Celebrities Category
Celebrity news & gossip from the world’s showbiz and glamour magazines (OK!, Hello, National Enquirer and more). We read them so you don’t have to, picking the best bits from the showbiz world’s maw and spitting it back at them. Expect lots of sarcasm.
JK Rowling Doesn’t Want Scottish Independence
THE political hot-tatty that is Scottish Independence has seen most people thinking ‘it doesn’t really matter whether Scotland would be better off independent, they’ll probably vote ‘Yes’ just to get away from the Tories and UKIP’.
Comedian Limmy is a huge vocal support of independence. So is Kevin Bridges, Alan Cumming, Sean Connery and actor Brian Cox. David Bowie and Alex Ferguson aren’t keen on the idea.
Billy Connolly says he’s staying out of it.
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Posted: 11th, June 2014 | In: Celebrities, Politicians | Comment
Get Rik Mayall & The Young Ones to Number One!
IT is remarkable that Rik Mayall, who sadly passed away yesterday, was so loved, considering the small matter of his solely playing really horrible people. Somehow, he retained a certain warmth while being slimy, obnoxious and pervy.
Such is the love, that fans have kicked off some campaigns to honour him.
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Posted: 10th, June 2014 | In: Celebrities, Music | Comment
Soccerball Lover J-Lo Sings World Cup Song And Follows The Action On An App.
THE World Cup is days away and fully grown adults are trying not to vomit with excitement about it all. Women and men everywhere are only half listening to conversations and forgetting to chew their food before swallowing, thanks to the impending cavalcade of football in Brazil.
Of course, the World Cup is big business. Non-football fans will be bitching and whining on social media, talking about how desperately unfair it all is even though they could go to a pub which isn’t showing the football, or go for a walk which isn’t football related or, indeed, look at everything that isn’t football related on the internet, listen to music, watch the numerous TV channels that are showing Not Football and do something else in this gigantic universe that we have, along with all those other people who don’t like football.
However, you can have it both ways – just ask Jennifer Lopez.
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Posted: 10th, June 2014 | In: Celebrities, Music, Sports | Comment
Axl Rose Threatens Everyone With New Guns N’ Roses LP
THERE was a time when Guns N’ Roses were the perfect, pompous ragtag gaggle of panto rock villains, waddling around giganto-stages and blasting out ‘Welcome To The Jungle’ while smoking fags and drinking booze from the bottle.
Then, like all good enormous rock bands, they cocked it all up with drugs and in-fighting.
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Rik Mayall RIP: A Brilliant Comedian Has Died
ONE of the most brilliant comedians of his generation, Rik Mayall has died.
Mayall, of course, was in his element when playing utterly obnoxious characters. The most famous of his irritating personas was the poetry-writing, Cliff Richard-loving anarchist Rick in The Young Ones, along with Ade Edmondson, who both went on to becoming the arseholes in Bottom.
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Posted: 9th, June 2014 | In: Celebrities | Comment
Gwyneth Paltrow Shouts At Rice And Urinates On Hilary Clinton’s Happy Teddy: The Greatest Celebrity News Story Of All Time
THIS might be the greatest celebrity news story of all time:
It is not a work of parody, unless Paltrow is, for she wrote on her blog:
“I am fascinated by the growing science behind the energy of consciousness and its effects on matter. I have long had Dr Emoto’s coffee table book on how negativity changes the structure of water, how the molecules behave differently depending on the words or music being expressed around it.”
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Posted: 9th, June 2014 | In: Celebrities | Comment
You Don’t Dare Kill It: The 5 Best Alien (1979) Knock-Offs of the 1980s
RIDLEY Scott’s Alien (1979) dramatically altered the template for horror films set in outer space. For example, the blockbuster film was among the first (after Dark Star [1975] to suggest that travel in the final frontier would be the purview of “work-a-day” space truckers rather than noble explorers or adventurous astronauts.
