Does anyone have more visible fun on camera than Tessa Thompson? She has that strut, and that smirk, and that presence, and when the movie is fun, she makes it FUN. The latest film to have Tessa Thompson swaggering all over the place is Men in Black: International, the sequel/spin-off to the Will Sm…

Does anyone have more visible fun on camera than Tessa Thompson? She has that strut, and that smirk, and that presence, and when the movie is fun, she makes it FUN. The latest film to have Tessa Thompson swaggering all over the place is Men in Black: International, the sequel/spin-off to the Will Sm…

This is typically a slow week in gossip. Many celebrities are already on holiday. There are a few who are making a final push for their Christmas releases but for the most part, things are shutting down and the idea is to coast towards the new year and come back hard in January. Same goes, sort of, …

And Halle Berry. New images from John Wick: Chapter 3 are out—oh, is that trailer coming soon, then?—and they show two sides of John Wick: Rainy John Wick and Dry John Wick. He’s looking a little worse for wear, sporting long hair and a struggle beard, and yet his suit is still pressed. I really adm…

The Men In Black: International trailer looks… okay? [Pajiba]
The Honest Trailer for the original Mary Poppins. [OMG Blog]
Tucker Carlson’s latest Fox News show tackled the important issue of whether to say “gingerbread people” rather than “men.” [Dlisted]
Where’d You Go Bernadette looks like a mess. [LaineyGossip]
Michelle Obama wears a canary yellow dress & crazy boots. [Tom & Lorenzo]
Michael Rapaport continues to be trash. [Jezebel]
Nick Jonas likes Priyanka Chopra’s butt, or something. [Seriously OMG]
Gisele Bundchen is in Brazil right now. [Just Jared]
Dua Lipa has style issues. [Red Carpet Fashion Awards]

The last time we heard from Macaulay Culkin was nearly eight months ago, doing the talk show rounds to promote his comedy site and podcast, Bunny Ears (the site is ongoing and mostly funny, the first iteration of the podcast has ended). More recently, Culkin has been appearing on YouTube shows like …

Dear Gossips,

Last week The New York Times reported that, earlier this year, CBS paid Eliza Dushku $9.5 million to settle harassment claims on the set of Bull. Michael Weatherly, the star of the show, had been harassing Eliza for months on set. When she reported his behaviour, she was written off…

A post shared by Khloé (@khloekardashian) on Dec 15, 2018 at 5:26pm PST

I don’t know anyone who subscribed to any of the Kardashian-Jenner’s subscription apps. All of the sisters had subscription apps, and some seemed more popular than others. Oddly, I think Khloe’s app was probably the most popular, because she used it for the kind of mundane exclusive content that people really wanted, like a glimpse into how she organized her closets, or her seeming obsession with The Container Store. Since I never subscribed, I have no idea if the other sisters were still doing much on their apps – I remember hearing that Kendall barely did anything for her subscribers, same with Kourtney. In any case, they’re all canceling their apps in the new year.

The Kardashian-Jenner family is looking to start fresh in the new year, and that means bidding farewell to their official apps. Kim Kardashian, Khloe Kardashian, Kourtney Kardashian and Kylie Jenner announced Wednesday that each of their websites will go dark in 2019.

“We’ve had an incredible experience connecting with all of you through our apps these past few years but have made the difficult decision to no longer continue updating in 2019. We truly hope you’ve enjoyed this journey as much as we have, and we look forward to what’s ahead,” a statement read.

Around this time last year, Kendall Jenner echoed a similar sentiment when she shut down her app. Launched in 2015, access to the stars’ apps cost subscribers $2.99 a month. Content primarily featured never-before-seen photos and videos from their personal lives, as well as insight into their beauty, fitness and diet routines. The E! reality TV personalities continue switching things up in their empire, as just eight months ago Kim announced the closure of their DASH clothing boutiques.

[From E! News]

So no more DASH and no more subscription apps. I have to think that both businesses were becoming unprofitable, or a bigger hassle than they were worth. What’s weird is that it feels like the Kardashian-Jenners are dealing with the same issues as media sites – do you make people pay for content, or do you try to give people content for free and hope that advertising allows you to turn a profit? In the Kardash-Jenners’ case, I think only Khloe really embraced the app, and the rest of them prefer the “free” ways of interacting with fans, on Twitter, Instagram and even Snapchat.

