Kris Jenner And Kanye West Are Fighting Over Kim Kardashian!
Kim Kardashian Is Jetting Over To paris To Give Birth?!
Justin Timberlake Dissed Kanye West Completely In Song Suit & Tie!
Here's Kim Kardashian And Kanye West's Super Fun Baby Name!Source: http://www.gossipcop.com/shain-gandee-dead-buckwild-died-mtv-cause-of-death/
Spielberg's blockbuster bent the laws of nature, ushering in an era of special effects that made dinosaurs out of action heroes
How fast does a T rex run? 20 years ago, the technicians at George Lucas's effects house, Industrial Light and Magic, laboring to finish Jurassic Park in time for its June 11 release date, made a decision whose effects would reverberate for decades to come. "We had a zillion arguments about it," said animator Steve Williams. Some argued, based on the animals' estimated mass, that it ran slower than a jeep, the only problem being that a jeep was precisely what it was required to chase in Spielberg's film. Others argued that it ran more like a lion: never unless it had to, and if it ran, only for a very short period of time, moving very fast. "Using that logic," said Williams, "I had to throw physics out the window and create a T rex that moved at 60mph, even thought its hollow bones would have busted if it ran that fast."
That decision – cheating mass to achieve the desired velocity – set the pattern for the bendy new laws of physics that were about to unfurl. The 80s had been about nothing if not mass, when 'roid-head heroes came on like one-man biological armies, wiping out whole buildings, neighbourhoods, villages, with one clench of oily pectoral. "He fills the space, and you have to go with that," said James Cameron of Arnold Schwarzenegger when casting The Terminator, originally a lithe assassin with a buzz cut, upturned trench-coat, capable of disappearing into a crowd.
What he got was 220 pounds of Austrian bodybuilder, who could no more disappear into a crowd than he could perform a pas de deux. As the 80s boomed, so too did the biceps of its movie heroes. "I always believed the mind is the best weapon", insisted John Rambo, before strapping some beefy rocket launchers to his forearms, in case his mind wandered.
That all changed in 1993. "Lizard eats Arnie's lunch," ran Variety's headline, after Jurassic Park smushed Arnie's appropriately titled Last Action Hero at the box office, ushering in a brave new world of computer-generated effects in which the bulk of Arnie, Sly, Bruce and the gang was suddenly a drag – un-aerodynamic. As The New Yorker's David Denby wrote in his review of X-Men United (2003):
"Gravity has given up its remorseless pull; one person's flesh can turn into another's, or melt, of become waxy, claylike, or metallic; the ground is not so much terra firma as a launching pad for the true cinematic space, the air, where bodies zoom like projectiles and actual projectiles (bullets say) sometimes move slowly enough to be inspected by the naked eye. Roll over Newton, computer imagery has altered the integrity of time and space."
This brave new post-Newtonian universe would belong instead to swift, svelte, low-cal metrosexuals like Keanu Reeves, Matt Damon, Leonardo diCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Leavitt and Andrew Garfield – buff but not ripped, able to cling to a window ledge by their fingertips, or run upside down a corridor, or wrap their tonsils around the gobblydegook of a script like Inception, whose exposition levels alone rendered it a no-fly zone to monosyllabic grunters like Sly and Arnie, whose eloquence at best stretched to a gruff "screw you" as he plunged a power drill into a man's chest. Jurassic Park put paid to all that – it put machismo on the extinction list.
The rerelease of Spielberg's frightener, newly refurbished in 3D, offers plenty of opportunity to ponder these and other important matters, such as: why isn't it more frightening? Why don't those night-time binoculars ever get used? Why doesn't the film have an ending? And: what's with the first 20 minutes? Spielberg's beginnings are usually beauts, too. Jaws begins with such fluently mounting dread that we are 30 minutes in before we realize that nobody has said the word "shark". The same with Close Encounters, which goes 40 minutes without anyone mentioning UFOs.
In Jurassic Park, it is five minutes before people start in with the dino chat, and they never let up: we get dino history and dino DNA, dino facts and figures, ticker-tape reams of dino data, and then – at the 25-minute mark – our first dinosaur, munching leaves in a field. The cast dutifully adopt their shock-and-awe expressions, although how it crept up on them, given that it is as large as a house and stood in a field so wide you half expect to see your dad practicing his golf-swing, is anyone's guess. David Koepp's script had them walking in a forest, coming across a tree trunk, then three more, the trunks turning out to be legs – a much more Spielbergian alternative to the version Spielberg gives us.
