about his raging ascent and crashing fall and return to form… Johnny Carson first brought the artist onto the Tonight Show as the swinging ’70s were just beginning. He did television, movies, concerts. If there was a group of “It-guys” in that crazy decade, Williams would surely have been a part of that cadre of people at the center of all that spectacle. But as the ’80s wore on and into the ’90s Paul Williams all but disappeared from the center of it all. Drugs and booze did him in for a while, though he came roaring back though via a less flashy route. Enter fan and Oscar-nominated filmmaker Stephen Kessler. He had long been a fan of Williams as a teen growing up in Queens, NY and his songs which he described as about “depression, loneliness and alienation,” and set out to find Williams and make a documentary. Williams said ‘yes’ but he was hardly a willing participant, at least initially, as Williams told Movieline. “By the time I decided to go along, he had spent a lot of time and a lot of money. I didn’t want to flat out say no and didn’t know how to say no.” Williams added that he thought there was nothing worse than some older famous guy trying to reach for that last bit of notoriety. Kessler is very present in the film, which goes against most documentary standards unless you’re Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock. With Williams reluctant initially to open up and only providing limited access, the story unfolds interweaving a treasure-trove of ’70s pop culture which Paul is at the center and Kessler’s desire to get at his core and open up. I’m an actor, I can ignore the camera if I want to. But it’s exhausting to try and pretend I don’t notice the camera,” said Williams. “I didn’t want to do that, it seemed ridiculous.” One thing cameras caught and the film surfaces, decades later, is footage of Williams, high, while doing late night talk shows. Now 22 years sober, it’s a painful reminder of his past life and he even said during the film that he didn’t want his daughter to see that. But he relents and said he hopes it will help others. “I became a shallow ride and my behavior was totally unacceptable. One of the best things I did was to say to keep that footage in the movie. I think by leaving in you get a sense of how bad it got,” he said. “[There is] a sense of real disappointment and leading edge of shame. In a certain context it’s hard to watch, but you get a sense that recovery works. You see the yin and yang of the whole deal and you see that now, my life is such a gift. I hope I can make a difference… I love my life. And I’m blown away by the reaction.” PAUL WILLIAM’s TOP 10 MOVIE SONGS: Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley, Blackboard Jungle (1955) Main title theme by Elmer Bernstein, The Man with a Golden Arm (1955) Lose Yourself by Eminem/Bass/Resto, 8 Mile (2002) When You Wish Upon a Star by Harline/Washington Pinnochio (1940) The Man That Got Away by Arlen /Gershwin, A Star is Born (1954) With a Song in My Heart by Rodgers/Hart, With A Song in my Heart (1954) Somewhere by Bernstein/Sondheim, West Side Story Moon River by Mancini/Mercer, Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) Alfie by Bacharach/David, Alfie (2004) Streets of Philadelphia by Bruce Springsteen, Philadelphia (1993) Born To Be Wild by Dennis Edmonton AKA: Mars Bonfire, Easy Rider (1969) And what are your favorites? Paul Williams Still Alive opens in NYC today. Follow Brian Brooks on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
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 .
