Weiner announces a comeback, Joseph Gordon-Levitt premieres the trailer for Don Jon, and The Lonely Island try its hand at grammar-rap
Read More...Baz-tardization: When Style Overwhelms Story
Love him or hate him, it’s hard to deny that Baz Luhrmann knows exactly what he wants when he makes a film. Luhrmann is, to some extent, the Michael Bay of melodrama, someone who takes well-worn archetypes and clichés and cranks them up past broadness and into comic overdrive, all while throwing it all out in an unprecedented quickness that borders on hyperactivity. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Luhrmann’s best work (Strictly Ballroom, Moulin Rouge!) has a giddy quality to it where the silliness stops being assaultive and veers towards transcendence.
Luhrmann has always been a polarizing director, but his most divisive works, by far, are his two adaptations, 1996’s Romeo + Juliet and 2013’s The Great Gatsby. All of Luhrmann’s films feel excessive and absurd, but with Strictly Ballroom and Moulin Rouge!, at least he’s being excessive and absurd with his own material—Strictly Ballroom is based on a play Luhrmann helped develop in the 80s, while Moulin Rouge! takes a famous location and one real character (Toulouse-Lautrec) but otherwise invents a new story. With his two major adaptations, he works with material by of two of the greatest writers who ever lived. Slavish devotees to the “the book is always better” argument pull out their sacrificial knives for Luhrmann, but his films do (at least superficially) follow the text rather closely. Besides, storytellers must change things up if they’re going to make the story their own.
Read More...Quantum Computing is Real (But Not Very Useful)
Quantum computing has long been a wacky, borderline fictional, mostly theoretical domain of physics reserved for highly speculative conversation. This is because quantum mechanics, or particle physics as it’s also called, makes some claims completely void of common sense. Particle physicists believe that a subatomic particle called a neutrino can pass through the entire Earth without slowing down, and that particles can be in two different states at the same time, and even that two particles can be entangled in such a way that their properties will match across any distance (imagine if flipping a light switch in Kansas caused a light switch on Saturn to flip as well). Various governments have poured money into the exploration of these theories—a giant sub-atomic roller rink was built in Geneva, Switzerland to test many of them resulting in the discovery of the Higgs Boson. But there hasn’t been much use for these theories in practical application. That is until the concept of quantum computing came about.
Read More...No ‘Slut’s Allowed
I’m standing in front of a camera, professor, and 30 frat boys and sorority girls, trying to explain slut-shaming. I’ve been at it for twenty minutes, and the audience who originally giggled when I said the word “slut” now sinks into their seats because I’ve put the blame on them.
The assignment was simple: form a group of four, pick a topic, talk about it for twenty minutes, and try not to use contrasting colors on your PowerPoint slides. In a Professional Communications Skills class the intensity of the topics didn’t matter as much as their presentation. We could have picked snowmobiling accidents, porn regulation, or lip-synching. But since I tend to make everything more difficult for myself, I suggested slut-shaming. Two in my group had absolutely no idea what slut-shaming is. But their lack of knowledge only proved to me how much education there needed to be.
Read More...Coachella Inside Out: An Indie Pilgrimage for the Masses
It’s a behemoth. Two weekends, 90,000 people each, four security check points, 175 bands: all happening in the middle-of-nothing desert. The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival was born in the age of the compact discs. Its debut in 1999 brought headliners Beck, Morrissey, Rage Against the Machine, Tool, and Pavement. 25,000 people showed up in the desert in October to hear them play. In the space between then and now, Coachella evolved from one two day weekend that failed to make a profit, to an international mega-fest which seems too big to fail.
Read More...Review in Haiku
Film reviews, in Haikus. Haikus are written by Tony Russo, designed by Blake J. Graham, and updated daily. Five-Seven-Five.
Read More...The Case Against Fairness: Why Favoritism, Not Fairness, Should be The Ethical Standard for The 21st Century
Imagine that a father said to you, “I would strangle everyone in this room if it somehow prolonged my son’s life.” You might be immediately repulsed and understandably doubt his capacity as a father. But bear with me. After a minute of reflection, you might think, “well, perhaps he’s just ignorant. Or perhaps very selfish. Maybe I could understand where he’s coming from, even if I think he’s wrong.” After some time to reconsider, the father only intensifies his earlier claim: “I realized that I meant it—I would choke them all.” Now imagine that that father is a philosopher who justifies that action using ideas from some of the greatest minds in the Western canon and got his argument published in a prestigious peer-reviewed university press.
In his recent book Against Fairness, Columbia College Chicago professor of philosophy Stephen T. Asma is just that philosopher-father and makes just this case for favoritism. He contends that all of the wishy-washy, kumbaya lessons we learned in kindergarten about the Golden Rule and only bringing treats if there’s enough for everyone are antithetical to the way human life was meant to be lived. According to Asma, we as a species have been making a category error for most of our existence by looking for the answers of how to live in abstract principles from ethical philosophy and religion when we should have been listening to our instincts for favoritism.
Read More...Whatever and Ever Today: Remembering Roger Ebert, Plan B For All, NBC’s ‘Hannibal,’ and The National’s ‘Heavenfaced’
Honoring a legend, a Judge wins one for reproductive health, watch a critically acclaimed new pilot, and get “Heavenfaced” by The National.
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Whatever and Ever Today: Sunday, March 31, 2013
A Princeton mother tries to get her son laid, Google stiffs Easter, Boston police are punk rock poseurs, and Nick Offerman break dances.
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