Tag Archives: culture

How One of The Biggest Porn Websites Helped Joseph Gordon-Levitt Make "Don Jon"

by John Bui Posted on September 27, 2013

Mother Jones

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Don Jon
Relativity Media
90 minutes

So much of this movie is just Joseph Gordon-Levitt masturbating in front of a computer, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt narrating about masturbating in front of a computer.

And it’s a testament to the 32-year-old actor‘s talents that this film, saddled to this premise, still manages to be charming and wholly enjoyable. Don Jon is Gordon-Levitt’s feature directorial debut (he also wrote the picture). It tells the story of Jon “Don Jon” Martello, Jr., a thickly accented New Jersey bartender and ladies’ man. He’s a nice-enough, church-going womanizer who soon finds the woman he believes is the love of his life: the much-coveted Barbara Sugarman, played with heat and attitude by Scarlett Johansson. The problem? Jon is a porn addict. Sure, he thinks sex with gorgeous young women is okay, and all. But the only sexual activity he truly loves is when he’s by himself, drooling over his keyboard, clicking on pornographic websites.

Sounds like a weird, godawful idea for a romantic comedy, right? But the film succeeds as a worthwhile, if forgettable, directing debut for Gordon-Levitt, primarily on the likability of its leads. (The movie also features fine performances from Tony Danza, Julianne Moore, Brie Larson, and Glenne Headly.)

Even prior to his recent years-long streak of critical acclaim, Gordon-Levitt showed himself to be a versatile and promising entertainer (click here to see him as a youngster playing blues guitar and waxing John Lee Hooker on an old clip from the sitcom 3rd Rock from the Sun). And in the director’s chair, he keeps things popping with a hip style and indie spirit. He and his crew apparently also put quite a premium on realism, as evidenced by their depiction of Don Jon’s swirling vortex of web porno. Arguably, the film’s most prominent co-star isn’t a person but a website: Pornhub, which is displayed in virtually every scene in which Jon is vigorously stroking himself. Pornhub is a Montreal-based free porn site started in 2007. It hosts a lot of amateur videos and professionally made content, as well as celebrity sex tapes from time to time. It’s one of the biggest porn websites in the world, and made news last year for marking Breast Cancer Awareness Month by pledging to donate one penny to breast cancer research for every 30 page views of its “Small Tits” and “Big Tits” videos. (This fundraising push was met with scorn by some, and Susan G. Komen for the Cure publicly refused to accept Pornhub’s donations.) At the end of their “Save The Boobs” campaign, Pornhub reportedly split their donation of $75,000 between several organization, including Cancer Sucks Inc.

And the conspicuous appearance of the website’s logo in Don Jon was no accident. It was a carefully coordinated effort by the crew, and one that’s certainly boosting the site’s profile. A representative for Pornhub has yet to confirm to me whether or not they paid for placement, but Corey Price, a vice president at the company, offered a statement outlining the collaboration: “A producer approached us in March 2012 seeking permission to use our brand in a movie starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Scarlett Johansson. The script had already been written and they were in pre-production at the time. After we reviewed the script and discussed the opportunity with the producers we agreed to take part in the movie. We also agreed to help them find adult clips to use in the movie from our content partners like Brazzers, Mofos, Digital Playground and Twistys.”

These were clips that Gordon-Levitt and his team judiciously selected from and edited into rapid-fire, sexually explicit montages in order to tell the story.

Now here’s a trailer for Don Jon:

Don Jon gets a release on Friday, September 27. The film is rated R for strong graphic sexual material and dialogue throughout, nudity, language and some drug use. Click here for local showtimes and tickets.

Click here for more TV and film coverage from Mother Jones.

To read more of Asawin’s reviews, click here.

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How One of The Biggest Porn Websites Helped Joseph Gordon-Levitt Make "Don Jon"

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"Homeland": The Broadway Musical!

by Frederick Cunningham Posted on September 26, 2013

Mother Jones

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Homeland, Showtime’s Emmy-winning drama, returns for its third season on Sunday. While they’re waiting, fans of the series can check out Homeland: The Musical. It’s a small production, blending the show’s war-on-terrorism thrills with jazz-hands theatricality. “Homeland is such a serious show, a big time drama; it was time for a lighthearted spin on it,” says Brendan McMorrow, a producer with Above Average, a NYC-based entertainment platform created by Lorne Michaels‘ Broadway Video. “There was some on-the-fly choreography, some throwback to Bob Fosse moves in there…Carrie Mathison is like something out of Chicago, and we have a little bit of Guys and Dolls thrown in there, for example.”

The musical will not, however, be debuting on Broadway any time soon. The video is a parody—a four-minute promo for a garish and fake musical adaptation. It was posted to this week to the YouTube page of Above Average, which specializes in promoting original comedy shorts. The sketch and lyrics were written and performed by comedian Eliot Glazer, the guy behind “Shit New Yorkers Say.”

