Kimora Lee Simmons Returns to Style

I am always inspired by women who could do it all. Kimora Lee Simmons is one of these women. She’s beautiful, talented and a mom! If you are like me, after you’ve had a few kids, feeling like you have more to give to anyone other than those kids is rare. Usually, by the end of the day, I’m “gived out”. I’m not usually one for reality TV, but Kimora fascinates me. I can’t help but think, as I watch her on her show, how well she would fit in here as a Nice Girl.

Kimora Lee Simmons not only gives out juice cups to her own sweet babes, she then has energy to create Baby Phat fragrance, bath and body products, her own line of cosmetics, clothing line and premiere season three of Kimora: Life in the Fab Lane on Style. Whew! And she makes it look so easy!

Well, sorta.

Djimon Hounsou isn’t helping, it seems. LOL! Follow Kimora as she takes us from kitchen to London to the world on the third season of Kimora: Life in the Fab Lane, premiering March 21, at 9/8 central, on Style.

New Burn Notice Poster

Burn Notice returns with all new episodes on USA Network. Mark your calendars for Jan. 21st! Here is the new poster to get you going.

“Burn Notice” Leaves You Breathless

Last night was the return of season three of Burn Notice. I was not disappointed. Curious, excited, yes, but not disappointed. I was happy the show picked up right where it leaves us off last season. It also did not allow you to ease into the episode; it grabbed you off your big, comfy couch and threw you right into the action.

We open with Michael coming out of the water he jumped into from the chopper where he had his meeting with the people that burned him. The chopper is flying off in the distance and Michael comes ashore only to be pursued by the police. It’s a chase seen opening! As the episode continues, Michael is volunteered for a job by Sam, which involves an old buddy of Michael’s. From what we’ve learned from Matt Nix, this is pretty much what we can expect from this season. People will be crawling out of Michael’s past, and maybe Fiona’s and Sam’s.

As the episode continues, Michael and Co. begin to understand just what life is going to be like now that the ‘protection’ that the Burn People supplied is gone. They begin to see that the only people they can truly trust is each other. In fact, Maddie nails it towards the end of the episode, when she tells them all that they need to “stick together”.

We are introduced to Moon Bloodgood in this episode. She plays Detective Paxon, who may very well be the replacement pain-in-the-ass for Carla. Even Michael takes her very seriously, and views her as a potentially formidable nemesis.

So, although the Burn People have backed off of Michael, this season should bring new challenges to overcome, and I, for one, am going to sit back and enjoy the season. Well, maybe not ’sit back’.

Bruce Campbell Discusses Burn Notice Season 3

It’s always a pleasure to talk with Bruce Campbell, whether he’s discussing Evil Dead, or Burn Notice. He sums up his character, Sam, simply like this:

“Well, Sam by now is, we’re now past the point where we don’t trust him. He’s a hopefully valuable member of the team now, and so, like Michael Westen, Sam is taking the twists and turns as they come now. I don’t know that Sam is going to get married or any personal revelation. Sam is pretty much living in Michael’s mother’s house, a room in her house, so he’s just kind of a permanent loser, at least in this season. And he’s always there to help.”

He adds, “He’s very loyal. He’s not going to rat on anybody, even in the first season where you didn’t know if he was ratting on Michael, he never really did. He always just stalled the cops, so very loyal. And he is trustworthy, even though he drinks a lot of beer. His other traits are, I wish he could get a job and an apartment, and a car that he can hang onto. We’re going through, like about every fourth episode, Sam gets another one of his cars wrecked. So he doesn’t even have a car, and he doesn’t even have an address, so I’d like to see, I wouldn’t mind some of that happening. But, whatever, I’m not telling the writers what to do. They’re doing a fine job.”

Campbell also gives us some clues to season three and what we can expect.

“It’s going to get worse for Michael Westen this year, because of a couple of things that have happened as a result of the last two-parter. So his world is a little more unstable this year. He’s not necessarily under the thumb of Carla any more. She was the evil temptress of the last season. She’s out of the way, but that’s not necessarily a good thing. His sort of veil of protection has been lifted by these shadowy figures, so now anybody who wants to put a bullet into Michael Westen, which is actually a lot of people, I don’t know – so yes, we do have to stick together. In order to pull through, we’ve all got to be on the same page and watch each other’s back, including Madeline. So, yes, the interpersonal dynamics will get theoretically tighter because if things get worse, you’ve got to know who you can count on.”

We’d all like to know what’s up next for the Burn Notice actor. “There’s really no sequel for Evil Dead planned right now. We are going to forge ahead and do the remake; we are going to do that. There’s nothing for me in the remake, though, do you know what I mean? That’s a cast of young people. So I’ll be on as the producer but I won’t be in it other than playing the old guy at the bait store at the beginning. So there’s nothing for me in that. Another thing to clarify, they’re probably going to do a Bubba Ho-tep sequel, but it won’t have me in it. I couldn’t come to an agreement with the director, Don Coscarelli, on a story, so I think it’s going to be Ron Perlman in that. And as far as the things to look forward to, I have another book coming out eventually called Vagabond, The Gypsy Life of an Actor, which should be out in a couple of years. And that’s the answer to that.”

