Thursday, February 21, 2008
Amy Winehouse Round-Up: Winegums Live At The Brits
1:59PM Clem Bastow | Apart from her forays into symbolic facial decoration, we’re most pleased with Amy Winehouse’s progress lately, both in an emotional/physical sense, and professional as well. First she wowed the crowd at the Grammys, and she has made a triumphant comeback on home turf at the Brit Awards, too, appearing in debut with Mark Ronson and then solo.
So, for a special treat to while away the afternoon ennui, hop over the jump to watch Amy performing Love Is A Losing Game, live at the Brits!
More » 
Vale Emily Perry
1:24PM Jess McGuire | Actress Emily Perry, famous for brilliantly portraying Dame Edna’s sidekick Madge Allsop for yeeeaaaars, has passed away at the ripe old age of 100.
The elderly English actress who played Dame Edna Everage’s sidekick Madge Allsop has died. The Sun newspaper said Emily Perry died aged 100. No other details were available. Perry began playing the sour-faced Madge, a New Zealander from Palmerston North, when she was 80. Madge, Edna’s elderly “bridesmaid” began appearing alongside Barry Humphries’ famous housewife and “gigastar” in 1987. She never spoke and was often the butt of Edna’s witty putdowns.
We grew up with a Dame Edna-obsessed mother and have incredibly fond memories of Emily Perry playing Madge, so today the metaphorical Defamer Australia flag flies at half-mast. More » 
Top-Deck Coloured Girls Aloud Members Inspire Biting Social Commentary
1:15PM Clem Bastow | There’s nothing we like more than a) serious journalism and b) Girls Aloud, so we were pleased as punch this morning to see the Daily Mail combining the two in some sort of heavenly coming together of everything we love (a bit like “INXS featuring Jon Stevens” or “cheeseburger with fries and a Coke”).
Evidently Girls Aloud members Kimberly Walsh and Nicola Roberts (pictured) took a holiday together, and stunned the snappers on their LA stopover with their ‘opposites attract’ approaches to tanning. To wit, Nicola clearly likes to tan by the light of the moon, and Kimberly is going for that oh-so-special George Hamilton look. Fair enough; to each their own, and so on.
But wait ’til you cop a load of the social commentary the Mail has squeezed out of this “story”!
Nicola Roberts must have virtually embalmed herself to avoid any sunshine at all. She is Michael Jackson pale.
This is not sun care but sun snobbery.
Just as Cheryl Cole pitched herself a cut above footballers’ wives, so Nicola Roberts is signalling that she is a better class of Girls Aloud.
She, like Victoria Beckham, is aiming for Vogue. Tans are for The Brits, Pale Skins are the Oscars.
Just as very rich people eat less than the poor, so smart women scorn the tan.
Who wants to look as if they have just come back from a holiday?
If you examine the class-ridden Holiday Swap television programme, it is always the chav family who hanker for a surfeit of fun and sunshine.
Nicola’s look is intimidatingly anti-holiday. She would prefer people to think she had returned from a spell in a TB clinic.
She also demonstrates a state of enlightenment, shared by women such as Madonna and Nicole Kidman and Gwyneth Paltrow.
What is the point of being a celebrity if you cannot conquer age?
And what is more ageing than sunshine? The poor dolt Kimberley Walsh, her bronze flesh on show in a cheerful sun dress and open-toed shoes, is shrivelling up like Michelle Pfeiffer as the witch in Stardust.
Whoa, Nelly! Who would have thought that so much could be read into such a simple act of SPF 30+ application?
Particularly since you consider, as the writer clearly hasn’t, the fact that both girls – yes, even snobbish Nicola – have returned from, you guessed it, a holiday.
We will try to remember all this next time we’re trying to decide whether to leave the house on a sunny day, and if we get burnt at a music festival (etc) we’ll remind ourselves: TANS ARE FOR THE BRITS, PALE SKINS ARE THE OSCARS.
Whatever the bloody hell that means! More » 
Will The Archibald Prize Judges Give The Sympathy Vote To Ledger Portrait?
1:00PM Clem Bastow | You may have read during the first flush of press frenzy immediately following Heath Ledger’s death that a Perth artist had released images of an almost-finished portrait (detail at left) that the actor had sat for in late-2007. And while Ledger had been relaxed and happy during his sittings, the moody painting took on an altogether more chilling vibe in light of Ledger’s reportedly troubled final days.
Well, as though it wasn’t already a fait accompli, the artist – Vincent Fantauzzo – will be entering the painting in this year’s Archibald Prize.
Ledger appears three times in the painting, which is titled Heath. In the central figure, he looks haunted and intense. On either side, he whispers secretively to himself from behind a shielding hand.
It is a dark painting in which the actor, who died in New York just weeks after the sitting, appears to be assailed by mischievous mind-spirits.
Fantauzzo yesterday delivered the painting to the Art Gallery of NSW as an entry in the Archibald Prize.
He said Ledger had been excited about the portrait, had known it was to be an Archibald entry and had thrown himself into the sittings.
“He was looking forward to everything to come,” Fantauzzo said.
Ledger and Fantauzzo worked together on the portrait’s concept. One of the secondary figures was originally going to be screaming, but Fantauzzo scrapped the idea as being too dominating for the central figure.
