Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have moved permanently to Los Angeles, having fled Canada before the borders between the countries were closed, in a bombshell move that will throw the royal family into fresh turmoil. U.K. paper the Sun reported Thursday night that the couple took a private flight with their 10-month-old baby Archie to the L.A. area and plan to set up a new, permanent […]
hollywood
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Photo Illustration by Kristen Hazzard/The Daily Beast Jeri Ryan is still haunted by those five little words. “It’s the scene that I’ve always hated,” she says with a sigh. “The notorious Then you wish to copulate? scene. Hated everything about it. It was so on the nose, so gratuitous. I haven’t gone back to watch any of it.” It occurred in “Revulsion,” the fifth episode of […]
TAPE, a #MeToo-era film, manages to be both overwrought and hyperliteral. In the film’s opening sequence, Rosa (Annarosa Mudd, who also produced), a former actress, pierces her own tongue, shaves her head, and (trigger warning) slits her wrists—but not quite suicidally. She’s on a revenge mission to get evidence against an abusive movie producer who now has a new crop of identical young women to prey […]
Isaac Godfrey Geoffrey (aka “IGG”) Nabwana had never stepped inside a movie theater before. Yet there the Ugandan filmmaker stood on the closing night of last year’s Toronto International Film Festival’s Midnight Madness program, basking in a five-minute standing ovation for his gonzo shoot-’em-up-kung-fu-comedy masterpiece Crazy World. It moved him to tears. “You don’t know what it means to me,” he said onstage to the audience. […]
Ryan Murphy, Shonda Rhimes, and Greg Berlanti are among the Hollywood heavyweights who have donated major sums to a relief fund for the assistants and support staff who are out of jobs and out of paychecks in the wake of the industry’s coronavirus shutdown. As of Wednesday afternoon, nearly $500,000 had been raised for the Relief Fund for Hollywood Support Staff. Hollywood, like many industries across […]
Rosanna Arquette inspired some colorful reactions when she floated the theory that Israel has long known about the coronavirus and claimed the country and Jared Kushner are putting “lives at risk for profit.” “I’m still confused,” the ‘Buffalo 66’ actress tweeted to her more than 100,000 Twitter followers on Tuesday, “so Israel has been working on a coronavirus vaccine for a year already? (so they knew).” […]
News broke late Sunday that a titan of the music industry, Universal Music chief Lucian Grainge, had been diagnosed with coronavirus infection, showing once again that the outbreak spares no one, regardless of fame or fortune. Arguably one of the most powerful people in his field, Grainge, who turned 60 on February 29, was struck down by the illness and is currently receiving treatment at UCLA […]
Sunday morning, eleven days after California Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency over the novel coronavirus, which has so far afflicted 335 people in the state, put another 11,500 under self-monitoring, and sent everyone else into “social distancing” protocols, influencer pastor Chad Veach uploaded a video to Instagram from a crowded room. “Alright we’re here, we’re getting ready to record,” Veach told the camera, […]
Wednesday morning, one month after Harvey Weinstein was convicted of raping former actress Jessica Mann and former Project Runway production assistant Miriam Haleyi, a New York judge sentenced him to 23 years in prison. Pending an appeal, the announcement brought an end to Weinstein’s intensely watched New York criminal proceedings. But it also marked the beginning of similar charges against the disgraced Miramax executive in Los […]
Disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein has been sentenced to 23 years in prison for sexually assaulting two women, close to the maximum sentence he faced in the landmark case. Judge James Burke handed down the harsh sentence to the 68-year-old former Miramax producer on Wednesday, siding with prosecutors’ call for a stiff punishment for the erstwhile Hollywood titan. While scores of women have accused Weinstein of […]
Hollywood stars and celebrities’ endorsements: What do they mean? Do they mean anything?? We’ll soon find out. It’s always fascinating to see which candidates resonate with Hollywood more than others, and this year Bernie Sanders, the decidedly anti-glitz senator from Vermont, has been raking in support. Dick Van Dyke? On board and laughing off fears about Sanders’ age. Danny DeVito? Ready for everyone but Bernie to […]
