热头条: 2013年1月11日

2013年1月11日星期五

Vice President Joe Biden described his meeting with the National Rifle Association Thursday as “productive” and said that even advocates for gun owners do not agree on one single solution to minimizing gun violence “I thought we had a very straightforward, productive meeting,” Biden told reporters at the beginning of his meeting with representatives from the video game industry today. Asked what he thought about the NRA’s stinging statement after the meeting yesterday, Biden only said, “I don’t have any comment on what anybody said about the meetings.” Shortly after Thursday’s meeting, the NRA blasted Biden, saying the administration is not trying to produce legitimate ideas about how to curb gun violence and instead went after the Second Amendment. “We were disappointed with how little this meeting had to do with keeping our children safe and how much it had to do with an agenda to attack the Second Amendment,” the NRA said Thursday. “While claiming that no policy proposals would be ‘prejudged,’ this task force spent most of its time on proposed restrictions on lawful firearms owners — honest, taxpaying, hardworking Americans.” “It is unfortunate that this Administration continues to insist on pushing failed solutions to our nation’s most pressing problems,” the NRA said. “We will not allow law-abiding gun owners to be blamed for the acts of criminals and madmen. Instead, we will now take our commitment and meaningful contributions to members of Congress of both parties who are interested in having an honest conversation about what works — and what does not.” The vice president tried to draw a distinction between the NRA and other gun ownership groups he met with this week, saying, “There is actually difference among them as well. It’s not a uniform view.” Biden, who was joined by Attorney General Eric Holder and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, met today with representatives from the video game industry, including members of Electronic Arts, the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, and Activision Blizzard, Inc., the makers of the highly popular Call of Duty games. In the weeks after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., the video game industry was criticized for promoting violent video games, but Biden assured the group that he was keeping an open mind. “I come to this meeting with no judgment. You all know the judgments other people have made,” Biden said. “There’s no silver bullet, there’s no, as one of my friends said, no seat belt that you can put on to assure that you will not be in this circumstance again,” he said. “I want you to know you have not been, quote, singled out for help, but we’ve asked a whole lot of people.” The vice president made no reference to an assault weapons ban, a topic which has not come up in the public portion of his meetings this week, raising questions about the administration’s intent to pursue such a ban. Biden said he’s still “shooting for Tuesday” as his deadline to submit recommendations to the president.

//Texas military assault scandal prompts congressional hearings//

Female trainees march during graduation at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. Military prosecutors have investigated 17 instructors at the base. (John L. Mone / Associated Press / June 22, 2012)

//Justin Timberlake to return to music after six years/

On Monday morning, Justin Timberlake is coming back. A surprise countdown on the singer's website promises that something – expected to be a new single – will be released at the beginning of next week. According to Billboard and the Hollywood Reporter, Timberlake has recorded around 20 songs for his third solo album. "Someone asked me the other day, 'So are you just done with music?'" the 31-year-old said in a new video, posted to his website on Thursday. "[But] I don't wanna put anything out that I don't love … You have to wait for it." "Look I've only done two albums in 10 years," Timberlake explained. "I'm the one that sits and is obsessive about it before you even get to hear it." Yet now, for the first time since 2006's FutureSex/LoveSounds, "I'm ready," Timberlake said. The clip finishes with the singer standing by a microphone, wearing a pair of headphones.

//Oscar nominations: 'Beasts of the Southern Wild' star Quvenzhane Wallis takes nom in stride//

'Beasts of the Southern Wild' stars Quvenzhane Wallis as Hushpuppy. 'Beasts of the Southern Wild' was also nominated for Best Picture, among other categories.

