In his latest movie, The Woman In Black, Dan traded his Hogwarts uniform for a totally new role as a Dad.
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.
I’m not an especially patient person, and it occurs to me the movies might be partly responsible for this. How can we accept that good things come to those who wait when we’re consistently bombarded with happy relationships between couples who have just met, or history-making accomplishments that require no more than three hours of the protagonist’s involvement? How can we accept that it takes years to learn a musical instrument, when we’ve seen character after character master it in minutes, or martial arts, when according to the movies all it requires is a training sequence and a montage?
I’m not trying to insult filmgoers (including myself), but I suspect there are more viewers out there who identify with Homer Simpson’s immortal words than we’d like to admit: “If something’s hard to do, then it’s not worth doing. You just stick that guitar in the closet next to your short wave radio, your karate outfit, and your unicycle and we’ll go inside and watch TV.”
So it is with Never Back Down, another film that takes something difficult (in this case, mixed martial arts) and makes it look easy, wrapping it inside another Rocky/Karate Kid-like underdog’s tale.
No, I’m not going to continue moaning about cliches. Accusing a movie like Never Back Down of being cliched is like accusing a dog of barking when it first meets you – it might turn out to be lovable or annoying, but criticizing its instinct means you probably shouldn’t be acknowledging it in the first place. What matters in a movie like this is, are the fight sequences exciting? Is the hero someone you care about? Is the villain someone you want to see taken down?
Under the first criteria, at least, the movie fails: our hero, Jake Tyler (Sean Faris), is a pacifist who doesn’t want to fight (though he’s provoked easily when someone mentions his dead father); the villain, Ryan McCarthy (Cam Gigandet) has no reason to hate him; and the villain (and later our hero)’s girlfriend (Amber Heard) ropes Jake into his first fight against Ryan for no apparent reason. Jake’s sidekick, Max Cooperman (Evan Peters), seems like the kind of guy who’s intelligent enough to realize he shouldn’t get into a car with Ryan, but then 30 minutes before the movie ends he does.
What bugs me the most about Never Back Down is that Jake starts off knowing the correct lesson: He’s angry, but would rather walk away from a fight than start one. Later he begins attacking people without provocation (the film actually glorifies one act of warrantless violence, when Jake attacks a trio of drivers and grievously injures one by slamming them into a sideview mirror – the results are posted on YouTube and his classmates applaud him for it), before learning to back off again. The movie argues (correctly, I think) that sometimes you can’t walk away from a fight, but at the end of the film the only thing that’s really changed is Jake has become much better at beating up people who make fun of him.
As for the action scenes, by Hollywood standards they’re entertaining enough. I don’t expect readers to be familiar with Donnie Yen’s recent Hong Kong fare, such as SPL or Flashpoint, but unlike those movies the fight sequences are not as gripping as what you’ll see during any given UFC match. While the final battle is somewhat rousing and the screenplay has one or two (literally) glimmers of intelligence, overall Never Back Down doesn’t work well enough for me to recommend it.
