THE BEGUILED - Official Trailer [HD] - In Theaters June 23
A short teaser has been released prior to the full trailer for Sofia Coppolas The Beguiled, which you can see here. The film is a Gothic thriller set during the Civil War and is based on the novel by Thomas Cullinan.
The Beguiled stars Colin Farrell, Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst, Elle Fanning, Oona Laurence, Angourie Rice, Emma Howard, and Addison Riecke. It will hit limited theaters on June 23rd and then expands to more locations on the 30th.
Synopsis:At a girls school in Virginia during the Civil War, where the young women have been sheltered from the outside world, a wounded Union soldier is taken in. soon the house is taken over with sexual tension, rivalries, and an unexpected turn of events.
Arkansas Court Frees Life of Two Convicted People As Innocent | USA Breaking News
More than two decades after he was found guilty in the slaying of a Jacksonville woman, Ledell Lee died by lethal injection Thursday night amid his protestations of innocence and last-ditch efforts for court-ordered DNA tests.
Lee, who also was serving prison time after two rape convictions, was sent to death row primarily on eyewitness testimony, a shoe imprint and the serial number of a $100 bill he was accused of lifting from 26-year-old Debra Reese. Police arrested Lee on Feb. 9, 1993, within hours of finding Reese bludgeoned and strangled in her Jacksonville home.
After the arrest, investigators drew Lee"s blood and linked his DNA to four unsolved cases -- three sexual assaults and one homicide -- in the central Arkansas city.
The second homicide charge and one of the rape cases were ultimately dropped, but Lee faced all five criminal cases -- simultaneously but separately -- before three different Pulaski County judges. Two public defenders represented him, and in the Reese case, they quickly requested a mental examination, court records show.
"I can"t see any daylight in fighting these charges," Lee told a state psychiatrist nearly one year to the day after Reese"s death. "I"m frustrated, irritated, troubled, all at the same time."
Twenty-three years later, the state executed Lee. His team of attorneys -- including from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Innocence Project -- in court filings sought to highlight problems with Lee"s previous legal counsel, his present-day competency and the lack of forensic evidence brought in the Reese trial.
Lee did not get a reprieve.
Lee"s younger brother, Howard Young, called it a "travesty" that courts declined Lee"s request for additional DNA testing.
Aside from his murder conviction, juries convicted Lee in the 1991 rape of a Jacksonville woman and the 1990 rape of a Jacksonville teenager. His s***n was found on the woman"s jeans and the teenager"s body, medical experts testified at the trials. He was convicted on one rape charge before the murder trial, but all three rape cases were disclosed during the sentencing part of the Reese-case trial.
Holly Lodge Meyer, the lead prosecutor on all five Lee cases, profiled him then as a "hunter" whose prey were the women of the Sunnydale neighborhood in Jacksonville.
"I think what makes Ledell Lee particularly deserving -- and no other penalty but the death penalty would be proportional to the crimes that he has committed -- would be this pattern of being a serial rapist and a killer," Meyer said in a telephone interview.
Born in Blytheville, Lee grew up mostly fatherless and in poverty, Young said. Lee and his three brothers shared one of their home"s three bedrooms and their clothes -- even frequently exchanging the same pair of pants on the same day, young said.
lee held a series of jobs working with fiberglass and boat construction, including at one factory in Sherwood, he told the psychiatrist. At the time of Reese"s murder, in early 1993, he had a 2-year-old daughter, according to the report.
A jury convicted Lee of striking Reese three dozen times with a tire thumper -- a tool similar to a baseball bat designed to be whacked against tires to gauge their inflation -- after invading her Jacksonville home.
Reese was a newlywed with a 7-year-old child from a previous marriage. A housewife who formerly worked at a baby boutique store and at a cleaner"s office, she visited her parents" home daily, according to her father, Stephen Williams.
Often, Reese and her mom spent their days together watching television or shopping before Reese went to get her son from school.
"They were best friends," Williams said.