And instead of intrepid space travelers fighting men-in-rubber suits inside idealized white-on-white space station environs (as was the case in The Green Slime [1968]) Alien suggested a technological space age marked by endless industrial corridors and aliens of constantly shifting dimension.
The Scott film’s central alien — a bio-mechanoid horror created by H.R. Giger — could also gestate inside a living human host, and this fact ushered in a new era of cinematic “body horror.”
As with any genre blockbuster, Alien almost immediately spawned a host of knock-offs, some terrible and some quite good. These films found much material to imitate and emulate, from the diverse make-up of Alien’s victim pool, to bloody variations on Alien’s famous chest-burster birth scene. Many Alien knock-off films also involved long forgotten derelicts or other structures on alien planetary surfaces, for instance. Inevitably, human crews would discover these Lovecraftian edifices and wake up age-old horrors.
Among the Alien knock-offs of the 1980s were Scared to Death (1981), Forbidden World (1982), The Beast Within (1982), Parasite (1982), The Being (1983), and Biohazard (1985), to name just a handful.
The list below represents five of the best — or at least the most memorable– of the Alien knock-off breed. As is often the case regarding knock-offs, the best such films are invariably those that re-purpose not merely the clichés from one source – in this case — Alien — but also from other literary or cinematic works as well.
Saturn 3 (1980)
The story of a psychotic mad scientist, Captain Benson (Harvey Keitel) who travels to the Experimental Food Research Station on a moon of Saturn during a twenty-two day eclipse and communications black-out called “Shadow Lock,” the much-reviled Saturn 3 might actually be considered, first-and-foremost, a child of the Frankenstein story.
On remote Saturn 3, Benson assists two scientists working to alleviate a famine on overpopulated planet Earth. Major Adam (Kirk Douglas) and his romantic partner, the beautiful and innocent Alex (Farrah Fawcett) are wary, however, of Benson’s form of help: a colossal humanoid robot named Hector, the first of the “Demi God” series. Hector boasts human intelligence, not to mention human tissue. And echoing his creator’s madness, he soon begins lusting mightily after Alex.
Outside the space-age Frankenstein monster tropes, Saturn 3, like Alien, is set in a location where aid and assistance from the authorities is not available. Similarly, Earth in both films is depicted as a used-up dystopia. In Alien, “the company” controls everything on Earth, and in Saturn 3, humans have polluted the planet and resorted to rampant drug use because of the planet’s inhospitable nature.
Hector stands in for the titular alien, as well, and hunts down the film’s Adam and Eve-styled protagonists in the facility’s twisting factory-like corridors.
Finally, in Scott’s film, the Alien is almost entirely a creature of instinct, driven by impulses to reproduce and survive. In Saturn 3, by contrast, the monster is a machine that experiences something “human” beyond programming: psychosis and lust. Hector is ultimately beaten, however, because as a machine he can’t understand the human concept of self-sacrifice.
Galaxy of Terror (1981)
Aliens (1986) director James Cameron served as a production designer on this knock-off from Roger Corman’s New World Studios, and in the process created a universe that is very reminiscent of the Scott film, at least from a visual stand-point. Like Alien, Galaxy of Terror is set in a “lived in” universe (unlike, say the white-on-white minimalism of 2001: A Space Odyssey [1968] or Space: 1999 [1975 – 1977].)
In Galaxy of Terror, a rescue ship, The Quest, heads to the mysterious planet called Morganthus to discover the fate of the Remus, another ship which crashed there. Once on the surface of dark Morganthus, however, the Quest crew discovers a strange alien pyramid. Soon, the crew — including characters played by Robert Englund, Sid Haig, Grace Zabriskie, and Erin Moran — begins to experience their worst fears made manifest.
In this case — if the plot summary hasn’t given it away already — Galaxy of Terror draws inspiration not only from Alien, but from Forbidden Planet (1956), a film in which another rescue mission (to Altair-4) runs afoul of a “Monster from the Id,” actually the human subconscious. That’s pretty much the case here, only with slimy monsters, doppelgangers, and a scene involving a rape by a giant alien worm.
