Sofia Vergara has denied rumours that advertising bosses had used digital technology to make her look thinner in a new advertising campaign for Pepsi.
She said that she looked slimmer in the photos because of a wardrobe choice.
The ‘Modern Family’ star is seen wearing a large blue hat and a revealing halter-neck top in the pictures to promote the drinks brand''s new Diet Pepsi Skinny Can.
The commercial, however, received criticism from critics and campaigners, who alleged computer wizardry was used to minimise Vergara''s curves, with a representative for The National Eating Disorders Association calling the advert ‘thoughtless and irresponsible’.
Vergara has now cleared the controversy, insisting the pictures have not been altered in any way.
“That is not true at all. I saw the pictures, and now with technology, they''re looking at it on the screen right after they take them. It was just a different way of dressing me,” the Daily Express quoted her, as telling the Boston Herald.
LOS ANGELES: Robert Zemeckis' performance capture system, which turns life-action into animation, gets quite a workout in Disney's "Mars Needs Moms," which opens on Friday.
Its characters, both human and Martian, tumble through space, slide down chutes, chase along corridors that turn every which way and dance around mountains and into caverns created out of huge mounds of trash. The process has also lost those weirdly inhuman faces that plagued "The Polar Express," Zemeckis' first foray into performance capture. In fact, so many things in this unique kind of animation, especially the designs and all its many details, keep getting better and better. So why does "Mars Needs Moms" feel so slight?
Other than "Beowulf," his most successful performance-capture film to date, Zemeckis has chosen to deploy this system in children's films. Which is just fine as far as that goes, but where the technical advances and story sophistication in his "Beowulf" pointed toward James Cameron's "Avatar," "Mars Needs Moms" points toward a ride at Disneyland.
This film from Zemickis' ImageMovers Digital and, appropriately, Walt Disney Pictures will certainly be a treat for younger family members. But for teens on up the generational scale, the interest level will plummet.
For that matter, it will be interesting to see how "Mars" in its first week fares against "Rango," an animated film with considerable sophistication and outreach to older audiences, in its second weekend. As with his "A Christmas Carol" movie, Zemeckis paints himself into a digital corner by ignoring adults.
"Mars" does do one thing much better than "A Christmas Carol," however: It has emotions. After all, it is based on a children's novel by cartoonist Berkeley Breathed, who admits the book came in reaction to a disobedient son expressing keen dissatisfaction with even having a (nagging) mother. Consequently, the entire story about a mom kidnapped by Martians and her rescue by her young son bubbles over with emotions. It's an illustrated laundry lists all the things moms do for their kids -- and that would include the laundry.
For this film, Zemeckis turns directing chores over to Simon Wells, who directed "The Time Machine" and co-directed the animated "The Prince of Egypt." Wells and his wife Wendy adapted the Breathed book with nearly every plot turn driving home the point that kids need moms.
Milo, age 9, is the focal point. He is enacted by Seth Green and voiced by a much younger Seth named Seth Dusky, age 11. The estimable Joan Cusack is Mom but since she spends most of the time under lock and key, the major roles fall to an extremely funny Dan Folger as Mars' only other human, a disheveled techo-wiz named Gribble; Elisabeth Harnois as Ki, a rebellious young Martian who learned English watching '70s sitcoms; and Mindy Sperling as the humorless, nasty Martian leader whose body appears as mummified as her heart.
Designer Doug Chiang has a grand time turning the Red Planet into a giant fun ride from those loopy Martians with triangular heads, no real noses and otherworldly bodies and gaits to an underground world of stark simplicity and sterility. Women run the place while men -- Gribble calls them the Hairy Tribe Guys -- get tossed down chutes with the garbage as they're apparently the most expendable resource on the planet.
The entire movie is set up as a race against the clock by Milo to save his mom but the film finds time to take in the Martian civilization in passing, a gag-filled and mostly lighthearted re-imagining of our own world if women ruled. (It is odd though how a movie meant to glorify moms is so riddled with anti-feminist concepts. These are, of course, Martian females not human ones but still ...)
