Mambo No. 5
With legalized same-sex unions already labeled passé, Hollywood discovered its newest cause designed specifically to piss off Arkansas: live, televised, boy-on-boy fox-trotting mayhem. This fall, Lance Bass is reportedly set to join the cast of Dancing With The Stars and partner with a male dancer and cha-cha his way into America's hearts. You know, because he's gay. And it's edgy.
Historically speaking, ballroom dancing is considered to be an incredibly hetero environment. There's nobody "light in the loafers" on that stage. The constant bedazzling of the purple, stretch satin leisure suits is not so much a fashion statement as it is a safety precaution: you need those sparkly guides to assist you during all that hetero twirling. So the announcement of male partners comes as shock to many, but as always, Hollywood is ready to plan massive events to support this radical cause.
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Defamer Funtime
Panic broke out at the OneXOne gala Saturday night in Calgary, when a group of African schoolchildren wearing traditional garb and posing sweetly for the cameras were sent fleeing for their lives as charity-spokesperson
Ben Affleck plunged his face—"Like nothing I have ever seen!" one was later quoted as saying, "It was the size of five regular-man's heads!"—into the shot. Once order had been restored, the frightened boys were reintroduced to the star, whose work they were unfamiliar with ("
Gone Baby Gone? National Board of Review winner for best director?
No? What about
Armageddon? They must have that one at Africa Blockbuster?").
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sportswear
There exists perhaps no more potent symbol of 1980s ratings powerhouse The Cosby Show than its star Bill Cosby's signature sweaters. Like the enchanted product of some magical mystery loom, no two inches of any garment was alike. If a plot involving Theo Huxtable's underachieving academics failed to capture your imagination, you could easily have gotten lost instead inside their woven psychedelia: One moment, you were picturing the vomited-up remains of an Uno deck; the next, you imagined an aerial tributary map as interpreted by a colorblind kindergartener. Now, thanks to a charitable eBay auction, some of these surrealist fashion masterworks are being made available for purchase. We guide you to the website now for a hypnotic slideshow of some of the greatest Cosby Sweater hits.
doing good
While having yet to really deliver on her post-incarceration pledge to feed the hungry Darfricans of Rwandonia, Paris Hilton did finally manage to make it to the African subcontinent yesterday, accompanying boyfriend Benji Madden to Johannesburg as he toured with his band Good Charlotte. Once there, she refused to step foot out of her Range Rover caravan until handlers agreed to "show me some African orphans like the one Madonna bought or whatever," at which point Hilton was whisked to the Jacaranda Children's Home, where she signed a stack of photographs featuring the humanitarian star of The Hottie or the Nottie striking a seductive pose in a white bikini. (A gesture which only confused some of the younger children, who proceeded to gnaw on the headshot, assuming it was was some kind of flatbread ration.)
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celeb causes
It's Oprah's Big Give fever! YOU get to give! And YOU get to give! EVeryBOdy GETS to GIVE! To start the ball rolling, we offer documented Mac-enthusiast Drew Barrymore, who made a donation of $1 million of her personal fortune to an organization that feeds Kenyan children, written out on a giant, Price Is Right-style check and presented on The Oprah Winfrey Show today. It was a gesture of such heartfelt magnanimity that none other than Drew's Charlie's Angels co-star and bestest friend Cameron Diaz (secret, mutual nickname: Poo) called in to congratulate her on the gesture. Lucy Liu, meanwhile, waited patiently on Line 2; unfortunately, time restraints never allowed her to publicly state that she too was all for Barrymore's decision to give $1 million to a very worthy cause.
Having just returned from a trip to Iraq,
Angelina Jolie has penned an opinion piece for
The Washington Post, in which she assessed her findings on how the war has devastated the people of that region: "More than 2 million people are refugees inside their own country — without homes, jobs and, to a terrible degree, without medicine, food or clean water. Ethnic cleansing and other acts of unspeakable violence have driven them into a vast and very dangerous no-man's land. Many of the survivors huddle in mosques, in abandoned buildings with no electricity, in tents or in one-room huts made of straw and mud." By way of fairness, the paper has opened up their op/ed section to Jennifer Aniston too, whose own column, "Whole Foods: Why Can't They Stay Open Until 11?" should appear early next week. [
WashPo]
While the Chinese government has been
admirably restrained in their criticism of
Steven Spielberg's decision to pull out of the Beijing Olympics, saying only that they "regret" his choice (while secretly making plans to colorize
Schindler's List and snip the first 25 minutes off of
Saving Private Ryan), the press and public have been less kind, with one editorial calling the director "famous for his science fiction. But now it seems he lives in a world of science fiction and he can't distinguish a dream from reality." [
AP]
boycotts
Yesterday's
surprise announcement that
Steven Spielberg would not, in fact, be contributing to the Beijing summer games—having enacted the
force genocide clause of his contract that allowed him to pull out if he found the host-country to be bankrolling a very unsportsmanlike systematic human slaughter—caused human rights groups the world over to sing the director's praises. (Amnesty International went so far as to issue a statement absolving the director "of all perceived misdeeds, including the last 7 minutes of
War of the Worlds.")
