Not content with just five, eHarmony broke out the 20 Essential Breakup Movies — this time “High Fidelity” makes the list, along with a lot of other BG reader favs. Though, oddly, no one here has mentioned “Chungking Express” yet. Focus, people, focus!
She slays us! Back in 2000, Marti Noxon — then supervising producer for Buffy and consulting producer for Angel — graced BreakupGirl.net with her presence, answering reader questions as part of our You & A Guest series, which also featured Kevin Bacon, Dan Savage, Martha Quinn, and even the boys of O-Town! (And significantly scooped other online pubs who wouldn’t do that for years. W00t!)
She’s been plenty bizzy since, but we’re extra-super-excited about her next gig. (In fact, she’s one of the few people we’d trust with something so tricky-yet-potentially-excellent.) Via Variety:
Diane Keaton is attached to star in a series project in development at HBO revolving around a feminist icon who launches a sex mag for women.
The untitled series is among the first projects to come from Grady Twins Prods., the production company formed earlier this year by TV vets Marti Noxon (“Buffy the Vampire Slayer”) and Dawn Parouse Olmstead (“Prison Break”).
The duo is also working with helmer Guillermo del Toro and author Chuck Hogan on a smallscreen adaptation of their book trilogy “The Strain.”
The Keaton project stems from Noxon and Parouse Olmstead’s interest in exploring the legacy of the feminist movement of the 1970s. Keaton was taking meetings for a TV series project, and she responded to Noxon and Parouse Olmstead’s vision for a show featuring a Gloria Steinem-type character who tries to reignite interest in femme-centered activism by launching a porn mag for women.
Noxon is writing the script and will exec produce along with Parouse Olmstead. After Keaton signed on, the lead character was tailored to the thesp’s background and experiences.
“We really value her experience and outlook on the world,” Noxon said. “She’s incredibly frank and honest as an actress and as a person, yet she’s also extremely private. We really want to capture that in the show.”
The “Strain” book trilogy is a bioterror thriller with fangs, telling the story of an outbreak in the U.S. of a virus that either kills those who are exposed to it or turns them into vampires. The first of the series came out in June. The plan is to shop the TV project, envisioned as an event series unfolding over three seasons, early next year after the second book is released.
Noxon and Parouse Olmstead have long been friends and occasional collaborators on such projects as the 2004-05 season Fox mystery drama “Point Pleasant.”
With help from their reps at WME, the two decided to go it alone as partners in Grady Twins after years of working for large production entities. (The Grady Twins moniker is a nod to the murdered twin girls who haunt the Overlook Hotel in “The Shining.”)
The two put up their own coin for office space in L.A.’s Larchmont Village and got busy setting up projects. “We both felt like it was a good time to strike out and not be committed to any one place,” Parouse Olmstead said. “The business models for network TV and cable TV are changing. We see this as a moment of opportunity for a company like this.”
The duo’s first series to go into production is “Gigantic,” a drama set for debut in January on the Viacom-owned cabler TEENick (the new name for the N as of September). Show examines the world of celebrity culture by focusing on high-school age children of fictional celebs.
As evidenced by Grady Twins’ initial batch of projects, Noxon and Parouse Olmstead aim to cast a wide net as producers. And they’re committed to live by the maxim that “we don’t want to be doing anything that we don’t have a passion for,” Noxon said.
Noxon’s recent primetime credits include “Private Practice,” “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Mad Men.” Separate from her Grady Twins labors, she’s set to make her directing debut on the indie feature “Box City” for Mockingbird Pictures.
[Note: We are powerless to remove the italics from this post. We believe that at this point only robots can help.] The Canadian Press’s Things That Go Pop! pop culture blog has listed the five best breakup movies of all time. I was with them on “Casablanca” (1942) and “Annie Hall” (1977), but then the blogger decided that the 00’s was a decade that ranked three spots on the list. Of the three, I’m willing to give him “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” (2004), because who amongst us HASN’T wanted to have the memory of a very bad breakup erased? But there’s nothing better from the 50’s, 60’s, 80’s(!), or 90’s that outranks “All the Real Girls” (2003) and “The Break Up” (2006) — a movie that even Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn didn’t bother to see? (And that is misspelled. Breakup, noun, is one word, as in Breakup Girl, the superhero/grammar stickler. Break up, verb, no hyphen, is two.) Posters to the site seem to be favoring “High Fidelity,” which is also from the 00’s (2000, to be exact), as missing from the list. What’s your vote?
