News

On the JoBlo Movies YouTube channel, we will be posting one full movie every day of the week, giving viewers the chance to watch them entirely free of charge. It’s quite fitting that today’s Free Movie of the Day is being released through our YouTube channel, because it happens to star a YouTuber. It’s the 2015 horror film The Chosen, and the lead character is played by Kian Lawley, who has had multiple YouTube channels and millions of followers over the years. His current channel is KianAndJc, which has 3.83 million subscribers as of right now. You can check out Lawley’s acting skills by watching The Chosen over on the JoBlo Movies YouTube channel, or you can just watch it in the embed at the top of this article.

Directed by Ben Jehoshua, who also wrote the script with Barry Jay Stich and Andrew Scheppmann, The Chosen has...

As Scorpion would say, "Get over here" and take a look at four new Mortal Kombat X Kombat Pack 2 characters. Leatherface, Xenomorph, and others will be available in 2016. Also: a free (for the weekend) Ultimate Night of the Living Dead comic and The Chosen release details.

Mortal Kombat X Dlc: From Mortal Kombat Community: "Four new playable characters are coming to Mortal Kombat X in Kombat Pack 2!

The new guest characters include Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre horror film series and the Xenomorph from the classic sci-fi horror film franchise Alien.

Additional characters include classic Mortal Kombat characters Bo Rai Cho, master of the drunken fist, and series favorites Cyrax, Sektor and Robot Smoke in the form of new Kombatant, Tri-Borg."

Mortal Kombat X Kombat Pack 2 will be released in 2016.

---------

Ultimate Night of the Living Dead: "As a holiday gift to fans and future fans alike, Double...

Kian Lawley is getting his fans excited for his first feature film. The former member of the now-disbanded YouTube supergroup O2L released the official trailer for the horror flick The Chosen on his YouTube channel on June 24, 2015.

In The Chosen, Lawley plays Cameron, a young man who must decide to end the lives of six family members to save his niece, who’s been possessed by a child-snatching demon. The Chosen co-stars Mykayla Sohn and Elizabeth Keener, is produced by Terror Films and Supergravity Pictures, the film studio created by Max Benator and Marc Hustvedt for features starring YouTubers.

Lawley, who boasts over 2.7 million subscribers on his channel (and now has 1.3 million on his joint channel with Jc Caylen) originally released an exclusive teaser trailer for The Chosen at an event during Playlist Live back in February 2015. And this isn’t the first time Lawley has been involved with a feature film.

Kian Lawley is about to be YouTube’s latest movie star. The 19-year-old former member of the late YouTube supergroup Our2ndLife and current half of the new YouTube channel with fellow O2L-mate Jc Caylen dubbed KianAndJC just dropped the trailer for his feature length thriller The Chosen at Playlist Live in front of an audience of screaming virtual and live fans numbering in the thousands.

Elliott Morgan played host for the evening’s brief event, introducing Lawley and co-star Mykayla Sohn before the pair introduced the worldwide premiere of The Chosen trailer and previewed an exclusive scene for the live Playslist attendees. The threesome then talked on stage for a few about the flick, which has an enticing tagline evocative of an old school William Peter Blatty classic spliced together with the relatively recent horror film phenomenon popularized by Hideo Nakata.

When a child-stealing demon attaches itself to a little girl,...

Tags: Sia FurlerElizabeth KeenerJane LynchKristen StewartLea MicheleSamantha RonsonCyndi LauperIMDb

Good afternoon and happy Friday!

Happy birthday to Analeigh Tipton, Vanessa Minnillo and Nikki Blonsky!

Actress Nikki Blonsky posing with lesbian comedian Judy Gold in New York City

Photo by Fernando Leon/Getty Images

Superstar and gay ally Cyndi Lauper lost her 90-year-old uncle in Hurricane Sandy. Please send good thoughts in Lauper's direction.

In case you missed it, watch Kristen Stewart chug a beer on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.

As mentioned in the Brew, Sara Ramirez is on the cover of Latina's December/January issue. And just because I love her on Grey's Anatomy, take a gander at Ramirez's cover.

Jane Lynch, Sarah Jessica Parker and Jessica Alba lend their voices to the animated film Escape from Planet Earth due out in theaters on Valentine's Day 2013. Check out the movie's trailer below.

Sia Furler gave a shout out to...

Lesbians were essentially shut out of ABC’s day at the Television Critics’ Association’s summer press tour Sunday. While ABC’s fall programming schedule is packed with new series that feature strong women front and center, the lesbian content doesn’t seem promising judging from their presentation to critics Sunday in Beverly Hills.

