Simon Cowell dubbed it 'the best performance we've had of all these live shows so far.'
By Gil Kaufman

Michael Lynche
Photo: Fox

Praise from the "American Idol" judges is one thing, but tears? That's when you know you've really nailed it.

And Michael Lynche definitely brought down the house Wednesday night (March 10) when he closed the top eight men's live performances with a seductive, between-the-sheets cover of one of British singer Kate Bush's most iconic tunes, "This Woman's Work," that made judge Kara DioGuardi openly weep.

Wearing a black suit coat with a red pocket square, black tie, jeans and a white dress shirt, the brawny Lynche opened with a fragile, operatic falsetto vocalization over piano that sent chills. The choice was a bold one, as Bush is a beloved figure and the song is a tricky-to-sing modern classic that has been used to dramatic effect in a number of TV shows over the years ("Felicity," "Alias," "Party of Five"). It was also famously covered by soul singer Maxwell on his 1997 MTV Unplugged album and later on his 2001 Now studio album, a version that clearly informed Lynche's take on the song.

Bush wrote it specifically for a sequence in the 1987 John Hughes film "She's Having a Baby," during which Kevin Bacon is pacing outside the delivery room where his wife is having their first child and he's fretting about the changes they're about to face and the rush of emotions he's feeling.

Making expert use of his breathy falsetto, Lynche, a new father whose firstborn arrived while he was toiling during Hollywood Week, wrenched every bit of emotion from the lyrics about life-changing events. "Ooh, it's hard on the man/ Now his part is over/ Now starts the craft of the father," he crooned in a clean, clear voice. On a night when the judges said some of the singers didn't connect with their chosen lyrics, Lynche astutely picked a song that mirrored the tumultuous adult changes he's going through in his personal life, helping to give the performance an added gravity and believability.

As he leaned into the second verse, Lynche came out from behind the mic stand and began laying a gospel edge on the song, shaking his head and shoulders, bobbing up and down and waving his hands as if giving a Sunday sermon. With a long, sustained note on the line "Oh, darling, make it go," Lynche provided the night's much-needed "wow" moment and easily punched his ticket to the top 12.

How good was it? DioGuardi was literally brought to tears. "I've never cried after hearing something like that," she said, her voice cracking with emotion. "It's amazing. You were amazing. And it's so relevant for you, and I can feel it. It's your life right now. It's your respect for your wife, what you've gone through ... and as a woman who doesn't have a child, I can relate to it so much and it brought me to tears."

All Randy...

Aaron Kelly and Andrew Garcia, however, get some tough words from the judges.
By Gil Kaufman

Tim Urban
Photo: Fox

The top eight men took the stage on "American Idol" on Wednesday (March 10), a night when the front-runners staked a claim for their spots in the top 12, and the weaker members of the herd punched their tickets home. When the dust settled, Michael Lynche emerged emerged as the new one to beat with a performance so strong, it brought judge Kara DioGuardi to tears, and seeming also-ran Tim Urban possibly saved himself with his strongest performance to date.

Lee Dewyze made it clear that he intends to hang around, coming out strong with a Dave Matthews-like acoustic ramble through Owl City's "Fireflies." It wasn't always on key, but he made up for it with his infectious charm and barroom sandpaper drawl.

Randy Jackson thought it was too soft a song for Lee's voice, and a bit pitchy, but he liked how he made it his own, and Kara appreciated the confident vibe he brought to the tune. "There's nothing to rave about after that," said Simon Cowell, who didn't feel his favorite male semifinalist had "a moment" but still displayed solid progress.

As his star has steadily risen on the show, Alex Lambert nailed his song choice with Ray LaMontagne's weary ballad "Trouble," a tune that perfectly fit his dry-throated voice and sad-eyed, innocent demeanor.

"The only thing standing in the way of you winning is you right now," Kara said, praising his unique voice but counseling him to let it rip. Ellen busted out the ripening banana metaphor one more time and said Lambert is getting better and better every week, even as he maintains his innocence. Continuing with the inappropriate advice, Simon said Lambert needs to loosen up, perhaps by imagining Jackson in a bikini.

