D'ats Link

Boy Culture on a new book of letters that's a must have for Grey Gardens fans
Netflix is streaming The Wizard of Oz for free (today only)
Art Net Kirsten Dunst goes Harajuku for artist Takashi Murakami. I saw his last show in Brooklyn featuring anime characters with shape-shifting ejaculate and whatnot. Very crazy / racy / grotesque stuff. I ♥ Kiki... anxious for a new film right about now
In Contention Guy asks the question we all must ask every year if we really care about the movies and not just Oscar. What are precursors for anyway? I'm happy to have Guy by my side in the good fight


She Wired This is a complicated first but Ming-Na (The Joy Luck Club) is now playing the first lesbian Asian-American series regular with her new role on Star Gate Universe. My first reaction is Star Gate is still on? My second is more appropriate: 'congratulates Mulan'! Yeah, I was looking for another link to pad this post. Sue me
Movie | Line interviews Lee Daniels and talks Precious. I love this bit on Mo'Nique

the comic dredges up a sneering, mind-blowing flair for movie monsterdom. For all the film’s tonal shifts and turbulence, the raw dread of her turbaned, chain-smoking fury up every stairwell and around every corner supersedes anything distributor Lionsgate will package for its latest Saw installment.

Goatdog looks back at Carmen Jones (1954) and doesn't like what he sees, outside of the mesmerizing Dorothy Dandridge of course
Guardian UK Terminator franchise for sale. Low low (high) price
My New Plaid Pants fanboy delusion: bullfighting with Javier Bardem

Emmy Live Blogging: Swine Flu Fever Edition (Pt 2)

part one
refresh screen regularly

9:03 I recently flew home to visit my parents who were moving out of my childhood home. One of my brother's friends was living in their basement. Killing time one night, I watched How I Met Your Mother on the ancient TV system. It only seemed to carry the broadcast networks. It's like the TV had absorbed my parents refusal to join the modern world. Anyway... while watching the show, my brother's friend comes in the room and says "this is a funny show but you know what the funniest show is? Two and a Half Men. I LOVE that show."

This is why people like Jeff Probst win "Best Host of a Reality TV Program"

9:07 Gilles Marini is thrusting so often on that clip from Dancing With the Stars I feel like he should be punished on an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.

9:14 Shohreh Agdashloo wins Best Supporting Actress in a Miniseries or Movie blocking Marcia Gay Harden's attempts at the triple crown. If Shohreh Agdashloo worked a sex phone line I would go bankrupt calling it. That voice!

Too much information I know. I'm sick. You're required to put up with me.

9:15 We're over an hour in and we've only had two Kanye West jokes. This is a surprising development.

9:28 It's hard to tell what is my fever and what is Patricia Arquette and Jennifer Love Hewitt standing before me. It's a chicken and an egg situation, surely. The cold sweats have set in.


Sadly, I'm not joking.

9:34 I just realized that both Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange can't win for Grey Gardens because they rightly considered them both leads. No category fraud here. It's Jessica Lange. I'm happy for her but quite honestly I thought Drew deserved it. Didn't you?

9:46 I'm dying here. Little Dorrit keeps winning things and I could have sworn that was an Oscar movie in the 80s. I'm starting to hallucinate. The Year in Variety. Like varieties of flus? HA? Avian? H9N2? I could have sworn I just saw a cross dissolve wherein Will Swenson from Broadway's Hair lept at me with his legs spread until he was Barack Obama.

9:57 If you have any antibiotics I could borrow, please convert them into comment form so I can absorb them before it's too late.

10:02 They have a Original Music category at the Emmys? Hugh Jackman's number from the Oscars wins. I love that the Emmys are always giving awards to other awards shows. Hollywood Inbreeding. It stops only for Hollywood Back Patting! Inbreeding is the theme of the weekend (see also: previous post).

I wish other blogs would give me awards but patting my back right now might not be a good idea. I can only imagine what I'd cough up.

10:11 I can't go on without more comments. The pillows are singing their siren song. Say something damnit.

10:17 NPH was just standing next to Dianne Wiest and he neither acknowledged her nor fell to his knees in worshipful genuflection. This is the first time I've ever been disappointed in NPH.

10:21 They're speeding things up. Michael Emerson wins Best Supporting Actor for Lost. Cherry Jones wins Best Supporting Actress for 24. WAIT! Where is Sarah Paulson??? First no NPH / Burtka kiss and now I'm denied girl on girl action with my ladies? What the hell... I have a fever. I deserve my televised gay love.

10:27 Sarah McLachlan sings "I Will Remember You" for the in memoriam. There's no way to cover this adequately whilst liveblogging. So I won't say anything other than 2009 has been a real death bummer, no?

10:38 Mad Men wins Best Writing for "Meditations in an Emergency" -- that was the second season finale about the Sterling Cooper merger and Betty's pregnancy

Close of the fierce back and faulty memory

10:40 Best Actress in a Drama Series goes to... Glenn Close Damages. Kyra Sedgwick is bummed. Elisabeth Moss is robbed. Glenn is confused... claiming that Patty Hewes is "maybe... the role of her lifetime". As NoNo smartly says in the comments: "Glenn hasn't seen herself in Fatal Attraction lately". Right? "Or Dangerous Liaisons!", I'd add. Time to pull those DVDs out of storage, Glenn.

10:50 Best Actor in a Drama Series goes to Bryan Cranston in Breaking Bad. (I don't even know what that show is about). Best Comedy Series goes to 30Rock.

