Channing Tatum: Movie Star of the Year 2012

Yes, he was a stripper. Yes, he was in Step Up—and Step Up 2: The Streets. But after a year like this, when he showed not just his abs and his glutes but his smarts and his inner Stanislavsky, it's time to give Channing Tatum his due. Meet America's newest bona fide movie star

It's about two in the afternoon when I finally see the day starting to wear on Channing Tatum. They're setting up the next shot for his movie, White House Down, and Channing is sitting in a director's chair wearing a wife-beater and some pants, plus a bloody gash on his arm and some spray-on movie soot. (His hair looks marvelous.)

The movie is basically Die Hard in the White House. It's the kind of movie in which Channing shoots everything "except for maybe a Javelin missile. But the president might get to shoot a missile, I'm not saying." They're filming today outside Montreal, at a driving range housed in an enormous inflatable bubble. The turf of the range has been covered by a vast carpeting of actual sod, on top of which are cameras and lights, crashed helicopters, fire engines, ambulances, and the entire back facade of the White House, rebuilt to scale, with some gashes in the pillars.
Channing Tatum is an indefatigable dude. He's relentlessly energetic and positive and upbeat. He is just happy to be here. He is grateful to be here. But right now, Channing actually looks like a guy who spent the past twelve hours crawling around on his hands and knees saving the world and the nuclear football and the president, etc. For an indefatigable dude, he looks, you know, defatigable.

Okay, part of it is that he skipped lunch to go work out with his trainer, which he does twice a day. They've built a gym for him near the bubble. (Jamie Foxx uses it, too.)

"We have a trailer we go in and do meatheadish things," Channing says.

How'd it go today, workout-wise?

"It was good, it was good. Deadlifted 425."

He is not, of course, simply tired from whaling delts/deadlifting 425. He whales on his delts all the time at home, and he hardly ever gets tired. It's more that White House Down is about to wrap after two months of six-day weeks. And he crammed this movie into the space between reshooting G.I. Joe: Retaliation and starting Foxcatcher, directed by Bennett Miller, which begins in less than a week.

I have spoken to professionals in the filmed-entertainment business about Channing's shooting schedule, and the verdict: insane. Sadistically insane, possibly not-good-for-career burnout insane. But: "Big actors have told me to get it while the getting is good. Grind it."

Who told you that?

"Ahhh, I'm not gonna drop names," he says. "You know, very successful, smart actors. And they were like: 'Grind it. If you love it, grind it.' I did. They said: 'And a lot of people who didn't grind it, it's not that they're not in a good place, but I'm in a better place.' "

This was the year that launched Channing Tatum into that special, lonely orbit in which one's dream career becomes an almost cannibalistically demanding job. He starred in three films. 21 Jump Street. The Vow. Magic Mike. Every one of these films not only way outperformed what they were meant to, box-office-wise, but seemed to cement the notion that people go to movies just to see Channing Tatum.

It's not right to boil a guy down like this, but here's a theory about who he is: He's the star football player whom you have to tutor in algebra, only to discover that, deep down, he's got just a giant heart. That boiled-downness can be experienced in its purest form in Magic Mike, based on the real-life stripping career of Channing Tatum. It's not merely that he has an uncanny ability to retain his dignity while greased up in only a shirt collar, pop-and-locking his junk onto the floor while twirling an umbrella. It's that you believe the odds are stacked against him. Maybe it's that his mouth can never get out of the way of the words he's saying, but you root for him. Just like you root for him when he yells "Fuck you, science!" at a dry-erase board full of numbers in 21 Jump Street.

Or consider The Vow, about a guy teaching his amnesiac wife to love him again. "I did The Vow because I really love being in love," he tells me. That's who Channing Tatum is. A guy who takes his vacations doing survival trips in the Amazon with former SAS members (true) and desperately wants to fight a sanctioned MMA bout but also tells you he loves being in love, and you just want to be like, COME HERE AND GIVE ME A HUG, BRO.

A man wanders by with a box full of "burritos beef" that he hawks with a French accent. Channing looks at the box like he wants to mount it. He glances hopefully at his trainer. The trainer shakes his head, like: You know better than that. Channing turns away from the box, and his face is steely with resolve. You can sleep, and have burritos beef, when you're dead, Channing Tatum. Right now you have a meeting with the president of the United States on his helicopter.

Jamie Foxx, duh, plays the president.

Suit by Calvin Klein Collection. Shirt by Ralph Lauren Black Label. Tie by DiBi. Shoes by Tom Ford. Socks by Pantherella . Pocket square by Paul Stuart . watch by Georg Jensen.

