under cover ladies night wallpaper: June 2007

Friday, June 29, 2007

Enjoy The Remixxx

So much pink...Blah!... I'm super busy right now for 4th of July/Essence Fest week. Besides Usher & Tameka having a baby, I have no idea what is going on in Hollyweird....I'm still trying to figure out how 2 men can have a baby? NEways while I try to figure out this puzzle, enjoy some new music remixes I just received at the radio station.

These hip-hop love songs are getting nastier by the minute...but I'm still feeling this one. Check it out

Piles feat. Teddypen-her-az-down aka T-pain - Shawty

OR

Check Out the remixxx

Listen - Piles feat. T-Pain & Webbie - Shawty (Remix)

Another one hit wonder...but still a hot song

Young Berg - Sexy Lady

Or

Young Berg feat. Jim Jones & Rich Boy - Sexy Lady (Remix)

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

It's Official.. Usher Jr. Is On The Way!

Just a week after his fiancée hinted that babies could be in their future, the pop star and Tameka Foster have announced that they're expecting their first child together, due in the fall.

"We are extremely excited at this point in our lives planning our wedding and the joy that comes with expecting our first child together," the couple said in a statement released to the Associated Press Wednesday. "We hope people will be happy for us and respect our privacy.

If you were hating on Tameka the Giant now, then you're really going to be hating on this beast for the next 9 months!! Congrats to the happy family!!

PEOPLE

BET Profiles YBF's Natasha.

My girl SandraRose has a clip of Young, Black& Fabulous creator "Natasha" on BET. Glad to see black bloggers getting some kind of media exposure.

Ratatouille Overload

This collection of interviews, reviews and features originally ran in the June 26 Volume section of the West Valley View.

Food — no, cuisine — stars in scrumptious new Pixar picture

Pixar’s latest dazzler is all about food. Not hot dogs, toaster pastries and microwave burritos, but serious cuisine, entrées with long-winded French names that come in miniature portions on oversized plates with drizzled sauces — one ingredient is required to be fois gras.

Don’t send your dinner jacket to dry cleaning yet. At the end of Ratatouille, it’s a simple recipe — a peasant food; the American translation would be cheesy macaroni from a box — that’s transformed tenfold to win our hearts and, more importantly, our stomachs. It wouldn’t be a stretch to layer this theme onto cinema itself: Pixar’s simple, story-driven pictures are not just run-of-the-mill menu items anymore, but the food equivalent of culinary art.

“It’s dangerous when we start talking themes. We don’t make films with the intention of teaching you something, or having a theme bring you a message,” the film’s producer, Brad Lewis, said. “But if you look at this and see it as a metaphor for life, or friends, or film … then that makes me happy. Obviously, you can pull anything from this that you want.”

Director Brad Bird chimed in with a food allegory: “A really good hamburger is just as fine as a filet mignon. What something is about does not define the quality of it. A comic strip like Peanuts can be as profound as any good book.”

Ratatouille, which carries Pixar’s most complex story to date, is about a rat, Remy (voiced by Patton Oswalt), who stumbles into France looking for his family. He finds Linguini (Lou Romano), a human, who is working in a famed French restaurant known for its bisque, which Linguini fouls up. Linguini, it would seem, can’t cook, but Remy can. They enlist each other — the rat invents the recipes, the human makes them — to win over a morose food critic whose office is in the shape of a coffin.

The movie is directed and co-written by Bird, the creative force behind two recent animated movies involving humans — The Iron Giant and The Incredibles. Bird has, twice in a row, featured humans at Pixar, a studio that has only animated toys, fish, monsters and bugs before him.

“People are scared off by humans because we know how humans move … it’s not a mystery to us anymore,” Bird said. “I’ve always been fascinated with animating humans because it’s difficult. In Ratatouille, these aren’t life-like humans; they’re caricatures. And it was really fun to watch them develop.”

And a footnote: “This is also my first talking critter movie.”

