What does our future hold?

I scoffed at the first leak, then was pwned when a bridge on YouTube seemed to confirm it. So I'll reserve judgment on this juicy post from MadonnaNation that lists over a dozen Madonna song titles that could pop up on her November (?) album, complete with impressions of several. Plus the comments in that MadonnaNation thread offer full lyrics to songs that are at best months away from release. This kind of thing must annoy the hell out of Madonna—especially if parts are true. But as I said before, fans don't respect the law; getting them (er, us!) to respect artistic privacy is a losing battle. Click on these to enlarge for easier reading. (Thanks to Chris.)

This could wind up being Erotica v2.0.

Meanwhile, Madonna's gypsy influence was evident during her "Live Earth Bonita" perf, and it is evident in the pic below (from here)—check out the CD she's got. Would be interesting if she somehow forced gypsy sounds with phat Timbaland beats. Or just tossed in a reference to Gypsy to own LuPone. Or maybe she could toss in "Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves" since Cher has moved on to the "hard" stuff.

Who cares? I just want a new CD.

When an audience has even one asshole in it, it can ruin my appreciation for a show or movie. I feel like when I see movies I'm cursed to be near the loud talking cellphone addicts, and on planes I attract the chatty and the unbathed. So why does it give me so much pleasure to read this hysterical thread regarding world's worst live-theater experiences? We are talking about laughter, dancing in the aisles, stuffed cats and accessorizing with vomit here. Maybe it makes me feel better to know I'm not alone in my contempt for the unwashed masses. Or maybe I enjoy being royally pissed off.

Nicole's secret's got a baby.

Before everyone on earth knows about it, hear about PlanetHiltron first from me! (Or did you already hear about it at Queerty?)

Jennifer Aniston, Mariah Carey and The Ritchies, remixed & reinvented.

This post has a Patti LuPone Gypsy review...eventually.

It’s been a week of fandom in a life that, in many ways, is devoted to the practice and study of it.

First, I went to see The Simpsons Movie. I’m definitely a fan of the show, although I’m not so far gone that I don’t realize it has slipped a lot from its golden (yellow?) years. Still, a compromised Simpsons is a cut above most of what’s on TV, so watching it feels like voting for quality. The voting part is apt because even though I’ve read that conservatives and even Christian conservatives have come to appreciate the show and argue that it “doesn’t play favorites,” I challenge that notion. True, it had that annoyingly funny George H.W. Bush/Dennis the Menace installment and does seem to embrace a core belief in God (which isn’t a strictly conservative trait), but I think Groening’s attacks on left-wing buffoonery have kid gloves and his attacks on right-wing buffoonery have talons.

Plus, even 20 years after the characters debuted on The Tracey Ullman Show, it rises to the occasion from time to time and makes me go, “Ha-ha!”

Someone finally ate his shorts.

The screening was interesting...there was a gigantic line even an hour before the movie started and the jostling for seats inside was streaked with barely subdued panic. This is how I feel all the time going to the movies (“Must. Not. Be. Late. Must. Get. Aisle. Seat,” said through clenched grin.) so I was right at home. Thunderous applause at the opening credits. I get turned off real fast if an audience is too appreciative unless I’m as hypnotized as they are, but since I’m basically on board with the show I withheld grumpiness even as all the jokes—even the lazy ones—drew rapturous guffaws.

Generally, fans really mean it. From here.

The movie was cute and I’m glad I saw it. It had a few very funny lines and visual jokes and went down easy. It wasn’t as savagely funny as I’d hoped and I found myself wondering how they managed an hour and a half with so little Milhouse (my favorite), Mrs. Krabappel, Mr. Burns, Moe and just about every other non-Simpson. But I enjoyed it. I’d probably give it a B or B-.

Fans, however, seem to live and die for it—is “Spider Pig” really, really that inventive? Does yet another near divorce really represent brilliance? Okay, the opening sequence featuring Green Day (R.I.P.) was truly memorable for me, but it’s strange how being pre-excited about a franchise can nearly dictate one’s response to the latest installment. It’s a bit like religion, isn’t it? Like everyone around you is “speaking in tongues” and you’re pretty sure you don’t have the spirit in you so you either laugh at them or—or you pretend to speak in tongues, too.

I can’t tell if being left out of the experience is annoying because I look down on it or regret not being as swept away, but I’m at least a semi-believer regarding Bart & Co. so I didn’t feel much of either.

Heading out to Gypsy with Mama (-in-"law") Carmen, a force of nature in her own right.

Next, I got to see the last performance of Gypsy at City Center, the praised new take on what is considered to be the best musical ever written, starring Broadway force Patti LuPone. Even before the show began, fandom presented itself in the form of star sightings. Barbara Walters walked up to us looking exceedingly orange and plastic in a way that many people would think constituted looking “great.” My impression was she looked waxy and was surprisingly stiff, like she couldn’t really move her upper body and was lucky to be maneuvering in heels. But it was Barbara Walters, a legend, an icon and also still someone I watch from time to time—or watched, until recently—and it was kinda exciting to see her. (I’d seen her once before outside the Paris when I was about to watch a revival of Purple Noon and thought she was both formidable and a caricature of an Upper East Side lady.)

