by Nicole Powers
“People are losing their skill to express themselves.”
– Chuck Palahniuk
“Chuck Palahniuk needs little by way of introduction on SuicideGirls, our very name being an hommage to the author of Fight Club, Choke and Snuff. We caught up with him by phone to talk about his latest novel, Tell-All. It’s a fictional gossip-laced memoir told in the voice of Hazie Coogan, the female assistant to “the glorious film actress” Miss Katherine Kenton who resides in Hollywood’s very real past – a glamorous world populated by the likes of Lillian Hellman, Darryl Zanuck, David O. Selznick, Clark Gable and Bette Davis, who are all names Tell-All’s characters love to drop. During our conversation with Palahniuk, we spoke about society’s need for the culture of celebrity, the nature of name-dropping, and the ultimate name to drop.
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by Damon Martin
It’s funny to look back just over the last decade and realize how much social networking has changed everyone’s lives. From the musicians who were launched on MySpace, to the friends who reconnected on Facebook, to the endless (and often inane) updates on Twitter, social networking has become a ubiquitous part of everyday life for millions all over the world. It’s a way to stay connected, it’s a way to stay interested, and for the 26-yeaor old creator of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, it’s a way to become the world’s youngest billionaire.
The story of Zuckerberg, and the creation and launch of Facebook, will hit the big screens today. However, even pre-release, the critics have given high praise to The Social Network, which was directed by David Fincher (Fight Club) and written by Aaron Sorkin (West Wing). The movie follows Zuckerberg as he awkwardly tries to make his way in upper crust society while attending an Ivy League school. It was during his time at Harvard that Zuckerberg, along with some classmates, created The Facebook, as it was originally known.
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by AJ Focht
The film industry has finally decided to put both feet in on the 3-D bandwagon and as a result cinemas have been overrun by glasses-required films in 2010. According to The Illustrated 3D Movie List over 40 movie titles have will be released in 3-D this year. While animated films have primarily dominated the 3-D market over the past decade, live action movies make up almost half of the 3-D films released this past year.
For most of these movies 3-D filming seems to be a gimmick to get more people in seats. Unfortunately many of the movies using 3-D effect don’t really need them. Resident Evil 3D, Saw 3D, and Jackass 3D are all examples of movies that had no good use for 3-D in their execution. I am confident that you won’t miss any gory moments or idiotic stunts if you see the movie in 2-D. Killing zombies is always good but Resident Evil has beaten its franchise to death and not even 3-D can save it.
These movies are only utilizing 3-D imaging as a sales gimmick; and we may soon see many more live action films that are shot in 3-D primarily to sell tickets rather than being motivated by more legitimate artistic reasons. Large film companies are starting to make a wholesale changeover to 3-D. Warner Bros will be releasing most of their movies in 3-D from now on; All future DC superhero movies produced by Warner Bros will be in 3-D, as will all of their tent pole movies.
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by Ryan Stewart
“If you want to live a rock star lifestyle, that’s your prerogative.”
– Jonah Hill
Famously discovered by Dustin Hoffman, whose children were fans of his one-man plays in Manhattan’s East Village, Jonah Hill was already going places in the comedy business when he had the good fortune to acquire a second mentor in comedy mogul Judd Apatow — the rest is history.
After killing with smallish parts in Apatow-directed comedies The 40 Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, the acerbic young comedian (then 24) landed a lead role specifically tailored to his strengths in Superbad, a teen bromance more foul-mouthed and uninhibited than any of the ’80s comedies that inspired it.
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by Brett Warner
“The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggle.” – Karl Marx
“It’s always about the money, isn’t it?” – Coach Eric Taylor
There is a scene late in the fourth season of NBC’s Friday Night Lights in which a sixteen year-old high school student named Becky Sproles confronts the football team’s star running back, Luke Cafferty, with some bad news: “I’m pregnant, and it’s yours, and I need an abortion…It’s really expensive, it’s like $300. And I don’t have all of it right now, but I can come up with half if you can come up with the other half.”
Television critics were quick to praise the show for its brave pro-choice stance, but Friday Night Lights adheres consistently to its “quasi-Marixst understanding that economics dictate everything.” (Ginia Bellafante, NY Times) Despite their clear eyes and full hearts, the residents of fictional working class town Dillon, Texas wind up losing quite a bit over the course of four football seasons; their televised drama reflects the struggles, worries, and economic woes of a significant percentage of the United States for whom the recession is far from over.
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by Nicole Powers
“She’s a bit of a skank.”
– Rufus Dayglo
It’s been a couple of years since Tank Girl made her dramatic comeback. Since then she’s been kicking a lot of physical and metaphorical butt. After a hiatus of over a decade, the punk rock comic character is making up for lost time, with a slew of new adventures in book and comic form.
Created by anarchist wordsmith Alan Martin and artist Jamie Hewlett, Tankie (as she is affectionately known to those in the know) first made her debut in the pages of UK comic magazine Deadline in 1988. Her “fuck you” attitude instantly resonated with Britain’s disenfranchised, Thatcher-abused youth, and it wasn’t long before Hollywood came calling. However MGM’s 1995 film, which captured the look but not the spirit of the comic strip, pretty much stopped Tank Girl in her tracks.
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By Edward Kelly
On paper, it seems like a no-brainer. Comedy and rap should, in theory, go together like Shakespeare and the stage – or CBS and derivative police procedurals. Even on a surface level, the similarities between comedy and hip-hop are many. Both are, essentially, spoken word art forms that are performed, at least in the beginning, at open mic nights in front of sometimes-hostile crowds. Both are very much raw and individual acts – an oftentimes undiluted, nerve-wracking display of what happens when a fan stops simply appreciating and starts producing material. As such, they invite a very personal dissection of an artist’s skill and talent.
But in practice comedy and rap rarely combine successfully. Sure, performers like MC Frontalot or MC Chris or Baddd Spellah are rappers and comedians, but part of their success is attributable to the postmodern, wink-wink comedic juxtaposition of gangsta rap clichés mixed with nerd culture quips. And while I love the nerdcore rappers, I can’t help but feel like I’m held at arms length. There’s an artifice there that can’t be bridged because, they’re essentially playing characters.
Rappers (and really all musicians) are at their best when the music feels, for lack of a less overused word, “real.” When Ice Cube told us that it was a good day because he didn’t have to use his AK, there was a certain sense of truth – a frustrated, angry condemnation of a society that allows injustice to continue. Likewise, transcendent comedy occurs when the comedian isn’t afraid to be uncomfortably honest about his life, such as when Louis CK rants about his young daughters’ bratty attitudes. The difference, of course, is that Cube uses testosterone-fueled posturing, while CK opts for exaggerated self-deprecation. Does that mean that CK doesn’t care about the injustice he sees in the world or that Cube isn’t aware of the inherently absurd nature of childrearing?
I don’t know the answer. But I have the feeling that Donald Glover does.
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