Lindsay Lohan’s former assistant Gavin Doyle was issued a subpoena to testify at her probation violation trial, which is not exactly good news for the star. It was Doyle, after all, who revealed to cops that Lindsay Lohan herself was driving the Porsche that crashed on the Pacific Coast Highway back in June. Lohan reportedly lied to police and said Doyle was driving, and was thus charged with willfully resisting, obstruction, and providing false information. And reckless driving, for good measure. Lohan is still on probation for her misdemeanor jewelry theft conviction at the time of the accident, making the allegations against her a very big deal. The Los Angeles City Attorney moved to revoke Lohan’s probation in December, which could mean eight months in jail – for just the probation violation. If she were to be convicted of lying to police and obstruction as well, that could conceivably tack on more time. Long story short … she could be effed. Lindsay’s next hearing is scheduled for March 1, and Doyle is expected to testify sometime in the next two months. It’s not looking great for the actress. She’s pulled many a rabbit out of her legal hat before, yes, but in this case, she’s got her back pinned against the wall, and not in the sexy kind of way. Lindsay Lohan: Will she do time in 2013? Yes. Her luck is running out and she’s going crazy! No! She always finds a way to get out of it! View Poll »
Hours after dodging a legal bullet in her NYC nightclub assault case, Lindsay Lohan continued her London party spree last night, hitting up swanky Rose Club. Until the wee hours of the morning, obvi. Lindsay Lohan, broke as she is, and facing eight months in jail for myriad probation violations, seems to find the money to go HARD every night. It’s how she rolls. Prosecutors opted to delay proceedings for the nightclub fight Lindsay got into back in November, when she clocked “gypsy” Tiffany Mitchell in the face. Later this month, she faces a hearing for lying to police in connection with her June car crash on the Pacific Coast Highway, and the probation violation therein. Hard to keep it all straight, we know. Without a care in the world, the 26-year-old’s been living it up abroad as her problems unravel – and Dina Lohan black eye photos are published – here in the U.S. As the world of LiLo turns.
If Lindsay Lohan doesn’t go back to jail as a result of today’s news, I have an idea for a film project for her: It’s a remake of Groundhog Day in which LiLo plays the Bill Murray role and wakes up every day to new criminal charges until she gets her act together. Since Tina Fey is the last person to get a memorable performance out of Lohan, she should write and direct. Harold Ramis , who wrote and directed the original Groundhog Day , could have a cameo as the wise prison warden, and…Jesus, why am I even bothering? I used to actually believe that Lohan had it in her to carve out a great second act in her life and career by stopping the nightclubbing, cutting off her embarrassing parents and devoting herself to work. But after five trips to rehab, the latest critical savaging she received for her performance in Liz & Dick and reports of her arrest Thursday morning and new criminal charges that are about to be filed against her, I think it may finally be time to declare Lohan a lost cause. As you probably know, Lohan was busted around 4 a.m. on Thursday morning after she allegedly punched woman at a Manhattan nightclub. Earlier that night, she’d caught Justin Bieber’s concert at Madison Square Garden, but apparently the good vibrations didn’t carry LiLo through the night. The NY Daily News reports that after exchanging words with 28-year-old Tiffany Eve Mitchell at the Chelsea nightclub Avenue, Lohan slugged the alleged victim in the face. TMZ reported that Lohan, 26, was arrested as she attempted to flee the scene in a friend’s car. “Are you kidding? Oh my God, are you kidding?” Lohan can be heard saying on the video of her arrest that the celebrity site posted. (I’ve embedded it below.) Lohan was issued a desk appearance ticket for misdemeanor assault and faces a Jan. 11 court date, but that’s just the beginning of her troubles. As TMZ reports, “she’ll face a total of four new criminal charges on the same day on different coasts.” In addition to the above charge, law enforcement sources told the website that the Santa Monica City Attorney will also hit Lohan with three criminal charges stemming from her car accident there last June on the Pacific Coast Highway. Lohan’s Porsche slammed into the rear of an 18-wheeler and though she told police she was a passenger in the car, it turned out she had been driving. The charges: Giving false information to a peace officer, obstructing or resisting a police officer in the performance of his duty, and reckless driving. (Meanwhile, Lifetime reportedly may sue Lohan for breach of contract because this incident happened during the shooting of Liz & Dick and the cable network’s insurance policy on the actress forbid her from driving.) Lohan is still on probation for felony jewel theft and TMZ notes that when the actress is arraigned on these charges, probably next week, the judge will revoke her probation and set a hearing to “determine if she will go to jail for a long period of time.” I can already see a tearful Lohan pleading for leniency, but will the judge, or anybody, be moved? At this point, it’s hard to feel any empathy — or even pity — for a 26-year-old actress who has squandered what should have been the most productive and exhilarating years of her career. Lohan could have been wowing us with her acting talent, but instead she chose to amuse and, ultimately, bore us with her bad behavior. [ TMZ , New York Daily News ] Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
