It's the last week of summer at the movies, and thanks to late assists from The Final Destination and Inglourious Basterds, 2009 will be the biggest summer ever at the box office. But the cash came from surprising sources: typically golden stars and directors notched major flops this year, while up-and-comers pulled off huge coups. To recap at season's end, we've put some of summer's biggest losers and winners below, along with the worldwide box-office gross of their movie (or movies, as the case may be).

After 26 years, LeVar Burton has turned his last page for Reading Rainbow. According to NPR, "no one—not the station, not PBS, not the Corporation for Public Broadcasting—will put up the several hundred thousand dollars needed to renew the show's broadcast rights." This on the heels of news that classroom fixture The Weekly Reader and its parent company (Reader's Digest Association, Inc.) have filed for bankruptcy.  What childhood institutions are left unscathed?

by Ramin Setoodeh

by Ramin Setoodeh

by Joshua Alston

Tickets to midnight showings of James Cameron's Avatar are already selling on movie sites─that's four months in advance, or nearly three times the industry standard of 45 days for presale tickets, reps for the sites confirm. MovieTickets.com says it's selling the tickets to Thursday midnight showings in 41 IMAX theaters nationwide, from Olathe, Kans., to Arcadia, Calif., and Fandango is offering them nationwide, as well.

Avatar's own Web site already crashed last week, after too many fans sought tickets to the 16-minute preview of the film, and the trailer just broke the record for the biggest debut ever on Apple's popular movie-trailer site. Apparently the AMC movie chain, the driving force behind the presale, saw that surge and decided to let tix out early: they went up for sale last Friday, Aug. 21, the same day as the preview.

So, do you have yours yet?

The View loves manufactured controversy like static cling loves a cheap pantsuit. So it's no big surprise that the show has announced a slew of guest hosts designed to stir the pot while regular Elisabeth Hasselbeck is out on maternity leave. Please welcome Meghan McCain (Sept. 9 and 10), LaToya Jackson (Sept. 16 and 18), Kate Gosselin (Sept. 18 and 19), and Fox News anchor E.D. Hill (Sept. 23 and 24).

At the very least, The View will see a big September ratings boom (hat tip, Gosselin and Jackson) and a handful of the YouTube smash hits for which it's known (look to McCain and Hill for these). If you were Hasselbeck, would you be worried?  Resident TV expert Joshua Alston says no—"Who cares what Kate Gosselin has to say about anything, including her own marriage and children?"—but I wonder. What do you think?

Plax explains it all: Excerpt from ESPN's E:60 exclusive interview with former Giants wide receiver Plaxico Burress, whose plea deal for possession of a criminal weapon calls for two years in prison. (He will be sentenced Sept. 22).  The interview airs tonight.

by Jeremy Herb

Obituary writers have had their hands full this summer. Last Wednesday, there was 60 Minutes creator Don Hewitt, who followed columnist Robert Novak the previous day, who, since June 1, were pre-deceased by 16 celebrities. By our count, 18 notable personalities have died from June through August (and that's a low estimate, since there are several others who some consider celebs).  The previous high? 2003, according to our celebrity estimate, when there were 16 celebrity deaths in the summer months. And we've still got a week left in August!

So what’s caused the sudden outburst of obituaries, spanning Michael Jackson to guitar inventor Les Paul to newsman Walter Cronkite? The answer isn’t found in how many celebrities have died, but how many are still alive today. Celebrities have been around for as long as humans have existed (wouldn’t “Lucy” be considered the oldest celebrity?), but with the creation of each new media—print, radio, TV, cable, the Internet—the number of celebrities has increased. We are coming into a period where a backlog of network TV stars, like Cronkite and McMahon, are hitting old age, and cable creations like Billy Mays are reaching millions of viewers.

Which means that this deadly summer is unlikely to be the last. “Think of all the famous cable stars that didn’t exist before: Bill O’Reilly, Larry King, the guys from Mad Men. That’s a pretty big crowd of people,” says Robert Thompson, a popular culture professor at Syracuse University. Cable and the Internet haven’t just created new stars like the Obama Girl, they’ve also upped the amount of coverage. “There’s an insatiable appetite for news of any kind about celebrities, whether it’s bellies hanging out or a nipple slip or whatever has happened,” says Peter Rollins, a retired professor at Oklahoma State University and former president of the National Popular Culture Association.

This week, we’re still fixated on coverage over MJ’s drug dosages, and bidding for the tomb above Marilyn Monroe has surpassed $4.5 million. Plus with sites like Facebook and Twitter, we can grieve in public ways that did not exist 10 years ago. In a post titled, “The Daily Death,” the blog Tomorrow Museum predicted we’ll have so many celebrities in the future that a famous person will die every 15 minutes. But the number of celebrities is not exponential.

The annual celebrity death count is still likely to increase for a few decades because the Internet is so new. Eventually, however, we’ll hit a plateau. That’s because there’s a finite number of people who can be considered “celebrities” before the word loses its meaning.  Think about it, will you really be mourning the death of the guy who created "My New Haircut" 40 years from now, especially after ten-dozen similar videos have gone up? As for the immediate future, if 2003 is any indication, September will be just as busy for obit writers: Johnny Cash, John Ritter and four other celebrities all died that month alone.

In her reserved and unprecedented appearance on David Letterman's Late Show last night, Vogue editor Anna Wintour finally answers a burning question: if your fashion budget has been slashed down to a measly "20 dollars," as Dave posits, what can one actually afford to look Vogue-approved?

Anna pauses thoughtfully: "You could buy a lipstick."

Click above to view full chat.

Photo of Jackson at his June 23—and final—rehearsal. Kevin Mazur / AEG via Getty Images. What will Michael Jackson's tomb look like? Click here for ideas.

