stuff
From Comic-Con, the 5-minute extended preview for The Golden Compass. [imdb]
The Dark Knight will knock your socks off! (Sorry, couldn't resist.) Today, we have a new viral website (instructions here), the official teaser in QT, and a new picture released showing The Joker (Heath Ledger) and Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal). [imdb]
Representatives for Naomi Watts, Stuart Townsend and Joseph Fiennes deny those Harry Potter 6 casting rumours. (Coming Soon)
Neil Gaiman is profiled in Time Magazine.
The trailer for Ang Lee's Lust, Caution is now up in glorious HD Quicktime.
The new official website for 30 Days of Night has been launched. Adapted from the horror graphic novel by writer Steve Niles and comics illustrator Ben Templesmith, it's directed by David Slade (Hard Candy). [imdb]
AMC's fascinating new drama Mad Men is set in 1960s New York, and the high-anxiety, cutting edge world of advertising (breaking the ground that Brian Kinney, decades later, would rumble in his own glamorous fashion). Its creator is Matthew Weiner, a writer and producer on The Sopranos. Cast features Jon Hamm (We Were Soldiers), Elisabeth Moss (The West Wing), Vincent Kartheiser (Angel: The Series), January Jones (We Are Marshall) and Christina Hendricks (Firefly). Alessandra Stanley at the NY Times reviews the show:
Men wore white shirts, drank Manhattans and harassed compliant secretaries in the elevator. Everybody read Reader’s Digest. Jews worked in Jewish advertising agencies, blacks were waiters and careful not to seem too uppity, and doctors smoked during gynecological exams. Women were called “girls.” Men who loved men kept it to themselves.
The magic of “Mad Men” is that it softly spoofs those cruel, antiquated mores without draining away the romance of that era: the amber-lit bars and indigo nightclubs, soaring skyscrapers, smoky railway cars and the brash confidence that comes with winning a war and owning the world. It’s a sardonic love letter to the era that wrought “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” and “The Best of Everything,” but homage is paid with more affection than satire.
Alan Sepinwall writes about the ambivalent women in Mad Men. At the Star-Ledger, he comments on the "British (and Aussie) Invasion" in American television.
Last chance to see the the Anselm Kiefer: New Works exhibition at the AGNSW - it closes tomorrow (July 29th). Philosophy Blog has an article on one of the works from the influential German painter/sculptor displayed there, "Women of Antiquity".