Jon Snow Lives...on a Poster

So Jon Snow is not dead then?

Identifying a renewed sense of wonder about the fate of one of the main, they-couldn’t-have-killed-him-for-realsies characters of its Game of Thrones (nice try pulling focus, Glenn), HBO kicked off the short Thanksgiving week this morning by teasing Game of Thrones’ upcoming sixth season with an image of the bloodied face of Jon Snow, one of the main, if not the main, they-couldn’t-have-killed-him-for-realsies characters.

You know, the one that Kit Harington (still?) plays.

This it for now, though. This is all we get.

And now we have something important to talk about over turkey and potatoes.

Photo: Twitter.com/GameOfThrones.

Losin’ It In the Name of His Art

Whoa.

I did not realize Chris Hemsworth had had to lose that much weight for director Ron Howard’s upcoming In the Heart of the Sea.

The film – the story of the real-life 1819 harrowing ordeal of the Essex whale ship that went on to inspire Moby Dick – clearly required that the man o.k.a. Thor go there for his art, huh.

Ya see? He is way more than just a pretty face and a beyond-hella hot bod of sexy Aussie goodness.

In the Heart of the Sea will open on Dec. 11.

Photo: UsMagazine.com.

Fhotties Married

Dem f---in’ hotties, Sofia Vergara and Joe Manganiello, are official, people.

The couple was married in Palm Beach yesterday. This is what La Vergara wore (custom Zuhair Murad, FYI). And this is how the Manga-beast bachelor-partied earlier this month.

This is the new reality: Two beautiful specimens have hitched their wagons to each other. The world may end when their kid is born.

It will be like a supernova, babies.

Photo: Instagram/sofiavergara.com.

Update: Click here to see more pics and even a clip from the wedding.

That Gal Is a (Wonder) Woman

Wonder Woman is cookin’ with oil now.

Actually, Wonder Woman is. Y’ know, the movie that we have anticipated for like, ever.

Ahem, “75 years,” actually. Gal Gadot, the Triple 9 and Fast & Furious 6 star and the actress who will embody the famous DC Comics character, said as much when she revealed this weekend that production is now underway on a blockbuster all Diana Prince’s, under the direction of Patty Jenkins (Monster).

Chris Pine is now confirmed in the role of Steve Trevor.

Up first, though, Diana Prince and Wonder Woman will take part in next spring’s much-anticipated Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

Wonder Woman is expected to take the multiplex in June 2017.

Photo: EW.com.

Misery Loves Company

OMGwyneth, you guys – Brangelina made a porno.

Well, no...not really, but Angelina Jolie Pitt’s third directorial effort, By the Sea (which features the filmmaker and her husband, Brad Pitt, as a sort of modern-day George and Martha), is the kind of #FOMO-inducing catnip that’s sure to send anyone who bothers seeking out the film on a daydream of Instagrams to come. And, yes, I can picture it clearly, the breathless Googling of “By the Sea, locations” that shall commence the second the lights come back on in your delightful local chain art house with comfy seats and available buckets of ice for the bubbly available within it, the only theater in town showing this slightly brutal, aimlessly pretentious dissection of a marriage at a crossroads.

At a crossroads at a charmingly quaint seaside resort of unconfirmed European provenance, honey. Because where else.

Obviously, they – her Vanessa, a former dancer, and his Roland, a writer fighting a mean case of the writer’s block – could be in France; just about everyone around speaks the language and has that air of, you know...nonchalance that is now so encapsulated by the holidaze hashtag. And they are, in fact, in France, for this production is definitely set there, the 1970s there that finally allows Jolie Pitt to play Elizabeth Taylor in the most indirect and deferential manner, since remaking Cleopatra is an idea that’s so last century: Angie’s remade Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, OKRRR, casting and recasting her main man as the Richard Burton for a new generation. FYI, though: The actual location was Malta’s island of Gozo, so bookin’ that next vacation.

The film is that ambitious.

