WBEZ | Film

Why actors deserve our respect

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 05:00:00 -0500

Friends may outright tell you that acting is a terrible career choice, or barely conceal their judgment behind a condescending smirk.

However, what these people may not realize is that actors are skilled professionals (no matter how much or how little they get paid) and that acting is more than just strutting around a stage and looking pretty for a camera. If forced to deliver a monologue before an audience of thousands, they might have a better appreciation for what actors do every 18-hour day on a film set or eight shows a week on Broadway.

Acting is hard work. Those who pursue acting as a career often work full-time jobs during the day, then hurry off to auditions on their lunch breaks and to the theater for rehearsals and shows at night. They eat, sleep and breathe their craft, sacrificing other more lucrative job offers in favor of their first love. Actors are a passionate bunch, and many have the jaw-dropping talent to merit star status alongside professional musicians, authors and athletes—even if they never acheive it.

Yes, some actors are hired for plum roles on film and television solely because of their looks or family connections (see Sofia Coppola in The Godfather Part III and Megan Fox in everything). However, other rising A-listers who are not conventionally attractive (like Steve Buscemi on Boardwalk Empire, the great Tilda Swinton and Chicago's own Michael Shannon) succeed because they are astoundingly good at what they do.

The act of "acting" is harder than it looks. Although pretending to fall in love with Johnny Depp might not look like the hardest job in the world, imagine the real-life scenario. Under the pressure of hot lights, multiple camera angles and several dozen crew members watching with bated breath, just remembering lines (not to mention delivering them well and performing convincingly) is a rare and truly impressive skill.

Many of the best film actors working today (Meryl Streep, Edward Norton, Al Pacino, etc.) first honed their skills in the theater. Myriads more have studied under the rigorous acting tenets of Uta Hagen and Lee Strasberg, devoting themselves completely to an art that few people can master, and even fewer actually acknowledge or respect as a viable career.

Good acting deserves to be seen and celebrated. Go to the Goodman, Steppenwolf, Victory Gardens or practically any other small storefront theater in Chicago to see the sublime acting talent that our city has to offer. For a better understanding of film actors and the intense work that goes into their craft, watch Inside the Actors Studio with James Lipton (recommended episodes: Jack Lemmon, Paul Newman and Kate Winslet).

Not everyone has what it takes to be a great actor; but to study acting as a true art form is a noble pursuit, and certainly worthy of respect. In the words of legendary acting coach Stella Adler, "Life beats down and crushes the soul, and art reminds you that you have one."

Leah Pickett writes about popular culture for WBEZ. Follow her on Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr.

'Before Midnight': This is what it means to be in love

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 12:00:00 -0500

This is the romantic reality. When it is easy, it is easier than we imagined. It is holding hands and quick kisses and looks of longing. It is conversation that flows easily, breathlessly, without a moment of pause. It is laughter. But when it is not easy, when everything is not just the first time, the true reality of the complexities of a contemporary romance set in.

This is the premise behind Richard Linklater’s latest film, Before Midnight, the third look at the relationship between Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) after Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. In this latest film, the two are finally together. Whereas in the first film they just met and in the second film they were reunited, in this latest, we learn that they took the major leap, altered their lives, and ended up committed to each other. Along the way, they also had twin daughters.

The movie is not a response to the previous films. Rather it works as a complete end to the series. Although each “Before” film can stand on its own, they work best as a complete trilogy on how love “works.” I enjoyed the films originally because they were light and visually lush and aurally-rich. The dialogue jumped out of their mouths. The European settings were vibrant and enticing. The characters felt real in that I saw them in couples I knew and admired from afar. Audiences want to follow them because they are us. They are what we see for ourselves when we are young, when we want to fall in love, and when we actually do.

Prior to watching Before Midnight, I re-watched Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. Watching them back-to-back further unraveled the singular narrative writers Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy, and Ethan Hawke aimed to tell.

Before Sunrise is about the headyness of something new. The movie takes place before sunrise, before a new day. Before Sunset is about the lust of something real. Jesse has to fly back to the United States. Celine says, “Baby, you are gonna miss that plane.” Jessie replies, “I know.” Those unbelievably heavy last lines in that film were the cliffhanger to what we now know: they end up together.

Before Midnight then is about the frustrations of something here and now, in the real world. It is well thought out and reflects the realities of love and romance. The original films show how easy it is to fall in love. This latest shows what happens after the love has settled. Real life and relationships are challenging and messy. There are consequences to our actions.

It is telling that the film opens in a Greek airport as Jesse leaves his son, Hank, from his original marriage. Their relationship is loving, but strained. It is not just about his age (pre-high school), but about the situation they’ve found themselves in. From the perspective of his son, his parents are divorced. One is (supposedly) an alcoholic and the other lives across the world with his girlfriend and two daughters. This is a complicated reality, though one that is not unfamiliar. His father found love on a different continent. For Jesse, he found love while also not being there, literally, for his son. What we want and what the world gives us are two different things.