Homeland: The Musical was intended as both a loving send-up of the Showtime series and as a riff on Broadway’s addiction to adapting popular on-screen fare—Legally Blonde, Catch Me If You Can, Billy Elliot, The Wedding Singer—to the stage and pumping them full of song, dance, and artificial cheer. Glazer pitched the idea to McMorrow about six months ago, but shelved the idea until the season-three premiere got closer.

In the past month, they booked their cast of Broadway singers and actors and quickly recorded vocals at a Broadway Video facility. Production and editing then took roughly two weeks. (Scenes were shot in the Producers’ Club, a small improv theater in Manhattan.)

McMorrow says that as of this week, there are no plans to extend their short into a full-blown Homeland musical. “Our office sits next to The Book of Mormon playing at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre, though, so we might be in a good position to do that,” he says. Glazer is about as open to the idea. “Could I write a whole Homeland musical? It’s definitely a possibility,” Glazer told Mashable. “It would be very Sondheim, if Sondheim was lobotomized and hadn’t seen a live play since 1988. Sorry, 1978, not ’88.”

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"Homeland": The Broadway Musical!

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The Death of American Exceptionalism—and of Me

by Aaleyah William Posted on September 24, 2013

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website. It will appear in “Death,” the Fall 2013 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly. This slightly adapted version is posted at TomDispatch.com with the kind permission of that magazine.

It’s not that I’m afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.
—Woody Allen

I admire the stoic fortitude, but at the age of 78 I know I won’t be skipping out on the appointment, and I notice that it gets harder to remember just why it is that I’m not afraid to die. My body routinely produces fresh and insistent signs of its mortality, and within the surrounding biosphere of the news and entertainment media it is the fear of death—24/7 in every shade of hospital white and doomsday black—that sells the pharmaceutical, political, financial, film, and food products promising to make good the wish to live forever. The latest issue of my magazine, Lapham’s Quarterly, therefore comes with an admission of self-interest as well as an apology for the un-American activity, death, that is its topic. The taking time to resurrect the body of its thought in LQ offered a chance to remember that the leading cause of death is birth.

I count it a lucky break to have been born in a day and age when answers to the question “Why do I have to die?” were still looked for in the experimental laboratories of art and literature as well as in the teachings of religion. The problem hadn’t yet been referred to the drug and weapons industries, to the cosmetic surgeons and the neuroscientists, and as a grammar-school boy in San Francisco during the Second World War, I was fortunate to be placed in the custody of Mr. Charles Mulholland. A history teacher trained in the philosophies of classical antiquity, Mr. Mulholland was fond of posting on his blackboard long lists of noteworthy last words, among them those of Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, Thomas More, and Stonewall Jackson.

The messages furnished need-to-know background on the news bulletins from Guadalcanal and Omaha Beach, and they made a greater impression on me than probably was expected or intended. By the age of 10, raised in a family unincorporated into the body of Christ, it never once had occurred to me to entertain the prospect of an afterlife. Eternal life may have been granted to the Christian martyrs delivered to the lions in the Roman Colosseum, possibly also to the Muslim faithful butchered in Jerusalem by Richard the Lionheart, but without the favor of Allah or early admission to a Calvinist state of grace, how was one to formulate a closing remark worthy of Mr. Mulholland’s blackboard?

The question came up in the winter of 1953 during my freshman year at Yale College, when I contracted a rare and particularly virulent form of meningitis. The doctors in the emergency room at Grace-New Haven Hospital rated the odds of my survival at no better than a hundred to one. To the surprise of all present, I responded to the infusion of several new drugs never before tested in combination. For two days, drifting in and out of consciousness in a ward reserved for patients without hope of recovery, I had ample chance to think a great thought or turn a noble phrase, possibly to dream of the wizard Merlin in an oak tree or behold a vision of the Virgin Mary. Nothing came to mind.

Nor do I remember being horrified. Astonished, but not horrified. Here was death making routine rounds, not to be seen wearing a Halloween costume but clearly in attendance. The man in the next bed died on the first night, the woman to his left on the second. Apparently an old story, but before being admitted to the hospital as a corpse in all but name, it was not one that I had guessed was also my own. I hadn’t been planning any foreign travel, and yet here I was, waiting for my passport to be stamped at the once-in-a-lifetime tourist destination that doesn’t sell postcards and from whose museum galleries no traveler returns.

Minus three toes destroyed by the disease, I left the hospital four months later knowing that my reprieve was temporary, subject to cancellation on short notice. Blessed by what I took to be the smile and gift of fortune, I resolved to spend as much time as possible in the present tense, to rejoice in the wonders of the world, chase the rainbows of the spirit, indulge the pleasures of the flesh, defy the foul fiend, go and catch a falling star.

I had been outfitted with a modus vivendi but no string of words with which to account for it, and so for the next three years at college I searched out writers who had drawn from their looking into the face of death a line of poetry or the bulwark of a philosophy. I don’t now remember how accurately or in what sequence I first read, but I know that with several of them—Michel de Montaigne and Seneca the Younger, Plutarch, W.H. Auden, and John Donne—I’ve stayed in touch.

