Backstreet Boys Reunite For New Album
After a two-year break, where no one noticed they were gone, the Backstreet Boys are at work on their first album since 2001's "Black and Blue." In a post on the Web site of its management company, Wright Entertainment Group, the group reveals, "All five of us went back into the studio this past February and have been working to create what we think will be our best album yet. It has been really great being back together working on our music."
The as-yet-untitled album is being targeted for a summer release on Jive. "We will be touring in the United States this fall," the post adds.
Since the release of "Black and Blue," which debuted at No. 1 on The Billboard 200 and has sold 5.4 million copies in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan, the group's members have busied themselves with various pursuits. The lone member to issue a solo album was Nick Carter, whose "Now or Never" was released in 2002 by Jive.
Group member Howie Dorough told Billboard in May 2003 that he was working on a solo album with songs in English and Spanish, but the set has yet to materialize.
Kung Fu Fighting
According to News Askew, Kevin Smith has confirmed he's after Jet Li to star in his film version of GREEN HORNET. However, a rumor has also popped up indicating that Smith may go female with the character, seeking Zhang Ziyi (CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON) to take the role.
Summer is for Superheroes
BATMAN BEGINS will be released on June 17, 2005 and X-MEN 3 will be released on May 5, 2006.
Nickelback, Sam Roberts kings of Junos at Sunday's awards
EDMONTON (CP) - Juno fever hit an oil gusher Sunday with a record number of fans to witness Alanis Morissette disrobe - sort of - and Sam Roberts, Sarah McLachlan and Nickelback pick up their hardware.
Morissette, who was host for the music awards show, shocked viewers when she dropped a white robe to reveal a nude-coloured body suit with pasties covering her breasts. "I'm overjoyed to be back in my homeland, the true north, strong and censor-free," she said, apparently referring to the aftermath caused by Janet Jackson's nipple exposure at the Super Bowl in January.
A few weeks later, the outspoken Morissette was asked by U.S. radio stations to change a word in the first verse of her new single Everything. In Canada, radio stations are playing the original version with the word "asshole." She performed the song - with the questionable word - to close the show.
"Any repression of acceptance of the human body has a cause and effect . . . everything you see from eating disorders to pornography and rape," she explained backstage.
"These are all manifestations of what happens when we repress acceptance of not only our body but our sexuality."
With three statuettes - all in major categories - Roberts was the biggest winner of the night. The Montrealer won every category he was nominated in, including the top prize of artist of the year.
His debut record We Were Born in a Flame, which included the hit songs Brother Down and Don't Walk Away Eileen, took album of the year and rock album of the year.
"What an award represents to me more than anything is a life in music and for that I am very, very, very thankful," said Roberts, who looked ever the rock star with shaggy hair, blue jeans and a white T-shirt.
"The second album all of a sudden feels as heavy as the ring on poor Frodo's shoulders. I don't really know what we're going to do from here."
Backstage Roberts was giddy with excitement, howling to friends and nearly knocking over a wall where media were working.
Nickelback, originally formed in Hanna, Alta., about 200 kilometres northeast of Calgary, was welcomed home with statuettes for group of the year and fan's choice award.
"These always feel so incredible but it feels so much more to receive one of these at home," said frontman Chad Kroeger.
McLachlan had the happy task of making room in her suitcase for the songwriter of the year trophy alongside the award for best pop album, which she collected Saturday at a pre-Juno ceremony where the majority of awards were announced.
"I've been gone a quite a long time . . . to come back and have this kind of love it feels really, really amazing," she told the audience.
The show was stuffed full of live music, including Kathleen Edwards, Blackie and the Rodeo Kings, Avril Lavigne, the Barenaked Ladies and Aaron Lines.
Nelly Furtado gave the best performance of the night with a melody of Try and Powerless. She was accompanied by aboriginal group Whitefish Juniors while more than 100 extras carrying placards reading "spirit" paraded through the audience.
This year's Juno marked the 10th anniversary of an aboriginal music category. Singer Susan Aglukark took the prize this year.
"I try to follow my heart. You have the power to say something, you might as well do it in a cool way," Furtado said backstage. "It was really important to have an aboriginal drum group because it was part of the inspiration for the song Powerless."
An appearance by leather-clad Alice Cooper sent the audience into a frenzy. The shock rocker inducted Bob Ezrin, who produced Cooper's albums, into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame.
"I met Bob over 30 years ago. We were just five guys from Detroit wearing our girlfriend's dresses looking for a record deal and a producer," said Cooper.
