Patrik-Ian Polk, the award-winning filmmaker behind the hit LOGO television series "Noah's Arc", is now working on a brand-new project- THE SKINNY. And it's gonna be great, but we need your help to make it happen.
THE SKINNY has been in development for two years, and the project is on the verge of being fully funded. Some amazing people have already put their support behind this movie, and now we're bringing it to the Kickstarter community to help us cross the finish line.
What's it About?
THE SKINNY tells the story of five Brown University classmates who reunite one year after graduation for Gay Pride weekend in New York City. Magnus has just completed his first year of medical school and is excited to see his friends & introduce them to his new man, Ryan. Angelic Sebastian has recently returned from a year in Paris and looks forward to finally losing his virginity. Devilish trustafarian playboy Kyle is up to his old tricks, bagging as many hot bodied men as possible. Atlanta native Joey is hiding a few secrets, not including the obvious pounds he's packed on since graduating. And acid-tongued black British lesbian Langston tries to hold her own with the boys in the Big Apple. Through three action-packed days of sex, drama, secrets, lies & laughter- these five college pals discover just how much can change in one short year. And you won't believe what goes down at the Gay Pride Parade!
The Future Forwardpoints out a fun way to waste away the few hours left before the weekend: Every issue of Ebony, from 1959 to 2008, is now available online. To the right is one from February 1970, featuring a stunning Diana Ross.
The magazine partnered with Google to launch the project. As you can tell, it’s a work in progress, as not every issue is available just yet.
Check out a collection of our favorite covers after the jump.
An online casting call for the lead role in the recently revived biopic Tupac is underway.
The application process, set to run until April 30, asks individuals who think they embody Shakur’s spirit to submit a five-minute video in which they perform a provided courtroom monologue and their favorite 2Pac song.
“We’re looking for someone with the right mix of raw charm and charisma for the role,” producer David Robinson said in a statement. “At this point, we’re more concerned about finding someone with the ability to give their entire heart into the performance than just looks and personality.”
Tupac, directed by Antoine Fuqua, recently rebounded from a two-year setback in development caused by a series of legal battles. The film will follow Shakur’s controversial career from his rise as a rap artist and actor to his highly publicized 1996 murder. Shooting is slated to begin this summer.
TriStar Pictures film JUMPING THE BROOM, which features an all-star cast of Angela Bassett, Paula Patton, Laz Alonso, Loretta Devine and so many more in theatres May 6, 2011.
Produced by T.D. Jakes and Tracey Edmonds, JUMPING THE BROOM is a romantic comedy depicting the love and laughs that result when two families from different socioeconomic backgrounds meet for a weekend wedding in Martha’s Vineyard.
Academy Awards veteran ... Whoopi Goldberg has presented the Oscars four times. Photograph: WireImage.com
By Ben Childs guardian.co.uk Actor furious over article on black Academy Award winners that neglected to mention her 1991 prize for best supporting actress
Hell hath no fury like an Oscar winner scorned. The actor Whoopi Goldberg has attacked the New York Times for failing to mention her in an article about black Academy Award winners.
Last week's extended feature by Manohla Dargis and AO Scott concerned the lack of racial diversity among this year's Oscar nominees in comparison to previous years. It mentioned past winners such as Halle Berry and Denzel Washington, who won the best actress and best actor gongs in 2002, as well as figures such as Hattie McDaniel, awarded best supporting actress in 1940 for her role as Mammy in Gone With the Wind.
There were also mentions for Jamie Foxx and Forest Whitaker, who best actor in 2005 and 2007 respectively, as well as Morgan Freeman (best supporting actor in 2005), Jennifer Hudson and Mo'Nique (best supporting actresses in 2007 and 2010). But there was no mention of Goldberg's win in the same category for 1990's Ghost, in which she played a fake psychic who begins to see real spirits.
"I am embarrassed to tell you it hurt me terribly," Goldberg said during an appearance on US TV show The View yesterday. "When you win an Academy Award, that's part of what you've done, your legacy. I will always be Academy Award-winner Whoopi Goldberg, and [I] have been dismissed and erased by the New York Times film critics, who should know better."
Goldberg added: "I have made over 50 films. I have been nominated twice – once for The Color Purple, once for Ghost. And I won for Ghost."
"This is not hidden information, and to these two critics, who are the head critics of the New York Times ... it's hard not to take it personally. This is sloppy journalism."
"People in Somalia know [about my Oscar win]," Goldberg said. "People in China know."
The New York Times was, however, unapologetic: "The error lies with those who are reading the story incorrectly. The point of the piece was not to name every black actor or actress who has been awarded an Oscar, it was to draw a comparison between the number who won prior to 2002 (the year Halle Berry and Denzel Washington won) and those who have won since. And the story states very clearly that in 73 years, prior to 2002, only seven black actors/actresses won Oscars.
No crime in American history-- let alone a crime that never occurred-- produced as many trials, convictions, reversals, and retrials as did an alleged gang rape of two white girls by nine black teenagers on a Southern Railroad freight run on March 25, 1931. Over the course of the two decades that followed, the struggle for justice of the "Scottsboro Boys," as the black teens were called, made celebrities out of anonymities, launched and ended careers, wasted lives, produced heroes, opened southern juries to blacks, exacerbated sectional strife, and divided America's political left.