Kathryn Bigelow ’s ambitious Oscar contender Zero Dark Thirty started out as a film about the 2001 siege of Tora Bora hunting down al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden , but as the Academy Award-winner told a rapt audience at the picture’s buzz-building debut in Beverly Hills on Sunday, it changed direction in one quick, fateful instant. “At about 10 o’clock at night on May 1, 2011 we realized we no longer had a project about the hunt for Osama bin Laden,” Bigelow said at a packed post-screening Q&A at the Pacific Design Center, “because he was no longer living.” Bin Laden’s death sent Bigelow and her Hurt Locker collaborator, screenwriter and journalist Mark Boal , scrambling to incorporate the update into Zero Dark Thirty , a tense semi-fictionalization of the intelligence efforts, and subsequent nighttime raid, that led to the death of bin Laden. Folding actual events and real-life figures into a decade-spanning account, Boal’s script relives the dogged, desperate, and often brutal search for bin Laden through the eyes of a female agent named Maya ( Jessica Chastain ), a fictional composite based on real women who played key roles in the circuitous, years-long operations that sniffed out bin Laden’s Pakistan hideout. Chastain, who was a lock for an Oscar nomination before Zero Dark Thirty even debuted, owns the screen as the driven workaholic agent whose tireless fixation on a needle-in-a-haystack lead ultimately proves vital to finding bin Laden. She looks a little too great doing it, too — a pillow-lipped, flame-haired beauty who manages to look luminous even when other characters are helpfully commenting that she’s rundown and haggard. (Offscreen, as in her new GQ UK cover spread, Chastain still has to play the glamour game , as most actresses do in order to vie for awards gold.) The men around Maya describe her as a “killer,” and though she struggles at first to stomach the sight of a detainee being waterboarded for intel, within a few years she’s adopted the torture tactics that made headlines out of Guantanamo. Boal’s script goes heavy on the gender politics and too light on character development, portraying Maya as a woman so devoted to her mission that she has no time for silly things like friends, love, life balance. She’s a lone strong woman in a man’s world, an awards-season narrative that pundits will predictably tether to Bigelow as they did when The Hurt Locker made its Oscar run. Still, the girl power moments are utterly satisfying; when the overlooked Maya makes her presence and contribution known in a roomful of male colleagues by barking an expletive at Tony Soprano himself (James Gandolfini as CIA head Leon Panetta), who can care that she has virtually no back story of her own?
Ang Lee ‘s Life of Pi is a doubled-edged argument for the transcendent capabilities of film. Its central section uses the latest technological achievements to transform the fantastical, fable-like tale of Yann Martel’s award-winning novel into some of the most innovative and wondrous images to flicker across the big screen this year. And in its framing story, one it returns to periodically as if needing to keep the audience from getting too caught up in the gorgeous abstraction of its narrative at sea, it provides a reminder of why we should trust more in those images, as it ploddingly trots out its source material’s heavy-handed and unnecessary delineation of its own themes. Those themes include faith and what fuels it. And in case anyone watching is in danger of not picking that up, Rafe Spall, in the role of a fictionalized version of Martel coming to interview the title character (played by Irrfan Khan as an adult) at his home in Canada, announces that he’s been promised a story that will make him believe in God. The nature of that God is a general one — Martel, and David Magee, who wrote the screenplay, are more interested in the idea of religion rather than one in particular. As a young boy, played by Ayush Tandon, Pi Patel becomes enchanted by Hinduism, then Christianity, then Islam, practicing them all with no sense that they need clash. As a grown man sharing his extraordinary tale of survival with a stranger who has come his way by chance, Pi remains a figure of strong but vague spirituality, though the film’s ultimate assessment of why people choose to believe in a higher power seems unlikely to please the devout. Life of Pi is also, more compellingly, about storytelling: the way we choose to present and frame the events that happen to us. Long before he’s stranded at sea with a tiger for company, Pi’s life is one that’s filled with strands of magical realism. Born in Pondicherry in French India, he’s named after a swimming pool in Paris that his uncle once visited. Its clear water is presented by the film as looking like air until swimmers ripple its surface as they dart across the screen. He and his brother Ravi (Vibish Sivakumar) spend their soft-focus childhood growing up on a zoo run by their reason-loving father (Adil Hussain) and their softer, more nurturing mother (Tabu). The animal inhabitants