All posts tagged: Chris

Robert Pattinson insists new film Primetime is ‘not an indictment’ of Chris Hansen

Robert Pattinson insists new film Primetime is ‘not an indictment’ of Chris Hansen

Published by Daniella Wilson

Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Membership today. Join today Already a member? Log in Robert Pattinson has insisted that his forthcoming film Primetime is “not an indictment” of real-life television host Chris Hansen. The 40-year-old British actor stars in the psychological thriller, which is directed by Lance Oppenheim from a script written by Ajon Singh. The project dramatises the behind-the-scenes creation of To Catch a Predator, the American reality series that aired between 2004 and 2007. Pattinson plays Hansen, an NBC journalist who teamed up with a group of vigilantes to expose child predators through sting operations. The series was taken off the air in 2008 following a sting operation involving Bill Conradt, an assistant district attorney in Texas. Conradt shot himself after police officers and a camera crew entered his home, and the resulting footage was never broadcast. Speaking to the Press Association at the film’s screening during the BFI London Film Festival, Pattinson explained his perspective on playing the real-life presenter. Robert …

Chris Rock Takes Scalpel to L.A. in Misty Green, Rosalind Eleazar Stars

Chris Rock Takes Scalpel to L.A. in Misty Green, Rosalind Eleazar Stars

Published by Daniella Wilson

Chris Rock delivers something unexpected with his fourth feature as writer-director, Misty Green, a slice-of-life movie that doubles as a bitter kiss-off to Los Angeles and a ride through the hellscape of working in Hollywood, seen through the titular actress as her once-promising career flickers out. But the surprise isn’t the harshness of Rock’s look at modern L.A., or that the beloved comic, who built his name on real talk about race and politics, would center the film on this woman. It’s the stunning performance he draws from British actor Rosalind Eleazar as the salty, self-sabotaging, washed-up Misty. Before this starmaking turn, Eleazar built a stateside profile on Apple TV’s Slow Horses alongside Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas. She spent four seasons on the critics’ darling as Louisa Guy, a disgraced, mourning MI5 agent. Before that, she appeared in the BBC’s Howards End as Jacky Bast, and in between these prestigious TV roles she worked on English stages, having trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. That varied résumé was a …

Chris Appleton Speaks Out After Becoming First Strictly Star Sent Home This Year

Chris Appleton Speaks Out After Becoming First Strictly Star Sent Home This Year

Published by Sam Flores

Strictly Come Dancing stars Chris Appleton and Amy Dowden have been reflecting after becoming the first contestants to be axed from the series. Chris and Amy wound up in the first dance-off of the new season over the weekend, and were sent home by the judges, who opted to save the actor Jaime Winstone and her professional partner Carlos Gu. On Sunday night, after their exit aired, the Welsh dancer posted a carousel of pictures of herself and the celebrity hairstylist on Instagram, telling him: “I honestly don’t think words can quite describe how proud I am of you.” Amy Dowden and Chris Appleton performing a Baywatch-themed routine during Saturday night’s Strictly live show “Seeing your Strictly journey come to an end is emotional, but what I’ll treasure most isn’t the result, it’s the friendship, memories and special moments we’ve shared along the way,” Amy wrote. “I know unfortunately only too well heartbreak. But I also know that the reason it hurts so much is because of the friendship and bond we’ve formed and that’s …

“Primetime” isn’t Chris Hansen’s story — it’s ours

“Primetime” isn’t Chris Hansen’s story — it’s ours

Published by Sam Flores

In the mid-2000s, “Dateline NBC” correspondent Chris Hansen became a national sensation for his hidden-camera sting show, “To Catch a Predator.” Shortly after, he became a meme.  Given the nature of “To Catch a Predator” — where Hansen applied his stern, lilting newscaster intonation to horrific online chat logs between grown men and what they assumed were teenagers — this blur between revulsion and comedy was practically inevitable. Hansen, along with the entire “To Catch a Predator” production, had a way of making the off-putting internet shorthand that men used in these archaic web chats to describe their sexual proclivities seem comical. As repulsive as the correspondence was, chat typos and ludicrous fetishes often made the predators look like bumbling fools, desensitizing viewers to their alleged crimes and downplaying the severity of their actions. As a form of ritual humiliation for its subjects, who were subsequently arrested and detained after being interrogated by Hansen in Tuscan décor kitchens around America, the show gave viewers the thumbs-up to turn its investigations into online fodder. Who were …

Chris Hansen shares what bothered him most about Robert Pattinson’s To Catch a Predator film

Chris Hansen shares what bothered him most about Robert Pattinson’s To Catch a Predator film

Published by Daniella Wilson

Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Membership today. Join today Already a member? Log in Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Chris Hansen, the subject of Robert Pattinson’s hotly anticipated new thriller, has now seen the film and reached a verdict. Released on 30 October in the UK, Primetime is a psychological crime thriller based on the making of the hugely popular NBC reality series To Catch a Predator. Running from 2004 to 2007 and hosted by Hanson, the show conducted sting operations to lure would-be predators to a house where they expect to be meeting with a minor (played by a decoy actor of a legal age) but are instead confronted by Hansen and his camera crew before being arrested by police. In the series, Pattinson plays Hansen with Skyler Gisondo starring as Dan Plumb, who …

