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The Couch Potato Report

I love it when love it is the air!!

The Couch Potato Report – October 26th, 2013

Love is in the air this week as I have movies about love, movies to love, and movies to share with the people you love.

We’ll star with FIRST LOVE, which is both the title and subject of a heartbreaking little made-in-Quebec film about 13-year-old Antoine.

Antoine and his parents are spending the summer in a rented cottage on an island in the middle of the Saint-Lawrence River. His neighbour for the summer is a beautiful 17-year-old girl named Anna that he just can’t get enough of.

As Anna is his first love, Antoine has no idea what to do, so he starts to follow her because he just wants to be around her as much as possible.

After initially encouraging his behaviour and attention, she soon starts to become distant, and Antoine discovers why.

Anna has a first love of her own.

FIRST LOVE is the sort of film that doesn’t give any more than it has to, even with dialogue. Sometimes just a glance between two characters, or body language, says more than words can say. I really liked that about the film.

It also doesn’t give us all the answers…but in a good way…and that leads to a lot of red herrings.

I really enjoyed FIRST LOVE. This one is worth searching out.

THE WAY WAY BACK is another coming of age story, and the love here is between a 14-year-old boy named Duncan and the one man who takes him seriously, when everyone else dismisses him, especially his Mother’s new boyfriend.

Steve Carell from LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE plays the boyfriend, and Sam Rockwell of SEVEN PSYCHOPATHS is the man who convinces the boy that he isn’t just a three.

Rockwell’s character also provides many of the film’s biggest laughs.

THE WAY WAY BACK is fun and funny and heartfelt. It’s not perfect, this type of story has been told dozens of times before and so we know what to expect by now, but this one is above –average and I really enjoyed it.

To the third in a trilogy now, a trilogy about love that I love.

We first met Jesse and Celine in 1995’s BEFORE SUNRISE. They got off a train in Vienna and spent the evening walking and talking.

2004’s BEFORE SUNSET takes place nine years after they first met and we get some details about what happened after that night as Jesse is in Paris promoting the book he wrote about their time together. We also find out that he is now married and has a son, but by the end of the film, it appears Jesse and Celine are destined to be together.

And now, after another nine years, we have BEFORE MIDNIGHT, the continuing story of Jesse and Celine, brought to us by actors Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy and director, co-writer Richard Linklater.

Jesse and Celine are now together and deeply in love in BEFORE MIDNIGHT and they have twin daughters. But like all couples, they also have plenty of disagreements.

I love this series and these characters and I was not disappointed by BEFORE MIDNIGHT.

Admittedly, their conversations were a little too raw and honest at times, but after almost twenty years together – in real life or in movies – people do speak to each other that way.

That honesty and the ongoing fantasy of meeting a stranger on a train and spending the rest of your with them is still one that keeps me coming back to this series, and recommending BEFORE SUNRISE, BEFORE SUNSET and now BEFORE MIDNIGHT to anyone who hasn’t seen them yet.

I can’t wait to meet up with Jesse and Celine again in nine years!!

Time for some GLEE now, specifically THE COMPLETE FOURTH SEASON of the Emmy Award winning show.

I have no problems admitting that I enjoyed watching GLEE when it first debuted. The musical numbers were always well done, and the writing and characters were very strong.

But into Season Three I stopped caring. I only watched the show sporadically as there was too much melodrama and not enough fun musical segments.

And now we have Season Four of GLEE and some of the characters are in New York City and others still in Ohio, so the show has to keep finding reasons to bring them together.

That stuff didn’t work for me at all. Either have them together or take them off the show.

And that is another thing that didn’t work, the new characters they’ve brought in to replace the cast members who’ve left the show aren’t as interesting as the old cast, or are just carbon copies of them.

But since I watch GLEE mostly for the musical numbers, and there are still plenty of those, I still enjoy it…just not as much as I used to.

So call that a mild recommendation, and here’s hoping it gets better, and not worse.

Danny Trejo is an actor who has made his name in the films of director Robert Rodriguez. He is an instantly recognizable man and usually plays the same one note character. Why he’s been successful in films like MACHETE and FROM DUSK TILL DAWN is due to the fact that is has a lot of charisma on screen.

Even in something like DEAD IN TOMBSTONE, and more action than dialogue revenge flick. Even in a low budget release like this, you want him to always come out on top.