Like the previous films, a beautiful setting (this time, a Greek island) is used in the first half of the film to frame the giddiness of love. In contrast, a cold, harsh hotel room becomes the background for a heated argument. Under the glare of reality and flawed humanity, reality is not as pleasant. Loveliness is fleeting.

It is nice to see them age. They are literally not driven by youth. In youth we find the desire to view the world and our interactions within it with the strength of naivete. Taking the films as a whole, their youth represents innocence and hopefulness. As they age, as wrinkles set in and forms mature, so too does the reality of building and maintaining a relationship. Life happens: with us, near us, and to us.

"Before Midnight" is out now in Chicagoland theaters. Britt Julious blogs about culture in and outside of Chicago. Follow Britt's essays for WBEZ's Tumblr or on Twitter @britticisms.

If you only had months to live, how would you spend them?

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 09:30:00 -0500

On May 20, 2013, Zach Sobiech died after a four-year battle with terminal osteosarcoma. While his name might not sound familiar, you may have heard his song "Clouds" after it went viral on YouTube earlier this year, or watched this video (over 9 million views to date) on the day of his passing.

After being told that he only had months to live, 18-year-old Zobiech decided to share his story with the world. First came the hit song, then a mini-documentary produced by none other than The Office star Rainn Wilson.

SoulPancake, a YouTube channel created by Wilson and featuring a revolving lineup of memorable characters (from Kid President to The Impression Guys), caught wind of "Clouds" and later teamed up with Sobiech for the groundbreaking online reality series "My Last Days."

Directed by filmmaker-actor Justin Baldoni, the 22-minute doc follows Sobiech and his family during his final months: a touching tribute to the Minnesota teen that manages to be charming, heartbreaking, inspiring and uplifting at the same time.

Wilson also recruited a long list of celebrity friends (including Bryan Cranston, Jenna Fischer and Jason Mraz) to lip-synch a music video to "Clouds," which Sobiech got to see just weeks before his death.

"I want to be remembered as the kid who went down fighting, and didn't really lose," said Zobiech, when asked what kind of legacy he would like to leave behind, "I want everyone to know, you don't have to find out you're dying to start living."

The delicate subject matter of a docuseries like "My Last Days" may not be the easiest to watch, but perhaps that is exactly why we should. Sobiech lived more in 18 years than most people do in a liftetime: a powerful reminder for all of us to be thankful for the little things and embrace every day as if it were our last.

"It's really simple, actually," Sobiech said about trying to make the world a better place. "Just make people happy."

Luckily for everyone who got the chance to know him, either in person or through his documentary, he succeeded in doing just that.

What do you think of this phenomenon? Would you film your last days to inspire others?

Leah Pickett writes about popular culture for WBEZ. Follow her on Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr.

Chicago books that would make great movies

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 08:00:00 -0500

When The Devil in the White City hit bookshelves in 2003, readers gobbled up the historical non-fiction story of the architect behind Chicago's 1893 World's Fair and the serial killer who lured countless victims to their deaths in a nearby hotel.

Leonardo DiCaprio secured the film rights in 2010, and rumors swirled that DiCaprio himself would play the man who murdered and dissected over 200 people: Dr. H.H. Holmes.

Three years later, the film remains "in development," which is another way of saying "this project has been put on hold so Leo can work with his old pals Baz and Marty first." Still, I wouldn't be surprised if DiCaprio tapped Martin Scorsese to direct (they have made five movies together over the past decade) and decided to go full-evil for his next Oscar-baiting role.

The Devil in the White City is a mesmerizing read, especially for Chicago history buffs, and ripe for a grisly film adapation. However, many other powerful books with Chicago settings are equally deserving of the page-to-screen treatment.

So, in no particular order, here is my top 10 list of the best Chicago books with cinematic potential:

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair that Changed America (Erik Larson, 2003) I hope that they construct at least part of the set for the 19th century World Fair at Navy Pier, similar to the dysptopic carnival recently erected by the crew of another Chicago-based film, Veronica Roth's Divergent. The director will most likely turn to CGI to create that epic first Ferris Wheel, but enlisting an actor like Robert Downey Jr. to play George Ferris Jr. (they kind of look alike, don't they?) would be real-life marvel enough for me.

Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago (Mike Royko, 1988) The Showtime series Boss, starring Kelsey Grammar as a corrupt Chicago mayor, was unofficially yet obviously based on former Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley. However, the show was cancelled after very low-rated two seasons, likely because it veered too far in the direction of outlandish Shakespearean soap opera instead of digging into the ample historical dirt that producers were probably too frightened to touch. Perhaps a film adaptation of Royko's scathing and immensely compelling biography of the late Daley Sr. would be brave enough to go there.

The Jungle (Upton Sinclair, 1906) This one is kind of cheating, since a silent film version of the book was made in 1914 and later lost. Still, Sinclair's groundbreaking exposé of corruption in Chicago's meatpacking business during the early 20th century, hailed by writer Jack London as "the Uncle Tom's Cabin of wage slavery," would be a sure-fire Oscar contender in the hands of a director like David Fincher or Danny Boyle.