Reese talked to her mom by phone minutes before her death, telling her she would be over soon. She said she was spooked after a man she didn"t know knocked on her door and asked to borrow tools to fix his car, Williams said.
Later, a shoe print, matching a pair of 10 Converse sneakers Lee owned, was found in the bedroom where she was killed. So was a hair strand, but it was not forensically linked to Lee. The state Crime Laboratory confirmed that Lee"s sneakers contained drops of human blood, but the sample was not large enough to test for a match with Reese"s DNA at the time, said Meyer, the prosecutor.
Lee"s recent bid was to have DNA tests conducted on the hair and the shoes.
The serial number of a $100 bill recovered from a Rent-A-Center in Jacksonville was within one digit of a $100 bill in Williams" possession, according to court testimony. Williams said he had given $300 to his daughter from a larger sum in sequential bills he received from a credit union after cashing a vacation check.
Company records showed Lee paid a debt on the day of Reese"s killing, according to testimony, though Young said prosecutors couldn"t prove definitively that his brother used the bill in question.
Reese"s neighbor testified that he tailed Lee on the day of Reese"s murder after becoming suspicious when he barged into Reese"s home and left while repeatedly looking over his shoulder. The neighbor, Andy Gomez, also testified that he lost sight of Lee for a few minutes while following him but that he was certain that Lee was the guy he saw leave Reese"s home.
A second neighbor of Reese"s testified that Lee knocked on his door and asked for tools. The neighbor loaned Lee tools, which were never recovered, according to Meyer, who posited that Lee knocked on doors to scout whether women were home alone.
Reese"s parents told her son that she had been killed on the same day it happened. The 7-year-old was deeply unsettled and could not be persuaded to stop playing a Nintendo video game even late into the night, Williams recalled. For several weeks, Williams slept with his grandson on a mattress on the floor.
"I"ll give you two words for "cruel and unusual,"" Williams said, referring to terms used by inmates to describe the manner of their planned execution. "Ledell Lee."
A Section on 04/21/2017
At a glance
THE INMATE
Ledell Lee
Age: 51
From: Jacksonville.
Sentenced: Oct. 16, 1995, in Pulaski County.
Police arrested Lee within hours of the 1993 beating death of Debra Reese, 26, in Jacksonville, after he was linked to the crime by eyewitness testimony from a neighbor. He maintains his innocence.
THE VICTIM
Debra Reese
Age: 26
Hometown: Jacksonville
How it happened: Reese was bludgeoned to death and strangled during a home invasion Feb. 9, 1993.
LIVE: Tad Cummins and Elizabeth Thomas breaking news
by Sinclair Broadcast Group
Tad Cummins was arrested on Thursday April 20, 2017 after a AMBER Alert triggered a nationwide manhunt. (Courtesy Siskiyou County Sheriffs Office )
WASHINGTON - A man accused of running away with a former student has been found and arrested.
According to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigations, Tad Cummins and and the girl* were located in Northern California.
The 50-year-old man and the 15-year-old girl were reported missing March 13 from Columbia, Tennessee.
"We couldn"t be happier to tell you she will soon be on her way back home to Tennessee," Tennessee Bureau of Investigation Director Mark Gwyn said.
Siskiyou County Sheriff"s Office spokesman Kelly Giordano says the capture of Cummins and rescue of the girl came thanks to a tip called into the department on Wednesday night.
Giordano says an officer responded to a tip Cummins" Nissan Rogue was spotted. The responding officer found the vehicle, which had no license plates. The officer ran the VIN number, which came back as Cummins" vehicle. The SCSO they mobilized their Special Response Team (SRT) this morning to Cecilville, where the vehicle was found. SRT officers found Cummins and the girl at a residence located near a commune in Cecilville.
Cummins did not resist arrest and was taken into custody just after 9 a.m. Thursday morning. He"s currently in transit from Cecilville to the Siskiyou County Jail located in Yreka, California. The area where they were found is two hours away from the jail. Cummins will be held on charges of sexual conduct with a minor and aggravated kidnapping. He has a hold for his extradition to Tennessee, placed by the TBI.