With two weeks of bad news behind him, Tim Urban went for it by tackling Leonard Cohen's iconic — and hard-to-sing — "Hallelujah." Strumming an acoustic guitar, Urban didn't try to reinvent the wheel but capably hung in there for his strongest effort to date.

Ellen, feeling bad about slagging Urban every week, ran up onstage and hugged him as a kind of apology, and Simon patted himself on the back for giving Urban back his confidence, calling it Tim's best performance to date. "You walked in some pretty big shoes, and I think you did a pretty good job, Tim," Randy said, as Kara predicted he might have sung his way back from the brink with his honest, emotional take on the song.

Needing to find his groove again, Andrew Garcia went back to the well for a cover of Christina Aguilera's breakthrough hit, "Genie in a Bottle." The Santana-like flamenco/soul take felt like another high point, with Garcia making the song his own.

Kara, though, sensed he was fighting with the melody and straining too hard to recapture his "Straight Up" glory, saying, "It just wasn't great." It was a good idea,...

Feldman also reveals the pair's plans to make two 'License to Drive' sequels on 'Larry King Live.'
By Josh Wigler

Corey Feldman on "Larry King Live" Wednesday
Photo: CNN

Actor Corey Feldman, 38, appeared Wednesday night (March 10) on CNN's "Larry King Live" to discuss the death of his best friend and colleague Corey Haim, 38. Feldman, who co-starred with Haim in movies such as "The Lost Boys," "License to Drive" and "Dream a Little Dream," said he was "in shock" over the news of Haim's passing and that he had seen the late actor as recently as "three or four days ago."

"He was fine," Feldman said when asked about Haim's appearance at the time of their last meeting. "He was actually giving me some advice about something I was very upset about. He was being very positive."

According to Feldman, reports that Haim died of a drug overdose are premature, citing other possible factors including kidney and heart failure, an inadvertent lethal mixture of prescribed drugs, or simply his body shutting down after years of drug abuse.

"Until the coroner's report comes out and until we get specific evidence and until we know exactly what the toxicology report says, nobody knows [how Haim died], and nobody is going to know," Feldman said. "We are aware of the fact that Corey Haim has a long and detailed drug history and battled addiction for many, many years. I know it better than anybody, because I've been the guy stuffing charcoal down his throat when he was [overdosing]. I've been the guy trying to make him stand up or say a complete sentence. I've been through it with him many, many times, and it's happened very badly and very intensely through the years."

While Feldman said he appreciated the outpouring of condolences from Haim's many mourning fans, he was disappointed that the late actor's support didn't reveal itself sooner.

"At the end of the day, where were all of these people the last 10 or 15 years of Corey's life?" Feldman asked. "Where were all of these people to reach a hand out to him and say, 'You're a legend. You're an amazingly talented and wonderful person.' "

Feldman said mean-spirited remarks from tabloid magazines and Web sites such as TMZ were quite troubling not just for Haim, but also for himself. In light of Haim's death, Feldman suggested that society needs "to grow up and think about every time we laugh at somebody in the tabloids, every time we poke a finger at somebody and say, 'They're a joke' or 'They're fat' or 'They're a drug addict' or 'They're washed up' or 'They're a loser,' we need to look at ourselves and say, 'Who am I?' "

Haim had filmed several movies prior to his death, Feldman said, including a celebrated role in "American Sunset." Feldman also revealed that before Haim's death, the longtime collaborators "were negotiating a deal to do [their] first movie together in nine years." Haim was apparently...

'Summit on the Summit: Kilimanjaro' documentary airs Sunday at 9 p.m. on MTV.
By James Montgomery

Lupe Fiasco
Photo: MTV News

NEW YORK — To make it to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro, climbers use high-altitude breathing techniques, a whole lot of rope and some seriously insulated parkas. But not Lupe Fiasco. When he climbed the peak, he did it with some lessons learned from none other than Daniel-san.