The alien pyramid in Galaxy of Terror looks like it could have been constructed on Alien’s LV-426, and the slate gray sky above it even looks eerily similar. More trenchantly, perhaps, Galaxy of Terror’s rape scene also reflects the violent sexuality seen in Alien, the harsh re-purposing of the human body for unwholesome breeding purposes.
Inseminoid (1982)
Also known as Horror Planet, Inseminoid is probably the schlockiest film on this list. The film stars Judy Geeson, Stephanie Beacham and Victoria Tennant as astronaut scientists, and involves the discovery of an ancient alien tomb on a far distant planet.
Before long, one astronaut, Sandy (Geeson), is impregnated by the last living alien in the tomb, and becomes the protective expectant mother of two ghastly alien twins. Her maternal instinct is re-purposed to serve an interloper’s biological imperative.
And just as Kane in Alien gives birth to the chest-burster, here Geeson gives birth to two monstrous tykes who — naturally — nurse on human blood.
Inseminoid’s central conceit is that everything on this distant alien world is “doubled.” The planet orbits twin stars, and the alien mythology is obsessed with twins, and so forth.
Although lacking tact (especially in the flashbacks to Sandy’s impregnation), Inseminoid occasionally features a beautifully composed shot, such as one on the purple surface of the distant planet during a funeral. There was also a funeral (for Kane) in Alien, but this shot of an alien vista grants the hororr film a nice sense of scope and also a visceral sense of place.
Like Alien, Inseminoid also concerns an alien species that co-opts the human race for its own reproductive requirements. Here, the aliens suckle on the (open) wounds of dead humans, and Sandy herself becomes a bit blood-thirsty as her biology is altered to play host to most unwelcome invaders.
Creature (1985)
A corporate spaceship, the Shenandoah, sets down on Titan to investigate an ancient alien archaeological site. The Shenandoah’s mission is imperiled, however, by the arrival of a ship from a competing corporation, Richter Dynamics, and the presence of its freakazoid captain, played by a scenery-chewing Klaus Kinski.
Before long, the rival crews learn that the archaeological site was actually something akin to an alien zoo or laboratory: a collection of diverse aliens from all over the universe. Unfortunately, one managed to break free from its captivity and is now attacking and brainwashing human beings…
Creature — while ripping off Alien lock, stock and barrel — also offers a number of notable fan touches. The film’s Ripley equivalent is Beth Sladen (Wendy Schaal), and her name seems like a nod to Elisabeth Sladen, who accompanied Tom Baker’s Fourth Doctor in Doctor Who on several dangerous adventures in space in TV serials such as “Ark in Space” and “Planet of Evil.” The film also quotes dialogue directly from — again – Forbidden Planet.
Additionally, the key to destroying the unleashed zoo specimen in Creature is Sladen’s knowledge of Howard Hawks’ The Thing (1951). She remembers that — in the movie’s last act — the imperiled humans electrocuted an invading alien.
These and other tributes assure that Creature can be contextualized as more than mere Alien knock-off.
Finally, Creature also revives the “corporate” culture social critique underlying the Scott film. In this case, the rival spaceships are involved in what the film’s dialogue calls “a fierce race for commercial supremacy.”
Even in space — with drooling, brainwashing aliens out and about — the ultimate enemy is…big business.
Predator (1987)
John McTiernan’s 1987 adventure/horror movie is actually part-Rambo (1985) and part-Aliens (1986), and is the best film on this list, by far. Still, much of its energy seems derived from the Alien aesthetic.
Here, we get the remote location (a jungle in Central America instead of outer space), an alien — with a similarly distinctive jaw-line — that cuts down one human at a time, and is a kind of alpha or apex predator.
The alien in Scott’s film was the ultimate survivor, able to breed and survive in any setting. The alien, by contrast, in Predator is the universe’s greatest hunter, a characterization that sets up a conflict with planet Earth’s greatest warrior, Dutch, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger.