What happened in California this morning, however, proves it only takes one person to lead to a successful end. We are extremely thankful the hard work of all partners in this search has paid off, Gywn said. Were also grateful for the publics support and vigilance throughout this search effort.
"At the end of the day she"s 15 years old. She"s 15 years old; she"s a young girl that"s with a grown man that"s 50 years old. He needs to be held accountable for kidnapping this girl," Gwyn said.
Efforts to reunite the girl with her family were ongoing at the time of this post.
The last confirmed sighting was recorded in Oklahoma City, when the two were seen on security cameras inside a Walmart March 15.
Cummins faces charges of sexual contact with a minor and aggravated kidnapping. TBI said he was believed to have had two guns in his possession.
A photo and witness reported the former teacher had inappropriate contact with his student.
"We"re so happy that California police worked quickly and were able to find them and get her safe," one of the girl"s sisters told The Tennessean.
"I believe the FBI are going to make sure she"s healthy before she comes home," she said. "We"ll make sure she"ll get what therapy she needs and that she"s safe, that she knows she"s safe."
A lawyer for the girl"s family has said the teacher was allowed to continue working at the school for two weeks after he was reported kissing the girl. Attorney Jason Whatley has said the school system must have not believed the student"s report.
The school"s investigative files provided to The Associated Press by the attorney show that both Cummins and the girl denied kissing. The teacher, however, acknowledged that the girl was "a really good friend and she does leave her other classes to come see him when she needs someone to calm her down," according to a school report dated Jan. 30.
The report recommended that the girl be taken out of Cummins" class and that he be reprimanded to uphold his professional responsibility. The report also recommended that the administration monitor Cummins" classroom to make sure students weren"t there when they weren"t supposed to be.
The teacher would later be reprimanded on Feb. 3 by school principal Penny Love after the girl was seen in Cummins" classroom for a little more than half an hour that day. In her letter, Love said the girl being in his classroom was a violation of the principal"s order to him.
The school system didn"t suspend Cummins until Feb. 6. He was fired about a month later a day after the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation issued an Amber Alert about the teen.
The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation said it worked tirelessly for the past five weeks, looking into more than 1,500 leads from all 50 states.
Two days after the girl disappeared, surveillance images from a Walmart in Oklahoma City showed Cummins and the girl purchasing food items in the store with cash. The images showed Cummins had altered his hair to appear darker and the girl"s hair may have changed to red.
The teacher"s wife of 31 years has filed for divorce. Court records show that Jill Cummins sued her then-missing husband on the grounds of irreconcilable differences and inappropriate marital conduct. The wife, who works for the Maury County school system, said she had not seen her husband since March 13. The couple has two children together.
*Editor"s Note: The name of the girl involved in this case has been removed from the original report because she is an alleged victim of a s*x crime.
AFRICANS GET EXECUTED IN ARKANSAS In a hearing this afternoon before Pulaski County Circuit Judge Herbert Wright, attorneys for death row inmate Ledell Lee argued that they should be allowed to locate crime scene evidence collected in 1993, including a single hair and a Converse shoe with a pinhead-sized spot of human blood on it, for modern DNA testing. They hope testing can prove that the African-American hair found at the crime scene belongs to someone other than Lee, and that the speck of blood found on Lee"s shoe does not belong to the victim in the case.
UPDATE: Wright denied the petition.
Here it is.
Lee was sentenced to death for the Feb. 9, 1993 murder of Debra Reese, 26, who was beaten to death in the bedroom of her home in Jacksonville. Investigators found that she was strangled and struck at least 36 times with a "tire thumper," a club used by truckers to check tire pressure. Her husband, a truck driver, had given her the tire thumper for protection while he was on the road. Lee has maintained he is innocent of the crime.
