Elisabeth Moss Says That "True Detective" Casting Talk Is "100% Rumor"



via BuzzFeed

“Everybody knew far more about this than I ever did,” the Mad Men actor told BuzzFeed News.



Elisabeth Moss attends the premiere of RADiUS-TWC's The One I Love at the Vista Theatre on August 7, 2014 in Los Angeles, California.


Jason Kempin / Getty Images


The casting rumors surrounding the second season of HBO's True Detective have persisted for months now and though they were partially put to rest when the premium cable network confirmed Colin Farrell and Vince Vaughn had signed on last week, the question about who will play a female cop on Season 2 of the Nic Pizzolatto-created drama remains.


The Notebook star Rachel McAdams and Mad Men's Elisabeth Moss have been two of the most-often discussed actors allegedly vying for the part, but Moss told BuzzFeed News in a phone interview that there's very little truth to those rumors.


"Literally, someone turned around to me in a car and got an e-mail and was like, 'Are you on True Detective?' And I was like, 'What are you talking about?' I was like, 'No. I don't think so.' And I had to go ask my team, 'What's happening with this? Is this, like, a thing?'" she said with a laugh while promoting her new film Listen Up Philip. "It's totally just a rumor. Actors are talked about when you're casting something. But everybody knew far more about this than I ever did. I had to go ask! Like, I read the article and had to go ask my team. So it's 100% a rumor."


Still, Moss, who wrapped up her run as Peggy Olson on Mad Men earlier this year (though the second half of the seventh and final season won't air until 2015), isn't avoiding a role on television. "I'm definitely open to doing television again. I think I might pause a second before getting into an episodic kind of thing like Mad Men where it's that kind of run because it is a lot and I want to try my hand at a couple other things," she said, "but I definitely, definitely am open to doing more."


"To me, it's where a lot of the really great material is," Moss continued. "And right now, I feel really lucky because we live in this place where, as actors, it doesn't matter. You can do a miniseries, you can do episodic, you can do theater, you can do big films, you can do small films. It doesn't really matter. It's all great stuff. I love that there are no lines anymore because I remember when there were. I can't tell you how many times I walk past a billboard or something and I see some really famous movie star doing a TV show now. And I'm like, They're doing a TV show?! It's truly amazing and it did not used to be like that. There's just such great crossover now and I love it. There shouldn't be any lines."



The Forgotten Story Of Classic Hollywood's First Asian-American Star



via BuzzFeed


Photoplay


The following is a bonus chapter from Anne Helen Petersen's Scandals of Classic Hollywood: Sex, Deviance, and Drama from the Golden Age of American Cinema. You can read previous installments — on everyone from Katharine Hepburn to Marlon Brandohere.


In a December 1933 issue of New Movie Magazine, society reporter Grace Kingsley described her visit to screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart’s famed costume party, where the who’s who of Hollywood showed up dressed, as the year’s theme dictated, as other Hollywood stars. The actress Fay Wray described the scene to Kingsley, cooing over each of her friend’s excellent costumes (“There’s Jack Gilbert as Lionel Barrymore in Rasputin!”) but really loses it when she sees “a little Chinese lady dancing about.”


But that lady wasn’t Chinese: She was the (white) comedienne Polly Moran. “I’m Anna May Wong!” she said, running over and brandishing her hands, “And my fingernails cost me a dollar and a half!”



New Movie Magazine / Via lantern.mediahist.org


As the picture that accompanied the article shows, Moran was decked out in full yellowface — including makeup to darken her skin, a wig, Chinese-style dress, and approximations of Wong’s signature long, pointed nails. In the picture, she makes a face intended to simulate a “Chinese” expression, and if you look closely, you can see that her eyes are taped up in an exaggeration of the Asian facial structure.


Moran, and whoever dressed her, would be familiar with this makeup technique (often achieved by using fish skin as an adhesive) because so many non-Asian women had been made up to play the role of Asian women. These were leading roles that could’ve been (but were seldom) given to classic Hollywood’s first and only Chinese-American star.


Anna May Wong, like other Hollywood actors of color, was not allowed in society, and would not have been invited to Stewart’s party. She couldn’t hang out with the very stars who exoticized and imitated her. In classic Hollywood, not only was it OK to act Asian, it was celebrated. And even though Stewart’s soiree was just a party, the behaviors modeled there bespoke the dominant understandings of Hollywood and America at large: White people can play at other races, and other races can play at very little.


