Out today is Best of Warner Bros. 20 Film Collection: Musicals, which is described in a press release as follows:

"Warner Bros. continues to entertain the world with films passionately produced, selectively acquired, carefully preserved and impeccably curated for both the casual and ultimate movie lover to enjoy forever. Best of Warner Bros. 20 Film Collection: Musicals will be released February 12 and will include films such as Singin' in the Rain, The Wizard of Oz and many more."

Talk about a killer collection! The full list is:

Privates dancer

Sherry Vine wants Tony Danza, Tony Danza for money.

David Miscavige's niece blows the lid off of Scientology.

Fugitive killer loves Ellen, hates lesbian cops.

Rob Gronkowski offered $3.75 million to do porn.

Viola Davis retires her maid uniform.

Hot model Dominic—ciao, Bello.

Porn actor dies in bathtub at 52.

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) on Boy Scouts' gay ban: "Outrageous."

Rex Reed: Melissa McCarthy = "obese," "obnoxious," "tractor-sized" "female hippo."

Zero Rex appeal

"I feel like Kay Francis!"

Last night was the NYC premiere of the Cabaret 40th Anniversary Restoration (on Blu-ray from Warner Bros. February 5, $27.98) at the Ziegfeld, the same theater that hosted the landmark musical's 1972 premiere.

York, Minnelli, Grey, Berenson, Robert Osborne & Nicole Fosse

I arrived at 5 to cover the carpet, shocked to discover it was quite small, but also to find that the tented-in area was wide open down at the end where I was positioned. It was freezing! Commiserating with my fellow non-A-list outlets helped somewhat, but I've never been so thrilled to see Nicole Fosse—Bob and Gwen Verdon's daughter—when she arrived, not only because she remembered me from the press day ("I know you!") but also because that meant we were down to the last hour before the film began and I could thaw out.

I hope she had a "terrific" time

Though some did photos on the carpet (Tony Danza, Arlene Dahl, Bernadette Peters), none of the actors who attended but who were not a part of the film did press. That should've made things more manageable, but the extreme cold (and wind, don't forget the wind) actually kept me from getting anything from either Marisa Berenson or Michael York. I'd just chatted with them at the press day, but still, it would've helped justify being freeze-dried to get a question with them.

 

Above, check out a gallery of nine of the subjects through the years

56 Up

BOY CULTURE REVIEW: **** out of ****

It's hard to rave about a movie that left me so depressed, but it would be a crime not to recognize what a treasure the whole Up series, not least of which the latest installment, is.

The premise began in 1964, when British TV filmed a documentary about the lives of 14 seven-year-olds from all walks of life in order to shine a light on the country's caste system. Over time, the hope became that they could all be re-interviewed every seven years forever. Nine have been in every installment, three have missed between one and three and one refused to appear after the age of 21.

This is not reality TV, where people auditioning to be famous agree to meet for lunch in order to fight and thus entertain the world. This series is the real deal, intimate, often painfully revelatory one-on-ones with the subjects, their mates, their extended familes. If you've never seen any of them, pick any one and you'll be hooked.

56 Up, directed (as have all the others except for the introductory installment) by Michael Apted, runs 138 minutes filled with not only ample glimpses into the love lives and careers of the now 56-year-old "kids," but also allows each the space to complain about the negatives of being in the films, including feeling misunderstood, misrepresented or shown two-dimensionally.

Director Apted later conceded there should've been more girls

What makes the films—and this film—work is the sometimes breathtaking insights into life that come from seemingly mundane interviews conducted over the course of a couple of days every seven years. Via snippets from the previous films, one sees the innocence of  youth, the budding of sexuality, the ups and downs of romantic love, the thrills of success and the agony of failure. Most movingly, now that the participants are closing in on retirement, one sees a fuller arc of life and of the physical body. It's impossible to watch and not walk away wondering: "What would I say for myself about the years I've been here?" One wonders if one would be jaded like local politician Neil, optimistic like barrister John, beaten down by life like Jackie, a modest and spunky success story like Tony?

But sometimes hard questions need to be asked, and that's something the Up Series has recognized from the beginning.

56 Up opens in New York today. Click here for other showings.

Crazy for you

Silver Linings Playbook

BOY CULTURE REVIEW: **** out of ****

After the early promise of Spanking the Monkey (1994) and Flirting with Disaster (1996), writer/director David O. Russell stumbled disastrously with the unwatchable I Heart Huckabees (2004). Since then, he seems to have found his groove as an innovative storyteller within a loosely mainstream framework, knocking it out of the park with the compelling The Fighter (2010) and one of this year's absolute best, Silver Linings Playbook.

