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Well, this is weird and wonderful. Here are Paul Scheer and Max Greenfield reenacting Arsenio Hall interviewing Vanilla Ice. The real interview (also below) is longer, and somehow actual Vanilla Ice is even more grating and off-putting than fake Vanilla Ice! Also, lest we forget, real Arsenio Hall will be returning to television in September. We look forward to the reenactments of that show twenty-odd years from now.

Read more posts by Margaret Lyons

Filed Under: reenactments ,tv ,arsenio hall ,paul scheer ,max greenfield ,vanilla ice ,video

You might think Aaron Sorkin's passion is politics: The American President, West Wing, that whole part on Studio 60 with the Christian Right and someone in Afghanistan. Maybe his passion is Misunderstood Jerks, like with A Few Good Men, or Toby on WW, or his version of Mark Zuckerberg. These both seem like compelling passions. But in truth, Aaron Sorkin's major passion is dad rock. The guy loves him some dad rock. And it's coming out in full force on The Newsroom.

What is dad rock? Picture your dad, in the car driving somewhere, loudly singing along to something and banging his hand on the steering wheel for extra emphasis. Whatever song he's listening to is dad rock.

It's one thing to think that Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) listens to dad rock, like at the beginning of this season when he sat relaxed with a smoke and Van Morrison's "Into the Mystic." He probably would listen to that! But on last night's episode, the throng of Romney reporters sat around in a bar while Mr. Mister's "These Broken Wings" played in the background. We've seen Will wax on about the Who's "You Better You Bet," but we've also been subjected to Toto's "Hold the Line." And REO Speedwagon's "Take It on the Run." These are all on this season's three episodes.

This dad-rock love is not a new passion, and it's not even a bad passion: Sometimes it's great. Sports Night has a whole episode called "Eli's Coming," framed around the idea that Dan initially misunderstood the meaning of the Three Dog Night song and thought it was about bad omens, and not "an inveterate womanizer," as Casey corrects him. "Crimson and Clover" is used to wonderful effect at the end of season one's "Sally," and if you can hear "Boogie Shoes" without thinking of Dana drunkenly dancing in the Sports Night offices, I feel a little sad for you.

West Wing, too, has plenty of dad rock. We see a dejected Sam sleeping at the office, set to Don Henley's "New York Minute." Dire Straits' "Brothers in Arms" wails over the end of "Two Cathedrals," and Aimee Mann covers quintessential dad-rock god James Taylor's "Shed a Little Light" in "College Kids." (I'm not including "The Jackal," because that was written into the show when Sorkin found out this was already in Allison Janney's personal arsenal.)

But things start to go a little haywire with Studio 60, most notably with the Sting debacle. Sting is not inherently dad-pleasing, and "Fields of Gold" isn't rock, but Sting's lute version of his 1993 song sort of summed up the schmaltziness and overadulation endemic to Studio 60. "Isn't this so wonderful?" all the characters marveled. Uh, I guess?

I'm alone on this, but I actually prefer the dad rock to other options. I'll take ten poignant montages set to Willie Nelson before I take one set to Coldplay's "Fix You." I'm not sure why everyone hangs out at a bar that plays a lot of Foreigner and is also a karaoke bar, but if the other choice is "Fix You" again, I pick Foreigner. But it would be okay to branch out, just a little.

Lots of shows use music supervisors to pick appropriate songs for their soundtracks. And certainly Sorkin shows do the same. (They also all have original scores, of course.) But Sorkin has spoken often about how particular he is about the music that goes in his shows — if you listen to the DVD commentary for The West Wing, he mentions it more than once. The guy is very particular — and consistent: Sports Night debuted in 1998. Fifteen years later, it's like Sorkin is working off the same playlist.

Read more posts by Margaret Lyons

Filed Under: aaron sorkin ,sorkinese ,tv ,dad rock ,the newsroom

Back in June, we heard that Paul Feig was interested in making a grounded comedy about a female James Bond, entitled Susan Cooper. It appears he has found his spy, and he didn't have to look too far. The Wrap reports Melissa McCarthy is in talks to play the title role. This makes all the sense, as McCarthy and Feig worked together on Bridesmaids and The Heat. Also, she's a gifted physical comedian with an ability to make bank at the box office. Right now they are trying to figure out how to work around McCarthy's Mike & Molly schedule. Seriously, Mike & Molly, quit getting in the way. 

Read more posts by Jesse David Fox

Filed Under: susan cooper ,melissa mccarthy ,paul feig ,casting couch ,movies

HBO doesn’t always deign to present an executive session at the Television Critics’ Association press tour, but every so often, in the summer, CEO Richard Plepler and president of programming Michael Lombardo can be lured out of their great money vault to appear before the unwashed masses, and, inevitably, the conversation turns to thoughts of death and decay.

Which is fun, because HBO now sort of feels like everything should just run forever. Granted, it just got done canceling Enlightened (because it felt the story had come to its conclusion—Mike White’s stated desires for a third season about a court case be damned—and not at all because of the show’s ratings struggles), and Eastbound And Down will end its run in the fall (this time because its creators have requested the end and not because the network wanted it to end). But everything else? It ...

Will Forte has a busy year ahead, with several new films both in the works and on the release docket. That now includes a new comedy from Peter Bogdonavich called Squirrels To The Nuts, in which Owen Wilson's Broadway director tries to help a prostitute turn her life around and gets over his head. Forte plays the playwright for Wilson's production; Jennifer Aniston plays Forte's girlfriend. Because after Brad Pitt and Justin Theroux, you can totally see those two getting together.

After a shaky start with The Brothers Solomon and MacGruber, Forte's film career seems to be in full swing, with upcoming appearances (again opposite Aniston) in the previously announced Elmore Leonard adaptation Life Of Crime, which just got added to the Toronto International Film Festival, as well as Alexander Payne's Nebraska, which had its first screening at Cannes. Forte will also most likely continue ...

