Thursday 28 April 2011

Naevia Reborn

Slave leader Spartacus isn’t the only part on Starz’ cult hit that’s being recast for season two. Lesley-Ann Brandt, who played Lucretia’s “body slave” Naevia, decided to leave the show during its protracted hiatus. Producers have now found an actress to step into (and most likely out of) her robes, and Entertainment Weekly has exclusively revealed that Ghanaian American Cynthia Addai-Robinson is the new girl. You’ll recall that Naevia fell in love with gladiator Crixus during season one and was subsequently banished from the House of Batiatus. She is described as "representing all that Crixus still lives for, driving him to fight alongside Spartacus in mutiny against Rome in the hopes of one day finding her. Crixus longs to see her still alive, to rescue her from exile and be reunited in love and freedom."

British-born Addai-Robinson inherits the role from fan favourite Brandt, who played the character in both the Blood and Sand & Gods of the Arena seasons of the show. The South African announced back in February that she was leaving the show to secure a recurring role on the CBS crime procedural CSI: NY and to pursue other endeavors; including three upcoming indie feature films. Unofficially, her manager maintained that she could've been lured back if the price had been right. Steven Jensen told The Wrap that his client and Starz had parted ways because they couldn't settle on money. He added at the time, "She'd like to go back, but they really haven't gotten the number we're looking for." He said she would reconsider "if they step up." Starz is known as being less restrictive in its actors contracts, which allowed Jane Lynch to leave Party Down when she was cast in Fox’s Glee.

Addai-Robinson is best known for her turn as nurse Debbie Hurst on ABC’s short-lived sci-fi mystery series FlashForward has also appeared in shows like CSI: NY and and Numbers. Past credits for the theater graduate from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University include roles in Tina Mabry's acclaimed feature debut, Mississippi Damned, as well as in Luc Besson’s latin-flavored revenge thriller Colombiana, with Zoe Saldana. She’s repped by Pantheon Talent and Liebman Entertainment.

After Starz aired its successful Gods of the Arena prequel in January, and Spartacus season two is expected to return early next year along with newcomer Liam McIntyre replacing Andy Whitfield in the lead role. Spartacus Season 2 will premiere in 2012.
Read more on this article...

Sunday 24 April 2011

Confronting The Last Taboo

A film’s success rises or falls on the smallest of details. And so it was that the director of this month’s medieval stoner comedy Your Highness found himself in a boardroom with the suits at Universal Studios, discussing every last facet of his minotaur’s manhood, writes Newsweek's Chris Lee. How to light the half-man/half-bull’s prosthetic appendage? How large should the dimensions be? And what would the anatomy suggest about the beast’s religious leanings? “We took the leap, culturally, and we circumcised him,” the director, David Gordon Green, explains.

Yes, much has changed in Hollywood since Clark Gable pushed the boundaries of taste by appearing without an undershirt in 1934’s It Happened One Night. For decades the dividing line between an R and an X rating was decidedly phallic-shaped. Not anymore. Male genitalia are getting unprecedented screen time at the multiplex and all over premium cable. “Male nudity has a humorous value because it’s taboo,” says Green, whose film garnered an R. “There’s a gracefulness to the female form that’s subject to this Last Tango in Paris, Jayne Mansfield–type of adoration. Where guys just don’t get the same shot. So that, for me, is where it’s ripe to come in and pull the pants down.”


Full-frontal dude-ity isn’t limited to visual punchlines in comedies like Forgetting Sarah Marshall and this summer’s The Hangover Part II. Male genitals (or, to use the now popular Hollywood vernacular, “peens”) are cropping up across the cultural grid, on cable shows like Starz’s Spartacus: Blood and Sand and HBO’s Game of Thrones, and in blue-chip Broadway fare like Equus, where Daniel Radcliffe showed he’s more than just Harry Potter. Over the years, A-list actors like Richard Gere, Tom Cruise, and Ewan McGregor have also played the full-monty card to establish their dramatic bona fides, but the full-frontal shots were fleeting. Now nude guys get much more hang time.

Take the Showtime reality series Gigolos, which follows the sexploits of high-priced male escorts plying their trade in Las Vegas. Even when the men aren’t shown servicing their female clientele, the show features no shortage of man parts. “Depending on your perspective and upbringing, more male nudity can be viewed as less repressed and more balanced with what we see of women,” says Gigolos executive producer Jay Blumenfield. “Or it can be a sign of the coming apocalypse. Our feeling is that a naked body is nothing to be ashamed of.”

The trend has Hollywood directors facing the kinds of casting decisions that used to bedevil their porn-making brethren. For a sequence in March’s raunch comedy Hall Pass, Owen Wilson’s doofus character passes out in a gym hot tub and is revived by a naked man in the locker room. The nude guy was a small part, but the movie’s directors, Bobby and Peter Farrelly, had to vet reams of actors’ photos to find someone who, uh, fit the bill. Once they’d found their man and were shooting the sequence, Wilson began to fret about photos of the scene leaking from the set. “That was Owen’s biggest fear in doing that scene,” Bobby Farrelly says. “Someone’s going to snap a picture of that on their phone, and it was going to get out before the movie was released. At least now there’s context for him hanging out with this giant penis.”
Read more on this article...

Saturday 16 April 2011

Thrones A Victim Of Inner Snobbery

It is puzzling, writes Matt Zoller Seitz, when critics complain about "unscalable slabs of expositionistic dialogue clogging the forward movement of the story" in relation to Game of Thrones. It is true the work is off-puttingly dense, but it is also economical; most of the scenes run less than two minutes. It lacks filmmaking flair and a sense of humor, but it's intelligent and serious. When characters speak, their conversations always revolve around important details of story and characterization, and their locutions are rather plain -- far less rhythmically distinctive than the dialogue in "Deadwood," "The Wire" or even "The Sopranos," to name just three HBO dramas considered worthy of serious discussion. There's no, "O this, o that." Nobody says "thou."

When reviewers allude to "imaginative horrors" inflicted on "women, precocious children, and four-legged animals", it falsely implies that the series has a penny dreadful sensibility, and that its adult male characters don't suffer as much indignity, injury and death. "Thrones" is violent, but it's not remotely as nasty as John Boorman's "Excalibur" or such current HBO shows as "True Blood" and "Boardwalk Empire." And when it comes to inflicting trauma on its characters, it's democratic. Women, children and animals suffer, but so do men. The series is aware that it's set in an adult male-dominated world and builds that awareness into its scripts. Several key subplots -- notably Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) getting strategically married off to a barbarian prince -- are specifically about how women adapt to oppressively patriarchal circumstances. And Patterson's description of a "luxuriantly offensive" sequence that's "either a gladiatorial rape tournament or a 'Jersey Shore' homage" is funny but misleading. It's actually Daenerys' wedding reception, and it's seen through the heroine's eyes as a deranged Bacchanal -- a horror show that makes the oppression she experienced back home seem tame.