Indeed, the critters do talk, but in his defense, they talk only to themselves. So when a human walks in on a rat conservation he only hears tiny squeaks and chirps. The illusion that humans talk human and rats talk rat is preserved, even with the anomaly of Remy, who seems to understand dialects of rat, human and food.

In the film, Remy helps steer the rather inept Linguini in the kitchen by hiding under his toque (a French chef’s hat) and pulling on tufts of his red hair as if they were reins. This presented an animation problem: how to convincingly illustrate hair. If his hair is too stiff Linguini runs the risk of looking like a Backstreet Boy minus the frosting; too floppy and it’ll dangle loosely on his digital scalp. The answer, Lewis said, was partially answered in a previous Pixar film, Monsters Inc., which featured a giant monster covered from horns to toes in purple and blue fur that matted when wet, moved when touched and swayed when blown upon.

“The fur on the Sully character in Monsters Inc. was a precursor to us understanding how hair and fur can be done this time out. I’m no animator, but I know it was no easy process,” Lewis said. “This film builds on the shoulders of other great Pixar films. From the fur, the hair, the water, the open flames in the kitchen … we can’t take credit for understanding these things without the films that came before us.”

Bird acknowledges the difficulties on the movie, but said they were important to telling a story.

“Water’s really hard to do on a computer. But for us, our movie wasn’t set on the ocean like Finding Nemo or Surf’s Up, which I haven’t seen yet. So water wasn’t a big concern. Even the hair played a minimal role,” he said. “For this movie we just really wanted to make the food look good.”

And food is the core element to Ratatouille, which is itself a food, a vegetable dish considered to be a simple and modest staple to a French diet. Much of the movie is spent in a kitchen drizzling sauces over plates, pinching herbs into pots, dicing vegetables and it has several memorable scenes at the edges of a spoon or fork where food meets mouth, or vice versa. The film had technical help from Thomas Keller, chef and owner of Northern California’s French Laundry, an ultra-exclusive (reservations must be made month in advance) restaurant known for its exquisite . Keller provided some inside expertise, said one of the Brads (Brad Lewis).

“One thing we had to fly by the seat of our pants on was food. This is the first time that computer animation has done first-rate food. We didn’t want it to be photo real; we wanted artistic, wonderful food that evokes appetite,” Lewis said. “If you leave hungry, then I guess it was done correctly.”

Tales from a dirty rat
Once upon a time, Patton Oswalt received a phone call. On the other line a voice relayed: “You’re the rat.” And then all was good in the comedian’s world. The end.

At least with that chapter.

Oswalt, a comedian known for his railings on Bush and religion, was asked to voice Remy, the rat and star in Ratatouille. Volume sat down with him to discuss the film, food and rats, but not necessarily in that order.

Volume: Have you ever been to Phoenix before?
Patton Oswalt: My grandma lives in Tempe, Ari., so I come here all the time, especially when I was a little kid. I really like it here because it kinda feels like you’re on a moon colony … things are so bleached and clean. And I really love the desert at night. I love how when it’s really hot everyone just locks themselves in their homes to escape the heat. Sure, Hispanics have their siestas, but everyone else does a very-Caucasian version of a siesta and they’ll crank the AC, jump in the pool and then come in and watch games shows on TV. The heat is just inescapable and I’ve always found it nice to chill out indoors.

Volume: How do you get picked for voicing a rat?
PO: I heard that Brad Bird was listening to one my comedy albums and he said, “That’s the rat.” [Bird confirmed this, saying Patton is “as funny as he thinks he is.”]

Volume: Is that weird someone thinks of you as a rat’s voice?
PO: Oh, it’s totally flattering. I’ve loved Brad Bird’s work way back to his days on The Simpsons and Iron Giant. I’ve been a Pixar fan since Luxo for crying out loud. I asked myself, “Was this a dream come true?” No! Because this was so ridiculously beyond any of my dreams that I never thought it would ever ever happen. I would have been happy with so much less than this.

