• Brain Pickings Marilyn Monroe's unpublished poems on the anniversary of her death
• Vulture Every Tom Cruise performance ranked. Interesting and sound choices mostly though I don't understand the #1 choice at all.
• TV Line The Americans wins big at the Television Critics Awards while Killing Eve is named best new series
• Salon has a piece on MoviePass troubles that is the most sane and balanced I've read. (I'm so sick of the disdain most articles have for a subscription that has meant so much to so many people and convinced them to see more movies - only a good thing!)
• Coming Soon Patrick Stewart to lead Star Trek again
• EW Lance Bass is buying the Brady Bunch house. Wha?
• Variety... spoke too soon. Lance Bass lost the house again. And it upset about the shady dealings!
Heated Discussion Point
As you may have heard by now Chloe Moretz has dissed the gay conversation camp drama Boy Erased sight unseen because the director isn't queer unlike her gay conversion camp drama The Miseducation of Cameron Post. Her reasoning is 'queer people should be making queer films'. As you may have guessed I have some feelings about this. A) Maybe people should wait until they see films before judging them and B) Maybe a straight woman taking a gay role when there are plenty of queer women who can act shouldn't be throwing such stones? and C) We should all be worrying about this emotionally and intellectually lazy epidemic of people demanding and assuming that artists stay in their lane and only do biographical work from here on out; Artists are capable of great leaps of imagination. Ang Lee is straight and made two great gay movies plus a smashingly good Austen adaptation and he definitely didn't grow up British and white and female in the 19th century. Spike Lee has made two terrific movies with non black leads (Summer of Sam and 25th Hour). White guy Hal Ashby made a fascinating movie about race (The Landlord). Todd Haynes and Pedro Almodovar tend to make amazing movies about women and only occasionally about gay men, though they are gay men. Steve McQueen's first two genius movies were about a white guy. Etcetera. Not everyone can or should be like Sofia Coppola and Woody Allen and just make movies about one specific kind of person or autobiographical milieu.
I don't want to discount the importance of minority voices telling their own stories. I just want there to be some balance in the discussion because imagination and artists who push themselves towards a wide range of expression are gifts to audiences. (All that said, Boy Erased might be terrible, who knows. But let's see it before we decide that.)
Finally...
Happy Centennial to Tom Drake. 100 years ago on this very day "The Boy Next Door" was born in Brooklyn.
Though he never became a household name, he worked steadily through the 1940s and 1950s in films like Meet Me In St Louis (1944), Mrs. Parkington (1944), Raintree County (1957), and Words and Music (1948) where he played Rodgers of Rodgers & Hammerstein and Rodgers & Hart musical fame. Some faces achieve immortality through proximity; Once you've heard Judy Garland yearn for him from him window and porch vantage point with "The Boy Next Door," you'll be ready to marry him on the spot, too.