At least Patterson cops to never liking fantasy fiction, and even admits (hilariously) to canceling a date in college once he found out that the young woman in question attended Renaissance festivals dressed as a "serving wench." (That detail would have increased my interest, but to each his own.) Better to concede your prejudices upfront than re-frame them as proof of intellectual superiority and smear a genre and its fans as stupid, childish and low-class -- which is what Ginia Bellafante does in her New York Times review of "Thrones."

Like Patterson, Bellafante somehow gets through a whole review without mentioning a single character or scene in detail. The piece is mainly interested in blasting TV for sexing-up the costume drama while de-carnalizing scripted shows set in modern times.

That's an intriguing premise. Unfortunately, Bellafante's gripes don't compute. "It says something about current American attitudes toward sex that with the exception of the lurid and awful 'Californication,' nearly all eroticism on television is past tense," Bellafante says, ignoring the likes of "Hung," "Rescue Me," "Skins," "Episodes," "Weeds," "Nurse Jackie," "Archer," "Sons of Anarchy," "Secret Diary of a Call Girl," and "True Blood," which the author herself cites as an example of HBO degrading its brand.

She also says that "the imagined historical universe of 'Game of Thrones' gives license for unhindered bed-jumping." That's not true. Sex, like violence, has consequences on "Thrones."

Ned Stark's bastard son feels so profoundly out-of-place -- illegitimate in every sense -- that he joins the border guards and moves far away from his blood family. The poor young man's whole life is "hindered"; he's a walking, talking consequence of illicit sex. The dwarf Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage) is seen cavorting with prostitutes, but the show lets us know that this is his only means of satisfying a powerful sexual appetite. His dwarfism neutralizes any sexual advantage that his royal bloodline provides. There's a moment in the second episode where another character chides him for paying for sex -- a remark that shakes Tyrion's self-image as a master cocksman. Daenerys Targaryen's status as a sex slave to her barbarian husband isn't treated in a titillating way; their couplings are depicted rather coldly, as transactions or negotiations. (She makes Khal Drogo look at her face during sex to force him to see her as a person rather than as a receptacle.)

Then there's this doozy of a passage:

"...[Y]ou get that all of this illicitness has been tossed in as a little something for the ladies, out of a justifiable fear, perhaps, that no woman alive would watch otherwise. While I do not doubt that there are women in the world who read books like Mr. Martin’s, I can honestly say that I have never met a single woman who has stood up in indignation at her book club and refused to read the latest from Lorrie Moore unless everyone agreed to 'The Hobbit' first. 'Game of Thrones' is boy fiction patronizingly turned out to reach the population’s other half."

Say what? The implication that women are predisposed to enjoy explicit sex scenes and female nudity may or may not be true, but it flies in the face of conventional industry wisdom about what women want from film and television. Filmmakers and TV producers are more likely to try to appeal to women by avoiding or deleting graphic sex and nudity while leaving in the kissing, cuddling, and heart-to-heart talks -- a patronizing strategy descended from the Old Hollywood "women's picture" and the early days of TV soaps. Is that what Bellafante is alluding to? If so, she's confusing the issue by conflating relationship melodrama with softcore porn.

As for the detail about Martin's work being "boy fiction patronizingly turned out to reach the population's other half," (a) I doubt Martin would have spent so much time on the book's trysts, affairs and marriages if he didn't find them personally interesting, and (b) Marion Zimmer Bradley, Ursula K. le Guin, Carol Berg, Holly Phillips, Juliet Marillier, Lynn Flewelling, Jacqueline Carey and Sharon Shinn would be surprised to learn that they've been writing "boy fiction" all this time.

You could make a compelling argument that pay cable's costume dramas try to eat their cake and have it, too, by treating specific historical circumstances as an excuse to put naked flesh on display. (Starz's "Spartacus" series sure do love their orgy scenes.) You could also argue that the nudity on "Thrones" objectifies women more than men. But I don't think either of those things are what Bellafante is getting at.

What is she getting at? Not much, beyond proclaiming, "I'm a girl, and I don't like fantasy fiction, therefore girls don't like fantasy fiction, so you boys can just bugger off with your Dungeons and Dragons nonsense."

Imagine if a review of "Deadwood" had mocked the very idea of a Western series telling morally complex adult stories, or if a review of "The Sopranos" proceeded from the assumption that gangster tales are inherently worthless as popular art. You can't. It's unthinkable.

These reviews are also disappointing because they're penned by critics I like. Patterson is one of the sharpest, funniest TV reviewers out there, and Bellafante is the only one of the New York Times' primary TV critics who doesn't write as if the medium were innately unworthy of her time. Something about the subject matter brought out their inner snobs. No other popular genre would be treated with such knee-jerk distaste by critics for major publications.
Read more on this article...

Monday 11 April 2011

Mildred Pierce S01E05

It's never easy getting naked for the cameras, even if you've stripped down onscreen before. Good thing, then, that Evan Rachel Wood had a seasoned mentor to help her through that first full-frontal shot: her Mildred Pierce costar Kate Winslet. If there’s one thing the British actress knows how to do, other than win Oscars, it’s doing nudity with grace.

"She coached me through my first nude scene," Wood said at the series' NYC premiere. "I mean, she's done it all. She was literally next to the camera going [thumbs-up]."

The 23-year-old actress admitted she was a lot more nervous than she thought she was going to be, so how exactly did Kate help her younger costar through it?

"Helping her to fully acknowledge the weight of that within the story. And also just talking to her about how to find a level of confidence," explained Kate, who plays Evan's mother in the movie.

It also helps to keep the spectators to a minimum.

"You keep the room as empty as possible and just kind of being there for her, really, and letting her know there was someone to hold her hand and throw a robe over her at the right moment...made her feel better," Kate added.

But the Oscar winner did convince Evan to cover up a bit.

"I looked at Kate and she was like, 'You've got to do it. Trust me, it's so brave. Put a merkin on and you'll be fine," the True Blood star continued. “Let’s just say, I had to wear a wig because it was in the '30s, and everything had to look like it was in the '30s,” Wood said with a laugh. “Kate helped me. She gave me strength. She kind of dared me. I also felt I had to prove it to myself. I had to do it at least once—get it all on film now so when I’m eighty I can look back at it and say, ‘Yeah! I did that!’”