The Los Angeles Times is confirming that Michael Jackson's cause of death was a homicide via lethal overdose of propofol, a sedative hypnotic that is typically used for surgical sedation.

An exceedingly unusual, not to mention horrific, way to die.  But with history as our guide, we can see that Jackson's murder and extensive substance abuse problems will barely taint his legacy, if at all. Warren Perry, author of Elvis: 1956 and the curator of two major Elvis shows at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery and the Grammy Museum says that unlike Jim Morrison or Janis Joplin, early death by substance overdose failed to compromise the legacy of Elvis Presley in the long run—nor temper the $55 million-per-year haul of estate. "Elvis was the all-American boy and his story encompasses great mythic patterns like the 'rags to riches' tale and the 'returning hero' motif. Every time he started his career again, he renewed his image as a hero," Perry says. "At times, it seems like Michael Jackson painted himself into such a poor corner that he couldn't do anything right in the eyes of the average public person. But this unexpectedly young death and tragedy could propel him into that sort of martyred, forgiven state that we seem to have for some of our tragic figures."

The same way that Elvis renewed himself throughout his career as a hero, Presley albums continue to redouble their success when music transitions to a new format: Perry says that millions of Elvis albums are sold every time a new format is introduced, half a century after they were cut and more than 30 years after the singer's death. That popularity speaks to how Presley has overcome the taint of death-by-drugs: "There are certain negative connotations associated with Elvis' death, the prescription drug abuse and the ensuing corpulence. [But they] were never enough to mar his image in the eyes of his devoted fans.  His legion is constant if not increasing, judging from the numbers who flock to the Gates of Graceland all year, each year," Perry says.  With Jackson's estate set to pull a record $200 million in this year alone—a new record, his lawyers say, one that handily surmounts the Elvis cash—Jackson looks to follow the Presley model.

For a look at what Jackson's memorial might look like, check out our celebrity tombstones gallery.


by Isia Jasiewicz

There was a time when Alexis Bledel, or rather, her character Rory Gilmore on Gilmore Girls,was the girl that my friends and I all wanted to be. She had everything: beautiful eyes, flawless skin, a fun, young mom who was also her best friend. More importantly, she was also smart and successful: she was valedictorian of her prep school, went to Yale, and became editor-in-chief of the Yale Daily News, all while bouncing from hot boyfriend to hotter boyfriend.



Imagine my generation’s collective sigh of disappointment at Bledel’s newest role.

“People can’t comprehend…why I’m not worried.” 

That’s just one of the many pearls of wisdom dispensed by Nadya Suleman on last night’s “Octomom: The Incredible Unseen Footage.” Sorry FOX, but I think you oversold us. For those who missed it (and I hope, for your sake, you’re in that category) the two-hour special was largely Suleman waving off concerns that 14 children might be too many to handle and complaining about a loss of privacy. She showed off her new house, hid from paparazzi, got a tattoo, and spent a little time with the octuplets, too. Back when the babies were born, 23 percent of Americans followed the story very closely, according to the Pew Research Center. I, admittedly, was among them. Now though, I can hardly make it through a two-hour television special.

After being delayed seven months, because of an extremely boring legal battle, television’s fiercest, cattiest, oh-no-she-didn’t-est reality competition, Project Runway, is back on the catwalk tonight. (You can read our roundtable with the Project Runway judges here.)

But after five seasons on the luxe, aspirational Bravo, it’s now on Lifetime, never a network known for its cachet. Like most cable networks, Lifetime is trying desperately to change its image and attract a new audience. AMC has effectively pivoted from being the old-movie channel to a destination for such lauded original series as Mad Men. VH1 transitioned from being MTV’s older-skewing sister station to a haven for pop-culture fetishists. In fact, it’s Project Runway that helped transform Bravo from a place to catch Merchant Ivory films into the affluent brand it is now.

By Isia Jasiewicz

I’m obsessed with Tim Gunn. I’ve interviewed him three times, and each time, I hang up the phone thinking he’s even more amazing than the last time. He’s smart, he’s sassy, he’s down to earth—he obviously has the best impersonation voice ever—and every time Heidi, Michael and Nina veered off topic during our Project Runway roundtable last month (which, um, was like every five minutes), Tim, like the pro that he is, would rein them all back in. But there were some things that were beyond even Tim’s control: Heidi’s constant sexual innuendos about her husband, Seal; Michael Kors’ over-sharing about his boxer-briefs (“they give me a nice line”); and Nina’s complaints about how utterly freezing our studio was (though she was right; it was cold as hell). Here are our 7 favorite behind-the-scenes moments from our Runway roundtable. (And check out the full thing here!)

As it turned out, Shakira stared me down. How naïve I was to think myself immune to—and I’m being completely serious here—her immense talent as a singer and her sultry, and seemingly inexhaustible, gift as a dancer. As an amateur musician myself, I stood, stage right, star struck, bowled over as she sang 'Estoy Aquí,' and the entire Garden roared the chorus back at her. It was clear that I was late to the party.

By Isia Jasiewicz

Sometimes life imitates art. The drama that goes on behind the scenes of Grey's Anatomy is, at times, every bit as juicy as the onscreen love triangles, medical emergencies, and mommy issues that keep the show rolling. Since the hospital drama debuted in 2005, there have been two cast-member dismissals, one cast member walkout, and constant complaints from the show's resident whiner, Katherine Heigl (Dr. Isobel Stevens). Now there are new reports that Eric Dane (Dr. Mark Sloan) has filmed a sex tape (well, technically it's just a naked tape, but still). As they say on the show: seriously?

Here's a handy timeline to catch you up to speed on the McScandals that have rocked the cast. It's enough to make us wonder whether there's a Grey's Anatomy curse.

