‘My goal is to migrate the cultures,’ Swizz tells MTV News about his new partnership with Korea’s O&Media. By Nadeska Alexis Swizz Beatz Photo: WireImage Swizz Beatz is notorious for having his hands in a few different projects at once. In addition to outside-the-box ventures like working with Christian Louboutin to score the music for Paris’ Crazy Horse cabaret, the producer is currently focused on developing his joint venture with O&Media, which aims to introduce Korean pop music, or “K-Pop,” to mainstream America. “My goal is to migrate the cultures,” Swizz told MTV News. “It’s not about me being a feature or just producing K-Pop music; it’s about migrating musical cultures around the world. And I just felt like starting with K-Pop, starting in Asia and opening up different outlets to something cool and new.” To spearhead this project, Swizz teamed up with popular Korean entertainment group O&Media. “That partnership has been coming about for a couple of months now,” he said, detailing the progress they’ve made together so far. “We have a TV show component, a tour company component, a production company and a label. We’re just active as the tunnel for artists that want to do things in the West, or artists in the West that want to do things in Asia. This is about a whole migration of cultures coming together under our umbrella to have an outlet to express themselves.” Part of Swizz’s goal is to use elements from each music culture to help grow the other. “They still do artist development [in Asia], where back here in the States, the labels and our culture lacks artist development,” he said. “Nowadays, an artist can go into the booth, put out a song the next day, and that person thinks that they’re a superstar. But within the K-Pop movement, artists actually go through artist development. They take music classes that allow them to be ready for when they do become that big star. “I think that introducing different cultures of music can help everybody out, and that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop doing hip-hop or R&B music,” he added. “I have love for all genres of music, because it’s all art, and I just want to take the boundaries and lines of segregation and make them invisible.” In the simplest terms, the super-producer wants the love to be spread evenly across the musical world. “When we go to these different countries — Korea, Japan, China — as artists from the United States, we get treated like kings,” he said. “We get treated like real stars. And I feel that when they come over to the States, as successful as they are, they should get treated the same.” What do you think about Swizz’s K-Pop efforts? Let us know in the comments! Related Artists Swizz Beatz
Lady Gaga wants kids to rethink their entire social structure. A bold, broad and ambitious task, but would you expect anything less from the Mother Monster? With her new Born This Way Foundation, that’s exactly what she’s striving for. She has some specific ideas for how it might work, too … Asked by Time how an 11-year-old girl might follow Gaga’s advice and become more empowered, rather than succumb to other patterns, the singer-songwriter says: “She could go up to a person in class who maybe is not one of the cool kids and say, ‘I really like your T-shirt.’ Her one great loving, accepting deed for the day.” That would be a brave step, which is what the initiative is about – combatting meanness and cruelty, inspiring bravery and working toward an accepting society. “I’m doing everything I can, working with experts, studying statistics, trying to figure out a way we can make it cool or normal to be kind and loving,” says Lady Gaga . Gaga, 25, says she was bullied in school and acknowledges it will be long process to shift people’s perceptions, but says one first step is not to demonize bullies. “We do not make a distinction between the bully and the victim,” she says. “Because each person is an equally important and valuable member of society.” “What the foundation is about is a transformative change that is going to take a long time to affect the overall culture. Bullies were born this way, too.” A tough task, but you gotta admire her for taking on such an important subject and tackling it from the ground up. Just one of many reasons we love the Gaga. [Photo: WENN.com]
Loveless, jobless and terminally ill, Frank has had enough of American society. He decides to go out with a bang – literally – and go postal on everyone who deserves it. In the hilarious-looking dark comedy God Bless America, Frank (Joel Murray) takes his gun and decides to take out the stupidest, cruelest, most repellent U.S. citizens. Frank finds an unusual accomplice in high-school student Roxy (Tara Lynne Barr), who shares his sense of rage, disenfranchisement, and loathing of irritating celebs. Stand-up comedian Bobcat Goldthwait wrote and directed this scathing, gut-busting attack on all that is sacred in the United States of America. Watch the trailer: God Bless America Trailer
Welcome back to the first annual Tournament of THG: Couples Edition, where fans vote on the most popular celebrity couple in the entire universe! The concept is simple: Pick your favorite of the two pairs in each poll. Done. YOUR VOTES will determine the winners of this tournament showdown. After eight hotly-contested first-round battles, the quarterfinal bracket is set. Tuesday, Robsten took on JT and Jessica Biel in a #1 vs. #9 matchup. Today’s contest: The President and First Lady of the United States, Barack and Michelle Obama, against upstarts Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds. The Gossip Girl and Safe House stars have their work cut out here, but they’ve already knocked off Brangelina, so all bets are off. Cast your votes below!
