Smash Season Finale: And the Marilyn Is…

NBC

Peanut allergy be damned, the show must go on!

After a season filled with some pretty glorious highs (We’re still obsessed with “Let Me Be Your Star”) and some stellar lows (“That’s why I moved to Micronesia,” real line said by Eileen’s daughter), Smashclosed out its polarizing first year on a glorious note: The finale, “Bombshell,” achieved the perfect balance of the characters’ personal drama with the fascinating inner workings of a Broadway show.

Drama, pressure, anxiety, excitement, we felt it all! Oh, and Marilyn was finally revealed: So was it plucky up-and-comer Karen (Katharine McPhee) or seasoned chorus vet Ivy (Megan Hilty)? Find out…

KEEP READING >>

[eonline.com]

Will Another Child Fix Sandra Bullock’s Broken Heart

Sandra Bullock is still walking around with a broken heart and she is praying that another adoption will ease her pain. Sandra hopes that adopting a little sister for her son Louis will save her from her crushing misery and loneliness.
Sandra is taking what seems to be a very long time to get over the heartbreaking blow delivered by … Keep Reading >>

CDL..

Being Flynn Review: Robert De Niro’s Breaking Point ©

by Paul Mazursky

BY DAVID LEE/COURTESY OF FOCUS FEATURES.

Just when I thought that Bob De Niro was wasting his great talent on too many silly movies, along comes a smashing performance in a very fine film, Being Flynn. The overpowering De Niro of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull will scare you with his portrait of a delusional drunkard. His Jonathan Flynn is demented, angry, and even funny. He hasn’t seen his son in 18 years, and the wife whom he abandoned hates him. Paul Dano is wonderful as the complicated younger Flynn, a twentysomething aspiring poet and fiction writer who is forced to take crappy jobs. His girlfriend, Olivia Thirlby, works in a Boston shelter for the homeless. She’s a lovely actress who holds her own with De Niro and Dano.

One of the lowly jobs Flynn junior must take is an aide position at his girlfriend’s shelter. Paul Weitz, the director, has an uncanny feel for the aching, shattered men that we meet there. If they are actors, they are great. If they are really homeless, they’re still great. You may see where this is going: one night, one of the shuffling walk-in turns out to be the elder Flynn. There is no catharsis at first; the two hate each other. Julianne Moore enters this ugly family portrait as the wife and mother Flynn left for good. She turns in another perfect performance as an alcoholic who still manages to work two jobs and take care of her adoring son.

There’s a lot of heavy plot here, but for the most part it’s so powerful it works. At one point De Niro gets a job driving a cab, and for a moment we see a connected thread between Taxi Driver and taxi drunkard. On a drunken rampage he crashes the cab, loses his license, and is kicked out of the shelter. What follows is a painful and painstaking account of his descent into the freezing snowy streets of Boston. There are some truly great scenes, but the gifted writer/director Weitz could have used a stronger editor. He apparently wrote 30 drafts, only to end up with his original script.

My only other problem with this well-executed film is its forced happy ending. The story skips a few years, and we see that the elder Flynn has somehow obtained and kept a cute little apartment. His attire has gone from indigent to nearly Ivy League. Young Flynn now has a wife and child, and father and son sweetly hug each other at the end. It felt to me like some focus group told the filmmakers too late in the game that the movie would be better with a happy ending.

But please go see Being Flynn. De Niro is magnificent and I think he’ll get nominated for an Oscar. Perhaps ditto for young Dano and Ms. Thirlby. I hope this picture gets the attention it deserves. It’s a movie that has really powerful feelings in it, something you don’t get much of these days.

vanityfair.com

Jake Owen Pops The Question – On Stage! ©

Jake Owen and Lacey Buchanan
Rick Diamond/Getty

Talk about a surprise engagement.

Country singer Jake Owen proposed to his girlfriend, Lacey Buchanan, on Saturday night in front of friends and family at the Citrus Bowl at Vero Beach High (his alma mater).

While singing his hit “Don’t Think I Can’t Love You,” Owen brought Buchanan out on stage for what at first appeared to be a dance. He then got down on one knee and popped the question in front of the audience. He was just missing one thing.

“You’re probably wondering where your ring is, right?” Owen could be heard asking over the speakers. Referencing the lyrics of the song, he added: “I just said I can’t buy you a big diamond ring or a big old house on the hill, but I promise you I’ll love you forever and ever and ever.”

Owen then finished the song, singing directly to Buchanan, who has appeared in his music videos for “Barefoot Blue Jean Night” and “Eight Second Ride.” The couple then shared a hug and several kisses onstage.

“He was talking about how he’d thrown his hat up on the fifty yard line [during graduation] and now he was here in front of friends and family, and it seemed like the most appropriate [venue], one concertgoer told PEOPLE.

“He seemed to spontaneously decide to bring her out on stage and propose to her.”

Ring or no ring, Owen is clearly happy with his decision. “I’m a happy man,” the singer Tweeted Sunday. “Life is complete.”

