Monday 28 July 2014

Why don't men wear socks any more?

There are certain trends that take a hold of the male population which fly in the face of good taste (deliberately exposed underwear, anyone?).

And then there are others that, while totally innocuous, just go against all seasonal common sense. Like forgoing socks in the middle of winter.

Find more stories on men's style

It's a trend that I am willing to own up to succumbing to. I have even been known to roll the hem of my pants up ever so slightly to expose my bare-naked ankle like some kind of Victorian-era Chippendale.

Actor Gerard Butler has sparked a review by aviation authorities in Australia after he shared a clip of a friend performing stunts in a helicopter on a chat show.

The Scottish actor has been Down Under filming a new movie, and he shared footage of his experiences in the country during an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel's talk show in June, reported Hollywood Life. The clip, which was also uploaded to YouTube shows Butler, 44, and his friends on a fishing trip as a helicopter comes in low and performs a dangerous-looking stunt close to the ground. The actor refused to reveal the pilot's name over fears he might get in trouble on the show.

A COMMEMORATIVE plaque dedicated to fallen entertainer Rolf Harris has been stolen from a Celebrity Tree Park in Western Australia - but he's not the only pilfered "star".

THE Shire of Kununurra was due to vote on Tuesday on whether to remove Harris' plaque from the park but thieves levered it off its concrete plinth at the weekend.
Shire president John Moulden said Harris was not the only person's plaque under attack.

THESE FINAL HOURS
3.5 out of 5 stars
MA, 87 minutes, opens Thursday
Director: Zak Hilditch
Stars: Nathan Phillips, Angourie Rice, Jessica De Gouw, Daniel Henshall
The world is ending – or at least on the brink of it – once every month at the movies these days, but Zak Hilditch’s tense apocalyptic drama These Final Hours gives a familiar concept a telling new location: Perth.

Sun-drenched and spread out – reminding its residents that there is nowhere to hide – the suburbs of the West Australian capital are the setting for a final day of life, where the planet’s imminent destruction via meteorite strike is a given and everything and everyone is coming to the boil. Signs of murderous violence and wanton destruction dot the streets, but there’s also blank despair and surrender.

Strange how such a dark morality tale, full of foreboding and cynicism, should have been regarded, by Mozart at least, as a comic opera.

Certainly there are comic moments, wittily wry observations on the relationships between the sexes and occasional barbs at the conventions of 18th-century Europe, but the overwhelming tone, set from the first clanging D-minor chord of the overture, is one of impending tragedy as the gates of hell grind open for our unwitting and unrepentant libertine of Seville, Don Giovanni, or Don Juan as he was once better known.

That this unlikely mixture works so effectively is a tribute to Mozart’s inventiveness nearly 227 years ago and Opera Australia’s inspired casting for this fresh revival under Scottish director Sir David McVicar.

The Rokitelly Man. Written by Michael Heming. Music and additional lyrics by Andrew Hackwill.

Directed by Richard Block. Dramatic Productions and Ickle Pickle Productions.

Belconnen Community Theatre. Until August 2.

In a city where the thriving musical theatre scene is largely dominated by revivals of West End and Broadway musicals, it is refreshing to come across original work with the charm and appeal of The Rokitelly Man, currently playing at the intimate Belconnen Community Theatre.

A cocky radio DJ-turned-conman from the south coast has gone to ground a few days shy of his 21st birthday, after his latest scam left small businesses and young DJs thousands of dollars out of pocket.

“Dirty Harry" O’Connor, whose real name is believed to be Dene Broadbelt, has incurred debts of more than $120,000 in the past 18 months across Australia by smooth-talking victims then obtaining goods and services with faked credit references and payment receipts.

A “Dene Broadbelt Support Group” has even been set up on Facebook where its 104 members discuss his scams and share his photo. His trail of victims stretches from Ulladulla to Perth, Brisbane to Darwin, and Goulburn to Adelaide.

Kip Williams' vision transcends professional inexperience, the gimmick of the performance venue and Hugo Weaving’s star power.

