Daily 30: Thu 12.11.2014

3mo
Kendrick Lamar: I am

10 Kendrick Lamar: I am Mini-Docs

Kendrick Lamar and Reebok join forces with acclaimed director Anthony Mandler to take you on a journey through Kendricks' hometown - Compton. The video celebrates the limitless potential of youth and is narrated by Kendrick through a powerful verse titled “Kendrick Lamar – I am” -- his own personal ode to Compton.
From The Hit Show "Black-ish" 3mo
Marcus Scribner on Anthony Anderson

12 Marcus Scribner on Anthony Anderson Late Night

Marcus reveals what it was like to beat Anthony Anderson’s son for the part of Anthony's son on "black-ish" and he talks about how being on the show has affected his high school experience.
3mo
Hacked Sony Honcho's Racist Obama Emails

17 Hacked Sony Honcho's Racist Obama Emails Variety

In the latest of embarrassing emails to leak online from Sony this week, studio co-chairman Amy Pascal and producer Scott Rudin riff on what President Barack Obama’s favorite movies could be, focusing mostly on films starring and by African Americans. According to Buzzfeed, Pascal asked Rudin for advice before going to an Obama fundraiser hosted by DreamWorks Animation head Jeffrey Katzenberg, particularly what she should ask the President “at this stupid Jeffrey breakfast.” “Would he like to finance some movies,” responded Rudin. “I doubt it. Should I ask him if he liked DJANGO?” said Pascal, with Rudin replying “12 YEARS.” “Or the butler. Or think like a man?” continued Pascal, who is a major donor for the Democratic party and President Obama. “Ride-along. I bet he likes Kevin Hart,” said Rudin. Hart, who stars in the upcoming Sony comedy “The Wedding Ringer,” was called a “whore” by a different Sony exec (Clint Culpepper) in another email on Wednesday for demanding more money from the studio. “I’m not saying he’s a whore, but he’s a whore,” Culpepper said of the box office star, who had asked for more money on top of his $3 million payment for tweeting about his new comedy. “If he doesn’t do his normal routine,” he wrote to Pascal, “his film will not open as well and his brand will appear diminished and he will- in fact – be f—ing himself because we have his next 2 immediate films.” On Tuesday, other damaging emails showed Pascal and Rudin trading nasty insults, mostly over the Steve Jobs biopic “Jobs” that started at Sony and ultimately moved to Universal. In the emails, Pascal said Angelina Jolie was upset that David Fincher was set to direct “Jobs” when she wanted him to direct her big-budget “Cleopatra,” to which Rudin called the actress a “minimally talented spoiled brat.” Rudin also took a jab at producer and Annapurna founder Megan Ellison, calling her a “28-year-old bipolar lunatic.” As the Sony situation continues to unravel, it was revealed through more stolen emails on Wednesday that Sony CEO Kazuo Hirai stepped in to scrutinize and approve certain scenes from James Franco and Seth Rogen’s controversial upcoming film “The Interview.” A group calling itself Guardians of Peace has been targeting Sony Pictures since Nov. 24, resulting in the leak of confidential information about executive and star salaries, movie budgets and employees’ personal information. The group also released five new Sony movies on torrent sites, including the upcoming titles “Annie” and “Still Alice.” A Sony rep declined comment on the leaked emails while Rudin did not immediately respond to Variety’s request to comment.
Must Watch! 5mo
What's In My Baggie?

18 What's In My Baggie? Jeff Chambers

"What's In My Baggie?" is a documentary on the rise of misrepresented substances, as well as a critique of ineffective drug policy.
5mo
The Grand Finale

19 The Grand Finale Steve Harvey

As the old adage goes, “all things must come to an end,” and for comedian Steve Harvey this week marks an end to a fraction of his 27 year comedy career.  The original “King Of Comedy” will headlines his final stand-up show, "Steve Harvey’s Grand Stand-Up Finale," at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.
4mo
777

20 777 Rihanna

Gives viewers a behind-the-scenes look at Rihanna's unprecedented globetrotting concert tour that hit seven countries in seven days with seven shows to promote her seventh album.
3mo
Mike Will Made It On Nicki Minaj's "I Lied"

21 Mike Will Made It On Nicki Minaj's … Complex

Mike WiLL Made It has more hours in the day than the rest of us. Or at least it seems that way. He's had yet another great year, with various record placements, the growth of his label, and the unavoidable tidal wave of success that Rae Sremmurd has been riding on. He's capping 2014 off with his new mixtape, Ransom, that's set to drop Dec. 15, and he told us that it will have an underground, gritty sound and feature artists like Gucci Mane, 2 Chainz, Future, Two-9, Rae Sremmurd, iLOVEMAKONNEN, Rich Homie Quan, Young Thug, and more. As you can see he's bringing a bunch of his homies into the fold for this winter release, and then he's got another album coming in 2015. He's also been busy working on music for some of rap's biggest names, most notably Nicki Minaj. Mike WiLL spoke about working on "I Lied," a track off Nicki's upcoming The Pinkprint album, comparing it to TLC's "Unpretty." "People aren't expecting what they are about to hear," Mike WiLL explains. "That TLC song, 'Unpretty,' how that impacted all females...and they could relate to it. It's going to be every girl's favorite song." You all will be able to hear it soon with The Pinkprint releasing the same day as Ransom.
Cooking Cocaine in Lima 3mo