Winslet, who plays the title role originated by Joan Crawford in the 1945 classic, is an old hand at baring all on screen. The Oscar winner disrobed for “The Reader” and famously posed au natural for Leonardo DiCaprio in “Titanic.”

"I think it's important that women on screen are portrayed as real women,” Winslet told People. “I'm comfortable in my own skin and I'm comfortable with all the imperfections that I have." Yet it still does not stop it being scary. "It is really strange, nudity," she said. "I know I've done it many, many times now, but you never really get used to it. You don't!"


Television Series: Mildred Pierce (S01E05)
Release Date: April 2011
Actress: Evan Rachel Wood
Video Clips Credit: El Amigo
39mb | XviD | mp3/128kps | 1:25 | 1280 x 720 | 3500kbps | 23,976fps










http://www.megaupload.com/?d=1D6MY4KY

or

http://www.mediafire.com/?xyc2xqf2u37ucf5
Read more on this article...

Saturday 9 April 2011

A Song of Fire and Ice

I'll watch it first before my dad watches it... and my brother doesn't know at all!

Emilia Clarke has admitted that she felt nervous while filming nude scenes for new HBO series Game Of Thrones. The actress will play Daenerys Targaryen in the adaptation of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy novels.

"It was really scary and I thought, 'Do I look terrible?' and all this kind of stuff," she told MTV. "But you just overcome it, because as soon as I'm in the character, that's it. You're her, you're not yourself."

Clarke added that the final scenes will be "100% tasteful".

"Obviously knowing it was HBO [and] totally legit [helped]," she insisted. "They just did it beautifully [and] tastefully."

Producer David Benioff previously suggested that the series is set in a "violent world" and will contain "a lot of sex".




Meanwhile, details have arrived on Upcomingnudescenes of the nudity in the first two episodes of Game of Thrones. An insider who has seen an early screener writes:

Episode 1
Esme Bianco (breasts, buns, possible bush)
Unknown actresses (Breasts)
Emilia Clarke (breasts, buns)
Lena Headey (Sexy)

British model-actress Esme Bianco plays a Ros, a prostitute. Can be seen rolling naked on a bed with semi clothed Peter Dinklage (Tyrion), performs oral sex on him just out of frame. Tyrion's brother Jaime enters, gives him a short lecture and complains about various things, and sends in four or five more prostitutes to keep Tyrion busy. You see all of their breasts.

Gorgeous and young English actress Emilia Clarke plays Daenerys, daughter of the deposed king. She's being traded to a warlord by her brother Viserys in exchange for an army. While preparing to meet the warlord she is stripped naked by her brother, and we get lingering shots of her breasts. After her brother leaves we get another shot of her breasts, and then her butt as she enters a large hot bath. Another shot of her breasts as she lowers herself into the bath.

During the wedding of Daenerys to the warlord, we get various shots of tribal women baring their breasts, as men fight over them and have sex with them.

After the wedding the warlord Drogo and Daenerys ride off to a secluded beach. He strips her naked, we get a shot of her breasts as he grabs them from behind, bends her over and has sex with her.

Towards the end of the episode Lena Headey, who plays the Queen, is discovered by a young child having sex with someone she really shouldn't be having sex with. Her dress is half open and she's showing a lot of cleavage.

Episode 2

Emilia Clarke (Breasts)
Roxanne McKee (Sexy)

Emilia Clarke is shown near the start of the episode being taken from behind again by Drogo, her breasts are visible and moving a lot from the force of the sex.

Roxanne McKee plays a former prostitute and servant who volunteers to show Emilia Clarke how to please Drogo. There is a lengthy scene in which she straddles Emilia Clarke (both clothed sadly) and gyrates her hips while they caress one another.

That's it. More to come from the show I'm sure (if the books are any indication)... it's a ridiculous amount of nudity from Emilia Clarke who is extremely beautiful. If the show follows the books, she will likely have a full frontal scene near the end of the season.
Read more on this article...

Camelot S01E03

Tamsin Egerton had only one scene in the premiere of the new Starz series Camelot, but it was a doozy: In this latest incarnation of the Arthurian legend, her Guinevere (or at least the naked, REM-state version of her) appears to young Arthur (Jamie Campbell Bower) in a dream on the beach, and they engage in some things in the sand that are, shall we say, not suitable for detailed description in a newspaper, writes USA Weekend's Brian Truit.

Like what the Spartacus series did for Roman gladiators, Camelot aims to take a realistic and gritty look at the ol’ roundtable tale, with Joseph Fiennes as the sorcerer Merlin, who comes to Arthur’s side with his dad Uther is killed, and Eva Green as Morgan, Arthur’s scheming half-sister who aims to take over the kingdom. And not to mention the love triangle that arises between Arthur, Guinevere and the dude to whom she’s betrothed, Leontes (Philip Winchester).

“That is the key to the season and this program,” Egerton says. “These are real humans, and people are often caught between a rock and a hard place. Guinevere’s a prime example of that.” The show also marks a chance of pace for Egerton, a British actress mostly known for her comedic roles — such as in the recently released (at least in Europe) Chalet Girl.


You have quite the introduction in the first episode, through a nude sex-dream sequence where you emerge from the sea.
Yes, exactly. I’m introduced just as an image and then you find out who I am, which is quite nice. I think everyone knows who Guinevere is and everybody’s waiting to see who she is and who’s going to play her or what the character’s going to be like. It’s quite nice to be introduced in a dream at first, so people can be guessing for at least the first hour and a half. That was quite cool. I admit, I was quite chuffed.

That’s a heck of a scene to be introduced to American cable audiences, too.
Yeah. [Laughs] That was my first day filming as well. It was quite hardcore. I was very embarrassed and obviously meeting a crew and the director and all the producers for the first time and then suddenly having to do those kinds of scenes, it was a bit nerve-wracking.

The second episode has a similar kind of scene, but you’re clothed for that one. Did you shoot both these scenes at the same time?
We shot a lot of beach stuff in the same day actually for episodes 1 and 2. We have the introduction with Arthur, the dream sequences, and the coming out of the water. Most of the day I was soaking wet, with wet hair, wet clothes and everything. And pretty cold. Ireland in the June/July time sounds really warm, because you’re from America! In Ireland, it’s really cold still. [Laughs] Unfortunately, you haven’t had the summer to warm up the sea either. It’s freezing cold. I did some more scenes in the sea later on in September, and it’s so much warmer because the temperatures had risen and warmed up the sea gradually over the months. The difference was insane.

