Tag: Adrianne Palicki

The Denver Post has posted a set of photos from the Australian premiere of “G.I. Joe: Retaliation”, which took place on the 14th in Sydney. John Chu, Dwayne Johnson, and Adrianne Palicki all attended the red carpet event in stylish fashion, all speaking to the media and putting on a good show. Look for the action flick to make its US premiere near the end of this month.

You can view all of the premiere photos at theDenverPost.com

As Landry Clarke on Friday Night Lights, actor Jesse Plemons may have been the most popular character without a uniform (though he would eventually join the Panthers squad). Playing the loyal best buddy of quarterback Matt Saracen (Zack Guilford) and the lovelorn boyfriend of Tyra Collette (Adrianne Palicki), Plemons cracked more jokes than linebackers – and he’ll have many more opportunities to sharpen his comedic timing as part of an “oddball construction crew” on the midseason comedy Bent, reports TVLine.com. The new series, written by former Scrubs writer Tad Quill, also features Amanda Peet The X-Files: I Want to Believe), Jeffrey Tambor (Arrested Development) and J.B. Smooth (Curb Your Enthusiasm). While you wait for Plemons to return to the airwaves, you can own his screen-worn football hoodie – as well as other Friday Night Lights wardrobe items worn by Palicki and other cast members – at VIP Fan Auctions.

If the end of Friday Night Lights left a void in your television-watching heart, there’s still a little more to see – sort of. An Easter egg hidden on the fifth season DVD reveals an alternate ending to the series finale. Entertainment Weekly reports that a farewell speech by Coach Taylor (played by Kyle Chandler) was originally planned to play over the final minutes showing where the main characters’ lives took them (the voiceover was ultimately replaced by the song “Devil Knows You’re Dead.”) To access the alternate ending, go to the menu screen on the Season 5 DVD, turn the commentary off, and then select the football that appears. Of course, you can also keep a piece of Friday Night Lights for yourself – literally. Check out the Dillon Panthers and East Dillon Lions gear (and other outfits) actually worn on-screen by cast members Kyle Chandler, Connie Britton, Adrianne Palicki, Taylor Kitsch and more at VIP Fan Auctions.

In a series retrospective, Sports Illustrated/CNN’s Bryan Armen Graham contributed his list of 10 Greatest Moments in 5 seasons of ‘FNL’. The following is an excerpt…

FNL was more than a high school soap opera about a football team from the fictional town of Dillon, Texas. It was an unflinching look at a town where sports touches everything, offering a tableau of Middle America with a realism and introspection seldom seen on network TV.
Shot in Austin in real-life locations rather than antiseptic soundstages, often with hundreds of locals populating the fringes as extras, the show benefited from a rare authenticity. Untraditional methods reigned: Three cameras tracked each take, with actors free to alter their lines. The result was an organic experience that consistently elevated the show throughout its five-year run.

Football quickly became the least interesting part of the show — almost a MacGuffin — thanks to a steady diet of compelling story arcs and well-drawn characters inhabited by one of the deepest benches of acting talent in the business. An arsenal of simple but powerful storytelling elements — like sports talk radio jock Slammin’ Sammy Meade and the play-by-play announcers who oversee the action like a Greek chorus — gave FNL a timeless yet modern feel.

Choosing a list of the best moments from the series is a thankless assignment, but here are 10 of our favorites:

“We will be tested.” (Season 1, Episode 1)
The last eight minutes of the pilot deliver a cascade of indelible images, all expertly cross-cut into a tapestry of pain and wonder: the buzzsaw cutting open Jason Street’s helmet in the ER, second-string quarterback Matt Saracen leading a fourth-quarter comeback, cheer captain Lyla Garrity crying in the hospital corridor, the Smash Williams-led prayer circle dovetailing into Coach Eric Taylor’s powerful speech: “It is this pain that allows us to look inside ourselves.” The unforgettable closing sequence set the stage for one of the best self-contained seasons of television ever produced.

“Champions don’t complain.” (Season 1, Episode 3)
With selfishness and excuse-making pervading the Panthers in the wake of an upset loss, Coach Taylor buses his players to a remote location in the middle of the night and makes them run wind sprints uphill in a driving rainstorm. Lather, rinse, repeat … until Smash invokes the team’s motto — “Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose!” — in a galvanizing moment that saves the team from disarray. It’s one of the most memorable and symbolic scenes of the series.

“Why don’t you take your Members Only jacket off and hang it on the coat rack?” (Season 1, Episode 9)
The entire sequence of Saracen’s first date with Julie Taylor is one of the show’s best, capped by the poignant scene of Saracen getting called home prematurely to lure his grandmother out of a locked bathroom by imitating his grandfather singing Mr. Sandman. (“It was the first time I got to see the real Matt Saracen,” recounts Julie in a post-date debriefing with Tami.) But it’s the moment when Chandler opens the door for Matt and prods his jacket, with a blend of incredulity and thinly veiled anger, that captures the disarming, wrong-footing humor that made Coach Taylor such an unforgettable character.

