Anderson .Paak Brings Out Dr. Dre and Sheila E. for ‘Still D.R.E.' and ‘California Love' at FireAid Concert
Billie Joe Armstrong was on hand to introduce .Paak, an Oxnard native, who kicked up the energy to full gear during his four-song set. Sheila E., a Prince collaborator and the anointed Queen of Percussion, appeared to bolster renditions of 'Put Me Thru' and 'Come Down,' with Paak starting out behind the kit and moving to the front of the stage.
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Then came one of the night's first few surprises: a stirring appearance from Dre, who has collaborated with .Paak numerous times over the years, including on his 2015 album 'Compton.' .Paak played hype man to Dre for 'Still D.R.E.,' with Dre taking a few moments to address the crowd and the historic night.
'I want to say this is a magical moment for me,' said Dre. 'I got so much love for you guys and this summer will be the mark of 40 years that I've been in this business. And I appreciate all the love that you guys have been giving me, and the reason that we're here, I appreciate all the first responders and firemen that put their lives on the line and I appreciate all that love. It's all about love for me to night. But guess what else I got?'
Thus began 'California Love,' a West Coast anthem that brought the three artists together to rep for the city. As the final notes rang out, .Paak thanked his supporting cast of characters as the evening continued on.
O Anderson .Paak é um espetáculo. pic.twitter.com/L3q0waReIZ
— NANY RAFAELA (@Rafaelaynan) January 31, 2025
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Los Angeles Times
13 minutes ago
- Los Angeles Times
To become Amanda Knox, Grace Van Patten had to inhabit her nuances and trauma very quickly
New York — The first time Grace Van Patten met Amanda Knox, it was a surreal experience. Not because she would be playing the much-talked-about Knox in the Hulu series 'The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox,' but because they decided to go paddle boating in Echo Park Lake. The activity was Knox's idea, the actor says. 'I remember just trying to ask questions, but also trying to keep it cool because it was the first time we were meeting, and also [I was] so out of breath from pedaling because I didn't realize how hard it was going to be,' Van Patten remembers. 'I also was so out of body. I couldn't believe what was going on. I didn't feel present.' A last-minute addition to the project after another performer dropped out, Van Patten had only about two months to prepare for the intense six-month shoot, in which she had to put herself in the skin of Knox, who was wrongfully convicted of the 2007 killing of her roommate Meredith Kercher during her year abroad in Perugia, Italy. Van Patten had to inhabit not only the trauma that Knox went through, in which her every move was scrutinized by worldwide media, but also the strange whimsy with which she approaches life. The limited series, premiering Wednesday with two episodes, offers a take on the events narrated by Van Patten as Knox, tracking her youthful joy when she moves to Italy, the terror she felt while incarcerated, and the ultimate forgiveness she bestowed upon her prosecutor. The project is a major moment for Van Patten, a breakout of Hulu's soapy drama 'Tell Me Lies,' as well as one for Knox, who serves as an executive producer. The eight-episode saga created by K.J. Steinberg is an act of reclamation for Knox, and she believes Van Patten captured the nuances that so many people missed when she was a regular presence in the tabloids. 'She got my tics, she does my snort-laugh, all of the little things that make you a person like a fully dimensional person,' Knox says during an interview at the show's New York press day. 'Honoring that young person I was, the kid who had never had anything bad happen to them until a horrific thing happened.' It's a performance that makes Knox feel grateful. The day before we speak, Knox explains to me that she told Van Patten, 'I cannot believe how lucky I am that you were playing me.' For Van Patten, now 28, getting the role was also something of a stroke of fate. She had honed in on Knox as someone she wanted to portray nearly 10 years ago. When the Netflix documentary about Knox, simply titled 'Amanda Knox,' came out in 2016, Van Patten had watched it and thought, if they ever made a dramatized account of the story she would love to play her. 'I was so young then too,' she says, perched wearing a denim dress in the downtown Manhattan hotel room. 'It was probably just like, 'Oh this is such an interesting person and that's what I would love to do as an actor.' ' If you look at her resumé, Van Patten's acting career began all the way back when she was a child in two episodes of 'The Sopranos,' directed by her father Tim Van Patten, but it was around the time she watched the Knox film that she began to pursue it seriously. Though she recently decamped to Los Angeles, she grew up in New York. After graduating from the prestigious Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School — otherwise known as the 'Fame' school — she deferred USC for a year. In that time, she started auditioning and by 2017, she was starring opposite Adam Sandler in Noah Baumbach's 'The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected).' She never started college. Through her father — whose credits besides 'The Sopranos' include 'Boardwalk Empire,' 'Game of Thrones' and, recently, 'Masters of the Air' — she saw sides of the industry that were not so 'glamorous.' So she took a beat to commit herself to the idea of acting as a job. (Her other love was sports: If she had gone to college she would have wanted to play basketball in some way.) 