Archive for August, 2012

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‘The Voice’ coaches excited for changes

 

(RollingStone.com) – Cee Lo Green, Blake Shelton, Adam Levine and Christina Aguilera — all four coaches of “The Voice” — joined producer Mark Burnett, host Carson Daly and the show’s social media maven Christina Milian for a press conference Sunday night at Burnett’s Malibu home. Looking out at the panoramic view of the Pacific Ocean, Levine quipped, “So this is what reality TV buys you.”

That, or maybe just knowing what makes for good TV. And Burnett and his team have demonstrated a knack for spotting opportunities. Last season there was shock among fans when singer Jesse Campbell, one of the favorites to win the title, was eliminated by coach Christina Aguilera. Even her fellow coaches expressed their disbelief.

This season, which starts September 10th, they’d be able to do something about it, thanks to a new element called “the Steal,” which allows judges to pick up a contestant who’s been ousted by another coach. Journalists got a sneak peak at a recently taped battle round between two of Green’s competitors, who each delivered a smoking rendition of Mariah Carey’s “Vision of Love.”

As soon as Green carried out the unenviable task of choosing just one, the other coaches hammered on their buttons and made their pitches to bring the loser onto one of their teams, just like they do in the battle rounds. Judges can only pick two additional team members, which will lead to a new cycle of the show called “Knockout Rounds,” where the teams will pare down before beginning the live episodes.

The new opportunity for poaching has added a lot to the show, the coaches told Rolling Stone. “It’s nice to throw those elements in to kind of spice things up,” Levine said. “Those things definitely help keep it fresh for us.”

It also adds more pressure, Shelton said. “There’s nothing that’s more nervewracking than knowing, ‘Okay, both these singers did really good and I gotta pick one and I know damn good and well one of these other three are gonna steal the person I don’t pick,’” he said. “There’s a chance that person may go on and win this and that’s gonna make me look really stupid. That definitely goes on in your mind. As an artist and somebody on television I have enough of an ego that I don’t want to look that stupid. I want to look brilliant.”

Ultimately, though, he recognizes it’s great for the show and viewers. “It’s going to be so exciting for people watching at home,” Shelton said. “Here’s the truth, as much as we want to sit up here and talk about how different this show is, and it is, what people love the most is those damn buttons. People love to see us hit those buttons and somebody’s life is changed at that moment. This is another way of changing somebody’s life later on in the show, where they think all hope is lost, they’re going home, the next thing you know the button gets pushed and they’re right back in the game again. That’s pretty exciting.”

The new components add another element to what Levine, Aguilera and Shelton call “the best season yet.” Only Green holds out on that, saying, “A few memorable things have happened thus far, but season three isn’t completed yet, so I don’t know if this is the favorite season yet.”

For the four coaches, though, the biggest strength of this season is their bond. In the first clip shown at the junket, the four are seen performing the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up,” and they resembled a band, much more than they did in the combined performances of the first two seasons.

What helped meld them into a tight, family-like unit is the way all four work with contestants, Aguilera said. “Over time we see how each of us react as coaches, giving such heartfelt advice and attention to these up-and-coming young fresh talents and it’s so nice to see,” she said. “It’s refreshing because we came into it not wanting to knock anybody down and I think we all respect that. We might take shots at each other, but never the talent. So there’s just a magic, there’s a bond there that’s unbreakable at this point.”

Shelton concurred, recognizing the quartet is now joined together by the success of the series. “We’re always going to be connected to each other through this show,” he says.

He admitted there have been some rough moments, like any family. “We’ve been through a lot of s**t with each other, no doubt,” he said. “We’ve had fights, ups and downs and weird moments and f**k-offs and all that stuff. But all friends go through that I think and you either go through it and you never speak to each other again or you go through it and your relationship is even stronger. We didn’t have to come back together, but we did, and our relationships are stronger.”

Levine agreed that the coaches have left the rockiest moments behind them. “We are getting along better than we ever have and I guess our energies have all congealed and we’re very, very close at this point,” he said.