The New King of Coke Pt. 3 Vice News

In part three of the five-part series, VICE News correspondent Kaj Larsen links up with cartel members at a clandestine lab in the middle of Lima and observes as they make cocaine that will be shipped from Peru to the world.
3mo
U.S. Secretly Infiltrated Cuba's Hip-Hop Scene

25 U.S. Secretly Infiltrated Cuba's Hi… Huffington Post

HAVANA (AP) — For more than two years, a U.S. agency secretly infiltrated Cuba's underground hip-hop movement, recruiting unwitting rappers to spark a youth movement against the government, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press. The idea was to use Cuban musicians "to break the information blockade" and build a network of young people seeking "social change," documents show. But the operation was amateurish and profoundly unsuccessful. On at least six occasions, Cuban authorities detained or interrogated people involved in the program; they also confiscated computer hardware, and in some cases it contained information that jeopardized Cubans who likely had no idea they were caught up in a clandestine U.S. operation. Still, contractors working for the U.S. Agency for International Development kept putting themselves and their targets at risk, the AP investigation found. They also ended up compromising Cuba's vibrant hip-hop culture — which has produced some of the hardest-hitting grassroots criticism since Fidel Castro came to power in 1959. Artists that USAID contractors tried to promote left the country or stopped performing after pressure from the Cuban government, and one of the island's most popular independent music festivals was taken over after officials linked it to USAID. The program is laid out in documents involving Creative Associates International, a Washington, D.C., contractor paid millions of dollars to undermine Cuba's communist government. The thousands of pages include contracts, emails, preserved chats, budgets, expense reports, power points, photographs and passports. The work included the creation of a "Cuban Twitter" social network and the dispatch of inexperienced Latin American youth to recruit activists, operations that were the focus of previous AP stories. "Any assertions that our work is secret or covert are simply false," USAID said in a statement Wednesday. Its programs were aimed at strengthening civil society "often in places where civic engagement is suppressed and where people are harassed, arrested, subjected to physical harm or worse." Creative Associates did not immediately respond to a request for comment. At first, the hip-hop operation was run in Cuba by Serbian contractor Rajko Bozic. His project was inspired by the protest concerts of the student movement that helped undermine former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. Nine years later, Bozic headed public relations for Serbia's EXIT Festival, an annual music event that had grown out of the student movement. Contractors would recruit scores of Cuban musicians for projects disguised as cultural initiatives but really aimed at boosting their visibility and stoking a movement of fans to challenge the government. Bozic spoke to the AP earlier this year but declined to talk about the Cuba program. The slender Serb homed in swiftly on Los Aldeanos, a hip-hop group frustrated by official pressure and widely respected by Cuban youth for its hard-hitting lyrics. "People marching blind, you have no credibility," the group rapped in "Long Live Free Cuba!" ''Go and tell the captain — this ship's sinking rapidly." Creative used a Panama front company and a bank in Lichtenstein to hide the money trail from Cuba, where thousands of dollars went to fund a TV program starring Los Aldeanos. It would be distributed on DVDs to circumvent Cuba's censors. Then the Colombian rock star Juanes announced a September 2009 concert in the heart of Havana. Creative managers held a two-day strategy session on how to persuade Juanes to let Los Aldeanos perform with him. It didn't happen, but Juanes publicly thanked the rappers after the concert and was photographed with them. The contractors were pleased; they believed this kind of public support by a major celebrity would protect Los Aldeanos from state pressure. In a statement Wednesday, a Juanes spokesman, John Reilly, said that the concert had no political agenda and that "Juanes and the other organizing artists did not have any knowledge" of what others did. Later the month of the concert, Los Aldeanos' charismatic front man, Aldo Rodriguez, was detained for illegal possession of a computer. Xavier Utset, who ran the program for Creative, saw the arrest as a "perfect test" of whether raising Aldo's profile would keep out of jail. In the end, a relative of Aldo's phoned Silvio Rodriguez, himself a legendary singer. Rodriguez, in an AP interview in Havana, said he called a friend in Cuba's Culture Ministry and asked for the computer to be returned. If there was a problem, he told the friend, "tell them I gave them the computer as a present." "Evidently he did what I said," Rodriguez said. "I never imagined that a program like this could exist ... When you find out you could be surrounded by a conspiracy, it's shocking." At one point, the contractors approached a government sex education institute run by President Raul Castro's daughter, Mariela, to be part of the EXIT Festival in Serbia, even as its organizers were running the anti-Castro hip-hop operation. One contractor said it would be "mind blowing" to be working with the president's family. Mariela Castro told the AP that her institute sent two representatives to the festival but didn't build deeper ties because the festival "didn't have anything to do with the work we were doing." Contractors paid $15,000 to underwrite an arts and music festival put on by the family of Pablo Milanes, the famed singer of "nueva trova" music and a man with close government ties. Their secret aim was to seed "the minds of festival organizers with new ideas" and persuade them to send "high-impact messages" to the audience, read one report. Milanes' daughter, Suylen Milanes, said government officials showed up the day before the festival and warned her that she was associating with unsavory characters. They even showed her copies of Bozic's emails, which they called suspicious, she recalled. Her father declined to comment. Clearly, Cuban officials had figured out what was going on. Bozic was detained coming into Havana with equipment, including a potentially incriminating memory stick, generating anxiety among the contractors. He cut his trip short and other contractors were told he wouldn't be returning soon. Then, Cuban authorities detained a photographer working with Adrian Monzon, the only Cuban who documents show knowingly worked for Creative Associates on the hip-hop program. State security then interrogated Monzon, a video jockey. He told Creative that the Cuban authorities were worried about Bozic and suspected links to the CIA. Four months later, Los Aldeanos left Cuba for their first trip off the island to perform at the EXIT festival in Serbia. On the side, they were the unwitting recipients of leadership training meant "to focus them a little more on their role as agents of social mobilization," wrote Utset, a veteran of Cuban pro-democracy efforts. Monzon was detained again returning to Havana in April 2011, his computer and a memory stick seized. When they were returned, he realized they contained a document with the names of two Creative Associates managers. It was a devastating blow. Monzon and Utset did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Aldo would only say that his "conscience is clear." While Bozic spoke with AP about his work with the EXIT festival, he did not respond to requests for comment on his Cuba work. In August 2010, Los Aldeanos took the stage at Rotilla, one of Cuba's largest independent music festivals. Before a crowd of about 15,000 people, they lacerated government officials by name and taunted the police. "The police instead of making me hate them, inspire pity, because they are such sh--- eaters they don't even realize they are victims of the system. Viva Cuba libre," Aldo's partner rapped. Within months, a USAID contractor told his handlers that the Cubans said USAID had infiltrated the festival, and soon enough, the Cubans took it over. . In the end, Los Aldeanos moved to South Florida after complaining that the Cuban government made it impossible for them to work in their own country. Their most recently published lyrics are softer-edged. In slickly produced videos, Aldo plays with dogs and children, making only scattered political references as he raps about helping people love each other, and making the world a better place.
3mo
Instagram Is Now Bigger Than Twitter