Anna May Wong never scandalized Hollywood with her string of fiancés, like Clara Bow, or an outré sex philosophy, like Mae West. Ultimately, the scandal of her career had little to do with her, or her actions — it’s the way that Hollywood, and the audience that powered it, remained so hideously stubborn about the roles a woman like her could play, both on and off the screen. Wong was a silent film demi-star, a European phenomenon, a cultural ambassador, and a curiosity, the de facto embodiment of China, Asia, and the “Orient” at large for millions. She didn’t choose that role, but it became hers, and she labored, subtly, cleverly, persistently, to challenge what Americans thought an Asian or Asian-American should or could be — a challenge that persists today.


Wong was born in 1905 in Los Angeles, California, just off Flower Street on the outskirts of Chinatown. Fan magazine renderings of Wong’s childhood didn’t shy from evoking the discrimination she faced, especially in her integrated elementary school. One boy would stick needles into her every day, to which she responded by simply wearing a thicker and thicker coat. A group of boys pulled her long braids, shoving her off the sidewalk and yelling, “Chink, Chink, Chinamen. Chink, Chink, Chinamen.” Sometimes the profile would admit that such children were of “lesser parents,” but the anecdotes were framed as a simple trial of childhood: no different than a white star getting teased as a child for an embarrassing name or pair of glasses.


Profiles also labored to reconcile an identity that was at once wholly Chinese yet also American. She worked in a Chinese laundry, but that laundry wasn’t in Chinatown. Her parents forced her to go to Chinese school after American school, but she skipped it to go to the movies. She had a Chinese name (Wong Liu Tsong) that meant “Frosted Yellow Willows,” but she opted for the Americanized Anna May Wong. Her parents were skeptical of the moving image — her mother purportedly believed that cameras could steal a bit of the soul — but Wong eschewed Old World superstition. She was, in many ways, a classic child of immigrants, incorporating the behaviors, beliefs, and vernacular of her homeland with the heritage of home.


As Wong grew, she became increasingly fascinated with the Hollywood pictures that would film in Chinatown, which, in the late ‘10s and early ‘20s, studios would regularly use as a visual substitute for China — a conflation that made it even more difficult for Americans to understand that Chinese-Americans were a distinct culture from the Chinese.


To make Chinatown seem like the bustling streets of China, directors needed Chinese faces — which is how Wong first appeared, as an extra in Alla Nazimova’s The Red Lantern at the age of 14. She had asked for her father’s permission, but he was reluctant: as one profile explained, “Of course, many Chinese girls had played extra, but there are many Chinese girls who are not nice.” It was only after her father made sure that other “honorable” Chinese extras, all male, would guard her that he agreed to let her participate.


Over the next two years, Wong appeared in bit parts in various films, still attending school, before quitting in 1921 to focus full-time on her career. She was immediately cast in her first leading role in The Toll of the Sea, a nonoperatic take on Madame Butterfly that blew up the screen for two very simple reasons: It had Technicolor (two-strip, which meant only tones of reds and greens, but no matter, COLOR, that was sick) and Wong was actually a decent actress.


Wong’s acting was subtle and unmannered; her eyebrow game was on point. She had a piercing stare that made you feel as if she saw the very best and very worst things about you, and her signature blunt-cut bangs made her face seem at once exquisitely, perfectly symmetrical. Given the quilt work of exotic roles she’d played on the silent screen, audiences expected her to speak with a broken, accented, or otherwise un-American English. But her tone was refined, cool, cultured, like a slap in the face to anyone who’d assumed otherwise.


Her early success, like that of Japanese star Sessue Hayakawa, can at least partially be attributed to the global market for silent films. Yet to truly understand Anna May Wong’s unique place in Hollywood — and the particular type of racist role available to her — you have to understand both the rampant fetishization of the “Orient” by the West and the place of Chinese-Americans in California in the early 20th century.


In very broad terms, “Orientalism” refers to the overarching tendency of the “Occident,” or the Western world, to fetishize and exoticize the “Orient” (“The East,” or civilizations and cultures spanning the Asian continent). Scholar Graham Huggan defines exoticism as an experience that “posits the lure of difference while protecting its practitioners from close involvement” — and that’s exactly what Westerners wanted: a taste of “difference,” usually in the form of an evocative song, poem, or painting, without the actual immersive and possibly challenging experience thereof.


Mediated through the lens of Orientalism, members of distinct Asian, Middle Eastern, and African cultures are grouped together into one vast sultry and quasi-backward “Orient,” replete with heathens, pungent spices, snake charmers, mysticism, and all sorts of other offensively stereotypical renderings. For the Occident to reify its position as potent, masculine, and dominant, it had to figure the Orient as diffuse, feminized, and passive. It’s bullshit, but it pervaded everything from political speeches to children’s bedtime stories. Think Madame Butterfly, think the entire oeuvre of Rudyard Kipling, think Rikki Tikki Tavi, think Aladdin.


