Julianne Hough dresses up in blackface to play Crazy Eyes from 'Orange
is the New Black' as she attends the Casamigos Tequila halloween party
in Hollywood on Friday.
Not a good look, Julianne Hough.
The former 'Dancing with the Stars' pro donned blackface on Friday night as part of her Halloween costume.
Paul Schiraldi/AP
Uzo Aduba as Crazy Eyes in a scene from 'Orange is the New Black.'
The 25-year-old actress was portraying "Orange is the New Black"
character Crazy Eyes, played on the hit Netflix series by Uzo Aduba.
Hough hit the Casamigos Tequila Halloween Party with a group of friends
dressed as the cast of the show.
Julianne Hough dresses up as Crazy Eyes from 'Orange is the New Black' with her friends.
For the occasion, Hough appears to have darkened the skin on her face
and neck, as well as tied up her hair in the characters' signature
knotty coiffure. Hough also sported a prison ID with the title "Crazy
Eyes."
After uproar began on the internet over her costume choice, Hough apologized.
"I am a huge fan of the show 'Orange is the New Black,' actress Uzo Aduba, and the character she has created," Hough tweeted.
"It certainly was never my intention to be disrespectful or demeaning
to anyone in any way. I realize my costume hurt and offended people and I
truly apologize."
Celine Dion recorded just two duets for her new album Loved Me Back to Life. In a behind-the-scenes clip released today (October 26), she previews one that features writing and vocals by R&B star Ne-Yo. And throughout, neither the singers nor producer Eman can stop repeating the title — “Incredible” — to describe the end results.
At the start, Dion asks Ne-Yo for pointers, particularly on
pronunciation. “‘Let’s give them something amazing,’” she sings to him,
quoting a lyric. “You don’t say ‘something.’”
“Yeah, it’s ‘summin’,'” Ne-Yo says. “It’s not even something I do on purpose. My lips are so big that they get in the way.” (Celine, charming as always: “Well, sometimes we wish to have lips like yours, so it’s okay.”)
What’s most endearing, though, may be Ne-Yo closes his eyes and takes
in how Dion tackles her share of the duet, on her own. And in the
process, the clip reveals the “Incredible” production to be incredibly
minimal, the sort of restraint necessary to allow these two big voices
to shine.
Loved Me Back to Life, also featuring a duet with Stevie Wonder,
is out November 5 in select countries. Watch the making-of clip of
“Incredible” up top, then check out the album’s other release dates at Dion’s official website.
Oct 26, 2013; St. Louis, MO, USA; St. Louis Cardinals designated hitter
Allen Craig (21) is tripped by Boston Red Sox third baseman Will
Middlebrooks (16) during the ninth inning and would score on an
obstruction call to win game three of the MLB baseball World Series at
Busch Stadium. Cardinals won 5-4. Mandatory Credit: Jeff Curry-USA TODAY
Sports
ST. LOUIS — Third baseman Will Middlebrooks tripped Allen Craig for a
game-ending obstruction call on Jon Jay’s ninth-inning grounder, giving
the St. Louis Cardinals a bizarre 5-4 win over the Boston Red Sox on
Saturday night and a 2-1 World Series lead.
Boston had tied the score with two runs in the eighth, and Yadier
Molina singled with one out in the ninth off loser Brandon Workman.
Allen Craig pinch hit and lined Koji Uehara’s first pitch down the
left-field line for a double that put runners on second and third.
With the infield in, Jon Jay hit a grounder to diving second baseman
Dustin Pedroia. He threw home to catcher Jarrod Saltalamacchia, who
tagged out the sliding Molina. Saltamacchia threw offline past third,
and Middlebrooks, with his stomach on the field, raised both legs and
tripped Craig.
Third base umpire Jim Joyce immediately signaled obstruction, and
even though a sliding Craig was tagged by Saltalamacchia at the plate
following the throw by left fielder Daniel Nava, plate umpire Dana
DeMuth signaled safe and then pointed to third, making clear the
obstruction had been called.
