entertainment
Outrageous: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars, by Kliph Nesteroff, Abrams, 312 pages, $30 The first paragraph of the book jacket lays it out: "There is a common belief that we live in unprecedented times, that people are too sensitive today, that nobody objected to the actions of actors, comedians, and filmmakers in the past. Modern pundits would have us believe that Americans of a previous generation had tougher skin and seldom complained. But does this argument hold up to scrutiny?" There's a good point underneath the hyperbole. People tend to believe—and pundits, politicians, and ac...
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In the first episode of Netflix's latest hit documentary series, Unlocked: A Jail Experiment, an inmate with newfound autonomy says, "There's no way we can let criminals govern themselves." But for six weeks, 46 inmates at Arkansas' Pulaski County detention center did just that. No longer confined to their cells for 23 hours a day, they were free to roam the cellblock with no guards in sight, all day long. And upon good behavior, they were given even more privileges, such as free phone calls and increased visitation rights with family and friends. By cultivating a community-driven atmosphere, ...
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Charles Fort lived a century ago but is still invoked fairly frequently today: the "inspired clown" (as the screenwriter and playwright Ben Hecht called him) who haunted the New York Public Library, collecting reports of anomalous events and devising wild theories to account for them. Fort's influence after he died isn't as widely appreciated. But Joshua Blu Buhs makes a strong case in Think to New Worlds: The Cultural History of Charles Fort and His Followers that the eccentric writer cast a long shadow, leaving a mark not only on the world of Bigfoot hunters and UFO buffs but also in literat...
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Cabrini is, on an obvious level, a movie about the anti-Italian animus facing swarthy newcomers to America in the late 19th century. It tells the story of Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini, a Catholic religious sister who arrives in 1889 to serve the desperately poor Italian-American community in Five Points, New York. She encounters her fair share of bigotry, but the obstacles that repeatedly threaten to derail her efforts come more often from City Hall than from everyday New Yorkers. Starved for resources, Cabrini convinces a New York Times reporter to write about the slum—and an avalanche of do...
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One way to understand the Bad Boys franchise is as a referendum on shifting cultural views of masculinity. The first two films, released in 1995 and 2003 respectively, followed the brash antics of two hard-charging Miami cops, Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) and Mike Lowrey (Will Smith). Mike and Marcus are a classic cinematic odd couple: Marcus is sloppy, goofy, messy, harried, and married; Marcus is handsome, uptight, hard-charging, and very, very single. But they shared a certain bro-code—vulgar, violent, competitive, sex-obsessed, and constantly engaged in insult comedy, much of which had...
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After escaping the oppressive regime of North Korea, Loh Kiwan arrives in Belgium to seek asylum, hoping to find freedom and a fresh start. Instead, he finds himself entangled in the bureaucratic limbo of the asylum process. Without money, a home, or the legal right to work, Kiwan's situation in the South Korean film My Name is Loh Kiwan (streaming on Netflix) becomes increasingly desperate. He is forced to sleep in public bathrooms in the brutal winter and scavenge for food in trash bins. Kiwan finally gets a break when he lands an illegal job at a meat factory. Even then, safety and stabilit...
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In Pluto, a sci-fi murder-mystery anime streaming on Netflix, a serial killer targets the world's most advanced robots. The mystery deepens as the killer starts pursuing human activists advocating robot rights. The investigation falls into the hands of Europol Inspector Gesicht, a robot who finds himself among the potential targets. The absence of human DNA at the crime scenes forces Gesicht to confront a disturbing possibility: Could an AI, programmed to never harm humans, be orchestrating the killings? If robots are responsible, the balance between humans and robots could be threatened, pote...
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Tom Cruise might just be Hollywood's most analog movie star. He reportedly once grew irate when a crew member suggested that a dangerous stunt be performed by a digital double, yelling: "There is no digital Tom! Just Tom!" For last summer's Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One, Cruise, who was 61 when the movie hit theaters, actually jumped a motorcycle off a ramp on top of a mountain, let the bike fall down into the canyon, and then parachuted down into the valley below. The complex sequence took a year to plan and shoot. It probably cost a lot of money. There were some computer effect...
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Morgan Spurlock, the documentarian whose film Super Size Me attempted to expose the perils of fast food as it followed him adhering to a monthlong McDonald's-only diet, has died from complications of cancer. He was 53. Spurlock went on to make several other films. But nothing would eclipse the hype around Super Size Me, which catapulted him to fame and attracted an Academy Award nomination for best documentary feature. If you're a millennial like me, there's a chance the movie, which was released in 2004, was a part of your education diet, whether in high school or college, touted as an exampl...
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For the pop culture–savvy, artificial intelligence has long been synonymous with Skynet, the autonomous machine network introduced in James Cameron's 1984 film The Terminator. Skynet embodies the dreaded Singularity, the theoretical point where technology advances so far that it moves beyond our control. In the franchise's ever-expanding lore—stretched across six films and a TV show, so far—Skynet is an all-powerful military AI that achieves sentience. Perceiving humanity as a threat, it attacks, first with the global nuclear arsenal and then with an army of skeletal metal robots that can appe...
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