When Anna May Wong rose to stardom in the 1920s, the “great” empires of the West were in decline — but that simply made it all the more important to shore up the ideas and attitudes that were under threat. Which explains why every. single. article. I found about Anna May Wong somehow manages to sexualize and exoticize her while also placing her — her upbringing, her family, her heritage — in diametric opposition to “American” and Western practices.



“Anna May Wong symbolizes the eternal paradox of her ancient race,” wrote one fan magazine. “She reminds us of cruel and intricate intrigues, and, at the same time, of crooned Chinese lullabies. She brings to the screen the rare comprehension and the mysterious colors of her ivory-skinned race.” That sort of rhetoric — directed to an almost entirely white audience — that’s Orientalism. That Wong was American, however, complicated the normal Orientalist discourses: She forced magazines to perform a lot of tricky rhetorical maneuvering where they acknowledge that she’s somehow, magically, almost inconceivably, at once American and Chinese.


Wong was also opposite of what many had come to associate with Chinese-Americans, which, at least in the late 19th and early 20th century, comprised a subculture that was conceived of as being segregated, unknowable and almost entirely male. The reasons for that reputation were complicated: When Chinese laborers first came to America in the mid-19th century, men traveled to make money, while women mostly stayed at home. With the passage of the Page Law in 1875, Chinese women with even a hint of “immoral character or suspect virtue” were banned from entering the United States, which resulted in even more gender imbalance.


Because Chinese lived in these nearly all-male configurations that didn’t match with American understandings of what community should look like, it was easy to further stigmatize and exclude them, both socially and legally. See, for example, the 1882 passage of the “Chinese Exclusion Act,” which prevented Chinese from entering the U.S. based on claims that as a people, the Chinese were immoral, unhealthy, and posed distinct threats to the American way of life and labor force (rhetoric that may sound familiar to anyone following contemporary immigration debates).


That was the environment of systemic racism in which Wong was operating in the early ‘20s, when her turn in the Technicolor Turn of the Sea was such a novelty that all of Hollywood saw it — including Douglas Fairbanks, then-ruling King of Hollywood, like Tom Cruise meets Brad Pitt only with a swashbuckling mustache. Fairbanks needed a dastardly “Mongol slave” for his production of The Thief of Baghdad, and immediately wanted Wong for the part.


What do these two roles have in common? In one, Wong plays a Chinese “Lotus Flower” who falls for a white man who loves her but can’t possibly be with her; in the other she plays “the scheming handmaiden” who tries to prevent the love between the handsome, swashbuckling lead and his princess (the daughter of a caliph who is unaccountably white). So: a victim who can’t have love, or evil temptress who prevents white woman from having love — these are the two roles that Wong would play again and again, with slight variations for ethnic specificity, time period, and plot, over the next two decades. A victim or a villain, with very little, in most cases, in terms of character development, ethnic specificity, or anything else to suggest that the depth, charisma, or worth of white counterparts.


Wong’s roles may have been shit, but the fan magazines loved her, unlike black actors, who were either relegated to even more demeaning bit parts and/or ghettoized in black films shown only in black theaters for black audiences. For various complicated reasons that have a lot to do with American racial history and the way that Orientalism actually weirdly celebrates the people and civilizations it fetishizes, it was OK for the fan mags to profile her, run pictures of her, and generally acquaint American audiences with her — but not put her on the cover.



In these profiles, you can see the press continuing, with extreme awkwardness, to reconcile the idea of a star who is at once American and Chinese:


To prove that she was Chinese:


From Crown to Sole, Anna May Wong is Chinese. Her black hair is of the texture that adorns the heads of the maidens who live beside the Yang-tse Kiang. Her deep brown eyes, while the slant is not pronounced, are typically Oriental.


But oh wait she’s totally American:


Improbable as this sounds, it is absolutely true. Anna May Wong, among Americans, is so thoroughly one of us that her Oriental background drops completely away.


No seriously guys she’s Chinese:


She is as Chinese as kumquats and the lotus. ... She is of centuries ago and yet of today. ... Animation scarcely ever ruffles the tranquility of her round face.


