Tag Archives: culture

"The Bling Ring": An Artful, Fun Examination of Why Hating America Is Often Completely Justified

by testdonekAQW Posted on June 21, 2013

Mother Jones

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The Bling Ring
A24
87 minutes

Emma Watson is developing a habit of robbing the homes of Hollywood celebrities. Earlier this month, ensemble comedy This Is the End (sort of a Left Behind for potheads) hit theaters. That film, set in Los Angeles during the Rapture, features Watson brandishing a gigantic ax and angrily stealing food from James Franco‘s house. In The Bling Ring, Watson assumes a similar role, burglarizing the homes of Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, Megan Fox, Rachel Bilson, and Audrina Patridge.

Watson plays Nicki, one-fifth of the “Bling Ring,” a group of disaffected, bored, fashionista teenagers who decide to rob the houses of famous people. (The rest of the crew is played—with commendable Valspeak dedication—by Katie Chang, Claire Julien, Taissa Farmiga, and Israel Broussard.) Their months-long crime spree snags them a small fortune in jewels, clothing, booze, and designer bags.

As you might have heard, this film is based on actual events. Writer/director Sofia Coppola adapted journalist Nancy Jo Sales‘ amazing 2010 Vanity Fair article (now a 268-page book) profiling the Bling Ring, a.k.a. the “Hollywood Hills Burglar Bunch.” And Coppola did so in a way that emphasizes blunt sentiment and sly commentary over exploitative cinematic impulses. “Sofia and I met several times over the year she was writing the script,” Sales writes in an email. “I was a fan of the director’s and knowing her work there’s no way it could have turned into an exploitation flick…It’s a dark story, a cautionary tale.”

A predictable avalanche of infamy and giddy public fascination followed the arrests of the real-life Bling Ringers. “Think of a major news organization and they were at the Bling Ring hearings,” Sales says. “The New York Times put it on the cover of the Sunday Styles section.” What followed the requisite press coverage was a cyclone of ill-gotten, reality-TV-abetted fame that wasn’t so much a train wreck as it was a heaving paroxysm of America’s worst voyeuristic and material tendencies. (To understand exactly what I mean, watch this psychotic slice of television.)

Sofia Coppola wanted to do everything she could to avoid further fueling the stardom of the real-life Bling Ring—hence her script’s heavy fictionalization and the name changes. For the same reason, I’m declining to print the Bling Ring members’ real names, and will not delve into their post-arraignment exploits. Instead, I will direct you to Sales’ riveting Vanity Fair story and encourage you to watch the film’s insane trailer here:

The movie is artful and wickedly fun, and pulled off with a welcome maturity. To get her actors into character, Coppola had them stage a mock home invasion. “I believe it was her sister-in-law’s house,” The Bling Ring star Israel Broussard tells me. “She gave us a detailed list, by brand name, color, designer of the cloths we needed to get in the closet, shoes, handbags…Sofia gave us an address, the list, and told us to hop in the minivan and go!” The scene in which the Bling Ring raids Paris Hilton’s house was filmed on-site—the socialite opened up her Beverly Hills mansion for the cast and crew to recreate the robbery. Hilton’s home is located in a mega-wealthy gated community where film crews aren’t permitted. So Coppola and company had to sneak in, shoot the sequences, and get the hell out of Dodge. “Paris was very gracious,” Broussard says. They then made their swift getaway—an exit befitting the story of the adolescent gang they unlovingly portray.

The Bling Ring gets released on Friday, June 21. The film is rated R for teen drug and alcohol use, and for language including some brief sexual references. Click here for local showtimes and tickets.

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

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

To listen to the movie and pop-culture podcast that Asawin cohosts with ThinkProgress critic Alyssa Rosenberg, click here.

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"The Bling Ring": An Artful, Fun Examination of Why Hating America Is Often Completely Justified

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How Brad Pitt’s "World War Z" Resolves the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

by Andrianayhv Posted on June 21, 2013

Mother Jones

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World War Z
Paramount Pictures
116 minutes

This post contains minor spoilers.

World War Z, also known as Run, Brad Pitt, Run, is a thoughtful and hugely exciting culmination of producer Brad Pitt’s campaign to create his very own Bourne-type action franchise starring zombies and Brad Pitt. The film, directed by Marc Forster and based on Max Brooks’ beloved 2006 oral history (a novel in which Howard Dean and Colin Powell analogs are the leaders of the post-apocalyptic free world), is set at the dawn of a worldwide zombie takeover. The president of the United States is dead, major cities fall within hours, and a single bite from one of those ravenous creatures can turn you into one in a little more than 10 seconds. At the behest of surviving politicians and military commanders, retired UN inspector Gerry Lane (played by Pitt) bolts around the globe in search of a cure for the rapidly spreading zombie virus.

