1. Madonna has finally confirmed rumors that she’ll play the halftime show at Super Bowl XLVI on February 5. Her set will be created by a team from Cirque du Soleil, and it’s expected that she’ll be performing some new material from her forthcoming album. [via Rolling Stone]
2. Peter Jackson‘s production company WingNut Films has finally completed work on West of Memphis, a documentary about the West Memphis Three. The film, which was written and directed by Amy Berg (Deliver Us From Evil), has been a passion project of Jackson’s since he became involved in the case back in 2005. [via Deadline]
3. Breaking Dawn – Part 1 topped the box office for a third consecutive week — which is surprisingly a first for a Twilight film — bringing its total gross so far to a whopping $247.3 million. [via MTV]
4. New Yorker film critic David Denby is in big trouble with Sony Pictures for breaking the studio’s embargo on any reviews for The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo running before December 13. The funny part? He had only nice things to say about the film. [via Vulture]
5. When life imitates art: Meet Irina Kristy, the real-life version of Walter White from Breaking Bad. A 75-year-old college professor in Boston, she’s been accused of running a meth lab out of her home with some help from her 29-year-old son. [via THR]
Bonus Buzz: Jeff Bridges Playing Peek-A-Boo
1. House Majority Leader Tom Delay will be on the upcoming season of Dancing With the Stars. [via Mediaite]
2. New Yorker critic David Denby says Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is too silly to be enjoyed, even as a joke. [via The Daily Beast]
3. Peter Jackson-produced District 9 topped the weekend box office taking in $37 M. [via AP]
4. Radiohead releases “These Are My Twisted Words” on their website for free. [via EW] Or not.
5. Someone stole a large collection of stuffed birds from London’s Natural History Museum over the weekend. [via Unbeige]
Loving this faux book cover as much as we do makes us feel rather traitorous; kind of like the floater girl (think Lindsay Lohan in Mean Girls) who was sort of friends with the judgmental nerd boy but has forsaken him to eat lunch at the *smart popular kids’ table (think Blair Waldorf). Or at least that’s how Denby would see it. Or maybe (and this is a really big maybe) he would be happy that his online enemies are getting creative? He does love The Onion… OK, we’re being naive. It’s funny though. [Via Spiersblr via MisterHippity]
* Our high school’s popular clique was a two-tiered community of smart/dumb. We also graduated with a class size of 37, so this metaphor might not hold true everywhere.
Books: Denby vs. Wonkette vs. Denby. It ain’t lookin’ good for our friend.
Dance/Opera: Sex on stage is OK, if you’re dancing.
Design: This bridge is wild. No, seriously.
Film: It’s a September release for the Vogue Mag doc, The September Issue.
Music: Andrew W.K. brings puke and alcohol to Adult Swim with a new show.
Television: My So-Called Life creators cook up a new series for CBS.
Theatre: Jane Fonda blogs her Broadway return.
Visual Arts: The MOMA and the Guggenheim fight for their Picasso paintings.
Web: What a $10 laptop really does. Not much.
David Denby is a film critic for the New Yorker; he’s also the author of the recently published book Snark, an important essay which traces the evolution of snark from ancient Athens to Gossip Girl, loosely defining it in its ideal form as so: “Two girls are sitting in a high-school cafeteria putting down a third, who’s sitting on the other side of the room. What’s peculiar about this event is that the girl on the other side of the room is their best friend. In that scenario, snark is abusive or sarcastic speech that operates like poisoned arrows within a closed space. Its intention is to offer solidarity between two or more parties and to exclude someone from the same group.”
In this same scenario we imagine that Denby would be the head of the judiciary society. Not because it looks good on his transcript, but because it’s the right thing to do and he doesn’t care what the cool kids think of him. It’s important to have people like that around. It keeps us honest.
While his argument is not without flaws (as Sarah Weinman notes here), we ripped through the extremely yellow book in a single evening and we haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since — especially when we’re sitting at the keyboard. And without a few holes to pick at, where would the interesting conversation start? (Generating a discussion about style, Denby explains, was his goal in writing Snark.)
Our own conversation with the writer after the jump.
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A few years ago Sarah Weinman thought she was going to have a career in science, possibly of the forensic variety. But then she launched the crime and mystery fiction blog Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind as a way of procrastinating on her master’s thesis, and it literally changed her life’s path.
We can respect that.
We also respect her opinions on books across all genres, so much so that we’ve asked Weinman to recommend a new one for you to check out each Wednesday. (It’s amazing that she finds the time. The woman read 462 books last year.)
Learn more about her latest pick after the jump, and let us know in the comments area what you thought if you’ve already read it.
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