American Horror Story: Hotel Is Tedious, Insufferable, and Occasionally Exhilarating

 Posted on June 10, 2024  |  7 minutes  |  1348 words  |  Sherie Connelly

Clockwise from left: Christine Estabrook as Marcy, Cheyenne Jackson as Will Drake, Lyric Lennon as Lachlan Drake. If nothing else, American Horror Story: Hotel represents a brazen doubling-down. The premiere plays as if the anthology’s creators listed every element that detractors have bitched about under the heading “Stuff We’ll Do More Of.” The Shining, Village of the Damned, Don’t Look Now, Barton Fink (partly a horror film, especially the last act), Se7en, Suspiria, Saw: You name it, it’s in here, plus dollops of Edgar Allan Poe and Clive Barker. [Read More]

An Education Director Lone Scherfig on Adapting Nick Hornby and Casting Carey Mulligan

 Posted on June 10, 2024  |  4 minutes  |  763 words  |  Aldo Pusey

Lone Scherfig’s An Education opened just two weeks ago, but was generating Oscar buzz as early as January when its young star, Carey Mulligan, made a splash at Sundance. The Nick Hornby–scripted film — about a schoolgirl (Mulligan) swept off her feet by a charming, older man-about-town (Peter Sarsgaard) who seems to offer her everything her ho-hum existence lacks — is only the Danish director’s second-ever English-language feature. Vulture spoke with Scherfig over the phone last week from her native Denmark. [Read More]

An Oral History of the Very First Episode of Yo! MTV Raps

 Posted on June 10, 2024  |  15 minutes  |  3009 words  |  Zora Stowers

Where It Started At: The NY Rap Story Presented by Where It Started At: The NY Rap Story Presented by Will Smith (a.k.a. the Fresh Prince), Run-D.M.C., DJ Jazzy Jeff, and Ready Rock C in the first episode of Yo! MTV Raps. “We want to let everybody know where it’s at / It’s right here: Yo! MTV Raps.” Those words, rapped in unison by DJ Jazzy Jeff, the Fresh Prince (a. [Read More]

Andy Greenwald Author Archive

 Posted on June 10, 2024  |  5 minutes  |  971 words  |  Aldo Pusey

Andy Greenwald Author Archive MOST RECENT ARTICLES BY: overnights June 20, 2011 The Killing Season Finale Recap: Unsolved MysteriesOoof. overnights June 13, 2011 The Killing Recap: You’ve Got MailIn the penultimate episode, the detectives do some email reading. overnights June 6, 2011 The Killing Recap: Cigarette BreakThe show takes a break from the murder, and it’s all for the best. overnights June 6, 2011 Friday Night Lights Recap: Star Wars“I kicked the extra point with my gold-plated schlong. [Read More]

Angela Bassett on Her American Horror Story Character and the Sensitive Michael Chiklis

 Posted on June 10, 2024  |  6 minutes  |  1099 words  |  Janel Helmers

After a long career on the big screen in movies like Waiting to Exhale, What’s Love Got to Do With It, and How Stella Got Her Groove Back, Angela Bassett has become one of the most recent additions to the troupe of actors that go from season to season to season on American Horror Story.We first saw her in Coven as the snake-charming, witch-cursing New Orleans voodoo queen Marie Laveau, and in this season’s Freak Show, she plays the multi-breasted circus performer Desiree Dupree. [Read More]

Anna Kendrick Is in 6 Movies This Year and Shes Not Totally Sure Why

 Posted on June 10, 2024  |  11 minutes  |  2179 words  |  Aldo Pusey

“I like the pace,” says Anna Kendrick. “But I feel like it’s not really sustainable.” Prolificity: A short series on the methods, meaning and occasional madness of the creatively super-productive. Anna Kendrick kept a journal once. She stuck with it for two years, between the ages of 17 and 19, and by her hyperproductive standards it contains a pitiful number of entries. Still, it’s a record of her early days in Los Angeles — after her Tony nomination at age 12 for High Society but before Twilight — when, in the wake of a pilot that never got off the ground, she was auditioning for seemingly every network-television procedural on the air. [Read More]

Annaleigh Ashford Wants You to Empathize With Paula Jones

 Posted on June 10, 2024  |  13 minutes  |  2567 words  |  Janel Helmers

Annaleigh Ashford as Paula Jones, and Taran Killam as her husband Steve, in American Crime Story: Impeachment. Annaleigh Ashford was a preteen the first time she learned of the existence of Paula Jones, the Arkansas woman who filed the sexual harassment suit that kick-started an impeachment scandal for President Bill Clinton. Her initial frame of reference for Jones was late-night talk shows. “I wasn’t amazingly aware of the specifics of her origin story or exactly what she was claiming,” Ashford says. [Read More]

Anthony Jeselnik Uses His New Netflix Special to Punch Himself in the Face

 Posted on June 10, 2024  |  7 minutes  |  1364 words  |  Elina Uphoff

Anthony Jeselnik. There’s an idea in literary theory called negative capability, and it’s often described as a sense of confusion, the freedom to live in uncertainty. It’s the ability to express two absolutely conflicting truths at the same time without ever picking one as the winner. The two truths are opposite one another; they cannot both exist and both be facts. And yet somehow the work supports them both, refusing to let either idea be diminished in favor of the other. [Read More]

Ari Shaffir Has Four Hours of Advice for Young Comedians

 Posted on June 10, 2024  |  1 minutes  |  46 words  |  Elina Uphoff

Stand-up Ari Shaffir delivered this nearly four-hour-long lecture, chock full of helpful advice for up and coming comics, onstage at The Comedy Store earlier this month and it’s well-worth listening to despite its considerable length.

Ari Shaffir Has Four Hours of Advice for Young […]

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Avatar: The Way of Water Might Be James Camerons Most Personal Film

 Posted on June 10, 2024  |  8 minutes  |  1701 words  |  Janel Helmers

It’s also, as you might suspect, spectacular. James Cameron is never leaving Pandora. That much is certain after seeing Avatar: The Way of Water, his sequel to 2009’s ginormo-hit, Avatar. In the past, the director has teased the idea of making smaller, more personal projects after each of his big blockbusters. But The Way of Water makes clear that Cameron no longer needs to leave the confines of this (virtual) extrasolar moon in the Alpha Centauri system to create something closer to the heart. [Read More]