Everybody Pays (Maurice Possley and Rick Kogan, 2002) Forget Al Capone—Chicago's deadliest hitman, Harry Aleman, is the kind of monumental figure that A-list actors would kill to play. Pair a riveting street-to-courtroom script from Chicago Tribune co-writers Possley and Kogan with a young Al Pacino type, and this true-story gangster film could be a huge hit.

The Lazarus Project (Aleksander Hemon, 2008) Not to be confused with the horrible Paul Walker movie of the same name, Hemon's award-winning novel about tensions between Chicago immigrants and police at the turn of the 20th century eerily echoes modern-day events (i.e. the death of Trayvon Martin) and provides a sweeping canvas for gritty cinematic vision to take hold.

Trumball Park (Frank London Brown, 1959) Brown's highly underrated account of the first black families to integrate Chicago's Trumball Park housing project in the 1950s recalls the easy book-to-film conversion of The Help, except a film version of this story hasn't been made yet. Still, in the hands of a director like Lee Daniels and a charismatic actor like Denzel Washington in the lead role of Buggy Martin, the moving story of a man protecting his family from race riots in Trumball Park could translate to a modern-day movie masterpiece.

The House on Mango Street (Sandra Cisneros, 1984) While this coming-of-age novel is made up of stand-alone vignettes rather than sequential chapters of a continuing narrative, Cisneros' rich and poetic source material—filled with humor, charm and acute observation— is an indie filmmaker's dream. Told from the perspective of a young Latina girl who longs for a better life but struggles to leave her family behind, The House on Mango Street is an enchanting collection of stories that would shine just as brightly on the big screen.

47th Street Black (Bayo Ojikuto, 2003) Ojikuto's debut is a stunning and incendiary work of fiction that hits all too close to home: the story of two black teenagers whose rise in Chicago's gangster-driven ghettos is "just as swift as it is brutal." With the amount of media attention we've received for our gang violence over the past year (the "Chiraq" episode of Vice being the most recent example), a film version of one of the best black American novels since 1940's Native Son could open millennial eyes even wider.

The Man with the Golden Arm (Nelson Algren, 1949) Okay, this one is really cheating—a well-received film version of this book starring Frank Sinatra and Kim Novak was released in 1955. Still, some remakes are better than their original films (for example: Cronenberg's The Fly and Scorsese's The Departed) and this beautifully-written novel about a heroin junkie chased by card sharks might make an even better movie today.

Tall Money (John Cappas, 2012) Does that name ring a bell? At the age of 21, John Cappas was a Chicago drug lord and one of the most infamous cocaine dealers in the U.S. during the mid to late 1980s. His shocking autobiography chronicles these early years, including a bust by the feds in 1988 and a 45-year jail sentence (reduced to 15 years on appeal) that lasted until his release in 2003. Today, Cappas runs a hot dog stand in Markham, IL called Johnny's Wee Nee Wagon and regularly speaks to students about the dangers of drug abuse. And with Cappas' connections in the movie business, it's only a matter of time before Hollywood comes knocking.

Which Chicago books would you like to see adapated for the silver screen?

Leah Pickett writes about popular culture for WBEZ. Follow her on Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr.

A Q&A with Nathan Rabin, author of 'You Don't Know Me but You Don't Like Me'

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:59:00 -0500

Chicago writer (and friend of mine) Nathan Rabin, formerly of the A.V. Club and now of Pitchfork's The Dissolve, is publishing a new book tomorrow titled You Don't Know Me but You Don't Like Me: Phish, Insane Clown Posse, and My Misadventures with Two of Music's Most Maligned Tribes. Since I'm fancy I already acquired a copy and am enjoying it very much, despite a limited knowledge of Phish (one concert, completely sober) and very little of Insane Clown Posse. I think you will enjoy it as well. Even if you don't care for either band, it's a story about love, mental health, pop culture affinities and a lot more.

Which additional fan bases would you fold into this book if you could?
The original vision of the book was to write about a broad range of subcultures. To that end, I attended the Disco Biscuits' Camp Bisco and booked travel for my girlfriend and myself aboard both the Jam Cruise and the Kid Rock Chillin' The Most Cruise, both of which were even more ridiculous than you would imagine.

The Lonely Island has a song called "Japan"; the concept is that every lyric is just an excuse to force their record label to pay for an insanely expensive music video. My book project felt a little like that in the beginning, that it was just a preposterous excuse to go on the Kid Rock Chillin' the Most cruise and justify it as both a professional necessity and a tax expense.

