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Joe Swanberg is 33. I don't know whether to be amazed by how high or low that number is.  On one hand, that's ridiculously young for a filmmaker who broke out back in 2006 and 2007 with "Lol" and "Hannah Takes The Stairs" and has been absurdly prolific since then. On the other hand, though, the filmmaker who made his name -- and, depending on your generosity, made a genre -- chronicling the dramatically limited foibles of recent college graduates has reached the "thirtysomething" phase of his career. The erratic and misdirected youths at the center of Swanberg's earlier films have become the pesky nubiles who show up to make Swanberg's new leads feel either old or optimistically mature. It's a transition that has been in the works for a little while. Last year's Swanberg Sundance entry "Happy Christmas" featured the director and Melanie Lynskey as a grown-up, responsible couple whose house nearly...

Betty Hutton movies (photo: Betty Hutton in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, with Eddie Bracken) [See previous post: "Betty Hutton Bio: The Blonde Bombshell."] Buddy DeSylva did as promised. Betty Hutton was given a key supporting role in Victor Schertzinger’s 1942 musical comedy The Fleet’s In, starring Dorothy Lamour, William Holden, and Eddie Bracken. “Her facial grimaces, body twists and man-pummeling gymnastics take wonderfully to the screen,” enthused Pm magazine. (Hutton would have a cameo, as Hetty Button, in the 1952 remake Sailor Beware, starring Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, and Corinne Calvet.) The following year, Betty Hutton landed the second female lead in Happy Go Lucky (1943), singing Jimmy McHugh and Frank Loesser’s "Murder, He Says," and stealing the show from fellow Broadway import Mary Martin and former Warner Bros. crooner Dick Powell. She also got co-star billing opposite Bob Hope in Sidney Lanfield’s musical comedy Let’s Face It. Additionally, Paramount’s hugely successful all-star war-effort...

Hollywood and Broadway star whose family life inspired the musical Gypsy

Those who know the gorgeously gaudy Jule Styne/Stephen Sondheim Broadway musical Gypsy (1959) will remember the refrain of "my name is June, what's yours?" addressed to the audience by the curly-haired child performer. "Baby" June was based on June Havoc, who has died aged 97, and the show was inspired by her early days in Us vaudeville with her "monstrous" stage mother and older sister Rose Louise, who became Gypsy Rose Lee, the famous stripper.

"I think Gypsy was one of the most smashing shows I've seen in my life," Havoc once told me. "But very little to do with fact. My mother was not such a monster. Few parents who had a child who, at the age of two, stood on her toes and danced every time she heard music, could resist putting her forward. Particularly if the child was happy doing it.