Sacha Baron Cohen's The Dictator is the picture of an equal-opportunity offender, but don't expect it to be taken as such. Racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, anti-American sentiment, anti-Arab sentiment, anti-celebrity sentiment — they're all key to the film's ruthless humor, but there is one breed of jokes that may affect delicate sensibilities above all the others: the rape joke.
About three years after its originally scheduled release, Baltimore rapper Rye Rye's debut album, Go! Pop! Bang!, has at last been released. It's a hoot that sometimes skews a little too close to radio trance, but otherwise has the ability to tease wild things out of her collaborators like Bangladesh — the dude who produced Lil Wayne's "A Milli" flips into full-on dance mode with Rye Rye.
Bianca Caampued, Brooklyn businesswoman, professional party crasher, routine stunt-puller, and sometimes wearer of non-prescription eyeglasses (because why not?), co-founded Small Girls PR back in 2011. It all started when she crashed a random birthday party and was one of the last people dancing—along with birthday girl Mallory Blair. They got to talking and social-media-ing and Small Girls PR was born.
Meet Maurizio and Roberto Viel. They are twin brothers who co-own a plastic surgery practice and have performed multiple procedures on one another to increase their resemblance. (Maurizio gave Roberto a nose job; Roberto plumped Maurizio's face.) One surgery they have not performed on each other, however, is their practice's specialty: Penis enlargement.
Puff of 1920's French salon smoke James Franco is in the midst of adapting two books of poetry for two different films. Stephen Dobyns' Black Dog, Red Dog will feature Olivia Wilde, Chloe Sevigny and Whoopi Goldberg, while Tar, by the great C.K. Williams, stars Mila Kunis and Jessica Chastain alongside Franco himself. Big stars, small budgets, lots of Tisch student participation.
A few weeks ago, I created a profile and logged onto VKontakte, the most popular Russian-language social network. I entered some personal information, uploaded an especially flattering picture of myself, then used the search function to find all single women between 25 and 35 in Ukraine who were online at the moment — around 7:30 p.m. Ukraine time. There were more than 10,000 available, all sorted by a rating system which seemed to be directly proportional to the amount of pictures a woman had posted of herself in a string bikini, and how good she looked in said bikini.
Stepping just outside of his element yet again (or maybe not?), Be Kind Rewind-cum-Green Hornet auteur Michel Gondry directs a bunch of Bronx teens discussing their lives and loves while riding the bus on the last day of school.
Last night marked Howard Stern's debut as a judge on NBC's giddily lowbrow/despicable freak show, America's Got Talent (now in its seventh fucking season). He was introduced on the show with an ominous package that contained the phrase "shock jock" and footage of Stern saying that he was going to be like "Piers on steroids" (in reference to replacing Piers Morgan as AGT's Simon Cowell). However, he was more like Piers on a mild stimulant and some Splenda. Stern let down easy a woman who sang with a dozen of her pet birds clinging to her shirt, gushed about how great America is after seeing one of those glow-in-the-dark dance acts this show adores and then cuddled onstage with a dude who'd received a second chance after he botched his initial audition. Stern's leaps and bounds more articulate than just about anyone else who's flapping their gums on a televised competition and he often tempered his praise with sarcasm, but this is a much kinder and gentler Stern.
Duane Lester of All American Blogger recently published a hyperlocal post concerning the "serious shortcomings" of the sheriff's department in Holt Country, Missouri — his home state. Of the piece, Lester wrote: "It was significant to me in that it was the first article I wrote utilizing training I received at BlogConCLT and it was very local."
The Washington, D.C., headquarters of the gay-rights organization Human Rights Campaign was evacuated this morning after D.C. police passed on an unspecified bomb threat, according to Metro Weekly.
Everyone heads to Hulu to watch the best of network and cable TV wherever and whenever. But sometimes you're in that mood where nothing appeals to you more than the thought of a serious TV marathon. This is where Battleground—Hulu's original series about a group of under-30 small-town Wisconsin pundits working around the clock to win their underdog candidate a seat in the U.S. Senate—comes in. Executive produced by J.D. Walsh, Hagai Shaham, and Marc Webb, Battleground's documentary feel amps up the real drama of Anytown, USA politics.
This is beautiful. Responding to President Obama's endorsement of gay marriage, commander-in-chief of hip-hop Jay-Z has weighed in with his own support of equality. In the video below, you can see Jay say:
