Sabtu, 05 Oktober 2019

Blake Lively Gives Birth to Baby No. 3 With Ryan Reynolds - Entertainment Tonight

Blake Lively Gives Birth to Baby No. 3 With Ryan Reynolds | Entertainment Tonight

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https://www.etonline.com/blake-lively-gives-birth-to-baby-no-3-with-ryan-reynolds-126077

2019-10-05 03:13:41Z
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Jumat, 04 Oktober 2019

Two former students sue James Franco for allegedly exploiting a ‘steady stream’ of young women. - The Washington Post


(FILES) In this file photo taken on September 30, 2017 US actor and director James Franco smiles after receiving the "Concha de Oro" (Golden Shell) best film award for the film "The Disaster artist" during the 65th San Sebastian Film Festival closing ceremony in the northern Spanish Basque city of San Sebastian. - In a lawsuit filed October 3, 2019, in Los Angeles County Superior Court two women say US television and film star James Franco acting school sexually exploited them. The women say the school pressured them into uncomfortable activities and promised acting opportunities that did not materialize. (ANDER GILLENEA / AFP) (ANDER GILLENEA/AFP via Getty Images)

When an inexperienced actress volunteered to perform in a nude scene in a short film called “Hungry Girl” for a course she took at James Franco’s acting school, she expected the classwork to lead to roles in feature-length films or television. Instead, she found graphic images from the short film uploaded on the Internet.

“If you Google me, you can see me naked,” Sarah Tither-Kaplan later told the Los Angeles Times. “Before I’ve ever been on TV or before I’ve ever had any real credits or before any of this — of course I regret that. I don’t want that.”

On Thursday, Tither-Kaplan and another actress, Toni Gaal, sued Franco, his two business partners and his production company for allegedly sexually exploiting women who paid to take classes at their school, Studio 4. The complaint, as reported by the New York Times, alleges the men “engaged in widespread inappropriate and sexually charged behavior towards female students by sexualizing their power as a teacher and an employer by dangling the opportunity for roles in their projects.”

“In essence, Franco took the ‘casting couch’ to another level by creating a ‘casting class,’” Tither-Kaplan’s attorneys said in a statement to The Washington Post.

Franco’s attorney called the claims “debunked” in a statement provided to the Hollywood Reporter.

“This is not the first time that these claims have been made and they have already been debunked,” attorney Michael Plonsker said. “James will not only fully defend himself, but will also seek damages from the plaintiffs and their attorneys for filing this scurrilous publicity seeking lawsuit.”

Tither-Kaplan and Gaal say they plan to eventually include more than 100 former Studio 4 students in their suit and allege that the school was set up to “create a steady stream of young women to objectify and exploit.”

Franco, 41, who was nominated for an Oscar and Golden Globe for his role in “127 Hours” and won a Golden Globe for best actor in a comedy for “The Disaster Artist,” has taught acting and screen writing to students at high schools and colleges including New York University. He opened Studio 4 in 2014 with Vince Jolivette, who is also named as a defendant in the lawsuit. Studio 4 held classes in New York and Los Angeles before it abruptly closed in October 2017.

Allegations about his school first surfaced in early 2018 after Franco appeared onstage to accept his Golden Globe Award wearing a Time’s Up pin, supporting the organization that grew out of the Me Too movement after allegations of Harvey Weinstein’s long history of sexual abuse became public in 2017.

Several women, including Tither-Kaplan, took to Twitter to challenge Franco. Four days later, the Los Angeles Times published five women’s accounts of sexual misconduct by the star, including several stemming from requests Franco allegedly made of young actresses enrolled in classes at his for-profit school.

Tither-Kaplan was one of the first students to take classes at Studio 4, including a $750 Sex Scenes master class that became one of the main focuses of their lawsuit. Gaal, who also took classed at Studio 4, also balked at the amount of sexually explicit work women were asked to do at the school.

“Most of the work that was offered for us had nudity requirements — for women specifically,” Gaal told NPR Thursday evening. But that work rarely turned into coveted acting credits the school used to lure its ambitious and hopeful students, the suit claims.