Their collective counsel continues to confirm me in the opinion reached in Athens by Epicurus in the fourth century B.C., transmuted into verse by the Roman poet Lucretius at about the same time that Caesar invaded Gaul, and rendered as equations in the twentieth century by Ernest Rutherford and Niels Bohr. If it’s true that the universe consists of atoms and void and nothing else, then everything that exists—the sun and the moon, mother and the flag, Beethoven’s string quartets and da Vinci’s decomposing flesh—is made of the elementary particles of nature in fervent and constant motion, colliding and combining with one another in an inexhaustibly abundant variety of form and substance. No afterlife, no divine retribution or reward, nothing other than a vast turmoil of creation and destruction. Plants and animals become the stuff of human beings, the stuff of human beings food for fish. Men die not because they are sick but because they are alive.

Old-Fashioned Death

“Death… the most awful of evils,” says Epicurus, “is nothing to us, seeing that when we are, death is not yet, and when death comes, we are not.” My experience in the New Haven hospital demonstrated the worth of the hypothesis; the books I read in college formed the thought as precept; my paternal grandfather, Roger D. Lapham, taught the lesson by example.

In the summer of 1918, then a captain of infantry with the American Expeditionary Force in World War I, he had been reported missing and presumed dead after his battalion had been overwhelmed by German poison gas during the Oise-Aisne offensive. Nearly everybody else in the battalion had been promptly killed, and it was six weeks before the Army found him in the hayloft of a French barn. A farmer had retrieved him, unconscious but otherwise more or less intact, from the pigsty into which he had fallen, by happy accident, on the day of what had been planned as a swift and sure advance.

The farmer’s wife nursed him back to life with soup and soap and Calvados, and by the time he was strong enough to walk, he had lost half his body weight and undergone a change in outlook. He had been born in 1883, descended from a family of New England Quakers, and before going to Europe in the spring of 1918 was said to have been almost solemnly conservative in both his thought and his behavior, shy in conversation, cautious in his dealings with money. He returned from France reconfigured in a character akin to Shakespeare’s Sir John Falstaff, extravagant in his consumption of wine and roses, passionate in his love of high-stakes gambling on the golf course and at the card table, persuaded that the object of life was nothing other than its fierce and close embrace.

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The Death of American Exceptionalism—and of Me

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The Story of Sir Stuffington, The Internet’s Favorite One-Eyed Pirate Cat

by mirorita02 Posted on September 22, 2013

Mother Jones

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He is the cutest one-eyed, disfigured pirate cat you’ve ever seen.

Over the past few days, pictures of Sir Stuffington (pictured above) have been widely shared online, making him the latest in a rich tradition of feline internet obsession. But there’s so much more to Sir Stuffington than his adorable and funny Facebook photos. His story is one of perseverance and love, as well as internet fame.

Earlier this month, the cat and his two brothers were taken into Multnomah County Animal Services, an open-door animal shelter in Troutdale, Oregon. Sir Stuffington wasn’t in good shape—his damaged jaw, his missing eye, his upper respiratory infection, his heart murmur, his body covered in fleas and dirt. (All three were about six weeks old, and came in with calicivirus.) But even before the kittens had been taken to the shelter, local resident Blazer Schaffer had stumbled upon a Facebook photo of Sir Stuffington suffering in the street, and was determined to track him down. Schaffer, an animal lover who has worked with the shelter for a decade, soon found the three kitten there. She promptly took them home as their foster parent, and is taking care of them at least for a couple months until they’re healthy enough for adoption.

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The Story of Sir Stuffington, The Internet’s Favorite One-Eyed Pirate Cat

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10 Non-Violent Video Games that Kick (Metaphorical) Butt

by Natalia681 Posted on September 21, 2013

Mother Jones

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Still from the acclaimed game Journey Thatgamecompany

A bunch of us here at MoJo play games, love games, and cringe at the publicity that a few shoot em’ up games like Call of Duty receive every time another terrible mass shooting hits the news. Despite three decades of research, we’re still far from a definitive answer on whether violent video games are linked to IRL violence, as Erik Kain has noted here before. But like any art form—and yes, video games are art—there’s as broad a range of expression in games as the space between Kill Bill and Amelie and well beyond. Games can be emotionally moving, intellectually challenging, deeply political, and straight-up good quirky fun.

Here’s our buyers guide to perhaps lesser known but thoroughly excellent titles we think you might love and are almost entirely devoid of physical combat, whether fantastical or realistic. We figured you’ve already heard of the big sports titles like Madden and the FIFA series, music games like Guitar Hero, and movement games like Dance Dance Revolution or Wii Sportsâ&#128;&#139;; our list focuses on immersive narratives, physics-based games (think Angry Birds but way better), and “sandbox” games that let you build your own worlds.

Use the comments to yell at us about everything we missed.