Uh. Thanks, Right Wing Watch, for looking at the 700 Club television program so we don’t have to. Tags: 700 Club, dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb, Pat Robertson, wingnuts Broadcasting platform : YouTube Source : Truth Wins Out Blog Discovery Date : 22/02/2012 17:47 Number of articles : 2
Uh. Thanks, Right Wing Watch, for looking at the 700 Club television program so we don’t have to. Tags: 700 Club, dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb, Pat Robertson, wingnuts Broadcasting platform : YouTube Source : Truth Wins Out Blog Discovery Date : 22/02/2012 17:47 Number of articles : 2
The white bricklayer from Virginia defied stereotypes and centuries of racist laws when he married Mildred Jeter, who was black and Native American. Convicted of violating a law against interracial marriage, the Lovings fought for their rights and won a landmark 1967 Supreme Court case that struck down such bans nationwide. Read: Black Love Their lives are explored in a new documentary, “The Loving Story,” which premieres Tuesday on HBO. Today, there are more than 4 million “mixed marriages” in the United States, and roughly one in seven new marriages are between people of different ethnicities. But in 1958, when the Lovings’ marriage was ruled illegal and they were banished from their native Virginia, 21 states outlawed interracial unions. “The Loving Story” details the couple’s nine-year battle to live in Virginia as man and wife. Using evocative photographs, newly unearthed footage and interviews with the Lovings’ daughter and lawyers, the film reveals the power of love to overcome bigotry.
There were many happy faces among critics on Saturday, the third day of the Berlinale. Because despite what I wrote yesterday about the criticism the festival has faced in recent years, particularly in terms of the films chosen for competition, nearly everyone I’ve spoken to thinks this year’s festival is off to a promising start. Of the six competition films that have been screened so far, not one has set any of my random sampling of critic friends howling with derision, or walking around wearing a perpetual scowly-frowny face. When the festival lineup was announced, friends who had to write pregame assessments had a hard time finding even one or two movies that, sight unseen, had the potential to stand out. But on the strength of what we’ve seen so far, it appears that the best of this festival, whatever that might be, will again come from left field, as it did last year with Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation . Not every edition of every festival starts out that way, with a sense of adventure and anticipation. Don’t quote me yet, but we may be onto something special here. We can attribute part of the buoyant mood to the reception of the screening of Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s Caesar Must Die on Saturday morning. In the late 1970s and early 1980s the Taviani Brothers rode high, on an internationally cresting wave, with pictures like Padre Padrone and The Night of the Shooting Stars . But in recent years, mentioning their name would be likely to elicit a blank stare or a “Taviani Who?” Even though the brothers have been steadily making films in Italy since then, they’ve dropped off the map in the United States, and even at home their profile hasn’t exactly been blazing. But Caesar Must Die may reignite the fortunes of this octogenarian directing team. The picture is stark and alive in its simplicity; rendered mostly in black-and-white, it’s gorgeous to look at — you could practically use it as an illustrated textbook on framing and composition. Caesar Must Die is a sort-of documentary that tells the story of a group of prison inmates — incarcerated at Rome’s maximum security Rebibbia — who mount a production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Footage from the actual performance frames the picture: In the opening scene, we see a bunch of stubbly, rough-looking guys, wearing simple, stylized costumes that give the whole affair the aura of a children’s holiday pageant, doing some pretty interesting things with Shakespeare’s language. Not all of those things are, in the strict sense, good. But even the “bad” actors among this bunch — and remember, they’re not just nonprofessionals but convicted criminals, for Christ’s sake — contribute to the intense, quiet power of the final work. Most of Caesar Must Die is devoted to watching these men work their way through the material during rehearsal, learning its ins and outs, its dips and dives, and teasing out nuances and details that mean something to them. Sometimes the Tavianis draw the parallels between art and life a little too starkly. We don’t really need to hear the inmates reflecting on how Julius Caesar speaks to them when we can see how, in their proto-method-acting way, they bring every scrap of their experience to rehearsal: They touch each other warily but tenderly; when it’s time for a character to draw a knife, you can tell the actors respect it as both a weapon and a symbol, even though