Angelina Jolie’s avatar appears naked in the Beowulf trailer, an upcoming CGI fantasy based on the anonymous epic poem dated at around 700-750 AD.

It’s not really Angelina of course, it’s a team of computer artist’s vision of the hottest version of Angelina. Obviously she’s significantly curvier than in real life, where she’s been looking positively skeletal lately. She’s just not as hot now as in her Tomb Raider days, but we can still fantasize through the help of computer animation. Fully naked Angelina is about 14 seconds before the end of this clip. (It counts backwards.)

It seems like this nude scene will not appear in the actual movie on screen, but should be available on the DVD:

More good news before I let you see the trailer: apparently, the two screenwriters had to go through a lot of pain and effort to render the story so as to get a PG-13 rating from the ever careful and watching MPAA. Therefore, most of the nude and blood-filled scenes have been stylized to the maximum or even completely cut out. However, Gaiman is in for an uncensored and unrated version of the movie, which will probably be made after the release (meaning, it depends on the way ‘Beowulf’ scores at the box-office) and only after every member of the team is also OK with it. Join me in prayers.

[News.Softpedia.com]

Beowulf out on November 16 in the US and is expected to be a big hit. The Softpedia article says it’s an “inspired combination of ‘Lord of the Rings’ and ‘300′.”

Thanks to Faded Youth via ONTD for the trailer and photo of Angelina’s nude avatar.

You’ve probably seen the Chocolate Rain video that’s this month’s hamster dance. (Although Internet phenomena had a longer shelf life in the dancing hamster and dancing baby era.) I saw something about it on TMZ, then my husband played the video for me when it hit the front page of Yahoo! Once you’re on the front page of Yahoo!, you’re famous on the Internet.

On first viewing, the guy singing seems like a teenage savant, and that’s part of the appeal of the video. He’s singing in this odd monotone that’s somewhat fascinating and the song is catchy despite being weird and repetitive.

It turns out that Tay Zonday is a 25 year-old politically aware guy, and is surprisingly articulate, if a bit wacky and defensive. In an interview with HHNLive.com he says that he’s not in a relationship and then goes off on the reasons why people pair up, saying it’s economic and tying it into social injustice. He makes a lot of really good points.

HHNLive: Can you give us a brief background? Where are you from? How old are you? What is your background?

Tay Zonday: I live in Minneapolis. I’m 25 years old. I’m not sure what you mean by “background.” Is that a code word for “race?” The straight-faced answer is that I’m Martian. They don’t have a box for me on the census form. I’m the write-in candidate that the government leaves no space for when you have to choose your race.
Seriously, is race something you choose? The whole point is that I don’t choose it. It is somebody else’s shortcut to my soul. So journalists ask “what’s your background?” like I’m supposed to retell someone else’s story about me as though it’s a fact of who I am and where I come from. As long as I talk about myself in fiction that someone else wrote, I might as well write my own fiction: I’m from Mars. Most believe the story that I’m a black mulatto.

HHNLive: For all the ladies out there, is Tay Zonday single?

TZ: Oh c’mon, relationships are so twentieth century! Why do we imagine ourselves in these pairs? There’s the economic reason: If I don’t have a partner to take care of me in rough times, I might not get through. So when things like Katrina happen and you know the government isn’t going to be there . . . you’ve got this insurance policy of a loving partner who will take care of you. When you can’t afford the surgery you need, you’ve got this insurance policy of a loving partner to take care of you because you have no healthcare. You can say it’s love. You can say it’s sex. But economics and getting by day-to-day are the main reason to label yourself based on the relationship you are in. You better have a committed lover there for you when your government isn’t.

So when Rush Limbaugh talks about the dangerous breakup of the family, and when gays are talking about recognizing same-sex relationships . . . they are actually talking about the same thing. The Human Rights Campaign (pro-gay marriage) and the Christian Coalition (pro-traditional family) agree: We need to spend our lives labeling ourselves based on what relationship we are in. But when you stop being afraid that nobody’s going to be there to support you if you become disabled; When you stop being afraid that you can’t live a decent life without two incomes; When you stop being afraid that life is so hard that you’ve got to have an ally at your side just to stay afloat . . . then you stop worrying about relationships. You stop labeling yourself according to your own relationship. You stop worrying about what other people are doing in their relationships. It no longer matters whether Tay Zonday is single.

I’m not dogging stable relationships. I think they can be fantastic. But when relationship status totally dominates the way we think about each other, there are bigger reasons than love and sex. Heaven knows those can happen without a relationship. You asked this as a very simple question. But I connected the dots. In music and life, you’ve got to connect the dots to see how simple things relate to power.

[From HHNLive.com]

Zonday says that his voice is just deep like that and that he gets about 20 e-mails a day from people saying it must be faked. He also said that people compare him to one of the Jackson 5 “because people have a limited vocabulary of what young black men can be.”

He says it doesn’t matter whether he wants to be an artist or entertainer, and that people interpret his work the way they want to. He doesn’t want to says he’s serious or joking because people will find fault with him either way.

As for his musical influences, he says they’re extremely limited and that he didn’t listen to music casually when growing up because his parents were very strict about it:

HHNLive: Who are some of your musical influences?

TZ: You aren’t going to believe this: I have never really listened to music. (Wow, my critics will quote that one). What I mean is that some people buy an iPod and they will listen to that thing in every spare moment of life: Walking to the bus. Riding on the bus. Walking to their job. Doing the dishes. Or they’ll have the radio blasting as they commute in the car. It has never been my practice to make music the backdrop of daily living. Part of it is that my parents were very strict as I grew up. I was not allowed to listen to a lot of music. Even in my late teen years as I approached adulthood, if it wasn’t classical music or Disney music, then it wasn’t really welcome in my house. I never watched MTV or VH1. I never watched rated-R movies. I grew up in a very intense pop-culture and pop-music isolation.

My only outlet was the internet, where my parents could not see what I was doing. So I would download MP3 files of music that I played in my headphones. But back then, you couldn’t just grab the Tupac Discography in one download. There weren’t even entire albums in, say, 1997. Most people were still on dialup modem connections. You only found MP3s of top singles and top hits. I cobbled together a modest MP3 collection that my parents could not hear. But because it was just top hits and not albums, I never came to identify strongly with any particular artist. And, of course, it wasn’t like I could put up posters or go to live concerts.

In many ways, I feel like a musical orphan. I’m not sure who my influences are. Growing up, I learned to hide the fact that I had any passion or enjoyment for music or life. Being “influenced” to laugh or dance was always a sickness or pathology. It made my parents fearful that they were losing their kids. To this day, I’m not sure you could get me to admit that I was influenced by anything. It’s just beaten out of the way I think. Perhaps people call my music “unique” because I don’t feel beholden to any influences.

Zonday says he would be open to doing voice-overs or commercials when he’s asked about it, but that he doesn’t know what the future will bring and doesn’t want to get ahead of himself. He says he gets so many messages on MySpace he can’t keep up with them, and that he still has his day job.

The guy certainly seems like he’ll weather Internet fame well, and he’s making the most of his 15 minutes with such revealing and thought-provoking interviews. I would like to see him write a book about the phenomenon of making it on the Internet. He definitely sounds like he can add a lot of insight and intellectual discussion to the way that society latches on to funny videos. To me it’s just a way to kill five minutes. (And I’ve managed to expand that into entire days by paying attention to the celebrities as a career.)

Here’s Zonday’s version of “Never Gonna Give You Up,” which he says “has deep cultural significance in some internet circles.” I thought it was just a throwaway diddy, but what the hell do I know? It’s not quite “Chocolate Rain”

You can view the rest of Zonday’s videos, including “Chocolate Rain,” on his channel on YouTube.

Thanks to Fark for linking this interview.

I didn’t want to report on this story despite how easy a target R.Kelly is, because that might mean I would have to watch some of this lengthy and widely panned R&B soap opera. Up until now my exposure to “Trapped in the Closet” was limited to a brief segment on The Daily Show in which it was all too easy to dismiss the laughable creation of an eccentric pedophile who has inexplicably been able to carry on with his singing career. (I guess Michael Jackson set the precedent.)

Now that Kelly has said that the “Trapped in the Closet” hip-hopera series was dictated to him by aliens that came down from space to show him new music video techniques, I can no longer ignore his extra-terrestrial inspired genius. He is quoted at the premiere of Chapters 11-16 using a kind of metaphor but it comes off like he’s saying aliens visited him and inspired him to create the series.

“Don’t nobody ask me no questions I don’t know how to explain how I wrote it” the singer laughed “I’m tired of people asking me that because I can not explain this. I can explain any other song but I cant explain ‘Trapped In The Closet’.”

Kelly went on to explain “It’s an alien, People ask me why is it an alien and I say it’s come down to show us new genres and new ways to produce movies, magic, song and dialogue which have all been put together, and has never been done as far as I’m concerned. I call that alien. And people ask me when ‘Trapped In The Closet’ is going to end and I say when the aliens decide to leave.”

[From NME.com]

So I read the summary of the first three episodes of “Trapped in the Closet” on Wikipedia and a guy played by Kelly ends up sleeping with a married woman whose husband comes home, so he hides in the closet. The husband and wife then mess around, Kelly’s cell phone rings, and the husband discovers him in the closet. Kelly has a loaded gun, so the husband doesn’t give him a beat down. It turns out the husband is a pastor. Then the husband’s lover comes over unexpectedly and it’s a man and all four people stand there arguing. After that I lost interest in the plot, which keeps getting more convoluted.

“Trapped in the Closet” has been parodied on South Park, Saturday Night Live, MadTv, and in a song released by Weird Al Yankovic called “Trapped in the Drive Through.”

I did watch some of it on YouTube, and it seems to merit all the derision it gets. Kelly sings the same tune in different voices with lyrics explaining the plot twists and it’s hard to believe he’s taking it seriously.

Here’s a link to part one. Chapter 15 is below. All the rest are available on YouTube.

After five years of an odd series of coincidences that delayed his trial for child pornography, R.Kelly will finally face the music at his trial September 17. His excuse for those sex videos that surfaced in 2002 featuring a maybe 13 year-old girl was that it wasn’t really him in the act - just a computer-generated image of him. Maybe the aliens made him make that video too.

Clay Aiken is one of those celebrities that annoys the crap out of me – and as a result, I tend to pay attention. I think that’s the same angle a lot of famous people take to get attention. His whole “I must expose my feet every chance I get” thing really freaks me out, but I can handle it. But thinking he’s sexy? That I just cannot take. Apparently part of Clay’s new repertoire involves a brief cover of Justin Timberlake’s now-classic “SexyBack.” My God, I hope he doesn’t cover JT’s “Dick in a Box.”

Did you notice that as the video cuts out, he starts in on a cover of Billy Ray Cyrus’s “Achy Breaky Heart?” That’s a bit more acceptable. What would make Clay think this is okay? And isn’t he loudly, annoyingly conservative Christian? Emphasis on the conservative? The guy really is an enigma. The “sexy” faces he makes are priceless. Clay, I don’t care whether you’re gay or straight, I don’t care whether you ever tell us if you’re gay or straight, I just care that you never do this to the internet again.

In slightly less horrifying Clay Aiken news, the red-headed sex machine will appear on an episode of Fox’s “Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?”

“We know Clay Aiken has a voice, but how’s his brain? We’ll find out when he appears on ‘Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?’

“Aiken will try to win money for his foundation that runs a camp for kids with developmental disabilities. If he answers all his questions correctly, the foundation will get a million dollars.

“Aiken will tape his appearance August 28th. No air date has been set yet.”

[From ABC affiliate abc13.com]

I really hate it when otherwise contemptible celebrities do something good. Like having charities for kids with developmental disabilities. Stupid Clay Aiken. You’re so good, and so bad, all at once.