Portal

If the last time you touched a game controller involved a spastic blue hedgehog, Portal is a great gateway into modern gaming. You’re an unwitting subject who’s just been mysteriously dropped into the test chambers of the dimly lit Aperture Science Enrichment Center. You’re not exactly sure why you’re there, but a droll artificial intelligence being named GLaDOS informs you there’s cake at the end of all the lab trials if you make it through. It so happens that you possess a blaster gun that can open portals in walls, and soon enough you’re popping out of floors and zooming through ceilings, leaping and hurling yourself around the lab, timing jumps for maximum velocity. It’s mind-bending gameplay that works your puzzle-solving skills and memories of 8th grade physics, so much so that the sequel, Portal 2, is popular with K-12 physics teachers as a teaching tool.

Available on Windows, Mac, Xbox 360, Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation 3, $9.99

Journey

Frankly, this stunningly beautiful game is impossible to describe. Take our word for it, or the fact that leading the Gawker gaming site Kotaku named Journey Game of the Year in 2012, it earned a profile from the New Yorker, and has even been likened to a “nondenominational religious experience.” The game itself is utterly devoid of dialogue: its characters never utter a single word. So let’s wrap this review up with just two: play it.

Available on PlayStation 3

â&#128;&#139;Minecraft

Ever wanted to build your own personal USS Starship Enterprise? A giant terrarium in the shape like R2D2? Landscape your own Westeros from Game of Thrones? The massively popular Minecraft was initially conceived as a straightforward game where players used the game’s Lego-like building blocks to build shelters from menacing creatures and so on. But even before the game made it out of its beta version, gamers began working together across multiplayer servers to construct ambitious and elaborate new lands and scenarios. You might build a digital replica of your house, down to the plumbing and light switches, and why not relocate the Arc de Triomph to your backyard while you’re at it? Slash your way through zombies and other creepy creatures if you so choose, but violence is entirely avoidable. In Minecraft, you create the world you want to live in.

Available on Windows, Mac, Xbox 360, GNU/Linux, $26.95

â&#128;&#139;Dear Esther

Game scholarship (yes, that’s a thing) hasn’t decided whether this “poetic ghost story” is a bona-fide video game or an interactive film. The workaday gamer doesn’t care—this 90-minute game turned a profit just five and a half hours after being released. You’re a shipwrecked man wandering around a beautifully realized island, exploring cliffs, caves, and beach as a narrator reveals bits of letters that eventually coalesce into a haunting story. Some may find the gameplay constraining—our protagonist doesn’t fight anyone or solve puzzles to advance. “Stripped down to its constituent parts, there’s very little game here at all,” PC Gamer’s Chris Thursten writes. “But at the same time, it’s a story that only games give us the freedom to hear.”

Available on Windows and Mac computers $9.99

â&#128;&#139;Animal Crossing

Animal Crossing moves you into a town populated by anthropomorphic raccoons, penguins, and goats, and simply lets you live your new fauna-fabulous life. Make friends with the hippo next door, stitch yourself a new animal-print wardrobe, hang out with a guitar-playing dog named K.K. Slider—it’s all up to you. While the game observes the changing of the seasons and the passing of time, its world is constantly changing, from the species of fish you can catch in its rivers to the goods available in village shops, with plenty of hidden surprises (including classic Nintendo games) to find. Critics have praised the simplicity and addictiveness of the game, even the parts that are essentially chores. “Some of the things you can do in Animal Crossing wouldn’t be considered fun at all were they to take place in real life,” IGN’s Peer Schneider wrote. “But that’s the beauty of the game.”

â&#128;&#139;Available on Gamecube, Wii, 3DS $30 (New Leaf)

â&#128;&#139;LittleBigPlanet

Like Minecraft, LittleBigPlanet is all about creating and sharing your own worlds. You’re a cheery little yarn-knit sackperson attempting to make your way across stylized levels inspired by locations like New York City streetscapes or the African savannah. Get though, and you can fire up the game’s DIY universe-building kit and build new stages and games to your heart’s desire. Fans have built everything from a bunny-themed version of Super Mario to a nearly hourlong feature film. You can buy and download extra themes like Toy Story, The Muppets, and Marvel Comics from developer Media Molecule. “Like the most prolific creators in the series’ community,” Gamespot reviewer Justin Calvert said about the most recent PS3 edition, it’s “a game that just keeps on giving.”

Available on PS3, PSP, Vita, $20 (LittleBigPlanet 2)

â&#128;&#139;

â&#128;&#139;Slender: The Eight Pages

In a mood for a good scare, but don’t care for blood and guts? Slender shares its fear factor with the Blair Witch Project: the scariest monster is the one you can’t see. You play from the first-person perspective of a regular person lost in the woods at night. You traipse around with only a flashlight in hand, doing your best to avoid the Slender Man, an loomingly tall, faceless figure who might have crawled out of the deepest recesses of your nightmare. This character was spawned from a real Internet meme in which people Photoshopped a tall man in black into the backgrounds of otherwise unremarkable photos, a sort of creeper photobomb writ large. Among the game’s many deliciously eery elements: there’s no music. You hear only the sound of own footfalls snapping twigs, the occasional cricket, your flashlight clicking on and off, and a pulsing, ominous beat that grows louder every time you find one of eight mysterious notebook pages scattered around the woods. This is one to play with headphones on and lights off.

