Links (AKA Ways To Kill Even More Time on the Internet)

Vulture Battle of the Long Island Blondes in Wolf of Wall Street, Don Jon and American Hustle. My favorite among them is definitely ScarJo
The Playlist shares the new Electro teaser from The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (aka Spider-Man 5) and is it just me or does Electro wielding his powers with a pointy all fingers twitch seem like a really bad cheap imitation of the Emperor in Return of the Jedi ?

Les InRocks [for French speaking readers] interviews director Alain Guiraudie on his critical breakthrough Stranger by the Lake. Please let us know the most interesting lines because I love the portrait of Guiraudie in the bushes
Awards Daily Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio to be honored at Santa Barbara Film Festival. (But in what order are the 48 or so honorees being feted? No one speaks of this!)
Thompson on Hollywood icymi here's a long piece on the very complicated voting process for Oscar's Best Picture. I feel like you have to a higher education math degree or just have a very finely tuned stay-patient stay-focused button, to understand this. Since I have neither, I'm (partially) lost. I have too many questions once you hit step #7... But the theory presented is that we will have a smaller pool of nominees due to the large number of films with broad support, rather than the more common sense 'more beloved films means more nominated pictures' feeling.
Variety SPC picks up the Hungarian future Oscar nominee The Notebook
Cinema Blend a new Ralph Fiennes clip from Grand Budapest Hotel 

Top Ten Mania
Towleroad my piece on the best queer characters of cinema this year from Kill Your Darlings through Blue is the Warmest Color
Towleroad best LGBT moments in television this year
Yahoo top grossing Broadway shows of 2013, The Lion King back on top despite Wicked continuing to rack in literally millions every week despite being several years old (Producers just burning money dawdilng about getting that movie mounted  as we've bitched about a lot). I read so many articles about this and NONE list all ten even though they're referring to a mythical top ten... so you gotta check...
Broadway World ...for that
Pajiba the "brotastic" list of most pirated movies of 2013 from The Hangover Part 3 to Gangster Squad
Frontiers LA has an amazing top ten from the always hilarious and hip "Chloe Sevigny" (aka Drew Droege). Here are the actressy entries though the whole thing is worth a read...

6. The bowel-shaking rhythms of Jodie Foster’s Elysium timbre.
3. Actresses without teeth. Or anyone but Anne Hathaway. 

LOL

Links: Ava, Spidey, Kruger, and The World's Finest

Vulture says goodbye to Ryan Gosling as he begins his break from on-screen acting post Only God Forgives. But it's not over. It's never over.
Laughing Squid awesome movie-themed wedding invitations. Seriously clever! 
In Contention Kris is ecstatic over the news that Man of Steel 2 will include Batman; "The World's Finest" will finally share the screen.
Pajiba on 20 reasons they're sad to be missing Comic-Con 

NPR extremely negative review of a book about Ava Gardner that she didn't want published
Playbill Rose Byrne might play "Grace" in Annie. That's the "We Got Annie!" assistant to Daddy Warbucks played by Ann Reinking in the previous film version
Movie City News 33 Weeks to Oscar - a season without a frontrunner?
Greg in Hollywood thinks this year's Emmy list is the gayest ever -- so many out TV stars these days
New Zealand Herald appreciates Diane Kruger's  terrific recent run of career-elevating parts 
New Zealand Herald -- I'm double-dipping (thx Morgan) since they're into actresses right now -- talks to Nicole Kidman about her recent roles and Grace of Monaco 
i09 has a ton of details from the Marvel Panel at Comic-Con including new Captain America Winter Soldier footage and the Guardians of the Galaxy panel and the Avengers sequel has been titled. It's Avengers: The Age of Ultron.

Peter 'Garfield' Parker 
Huffington Post truly fun interview with Andrew Garfield at Comic-Con who is delightfully candid about his years locked into playing Spidey.

And here he is at Comic-Con delighting the crowd...

Twins: Electro & Mr Freeze

Have you seen the first official still of Electro (Jamie Foxx) from The Amazing Spider-Man 2. This is it, albeit quite, um, altered by my photoshoppin' whimsy.

Can The Amazing Spider-Man 2 be as terrible as I want it to be? I mean please please please for the love of all that is holy in comic book cinema please don't be just dull and bland and redundant like The Amazing Spider-Man reboot. Please be just straight-up terrible so that you're fun to hate! Like Batman and Robin (1997)!

Children of the Link

EW lets you zoom in on details of Spidey's new suit from The Amazing Spider-Man 2
Cinema Blend Oscar winning cinematography Wally Pfister's directorial debut Transcendence is already courting the Chinese audience 
Pajiba "the 12 most awesome sexually confident movie lines" Ha. I couldn't pull any of these off (TMI!) but I love the list
Coming Soon You can now watch the opening and closing credit sequences of Pacific Rim online. Though honestly they look fairly generic despite the hype for the film.
Playbill Theresa Rebeck of Smash-creation fame is trying another series. She's developing a "Bleak House" adaptation for Bravo 

Variety Whoa. Hunky Bollywood superstar Hrithink Roshan recently had brain surgery. Get well soon.
Awards Daily Rising writer/director Ava DuVernay, who made the excellent Middle of Nowhere last year, is taking on Selma, a true-life drama about MLK and the Civil Rights Act
In Contention will Philomena be TWC's secret Oscar weapon this year? I don't know how secret it can be after the reception of several minutes at Cannes but yes, it could be.
Final Girl is about to trace the evolution of the entire Children of the Corn series with a marathon blogging effort on Monday. But she's already surveyed the posters.
Natasha VC a perfect one sentence commentary on Mia Farrow and Philip Roth watching Sharknado together

A Link Odyssey

The Flick Filosopher "my back let me show you it" on the faceless objectification of women in movie posters
Pacific Standard investigates what's going on with all those shlocky monster movies on Netflix Instant Watch. One studio is just churning them out by the dozen!
Splash Page Andrew Garfield wonders why we can't have a gay Spider-Man 

Vulture does some mathematical analysis from 1989-to-Now and, nope, Hollywood just doesn't make movies about women anymore
Deep Dish (site is NSFW) picks the best (& worst) of the season. A lot of Nashville, American Horror Story, and Downton Abbey but Don & Betty win "best sex" for Mad Men. I concur.
Hollywood in this week's Truly Tasteless News, they are already planning a movie about the Boston Marathon Bombing. It might be well-written -- the guys from The Fighter are onboard -- but still... a little time to heal people. 

Finally, Jose from Movies Kick Ass never cared much for Stanley Kubrick while still respecting him (he and I are similar that way) but Jose was finally converted to 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) by way of this week's big screen viewing at BAM in Brooklyn as part of their Big Screen Epics series. And how!

Coincidentally I was also there and the size of the screen, the beauty of the theater (thanks BAM) and the immersion of the sound also made me a new and real convert. It was as if I'd never seen the film before. Suddenly so many movies... so many movies seem like they owe their best moments and even their existence to it. (Hi, Tree of Life!) I suddenly need to reevaluate every Kubrick on the big screen. In fact, the only film of his I've seen in the size it deserves is Eyes Wide Shut (1999)... though in that case, size didn't matter. I was unmoved.