Flitting Through the Internet

Twilight

I didn't know they were making the book into a movie.  More at /Film.

Evolution of Style at the Oscars

You can see various outfits that actresses have worn (no actors?  I guess their clothes aren't as interesting) over the years.  Cher's are particularly unusual.

"You Can't Stop the Beat" - Hairspray (movie)

Then again, from this video, maybe I do want to see the movie (even without Harvey Fierstein).

And here The Wiz's Ease on Down the Road (if you haven't already looked it up).

Trailer for Hairspray

Here.

Dick Van Dyke

From IMDB trivia:

• In Britain, his attempt at a Cockney accent in Mary Poppins (1964) is so notorious that a "Dick Van Dyke accent" is an accepted slang term for an American's unsuccessful attempt at a British accent. Despite that, he is quite popular in Britain.
• Played Lionel Jeffries's son in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) even though Jeffries is actually six months his junior.
• "I never wanted to be an actor and to this day I don't. I can't get a handle on it. An actor wants to become someone else. I am a song-and-dance man and I enjoy being myself, which is all I can do."

How to make a starship Enterprise out of a floppy disk.

From Wikihow.  Directions here.

Nixon/Langella

There was an article in Newsweek last week which mentioned Frank Langella playing Richard Nixon in a new play, Frost/Nixon, which opens on Broadway this week.  The Newsweek article is more about Nixon as the subject of books/movies/plays, but here are some more links to the play:

The press release for the play, which has been playing in London:

One of the hottest tickets in the London theatre and winner of an Evening Standard Award, Frost/Nixon, the new play by Peter Morgan, directed by Michael Grandage, will open on Broadway this spring starring Frank Langella (as President Richard Nixon) and Michael Sheen (as Sir David Frost).

The acclaimed Donmar Warehouse production, which has received three Olivier Award nominations including Best New Play, will officially open on April 22, 2007 at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre (242 West 45th Street) for a 20-week limited engagement.  Preview performances will begin March 31.          

Frank Langella and Michael Sheen have also each received Best Actor Olivier Award nominations for their roles in Frost/Nixon.
...

Frost/Nixon recently transferred to London’s West End following a sold-out run at the Donmar Warehouse. Prior to coming to Broadway, the production is playing at the Gielgud Theatre through February 3, 2007. 

Revisiting Frost/Nixon, critic Nicholas de Jongh said in The Evening Standard:  "No other West End production surpasses Peter Morgan's Frost/Nixon for serious-minded excitement and black comedy, or offers a performance to which that misused adjective ‘great’ applies,” and continued, “As Nixon, Frank Langella manages an extraordinary acting feat. Michael Sheen's Frost, already an expert piece of mimicry, has magnificently deepened and darkened. Michael Grandage stages a swift, brilliant production. I was enthralled, amused and enlightened."

...
Frost/Nixon tackles the question: How did David Frost, a famous British talk-show host with a playboy reputation, elicit the apology that the rest of the world was waiting to hear from former President Richard Nixon?  The fast-paced new play shows the determination, conviction and cunning of two men as they square off in one of the most monumental political interviews of all time.

Playbill News:

...Frost/Nixon is based on the television interviews, conducted in 1977 by the British talk-show host, which became the most watched interview ever in TV history. They also elicited a remarkable admission from the former U.S. President, whose incrimination in the break-in at the offices of the Democratic Committee at the Watergate Hotel in Washington led to his ultimate resignation.

The Chicago Tribune:

...As with "The Queen," Morgan's play, performed without intermission, concerns what Michael Billington, critic for The Guardian of London, has called "the politics of the media" and places its principals at a crossroad in their lives. For Frost, the talks with Nixon, which gathered the largest audience ever for a news interview (45 million viewers in America), were an opportunity to revive a fading TV career and prove that he was more than an entertaining lightweight; for Nixon, the interviews were a chance for badly needed cash and the possibility of restoring him to some public favor.

There are other characters in the play portraying various aides and allies in the Nixon and Frost camps, including superagent Irving "Swifty" Lazar, who squeezed $600,000 out of Frost for the exclusive interview rights; but it is the two principals who are crucial to the play's aura of authenticity, and casting those roles was a key to the production's success.

One role was relatively easy to cast, because Morgan, who knew Michael Sheen's work well (he plays Prime Minister Tony Blair in "The Queen"), wrote the part of Frost for him; but Nixon was tougher. He had already been endlessly imitated and finding a fresh, convincing take on his character was a problem.

