Hollywood – praag.org

Lesbians, Transgenders, Pedophile Priests will top Oscar Nominees

Get ready. This is going to be an interesting year at the Oscars.

The movies that are getting into position for Best Picture nominations are not “Driving Miss Daisy” material.

One of the leading candidates is “Spotlight,” Tom McCarthy’s exciting telling of how Boston Globe reporters unmasked 90 pedophile priests. The film has an all star cast including Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton and Liev Schreiber. They will all be contenders in the Best Supporting Acto race.

“Carol” is a love story about two lesbians in 1952 New York. Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara are the lovers, and their work is exceptional. Director Todd Haynes, the actresses, and cinematographer Ed Lachman will all be up for awards.

“Grandma” stars Lily Tomlin as a hippie grandmother, pot smoking lesbian who’s trying to help her granddaughter raise enough money for an abortion. Tomlin is absolutely sterling, and leads my list of potential Best Actress nominees.

Then there’s the transgender section: Eddie Redmayne plays a man who becomes a woman in “The Danish Girl.” Redmayne is absolutely spot on as he makes the transition with his loyal– and unusually understanding– wife (Alicia Vikander) by his side. Tom Hooper’s movie is exquisite.

I wouldn’t be surprised at all if five of the eight or nine Best Picture nominees include “Spotlight,” “The Danish Girl,” “Carol,” “Grandma,” and “Spotlight.” Whoever hosts the Academy Awards is going to have a lot of fun summarizing these films. Really, only Billy Crystal could pull off a proper parody of “The Danish Girl.”

Other potential Best Picture nominees will be less cutting edge sexually: “Bridge of Spies” from Steven Spielberg, “Steve Jobs” from Danny Boyle, Robert Zemeckis’s “The Walk,” Ridley Scott’s “The Martian,” and Quentin Tarantino’s “Hateful Eight” don’t involve gender issues.

Source: Showbiz411

GLAAD fails Sony, Disney on gay films

Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender characters may be showing up on American television with increasing regularity, but not enough, according to GLAAD.

In its third annual report about LGBT representation on film, the gay advocacy group GLAAD, found that of the 114 releases from the major studios in 2014, only 20 of them, or 17.5 percent, included characters identified as lesbian, gay or bisexual.

Grading the individual studios on their performance, GLAAD awarded a “good” to Warner Bros, an “adequate” to Fox, Lionsgate, Paramount and Universal and “failing” grades to Sony and Disney. No studio earned a grade of “excellent.”

The figure represented a slight increase from 2013, when 16.7 percent of studio releases were found to be inclusive. But many of the gay characters who appeared on screen in 2015 made only fleeting appearances.

“Of the 20 films we found to be inclusive,” the report, which was released today, said, “10 of those contained less than five minutes of screen time for their LGBT characters — with several being less than 30 seconds — while three others contained less than 10 minutes of screen time.

In the case of several films, audiences may not have been aware that they were seeing LGBT characters if they did not read outside press coverage or were unaware of the real-life LGBT person a character was based on.”

Among the inclusive films, the report found, 65 percent of them featured gay male characters, less than a third featured bisexuals and about one tenth included lesbian characters.

There was a slight increase in racial diversity with 32.1 percent of the characters being people of color, compared to 24 percent in 2013. Of the 28 characters GLAAD counted, 19 were white (67.9 percent), three were black/African-American (10.7 percent), two were Latin (7.1 percent), and four were Asian/Pacific Islander (14.3 percent).

“LGBT people were largely shut out of the genre films (action, sci-fi, fantasy), where Hollywood film studios commit the majority of their capital and promotional resources,” GLAAD said. Additionally, three of 13 animated/family films (23.1 percent), six of 33 dramas (18.2 percent) and none of the three documentaries contained LGBT characters.

Source: Hollywood Reporter

Russia bans Hollywood propaganda film

Russia on Wednesday cancelled the release of a Hollywood thriller set in the Stalin era on grounds it distorts history and would be shown as the country celebrates the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in WWII.

The film, “Child 44”, starring Tom Hardy, Vincent Cassel and Gary Oldman, tells the story of a serial killer who targets children in the Stalin era. It is based on a fantasy novel by British writer Tom Rob Smith and was due to premiere in Russia on Thursday.

Russia’s culture ministry said the film’s distributors in Russia, Central Partnership, had agreed to withdraw a request for a distribution licence after ministry officials viewed the film.

