Daniel Craig Returns in New James Bond Film Skyfall

Fifty years to the day since Sean Connery was cast as James Bond in Dr. No, the latest installment of one of the world’s most popular film franchises was announced. Skyfall, which is officially the 23rd Bond film, will be released in the U.K. on October 23, 2012 (and is slated for a November 9 opening in the U.S.).

Skyfall marks the third outing for Daniel Craig as 007. Joining the familiar face of Dame Judi Dench as his boss ‘M.,’ will be Ralph Fiennes, Albert Finney and Javier Bardem, who stars as the film’s villain. The all-important Bond girls (in so many ways, the Bond franchise is still stuck in the 1960′s) will be Naomie Harris and French actress Berenice Marlohe. Marlohe will play “a glamorous, enigmatic character” (snooze…) named Severine while Harris is a field agent named Eve. “I’ve been doing yoga three times a week to get into shape and stunt-driving and firing machine guns, which I’ve discovered I’ve got a real taste for,” said Harris.

(PHOTOS: The Best Bond Girls)

So far so expected. But the choice of director does mark an interesting departure for the franchise. Oscar-nominated Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Road to Perdition) may well provide a more artistic take than Marc Forster (Quantum of Solace), Martin Campbell (Casino Royale, Goldeneye) or Lee Tamahori (Die Another Day, a film so bad it came closer than any Bond villain to actually killing 007 off for good).

At the lavish London launch on Thursday, Mendes couldn’t give too much away – presumably he’d have to kill us if he did – but confirmed that the film would be shot in London, Turkey, China and Scotland. One considerable concern has been the suggestion that Mendes would tone down or, heaven forbid!, abandon altogether the action sequences which are part and parcel of Bond folklore. Fear not, said Mendes, the “fantastic script” had “all the elements of a classic Bond movie, including — to quell any rumors — lots of action.” In other words, those scared by the notion of the film resembling one of Mendes’s plays or the tight narrative structure of Revolutionary Road can rest easy.

Inevitably, concrete details about the “fantastic script” were difficult to come by. Finney, for example, has already been a villainous star of a rival Bond franchise (Jason Bourne), but producers wouldn’t expand upon his or Fiennes’ roles. Instead, producer Michael G Wilson merely said that the title was “the worst kept secret in London” (it had already been leaked by an eagle-eyed fan who’d figured out that Sony had registered domain names such as ‘jamesbond-skyfall’ and ‘jamesbondskyfall’). And that title (which we’re all agreed on is a marked improvement from Quantum of Solace, right?) has an “emotional meaning” which will be explained during the movie.

But if Bond fans are delighted that they can finally set a calendar date for the next film, the most relieved group of all might be the money-men at Sony. Added together, the past two movies took in over a billion dollars in global ticket sales. According to Craig, the film starts shooting today. Bond is back.

The Otherworldly Charms of Florence + the Machine

Florence Welch doesn’t dance. She writhes. The striking auburn-haired singer who fronts Florence + the Machine likes to perform in long, robe-like gowns and sing sweeping ballads full of majestic imagery: stars, the universe, eternity, the ocean. When Welsh commands, “Say my name and every color illuminates” on a song from Ceremonials, Florence + the Machine’s second album, you actually believe it might happen. Her voice, with its ability to switch from fragile to bold in just a single note, is otherworldly. This is why Odysseus feared the sirens. Something this beautiful has to be dangerous.

Welch’s ethereal art rock songs created such a sensation in her native Britain that Florence + the Machine won the highly coveted 2008 Critics Choice award before the band had even released an album. (“The Machine” originally referred to her frequent keyboardist and longtime collaborator Isabella “Machine” Summers, but the term has now broadened to include the ever-changing roster of musicians who perform with Welch) Her debut record, Lungs, came out in 2009 and was an instant U.K. hit. Over in the U.S. her rise was much more gradual. It wasn’t until her whirlwind performance of“Dog Days Are Over” at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards (nearly a year after Lungs’ release) that the album shot to No. 14 on the Billboard 200. “Dog Days” was also covered by the cast of Glee and featured in the trailer for Julia Roberts’ Eat, Pray, Love — two points that might seem minor, but they introduced Welch to the most important of audiences — America’s obdurate heartland. That’s who an artist must charm to become big enough for, say, a Best New Artist Grammy nomination. (Welch was nominated last year alongside Drake and Justin Bieber. Surprisingly, they all lost to jazz bassist Esperanza Spalding). Florence + the Machine is now an undeniable success; Ceremonials will likely take her to greater heights.