So I actually went and did all of that extra research into all these other groups of fans and didn't really get anything I could use out of it for the book, beyond contributing substantially to the cratering of my finances that helped lead to the nervous breakdown at the epicenter of my book. So I actually went and explored a number of fan bases that I did not end up writing substantially but if I had to write about an additional fan base it would have to be super-fans of "Weird Al" Yankovic, who I perhaps not so coincidentally wrote a book for/about with (it's called Weird Al: The Book and is a book about Weird Al). I was fascinated by this very brainy, nerdy subculture of Weird Al devotees and super-fans who memorize every lyric and get Al tattooed on their bodies. The fan bases of Phish and ICP tend to be very hedonistic; I was intrigued that Al's fans (and Al himself) tend to veer towards the opposite extreme while still embodying the sense of fun and escape at the heart of both music's primal, enduring appeal and the subcultures I wrote about.

I know you to be a pretty open-minded guy, but what adventures took place in the book that, a year or so earlier, you could have never fathomed you'd ever take part in?

My very first day at the Gathering of the Juggalos I watched Ron Jeremy host a "Miss Juggalette" pageant where one of the contestant masturbated vigorously as the climax of her performance (no pun intended) and witnessed the famous debacle of Tila Tequila being inundated with bottles of piss and sh*t during her ill-fated performance at the Gathering. A year before that might have struck me as a little odd but spending over two years documenting the curious ways of the domestic Juggalo has profoundly altered my conception of what qualifies as "odd."

Which experiences made you think, "Wow, now that I've done that, I'm glad I never have to do it again"?
Having taken an 18-hour trip on a Greyhound night bus from New Jersey to Ohio, I am not keen to repeat that experience ever again, especially with a crack-addled rapper (I knew he was a rapper because he would rap softly to himself as I gave up on the prospect of sleeping ever again) as my seat mate for at least part of the journey.

If my son had to grow up and become an extreme Phish follower or an extreme Juggalo, which would you choose for him (and me)?
I would choose Phish because life is harder for Juggalos. They're more public and more visible and more reviled, whereas Phish fans can more easily blend in with the rest of society and pass as "normals" (in part because they are normals). I would love the hell out of my extreme Juggalo son or daughter even as I realized that life would not be easy for them.

Can you name one lesson you’ve been able to take away from each book that you’ve written?
With my first book I felt like I had to get everything out in case I never got to write another book again. As a result, I probably overdid it a little, even though I'm enormously proud of the book. Going into The Big Rewind, I had no real conception of how tough the publishing industry is and how few books actually make a profit for their publishers (only about one in 10, I reckon) so I had unrealistically high expectations for it, especially when it attracted a tidal wave of publicity and attention. When I found out the book under-performed commercially I felt like a real failure as a writer and an author. Now I've come to understand that a book's value and its merits often have nothing to do with how it sold, that that's a bullsh*t metric for which to judge anything even vaguely resembling art. My Year Of Flops taught me restraint and understatement, that sometimes less is more and that oftentimes jokes hurt more than they help. With Weird Al: The Book I learned to write for another person. Though Yankovic was my childhood hero, I was a gun for hire whose job was to realize Al's vision for the project rather than my own. That was a useful and important structure; it's important to learn to write within limitations. In this case, that entailed writing a G-rated book for a very specific audience. And with You Don't Know Me I learned a number of important things, chief among them don't write a book that costs more than its advance. Also, do not write an ambitious travel book without doing any research or preparation or anything that can even generously be deemed homework. Know your sh*t! Don't leave everything to chance or you will end up like me, with a crazy, entertaining book you're super-proud of, even if it nearly cost you your career, sanity and life.

Follow Claire Zulkey @Zulkey.

How growing up Disney shapes gender roles

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 09:00:00 -0500

If you are currently between the ages of 18-29, then you were raised during the Disney Renaissance. This golden era of musical films—beginning in the late 1980s and ending around 2000—not only saved Disney from creative and financial ruin, but also renewed interest in the Disney brand as a critical and commerical goldmine.

And if you were a pre-adolescent girl during this time, chances are good that you had a favorite Disney princess (mine was Ariel, the plucky and impossibly beautiful heroine of The Little Mermaid) whose love affair with a handsome prince may have been your first model of what a grownup boyfriend/girlfriend relationship should be.

Unfortunately, the fairytale romances in films like The Little Mermaid (1989) and Beauty and the Beast (1991) actually set very poor examples for young girls to follow. Ariel and Belle are smart and refreshingly independent female protagonists; that is, until they enter into relationships with their male lovers, fall head-over-heels into stereotypically submissive gender roles and lose themselves along the way.

While Ariel does have some feminist qualities (she wants to explore, rebel and experience a life beyond the confines of her underwater world), she ultimately succumbs to a subservient role by giving up everything for her man.

Ariel trades her means of communicating and expressing personality—her voice— for the eroticism of human legs, turning her into a purely visual object of desire. Think about it: she literally gives up her voice to be with Prince Eric, even though she's only known him for about five minutes, to become the perfect mute for the male gaze.

Furthermore, the idea of Eric growing some gills and becoming a merman himself is never even mentioned. Because he is the dominant male, Ariel is expected to change her life for him—not the other way around. She transitions from being directly under the control of her father to being Eric's wife; so, despite longing for freedom throughout the course of the film, she is never truly independent.

