8 Steps of Daily Life/Blogging Chez Nathaniel

I am bad at math. There's actually 10/11 steps

1. Waking up to too few comments, tweets, shares, likes

2. Coffee

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Mad Men and The Other Women

* an earlier partial version of this article was accidentally published last night. It's complete now.

Have you wondered what happened to our series Mad Men @ The Movies? Well, Matthew Weiner and his team up and ditched the abundant movie references for most of season 5, leaving me to wish that I hadn't required movie references in order to write about the Sterling Draper Cooper Pryce worker-bees each week. Last week's "The Other Woman", a queasy game changing episode is the instant classic Season Five episode but for our purposes The Other Women this season on Mad Men are TV and Music (particularly the Beatles) which have stolen the pop culture referencing thunder from the movies.

Ratings and cinema references may be down (the former an obvious risk when a series disappears for long stretches) but quality, thankfully, isn't.  Not at all. The finale is next week on June 10th, an exhaustive television evening given that True Blood returns and it also happens to be Tony Awards Night and I also have a birthday party to attend... 

The much despised Betty Draper Francis. Still one of the most fascinating characters on television.

Much to look forward to. Much to write about. So herewith brief notes on the last four episodes... 

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Links: Descendants By Poster, Friends With Benefits, Uma in Blue

Lookie. It's the first poster for The Descendants starring George Clooney in which a man in Hawaii tries to reconnect with his young daughters. Will it be an Oscar player? It sure looks good on paper with Clooney leading and Alexander Payne (Sideways) in the director's chair but time will tell. I'll update the current Oscar predictions this weekend.

Brandon Ney looks at the famous "Hush" episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer from a Zen Buddhist perspective.
Stale Popcorn on the different posters for Friends With Benefits. Australians do do it dirtier.
In Contention chooses the top ten performances in Terrence Malick films. The director tends to hog the accolades for his film but that doesn't mean the performances aren't top notch.

Off Cinema Time Out
Drawn! "Where do ideas come from?" This is true. They are elusive little buggers.
Loldwell.com A true story about coffee (I can't quit!).
Critical Condition Lady Gaga and her "Dark Idealism" -good piece on the new record.

Finally...
Go Fug Yourself investigates Uma's Blue Period at Cannes. Love this quote on the dress to your right.

It's the type of thing you can't wear unless you are SUPREMELY sure that you are smoking hot, because basically the only design element to the dress is: your boobs, your abs, your bum. Fortunately, Uma appears to be architecturally sound there.

Plus: Uma suddenly has new film projects lined up.... although I'll believe Kill Bill Vol. 3 when I see it.

And if you feel you just didn't get enough Cannes coverage, IndieWire has a huge index of writings and interviews, Cineuropa has links to film trailers and awards reactions and Sasha tries to keep an open mind about Oscar and Cannes over at Awards Daily.

Here's Jude With Your Coffee

Start your work week fully caffeinated.

You take it with cream and sugar, right?