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Britney Spears’ on-camera meltdown at the MTV Video Music Awards couldn’t hold a candle to the drama going on backstage, and yesterday an irate Kanye West vowed he’d never work with the music network again.
West, who threw a tantrum at the show after being blanked in all five categories he was nominated for, told New York radio station Z100 that he’s cancelled all his upcoming “TRL” appearances to promote his new CD “Graduation.”
“That’s two years in a row, man . . . give a black man a chance,” said West. “I’m trying hard man, I have the No. 1 record, man.”
West said he was also peeved that MTV didn’t allow him to perform on the main stage, instead he was relegated to a suite.
“For me, MTV made it seem like performing on the main stage was a bad thing, and the suites were just so great,” he said. “It was my dream when I made ‘Stronger’ to open up the VMAs with a real power performance.”
West also blasted the music channel for letting Tinseltown trainwreck Britney Spears open the show.
“They exploited Britney in helping to end her career,” he said. “This game will chew you up and spit you out.”
For her part, Spears was so distraught over her embarrassing performance she broke down in tears backstage. According to Us magazine, the trashtastic pop tart was “crying badly.”
“She’s devastated. She was really nervous and knows she screwed up,” a source told Us.
Another spy dished to People.com that Spears’ lip-synching flubs and dance screw-ups were the result of terrible nerves.
“She was just plain nervous because of all the hype . . . . She just got out there and froze.”
And that wasn’t the only VMA fallout.
Police in Las Vegas cited Kid Rock, the former husband of actress Pamela Anderson, for suspicion of battery after a backstage scuffle with her other ex, Tommy Lee. The two men got into a fight while singer Alicia Keys was performing during the two-hour show Sunday.
While it’s unclear why the brawl broke out, observers speculated that Lee’s man-handling of Anderson may have sent Rock over the edge. Anderson was married to Rock for four months last year. She and Lee, who have two sons together, were wed for three years.
Las Vegas police said that Rock, whose real name is Robert Ritchie, was cited for misdemeanor battery after investigators determined from interviews with both men and eyewitness accounts that he was the instigator.
“He was deemed to be the primary aggressor,” said police spokesman Bill Castle.
According to an audience member, the aging rockers “had each other at the necks, they were practically strangling each other.”
Another eyewitness spotted the Motley Crue drummer being escorted out of the venue and into the main casino “screaming the f-word over and over again.”
MTV posted a short video clip of the altercation, showing Rock and Lee being pulled apart by security guards as they shouted at one another. But what the two men said was inaudible.
Lee insisted to “The Insider” he was “trying to be the bigger man,” when the Detroit rocker approached him and socked him in the jaw.
“I was about to put Kid in the emergency room when security grabbed me,” the 44-year-old boasted. “They said, “If you move, we will break your arms.’ ”
The near-brawl did provide a few extra laughs during the award show when presenter Jamie Foxx called on the boys to “stop all of this white-on-white crime.”
“Tommy Lee and Kid Rock fighting like black folks - it’s hilarious,” he said. “Who won? I was in the bathroom. Pamela Anderson has got a hard choice to make.”
A song touted as the first new release from MICHAEL JACKSON in four years is a fake, according to the pop superstar's representative.
Radio bosses at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania station 93.1 Kiis FM aired dance track Mamacita, which contains segments sung in Spanish, earlier this week (begs03Sep07), and claimed it was Jackson's work.
However, the King Of Pop's spokesman Raymone Bain denies Mamacita is a Jackson song, telling Eurweb that he "has not released any music yet".
HOLLYWOOD - Michael Lohan is ecstatic after his "amazing" reunion with his estranged daughter Lindsay.
Former convict Michael visited the 21-year-old singer/actress at the Cirque Lodge rehabilitation center in Utah on Thursday, where she has been seeking treatment since last month.
Father and daughter hadn't seen each other since Michael went to prison in New York after he was found guilty of driving while intoxicated and other charges two years ago.
An eyewitness to the reunion tells TV channel E!, "The moment Lindsay saw Michael, she started running and jumped into her father's arms. Her father hugged her and swung her around. Lindsay was so happy. It was very emotional."
Leaving Cirque Lodge after their meeting, Michael said, "I can't comment on my relationship with my daughter. But (the reunion) was amazing."
Michael is planning to visit Lindsay again during his stay in Utah, before he returns to New York on Saturday.
Actor Heath Ledger arrived at the Venice Film Festival alone today as family confirmed he has split from partner Michelle Williams. The couple are said to have separated after three years together.
'Brokeback Mountain' star Ledger, 28, looked grim-faced and spoke only briefly during a press conference for his new Bob Dylan film 'I'm Not There'. Williams, 26, also appears in the movie but did not accompany him to promote it.
The couple got together while filming 'Brokeback Mountain' in 2004 and their daughter Matilda was born in October 2005.
Williams' father, Larry, told Australia's Daily Telegraph: "We have known about their troubles for a while but it's always a very difficult thing in life when these things happen. I know Heath and Michelle still care about each other deeply and are very committed to being great parents to their daughter."
