1. During last night’s State of the Union address, President Obama decided to top that awkward salmon joke from last year with a bit about spilled milk that was just as groan-worthy; as to be expected, political observers’ immediate response to the cringe-inducing moment on Twitter wasn’t exactly kind. [via Daily Intel]
2. Steven Soderbergh’s upcoming film project Side Effects has lost its financing — apparently the director’s rumored casting of Blake Lively is part of the reason why, but Haywire’s weak box office performance might also be a factor. [via The Huffington Post]
3. Vanessa Paradis insists that rumors that her 14-year marriage to Johnny Depp is over are totally false: “All this is, I don’t know, because the Queen of England didn’t lose her teeth this week and there’s nothing happening.” [via People]
4. There are now two Beauty and the Beast-related TV projects in the works for next season. The CW is moving forward on an update of the 1980s CBS drama that starred Linda Hamilton; meanwhile ABC just announced a version that will go the classic fairytale route. [via THR]
5. “I’ve been talking to [Dave] Chappelle a lot. Been trying to get Chappelle to go on tour. You know I’m not the hard one, but I’m trying to make that happen. After seeing Kanye and Jay-Z, I was like, ‘Me and Dave should do this.’” — Chris Rock gets our collective hopes up during a conversation with Vulture at Sundance.
There have been casting rumors swirling around Pride and Prejudice and Zombies since the film adaptation of Seth Grahame-Smith’s mashup parody of the Jane Austen classic was first announced, but this has to be the strangest one yet: Twitch is reporting that Blake Lively has been offered the lead role of Elizabeth Bennet in the film.
From where we’re sitting, this makes little to no sense. Lively — while she does a lovely job of annoying us week after week as Serena van der Woodsen on Gossip Girl — isn’t in the same league as actresses like Natalie Portman, Emma Stone, Anne Hathaway, Scarlett Johansson, or Mia Wasikowska — who have all previously been mentioned as contenders for the part. Our friends over at The Playlist think that budget concerns (which were the reason why director David O. Russell handed over the reigns to Mike White who handed them over to Craig Gillespie) are the primary reason that she’s being considered. It certainly can’t be based on her previous big-screen performances in films like Green Lantern, The Town, or The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.
We’re curious: What do you think of Lively as a zombie slaying heroine? Are the casting gods seeing something in her that we’re just missing (you know, other than the fact that she’s really hot)?
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!
As we’ve all heard, the folks over at HBO have closed a deal to turn Jennifer Egan’s recent Pulitzer prize-winning novel A Visit From the Goon Squad into an HBO series. No word on what exactly that will mean yet, however – the book spans so many generations and expands in so many directions that they’re going to have a tough time pinning it down to just a series. Or maybe they won’t – that’s the magic of television. After all, Egan has mentioned that she thought about The Sopranos while writing the book, so maybe there’s hope yet. As long as they figure out how to show that Power Point chapter. Regardless, the whole thing has got us thinking about the actors we’d pick to play our beloved characters from Egan’s masterpiece, but since the book spans so many characters at different points in their lives, we thought we’d just pick one of our favorite sections — the safari chapter — and cast that one. If you haven’t read the novel yet and want to play along at home, this chapter is actually available online — it was also published as a standalone short story in The New Yorker. Yep, it’s that good. Click though to see who we’d pick to play some of our favorite characters from A Visit From the Goon Squad, and let us know your own picks in the comments!
Sex and the City is dead, and Michael Patrick King killed it, with the awfulness that was Sex and the City 2. No matter. King is still planning to resurrect its stinking corpse for The Carrie Diaries, a prequel that tracks our over-analytical heroine from high school in the ’80s through her early days in New York. And now, there’s a rumor spreading that Blake Lively will play the young Carrie. Although we don’t dislike Lively as much as most people seem to, we think that if this project really is happening, she would be an awful choice for Carrie. So the news that her people are denying she’s been cast gives us hope. After the jump, we cast the prequel, based on the potentially misguided belief that the young Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte will also be making appearances.
1. Beating out both Jennifer Garner and Keri Russell, Gossip Girl Blake Lively has been cast as the female lead opposite Ryan Reynolds in The Green Lantern. [via THR]
2. Billy Name, resident photographer of Andy Warhol‘s Factory for seven years, is missing his archive of negatives. [via NYT]
3. How the Jay Leno disaster could ultimately cost NBC more than $200 million. (Also of note: As a result, they’ve just unveiled six new drama pilots.) [via LAT]
4. Sarah Jessica Parker‘s new Bravo reality show Work of Art: The Next Great Artist will feature New York gallery owner Bill Powers, New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz, and curator Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, as judges; China Chow and Simon de Pury will host. [via Variety]
5. Foster Kamer explores the short distance between the branding of mega pop stars and the branding of indie rock bands like Vampire Weekend. [via Gawker]
First, let’s get a few things out of the way. Any trailer where Keanu Reeves’ acting looks good, Julianne Moore’s hair looks bad (nay, awful), and Blake Lively is a standout amongst an emsemble cast that also includes Winona Ryder, Zoe Kazan, Monica Belluci, and Maria Bello, throws us for a loop. Moving on. Rebecca Miller’s film — obviously chasing the more cerebral end of the adult female audience tapped by Sex and the City and Mama Mia! — is helmed by Robin Wright Penn who plays Pippa, a middle-aged woman going through an existential crisis. We’re guessing it’s because she’s married to an old like Alan Arkin. Read More »
Last night’s Blake Lively appearance on Letterman (in which she naturally made jokes about demolishing his freshly minted marriage) got our brains in a twitter. Besides reminding us that Leighton Meister is the less skanky of the ice cream cone-gnawing pair, it also got us to noodling on S’s bedroom on Gossip Girl.
So, he might be hot, but Robert Pattison smells. “‘He stinks. I mean, it’s awful. He never showers, and it drives people on the set crazy,’ dishes someone who works in very close quarters with Pattz.” [E! Online] (Side note: Do you think that is why this happened?)
Yesterday was a Terry Richardson day — first we saw him sitting on a fire hydrant on Spring Street, and then we got home and saw his “sexy” Gossip Girl photoshoot for Rolling Stone plastered all over the internet. Mildly-interesting photographer sightings aside, we’re kind of bothered by the whole thing: first, Rolling Stone‘s blatantly sensationalist cover, then, the cover’s timing to coincide with the worst episode of Gossip Girl yet (just look at all the Twitter results for “Gossip Girl sucked”).
We at Flavorwire are divided in our Gossip Girl levels of tolerance — some of us never miss it (cough, cough, Caroline), some of us started boycotting it back in January (and the rest of us probably have never cared). But regardless of whether or not we think the show has been the most amazing thing on TV, it’s time to drop the “Best Show Ever” narrative and hope that the actual plotlines get better before we have to deal with Blake Lively’s re-creation of Lindsay Lohan’s Marilyn Monroe re-creation (after this photoshoot, could that one be too far off?).
TV can be an art form, or it can be absolute crap — Gossip Girl is inching closer to the latter while attempting to be the former and failing, then overcompensating with photos like these.
