Movers and Shakers - Articles - Zimbio

7 Questions with Christina Ricci

Thu, 9 May 2008 18:11:31 GMT

posted by John
Five sort of relevant facts about Christina Ricci: 1) She was born in Santa Monica, California in 1980 to a former Ford model (the agency, not the car) mother and a psychiatrist father. 2) She’s most known for her role in awesome indie films like The Ice Storm, Monster and The Opposite Sex for which she received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress. 3) Her breakout role was in The Addams Family where she played goth daughter Wednesday. 4) She has her own production company called Blaspheme Films which produced Prozac Nation and Pumpkin. 5) She modeled for Louis Vuitton in 2004, is good friends with Samuel L. Jackson and stars as Trixie in the big budget Wachowski Brothers’ feature, Speed Racer which hits theaters May 9, 2008.

Zimbio: Did you see a resemblance between yourself and Trixie in the original cartoon?
Christina Ricci: Well, people have told me that I looked like anime for a long time and so after a while you're like, "Okay, fine." I have big eyes and a small chin, I would imagine. You don't see it?

Zimbio: I don't watch a lot of anime.
Ricci: Me neither.

Zimbio: Are you hoping to bring back the phrase "cool beans?"
Ricci: My sister says "cool beans" and I said, "Okay. This might not be so hard. I’ve heard my sister use this term before." So I think it's already here and I don't need to bring it back.

Zimbio: Do you like the sort of visual style of this film, even if it's not your own movie?
Ricci: Yeah, I actually do. I find that incredibly gratifying and satisfying because you get to see all these colors and the flashbulbs breaking into hearts and stuff. It's stuff that people wouldn't normally do in film because they think, "Well, you can't really do that." But they did it. They were like, "We want sparkles. We want hearts and rainbow colors." It's just like, "Yeah, sparkles!" I found the whole thing to be so fun. It's indulgent but a really fun indulgence. It was like, "We're going to do whatever the hell we want to and it's going to be awesome."

Zimbio: This is kind of your first big action movie. How did you like doing the fighting and stunts?
Ricci: It was great. It was really fun and it was something that I loved. That really is the sort of ultimate feminist thing where you can be as girlie as you want to be, but you're still as capable and as able to do everything that the boys can do. But I still want more. I would like to be a spy.

Zimbio: Retro '60s type spy or high tech and current like Alias?
Ricci: High tech and current. Like, I love the boy movies. I love them. That would be awesome, doing something like that.

Zimbio: We never heard crazy stories about you getting into trouble as a teen. How did you stay so normal being a child star?
Ricci: I went through the same sort of growing up pains and partying and everything in my late teens and early 20s, but there wasn't the level of scrutiny and media attention and paparazzi then that there is now. So I got to go through all of that without people taking pictures of me and judging me. I did it already and I'm not interested in that anymore. Had there been the same amount of media attention, I certainly would be in as much trouble as everyone else is these days. I mean, you're a teenager and in your early 20s. You do stupid things, really dumb things. If people are there documenting the whole thing, that's going to add a whole level of self-consciousness and confusion and shame that leads to more trouble.

Zimbio: Did your sense of humor help you deal with the media?
Ricci: Sometimes it helps. Sometimes it doesn't help that much. Sometimes the sarcasm doesn't really translate. It's true.

Zimbio: I always got you.
Ricci: I appreciate that.

Watch the Speed Racer Trailer here.

Q&A by Fred Topel

7 Questions with Tina Fey

Tue, 7 May 2008 19:40:30 GMT

posted by Tony

It’s hard to argue with the statement that everything Tina Fey touches turns to comedy gold. You don’t become the first female head writer at SNL after just two years on staff by writing bad jokes. You could safely call her a genius and few people would protest.

Her most recent contribution to popular culture is 30 Rock – a show loosely based on her days at SNL – and if you haven’t seen it, get thee to a the DVD store and rent season one. It’s irreverent, self-effacing, wickedly intelligent and filled with jokes that hit with all the subtly of a 2x4.

We caught up with Fey in Los Angeles to chat about her success.