DEAD IN TOMBSTONE is about a man who was betrayed by his gang, including his half-brother, and must kill them all – in the name of Satan – or face eternal damnation himself.

DEAD IN TOMBSTONE is never great, but Danny Trejo is at times, and so I can mildly – very mildly – recommend the film to those who love movies that feature lots of fights and explosions.

Otherwise, just skip it.

Our final love story is another one I – and many others – truly love. NOTTING HILL may just be the perfect romantic comedy.

This 1999 film stars Hugh Grant as the owner of a small book store in London whose life changes forever when he meets the most famous film star in the world.

She is played by Julia Roberts.

NOTTING HILL is a fantastic film with a great cast and a fantastic supporting cast.

The new blu-ray doesn’t get as high praise as it doesn’t offer any new retrospective features, but it does have the movie itself. The beautiful, lovely, involving movie itself.

Pick it up and fall in love all over again.

The fantastic NOTTING HILL; the mildly entertaining action packed flick DEAD IN TOMBSTONE; THE COMPLETE FOURTH SEASON of the less and less interesting GLEE; the great, very mature third part of the BEFORE series – BEFORE MIDNIGHT; the fun, funny and heartfely coming of age film THE WAY WAY BACK; and the very good made-in-Quebec film FIRST LOVE are all available now, either on disc or on demand.

And that’s this week’s COUCH POTATO REPORT.

Enjoy the movies and I’ll see you back here again next time on The Couch!

Categories
People

May she rest in peace.

Marcia Wallace, actress from ‘The Simpsons’ and ‘The Bob Newhart Show’, dies at 70

As Edna Krabappel on The Simpsons, Marcia Wallace may be the only 4th-grade teacher to have the same student for 24 years. Before that, she was beloved as Carol Kester, the lovelorn, wisecracking secretary on The Bob Newhart Show.

Wallace, who was a breast cancer survivor for 28 years, has died at age 70, according to the showrunner of The Simpsons. “I was tremendously saddened to learn this morning of the passing of the brilliant and gracious Marcia Wallace,” producer Al Jean said in a statement to EW. “She was beloved by all at The Simpsons and we intend to retire her irreplaceable character.”

It has become a sad tradition of the extremely long-running show to simply cease using characters whose voice actors pass away. The first instance was when Phil Hartman died in 1998, and the show retired his sleazy attorney Lionel Hutz and desperate pretty-boy actor Troy McClure. Lunchlady Doris was retired as a speaking role for nearly a decade after actress Doris Grau’s death in 1995, but has made brief appearances since 2006 with Tress MacNeille as the voice.

The Simpsons, which began in 1989, had recently announced it planned to end the life of a veteran character. Producers previously killed off Ned Flanders’ wife Maude in 2000. But Jean said today that Mrs. Krabappel was not one they had planned to eliminate. “Earlier we had discussed a potential storyline in which a character passed away,” Jean said. “This was not Marcia’s Edna Krabappel. Marcia’s passing is unrelated and again, a terrible loss for all who had the pleasure of knowing her.”

Reps for The Simpsons said they were aware, however, that Wallace had become gravely ill, although her exact cause of death was not revealed. The news of her death began to spread virally on Twitter late Friday after a friend, comedian and radio host Frank DeCaro, broke the news. Grief over her loss was also tweeted by several other friends, including Yeardly Smith, who voices Lisa Simpson and Cathryn Michon, who directed her in the upcoming movie Muffin Top.

Wallace’s work as the cynical, abused, and sarcastic Mrs. Krabappel won her an Emmy for outstanding voice actress in 1992, and was nominated for outstanding guest actress in a comedy for Murphy Brown, playing the most efficient of the journalist’s constantly changing secretaries — reprising her role as Carol Kester. Adding to the joke, Newhart also made an appearance on that episode.

Born and raised in Creston, Iowa, the daughter of a shopkeeper, she moved to New York after college to pursue stage acting. She started her onscreen career making regular appearances on The Merv Griffin Show, and in 1971 had bit parts on Bewitched, Columbo, and The Brady Bunch.

A year later, The Bob Newhart Show made her a star. Her flame-haired, feisty, and free-spirited receptionist was a counterpoint to Newhart’s buttoned-down psychiatrist. She played the role of Carol Kester in 139 episodes from 1972-1978.

