Also, what is Jessica Simpson‘s favorite pregnancy snack? Why is Taylor Swift so terrified of drinking wine in marble bathtubs? And how is Russell Crowe making sure that Les Miserables co-star Samantha Barks isn’t left on her own? All this and more in this morning’s The Scoop.
We’re starting to get a little jealous that Mark Wahlberg wants to say hi to our mothers all the time. In case we’d somehow forgotten that Marky Mark is adorable and hilarious in addition to being ripped (please watch the Pain And Gain trailer for more information regarding Mark Wahlberg’s gun show), the actor and his Broken City director Allen Hughes popped up on Fox 29′s Good Day Philadelphia to deliver the weather report today, i.e. charm the khakis off all the moms in the viewing area.
“We’re expecting 40- to 45-minute delays if you’re coming east bound on the 676 here,” Wahlberg explained in what can only be described as Chris Farley‘s “Da Bears” accent while flailing his arms in front of a green screen. “You’re going to have some serious problems. Why don’t you stop and get yourself a hoagie?” Did you know Mark Wahlberg has been with his wife since 2001 and they have four beautiful children together? He was basically engineered in a lab for moms to love him. On a related note, we’re assuming director Allen Hughes unleashed Mark Wahlberg onto the Philly airways because his staggering charm is the only way anyone will be seeing Broken City. Have any of you even heard of it until right this second? It’s coming out next Friday! Tell your mother to go see it. Also? Please tell her hello.
Tee hee! We’re so glad it was Adam Lambert who criticized the singing in Les Miserables and not, say, any other person on the planet. “Les Mis: Visually impressive w great Emotional performances. But the score suffered massively with great actors PRETENDING to be singers,” the singer lamented last night as part of a truly winning Twitter rant. “The industry will say “these actors were so brave to attempt singing this score live”but why not cast actors who could actually sound good?” Now how are you going to argue with Adam Lambert on this issue? Claim he doesn’t know what good singing sounds like? Doing so would be but a fool’s errand, son.
Obviously, Les Miz fans were more than a little miffed at Glambert’s review. We still haven’t seen the sweeping epic (we know!), so we will withhold judgement, though to be fair we’ve heard mixed opinions about the vocal performance of everyone from Anne Hathaway to Russell Crowe since the first trailer dropped. What’s ironic about the whole thing is that Les Miz is basically the Adam Lambert of movie musicals: amazing hair, flawless wardrobe, maybe a little too grandiose but we’d all be disappointed if it wasn’t over-the-top. Even better? It’s not like Lamber’s apologizing! “Sorry for being so harsh but it’s so True!,” he tweeted. “I’m so glad we are all discussing this now! Look-I grew up w this musical and so my expectations are quite high. Didn’t mean to b negative.” You’re totally forgiven, Adam. Now what did you think of The Guilt Trip? Don’t hold back! Show Barbra no mercy! Rip Rogen to shreds!
[Photo: Getty Images]
We’d like to start by saying that we love our work. We just love pizza, ice cream cakes and those Girl Scout cookies with the coconut a hell of a lot more. And that’s the thing that separates us from the truly great actors. Well, that and a zillion KFC buckets worth of talent! Uber-dedicated movie stars will sometimes go the extra mile and put their bodies through insane physical transformations that make us sore just watching them up there on the big screen. Many hit the gym ruthlessly to purge every excess pound from their body and slim down, while some (occasionally) take a few weeks to pack on the pounds for a role. If it were us we’d choose the pound-packing parts exclusively, but hey!
More recently Anne Hathaway, Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto took the tougher route and each shed an unbelievable amount of weight for their respective roles. Anne famously lost 25 pounds for the part of Fantine in the big screen adaptation of Les Miserables by eating two thin squares of oatmeal paste a day! We imagine that includes no dessert? McConaughey jettisoned his Magic Mike six-pack to play the HIV positive lead in Dallas Buyers Club, and his whopping 40 pound weight loss has lead some to wonder if he’s going too far. It’s got to be rough, but they certainly aren’t the first famous folks to go through such a dramatic body overhaul before going in front of the camera. Head on down to the gallery below for more thespians who took their bodies to crazy town, all in the name of their art. Sit down with a nice bag of chips and enjoy!
[Photo: Splash News Online/Getty Images/Universal Pictures]
We know we’ve been on the Anne Hathaway tip for awhile now (That hair! That sweater! Dem teeth!) but we especially felt protective of the lady when some would-be fans and critics started ragging on her about her vocals from the Les Miserables trailer. (We all saw the featurette! They sing those songs live in order that their voices break with emotion like that!) We especially want to rep Hathaway now that we got a taste of Russell Crowe‘s singing in the new Les Miz trailer that dropped today. It’s noticeably different than say, Hugh Jackman‘s or Amanda Seyfried‘s pipes. It’s not Pierce Brosnan in Mama Mia! bad…but it’s questionable at best.