Furtado's Powerless was named single of the year, while rock outfit Billy Talent from Toronto was crowned best new group.
The government city with a reputation for being a little staid compared to honky-tonk Calgary was whipped into a frenzy by the Juno festival, which turned bars and restaurants across town into standing-room-only concert venues. Parties raged late into the night Friday and Saturday.
Sunny skies and mild temperatures made it easy for fans on the prowl for celebrity sightings. Tour buses and limos crowded streets near downtown hotels and along trendy Whyte Avenue's popular eateries and shops.
Juno buzz grew all week and prompted fans to snap up a remaining thousand tickets for the show at the 16,000-seat Rexall Place, despite a high price tag of between $57 and $91.50.
The support wowed Juno organizers who reported it was the largest crowd in the show's 33-year history.
In addition to international superstars, political figures were in town to take advantage of the hipster scene, including Prime Minister Paul Martin, NDP Leader Jack Layton and Deputy Prime Minister Anne McLellan, who is an Edmonton MP.
In all, 38 Junos were awarded over two nights of awards. During a four-hour dinner and ceremony Saturday, Shania Twain's Up! was named best country recording. Michael Buble won best new artist, while Buck 65 was awarded best alternative album of the year.
Holly Cole took home best vocal jazz album for Shade. Her technicians Mike Haas, Dylan Heming and Jeff Wolpert were named recording engineers of the year.
Winnipeg will play host to next year's fest.
Fans to Mark 10 Years Since Cobain Death
ABERDEEN, Wash. - Kurt Cobain and his band, Nirvana, spent only three years in the public eye, and they released only three studio albums. But what he accomplished before committing suicide 10 years ago Monday at age 27 — deciding it was "better to burn out than fade away," as he quoted Neil Young in his suicide note — was remarkable.
Beneath this bridge above the muddy banks of the Wishkah River, a troubled young Cobain would come to escape his unhappy home and the persistent gray drizzle of the Washington coast.
Among the cracking concrete supports, he would smoke pot and drink and plot his stardom, bragging to friends of his "suicide genes" and that he would die a young rock star.
It's here that many of his fans have come to pay their respects since he fulfilled that prophesy with a needle and a shotgun.
"Peace, love, empathy," reads one message scrawled in graffiti under the bridge.
"Kurt," says another, "Your spirit will bounce on happily."
Critics describe 1991's "Nevermind," which has sold more than 10 million copies, as one of the decade's most important albums. Its biggest hit, "Smells Like Teen Spirit," remains a seminal expression of teen angst. Cobain brought the dark, driven sound of grunge rock to the nation, helped save the world from hair metal, and with a single line — "Here we are now, entertain us" — captured and captivated a generation that had grown bored and cynical about popular music.
Andrew Harms, a 24-year-old disc jockey on a Seattle radio station, still remembers his first exposure to Nirvana, which remains his favorite band: seeing the video for "Teen Spirit" on MTV.
"It filled me with an energy that music had not done for me before," Harms says. "The guy had an amazing creative mind, and he took all the emotions within him and expressed it through music. It was music of substance, music that seemed real to me."
Cobain biographer Charles Cross says that when Nirvana went to record "Nevermind," they followed Warrant into the studio — a band known for big hair, open shirts and their "Cherry Pie" video.
"Music at that point was so prefabricated, so fake, so hairspray that Nirvana was really a breath of fresh air," Cross says. "It was more organic than anything we'd seen in music in years."
Much of the screaming desperation in Cobain's songs can be traced to his life in this timber town on the Washington coast, and in Montesano, just inland, where his grandparents and father lived. Cobain's parents divorced when he was 9, an event that scarred him deeply, and much of his adolescence was spent bouncing among the homes — and garages and vans — of his parents, grandparents, relatives and friends.
As Cross writes in "Heavier Than Heaven," a family history of alcohol abuse and suicide weighed on him, but several relatives on both sides were artistically talented. Many friends recall Cobain saying he would one day join the "27 Club" — a reference to the age Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix were when they died.
Cobain found an outlet for these emotions in guitar, punk rock and painting, through which he would express himself for the rest of his life. He spoke frequently during the last two years of his life of giving up music for painting.
Shortly before he dropped out of Aberdeen's Weatherwax High School, Cobain began playing with classmate Krist Novoselic. They formed Nirvana after moving to Olympia in the late 1980s, and drummer Dave Grohl — now of the Foo Fighters — joined the band in 1990, the year Cobain began taking heroin, and the year Nirvana's first album, "Bleach," helped it win a major label deal with DGC, part of Geffen Records.