“Films such as ‘Child 44’ should not go out in our country on mass release, earning money from our cinema audiences, not in the year of the 70th anniversary of victory, not ever,” Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky wrote on the ministry’s website.

The move to effectively ban a major mainstream Hollywood film just a day before it was due to premiere was unprecedented.

In recent years, Russia has cracked down harshly on negative depictions of the Soviet Union during the Stalin era, while criticism of those who fought in World War II is frowned upon.

The culture ministry accused the film of “distortion of historical facts and the idiosyncratic treatment of events before, during and after” World War II.

Source: AFP

Hollywood star Mark Wahlberg haunted by racial incident from 30 years ago

Just 16 in 1988, the boy who would become film star Mark Wahlberg assaulted two Asian men while trying to steal two cases of beer from a convenience store.

More than 25 years later, Wahlberg, a devout Catholic and philanthropist, has made a much publicized — and much debated — request for a pardon for his crime.

But now, another of Wahlberg’s victims — not one of the Asian men, but an African American woman he attacked in 1986 — says the Commonwealth of Massachusetts shouldn’t forgive and forget hate crimes, even if they were committed by a movie star.

“I don’t think he should get a pardon,” Kristyn Atwood, 38, of Decatur, Ga., told the Associated Press. She was a Boston fourth grader on a field trip to the beach when Wahlberg and his partners-in-crime threw rocks and yelled racial epithets, including the n-word, at her and her classmates.

“I don’t really care who he is,” she said. “It doesn’t make him any exception. If you’re a racist, you’re always going to be a racist. And for him to want to erase it I just think it’s wrong. … It was a hate crime and that’s exactly what should be on his record forever.”

The attack left a scar, she said — and trauma that won’t fade even if the actor’s record is wiped clean.

“I was really scared,” Atwood told the AP. “My heart was beating fast. I couldn’t believe it was happening. The names. The rocks. The kids chasing.”

Wahlberg was not tried and convicted for this 1986 attack. Instead, a Boston judge issued a civil rights injunction against him and his friends; as the AP put it, “essentially a stern warning that if they committed another hate crime, they would be sent to jail.”

Unfortunately for Wahlberg, Judith Beals, the former Massachusetts assistant attorney general who sought that civil rights injunction, offered her thoughts on the actor’s pardon last week in a Boston Globe editorial called “Don’t Pardon Mark Wahlberg.”

“In the 13 years I served in the attorney general’s office, I recall only one instance of a defendant violating a civil rights injunction — Mark Wahlberg,” Beals wrote, saying his 1988 attack on the Asian men at the convenience store showed “the same tendency toward serial acts of racial violence.” She added: “Wahlberg has never acknowledged the racial nature of his crimes. Even his pardon petition describes his serial pattern of racist violence as a ‘single episode’ that took place while he was ‘under the influence of alcohol and narcotics.’ For a community that continues to confront racism and hate crime, we need acknowledgment and leadership, not denial.”

Indeed, Beals said a pardon would do little but indicate Wahlberg enjoys white privilege, undermining the actor’s work with at-risk youth: “A formal public pardon would highlight all too clearly that if you are white and a movie star, a different standard applies. Is that really what Wahlberg wants?”

Besides family members in business with the actor with the restaurant Wahlburgers — and, presumably, the cast of “Entourage” — there is at least one person in Wahlberg’s corner as he seeks his pardon: Hoa Trinh, one of the Asian men he attacked in 1988.

“I would like to see him get a pardon,” Trinh said. “He should not have the crime hanging over him any longer. … He paid for his crime when he went to prison. I am not saying that it did not hurt when he punched me in the face, but it was a long time ago.”

Russia considers US movie boycott amid sanctions, stereotyping

Is a new cold war brewing between Hollywood and Russia?

After a string of recent movies including The Avengers, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit and A Good Day to Die Hard featured Russian villains, a member of the country’s parliament has suggested outlawing foreign movies that “demonize Russia and Russians.” And on Sept. 17, top Russian director Yuri Kara called for a ban on U.S. films until it lifts sanctions imposed against Russia for annexing Crimea from Ukraine. “Hollywood would exert pressure on Obama, and he would lift the sanctions,” said Kara.

