People crowned Channing Tatum Sexiest Man Alive 2012 this week. Somewhere, the Speedo-wearing, Olympic medal-winning, certified hunk Ryan Lochte is pissed that he was merely on the inside of the annual issue! Okay, he probably doesn’t care. Heck, it’s Ryan Lochte . He probably forgot what this shoot was for 30 minutes later. But come on. Eat your heart out, Chan. You’re welcome, ladies. And dog lovers. Who’s sexier, readers? Ryan Lochte Channing Tatum View Poll »
It was Divas Night on The X Factor Wednesday, as contestants took to the stage and belted out songs by famous women. But which female contestant will enjoy the most success once Season 2 is said and done? We’ve already asked readers to compare the young adults managed by Britney Spears. Are you on Team Jennel, Paige or CeCe ? Now we’re back with the youngest remaining singers: Diamond White, Carly Rose Sonenclar, Beatrice Miller and Arin Ray. Compare the charges of Demi Lovato now and cast your vote… Diamond White – “Halo” Beatrice Miller – “Time After Time” Carly Rose Sonenclar – “My Heart Will Go On” Arin Ray – “Crazy For You” Which performance did you like best? Arin Ray – “Crazy For You” Beatrice Miller – “Time After Time” Carly Rose Sonenclar – “My Heart Will Go On” View Poll »
Yesterday, People anointed Channing Tatum Sexiest Man Alive . Without a doubt, 2012 was Tatum’s year, with three successful movies in The Vow, Magic Mike , and 21 Jump Street . But People has its share of critics just the same. The main complaint? With a singular exception – Denzel Washington in 1996 – the magazine has picked a square-jawed white guy (usually an actor) EVERY year. In 2008, Hugh Jackman took the top honor. In 2009, Johnny Depp was selected for a second time. Last year, Bradley Cooper walked away with the crown. The year before that, it was Ryan Reynolds, perhaps in anticipation of his film Green Lantern . Should they rename it Sexiest Milquetoast White Man Alive? Asks the Daily Beast: Where are the Blair Underwoods, the Taye Diggses, the Morris Chestnuts? The Terrence Howards, the Jesse Williamses, the Idris Elbas? Inside. And if you believe People ’s official line, it is what’s inside that counts. A representative for the magazine wrote: “ People is sensitive to representing people of color in its pages; our Sexiest Man Alive issue is no exception. Every section in this year’s issue includes a diverse group of men.” Brett R. Johnson, associate editor of The Root, said, “That response is expected … They can’t come out and say black men don’t sell magazine covers.” Though there are some sports celebrities, most of the picks skew toward Hollywood, and actors rather than musicians. Perhaps that’s part of the issue. Jay-Z, Kanye West, Kobe Bryant, or Michael Jordan during their primes would’ve been fine cover stars, no? A rep for People explained of the criteria: “Is he hot at the moment? Is he sexy? Is his career on fire this year? Channing Tatum fits that criteria this year, which is why he was named 2012 Sexiest Man Alive.” The list, then, said Jezebel ‘s Jessica Coen, isn’t truthfully the “sexiest man in general, just – ‘handsome man who’s getting the most work right now,’ “And what makes that so strange is that People is not a trade mag.” “People’s response places the blame on Hollywood. That’s a copout. They have a lot of power as a media outlet, but their response is akin to throwing up their hands.” “Hollywood and the media – and that includes People – have a highly symbiotic relationship.” “Putting a man of color on the inside is like saying, ‘He’s hot, sure, but just not hot enough for the cover. Only a white man can be number one.’” “Which is kind of how the world has worked for the past couple centuries.” What do you think? Share your comments and vote in our survey below: Channing Tatum: Sexiest Man Alive? Yes, look at him! Nah, but he ain’t shabby! Not even close! View Poll »
Yesterday, People anointed Channing Tatum Sexiest Man Alive . Without a doubt, 2012 was Tatum’s year, with three successful movies in The Vow, Magic Mike , and 21 Jump Street . But People has its share of critics just the same. The main complaint? With a singular exception – Denzel Washington in 1996 – the magazine has picked a square-jawed white guy (usually an actor) EVERY year. In 2008, Hugh Jackman took the top honor. In 2009, Johnny Depp was selected for a second time. Last year, Bradley Cooper walked away with the crown. The year before that, it was Ryan Reynolds, perhaps in anticipation of his film Green Lantern . Should they rename it Sexiest Milquetoast White Man Alive? Asks the Daily Beast: Where are the Blair Underwoods, the Taye Diggses, the Morris Chestnuts? The Terrence Howards, the Jesse Williamses, the Idris Elbas? Inside. And if you believe People ’s official line, it is what’s inside that counts. A representative for the magazine wrote: “ People is sensitive to representing people of color in its pages; our Sexiest Man Alive issue is no exception. Every section in this year’s issue includes a diverse group of men.” Brett R. Johnson, associate editor of The Root, said, “That response is expected … They can’t come out and say black men don’t sell magazine covers.” Though there are some sports celebrities, most of the picks skew toward Hollywood, and actors rather