Filed under: media,News — posted by Breakup Girl @ 11:58 am
Interesting (and belated; sorry) Comic-Con-related news (and cute headline) from the New York Times:
Reunited, and It Feels So Super
IMAGE UNITED is akin to a Beatles reunion. This six-issue comic-book series, which will be previewed at Comic-Con International in San Diego on Wednesday, brings together six of the seven founders of Image Comics— a group of prominent illustrators who defected from Marvel in 1992 to start their own publishing company— as well as some of the most successful characters they have created or developed there. It is not your typical comic-book team-up, in which a single artist interprets several other artists’ characters. Whenever Spawn, say, or Savage Dragon appears, he is illustrated by his creator. Throw in ShadowHawk, Witchblade and Youngbloood, along with Fortress, a new character, and you have a gathering of superheroes that is also a logistical nightmare.
“Queen Padme to be Jane Foster? Such is the case as Marvel Studios announced today that Natalie Portman will star opposite Chris Hemsworth in Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of Thor. The Academy-award nominated actress will play the nurse, Jane Foster, who becomes Thor’s first love.”
Music can have an overwhelmingly strong hold on the human mind, dramatically swaying our emotions and evoking memories. How come? The new issue of Scientific American Mind surveys recent research on music and the mind. For example, the power of music may come from its influence on regions of the brain responsible for language, feelings, movement, and other unrelated systems. It could also be an important vehicle for emotional communication and connection from which societies emerge. The article looks at studies supporting such theories. From SciAm Mind:
The musical tongue may also transcend more fundamental communication barriers. In studies conducted over the past decade, cognitive psychologist Pam Heaton of Goldsmiths, University of London, and her research team played music for both autistic and nonautistic children, comparing those with similar language skills, and asked the kids to match the music to emotions. In the initial studies, the kids simply chose between happy and sad. In later studies, Heaton and her colleagues introduced a range of complex emotions, such as triumph, contentment and anger, and found that the kids’ ability to recognize these feelings in music did not depend on their diagnosis. Autistic and typical children with similar verbal skills performed equally well, indicating that music can reliably convey feelings even in people whose ability to pick up emotion-laden social cues, such as facial expressions or tone of voice, is severely compromised.
Recently, in a clever experiment, acoustics scientist Roberto Bresin and his co-workers at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm garnered quantitative support for the idea that music is a universal language. Instead of asking volunteers to make subjective judgments about a piece of music, scientists asked them to manipulate the song—in particular, its tempo, volume and phrasing—to maximize a given emotion. For a happy song, for instance, a participant was supposed to manipulate these variables by adjusting sliders so that the song sounded as cheerful as possible; then as sad as possible; then scary, peaceful and neutral.
The researchers found that the participants—expert musicians and, in another study, seven-year-old children—all landed on the same tempo for each song to bring out its intended emotion, be it happiness, sadness, fear or tranquility. These findings, which Bresin reported at the 2008 Neuromusic III conference in Montreal, bolster the idea that music contains information that elicits a specific emotional response in the brain regardless of personality, taste or training. As such, music may constitute a unique form of communication.
I recently watched Twilight for the first time and I couldn’t understand why Bella (Kristen Stewart, who I will always identify as the little boy in Panic Room) was attracted to Edward (Robert Pattinson) at all. But then, I’m a guy. I guess there was that saving-her-life thing. That’s sexy. But otherwise? He was kind of a mess of creepy affectations. And let’s not forget he’s really an old man.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer always did a good job of punching a hole in this kind of epic brooding, so maybe that ruined it for me. In fact, my reaction to the movie is perfectly captured in this well edited video mashup of Buffy Summers meeting Edward Cullen:
Cree-pee. I would stake him too. (And, boy, does he do a LOT of walking away.) And yet this is what passes for female-fantasy? Edward doesn’t seem any less creepy when Vicki Iovine at the Huffington Post tries to explain his appeal (in the books) in a vacuous and only barely self-aware piece on what she’s calling “mommy porn”:
I’m in the mood to see more people punched in the nose by a handsome hero. Perhaps the evolution of 21st century men into laptop toting, UFL-lit frequent fliers to further self-importance leaves many women hungering for a man who can cut down a tree, rebuild an engine and catch and gut a fish. And I want one of those kinds of guys handing out a few shiners to the girly men on my list: Bernie Madoff, Bill Clinton, Rush Limbaugh to name a few. Admit it, it felt good to see someone punch Perez Hilton, didn’t it?
To all those guys — myself included — asking “why do women date assholes?” I think her piece inadvertently holds the answer.
e-mail to a friend in need
She slays us! Back in 2000, Marti Noxon — then supervising producer for Buffy and consulting producer for Angel — 
[Note: We are powerless to remove the italics from this post. We believe that at this point only 
Interesting (and belated; sorry) 