Another director, Stanislav Govorukhin, who was Russian president Vladimir Putin’s campaign chief in the election two years ago, also has spoken out in favor of restrictions on Hollywood fare. “I believe that it would be good to limit the presence of Hollywood movies on Russian screens,” he said Sept. 18 at a congress of All-Russian People’s Front, a pro-Kremlin organization, which he co-chairs.

Any limit on access to the Russian market would hurt Hollywood like never before. In 2013, Russia’s box office grew to $1.3 billion, becoming the world’s sixth-largest movie market. U.S. fare accounted for more than 75 percent of the total gross.

Curtailing U.S. movies might play well with Putin, but many in the Russian entertainment community aren’t fans of possible retaliation. “Hollywood movies create steady audience flow to theaters here, leading to more screens being opened in the country, which eventually helps Russian productions,” says Alexander Akopov, head of Moscow’s AMedia.

Russia’s public chamber has said it will consider the introduction of a 40 percent quota for Russian releases. Govorukhin believes Russian releases wouldn’t be able to fully replace Hollywood films as the local film industry only produces 60 features a year, so more films made “in countries with rich film cultures,” such as Turkey, Korea, Iran and Japan, should be released in Russia, as well as more European films, he says.

In addition to the U.S. sanctions against Russia, several high-profile portrayals have rankled nationalist pride.

In 2008, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was attacked by communists in St Petersburg for a “distorted depiction of the Soviet Union’s foreign policy in the 1950s” and “satirized and negative portrayal of Soviet soldiers.”

British actor Kenneth Branagh is among the latest in Hollywood’s long list of Russian screen villains, playing diabolical oligarch Viktor Cherevin hell bent on destroying America in the winter release Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. Other recent portrayals: A sadistic former KGB agent in The Avengers; bent Russian officials in A Good Day to Die Hard; a Russian-American loan shark in Limitless and even Russian missile space debris that destroys the US space station in Gravity.

“In some films, anti-social and sometimes anti-Russian rhetoric is present, confusing the younger generation,” the chamber’s first deputy secretary Vladislav Grib was quoted as saying on Sept. 24 by the Russian news agency ITAR-TASS. “At the same time, Russian pictures have a hard time reaching the screens and sometimes they are unable to do that at all,” he added.

Akopov believes a compromise is in order. “We understand that there is no way for Hollywood to stop portraying us as the bad guys,” he says. “We just advise that Hollywood add some balance and introduce some good Russian characters into their stories too. Apart from being fair and politically correct, this approach will also help keep screens open for Hollywood in the world’s sixth largest theatrical market.”

– The Hollywood Reporter

Hollywood couple face serious backlash over Gaza letter

Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem are reportedly facing a serious backlash from top Hollywood executives following their support for Gaza, which saw the couple sign an open letter condemning the actions of Israel as tantamount to “genocide”.

The couple were among 100 film professionals to sign the open Spanish letter calling on the European Union to end Israel’s military operation in Gaza, along with director Pedro Almodovar in July.

But their actions have sparked anger in top Hollywood executives, which has reportedly called their careers in to question.

The Spanish letter was signed by 100 leading figures in the film industry, including director Pedro Almodovar.

Other Hollywood big names have waded into the controversy, including comedian Joan Rivers. When quizzed by a TMZ reporter on her thoughts about the 2,000 Palestinians who have so far been killed, she said: “Oh my God! Tell that to the people in Hiroshima.

“Good. Good. When you declare war, you declare war. They started it. We now don’t count who’s dead. You’re dead, you deserve to be dead. Don’t you dare make me feel bad about that.

“They were told to get out. They didn’t get out. You don’t get out, you are an idiot. At least the ones that were killed were the ones with low IQs.”

Source: ibitimes

Hollywood: The No-Good, The Bad And The Beastly

by Ilana Mercer

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Glenn Close’s remarks, In Memoriam, at the 86th Academy Awards ceremony, captured the delusions of grandeur held by the “tarts and tards of Hollywood,” and helped by their fans.

The actress (or is it “actor”?) did not thank the dearly departed for merely entertaining the masses, which is all actors and directors are capable of doing. Oh no. Her deities were, instead, acknowledged for “mentoring us, challenging us, elevating us”; “they made us want to be better, and gave us a greater understanding of the human condition and the human heart,” language that should be reserved for the likes of Ayn Rand and Aristotle.

