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Jumat, 12 Juli 2019

R. Kelly arrested by NYPD in Chicago on federal sex crime charges including child pornography, obstruction of justice - KABC-TV

CHICAGO -- Singer R. Kelly was arrested in Chicago Thursday night on more than a dozen new federal sex crime charges including child pornography and obstruction of justice, officials said.

The U.S. Attorney's Office in Chicago released a statement saying Kelly was arrested on a 13- count indictment returned Thursday in the Northern District of Illinois. The statement said charges included child pornography and obstruction of justice, but did not say how many counts of each of those were included, nor what any other charges may be included in the indictment.

Kelly was arrested by New York Police Department detectives in Chicago, and is expected to be brought back to New York City, officials said.

Kelly's publicist confirmed his client was arrested on federal sex crime charges and is in custody in Chicago. He said a news conference is planned for Friday morning to discuss the charges. Kelly's attorneys have not commented on the latest round of charges.

No further details about the latest round of charges have been released. It was also not immediately clear if any of these charges were related to any previous sex-related felony charges that have been leveled against the singer.

In June, Kelly returned to court to plead not guilty to nearly a dozen new counts of sex-related felonies, including four aggravated criminal sexual assault charges.

In February, Kelly pleaded not guilty to 10 counts of aggravated sexual abuse involved three girls and one woman.

Previous coverage:

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https://abc7.com/r-kelly-arrested-in-chicago-on-federal-sex-crime-charges-/5390358/

2019-07-12 09:19:51Z
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Federal Authorities Arrest R. Kelly On New Charges Of Child Pornography - NPR

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This June photo of R. Kelly shows him departing a courtroom in Chicago in a case related to a state sexual abuse case. On Thursday, federal prosecutors said an additional criminal prosecution against Kelly has been launched. Amr Alfiky/AP hide caption

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Amr Alfiky/AP

Federal authorities in Chicago have arrested and charged R&B singer R. Kelly in a 13-count indictment alleging child pornography and obstruction of justice, according to a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Illinois.

Kelly, who already faces separate sexual assault charges in state court, will now be confronting two possible criminal trials following his Thursday night arrest by federal authorities.

For decades, Kelly has been dogged by accusations over sexual contact with minors and child pornography allegations. He was prosecuted by state authorities in a child pornography case before, but in June 2008, Kelly was acquitted of all charges, allowing him to walk a free man.

Kelly's arrest by agents Thursday night represents the first time the singer has faced federal charges.

A law enforcement official tells The New York Times that investigators plan to bring Kelly to New York to face charges. Federal prosecutors told the paper that prosecutors in Brooklyn will detail those plans on Friday.

In recent months, fresh interest has been generated around the longtime accusations against Kelly.

An interview Kelly did with Gayle King in March in which he emotionally denied sexual misconduct with underage girls prompted widespread attention.

And Lifetime's recent six-episode Surviving R. Kelly documentary included accounts from several women who accused the singer of misconduct, drawing a new focus to the longstanding accusations lodged at him. More accusers began publicly telling their stories about alleged abuse and sexual misconduct perpetrated by him.

State prosecutors in Chicago this year have filed sexual assault and abuse charges against him, the latest of which were filed six weeks ago. Kelly,52, whose real name is Robert S. Kelly, has pleaded not guilty.

Steve Greenberg, Kelley's lawyer, did not respond to requests for comment.

WBEZ's Patrick Smith contributed to this report.

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https://www.npr.org/2019/07/12/741008967/federal-prosecutors-arrest-and-charge-r-kelly-in-new-child-pornography-case

2019-07-12 07:12:00Z
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Kamis, 11 Juli 2019

Review: The Lion King remake doesn’t get the Disney original at all - Polygon

The 1994 Lion King and this month’s remake take Simba the lion on the same exact arc. Born to Mufasa, king of Pride Rock, the scrappy cub spends his savanna days boasting about royalty status. Simba’s ego and gullibility leave him vulnerable to Scar’s manipulation, and the death of his father thrusts him into the jungle, where he embraces “hakuna matata,” the Swahili phrase for “no worries” and the meerkat mantra for “fuck it.” His friend Nala helps him see the light: Being a king, being great, is earned — it’s achieved by shedding privilege and taking a brave step forward.