Beyond that I enjoyed World War Z‘s big-screen adaptation (I will leave the griping about the movie being a faithless adaptation of the novel to others), there are a few factors that stood out to me. First of all, World War Z: The Brad Pitt Saga is by far the best free advertising the United Nations has gotten in years: A courageous, loving, sex-appeal-gushing family man/UN employee—who has seen action in Liberia and Bosnia—is quite possibly humanity’s only hope for survival.

But the aspect of the film I found most interesting is that World War Z completely resolves the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

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How Brad Pitt’s "World War Z" Resolves the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

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Los Angeles bans the bag

by Myrna Posted on June 18, 2013

LA passes a bag ban Continue reading here –  Los Angeles bans the bag ; ;Related ArticlesLove Trestles? Show up tomorrow.Here’s your sick note for International Surfing DayThe three best surfing ads of the year? ;

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Los Angeles bans the bag

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"Veep" Creator Armando Iannucci on Why He’d Never, Ever Allow Joe Biden on The Show

by Edbre23ne Posted on June 15, 2013

Mother Jones

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Armando Iannucci, the acclaimed satirist and creator of the HBO comedy Veep, is a self-described longtime politics geek. When he was growing up in a Scottish-Italian household in Glasgow, he stayed up late to watch American election results—the first US presidential election he watched with a budding fascination was in 1976, when Carter trumped Ford. His childhood attraction to observing UK and US politics evidently carried over into adulthood. The 49-year-old writer/director has a number of well-regarded political satires under his belt, and he’s influenced such comic darlings as Sacha Baron Cohen, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Ricky Gervais.

Since the mid-1990s, Iannucci has been noted for a patented mold of rollicking commentary—a brand of comedy that takes mischievous deromanticization of political elites, and filters it through his rapid-fire sardonicism. (Prime examples are his work in British television including The Day Today and The Thick of It, and the latter’s brilliant 2009 spin-off film In the Loop.) Many of his scripts are famous for their blitzes of carefully constructed, linguistically acrobatic profanity that’s acidic enough to qualify as minor human rights abuses.

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"Veep" Creator Armando Iannucci on Why He’d Never, Ever Allow Joe Biden on The Show

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How The National Guard Is Using “Man of Steel” To Recruit You

by Judith Kimbers Posted on June 14, 2013

Mother Jones

Man of Steel (Warner Bros., 143 minutes) is a commendable, if patently flawed, summer blockbuster. The highly anticipated Superman reboot, starring Henry Cavill and Amy Adams, merges the strengths and styles of its director Zack Snyder and its producer Christopher Nolan with mixed results. But the parts of the film that are exhilarating roundly compensate for the many parts of the film that are boring as all hell (dulled passion, bland dialogue, blander interactions).

Putting all that aside, one of the most fascinating things about this movie is how blatantly littered with product placement it is—roughly $160 million in product placement and promotions went into its makers’ coffers. Man of Steel has over 100 global marketing partners, surpassing Universal’s 2012 animated flick The Lorax, which reportedly had 70 partners. So if you have forgotten recently to eat at IHOP or shop at Sears, this film will remind you to do so in big letters.

But the film also doubles as advertisement for an employer arguably more noble than IHOP: The National Guard of the United States.

Here’s behind-the-scenes footage released in May by the National Guard regarding their work with Snyder and Warner Bros.

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How The National Guard Is Using “Man of Steel” To Recruit You

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The Truth About Video Games and Gun Violence

by Polly Browder Posted on June 11, 2013

Mother Jones

It was one of the most brutal video games imaginable—players used cars to murder people in broad daylight. Parents were outraged, and behavioral experts warned of real-world carnage. “In this game a player takes the first step to creating violence,” a psychologist from the National Safety Council told the New York Times. “And I shudder to think what will come next if this is encouraged. It’ll be pretty gory.”

To earn points, Death Race encouraged players to mow down pedestrians. Given that it was 1976, those pedestrians were little pixel-gremlins in a 2-D black-and-white universe that bore almost no recognizable likeness to real people.

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The Truth About Video Games and Gun Violence

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A Graduation Day Speech for the Class of 1966

by Felixct7yh Posted on June 6, 2013

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Here may be the most commonplace sentence anyone could write about graduation day in any year: when I think back to my own graduation in 1966, an eon, a lifetime, a world ago, I have no memory of who addressed us. None. I have a little packet of photos of the event: shots of my parents and me, my grandmother and me, my aunt and me, my former roommates and me, my friends and me. You can even see the chairs for the ceremony. But not the speaker. And yet it’s odds on that he—and in 1966, it was surely a “he”—made some effort to usher me into the American world, offering me, as a member of a new generation, words of wisdom and some advice. You know, the usual thing that no one pays much attention to or ever remembers.