Tither-Kaplan said she believed her willingness to act in sex scenes without complaint during the Studio 4 class helped her get opportunities other women did not have, like being cast in one of Franco’s indie movies. Still, the young actress said she was uncomfortable during the class and she did not learn about the typical safeguards put in place to protect women playing roles that involve nudity.

“I didn’t know anything about nudity riders, the detail required in them, the right to counsel with the director about nude scenes, the custom to choreograph nude scenes ahead of time to negotiate them with the cast and the director — I knew none of that throughout that class,” Tither-Kaplan told NPR Thursday.

The complaint also argues Franco and his business partners used the school, which charged between $300 and $750 for classes, to skirt California regulations that bar actors from paying for auditions.

Tither-Kaplan told the Los Angeles Times in 2018 that Franco had removed protective plastic barriers from two other women’s vaginas during the filming of an orgy scene for his indie film, “The Long Home.” Another unnamed woman corroborated the allegation to the newspaper. A second woman, who later had a consensual sexual relationship with Franco, reported the actor pressured her to perform oral sex in a car. Two other actresses who volunteered to film a scene dressed in lingerie and masks told the Los Angeles Times Franco had stormed off set when they refused to perform the scene topless.

Franco’s lawyer denied all of those allegations in 2018.

Gaal told NPR Thursday that the school often asked students to upload auditions, including footage that had nudity.

“We were consistently auditioning for projects that had nudity, and we had to upload our self-tapes at home, so they were consistently getting footage of this sensitive nature of work,” she said.

Allegations of sexual misconduct against Franco date back to 2014, when Gawker reported on Instagram messages between the actor and a 17-year-old girl he met at his Broadway show, “Of Mice and Men.” The two exchanged direct messages and texts, and Franco, who was 35 at the time, asked to meet the girl in her hotel even after he learned that she was not an adult. He admitted to the exchange on “Live with Kelly and Michael,” and said he had exercised “bad judgment” by sending the messages to someone he did not know.

“I guess I’m just a model of how social media is tricky,” he said on the show. “What I’ve learned, I guess just because I’m new to it, you don’t know who is on the other end. You meet somebody in person and you get a feel for them, but you don’t know who you’re talking to. I used bad judgment and I learned my lesson.”

The actor reportedly added an instruction asking fans not message him if they are younger than 18 to his Instagram bio after the incident. The actor no longer has an Instagram account.

Jay Davis, who is the general manager of Franco’s Rabbit Bandini production company, is also named as a defendant in the lawsuit.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/10/04/james-franco-sexual-exploitation-lawsuit-students/

2019-10-04 11:17:24Z
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James Franco faces legal action over sexual misconduct allegations - BBC News

Actor James Franco is being sued for sexual misconduct by two former students at his acting and film school.

They allege that the Hollywood star engaged in "sexually-charged behaviour towards female students".

He is accused of abusing his position by pushing female students into taking part in sex scenes and "dangling the opportunity for roles" in his films.

The Pineapple Express and 127 Hours actor denies the claims, which his lawyer said were "ill-informed".

The legal case, which has been filed at a court in Los Angeles, says the alleged abuses took place at Franco's Studio 4, which opened in 2014 and closed in 2017.

The former students, Sarah Tither-Kaplan and Toni Gaal, said Franco tried to "create a pipeline of young women who were subjected to his personal and professional sexual exploitation in the name of education".

They alleged that students were encouraged to pay $750 (£608) to join a sex scenes masterclass, for which they had to audition nude or partially nude. The sex scenes "went far beyond the standards in the industry", the women said.

Those who performed were led to believe parts in Franco's films would be made available, the legal papers say.

'Debunked'

Tither-Kaplan had previously come forward with allegations of sexual misconduct against the actor/director, shortly after he won a Golden Globe Award for his film The Disaster Artist last year.

When the allegations first surfaced, Franco said they were "not accurate".

In response to the new case, his lawyer Michael Plonsker said: "This is not the first time that these claims have been made and they have already been debunked.

"We have not had an opportunity to review the ill-informed complaint in depth since it was leaked to the press before it was filed and our client has yet to even be served.

