Purrfect Anne Hathaway Has Big Stilettos To Fill.

A horror movie serial is opening (at least) every month all over the internet for the next 18 months. It's called News and Rumors and Collective Freakouts Concerning Chris Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises. With each new chapter the internet will shiver and tremble, cry out or shake with alarm, fury, disbelief, fear and finally cathartic release. The latest chapter involves two official casting reveals from Nolan himself. The first is that Inception's Tom Hardy will be playing the grotesquely muscular "Bane" (who we last saw onscreen in the fiasco Batman & Robin, 1997) and the second is that Anne Hathaway, she of the backless gowns and "look at me, I'm fabulous!" nakedity in Love and Other Drugs, will be playing Selina Kyle. Selina is, rather famously, Catwoman's alter ego but given Nolan's two previous Batman films we have no indication that we'll actually get Selina as Catwoman, just that we're getting Selina. 

Julie Newmar (the first Catwoman) | Anne Hathaway (the latest)

Remember when Sam Raimi kept setting up Dylan Baker to play The Lizard in his Spider-Man trilogy and never delivered?

I'd say the most we can hope for is that Anne gets to let her bitchy freak side fly a bit. Rachel Getting Married minus the babbling and the "L'Haim!"s divided by Get Smart physicality? She'll probably use a weapon at some point but sadly, it'll probably be a plain ol' gun and not sewing machine claws. What I'm trying to say is that I wouldn't exactly expect her to have nine mystical lives or suit up and throwdown with Christian Bale with pithy one liners and claws out. Maybe she'll get a whip if we're lucky. Nolan likes his female characters as dangerous window dressing or as damsels in distress and on either front Hathaway will be terrific. Or at least more terrific than previous Nolan women.

Believe it or not I don't consider the role too sacred to be recreated. (Someone will reinterpret The Joker before too long, too, even though everyone currently thinks that that'll never happen. It always happens. Trust.) Superheroes and Villians are just from that school of roles that are meant to be constantly reinterpreted, like uh.. .Shakespearean protagonists! Not that the birth of any new feline fatale will ever measure up to Michelle Pfeiffer and that snowy alley with pussies galore.

We'll always hear her roar.

Live Blog Golden Globes

8:01 SEE PREVIOUS POST FOR WACKY ARRIVALS.
I'd start there as some of the narrative threads continue into this live blog below

8:03 Ricky Gervais has already decimated The Tourist. Ouch. and even brutalized my Cher. "Why don't you want to see Cher?" Because it's not 1975." Ouch 2. And this wasn't part of the joke BUT when he said "The Walking Dead" they cut to Steve Buscemi. Ouch 3

8:04 My "comedy" in the arrivals was much kinder. Well but for the Silence of the Lambs joke.

Bale wins the night's first award

8:04 I don't know if you read Friday's Towleroad article but I devised a Golden Globe Drinking Game which goes like so.

Drink every time...

• Someone makes a Black Swan joke.
• Someone makes a Facebook joke.
• Cher licks her lips.
• Every time a presenter arrives that has absolutely no business being there other than as shameful attempt at attracting young viewers who won't be watching anyway. (Justin Beiber et. al)
• When "Miss Golden Globe" is introduced.
• Another swig if she's totally awkward about it. Having celebrity parents is SO mortifying!
• You spot a closeted gay. (Kevin Spacey et. al)
• Every time there's a closeup reaction shot of someone who clearly did not get Ricky Gervais's joke. (Even if they're laughing)
• You see two celebrities you'd otherwise never see together sharing a table. (The seating arrangements are so bent sometimes.)
• A winner is announced. Keeping chugging until they make it to the stage!

GOOD LUCK.

A Drinking Opportunity: Captain America with "The Fighter"?

8:14  BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR - CHRISTIAN BALE. The speech is great and I loved that he singled out Mark Wahlberg's work and mentioned that the stoic character never reaps the benefits. Like so.

Mark, really got a give a shout to Mark. You can only give a loud performance like the one I gave when you have a quiet anchor, a stoic character. I've played that one many times and it never gets any notice... thank you buddy. Kudos to you for that. Otherwise we wouldn't have gotten away with it.

