To any actual eighth-grader, Bo Burnham, the director of the achingly empathetic new film Eighth Grade, must seem old. So, so old. How old is he, you ask? In Internet years, the comedian-filmmaker is so old, he went viral before “Dramatic Chipmunk.” The man is so old, his teenage skits, …
Read More »'Late Late Show' Producer on Booking Shawn Mendes, BTS, Fifth Harmony
It began with a toothbrush. During a late-March episode of The Late Late Show With James Corden, the host reached for his coffee mug only to find an Oral-B protruding from it. “What’s this? What has happened here?” he asked in a comically high voice. Bandleader Reggie Watts denied putting …
Read More »Dwayne Johnson: The Pain and the Passion That Fuel the Rock
If the world seemed a little bit sluggish this morning – if the birds weren’t singing as sweetly, or the sun hung a bit lower in the sky – it might be because Dwayne Johnson didn’t work out. On any other day, Johnson would be up before dawn, clanging and …
Read More »How Joel Kinnaman Became a Sci-Fi TV Star (and Lived to Tell About It)
In the first episode of Altered Carbon, Netflix‘s bid for a big, dystopic sci-fi-blockbuster series, Takeshi Kovacs, played by Swedish-American actor Joel Kinnaman, drops to the floor, his naked body oozing out of body bag full of gelatinous preservatives that have kept this new corpus intact. With a fit of …
Read More »Ryan Coogler: Why I Needed to Make 'Black Panther'
It was late 2015, and director Ryan Coogler was feeling the call of Africa. Coogler, then 29, was just finishing up his second film, the soon-to-be-a-hit Rocky rebootCreed. He was starting to think about what came next. “I was grappling with something I’ve kind of been scraping at my whole …
Read More »Jedi Confidential: Inside the Dark New 'Star Wars' Movie
A long time ago, a grade-schooler got his hands on a spaceship. He followed the assembly instructions as best he could, snapping on the cannons, the landing gear, the tiny interstellar-chess table. Soon enough, Rian Johnson was holding his very own Millennium Falcon. “The first thing I did,” he recalls, …
Read More »Spike Lee: Why I Turned 'She's Gotta Have It' Into a TV Series
“I want you to know the only reason I’m consenting to this is because I wish to clear my name.” With those words, a twentysomething Brooklyn artist named Nola Darling introduced herself to the world – and, in the process, so did Spike Lee, a prodigiously talented twentysomething writer-director who …
Read More »How 'Jane' Captures the Legendary Primatologist – In Her Own Words
Long before he became acquainted with the subject of his documentary Jane, Brett Morgen assumed that the primatologist Jane Goodall was a “goody two-shoe[s].” The filmmaker was used to tackling figures with pronounced dark sides like Hollywood producer Robert Evans and Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, not the type of scientific …
Read More »Tim Roth on 'Tin Star,' Tarantino and Tupac
Skinheads, hit men, cops, criminals, cops-posing-as-criminals, princes, junkies, executioners, politicians, supervillains, an 18th-century fop, a 19th-century impressionist painter and a 21st-century psychotic chimp – you name it, and there’s an extremely good chance that Tim Roth has played it. The 56-year-old British actor has the sort of varied, overstuffed resumé …
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