Marcia Wallace, whose four-decade
television career included playing secretary Carol Kester on "The Bob
Newhart Show" and the voice of Bart's fourth-grade teacher on "The
Simpsons," has died, her agent said Saturday.
'Simpsons' voice artist Wallace dies
Marcia Wallace, whose four-decade television career included playing
the receptionist on "The Bob Newhart Show" and Bart's fourth-grade
teacher on "The Simpsons," has died, her agent said Saturday.
Wallace was 70, according to imdb.com. Her cause of death was not immediately confirmed.
Wallace starred for six
seasons as Carol Kester on "The Bob Newhart Show" in the 1970s and
reprised the role in the 1990s on "Murphy Brown."
But it was her
Emmy-winning role as Edna Krabappel, Bart Simpson's teacher with the
snarky laugh, that may have earned her the most fame in recent years. It
was a part she held since the show's premiere in 1990.
Photos: People we lost in 2013
"I was tremendously
saddened to learn this morning of the passing of the brilliant and
gracious Marcia Wallace," executive producer Al Jean of "The Simpsons"
said in a statement. "She was beloved by all at 'The Simpsons' and we
intend to retire her irreplaceable character."
Jean said rumors that the show had already planned to retire Wallace's character are not true, he added.
"Marcia's passing is unrelated and again, a terrible loss for all who had the pleasure of knowing her," Jean said.
Wallace was a regular
guest star on a host of popular TV shows in the 1970s and 1980s, from
"The Love Boat" and "Fantasy Island" to "Gimme a Break!", "ALF," "Night
Court," "Charles in Charge" and "Magnum, P.I."
She was also a mainstay
of TV game shows such "The Hollywood Squares," "Password" and "The (New)
$25,000 Pyramid" and starred in numerous stage productions, including a
touring production of "The Vagina Monologues."
In recent years, Wallace
also advocated for awareness of breast cancer, a disease she battled
herself. Her 2004 book, "Don't Look Back, We're Not Going That Way," in
part chronicled her fight.
Interior Minister Gideon Sa'ar announces the extension of daylight savings time at the Knesset in May. (photo credit: Flash90)
Israel will switch to standard time at 2 a.m. on Sunday morning, after
daylight savings time was extended by 3 weeks. Clocks go back an hour at
2 a.m. to 1 a.m.
Israel will switch to standard
time at 2 a.m. on Sunday morning, after daylight savings time was
extended by 3 weeks. Clocks go back an hour at 2 a.m. to 1 a.m.
Instead
of moving clocks back on October 6, Israel waited until the end of the
month to do so after Interior Minister Gideon Sa’ar agreed to extend
daylight savings time by three weeks.
“I announced when I set up the committee that
the objective was to find the best arrangement for the citizens of
Israel,” Sa’ar said at a press conference. “After checking the
committee’s work and its recommendations I decided to change the status
quo.”
On October 6, Israelis who fought for years to
have daylight savings time substantially extended found that their
phones and computers ignored new state directives and sent their clocks
an hour back overnight.
Many mobile phones were already programmed to
expect the clock change to go ahead over last weekend and were not able
to readjust for the later, October end to daylight savings. The bug
affected some Google phones, iPhones, Android and iOS software,
BlackBerrys and Symbian phones.
Local cellphone providers tried to preempt the
problem by sending text messages to their users last week advising to
set their phones to Athens time, which also has October 27 as the start
of winter time.
The thorny issue of when and how to implement
daylight saving time was the focus of a special committee appointed by
Sa’ar (Likud) in April.
Headed by Shmuel Abuav, a former Construction
Ministry director general and head of the Or Yarok (“Green Light” in
Hebrew) road safety organization, the committee examined the current
daylight saving time policy and its impact on road safety, energy
consumption and the economy.
“The additional hour of daylight for the
citizens of Israel has a positive influence on every one of the central
aspects of life,” Sa’ar said, adding that he would immediately begin
working on getting government and Knesset approval for the legislation.