He blamed pressures of work for their break-up, saying: "You can never be stunned by what happens in Hollywood - I learned that when we were dealing with Michelle's career when she was younger. Michelle was grown up at 16 and, just like Heath, her life has had an extremely fast
pace to it. I feel tremendously for her and for him, and hope they will find what they want in life."
The split has not yet been officially confirmed by the couple's publicist but they are believed to have parted amicably several weeks ago.
Catherine Zeta-Jones revealed that she got back her svelte look after her pregnancies through a combination of healthy eating and a rigorous exercise regime.
The 37-year-old, who once admitted that reducing after giving birth would be hard, featured in the InStyle magazine showing off perfectly toned legs and a trim midriff.
The actress has to be extra cautious now about her fitness regime as she is playing role of a New York chef in her latest film, No Reservations.
'I have to drag myself to the gym like everyone else,' Daily mail quoted Zeta-Jones, as saying.
'But I do eat sensibly and have lots of chicken -- although if I could eat only three foods for the rest of my life, it would also be smoked salmon sandwiches with potato chips crunched inside and fish and chips if I did not put on weight,' she added.
She also revealed that she indulged in her favourite sandwiches while carrying Dylan, 7, and Carys, 4.
Amy Winehouse arrived back in the UK today as concern continues to mount about the troubled singer.
Winehouse, 23, and husband Blake Fielder-Civil were photographed at Gatwick on their return from a five-star resort on St Lucia in the Caribbean.
The singer, who has cancelled a string of performances, is nominated for a Mercury Award, and is due at the London ceremony tomorrow.
Brit-award winner Winehouse was admitted to hospital last month after a reported overdose of heroin, ecstasy, cocaine, ketamine and alcohol.
The couple went on holiday after Winehouse quit rehab for a second time.
But pictures of the talented singer on holiday have sparked concern that she is still using hard drugs.
Before she went away, Winehouse was seen bloodstained and covered in scratches after quitting rehab with her husband.
The Back to Black singer shocked her fans with her blood-soaked ballet shoes, bruises to her neck, bandages on her arms and make-up smeared down her face.
Fielder-Civil had scratches covering his face and neck.
On the Lido, a paradisical Adriatic island, Venice Film Festival audiences were shown the horrors of war — and the U.S. occupation of Iraq — in two American movies premiering here. Brian De Palma's Redacted dramatizes the inhuman violence U.S. soldiers can be driven to commit in a country of which they know little, except that death can erupt anywhere. In the Valley of Elah, from Paul Haggis, who received a Best Picture Academy Award for Crash, enlists three other Oscar winners (Tommy Lee Jones, Charlize Theron and Susan Sarandon) in a story of the war brought home.
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Both films are based on actual atrocities. Redacted is inspired by the March 2006 rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl, Abeer Qasim Hamza, and the killing of her family and torching of their bodies and their home, by four American soldiers. Three of the GI's have been convicted by military juries, earning from 90 to 110 years in prison. The fourth, who was discharged from the Army before charges were brought, is to be tried in criminal court; the prosecutor handling the case says he will seek the death penalty.
Elah is based on a Playboy investigative article, Mark Boal's "Death and Dishonor," about a returned Iraq vet whose body was found near an Army base, hacked to pieces with dozens of stab wounds.
In their styles, the movies are poles apart: Redacted is constructed entirely of seemingly real snippets of media: YouTube-like blogs, video posts, picture-phone emails and a daily video record of the war kept by one soldier, Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz); it's a multimedia mockumentary. Elah is more traditional, a crime procedural that involves a police detective (Theron) and the murdered GI's father (Jones). But both films have a startling impact and a lingering chill. Just as important, both demand that their viewers consider the cost of the government's decision to invade a land no American was properly prepared for fighting in.
The cost — beyond the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives, beyond the toxic inflaming of the Middle East and the trashing of our country's reputation — is surely the reckless endangerment of U.S. soldiers' physical and mental health. They go over to Iraq whole; of those who make it back, many return with body parts missing or minds horribly damaged. Health officials report a huge increase in spousal and child abuse by returning vets.
How long will America keep paying for the psychic wounds its good young men encountered in Iraq? How long will they be emotionally disabled by their experiences? Rachel Maddow, one of the sharpest political commentators around, said on her Air America show a few weeks ago that the war in Iraq would not end for another 75 years — until the last haunted vet dies, still screaming out his nightmares.
MURDER IN IRAQ: SEE IT NOW ON YOUTUBE
What was the upside for young Americans sent overseas in World Wars I and II? Two things: They could kill the enemy, and have sex with the local ladies. Neither applies in Iraq. The enemy is almost impossible to identify — it could be man, woman or child — and Muslim women would risk death if they had sex with the infidel invaders, even if they were so inclined.
These frustrations are at the heart of the drama in Redacted. The Iraqis are not guys in different uniforms, or women one might woo; they are walking frag bombs, more animal or mineral than human. And when the members of one squad stationed in at a checkpoint in Samarra see their sergeant blown up while sweeping a dump site (his severed arm lands in front of Salazar's camera), they gradually go a little nuts.
