Vanity Fair alleges that La Toya Jackson raided and pillaged Michael Jackson’s house just hours after he died, and the late singer’s sister is infuriated. La Toya is threatening to sue the magazine if it doesn’t retract the story. The article, entitled “Estate of Siege,” claims she showed up at MJ’s mansion shortly after his death and began stuffing plastic bags filled with cash into a duffel bag. La Toya’s ” mad scramble for money ” allegedly took place June 25, 2009. That morning, Michael died of cardiac arrest, due to a Propofol injection by Dr. Conrad Murray . After MJ was taken to UCLA Medical Center, La Toya came by his house. VF then says her boyfriend was seen leaving the home in a moving van. According to La Toya, the story is “replete with misstatements of fact, false innuendos, and defamatory insinuations” and she will sue if there isn’t an immediate retraction. Stay tuned on this one.
Justin Bieber – Justin Bieber First Step 2 Forever – My Story (6131) – file_zps4dba3f44.jpg More here: Justin Bieber – Justin Bieber First Step 2 Forever – My Story (6131)
Emily Maynard was sexting none other than NFL quarterback Matt Leinart while on vacation with Jef Holm, according to the magazine who will simply not let go of this story. Last month, The Bachelorette winner was accused by Us Weekly of sexting with another man , leading to an explosive fight with fiance Jef that his own brother “confirmed.” The tabloid now claims it was Oakland Raiders quarterback Matt Leinart on the other end. Despite his earlier denials, Us claims Holm had a heart-to-heart with ex Kaylee Shepherd about the incident, and she says “He said the story was 100 percent accurate.” “When she put her phone down, [Jef] picked it up and read everything. Jef said, ‘It was that pro football guy … She strung me along and was talking to another guy the whole time!'” [SIDE NOTE: Matt Leinart is still in the NFL? Who knew!] Of course, Bachelorette fans are likely aware that Emily Maynard and Jef Holm have not only stayed together, but seemed happier than ever since the alleged incident. And he met her late fiance’s parents. And moved to North Carolina. Still, “Jef said their relationship isn’t what it seems,” Shepherd says. Us claims in its new issue that the reason they’re still together is simple: Emily’s paying him . The couple also shot this report down immediately, so you be the judge. Will Emily Maynard and Jef Holm last? Yes! Jef’s the one! Emily made a great choice! No. She should’ve picked Arie. Or Sean. View Poll »
Almost three years ago we posted the story of this woman, who put her ex-boyfriend on blast after he decided to reconcile with his wife following their 8 1/2 year relationship… It looks like she wasn’t nearly finished humiliating him. Woman Who Put Lover On Blast Via Billboard Makes Movie About Affair Via NY Daily News reports: Charles Phillips, the former president of Oracle Corp. and a member of President Obama’s Economic Advisory Board, sent the Harlem International Film Festival a cease-and-desist letter this week trying to block Thursday’s premiere of “The Glamorous Lie,” a documentary by his ex-mistress YaVaughnie Wilkins. Wilkins, who in 2010 vindictively plastered shots of her and Phillips on pricey billboards in Times Square, Atlanta and San Francisco after their 81/2-year relationship ended, didn’t let the letter scare her. Neither did the Harlem Film Festival. Nasri Zacharia, a festival spokesman, says the staff for the tiny, 100-person Maysles Cinema, set to screen the film at 7 p.m., was initially worried because the still-married Phillips’ lawyers also targeted the theater. “We were on hold for a while, and the theater where we are screening the world premiere was concerned, but we managed to alleviate the problems,” says Zacharia. He says Wilkins agreed to take responsibility for all liability and is “standing behind the film.” Wilkins tells Confidenti@l that her ex-beau’s “cease-and-desist letter is saying it’s an unauthorized documentary, but my lawyers are countering that he’s a public figure and I have a right to tell my story.” Wilkins is also in a civil court battle with the film’s director, who she claims is now in cahoots with Phillips. Her ex, she said, tried to buy the documentary to kill it. “If Charles thinks there is something in there that misrepresents our relationship, then he should do his own documentary and tell his own story,” says Wilkins. A spokesman for Phillips, who is now the CEO of software company Infor, did not respond to a request for comment. But back when he was the butt of Wilkins’ rage after he decided to reconcile with wife Karen, he said this: “I had an 81/2-year serious relationship with YaVaughnie Wilkins … The relationship with Ms. Wilkins has since ended and we both wish each other well.” Cry him a damn river… You do the crime, you pay the time, over and over again apparently. But seriously, we have to imagine that with all her resources there has to be something more constructive YaVaughnie could be doing with her time and money. Do you agree? Photo Credit: Sam Costanza