After that, Wallace became a regular on a litany of gameshows such as Match Game, Hollywood Squares, and The $25,000 Pyramid. She guest starred on single episodes of Magnum, P.I., Gimme a Break!, and Murder, She Wrote, among many others, and had a recurring role as Mrs. Caruthers on Full House. She also had a small role in the 1989 film Teen Witch and became a popular voice-over actress in animated shows, playing characters on Darkwing Duck and Captain Planet and the Planeteers. Later, she also co-starred as the housekeeper on the short-lived 2001 Comedy Central spoof of President George W. Bush That’s My Bush!

But it was the droll, chain-smoking, semi-defeated Edna Krabappel on The Simpsons that would give Wallace her defining role. Originally set up as a Nurse Ratched-like nemesis of trouble student Bart Simpson, she evolved into one of the richest, and most nuanced characters on the series.

In episode 16 of season 3, “Bart the Lover,” the showrunners turned a sympathetic focus on the character. Bart discovers the lonely teacher had posted a personal ad, so he begins writing her bogus love letters, accompanied by a photo of hockey star Gordie Howe. After setting her up on a fake date, he cackles to himself as he looks in the restaurant window and sees her sitting by herself. When she’s still sitting there hours later, he’s no longer so amused by his prank and sets about trying to make it right.

This was the episode that won Wallace her Emmy.

The actress was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1985 but fought it back and became a prominent activist and advocate for early detection procedures. In 2007, she won the Gilda Radner Courage Award from Roswell Park Cancer Institute for her decades of work for the cause.
She was married for six years to hotel owner Dennis Hawley, until his death in 1992 from pancreatic cancer. The couple had one son, Michael Hawley, and Wallace wrote about her illness, the loss of her husband, and the challenges of motherhood in her 2004 autobiography Don’t Look Back, We’re Not Going That Way. Despite tackling dark issues, readers acclaimed the book for its sense of humor and optimism.

The subtitle for the book was “How I overcame a rocky childhood, a nervous breakdown, breast cancer, widowhood, fat, fire and menopausal motherhood and still manage to count my lucky chickens.”

Categories
Movies

I need to see BAD GRANDPA!!

Box office report: ‘Bad Grandpa’ spoofs its way to $32 million debut

This weekend, a Ridley Scott-directed drama starring Michael Fassbender, Javier Bardem, Cameron Diaz, and Brad Pitt got trounced at the box office by Johnny Knoxville in an old-man costume. Yep, Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa topped the chart with an excellent $32 million in its first three days, giving Knoxville his sixth No. 1 movie after his three Jackass films, Men in Black II, and The Dukes of Hazzard. Not a bad run for a guy who built his career on getting pushed into street curbs while sitting inside shopping carts!

Bad Grandpa, which Paramount made on a $15 million budget, didn’t feature the entire Jackass crew, but it still posted numbers in line with the rest of the irreverent prank franchise. While the film opened below 2010′s Jackass 3-D, which debuted with $50 million (boosted, in part, by 3-D ticket prices), it beat the openings of both Jackass: The Movie ($22.8 million) and Jackass: Number Two ($29 million). Audiences gave it a middling “B” CinemaScore grade, but if it performs similarly to its Jackass predecessors, Bad Grandpa should finish with about $70-80 million total.

Bad Grandpa finally knocked Gravity out of first place, but Warner Bros’ $100 million space drama starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney still managed a terrific hold in its fourth weekend. The film dropped just 32 percent to $20.3 million, giving it a $200.5 million total and making it Clooney’s highest-grossing film ever ahead of Ocean’s Eleven, which earned $183.4 million in 2001.

One rung below, Tom Hanks’ nautical drama Captain Phillips stayed on course in its third voyage. Sony’s $55 million film sank just 28 percent to $11.8 million and $70.1 million total. After a trio of misfires in Larry Crowne, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and Cloud Atlas, Phillips marks a major return-to-form for Hanks. With some likely awards attention in the weeks to come, the film could sail to the $100 million mark.
Down in fourth place, Ridley Scott’s star-studded drama The Counselor failed out of the gate with just $8 million from 3,044 theaters. Fox spent $25 million on the film, but audiences weren’t impressed by its convoluted ad campaign — and they weren’t impressed by the final product either, slapping The Counselor with a distressing “D” CinemaScore grade. While Gravity and Captain Phillips have thrived in recent weeks, adult dramas like Don Jon, Rush, The Fifth Estate, and now The Counselor have fallen by the wayside.

