News

Espn is sending Jemele Hill to the bench: The SportsCenter anchor has been suspended for two weeks for violating the network’s social-media guidelines.

The violation stems from a series of tweets Hill sent on Sunday advocating a boycott of the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys after owner Jerry Jones said he wouldn’t tolerate his team’s players not standing for the national anthem:

Don't ask Dak, Dez & other Cowboys players to protest. A more powerful statement is if you stop watching and buying their merchandise.

— Jemele Hill (@jemelehill) October 9, 2017

Or, how about not patronizing the advertisers who support the Cowboys?...

Asian sports announcer Robert Lee — not to be confused with Confederate General Robert E. Lee, who died in 1870 — will no longer call the University of Virginia’s first college football game of the season, Espn has announced.

The decision to remove Lee from the broadcast comes after white nationalist rallies were held on the UVa campus earlier this month protesting the city’s plan to remove a statue of the controversial historical figure of the same name. Those protests eventually turned violent, culminating in a domestic terrorist attack during which a man rammed his car into a group of demonstrators,...

Former “SportsCenter” anchor Sara Walsh discovered that she was laid off as she was preparing to return to work after maternity leave, she said Thursday. The Espn sportscaster was among the estimated 100 employees and on-air talent who were victims of the latest round of cost-cutting layoffs at the network. “I was truly excited to return to work today from maternity leave with the twins. Unfortunately, I will not be coming back as I was included in the recent layoffs,” Walsh tweeted Thursday. “Much appreciation to those I worked with, and especially to those who watched.” Also Read: Here's Everyone Laid Off at.

Espn laid off 100 on-air personalities and writers on Wednesday, and we think we know why. While it was a bad day at headquarters in Bristol, Connecticut, the company had good reason for the bloodbath. Or technically 11 reasons on TheWrap‘s count. Click here for the running list of those confirmed to have been let go, and read on for what went so wrong for the so-called “Worldwide Leader in Sports.” Also Read: Here's Everyone Laid Off at Espn, From Jay Crawford to Trent Dilfer (Updating List) 1. It Just Costs Too Damn Much Espn is by far the most expensive channel in your cable package.

Heaps of set photos are out of shooting on the John Wick sequel, Matt Damon filming scenes for the fifth Jason Bourne film, a new shot from the 1970s UK set The Conjuring 2, Emily Blunt filming The Girl on the Train, and Zoe Saldana showing off her make-up prep for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.

Chef

Saif Ali Khan ("Phantom") will star in a Bollywood remake of Jon Favreau's comedy "Chef". Favreau starred in the original as a professional chef who quits his job at a popular Los Angeles restaurant and reinvents himself with a food truck. Khan will play the role in the Hindi-language remake which will have a more Indian palate to the story and food. [Source: Variety]

Marvel's Luke Cage

Sonia Braga will play Soledad Temple, the mother of Rosario Dawson's nurse Clare, in the upcoming third of Marvel's Netflix dramas "Luke Cage". Claire becomes a key...

The Daily News in New York City is in trouble, as dozens of layoffs taking place earlier this month have signalled, but a takeout in Monday’s New York Times details the “disembowelment” of Mort Zuckerman’s empire from a robust daily in the nation’s biggest city to a click-hungry digital operation with an ever-shrinking newsroom. Here are the 5 biggest revelations from the story: Also Read: Laid Off New York Daily News Reporter Proud to Be Old Media 'Dinosaur' 1. Plummeting Circulation The days of one million copies sold a day are long gone. The daily paper’s current daily circulation tips slightly over 300,000 with.

Taking its cue from the common social grievances often found in Korean indie dramas, Gifted, the sophomore effort of Poongsan (2011) helmer Jung Jai-hung, examines the friction between unemployment and consumerist ambitions in modern Korea. Slight and familiar, the film doesn't immediately stand out but when its narrative starts to deviate off the standard template, it isn't long before it goes in a surprising direction. Min-soo has been unemployed for months. Laid off from his company after eight years of service with no promotion, his job history is haunting his current work applications, as recruiters are quick to dismiss him. His girlfriend Su-jin is offered the opportunity to buy out her employer's cafe, but she isn't aware of Min-soo's job status and when she signs...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

With November Man out, excitement for Pierce Bosnan’s return to spying is at an all-time high for many James Bond fans. November Man, based on the seventh installment of Bill Granger’s book series called There Are No Spies, is about ex- CIA agent Peter Devereaux (Pierce Bosnan). While living a quiet life in Switzerland, Devereaux is ejected out of retirement for one last mission. Although the concept of the “one last mission/job” is not a new concept for Hollywood, it definitely has its place in cinema history, branching out to a wide range of reasons why our beloved characters are being pulled back into their past lives. From a retiree’s last gig, to the bad-boy-gone-good-and-then-bad-again mission, to the revenge premise, mythology of the ex-professional can surely delight and excite us to champion our heroes for one last fight. Here are scenes from ten incredible “one last job” films,...

