Elton John: The Million Dollar Piano

Elton John: The Million Dollar Piano - Trailer

Year 2014Genre(s) Documentaries    Videohttp://www.contactmusic.com/video/elton-john-the-million-dollar-piano-trailer

Year 2014Genre(s) Documentaries

Elton John is one of the biggest and most glamorous rockstars of all time having sold over 250 million records in his 50 year career with hit single after hit single topping the charts in countries across the world; his 1997 single 'Candle In The Wind' remains the biggest selling single ever released. In true Elton style, the singer and pianist took to Caesars Palace, Las Vegas to perform one of the most spectacular and stunningly extravagant concerts of his life featuring renditions of his biggest hitsplayed on one of the world's most remarkable pianos. The Yamaha instrument is fitted with LED screens that display a myriad of beautiful images to accompany each track. Carefully crafted over the last four years, this unique piano weighs a massive 3,200 pounds.

One of Elton John's most extraordinary concerts filmed at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace, Las Vegas is now set to hit cinema screens in the UK for one night only, featuring hits such as 'Rocket Man', 'Tiny Dancer', 'Goodbye Yellow Brick Road' and 'Your Song'. The sumptuously decorated stage performance with its incredible light tricks is not to be missed and will be arriving in 200 movie theatres across the UK on March 22nd 2014, and a grand 1,200 across the world. 

Newly Engaged Sweethearts Ashton Kutcher And Mila Kunis Join Forces On "Two And A Half Men"

by Victoria Pavlova | 05 March 2014

First comes love, then comes... a shared gig on Kutcher's sitcom.

Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis are already engaged, so why not add a little screen love on top of it? Kunis will join her co-star on That 70s Show and now in life in his own show, as his love interest no less. According to the New York Daily News, Kunis will play Vivian, a traveler who unexpectedly drops into the life of Kutcher's Walden and has an instant connection with him. But there's a plot twist, of course. Walden is about to propose to someone else.

Onscreen and off, the two were inseparable, even before the engagement announcement. 

This could be a great thing for the show. Since the two actors starred together on That 70s Show for eight consecutive seasons, we already know that they have on-screen chemistry.

So was the decision made after K & K’s recent engagement? You know, so they could spend more time together at work. Obviously sitcom production doesn’t work like that, but it would be pretty romantic if it did. Us Weekly first reported the news of the couple's engagement last week. The pair have been together since 2011, but have kept their relationship out of the public eye as much as possible. 

According to a press release, quoted by the Daily Mail, Kunis’ character is described as a “o is described as “a young, beautiful, free-spirited world traveler.” Sounds like a much needed breath of fresh air for the show, currently in its eleventh season.

Apparently, Kutcher and Kunis aren't afraid to mix business and personal life.

Let It Go! John Travolta Apologizes For Embarrassing Idina Menzel Mispronunciation 

The actor got the 'Frozen' singer's name very, very wrong in his Oscars speech.

John Travolta has felt compelled to apologize after he made a mess of the pronunciation of singer Idina Menzel's name when tasked with introducing the Frozen singer at Sunday's Oscars. Travolta had one job at the ceremony - to introduce Menzel who sang 'Let It Go' live - but made a hash of her name, producing something that sounded like "Adela Dazeem."

Travolta's error was quickly picked up upon by Twitter users who ridiculed the Pulp Fiction star for his goof. A spoof Twitter account under the name "Adela Dazeem" was quickly set up and tweeted "THANK YOU, JORN TROMOLTO!" after John's introduction speech aired. Slate magazine created a "Travoltify" app on its website, allowing users to generate their own scrambled names: "You're no one until you've had your name mangled by a confused, squinting John Travolta."

In response to the storm of scorn and mirth, Travolta has issued an apology, saying "I've been beating myself up all day. Then I thought...what would Idina Menzel say. She'd say, Let it go, let it go! Idina is incredibly talented and I am so happy Frozen took home two Oscars Sunday night!" However, hilariously, CNN reports that the statement Travolta sent was pretty "distorted" too and contained fragments of sentences and errors.

Menzel, who sang the Oscar-winning song 'Let It Go' from Disney's wintery fairytale Frozen, has not commented publically on Travolta's blunder. The Broadway singer is presumably still on a high after the elation of Sunday's Oscars where her movie also picked up Best Animated Feature Film and she performed the track live.

Starring Kristen Bell and Jonathan Groff, the snowy musical became one of Disney's highest grossing movie of all time when it dominated the box office over the Christmas period, earning $1 billion.