NO SERIOUSLY SHE’S AMERICAN:


Anna May Wong has never even been to China, and you might just as well know it right now. Moreover, she has seen NY’s Chinatown only from a taxi-cab, and she doesn’t wear a mandarin coat … her English is faultless. Her conversation consists of scintillating chatter that any flapper might envy. Her sense of humor is thoroughly American. She didn’t eat rice when she and I lunched together, and she distinctly impressed it upon the waiter to bring her coffee, not tea.


NEVER MIND HERE’S A POEM, SHE’S TOTALLY CHINESE:



Motion Picture Magazine / Via lantern.mediahist.org


You can see how Wong would grow weary, both of this treatment in her publicity and the relative dearth of roles, especially complex ones, available to her. She was also understandably pissed that when an Asian role did come along, directors found an actor of basically any other ethnicity — Latino, Eastern European, Irish — and cast her as the Asian character.



In 1928, when an opportunity came along to go to Europe, she jumped at it. There she could make films that might exoticize her slightly less. She’d be able to do things like hang out with her white co-stars. She'd maybe even be able to have a romance, which, to that point, had been wholly unavailable to her, at least publicly.


Making her home in Berlin, she not only got to star in all of her own films, but was celebrated as a great beauty. She hung out with Leni Riefenstahl; she palled around with Marlene Dietrich; she sparked a few vague sapphic whispers. She appeared in five British films, and while she didn’t get to kiss the white co-star, she did get a chance to shine, especially in Piccadilly (1929), her last silent film and widely believed to be her best performance.


Across Europe, Wong inspired very explicit adulation: Composer Constant Lambert wrote Eight Poems of Li Po and dedicated it to her; Eric Maschwitz wrote “These Foolish Things (Remind Me of You)” to commemorate the end of a rumored romance. “They were all so wonderful to me,” Wong said upon her return to America. “You are admired abroad for your accomplishments and loved for yourself. That made me an individual, instead of a symbol of my race.” The extent to which Wong’s European films refused to make her a “symbol of her race” is questionable, but it’s certainly true that Wong, like Josephine Baker, Nella Larsen, and Langston Hughes, was celebrated in a way she had never experienced in America.


According to an American gossip columnist visiting Europe during Wong’s tenure, she was “acclaimed by nobility,” “the toast of the continent,” with “attendant stories of princes and even kings being madly in love with her.” This veneration was, at least in part, self-congratulatory: cultured Europeans’ way of showing just how much more sophisticated they were than those silly, racist Americans, even as they reproduced much of the same fetishizing rhetoric and narratives, just while letting the stars sit with them at dinner and waltzing cheek to cheek afterward.



Pictures and Picturegoer



The Weird Genius Of The "Crouching Tiger 2" Netflix Deal



via BuzzFeed

By releasing a major feature film on the streaming service — and in IMAX — the Weinstein Company has crafted the strangest, and perhaps savviest, ploy yet to shut out movie theaters from the movie business.



Michelle Yeoh in 2000's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon


Sony Pictures Classics


Late Monday night, Netflix and The Weinstein Company announced that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: The Green Legend would be the first major feature film to debut exclusively on the digital streaming service — instead of in a standard theatrical release — on Aug. 28, 2015. Although the announcement also noted that the film would also debut in "select" IMAX theaters worldwide on the same date, it is already clear that the movie won't be appearing on IMAX screens housed in three of the largest movie theater chains in the U.S.: Regal, Cinemark, and Carmike. In a statement to BuzzFeed News, AMC Theaters, which is owned by Chinese conglomerate Wanda Group, did not state unequivocally that they would not exhibit Crouching Tiger 2, but its sharp tone remains perhaps the best encapsulation of how exhibitors feel about this deal in general:



AMC Theatres and Wanda Cinema are the largest operators of IMAX-equipped auditoriums in the world. We license just the technology from IMAX. Only AMC and Wanda decide what programming plays in our respective theatres. No one has approached us to license this made-for-video sequel in the U.S. or China, so one must assume the screens IMAX committed are in science centers and aquariums.



Despite the outcry from theater chains, this announcement could fundamentally reshape the way the movie industry regards the way it does business. More likely, it will serve as simply yet another example of the slow, unstoppable expansion of what it means to watch a movie. Regardless of the outcome, however, it is a showdown that has been a long time coming within the movie business and — let's be clear here — it is kind of weird that it is happening now, with this movie, on this service. And kind of genius.