Bradley Cooper is Oscar-worthy as "Pat," a wayward son recently released from an asylum after becoming obsessed and violent over his cheating wife (a scarce Brea Bee). Sprung from the loony bin, he's not a hit around his hometown, not even with his parents (equally OCD dad Robert DeNiro and daffy mom Jacki Weaver), with whom he has to live. He just can't seem to let his marriage go, nor does he seem fully cognizant of the bizarre mood swings and at inappropriate behavior he continues to exhibit, whether it be compulsive runs, blunt social interactions or worse.

When his pal "Ronnie" (a hilariously understated John Ortiz) and his handful of a wife "Veronica" (Julia Stiles, who could easily have been the female lead a few years ago) introduce Pat to Veronica's equally mentally unstable sister "Tiffany" (Jennifer Lawrence), it's a match made in dysfunctional heaven—they discuss meds from the get-go and begin a bizarre, touching, hilariously awkward courtship that culminates with Pat's blackmailed participation in a local dance competition.

As wonderfully shaded as Cooper is—this is the best he's ever been in a movie, in a role that seems perfectly crafted for him—Lawrence is at least as impressive, if only because yet again she disappears into a part. This time, she plays Tiffany as flashing between vulnerable and violently resentful, and she's hardly recognizable doing so.

It takes an auteur like Russell to go so far out on a limb that even Shirely MacLaine would urge caution, and to remind us that not every movie needs to be neat and tidy and a slight reworking of every movie we've seen before it. One of the year's best.

**********

Gidget goes to the White House

Lincoln

BOY CULTURE REVIEW: ***1/2 out of ****

As much as I liked Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple (1985), it always did have that slightly Disney feel to it. I feared the same from Lincoln, not only for its casting of the very modern-looking (and too old!) Sally Field as "Mary Todd Lincoln", but for the gimmicky, Disneyland's Hall of Presidents-esque clips I'd seen of Daniel Day-Lewis as our sixteenth president.

When I first started watching the film, I thought my fears had been justified—it opens with a really ridiculously mythological-feeling scene showing "Lincoln" (Day-Lewis) sitting with some Union soldiers, two white and two black, and proceeds to hammer us over the head with the idea that Lincoln was a uniter of the races.

But aside from that misstep, the rest of the film was an impressive and engrossing piece of work. It's more of an artfully done historical document than a history-infused piece of art in that it focuses so heavily on the machinations (some unsavory) Honest Abe had to resort to in order to get slavery abolished on the federal level while simultaneously winning the Civil War, but no matter—a good movie is a good movie.

And speaking of good, Sally Field turns out to be the best thing about Lincoln, giving a starkly empathetic performance as the first lady who's lost one son and is on the verge of insanity over the thought of losing another (Joseph Gordon Leavitt). Her performance is beautifully modulated, her face expressive and her true age never visually an issue (at the time of filming, she was more than 20 years older than Mary Todd Lincoln was in the period during which the film is set; Day-Lewis is almost exactly the age Lincoln was). If she were to best Anne Hathaway for Best Supporting Actress, it couldn't be said she didn't deserve it.

The reason Field stands out is that she's one of the few actors given enough room to emote and to craft a character for more than highly dramatic (Gloria Reuben's stoic slave) or highly comical purposes. Day-Lewis is superb as Lincoln, but he's still so mired in his excellent costume and makeup and in camera trickery/lighting used to create and maintain his uncanny likeness to the man that his performance still felt more superficial than it might have been had those considerations been cast aside.

In a memorable supporting role, Tommy Lee Jones is outstanding as "Thaddeus Stevens," Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committe and a radical forced to betray the purity of his beliefs in order to receive the biggest, broadest realization of his dream of racial equality. The fireworks between him Field in one scene are a hoot, and immediately call to mind former First Lady Hillary Clinton's battles with Republicans dead set against her husband.

In fact, the film plays as the thinly veiled story of Barack Obama—a great orator and war-time president re-elected to office in spite of hyperbolic opposition by the other party, the art of political maneuvering vs. the heart of being true to one's principles. One major difference is which side is which; the modern Republican party is quick to claim Lincoln as its own, but would Lincoln return the favor were he alive today? Hardly.

There are almost too many familiar faces for Lincoln to ever feel like less than a Hollywood epic (Hal Holbrook, David Strathairn, John Hawkes, Jackie Early Haley, S. Epatha Merkerson, Lukas Haas, a magnetic Lee Pace and a grotesquely funny James Spader), but it's still an engrossing and exhaustively detailed, serious biopic of one of the United States's most important figures. Lincoln may last a hair longer than the actual Civil War did, but it's a pleasure of a history lesson.