How does one prepare for being naked on a beach?
I don’t think anyone’s really comfortable being naked on a beach in front of lots of people when it’s freezing cold. [Laughs] A lot of girls would probably have gone to the gym and not eaten or whatever, but I actually knew I was going to be cold, so I had two pints of Guinness and some pasta the night before with the guys. Purely because I just thought, “I’m gonna eat these calories. I need this because I’m going to be freezing!” I’m not gonna lie, I really suffered during that day. I had to take half an hour out and paramedics had to come and see if I was all right. But then afterwards, one of the producers was very sweet and made sure I had a massage at a sauna and was like, “There you go!” I went straight from the set after my ordeal and had a nice pampering session, so that was lovely. Being naked comes with the territory. A lot of people are so quick to judge and I’m not a prude, but the character calls for it. This is a saucy piece, and I feel very privileged to be playing Guinevere. To a certain extent, if it’s written, I’m happy to do it. She’s coming out of the sea, and it’s a great image. I’m not going to show everything, I always say I wouldn’t, and what we’re showing is lovemaking. It’s not just any old gratuitous sex. That’s my point of view. I’m personally in a very loving relationship, and I’m not doing that in real life. I mean, I’m an actor! [Laughs] I think people get confused sometimes.

Like the other historical Starz series Spartacus, there’s both sex and violence. Do you have action sequences later in the season?
I do. Camelot’s a little bit more character-driven than Spartacus — there’s a lot of violence in that and a lot of fight sequences. I learned to ride horses for this program. In the beginning, I was quite scared of horses, and by the end, I’m doing my own galloping stunts. And I wield a dagger and I learned how to use an arrow during filming. Yeah, I do a little bit of fighting. The good thing about Guinevere is she’s quite feisty, so there’s more of her arguing and saying, “Why can’t I fight? You warriors are out there fighting, why can’t I? I don’t want to sit here and get raped by whoever comes along. I’m not going to be a sitting duck.” She’s growing into that as well. She’s going to be quite the feisty one in the future.

Is it exciting to potentially break out on a show like this in a whole new country?
Well, I hope a whole country full of people will watch this. [Laughs] In England, I’ve got a certain niche at the moment — I do a lot of comedy, which has been fantastic. The last few years, I’ve mostly done very independent, young-schoolgirl comedy roles. To come and do Camelot where I’m playing, first of all, a part I’ve wanted to play since I was a kid, but also it’s serious and it’s a lot more emotional wallowing and playing action and there’s love and turmoil and grief and betrayal — all these things you don’t get in comedies. It’s been fantastic to explore that territory. And it’s an American job and I’m so thrilled to be from this side of the pond. I wanted this part so badly when I was auditioning for it and I worked so hard to get it and I’m thrilled to be a part of it.

The Arthurian stuff plays well over here. A lot of people watch Merlin on Syfy, and there’s a lot of interest in Spartacus and other Starz series.
With Merlin, it’s so funny because over here, it’s more for children. Camelot’s not really for young kids. [Laughs] This is more for the adults.

Television Series: Camelot (S01E03)
Release Date: April 2011
Actress: Tamsin Egerton
Video Clips Credit: Zither
XviD | 1280 x 720 (16/9) at 23,976fps










http://www.megaupload.com/?d=Y66RWV5W

or

http://www.mediafire.com/?9uzp0v2imna3c5h

or

http://www.filesonic.com/file/562403964 ... hd720p.mp4



Read more on this article...

Friday 8 April 2011

Room At The Top Postponed

The BBC has postponed airing Room At The Top at the last minute due to a "contractual issue". Maxine Peake and Matthew McNulty star in the latest two-part adaptation of the 1950s novel about the rise of amorous Joe Lampton, who is willing to do anything to get to the top.

According to the Daily Mail, the last-minute withdrawal of the show was down to a legal challenge. The John Braine-penned story was previously turned into a film in 1957, while Thames produced spinoff comedy series Man At The Top in the 1970s.


Braine's family and widow approved the BBC adaptation, but a rival producer has claimed ownership of the screen rights.

A BBC rep said: "Transmission of Room At The Top has been postponed while we address a potential contractual issue which has emerged in the last few days." A repeat of Fanny Hill aired instead last night.

The author's son Tony said: "My mother has the rights to the book and she was looking forward to watching the drama on Thursday night. We just heard that it won't be on and it's disappointing. The objection is nothing to do with the family members."
Read more on this article...

Thursday 7 April 2011

The Crimson Petal and the White S01E01

The Crimson Petal and the White began as a bad laudanum dream: "This city is vast and intricate and you do not know your way around," whispered expressionless strumpet Sugar (Romola Garai), hunched, naked and blotchy, over a rickety writing desk as her quill spidered across yellowed paper. "You are an alien from another time and place altogether. You've allowed yourself to be led astray, and there's no hope of finding your way back." She wasn't wrong.

The London she moved through was – it was suggested – both a physical and a moral maze, a warren of squalid streets marked by odd visions: a grubby angel with swan's wings on his back, a crow-headed figure, a dying horse down on the cobbles. Things were just as feverish inside too, as the whore hero of this Victorian pastiche threaded her way past piglets and obese slatterns and pissing doxies to discover a friend dying, savagely beaten by her latest clients.

And yes, it looked fabulous. This is London, 1874, as if Vogue had decided that Victorian underbelly was going to be this season's big thing. Marc "The Devil's Whore/The Mark of Cain" Munden's extraordinary direction ensured we were discombobulated from the get-go. Everything looked as if it had been smeared with goose fat, then dunked in soot, and had then half-fallen over, like a drunk in a telephone booth. There were odd angles and seasick cellos. They'd even got a madly cackling old man to decorate one of the street scenes – a popular gothic accessory that you can normally take as evidence of failure of imagination but somehow seemed to fit here. Abandon hope all ye who entered in search of a simple, sugar-dusted treat to tide ye over until the next series of Downton Abbey. Here, it seemed to say, is a costume drama as snug as a steel corset.


Yet all of 19th-century literary trope-life is present. As well as the fascinating lady of the night, we have a disappointing son disinherited by his father, a wife slipping slowly into insanity (though she has not yet been banished to the attic, her inability to survive supper without falling into a frothing fit on the carpet surely bodes ill), a predatory doctor, a pious Gladstonian brother with a growing interest in London's underworld and a ministering angel in black bombazine – but stirred with a dirty great postmodern stick so we get to see all the sex too.

Adapted by writer Lucinda Coxon from Michel Faber's 2002 novel, episode one lifted its nightie to reveal a world in which life is cheap, sanity is tenuous, sexual skullduggery is rife, and one's position in society is as unsteady as the pustular dandies who wobble boozily through the honking corridors of Mrs Castaway (Gillian Anderson)- the sub-Dickensian grotesque who runs the brothel at which Sugar works.

