30 Seconds To Link

Time Warner Do you want to be an indie film icon? Time Warner is hosting a short film competition on their YouTube channel. The prize is a trip to Sundance and presumably the festivities there.
Spangle the slippery slope of the new MPAA ratings. Yes, they're now warning you if a movie shows male nudity. Female nudity is the regular kind, see. No funny stuff!
Self Styled Siren great rangey entertaining review of the Romanian drama Tuesday After Christmas. Though I have to disagree on one major point: I thought the oaf at center was hot in the ways one can be if one happens to be oafish...
/Film Daniel Craig on the set of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

TCM Fredric March is the star of the month. Yay. Make sure to watch The Best Years of Our Lives... since we just discussed it (in case you haven't). I'm DVRing One Foot in Heaven tonight because it's never been able for home viewing.
Mind of a Suspicious Kind on Canadian Oscar submission Incendies
This Recording Molly Lambert wrote a zingy personal runaway train piece on Aaron Sorkin. Loved it but for that "artistic meritocracy" detour sent me spinning. I don't believe in any true meritocracy anywhere. I think believing it it only leads to unhappiness. Success is always about a combo of things including luck, getting to the right places first, knowing the right people, looking the right way, saying the right thing at the exact right time, being in the right mood at the right times, noticing opportunities when they whiz by,  and then... then and only then (and maybe even further down the list) merit. Sorry! There's just too many wildly successful people / things that are indifferently executed, lazily created, or unspecial to believe in merit. Personal button: Pushed! Beep Beep. But Molly is astute...

The internet has taught me that people are radically transparent even when they try not to be. It is a way to channel your id directly, sometimes dangerously, and everyone's id is going "I'M THE BEST LOOK AT ME I'M THE BEST" and then also simultaneously "OH GOD FUCK I AM THE WORST" as an extension of the same thing. Namely that people are fucking fragile, even the accomplished ones.

Dead on. Which is why I try to be transparent. Iwish I was more successful! I'mthebestlookat-ohfuckI....

Antagony & Ecstasy "Beating a Dead Horse" I almost don't want to see Secretariat now. I've been enjoying the merciless reviews too much. The movie might spoil the reviews!
Coming Soon Eric Stoltz as Marty McFly in Back to the Future. What could have been as DVD extras. (Though I'm surprised that contractually, studios can do this?)
MTV Rhys Ifans will play Spider-Man's villain. No word on which villain but if they're going with the canonic Gwen Stacy story it'd be The Green Goblin again.
OUT Cheyenne Jackson's career continues to blossom on television. I'm so embarrassed that the movies are still so hung up about out actors but TV is getting over it already. Oh, movies. Catch up!NY Times Courtroom sketch of Woody Allen & Mia Farrow circa 1993. Ohhhhh...


Refinery and Boy Culture have new Terry Richardson shots of Jared Leto. And speaking of...
Cineboobs Katey drew our attention yesterday to this incredible Jared Leto transformation.



Wow.

Links: Cher, Cheyenne, Celestia, Carey and CQueen

Guardian good piece on Anne Heche, her not totally recovered career post-Celestia, and Hollywood's double standards about men and women with troubled souls.
After Elton first look at Cheyenne Jackson on Glee. He's replacing Idina as the Vocal Adrenaline coach. I guess that means he's off 30 Rock? But this'll be a better fit anyway. Yay for singing stars!
Lazy Circles speaking of Cheyenne...
Natasha VC makes a brilliant observation on the quality of Al Pacino's acting.
Broadway Buzz A Cher bio-pic style Broadway musical is in the works from director Andy Fickman (You Again)


Avengers Assemble have you seen these new YouTube shorts, the superhero team gathers to discuss business/politics. It's such a weird concept that I am forced to enjoy. They need to speed up line delivery a bit but each episode has a few good laughs.
Film Freak Central on Let Me In (I thought this review was interesting. Positive but definitely keeps the original in mind.)
Coming Soon Sacha Baron Cohen to play Queen frontman Freddie Mercury in a biopic. Filming starts in 2011. You know what's weird? The internet rumor mill spends so much time talking about pre-production and development that by the time something is official, one could swear it was official 7 or 8 months prior! and that it's totally old news.
PopWrap Carey Mulligan has been making surprise appearances at movie theaters in NYC to introduce Never Let Me Go. How cool.
Pussy Goes Grrr offers up a late "best shot", a minimalist one, from the wonderful Pandora's Box (1929)
/Film Bryan Fuller (Pushing Daisies) writing a new live-action version of Pinnocchio.
37 Posters by Jerod Gibson is a design project using movie quotes in the shape of the movie's iconography for new posters. Fun. The one for The Big Lebowski is probably my favorite.
Movie|Line Andrew Garfield sings "Bed Intruder". Wait, what? I have to post it here. It's just too funny/weird.