Where a motion picture has indeed transported anyone—it is because it cleaved to a decent script, usually a good book. “Gone With the Wind,” “Doctor Zhivago,” “Midnight Express,” and “Papillon,” are examples.

Still, Hollywood is quite capable of reducing great literature to schmaltzy jingles, belted out by shrill starlets. This was the fate of “Les Misérables,” last year. Lost in the din were a lot of lessons about “the human condition.” The Victor-Hugo masterpiece I read as a kid was about France’s unfathomably cruel and unjust penal system, and the prototypical obedient functionary who worked a lifetime to enforce the system’s depredations—a lot like the powers that hounded Aaron Swartz, the co-founder of Reddit.com, to death, in 2013, and are intent on doing the same to the heroic Edward Snowden.

The dead were deified, but what of the walking dead?

To the Chinese, who appreciate the value of experience, the greater the ratio in a team of “grey hairs and no-hairs” to “black hairs”—the faster and better a task will be completed. The opposite assumption obtains in the youth-obsessed U.S.

On the old, Hollywood performs professional geronticide.

Aging actors are put out to pasture, retired into buffoonish, badly scripted roles (“Nebraska”). The annual Oscar Awards will see at least one old actor trotted out (in 2011, the “distinction” went to Kirk Douglas) from retirement. From the sympathetic thunder clap received by Harrison Ford, 71, this year, I’d say he’s ready to be retired.

Yes, a silly society is a youth-obsessed society. Duly, a precocious kid actor will typically cameo. This year, viewers were spared the spectacle. Tykes did, however, twerk and twirl with the adults in a Pharrell Williams routine, conjuring the current crop of Walt Disney cartoon characters (“Rio 1”). Once-upon-a-time, our beloved cartoons were cute, innocent and mischievous. Think Disney’s Donald Duck, Warner Brothers’ Bugs-Bunny and Amblimation’s Fievel of “An American Tail” fame.

Alas, like The Kids, the animated characters that festoon film nowadays sound and act as if created by another Victor (Frankenstein), combining pixelated bits of the putrefying Bethenny Frankel, and some “Mob Wives,” “Real Housewives,” and “Dance Moms,” for good measure.

On the topic of body parts. Dance, in general, has also become more atavistic than artistic. Dance moves most energetically engage the rump and the reproductive region, as though choreographed to the rhythm of mating primates.

As for music, here too pimp culture has prevailed. Remember when the Obamas spiritual guide, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, attempted to illustrate how “African” music differed from “European” music? His voice dripping with envy, Wright mocked the cantata in an address before the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “Black music,” hissed Obama’s holy man, may be different to “white music,” but in no way was it deficient.

Wright needn’t torture himself over the fact that B.B. King is no match for Johann Sebastian Bach. Honky style harmonization—the controlled use of the human voice—that’s all dead, replaced with tribal primal screams, the kind emitted by one Idina Menzel, who ululated her way through a frightful number from “Frozen.”

Camelot culture has long since been usurped by pimp culture, because the latter is as easy as an American Girl Gone Wild on spring break. For her state dinners, Jackie Kennedy sought out the likes of the sublime mezzo-soprano Grace Bumbry and cellist Pablo Casals; the current White House promotes Mary J. Blige and squat-and-thrust Beyoncé.

The annual Academy Awards will invariably showcase some unfunny standup—almost, but not quite, as bad as the tomfoolery of Jimmy Fallon. Forgive another bloated digression, but what does the popularity of this whiteface minstrel show, starring the almost desperate, dancing, prancing, androgynous Fallon, say about America?

I’d venture that Fallon has been groomed to provide bread and circuses for Booboisie. Replacing Jay Leno’s hardly demanding political satire with a vaudeville of giggles, goofiness, mind-numbing banter and God-awful “music” comes with the “responsibility” to propagandize the same population.

And so it was that during Michelle Obama’s appearance on the Tonight Show set, as if on cue, one minute and fifty nine seconds in, dumb dweeb Fallon segues into an Obamacare promotional segment. Fallon’s lead was a signal to Sister Act. FLOTUS launched her own agitprop for her husband’s healthcare juggernaut.

Other than “Prisoners” (thrillers are my thing), there is not one film gushed over at the 86th Academy Awards that I’d watch. I was unable to endure more than 15 minutes of the first, much-ballyhooed “Hunger Games.” Allegories—libertarian, left or right—are cumbersome, inorganic and artificial, all the more so when dreamt-up by Hollywood dumb-asses.

