Recently in Hollywood Category

Most Friday nights at The Hotel Cafe in October have featured (or will feature) great musical acts and this coming Friday the16th is no exception.

Keaton Simons will play at 9 p.m. that night and is a fantastic singer/songwriter
who is great on record and better live. His genre of music is blues
for the most part, and his voice and guitar-playing certainly match
that. His songs are sometimes acoustic, sometimes blues-pop and
sometimes just rockin — but they are always great.

He released his full-length debut CD called "Can You Hear Me" in June 2008 on CBS Records and he has been touring around the country in support of it ever since - playing in Los Angeles sparingly among those stops. The album is a brilliant mix of blues, pop with some rockin' thrown in, with some of the standout tunes that include the very radio-friendly 'Good Things Get Better;' the mellow 'Without Your Skin;' and the blues-rippin' 'Mama Song' and 'Burch Mog.' Another track on the record is perfect for today's weather - add some rain, some wine, some cold, maybe a fireplace along with your significant other and then play the song 'Currently.' Perfect combination.

You probably have already heard his songs and didn't realize it. One
of his tunes is featured in several trailers for the Starz Network
television series "Crash," and several of his tunes have been in the
television shows "Men in Trees" and "Numbers" and the movie "Sky High."

Since his last show in Los Angeles in the summer, he has made a video for 'Without Your Skin' which is here on his youtube channel. He is all over the place online with Facebook fan pages here and here; a myspace page and his own website . He is also on twitter and has created a weekly conversation called Twitterviews where on Mondays, he and another artist interview each other on twitter. That happens at 1pm PST each week.

On Friday, he goes on at 9pm, right after The Makepeace Brothers. Look for new album from Simons soon too, but check out his show first. You're guaranteed to love it.

In case you missed it, Medium is back on Friday nights - now in it's sixth season. Last Friday's premiere had Allison coming out of her coma and realizing she hasn't had a psychic vision in a little while. But don't sweat it, the visions come back a little at a time as she returns to work.

The show stars Patricia Arquette as wife and mother Allison DuBois, who struggles with a hectic job, a family with three young children and her psychic ability to see clues from dead people while she sleeps. She helps solves the crimes against the victims by using her abilities to aid the authorities.

NBC dropped it from it's lineup last year, so the series went to CBS - without a hitch. it's a pretty cool show and it'll continue every Friday night at 9pm. Arquette is great as the conflicted lead character. So much so that she won an Emmy in 2005 for her performance.

So, when is it? Friday at 9pm on CBS.

Most young boys grow up watching the Indiana Jones and Die Hard movies idolizing the main characters and the actors who played them. James Francis Ginty also did that, but then he did what most people don't have the chance to do - appear in movies with both Harrison Ford and Bruce Willis before the age of 30.

After acting with Ford at age 21, Ginty now stars with Willis as well as Radha Mitchell, Boris Kodjoe and Ving Rhames in the sci-fi movie Surrogates, which opens today. The film is based on a graphic novel by Robert Vendetti and Brett Weldele and is directed by Jonathan Mostow, who has helmed Terminator 3: The Rise of the Machines and U-571, among others.

The film is about a society of people who never leave their homes and live vicariously through sexier and better versions of themselves - called surrogates. After an extremely rare murder of a host and subsequent surrogate, Willis's character has to go into the real world as himself to investigate the crime and he eventually confronts a large population of robots.

Willis plays two versions of the FBI agent 'Greer,' with the surrogate wearing a comb over of blonde hair and is clean-shaven, while the 'real' version is the haggard-looking, unshaven, aged agent. While most surrogates look generally like their hosts and are approximately the same age, Ginty's character of 'Canter' is unlike most of the others - with Ginty playing a younger version and James Cromwell portraying him older.

For the part of the younger Canter, director Mostow cast Ginty obviously on his acting talent, but also on his varied arts background.

Ginty studied and performed ballet for seven years at The American Ballet Company, The Royal Ballet and The National Ballet of Canada. For his acting training, he studied at The American Drama Academy, The Royal Academy, Interlochen in northern Michigan and Julliard. All of that experience helped Ginty prepare for working on Surrogates.

"Mostow will pull whatever he can out of you," said Ginty, hours before the world premiere of the film in Los Angeles. "Doing this movie was an extraordinary experience."

As a filmmaker, Mostow tries to incorporate as many physical and practical action sequences into his films as he can, as does Willis as an action star/actor. Both of them encouraged Ginty to do the same throughout his performance, including doing some stunt work.