Enter Langella. He is a two-time Tony Award winner and had been a box office sensation as a sexy Dracula on Broadway in 1979, but his earlier two stage appearances in England had been resounding flops, and no one (including Langella) would have thought him a likely candidate for Nixon. However, according to director Michael Grandage, "I was keen to find an American actor -- he had to be American -- who could bring something of the office of president on stage with him -- a charisma, a power, a sense of `other.' Langella was an imposing man with a huge voice, and he is a stage actor first and foremost. Moreover, he had just opened in the film `Good Night and Good Luck' [in which he gave a powerhouse portrayal of William S. Paley, board chairman of CBS] and his profile was in a strong place. After a few conversations with him, it was clear he was the man for the job."

Langella, a self-described "stage monster," attacked the role with his usual ferocity. He viewed and re-viewed the original videotapes, talked at length with Nixon colleagues and confidants, read everything he could find on the subject, and took exhaustive notes on Morgan's script. Arriving for rehearsals, he showed his pages of notes to Grandage, who said, "Well, at least you're taking the job seriously." He also showed his notes to Morgan and asked him if he could use any of them. Morgan replied, "Maybe one or two."

However and whatever, the resulting Nixon evoked by Langella is a stunning piece of work. Shambling on stage in the play's first scene, making lame wisecracks as he prepares to announce his resignation on television, he immediately summons up the body language, the vocal rhythms and the inner workings of his subject. His Nixon is a man used to command but now an outcast desperate for recognition, Sharp, sly and quick in his political instincts, he bulls forward to the interviews, hoping he can turn them to his advantage. This portrayal, according to Matt Wolf, an American critic based in London, "forsakes all facile attempts at mimicry to take us far inside the wounded psyche of a leader adrift in a hubristic landscape of his own making."

"I'm tall, like Nixon, and I'm in my 60s," says Langella. But, aside from a small hairpiece, he uses no makeup to give him the Nixon look. "I wash my face," he says, "put on my blue suit and walk on stage,"

Tug of war

Pitted against the slight, debonair Frost of Sheen, he spins out an amazingly suspenseful tug of war between the two men, the play's swift progression of scenes climaxing when they meet in the taping of the interviews. Here, with a giant television screen in the stage's background capturing the proceedings, Morgan's script quotes the actual language of the interviews. But it is the physical presence of the two actors -- Sheen perched on the edge of his chair, leaning forward in his eagerness, while Langella shifts, squirms and finally collapses under fire -- that gives this re-created event its sense of convincing reality. And in that moment when Nixon finally faces the camera to admit his culpability, there is a brilliant theatrical stroke when the TV screen shows Langella/Nixon's anguished face in extreme close-up.

It will be interesting to see how all this plays out when Sheen, Langella and an American supporting cast open April 22 in the always risky territory of Broadway. In London, where I saw the play, critics and audiences, including David Frost (or Sir David, since his 1993 knighthood) were generally approving.

This is not the old Tricky Dick, nor is it necessarily the making of a new Nixon Agonistes. But it does offer a fresh perspective, taking place at a particular point in time, on the nature of a man whose life, one would have thought, has been explored from every possible angle.

"I tried not to be a caricature," Langella says, "and I tried to follow the wishes of a close Nixon friend who told me, `Whatever you do, don't make him into a boor or a drunk, because he was neither.'"

Langella's own attitude toward the man he so intensely studied and so spectacularly plays, is simple: "Surely he was capable of great evil. Some of the things he did were unforgivable. But he had intelligence and ambition and the overwhelming desire to be great. And then, because of greed or paranoia or some terrible flaw, he threw it all away.

"It's not a tragic story. But it is certainly sad. Very sad."

Disney's next movie

The Frog Princess

[Hat tip to Everything I Know I Learned from Musicals]

Tintin

Dreamworks is going to make a Tintin movie.

Ursula - Little Mermaid and Hairspray

From IMDB trivia:

The character of Ursula was based on Divine [right]. Her personality and some of her actions were also largely inspired by a previous Disney villain, Madame Medusa from Disney's The Rescuers (1977).

In the original movie of Hairspray, Divine played Edna Turnblad, the role later played in the musical by Harvey Fierstein (left) (who won a Tony Award for it in 2003).   Here's "You Can't Stop the Beat" from the 2003 Tony Awards:

Unfortunately, Harvey Fierstein isn't a big enough star for movies so John Travolta will be playing the part in this summer's movie.  Queen Latifah will also be in it - singing "You Can't Stop the Beat"  (Promotional slideshow here). 

And here's a commercial for the Finnish production.