1. TIME magazine’s Person of the Year 2011: The Protestor (as portrayed here by cover artist Shepard Fairey). “There’s this contagion of protest,” explains managing editor Rick Stengel. “These are folks who are changing history already and they will change history in the future.” More on the reasoning behind the editors’ choice here.
2. “I am not surprised that women don’t want to see an ultra-violent David Fincher movie about women being tortured and raped. I think women see these trailers and are being scared shitless away from it.” — A marketing insider “explains” why only 36 percent of women are planning to see Sony’s “$125 million gamble,” The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
3. George Clooney has signed on to appear in a Rob Reiner-directed benefit reading of 8, the latest play from Oscar-winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black. The work, which examines the legality of Prop. 8, made its debut at a staged reading in September at New York’s Eugene O’Neill Theatre. [via LAT]
4. It sounds like Louis CK’s new $5 comedy special is working out nicely; so far he’s made an estimated profit of $200,000. “I really hope people keep buying it a lot, so I can have shitloads of money, but at this point I think we can safely say that the experiment really worked,” he writes. “If anybody stole it, it wasn’t many of you. Pretty much everybody bought it.” [via Vulture]
5. Here’s your first look at the new graphic novel adaptation of George RR Martin’s Game of Thrones series by novelist Daniel Abraham and illustrator Tommy Patterson.
Bonus Buzz: Why Dubstep Should Never Be Played In Public
Editor’s note: Welcome to The Fug Report! Each week our fashion blogger friends Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan, the sartorial geniuses behind Go Fug Yourself, will feature some of the most memorable looks of the week in this space. We hope you enjoy it!
This week, on Go Fug Yourself, we gave props to Kristen Stewart… twice! We were horrified (horrified, I tell you!) by Rosanna Arquette. We speculated that Lisa Rinna may have assaulted a Muppet, and thought Jackson Rathbone might be turning into one. We were stunned by the fact that a British reality star was able to walk around in this dress without flashing us the efforts of her bikini waxer. We wished Mia Wasikowska would do something with herself, and decided George Clooney needs to date someone closer to his own age — sorry, Stacy Keibler. And, finally, we decided that we will always love Emma Stone, even when she’s wearing an evening gown that looks like it was made out of newspaper.
Editor’s note: Welcome to The Fug Report! Each week our fashion blogger friends Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan, the sartorial geniuses behind Go Fug Yourself, will feature some of their favorite looks of the week in this space. We hope you enjoy it!
This week on Go Fug Yourself, we gave props — many of them! We applauded Kate Bosworth for hitting the Outfit Holy Grail, Camilla Belle for making a hairy dress look good, and Michelle Williams for kind of confusing us about how we feel. We worried! Specifically, about Robert Pattinson’s facial hair, whether or not Rumer Willis was pulling off her new retro-look, and about what dating George Clooney is doing to Stacy Keibler. Finally, we took a look at Keira Knightley, who we are starting to hate less; checked in with Freida Pinto, who is pretty no matter what she is wearing; and hung out with J. Lo, who told us a sad story about all the problems she’s been having recently. Although, obviously, not for real.
Margin Call, a fact-based thriller concerning the beginning of the financial crisis, opens tomorrow with a stellar ensemble cast that includes Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Stanley Tucci, Zachary Quinto, Paul Bettany, Simon Baker, and Mary McDonnell. (And Demi Moore. Hey, can’t win ‘em all.) Throw in last month’s Contagion (featuring Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Laurence Fishburne, Bryan Cranston, Marion Cotillard, and Elliott Gould) and December’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (with Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, John Hurt, Toby Jones, and Mark Strong), and this is starting to look like the Season of the Ensemble. In celebration of these smart, adult movies flush with Oscar winners and fine character performers, we’ve assembled some of our favorite big-cast ensemble movies after the jump — check it out, and throw in your own in the comments.
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For film fans who are not entirely obsessed with the horror genre, October can be a long and lonely month indeed, since we’re seemingly expected to spend our every spare movie-viewing moment consuming horror movies as a kind of extended Halloween celebration. The trouble is, some of us just aren’t that nuts about horror movies — but there’s all of these “31 Days of Horror” and “October Horror Movie Challenge” threads, and nobody wants to be the killjoy who spoils the party. But remember this, fellow indifferent film fanatics: the nice thing about the horror genre is that it’s adaptable. Elements of the scary movie not only can be easily combined with those forms you’re more at home with, but have been. After the jump, we’ll take a look at a few of our favorite horror hybrid movies.
