Forest Whitaker will be starring and directing in the new Louis Armstrong biopic, What a Wonderful World.

He better not suck - cuz, since he's directing it, he can't blame anyone but himself!

The flick is being made by the Paris-base company Legende.

The film's exec producer will be Oscar Cohen, who actually worked with Armstrong in the late 1940s as his road manager.

As for the script, that will be written by Ron Bass who also wrote My Best Friend's Wedding and Entrapment.

Whitaker said, "Armstrong left a monumental mark on our lives and our culture. He lived an amazing life and, through his art, shifted the way music was played and would be heard after him, not just here in the US but all over the world."

Let's hope the movie doesn't bomb.

[Image via WENN.]

This needs to stop. In Body of Lies, Russell Crowe once again pulls out his oldest gimmick: The Contrarian Detail. Again and again, Crowe plays tough guys — and tries to humanize them with some too poetic, too cute detail, to ridiculous, distracting effect. His Black Bart cowboy had a taste for painting in 3:10 to Yuma (remember him sketching the sagebrush in between gunfights?). His fearless sea captain had a fine hand with the violin in Master and Commander (how’d he keep that thing in tune?). And now, like his sensitive divorced dad–tough cop in American Gangster, his absurdly evil, Rumsfeldian CIA mastermind in Body of Lies is a magnet for soccer-dad clichés, ferrying his kids back and forth to school while plotting assassinations on his cell phone.

After breaking through with coherent, focused performances in Romper Stomper, Love in Limbo, and L.A. Confidential, Crowe hit on his formula in Gladiator. “The big mistake is their monolithism,” said Crowe, badmouthing other heroes. “The approach to my character is different, more subtle … [He] has a wife and a son, vineyard and olive groves … It can’t be more different to the action heroes you’re talking about. They’re crude characters with a gun in their hands!” After romanticizing that Roman killing machine as a loving dad and husband, Crowe won an Oscar.

Since then, Crowe hasn’t just rounded out his characters, he’s slathered them with odd accents, uncharacteristic hobbies, and odd tics. He always needs more to play (and, yes, it’s fair to lay the blame on him, since he has more control than most actors in the business. As Sam Raimi once said, "The problem with working with Russell is that he always has a good idea"). Unfortunately, Crowe hasn’t made his characters more interesting by giving them surprising characteristics, he’s just made them ridiculous. (Weirdly, his best recent films have been with Ron Howard, who’s pathologically averse to complexity.) Below, a few examples:

The Rough Sailor As Soulful Violinist: In Master and Commander, his Captain Jack Aubrey is not only a fearsome sailor, he has a beautiful artistic soul. He discusses literature with his best friend (Paul Bettany) and plays violin in his spare time. “Those same callused, thickened hands then pick up this delicate, feminine instrument, the violin,” crowed Crowe. “He will play from his heart the things he can never say.”

The Evil Gunslinger As Soulful Sketch Artist: In 3:10 to Yuma, not only can bad man Ben Wade bed prostitutes and shoot the wings off a horsefly from a hundred yards, he can draw! The rough-rider artiste likes long walks and sketching the horizon, or naked female form, romantically framing one drawing on a scraggly piece of scrub brush for Christian Bale to discover.

Mean Streets Plus Kramer vs. Kramer: Since real-life hard-ass detective Ritchie Roberts apparently wasn’t interesting enough, Crowe gives him a complicated home life and a child-custody case to fight in American Gangster.

The Wall Street Asshole As Great Guy: In a way, the preposterous film A Good Year is entirely a collection of contrarian tics. We’re told that Max is a Wall Street asshole prick good-for-nothing, but everything he does proves that he’s a wonderful, tender, wounded soul who had a magical childhood. Everything is overkill; nothing makes any psychological sense.

Rumsfeld As Soccer Dad: None of Crowe’s yin-yang characters are more egregiously rounded than the insane soccer-mom Pentagon sonofabitch he plays in Body of Lies. Over and over again, Crowe is seen driving kids to school, or watching their soccer games, at the exact moments that Leonardo DiCaprio happens to call his cell phone with a new update on a high-profile Middle Eastern catastrophe. This allows Crowe to yell threats and issue life-or-death commands in a weird country-boy accent — while lovingly dropping off his daughter at school in the SUV. Isn’t that just crazy? Yeah, it is.

