Daniel Day-Lewis may specialize in weighty roles, but that doesn’t mean he’s without a sense of humor. The star of Lincoln cracked up the crowd at the BAFTA Los Angeles Britannia awards on Wednesday when he referenced Clint Eastwood’s now-famous empty chair speech at the Republican National Convention this past summer.
After Steven Spielberg presented Day-Lewis with the Stanley Kubrick Britannia Award for Excellence in Film, Day-Lewis motioned to an empty chair sitting next to the podium, as if he were urging someone sitting in it to stay seated. The crowd seemed to immediately get the joke.
Day-Lewis explained that he’d been up since 2 a.m. watching CNN, and turning once again to the chair, said he was “extremely glad and grateful” that the “recently reelected president of this country was able to make it here tonight.”
He then told the audience, “I love Clint Eastwood. This is no satirical comment on him or his politics or anything else, but I have to say that when I saw him talking to a chair in front of a room full of strangers, I thought: I’ve got to try that!”
Check out the video of Daniel Day-Lewis’ chair speech below:
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The New York Times reported Friday morning that Google had made the controversial decision to block access to the inflammatory anti-Islam video, Innocence of Muslims, in Egypt and Libya, where the crude production had sparked anti-U.S. riots and violence that resulted in the deaths of four American diplomats, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stephens.
According to the Times, Google, which owns YouTube where the clip is posted, did not remove the video from its site because its policy is to remove content only if it is deemed “hate speech,” or “if it is responding to valid court orders or government requests.” Based on company guidelines, the Internet behemoth determined that Innocence of Muslims “was not hate speech,” the paper reported, but Google still made the exceptional decision to block access to the video in Egypt and Libya in response to the violence and killings.
In the wake of this extraordinary decision by an American company to censor content, Movieline wants to hear from you. Take the poll after the jump and tell us if Google’s actions were warranted, or if, in your opinion, even more decisive action is required.
Google’s immense power as one of the pillars of the Internet means that it can have huge influence over the boundaries of free speech on the web. As Peter Spiro, a constitutional and international law professor at Temple University, told the Times: “Google is the world’s gatekeeper for information so if Google wants to define the First Amendment to exclude this sort of material then there’s not a lot the rest of the world can do about it.” [New York Times]
You can make your opinion heard. If your point of view doesn’t fit neatly into one of the three choices below, please leave…
Full Story »Oscar-winner George Clooney lent his voice to President Obama’s campaign for a video introduction Thursday night to close out the Democratic National Convention, but it was a trio of leading ladies — Kerry Washington, Scarlett Johansson, and Eva Longoria — who gave the DNC a rousing jolt of star power in Charlotte, NC.
Washington, who manages political crises on ABC’s Scandal, introduced herself as “not just as an actress but as a woman, an African-American, a granddaughter of immigrants who came through Ellis Island, a person who could not have afforded college without the help of student loans and as one of millions of volunteers working to re-elect President Obama.”
Her rallying cry was an embracing of the Constitutional phrase “we the people,” delivered in a passionate three minute speech at the DNC podium. “I love that phrase so much,” she said, “because throughout our country’s history, we’ve expanded the meaning of that phrase to include more and more of us. And that’s what it means to move forward. And that is what this election is all about.”
(Funny enough, Washington has a movie out next year called We the Peeples. Coincidence?)
Taking a more personal approach, Johansson appealed to the emotionally-charged shared experiences of America’s middle class, citing her own family’s upbringing and dependency on public and nonprofit programs. “I grew up in New York City, I grew up with four siblings, my father barely made enough to get by. We moved every year and we finally settled in a housing development for lower middle income families.”
“My girlfriends from high school to this day still depend on Planned Parenthood and often Medicaid for important healthcare services,” she continued, urging young voters to register and commit…
Full Story »As they used to say in my hometown, Kal Penn knocked Clint Eastwood’s dick in the dirt Tuesday night with a smart — and subtly smart-alecky — celebrity turn at the podium on the first night of the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, NC.
In contrast to 82-year-old Eastwood’s aimless — and heartless — speech in support of Mitt Romney, Penn, 35, gave a focused, funny speech that, like the Harold & Kumar franchise, proved to be a lot smarter than it’s stoner-targeted marketing campaign advertised. (Actually, I think there’s an argument to be made that stoners are some of the sharpest cultural consumers on earth, but that’s an argument for another day.)
What I particularly appreciated about Penn’s speech was that it hit important DNC talking points without sounding like corny propaganda, and the actor struck an inclusive note that, I suspect, could sway some hawkish-yet-hip fringe voters to cast their ballot for President Obama.
And that was in a single sentence: “I’ve worked on a lot of fun movies but my favorite job was having a boss who gave the order to take out Bin Laden and is cool with all of us getting gay married,” Penn told DNC delegates. “So thank you invisible man in the chair for that.”