But the real commonality between Alien and Predator arises in a mid-story surprise and revelation of conspiracy. In Alien, the Nostromo’s science officer, Ash (Ian Holm), protects the alien all along, and considers the rest of the human crew “expendable,” on secret orders from the Company.
In Predator, Dillon (Carl Weathers), an ambitious military officer, uses the cover of a rescue mission to get Dutch’s men into a position where they can acquire important documents about “the enemy.” As in Alien, the soldiers serving under Dutch are thus considered “expendable.”
Neither Ripley nor Dutch respond well when they expose the secret conspiracy, and the conspirator. In Predator, however, Dillon gets a shot at redemption, and Ash gets…decapitated.
Posted: 7th, June 2014 | In: Film, Flashback, Key Posts | Comments (2)
Cheryl Cole Had Ashley Cole Vaccinations In Her Bum
IN this week’s OK! magazine, we gain invaluable insight into the life of Cheryl Cole:
“The X Factor judge has admitted she had a vitamin injection in her bum — to help her cope with the revelation that ex-husband Ashley Cole had cheated.”
Just a little prick on your rosy bum….
Posted: 6th, June 2014 | In: Celebrities | Comment
Joey Essex Solves Britain’s Skills Shortage In Sunderland
IS there nothing celebrity cannot improve? The Sunderland Echo says Joey Essex is heading to the city to help with education and jobs:
It’s run by Gateshead Council LearningSkills. The Echo notes:
Organisers of the event say that, despite not having any higher education qualifications, Joey has shown that with hard work and dedication you don’t need great academic qualifications to succeed.
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Posted: 5th, June 2014 | In: Celebrities | Comment
Rihanna’s Perfume Banned For Coming With A Free Bear Trap
THE billboard advertising a new perfume from Rihanna has been banned for being too sexy. The ban makes you want to see it. And her it is. Rihanna is leaning back with her feet rested against a massive bottle of light pinky-brown stuff called ROGUE
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Posted: 4th, June 2014 | In: Celebrities | Comment (1)
16 Tragic Science Fiction Calendar Miscalculations
THE phrase “Where’s my jetpack?” has become something of a collective outcry in recent years. Since the 1950s, we’ve been indoctrinated with visions of the future full of spaceships, time travel, instant food, laser guns, and best of all, dazzling sci-fi duds.
Instead, here we are in 2014 and things haven’t shaped up to that Utopian model at all. Sure, communication technologies have exceeded our expectations, but the “Jetsons” lifestyle still hasn’t arrived. Thanks to pop culture’s broken promises of delivering robot maids and whooshing Star Trek doors in a timely manner, we are all a little disappointed.
Here’s a list of sci-fi TV shows and movies and the dates they were supposed to take place. Some are reasonable… some way, way off the mark.
1. LAND OF THE GIANTS
Land of the Giants is set in 1983. This is one of the more blatant errors in calculation. Fancy tourist spaceships are still nowhere in sight, and we’re 31 years past the show’s setting.
2. UFO
The TV series UFO. was actually set in 1980. As you will recall, the SHADO facility was one of the grooviest places on earth. Everything was painted mod colors with babes in mini-skirts or unitards strolling the hallways… and there was Moonbase. Well, it’s 34 years past due, and still no purple haired Moonmaidens.
3. SPACE:1999
Anyone who watched Space:1999 knows the show should’ve been called Space:1976. Evidently, earth-toned velour track suits were in vogue on Moonbase Alpha.
4. LOGAN’S RUN
Logan’s Run is set in 2274. Even though it features teleportation devices, I guess it’s far enough away in time that I can go along with it.
5. BLADE RUNNER
Blade Runner is set in 2019. We officially have five years to go before we have to start worrying about those pesky replicants.
6. TOTAL RECALL
The year is 2084 in Total Recall. I was kind of hoping that virtual reality thing would come around a bit sooner. Although, the three-breasted mutant women and cars driven by Howdy Doody robots can wait.