Amid the woozy, widdly squalor, the plot staggered in and out of focus. Semolina-faced autodidact Sugar channelled her vast intelligence and broiling hatred of men into her novel-in-progress, whiling away the hours between clients by penning murderous fantasies about them. "It's a book of HATE," she snapped at a friend, as they ate cream buns in the park. "To wreak revenge on every pompous, trembling worm who taps at Mrs Castaway's door."

Across town, and several miles up the social ladder, potato-bonced William Rackham (Chris O'Dowd) is heir to a perfume business but distracted by writerly aspirations, and desperately seeking to placate his furious father. Upstairs his tremulous, housebound wife Agnes spends her time whacking at in-laws' fascinators with a poker and being felt up by Richard E Grant's repellent physician. Dowd nicely caught the absurdity of a man trapped between affectations of bohemianism and feeble attempts at Victorian mastery. William fancies himself as a man and an intellectual, but he's not really either. He is, instead, just the right mixture of haplessness, selfishness and vulnerability to make him perfect prey for a bright prostitute with an eye on the main chance.

Seeking relief from his debts and his neurasthenic wife he finds Sugar, who's received a glowing write-up ("They say she never disappoints …") in a gentlemen's guide to London's sexual underworld. And when he discovers that Sugar can talk arty with the best of them – she scornfully dismisses Ruskin as a "major minor" in verse – he's lost. In a pub, they discussed Tennyson and Arnold. Then, stifling sniggers, she gave him a blow job. "Ho! Hah! HAAAHRRNNNNG!" he roared, enormous legs pedalling the air as if it was an upside-down sex tricycle. Reinvigorated, Rackham scampered home to sort out his wonga. "I am ushering in a new regime!" he boomed, hurtling through his accounts in the manner of a tumescent bowling ball as his terrified maids cowered behind the nearest antimacassar.

Later, while William is going at her from behind, yodelling with sexual release, Sugar is busy rifling through his coat pockets for useful intelligence. A few hurried searches through his briefcase later and Sugar is soon advising him about business plans, amending advertising copy and generally making herself indispensable in ways outside the traditional remit. Soon Daddy has restored his allowance, William is paying for "exclusive patronage" to Sugar and she is on the verge of being installed in some pseudo-official capacity in his house.

As Sugar parlays sex into success, William's poor wife (another great performance, this time from Amanda Hale) is sliding deeper into madness, thanks to her sexually abusive doctor. She writes too, though rarely more than a few words. She wrote "Help" in her own breath on the window and "Must get out" in her diary, as the sinister Dr Curlew turns up now and then to terrify her by doing something unspeakably clinical under her petticoats.

The episode ended on a particularly bleak note. Sugar made a clandestine reconnaissance mission to the Rackhams' enormous house, culminating with her admiring discovery of just how far beyond his means he's been living. "You'll keep me better than you do now," she breathed. Meanwhile, watching from the bedroom was a pallid, nightie-bound Agnes. "My angel!" she gasped, peering at the gawping Sugar below while clawing at the windowpane: an image so tragic, so heavy with impending awfulness, you could probably hear the resulting outbreak of facepalms from Neptune. There is a kind of nightmarish glamour to the whole thing, a weird, off-kilterish feeling against which refreshing scenes of prostitutes remaining preoccupied with their own survival and nursing diaries full of vengeance sit well, and suggest a story and an execution that will yet come to bite complacent viewers firmly on the ass. More laudanum, please.

Television Series: The Crimson Petal and the White (S01E01)
Release Date: April 2011
Actress: Romola Garai
Video Clips Credit: Zorg











Filesonic

or

Filesonic

or

Megaupload

or

Mediafire
Read more on this article...

Wednesday 6 April 2011

Candy Cabs S01E01

EastEnders star Jo Joyner stripped off for her new BBC comedy show Candy Cabs, reports today's Mail. We're not sure that it's something that Tanya Branning would approve of, writes Georgina Littlejohn, so it's just as well that the soap star was hundreds of miles away from Albert Square when she decided to get her kit off. The actress, who plays the long-suffering beautician in EastEnders, is starring in the new three-part comedy that started last night.

Of course, this being a Daily Mail story about a tame and sentimental primetime BBC One comedy-drama, things aren't quite as sensational as it sounds. Joyner, 33, stars as Jackie O'Sullivan, the boss of an all-female mini taxi company. The first episode began at a funeral – Shazza's funeral, according to the pink floral display spelling out her name in the hearse's window – creating a dark and engaging atmosphere that immediately dissipates, not long after they play Tom Jones's Sex Bomb at the cremation.


Shazza, we learn, was the would-be proprietor of Candy Cabs, until she died in the reduced bread section at Asda, expiring even before the bread did. Her two partners, Jackie and Elaine, decide to go on without her, taking delivery of the new fleet of pink cabs and hiring a load of women drivers. From then on the whole thing becomes terribly insubstantial. Candy Cabs has a company slimming club, which obliges the employees to spend rather more time in their underwear than you find in most cab offices.

In these scenes, Stella, played by former Bread star Melanie Hill, lines up the female employees - Amanda, played by Claire Sweeney, Sally-Anne, played by Danielle Henry, Big Pam, played by Lu Corfield and Diane, played by Jodie Prenger - for their weekly Fat Club weigh-in. Joyner, herself, contributes an unintentional boob flash courtesy of a reflection in a window and presumedly missed by the programme's production staff.

A lot of the humour, such as it is, comes from the use of northern turns of phrase that are either meant to strike you as quirkily novel or pleasingly familiar, depending on where you live. Saying: "Look what t'cat's peeled up" when someone walks into a room is not itself a joke, but you might still find it funny if you'd never heard it before.

Joyner filmed the series while on maternity leave from EastEnders last year and said that although she loves playing Tanya Branning, filming Candy Cabs was a breath of fresh air. Speaking to the Radio Times, she said: "It was lovely playing someone who wasn't constantly crying or doing 'the Walford sigh'. Going up north with a wonderful group of women was so much fun - as was working on something that is easy to watch for a change."

Television Series: Candy Cabs(S01E01)
Release Date: April 2011
Actress: Jo Joyner
Video Clips Credit: Lip










Rapidshare

or

Hotfile

or

Embedupload




Read more on this article...

Tuesday 5 April 2011

Mildred Pierce S01E03

I'm having great difficulty restraining myself from biting it... now get it off!

Kate Winslet doesn't mind that she looks older these days, writes Melissa Maerz. "Look here," says the 35-year-old actress, pointing high up on her forehead. Her still slightly damp hair is slicked back into a ponytail, and when she moves her eyebrows upward, her skin crinkles up. "Hello!" she says, laughing. "I have a few more wrinkles than I used to."