Zimbio: You're playing a writer on a show that you write as well as star in, so will you be writing about the writer's strike at all now that it's over?
Tina Fey: We are not. We decided that the strike did not happen in our world because we sort of felt like for people viewing at home, the real strike was a big enough pain and that they probably didn’t really want to hear anymore about [it]. Before there was ever a strike, we had had sort of a writers’ strike story that we may just save for later down the road because it didn’t have anything to do with the actual strike.

Below are some sample 30 Rock highlights.
Zimbio: What other shows or writers do you take inspiration from?
Tina Fey: I mean, The Larry Sanders Show was just one of the greatest TV shows ever, especially in terms of being about a similar topic to this show. I’m a big fan of The Office, both the British and the American versions. I grew up on a lot of classic TV too: Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart, Carol Burnett Show, all that kind of stuff. I’m trying to think if there’s anybody I’m forgetting. I really like Christopher Guest movies.

Zimbio: 30 Rock has had some awesome guest stars. Is there anyone you're still gunning for?
Tina Fey: I still want Oprah to play my best friend. I want to spend time with Oprah and I don’t know what I need to do to make that happen. So far we’ve been super lucky... it was an amazing honor to work with Tim Conway. So things like that that are just people you idolized growing up, be it Paul Reubens or Tim Conway or Isabella Rosellini. We’ve just had a lot of luck so far. So just Oprah, really.

Zimbio: How about some hunk to play a new love interest for Liz?
Tina Fey: It’s funny because those are, for me, my least favorite stories to do and so there’s a certain contingency in our writers’ room. They’re always pitching them and I’m always saying, "No. No more love stories." So I don’t know what will be on the horizon for Liz. You know who would be good? Peter Dinklage. That would be good. That guy is awesome. Let me go in there and say we need to start working on that.

Zimbio: What about a cameo from your SNL boss Lorne Michaels?
Tina Fey: He would be good as a Rupert Murdoch type. He won’t be able to play himself because we realized if we use anyone from SNL as themselves, then our world kind of collapses because who is Tracy? I think even like referencing that Eddie Murphy exists is maybe the closest we can get to even acknowledging that Saturday Night Live exists. So if you see Lorne, he’ll be doing one of his world famous characters in a funny mustache and glasses.

Zimbio: You're on the cover of Vanity Fair and have sort of become the ultimate funny woman. Do you feel any pressure about that, and would that storyline make it into the show?
Tina Fey: No, it won’t be on the show because Liz Lemon is wholly a behind the scenes person. Liz Lemon never gets her hair done. I think the great thing about that Vanity Fair article was that it was talking about how many women are in comedy now. I mean, there are so many more women obviously than even [the ones] that are included in that article. I think that the thing that’s a nice change is, because there are more women doing it and succeeding in comedy, then it doesn’t put that individual pressure on anyone to be like the face of ladies in comedy.

Zimbio: You're also famous for wearing glasses. How many pair do you own?
Tina Fey: At home I probably have four or five that I can never find. Sometimes I bring ones home from the set and half of the ones on the set have prescription in them and half of them don’t because they’re just props that we only need sometimes. Especially at SNL, I really needed them to read cue cards and that’s not a thing over here, obviously. So I went and got an eye exam the other day and tested my glasses and he said, "You know these are props, right, that there’s no prescription?" I had been wearing them around thinking that they were helping my vision.

Q&A by Fred Topel

Jayde Nicole Named Playboy's 2008 Playmate of the Year

Thu, 9 May 2008 19:10:50 GMT

posted by tatiana

Oh Canada! Over the years you have given the world so many amazing things. A few come to mind: maple syrup, hockey, Pamela Anderson, the phrase "Eh!" and now, the 2008 Playboy Playmate of the year.

Canadian born Jayde Nicole received the honors this year, she'll be featured in a 10-page spread in Playboy's June issue. She'll also receive $100,000 in prize money and 2008 Cadillac C-T-S.

The Brunette from Port Perry, Ontario is the first Canadian Playmate of the Year, since Shannon Tweed was honored in 1982.

Contrary to popular belief, this 22-year-old Playmate doesn't spend all her free time frolicking around the Playboy mansion. She owns a modeling agency called Jayde Nicole Incorporated, which she founded in 2005.