Volume: How much less?
PO: If I would have had one line I would have still taken it. If all I said was “give me that pot” in the background I would be blogging about how awesome it was right now.

Volume: Have you had the dish ratatouille?
PO: It’s delicious. It’s a very basic peasant dish — it’s tomato sauce and savory vegetables all grilled and cooked. It’s great. It’s like succotash or chili or pot roast in that it’s cheap and can feed your whole family. That’s why the movie works: because the dish is so simple. Think about it, anybody could make filet mignon or black truffles taste amazing. But if you can take a ribeye or a haddock and make it amazing that’s the sign of a great chef. If you can elevate something that much, you’re good.

Volume: Are you getting any stories for your stand-up from this experience?
PO: I’ve been doing a lot of kids press because of this movie. That’s when I realized how much I use cynicism and negativity just to communicate in the world. With kids you have to be really positive. It’s almost painful. They ask, [in a child’s voice] “Did you like working with Brad Bird?” I respond: “It was really really fun” as blood drips from my ears. It’s like my head’s coming apart.

Context-free thoughts from Janeane G.
Janeane Garafalo voices a sultry French chef in Ratatouille. Talking with her about just one topic is impossible. Here are some context-free examples from our uproarious conversation:

• “It’s not horrible, like, working in a salt mine, especially since it’s elective.”
• “No one makes anyone go into entertainment.”
• “Getting up at 4:15 in the morning to be on Good Morning Utah is not the highlight of my career.”
• “Apparently the timbre and tone of my voice is what people want.”
• “I haven’t been to France so I had a CD with a French guy speaking English, but then I lost that. So then I started watching CNN International because they have an anchor who speaks in a French accent.”
• “Sometimes I would forget so I would just think of suh-ren-oh-mee for the word ‘ceremony.’”
• “Sorry, I don’t know how to turn my phone off … seriously.”
• “I have no excuses, only apologies.”
• “I will one day run with the bulls in Pamplona, except I won’t because I don’t want to run with the bulls in Pamplona.”
• “I don’t cook, but I do like watching good cooks cook.”
• “I’m fiscally prudent, I’ll give myself that.”
• “I am savvy, which is why I don’t have to do Revenge of the Nerds III.”
• “Nothing against doing Revenge of the Nerds III.”
• “I think those drapes are perfectly adequate for this room. They wouldn’t have been my first choice but then again they are pleasing to the eye and fully functional.”
• “When I met Albert Brooks I thought I was going to have a heart attack.”
• “You can’t polish a turd … especially with chamois.”
• “It’s a swimsuit, but I just use it as a bra.”
• “Patton [Oswalt] has man-boobs, but he’ll admit that freely.”

Quick Scoops

Rhinestones oozes Gangsta
Foxy Brown is skipping P.O. meetings because she has rings around her eyes.
MSNBC on Paris: I'm about to snap!!!
Is this A New Sextape cover??
Finally! Good music from someone besides that druggie "Ms. Rehab"
Gays Gone Mad
A Hooker and a Reverend?
A peek of the women who piss standing up

Off to a good start -- thanks, IMDb

Three posts into this Web log (I won't say that other word; it rhymes with grog) and the Internet Movie DataBase, the end-all be-all of movie Web sites, plunked Pick-Up Flix on its home page. Gracias, IMDb. Since they've posted it, though, I've already added my review of Live Free or Die Hard. So, if you were diverted here from IMDb, please scroll down to read about two kinds of movie badness. And pretty please stick around for the review of Live Free or Die Hard. And in case you want to bookmark this page, I will be doing weekly reviews of movies, daily features on other cinema in general, as well as discussing old movies I might be viewing between current releases. Thanks for checking this page out.

McClane censors himself for the kids

Live Free or Die Hard takes place during what appears to be a 24-hour period. And, hey, look! That’s CTU. The only thing missing is Keifer Sutherland shooting people in the kneecaps.