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1. Apple has set a new company record by selling one million units of its new iPhone 4S in just 24 hours. Evidently, it really doesn’t matter that it’s not called the iPhone 5. [via Gizmodo]
2. Real Steel — the robot boxing movie that stars Hugh Jackman — dominated the weekend box office despite earning less than kind reviews, taking in $27.3 million in ticket sales. Meanwhile, George Clooney’s political film The Ides of March came in second place with $10.4 million. [via ArtsBeat]
3. Do you care if David Foster Wallace made up part of his his famous cruise piece for Harper’s? Perhaps more importantly, what do you make of Jonathan Franzen spilling the beans on his friend? [via Vulture]
4. “Consumers value the simplicity Netflix has always offered and we respect that. There is a difference between moving quickly — which Netflix has done very well for years—and moving too fast, which is what we did in this case.” – Netflix co-founder and CEO Reed Hastings now says that there will be no Qwikster
5. Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker is accusing Beyoncé and her baby bump of plagiarizing some dance sequences in the new video for “Countdown.” As Jezebel points out, this isn’t the first time that the pop star is facing these kind of accusations.
Bonus Buzz: Harvard Is No Longer the World’s Best School
On this day back in 1947, President Harry S. Truman became the first US president to give an official address on television, asking the American people to cut back on their use of grain in order to help starving Europeans. It was the beginning of a complicated and occasionally contentious relationship between the White House and the moving image.
This week, another image of the American presidency — a fictional one, this time — hits multiplexes in the form of George Clooney, whose new film The Ides of March concerns a handsome governor running for the highest office in the land (with the help of equally dreamy staffer Ryan Gosling). In commemoration of this significant date in presidential mass media history, and with Clooney’s Mike Morris aiming to join the ranks of cinematic commanders-in-chief, let’s rank ten of the most memorable movie presidents from worst to best. (And to clarify: we’re ranking them as presidents, not as enjoyable movie characters). Check out our rankings after the jump, and let us know if you agree in the comments.
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Today at Flavorpill, we looked at some of the most challenged books of the past year. We drooled over a few of these haute couture-inspired versions of the Disney Princess costumes. We wondered if the fried chicken necklace trend — as spotted on Nicki Minaj over the weekend in Vegas — will catch on. We learned what George Clooney considers to be the best 100 films made between 1964 an 1976. We laughed out loud (and possibly got a contact high) while watching this supercut of the most memorable movie stoners. We danced along to Weird Al’s latest polka medley of some recent pop hits. We liked the Guardian’s roundup of the 10 best songs based on books. We crushed a little harder on Mindy Kaling after reading her confess her irrational love for romantic comedies in the New Yorker. We wanted to adopt one of these adorable bear cubs. And finally, we thought that hacking a knitting machine from the ’80s so that it would print out Cosby sweaters with Bill Cosby’s face on them was the most inspired thing we’d seen in a long, long time.
Before pocket-sized puppies became the norm amongst the rich and famous, alligators and drunken deer could be found mingling at gatherings of noblemen and politicians. These strange pets were quirky sidekicks rather than illegal domestic beasts, providing unlikely friendship to some of history’s most influential figures. And that tradition isn’t entirely in the past — even now, celebrities will occasionally defy the teacup-poodle norm to join the ranks of our bizarre pet-owning forefathers (and raise their Los Angeles neighbors’ eyebrows in the process). Check out some lions, tigers, and bears after the jump.
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In his Iconatomy series, Swedish artist George Chamoun creates digital collages out of photographs of Hollywood stars from two different eras — and in the process reveals that maybe standards of beauty haven’t changed as much as we thought over the past few decades. The most challenging part for him? Finding the right images to pair together. “This project has been a lot about ideals, patterns, and anatomy,” he writes. “The pictures are not morphed in any way. What you see is a collage of two different people in each picture.” Click through to see the interesting results, and let us know in the comments which “Franken-celebrity” you think works best.
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