Its designs on prestige, on important-ness, are only surpassed by its desire to be admired. Just like The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Jolie Pitt’s proposition looks impossibly gorge – like a moving, talking, walking W magazine spread. Kudos to the cinematographer and the production design team: It’s all quite the special effect, especially because it upstages Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

It’s not that the spectacle of the film takes away from the story. Au contraire, the fantasia provides a welcome respite from the nonsense (right, Roland and Vanessa totally fit all those Louis Vuitton trunks of slinky, gauzy nightgowns and that cute little red typewriter that travels with its own accoutreument in that cute little classic coupe they drove in on...) and marital strife between these two. Roland drinks too much and writes too little during his days by the sea, chatting up the initially put-upon widower who keeps the local watering hole (A Prophet’s Niels Arestrup, his eyes profound with a deep and sad longing wisdowm); Nessa, as he calls her, takes too many pills, spends too much time confined to their room, contemplating death (past death, her own).

Neither talks to the other – really talk, I mean. There’s a hole between the two, and he’s on the verge of giving up trying to fill it or, at the very least, mend it. It isn’t until there’s a literal hole between ’em – a hole on a wall that allows the pair to peep into their next-room neighbors, young newlyweds portrayed by Mélanie Laurent and Melvil Poupaud – that Roland and Vanessa start getting real with each other, and that we learn what it was that wedged them apart.

Alas, it is all too terribly dull. Jolie Pitt is made up and styled for war...her eyes painted to draw you in, her nails softly painted, yet sharply pointed, her slinky wardrobe belying an inner storm of turmoil that unspools in whimpers, but it is Pitt who rises to the occasion in nominatable fashion. His Roland’s face is a portrait of pain, compassion, fed-up-ness, slight joy, and even slighter hope.

Too bad that by the time the recriminations and slaps start flying By the Sea, you’ll be thinking Mike Nichols did this better...and this woulda been way more engaging had Roland and Nessa been a little more like the Needdlers.

My Rating **

Photo: Celebuzz.com.

Animeted Sam

Sam Riley is coming, ScarJo.

The Maleficent actor is circling the lead in Ghost In the Shell, the Rupert Sanders-directed adaptation of the popular Japanese anime movie of the same name, opposite Scarlett Johansson.

The actress a.k.a. Black Widow will play a member of a covert-ops unit of the Japanese National Public Safety Commission that specializes in flighting tech-related crime.

Riley would portray The Laughing Man, the leader of a super-dangerous criminal group and her principal antagonist.

Photo: News.com.au.

Mr. Washington, Your DeMille Awaits

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association has chosen Denzel Washington as the recipient of its 2016 Cecil B. DeMille Award.

The Oscar winner will collect his latest career-reconigzing hardware during the 73rd annual Golden Globe Awards – hosted by Ricky Gervais – on Jan. 10.

Washington has two Golden Globes to his name: one for The Hurricane and another for Glory.

Speaking of people getting honors, Steven Spielberg, Barbra Streisand, Gloria and Emilio Estefan, and Stephen Sondheim are among the folks who will receive a Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama on Nov. 24.

Photo: PAFF.org.

El Comeback de Willcito

Will Smith may be about to debut Concussion up on that silver screen he loves and we heart him on so much, but – guesswha’ – he’s been making some time for some musica!

Yes, Big Willie is fixin’ for un retorno to the airwaves or lo que sea que we use today, and he began to lay the foundation for it among Latinos, en Las Vegas last night, at the Latin Grammy Awards, where he performed a spirited version de “Fiesta,” su nuevo single.

Que? Miami estaba busy?

Dale, Guillermo!

Photo: USAToday.com.

The Triumph of a Girl’s Rebel Heart

Katniss Everdeen is done.

Jennifer Lawrence’s trilogy of blockbusters based on the popular Suzanne Collins young-adult novels comes to a conclusion this weekend with the release of the second part of its third installment (oh, Hollywood – you are incorrigible!), The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2. Once again helmed by Francis Lawrence, the film marks, feels like, and is a logical and mostly satisfying saga ender, but it also comes off just a tad anticlimactic there at the very end.

