RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars E1 - Let's Get All Star-ted

By Chris Feil

RuPaul is bringing back some of the biggest names in Drag Race herstory and honey she is not holding back.

The premiere of this new season of All Stars (let's full-stop forget the team-based first All-Stars existed, shall we?) is a new benchmark for the series, providing more drama and unexpected twists than ever before while still keeping the focus on the queens' personalities. Even the evolution of the contestants' personas provides some refreshing surprises with past villains like Phi Phi O'Hara and Roxxxy Andrews out to prove that they should be known for something more than their past bitchery. In fact, assumed early frontrunners took a back seat in this premiere in favor of the girls looking to battle perceptions on their way to the crown.

But Drag Race is quite eager to shake up the formula this season, something that the show desperately needs in order to raise the stakes on these powerhouses and to combat the diminishing returns of series staples like Snatch Game. And the first big twist is ruthless: the queens that perform best in the main challenge will Lipsync For Their Legacy, and the winner gets both $10,000 and the right to eliminate a queen. Oh, y'all wanted a twist? The genius here is that the very structure of the show is built to bring more drama.

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Links: Marnie, Pokemon, The Tempest, Emmys, and Squad Goals

MTV test your knowledge - is this person Miles Teller or Ansel Elgort? 
Forbes very positive piece on Suicide Squad's success. But what about the fact that it's a terrible movie and terrible movies aren't good for movie culture or franchise futures?
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EW Catherine Zeta Jones joining the Feud miniseries. She'll play Olivia de Havilland
Comics Alliance Well we should have known this was coming. There's going to be a live-action Pokemon movie. Nicole Perlman, the Guardians of the Galaxy screenwriter is co-penning
Variety oops. a poster for Denis Villeneuve's Arrival has accidentally stirred up political trouble in Hong Kong 

MNPP's favorite movies of 1984
We Got This Covered Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon will reteam after Big Little Lies for a movie called Truly Madly Guilty, based on another best-selling love by Liane Moriarty -- I guess they all really liked each other!
Variety Lion starring Dev Patel and Nicole Kidman will be the centerpiece at the London Film Festival this fall
Tracking Board Marvel sure its spreading itself thin. Now Hulu will be making a Marvel series with Runaways. So that means they've got shows/deals with Netflix, Hulu, Freeform, ABC, and Disney.
Variety Speaking of spreading yourself thin: Lin-Manuel Miranda will write new songs for The Little Mermaid live-action remake. I love Miranda but that seems like a strange fit to me, given that The Little Mermaid's songs are so old school Broadway musical flavored
/Film why we shouldn't expect to see sequels from Laika. (Sigh. I would proclaim this as great news but we once thought Pixar wouldn't be defeated by regurgitation and we were wrong.)
Coming Soon Natalie Portman says she's done with Marvel movies
Playbill a mostly nude female production of The Tempest is playing this summers in Brooklyn's Prospect Park. For free. I bet it's better than the Julie Taymor version with Helen Mirren!
Good Morning America Amy Schumer explains how she got Goldie Hawn out of retirement for her new film 
New Yorker Richard Brody argues that Marnie, not Vertigo, is the film we should look to in regards to encapsulating Hitchcock's career...

The greatness of Hitchcock’s artistry, the musical sublimity of his images and the emotional power of his stories, isn’t separable from his carnality—rather, his greatness depends upon the worst and most bestial aspects of his character. Without them, he’d be the artisan of cinematic cuckoo clocks, and what’s all too often celebrated in the name of Hitchcock mania is precisely an abstracted craft that’s isolated from its source of power, from its dynamic principle, from its raison d’être.

Emmys
Variety Creative Arts Emmys will be split into two pre Emmys awards ceremonies
Vulture an extremely choice interview with RuPaul on his first Emmy nomination and everything being political... including politics. 

For Fun
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Towleroad Pole vaulter defeated by his own pole -- oh, I'm sorry this one isn't "fun" but painful to watch 

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?

Emmy Nom Aftermath Finale: Happy Thoughts

We'll return to the Emmys at a later date (the gap between their nominations and their ceremony is enormous) but for now, one last Emmy post. To end on a happy note I asked Team Experience two final questions:

1. What's your single favorite acting nomination?
2. What's your favorite non-acting nomination?

Our answers follow and yours should, too.

FAVORITE ACTING NOMINATION

Margaret de Larios: I honest-to-god pinched myself when I saw that Constance Zimmer was nominated for UnREAL. The Emmys have been so predictably blind to the sensational programming coming out of the CW these days, it was easy to believe that they would similarly ignore product from the notorious schlock-factory that is Lifetime...

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I'm With Tweet

Everything comes back to the movies, even shopping and the Presidential Election...

Pretty sure this is a better deal than what Meryl Streep was offered. pic.twitter.com/JqXcpXYAKA

— Aisling Bea (@WeeMissBea) July 16, 2016

"when the time is right, he'll pay me back" - Chris Christie pic.twitter.com/OYD4EiMxom

— Lauren Larson (@lrnlrsn) July 15, 2016

There's more tweeting fun after the jump including Interview with the Vampire vocabulary lessons, Emmy nomination gratitude, Lady Ghostbusters, thriller rewatches, Movie Poster Typeface blunders, and more...

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