it’s presumably made out of plastic. You can bet these guys know a lot about duplicity and betrayal and power struggles, and they bring all of that to bear as they tangle with this challenging material, and with each other. The most wonderful sequence in this overall very fine picture may be the montage of the actors’ auditions, as they meet with the play’s director – a professional brought in from the outside – and try to impress him with their swagger and capacity for pathos. Many of them have both in spades. Some are awkwardly touching; others come off like they’ve spent too much time channeling Robert De Niro; and some are simply naturals, able to summon that deep-rooted whatever-it-is that makes magic happen in live performance. The picture also features a lovely, haunting Bernard Herrmann-inflected score — in places I could hear shadows of Taxi Driver . When Caesar Must Die eventually shows up in American theaters — and it will — it’s going to be easy as pie for marketing people to sell: An uplifting story about prison dudes finding meaning in art can pretty much sell itself. But even though that line essentially describes what happens in Caesar Must Die , it doesn’t come close to capturing the simultaneously joyous and mournful resonance of the picture. Caesar Must Die is really just about the way art lives on through people, sometimes in unlikely ways. There’s no way to keep it behind bars. Saturday’s press screening of Barbara, from German director Christian Petzold, didn’t draw the same kind of rapturous audience affection that Caesar Must Die did. But then, it’s a very different type of movie. In Barbara , a beautiful but rather blank-faced young doctor – played by the superb German actress Nina Hoss — arrives in a small East German town to take a new job at a tiny hospital. She doesn’t seem too happy to be there, though clearly the doc in charge – Ronald Zehrfeld, who somewhat resembles Brendan Fraser and is equally charming — takes an immediate shine to her. It’s 1980, as the movie’s press notes tell us, though if you go in cold, you probably won’t be able to immediately discern when and where the action is taking place. That’s probably intentional, and the approach works. This isn’t The Lives of Others, where the East-West divide is practically a major character; instead, it’s just a story about people living in constrained (and at times dangerous) circumstances and yearning for something more. Barbara is a drama and a romance, and it’s also laced with dry, delicate humor. There were times when the German members of the audience would laugh at a joke that I couldn’t quite get, and yet Petzold — the director behind the 2007 drama Yella, also featuring Hoss — is such a master of tone and mood that I could feel the vibrations of the movie’s subtle humor, even if I’d be hard-pressed to articulate it. Barbara starts out slow and then moves even slower — but by the end, somehow, it got me in its gentle clutches. Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
There were many happy faces among critics on Saturday, the third day of the Berlinale. Because despite what I wrote yesterday about the criticism the festival has faced in recent years, particularly in terms of the films chosen for competition, nearly everyone I’ve spoken to thinks this year’s festival is off to a promising start. Of the six competition films that have been screened so far, not one has set any of my random sampling of critic friends howling with derision, or walking around wearing a perpetual scowly-frowny face. When the festival lineup was announced, friends who had to write pregame assessments had a hard time finding even one or two movies that, sight unseen, had the potential to stand out. But on the strength of what we’ve seen so far, it appears that the best of this festival, whatever that might be, will again come from left field, as it did last year with Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation . Not every edition of every festival starts out that way, with a sense of adventure and anticipation. Don’t quote me yet, but we may be onto something special here. We can attribute part of the buoyant mood to the reception of the screening of Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s Caesar Must Die on Saturday morning. In the late 1970s and early 1980s the Taviani Brothers rode high, on an internationally cresting wave, with pictures like Padre Padrone and The Night of the Shooting Stars . But in recent years, mentioning their name would be likely to elicit a blank stare or a “Taviani Who?” Even though the brothers have been steadily making films in Italy since then, they’ve dropped off the map in the United States, and even at home their profile hasn’t exactly been blazing. But Caesar Must Die may reignite the fortunes of this octogenarian directing team. The picture is stark and alive in its simplicity; rendered mostly in black-and-white, it’s gorgeous to look at — you could practically use it as an illustrated textbook on framing and composition. Caesar Must Die is a sort-of documentary that