This Suit Can Talk
And it's saying, "I've got confidence." Business suits with a slight sheen to the fabric—usually a wool-mohair blend—are back in style. Just make sure your shine is subtle, not blinding.

Suit by Tom Ford. Shirt by John Varvatos. Tie by Burberry Prorsum. Shoes by Salvatore Ferragamo. Tie bar and pocket square by The Tie Bar.

Do You Know What Slim Means?
Tight means you can't move. Slim means you can break-dance. To get the right fit, find the size that's one up from too damn restrictive. Then let your tailor do the rest.

Suit by Dolce & Gabbana. Shirt by John Varvatos. Tie by Band of Outsiders. Shoes by Salvatore Ferragamo. Socks by Pantherella. Pocket square by Paul Stuart.

How to Choose Your Supporting Cast
If you start piling on the blingy accessories while wearing a shiny suit, you can start to look like a contract killer in a B movie. Follow this leading man's lead and keep the accoutrements minimal.

Suit and tie by Emporio Armani. Shirt by Charvet at MrPorter.com. Tie bar by and pocket square The Tie Bar.

NASA's Mars Rover Team: Spacemen of the Year 2012

NASA's Mars Rover Team: Spacemen of the Year 2012

Baker: Engineers don't believe in superstition. We believe in the laws of physics. But when it comes to things like this, you have a sense you'd better do what you've always done before.

Chen: You know the saying—"There are no atheists in a foxhole."

Baker: Late afternoon, things started happening. My Twitter feed started buzzing like mad. Then this radio show in Australia wants to interview me. That's when I realize the whole world is watching.

Chen: My job is to explain to the world what's going on. That was the first time anyone had ever put makeup on me. Not many people get to have their life's work play out before the whole world and also do the play-by-play of it. It was nerve-racking.

Devereaux: We see that people are watching in Times Square. There's a landing party at a bar in Seattle.

Chen: TV goes live with programming at eight thirty. The girl who named Curiosity is outside getting interviewed. There are sound checks. It's surreal.

Devereaux: My job was to be the fire extinguisher behind the glass. Hypothetically, something goes wrong, I'm expected to break the glass and leap into action. But really there was nothing I could do. There was nothing anyone in that room could do.

Steve Sell (war-room chief): We're just monitoring the data as it comes in. We've got engineers monitoring specific events, giving a thumbs-up if we're nominal. We make that call on the network and let Allen know.

Baker: A big milestone is forty minutes before atmosphere, a signal called EDL main. It's basically "Okay, no kidding, we're doing EDL now." I'm a snowboarder, so it's like you've gotten off the ski lift, you've edged over, and you're looking down that double black diamond.

Chen: Ten minutes before cruise-stage separation, Adam selects "All or Nothing at All" by Sinatra, plays it over the network.

Sell: There's a fourteen-minute speed-of-light delay. When we learn we're hitting the top of the atmosphere, in reality Curiosity has been sitting on the surface for seven minutes. Or she's dead. Either way, it was all over seven minutes ago.

Steltzner: But you don't live it that way. You're in the moment.

Chen: We separate from cruise and switch to an omnidirectional antenna. Our data stream slows significantly. We've suddenly got the speed of a dial-up modem, a blip of data every ten seconds.

Baker: If you want to make an engineer nervous, take away his data.

Chen: We watch the spacecraft turn off the fault-protection software. That keeps it from doing anything dangerous during cruise. It's about to start doing lots of dangerous things.

Sell: You can feel the anxiety level starting to rise.

Steltzner: I'm not sitting. I can't sit.

Devereaux: I'm seated next to the chief engineer, Rob Manning. He and Adam are pacers. The two of them are doing cycles around the room. They've got their own little orbits.

Davis: We had run millions of simulations. Now we had one chance to get it right.

Steltzner: When you get close to Mars, Mars starts sucking you in.

Baker: We hit the atmosphere doing 13,000 mph.

Chen: We pressurize the engines, start flying towards the target.

Baker: We've got eight rockets producing sixty pounds of thrust.

Chen: We're doing bank reversals, steering from left to right.

Baker: We're carving S's in the upper atmosphere.

Chen: In seventy seconds we hit our peak temperature, 1,300 degrees Celsius [2,372 Fahrenheit], and peak deceleration. The spacecraft is pulling twelve Earth g's.

Baker: For thirteen minutes we're getting this really low data rate, which means we're doing some critical things in the dark—cruise separation, de-spinning, pressurizing. Then boom! All our screens light up. We've got our data back. The Mars Odyssey satellite is now close enough to the spacecraft to give us a faster rate.