(MORE: The Best And Worst of the 2011 Grammys)

“People say that making the second album is supposed to be more difficult,” Welch says, speaking by phone from a New York hotel room. “But nothing could have been harder than that first record. I had no idea what I was doing.” Welch, 25, started writing songs when she was a teenager and had several years of work to choose from when it came time to record Lungs. Her earlier tunes—one, “Kiss with a Fist,” was written when she was just 17— were traditional, guitar-driven indie pop. “I didn’t hit on this sound—of songs like ‘Dog Days Are Over’ and ‘Cosmic Love’—until halfway through making the record,” she says. “Suddenly I realized the type of music I wanted to be making.”

Ceremonials expands that sound, turning Welch’s signature wail into something so full-bodied it sounds as if it’s coming at you from inside a cathedral. Most of the album was written in just a few months; as a result it feels tighter and more focused than anything Welch has done before. There’s very little guitar — just drums, piano and the occasional harp.

A big sound necessitates big themes. “My instincts are sometimes quite dark and my imagination has a tendency to take me to some quite frightening places,” admits Welch. Here, she sings of being brought down — whether by devils, a distant lover or her own mind — and then pulling herself back up again. Ceremonials’ highlight, second single “No Light No Light,” is a roaring number about looking into her partner’s eyes to discover that the love is gone, while “Shake it Out” finds Welch trying to escape a terrible, haunting past. “I am done with my graceless heart,” she sings, “so tonight I am going to cut it out and then restart.” Those last three words are what makes Welch’s doom-and-gloom palatable. Florence + the Machine’s songs may delve into darkness, but a part of them is always searching for the light.

Visually, Welch is as great a contrast to today’s female stars as is possible. There is little sex in her songs and she doesn’t dress in the usual pop uniform of miniskirts, bikini tops or candy-colored outfits. “There’s never been a part of my life when I’ve tried to look sexy,” Welch says. “Most of the time I feel like a paisley librarian.” While most teenage girls flipped through Seventeen magazine and watched Clueless, Welch says that she idolized Fairuza Balk’s goth witch character from the 1996 film The Craft—wine-colored lipstick and all. For an entire year, she bleached her eyebrows white. “It’s good for performing because you look frightening but no one can figure out why,” she says.

Last month, Welch debuted Ceremonials at an outdoor concert held under a stone archway underneath New York’s Manhattan Bridge. Her hair was pulled back and her shimmery blouse was tucked into a floor-sweeping skirt. The only thing about her that wasn’t restrained was her voice. Welch stomped and trembled and threw out her arms as the music reverberated off the curved walls around her. She’s refreshing, this female singer whose idea of theatrics involves more buttons, not less, and who tries to retain a sense of artistry in the midst of her ever-broadening appeal. Welch has received offers to travel to Los Angeles and make a “proper American pop album,” and says she has considered it. But honestly, why would she want that? Her voice already fills the sky.

Real Steel Review: Babes in Mad Max Land

In Real Steel, Dreamworks' lavishly photographed deadbeat-dad redemption story, retired boxer and practicing flim-flam man Charlie Kenton (Hugh Jackman) explains the origin of robot boxing to his long-lost 11-year-old son Max (Dakota Goyo). The action is set in the near future, sometime after 2016 (the exact year is vague). He and Max are reluctantly reunited after the boy's mother dies, having not seen each other since Charlie bailed shortly after Max's birth. In the decade in between, human boxers like Charlie have been replaced with heavily armored robots that tower over their human controllers.

I couldn't wait to find out why. My favorite part of science fiction stories is when the journey from point A, life as we know it, to point B, life in the future, is finally spelled out for the audience. One deliciously cool revelation and everything makes sense. Whether it's a classic like Blade Runner or something lesser like A.I. Artificial Intelligence, the joy is in watching the brave new world come into focus, illuminating just how close today's society might be to that spooky futuristic society. It's that shiver of proximity that provides the perverse pleasure; ask anyone who saw Contagion.(See the top 10 movies of 2010.)

But what a disappointing rationale Charlie gives for the evolution of boxing: "What people really wanted was true, no holds-barred violence," he tells Max. Of course; people are pigs. But wait, what do robots have to do with true violence? Isn't a bloodless sport between unfeeling machines the very definition of holds-barred? The worst thing that happens when the robots in Real Steel are in the ring is that things fall apart and, occasionally, a fluid that looks like battery acid oozes from the wreckage. The boy is about a thousand times smarter than his father — he's learned Japanese from video games, capably rewires a robot they find at the dump and easily tricks Charlie into taking him on a cross country tour. (Charlie sells his parenting rights to Max's aunt and creepy uncle, played by Hope Davis and James Rebhorn, but agrees to babysit for the summer). But Max doesn't probe Charlie on this one.