The audience enters the stage, taking their seats where the actors would usually deliver their performance. The space is bare but for a trestle and seven mismatched chairs, beyond which lies the dimly lit auditorium. It is a consuming expanse of nothingness, from which looms Birnam Wood, Dunsinane Castle or perhaps the very depths of Macbeth’s own consciousness.

The Block Glasshouse contestants Chris and Jenna were chosen for their never-say-die attitudes rather than their ethnic backgrounds, host Scott Cam says.

The Nine Network's reality renovation series The Block Glasshouse premiered on Sunday.

Teams have a mammoth task ahead of them, with the 1980s office block in Melbourne's trendy Prahran, around twice the size as last series' Dux House.

Husband-and-wife team Chris and Jenna are a cabinetmaker and video editor from Campbelltown in western Sydney.

Now that the cars are packed and planes are filling up with homebound punters – some a little worse for wear - we can start to process the absolutely amazing weekend that Splendour In The Grass 2014 provided. All pics by Peter Sharp.

Whether you chose to make the trip to North Byron Parklands for the three-day event or lived vicariously via social media that thrust envy-levels into overload, there was so much going on across numerous states and various sideshows across the country that no doubt you missed some of the action.

Rapper Kendrick Lamar has been considered the King of the New crop of hip-hop artists since his breakthrough album “Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City,” but Childish Gambino doesn’t believe Kendrick deserves the crown.

Childish Gambino performed in Sydney, Australia and broke into a freestyle where he called out some of today’s favorite rappers including ScHoolboy Q, Drake, and Lamar. Gambino boastfully spit, “I’m the best rapper, definitely top 5. I cut their head off, that’s every rapper living. That’s Kendrick, that’s Drake, that’sScHoolboy, that’s everyone. I don’t give a f**k. I’ll f**king kill you ni**as.”

MAKING a very pleasant change, bad-boy pop star Justin Bieber is in the news for all the right reasons.

The singer is back in the good books after taking 10-year-old cancer patient Grace Kesablak as his date to the Young Hollywood Awards in Los Angeles on the weekend.

Make-A-Wish foundation recipient Kesablak took photos with Bieber on the red carpet, shared his table and later joined the singer onstage to accept the Champ of Charity Award, where he enthusiastically embraced her, the Boston Herald reported .

The artist's struggle against mortality

Green Screen
by Nicola Gunn/Sans Hotel
4 STARS
Lawler Theatre, MTC, until August 3
Reviewed by Rebecca Harkins-Cross

Early on in Green Screen, Nicola Gunn papier mache’s her tax receipts onto a soon-to-be-obliterated piñata. Theatre tickets are filed under “entertainment”.

But while her new show co-devised with collective Sans Hotel is entertaining – funny, smart, heartfelt – at its core is mortality and the artist’s futile struggle against it.
Gunn keeps her audience on a knife’s edge between profundity and the ludicrous. Her last show In Spite of Myself pushed irony to an impossible degree, a parody of performance art that almost became the very thing it was satirising. Blurring truth and fiction, there’s some threat that if we dare to feel anything she’ll pull the rug out.

Madonna darling, your timing was a little off.
She has long been hailed the queen of media manipulation, but Madonna, along with so many other celebrities over the past few days, has made what can only be described as an epic fail.

Two days after the world was violently jolted by the Malaysia Airlines disaster, Madonna and her brood of children, a party numbering six in total, boarded a flight from New York to London.

According to reports, the pop star sat herself in first class while her entourage slummed it down in business class, which for anyone who has bravely tried to cross the curtain will know, are heavily guarded and very separate territories aboard any aircraft.

THE statistics sound impressive: 100 events in 30 venues, including 15 world premieres and 21 Australian premieres.

But when the 2014 Melbourne Festival unfurls in early October, the figures people talk about will be the ones performing amazing acrobatics and daring dance moves.