24, Fox’s runaway action series, is itself a sanitized, tech’d-out version of Die Hard, so it’s ironic that even the Die Hard franchise has come full circle. It’s ironic, and also very sad. Die Hard is the high-water mark of the action genre (Die Hard 2 is the low-water mark), but here, in its fourth entry, it’s a convoluted mess of computer parts, USB cables, brain-dead OnStar dispatchers, cell phone gadgets and John McClane, dinosaur supercop still trying to find his place in a police department that may not want him. Notice how in all four Die Hard movies we’ve never seen McClane (Bruce Willis) do any real police work — not a drug bust, felony arrest, speeding ticket or littering violation. Is he kept around in the off chance terrorists hijack an airport/office/city/computer network? They need a union for that kind of cop. They can meet at the Moose Lodge.

With Live Free and Die Hard target is a computer network. Apparently, the computer infrastructure of the entire United States government can be breached and destroyed with three keystrokes, because Thomas Gabriel (Timothy Olyphant) does it, and in a suit straight out of Esquire no less. First he hacks the transportation grid, then the heart of economy (Wall Street), and finally major utilities. He has a theory and it’s called a Fire Sale: destroy the computer network of the country and it’s like hitting the reset button on our society. Of course, Tom will also steal some money — all money, in fact.

So in drops McClane, bald as Telly Savalas using Nair shampoo, tasked with bringing a computer hacker to Washington, D.C. The hacker, played by Justin Long, programmed a small portion of the Fire Sale without knowing the whole scheme, so he reluctantly helps McClane rustle through Gabriel’s plans.

I enjoyed parts of Live Free or Die Hard, but only because the grand stunts are kind of awe inspiring, or maybe just shock-and-awe inspiring. They're ambitious, too: a series of tunnel stunts multiply into larger and larger events until cars are spilling (literally) out of the tunnel. Largely, though, I’m disappointed that a modern-day McClane is nothing but a dopey cyber-cop protecting us helpless Internet surfers from computer spammers like Thomas Gabriel, a wimpy villain compared to A-list threats like Hans or Simon Gruber. And what’s with the intelligence community of the United States? The movie suggests that a Cheeto-fingered 8-year-old diverted from the Nickelodeon homepage could hack into the FBI database or post graffiti on President Bush’s MySpace page. Really?!?

What frustrated me most, though, were all the implausible computer hacking and physical stunts. Here’s an entire movie where characters hammer at keyboards and make terrible things happen. Here, I’ll try: “k;jsdsjldfnhouhsaeof jldfnoukdno[is.” I just shut down the New York City subway system, and it took one second to type. One more: “oqwhfmshsyfnfk.” That was me deprogramming Bruce Willis films from my TiVo unit. As if fudged QWERTY rows weren’t bad enough, in flies a jet that can hover with the agility of a hummingbird. And there’s McClane driving a big rig up a corkscrewing freeway of death that goes up and up and up — was the stairway to heaven not available? The jet itself is a cool trick, but the way it interacts with McClane’s world is a little hard to swallow. Not that I doubt the talent of American military pilots, but I do doubt they can fly a billion-dollar jet underneath an elevated freeway and shoot at a big rig in the process. Not even Top Gun attempted nonsense like that.

As for the rating — it’s PG-13 — I’m peeved. John McClane is an R-rated guy. Why censor him now after three R-rated adventures? As for the violence, the body count is just as high, if not higher, than previous Die Hard pictures. The only difference now is that brains, blood and guts aren’t spilling from the gunshot wounds. My biggest gripe, though, is with his tagline: “Yippee-ki-yay … (you know the rest).” Here, it’s truncated (and castrated) by a cleverly placed gunshot. Even 24's Keifer Sutherland gets away with something like a million utterances of the word "damn," and he's on TV.