I burned through every episode of Orange Is the New Black in 48 hours. I'm giddy on Mondays to watch The Fosters. I've even endured another summer of The Killing. Under the Dome, Mistresses, Pretty Little Liars — look around, friends! This is a great summer for lesbians on TV.

We're at a point now where tokenism or generic representation isn't enough. What's special about this summer is the range of lesbian characters we're seeing on TV: from super femme to super butch, Kinsey sixes and Kinsey ones, monogamous and non-monogamous, young and old. Orange Is the New Black is the new high-water mark for shows with prominent lesbian characters. (The L Word was the former standard bearer). There's the kooky-funky poor little rich girl Nicky (Natasha Lyonne), the sultry drug queenpin who used to rock pinup-style bumper bangs (Laura Prepon), the unpredictably poetic Crazy Eyes (Uzo Aduba), and the megabutch Big Boo (Lea DeLaria). The Killing, despite its myriad other flaws, also introduced a rarely seen lesbian type: the gutter punk baby butch Bullet (Bex Taylor-Klaus). Sadly, Bullet was killed on last week's episode, but that does not diminish her impact as a character and as a presence on TV! We saw her face homophobia, transphobia (even though she wasn't trans, her style was perhaps gender non-conforming), sexual assault, and constant marginalization — and then she was murdered by a serial killer.

ABC Family has a solid lesbian contingency, too, between Emily on Pretty Little Liars and the moms on The Fosters. While Emily's story at this point operates like any hetero romance would on a teen soap — will we go to the same college? etc. — the relationship between Stef (Teri Polo) and Lena (Sherri Saun) on The Fosters is more unusual. For starters, they're an interracial couple, which is still a rarity on television. But this week's episode brought up the fact that, despite raising three children together (plus fostering two more), owning a house, and being partners in every conceivable way, Stef and Lena aren't married. And not because of legalities. They're not married because Stef does't want to be — she was married to a man previously, she says, and look how that worked out.

It's interesting to watch the push-and-pull between Stef and Lena, the way they negotiate queer politics within their relationship. Does Stef experience lingering straight privilege because she was married to a man and is the biological mother of one of the sons she and Lena are raising? That's not a conversation that's present elsewhere on television. That said, they're not the only interracial lesbian mom couple on TV right now. Under the Dome has Alice (Samantha Mathis) and Carolyn (Aisha Hinds), who are raising teenager Norrie — though obviously being trapped under a dome is their most pressing concern.

Elsewhere, Mistresses has the sexually rambunctious Joss (Jes Macallan) deciding to date a woman — a little Samantha Jones redux, but that's not inherently a bad thing. Tara (Rutina Wesley) and Pam (Kristin Bauer van Straten) on True Blood have been tragically kept apart for most of the season in the Holocaust-ish "vamp camps," but it seems clear we're looking at a major reunion in the next few weeks. This is cheating a little on my part, but Orphan Black, while not currently airing, did just come out on DVD — and features science geek Cosima. She's one of ten clones, but she's the only queer one among them, which raises some nature-vs.-nurture questions within the show.

Moving forward, it would be nice to see more racial diversity and more body diversity, but that's true of television in general, and true of roles for women in general. But for now, just for this summer, just at this moment, this kind of feels like progress.

Read more posts by Margaret Lyons

Filed Under: tv ,mistresses ,orange is the new black ,the fosters ,orphan black ,lesbians ,sexual healing

If you don't already follow Pablo Schreiber on Twitter, you should. One, because he has a cute picture of himself on a hammock as his background. And two, because if you were to point something like that out to him — which his followers often do — he'd probably retweet and gently chide you for it. It's funny! And fitting, given that he plays the insults-slinging corrections officer in Orange Is the New Black. We spoke to Schreiber about developing that character (who, jokes aside, is much more sadistic than any human should be); re-teaming with creator Jenji Kohan, whom he worked with on Weeds; and acting alongside so many women. [There are occasional spoilers, noted in advance, if you haven't watched all thirteen episodes.]

I was sad it see on your Twitter that the mustache isn’t real.
Well, what’s real, Patti? You know? It was glued to my face every day — that felt pretty real to me.

Did you try to grow one out but couldn’t?
No. I had no interest in wearing that thing on my face other than when I was shooting.

I like that you’re appropriately judgmental of Twitter followers who ask you for things like mustache rides.
[Laughs.] Wouldn’t you be, Patti? Wouldn't you be?

Yes. Pornstache is gross. Were you expecting the sort of reaction you’ve gotten to him?
No, you know, there's been this really split reaction to the character: Obviously, as you mentioned, he is gross. He also can be hysterically funny because of his lack of self-awareness. So there’s been this split reaction of people who absolutely hate my character with a passion and want him to die, and this really strange contingent of people who seem to be titillated by him. And I’m just doing my best to navigate a stormy sea, here, Patti.

Were you ever considered for the role of John Bennett?
No, I was not. I did Weeds with Jenji and because the character on Weeds was this very sexualized character — there was a kind of oohing and ahing on the Internet about how sexy the character was and blah blah blah. And so part of doing this role for me was about messing with people’s expectations. Because there was this desire to peg me as the sexy guy, I really wanted to turn that on its head. And so when I saw the script for Orange Is the New Black, I was actually considered for Larry [played by Jason Biggs], strangely enough. Jenji was like, "Oh, I’d love to work with you, we have this character Larry." Then she’s like, “I don’t really think that’s right.” And then I read the script and I saw this guy, Pornstache, and thought, This is a way to mess with people’s perceptions. And then I read the book and the guy was this completely sadistic pig, and I knew right away that he was mine. 