She was managing the agency when she caught Playboy's attention in 2007, and landed the title of Miss January.

Nicole also has other projects in the works. She's writing a fitness and beauty book, and just finished filming a pilot for a reality TV show about her life. She also raises money for a campaign to fight AIDS in Africa.

Don't forget to check out 2008's Playmate of the year, the June issue hits newsstands this week.

Image Source Getty Images

Welcome to our wikizine called "Movers and Shakers"

Tue, 7 May 2008 19:36:22 GMT

posted by Tony
Wikizines are interactive magazines that anyone can create or edit - and this one is called "Movers and Shakers". Here you can find fresh voices and respond in real time. Some members write articles about recent news and trends related to the wikizine's topic, others recount relevant personal stories or share their favorite pictures and video clips. Got an interesting idea or story to share with other members of this wikizine? Well, then put on your journalist's cap and add your own article!

You'll Fight, All Right - Because Like Me Once, You Won't Have a Choice.

Fri, 10 May 2008 18:22:54 GMT

posted by The-Mongoose-Trick

Each morning, I do a “dry-run” defense of our home against a misguided or malicious – it makes no difference, they kill you either way – S.W.A.T police raid. The place is “mined” – booby traps designed to disrupt the invaders’ otherwise practiced and machine-like assault – and readied as it is each night before bed time, as the cops pour down the lanes they’re forced into and fall prey to the devices they couldn’t possible anticipate and or avoid, I race through my own “play,” moving as planned, and killing methodically – one .45 ACP round to the upper lip of each man. It all takes about three and one-half seconds, and I’m striving for less. Even allowing for surprise, the shots require less than two seconds. I’m very good – I’ve been practicing, you see, for twenty-three years. It was May 5, 1986 in the early morning hours when the IRS first invaded my house illegally; it was October 6, 1986 when I received my first bullet wounds from the United States. During the years that followed, the conspiracy of criminals that is my country’s government burglarized or otherwise invaded my homes and offices more (there were dozens of covert invasions before installed listening and recoding devices documented each burglary) than sixty times . It’s a strange county, trumpeting relentlessly and endlessly as it does to the world its respect for the rights of the individual, its humanity, its peaceful intentions, and all the rest. On the other hand, it is a vicious killer, with a history of internecine savagery almost unprecedented in human history, a nation dedicated as none ever before to the design, production, building, and use of weapons, military vehicles, vessels, and aircraft. Today, it spends more on means to kill than the next fifteen largest industrialized nations together. Behaving like a demented lunatic, it imprisons by many times more of its people than the next most cruel nation (upwards of two million, 760 for every 100,000), and keeps in poverty with its Brobdingnagian spending on weapons and making war forty million more. Reciting endlessly its devotion – leaders are sworn to protect and defend it – to its Constitution, it ruthlessly violates the human rights of more of its citizens in a single day than many countries do in a month – or in some instances, a year. Its government steals more money in a year than the entire fiscal budget of whole nations. As much as twenty percent of money derived from taxation of even the very poor is stolen by members of Congress and the bureaucracy. In a nation proclaiming equality under the law, the rich pay no taxes or fines, through the legislative magic of incorporation handing both on to the wage-earning poor who have no alternative to buying their oppressors’ products and services. Talking peace relentlessly, it wages war continually, the costs for it all born by the poor, as are the costs in human life, injury and misery. The rich – especially those urging more war or standing idly by while the president sends thousands of their countrymen to die for the supposed freedom of foreign citizens – do not send their sons and daughter, or their loved ones, to die for “American honor.” Neither do they have any more respect for their countrymen here at home. I have already made reference to the internecine savagery of the United States toward its own, but what is strange even for a nation ideologically, even religiously, devoted to the lie, is the fact that a recent spate of police brutality seems to be happening in a vacuum. Even with the perfectly understandable anger of the black community concerning the recent murder Sean Bell, the young bridegroom who died unarmed in a hailstorm of police gunfire, no one otherwise seems to relate the startling rise in savagery by the police with the similar primitive behavior being witnessed everywhere among the populace, especially its youth. It’s as though Ruby Ridge and the murder of a child and his mother by authorities, Waco, Texas and the immolation of seventy-six women and children, and dozens of hideous outrages the like never happened. The list of Nazi-like summary