Sitting in a French cafe in Manhattan, smartly attired in a camel-colored blazer, a black scarf and makeup that's designed to look like she's not wearing any, Winslet says she was proud to see new creases on her face during a recent screening of Mildred Pierce, a five-part miniseries that finds the actress in the title role as an upwardly mobile housewife during the 1930s. "I watched myself on-screen, and you could really see my crow's-feet," she admits, a bit gleefully. "I was like, 'My forehead moves! Good girl!'"

Being a normal thirtysomething actress with fully functioning human parts is a big part of Winslet's appeal and a major reason why so many women feel they can relate to her. She's long dismissed Botox. Her nude scenes once made Oprah Winfrey gush, "God bless your natural breasts!" And even before Mildred Pierce, she'd brought an inner fire to supposedly ordinary housewives, such as the ones in 2006's "Little Children" and 2008's "Revolutionary Road."


Winslet may love the lines on her forehead, but she's earned them over a rough couple of years. Mildred Pierce is her first project since the breakup with Revolutionary Road director Sam Mendes— and certain scenes eerily mirror their split. Based on James M. Cain's 1941 novel of the same name, the miniseries follows a Glendale matriarch who's struggling to maintain her family's social class during the Depression, working to create a better life for her self-absorbed daughter Veda (Evan Rachel Wood). The story begins when Mildred decides to leave her husband, Bert, and care for their two daughters by herself at a time when women didn't get divorces, much less jobs.

Winslet, who has two children of her own, grew to dread the scenes where Bert and Mildred fought about their separation. The subject still felt too raw, and the ambitious 17-week shoot in New York, which required her to appear in every scene, was grueling. "It was tough," she says, modifying the word "tough" with a more emphatic term that cannot be used here. "There were days when I'd be in the car on the way to work, and I'd almost feel comatose. I'd actually say out loud, 'I can't. I can't. I can't.'"

Winslet found herself leaning on director Todd Haynes, who she says was a source of strength. "He's interested in these emotional female powerhouses who have a rich story to tell," she says. "Thank God that us girls have Todd." Like Winslet's films, Haynes' projects tend to focus on women who are trapped in suffocating domestic situations, whether in self-help-obsessed Southern California ("Safe") or the 1950s suburbs ("Far From Heaven"). In "Mildred Pierce," he often makes those trappings literal by framing Winslet through a kitchen window or a half-closed door, as if challenging her to break out of her house.

Though the Berkshire, England-born Winslet might not seem the ideal choice for such an American role, Haynes saw parallels between the actress and Mildred early on. He'd seen Joan Crawford in the original 1945 version in the 1980s, when he was studying art and semiotics at Brown University, where the melodrama was often viewed in feminist film theory classes as a radical attempt to blend the conventions of so-called women's pictures with the more masculine escapism of film noir. (With Crawford's oversized shoulder pads and affinity for handguns, Mildred's more of a man then most of the men in her life.) But it wasn't until Jon Raymond, Haynes' cowriter on the project, gave him a copy of the book in 2008 that he began to picture Winslet in the role.

"Mildred was an attractive dirty blond-haired young mother of two girls, and they made a real point of the fact that she was 17 when she had Veda," says Haynes. (Winslet married young and had her daughter, Mia, with first husband Jim Threapleton at age 25.) "I couldn't shake Kate from my mind."

But it was Winslet's naturalistic acting style that cemented her as Mildred. Aiming to distinguish the miniseries from the highly stylized classic, Haynes wanted to blend the language and storytelling of melodrama with what he calls the "dressed-down" style of American filmmaking during the 1970s. "Those films like 'Chinatown' or 'The Godfather,' the actors that didn't look like perfect movie stars, and they weren't tailored that way. I wanted to bring that to Mildred, and it all started with Kate."

One of the miniseries' major themes is a classic one for melodrama: Happy endings are not always happy, and no one can ever really have it all. For Haynes, the 1930s was defined by the middle-class aspirations set into motion after that decade of great American prosperity, the 1920s. Maternal desire started to get tangled up in dreams of moving up the ladder. "Having your child have access to things you didn't, that's the American dream," he says. "But in excess, it becomes dangerous."

In the miniseries, Mildred starts her own restaurant in the hopes of helping her daughter live a more upscale life, but watching Veda buy fur coats and whiz around in society boys' Cadillacs just creates a vicious rivalry between them. "Mildred began living out her dreams through her kid, and she made the grave mistake of thinking that they were happening to her as well," Winslet says. "She just got to the point where she just couldn't exist without [that fantasy]."

Winslet points to a scene where Mildred throws Veda out of the house. "It's devastating," she says. "Mildred's not just saying goodbye to that kid, she's saying goodbye to every version of herself that she ever tried to be. She's crumbled and broken, and she has to go back and start over. And to do that, for a woman in her 30s, after everything she's gone through, is the most unbelievable act of courage I've come across in any character I've played."

Looking back at "Mildred Pierce" now, she sees the experience as somewhat therapeutic. "You end up revealing things in your acting that you might not choose to reveal to anybody at all off-screen," she says. "I remember thinking, 'This could not be worse timing.' But then, maybe it was actually the best possible timing. If something hurts, it [really] hurts. You can't pretend that you're acting."

Television Series: Mildred Pierce (S01E03)
Release Date: April 2011
Actress: Kate Winslet
Video Clips Credit: Zither
XviD | 9Mio for 20s | 1280 x 720 (16/9) at 23,976fps


http://www.megaupload.com/?d=B5J61CG2
or
http://www.mediafire.com/?rg7z2haqz237jud


Read more on this article...

Sunday 3 April 2011

Camelot S01E02

I need more... tell me what I have to do

French actress Eva Green, 30, all angular features and piercing blue eyes, got her start playing a clothing-averse hedonist in Bernardo Bertolucci’s erotic political drama The Dreamers. Since then she's worked hard to challenge the assumption that she is some latter-day Maria Schneider, writes Nisha Gopalan, yet has sorta stoked it, too, by starring as a hottie princess in Ridley Scott’s Crusades drama Kingdom of Heaven and a smarter-than-average Bond girl in Casino Royale.

Now she can be seen in the new series Camelot, playing her ugliest role yet: sneering sorceress Morgan Le Fay, who's out to destroy her sun-kissed half-brother King Arthur (Jamie Campbell Bower) and his bestie, Merlin (Joseph Fiennes), in a bid for the throne. This being a Starz series, there is a heap of sex and violence. But as Green explains to Vulture, Camelot may finally be her ticket to another specialty: weirdness.