As viewers, we got all thirteen episodes at once. But how did the story unfold for you? How much did you know about your character going in? [SPOILER] Did you know, for example, about his involvement in Tricia’s overdose?
No, no I didn’t. Towards the beginning of the season, all I knew was that he was a very sadistic correctional officer who was power hungry, likes to make people suffer, and that he was bringing drugs in for blow jobs. And probably when we were shooting maybe the fifth or sixth episode, people started to tease some things to me like something really dark was coming up. And then maybe a couple of episodes before we shot it I was told that that was going to happen. Also, you know, they didn’t want Tricia’s character to know that she was going to die. So they were being careful about how much they would tell me because they didn’t want me to tell other people.

You kill it with the one-liners and insults. Do you ever help the writers come up with them?
The writers did a delicious job with all of it, but I was given a lot of free reign with the guy. A lot of the stuff that ended up there was mine. The whole thing that Mendez goes into about Sudoku and it being connected to 9/11, that was stuff that I improv-ed.

Where did that come from? That's weird.
I don’t know, I have no idea. It was a free license to basically be as absolutely ludicrous and crazy as I wanted to be. It’s every actor’s dream. It’s ended in this shitstorm of Twitter hate and pervy come-ons, but the beginning of it was an actor's dream. What was another one? “One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish” — whatever that Dr. Seuss rhyme is that he says — that was mine. There’s a lot of things that I just threw out, and Jenji was really open. She’s pretty protective of her writing, but because we worked together on Weeds and because she trusted me as an actor, she was open to me just doing things.

What about the thing you said to the shop guy: “You ought to be relaxing after an exhausting weekend of prostate stimulation and blow-up fuck dolls”?
Absolutely, that’s mine. See? You’re picking out all my best work. The second episode, where he’s showing them all the things you could do with the pipe [and how different objects could be used as weapons] — all of that is improv. And that was really the start of it, I think. Jenji had a little paragraph on the dangers of prison stuff, and then I basically just went with that and went all over the place. And I think that was kind of the day that they saw the potential of the character. It allowed me a lot of freedom later on.

Why did you give the character a Southern accent? Or it’s kind of Southern. You say thing like muss up.
I never spoke to Jenji about this, but Mendez, to me, was from Texas. He was a guy who was working up in New York with all these Northerners, and he was the kind of out-of-place Texan. I didn’t go too strong with the accent because he’s not the guy who just moved there or whatever, he’s been there for a while. But I wanted there to be an outsiderish thing about him. So that was my choice. I never have said that to Jenji, so I don’t know where she thinks he’s from.

Will we find out his backstory in season two, with a flashback episode? Or how will this work given that you’re on contract with another show [NBC's Ironside]?
I’m not sure how much I’m supposed to say here. My answer to your question will have to be: You’ll have to wait and see next year. 

[SPOILER] If you do come back, maybe we’ll see Pornstache and Bennett fight over Daya?
Maybe. They’re definitely going to wrap my story line up. I just don’t know how it’s going to be wrapped up.

Matt McGorry [who plays Bennett] can probably hold his own against you. You might be like a foot taller, but he has those workout videos. You might have met your match.
Fuck, no. Matt McGorry is a fucking pussy, dude. I’m serious. Do you think Pornstache would ever admit that somebody could take him? Hell no. Pornstache has nunchakus, okay? I see your muscles and I raise you nunchakus.

Have you seen his videos?
He sends me his workout videos as a form of intimidation, but it doesn’t work.

You guys are two of a handful of male characters on a show that’s about women and stars so many women. Do you ever feel like outsiders on the set?
Absolutely. Well, not so much outsiders. I guess you can say outsiders. I have never been on a set that was more estrogen-filled and more ruled by insanity and emotion than that one. And I also had that mustache, so I was walking around and people were as horrified as you were watching, just being near me. People were totally terrified of me. I was kind of my weird island within the show.

What do you mean, “ruled by insanity and emotion”? Are you picking on women?
I’m not picking on them. But I am married, I do have a wife, I think I know them pretty intimately, and I think they are not ruled by logic and the sound, calm decision-making we as men are blessed with. No, I love the show, I love Jenji, I love the fact that it is such a woman-heavy show. The fact that Netflix has given that kind of opportunity to so many women is fucking phenomenal. 

Read more posts by Patti Greco

Filed Under: pablo schreiber ,chat room ,interview ,orange is the new black ,people ,netflix ,tv

Actor Dennis Farina passed away today at the age of 69. Here is a quick look at some of his more memorable movie and TV roles.

Crime Story (1986)
There’s a reason Farina was so natural playing a cop: He actually was one in Chicago from 1967 to 1985, and fell into acting after serving as a police consultant for Michael Mann. Mann first cast him in a small role in his 1981 film Thief, but Farina would become a frequent presence in his work, recurring as crime boss Albert Lombard on Miami Vice, and showing up in 1986’s Manhunter. That was also the year that Mann built a TV series entirely around him: Crime Story, a serialized sixties period piece about the war between an L.A. cop (Farina) and a Chicago mobster. This scene from the pilot, in which he negotiates a hostage situation at a nightclub, feels like quintessential Farina. Check out his closing threat, delivered slowly and methodically in that Chicago accent (as unshakable in his work as Michael Caine’s cockney): “You hurt anybody else, when this is over, I’m gonna find what you love the most, and I’m gonna kill it. Your mother, your father, your dog. Don’t matter what it is, it’s dead."

Midnight Run (1988)
The ne plus ultra of Farina’s mobster oeuvre. “You and that other dummy better start getting more personally involved in your work, or I’m gonna stab you through the heart with a fuckin’ pencil, you understand me?” “I don’t want to get another phone call like this, because if I do, I’m gonna get on a fuckin’ plane, and I’m gonna blowtorch the both of you.” “Sidney, siddown, relax, have a sandwich, drink a glass of milk, do some fuckin’ thing, will ya?”