Source : people.com

Aaron Sorkin on His New HBO Show, The Newsroom, and His Style of “Musical Dialogue” ©

by VanityFair. photographs by Annie Leibovitz 12:00 AM, APRIL 6 2012

“I’ve always thought of myself as somebody who, when it comes to comedy or drama, I don’t do either one of them well enough to do only one of them,” Aaron Sorkin tells Vanity Fair writer James Kaplan in a May-issue sneak peek of The Newsroom, his series for HBO. “So I try to mix up my pitches a little bit in an episode.” But, Sorkin says, “I am truly at my happiest not when I am writing an aria for an actor or making a grand political or social point. I am at my happiest when I’ve figured out a fun way for somebody to slip on a banana peel.” In his forthcoming show, Sorkin investigates the fast-talking and volatile world of cable news, with a cast that includes Emily Mortimer, Dev Patel, Olivia Munn, Jeff Daniels, and Sam Waterston. (See a slide show of Sorkin with the cast and crew, in photographs by Annie Leibovitz.)

“I create these shows so that I can write them,” he says of his limited collaborative style. “I’m not an empire builder. I’m not interested in just producing. All I want to do is write. I came up as a playwright—writing is something you do by yourself in a room. That said, I couldn’t possibly write the show without that room full of people. I go in there, and we kick around ideas. I’m writing about all kinds of things I don’t know anything about. So they do research for me.”

“I kind of see plot as a necessary intrusion on what I really want to do, which is write musical dialogue,” Sorkin says of his notoriously snappy style of discourse. “So these arguments aren’t me finding sort of a clever way to be politically persuasive. [The news is] just a really rich area for arguing.” He admits, “I’m pretty wordy when I write.”

Daniels, who stars as the broken-down anchorman Will McAvoy, agrees with that. “The trick with Aaron, which I think makes this the ultimate challenge,” he tells Kaplan, “is that you have to learn a Broadway play every week. We’re not walking around the corner holding a gun, going, ‘Look out!’ We’re coming around the corner and doing Sorkin, and that’s a whole other thing. And it’s Sorkin at 90 miles an hour, because there’s a musicality, there’s a rhythm to him. Dialogue that has to come out of your mouth, snap-snap—and not just actors talking fast. These [characters] are very smart people, they think fast and they talk fast, and those listening have to keep up.”

But, says Mortimer, that is part of why she loves doing Sorkin. “The problem with romantic comedies nowadays is that they’re not clever and they’re not about anything. Whereas this is very clever and it’s about something. The great writers and directors of the past have understood that sexual tension can be so brilliantly depicted in the way that people talk to each other—Billy Wilder and Cukor knew that, Shakespeare knew that, and Jane Austen knew that. And it’s so rarely investigated these days, partly because the world has to be a world where people talk fast and funny. And one of those worlds is the news.”

“I love television,” Sorkin says. “I love putting on a show every week. I love coming to work with the same people every week. I love the immediacy of it. But the price that you pay for all that is the ferocity of the schedule. We have to make a one-hour movie every nine days. So I have to write a one-hour movie every nine days. You’re writing an episode, you’re shooting an episode, and one is in postproduction while another is in pre-production, casting, and scouting. It becomes a little bit like a MASH unit.”

Read more: James Kaplan takes an inside look at the West Wing creator’s new dramedy in “The Sorkin Way,” published in the May 2012 issue.

Source : vanityfair.com

So You’re Dating a Narcissist… ©

YOUR SPECIAL MAN OR LADY IS MORE IN LOVE WITH THE (WO)MAN IN THE MIRROR THAN THEY ARE WITH YOU…IS THERE ANY HOPE FOR THIS BAD ROMANCE?

By KANEISHA GRAYSON

We all know these people: ​they have a treasure trove of entertaining stories about their fabulous, adventurous lives. They often have larger-than-life personalities coupled with baffling displays of deep insecurity. They have extremely high demands of the people close to them, yet they often fail to keep their own promises or live up to adult responsibilities. They don’t think the rules everyone else abides by apply to them, and they feel that their “specialness” can only truly be understood by other exceptional people.
The official definition of “narcissistic personality disorder” from our friends at the Mayo Clinic is the following [emphasis added]:
Narcissistic personality disorder is a mental disorder in which people have an inflated sense of their own importance and a deep need for admiration. Those with narcissistic personality disorder believe that they’re superior to others and have little regard for other people’s feelings. But behind this mask of ultra-confidence lies a fragile self-esteem, vulnerable to the slightest criticism.
Being colleagues or close friends with a narcissist is hard enough. But what about if you’re actually in love with a narcissist? I myself have narcissistic tendencies, and can definitely point to at least one relationship where I was dating a toxic narcissist. In our “look at me, fan me, follow me” culture, it seems like everyone has a place in the spectrum of self-absorbed behavior that is narcissism. However, there’s an important difference between having narcissistic tendencies and being a toxic narcissist, someone’s whose behavior is so wildly destructive, oblivious of consequences, and inconsiderate of others’ feelings that it’s nearly impossible for them to be in an authentic relationship built on love, trust, and support.
In their book Help! I’m in Love with a Narcissist, authors Steven Carter and Julia Sokol gave ample examples of relationships featuring toxic narcissists and their clueless counterparts. To help those of you who might be reluctant to come to terms with the fact that you are in love with a narcissist, here is a checklist of what dating a narcissist feels like:

• You’ll feel like you’re doing most of the “work” in the relationship.
• Your partner will do things to sabotage the relationship from moving forward—but doesn’t want to completely let you go either.
• Your partner may have a long history of troubled relationships and addictions of all kinds.
• Your partner may have recurring episodes of infidelity—which he or she somehow makes your fault.

Source : ebony.com