'I think it just took me a while to have faith in myself and I probably needed some external validation,' she says. Her full circle moment with Knox's story came when she got a meeting with Steinberg and executive producer Warren Littlefield to take over for Margaret Qualley. Within a week she had the role and from there had about two months to line up an Italian teacher and do as much research as she possibly could. 'It was nice to kind of have a fire under me,' she says. The show's executive producer Monica Lewinsky understood the challenges of casting someone to play a highly scrutinized real-life subject like Knox. She herself was portrayed in FX's 'Impeachment: American Crime Story' by Beanie Feldstein in 2021. 'I have been through this process as a subject, and I think in talking to Amanda about almost the most important thing that I felt, and that I felt Beanie Feldstein had captured so well, is the emotional truth, my emotional truth as a human being,' she says. 'Where verisimilitude can be really important — and we strived for verisimilitude in this project — I think that someone who looks like you, who can evoke you, if they can't bring out the soul of you, it almost doesn't matter in my opinion.' Van Patten, she says, was up to the task. 'She just captured my heart in every scene,' Lewinsky adds. Knox, meanwhile, started to have faith in Van Patten because of the kinds of questions she asked. Knox recalls, 'She would say things like, 'OK, there are a lot of people who say like you're quirky or whatever, they judge you for that kind of thing, and I just want to get that right, what do they mean by that?' ' (Knox's answer: 'Like the musical theater kids at school.') Van Patten also wanted to know the nonverbal ways that Knox and her husband Christopher Robinson communicate with each other. (Touching hands.) 'I didn't want to attempt to do some impersonation or impression,' Van Patten says. 'I was so much more interested in capturing essence and portraying her emotions authentically.' In person you can tell they are not one-to-one. Van Patten's voice has a huskiness to it that Knox's lacks. And while Knox has the carefully chosen words of a practiced public speaker, Van Patten has a chillness that pervades. Knox didn't coach Van Patten through every second of the grueling interrogation scene depicted in the second episode, which condenses 53 hours of ruthless questioning into one harrowing scene. 'She had such really good instincts,' Knox says. 'Even the way that scene is crafted you realize everyone in the room is kind of being gaslit by each other, everyone's sort of crafting this false narrative around Amanda and she's trying to figure it out as it's going. It's such a nuanced scene and she carried it.' During filming, which took place in Rome and Budapest, Van Patten says she didn't do much other than work and sleep, though Lewinsky says she brought genuine warmth and cheeriness to the set. 'I was very much trying to be in her brain as much as possible and trying to see these situations through her eyes as best as I could and then getting home and making sure that I'm settling back into me and staying calm and winding down so that I could just be present and open,' she says. The fact that her real-life sister, Anna Van Patten, played her on-screen sister also helped ground her, along with visits from their family. Van Patten didn't have much time to recenter herself after shooting on 'The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox' wrapped. About three weeks later, she had to start shooting Season 3 of 'Tell Me Lies,' where she plays college student Lucy Albright who is in and out of a toxic relationship with the hunky and volatile Stephen DeMarco (played by Jackson White, who is Van Patten's actual boyfriend). She was thankful it was a part she knew well. In her brief downtime she did as little as possible. 'I was horizontal for three weeks, it felt like,' she says. 'But that's kind of life when I'm not working.' Now she is prepping to see how her version of Amanda will be received. 'There will be a lot of strong preconceived opinions going into this, so I'm really curious and hoping that people can be open to reconsidering their thoughts on it through watching it,' Van Patten says. Knox already considers the series a 'dream scenario.' 'The burden is taken off me to be and explain Amanda Knox to the world and the fact that Grace would be willing to take that on — she knew my story and she knew the kind of baggage and challenge that it would be to represent me and to carry that torch alongside me,' Knox says. Van Patten had waited a decade to do so.
