Entertaining Posts: 02/11/11

Friday, February 11, 2011

Elizabeth Taylor being treated for heart failure

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Lady Gaga's new single compared to Madonna

By Christine Kearney

NEW YORK | Fri Feb 11, 2011 2:10pm EST

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Pop diva Lady Gaga's new single, "Born This Way," debuted on Friday -- a nod to acceptance of race and sexuality and a straightforward dance floor song that was quickly compared to Madonna.

The song is the lead track off a new album of the same title, to be released in May, and follows her best-selling albums "The Fame" and its extended version "The Fame Monster."

Lady Gaga is expected to perform the song live at the Grammy Awards on Sunday.

The New York-born 24-year-old has said she wrote "Born This Way" in just ten minutes and it was a gay pride anthem. But several critics and fans noted it sounded very similar to Madonna's 1989 hit, "Express Yourself."

"Basically it is a reworking of Madonna's 'Express Yourself' with a touch of Madonna's 'Vogue'. Which is a bit too much Madonna for someone who is trying to establish her own identity as the, er, new Madonna," wrote London's Daily Telegraph critic Neil McCormick.

Fans thought so too, and "Madonna" and "Express Yourself" quickly became two of the top trending topics on Twitter.

"Definitely feeling the Madonna vibes, which I mean as a huge compliment. This track is fierce," Tweeted NerdAndAHalf on Friday.

Other music writers said the similarity between the songs was nothing more than the usual influences derived from all music genres over the decades. Rolling Stone magazine rated the house and disco-orientated single four stars out of five.

"Despite the obvious tip of the cap to Madonna's 'Express Yourself' (which was just Madge's knock-off of the Staple Singers' 'Respect Yourself'), it's steeped in decades of gay disco tradition," said Rolling Stone.

" 'Born This Way' sums up all the complex Gaga myths, all her politics and Catholic angst and smeared lipstick, in one brilliant pop blast," Rolling Stone added.

The pop singer, whose real name is Stefani Germanotta, has frequently been compared to Madonna for her shock tactics in music videos and stage performances, as well as catchy pop songs like "Bad Romance" and "Poker Face."

With the repeated hook "Don't be a drag, just be a queen," and lyrics such as "You're black, white, beige, chola descent / You're Lebanese, you're Orient", "Born This Way"'s message of embracing all cultures and being yourself is a familiar one in pop music history.

"The greatest trick Lady Gaga has pulled -- the thing that makes her a genuinely impressive pop star -- is creating an atmosphere where people can legitimately feel like revolutionary all-embracing gender-queering 'little monsters' by listening to one of the most popular artists in the country," said New York Magazine. "That's rare and makes for vital pop."

Gaga, who appears on the March cover of Vogue with a pink bob hair-style, told the magazine she wanted the new album to be "nothing less than the greatest album of the decade."

She told U.S. TV news program "60 Minutes" in an interview to be aired on Sunday: "One of my greatest artworks is the art of fame. I am a master of the art of fame."

(Reporting by Christine Kearney, editing by Jill Serjeant)

German cross-eyed opossum to predict Oscars on TV

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Jeff Beck hopes to make a "Commotion" at Grammys

LOS ANGELES | Fri Feb 11, 2011 12:47pm EST

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - If all goes well on Sunday, Jeff Beck could double his Grammy collection to 10.

The British rock guitarist's latest album "Emotion & Commotion" will compete in four categories, and he also picked up a nod for his work on a Herbie Hancock project.

Beck, a somewhat reclusive type once described as "the lone-cat gunslinger supreme" by Mojo magazine, will temporarily bury his disdain for awards shows and show up at the 53rd annual Grammy Awards ceremonies in Los Angeles on Sunday.

"I'm pretty much a hypocrite because I've been throwing abuse and other various objects at the screens of various functions like the Grammys and the Golden Globes and the Oscars," he told Reuters in an interview.

"But with five (nominations), I thought I'd better put in an appearance."

The 66-year-old musician, who stands alongside Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page as one of most influential living guitarists in rock, will also perform a Ray Charles song at a related music-industry tribute to Barbra Streisand on Friday.