Me & my bff! ? North came to visit me on set & said momma can we do a photo shoot together just me & you! I followed her poses & direction so here it is! I always dreamed of having a baby girl & she’s perfect! pic.twitter.com/qyNG6wmjQZ

— Kim Kardashian West (@KimKardashian) December 18, 2018

Photos courtesy of Twitter, Instagram.

Vanity Fair has a new long-read royal story called “Inside the Markle Family Breakdown.” It was not written by their in-house royal reporter, Katie Nicholl. It was written by Vanessa Grigoriadis, who gives the Markle family the full “Vanity Fair treatment.” This is the kind of article that VF used to be known for – full of bitchy tabloid details and extensive interviews with shady people. Grigoriadis doesn’t make a judgment on Samantha Markle, who is quoted extensively throughout the piece, like the tackiest, thirstiest Greek chorus of Meghan’s royal story. The point of this VF piece is that the White Markles aren’t going away and it’s all Meghan’s fault – at no point does Grigoriadis even entertain the thought that Samantha and Thomas Markle are toxic, abusive people who deserve to be cut out of Meghan’s life. Instead, the piece reads like “yeah, Samantha and Thomas are showing their asses, but what did Meghan expect, it’s her own fault!” Grigoriadis doesn’t just speak to Samantha extensively – there are unnamed courtiers, royal sources and random, anonymous friends who all provide a backing diss track. Some non-Samantha-related highlights:

Meghan isn’t the most important princess: “Even if she’s not the monarchy’s most important princess—this honor goes to the assiduously pleasant Kate Middleton, one day to be queen consort—Meghan is the princess of the moment, as transformational in her way as Princess Di.”

Meghan’s Hollywood past: “She comes from a family of acolytes of motivational speakers and reality shows (Tony Robbins and the Kardashians are touchstones), people who believe that the future doesn’t at all have to be governed by the past. According to a Hollywood source, when her star was rising she threw herself a party at her home unofficially billed as a “Sayonara Zara” party and gave away the lower- priced clothes in her closet to her guests.”

Who Meghan is below the surface: Beneath the performance, Meghan, reporting indicates, is a solitary, emotionally guarded perfectionist likely carrying scar tissue from her tumultuous background…The image Meghan created for herself was free-spirited and earthy—but not entirely consistent with who she really was, according to those who know her. “Meghan’s goal was always becoming a household name,” says an acquaintance in the television world. “She’s insanely smart and poised, but very, very guarded. She’s not a person you can actually be friends with. She’s the type of person who is best friends with her stylist.”

What happened when Thomas Markle’s melodrama exploded ahead of the wedding: The Queen knew that Harry worshipped Meghan, and also that the House of Windsor didn’t need another busted-up fairy tale. “She was very concerned that it [the Markle situation] was spiraling out of control, which it was,” says one observer. “Buckingham Palace wanted to be able to do something and be proactive and make the situation go away. It was a direction from the Queen, so her courtiers were under strict instructions to sort it out. But Kensington Palace was not singing from the same hymn sheet, and that was because the message was coming from Meghan. She didn’t want to engage and thought that she could handle it on her own.” Both palaces’ aides whispered and planned, to no avail. “There was a lot of tension between courtiers within the two royal households, and I think it just got to a point where it was stalemate and, you know, neither could move.”

Meghan does read her press, and she was trying to manage her family situation her own way: Meghan herself was handling this fracas, or not handling it. “This is her family, and no one at the palace would make a move without her,” explains Patrick Jephson, Princess Diana’s former private secretary and author of The Meghan Factor, a book weighing Meghan’s impact on the monarchy. He pauses, then adds, “In talking about Meghan, I wouldn’t say that her advisers are doing a good job or a bad job. It is one of the perks of royalty never to be held responsible for their actions.” Regardless, the observer says, “Meghan and Harry made efforts to make sure Tom was properly kitted out for the day, so that level of care was there, but it wasn’t enough care. He needed an equerry to go out there and take him back to England, put him in Sandringham or Balmoral in a small cottage where no one knew where he was, and where he would have been very happy. That’s what should have happened.”