Get Shorty (1995)
Ray Barboni was Midnight Run’s Jimmy Serrano, taken down a peg; he’s violent and dapper, but marked early as a lesser hood by the giant broken nose dealt him by John Travolta’s Chili Palmer. But boy, can he make the F-word pop: “No, no, no, no. Fuck you, fuckball.”

Out of Sight (1998)
As Karen Sisco's (Jennifer Lopez) father, Farina only appears briefly in this Steven Soderbergh movie based, like Get Shorty, on an Elmore Leonard book. Yet in this scene, with very little dialogue and with very little screen time, he's able to convince us that he's a tough guy with a dry sense of humor, but also a loving father. (Watch clip here.)

Law and Order (2004-06)
Farina played the nattily dressed homicide detective Joe Fontana on this NBC show for two seasons. He looked smooth even when shoving a guy's head into a toilet.

New Girl (2013)
Farina played Nick Miller's con-man father, Walt, who had a horse-related heart-to-heart with his son in season two episode "A Father's Love" before dying offscreen.

Read more posts by Josh WolkGilbert Cruz

Filed Under: movies ,tv ,dennis farina ,obits ,tributes

The thing about counting down to the final eight episodes of a show that the internet is obsessed with is there are so many eyeballs picking up on the little things that make the show brilliant and bringing them to the rest of our attention. It’s why we’re in the golden age of both television and internet. Take pretty much everything Breaking Bad-related Dustin does, for example. Or the below new something from r/BreakingBad paying tribute to the acting prowess of Bryan Cranston.

Mr. Cranston is clearly a good enough actor that he can walk around Comic-Con in his own mask without anyone being the wiser, but a true testament to his finely tuned craft and why he should always win ALL THE AWARDS is this season by season breakdown of Walter White’s evolution as told by how he reacts to a gun in his face.

The man is a national treasure, folks. Speaking of which, here’s another image shared on r/Breaking Bad entitled, “Bryan Cranston and I at Comic-con this morning. Little did I know…”

My what an equal parts tremendous and gut-wrenching story.

r/BreakingBad

"There is a misperception, if you will, in critical response or even in Hollywood, that I can only do exaggerated characters," Nicolas Cage explained to the Guardian, going so far as to outline the three other misconceptions that people often make about him: that he does movies "for pay cheques," that he's obsessed with comics... and there's also that whole buying and losing three European castles thing: "For a while there, it was the three Cs; castles, comic books and cars. I just can't get that stuff off of me." (Is that what the three Cs stand for?) Cage goes on to say, "The internet has developed this thing about me — and I'm not even a computer guy, you know? I don't know why it is happening. I'm trying not to … lemme say this: I'm now of the mindset that, when in Rome, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em." You hear that? Your Nic Cage memes were just validated.

Read more posts by Lindsey Weber

Filed Under: movies ,nicholas cage ,meme king

AMC has announced it will duplicate its Talking Dead idea with Talking Bad, a half-hour live show that will air after each of the final eight episodes of Breaking Bad. Chris Hardwick will host, just like he does with Talking Dead. "AMC will tell you that it's because of the success of Talking Dead or my friendship with the BB cast that they asked me to host this," says Hardwick, "but I maintain it probably has more to do with my unmistakable resemblance to Jesse Pinkman, BITCH.” More than 5 million viewers tuned into Talking Dead after The Walking Dead's third season finale.

Read more posts by Zach Dionne

Filed Under: tv ,talking bad ,breaking bad ,amc ,chris hardwick ,offshoots

Oh yes, there will be bromance coming up on Sherlock. Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman did not make it to San Diego for the series' Comic-Con debut Thursday, but as a make-good, executive producers Steven Moffat, Mark Gatniss and Sue Vertue brought a rough cut of a sweet, squeal-eliciting scene from — spoilers, ahoy! — Watson's wedding. Sherlock is giving a toast about the day he became John's best man. Flashback to John casually bringing up the subject and Sherlock rattling off a list of potential candidates — until Watson interrupts: “But he's not my best friend!” It finally hits Sherlock. “I'm… your… best friend,” he says, to which John replies, “Of course you are.” Awwwwww.

Cumberbatch, who was just nominated for two Emmys, offered slightly less reliable intel via this pre-taped video in which he used a stuffed monkey to “spoil” what happens to Sherlock after his season-ending plummet.  The footage is a bit garbled but, Gatniss insisted, “He really does reveal it.” In all seriousness though, the explanation will be a quick and rational one. “There are really only a few ways you can fall off a roof and survive. It's not black magic,” Gatniss said. Moffat said the real showstopper of next season's premiere – title: “The Empty Hearse,” based loosely on “The Adventure of the Empty House” – is when John and Sherlock meet again. “It's electrifying,” he said. “And it goes on and on. That lengthy sequence is my favorite moment of Sherlock that we've made.”

What else to expect? Andrew Scott will be back as Moriarty even though he is dead – and he is dead. (“He shot himself in the face. What more do you want?” Moffat said.) Mycroft will also be around but unlike in the original stories, all won't be forgiven when Sherlock resurfaces. “We wanted to explore how [his disappearance] affected all of his friends and family,” said Gatniss. Sherlock will stay true to the books, however, when it comes to John's marriage to Mary, happening in episode two. Romance for Sherlock is less likely. “Sex for Sherlock is up here,” Moffat said pointing to his head. “Romance? He'd poison his girlfriend just to see if it worked!”

Producers are waiting for Freeman to finish shooting the next Hobbit film before they can complete production on the season's final episode, but they already know it all ends with another big cliffhanger. “You'll be watching the end of the last episode thinking, ‘They wouldn't stop it there. Oh my God, would they stop it there?’ ” Moffat teased. Rest assured, the producers confirmed the cast has already been optioned for a fourth season, so all will be delightfully resolved.