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creative differences
Steven Spielberg has long been attached to the 2008 summer games in Beijing, his wizardry over childlike wonder™ secured by organizers for their opening ceremonies. The decision greatly angered Mia Farrow, who blamed the Sudanese-backing Chinese government of helping to fund the Darfur genocide; in a now-famous WSJ op-ed from last March, she likened the Schindler's List director to Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl for agreeing to work with a regime with so much blood on its hands. Minutes ago, news broke that Spielberg would be pulling out of the Olympics, citing Darfur as the reason. His statement follows after the jump:
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Madonna and
Guy Ritchie popped up in quite the most unexpected of places today—touring the slums of Mumbai, where she was "showered with rose and marigold petals," and dangled bottles of antibiotics in front of the locals' faces which she happily turned over just as soon as they signed a document ostensibly converting them for the rest of eternity to Kaballah. [
AP]
more 2007 listmania
Angelina Jolie can add another superlative feather in her cap: she's a poll-topper in the all-important Best Celebrity Humanitarian of 2007 caucus. Voters chose the adoptive mother of several Third World tykes specifically because they believe her charitable efforts not to be a calculated effort to land atop the very Best Celebrity Humanitarian poll. From the Reuters report:
"People aren't stupid," said Peter Walker, director of the Feinstein International Famine Center at Tufts University.
"They can really sense when it's just an endorsement and when somebody really means it. Someone like Angelina Jolie comes across as having more integrity than some celebrities and a greater sense that she doesn't just do this for the publicity."
You know, like Madonna.
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Barron Hilton, Paris's grandfather, has announced today his plans to donate 97 percent of his $2.3 billion fortune to charity. While his similarly philanthropic granddaughter was unavailable for comment, we're certain she would wholeheartedly embrace the rechanneling of the family's vast fortunes to those less hot and/or fortunate, and match the act by pledging a penny from every sale of her mobile phone game sensation
Paris Hilton's Jewel Jam to feed the hungry Darfricans. [
Reuters]
celeb causes
As George and his A-list Clooneyites take a step back from electioneering, the resulting vacuum has found an unlikely demographic with which to fill the celebrity-grandstanding void: Hollywood's young starlets, whom, inspired by their patron saint Angelina Jolie's willingness to get her hands dirty with some face-to-face human suffering along her far-flung orphan-collecting travels, have now taken it upon themselves to do more for their own pet causes. The LAT reports:
Even tweens are hip to the importance of altruism. Last month, Variety launched a nonprofit initiative to highlight junior Hollywood's philanthropy and sponsored a Power of Youth event that drew [Dakota] Fanning, Miley Cyrus and Raven Symone.
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dear hillary
Alec Baldwin recently took the time to send a personal letter to
Hillary Clinton and her fellow senators, imploring them to vote no on a proposed $10 billion farm subsidies bill before that could potentially turn already overweight children into a generation of cream-cheese-and-donut gobbling gluttons with an upper-range life expectancy of 14. From the
NY Daily News:
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Like a fine, snout-sprayed cognac mist,
Paris Hilton's
plea on behalf of drunken elephants appears to have evaporated into thin air, as the AP has issued the following kill-order on the story: "AP-KILL ADVISORY Stations: The separate slugged Hilton-
Drunk Elephants sent as V3374 at 12:17 p.m. Eastern time has been KILLED. Lori Berk, a publicist for Hilton, says she never made any comments about helping drunken elephants in India. A kill is mandatory. Make certain the item is not aired. No sub will be filed. AP Broadcast News Center - Washington."
celeb causes
We're not entirely sure when the AP started running ridiculous-sounding quotes taken from Celebrity Hearsay Wire Service WENN, but we'll just have to assume all the fact-checking legwork has been done on this particular tale of celebutard altruism in the widely ignored realm of animal substance abuse. In Tokyo, where she was judging a local beauty pageant, Paris Hilton allegedly made the following statement in response to a story about wild Indian pachyderms having gone on a rice-beer-fueled rampage:
Update/story murder after the jump!
"The elephants get drunk all the time. It is becoming really dangerous. We need to stop making alcohol available to them."
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celeb causes
A generation of panty-eschewing shock-starlets owe a giant debt of gratitude to Basic Instinct star Sharon Stone, whose early advances in the vagina-flashing sciences are the stuff of legend. Still, someone who's been in the game as long as Stone has knows that as effective a statement can be made using nothing more than a little modesty and timeless elegance. Case in point: the actress's choice of ensemble for the 13th Annual Make-A-Wish Ball in Miami over the weekend, which kept her fabulous-at-50 body almost completely covered, save perhaps for an alluring glimpse of bare shoulder. And for at least one 13-year-old boy with leukemia who fantasized about experiencing "a faceful of Sharon Stone cameltoe just once," it was a night in which dreams really did come true.
[Photo: X17 Online]
Defamer