are showcased in a delightful opening credits sequence — all except the newest arrival, a Bengal tiger with the unlikely name of Richard Parker. The tragedy that strands a teenage Pi (played by perfectly adequate first-timer Suraj Sharma) in a lifeboat with Richard Parker in the middle of the Pacific Ocean is a terrifyingly realized storm that takes down the freighter transporting the Patel family and their menagerie to a new life in Canada. Water, whether in the form of a remembered pool or an angry sea swamping the deck of a ship, is the element that buoys the film along. Lee uses it as the medium for some unparalleled instances of 3-D, first in how our protagonist is thrown onto his tiny boat with a few panicked animals, riding giant waves that bring the larger vessel down to a resting place of haunting and tragic beauty. Later, as Pi and his dangerous companion struggle to reach some kind of accord that will allow for their mutual coexistence on a very limited space, the ocean stretches endlessly around them as a force of mystical capriciousness — sometimes it’s a mirror-still reflection of the sky, another time it offers up sustenance via a school of flying fish or takes it away in a dreamily alarming brush with a whale. The sea dwarfs the odd pair of travelers, the camera sometimes swinging out above the lifeboat to show it as a small blip in a vast body of water that resembles the cosmos. Pi’s continued existence and trials may be thanks to the whims of the universe — “I give myself to you!” he yells to whatever deity might be listening, “I am your vessel! Whatever comes, I want to know!” — but it’s his relationship with Richard Parker that provides the human side to this existential crisis. A seamless blend of real tiger and CGI, Richard Parker is a fully believable creation, and while Pi searches him for some sign of a soul, of some connection between living things, Life of Pi is careful not to anthropomorphize him. He’s a formidable beast, a potential killer, and the film’s best representation of its central question of whether there’s some design to existence or if it’s just a collection of chaotic and sometimes awful events. Unfortunately, Life of Pi also prods at this question during periodic returns to the present day with the grown Pi and Martel, and the scenes create the sensation of an author leaning over your shoulder as you read to point out all of the symbolism he doesn’t want you to miss. The story of Pi and Richard Parker already has the clean simplicity of a myth and really doesn’t require significant elaboration, but following in the footsteps of the source material, the film provides elaboration anyway, demonstrating a condescension to the audience that dulls the spectacle it punctuates. The past and the present day become an example of not just the contrast between the classic poles of showing and telling but of the fundamentally cinematic and the not. Pi’s reliability as a narrator is one of the key aspects of the story, but the heightened sensibility of his account is contrasted not with some underlying sense of another reality but of a framing story that’s only there as a vehicle for authorial exposition. Lee’s movie is a grand gesture of filmmaking pushed to its furthest technical edges, but hemmed in and confined by its fidelity to words on a page. Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
More good news from Movieline’s parent company, Penske Media Corp. (PMC): FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE BGR Website Launches THE NEW BGR, With Complete Redesign. Leading mobile and gadget brand redefines the category with new look and remarkable user experience. Today marks BGR’s third redesign since the site’s initial launch six years ago, though this redesign is noticeably its most thorough. Markedly apparent is the site’s sharp rebranding, with new logos, colors, and what Jonathan calls, “a new personality.” Jonathan and his team created a new logo to better reflect this site’s growth and evolution, with what Jonathan describes as, “Clean-cut, strong and powerful, but still with an edge and personality.” Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Penske Media Corporation (PMC) Jay Penske said, “Jonathan has once again raised the bar in technology and gadget publishing—not only answering his users’ requests, but significantly enhancing BGR.com’s design and presentation layer on all platforms. The new BGR homepage design is second to none in one of the most exciting categories online.” Jonathan and his team have created the new BGR to better reflect today’s internet experience, making its content clear and easy to navigate from a desktop, tablet and or mobile phone, with no redirects to a subdomain. Users will also find greater ease clicking through the site’s galleries, hubs, review pages, tip us box, search area, integrated Twitter feeds, mini hubs, featured section pages, and more. The new BGR clarifies its verticals and categories with its new hubs layout, making it easier for users to navigate to the categories they most like to read about. Sidebars have been eliminated and each page is full with, allowing content to flow as users read – from left to right. Real-time information is an aspect of the site that will continue to be enhanced over the next few weeks, with comments continually updating as well as new posts appearing if they go up while a user browses the homepage. BGR is pleased to