The Jenners and the Kardashians jetted to Greece last week, where they rented a $200,000-per-week yacht, held babies , wore bikinis … and, of course, posted numerous photos from the vacation on Instagram. Look, there’s Kourtney Kardashian taking a self-portrait! And Brody Jenner trying to seduce the camera! We’d be irritated at the family for shoving such a vacation in our face, but look at the bright side: Now we don’t need to watch Keeping Up with the Kardashians Season 8 ! All new episodes are summed up in these photos:
A super drunk Novi, Mich., elementary school principal was recently arrested for DUI, then proceeded to slip out of her handcuffs in the back of a police car! It was a super effort by Kim Warren, 44, but what’s a lot less cool is the fact that she allegedly violated the city’s “Super Drunk” ordinance beforehand. Long story short: She was PLASTERED! Super Drunk Principal Warren was arraigned under Novi’s high-blood alcohol content DUI ordinance, which instills harsher penalties on those with a BAC of twice the legal limit. Apparently, the principal qualified, at 0.17. In broad daylight no less. Pretty unreal. After two citizens called to report that a driver was swerving and pulled into the Deerfield Elementary School parking lot, ABC-WXYZ reported. Police arrived and arrested her, but the surprises didn’t end there. As Warren rode in the back of a police cruiser to the station, she is seen in the video slipping off the handcuffs, despite her high level of intoxication. Not that the police were somehow blind to what was going on. “You can hang on to them … Just don’t throw them out the window or anything,” the officer can be heard telling her after her stealthy maneuver. Warren entered a plea of not guilty. After Warren’s arrest, she was placed on paid administrative leave, according to a letter sent by the Novi Community School District to parents. Novi Police Chief David Malloy said that on occasion, people maneuver their way out of handcuffs, and that it is the officer’s responsibility to check them. If convicted under the “Super Drunk” ordinance, first time offenders face 180 days in jail; DUI typically carries more lenient sentences for first offenses.
It’s a new era for Star Wars , with J.J. Abrams taking the helm as Disney is now in charge of Lucasfilm. But while many hope that Abrams will inject something new into the franchise, the director still wants to maintain a connection to the other six films. That’s why, at a press conference in Germany today, Abrams said that he wants original composer John Williams to score Star Wars Episode VII . The director stated, “For Star Wars , it’s very early days, but I believe that, going forward, John Williams will be doing that film, because he was there long before I was.” Michael Arndt is currently writing the new movie’s script, which is thought to take place some 20-30 years after the events of Return of the Jedi . It is believed that Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, and Mark Hamill will reprise their roles from the first trilogy, though not much else is known about the plot or casting. Star Wars Episode VII has a release date set for Summer 2015.
The marketing people at Lionsgate are no dummies. They clearly recognize that celebrity culture has been reduced to “What are you wearing” questions on the red carpet, and are ramping up their marketing efforts for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire with the movie poster equivalent: seven character portrait images that depict Katniss & Compay in fancy freaky fashions before the next round of adolescent-on-adolescent bloodshed begins. Based on the images below, the film’s costume designer Trish Summerville should consider establishing a men’s line (as long as she doesn’t stray too far into Stanley Tucci /Caesar territory), but whoa, she’d get ripped a new one by Joan Rivers for her women’s wear. I’m guessing that Jennifer Lawrence /Katniss’ winged outfit is Mockingjay -inspired, and it certainly will be mocked. Thank God JLaw didn’t wear that number to the Oscars. Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