"Penny Dreadful" has wrapped up its morose, bloody, twisty-turny, literary-infused first season, and we -- like you -- have some things to say about last night's finale. We also have some questions that we hope get answered in Season 2, which will likely air a year from now. Just take that in for a second.

Good?

Ok, let's move on. We're going to recap the finale a bit first, then ask some questions. Remember, we're going to be discussing the show in some detail, so thar be Spoilers Ahead.

If you haven't seen "Penny Dreadful" yet, find out where to watch it.

Sir Malcolm Murray and the Not-So-Mysterious Case of Mina Harker

So, while Sir Malcolm and his ragtag group of supernatural warriors were able to kill The Vampire That Dare Not Speak Its Name with what looked like an oversized knitting needle, it wasn't enough to bring his daughter Mina back from the undead.

Sony Imageworks is heading north. The VFX and animation house — which handles all of Sony's animated films and special effects on both internal studio movies (like “The Amazing Spider-Man”) and outside projects (“Angry Birds” film) will relocate its headquarters from Culver City to a 74,000-square-foot facility in Vancouver, Canada. Also read: ‘This Is the End,’ ‘Now You See Me’ VFX Firm Closes Doors, 100 People Laid Off The city offers a 58% tax incentive, which has helped it attract an increasing amount of film and animation production. The move, announced late Thursday night, will be complete by 2015, when the new facility will.

Laid off from her job at a grocery store just before Thanksgiving, Brittany Taylor, 28, and her children John, 7, and Johneya, 5, soon found themselves at a homeless shelter in frosty Providence, R.I. Among needs the shelter couldn't fulfill were children's shoes. With a snowy winter approaching, Johneya only had flat, ballet-style shoes that were peeling, and John's sneakers were dirty and worn out. Within days, however, the children were handed new sneakers and new winter boots by local teen Nicholas Lowinger, whose Gotta Have Sole foundation has distributed nearly 16,000 pairs of shoes in 32 states. "It definitely made me happy to...

Jimmy Fallon hosted his final “Late Night” Friday, and he brought the Muppets on-stage for a proper send-off. Fallon, Kermit, Miss Piggy and the crew sang a scratchy rendition of “The Weight,” The Band song widely considered one of the greatest in rock history. Also read: Entire ‘Tonight Show’ Staff Laid Off as Jimmy Fallon Moves Show From Burbank to NYC Fallon has set himself apart as a talk show host with his affinity for live music, recruiting The Roots as his in-house band and performing on his own as well. He played the drums in this final jamboree, the same.

By Joseph Leray

Lab Zero Games, the minds behind the cross-platform PC and PlayStation 3 fighter “Skullgirls,” are asking fans of the game for $150,000 to create, develop, test, and release a new character: an undead opera singer named Squigly, who hosts a parasitic snake living inside her.

In most cases, this type of thing would be handled internally with publisher money, but there’s a hitch: Autumn Games, the publishers of the Reverge Games-developed “Skullgirls,” is in the middle of a costly legal battle related to some of their other projects. With cash running out, Reverge Laid off the “Skullgirls” team, who reformed as indie outfit Lab Zero to further support the game.

Before the Lab Zero team was laid off, Squigly was about 30% finished, which amounts to a $50,000 discount for the Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign. Here’s a breakdown of how the money will be used:

•$48,000: Staff Salaries - 8 people...

The debate over whether HBO’s Girls is one of the most overrated comedies of all time or a brilliant-hilarious look at an aimless generation of American twentysomethings is perhaps as polarizing as whether Carrie should or shouldn’t have ended up with Big at the end of Sex and the City. My opinion falls squarely in the latter camp (on both matters), but that doesn’t mean I didn’t occasionally want to reach through my TV screen during Sunday’s Season 2 premiere and violently shake some sense into several of the show’s maddening characters. (Actually, if I’m being honest,...

