Reality TV isn’t a cesspool; it’s more a bottomless pit. Believe that you’ve seen the worst of it at your own peril—soon enough you’ll plunge to a new low. There will always be one. In my years of watching trash that incentivizes people to act like garbage, I’ve seen someone resort to shitting on the floor when…
It looks as though Amazing Grace, the Sydney Pollack-directed documentary chronicling the live recording of Aretha Franklin’s landmark 1972 gospel album of the same name, will finally hit theaters. The DOC NYC film festival announced today it will be screening the movie twice on Monday, November 12.
“With profound gratitude,” Janet Jackson accepted the Global Icon Award at Sunday’s MTV Europe Music Awards in Barakaldo, Spain. In her reliably soothing voice, Ms. Jackson (whether you are nasty or not, at this point) reiterated the main themes of her acceptance speech for the Billboard Icon Award in May—uplifting…
Forced* conversion therapy is bad. You either believe this or you (at least tacitly) advocate for the extermination of queerness, which makes you a bigot. This is a black-and-white matter, and, given the havoc attempts at turning queer youth straight wreaks on lives, it seems to gay old me that this is also a matter…
There is a moment on the new song “Orbit,” by NAO, that is both entirely characteristic of its surrounding album and yet totally bonkers. On it, one of several lovelorn tracks on the British singer-songwriter-producer’s sophomore album Saturn, NAO sings what is at once an ode to lost love and one to a new prospect.…
Last week, a person named Vivian started blowing up my phone with complaints. She tends to communicate by either ranting or falling to pieces. She does so over co-workers who cramp her style, over her ex being spotted in public with a new woman, over a morning boxing class, over the lack of beautiful people in the…
The Motion Picture Association of America’s ratings board CARA (Classification and Ratings Administration) is kind of like the coven of witches that run Suspiria’s dance school: They operate in secrecy, the rationale behind their actions is not particularly clear, their headquarters is reachable by a secret passage…
6ix9ine, also known also as Tekashi 6ix9ine and by his government name, Daniel Hernandez, remains a free man by the skin of his rainbow-colored fronts. At Friday’s sentencing for his 2015 conviction of use of a child in a sexual performance, Hon. Judge Felicia Mennin conceded that while he had “technically” violated…
“It’s expected that I’m going to have an opinion about things,” actor Virginia Madsen said Thursday in a Midtown cafe. We were meeting to discuss 1985, Yen Tan’s acclaimed black-and-white drama about a man named Adrian (Cory Michael Smith) who goes home to visit his family during the titular year, knowing it may be…
Say what you will about Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria (and if you see it, you’ll undoubtedly have a lot to say about the provocative film)—even its detractors would agree that the movie is audacious. It rips out the skeleton of Dario Argento’s 1977 witch flick of the same name and piles on new narratives about Nazism,…
Today in white tears: Megyn Kelly opened her segment of the Today show addressing her comments made on yesterday’s episode, in which she said that she didn’t understand what the big deal was over blackface. Her voice trembled a few times, and toward the end of her apology, it sounded as though she might cry. She was…
The new Halloween sequel is such an astonishing success, grossing $76.2 million its opening weekend against a $10 million budget, that more of its ilk is inevitable. (Good thing they left the door open for a sequel even though much of the vibe of the movie and chatter surrounding it suggested that this was the final…
I’m not saying, “Oh you should have sex with the new Salem Saberhagen from Netflix’s Sabrina the Teenage Witch reboot,” but then again, I’m not not saying that. Wait, wait, I am definitely not saying that. Let me try again: The cat has a trim, long-limbed body, it serves face including eyes so soulful I hear Luther…
A sense of mortality permeates Neneh Cherry’s new album, Broken Politics. “It seems sick to me now/It’s funny how fragile is a life/That can have everything now to nothing left at all/Amounts to little pieces,” she sings on “Deep Vein Thrombosis,” a lilting song about blood clots. In language so…
We shouldn’t ask art to be emblematic of the #MeToo movement, but sometimes its makers tell us that it is, regardless. Case in point: Those involved in the new Halloween have linked the film’s sensibilities to the current moment. In a recent interview, Jamie Lee Curtis, who is once again donning the role of Laurie…
You read that headline right: Bella Thorne’s #spon-spawned, violet-painted house is home to 19 cats. This is one of the several interesting facts included in a Los Angeles Times profile of the actor/singer/person on Instagram. Why does Bella Thorne have so many cats? How does she do it? What’s her secret formula? It’s…
In September, Roseanne Barr revealed her Roseanne character would die of an opioid overdose on The Conners, and so it was. Tuesday’s premiere episode—essentially the start of the 11th season of Roseanne, sans Roseanne—continued a narrative thread introduced last season regarding Roseanne’s dependency on pain meds due…
Director Bryan Singer claims a) Esquire is planning to publish a “negative” article about him, and that b) it’s predicated on a “reckless disregard for the truth,” in a post he uploaded to Instagram on Monday.
The question of why we went to the moon is batted around Damien Chazelle’s First Man like a piece of crumpled-up paper by a cat with waning interest. Among the hypotheses, there’s the notion that it could influence young people by expanding their horizons. Additionally, during his interview for the astronaut gig,…