“There’s nothing wrong with you. There’s nothing wrong with you at all.” (Season 2, Episode 14)
Spurned by Julie, seemingly forgotten by his father abroad and wasting away on the Panthers’ bench, Saracen shows up to school directionless and drunk. When Coach grabs the quarterback and tosses him into the shower, Gilford delivers a scene of raw catharsis, asking why everybody in his life abandons him. It’s an emotionally stripped-down scene that helped restore faith in the series after an uncharacteristic sophomore slump early in a season abbreviated by the Writers Guild of America strike.

“I’m goin’ to college, Momma.” (Season 2, Episode 15)
As FNL progressed from year to year, the producers did an excellent job of integrating new characters as old ones graduated and moved on. When Smash’s fate is jeopardized after he loses his scholarship to the prestigious TMU because of a race-related fight in a movie theater, a deus ex machina comes in the form of an unlikely scholarship offer from Whitmore College, an HBCU whose coach has scouted Smash since middle school. Smash’s tearful exchange of the news with his mother is one of the series’ most satisfying payoffs.

“It’s not that I think I’m going to get all these things, I just want the possibility of getting them.” (Season 3, Episode 13)
When Tyra Collette reads the college admissions essay to the University of Texas she worked on with Landry Clarke during the drive up to Austin for the state championship game, it offers a pleasing farewell to one of the series’ most beloved characters. The entire episode — written as a series finale during one of the show’s multiple cancellation scares — is golden, capped by a powerful speech from Coach Taylor after a Saracen-led rally (following freshman phenom J.D. McCoy’s halftime benching) comes up short.

“I’m just having a moment here.” (Season 4, Episode 5)
Saracen’s pent-up grief over the recent death of his father in Iraq bubbles throughout this powerful episode, climaxing when he breaks into a funeral home to see the face of his father, gruesomely disfigured by an IED and hidden within a closed casket. The compulsively reserved Saracen finally breaks down during a dinner at the Taylor house, confessing that he hates his father and wishes he could say so to his father’s face — only he doesn’t have one. Critics everywhere hailed it as the consistently strong Gilford’s finest work.

“I did it. I did it all. You did not do anything.” (Season 4, Episode 13)
From the moment we’re introduced to a half-drunk Tim Riggins at the Dillon Panthers’ media day in the pilot, we know we’re dealing with one of TV’s all-time great self-defeating antiheroes, whose days and nights of heroic drinking uncannily never affected his conditioning. By agreeing to take the fall for his brother’s chop shop to ensure Billy’s unborn son won’t grow up fatherless, a character dogged by a state of arrested development manages to achieve manhood on his own difficult terms.

“We’re getting there. Slowly but surely, we’re getting there.” (Season 5, Episode 5)
When the Lions set off for a rematch of a game they forfeited early in Season 4, it’s a scene from the hotel on the night before the game that shows how far these East Dillon outcasts thrown together by circumstance have come. Luke Cafferty joins Vince Howard on his hotel balcony, and they’re soon joined by Dallas Tinker and Hastings Ruckle for a late-night bull session about porn and fried food, memories and hopes. All the while, Coach Taylor sits in the shadows eavesdropping from his own patio — listening with satisfaction as a palpable camaraderie forms between these boys who would be a team. The touching, understated moment is among the high points of the East Dillon years.

“Eighteen years…” (Season 5, Episode 12)
The Taylor marriage was always the heart of FNL, particularly the brilliantly wrought arguments and discussions that captured the depth of their friendship. At no point was that more evident than in the finale, when Tami is weighing an offer to be Dean of Admissions at Philadelphia’s Braemore College while Eric contemplates the future. “I have been a coach’s wife for 18 years,” Tami says. “I don’t see why we can’t look at something else beyond football.”

Used with permission. Copyright 2011 Sports Illustrated/CNN.

Bid on props and wardrobe from all five Friday Night Lights seasons at vipfanauctions.com

As the final curtain closed on Friday Night Lights, Chicago Sun-Times columnist and film critic Richard Roeper praised the quality of the remarkable series and likened the TV incarnation of the story to another groundbreaking series, MASH, which was also preceded by a book and film.”Like MASH, Friday Night Lights is that extremely rare television adaptation that’s even more memorable than the book and the movie that preceded it,” Roeper wrote in a column titled “Friday Night Lights was about so much more than small-town football” on July 13. “For the last five years, this series has outperformed the vast majority of movies I’ve seen. At times it has achieved the level of true modern art.” He added: “Through the seasons, Friday Night Lights dealt with issues ranging from class warfare to drug addiction to abortion to murder, almost never devolving into soap opera. There were more than a dozen characters that could have carried their own series, from Zach Gilford’s Matt Saracen to Adrianne Palicki’s Tyra to the Riggins brothers to Buddy Garrity, played by the invaluable Brad Leland.” Hopefully, we’ll see these characters again someday.

Check out VIP Fan Auctions today for Friday Night Lights props and wardrobe items featured on-screen during the series incredible run.