Barstool Sports "The Life" with Tyler Seguin of the Dallas Stars Full Episode
By Mike Heika , Staff Writer Contact Mike Heika on Twitter:
Veteran Jason Demers is returning from a shoulder injury that kept him out 13 games. He played in the final regular season game and looked rusty, but Ruff said he wanted to trust Demers performance during 62 regular season games.
I had a conversation with him about his game and hes been a big part of our team, Ruff said. He was playing real well before he went out.
But Ruff added that the team has great depth on defense and he wont hesitate to use it. Dallas made Jordie Benn, Patrik Nemeth and Jamie Oleksiak healthy scratches in Game 1.
There is competition. You dont have time to wait for somebody to play well inside a series, Ruff said. We feel weve really got three other defensemen that we can put in the lineup that can be very effective. If he struggles, theres an opportunity for somebody else to step in and fill that void for us.
Governor’s Phone Sex With Mistress Released (AUDIO)
Republicans stormed Montgomery in 2010, and it seemed an overdue siege. Democrats had held legislative power for 136 years, and the lack of relevant opposition had left them more accountable to special interests and old money than to the people.
It was billed as more than just a partisan shift. Item 1 on the agenda was ethics reform. This new breed of politicians wasnt just about family values, but about transparency and rigorous financial honesty. These were idealists, convinced that lean, accountable government would make Alabama a model for the nations conservative revolution.
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"I was like, "Oh, man, are you guys sure you want to put that in the movie? My wife is going to kill me! Of course, I knew the second I did it makes the film." - BASE jumper Jon Devore on the five-man wingsuit jump, perhaps the most epic stunt in all of cinematic history.
Credit: Photographs Courtesy Warner Bros.
The first thing BASE-jumper and wingsuit pilot Jeb Corliss wants you to know about the newPoint Breakremake is that the mind-blowingwingsuit scene is real. "People aren"t going to believe this flight," he says. "It looks like it was shot on a green screen, because it"s so perfect."Asone of the most technically difficult and complicated wingsuit flights ever captured, it had to be. "The danger is off the chart, like, just impossible to even comprehend," says Corliss. "It"s probably the most dangerous stunt that has ever been filmed."
And that wasexactlythe point of thenewPoint Breakremake, withVenezuelan actor Edgar Ramrez playing Bodhi and Aussie Luke Bracey takingon the role of Utah.The original 1991 film, starring Patrick Swayze and Keanu Reeves, focuses on a crew of surfers robbing banks to pay for their endless summer. The new one follows much of the same setup, except Utah, instead of an ex-football player, is now a former extreme motocross star; Bodhi, rather than a surfer, is now a blanket"extreme athlete" and eco-warrior who plays a sort of Robin Hood role. If the plot sounds a little thin, it is. And the character development is almost non-existent. But none of that matters, really, because the film"s primary purpose is to serve as a vehicle for a series of mind-blowing stunts and that it does.
But the standout sceneworthyofthe record books and the price of admission isthe wingsuit jump. "I"ve been watching movies my whole life and my best friends in the world are stunt guys, and after seeing the film"s footage, they werejust like, "Woaaaah! Woaaah!" "says Corliss, who served as the wingsuit technical advisor for flight sequence. "The amount of risk that they took on this is just unparalleled."
Getting Off the GroundA script for the remake had been floating around for years, but it wasn"t until Ericson Core, the director of photography behind the firstFast and Furiousfilm and director ofInvincible, pitched his idea to the studio that the movie actually got off the ground. "My ideas for the film were significantly different than what was on paper," Coresays. "It was originally much more of a big tent-pole movie, and certainly broke the laws of physics, as many films do these days."
Core aimed to gather a group of the best snowboarders, climbers, surfers, and wingsuit pilots on planet and film them, essentially, as actors. The team would use full storyboards to fit the action into a plotline, but the movie would film the same stunts that are popular on YouTube only taken up a notch and filmed with cinema-quality cameras. He also wanted to include a host of new sports, many of which weren"t even around when the firstPoint Breakwas made: tow-in surfing, extreme motocross, big-mountain snowboarding, and, of course, wingsuit proximity flying.
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"After looking at so many YouTube videos and understanding something of these sports," says Core, "I felt that in order to honor them we had to experience them for real the movie needed to have real peril to it."
That meant snowboarding in the backcountry of Austria with Xavier De Le Rue. Free-climbing Angel Falls in Venezuela with Chris Sharma. Big-wave surfing in Tahiti with Laird Hamilton. But nowhere is that peril as apparent as in the wingsuit sequence, in which four wingsuit pilots (and a cameraman) fly through the mountains in Switzerland wingtip to wingtip, only inches apart. The sequence happens relatively early in the film, shortly after Utah and Bodhi meet up for the first timeessentially Utah"s first test of loyalty while trying to infiltrate Bodhi"s crew, if you"re paying attention to the plot. What you can"t miss isthe difficulty ofthe stunt.