Not the same old song and dance

Les Misérables

BOY CULTURE REVIEW: **** out of ****

I see a lot of Broadway musicals, yet I'm not up to the level of considering myself a theater queen. Maybe my appreciation, but malleable reverence, for the form is why Tom Hooper's very different take on Les Miz blew me away; I had no reservations about the film's much-ballyhooed live-take (and therefore rougher) singing, its emphasis on hitting emotional rather than musical notes.

In the timeless story of a group of characters struggling for happiness or merely for survival on the mean streets of 19th Century France, Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway give two of the most open-hearted performances I can recall seeing in a movie. Jackman's "Jean Valjean"—imprisoned 20 years for stealing bread to help his starving nephew and for attempting to escape—transforms from defiant to embittered to seraphic on his journey to redeem himself, to pay a debt he feels he owes after jumping bail and reinventing himself as a successful mayor. The performance is deeply felt and his singing is beautiful, even if—as with the others—Jackman is usually singing more for the narrative than for ear candy.

As "Fantine," a hapless young mother bullied into a breathtaking slide from a desirable (and therefore resented) working girl to disgraced prostitute, Hathaway shines. Her performance of "I Dreamed a Dream" is as electrifying as Jennifer Hudson's "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going" in Dreamgirls—and it should earn her an Oscar, as well.

Russell Crowe as "Javert," Valjean's obsessive nemesis, is a bit wooden and his singing less expressive when compared to those around him, but it's not enough to detract from Hooper's densely emotional epic, nor is the somewhat lazy casting of Helena Bonham Carter as "Mme. Thénardier," a role that's distractingly reminiscent of her turn in Sweeney Todd. Eddie Redmayne as "Marius" and Samantha Barks as "Eponine" live up to Jackman and Hathaway, Sacha Baron Cohen is spot-on as "M. Thénardier," Amanda Seyfried's "Cosette" is sweet and Broadway vet Aaron Tveit is charismatic as the rebel "Enjolras." The children—particularly Daniel Huttlestone as the heart-tugging little shit "Gavroche"—are excellent.

Overall, there is a palpable feeling that all involved took the story and the characters seriously and that each actor understood every word sung. It's a spectacle, but never for spectacle's sake, a darkly lavish opera. I can't recommend it highly enough. This director and his committed ensemble have truly come together to create a film classic.

Mean but funny and the impersonations are a scream!

**********

Something wild

Beasts of the Southern Wild

BOY CULTURE REVIEW: **** out of ****

Newcomer Benh Zeitlin, using non-actors (or rather, natural-born actors), has directed a mystical, moving poem of a film about a little girl named "Hushpuppy" (Quvenzhané Wallis) barely existing in a remote Louisiana bayou alongside, more than with, her anti-social, free-living, passionately angry father (Dwight Henry). Animalistic in their day-to-day existence—which consists of eating, blowing off steam and in Hushpuppy's case exploring the abandoned bits of civilization that happen to be under their control—the two are at times allies and at other times combatants, but are drawn together when a massive hurricane destroys their ramshackle community.

Haunted by her childish vision of the world as a place of balance where the presumed melting of massive icecaps has caused the storm which in turn has unleashed wandering beasts the likes of which would scare Maurice Sendak, Hushpuppy almost has to be her own grown-up. She will need to draw on her father's many harsh lessons, which are a combination of tough love and abuse. Her mettle is mesmerizing, as is her journey from her ruined home to the world beyond the levee—and back?

I definitely did not get the impression that these people were to be praised for their stubborn refusal to blend in with society. I would like nothing more than for Hushpuppy to be plucked from her squalor and put into school. But that's not something I felt the movie required me to believe. It felt to me more like an examination of how the mind of a child would work under these conditions, and how the human spirit presents itself in less than ideal circumstances.

This movie is an example of how a cerebral, experimental work of art can also be gritty and touching and real. If Wallis is not given an Oscar nomination, the Academy has no credibility. None.

"Fasten your seatbelts!"

The Guilt Trip

BOY CULTURE REVIEW: *** out of ****

I went into this Barbra Streisand/Seth Rogen mom/son buddy movie expecting it to be as meandering and pointless as its unfunny trailer, but I was pleasantly surprised. Eventually. In the beginning, it was hard to take the unlikable characters—Streisand's Jewish mother a smothering nag, Rogen's inventor son cold and seemingly filled to the brim with resentment. It could've been Psycho: The Prequel. Then, once a huge fight cleared the air, watching the characters embark on a long road trip as the son attempts to sell an all-natural cleaner he's invented became a pleasure. In particular, it was fun watching Streisand let her hair down, avoid vanity shots (except toward the end, where her hair suddenly looks like buttah) and crack wise, not to mention scarf down a steak that would have choked a prize fighter. The film holds a couple of bittersweet surprises, but the biggest shocker is that it's not a broad, Fockers-like comedy, but something if not deep then certainly more to be felt than simply enjoyed.

