A Glimpse Inside The Mind Of Charles Swan III
Rated R For language and some nudity
(movies with this rating will usually have bare breasts and brief bush)
Primarily interest : Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Aubrey Plaza.
Others in the cast and more likely to show tits : Bar Paly, Angela Lindvall, Katheryn Winnick, Patricia Arquette, Najarra Townsend, Lexy Hulme, Fabianne Therese, Stacy Jordan, Piper Hinson, Holly Sherman, Alena Savostikova.
(Indulge me for a moment, guys. Let me take you on a fantasy ride. Imagine the greatest opening intro scene Star Wars. The camera pans home to a bare-breasted woman in the bed. Kate is breaking up with Charles Swan III. Holy shit! Mary Elizabeth Winstead is topless and as she dresses we get clear view of her tits again....)
Girls Against Boys
Rated R For violence, some sexual content/nudity and language.
Nudity : Nicole LaLiberte (breasts)
Pusher
Rated R For pervasive drug content and language, some strong sexuality, nudity and violence.
Release Date: TBA 2013
Cast : Agyness Deyn (stripper/hooker), Daisy Lewis, Tracy Green, Joanne Rayner
Stand Up Guys
Rated R For language, sexual content, violence and brief drug use.
(this rating usually denotes brief topless scene)
Cast : Vanessa Ferlito, Addison Timlin, Weronika Rosati, Julianna Margulies, Katheryn Winnick, Courtney Galiano, Miss Switzerland 2005 Lauriane Gilliéron
(the old boys visits a brothel and chances are good we may get to feast our eyes on couple of Euro breasts in shape of Rosati and Gilliéron)
In theaters: October 5th, 2012
Rated R For strong bloody violence, sexual content, language and some drug use.
Cast : Katrina Bowden, Erin Marie Hogan (if there's any nudity it will probably come courtesy of Miss Hogan), Devanny Pinn (or her).
(Spoilers Alert : the trailer pretty much reveals the twist)
Rated R For violence and disturbing images, some language and brief nudity.
Primarily interest : Adelaide Clemens, model Heather Marks
Others in the cast : Carrie-Anne Moss, Radha Mitchell, Deborah Kara Unger, Jacky Lai, Cassie Owoc.
Silent Hill - Revelation 3D - Trailer by ohmygore
Seven Psychopaths
Rated R For strong violence, bloody images, pervasive language, sexuality/nudity and some drug use.
Release Date: October 12, 2012
Primarily interest : Abbie Cornish, Olga Kurylenko, Helena Mattsson, Jamie Noel.
(all four girls have performed nude/sex scenes before but the latter two is prime candidates for frontal nudity in the flick)
Wrong Turn 5: Bloodlines
Rated R For strong bloody horror violence, sexuality, language and drug content.
Cute newbie : Amy Lennox
(horrible dead scene but does she goes topless for the first time on-screen?)
Silent Night
Rated R For bloody violence, some sexuality/nudity, language and brief drug use.
Primarily interest : Jaime King.
Others in the cast : Cortney Palm, Courtney-Jane White, Jessica Cameron, Lisa Marie (likely to be nude), Ellen Wong
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'Fifty Shades of Grey' Movie Casting: Alexandra Daddario Now Anastasia Favorite?
By Bobby Pollier, EnStarz
The buzz over the film adaptation of E.L. James' "50 Shades of Grey" and its casting process has continued on full speed ahead. While recent chatter had many fans favoring former "Gilmore Girls" standout Alexis Bledel as one of the favorites to play Anastasia Steele, Alexandra Daddario is now being depicted as a newer and more suitable choice over the 30-year-old.
Most known for her role in the 2010 fantasy flick "Percy Jackson and The Olympians: The Lightning Thief," the actress has shown quite the range to pull off the sexy part - she has done adult-themed television work on NBC's "Parenthood" and USA's "White Collar," amongst other roles.
A description given by a Books and Review fan of "50 Shades" in June summed up the striking resemblance between the 26-year-old and Steele, the college graduate in the book and love interest to Christian Grey.
"I think Alexandra Daddario is the perfect Ana. She has the long brown hair, alabaster skin, blue eyes too big for her face and pouty lips. She has an innocent beauty requiring no makeup and can be played up sexy when need be," said the fan.
As of late, Daddario had recently wrapped work on the sequel "Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters," as well as the slasher film "Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3D."
Although no release date on the book's film adaptation has yet to be released, Universal Pictures and Focus Features secured the rights earlier in 2012. The casting process has yet to begin as well.
Most known for her role in the 2010 fantasy flick "Percy Jackson and The Olympians: The Lightning Thief," the actress has shown quite the range to pull off the sexy part - she has done adult-themed television work on NBC's "Parenthood" and USA's "White Collar," amongst other roles.
A description given by a Books and Review fan of "50 Shades" in June summed up the striking resemblance between the 26-year-old and Steele, the college graduate in the book and love interest to Christian Grey.
"I think Alexandra Daddario is the perfect Ana. She has the long brown hair, alabaster skin, blue eyes too big for her face and pouty lips. She has an innocent beauty requiring no makeup and can be played up sexy when need be," said the fan.
As of late, Daddario had recently wrapped work on the sequel "Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters," as well as the slasher film "Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3D."
Although no release date on the book's film adaptation has yet to be released, Universal Pictures and Focus Features secured the rights earlier in 2012. The casting process has yet to begin as well.
'Fifty Shades of Grey'movie poll: Ian Somerhalder, Alexandra Daddario on top
While bestselling “50 Shades” author EL James has said that casting Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele for the hotly awaited “Fifty Shades of Grey” movie is still some months away, fans are still putting their passion to the vote as to who should play the steamy trilogy’s leads on the big screen.
According to recent news from “Gather Entertainment” this Thursday, some new results have arrived on the latest big fan favorite casting poll. Two “Books and Review” polls in recent weeks have led by an impressive number of votes Ian Somerhalder—for lack of a better term—on top as Christian Grey, while actress Alexandra Daddario is in the lead for Anastasia Steele.
Alexis Bledel came in second place, and after a Twitter post earlier this week that the star was “happy” to hear fans wanted her to be cast as Ana, her popularity for landing the role seemed to rise even higher. However, the most recent reports confirm that the tweet was not verified by the “Gilmore Girls” actress, so it may have just been a rumor or hoax.
Yet on the “Books and Review” poll, Alexandra Daddario has now come out of the grey and into light of “Fifty Shades of Grey” film castings. To play the part of the 21-year-old blue-eyed, innocent college grad, Daddario does look to fit the part. She is closer in age to Ana’s character, and has the same blue eyes, dark hair, and attractive looks, though is a bit less well-known (which may not be a bad thing if that type of actress is considered for the role).
Alexandra Daddario is set to star in “Percy Jackson and The Olympians: The Lightning Thief” (out in U.S. theaters next year), and also made an appearance alongside Christian Grey casting choice, Matt Bomer, in “White Collar.”
In another “Books and Review” casting poll this August, Ian Somerhalder took first place—even beating out the second choice, Matt Bomer, by over 400 votes. Rumors also swirled this week that Ian Somerhalder had an alleged upcoming interview with the “Fifty Shades of Grey” film producers, and while there is confirmation on the “Vampire Diaries” actor thinking this, producer Dana Brunetti said they’re only looking at screenwriters for now.
Do you feel there could be chemistry on the big screen between actors Ian Somerhalder and Alexandra Daddario? While stars from Shia LaBeouf to Shailene Woodley may be considered by fans for now, EL James has said she would take her fans’ considerations into account before the final casting calls for the steamy book-into-film adaptation.
* She is my favorite as well and perfect for the role. Just got a feeling she doing movies just for fun of it and not as a serious career. She is from fairly wealthy background. Most likely Daddario will pass it on if her rep attempts to push the script on her. Big shock if she accepts the role. Largely depends on the script and director preferably a female helmer.
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* Maybe this is all cock-teasing of the cruelest kind but nudity dodger Katharine Isabelle will be nude at some point....
She's So Unusual: Directors Jen and Sylvia Soska Dish on AMERICAN MARY
The buzz surrounding Canadian identical twin horror directors Jen and Sylvia Soska is growing increasingly loud, despite the fact that their second feature film, American Mary, has yet to even premiere. Following the unlikely success of their ultra-low-budget grindhouse flick Dead Hooker in a Trunk, the girls quietly cultivated both a reputation and a serious fan base that includes director Eli Roth. It was just announced that their highly anticipated follow-up, set to bow next week at Film4 FrightFestin London, has been picked up by Universal Pictures International for distribution in a number of countries, including the United Kingdom and Germany. The film was produced by Vancouver, British Columbia based IndustryWorks Pictures, also the worldwide distributor.