"James will not only fully defend himself, but will also seek damages from the plaintiffs and their attorneys for filing this scurrilous publicity-seeking lawsuit."

The two women accused Franco, his production company and his two business partners of sex discrimination, sexual harassment, fraud and other wrongdoing. They are seeking unspecified damages and for any video recordings of the sex scenes to be destroyed.

Follow us on Facebook, or on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.

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https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-49931783

2019-10-04 09:19:43Z
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Miley Cyrus Spotted Kissing Singer Cody Simpson - TMZ

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https://www.tmz.com/2019/10/04/miley-cyrus-kissing-australian-musician-cody-simpson-kissing-friends/

2019-10-04 08:00:00Z
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Post-Surgery Taylor Swift Getting Emotional Over A Banana Is My New Favorite Thing To Watch - BuzzFeed

Taylor Swift Gets Surprised By Jimmy Fallon With Video Of Her Post-Surgery Daze back to top

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https://www.buzzfeed.com/marissamuller/taylor-swift-post-surgery-video-banana

2019-10-04 04:41:00Z
52780400716830

Kamis, 03 Oktober 2019

Kylie Jenner and Tyga Reunite After Travis Scott Breakup - Cosmopolitan.com

Philipp Plein - Front Row - February 2017 - New York Fashion Week: The Shows

Monica SchipperGetty Images

  • Kylie Jenner was seen at her ex-boyfriend Tyga's recording studio just one night after news of her breakup with Travis Scott went public.
  • Sources says "it wasn't an intentional jab at Travis."

    Welp, the plot thickens. Just one day after news of her breakup with Travis Scott hit the internet, Kylie Jenner was seen visiting her ex-boyfriend Tyga's recording studio late Tuesday night. And honestly, WHAT IS HAPPENING???? Multiple sources have confirmed this news including E!, who say the former couple met up late on Tuesday night—after Kylie was out hanging at Delilah with her friends.

    "Kylie wanted to have a girls' night out last night and Stassie thought it would be best to get her out of the house and her mind off the news," a source says. "He was with a few of their mutual friends at Sunset Marquis and invited Kylie and her girlfriends to come hangout, since they were already out."

    Celebrity Sightings in New York City - September 6, 2016
    Kylie and Tyga in September 2016.

    James DevaneyGetty Images

    Um...interesting timing, Tyga! But before you jump to conclusions, E!'s source said that "It wasn't an intentional jab at Travis, but she did hangout with Tyga for a bit. Nothing romantic is going on." Turns out Kylie's social circle is just "small" and "her girlfriends know a few of Tyga's friends as well."

    Reminder that Kylie and Tyga met at Kendall Jenner’s Sweet Sixteen Party in 2011, and started hanging out a ton in 2014. There was a lot of controversy surrounding Kylie's age, and the couple only went public with their relationship when she turned 18. It's sort of surprising that Kylie is chilling with Tyga considering that he's been super petty since their 2017 split, by which I mean he took credit for Kylie’s Lip Kits.

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    https://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/celebs/a29348374/kylie-jenner-tyga-reunite-travis-scott-breakup/

    2019-10-03 10:30:00Z
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    Todd Phillips Was Destined to Make a Movie Like ‘Joker’ - The Ringer

    Todd Phillips has been talking a lot about Joker lately. In his defense, a lot of people have been talking about Joker, Phillips’s take on the Batman villain’s origin story starring Joaquin Phoenix, too—many of them sight unseen. That at least partially explains the director’s defensiveness, if not his tendency to punch wildly at the vaguely defined backlash the film’s attracted since winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Speaking to The Wrap, Phillips noted that “the far left can sound like the far right when it suits their agenda” and said he believes outrage “has been a commodity for a while.” In a Vanity Fair profile of Phoenix, Phillips railed against the “woke culture” that has driven the “funny guys” into exile because “[i]t’s hard to argue with 30 million people on Twitter.” He implies that this perceived development—roundly mocked online—and his desire to continue making irreverent films, has pushed him away from comedy and toward making Joker, a dark, violent, Scorsese-inspired character study that would appear to be a huge departure for a director best known for comedies like Old School and the Hangover trilogy. Except it’s not.

