Links: Martin, Cheno, Lynch, Diggs, Max, and More

To Purchase Click on Poster

<---LOOK at this amazing Blue Velvet poster making the web rounds. [Hat tip MNPP]. I so love painted movie posters and it's only 7 bucks. Click on photo to go to the artist's site.

Links
El Desio Pedro Almodóvar blogging from the set of Silencio (!!) with two photos
Dissolve Today in Ballsiest News: Nate Parker (Beyond the Lights) who we just celebrated as a Born in '79 Hottie is directing and starring in a feature biopic of Nat Turner, a slave who led a bloody massacre against white captors in 1831. But here's the ballsy part: they're naming it Birth of a Nation (!) 
Vanity Fair Don Hertzfeldt (World of Tomorrow) says being an artist should be your full time job. Hear hear! Start donating to creatives you believe in or purchasing their work. Life is not free. 
MUBI "Psychopolitical Realism in Mad Max: Fury Road" - provocative piece
Far Flung Correspondents looks at Fury Road's use of Giussepe Verdi's "Dies Irae" from his Requiem mass
Decider pays tribute to Under the Skin, now streaming on Amazon, which we are confident people will continue to discover and be floored by
Comics Alliance Chris Pine may be the new Steve Trevor for the new Wonder Woman film
AV Club celebrates Steve Martin's ear worm "King Tut" - have I ever inadequately expressed to you how much I love Steve Martin? If not, know that it's muchly. 

Vulture passes out fun awards to the movies that screened at Cannes including "Most Likely to Make You Hug Your Cab Driver" (The Palme winner Dheepan) and  "Hottest Movie With No Sex" (Maryland ....starring Matthias Schoenaerts naturally. He can't help himself)
MNPP Jude Law accessorizes with chest hair at the Spy premiere
Boy Culture Little Darling Tatum O'Neal is now dating women
Forbes the current gender quake in the film world - female directors want to work but it's not a meritocracy 

Broadway's Season
Towleroad Taye Diggs is set to play Hedwig on Broadway (such an amazing/unexpected choice!) and TMZ reporters continue to be awful but sometimes they're hounding obnoxiousness gets wonderful things like Taye Diggs deadpan monologue about being a drag queen and prostitute in high school come out. He's kidding but what else are you going to do in a situation like this?
Time Out NY Why Kristin Chenoweth deserves the Tony
Theater Mania "Taystee" from OITNB (Danielle Brooks) is joining the revival of The Color Purple on Broadway. She'll play Oprah's old role "Sofia" 

Showtune to Go...
A little Cheno. If you ever have the chance to see her live (on stage or in concert) do not hesitate. Spend the money. Simply put: She's one of the best live performers of all time. She ALWAYS delivers (I've seen her several times) and in a really big way, too - spontaneous, disciplined, great sounding, and just hilarious.

Beauty vs Beast: Blue Beauty On Velvet Beast

Jason from MNPP here wishing everyone a blue blue Blue Monday. When I tell you that it feels as if I've been having an awfully Lynchian series of months, I'm sure your first reaction is to 1) shudder and 2) to call the police on my behalf. But this is not a cry for help, don't worry - I haven't turned into a door-knob or anything.  It's just been a random confluence of events - I saw David Lynch speak at BAM a few months ago; then I read Lynch on Lynch (a terrific book of interviews with the director); then there was the news about the Twin Peaks revival; then I met Laura Dern at a party and told her she needs to get herself into the Twin Peaks revivial; then I went to Philadelphia and saw an exhibit of his paintings. It's been Lynch up the wazoo, basically.

And since tomorrow is Mr. Lynch's 69th birthday it seems a heck of a good time to give him the "Beauty vs Beast" treatment. I mean, what other director works in such extremes of dreamy beauties and nightmare beasts after all? Laura Palmer and the BOB at the end of her bed, for instance. And when the beauty & beast meet, watch out - you could argue that Laura Dern's become the perfect muse for him since she can so effortlessly stretch her sunny beauty out out out way too far for comfort. Those examples aside, it was pretty clear where we needed to mine this week's competition from...

poll by twiigs.com

Treat yourself to some cherry pie, climb inside a stranger's closet, do whatever it takes, and then hit the comments to tell us whose disease you want put inside of you in the next seven days, and why and how. And here's to your...

Mix Tape: "In Dreams" in Blue Velvet

Andreas from Pussy Goes Grrr here, with one of the most disturbing cinematic uses of pop music.

From his controlled demolition of the nuclear family in Eraserhead to his grotesque send-up of Hollywood in Mulholland Drive, David Lynch has always delighted in savaging American institutions. Through the S&M-tinged surrealism of Blue Velvet, he pried the bland surface off of suburbia and illuminated the perverse secrets underneath.

The darkest of those secrets is Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), an abusive, foul-mouthed gangster who holds sultry chanteuse Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) in his thrall. Hopper is a villain unlike any other, snapping from relative calm to strung-out psychosis without warning. But Frank's most terrifying tendency isn't his hair-trigger temper or his torrents of profanity: it's the unexpected well of emotion festering inside him.

Read more about Dennis Hopper in David Lynch's America after the jump.

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Take Three: Isabella Rossellini

Craig here with Take Three. Today: Isabella Rossellini

Take One: Blue Velvet (1986)
“She... Wore... Bluuuuuue Vel-vet.” Indeed she did: bluer than velvet was the night. Ladies and gentlemen, Rossellini was the Blue Lady, Miss Dorothy Vallens, in David Lynch’s mid-eighties masterpiece Blue Velvet. Vallens was a tortured torch singer, a gas-guzzling freakopath Frank Booth’s (Dennis Hopper) late-night inviter and pervy amateur detective Jeffrey Beaumont’s (Kyle MacLachlan) sexual initiation vixen. And yet, behind it all, lay a fretful wife and mother. Rossellini’s introductory scene in the film showed her as a midnight siren, a depressed blue dahlia who, once done with her sad, strange rendition of Bobby Vinton’s titular song, seems to dematerialise into a pair of Lynch’s signature red curtains.

 After she finds snooping Jeffrey in her closet she’s both defender of her home and explorer of her own dark thoughts. She’s furious, but as excited by the imminent enveloping mystery as he is; you can just make out the glimmer of utter thrill creep across Rossellini’s face as she jabs his cheek with a breadknife. Here's to Rossellini for nearly making Dorothy as kinky as her male lead. She doesn’t so much break the fourth wall as demolish it, with an infuriated stare and exclamation to camera (“Grand Central Station!”) when more than one guest visits her gloomy apartment at once.

More of the sublime Saddest Music within Blue Velvet, plus the ageless silliness of Death Becomes Her after the jump.

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