"i will be your preacher teacher, any link you have in mind"

crazy people
Radar Online Mel Gibson's lost his marbles again. His angry angry marbles.
NatashaVC explains the ridiculousness that is Lindsay Lohan's absences from her alcohol classes
BlogStage speaking of crazy... albeit a more entertaining more benevolent kind. Lea Michele seems to think she could film Glee by day and take on the ghost of Barbra Streisand at night in Broadway's Funny Girl. This is, in a word, insane.
People Bruce Willis now has his own cologne. I love celebrities. They are so shameless. Smell like me!

linkage
My New Plaid Pants "Do it, Jake"... MNPP always makes me lol.
Self Styled Siren This is wonderful. The Siren interviews Mary Astor's daughter. A must for you classic movie fans. I'm glad that Siren opens with Meet Me in St. Louis because Astor is just wonderful in that picture (my review).
Cinematical Some enchanted evening, someone decided to remake South Pacific. With and edge. I'd love some original musicals but if we have to have remakes, so be it.
Art of the Title Sequence The Emmy nominees in this category. I do love the Nurse Jackie credits. Opening titles are one of my favorite parts of TV shows and this is why I knew I made the right decision to stop watching Weeds when I saw they had dumped the "little boxes" opening.
Flick Filosopher 8 extra minutes for Avatar rerelease. Do you care? I loved Avatar but if half of those 480 seconds don't fall under the category of explicit full braided neon sex scene with jakesully and Neytiri (hotness), I'm not forking over another $20!
Just Jared uh-oh. Colin Farrell is muscling in on Tom Cruise's Les Grossman-style makeup comedy
Writing the Wrong sequels that never were (for better and worse)

Being Boring watches lots of movies while sick. Derek Jarman this time. Do you do that too?
Towleroad A Betty White calendar? Betty White is our master now.
Asian Movie Pulse and Sina are covering a new film City Under Seige starring the beauteous Qi Shu and Aaron Kwok. Sounds like an interesting hybrid of sci-fi/horror... with circus performers. Wha?
EW If you've read my Julianne Moore interview, you know that I felt for Michael Ausellio yesterday when he spoke with Connie Britton. Now, he chats with celebrities all the time so it's no biggie for him but he's been pumping for Friday Night Lights Emmy recognition forever, so it's a sweet read after the lead acting nominations finally happened.

Housekeeping note
I've recently done a bit of sprucing up of the sidebar for your infotainment. For example, I can't believe I didn't have a "search" box before. My apologies. I know people are always asking "where's ______?" It's right below the advertisement in the sidebar.

Father Figure
Finally, hat tip to Anne Thompson, but the third Chris Nolan Batman film may start shooting next Spring. The "info" i.e. rumor is culled from this Michael Caine red carpet interview.



The interwebs will surely say claim this as breaking news but considering Michael Caine also states that he doesn't even know if his character is coming back, I'd take his 'I think they're starting next April' with a huge grainlake of salt. But I like what he says about his career

I'm a father figure now. I'm Goldmember's father. I'm Nicole Kidman's father. I'm everyone's father.

It took me a second to connect him with our Darling Nicki... that'd be from Bewitched (2005). Of all the movies to remember Michael? I mean, really. That's where you want to go?
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South Pacific

We took in the Broadway revival of South Pacific last night. Very handsome production, though I wish I'd seen the original cast. I've never been a big fan of the musical but I have to blame that on the stiff movie version and the subsequent TV version because, like most of Rodgers & Hammerstein's work it's pretty solid from song to song to song. This is why modern musicals are so often not wonderful, as they usually have to rely on one or two killer songs/hooks to get them through two plus hours. You need at least four or five!

Mitzi Gaynor sings in outside the shower

If you're an overachiever like West Side Story, you don't take any chances and only allow superlative classics into your song score. Literally any of those numbers could carry entire lesser musicals through long rough patches.

I thought the recent TV version with Glenn Close was close to unwatchable. Not sure why I had that reaction, but I did. Maybe it's all the icky dated romantic stuff? I mean, I love "Carefully Taught", one of the most succinct and potent songs ever written about racism and prejudice. But then that beautiful message gets all bogged down in weirdly creepy 50s sexual politics. Like My Fair Lady, South Pacific ends with such a conservative 'a woman's place is in the home' worldview that it's hard to really get behind. And that's not the half of it.

The second tier romance in the movie/play is more troubling. The big romantic ballad "Younger Than Springtime isn't as quite as creepy as Gigi's "Thank Heaven For Little Girls" but it's just as emphatic about women being desirable only if they're young. [Have you ever heard Annie Lennox's retro skewering of this mentality? So fun]

Lt Cable has a thing for young Asians: film version (John Kerr),
current B'way (Andrew Samonsky), TV movie (Harry Connick Jr)
and original B'way cast (Matthew Morrison from Glee. Yay!)

Even though the show is morally right-on about love being color blind, it's still asking you to swoon for two complicated and one ethically questionable romance. The lead romance involves a much older man who lies (or at least hides the truth) to a young woman he'd like as the mother of his two children. The secondary romance involves a man and younger woman who can't even communicate (but for hot sex)... and she's basically been pimped by her entrepreneurial mother! You're definitely supposed to think that Lt. Cable scored by getting a girl that's "younger than springtime". Creepy!

Have you seen any versions of South Pacific and do you find it easy to ignore the politically sexually questionable politics in old movies/classics? Do you wash those memes right out of your hair?
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