I'd like to blame Real Steel on Transformers because I like to blame anything involving silly robots and sillier humans on Transformers whenever possible, but its origin dates back to Richard Matheson's 1956 short story Steel. Real Steel made it to the small screen as an episode of The Twilight Zone in the 1960s, starring Lee Marvin as a robot controller in a world where human fighting had been outlawed. Marvin steps in for a broken bot in a fight — he's more man than machine — and for a while it seems possible that something similar might happen with Charlie and the robot Max salvages from the dump, reboots and christens Adam. Adam mirrors his operator (In the movies most appealing moments, there is a hint that he may be special, magical even) and there's this expectation that Jackman may enter the ring again, leading to shirtlessness and revelations and lessons about humanity and fatherhood.(See the 100 best movies of all time.)

But the story remains sadly mired in botdom, which leads to some boredom. It's hard to look away from the ever-dazzling Jackman, but the sight of him hunched over the controls of something akin to a live action video game is not, in the end, much more exciting than the sight of your average teenager hunched over the controls of a Game Boy. It's all just technological fussing; there's no urgency, no point to be made about strength or weakness. The acting matches that mood, with Jackman giving the kind of heightened, artificial performance that seems right out of the 1930s or '40s. Goyo oozes confidence, but that too feels unnatural.

The movie was directed by Shawn Levy, of the Night at the Museum series and Date Night but cinematographer Mauro Fiore (Avatar is the more dominant force at work. Fiore doesn't have to work hard to make any of the sinfully attractive stars look good, certainly not Jackman, Goyo or Lost's Evangeline Lily, who plays the ridiculous part of Bailey, the daughter of Charlie's old boxing coach and his bot mechanic. But he puts a serious sheen on the robots (they make Darth Vader look like a dusty old thing) and on the surroundings, particularly the scenes of a verging-on-dystopian America. Whether it's a ruined zoo or a county fair when a bull and a robot go head to head while a Ferris wheel spins nearby, Fiore makes Real Steel look like the real deal. What a tease.

Kirsten Dunst Is Now A German Citizen

Is Kirsten Dunst moving to Germany?

Well, maybe. Dunst recently told the German publication B.Z. that she has received German citizenship.

"I'm now a real international lady," she said (via Daily Mail), adding, "One who can film in Europe without a problem."

The "Melancholia" star -- who says she speaks German "at a child's level" -- also revealed that she'd love to move to Berlin one day.

"I would prefer to buy an apartment in Berlin," Dunst said. "It's such a young city, and right now so much is happening in Berlin."

Dunst has recently been making the press rounds for "Melancholia," along with her co-star Alexander Skarsgard. However, the film's director, Lars Von Trier, has withdrawn from making public statementsafter learning he will face charges for the Hitler remarks he made earlier this year at the Cannes Film Festival.

'World War Z' Set Raided By Hungarian Anti-Terrorism Unit

He was just trying to save the world from zombies, okay?

Things got a little too real on the set of Brad Pitt'supcoming zombie apocalypse film "World War Z"recently, as Hungarian anti-terrorism authorities swept the set and seized a cache of unauthorized weapons. Us Weekly reports that police in Budapest, where the film moved after shooting in Glasgow, took 85 functional weapons, many of which were automatic assault rifles similar to those used by the military.

The problem? The weapons weren't actually supposed to work.

"Guns like these are highly illegal to transport even if they were to used as stage guns, which hopefully they weren't," Hajdu Janos and Zsolt Bodnar, the director and deputy director of Hungary's Anti-Terrorism Unit, told the magazine.

This marks yet another snafu on the film's set; back in August, a planned human stampede became a true danger zone, and Pitt had to swoop in and rescue a woman who was being trampled on by the running extras.

The film, based on the hit book by Max Brooks, features Pitt as a UN employee trying to prevent a zombie takeover of the world.

Jason Biggs, Wife Jenny Mollen Order Prostitutes In Las Vegas

And we thought a pie was Jason Biggs' most risque sexual partner.

The actor who launched into the national consciousness -- and subconsciousness -- when he mounted a freshly baked apple pastry back in 1999's "American Pie" is now married to fellow actress Jenny Mollen. She is perhaps best known for her role in 2006's National Lampoon's "Cattle Call," and together, the two put their formidable knowledge of unconventional sex escapades to good use during a recent trip to Las Vegas.

Blogging for Playboy, Mollen recounts, in vivid detail, the time she and her husband ordered a couple of prostitutes to their Hotel Room.

After a false start with a girl named Eva and an uncooperative ATM (not to mention some close calls with friends, bruised egos and a failed attempt at sexual bravery), Mollen and Biggs finally scored a friendly sex worker on their second night in the hotel.

What follows is very suggestive, if not explicit.