The female protaganist of Beauty and the Beast also ends up conforming to patriarchal gender strereotypes in her "happily ever after," although she does not begin her story that way. At first glance, Belle is the ideal feminist. She has a passion for books, longs to escape the confines of her provincial town and makes it clear to the lecherous lothario Gaston that she has zero interest in marrying him.

However, Belle still represents the sexist role of submissive female in relation to her dominant male counterpart. A pretty girl with no money falls for a rich, abusive monster. Belle submits herself to the Beast as the self-sacrifyicing daughter, and then yields to his every command without even trying to escape. This portrayal suggests that women are repsonsible for controlling male anger and violence, even if that means completely disregarding their own sense of safety and well-being.

Belle's character further presents a damaging role model for young girls in showing that a woman is obligated to stay loyal to the abusive male in her life. She learns how to tame his outbursts and "fix" him to become sweet again: a dangerous error that many women make when struggling to leave a home of domestic violence.

Also, the overly-sexualized, anorexic Barbie doll image of Disney princesses like Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Pocahontas and even Tiana from The Princess and the Frog is another problem of gender conformity (the most beautiful and desirable women have perfectly delicate features, tiny waists, huge busoms, etc.) that Disney continues to perpetuate today.

For example, while Pixar made great progress in writing the female protagonist of Brave as a courageous and self-actualized heroine whose journey doesn't revolve around a man (how refreshing!), the controversial decision to "glamorize" Merida's body type for promotional purposes still proves that sexist ideology is alive and well at the Disney corporation.

What kind of role models should children be looking up to in Disney movies and beyond?

Leah Pickett writes about popular culture for WBEZ. Follow her on Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr.

The Nancy Jo Sales interview: A talk with the author of 'The Bling Ring'

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 08:21:00 -0500

In 2010, today's interviewed published an article in Vanity Fair called "The Suspects Wore Louboutins," which now you can read in a longer form in a new book called The Bling Ring: How a Gang of Fame-Obsessed Teens Ripped Off Hollywood and Shocked the World as well as see in a soon-to-be-released movie by the same title directed by Sofia Coppola and starring Emma Watson. Nancy Jo Sales is an award-winning journalist, editor and author who has written for Vanity Fair, New York, Harper's Bazaar and many other publications covering subjects like Angelina Jolie, Hugh Hefner, Russell Simmons, Taylor Swift, Tyra Banks and Paris Hilton. You can read a lot more about her here.

What were some of the challenges of turning the article into a book, aside from the quick turnaround time?
The sheer physical effort was pretty intense. I felt like I was running a marathon. I didn’t sleep very much. The book was constantly running through my head, which was both interesting and distracting.

You were on the other line of one of my favorite Soup clips of all time, so I have to know, what did Alexis’ final voicemail actually sound like, and were you surprised by her reaction to the piece?
I was surprised that someone who was being charged with burglary was upset that I had allegedly misidentified her shoes! I found the whole thing very confusing.

Something that’s funny and sad to me is that Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan already seem a bit passe compared to a few years ago. Has starlet/fame-worship culture changed, do you think, since your original article? (Perhaps influenced by the prevalence of Twitter?)
Those particular starlets have faded—although Paris seems to be enjoying a little comeback with The Bling Ring movie—but I don’t think our culture’s focus on celebrities has diminished at all. If anything, I think the amount of celebrity “news” (which isn’t really news), celebrity talk, and trash talk has increased.

I already thought of Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan as being a bit desperate in terms of fame, so the Bling Ring were somewhat bottom feeders of celebrity. What was the victims’ reaction to the thieves’ becoming famous?
In the book I quote Paris calling them “scumbags” [and] quote from the grand jury testimony in which the celebrities describe coming home to find their homes ransacked. The thieves took tons of stuff—“bags and bags” of stuff, says Audrina Patridge. They developed a method where they would go in, find suitcases, and start filling them up. So, even though these celebrities were famous, privileged people, I think their testimony shows how they were true victims of serious crimes. And they all seemed very traumatized by it. Lindsay said she was so freaked out she could never return to the house they robbed, and she didn’t.

Party girls are not a recent innovation: are there any “famous for being famous” starlets of old that you think an Alexis Neiers could benefit from reading up on?
“Party girls” started with the flapper era, really. Joan Crawford was maybe the original party girl, known for dancing on tables in nightclubs, just like Paris Hilton. The 30s had many movies about high-spirited heiresses getting into trouble (including It Happened One Night). The real party girls of Hollywood who didn’t achieve that kind of Crawford-level fame often met bad ends, including Virginia Rappe (who died at a wild party in San Francisco; Fatty Arbuckle was charged with accidentally killing her) and Elizabeth Short (“The Black Dahlia”).

How much did Sofia Coppola consult with you prior to or while making the film? What parts of the movie seem distinctively her as opposed to the story you covered?
We met several times in New York while she was writing the script. We talked about the story and the characters and the themes in the story, i.e. celebrity obsession, social media obsession, materialism and conspicuous consumption. We talked about kid culture today. The movie is like a roman a clef, a thinly veiled account of the facts. The basic story is there but the style and atmosphere is all Sofia.

