I sometimes forget that the characters in my “stories” have had previous acting jobs. Which means that this adorable Brit:
Went on to become this Georgian corpse-killer:
While we can all agree that Andrew Lincoln is totally dreamy (even if he’s grown a bit skeletal himself since he started his Walking Dead stint) I think after tonight’s episode I’m firmly on Shane’s side – if you’re not busting zombie heads, you clearly have no interest in survival anymore.
High-fashion onesie
This morning I had to take two dogs for a walk when it was 37 degrees. I know that’s not exceptionally cold if you’re Canadian or a penguin, but I could barely get myself out of bed, much less find enough layers to ensure I wouldn’t freeze the second I made it outside. For whatever reason, I get cold way faster than the population at large, and until I can afford winter trips to Cabo, it’s all about thermal shirts and long johns for me. I’ve been scouring stores, and the only real options are the AA thermals, the Uniqlo HeatTech line (oooh, science), or this stunning one-piece Fair Isle contraption from Japan…
(How do you go to the bathroom in this?)
One of the nice things about quitting smoking (I’m on my third week) is that I’m setting aside all the money I would have spent on cigs, and instead buying something as a reward. So my plan is to buy a pair of long johns for every day of the week, and laugh in the face of the bitter elements.
April joined me for a photoshoot
Say hello to my weekend uniform.
(The best thing to happen this week.)
I’ve been MIA of late, since I’ve started doing a bit of blogging and writing for Out magazine. That’s awesome news for me, but it means I have a lot less time to muse on my own personal favorite things. I’m going to set aside more time for that, but until then, here’s some stuff I put together over the past few weeks (much of which would have ended up on here instead, except with more curse words):
A review of Colson Whitehead’s awesome zombie apocalypse novel, Zone One.
A preview of the prelude to Lady Gaga’s newest music video (very One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest).
A slideshow of the images from Benetton’s new, controversial ad campaign, with lots of world leaders getting kissy kissy.
Shame on you if didn’t see the latest episode of Glee. But if you didn’t, you can read about it here.
A little info on a particularly badass queer graffiti artist.
A slideshow of all the best abs in Immortals (don’t pretend you paid $12 to see anything else except muscles).
An interview with indie punk band Hostage Calm, who got more than 3,000 signatures on their petition to end the gay marriage ban in NY state.
Lots and lots and lots of gay weddings.
Alright, see you soon. Oh, and go to out.com 500 times a day please – gotta keep those numbers UP!
I’ve been curious about Amber Heard for a few months now. She’s gorgeous, and in a Nylon Guys interview she said something interesting: That horror movies are “sometimes the only real platform for a young woman to act. Horror films give you the opportunity to be tough and independent and to fight, to kick, to kill, to cry.”
I get that (I’m only taken seriously when I kick, kill and cry too) so I was excited to see The Ward on Netflix. It’s the first film John Carpenter’s directed in nine years, it stars this kicky blonde girl who thinks she’ll have a platform to act, and it’s set in an insane asylum, which I always find fascinating.
Amber’s character Kristen ends up here after she burns an empty farm house. She arrives at the asylum with no memory of her past, disoriented and surly. Eventually she meets the other girls in the ward. They’re nice enough, but they fit stereotypes so perfectly it starts feeling a little contrived. In this clip you can see Zoey (the nympho), Sarah (the infantile one) and Emily (the kooky tomboy) – and Kristen, who is just kind of pissed off.
The “Alice” everyone’s getting worked up about is a rotting girl-corpse who devises different ways to take out the girls, one by one.
Really, the movie would be better without Alice.
I know that having a ghoul lurking around makes everyone question their sanity in thought-provoking ways, and quick cuts to rotting flesh make for good shocks, but the ghost aspect actually detracts from this film. The best scenes here involve the (living) girls interacting with each other, or the various ways the nurse, attendant and doctor exert their authority and coerce them into submission – there are two great electroshock scenes, one a little deadlier than the other. And when Kirsten has her interviews with the doctor, she does act – and yell and fight – and she doesn’t need a monster to make that happen.