than musicians. Perhaps that’s part of the issue. Jay-Z, Kanye West, Kobe Bryant, or Michael Jordan during their primes would’ve been fine cover stars, no? A rep for People explained of the criteria: “Is he hot at the moment? Is he sexy? Is his career on fire this year? Channing Tatum fits that criteria this year, which is why he was named 2012 Sexiest Man Alive.” The list, then, said Jezebel ‘s Jessica Coen, isn’t truthfully the “sexiest man in general, just – ‘handsome man who’s getting the most work right now,’ “And what makes that so strange is that People is not a trade mag.” “People’s response places the blame on Hollywood. That’s a copout. They have a lot of power as a media outlet, but their response is akin to throwing up their hands.” “Hollywood and the media – and that includes People – have a highly symbiotic relationship.” “Putting a man of color on the inside is like saying, ‘He’s hot, sure, but just not hot enough for the cover. Only a white man can be number one.’” “Which is kind of how the world has worked for the past couple centuries.” What do you think? Share your comments and vote in our survey below: Channing Tatum: Sexiest Man Alive? Yes, look at him! Nah, but he ain’t shabby! Not even close! View Poll »
Wednesday morning’s round of five stories you should know also include a new thriller role for Maria Bello. Skyfall momentum continues in the U.S. box office, passing a threshold. And on the heels of Hollywood recognition, a director’s foreign-language pic is heading to the U.S. 1. Channing Tatum Named Sexiest Man Alive for 2012 How could Tatum not win the 2012 Sexiest Crown after starring in and being the creative force behind box office stripper success Magic Mike ? People magazine gave Tatum the 2012 title. “My first thought was, ‘Y’all are messing with me”I told [my wife] Jenna after we’d been in the bathtub washing our dogs because they’d gotten skunked.” People reports . 2. Jack Nicholson Tapped for Robert Downey Jr.’s The Judge Warner Bros is hoping to court the very picky actor to play Downey’s father. The project will star Downey as a successful attorney who returns to his hometown for his mother’s funeral only to discover that his estranged and Alzheimer’s-stricken father, the town’s judge, is the murder suspect. The man sets out to discover the truth and along the way reconnects with the family he walked away from years before. Nicholson is not a shoe-in. He has made only three movies since 2003, THR reports . 3. Maria Bello Set for James Wan Thriller The story revolves around the aftermath of a horrific massacre: five college students, brutally murdered inside a decrepit, abandoned home. Fresh on the scene, detective Mark Lewis and the police department’s psychologist, Dr. Elizabeth Klein (Bello), question one of the few survivors who explains they were amateur ghost-hunters, seeking out paranormal phenomenon at the abandoned house, believed to be haunted. Will Canon ( Brotherhood ) will direct the pic from producer James Wan’s concept. Wan co-created the successful Saw and Insidious franchises. 4. Skyfall Crosses $100M in the U.S. The latest James Bond has been a box office hit overseas and it’s seen its fortunes continue Stateside. It took in $11.3 million on Veterans Day combined with $90 million over the Friday – Sunday weekend, giving it a $101.9 million total. The global come as of Sunday was $518.6 million, Deadline reports . 5. The Deep Heads to U.S. Theaters U.S. rights to Baltasar Kormakur’s The Deep will head to Focus Features. His film Reykjavik-Rotterdam is being re-made into Contraband starring Mark Wahlberg and he is currently directing 2 Guns starring Wahlberg and Denzel Washington. The Deep is Iceland’s foreign-language Oscar submission, Deadline reports .
James Cameron recently said he is Avatar -bound and Sigourney Weaver said she will appear in what will be Avatar 2, 3, 4, confirming that the Titanic director is still on track with the franchise, which made over $2 billion worldwide in its first mammoth installment, which debuted back in December, 2009. Production will apparently begin on the back to back installments this fall, Weaver told Showbiz 411 . The actress has stints in USA Networks’ Political Animals followed by a short-run play at New York’s Lincoln Center and then dives in on Avatar 2 – 4 with Cameron. Weaver noted that she does not know the time frame for the sequels to the 3-D behemoth, “I just show up.” James Cameron made headlines in March for reaching the furthest depth of the ocean, the Mariana Trench, which is nearly seven miles below the surface of the Pacific near Guam. “I’ve divided my time over the last 16 years over deep ocean exploration and filmmaking. I’ve made two movies in 16 years, and I’ve done eight expeditions,” he told The New York Times in May. He also noted that he had closed his production company and is devoting the movie-side of his career to Avatar exclusively. “I’m not interested in developing anything. I’m in the “Avatar” business. Period. That’s it. I’m making Avatar 2, Avatar 3 , maybe Avatar 4 , and I’m not going to produce other people’s movies for them. I’m not interested in taking scripts.” He did note, however, he will also do documentaries about his deep-sea exploration, the first of which should be out next year.