8:16 Katey Sagal wins BEST ACTRESS IN DRAMA SERIES for "Sons of Anarchy" but we were ordering pizza so I missed her speech.

8:17 Miss Golden Globe already? "Gia Mantegna". She was not awkward about it at all so you only get one drink not two. Don't be greedy about it. You'll be drunk in no time even if you're VERY strict about the roles.

8:22 Ricky Gervais just introduced Bruce Willis as "Ashton Kutcher's Dad." HEE. But then Bruce made the evening more absurd by saying the word "fabulous". I somehow didn't expect that word out of Bruce's mouth.

8:25 BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR TV - CHRIS COLFER "GLEE"
Oh he's so shook up. And he's way back there, table-wise. Beautiful speech.

I think I dropped my heart between Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore so if anyone sees that please return it to me.

You know every gayboy in the world would love to say that line. It's "fabulous" as... uh... Bruce Willis might say.

8:30 UHHHHHHhhhhhhhhhhhhh

8:31 I don't even know what to say. They bring La Pfeiffer out to present and she is the one who gets the "honor" of introducing Tim Burton's Eyesore in Wonderland. 

Let this be a lesson to us all: BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR.

complete post -- you see there's more: Brad & Angie 'they're just like us!', shiny new Globe toys, The Bening's crazy ass hair, Pfeiffer's exhaustion, Portman's cuteness, and more.

Click to read more ...

Pippi Long Linkings

Some links and/or movie news for your perusal

• Playbill Greenday's "American Idiot," once an album then a Broadway stage musical could eventually be coming to the screen.
• Deadline Hollywood Daniel Craig will be back as James Bond (whew) in November 2012. No title yet though we're betting it'll easy trump "Quantum of Solace". Sam Mendes is directing. 
• Cinema Blend Katey shares the news that Debra Granik (Winter's Bone) wants to bring Pippi Longstocking back to the screen. How peculiar/fun!
• The House Next Door takes an interesting Baltimore-specific look at both Hairspray (1988) and Hairspray (2007).
• Gold Derby rounds up the Golden Globe predictions from the experts, including moi. Can you believe it's this weekend?
• My New Plaid Pants obsesses over new HBO Game of Thrones pics. I keep hearing that George R R Martin loses the thread of his story a little bit on the 3rd book (and that there's no book 4) but I tell you. I'm already on book 3 but I think he lost the thread on book 2. It took forever and when it was all over it's kind of like "so, what happened?" everyone is still at war with each other and no closer to resolution on any of their stories. The end. You know, long arcs are fine. But you have to stagger them a bit so that SOMETHING happens. I mean a lot of things happened but few that advanced the big arc. It was a bit like how I felt at the end of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One only less angry because Martin's writing is so beautifully assured. My how he can paragraph.
• i09 on the American cast of new Being Human series (based on the British series of the same name). Normally I oppose remakes but there's no reason why this couldn't be better since (spoiler alert: NOTHING HAPPENS in Being Human either). It's turning into a theme today. Seriously, where were the stakes in Being Human? It was just a whole lot of supernatural moping.

Finally, as you may have heard, Michelle Pfeiffer is getting back to work in 2011. The goddess is currently filming the Valentine's Day sequel New Year's Eve which opens this December and now she's confirmed for Alex Kurtzman's Welcome to People (2012) where she'll play the mother of Chris Pine, a man who must deliver his deceased dad's fortune to a long lost sister (or some such. I'm no good with plots.) Now, I know we're all getting older every day and I know that my favorite movie star is 52 BUT her own children Claudia Rose and John Henry are 17 and Michelle is not old enough to play a 30 year old's mother. Well, yes, she technically is but I don't have to like it. Please to remember that her last onscreen lover Rupert Friend is only a year older than Chris Pine.

Given the cinematic year the world's 50-to-60something actresses just had (I'm talking about Tilda Swinton, Isabelle Huppert, Julianne Moore, Annette Bening, Kim Hye-Ja, Barbara Hershey, Helen Mirren, Jacki Weaver, Melissa Leo and Lesley Manville who all starred or co-starred in complex roles in successful films) I think Pfeiffer is totally slacking. Pick it up lady. Challenge yo'self.