Baker: We do a maneuver called "straighten up and fly right" just before the parachute deploys. The parachute is going to yank us with 60,000 pounds of force.

Sengupta: Parachute deployment is particularly violent and chaotic.

Chen: We lose communication briefly when violent things happen to the spacecraft. Things are tense.

Sengupta: It's the largest parachute ever used on Mars, and it's deployed at the largest Mach number a parachute has ever been deployed, 950 mph, two times the speed of sound on Mars. It's unpredictable. It acts like a big jellyfish, collapsing and reinflating. It's just spewing everywhere.

Baker: We slow dramatically with the parachute.

Chen: The parachute deploys; the heat shield drops; our radar picks up the ground. We're nine kilometers up. You can hear some excitement in people's voices. But this is a place that has killed us in tests.

Baker: At back-shell separation, we sever the parachute, and the descent stage and rover fall out and free-fall for one second.

Chen: We activate the descent-stage thrusters. We do some pretty gnarly maneuvers to fly away from the back shell and parachute.

Baker: We're falling at 200 mph one minute before impact. The engines throttle up to slow us to 64 mph. I've never been more stressed-out.

Chen: Now we're hovering twenty meters above the surface, moving less than 2 mph.

Steltzner: I hear Al say, "Sky crane start." That was the part I was frankly most nervous about.

Davis: I'm the one who has to tell everyone that we've touched down, but you can't say, "Touchdown." There are two more confirmation steps after that.

Sell: You don't want Allen telling the world we've touched down when it's not confirmed. You don't want to fumble on the one-yard line.

Davis: So we came up with "Tango delta nominal." Only the core people knew what that meant.

Steltzner: I hear Jody say, "Tango delta nominal."

Davis: I want to scream it, but you have to remain cool and collected.

Steltzner: I'm like, "This could be pretty cool," but I'm still listening, listening...

Sell: There's an inertial sensor in Curiosity. When we learn that the rover is no longer moving, someone will say, "RIMU stable."

Steltzner: I hear, "RIMU stable..."

Sengupta: You've still got those high-velocity supersonic jets hovering twenty feet over the rover. You don't want that.

Baker: Curiosity tells the descent stage to fly away. Then it's got .7 seconds to fire pyrotechnic devices that cut the cables or it's going for a ride.

Davis: Everyone's bubbling with anticipation. I start this clock in the back of my head. We have to wait ten seconds after "RIMU stable" to make sure the fly-away has happened.

Baker: The descent stage flies 625 meters away and crashes into the surface going 100 mph.

Chen: Adam pokes me in the shoulder. I say, "Touchdown confirmed. We are safe on Mars."

Sell: The room erupts.

Steltzner: Almost immediately we get the thumbnail images. For me, that was it. That was the human existential proof that we did it.

Baker: [In the satellite photos] you could see this little plume. That was all my hardware and engines going up in a cloud of debris and vapor. Sometimes I think of someone finding that stuff one day, the stuff some nameless engineer spent eleven years of his life on. It would be like finding one of Columbus's ships.

Devereaux: The data is great, but you see pictures and you think, That is fucking Mars!

Davis: "Tango delta nominal" has become its own thing. I get tweets from people taking trips, and when their plane lands, they'll say, "Tango delta nominal Paris" or "Tango delta nominal L.A."

Devereaux: I walked around in a trance for a week.

Steltzner: So, um, it was a great night. Inspirational.

Men's shirts by Brooks Brothers. Ties by The Tie Bar

Rihanna: Obsession of the Year

In 2012, men straight lost their minds over this woman—Chris Brown's crazy neck tattoo, Brown and Drake's nightclub riot. She drove the rest of us wild, too. And that was all before Rihanna dropped the sexiest, most outrageous album of the year

 

At nine fifteen, Rihanna's black Escalade pulls up in front of Emilio's Ballato, Andy Warhol's Nolita Italian restaurant of choice, a circus in tow. Her army of bodyguards surveys the scene. Then one of Rihanna's long legs hits the pavement and it's madness. There are paparazzi everywhere, all at once, perching on bicycles and European motorbikes, firing out of Mercedes-Benz windows and SUV sunroofs, pushing in on every square foot of sidewalk. The cameras strobe around her like a Ferris wheel.

Rihanna glides through the melee and into the foyer, where her signed photograph hangs. She's sporting skintight black jeans, black shades, a black cutoff designer sweatshirt with oversize gold letters. (ORIGINAL, it says.) With her dahlia-shade lips, big anime eyes, and slow-motion strut, she looks like some neo-noir femme fatale en route to her next hit.