He said the whispering in the painting represented Ledger’s inner thoughts which, as a private man, he was inclined to withhold.
“I guess it’s the whispering, the voices, the frustration or something comical – all the different ways that we might be thinking in our own mind,” Fantauzzo said.
Even if Fantauzzo doesn’t come away with the prize (likely, particularly in light of the judges’ recent predilection for charcoal sketches), he’d have to be a sure bet for either the People’s Choice or Packing Room gongs, wouldn’t he? More » 
YouTube Clip Of The Day
12:36PM Jess McGuire | Reader Wiz just sent this into us, declaring “OK, I am gonna get on YouTube Clip Of The Day if it kills me…”
Well, as far as we’re concerned it’s too nice a day to see anyone die, so congratulations – you’ve made it, Wiz! Put down the blunt LadyBic and walk away from the bottle of sleeping pills, a wanking kangaroo has just saved your life!
We had no idea kangaroos could do that. But then, we’re quite naive when it comes to the sexual ways of animals. Until we rescued our puppy from the Lost Dogs Home, we were blissfully unaware of the male canine’s ability to make furious love to a seat cushion for hours on end. More » 
While My Ukulele Gently Weeps
12:30PM Mark Graham | We suppose we could do some research to find the name of the guy who rocked the meanest motherscratching ukulele solo we have ever heard on Conan last night, but frankly, it’s late and we’re tired. Besides, all you need to know is that this fella is even more earnest in his desire to rock than Jables was in School Of Rock. Roy Smeck, eat your heart out. [Late Night with Conan O'Brien] Human Giant’s Rob Huebel finally gets around to learning the lesson that John Bobbitt taught us back on a warm summer night in 1993. Namely, that having your penis cut off is the fastest way to get famous. [Funny Or Die] Slashfilm has the first look (at least the first that we have seen) of Richard Kelly’s next directorial effort, The Box. [Slashfilm] Jamie Lynn Spears got grounded. What possible trouble can a pregnant girl get into that doesn’t involve burger phones, you ask? Going out in public with her boyfriend, that’s what! [Radar] Look up, it’s a solar eclipse! (And by solar, we really meant lunar.) [LAist] More »
Will.i.am To Bring His Reverse Midas Touch To ‘X-Men’ Franchise
12:09PM Defamer Hollywood | There are several immutable laws of physics: The net force on a body is equal to it’s mass multiplied by it’s acceleration. Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. Will.i.am ruins everything he touches. Don’t believe us? Check out his recent Grammy performance. Need more proof? Listen to his lifeless remixes on that 25th anniversary re-issue of Thriller. But just when you thought that Will.i.am was content with debasing the sanctity of the entire recording industry, it appears as if he is about to apply his patented reverse Midas Touch on one of the most anticipated action films of 2009. More »We Have Met Our Match When It Comes To Earning The (Tough) Love Of Jillian Michaels
11:51AM Jess McGuire | For the last couple of years, we’ve been fairly confident that we are the most devoted of Jillian Michaels fans out there. We blog about her more than we possibly should, considering she’s only really been on Australian television screens this year for a depressing three minutes at best. We started that Facebook group. We imitate her making Shane cry with disturbing regularity on radio. Once we discovered the other day that she is, as we speak, on Australian soil, we actually contemplated contacting our bosses and asking them to cough up the cash for a stalky trip up north to track her down and convince her to make us do push ups and bawl our eyes out, thus making us happier than we could ever fathom being.
But Mallory, a recent commenter on Defamer Australia, has quite possibly outdone us. She puts forward a compelling argument as to why she is the number one Jillian Michaels fan on the planet, if not the universe.
Jillian is the most amazing, inspirational person that was ever created. Being the fitness guru that i am it’s astonishingly phenominal(yea big words!)to watch jillian do what she does, i look up to her as if she’s God (personally i think she’s better)anyway, everytime i see her i get this feeling in my stomach that i really can’t explain but its the best feeling in the world, it’s almost as if i melt. i can GARUNTEE on my life and my family’s life that i am 100% jillian’s biggest most appreciative fan. I LOVE HER MORE THEN SOME OF MY FAMILY MEMBERS.
We believe we may, as the kids like to say, have been “served”.
If we find out Mallory is a B.D Wong obsessive, we might as well give up this thing called Idiotic Fandom altogether. More » 
Olivia Munn Wonders Why Lindsay Lohan’s Boobs Hang Low
11:50AM Mark Graham | Our fondness for Attack Of The Show’s impossibly shiny haired Olivia Munn has been well-documented on these here pages. Aside from our fanboyish appreciation of her considerable physical charms, the thing that we feel separates Munn from the other pretty faces that grace the telly is her fearlessly honest assessments of some of the, shall we say, floozier members of the Young Hollywood set. Take her comments on Lindsay Lohan’s boob-baring photoshoot, for example. What other female television color commentator would dare label LiLo as looking “haggard” and then follow that crack by putting her low-hanging boobs on blast? We can answer that for you: none. Olivia Munn, we salute you and your impossibly shiny hair. Stay gold. WATCH VIDEO More »