    It’s hard to arrive at a grand theory of Todd Phillips, whose directorial career includes everything from a documentary about Phish to War Dogs, a fact-inspired black comedy about arms dealers. (To say nothing of producing credits that range from the raunchy found-footage comedy Project X to Bradley Cooper’s A Star Is Born.) It’s not hard, however, to find frequent tendencies and driving interests in his work, which from the start has frequently focused on men who come to embrace chaos after feeling hemmed in, emasculated, and oppressed by social norms—in their minds if nowhere else. In fact, if Phillips’s career were to end with Joker, it would have complementary bookends in the form of two movies about social outcasts who cross the line between entertainment and violence.

    Phillips might be the only director whose feature-filmmaking career began with sending his subject a bus ticket to break parole. Running a brisk, thrilling, excruciating 53 minutes, Hated: GG Allin & the Murder Junkies captures some of the final performances of GG Allin, a punk performer whose extreme behavior earned him a cult following over a career that stretched from the mid-’70s until his death from a heroin overdose in 1993, the year of the film’s release—a death that forced Allin to default on his longstanding promise to die by suicide on stage. By then, Allin’s performances had given him a national profile, or at least enough notoriety to earn appearances on The Jerry Springer Show and Geraldo, where he sparred with Geraldo Rivera about his lyrics and showed off his chest tattoo, an image of his own tombstone.

    Rivera could only allude to Allin’s stage act—Phillips captured it in detail. In one trademark appearance, Allin performs nude, defecates on stage, covers himself in his own feces (some of which he appears to consume), then projects it at concertgoers who knew what they signed up for when they bought tickets. Hated might be compelling enough if it were only performance footage, but Phillips does his best to capture Allin in full. He doesn’t attempt to hide Allin’s vile behavior or cover up his history of violence and sexual assault (to say nothing of his pen pal friendship with John Wayne Gacy), but he also seeks out Allin’s high school teachers (one of whom likens him to a wolverine) and captures Allin, in a coherent moment, recounting a childhood that included seeing his father dig graves for his family in the cellar of his childhood home in New Hampshire. Elsewhere, Phillips lets Allin offer the most persuasive defense of his life and art as an ongoing act of rebellion against society and a punk-inspired attempt “to bring danger back into rock and roll.” It’s a journey that takes Hated deep into “Dude, at least it’s an ethos” territory but, well, at least it’s an ethos. It also positions Allin as the first in a line of Phillips protagonists who live outside of the norms of society, pushed too far by the perceived disappointments and hypocrisies of the straight world.

    The film earned a limited release, where it attracted mixed reviews but found an appreciative audience as a “You have to see this to believe it” item in the video store era. Phillips’s next project, codirected with his then-partner Andrew Gurland, wouldn’t make it even that far. Frat House premiered at Sundance in 1998, where it shared the Grand Jury Prize for documentaries. The film’s depiction of the brutal hazing rituals practiced by college fraternities immediately created a stir that would curdle into controversy when some involved questioned the veracity of the footage. Eventually, the controversy became loud enough for HBO to kill its plans to air the film.

    Phillips has since defended his technique in making Frat House, but has also equivocated on the subject of the accusations. In a 2000 interview published by Vice in 2010, he suggested HBO suppressed the film because “you turn your cameras on the sons and daughters of rich white Americans, you’re going to get heat for it,” while also pushing back against claims that he staged footage and shot scenes repeatedly. He also offered a curious definition of “good” documentary filmmaking, saying, “It’s screenwriting. You write the movie before you show up. And you manipulate everybody in the room to say exactly what you want them to say. That, I’m guilty of. That is how I make documentaries.”

    Watching Frat House now, it seems remarkable it was taken so seriously at the time. Faked or not, Frat House opts for the sensationalistic tone of the kind of easily shocked talk shows that would book GG Allin. Early on, Phillips warns in voice-over, “Few of us know what really happens when the parties are over,” then proceeds to plunge head-first into the deep end of frat excess. It would have easily fit into the landscape of ’90s HBO, dotted with shows like Real Sex and Taxicab Confessions. (Phillips even worked as a driver early in the run of Taxicab Confessions, a show that didn’t have a spotless history when it came to presenting urban legends as true stories.) But it really belongs in the “mondo” genre, alongside films like Mondo Cane and Faces of Death, whose desire to shock and titillate overwhelms all other concerns, including veracity.