As a kid, I recall trying to divine (while reading subtitles) the agonized themes and symbolism in the work of the Nordic Chekhov, Ingmar Bergman. Like director Quentin Tarantino’s fetish with actress Uma Thurman, Bergman’s muse was the lovely Liv Ullmann. The duo tortured their viewers, but this director’s work was never labored; the plot was not beyond the ken of a curious kid. More in the league of Federico Fellini, Bergman was way too sophisticated to be compared to the creator of “Hunger Games,” whoever he is.

Prequels and sequels, Steve Sailer has settled the score on “Hunger Games”: “Like the Twilight series, Suzanne Collins’s ‘The Hunger Games’ young-adult novels are aimed at 12-year-old female readers. This puts the movies squarely in the intellectual wheelhouse of average Americans, a sizable fraction of whom don’t read much at all.”

Oddly enough, the most marked artistic deterioration in celluloid is due to computer-generated imagery, used in most all genres: action, adventure and event films. When compared to the on-set props of yesteryear’s films, computerized special effects appear cheap and fake.

The computer-generated presentation transports this viewer no further than her local video-game arcade.

The best special effects were achieved in the old disaster-film productions: “Towering Inferno,” “Earthquake,” the “Airport” movies, and the original “Poseidon Adventure”, where a real model ship was recreated. (Just imagine: Poseidon’s original hero, played by Gene Hackman, was a priest who struggled with his faith!)

The authentic experience afforded in these films was owed not to a computer program, but to real props built on set and to the stuntmen who manned them. (And who can forget the on-camera war-paint wizardry of Dick Smith, in “The Exorcist” and “Taxi Driver”?)

Finally, please stand up and be counted if you flocked to see Lupita Nyong perform reruns of “Roots.”

She was a sartorial dream-come-true, in pale blue, but I’m no more inclined to turn to Lupita, in “12 Years A Slave,” for entertainment, than I am to subject myself to Oprah Winfrey and her M.O.P.E. (Most Oppressed Person Ever) “Butler.”

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Hollywood says US is embarrassing

Despite the botched launch of Obamacare, the United States as a whole, because of its opposition to the health-care law and support of gun rights, is still more of an embarrassment than the president, said Hollywood executive Harvey Weinstein. He also asserted that then-senator Obama wouldn’t have been “beating” on George W. Bush if Bush had rolled out a dysfunctional program as president.

Weinstein, a big donor to the president, downplayed the problems with Obamacare’s implementation and the misleading promise that Americans could keep their insurance plans, saying that Obama “made a mistake — he’s human.”

“This is the only country in the world where we don’t have a health-care,” he told CNN’s Piers Morgan over the weekend “Countries embarrass us around the world — this is the only country in the world where we don’t have a gun law.”

“Obama’s not embarrassing — the country’s embarrassing,” he said. – nationalreview.com

Europeans and Americans, Afrikaners and English

by Dan Roodt

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I have just read an interesting article by Matthew Contessini, claiming that Europeans are “more pro-white than Americans”. The piece is full of speculative insights that may not ultimately survive scrutiny, but does identify some elements undermining Western/European culture and others supporting it.

I think Anglo-Saxon culture is to some extent a victim of its own success. Many people learn English and Third Worlders especially are attracted to it as a source of power and economic prowess. British colonialism anglicised India and most of Africa. In order to maintain itself, the Empire must ultimately assume the complexion, literally and figuratively, of its inhabitants. The whole chicken tikka masala debate started by Robin Cook in 2001 is relevant here. According to Cook, the ethnic homogeneity that Britain enjoyed in the Victorian era is an illusion and “(t)he diversity of modern Britain expressed through devolution and multiculturalism is more consistent with the historical experience of our islands”.

South Africa, even more than Britain, is a country in search of its own identity. Will there be any whites left in this country in fifty years’ time? Whites are legislated against by government and attacked by black criminals. Yet English-speaking whites mostly see a solution in “better law enforcement”, “better education” and “making multiculturalism work”. Taking their cue from “chicken tikka masala Britain”, they wish to be part of a global Anglo-Saxon empire where “diversity” is celebrated. The same goes for those Afrikaners who live in mostly English-speaking areas of South Africa, some of whom send their children to English private schools (although this phenomenon is also declining).