In other words, this is his you-ain't-seen-nothing-yet moment, and he fluffs it. Jurassic Park may have re-angled the trajectory of Hollywood as thoroughly as did The Jazz Singer in 1927, but like The Jazz Singer, it is not a particularly good movie. It's one of the big secrets of film history, in fact, that cinema's landmark films often turn out to be lousy, frequently for the same reason that they are landmark films: too busy funneling this historic head-wind, or showing off that game-changing technological development, to keep their balance on the beam.
Spielberg's heart and mind were elsewhere – on Schindler's List to be precise, which he shot almost concurrently, as editing on Jurassic Park wound down. His sensibility had bifurcated. The 28-year-old who made Jaws with such disinhibited glee now worried about the kids in the audience, those raptors in the front row. "Frankly I don't think that Jaws would do as well today as it did in 1975," Spielberg would say when Jaws was rereleased a few years later: "because people would not wait so long to see the shark. Or they'd say, there, too much time between the first attack and the second attack, which is too bad, we now have an audience that doesn't have patience with us. They've been taught, by people like me, to be impatient with people like me."
Jurassic Park is a product of that impatience, and whisked it up some more. By 1992, the entertainment industry had become America's second largest export after aerospace, generating some $3.7bn in revenue, and in 1993, thanks to Jurassic Park, overseas box office out-stripped domestic for the first time in Hollywood's history – a crucial tip of the see-saw, for that global market would increasingly be calling the shots. "The world is listening," declared the motto of George Lucas's THX Dolby system. In truth, it was the world that was now speaking. It was Hollywood's turn to listen.
• Jurassic Park 3D is released worldwide on Friday, April 5.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2013/apr/01/jurassic-park-3d-rerelease-spielberg
Paramount's decision to delay the film and boost Channing Tatum's role has paid dividends, with audiences flocking to a sequel that outshoots its predecessor
The knives were out in Hollywood for GI Joe: Retaliation back in 2012, when Paramount surprised everyone (including director Jon Chu) by announcing it was putting back the release by nine months from 29 June 2012 to the end of March 2013.
At the time there was the usual Hollywood smokescreen to placate the masses. The official line was that the studio needed more time on the 3D conversion, whereas in fact executives were scrambling to reshoot and expand Channing Tatum's role. Tatum's chemistry with Dwayne Johnson is one of the best things about this actually quite decent sequel to a hideous predecessor (2009's GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra) and test audiences last year were upset when Tatu's character died in the opening minutes.
That's understandable. Tatum is a charmer and audiences love him. (So do collaborators, as anyone who saw the late-February love-in with White House Down co-star Jamie Foxx on Jimmy Kimmel's late night talk show will attest.) He'd just scored successive hits with The Vow and 21 Jump Street and you don't kill off a star in the first act.
So Tatum has a bigger role now and the $41.2m (£27m) result over the weekend was the second best ever three-day Easter weekend launch at the North American box office – following Clash of the Titans in 2010 with $61.2m. Factoring in Retaliation's four-day launch that kicked off last Thursday, the film stands at $51.7m and $130m worldwide.
The official line is the movie cost $130m to produce, so let's make it real and boost the figure to $160m and throw in a minimum $80m for marketing and that takes us to $240m. Even at that threshold, the movie is looking good.
The same cannot be said for The Host, a new Stephenie Meyer adaptation starring Saoirse Ronan and distributed by Open Road. It arrived in sixth place on $11m in a disappointing start. Tyler Perry, on the other hand, remains gold dust and his partners at Lionsgate are laughing all the way to the bank. His Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor opened in third place on a rock-solid $22.3m with a very promising ancillary career to come, judging by Perry's track record on TV and DVD.
Meanwhile Harmony Korine's deliciously raunchy Spring Breakers has crossed $10m through arthouse distributor A24. What a way to start for the new distributor. That can only be good news for the specialty market as hundreds of movies jostle for attention in the notoriously treacherous North American market each month.