After a disappointing debut, horror remake Carrie plummeted by 63 percent in its second weekend to $5.9 million, giving Screen Gems’ and MGM’s $30 million film an awful $26 million total. So much for Halloween appeal easing its decline during the sophomore frame. That opened the door for Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2 to score one final weekend in the top five, grossing $6.1 million and pushing its total past $100 million.

1. Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa – $32 million
2. Gravity – $20.3 million
3. Captain Phillips – $11.8 million
4. The Counselor – $8 million
5. Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2 – $6.1 million

Oscar contender 12 Years a Slave jumped into the top 10 after expanding from 19 to 123 theaters. The harrowing slavery drama, which earned an “A” CinemaScore from audiences last weekend, grossed $2.2 million, yielding a $17,480 location average this weekend and an excellent $3.4 million total after 10 days. Fox Searchlight will continue to expand the film (which was produced by Brad Pitt’s production company, Plan B — so it wasn’t all bad news for the star this weekend) in the weeks to come.

Categories
People

This truly is sad news. May he rest in peace.

Lou Reed, Velvet Underground Leader and Rock Pioneer, Dead at 71

Lou Reed, a massively influential songwriter and guitarist who helped shape nearly fifty years of rock music, died today. The cause of his death has not yet been released, but Reed underwent a liver transplant in May.

With the Velvet Underground in the late Sixties, Reed fused street-level urgency with elements of European avant-garde music, marrying beauty and noise, while bringing a whole new lyrical honesty to rock & roll poetry. As a restlessly inventive solo artist, from the Seventies into the 2010s, he was chameleonic, thorny and unpredictable, challenging his fans at every turn. Glam, punk and alternative rock are all unthinkable without his revelatory example. “One chord is fine,” he once said, alluding to his bare-bones guitar style. “Two chords are pushing it. Three chords and you’re into jazz.”

Lewis Allan “Lou” Reed was born in Brooklyn, in 1942. A fan of doo-wop and early rock & roll (he movingly inducted Dion into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989), Reed also took formative inspiration during his studies at Syracuse University with the poet Delmore Schwartz. After college, he worked as a staff songwriter for the novelty label Pickwick Records (where he had a minor hit in 1964 with a dance-song parody called “The Ostrich”). In the mid-Sixties, Reed befriended Welsh musician John Cale, a classically trained violist who had performed with groundbreaking minimalist composer La Monte Young. Reed and Cale formed a band called the Primitives, then changed their name to the Warlocks. After meeting guitarist Sterling Morrison and drummer Maureen Tucker, they became the Velvet Underground. With a stark sound and ominous look, the band caught the attention of Andy Warhol, who incorporated the Velvets into his Exploding Plastic Inevitable. “Andy would show his movies on us,” Reed said. “We wore black so you could see the movie. But we were all wearing black anyway.”

“Produced” by Warhol and met with total commercial indifference when it was released in early 1967, VU’s debut The Velvet Underground & Nico stands as a landmark on par with the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Bob Dylan’s Blonde On Blonde. Reed’s matter-of-fact descriptions of New York’s bohemian demimonde, rife with allusions to drugs and S&M, pushed beyond even the Rolling Stones’ darkest moments, while the heavy doses of distortion and noise for its own sake revolutionized rock guitar. The band’s three subsequent albums – 1968’s even more corrosive sounding White Light/White Heat, 1969’s fragile, folk-toned The Velvet Underground and 1970’s Loaded, which despite being recorded while he was leaving the group, contained two Reed standards, “Rock & Roll” and “Sweet Jane,” were similarly ignored. But they’d be embraced by future generations, cementing the Velvet Underground’s status as the most influential American rock band of all time.

