Natalia brings you the latest news on Adele’s interview with Anderson Cooper, Kristen Bell’s interview on Ellen is auto tuned, Ladyhawke’s latest music video and much more!
Natalia discusses what’s new with Pharrell Williams and her thoughts on Karl Lagerfeld’s mean comments towards Adele’s weight. She also shows a roster of animals behaving like humans and, wait until you see the new size of coffee available at Starbucks!
Natalia dishes the latest news on the Juno Awards nominees, the upcoming Spiderman 3D film starring Emma Stone and Andrew Garfield and is Katy Perry hooking up with Tim Tebow? Watch today’s episode to find out.
When The Kooks are in the studio they’re focused and most importantly, sober. Watch Hugh and Luke explain their reasoning below.
The Kooks released a new album called “Junk of the Heart,” and you would think Hugh and Luke would be very excited about it. Well, they seemed rather indifferent to be honest. We spoke about that and why they don’t care about critics.
Natalia dishes the latest in entertainment news on Joan Rivers, Lana Del Rey and a brand new trailer for the movie Hunger Games.
Natalia talks about how Snooki might be pregnant, Nicolas Cage’s Cage Rage, Elisabetta Canalis is dating Steve-O and more for Feb 1, 2012.
Natalia dishes the news on Miley Cyrus breaking her tailbone, a 100 year old woman who plays the Nintendo DS to stay young and Houston, Texas contemplating a statute of Beyonce.
David Beckham debuts a new line of underwear, the worst dressed celebrity – Shy’m and Matthew Broderick is back as Ferris Bueller with a brand new commercial airing during the Super Bowl on Feb 5th 2012.
Daniel Radcliffe is back with his new movie The Woman In Black. It’s a bone chilling remake of a film from the ’80s. Ironically, Daniel actually scares very easily but he’s not afraid of ghosts. In this interview he tells us what really gives him the creeps.
Next time you’re struggling to make conversation, try asking this question: “If you could invite anyone (living or dead) to the perfect house party, who would it be?”
Graffiti6 is starting to make their North American invasion, and they are hitting up the Tonight Show. Does this sound familiar? Well the Beatles made the exact same journey over 40 years ago. Naturally, @jordans_life had to make some comparisons.
Nick plays World of Warcraft. Not only that, he’s the head of his guild, demonstrating that it IS possible to juggle being a hardcore gamer with being a top-selling recording artist.
During a LIVE interview on andPOP.com Nick Carter gave out a number and took phone calls from his fans. These were real phone calls from real fans who we gave exclusive access to one of the biggest recording artists of our generation.
There were great questions about music, fitness, the backstreet boys but the most popular question, however, was about his underwear. In this clip Nick talks about his his ‘Haynes’ and covering his fans with glow in the dark paint.
When releasing new music today, half the battle is online promotion. However, contests, signed merch and giveaways aren’t always the best solutions. When working on their latest album, Hedley came up with a brilliant idea, they decided to make trailers.
It’s hard to prepare for an interview with Hedley. So in this interview, we threw caution to the wind, got a 24 of beer and broadcast the interview live on our USTREAM (andPOP.tv). Eventually Jacob, Dave and @jordans_life ended up talking about hairy legs, their newest music video and more.
Diamandis from Marina and The Diamonds talks to us about her very serious disease. It’s called synaesthetic. And we lied, it’s not a disease. More like a cool condition. Diamandis explains further.
Would you be embarrassed if someone scrolled through your iPod? We sit down with Spee and Brendan to talk about the diverse music on their playlist.
Marina and The Diamonds are working on some new music, but Marina is being very secretive about it. Although the release has been delayed, she let’s us in on some secrets about the new album, and how alcohol changed her life.
For the most part, sequels of any medium, be they film, novel or video game, have a few important items to address on a checklist: better developed characters, a more enticing story, new locations, and most importantly, a sense of polish and completeness that the original, while perhaps something new and unique, was unable to be fully realized for any number of reasons.
