CMA Awards: THR Names Country's 20 Top Entertainers

This story first appeared in the Nov. 8 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.

Country music celebrates its own Nov. 6 at the CMA Awards. Hosted by Brad Paisley and Carrie Underwood at Nashville's Bridgestone Arena, the ABC-televised party will showcase the genre's chart-toppers and road warriors, 20 of whom are keeping the down-home sound alive.

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Jason Aldean

The 36-year-old's Night Train album is 2013's fourth-biggest seller behind sets from Taylor Swift, Mumford & Sons and One Direction. He was the first country singer to sell out Boston's Fenway Park.

The Band Perry

Kimberly Perry, 30, conquered the genre with a million-dollar smile and the most winning rasp since Rod's. She and her brothers did it again this year with Pioneer, handily beating the sophomore jinx while proving there's room for girls.

Dierks Bentley

Bentley, 37, arrived a decade ago, making fans not only of country lovers but also rockers like Pearl Jam's Mike McCready, his recent jamming partner on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon. Radio drove three Bentley songs to No. 1 in 2011-12.

Luke Bryan

A polarizing figure, Bryan, 37, was at the center of Nashville's Old School vs. New School debate when Zac Brown said his "That's My Kind of Night" was "the worst song I've ever heard." Plenty disagree as "Night" hit No. 1 on the country chart and Bryan's album Crash My Party sold 528,000 copies during its first week.

Kenny Chesney

Chesney, 45, has staying power. Life on a Rock, his 14th studio album over two decades, followed its predecessor, Welcome to the Fishbowl, by 10 months but still topped the country chart.

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Florida Georgia Line

Who'll win the new artist award? If ordinary fans and the radio stations that cater to them had their way, it would be this upstart duo by a landslide. Their first three singles hit No. 1, and "Cruise" spent six months there.

Toby Keith

Since 2004, Keith, 52, hasn't let a year go by without a new album. Plus, he grossed $25 million on tour in 2012. Throw in his chain of I Love This Bar watering holes, and it's no wonder Forbes dubbed him the "Cowboy Capitalist."

Lady Antebellum

On the heels of their fourth studio album, Golden, Hillary Scott, 27, Charles Kelley, 32, and Dave Haywood, 31, celebrated the chart-topping release with a group hug. As the trio adjusts to its new normal -- Grammys, babies -- it will vie for two trophies at the CMA Awards.

Miranda Lambert

Solo or in a group, Lambert is heating up. "Mama's Broken Heart" earned the 29-year-old Nashville Star alum three CMA noms. This year she also appeared alongside husband Blake Shelton on The Voice and celebrated her side band Pistol Annies' second release, Annie Up.

Reba McEntire

Although her ABC sitcom Malibu Country was canceled after one season, McEntire, 58, continues to represent divadom at its most dolled up, complete with curling lips, mischievous eyes and that undiminished-by-Malibu accent.

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Tim McGraw

McGraw, 46, made his Big Machine debut with Two Lanes of Freedom, selling 107,000 copies during its first week -- his biggest tally since 2009's Southern Voice.

Willie Nelson

His duets project, To All the Girls …, was his first top 10 entry since 1982. Looking and sounding the same as then, the 80-year-old is the North Star of music.

Brad Paisley

A 14-time CMA Award winner, Paisley, 41, practically can call the arena his office, and Nashville is both real-life and TV home to him and wife Kimberly Williams-Paisley, a star on ABC's soap.

Darius Rucker

All three of the 47-year-old's post-Hootie solo albums have topped the country chart, and six of his 10 singles have reached No. 1, so don't hold your breath waiting for that Blowfish nostalgia tour.

Blake Shelton

Already a staple in Nashville, Shelton, 37, became a household name in 2011 by occupying a big red chair on NBC's The Voice. His latest album, Based on a True Story …, has posted career-best sales.

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George Strait

At 61, Strait remains a record setter, notching his 60th No. 1 country single this year with "Give It All We Got Tonight." His 25-date The Cowboy Rides Away tour is set for 2014.

Taylor Swift

At 23, country's ultimate crossover artist boasts three No. 1 albums. The latest, Red, spawned seven hits, including "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together."

Carrie Underwood

The American Idol champ, 30, scored her third No. 1 album with 2012's Blown Away, and her crowning achievement of 2013 came when she was handed the NFL's Sunday Night Football theme song. Up next: NBC's live broadcast of The Sound of Music.