According to recent news from “Gather Entertainment” this Thursday, some new results have arrived on the latest big fan favorite casting poll. Two “Books and Review” polls in recent weeks have led by an impressive number of votes Ian Somerhalder—for lack of a better term—on top as Christian Grey, while actress Alexandra Daddario is in the lead for Anastasia Steele.
Alexis Bledel came in second place, and after a Twitter post earlier this week that the star was “happy” to hear fans wanted her to be cast as Ana, her popularity for landing the role seemed to rise even higher. However, the most recent reports confirm that the tweet was not verified by the “Gilmore Girls” actress, so it may have just been a rumor or hoax.
Yet on the “Books and Review” poll, Alexandra Daddario has now come out of the grey and into light of “Fifty Shades of Grey” film castings. To play the part of the 21-year-old blue-eyed, innocent college grad, Daddario does look to fit the part. She is closer in age to Ana’s character, and has the same blue eyes, dark hair, and attractive looks, though is a bit less well-known (which may not be a bad thing if that type of actress is considered for the role).
Alexandra Daddario is set to star in “Percy Jackson and The Olympians: The Lightning Thief” (out in U.S. theaters next year), and also made an appearance alongside Christian Grey casting choice, Matt Bomer, in “White Collar.”
In another “Books and Review” casting poll this August, Ian Somerhalder took first place—even beating out the second choice, Matt Bomer, by over 400 votes. Rumors also swirled this week that Ian Somerhalder had an alleged upcoming interview with the “Fifty Shades of Grey” film producers, and while there is confirmation on the “Vampire Diaries” actor thinking this, producer Dana Brunetti said they’re only looking at screenwriters for now.
Do you feel there could be chemistry on the big screen between actors Ian Somerhalder and Alexandra Daddario? While stars from Shia LaBeouf to Shailene Woodley may be considered by fans for now, EL James has said she would take her fans’ considerations into account before the final casting calls for the steamy book-into-film adaptation.
* She is my favorite as well and perfect for the role. Just got a feeling she doing movies just for fun of it and not as a serious career. She is from fairly wealthy background. Most likely Daddario will pass it on if her rep attempts to push the script on her. Big shock if she accepts the role. Largely depends on the script and director preferably a female helmer.
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* Maybe this is all cock-teasing of the cruelest kind but nudity dodger Katharine Isabelle will be nude at some point....
She's So Unusual: Directors Jen and Sylvia Soska Dish on AMERICAN MARY
The buzz surrounding Canadian identical twin horror directors Jen and Sylvia Soska is growing increasingly loud, despite the fact that their second feature film, American Mary, has yet to even premiere. Following the unlikely success of their ultra-low-budget grindhouse flick Dead Hooker in a Trunk, the girls quietly cultivated both a reputation and a serious fan base that includes director Eli Roth. It was just announced that their highly anticipated follow-up, set to bow next week at Film4 FrightFestin London, has been picked up by Universal Pictures International for distribution in a number of countries, including the United Kingdom and Germany. The film was produced by Vancouver, British Columbia based IndustryWorks Pictures, also the worldwide distributor.
On Monday, I attended a private screening for cast and crew at the Rio Theatre in the Soska's hometown of Vancouver, where the film was shot. American Mary is the story of broke medical student Mary Mason, who becomes disillusioned enough with the "establishment" to drop out when she discovers a more lucrative way to make use of her surgical skills in the dangerous, underground world of extreme body modification. Starring Vancouverite Katharine Isabelle (Ginger Snaps, Freddy vs. Jason) and an eye-popping array of old-school prosthetics and special effects courtesy of Todd Masters and MastersFX (True Blood, Slither), the film is an homage to the kind of classic horror movies Jen and Sylvia grew up watching. "We're such horror nerds," Jen tells me.Following the screening, the jubilant directors (donning a pair of matching dresses worn by Mary in the film) brought their own Mary, actress Katharine Isabelle, up on stage for a round of applause. Sylvia issued a heartfelt apology for "covering her in so much blood, which she hated. But it was worth it!" Isabelle seemed both emotional and overwhelmed. "I'm very happy. I had a little bit of anxiety going in, but I knew that it would be good because of these girls. It turned out to be just wonderful. I love you two."
I had some time to chat with Jen, Sylvia and cast members Katharine Isabelle, John Emmett Tracy (Detective Dolor) and Tristan Risk (Beatress, pictured at left) about the making of the film and what audiences can expect from American Mary.
Congratulations, everyone, and thank you so much for letting me share this with you all. Katharine, everything having to do with this movie - the world of body modification, the character of Mary and her strange progression - it's all so unusual. What did you think when you first read the script?
Katharine Isabelle: At the time I had it sent to me my computer wasn't working, and I ended up reading the entire script on my Blackberry. All 190 pages! I really liked it, but I didn't know if I was crazy or not, so I had to get other people to read it. Like my mom, who is a very sensitive person. [Laughs]
I read the whole thing and I thought... I didn't know what I thought. I knew it was interesting and I really liked the themes, and I reallyliked Mary. The whole thing appealed to me, oddly. It wasn't anything specific: I just wanted to read it. I wanted to watch it. I wanted to be a part of it. It was one of the best scripts I'd ever read in my life. That was clearly something that was a big deal to me.
I don't like being covered in blood, wearing no clothes and in uncomfortable and awkward, horrifying situations, but it was so appealing to me that it totally overrode all of that. It made it more endearing, more interesting. It was like, 'Yeah, let's do this.' It was a great experience and these guys made it awesome.
Read the rest of the interview here
* She went on a diet for the role. Perhaps wants to look good in the buff.
Anna Karenina Teases High Society Sexual Scandal
Fittingly lavish, new images from Anna Karenina, the splendor of imperial Russia is merely the backdrop for a scandalous love affair. But strict rules and mores adhered to (and then broken) by high society have long been enticing setting for 99 per centers (and their friends) throughout the ages to witness aristocratic crash and burns through fleshly indulgences. And the screen version of Leo Tolstoy's novel appears to not hold back. Keira Knightley, Jude Law, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson (aka Aaron Johnson) star in the 19th century epic, directed by Joe Wright (Atonement, Pride & Prejudice) and adapted by Oscar-winner Tom Stoppard (Shakespeare in Love).
Read More at: http://movieline.com/2012/08/23/anna-karenina-teases-high-society-sexual-scandal/#utm_source=copypaste&utm_campaign=referral
Fittingly lavish, new images from Anna Karenina, the splendor of imperial Russia is merely the backdrop for a scandalous love affair. But strict rules and mores adhered to (and then broken) by high society have long been enticing setting for 99 per centers (and their friends) throughout the ages to witness aristocratic crash and burns through fleshly indulgences. And the screen version of Leo Tolstoy's novel appears to not hold back. Keira Knightley, Jude Law, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson (aka Aaron Johnson) star in the 19th century epic, directed by Joe Wright (Atonement, Pride and Prejudice) and adapted by Oscar-winner Tom Stoppard (Shakespeare in Love).Read More at: http://movieline.com/2012/08/23/anna-karenina-teases-high-society-sexual-scandal/#utm_source=copypaste&utm_campaign=referral
Rated R for some sexuality and violence (bit of nudity and perhaps heavy breathers shot in very low lighting as usual)
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Kelly Brook insisted on nude scenes in new movie
Playboy model Kelly Brook, who will be seen in new movie "Keith Lemon: The Film", insisted to put some nude scenes in the film after she realised the makers hadn't put any.
The 32-year-old believes she is most famous for appearing in her underwear and was surprised that the movie didn't have any revealing scene, reported Sun Online.
"I got the script - but there was no part where I was in underwear. There was nothing remotely like that. It was always Keith referencing sexy things. So I said to Leigh, 'You have not got one scene where I am in my underwear, which is probably what I am most famous for in the UK. "He goes, 'Well, we didn't want to ask you.' And I was like, 'Listen, I think you should do it. When I walk down the corridor, you can put me in slow-motion, give me a wind machine and let me do my thing," she said.
After Brook's request, movie bosses have now included a scene in the film, in which Brook plays herself and she is seen walking down a corridor in only her lingerie.
* Title is misnomer.......
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Alicia Silverstone in Broadway’s ‘The Performers’
Actress will join Henry Winkler and “30 Rock” star Cheyenne Jackson in a romantic comedy set in the porn industry
Alicia Silverstone is coming back to Broadway - in a romantic comedy set in the porn industry.
Producers of David West Read’s comedy “The Performers” said Wednesday the actress will join Henry Winkler and “30 Rock” star Cheyenne Jackson in the play, which begin previews Oct. 23 at the Longacre Theatre.
It’s about two high school friends who reconnect at the Adult Film Awards in Las Vegas. Silverstone will play the girlfriend of one of the friends.
The rest of the cast includes Daniel Breaker, Ari Graynor and Jenni Barber. Evan Cabnet, director of Read’s “The Dream of the Burning Boy,” will direct.
Silverstone made her Broadway debut in 2002 in “The Graduate” and was last on Broadway in 2010 opposite Laura Linney in “Time Stands Still.”