Their attitude has never been exactly enlightened. They refer to Iraqis as "sand n-----s," and when one car goes speeding toward the checkpoint (after, the driver says, being waved through), they blow it up, injuring the driver and killing the woman in the back seat, who had been about to give birth. After the sergeant's death, one of the squad's less evolved members, B.B. Rush (Daniel Stewart Sherman), starts frisking an Iraqi schoolgirl with unseemly sexual forcefulness.
Later, over a drunken poker game, Rush and his redneck pal Flake (Patrick Carroll) think it'd be fun to return to a house they had searched and pay a little more attention to the pretty Iraqi girl who lives there. They do that, dragging along some of their reluctant buddies, and in a long scene that shocks and sickens, commit their crimes of passion and vengeance.
If you're wondering about journalistic impartiality, I should say that not all the violence in Redacted is the soldiers'. After the rape-murder, one of the squad is kidnapped by an insurgent group; in a video on the group's website, we see the soldier condemned to death, his throat slit, his severed head held up. But, you could say, those are the tactics of jihadists; they're supposed to behave abominably. We're not. And if we did, we're obliged to ask why.
In Venice, De Palma explained that "redacted" is the military's euphemism for the editing, in fact censoring, of impolitic comments in war documents, including servicemen's letters to the folks back home. (The Army also recently forbade its soldiers access to YouTube; but emails and videophone messages still get through.) "Sadly," De Palma said, "the true story of the war in Iraq has been redacted from the mainstream corporate media. I did this film because I believe that if we as a country are going to cause such disorder we must also be prepared to face the horrendous images that result from these events." And in the current video culture, he added, "The pictures are what will stop the war. If we get these pictures and stories in front of a mass audience, maybe it will do something."
Salazar, who hopes his video record will get him into film school, is the movie's recording Angel; he tells one of his squad subjects, "The camera never lies." That's nonsense, the other soldier says, "The camera does nothing but lie." De Palma has been investigating the question of visual veracity for most of his 40-year career. Redacted takes him back, back, past the Hitchcock homages and the action epics, back to his earliest films: Greetings! and Hi, Mom!, two innovative satires on the Vietnam War. The first film has clips of Lyndon Johnson addressing the nation on TV, and a character obsessed with the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination. Hi, Mom! follows a Viet vet (Robert De Niro) with a movie camera, recording what he sees and what he does, including bombing his own housing development, an action that kills his pregnant wife and his dog. In the 60s and today, De Palma says, war does bad stuff to people.
His new movie has torrents of words and goes heavy on macho posturing; at times it suggests a ragged off-off-Broadway play. And De Palma is not going for subtlety here: Flake, the craziest of the squad members, has a Confederate flag for his bedspread — he's a lunatic Reb. But Redacted pretty successfully sustains a dual level of hysteria (in its content) and disinterest (in its film-long framing devices). It's an amazingly vigorous work for a filmmaker who turns 67 on Sept. 11, and his strongest cinematic and political statement at least since Casualties of War, his Vietnam film of 1989. The movie is a cry of national shame; for De Palma, it's a new badge of honor for a wily old vet.
DAVID VS GOLIATH: WHO WINS?
The valley of Elah is where the Philistines sent out their Goliath to terrify the Israelites, and where young David felled the giant with his trusty slingshot. Haggis wants you to ask: In Iraq, who is the good guy, who the enemy? And how does one turn into the other?
Hank Deerfield (Jones) is a terse, honorable man, an ex-soldier who, against the pleas of his wife (Sarandon), encouraged his son to enlist for Iraq. Now he learns that the boy, Mike, has been back in the States without telling his family and, much worse, has been found murdered. Was the crime drug-related? Hank is skeptical. He tells an Army doctor, "You know, the Army does regular drug tests on its soldiers." The doctor replies: "Not when they're in Iraq."
Hank knows a lot — the number of men in an infantry unit, the way a blue car looks green under a yellow streetlight — but he has much to learn about the effect of this war on today's young men. One vet has drowned his wife's dog, and later drowns her in a bathtub. Hank has also hears that Mike had been called Doc by his comrades. Why? Because, on patrol in Iraq, Doc would "stick his hand in some hadji's wound and say, ‘Does that hurt?' And the hadji would say yes. Then he'd stick it in again and say, ‘Does that hurt?' That's how he got the name Doc."
Those of us who weren't crazy about Crash thought it reduced each of its dozens of characters to one small virtue and big flaw. This time Haggis is more open to his characters' drives and demons. The good guys, the ones so well played by Jones, Theron and Sarandon, have nuances worth noting; and even the ones capable of committing the most heinous crimes seem like decent people to whom some awful thing happened. (Special mention to Wes Chatham, who could be Matt Damon's younger, cuter brother, as a soldier testifying to Hank about the killing.) The combination of dedicated actors and a superior script helps make Elah a far more satisfying film than Crash.
Both films end with powerful visual statements: a montage of real people killed in Iraq, the raising of an American flag upside down, as a traditional distress signal to other nations. We need help, these wrenching films say, when we can no longer help ourselves.
Britney Spears’ on-camera meltdown at the MTV Video Music Awards couldn’t hold a candle to the drama going on backstage, and yesterday an irate Kanye West vowed he’d never work with the music network again.