It sure looks like Star Wars creator, George Lucas , dropped a bombshell in a fascinating Bloomberg Businessweek feature on how Disney acquired Lucasfilm late last year. When the article’s author, Devin Leonard, asked Lucas if the original Star Wars cast will appear in the J.J. Abrams -directed Episode VII , the Force Father replied: “We had already signed Mark and Carrie and Harrison —or we were pretty much in final stages of negotiation. So I called them to say, ‘Look, this is what’s going on.’ ” He pauses. “Maybe I’m not supposed to say that. I think they want to announce that with some big whoop-de-do, but we were negotiating with them.” Then he adds: “I won’t say whether the negotiations were successful or not.” George Lucas Backtracks On ‘Star Wars Episode 7’ Cast Spoiler I love that little Jedi Mind Trick that Lucas attempts at the end. You will not think that I have just thrown a giant hydrospanner into Disney’s Star Wars marketing efforts. It sure sounds like backpedaling to me, and when I contacted Leonard to ask him whether Lucas left with the impression that Hamill, Fisher and Harrison are indeed on board, he replied: “I took it as a confirmation.” That’s not the only revelation contained in the feature, which you can read here . Lucas also reveals that the negative Internet chatter over his Star Wars prequels got to him. “He found it difficult to be creative when people were calling him a jerk,” writes Leonard, who then quotes Lucas saying: “It was fine before the Internet….But now with the Internet, it’s gotten very vicious and very personal. You just say, ‘Why do I need to do this?’ ” Lesson learned: The Dark Side controls the Internet, but The Force lives on at the Magic Kingdom. And here’s hoping Harrison Ford finally gets that Han Solo death scene he wanted in Episode VI . More on Star Wars Episode VII: Harrison Ford Might Return As Han Solo − And Die Happy [ Bloomberg Businessweek ] Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
For the latest movie news , turn to Mark Hamill himself apparently. The last Jedi standing recently opened up to ET about his possible return to Star Wars in Episode VII, and weighed in on many other topics regarding the film. Hamill says there aren’t any deals in place for himself, Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford returning to Star Wars yet, but Lucasfilm is negotiating with them. “They’re talking to us,” Hamill said, and they have for some time. “George [Lucas] wanted to know whether we’d be interested. He did say that if we didn’t want to do it, they wouldn’t cast another actor in our parts.” “I can tell you right away that we haven’t signed any contracts. We’re in the stage where they want us to go in and meet with Michael Arndt, who is the writer.” “They want us to meet Kathleen Kennedy, who is going to run Lucasfilm. Both have had meetings that were postponed – on their end, not mine. They’re more busy than I am.” What does Hamill, now 61, think Star Wars: Episode VII holds for Luke Skywalker, the character he made iconic more than three decades ago? “I’m assuming, because I haven’t talked to the writers, that these movies would be about our offspring … like my character would be sort of in the Obi-Wan range.” “[Luke would be] an older, influential character.” “When I found out [while making the original trilogy] the ultimate good news/bad news joke – the good news is there’s a real attractive, hot girl in the universe. The bad news is she’s your sister – I thought, ‘Well, I’m going to wind up like Sir Alec [Guinness]. I’m going to be a lonely old hermit living out in some kind of desert igloo with a couple of robots.'” He also has some reservations about returning without his costars, and about the new trilogy and any Star Wars spinoffs being too reliant on CGI. “Another thing I’d want to make sure of is are we going to have the whole gang back? Is Carrie and Harrison and Billy Dee and Tony Daniels, everybody that’s around?” “I want to make sure everybody’s on board here, rather than just one.” “I also said to George that I wanted to go back to the way it was, in the sense that ours was much more carefree and lighthearted and humorous.” “In my opinion, anyway… I hope they find the right balance of CGI with practical effects. I love props, I love models, miniatures, matte paintings ̬ I’m sort of old school.” “I think if you go too far it winds up looking like just a giant a video game, and that’s unfortunate…. If they listen to me, I’d say, ‘Lighten up and go retro with the way it looks.'”
