Latest news with #Graffiti
News18
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- News18
Gauri Khan's White Jacket-Baggy Jeans Combo Is Street Style Done Right
Last Updated: For AbRam's 12th birthday, Gauri Khan kept it casual yet stylish in a white jacket and blue oversized jeans. Gauri Khan has once again reminded us why she is the undisputed fashion queen. The entrepreneur and interior designer made a strong case for chic and effortless fashion at her son, AbRam Khan's, birthday party on May 27. The intimate affair was nothing short of a fashion spectacle, with Gauri taking the centre stage in a stylish ensemble. At the birthday bash, Gauri Khan proved her penchant for fashion with her striking choice of ensemble. Effortlessly balancing high fashion and casual flair, she wore a Graffiti motif jacket from the shelves of the luxury brand Dior. She paired it with a black tee and baggy denim jeans from Citizens of Humanity. Loved the bottom and planning to add it to your closet? We've got your back. The 'Horseshoe Jean in Magnolia' jeans will cost you $278 (around Rs 23,700). For a beauty like Gauri, one does not need heavy makeup. She beautified her already striking features with natural glam makeup, characterised by soft, blushed cheeks, nude lipstick and mascara-laden lashes. As for her hair, she styled her tresses in a ponytail with a sleek middle parting. Gauri's outfit added a perfect touch of glamour to the low-key celebration, and we are taking notes. Just a few days back, the Khan family came together to celebrate Suhana Khan's birthday. Gauri stole the show with her sartorial choice at the intimate bash. She donned a gathered V-neck midi dress by Victoria Beckham. The pastel blue outfit, ideal for a romantic evening outing with your special someone, comes with a price tag of £510 (around Rs 58,000). She accessorised the figure-hugging fit with a luxurious Louis Vuitton 2021 Crocodile Capucines Bag and Ballet Pink Patent Leather Mules with Crystal Strap, exuding timeless grace and sophistication. If you like the Jimmy Choo bag and want to add it to your closet, it is available for €925 (approximately Rs 89,770). Whether it's a family birthday or a glamorous gathering, Gauri continues to serve looks that need to be bookmarked. First Published:
Metro
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Metro
Beloved Cheers and Space Jam actor Michael Alaimo dies aged 86
Michael Alaimo, a seasoned character actor whose screen and stage career spanned more than sixty years, has died at the age of 86. His daughter, Gabriella Alaimo Thomas, confirmed his death, noting he passed away peacefully on May 2 in Burbank, California. No cause of death was disclosed. Alaimo built a long, varied résumé in Hollywood, marked by memorable turns in film, television, and theater. Though never a household name, he became a familiar face to generations of viewers, thanks to a steady stream of supporting roles. One of his most widely seen performances came in the 1996 cult hit Space Jam, where he appeared opposite Michael Jordan as the team doctor. Earlier in his career, Alaimo had roles in socially resonant films like The China Syndrome (1979), a nuclear meltdown thriller that mirrored real-world anxieties. He also worked on a variety of genre films in the late 1960s and early 70s, including Graffiti (1969) and Come Play with Me (1968), often appearing in low-budget, adult-oriented features that later developed cult followings. On television, Alaimo made appearances on numerous iconic shows throughout the 1980s. He guest-starred on Cheers in a 1985 episode titled 2 Good 2 Be 4 Real, playing the role of Vinnie Claussen. The appearance came during the show's acclaimed fourth season. More Trending Other TV credits included Dynasty, Night Court, Hill Street Blues, ALF, Mr. Belvedere, and The Paper Chase. He also played Mr. Radford on Scrubs in 2004, along with parts on The Drew Carey Show in 1997 and The Wonder Years in 1992. Alaimo also appeared in films including the 1989 Tony Danza comedy She's Out of Control and 1983's Mr. Mom, which starred Michael Keaton and the late Teri Garr. The actor is survived by his wife Louise; daughters Gabriella and Giovanna; son-in-law David; and granddaughters Isabella and Malia. This is a breaking news story, more to follow soon… Check back shortly for further updates. If you've got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@ calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we'd love to hear from you. For more stories like this, check our entertainment page. Follow Entertainment on Twitter and Facebook for the latest celeb and entertainment updates. You can now also get articles sent straight to your device. Sign up for our daily push alerts here. MORE: Dropout Kings singer Adam Ramey dies aged 32 after 'painful battle with addiction' MORE: Ted Danson 'devastated' after Cheers co-star George Wendt dies aged 76 MORE: Doctor Who and Coronation Street star Michael McStay dies aged 92 as family pay tribute
Los Angeles Times
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Did ‘Star Wars' teach us the wrong ideas about rebellion?