Daylight saving time went into effect across Israel on Friday, March 29, turning 2 a.m. into 3 a.m.
In November, the Knesset passed legislation
extending daylight savings time until the first Sunday after October 1.
Before that, standard time would begin the Saturday night before Yom
Kippur, so that the day’s fast, which is pegged to nightfall, would end
an hour earlier.
Because the Hebrew calendar is lunar, Yom
Kippur can fall between mid-September and mid-October, which used to
mean that Israelis returned to standard time as much as a month and a
half before most other countries, where daylight savings time ends on
November 1.
As a result, the issue of the seasonal time
transition became contentious among Israelis, and was caught up in
political tensions between religious and secular politicians.
Religious parties generally pushed for the
early time change to ease the Yom Kippur fast, and some secular
activists protested that the change was unnecessarily inconvenient and
expensive. They pointed to a relatively early loss of daylight hours and
a resultant rise in electricity bills as well as car accidents as
people who would otherwise drive home from work in daylight were forced
to drive in darkness.
The seven-minute lesbian sex scene in the magnificent French drama Blue is the Warmest Color
has raised eyebrows—including those of the author of the graphic novel
upon which the film is based. Marlow Stern analyzes the year’s most
talked-about sex scene.
With all due respect to Cameron Diaz, who grinds herself to completion on a Ferrari in The Counselor, the most controversial sex scene of 2013 belongs to Blue is the Warmest Color.
IFC Films
From
the moment the movie premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, the
coverage has been fast and furious. One of the first dispatches on the
film from Cannes, courtesy of New York magazine,
claimed, “I clocked the first sex scene between Adèle and Emma —
replete with fingering, licking, and, as a friend called it, ‘impressive
scissoring’ — at an approximate ten minutes. Audience walkouts began
around minute nine. That turned into spontaneous applause (and relieved
laughter), when the women climaxed and finished a minute later.” The
reporter from Variety, meanwhile, wrote that it had “the most explosively graphic lesbian sex scenes in recent memory.”
Now, the scene may feel
like it’s 10 minutes long, but it’s really a shade over seven. And yes,
much of the feigned shock—or genuine, as it were—over the sequence can
be credited to a mélange of tabloid sensationalism, the last vestiges of
American Puritanism, and heteronormativity. Some of the criticisms
aimed at the scene, however, arelegitimate.
But first, some background.
Blue is the Warmest Color tells
the tale of Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos), a 15-year-old high school
student in Paris whose initial forays into the realm of sexual
experimentation leave much to be desired. One day, she crosses paths
with Emma (Léa Seydoux), an art student at a nearby college with a
flashy blue ’do, and becomes infatuated with her. After a series of
flirtatious encounters in the park, the two fall madly, passionately in
love. All the brewing tension comes to a head in their first love scene:
a seven-minute paroxysm of sexual desire replete with clawing,
slapping, scratching, moaning, and howling. It’s feral.
There
were several walkouts at both screenings of the movie I attended—the
first in late August at the Telluride Film Festival, and the second at
the New York Film Festival earlier this month. They were all, from what I
could gather, middle-aged women who bid the film adieu at around the
five-minute mark. And Julie Maroh, the author of the graphic novel upon
which the film is based, penned a lengthy screed
against the sex scene after it screened in Cannes, calling it “a brutal
and surgical display, exuberant and cold, of so-called lesbian sex,
which turned into porn, and made me feel very ill at ease.”
When I interviewed
the two stars of the film, Adèle Exarchopoulos, 19, and Léa Seydoux,
28, at Telluride, the actresses spoke out against their director,
Abdellatif Kechiche, complaining of the “power” he wielded over them,
and how the first sex scene, in particular, was “very embarrassing.”
Seydoux also revealed that they shot the scene over 10 days, and that
the actresses had “fake pussies that were molds of our real pussies,” to
simulate manual and oral penetration. The interview has since caused a
great deal of controversy, particularly between Seydoux and Kechiche,
with the latter recently penning a fiery open letter—they are all the rage these days, aren’t they?—defending his vision and treatment of the actresses.