HELP. I'm curious as to what you all use for your blog reading? Do you click directly to the sites or do you use a blog reader? In the past I've always used bloglines which is where roughly 2/3rds of my link roundups are pulled from. I have hundreds of subscriptions... some of which I read and some of which... well, there's only so much time. Bloglines is shutting down as of October 1st so I'll have to rebuild elsewhere. I think I'll start from scratch so to as freshen up. Any suggestions?
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Xanadu Your Neon Lights Will Shine...

So I started that 10|25|50|75|100 series a month or two ago because I like a wide variety of years in my film blogging, but you have to restrain yourself somehow. You can't focus on all 100+ years of cinema at once! But yesterday on twitter WonderRobbie reminded me that it was the 30th anniversary of Xanadu today. Since y'all know I love the movie like crazy I figured a quick mention was in order. I've already written extensively about the movie, so let's just take a quick look at a few random progeny. It's had 30 years now to sink deep down into the DNA of pop culture.


Have you seen this parody which mixes the rollerskating musical with ... wait for it... Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby ? That's right. It definitely has its moments though video parodies that stretch over a few minutes, rarely go viral. It's gotta be short, don'cha know? There's an even longer parody staring peeps but... brevity is key for good movie humor. (Perfect example: Kill Bill in 1 minute.)



Now that YouTube has expanded the allowable upload length, even fewer people will restrain themselves. Ah well.

More? Here is sexgod Cheyenne Jackson, former Woody Allen regular Tony Roberts and the hilarious Kerry Butler doing "Don't Walk Away" from the excellent Broadway spoof.



Ms. Butler has actually made a habit of movie characters on stage. She was one of many replacement "Belle"s in Disney's Beauty and the Beast. She nailed "Penny Pingleton" in the original cast of Hairspray and was totally robbed of a Tony nomination. She then struggled a bit with Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors (but then, Ellen Greene owns that role so thoroughly one can only feel pity for anyone who dares approach it now). Finally, she was pure heaven when she essentially sent up Olivia Newton-John as "Kira" in the stage version of Xanadu. She won her first and very deserved Tony nomination for stretching out all those Aussie vowels to ridiculous length and singing her sparkly heart out.

You'd think more people would have covered the songs from the Xanadu soundtrack over the years given that the original screen musical, starring mostly the sounds of Olivia and Electric Light Orchestra spawned so many hit singles. But mostly I could only find evidence of the title song becoming a regular again a few years ago.



To your left is Sarah Blasko doing a gorgeous reworking of the tune for bonus tracks for "As Day Follows Night". To your right is Sharleen Spiteri doing a more traditional cover for her CD, "The Movie Songbook".

Xanadu. Xanadu-oooh-oooh. Now we are here. In Xanadu.

And we can't let this go without ONJ's heavenly presence for exit music.



Can you rollerskate like a Greek muse... or do you fall flat on your ass like me?
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A Story of Run-On Linkings

Sometimes when I fall out of the loop as I just did, taking a few days away from normal internettings to finish a freelance gig I have trouble getting back on the horse because I subscribe to a lot of websites and blogs and I almost never have time to read them and if I stop reading for even one day I end up lost inside multiple levels of nightmares while trying to find my footing again because there's an awful a lot of "news" on the internet that feels totally urgent even when it's not and it's less news than rumors and then retractions of rumors to be replaced by other rumors and which, well, we'd really all be better off it it was all opinion pieces


like "which will be a better 2012 film The Avengers or Batman 3?" because at least that's honest rather than the rumor mill which can take HOURS to sift through and only exists to generate page views and, really now, who cares if The Wasp is going to be in the Avengers when The Scarlet Witch (my favorite) isn't and why would anyone care that Joss Whedon is directing it when it's so sorely lacking in awesome girlpower (see the monotonous photo above for too much penis) and that's like his trademark thang and if people step outside their comfort zone it's sometimes really painful and that's what American Idol is always teaching us and don't even get me started on what a horrible lesson that is to drill into people week after week "STAY IN YOUR BOX!!!" because sometimes the world would really benefit from everyone stepping out of their boxes and doing something a little different, you know, instead of just relentlessly copying previous cool things whether it was their cool thing to begin with or not but...

okay okay okay some people like Gwyneth Paltrow probably shoulda stayed in the acting box instead of wasting her youth on GOOP and what is all this sudden buzz about her Oscar chances for a reboot of Crazy Heart because I had no idea she was acting again and everytime someone asks me about her and the Best Original Song category I actually have no earthly idea what they're talking about -- stop e-mailing me but yes, yes, I thought it was interesting what Tom Hardy said -- because I haven't really been reading the internet in three days because I haven't had much time but even when I don't have much time I totally notice things like how cute Nicole Kidman is looking or that Cheyenne Jackson is going to be on Glee even though he's not playing one of the mysteriously absent gay Rachel dads who make NO narrative sense because gay dads would be alloverthatshit if their daughter was that talented ...not that Glee has ever excelled in making narrative sense but my point is this: sometimes you just have to stop trying to catch up and you have to scream "Begone Old Movie News From Tuesday That I Never Read About!" and simply state "I'll just have to start again from Friday July 30th, 2010 at 5:01 PM," you know?

So that's what I'm saying and doing. How are you?
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