A “hurt and angry” Britney Spears is reportedly writing coloring a tell-all book about her exes, Kevin Federline and Justin Timberlake. You know this is going to be good.
A source says Justin, in particular, “will be pissed” when he hears about the yet to be published autobiography.
“Britney blames most of her problems with drugs and alcohol on the heartache she experienced years before, during her time with Justin - she couldn’t trust him … She also felt he became mean toward the end of their relationship, she said he called her fat and told her she’d need to lose weight before he would have sex with her.”
“Stage mum” Lynne won’t get off lightly either.
“She’ll say Lynne’s money hungry and that she was just along for the free ride. Britney thinks of her as a meddling, smothering person and blames her for her messy marriages.”
It will probably end up as a Pop-up book, reeking of Cheetos and Axe Body Spray. That’s funny!
There are few things Stephen King hasn’t tried when it comes to his work. He’s already the master of horror fiction, a tour guide through disturbing and fantastical worlds, a writing coach, a nonfiction author, a screen writer and even a director.
Now… he claims comic books.
He can now claim a new genre with the recent Marvel Entertainment comics publication “The Dark Tower,” based on his books of the same name.
“I’m a big fan of the medium,” King said of comic books. “A different way to tell stories is always exciting. It’s like being a kid with a chemistry set.”
It’s not that he’s a comic book buff. In fact, he hasn’t really kept tabs on the medium since his “Sandman” days as a child. But when the idea came up to make his seven-book “Dark Tower” series into a comic serial, he jumped at the chance.
The time is right for the collaboration, as both the genre and the author are being showered with critical and academic success like never before. These days, comic books aren’t just for gangly teenage boys or geeky adults, and King isn’t just a grocery store paperback writer.
“It asks something more of the reader than an old ‘Donald Duck’ or an ‘Archie’ or ‘Veronica,”‘ King says of the new comic. “You have to learn how to read it, and find out you’re going to be challenged.”
The “Dark Tower” is part Western, part fantasy and part adventure, centering on the story of Roland Deschain, a man who lives in a futuristic kind of world, and his quest to find the “Man in Black” and later on, the dark tower.
King calls it his life’s work - it took him nearly 20 years to complete the series, the final book was published in 2004. But unlike myriad other King stories, it’s never been made into a film or TV show.
Assassinated, in fact, as he walks into a federal courthouse in New York, under arrest and in handcuffs, headed to his arraignment for refusing to sign the government’s Superhero Registration Act and forcibly revealing his true identity.
It all happens in the latest edition of Marvel Comics, which hit newsstands on Wednesday.
A sniper, firing a high-powered rifle from a rooftop, hits the famed red, white and blue leader of the Avengers with three bullets and escapes the scene, leaving the weapon behind Oswald-style, as police and Captain America’s military escort cope with chaos in the streets.
What does this mean? Can the pulverizing patriot really be dead, shot down on the courthouse steps after 66 years of battling villains from Adolf Hitler to the Red Skull? Will the killer or killers be captured?
The only way to find out, says Dan Buckley, president and publisher of Marvel Entertainment, is to “read the book” as the story line unfolds. Buckley will not divulge details of what he describes as “really cool plot twists,” but does not rule out the possibility that Captain America is not really dead or is somehow resurrected. “When you live in a world of make-believe, a lot of things are possible,” he said in a telephone interview.
In any case, readers should not necessarily despair. After all, this is not the first time Captain America was presumed dead. In the last days of World War II, his alter-ego, the former arts student Steve Rogers, was believed killed by a bomb aboard an experimental pilot-less plane, only to have been found later, frozen in a cake of ice, by Sub-Mariner (remember him?).
[...]
Captain America was an early member of the pantheon of comic book heroes that began with Superman in the 1930s. He landed on newsstands in March 1941, nine months before Pearl Harbor — delivering a a punch to Hitler on the cover of his first issue, a sock-in-the-jaw reminder that there was a war on and the United States was not involved. Since then, Marvel Entertainment Inc., has sold more than 200 million copies of Captain America magazine in 75 countries.
