Brother and sister Nathan and Emily Woodsworth give a whole new meaning to the German word “wunderkind.” Nathan, 22, attended the American Broadcasting Institute, studied improv with The Groundlings in Los Angeles—an improvisational comedy troupe that produced the infamous Peewee Herman character and had a handful of members go on to be cast on Saturday […]
Film
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Crazy Train
Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer Is Crazy, But That’s How It Goes
A train hurtles over the dead Earth, speeding across deep-frozen plains and carving a path around oceans of ice. The desiccated skeletons of cities blur by, as do old automobiles and abandoned ships; every once in a great while, the train shoots by a pile of huddled corpses, half-buried in the snow. The vague lumps […]
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Spiritual Warriors
The making of a film that was never made
Dune is a boring book, and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s movies are torturously indulgent. That’s my take, anyway, offered after multiple failed attempts to appreciate both Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi novel and Jodorowsky’s surrealist classics The Holy Mountain and El Topo. Your mileage out of these things certainly varies, just as your mileage with Jodorowsky’s Dune will […]
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Let’s Do it Again
22 Jump Street: Bring on number 23!
Hollywood is littered with the decaying carcasses of failed sequels. But 22 Jump Street—the follow-up to the implausibly funny 21 Jump Street starring Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum—not only overcomes “the curse of the sequel,” it laughs in the curse’s face, shoves it down the stairs, and laughs some more. Then it feels bad about […]
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Jazz Hands? Or SAD HANDS?
I love all musicals, including Jersey Boys. Sue me.
Like television shows, young adult fiction, and the cherished toys of our childhoods, no popular Broadway musical is currently safe from film adaptation. Hey, no complaints from this repressed musical theater nerd over here; I love all of them. Even the ones that aren’t as good as they should be. Segue to: Jersey Boys. Jersey […]
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I’ll Be Your Mirror
Getting under Scarlett Johansson’s skin
Much ado has been made about Anthony Lane’s recent skin-crawling New Yorker profile of Scarlett Johansson—a weird up-skirt shot of a character study that reads like a grad school application to Esquire. Ostensibly meant as a preview for her role in Jonathan Glazer’s remarkable new film Under the Skin, the 50-something Lane jizzes poetic over […]
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Good Ol’ Rummy
Donald Rumsfeld: Your friend and mine!
Donald Rumsfeld was the Secretary of Defense for the half-decade that included September 11 and a couple of wars you might have heard of. But before that he was a Nixonian power player and NATO globetrotter. So it makes sense that Errol Morris would follow up his enormously powerful The Fog of War—which profiled another Cold […]
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South-by-South Sex
Dan Savage’s amateur porn film festival HUMP! goes on tour
Admit it. We all watch porn. But more likely than not, it’s alone, and in the privacy of our own homes in front of a sticky laptop and within the limited scope of what we already knows gets us off. Everyone has their own definition of sexy, sexuality, gender and kink porn itself, but prepare […]
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A Dead Horse
A million ways to ruin the western
Maybe it’s best to think of Seth MacFarlane as the guy in class who copies your homework. He’s shrewd enough to find a way to pass the class, but he hasn’t done any original work all semester. Let’s look at MacFarlane’s career: His weirdly ripe singing voice is cribbed from Sinatra. His interminably enduring “Family […]
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The Darkest Timeline
Going Back to the Future with the X-Men
Traditionally, X-Men stories need at least two things: Way too many characters, and a plot that doesn’t make much sense. In those regards, X-Men: Days of Future Past is a rousing success! By cramming in at least 4,000 mutants and a story that spans continents and decades, there’s a whole lot of gibberish going on, […]