By Isia Jasiewicz

Listen very, very closely. Hear that high-pitched noise? That's the reverberating sound of all the squealing Twilight fans. First came last week's release of the latest trailer for New Moon, the new movie installment of the bestselling teen vampire book series. Then, as if that weren't enough, stars Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson were caught canoodling at a Kings of Leon concert. Could it be that Kristen and Rob are a real-world Bella and Edward? That might cause too much happiness (and/or jealousy) for Twilight fans to bear.

 In case you're a rare surviving specimen of the endangered species known as the "non-Twilight fan," here's a quick guide to the (supernaturally attractive) cast of New Moon. Trust us, if you stare at their pictures for long enough, you're bound to become another squealer. 

The other day, I saw Don Draper in a restaurant on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Or rather, I saw Jon Hamm, the award-winning actor who plays the ad exec anti-hero on AMC's Mad Men, which kicked off its third season Sunday night. He was dining with friends in a quiet corner of the bar, his broad shoulders hunched over his appetizer, thinly disguised by a pair of nerdy glasses that Draper wouldn't be caught dead in. Despite his unobtrusive air, Hamm was causing quite the stir. The hostesses stared. The waitresses giggled and gaped at him. Female patrons sized him up like tigresses in heat. Even the manager was giving him her best seductress eyes. 

When I told my friends about the sighting, their reactions were similar. "I don't get excited about celebrities," one said, "but if I saw him, I'd tear off my clothes." "He is so sexy," said another. "I love him," said a third. "He looks like he would know how to throw me to the wall and do me right."

Why are we so wild for Draper? By any measure, the character's a cad. He constantly cheats on his wife. He skips town for weeks and won't write or call. He doesn't talk much, and anesthetizes any feelings with copious amounts of booze. He's an enigma, a locked box of a man who resists, maddeningly, easy explanation. And yet he excites an attraction among women—particularly ones my age, women in their late '20s and '30s who were born after the era that Mad Men portrays—that seems unmatched by any leading man on television today, with the possible exception of Lost's con artist, Saywer (another strapping scoundrel with a deeply troubled soul). We describe our obsession in words that, like the show itself, are somewhat retro. "He is a straight-up man. He makes me feel like a woman via the TV." "He's a throwback to a time when men were men. "It's the thickness of his body." "Shoulders to cry on and a jaw that causes women to swoon."

By Malcolm Jones

“He left a big hole” is such an obit cliché, but it sure doesn’t help when the hole is in your heart. Jim Dickinson, who died Aug 15,  was not a famous musician, but he was a great one. He truly was one of those mysterious people who could get more out of two notes than most people get out of 20, maybe because he knew that less is more, or more likely because he knew where to put them. When I got the word from a mutual friend that Dickinson, 67, contrary to expectations, would not be coming back from bypass surgery, all I could think was, now the world will be a poorer place. Music never dies, but now and then it takes a hit that there’s no recovering from.

Dickinson was in no way famous, unless being famous among one’s peers counts. With his wife and family, he lived in two trailers, one of them a recording studio, on a spread in northern Mississippi he called the Zebra Ranch. A Memphis denizen since childhood, he never traveled far. Instead, people came to him. He was the rock and roll doctor (whenever I hear Lowell George’s song of the same name—“two degrees in bebop, a PhD. In swing, he’s the master of rhythm, he’s the rock n roll king”—I think of Dickinson. The song may not be about him, but it sure could have been).

He spent most of his life helping other people get their music on wax, disc, tape—realize their vision, in other words. Not many people know how to do that and those who do rarely do it with the inspiring generosity Dickinson brought to the studio or the recording booth (and the concert stage: bidding his audience goodbye at the end of one album, he said “Take care of yourself, and if you can, take care of someone else”). He was a selfless sideman: he played keyboards on the Stones’ “Wild Horses” and Dylan’s comeback breakthrough “Time Out of Mind,” but those works don’t sound a thing alike. He cut albums on musicians as disparate as Big Star, the Replacements, Toots Hibbert, John Hiatt, Ry Cooder, Mudboy and the Neutrons and the Dickinson boys, Luther and Cody, two-thirds of the North Mississippi All-Stars. With Cooder he co-wrote “The Wildwood Boys” and “Down Below the Borderline.” Toward the end of his life, he returned to recording himself and produced a handful of idiosyncratic albums that each defy categorization—blues, soul, swing tunes, novelty numbers and plain old rock n roll. The unifying aspect resides less in the grooves than in the mind of the listener: the unmistakable realization that on the other end of the microphone is a real live human being who is holding nothing back. Listening to a track from Dickinson’s first solo album, “Dixie Fried” (1972), Dr. John was heard to remark, “That boy is SELLING that song.”

A self-deprecating man who never left his sense of humor in his other pants, Dickinson deflected any suggestion that he was a walking encyclopedia of American popular music, or that he was some torch bearer of white Southern soul or that he knew how to reach down to the very roots of American song and then communicate that essence to you in his music or the music he helped others make. He made no claims for his piano playing or his singing—before turning his sandpapery growl loose on a cover of the Dan Penn song “Pain and Strain” on his live album, “A Thousand Footprints in the Sand,” he told the audience, “I can’t sing it like Dan Penn, but … use your imagination.” But while there are plenty of people with better chops and more golden throats, Dickinson always did the most he could with what he had. And somehow he always reached back and found just the right note, the right inflection, to make you lean forward and listen. When Dickinson sang a lyric, you believed every word. If he’d said he learned what he knew from selling his soul to the devil at some crossroads at midnight, you wouldn’t be too quick to call him a liar. In fact, when someone did ask him where he learned what he knew, the middle-class Memphis white boy never got above his raising: “From the yard man, like everybody else.”

I met him just once, for a moment, n a New York City club where he was performing with his sons. I got the chance to thank him for all the hours of pleasure he’d given me on his albums and the albums he helped produce. He was very gracious, but as we parted, I thought how strange it is, this world of recorded sound, where a man puts his soul on record, where you feel like you know him as well as you know your best friend, and yet, when you meet, you’re strangers again. Until you flip the on switch to listen again.

Jim Dickinson was a great musician who led by example. He never cut a dishonest track in his life. If you never heard him, it’s your loss, because he was the real deal. He said he wanted his epitaph to read, “I’m just dead. I’m not gone.” I wish.

By Anne Becker

In the last few years, opportunity has been knocking on Ashton Kutcher’s door. He runs his own production company Katalyst, he’s a spokesperson for Nikon and he’s lent his name to a trendy Los Angeles restaurant. But sometimes, it’s more than opportunity knocking on Ashton’s door. Yesterday, it was Mickey Rooney. “It was the weirdest experience of the past five years,” says Kutcher in his squeaky-pitched, excited-Ashton voice. “I’m at home reading a script and fiddling around, answering emails and all of a sudden this person who works on my house is like, ‘Uh Mickey Rooney is here.’ I’m like, ‘who??’ He’s like, ‘Aren’t you supposed to be meeting with him?’ I look downstairs and Mickey Rooney is walking into my house with some guy and he’s all miked up and I’m like, ‘What’s going on?’ As Kutcher tells it, Rooney and a producer had been going door to door at celebrities’ homes, shooting a documentary, and Ashton’s was next on their list. Right after Jack Nicholson.

You can’t blame Rooney for wanting a piece of Ashton—especially if you’ve seen his clothes (hot) and his body (hotter) in the new movie Spread, which opens today ...

by Andrew Bast

Studying rock guitar is an oxymoron. That's strange, because there's formal education for just about every other popular kind of music. If you want to play, say, double bass in a classical orchestra, there are scores of advanced programs offering master's degrees that lead to apprenticeships and auditions. The same is true even with an improvisational genre like jazz: in the past few decades, a growing number of advanced programs have been training budding musicians in theory, composition, and performance. Yes, a few "school of rock"-type places have been popping up, but there's an unavoidable prerequisite: you have to be a teenager.

That makes the new documentary It Might Get Loud perhaps the closest thing to a master class in rock guitar around. The film is a mashup of the techniques, styles, and inner drives of three of the most influential players of the past 50 years. The filmmakers interviewed Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, the Edge of U2, and Jack White of the White Stripes in their hometowns and then sat them down on a soundstage with their rigs and axes. The result?

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by Andrew Bast

Aren’t aliens adorable? Little green men waving peace signs have long been an extraterrestrial staple of the culture. The bigheaded E.T. may be the most famous, created by Steven Spielberg in 1982, who captured the country’s heart by desperately wanting to call home. Monsters vs. Aliens was one of the top grossing films of this year. Even Radiohead writes songs about them, wishing they’d “take me onboard their beautiful ship” and “show me the world as I’d love to see it.”
   
The new movie District 9, out today, furthers the lovefest—but with a twist. The dystopian thriller, set in South Africa, pits its squirmy-nosed aliens (known as “prawns”) as modern-day refugees, ghettoized and targeted by authorities. The allegory is obvious: District 9 shows us why no society should have two classes of citizens, as it echoes divisive decades of apartheid. Perhaps unknowingly, District 9 does something else, too. The movie drives home the point that we get a thrill out of watching fantastical, fictional aliens, but we have little stomach for real, human, illegal aliens.
   
District 9 dives directly into the immigration debate. In the film, the prawns’ plight is reported with a 24-hour-cable-news feel, curiously giving the impression that you are watching a real-life documentary. To the point, director Neill Blomkamp recently told New York magazine, “The film is about issues I grew up with—like segregation and xenophobia. I’m proud of the fact that we deal with those issues without beating you over the head with it.” Likewise, the studio’s clever marketing campaign plastered tongue-in-cheek ads on city benches and on the sides of buses making authoritative threats like: BUS BENCH FOR HUMAN ONLY. There are even refrigerator magnets—with a human and a prawn holding hands—declaring SUPPORT NON-HUMAN RIGHTS. The ad campaign is smart, but the biggest selling point is the aliens. There’s nothing we love more at the multiplex, and District 9 could be in for a surprisingly big weekend.
   
Think about that alongside the Emmy-winning documentary Made In L.A. Coincidentally, it happened to also be showing this week, only, it was on public television. It tracks the real-life struggle of wronged Latina garment workers in Southern California and their long fight for rights and wages in the workplace. Filmmaker Almudena Carracedo has said that she struggled for years to find funding for her project. (The film was ultimately produced with hardly a fraction of the $30 million that made District 9, considered a modest film budget by Hollywood standards.) With Made in L.A., the aim was “to put a human face on the story,” Carracedo explained. Since coming out in 2007, she has been crisscrossing the country showing the documentary to universities and community centers. Unsurprisingly, there’s been no national marketing campaign.

Despite the documentary’s successes (it is heartbreaking and great), it seems that the country is much more content to deal with a scaly, mumbling alien face than a real, human face. When President Bush pushed his guest-worker programs in 2006, Latinos poured into the streets of Los Angeles, and not soon after, immigration reform stalled. The facts today are daunting. Some 11 million people toil in the country’s shadows, cleaning toilets, cooking food, and raising others’ children. And President Obama recently said that the debate would be tabled, at least until next year.
   
Maybe District 9 will move the discussion forward. After all, allegory has long played a hugely political role. Just think of the biting critique of communism that George Orwell made with his novel Animal Farm. But just as likely, its “sheer awesomeness” (as reported one review yesterday) could very well prove just a slick marketing gimmick and be lost on a crowd enthralled by special effects.

