Manila Life Online - bits n pieces: October 2012

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Global 2012: Star Wars: Episode 7 Coming in 2015

Star Wars episode 3 coin (Photo credit: kevin dooley)

The Force is strong with this one: In a major surprise, a seventh "Star Wars" film entitled "Episode 7" is slated to be released in 2015 -- and will launch a new trilogy with which George Lucas pledges to hand off the intergalactic saga to "a new generation of filmmakers."

The news comes as Disney announced it has purchased Lucas' Lucasfilm for $4.05 billion. Disney Chief Financial Officer Jay Rasulo said in a conference call that the company has a "very lengthy treatment" in hand to begin the development proces for the start of the new trilogy -- one that will likely be in 3-D.

Disney CEO Bob Iger said the company plans to release a new "Star Wars" film every two to three years after "Episode 7."

The box-office impact will be enormous. "Star Wars" films have earned a total of $4.4 billion in global box office to date.

"For the past 35 years, one of my greatest pleasures has been to see 'Star Wars' passed from one generation to the next," said Lucas, the 68-year-old chairman and CEO of Lucasfilm. "It's now time for me to pass 'Star Wars' on to a new generation of filmmakers. I've always believed that 'Star Wars' could live beyond me, and I thought it was important to set up the transition during my lifetime."

Lucas will serve as a creative consultant on the films, with Kathleen Kennedy, the current co-chair of Lucasfilm, executive producing. She will join Disney as the president of Lucasfilm, reporting to Walt Disney Studios Chairman Alan Horn to integrate and build the franchise.

But that doesn't answer the question of who will be given the awesome task of scripting and directing the next "Star Wars" film. For countless fans-turned-filmmakers, continuing the "Star Wars" legacy will be one of the most enticing and intimidating jobs imaginable.

The title of the new film installment suggests that it will continue after 1983's "Return of the Jedi," the sixth episode in Lucas' series. The three most recent films, episodes 1 through 3, were prequels to the original, 1977 "Star Wars," also known as "Episode IV: A New Hope."

Lucas' exit from the franchise comes after his trilogy of prequels, with films released in 1999, 2002 and 2005, scored at the box office but disappointed some longtime fans. Whoever takes over the saga will have to not only live up to original films, which many treat almost as a religion but avoid what they saw as the missteps of "The Phantom Menace," "Attack of the Clones" and "Revenge of the Sith."

Bringing back Jar-Jar Binks would not be a wise move.

The original "Star Wars," with its oddly named characters, flashing lightsabers, and complicated plot involving something called "The Force," seemed laughably unlikely to succeed when it appeared in 1977.

But it quickly became a global phenomenon that inspired a generation of blockbusters. Lines from "Use the force, Luke," to "I am your father" -- Darth Vader's chilling revelation in "The Empire Strikes Back" -- became some of the the most quoted in film history.

Disney also plans to continue developing "Star Wars"-related projects for theme parks and television. The animated series "The Clone Wars" debuted on the Cartoon Network in 2008.

In 1986, George Lucas executive produced the "Star Wars"-influenced 3D Michael Jackson film "Captain Eo" that played at Disney parks. The ride "Star Tours," in which guests visited different corners of the "Star Wars" universe, debuted the next year.

http://tv.yahoo.com/news/star-wars-episode-7-coming-2015-lucas-hands-205350873.html

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Global 2012: 'Friends' creators: Matt LeBlanc surprised us with how well he could play dumb

Global 2012: Taylor Swift Reaches Breaking Point Over Boys On ‘Ellen’ Show

English: Taylor Swift at the 2010 Time 100. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There's plenty of fodder for discussion regarding Taylor Swift this week--after all, the country/pop cutie has just released her fourth album, Red, which has already spawned several rapid-fire hits and is anticipated to crack 1 million in first-week sales. However, when the superstar appeared on the Ellen DeGeneres show Thursday, DeGeneres just skipped to what fans really want to talk about: Boys, of course.

In fact, DeGeneres teased Swift so mercilessly about the subject--to the point of playing a slideshow of the singer's past flames--that Swift actually had a mini-breakdown on air.

