Just upgraded to WordPress 2.9.  Reportedly more than 500 bug fixes and enhancements.

And now, a vaguely marvelous compendium of the stuff that’s caught my eye so far this morning, in random order.  Warning, down towards the bottom of this post there’s a photo that some might consider somewhat NSFW.

First up, the NY Times’ Manohla Dargis on her favorite (and a few least favorite) films of 2009.   She mentions that Star Trek and Avatar “remain exceptions to the flashier, noisier, dumber rule of much of today’s mega-budget entertainment.”  Her favorites include Gomorrah, Tulpan, Summer Hours, Hurt Locker, Beaches of Agnes, Public Enemies, Beeswax, Ponyo, The Informant, Where the Wild Things Are, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Sun and, of course, Avatar.

She pulls even fewer punches in this interview.

On why so many romantic comedies are so terrible: One, the people making them have no fucking taste, two, they’re morons, three they’re insulting panderers who think they’re making movies for the great unwashed and that’s what they want. I love romantic movies. I absolutely do. But I literally don’t know what’s happening. I think it’s depressing that Judd Apatow makes the best romantic comedies and they’re about men.

Is Mila Kunis the thinking man’s Megan Fox?  Maybe “thinking man” isn’t the proper phrase here.  (Photo swiped from here.)

Click here if you wanna see a Lady Gaga video redone Sims-style. Someone’s got more free time on their hands than even me?

And from a Sim to the real thing, some new shots of Lady Gaga by David LaChapelle, swiped from here.

That’s one of the least-NSFW shots over there.  (And yes, she has reportedly had “them” done recently.)

My admiration for LaChapelle knows few bounds.  I love his saturated colors and the concepts he comes up with.  This Google image search reveals lots of his stuff.  How he conceives of this stuff much less how he executes what he sees in his head remains a mystery to me.

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