US Townhall RealStories Presents: New Interview with CHICK star, KAI SOREMEKUN
Written by Scott Katz
Monday, 19 April 2010 13:57
TUNE IN TUESDAY APRIL 20 FOR THE NEXT EPISODE OF OUR INTERNET RADIO SHOW!
On Tuesday, April 20 at 1pm Eastern (10am Pacific), we're going to be broadcasting the next episode of our US Townhall RealStories radio show. Our guest will be KAI SOREMEKUN, the creator and star of the web series, CHICK! We interviewed Kai back in February while she was still filming her first season, and now that season 1 has finished, we thought we'd have her on our radio show to do a wrap up and have her share her feelings and experiences about it all.
Visit Kai Soremekun's websites:
www.whoischick.com & www.chickspirit.com - to communicate with the actress and follow the latest CHICK news.
www.youtube.com/chickspirit - to watch the web series CHICK. Season 1 has just wrapped.
Click on the triangular "play" button on the graphic below to listen to the show.
US Townhall RealStories presents: JERRY BECK, Animation Historian
Written by Scott Katz
Click the "play" icon on the player above to listen to the show.
Join us for a one-of-a-kind chat with a recognized expert from the world of animated cartoons – Jerry Beck. Mr. Beck has written or co-written about a dozen books over the last few decades on the subject of animated cartoons, the studios that produced them, and the creative talent behind them. His latest book is entitled The 100 Greatest Looney Tunes Cartoons, and will be on sale beginning June 1.
We have Mr. Beck for the full hour on our radio show on Tuesday, March 23 at 2pm Eastern Time. Listen live at 2pm via the player control above and enjoy!
If the show goes long, only the first hour will be heard live. You can then come back later in the day, and the entire show will be posted and available for listening.
Visit Jerry Beck's websites:
www.cartoonbrew.com - Jerry's cartoon blog with posts of animation news and interesting cartoon clips
www.cartoonresearch.com - Jerry's website dedicated to classic cartoons "past, present, and future."
82nd Annual ACADEMY AWARDS Winners - Complete list
Written by US Townhall staff
Monday, 08 March 2010 01:13
Here is the complete list of Academy Award winners from the 82nd Annual ceremony held on Sunday, March 7, 2010. In all, 24 awards were handed out in a star-studded parade of excess that lasted over three-and-a-half hours.
Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin served as dual hosts and did a fantastic job. They had great chemistry, and we're sure a film starring the two of them together would be a big hit. However, in spite of the Academy trying to improve television ratings by including a wider variety of nominees for Best Picture, the overall affair, while entertaining, proved to be one of the least suspenseful Oscar telecasts ever.
All of the actors that industry pundits had predicted to win did win: Sandra Bullock, Jeff Bridges, Mo'Nique, and Christoph Waltz.
The Best Picture winner was equally as predictable. While some thought that James Cameron's record-breaking Avatar would take home the big prize, it was obvious to us in the run-up to the awards that The Hurt Locker would stage an "upset." It's just the kind of movie that Hollywood loves to award, while a scifi spectacle like Avatar is decidedly not. To those who thought Avatar was a shoo-in: have you learned nothing from ET: The Extra Terrestrial ?
The tally of multiple award winners is as follows:
The Hurt Locker - 6 Oscars including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay Avatar - 3 Oscars including Best Visual Effects Crazy Heart - 2 Oscars including Best Actor Precious - 2 Oscars including Best Supporting Actress Up - 2 Oscars including Best Animated Feature
MAIN AWARDS
BEST PICTURE: The Hurt Locker Other Nominees: Avatar, The Blind Side, District 9, An Education, Inglourious Basterds, Precious, A Serious Man, Up, Up in the Air
BEST DIRECTOR: Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker) Other Nominees: James Cameron (Avatar), Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds), Lee Daniels (Precious), Jason Reitman (Up in the Air)
BEST ACTRESS: Sandra Bullock (The Blind Side) Other Nominees: Helen Mirren (The Last Station), Carey Mulligan (An Education), Gabourey Sidibe (Precious), Meryl Streep (Julie & Julia)
BEST ACTOR: Jeff Bridges (Crazy Heart) Other Nominees: George Clooney (Up in the Air), Colin Firth (A Single Man), Morgan Freeman (Invictus), Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker)
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Mo'Nique (Precious) Other Nominees: Penelope Cruz (Nine), Vera Farmiga (Up in the Air), Maggie Gyllenhaal (Crazy Heart), Anna Kendrick (Up in the Air)
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Basterds) Other Nominees: Matt Damon (Invictus), Woody Harrelson (The Messenger), Christopher Plummer (The Last Station), Stanley Tucci (The Lovely Bones)
The advent of the Internet and the availability of high tech photographic equipment and software at affordable prices have created an explosion of creative content across the virtual landscape. In addition to our ongoing series spotlighting independent producers of film and theater, we at US Townhall wanted to recognize some of the best of what we're calling "Entertainment Entrepreneurs" – those creative individuals who choose to work outside the traditional corporate studio system in order to create and develop their own projects that they can bring to life in a vision wholly their own, undiluted by Hollywood committees and focus groups.
