Magazine Meh

My subscription to Hollywood Life is about to run out. But I'm not renewing it. In fact, I never actually ordered it. My subscription was to Movieline and I'd been a subscriber for just aeons.



I can't remember how long ago it was but suddenly Movieline was "(small print)Movieline's(/small print) Hollywood Life" but the downward slide had happened long before. In the beginning Movieline would put cool at the time people like Winona Ryder and Drew Barrymore on their cover. Eventually it became clear that they had somehow become a B list publicity tool and they didnt' land big stars as often for their covers. They would go with TV personalities (like Jennifer Love Hewitt) or musicians who wanted to act (like Beyonce) as bait for the impulse buy at magazine racks even though they were a film magazine. Blech. But I kept reading out of habit.

There was once a time when their "Young Hollywood" issue was the most exciting thing. It wasn't just because I was younger, too. They would have fantastic articles like "Top 10 Performances of the Past Ten Years by an Actor Under 30" with long essays on the performances and the like --you know, exactly my sort of thing. I remember one time they had a massive chart of famous young actors with a point system that was all kinds of funny, subtracting points for making films with a significant other, adding points if they'd publicly exhibited a sense of humor about their own fame, 0 points for being on the cover of Movieline, etc... I still remember it fondly.

Now their "Young Hollywood" issue is just lists. Lists are always fun but they're also kind of empty if they don't have explanatory text. But I thought some of them were worth sharing anyway:

Top 10 Young Hollywood Actors Making Interesting Career Choices
Rachel McAdams * Scarlett Johansson * Jake Gyllenhaal * Maggie Gyllenhaal * Ryan Gosling * Bryce Dallas Howard * Evan Rachel Wood * Gael Garcia Bernal * Heath Ledger * Joseph Gordon Levitt *
(Levitt gets the only photo. But I think the list is pretty right on.)

Top 10 Young Hollywooders We'd Like To See More of, Please
Agnes Bruckner * Jon Foster * Victor Rasuk * America Ferrera * Bryan Greenberg * Jesse Eisenberg * Amanda Seyfried * Brady Corbet * Milo Ventimiglia * Andy Samberg
(Even though they'd like to see more of these folks, not a one of them gets a photo. Tacky. But interesting choices for the most part.)

Top 10 Young Hollywood Lies
"I like to pay attention to what's happening around the world."
"I was suffering from exhaustion."
"I'm really a homebody."
"I wish the tabloids would leave me alone."
"They're real."
"I just have a really high metabolism."
"Our relationship is fine."
"I didn't get into this for the fame."
"I never read what people write about me on the internet." (hee)
"I'm straight."
(Funny stuff, yes?)