On the other hand, Afrikaners who remain true to their language and traditions see separatism, the pursuit of a so-called “volkstaat” or ethnic state as the sole solution to the problems of white survival. Over the past two years or so, most Afrikaner organisations, sometimes meeting secretly, have endorsed the pursuit of self-determination as the only viable survival strategy.

It seems that, ultimately, having a universal culture beamed to the whole world via Hollywood and global corporations, becomes a handicap as it creates the impression that you are a master of your own destiny whereas in fact you are not. To some extent, English in South Africa has become a black language because all English institutions such as universities, state schools, media, etc., have been taken over by blacks. Despite twenty years of affirmative action, forced integration, and so on, there are still many Afrikaans state schools that are 95% white, to the frustration of the authorities. Ironically, liberal whites such as Helen Zille or Barbara Creecy, the provincial education minister of Gauteng, are more hostile to these schools than blacks and are trying their utmost to have them declared illegal.

The point that Matthew Contessini makes about Europeans’ sense of kinship is important too. A year ago, a columnist for the London Financial Times, Simon Kuper, wrote scathingly about his visits to South Africa, saying:

One Christmas about 30 years ago we left Johannesburg on a bus trip to a safari park. All the other people in the bus were Afrikaners: big healthy white families in shorts. With their handful of surnames, and heavy Dutch faces utterly distinct from their African surroundings, they were a tribe.”

The “handful of surnames” he is referring to are the Dutch and French surnames that we have kept and that have been Afrikanerised over the centuries. We can tell immediately by surname if someone is “one of us” or not. As Kuper, who is generally not sympathetic to Afrikaners, admits, that makes us a “white tribe”.

On Thursday night I attended a poetry reading at my children’s high school. It breaks one’s heart to see all those talented, clever children emerging into adulthood, able to write, to compose, to think, to reason, but who have one handicap: they are white in a black world. What will become of them? Will they be overwhelmed with “diversity” and simply get assimilated, or will they survive as white Afrikaners, bearers of our language and culture?

I think Southern identity in the US has the same potential to unite at least some Americans around an ideal. Often defeat, as during the Civil War or our Anglo-Boer War, leads to loss of territory but can create a more enduring sense of identity even stronger and more valuable than territory which depends so much on demography and military power. I think as Western populations decline world-wide, we have to accept that we are going to lose vast tracts of land to others. The trick will be to keep our sense of who we are and where we come from. Teaching our children about European art history and philosophy is as important as teaching them our language and literature.

Not that territory is unimportant, but this is as much a struggle for identity as it is for anything else.

The most horrifying aspect of all is that American military might, created by a vast army of Western scientists and engineers, will ultimately fall into the hands of the imperial multiculturalists, a mixed-race America, who will use it to oppress and persecute whites globally. South Africa is a precedent for this, as the ANC is using the power of the formerly white state and its institutions, including its highly efficient revenue-gathering capability, to wage identity war against whites.

The future ownership of the US military-industrial complex is therefore of concern to us all. The sooner Europeans realise this too, the better.

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Hollywood facing crisis with huge flops

Analysts are predicting that R.I.P.D, starring Jeff Bridges and Ryan Reynolds, will become the fourth big film in as many weeks to underperform. Hollywood is facing a summer crisis after an unprecedented series of films with budgets of more than $100 million flopped at the box office.

The costliest failure so far has been The Lone Ranger, starring Johnny Depp, which cost $250 million (£165 million) to make, and had a huge marketing budget. It was savaged by critics as a “bloated, unfunny, sometimes downright bizarre train wreck” amid a “summer of garbage blockbusters.”

Disney may have to write off up to $150 million losses on the movie, which was largely ignored by cinemagoers despite being released over the July 4 holiday weekend. It took in just $29 million that weekend in North America, losing out heavily to the animated comedy Despicable Me 2.

White House Down, starring Jamie Foxx and Channing Tatum, took just $25 million on the June 28 weekend, while Pacific Rim, a story of alien monsters, while praised by many critics, still brought in only $38 million over the July 11 weekend. More people went to see the Adam Sandler comedy Grown Ups 2.

R.I.P.D, a $130 million science fiction film about police officers fighting villains in the afterlife, is predicted to take in only around $20 million this weekend.

To be considered successful, blockbusters aim to take in about half their budget over the first weekend.
The movie is being released at the same time as Red 2, a tale of retired hitmen starring Bruce Willis and Dame Helen Mirren, which is expected to split the audience.

