Tag Archives: culture

How Jesse Eisenberg Disappeared Into His Latest Role

by anjunonstennyao Posted on May 31, 2013

Mother Jones

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Jesse Eisenberg prepares for his roles the same way just about any other responsible actor would: He does his research.

In 2007’s The Hunting Party, Eisenberg played a TV news reporter and wannabe war correspondent. The film, also starring Richard Gere and Terrence Howard, is loosely based on an Esquire article from October 2000 that tells the true story of how three American and two European journalists accidentally set off an international incident after drunkenly deciding to hunt for a fugitive Serbian war criminal hiding out in Bosnia. To prepare for this role, Eisenberg hung out with members of the real-life “party,” which included author and war correspondent Sebastian Junger (whom Eisenberg calls a “total badass”).

In 2010’s The Social Network, Eisenberg played Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, a role that earned him his first Oscar nomination. To prepare, Eisenberg “read everything he possibly could” on Zuckerberg and activated a phony account on Facebook—a website he claims he had never seen before gearing up to play Zuckerberg.

His latest film, released on Friday, is action director Louis Leterrier’s Now You See Me (Summit Entertainment, 116 minutes). Eisenberg plays J. Daniel Atlas, a cocky Vegas illusionist who steals from the wealthy and wicked and then literally showers the money onto his working-class audiences. Eisenberg teams up with Woody Harrelson, Isla Fisher, and Dave Franco as a band of Robin Hood-like criminals who routinely outsmart and mystify an FBI agent played by Mark Ruffalo and an Interpol officer played by Mélanie Laurent.

To prep for this “intense character,” as he put it, the 29-year-old actor became an amateur magician.

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How Jesse Eisenberg Disappeared Into His Latest Role

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Anti-Defamation League, Mayor of Culver City Respond to JCPenney’s Hitler Teakettle Billboard

by John Graham Posted on May 29, 2013

Mother Jones

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It’s not quite summer, but the silly stories have started, and you may have heard about a certain JCPenney billboard located east of the 405 freeway in Culver City, California. It looks like this:

Bill Burman/Reddit

And it reminded a lot of people of…

Bill Burman/Reddit ; German Federal Archive

The kettle was designed by architect and New Jersey Hall of Famer Michael Graves, who has a long history of designing consumer products that do not resemble a saluting Hitler, including this teakettle from 1984. After the Hitler-kettle story went viral, JCPenney took to Twitter to reassure the public there was no intended connection between the product and the Nazi leader. Here’s one of JCPenney’s damage-controlling Tweets:

JCPenney/Twitter

JCPenney elected to stop selling the item on its website, and took down the billboard on Tuesday—but not before all the Hitler hoopla caused a sales spike in the now notorious kettles.

Still, Jeffrey Cooper, the Democratic mayor of Culver City, remains upset at JCPenney for not initially noticing the resemblance. “I am disappointed JCPenney actually put the billboard up in the first place and more outraged that they actually attempted to defend it,” he says in an email. “As a Jew, I am offended, and as an elected official, I am mad that the city I represent is linked to this.”

Others were more forgiving. “JCPenney did the right thing by responding to public concerns and removing the tea pot from their product line,” the Anti-Defamation League, one of the major groups that monitors anti-Semitism, says in a statement sent to Mother Jones. “We take JCPenney at their word that any resemblance to the Nazi dictator was completely unintended.”

Michael Graves did not respond to a request for comment.

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Anti-Defamation League, Mayor of Culver City Respond to JCPenney’s Hitler Teakettle Billboard

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Press Release of the Day: Downton Abbey’s Mrs. Patmore Visits Chinese Moon Bears

by dfonis5 Posted on May 28, 2013

Mother Jones

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And the winner for today’s greatest press release:

English actress Lesley Nicol, star of international hit TV show Downton Abbey, has completed a visit to Animals Asia’s China Bear Rescue Centre (CBRC) in Chengdu, China.

Via Animals Asia

Nicol—who plays the “highly-strung and quick-tempered” cook Mrs. Patmore—has previously tweeted her love for the Chinese bears:

Animals Asia, headquartered in Hong Kong, is an organization dedicated to protecting “moon bears” in China; here’s an example of moon-bear abuse.

Lesley Nicol isn’t even the first actor in the acclaimed British period drama to go rescue tortured bears in China. That honor belongs to Peter Egan, who earlier this year traveled to Chengdu, a city in southwest China, to work with Animals Asia. Egan played the Duke of Argyll in a Downton Abbey Christmas special.

On a related note, there was that one episode of Downton Abbey in which under-butler Thomas Barrow teaches kitchen maid Daisy Mason an old dance move called “the Grizzly Bear“; Mrs. Patmore shows up in that scene near the end.