death-dealing goes on and on, matter of fact. It has been going on for decades. On May 17, 1974, for instance, a house and surrounding in Los Angeles was set ablaze by explosives, and six people incinerated. On June 3, 1983, a man named Gordon Kaul – an individual whose story would serve to let me escape a similar fate – was barbecued in what has now become typical fashion during a siege of a farmhouse in Arkansas. In Philadelphia, May 14, 1985, the MOVE compound was blasted and burned in a fire that incinerated eleven people including six children, that when a state helicopter dropped a bomb on the place. It has gone on and on, with the national news and information media making far, far more of Chandra Levy-Natalee Holloway disappearances and Nancy Grace smut-peddler “news” than the appalling slaughter of the citizenry by those supposedly hired to protect it. Still, muck-raking is the source of big business for the media, and weekly or so we are treated to a video of the “Serve and Protect” people in action like that a couple days ago, as many as fifteen cops kicking and beating the living hell out of three men who supposedly fired shots at someone or something. You never know, because the government never punishes any of its minions – the Fairfax County, VA cop who shot to death unarmed Dr. Salvatore Culosi as he stood defenseless in his driveway a little over a year ago was punished by a three week suspension - and its official account of what happened always makes one wonder if he was hallucinatory as he watched it. The de rigueur investigation never squares with the obvious. That last reminds of Ken Trentadue, the Oklahoma man who on August 21, 1995 was tortured and beaten to death in a federal prison in Oklahoma City (for those with a strong stomach, the links below provide photos). To date, no one has received so much as a reprimand, and while the family of the brutalized man has three times won their lawsuit for civil damages, the government continues refusing to pay. The government won’t pay, of course. To date, the United States has four times evaded facing me in court – where the power of subpoena could prove devastating for someone as well-informed of federal criminality as I. This isn’t the country FoxNews would have you believe it is. In fact, the toll of U.S. citizens murdered by their government would amount to nothing less than a reign of terror – were anyone able to learn through the blizzard of Operation MOCKINGBIRD media “cooking,” spin-doctoring, and outright lying. The U.S. Bureau of Prisons told Trentadue’s family that he hanged himself, but upon inspection at the funeral, injuries over his entire body were discovered - the truth of it. Since the supposed invention of the SWAT team in 1967 (another government-by-corporation lie: actually, I wrote the first paper outlining the “Special Weapons and Tactics” concept ten years earlier, calling it exactly what Los Angeles Police would one day name it), there have been an average of forty thousand police raids on private homes yearly. Forty unarmed and innocent people have been shot to death, people like Dr. Salvatore Culosi, the optometrist I mentioned (Culosi’s crime? Betting on sports!) Ken Trentadue’s crime, incidentally, was a supposed (and minor) parole violation. Of course, in George W. Bush’s “America,” the constitutionally convenient lie has become a legal process on a par with the arrest warrant. All that is necessary for the government to take a man’s freedom is the word of a malfeasant official. Thanks largely to the feminist revolution and its mindless machinations, the ages-old rule of unus testis; nullus testis – one witness, no witness – is dead as the proverbial doornail. In fact, the “word of an official” may very well be supplanted by the bark of a dog. So, survivalists urban, wilderness, and jurisprudential – I have, as a matter of fact, come to be known as a “guerrilla lawyer” - like me train continually and intensively. Early on in my war with the IRS – and war with the U.S. Government inevitably means confrontation with IRS – I realized that any or all of the lawless brutality of the United States we have been observing now for decades would inevitably be directed at me. I was right. I was meant to be at some length the victim of a SWAT raid (and, as a matter of fact, actually thwarted one – the story being in my book “Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story). The more than one hundred nine recorded times (in total, approximately a hundred twenty-five) I was stopped and harassed by police and constabulary on the nation’s streets and highways was supposed to result in one of the scores of beatings we have repeatedly witnessed by way of a video camera in the hands of a citizen (imagine, if you want to raise your “pucker factor” twenty points, the number of beatings that took place outside the view of video cameras). Had the police succeeded in making a valid arrest, I would surely have been a Ken Trentadue (I would forego for more than a decade surgery for a double hernia inflicted when I was run down by a federal assassin in an eight-passenger van, fearful that unless I could arrange for monitors at the hospital, I would never survive anesthesia). As it was, I was wounded by gunfire three times, suffered