What are some of your favorite other sidelong looks at the nature of fame in pop culture?
The Day of the Locust by Nathanel West, the movie To Die For with Nicole Kidman, Sunset Boulevard, of course, and Lisa Kudrow’s brilliant show about a reality star, The Comeback, to name just a few. Fame is such a theme in American culture, there are so many.

I know from speaking to other celebrity profiling reporter friends that it’s a job that’s not as glamorous or glitzy as it looks, but I always have wondered how one does become a writer who is entrusted to eat lunch with Angelina Jolie. What were the first few stories that broke you through to being a trusted celebrity reporter?
As a young freelance reporter I started doing these really small Q and As for the New York Times Magazine in the mid-90s. Somehow I got assigned Jerry Lewis and John Cleese. I love them both, and in both cases what was supposed to be a 15 minute interview turned into like two hours. They made me laugh. I still have Jerry’s fax to me after the interview, which says, “It was fun today…. Thank you for a great sense of humor.” I cherish it.

For those aspiring to do what you do, what have been some of the most important lessons you’ve learned about how to interact with celebrities and what to expect when you write about them?
Just be natural and listen, and don’t have an agenda. I try and forget everything I’ve read about this person at the moment of the interview and just let them tell me about themselves.

How does it feel to be the 351st person interviewed for Zulkey.com/WBEZ?
I’m very honored.

You can find a lot more interviews here. Follow Claire Zulkey @Zulkey

The female film critic: an endangered species?

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 16:07:00 -0500

When I think of the people who first turned me onto talking and thinking about film, the list skews heavily female: Pauline Kael. Amy Taubin. Molly Haskell.

I even liked Libby Gelman-Waxner, who wrote the satiric column “If You Ask Me” for Premiere Magazine and, who by the way, was actually a nom de drag: comedic writer Paul Rudnick doing his best impersonation of a Manhattan housewife/career woman.

I’m not sure why this was the case. Maybe I liked women writers because I was a woman who wanted to be a writer! As a film school student, maybe I just preferred “serious” critics. Most of these women, judged by either the length of their reviews or by their actual academic bona fides, seemed awfully serious to me.

Or maybe - and don’t crucify me Chicagoans - I just liked New Yorkers.

But I started rethinking my connection to film criticism after reading some depressing news. A two-month survey conducted this past spring, of the movie aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, found that 78 percent of their “top critics” were men. And those dudes accounted for 82% of the site’s total film criticism.

So, bottom line, according to the survey’s author Martha Lauzen? As she concluded in a previous study of newspaper film critics: “Men dominate the reviewing process of films primarily made by men featuring mostly males intended for a largely male audience.”

Talk about the man snake eating its man snake tail!

For now, some have complicated Lauzen’s bottom line, including the great Linda Holmes at NPR.

But to me, Lauzen’s findings really resonate. I still read lots of female film critics, from Manola Dargis to Farran Nehme. Great as they are, they’re still few and far between.

And when I look for women critics in Chicago, the picture only gets worse.

Take your pick: the Chicago Reader, the Tribune, the Sun Times, TimeOut Chicago, Gapers Block, Windy City Times, WBEZ’s Filmspotting? Most of these oulets’ film critics – and certainly the “top critics” – are men. Or take a look at the Chicago Film Critics Assocation, whose membership is mostly male.

Then recently, two national outlets with local ties upped the gender inequity ante. Pitchfork announced it’s new film site The Dissolve. Among the seven critics (most formerly of the A.V. Club), two are women: Tasha Robinson and Genevieve Koski.

Meanwhile, over at RogerEbert.com, newly appointed editor Matt Zoller Seitz is not only a man, he’s a New Yorker!

In announcing the pick, Chaz Ebert lauded Seitz’s many talents, including his ability “to spot and encourage talent in other journalists, critics and video essayists” and to mentor “with a benevolent style.”

Seitz has certainly built some fine film criticism outlets, including Press Play. But if the contributors there are any indication, Seitz has mainly mentored men: Out of 41 writers, 8 are women.

Lest I sound like a cranky and slightly obsessed accountant, toting up gender counts at various media outlets, I want to stress that there are of course women here writing about film: Nina Metz and Maureen Hart at the Trib, Ruth Ratney and Carrie Kaufman at Reel Chicago, and many more at CINE-FILE.info including Christy LeMaster, Candace Wirt, Chloe McLaren among others.

Of course, any attempt at a list is most defined by what’s left off it, so if I’ve missed any local female film critics, please don’t yell, just add their names in the comments section below.

Meanwhile, ponder this interesting silver lining: While women may not have achieved critical mass in local or national critical circles, they are a significant presence among film programmers and presenters.

In fact, as I started to compile this list, I was astonished by how many local film series and festivals are due in whole or part to women. Another interesting fact: many of these women got into programming by starting as filmmakers or projectionists, and many of them are still working the booth at various local cinemas.