26 Instagram Is Now Bigger Than Twitter Complex

If a picture is worth a thousand words, it's definitely more popular than 140 characters — at least based on some new numbers that Instagram released today it is. The photo sharing app owned by Facebook appears to now have more active users than Twitter, despite Twitter's four-year head start. The app that has distinguished itself as the top source for photos of food porn, balling out of control, and celebrities being famous, announced Wednesday that it now has 300 million active monthly users (a jump of 100 million from nine months back), compared to Twitter's most recently announced tally in October of 284 million. You probably don't want to send your Twitter handle the way of your Myspace account just yet, though. If Twitter's growth pattern has held on, the company's as-of-yet-unannounced active user average for this quarter is probably around 297 million, Quartz reports.
#TBT Trailer! 3mo
I'm Gonna Git You Sucka

27 I'm Gonna Git You Sucka United Artist

I'm Gonna Git You Sucka Trailer - Directed by Keenen Ivory Wayans and starring Keenen Ivory Wayans, Bernie Casey, Antonio Fargas, Steve James, Isaac Hayes. Jack Spade returns from the army in his old ghetto neighbourhood when his brother, June Bug, dies. Jack declares war on Mr. Big, powerful local crimelord. His army is led by John Slade, his childhood idol who used to fight bad guys in the 70s.
3mo
Vice

28 Vice Lionsgate

Julian Michaels (Bruce Willis) has designed the ultimate resort: VICE, where anything goes and the customers can play out their wildest fantasies with artificial inhabitants who look, think and feel like humans. When an artificial (Ambyr Childers) becomes self-aware and escapes, she finds herself caught in the crossfire between Julian's mercenaries and a cop (Thomas Jane) who is hell-bent on shutting down Vice, and stopping the violence once and for all.
Powerful! 4mo

Selma Paramount

Martin Luther King, Lyndon Baines Johnson and the civil rights marches that changed America.
5mo
Taken 3

30 Taken 3 20th Century Fox

Liam Neeson returns as ex-covert operative Bryan Mills, whose reconciliation with his ex-wife is tragically cut short when she is brutally murdered. Consumed with rage, and framed for the crime, he goes on the run to evade the relentless pursuit of the CIA, FBI and the police. For one last time, Mills must use his “particular set of skills,” to track down the real killers, exact his unique brand of justice, and protect the only thing that matters to him now – his daughter.