Read more posts by Denise Martin

Filed Under: sherlock ,tv ,comic-con 2013 ,comic-con

dinomancer asked: I thought my grandma was surprisingly not racist when she said that “it’s a real shame america treats latinos so poorly when it comes to immigration", but she immediately followed up with “I mean, it’s not like they’re those lazy blacks!" Lesson learned - I’ll never give anyone the benefit of the doubt again.

It’s pretty much safe to say at this point that we live in a time when assuming someone is a decent human being is usually wildly optimistic.

The Chris Gethard Show celebrates 100 episodes tonight on New York Public Access, but you can also celebrate on-line. Very niiiiiiice! (Borat says “Congratulations to that show!”)

HBO has given a series order to a half-hour comedy from Jay and Mark Duplass. Togetherness stars Amanda Peet as the extroverted Tina, who moves in with her sister (Melanie Lynskey), her sister's husband (Mark Duplass), and the husband's washed-up best friend (frequent Duplass collaborator Steve Zissis). At last, a TV role that might actually work out for Amanda Peet! The show goes into production early next year, according to The Hollywood Reporter, and it won't affect the world's busiest actor, writer, and producer's role on The League, thank goodness.

Read more posts by Margaret Lyons

Filed Under: pickups ,mark duplass ,the duplass brothers ,togetherness ,amanda peet ,tv ,hbo

The entire first season of Jenji Kohen’s Orange Is the New Black, which follows Piper Chapman’s (Taylor Schilling) life as she spends a year in prison, became available on Netflix Instant last Thursday. THANK GOODNESS! Without it we’d be left only to sigh and watch Whodunnit?, and to attempt to keep our hopes up for the group of townies, +Barbie, +the ladies and their daughter who were just driving through on their way to– DON’T TALK ABOUT IT!, trapped Under the Dome. (Or I guess we could read a book or travel to a lake or someplace, just kidding. GIVE US TV!) Orange Is the New Black offers a bit of relief from the summer TV drought in a way that was, I WILL ADMIT, surprising to me. I started watching OITNB yesterday only after seeking other options and coming up empty, and only after being encouraged by everyone on Twitter taking time out of tweeting their outrage in order to tweet about how great the series is. I wasn’t a big Weeds fan, and the idea of another Jenji Kohen series about a pretty young lady paying for her mistakes in legality didn’t immediately grab me, but what kept me returning to Orange Is the New Black (I watched three episodes before forcing myself to RELAX) was the life that surrounds Chapman in prison. Her fellow inmates are compelling, funny, full characters whose stories are told in flashback (like Chapman’s is) as the episodes unfold. Their lives outside and relationships inside would be enough to hold a series, even without the binding element of Chapman’s story! (Though, that isn’t to say I don’t appreciate the lead, as well – Taylor Schilling is very good in this!) (Jason Biggs is also good in it!) It is a good show, the end. Basically. Are you watching it? Are you pacing yourself? Have you finished already, and now you’re back in the same no-good-TV spot you were before you began? Why did you do that to yourself?!

Yes, that Ad-Rock: Adam Horovitz is reportedly in talks for a role in Noah Baumbach's While We're Young, about a middle-aged couple (Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts) who make some new, hip young friends (Amanda Seyfried and the ubiquitous Adam Driver). Ad-Rock would play a married and slightly disapproving pal to Stiller and Watts, so Beastie Boy Domesticity is still a trend, weirdly. 

Read more posts by Amanda Dobbins

Filed Under: adam horovitz ,noah baumbach ,acting ,movies ,while we're young

Whit Stillman appears briefly in Girl Most Likely, when Kristen Wiig's character, a playwright, is introduced to him. (We won't say more than that so as not to spoil the movie.) When we saw Stillman last night, at a screening of the movie hosted by the Cinema Society, he made clear just how self-conscious he was feeling about his cameo. "After seeing it, I'm going to definitely, definitely try to lose weight and maybe [get] plastic surgery," he joked. "Well, I'm going to definitely get some new clothes. And a better smartphone. [Pulls out his BlackBerry.] How bad do you think my cameo was?"

"We had no time at all to shoot it. I was sort of waiting around there, it was really late, it was very well timed to be two takes, and I think I probably looked the wrong way in one take, so they had one take where it looked terrible. I'm always surprised when I do a film, though, when they don't cut me out. It's always a good surprise. I always think, I'll be cut out. You're never very happy with it. You always think, I was lame." Stillman agreed to the role because he's friends with the directors, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini. "They had to shoot some extra stuff at the last minute, and they called me and just asked. And I have a thing where, if anyone asks me to do anything, I'm there. Because it's so hard making a film. So hard. So I said, 'Yes, definitely.'" And, clearly, he has no regrets.

Read more posts by Jennifer Vineyard

Filed Under: whit stillman ,party chat ,girl most likely ,insecurities

anonymous asked: Yo, I was going to say that 2013 is shaping up to be a good day for racists, and then I realized that every year has been a good year for racists. :(

Racists have never had a losing year.

In season one, The Newsroom was the most insufferable good show on TV: so expertly acted, shot, directed, and edited that its flaws were all the more maddening. My colleague Tim Goodman put it nicely in his Hollywood Reporter review, arguing that the term “hate-watching” was the wrong one to apply to Aaron Sorkin's TV journalism drama. “Don’t kid yourself – you were ‘disappointment-watching.’”

The cutesy sexism that The Newsroom displayed towards its women would have been irritating in any context, but it was doubly so on a show with screwball comedy rhythms. (In true screwball, men and women are equally matched; that's what makes their banter exciting.) Head anchor Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) was a blowhard and prone to petty behavior and self-pity, but he and the show's other men were never made to seem like trivial people, as the women sometimes were. The show's main female character, producer MacKenzie McHale (Emily Mortimer), was so clumsy and technically inept that her backstory as a veteran of international hot spots was hard to swallow. The other women were borderline hysterical a lot of the time, or at least less reliable in a crisis than their male colleagues. And the ratio of scenes of men explaining things to women versus women explaining things to men was, by my count, 5 to 1. I kept waiting for this to get better during season one, and it really never did. 