No, not because J. Law’s fierce-warrior heroine finally chooses between Josh Hutcherson’s noble, if brainwashed-into-wanting-to-kill-her Peeta Mellark  and Liam Hemsworth’s also-noble Gale Hawthorne – something I guess she simply had to do. These crowd-pleasers may have been wonderfully pro-independent, strong women, but they clearly still had to hit certain beats, and, well...there was no getting away from that bit o’ convention. Having having Katniss be quote-unquoted completed by a man, no matter how bland the move (and no matter how bland he was – seriously, it took brainwashing to make Peeta somewhat interesting...and ya still couldn’t make Gale compelling, even after he tacitly confesses his perhaps,not-so-unwitting role in Katniss’ biggest heartbreak?), was inevitable.

The disconnect actually comes from the fact that we’re denied a moment of schadenfreude that we have been anticipating for three movies and three and a half years.

I mean, we knew that Donald Sutherland’s entitledly evil President Snow would fall. I never quite imagined he would fall like that, you see, but it makes sense things played out the way they did in this final film. Danny Strong (TV’s Empire, Lee Daniels’ The Butler) co-wrote The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 and its immediate predecessor, and he is the years-later breakout of TV’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a wonderfully pro-independent, strong women show by one Joss Whedon, a firm proponent of not giving audiences what they want but what they need. He and co-writer Peter Craig have delivered a script that doesn’t cater to Katniss’ franchise-long motivation but confronts it, making her thing about who her true enemy is and allowing her to be both smart and merciful.

Had the powers that be served up Katniss doing with Snow the way she always thought she wanted to – the way we wanted her to – some of us probably would be comparing the actions of the Mockingjay to those of Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 does what it needs to, which is to bring Katniss home, back to her beloved District 12 to live the life for which she has had to fight so hard and lost so much. Yes, we see her and her band of allies (including Gale and Peeta and the film crew that Julianne Moore’s coldly calculating rebel President Coin has commissioned to chronicle the Mockingjay’s every rallying movie) infiltrate the Capitol to get to Snow. So we get action and adventure and a few moving moments with the friends she’s made along the way, like Woody Harrelson’s Haymitch Abernathy and Elizabeth Banks’ Effie Trinket.

But we’re on this side of the ride now, and F. Law knows that he needn’t sustain the excitement for yet another money-making chapter of the story. He can bring us home, too. And he does.

My Rating ***

Photo: Classicalite.com.

The Benchwarmer

There is an indie I have been hearing about all year long, and now it seems it finally is ready to be seen.

I’m talking about The Bronze, starring Melissa Rauch (TV’s The Big Bang Theory) as Hope Annabelle Greggory, a bitter medalist who had to settle for the titular hardware after an injury sidelined her.

Check out the film’s red-band trailer to see how she’s coping with that, with her status as a small-town celebrity, and with the rising star of a younger athlete threatening to take her place in the spotlight.

The Bronze will be released next spring.

Photo: Collider.com.

Saying Hello to My New Adele

Woke up this morning – got myself Adele’s 25.

Obviously.

Hashtag connected. Hashtag sheep.

Hashtag what else was I to do.

So far so good, kids.

Photo: Hypable.com.

Update 1: It’s not gonna be N’SYNC anymore!

Adele’s 25 officially broke the long-standing record held by the boy band on Nov. 23, when it sold 2.43 million copies in just four days.

N’SYNC set a record in 2000, when their No Strings Attached album moved 2.416 records during its first week out.

Such is Adele.

Update 2: 25 was made available on Pandora on Nov. 24 – so enjoy listening to that on heavy rotation in the office, workers.

Update 3: Of course, given the shattering of their record, N’SYNC had a comment or two on the juggernaut that is Adele.

And by N’SYNC I mean Lance Bass (and, OK, JC Chasez and Joey Fatone). Bass has even (jockingly) demanded a recount.

Winter Is Coming

Chris Hemsworth. Charlize Theron. Emily Blunt. And Jessica Chastain.

It’s the stuff of wet dreams, and it’s the cast of the upcoming awkwardly titled, somewhat-cheap-looking The Huntsman: Winter’s War, the Kristen Stewart-less prequel/sequel hybrid to Snow White and the Huntsman.

Blunt joins the franchise as the just-as-evil revenge-seeking icy sister of Theron’s Ravenna, while Chastain is taking on the role of a warrior with whom Hemsworth’s titular character has history. Check out the movie’s first trailer:



The Huntsman: Winter’s War will be in theaters on April 22.