"No! I am really discreet! Even if they had, people never think I'm a working girl. I usually just get away with saying I'm somebody's cousin," she explained. "Somebody's cousin who sucks d*ck for a living." I thought to myself. The chick was wearing five-inch heels and had tits that seriously could have knocked anybody under six feet tall unconscious. There was no way she was passing for anything other than maybe Barbarella. In other words, she was hot. I took my cues from the previous day's disaster and cut to the chase.

"We want you to go down on him for six hundred bucks," I proclaimed. Keisha, being the professional that she was, didn't bat an eye.

At least that's the allegation by an ex-employee of the actress's candy and yogurt company, Sweet Harts, who is suing the erstwhile teenage witch and her business for wrongful termination and racial profiling.
What exactly is the former store manager claming?
RELATED: Check out the lawsuit
In the lawsuit, filed Thursday in Los Angeles and obtained by E! News, Shana Kharineh accuses the Melissa & Joey star and Sweet Harts of wrongful termination, discrimination based on race, retaliation against employee complaining of discrimination, failure to pay wages owed, failure to pay overtime wages, failure to provide eal periods, failure to provide rest periods, failure to pay minimum wage and unlawful business practices.
Hart's camp reached out to E! News, saying, "Melissa Joan Hart is the owner of Sweetharts Sweets in Sherman Oaks, California. While the shop was her vision, Melissa does not currently function in a day-to-day operational capacity, and has never met Shana Kharineh. Sweet Harts Sweets is an equal opportunity employer, as is Melissa Joan Hart. Neither Sweetharts Sweets nor Melissa engages in or condones any form of discrimination whatsoever. There is no basis whatsoever to these vicious allegations."
Kharineh was hired as a manager at the Sherman Oaks store in May 2011 with a starting salary of $450 a week, according to her complaint.
The plaintiff alleges that unlike the store's white employees, Kharineh, who is African American, was given a special dress code based on her race and told not to wear black because  "'black on black' did not look appropriate."
Kharineh also says that because the store was understaffed June 2011, she was forced to work in excess of 60 hours per week with no overtime pay and no breaks. The next month, she claims, her employers "berated and humiliated" her, criticizing her performance and relationship with her fellow employees and complaining that "when she bent over her underwear would show." She was fired in August and believes it's because of her race and her complaints about her working conditons.

Jessica Simpson Keeping Wedding Date Secret From Dad?

After sharing every detail of her first wedding, married life, and divorce with all of America, Jessica Simpson has decided that her second wedding, to Eric Johnson, is going to be very different. She has refused to divulge any details when it comes to the big day -- even with dear old dad.

So who's in the know when it comes to dresses and desserts? “Just me, Eric and the wedding planner," Simpson admitted at a press junket. She's taking joy in the secrecy of the covert affair.

“After 'Newlyweds,' her life became so public that everyone thought they deserved to know everything about her," a friend of the reality star's tells me. "She is a very different person now than she was five years ago and is now making her own decisions, including who to trust and who not to share everything with."

Although the top secret date has been selected, the dress has not. But heading up a fashion empire, estimated to be worth one billion dollars, she shouldn't find it too hard to score the perfect gown. 

“Expect the dress to be as big a secret as the date,” a friend says. “Guests will be called a few weeks before the big day to give them a heads up and then called days before to give them the exact location.” The hush, hush celebration is not much different than the way her ex-husband, Nick Lachey, handled his recent wedding with former Miss USA, Vanessa Minnillo.

But, as he has in the past, will her manager-father work out a lucrative deal with a magazine or TV network on behalf of all those not invited to share in the private moment? “No decision has been made yet,” an insider says. “However, if it does it will be Jessica, not Joe, making that decision this time 'round.”

Jessica Simpson Pregnant:

Jessica Simpson may already be starting a family with fiancé Eric Johnson. According to InTouch, Simpson recently celebrated Johnson's 32nd birthday but made it clear that she was not participating in the champagne toast -- she sent back her glass of bubbly. The source close to the singer and the former NFL player who told InTouch that the pair is expecting their first child also divulged that Simpson is already experience pregnancy cravings.

The news that Simpson may be eating for two only further gains its footing with reports that she may be postponing her nuptials, Us Weekly reports. Perhaps Simpson and Johnson want their forthcoming little one to be present on their big day?

Johnson proposed to Simpson in November of last year, making the couple's extended engagement just two months shy of one year. Simpson's little sister, Ashlee, similarly got pregnant with then fiancé Pete Wentz before they officially tied the knot (and later divorced) -- we wonder what minister dad, Joe Simpson, thinks about the reported trend in his daughters' family planning choices.

Although Simpson's ex-husband, Nick Lachey tied the knot with his new wife, Vanessa Minnillo, before Simpson had the chance to get hitched, it looks like she may be the first one of the pair to call herself a parent.

If Simpson is pregnant, she'll be joining these similarly expecting celebs: