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What’s on at Flavorpill: Links That Made the Rounds in Our Office

By Caroline Stanley on

Today at Flavorpill, we cheered for Judy Greer, a beloved character actress who’s finally getting her own ABC series. We couldn’t decide who we find more frightening: Glenn Beck or his armed bodyguard. We made a mental note never to piss off (or date) Salman Rushdie. We wished we lived in Australia, where Stephen Soderbergh is debuting Tot Mom, a play about Nancy Grace. We discovered it’s no accident that Christian Bale’s American Psycho performance reminds us of Tom Cruise. We welcomed Trent Reznor back to Twitter. How long do you think before Courtney Love caves? We learned how to eat a horse. We met Jordan Wolfson, winner of The Cartier Prize 2009 at the Frieze Art Fair. We discovered a positive side effect of reality TV. Now we’re off to watch the new Fever Ray video for “Stranger Than Kindness” which just premiered on VanityFair.com? You can watch it too after the… Read More

News

The Morning’s Top 5 Pop Culture Stories

By Caroline Stanley on

1. Don’t believe the trending Twitter topic: Kanye West is not dead. [via NME]
2. Yesterday Barnes & Noble launched an unfortunately-named but rather cool e-reader set to rival the Kindle: the Nook. [via LAT]
3. Hugh Jackman, Daniel Craig, Jude Law, and James Gandolfini are largely responsible for one of… Read More

Web

Exclusive: The Story Behind Miles Fisher’s American Psycho Homage

By Heather Schwedel on

Miles Fisher‘s American Psycho-inspired music video and cover of “This Must Be the Place” won the first-ever Flavorpill Memorial Thing We Can’t Stop Watching Award last week (a Flavie, for short). We wanted to find out a little more about the Christian Bale-ful star of the video, so we hit him up. As it turns out, we already know him: Fisher spoke to us about the art blog he curates earlier this year (and apparently he uses a different name for each of his artistic pursuits). Fisher gave us the scoop on the video, the art of imitation, and his upcoming Mad Men… Read More

Web

The Seven Un-Sexiest Attractive People

By Heather Schwedel on

Today, Nerve published a list of the 20 Sexiest Ugly People, a group whose homeliness in no way precludes their hotness. Huh? You know, like Woody Allen. Ooooh. They promised to follow up with the other side of the contrarian coin, but we thought we’d get a jump on things with the following list of people that are technically good-looking, but for various reasons, completely… Read More

Web

What's on at Flavorpill: Links that made the rounds at the office.

By Caroline Stanley on

Today at Flavorpill, we found a new addition to our blogs that should be books list. Richard at Gawker made us decide to watch Kings. We were excited to see the Yeah Yeah Yeahs on this week’s SNL. We spent a good chunk of the day imagining we were hanging out… Read More

Film

A Cheat Sheet to Spending Tomorrow at the Multiplex

By Caroline Stanley on

Perhaps the whole Christmas dinner with the family isn’t your thing, or maybe your religion requests that you stay as far away from the jolly fat man as possible (if that’s the case, we’re jealous) — but either way, there’s a reason why so many hotly-anticipated films open in theaters on Christmas Day … and it’s not so Santa’s elves would have something to do once their long shift finally ended.

Believe it or not, but a lot of people choose to spend their Christmas (which, in some circles, is just another day off from work) at the movies. And if you’re one of those people, then feel free to use the handy cheat sheet after the jump to help you decide what to see. … Read More

Film

Will Negative Public Perception of Tom Cruise Ruin Otherwise-OK Valkyrie?

By Fernanda Diaz on

Perhaps unfairly, we have become a movie-going public that judges performances on the love/hate we feel for the actors in real life. Judging by the pretty scathing reviews for Tom Cruise‘s Valkyrie so far (with soundbites from the mean “There’s a gaping hole at the center of ‘Valkyrie,’ and his name is Tom Cruise” to the punny/vaguely offensive “‘Valkyrie’ lacks the Reich Stuff”), Cruise is perhaps the most extreme example of the way that public perception of celebrities can affect the way we feel about their films regardless of the actual quality of the movies themselves.

It’s like how some people loved to hate everything Woody Allen did from 1999 to 2003, before he became legit again with Match Point. … Read More

Theatre

Video of the Day: How Many Times Can Tom Cruise Say “Musical” on Leno?

By Caroline Stanley on

We counted six, but then we became so uncomfortable that we had to turn away — but not before we heard him bust out some Elvis. Maybe you’re stronger.

Click here to watch it on Gawker.

Web

Google Shows Us What We’ve Been Searching For: Making Sense of the Zeitgeist

By Doug Schrashun on

Google released its annual Zeitgeist report this week, giving the world a chance to view 2008 through the lens of our search habits. Data geeks that they are, they’ve formatted their version of a year-end report not as an easy to read (read: easy to ignore) list, but rather as a collection of numbers, charts, regional segmentations and other showy stuff that we don’t know how to do in Excel.

While we know that the point of the Zeitgeist is to help us understand the state of the Internet world — and be extension, society at large — our first reaction to it was a resounding “Huh? What does this all mean? What’s a ‘nasza klasa’? Where are we? We’re scared.” After the jump, we try our best to sort it all out for you. … Read More

Film

Van Sant Wanted Tom Cruise in Milk, and Other Interesting Tidbits About this Must-See Flick

By Jason Jude Chan on

We’ve been putting it off for over 168 less-constructive hours now, but we finally saw Gus Van Sant’s Milk biopic at a special MoMA screening last night. It’s a beautiful, smart, but safely romanticized portrait — New York Magazine’s David Edelstein rightly deemed it a hagiography of the martyred gay activist and San Francisco supervisor — a film whose artistic merit is fortuitously bolstered by the shameful situation surrounding California’s Prop 8.  Like the yes-we-can mantra we’ve heard for the past year, Harvey Milk’s own hopeful, equal-opportunity message suffuses the film with warmth, even as historical fact propels the proceedings toward its tragic end like a fatalistic drag car. … Read More