Circus and dance loom as big program pillars this year, bolstered by hugely diverse music, intriguing theatre and exciting design innovations.

Star names abound (Jeff Mills and Clint Mansell, Pat Metheny and The Gloaming), but looking for “something unique” to “disrupt our thinking”, festival director Josephine Ridge has cast her net far and wide.

BRENT Owens will be quitting his job as a bobcat driver after winning this year’s MasterChef Australia.

The 24-year-old Owens, from Victoria, staged a come-from-behind victory over teenage student Laura ‘Lottie’ Cassai on the Channel 10 reality cooking show last night.

Owens finished with 83 points out of a possible 100 — three points ahead of South Australia’s Cassai, the youngest grand finalist ever on the show.

The Sheezus singer asked to be handcuffed for a photo she then shared on Instagram and Twitter

Australian police officers who handcuffed singer Lily Allen after she requested they do so for a photo opportunity are being investigated for "breaching protocol".

The British singer posted a tweet of the photograph to almost 5 million followers on Sunday with the caption #uhoh. She also posted the photograph on Instagram, where it received almost 8,000 likes, but it has since been removed from the photo-sharing site.

Are Australian TV viewers becoming unwitting victims of a ‘‘roadblocking’’ war?

Last night, the Nine network simulcast The Block Glasshouse launch on all three of its channels: Nine, Gem and Go. It’s a strategy known as ‘‘roadblocking’’, in which a TV broadcaster screens the same thing – right down to the advertisements – across every station to bump up its audience.

But this was a last-minute switch. Those who consulted printed TV guides expected to find British comedy Absolutely Fabulous on Gem and the 2011 movie Arthur on Go.

Not surprisingly, angry viewers took to social media to vent their frustration.

Peter Jackson, the director of 'The Hobbit' series amused the movie fans when he told the Comic-Con crowd that the third sequence of the movie will have a lot of sadness and tragedy.

Jackson asserted that 'The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies' would have some main characters killed and a few scenes that hadn't been seen from 'Lord of the Rings' might be put back in, Deadline.com reported.

A report claims the singer didn't want a "Kardashian to socially climb her" while Jay Z wasn't happy Kanye ended up with Kim

The rumours surrounding Beyonce and Jay Z have gone into overdrive recently and the latest report claims the power pair skipped Kim Kardashian and Kanye West's wedding because it wasn't classy enough for their brand.

According to Page Six, the duo are not impressed that Jay Z's close pal Kanye married the reality TV star - who shot to fame after her sex tape was released - and refused to attend the nuptials in Italy in May.

A source said: "They are guarding like hell their status. Beyonce wasn’t going to allow a Kardashian to
socially climb her. And Jay didn't want Kanye with Kim - he thinks it's bad for business. I think Jay lost a little respect for Kanye there."

A 53-year-old homeless man by the name of Kevin McGlynn has been arrested for allegedly stalking Rihanna. The man was taken into custody on Thursday after leaving notes threatening the Barbadian singer at her rented home in New York.

According to a report from the New York Post’s Page Six, McGlynn was charged with stalking, menacing and harassment. He was held without bail after it was found that he delivered insulting and threatening notes to the singer. On first occasion, it was July 1st and he repeated the incident again on July 8th.

What is the real score between Jay-Z and Beyonce? They have been making headlines for weeks now and reports say that the couple is trying their best to make everything alright despite infidelity and divorce rumors.

The New York post published a detailed report regarding the many problems the couple is going through. This article has been dubbed as the 'hit piece'. The story contained quoted statements from Beyonce's uncle.

Manhattan is an earnest attempt to dramatize the lives of the scientists and their families living in tactical isolation and under strict security in Los Alamos, N.M., during the latter part of World War II.

The United States is racing to design and build an atomic bomb before the Germans can develop the devastating next-generation weapon themselves.

The action centers on two teams competing for primacy, funding, and resources. John Benjamin Hickey (who plays Chumhum founder Neil Gross on The Good Wife) gives an intense performance as Frank Winter, a scientist completely consumed with the project.