Here then, is as comprehensive a list as I can muster, with some musings from local programmers about why women seem to gravitate toward programming over criticism, and why the lack of female critics matters.

One thing to note as you review this list, and add other names below, there is almost no diversity among local female programmers - most on this list are white.

1. Film Houses. Barbara Scharres, Programmer, Gene Siskel Film Center. Scharres started out by making films, then was hired as a projectionist by Siskel founder Camille Cook. After a stint as technical director she moved into programming. Scharres says that based on an annual gathering of North American film programmers, the male-female split is about 50-50. On the surface that makes the programming field more female friendly than criticism.

Scharres notes that women who present films tend to have more formal film educations or academic backgrounds, whereas much current criticism tends to favor “Quentin Tarantino-types”: Young, strongly opinionated male film fans who undergo a thorough and self-driven film education.

“I don’t want to put that down,” says Scharres, “But at the same time it does produce a more cowboy kind of field.”

Scharres says maybe the people who hire film critics might be less disposed to a lack of female critics who don’t come off as “brash, enthusiastic fanboys.” But she thinks their absence means we are missing something.

“Women have a whole different take on things. just even the obvious bullshit detection when it comes to filjm’s portrayal of women.”

As an example, she cites the recent film at Cannes, François Ozon’s “Young and Beautiful”, a movie about a rich young woman’s random turn to prostitution. Scharres noticed a clear gender divide in the critical responses, saying it left most women saying “what the f*&k get out of here,” while men seemed to find it “so real, so beautiful, so plausible”.

Scharres does write about film - she is one of the critics who covers Cannes for RogerEbert.com. Though I noticed that the site’s recap of the festival followed the usual two dudes talking format.

Others: Mimi Brody at Northwestern University’s Block Cinema. Julia Gibbs and Sabrina Craig at the Film Studies Center and Haley Markbreiter of student-run Doc Films, both located at the University of Chicago.

2. Multi-taskers. Christy LeMaster runs micro-cinema The Nightingale, previously contributed to CINE-FILE.info and for a time was a film critic for WBEZ's Eight Forty-Eight.

Like many others I spoke with, she got into programming because she’d rather show a film then tell someone about it.

“It’s all sharing the movie, right?” says LeMaster, “But it’s way more fun for me to watch it with everybody.”

Though CINE-FILE includes a number of women critics, LeMaster says there’s been lots of debate among contributors about the absence of film voices in local film criticism, and perceived sexism in some reviews by men.

Rebecca Hall said that was a concern for her, when she first started getting into film presentation. Hall started at Doc Films, taking tickets, projecting films and eventually tackling publicity and other administration duties because, she says, “it was something no one else was bothering about.”

But what most struck here was the “weird culture” of Doc, which involved a fairly regular group of guys debating films and showing off for one another.

“Wow this is a guy thing,” Hall remembers thinking. “How can I even be friends with them? But of course I did end up being friends wih them.”

Friends, and more. Together with Kyle Westphal and Julian Antos, Hall founded the nonprofit Northwest Chicago Film Society, which emerged out of the ashes of the former Saturday night screenings at the Bank of America cinema and had, until its recent and abrupt closure, done a weekly series at the Portage Theatre.

Like LeMaster, Hall was most interested in creating a space where “we put on a show and people come to see it.” But her path there has been less through programming and more via administration and business building.

That's been the case for others as well. Hall told me Linda Stagner runs the business end of the Silent Film Festival, which is programmed by Stagner’s husband Dennis Wolkowicz.

Others: Amy Beste programs the annual experimental media series Conversations at the Edge for the School of the Art Institute. Anne Wells and Nancy Watrous run the Chicago Film Archives, and regularly presents free film programming throughout the city (full disclosure, I’m a member of the CFA’s advisory board).

Lyra Hill, a projectionist and filmmaker, runs Brain Frame, a performative comix event which includes a strong film component. Meanwhile Manual Cinema, which does shadow puppetry with “cinematic motifs” includes Julia Miller and Sarah Fornace among its members.

3. Film Festivals Lori Felker makes films, projects at the Siskel, and coordinates the Chicago Underground Film Festival. Mimi Plauché has been Programming Director at the Chicago International Film Festival since 2006. Noha El Shareif is the Executive Director of the Chicago Palestinian Film Festival.

That’s all I’ve got for now. Again, please add your favorite female film critics/programmers below. And let me know - does the lack of female film critics matter to you? Why or why not?

Alison Cuddy is WBEZ’s Arts and Culture reporter. Follow her @wbezacuddy, on Facebook and on Instagram

Porn stars on Vine: they're just like us

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 08:00:00 -0500

In the olden days of pornography, the lives of the performers were mostly limited to what we saw acted out on film.

Of course, rabid fans knew who Linda Lovelace was hooking up with offscreen and whether Jenna Jameson actually dated women in real life; but on the whole, porn stars existed as larger-than-life projections of what their audiences wanted them to be.

They played to the fantasies of millions, then disappeared back into their private lives. Under the guise of their erotic fake names and strategically-tailored public personas, they could expose every inch of themselves, yet still remain completely unknowable as human beings.

That is, until social media came along and changed everything.

While Facebook continues to lock out porn stars (their "no nudity" policy extends to Instagram as well), Twitter has welomed them with open arms. Not only can these performers tweet nude photos and other NSFW material to their personal accounts, but they can also use Vine—Twitter's six-second video sharing app, the moving picture version of Instagram—to create mini-movies of themselves for the world to see.

However, not all of these Vines are as titillating or overtly sexual as one might think. In fact, many of them are downright mundane: driving in traffic, cooking dinner, spinning around in parking lots (fun fact: Lexi Belle and I have the same Ikea office chair) and other activities that aren't unlike anything you, your sister or your best friend might capture on a given day.

This disarming display of normalcy is what makes these videos so remarkable. Porn stars are pulling back the curtain on their private lives and showing viewers that despite their "unique" career paths, they're really just like us.

For example, porn actress and activist Stoya wrote a wonderful piece for Vice a couple of weeks ago that defends this cultural shift, saying that social media outlets like Twitter, Tumblr and Vine have been enormously helpful in allowing viewers to see porn stars as more than just sexual objects:

"Porn stars can definitely be quirky and are probably more sexually liberated than the average adult, but we aren't so far removed from humanity that we're above concerns like bills and laundry," Stoya writes, "To pretend that we are underestimates the intelligence of people who are interested in the lives of porn stars or what goes on behind the scenes of the adult film industry."

Dylan Ryan is another porn actress who defends the right of women to be sexually liberated in whichever ways feel right for them, even going as far as to say that the choice of an adult film career can be both "feminist" and "empowering."

"I am the agent of my own experience," Ryan told the Huffington Post, "One of the things that people often think about porn is that the women who are performing in it are distant from their bodies or they're there because they're getting paid or because they've been sexually abused or because they have a very unhealthy sense of self. And while those stereotypes are based in a lot of realities that exist...that's not the experience of every performer, and that's not been my experience."

Perhaps one can be a feminist and a porn star, a kinky exibitionist and a down-home girl who likes to Vine videos of her cat jumping onto a beanbag chair. All of us are full of contradictions, some of them surprising and often endearing: that's what makes us human.

Does seeing photos and videos of Stoya goofing off with her friends or Lexi shopping for Nutella at the grocery store strip away their fantasy, or make them even more interesting—and by extension, even more sexy and appealing—to porn fans and naysayers alike?

Leave me your take on the humanization of porn stars (and whether this has been a positive or negative side effect of our 2013 "insta-share" culture) in the comments section below.

Leah Pickett writes about popular culture for WBEZ. Follow her on Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr.

Some disdainful thoughts on Superman

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 10:32:00 -0500

Superman is boring. What’s interesting about a guy who can do everything? Why don’t you just make a movie about God or something, only one that isn’t made by Mel Gibson or features God doing shenanigans like making newscasters talk funny. But seriously, a guy who can do everything is boring, especially if he always could do everything and it’s nothing new. If you just want a movie with a handsome guy in tight underwear, that’s fine, but have him be someone other than Superman.

And he’s from outer space? Ugh. Nothing (and I mean nothing—particularly no good movies) ever came from outer space. Do you know why the movie Inner Space was so good? Because it looked inward, not out into boring old space.

Here’s a funny joke I told my husband about Superman. “I’m allergic to bee stings: they’re my kryptonite. What’s Superman’s kryptonite?”

Perhaps you had to be there.

His outfit will never be cool, no matter how many textures they put on it.

How much money does Superman make? Because Bruce Wayne, when he’s not being Batman, is a rich playboy. Which is pretty cool.

At least Batman has the decency to cover half of his face to hide his true identity. People just seem dumb in Superman movies, not being able to figure out something so obvious.

Also, why does Superman need to wear an “S” on his chest? So people don’t forget who the immortal man who flies around their city is? Is there a danger with confusing him with someone else?

I also find the legend of how his outfit got made problematic. Who made it for him? Who is his tailor? Or did he make it himself, thereby giving himself the name and making a monogrammed outfit? Even I know his parents did not name him “Superman” at birth. Again: problems.

If Superman is so great, why can’t Clark Kent do something to save the dying newspaper industry?

In case you couldn’t tell, I like Batman more than I like Superman. I don’t consider Robin to be a real superhero, even when played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Spider-Man is just a kid. All the other superheroes are tedious at this point because they have had too many movies made about them or their movies were unnecessary to begin with. Don’t even get me started on whatever happened to Jean Grey in the third X-Men movie.

“Super” is a lame adjective. Would you trust someone who used the phrase “Super!” to describe any aspect of his or her life?

None of these points is arguable as they are all based in fact. If you enjoyed this piece, then you probably loved the Batman review I ran a few years ago. If not, don’t worry, I’m sure I will win you over at a future date.

Follow Claire Zulkey @Zulkey