The series of big budget disappointments has come just a month after Steven Spielberg warned that Hollywood was facing a “meltdown” because of its over-reliance on blockbusters.

Speaking at the University of Southern California in June, Spielberg predicted “an implosion where three or four, or maybe even a half dozen, mega-budget movies are going to go crashing into the ground.”

Analysts said the failures were partly a result of competing studios trying to release too many big movies at the same time. There are more than 20 films with a budget of more than $100 million being released this summer, six more than last year.

The studios have ploughed resources in to so-called “tent pole” films, which are accompanied by costly marketing, and are expected to make large profits. But, to do so, they all need to arrive in cinemas over the summer months.

Until late June, Hollywood had been on course for a record summer, following the success of early hits including Iron Man 3, Star Trek Into Darkness. and Fast & Furious 6.

However, as fatigue set in with audiences the movie industry entered what has been labelled the “dud zone,” in which big releases have fared less impressively than lower budget productions. A slew of expensive films remain to be released in late July and August.

One exasperated studio head told The Hollywood Reporter: “You had too many $100 million-plus movies, not to mention $200 million-plus movies, jammed on top of each other. There isn’t enough play time, and the result has been more movies that wipe out.” – The Daily Telegraph

Spielberg predicts implosion of Hollywood

Steven Spielberg on Wednesday predicted an “implosion” in the film industry is inevitable, whereby a half dozen or so $250 million movies flop at the box office and alter the industry forever. What comes next — or even before then — will be price variances at movie theaters, where “you’re gonna have to pay $25 for the next Iron Man, you’re probably only going to have to pay $7 to see Lincoln.” He also said that Lincoln came “this close” to being an HBO movie instead of a theatrical release.

George Lucas agreed that massive changes are afoot, including film exhibition morphing somewhat into a Broadway play model, whereby fewer movies are released, they stay in theaters for a year and ticket prices are much higher. His prediction prompted Spielberg to recall that his 1982 film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial stayed in theaters for a year and four months.

The two legendary filmmakers, along with CNBC anchor Julia Boorstin and Microsoft president of interactive entertainment business Don Mattrick, were speaking at the University of Southern California as part of the festivities surrounding the official opening of the Interactive Media Building, three stories high and part of the USC School of Cinematic Arts.

Lucas and Spielberg told USC students that they are learning about the industry at an extraordinary time of upheaval, where even proven talents find it difficult to get movies into theaters. Some ideas from young filmmakers “are too fringe-y for the movies,” Spielberg said. “That’s the big danger, and there’s eventually going to be an implosion — or a big meltdown. There’s going to be an implosion where three or four or maybe even a half-dozen megabudget movies are going to go crashing into the ground, and that’s going to change the paradigm.”

Lucas lamented the high cost of marketing movies and the urge to make them for the masses while ignoring niche audiences. He called cable television “much more adventurous” than film nowadays.

“I think eventually the Lincolns will go away and they’re going to be on television,” Lucas said. “As mine almost was,” Spielberg interjected. “This close — ask HBO — this close.”

“We’re talking Lincoln and Red Tails — we barely got them into theaters. You’re talking about Steven Spielberg and George Lucas can’t get their movie into a theater,” Lucas said. “I got more people into Lincoln than you got into Red Tails,” Spielberg joked.

Spielberg added that he had to co-own his own studio in order to get Lincoln into theaters.

“The pathway to get into theaters is really getting smaller and smaller,” Lucas said.

Mattrick and Spielberg also praised Netflix, prompting Boorstin to ask Spielberg if he planned to make original content for the Internet streamer. “I have nothing to announce,” said the director.

Lucas and Spielberg also spoke of vast differences between filmmaking and video games because the latter hasn’t been able to tell stories and make consumers care about the characters. Which isn’t to say the two worlds aren’t connected. Spielberg, in fact, has teamed with Microsoft to make a “TV” show for Xbox 360 based on the game Halo and he is making a movie based on the Electronic Arts game Need for Speed.

Erotic novel will feature Barack and Michelle Obama

obamabeyonce — Faux, the American way. Beyoncé and the First lady exchange air kisses

Hollywood has finally totally invaded American politics.