7. FORBIDDEN PLANET
Forbidden Planet is set in the early 2200s. Can we reasonably expect interplanetary travel and Robbie the Robot in a couple hundred years? The “plastic educator”, a device capable of measuring and enhancing intellectual capacity, seems doable.
8. THE JETSONS
The original Jetsons was supposed to take place in 2062. If I could pick any science fiction universe to live in, it would be The Jetsons, without hesitation. Sure, you still had to work and deal with overbearing bosses (Mr. Spacely was a dick!), but it was more than compensated by the Utopian awesomeness of it all.
9. PLANET OF THE APES
The crew in Planet of the Apes left earth in 2006 in their spaceship traveling at near light speed. Spoiler alert: They crash landed on Earth in the year 3978.
10. ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK
The tag line for Escape from New York:
The year is 1997. The Big Apple is the world’s largest penitentiary. Breaking out is impossible. Breaking IN is INSANE.
11. METROPOLIS
The 1927 film Metropolis is set in 2026.
12. 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY
2001: A Space Odyssey was right on the money for a lot of things, but it overshot its wad on artificial intelligence and suspended animation.
13. ALIEN
Alien is set in 2122. Again, filmmakers have a tendency to underestimate the time it will take to develop this suspended animation thing. It’s the only feasible way to have interstellar space travel, so I understand their motives.
14. BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY
The Buck Rogers TV series is set in 2491. This show was overflowing with sci-fi tropes: lasers, spaceships, groovy fashions, and wisecracking robots. Since it’s still 477 years away, I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt.
15. BACK TO THE FUTURE II
Back to the Future II is set in 2015. Only one more year until the hoverboard!
16. STAR TREK
The best method to avoid having your film or TV show woefully outdated may be to set it far beyond the present date like Dune, which is set thousands of years ahead. Or, opt for the Star Wars plan and have it set a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. But the best plan of all may have been Star Trek which used “Star Dates”, which kept the timeline purposefully ambiguous.
Sadly, that was all ruined by Star Trek: The Next Generation which was set in 2364, which allows us to extrapolate that the original series was about 100 years prior. This really blows the mystique and pisses me off…. what say you, Dr. Bones?
Posted: 3rd, June 2014 | In: Film, Flashback, Key Posts, TV & Radio | Comments (10)
Crisis Averted: Justin Bieber Loses No Followers
EVEN though Justin Bieber has been in a fair amount of trouble lately, this week, his ears will be going hot with embarrassment after a video was published which showed him telling a racist joke.
Bieber says: “Why are black people afraid of chain saws?” The punchline is both racist and not very funny. To save us from laboriously spelling it out and explaining it in text, you can see the joke here.
Professional ambulance chasers, TMZ, are the people responsible for the video and, apparently, have had it for a while. You see, Bieber was 15 years old when he told the joke. TMZ decided not to share it with the world because of his age and because he “immediately told his friends what he did was stupid.”
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Boy Band Weed Watch: Dull One Direction Make Smoking Marijuana Uncool
THE video of One Direction members Zayn Malik and Louis Tomlinson smoking weed has been shared a million times on the internet and a number of op-ed pieces have fretted over the band’s reputation and the potential for the band misleading their fans into doing naughty things.
So, let us look at each in turn.
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The 10-Point CV Leonardo da Vinci Sent To The Duke of Milan
AT age 32, Leonardo da Vinci wanted to work for the Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza. Leonardo wrote his CV.
My Most Illustrious Lord,
Having now sufficiently seen and considered the achievements of all those who count themselves masters and artificers of instruments of war, and having noted that the invention and performance of the said instruments is in no way different from that in common usage, I shall endeavour, while intending no discredit to anyone else, to make myself understood to Your Excellency for the purpose of unfolding to you my secrets, and thereafter offering them at your complete disposal, and when the time is right bringing into effective operation all those things which are in part briefly listed below:
1. I have plans for very light, strong and easily portable bridges with which to pursue and, on some occasions, flee the enemy, and others, sturdy and indestructible either by fire or in battle, easy and convenient to lift and place in position. Also means of burning and destroying those of the enemy.