Chris Hansen Reviews Robert Pattinson ‘Primetime’ Movie, Not a Fan

Chris Hansen Reviews Robert Pattinson ‘Primetime’ Movie, Not a Fan

Published by Daniella Wilson

Former To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen was interviewed on his podcast Friday to give his unfiltered reaction to A24‘s unauthorized, dramatized film about parts of his life, Primetime, which he called overly dramatic, detached from reality, and a “fever dream” — while giving Robert Pattinson‘s performance a “D” grade. Primetime, which opens Friday in the U.S., is set in 2006 and follows Pattinson’s fictionalized version of Hansen as the popular To Catch a Predator segment on NBC’s Dateline grows into its own primetime block on the network. On the show, Hansen blurred journalistic lines by working with law enforcement and the watchdog group Perverted Justice to intercept adult men as they arrived, unbeknownst to them, at a sting house to meet a minor they’d met online for sex. The men were typically arrested as a result. The series drew mixed reactions, with concerns about potential entrapment-law violations at the forefront of the criticism. In a brief segment produced for his video podcast, Have a Seat with Chris Hansen, the former NBC News journalist …

Chris Hansen Strikes Back at ‘Primetime’ With ‘I’m Chris Hansen’ Doc

Chris Hansen Strikes Back at ‘Primetime’ With ‘I’m Chris Hansen’ Doc

Published by Daniella Wilson

Have a seat: Chris Hansen wants to show you something. On Friday, Hansen’s TruBlu streaming network ($4.99/month or $49.99/year) unveiled the trailer for I’m Chris Hansen, a documentary about and starring the Dateline legend three years in the making. That timeline is important as everyone involved wants you to know that this doc is not simply some knee-jerk reaction to how Hansen feels about A24 feature film Primetime, in which Robert Pattinson portrays the To Catch a Predator journalist. As for Primetime, well, he’s not a fan. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter — Hansen’s first since the Lance Oppenheim film debuted at Venice — Hansen called the movie, out today in theaters, “a complete work of fiction attached to a real name.” “Based upon what I’ve seen in the trailer and my understanding of what has been written about the film, they wanted to create something much darker and way more dramatic,” he told THR‘s Seth Abramovitch. “I think it’s an insult to the thousands of men and women who work hard every …

Robert Pattinson responds after Chris Hansen calls Primetime film an ‘insult’

Robert Pattinson responds after Chris Hansen calls Primetime film an ‘insult’

Published by Daniella Wilson

Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Membership today. Join today Already a member? Log in Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Robert Pattinson has responded to Chris Hansen’s criticism of Primetime, a dramatisation of his NBC Dateline show To Catch a Predator, which he branded an “insult”. The movie is inspired by the enormous success of Hansen’s TV series To Catch a Predator, which began in 2004 first as a single segment on the US magazine show Dateline NBC, before being spun off into its own series. The show saw alleged child predators lured into the homes of children they believed they had been communicating with online, unaware that the children in question were actually adult crew members of the series pretending to be underage. Despite being cancelled in 2008, the subject remains relevant, having been featured …

Chris Hayes says GOP’s domination of Texas is coming back to bite them

Chris Hayes says GOP’s domination of Texas is coming back to bite them

Published by Sam Flores

When MS NOW heads to Arlington, Texas, on Saturday, Sept. 26, for “MS NOW Live: Together in Texas,” host Chris Hayes will be stepping into an environment he finds both familiar and necessary. For Hayes, host of “All In with Chris Hayes” and author of “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource,” gathering face-to-face with his audience isn’t just network promotion — it’s nurturing the one thing he has left in a media environment defined by change. “I love live events,” he told me in an interview ahead of the event, describing having “a head start” on the live-events model with book tours and podcast live shows. “There’s a great energy that comes from being in a room with people. I think it’s a different energy than anything else, particularly true and truer every day in the increasingly screen-based and mediated world.” Held at the College Park Center at the University of Texas at Arlington, MS NOW’s day-long fan event brings together 15 of the network’s top anchors — including Rachel …

Chris Appleton reveals whether Kim Kardashian will make Strictly appearance’

Chris Appleton reveals whether Kim Kardashian will make Strictly appearance’

Published by Daniella Wilson

Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Celebrity hairdresser Chris Appleton has suggested his friend and client Kim Kardashian could be cheering him on from the studio audience as he takes part in Strictly Come Dancing. The 43-year-old was paired with professional dancer Amy Dowden on Saturday’s launch episode of the BBC One entertainment show. He will compete against stars including singer Delta Goodrem, former Love Island winner Dani Dyer and former England footballer Shaun Wright-Phillips. Asked if Kardashian, whose reality TV show The Kardashians has featured Appleton, would attend a live show, he said: “Who knows? Watch this space, but I don’t know, anything could happen. “I think being in Strictly, I’ve realised anything is possible and magic happens. “I have no idea, I know a lot of people want to come to the show and we’re only allocated two tickets.” It comes after Kardashian posted on …