On the show, each contestant earns $1,000 a week. Handlers hold it for each performer, doling out cash as needed. The cast has their meals catered. They have no housework or chores in the mansion to speak of, other than doing their own dishes.
If Storm wins, she will earn $5,000 a week, plus possible bonuses. The recording of the album would begin almost immediately, and the first gig of the Supernova world tour is scheduled for New Year’s Eve at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.
Last season’s “Rock Star” winner, J.D. Fortune, fronted a revived INXS. The Australian band’s new album has sold 370,000 copies. The band performed last January at the Chinook Winds Casino in Lincoln City.
Even with touring and recording, Storm says she’ll stay based in Portland. She likes the “roots” she has. And she hopes to pay off the $98,000 on the house she shares with boyfriend Davey Nipples (Portland native David A. Loprinzi II), who is the bassist for the Balls.
Interesting. Given that INXS’ new album, Switch, hasn’t even gone gold, $260,000 isn’t a bad salary.
Twelve minutes to airtime in the dressing room, the cast is subdued. Contestant Toby Rand of Australia listens to an iPod. Ryan Star from New York breathes in clouds of pure air from a portable steamer. Iceland’s Magni Asgeirsson looks through digital photos of his wife and child who had been allowed to visit him two weeks earlier. “I don’t think I would have survived another week without them,” Asgeirsson says.
What about the “Rock Star” family?
“(Storm) is the anchor in the house, you know. Storm is the mommy, and I’m the daddy. She’s the queen,” he says smiling. “And I honestly think she should win this.”
Storm doesn’t sing one of the two sing-your-own-originals slots tonight, but instead sings (highlight it to read) “Cryin'” by Aerosmith. It could be interesting, but having heard a lot of her originals, it’s probably time to stop letting the Zayras, Patrices and Ryans have that shot instead.
I know I’m late to the party with this, but hey, we didn’t have cable until recently. And hey, that’s one cool-as-hell video. I can’t imagine the time spent choreographing that.
Wired has a neat article about how Survivor is a well-designed videogame played with living characters and a real world environment:
“Nobody talks about it on this level, but that’s what I do,” said Burnett, nattily dressed in a tieless pinstriped suit. I met him at Trump International Hotel when he came through town to talk about Gold Rush.
While tweaking Survivor, he closely studied John Nash’s game theory in order to better engineer the hysteria and emotional blowouts of each season’s finale.
This fourth Spike Lee/Denzel Washington collaboration in many ways is the most conventional and the one that has the least to do with Spike’s own voice — he’s operating off a thriller script he did not create — but there are still signs that “Inside Man” is still a Spike Lee Joint.
There’s the signature shot of a protagonist moving down the street on a rolling cart instead of walking, an off-hand discussion of the damage done by videogames that glamorize the gangsta lifestyle and, as always, a lot of Spike’s signature camera work and camera shots. For big Spike Lee fans, this might not be as much Spike as they want, but the film is still definitely worth watching.
It’s a smart thriller, not so much a “whodunnit” as a “what, exactly, did they do?” Clive Owen appears at the very beginning of the film, laying out what’s happened in the film, with an implicit challenge to the viewers to figure out exactly what they’re about to see. The bank robbery that follows is mysterious and more clever than it at first appears to be and the entire affair takes on extra realism thanks to an extremely good cast, including a number of lower-tier character actors putting in solid work, and especially Christopher Plummer and a surprisingly disquieting Jodie Foster, playing against type.
The final resolution doesn’t have quite the emotional pop that may have been intended, but it’s an intellectually satisfying one.
“Inside Man” could have used more of Spike Lee’s signature style to spice things up, but it’s still a very solid little caper movie and well worth seeing for fans of such films or Spike Lee Joints.
