Hollywood Latest News 6th September 2013

Ricky Gervais on His Favorite Comedians, Atheism, and 'Derek'

As the champion of atheism, British comedy, and put-down humor, it makes sense why Redditors love Ricky Gervais.  It also makes sense that when he tells Reddit to ask him anything (AMA), they have a lot of questions. Reddit's inquiries were personal, funny, and often lewd, and Gervais responded in kind. He also discussed his new show Derek, which has already aired in England and will come to Netflix on September 12th. The mockumentary comedy centers around Derek, played by Gervais, a sweet and bumbling nursing home worker.  Here are some of Gervais' best quotes from the AMA, some about Derek, and some about...other things.
On who would play the lead in a movie about Gervais:"Daniel Day-Lewis would play me as a baby. He can do anything. Johnny Depp or Brad Pitt are fighting out for me now. And Meryl Streep will play me after the sex change. I haven't told you about that, have I?"
On his current favorite shows: 
"My favourite shows of the year are House of Cards, the Scandinavian versions of The Killing and The Bridge, and my guilty pleasure is everything MMA. Ultimate Fighter is amazing."
On whether Derek was based on his experiences: 
"The situation certainly is. Half my family growing up were carers of some sort, mostly retirement homes (stroke, Alzheimers), and Derek is like my fictional superhero of an everyday gentle outsider. I suppose they're all little fables about kindness. And possibly, a love letter to my lovely, poor and humble family growing up."
On which The Office boss would survive longer as gladiators in ancient Rome (Gervais played the UK Office's boss David Brent):"Brent lasts longest. Because he begs for his life, and then stabs Michael when he lets him up."
On his worst experience:"I saw Louis CK naked."
On his favorite comedians:
"Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Dave Allen, and a couple of new boys heading towards that list like Louis CK and Doug Stanhope."
On his favorite snack:
"Cheese on toast has got to be right up there."
On what he would do as King of England:"I'd probably invade a country. A smaller, weaker country. One that can't defend itself and is helpless. With lots of gold."
On his infamous bathtub selfies:
"I like my baths really deep and hot. But washing everything only takes a few minutes. So I thought it would be a waste to just flush all that water away. So there was nothing else to do but take pictures of myself trying to look as horrendous as possible. Oh my, what have I started?"
On his greatest accomplishment:
"I fought a bear once. But it started crying, so I let it off."
On the moment when he became a celebrity in America:
"I guess winning the Golden Globes for The Office in 2004 against all odds started it all. When I went up to collect the first award, Clint Eastwood was overheard to say 'Who the f**k is that?'"
On being known as Reddit's "King of the Atheists":
"I prefer 'God of the Atheists.'"

The 11 Craziest Quotes From Lady Gaga's Interview with 'The Guardian'

In Tuesday's interview with The Guardian, Lady Gaga proves just how insane the life of the rich and famous can be. She's also proving she's a little wacky herself… you know, in case you missed the meat dress, egg hatching, or naked video. In the interview, Gaga talks about the pressure of being a star and of always having people watching you, especially when you draw attention to yourself. 
Here are a few quotes from her interview that will give you some insight into her life (or something). 
When asked about being in the spotlight:
"I hid in my house, I hid a lot ... to preserve my image as a superstar to my fans. I don't mean I am a superstar, I mean that they only ever see me at my best. And it really drove me crazy. So I've really had to make more of an effort to go out more. I mean, can you imagine what it's like not to feel real wind? Honestly, I hadn't felt real wind for years!"
"I would be indoors all day and then I'd get in a car in a garage and then drive to another garage and get out and rehearse and then do it again, from country to country, and never walk outside. I remember some of the longest walks I had were from the car to the aeroplane on the tarmac."
When asked if she felt persecuted:
"Yeah, for sure I do. Yes! I certainly feel that at this time it's almost as if people are surprised they haven't already destroyed me."
"It gives them a sense of pleasure when they believe that they've destroyed me or taken me down."
When asked about her new single, "Applause":
"It's literally not even been two weeks since my first single came out and it's all, 'She's over', or, because I'm not No. 1 yet, 'She's finished.' People focus less on the music and focus more on how the music's doing; how it's faring from a numbers perspective, from a financial perspective. If you think I give a damn about money then you don't know me as an artist at all."
"I think that once you've had a few No. 1s in your career that you've kind of proven yourself and I don't feel the need to prove anything anymore."
"It's so interesting for people to say that the lyrics are all about me the performer, I want you to feel that way about yourself, that's why I wrote the song. I want you to wake up in the morning and say: 'I live for your applause, look at me today, I'm having a great day, I'm going to work and I'm going to have a fantastic lunch with my friends.' But it's not to be taken quite as seriously and as literally as people make it to be, which is why in the verses I'm sort of making fun of what people think about fame."
When discussing the operation that put her in a wheelchair:
"I know everyone was thinking I was trying to be a bit silly with my gold wheelchair but I was really trying to keep a bit of strength for my fans because it really upset them and scared them."
When asked about who she considers to be her fans:
"I mean everybody. I mean anyone that's watching."
Why she made her new album, ARTPOP:
"I had really tried to hide a lot of my pain from my past in the last few years," she says towards the end of the interview. And yet, at the Roundhouse she introduced her new song "Swine" with, "My heart, my skin, and my pussy felt like trash."
"For ARTPOP, I, in the most metaphorical explanation, stood in front of a mirror and I took off the wig and I took off the makeup and I unzipped the outfit and I put a black cap on my head and I covered my body in a black catsuit and I looked in the mirror and I said: 'OK, now you need to show them you can be brilliant without that.' And that's what ARTPOP is all about. Because I knew that if I wanted to grow, if I really wanted to innovate from the inside, I had to do something that was almost impossible for me."