Here’s a rundown of the scripted series ABC will be kicking off come September and beyond.

9:45 ABC Executive session

Incoming ABC Entertainment president Paul Lee, noting that he’s only been on the job for 36 hours (having just been promoted after the departure of Steve McPherson), didn’t say much about specific plans for the network’s fall primetime schedule, other than that he isn’t planning to shuffle premiere dates and time slots. Lee, who earned the bump after developing such ABC Family hits as Kyle Xy, The Secret Life of the American Teenager and Pretty Little Liars,...

Sony Pictures Classics have been kind enough to give us a brand new and exclusive trailer for their new movie, Please Give which has some lovely new footage in it. The movie is directed by Nicole Holofcener and stars Rebecca Hall, Elizabeth Keener, Elise Ivy, Catherine Keener, Josh Pais, Amanda Peet and Oliver Platt.

Synopsis: Kate (Catherine Keener) and Alex (Oliver Platt), a married couple who run a successful business reselling estate-sale furniture, live in Manhattan with their teenage daughter, Abby. Wanting to expand their two-bedroom apartment, they buy the unit next door, planning to knock the walls out. However, before doing so, they have to wait for the occupant, Andra, a cranky elderly woman, to die. The wait becomes complicated when the family develops relationships with Andra and her two grown granddaughters.

Please Give is released in UK cinemas tomorrow, 18th June and keep your eyes peeled for Jon...

This is the trailer for Please Give (directed by Nicole Holofcener and starring Rebecca Hall, Elizabeth Keener, Elise Ivy, Catherine Keener, Josh Pais, Sarah Steele, Ann Morgan Guilbert, Amanda Peet and Oliver Platt. Kate (Catherine Keener) has a lot on her mind. There’s the ethics problem of buying furniture on the cheap at estate sales and marking it up at her trendy Manhattan store (and how much markup can she get away with?). There’s the materialism problem of not wanting her teenage daughter (Sarah Steele) to want the expensive things that Kate wants.

Riddle me this. What do you get when you combine over 10,000 happy lesbians, daily pool parties, nightly dance parties, and enough alcohol to keep Amy Winehouse occupied for five days? If you answered, "I don't know, but where do I sign up?" you wouldn't be the first. Actually, what you do get is the largest lesbian event in the world: The Dinah Shore Weekend in Palm Springs, California.

The desert extravaganza that's been described as "Lesbian Spring Break" is more than gay girls gone wild. I've been to three Dinah's and can tell you it's not for the weak, the straight, or the easily shocked. You haven't lived until you've seen topless girls hanging off a hotel balcony, swinging a blow up doll and waving to Leisha Hailey.

A new feature length documentary, Out in The Desert, promises an insider's look into, not only the dreamy dykes, debauchery and drama,...

Season one of the highly anticipated web series Venice was shot in Los Angeles last week, and AfterEllen.com was invited to the set to catch up with the hardworking and attractive cast. They are shooting primarily in, you guessed it, Venice Beach, with headquarters in a hipster hotel where we met in one of the suites.

As we've previously reported, a great cast for the series has been assembled. Series creator Crystal Chappell (Guiding Light) will play the lead, Gina, a designer and lesbian who has been out since her teenage years. Jessica Leccia (Chappell's former love interest on Guiding Light) will play Gina’s ex, and possibly future, girlfriend, Ani.

Crystal Chappell and Jessica Leccia

Leccia and Chappell in a production still from Venice

The details of their relationship have not been confirmed and everyone is very tight-lipped about plot specifics. We do know that Gina will hook up with attorney Tracy,...

As the fall television season gets underway with few lesbian characters or storylines in sight, lesbian viewers are eagerly anticipating the launch of the new web series Venice, the brainchild of soap star Crystal Chappell (best known to lesbian viewers as one half of Guiding Light’s lesbian super-couple, Olivia and Natalia, or “Otalia”).

The web series reunites Chappell with Jessica Leccia, her Guiding Light love interest, in a medium where their remarkable chemistry can be more fully expressed. The web series also stars Elizabeth Keener (The L Word), Daniel Cosgrove (Guiding Light), and Michelle Carter.

When CBS canceled Guiding Light, ending its unparalleled 72-year run on radio and television (the final episode airs September 18), the entrepreneurial, tech-savvy Chappell saw an opportunity to continue telling stories featuring lesbian characters and relationships, but without networks or corporate producers making the rules.

Chappell spoke with AfterEllen.com about Venice and her character,...