Despite an 11th hour twist (why do screenwriters always add those? to make us watch the movie again) there’s not all that much to recommend The Ward. I love a nice 60s aesthetic, and the actors are good when they get a chance to act, but the story is awfully sparse. Instead of learning more about the inmates, we see them showering with a corpse hiding in the steam. Instead of figuring out whether the attendant is molesting his charges, we see endless creepy pans across the long asylum halls.
You know what? Go watch Halloween, and then watch Girl, Interrupted. That way you’ll see two good movies instead of a mediocre one.
In the past several years, LGBT teens have made headlines for being bullied, beaten, and ultimately taking their lives after enduring daily harassment from their classmates. For gay men and women, this isn’t exactly news. That’s why Dan Savage started “It’s Gets Better,” a series of videologs filmed by celebrities, athletes,and people like us – promising the kids that they’ll be alright. To date, there have been 22,000 entries.
But bullying, unfortunately, is by no means a recent phenomenon. Last night, as part of their Vincente Minnelli retrospective, the Brooklyn Academy of Music Cinematek screened Tea and Sympathy, a 1956 melodrama that follows the trail of an “off horse” in a New England prep school populated by “regular fellows.” Protagonist Tom Lee is a sensitive guy. He spends his time listening to records and strumming his guitar – the other boys play football and go mountain climbing. Tom’s only allies are his roommate, Al, and the housemaster’s wife, Lauren, played by Deborah Kerr.
It’s easy to read Tea and Sympathy as a cult classic of the ‘so-bad-it’s-good’ variety. When Tom’s father complains, “I can’t tell my friends he wants to grow up to be a…folk singer,” he delivers it as though a folk singer were no different than a crack fiend. Later, the housemaster reassures Tom’s father: “Don’t worry, they’ll give him a real going over at the pajama party tonight,” which, to a gay audience, plays very differently than intended. Between the soaring orchestrations, bereft close-ups and the camera’s omnipresent focus on the tea set, one can imagine that Todd Haynes partly styled 2002’s Far From Heaven on this film.
Check the trailer (which really glosses over the gay parts)
While some scenes come off as shlocky, others can give gay audiences goose pricks ofrecognition. Tom’s father forces masculinity on him – encouraging him to flirt with the haggard woman at the coffee shop, nearly forcing him to get a crew cut so he’ll fit in the other boys. Tom’s interests, including gardening, sewing and cooking, immediately earn him the nickname “sister boy,” a moniker that sticks like superglue in an all-boysschool. The most poignant scene comes when Tom’s alpha-male roommate tries to coach Tom in the art of manliness. He has Tom walk around the room, and when he attempts to describe his stride, he can only produce a gesture, an unspoken, “You’re light in yourloafers.” Then when Al demonstrates his walk, a hulking stomp, it seems ludicrous –Tom won’t event attempt it.
“It wouldn’t do me any good anyway,” he says. Once you’ve become the class pariah,there’s really no way to shake it. Tom does try to bed the coffee shop girl but the plan goes horribly awry, and in a heartbreaking capitulation Tom casts aside the girl and riflesthrough her kitchen for a sharp knife. Only the intervention of strangers stops him from killing himself.
Many hold that the main character in Tea and Sympathy is not gay at all. The playwright Robert Anderson flatly stated, “It has nothing to do with homosexuality… It’s about a false charge of homosexuality.” While many gay audiences ignore this, the film is no-less poignant if Tom is simply a sensitive, straight teenager. Whether bullying springs from differences in race, class, orientation or anything else, the common denominator is difference. If the trappings have become outdated, the central theme of Tea and Sympathy is as important today as ever: students can be helpless at the hands of their classmates, but it only takes one understanding person to turn their life around.