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Alicia Silverstone in Broadway’s ‘The Performers’
Actress will join Henry Winkler and “30 Rock” star Cheyenne Jackson in a romantic comedy set in the porn industry
Alicia Silverstone is coming back to Broadway - in a romantic comedy set in the porn industry.
Producers of David West Read’s comedy “The Performers” said Wednesday the actress will join Henry Winkler and “30 Rock” star Cheyenne Jackson in the play, which begin previews Oct. 23 at the Longacre Theatre.
It’s about two high school friends who reconnect at the Adult Film Awards in Las Vegas. Silverstone will play the girlfriend of one of the friends.
The rest of the cast includes Daniel Breaker, Ari Graynor and Jenni Barber. Evan Cabnet, director of Read’s “The Dream of the Burning Boy,” will direct.
Silverstone made her Broadway debut in 2002 in “The Graduate” and was last on Broadway in 2010 opposite Laura Linney in “Time Stands Still.”
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Tatiana Likhina will suck old cock (the guy calls himself Uncle!) and ass-fucked just to get ahead and live the high-life.....my kind of girl : Premiere of For a Good Time Call In [August]2012 (MQ)
http://globalgrind.com/entertainment/tatiana-likhina-russia-model-sexy-pics-photos
Modeling pics:
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Kim Soo Hyun with Kaya Scodelario @ J.ESTINA F/W 2012 Wallpaper (HQ)
More here : http://www.jestina.com/11fw/jStory/adList.asp
'True Blood' needs to stake out new stories
When last we last left True Blood (HBO, Sunday, 9 ET/PT), Russell Edgington was getting ready to kill all the Faeries.
We should be so lucky.
Unfortunately, as much as we may wish for a murder/suicide pact, there's only one stroke of luck viewers can count on: We have just Sunday's episode to go, and then this horror of a season will be over.
Squandering a terrific start, this once-entertaining, now wildly aggravating series went into a mid-stretch tailspin from which it never recovered. While Sunday's finale may turn out to be an improvement, it can't possibly be good enough to redeem a disastrous season. And judging by the heavy-handed war-is-upon-us previews, even improvement may be too much to hope.
Subtlety was never a True strong suit. But there used to be some wit in the outrageousness. Now the episodes seem a disjointed collection of blood, bare butts and breasts, mixed in with silly asides and a club-fisted attack on religious zealotry.
Those seeking to assign blame can start with a string of terrible subplots, many of them tied to the weakest set of new characters Blood has yet to introduce. It's hard to imagine what poor Scott Foley ever did to the writers, but whatever it was, it didn't justify being thrown into the show's most insultingly idiotic plot yet — a fire monster seeking revenge for Foley's character's war crimes. You can argue whether the special effects were stolen from Lost or Lord of the Rings, but that the treatment of the story demeaned the subject matter seems indisputable.
While that was clearly the worst subplot, none were worth the airtime they occupied, from Alcide's problems with his werewolf pack (does the character now exist solely so Joe Manganiello can appear shirtless?) to every painful moment spent with Sam, Luna and her puppy child.
As for those Faeries and their space-wasting nightclub, in their thousands of years of existence, shouldn't at least one of them have learned to dance? And what good is having a super-powerful Queen if all it takes to kill her is the age-old human shield trick?
Still, problems with its secondary stories are nothing new for Blood. What was new this season was the by-now unbearable main story, a drama-free plot that allowed the writers to mock fundamentalist beliefs without bothering to couch the mockery within an intelligible story or worrying about what it did to the main characters.
When the season introduced its "Lilith" vampire-religion factions, it looked like they would be background noise to the real point: turning Stephen Moyer's Bill, Alexander Skarsgard's Eric and Anna Paquin's Sookie into Hope, Crosby and Lamour, and sending them on the road in search of the missing Russell (Denis O'Hare, whose character has become as ludicrous as his occasional German accent). Instead, Russell was instantly found, and the three main characters separated and haven't shared a scene as a trio in months.
Why? So the show can continue to make the same point again and again about the foolishness of fundamentalism taken to violent extremes. What was once an allegory about prejudice has been stripped to the complexity of a billboard ad.
Still, there's always Sunday's last hope. Fingers crossed that Eric kills everyone in the vampires' secret compound, killing the vampire religion story with them — and that the show returns with a renewed determination to tell a story first, and let the point flow out of it.
Because otherwise, if this is the show True Blood now wants to be, the only point it needs is a stake to the heart.
* Hope the new show-runner will be more liberal with nudity and tougher on dodgers. Hire women willing to strip and kick-out the cock-teasers including Woll.
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| This Korean Infomercial Teaches You How to Ride |
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'Compliance' cleverly plays us all for suckers
By Roger Moore
McClatchy-Tribune News Service (MCT)
There are still people out there who are sending their savings to Nigeria. So for every jaw-dropping "How could they BE so gullible?" moment of "Compliance," there's justification. We are that gullible.McClatchy-Tribune News Service (MCT)
And that "inspired by true events" opening credit? Yeah, this really happened. More than once. Look up "strip search" on the urban legend-debunking website Snopes.com, and there it is.
"Compliance" is a thriller that permits you to stay two or three steps ahead of it. It's a film that makes you yell at the screen, to shout "Come ON!" at many a moment that seems to defy credulity.
But "credulity" is the name of the game, here. We're all too willing to set aside our skepticism and common sense when someone identifying himself as an authority figure insists on it — even if he's just barking orders over a telephone.
Sandra (the terrific Ann Dowd) is a bit overwhelmed running a rural Chick-wich fast-food franchise. Her staff, "the kids," are screw-ups. We meet her as she's getting yelled at by a supplier because she's trying to cover that up — the kids left the food locker opened and a lot of food spoiled.
The entry-level proles who work for her don't hold her in high regard. But still, she's older and she's the boss. In a brief scene or two, writer/ director Craig Zobel sketches in the employees — pretty, serial-dating Becky (Dreama Walker), Kevin, who has a crush on her (Philip Ettinger), the older Marti (Ashlie Atkinson), who has her own sort of crush, living vicariously through Becky's exploits.
Sandra's newly engaged. It's Friday night, the busiest night of the week. Sandra's worried over a "secret shopper," somebody from corporate who is due to show up and evaluate her staff and her work. And then the phone rings.
He says he's a police officer. He says there's been a theft. He says he and his team are investigating "a ring" of criminal activity whose members include one of her staff. Say what?
"I'm going to need for you to address me as 'sir' or 'officer,'" he snaps.
And we're off, hurtling into a working-class nightmare that is by equal measures maddening, alarming, titillating and shocking. "Officer Daniels" stays on the phone. He keeps promising "We'll be there soon." He builds trust, alternately insulting and complimenting first Sandra, then others who get on the phone after her.
Instantly, Becky is under suspicion. Within minutes, Sandra, the low-level management drone with a passing knowledge of company procedure and "compliance," is accusing the girl, searching the girl and, as Officer Daniels listens — strip-searching a 19-year-old in the employee's break room of a fast-food franchise.
Sandra and the other older characters brought into this situation may express doubts. But they've gotten used to taking orders. Kevin is still young enough to question authority. So is Becky. But shock makes her protests feeble. Walker gets across Becky's powerlessness and becomes exactly what the film's title implies, compliant.
"Don't make me do this. This is crazy."
Which is how most of us will react to this film. How could these people fall for this? Even before we see the caller (very early on), we've realized "This isn't the way they do it on 'Law and Order.' No cop would do any of this over the phone." The game is up.
But "Compliance" isn't about the game. It's about the psychology of compliance, our foolish willingness to follow orders, to ignore both common sense and common decency.
Zobel, who gave us the record-producer con-man comedy "Great World of Sound," isn't as good at creating the "We're slammed" sense of a fast-food joint running at high speed, racheting up the stress on staff and manager. That contributes to a maddening lack of tension, without which the behavior of characters seems harder to justify. And the slack pacing gives the viewer too many chances to shout "Are you kidding me?" at the screen.
But if you've made a movie that makes people want to do that sort of shouting, you've already won the battle. We've become just as compliant as everybody else.
‘Compliance’: The Year’s Most Controversial Film
Based on a true story, the provocative indie film Compliance has caused walkouts and post-screening shouting matches. Marlow Stern examines the real-life incidents that inspired the film and speaks with the film’s director and star.
When the curtains were drawn and the lights went up following the premiere screening of Compliance at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, the cramped movie theater—embedded in a library, no less—erupted in chaos.
“Sundance, you can do better!” an irate woman shouted. “This is not the year to make violence against women entertaining.”