//2013 Oscar Nominations: Who Will Win?//

Nominees: Alan Arkin, Argo Christoph Waltz, Django Unchained Robert De Niro, Silver Linings Playbook Philip Seymour Hoffman, The Master Tommy Lee Jones, Lincoln Like the all-star season of Dancing with the Stars, except these really are all stars, this category features five Academy Award winners. De Niro, 69, a two-time champ for The Godfather Part II (Best Supporting Actor) and Raging Bull (Best Actor), who is decades past his World’s Great Actor prime, when he was routinely robbed of Oscars — somehow he did not win for Taxi Driver or Cape Fear — has received his first nomination in 21 years for the mostly comic role of Bradley Cooper’s blustering dad. Arkin, 78, who won Best Supporting Actor seven years ago for his crazy-like-a-fox grandpa in Little Miss Sunshine, also has a comic part as one of the two Hollywood insiders who help hatch the Argo caper. It’s a mystery as to why Arkin was nominated while John Goodman, his partner in chicanery, was not even in the conversation. Waltz, 56, a Best Supporting Actor winner as the slick Nazi in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, is back as a bounty-hunting dentist in Tarantino’s Django Unchained — it’s really a leading role, or a co-starring one, but Waltz makes himself worthy in either category. If the final dance were a pas de deux, the performers would be Hoffman, 45, a 2006 winner for Best Actor in Capote, and Jones, 66, who won Best Supporting Actor in 1994 for The Fugitive. Hoffman is the Master in The Master, an L. Ron Hubbard type who seems as jovial as he is menacing. Jones is all prickly intellect, all fuming righteousness, as Thaddeus Stevens, who pushed the 13th Amendment through Congress for President Lincoln. (Could he help Obama with immigration reform?) It’s a coin toss, but we say the Academy has a Jones for Tommy Lee. Snubs: Matthew McConaughey, 43, has never been nominated for an Oscar. Even at the Teen Choice Awards, the erstwhile rom-com preener lost out in such categories as Sexiest Love Scene and Choice Movie Liplock. Going boldly indie for a half-dozen films, four of them released last year, he earned critic cred for Killer Joe (lead) and Bernie and Magic Mike (supporting). He may have another shot next year, when his AIDS-victim role in Dallas Buyers Club, for which he lost 25 lb., will be eligible for Oscar consideration. Javier Bardem, 43, snagged a statuette five years ago as the chilling killer Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men; his Skyfall turn, as the mad genius who tries to blow up the British spy service, geysers even higher into chilling comedic grandeur. But this time the Academy didn’t acknowledge his work. Waltz’s co-stars in Django — Oscar nominees Leonardo DiCaprio and Samuel L. Jackson — were also ignored. Or in a Tarantino twist on a Sergio Leone trope, the three actors engaged in a triangular shootout, and only the Austrian survived. Read more: http://entertainment.time.com/2013/01/10/2013-oscar-nominations-who-will-win/#ixzz2HjBR9CtG

///'Gangster Squad' a stylish but shallow noir tale, critics say//

Taking its name and inspiration from a real LAPD operation that battled organized crime during the 1940s and '50s, the new film "Gangster Squad" dramatizes the story of Sgt. John O'Mara (played by Josh Brolin) and his squad's crusade against the interloping East Coast mobster Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn). Given free rein to bend (and break) the rules by the police chief, O'Mara and his men (played by Ryan Gosling, Robert Patrick, Anthony Mackie and others) pull no punches when going after criminals. Unfortunately for the squad, movie critics aren't taking it easy on the film either, with most reviews characterizing it as stylish but shallow. The Times' Betsy Sharkey says "Gangster Squad" initially shows promise, with a "swell cast" (which also includes Emma Stone as Cohen's dame), "a lot of neon and noir-ish flash" from director Ruben Fleischer ("Zombieland"), and a script by Will Beall packed "with period details, violence and the sort of pithy lines you'd expect bruisers to be spitting out in the 1950s." PHOTOS: The Gangster Squad But "the soul of the era is missing, and with it any reason to care," Sharkey says, adding, "The movie quickly slips into something closer to a 'Law & Order' procedural." The Boston Globe's Wesley Morris labels "Gangster Squad" "an almost movie." He explains: "It's almost entertaining. But it's missing the shameless insanity of a wonderfully bad movie, and the particular vision, point of view, and coherence of some very good ones. So it sits there in between — loud, flashy, and unnecessary." And despite the talented cast, Morris adds, "Fleischer appears to have left them all to figure out how to stay in the same movie." A.O. Scott of the New York Times writes that " 'Gangster Squad' is less a movie than a costume party run amok … a hectic jumble of fedoras and zoot suits, stockings and cigarettes, and red femme-fatale dresses." Being "too self-serious to succeed as pastiche," Scott adds, the film "has no reason for being beyond the parasitic urge to feed on the memories of other, better movies." Scott isn't the only critic to compare "Gangster Squad" unfavorably to its predecessors; Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post is another. She writes, "Slick, sick, self-consciously stylish and defiantly shallow, 'Gangster Squad' is one of those movies you can’t talk about without invoking other (often better) movies. A lot of movies." (Among them are "L.A. Confidential" "The Untouchables," "Chinatown" and even "Dick Tracy.") In Case You Missed It: OSCARS 2013 | Complete list | Snubs & surprises | Reactions | Play-at-Home ballot |Trivia | Oscar Watch | Timeline| Full coverage Salon's Andrew O'Hehir has an intriguing take on the film, which he initially describes as "reasonably successful entertainment" and "by the standards of midwinter Hollywood releases, not bad at all." More damning, however, and more interesting, is that O'Hehir goes on to blast the film as "a complete whitewashing of one of the most vicious and racist paramilitary organizations in American history: the Los Angeles Police Department." With its simplistic take on Los Angeles history, O'Hehir says, the film qualifies as "lazy and mendacious soft propaganda." Among the somewhat scarce positive reviews of the film, Variety's Peter Debruge calls it "an impressively pulpy underworld-plunger." Some "over-the-top" action notwithstanding, "every creative decision seems to be in service of telling the most entertaining possible story, backed by first-rate wardrobe and art contributions."