have partnered with Motorola on its re-launch and rebranding. Motorola has also stepped in to partner on a BGR app for Android, set to launch in the next couple weeks. About BGR: Jonathan Geller is the founder of Boy Genius Report, now known as BGR. What began as a column on popular gadget blog Engadget quickly grew into one of the site’s biggest draws, and Jonathan soon detached the wildly popular column to create what has since become the biggest mobile news destination in the world. BGR was acquired by leading digital media company PMC in April 2010 and Jonathan currently acts as President and General Manager of the newly formed BGR Media, Inc., and Editor-in-chief of the BGR website. About Penske Media Corporation (PMC): PMC is a leading digital media and publishing company founded by Jay Penske in 2004. Today, PMC engages with audiences across the web, television, mobile, print and social media—reaching more than 83 million consumers monthly according to Comscore. PMC owns a unique and growing portfolio of lifestyle brands that provide the web’s best original content in categories including entertainment, sports, breaking news, media, finance, tech, health, shopping, fashion, beauty, and automotive. BGR, PMC Studios, Deadline.com, Variety, OnCars, HollywoodLife, ENTV, India.com, Movieline, TVLine, AwardsLine, Young Hollywood Awards, The Style Awards, and Breakthrough of the Year Awards are all part of the expanding PMC portfolio. For more information on PMC and its brands, please visit: www.PMC.com or its digital properties directly. PRESS CONTACT: Lauren Gullion Press@PMC.com Follow Movieline on Twitter.
Tony Stark is struggling to hold it together in the first trailer for Iron Man 3 , and that’s before Ben Kingsley as conveniently and ambiguously-ethnic baddie The Mandarin enters the picture with his samurai hair and his even more ambiguous weirdo accent. Then it’s bye bye Stark mansion and hello waking nightmare as Tony’s world unravels. “Nothing’s been the same since New York ,” he sighs. “I can’t sleep… and when I do, I have nightmares.” Air-attacks crumbling that sweet Malibu pad into the Pacific and being haunted by an Iron Man doppelganger are freaky enough, but the saddest sight in our first glimpse at Iron Man 3 has to be the image of Stark crawling into bed alone, Iron Man parts strewn across the floor like an addict’s discarded syringes. Five bucks the line “It’s like I don’t even know you” or “I can stop whenever I want!” are uttered somewhere in this movie. Trailer debut via Apple iTunes : Dynamic action, a hint of self-destruction, Guy Pearce’s clean-shaven and therefore supremely threatening mug (what’s more rage-inducing if you’re Tony Stark – Pearce kissing your lady on the cheek, or your competition from another dude in a magical flying suit?)… I’d venture to say it seems like Shane Black is back. Let’s hope. Synopsis: Marvel Studios’ “Iron Man 3” pits brash-but-brilliant industrialist Tony Stark/Iron Man against an enemy whose reach knows no bounds. When Stark finds his personal world destroyed at his enemy’s hands, he embarks on a harrowing quest to find those responsible. This journey, at every turn, will test his mettle. With his back against the wall, Stark is left to survive by his own devices, relying on his ingenuity and instincts to protect those closest to him. As he fights his way back, Stark discovers the answer to the question that has secretly haunted him: does the man make the suit or does the suit make the man? Iron Man 3 is in theaters May 3, 2013.
Tony Stark is struggling to hold it together in the first trailer for Iron Man 3 , and that’s before Ben Kingsley as conveniently and ambiguously-ethnic baddie The Mandarin enters the picture with his samurai hair and his even more ambiguous weirdo accent. Then it’s bye bye Stark mansion and hello waking nightmare as Tony’s world unravels. “Nothing’s been the same since New York ,” he sighs. “I can’t sleep… and when I do, I have nightmares.” Air-attacks crumbling that sweet Malibu pad into the Pacific and being haunted by an Iron Man doppelganger are freaky enough, but the saddest sight in our first glimpse at Iron Man 3 has to be the image of Stark crawling into bed alone, Iron Man parts strewn across the floor like an addict’s discarded syringes. Five bucks the line “It’s like I don’t even know you” or “I can stop whenever I want!” are uttered somewhere in this movie. Trailer debut via Apple iTunes : Dynamic action, a hint of self-destruction, Guy Pearce’s clean-shaven and therefore supremely threatening mug (what’s more rage-inducing if you’re Tony Stark – Pearce kissing your lady on the cheek, or your competition from another dude in a magical flying suit?)… I’d venture to say it seems like Shane Black is back. Let’s hope. Synopsis: Marvel Studios’ “Iron Man 3” pits brash-but-brilliant industrialist Tony Stark/Iron Man against an enemy whose reach knows no bounds. When Stark finds his personal world destroyed at his enemy’s hands, he embarks on a harrowing quest to find those responsible. This journey, at every turn, will test his mettle. With his back against the wall, Stark is left to survive by his own devices, relying on his ingenuity and instincts to protect those closest to him. As he fights his way back, Stark discovers the answer to the question that has secretly haunted him: does the man make the suit or does the suit make the man? Iron Man 3 is in theaters May 3, 2013.