Directed by Craig Zobel, the indie film follows a female manager (Ann Dowd) and several other members of a ChickWich fast food restaurant in rural Ohio as a man posing as a police officer phones and instructs the investigation of a teenage female checkout clerk (Dreama Walker), who he’s accusing of theft. After a series of psychological manipulations a la Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, including threatening her with jail time, forcing the detained woman to address him as “sir,” and the occasional friendly rationalization (“Look, I don’t like this as much as you do”), the girl is forced to submit to a strip search and, ultimately, commit a lewd sex act.
“People have these complicated relationships with authority,” Zobel told The Daily Beast. “I don’t think people do it out of malice, but I think people will do things that are even against their own morals if coerced.”
Compliance was shot in 15 days in a fast-food restaurant in New Jersey for under $1 million (Zobel agreed not to disclose the name of the franchise). Thanks to the naturalistic performances and minimalist filmmaking aesthetic, audiences are forced to assume the role of complicit voyeurs—silent witnesses to a depraved series of acts performed on a scared young girl, like those who did nothing while Kitty Genovese was stabbed to death in public in 1964. The New York Times called the film “a slow-motion punch to the groin,” while Time went one step further, branding it “Sundance torture porn.”
“Sandra [the movie’s fast-food restaurant manager] worries about losing her job, so that means you fall in line and do what’s expected of you,” Ann Dowd, who plays Sandra in Compliance, told The Daily Beast. “It’s about the pressure to survive.”
“As far as the exploitation of women is concerned, when you’re talking about power and the way that people use authority over others, it’s very hard to have that conversation be nuanced without discussing gender and the way that it’s used,” says Zobel. “I don’t think the film is trying to celebrate that in any way. So when people don’t meet me there on that, it’s a shame. I wasn’t trying to be a misogynist.”
Zobel studied a notorious series of social psychology experiments conducted in the '60s by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram. Milgram devised this study during the 1961 trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann to answer whether Eichmann and his Holocaust accomplices had mutual intent, i.e., whether the soldiers following orders were just as morally bankrupt as Eichmann himself. Subjects were assigned the roles of “teacher” and “learner” and placed in separate rooms. All subjects were then instructed to administer an electric shock on the unseen person, and were commanded to amp up the voltage regardless of the consequences. Most subjects applied the maximum 450 volts on their “victims” (no shocks were actually administered). Milgram summarized his findings in a 1974 article titled "The Perils of Obedience."
“Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.”
Given the current climate, Compliance also preys on audience’s post-9/11 fear and paranoia.
“I remember being in New York City in 2002, and it was pretty common to see police with extreme machine guns in the subway, and that soon became second nature to me,” says Zobel. “And people give up some amount of agency over their bodies on an institutional level every time they go on an airplane with TSA pat-downs.”
Zobel’s film is even more disturbing, however, when you consider that it actually happened.
On April 9, 2004, a man identifying himself as a policeman named “Officer Scott” phoned a McDonald’s in Mount Washington, Ky., and gave a vague description to assistant manager Donna Summers of a young woman with dark hair suspected of theft. The officer said he had received a report from the store’s manager, Lisa Siddons, who he claimed was on the other line. Summers believed that Louise Ogborn, an 18-year-old girl on duty, fit the description, and was ordered by the “cop” to take her to a back room. There, the man over the phone gave Ogborn an ultimatum: submit to a strip search or be arrested and taken to the police station.
Ogborn complied and removed all her clothes, which were then placed in a plastic bag by Summers and taken to her car (at the officer’s behest). Ogborn, meanwhile, was left with a nothing but a dirty apron covering herself. She sobbed.
“I honestly thought he was a police officer and what I was doing was the right thing,” Summers later said, according to ABC News. “I thought I was doing what I was supposed to be doing.”
The store was busy, so when Summers was forced to manage the restaurant, the officer demanded that another employee take her place, and that onus fell on 27-year-old Jason Bradley. Bradley didn’t buy what the “cop” was selling and left the scene in disgust. Summers was then talked into having her fiancé, Walter Nix, come down to the store and guard the accused teen.
Nix then began following the officer’s demands, including having Ogborn drop her apron, perform naked jumping jacks, have her genital area inspected, and spank her for refusing to kiss him and address him as “sir.” The entire incident was captured on surveillance camera, and Ogborn was spanked for 10 straight minutes.
“He told me I was asking too many questions, so he was told to hit me,” Ogborn said, according to ABC News. “I just said, ‘Please don’t do this.’”
After nearly three hours of abuse, Ogborn was forced by the man on the phone to perform oral sex on Nix.
After that, Nix was permitted by the cop to leave and find someone to replace him. That man was Thomas Simms, 58, a maintenance worker at the McDonald’s. Simms immediately suspected something was not right and informed Summers, who then called her manager and realized the whole thing was an awful hoax.
In the aftermath, Summers was fired by McDonald's for violating their corporate policy prohibiting strip searches, while Nix pleaded guilty to sexual assault, receiving a five-year prison sentence. Summers, meanwhile, entered an Alford plea to the misdemeanor charge of unlawful imprisonment, receiving a one-year probation. Ogborn, who suffered crippling PTSD from the incident, sued McDonald's and was awarded $5 million in punitive damages and $1.1 million in compensatory damages. It was later discovered that more than 70 such incidents had occurred across 30 states in which a man called, claiming to be a cop, and forced a fast-food restaurant or grocery-store manager to administer strip searches. No one was ever convicted of the crimes.
At the recent New York City premiere screening of Compliance, one woman loudly screamed “Gimme a break!” midway through the film and stormed out in disgust. Around eight others followed her out the door over the course of the movie.
“The point of the movie is to be open to all interpretations, and the only reading that bumps with me is when certain people say, ‘Why didn’t they just not do it? Why didn’t they get another job?’” says Zobel. “I’ve had jobs like this. Some people have to eat shit for their jobs because they need the money.”
‘Compliance’ taken to unusual and unpleasant extremes
Movies offer a matchless gift to their makers: verisimilitude. Seeing really is believing. Something in our neural nature predisposes us to accept whatever we see up on the screen as reality — and that’s even before factoring in synchronized sound and the illusion of motion. A giant, impregnable space station called the Death Star? Sure, why not. A little later, the destruction of that same Death Star by a torpedo-like thing whooshing up a heating duct? Sure, that, too. Some combination of our desire to believe and a filmmaker’s artistry makes the movies work.
That gift comes with a disclaimer, though. Note those words “filmmaker’s artistry.” Just as we happily grant the most fantastical onscreen actions a dramatic actuality so long as the filmmaker makes them seem real, so do we reject anything that violates our experience of human nature and everyday life. Even if we’re watching a docudrama about something we know happened, and it doesn’t feel real? Then forget about it.
“Compliance” claims to be based on a true incident. The incident in the movie takes place at a fast-food place in Ohio. Things aren’t going well at this particular ChickWich. Someone left the freezer door open overnight, so there isn’t enough bacon. Someone else has called in sick. A “franchise quality-control person” might be showing up. It’s Friday, a particularly busy day. So Sandra, the manager (Ann Dowd), is already feeling stressed when she’s told the police want her on the phone. One of her counter staff, Becky (Dreama Walker, of the charmingly titled ABC sitcom “Don’t Trust the B---- in Apartment 23”), has been accused of stealing from a customer’s purse.
The phone call comes about 15 minutes into the movie. Up to that point, it's not clear where “Compliance” is going — but it does seem to be getting somewhere. Writer-director Craig Zobel (“Great World of Sound”) conveys a sense of the over-bright yet beaten-down atmosphere that fast-food places specialize in; and the characters feel familiar without quite seeming stereotyped. Dowd, for example, has the sort of careworn, all-too-human face almost never seen in American movies.
Apparently, Fridays are really busy at police stations, too. So the man on the phone, Officer Lewis (Pat Healy, channeling his inner Kevin Spacey), asks that Becky be taken into a back room, since the police are unable to get to the ChickWich quite yet. The next 70 minutes or so consist of him ordering Sandra and then other ChickWich staff to interrogate, inspect, and do other increasingly outrageous things to Becky. Lewis asks if Sandra has a husband. No, but she has a boyfriend. Well, Lewis proposes, why not have him come by and help out? Sandra thinks this is a fine idea. Well, it’s not, with degrading consequences for both Becky and Sandra’s boyfriend (though a lot worse for her).
A young woman at the press screening for “Compliance” asked the friend I watched it with, “At what point do you think the movie became exploitative?” He answered with a question of his own. “For the actors or the audience?”
People do stupid things all the time. My friend and I sat through “Compliance,” didn’t we? But there is a level of stupidity displayed by the people in this movie that beggars belief. Their behavior is to stupidity as the Death Star is to a doughnut.
Anyone in this country who has seen a minimum of two episodes of a TV crime series — which is to say, everyone in this country over the age of 7 — knows at least a little bit about police procedure: the accused’s right to make a phone call, being read the Miranda warning, how understandably proprietary cops are about what they do, stuff like that. About two minutes into Officer Lewis’s phone call any one of those people will figure out what’s going on. About five minutes into the phone call, that same person will begin to wonder why no one in the movie has. And about 15 minutes into the phone call, that person may recall a presumably apocryphal story about Pia Zadora.