Before I go into exactly why the scene is problematic, it should be noted that Blue is the Warmest Color
is one of the best films of the year—a fantastically acted, enduring
portrait of first love. It vividly captures the feelings of lust and
infatuation inherent in first love, and the psychological toll it bears
when it shatters into a million pieces. Both actresses—in particular
Exarchopoulos, who delivers the best performance, male or female, of the
year—deserve to be nominated for Oscars, and Kechiche should, all
things considered, be given kudos for creating a fine work of art. It’s
also an important film. Just days after the movie won the Palme d’Or at
Cannes, the first official same-sex marriage ceremony took place in
France—on May 29, in Montpellier.
Now to the scene.
For
starters, it does run too long. It’s nothing to walk out over—what a
disrespectful, wrongheaded act that is in the presence of such a
terrific film. But it could stand to have its running time cut in half.
Even if Kechiche’s aim was to challenge the heteronormative way most
movie-going audiences process onscreen sexuality by presenting them with
seven minutes of sweaty girl-on-girl carnality, which is admirable, it
still runs too long. By the fourth minute, you’ll go for your soda; by
the fifth, you’ll check your watch; by the sixth, everyone’s eyes will
dart around the theater to break the monotony onscreen; and by the
seventh, it’s become a farcical tangle of panting and moaning.
The
other problem is the way it is staged and lit. Much of the love scene
is composed of medium shots, with the camera focused on the two
horizontal bodies writhing on a bed. The bodies are seen, as well as the
bed and the windows. The bed is essentially acting as the stage, and
the women are being presented as spectacle. This, combined with some
odd, hazy lighting, lending the proceedings a desaturated sheen that
isn’t present anywhere else in the film, proves a puzzling combination.
The scene looks—and is staged—like porn circa 1970s.
Point
of view is the biggest concern when it comes to the sex scene. Because
of the way the shots are composed—from medium shots to close-ups, and
always through the point of view of the director—the camera makes the
audience assume the perspective of a man, or the “male gaze,” as
feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey would put it. “In their traditional
exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed,
with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that
they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness,” Mulvey wrote in
“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” her groundbreaking 1975 essay on
the subject. “Woman displayed as sexual object is the leit-motif of
erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to striptease, from Ziegfeld to Busby
Berkeley, she holds the look, plays to and signifies male desire.” It’s
pure voyeurism, or scopophilia. If the POV had shifted from the camera’s
to that of the two women—or better yet, switching the POV
back-and-forth between each of the two women—then the scene would have
been far more effective, and less like exhibitionism.
While Blue is the Warmest Color is a great film, and deserves to be seen by as many people as possible, its sex scene does leave something to be desired: the female gaze.
Russell Brand's appearance opposite Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight
earlier this week in which he raged against the current political
system has divided opinion. Some felt he gave voice to the disillusioned
youth. Others thought he offered only criticism and no solutions. Tory
MP Michael Fabricant thinks he is a "twat".
The colourful MP for Lichfield told the BBC WM radio station on Friday morning that he had "never heard so many big words used for so little effect" before.
"He [Brand] had absolutely nothing positive to say, he just said what
we shouldn't do, nothing about what we should be doing. It's pretty sad
actually," Fabricant said [skip to 1.36 minutes].
He added light heartedly: "If you insult people, which he didn't,
when you insult people personally that's very weak, and when you start
using big words like 'paradigm' and things like that and still don'y
actually say anything positive you think: 'what a twat'."
It's ok though, given the comment wasn't made on a national radio
station not many people would have noticed. As long as you don't tweet
about it.
What was that about too many tweets making a twat?
Marcia Wallace, whose four-decade
television career included playing secretary Carol Kester on "The Bob
Newhart Show" and the voice of Bart's fourth-grade teacher on "The
Simpsons," has died, her agent said Saturday.