Less bothersome, to me anyway, was the spectacle of the show's creator and main writer Aaron Sorkin appearing to lecture the press corps on how they should have covered recent stories, while writing plots that were hugely dependent upon hindsight and coincidence. He used to do pretty much the same thing on Sports Night and The West Wing, but this time he was writing about a business that TV critics knew well, or at somewhat better than they knew cable sports coverage or White House politics, and I think that's why my peers hauled out the mallet when rapping his knuckles for implausibility. There were other charges lodged against Sorkin, too, including overall smugness and condescension, and a tendency to needlessly stack the deck when tweaking right-wingers, a group whose national leaders make Tom Tomorrow's cartoons seem like finely nuanced portraits. And there were complaints that while much was made of Will being a lone Republican in an otherwise liberal newsroom, he was a Republican in Name Only, his affiliation merely an unconvincing fig leaf for Sorkin's continual attacks on the American right, using the show's hero as his mouthpiece.

But here, too, Sorkin was just being Sorkin. There was always more David E. Kelley (The Practice, Ally McBeal) in the guy's writing than his fans cared to admit: the grandstanding left-wing monologues that were eloquent fact-dumps, the ping-pong arguments that were sometimes more speedy than truly witty, the relationships that amounted to little conclaves of adolescent pathology. Have you re-watched episodes of Sports Night or The West Wing recently? They're both altogether finer entertainments than The Newsroom, but they have a lot of the same flaws. Sorkin didn't suddenly "lose it" when he started working for HBO. More likely, the creative power concentrated exclusively in his hands made flaws that had always been present loom larger.  

I wouldn't say season two of The Newsroom is a big improvement over season one, but the show's definitely more measured and confident—and now that we've accepted that certain tics, such as setting the stories in a recent, real past, aren't going away, it's easier to appreciate what Sorkin and company do well. 

Sometime in the near-present, Will and other network staffers are being deposed in advance of a lawsuit. The network's $1,500-an-hour lawyer is played by Marcia Gay Harden, a welcome addition to the show's cast. Apparently the show aired an investigative report accusing the U.S. military of using Sarin nerve gas in a top secret military operation in Pakistan. (Sorkin's reaching deeper into the past for this storyline — remember CNN's "Operation Tailwind" scandal from 2000? — but by a fluke of timing, France's government was recently accused of using Sarin gas in Syria.) Margaret Jordan (Alison Pill) briefly appears in the deposition room, looking haunted and sporting a chopped-up orange hairdo that Will says is a reaction to being traumatized during an overseas assignment; the attentive news junkie will instantly think of the Lara Logan incident.

The show flashes back to August, 2011, to show the domino-like chain of events that led them to this bad place. Things weren't good then, either. The whole network is in the political doghouse because Will referred to the Tea Party as "the American Taliban" in a news report. He's forced to sit out 9/11 anniversary coverage for fear that conservatives will squawk about him being unpatriotic. One staffer has a broken leg, which leads another (John Gallagher Jr.'s Jim) to take over covering the Mitt Romney campaign. Jim is excluded from the campaign bus, just as ACN president Reese Lansing (Chris Messina) is shut out of a Capitol Hill hearing on the Stop Online Piracy Act. The plotline about Neal (Dev Patel) covering the beginnings of Occupy Wall Street initially seems like an obligatory recent-history detour, but it ties in with the stuff happening at the top of ACN's corporate ladder, and as the season winds onward, all the stories intertwine in ways that make both dramatic and rhetorical sense, even if you're not on board with every single scene or line. 

Certain touches rubbed me the wrong way — I really wish, for example, that they'd had a regular character draw the network into the Sarin gas screwup, rather than pinning it on a new character, Jerry Dantana (Hamish Linklater), who is brought in to cover for Jim when he goes out on the campaign trail. And the show's portrait of male-female relations is as annoying as ever; is there any major character who isn't emotionally stuck in junior high? 

Nevertheless, the slightly dour tone is a nice break from season one's inspirational cheerleading and manic rushing-about. It's compelling to see these characters suffer, struggle, fail, and be punished for both unjust and just reasons; it makes for better drama than watching them get into a little trouble each week and then magically extract victory from defeat's jaws. The spectacle of a whipped, exhausted Will is especially appealing. As Daniels proved in The Squid and the Whale, when he plays bitter intellectuals who believe they've failed in some basic way, he becomes a deeper, more fascinating actor than when he's playing the know-it-all or nice-guy sides of Will. "Do you want to lead, or do you want to follow?" Charlie Skinner (Sam Waterston) asks Will. "He wants to follow," MacKenzie answers for him. "And barely that," Will says, resigned. 

Read more posts by Matt Zoller Seitz

Filed Under: tv ,tv review ,the newsroom

A couple decades before he became TV's most valuable guest star, a 19-year-old Patton Oswalt once accepted $300 for his first "acting" gig. It consisted of college-centric comedy bits for a bizarrely conceived educational video about student loans. In the newly unearthed clip, Oswalt wears a sweater vest that shrieks 1990!!!, he was already performing riffs about food, and he gets introduced as something that sounds suspiciously like "Patent Oswald." (How's Patton feel about seeing this clip now, you ask? "Kill me," he tweets.) He shows up at the 30-second mark and at 5:40, with a bonus appearance right near the end (8:50ish).