I keep coming back to The Place Beyond the Pines , but it was the movie that defined the Toronto International Film Festival for me. More than once, I heard the director Derek Cianfrance describe his ambitious and moving film as a movie about “legacy” and how “sometimes you’re born into a world with all of these repercussions that people have made before you” and “have to fight and claw to get out of that.” Judging from the features and documentaries I saw during my short stay in Toronto, these ideas of legacy and the sins of our fathers — whether they’re our literal or institutional fathers — are weighing heavily on America’s collective psyche. Perhaps this theme resonated with me because I am a father — the sins come with the territory — but after a decade of terrorism, war and economic turmoil, I think that, on a larger psychological scale, even a nice chunk of the 1 percent are freaked about how America’s recent past will affect its future, and that insecurity has seeped into a lot of the art that will be seeing over the next few months. The Place Beyond The Pines , which Focus Features will release in 2013, is essentially about how a fateful encounter between two fathers — one a stunt motorcyclist ( Ryan Gosling ) who has turned to crime to support his son; the other, a cop ( Bradley Cooper) , who has his own daddy issues, carries over into the next generation. I’m oversimplifying the plot, a good portion of which needs to stay under wraps for optimum dramatic impact, but, in the last third of the movie, Cianfrance creates a remarkable amount of tension around the question of whether the sons of Gosling and Cooper’s characters will be damned by the actions of their fathers. A similar theme is at play in Daniel Algrant’s Greetings From Tim Buckley , a movie that features a breakthrough performance from Penn Badgley as Tim’s son, Jeff Buckley, who, like his father, was an extremely talented singer/songwriter. (Based on Badgley’s performance, he has a bright future in film.) Buckley pere and fils both died young: Tim succumbed to a drug overdose at the age of 28 when his son was just an infant. Jeff drowned in the Wolf River in Memphis, TN when he was 30. Greetings doesn’t deal with their deaths, though. It grapples with the much thornier aspect of Jeff’s life, specifically, his struggle to shake off the weighty ghost of his father — at the post-screening Q&A I attended, Algrant said Greetings producer Fred Zollo described the story as ” Hamlet ” — who he barely knew but who serves as a constant reminder of all he has not accomplished. Tim Buckley had released nine studio albums, achieved critical acclaim and credibility as a political activist by the time he died. Jeff Buckley was just beginning to record his second album when he died. And yet, anyone who has heard his recordings of “Forget Her,” “Lover, You Should Have Come Over” or his ethereal version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” knows that Jeff found himself. But as Algrant and, especially Badgley, reveal, the story is all in the telling.
Jessica Chastain ‘s had an incredibly good run of prestige films in the brief span of time that she’s been in Hollywood: Take Shelter , Coriolanus , Tree of Life , The Help , and this summer’s Lawless have made quite the highlight reel. So it was inevitable that the starlet would pop up in a horror film sooner or later. Might as well be a spooky one like the Guillermo Del Toro -executive produced Mama , right? Well — spooky, silly, horror movies tend to be both of those things these days and Mama , from first time feature director Andres Muschietti (adapting his own short film), doesn’t look to be terribly groundbreaking. Lucas ( Game of Thrones ‘ Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and his girlfriend Annabel (Chastain) take in Lucas’s two young nieces, who are discovered living near-feral existences on their own in a desolate cabin in the woods for five years following their parents’ death. Adjusting to life with the adopted tykes isn’t so easy, though – Annabel begins to suspect that something sinister (“Mama!”) has followed them. And it probably doesn’t like seeing a new mommy tucking the kids in at night. Moody atmospherics, supernatural suspense, spider-crawling ghouls, Chastain with a black dye job and heavily-lined eyes at her very Gothiest… nothing seems all that original here. Despite Del Toro’s involvement and Chastain’s abilities, this is hitting theaters during the dumping grounds of January, so temper your expectations. Verdict: Looks like that Julia Roberts movie Stepmom , with ghosts. Meh. Mama is in theaters January 18. [Via Apple ]