1. GI Joe: Retaliation, $41.2m. Total: $51.7m
2. The Croods, $26.5m. Total: $88.6m
3. Tyler Perry's Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor, $22.3m
4. Olympus Has Fallen, $14m. Total: $54.7m
5. Oz the Great and Powerful, $11.6m. Total: $198.3m
6. The Host, $11m
7. The Call, $4.8m. Total: $39.5m
8. Admission, $3.3m. Total: $11.8m
9. Spring Breakers, $2.8m. Total: $10.1m
10. The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, $1.3m. Total: $20.6m
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/apr/01/gi-joe-retaliation-us-box-office
He has a history of bad behavior during media appearances, but Chris Brown was nothing but pleasant when he paid a visit to Rockefeller Center this morning (April 1).
The “Kiss Kiss” singer was in the house to chat with Matt Lauer on the “Today” show, and of course the conversation turned to his abuse of Rihanna that happened four years ago.
Chris explained that he’s learned a ton from the experience- "I think it's just me proving myself once again and also me just being a man, and knowing what I did wrong and never doing it again.”
“As for as me and her concerned, she knows my heart and I know her heart. I'm not really focused on the negative, everything about is positive for me. I did my 52 weeks of counseling and learned it was absolutely wrong."
When Lauer asked Brown if anything like that would ever happen again, Chris stated, "Absolutely not."
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As two more Afghan children are liberated (from their lives) by NATO this weekend, a new film examines the effects of endless US aggression
(updated below)
Yesterday I had the privilege to watch Dirty Wars, an upcoming film directed by Richard Rowley that chronicles the investigations of journalist Jeremy Scahill into America's global covert war under President Obama and specifically his ever-growing kill lists. I will write comprehensively about this film closer to the date when it and the book by the same name will be released. For now, it will suffice to say that the film is one of the most important I've seen in years: gripping and emotionally affecting in the extreme, with remarkable, news-breaking revelations even for those of us who have intensely followed these issues. The film won awards at Sundance and rave reviews in unlikely places such as Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. But for now, I want to focus on just one small aspect of what makes the film so crucial.
The most propagandistic aspect of the US War on Terror has been, and remains, that its victims are rendered invisible and voiceless. They are almost never named by newspapers. They and their surviving family members are virtually never heard from on television. The Bush and Obama DOJs have collaborated with federal judges to ensure that even those who everyone admits are completely innocent have no access to American courts and thus no means of having their stories heard or their rights vindicated. Radical secrecy theories and escalating attacks on whistleblowers push these victims further into the dark.
It is the ultimate tactic of Othering: concealing their humanity, enabling their dehumanization, by simply relegating them to nonexistence. As Ashleigh Banfield put it her 2003 speech denouncing US media coverage of the Iraq war just months before she was demoted and then fired by MSNBC: US media reports systematically exclude both the perspectives of "the other side" and the victims of American violence. Media outlets in predominantly Muslim countries certainly report on their plight, but US media outlets simply do not, which is one major reason for the disparity in worldviews between the two populations. They know what the US does in their part of the world, but Americans are kept deliberately ignorant of it.
What makes Dirty Wars so important is that it viscerally conveys the effects of US militarism on these invisible victims: by letting them speak for themselves. Scahill and his crew travel to the places most US journalists are unwilling or unable to go: to remote and dangerous provinces in Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia, all to give voice to the victims of US aggression. We hear from the Afghans whose family members (including two pregnant women) were slaughtered by US Special Forces in 2010 in the Paktia Province, despite being part of the Afghan Police, only for NATO to outright lie and claim the women were already dead from "honor killings" by the time they arrived (lies uncritically repeated, of course, by leading US media outlets).
Scahill interviews the still-traumatized survivors of the US cruise missile and cluster bomb attack in Southern Yemen that killed 35 women and children just weeks after Obama was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. We see the widespread anger in Yemen over the fact that the Yemeni journalist who first exposed US responsibility for that attack, Abdulelah Haider Shaye, was not only arrested by the US puppet regime but, as Scahill first reported, has been kept imprisoned to this very day at the direct insistence of President Obama. We hear from the grandfather of 16-year-old American teenager Abdulrahman al-Awlaki (he is also the father of US cleric Anwar al-Awlaki) - both before and after a CIA drone killed his son and then (two weeks later) his teenaged grandson who everyone acknowledges had nothing to do with terrorism. We hear boastful tales of summary executions from US-funded-and-directed Somali warlords.