After splitting with the Velvets in 1970, Reed traveled to England and, in characteristically paradoxical fashion, recorded a solo debut backed by members of the progressive-rock band Yes. But it was his next album, 1972’s Transformer, produced by Reed-disciple David Bowie, that pushed him beyond cult status into genuine rock stardom. “Walk On the Wild Side,” a loving yet unsentimental evocation of Warhol’s Factory scene, became a radio hit (despite its allusions to oral sex) and “Satellite of Love” was covered by U2 and others. Reed spent the Seventies defying expectations almost as a kind of sport. 1973’s Berlin was brutal literary bombast while 1974’s Sally Can’t Dance had soul horns and flashy guitar. In 1975 he released Metal Machine Music, a seething all-noise experiment his label RCA marketed as a avant-garde classic music, while 1978’s banter-heavy live album Take No Prisoners was a kind of comedy record in which Reed went on wild tangents and savaged rock critics by name (“Lou sure is adept at figuring out new ways to shit on people,” one of those critics, Robert Christgau, wrote at the time). Explaining his less-than-accommodating career trajectory, Reed told journalist Lester Bangs, “My bullshit is worth more than other people’s diamonds.”

Reed’s ambiguous sexual persona and excessive drug use throughout the Seventies was the stuff of underground rock myth. But in the Eighties, he began to mellow. He married Sylvia Morales and opened a window into his new married life on 1982’s excellent The Blue Mask, his best work since Transformer. His 1984 album New Sensations took a more commercial turn and 1989’s New York ended the decade with a set of funny, politically cutting songs that received universal critical praise. In 1991, he collaborated with Cale on Songs For Drella, a tribute to Warhol. Three years later, the Velvet Underground reunited for a series of successful European gigs.

Reed and Morales divorced in the early Nineties. Within a few years, Reed began a relationship with musician-performance artist Laurie Anderson. The two became an inseparable New York fixture, collaborating and performing live together, while also engaging in civic and environmental activism. They were married in 2008.

Reed continued to follow his own idiosyncratic artistic impulses throughout the ‘00s. The once-decadent rocker became an avid student of T’ai Chi, even bringing his instructor onstage during concerts in 2003. In 2005 he released a double CD called The Raven, based on the work of Edgar Allen Poe. In 2007, he released an ambient album titled Hudson River Wind Meditations. Reed returned to mainstream rock with 2011’s Lulu, a collaboration with Metallica.

“All through this, I’ve always thought that if you thought of all of it as a book then you have the Great American Novel, every record as a chapter,” he told Rolling Stone in 1987. “They’re all in chronological order. You take the whole thing, stack it and listen to it in order, there’s my Great American Novel.”

Categories
Music

Cool! Cool!! Cool!!!

‘Arrested Development’ soundtrack with 42 songs coming in November

The Mitch Hurwitz-created show about the misadventures of the Bluth clan will give fans something to sing about while we wait with bated breath for more AD episodes or a possible film. Varèse Sarabande Records will release the soundtrack on Nov. 19. Film Music Reporter first reported the news.

“Arrested Development’s composer David Schwartz selected his songs and score from all four seasons of the show, with a heavy dose of the original madcap songs and its signature ukulele tunes,” according to a press release. Schwartz (who scored Deadwood, Beverly Hills, 90210) wrote on his website that “the playlist is based on all of the requests from we received during the AMA on reddit.com. Greatest fans ever!”

Do you think Gob and Franklin will go on tour?

The full track listing:
1. Arrested Development (Main Title) (:18)
2. She’s Cute (1:25)
3. Getaway (Extended Version) (2:53)
4. Practice Kisses (1:51)
5. Sound of Silence / The Cockroach (Medley) (1:09)
6. Balls In The Air (Extended Version) (3:05)
7. Face Blindness (L&M) (1:33)
8. You’ll Never Hear From Me Again (3:35)
9. As It Is Such (Medley) (1:18)
10. Tobias Eat Pray Gay (Medley) (:40)
11. Motherboy (1:19)
12. Franklin’s Brown Sugar (:23)
13. It Ain’t Easy Being White (1:19)
14. Shot By Love (Extended Version) (3:04)
15. Mr.F (:49)
16. The Yellow Boat (1:56)
17. All You Need Is Smiles (:27)
18. Big Yellow Joint (:27)
19. Big Rock’n Yellow Joint (:09)
20. The Cute Test (2:05)
21. Aloha Lei To You (1:09)
22. Oh Phoenix (2:14)
23. Andele (:28)
24. Bang Bang Bang Bang (Buster Dance) (2:14)
25. I’m Blue, Man (2:13)
26. Mock Trial (:15)
27. Not Your Father, Mopy, Tiny Town (Medley) (1:30)
28. What Could Be Better (1:20)
29. She Winked (1:07)
30. Free At Last (1:18)
31. Oh My (Medley) (:49)
32. Get Along, Little Sheep (:29)
33. Big Ska (:49)
34. Buster & Lucille & George & GOB (:40)
35. Fantastic 4 (Medley) (:54)
36. The Invisible Girl (:58)
37. Rub It In (1:53)
38. The Chipper (1:39)
39. Teamocil (:35)
40. You Here With Me (1:27)
41. Police Cruise (1:04)
42. Boomerang (3:37) Performed by Lucy Schwartz