Just a couple of days into the Toronto International Film Festival this year, a curious commonality was noticeable in a number of the documentaries that I screened – re-enactments. While I only managed to see just under half of the nearly 50 documentary features in the TIFF line-up , it was surprising to see the storytelling approach — where significant past events are recreated via actors and, sometimes, animation — relatively widely employed. While some notable non-fiction films have made effective use of the practice — such as The Imposter or The Thin Blue Line — re-enactments more often feel in line with television productions of the Unsolved Mysteries variety. They remain a controversial element of documentary making, potentially challenging a film’s authenticity by introducing an outside, fictional element. It’s significant that the practice of re-enactment is the singular focus of one of the festival’s most-discussed docs, The Act of Killing , making this challenging film an appropriate place to begin. Director Joshua Oppenheimer, together with Christine Cynn and other anonymous co-directors, turn Indonesian gangsters into would-be Hollywood stars. The former death-squad leaders, responsible for the massacre of more than a million undesirables in 1965-1966, gleefully go along with Oppenheimer’s unusual plan, re-enacting the techniques they used to torture and murder suspected Communists, from off-the-cuff demonstrations of the cleanest way to strangle a victim to more elaborate set pieces involving interrogations and the destruction of a village. Verisimilitude is not the intent here. Although these over-the-top re-enactments push the limits of documentary ethics, they also shed light on the outsized personalities of the main subjects and reveal their histories and character. This conflation of a horrific reality with stylized fantasy also challenges the viewer and the perpetrators and becomes an unexpected form of therapy for the latter group. Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God More literal examples of re-enactments are present in Alex Gibney’s Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God , the prolific Oscar-winner’s exploration of child sexual abuse by Catholic priests. Focused around a Milwaukee priest who abused countless boys at the deaf school he ran, the film features the American Sign Language testimony of a number of men, spoken aloud by the likes of Ethan Hawke and John Slattery, but not distractingly so. Despite the forcefulness of the now-grown victims’ anger, expressed via their demonstrative signing and reinforced by the actors’ delivery (itself a form of re-enactment), Gibney decides to go one step further, recreating key sequences from their stories: silent scenes in which the priest prowls through the dorms ready to pounce on a sleeping young boy, or abuses the sanctity of the confessional booth. These sequences lack in subtlety and while they don’t undermine the strength of the film as a whole, they seem entirely superfluous. [ Editor’s Note: Gibney talks about his reasons for using these re-enactment sequences in an upcoming Movieline interview. ] Even more conventional is the use of re-enactments in Janet Tobias’ N o Place On Earth , the story of Ukrainian Jews who spent nearly a year and half living, literally, in caves to avoid capture during World War II. The majority of the film consists of actors portraying the circumstances of their flight from persecution and the conditions of their underground existence. Still-living survivors offer commentary in intermittent talking-head sequences, but the intended weight of the film is in the re-enactments which at times break from simply illustrating the story to feature actual scripted sequences. In the process, No Place on Earth ventures a step too far into docudrama. Given that the film is a production of the History Channel, it will likely connect with TV viewers, but, personally, scenes with the survivors re-visiting their cave sanctuary late in the film carried far more emotional resonance than the recreations.
Despite his denials, Jef Holm’s recent family vacation ended in tears and heartbreak after he caught Emily Maynard cheating , his brother swears. The 26-year-old stay-at-home mom and her daughter, Ricki, 7, recently joined Holm’s extended family for a beach vacation in South Carolina. On August 19, Holm was blindsided – according to Us Weekly – when he found explicit texts and photos to and from another man on Emily’s phone. Jef Holm ‘s brother, Mike Holm, insists Us is correct . “I can tell you that it’s all 100% true. I was there and I heard the fight and watched the whole thing go down, Emily leaving and everything,” Mike said. “I love my brother very much and, like the rest of our family, I just want him to be happy. We all love Emily, too. Mistakes happen, we all get that.” “I hope they work it out, but as far as your story goes, it’s all true.” Is it though? Emily and Jef have already denied the story, claiming the rumor is 100 percent false , then went on a PDA-filled trip to the grocery store. Jef denied it again on Twitter two hours ago, writing “It’s crazy what people will do, even family members, to see their name in a magazine.” What do you think? Will Emily and Jef last?
The starlet and the Black Eye Pea tease a possible musical collaboration at #willpower listening party. By Jocelyn Vena Lindsay Lohan Photo: JB Lacroix/WireImage