tells the story of a group of prison inmates — incarcerated at Rome’s maximum security Rebibbia — who mount a production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Footage from the actual performance frames the picture: In the opening scene, we see a bunch of stubbly, rough-looking guys, wearing simple, stylized costumes that give the whole affair the aura of a children’s holiday pageant, doing some pretty interesting things with Shakespeare’s language. Not all of those things are, in the strict sense, good. But even the “bad” actors among this bunch — and remember, they’re not just nonprofessionals but convicted criminals, for Christ’s sake — contribute to the intense, quiet power of the final work. Most of Caesar Must Die is devoted to watching these men work their way through the material during rehearsal, learning its ins and outs, its dips and dives, and teasing out nuances and details that mean something to them. Sometimes the Tavianis draw the parallels between art and life a little too starkly. We don’t really need to hear the inmates reflecting on how Julius Caesar speaks to them when we can see how, in their proto-method-acting way, they bring every scrap of their experience to rehearsal: They touch each other warily but tenderly; when it’s time for a character to draw a knife, you can tell the actors respect it as both a weapon and a symbol, even though it’s presumably made out of plastic. You can bet these guys know a lot about duplicity and betrayal and power struggles, and they bring all of that to bear as they tangle with this challenging material, and with each other. The most wonderful sequence in this overall very fine picture may be the montage of the actors’ auditions, as they meet with the play’s director – a professional brought in from the outside – and try to impress him with their swagger and capacity for pathos. Many of them have both in spades. Some are awkwardly touching; others come off like they’ve spent too much time channeling Robert De Niro; and some are simply naturals, able to summon that deep-rooted whatever-it-is that makes magic happen in live performance. The picture also features a lovely, haunting Bernard Herrmann-inflected score — in places I could hear shadows of Taxi Driver . When Caesar Must Die eventually shows up in American theaters — and it will — it’s going to be easy as pie for marketing people to sell: An uplifting story about prison dudes finding meaning in art can pretty much sell itself. But even though that line essentially describes what happens in Caesar Must Die , it doesn’t come close to capturing the simultaneously joyous and mournful resonance of the picture. Caesar Must Die is really just about the way art lives on through people, sometimes in unlikely ways. There’s no way to keep it behind bars. Saturday’s press screening of Barbara, from German director Christian Petzold, didn’t draw the same kind of rapturous audience affection that Caesar Must Die did. But then, it’s a very different type of movie. In Barbara , a beautiful but rather blank-faced young doctor – played by the superb German actress Nina Hoss — arrives in a small East German town to take a new job at a tiny hospital. She doesn’t seem too happy to be there, though clearly the doc in charge – Ronald Zehrfeld, who somewhat resembles Brendan Fraser and is equally charming — takes an immediate shine to her. It’s 1980, as the movie’s press notes tell us, though if you go in cold, you probably won’t be able to immediately discern when and where the action is taking place. That’s probably intentional, and the approach works. This isn’t The Lives of Others, where the East-West divide is practically a major character; instead, it’s just a story about people living in constrained (and at times dangerous) circumstances and yearning for something more. Barbara is a drama and a romance, and it’s also laced with dry, delicate humor. There were times when the German members of the audience would laugh at a joke that I couldn’t quite get, and yet Petzold — the director behind the 2007 drama Yella, also featuring Hoss — is such a master of tone and mood that I could feel the vibrations of the movie’s subtle humor, even if I’d be hard-pressed to articulate it. Barbara starts out slow and then moves even slower — but by the end, somehow, it got me in its gentle clutches. Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Welcome back to the first annual Tournament of THG: Couples Edition , where fans vote on the most popular celebrity couple in the entire universe! The concept is simple: Pick your favorite of the two pairs in each poll. Done. YOUR VOTES will determine the winners of this tournament showdown. So far in round one, Robsten is cruising, while Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel and Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds both hold narrow advantages. Today’s battle: The President and the First Lady of the United States against TomKat! An unconventional matchup, we know. But a good one! Cast your VOTE BELOW for your favorite couple of the two:
