<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"     #1 Sex, Love and Music: Fame and Nine play it again Two eagerly anticipated movie musicals\u2014one big, one little\u2014have illustrious pasts to live up to. The little guy is Fame, \u00ADstarring young breakout talents as the competitive showbiz babies at Manhattan&amp;#039;s High School of the Performing Arts. While Alan Parker&amp;#039;s 1980 original remains a priceless snapshot of New York at its grittiest, the twenty-first-century version offers breath\u00ADtaking dance sequences and Naturi Naughton&amp;#039;s shivery vocals. But for glamour on a grand scale, the go-to guy is Rob \u00ADMarshall, who mighty-morphed the Broadway hit Chicago into an Oscar-\u00ADsweeping powerhouse and promises more of the same with Nine, a five-Tony winner based on Federico Fellini&amp;#039;s highly personal 1963 classic, 8\u00BD. Daniel Day-Lewis plays Guido Contini, a great Italian film director who, creatively blocked, seeks solace in reveries about the women in his life: Pen\u00E9lope Cruz (his mistress), Marion Cotillard (his wife), Judi Dench (his costume designer), Nicole Kidman (his muse), Sophia Loren (his mama), Kate Hudson (a journalist), and Fergie (the prostitute who told a young Guido about love). One reason to cheer this movie: Fergie and Cruz had to plump up for their roles. Now that&amp;#039;s glamour you can dine out on.\u2014Karen Durbin  #2 Aubrey Plaza: The new funny girl Given the circumstances, there couldn&amp;#039;t be a less surprising career arc than that of 25-year-old Aubrey Plaza. She attended an all-girls Catholic high school in Delaware, where the official handbook afforded a single loophole\u2014&amp;quot;It didn&amp;#039;t say you couldn&amp;#039;t have fake facial hair. I almost wore my mustache to detention, but I thought that was pushing it&amp;quot;\u2014and has grown up in the YouTube age idolizing funny women. (&amp;quot;Tina and Amy are my heroes.&amp;quot;) Then there were the weekly improv classes in Philly. (&amp;quot;I researched how people got on SNL\u2014their bios always said they came from improv.&amp;quot;) As wry as Sarah Silverman and as grounded as any Groundling, Plaza, a deadpan ace, was first noticed by SNL regular Bill Hader, whose wife, Maggie Carey, cast her in the perfectly absurd Web series The Jeannie Tate Show. Plaza costarred in Judd Apatow&amp;#039;s Funny People, snagging the role of a stand-up comic with a tape of her first gig. This month, she&amp;#039;s back in NBC&amp;#039;s Amy Poehler\u2013ized Parks and Recreation, and she&amp;#039;ll continue her costar-of-every-hilarious-actor tour with Michael Cera in next year&amp;#039;s Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. Celluloid suits her, but she&amp;#039;ll be damned if she&amp;#039;s giving up the mic. &amp;quot;With stand-up, it doesn&amp;#039;t matter who you are,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;If the audience claps because they love your movies, that clapping stops after five seconds, and then it&amp;#039;s your job to make them laugh. It&amp;#039;s kind of badass.&amp;quot; \u2014Rachel Rosenblit  #3 Where the Wild Things Are: A children&amp;#039;s classic gets a postmodern makeover The outlandishly brilliant Spike Jonze (Adaptation, Being John Malkovich) roars back to the big screen with Where the Wild Things Are (cowriting it with Dave Eggers), his fierce, funny, and touching live-action film of Maurice Sendak&amp;#039;s great kids&amp;#039; classic. As one Wild Thing tells the angry, hurting young Max (played memorably by newcomer Max Records), &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s hard to be a family.&amp;quot; Featuring vividly outsize monsters as compelling as Max himself and skillfully voiced by James Gandolfini, Lauren Ambrose, and Catherine O&amp;#039;Hara, among others, this is bona fide movie magic.\u2014K.D.  #4 Taylor Lautner: Twilight&amp;#039;s leading man Even if you aren&amp;#039;t among the mobs of bloodthirsty teens (or hell, adults) who devoured Stephenie Meyer&amp;#039;s four vampire romance novels, you&amp;#039;ve probably noticed the tabloid frenzy over square-jawed Brit Robert Pattinson, who was cast as Edward, undead love interest to Kristen Stewart&amp;#039;s mortal Bella in Catherine Hardwicke&amp;#039;s film adaptation of Twilight. But when the series&amp;#039; second installment, New Moon, hits theaters in November, Pattinson diehards will be ditching their Bite Me Edward! T-shirts to join team Taylor Lautner. The 17-year-old Michigan native plays Bella&amp;#039;s sensitive friend Jacob, an underdog, er, wolf, who takes over when Edward disappears. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m literally the only person not wearing a shirt,&amp;quot; says Lautner, who gained 30 pounds to bulk up for the role. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re [filming] in the Pacific Northwest, and everyone&amp;#039;s all bundled up. And all I&amp;#039;m wearing is cutoff jean shorts. That&amp;#039;s it.&amp;quot; \u2014Julie Vadnal  #5 Coco A-Go-Go: Fascinating looks at the iconic designer&amp;#039;s early years Coco Chanel is everywhere. We don&amp;#039;t mean white-toed flats and quilted handbags, or even Mademoiselle&amp;#039;s greater influence on every woman&amp;#039;s closet (boucl\u00E9 suit, anyone?). We&amp;#039;re talking about all the biopics! First came last year&amp;#039;s Coco Chanel, a Lifetime TV movie starring Shirley MacLaine as the headstrong designer in her later years. This month brings Coco Before Chanel, a French film starring Audrey Tautou (Am\u00E9lie) as the young social climber set on redefining women&amp;#039;s fashion. Later this year look for Anna Mouglalis&amp;#039; turn in Coco Chanel &amp;amp;amp; Igor Stravinsky, about her brief affair with the composer in the early &amp;#039;20s. Each film highlights a facet of the force de nature, who was an orphan and who later refused to marry for the sake of appearances or to apologize for her ambitions, which many deemed unfeminine. But all three films make clear why the legend (the other link between Marilyn and Jackie) is a story worth telling again and again.\u2014R.R.  #6 Precious: And you thought nothing could make you cry What Monster&amp;#039;s Ball producer Lee Daniels has managed to coax from his second feature as a director, Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, are transcendent performances from Mo&amp;#039;Nique, Paula Patton, Mariah Carey, Lenny Kravitz, and newcomer Gabourey Sidibe playing a teenager who overcomes a horrific family life with mind-boggling resilience. Precious marks Daniels as a true original and leaves his first filmmaking effort (Shadowboxer) in the dust. You&amp;#039;ll exit this film breathless (in a good way).\u2014R.R.  #7 The Beautiful Life: Trust us. It ain&amp;#039;t pretty.  #8 Glee: Because we could all use a little harmony In May, Fox gave us a taste of Glee, a dramedy about misunderstood high school misfits and their resurrection of the glee club as a proverbial middle finger to the cool kids. Creator Ryan Murphy, the mastermind of FX&amp;#039;s delightfully twisted Nip/Tuck, surely drew from High School Musical, Fame, and Grease, but he replaced some of the saccharine (well, there was the kid in the wheelchair guitar-riffing during the &amp;quot;Don&amp;#039;t Stop Believin&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; finale) with dry wit and humor. On September 16, the series returns, as does the a cappella. We just want to see the cast, costarring Broadway&amp;#039;s Lea Michele (Spring Awakening) and Matthew Morrison (Hairspray), pull off Kanye&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Gold Digger.&amp;quot;\u2014Candice Rainey  #9 The Good Wife:  Ripped-from-the-news TV is going to makes its own headlines In CBS&amp;#039;s fall series The Good Wife, Alicia Florrick&amp;#039;s politician-husband (Chris Noth) has been caught with his knickers down (cough, Spitzer, cough). Julianna Margulies is Alicia unleashed, reborn as a rage-fueled defense attorney, in this crackling-smart legal procedural.\u2014Ben Dickinson  #10 Streetcar Redux: Will Cate Blanchett play Blanche with a little more &amp;#039;tude? With her icy blond hair and patrician delivery, Cate Blanchett hit her sweet spot with such imperious film roles as Elizabeth I and Katharine Hepburn. Onstage, too, her acclaimed turn as Hedda Gabler made that sometimes whiny victim into a riveting witch. But the problem with a sweet spot is that it can get cloying. So it&amp;#039;s exciting to anticipate Blanchett&amp;#039;s appearance as Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams&amp;#039; A Streetcar Named Desire at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC (October 29 to November 21), and Brooklyn Academy of Music (November 27 to December 20), costarring Joel Edgerton and Robin McLeavy. How will the actress, all cheekbones and backbone, wilt into the aging archetypal Southern flower? Probably not completely. Under director Liv Ullmann (yes, Ingmar Bergman&amp;#039;s muse), Blanchett could bring us a Hedda-like Blanche: a belle who can give brute Stanley Kowalski as good as she gets.\u2014Jesse Green  #11 Mamet Mania:  Proof the prince of profanity hasn&amp;#039;t gone soft by any means David Mamet made his name with foul-mouthed takedowns of capitalism but switched to skewering lefty notions of justice in recent comedies. This fall, a new play called (and about) Race, starring James Spader and Kerry Washington, and a revival of 1992&amp;#039;s Oleanna, about political correctness run amok, will turn Broadway into a Mamet kaleidoscope.\u2014J.G.  #12 Girl Drama:  A trio of one-woman shows take the stage These days, a one-woman show seems economical: a few props, some sound effects, and a very small cast party. But that doesn&amp;#039;t mean a poor return on the audience&amp;#039;s investment, as three such shows\u2014all opening in New York City this October\u2014demonstrate. The Night Watcher, at Primary Stages, is perhaps the most traditional: Charlayne Woodard acts out a series of stories from her life, linked by the theme of becoming, instead of a parent, the beloved auntie of various kids in dire straits. In the process, she makes the profound case that there are as many ways to love children well as there are to love them poorly. If Woodard tells all but changes the names, Carrie Fisher, in Wishful Drinking (at the Roundabout Theatre Company), does the opposite. The names in her stories (Brangelina, mom Debbie Reynolds, costar R2-D2) are all too familiar; the only person she exposes is herself: &amp;quot;the finest mentally ill person in the world.&amp;quot; Fisher sees the show, a harrowing but hilarious memoir of her addictions and bouts with manic depression, as part of her recovery: &amp;quot;To turn it into something funny makes you feel more powerful than this stuff that was once more powerful than you.&amp;quot; Though less autobiographical, Anna Deavere Smith&amp;#039;s Let Me Down Easy (at Second Stage) is no less personal. Enacting transcripts of interviews with people facing the betrayal of their bodies (Lance Armstrong; a young cancer patient), Smith creates a deeply emotional experience from the humblest of ingredients: human life and death.\u2014J.G.  #13 Cash Rules:  Rosanne Cash&amp;#039;s daddy tried to raise her better by giving her the List In 1973, Johnny Cash wrote down &amp;quot;100 Essential Country Songs&amp;quot; and instructed his 18-year-old daughter, Rosanne, who was obsessing over the Beatles at the time, to study them all. Next month, she shares her education in The List, lending her own haunting spin to &amp;quot;Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow&amp;quot; (made famous by the Carter Family), Merle Haggard&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Silver Wings,&amp;quot; and 10 other tunes curated by the Man in Black. Long revered as a master songwriter, Rosanne is equally talented at reinterpretation, singing with such close-to-the-bone sincerity that you can&amp;#039;t help but think: like father, like daughter.\u2014C.R.  #14 Janelle Mon\u00E1e: The future of soul is now Diddy, who last year co-released 24-year-old Janelle Mon\u00E1e&amp;#039;s EP, Metropolis: The Chase Suite, has compared her to James Brown, Elvis, Judy Garland, and Anita Baker (in the same sentence). This fall, the saddle-shoed wunderkind delivers Suites II &amp;amp;amp; III: The ArchAndroid &amp;amp;amp; the Great Divide, chockablock with freaky-deaky funk that is truly otherworldly.\u2014J.V.  #15 5 Million: Book publishers&amp;#039; lucky number? That&amp;#039;s the magic number in books this fall. Doubleday is printing 5 million copies of The Lost Symbol\u2014Dan Brown&amp;#039;s sequel to the best-selling hardcover adult novel of all time (boy wizards disqualified), The Da Vinci Code\u2014in which Robert Langdon returns to face a 24-style 12 hours of unholy hell. And following on the film version of The Time Traveler&amp;#039;s Wife (starring Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana), Audrey Niffenegger offers up the ghost story Her Fearful Symmetry\u2014an even better read\u2014which cost Scribner a cool $5 mil.\u2014B.D.  #16 The Big Book: Margaret Atwood has outdone\u2014and outsung\u2014herself this time The apocalyptic allegory The Year of the Flood (Nan A. Talese) is at once a solemn praise song to human hope and a dead-serious poke at our capacity for self-destruction. The novel shows the Nobel Prize\u2013worthy Margaret Atwood (she has already won virtually every other major literary award) at the pinnacle of her prodigious creative powers. Her weigh-in on the breakdown of the social covenant comes during a time of historic global change that her story eerily both mirrors and foretells.  In it, a ragtag array of survivors called God&amp;#039;s Gardeners are pitted against a Boschian band of baddies. The constant within this teeming dystopia is music. Atwood says she sang alto in her high school choir and was familiar with theories of how music underlies all language. The 14 hymns that grace her new novel\u2014written after her parents&amp;#039; deaths, when she couldn&amp;#039;t find existing works that &amp;quot;captured their voices&amp;quot;\u2014serve as moral sentries over a world pillaged beyond redemption. (Or is it?) Composer Orville Stoeber has set them to music and will perform a series of U.S. recitals with Atwood, starting October 6 in San Francisco.\u2014Lisa Shea  #17 Tim Burton: MoMA celebrates the dark art of a creative mastermind You Goth-positive girls who can&amp;#039;t wait to see Anne Hathaway as the White Queen in Tim Burton&amp;#039;s Alice in Wonderland can get a quicker fix at the Museum of Modern Art&amp;#039;s retrospective of the director&amp;#039;s oeuvre, from childhood drawings to unrealized films. (November 22\u2013 April 26, 2010)\u2014Miranda Purves  #18 Luc Tuymans: The painter changes the rules of engagement  #19 In the House: Two major labels are about to get new blood When Phoebe Philo stepped down as creative director at Chlo\u00E9 in 2006, nobody expected the British-bred designer to drop off fashion&amp;#039;s radar as profoundly as when she came into her own, back in 2001. But after an almost three-year family-focused hiatus, Philo missed the industry as much as it did her elevation of casual, and when Celine offered her its top job, she accepted. Philo&amp;#039;s resort collection for the French house (presented in June to much critical acclaim) proved the wait was worth it, as her signature for all things tailored and femme never looked sharper. Another UK-based designer looking to make an impression this season is Peter Copping, Marc Jacobs&amp;#039; former right hand at Louis Vuitton and Nina Ricci&amp;#039;s newly appointed artistic director. With a taste for luxurious, ultra- refined sportswear, Copping will likely breathe very different life into a house many have come to love for its grand, avant-garde occasion-wear. The wait for two of the most anticipated spring 2010 collections in years is nearly over.\u2014Johanna Cox  #20 The Foodie Trend: Just when all we can afford to eat are staples, the staples get fancy This fall, prepare to nod knowingly at small-batch, low-yield, deliciously obscure grains, such as Anson Mills Farro Piccolo, beloved by Thomas Keller, and New England Eight Row Flint milling corn in the divine polenta at Blue Hill, in Pocantico Hills, New York.\u2014M.P.  #21 The Forecast: The ultimate consumption junction quiz As economists appear to be clueless\u2014at least when it comes to predicting the financial future\u2014we thought, Why not foment a people&amp;#039;s revolution? You predict the spending trend that&amp;#039;s hot, hot, hot for fall. We&amp;#039;ve narrowed the theories for you.  A: Consumption Minimus:  No one dares spend a dime. The stock price of Family Dollar stores explodes, and McDonald&amp;#039;s remains strong and steady. Once-a-month pedicures explain why last season&amp;#039;s closed-toe pumps are ubiquitous by Labor Day.  B: Inconspicuous Consumption: Buying a dress is like watching porn. When we gotta have it, we sneak it, online; even grocery-bag-brown J. Crew totes seem too showy. And leave the briefcases at home. They&amp;#039;re for braggarts. They say, &amp;quot;I have a job, and you don&amp;#039;t!&amp;quot;  C: Orgiastic Consumption: The unemployment rate may be nearing 10 percent, but the other 90 percent of the labor force still have jobs, and, by God, it&amp;#039;s time to stop hoarding and exercise our United States of Materialism birthright. Sales soar of HD flat-screen TVs, $10,000 ready-to-wear frocks, and Hummer hybrids.  D: Rationale Consumption: Economic misery has taught us that money doesn&amp;#039;t buy happiness, more isn&amp;#039;t better, and the best things in life are free. Nah.\u2014Laurie Abraham  #22 Republicans Reboot:  Whither (or wither) the GOP in the Age of Obama? Was that cruel laughter we heard from inside the Beltway last September when we asked here, Will the Democrats shoot the moon? Nobody&amp;#039;s giggling now. Four years ago, Republicans were in charge of every lever of the U.S. government; lately, they&amp;#039;re literally less popular than Castro&amp;#039;s Cuba, and to hear them tell it, the Democrats control everything except Fox News. Party macher Mike Murphy forecasts a Republican &amp;quot;ice age.&amp;quot; What now? Like the Sufi parable about the blind men, it depends on which part of the elephant you&amp;#039;re touching. Some scenarios:  \u2022 The GOP base packs up its xenophobia, homophobia, and general cussedness and goes the way of the Whigs, ceding political space to some new conservative movement. \u2022 Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee scrounge up some gravitas to ground their happy-faced culture-warrior charisma and lead the GOP and America back to\u2026somewhere back there.  \u2022 Mitt Romney and eBay biz whiz Meg Whitman sweep the culture wars aside and lead the GOP back to power as the party of a rejuvenated American globalist capitalism.  \u2022 Apostate heir Christopher Buckley and former congressman Joe &amp;quot;Morning Joe&amp;quot; Scarborough create an improbably articulate, enlightened, and clubbable core of a renewed, modernized movement-conservative GOP.  \u2022 Guys, get out of the way: Christine Todd Whitman/Meghan McCain in 2012!\u2014B.D.   #23 Jay-Z Gets Deep : The veteran rapper on The Blueprint 3, due out September 11, eight years after releasing his seminal The Blueprint &amp;quot;Blueprint pays homage to the soul music that our parents played. Blueprint 3 pays homage to that original release date, and in remembering the past we must look to the future in a different way. Musically the album recognizes that there is a generation of us who are influencing the next wave of artists.&amp;quot;\u2014Jay-Z  #24 The It Girl: Undeniably cool, on-and offscreen Britain&amp;#039;s dazzling new actress, Carey Mulligan, has such spectacular screen chemistry that Audrey Hepburn comparisons are breaking out all over. She more closely resembles a young Debbie Reynolds, only minus the innocence\u2014the key to her charm. Mulligan has four movies out this year and is currently filming Oliver Stone&amp;#039;s Wall Street sequel. But catch her early playing opposite Peter Sarsgaard in An Education. As a 16-year-old London schoolgirl seduced by the fast life and a dubiously supersmooth older man, she&amp;#039;s both vulnerable and avid, and you can&amp;#039;t get enough of her.\u2014K.D.  #25 9/13/09 : Hotness meats greatness The Jets&amp;#039; new QB, Mark Sanchez, debuts in his first game. Unfortunately, he will be wearing his jersey.\u2014L.A. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/a11986/the-elle-25-340194/>