Microsoft, Mac, free download —Maggie Caldwell

â&#128;&#139;Gone Home

You are 18-year-old Katie Greenbriar, just returned home from a long trip to Europe. Your family moved homes while you were gone, and you show up at the new address for the first time late one thunderstorm-soaked night only to find your family has disappeared. You slowly piece together what happened to your parents and lovestruck little sister Sam as you search the house, combing for clues in the magazines, ticket stubs, and letters they left behind. What you find is knowingly realistic (the food items in the fridge have ingredients on the back), funny (check your dad’s box of magazines at your own peril), and eventually extremely poignant. The game is heavy on 90s nostalgia, with a soundtrack by riot grrrl-era favorites Bratmobile and Heavens to Betsy. With its deeply realized coming-of-age storyline and themes of gender identity and sexuality, this indie game proves you don’t need big bucks to tell a great story. “Even though they weren’t mine, it still evoked the memories of my own time as a teenage riot grrrl with a secret love,” wrote one fan. “That’s something I thought I would never get back.”

Available on PC, Mac, Linux $19.99

â&#128;&#139;Katamari Damacy

The King of the Cosmos got loose one night and knocked all the stars and planets out of the sky. Your job, as the star prince, is to clean up the mess and replace the missing celestial bodies with whatever you can. First stop: Earth. Using a magical sticky ball that rolls up anything in its path, you travel around picking up smaller and then larger and larger objects, from ants to thumbtacks to cities and mountains, lumping them all into a big ball that will be thrown back into the sky. The title loosely translates from the Japanese to “clump spirit,” resulting in one wonderfully wierd, quirky, and oddly joyful game.

Available on PlayStation 2 (sequels available on PS3), $14.99 (pre-owned)

â&#128;&#139;Braid

Another brain-stretcher, this game allows you to rewind time and redo actions, even if your character dies. With some art nods to old school Nintendo games, Wired described its aesthetics as if “Mario’s art director had been Van Gogh.” But don’t let the dreamy palette and the tranquil music lull you, you’ll be facing difficult challenges and must collect pieces of different puzzles that will eventually explain the main character’s affecting backstory and motivations. This strange and beautiful game will leave you feeling both challenged and haunted.

Available Xbox 360, Windows, Mac, Linux, PlayStation 3, Cloud, $9.99

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10 Non-Violent Video Games that Kick (Metaphorical) Butt

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"Prisoners": The Strongest Anti-Torture Argument That Has Come Out of The Movies in Years

by Charlie Smith Posted on September 20, 2013

Mother Jones

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Prisoners
Warner Bros. Pictures
153 minutes

Prisoners is one of the year’s finest films. It’s a riveting and superbly acted two-and-a-half hours, carefully and smartly crafted by director Denis Villeneuve and screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski.

The film focuses on the Thanksgiving kidnapping of two daughters, one from the Dover family and one from the Birches. Hugh Jackman commands the screen as Keller Dover, a father who abducts and terrorizes Alex Jones (played by Paul Dano), a mentally impaired young man who Keller is convinced took the girls and knows where they’re being held. The police investigation is led by the ultra-dedicated Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal). The movie scores high marks as a gripping mystery, and as a terrifying human drama. It’s also the best argument against torture that has emerged from the film industry in a long time.

Last year, a lengthy debate began regarding Zero Dark Thirty‘s depiction of the United States’ use of torture during the Bush administration. Some anti-torture commentators were rather generous. “It is an exposure of torture,” Andrew Sullivan wrote. “It removes any doubt that war criminals ran this country for seven years and remain at large, while they scapegoated the grunts at Abu Ghraib who were, yes, merely following their superior’s own orders.” This point, made by Sullivan and many others at the time, is (to put it politely) excessively generous, given that ZDT offers a severe mangling of recent history that gives the viewer the impression that torture was crucial in tracking down Osama bin Laden. (It simply wasn’t.) With Prisoners, however, there is no hedging on the matter. The film has nothing to do with politics or the abuses of the War on Terror, but it does depict the prolonged, illegal, and sloppy interrogation of someone for vital information.

Very quickly, Keller (Jackman) looks more like a villain than a determined and sympathetic family man. Alex’s face is swollen and bloodied beyond recognition. Shards of glass protrude from his flesh. He’s been drenched in streams of scalding water. There are serious doubts about whether Alex had anything to do with the abduction, and Keller’s “hurt him until he talks” policy grows increasingly unsuccessful and problematic.