Overall, Live Free or Die Hard breaks a lot of rules — including many of its own — but it’s a spirited adventure with John McClane, but not his best, nor his most believable. If you want something with some teeth check out TV’s 24, which is Die Hard lite, or Live Free or Die Hard heavy.

"Fancy" covers Playboy

[scan courtesy of Concrete-Loop]

Garcelle Beauvais, best known for playing Fancy on the Jamie Foxx Show, covers the August issue of Playboy.. 40 never looked sooo good. I'm sure she's not going nude like the Stacey Dash spread but it's good to see another sista covering this magazine.

She's Smuggling Somethin' Back There

What's going on with Kim Karadashians backside.. She looks like a princess from the front and Oprah from the back.

Drunken Stepfather

New Music: Kanye West & Lloyd

This is Kanye's new single Stronger for his new LP Graduation

if your feeling it you can get here

Listen - Kanye West feat. Daft Punk - Stronger

Also if you missed the pre-show on 106&Park, here is Lloyd's performance. Nice perm, he must have Indian in his family.....

You all know I don't do this a lot so don't expect this for another 3 months. Check out The Official remixxx of Get It Shawty

Listen - Lloyd feat. Lil Wayne, Big Boi, Chamillionaire - Get It Shawty (Remix)

Caption This

I hope their not praying with that blunt/cigar in his hand?

Rumor Has It ....50 Cent Snuff The Game??

Word is getting out about this alleged incident... I have no clue if this is true but it sure has made it's way to my mail box 113 times...

“Just reported 50 and The Game just crossed paths in
L.A. while 50 was doing a photo shoot for his new video and The Game made a
special appearance.
Reports say 50 knocked The Game out, Game was stunned
and has a broken nose and black eye from one punch by 50. 50 cent’s entourage
which includes over 100 men took over the scene and got 50 out of there
a.s.a.p.There’s also supposed to be a Cell Phone Vid of the incident, however, like with the Uncle Murda & Papoose
punch, Tru Life &
Cam Ron punch, don’t get your hopes up.

UPDATE: I talked to some kats in L.A. According to them they haven't heard anything on the radio and if it did, everyone would have known and broadcast the beef by now. So for right now the rumor is FALSE

source G-UintWorld.com

Rumor Has It....The B.E.T. Awards Edition

Now I see why juiicy declined the invitation. I personally wasn't entertained except for when 50's mic was cut off for the first half of his performance. With Yayo yelling " whats wrong 50! whats wrong!" made me laugh even more but I could have saved it on the TiVo instead of watching it live. A lot of funny things went down so I'm going to give you the scoop.

I heard during the red carpet, Rihanna was held back by the B.E.T. staff until Beyonce clear the red carpet because of their "beef"
I heard Ciara WAS sitting next to 50 during the beginning of the show when the camera spotted them together. She moved afterwards when Yayo came to take his seat next to 50.
I heard Tracey Edmond (Eddie Murphy's now woman) and Mel B (Eddie Murphy's baby momma) showed up to the same after-party around the same time. Knowing this their entourage/friends kept them away from each other most of the night
I heard Jay-Z pulled a no-show at the last minute...Has nothing to do with bey & Jay breaking up
I heard Bow Wow had a stink face during Ciara's performance. He played with his sidekick until Ciara came up to his row during the performance. UPDATE: Don't believe me, check this out

Check Out ALL of the half-decent performances from last night and Speak On It

50 Cent - Amusement Park

Diddy feat. Keyshia Cole & Lil Kim

Beyonce, Kelly & Eve

Ciara - Like a Boy

Robin Thicke - Loss without you

T.I. Big Things Poppin

Neyo & Fabolous - Because of You/Make Me Better

Jennifer Hudson & Jennifer Holiday

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

BET Awards 2007!!

Welcome to the 2007 BET AWARDS! I personally declined my invitation to attend the show so I could sit back and and bring ya'll up- to- date pictures of the event and the winners... You can thank me later.

7:32 Awards Show

Keyshia Cole, Diddy, Lil Kim Performance