There is an unmistakable and singular message sent by these disparate groups and events. It's one particularly worth thinking about with news reports this morning that two more Afghan children have been killed by a NATO air attack.
The message is that the US is viewed as the greatest threat and that it is US aggression and violence far more than any other cause that motivates support for al-Qaida and anti-American sentiment. The son of the slain Afghan police commander (who is the husband of one of the killed pregnant woman and brother of the other) says that villagers refer to US Special Forces as the "American Taliban" and that he refrained from putting on a suicide belt and attacking US soldiers with it only because of the pleas of his grieving siblings. An influential Southern Yemeni cleric explains that he never heard of al-Qaida sympathizers in his country until that 2009 cruise missile attack and subsequent drone killings, including the one that ended the life of Abdulrahman (a claim supported by all sorts of data). The brutal Somali warlord explains that the Americans are the "masters of war" who taught him everything he knows and who fuel ongoing conflict. Anwar Awlaki's transformation from moderate and peace-preaching American cleric to angry critic of the US is shown to have begun with the US attack on Iraq and then rapidly intensifying with Obama's drone attacks and kill lists. Meanwhile, US military officials and officers interviewed by Scahill exhibit a sociopathic indifference to their victims, while Awlaki's increasingly angry sermons in defense of jihad are juxtaposed with the very similar-sounding justifications of endless war from Obama.
The evidence has long been compelling that the primary fuel of what the US calls terrorism are the very policies of aggression justified in the name of stopping terrorism. The vast bulk of those who have been caught in recent years attempting attacks on the US have emphatically cited US militarism and drone killings in their part of the world as their motive. Evidence is overwhelming that what has radicalized huge numbers of previously peaceful and moderate Muslims is growing rage at seeing a continuous stream of innocent victims, including children, at the hands of the seemingly endless US commitment to violence.
The only way this clear truth is concealed is by preventing Americans from knowing about, let alone hearing from, the victims of US aggression. That concealment is what caused huge numbers of Americans to wander around in a daze after 9/11 innocently and bewilderingly wondering "why do they hate us"? - despite decades of continuous US interference, aggression, and violence-enabling in that part of the world. And it's this concealment of these victims that causes Americans now to react to endless stories of the killing of innocent Muslims with the excuse that "we have to do something about the Terrorists" or "it's better than a ground invasion" - without realizing that they're affirming what Chris Hayes aptly describes as a false choice, and worse, without realizing that the very policies they're cheering are not stopping the Terrorists at all but doing the opposite: helping the existing Terrorists and creating new ones.
To be fair, it's not difficult to induce a population to avert its eyes from the victims of the violence they support: we all like to believe that we're Good and peaceful people, and we particularly like to believe this about the leaders we elect, cheer and admire. Moreover, what the Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole recently described as "the empathy gap" - the failure to imagine how others will react to situations that would cause us (and have caused us) to be driven by rage and violence - means that the US government need not work all that hard to silence its victims: there is a pervasive desire to keep them out of sight.
Nonetheless, if Americans are going to support or even tolerate endless militarism, as they have been doing, then they should at least have to be confronted with their victims - if not on moral grounds then on pragmatic ones, to understand the effects of these policies. Based on the out-of-sight-out-of-mind reality, the US government and media have been incredibly successful in rendering those victims silent and invisible. Dirty Wars is a truly crucial tonic to that propaganda. At the very least, nobody who sees it and hears from the victims of US aggression will ever again wonder why there are so many people in the world who believe in the justifiability or even necessity of violence against the US.
For those in London: there will be a special screening of Dirty Wars at the Frontline Club on April 12, followed by a Q-and-A session with Scahill (via Skype) and producer Anthony Arnove. Ticket and event information are here. The ACLU of Massachusetts is hosting a special screening in Boston on April 27. I'll post event information for that and other screening dates as they become available.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/31/dirty-wars-terrorism-victims
Source: http://robpattinson.blogspot.com/2013/03/old-hq-pic-of-rob-at-louis-vuitton-marc.html