Uncoupled Collaborators

The new Coldplay album, A Head Full of Dreams, is already promising to be som’in’ special.

Now, though,frontman Chris Martin has gone and made it even more must-y now that he has revealed that his ex, Gwyneth Paltrow, is going to be on the record!

Indeed, G.P. reportedly will be featured on a song called “Everglow.”

Paltrow does have lots of experience singin’ and singing on other people’s records – she was featured on Sheryl Crow’s “It’s Only Love,” a track from the singer’s C’mon, C’mon record.

Know who else Coldplay are featuring on A Head Full of Dreams? Blue friggin’ Ivy. You know, Beyoncé and Jay Z’s daughter.

’Cause why not, right?

That’s at least two songs that kid’s featured on. Versus our none.

Photo: Idolator.com.

Adele’s Pulling a Taylor Swift

OMG, can you handle the anticipation right now, for Adele’s 25?

Exciting times, huh.

Well, here’s the rub: The album, which is legitimately dropping tomorrow (if you are listening to the leaks, you suck), will not be available for streaming on Spotify or Apple Music.

How very Taylor Swift of Adele, no?

I mean, this could be Red Cupgate all over again. Ah...Adele does not care about her fans.

Ah!

Photo: ETOnline.com.

Canned Soup

Ha! Is that headline not super-smart or what!

Ha!

Ha.

E! is done with its Soup, you see.

Ha!

No?

OK, so, yeah...Joel McHale is out of yet another job.

Good going, E! – gawsh.

Twenty-two-season-old The Soup will last serve it up on Dec. 18.

Photo: ScreenRush.com.

Kitsch for Life...or Death

Xavier Dolan’s forthcoming The Death and Life of John F. Donovan may feature Adele, but it for sure will showcase Taylor Kitsch.

The True Detective has signed on to join Jessica Chastain and Kit Harington in the story of an American film star who struck up a secret pen friendship with an 11-year-old Londoner (a fellow actor, it seems) – a friendship that is exposed as something sordid by a merciless gossip editrix, which sends the now-grown young man’s life into a tizzy (the actor will have died 10 years ago, so that’s that).

Kitsch in on board for a role that is, of course, being kept secret at this time, but let’s take a moment to imagine he will be kissing the maybe-erstwhile Jon Snow, alright?

Put that in your pipes and smoke it, Kitsch Kravers.

Photo: PopSugar.com.

More Little Princes or Princesses Are Coming

What is in the water over there in Storybrooke?

First Emile de Ravin, who plays Belle on TV’s Once Upon a Time, announced that she is expecting her first kid, and, now, Ginnifer Goodwin and Josh Dallas have revealed that the actress is pregnant with baby No. 2.

Goodwin and Dallas welcomed their first son, the boringly named Oliver Finlay (I keed, I keed), 17 months ago.

Cute!

Photo: DailyMail.co.uk.

The Becks the Sex(iest)

What...a sexy, obvious, vintage, easy to choice to make, People.

David Beckham has been named the Sexiest Man Alive for 2015. Because clearly.

While some may argue that the Becks is years overdue for the honor – the guy has proven he has what it takes to wear the crown on and off the pitch, time and time and time again – all I have to say is better late than never.

Seriously, this couldn’t have happened to anyone more deserving.

Sorry, Justin Timberlake, Idris Elba, Jussie Smolett, and Jake Gyllenhaal – maybe next year!

Photo: People.com.

The Gos Is Ready for Saturday Night!

Finally! Ryan Gosling is hosting TV’s Saturday Night Live this season.

The Big Short star will do the honors on Dec. 5, with musical guest Leon Bridges.

Chris Hemsworth – who will be in the thick of promoting Ron Howard’s In the Heart of the Sea – will host the following week, with Chance the Rapper taking to the stage for the night.

And, finally, Sisters Tina Fey and Amy Poehler will close out the year on Dec. 19. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band will be on hand that night.

But back to the Gos.

SNL better write him one heckuva show.

Photo: LatinPost.com.