Over the next year, Nirvana — and grunge — exploded onto the national stage, with Seattle becoming the locus, thanks to Nirvana and other local bands such as Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains. In September 1991, when "Nevermind" went on sale, Cobain had just been evicted from his Olympia apartment and was sleeping in his car. Geffen initially expected to sell only 50,000 copies of "Nevermind." By year's end, it sold 2 million.
Shortly before Cobain brought his dyed locks and emaciated frame onto "Saturday Night Live," he learned "Nevermind" had knocked Michael Jackson's "Dangerous" out of the No. 1 spot on the charts.
As his fame soared, though, so did his heroin use, in part as a self-treatment for his chronic stomach pain. Encouraged by his wife, Courtney Love, who had her own drug problems, Cobain checked into detox several times over the next 2 1/2 years. But he always returned to heroin, even around the time his daughter was born in the summer of 1992.
Nevertheless, his songwriting remained impressive and became more polished with Love's collaboration, especially on "Heart-shaped Box" and other songs for Nirvana's third album, "In Utero."
In January 1994, as Cobain's despondency spiraled, he recorded his last great song, "You Know You're Right." It would not be released until 2002, following a long legal battle between Love and the surviving Nirvana members, but the song's ironic couplet "Things have never been so swell/ and I have never been so well" lent a serious insight into Cobain's mind at the time.
While in Rome a month after recording it, he tried to kill himself by taking 60 tranquilizers. The overdose left him in a coma.
He survived, but in early April he jumped a wall at a detox center in Los Angeles and flew back to Seattle.
On April 5, 1994 — give or take 24 hours — Cobain wrote a suicide note, in which he said he couldn't stand to think of his daughter becoming "the miserable self-destructive, death rocker that I've become." He went into the greenhouse of his mansion, injected himself with a massive dose of heroin, put a 20-gauge shotgun against the roof of his mouth, and fired.
An electrician found his body the morning of April 8.
Thousands of people attended a vigil for him at Seattle Center back then. There is no such widespread event planned for the 10th anniversary of his death, though some fans communicating on the Internet have suggested meeting at Seattle Center. Others will come here, beneath the Young Street Bridge, or to the benches at Viretta Park, next to Cobain's house in Seattle, where some of his ashes are scattered.
Radio stations around the country plan to devote airplay to Nirvana's music Monday, and the Aberdeen Museum of History plans to open an exhibit and walking tour of Cobain-related sites this summer.
"You can't get around the drug use, but we're not going to dwell on it a lot," curator Dann Sears says. "What's important is his legacy, his music ... and he revolutionized music."
'Hellboy' Topples the Rock at Box Office
LOS ANGELES - A wisecracking demon from hell took down The Rock for the weekend's box-office title. "Hellboy," starring Ron Perlman as the comic-book superhero with red skin, horns and a tail, debuted as the top flick with $23.5 million, according to studio estimates Sunday.
The Rock's "Walking Tall," a remake of the 1973 vigilante-justice tale, opened in second place with $15.3 million.
The previous weekend's top movie, "Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed," fell to No. 3 with $15.1 million, lifting its 10-day total to $50 million.
The weekend's other new wide releases followed: Disney's animated cow tale "Home on the Range" at No. 4 with $14 million and Julia Stiles' love story "The Prince and Me" at No. 5 with $10 million.
Having five movies pull in $10 million or more is a rarity for early April, typically a slower time at theaters. The range of movies left something for all audiences, from G-rated family adventures to teen romance to violent shoot-'em-ups.
"This weekend was like the classic movie-goers' weekend. You had all these different genres represented," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office tracker Exhibitor Relations. "If you wanted lots of choices, they certainly were there for you."
The overall box office rose for the sixth-straight weekend. The top 12 movies took in $114.5 million, up 40 percent from the same weekend last year.
That string of up weekends began with the blockbuster debut of Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ, which continued to hold strongly. "The Passion" came in sixth with $9.9 million, raising its total to $330.1 million.
Distributor Newmarket Films expanded "The Passion" to 3,408 theaters, up about 200, in anticipation of a solid run through Easter next Sunday.
Hollywood's domestic revenues for 2004 are just over $2 billion, about 6 percent ahead of last year's.
