While You Were Sleeping, Willie Nelson Got Stoned And Auditioned For The Hobbit
Here are some things that happened overnight. Featuring Emeli Sandé's cover of 'Crazy In Love', Steven Soderbergh's extended diss on the film industry, and Willie Nelson's 80th birthday.
Emeli Sandé’s ‘Crazy In Love’:
Emeli Sandé is a Scottish singer who you may or may not have heard of. Which is actually really bizarre, considering that her debut album, Our Version Of Events, has just celebrated its 63rd week in the top ten of the UK charts — breaking a world record that’s been held by the Beatles for 50 years.
Apparently, Emeli Sandé is quite a big deal. Which makes us a little more comfortable with her taking on this modern classic with the Brian Ferry Orchestra, for the Gatsby soundtrack.
It will probably be playing in that shiny party scene with all of the pretty flapper ladies. See? Directing’s not that hard.
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Watch Willie Nelson Get Stoned And Pretend To Be A Wizard:
Yesterday was the 80th birthday of country music/activist legend Willie Nelson. It was also the day that this audition tape turned up on Conan O’Brien’s Webby-winning Team Coco channel, with Nelson trying out for the role of The Hobbit‘s Gandalf. (You have to zoom in to get the whole screen, for some reason.)
There hasn’t been an old guy this amazing since Sir Ian.
Here’s What Steven Soderberg Thinks Of Your Stinking Film Industry:
The recently retired king of genre versatility, who’s now, yes, writing a book on Twitter, was asked to give the keynote speech at the San Francisco International Film Festival over the weekend. It’s a wonderful speech, and it takes all types of poetic twists and turns, from analytic to statistic to philosophic – What is art for? Why are we spending so much money on it? What’s the difference between cinema and movies? – before basically just ripping into the entire mainstream movie industry, and its inability to produce good movies.
“Cinema as I define it, and as something that inspired me, is under assault by the studios and, from what I can tell, with the full support of the audience,” he says. “The reasons for this, in my opinion, are more economic than philosophical, but when you add an ample amount of fear and a lack of vision, and a lack of leadership, you’ve got a trajectory that I think is pretty difficult to reverse.”
What Just Happened?
(via Neatorama)