It is an ugly, frightening, and self-defeating act that is committed out of love and desperation. And it’s a punishing depiction handled responsibly and masterfully by Villeneuve, and his cast and crew. It addresses a question we’ve heard many times before. For instance, in a 2006 episode of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, the panel discussed the issue of Bush-era torture and “enhanced interrogation.” Actor Jason Alexander stated that if a prisoner had information on the location of his kidnapped child, he would without hesitation go “Quentin Tarantino” on him. That seems like something many parents would say, and it’s not hard to understand why. But Prisoners intelligently explores the failings of that logic. What if you have the wrong person? Is this undermining effective police work? What do you lose of yourself if you go down this road? Prisoners strips any hint of heroism or romanticism from the notion of doing “whatever it takes” to save your family. Take that, Jack Bauer.

Here’s a trailer for the powerful film:

Prisoners gets a release on Friday, September 20. The film is rated R for disturbing violent content including torture, and language throughout. Click here for local showtimes and tickets.

Click here for more TV and film coverage from Mother Jones.

To read more of Asawin’s reviews, click here.

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"Prisoners": The Strongest Anti-Torture Argument That Has Come Out of The Movies in Years

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Why This Indie Game Studio Chose a Feminist Drama Over Guns and Zombies

by Gabrielle Hartzog Posted on September 20, 2013

Mother Jones

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Gone Home begins with Katie Greenbriar arriving at her family’s new house during a thunderstorm in the dead of night. After reading a foreboding note from her little sister Sam taped to the door, Katie enters to find only flickering lights, creepy hallways, and mementos from her mysteriously absent family strewn about.

Anyone who has played more than a few video games can be excused for assuming this is all a prelude to Katie finding her dad’s shotgun and fending off hordes of the undead. Gone Home has no combat, however—your only mission is to explore the house and piece together your family’s story based on letters, ticket stubs, and plenty of other objects they left behind. As you hunt through every room, Sam’s audio diaries guide you through a riot grrrl-soundtracked story of high school, sexuality, and romance.

In an industry full of big budget shooters, Gone Home’s eschewal of violence to focus on exploration and storytelling has brought near-universal critical acclaim since its August 15 release. It’s the first game from The Fullbright Company, a studio founded last year by former developers of some of the award-winning BioShock games, genre-bending shooters that garnered plenty of praise for their own storytelling. Cofounder Steve Gaynor spoke with Mother Jones about moving away from major studio work, taking storytelling and gameplay risks, and why he finds the current state of the video game industry to be so inspiring. **Gone Home spoilers will follow.**

MJ: You worked on BioShock Infinite before Gone Home. What was it like moving from a big studio to an office in your Portland basement?

SG: It was an interesting set of transitions because I worked on BioShock 2 and it was like 80 or 100 people working on it, then I was the lead of the Minerva’s Den DLC and that was 12 people that were on it full-time within this big organization. It felt like a very small project and we had a lot of control over it. It was a good experience. Going back to a giant team on a massive production like Infinite was—I don’t know, I spent a year in Boston, and by the end of that I felt like it wasn’t a project for me. It wasn’t the size of the game that I wanted to be working on. Really I wanted to get back to that smaller game feeling.

MJ: How did you guys come up with Gone Home’s storyline?

SG: Coming off of BioShock stuff, the part that really inspired us about those games was the sense of exploration—going around a first-person environment, finding the story in the environment, and putting together the story of the place as you go. Unlike most games, where those aspects are kind of a sideshow, we wanted the whole game to be that… We knew it had to be a small place that would be dense with evidence you can find, so we settled on a house. And it’s a story of the family that lives in the house. Going from there, our creative decisions came from that kind of practical problem solving, you know, there should be drama between the parents and the teenage kid, and what form does that take, and who are these people and how do the conflicts resolve between them in an interpersonal way. In so many games, the conflict is resolved by ‘this guy kills this other guy’ or something. So our challenge was, if we have the teenager and the parents and they don’t see eye to eye, how does the resolution of their story remain interesting just by finding the stuff they had left behind?

MJ: Maybe it’s just the games that I play, but it seems so hard to find a game with everyday female main characters, not to mention gay characters. Gone Home also dives into a lot of territory—gender, sexuality, coming of age—that your stereotypical video game doesn’t cover. Is it nice to take a game and switch things up?

SG: It is. Really, it was a process of us taking opportunities that presented themselves with the game we were making. We decided early on there weren’t going to be any puzzles, and there won’t be any combat. The whole game is just about exploring a place and the reason the player is playing is not to beat challenges but because of natural curiosity and their desire to find everything and find out what happens next. So we said, “We can make this story about just a normal family, a group of people that live in this house in contemporary America, and there doesn’t also have to be zombies coming out the walls.” At that point we started talking about what the conflict is. And it’s the kid falls in love with somebody the parents don’t approve of. That’s a classic irreconcilable difference. So we thought about what the contemporary version of that is, and at some point I said, “OK, we signed up to write a gay character and write about their experience and make that central to the events of the game. Now we have to commit to that and make that a thing that feels authentic, that the player gets invested in.” It definitely didn’t come from the point of, well we want to do an LGBT story, how do we do that? It was a process of discovering who these characters were and then when we arrived at who they were, how to tell their stories in a way that felt honest.