Luckily the new trailer also has some delicious shots of Sacha Baron Cohen and Helen Bonham Carter as the fabulously greasy Thenadiers, so there’s a lot to love. And really, we love Russell Crowe too! We’ve had a crush on him since Gladiator, his beard looks great and we want to make-out with that giant hat he gets to wear. We just might not love his shout-singing as much as some other performer’s vocal contributions. Like, say, one Ms. Anne Hathaway’s, for example. Anne Hathaway is going to blow everyone way as Fantine! Mark our words!
Humina humina! Is it gross to refer to the new Les Miserables first look video as “musical movie porn”? It is, isn’t it? Very gross? Ah, we see. Forget we said anything! Let’s just watch it a dozen more times on repeat. “It’s going to be different for sure. It’s the first time anyone’s tried it like this,” Anne Hathaway explains in the new clip. The main difference to us seems to be the fact that they’ve taken a musical people are literally obsessed with…and successfully translated it for the big screen! We may be counting our tubercular French chickens before they hatch, but there were at least five elements in this new video that had us gasping in delight:
The photograph you see above is of Russell Crowe posing with Coast Guard members after they ended up rescuing him after the actor got lost on his kayak! The actor and a friend of his were kayaking around Long Island, New York, over the weekend but ended up getting lost and had to beach their boats in Huntington Bay. This was at night and the weather was getting dicey and pretty cold, we would imagine, but luckily they spotted the Coast Guard and hitched a ride back. No injury to the both of them, either, thankfully. Coast Guard Petty Officer 2nd Class Robert Swieciki, said, ”It is common for the Coast Guard to assist boaters like this, but it was very cool to help Russell Crowe and his friend. Crowe and his friend were very grateful to get a lift.” We’re guessing Swieciki is one of the beaming guys in the picture! Crowe’s looking rather grizzled that because he’s filming the title role in Darren Aronofsky‘s Noah, which they’re shooting in New York. The actor thanked the Coast Guard in a tweet, reading, “Kayak; Cold Spring/Huntington Harbour, thanks to Seth and the boys from the US Coast Guard for guiding the way…4 hrs 30 mins, 7m(11.2km)” and also made a bit of fun of the incident in another message that read, “not lost,we knew where exactly where we were, paddling around from csh into wind, we ran out of day. Grand adventure eh chris_feather ?” Glad everyone’s okay and an adventure, not a disaster, was had!
[Photo: Splash News Online]
Huh. Okay. Maybe we’re just used to the slender, sparkly hotties of the Twilight series, but Russell Crowe would not have been our first pick to play Dracula. Obviously director Eli Roth would beg to differ, seeing as how he’ll allegedly be directing the Robin Hood actor as the blood-sucking count in the upcoming horror action movie Harker. Then again, Russell certainly isn’t the first vampyre curveball Hollywood has hurled at the audience’s befuddled faces:
Whoa. We’ve heard Anne Hathaway sing a bit before. And we’ve seen her with that haircut. But we’re not sure any of that prepared us for her powerful “I Dreamed a Dream” performance in the teaser trailer for Les Miserables. (It seriously just sent me into flashbacks of dramatically waving fake French flags around our childhood living room and re-enacting all the dying scenes from the musical.) At the same time, the trailer adds a level of sophisticated movie magic that almost makes you forget this story has been told countless times since Victor Hugo first published his novel in 1862. That makes us extra excited for the movie’s December release, and for that reason, we’d like to cheer up Fantine, Jean Valjean and Co. Here are at least eight things that should make them just a little less miserable:
Jefferson Starship might have built this city on rock’n'roll but it looks like director Adam Shankman built this Rock of Ages trailer out of pure, delicious cheddar cheese. Set to drop next Wednesday, Tom Cruise‘s official site released the film’s trailer today instead. We had already seen Tom Cruise‘s sweaty rock star Stacee Jaxx. We’d already caught a glimpse of Alec Baldwin and Russell Brand in all their hairsprayed finest, but this trailer seems to strike the exact tone necessary to successfully pull off a rock musical set in the late 1980s. It also contains a monkey. Don’t believe us? Let us identify the exact8 moments that give us hope Rock Of Ages will be carved entirely from a block of sharp cheddar…in a good way.
