by Fred Topel
“I do think there’s a real world parallel.”
– Gavin Hood
Gavin Hood became a political filmmaker with his very first movie. In Tsotsi he attempted to redeem a fictional criminal teen in South Africa, Hood’s country of origin. He tackled American foreign policy, for better or worse, in his follow-up film, Rendition. The ensemble drama about our government’s often overlooked policy of taking terror suspects to foreign countries where torture could be conducted legally, was not a hit financially or critically, but it asked the questions Hood wanted to ask.
The X-Men series has always kept politics in the metaphorical forefront. The comic books portrayed mutants as a persecuted minority. The films featured politicians proposing policy to round up mutants, exterminate them or even try to “cure” them, raising the moral question of who decides what needs to be fixed.
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by Nicole Powers
“I think it’s a question of vengeance.”
– Leonard Nimoy
The makers of Star Trek can thank their lucky stars that the spacetime continuum isn’t thought to be very continuous these days. The new Star Trek film turns its back on everything that Back To The Future ever taught us about time, and embraces the possibilities of infinite alternate universes that come along with the relatively recent science of string theory.
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by Nicole Powers
“You’ve got to keep ducking and weaving.”
– Billy Duffy
Interviews are not exactly something The Cult’s Billy Duffy enjoys doing. This is something the iconic guitarist reiterates several times in different ways during the course of our 40-minute conversation. However, after remaining mostly silent during his band’s recent Love Live Tour – celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Love album which carried the seminal single “She Sells Sanctuary” – Duffy is biting the proverbial bullet to promote new material.
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by Ryan Stewart
“Movies don’t matter anymore.”
-Steven Soderbergh
“If I’m such a commodity, how come nobody went to see The Good German,” Steven Soderbergh asks at one point during our conversation. He’s being half-facetious and half-serious when posing the question. At 46, Soderbergh has already earned every professional accolade a film director can, including the Palme D’Or for his debut, Sex, Lies and Videotape, and the Oscar for his drug war opus Traffic. His frequent collaborators now include George Clooney, Julia Roberts, and Brad Pitt (who is starring in his forthcoming adaptation of the controversial state-of-baseball tome Moneyball). Yet Soderbergh remains a stubbornly anonymous filmmaker, difficult to nail down in terms of style or subject, removed from the public eye, and without a cult following that can be roused to seek out his smaller, more experimental films.
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by Nicole Powers
“I’m genuinely a fan of most of the people I trash.”
– Kathy Griffin
On the surface Kathy Griffin’s “reality” show, My Life on the D-List, may be about the comedienne’s relentless quest for A-List acclaim. However, in reality (of the real variety), Griffin’s Emmy Award-winning Bravo show pokes fun at and undermines the very institution she purports to covet above all else: fame.
Furthermore, while other reality stars make a virtue out of their genuinely mean spirits in a desperate attempt to make the most of their fifteen minutes, Griffin delivers the wickedest lines with the kind of underlying warmth that lets all that “get it” know that no malice is intended.
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by Jay Hathaway
“In the indie rock world, there’s never really any collaborating outside…”
– Matt Johnson
Matt Johnson of Brooklyn dance-punk duo Matt and Kim has been giving whirlwind interviews all afternoon, ten minutes at a time, but he still has energy to chat with SuicideGirls about his band’s new album, Sidewalks. The first single, “Cameras,” is so catchy that it’s led Matt to tell the press, “We don’t write songs anymore. We write anthems.”
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