On the Road

BOY CULTURE REVIEW: ** out of ****

Less fun was sitting through Walter Salles's take on Jack Kerouac's classic On the Road. A thinly disguised memoir chronicling Kerouac's (Sam Riley as "Sal Paradise") relationships with Neal Cassady (Garrett Hedlund as "Dean Moriarty"), Allen Ginsberg (Tom Sturridge as "Carlo Marx"), the book does not fare well on the big screen, with most of the characters coming off as ridiculously pretentious, selfish and vapid. Or maybe that's how I'd react to reading the book at age 44. One thing's for sure—Riley does not conjure up whatever it is people find appealing about Kerouac, and that is a fatal flaw. The story still stings, even in a not-great adaptation, because it's about the devastation that charm can visit upon the romantic. I was also enamored of Garrett Hedlund's I-shouldn't-love-him intensity as well as his oft-glimpsed power-fucking. I never though I'd say this, either, but Kristen Stewart (as a not-that-innocent child bride) and Kirsten Dunst (as a woman who thinks she's tamed "Dean" but soon finds out she was sorely mistaken) are the absolute highlights, managing to fill their characters with more emotion and complexity with less camera time than all of the guys combined. Overall, it had me murmuring, "Are we there yet?"

Top Justin Bieber underwear sightings.

Male student strips to tick off anti-gay preacher.

Rick Warren as anti-gay as ever.

Gay roomies.

Will Chalker in his skivvies.

House GOP committee chairs: All white meat.

Dad rips adult kids some new assholes.

Angus T. Jones sorry if he offended his co-filth peddlers.

Obama and Romney to do lunch. (Why???)

Me-OW!: Ex-gay lawsuit in NJ.

Mama Makeup from Truth or Dare sighted.

Madonna rocks (real?) fur in Mexico.

DNA cover #155 couldn't be more revealing (Work Unfriendly).

The AP uses dumb logic in advising against using "homophobia."

Moving mea culpa from ex-Bill O'Reilly fan blown away by Chasing Ice:

BOY CULTURE REVIEW: *** OUT OF ****

I once had scabies in elementary school, but don't worry—a gayby, and the film Gayby, are much less unpleasant.

He's versatile: Lisecki wrote, directed and appears in Gayby

Gayby, written, directed and featuring a nelly-but-with-teeth (Franklin Fangborn?) supporting performance by Jonathan Lisecki, is about an average gay Joe (Matthew Wilkas) and what used to be called his fag hag but is now called his female best friend (Jenn Harris) getting together and deciding to have a baby...the old-fashioned way.

Think of it as The Next Best Thing, but funny and well-acted and worth seeing.

What we liked about this sweet comedy is that it has real heart and brings a bit of dimension to a simple premise thanks to the great chemistry of the talented cast. Wilkas is way too adorable to be believably having dating issues, but he has a wonderful Peter Scolari quality that helps you forget—for minutes at a stretch—that he is in possession of a bangin' body and could easily be off somewhere modeling instead of playing a character pining for an ex and meekly trying to find his Mr. Right. He's absolutely great in this.

Harris has a deadpan Jackie Hoffman thing that makes some of her work—especially an athletic sex scene—utterly hilarious.

And even though those three would have been enough to make Gayby satisfying, the large supporting cast is uniformly good and interesting, especially Jack Ferver, who out-nellies Lisecki in a memorable battle of the boy bitches. You know the script is good when you see the variety of talent Lisecki has attracted for small roles, including a virtual cameo by Randy Harrison, appearances by two guys who would go on to appear on Girls (Adam Driver and Alex Karpovsky) and Miss Mississippi Massala herself, Sarita Choudhury.

Gayby has a few easy jokes and some clichés, but it never gives itself over to them and never gets too serious, and that's the point. Having children isn't all angst—there's time to smile.

Gayby is available December 11 at WolfeVideo.com

Rebel of the ball

BOY CULTURE REVIEW: **1/2 OUT OF ****

I saw a preview of the wildly unoriginal (it's like Glee crossed with Glee!) Pitch Perfect, and while it definitely isn't, it hits most of the notes it doesn't have to strain for and makes for a fun diversion if you're not looking for operatic supremacy.