It is weird that The Weinstein Company, which did not exist when Ang Lee's Oscar-winning film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon became the highest-grossing foreign language film in the U.S. in 2000, is making a sequel 14 years later that does not involve Lee nor any of the first film's creative team, except for fight choreographer Yuen Wo-Ping, who is directing the new film outright. TWC can call the movie a sequel because, for one, John Fusco (The Forbidden Kingdom) is writing the movie based on the same novel series by Wang Dulu that inspired the first Crouching Tiger, and for another, actress Michelle Yeoh is reprising her role as Yu Shu Lien. (Also weird: The film is shooting not in China, but in New Zealand.)


It is weird that TWC would choose the subscription-based Netflix to exhibit this major feature release, rather than the pay-for-play VOD options that have proven successful on a smaller scale with independent film releases through subsidiary RADIUS-TWC, like Bachelorette and Snowpiercer.


And it is weird that IMAX would risk angering its theatrical partners by agreeing to be the exclusive theatrical parter for the Crouching Tiger 2 Netflix release.


But it is also genius that TWC is using this particular film as its weapon, and IMAX as its partner, to slice through the iron-clad resolve of North American movie theaters to maintain their exclusive window for theatrical exhibition.


And the reason, like so many things with Hollywood of late, has to do with China.



Ben Stiller and Eddie Murphy in Tower Heist


Universal Pictures


Let's take a step back for a moment. The "theatrical window" — i.e., the space of time when a feature film is available only at movie theaters, usually lasting roughly three months — is something that major Hollywood studios have been itching to shorten since at least 2011. That's the year Universal floated a plan to offer the Ben Stiller-Eddie Murphy comedy Tower Heist on cable VOD three weeks after its theatrical release — for a whopping $60. It was met with a swift and resolute rejection by American movie theater chains, which refused to show the movie at all if Universal went through with its plan. The studio quickly backed down, because its plan made no sense: The studio still needed that theatrical run, since there was very little chance Tower Heist's target audience was all that keen to spend $60 to watch a movie they would have spent $8 on at the theater. Universal had no leverage, exhibitors knew it, and they called the studio's bluff.


But closing that theatrical window has remained a priority among Hollywood studios, for the simple fact that for over a decade now there has been a seemingly inexorable erosion of audiences away from movie theaters and into their homes. In 2002, according to Box Office Mojo, nearly 1.6 billion tickets were sold in the U.S. Last year, it was just over 1.3 billion — a loss of almost 300 million moviegoers over 11 years. Theaters have been scrambling to entice audiences back, with amenities like assigned seating, fancier chairs, and in-theater food service, while at the same time boosting ticket prices and especially 3D surcharges to make up the difference. But while they've succeeded in propping up box office revenue — $10.9 billion in 2013 versus $9.2 billion in 2002 — that steady drip of audiences away from theaters has been weighing on Hollywood's mind. (This summer's abysmal box office certainly has not helped matters.) Studios want to start making serious money from the other ways people are watching their movies — on their wide-screen TVs, tablets, and (shudder) smartphones — as quickly as possible.




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293 Thoughts I Had While Watching "Gilmore Girls" For The First Time



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45. I’ve officially started singing the theme song at this point.



Warner Bros.


For years, Girlmore Girls has been an embarrassing blind spot in my pop culture life, like The Wire or Freaks and Geeks. So with all seven seasons of Amy Sherman-Palladino's series — revolving around history's most beloved mother and daughter — available to stream on Netflix beginning on Oct. 1, I decided to get a head start and binge-watch the whole first season on DVD.


Going in, I knew very little about Gilmore Girls — I was aware of Lorelai (Lauren Graham) and Rory (Alexis Bledel); that Lorelai shared a very long flirtmance with Luke (Scott Patterson), who owned a diner and might be balding because he wears a lot of baseball caps; Rory's myriad of men — most of whom went on to get their own WB shows — a pair of extremely posh grandparents; Melissa McCarthy playing a character named Sookie years before Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse Novels and True Blood Sookie; something about a hotel; something about weekly dinners; a lot of Sorkin-esque fast talking; and a town called Stars Hollow, where it was always autumn.


I also knew that people loved this show. Like, deeply, passionately, crazily. I knew there would be 'shipping and swooning and many opportunities for my own dysfunctional childhood to seem quaint by comparison.


So I stocked up on coffee (which was very apt in retrospect) and sat down for a 21-hour marathon of Gilmore Girls. Here's what I thought.


Episode 1: "Pilot"


Episode 1: "Pilot"


Warner Bros.


1. Oh, the "g" in Gilmore girls is lowercase.

2. Show opens with "There She Goes" playing. The first reminder (of many, I'm assuming) that this show is old.

3. A sign informs me that Stars Hollow was founded in 1779. That same year this song was released.

4. "I lost my Macy Gray CD." Yep. Old.

