Today at Flavorpill, when we were supposed to be busy working, we saved money while satisfying our unquenchable Gossip Girl fix, learned about passive aggressive punctuation from a disgruntled designer, got in touch with a few Gracious Dictators courtesy of Mark Beard, contemplated making like everyone else and buying the Obama book, and discovered where Gideon Yago has been hiding all this time.
Baz Luhrmann’s homeland epic “Australia” premiered in Sydney last night, following months of buzz as grandiose as the outback landscapes and passionate love story at the center of the film. The most over-the-top praise came from none other than Oprah herself, who told Luhrmann a few weeks ago: “Congratulations on your imagination, your vision, your creativity, your direction. Our hearts are all swelling because, my God, it’s just the film we needed to see.”
We’re not sure who she meant to include in “our hearts,” because the early reviews are in, and it doesn’t seem like anyone shares her sweeping love for the movie. Although as Spout Blog points out, Oprah’s endorsement probably doesn’t matter (she’s failed to guarantee box-office gold with her past faves like “Sicko” and “Love in the Time of Cholera”), it does stand in pretty stark contrast to the British and Australian press’ take on the movie that’s supposed to single-handedly revive the Australian tourism and film industries.
Read selections from the most biting reviews after the jump.
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“Hillary is like a 21st Century Rocky. She refuses to stop being a public servant. She is tough and is not a quitter. Hillary is not only resilient, but also she is insightful and creative. It would be a mistake to overlook her again.” - taken from Russell Simmons’s official statement on the Global Grind publicly endorsing Hillary Clinton as Barack Obama’s Secretary of State…does that make Bubba Adrien?
So he’s not spending all of his time in the gym: Variety reports that Seth Rogen is behind a new porno-based comedy for Showtime with his good buddy Evan Goldberg (other new Showtime series with A-list talent include Nurse Jackie which stars Edie Falco and United States of Tara from Diablo Cody).
Overexposed Rogen is one of the last members of Judd Apatow’s “Back Pack” that we’d like to see playing a guy running a pornography shop (maybe because he looks too much like a guy running a pornography shop), so we hope this isn’t one of those projects that he plans to write and star in. Knowing that these incestuous funny guys like to keep things in the family, after the jump you’ll find our casting suggestions for him — let us know if you agree with our ranking.
Hollywood, as we all know, is full of godless liberals who are intentionally trying to disintegrate America’s moral fiber through their bloody, sacrilegious movies about sex and breaking the Sabbath. At least according to the Anti-Defamation League, which released a poll today called “American Attitudes on Religion, Moral Values, and Hollywood” that found that “43% of Americans believe there is an organized campaign by Hollywood and the national media to weaken the influence of religious values in this country.”
But we think there’s a distinction to be made between attacking religion and attacking “religious values.” It’s one thing to pull a Bill Maher and trash every creed and church, and quite another to blame mainstream movies for picking on religious values — values that are actually quite present in many films’ moralistic undertones.
Looking back at the year’s top-grossing films, it’s hard to ignore that this year’s Hollywood heroes were mostly law-abiding, trash-collecting, world-saving individuals who might as well have been sporting W.W.J.D. bracelets.
See for yourself after the jump.
Those who live in sustainable houses made from re-purposed shipping containers can throw all the stones that they please. [Archinect]
Grammy award-winning songwriter/producer Rick Nowels is the man responsible for many of the hits we sing at karaoke — everything from the New Radicals’ “You Get What You Give” to Dido’s “White Flag” to Madonna’s “Power of Goodbye.” He’s also behind more current songs like John Legend’s “Green Light” and Sia’s “Soon We’ll Be Found”.
But when we got the chance to talk to Nowels, we weren’t interested in the new stuff — or even his material from the past decade. We wanted him to take us all the way back to 1986, to a little song he wrote called “Heaven is a Place on Earth” — a relic of our childhood as beloved as banana clips Bosom Buddies and our ALF doll.
After the jump, the story behind the genesis of this ’80s classic.
This Toshiba ad–sorry, “time sculpture”–has been floating around for a few weeks, inciting bloggers to wonder whether or not it’s a holy union of art and advertising.
Using the sick bullet-time effects immortalized by The Matrix, the video replaces Neo’s trenchoat and bullets with striped sweaters and bouncy balls, adds a Crystal Castles soundtrack, and voila–it’s an nerdy hipster’s wet dream!
But the robotic female voice at the end, musing about the re-definition of art and the way we watch it (on Toshiba screens of course!), reminds us that we’re only watching because the company lent ad agency Grey London 200 of its cameras and paid for the 20 terrabytes of footage created. Nevertheless, it’s really cool? We’ll probably keep playing it over and over, if only to keep “Air War” on in the background. [After you do the same, watch the making of video here].
Hillary Clinton better hope an aide erased her Lewinskygate-era LiveJournal, because Barack Obama’s gonna want to see it. CNET is reporting that applicants for positions in the 44th administration are required to list all “posts or comments on blogs or other Web sites” that they have ever made — a tall order in these wired times.
Salon points out that this Sisyphean task suggests “the Obama administration may not be quite as tech-savvy as its reputation would indicate,” given that a single flame war on the Daily Kos could easily reach War and Peace proportions. Of course, future Secretary of State HRC is probably in the clear — after all, the Senator was already a mom by the time Al Gore invented the internet.
Last week Norwegian songstress Ane Brun reminded a room full of L.A. kids that they had hearts — for a minute. The “thinking-Scandinavian-man’s Dolly Parton” played Union Hall last week, so if you live in New York, you know what we mean.
Brun has been on a North American tour promoting her new record Changing of the Seasons, with Tobias Froberg, a former journalist who retired his pen after fulfilling his dream of interviewing Neil Young. The deceptively simple songs on Changing of the Seasons are a lot like an early morning drive through the countryside on what will be a hot day — peripheral thoughts of impending battles ahead.
While such fare could be a downer, on stage Brun is animated, waving around as if possessed. Our favorite song, “The Puzzle,” describes letting your heart be vulnerable and how others can take advantage of that. The lyrics say it all: “I walked into love. I walked into a minefield I’d never heard of.” When she performs this track you know that everyone in the room is quietly reliving their own heartbreak. It’s an eerie feeling that makes you feel dark inside, but in a good way.
And in a way that made us want to know more about Brun. After the jump, Flavorwire sits down with the Swedish dish for an impromptu backstage therapy session that she barely tolerated.
The end result? Some much-needed catharsis.
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