a broken wrist, broken ribs, and a severe facial laceration when rammed in my car by another vehicle. I escaped – outfought, then fled when he went to get a silenced pistol with which to end settle the issue – the Christmas Eve karate attack of a would-be federal killer, twice recovered from poisoning, and six times avoided or recovered from having been run down by cars while a pedestrian or riding my bicycle (use of a car finally proved to offer the government too many opportunities for the Amadou Diallo, Salvatore Culosi, Sean Bell Tactic). My vehicles were sabotaged several times with obviously murderous intent, and the RV where I lived for ten years was likewose frequently sabotaged, once obviously with arson in mind. There’s more – this was a war that began in 1977 – but that, together with my long and intensive study of U.S. History, would suffice to confirm my understanding of my country. I’ve learned – I learned, and it’s let me be here today – the guerrilla tactics that will soon be required for survival in the Land of the Free become the Land of the Fee. I’ve learned to keep a voice recorder at hand at all times (never go out without it, and never answer the door without it). This is a nation whose officialdom lives by the lie, a fact no waking and sane person can fail to observe even daily. I do not – ever! – talk to a police or other official (friend, acquaintance or otherwise – the typical citizen of the U.S. will sell his soul in order to keep his job and/or income; public office makes it immensely worse). Learn the tactics of deceit. The nation is run by them. Understand that to file a tax return is much like operating a motor vehicle on the nation’s streets and highways, an invitation to utter, ruinous disaster. The IRS can take everything you have, and without any kind of legal process whatever – in fact, any legal process will be entirely theirs, a mockery of legality. Traffic laws let the government stop you for any reason whatever, and to violate with impunity any and all civil and human rights protected by the U.S. Constitution (how many civil rights violations can you count in the latest police beating – and shooting unarmed men to death doesn’t violate their civil rights?). When you have been beaten, dispossessed, or raped – a favorite among the studs of the IRS, especially women who are illegal aliens and dare not retaliate against their abuser – the perpetrator will lie, and he will not be punished (something he knows, and which energizes him). Believe me or your eyes and ears. The story of what happened to me – and what can happen to any citizen foolish enough or forced by circumstances to file a tax return - is included on my www.judoknighterrant.com website, in the legal complaint I filed with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas more than a year and a half ago. In the several instances where my covertly recorded conversation with a cop or other officer of the law proved him to be a liar, not once was the offending criminal – falsifying a police report is a crime regardless of whether the perpetrator is a civilian or an officer of the law – prosecuted or otherwise punished. And, by the way, with what we’ve seen with our own eyes of police behavior nationally, and with the government’s obvious attitude concerning law as it applies to them (the congressman with $100,000 in his freezer, sexual abuse of congressional aides, and scores of things the like – to say nothing of the cover-up of 9-11, the falsification of reasons for invasion of Iraq, and on and on and on), how many of the persons listed as missing in the U.S., especially women, is it reasonable to assume were victims of the police and officialdom otherwise? If Ken Trentadue’s death was made known because of the fact of his having been in prison, how likely is it that the truth would have been known, had he been found on a deserted road somewhere? As an example and on the other hand, the fact that I made monkeys several times of cops who stopped me far from civilization and possibly prying eyes or videos cameras without the incident ever being reported should tell you something. A number of times, I tore up a traffic ticket and flipped it into the air, certain because of the recording I had just made of the cop’s remarks that he would dare do nothing. Once, in a story I reported in my book “Letters,” I actually confronted two Wyoming Highway patrolmen, and man-handled one – all with impunity provided by the fact of my having recorded their misconduct during the “stop.” In a parking lot in Raton, New Mexico, a few days before Christmas, I confronted three officers of the law, refusing to let them search my RV, and promising to kill in its defense. Obviously well aware of my reputation with judo and the .45 1911 pistol I wore in plain sight, aware that they were entirely in the wrong and being recorded, both video and voice, there was no search and no arrest. When I continued on my way to Colorado Springs, moreover there were no more “stops.” The story is also in the book, “Letters.” When – with no reasonable alternative - I had begun my counter-attack against crime by government by infiltrating federal (and, in a couple of instances, state and local) offices in order to plant listening devices, I often