Gossip Morning
- Jamie Spears, Britney’s father, will maintain control over his daughter’s affairs because a judge has ruled that she is not competent. Oh, and her estate is worth 40 million dollars.
- Lindsay Lohan gives a p.r.-perfect interview to Glamour Magazine about life after rehab. Among the highlights: she likes staying home now, and it hard to be around certain friends because they have “gone down a different path.” Gag me.
- Ellen Page wears something other than black to some red carpet event. She still won’t really smile, though.
- Patrick Swayze spent the weekend at Stanford Medical Center to be treated for a “gastrointestinal procedure.” He is now resting comfortably at home, I am happy to report.
Gossip Morning
- Britney Spears is extending her stay at UCLA Medical Center for 14 days, unless she protests the hold.
- What Spears is protesting is her father’s control over her estate, which he acquired on Friday.
- Michelle Williams releases a very sad public statement. Really.
- Singer Lily Allen was dumped by her boyfriend two weeks after having a miscarriage. The couple had recently returned from a $6000 a night vacation in the Maldives.
Movies opening this week
The Eye
Strange Wilderness
Below the jump: Over Her Dead Body
Obituary: Netscape browser, 1994-2008
Scott Gilbertson writes at Wired’s Compiler blog that as of today, America Online has turned off the switch: “Navigator will continue to function should you happen to have a recent copy stashed away. But America Online, which has been Netscape’s guardian during its long, downward slide in popularity, will no longer support the browser and will stop releasing updates. Support for all versions of the software will be off-loaded to the Netscape community forum. Netscape.com will continue to live on as a web portal.”
Gossip Morning
Cecily files via email:
I am in LA, and the gossip is that in LA, celebrity gossip is a normal part of local news coverage. Go figure. On the 6 am news I have heard about Britney Spears (I am at UCLA today too, but not in the psych ward), Star Jones, and paparazzi laws!
- Entertainment Tonight was to run a video of Heath Ledger at a drug-laden party (though apparently there is no footage of him actually doing drugs), but Hollywood publicists and stars pressured the outfit to drop the video. Scarlett Johansson, Natalie Portman, Josh Brolin, and Sarah Jessica Parker all sent emails.
- Grey’s Anatomy star Justin Chambers recently checked himself into the same UCLA psych ward as Spears. Chambers was suffering from “exhaustion” and a “sleep disorder.”
- Actress Julianna Marguiles has given birth to a boy, Kieran.
Video: Alan Moore documentary
Altertube has posted a 77-minute documentary on the cult comics-writer and novelist Alan Moore (The Watchmen, From Hell, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, V for Vendetta).
Phyllis Stein’s Review of Trailers
I saw the original Funny Games and I HATED it. A split pea green movie about a family vacation taken down by two sadistic, menacing, sociopathic teenage torturers, this was not the movie to see on a date, with a friend, a loved one, alone, or ever again. It wasn’t that it was so scary or effective, but that it was seriously bent, brutal, excessive, and in love with itself. Now the shot by shot remake by the original’s German director Michael Haneke is gaining buzz from star power with Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, and Michael Pitt, and I can’t emphasize enough how much I will not be going to see this movie.
I also probably won’t go see Bonneville, though not because it looks so god awful but because a movie about middle-aged women is bound to be in the theaters for about eight minutes. Starring two people (Jessica Lange and Kathy Bates) and one alien (Joan Allen), Bonneville is about three friends who take a road trip to deliver the ashes of Lange’s dead husband to California. The trailer makes a gauzy picture of friendship, self-discovery, and other such drivel, but there is something to say for Kathy Bates doing anything on screen. She makes drivel sing.
Video: Google Street View 2.0 will be even more powerful and versatile
Via Valleywag, and one of the hotter YouTube clips of the week.
ArsTechnica: The state of the music industry 2008
If you follow news about the music industry, then you already know that the piecemeal drip-drip-drip of bad news is relentless. But coherent big-picture stories aren’t easy to come by. Last week Nate Anderson of ArsTechnica wrote the best analysis of music business trend lines I’ve seen in a long time, and it’s accompanied by interesting and accessible infographics. Highly recommended.
Excerpt:
“Don’t put all the blame on file-swapping… or chalk the problems up to an inability to ‘compete with free.’ Digital music sales soared in 2007, and in fact, the total number of ‘units’ moved during the year increased over 2006. eMusic, the number two music download service in the US behind iTunes, doubled its own projections for the Christmas season, pushed out 10 million tracks in the month of December, and added 50,000 new paying customers in the last six months.
“And all of this happened without the four major labels even offering DRM-free tracks online. Now that Sony BMG has finally capitulated, 2008 is poised to be the year digital goes so mainstream that even your parents use it.
“All that good news means that music is alive and well—but it doesn’t mean that things are rosy at the major labels. Let’s run the numbers from 2007, then do a case study on eMusic’s recent results to see just what kind of success can be had in the digital download world by competing with free.”
What’s wrong with this picture?
Via Consumerist: Has Wal-Mart got a deal for you! (And yes, this does mean you can get 4 for $20.)
Gossip Morning
- Britney Spears has been hospitalized again for psychiatric evaluation. Last night, her shrink called an ambulance. The ambulance was followed by her mother, beau, and a significant police escort. Spears is said to be suffering from a bipolar disorder. For more info, go here and here.