I'm always struck by how many extras it takes to wage a rebellion. In an early cut of 1977's 'Star Wars,' George Lucas included a shaggy, chatty 'Graffiti'-esque sequence between Luke Skywalker and one of his Tatooine pals, Biggs, who tells him, 'I'm not going to wait for the Empire to draft me into service. The Rebellion is spreading and I want to be on the right side.' Those scenes got scrapped, so Luke's first conversations about the rebel alliance would have to wait until deeper into the movie. But you can catch a glimpse of Biggs flying an X-wing in the Death Star attack. He's the one with a brown mustache who gets shot down in combat, earning respect even though the action doesn't stop to mourn him. 'Star Wars' ends with victory and medals, but the Dark Side is rarely beaten head-on. Over its nearly two-dozen films and TV shows, the battle between the formidable Empire and the scrappy resistance has become not just a metaphor for the current crisis of the day, but a moral guidebook of how and when — and when not — to fight. 'The Empire Strikes Back,' which celebrates its 45th anniversary this year and will open the TCM Classic Film Festival tomorrow night, starts with the rebel's Hoth ice base under attack. Princess Leia instantly chooses to evacuate and save its anonymous mechanics and map-makers instead of risking everyone's lives with a more spectacular, implausible showdown. A pure popcorn movie would pick fireworks over fleeing to safety, especially when the common wisdom of the time was that sequels were dreck. Lucas, who funded the film independently without studio interference, had more serious intentions — and his own choices would go on to reshape our cultural landscape for better and worse. Audiences have adored 'The Empire Strikes Back' across five decades, seven presidencies and a seismic industry change triggered in part by its own critical and financial impact. While the original 'Star Wars' is credited with hyperspacing cinema from the earthy, gritty '70s to the high-gloss blockbuster '80s, it's 'Empire' — both as a hugely successful follow-up and a business-minded pivot — that encouraged Hollywood to make more franchises. My main problem with it is its most famous quote: 'No, I am your father.' That Darth Vader revelation altered the drama from political animosity to Oedipal mythos. The Galactic Emperor's top henchman and the freedom fighter Luke Skywalker were related? Really? Vader's voice actor James Earl Jones delivers that line gentler than it clangs in my head, hitting the 'I' hard but soft-pedaling the rest, pronouncing the word 'father' so quietly that it sounds like Vader is luring a stray dog with a bone. Jones has said he assumed Vader was lying and I wish he had been. (Marcia Lucas, George Lucas' then-wife, said the idea began as a dinner party joke.) Of all the franchise's insights into revolution, this claim that Luke's inherited destiny meant he could destroy the Emperor — that this regular farm kid was, in fact, a space Jesus hunted by a space Herod — feels to me like a shoddy twist that's caused more headache than it was worth. What are the odds that Luke would randomly buy a salvaged droid that just so happened to be on the lam from his own daddy? How could an entire galaxy be so small? Luke, I am your fumble. But the big reveal was pop-culturally sticky. Not only did the series stand by it — sorry, James Earl Jones — so did Hollywood. For generations, too many blockbuster franchises have leaned on 'chosen one' heroes who were simply born special, from Harry Potter and Neo to Kung Fu Panda and Austin Powers, who discovered to his chagrin that he and the villainous Dr. Evil were secretly twin brothers. The twist went from surprise to stock. (Even the recent third season of 'The White Lotus' has a big father reveal.) By now, it's so steeped in epic storytelling that any character able to sustain a trilogy will have their DNA tested by 23andMe. After 'Empire,' Star Wars itself couldn't escape the chokehold of cliché. When the series' latest trilogy introduced a new heroic orphan, Rey (Daisy Ridley), in 2015's 'The Force Awakens,' audiences assumed that she had to be related to someone. 'The Last Jedi' filmmaker Rian Johnson tried to steer the series back to the first film's rousing egalitarianism, establishing Rey's parents as merely heavy-drinking junk traders. A vocal niche of fans was so disappointed that its follow-up, 'The Rise of Skywalker,' executed an about-face and proclaimed that Rey was no less than the daughter of the Emperor himself. Personally, I've come to hate that twist. Ordinary rebels — even ones born from boozehounds — taking down a dictator are inspirational. Waiting around for a messiah isn't. (How funny that fanboys who attempted to shoot their own version of 'The Last Jedi' referred to Johnson's take as 'blasphemy.') There's a petulant idleness implicit in the post-'Empire' fixation on saviors, a suggestion that societal change is best left for someone else more important. A decade or so ago during the dystopian YA craze, when chosen-one films like 'The Maze Runner' and 'Divergent' saturated the multiplex, that sort of passive thinking felt as pointless as buying a prayer candle of Ruth Bader Ginsberg. It's dinky and depressing and it doesn't do a thing to make the world a better place. And yet, whatever your political stripes and wherever on this planet you live, it's hard to escape the sense that lots of people are either putting their faith in all-powerful leaders or crossing their fingers that one they like will arise. Luke's magical genes are the least interesting thing about him. More moving are his relatable failures. He started 'Star Wars' as a self-absorbed teenager who refused to help Princess Leia, sputtering, 'It's not that I like the Empire — I hate it — but there's nothing I can do about it right now.' He refused to wear a halo, even when fans tried to jam one on him. An impulsive brawler, he ditched his Jedi training and immediately got his hand cut off and, by the end of his