Here, on the other hand, is my most vivid memory of that day. I reserved a room at a local motel for my parents the night before the graduation ceremony. As it happened, I had reserved the same room the previous night for my girlfriend and me (and conveniently not paid for it). When, on the morning of graduation, I picked my parents up and my father went to pay, the hotel clerk charged him for both nights, winked, and said something suggestive.

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A Graduation Day Speech for the Class of 1966

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"Arrested Development" Creator Explains How Herman Cain Inspired Season 4—and Cain Responds

by Curtis Tangredi Posted on June 5, 2013

Mother Jones

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The new season of Arrested Development has a sharp political edge that should feel familiar to fans of the show. The series’ original three-season run on Fox, which aired between 2003 and 2006, contained some of the richest TV satire of the Iraq War and Bush years (bad WMD intel, “Mission Accomplished,” “preemptive strike,” Abu Ghraib, CIA dysfunction, war protests, and so on). The fourth season, which debuted on Netflix in late May, depicts the infamous Bluth family in the context of a new political era, one defined by the American housing crisis, economic collapse, and out-of-control drone warfare. But of all the political elements of this long-awaited season, arguably the most important—or at least most visible—real-world inspiration for this new batch of episodes is Herman Cain, the one-time 2012 GOP presidential front-runner and former pizza baron.

One of the fourth season’s central story arcs involves an illicit sexual relationship between Lindsay Bluth Fünke (played by Portia de Rossi) and Herbert Love (played by Arrested newcomer Terry Crews), a charismatic, philandering California Republican congressional candidate explicitly modeled after Cain. Both are black, bespectacled, and intensely conservative and anti-Obama, and Love’s “low-high” economic prescription sounds an awful lot like Cain’s widely blasted 9-9-9 tax plan. (Furthermore, both men use Krista Branch’s song “I Am America” in their campaigns, and Love’s campaign manager looks, acts, and smokes like Cain’s 2012 chief of staff Mark Block.)

Cain is well aware of this satirical, comic rendering of his 2012 “Cain Train“—he just couldn’t care less about it. “I heard about it, haven’t seen it, and I’m unfazed by it,” Cain said in a statement sent to Mother Jones. “In the vernacular of my grandfather, ‘I does not care.'”

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"Arrested Development" Creator Explains How Herman Cain Inspired Season 4—and Cain Responds

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Birthright

by Myrna Posted on June 4, 2013

One man’s journey to stay connected to the ocean. Source:  Birthright ; ;Related ArticlesSurfrider college club joins the offshore campaignThousands engage in Morocco, the beach is not a garbage canDot Earth Blog: A New Way to Harvest Wind Energy at Sea ;

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Birthright

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In the Era of Climate Change, Poets Can’t Write About the "Eternal Sea"

by Ivan Nutter Posted on June 3, 2013

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

In heavy fog on the night of October 7, 1936, the SS Ohioan ran aground three miles south and west of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, and by noon on October 8th, I was among a crowd of spectators come to pay its respects to the no small terror of the sea. I was two years old, hoisted on the shoulders of my father, for whom the view to windward was neither openly nor latently sublime. The stranded vessel, an 8,046-ton freighter laden with a cargo valued at $450,000, was owned by the family steamship company of which my father one day was to become the president, and he would have been counting costs instead of looking to the consolations of philosophy. No lives had been lost—Coast Guard boats had rescued the captain and the crew—but the first assessments of the damaged hull pegged the hopes of salvage in the vicinity of few and none.

Happily aloft in the vicinity of my father’s hat, and the weather having cleared since the Ohioan missed its compass heading, I was free to form my earliest impression of the sea at a safe and sunny distance, lulled by the sound of waves breaking on the beach, delighting in the drift of gulls in a bright blue sky.

The injured ship never regained consciousness. All attempts at righting it were to no avail, and in the summer of 1937, the removable planking and machinery having been sold for scrap, the Ohioan was declared a total loss, the hull abandoned to the drumming of the surf and the shifting of the sand. The prolonged and unhappy ending of the story my father regarded as a useful lesson, and over the course of the next three years as I was moving up in age from two to five, he often walked me by the hand along the cliff above the wreck to behold the work of its destruction.

To foster my acquaintance with the family’s history and changing fortunes, he spoke of distant ancestors sailing from the port of Boston and the Gulf of Maine in the early-nineteenth-century China trade, of my great-grandfather’s organizing the American-Hawaiian Steamship Company in 1899 not because of the money in the business but because of the romance. My father’s turn of mind was literary, and he was fond of strengthening his narratives with lengthy quotations from William Shakespeare’s plays and extensive recitations from Joseph Conrad’s An Outcast of the Islands and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.

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In the Era of Climate Change, Poets Can’t Write About the "Eternal Sea"

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