    After the perfectly pleasant Phish documentary Bittersweet Motel, Phillips would abandon the world of nonfiction filmmaking for studio comedies. But the break wouldn’t be quite as dramatic as it might sound. Phillips stayed on campus—at least initially—for 2000’s Road Trip, part of the wave of post–American Pie comedies to fill theaters in the early ’00s. It’s mostly notable for featuring Tom Green, then a popular MTV personality famous for deadpanning his way through absurdist, boundary-pushing pranks. He’s not GG Allin, but he’s driven by some of the same disruptive impulses (insofar as those impulses could be channeled into basic cable and R-rated teen comedies). A hit, Road Trip led to Phillips’s appreciably better second comedy, 2003’s Old School. Another, much warmer look at the fraternity world, it stars Luke Wilson, Will Ferrell, and Vince Vaughn as a trio of buddies who take advantage of Wilson’s character moving to a house near a college campus after he discovers his wife has been holding orgies in their home without his knowledge. Through a series of convolutions, they end up starting a frat of their own, complete with hazing rituals (less purposefully sadistic than those of Frat House), wild parties, and youthful regressions to push back the specter of middle age.

    Phillips’s best comedy, Old School benefits from an unexpected soulfulness. Wilson’s Mitch is merely looking for purpose, partnership, and a sense of community. Beanie (Vaughn), the most enthusiastic of the latter-day frat bros, ultimately only wants to dip his toe into the scene without cheating on his wife or blowing up the life they’ve built. But it’s Ferrell’s performance as Frank “The Tank” Ricard, a man shaken to his core by his dissatisfaction with the predictability of married life and a routine defined by trips to Home Depot and Bed Bath & Beyond, that gives the film depth. Ferrell’s bare ass gets the easy laughs, but his panicked eyes tell another story. For Frank, the only way out of the trap of his life is to blow it up.

    The next year saw Phillips following the success of Old School with Starsky & Hutch, a fun riff on the once-popular cop show that got a lot of mileage out of ’70s references and the easy charm of stars Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson. Since then, Phillips has mostly offered variations on themes introduced in Old School: men rebelling against a world that won’t let them be themselves and who throw away the rules after discovering the world runs on sham principles anyway.

    In School for Scoundrels, his 2006 remake of a 1960 British comedy, Jon Heder plays Roger, a New York parking enforcement officer who can’t talk to his attractive neighbor, Amanda (Jacinda Barrett), without fainting and who lets those he tickets bully him into paying their fines for him (and into giving up his shoes in the process). At the suggestion of a friend, he enrolls in a class run by Dr. P (Billy Bob Thornton), whose curriculum repurposes lessons gleaned from pick-up artists and Fight Club for a class filled with weak-willed men (played by comedy ringers like Matt Walsh, Paul Scheer, and Aziz Ansari). Soon, Dr. P’s meek students are starting fights with strangers and lying to women in attempts to get them into bed. And it works. “Roger,” Dr. P tells his student, “there are two types of men in this world: Those who run shit, like me. And those who eat shit, like you.” And though the film pushes back on this grim vision of life as an endless power struggle by exposing Dr. P as—gasp—a married man living in the suburbs, nothing suggests he’s wrong, either. The only real rule seems to be that there are no real rules, and the film doesn’t really have much to say beyond this. It stacks the deck against Roger by presenting a world in which men are either bullies or sheep, and women are either sweet trophies to be won, like Amanda, or shrill harridans, like Amanda’s roommate Becky (Sarah Silverman), who can’t go two sentences without questioning Roger’s sexuality.

