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Robert Pattinson Is Not Playing Finnick in The Hunger Games Sequel

Several days ago, Movie Fanatic circulated a rumor that the Twilight star might play the part of steely-abbed Finnick Odair, the trident-wielding District 4 mentor-turned-tribute from the next installment in The Hunger Games trilogy, Chasing Fire,. So when Pattinson woke up yesterday, he called his agent about what he was reading online. "[My agent] was like no one's going to offer you that part," Pattinson told USA Today. "I was like, thanks for the reassurance." Maybe his YA days are finally behind him?

Sunday Reads: Jonathan Franzen, D’Angelo, and Moonrise Kingdom Prep

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It's Sunday afternoon, or: Your last chance to read all that stuff you meant to read last week before Monday (or in this case, Tuesday) brings a new deluge of things you will want to read. Below, some of our recommendations:

"What Your Favorite Wes Anderson Movie Says About You," by Richard Lawson and Jen Doll (The Atlantic Wire): Self-explanatory, really, not to mention something to contemplate going into Moonrise Kingdom.

"Jonathan Franzen: The Path to Freedom," by Jonathan Franzen (Guardian): The Corrections author answers — at length — "four unpleasant questions novelists get asked," so no one ever has to ask him those again! Then, he describes the breakup of his marriage, and the challenge of combining autobiography and fiction.

"Amen! (D'Angelo's Back)," by Amy Wallace (GQ): We may have already mentioned it this week, but this thorough, sometimes quite dark chronicle of D'Angelo's descent into addiction and return to the stage (and, for the first time in 12 years, studio) will be of interest to anyone who ever saw the video for "Untitled," which is pretty much everyone.

Plus, Richard Brody on Sontag, and what happens when you listen to the Billboard Top 10 all day. »

WASHINGTON, DC - APRIL 28: Mary J. Blige attends the 98th Annual White House Correspondents' Association Dinner at the Washington Hilton on April 28, 2012 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images)

Mary J. Blige’s Women’s Charity Is in Trouble

Today, the New York Post revealed the perilous financial situation over at Mary J. Blige's Foundation for the Advancement of Women Now, which has just been hit by two lawsuits over unpaid bills. The foundation, whose website offers scholarships and women's issue workshops, owes $167,252 to a group of performers at a recent fund-raising gala and failed to pay back a $250,000 bank loan. All that's known about Blige's involvement with the group, apart from a few TV appearances to promote it, is a $25,000 donation in 2009 and a pledge to give $60,000 from the sale of her fragrance in 2010, money that appears to be unaccounted for.

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Lady Gaga performs during the New Year's Eve celebration in Times Square December 31, 2011 in New York. AFP PHOTO/DON EMMERT (Photo credit should read DON EMMERT/AFP/Getty Images)

Lady Gaga Cancels Performance in Indonesia Over Threats of Violence

Lady Gaga was forced to pull the plug on a planned Sunday performance in Jakarta, Indonesia after the often violent Islamic Defenders Front called her a "messenger of the devil" and claimed to have purchased tickets to the show in order to "wreak havoc" from within the 52,000-seat stadium venue. Authorities responded by denying the tour the necessary permits, which they vowed to continue withholding unless Gaga "toned down" her act. This being Gaga, she of course refused — but not without sending a compassionate tweet to Indonesia's little monsters.

Michelle Obama and the Girls Attend Beyoncé's Comeback Concert

The First Lady and First Daughters were on hand at Atlantic City's brand-new Revel casino for the second night of Beyoncé's much-awaited return to music — Friday was the superstar's first performance since delivering luckiest-baby-in-the-world Blue Ivy. Throughout the evening, which included a rendition of "Halo" with an "I Will Always Love You" (RIP Whitney) lead-in, Sasha and Malia could be seen singing along, while Michelle wondered — for another, brief moment — what it would be like to actually be Bey.

  • Posted 5/27/12 at 2:00 PM
  • Movies

From Space to South Africa: Idris Elba on Prometheus and Playing Mandela

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For almost a year, Idris Elba's home has been his suitcase. Not literally, because at nearly six-foot-three, he wouldn't fit. But for the first time in his career, the 39-year-old, best known for playing The Wire's Stringer Bell, is shooting back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back movies, and the luggage he's been carting around the world is the only thing providing him any sense of comfort and stability.