Courtesy of Naughty Dog

MJ: There was some controversy at the end of last year when it came out that the developers of The Last Of Us had to fight to keep Ellie, the game’s female main character, in a prominent place on the cover art. Is it easier for a small indie studio to put out games with gay characters and female main characters than it is for major studios looking for a wide audience?

SG: I think that it is, and I think that’s not because of the people making the games generally. Obviously there are people who are trying to push on what kind of people are represented in mainstream games. When you bring up The Last of Us, it’s a good example—Ellie was a great character, and obviously the developers of the game fought hard to get her on the promotional materials and everything. I think the difference is that when you’re working on a game that has a budget of tens of millions of dollars and you have to sell millions and millions and millions of copies to break even, you have a lot more layers between you and the audience. You have a marketing department, and there’s a different marketing department for every continent, and the parent company has stockholders, and all that kind of stuff. You have to get all these approvals and go through all these hoops. I’m really grateful for the fact that we’re working in a time for the industry and in a part of the industry that allows us to make the game we believe in and get it out to people without really any barriers to entry. We can just make the game in our basement and work to get it on the digital game distribution platform Steam and get it previewed and reviewed on websites, and the only version of it that people see is the one that we want to put out there.

MJ: You mentioned all the different layers at work on these larger studio games, and plenty of critics have called for more diversity when it comes to character depictions in games. Is it more that the audience only wants a certain type of game or character? Or is it that your marketers or shareholders are scared to put out a game that doesn’t have a nameless space marine in the middle of it?

SG: I think there are a lot of different factors there. A game that a lot of critics like is not necessarily a game that enough players like to be able to make back an investment of tens of millions of dollars. So I understand the concern that you have to have when you’re working on something really big. I think that the good thing about working smaller and being a smaller company that doesn’t have to make as much to make money back is that you don’t have to worry about, well, critics like this and they’ll tell people to buy it, but millions of people might say, ‘Oh, well I’m not interested in that subject matter’ and we’re sunk. There are enough tools now…stuff like Steam and Twitter that allow people to tell their friends about games that they might be interested in, that let us say we don’t want to make something that will sell 3 million copies at Wal-Mart. We want to make something that would sell 50,000 copies online. I think that’s a really inspiring place for the industry to be right now.

MJ: Sam’s riot grrrl tapes are scattered around the house, and you can listen to them as you explore. Tell me about getting Bratmobile and Heavens To Betsy on the soundtrack.

SG: We started working on that early, which is good because it took a long time. We’re a small studio and we don’t have any clout, we don’t have a track record really, so it was a long drawn-out process of negotiating for the rights to use those songs. Early on, when we knew who Sam and Lonnie were, and we knew the time period was the mid-90s, we knew this would be the perfect music for what these characters are going through. Kill Rock Stars is a local label. They’re here in Portland. We actually had to work with their licensing agency in New York, but early on, we knew they were a local company and this is music from the Pacific Northwest, and it’s obscure enough that we might be able to afford it. We were really excited to get that in because I think it adds a lot to the feeling of the game and what the characters are going through.

MJ: All of Gone Home takes place inside a single house. What was the challenge gameplay-wise of fitting everything into this small setting?

SG: On some level, the biggest challenge and the thing I’m happiest about as far as telling a story about people is that, well, there are no people in the game. I’m glad that we didn’t do that because that just introduces its own challenges from both a development and an aesthetic standpoint. But also it was the one constraint that we had—Mom went and did this thing outside of the house, so how do you know that happened? Well maybe she brings the ticket stub home, and you can find the note inviting her out and all that kind of stuff. It was a fun challenge, and it played to our strengths because there was a lot of writing in the game and a lot of really nice 2-D art. Karla, one of our cofounders, is a really great 2-D artist and just a Photoshop wizard. A document forger, really. It allowed us to say we’ll focus on these 2-D productions to convey what the characters left behind and what their story is.

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Why This Indie Game Studio Chose a Feminist Drama Over Guns and Zombies

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The Man Who Turned Nintendo Into a Gaming Juggernaut Dies at 85

by Donekola Posted on September 20, 2013

Mother Jones

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If you were born after 1970, there’s a good chance that a man responsible for much of the fun in your childhood and adolescence has just died.

Hiroshi Yamauchi—who passed away Thursday from complications of pneumonia at the age of 85—may not be a household name in America; but he played a huge role (one that is hard to overstate) in shaping the video game industry. Yamauchi was born in Kyoto, Japan in 1927, and worked in a military factory as a teenager during World War II. He became president of Nintendo in 1949 (at the age of 22), succeeding his grandfather.