Los Angeles Times
13 minutes ago
- Los Angeles Times
She was always meant to play Jean Seberg. Now Zoey Deutch has her own ‘Breathless'
When making a movie about the behind-the-scenes saga of one of the most transformative and influential films of all time, one might not expect it all to hinge on a haircut. And yet for the team behind 'Nouvelle Vague,' about the production of Jean-Luc Godard's radically freewheeling 1960 feature debut, 'Breathless,' it kind of did. As the film's director, Richard Linklater, puts it, 'All the roads led up to the haircut moment.' Linklater, himself a generationally influential filmmaker for movies such as 'Slacker,' 'Before Sunrise' and 'Boyhood,' first worked with actor Zoey Deutch on the 2016 baseball comedy 'Everybody Wants Some!!' It was then that he first mentioned to her the idea of playing Jean Seberg, the American star who took on the female lead in Godard's Paris-set film about a doomed low-level gangster on the run from the police. (Having premiered earlier this year at Cannes, 'Nouvelle Vague' will touch down at festivals in both Toronto and New York before coming to theaters Oct. 31, then on Netflix on Nov. 14.) Seberg's haircut in the original film, a super-short, blond pixie cut, rewrote fashion trends around the world and encapsulated a spirit of youthful, diffident insouciance. Working with colorist Tracey Cunningham and stylist Bridget Brager in Los Angeles, Deutch recreated the look. During a recent interview at Netflix's offices on Sunset Boulevard with a straight-on view of the Hollywood sign, Deutch says she had no fear about the transformation. 'It was so much harder for everybody else around me,' says Deutch, 30, her hair currently at a sleek shoulder length and dyed a rich dark brown. 'I found that people, women and men, were like, 'How do you feel? Are you OK? This is so crazy. What's it like?' It was the focal point of every discussion. It was like a cool social experiment.' For Linklater, it was worth the wait. 'You can imagine for months and months I'm in Paris, saying, 'This is Jean Seberg,' and people are seeing this dark-haired American,' recalls Linklater in a Zoom call from his home in Texas. 'I was like, 'She's the perfect Seberg, trust me.' And then in through the door comes the pixie-cutted Zoey as Seberg. And everybody was like, 'Oh, OK. That's her.'' Deutch often brings a mischievous playfulness to her performances, a knowing sense that she gets it, regardless of the genre or situation. Which fits in well with the movie-mad world of Godard and the community of French New Wave filmmakers in 'Nouvelle Vague.' 'Zoey's a good old-fashioned chameleon,' says Linklater, calling her a 'body-of-work actress' for the broad range of roles she is capable of, from the teen drama 'Before I Fall' to rom-coms like 'Set It Up' and even a legal thriller in 'Juror #2.' 'You look at her films, she can be very different and not afraid to play an a— or someone who has very strong feelings, and so there's a certain constant bravery to Zoey that I really admire.' In the intervening years since shooting 'Everybody Wants Some!!,' Linklater and Deutch have remained in-touch and he casually mentioned the Seberg project once or twice. A few years ago, on the off chance it might actually come to be, Deutch began studying the films of the French New Wave and learning to speak French. 'I thought just in case, let me be ready to be lucky,' she says, in Los Angeles for a day while on a break from shooting the upcoming 'Voicemails for Isabelle' in Vancouver. There was a television interview from August 1960 in which Seberg gives a tour of her apartment in Paris, speaking both French and English, that became a touchstone for Deutch. You can hear Seberg attempting to mask her natural Midwestern accent with a more mid-Atlantic flavor popular among performers at that time — and then also speak French on top of that. 'I was grateful that I got to play her at a moment in time when her French wasn't perfect, because that was less intimidating,' says Deutch. She adds, 'I find her to be an incredibly mysterious person. And me not speaking French and having to learn the language helped me kind of step into her a little bit a lot more, between that and the hair. There's a certain set of challenges with doing an entire movie in a language you don't speak, but a huge gift because it helped me understand her essence.' Originally from Marshalltown, Iowa, Seberg leaped to fame following an international talent search by director Otto Preminger for the leading role of his 1957 medieval epic, 'Saint Joan.' The actor was physically harmed while shooting the film's climactic burned-at-the-stake scene, then suffered terribly from the film's bad reviews. Preminger cast her again in his 1958 'Bonjour Tristesse' and again psychologically tormented her during the film's production. After 'Breathless' made her an international star, Seberg's career continued to have its ups and downs, with her radical politics leading to her being put under surveillance by the FBI. In 1979, her body would be discovered in the backseat of her car in Paris, her death ruled a suicide. 'Is the rest of her life incredibly fascinating and intense and tragic? Yes,' says Deutch. 