5. First laugh of the show comes courtesy of Rory asking that creeper, "Are you my new daddy?" Sold.

6. And now Rory is wearing the biggest sweater I've ever seen.

7. Oh wow, Jared Padalecki really grew into his face.

8. Did my town have teen hayrides?

9. Oh, so Melissa McCarthy was always incredible. It just took the world a long time to recognize that.

10. Eighteen minutes in and there are already a billion lines I want to quote forever and ever.

11. No one is — or ever has looked — younger than Jared Padalecki.


Best Line of the Episode

Lorelai: "I stopped being a child the minute the strip turned pink, OK? I had to figure out how to live. I found a good job."




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The 5 Most Amazing Moments In The New "AHS: Freak Show" Trailer



via BuzzFeed

Exclusive: Watch the first footage from American Horror Story: Freak Show , only on BuzzFeed.



FX


BuzzFeed has the exclusive teaser for the new season of American Horror Story: Freak Show, and these five eye-popping moments from the 60-second preview require a closer look!


Jessica Lange, decked out in a powder-blue suit (with matching eyeshadow!), commanding attention on a stunning stage with a song.


Jessica Lange, decked out in a powder-blue suit (with matching eyeshadow!), commanding attention on a stunning stage with a song.


FX




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"Left Behind" Is Marketing Itself With Quotes From Satan



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Roger Ebert, this is not. Nicolas Cage’s new faith-based thriller is touting an unusual anti-endorsement.



Nicolas Cage in Left Behind


Stoney Lake Entertainment


You might not know it, but Left Behind, which arrives in theaters on Oct. 3, is a reboot of the Christian apocalyptic franchise based on Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins' novels about life on Earth after millions of people disappear in the Rapture. The best-sellers were first adapted to screen in 2000 in what become a series of movies starring Kirk Cameron.


This new Left Behind is, even for the fast-growing faith-based film industry, poised to reach a unusually wide audience when it opens in over 1,700 theaters nationwide this Friday. It's got a major movie star in Nicolas Cage as its lead, and plenty of other recognizable faces in the cast, including Lea Thompson, Chad Michael Murray, and Jordin Sparks. And the trailer positions the movie more as a mainstream thriller than as something overtly religious in nature — if you weren't familiar with the books, you might see it as an action-filled feature film cousin to HBO's similar but secular drama The Leftovers.



Stoney Lake Entertainment


The movie's official Facebook page tells another story, though. On it, Duck Dynasty star Willie Robertson, one of Left Behind's executive producers, urges people to use the film as a tool to talk to "those who have not found their way," "to be able to show someone you care about what the Rapture is all about without giving them that glazed look." Televangelist David Jeremiah is quoted as saying, "God is going [to] use this film!" And, most unusually, yesterday the page posted a promotional image with a quote from...Satan.




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Here's What The Cast Of "Buffy The Vampire Slayer Looks Like Now"



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Buffy forever .


20th Century Fox Film Corp/Everett/David Livingston / Getty




20th Century Fox Film Corp/Everett/Vincent Sandoval / WireImage




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That Crazy "Simpsons" Couch Gag Was Made By An Oscar-Nominated Animator



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Don Hertzfeldt is the greatest, strangest animator you might not have heard of yet. And there’s a lot more to him than “I AM SIMPSON.”



Fox


If you tuned into last night's Season 26 premiere of The Simpsons, "Clown in the Dumps," you were treated to an opening sequence that featured Homer as a floating tentacled head, a seriously deformed Lisa, and Bart as a flailing blob groaning, "Don't...don't have cow, man!"


That's what happened when the long-running Fox animated comedy turned its couch gag over to guest animator Don Hertzfeldt, an indie filmmaker known for his amazing and amazingly strange work with hand-drawn animation.



Fox


The 38-year-old Hertzfeldt is actually an Oscar nominee, thanks to his hilarious 2000 short Rejected (below with commentary), which told the fictional story of how he was commissioned to make animated sequences for TV networks and commercials, only to have them all rejected, leading to his breakdown.




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An In-Depth Analysis Of Lorelai Gilmore's Love Interests



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“Max ‘Mediocre’ Medina.”



The WB


"Max forever gets points for the daisies thing."

"Yeah, but otherwise he's kind of a tepid, dull guy."

"Plus, seasonal allergies are real. Cool it with the flowers, dude.

"Max 'Mediocre' Medina."

"Max was so sweet! He was so patient with Lorelai."

"Sure but they had no heat. They went on a couple dates, and then GOT ENGAGED."

