Entertainment Express: Michael Jackson, iHeart Radio, Half of a Yellow Sun, Wolverine

Hello! I got to see a sneak peak of Godzilla last night, but my lips have to remain sealed until just before the film’s release!

* We have our first single from the new posthumous Michael Jackson album. Called Love Never Felt So Good, two versions have been released – one has the additional oohh’s and aahh’s from Justin Timberlake. The other is just MJ on his own. It’s a sweet little track, with a nice light retro-disco feel and I think the producers have done an admirable job to polish up the song, which was written with Paul Anca in 1983. But these songs were demos that MJ had, so it’s hard to forget that perhaps he wasn’t ever ready for them to be released.

* The first play of the MJ song came at the first ever iHeart Radio Music Awards in Los Angeles on Thursday night, a new set of music awards to dole out. According to Variety, the show aired on over 150 iHeart radio stations across the country, and 60 million votes were cast for several categories of this awards show. Rihanna was the big winner of the night taking home 4 awards, including artist and song of the year, while Pharrell Williams received the innovator award.  

* With eyes being cast on Nigeria in light of the over 200 girls who were abducted and still haven’t been returned, comes the news that Half of a Yellow Son, a movie set during that country’s 1967-70 civil war, has, essentially, been banned. The film, based on the book by Chimamand Ngozi Adichie, stars Chiwetel Ejiofor and Thandie Newton, and its director, Biyi Bandele, says Nigerian government censors are not allowing it to be shown there, yet they will not say why. I saw the film at the Toronto Film Festival and while it did have a few issues with the story-telling, it is an important one film that touches on a subject, as Bandele says, that has been kept silent for many years.

* Could it really be? Could Marvel really kill off one of its most popular characters? Wolverine is so intertwined in the mutant world that it would be hard to think of it without him. But, after being around for almost 40 years in comic book history, the character, whose ability to self-heal made him able to live way beyond human years, is being killed off in September – as reported by Entertainment Weekly. It’s thanks to my brother that for about 20 of those years, I’ve known who he is, and thanks to Hugh Jackman (who says he’s not sure he’ll be playing the character again), that I, like many, really came to love Logan.

[Pic: Epic Records]