In the most recent story line, he became involved in a superhero “civil war,” taking up sides against former buddy Iron Man in the registration controversy, climaxed by his arrest and assassination.
Killing off comic book heroes, only to bring them back again, is a time-honored gimmick in the business. Unless sales have sunk so low as to make the book no longer profitable, I’m sure Cap will be Back.
“This is the end of Steve Rogers, the meat and potatoes guy from 1941,” Dan Buckley, president and publisher of publishing, Marvel Entertainment, told Reuters. “But Captain America is a costume, and there are other people who could take it over. He is iconic, and we’re continuing the comic books,” he added. But he declined to speculate who could step into the hero’s 66-year-old boots.
He said the continuing comic series would initially be focused on the reaction of other characters to Captain America’s death.
This was similar to the death of Superman in 1993, when the leading superhero of Marvel rival D.C. Comics was killed off after about 55 years — only to be brought back months later.
Captain America has appeared in about 210 million comics in 75 countries, but currently his title sells up to 80,000 copies a month in the United States, down from about 150,000 in their heyday.
Unlike other comic heroes such as Spider-Man, Superman, Batman and the Fantastic Four, the Captain has yet to win Hollywood fame, though Buckley said there are plans for a Captain America movie. “He is still popular, but he has not been getting the same attention as Spider-Man and others,” said Buckley. “We hope this will make him more popular in the short-term at least.”
Andy Khouri has an excellent roundup of mainstream media reaction at the Comic Book Resource.
News broke this morning of the death of Marvel Comics superhero Captain America in issue #25 of the character’s monthly series, which shipped today to comic stores everywhere. Interestingly, the story has been covered by numerous mainstream media outlets including CBS News and CNN, operations not known for their coverage of comic book storylines.
“Captain America Killed Outside Courthouse” read the headline on CBSNews.com’s Entertainment section.
“Captain America Killed!” screamed the headline on page 3 of the New York Daily News.
“Comic Book Superhero Captain America Dies on the Page,” said the AP, whose story was run in too many places to count, such as ABC News.
Banner headline on page 3 of today’s edition of The New York Daily News
Few of these articles are particularly substantive, with most giving little to no context at all as to the fictional circumstances of Captain America’s death, reporting only that he’s died. Nevertheless, that so many such articles exist at all is quite remarkable for the small comics industry, and will certainly remind long-time comic fans of the media attention generated by DC Comics’ “Death of Superman” event in 1992. “Superman” #75, while similarly controversial amongst longtime readers, sold a great many comic books and gave new and returning fans a place to begin reading stories of the DC Universe. Written by Ed Brubaker and illustrated by Steve Epting, “Captain America” #25 is clearly designed to be accessible by everyone and achieve the same goal for Marvel Comics.
“There is a lot to be read in there. But I’m not one who is going to tell people, this is what you should read into it, because I could look into it and read several different types of messages,” Marvel Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada said in a taped interview with CNN, who, unlike other mainstream news sources, actually began their article with a spoiler warning and included a recap of the events of “Civil War.”
These are apparently the two alternate covers of (vol. 5) issue #25:
An Air Force staff sergeant who posed nude for Playboy magazine has been relieved of her duties while the military investigates, officials said Thursday.
In February’s issue, hitting newsstands this week, Michelle Manhart is photographed in uniform yelling and holding weapons under the headline “Tough Love.” The following pages show her partially clothed, wearing her dog tags while working out, as well as completely nude.
“This staff sergeant’s alleged action does not meet the high standards we expect of our airmen, nor does it comply with the Air Force’s core values of integrity, service before self, and excellence in all we do,” Oscar Balladares, spokesman for Lackland Air Force Base, said in a statement.