Burn Notice returns to Thursday nights in its new time slot, 8 p.m. CT, June 4th, on USA.

The Special FX of “Burn Notice” and a Look Ahead

I am not a technically minded person at all and when I watch a television show that has a fair amount of special effects, my first thought is often, “Wow, how did they do that!” But try to explain the technicalities of the scene to me and my eyes glaze over, and all I hear is, “Flar, flar, flar flar.” I recently sat in on a conference call with Burn Notice creator Matt Nix and Special Effects Coordinator, Kevin Harris, and I was determined to learn something from them that I could understand. Coming up with questions for them was not easy, this time. I mean, easy enough to ask a bunch of questions of Matt, but what was I going to do about Kevin? “Um, Mr. Harris, could you please explain to me, er, um, everything?!” Doesn’t really fly well, does it?

Fortunately, this was a conference call, and there were plenty of others on the line to cover for me. People who asked intelligent questions, or at least, they fooled me. I thought they were intelligent. And, I did learn some things! For instance, Matt told me that money is not always the obstacle when filming a scene requiring special effects.

“I mean really we’ve got such a great team of effects and stunt people that I can’t think of a time that they have come to me and said, “This stunt is too expensive. We cannot do this stunt.” Literally they will say to me, “You are not pushing hard enough. Come up with something that you really think we can’t do so that we can show you that we can do it.” Right? And so it’s just not – budget is not really the issue.

And really a good example is when Kevin (Harris) talks about doing intricate gags, that being a lot more difficult than doing big things. Like we do all the big things. We do the same things that they would do in a big movie, we’ll do them in more or less the same way, it’s just that we don’t have as many cameras on the stunt, we don’t shoot the green screen shot of the lead as the car is flipping, so that you see that it’s him in the car. You know, there are certain things that we don’t have time to do. So it’s kind of the details that end up falling out of stuff because we don’t have time to do it.”

Matt and Kevin each had their favorite scenes that were filmed.

Matt: “The funny thing is actually like my dream stunt sequence was the raining, flaming cars car chase sequence at the end of season two, which I wrote fully expecting them to come back and say, “We can’t do it.” And Artie, our stunt coordinator, and Kevin talked to me and the basically had pitches for making it bigger. And of course I said, “Yes, make it bigger.” So honestly, like I’m still trying to push for something that we can’t get, and we just keep writing it and they just keep doing it. So because of that it’s kind of a difficult question to answer.”

Kevin: “I’m more partial to water-type work, boat work, doing a lot of different types of effects on water and with the boats and stuff; it’s a lot more challenging. I will say that after doing a couple of seasons of SeaQuest and a Hulk Hogan series called Thunder in Paradise, the thing that really needs to be done when you want to do real deep action is you almost have to run simultaneously. We have a second unit and a first unit. And on both of those shows there, pretty much your first year they did all of your walk and talk scenes when your second unit was backing it up with all the action sequences. And in that case there is my difference as far as time versus money. There it’s both; you’re going to get double the time, although you’re going to spend double the money.”

I also wanted to know, from Matt, who we can expect to see guest starring this season.

“Well, we have – let’s see. We just got Debi Mazar; she’s going to be guesting for us in the – I just happen to be excited about that one. She’s guesting in the eighth episode.

Moon Bloodgood is our Burn Notice sort of arc character for the first bit of the season, and Ben Shenkman for the second bit. We’ve got Brian Van Holt in the first episode. Hope McElhany in the second episode does a great job. Third episode is the return of Brennen, played by Jay Karnes from The Shield. The fourth episode we have a fantastic performance by Nick Turturro.

I think this episode – oh, actually this is a fun one. In the fifth episode the actor Michael Weston stars as a schizophrenic client. So we have Michael Weston meets Michael Westen. He plays a character named Spencer. It’s not confusing, but it was fun for us. And he does a great job. We didn’t cast him because of his name, but it was a fun accident.

In the sixth episode – let’s see. We have some great actors, but I’m not thinking of anybody that would jump out as…. Seventh episode we have Jay Harrington, who did a great job. And then that’s basically as far as we’ve cast. So there should be another – there’s going to be another big Burn Notice character in the second half of the season, and we’ve got a fun list that we’re pulling together for that, but we haven’t nailed down who that’s going to be yet.”

I’ve already viewed the first three episodes of the new season, and let me tell you, it’s going to be a fun ride!

Burn Notice returns for its third season and in a new time slot, Thursday night at 8 p.m., CT, on USA. You can read the transcript from this interview HERE.

New Promo for “Burn Notice”: Sharp Dressed Man!

With only weeks to go before the premiere of season three of Burn Notice, the promo videos are starting to trickle online. Here is a fresh one:

Burn Notice, season three, premiere’s June 4 on USA.

Moon Bloodgood Replaces Esposito in “Burn Notice”

Ausiello tells us that Jennifer Esposito has had to bow out of Burn Notice due to health reasons. Moon Bloodgood (Journeyman) will step in as Michael’s latest enemy for the third season of the USA Network hit series.