Beastie Boys filmed an unreleased musical performance of “The New Style” for the aborted 3rd season of “Chappelle’s Show” in late fall 2004. It was on a boat in the East River, NYC. Via Bonus: MTV Glasgow 1999 EXIT 07 Broadcasting platform : YouTube Source : Exile On Moan Street Discovery Date : 07/05/2012 03:23 Number of articles : 2
Some of these folks believe that Barack Obama won the election in 2008 due to “Black Ignorance”…thoughts? Via NY Times: STEUBENVILLE, Ohio — This is the land of die-hard Democrats — mill workers, coal miners and union members. They have voted party line for generations, forming a reliable constituency for just about any Democrat who decides to run for office. But when it comes to President Obama, a small part of this constituency balks. “Certain precincts in this county are not going to vote for Obama,” said John Corrigan, clerk of courts for Jefferson County, who was drinking coffee in a furniture shop downtown one morning last week with a small group of friends, retired judges and civil servants. “I don’t want to say it, but we all know why.” A retired state employee, Jason Foreman, interjected, “I’ll say it: it’s because he’s black.” For nearly three and a half years, a black family has occupied the White House, and much of the time what has been most remarkable about that fact is how unremarkable it has become to the country. While Mr. Obama will always be known to the history books as the country’s first black president, his mixed-race heritage has only rarely surfaced in visible and explicit ways amid the tumult of a deep recession, two wars and shifting political currents. But as Mr. Obama braces for what most signs suggest will be a close re-election battle, race remains a powerful factor among a small minority of voters — especially, research suggests, those in economically distressed regions with high proportions of white working-class residents, like this one. Mr. Obama barely won this county in 2008 — 48.9 percent to John McCain’s 48.7 percent. Four years earlier, John Kerry had an easier time here, winning 52.3 percent to 47.2 percent over George W. Bush. Given Ohio’s critical importance as a swing state that will most likely be won or lost by the narrowest of margins, the fact that Mr. Obama’s race is a deal-breaker for even a small number of otherwise loyal Democrats could have implications for the final results. Obama advisers acknowledged that some areas of the state presented more political challenges than others, but said that the racial sentiment was not a major source of worry. The campaign’s strategy relies in large part on a strong performance in cities and suburban areas to make up for any falloff elsewhere among Democrats in this or other corners of Ohio. Researchers have long struggled to quantify racial bias in electoral politics, in part because of the reliance on surveys, a forum in which respondents rarely admit to prejudice. In 50 interviews in this county over three days last week, 5 people raised race directly as a reason they would not vote for Mr. Obama. In those conversations, voters were not asked specifically about race, but about their views on the candidates generally. Those who raised the issue did so of their own accord. “I’ll just come right out and say it: he was elected because of his race,” said Sara Reese, a bank employee who said she voted for Ralph Nader in 2008, even though she usually votes Democrat. Did her father, a staunch Democrat and retired mill worker, vote for Mr. Obama? “I’d have to say no. I don’t think he could do it,” she said. But the main quarrels Democratic voters here have with Mr. Obama have nothing to do with race. They include his rejection of one proposed route for the Keystone pipeline, a stance they say will harm this area, whose backbone, the Ohio River, is lined with metal mills and coal mines. Stephanie Montgomery, who is black and a graduate of Franciscan University in Steubenville, said her race came up so often in her job search in this area that she developed a technique for recognizing when it was happening. The sign: when warmth on the phone turns cool in person, and “they lose eye contact with you.” “You almost need a corporate environment to get a fair shot,” she said while standing at a job fair in the Steubenville mall. She said that she did not vote for Mr. Obama in 2008 because she preferred Mr. McCain’s more conservative platform, but that Mr. Obama seemed to be a lightning rod for criticism, in part because of his race. “He’s everything they hate,” she said, referring to ultraconservatives. “An affirmative-action baby. Got the Nobel Prize without deserving it.” Many who raised race as a concern cast Mr. Obama as a flawed candidate carried to victory by blacks voting for the first time. Others expressed concerns indirectly, through suspicions about Mr. Obama’s background and questions about his faith.nn“He was like, ‘Here I am, I’m black and I’m proud,’ ” said Lesia Felsoci, a bank employee drinking a beer in an Applebee’s. “To me, he didn’t have a platform. Black people voted him in, that’s why he won. It was black ignorance.” Louis Tripodi, a baker in Steubenville who voted for Mr. Obama, blames talk radio and Republican rhetoric for encouraging such attitudes. “ ‘He’s a Muslim, he’s a socialist, he’s not born in this country,’ ” he said. “It’s got a lot to do with race.” Race has also helped Mr. Obama. It increased voter turnout among blacks in 2008, and some younger voters said it was part of why they voted for him. But now that history has been made, it is less of a pull. Discuss…
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