Keith Urban

Urban, 46, made his stateside TV debut on the 12th season of Idol as the mellow counterpart to Mariah Carey and Nicki Minaj's diva feuds, and he'll return to the show in January. His eighth studio album, Fuse, debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart in September.

Zac Brown Band

Their third studio album, 2012's Uncaged, earned them their third Grammy, and they're nominated for vocal group of the year at the CMAs.

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Dallas Buyers Club

Matthew McConaughey, right, and Jared Leto in Dallas Buyers Club.

Courtesy of Anne Marie Fox/Focus Features

The opening images of Dallas Buyers Club have a raw, primitive vitality: A man and two women are having sweaty sex in a stall-like enclosure next to a ring where a rodeo is in progress. As the man grinds and grunts away, he can see through the slats in the door as a rider is first thrown from, then gored by, a bull. The parallelism isn’t subtle: On both sides of the gate, we sense, there is a man risking mortal peril. Dallas Buyers Club, directed by Jean-Marc Vallée (The Young Victoria) and starring Matthew McConaughey as a hard-living Texan electrician who contracts HIV in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, often works broad like that. This is a movie that traffics in deep hindbrain emotions: fear and rage and lust and, above all, the pure animal drive to go on living.

Dana Stevens is Slate's movie critic.

But Dallas Buyers Club, which was scripted by Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack, feels right just as it is—it wouldn’t make sense for the study of a character as outsized and rough-edged as Ron Woodroof to be anything smaller or more restrained. The real-life Woodroof died in 1992 after living much longer with the virus than his doctors had believed possible. After a round of treatment with the early, highly toxic AIDS drug AZT left Woodroof at death’s door, he nursed himself back to (relative) health with a cocktail of vitamins, supplements, and still-unapproved antiviral drugs obtained from around the world, some via the black market. With the help of a doctor and other patients, Woodroof eventually started a “buyers club” out of his Oak Lawn, Texas, apartment, offering $400-a-month pharmaceutical packages to HIV-positive people who had either been made sicker by AZT or simply couldn’t afford it.

As played by McConaughey, Ron is an entrepreneur first and an activist second—his empathy for his fellow man, particularly his gay fellow man, doesn’t start to surface until well into the second half of the film. When we first meet him, Ron is an unreconstructed rascal, a part-time rodeo rider who enjoys his whiskey, his women (several at once if possible), and, when payday rolls around, his weed and cocaine. His first reaction after he’s diagnosed with full-blown AIDS and given 30 days to live is to insist that the hospital must have mixed up his blood sample with “some daisy-puller’s,” then head home for a daylong hookers-and-coke bender. Ron’s deeply ingrained fear and hatred of homosexuals—traits we also witness in his uncharming circle of good ol’ boy buddies—prevent him from taking either the diagnosis or the treatment seriously until he’s so ill he’s on the verge of collapse.

The gradual process by which Ron learns to accept first his illness and then his kinship with other AIDS sufferers, gay or straight, provides the second half of the movie with moral suspense: Yes, the buyers-club enterprise is a financial success, but will Ron die before he starts helping people for the right reasons? There’s suspense of the more traditional sort as well, as an ever-sicker Ron, whose fierce will to live has turned him into a kind of gaunt, homophobic Energizer Bunny, drives across the border to smuggle back unapproved drugs from Mexico, passing himself off to border authorities as a cancer-stricken priest. (In this scene and many others, Dallas Buyers Club demonstrates a dry gallows wit.)

Though there’s a hint of romance in the warm relationship between Ron and one of his doctors—played by Jennifer Garner, whose virginal sweetness makes a nice foil to McConaughey’s permanent aura of debauchery—the central relationship in Dallas Buyers Club is between Ron and Rayon (Jared Leto), an HIV-positive trans woman he meets in the hospital and eventually makes his partner in the drug-selling enterprise. Rayon, who’s a composite of several real-life people, is a complex character—tart-tongued and hypercompetent one minute, a drug-addled mess the next—but Leto plays her (or “him,” as the change-averse Ron insists on continuing to call Rayon even after they become friends) with delicacy and humor and nary a hint of “look, I’m a drag queen!” straight-actor self-regard. Late in the film, Ron forces one of his homo-hating buddies to shake Rayon’s hand in a grocery store, and Leto’s barely perceptible smile of triumph is the grace note that makes the scene. It’s a performance that should catapult Leto out of the prison of being remembered forever as My So-Called Life’s teen heartthrob (a career move that, should it happen, I propose we call the Catalanopult.)