Manhart told Playboy that she considers herself as standing up for her rights. “Of what I did, nothing is wrong, so I didn’t anticipate anything, of course,” Manhart, 30, told The Associated Press. “I didn’t do anything wrong, so I didn’t think it would be a major issue.”
Manhart, who is married with two children, joined the Air Force in 1994, spending time in Kuwait in 2002. She trains airmen at Lackland.
It’s rather difficult to be taken seriously as a military leader after appearing naked in a porno mag. That someone who has been in the Air Force thirteen years can’t figure this out is incredible. And the only reason a 30-year-old mother of two is in Playboy to begin with is because of the novelty of her being in (and out) of uniform.
She has a MySpace page with numerous photos. She has her clothes on in all of them.
Okay, so maybe her Air Force affiliation isn’t the only reason Playboy was interested. Still, what was she thinking?
UPDATE:Steven Taylor wonders whether “investigating, and likely castigating, someone over nude photos is a good use of time and resources” given the military’s recruiting issues.
The Silver Surfer will make his live action debut in the second installment of the Fantastic Four movie franchise, USA Today’s Arienne Thompson reports.
In June, the Silver Surfer jumps from page to screen in The Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.
With computer-generated imagery techniques similar to those used to create Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, the slippery Surfer, voiced by Doug Jones, “will look somewhere between gun metal and fluid metallics so you can see the body motion, the breathing, the muscle tone, the mood,” says Marvel Studios CEO Avi Arad.
The Surfer’s mood is key to the story. After striking a deal with the evil Galactus to save his planet, the once-human Surfer wreaks havoc throughout the cosmos. “He is a highly emotional being, trapped inside fluid metal,” Arad says.
Audiences will get a first look at the Silver Surfer this weekend in trailers before Night at the Museum.
Cool. The Surfer was long one of the more interesting Marvel supporting characters, although not one able to carry a book (or movie) on his own.
The next Star Trek movie is under development, reports Robert Hyde from ComicCon.
As more and more revelations come out of this years Comic-Con here’s some news that we all wanted to know was true as the rumours have been flying around for ages, Star Trek XI will be with us in 2008 and here’s the poster to prove it.
JJ Abrams who has had a hit this year with the Tom Cruise vehicle Mission:Impossible III is on board as producer and writer, although it’s not been revealed yet if he will direct or allow someone else that honour. Recent internet rumblings have suggested that he will write a story that goes back to Kirk and Spocks academy days, but these have been denied in the past.
Whatever happens is good to see that Paramount have handed the series over to some capable hands, and that they are not going to rush release a film to the market next year, a 2008 release date means that a lot of thought can go into the production and hopefully bring the flagging series back to a place where it sat in the 80’s and 90’s.
Warner is releasing a boxed set of the Christopher Reeve Superman movies in November that will feature a radically different version of “Superman II” and a 2001 “Director’s Cut” of the first film.
On the heels of “Superman Returns” storming the box office, the four original “Superman” movies starring Christopher Reeve are set to get the special DVD treatment.
The highlight of the November 28 DVD rollout: “Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut,” a revised version of the controversial 1980 sequel as it originally was conceived and intended to be filmed by director Richard Donner, who also shot the 1978 original. Donner was fired midway through the shoot and replaced by Richard Lester, who gave the film more of a comic bent. The version of the film being prepared for the DVD features Donner’s original footage, shot but never used, including a never-before-seen beginning, a different ending and 15 minutes of Marlon Brando as Jor-El in key scenes that probe deeper into Superman lore and further the relationship between father and son.
Donner shot most of the “Superman II” footage while he was filming “Superman: The Movie.” But as production on the sequel continued, friction between the director and the film’s producers led to his dismissal. Lester was hired to finish the shoot but wound up making substantial changes.
[...]
The four-disc “Superman: The Movie” includes two versions of the movie: The 1978 theatrical original and the 2001 director’s cut.
