Not really the standard news for this site but it involves Amanda Bynes in some way. Steve & Barry’s, the chain that sells Amanda’s Dear collection, has filed for what’s called Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Which basically means that they can try and fix the problems they’re having without being declared bankrupt.

It seems that Steve & Barry’s was basically overexpanding and the problem everyone is having; the rise of costs. Seeing Steve & Barry’s is considered a budget store their margins would be a lot lower than for other stores. Meaning that a cost increase hurts them harder than others.

So for now Dear won’t disappear from stores, I don’t know if Amanda makes a lot of her clothing being sold there but it probably would suck for her if she lost a source of income. She seems to be focusing on changing her career a bit now so she’s not exactly making big bucks with the movies she’s currently doing. Not that I think she’ll have a shortage of money; she’s not exactly known as a big spending celebrity blowing her money on partying.

Amanda Bynes has landed her first role that doesn’t involve comedy. She’s been cast for a role in the Lifetime movie Living Proof, which is about the development of a breast cancer drug and is based on a book by Robert Bazell. Others cast in the movie Angie Harmon, Bernadette Peters, Swoosie Kurtz and Harry Connick Jr. Amanda’s character is the student assistant to Connick’s character Dennis Slamon.

So this is a TV movie, it might seem a step down for Amanda from Hollywood movies but I understand the move. She has always said she wants to venture into more serious roles and this movie is a drama. It wouldn’t really make a lot of sense for anyone to cast her in a bigger production. This is just a way for herself to discover what she can actually do in the drama genre.

The movie will air in October so we’ll see what Amanda can do in the genre by then. If it’s a failure she won’t have too much egg on her face, she can just as quickly return to comedy. Though sometimes I wonder why she’s so very picky about movie roles, she really doesn’t make that many movies compared to other actresses in her age group.

Have Lindsay Lohan, Amanda Bynes and Brittany Snow teamed up against Miley Cyrus? No they’re not turning against Miley because of the Vanity Fair pictures; this is another episode in the YouTube dance battle between the dance crews ACDC (Step Up director John Chu and Adam Sevani) and M&M Cru with a U (Miley Cyrus and Mandy Jiroux).

While the first they made just consisted of dancers the new one also features celebrities, amongst these are some people of the Hairspray cast (in this case Amanda Bynes, Brittany Snow and Elijah Kelley) but also Lindsay Lohan and her galpal (somehow I hate that term) Samantha Ronson. Of those the biggest part is probably for Lindsay, including one where she knocks over two cardboard cut-outs of Hannah Montana. There actually are far more celebrities in the video but I’m not going to name them all.

As for the video itself, all those celebrities being in there is actually problem if you ask me. While the M&M video basically only had Channing Tatum as a celebrity, John and Adam tried to stick as many as possible in there. It just makes it more a parade of celebrities than an actual dance video. The dancing is of course of the highest level but the video itself just doesn’t really work for me, I actually think their first video was better.

Of course it took time to produce this video; seeing it only took a couple of days for the Miley & Mandy response to come online I don’t know if that will be the case this time. Mandy is away with her new band the Beach Girlz while Miley is in Tennessee for the Hannah Montana Movie rehearsals. So if they have the response prepared (which I think was the case last time) it will only take a couple of days. Otherwise we won’t see a response for another couple of months.

US Magazine has put out another one of those quite weird lists, this time the 2007 Hot Hollywood Power Players. I’ve questioned the use of rankings before but in this one I really wonder what their ranking criteria are.

Focussing on the younger women on the list we can see Miley Cyrus, Vanessa Hudgens, Amanda Bynes and Jamie Lynn Spears. They also included the Cast of Heroes (which makes the list even stranger) which also includes Hayden Panettiere. The Heroes show will lose a lot of support this year I think, the show seems to be overhyped a bit right now. So not that Hot Hollywood at the end of this year I think.

I can understand why they put Miley Cyrus and Vanessa Hudgens on the list; they’re having a good run with the younger crowd right now. Amanda Bynes is on there because of the success of Hairspray and because she is completely scandal free which the press likes these days.

Why put Jamie Lynn Spears on the list? Her sister isn’t exactly helping with her problems; she herself even had a pregnancy scare. The only thing she has going right now is her TV show Zoey 101, besides that she isn’t really doing anything. Compared to other shows on TV the show isn’t doing that great, if you compare it to her competition on that list she loses by a mile to Miley Cyrus. I really wouldn’t rate her as a power player.

I’m just starting to think they put this list together so they could invite these people to a party. If you put them on a list like that you’ll have a bigger chance of them coming than just inviting them. I can’t see any concrete criteria to how these girls were ranked in that list.

The thing with actresses starting at a young age is that you see them growing up on screen. You can of course never predict what they’ll be like in the future, sometimes they turn out to be different than you ever imagined.

There are two possible ways we can see people growing up on screen, there are the actresses that start out on TV and there are the ones that start in movies. With movies you see them growing up in steps, you see them once in a while. With TV you can literally see them growing up, they can even change over the course of a TV season.

One of the most famous examples probably are the Olsen twins, you could literally see Mary-Kate and Ashley start out as babies on Full House. After that they kept exploiting their cute twin factor in straight to DVD movies from their own production company Dual Star. But what everyone knew would happen really did happen; their cuteness factor wore off and now we just see two close to being anorexic fashion disasters in the tabloids. They’re now trying to get into acting again but solo; the twin thing isn’t that useful for adult actors.
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