Days after Brooklyn rapper Bashar Barakah Jackson, better known as Pop Smoke, was killed during a home invasion in Los Angeles, authorities are still investigating the motives behind the attack. Thursday night, TMZ reported that the tragedy appeared to be a “targeted hit…not a robbery.” But on Friday afternoon, LAPD Capt. Jonathan Tippet, head of the Robbery-Homicide Division, disputed their assessment in a phone call with […]
On Thursday evening, at one of his ego-nourishing rallies, President Donald Trump took aim at Parasite, Bong Joon-ho’s South Korean satire that made history as the first foreign film to win the Best Picture Oscar. “By the way, how bad were the Academy Awards this year? You see ‘em? And the winner is…a movie from South Korea. What the hell is that about?” bellowed a rather […]
Movie director William Brent Bell claims his newly released horror film ‘Brahms: The Boy II’ was greenlit thanks to people using the first film to troll Ivanka Trump’s husband – and adviser to her father Donald – Jared Kushner. The 2016 feature, ‘The Boy’ wasn’t a film begging for a sequel. The $10 million horror film came and went in January that year with little fanfare, […]
Zachary Leeman is a US-based journalist and author of the novel Nigh. The US film and TV industry’s latest answer to its lack of diversity is ‘Spellcheck for Bias,’ a tool several Hollywood studios plan to use to help increase positive portrayals of Latinos on the big and small screen. ‘Beetlejuice’ actress Geena Davis has partnered with Universal Filmed Entertainment Group to try out the new program, […]
Veiled opportunism is the latest iteration of celebrity scandal, and if you spend any of your life online it’s impossible to look away. Recently, this new scandal has seen wealthy and attractive famous people make suspiciously timed claims to marginalized identities as an escape route from valid criticism. Case in point are Jameela Jamil—a self-appointed body-positivity movement spokeswoman and regular on the TV show The Good […]
On a Wednesday in January, comedian Joel Kim Booster spent the afternoon walking the streets of Sherman Oaks, a neighborhood in northeast Los Angeles, knocking on doors. Last fall, Booster, a touring stand-up, actor, and writer, starred in Sunnyside, an NBC single-camera sitcom about a corrupt city councilman who gets fired and finds his calling helping the disenfranchised to find their footing and live the American […]
What makes a movie like Chinatown break a heart? What desperation did Sam Wasson try to touch, as he wrote The Big Goodbye, about Chinatown’s creation during the long-gone ’70s filmmaking era? Roman Polanski gave Wasson the answer: talking about watching Of Mice and Men as a teenage boy and leaving a Warsaw theater with Lenny’s death in the forefront of his mind. Wasson wrote, “it […]
“And the Oscar goes to…Parasite.” With those six words, and a very pregnant pause, Jane Fonda ushered in a new era for the Academy Awards. In its 92-year history, the Oscars had never awarded Best Picture to a film not in the English language; heck, they’d never even nominated a film from South Korea for Best International Feature, shunning Oldboy, Mother, Burning, and more. And its […]
This is a preview of our pop culture newsletter The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, written by senior entertainment reporter Kevin Fallon. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up for it here. Congratulations to the Best Chris, Chris Messina The committee responsible for the Iowa Caucus has finally delivered its results, and they are surprising. Coming out of nowhere, it is Chris Messina […]
Harvey Weinstein’s defense team urged jurors Thursday to disregard their “gut feelings” about the disgraced Hollywood producer—who’s been accused by over 80 alleged victims of sexual misconduct—arguing that prosecutors in his landmark rape trial in Manhattan stripped “adult women” of their own responsibility. “In their universe, women are not responsible for what parties they attend, the men they flirt with… for the jobs they ask for […]
There is a pivotal moment in the Apple TV+ anthology series Little America that so many of us can relate to—a character is weeping to a Kelly Clarkson song. The circumstances in this case are incredibly specific. A gay man from Syria named Rafiq (Haaz Sleiman) is fleeing violent persecution from his family, seeking asylum in the United States at the encouragement of a Kelly Clarkson-loving […]
Authored by Larry Johnson via Sic Semper Tyrannis blog, In the wake of the latest Hollywood buffoonery displayed at the Oscars, I think it is time for the American public to denounce in the strongest possible terms the rampant hypocrisy of sanctimonious cretins who make their living pretending to be someone other than themselves. Brad Pitt, Joaquin Phoenix and Barbara Streisand pop to mind as representative […]