So there's maybe a new Radiohead song making the rounds—and, as Pitchfork and Stereogum have noted, if it's a fake, it's a damn good one. "These Are My Twisted Words" popped up on a fan site this morning, without any attribution or, um, attendant facts. But the looping weird melody and plaintive vocals are prime Yorke & Co. Hear it for yourself, before YouTube receives a copyright infringement claim.

Fans at the unofficial site AtEaseWeb.com reportedly pulled the following gobbledygook from the leaked mp3 file:

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How many inventors are also great artists? Les Paul was both—an innovator in jazz, blues, and pop music who also pioneered the design of the solid-body electric guitar (since made iconic by the Gibson brand that bears his name). He passed away Thursday, August 13 in White Plains, New York, from "complications of severe pneumonia." He was 94 years old. In memory of Paul, we offer a tribute with these YouTube clips.

by Seth Colter Walls

A truly great commercial, in which an aging Paul schools a youngun playing the guitar he invented.



Here's some blues from Les Paul, courtesy of what looks like a TV appearance from the 1970s or early '80s. Country legend Chet Atkins joins Paul halfway through.



Going back to the '50s, here we see Paul jamming with a jazz group that's part of some plot or another. Check out his solo at the 2:30 mark.



For a more comprehensive look, see this short documentary produced for the JVC JazzFest in 2005.

The just-released trailer for The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, a Terry Gilliam film that hits theaters Oct. 16 and costars Johnny Depp, Jude Law, Colin Farrell, and Christopher Plummer. What do you think? Will you see it?

by Anne Becker

Last night's finale of NYC Prep on Bravo was full of so much drama, snark and petty intrigue it was practically a real-life episode of Gossip Girl.That's no coincidence. Bravo can now legitimately lay claim to beingthe network that mints that ever-elusive "buzz" (whatever that is) byturning proven scripted shows into solid, low-brow reality TV. Witness The Real Housewives of Orange County—essentially Desperate Housewives gone SoCal. Miami Social? Friends in Florida.

But NYC Prep actually trumps its scripted predecessor, Gossip Girl,on the quality, guilty viewing pleasure front. Despite its floggingratings, the thing's actually more entertaining than the show fromwhence it was born. Below we present seven reasons why:

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We've already discussed traditional country music's murky future in Steve Tuttle's hilarious essay and the attendant photo gallery.  By Steve's lights, "something gritty and real has been lost. [Today's hits] borrow the vernacular ofcountry music, the genuineness and masculinity of that hard-knock life,but they morph it into something that's barely recognizable. The roughedges and authenticity have been sanded off."

There's no better confirmation of his prescience than today's news that 19-year country music veterans Brooks & Dunn are hanging up their Stetsons as an act, preferring instead to gamble on solo careers. They put the news up on their website, announcing that they'll embark on one last tour together (dubbed the "Last Rodeo") before calling it quits in 2010.

In the limited country radio market, the end of Kix Brooks' and Ronnie Dunn's honky-tonk hits means more playtime for poppier fare. Pop critic Jon Caramanica had a great piece in The New York Times a week ago about the wave of Taylor Swift wanna-bes currently using social media to nab those very playlist spots.  From his piece:

The target demographic for country radio, which has historically been middle-aged women, hasn’t helped usher in younger stars, though executives say that for new artists to have stability they must attract mothers as well as their children.... Regenerating its audience is something that’s been heavily on the mind of Nashville of late. In March the Country Music Association released the results of a 2008 marketplace study it commissioned, the largest in its history. The findings identified one of the largest locuses of growth potential as “pop country” listeners, whom it described as “very urban, responding to new, female, pop-leaning country artists.”

And where as traditional and pop coexisted in the '90s (Shania, meet George Strait), airtime in this decade is much more heavily populated with the latter.  Summer singles "Alright," by former pop-rocker and Hootie & the Blowish frontman Darius Rucker, and "You Belong With Me," by Swift, are hardly mainline country. (As evidence, "You Belong With Me" sits at equal positions on both the top country and pop Billboard charts).

Country listeners, what's the future? Is there room for both types, as Carrie Underwood and Randy Travis are trying to prove? Is the extremely addictive "You Belong With Me" (13 million views on YouTube!) where it's at? Or should we simply pine for the dreamy days of Bob Wills?

The Offer: Nigel Lythgoe, who used to work with Paula as an executive producer on American Idol, offered her a spot as a guest judge and choreographer on his show.
The Ups: Next to Mary Murphy and Lythgoe, Paula won't have to work very hard to be the star.
The Downs: Does anybody watch this show? The summer premiere caught just under 9 million eyeballs, a fraction of Idol's audience. When it returns in the fall, opposite new programming, it might do even worse.
The Pay: Who knows. But it's doubtful Fox will give Paula more to do this show than what she was offered to stay on Idol (she reportedly turned down $5 million a year).

The Offer: Stephen McPherson, the president of ABC's entertainment programming, said that Paula could join the show—either as a contestant or a judge.
The Ups: It's the most watched reality TV show after Idol. Plus, if she put on her dancing shoes, it's almost a guarantee that her Idol fans—already pros at texting or calling—would help her win the disco ball trophy.
The Downs: All the extra work! On Idol, Paula only had to critique a few songs a week and play with Simon Cowell. Here, she'd have to rehearse all week long and—to steal lyrics from her last hit song—dance like there's no tomorrow.
The Pay: Still a mystery. But the contestants usually donate their earnings to charity.