story, he'd quit the rebellion to circle right back to his comfort zone as an isolated farmer. Yet, Luke's ultimately fleeting contributions to the cause say that a fumbling step is better than staying still. The weight of all of that moral awareness seems to now rest on the actor who played him too, with Mark Hamill becoming one of social media's more outspoken voices. (Recently, Hamill posted: 'After playing a fictional member of the Resistance a long time ago, I never could have imagined it ever happening in real life, but here we are.') Elsewhere in the grand expanse of Lucas' universe, the right moves are rarely preordained. If there's a unifying truth in his galaxy, it's that heroism is messy and complex. As a child, Lucas had been thrilled by televised war footage until his older sister's fiancé died serving in Korea. He grew up to see how politics was at once powerful and petty, like when he took a job editing government documentaries of Lyndon Johnson and was ordered to never show the president's bald spot. As part of a self-described friend group of 'bearded, freako pre-hippies,' he marched against Vietnam, which he described as 'a huge psychological bomb [that] landed on United States soil.' His own smash-cut from innocence to tragedy was mirrored in 'American Graffiti,' a period-piece romp that abruptly ended in a roll call of death: One character would be killed by a drunk driver, another missing in action near An Loc. Lucas loved the idealistic adventure reels of the '30s and '40s where good and evil were divided by a fresh coat of paint. But his own life experience turned what looked like black and white into his version of gray. Part of the series' tractor-beam pull is that installments don't always end with a shamelessly audience-satiating happy climax: Characters are abducted, they lose their innocence, they die in childbirth, they die en masse. They accidentally help the darkness or they choose the darkness outright. The bad guys always strike back. Even in times of relative peace, the 'Star Wars' galaxy is moldering with economic inequality, burdensome military spending and distracted leaders who are content to maintain the status quo. At its most provocative, the franchise reflects our own dilemmas without offering any solutions, from directors tugging Rey's lineage back and forth to Lucas' own political curiosities, which matured even as copycats continued to reign on other multiplex screens. 'How does a democracy turn itself into a dictatorship?' Lucas said in a 2012 interview with the former presidential candidate Bill Bradley. 'It happened in Rome, happened in France, happened in Germany. What causes that?' He explored that question in the prequel trilogy he launched with 1999's 'The Phantom Menace,' and while his answer isn't especially cinematic, it now has a ripped-from-the-headlines resonance. In short: A politician instigates a feud over tariffs to win an election and, over three films and 13 years, claims to 'love democracy' even as he declares emergencies that allow him to consolidate power over a weakened Senate that eventually agrees he can declare himself Emperor. Children's eyes glazed over at 'The Phantom Menace's' opening crawl: 'The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute.' Blaming the fall of a republic on a blockade instead of a dad-versus-son battle royale is like making the Millennium Falcon slow down for speed bumps. But it's leagues more narratively expansive and honest — and more personally galvanizing — now that I feel like a background extra in Lucas' universe. As Darth says right after the line that screwed everything up, 'Search your feelings, you know it to be true.'
Korea Herald
05-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Korea Herald
All(H)ours ready to ignite music scene with ‘Smoke Point'
Band has eyes on Coachella All(H)ours has made an ambitious return, with an album that covers a spectrum of genres. Debuted in January last year, All(H)ours is the first boy band from Eden Entertainment, the agency founded by former JYP executive Cho Hae-sung. The title of the group's latest mini-album, 'Smoke Point,' refers to the temperature at which oil or other substances begin to emit smoke, symbolizing All(H)ours' readiness to rise and take off. 'While our previous albums focused on establishing our identity and introducing ourselves to the public, this time, we wanted to show what else we could do,' said leader Kunho. Highlights of the album include 'Graffiti,' a pop track with an addictive melody and youthful charm, and 'Gimme Gimme,' an energetic dance track with a mischievous vibe. 'Our previous main tracks have showcased our powerful side, but this time, we wanted to highlight our musical range. That's why we chose 'Gimme Gimme' to represent our intensity and 'Graffiti' to showcase a new side of us,' said Youmin. The five-track album includes title track 'Smoke Point,' which stands out with its new jack swing rhythm, the R&B hip-hop track 'Kings & Queens' and 'Freaky Fresh.' Celebrating the first anniversary of the group's debut, the members reflected on the hard work they put in to improve their skills. 'I think our choreography has become more intense and refined. We put a lot of thought into our facial expressions and the details of our performances to see how we could deliver even more energy,' said Xayden. "Meeting so many international fans during our showcases in Tokyo and Taipei gave us a lot of strength and motivation,' said Minje. When asked about the group's future goals, Kunho ambitiously mentioned Coachella. 'It's a dream stage for all idols, and we'd love to perform there one day. Our goal is to showcase our strength in live performances on a massive stage like Coachella.' Youngest member Hyunbin, who recently turned 20, expressed his desire for the group to be recognized as a 'complete-package idol group," that excels at not only singing and performing but also on variety shows. "I hope we can earn recognition for being able to pull off a wide range of genres," he said.
