L.A. Lakers star Kobe Bryant suffered a torn Achilles tendon late in the team's win over Golden State last night and is finished for the rest of the NBA season.
Standing on crutches in front of his locker, sweaty game uniform on his back and tears in his eyes, Kobe confirmed the news, and his disappointment.
"Just terrible," Bryant said. "It's a terrible feeling, man."
Bryant will undergo an MRI on Saturday, but the team is calling the injury a "probable" and "complete tear" that will end his 2012-13 season immediately.
Bryant fell to the floor with 3:08 remaining while being guarded by Harrison Barnes. The defender did NOT kick him, and that's why Kobe feared the worst.
"I made a move that I make a million times and it just popped," said Bryant. "I was just hoping it wasn't what I knew it was. Just trying to walk it off."
"Hoping that the sensation would come back, but no such luck."
Following a timeout, Bryant went back in and hit both of his free throws with the injury to end his night with 34 points, five rebounds and four assists.
He was replaced by Metta World Peace and went to the locker room.
"MRI, surgery and then recovery," the husband of Vanessa Bryant said of his plans. "I was really tired, man. Just tired in the locker room and dejected."
"Thinking about this mountain to overcome. I mean, this is a long process. I wasn't sure I could do it. Then your kids walk in and you're like, 'I need to set an example.'"
"I can do it. Work hard and just go from there."
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Kermit Gosnell, a Philadelphia doctor, is on trial for performing gruesome, illegal late-term abortions that led to the death of a woman and seven infants.
In Pennsylvania, abortions after 24 weeks of gestation are against the law. Gosnell regularly performed the procedure at 30 weeks of gestation or later.
Gosnell's clinic has been labeled a "house of horrors" and is beyond sickening, no matter where you stand on the issue of abortion rights' legality.
The case has already had a profound effect politically.
Anti-abortion advocates are using the high-profile case, which first made headlines in 2010, to boost support for new restrictions nationwide.
One of those is TRAP (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) laws imposing strict architectural standards on clinics that perform only first-trimester abortions.
Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, implied on Friday that TRAP laws are all directly inspired by the Kermit Gosnell case.
Dannenfelser said in a statement about Virginia's new regulations:
"Since Kermit Gosnell's 'house of horrors' clinic was discovered in 2010, several states have enacted measures to ensure women going into abortion facilities are treated with basic dignity and respect."
Not surprisingly, the doctor has galvanized the pro-life movement with his misdeeds. The images (not shown here) from his trial are graphic and horrific.
But others, like Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, argue that abortion rights opponents are drawing the wrong lesson from the case.
Hogue argued that the TRAP regulations could shut down many safe and legal abortion clinics by requiring them to undergo cost-prohibitive renovations.
That, she said, could increase the chances of another Gosnell.
"Kermit Gosnell's so-called clinic is a peek into the world before Roe v. Wade," she said, "and this is exactly what our opponents are driving us to."
Instead of encouraging more restrictions on rights, Hogue said the Gosnell trial should remind people of the need for safe and affordable abortion care:
"This is exactly what happens when you place undue restrictions and you try to shame women to keep them from exercising their constitutional right to safe and legal abortions."
"You make them victims to people like Gosnell, because in desperation they'll turn anywhere."
"You want to drive people like Gosnell out of business? Then you actually support medical facilities and the right of women to safe and legal abortion."
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But to appease us for another 48 hours, Lionsgate has released a new still, featuring Liam Hemsworth! Check it out:
Hemsworth returns as Gale Hawthorne in the Hunger Games sequel, with Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson also returning.
Catching Fire sees the winners from the last film heading off on their Victory Tour, as the country prepares for the next games, called the Quarter Quell.
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire will premiere November 22.
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Derek Cianfrance has made another brilliantly pensive film about the failings of the human drive for progress in The Place Beyond the Pines.
Movies that treat small personal conflicts in sweepingly dramatic and devastating ways are often hard to watch, inching dangerously close to mushy melodrama. But the Blue Valentine director has an amazing ability to treat an intimate narrative like an epic poem.
The Place Beyond the Pines is actually three films. Three very good films. While they are woven together in a way that is initially jarring, Cianfrance's structural decisions prove carefully thought-out and, indeed, riveting.
Ryan Gosling stars as Luke Glanton, a motorcycle stuntman at a rural fairground who discovers that he has a baby son. In an effort to support his new family, Glanton begins robbing banks.
But Glanton's thrill-seeking personality takes over, and he becomes addicted to the rush he gets from the robberies.
In the second plotline, Bradley Cooper plays Avery Cross, a young cop trying to find a place in the tightly-knit force. When a heroic act thrusts him in the public eye, he discovers that the station is riddled with corruption.
Then, to finish the triptych, Dane DeHaan plays a misguided high school kid trying to find the truth about his father.
All three of the film's main actors turn in incredibly nuanced performances. In fact, the entire cast, from Eva Mendes as an emotionally exhausted mother to Ray Liotta as a degenerate cop, is superb.
The best performances, however, may have come Ben Mendelsohn and Emory Cohen in supporting roles as a well-meaning auto repairman and a drug-obsessed high school bully, respectively.
The Place Beyond the Pines combs through the human condition with elegant deftness. What does it mean to love? To hate? To fear? Instead of simply showing us a man who loves, hates, fears, Cianfrance subtly dissects those emotions before our eyes.
Breathtaking cinematography from Sean Bobbitt places the audience into a world rich in greens and whites, where the characters, the trees, and the walls of the houses blend into one Earth tone, as if to suggest that these are not characters, but explorations into our very nature.
The Place Beyond the Pines is easily one of the best films of the year so far, and is an early contender for Oscar nods in more than one category.
RATING: 4.5/5
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Speculation continues to swirl surrounding Teen Mom star Farrah Abraham, her sex tape, how it came to be, and when if will see the light of day.
The video, which was made with porn star James Deen, was made for her eyes only and never intended for the public ... if you believe her lies.
In a new interview, Deen says Farrah signed a release, got paid for the tape and was part of a for-profit plot to make it look like it accidentally leaked.
"There was this whole scheme ... 'you guys can go out on a date and we'll take pictures and pretend you're dating' ... and I said absolutely not."
"There was this whole strategy and it blew up in their faces."
By "they," he means Abraham's PR people and the production company that created an elaborate scenario for him to pose with Farrah as a dating couple.
Presumably, this idea was concocted based on the premise that a "leaked" tape would generate huge buzz and an even bigger payday for Abraham.
It was all a big lie to make money, James Deen says, and Farrah was in on the whole scheme from the start. He did her ... but he wouldn't do that.
"I have no desire to participate in that kind of publicity," he said, noting that he tried to talk Abraham out of the ruse and made it clear he wasn't on board.
"I told them, someone is gonna see this and be like, 'Oh, that's James Deen, and someone's gonna call me and say, 'Hey man, what's up with this chick?'"
"And I'm gonna say, 'We shot a porno and that's it.' I'm not going to say I'm dating someone I'm not," adds Deen, and that's exactly what happened.
When he was photographed with Abraham after a meeting with Vivid Entertainment, he directly said upon being asked that they aren't dating - just filmed a porno.
"I can say whatever I want to, it's not like I have any legal restrictions in any way, shape, or form," he said of the tape, which is still being shopped.
Deen also pointed out the obvious: That's there's no way anyone would believe a porn star like him would be involved in this without being contracted.
"I was approached to do this, and I was like, 'I'm the worst person to do this.' Not to be arrogant, but if you watch pornos and I'm in it ... people are gonna know it's me."
"I'm a public person, especially in the adult film world."
"On the street, most people might not recognize me, but if you're going to watch a porno and you're into porno, it's like, 'Hey, there's that porn guy!'"
"I told them I'm not the right person to cast for this."
But hey, they paid him and he did his thing. He just didn't go along with the ruse they wanted him to, apparently. The real question, at the end of the day:
Scary Movie 5 is not a spoof. It's not even a comedy. It's a mess of very vague references to mostly outdated cultural phenomena, sprinkled in between half-hearted and half-baked "gags."
Genre spoof is supposed to expose the conventions of that genre in a clever way.
The original Scary Movie was successful because it came on the heels of a horror film Renaissance that began with the movie Scream (which, in itself was somewhat of a spoof, but, that's okay).
Scary Movie had a reason to exist. It had something to say.
Mainly, "Boy, there sure are a lot of horror movies copying Scream these days."
But what is Scary Movie 5 saying? I sat through it, and I couldn't tell you.
It doesn't look like a horror movie. It doesn't act like a horror movie. It plays off exactly zero horror movie conventions, and really only makes reference to the horror aesthetic a handful of times.
The film mainly follows the plotline of Guillermo Del Toro's Mama. Hardly the cultural touchstone that Scream was. Ashley Tisdale and Simon Rex play a couple who take in their nieces after they are found living for months alone in the woods.
From there, there's a bit of supernatural furniture movement, some mild possession, and a whole lot of references to already forgotten movies like Black Swan, Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Inception. To the film's very minor credit, is was able to fit in a reference to the recently-released Evil Dead remake, and to the still-uncast Fifty Shades of Grey movie.
Then there's the utterly humiliating Lindsay Lohan and Charlie Sheen scene that opens the film. The scene features the two celebrity train-wrecks in bed together (which just looks really gross), spitting out canned self-awareness directly to camera in a moment of "my publicist said this'd be funny" desperation.
For a movie that fails to even qualify as a spoof, you'd hope it would at least be funny. But it's not. The jokes seem thrown together by a couple frat guys on an all-night coke binge. "Let's have a Mexican maid dance with a vacuum, and a black exorcist who steals. Because that wouldn't be at all racist in 21st Century." (note to the writers: It is racist).
Watching Scary Movie 5 is like watching an awful stand-up comedian plod clumsily through a 90-minute set of fart jokes he just wrote back stage (the difference being at a comedy club you can have a drink). Also, he took a Percocet and is trying to stay awake. And so are you.
Scary Movie 5 isn't even "bad" in that gut-wrenching "how was this made" sense. It's not interesting enough to be that bad. It's just flat out boring. It's hard to get through. It's time to retire the franchise.
Don't see it. Listen to your friends make fun of Paranormal Activity at a bar instead. At least you'll be drunk.
RATING:0/5 STARS
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