"Most of the time you see really intense proximity flying, where people are close to a cliff or mountain, it"s one person flying that close, with maybe one camera guy following," says Corliss. "But as far as tight, Blue Angelsstyle flight with a wingsuit, that has just never been done."
There"s also only a few people in the world capable of flying that precisely and repeatedly without cratering into the mountain. As the wingsuit advisor, Corliss helped hand-select the team (Corliss himself wasn"t able to jump because he was recovering from knee surgery), which included two-time World Wingsuit League champion Jhonathan Florez and Red Bull Air Force manager Jon DeVore, who"s racked up nearly 20,000 parachute jumps over his career. DeVore, who previously worked onthe wingsuit sequence forTransformers: Dark Of the Moon, served as the aerial coordinator.
"There"s a lot of really talented wingsuit fliers out there in the world, but most of them fly really rad, really excitingsoloproximity lines," says DeVore. "Very few people have much practice doing it in groups, especially in supertight, choreographed formations. We knew going in that this was going to be the toughest thing any of us had ever done."
Grinding the Crack, with Five People at OnceThe location of the flight sequence was one intimately familiar to Corliss: Walenstadt, Switzerland. In 2011, Corliss jumped from a peakjust outside of the Swiss town and flew through a ridiculously tight opening, swooping below the crowns of trees at over 120 mph, and into a near-vertical canyon. Video from the jump, called "Grinding the Crack," has racked up 30 million views on YouTube.
"This location, for one, is visually stunning," says Corliss. "It"s big and epic, which meant it was great on camera. But that steepness allows the wingsuit pilot a margin for error: If something does go wrong, they can get away from the terrain and pull out into open air."
But the Point Break sequence demanded five people to fly through the crack, so even with a safety margin, they would have to be perfect. That meant the five-person team would need to do hundreds of jumps in preparation. "The summer before, everybody started going out to the exact location and to locations that were very similar," says DeVore. "We needed to start training on more than just solo lines."
"It was very mathematical, very surgical. Jon orEricsonwould be like, "Hey I need it ten feet lower on the next one," and then they were ten feet lower on the next one. I mean every time he said, "I need you to do this," they nailed it, first jump they werethattrained andthatprepared." Jeb Corliss, stunt coordinator for the film
Flying in a tight formation, where everyone has to be in sync, is an entirely different beast. If one person crashes in that situation, they all could perish. "One thing that people need to understand is that when a wingsuit pilot flies through the air, they are basically ripping that air apart and creating something called a wake vortex that comes off the wingsuit," says Corliss.
"We"re moving through the sky at 100-plus miles per hour forward," explains DeVore. "And just like a jet, there"s a very turbulent wake of air behind every single pilot. And you don"t see it, but if you"re flying behind it, you feel it. You feel it so much that it can steal all your air and collapse your wingsuit. You can easily have a fatal accident if you fly through somebody"s airstream, because sometimes when you"re five, ten feet off the ground, and collapsing a wingsuit even for a fraction of asecond means you drop 20, 30, 50 feet."
To become comfortable with the wingtip-to-wingtip flights necessary to pull thescene off, the wingsuiters initially jumped from planes, racking up more than 500 jumps over the course of the year leading up to filming. They would fly in tight formations over and over again, simply as a way of getting accustomed to the idea of having someone nearby at all times.
Unlike a GoPro flight, where all the action is captured in one flight even if from multiple camera angles Core needed a series of shots to create the sequence, everything from point-of-view shots to profile shots of the wingsuiters cruising past the mountain to close-ups. That meant that one of the wingsuiters would need to wear a cinema-quality camera on hishead, rather than a GoPro, and that task fell to Florez, who had never done camera work before. The Red camera used in the flights weighed an astounding 15 pounds, enough to significantly alter the way Florez normally flew.
RELATED FEATURE: The State of BASE Jumping Today
"We had ground-based cameras with long lenses, and we had a helicopter with a gyro-stabilized camera as well," says Core. "But the majority of the camera work was done by [Florez]." Tragically, in July after filming wrapped forPoint Break Florez died in a BASE-jumping accident while training for another World Wingsuit League.
"He just did extraordinary, extraordinary camera work," says Core. "We even added in a little camera shake afterwards to make a shot worse, to give it more of that sense of turbulence. Otherwise it just looked too beautiful and calm."
Cheating DeathIn a pursuit as dangerous as wingsuiting, there arebound to be injuries even deaths. On average, more than 20 wingsuit pilots die each year, and because of that, it"s often considered the deadliest sport on the planet. So for Core, safety was critical.
