REVIEW: The Material Girl Channels Wallis Simpson, and Her Stuff, in W.E.

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Movieline Score: 5.5

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Even though it’s something of a slick mess, Madonna’s W.E. is just the kind of movie you’d expect from an artist who once, with a delightful lack of irony, declared herself a material girl. A weirdly sympathetic portrait of Wallis Simpson, the woman for whom a king gave up his throne, W.E. is the story of a life told through stuff: Evening gloves, cocktail shakers, baubles from Cartier, little hats trimmed with netting. It’s as if Madonna went back in time and forgot to talk to actual people, to find out how they lived and what they thought — but she sure did a lot of shopping.

And that’s OK, as far as it goes. W.E. is at times comically bad. But it’s also criminally watchable: Even through its many dull patches, places where Madonna apparently felt the need to carefully frame characters in doorways and hallways for no good reason, I couldn’t take my eyes off it. This is Madonna’s second movie as a director (following the 2008 comedy Filth and Wisdom), and it’s obviously her bid to make a classy period picture that people will take seriously. The Weinstein Co., for one, sort of has: Perhaps it’s hoping to repeat the magic formula that worked so well last year with The King’s Speech, a movie set in the same era and dealing with some of the same characters, though the tone and approach of W.E. is very different.

W.E. is actually two intertwining stories — or maybe, more accurately, two stories clumsily rubbing against

Source: http://www.celebrities.com/celebrities-gossip/review-the-material-girl-channels-wallis-simpson-and-her-stuff-in-w-e/

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'X-Factor' Honchos -- We're Willing to Pay Winner EVEN MORE than $5 Mil

If the $5 MILLION recording contract wasn't enough ... TMZ has learned the people behind 'X Factor' are willing to shell out MILLIONS more to the winner ... depending on how hard the soon-to-crowned champ works after the show. Here's the deal -- each…

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Source: http://www.tmz.com/2011/12/05/x-factor-rachel-crow-contract/

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REVIEW: Jonah Hill, The Sitter Offer (Mostly) Inoffensive, Forgettable Fun

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Movieline Score: 6.5

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Having begun his career as American independent film’s great hope with delicate, languid features like George Washington and All the Real Girls, David Gordon Green has devoted the last few years to turning out goofball stoner comedies that, aside from their hip and very current casts, could seem like forgotten oddball ’80s artifacts discovered in a box of dusty VHS tapes at a garage sale. While it’s not a career trajectory anyone who went googly-eyed over his early output would have guessed for him, there’s an unmistakable undercurrent of glee to these recent films that suggests Green — who still works with many of the crew members with which he started, including composer David Wingo and DP Tim Orr — is having a great time making exactly the type of movies he wants to.

How fun they are to actually watch is a knottier question. Pineapple Express was hazy, sloppy fun, but Your Highness felt like one long inside joke no one deigned to explain. The Sitter pulls back from the latter’s sometimes jarring abrasiveness and aims to sprinkle sweetness and reconciliation between the laughs — without, this time, putting them in air quotes. It succeeds at tickling the funny bone and warming the heart, though it’s not terribly good at either — The Sitter’s a lazy ramble of a movie that’s amusing enough to hold your gaze for 81 minutes while leaving you feeling a little cheated when it’s over.

Jonah Hill’s slimmed down considerably in the months since shooting this movie, but as genial waster Noah Griffith he…

Source: http://www.celebrities.com/celebrities-gossip/review-jonah-hill-the-sitter-offer-mostly-inoffensive-forgettable-fun/

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Brooke Mueller -- Options to Avoid Jail 'On the Table' in Aspen Drug Case

There's more than a good chance Brooke Mueller will not see another day in the pokey for her felony drug bust in Aspen ... according to law enforcement sources.We're told that although Brooke allegedly had four grams of cocaine on her -- nothing to…

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Source: http://www.tmz.com/2011/12/07/brooke-mueller-cocaine-arrest-aspen-no-jail-time/

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