RuPaul's All Stars Enter the Workroom!

Chris here, champing at the bit to just get RuPaul's Drag Race All Star-ted, already! We are only a week away from a new season of mega-wattage lipsyncs and high stakes before another queen joins previous All Stars winners Alaska Thunderfuck and Chad Michaels in the Drag Race Hall of Fame. We still have no sign of the mystery tenth queen, so we can expect the show to save her for a big reveal as it did last season with the return of Cucu. However, we can expect a slew of guest stars including Titus Burgess, Vanessa Williams, Kristen Chenoweth, and, catch this, Nancy Pelosi!

And to aid our speculation on the eventual winner before the premiere, we've gotten a glimpse at the first looks as the queens enter the workroom. Since we're Drag Race obsessed, let's rundown the best first impressions and rank the looks:

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The Planet of the Links

Pull it together, Nathaniel! There is so much showbiz news of late that we've been buried in avalanche of it. How to stop and collect the linkage? So herewith a looooong list of links in a vain attempt to catch up or but by the time you've read it we'll surely have missed another 20 stories in addition to those that already slipped by in the past two weeks. What I'm saying is "too many things too many things too many things" 

So read on and click away for The Avengers: Infinity War, Paul Thomas Anderson, Jessica Chastain, Big Little Lies paydays, Sundance buzz, and much much more. Please to enjoy or at least peruse...

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Will "Call Me By Your Name" Be Ignored by Oscar?

The following article was originally published in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad. It's reprinted here with some updates... 

Though you might feel like you’ve been hearing “Oscar buzz” for months, it’s always good to be reminded that timetables are askew and “buzz” is a lot faster/noisier than the real thing. Academy members don’t actually start filling out their nomination ballots until Friday morning!

They’ll have one week to determine which movies and performances are in the running for the industry’s most coveted golden statues. Each year some adult-oriented movies risk going wide without Oscar’s blessing while others lay in wait, banking on Oscar favor to help sell them to a wider audience. One of the pictures that’s trying the lay-low-until-Oscar game is the gay coming-of-age drama Call Me By Your Name. Though it’s been in theaters for six weeks it still hasn’t expanded past major markets and is only on 115 screens (stateside) at this writing. It’s poised to become either one of the biggest Oscar players or one of the most “snubbed”. So this seems as good a time as any to share some anxiety about it...

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VOTE In Our Thirst Trap Party. We Rounded Them Up For a Sexy NY's

Happy New Year's Eve! One last year in review list during the actual calendar year (though you know 2017 film year doesn't truly end until the Oscars are handed out). Here's Nathaniel R...

[Pictured left: Lady Bird just needed to see some D. We've all been there.]

In a not so festive season when we've all been thinking hard about a lot of terrible thinkings like corrupt governments and oligarchies, sexual misconduct and systemic isms that make life such an oppressive mess for so many people (and damage everyone -- even the opporessors -- since we all are truly in this life together) as well as the terror of both climate change and this particular cold snap  (I'm super sick right now, yay!)  it may feel counterintuitive to be silly and celebrate, I dunno, sexy movie men.

But it is New Year's Eve as I type this (my least favorite holiday since i can remember... I only like to goof off at home and make lists for this one) and we must start the New Year on a positive hedonistic note. Puritanism is bad for you anyway since sex and the enjoyment of sexy things can be a source of immense  joy and pleasure and intimacy and/or whatever both consenting parties have agreed upon. 

If you're a cinephile some part of you loves to look so this one's for you as we ogle some movie men after the jump. We squeezed them into six themed groups in their showoff or coy glory from which you should vote and choose the winners, okay? Okay!  

1 SIDEBAR HEROICS

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Cinematic Inverses: Beach Rats and Call Me By Your Name

by Dancin' Dan

It's the time of year where we're all playing catch-up with everything we missed in theaters. This prepares us for that most sacred of cinephile traditions: End-of-year list-making!

I had heard a lot of good things about Eliza Hittman's Beach Rats when it was released in theaters late this summer, but I wasn't able to catch it. But nothing I had heard about it prepared me for what I found. Beach Rats is nothing if not the inverse of the acclaimed (and currently playing) Call Me By Your Name; nearly everything in one is the opposite of the other.

It starts with our protagonists, Harris Dickinson's Frankie and Timothée Chalamet's Elio. Both are possessed of a certain amount of self-confidence but even more self-doubt...

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