Search Results for: The Aces

Apparently when the bell tolled for Marissa Cooper, it also spelled curtains for the entire O.C. After ordering up an abbreviated season of what was once TV’s hottest prime-time teen drama (Beverly Hills, 90210 with even more beach time, if you will), Fox announced Wednesday that it has officially deep-sixed The O.C. The finale will air Feb. 22 after a non-stop run of new episodes starting Thursday. “The O.C. season four finale will also be the series finale. This feels like the best time to bring the show to its close,” O.C. creator and executive producer Josh Schwartz said in… Read more »

Frustrated with just donating money to charities, Oprah Winfrey says she built a school for poor girls in South Africa because she wanted to feel closer to the people she was trying to help. “I really became frustrated with the fact that all I did was write check after check,” she told Newsweek magazine. “At a certain point, you want to feel that connection.” Winfrey spent five years and $40 million to build the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls outside Johannesburg. The school for 12- and 13-year-old girls has 28 buildings on 22 lush acres. The school includes huge… Read more »

One sunny afternoon not long ago, Dick Copaken sat in a booth at Daniel, one of those hushed, exclusive restaurants on Manhattan’s Upper East Side where the waiters glide spectrally fro table to table. He was wearing a starched button-down shirt and a blue blazer. Every strand of his thinning hair was in place, and he spoke calmly and slowly, his large pink Charlie Brow head bobbing along evenly as he did. Copaken spent many years as a partner at the white-shoe Washington, D.C., firm Covington & Burling, and he has a lawyer’s gravitas. One of his bes friends calls… Read more »

Let’s face it: When it comes to defending the planet, five white-belted emo kids would probably be the last crew you’d want on the frontlines (even Captain Planet and those wussy Planeteers would instill more confidence). But in a new short film by two “unemployed” British directors, the fate of the free world rests directly on the scrawny shoulders of five sad sorta-superheroes. The film, called “Mighty Moshin’ Emo Rangers,” was the brainchild of Chris Phillips and Nick Pittom, two twentysomething filmmakers who were barely getting filming gigs for local bands. Their money situation only continued to worsen, and things… Read more »

One of the most advertised places in Canada is about to get a whole lot busier. Toronto’s Yonge-Dundas Square has been chosen as the site of the new Canadian Music Hall Of Fame, as announced by The Canadian Academy Of Recording Arts And Sciences (CARAS) on Tuesday. The Square, which attracts more than 50 million people (and many more pigeons) annually, was selected in part because of its location in Toronto’s downtown core. Ross Reynolds, chairman of CARAS and chair of the Hall Of Fame committee, said, “All the proposals were unique and represented a diversity of ideas and suggestions… Read more »

Following the release of Fall Out Boy’s 2003 full-length debut, Take This to Your Grave, the Chicago quartet was flooded with hyperbolic praise. The group, which was signed by tiny independent label Fueled by Ramen, was declared the “next big thing” by multiple media outlets, and its album sold more than 200,000 copies. So expectations were high for the band’s major-label follow-up, From Under the Cork Tree, which came out on May 3 and will debut at #9 on next week’s Billboard albums chart. Some pundits predicted a groundbreaking pop-punk expedition, and others awaited a heart-rending emo excursion, but Fall… Read more »

BEVERLY HILLS, California – If only iTunes charts meant as much as Billboard charts. “I’d be on the front of People magazine every week,” Ben Folds joked. “I have a real disproportionate Internet fanbase. On iTunes, it’s me and the Boss.” In “the real world,” a.k.a. record stores, though, Folds has pretty much tossed in the towel. “You don’t have to walk in the mall for very long to realize I’m not really in that world,” Folds said during a promotional trip to Los Angeles last week that included, of all things, an in-store performance at Virgin Records. “The misconception… Read more »

Los Angeles – Rob Thomas jokes that his label, Melisma/Atlantic, is seeing a different side of him as it prepares for the launch of his solo debut, “… Something to Be.” In the multiplatinum group Matchbox Twenty, drummer Paul Doucette was the “bad cop. I was good cop,” Thomas says. “Now I’m good cop and bad cop. A lot of people who thought I was easygoing, pot-smoking Rob don’t think that anymore. Now they see I’m not so easy.” Fans of Matchbox Twenty will also hear a different side of Thomas on the album, which ranges from familiar Matchbox Twenty… Read more »

Beverly Hills – Bono and Brad Pitt brought their star power to the kickoff of the One Campaign on Wednesday, calling on people to come together to fight the global crises of AIDS, hunger and poverty. Explaining that “it’s not a cause, it’s an emergency,” Bono said thousands of people die every day in Africa from preventable causes. He called upon the young people of today to make the fight for third-world relief their generation’s movement, much like the youth of the 1960s fought for civil rights in America. Pitt playfully blamed Bono for getting him involved in the effort,… Read more »

PARK CITY, Utah – Deciding to shelve an album is never easy, but it helps when writing another one only takes a month. “I wrote a record and I didn’t like it so much,” Dashboard Confessional singer Chris Carrabba said recently. “It didn’t feel like the right songs for where I’m at in my life right now, so I started again about four weeks ago. Now I’ve got another one and I like it a lot – I can talk about these stories truthfully for the next two years. I didn’t think the last batch would mean something to me… Read more »