A very interesting concept. I’d be interested in seeing the Donner version but it’s rather odd to have two totally different versions of the same movie. Indeed, I’m generally skeptical of the “Director’s Cut” and other special versions of the movie that make it to DVD, since part of the idea of owning a movie is recapturing the theatrical experience.
This, of course, also brings to mind the “Free Hat” episode of “South Park” which spoofed changes to classic films made by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Here’s a few excerpts on video via YouTube:
Andreia Schwartz gives new meaning to the phrase “high priced call girl.”
The Brazilian bombshell accused of running a million-dollar call girl ring out of her midtown condo told cops her two biggest sugar daddies paid her a total $250,000 for sex, it was revealed yesterday.
But money aside, Andreia Schwartz said she’d rather sleep with women than her newly revealed benefactor Robert Voccola, a 68-year-old money manager, or her other supposed paramour, Time Warner Chief Financial Officer Wayne Pace. “I wouldn’t have kept having sex with [Pace] or any of these guys if they weren’t paying me,” Schwartz said in a statement unveiled yesterday during her arraignment in Manhattan Supreme Court. “I don’t do guys for money anymore,” she told cops. “I only do girls.”
Schwartz, 31, who pleaded not guilty to prostitution, selling drugs and money laundering, told cops shortly after her arrest that Pace and Voccola were helping pay her bills. “I got up to $200,000 … from just one guy, who worked for AOL, in cash, mortgage payments, checks and other things,” Schwartz said in an apparent reference to Pace.
Life wasn’t quite as lucrative with Voccola, the chief investment officer of Barrett Associates, Schwartz said. “We have sex once or twice a week over the past year and a half,” she said. “He’s given me about $50,000 a year in cash, mortgage payments, checks and other things. He also gave me a credit card and financial advice, telling me where to invest.”
Prosecutors also revealed that U.S. Customs was probing Schwartz after they caught her bringing wads of cash into the country. “She has grossly underreported her income,” Assistant District Attorney John (Artie) McConnell said. “She should expect additional charges.”
One would hope. It’s bad enough to overcharge guys for sex without then demeaning them in public. She’s an attractive woman and all that but, geez, a quarter mil?
Sadly, these smallish non-nude photos are all I could dig up:
My wife and I went to the 10:00 p.m. showing of “Superman Returns” last night. No real spoilers below for any who have seen any of the pre-release publicity but my review is hidden after the jump just in case.
Overall, it was an enjoyable movie but not one that lived up to the hype, let alone an eighteen year wait. It wasn’t nearly as good as most of the other superhero movies that have come out over the last few years.
Bryan Singer is an excellent director but his X-Men films were far superior to this one. The special effects were excellent, especially compared to the Christopher Reeve “Superman” films, but nothing special in comparison to the X-Men, Spiderman, and Fantastic Four movies. The plot moved very slowly, with long setups for a rather mundane story.
The premise of the movie is that our hero departed five years earlier to explore Krypton after its remains were discovered by astronomers. Yet, all we learn of that trip is that the planet was “a graveyard.” Why, then, was he gone five years? One would think a man who can fly at light speed could have explored a barren planet and returned home in time for dinner. No explanation is offered.
The Fortress of Solitude as crystals from Krypton angle, one of the most annoying aspects of the Reeve “Superman” series given its departure from the comics (although since woven into the two television adaptations) is central to the plot of this film. That the crystals can be easily removed by human hands and dumped into water — “like sea monkeys!” — with literally Earth shattering effect struck me as highly implausible. And Luthor’s motivations for a plan that would kill “billions,” including destroying the wealth of the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, were at best puzzling. How, exactly, he hoped to get rich with those people gone, especially living out on a barren Kryptonian-technology-laden island, was unexplained.
Singer is obviously a comic book fan and there were numerous clever homages to the genre throughout the movie. Not only did Brandon Routh look eerily like Reeve, especially in his Clark Kent guise–down to a 1970s haircut and outdated three piece suit and tie–but he worked in most of the standard cliches and even evoked the cover of Action Comics #1, where Superman made his debut.