I was right by her in the same room with her and so I did what others were doing—I decided I hadda say something.

View voyeuwism. Perhaps her improvements are all camera-conscious because she looks natural and, well, great in this pic we snapped.

I don’t always do this; I don’t often do this. But I introduced myself and said I was one of her male View-ers and said I’d enjoyed the show in the past and wished her well. She did the signature Barbara pursed Mona Lisa smile, made brief eye contact before looking to the side and murmured “thank you” three times evenly spaced between the seconds it took for me to have my say. The effect was cool, robotic, but polite. It felt like we were both trapped in the inevitability of this type of encounter—celebrity creates an imaginary relationship between a star and a fan (or admirer) so that when a fan sees a star in person, there is almost a feeling that it would be rude not to say hi. The real relationship is not between the star and the fan, but between the fan and him- or herself, as spurred by whatever emotions the star has aroused in him or her over the years.

Here's a phrase I never thought I'd say: From Newt's mouth to God's ears.

Sniping aside, they hafta know they'd be the dream team.

I liked this shrewd assessment of Elizabeth Hasselbeck in (of all places) The New York Post today. I would never buy that arch-right-wing rag, but I found the link in a comment on Rosie's blog. I think it nails her down pretty neatly despite the fact that in so doing it falsely asserts that Rosie has said, point-blank, that the government was behind the collapse of 7 World Trade Center.

If rumors are true that The View is bringing Whoopi Goldberg and Sherri Shepherd aboard, I'll never watch it again unless a supercompelling guest appears. I like Whoopi, but she's dry as melba toast, and I used to like Sherri but have found she is a bit Christ-y and lost tons of credibility after her husband-bashing segued into her on-air embracing of the child he fathered with another woman while married to Sherri.

I probably would have watched it again with Kathy Griffin, if only to see how long Barbara could stand her.

I think Lindsay Lohan has what it takes to be an enduring superstar—she is beautiful, she is sexual, she matters (hence the scrutiny of her every move), she can act, she has a compelling personal story and now, for the first time, she has a classic camp movie role under her belt.

The problem is that most true stars take a little longer to go into supernova—Marilyn Monroe self-destructed at 36, Liz Taylor is alive but in many ways she croaked in her forties...Lindsay has mirrored their tumultuous lives and careers in microcosm, all by the age of 21.

Some observers think the proof that she is a human being out of control lies in her substance abuse and in her recent vehicular "vampage." But her judgment left her some time ago, probably when this hitherto consummate thespian agreed to star in a film with the ludicrous title I Know Who Killed Me. It had a script to match, and it now has Lindsay's first-ever terrible performance to add to its collection.

I was attracted to I Know Who Killed Me because I’ve followed Lindsay’s story closely, and because it cried out to me as a potential hoot. It reminded me of The Eyes Of Laura Mars and other ’80s pervfests. It couldn’t have lived down to its potential more thoroughly—it’s like the worst Brian De Palma movie ever, complete with a look-Ma-no-hands unnecessary split-screen moment, outrageously inappropriate line readings from a supporting cast of Z-grade thesps who look like they recently did blow and screwed each other, intrusive music and an embarrassingly melodramatic spooky score and lots of uncomfortably sexualized violence. In short, I’d say writer Jeff Hammond and director Chris Sivertson have hatched the next best thing to an actual Lindsay Lohan snuff movie for the small but eager audience that dreams of such things.

The first sign that I Know Who Killed Me is going to be some misogynist’s torture-rape fantasy is Lindsay’s character’s name—Aubrey Fleming. In this kind of movie, it’s important to concoct a sexy, hokey name that will be repeated over and over, as if attempting to hypnotize the viewers (or perhaps the regretful lead actress) that this is all just make believe and that it’s okay to get hard at the sight of a woman being dismembered.

Aubrey is a spunky 19-year-old college student who’s got it all—in fact, she’s so blessed with talents she finds she must abandon either the piano or her writing. Even though scenes in which she reads her imaginings aloud to rapt classmates fail to communicate her brilliance (after all, the short stories were written by the dude who wrote this flick), she opts for writing. She’s dating an amiable, hard-bodied jock, she’s cockteasing a menacing, hard-bodied weed-whacker, her mom has giant tits and dark hair like hers and she’s blissfully unconcerned with the fact that a classmate who’d been missing has turned up dead and absent a bunch of limbs. (“As we all know, Jennifer Toland’s body was found this week. Let’s win this one for Jennifer!” shouts an announcer at the big football game.)

