Music and movies

Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner’s live-in girlfriends are set to star in their own TV shows.

Holly Madison, Kendra Wilkinson and Bridget Marquardt - who live in the Playboy mansion in Los Angeles with the magazine mogul - currently appear in reality TV show The Girls Next Door with Hugh, but will soon front their own programmes.

He said: “I think all three girls are likely to get spin-offs. I think they will be interconnected to the main show, and we will all appear on both.”

The 82-year-old lothario - who was recently rumoured to be considering marrying his closest lover Holly - also revealed if anything changes in his romantic life, it will be shown on the E! reality show.

He added: “Everything will be on TV, because this show, unlike most, really is a reality show. It deals with our lives and wherever that takes us.”

Hugh also said he cannot believe how popular the series has been, adding: “It’s amazing. We’re about launch season five, and we’re committed to doing season six. We thought it would be a one-season wonder.”

Other news:

• Cineplex Entertainment launching fall concert series in movie theatres
• Pop Levi to headline Club NME LA tomorrow (Sept 17)
• VH1 debuting two original hip-hop shows

Calista Flockhart reportedly fell apart when she gave up her role as a full-time mother to return to acting, imdb.com reports.

After raising son Liam from infancy, the former Ally McBeal star returned to the small screen in 2006 to star in Brothers and Sisters.

“All of a sudden, I wasn’t home to pick Liam up from school, and I realized it wasn’t really OK, and I wasn’t happy, and I was scratching my eyes out,” Flockhart tells C Magazine. “I couldn’t believe I’d put myself in this situation.”

Flockhart was grateful she had boyfriend Harrison Ford to fall back on, as the actor became a full-time dad.

“(I) was very comforted knowing that Harrison was there. He really stepped up and became a stay-at-home dad,” she says.

Is it possible that Iceland’s entire pop industry is actually a brilliant scam by their tourist board? Put on records by Sigur Ros, early Bjork or Emiliana Torrini – with their gleaming intelligence, playful strangeness and raptures in the face of nature – and it’s all you can do not to leap into the Atlantic and start swimming north west immediately.

This third record by Emiliana Torrini (best known here for writing one of Kylie Minogue’s best and most unusual songs, Slow) is no exception. On first landing, the simple, stripped down instrumentation – often little more than Torrini’s crystalline voice, a guitar and understated keyboards - seem perhaps a little too languid and sparse, even a little samey. But an extended stay reveals sharp jolts of beauty, delicate little flourishes and unexpected oddities hidden in the apparently simple song structures.

Just listen to the way the gentle ska skip of Heard It All Before gradually picks up pace, ending in a feverish strum that perfectly replicates the lyrical self-flaggelation. Or how the acoustic, pastoral Birds literally takes flight at its end, carried aloft on a bank of gorgeously multitracked harmonies. Most unusually of all, listen to Dead Duck which is less a song than a reverie, all tricksy guitar motifs lost in softly buzzing synths, sounding much like criminally neglected nineties band Butterfly Child.

Not that Torrini can’t do direct. Opener Fireheads may be a little too close to Jack Johnson cosiness to really impress, but the reggae-tinged single Me And Armini is full of melancholy, sad-eyed charm and Big Jumps is a warm, huggable kitten of a song. You’ll want to revisit them repeatedly, finding something new each time.

Sometimes love is like a bomb exploding: sudden and dramatic, it leaves you reeling. But sometimes it creeps up as stealthily as spring, slowly warming your bones. These are the loves that tend to last, and Me And Armini is one of them.

More info

• Exumer | Download mp3
• Download Nikka Costa
• Demi Moore ’squirted breast milk at lesbians’
• Download Editors
• Download Dave Gahan

It’s an offer film buffs can’t refuse.

Director Francis Ford Coppola has overseen the digital restoration of his landmark films The Godfather and The Godfather, Part II.

We’re talking (actually, the press release is) “extensive frame-by-frame examination and restoration utilizing state-of-the-art digital technology.”

That sounds serious. That’s why it took more than a year. It’s not something you’d do for every flick. Who wants to go frame by frame through Tango and Cash for 365 days?

But The Godfather saga? Both films won Academy Awards for best picture. The Godfather won in 1972; the sequel two years later.

Filmmaker Stanley Kubrick went so far as to say The Godfather is “possibly the greatest movie ever made.”

Maybe more importantly than any accolades, Coppola’s interpretation of novelist Mario Puzo’s tale of the Corleone family created the blueprint for the many organized-crime movies that have followed.

Or at least it should be the blueprint.

“It’s a gangster movie, but it’s doing a number of things that most gangster movies don’t,” said Jerry White, director of film studies at the University of Alberta. “It’s a lot more ambitious and sophisticated.”

Loyalty, family and integration are among the themes explored by The Godfather, but those soft words seem out of place in this story. Like a horse head between the sheets.

“It does all the stuff that gangster films are supposed to do,” said White. “It has the kind of violence — exciting violence and vividly realized violence — all that kind of good, pulpy genre stuff is in The Godfather, for sure.

“But it’s a lot more sophisticated about the ethical quandaries inherent in that kind of violence. It’s a lot more sophisticated about the political and the social meaning of that kind of violence.”
As for the restoration, White says it will revitalize one of the things that make The Godfather a masterpiece.

“The movie really is one of the great works of American cinema, and a lot of it has to do with the colour,” he said.