    Phillips’s highly successful The Hangover and its two sequels take place in a similar world. In the first outing, released in 2009, a trip to Las Vegas prompts meek dentist Stu Price (Ed Helms) to stand up to his domineering girlfriend and gives schoolteacher Phil Wenneck (Bradley Cooper) a respite from the dullness of quiet married life. Only Alan (Zach Galifianakis), an oddball who lives in his own reality, seems untouched by the oppressiveness of everyday existence, and it’s Alan who provides their escape by accidentally administering roofies to the whole gang (which also includes Doug, a mostly colorless plot device played by Justin Bartha).

    Three elements combined to make The Hangover a hit: Galifianakis’s inimitable presence and ability to destabilize even the most mundane scene, a clever premise that found the protagonists scrambling to piece together the events of the night before, and Phillips’s understanding that comedy would have to scale up to blockbuster proportions to compete with the superhero films that had started to dominate the box office by 2009. The Hangover caught on with audiences due to its wild energy and surprising twists and turns. But the unpredictability that made it seem so fresh was, by definition, not so easy to replicate, especially as the movie’s two sequels grew increasingly mean-spirited and abandoned any emotional investment in the characters, or even making them seem like human beings. When Alan accidentally beheads a giraffe in The Hangover Part III, Phil sums up the series’ attitude toward, well, just about everything: “He killed a giraffe. Who gives a fuck?”

    As if in an attempt to counterbalance the nihilistic notes of The Hangover series, Phillips’s Due Date overdoes the sentimentality via a variation on Planes, Trains and Automobiles that pairs Robert Downey Jr. with Galifianakis in a race to make it back home before the former character’s wife gives birth. Released in 2010, between The Hangover and the first sequel, it’s the only Phillips film that doesn’t suggest that settled-down stability could be anything but a ball-shearing trap. But while Downey and Galifianakis make for a fun team, the film’s stabs at big comic set pieces just feel loud and busy, and its attempts at warmth feel insincere, more scripted than felt.

    By contrast, Phillips’s first post–Hangover trilogy project, War Dogs, features virtually no sentiment, and is all the better for it. Adapting a Rolling Stone story about unlikely arms dealers taking advantage of Pentagon contracts during the Iraq War, the film stars Miles Teller as David, a low-earning Miami massage therapist who grows rich beyond his wildest dreams when his childhood friend Efraim (Jonah Hill) brings him into the shady world of buying and selling weapons online, which David embraces just as fast as he can shed his ethical qualms and anti-war convictions. After successfully lying and exploiting loopholes between bong hits, they eventually find themselves in over their heads and thrust into the middle of the action in ways they’d never anticipated—all before David realizes Efraim is, at heart, a sociopath who will say anything to anyone to get what he wants. Played well by Hill in a tricky performance, Efraim’s the ultimate realization of a certain type of man Phillips had been depicting, mostly admiringly, for years: a smug operator not bound by the morals or personal entanglements that weigh down others. Determined to run shit, not eat it, he’s the ultimate realization of the sort of character that’s long fascinated Phillips.

    That War Dogs reveals Efraim as a villain suggests a dawning self-awareness about the characters and stories that have filled Phillips’s films. And in the tradition of Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, Casino, and their ilk, War Dogs makes Efraim’s world seem thrilling up to the point when it becomes impossible to ignore its moral rot. It’s a tricky balancing act, capturing the thrill of transgression without endorsing it or making heroes out of the bad guys. So perhaps it’s not surprising that much of the debate whirling around Joker concerns whether or not Phillips has found a similar balance in a film inspired by a different strand of Scorsese’s career, one in which he explored alienation, loneliness, and violence with a mix of queasy sympathy and a deep consideration of his story’s implications. A man who overcomes victimization with violence, Joker’s protagonist, though hauntingly portrayed by Phoenix, feels like one of Phillips’s put-upon rebels taken to a logical, bloody extreme. The movie brings the director full circle via a story of a man for whom performance and violence are one and the same. But it also raises a question: Has Phillips’s whole career led to him assuming the role of a shock artist?

    Keith Phipps is a writer and editor specializing in film and TV. Formerly: Uproxx, The Dissolve, and The A.V. Club.

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    https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/10/3/20895740/joker-director-todd-phillips-history-hangover

    2019-10-03 09:30:00Z
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