You've said that when you do a nude scene, you have to think twice. Why is that?
The Dreamers was the first movie I ever made, and people made such a fuss when it came out. Sex was a theme, but there was more to it. And then I saw a lot of pictures of me naked [on the Internet] — oh my God. This was terrible. I love the movie, but now I know that if I do a nude scene that people will talk about it. I always feel like I have to prove myself. I want to be taken seriously.

Knowing Starz has earned a reputation for pushing boundaries, why would you take this role?
This is not Spartacus at all. I have one sex scene. I don’t want to disappoint people [laughs]. That is it. Then Morgan's a nun. She’s disappointed by men. She’s not a lesbian, either, but she surrounds herself with strong women. This is not, like, a show about sex and violence.

Have you seen Spartacus?
I don’t know if I can talk about that. I’ve seen bits and pieces. It’s … interesting. But this is not Spartacus.

Camelot certainly has violence, though.
Yeah. You’ll see it evolve. I mean, for my character.

Are you a fan of the fantasy genre?
I loved Willow as a child. But you don’t have a lot of magic here. It's more earthly magic. It's not fantasy fantasy.

Describe yourself.
I’m very kind of shy and very clear. People put me in a box: They think I’m a dark, sexy, French whatever. But in drama school, I loved playing Lady Macbeth. There’s something electric about those types of characters. They’re powerful. They’re strong. Because in real life, I’m like this [gestures to her small frame].

And Morgan fits into that?
She's … complex. It's like digging into somebody’s mind. There’s a movie I just did called Cracks. You had to read the script again and again to understand why my character would behave a certain way. Bad people are baddies for a reason. Damaged people are fun to play. Because in real life, I'm not a baddie. But that’s the great thing about Morgan: She has this vulnerable side which you will discover little by little. You don’t see it straight away, because she can be ruthless in the beginning.

You also do a pretty good English accent.
The French is … gone. I have a good dialect coach. It took me a while. When you look at The Dreamers, that was my real accent. During Casino Royale, the studio put the pressure on me to, like [says in a nasally American accent], "have a British accent." Oh my God! I worked like hell. Like hell. Now I have to do an American accent for Dark Shadows [an upcoming Tim Burton film].

There have been so many adaptations of Camelot. Did you base your Morgan on any previous one?
I read a lot of books on Morgan. There’s this amazing French book; she’s described as a saint, a Joan of Arc character. She’s not the image that we first have in mind: a sorceress. She wants to restore pagan ways — celebrate sexuality, love.

Did you explore any modern-day paganism?
I met a shaman. She was the mother of a makeup artist who was on set! She was an amazing person — not, like, a weirdo. She’s not creepy, but the way that she looks at you, there's something there. Her pupils are, like, [intense stare] moving or something weird. It's as if she’s seeing your aura or something. She was talking about shape-shifting, because my character shape-shifts into animals sometimes.

Did she claim she could shape-shift?
Yes, it's fascinating! She said my animal was a crane bird. But Morgan is a tiger [in Camelot]. There was like an energy about her. She kind of baptized me. She gave me a stone and said, "You will do, and it will be good." She told me it’ll be all right.

Television Series: Camelot (S01E02)
Release Date: April 2011
Actress: Eva Green & Tamsin Egerton
Video Clips Credit: Zither
XviD | 39Mio for 1mn13s | 1280 x 400 (16/9) at 23,976fps | 2 vids




















http://www.megaupload.com/?d=2Z008OHX

or

http://www.mediafire.com/?bwplvooxxwo51po

or

http://www.filesonic.com/file/460636074 ... hd720p.mp4
Read more on this article...

Saturday 2 April 2011

Our Fiend In The North

An amoral scoundrel, scheming his way to the top and grabbing sex and money as he climbs; it sounds like a story from our own age, but Joe Lampton, antihero of new series Room At The Top, was originally embodied back in the cosy 1950s by Laurence Harvey, an actor whose sleazy lifestyle mirrored the character he played.

Writing in the Mail, Maureen Paton states Harvey’s stellar performance catapulted him to fame, but was so powerful it has inhibited anyone else from attempting the part – until now. In the two-part BBC4 drama charting Joe Lampton’s ruthless drive to sexual and business success, rising Mancunian actor Matthew McNulty, 28, challenges Harvey’s definitive interpretation. The love scenes are as daring and revealing as those in the original X-rated 1959 movie – but the story has a much more modern feel. ‘Our version is more realistic and goes deeper into the story’s time and place – the industrial North in the gritty, class-bound 1950s,’ says Mcnulty.


His character Joe gets on by ruthlessly exploiting his charms both to further his business career and keep two women simultaneously – his married mistress Alice, played by Red Riding star Maxine Peake, and Susan, played by Jenna-Louise Coleman of Waterloo Road and Emmerdale – the rich girl he dumps Alice to marry.

So does Matthew have anything in common with Joe?

‘Absolutely not,’ he insists. ‘Family life is my anchor. I’m actually shy and lacking in confidence’.

After losing his mother at 18, Matthew dropped out of his film studies degree course because the acting offers were flooding in, and he hasn’t stopped working since.

Constantly on the road as an actor, he is sustained by his schoolgirl sweetheart Katie, now his wife, and their two young sons. For a happily married man, how did filming the production’s sex scenes feel?

‘It’s always awkward doing love scenes. But I was lucky, as I knew Maxine well.’ (The two worked together on Channel 4’s Shameless and ITV1’s Moors Murderers drama See No Evil). ‘Also she’s a Northerner like me. We’re good friends’.

McNulty’s steady lifestyle is a million miles away from Laurence Harvey’s, too.

Harvey, actually a Lithuanian-born Jewish immigrant, adopted his screen name and the drawl and manners of an uppercrust Englishman. His good looks carried him to Hollywood superstardom.

Like Lampton, he slept his way to the top, marrying actress Margaret Leighton and Joan, widow of Hollywood producer Harry Cohn, before making Sixties model Paulene Stone his third wife, and mother of his only child, daughter Domino (who died of an overdose in 2005).

But Harvey’s womanising hid a very different persona. At a time when homosexual acts were still outlawed in Britain, bisexual Harvey had a secret string of male lovers.

After the death of one of the more durable of them, film producer James Woolf, in 1966, Harvey told Paulene, ‘No woman will ever be able to give me the love Jimmy gave me’. Harvey himself, a heavy smoker and drinker, died of stomach cancer in 1973 aged just 45.

Matthew McNulty feels that even today, coming out of the closet is still a problem for many gay actors.

‘There’s always the risk the work will dry up.’ For Laurence Harvey, the burden of hiding a secret that would have horrified his female fans may have proved too much to bear.
Read more on this article...