Assassin’s Creed II manages to not only address all of these issues, but manages to throw out the entire list and make you wonder just how far the inevitable sequel will be able to go from this point.
Anyone familiar with the first Assassin’s Creed is aware of the ongoing war between the Assassins and the Templars. The story picks up immediately where the first game left off, with you starting out in the shoes of Desmond Miles. Luckily, this is quickly rectified, and you are whisked away to the Renaissance, landing in the middle of 15th century Italy. Immediately, the sense of history, structure and life that flows through the city streets is instantly believable, immersing you in the reality of the game world. Merchants sweep the walkways in front of their stores, businessmen walk the streets with an entourage in tow, all the while engaged in private conversations. Doctors and artists hawk their wares to the passing crowds, some of who even stop in for a quick peek before returning to their chore of the moment. The cities feel alive in a way that the first game lacked, and each character walking the streets is unique – very rarely will you see a repeat costume or face in the same block of cobblestone walkways.
What helps to bring these vistas to life is the fantastic musical score. From haunting melodies to angelic choirs, the music fits the scenery as well as the action throughout the entire world. Attempting to scale to the top of a church tower results in both an uplifting and equally haunting rise in the score, making the sequence feel scripted, even though you are in complete control of when and where you choose to start climbing, or even if you decided halfway up to perform a swan dive into a conveniently-placed ox-cart; and even then, the sound design doesn’t fail. Dive off a high enough ledge, and you hear the wind whistle past your ears, and your clothes begin to flutter faster and harder the longer you fall. It is this attention to detail that helps fully realize the world in which Ezio lives, and immerses you in a way that few other games have been able to do. (more…)
A secret song, hidden for more than 500 years in Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper”?
It sounds like it could be the plot of a Dan Brown novel, but one man claims to have discovered music hidden in the Renaissance man’s famous painting.
Giovanni Maria Pala, an Italian musician and computer technician, says the hands of Jesus and the Apostles along with the loaves of bread in the painting each represent a note. When the “notes” are read from right to left, following Leonardo’s particular writing style, a 40-second composition emerges.
Pala said he made the discovery after superimposing a stave – the five lines used in sheet music – onto the painting.
“It sounded really solemn, almost like a requiem,” he said of the song, which he believes plays best on a pipe organ.
Pala published his findings in a book, “La Musica Celata (The Hidden Music).”
Alessandro Vezzosi, a Leonardo expert and the director of Tuscany’s Leonardo museum, said that he had not seen Pala’s research but that the musician’s hypothesis is “plausible.”
Previous research has indicated that the Apostles’ hands in the painting may form a Gregorian chant, Vezzosi said, but this is the first time the bread loaves have been taken into account.
“There’s always a risk of seeing something that is not there, but it’s certain that the spaces [in the painting] are divided harmonically,” said Vezzosi.
“Where you have harmonic proportions, you can find music.”
Painted from 1494 to 1498 in Milan’s Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, “The Last Supper” has been the subject of renewed interest following Brown’s bestselling novel “The Da Vinci Code,” which suggested that one of the Apostles sitting on Jesus’ right is Mary Magdalene instead of a male.
According to the IMDB, Joel Surnow, the creator/producer of 24, read The Da Vinci Code and thought it would make a great storyline for the third season. He approached his boss, producer Brian Grazer (who also produced The Da Vinci Code), with the idea, and Grazer approached Dan Brown, who rejected their bid.
If I am to believe the IMDB (their record can be a little spotty) this means I have good reason to be pissed at Dan Brown.
Don’t get me wrong: in the interests of full disclosure, let me admit that had I been in Brown’s shoes I would have done the same thing. I’m sure he’s proud of his novel and having netted Tom Hanks for the lead role and Ron Howard behind the camera, I’m sure he watched every frame of this movie with glee.