Forget the guise of feminism—you stay just how you are, sweetie!—that was en vogue few months ago. Scottish singing sensation Susan Boyle finally succumbed to her first glossy fashion photo shoot for September's Harper's Bazaar, and now the video of the shoot is online. She stutters and acts very shy in the clip, and we feel for her—all those lackeys touching her face, all those flashbulbs going off.  She might look more Town & Country, but her diminished confidence is a bit sad. Where's the sassy Susan who put Simon in his place—and who's logged a hundred million views on YouTube?

by Ramin Setoodeh

Paramount was so worried the critics would hate GI Joe: Rise of the Cobra—and with good reason, it's awful—that they decided not to screen it for anybody. Just one problem: the first showing was at 12:01 a.m. Friday morning, which means I have all night to tell you how bad it is. Bad. Bad. Bad. It's excruciatingly bad. Gigli bad. How bad are we talking? I chronicled my night:

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John Hughes helmed just eight films, in the process defining for a generation what it meant to be a teen in the '80s, but he wrote many, many more. Not only Chevy Chase and John Candy have Hughes to thank for iconic roles (Clark W. Griswold and Uncle Buck, respectively)—the filmmaker gave plenty of other up-and-coming actors their start. Here are 10 whose names and faces you likely wouldn't know if not for Hughes's films.

Ben Stein.  What would this master of deadpan delivery be doing if it weren't for John Hughes? Maybe teaching high-school economics. Stein was cast as a chalk-dusted, painfully boring econ teacher in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and his roll call—"Bueller … Bueller … Bueller …"—is one of the most memorable lines in comedy history. Stein turned his popularity into more movies (Hughes's Planes, Trains and Automobiles), a few television series (The Wonder Years, Win Ben Stein's Money), and even celebrity product endorsement (Clear Eyes eye drops).

Molly Ringwald.  Ringwald was the creamy-skinned crown jewel of the boy-dominant Brat Pack after she starred in The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, and Sixteen Candles. She played the popular girl and the angsty outsider with equal aplomb, and purportedly dated co-star Anthony Michael Hall for a spell in the '80s, proving the Hughes mantra that the popular girl really could stoop to date a nerd.

Matthew Broderick.  These days, he's got graying mutton chops and Carrie Bradshaw as a wife, but back in 1986, Broderick was the teen (and sausage) king of Chicago as happy-go-lucky Ferris Bueller. The carpe-diem film Ferris Bueller's Day Off is still one of the most popular teen flicks ever, and it earned Broderick his only major award nomination: a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Comedy.

Jennifer Grey.  Before Baby was fondling Patrick Swayze's bulging biceps in the Catskills, she was Matthew Broderick's acrimonious older sister, Jeanie (and, for a time, his real-life love interest), in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. And in the role, she shared a sexy kiss with another up-and-coming young star: that's Charlie Sheen rocking a bad attitude and a leather jacket in the police station.

John Cusack.  The sensitive heartthrob started out as one of the band of geeks in Hughes's first film, Sixteen Candles. He never shook the geek typecasting; even as an assassin-for-hire in 1997's Grosse Pointe Blank, he was nervy and clammy-handed around women (namely, Minnie Driver).

Emilio Estevez.  He was the jock in The Breakfast Club, a prescient role given his smash-hit series of Mighty Duck hockey movies in the 1990s. But Estevez is still going strong, most notably with Bobby, the 2006 Sen. Robert F. Kennedy biopic that he both wrote and directed.

Steve Carell.  The Office star's first ever big-screen role was in 1991's Curly Sue, written and directed by Hughes. The comedian wouldn't fully break out in movies for another 12 years, when he was cast as Evan Baxter in the Jim Carrey starrer Bruce Almighty. But these days, Carell has a Golden Globe and an Emmy-winning show, and he's one of the most popular faces in comedy.

Anthony Michael Hall.  More so even than Molly Ringwald, actor Anthony Michael Hall was a huge '80s star synonymous with John Hughes. But like others before him, Hall's post-Hughes career shows he had a tough time growing out of his earlier roles as a nerd. He's had some recent success: his biggest movie of late was Oscar-winner The Dark Knight, a film notably missing cream-puff high-school boys of the sort Hughes seemingly wrote for Hall.

Jon Cryer.  He was the shoulder to cry on in Pretty in Pink, and his lip-sync of Otis Redding's "Try a Little Tenderness" is an iconic '80s movie scene. Today, the skinny, nerdy Duckie has graduated to costar in one of television's best-rated sitcoms: Two and a Half Men.

Macaulay Culkin.  Culkin got both his first major role and his most famous role from Hughes—he was the kid in 1989's Uncle Buck and, of course, the star of 1990's Home Alone. The pair of films made him the biggest child star of the 1990s (My Girl, Richie Rich), and his success also helped boost the careers of the other Culkin brothers. Most recently, Culkin had a recurring role on the critically acclaimed TV drama Kings.

John Hughes, the beloved writer and director of 1980s teen classics like The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, died today in New York City of a sudden heart attack. He was just 59. In memory of Hughes and in honor of his still highly popular oeuvre, we pay tribute with these YouTube scenes.

Maybe the most famous movie lip-sync ever. Ferris Bueller (an impish, fresh-faced Matthew Broderick) twists and shouts on a parade float, and all of Chicago joins in.

Long, long before Judd Apatow hogged all the credit, John Hughes let the nerdy guy finish first with Duckie, Molly Ringwald's best friend in the Hughes-penned Pretty in Pink. Jon Cryer wins over Ringwald—and every girl, ever, in the history of girlkind—with this endearing lip-sync of Otis Redding's "Try A Little Tenderness." You got to!

Aside from the racial faux pas that was an exchange student named Long Duk Dong (see below), Sixteen Candles pitch-perfectly captured teen angst. "This information can not leave this room, OK? It would devastate my reputation as a dude. (pause) I've never bagged a babe. I'm not a stud." (Anthony Michael Hall may have been 16 when he said that, but he looks all of 12.)

John Candy, lovable and goofy, against Steve Martin, grumpy and smoldering. Planes, Trains and Automobiles was holiday staple that became an all-seasons classic.