Anachronistic dialogue rules for the most part as not only does Ki brim with the hep lingo of the Flower Children era, but Gribble, who is thirty-something, is stuck forever in the '80s when he left planet Earth.
The movie shrugs off any real attempt at science fiction other than oxygen helmets for the surface of Mars. The characters still dash around those surfaces in short sleeves in what should be an 87 degrees climate and make the round trip from Earth to Mars, which should take about 18 months, in a half minute.
The skill level of this motion capture animation is getting better all the time. So "Mars" is accomplished at every level. But the three most important things in movies are story, story, story so the movie never comes off as the considerable achievement it truly is. (Reuters)
MEXICO CITY: Actress Jennifer Aniston says some non-comedy movie projects are in her future, including a film based on the true story of an all-female country-western band that formed at a Texas prison in the 1940s.
Aniston says the band was "sort of the Dixie Chicks of their time." No production or release dates have been set for the project, tentatively titled "The Goree Girls."
After starring in a string of romantic comedies such as "Just Go With It," Aniston may be turning her sights to more serious fare. Another project, tentatively called "Counterclockwise," may focus on the studies of Ellen Langer, a renowned Harvard psychology professor.
Aniston was in Mexico City on Thursday to promote her new perfume, which bears her name. (AP)
LOS ANGELES: A film of grimm banality, "Red Riding Hood" puts a bloodthirsty "Twilight" spin on a fairy tale already possessed of an unusually macabre climax.
As it thuds along from one wolf attack to the next, Catherine Hardwicke's first film since taking leave of Bella and her toothy friends adamantly refuses to provide any wit, humor or fun, concerning itself mostly with the heroine's taxing dilemma of picking between the rural village's two best looking boys.
Still, with Warner Bros. delivering a massive campaign aimed at a ready-and-drooling target audience, some big opening numbers lie in wait this weekend.
"Red Riding Hood" is in the vanguard of what appears to be an onslaught of live-action fairy tale-derived studio features over the next year or so. What triggered this trend remains unclear, but one can only hope that the level of cleverness and invention improves, as things hardly get off to an inspired start here.
Restricting the action almost entirely to a small Ruritanian community where everyone but the visiting Gary Oldman speaks in mundane American accents, the script by David Leslie Johnson ("Orphan") pivots on two central creative ploys -- to turn a mere wolf into a werewolf and to transform the ancient story into a whodunnit in which the lovely young Valerie (Amanda Seyfried) must figure out who among the locals nocturnally mutates into the massive black hound that killed her sister and converses to her, hoping she'll run away with it.
Is it Peter (Shiloh Fernandez), the cute but poor woodcutter who has been her true love since childhood and himself would love to take her away? Might it possibly be his rival, Henry (Max Irons), the prosperous blacksmith Valerie's mother (Virginia Madsen) has arranged for her to marry? Could it be Dad (Billy Burke, the sad-sack father from "Twilight"), who boozes it up with regularity? Or, heaven forbid, is the wolf perhaps Grandma herself (Julie Christie), a bohemian eccentric who lives on her own out in the forest and has yellowish-brown eyes quite like those of the wolf itself.
Officially taking charge of the case once the wolf begins attacking humans for the first time in 20 years is Father Solomon (Oldman), an itinerant werewolf hunter in cleric's robes who resembles his Biblical namesake far less than he does Torquemada, so convinced is he that his inquisitional techniques can elicit a confession of lycanthropy.
As in "Thirteen," "The Nativity Story" and "Twilight" before it, "Red Riding Hood" allows Hardwicke to focus on the emotional trials of a teenager thrust unceremoniously onto the rocks of extreme grown-up dilemmas and feeling her way toward solutions.
