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.
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.
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.
Everybody loves The Conjuring.
"Ultimate" meaning both the greatest and the last, because after this inimitable exercise in pining for lost love, no one will ever dare miss a connection again.
Artist Jemima Kirke got a little too clingy for Jay Z's comfort on the gallery set of "Picasso Baby," reports the New York Daily News. That's so unlike her disaffected Girls character Jessa. See what happens when, as an artist, you play against type? Your artist body loses control and your artist self gets shamed in front of luminaries such as Rosie Perez, Marilyn Minter, Jim Jarmusch, and your Girls costar Adam Driver.
Here's the trailer for Spike Jonze's upcoming film Her, starring Joaquin Phoenix as Mr. Lonely Bones, Amy Adams as the perennial cute lady in his life, and Scarlett Johansson as a sexy set of sounds. Is it already making a commentary on modern love and instant gratification and the confluence of technology and emotional attachment? Maybe!
Our Generation's Lena Dunham was the keynote speaker at a fundraiser last night for comptroller candidate Scott Stringer. (Dunham's best friend and real-life Marnie is Audrey Gelman, Stringer's press secretary.) Dunham opened her speech by saying,"When Scott told me he was running for comptroller, the first thing I did was Google the word comptroller... I thought the comptroller was the guy who rode on the back of the fire truck and steered!"
Daft Punk were supposed to headline the Colbert Report's annual StePhest Colbchella and play the "song of the summer," "Get Lucky." (That must have seemed slightly more plausible as the actual song of the summer a month ago, when the duo were booked.) However, because they had a deal with MTV for a surprise appearance on August 25's Video Music Awards, President of MTV Networks Music & Logo Group at Viacom, Inc., Van Toffler stepped in and put the kibosh on the Colbert Report appearance, citing contractual exclusivity.
On Saturday, August 3rd at approximately 9:20 p.m., the physical embodiment of the Beyoncé concept, Beyoncé, took the stage for the first of three consecutive performances at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. On Saturday, August 3rd at approximately 8:20 p.m., two Gawker bloggers covered in body glitter (in hindsight: why?) concocted an iffy plan to make it onto the floor of the area, without purchasing floor passes for a thousand dollars.
Fab Morvan, the member of Milli Vanilli who didn't kill himself in 1998, appeared on last night's episode of Oprah: Where Are They Now? He was drawn to Holland "on a fashion project" and now lives there. His current musical project is called Fabulous Addiction. It involves him singing (actually singing) over generic EDM (that's "electronic dance music" if you didn't know, and if you didn't know, Morvan will tell you). He makes a good case for lip-synching.
Mumford & Sons yesterday released the music video for "Hopeless Wanderer," the latest single off their second studio album Babel, and it has everything you could ever want in a music video: Jason Sudeikis, Jason Bateman, Will Forte and Ed Helms.
Welcome to Annotate This, where we gather reviews, trailers, and annotate the posters for movies coming out this week. It will help you decide what to avoid, what to see, and what to pretend to see. Click on the image above to add your comments to the mix.
James Ponsoldt’s The Spectacular Now practically marches up and announces to you that it’s going to serve a refreshingly multi-dimensional portrayal of teens and their problems. Upon meeting his love interest when he wakes up on her lawn after a drunken blackout, our protagonist Sutter (Miles Teller) asks her, “So, what’s your thing?” “I like to think there’s more about a person than one thing,” replies Amy (Shailene Woodley).
Porn performer James Deen will not discuss his Canyons costar Lindsay Lohan. But he will discuss his experiences with gay sex, both onscreen—in Paul Schrader’s aforementioned bizarrely mesmerizing and already-storied thriller—and in his real life. What does that say about a performer whose heterosexuality is a commodity that’s sold countless straight porn movies, including Farrah Abraham’s “sex tape?”
R&B is about selling the cliché. An effective vocalist can create urgent and crucial emotions out of words that would sound cringe-worthy if spoken—imagine someone sitting you down and telling you, "I had a vision of love, and it was all that you've given to me," or, "You say he's not treating you right, then lady spend the night — I'll love you like you need to be loved."