Wanting to strengthen her acting credentials, she was appearing at a Florida dinner theater in “The Diary of Anne Frank” in the title role. Things got so bad that when the Gestapo appears onstage someone in the audience yelled, “They’re hiding in the attic!” I guarantee you — SPOILER ALERT — someone at some showing of “Compliance” is going to yell, “He’s not a cop!”
'Compliance': Following prankster's orders turns creepy, unsettling
A movie review of "Compliance," a claustrophobic and vastly unsettling drama in which ordinary people in ordinary settings are psychologically manipulated by a sick prankster to engage in behaviors so egregious that his victims can scarcely believe they're doing them. Yet they do them anyway.
by Soren Andersen [Special to The Seattle Times]
A voice on the phone turns strangers into puppets in "Compliance."
The voice is authoritative. Insistent. Persistent. Demanding. Commanding. It won't take no for an answer.
The voice on the phone claims it's the voice of a cop. It's not.
But the voice exerts such a hold on the people who hear it that they do things that are against their better natures. Outrageous things. Degrading things. Things, though, that are not unbelievable.
Inspired by actual incidents, writer-director Craig Zobel has crafted a claustrophobic and vastly unsettling drama in which ordinary people in ordinary settings are psychologically manipulated by a sick prankster to engage in behaviors so egregious that his victims can scarcely believe they're doing them. Yet they do them anyway.
The setting is a fast-food restaurant. More specifically, and most of the time, the setting is a back office in the place. In that claustrophobic space, the manager (Ann Dowd) takes a call from a man (Pat Healy) who claims he's a cop and accuses a teenage employee (Dreama Walker) of stealing money out of a customer's purse.
The man instructs the manager to interrogate the girl until officers arrive on the scene (which they never do). The girl insists she's innocent. The manager is doubtful. The voice bores in, instilling fear in the girl by threatening her with jail, and commanding obedience from the manager through unrelenting insistence that she follow his instructions. The instructions escalate to a demand that the girl be strip-searched and worse.
The movie's power — and it's an extraordinarily powerful picture — comes from the fact that it makes wholly believable the slippery-slope nature of the victimization of these two ordinary women; how their compliance with the caller's initial demands makes them his prisoners, helpless to disobey his escalating instructions.
One watches in horrified fascination, and a greater horror comes when one realizes that, placed in the same kind of situation, one might react in the same way.
'Compliance' review: Discomforting witnesses
Amy Biancolli
Some films are harder to watch than others - not because they're bad, which makes for a different sort of painful viewing, but because they touch on areas of such profound moral discomfort that the mere act of watching makes us feel complicit. We feel like gutless witnesses to a crime. And that's what makes "Compliance" such a hard thing to stomach. Based on the infamous "strip search" prank calls that occurred over several years and dozens of states (the plot closely tracks one incident at a McDonald's in Kentucky), the movie dramatizes what might, could, did happen if a man were to call up a fast-food restaurant and claim to be a cop investigating a young female employee. And then what might, could, did happen if one person after another simply did as they were told - no matter how unconstitutional, outrageous or wrong.
So "Officer Daniels" (Pat Healy) rings up an Ohio "Chickwich" shop one busy Friday night and speaks to the manager, the decent, harried Sandra (Ann Dowd). He tells her of a theft: A blond employee stole money from a customer's purse, he says. Without thinking, Sandra feeds him the name of an employee who fits the description - Becky, played by Dreama Walker - and immediately brings her to the phone.
Becky, understandably bewildered, denies she did anything wrong. But that doesn't matter. Daniels tells Sandra the police can't spare any officers to come down in person. He tells her Becky is under investigation for other crimes, too. He tells her to strip Becky and search her.
And Sandra does as she's instructed - because the man says he's a cop, because he assumes an air of authority, and because no one, it seems, has the moral courage or simple presence of mind to doubt him.
Eventually someone does, but not until it's too late. Not until "Compliance," with its bare-bones cinematography, naturalistic, nuanced acting and unblinking directness of gaze, forces us to consider the horror at the heart of simply going along.
Although the worst of it is shot at discreet angles, it's still there. You'll still know it's happening, and you'll wonder, if you were in the room with these folks, whether you'd do anything differently.
"Compliance" was written and directed by Craig Zobel, whose "Great World of Sound" took an amusing peek at a small, dysfunctional record label. That movie was far less disturbing than this one, but Zobel's filmmaking MO is well apparent in both: the frazzled workers; the mundane settings; the loose, realistic dialogue; and a moral component that finally pushes someone to object and take action.
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Video : News Anchor Rejected On-Air After Asking Weather Girl If She Wants to "Canoodle"
It's always funny to see people get rejected on live camera, but when those people hold some sort of important job? Even better. Take CTV news anchor Andrew Johnson, for instance. Following a news segment that involved a woman employed at a historical society using the term "canoodling," Johnson jokingly asked weather girl Astrid Braunschmidt if she wanted to "canoodle" a bit before she reported the weather. Braunschmidt was having none of that, though, and quickly - not to mention harshly - shuts her co-worker down.
Johnson's response?
"Oh, I thought canoodle meant 'chat'!
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Rewind: Salma Hayek on Her Famous Sex Scene
Known for her acting and intriguing beauty, Salma Hayek has become one Hollywood's greatest Latina actresses. This Pop Culture Rewind takes you back to the beginning of her career, to a film and a scene that shot her to fame.
Although she had already experienced a life of fame and fortune in her native Mexico with the telenovela Teresa, Hayek wanted more than fame for her persona and decided to move to the U.S. for a fuller acting career.
"I don't like doing something like that," the then-27-year-old Coatzacoalcos native says in the featured flashback. "I hate to disappoint the public and every single woman probably, but it's not the most fun thing to do. It's not my favorite thing."
While the scene--which occurs between her character, "Carolina," and Banderas', "El Mariachi"--may have boosted her career to some extent, Hayek continues to express her distaste for the scene, which she describes as "extremely hard" and "extremely, extremely uncomfortable."
Not only did she have to film the scene, which is understandably uncomfortable, but she also had to watch the scene on the big screen with the thought of others, and more importantly, her family, watching it.
"The first thing that goes through my mind is...'My father has to swear to me he's going to close his eyes when he sees this,'" she says, "Then I try to make myself strong and say...'This is completely cool. Meryl Streep's done it; everybody's done it; what's the big deal about it?'"
The scene's positive reception doesn't change her feelings about acting out love scenes, but it certainly doesn't hurt to know that over 80 percent of viewers selected it as their favorite scene in the film, as she divulges.
"I like it that people like it so much, though," Hayek says.
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Fall TV Preview: 15 Shows To Look Out For In The Coming Season
With the summer pretty much winding down in every way except the temperature, our thoughts are starting to turn towards the fall line-up. Over the next week or two as the festival season gears up, we're going to be casting our eye on what to expect not just from Venice, Telluride and TIFF, but also the rest of the movie season in general.
But of course, movies aren't all that will be available to watch. With TV going through something of a golden age (and our coverage of the medium growing), we wanted to kick off our fall preview week by looking at some of the most exciting TV shows that are set to debut over the next six months or so. Below you'll find ten shows that should premiere on the networks and cable channels in the near future. And given the increasing popularity of British shows like " Downton Abbey," "Luther," "Sherlock" and "Doctor Who" in the U.S., we've also added a bonus five from across the pond. Read on for more, and let us know what you'll be looking forward to yourselves on the small screen in the near future.
But of course, movies aren't all that will be available to watch. With TV going through something of a golden age (and our coverage of the medium growing), we wanted to kick off our fall preview week by looking at some of the most exciting TV shows that are set to debut over the next six months or so. Below you'll find ten shows that should premiere on the networks and cable channels in the near future. And given the increasing popularity of British shows like " Downton Abbey," "Luther," "Sherlock" and "Doctor Who" in the U.S., we've also added a bonus five from across the pond. Read on for more, and let us know what you'll be looking forward to yourselves on the small screen in the near future.
The latest movie star to make his way onto the small screen (something that you'll see being a recurring theme on this list) is Liev Schreiber. The excellent character actor (most recently seen in "Goon") dipped his toe into TV waters a few years back with a four-episode arc on "CSI," but has now plunged into the waters properly by taking the title part in "Ray Donovan," which will air on Showtime in the new year. The "Salt" star plays a South Boston native who tries to juggle his job as a fixer for LA's rich and famous with the needs of his troubled, tempestuous family. Schreiber tops off a pretty great cast that inlcudes Jon Voight as his father, Eddie Marsan and Dash Mihok as his brothers, Paula Malcolmson ("Deadwood") as his wife, and Elliott Gould as his mentor. That's certainly a cast we're prepared to watch every week. The premise seems a touch generic -- somewhere between "Entourage" and "House of Lies" -- and the previous credits of creator Ann Biderman ("Copycat," "Primal Fear," "Public Enemies") aren't glowing, but this is certainly one of the more promising shows in the works.