"Max is like the Lorelai equivalent of Dean."

"Max is one of those people who always says he wants a tattoo and never gets one he just wants to be the person who gets one but is like, 'Nooo, people will think poorly of me!'"

"Max is the kid who wore a suit to school way too young."

"Max is the guy who read The Giver and identified with Jonas way too much."

"Max totally used a rolling book bag in middle school."

"Oh come on, Lorelai left on their wedding day. WHAT A FUCKED UP THING."

"I love Lorelai forever and ever, but come on, get your shit together."

"She's a very complex, nuanced character who isn't always likable, which is what makes her great."

"LUKE MADE HER A CHUPPA FOR THAT WEDDING."



The WB


"Oh, and what about Alex?"

"Oh yeah! That guy. He was younger, right?"

"Yeah, he was a good guy, but sometimes good people are not right romantically."

"Sometimes a lady doesn't want to fish and does not like a man who does."

"The WEIRD thing is that he sort of fades away and we never see them break up."

"He was a good guy! A lot of the other guys were poops at some point but he never really got sour."

"He was a cool coffee dude though, which was a nice match for Lorelai."

"Later, he played Bella's dad in Twilight."

"That's probs why he left."

"Almost definitely."




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26 Things Only "Breaking Bad" Fans Will Understand



via BuzzFeed

A year to the day since the final episode aired, we take a trip back to ABQ.



w.soundcloud.com


This plea from a professor.


This plea from a professor.


Via imgur.com


This important question that we should ask ourselves daily.


This important question that we should ask ourselves daily.


Via imgur.com


This unseen epilogue.


This unseen epilogue.


Via imgur.com




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Chris Pratt And SNL Take A Dig At The NFL's Controversies



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“I punched a mailman, that’s federal baby.”


Last night on Saturday Night Live, the show parodied the recent controversies within the NFL.


Last night on Saturday Night Live , the show parodied the recent controversies within the NFL.


If you've been living under a rock, they include allegations of child abuse against Adrian Peterson, and the video that surfaced of Ray Rice punching his wife.


NBC / Via hulu.com


"Accountability, that's what the NFL is all about," said SNL's Beck Bennett, acting as announcer Jim Nantz. "I think you'll see that reflected in today's player introductions."


Then, NFL team members introduce themselves and listed the charges against them.


"Marvin Ingram, I got accused of sexual assault at THE Ohio State University."


"Marvin Ingram, I got accused of sexual assault at THE Ohio State University."


NBC / Via hulu.com


"I punched a mailman. That's federal, baby!"


"I punched a mailman. That's federal, baby!"


NBC




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Chris Pratt Sang About Having Sex With His Wife And Getting Buff In His SNL Opener



via BuzzFeed

“We had sex and a baby popped out,” he sang.



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56 Things To Remember From The "Scandal" Season 3 Finale



via BuzzFeed

Olivia quit and flew away! Remind yourself what else happened before the fourth season premiere on Sept. 25.


There's a bomb in the church where Sen. Hightower's funeral is about to take place.


There's a bomb in the church where Sen. Hightower's funeral is about to take place.


If you don't remember who Sen. Hightower was, or why there is a bomb at his funeral, I didn't either — and had to go back and watch the episode before this one. Basically, they know that Mama Pope (Khandi Alexander) is trying to kill the president, Fitz (Tony Goldwyn), with a bomb. They thought it was somewhere else in the previous episode, but now they know it's here. The three-way election is days away, and this episode is called "The Price of a Free and Fair Election." Scandal's third season was cut short — to 18 episodes — because of Kerry Washington's pregnancy. There are only so many folders Olivia Pope can carry, people, and only so many coats she can wear indoors! Considering that the ABC drama is such a high-wire act racing at a WTF pace, cutting the season short by four episodes doesn't seem like a bad thing. Scandal will work until it doesn't!


The show's creator, Shonda Rhimes, co-wrote this finale with Mark Wilding; Tom Verica directed it.


ABC



ABC



ABC




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Miles Teller's "Whiplash" Is An Inspirational Teacher Story Gone Disturbingly Wrong



via BuzzFeed

The future member of the Fantastic Four stars alongside J.K. Simmons in an exhilarating new movie that makes drumming look as ferocious as boxing.



Miles Teller in Whiplash.


Daniel McFadden/Sony Pictures Classics


We all know how inspirational teacher stories are supposed to go — those movies like Stand and Deliver, Dead Poets Society, and The Miracle Worker, in which determined instructors wrangle difficult, indifferent, ill-treated, or seemingly unreachable students, coaxing and prodding them toward success, seeing potential in them that no one else has. There are ups and downs, but by the time we reach the ending, everyone's better for the struggle. Right?