Unfortch, Aubrey goes missing after agreeing to meet her friends for a movie. Her pals are of no use in finding her—not hard to accept considering one of them is Lonelygirl herself (Jessica Rose of the notorious YouTube ruse). Her parents are sad, but the cops investigating what appears to be the work of a serial killer (Spencer Garrett and a hysterically brusque Garcelle Beauvais) seem more annoyed than empathetic.

Cut to a long, long scene involving the freezing and removal of bits of Aubrey—this was when a young mother arrived at my screening toting four small children, though she later responsibly left during a smokin’ sex scene—and that brings us to the discovery of “Aubrey” at the side of the road by what appears to be a casting-couch-ready plastic-surgery patient.

Yay, she’s found! And we’re only 25 minutes into the movie! Oh. Wait. There’s going to be more. It's like Psycho, except the heroine doesn't die right away, just her arm and leg do. And a lot of what's left of the movie won't be in black-and-white, but will be related to the color blue—blue roses, blue stained glass, blue instruments of torture, daddy’s blue eyes. Blue is an unexplained fetish for the filmmaker. His answer to making the scenes menacing is, “Blue it!”...and he sure did.

"Like, wow, a giant plastic blue rose. How...creepy..."

It turns out that the young woman they’ve found insists she is not Aubrey, but is instead Dakota Moss, who we assume is the character Aubrey was writing about before she was snatched. (Weirdly, Lindsay’s real-life brother is named Dakota.) So we all assume Aubrey’s just buggin’ with some kind of reality-escaping mental issue, but when one of your doctors is played by ’80s debutante Cornelia Guest, you’re not too sure about your diagnosis.

Dakota is everything Aubrey was not—determined, profane, willing to ball a guy she’s just met (provided a condom is used) even without one of her arms and one of her legs. She also smokes—so we know this is a bad-ass bitch. Oh, and she says she was a crack addict’s daughter (getting warmer...) and that she stripped for a living, which necessitates a truly dirty scene that finds Aubrey, er, Dakota, er—fuck it, it’s Lindsay Lohan!—in the pole position.

The world's only disrobing-optional stripper.

The Advocate (and many other online sources) has picked up on Star's apology for the "NOT NORMAL" designation it gave to a "Man to man" kiss between Adam Sandler and Kevin James that I blogged about. I am satisfied with the apology, and it's nice that The Advocate reported on this, but the thrust of The Advocate's coverage is on the editor's explanation for the piece...when the really important and interesting part of her statement was as follows: "We are proud that we support the gay community and will continue to do so."

I think that statement goes beyond trying to explain a lapse in judgment or trying to enlighten us on the finer points of humor and becomes an outright endorsement of the gay community. That, to me, is breaking (gay) news.

Very nice! A link would have been very nicer!

Congrats to all the winners of this year's Outfest, but especially to Casper Andreas (whom I believe I met briefly at a Barracuda event for Boy Culture?) and Jesse Archer (whom I've met and who is a real sweetheart) for winning Outstanding Screenplay! They won it for A Four Letter Word, in which Jesse also stars. Since I know Jesse, it's not appropriate for me to expound on how cute he is in the image which decorates this post. But more than one four-letter word comes to mind: Lust. Envy. Woof. Bait. And finally food, because I'm now inexplicably starving even though I just ate.

The pronounced pucker.

In direct response to my post regarding what I feel is an anti-gay moment in the current issue of Star, EIC Candace Trunzo has issued a formal apology, sent to me just now by GLAAD's Entertainment Media Director Damon Romine:

"'Normal/Not Normal' is supposed to be funny, and I regret that this particular photo caption was offensive and not written in a way to make it clear that we were being humorous. The joke was that Kevin James and Adam Sandler are not gay. If the kiss was between Lance Bass and his boyfriend or any other gay celebrities it would be 'Normal.' Let me point out that in the same issue of STAR, we devote the entire Couples News lead to Neil Patrick Harris and his boyfriend moving in together. Now that's normal. I sincerely apologize that our attempt at humor was perceived by some to be offensive to the gay community. That was certainly not our intent. We are proud that we support the gay community and will continue to do so."

According to Romine (in addition to the content of Trunzo's own statement), she was "deeply apologetic."

Some of the commenters on various blogs that linked to my post have suggested this kind of thing is petty, not worth mentioning, that it isn't worth bringing up when we are fighting a war or that there was no chance Star would respond. Some have said Star is a tabloid so who cares what its editors believe on issues of substance. But I strongly felt and feel that what is written in Star and what is put out there by the entertainment world are sentiments that matter deeply, that mold young—and old!—minds. Star has an audited circ of 1.5 million—that alone makes it powerful.

So while I'm critical of certain aspects of it from time to time, I respect Star. And wasn't it worth bringing up this minor complaint now that it's led to a statement that Star respects us, too?

Personally, I totally accept Star's apology and I don't care how gay it is—I'm tickled pink that Ms. Trunzo cleared that up.