As reported in the jacksonville"s arkansas leader newspaper, lee was also convicted of raping two other Jacksonville women, and was put on trail in the rape and murder of Christine Lewis, a 22-year-old mother, also from Jacksonville, who was abducted from her home in Nov. 1989 before being raped and strangled. Her body was left in an abandoned house. Lee"s trial in the Lewis case ended in a hung jury.
During the hearing, Lee"s attorney Lee Short made the case that prior counsel in the Reese case failed Lee by not insisting on modern DNA testing of the items prior to now. He said that Lee had reached out to the Innocence Project in 1996, asking for them to take up his case, but was told they didn"t have the staff or funding. Pulaski County Chief Deputy Prosecuting Attorney John Johnson, arguing for the state, said that while there have been advancements in DNA testing techniques and technologies, attorneys for Lee had presented no evidence to the court proving those advancements.
Short said that at the time of Lee"s original trial, the science of hair analysis was mostly about comparison. "Basically what happened at the trial is this," Lee said. "I"ve got a hair. I"ve got another hair. I"m going to show you what the differences are." Lee said that with significant scientific advancements since 1993, investigators can now determine much more from hair analysis, especially if the hair involved has a root. Johnson said there"s no way of knowing if the hair has a root. Short claimed there was testimony to the effect that there was a hair root, but couldn"t find the passage while searching the transcript at today"s hearing. As for the speck of blood found on Lee"s Converse tennis shoe which was determined destroyed during testing to prove it was human blood Short said modern techniques could potentially recover a sample and prove it was either Lee"s blood or belonged to someone other than Debra Reese.
Judge Wright noted that there have been many instances where Mr. Lee "s case had come before the courts, but he hadn"t made the argument that the material should be tested with modern technologies and techniques. Wright said that if actual innocence was the basis of a claim by Lee, that could have been raised "earlier than the eve of execution." Short said that Lee has always maintained his innocence in the case, adding that without undertaking modern DNA testing, Lee "was not a good candidate for an actual innocence claim." If the court allows the testing, Short said, he believes the results will make Lee a very good candidate for an innocence claim. Johnson said that the purpose of the hearing is "not to ask "what if?"" adding that Short had "besmirched" the character of previous counsel who represented Lee. Short replied that he would "absolutely" besmirch the character of Lee"s previous counsel.
Short said that his investigations have shown that the evidence in the case is supposed to be in the custody of the Jacksonville Police Department, which is required to preserve the evidence. He asked the court to order the Jacksonville PD to either produce those items for testing or admit that they have been discarded. Short said attorneys for Lee are not asking for a new trial, only that the evidence be made available for testing.
Short said that Lee"s case was based on circumstantial evidence and eyewitness testimony from witnesses he painted as flawed, including one witness who was on Vicodin at the time he claimed he saw Lee leaving Reese"s home, and another who told investigators she was of the Rastafarian religion and smoked marijuana daily. All eyewitnesses in the case, Short said, made "cross-racial identification" of Lee, which has been found to be flawed in other cases. Short also said that even though the crime scene was "extremely b****y," when Lee was arrested three hours after the murder, Lee was only found with a single speck of blood on his shoe. Short said the strongest evidence by the state was a Converse shoe imprint left at the crime scene. If Lee had changed out of his b****y clothes, Short asked, why didn"t he change his shoes too?
Johnson countered that even if modern testing found that the hair discovered at the crime scene belonged to a different African-American man, and that the blood on the shoe belonged to someone other than Debra Reese, neither would prove Lee"s innocence or create an alibi for him the night of the crime. Short argued that if either of those outcomes turned out to be true, it would "substantially advance" Lee"s case for innocence. Short cited the West Memphis 3 case, in which later DNA testing found that none of the DNA evidence discovered at the crime scene matched Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley or Jason Baldwin. Short said that in that case, Johnson could have made the same argument as he did in Lee"s case. The discovery that DNA evidence collected at the crime scene didn"t match any of the West Memphis 3 was instrumental to securing their release.
Judge Wright said he would have a ruling on the issue "by the close of business today."
In the Martin Scorsese-produced shoot em up Free Fire, South African actor Sharlto Copley plays Vern, a narcissistic gunrunner in a polyester suit whos prone to a certain behavioral grandiloquence. He describes himself as a rare and mysterious pearl but cant shoot a gun to save his life; hes revealed to be a misdiagnosed child genius but never recovered from discovering his brilliance lacks any basis in truth.
Its a baroque characterization all antic energy and adenoidal line readings that allows Copley to steal just about every scene hes in. Which is no small feat considering free fires ensemble cast is rounded out by Oscar-winner Brie Larson and Armie Hammer (as a studly stoner) and offers determinedly demented performances by British actors Sam Riley and Babou Ceesay all amid a cartoonish crime tableau where the sense of suspense comes from just how many bullets the characters can pump into one another before finally bleeding out.
Copley explains his objective in Free Fire, opening Friday, wasnt to keep it real so much as surreal.
With the Vern character, I thought, Can I pitch the voice that way? Is the voice going to annoy the out of people? the actor says, seated on the patio of a Beverly Hills hotel restaurant. Is the audience going to go, That was funny for the first minute. Now please shoot him and shut him up!
Copley, though, isnt the sort of actor who plays things safe. Its not for everyone, he says. When you take a strong position as an actor, its risky. It is what you might call scene-stealing or chewing the scenery. But thats my instinct: to do the thing Id like to watch on-screen.
Eight years into what can fairly be called an accidental movie star career, the 43-year-old has built a bizarre yet fascinating filmography by gnawing off sizable chunks of Hollywood scenery and chewing them to smithereens. With his natural talent for accents, implacable joie de vivre, gonzo skill at improvising dialogue and bottomless capacity to change his appearance from role to role, Copley is becoming increasingly well-known for his self-styled, sui generis screen presence. One that can bring to mind Crispin Glover or John Malkovich or Jeff Goldblum in the performances proud eccentricity.
Which makes it all the more surprising to discover, then, that Copley had barely contemplated acting when he was cast in his debut movie, 2009s documentary style sci-fi thriller District 9. At the time, the Pretoria native had his sights set on becoming a media maverick, operating a film and TV production company while trying to set up ETV, what Copley describes as South Africas first national, free-to-air terrestrial TV channel.
He fluked into the role when writer-director Neill Blomkamp a Johannesburg school friend and filmmaking collaborator asked Copley to appear as a bumbling Afrikaner bureaucrat in a 10-minute test film he intended to show Hobbit and Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson. In the short, Blomkamp was pursuing the kind of lo-fi, found footage aesthetic that eventually found its way into District 9, which Jackson ended up producing.
Sharl was always this guy who was extremely overt and larger than life and very funny. He also could create characters very easily even though acting was never on his radar, Blomkamp says. Being a personality was on his radar. When he was starting his TV station, one of the shows was like Punkd. He was the guy who would manipulate people and mess with them. But that was in the greater goal of becoming a writer-producer-director.
Despite that lack of acting bona fides, the test footage persuaded Blomkamp and Jackson that Copley could carry the $30-million Sony film. And D9, of course, went on to become a surprise smash, grossing $210 million worldwide and earning four Academy Award nominations including best picture. You could imagine the conversations Neill must have had when he said, I want to cast my buddy from South Africa, Copley says, growing wide-eyed at the memory. What has he done? Well, hes not really an actor. And hes going to make up the dialogue. Its impossible! I didnt even know I could do it!
Since then, the actor has gone on to rack up memorable performances in a dozen-odd films. Appearing alongside Bradley Cooper and Liam Neeson as the mentally unstable Capt. James Howling Mad Murdock in Foxs 2010 A-Team movie adaptation, Copley adopts a drawling Southern accent and attempts to use a defibrillator to jump-start a car engine. Thats one of my favorite all-time characters, an absolute essential part of being able to work in Hollywood, he says. After District 9, my agents were very quick to set up that meeting saying, Look, he isnt the bureaucrat guy. But people thought, Hes not an actor. This is him. I got that a lot.