'But Rick was really adamant on telling a story at a very specific moment in time. We're not telling anything that happens after. Godard is not a legend yet. You don't know who this guy is, what he's doing. He's not who he was later. Don't read the last page of the book when we're still on Page 1.' The teasing dynamic between Seberg and Godard (played by Guillaume Marbeck) is the core of 'Nouvelle Vague,' with Seberg often exasperated by the emerging director's unconventional ideas — and vocal about it. Deutch's impressions of Marbeck's deadpan Godardian grumble, sometimes affectionate, sometimes sarcastically biting, are a comedic highlight of the movie. Eventually the two come to appreciate each other. In preparing for the film, Deutch realized she would in essence be playing three parts: the actual Seberg, the character of Patricia in 'Breathless' and the moments when Seberg is popping through while playing Patricia. The re-creation in 'Nouvelle Vague' of one of the most famous scenes from 'Breathless,' — Jean-Paul Belmondo and Seberg sharing a flirtatious stroll down the Champs-Élysées — required Deutch to exhaustively match the onscreen movements of Seberg as Patricia while also speaking as Seberg, since the film had its dialogue recorded later, essentially playing two characters at the same time. While Seberg may have been plucked from obscurity and tossed into a literal trial-by-fire with her first two movies, Deutch was born in Los Angeles, the child of 'Back to the Future' star Lea Thompson and veteran director Howard Deutch ('Pretty in Pink'). Still, she recognized something in Seberg's struggles. 'There is a sort of collective unconscious understanding amongst anyone who's been a young actress — you get it,' says Deutch. 'No one's exempt from the experience of what it means to be a woman in Hollywood at a young age, regardless of what year it is. 'But I have immense empathy and feel deep pain for her circumstances of not having a community around her that could help her, when she was 19, navigate in these in insane waters,' adds Deutch. 'She's an incredibly strong, brave, brilliant woman. It's absolutely correct we have very different backgrounds and I feel for anybody that comes into this world and doesn't have a foundation or a support system around them.' The production of 'Nouvelle Vague' had access to voluminous information on the production of 'Breathless,' from many books and documentaries to the paperwork of the original shoot itself. The actual camera used by cinematographer Raoul Coutard to shoot 'Breathless' is the one seen onscreen capturing the action in 'Nouvelle Vague.' While the film's costume designer, Pascaline Chavanne, did deep-dive research into the origins of the clothes in the original film, some garments were provided by Chanel, including a reproduction of a cappuccino-colored striped dress that Deutch liked so much she wore it to the photo call for the film at Cannes. The production had to recreate the iconic T-shirt worn by Seberg for the Champs-Élysées scene featuring the logo for the New York Herald Tribune. It has become one of the film's most cherished images. 'There were places where we could be more fluid and interpretive, but that shirt was not one of them,' recalls Deutch, with genuine seriousness. 'We wanted the ribbing to be perfect. We did so many different variations of it with the text and the size and getting it perfect.' Deutch also reverse-engineered moments from 'Breathless' that she would drop in elsewhere in 'Nouvelle Vague,' such as skipping onto set or repeating a line with different inflections, to imply that Godard may have plucked them from the world of the film's production and inserted them into the story. She observed this was a technique Linklater had used when they were shooting 'Everybody Wants Some!!' to bring the unpredictable liveliness of the making of the movie into the movie itself. 'I basically just obsessively watched 'Breathless' and said, 'What are some weird moments that I'm confused why they're there?'' says Deutch, who sees Godard and Linklater as similar in spirit. 'They are both directors of deep and true authenticity. And I liked the idea that both of them would do something like that because they're present and they're looking.' Linklater describes making the new film as 'a kind of séance' with the dead, noting that only two people portrayed in the movie are known to still be alive. Recreating a famous moment — such as when Seberg runs her finger over her lips as Belmondo had done — was deeply meaningful to him: an invocation. 'My favorite moments are when you finish a scene — an actor does something just great — and you're the first one to know it,' says Linklater. 'You've worked on it and you recognize it and you know what they just did was fantastic. And you can't wait to edit it and put it in the movie. 'But then they say 'cut' and the real world quickly fills up that space,' he adds. 'Magic just happened but then, OK, we're moving on. Just the way life seeps back into the magic — what did it look like to everyone else there?' 'There's always that layer when you're filming a movie, it's just people don't know it's there,' says Deutch. 'No one ever watches the movie and knows that day you got into a fight with your husband or your dog died or it was raining and your mascara was smearing. No one has any context and no one really cares. Generally they see it for what it is. But you feel it and see it and remember.' She's articulating a mission statement as good as any. In combining the emotions of 'Breathless' with the story of its creation, 'Nouvelle Vague' finds a heart and meaning of its own: when people with ambition, talent and creative drive step into their own power.