The Griffins are headed to Springfield, in Fox's highly anticipated "Family Guy," "The Simpsons" crossover episode.

According to a Fox news release, the special one-hour show, "The Simpson Guy," will be the Sept. 28, 2014, season premiere of "Family Guy."

The episode, according to the Entertainment Weekly website, EW.com, will find the Griffin family on a road trip that takes them to Springfield, where the two iconic animated families meet.

This week’s The Leftovers, the darkest and most disturbing yet, opens with a familiar face getting stoned to death by a group of masked men.

It’s a horrific scene — a Guilty Remnant devotee, the steely-eyed librarian type seen around town on recruiting missions and spreading the religious group’s philosophy of detached enlightenment, breaks her vow of silence to urge the stone-throwers to “Please stop.”

They don’t.

The victim had a name: Gladys (Marceline Hugot), which is also the title of the episode. She had a son who died in a helicopter accident. Her brutal murder goes unsolved as Police Chief Kevin Garvey (Justin Theroux) mounts an investigation that leads nowhere amid rising tension between Mapleton townies and Guilty Remnant members.

Justin Bieber has earned a bad rap in recent months, but he attempted to turn the tables on Sunday.

The troubled pop star found he's still got fans as he picked up the Champ Of Charity trophy at the 2014 Young Hollywood Awards at The Wiltern in Los Angeles.

Justin, 20, worked the crowd into a cheering roar as he hugged his very special presenter, Make A Wish recipient Grace Kesablak.

Well, there's nothing wrong with his body.

Stephen Amell was persuaded to show off his amazingly muscular torso at Comic-Con's Warner Bros. Television/DC Entertainment panel at the Hard Rock Hotel in San Diego on Saturday afternoon.

And hard rock turned out to be a good description of the Arrow star's physique, as he displayed his rippled six-pack to a cheering audience.

After seven seasons on FX, Kurt Sutter’s Sons of Anarchy is finally coming to an end. Over the course of the show, fans have watched as Charlie Hunnam’s Jax Teller navigates the harsh and brutal world of motorcycle clubs in Northern California all while being a new father and trying not to repeat the sins of his father - one of the original founders. Soon that story will be completed, but just in case you’re worried that this means that the Sons of Anarchy universe will be coming to a close, I have some good news.

During today’s Sons of Anarchy panel at San Diego Comic-Con, Kurt Sutter revealed that negotiations are on-going to create a prequel series of sorts that will follow the early days of titular motorcycle club. While things are still in the very beginnings of development and nothing is set in stone yet, the thought right now is for a few years to pass after the current show’s finale before pursuing the idea at a later date. As of right now, Sutter is unsure if he wants to make the show as either a full series or as a mini-series, but whatever form it ends up taking, it’s definitely in the works.

Bobby Flay likes a feast for the eyes; Cameron Diaz gets Benji Madden into a kayak in Italy

Newly single Orlando Bloom spent a steamy evening party-hopping with “Vampire Diaries” star Nina Dobrev over the weekend at Comic-Con.

The “Hobbit” actor, who split from supermodel Miranda Kerr in October, arrived at Playboy’s party for A&E’s show “Bates Motel” at the nerdy San Diego convention late Friday.

Eric has decimated the hordes of hit men on his tail, but cuts his rampage short when he sees that the Yakanomo thugs have Pam in silver chains and a gun to her head. Still dressed in their Texas Republican fundraiser finery, they are taken captive and the Yakanomo thugs tie them up to wait for sunrise. It’s their first sunrise together, which would be sweet except for the fact that the sun will kill them. On the plus side, as Pam notes the room does have wall-to-wall carpeting. Before the sun can turn them to dust, Gus Jr., the head of the Yakanomo Corp., wants a little information on the whereabouts of Sarah Newlin — after all, she destroyed his company. As Eric and Pam sizzle in the sunlight, they make a deal with the Yakanomo devil to help him track down Sarah — but only if Eric gets to kill the “bobblehead blonde” himself. With a deal struck, Eric and Pam tell the Yakanomo boss about Sarah’s vampire sister, Amber.