"Stop it, stop it, stop it!" she screamed. "This makes me feel so bad about myself. Every time I come up here, you put a different dude up on the screen. It just makes me really question what I stand for as a human being."

One can hardly blame poor Swift for reaching the breaking point. DeGeneres started off the interview by repeatedly insisting Swift and her Lorax co-star Zac Efron were an item at one point. ("We never dated," protested Swift. "Yes you did," fired back DeGeneres. "Why do you deny it?")

Then, DeGeneres offered to discuss Swift's new album--and, by "discuss," we mean she attempted to get Swift to disclose which ex-boyfriend the hit "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" is about.

"Here's what I'll do. You don't have to say," DeGeneres offered, handing a baffled Swift a large bell and indicating a screen behind the pair. "I'm gonna show you pictures, here's a bell, and you ring it when..."

"Oh my God!" exclaimed Swift. "I don't know if I'm going to do this. This is the one shred of dignity that I have."

DeGeneres, undaunted, started a slideshow showing Swift posing with various men--including everyone from John Mayer to Danny DeVito. After DeGeneres gleefully rang the bell herself a few times, Swift finally put her head in her hands and cried for mercy.

"There's never been two guys on the screen two visits in a row," she pleaded with DeGeneres. "It's sad."

"Well, you have to come more often," quipped DeGeneres. "Just so you can say 'He's still there!'"

DeGeneres didn't just torture her celeb guest about romantic issues. She also pranked Swift, who confessed earlier to a fear of earwigs, by having a production member dressed up as a giant bug sneak up on the singer--causing her to jump and squeal, much to the delight of the audience.

http://music.yahoo.com/blogs/our-country/taylor-swift-reaches-breaking-point-over-boys-ellen-184631252.html

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Global 2012: Honda Fit She’s, the world’s only car aimed exclusively at women

2010 Honda Fit photographed in College Park, Maryland, USA. Category:Second-generation Honda Fit (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Around the world, building and designing cars remains a male-dominated business, and many companies live by an old axiom that women will buy a man's car but men won't buy a woman's car. While a few companies have attempted to bend that rule, only Honda has chosen to embrace it with the Honda Fit She's -- the only model built by an automaker today aimed exclusively at women. Hope you like pink, ladies.

There's a long and embarrassing history of automakers attempting to lure women with ladies-only models. At the turn of the 20th century, electric cars were marketed to wives with the pitch that their lack of hand-crank starting would avoid broken shoulders and/or death. In 1955, Chrysler made a bid for feminine attention with the Dodge LaFemme -- which came in a two-tone pink-and-white paint scheme, along with a storage place for the matching purse and rain hat. Lest you think modern executives learned from errors of the past, in 2000 Ford showed off a concept Windstar minivan developed with Maytag featuring a compact washer/dryer, microwave and vacuum in the rear hatch, because why would a soccer mom ever want to be parted from her appliances?

As women have grown to buy more cars in recent decades -- accounting for about one-third of car shoppers in the United States -- such attempts have given way to more savvy marketing. But in Japan, the gender divide remains more stark; half of all working-age women stay out of the workforce due to more stringent societal pressure to choose homemaking over careers, a major reason Japan's economy has been stuck in a rut for decades. But there's a cohort of younger Japanese women putting work first, and in a weak market Honda sees an opening.

Launched this summer, the Honda Fit She's designers say they wanted to take a regular Fit subcompact and make it in their words "adult cute." That means lots of pink: Pink stitching in the seats and steering wheel and floor mats, matched by pink metallic bezels around the shifter and displays. There's also a few extra shades of pink in the special She's badge, spelled with a heart for an apostrophe. If pink isn't a customer's style, Japanese buyers can also select a Fit She's in shades of brown and white that a Honda executive told the Yomuri Shinbun newspaper match the color of eyeshadow.