The Borgias S01E01

You may never go to church again.

As the Vatican fends off one sex scandal after another, along comes The Borgias to show that priests have historically been corrupt. In other words: don’t drink the holy water.

In Neil Jordan’s terrifyingly opulent saga, the commission of mortal sins begins at the very top: when the cardinals gather at the deathbed of Pope Innocent VIII. It’s 1492.

While the old man breathes his last, he says, rather rhetorically, “The throne of St. Peter’s was pure once. We have sullied it with our greed and lechery. Who will wash it clean?” Certainly none of the devious, power-mad, red-clad cardinals who are conniving for a way to leapfrog over each other to the throne, writes Robert Rorke


None is more devious that Rodrigo Borgia (Jeremy Irons), a Spaniard from Valencia who has sired four children with a married local courtesan. As an outsider, Borgia must outwit the elite Italian families who think they will become Pope automatically so he buys the largest of number of votes to ensure his election.

Once ensconced on the throne, Rodrigo wastes no time turning the papacy into a dynastic possession for his children, while his rivals, among them Cardinal Delle Rovere (Colm Feore) and Cardinal Orsini (Derek Jacobi). Borgia finishes Orsini off with vial of poison. Della Rovere fares better, but even he must flee Rome to escape a murder rap when a murdered informant is found in his bed.

In reality, Rodrigo was a burly, bulbous-nosed man; for TV’s sake, he’s played by elegant Englishman Jeremy Irons who knows a thing or two about playing devious while sounding terribly, terribly civilized. In his most famous role, as Claus von Bulow in “Reversal of Fortune,” Irons, 62, exuded a certain kinky, well-heeled menace; when his lawyer Alan Dershowitz says to him at the end of the movie, “You are a very strange man,” von Bulow simply replies, “You have no idea.”

Rodrigo Borgia makes Claus von Bulow look like Ryan Seacrest. Since the Pope then had military as well spiritual authority, his power was never questioned and enforced at great cost. Bribery, treachery, torture, murder — he did whatever he had to maintain his power.

Admitting his affinity for playing well-spoken degenerates, Irons lights up a cigarette (“Don’t tell Bloomberg,” he begs) in Manhattan’s posh Hotel Lowell and says, blithely, “I’m interested in people who live beyond the pale. It allows me to live a very circumscribed and normal life because I can live all my fantasies through my characters.”

To prepare, Irons read up on history and church history, which gave him many insights into the period: “The Borgias didn’t have the problem we have today of believing that if you were a leader you had to be snowy white,” he says. “You were what you were. They were quite pragmatic. I think the medievalists would look at the public’s behavior towards Bill Clinton and think that was so hypocritical if you’re a good leader. That’s the important thing.”

The Borgias will have nine episodes for its first season and, unlike Henry VIII in “The Tudors,” Pope Alexander VI will not be the focus of all of them. His children, most notably Cesare (Francois Arnaud) and Lucrezia (Holliday Grainger), figure in the plot as The Borgias, which was filmed at the Korda Studios in Budapest, explores the family dynamics as Cardinal Della Rovere gathers allies in northern Italy and France to defeat the Vatican.

The series is Irons’ first, but he is no stranger to television, having already won an Emmy for his co-starring role opposite Helen Mirren in “Elizabeth 1” and playing a recurring role on “Law & Order: SVU.” When told that people who only know him from the movies were shocked to see him on crime procedural, he shrugs. “They pay very nicely,” he says, “and I thought, ‘Why not?’”


Television Series: The Borgias (S01E01)
Release Date: April 2011
Actress: Lotte Verbeek, Montserrat Lombard & Elena Argiros
Video Clips Credit: Zorg
XviD | 9Mio for 20s | 1280 x 720 (16/9) at 23,976fps

Lotte Verbeek











MPEG-4 | 54.1 MiB for 2mn 19s

http://www.filesonic.com/file/455042904/zorg-12473-Lotte_Verbeek@The_Borgias_s01e01_hd720p_(2011)_02.mp4

Montserrat Lombard











MPEG-4 | 10.8 MiB for 23s

http://www.filesonic.com/file/455042914/zorg-12474-Montserrat_Lombard@The_Borgias_s01e01_hd720p_(2011)_03.mp4

Elena Argiros











MPEG-4 | 27.8 MiB for 1mn 3s

http://www.filesonic.com/file/455042884/zorg-12472-Elena_Argiros@The_Borgias_s01e01_hd720p_(2011)_01.mp4

or

Xvid | 33Mio for 1mn25s (x3 videos) | 1280 x 720 (16/9)

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=KQH6M6KN
or
http://www.mediafire.com/?rxj3ha8ncgnfs1x



Read more on this article...

Friday 1 April 2011

Bare Bunnies

These Playboy Bunnies could be showing off more than their cottontails. The stars of NBC's upcoming series, The Playboy Club, have contractually committed to baring all -- if necessary.

This stipulation is unheard-of for a network show -- where nudity is verboten -- but it's believed that the clause, reported by Variety, is intended for the show's release on DVD and in domestic and foreign cable syndication.

"Nudity as defined above and/or simulated sex acts may be required in connection with player's services in the pilot and/or series," reads the clause signed by stars Amber Heard, Eddie Cibrian, Jenna Dewan-Tatum and Leah Renee.

The actors, however, can't be forced to shoot nude scenes. If it came to pass that nudity was included, the particular scene in the script must be given to the actor(s), allowing them the opportunity to consent or decline, according to the report.


Insiders tell Variety that no nudity was included in the pilot episode, and that there are no plans to include nudity if the pilot is picked up for a (likely) series run by NBC.

There are also no plans to shoot two different versions of the show a la HBO's "The Sopranos" -- which scrubbed the nudity and profanity -- with an eye toward the show's syndicated run.

The Playboy Club is based on the "Swinging '60s"-era nightclubs spun off from Hugh Hefner's Chicago-based Playboy magazine.

(The pilot is set in 1963 at the original Playboy Club in Chicago.)

The clubs featured scantily clad waitresses in bunny outfits (complete with cottontail).

Heard is headlining the series as Maureen, a new Playboy Club hire with "an untethered, unconscious sexuality," according to Variety.

She recently posted a photo of herself, in her Playboy Bunny outfit, on her Facebook page.

Heard is best-known for her role in the short-lived CW series "Hidden Palms" and has also co-starred on the big screen in "Pineapple Express," "Never Back Down" and "Zombieland" -- opposite "The Social Network" star Jesse Eisenberg.
Read more on this article...
 

Copyright 2007 ID Media Inc, All Right Reserved. Crafted by Nurudin Jauhari