A career of playing righteous bad-asses in Pulp Fiction , the Star Wars prequel trilogy and the Marvel superhero movies has made Samuel L. Jackson one of the highest grossing actors of all time. Which makes his decision to play Stephen, the calculating and merciless right-hand man of plantation owner Calvin Candie ( Leonardo DiCaprio ) in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, Jackson’s most daring acting choice yet. Fans of the actor who see Tarantino’s spaghetti southern, which opens Christmas day, in the hopes of seeing Jackson in a Jules Winnfield -style role are in for quite a surprise. The 64-year-old Jackson originally wanted the role of the film’s titular hero, but when he learned he was too old for the part, he took the role of one of Django’s main antagonists and set out to make him, as he says in the interview below, ” the most reprehensible negro in cinema history.” Although it’s hard to imagine, Jackson told Movieline that he was initially depicted as even more villainous in earlier cut of Django Unchained , but that Tarantino “sanitized” Stephen in the editing room. Jackson also talked about his desire to reprise Mace Windu in Disney’s reboot of the Star Wars franchise and his frustration with America’s refusal to confront its history with slavery. Movieline: Stephen is such a complex character. He manages to be a villain, a slave and a father figure to Calvin Candie. There are also parallels between Stephen’s relationship to Calvin and Django’s relationship to Dr. King Schultz. Was all of this in the script? Samuel Jackson: It’s always been in the script. When Quentin and I were talking about it, he was saying that they were mirrored relationships and by the time Django and Schultz got to Candyland they would have developed the relationship that Calvin and I have always had. Theirs is more mentor/mentee. And ours is more father/son. But it’s still the same kind of relationship. Your character turns out to be the power behind the throne at Candyland. Yeah, I’m the brains at the plantation. I know what’s going on and I’ve been around longer. And Calvin is not the brightest candle in the room. As I said earlier, I’m the Dick Cheney of Candyland. Given what this movie has to say about slavery and how reprehensible your character is, did you have to think twice about taking this part? Not at all. When I read the script, and realized I wasn’t Django and then who Stephen was, I was like, okay, we’ve seen Uncle Toms, we’ve seen slaves, we’ve seen Stepin Fetchit, but we never seen this guy. And the potential for him to be the most reprehensible negro in cinema history is there. I think you succeed there. It’s in the film, but like Quentin says, we’re also talking about things that you don’t see. There are scenes we shot that aren’t in the movie in which I do some things that are way more reprehensible than what you actually see on screen.” Such as? Well in that scene where Django’s hanging upside down, and I give that speech. There’s a whole other section of that speech that goes on where I torture him. ” I burn his nipples off with a hot poker. I do all kinds of shit to him in that scene that would have just made people go, ‘ Ahhhhh!” Just for fun? There’s another scene we shot where, when Django first gets to Candyland, he and Stephen have a physical altercation. I show him to his room, and I say something to him and he slaps me down. He actually puts his hands on me. I’m supposed to be old and weak, so I don’t do anything. He puts his foot in my chest and he says all this shit to me about how fucked up I am and kicks me out of the room. He kicks me in the ass and kicks me out of the room. And from that point on, I’m on his ass trying to figure out what’s up. So there’s that, and I do some other things to some other slaves that are in the house that you actually see me do on the screen. I say shit about them, I reprimand them and do shit to them. So, Stephen is a detestable character who could have been much more detestable. Quentin sanitized Stephen a bit. What’s interesting about this movie is that it’s very entertaining and, yet, I had quite a visceral reaction to the scenes of brutality involving slaves. Yeah, they’re horrific. The guy sitting next to me walked out. Oh did he? And didn’t come back? No, he didn’t come back. And I got the impression that Tarantino wants moviegoers to really feel the brutality of those scenes. It’s not an easy time. You know, every time people do a movie about slavery, you don’t see that kind of shit. You might see a person get whipped, or you might see somebody get dressed down or shackled or whatever. But, you know, human life was cheap to those people. If you did something wrong, an example was made to make sure that whoever saw [the punishment] knew this is what could happen to you. We’ll cut your foot off. We’ll cut your hand off. You know, they used to take pregnant women — take one of