“It is this incredibly rich, vibrant, very visually lush piece of work. Some of that has to do with camera movement, but a lot of it has to do with colour.

“It’s a really beautifully visualized piece of work.”

In the days of simple thrills on the Northside of Dublin in the late 1970s, the - for want of a better description - ’soundtrack test’ had its enthusiasts. What it involved was getting a friend or sibling to sit in a totally darkened room at night with the soundtrack to ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’, ‘Halloween’ or ‘Jaws’ playing on the stereo. While they listened, those outside the room added their own sound effects and timed how long those on the inside could last.

Had Alan Lambert been making records in the 1970s, he too would have featured on the nocturnal playlist.

Alternately scary and uplifting, subtle and epic, catchy and difficult, ‘Pteranodon’ is two pieces of electronic music, each hitting the 20-minute mark. But don’t let that put you off - the time goes by very quickly.

The title track mixes militaristic drumming, swirling keyboards and Asian voices to create what feels like a travelogue through headphones. It is followed by ‘A Bao A Qu (The Turning Step)’, a piece which starts soothing, then ups the heart-rate by transforming into Arabian dance music before enveloping you in gloom.

With both, you return to pick out different things and try to figure out how it all sits together so well. And the more you listen, the more you expect more exciting times ahead.

Harry Guerin

Miley Cyrus has confessed that she would love to be in the same league as her idols Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears.

The not-so-squeaky-clean teen opened up to German reporters on a promotional trip to Berlin, saying that she thinks the Mean Girls star and pop’s comeback queen are a force to be reckoned with.

Miley says, “I think they are both really talented and, I don’t know about around here, but at the Video Music Awards and everything.

“Britney Spears has been taking all the awards home and has really had quite a comeback.

“So, I just think that they are super successful, and hopefully when I am compared to them career-wise, it’s them…because they have all been super successful and had amazing careers and they are both really talented.”

See Miley transforming from innocent Disney star to racy teenager here

Bloc Party’s Gordon Moakes has said that the band are considering never releasing singles on CD format again after their current effort, ‘Talons’.

The bassist told ‘Talons’,” Moakes said, despite the 2007 chart rule change that allows downloads to count towards the main chart.

He added: “I think the days are gone where you can really make a splash in the charts, being a band like us.

“Music was never a competition. One decision might be to not get involved in that and put out non-eligible things on purpose.”

Moakes said that the band are still likely to release future albums in more traditional formats.

“We have a young fanbase, so I don’t know how doing it the way we did will affect us,” he said, “but it’s still an event to put out a record.
We’re still vinyl fans. With the last record we put out a picture disc. All this extra stuff that’s dying out, we’re still into as a band.”

Bloc Party released their latest album, ‘Intimacy’, as a download in August. It was released on physical formats yesterday (October 27). ‘Talons’ came out on October 20.

McCain Finally Sets Interview Date On CNN

21 October 2008 10:30 AM, PDT | From Studio Briefing
| See recent Studio Briefing news

John McCain has agreed to be interviewed by CNN for the first time since his
nomination. He is scheduled to appear on the cable news network’s The
Situation Room With Wolf Blitzer on Wednesday. He last appeared on CNN
in late July, before the Republican convention, when he promised Larry King
that he would bring his running mate to his program, saying, “I will not
risk the wrath of Larry King, I want to assure you.” He did do precisely
that in September when he canceled an appearance on Larry King Live after CNN reporter Campbell Brown doggedly questioned campaign spokesman
Tucker Bounds about Governor Sarah Palin’s role as commander in chief of the
Alaska Air National Guard. A message currently appearing on King’s website
says, “We’re still waiting for the senator to reschedule with us. … We’ve
also extended an invitation to Gov. Palin to be a guest on the show, as Sen.
McCain assured us would happen.”

Robbie Williams has ended his strike against his record label, EMI, and is scheduled to release a new album next year.

The singer’s manager, Tim Clark, told BBC Newsbeat that he couldn’t guarantee a new album for 2009, but that that was Williams‘ aim.

In January Robbie Williams threatened to withhold his next album from EMI in protest at the way the label was being run by its owner, Guy Hands. Clark accused Hands of running the label in the style of a “plantation owner”.

However, Clark has said that plans are steaming ahead for the release of Williams‘ eighth studio album, the first since 2006’s ‘Rudebox’.

“I would certainly hope that a new album will be coming next year,” he said. “There are never any guarantees but that’s what we would hope.

“I was with Robbie last week. He was at home and writing songs. He played some of them to us. He’s in fine spirits, in fine form and I think what he’s doing sounds wonderful.”

Clark said that rumours that Williams interest in UFOs had inspired the subject matter were “exaggerated”.

Crowe’s Fears For DiCaprio

Actor Russell Crowe was concerned for his pal Leonardo DiCaprio after his appearance in hit movie Titanic - in case life in the spotlight ruined him.

Gladiator star Crowe met DiCaprio when they filmed Western movie The Quick and the Dead in the early 1990s.

The two actors were both relatively unknown at the time, and became firm friends on set.

DiCaprio later shot to global superstardom as Jack Dawson in Oscar-winning 1997 movie Titanic - and Crowe admits he feared the young actor would be sucked into the Hollywood promotion machine.

He tells USA Today newspaper, “I was a little worried about him after Titanic. The massive success of something like that, it’s not always a positive, particularly when you’re that young.

“Suddenly you find yourself on lunchboxes and bedroom slippers. That can have a deteriorating effect on the inside.”