When? Most likely January once "Homeland" finishes its run.
"Masters of Sex" is Showtime's other big new drama of the year, and you can imagine from the title alone that it'll be controversial fare. Appearing like a mid-point between "Mad Men" and "Kinsey," and based on the book "Masters of Sex: The Life and Times of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, The Couple Who Taught America How To Love," it sees Michael Sheen (in his first regular TV gig, having replaced the originally cast Paul Bettany) and Lizzy Caplan play Masters and Johnson, pioneering researchers into the field of human sexual response, who also began an affair with each other during their work. It's likely to wind up the moral majority, but also more liberal types (the pair ran a program to convert homosexuals to heterosexuality), but there seems to be more than enough potential for drama in the premise that we can see this being fascinating stuff, particularly with two excellent actors (joined by Emmy-winner Margo Martindale and Beau Bridges) in the lead roles. The script comes from Michelle Ashford ("The Pacific," "John Adams"), while "Shakespeare in Love" and "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel" director John Madden helmed the pilot.
When? Also January. We imagine Showtime will pair it with "Ray Donovan" on Sunday nights.
More here.
* The boys at indiewire are pervs just like us for nude games choosing couple of shows with promises of topless scenes by Ambyr Childers as wild rock-star attracted to Donovan and abundance of nudes by Broadway actors in MOS.
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Ostrow: Starz poised to go head to head with pay-cable giants after spinof
Imagine a great city, a mayoral hopeful once said of Denver.
Now imagine a great city with a great pay-cable network based here.
Can you imagine Starz on par with Showtime and HBO?
Insiders are wondering whether Starz, the Colorado-based pay-cable company, will be gobbled up by a large corporation, now that it has been split from John Malone's Liberty Media.
Starz boss Chris Albrecht, the former head of HBO, sought to calm the troops in a meeting at the Meridian headquarters on Tuesday, at which he told the staff it is "financially advantageous" to keep the company's operations based here. Albrecht visits almost every other week; a spokesperson stresses there is no plan to relocate and there are hot titles in the pipeline.
This spring, David Goyer ("The Dark Knight Rises") will deliver "DaVinci's Demons," shooting in Wales and the first collaboration between Starz and BBC Worldwide. Next year, Michael Bay's pirate saga "Black Sails" and the Weinstein Co.'s "Marco Polo" are in store. "Vlad Dracula," from J. Michael Straczynski ("Thor") is in development. And Starz will keep "Spartacus" creator Steven S. DeKnight in-house with an overall development deal that includes the forthcoming "Incursion," a sci-fi, alien-fighting thriller. And next month sister network Encore will unveil "The Crimson Petal and the White."
But still, the mood inside Starz is understandably tense, as employees wait for the next shoe to drop.
It's possible Starz could become an independent TV production and distribution source. More likely, it will be swallowed by a bigger fish. Financial analysts are mulling which corporations are likely suitors to acquire the company. A media company? A streaming service? Someone else entirely?
Best guess: a multinational media conglomerate that doesn't already have a pay-cable branch.
Time Warner already has HBO; CBS Corp. already has Showtime.
What big media company has a studio but no pay-cable arm? Both Disney and Comcast/NBC fit that criteria. Starz is valued at around $2.8 billion. That might fit nicely into either portfolio.
Albrecht has told Starz investors the focus is on spending more on original programming. The goal is 50 hours of originals a year by 2014, a tall order.
The Denver area has benefitted from the presence of Starz ever since the network bowed on the old TCI (also under Malone) in 1994. Not only in terms of jobs, but as a creative presence, Starz is part of the local cultural landscape. The Starz Denver Film Festival is an important annual fixture, along with the attendant conferences, symposia and, not least, receptions.
On the tube, Starz is less well defined. The "multiplex" idea of Starz and Encore — so many channels, so many name changes — has always been confusing. Starz Cinema, Starz Family, Starz Comedy, Starz Edge, Starz multiplex moviepack superpack cluster. Not to mention Encore Western, Encore Love Stories, Encore Suspense, Encore Wam! and too many more. Someone needs to acquire, streamline, promote and have it make sense.
The real goal for Starz, as far as viewers are concerned, should be stepping up to the level of Showtime. In the old days, HBO owned the Emmys, the critical love and the pay-cable subscriber numbers. Then "Homeland" became the breakthrough original that proved Showtime could play in the big leagues, in terms of awards as well as subscribers and revenue. Now it's time for Starz to do the same.
"Spartacus" is a great draw for Starz, but it's a niche favorite, as "Dexter" is to Showtime. Neither of Starz's recent originals, "Boss" nor "Magic City," has risen to the "Homeland" level of dramatic greatness.
Starz means business with its focus on originals. As to quality, we'll have to wait and see.
Albrecht welcomed the Starz spinoff from Liberty as "the first step to unlocking the real potential growth opportunities for our businesses."
With luck, those growth opportunities will share the wealth with Colorado.
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Ostrow: Starz poised to go head to head with pay-cable giants after spinof
Imagine a great city, a mayoral hopeful once said of Denver.
Now imagine a great city with a great pay-cable network based here.
Can you imagine Starz on par with Showtime and HBO?
Insiders are wondering whether Starz, the Colorado-based pay-cable company, will be gobbled up by a large corporation, now that it has been split from John Malone's Liberty Media.
Starz boss Chris Albrecht, the former head of HBO, sought to calm the troops in a meeting at the Meridian headquarters on Tuesday, at which he told the staff it is "financially advantageous" to keep the company's operations based here. Albrecht visits almost every other week; a spokesperson stresses there is no plan to relocate and there are hot titles in the pipeline.
This spring, David Goyer ("The Dark Knight Rises") will deliver "DaVinci's Demons," shooting in Wales and the first collaboration between Starz and BBC Worldwide. Next year, Michael Bay's pirate saga "Black Sails" and the Weinstein Co.'s "Marco Polo" are in store. "Vlad Dracula," from J. Michael Straczynski ("Thor") is in development. And Starz will keep "Spartacus" creator Steven S. DeKnight in-house with an overall development deal that includes the forthcoming "Incursion," a sci-fi, alien-fighting thriller. And next month sister network Encore will unveil "The Crimson Petal and the White."
But still, the mood inside Starz is understandably tense, as employees wait for the next shoe to drop.
It's possible Starz could become an independent TV production and distribution source. More likely, it will be swallowed by a bigger fish. Financial analysts are mulling which corporations are likely suitors to acquire the company. A media company? A streaming service? Someone else entirely?
Best guess: a multinational media conglomerate that doesn't already have a pay-cable branch.
Time Warner already has HBO; CBS Corp. already has Showtime.
What big media company has a studio but no pay-cable arm? Both Disney and Comcast/NBC fit that criteria. Starz is valued at around $2.8 billion. That might fit nicely into either portfolio.
Albrecht has told Starz investors the focus is on spending more on original programming. The goal is 50 hours of originals a year by 2014, a tall order.
The Denver area has benefitted from the presence of Starz ever since the network bowed on the old TCI (also under Malone) in 1994. Not only in terms of jobs, but as a creative presence, Starz is part of the local cultural landscape. The Starz Denver Film Festival is an important annual fixture, along with the attendant conferences, symposia and, not least, receptions.
On the tube, Starz is less well defined. The "multiplex" idea of Starz and Encore — so many channels, so many name changes — has always been confusing. Starz Cinema, Starz Family, Starz Comedy, Starz Edge, Starz multiplex moviepack superpack cluster. Not to mention Encore Western, Encore Love Stories, Encore Suspense, Encore Wam! and too many more. Someone needs to acquire, streamline, promote and have it make sense.
The real goal for Starz, as far as viewers are concerned, should be stepping up to the level of Showtime. In the old days, HBO owned the Emmys, the critical love and the pay-cable subscriber numbers. Then "Homeland" became the breakthrough original that proved Showtime could play in the big leagues, in terms of awards as well as subscribers and revenue. Now it's time for Starz to do the same.
"Spartacus" is a great draw for Starz, but it's a niche favorite, as "Dexter" is to Showtime. Neither of Starz's recent originals, "Boss" nor "Magic City," has risen to the "Homeland" level of dramatic greatness.
Starz means business with its focus on originals. As to quality, we'll have to wait and see.
Albrecht welcomed the Starz spinoff from Liberty as "the first step to unlocking the real potential growth opportunities for our businesses."
With luck, those growth opportunities will share the wealth with Colorado.
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Masterpiece Theater
by Hex
I say, good chaps. While I readily admit to enjoying a jolly laugh as much as anyone, I’ve become gravely concerned at the rising level of ribald discourse among the good people of this community.Whatever happened to content that enriches while it entertains? Can’t we find a way to enjoy each other’s good company whilst broadening our horizons at the same time?