It’s of course no secret that Jeremy Renner is the new face of the Bourne franchise, playing Aaron Cross, a new character in a parallel story to The Bourne Ultimatum . But could Matt Damon possibly team up with Renner in future installments of the story? Yes says the producer of Legacy . The Bourne Legacy producer told Empire that “all possibilities” are open. “You see there are several different programs in the movie with different skill sets,” said producer Frank Marshall. “All possibilities are open. My dream is that in the next one we see Matt and Jeremy team up.” EW notes that Damon reprising his Jason Bourne character could be complicated, however, because of his loyalty to Bourne director Paul Greengrass and the actor had a public spat with Bourne creator Tony Gilroy last December. [Source: Empire via EW ]
A community of survivors exists on the outskirts of a Louisiana levee, where a six-year-old girl with a boundless imagination and a deep connection to the world around her lives with her father. In Movieline’s exclusive clip, enter the world of Benh Zeitlin’s impressive feature debut/Sundance hit Beasts of the Southern Wild (in limited release this week), as seen through the eyes of the film’s pint-sized heroine, Hushpuppy (played with tremendous fearlessness by discovery of the year, Quvenzhané Wallis). Beasts of the Southern Wild debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January, where it won the Grand Jury Prize and the Cinematography Award before nabbing four honors at Cannes , including the FIPRESCI Prize and the Caméra d’Or. Zeitlin’s magical-realist fable is a deeply emotional experience, thanks in great part to Wallis’s central turn as the fierce Hushpuppy, whose relationship with her troubled father Wink (local chef/baker Dwight Howard, in his acting debut) anchors the film. Plucked from over 4,000 prospective actresses, Wallis, who was just five years old when she auditioned, commands the screen with an impressive intensity and naturalism. “When she first walked in, she was defiant towards me,” director Zeitlin told Movieline . “Most of the times you figure you can easily puppeteer a kid, but she was not like that at all. She was refusing to do this thing that I asked her to, because she didn’t it was right. I wanted her to throw something at somebody, and she said, ‘No, that’s not right to throw something at somebody you don’t know.’ Filmed on location in Louisiana, Beasts began principal photography on April 20, 2010 — the day of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the impact of which mirrored the plight of the residents of the Bathtub within the film. The story celebrates the resilience of a community in the face of disaster, highlighting the spirit of the people who remain. Beasts of the Southern Wild is in limited release today. Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Like the world of male stripping it inhabits, Steven Soderbergh ‘s Magic Mike is naughty in gaudy but sanctioned and unthreatening ways. It teases with the promise of outrageousness, but underneath the G-string it’s a practically minded coming-of-age story about a young man reaching the end of a years-long spiritual spring break. Choreographed stripteases and celebrity cast aside, the film has a lot in common with the director’s 2009 The Girlfriend Experience — both are set in corners of the sex industry, share an undercurrent of economic instability and deal with how their protagonists’ professions, the perception and the performative aspect of them, clank up against their personal lives. And both keep to a low-key, realistic tone that’s deliberately at odds with their subject matter, one that in Magic Mike makes the film feel curiously rudderless, its off-stage journey pale and enervated in contrast with the cheesy, ebullient dance numbers it makes room for. Like the call girl Christine/Chelsea, the main character in the earlier film played by Sasha Grey, Mike ( Channing Tatum ) is aware of himself as a commodity and is constantly hustling, struggling for more control over the business in which he’s being offered — “I want to own something,” he says, and there seems to be more passion in those words than in his long, flirty pursuit of his tough-minded love interest Brooke (Cody Horn). Mike doesn’t make nearly as much money as Chelsea does, but he has side benefits that wouldn’t interest her: Occasional clients who stick around to sleep with him after the show, camaraderie with his fellow dancers and the swagger that comes with publicly embracing his place as, in the words of manager/MC Dallas (Matthew McConaughey), one of the “cock-rocking Kings of Tampa.” Mike’s a great stripper, but it’s not what he wants to do with his life. He also runs small roofing, event and car-detailing businesses that amount to a series of odd jobs. He’s saving up to pursue his dream of starting his own custom furniture business, with dedication if no particular urgency — he speaks of waiting for the market to reach its sweet spot and being able to get a good bank loan rate in ways that sound abstract, though we later see he’s actually put work into his ideas and is deeply frustrated by the obstacles he’s encountered. He is, in short, looking for the next step that will likely provide a way out, though when we see him grinding on