This has been a good week for remakes (or a bad week, depending on how you feel about them), but while announced redos of our beloved mystery comedies, sci-fi actioners and neverending fantasy flicks are shocking enough, there’s not a blogger in the world who saw a new “contemporized” version of Damn Yankees coming. Let alone one starring Jim Carrey and Jake Gyllenhaal as Mr. Applegate (aka Satan) and soul-selling baseballer Joe Hardy, respectively.
Yet Hugh Jackman and the rest of the all-singing-all-dancing stars of Sunday’s Oscars telecast did tell us that the musical is back, so maybe we should be making bets on what classic songfest gets reworked next (I’m putting money on West Side Story). This isn’t even the first musical remake we’ll be seeing in the next few years. New films of My Fair Lady, Carousel, Bye Bye Birdie and Jesus Christ Superstar are apparently already on their way to theaters. Anyhoo, let’s see how the ol’ blogosphere reacted to the Damn Yankees news today:
…Read more
Have you been following The Hollywood Temp Diaries? It’s an anonymous Blogger blog with the tagline, “I am one of those barnacles on the hull of the good ship ‘Hollywood.’ These are my stories.” Good stuff, especially if you subscribe to that dirty secret that most Hollywood jobs are just as glamorous and exciting as, like, working anywhere else. The blog’s author, known only as Temp X, has been drawing a direct line between the impending SAG strike and total global apocalypse for awhile. A couple of days ago, s/he posted a “videotorial” to hammer home her/his case, and for people like me who haven’t been able to get it up to care much about an actor’s strike, it’s the perfect vehicle for impressing the seriousness of the situation. More here.
The Playlist passes along word that David Bowie has recorded back-up vocals for Anywhere I Lay My Head, Scarlett Johansson’s Tom Waits covers album. The record’s producer, Dave Sitek of TV on the Radio, describes Anywhere as having a “‘cough medicine/TinkerBell’ vibe”––which, funnily enough, seems as good a description as any of Bowie’s performance as Andy Warhol in Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat.
In other indie-cred starlet-turned-pop star news, remember Zooey Deschanel’s album? Justin Wolfe, that smart-star who writes one of the blogs I mentioned in this post about The Hills, wrote an incredible post last week, in which he made the argument that, as “extension of their brand, from image to sound” the She and Him stuff as a Zooey Deschanel product is materially the same as Hills star Heidi Montag’s much-reviled first single. Check it out here.
I’ve been slowly gathering material for an academic article about the film references used by both bloggers and “real” journalists to talk about MTV’s The Hills. Stories and blog posts that discuss the show using the language of academic film/media criticism, some likening certain aspects of the show to the films of Michelangelo Antonioni and Eric Rohmer, have begun to stack up. Now, Jim Carrey and Peter Weir have been thrown into the mix, with a post on PopWatch titled, ‘The Hills’ is Like ‘The Truman Show’, Only Awful.
This cinematic reference is, in terms of the literal conditions of The Hills‘ production, probably more accurate than most, but when held up to any sort of scrutiny in terms of the content of the show, it’s proven to be off the mark.
…Read more
“If the personalities of 