In the animated classic, the rightful king’s return is a triumph. In the photorealistic edition, it’s a self-own. No one involved in paving over the original learned Simba’s lesson. Ripping shots, leaning hard on Hans Zimmer’s original score, and owing everything to Disney’s legacy, The Lion King (2019) is an arrogant successor with no roar. Zazu puts it simply: “a rather uninspiring thing.”

There’s a tremendous amount of craft in The Lion King, and under the direction of Jon Favreau (The Jungle Book, Chef), a complete absence of art. The CG water really looks like water. The CG rocks really look like rocks. The CG plants really look like plants. The CG dust really looks like dust. The CG fur really looks like fur. If Earth transforms into a husk of its former self in the next 100 years, The Lion King will play an important historical role in our future. But unlike with this year’s Dumbo, which pushed past the plot markers of the 1941 movie, or Aladdin, which saw an opportunity for the underserved Jasmine, the team behind The Lion King saw no room for improvement other than a hyper-realistic overhaul.

Beyoncé Knowles-Carter as Nala and Donald Glover as Simba in The Lion King (2019) — Nala and Simba, but real!

That photorealism never makes a case for itself. The majesty of Planet Earth is how cameras capture the instinctual, unaware behavior of animals. The Lion King can’t tap that energy while delivering a shot-for-shot remake of a movie in which lions dance on top of elephants. The “realism” neither brings the source material closer to any African culture or ecology, nor nuances the characters’ expressions. From the very first shot, the movie is caught in a limbo between raw nature footage and the imaginative power of cartooning. Turns out, two lions’ flirtatious “play-fighting” is super terrifying when rendered as two real lions baring their teeth and growling.

What sounds like a Disney purist’s best-case scenario feels more like the switch from sugar-coated chewables to swallowing knuckle-sized gel capsules. The expressive animation that made Simba innocent, Pumbaa a riot, and Scar so devilish is ditched for deadpan animal deepfakes. Instead of the explosion of color and design that defined “I Just Can’t Wait to Be King,” Favreau opts for swirling cameras, choppy editing, and exhausting amounts of running over the reality-breaking. Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years a Slave) chews up his scenes as Scar, but his number, “Be Prepared,” is also an unlikely victim, reduced to a rhythmic dialogue reading that sounds like Rex Harrison speak-singing Al Pacino monologues. The mood of the entire movie is “beige.”

The performances needed to be fabulous to make this Lion King something more. A few are. Ejiofor has a crisp edge to his Scar voice that breaks through the sameness of all the lion designs. Billy Eichner’s Timon is transcendent, popping up in the middle of the movie when all hope is lost and riffing with Seth Rogen’s Pumbaa like there’s no tomorrow. (If Timon were a nimble huckster instead of being locked into a stiff, upright meerkat position for the entire movie, maybe he could’ve won a Golden Globe.) In the gluttony of walk-and-talks packed into The Lion King, no one else registers — not even the great James Earl Jones, who returns as Mufasa and ensures the movie can’t escape the past.

Donald Glover and Beyoncé Knowles-Carter are technically in this movie, their disembodied voice-overs hovering over footage that so often obscures the moving mouths and emoting eyes. Their big moment, the “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” duet, is a dizzying, crossfade-filled blur that carries itself with the grace of a soundtrack MP3 slapped over ripped PBS videos. The expectation is that a blockbuster remake has more gravity than a YouTube fan edit.

The Lion king lions - young Simba and Scar — The *Lion King* lions look real, yes?

Combined with the photorealism, screenwriter Jeff Nathanson’s faithful adaptation exposes a thin plot that the original film glided through with expressionistic animation. The timeline is inexplicable, while Nala’s devotion to Simba — and their immediate romance after years apart — is a glaring issue. This Lion King tacks on 30 more minutes to the runtime, and uses none of that space to add dimension to Simba, Nala, or the world around Pride Rock. Instead, we get an extended scene of Simba’s fur flying toward Rafiki, which involves a dung beetle pushing a giant ball of poop across the screen. Real life, baby!