Fast forward to Fall 2010, in their two most famous works, Cabaret and Chicago, composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb used popular forms of entertainment as metaphors for our tainted world. A resigned Sally Bowles insisted that “life is a cabaret,” while cocksure Billy Flynn asserted that “it's all a circus … the whole world, all show business.”
The Scottsboro Boys, Kander and Ebb's troubling new musical, begins with a slightly less definitive pronouncement. “Everyone's a minstrel tonight,” sings the Interlocutor (Tony Award winner John Cullum, the only Caucasian in the cast) at the start of this show that repurposes the trappings of minstrelsy to revisit a racial injustice from the not-so-distant past.
Now getting its Broadway premiere in a powerful and unsettling production by Susan Stroman, The Scottsboro Boys is in fact the final collaboration between Kander and Ebb, assuming the former doesn't have any unfinished shows hiding away in a drawer somewhere. (Ebb died in 2004.)
Under the command of the Interlocutor, a company of dynamic African-American performers perform the true story of the Scottsboro boys with a little help – and hindrance – from the sadistic stock minstrel characters Mr. Tambo and Mr. Bones (the formidable caricaturists Forrest McClendon and Colman Domingo),
As the illiterate Haywood Patterson, who eventually learned to write and penned a book in prison, Winnipeg-born Joshua Henry gives a tremendous lead performance. Throughout his incarceration, Haywood remains defiant and tells the truth even when, in a cruel paradox, a lie would set him free. Henry plays him with a quivering, furious integrity, but also enough flawed humanity that he never turns into a symbol.
While Henry showed off his tank of a body in Green Day's American Idiot earlier this year, he now gets to prove what kind of dramatic ammunition he is packing in numbers like Nothin', in which, stuck in an impossible situation, Haywood performs a brutally slow, mocking shuck-and-jive.
Kander's catchy music – a mix of ragtime and American folk song – is effectively undercut by Ebb's lyrics. A song like Southern Days is beautiful, even as its ironic lyrics aim to wring all the nostalgia out of standards like My Old Kentucky Home that owe their origins to minstrel shows.
Stroman, who showed that nothing succeeds like excess with The Producers, here directs with impressive economy. With a few quick movements, the cast transforms the simple set of chairs and wooden planks into, for instance, a train chugging out of Chattanooga with tambourines for wheels.
Her most chilling staging comes during Electric Chair, a dream tap ballet in which the youngest of the boys (the naturally talented Jeremy Gumbs) has a nightmare about his upcoming execution that turns into what seems like a mad Mickey Mouse cartoon (Mickey being one of the few remaining pop-culture icons still to bear the traces of minstrelsy and blackface).
While Stroman's choreography and the energetic performances keep tempting you to enjoy The Scottsboro Boys's spectacle, the form the show takes never allows you to do so with a clear conscience.
The minstrelsy aspects – including a scene in blackface – have proved controversial, with small protests organized outside the show on recent weekends. But the cast's twisted portrayal of the women who made the accusations and the boys' Jewish lawyer are more potentially offensive than anything involving the African-American characters, whose side the show takes unequivocally.
Thanks to the movie For Colored Girls and the countless TV commercials and Films using her music, Nina Simone fever has been building over the past few years.So when is her story coming to the silver screen?That’s right folks in 2012.The moody, forceful soul diva Mary J. Blige has signed on play the moody, forceful soul diva Nina Simone, in Nina, the latter's inevitable biopic.
Blige becomes perhaps the highest-profile musician to star in another musician's biopic since Babs played Fanny Brice, though there have been a number of recent crossovers: club R&B star Jamie Foxx won an Oscar for playing Ray Charles, of course, and Joaquin Phoenix was nominated for one for Johnny Cash in Walk the Line. Beyonce played Etta James in Cadillac Records and who can forget Jennifer Lopez lip-syncing so movingly, Selena in Selena?
R&B songstress Mary J. Blige will tune up her jazz vocals after signing to star in Cynthia Mort's "Nina," a movie about legendary singer Nina Simone. Mort's script focuses on Simone's relationship with her assistant Clifton Henderson, who will be played by David Oyelowo, backers said.
William Morris Endeavor's Global Finance & Distribution Group brought the film to U.K. production, finance and studio facility operator Ealing Studios. Ealing is financing, producing and selling internationally the $10 million movie scheduled to shoot in the fall this year. WME Global is handling North American rights.
Mort's resume includes a stint as a writer-producer on TV's "Rosanne" and "Will & Grace" and as creator of "Tell Me You Love Me." Simone was a singer, songwriter, pianist, arranger and civil rights activist.
FEELING GOOD by Nina Simone
FOUR WOMEN by Nina Simone
SINNERMAN by Nina Simone
HTC “You” TV Campaign - simpled SINNERMAN by DJ Felix Da Housecat
Lady Gaga's meat dress, which she wore at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards, still may be causing a stir, but there's another Gaga-related buzz hitting the newswires: her fragrance deal with Coty.
Coty has not yet issued a formal announcement detailing the specifics of the launch, but the company did state in a comment: "Coty is excited to be partnering with Lady Gaga to develop her first-ever signature fragrance. We will be unveiling additional information regarding our dynamic partnership at a later date."
According to published reports, the fragrance will launch during spring 2012 and will be released under Gaga's name.
During Sunday's awards event, Gaga won eight awards.