We take a look back at a hectic seven days for the actress. By James Montgomery Lindsay Lohan leaves the hospital after her car accident on June 8 Photo: If your week involved smashing a Porsche into an 18-wheeler, being linked in headlines to a porn star, and having the paramedics called to your hotel room, there’s a pretty good chance you are probably James Bond. Or Lindsay Lohan. Of course, one of those folks is fictional. The other is very much real — and just had a really crazy week. Yes, the Lind-sanity is still with us, as the actress wrapped an impressive seven-day stretch that began with a car wreck (and hospitalization), rolled right on with some salacious headlines and wrapped with some drama at the Ritz-Carlton (and a rumored hospitalization). Here’s a look back at Lindsay Lohan’s rather hectic week, one that would give any mere mortal (or secret agent) pause. But not her. Friday, June 8 : Lohan is taken to the hospital after smashing her Porsche into an 18-wheeler on the Pacific Coast Highway in Santa Monica. Luckily, she wasn’t seriously injured — though the same couldn’t be said for her vehicle, as photos showed the Porsche with a severely damaged front end, a smashed windshield and a deployed airbag. Monday, June 11 : Reports surface that Lohan may have lied to police about just who was driving the car. She had originally told responding officers she was sitting in the passenger seat, with her assistant behind the wheel, which supposedly didn’t corroborate with the story her assistant told police. Uh-oh. Tuesday, June 12 : Lohan’s name is attached to “The Canyons,” a Hollywood drama from writer Bret Easton Ellis that will also feature adult-film star James Deen. Lohan will reportedly play Tara, girlfriend to Deen’s Christian, a “trust fund kid, power player and major manipulator, who is a film producer that enjoys filming his own three-way sex sessions.” Thursday, June 14 : “The Canyons” producer Braxton Pope acknowledges Lindsay’s reputation to MTV News, saying, “What’s kind of lost in a lot of the Lindsay discussions is the fact that Lindsay is a very talented actress. She’s very charismatic and she has a lot of acting skills. So her lifestyle and some of the things that she’s gone through have tended to kind of overwhelm the fact, but Lindsay has kind of real talent. So for this part, we felt that she was really the right actor for a host of different reasons.” Friday, June 15 : A California news station erroneously reports that Lohan had been taken to the hospital after being found unconscious in a hotel room. While paramedics had been called to her penthouse at the Ritz-Carlton, they left the scene without the actress, and her reps insisted that all she was suffering from was “exhaustion and dehydration” and said Lohan was actually napping after a grueling stretch of shooting the upcoming Lifetime movie “Liz & Dick.” Related Photos The Highs And Lows Of Lindsay Lohan
Lindsay Lohan lied to police Friday, and not just about her brakes failing . The hot mess initially told them she was NOT driving the Porsche that she totaled when she slammed into a semi on the Pacific Coast Highway north of L.A. As a result, her probation could be revoked … what else is new. When Lindsay was in the hospital getting checked out after the serious car accident , cops from the Santa Monica Police Department paid a visit. Lindsay told police she was a passenger in the Porsche and her assistant was driving. However, the assistant said that Lohan was behind the wheel. Police are writing up a report that will include Lindsay’s lie. It’s unclear why she would lie … but she could be screwed. This is significant because it’s a crime to provide false information to a police officer, especially if it impedes an active criminal investigation, and doing so could trigger a probation violation in her shoplifting case. That could send her back to jail … again. Several eyewitnesses at the scene say Lindsay and her assistant both got out on the passenger side, which means Lindsay had to climb over the console. Lohan appears to have concocted the lie almost immediately after impact. She was not ticketed in the wreck, that we know of, but time will tell if Lohan faces criminal charges for her obvious lies to the authorities. [Photo: WENN.com]