left my card behind, a taunt. Of the dozens of times I did so, only twice did the official in question report (one famously, matter of fact) that he had been compromised. Of the several IRS female officials who provided me access to their files – among other things – not one confessed her (ahem - you should pardon the expression) infidelity. A government job – with all its power and perks - is something more feverishly-protected than anything you or I can imagine. Unless you think about it. As Thomas Jefferson noted, "Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct." In the years after I started driving again in 2001 (shortly after 9-ll and after a six year hiatus), I planned every trip carefully, noting the address of each police station and sheriff’s office en route in order to be able to drive there slowly in the event of an attempted “stop” by a cop, highway patrolman, sheriff’s deputy or other law enforcement officer (a couple of times, even that didn’t work – a second and third car forced me off the road by blocking my way – and was obliged to resort to other means including the tape cellular phone, voice recorder and video camera were necessary). When I had moved my RV to a RV and camper park in Corpus Christi, Texas, the first thing I did was learn the addresses of several local judges. As I related in the book “Letters,” the night I foiled a police attempt at provoking a lethal confrontation, I had among my plans for escape after the shoot-out a plan to reach the nearest judge’s residence. Nothing else would have stayed police vengeance for the killing of four (or five) cops. The confrontation with five police officers who surrounded my RV, incidentally, was all voice recorded. The police were to retaliate a couple of days later with a phony traffic ticket written after another “stop” while I test-drove my just-repaired 80 VW Rabbit around the camper park (not, in other words, on the street or highway; and not, therefore illegal). When neither the court or the city attorney to whom the judge referred me would not look at the proof of insurance and vehicle registration that had been contained in the dashboard panel and glove box lying in my camper driveway some one hundred feet distant (the cop, a lieutenant named Vessey, would not let me go get it, preferring for some reason to write the bogus summons), and I appeared as ordered only to find no judge, no court, and no arresting officer, and a city attorney offering me a “deal” wherein I would pay a $400 fine, I told the lawyer to go to hell. Facing down two fat sheriff’s deputies summoned for the supposed purpose of intimidation, I left. Later, when the “official” notice that I had been found guilty and fined arrived by mail, I wrote across it something lewd and sent it back – together with copies of the damning insurance paper and motor vehicle registration, dates of issue high-lighted. There were no repercussions. I still have the tape recording of the “arrest.” Again, the entire series of events was voice recorded. The United States is in rapid decay now because its citizenry submits docilely to the equivalent of being raped. It is being raped because it is too self-indulgent, too selfish, to react with outrage when one of its number is attacked and brutalized by government. It is being raped because it will not learn the law and use it as I have, because it simply pays instead of using all the devices available by which to fight and delay. It is being raped because a sufficient number of individual citizens will not withdraw from the economic system as I once did, to live off the land without money. The American public is also being raped because it will not slow down on the highways (as I also did, then in order to save my meager funds, driving forty-five miles an hour whenever and wherever I went), or turn off the engine at stop signs or other places where one normally lets the engine idle wastefully. Pushing on the accelerator is demand, you know, and demand offers the corporations who own government an excuse and subterfuge by which to steal. Americans are being swindled, beaten, and murdered by their government because they are too stupid, and too cowardly to make it stop. I am reminded of a couple of apropos quotes, one from a man named Martin Niemöller, the other Sir Winston Churchill (if you are the typical Kellie Pickler American, look him up). Niemöller, a pastor in Nazi Germany, said, “In Germany, they came first for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist; and then they came for the trade unionists, I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist; and then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew; and then . . . they came for me . . . and by that time there was no one left to speak up." And Sir Winston said, “If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a small chance of survival. There may even be a worse case: you may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as a slave. Corporate capitalism is what it says it is, and what you know it is. So is government by corporate capitalist. You are seeing it all around you, and every day. As I said in a video tape made for the American Lyceum many years ago, you’ll fight all right – like they did me, they won’t give you a choice.