Picture note by JayBird: Here’s Clay at the Emmy Awards in 2005. Images thanks to PR Photos.

Robert John Bardo, the obsessed fan who murdered actress Rebecca Schaeffer (”My Sister Sam”) in 1989 and who was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole and sent to Mule Creek State Prison in Ione, California, was stabbed 11 times on Friday by a prison inmate.

Bardo was airlifted to a local hospital where he was treated and returned to the prison.

According to a report in the LA Times, the suspect is a 49-year-old murderer who is said to be serving a life term. State Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation officials said the stabbing occurred in the yard while inmates were on their way to breakfast at approximately 6:20 in the morning. Two inmate-made weapons were recovered at the scene.

“She came into my life in the right moment. She was brilliant, pretty, outrageous, her innocence impressed me. She turned into a goddess for me, an idol. Since then, I turned an atheist, I only adored her.”
- Robert John Bardo

[Morbidly Hollywood]

Before her murder in 1989, Bardo (who was then just 19) was obsessed with the young starlet and had written her letters several times, even attempting to gain entry onto the “My Sister Sam” set. Later, Bardo obtained Schaeffer’s address through a private detective agency, made his way to Los Angeles and tracked down her apartment building. Upon buzzing her apartment, Schaeffer (who was said to be waiting for a script for an upcoming audition at the time) answered the door to find no script, but instead Bardo waiting and wanting an autograph. After asking for her autograph Bardo left, only to return approximately 20 minutes later. When Schaeffer answered the door a second time, Bardo pulled out a gun from a brown paper bag and shot her once at point-blank range in the chest.

Schaeffer was quicly transported to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where she was pronounced dead 30 minutes after her arrival. The following day, Bardo was arrested in Tucson, Arizona where he confessed to her murder. He was tried and convicted without a jury by prosecutor Marcia Clark on charges of capital murder. On December 20, 1991, Bardo was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.

Note by Celebitchy: Here’s the intro to “My Sister Sam”:

USA Today has a list of the 25 most memorial commercials from the past 25 years. Most of these I remember as I’m a little bit north of 30. I’ve added the YouTube versions where available, and they do bring back memories. Unfortunately USA Today focuses a lot on the 90s, and there are some more recent ads that they may have overlooked. Here are the first 15 ads on their list, with the rest available at the source.

1. Lifealert: I’ve Fallen and I Can’t Get Up! (1990)

2. Apple Macintosh: 1984 (1984)

3. Wendy’s: Where’s the Beef? (1984)

4. Isuzu: Joe “Trust me” Isuzu (1986)
I don’t remember this one at all, probably because I was too young when it aired, although I definitely remember “Where’s the Beef” from that same year. Here is USA Today’s description. You can see some of the ads on YouTube.

Joe Isuzu ranks among the most memorable auto pitchmen. He (David Leisure) was a remarkably likable liar making outrageous claims about the Isuzus. Joe’s job as slimy hawker wasn’t to sell cars, but to familiarize consumers with the then-little-known Isuzu name. Did he ever. Trust us.

5. Energizer Bunny (1989)

6. Bartles & Jaymes: Thank You for Your Support (1985)

7. California Raisin Advisory Board: Heard it Through the Grapevine (1986)

8. Budweiser: Croaking Frogs (1995)

9. Bush campaign: Willie Horton (1988)
Here’s a link to the YouTube video

Who can forget that mug shot? The ad tried to link Democratic presidential opponent Michael Dukakis to a prison furlough for the Massachusetts convict during which Horton raped a woman and stabbed her boyfriend. But Dukakis felt the knife.

10. California Milk Processors Board: Got Milk? (1993)

11. Partnership for a Drug-Free America: “This is Your Brain on Drugs” (1987)
I really hated this ad!

12. Ikea: Gay Men Shopping (1994)
Does anyone remember this commercial? I could not find it on YouTube

Major marketers were too timid to court gays on TV until Ikea broke the barrier. Two male actors portray a couple shopping for a dining room table. IKEA was bold, but not so much that they shopped for other rooms.