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  • Posted 5/27/12 at 12:32 PM
  • Music

Music Review: Abebe on the Scissor Sisters’ Magic Hour

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If you reacted to news of Donna Summer’s death (at 63, of cancer) by revisiting her early discography, you’ll have already been reminded of the breadth and poignancy she brought to mainstream ­disco—the way her records could span throbbing dance classics to musical theater to misty sentimentality. If, soon after, you reacted to news of Robin Gibb’s death (62, also cancer) by revisiting the Bee Gees’ late-seventies work, you got a double dose of the “misty sentimentality” part. This is not a side of pop that critics have always praised: For years, the party line seemed to be that the seventies and eighties were eras of goopy, glitzy dreck and lumbering, pompous rock, all in dire need of rescuing by punks with battered guitars. At times, even disco’s defenders accepted those terms. Forget the soft-­focus glamour that crossed over to a vast American mainstream; they’d praise the genre by pointing out how much of it was underground, radically inventive, avant-garde, and steeped in gay subculture—which is to say, punker than punk.

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  • Posted 5/27/12 at 12:16 PM
  • Precaps

Vulture Precaps: Girls, Mad Men, and Game of Thrones

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Welcome to Vulture Precaps, where we combine recaps, news, and (often informed) speculation into a pre-Sunday night TV-viewing primer.

Girls

What happened last week: Hannah headed back to her hometown of East Lansing, Michigan, trash bag full of dirty clothes and transplant attitude in hand. (“You are from New York,” she tells her reflection, “therefore you are just naturally interesting.”) There, she binge ate, went on a date with a cute but not naturally interesting former high school classmate to a decidedly “cheesy” event, and just missed walking in on her parents having sex. What was going on back in Brooklyn remains a mystery, though we do know from his phone call that Adam got bored in her absence.

What's happened since then: The New York Times revealed that Girls-watchers do not know about torrenting. And actor Christopher Abbott (Charlie) talked to Vulture about — what else? — sex scenes, and his lack of interest in the controversy surrounding the show. (And a Girls production designer told the L.A. Times how she put together his Target ad apartment.)

What to look for tonight: What appears to be a warehouse party in Bushwick, where Shoshonna smokes crack, somehow. Charlie seems to be on the rebound, Adam has put on a shirt, and Jessa’s boss — semi-cool dad Jeff — appears to have ventured out of Tribeca.

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MADRID, SPAIN - MAY 17: Actress Charlize Theron attends "Snow White and the Huntsman" (Blancanieves y la Leyenda del Cazador) photocall at Casa de America on May 17, 2012 in Madrid, Spain. (Photo by Carlos Alvarez/Getty Images)

Charlize Theron Is a Go the F--- to Sleep Mommy

Speaking to MTV News recently, Charlize Theron, new mother and Evil Queen (in the upcoming Snow White and the Huntsman) described her oh-so-sensible parenting strategy.

A lot of people have sent me these children's books, and there's this amazing book, a best-seller Go the Fuck to Sleep. This book was fantastic for me because it made me realize that I don't need to judge myself right now ... [Jackson] doesn't understand anything right now, and so he just wants my face to look a certain way.

Bleep away Charlize!

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Who to Root for in Tonight’s Eurovision Song Contest Finals

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It might have slipped under our collective radars on this side of the Atlantic, but tonight is the 2012 Eurovision Song Contest finals! Twenty-six nations are sending their musically gifted — or just plain odd — champions to Baku, Azerbaijan, to compete before a projected audience of 125 million for the title of Europe's Bravest Performer(s). (Since when is Azerbaijan considered part of Europe, you ask? Who knows.) So, if you do decide to tune into the livestream — already started, given the time difference — here's just a few of the top acts you should watch out for.

Engelbert Humperdinck (United Kingdom)
The 76-year-old pop crooner is one of the first serious-to-goodness names to grace the Eurovision stage and will be performing, "Love Will Set You Free," a song specially written for the contest. Oh, and he'll be sporting a necklace gifted to him by Elvis Presley.