The show will run this year in both the fall and spring seasons, which could result in one or more of the coaches having to take a sabbatical to go on tour. Although Burnett said the coaches have their “chairs for live,” the assembled journalists were keen to speculate on who the replacement coaches might be. Green shut down the speculation while nicely summing up the bond among the current four.

“For me, there’s nobody comes to mind that can replace my Blake, my Adam and my Christina,” he said.

See full story at RollingStone.com.

Review: ‘Sparkle’ isn’t dull

 

(EW.com) – “Sparkle” is a movie for anyone who thought that the pop melodrama of “Dreamgirls” wasn’t over-the-top enough.

Set in the late ’60s, it tells the story of three sisters from middle-class Detroit who form a girl group sort of like the Supremes. They’re astoundingly talented, they want to be famous, and at one point they get their shot at a major deal with Columbia Records.

But all sorts of things keep getting in the way, like an abusive, coke-sniffing celebrity boyfriend — what happens to him will leave your jaw on the floor — and, more than that, their oppressively uptight church-lady mother, played with teasing confidence and force by Whitney Houston in her final screen role.

 

The movie is a remake of the 1976 ersatz-Supremes Hollywood fable that starred Irene Cara, and the earlier film’s setting — the late ’50s and early ’60s — made sense. Transplanting the material ahead nearly a decade, to the era of race riots and black power (when the classic Motown sound was, in fact, already starting to fade), hurts the movie’s credibility, since it is now all the harder to believe that three feisty grown women are still living in their puritanical mother’s house because they’re too cowed to go out on their own. From its opening scene, set inside a hopping Detroit nightclub, Sparkle is charged with a synthetically corny high tension. (Cee Lo Green shows up in that scene, and does a fine job of playing a conk-haired funk-soul relic who loves the ladies, but then he completely vanishes from the movie.)

The three sisters are each cut from a very different cloth. The quietly ambitious Sparkle, a brilliant songwriter, is played by the sixth-season American Idol winner Jordin Sparks, who proves to be a lot like Irene Cara — that is, she’s pretty in a slightly pained way and wholesomely sincere to the point of being a bit boring. The whippersnapper Dolores (Tika Sumpter) mostly stays in the background, except when she explodes in moments of vengeful high dudgeon. And then there’s the sister known, literally, as Sister, who’s the star of the group and is played by the ravishingly sexy and accomplished British actress Carmen Ejogo. In this role, she looks and acts strikingly like a demon-driven, down-and-dirty Beyoncé, and her scenes with Mike Epps, as her charismatic but hateful comedian lover, are the most potent in the film. The truth is that whenever Sister is on screen, we’re a little unsure why the movie is named after anyone else.

Sparkle uses some of the same imitation-Motown numbers by Curtis Mayfield that powered the 1976 version, along with new songs by R. Kelly. The music is all highly competent and, frankly, just unmemorable enough to make you wish that you were hearing authentic period chestnuts instead. The trouble with Sparkle isn’t that it’s overwrought (that’s what’s sometimes fun about it). It’s that everything in the movie is derivative and third-hand: a copy of a copy. The film is pulp that’s been fed through a strainer, with bits and pieces squeezed out of a dozen other, better movies (“What’s Love Got to Do With It”, “Lady Sings the Blues,” and “Dreamgirls,” to name just a few). At times, it’s like a Joan Crawford neurotic-mother fantasy, and the gravelly conviction of Whitney Houston’s performance proves that this could have been the first step not merely in a comeback but in a major re-invention. She had the instincts of a superb character actress.

At other times, the movie is a girl-group biopic that never quite delivers the charge of success that we’re longing to see. Jordin Sparks’ big, climactic on-stage number is supposed to do that, but to me it’s just a testament to the way that too many “Idol” graduates, with their how-many-notes-can-I-cram-inside-a-note technical bravura, short-circuit any true connection with the audience. “Sparkle” is never more than an overheated mediocrity. The one thing it isn’t, however, is dull. Grade: B-

See full story at EW.com.

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