Drag Race All Stars Begins Aug. 25!

Get ready for the return of your favorite drag queens because later this month RuPaul's Drag Race is giving us another All Stars season. Can you believe we are already getting more eleganza when it feels like season 8 just ended?

In case you haven't seen the cast, here's our returning queens:

• Adore Delano (Season 6)
• Alaska (Season 5)
• Alyssa Edwards (Season 5)
• Coco Montrese (Season 5)
• Detox (Season 5)
• Ginger Minj (Season 7)
• Katya Zamolodchikova (Season 7)
• Phi Phi O'Hara (Season 4)
• Roxxxy Andrews (Season 5)
• Tatianna (Season 2)

That is an overload of season five realness, but if it means the return of Rolaskatox, we are perfectly okay with that. Tatianna is the only returning early season competitor and maybe the season's underdog - don't forget she was the original Snatch Game winner with her Britney Spears ("I got lost!"). Overall this cast is heavy with strong performers ready to bring the drama. This round is forgoing the first All Stars season's drama-undercutting teams concept in favor of a new twist:

You heard that right: the best performers will lipsync against one another and the lipsync winner will choose the queen that sashays away. Could it lead to another Rolaskatox domination? Does it stack the deck against lipsync assassins like Alyssa Edwards and Coco Montrese that were never strong performers in actual challenges?

Season 2 of Rupaul's Drag Race All Stars begins Thursday, August 25th. Whose return has you most excited and what queen do you wish was in the cast?

Born in 1984? Oscar doesn't love you (yet)

Since 1984 is our Year of the Month I was prepping a "vintage" list of the people, places, and things birthed that year and was alarmed to realize that I could find ZERO Oscar nominees born that year. Not a one. And I've spent all too much time scouring the web for it.

Actors born in 1984 are 31 or 32 years of age which is plenty of time to secure an Oscar nomination, at least for women. For comparison sake consider that a very quick glance at 1983, no more than one minute of research, turns up at least 5 nominees one of whom won (Lupita N'yongo). The same speedy glance at 1985 reveals 4 nominees instantly. Even 1986 has one that immediately pops out (Lady Gaga for Original Song) though the more recent years naturally have less as the field of contenders gets younger and younger. Unless I'm missing some fast-rising sound editor or makeup artist or some such, Oscar has yet to love any 1984 babies. Poor Millenial babies. If you were born in 1984 does this make you grumpy?

So who do you think will be first? Some options after the jump as well as the saving grace of Tony, Emmy, and Grammy nominees from that 1984 crop.

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Review: Indignation

Manuel here with a review of Indignation, now in theaters.

Indignation is the type of film that, even if you didn’t know was adapted from a novel (by Philip Roth), you’d describe as “literary.” Part of this has to do with its dialogue which is both highly literate and thematically robust. And the other part comes from the strategically and efficaciously deployed voice overs that all but announce themselves as being cut whole cloth from a novel with a highly sophisticated narrator whose attempts at self-knowledge would be comical if they weren’t so earnestly intense.

The very first pages of Roth’s novel introduces us to Jewish student, Marcus (a wonderful Logan Lerman) as he’s rankled by his father’s sudden mistrust of him ahead of his heading to college. His father is clearly afraid for his boy—he’s seen too many of his relatives head to Korea never to come back. His pestering (and in the film, Danny Burstein gets at Marcus’s father worry as tinged by his own anticipated grief) leads him to constantly keep tabs on him, asking him where he’s been, how he can be trusted, and more pointedly: how does he know Marcus won’t go to places where he’ll get killed...

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Marion Cotillard and Brad Pitt Got Us Thinking

Released exclusively through People Magazine

by Murtada 

There are a couple of ways to look at this first released picture from the Marion Cotillard - Brad Pitt November release, Allied. Your mileage might depend on your feelings about the actors. So if you like them, you might be saying glamourous movie stars! Pretty period costumes! Why isn’t it November yet?. If not, your reaction might be that the picture is a bit posed. Maybe a bit too studied. Even cheesy...

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Ira Sachs and Cary Fukunaga Team Up To Bring '80s East Village AIDS Drama to TV

by Daniel Crooke

When mulling over Ira Sachs’ last handful of films – the intimately sketched, ephemeral epics of the heart, body, and soul, Keep The Lights On and Love is Strange, as well as his upcoming Little Men – a jokey poke from David Wain’s They Came Together immediately pops to mind: New York, a common setting between Sachs’ three aforementioned stories, “it’s almost like another character in the movie!”

After chronicling the city through a queer lens from the 1990s until now, Sachs will join forces with Cary Fukunaga to wind the clock back another decade to bring Christodora to the small screen – a interlocking character drama set in a 1980s East Village apartment building, built around devastation and communal connection in the midst of the AIDS crisis. Props to Sachs, for his New York stories always incorporate the city into the narrative in a way that isn’t only about iconographic lip service; his characters and their dilemmas could only exist within these urban surroundings, which creates deep internal and external senses of environmental exploration, whether through hard drugs, real estate, or gentrification.

Based on the novel of the same name, which was just released earlier this week, Christodora will be directed by Sachs and produced by Fukunaga via his production company, Parliament of Owls. [Side note: this company name in and of itself sounds like a creative collaboration between a lofty, Lincoln-mode Spielberg and Zack Snyder’s Ga-Hoole.] We don’t yet have a release date but fingers crossed that the limited series hits our televisions, tablets, very tiny screens, etcetera by 2017.

Have you picked up a copy of Christodora yet? What should we expect from Sachs’ first foray into television series?