The smear campaign against Meghan: Understanding what’s going on behind castle walls is always a game of reading tea leaves, but the posh Brits I spoke with said they’d heard that some stories were correct: Meghan’s staff is annoyed by her waking up at a Californian five A.M. and texting about various initiatives she wants them to pursue, and Meghan is callous toward staff in general. One thought it was “peculiar” that her mother was the only family member at her wedding; another even said she’d heard Meghan was dubbed “Monster Markle” at Kensington Palace. I can’t vouch for any of that, but when papers began reporting that Kate and Meghan had feuded before the wedding, and then Kensington Palace issued a statement denying a feud, I thought about Tina Brown’s comment in The Diana Chronicles, her outstanding biography of the princess: “The palace only bothers to deny something that’s true.”

[From Vanity Fair]

I remember the back-and-forth dramas ahead of the wedding and after, all related to Toxic Thomas, and I remember the articles about the “high level” palace meetings about what they could do or should do about Thomas. I understand the petty hindsight bitchery of “Meghan and Harry should have sorted out Thomas months before the wedding,” but I also think that… at the end of the day, it was always going to play out this way, or a very similar way. If Meghan and Harry had brought Thomas to England and set him up in a private apartment or whatever, he still would have been in contact with Samantha, and he still would have found a way to sell out Meghan and embarrass her. Plus, I’ve always believed that Meghan and Harry did offer Toxic Thomas the whole thing – they asked him to come to England earlier, they offered him all kinds of help, and he turned them down. He kept turning them down and then when he sold them out and they cut him off, suddenly he gets to play the victim.

Basically, I understand why a longer-read on the Markles was newsworthy, but I absolutely think the author took the wrong angle. It’s easy enough to look at Samantha and Thomas’s shameful behavior and say “well, this could have gone better” but why not look at them and say “wow, they were ALWAYS going to behave this way, and good for Meghan for cutting them out of her life”?

Photos courtesy of WENN, Backgrid and Avalon Red.

Natalie Portman is a citizen of Israel and America. She was born in Israel, and she was raised in America, and she currently lives in LA (having left Paris when her husband left his Opera De Paris job). Over the years, Natalie gets questions about Israel, Israeli politicians and Israeli policies. I actually think Natalie does a decent job balancing out her views – she’s criticized Israel before, she’s criticized Benjamin Netanyahu before, but I’ve never felt like she’s just mouthing off for the sake of it. She’s judicious in how she criticizes her other home country. And this is one of those moments – earlier this year, the Knesset passed a nation-state law which basically only confers citizenship on Jewish, Hebrew-speaking Israelis and not any of the 1.8 million Arab Israelis currently living in Israel. Natalie has some thoughts:

Natalie Portman is speaking out about Israel’s controversial nation-state law, which was passed earlier this year to widespread criticism from within Israel and overseas. Speaking to the London-based Arabic daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi, as translated by both Al Jazeera and Haaretz, the Oscar-winner described the law as “racist.”

“It is a mistake and I don’t agree with it … [people’s] lives are [being] affected on a personal level by decisions made by politicians,” she added. “I only hope that we will be able to truly love our neighbours and that we can work together.”

Portman’s comments come less than a year after the Israeli-born actress sparked global headlines by pulling out of a prize ceremony in Tel Aviv, just weeks after Israeli troops had shot and killed a number of Palestinians protestors at the Gaza border (the casualty figures would rise to more than a hundred over the month that followed).

[From The Hollywood Reporter]

The nation-state law has been called “apartheid” by many human rights groups and watchdog groups, so it’s not like Natalie is the only one standing up to say this. It’s just unusual because she’s in the unusual position of being a famous dual citizen. In the past, when she’s made mild criticism of Israel or Israeli politicians before, I got the sense that her remarks were not well-received in Israel. I don’t know how these comments are being received, but my guess is that Netanyahu doesn’t give a sh-t. As long as he stays cozied up to the worst of the American right-wing, there’s not much anyone can do to him.

Photos courtesy of WENN.