We introduce to you Kai Soremekun, an established actress living in Hollywood who has decided to chart her own course and create her first ongoing web series, simply entitled Chick. Chick follows the journey of Lisa, played by Ms. Soremekun, a person much like you or anyone you could know: bright, funny, insecure, determined, complex, contradictory, and hopeful. However, Lisa has one tiny little quirk that sets her apart from the average boy or girl next door:
She wants to become a superhero.
And, fashioning a costume for herself and naming herself Fantastica, she sets out to do just that.
As the series creator herself puts it, Chick "uses the superhero as a metaphor for exploring human potential." Can Lisa be successful in her pursuit? Will she give up and just go back to her philandering boyfriend? And what are the underlying root causes of Lisa's desire to pursue such a seemingly off-kilter goal?
Read the no-holds-barred interview below to gain more insight into both Chick's creator, Kai Soremekun, and her character, Lisa. After which, we're sure you'll catch the chickspirit and want to follow Kai's ongoing project, the innovative new web series, Chick.
ABOUT KAI SOREMEKUN
USTOWNHALL: Tell us about your background: where were you born, and where did you grow up? KAI SOREMEKUN: I was born in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada and moved to Toronto when I was 6 months old where I grew up until I moved to New York to pursue dancing and acting.
USTH: When did you develop an interest in acting and performing? KS: My mom is a nurse and my dad a doctor so I prepped myself through high school to follow in my parents' footsteps and go to medical school. But I struggled with math and physics and hated it even though I was smart enough to do well at it if I put my mind to it. Then it hit me that I didn't really want to be a doctor; I was doing it to please my father. So I took a year off after I graduated from high school to figure out what I really wanted to do. This kind of freaked my parents out because they feared I wouldn't go back to school and get a degree after my hiatus. But I felt it made more sense to figure out what I wanted to do than waste my parents' money doing something I may not follow through with. I had been taking dance classes for a couple of years at this point and really loved it. I explored that even though as a performer I was often terrified. At the time, I worked at a performing arts center called the O'Keefe Center as a concession stand employee. Posted in the Artists' Entrance was a notice about auditions coming up for entrance into a performing arts academy in New York called the American Musical and Dramatic Academy. So, on a whim and to push myself, I decided to audition. I sang "My Favorite Things" from The Sound of Music, and I was pretty bad. But despite this, they invited me to attend the school. I had also been accepted into Simon Frasier University in British Columbia. So it was a moment of truth...University or Performing Arts Academy? I was having a hard time letting go of the belief that you have to go to University in order to make something of yourself. My mom was the deciding factor. She told me I should go to New York because if I didn't I would always wonder what if? And so, I went to New York, attended AMDA for two years, and have never looked back.
Michael Jackson's recent tragic death has once again catapulted him into the world spotlight. Rather than focus on all of the personal trials and tribulations he faced over the last three decades, we'd like to focus on his talent and the music that made him a worldwide superstar. As longtime Jackson collaborator Quincy Jones recently said, someone like Michael Jackson doesn't come along once in a lifetime; he just comes along once.
What follows in this longform article is a career retrospective on one of the great talents in the music industry.
As an adult, Michael Jackson only released six studio albums over the course of his career. This adult phase of Jackson's career began when the Jacksons left Motown and signed with CBS Records in 1975.
After working with Quincy Jones on the movie The Wiz in 1978, Jones and Jackson formed a partnership and went to work on Michael's first solo album for CBS Records' Epic Records division. The resulting album, Off the Wall, was released on August 10, 1979 and has gone on to sell over 7 million copies in the United States, and a total of over 20 million worldwide. Off the Wall gave Jackson his first solo career achievement: it became the very first album in Billboard chart history by a solo artist to land four singles in the top 10. These singles were: "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough" (#1), "Rock with You" (#1), "Off the Wall" (#10), and "She's Out of My Life" (#10). "Don't Stop..." was the only single actually written by Michael Jackson. Subsequent albums would feature a majority of the songs either written or co-written by Michael.