As The Lion King unfolded, I desperately wanted to embrace Favreau’s choices on their own merits. Yet each scene asks us to admire the recreation while pushing the visuals into the realm of the grotesque. The hyenas in the original are a wily pack of sidekicks. The hyenas in this movie are gnarled, slobbering animals who will absolutely terrify small children when they hunt down young Simba and Nala. More disturbing is how, for all the realism, Disney still optimizes the corporate synergy. Timon and Pumbaa’s fourth-wall-breaking shtick (“Every time that I fa—” “Hey, not in front of the kids!”) worked for every age group. Timon and Pumbaa performing 40 seconds of “Be Our Guest” is insidious.

There are glimmers of beauty and awe in the new Lion King. A blood-orange sun rising above the horizon to the sound of Lebo M’s ringing vocals. A god’s-eye view of a sun-baked Simba succumbing to the arid nothingness. A close-up of Rafiki cracking open a fruit to announce, “He’s alive!” They’re all moments first storyboarded in the early ’90s, when a team of artists was asked to bring an original, animated work of art to life.

The Lion King opens nationwide in theaters on July 18.

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https://www.polygon.com/2019/7/11/20690363/the-lion-king-2019-review

2019-07-11 16:00:00Z
52780329241926

Weinstein's Legal Team Falls Apart Again Over Drama: 'He's Impossible to Work With' - The Daily Beast

Harvey Weinstein’s legal “dream team” for his much-anticipated sexual assault case suffered another blow Thursday when lawyer Jose Baez was granted permission to withdraw from the case.

As The Daily Beast first reported, Weinstein dumped star litigator Ben Brafman in favor of a so-called “dream team” of lawyers that included Baez and Harvard law professor Ronald Sullivan.

That move seems to have backfired with Sullivan dropping out of the case following backlash at Harvard regarding his role in the proceedings.

During the pretrial hearing Thursday, Judge James Burked asked Weinstein if he was OK with Baez leaving his legal team. “Yes,” replied Weinstein, who ignored questions from reporters as he made his way into court.

People familiar with the situation tell The Daily Beast that Baez, who’s previously represented high-profile clients like Casey Anthony, is exiting due to clashes over legal tactics with the former Hollywood mogul.

“He thinks he’s making a movie,” said a person familiar with the case. “He’s just trying to put together the perfect cast and it’s not working. It’s not a movie. He is impossible to work with,” the person said.

The person familiar with the matter said Weinstein was keen to try the case in the court of public opinion—a strategy Brafman had earlier rejected.

“Ben wants to do everything in the courtroom and that’s the opposite of Weinstein, who wants the case tried in the court of public opinion and not a court of law,” a source previously told The Daily Beast.

The individual familiar with the matter echoed those concerns. “Weinstein’s strategy is still to try this case in the public domain,” the person said “It’s pointless. It’s counterintuitive.”

Baez only joined Weinstein’s legal team in January, and at the time, The Daily Beast reported his former client Rose McGowan criticized the lawyer for what she believed was a conflict.

“This is a major conflict of interest but I knew there was shadiness going on behind the scenes,” she told The Daily Beast. “This is why my case didn’t go to trial—my instinct was my lawyers had been bought off,” she added. Baez denied at the time there was any conflict of interest.

McGowan is one of dozens of women who have accused Weinstein of sexual misconduct but is not involved in the Manhattan criminal case that goes to trial September 9.

Weinstein, 67, is charged with raping a woman in 2013 and performing a sex act on a different woman in 2006. He denies the allegations.

Baez told Judge Burke in a letter last month that his relationship with Weinstein had broken down.

“Mr. Weinstein has engaged in behavior that makes this representation unreasonably difficult to carry out effectively and has insisted upon taking actions with which I have fundamental disagreements,” Baez wrote.

Jeremy Saland, a former prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office said having a “constant revolving door” of lawyers isn’t good for Weinstein’s case.

“Every time you change counsel, you run the risk that something will be missed or misinterpreted,” he said. “That never comes out to the benefit of the accused.”

“The lack of continuity demonstrates that he may be a difficult client, he’s unwilling to heed the advice and strategy of his counsel, or there’s financial troubles,” Saland added. “It seems to me it’s one or a combination of those issues.”

Weinstein has added two new lawyers to his team, Donna Rotunno and Damon Cheronis, both from Chicago.

“He thinks he is producing a movie. It’s pathetic and comical all in one. All the other female attorneys turned him down,” said the person familiar with the inner workings of Weinstein’s defense.