Tom's Guide
13 minutes ago
- Tom's Guide
5 best movies like 'Night Always Comes'
Netflix's No. 1 spot may still belong to the phenomenon that is "KPop Demon Hunters," but the streaming service's propulsive new thriller "Night Always Comes" has nevertheless managed to make a strong impression. Within days of its Netflix premiere, Benjamin Caron's hard-hitting crime thriller has shot to the No. 2 spot in Netflix's top 10 movies list. The movie, essentially, is a survival story. We follow Lynette ("The Fantastic Four: First Steps" star Vanessa Kirby), an occasionally reckless young woman who spends one stressful evening trying desperately to secure enough money to save her family home in Portland, Oregon. Despite breaking into the most-watched list, "Night Always Comes" has landed mixed reviews from both critics and fellow viewers. While I found it to be a fairly compelling (if bleak) watch, others aren't so sure: it's currently earned a 56% critics' score and an even lower 45% from audience members on Rotten Tomatoes. If you've already streamed "Night Always Comes" — or the mixed reception has put you off, but you're still looking for a thriller to watch — here's a round-up of movies like "Night Always Comes" that you may want to stream next, and where you can watch them. I'm kicking off this list with another intense thriller that plays out across one evening: Michael Mann's "Collateral." We're introduced to LA cab driver, Max (Jamie Foxx), whose night veers wildly off-course when sharply-dressed Vincent (Tom Cruise) hitches a ride. His new customer is a hit man who wants Max to ferry him from job to job, and when Max clocks what's really going on, he attempts to stop Vincent from finishing his current job — all while trying to avoid ending up becoming Vincent's next victim himself. Watch "Collateral" on Paramount Plus now Get instant access to breaking news, the hottest reviews, great deals and helpful tips. Nicolas Winding Refn's slick Ryan Gosling thriller "Drive" is a violent action thriller (with one hell of a soundtrack) that's more than worthy of your precious streaming time. It follows Driver (Gosling), a skilled stuntman with skills behind the wheel who moonlights as a getaway driver for the city's criminals: Give him a time and place, you get him for five minutes, and he'll get you where you need to be, safely. Trouble brews when a heist goes south, putting the Driver — and Irene (Carey Mulligan), the neighbor he's fallen for and her young son — in the crosshairs of some very dangerous people, and forcing him to go on the offensive. Watch "Drive" on Philo now Joel Schumacher's "Falling Down" is a tense, comic thriller about Bill Foster (Michael Douglas), a disgruntled man who bristles against the mounting frustrations of everyday life. On the day we join him, Bill faces one too many minor annoyances, and something inside finally snaps. He abandons his car in gridlock traffic and sets off on a violent trek across Los Angeles, lashing at anyone who gets in his way. Meanwhile, police sergeant Martin Prendergast (Robert Duvall) spends his final day of service in hot pursuit, trying to find and stop Bill Foster as his spree rages on. Buy/rent "Falling Down" on Prime Video now If you read my initial reaction to "Night Always Comes," you'll know that I couldn't stop thinking about "Good Time" the entire time I was watching Netflix's new movie. That's because these two taut, neon-lit crime thrillers make for great companion features. In this sprawling thriller, small-time crook Connie Nikas (Robert Pattinson) is forced into action after a botched bank heist ends with his younger brother Nick (Benny Safdie) behind bars. manipulative Connie then embarks on a long and violent journey through New York City's criminal underbelly, trying to secure enough cash to bail him, on a night that just keeps getting worse. Watch with Cinemax or buy/rent "Good Time" on Prime Video now On the surface, "One Of Them Days" might seem a slightly odd choice to follow "Night Always Comes." Lawrence Lamont's buddy comedy isn't exactly a taut, gritty thriller. But it is another movie that plays out over just one day that spirals way out of hand, and could make for a breezy follow-up to the intense Netflix original. In this hilarious comedy camper, we follow Dreux (Keke Palmer) and Alyssa (SZA) as they scramble to avoid eviction... because Alyssa's boyfriend (Joshua David Neal) has run off with their money. Cue a chaotic race against the clock to gather enough cash and survive with their friendship intact. Watch "One of Them Days" on Netflix now Not seeing anything you want to stream? Take a look at our round-up of the best movies on Netflix for tons more streaming suggestions perfect for your next movie night. Follow Tom's Guide on Google News to get our up-to-date news, how-tos, and reviews in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button.