"The pressure was on us to tell a story, but not on the wingsuit pilots to jump, ever," says Core. "We took the time to do it right and tried to give ourselves as much time as possible. But we definitely held our breathes every time they jumped because, frankly, what those guys do is incredibly dangerous."
"The second we showed up, the first thing Core said was, "We are out of our element, we"re 100-percent deferring to you guys on what"s safe and what"s not," " says DeVore. "And they gave us all the time we wanted to experience 30 minutes of wind cycles, and everything from the moisture in the air down to the strength of the wind and everything in the middle. It takes a little bit to get into that Zen state, when you feel like you"re one with your terrain and you don"t want to have a rushed feeling when it"s time to jump."
This lack of pressure is particularly notable because every second they wait, the budget is exploding helicopters burning fuel, two-dozen crew members who need to get paid and fed, and weather windows that could close and cost them an entire day or more. But Core wanted to make sure the team had everything they wanted.
"They let us go out to Switzerland almost two weeks early, with all the gear and cameras, and let us go on our own without any pressure from production-type people looking at us," says DeVore."By the time we went to day one with the cameras rolling, it felt like day 12 because we were already there doing it."
The Final ShotThe team made more than 60 jumps each over the course of the two-week film shoot in Switzerland. To make sure the team knew exactly what they would encounter once they leapt from the summit, crew members were placed at various points along the route to monitor wind speed. The pilots became so dialed in that they were able to change their elevations by a few feet along the route, to correspond with demands from the filming crew.
"It was very mathematical, very surgical," says Corliss. "Jon or Ericson would be like, "Hey I need it ten feet lower on the next one," and then they were ten feet lower on the next one. I mean every time he said, "I need you to do this," they nailed it, first jump they werethattrained andthatprepared."
"There were times when it wasn"t at all dangerous, when we had a cushion," says DeVore. "But there were other times where you knew you had to stick It. There was no other solution."
ALSO: Would Legalizing BASE Jumping Make It Safer?
One of those times is perhaps the most intense frame in the entire movie. As the team of wingsuiters swoop into the canyon, DeVore is low enough that his wake vortex turbulence causes the grass beneath him to spread like he"s running his hand though it this with three other wingsuiters only inches from him.
"We were shooting with the Phantom camera, which shoots about a thousand frames per second," says Core, "and he flew low enough and he is an extraordinary wingsuit pilot, so he understands very well what he"s doing but he got down so low that his foot was dragging through the grass at 140 miles per hour. So any variation at all, and he would have hit his knee or foot on the ground and tumbled into a ball of nothing. So that was very scary, and that was the closest anyone ever came to death on this film."
"I knew it was going to be very, very close," says DeVore. "But it wasn"t until the blades of grass startedhitting me in my cheek that I realized how low I really was."
The jump, teased in the movietrailer at 2:00.
"It"s probably the single gnarliest frame of footage ever shot. Ever. Period," says Corliss. "His foot is literally inches, not feet, from the ground, and you get this kind of visceral sensation from seeing it, because you just know even if you don"t know anything about wingsuits you just know he"s f*****g close."
There are certainly more intense wingsuit lines that have been filmed, and they"re all over YouTube. But in terms of precision, it"s hard to explainjust how skilled, and close to the ground, this particular flight was.
"It wasn"t until we were in the production truck at the bottom watching the footage that I realized that I was dragging that low in the grass," says DeVore. "To be honest, after all of these jumps and years in the sport, it was one of the biggest learning experiences I"ve had in a long time, where my mind was telling me I was three feet off the deck when I was actually a foot and a half off the deck."
And so what was he thinking when he saw the footage?
"I was like, "Oh, man, are you guys sure you want to put that in the movie? My wife is going to kill me!" " he says. "I don"t need to tell her that happened, if you don"t. Of course, I knew the second I did it makes the film."
And Corliss?
"Let"s put it this way: He got closer than he should have. We"re all like, "Dude, come on, you don"t need to be that close," " he says. "But we instantly knew it would make the film. And that sequence, the entire thing put together I don"t think anything like it will ever be filmed again. I don"t think anything like itcanbe filmed again it"s that special."
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His mother Madonna is one of the world"s most image-conscious stars - and has the money to buy him whatever he wants.
But it seems that Rocco Ritchie is embracing a more relaxed, grunge-inspired look all of his own.
The 15-year-old was all smiles as he joined his famous mom and younger brother David Banda, 10, to celebrate Thanksgiving with the pop icon in Barcelona in Spain.
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Relaxed style: Rocco Ritchie wore ripped, baggy jeans and a sweatshirt to Thanksgiving at a Barcelona bar with mother Madonna on Thursday
Rocco appeared to be taking style inspiration from Nirvana icon Kurt Cobain, with a stripped sweatshirt and ripped baggy jeans decorated with a UFO doodle.