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Posted: 2nd, June 2014 | In: Celebrities, Flashback | Comment
Epic Adverts: Dynamic Nashville Bass Player Is Looking For Work In G (Some Restrictions Apply)
A DYNAMIC Bass Player is looking for work in Nashville:
S-Nigger Watch: Eeeny Justin Bieber Is No Meeny Jeremy Clarskon
WHEN he 15, Justin Bieber told a racist joke about black people. Four years on and The Sun is outraged. It’s posted footage of Bieber behaving like a dickhead (which is pretty much all he does) for a documentary called Never Say Never.
The so-called joke goes like this:
Bieber: “What’s the most confusing day for black people?”
He answers his own question: “Father’s Day.”
He then fires another:
Bieber: “Why are black people afraid of chainsaws?
Voice in room:“Don’t say it.”
Bieber: “Run-nigger-nigger-run…”
This, to the Sun, is “Bieber’s N-word shame”.
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Posted: 1st, June 2014 | In: Celebrities, Key Posts | Comment
Daily Express Writers Say Daily Express Story Is Untrue
COMPARE and contrast these Daily Express stories on Daily Express columnists Richard And Judy:
MAY 12, 2014: Richard and Judy;s “suicide pact”:
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Posted: 1st, June 2014 | In: Celebrities, Reviews | Comment
The Top 10 Lyrical Low Points of the 1970s
BACK in January, we covered The Top Ten Lyrical Low Points of the 1980s. Well, it’s time to tackle another decade – the 1970s. While there were certainly a lot of good songs with good lyrics recorded during this period, there was a metric f**k-ton of bad ones as well. But despite the enormity of the task, we’ve waded through it and plucked out the worst of reasonably well-known songs, and here they are…
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Posted: 30th, May 2014 | In: Flashback, Key Posts, Music | Comments (8)
Rap Genius Founder Fired For Being a Complete Dickhead About Elliot Rodger
THAT you’re able to think up and found one of the web’s hotter properties does show that you’ve got some smarts. You’re good at doing something at least. But that’s not to say that having done that that you’re smart, as Mahbod Moghadam of Rap Genius has just proven. For he’s gone off and done something so dickheaded that he’s had to immediately resign from the company that he himself founded. He took the manifesto of the UCSB psycho shooter who killed all those people last week and loaded it up onto his own site. Fair enough, that’s what it’s for, you put a document up on Rap Genius and then people can add their annotations to it. But then he started to make his own annotations. Which were not cool, not cool at all:
Rap Genius co-founder Mahbod Moghadam has been fired from the annotation service after posting appalling comments on the memoir of mass murderer Elliot Rodger, who killed six people in a shooting spree earlier this week.
In now-removed annotations on the site on the sick 141-page manifesto, Moghadam added a tasteless series of comments, including “beautifully written” and also “MY GUESS: his sister is smokin hot.”
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Posted: 29th, May 2014 | In: Money, Music, Reviews, Technology | Comment
Copyright Suits: Beastie Boys Lose The Right To Say ‘No’
WHEN Adam Yauch passed away, his fellow Beastie Boys were told, in no uncertain terms, that they should respect his legacy by never allowing their music to be used in advertisements.
And so, the Beasties are now taking on the Monster Energy drinks company over music used for commercial purposes.
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The Devil Made Them Do It: The Five Best Exorcist (1973) Knock-Offs
WILLIAM Friedkin’s The Exorcist — based on the best-selling novel by William Peter Blatty — quickly became one of the first genre blockbusters of the seventies, and a generational touchstone to boot.
The Exorcist also represented a new brand of horror film, in a sense, because it lacked a familiar “monster” like Dracula, the Wolf Man or The Frankenstein Monster, and it didn’t depend on well-known genre personalities, like Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, or Peter Cushing, either.
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Posted: 29th, May 2014 | In: Film, Flashback, Key Posts | Comments (6)
