Tag Archives: film and tv

Sex, Drugs, and Oscar: The Mother Jones 2014 Academy Awards Live Blog

by Chauncey43M Posted on March 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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Good news, everyone! You’ve arrived at the Mother Jones Oscars Live Blog, 2014. We’ll start around 8:30 p.m. EST tonight when the 86th Academy Awards ceremony gets underway on ABC, so sit tight. (We will not be blogging the red carpet broadcast, which starts at 7 p.m.)

First off, here are some lists you might find useful:

The 2014 Oscar nominees.

The evening’s performers and presenters.
The 5 biggest controversies of this Oscar season.

Mother Jones movie guy Asawin Suebsaeng’s picks for the very best (and very worst) movies of 2013.

Our Oscar facts and live blogging from last year.

We’ll be updating this throughout the night here:

Original article: 

Sex, Drugs, and Oscar: The Mother Jones 2014 Academy Awards Live Blog

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Here’s Comedy Legend Harold Ramis’ Advice to Young Filmmakers

by CarmonRoy Posted on February 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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Harold Ramis, the influential comedy filmmaker, died on Monday in his hometown of Chicago from complications of autoimmune inflammatory vasculitis. He was 69.

Ramis is best known for directing acclaimed comedies such as Caddyshack, Groundhog Day, and Analyze This, and for cowriting and starring in Ghostbusters. His work has had a huge impact on American comedy over the past 30-plus years. “The simple idiot’s advice I give to screenwriters who say they want to sell a screenplay is, ‘Write good,'” Ramis said during an interview for American Storytellers in 2002. “Nothing sells like a good screenplay.”

Here’s more advice for young filmmakers from Ramis’ American Storytellers interview. It’s worth taking to heart:

You have to live your life with a certain blind confidence that if it’s your destiny to succeed at these things, it will happen, if you just continue to follow a straight path, to do you work as conscientiously and as creatively as you can, and to just stay open to all opportunity and experience. There’s a performing motto at Second City…to say yes instead of no. It’s actually an improvisational rule…It’s about supporting the other person. And the corollary to that is if you concentrate on making other people look good, then we all have the potential to look good. If you’re just worried about yourself—How am I doing? How am I doing?—which is kind of a refrain in Hollywood, you know, people are desperately trying to make their careers in isolation, independent of everyone around them.

And I’ve always found that my career happened as a result of a tremendous synergy of all the talented people I’ve worked with, all helping each other, all connecting, and reconnecting in different combinations. So…identify talented people around you and then instead of going into competition with them, or trying to wipe them out, make alliances, make creative friendships that allow you and your friends to grow together, because someday your friend is going to be sitting across a desk from you running a movie studio.

Watch the full video below:

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Here’s Comedy Legend Harold Ramis’ Advice to Young Filmmakers

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Why Ben Affleck Is Qualified to Testify Before the Senate on Atrocities in Congo

by Sheeritwern Posted on February 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Thursday, John Hudson at Foreign Policy reported that actor Ben Affleck is set to appear before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee next Wednesday to testify on the mass killings in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Affleck’s inclusion among the experts scheduled to testify invited some predictable skepticism and ridicule. In response to the news, Washington Post digital foreign editor Anup Kaphle tweeted, “zzzzzz…” National Review correspondent Jim Geraghty joked, “If a Congressman asks about his qualifications as a Congo expert, Ben Affleck should simply answer, ‘I’m Batman.'”

“People serious about resolving problems—especially problems related to life and death—want to have serious conversations with experts and leaders in the field; not celebrities,” a Republican aide at the House Foreign Affairs Committee told Foreign Policy‘s “The Cable.” (House Republicans reportedly declined to hold a similar, Affleck-inclusive event.)

It’s pretty easy to laugh at the idea of the one-time Gigli and Pearl Harbor star now lecturing senators on atrocities in Central Africa. But the Oscar-winning future Batman knows his stuff. He isn’t some celebrity who just happened to open his mouth about a humanitarian cause (think: Paris Hilton and Rwanda). The acclaimed Argo director has repeatedly traveled to Congo and has even met with warlords accused of atrocities. Here’s his 2008 report from the country for ABC’s Nightline, in which he discusses mass rape, war, and survival:

ABC Entertainment News|ABC Business News

Affleck previously testified before the House Armed Services Committee on the humanitarian crisis in the African nation. That same year, he made the media rounds with Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) to discuss renewed violence in Congo. In 2011, he testified before the House Foreign Affairs Africa Subcommittee. In 2010, Affleck founded the Eastern Congo Initiative, an advocacy and grant-making 501(c)(3) organization. On top of all that, he made this video this month (in which he and Matt Damon humorously trade insults) to help raise money for the Initiative.