"I guess it was one of them 'Karate Kid' moments, you know? I did martial arts for, like, 20 years. My father was a Grand Master for, like, 40 years before he passed. It's just one of those lessons that we were taught," he laughed at the New York premiere of "Summit on the Summit: Kilimanjaro." "We used to run in the snow barefoot, jump over cars, hang out of trees and do all types of crazy stuff, and that was just part of the training, to understand that it's you versus yourself. The terrain is always going to exist, it's always going to be there, and it's whether you are capable enough to go through it. ... Just some little mysticism right there, a little bit of that karate magic to keep the mind going."

And Fiasco — who, along with Kenna, Santigold, Jessica Biel, Emile Hirsch and a team of scientists, United Nations ambassadors and experienced mountain guides, took on Kilimanjaro to raise awareness about the global clean-water crisis — most certainly made it to the peak, braving freezing temperatures, dizzying heights and crippling altitude sickness. Of course, while all of those things are what made the trip difficult for him, the toughest hurdle to overcome was mental.

"It probably is the most difficult thing I've ever done. It wasn't the altitude sickness; it was more so the battle of myself," he explained. "Battling, getting the variables right, working the math out about how much water you're going to drink, how hard you're going to push yourself, how mad you're going to get, how much you're going to think about going home."

Oh, and there was also the lack of certain, uh, creature comforts too.

"It was very, very wild when it came to the restroom situation," he laughed. "There was lot of rationing going on up there."

And while making it to the highest peak in Africa was certainly an accomplishment, Fiasco said he's most proud of something else both the film and the team managed to accomplish: They made thousands of people aware of the shortage of clean water available to people in the most impoverished nations on earth. And they did it together.

"There's strength in numbers. It's about mass. You can have one person, and he looks cool holding up a sign, but it's much better when you have 500 people holding up the same sign," he said. "There was actually, like, 300 people involved in this climb, and that's what it took to get everyone to the top. And that's what it's going to...

Actress says Mount Kilimanjaro 'was like this mysterious, foreboding, ominous woman.'
By James Montgomery

Jessica Biel
Photo: MTV News

NEW YORK — While climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, as part of Kenna's "Summit on the Summit" mission, Jessica Biel got to know the 19,000-odd feet of rock pretty well. In fact, she's pretty sure the mountain is actually a woman.

"She was like this mysterious, foreboding, ominous woman. And she was hidden almost all day long, and just when you were unmotivated, and feeling like crap and uninspired and thinking, 'What am I doing here?' the clouds would part and she would peek out, and the beauty would strike you, and then you'd be inspired again," Biel told MTV News on the red carpet for the premiere of "Summit." "And she was literally, like, this woman who would pull this veil over her face and disappear, and then she'd show a little bit of herself, and then she'd disappear again. It was kind of this running joke, but I really felt that way. I felt like, 'I respect you. Please let me get up, please.' "

But just because Kilimanjaro was inspiring doesn't mean she also couldn't be positively dominating too. In the film — which debuts Sunday at 9 p.m. ET on MTV — Biel and her fellow climbers (a team that also featured Lupe Fiasco, Santigold, Emile Hirsch and a team of scientists, United Nations ambassadors and experienced mountain guides) were brutalized by freezing rain and snow, gashed and twisted on stones and dizzied by the rapidly thinning atmospheric conditions. But that was just the physical trauma. The real challenge, for Biel at least, was overcoming the mental aspects of scaling the peak.

"It was a combination of the mental and the psychological aspects of the mountain, of the slow-but-steady pace that you had to go up it, and that sometimes made your brain just want to explode, because you just wanted to get there so badly," she said. "And then you couldn't see anything at night, when we were doing our ascent attempt, and you start thinking that it would never end and you'd start to think, 'Why am I here? This is miserable!'

"But then you'd get this rush of inspiration of 'I'm not doing this for me. I'm doing this for something bigger than me, for people who don't have a voice, for people that need water around the world,' and then you'd power through," she continued. "Your mind started to play tricks on you. And then, with the altitude, you just felt so strange. You didn't know why you were lethargic, you didn't know why you were so tired. It was an intense experience."

And that bigger goal was to raise awareness about the global clean-water crisis, a problem much bigger than any mountain. But Biel was inspired, not just by her trip to the top of the world, but by the larger message the mission carries: that together, people can conquer even...