Zombieland—Oct. 9, 2009

(This is part of our recurring series in which we dish on newly released trailers,then solicit your feedback. Tell us if you'll see the movie below, in the comments!)

THE LOOK: The trailer for the upcoming horror-camp-fest Zombieland has been out since June, but this Wednesday, Columbia Pictures released the film's much juicier, much funnier red-band trailer. (Warning! It's gory and probably NSFW!) The cast is an odd but promising group─Woody Harrelson, Jessie Eisenberg, Emma Stone, Abigail Breslin, and a rumored Bill Murray─and the abundance of cheesy slo-mo shots is really fun. Love the tunes, which include the hip-hop remix of Johnny Cash's "Country Boy." No surprise that sneak snippets of the movie made a big splash at Comic Con a few weeks ago.

THE FEEL: Looks like Jessie Eisenberg is starring once again as Jessie Eisenberg─which is fine by us, since his earnest mumbling never fails to win us over.  And Emma Stone is one of our favorites. But we can't quite get a read on Woody Harrelson as Tallahassee, a Tim McGraw-ed version of Sgt. Nicholas Angel. He'll either be hilarious or an eye-rolling cliché. (The Titanic part had us groaning.) But in the plus column, the actor has already claimed that training for this zombie-battling role is what caused him to assault a paparazzo a few months back. Badass.

GRIPES? Being a trailer, this clip is bound to paint with broad strokes. But it so aggressively oozes HAHAHA-it's-funny-wink-wink, much more than the deadpan classics of this genre (Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead), that we're left a tad cold. Also, the sexpot, raccoon-eyed character is a change of pace for Stone, and we're not sure how we feel about it.  Her earlier roles─as Jonah Hill's bumbling crush in Superbad, and as Anna Faris's sorority protégée in The House Bunny─flaunted her smart, quippy comedy above her (obvious) beauty. We'd hate to see her watered down.

What do you think?

Photo, Chris Pizzello/AP (left); AL Grillo/AP 

Gaggle contributor Daniel Stone has a fun think-piece comparing The Recent Resignations That Have Rocked The Earth to Its Core: Paula Abdul's American Idol departure, and the Palin family's Alaskan exeunt. Check it out here!

After a weeklong standoff, executed primarily through a series of tweets, the die is finally cast: Paula Abdul is leaving American Idol after eight seasons, during which time her sunny-side disposition and kid-glove criticism defined the tone and dynamic of the ratings juggernaut. This means that the judge’s table, which truthfully had gotten a little overpopulated when songwriter Kara DioGuardi joined last year, will be back down to three. DioGuardi will take Abdul’s spot between Randy Jackson and Simon Cowell. Abdul and the Fox network both released statements bemoaning Abdul’s loss. But is it really that much of a loss?

Clearly, the bosses at Fox don’t think so, and while they’ve been gracious in bidding Abdul adieu, they must not have taken kindly to her very public overtures to get herself a bump in pay. Abdul’s hardball tactics are nothing new in Hollywood, of course, but when you don’t have the clout to pull it off, the bosses call your bluff. Abdul didn’t really have clout. She had visibility, she had experience, she had fans, but she doesn’t provide anything that would put her in a position to make exorbitant salary demands.

When Idol began, the show had to explain to its audience why these judges were qualified to whittle down the contestants and offer their notes week after week. For Cowell, it was his experience as an A&R man and a judge on the original Pop Idol. For Jackson, it was his years as a music producer and touring musician. For Abdul, it was her singing career. I’ve been in your shoes before, she would always tell the contestants. But it was never really true. Abdul’s voice is among the weakest in pop-music history, and her singing career was less a result of her singing ability as it was a result of the connections she’d built in the industry as a choreographer. She’s in as much a position to provide feedback as a singer as is Ashlee Simpson.

Abdul’s role on Idol when it was in its infancy wasn’t really the "experienced singer," it was the familiar face that would get folks to tune in, having never laid eyes on Jackson or Cowell before. Eight seasons later, Idol needs Abdul far, far less than she needs Idol, and the show won’t be any worse for the wear without her on the judge’s panel this year. In fact, it might even be better.

Granted, DioGuardi's first season as a judge wasn’t the most auspicious of beginnings. But as any who’s ever watching Idol in syndication can attest, each judge had to find his or her mojo over time. I don’t doubt that DioGuardi will find hers. She’ll become less wooden and more personable. And by replacing Abdul, she raises the legitimacy of the judging table as arbiters of technical skill. No one picked DioGuardi to join the judge's table because she’s a recognizable celebrity who would attract new viewers. They brought her in because she’s an experienced, working songwriter. Abdul’s been doing the Idol thing long enough to be better at that specific skill than DioGuardi, who just started. But once the new addition gets up to speed, we may wonder what kept us attached to Abdul so long.

The only thing Idol will definitely miss by not having Abdul around is the periodic publicity bump from her erratic behavior. The trick to Idol for the producers is walking the fine line between making great television and finding great talent, and sometimes, what serves one goal detracts from the other. There’s been no bigger scandal in Idol history than when season two contestant Corey Clark alleged that he and Abdul had an affair, and that she gave him tips on song selection and styling, so as to give him a leg up on his competitors. An “independent counsel” investigated Clark’s stor and concluded that there was no evidence to support his claims. No details were provided about the counsel, or what if any standards they were being held to. It smelled fishy then and it still does now, as though the network assembled a sham trial to allow a star of its biggest show to stick around. That story broke in season four, and while Abdul’s antics haven’t caused quite that much commotion since, questions about her sobriety and lucidity are evergreen. Sometimes it seems she’s more trouble than she’s worth. 