What’s Next? His next part isn’t just one dream role of contrarian more-is-more gimmickry. It’s two: Russell Crowe will play both Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham in his next film with the ever-indulgent Ridley Scott. Crowe’s revisionist Robin Hood sounds like it will reveal Hood as a hood and the Sheriff as a caring father and lute player.

According to the folks over at The Enquirer who, in my opinion blew the Jamie Lynn Spears story, but who I still have great affection for are reporting that Avril Lavigne and her husband Deryck Whibley are dunzo. Is that word? When did it become appropriate to put z’s in the place of the letter s all the time. I’m really waiting for that day when the US starts spelling boys, as “boyz.” Anyway, apparently Deryck sobered up or got off his meds or something because he realized that maybe he and Avril are not right for each other. Is she ever right for anyone at anytime?

The Enquirer says he is partying too much because his career is for crap. Well, her career is not exactly rolling along either. I don’t know how many more years she can get away with those tweener bubble gum pop songs of hers, but whatever. The Enquirer also said that Deryck had been spotted a club holding some woman’s hand. Yep, that is a sure sign of infidelity and a breakup in a marriage. The hand holding. That’s why no one wanted to do Hands Across America.

With Avril gone on a world tour, Deryck had no one to turn to except his friends and a bottle. Hey, that sounds like my life. Lucky for Deryck, Avril Lavigne has money so he probably won’t have to move back home and live in the basement with his parents. Oh, and update on that. Moving out soon. Yep, and it isn’t a halfway house or anything. It actually as a four walls and, gasp, windows.

(source)

A little over one year ago:
1) Consumer confidence stood at a 2 1/2 year high;
2) Regular gasoline sold for $2.19 a gallon;
3) the unemployment rate was 4.5%.
4) the DOW JONES hit a record high--14,000 +
5) American's were buying new cars, taking cruises, vacations overseas, living large!...

But American's wanted 'CHANGE'! So, in 2006 they voted in a Democratic Congress and yes--we got 'CHANGE' all right. In the PAST YEAR:

1) Consumer confidence has plummeted;
2) Gasoline is now over $4 a gallon & climbing!;
3) Unemployment is up to 5.5% (a 10% increase);
4) Americans have seen their home equity drop by $12 TRILLION DOLLARS and prices still dropping;
5) 1% of American homes are in foreclosure.
6) as I write, THE DOW is probing another low~~
$2.5 TRILLION DOLLARS HAS EVAPORATED FROM THEIR STOCKS, BONDS & MUTUAL FUNDS INVESTMENT
PORTFOLIOS!

YES, IN 2006 AMERICA VOTED FOR CHANGE...AND WE SURE GOT IT! ...

REMEMBER THE PRESIDENT HAS NO CONTROL OVER ANY OF THESE ISSUES, ONLY CONGRESS.

AND WHAT HAS CONGRESS DONE IN THE LAST TWO YEARS, TO CHANGE THINGS FOR THE BETTER? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Well, they try to blame the president for everything, so that is something, right?

NOW THE DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT CLAIMS HE IS GOING TO REALLY GIVE US CHANGE ALONG WITH A DEMOCRATIC CONGRESS!!!!

JUST HOW MUCH MORE 'CHANGE' DO YOU THINK YOU CAN STAND?

Polls earlier this year showed Sen. John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, leading Obama, his Democratic rival, in Virginia by a healthy margin.

A Virginia Commonwealth University poll taken May 12-18 had McCain leading 47 percent to 39 percent.

But as the financial crisis has shaken voters' confidence in the economy, Obama has begun to open a lead in the state, as he has done in other battleground states.

The latest CNN poll of polls has Obama leading McCain 49 percent to 45 percent. A CNN/TIME/Opinion Research Corporation poll conducted September 28-30 shows Obama with an even bigger lead over McCain, 53 percent to 44 percent. The CNN poll's margin of error was plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Polls show that voters have more confidence in Obama to handle the economic crisis than they do in McCain, and are more likely to blame Republicans for the recent turmoil than Democrats.