Attention all Nerdfighters! ‘Fault In Our Stars’ author was given the Visionary Award at the mtvU Fandom Awards on July 24. Congrats to John!

Nerdfighters, you need to celebrate! John Green, 37, author of the beloved tearjerker The Fault In Our Stars, was given the first-ever Visionary Award at the mtvU Fandom Awards at San Diego Comic-Con.

John Green Given Visionary Award At mtvU Fandom Awards

Witches of East End star Jenna Dewan-Tatum, 33, presented John the Visionary Award before hundred of screaming fans.

During Marvel's Comic-Con panel on Saturday night at the San Diego Convention Center, studio boss Kevin Feige and the cast of "Marvel's The Avengers: Age of Ultron" unveiled new footage from the forthcoming sequel. The follow-up to "Marvel's The Avengers," the 2012 blockbuster that earned more than $1.5 billion in worldwide grosses, is set for release on May 1, 2015. Joss Whedon, who was not present at Comic-Con because he recently underwent knee surgery, is the film's director. Needless to say, journalists and fans in attendance for the Marvel presentation were impressed with the footage. A compilation of their enthusiastic tweets are below.

Dozens of concert-goers were hospitalised during Keith Urban's concert in Mansfield, Massachusetts on Saturday night (26Jul14).

The You'll Think of Me hitmaker brought his Raise 'Em Up Tour to the Xfinity Center but the gig was marred when emergency medics from five mutual aid communities were called in to treat a high number of revellers who had become ill.

Local police and fire chiefs tell news station Necn that 46 people were treated for "alcohol-related" illnesses, and 22 of them were sent to local hospitals for further treatment.

Earlier today WZ learned TNA President Dixie Carter held a meeting at company headquarters in Nashville, but until now it was unclear what the meeting was about. Wrestlezone has since learned Dixie did in fact meet with SpikeTV representatives last week – most likely on Thursday afternoon – and that she met with her inner circle on Friday to discuss the results of that meeting, in addition to today’s gathering with company officials.

Washington - It's a common conversation starter to assert that we only use 10 percent of our brains. In Lucy, the soon-to-be-released thriller about a woman forced to work as a drug mule for the Taiwanese mob, Professor Norman lectures, “It is estimated most human beings only use 10 percent of their brain's capacity. Imagine if we could access 100 percent. Interesting things begin to happen.”

Now, I know Morgan Freeman is well versed in playing the wise sage, and I know that I haven't earned my PhD yet - but professor, I beg to differ. You see, we all access 100 percent of our brains every day. And we don't have to be telekinetic or memorise an entire deck of cards to do it.

In the film, the drugs implanted into Lucy (played by Scarlett Johansson) leak into her system, allowing her to “access 100 percent” of her brain. Among other things, Lucy can move objects with her mind, choose not to feel pain and memorise copious amounts of information.

Warner Bros. has released the 1st official trailer for Mad Max: Fury Road. It’s a film trailer many of us Mad Max fans have waited a long time for, and it debuted at Comic-Con San Diego today. The trailer comes just weeks after several official set photos were shared last month, but years of setbacks and speculation about when the film would release.

The 2-minute: 30-second trailer is nothing short of explosive, raw, and a tribute to the first Mad Max films. We won’t give too much away, only to say the setting is just as post-apocalyptic as the previous films, but with the advantage of 30 decades of advancements in special effects.

The new teaser for “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1″ is out, showing how Katniss Everdeen reluctantly finds herself the symbol of rebellion in the world of Panem, and the target of ruthless President Snow.

The clip for the new film, due out in November, opens with a conversation between former games maker Plutarch Heavensbee (the late Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Julianne Moore’s Alma Coin discussing how Katniss (played again by Jennifer Lawrence) is the only person capable of uniting a downtrodden populace terrorized by Donald Sutherland’s Snow.

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