Categories
Lawsuits

Hope he wins!!

Quincy Jones sues Michael Jackson’s estate

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Quincy Jones sued Michael Jackson’s estate on Friday claiming he is owed millions in royalties and production fees on some of the superstar’s greatest hits.

Jones’ lawsuit seeks at least $10 million from the singer’s estate and Sony Music Entertainment, claiming the entities improperly re-edited songs to deprive him of royalties and production fees. The music has been used in the film “This Is It” and a pair of Cirque du Soleil shows based on the King of Pop’s songs, the lawsuit states.

Jones also claims that he should have received a producer’s credit on the music in “This Is It.” His lawsuit seeks an accounting of the estate’s profits from the works so that Jones can determine how much he is owed.

The producer worked with Jackson on three of his most popular solo albums, “Off the Wall,” ”Thriller” and “Bad.”

Jackson’s estate wrote in a statement that it was saddened by Jones’ lawsuit. “To the best of its knowledge, Mr. Jones has been appropriately compensated over approximately 35 years for his work with Michael,” the statement said.

An after-hours message left at Sony Music’s New York offices was not immediately returned.

Jackson’s hits “Billie Jean,” ”Thriller” and “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” are among the songs Jones claims were re-edited to deprive him of royalties and his producer’s fee.

Jones’ lawsuit states the producer’s contracts called for him to have the first opportunity to re-edit or alter the songs, in part to protect his reputation.

Categories
People

May he rest in peace.

Hal Needham Dead; Legendary Stuntman and Director Was 82

Hal Needham, longtime stuntman and director of “Smokey and the Bandit” and “Cannonball Run” for Burt Reynolds, died Friday in Los Angeles after a short battle with cancer, his manager confirmed. He was 82.

At one time the highest paid stuntman in the world, he was said to have broken 56 bones, broken his back twice, punctured a lung and knocked out a few teeth while working on 4500 TV episodes and 310 feature films. His work was admired by generations of filmmakers including Quentin Tarantino.

Needham, a native of Tennessee, broke into show business as a stunt double for Richard Boone on the series “Have Gun, Will Travel.” Among the hundreds of films on which he did stunts were “Stagecoach,” “How the West Was Won,” “The Bridge at Remagen,” “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” and “Little Big Man.”

He became friends with Reynolds, who offered Needham the opportunity to direct “Smokey and the Bandit,” for which Needham had written the screenplay. Needham also directed “Hooper,” “Stroker Ace,””Street Luge” and “Rad.”

Needham received a Governors Award from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences last year, where he was introduced by Tarantino, who said, “I have ripped off a lot of shots from you, and today I say, ‘Thank you very much.’” At the tribute, Needham called himself “the luckiest man alive and lucky to be alive.”

He developed numerous camera and production innovations, and won a Scientific and Engineering Oscar in 1987 for the design and development of the Shotmaker Elite camera car and crane. Among his other inventions were the air ram, air bag, car cannon turnover, nitrogen ratchet, jerk-off ratchet and rocket power.

Categories
Music

I bought one!!

On the charts: Pearl Jam land on top, Paul McCartney and Avett Brothers have strong showings

With all this talk of Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga, and the rest of the fall diva lineup, you would think there would be no room for a bunch of casually dressed dudes playing guitars. But as this week’s album chart shows, the market still demands the occasional infusion of good old-fashioned rock.