So now you know.

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Press Release of the Day: Downton Abbey’s Mrs. Patmore Visits Chinese Moon Bears

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Laura Marling’s "Once I Was an Eagle" Explores the Heart’s Colder Recesses

by qiuyz4ye Posted on May 27, 2013

Mother Jones

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Laura Marling
Once I Was an Eagle
Ribbon Music

Is Britain’s Laura Marling the modern Joni Mitchell? Her stellar fourth album underscores the similarities, among them ringing acoustic guitar, insistent vocals that linger on high notes, and cliché-free songwriting rooted in folk-music traditions.

But Marling is nobody’s disciple, and the hour-long Once I Was an Eagle takes its own distinctive head trip in the course of 16 bracing tracks. Songs flow from one into the next like movements of a single suite as she reflects on desire, loneliness and the impulse toward self-realization that inevitably reinforces isolation at the expense of connection. “We are so alone / There’s nothing we can share / You can get me on the telephone / But you won’t keep me there,” she sings in “Master Hunter.” On “Pray for Me,” she declares, “I will not love, I want to be alone.”

While such sentiments might seem self-indulgent in lesser hands, she’s a reliably stirring chronicler of the heart’s colder recesses.

Listen…

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Laura Marling’s "Once I Was an Eagle" Explores the Heart’s Colder Recesses

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Liberace’s Best TV Moments

by NatishaFe Posted on May 26, 2013

Mother Jones

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The King of Bling before it was a thing Alan Light/Flickr

When I met Liberace in 1986, I tried to eat his diamond rings. He was making an appearance at Caldors in Riverside, Connecticut, promoting a coffee table book of photos of one of his fantastic homes. My mom tells me he held me in his famously bejeweled hands and we exchanged grins. I was two.

“He was an absolute sweetheart,” Mom recalled the other day. “Beautiful in his ermine sweater. Big dimples, big diamonds.”

I don’t remember the encounter, but as an “older millennial” I have an awareness of who Liberace was: a flamboyant pianist with a taste for furs and jewels who was the butt of many a terrible late-show joke. Wladziu (Lee) Liberace was a child prodigy born of humble Midwestern roots who gained fame by combining exceptional musical talent with personal charm and a flair for showmanship.

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Liberace’s Best TV Moments

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The Canary Islands Government Allowed "Fast & Furious 6" To Destroy Their Highway With a Tank

by Bart Gibson Posted on May 24, 2013

Mother Jones

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Fast & Furious 6
Universal Pictures
130 minutes

Hands down, Fast & Furious 6 is by far the best movie ever made to feature Ludacris and Tyrese trapped in a Jeep dangling inches off the ground from an imperiled cargo plane.

And there is so, so much more to cherish about the film.

The Fast & Furious franchise has become genuinely fascinating over the last couple of years. One of the most fascinating things about the series is the addition of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as the ultra-brawny Diplomatic Security Service agent Luke Hobbs, a character who seemingly cannot go ten minutes without torturing somebody for information. Another fascinating thing is that after a long stretch of churning out barely passable B-movies, the series somehow managed to produce critically acclaimed entertainment, starting with 2011’s Fast Five. (The sixth film has received similarly high marks.) Credit for the newfound critic-and-crowd-pleasing goes to Taiwanese-born American filmmaker Justin Lin, who initially demonstrated the full extent of his directorial talents with the stereotype-subverting independent film Better Luck Tomorrow in 2002.

But the single most fascinating thing about the series so far is the enormous tank in Fast & Furious 6. The tank is arguably the main character in the movie.

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The Canary Islands Government Allowed "Fast & Furious 6" To Destroy Their Highway With a Tank

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German beer-makers are concerned about the impact of fracking on beer quality

by Myrna Posted on May 24, 2013

German brewers have sent a letter to various officials in Berlin to voice their concern that shale gas exploitation via fracking could endanger the water supply on which they depend. Original source: German beer-makers are concerned about the impact of fracking on beer quality ; ;Related ArticlesNearly half the rice sold in Guangzhou (pop. 12+ million) is contaminated by cadmium5 ways that urine can help save humanityBreakthrough clean gold mining technique replaces cyanide with… cornstarch! ;

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German beer-makers are concerned about the impact of fracking on beer quality

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"Arrested Development" Was The Best TV Satire of the Bush Era

by Margurite Axley Posted on May 24, 2013

Mother Jones

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Arrested Development is finally (for real this time) coming back. On May 26 at exactly 12:01 a.m. PDT, the series’ fourth season will debut exclusively on Netflix, the on-demand streaming service that on any given weeknight accounts for nearly a third of Internet traffic in North America. It’s a hotly anticipated premiere that fans are praying will not crash the website.