Routh did a creditable turn as Superman and Clark Kent, although nothing spectacular. For my tastes, Reeve’s was the best “Superman” portrayal and Dean Cain’s (”Lois and Clark”) the best “Clark Kent.” (Tom Welling’s “Smallville” version is also compelling but a radical departure from the canon.)
Kate Bosworth was an excellent Lois Lane, portraying the role more powerfully than Margot Kidder. Mostly, I suspect, this is just a function of it being 2006, where a strong professional woman can be played effortlessly, vice 1978, where one had to introduce a campy “women’s libber” angle. She’s also, frankly, much better looking than Kidder, although perhaps no Teri Hatcher.
Kevin Spacey stole the show with his variation on Lex Luthor. His interpretation is much more theatrical than past versions, borrowing somewhat from Jack Nicholson’s Joker. He had several great lines and pulled off the role superbly. It’s been too long since I’ve seen the Gene Hackman version to compare them. It seems clear, though, that the Luthor role is the premier one in the Superman stable. Michael Rosenbaum’s portrayal in “Smallville” is probably my favorite, just in terms of showing the man’s brilliance and complexity, but it’s not fair to compare a 2-1/2 hour film with an episodic format.
Parker Posey was also quite funny in her portrayal of Kitty Kowalski, Luthor’s nitwit girl Friday. Like Valerie Perrine in the Reeve movies, though, one wondered why Luthor would consort with such an obviously stupid woman. Indeed, more so given Perrine’s rather obvious compensating qualities.
Overall, I’d say the movie is worth seeing in the theater but certainly not worth camping out overnight for. It’s a cultural event moreso than an ordinary movie, just because of the character’s staying power–now going on 70 years. If this were the debut of Superman, though, I don’t think he would catch on.
SUPERMAN’S motto, “Truth, justice and the American way,” has been rewritten in the new “Superman Returns” to “Truth, justice and . . . all that stuff.” Jeannie Wolf reports on Movies.com that screenwriters Mike Dougherty and Dan Harris wanted to avoid outdated jingoism. Dan: “I don’t think ‘the American way’ means what it meant in 1945.” Mike: “He’s not just for Metropolis and not just for America.” Dan: “He’s an alien, from Krypton; he has come to Earth to be kind of a savior for this world, not our country . . . And he has no papers.” Mike: “What would happen with the immigration laws we have now?” Dan: “I’d like to see someone kick him out!”
Lovely. I understand the sentiment–Superman has been saving the (fictitious) world (he fictitiously inhabits) for decades. Still, it’s just wrong somehow.
Via “Tyler Durden,” who is somewhat less understanding.
After all the recent hubbub about the kinky sex lives of X-Men actresses Halle Berry, Rebecca Romijn, and Anna Paquin (actually, there’s nothing kinky about Paquin’s sex life that I’m aware of, but that doesn’t mean we’re not talking about it) it turns out Fantastic 4 star Jessica Alba has a whipped cream fetish.
In the midst of a wide-ranging interview, wherein she notes that she plans to see “X-Men 3,” reveals that “Fantastic Four 2″ starts shooting in August, and that her “character, Susan Storm, has another love triangle and may use a power people haven’t seen before,” we get this stunning revelation:
I like whipped cream a lot. I’ll put whipped cream on anything.
Now, granted, this is in response to the question, “You always look awesome. How do you keep those Alba abs?” It could simply be construed as a dietary tip and nothing kinky. But, work with me here people, it could be much more provocative than that.
Also, we learn that,
Bikinis are more flattering on my body. I wore jean shorts to the beach when I was a teenager. I was an insecure teenager and a born-again Christian hanging out with a group of kids that made me feel bad about showing my body. But I learned I shouldn’t be ashamed of what God gave me.
So, she’s an exhibitionist with a whipped cream fetish. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
A source says Justin, in particular, “will be pissed” when he hears about the yet to be published autobiography.