In celebration of Spirit Day 2011, go be that understanding person. Check out Out.com’s post on how to show your solidarity with LGBT youth, and remember that your help can make all the difference in the world.
The Vincente Minnelli Retrospective at the BAM Cinematek runs through November 2. For information on screenings, tickets and times, visit www.bam.org.
I’m posting this without much comment. There’s all this ridiculous controversy about this singer – “Her lips are fake!” “Her music’s inauthentic.” Which is all bullshit, as Gawker will tell you. I love her stuff, and her videos are REALLY evocative of the kind of mid-century nostalgia I live and die for.
Yesterday was National Coming Out Day, a great opportunity to stand up and be counted. Sadly, the following people forgot to mark their calendar. Damn! Technically, these boys could come out any day of the year. So here’s hoping.
Warning: Nude dudes below. It’s PG-13 though. You can handle it.
Zone One - Out October 18
Some books read like love letters to New York City: Joseph Mitchell’s Up In The Old Hotel, for example, and Joan Didion’s gut-wrenching essay: “Goodbye To All That.”
Zone One? It’s hate mail for the whole island. There is a lot of gut-wrenching, though.
James Maher's take on Chinatown post-apocalypse
Meet Mark Spitz – he’s managed to survive after most of the population has been reduced to mindless ‘skels,’ only because he is so exceptionally mediocre. A consistent B student, whether he studied or not. The member of the senior class “Most Likely Not To Be Named The Most Likely Anything.” That mediocrity grants him a longer lease on life than his parents, his girlfriends, than almost anyone he knew before the innard-chomping nightmare the survivors refer to as ‘Last Night.’
It’s a good name. For the survivors sweeping Zone One in southern Manhattan, the evening when the world went mad stays fresh in their minds. How can they escape it? Mark and the two other civilians in Omega Unit spend their days picking off the wasted victims of the disease – walking corpses who still sport haircuts copied from sitcom characters and bear passing resemblances to former gym teachers, girlfriends, relatives.
That’s the problem when the whole world’s gone skel – the victims still have some shadow memory: they frequent the same hang-outs, wear the same clothes, maintain the same piercings and haircuts and facial features (at least until the skin starts rotting away). In an interview with GQ, Whitehead sums it up: “The skels are ghosts, other people haunted by their pasts. I’ve certainly been stuck on certain periods and events in my life, so a skel is a statue dedicated to nostalgia.”
Each monster has its trope. With vampires it’s abusive lust, with werewolves it’s a split personality. Zombies come in mobs, and with mobs there is a mentality. The skels in Zone One invite contemplation, not as sad skin sacks, but as walking memories of the people they were, people who were always part-monster to begin with.
In 'Zone One,' the skels are incinerated, creating clouds of ash over the city. By inbrainstorm
Zone One didn’t have to be a zombie novel, but it’s a handy device to dissect the problems of the populace post-Empire, particularly in a city. As a new recruit to New York, there are certain lines that hit me in the gut. Spitz will pick off zombies and consider their former, waking lives – He wonders when they came to the city, bright-eyed and ambitious, and how they’d been forced to settle in the intervening years, crowding around cocktail bars and laughing too loudly in attempts to capture some Sex and the City fantasy. He thinks about the shut-ins who barricaded themselves against the coming plague, particularly “new recruits” like myself, who were too fresh to the city to develop the kind of support system that could have afforded them a means of escape.
It scares you. Scared me, at least, in a way blood-spurting zombie movies never have.
Formally, it’s excellent. Spitz falls through temporal trap doors constantly in the narrative, moving backwards to memories of ‘Last Night,’ the deaths of his parents, unexpected skel attacks, and then he snaps to at the last moment, when his life depends on it. The language is carefully chosen, and evokes spinal cords, joints and necrosis, even when describing entertainment systems and subways. And there’s humor, too, in the unlikeliest places. When Omega Team spots a few walkers in the distance, they try to tell if they’re human or skel. The deciding factor? They’re wearing ponchos. “Only a human cursed with the burden of free will would wear a poncho.”