Playing a psychotic baddie in Spike Lees 2013 Oldboy, the actor grew out his nails, donned prosthetic scars and assumed an upper-crust English accent (as well as what Copley calls a bisexual edge). He plants loves true kiss on Angelina Jolie as the unrequiting subject of her storybook sorceress characters affections in Maleficent. And as a samurai sword-wielding mercenary pursuing Matt Damons character in the 2014 sci-fi thriller Elysium (also directed by Blomkamp), Copley displays a convincing homicidal streak and outre physicality that had remained, until then, an unproven commodity.
The actor also provides a motion-capture performance and weirdly childish voice-over as a Pinocchio-like A.I. battle bot in Blomkamps action-dramedy Chappie. And by this point, Copley serves as something like a spirit animal for the writer-director.
Off camera, as a friend, he really has a heart of gold, says Blomkamp. On-screen, working with him, theres a level of intensity he has that 99.9% of actors dont have: a specificity and intensity about what hes doing with the role, and wanting to know every single possible thing he can know about it. Its probably what makes him so magnetic to watch.
But none of those roles offered such a pu pu platter of dramatic personae as last years first-person-shooter action flick Hardcore Henry. Portraying a character named Jimmy, Copley appears in 11 incarnations as a homeless alcoholic, hippie biker, ghillie suit-wearing sniper and quadriplegic scientist among them getting his head blown off, going up in flames and dying repeatedly, only to come back and chew the scenery again.
The actor called it his most challenging professional experience to date (and not just because at one point he thought he had accidentally run over and killed a stunt man during production). A good character actor is going to do those characters really different, says Copley. The real challenge is, how do you play 11 versions of the same guy? If you go too different, it starts to feel like, No, thats weird. Youve got to feel like its him still in there.
To hear it from Ben Wheatley, director and co-writer of Free Fire, Copleys background behind the camera gives him certain advantages inhabiting different characters. On set, hes offering up loads and loads of stuff all the time almost to the chagrin of the other performers, Wheatley says. Hes come up through postproduction, through sales and all sorts of stuff. He can look at how everythings made with a much more understanding eye.
Of Copleys overall body of work, the director adds: A lot of why those performances are so rounded is because they come from that position of understanding what the world of the work is like.
Toward the end of the year, however, Copley plans to cross the filmmaker-performer divide once more, having written, with the intention of directing and starring in, a film project he describes as satirical science fiction with a lot of comedy.
Currently casting the movie, the South African admits some difficulty in finding actors who can conjure the heartfelt yet buck-wild je ne sais quoi that imbues his own performances.
Im thinking, Who do I put with me? What Ill often find is theyre great in serious but not that funny. Or theyre so funny but am I going to feel them? Its that line of: How much heart and how much humor? Copley says. Like Woody Allen has his thing. Will Ferrell has his thing. The tone, if I get it right, becomes my thing.
And what, precisely, is that tone? Its the instinct I have as an actor. Its for the purpose of entertaining, not the purpose of, Thats so real! Those performances never interested me.
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Ann Coulter on The Sean Hannity Radio Show (4/19/2017)
The PostsWilliam Wan and Susan Svrluga report:
The [University of California at Berkeley] had announced Wednesday that it was canceling [Ann] Coulters appearance following several political protests in Berkeley that turned violent.
But on Thursday, the university said it had found a venue where it could hold the speech on May 2, instead of the original April 27 date. However, a leader of the college Republican group that originally invited coulter said the university was placing strict conditions on the event, and he said his group intended to reject the new terms.
The decision to cancel Coulters speech drew sharp criticism from some on the campus, such as Robert Reich, a Berkeley professor who served as labor secretary under President Bill Clinton.
Im not sure from the story what conditions the college Republicans are rejecting; I will update the post when I learn more.