A match made in heaven? One could say filmmaker Richard Kelly has been leading up to this moment for a long time. The "Donnie Darko" director is teaming up with Nicolas Cage for a true-crime thriller called "Amicus" that he will not not only helm, but write and produce as well alongside Laura Bickford ("Traffic," "Che") and Cage's agent Mike Nilon.  According to Variety, the picture will be Kelly's next feature and Cage will play Rodney A. Smolla, an award-winning author and one of the most influential First Amendment scholars of the past two decades. A January start date is being eyed. The bizarre and fascinating story centers the around the lives of several people. Lawrence Horn, a former Motown Records exec and record producer who is currently serving a life sentence for hiring a hit man to commit a triple-murder is where the tale begins. Laid off by Mowtown in 1990 and sliding into debt,...

Back in 2008, Zam Salim created a short film called Laid Off. A critical smash and a minor YouTube sensation, it told the tale of a man that had died but lived on in an earth-bound purgatory until he was worthy of going up to heaven. Here today is the first trailer for the feature length version, Up There, starring Game Of Thrones/Torchwood/The Dark Knight Rises' Burn Gorman as Martin, a recently deceased man who wants to get Up There after being knocked down by a car.Winner of the Panavision Spirit Award - the top prize at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival 2012 - and co-starring Kate O'Flynn (Happy-Go-Lucky), Aymen Hamdouchi (Green Zone), it also features the acting takents of Chris Waitt (A Complete History of My Sexual Failures), Jo Hartley (Dead Man's Shoes, Ill Manors), Iain de Caestecker (The Fades, Young James Herriott), and Kirsty Strain (Burnistoun,...

What my followers on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ saw today: • Well, honestly, what does a respectable movie site need with a critic, anyway? Stephanie Zacharek Laid Off By Movieline; Film Critic Position "Eliminated" • This might sound like good news, but the buried lede here is that there will a Transformers 5. Michael Bay: Transformers 4 to be his last • Makes some plausible connections between our love of zombies and our growing sense of economic and political helplessness... What Does Our Obsession With Zombie Stories Tell Us About Our Politics?...

This week on Indiewire (the first of 2012) we launched our annual 'Meet the Sundance Filmmakers' profile series, The Village Voice made a shocking cut, we told you what to see this month and much more. News J. Hoberman Laid Off as Chief Film Critic at The Village Voice The Village Voice has laid off its senior film critic, J. Hoberman, a staple of the American film criticism and a contributor to the publication since 1977. Hoberman served as a staff writer for the publication since 1983 and was appointed its chief film critic in 1988. Berlinale Announced 20 Films for the Panorama The Berlin International Film Festival has announced the first 20 titles of its Panorama Program. 2012 PGA Award Nominations "Bridemaids" is in while "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" is out with the 2012 PGA Award nominations. "Farewell My Queen" to Open Berlin Film Festival The period drama "Farewell My Queen"...

What’s brand new, big and British? Why, it’s the first annual London Underground Film Festival, which will run at the infamous Horse Hospital underground screening room on Dec. 4-10.

Seven full days and nights is an exceptionally aggressive schedule for a first time out, but it’s even more impressive once you dig into the variety of films and programs being offered, including lectures, installations and live performances mixed in with feature length films and short film programs.

To help out with such an ambitious project, the London Underground has asked a couple of festival big guns to help them out. First, underground film historian and Program Director of Australia’s Revelation Perth International Film Festival Jack Sargeant has curated a full day of films for Sunday, Dec., all of which have played at Revelation under his watch.

The films Sargeant has picked are Kevin Barker’s The Family Jams,...

The 4th annual Sydney Underground Film Festival, which runs for three days on Sept. 9-11, will screen about 10 features from all over the world and a veritable ton of short films from even further out there.

The fest will open with the latest documentary by a Hollywood icon. It’s Oliver Stone’s South of the Border, which has the director meeting with South American politicians and dignitaries. (The film opened to mixed reviews here in the States earlier this year.) Also screening is Trash Humpers, the latest film by indie rabble-rouser Harmony Korine, which has been confounding audiences on the indie film fest circuit, and Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void, which has been earning rave reviews.

The rest of the features in the lineup are an eclectic, oddball concoction, including Mladen Djordjevic‘s Serbian atrocity Life and Death of a Porno Gang, Victor Nieuwenhuijs and Maartje Seyferth’s twisted Netherlands tale Meat,...

Media outlets are canceling holiday parties all over town, but that didn't stop Maxim magazine from planning not one, but two bashes this year. Last night, editorial director Jim Kaminsky shelled out for an open bar for his staffers during a "Wet Hot Christmas Party" at the Hog Pit on Ninth Avenue. Maxim staffers will celebrate again tomorrow with Alpha Media's other title, Blender, during a joint potluck dinner at their shared office. Meanwhile, writers and editors who've been laid off will have at least one occasion to drown their sorrows: the "American Society of [Bleep]-Canned Magazine Editors" fete at Ella on Dec.