A forthcoming erotic novel being described as “fan fiction” will feature the first couple as protagonists-in-chief. According to Pop Culture Public Relations, the firm representing the book’s publisher, the novel, a version of a “personalizable” erotic tome, will be printed with the first couple’s names in it and available online at no cost on January 28. In an e-mail circulated yesterday, Pop Culture PR wrote, “Barack and Michelle Obama Star in This Erotic, Romantic Novel.”

Surely American literature will reach new heights with the publication of GuestHouse Games, in which the Obamas, “alone in their isolated beachfront guesthouse in the tropical paradise of Kailua, Hawaii,” are “drawn into the ancient Hawaiian spiritual world and into the exploration of their own deepest and most forbidden desires.”

It looks like you’ll have to read the whole thing to find out why they’re staying in the guest house as opposed to the main residence, among other mysteries.

uStarNovels, the publisher of this pioneering work, describes itself as a purveyor of “specially crafted original erotica and erotic romance” featuring “characters that are relatable for everyone” and “experiences that are credible.” Chris Matthews, brace yourself for more thrills up your leg.

President Obama’s inauguration ceremony meanwhile was full of fashion moments, which included his wife’s new wig. But Beyonce’s earrings made for one of the most sensational details.

The star sang the National Anthem out with a pair of dazzling emeralds at her ears, worth a cool $1.8million, according to designer Lorraine Schwartz.

The bright green hue was hardly noticed under her loose blonde waves.

A representative for the designer confirmed the price and said “These earrings were perfect for Beyonce because they are modern and classic just like she is!”

Fashion pundits gave Michelle’s new do a don’t, though.

Post Racial? Hollywood didn’t get the memo

The movie industry really has me, Roschelle, second guessing this post racial era we’ve been living in since the last presidential election. Hollywood. The industry is viewed by many as the most progressively liberal set of folks (producers, directors, movie stars, etc.) you ever want to meet. But they are not post-racial enough.

What do Robert DeNiro, Ron Perlman, Tyne Daly, Cuba Gooding, Jr., Justin Chambers, George Lucas, Halle Berry, Sidney Poitier, James Earl Jones, and Alfre Woodard all have in common? All these Hollywood heavy hitters have husbands/wives/significant others to someone of a different race than their own.

I’ll use the black white dichotomy for this argument. Although, the same applies regarding other races and ethnic groups.

You see the thing is out of every actor or actress I mentioned with the exception of Halle Berry none of these stars have been in a role that would have their love interest, mate or spouse someone of another race.

Sure Sidney Poitier ruffled a few feathers in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. It was too much for many people to take in. Taboo. Unthinkable. And I guess that still applies today.

I certainly consider myself a movie buff. So, if my knowledge of movies is too limited and I’ve overlooked a blockbuster that depicted an interracial relationship worthy of mention please let me know. I hardly think Billy Bob banging Halle or Denzel with his part time lover in Training Day (oh, how I hated that movie) make the grade.

I’m not asking to be subjected to another typical racially charged plot. The interracial couple and all the challenges they face in a society that’s, for the most part, completely unaccepting of their relationship and spend the next 120 minutes of the movie making their lives miserable. That’s just more of the same. And with all due respect, we’re past all that stuff anyway. This is post racial America!

It’s as if Hollywood frowns on this reality as much as some of us. Harrison Ford, Brad Pitt, Anthony Hopkins could never come home to a woman of color and sit around the dinner table with their biracial children, get a good night’s sleep and wake the next morning to begin a family vacation that ends in disaster…or a wholesome made for TV movie about family life in the Midwest…or be the parents of the next guy who battles the Decepticons along with the Transformers.

Gabrielle Union, Lynn Whitfield, Thandie Newton, and Cicely Tyson would never be viewed as authentic as they kissed their white mate good bye as he went off to foil some terrorist plot, pull off a big jewelry heist, coach a bunch of misfits into the winniest team in high school football history or save the planet from aliens!

I understand that movies have to be seen and gross mega bucks to be considered blockbusters or worthy of the little gold statue by the Academy. Is that the problem? Are the execs fearful that releasing these types of movies might land them in the soup line?

Life isn’t cookie cutter. Love isn’t monochromatic nor are those we choose to love. Black people love white people and brown people love yellow people and yellow people love red people.

The entertainment industry owe it to us to be true to the ideology of mixing. Maybe even help make the idea of interracial relationships less foreign by changing the humdrum family dynamics found in just about every movie I’ve ever seen. Or am I being unrealistic?