To Honda's credit, the Fit She's beauty treatment isn't just skin deep. It also comes with special windshield glass that cuts 99 percent of ultraviolet rays and a "Plasmacluster" air conditioning system that Honda claims can improve a driver's skin quality, all aimed at stopping those wrinkles that turn adult cute into just adult. With a starting price of $17,500, the Fit She's got an attractive price for a home-market Japanese car -- but automakers wouldn't need special editions if taking advice from women wasn't such a noteworthy event.

http://autos.yahoo.com/blogs/motoramic/honda-fit-she-world-only-car-aimed-exclusively-205422886.html

Saturday, October 20, 2012

Global 2012: Halle Berry on Why She's Had Bad Choices in Men

Introducing Dorothy Dandridge (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Halle Berry, 46, is opening up about her failed past relationships in a new interview with T, The New York Times Style Magazine, where she says "her picker's broken" when it comes to men.

Berry's rocky relationships are no secret. The collapse of Berry's four-year marriage to baseball player David Justice resulted in a suicide attempt, her second husband Eric Benet went into sex rehab and admitted to cheating on her repeatedly, and now she is currently in a custody struggle with her daughter Nahla's father Gabriel Aubry.

"My picker's broken," Berry tells T about her ability to choose men. "God just wanted to mix up my life. Maybe he was thinking, 'This girl can't get everything! I'm going to give her a broken picker.'"

But now that she's engaged to Olivier Martinez, she says her picker is apparently "fixed now."

According to Berry, part of her questionable past choices comes from her admitted low self-esteem.

"Just because they see my face doesn't mean they see me. A person's self-esteem has nothing to do with how she looks," she says. "If it's true that I'm beautiful, I'm proof of that. Self-esteem comes from who you have in your life. How you were raised. What you struggled with as a child."

Her childhood struggles include being raised by a single mother and having a hard time fitting in due to being bi-racial.

"My mother tried hard," Berry says. "But there was no substitute for having a black woman I could identify with, who could teach me about being black."

"I always had to prove myself through my actions,"she recalls about being the lone black student in a nearly all-white school. "Be a cheerleader. Be class president. Be the editor of the newspaper. It gave me a way to show who I was without being angry or violent. By the time I left school, I had a lot of tenacity. I'd turned things around."

Still, her "humble beginnings" very much affect her today -- even on the night she won an Oscar for Monster's Ball.

"I always felt like the underdog. Behind the eight ball. I learned not to be too high on the hog," she explains. "Even that night I won the Oscar, I had a fundamental knowing, it was just a moment in time. Driving home that night, back to my house, I felt like Cinderella. I said, 'When this night is over, I'm going back to who I was.' And I did."

http://omg.yahoo.com/news/halle-berry-why-shes-had-bad-choices-men-161400233.html

Saturday, October 6, 2012

Global 2012: Pacquiao vs Floyd Mayweather... up to "Money"

Floyd Mayweather, Jr in a WWE ring. Bradley Center, Milwaukee, WI. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The burden, finally, is fully and entirely on Floyd Mayweather Jr. to make a fight with Manny Pacquiao.

Pacquiao agreed Thursday during appearances on two separate television shows on ESPN to give Mayweather a 55-45 advantage on a financial split should they fight, as the public has been demanding since late 2009. A match between them is expected to be the most lucrative bout in boxing history.

Pacquiao, who meets Juan Manuel Marquez for a fourth time on Dec. 8 in Las Vegas, had been demanding a 50-50 split. Without such a split, he’d said repeatedly over the last 18 months that he would not agree to a fight with Mayweather.

The other major hurdle blocking the fight between the two men regarded by many as the two best in the world was Mayweather's demand for Olympic-style drug testing. Initially, Pacquiao balked at the testing. He has since changed his stance and has said repeatedly over the last year he would fully comply with the tests, just as Shane Mosley, Victor Ortiz and Miguel Cotto have done in Mayweather's last three fights.

In a telephone interview with Yahoo! Sports on Monday, Pacquiao made no mention of a purse split, but he was as optimistic about the possibility of a fight with Mayweather as he had ever been.

"I think Mayweather will be next," Pacquiao said, declining to specify why.

But by agreeing to give Mayweather the lion's share of the purse, Pacquiao has shifted the onus to Mayweather.

If Mayweather raises new objections, then it becomes obvious he's not serious and is playing some sort of game.

But at this stage, with the demand for the bout seemingly waning a bit because of all the inaction and drama that has surrounded the talks, it would be a miscalculation for Mayweather to add more conditions.