Unfortunately, the context here is hokier than in any of the director's previous films and, as she's not a stylist or genre specialist, she has little to bring to this sort of material other than a natural empathy for the lead character. The dialogue exchanges possess no spark, the action is indifferently covered by random camera moves and cuts and the only jolts are provoked by cheap shock-cuts to the growling or roaring wolf.
The only memorable image is the fortunately frequently appearing one of Seyfried with her blond hair flowing from beneath the eponymous scarlet cloak that matches her pillow lips. Otherwise, the young actress has seen better days than this before and assuredly will again. The local men are boringly one-note but the casting of Christie was smart, as she bestows her iconoclastic spirit upon the ambiguous grandma.
The Vancouver-shot production, mostly confined to a studio set, has a rather dreary look spiced here and there by unusual production and costume design details that lend modern touches. (Reuters)
"World Invasion: Battle Los Angeles"; Actors: Aaron Eckhart, Ramon Rodriguez, Bridget Moynahan, Michelle Rodriguez, Ne-Yo; Director: Jonathan Liebesman; Rating: ***
There is nothing original about "World Invasion: Battle Los Angeles". In brief, it is "Independence Day" meets "Cloverfield" meets "Black Hawk Down" meets "Saving Private Ryan" with state-of-art special effects thrown in. And this, as you would have guessed, makes it a fun film, a total value-for-your-money movie.
Gulf War veteran Marine Staff Sergeant Michael (Aaron Eckhart) has put in his papers. But when the world is under attack from an alien race, he unwillingly becomes part of a platoon with zero combat experience to fight an enemy with superior power.
As things escalate and most of the air power of the United States is wiped out, it is up to the Staff Sergeant to command the inexperienced group of soldiers and a few civilians to safety.
Along the way, he discovers he could be the key to defeating the undefeatable aliens and as the world is retreating to a defence, he and his motley band of soldiers, decide to go on the offensive.
"World Invasion" takes itself less seriously than even the fun-film "Independence Day". If you consider the patriotic rhetoric of that film, this is a good thing. And there's no politics of "Saving Private Ryan" either. Though there is a hint of politics when the reason for the invasion is believed to be the one resource that the earth has an abundance of - water - and an expert claims on TV, "Rule of colonisation states that you wipe out the indigenous population. Right now we are being colonised."
There was a scope to throw in more of how dominant nations have been doing to their colonies what the aliens are doing to earth - decimating them. That would have made the film much more exciting.
Thus you have the usual sacrifices just at the right time, the fight over who's in command, an unresolved enmity, an unsure commanding officer, a band of brothers unwilling to leave the wounded behind, the usual teasing where you are not shown the full view of the alien for long, a civilian with just the information needed at crucial times, the expected twist in the tale a little after centre point, the usual last crucial missile shot that can save the planet etc.
Yet, despite its slightly longish take at over two hours, the film does not get boring or lose momentum at any point.
Director Jonathan Liebesman who has given some forgettable films, finally makes one that would be remembered. Writer Christopher Bertolini, who seemed to have disappeared after his delightful screenplay of "The General's Daughter", over a decade back, resurfaces with this film that is just the beginning of a franchise.
"Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows Part 1" has become the highest international grosser of "Harry Potter" franchise.
It has earned over USD 657 million at the world box office, reports contactmusic.com.
"It's tremendously gratifying to reach this benchmark as we enter the final stretch of this remarkable journey. We share this achievement with Jo Rowling, whose books are the foundation of this rich and vibrant world, as well as the talented people who brought her vision to life on the screen," Jeff Robinov, president of Warner Bros. Pictures Group, said in a statement.
Warner Bros. representative Veronika Kwan-Rubinek said: "These numbers speak to the phenomenal and enduring strength of this property, which has captivated audiences across all borders, regardless of age or culture."
The success of the franchise has also made actors Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint - who play Harry Potter, Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley respectively - among Britain's richest young celebrities.
"Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2" will be the last of the historical "Harry Potter" franchise. It may hit the screens July 15.