Definitely pick up a copy on the 18th. Whether you’re a zombie fan or not, this book has a lot to say.
Having stumbled upon Fuck! I’m In My 20s, the most on-point tumblr 20somethings have ever seen, I felt the need to catalog that things that DO motivate me. You know, stuff to fight the Scylla and Charybdis of procrastination and sleep.
1. Britney Spears
2. Coffee
3. Cigarettes
Alright, that was supposed to be a much longer list. But I’m pretty much stumped. Better play to my strengths, anyway. And go check out that tumblr.
It took me a while to explain to a straight friend that what he thought was a “Deep V” was more like a droopy crew neck. This SNL digital short should set that misconception aright…
American Horror Story premieres tonight at 10pm on FX, and let’s all pray to the gods of the F train that I make it home in time…
You may have noticed I have a thing for horror (see: The Woman In Black, The Prowler, a billion other things on this blog) and this show will try to make a case for serialized horror, versus something feature length. There aren’t many predecessors in this genre – the only one that comes to mind is Dark Shadows, a Gothic soap opera that aired on NBC in the late 60s/early 70s (that series is now being recast as a film, directed by Tim Burton, starring (surprise) Johnny Depp).
AHS follows an unfaithful psychiatrist and his wife and daughter as they move cross-country, mostly to try to repair the family after Daddy (Dylan McDermott) is caught cheating. The daughter is a especially awesome, as she sort of resembles Lydia from Beetle Juice. She smokes at school, and spits in the face of the girl who tries to stop her, and when the realtor mentions there was a murder suicide in their prospective home, she immediately replies “We’ll take it.” She’s like the ginger from Suburgatory with more Gothic bite. Here’s the 30-second spot they’ve been airing on TV.
The family ends up in a beautiful, sprawling house (yes, psychiatry pays well) with a bloody past. FX recently released the first five minutes of tonight’s episode. It doesn’t tell you much about the current family, but you get a sense of the creepiness that will be going on here. Hank Steuver of the Washington Post had this to say: “American Horror Story is one scream after another. So much creepy stuff happens in the first episode that viewers will be left asking: Can I possibly watch an entire series of this? Followed, of course, by a more obvious question: Why do they stay in that house?”
People in the horror genre are dumb! That’s why they stay put. Otherwise we’d have nothing to watch.
OK, enjoy the first five minutes.
To be honest, the scariest part for me was watching those boys vandalize irreplaceable light fixtures and stained glass. They had it coming.
Just to make sure you’re not missing the gay quotient here: The show is created and produced by the makers of Glee, and Zachary Quinto (is he or isn’t he?) has a recurring role as one half of the gay couple who formerly occupied the house – you know, the ones involved in the murder-suicide…
The answer: he is.
I think they should replace the rest of the Jersey Shore cast with more of Vinny.
He’s even channeling a bit o’ Ryan Gosling a la Blue Valentine with that ukelele. And did I mention he has a blog? He does. Read it, to learn the many trails and travails of being a highly paid reality star.
Looking for someone relatable to endorse your product? How about a blogger?
Everyone’s a blogger, so it seems like a valid way to connect with a big audience. I guess I feel a little jaded when advertisers finally catch on to the trends of 2008 and harness it for their own nefarious ends, but I can’t hate on blogger commercials TOO much. I mean, bloggers are pretty nice people, right? Unless they’re Les Carles or running the Westboro Baptist Church homepage.
Ashley runs Not Without Salt, a beautifully photographed culinary blog. Not long ago she was offered free samples of Finish dish detergent to try out. The samples worked really well! So she agreed to a commercial.
And she even wrote a very forthright blog post about the whole filming experience. It was sort of touching (her brother worked the second camera on the shoot).