As for McConaughey, he’s so fine in this role it’s hard to shake a sense that he’s been prepping for it his whole career. Watching his character waste away onscreen—McConaughey lost 30 pounds for the part, and on his lanky frame it looks like much more—we experience the usually buff actor as alarmingly frail, which only makes his character’s dogged determination to survive (and, eventually, to help others do the same) that much harder, and more powerful, to witness.

The rowdy, drink-life-to-the-dregs philosophy of Ron Woodroof contains more than a little of the DNA of McConaughey’s Magic Mike character, a large-living strip-club owner named, providentially enough, Dallas. And both characters have clear genetic links to Wooderson, the unapologetic jailbait-chasing libertine in Dazed and Confused who so memorably told his teen acolytes to “just keep livin’.” You could lament McConaughey’s “typecasting” as a laconic Texas party animal—or you could rejoice that there’s an actor out there that can play that type so richly that it transcends mere type-ness. Like Robert Mitchum (to whom he’s been persuasively compared), McConaughey isn’t an actor we value for his plasticity from role to role, but for the special aura he brings with him into every film: a dangerous mix of friendliness and menace, seduction and threat (all with an undertone of wry humor that wasn’t part of Mitchum’s stock in trade). Whatever you do next, Matthew McConaughey, just keep livin’.

Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2013/11/dallas_buyers_club_review_matthew_mcconaughey_is_great_as_ron_woodroof.html
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Nintendo demos Wii Fit U and Fit Meter pedometer before they go on sale tomorrow (video)

Wii U owners wanting more exercise are about to get their fix, as Nintendo is releasing its long-promised Wii Fit U and companion Fit Meter in the US tomorrow, November 1st. Balance Board owners can pick up the pedometer by itself for $20, and they can download the game trial from the eShop for ...

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Nexus 5 official specs

Complete spec listings for Google and LG's five-inch Nexus phone

The Nexus 5 is finally official, bringing a top-level smartphone hardware paired with stock Android 4.4 KitKat at an affordable price point. Though pre-release leaks have told us a great deal about what's lurking beneath the Nexus 5's hood, it's worth taking a glance down the spec sheet now that everything's official, announced and finalized.

The short version: 5-inch 1080p screen, Snapdragon 800, 2GB of RAM, 16 or 32GB of storage, an 8-megapixel camera and 4G LTE connectivity over a whole bunch of different bands.

You find the longer version after the break.

read more

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Scientists fear renewed threat to white pine trees

CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — A fungus targeting white pine forests has mutated and poses new threats more than a century after it first hit the United States, American and Canadian scientists said Thursday.

A mutant form of white pine blister rust was discovered by Cornell University researcher Kerik Cox in 2011 in Connecticut. After two years of study, scientists now believe a large number of host plants — called ribes (pronounced RYE'-beez) — previously thought to be immune to the fungus are susceptible. Ribes include valuable niche crops like black currants and gooseberries that are used in products from jam to vodka.

Spores from infected ribes are carried by wind to the pines where the fungus invades the tree, eventually killing it.

"This is a problem both for the forest industry and for growers (of ribes)," said Isabel Munck, a plant pathologist for the U.S. Forest Service based in Durham, N.H. She estimates up to half the plants previously thought to be immune have been found to be infected.

When the fungus first hit in 1909 and spread outward from New York state, a massive eradication effort including a federal ban on planting ribes, helped stem the destruction. Still, within 13 years, about half the pines in New Hampshire were infected by the fungus, which is native to Asia and is believed to have hitchhiked here on an infected pine seedling from Europe.

Philippe Tanguay, a molecular forest pathologist with the Canadian Forest Service, said a genetic fingerprint of the new discovery determined it was a mutation of an existing strain of blister rust and not a new strain.

Several states, including New Hampshire, Maine and Massachusetts, still ban the planting of certain varieties of currants and other ribes. In light of the 2011 discovery, New Hampshire will add the previously immune plants to the banned list, and Munck said other states may follow.

There are other treatments including fungicides used on ribes, pruning of infected pine branches or removal of trees, she said.

It's a worry in timbering states like New Hampshire and Maine and in Canada.

"Pine is still the king in New Hampshire," said Kyle Lombard, the state's forest health program manager. "We grow and cut more pine in New Hampshire than any other tree species."

Eastern white pine is native to eastern North America. It ranges as far north as the Canadian Maritimes, westward to the Great Lakes and as far south as Mississippi. Munck said scientists are just getting a handle on the mutation and part of the early effort will focus on outreach to other states.

"This is all brand new," she said.

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Video: What's new in Android 4.4

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