That's a solid springboard for the busy summer season, whose May releases include the animated sequel "Shrek 2," Brad Pitt's epic "Troy," the vampire yarn "Van Helsing" and the end-of-the-world tale "The Day After Tomorrow." Following in June are "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" and "Spider-Man 2."
A cult attraction compared to better-known comic books such as "Spider-Man" and "X-Men," "Hellboy" managed to draw a broad audience with its mix of dark humor and nonstop action.
Perlman plays a demon raised by a loving adopted father (John Hurt), who grooms the hero to work for a government paranormal bureau disguised as a waste-management operation.
The movie presents a working-class hero fighting for good despite his demonic pedigree and wistful longing for the affection of a beautiful colleague (Selma Blair).
"He's a plumber. He rides around in a garbage truck. How's he supposed to get the girl?" said Tom Sherak, a partner in Revolution Studios, which produced the movie for distributor Sony. "You think of the title `Hellboy,' you think of the end of the world, but it turns out to be a fun movie."
Here are the estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at North American theaters, according to Exhibitor Relations Co. Inc.
1. "Hellboy," $23.5 million.
2. "Walking Tall," $15.3 million.
3. "Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed," $15.1 million.
4. "Home on the Range," $14 million.
5. "The Prince and Me," $10 million.
6. "The Passion of the Christ," $9.9 million.
7. "The Ladykillers," $7 million.
8. "Jersey Girl," $5.1 million.
9. "Dawn of the Dead," $4.4 million.
10. "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," $3.6 million.
Kids Pick OutKast, 'Nemo' at Nick Awards
LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - The green slime oozed freely and the enthusiasm raged at a fever pitch Saturday during Nickelodeon's 17th annual Kids' Choice Awards, which crowned animated smash "Finding Nemo," and hip-hop duo OutKast as the top choices of children voting coast to coast.
This year's ceremony, held at UCLA's Pauley Pavilion, was co-hosted by Mike Myers and Cameron Diaz in a canny bit of "Shrek 2" promotion (they portray the voices of the ogre and the princess, respectively). It marked the first time in eight years that Rosie O'Donnell failed to preside.
Myers would find himself dripping slime by the show's conclusion, though it proved a significantly less satisfying moment than the earlier sliming of tycoon twins Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen -- who were caught in a fountain of the stuff at the show's midway point while presenting.
As for the awards themselves, the KCAs -- which found 17 million kids voting both online and by telephone for their fave actors, musicians, sports stars, movie, TV series, video game, book and, uh, movie fart -- had a decided OutKast ring this time. The Grammy-winning duo ended up with two of the distinctive orange blimps, for favorite music group and favorite song ("Hey Ya!").
OutKast member Andre 3000 opened the show with "Hey Ya!" accompanied by his young son. His conrade, Big Boi, later performed "The Way You Move," with help from Sleepy Brown and Sean Combs' former manservant, Bentley Farnsworth.
"We're having a great time, and it is so great to learn how to read. You gotta read, that's it, and count . . . and stay off them drugs," Andre 3000 told the crowd. Big Boi urged the tykes to tell their parents to get out and vote.
Also carting off a pair of awards was Ellen DeGeneres, earning the trophy as favorite animated voice for her portrayal of Dorie in "Finding Nemo," and accepting the award for the film's top movie win.
"Enjoy being a kid. It's the best time of your life. Don't grow up too fast," she said.
The screaming kids in the crowd appeared to be taking her advice to heart, just as they were following the orders of favorite movie actor winner Jim Carrey (for "Bruce Almighty").
"The most important thing in life growing up is to learn how to play," Carrey said.
Amanda Bynes celebrated her 18th birthday Saturday by winning her second consecutive blimp in the favorite movie actress category, this time for "What a Girl Wants." Frankie Muniz took the Kids' Choice statuette for a second consecutive year as favorite TV actor for "Malcolm in the Middle," while Raven-Symone was the TV actress choice for "That's So Raven." The Nickelodeon comedy series "All That" was honored as favorite TV show.
Other repeat winners included skateboard legend Tony Hawk (favorite male athlete) and the Los Angeles Lakers (favorite sports team) as well as "SpongeBob SquarePants" (a second consecutive double for favorite cartoon and video game).
And what can you say about an awards show in which Adam Sandler is bestowed the Wannabe Award -- given annually to the celebrity that kids most want to be like? Or one that finds "X-Men" star Hugh Jackman winning the title as finest celebrity burper.
Quipped Jackman in his acceptance: "Finally, something my family can be proud of."