The Happytime Murders Is a Really Terrible Puppet Movie

 Posted on June 11, 2024  |  5 minutes  |  885 words  |  Aldo Pusey

Let me say off the bat that I have zero problem per se with smutty puppets. There’s a place in the firmament for Avenue Q (though it’s already dated) and the South Park guys’ Team America: World Police, in which puppets suck and f—. (I am using hyphens in case there are children reading this.) And the idea of Jim Henson’s son appropriating the Sesame Street aesthetic for a nihilistic blood- (or stuffing-) bath rich in F-words and ejaculatory (literally) gags is, on an Oedipal level, tantalizing. [Read More]

The Hidden Meaning Behind My Brilliant Friends Neapolitan Dialect

 Posted on June 11, 2024  |  7 minutes  |  1372 words  |  Aldo Pusey

Gaia Girace and Margherita Mazzucco in My Brilliant Friend. Italy is a 19th-century invention unified by an official language that, until the 20th century, most Italians didn’t speak. Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, the first of the four volumes of her Neopolitan Novels, takes place on the outskirts of Naples, in a neighborhood isolated by dialect as well as by poverty. Ferrante avoids transcribing the speech patterns of the street, writing out everything in proper Italian and inserting a clause to specify whether the speaker is using Neapolitan dialect or not. [Read More]

The History of the Comic That Inspired Logan and Revolutionized the Marvel Brand

 Posted on June 11, 2024  |  11 minutes  |  2234 words  |  Janel Helmers

Excerpt from “Old Man Logan.” It’s hard to pick which scene in “Old Man Logan” is the wildest. The epic tale was first published by Marvel Comics in the pages of X-Men spinoff series Wolverine at the turn of this decade and is a huge influence on this weekend’s superhero tentpole picture Logan. It remains as shocking today as it was when it came out, a decade ago. The story is built on the premise that the venerable Marvel universe has gone all dystopian and cockeyed, which leads familiar archetypes to be warped to the very edge of recognition. [Read More]

The Hottest Titles at Book Expo 2014

 Posted on June 11, 2024  |  4 minutes  |  798 words  |  Elina Uphoff

This year’s iteration of Book Expo America, last week’s trade book fair at the Javits Center, borrowed some of the populist, cross-fertilizing spirit of its newly expanded, very pop-oriented consumer day, BookCon. You definitely got that sense, at least, from talking to booksellers, publishers, and librarians about the forthcoming titles they were most eager to get ahold of for themselves and their customers. HISTORICAL BREAKTHROUGH The Miniaturist, by Jessie Burton (Ecco, August) [Read More]

The J.T. LeRoy Trailer Has Wigs, Lies, Laura Dern, Wigs, Kristen Stewart, and More Wigs

 Posted on June 11, 2024  |  1 minutes  |  207 words  |  Zora Stowers

Based on one of the more surreal literary hoaxes to ever exist, the movie J.T. LeRoy gives Laura Dern and Kristen Stewart the opportunity to wear a lot of wigs and sunglasses and try to schmooze their way to fame. Dern plays Laura Albert, the woman who published books from the perspective of “Jeremiah ‘Terminator’ LeRoy,” supposedly a down-on-his-luck young southern hustler pimped out as a girl at truck stops by his mother. [Read More]

The Jokes That Get Told Over and Over Again on TV

 Posted on June 11, 2024  |  4 minutes  |  825 words  |  Janel Helmers

As part of Vulture’s weeklong 100 More Jokes series, Jesse David Fox joined the Vulture TV Podcast to break down the many ways humor is deployed on TV today. We talked about what is considered “funny” nowadays, what differentiates a writer’s joke from a joke written specifically for a character, and the jokes that get told over and over again. Listen to the episode, which also includes an interview with Sneaky Pete’s Giovanni Ribisi, and read an excerpt of our discussion below. [Read More]

The King of the Geezer Teasers

 Posted on June 11, 2024  |  28 minutes  |  5798 words  |  Aldo Pusey

Inside Randall Emmett’s direct-to-video empire, where many Hollywood stars have found lucrative early retirement. Illustration: Zohar Lazar Illustration: Zohar Lazar This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly. On Wednesday, January 13, Randall Emmett presided over a crime scene near one of America’s few tropical rain forests in Trujillo Alto, Puerto Rico. Robert De Niro, dressed as a small-town Georgia sheriff, emerged from a sun-faded mobile home and walked solemnly past a black van marked CORONER, looking like a man uneasy about the ordeal ahead of him. [Read More]

The Lady Bird House Is Being Constantly Bombarded by Greta Gerwig Enthusiasts

 Posted on June 11, 2024  |  1 minutes  |  151 words  |  Sherie Connelly

First there was Psycho. Then there was Home Alone. Now, Lady Bird. One could reasonably argue that when somebody makes a pilgrimage to your movie’s fictional house, you’ve done a damn good job as a filmmaker with your “world building” and all that jazz — which is exactly what’s happening to the fine folks living in Sacramento’s posh Lady Bird house. “I think they’re okay, but I feel so badly, because I didn’t know, and certainly couldn’t have known that this is what would end up happening,” Greta Gerwig explained on The Late Late Show. [Read More]

The Liam Neeson Action Genre Deserves Better Than Blacklight

 Posted on June 11, 2024  |  5 minutes  |  971 words  |  Sherie Connelly

Liam Neeson in Blacklight. Oddly enough, it might count as something of a triumph that the new Liam Neeson dadsploitation flick Blacklight feels like such a letdown. Partly because Neeson’s most recent run of roles, while not exactly distinguished, has been at times interesting and moving enough that we’ve come to expect more from these pictures. Films like Cold Pursuit, The Marksman, and The Ice Road may be of varying quality, but they still offer intriguing variations on the Neeson persona. [Read More]

The Long, Dark History of Castle Rock, Maine

 Posted on June 11, 2024  |  7 minutes  |  1448 words  |  Elina Uphoff

A scene from Hulu’s Castle Rock. Stephen King has never made Castle Rock, Maine, sound like a nice place to visit. The fictional small town appears or is referenced frequently in King’s writing, starting with King’s 1979 novel The Dead Zone and going beyond the 1993 novel Needful Things (despite it being billed on the cover as “The Last Castle Rock Story”). In King’s fiction, it’s been the site of, among other menaces, a serial killer, a rabid St. [Read More]