The solipsism of artists and influencers offers infinite variations on self-lacerating lampoon, and Sebastian Silva’s new film Rotting in the Sun comes up with a dandy. Here Silva, the Chilean filmmaker best known in the States for the Michael Cera psychedelic quest movie Crystal Fairy & the Magic Cactus, creates …
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It is easy to shit on Nickelback. Too easy, some might say. The question is really: Why? What, exactly, is it about this Canadian group that inspires such ill will? Their overwhelming success? Lots of bands are successful, for all of the right and wrong reasons. Their hits? No one’s …
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“I like the stock!” In terms of revolutionary rallying cries, it’s no “Liberté, égalité, fraternité!” or “We will fight them on the beaches …” or “They will never take our freedom!” But by the time that Keith Gill, a.k.a. Roaring Kitty — Reddit and YouTube poster, red headband model, reluctant …
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“Show us your Dicks!” Roughly 90 minutes after someone in the audience yelled that request out, the people sitting in the Royal Alexandra Theatre would find themselves being showered with makeshift confetti, led in a gospel sing-along by folks in church-choir robes, and batting around beach balls and, naturally, inflatable …
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There are those who were confused upon reading the announcement that the Toronto International Film Festival would kick off its 48th edition with The Boy and the Heron, from the Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki. And then there are those who heard that this latest — and possibly the last — …
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When Star Trek: Lower Decks premiered in the summer of 2020 — so long ago that its streaming home at the time was called CBS All Access, rather than Paramount+ — it seemed caught between two potentially incompatible goals. On the one hand, the animated series, run by Mike McMahan, …
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Ten years ago, The Criterion Collection dropped a dual-format edition of Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights. Included amongst its special features is behind-the-scenes footage of Chaplin forcing his co-star, Virginia Cherrill — a socialite the filmmaker spotted at a boxing match — to act out the scene of her blind flower …
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They say you should never meet your heroes, but you definitely shouldn’t start romancing them in a foreign country when you’re 14 (to their 24), let them ply you with pills, dictate what clothes you wear, and trap you in a mansion while they go off to fuck starlets and …
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We are told to judge the art rather than the artist, but sometimes the artist makes this difficult. Woody Allen still carries loud freight – the freight of someone who was accused by his daughter, Dylan Farrow, of child sexual abuse. People will argue that none of the above matters, …
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Much ink has been spilled — or rather, tweets fired off — over Bradley Cooper’s prosthetic nose in his Leonard Bernstein biopic. Because Cooper is not a Jew himself, dissenters opined, accentuating his schnoz was an act of crude caricature. Of ethnic derision. The word “Jewface” trended online for an …
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