With this in mind, I am pleased — nay, humbled to present this cinematic representation of Russian interpretive dance, featuring some of the world’s most beloved Classical Music.
Truly this represents enlightenment of the highest degree.
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* Some things do change.........
Boys on the Side
The hookup culture that has largely replaced dating on college campuses has been viewed, in many quarters, as socially corrosive and ultimately toxic to women, who seemingly have little choice but to participate. Actually, it is an engine of female progress—one being harnessed and driven by women themselves.
by Hanna Rosin
The porn pic being passed around on the students’ cellphones at an Ivy League business-school party last fall was more prank than smut: a woman in a wool pom-pom hat giving a snowman with a snow penis a blow job. Snowblowing, it’s called, or snowman fellatio, terms everyone at this midweek happy hour seemed to know (except me). The men at the party flashed the snapshot at the women, and the women barely bothered to roll their eyes. These were not women’s-studies types, for sure; they were already several years out of college and proud veterans of the much maligned hookup culture that, over the past 15 years or so, has largely replaced dating on college campuses and beyond.
One of the women had already seen the photo five times before her boyfriend showed it to her, so she just moved her pitcher of beer in front of his phone and kept on talking. He’d already suggested twice that night that they go to a strip club, and when their mutual friend asked if the two of them were getting married, he gave the friend the finger and made sure his girlfriend could see it, so she wouldn’t get any ideas about a forthcoming ring. She remained unfazed. She was used to his “juvenile thing,” she told me.
I had gone to visit the business school because a friend had described the women there as the most sexually aggressive he had ever met. Many of them had been molded on trading floors or in investment banks with male-female ratios as terrifying as 50-to-1, so they had learned to keep pace with the boys. Women told me stories of being hit on at work by “FDBs” (finance douche bags) who hadn’t even bothered to take off their wedding rings, or sitting through Monday-morning meetings that started with stories about who had banged whom (or what) that weekend. In their decade or so of working, they had been routinely hazed by male colleagues showing them ever more baroque porn downloaded on cellphones. Snowblowing was nothing to them.
In fact, I found barely anyone who even noticed the vulgarity anymore, until I came across a new student. She had arrived two weeks earlier, from Argentina. She and I stood by the bar at one point and watched a woman put her hand on a guy’s inner thigh, shortly before they disappeared together. In another corner of the room, a beautiful Asian woman in her second year at school was entertaining the six guys around her with her best imitation of an Asian prostitute—“Oooo, you so big. Me love you long time”—winning the Tucker Max showdown before any of the guys had even tried to make a move on her. (She eventually chose the shortest guy in the group to go home with, because, she later told me, he seemed like he’d be the best in bed.)
“Here in America, the girls, they give up their mouth, their ass, their tits,” the Argentinean said to me, punctuating each with the appropriate hand motion, “before they even know the guy. It’s like, ‘Hello.’ ‘Hello.’ ‘You wanna hook up?’ ‘Sure.’ They are so aggressive! Do they have hearts of steel or something? In my country, a girl like this would be desperate. Or a prostitute.”
So there we have it. America has unseated the Scandinavian countries for the title of Easiest Lay. We are, in the world’s estimation, a nation of prostitutes. And not even prostitutes with hearts of gold.
Is that so bad? Or is there, maybe, a different way to analyze the scene that had just unfolded? Admittedly, what the Argentinean and I had just witnessed fills the nightmares of those who lament the evil hookup culture: ubiquitous porn, young women so inured to ubiquitous porn that they don’t bother to protest, young women behaving exactly like frat boys, and no one guarding the virtues of honor, chivalry, or even lasting love. It’s a sexual culture lamented by, among others, Caitlin Flanagan, in the pages of this magazine as well as in her nostalgia-drenched new book, Girl Land. Like many other critics, Flanagan pines for an earlier time, when fathers protected “innocent” girls from “punks” and predators, and when girls understood it was their role to also protect themselves.
Girl Land, like so much writing about young women and sexuality, concentrates on what has been lost. The central argument holds that women have effectively been duped by a sexual revolution that persuaded them to trade away the protections of (and from) young men. In return, they were left even more vulnerable and exploited than before. Sexual liberation, goes the argument, primarily liberated men—to act as cads, using women for their own pleasures and taking no responsibility for the emotional wreckage that their behavior created. The men hold all the cards, and the women put up with it because now it’s too late to zip it back up, so they don’t have a choice.
But this analysis downplays the unbelievable gains women have lately made, and, more important, it forgets how much those gains depend on sexual liberation. Single young women in their sexual prime—that is, their 20s and early 30s, the same age as the women at the business-school party—are for the first time in history more successful, on average, than the single young men around them. They are more likely to have a college degree and, in aggregate, they make more money. What makes this remarkable development possible is not just the pill or legal abortion but the whole new landscape of sexual freedom—the ability to delay marriage and have temporary relationships that don’t derail education or career. To put it crudely, feminist progress right now largely depends on the existence of the hookup culture. And to a surprising degree, it is women—not men—who are perpetuating the culture, especially in school, cannily manipulating it to make space for their success, always keeping their own ends in mind. For college girls these days, an overly serious suitor fills the same role an accidental pregnancy did in the 19th century: a danger to be avoided at all costs, lest it get in the way of a promising future.
The business-school women I met were in an extreme situation. Wall Street culture had socialized them to tolerate high degrees of sexual crudeness, and they were also a decade past the tentative explorations of their freshman year. But they are merely the most purified sample of a much larger group of empowered college-age women. Even freshmen and sophomores are not nearly as vulnerable as we imagine them to be.
On a mild fall afternoon in 2011, I sat in a courtyard with some undergraduates at Yale to ask about their romantic lives. A few months earlier, a group of mostly feminist-minded students had filed a Title IX complaint against the university for tolerating a “hostile sexual environment on campus.” The students specifically cited a 2010 incident when members of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity stood outside freshman dorms chanting “No means yes! Yes means anal!” I’d heard this phrase before, from the business-school students, of course: on spring break, they had played a game called “dirty rounds”—something like charades, except instead of acting out movie or book titles, they acted out sex slogans like the one above, or terms like pink sock (what your anus looks like after too much anal sex). But the Yale undergraduates had not reached that level of blitheness. They were incensed. The week before I arrived, an unrelated group of students ran a letter in the campus paper complaining that the heart of the problem was “Yale’s sexual culture” itself, that the “hookup culture is fertile ground for acts of sexual selfishness, insensitivity, cruelty and malice.”
At Yale I heard stories like the ones I had read in many journalistic accounts of the hookup culture. One sorority girl, a junior with a beautiful tan, long dark hair, and a great figure, whom I’ll call Tali, told me that freshman year she, like many of her peers, was high on her first taste of the hookup culture and didn’t want a boyfriend. “It was empowering, to have that kind of control,” she recalls. “Guys were texting and calling me all the time, and I was turning them down. I really enjoyed it! I had these options to hook up if I wanted them, and no one would judge me for it.” But then, sometime during sophomore year, her feelings changed. She got tired of relationships that just faded away, “no end, no beginning.” Like many of the other college women I talked with, Tali and her friends seemed much more sexually experienced and knowing than my friends at college. They were as blasé about blow jobs and anal sex as the one girl I remember from my junior year whom we all considered destined for a tragic early marriage or an asylum. But they were also more innocent. When I asked Tali what she really wanted, she didn’t say anything about commitment or marriage or a return to a more chivalrous age. “Some guy to ask me out on a date to the frozen-yogurt place,” she said. That’s it. A $3 date.
But the soda-fountain nostalgia of this answer quickly dissipated when I asked Tali and her peers a related question: Did they want the hookup culture to go away—might they prefer the mores of an earlier age, with formal dating and slightly more obvious rules? This question, each time, prompted a look of horror. Reform the culture, maybe, teach women to “advocate for themselves”—a phrase I heard many times—but end it? Never. Even one of the women who had initiated the Title IX complaint, Alexandra Brodsky, felt this way. “I would never come down on the hookup culture,” she said. “Plenty of women enjoy having casual sex.”
Books about the hookup culture tend to emphasize the frustration that results from transient sexual encounters, stripped of true intimacy: “A lot of [boys] just want to hook up with you and then never talk to you again … and they don’t care!” one woman complains to Kathleen Bogle in Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus. “That might not stop you [from hooking up,] because you think: ‘This time it might be different.’ ” From her interviews with 76 college students, Bogle also deduces that the double standard is alive and well. Men tally “fuck points” on their frat-house bulletin boards. Women who sleep with “too many” men are called “houserats” or “laxtitutes” (a term of art denoting women who sleep with several guys on the lacrosse team) or are deemed “HFH,” meaning “hot for a hookup” but definitely not for anything more. The hookup culture, writes Bogle, is a “battle of the sexes” in which women want relationships and men want “no strings attached.”