When he assumed power, it was a playing-card company. Over the next decades of his tenure—through his “notoriously imperialistic style” of management and doing business—Yamauchi orchestrated Nintendo’s transformation into Japan’s first major video game company. One of his many pivotal business decision was hiring Shigeru Miyamoto, the “father of modern video gaming” who created The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Bros., and Donkey Kong. Before stepping down as president of his multi-billion-dollar operation in 2002, Yamauchi had overseen the launch of Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, GameCube, and the ubiquitous Game Boy. And he decided which games Nintendo would release.

Not bad for a businessman who never played a video game and never showed any interest in enjoying them himself. But what he had was a clear vision for where the global electronic entertainment market was headed, and an eye for talent and what people craved. He was a visionary and revolutionary in the video game business in the same way that David Geffen was a visionary in modern show biz. So if you ever spent hours upon hours as a kid playing GoldenEye, then by all means raise a glass.

Now here’s an old clip of him on Japanese TV news:

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The Man Who Turned Nintendo Into a Gaming Juggernaut Dies at 85

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The Many Small Ways Americans Are Adapting to Climate Change

by kdneyo Posted on September 20, 2013

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the Atlantic website and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In March of this year, a Gallup poll highlighted an interesting tension in American thinking on global warming: While a majority of respondents said they believe global warming has already begun, a majority also said they don’t expect to suffer any hardships from global warming within their lifetimes. What the survey didn’t ask was how many people across the country are already reacting to rising temperatures—and preparing for those ahead.

This past summer, twenty-somethings Allie Goldstein and Kirsten Howard took a road trip to document stories of what they call “climate resilience”—examples of individuals and communities finding creative ways to adapt to hotter summers, stronger storms, bigger wildfires, rising sea levels, and more. They visited 31 states and offset their minivan’s carbon emissions by purchasing carbon credits from Terrapass. Whether learning about Ann Arbor, Michigan’s newly structured stormwater utility or evaluating the use of public art to mark evacuation routes in New Orleans, Goldstein and Howard found these examples everywhere they looked—suggesting that perhaps the rest of us don’t have to travel far at all to witness similar initiatives being implemented.

In some places, climate change is an explicit factor driving a city’s action; such is the case in Baltimore, Maryland, which has a Climate Action Plan and a recently appointed “Hazard Mitigation and Adaptation Planner” who is trying to build more tree canopy in the city’s neighborhoods so that residents may benefit from increased shade during heat waves. In addition to combating the “urban heat island effect” (increased canopy can cool the city by up to 9 degrees Fahrenheit), planting more trees has a host of other benefits: increasing property values and decreasing crime, according to Goldstein. These “co-benefits” were observed all around the country, Goldstein says, pointing out that sometimes “responding to climate change” is a co-benefit in itself, tertiary to the main goal of attracting tourists or reducing crime.

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The Many Small Ways Americans Are Adapting to Climate Change

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Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, "Burn Everything Down and Run"

by Raisacjayv Posted on September 20, 2013

Mother Jones

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IF ANYONE CAN MAKE a story about a spinster who devotes her life to the study of mosses read like high adventure, it’s Elizabeth Gilbert, who published three critically acclaimed works of fiction and biography before she turned her own pizza-eating, meditating, soul-searching travel exploits into the 2006 bestseller Eat, Pray, Love. Next came Committed, a follow-up memoir that explores her ambivalence toward marriage, and At Home on the Range, a cookbook of her great-grandmother’s recipes.

In October, Gilbert will unveil The Signature of All Things, her first novel in 13 years. The book’s protagonist is Alma Whittaker, the homely, overeducated daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia plant trader who spends most of her life practicing bryology on her father’s estate before embarking, at 51, on a journey to unlock the mysteries of evolution.

For her own research, Gilbert delved into the writings of Charles Darwin, Asa Gray, and other great naturalists of the time—and, to get a sense of the common parlance, she pored over the correspondence of scientists who rattled off informal letters the way we send emails. Some of the novel’s wryest moments, though, come during flashes of modernity in which Alma expresses herself with a Liz Lemon-esque exasperation. I caught up with Gilbert, 44, to talk about her travel bug, 19th-century feminism, and the vexing tendency of creative women to sabotage their own work through the pursuit of perfection.

Mother Jones: Alma is a wonderful character. How long has she been kicking around in your head, studying botany, gathering mosses?

Elizabeth Gilbert: I did three years of research before I started writing. It was just like developing a photograph very slowly. I knew I wanted to write a woman’s story. I knew I wanted to write about 19th-century botanical exploration. I knew she was going to be an explorer of the mundane and the overlooked. I was struck by the idea of what they called “polite botanists” back then, women who for the most part were unable to travel. Darwin and Alfred R. Wallace and numberless other naturalists were able to climb mountains and explore valleys and go spelunking and do that sort of research in the jungles that leads to the taxonomical advances. But she was a woman and she was tied to her father and she couldn’t do that. I think the fundamental question I had was: What can you do as a woman with your tremendous intelligence and education when you can’t leave? Her work in the mosses is kind of like hyper-intellectualized needlepoint—the small domestic arts that women were able to do to keep themselves from going mad from boredom.

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Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, "Burn Everything Down and Run"

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