them, cut her belly open, drop the baby out and just stomp it to death in front of all the slaves. Good lord. Just to let them know: I own you. I can do whatever I want with you. Like Leo says, “I can smash your brains out if I feel like it.” As a poorly informed white guy, by the end of the movie, I certainly felt like I had a greater understanding of why there’s so much lingering anger over that period in American history. Yeah, because we’ve been avoiding really talking about it. Okay, so you fucked over the Indians, and you gave them their land back and tax-free casinos. You fucked over the Japanese. You interred them during World War II and then you turned around and you gave all of them some money. Well, after you fucked us over, we didn’t get the 40 acres and a mule. You look at us every day and go, “Fuck y’all.” When the subject of reparations is raised, everybody goes: “Well, I didn’t have slaves. Those were my ancestors. Get over it.” Well you didn’t ask those other motherfuckers to get over it. Why do we got to get over it? When I was in Liverpool doing Formula 51 , that port was one of the first places slave ships stopped on the way over here. And there are huge shipping buildings that used to be shipping corporations and all of them have these slave faces painted on their facades. And people there told me, “Well, you know, there was a lot of slave trade here and this [city] was built on the blood of slaves. So we have their faces on the buildings.” And then they had a big apology ceremony while I was there. They owned up to their responsibility and their part in the slave trade. America has never done any shit like that. Do you think it would help or is too little, too late at this point? Fuck no. We’re past all that shit. There’s also been quite a bit of discussion in the media over the number of times that the word “nigger” is uttered in the movie. There was no other term for who we were. They weren’t talking about African-Americans and Negros. That was the name. That was it. How do you feel about white people using the word, for example in a pop-culture context. I’m kind of over it. I grew up hearing it. I grew up in Tennessee during segregation, so it was something that was screamed out, of course. When people ask me, ‘What’s the first time you were called nigger?’ I say, probably some time in my house when I was like one or two years old . So, I can look at a person and tell what their intent is, and I deal with it that way. I deal with it in context. Your performance as Stephen is full of surprises beginning with the moment that you first appear onscreen. What is your favorite scene in the movie? My favorite scene is not in the movie. Seriously? What happens in it? My favorite scene is the one in the barn where I explain to Django [who’s been captured and suspended upside down] what the problem was between him and me: He put his hands on me, and nobody has ever touched me in my life. I explain that I’ve been on this plantation 70-odd years and I’ve seen all kinds of shit done to niggers: hanging, drowning — Some of that does remain in the movie. And after I run through this litany of all this horrific shit that gets done to slaves, I say, you know I ain’t never been touched, and your black ass shows up and slaps me down. I’m doing this because you put your hands on me. Can you see any reason to empathize with the character you play? He’s a product of his environment. His grandfather did that job. His father did that job. He’d never been in the fields. He was raised to be Calvin Candie’s right-hand-man and because he’s in that position, not only can he read and write, he writes the checks. He runs the plantation. He makes sure the cotton gets picked. He is the king of a 75-mile radius world, and he knows that if he steps foot outside that, he’s just another slave in the South. So why wouldn’t he want that? As far as he knows, that system has worked all his life. Plus the white people on the plantation take orders from him. What better world could he be in? You’ve been pretty vocal about your desire to reprise the role of Mace Windu in one of the new Star Wars movies that Disney is making. Has the studio talked to you at all? I’m campaigning. They haven’t approached me yet. I’ve been putting my feelers out there, and I’ve got all my people on Twitter talking about it. So hopefully they’ll hear it and whoever’s writing the story will, you know, write me in as an Obi-wan Kenobi hologram ghost, or maybe even I can fuckin’ show back up with one hand. He is a Jedi. Right, and Anakin lost his arm in Episode II . Yeah. I’m down with that. I’m totally down with it. And I think they are going to need characters that audiences are familiar with to get [the franchise] going in a direction where people will feel comfortable and familiar with what’s going on. They just can’t bring in a whole bunch of new Jedi — no way. Read More on Django Unchained: Samuel L. Jackson Says He Burned Off Jamie Foxx’s Nipples In Cut ‘Django Unchained’ Scene Quentin Tarantino Says Slavery Still Exists Via ‘Mass Incarcerations’ & The ‘War On Drugs’ Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