Pearl Jam’s Lightning Bolt took the number one spot on this week’s Billboard 200 with 166,000 copies sold in its first week of release. That’s the largest opening week for a rock album in a year (Phillip Phillips’ The World From the Side of the Moon, if you count that as rock, sold 169,000 in its opening frame last November), though it’s below the first week numbers for Pearl Jam’s last album (Backspacer did 189,000 during its kickoff week in 2009), and well below 2013′s bigger debuts like Justin Timberlake and Drake.

Still, it’s Pearl Jam’s fifth chart-topper, a list that also includes Backspacer, No Code, Vitalogy, and Vs., the latter of which moved a then-record 950,000 units during its first week of release in 1993.

It was a healthy week for rock in general, though — Paul McCartney’s New sold 67,000 copies, which was good enough for a third place opening. A little ways behind Macca in the number five slot sit the Avett Brothers, whose Magpie and the Dandelion sold 58,000 copies in its first week.

Three other guitar-centric albums also debuted in the top 10: Scott McCreery’s See You Tonight (number six, 52,000 sold), Willie Nelson’s To All The Girls (number nine, 43,000), and the Head and the Heart’s Let’s Be Still (number 10, 42,000). That’s a particularly powerful week for the folkies in the Head and the Heart—they had previously sold no more than 4,000 albums in any given week.

Last week’s chart-topper, Miley Cyrus’ Bangerz, took quite a tumble. While it only slid from the top position to number two, it fell 73 percent for a second week sales tally of 72,000. Second frame plummets are common, though anything over 70 percent is generally cause for concern. However, it’s not all bad news for Cyrus: “Wrecking Ball” remains a constant threat to return to the top of the Hot 100, as its airplay numbers and streaming stats continue to climb. The catbird seat on that chart, however, still belongs to Lorde’s “Royals,” which is number one for a fourth week in a row.

According to Billboard, “Wrecking Ball” very nearly returned to the top of the Hot 100 this week, which means that “Royals” may be on the down swing and another song could swoop in and take the top slot. Perhaps it’ll be one of the big gainers on this week’s Hot 100, which include Eminem’s “Rap God” (which debuts at number seven) and Avicii’s “Wake Me Up” (which holds at number four but continues to gain radio and streaming traction).

Categories
Television

Awesome, awesome, awesome, awesome, awesome!!!

‘Sherlock’ season 3 premiere date revealed

The world’s biggest premiere date mystery has been solved. Anythingbut.com has learned the return date for Sherlock, along with some details about how the third season roll-out plan came together.

Sherlock will return to PBS Masterpiece on Jan. 19 at 10 p.m. That means the show will air back-to-back for the first time with that other hugely popular and influential Brit import, Downton Abbey (which returns Jan. 5).

This announcement caps nearly two years of rabid fan speculation about when the third season of the international sensation will premiere. This also marks first time the mystery-thriller’s U.S. air date has been announced before the BBC reveals its UK premiere date (the BBC has the “first window” rights to air the show, so UK fans can at least take heart in knowing they will almost certainly get season 3 sometime before Jan. 19).

Masterpiece executive producer Rebecca Eaton tells EW that this is the best season yet of Sherlock, which stars Benedict Cumberbatch as the legendary detective and Martin Freeman as his partner Dr. Watson (the first official image of the actors from season 3 is above). “They’re fantastic,” she says of the new episodes. “They are jaw dropping. They are like small movies. Benedict and Martin are so in their Sherlock-Watson groove. They are so comfortable with that relationship it’s like being in the room with them.”

Sherlock executive producer Sue Vertue added in a statement: “We are hugely excited about this next series of Sherlock, and have worked closely with our partners, Masterpiece and PBS, to bring these episodes to U.S. audiences in January. We promise our fans that Season 3 is worth waiting for.”

Sunday entertainment programming on the Big 4 broadcast networks has been seriously weakening in the ratings this fall. So the British invasion power-pairing of hugely anticipated Downton season 4 and Sherlock season 3 could make PBS a significant player on that night in January. “We love that Sherlock fans are so passionate and eager to see Season 3,” said PBS chief programmer Beth Hoppe in a statement. “The pairing of Downton Abbey and Sherlock in January offers a blockbuster night of British drama only on PBS stations.”