This TV series—about a spoiled family wading through a glut of personal, financial, and international scandal—occupies a place in popular culture that few other shows have managed to reach. Fans have even witnessed Arrested Development burrow itself into Western politics. In March 2011, before NATO forces launched an air war that would help topple Moammar Qaddafi‘s mass-murdering regime in Libya, The New Republic ran a fantastic slideshow comparing the notorious Qaddafi family to Arrested Development‘s Bluth clan. During a speech this month in the House of Commons of Canada, opposition leader Thomas Mulcair quoted a famous episode of Arrested Development while criticizing the prime minister for over $3 billion in unaccounted anti-terrorism funding. And as the series revival neared, Republicans started dropping Arrested Development references to ridicule the Affordable Care Act, Democratic leadership, and the Obama administration.

The series has also found its way into the syllabi of college courses, and onto the pages of academic essays. “The writers worked miracles addressing philosophical and social issues,” says J. Jeremy Wisnewski, an associate professor of philosophy at Hartwick College who served as a volume editor on the book Arrested Development and Philosophy. “To see the way race, gender, sexual orientation, and class are handled in the show is to witness genius at work.”

There’s something else the show handled so well that’s often taken for granted: During its original run on Fox from 2003 to 2006, the series delivered what was arguably the sharpest satire of the Bush era and the Iraq War that has ever been broadcast on television.

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"Arrested Development" Was The Best TV Satire of the Bush Era

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Why Julian Assange Hates "We Steal Secrets"

by PhoenixBrook3 Posted on May 23, 2013

Mother Jones

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Julian Assange already hates this movie. That six-word review may be all that his diehard supporters need to know about We Steal Secrets, Alex Gibney’s exhaustive and exhausting new documentary on the rise and fall of WikiLeaks. Apparently without having seeing the film, which hits theaters tomorrow and will be available on demand on June 7, Assange has condemned it as a hatchet job, starting with its name. “An unethical and biased title in the context of pending criminal trials,” WikiLeaks tweeted in January when the movie screened at Sundance. “It is the prosecution’s claim and it is false.”

Assange’s preemptive attack one of the film’s main themes: What happens when an admirable cause is headed by a thin-skinned, combative prick?

Like many observers of WikiLeaks’ short, chaotic history, Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer) starts out sympathetic before souring on Assange. At first, We Steal Secrets seems enthralled with its subject. When Assange quotes a favorite Midnight Oil song, Gibney obligingly blasts the tune—a haranguing one even by the band’s standards—over a title sequence that ricochets through cyberspace.

What follows is a complimentary look at Australia’s “most infamous hacker,” a peripatetic cryptographic whiz who recognized the promise and threat posed by a site that could publish anonymous leaks from around the globe. Robert Manne, a professor of politics at La Trobe University in Melbourne, gushes that Assange is “a humanitarian anarchist, a kind of John Lennon-like revolutionary, dreaming of better world.” Or as Assange declares with casual bravado, “I enjoy crushing bastards.”

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Why Julian Assange Hates "We Steal Secrets"

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Boy Scouts: Gays Okay. Treehuggers Not So Much.

by Bob Hurley Posted on May 22, 2013

Mother Jones

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The board that governs the Boy Scouts of America plans to vote on Thursday on a proposal to lift the ban on gay members.

But while the organization may soon welcome gay scouts, they are apparently not so welcoming of treehuggers. The Center for Investigative Reporting posted a story this week on the Scouts booting out Kim Kuska, a naturalist and former biology teacher who been affiliated with the Scouts for 50 years, over his “obsession” with protecting the rare Dudley’s lousewort:

Since the 1970s, the Eagle Scout and adult Scout leader-turned-whistle-blower has worked to protect the plant from extinction at Camp Pico Blanco, a Boy Scout camp nestled in the mountains along the Little Sur River south of Monterey, Calif. The camp is home to nearly 50 percent of all known specimens of Dudley’s lousewort, a flowering fern-like plant found in only three places in the world.

But over the past four decades, Scout officials and camp staff have threatened its existence repeatedly by harvesting old-growth trees it needs to survive, crushing some of the few remaining plants and introducing potentially competitive species. Under state law, it is illegal to harm a plant that is classified as rare.

The camp also cut down several trees in the old-growth forest in 2011 without a permit, a Scout official acknowledged.

Kuska’s whistleblowing reportedly got him drummed out of the Scouts earlier this month. Read the whole story here.

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Boy Scouts: Gays Okay. Treehuggers Not So Much.

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