"There was a ton of practical stuff (real stunts) in the movie and there was certainly CGI also," said Ginty. "Bruce was a real mentor to me. He had a mentor playfulness about him. The whole cast was family through and through."

For the premiere of Surrogates at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood, Ginty teamed up with designer Ra'mon Lawrence Coleman of 'Ra'mon-Lawrence Designs,' who currently has three collections at Kohl's and appears on the Bravo series Project Runway.

Ra'mon - concidentally, a major sci-fi fan and an admitted 'Trekkie'- made Ginty a blue/black tuxedo with a combination sci-fi and an vintage-film look and both collaborated on the silver bow tie.

"I wanted a re-invented Old Hollywood in the tuxedo that was appropriate for him (Ginty), said Ra'mon. "The look has to represent the person as well as the designer."

Surrogates is produced by Max Handelman, David Hoberman and Todd Lieberman for Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. It was written by Michael Ferris and John D. Brancato.

After a slight delay in getting a copy of Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus, the review will be coming in the next day or two.

(Couldn't find the movie in order watch it...)

more to come..........

On DVD today is the movie event of the summer.

Watch the trailer here. Review coming later this week.

It's singer Debbie (now Deborah) Gibson and Lorenzo Lamas. It's a shark so large that it bites a Golden Gate-sized bridge in half (as well as a ship) against an octopus so big that one of its tentacles knocks a fighter plane out of the sky.

Brilliant.

An example.

Society today owes a great debt to ... Hollywood paparazzi. No, really. Think of all the tax dollars the County of Los Angeles saved by not having to pay an investigator to dog Britney Spears' every move to see whether she was complying with multiple orders from the court commissioner overseeing her child custody case. And TMZ has provided such a meaningful charitable service by transmitting all those images of the Bad Mom of the Year straight to the judge's chambers, that its Web site may now qualify to end in ".org" instead of ".com."
Same goes for the DMV, which under normal circumstances has a heck of a time proving that a scoflaw has been driving without a license. Little Jayden and Sean Preston, who now apparently have and really use their carseats, also should thank those guys and gals who practically plaster themselves to Mom's wheels.
So, Angelenos and SoCal tourists, next time you can't even maneuver on a Beverly Hills sidewalk because of the clicking and flashing throng hovering over Brit, don't complain. In fact, say thank you.

(Photo of LiLo and Samantha Ronson from Celebrity Babylon)

So we're buried in super-exciting, super-critical work here, and I've been told to keep it -- i.e. blogging -- on the DL, because a certain percussion instrument is being crushed, slowly, in a dark place ... but I digress.

Still, I cannot remain silent: I only heard about it this morning, and by it I mean the identity of LINDSAY LOHAN'S ALLEGED LESBIAN LOVER. It's club DJ Samantha Ronson, as reported on A Socialite Life via tabs of various stripes (I heard the Star and the New York Daily News, but don't quote me, 'cause I'll cut you). The info comes from people who either hacked into or had privileged access to, LiLo's MySpace page (what, she needs a MySpace page? Kids!) Star is holding the tidbit off of their Web site (that's how you make money, people, by selling magazines to people in the supermarket checkout lines -- hear that newspaper industry?). The other Daily News does have something, evidenced at the link above.

Here's the dirt from Celebrity Bablyon, for those too lazy to click:

Here is an example of one late night MySpace message from Lohan to Ronson, “Your [sic] all I have to live for, babe. I want to marry you and have children with you.” Sources say that the 21 year old actress has also been in many fights over the web with the 29 year old Samantha, Lindsay types, “Babe don’t leave me I [insert "f" word] LOVE YOU!” The relationship between the two lovebirds has been a bumpy one at best. Lohan has described the two as having an “on-again, off-again” romance. A MySpace friend has claimed that the two are obsessed with each other writing ‘I love you’ and ‘I have to have you.’ Apparently there is not so much censorship involved online with the two girlfriends, on one occasion Samantha writes to Lindsay saying “You still have me. I’m here for you. With you” Lindsay simply replies with, “I love you. You love me. Why don’t we [insert "f"word] and make a family...”

I first heard about all this at the tail end of the "Adam Corolla Show", which doesn't make me feel as bad that I'm listening to it as I would if it were "Howard Stern," but it's not something to be proud of, even if Corolla and co-hosts Danny Bonaduce and Teresa Strasser had documentary maker Ken Burns as a guest yesterday. It's the low-brow and the middlle-brow on KLSX 97.1 Free FM ... but I digress. We've got dirt on LiLo's alleged lesbian lover ... and isn't that all that counts?