In our pre-Mayan apocalypse era, when you want to ensure that whatever you say is disseminated far and wide faster than the time it takes to tweet ‘DID YOU SEE THIS ###$$!!!’ the best advice is to master the subtle art of trolling with useful facts. Case in point: Joss Whedon , who screened The Avengers and afterward, sat for one of Jeff Goldsmith’s Q&As Tuesday night at the Director’s Guild of America in Hollywood. During a discussion that also included some tantalizing non-reveals about elements that almost, but didn’t make it into The Avengers , he decided to troll the entire universe by insisting that Star Wars: A New Hope is better than The Empire Strikes Back . Kind of! Slashfilm was on the scene and reports this comment: “I still believe that even though The Empire Strikes Back is better in innumerable ways than Star Wars , Star Wars wins,” Whedon said, “because you can’t end a movie with Han frozen in carbonite. That’s not a movie, it’s an episode.” Okay, after putting my fist back down and unclenching it, I see his point. Empire began what has become the most troubling aspect* of Hollywood’s obsession with trilogies; a stand alone first installment, with two subsequent films that work better as a duo rather than taken individually. A true trilogy ought to either feature three films that either work as stand alone stories linked by a common theme, or two cliffhangers in a row with resolution coming in the third movie. Empire , and to a lesser extent Jedi , manage the trick with some subtlety, but there’s a short line between them and Matrix Reloaded / Revolutions . And we must never forget Matrix Reloaded , lest we repeat the mistakes of the past. Anyway, those comments came during a circumspect discussion of how he envisions the Avengers franchise, and should probably be taken to mean that we won’t be getting an Avengers ‘trilogy.’ Good news, that, because instead we’re getting the crazy experiment that is the Marvel movie universe. Slashfilm ‘s recap is worth a full read, particularly because it includes more confirmation that the inclusion of the Wasp was indeed considered in the event ScarJo wasn’t available — interesting in light of recent rumors that Lizzy Caplan , who stars with Jesse Bradford in the Marvel short Item 47 , is a potential candidate to play the diminutive mutant. Read the whole thing here . * Second most troubling: claiming that three thematically unrelated sequels constitute a trilogy I AM LOOKING AT YOU DIE HARD . [ Source: Slashfilm ] Ross Lincoln is a LA-based freelance writer from Oklahoma with an unhealthy obsession with comics, movies, video games, ancient history, Gore Vidal, and wine. Follow him on twitter (@rossalincoln). Follow Movieline on Twitter .
We the People of the United States…are some weird dudes. A clever but clearly tongue-in-cheek petition to build a Star Wars -style Death Star isn’t the only petition that’s been started on the Obama administration’s much-debated We The People website. That’s the place where ordinary citizens can log in and lobby for change. When a petition registered on the site gets 25,000 signatures, the administration issues an official response to it, which, you might guess, means that there are quite a few wackadoo proposals on the site. In addition to the Death Star proposal, which needs more than 21,000 signatures before its Dec. 14 deadline, there is also a petition started by “Sean M” of San Francisco that seeks to establish a “new legal system of motorcycle riding ‘Judges’ who serve as police, judge, jury, and executioner all in one.” If you saw Dredd 3D or are a fan of Judge Dredd comics, you’ll get the reference. If you’re like me, you’ll also start thinking of Karl Urban riding in formation with leather-clad Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg who also know how to scowl effectively. And for you gamer fans, nathan p of Columbus, Ohio has petitioned the administration to build a statue of Halo hero Master Chief on the White House lawn, noting: “He deserves more praise for what he has done.” Compared to those last two petitions, the Death Star proposal at least has some satirical bite, nothing that its construction will “spur job creation…and strengthen our national defense.” It could also boost Disney’s stock. It will be interesting to see if any of these petitions makes their 25,000-signature deadlines, which all fall at the end of next week. As of this posting, the Master Chief statute proposal is in the lead with more than 4,700 signatures, and Halo fans are a passionate breed. This could get interesting. Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
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