Watch New 'American Horror Story: Coven' Teaser: The Dead Don't Lay Still

FX’s creeptastic horror series, American Horror Story won’t haunt your TV sets for a few weeks but this clip does give us a little glimpse into what this demented show has in store for us come October. And when I say glimpse I mean a literal glimpse into a dead person's grave, though she’s a little too fidgety to be truly dead. The third season of Ryan Murphy's horror anthology, called American Horror story: Coven, focuses on the history of witches in America and twists the real-life salem witch trials into its narrative. Is this one of the witches of the coven?  Grab a security blanket and watch this unnerving clip.

The Gender Politics of Vin Diesel's 'Riddick'

Warning: The following contains spoilers for the movie Riddick.

It says something that one of Hollywood.com's top viewed articles, to this day, is a 2006 post titled "Vin Diesel Slams Gay Rumors." Seven years and an ostensible leap forward in our nation's attitude toward sexual identity and there remain those who are bewildered, outraged, and mortified over the idea of Diesel, the poster boy for all things manly, being gay. We can't blame the actor for this flowing river of backwards thinking, but we can take issue with some of his creative endeavors. Made famous by action-heavy, brutally macho movies like xXx and the Fast and Furious franchise, Diesel seems to have made a habit of aligning himself with the sort of project that glorifies the heteronormative idea of man: someone who fights, frowns, and beds as many nameless women as he can. And although there is nothing impressively progressive about the actor's past choices, their offense might pale in comparison to his latest gig: the new installment of the Richard Riddick trilogy, Riddick. A movie that is so frought with gender-political issues that we're beginning to wonder if the people populating the "Vin Diesel Slams Gay Rumors" comment section actually had a hand in writing the script.

What's curious about Riddick is that it actually approaches the ideas of gender roles and sexual orientation head on. With a lot of time to chat during their motionless stakeout of a wasteland planet in hopes of apprehending the titular criminal, a pair of bounty hunter teams gets into some heated trifles. The head of Team A, Jordi Mollà's Santana, is a sociopathic bandit defined by his plaguing pride issues and a sexual predatory streak, the target of his assaults being the film's sole female character, a strong-willed agent played by Katee Sackhoff (who also, it must be noted, denounces any sexual interest in men at the start of the movie). Santana is obsessed with seizing control from Team B captain Boss Johns (Matt Nable), an intellectual stoic who matches every one of Santana's threats with a passive-aggressive alternative, opting for patience and collection over his opponent's venemous bravado. Fairly quickly, the dynamic between the two men becomes little more than a pissing contest between the contrasting alpha males, each losing battles along the way as the other's methods prove conditionally more effective in the maintenance of his camp.

Early on in the movie, you're inclined to sympathize with Boss Johns, championing his intelligence over the all brawn and balls approach of the deplorable Santana character (who, it's made clear from the start, you're supposed to hate). But while Nable's temperate captain is presented initially as the Spock to Mollà's Kirk, he descends pretty quickly into his own corrupt drive to capture Riddick, the man he believes to be responsible for his son's death. But this particular conflict of allegiance is resolved when another one spawns: by this point in the movie, you're meant to have allied your sympathies with Riddick himself, who might be the closest thing this film has to a Bones, were not for his own predatory inclinations. And that's where the real issues with Riddick's attitudes on gender come in: when the hero becomes just as big a sexual criminal as the villain, but is applauded for it.

We do not struggle with our affection for Riddick in the early chapters of the movie. We catch up with him surviving alone, abandoned on a near-apocalyptic planet. He gets by on his stealth and agility. He longs humbly for his distant homeland of Furya. He befriends a wild dog. The film might as well open on him carrying a baby out of a burning building, draped in a Beatles t-shirt and a red, white, and blue cape. And not only is he heroic, but exacted as a character symbolizing an array of liberal values: He rejects another character's compulsion to pray to God in a time of duress, favoring tactile logic over faith. He swipes spaceship batteries from the bounty hunter crew, leaving his mark with the none-too-subtle graffiti tag "FAIR TRADE." Hell, he conducts an ad-hoc abortion on a pregnant alien reptile. By displaying both these values and those way across the spectrum, brazen machismo, the movie is really setting us up with an all-purpose good guy.