Whiplash, which is screening at the New York Film Festival before opening in theaters Oct. 10, takes this formula and tilts it on its axis, so that it's always wobbling between harsh guidance and outright abuse. It's thrilling and sickening to watch, pushing you away with scenes of inventive cruelty, then reeling you back in by demanding that you consider if you're seeing someone run the kind of gauntlet necessary to create true greatness.


Andrew Neyman (Miles Teller) is a 19-year-old jazz drummer enrolled at the Shaffer Conservatory of Music, a Juilliard-esque fictional institution in Manhattan. He's the child of an absent mother and an affectionate failed writer of a father, and he's the only musician in the family. At a Thanksgiving dinner, or on a date with the girl who works the concession stand at his local movie theater, he gets nothing but blank incomprehension when he talks about ambitions.


But within Shaffer's intensely competitive walls and the equally closed-in world of orchestral jazz, Andrew knows exactly where he stands and where he wants to go, and he and the other students wait to catch the eye of Terence Fletcher (J. K. Simmons) like restless debutants at a ball, longing to be asked to dance. Terence is the conductor for the conservatory's high-profile studio band, which participates in competitions and could serve as a stepping stone to Lincoln Center. He's also an epic asshole.



J.K. Simmons in Whiplash.


Daniel McFadden/Sony Pictures Classics


Whiplash, which is written and directed with jolting vitality by 29-year-old Damien Chazelle (Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench), is a nervy pas de deux between Teller and Simmons. There are other people in its world, but they're window dressing — the fellow musicians who avert their eyes when Terence brings his wrath down on someone, Andrew's loving but ineffectual father (Paul Reiser), who doesn't even have a name, and Nicole (Melissa Benoist), the girl Andrew briefly dates, an indecisive Fordham undergrad whose uncertainties about her life pale, in Andrew's eyes, in comparison to his own drive. Terence is the only one who counts in Andrew's increasingly narrow life, though his attention, which Andrew eventually earns, is a questionable blessing.


Simmons has played all sorts of gruff but twinkly paternal figures in his career, from Spider-Man to Juno to Growing Up Fisher. Terence isn't one of them. He'll offer up moments of softness and warmth, but they're more often than not deceptive, an attempt to lure someone into defensiveness before ruthlessly breaking them down. Whiplash is a film about a certain type of jazz, but Terence could just as easily be a hardass football coach or a steely drill sergeant, so mercilessly does he treat the band. On Andrew's first day with them, he gives him a pep talk in the hallway about having fun, then, in a magnificent sequence of building dread, makes him play the same measure again, and again, and again in front of the other musicians, insisting it's "not my tempo" until Andrew's humiliated and in tears.


Whiplash is about a bully, but it's not a cruel film — Andrew's hardiness, and his own myopic dedication to greatness at the expense of his personal life, save it from that. Teller, who's rapidly transitioning from the standout star of indies like The Spectacular Now to a future superhero movie lead, is once again strong here, playing Andrew as sullen, scowling, able to light up and look vulnerable in small moments but otherwise ready to accept Terence's treatment as the forge in which he'll be remade. He squares his shoulders and charges into Terence's worst attacks. He practices until he's drenched in sweat, face contorting with effort, blood on his drum kit from torn fingers (an image of which the movie's a little too fond), then sinks his fists into ice water like a boxer.




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"Bones" Won't Be The Same Without Sweets



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“The world’s a lot better than you think it is…”



Fox


Dr. Lance Sweets died in a parking lot in the Season 10 premiere of Bones. John Francis Daley had played the beleaguered FBI psychologist since Season 3, where we met him as a 22-year-old with a doctorate in psychology.


In his first scene in the series, Dr. Brennan (Emily Deschanel) insults Sweets' "meaningless exercises," Booth (David Boreanaz) insults his youth, and Brennan says, "I don't care how young you are" — which makes him smile — before she adds, "I've never believed in psychotherapy." In his final moments, the dying man comforted Booth and Brennan: "The world's a lot better than you think it is." Earlier in the episode, Brennan calls his discipline "pseudo-science," but she also calls him a friend.


He was a friend because he was charmingly dorky.


He was a friend because he was charmingly dorky.


;) <3, he says, in actual words.


FOX / Via sweet-facts-about-sweets.tumblr.com


He was dedicated to his craft.


He was dedicated to his craft.


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