The stylish teenager looked to be in a great mood, smiling as he climbed into a waiting vehicle with his mother, who is in Spain for her Rebel Heart world tour.
The pop legend hosted a Thanksgiving dinner party for 70 people at the Barcelona restaurant.
Rocco, whose father is British film director Guy Ritchie, wore his blonde, wavy hair long over his shoulders for the holiday celebration.
Upbeat: The 15-year-old flashed a big smile as he climbed into a waiting vehicle
Simple style: The teenager dressed down in a parachute jacket for a 1990s grunge-inspired look
He stayed warm in a seafoam-and-white parachute material jacket, while simple black sneakers and socks completed his down-to-earth approach to fashion.
And the teen gave his baggy 1990s-style jeans an individual touch, with a doodle of a UFO on one leg to complete his grunge-inspired outfit.
The eldest of Madonna"s children appeared to be embracing the anti-fashion, "normcore" look, which takes the simple style Steve Jobs and Jerry Seinfeld as its icons and gives an ironic twist on 1990s fashion.
Anti-fashion: Rocco wore a green and white parachute jacket and left his long blonde hair down
Meanwhile, Rocco"s mother also showed off her unique personal style by flashing her grill while celebrating Thanksgiving with her sons.
The Like A Virgin singer wore a red hat and black, fitted coat as she climbed into her waiting van, showing off her mouth bling with a big smile.
The 57-year-old pop icon wore a patterned black and white shirt under a tuxedo-inspired jacket, and added a bright red hat.
Fashion icon: Rocco"s mother Madonna looked stylish in a fitted coat and red hat
Flaunting it: The pop icon showed off her grill with a big smile
Donald Trump: Hillary Clinton Got "Schlonged" By Obama
Bernie Sanders would beat Donald Trump 51-38 in a general-election match-up, according to the latest poll from Quinnipiac University. Orto put it in the course vernacular that Trump introduced to America this week the billionaire would get "schlonged" by the democratic socialist.
Sidebar Bernie Sanders" Political Revolution
"Sen. Bernie Sanders hammers him," saidTim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac poll. Hillary Clinton, the poll suggests, would also put Trump in his place "Hillary Clinton tops him," added Malloy though by a more modest 47-40.
That wasn"t the only bad news for Trump, and by extension the GOP, to come out of the national poll: 61 percent of Americans say the Republican frontrunner "does not share their values," 58 percent believe he "is not honest and trustworthy,"and 57 percent say he "does not care about their needs and problems."
Most striking is the disconnect between GOP voters and the rest of the electorate of Trump"s viability as a general-election candidate. Fully 70 percent of GOP voters are convinced Trump would have a good chance of winning in November 2016. Just 41 percent of Americans at large hold the same view, with a majority (51 percent) holding that Trump "does not have a good chance of winning."
In the race for the Republican nomination, the poll shows Trump still leading a divided field. With 28 percent support, Trump bests Texas Sen. Ted Cruz by 4 points, and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio by 14 points. The poll finds that both Cruz and Rubio would prove more formidable general-election competitors. Against either Clinton or Sanders, both Cruz and Rubio make the 2016 election, effectively, a tossup.
#BlueLivesMatter trending following Ferguson violence
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#BlueLivesMatter trending following Ferguson violence
Two police officers were shot outside the Ferguson Police Department early Thursday sparking a conversation on social media about the role of law enforcement in the Missouri town and wider USA.
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Police investigate the scene where two police officers were shot outside the Ferguson Police Department on March 12.(Photo: Jeff Roberson, AP)
The shooting of two police officers outside the Ferguson Police Department early Thursday has sparked an impassioned conversation on social media about the role of law enforcement in the Missouri town.
Here are some reactions to the shootings and how cops are treated in the USA:
Photos: Crime scene in Ferguson
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MIAMI Talk show host Rodner Figueroa was fired from Univision after saying that Michelle Obama looks like someone from the cast of Planet of the Apes.
Figueroa, whos known for his biting fashion commentary, made his remarks during a live segment of the show El Gordo y la Flaca in which the hosts were commenting on a viral video that shows a makeup artist transforming himself into different celebrities, including Michelle Obama.
Well, watch out, you know that Michelle Obama looks like shes from the cast of Planet of the Apes, the movie, Figueroa, 42, said with a giggle.
When hostess Lili Estefan countered with What are you saying? and host Raul de Molina said Obama was very attractive, Figueroa defended his remark, saying but it is true.
In a statement, Univision called Figueroas comments completely reprehensible and said they in no way reflect the values or opinions of Univision.
Figueroa, who in 2014 won a Daytime Emmy Award, did not respond to requests for comment Thursday. He worked for Univision for 17 years and had been on El Gordo y la Flaca since 2000.