“He thinks it makes him look less creepy to have a female lawyer represent him. I think he needs the best lawyer not window dressing.”

But the person with knowledge of the situation believes the Pulp Fiction producer may walk a free man.

“I give him a great chance of getting off,” the person said. “The charges are flimsy. It’s a weak, weak case. The only way he will lose this case is if the lawyers fall on their head and forget where the courthouse is.”

—Additional reporting by Pervaiz Shallwani

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https://www.thedailybeast.com/harvey-weinsteins-legal-team-falls-apart-again-over-drama-hes-impossible-to-work-with

2019-07-11 15:48:00Z
52780330478837

Denise Nickerson, Violet in 'Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory,' has died - CNN

She was 62.

Her son and daughter-in-law have said Nickerson suffered a stroke last year from which she had been unable to fully recover, according to their public family Facebook page.

CNN has attempted to reach her family.

Nickerson's last acting credit was in 1978. Prior to her exit from Hollywood, she appeared in "The Brady Bunch" and the cult television series "Dark Shadows."

Her role in the iconic Roald Dahl adaptation remains her most celebrated work.

Denise Nickerson as Violet Beauregarde in 'Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory'

In 2011, some of the movie's key cast members reunited for an episode of "Top Chef: Desserts," which challenged the contestants to create an edible world of wonder.

The cast reunited again in 2015 on the Today show.

At the time, Nickerson joked that doing the role didn't make her sick of chewing gum, but her dental health caused her to give it up for good.

"When did you give it up?" the interviewer asked.

"When I returned and had 13 cavities," she said.

The cast, too, reflected on the so-called Wonka effect -- the term they've assigned to the reaction they get from fans.

"Look, I mean, we are the fortunate ones. We're here. We got to really see it and experience it," Nickerson said. "The first thing people do when they find out who we are is they smile."

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https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/11/entertainment/denise-nickerson/index.html

2019-07-11 14:12:00Z
CBMiSGh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmNubi5jb20vMjAxOS8wNy8xMS9lbnRlcnRhaW5tZW50L2RlbmlzZS1uaWNrZXJzb24vaW5kZXguaHRtbNIBTGh0dHBzOi8vYW1wLmNubi5jb20vY25uLzIwMTkvMDcvMTEvZW50ZXJ0YWlubWVudC9kZW5pc2Utbmlja2Vyc29uL2luZGV4Lmh0bWw

The Lion King review: Like the 1994 film, but without the magic - Vox

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https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/7/11/20689387/lion-king-review-new-remake-live-action

2019-07-11 13:00:00Z
52780329241926

Denise Nickerson, Violet in 'Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory,' has died - CNN

She was 62.

Her son and daughter-in-law have said Nickerson suffered a stroke last year from which she had been unable to fully recover, according to their public family Facebook page.

CNN has attempted to reach her family.

Nickerson's last acting credit was in 1978. Prior to her exit from Hollywood, she appeared in "The Brady Bunch" and the cult television series "Dark Shadows."

Her role in the iconic Roald Dahl adaptation remains her most celebrated work.

Denise Nickerson as Violet Beauregard in 'Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory'

In 2011, some of the movie's key cast members reunited for an episode of "Top Chef: Desserts," which challenged the contestants to create an edible world of wonder.

The cast reunited again in 2015 on the Today show.

At the time, Nickerson joked that doing the role didn't make her sick of chewing gum, but her dental health caused her to give it up for good.

"When did you give it up?" the interviewer asked.

"When I returned and had 13 cavities," she said.

The cast, too, reflected on the so-called Wonka effect -- the term they've assigned to the reaction they get from fans.

"Look, I mean, we are the fortunate ones. We're here. We got to really see it and experience it," Nickerson said. "The first thing people do when they find out who we are is they smile."

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https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/11/entertainment/denise-nickerson/index.html

2019-07-11 12:16:00Z
CBMiSGh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmNubi5jb20vMjAxOS8wNy8xMS9lbnRlcnRhaW5tZW50L2RlbmlzZS1uaWNrZXJzb24vaW5kZXguaHRtbNIBTGh0dHBzOi8vYW1wLmNubi5jb20vY25uLzIwMTkvMDcvMTEvZW50ZXJ0YWlubWVudC9kZW5pc2Utbmlja2Vyc29uL2luZGV4Lmh0bWw