11:01 I think it's shameful when awards shows that are running over time go to commercials before the final award. I mean, really. Screw the advertising dollars, think of the audience with the flu watching at home.

11:02 SIGWEAVIE! A vision in red. And Mad Men wins best series. Good night. Thanks for watching with me from your homes, through the internet where you can't catch my flu virus. Only other kinds.

Good night, and good luck.

Vintage Pfeiffer & Lange

Twelve years ago today A Thousand Acres premiered.


I love how incongruous this photoshoot was with the material it was promoting. Michelle Pfeiffer and Jessica Lange look like they're reliving their childhoods and they're just happy-go-lucky. Not so onscreen. They're all kinds of miserable in their tragic King Learish farm wives movie.

Lange is up for an EMMY tomorrow night for Grey Gardens [editors note: I'll be live-blogging. Be here!]. La Pfeiffer is also in comeback mode after a well deserved hit Hairspray and a probable Oscar campaign for Chéri. That said, "Comeback" is such a weird and misleading concept. It feels like these 80s superstars have always been with us. There's an ineffably endearing quality to that kind of longevity, don't you think?
*

"Cat's going to the bathroom right in back of my portrait."

Little Edie: Oh god, isn't that awful?

Big Edie: No, I'm glad he is. I'm glad somebody's doing something they want to do.

Care to Make Any EMMY Predictions?

If you're new here and click on the EMMY label below, you'll probably find a thesaurus worth of unpleasant adjectives about TV's own "Oscars". But to save you the trouble of clicking, it goes like this: I don't like them. There, that was short and sweet bitter.

Does another dark Emmy-less fate await Friday Night Lights?
What a great show. Why can't they see that?

The Academy Awards are often chastised for their obvious preferencing: Holocaust dramas, biopics, women who allow themselves to look frumpy ... but at least you can understand where they're coming from and why they go for those things even if you don't agree. Who can explain EMMY's deep love for Two and a Half Men?

When Oscar gets chastised for repeatedly ignoring a brilliant performer or filmmaker, they usually give in and do a kind of makeup 'yeah, we're sorry we ignored your brilliance!' nomination. When Emmy gets chastised for ignoring something awesomely good at what it does they just continue to ignore it (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Battlestar Galactica, Scrubs, The Wire, Friday Night Lights). So I'm not really hopeful that they'll suddenly grow a brain when the nominations are announced tomorrow but you never know. Occasionally they don't run screaming from true brilliance but fully embrace it (see: Mad Men, 30Rock) which makes their usual dimness all the more puzzling.

I couldn't find any info on "top ten finalists" this year (did they do away with that system? I can't keep track of EMMY's frequent rule changes) but there will be 6 nominees in each of the lead categories.

BEST DRAMA Which six will be named: (previously nominated series in red. winners with asterisks) 24*, Battlestar Galactica (final season), Big Love, Boston Legal (final season), Breaking Bad, The Closer, Damages, Dexter, ER* (final season), Friday Night Lights, Grey's Anatomy, House, In Treatment, Lost*, Mad Men*, The Shield, The Tudors and/or True Blood?

<-- Will host Neil Patrick Harris finally win supporting actor for How I Met Your Mother or will they feel the need to give Entourage's Jeremy Piven a fourth consecutive trophy? They do get stuck in ruts.

BEST COMEDY Which six: (previously nominated series in red. winners with asterisks) 30 Rock*, The Big Bang Theory, Californication, Desperate Housewives, Entourage, Family Guy, Flight of the Conchords, The Office*, How I Met Your Mother, The New Adventures of Old Christine, Parks and Recreation, Samantha Who? (final season), Scrubs, Two and a Half Men, Ugly Betty, The United States of Tara and/or Weeds?

Do you care?

Or are you just waiting for the news of which silver screen actresses will get nominated for their acclaimed detours into pay cable work? I think we can all expect Tara's Toni Collette and Grey Gardens' Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange to be there on the big night in their red carpet finery, can't we?

Linking at Windmills

Deep Focus I love this review of Benjamin Button
Burbanked Comparative Celebrities: Paul Walker & Chris Evans
The Bad and Ugly Emily Blunt as The Black Widow in Iron Man 2? I love this idea
Reverse Shot 11 movie offenses of 2008. Your favorites will be skewered. Super bitchy but there are some really choice one liners.
Welcome to LA on Wyeth's passing --what, no opening scene from In the Bedroom :(
MNPP 'do dump or marry?' the Defiance kin edition


The Big Picture shameless. Hollywood, swimming in money, is shutting down the Motion Picture Home
Cinematical on the Coco Chanel biopic with Audrey Tatou
Just Jared new Grey Gardens still
Underwire the women of Galactica
/Film Terry Gilliam back to work on Don Quixote (the disastrous production chronicled in that Lost in La Mancha documentary)? My gods but that project will be the death of him

Grey Gardens Promo

Early in the year I mistakenly assumed that the feature inspired by the classic documentary Grey Gardens was headed for movie theaters. It's going to air as an HBO film. The movie stars Jessica Lange ("Big Edie") and Drew Barrymore ("Little Edie") at their current ages as well as in old age prosthetics. Apparently the narrative structure is closer to the Broadway musical telling (albeit without the songs) which had Act 1 taking place in the mother & daughter's well-heeled past and Act II in their isolated ruins (the familiar time frame of the documentary). Here's the first promo.



We've known for some time that Jessica & Drew weren't headed for the Oscar Best Actress race this year but maybe next years EMMYs will be within their grasp. HBO tends to kill in TV awardage. [news source]