stage at Club Xquisite we can see why he’s not in a hurry: He sparks to life in front of a crowd — he belongs there, and his audience adores him, showering him with bills (alas, mostly ones). Magic Mike is set over a summer in which Mike meets aimless, muscly 19-year-old Adam (Alex Pettyfer), whom he nicknames “The Kid,” and Horn’s Brooke, the sister on whose couch Adam is crashing. The two push Mike to reconsider his life — in Adam he sees enough promise (and reminders of his younger himself) to recruit him as Xquisite’s newest performer, and in Brooke there’s the potential for something serious, though she pushes him away whenever he saunters too close. As critical as these two relationships are for the film, they’re unfortunately lackluster — Adam is a slack-jawed, half-formed stand-in for the unthinking pleasure-seeker Mike used to be, and beefcakeyness-aside, Pettyfer can’t bring out anything in the character that could show us what Mike glimpses in him. Horn, with her strong jawline and tomboyish air, is an enjoyably off-beat pick for a romantic lead, but Brooke’s forceful pragmatism gets expressed primarily through glowering. Rather than reflect a sense of mutual attraction, her interactions with Mike projects only genuine distrust of him as her kid brother’s sleazy pal, to the point where it’s a struggle to believe that her opinion could possibly be important to him. Speaking as someone who’s slowly come around to Tatum’s meatlike leading-man qualities, I’d say this represents a step forward for the actor. He may not have the most expressive of faces, but his bro-ish friendships with the other dancers (who include Matt Bomer, Joe Manganiello, Kevin Nash and Adam Rodriguez, all magnificently ripply) have a comfort and ease to them. His relationship with Dallas, his former mentor, is more compellingly complicated still. McConaughey plays the character like he’s Dazed and Confused ‘s David Wooderson all grown up and wearing a leather harness (complete with drawled “all right, all right”s), but he’s calculating underneath the preening, outsized showman persona. Dallas is setting himself up to be the business owner, and while he appreciates Mike’s ambition, he’d still rather have him as an employee than a partner — their maneuverings over a planned expansion and move to Miami grow steadily edgier under the familiar banter. And when Tatum’s on stage, he seems like a different performer entirely — one who’s startlingly physical. Magic Mike slyly offers up a look at the actor nude from behind in an early scene, as he gets out of bed with his ongoing casual hookup Joanna (Olivia Munn). But its not actually (just) the chance to gawp at his impeccable musculature that makes Tatum such an impressive spectacle in the film — it’s his dancing, the way he goes from hulking screen presence to a fluidly athletic being, aware in his movements. Before he launched his acting career, Tatum did work as a stripper for a few months, an experience that informed the film (Reid Carolin wrote the screenplay), and he has danced in a non-exotic fashion on-screen in music videos and in the 2006 Step Up . The divide between Tatum as performer and Tatum as actor gives the film an interesting unsteadiness. Set in a strip mall-filled Tampa that Soderbergh, who also served as cinematographer, tints a smoggy yellow, the movie carries the underlying message that it’s time for Mike to grow up and figure out what’s next. But that doesn’t quite line up with the grinding normalcy with which the film depicts “responsible” living. How’s that really suppose to compare with being up there in the spotlight, rolling around in money, adored? Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
While official confirmation has yet to be reported, columnist Liz Smith eulogizes friend and filmmaker Nora Ephron , writer and director of films including Sleepless in Seattle , You’ve Got Mail , and 2009’s Julie & Julia . “People who never dreamed she was ill, are crestfallen. Amazed. Stunned,” Smith writes. “I won’t say, “Rest in peace, Nora” – I will just ask “What the hell will we do without you?” UPDATE: Sources clarify that Ephron is alive, but “gravely ill.” Meanwhile, advice columnist Margo Howard, who also writes for the online publication The Women on the Web , where Smith’s remembrance appeared today, Tweeted the news citing Smith as her source: Well, to those of you who can't find the news of Nora Ephron's death, the funeral is Thursday – and maybe that's the way she wanted it.— Margo Howard (@Margoandhow) June 26, 2012 Contradicting the odd announcements, the New York Times contacted Ephron’s publisher, Knopf, who said she has not died : Nora Ephron's publisher, Knopf, tells the NYT that she is still alive.— Julie Bosman (@juliebosman) June 26, 2012 UPDATE: Newsweek/Daily Beast reporter MariaElena Fernandez chimed in through the confusion, adding that Ephron, who is battling cancer, is alive but near death. Nora Ephron news is not a hoax but she has not passed away. She is not expected to make it through tonight. This is the truth.— MariaElena Fernandez (@writerchica) June 26, 2012 UPDATE: TMZ cites family members who say Ephron is “gravely ill,” while Roger Friedman has been told that she’s in a New York hospital suffering from “a rare form of leukemia.” Developing… [ WOW ]