Beside an advantage on the economy, Obama is also benefiting from a demographic shift that has reshaped Virginia politics.

For the last 10 presidential elections, Republicans have been able to bank on Virginia delivering its 13 electoral votes to the GOP. President Bush won Virginia by 8 percentage points in both 2000 and 2004, and President Bill Clinton was never able to capture the state when he ran in 1992 and 1996.

But the explosive growth of Northern Virginia in the last decade has changed the state's electorate. Drawn by government jobs in nearby Washington and high-tech jobs in the Dulles corridor, the growing population in Northern Virginia is more liberal than the mostly rural southern portion of the state, which has remained reliably Republican.

In 2000, Bush carried Northern Virginia 49 percent to 47 percent, but in 2004, Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, carried the area 51 percent to 48 percent.

Virginia "is not as red as people think," said Doc Thompson, a conservative talk show host for WRVA radio. "A third of the population in Northern Virginia is pretty liberal. A lot of people are buying into [Obama's] notion of change."

Virginia Democrats have been able to exploit the changes in the electorate into statewide electoral success after years in which the Republicans had a virtual lock on the state.

In fact, Virginia Republicans have not won a statewide race since Mark Warner, a former mobile phone company executive, captured the governorship for the Democrats in 2001 by emphasizing economic growth.

Democrat Tim Kaine, who was Warner's lieutenant governor, succeeded Warner in 2005. And in what may have been the most surprising result of the 2006 election cycle, Democrat Jim Webb defeated the incumbent Republican George Allen in the race for one of Virginia's seats in the U.S. Senate.

The trend favoring the Democrats is expected to continue this year, which is expected to help drive Virginia Democrats to the polls.

The extremely popular Warner is almost certain to win this year's race against another former governor, Republican Jim Gilmore, to replace Virginia's long-standing Republican senator, John Warner, who is retiring. (The two Warners are not related, and John Warner was unopposed in 2002.)

A Washington Post-ABC News poll conducted in late September found Warner leading Gilmore by 30 points, and Warner's victory would give Democrats control of both of Virginia's seats in the U.S. Senate for the first time since 1970.

While conservatives may be demoralized by Gilmore's poor showing, McCain may also face eroding support from Virginia conservatives for his recent proposals for the government to become heavily involved in the U.S. economy, said Thompson, the radio talk show host.

During Tuesday night's presidential debate, McCain suggested that the government directly buy up to $300 billion in home mortgages to help homeowners facing foreclosure.

Thompson said that proposal, along with his support for a $700 billion bailout package to help Wall Street firms that McCain voted for last week, are two signs that McCain is breaking from the free-market principles that Virginia conservatives support and not stopping "the march toward socialism" that has begun since the economic crisis started.

"They missed a real opportunity, certainly, in Virginia with my listeners who say they want someone who is fiscally conservative," said Thompson, who added that he's considering voting for a third-party candidate. "They could have come out and said, 'no more spending.' "

Source: http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/09/virginia.battleground/index.html

We Say...

Whilst we're all up for the 'socks 'n' shoes' look (and it works particularly well with Mary-Janes, so well done, Cotton), we're not quite sure that it totally works when paired with ankle-length jeans and a big old winter coat. Although, based on how cold it's turned recently, we can't blame Fearne for covering every inch of skin up! On a more positive note, we can't really fault anything else - great coat, great bag, great big bow in her hair.

You Say...

Gareth Candlin, 27, Dispute Resolution Manager from London

Overall, I actually like this outfit (bet you weren't expecting me to say that). I love a girl in skinny jeans (as long as it's a quality pair) and the coat, despite being a bit too big, is a cool print. I even like that bow-thing in her hair (and, speaking of her hair, it looks great - really shiny). The only thing I really don't like (you knew it was coming...) is the grey socks worn with shoes. I just don't understand this trend - why do girls think it's a good look? For me, it just reminds me of the girls in the playground at school - and that's surely not how you want us to see you...