Beck's "Emotion & Commotion" will compete for best rock album, a tough field including Muse, Pearl Jam, Neil Young and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

Two of its tracks, the popular aria "Nessun Dorma" and the original tune "Hammerhead," are in separate instrumental categories. A third, a cover of Screamin' Jay Hawkins' "I Put a Spell On You" featuring Joss Stone, is a contender for rock vocal performance by a duo or group.

The album generated a Grammy for Beck last year when he won for his instrumental cover of "A Day in the Life."

Another Beatle-related track, a seven-minute all-star cover of John Lennon's "Imagine" for Hancock's "The Imagine Project," rounds out Beck's 2011 Grammy quota.

His first release in seven years, "Emotion & Commotion," was a deliberate attempt to return to the mainstream after a trio of albums he now dismisses as "Planet Zork music."

"Who Else" (1999), "You Had It Coming" (2001) and "Jeff" (2003) consisted of unfinished songs full of esoteric, house and hard-edged techno grooves. Traditional verse-chorus-verse structures, melodies and hooks were left by the wayside.

Beck, who blames himself for his irresponsibility, retreated to his 16th century farm house and his collection of hot rods in southern England, and eventually realized he'd better make another album to pay his bills.

Clocking in at an economical 40 minutes, "Emotion & Commotion" mixes a few originals with a wide selection of covers. Besides Stone, other guest vocalists include jazz singer Imelda May and opera singer Olivia Safe.

It has sold 94,000 copies in the United States, up from 65,000 for "Jeff" and on par with "You Had it Coming," according to Nielsen SoundScan. "Who Else?" sold 129,000 copies, but that came out just before the music industry started collapsing.

Beck hopes some additional Grammy success will renew interest in "Emotion & Commotion" especially as he tours to promote both that album and an upcoming CD and DVD tribute to guitar icon Les Paul.

"From what I understand the people that have heard it and have got bitten after a few plays, they just love it. So if they love it, perhaps we should push it a little bit harder to get a few more people to enjoy it," he said.

(Reporting by Dean Goodman; Editing by Jill Serjeant)

Kevin Spacey bank movie asks "are we all greedy?"

By Mike Collett-White

BERLIN | Fri Feb 11, 2011 7:29am EST

BERLIN (Reuters) - Kevin Spacey stars in first-time director J.C. Chandor's "Margin Call," a drama set in a New York bank as it scrambles to offload massive toxic debts irrespective of what it means for the market or the population as a whole.

Spacey, as long-serving trading boss Sam, wrestles with the knowledge that his actions will harm the bank's reputation and put people out of work, but he, like others in a cast including Demi Moore, feels obliged to follow orders as that is what pays.

Chandor said the movie, which has its premiere at the Berlin film festival on Friday where it is in the main competition, sought to humanize the world of big-bonus banks and to show that greed went further than the world of finance.

"What the script for me is about is not excessive greed on any one individual's part, but it was the greed on a very small scale of the whole population, certainly in the United States," he told reporters after the official press screening.

Spacey said he welcomed the opportunity to explore what it was like for people caught in the center of the financial crash in 2008.

"There was a period of time where you couldn't pick up a newspaper and not read that every banker was the most horrible and greedy person that walked the face of the earth," the Oscar-winning actor told a news conference.

"The truth is ... in a lot of cases, these are regular people who have regular jobs who aren't making gazillions of dollars and who have to follow orders, and that's the crux of the morality of the piece and why I found it so fascinating."

MASS SACKINGS, DARK HUMOUR

Set over a 24 hour period, Margin Call opens with mass layoffs that are handled with almost comic brutality.

Who goes and who stays seems arbitrary, phone accounts are shut down the minute a person is sacked, and the newly unemployed are frog-marched out of the building clutching cardboard boxes containing their personal effects.

A young analyst, played by Zachary Quinto, is passed an electronic file by his outgoing mentor, and he soon discovers that it contains the bank's dirty secret -- that it is sitting on billions of dollars of almost worthless assets.

Academy Award winner Jeremy Irons plays the ruthless boss, who is called in to the swanky Manhattan offices in the middle of the night for an emergency board meeting where he must decide how best to save the bank from going under.

The actor said he believed all big business was amoral, including the movie industry, as it was driven only by profit.

"The problem is that to live in a world which is self-continuing we need morality," Irons said.

"We have to care about the fact that people are having their houses taken away from them.