Smash 1.1 "Pilot"

NBC's new musical drama "Smash", a behind the scenes showbiz drama about Broadway musical theater and our enduring Marilyn Monroe obsession, premieres tonight. If pilot quality and series promise equal ratings, the show will make good on its title. The internet has had a good laugh about its relentless ad campaign and the absurd "Introducing... Katharine McPhee" angle (American Idol being underground experimental television that only 5 people have ever seen, don'cha know) but the show is smartly written enough to use McPhee's familiarity as an opening gambit to throw you into an unfamiliar world.

Reintroducing... McPhee's "Somewhere Over the Rainbow"

"Somewhere Over the Rainbow" is long since the most oversung song in the popular canon and a song McPhee was already known for from her original introduction years ago.  But this cozy dreamy showtune reverie is interrupted by a cel phone, snapping us back to plainclothes everyday New York where McPhee's "Karen" is auditioning for god knows what. The casting director is decidedly unmoved and takes the call. 

Dreamy musical outbursts screeching to a halt for reality-check comic purposes is as familiar a cliché as Somewhere Over the Rainbow but "Smash", as it turns out, isn't actually going to coddle us. Continued after the jump.

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Q&A: Blondes & Brunettes, Silents & Sequels

Each week in the Q & A column I choose a couple handfuls of reader questions to answer. I don't intentionally choose with themes in mind but this week's column, in the requested vacuum of Streep-less questions -- she'd been hogging the column -- tilted straight toward blonde icons and beloved brunettes.

Aaron: If "Girl with a Pearl Earring" and "Lost in Translation" had been released in different years, do you think Scarlett Johansson would be a two-time Academy Award nominee by now?

Fun question. I had to really ponder this. But my answer is no. Oscar fanatics love to debate "vote splitting" whenever someone has two meaty roles in the same category in a given year. The 2003 Oscar race was so weirdly splintered in Best Actress and the precursors just weren't showing herd mentality so right up until nomination morning it felt like virtually any combination of a shortlist that included frontrunners Theron and Keaton was possible. But Scarlett's Lost campaign had more problems than just The Girl With the Pearl Earring. Maybe Samantha Morton, in particular, would've been pushed aside for Scarlett had she only had one film. On the other hand, it was probably the combination of Scarlett's double-breakthrough that put her in the conversation to the degree that she was in it. But I don't believe that she'd have been a two time nominee regardless because the competition in 2004 felt so impenetrable; Moreno, Swank, Bening, Winslet and Staunton were always going to be the top five the following year. 

Scarlett on the Lost in Translation circuit: BAFTA, GLOBES, OSCAR

The most interesting thing about 2003 Best Actress, at least for Trivia Nerds, is how young it skewed historically. Even if you remove the novelty nomination for 13 year old Keisha Castle Hughes (Whale Rider) you might still have had a record breaking year since both Evan Rachel Wood (she was 16 during the Thirteen campaign) and Scarlett Johansson (who had just turned 20) could have also become Youngest Ever had they landed in the shortlist. Both were younger than Jennifer Lawrence from Winter's Bone even who is now the second youngest nominee ever in the category after Keisha. Don't you ♥ trivia!?

MrW: Do you intend to have seen one day all Oscar-winning performances (all four acting categories)? Are there any Oscar winning performances you're embarrassed to admit you haven't seen yet?

I would love to be able to someday claim this but I fear I'll die before that gargantuan task is completed. Naturally, I'm most worried about finishing the actress categories. The three movies I'm most embarrassed I haven't yet seen that sucked up plentiful acting attention / wins are My Left Foot, The Last Picture Show and, yes, The Godfather Part Two. I seriously have no idea why I keep putting the last one off. I even own it! 

Kent: Recently watched GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES for the first time. It was such a fun movie! Got me thinking about Marilyn Monroe and how the Academy shunned her so many times. She's so underrated as an actress. I loved her in BUS STOP and SOME LIKE IT HOT. Would you have rewarded her with nominations, even yet, a win?

True Story: I had this poster above of Marilyn Monroe from Bus Stop on my bedroom wall as a teenager -- yes the actressexuality started very early -- My mother saw it, shook her head  and sighed audibly. "Tell her to put some clothes on!" LOL. Different generations, you know.

Marilyn nominations, War of the Hepburns, and sequelitis after the jump.

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Curio: Costume Dramas

Alexa here.  Every year my desire to arrive at the perfect Halloween costume sees me trolling the internet for ideas.  Unlike my husband, who can throw together the perfect Carl Spackler costume in 10 minutes, I need to plan ahead, and I can't sew well enough to get really creative.  Someday I'll create the perfect Maude Lebowski Valkyrie look, but this year, on my daughter's orders, I'm going as a chicken.  Here are some looks I'd rather be wearing for Halloween.

A Black Swan Rodarte replica, $700, from this shop.

Take a flowered house dress, some duct tape, and this book, and you'd have the perfect Geena Davis Beetlejuice look.

Click for more including Marilyn, Catwoman, and Mattie Ross...

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NYFF: "My Week With Marilyn"

Poor Marilyn. The press hounded her. Fans would tear off pieces of her soul if they could. Co-stars and directors dissed her. Men wouldn't leave her alone (not that she wanted them to). And now Simon Curtis is holding yet another Monroe seance -- her soul will never rest in peace -- with his feature film debut My Week With Marilyn (2011),  a "true" story about the making of The Prince and the Showgirl (1957).

True must come with quotes. The film is based on the memoirs of Colin Clark, the third assistant director on the "lightest of comedies" directed by and starring Sir Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) and Marilyn Monroe (Michelle Williams). Can we trust the awestruck account of a young movie dreamer's version of his friendship and quasi-romance with the world's most famous actress? My Week With Marilyn emphatically does despite the amusingly placcid (if repetitive) moonyness with which the talented Eddie Redmayne portrays him, as if he's just as doped up as Marilyn, but much smarter about his cocktails of choice.

"Surprise!" Marilyn escapes with Colin Clark, lowly third assistant directorClark was 23 going on 24 when he met the immortal bombshell while hustling into the movies, landing his first job on a set through the help of his father's connections, despite the fact that the father did not approve of him 'running off to the circus'. The details of Clark's adventure in the movies are both acted out and explained to us in voiceover in the film's inelegant screenplay, which prefers for the characters to state the obvious or speak their psychologies aloud. Sometimes they even speak Marilyn's aloud; in the great transitive powers of true celebrity, everyone on earth is her psycho-therapist. Sometimes this obviousness of speech has comic payoffs (the film works best as a comedic clash between proper British theatrical training and idiot-savant American stardom) and once it even pays off both dramatically and comedically in a sadly funny scene where Colin Clark tells it like it is, succinctly, to Marilyn. He understands Marilyn and Olivier's mirrored goals and prophesies the failure of the movie.

Thought Balloons as dialogue and Michelle's performance after the jump...

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Yes, No, Maybe So: "My Week With Marilyn"

Visual information was a long time coming with My Week With Marilyn, but now at last the trailer for the film has arrived giving us a peek at Michelle Williams as Hollywood's most famous blonde bombshell and the story of a diversion with a reporter during the filming of The Prince and the Showgirl.

Dougray Scott and Michelle Williams as Mr & Mrs Arthur Miller

In the trailer we see lots of Michelle as Marilyn and a pissy Sir Kenneth Branagh as Sir Laurence Olivier. Judi Dench seems starstruck, Dominic Cooper annoyed, and Eddie Redmayne appropriately in over his head as the young man she takes up with.  Let's break it down. Do we wanna see it and why?

Breakdown and full trailer after the jump.

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