Read more posts by Zach Dionne

Filed Under: patton oswalt ,comedy ,movies

With the exception of The Heat — which earned a solid $40 million on its opening weekend, handily defeating the competition — it has not been a good summer for women in the movies. Put more plainly: With the exception of The Heat, women have barely been in the movies this summer at all. In the words of NPR's Linda Holmes, who wrote about the problem last month, "if you want to go to see a movie in the theater and see a current movie about a woman — any story about any woman that isn't a documentary or a cartoon — you can't." The 2013 lineup is all superheroes and crass man-boy bonding. Granted, studios release these types of movies every summer, but usually they'll at least give us one rom-com or female ensemble movie, or a woman in a role that is not "secretary to an Avenger." Or so I assumed, based on fond memories of The Notebook and every mediocre Kate Hudson film ever made. This year seemed worse to me, and so I decided to do the math, comparing the number of women in major roles in the last five years of major summer releases with those in major releases from twenty years ago. It turns out that yes, 2013 is a bad summer — but it is far from a record low point. This has been a problem for 25 years now.

First, some notes on procedure: This exercise focuses on wide-release summer movies, which I have defined based on theater count, with adjustments for blockbuster screen inflation. For the years 2009 through 2013, I included movies that, at their widest release, were shown on at least 1,000 screens — a slightly generous designation that includes some medium-range, female-friendly movies (like Focus's Seeking a Friend for the End of the World) but does not cover other indies, like Before Midnight (897 theaters) or Vicky Cristina Barcelona (726). (Since some smaller 2013 movies have not yet revealed their full potential, assumptions on which ones will cross 1,000 have been made.) For the years 1989 through 1993, the cutoff is 500 theaters to account for the pre-megaplex era (blockbusters maxed out at around 2,500 screens back then, as opposed to today's 4,000) and also a more varied studio approach. The following charts, which compare the number of films with varying degrees of a female presence in a given year, are presented as a percentage of total wide-release movies for that summer. The summer season is defined as Memorial Day weekend through August for 1989 through 1993 and is expanded to late April through August for the later years, to include the new May rush. Animated films and children's movies are not included (sorry, Free Willy).

Chart One: Percentage of Movies Featuring One Woman in a Co-Starring Role
We define a co-starring role as one that is, essentially, "memorable": Screen time is a factor, but so is billing, which is an indication of whether the studio values a woman's presence in the film. If the woman's name was on the poster, or featured heavily in the trailer, she is included in this chart — even if her role was noticeably smaller than all the men in the film. Gwyneth Paltrow's Iron Man 3 role counts, then, as does Amy Adams in Man of Steel; Maggie Gyllenhaal, who had a decent supporting role in White House Down but was completely absent in the marketing, does not.

As you can see, even when counting courtesy roles, 2013 is the worst year in the modern era, and at 57 percent it's below the average for the past five years. (That's 67 percent.) But it's pretty much equal to the average for 1989 through 1993 (58 percent), and it is not the lowest year in the study (that would be 1989, which was just an embarrassment across the board). Mind-bogglingly, the number of women in major studio movies has actually improved since the nineties — though as mentioned above, these roles are not always plum, well-developed roles. Which brings us to …

Chart Two: Percentage of Movies Featuring Two or More Women in a Co-Starring Role
Again, this includes supporting roles, but it is sort of like the Bechdel test minus the conversations: If a movie features more than one woman, then it usually treats the women as more than adornments or expendable love interests. (Notable exceptions: Gwyneth Paltrow and Scarlett Johannson in 2010's Iron Man 2; Jeanne Tripplehorn and Holly Hunter in 1993's The Firm.) Taken further, having more than one co-starring actress turns out to be a fairly decent indicator of a movie being about a group of women (A League of Their Own, say, or the obvious Bridesmaids example) as opposed to relationships or families.

Again, 2013 is a low point of the past four years, but it is somehow not as low as the wasteland of 1989 through 1993. And even at its best, this data is a bummer: Less than 30 percent of all movies can bother to write in more than a wife or a sidekick.

Chart Three: Percentage of Movies Featuring a Woman in a Starring Role
And finally, the movies about women. Starring in this case also includes equal billing, so movies like When Harry Met Sally — which is just as much about Meg Ryan as it is Billy Crystal — are included, even though a woman is not the sole focus. (The numbers on movies focusing on just one woman are too depressing and microscopic to capture in a graph.) To clarify, the 2013 movies that met the "starring role" qualification were: The Heat, Pacific Rim (equal billing among humans, anyway), Girl Most Likely, The Conjuring, The To-Do List, We're the Millers, Kick Ass 2, Closed Circuit, and Getaway. It is probably not a coincidence that many of these movies were shunted to August.

What’s interesting to note here is that movies about women are essentially a trend, like movies about archery or the apocalypse. The 2011 peak was the year of both Bridesmaids and The Help (Bad Teacher was also in there, riding on Bridesmaids' girls-get-raunchy coattails); the 1992 peak was a year after the release of Thelma and Louise, as if studios suddenly realized that women could star in successful movies, too. And then the studios got excited about some other trend, and the starring roles for women disappeared again.

In conclusion: Yes, 2013 is a noticeably bad summer for women in movies — but every year is bad once you start counting, and it has been for ages. The only reassuring lesson from this entire exercise is that The Heat probably will inspire a round of knockoff female comedies, though if history is any indication, the trend won't last past 2014. (Then soon, presumably, humans will be CGIed out of movies completely.) For now, I'll see you at Girl Most Likely, The To-Do List, and all the current indie movies featuring sad girls or doomed romances or anyone who is not a robot. It’s all we can do.

Additional research by Lauren Duca, Jeanette Moses, Kate Zavadski, and Nick Robins-Early.

Read more posts by Amanda Dobbins

Filed Under: movies ,counting ,the heat ,women in film ,charts

Clue. Trouble. Risk. Hungry Hungry Hippos. Truly, these are the contests that separate the weak from the strong and tap into our deepest human potential. And now a new board game has entered the fray: Rob Delaney's War of Words. But does it have what it takes to enter the board game pantheon? Julie Klausner sat down with Delaney — comedian and famed tweeter — to play his new game, as well as a few classics. Rejoice in this combat between champions!