Mayweather is very much aware of his place in history and wants the fight badly because he doesn't feel as if he's received enough credit for his achievements. He’s 43-0 with 26 knockouts. He won a bronze medal at the 1996 Olympics, though his loss in the semifinals was an outrageously bad call. As a pro, he's won world titles at 130, 135, 140, 147 and 154 pounds.

He has spoken of being rated the greatest fighter ever, and to do that, he'd have to beat the best opponent of his era. Without question, for Mayweather, that is Pacquiao.

To make the fight, though, Mayweather must also stay out of further legal trouble. He was paroled in August after serving just under two months of a six-month sentence for misdemeanor domestic violence. Part of the sentence was suspended, but he could be required by Las Vegas judge Melissa Saragosa to serve that time if he has another incident with the law.

http://sports.yahoo.com/news/manny-pacquiao-floyd-mayweather-55-45-financial-split-superfight.html;_ylt=Am5TVSnKsnrZRbpv4n2q01KUxLYF;_ylu=X3oDMTQxdGRxNTlnBG1pdANGRUFUVVJFRCBNZWdhdHJvbiBCT1hJTkcEcGtnAzFkNWE1NjQ2LTgwMTUtMzA2Ny1hMWM4LThkNDVkYmRlM2FhNQRwb3MDMQRzZWMDbWVnYXRyb24EdmVyA2M2MWRiOGIzLTAzODAtMTFlMi05ZmZmLTJmYjc0YTg4NzY1Yg--;_ylg=X3oDMTFraHV2ZXY5BGludGwDdXMEbGFuZwNlbi11cwRwc3RhaWQDBHBzdGNhdANib3hpbmcEcHQDc2VjdGlvbnM-;_ylv=3

Friday, October 5, 2012

Global 2012: Manny Pacquiao's willingness to 55-45 financial split puts onus squarely on Floyd Mayweather

LAS VEGAS, NV - MAY 05: Singer Justin Bieber, Rapper Lil Wayne, boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr., rapper Curtis '50 Cent' Jackson and guest pose after Mayweather Jr. defeats Miguel Cotto by unanimous decision in their WBA super welterweight title fight at the MGM Grand Garden Arena on May 5, 2012 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

Thursday, October 4, 2012

Global 2012: Nicki Minaj/Mariah Carey ‘Idol’ Catfight

Cover of Mariah Carey

Rumor has it that "American Idol" producers are hoping that some juicy feuding between new alpha-female judges Mariah Carey and Nicki Minaj will bring in ratings for Season 12. And now, months before Season 12 even starts, a video has already "leaked" depicting a blowup between the two loud ladies during this Tuesday's Charlotte, North Carolina, auditions. It's probably far from the last such TMZ-obtained video we will see before a drastically different "Idol" returns to the air in 2013.

In a seemingly scandalous new fly-on-the-wall clip just posted by TMZ, a pink-wigged and dirty-mouthed Nicki is shown going off on her former "Up Out Of My Face" duet partner, shouting, "If you've got a f***ing problem, handle it!" She also yells, "I told them, I'm not putting up with her f***ing highness over here. I'm not gonna sit here every f***ing minute to have you come down and harass me every minute every day."

Meanwhile, Mariah's manager and fellow judge, Randy Jackson, sitting by his star client's side, orders Nicki to "settle down." Producer Nigel Lythgoe, who has repeatedly claimed that Mariah and Nicki are getting along just swimmingly, also steps in to intervene. New neutral-as-Switzerland judge Keith Urban, sitting in the undesirable hot seat between Nicki and Mariah, remains calm and carries on, just sipping his Coke and probably mentally going straight to his happy place. And Mariah looks exasperated; moans,"Why, why, why?"; and appears to point Nicki in the direction of the exit door. (Mariah tweeted on Tuesday late afternoon, "whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy"--but that post has since been deleted.)

TMZ additionally reports that Nicki also threatened to "knock out" Mariah, although that exchange apparently wasn't caught on tape.

http://music.yahoo.com/blogs/reality-rocks/nicki-minaj-mariah-carey-idol-catfight-caught-video-055850018.html

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