Whip It Inspires Roller-Derby Mania in Newspapers

 Posted on June 11, 2024  |  2 minutes  |  404 words  |  Sherie Connelly

Everybody’s doing it! In this new movie. We haven’t seen more tough women on roller skates recently, but, boy, have we seen more roller-derby trend stories (and more Devo headline puns), as Whip It heads into theaters today. From Dodgeball to Little Miss Sunshine and all the subject-specific films in between, we know trend stories tend to erupt before the premiere of any movie with a peg. It’s typically thanks to publicity stunts, publicist-funneled “experts,” the self-promoters (roller-skate-company executives, roller-skate business-association presidents) who are hoping to get a little prominent product placement in the news. [Read More]

White Men Cant Jump, but Can Jack Harlow Act?

 Posted on June 11, 2024  |  1 minutes  |  192 words  |  Elina Uphoff

20th Century Studios has given us a full trailer of the White Men Can’t Jump remake, starring Jack Harlow as the titular white men. Okay, he’s just one white man, and he can presumably jump fine — just like Woody Harrelson in the 1992 original. The trailer shows Harlow dressed like “a white girl at Whole Foods,” hustling some people who assume he can’t play ball. Thus we are treated to Harlow making baskets while wearing Birkenstocks — an image that will be seared in our memory whenever we hear “First Class” for the rest of time. [Read More]

Who Are Claim to Fames Celeb Family Members?

 Posted on June 11, 2024  |  11 minutes  |  2253 words  |  Aldo Pusey

This post has been updated with new clues and theories. Claim to Fame is the perfect summer reality series: It’s mindless and low-stakes enough to feel breezy, but also invites enough wild speculation to make it seem like it somehow matters if someone is Jason Aldean’s cousin or Nick Cannon’s brother. And because we’re playing along at home with the contestants trying to sniff out their fellow fame-adjacents before getting eliminated themselves, it’s more satisfying than, say, The Masked Singer, where the embarrassingly off-base guesses Jenny McCarthy and company have been known to throw around can make the show’s reveals anti-climactic. [Read More]

Who Gave You the Right to Tell That Story?

 Posted on June 11, 2024  |  24 minutes  |  4914 words  |  Aldo Pusey

Ten authors on the most divisive question in fiction, and the times they wrote outside their own identities. Photo: Simone Noronha Photo: Simone Noronha A few years ago, a writer named Ashima Saigal from Grand Rapids, Michigan, witnessed an incident on a bus in which a group of black kids were mistreated by the police. She was disturbed, and soon after, she wrote about it. Later, reading over what she’d written, she realized the story wasn’t working. [Read More]

Why Burt Reynolds Was Such a Compelling Sex Symbol

 Posted on June 11, 2024  |  6 minutes  |  1171 words  |  Sherie Connelly

Burt Reynolds in Boogie Nights. In her tremendous book The Male Body Susan Bordo writes, “When we look at bodies (including our own in the mirror), we don’t just see biological nature at work, but values and ideals, differences and similarities that culture has written, so to speak, on those bodies.” This is never more true than for movie stars like Burt Reynolds. The story Reynolds’s body told at the height of his fame in the 1970s is that of hot summer nights and cold beers, the joy of living thoroughly in the present, and the kind of charisma that carries its own gravitational pull. [Read More]

Why Daveed Diggs Finally Said Yes to Playing Frederick Douglass for The Good Lord Bird

 Posted on June 11, 2024  |  12 minutes  |  2409 words  |  Sherie Connelly

When we meet the Frederick Douglass of The Good Lord Bird, he’s in front of a crowd of well-heeled ladies, delivering one of his seismic speeches. The ladies giggle and smile and practically faint, starstruck by the most famous formerly enslaved man in the world — hell, possibly the most famous man in the world at that time. Douglass is basking in every minute of it and simultaneously trying to wave off his friend and sometimes collaborator John Brown, who has shown up scraggly and wanted by the law. [Read More]

Why Didnt Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets Find Its Audience?

 Posted on June 11, 2024  |  7 minutes  |  1439 words  |  Zora Stowers

Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne in Valerian. I don’t know about you, but I was personally looking forward to Luc Besson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, for several reasons. I thought Besson’s 2014 film Lucy was an encouraging turn for its wildly uneven director, and I still follow Cara Delevingne on Instagram, but most importantly, I like science fiction and wacky aliens on principle. Part of me liked to imagine that the rest of the country was on the same page. [Read More]

Why the Irish Love Making Fun of Wild Mountain Thyme

 Posted on June 11, 2024  |  11 minutes  |  2234 words  |  Zora Stowers

Jamie Dornan and Emily Blunt in Wild Mountain Thyme. When John Patrick Shanley’s Outside Mullingar opened on Broadway in 2014, reviews were mostly warm. Charles Isherwood in the New York Times called the romance between neighboring Irish farmers — one played by stage veteran Brian F. O’Byrne, the other by Debra Messing — “wholly diverting,” praising Shanley’s “lyrical writing” for giving “such consistent pleasure.” The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney hailed it as “a tender paean to rural life, to the Irish spirit, and to the enduring belief that love will find a way. [Read More]

Will Cline Dion Perform at the 2024 Paris Olympics?

 Posted on June 11, 2024  |  2 minutes  |  264 words  |  Aldo Pusey

Céline Dion has vowed to return to performing after coming forward with her stiff-person syndrome diagnosis. And there are currently rumors circling that Dion’s big return to the stage could coincide with the 2024 Paris Olympics. The Sun claims that she’s been offered a slot. But are the rumors true? Hoda Kotb weighed in on WWHL. Kotb has spent time with Dion recently, filming a primetime interview special in June of this year. [Read More]

With Wonder Woman 3 Canceled, the DC Extended Universe Could Be Very Different

 Posted on June 11, 2024  |  6 minutes  |  1140 words  |  Aldo Pusey

Earlier this week, the news of impending superhero-franchise doom ripped across Movie Twitter faster than a speeding bullet. Warner Bros. would not be moving forward with its planned third installment of Wonder Woman as part of a sweeping re-org that will in all likelihood have wide implications for movies across the studio’s DC Extended Universe. At issue: a new era of corporate belt tightening as the studio’s parent company WarnerMedia continues its creaky merger into the mega-debt-laden, mega-conglomerate Warner Bros. [Read More]