Sure, the show will miss her optimism in the face of mediocrity, and her loopy antics were occasionally good for a YouTube moment. But anyone can compliment an outfit, and the less spaced-out moments, the more Idol is taken seriously as a breeding ground for new pop stars. The only thing we’ll really miss about Paula is…Paula. No one likes change, and not seeing a familiar face on Idol will take getting used to. But Abdul will soon learn the same lesson as Brian Dunkleman—no one is bigger than the game.

First, Jennifer Hudson was voted off American Idol. Then Chris Daughtry. Now another superstar is going home prematurely—Paula Abdul. The show's most beloved judge broke the news to her fans last night on Twitter, announcing that she won't be back on the No. 1 show on TV for its upcoming ninth season. "I'll miss nurturing all the new talent," Paula tweeted, "but most of all being part of a show that I helped from day one become an international phenomenon."

What made her jump? Was it that the show didn't offer her enough money, after throwing buckets of cash—$45 million over three years—at Ryan Seacrest? Or was it that Kara DioGuardi, who was brought in last season as a fourth judge, was meant as a replacement for Paula all along? We might never know—until Paula weeps on Oprah's couch. For now, let's pay our respects to Paula. Despite what Simon Cowell thinks, she really was the show's biggest star. A timeline of her ups and downs:

• The summer of 2002: Paula Abdul makes her debut on American Idol. America has one question. What the heck is in her red cup?
• January 2005: Paula looks like she's about to fall asleep during Carrie Underwood's first audition.
• April 2005: A 24-year-old contestant, Corey Clark, alleges that he slept with Paula and that she coached him privately at her house. A special Idol panel investigates—did it include Simon Cowell?—and finds Paula not guilty.
• January 2007: Paula appears on a Fox affiliate show slurring her words, giggling and waving her hands in the air ("Good morning, everyone").
• May 2007: Paula is rushed to the hospital right before the finale between Jordin Sparks and Blake Lewis. She says she fell over her dog Tulip.
• Later that month: An audiotape leaks featuring a weepy Paula yelling and crying at her publicist. "All I've ever wanted in my life is to be treated fairly and with kindness," she says.
• That summer: Paula's reality show, Hey Paula, premieres, featuring Abdul yelling at her assistants (and more tears). Maybe she really is as mean as Simon Cowell.
• April 2008: Paula gives a contestant—Jason Castro—a bad critique based on a song he hasn't even sung yet.
• May 2009: Paula performs! Actually, she lip-syncs her new song. For the first time in the history of the show, Simon Cowell is speechless.

For reference point's sake, here's the Mimi clip that supposedly inspired Eminem:

Now--the cold, cynical economic rationalization for this generally tired and immature back and forth centers around the fact that both platinum-selling work-horses have albums out this year, during an era in which record labels are desperate for numbers. Eminem took the top of the charts when Relapse debuted back in May. But its first week sales of 600,000 utterly paled in comparison to the million plus in opening business he notched with previous records. Is there a "threaten to murder someone" button over at Universal Music Group--the owner of Interscope, which in turn distributes Dr. Dre's Aftermath label--that gets pushed whenever Slim Shady fails to move a million units in the first week? There's an odor of stale beef here that could lead one to think this is being done with a wink and nod between the two performers. (After all, Eminem proved he wasn't above a little stagecraft back at the MTV Movie Awards, as his encounter with Bruno's ass was planned well ahead of time.)

But even if the Mariah-Eminem feud isn't staged, what's strange is how witless the end product is. Diss tracks are supposed to bring some funny. Yes, they also need to devastate an opponent, but most rappers understand this is better achieved with an undermining wit as opposed to a violent spasm in the gutter. Take, for example, Inspectah Deck's recent swipe at Joe Budden--who had apparently committed the sin of comparing himself favorably to a member of the Wu-Tang Clan. Again, NSFW:

Around the one minute mark, in the midst of a hard-bangin' verse, Deck dares the listener to "name me three Joe Budden songs," after which we hear the Jeopardy! theme. In the background, a hip-hop head attempts to do Deck's bidding, but can only come up with "Pump It Up" as a Budden track. "Aw, this is for a hundred thousand dollars? I'm blowin' it!" the faux contestant cries in desperation as he realizes he doesn't know or like Budden's music enough about to be able to answer the question. "Still waitin'," Deck thunders as the track comes back strong. The point--that Budden isn't successful enough to back up his boasting--is effective because it makes you laugh, even if you've never heard Budden's music.

I'll say this for Eminem's diss track, though. Dr. Dre's beat is more interesting than the track Cary used for "Obsessed."

• Many D-girls are men. In fact, while Silverman’s comments in Esquire implied that he was talking about Tassler, he didn’t actually mention her by name. The real targets of his derision were Steve McPherson of ABC and Kevin Reilly at Fox.
• The term served as a title for episodes of Law & Order in its seventh season and The Sopranos in its second.
• The term has staying power. (McDonnell’s piece was printed in 1987.) The fact that it’s still tossed around and hasn’t even been gender-neutralized (D-person?) is indicative of the sexism that still permeates the entertainment industry.

by Nicki Gostin

Nora Ephron isn't just one of our best female directors, she's also Hollywood's top chef. Don't believe us? Food is a theme that reoccurs in all of her movies—just ask Meg Ryan. There's that famous delicatessen scene in When Harry Met Sally when Ryan gets really excited about ... dinner. Or when Ryan stops at a diner in Sleepless in Seattle and orders "tea, with the bag out," while listening to the radio. Or all the Starbucks in You've Got Mail. OK, maybe the last example was just really clever product placement, but you get the idea.

Now Ephron is finally entering the kitchen for real, with Julie & Julia, which tells the story of not one, but two chefs: Julia Child (played by Meryl Streep) and food blogger Julie Powell (Amy Adams). Ephron spoke with NEWSWEEK about her love affair with food.

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