Jesse Unleashed. And Other Links

i09 the best critical responses to Safe Haven's batsh*t ending (spoilers, obviously)
Natasha VC the Boogie Nights premiere photos are debilitating. (amen)
Cinematic Corner expresses disatisfaction with The Master. I think the qualms expressed here are very imply put the problem a lot of people have with the second act of Paul Thomas Anderson's career. I wonder if he'll change again?
Awards Daily salutes the hard working Oscar publicists as ballots close
MNPP Judy Garland's A Star is Born even wins over JA! She's just brilliant in that film. One of the worst Oscar losses ever. 

Coming Soon on a new Bruce Lee biopic in the works. I read a few articles on this last night and not one of them mentioned that there already is a Bruce Lee biopic, Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story which came out in the 90s and starred the hotness that was Jason Scott Lee (no relation)
Playbill Les Misérables will be returning to Broadway in 2014, just 11 years since the original long running show closed. Meanwhile the show has never closed in London and has now been playing for 27 years
Jesse Williams the actor (the hottie from Cabin in the Woods) doesn't pull punches detailing his issues with Django Unchained's treatment of race and slavery
Advocate Kelly McGillis will reminisce about Top Gun generically but she won't talk about Jodie Foster's coming out!
Lainey Gossip checks in with the pre-Oscar gingers Jessica Chastain & Nicole Kidman
In Contention looks at Sound Mixing which I personally think is terrifically hard to predict this year 

Finally... if you believe that math can predict the Oscars check out Ben's Oscar Forecast. He's a Harvard student who's trying to predict them with formulas. He's predicting the usual suspects that have been winning everything for acting but for best director... Ang Lee (!?!)

Mad Men @ the Movies: Charlton Heston Starkers and "A Star is Born"

In "Mad Men @ the Movies" we look at the best show on television through the lens of its movie-loving ways. Obviously there are spoilers.

5.3 "Tea Leaves"
In the third episode of the season Betty Draper Francis (January Jones) returns and there's more of her to love to hate! She's been packing on the pounds. At first there's a thyroid scare but it turns out Betty is just depressed and fat. The episode ends with Betty helping herself to a second ice cream sundae (to the tune of The Sound of Music's "I Am Sixteen"). Why not? 

One of the themes of the new season is aging and the rise of youth culture is evident. Betty is referred to as middle-aged by her doctor. Don, previously an icon of cool, is now 'so square he's got corners' to both his younger wife (she's 20, he's 40) and the young teenagers he meets at a Rolling Stones concert (he's there with Harry Crane on business). When the teens hear that the men are in advertising they instantly think of Bewitched. "You're Derwood and He's Mr. Cravitz."

Later after smoking a joint Harry is trying to impress the teens with celebrity stories. 

Charlton Heston and Esther Blodgett after the jump

Click to read more ...

Hello, I Must Be Linking

/Film Chris Hemsworth on the set of Ron Howard's Rush about race car drivers
Flavorwire Fun stories from Joss Whedon's SXSW Talk: The Avengers, Buffy, TV versus film, and more.
Ultra Culture puts 2012 releases thus far through the wonderful "Bechdel Test" in which a movie must have more than 1 female character and they must talk to each other... about something other than a man). Naturally most of them fail.

My Modern Met just incredible "Star Wars Identity" posters. I wish other films would inspire the kind of enduring creativity this franchise does from people... because given the developments of the past 30 years our global worship of this franchise is just, well, embarrassing.
THR Hello I Must Be Going, a hit at Sundance starring Melanie Lynskey (yay!), is getting a theatrical release later this year.
Wow Report ouch! (NSFW) A nasty accident for a son of a movie superstar. Guess who?
Movie|Line Tom Cruise is the latest star being talked up to play opposite Beyoncé in the A Star is Born. If it weren't a Clint Eastwood picture I'd assume this movie was never happening but since it's a Clint Eastwood picture some male star is eventually going to bite before Blue Ivy is old enough to take the role from Mama.

Oh look. It's Javier Bardem on the set of Skyfall. With blonde hair? 

Villains just can't be trusted with hair dye.

And I kept forgetting to post the Genie Award winners but Awards Daily did that duty. Here's Viggo Mortensen accepting Best Supporting Actor for A Dangerous Method. Good pick, Genie. He was great in that movie. Not that greatness is surprising these days from Viggo.

Viggo. Viggo. Viggo.

"A Star is Born"... or, will be *after* the Star's baby is born.

Beyoncé announced her pregnancy at MTV's VMAs last night. I switched channels after Gaga's drag king opening number so the news got to me secondhand.

There be film fallout. The fourth feature film version of A Star is Born (2013? 2014?) is now delayed for at least nine months as Beyoncé gestates and welcomes her first child into the world. The musical, meant to be Clint Eastwood's post J Edgar project, had hoped to go before the cameras early in 2012 and with the speed that Eastwood tends to work we would have probably seen it as a Christmas 2012 release.

But now that Beyoncé is pregnant (and considering also that Leonardo DiCaprio has turned down the male lead role), this won't be happening just yet. The Beyoncé/Jay-Z babe will be born first.

Oscar-obsessives should keep a close eye on this one -- the film, not the babe. While the project seems ridiculous on the surface for both "another one?" superfluity and Eastwood + Beyoncé odd-coupledom, A Star is Born is a durable cultural object. It's always a major morphing showcase for the gifts of its leading lady. The first three incarnations resulted in 17 Oscar nominations and 3 Oscars all told including bids for Best Actress for both Janet Gaynor (1937) and Judy Garland (1954) and a Best Original Song Oscar for Barbra Streisand's "Evergreen" (1976).

Will we see Beyoncé as a Best Actress nominee in 2013 or 2014... or will she have to "settle" for a Best Song Oscar?

Clint Eastwood & Beyoncé. A Match Made In...

This might just be the strangest thing you read all week.

Clint Eastwood, currently working on FBI biopic J. Edgar, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Hoover and Armie Hammer as his lover and star employee, will be chasing that unlikely project with... wait for it...

A STAR IS BORN with Beyoncé. According to Deadline it's a go and they may even start shooting the third musical version of this story before the end of the year. There are so many things one might say to this news including.

"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooooooo"

or perhaps

"the earth is doomed" which is what I tweeted.

Maybe "Streisand is gonna be pissed" which is what I went with for my upcoming Towleroad column.

Stars Are Born in the 30s (Gaynor) the 50s (Garland) and 70s (Streisand)

I've never understood why anyone would want to remake A Star is Born (including Babs in the 70s), given that Judy Garland's 1954 performance is so unassailably ginormous and mythical and awesome and Oscar winning (damnit!). But mostly, I'm scratching my head about conservative manly "get off my lawn" Clint Eastwood doing two gay-appeal projects back to back. First he's training his Oscarbait eyes on a closeted cross-dresser and then he's turning klieg lights on an actual show queen?

Finally, aside from Eastwood's "what the hell will this be like?" involvement it feels rather redundant and not just because we've already had three film versions. Won't watching Beyoncé do A Star is Born be like watching a two hour extended remix of "Listen" from Dreamgirls.

That's the whole emotional arc and story right there.