- Okay, so apparently it is totally true that Angelina Jolie is pregnant. So is 24’s Potato Face Mary Lynn Rajskub. And so is Ethan Hawke Ethan Hawke’s girlfriend, Uma Thurman’s former nanny. Small world!
- Page Six has more on Heath Ledger’s history of drug problems.
Reel Geezers: Marcia and Lorenzo review There Will Be Blood
Phyllis Stein’s pals Marcia and Lorenzo, aka Reel Geezers, are fast becoming the Mole’s favorite film critics. Here they offer the best review of Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood that we’ve heard or read.
Say it ain’t so: Enzyte Bob was faking it the whole time
Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals–the company behind the “natural male enhancement” product Enzyte and all those faux-retro TV spots starring “Bob” and his suddenly-sexed-up ’50s hausfrau–is currently on trial for consumer fraud in US District Court, reports Consumerist. A former VP of the company told the judge that the company made up doctor endorsements, fabricated research and customer satisfaction survey results, and made a practice of repeatedly billing customers who ordered the product once.
From a Cincinnati Enquirer account:
“If customers complained, [VP James Teegarden] said, employees were instructed to ‘make it as difficult as possible’ for them to get their money back. In some cases, Teegarden said, [company founder Steve] Warshak required customers to produce a notarized statement from a doctor certifying Enzyte did not work. ‘He said it was extremely unlikely someone would get anything notarized saying they had a small penis,’ Teegarden said.”
When Quentin Tarantino gets upset, he talks like a character from a Quentin Tarantino movie
And here, from the recent Sundance Film Festival, is proof. I don’t know whether the shooter was a paparazzo or a fan/blogger–a distinction that Tarantino himself rarely makes, either, from the sound of it.
Gilliam may finish Ledger’s last movie with computer-generated Heath
When Heath Ledger died midway through the shooting of director Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, the first rumor was that the project would die; the second, that Ledger’s part might be reshot with Johnny Depp. Now, as Christopher Campbell notes at Cinematical, another actor in the movie (Christopher Plummer) is suggesting the movie may be finished using CGI effects to reproduce Ledger in the remaining scenes.
We’ll forgo the Re-Animator jokes and simply note that the movie business has come a long way since the ’50s, when Bela Lugosi died at the start of production of Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space and was replaced by a chiropractor holding a cape across his face.
More: This Terry Teachout essay about how death can boost an artist’s career appeared in the Wall Street Journal a few days before Ledger’s death, but Amazon DVD sales figures prove it goes for Ledger, too.
Gossip Morning
- Gwen Stefani is 13 weeks pregnant with her second child. This is good news, as she had good clothes and was fun to watch when she was pregnant the first time.
- Kevin Federline’s lawyer is going back to court to get Britney Spears to pay another 500k in legal bills.
- Click here to read Us Weekly’s take on Michelle William’s purported attempt to get Heath Ledger into rehab in 2006.
LOL Cats coming to a bookstore near you
MediaBistro’s GalleyCat blog reports that Gotham Books will publish a book spinoff from the LOL cats website I Can Has Cheezburger. The agent says, “The authors are letting [website icon] Professor Happycat guide the reader through the different memes with brief definitions and context, while still capturing the absurd humor of the site.” Uh huh.
Meanwhile, notes GalleyCat, there’s already a book that compiles Adam Koford’s The Laugh-Out-Loud Cats, a strip based on the premise that LOL cats started in a newspaper comics strip in 1912.
There’s a very funny video clip for Koford’s strip. We posted it a few months ago, and–what the hell–here is it again in case you missed it the first time.
Fun with data mining: Books that make you dumb
Artur Bergman at O’Reilly Radar points out a data-mining exercise that correlates the most popular books on a variety of college campuses, as compiled at Facebook, to those schools’ average SAT scores. The results are posted, in graphic and tabular formats, at Books That Make You Dumb.
Top 5 “smart books”: Lolita, 100 Years of Solitude, Crime and Punishment, Freakonomics, and Catch-22.
Google may get into the scientific data business, and the “Google generation” isn’t
Two items about the Behemoth of Mountain View from the invaluable ArsTechnica:
- John Timmer writes that Google has been providing science researchers with powerful computers–in exchange, effectively, for copies of the data–and may soon open a science data store under the auspices of Google Research.
- Nate Anderson writes that a British study has found that the “Google generation”–kids born since 1993–are not the search and navigation jocks they’re presumed to be: “It’s true that young people prefer interactive systems to passive ones and that they are generally competent with technology, but it’s not true that students today are ‘expert searchers.’ In fact, the report calls this ‘a dangerous myth.’ Knowing how to use Facebook doesn’t make one an Internet search god, and the report concludes that a literature review shows no movement (either good or bad) in young people’s information skills over the last several decades. Choosing good search terms is a special problem for younger users.”
Gossip Morning
- Britney Spears is so powerful fucked she’s stimulating a whole economy all by herself. I’m not kidding!
- Michelle Williams’s next movie, Blue Valentine, is on hold until she is ready to go back to work. The drama also starring Ryan Gosling, was set to start production in late February.
- Lindsay Lohan was spotted drinking straight from the bottle again.
keep looking »
