Would you rather?

It's our time-wasting habit of sharing fav Instagram posts of the weeks via celeb fantasy questions. SO...Would you rather

... play on the red carpet with Audra McDonald and Mary Testa (and Billy Porter sorta) ?
... hot tub it with Grant Gustin in Mexico?
... enjoy fresh avocados with Zooey Deschanel?
... watch a Toronto Raptors game with Dan Levy?
... get political at LifeBall in Vienna with Lea Delaria & Alan Cumming?
... hit the drive-in theater with Jenny Slate?
... go backstage with U2 at an Elton John concert?
... snuggle with Katee Sackhoff? 
... check out old Elvis memorabilia with Baz Luhrmann?
... practice "red carpet self care" with Jena Malone?  

Pictures are after the jump to help you decide. 

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Soundtracking: Rocketman

by Chris Feil

Rocketman is just about the jukeboxiest musical that ever jukeboxed, arriving on the screen with a structure more indebted to that of the stage than the kind of musical biopic (namely Bohemian Rhapsody) some might have expected. It’s as if Elton John’s and his Billy Elliot collaborator Lee Hall had shifted gears mid-conception, opting for a film with what had originally been planned for the stage. Safe bets will be on Rocketman coming to Broadway eventually anyway.

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Soundtracking: Moulin Rouge!

by Chris Feil

Perhaps it’s easy to forget how revolutionary Baz Luhrman’s Moulin Rouge! was in 2001. The thing about masterpieces is their legacy sometimes overshadows the context that birthed them. But at the time, the musical was a massive gamble and creative leap, helping to relaunch the genre that had died a slow death at the box office and to cultural  cinematic tastes. Just as Luhrman’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet had aggressively re-imagined its text for the MTV set, he delivered something even more drug-fevered to the musical, shattering notions of what the genre’s limitations were and how it could exist in the modern era.

Musicals may be more commonplace now, but they have yet to be as audacious since. But as much as Luhrman’s trippy, frenetic stylings play nearly twenty (gasp!) years later as its most obvious innovations, it was Luhrman’s music choices that were the biggest shock to the system for movie musicals.

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Review: "Rocketman" blasts off

This review was originally published in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad

Pop stardom is a notoriously fickle thing. For every “legacy” artist out there, there are thousands of one-hit wonders, and hundreds of sort-of famous B listers. One imagines that anyone in the center of the hurricane of New Fame imagines it will last forever. If you find yourself engineering your own biopic in your golden years, congratulations, it did. Which brings us to Reginald Dwight… better known as Elton John.

In the first frames of Rocketman, Elton John (Taron Egerton) strolls into focus, cheekily dressed as a horned devil to confront his own demons in a therapy session framing device...

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"(I'm Gonna) Love Me Again"

The race for Best Original Song nominations at the Oscars is just beginning. Here's Elton John and Taron Egerton singing what we assume is the end credits song for Rocketman. It was written specifically for the biopic. And a week before this film premieres we'll hear two new songs in Disney's live-action remake of Aladdin...

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