Next up is Lindsey Calla, who writes Saucy Glossie, a fashion blog that’s been featured all over the place: Marie Claire, Elle, Seventeen, etc. She’s been working the ho stroll a bit harder than Ashley. Some sort of serious deal has been inked, as she hosts “Twitter parties” about TJ Maxx, does a few webisodes about “taking your look from the office to the club,” and offers tips on fashion trends via smart phone.
I’m wondering if every other commercial is going to have a blogger soon, like the capitalist realization of Diablo Cody’s “Honest to blog.” If so, I’ll probably like it. I’m the last person to call anyone a sell-out. So if Marlboros, Levis or TopMan need someone to receive free samples… you know where to comment.
First, Suburgatory wasn’t nearly as dismal as I thought. Second, it’s channeling a lot of that Mean Girls fish-out-of-water vibe with great success.
Is it downright derivative? Yes. When Tessa Altman’s dad (who is Elton from Clueless!) finds her condoms in her drawer, he moves them out of NYC and to a place that looks like Greenwich. She’s dropped off in suburbia and muses: ”Kind of ironic that a box full of rubbers would bring me here, where everything is… plastic.”
The suburban girls wear only pink, slather on lip gloss and live for the mall – all things you’ll recognize from the plastics in Mean Girls. When Tessa’s dad starts a new remodelling project, he meets Dallas (she’s not like a regular mom – she’s a ‘cool mom‘) who immediately tries to take the motherless Tessa under her wing. Tessa, who prefers ‘lesbian’ boots (according to her new classmates) doesn’t go for this plan.
(I mean, does this not look familiar? A ginger girl hiding in a bathroom stall at her new school. Who happens to also like animals? They could have been a tad more subtle.)
But listen, here’s what could redeem Suburgatory. First off, Mean Girls was awesome, and if this show can make that theme work over a season, I’ll be watching.
Second, both Mean Girls and Suburgatory are at their best when they break a bit from reality. In the former I’m thinking of all those fun jungle scenes. In the latter there are several moments of totally surreal, menacing homogeneity that actually make suburbia seem like hell. Tessa’s father walks into the country club, and six augmented housewives tanning in lounge chairs slowly put down their cell phones, sit up and pivot their heads to follow his stride in perfect synchronization. Later, Tessa’s walking down the street and thinking “New York was scary, but here. Here the people look like they could eat their young.” At that moment she passes a Real Housewife who’s just thrown a pair of baby booties on her grill.
I like a little weirdness like that. I also like Ana Gasteyer, and I can’t wait till she makes it across the street and becomes a real character.
See for yourself.
First off, this is an excellent song. I mean, it’s not exactly Eartha Kitt, but it gets across the slow, sultry vibe where the high hat sounds like it’s steam rising off the sidewalk. Did you guys see Pan Am yesterday? I had to, since Mad Men is so far away and I can’t survive indefinitely without weekly doses of Mid-century Modern.
It’s not fair to compare an ABC show with AMC’s output, so I won’t. Let’s just say it’ll do the trick for now. The score was a little hokey (not the pop songs, I mean the reheated Titanic strings that started soaring during take-off) and I don’t see why they felt the need to include espionage in the first episode. They spend a lot of time talking about how airline attendants are a “new breed of woman,” and they do all sort of act like sex-savvy polyglot models, so maybe that’s an accurate statement? I also can’t wait to learn more about Christina Ricci’s character, as she’s sort of a Boho Joan Holloway type who name drops Marx and Hegel.
This scene was really nice: if you’re going to be a runaway bride, may as well travel the world.
Also I’m speculating that the pilot and co-pilot are gay for each other. You can’t tell from this picture, but all that lingering eye contact and flirty banter speaks volumes.
If you’re interested, ABC (who are packaging the show pretty nicely) have made a Pandora station, which they’re calling the “tunes of the Jet Age.” Has a nice ring to it, right?
A parting question: Would this show have been made if a.) Mad Men weren’t postponed and b.) the TSA hadn’t made air travel completely hellish and sterile?