Duuuude! In a single soundbite, Penn, a former Associate Director for the White House’s Office of Public Engagement, accomplished a remarkable hat trick: He twitted Eastwood’s RNC performance; reiterated the administration’s support for gay marriage and reminded us that Osama Bin Laden was taken out under Obama’s leadership — a goal that, given America’s post-9/11 fury, should have been accomplished during the eight years of George W. Bush’s…
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Clint Eastwood made Twitter’s Day — or at least its night. The veteran actor and filmmaker’s bizarre, aimless speech at the Republican National Convention in Tampa on Thursday night — to a chair that purportedly contained an invisible President Obama — brought out plenty of celebrity tweeters on the social media site.
As of Friday morning “Eastwood” was still trending intermittently on the Twitter, and a number of actors and filmmakers’ comments were among the reactions to the Unforgiven actor’s speech.
Among them was Magic Mike actress Olivia Munn who tweeted: “Clint Eastwood was talking to an empty chair at the RNC…No, that’s not the set-up to a joke. Its not even a joke.”
This Is 40 filmmaker Judd Apatow had fun with the subject on a more oblique level. ”Clint used to be Every Which ‘But’Loose. Tonight he got loose,” Apatow tweeted. The truncated film title was a reference to Eastwood’s 1978 buddy picture with an orangutan, Every Which Way But Loose, which seemed to mystify Apatow: ”How does that title refer to a relationship with orangutans?” He wrote. “Really. How?”
Shaun of the Dead filmmaker Simon Pegg weighed in from the UK, tweeting: “Woken up to excited chatter in the US. Apparently Clint Eastwood had an argument with an empty chair regarding its political standpoint.”
Star Trek actor George Takei also weighed in tweeting: Clint Eastwood’s RNC speech was to imaginary Obama in an empty chair. I’m drafting a DNC speech to imaginary Romney in an empty factory.”
Nice.
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Clint Eastwood has starred in and/or directed some of the smartest, most thought-provoking movies I’ve seen in the last 10 years. And that’s making it very hard for me to get my head around his trite, addled performance at the Republican National Convention on Thursday night.
I’m not bitching about Eastwood’s politics. I’m pretty certain that I don’t share his ideology, but I can’t help but respect someone who’s not afraid to be politically unpopular in largely liberal Hollywood.
I only wish Eastwood’s courage and convictions translated to a more articulate speech and an appearance that didn’t make him look like a GOP pawn. For one thing, what possessed him to let the RNC appropriate the silhouette of his High Plains Drifter character for Mitt Romney’s coronation? The Stranger, as that character was billed in the movie’s credits, ran silent but deep — a far cry from Romney who runs silent and empty.
Then there was Eastwood’s assertion in his speech that there are “a lot of conservative people” and moderates in Hollywood, but that they play their cards “close to the vest.”
They must because the filmmaker could only name one famous fellow conservative: Jon Voight. That Eastwood followed Voight’s name with the statement: “These are all people that are like-minded,” made me wonder if he needed to up his Centrum Silver dosage.
Eastwood, 82, also shot himself in the foot (with a .44 Magnum) when he derisively told the Tampa convention crowd that he wept during Obama’s inauguration. “I haven’t cried that hard since I found out that there’s 23 million unemployed people in this country,” said Eastwood, ploughing past the faulty construction of that sentence and adding: “That is a disgrace, a national disgrace.”
Maybe he believes that, but, Eastwood, who made…
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The good gay news today is that soon gays and gayelles will be able to have the rained out, flying fish wedding of their dreams at the Seattle Fish Market, because Washington is inches away from legalizing gay marriage finally. The other gay news that I’m not sure how to wrap the lobes of my brain around is that Cynthia Nixon told The New York Times that she made the choice to slurp on lady clit and fall in love with a woman.
“I gave a speech recently, an empowerment speech to a gay audience, and it included the line ‘I’ve been straight and I’ve been gay, and gay is better.’ And they tried to get me to change it, because they said it implies that homosexuality can be a choice. And for me, it is a choice. I understand that for many people it’s not, but for me it’s a choice, and you don’t get to define my gayness for me. A certain section of our community is very concerned that it not be seen as a choice, because if it’s a choice, then we could opt out. I say it doesn’t matter if we flew here or we swam here, it matters that we are here and we are one group and let us stop trying to make a litmus test for who is considered gay
…
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When Kristen Stewart awkwardly praised Emma Watson during her acceptance speech for Best Female Performance during the MTV Movie Awards on Sunday night, the camera cut to the lovely Harry Potter star and caught her slightly shaking her head in seeming disapproval. And if that doesn’t permanently endear you to the charms of Emma Watson, perhaps this set of post-Movie Awards photos will.
Click here to launch the most charming slideshow you’ll see all day: Emma Watson meeting other celebrities.
[Photo: WireImage]
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