But what's troubling is that this established affection is meant to carry over during Riddick's less favorable antics. Once captured by the troops, Riddick engages in provocative dialogue with Sackhoff's character — who is so unfortunately named Dahl (pronounced "doll") — that is no less repugnant than the sort of vile lines tossed her way via the Santana we are all understood to be the film's biggest douchebag. But when Riddick does it — objectifying her, prompting her for sex, remarking quite shamelessly on her breasts — the audience is asked to cheer. (And actually mine did.) But that's not even the worst part: the impassioned viewer isn't the only one who gets on board with Riddick's behavior. Dahl does too.

By the end of the film, Sackhoff's heroine — the intelligent, dutiful, strong, and proud woman who identifies her sexual orientation fairly bluntly early in the film ("I don't f**k guys" isn't too ambiguous) not only stands alone in sympathizing with the criminal Riddick, but risks her life to save him in the final moments of the planet's decay, succumbing to his previous advances by professing her desire to sleep with him as the two retreat to the safety of the ascending spaceship. And thus, her story is resolved. Boss Johns comes to terms with Riddick's innocence in regard to his son's death (coming to accept that Johns Jr. was a junkie and a criminal). Riddick finally flees the impending Armageddon that has proven his feature-long mortal enemy. And Dahl shirks her avowed disinterest in the male form, submitting to the calls of heteronormativity, and closing her story on a request to sleep with the guy whose only other converastion with her had been comprised of lewd, perverse come-ons.

So how can a movie villify a character like Santana and champion one like Riddick? The difference between the two men is microscopic, but Santana is reviled in-universe as feeble and depraved, whereas Riddick is adored (or at least admired) for his gallant displays of masculinity. Santana comes up short in challenging Johns for top banana status, but Riddick earns celebratory laughs over his casual insistence that Nable's increasingly agitated character "ride b***h" on their shared hover-bike during a quest to retrieve a spaceship battery buried in the wilderness. The only thing that keeps us from feeling about Riddick the way we do about Santana, in fact, is the fact that we're not obligated to. As this film is a Vin Diesel vehicle, and as Diesel is a moreover charismatic actor, we know that we can "get away" with laughing off his oh-so-charming aggressions, his that's-just-Riddick-bein'-Riddick come-ons. We feel as though we're allowed to like him and all his bravado, despite the fact that we know better. Riddick is the "Blurred Lines" of movie characters.

And therein is our problem: Characters and ideas we root for, our value system notwithstanding, just because we don't feel the threat of scorn and judgment present. When we feel safe and comfortable among things we know we should detest it should not be an invitation to get behind them. It should be all the more reason to challenge our own attitudes. Yes, we can clap for Riddick, derive satisfaction in his snappy "flirtations" and hoot and holler when he finally gets (in the most material sense of the word) the girl. It'd be fun, it'd be easy. And there'd be nobody there to wag a finger. But that's the same kind of attitude that allows some folks to rest comfortably among the masses who are disgusted by the idea of an action movie star being gay. If you do see Riddick, don't let it convince you to excuse the criminal behaviors imparted by its title character or the "victorious transformation" of an established lesbian into the hero's heterosexual bounty. Feel what you know you should, take as much issue as your gut tells you to, and embrace that... no matter how many other people are cheering beside you.

Katy Perry's 'Roar' Video Is So Ridiculous It's Good

What do you get when you combine plane crashes, elephant pedicures, and skirts made of leaves? The video for Katy Perry's latest single "Roar," of course. Stylized after an old-fashioned disaster movie, it shows Perry undergo the typical uplifting pop song journey from wide-eyed and scared to Queen of the Jungle. Sure, you've seen it before — Perry's even done it before — but what saves "Roar" from getting lost in the empowerment video shuffle is the sheer amount of fun in it.

Becuase when Katy Perry is Queen of the Jungle, she uses her high heel to catch bananas and wrestles alligators so she can clean their teeth. She even has a roaring contest with the tiger that killed her boyfriend. The video is, essentially, so ridiculous that it's good. It plays up the cheesiness of the song in just the right way, making the song actually better with the video than on its own. By the time Perry's taking selfies with a monkey, you might even be charmed enough to forgive her for the fact that "Roar" will be stuck in your head for the next week.

Perry's at her best when she's at her goofiest, so let's hope the cheese and the charm is back for good.

5 Quentin Tarantino Cameos

The Weinstein Company Even Quentin Tarantino, the king of celluloid cool, can’t resist photobombing his cult classics from time to time.  He hijacks the opening scene in Reservoir Dogs as Mr. Brown, waxing lyrical about pop culture as usual (Madonna’s "Like A Virgin," in this instance). He gets shot in the head not long after (but he DIES in a car crash, if any geeks want to get technical about it).
In Pulp Fiction, a yuppiefied suburbanite Tarantino helps the not-so-smooth criminals dispose of an inconvenient body, but he’s no hard man: his main concern is not getting busted by his wife.
Tarantino snags himself a cameo as a rape-minded soldier in Robert Rodriguez's half of their shared joint Grindhouse. Previously, Rodriguez let him run rampant with a self-penned, three-minute urine joke in Desperado. It doesn’t always work out. Tarantino’s recent turn as an Australian miner in Django Unchained gets dishonorable mention for the heinous (and possibly ironic, of course) accent. But leave the guy alone already! Isn’t the fact that he gets blown up by his own dynamite punishment enough?