Sherlock season three production was delayed partly due to skyrocketing demand for its two stars, with Cumberbatch landing roles in Star Trek and several other films, while Freeman snagged the lead of Bilbo Baggins in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit films (in which Cumberbatch also plays a small but pivotal role, as the voice of the dragon Smaug in December’s second film in the trilogy — which ought to make the climactic Bilbo-Smaug confrontation rather surreal for Sherlock fans). Sherlock season three production was then split into three chunks over the course of this year rather than being shot continuously like on most shows.

“The first holdup was the boys, of course, and getting all of them together — not just Benedict and Martin but also [creators] Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss,” Eaton says. “They had to break up the production to accommodate all the movies they wanted to make.”

Once production wrapped in August, the BBC and PBS had to plan their respective schedules. Though fans may feel the wait has been endless, Eaton says that, if anything, the scheduling was hastened because of fan interest. “This is about as quickly as we could have possibly got them on the air once they were made,” Eaton says.

Since the BBC date is not yet public, one lingering question is how big of a gap there will be between the UK and U.S. air dates. Cumberbatch and U.S. fans have lobbied for the show to air in both countries on nearly the same date. Such a move would help prevent the stateside audience from getting spoiled on the show’s surprises (mainly: How exactly did Sherlock survive his rooftop plummet at the end of season two?). It’s an issue overseas audiences are all-too-accustomed to facing while waiting for American shows, and one that TV companies have been giving increasing consideration given the rise of online piracy. “There are things fans would like to do we just can’t do,” Eaton says. “But we do pay attention. This isn’t just the fans of Sherlock speaking up, it’s the nature of the shrinking TV world. So we try to manage that with all the intricacies involved. It’s all taken into consideration.”

Obviously we don’t yet know the BBC date. But given that the U.S. fans had to wait three months after the 2010 BBC premiere to see the first season of Sherlock, then had to wait four months for the 2012 second season after its UK debut, no matter when the BBC schedules its season three premiere, the gap is going to be less than before since Jan. 19 is less than three months from now (that sentence was totally convoluted but does make sense).

The first episode is called “The Empty Hearse” and solves the mystery of Sherlock’s death. The second episode is titled “The Sign of Three” and features — spoiler alert if you haven’t been following the online chatter about the new season — Watson getting married to Mary Morstan (played by his real-life partner, Mr. Selfridge actress Amanda Abbington). The third episode is “The Last Vow” and airs Feb. 2. And then the wait for new Sherlock will begin all over again. Season 4 is heavily presumed to be happening, but the BBC has not confirmed this and the company tends to wait until each season of Sherlock airs until announcing the next.

“I think there’s such an appetite for Sherlock because every season we do they’re bites; the season isn’t 13 episodes, which we would love,” Eaton notes. “They’re complicated to make and we can’t do more than that. So you never get quite enough even when you get a new season. Even more than with Downton, because Downton is 10 hours and it comes back regularly once a year. So Sherlock creates an unusual appetite.”

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Movies

Just get it done already!!

‘Entourage’ movie delayed because of Jeremy Piven’s pay?

Finally, the problem behind the “Entourage” movie is coming into focus. With most of the cast saying they were ready to start filming, but executive producer Mark Wahlberg claiming greed was delaying the process, it was Adrian Grenier who shared his true feelings on the impasse. He wanted his fellow cast members to get deals that would compensate them equally.

The issue at hand, according to THR, is Jeremy Piven (Ari Gold) has a deal that will give him a piece of the back end, should the movie become profitable. While it would seem logical that the rest of the cast would be on par with Piven, they say that Jeremy has always had a better deal than his costars, because he’s was the biggest name on the show. He also won three Emmys for the role. Piven revealed on Twitter that he signed his deal for the movie in August.

The problem with the cast holding out for more money is Warner Bros. doesn’t want the budget to go above $30 million, so Wahlberg and fellow executive producer Stephen Levinson are having to find a solution.

Naturally the cast wants what’s rightfully theirs, should the movie become a “Sex and the City”-sized hit, but for that to become a possibility it has to get made. Another thing complicating matters is a ticking clock. One condition Warner Bros. has for the movie being made is that it needs to take advantage of a California tax credit, which would save some of the budget. However, an insider tells THR for that to happen production needs to begin by January 2014.

Perhaps that’s what Kevin Connolly was referring to when he told a photographer that the movie would be going forward in January. However, he also said everybody was ready to go, which really doesn’t seem to be the case.