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Rihanna's Fast Track to Disaster: "Rihanna loves to party, but this past month she's gotten really out of control. She's been drinking almost every day and talking about smoking weed a lot too." On Twitter, "she often tweets about '420,' a popular term for smoking marijuana," and "makes no effort to hide her nonstop alcohol consumption." She stopped off at "Club Perfection in Queens" at 2 a.m. on May 2, to "dance with and throw money at the strippers" at the "grimy strip club." She shrugs off similarities to Whitney Houston, but crazy nights have "become the norm" for the 24-year-old. "She's actually a very lonely girl," says a friend. "She gets fed up with sitting in her hotel room, so she goes out drinking." She was hoping to get back together with Chris Brown, but Brown "returned to his girlfriend Karrueche Tran and even got a tattoo of her face inked on his arm to prove his love and loyalty. When Chris got the tattoo, Rihanna freaked out. She's been obsessed with the thought that he's going to marry Karrueche and she'll never be able to get back with him. She's heartbroken and in a bad place. She's been numbing the pain with alcohol." She likes to test boundaries. "When people tell her she's a role model, she goes crazy. She doesn't want to hear it. If anything, she rebels and goes out and does something even more shocking than the time before." When she "posted a picture of a substance that appeared to resemble cocaine" her managers got mad, but "she responded by claiming to be in a lesbian relationship with her friend Melissa Forde." Riri "loves being a bad girl and shocking people. She says she's having fun, but it's clear she's acting out because she's in a lot of emotional pain."
Some years, it’s a stretch to come up with five decent candidates for Best Actress; such are the seemingly permanent inequities of the movie business. So it’s a pleasure to report that, despite a deeply problematic set of films, this year’s field is actually stronger than the roster of Best Actor candidates — the women contending for nominations this year did more with less. (But why should they have to? That’s another story.)
Just before today’s 5:30 a.m. press event announcing the Golden Globe nominations, a Hollywood Foreign Press Association arranger wearily droned into the microphone, “We’re three minutes away. Can we get talent back in the room, please?” Dude, it’s the Globes: Talent was never in the room. And talent, taste, even the movies themselves seemed to have little to do with the relentless blare of nomination announcements — the Broadcast Film Critics Association Critic’s Choice nominations on Tuesday, the Screen Actors Guild nominations on Wednesday, the Globes this morning — that made every day feel like Christmas. That is, if what was under the tree included several empty boxes and a couple of immaculately wrapped turds.
Robert De Niro and John Travolta will co-star in the thriller Killing Season, to be directed by Ghost Rider’s Mark Steven Johnson. It features De Niro as a retired military guy living in a cabin in the woods and Travolta as a European tourist who befriends him; eventually, it turns out Travolta is a Serbian soldier seeking revenge. That actually sounds pretty cool, but let's not forget that the last time De Niro teamed up with a fellow legend with whom he’d never shared significant screen time, it with was with Pacino for Righteous Kill, and we all agreed that was an utter disaster. [Deadline]
Today controversial Danish director Lars Von Trier removed his foot from his mouth for long enough to close it for good. After a surprise visit from his local constabulary to follow up on the possibility that Von Trier had violated a French law forbidding the public justification of war crimes (!) when he made his now infamous comments claiming sympathy for Adolf Hitler at Cannes earlier in the year — the filmmaker released a statement silencing himself for the forseeable future. Because he lacks “the skills to express” himself unequivocally, Von Trier claims he will now refrain from all public statements and interviews.