It’s official: After months of playful innuendo, The Soapgeist has announced Crystal Chappell will be playing the lesbian lead character, a designer named Gina, in the upcoming web serial, Venice: The Series.

Little is known of the series other than it is based around a family dynamic set in the progressive Southern California city of Venice Beach and several notable soap stars have signed on to the project including Jessica Leccia, the other half of Guiding Light’s same-sex super couple, Otalia, and Elizabeth Keener (The L Word, 3-Way).

Twitter was aflutter as legions of Otalia fans celebrated the confirmation that Chappell will play Gina.The production team tease that this could be the anticipated continuation of the pairing from the now canceled daytime drama.

The only one that knows for sure is Chappell and she’s not saying yet, but we do have an interview with her coming up soon on AfterEllen.

Want to know the status of a particular movie, TV show, or band? Wondering what a certain actress is up to these days? Send your entertainment-related questions to [email protected] — with your first name, city and country — and we'll try to answer as many as we can.

Question: I loved But I'm a Cheerleader, and I have watched Itty Bitty Titty Committee ten times now. Enough already! When is Jamie Babbit's next movie coming out?

― Tina, Columbia, MD

Jamie Babbit

Answer: Did you check out Babbit's 2005 feature, The Quiet, starring Elisha Cuthbert, Camilla Belle and Edie Falco? If not, the cast alone should be enough to send you to the video store.

I passed your question along to Babbitt, who told me:

I'm currently casting for my new film called Breaking The Girl. It's tonally in the vein of Body Heat, with lots of bi beauties and femme fatales.

If you've seen Itty Bitty Titty Committee or D.E.B.S., you've seen the fruits of Power Up!'s labor. Power Up! is a lesbian-film based non-profit organization that raises funds to put out films by gay female directors, writers and actors. Both Itty director Jamie Babbit and Angela Robinson (D.E.B.S.) are on the honorary board of directors, in good company with the likes of Debra Chasnoff.

Now Power Up! has made a new surprising move: They are opening up the organization to gay men as well. Founder and executive director Stacy Codikow released a statement regarding why she felt that it was time to bring men into the organization:

With the current climate, Power Up saw this as a time, more than any other, where our Glbtq community - Women & Men - needs to be unified to help achieve our collective goal of equality, representation and acceptance. Power Up knows that...

Last weekend celebrities came out in style to attend the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center's annual fundraiser An Evening with Women, and we have photos, photos, and more photos! (All photos are from Getty unless otherwise specified.)

Our L.A. Scene columnist Sarah Witness is going to cover it in more detail in her next column, but here's a quick rundown of the event.

Gina Gershon (Love Ranch, Bound) was scheduled to host, but had to back out at the last minute when her shooting schedule was changed, so Jennifer Coolidge (Nip/Tuck, Best in Show) gamely stepped in to Mc, entertaining the crowd with lines like, "a word about Mormons — what the f--k?" (pause) "I realize that was more than one word."

Jennifer Coolidge welcomes the crowd

Legendary musician (and organizer of the event) Linda Perry played piano and sang a new song she wrote called "Letter to God,...

In our annual Visibility Awards, we formally recognize the people who have positively or negatively impacted lesbian and bi visibility in American entertainment during the year. (See previous years here: 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004).

From Best Movie to Worst Song to Lesbian/Bi Woman of the Year, these awards recognize the television shows, movies, music, books and people who entertained, inspired, or disappointed us in 2008.

In previous years, the winners have been editorially chosen by the AfterEllen.com staff (note: winners do not necessarily represent any individual staff member's preference). This year, we opened up some of the categories for nominations, posted the finalists, and thousands of you voted. We've designated those categories with this symbol:

We've also included more international people, shows and movies this year, a reflection of the increasing awareness of lesbian and bisexual visibility around the world made possible by the internet.

Now on to the best and worst of...

Last year in our annual overview of the Year in Television, Malinda Lo wrote, “Though there is still plenty of room for improvement — particularly on broadcast TV — the low points of 2007 do not contradict the fact that lesbian/bi representation on TV this past year has increased and improved significantly.”

Clearly, a lot can change in a year.

Though 2008 comes to a close with word of possible new queer female characters on the horizon in the coming year, the prospects for lesbians and bisexual women on television over the last twelve months have been somewhat grim.

This has been particularly true for lesbians, whose numbers on scripted network television have now dwindled to zero.

While portrayals of lesbian characters on Grey’s Anatomy and Cashmere Mafia (both on ABC) showed initial promise, it wasn’t long before their storylines turned sour and came to a screeching halt, due to either...