Read more posts by Abraham RiesmanSarah Frank

Filed Under: rob delaney ,julie klausner ,vulture with julie klausner ,twitter ,comedy

In 1983, Bill Cosby put out the stand-up film Bill Cosby: Himself. An instant classic that somehow feels completely fresh and relevant 30 years later. (If you haven't seen it, the whole thing is on YouTube below.) Beyond that, it laid the groundwork for the cultural institution that was The Cosby Show. Well, it was announced today that Cosby will be releasing his first special since Himself on Comedy Central on November 24, 2013. Entitled Far From Finished, it was directed by another comedy icon Robert Townsend. Cosby has been very active over the last decade or so, touring the country and killing it on late-night shows, but this is the first time we'll get to see a whole polished set from the legend. Kevin Hart, your "best stand-up special of the year" title is in serious jeopardy. 

Read more posts by Jesse David Fox

Filed Under: bill cosby ,stand-up ,comedy ,far from finished ,don't call it a comeback

Edgar Wright left us a note at today’s screening of The World’s End. How can we say no to such a polite guy?

Last night on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Jeff Bridges, in an atypically boring conversation about parenting and kids, explained his New Age version of the "time out" strategy. Stick with the child and prattle your way out of his or her tantrum. But why do kids get the special treatment? "I wish sometimes somebody would do that for me ... I get so anxious sometimes," Bridges exclaimed, to which Kimmel replied, "I don't see you as an anxious person." (Seriously, the Dude doesn't always abide?) "I'm an actor, Jimmy," he pronounced. "This is an act, man." So please, if you ever see Jeff Bridges in cranky spirits, dole out the TLC.

Read more posts by Caroline Shin

Filed Under: last night on late night ,video ,r.i.p.d. ,jeff bridges ,jimmy kimmel ,the dude

The new movie Ender's Game, based on the revered 1985 sci-fi novel by Orson Scott Card, will have a big presence at Comic-Con this month … but while stars like Harrison Ford and Hailee Steinfeld are among those heading down to San Diego for the film's panel, Card won't be attending, and he may have only himself to blame for it. The 61-year-old Card has come under fire recently for his virulent anti-gay rhetoric, and it's started to cost him money: DC Comics put the kibosh on a Card-penned Superman story after fans cried foul, and a movement is starting to boycott the Ender's Game movie in order to send a message to Card and those who would do business with him. Summit, the studio behind Ender's Game, has no doubt gotten that message — they've minimized Card's role in the promotion as much as possible — but what does Card himself think of the boycott?

Though Card once argued that gay people "cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within … society," he now claims to see the writing on the wall. "With the recent Supreme Court ruling, the gay marriage issue becomes moot," Card wrote in a statement to EW. "The Full Faith and Credit clause of the Constitution will, sooner or later, give legal force in every state to any marriage contract recognized by any other state. Now it will be interesting to see whether the victorious proponents of gay marriage will show tolerance toward those who disagreed with them when the issue was still in dispute."

Those "victorious proponents" may find Card's cagey claim hard to take — Card wasn't exactly showing tolerance when he once said, "Marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy" — but whether it will have any effect on the film's box office remains to be seen. Ender's Game is due out November 1.

Read more posts by Kyle Buchanan

Filed Under: ender's game ,controversy ,orson scott card ,movies

This is just a nice thing: One of the producers on Jay-Z's Magna Carta Holy Grail is Ebona Oshunrinde, a.k.a WondaGurl, a 16-year-old Canadian beatmaker. Below, she explains how she wound up on the album — basically, she'd worked with Travi$ Scott, sent a beat to him, and then surprise! It became "Crown" on Jay's new album. Look how relaxed she is about the whole thing. "Yeah, I'm 16 and in my parent's basement and I have a track on Jay's album. Normal teen stuff." Amazing.

Read more posts by Amanda Dobbins

Filed Under: teens ,jay-z ,magna carta holy grail ,music

The Mary Sue has unearthed a weirdly moving clip of Dustin Hoffman explaining what his performance in Tootsie taught him about how society values women. While screen-testing his drag makeup, he asked producers to make him more beautiful. “I thought, if I was going to be a woman, I should be beautiful,” he explains. When the makeup artists told him that was as good as it gets, he had a tearful epiphany: He wouldn’t hit on himself at a party. “I think I’m an interesting woman, when I look at myself on screen. I know if I met myself at a party I would never talk to that character because she doesn’t fulfill, physically, the demands we’re brought up to think women have to have in order for us to ask them out.” Watch Hoffman get choked up, thinking of all the interesting women he never knew.

Read more posts by Kat Stoeffel

Filed Under: video ,dustin hoffman ,feminist awakenings ,watch

Back in February, Huffington Post entertainment writer Mike Ryan wrote a review of the utterly forgettable movie, Safe Haven. In the middle of that review was the following passage…

Let’s put it this way, here are the only twists that I could come up with that were more insane than the one in Safe Haven.

· When it was revealed that Ben Affleck’s character in Argo was a ghost.

· When it turned out that Bob Sugar was a ghost in Jerry Maguire.

· When I discovered that all of the penguins were ghosts in March of the Penguins.

In the event you have yet to see Argo, Ben Affleck’s character was not, in fact, revealed to be a ghost at any point. Apparent spoiler alert nazi Alex Picchietti — who read Ryan’s Safe Haven review earlier in the week — obviously did not know this and proceeded to lose his freaking mind over what he thought was a spoiler that didn’t come with a “spoiler alert” warning preceding it.

In the wake of his public meltdown, Alex Picchietti has understandably deleted his Twitter account in shame. Thankfully, Andy Levy storified the whole rage-filled exchange before he did, and it’s absolutely glorious.

I agree with Dave Lozo’s assessment that this “will remain forever The Godfather of stories about Internet commenting.” Also, spolier alert Nazis are still the f*cking worst.

(Pic via Warner Bros)