But man, this really would’ve made a great season of 24. All the ingredients are there – a gigantic conspiracy, narrow escapes and betrayals that make no sense. By the time the action element abruptly wraps itself 75 per cent of the way through, there’s easily a novel’s worth of material remaining. 24‘s writers would have had no trouble expanding it, and it wouldn’t have had such an anticlimactic ending. As is, we get a movie that’s solidly acted, really well directed, and frankly, about as good at delivering thrills as two or three solid episodes of 24.
My complaints with the movie lie with the writing. Watching The Da Vinci Code dredged up memories of reading R.L Stine and Michael Crichton’s potboilers in middle school, the kind where the plot moves at a breakneck pace and one solid event in someone’s past counts as character development. Again, full disclosure: I haven’t read The Da Vinci Code (I’d like to), and in 99 per cent of cases (Jurassic Park‘s the only exception that comes to mind, and maybe last year’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe) the movie is either vastly inferior (the first two Harry Potter films, the Lemony Snicket film from a couple years ago) or, if it’s lucky, equal to (The Lord of the Rings, The Silence of the Lambs, The Godfather) the book. I usually try to read books before seeing the movie, so I’m not proud of this. I’ve read/heard most of the criticism, however, and recall reading the prologue and laughing. From what I can tell Brown wrote a typical potboiler with a really good premise, and I’m willing to bet the movie follows his plot reasonably faithfully.
Which means I can probably blame him for the awful dialogue, especially painful when characters are talking about that one event from their past. I can probably blame him for the paper-thin characters (Robert Langdon has to be one of the most boring protagonists in bestseller history; far more engaging is the wonderful Audrey Tatou – whose name, incidentally, should be on posters right next to Hanks’; she has more lines than him – as leading lady Sophie Neveu). And I can probably blame him for the way characters’ pasts and moments in history are abruptly dredged up during the action (Ron Howard handles it well, though – it ends up coming off like the PS2 game God of War, and that’s a compliment).
Of course, bad dialogue, thin characters, and bald exposition are forgivable if you’re telling a ripping good story. And I may not have the time or interest anymore to read potboilers, but I’m all for hearing a shopworn tale if it’s done really well. Again, though, I think I can blame Brown for the way the movie derails itself 75 per cent of the way through. And from what I could tell overhearing a pair of critics in the bathroom afterward, screenwriter Akiva Goldsman changed just one or two minor details that relate to Sophie’s back story (you get to know her better than Langdon). Ron Howard directs this movie very well – lots of scenic pans, on-location shooting, close-ups where necessary, and the camera’s always moving – and the acting, with strong turns from pros like Ian McKellen, Alfred Molina, and Jean Reno, seems to be as good as it gets given the material. For a large part of the way, The Da Vinci Code is quite involving. But I’m guessing Dan Brown’s prose is pretty thin material, and because it’s been adapted this well the thinness has only been accentuated. Even Tim Burton wouldn’t have been able to make one of R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps books a classic. It still would have been watchable; that’s basically what we get here.
3*/5*
An evangelical company is releasing a video Bible as a “Christian response” to The Da Vinci Code movie, which opens in theatres on May 19.
The WatchWord Bible, a 10-DVD version of the New Testament, will be sold in 140,000 churches across the U.S., says the Hollywood Reporter.
“We feel it is important to be able to open up a dialogue about faith that is positive, that looks at The Da Vinci Code as a positive platform for discussion about faith and the roots of our faith,” said David Kirkpatrick, president of distributor Good News Holdings and former head of production at Paramount Pictures. “Personally I think The Da Vinci Code is a really good book, a great work of fiction, and it will be a huge success at the box office.”
The video Bible has a total running time of 26 hours and the complete New Testament in both onscreen text and narration. Churches will keep half of the selling price of $49.95.
The Da Vinci Code’s controversial theories about Christianity has led to some officials in the Vatican calling for Catholics to boycott the movie.
