I saw Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s biopic Lovelace about a month ago, and I still haven't figured out its purpose. We don't really need another retelling of Linda Lovelace’s story, especially one like this: bereft of nuance and determined to make a one-dimensional victim out of a woman who was fascinating, complex, contradictory, and revolutionary.
Ever since David Foster Wallace committed suicide in 2008, the late novelist's friends and literary executors have been exploring the intersection of canonization, exploitation, and vengeance. His publishing house chopped and shuffled his unfinished and unfinishable final manuscript into a "posthumous novel." Jonathan Franzen, loser of their head-to-head trial of literary merit in life, set about relitigating it through underminer-y ostensibly memorial essay-writing. Elizabeth Wurtzel used him as a reference point for her crush on David Boies ("David Boies makes David Wallace look like, well, some other lesser David, maybe David Remnick"). He's become the lit-martyr equivalent of Bruce Lee in Game of Death, with everything he ever said or wrote available for potential repackaging as a holy relic. (A phoner I did with him in 1998 has made it into two different volumes.)
Acclaimed filmmaker Werner Herzog's wants to bring an end to the scourge of texting while driving once and for all — and he just might do it.
Kids these days are straight up zooted and bouncing off the emergency room walls, thanks to copious supplies of Adderrall and Ritalin and all the other ADHD drugs that they got from you. (They learned it by watching you, okay?) If we'd simply been giving our kids Vivarin this whole time, none of this would have happened.
Retired Army officer, failed presidential candidate, and prolific foreword-writer Wesley Clark has a girlfriend: Ahalife.com CEO Shauna Mei, an ex-Goldman banker who graduated from MIT in 2005. Page Six reports the May-December couple (Clark is 68) recently appeared holding hands in the Hamptons. Aww.
Tired of receiving unsolicited credit card offers from the bank, one man finally gave in and signed up — but not before drawing up his own contract and making the bank sign it.
Elysium, the titular utopia of District 9 writer-director Neill Blomkamp’s second film, looks like the ritziest parts of Los Angeles. Maybe it will remind you of the Hamptons or St. Tropez (does St. Tropez look like that?), but it was an L.A. ringer to me. It is home to sprawling McMansions, intensely green yards, tanned bodies lying in blissful inertia, elegant dinner parties. It's a beautiful place where no one grows old, and where healing whatever ails you is as simple as lying on a slab and pushing a button.
You'd think someone like Oprah Winfrey wouldn't have a problem going into any shop in the world to buy whatever the hell she damn well pleases. But you'd be wrong.
Remember when New York City was perceived as some sort of gritty urban jungle? Haha. Remember when Brooklyn was perceived as an even grittier urban backwater? Hahaha. Remember when New York City was "cool?"
Over 120 dolphin corpses have washed on shore so far this summer—seven times the normal amount. Experts say that the number of dead bottlenose dolphins is "very alarming." The strandlings have appeared on shore between New York and Virginia starting in July and increasing over the past two weeks. In Virginia, 64 animals have been found.