So, are there experts who know more about the Democratic Republic of the Congo than Ben Affleck? Of course—and some of them will also testify before the Senate committee next week. But celebrities testifying before Congress, or heading to the Hill to make their case, isn’t exactly new. Harrison Ford has swung by the House and Senate to talk about planes, and Val Kilmer visited Capitol Hill last year to push for the expansion of Americans’ ability to claim religious exemptions to Obamacare’s health insurance mandate.

With Affleck, you get testimony from a famous person who has really done his homework.

Click here to check out our interactive map of celebrity humanitarian efforts in (and the “celebrity recolonization” of) Africa.

Taken from – 

Why Ben Affleck Is Qualified to Testify Before the Senate on Atrocities in Congo

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This Video of a Marriage Break-Up Done Entirely in Movie Titles Is Pretty Great

by ColbySambell Posted on February 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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This sketch features a couple breaking up, with dialogue constructed exclusively from 154 film titles. (Liar Liar, The Man Who Wasn’t There, Unfaithful, and Whore are included.) The video—made by the Brooklyn-based, five-member comedy troupe POYKPAC—stars Ryan Hunter, Jenn Lyon, and Maggie Ross.

“It started to seem like there was this period where all these movies kept coming out with names like How Do You Know and Rumor Has It…, and they were mostly romantic comedies,” Hunter, who also wrote and directed “Movie Title Breakup,” tells me. It took him two days to write the sketch—staring at his computer, searching through IMDb for applicable titles. “It was almost as if Hollywood was running out of names to call movies, so they started using phrases—like we were trending toward a world where every human phrase ever said was going to be the name of a movie.”

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This Video of a Marriage Break-Up Done Entirely in Movie Titles Is Pretty Great

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"The Lego Movie" Is Actually a Satire

by Lazaro7386 Posted on February 8, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Thursday, New York mag critic Bilge Ebiri praised The Lego Movie as, “the best action flick in years, a hilarious satire, and an inquiry into the mind of God.” And it isn’t over-the-top praise—it accurately reflects the overwhelmingly positive critical response to the computer-animated comedy, released on Friday.

The film, which is based on—and pays loving tribute to—Lego toys, was co-written and directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the pair who directed the fantastic 21 Jump Street reboot and its upcoming sequel. The Lego Movie takes place mostly in a city in a Lego universe. A construction worker Lego named Emmet Brickowski (voiced by Chris Pratt) must save the Lego realms from imminent destruction and coerced conformity. His comrades are a mysterious female Lego warrior named Wyldstyle; a wizard; a “Unikitty,” which is a unicorn-animé kitten hybrid; a pirate called Metalbeard; Lego Batman; and many more goofy and heroic Lego characters.

The simple tale is loaded with gleeful pop-culture references and great voice-acting (everyone is in this movie, by the way, from Morgan Freeman and Jonah Hill to Cobie Smulders and Alison Brie). But what makes The Lego Movie even more accessible for viewers above the age of six is the fact that the film is full of political and social satire. The villain is President/Lord Business (voiced by Will Ferrell), who presides over a totalitarian surveillance state. President Business’ regime creates virtually everything in the Lego society—generic pop music, lousy TV comedy, cameras, rigged voting machines, you name it. The dictator/CEO uses extended televised broadcasts to inform his citizens (with a friendly grin on his face) that they’ll be executed if they disobey. He controls a secret police led by Bad Cop/Good Cop (Liam Neeson), who is charged with torturing dissidents and rebels.

President Business is the Lego CeauÈ&#153;escu, if you swap the communism for capitalism.

Some of this sounds pretty heavy, but it’s all filtered through the soft, giddy lens of a kids’ movie. Like all other entries into the “kids’ movies that their parents can dig, too!” subgenre of cinema, it’s this thinly-disguised maturity that makes the film both fun and winkingly smart.

UPDATE, February 8, 2014, 12:39 a.m. EST: I missed this earlier, but on Friday, Fox personalities went after The Lego Movie for its allegedly “anti-business” and anti-capitalist message. One says President Business looks a bit like Mitt Romney. Another starts defending Mr. Potter from It’s a Wonderful Life (which is just an act of life imitating parody).

This is weird, but not all that different from the Fox reaction to The Muppets and The Lorax. Watch below:

Now check out this trailer for The Lego Movie:

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"The Lego Movie" Is Actually a Satire

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