Russian baking grandmothers! »

Neil Patrick Harris on Hosting the Tonys and Guesting in Sleep No More

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When one checks into the McKittrick Hotel, home of the full-immersion dance-theater phantasm Sleep No More, one expects the unexpected. Still, one does not expect to be pulled into a small room with Neil Patrick Harris, dressed as a hotel porter, tearfully exploring the “androgynous side of himself.” (Somehow, James Franco seems more likely.) The quintuple-threat How I Met Your Mother star and once-and-future Tony host was “so envious” when he heard Alan Cumming had done Sleep (as have Evan Rachel Wood and Dita Von Teese), he asked for a walk-on. And he’s going to do it again soon — though he won’t say exactly when. “If there’s ever any production of theirs they want me to be a part of, I am, by default, their lackey.”

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Pixar’s Brave Remembers Steve Jobs As a Friend and Mentor

After seeing an early cut of Pixar's upcoming Brave, The Wall Street Journal reports that "one of the most emotional moments" is when former Pixar co-founder and Apple genius Steve Jobs's name appears during the end credits, which remember him as a partner, mentor, and friend. Fittingly, Jobs's name is accompanied onscreen by a will-o'-the-wisp, ethereal creatures that are said to lead people to their destinies in Brave.

TV Review: HBO’s Hemingway & Gellhorn Is Silly and Smart

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"There's nothing to writing, Gellhorn," Ernest Hemingway tells journalist Martha Gellhorn, his lover and muse, in HBO's Hemingway &
Gellhorn. "All you've got to do is sit down at your typewriter and bleed." The line would be easy to dismiss as Hollywood b.s. if it weren't an actual Hemingway quote, rephrased slightly by screenwriters Jerry Stahl and Barbara Turner, and spat out like a plug of chewing tobacco by the film's costar Clive Owen. Within minutes of Hemingway's pronouncement, which is meant to push Gellhorn (Nicole Kidman) past a bout of writer's block while she's covering the Spanish Civil War for Collier's Magazine, bombs fall on the city. Their hotel shudders under the impact. Hemingway gropes Gellhorn while shielding her body from shards of glass, and the two scribes end up naked on a bed, rutting hungrily while explosives flash in a window just beyond Gellhorn's upraised heels.

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Theater Reviews: The Stage Dive Memorial Day Roundup

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The cast of February House, music and lyrics by Gabriel Kahane, book by Seth Bockley, and directed by Davis McCallum, running at The Public Theater from May 8 through June 10. Photo credit: Joan Marcus.

FEBRUARY HOUSE (Playing at the Public Theater through June 10)

February House is an ambitious artistic experiment about an ambitious artistic experiment: An attempt by Harpers fiction editor George Davis (Julian Fleisher) to found an art commune in Brooklyn Heights in 1940. Davis’s incandescent brood of tinderbox souls included wunderkind novelist Carson McCullers (the adorable Kristen Sieh), composer Benjamin Britten (Stanley Bahorek) and his lover-muse, the tenor Peter Pears (Ken Barnett), anti-fascist firebrand Erika Mann (Stephanie Hayes), “thinking-man’s stripper” Gypsy Rose Lee (Kacie Sheik), and, as elder statesman (at 33), the revered poet W.H. Auden (Erik Lochtefeld, subtly and sustainedly wrong for a disagreeable and miswritten role).

Old Jews telling jokes. Which is also the name of a show! »

Barry Sonnenfeld Explains Why Justin Bieber Is an Alien

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NEW YORK, NY - MAY 23: Director/producer Barry Sonnenfeld attends the "Men In Black 3" New York Premiere at Ziegfeld Theatre on May 23, 2012 in New York City. (Photo by Theo Wargo/Getty Images)

In the previous two Men in Black movies, the MiB video surveillance zoomed in on famous people who were in fact aliens (or suspected aliens): In the first film, the list included Isaac Mizrahi, Danny DeVito, Sylvester Stallone, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg. In MiB3, which opens this weekend, the Men in Black are monitoring new celebr-E.T.s (trademark ours), including Lady Gaga (of course), Justin Bieber, the Dalai Lama, Shaun White, and Tim Burton. So when Vulture ran into director Barry Sonnenfeld at the premiere party on the Intrepid flight deck on Wednesday, we had to ask: What makes these people aliens?

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