Did you remember that Jennifer Aniston was in Leprechaun? That Jake Gyllenhaal played Billy Crystal’s son in City Slickers? Of course you don’t, you’re not IMDB! (you’re NOT IMDB… are you?). Luckily this supercut is here to take you on an interesting and informative trip down memory lane, where future stars starred in films you don’t remember, where you can see Natalie Portman giving herself a breast exam in “Developing,” a 1994 short film about breast cancer. Just don’t wank to it, she was 13. I mean, I’d hate to see what would happen if PERVERTS got a hold of this footage. This is why I try to offer free breast exams to all the 13-year-olds in my neighborhood. So they never have to appear in films like this. I worry about them, and they know there’s nothing but love in these hands.

[pleated-jeans]

I originally wrote this review in January of 2010 after seeing Hesher (directed by Spencer Susser, co-written by Susser and David Michod of the equally kickass Animal Kingdom) at Sundance.  Since then, it’s gotten a new cut, and opens today in these cities*.  I saw the new cut of the film a few weeks ago, and though I couldn’t isolate what exactly was different, I can tell you that I liked it even more, or at least, felt that much more justified in loving it the first time around.  It’s essentially the story of a family who experience a loss and start to lose themselves, wondering if life has no meaning.  Then a mysterious character named Hesher comes along and basically says, “F*CK IT, MAYBE LIFE HAS NO MEANING!” and lights everything on fire.  Seriously, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is so righteous in this movie, you guys.  One of the things I love about Hesher is that it’s finally an indie movie that isn’t so f*cking mannered. You see Paul Giamatti in a movie like Win-Win, and it’s a pretty well-made film, but everything about it is just so… expected.  You know it’s going to warm a smug film critic just like one of his conservative sweaters.  It’s exactly the kind of film you expect to see at Sundance, and has all the heart, middle-class ennui, and character drama that middle-aged progressives demand in a film they discuss over Chardonnay.  It’s not bad, it’s just godd*mn boring.  Hesher is a gleefully nihilistic cinematic middle finger that has Joseph Gordon-Levitt talking about old ladies “getting strangled with their dirty panties” and specifying between “dick f*cking” and “finger f*cking.”  It’s abrasive, it’s not nice, and your parents will probably hate it.  Just like heavy metal.  That’s part of why it feels so good.

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Joseph Gordon-Levitt is a White-Snake Chorus

You know that one White Snake song, where it starts off kind of slow, and there’s all these gay synthesizers, and some guy’s singing about being “a heart in need of rescue?”  And the first time you heard it, you were just about to turn it off, but then all of a sudden, this thumpin’ chorus fades in and you just wanna jump up on the bar and start singin’ — HERE I GO AGAIN ON MY OOOOOWWWN — and you kick an old lady’s drink into her lap, and you’re still shouting, and the veins in your neck are all poppin’ out — GOIN’ DOWN THE ONLY ROOOOAAAD I’VE EVER KNOOOOOOWWWN — and it’s rocking you so hard, you pull your pants down and start waving your wiener around like a helicopter — LIKE A DRIFTER I WAS BOORN, TO WALK ALLOOOOOOWWWOOONE — but then the chorus ends, and it’s back to the gay synthesizers again?  But it’s almost like the gay synthesizer parts don’t even matter, because in the back of your mind you know that awesome chorus is coming up again any second now, so while the gay synthesizers play, you’re just waiting to get naked and light the bar on fire?  And it’s almost unfair to criticize the gay synthesizer parts, because without them the chorus wouldn’t make you want to run up to the overpass and flash your tits at oncoming traffic nearly as much, and the anticipation is half the fun?  Yeah.  So Hesher.  It’s, uh… it’s kind of like that.

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I saw Hesher last year at Sundance, and while it had some stock-indie-movie elements I didn’t love, the good parts still kicked enough ass that I named it to my top 10 of 2010.  Since then, it got a new cut (which hopefully made it even better) and played SXSW.  A few months ago, a trailer hit the web, but it wasn’t very good and had a nut shot in it, and director Spencer Susser said it was an unauthorized version and urged people not to watch it.  Today brings us a new, Susser-approved trailer, cut by Susser himself.  And yeah, remove your metal fingers from your butt because this one’s a lot more awesome.

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Natalie Portman’s father, Avner Hershlag, a Long Island fertility specialist, self-published his first novel, Misconception, a self-dubbed “reproductive thriller”, last year.  According the the New York Observer, it’s “a tale of cloning experiments gone bad and the compromised embryos of a U.S. first lady,” and is currently generating interest from major publishing houses.  Hey, who wants to bet the first lady in question is a fictionalized Sarah Palin?  Old Jews never shut up about Palin.  Eh, at least he’s not commenting on all your pictures on Facebook.  Anyway, the fine folks at NYMag dug up an excerpt, and there’s a penis-measuring scene in the first paragraph, so it’s got that going for it.

This time I won’t let the doctor pull down my underwear. No way will this man feel my balls again and measure my penis with a yardstick. I hate him. I hate the clinic.
For six months, Mom’s been dragging me every week to this nightmare of a place, to see the awful doctor. The freezing stethoscope and his cold hands give me the creeps. Why would the bastard think his white coat gives him the right to embarrass me in front of the nurse, telling her with his smart-ass attitude to look at my private parts, pulling my elastic without permission?

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Yesterday we touched on the controversy over how much of Natalie Portman’s dancing in Black Swan was performed by a stunt double, a topic we quickly abandoned in favor of a thorough investigation of just how much of that thong butt in the Your Highness trailer was hers.  But God forbid anyone care about my Pulitzer-caliber reporting, everyone’s still hung up on the ballerina crap. Darren Aronofsky and Mila Kunis have now both weighed in on the matter.  To recap, here’s what the ballerina double, Sarah Lane, who earned $6,000 $25,000 for her work, had to say:

“They wanted to create this idea in people’s minds that Natalie was some kind of prodigy or so gifted in dance and really worked so hard to make herself a ballerina in a year and a half for the movie, basically because of the Oscar,” says Natalie Lane. “It is demeaning to the profession and not just to me. I’ve been doing this for 22 years…. Can you become a concert pianist in a year and a half, even if you’re a movie star?”

“I mean, from a professional dancer’s standpoint, she doesn’t look like a professional ballet dancer at all and she can’t dance in pointe shoes. And she can’t move her body; she’s very stiff,” says Lane. “I do give her a lot of credit because in a year and a half she lost a lot of weight and she really tried to go method and get into a dancers head and really feel like a ballet dancer.”

If I could paraphrase, “Meee-yow.”  Here’s Darren Aronofsky’s two cents:

“Here is the reality. I had my editor count shots. There are 139 dance shots in the film. 111 are Natalie Portman untouched. 28 are her dance double Sarah Lane. If you do the math that’s 80% Natalie Portman. What about duration? The shots that feature the double are wide shots and rarely play for longer than one second. There are two complicated longer dance sequences that we used face replacement. Even so, if we were judging by time over 90% would be Natalie Portman.

And to be clear Natalie did dance on pointe in pointe shoes. If you look at the final shot of the opening prologue, which lasts 85 seconds, and was danced completely by Natalie, she exits the scene on pointe. That is completely her without any digital magic.” [EW]

(*yawns, suppesses urge to wank dismissively*)  And here’s Kunis’s:

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