Watch The 'Let It Go' Scene From Disney's 'Frozen':

The Secrets to Winning an Academy Award

... as revealed by sociology

DEREK THOMPSONMAR  2014, 11:30 AM ET

Reuters

If the Oscars seem boring and predictable to you this year, then you're in good company. Sociologists have considered the Academy Awards predictable for a long time.

A few weeks ago, I spoke with Gabriel Rossman, a UCLA sociologist with some of the most interesting research on the intersection of economics and pop culture. Rossman has two fascinating papers about the Oscars. The first addressed the tantalizing question: What qualities of a movie best predict Oscars nominations? 

Unsurprisingly, the biggest correlation was being in a very serious movie. Considering 172,000 performances listed on IMDB in 20,000 movies, Rossman and co-author Nicole Esparza found that dramas were were nine times more likely to get nominations.

The second and third best predictors both had to do with the size of the competition. When there are fewer films released around awards season, the odds that any one movie gets a nomination increases. This simple principle applies, rather unfortunately, to actresses, as well. It's an industry truism, borne out in the evidence, that women have fewer meaty roles in the types of movies likely to be nominated for an Oscar. That means any one dramatic end-of-year performance by a woman has a higher chance of earning a nomination.

Perhaps the most substantive finding in the paper is that people with high IMDB movie rankings in past movie credits were more likely to work with other stars, doubling their chances at getting a nomination. “Actors are going to look good when they work with talented people," Rossman told the Daily Bruin. "This is an interesting thing since you tend to get talented people working with other talented people, meaning that people will end up looking even better than when just working alone.”

Maybe this seems completely obvious to you: Better actors get better parts and then get to work with better directors (hello, Leonardo DiCaprio). But it's also a classic example of what sociologists call cumulative advantage or the "Matthew Effect," named after the passage in Matthew where Jesus says "For to everyone who has, more will be given and he will grow rich." This isn't as simple as the rich getting richer. It's the idea that slightly more talented people get access to higher-quality support for their talents, which greatly multiplies the benefits of their innate advantage (e.g.: smarter students going to colleges with better professors and better career services connections).

The fact that movies with stars get more Oscar attention might be an indication that Hollywood's stars are simply better than its non-stars. But probably not. It's much more likely a sign that (just as you might have suspected) we're bad picking out discrete instances of talent in star-studded projects. This would imply we—or, at least, the Academy—is just as bad at recognizing Oscar-worthy talentin movies without any past Oscar nominees. In both cases, the context overwhelms our ability to recognize individual achievement. 

Rossman's second Oscar paper is about audiences and prizes. Some producers really want to win Oscars. These producers would also, presumably, like to make money. The problem is that audiences don't like most movies that are "Academy Award movies"—here defined as late-year releases about serious subjects (like AIDS, slavery, or technological dystopia)—so the business of making an Oscar-y movie is high-risk with dubiously high reward.

Rossman explains it well:

It turns out that audiences dislike movies that are *trying* to get Oscar nominations but really like movies that actually *get* Oscar nominations. By inference, if there were no Oscars to drive box office towards them, there would be far fewer movies about historical protagonists overcoming oppression. Indeed, it looks like Hollywood basically nails it since they make exactly the right number of Oscar-targeted movies that the two effects balance out on average.

  

Syrian air raids hit Lebanese border region

BEIRUT Wed Mar 5, 2014 2:02pm IST

 

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(Reuters) - Syria carried out air raids inside Lebanon on Wednesday close to the Syrian border and near one of the last rebel-held Syrian border towns, Lebanese security sources said.

There were no immediate reports of casualties or damages from the air strikes, which the sources said appeared to be linked to a Syrian military offensive against the rebel stronghold of Yabroud.

Syrian journalists who were taken on a state-organised tour of government-held areas around Yabroud on Tuesday heard gunfire and saw jets flying overhead as troops fought on the edges of the town.

The offensive is part of a military campaign by President Bashar al-Assad's forces, backed by Lebanese Shi'ite Hezbollah militants, to drive rebels from the border region and secure territory linking Assad's coastal bastions with Damascus.

The fighting has frequently spilled across the ill-defined frontier between the two countries. The mainly Sunni Muslim rebels have targeted Shi'ite Muslim towns inside Lebanon in response to Hezbollah's support for Assad, while Sunni areas sympathetic to the rebels have also come under fire.

(Writing by Dominic Evans; Editing by Mark Heinrich)