13. McDonald’s: Nothing but Net (1993)
Michael Jordan vs. Larry Bird. I remember this commercial well.

14. Pepsi: Michael Jackson on fire (1984)
Michael Jackson’s hair caught on fire in this one, but in the versions on YouTube it’s cut out. Is there an actual commercial showing his hair on fire? USA Today words their description of this ad as if the hair-on-fire scene exists:

This ad is remembered not for its wonderfully 1980s capture of the Jackson mystique, but for its pyrotechnics gone awry. Jackson’s hair caught fire, and nothing else mattered - not even the fact that the Gloved One refused to be seen in the ad actually holding a Pepsi.

15. Reagan Campaign: Morning in America (1984)
This looks like a car commercial at first.

Thanks to USA Today for the memories and for all the users on YouTube who uploaded these classic commercials. Article found via Fark.

Sharon Stone was holding some kind of benefit auction in Berlin yesterday for a peace foundation, and she started drunken dirty talking to the audience, calling them “naughty, nasty little Germans” and purr growling. She must have confused her gig as a charity auctioneer with the job she was hired for later that night as Dieter Bohlen’s mistress. After Stone’s weird purr, which garnered applause from the audience, the annoucer just says in German that the last winning bidder is coming onto the stage.

[via ONTD]

This is the woman who said during an AIDS benefit auction that “I want to take it [cash] from your pocket so I can feel how big your penis is when I take it,” so it’s not like this is new for her. She also made out with a holy wall in Israel and claimed she would kiss anyone and everyone for world peace. You can see from the video that she got upset that people were talking and that’s when she started with the bedroom talk. Stone can’t stand it when she’s not the center of attention.

The source of the video (link plays automatic video) claims she was making out with Richard Gere the night this footage was taken, but unfortunately I haven’t seen evidence of that.

Header image is from Sharon Stone’s “peace mission” to Israel last March.

In case you like bad singing without any filler, these “Song Quiz” clips of people who didn’t make it to the judges round in from Germany’s version of Idol are rather entertaining. You really can’t tell what they’re singing until it’s pointed out to you, and there’s no talking or commentary to sit through, just pure cringe-worthy tunes from people who waited hours for the privilege to sing them to the camera.

You do not need to know one word of German to thoroughly enjoy these clips from Deutschland sucht den Superstar. Bad singing and false pride are universal.

Andreas, “Everything I Do.”

Caroline, I don’t know what she’s signing, but she sure is scary

“Hot Stuff” Dennis

Nadine, “My Heart Will Go On”

Nicole, I have no idea what she’s singing

And here are two people who sort-of sing well and get denied:

This chick is from last season, but it’s precious how she gets all offended and tells the judge she can sing better than he can:

My husband and I have have been enjoying Germany’s version of Idol, Deutschland sucht den Superstar, and I was struck by how much this one chick, 18 year-old Lisa Bund, looks like Kelly Clarkson. She can sing too.

Drama on this year’s season of DSDS includes a candidate, Nico, who tearfully reveals he’s got narcolepsy when he’s cut from the competition, and a smoldering orphan with ice-blue eyes, Christian, who leaves on his own accord to spend more time with his wife and infant daughter.

There’s also a water-spraying incident by a guy who calls himself “Mr. Love” that’s suspiciously similar to something that went down on American Idol two years ago. Judge Dieter Bohlen uses the word “scheisse” several times while describing the guy’s performance, which is predictably German for “shit.”

And a woman shaking her tits singing about her pretty hair that’s so fun I couldn’t resist. Overall there’s a lot more T&A on Germany’s Idol, including kids stripping and showing their butts, but we get softcore stuff here on weekend nights, so that’s not surprising.

You don’t have to understand German to get a kick out of the highlights from Germany’s version of Idol. Just like on the American version, there are plenty of unattractive clueless people who can’t sing. (Link leads to video) Do a search on DSDS on YouTube for more.