But it turns out that these sorts of spotlight interviews can be misleading. Talk to an individual 19-year-old woman such as Tali on a given day, and she may give you an earful of girl trouble. But as her girlfriend might tell her after a teary night, you have to get some perspective. Zoom out, and you see that for most women, the hookup culture is like an island they visit, mostly during their college years and even then only when they are bored or experimenting or don’t know any better. But it is not a place where they drown. The sexual culture may be more coarse these days, but young women are more than adequately equipped to handle it, because unlike the women in earlier ages, they have more-important things on their minds, such as good grades and internships and job interviews and a financial future of their own. The most patient and thorough research about the hookup culture shows that over the long run, women benefit greatly from living in a world where they can have sexual adventure without commitment or all that much shame, and where they can enter into temporary relationships that don’t get in the way of future success.
In 2004, Elizabeth Armstrong, then a sociologist at Indiana University, and Laura Hamilton, a young graduate student, set out to do a study on sexual abuse in college students’ relationships. They applied for permission to interview women on a single floor of what was known as a “party dorm” at a state university in the Midwest. About two-thirds of the students came from what they called “more privileged” backgrounds, meaning they had financial support from their parents, who were probably college-educated themselves. A third came from less privileged families; they supported themselves and were probably the first in their family to go to college. The researchers found their first day of interviewing so enlightening that they decided to ask the administration if they could stay on campus for four years and track the 53 women’s romantic lives.
Women in the dorm complained to the researchers about the double standard, about being called sluts, about not being treated with respect. But what emerged from four years of research was the sense that hooking up was part of a larger romantic strategy, part of what Armstrong came to think of as a “sexual career.” For an upwardly mobile, ambitious young woman, hookups were a way to dip into relationships without disrupting her self-development or schoolwork. Hookups functioned as a “delay tactic,” Armstrong writes, because the immediate priority, for the privileged women at least, was setting themselves up for a career. “If I want to maintain the lifestyle that I’ve grown up with,” one woman told Armstrong, “I have to work. I just don’t see myself being someone who marries young and lives off of some boy’s money.” Or from another woman: “I want to get secure in a city and in a job … I’m not in any hurry at all. As long as I’m married by 30, I’m good.”
The women still had to deal with the old-fashioned burden of protecting their personal reputations, but in the long view, what they really wanted to protect was their future professional reputations. “Rather than struggling to get into relationships,” Armstrong reported, women “had to work to avoid them.” (One woman lied to an interested guy, portraying herself as “extremely conservative” to avoid dating him.) Many did not want a relationship to steal time away from their friendships or studying.
Armstrong and Hamilton had come looking for sexual victims. Instead, at this university, and even more so at other, more prestigious universities they studied, they found the opposite: women who were managing their romantic lives like savvy headhunters. “The ambitious women calculate that having a relationship would be like a four-credit class, and they don’t always have time for it, so instead they opt for a lighter hookup,” Armstrong told me.
The women described boyfriends as “too greedy” and relationships as “too involved.” One woman “with no shortage of admirers” explained, “I know this sounds really pathetic and you probably think I am lying, but there are so many other things going on right now that it’s really not something high up on my list … I know that’s such a lame-ass excuse, but it’s true.” The women wanted to study or hang out with friends or just be “100 percent selfish,” as one said. “I have the rest of my life to devote to a husband or kids or my job.” Some even purposely had what one might think of as fake boyfriends, whom they considered sub–marriage quality, and weren’t genuinely attached to. “He fits my needs now, because I don’t want to get married now,” one said. “I don’t want anyone else to influence what I do after I graduate.”
The most revealing parts of the study emerge from the interviews with the less privileged women. They came to college mostly with boyfriends back home and the expectation of living a life similar to their parents’, piloting toward an early marriage. They were still fairly conservative and found the hookup culture initially alienating (“Those rich bitches are way slutty” is how Armstrong summarizes their attitude). They felt trapped between the choice of marrying the kind of disastrous hometown guy who never gets off the couch, and will steal their credit card—or joining a sexual culture that made them uncomfortable. The ones who chose the first option were considered the dorm tragedies, women who had succumbed to some Victorian-style delusion. “She would always talk about how she couldn’t wait to get married and have babies,” one woman said about her working-class friend. “It was just like, Whoa. I’m 18 … Slow down. You know? Then she just crazy dropped out of school and wouldn’t contact any of us … The way I see it is that she’s from a really small town, and that’s what everyone in her town does … [they] get married and have babies.”
Most of the women considered success stories by their dormmates had a revelation and revised their plan, setting themselves on what was universally considered the path to success. “Now I’m like, I don’t even need to be getting married yet [or] have kids,” one of the less privileged women told the researchers in her senior year. “All of [my brother’s] friends, 17-to-20-year-old girls, have their … babies, and I’m like, Oh my God … Now I’ll be able to do something else for a couple years before I settle down … before I worry about kids.” The hookup culture opened her horizons. She could study and work and date, and live on temporary intimacy. She could find her way to professional success, and then get married.
Does this mean that in the interim years, women are living a depraved, libertine existence, contributing to the breakdown of social order? Hardly. In fact, women have vastly more control over their actions and appetites than we have been led to believe. You could even say that what defines this era is an unusual amount of sexual control and planning. Since 2005, Paula England, a sociologist at New York University, has been collecting data from an online survey about hookups. She is up to about 20,000 responses—the largest sample to date. In her survey, college seniors report an average of 7.9 hookups over four years, but a median of only five. (“Hookups” do not necessarily involve sex; students are instructed to use whatever definition their friends use.) This confirms what other surveys have found: people at either end of the scale are skewing the numbers. Researchers guess that about a quarter of college kids skip out on the hookup culture altogether, while a similar number participate with gusto—about 10 hookups or more (the laxtitutes?). For the majority in the middle, the hookup culture is a place to visit freshman year, or whenever you feel like it, or after you’ve been through a breakup, says England. Most important, hookups haven’t wrecked the capacity for intimacy. In England’s survey, 74 percent of women and about an equal number of men say they’ve had a relationship in college that lasted at least six months.
When they do hook up, the weepy-woman stereotype doesn’t hold. Equal numbers of men and women—about half—report to England that they enjoyed their latest hookup “very much.” About 66 percent of women say they wanted their most recent hookup to turn into something more, but 58 percent of men say the same—not a vast difference, considering the cultural panic about the demise of chivalry and its consequences for women. And in fact, the broad inference that young people are having more sex—and not just coarser sex—is just wrong; teenagers today, for instance, are far less likely than their parents were to have sex or get pregnant. Between 1988 and 2010, the percentage of teenage girls having sex dropped from 37 to 27, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. By many measures, the behavior of young people can even look like a return to a more innocent age.
Almost all of the college women Armstrong and Hamilton interviewed assumed they would get married, and were looking forward to it. In England’s survey, about 90 percent of the college kids, male and female, have said they want to get married.
One of the great crime stories of the past 20 years, meanwhile, is the dramatic decline of rape and sexual assault. Between 1993 and 2008, the rate of those crimes against females dropped by 70 percent nationally. When women were financially dependent on men, leaving an abusive situation was much harder for them. But now women who in earlier eras might have stayed in such relationships can leave or, more often, kick men out of the house. Women, argues Mike Males, a criminologist at the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, “have achieved a great deal more power. And that makes them a lot harder to victimize.”
We’ve landed in an era that has produced a new breed of female sexual creature, one who acknowledges the eternal vulnerability of women but, rather than cave in or trap herself in the bell jar, instead looks that vulnerability square in the face and then manipulates it in unexpected, and sometimes hilarious, ways. In the fall of 2010, Karen Owen, a recent graduate of Duke University, became momentarily famous when her friends leaked her pornographic PowerPoint presentation cataloging her sexual exploits with 13 Duke athletes, whom she identified by name, skill, and penis size (“While he had girth on his side, the subject was severely lacking in length”). In Owen’s hands, scenes of potential humiliation were transformed into punch lines. (“Mmm tell me about how much you like big, black cocks,” Subject 6, a baseball player, told her. “But, I’ve never even hooked up with a black man!” she told him. “Oh … well, just pretend like you have,” he responded. “Umm ok … I like big, black … cocks?”)
The 2012 successor to the iconic single-girl show of a decade ago, Sex and the City, is Girls, a new HBO series created by the indie actress/filmmaker Lena Dunham, who plays the main character, Hannah. When Hannah has sex, she is not wearing a Carrie Bradshaw–style $200 couture bra and rolling in silk sheets, but hiking her shirt up over belly flesh loose enough that her boyfriend, Adam, can grab it by the fistful. In one scene, they attempt anal sex: “That feels awful.” In another, Adam spins a ridiculously degrading fantasy about Hannah as an 11-year-old hooker with a “fucking Cabbage Patch lunch box.” Hannah plays along, reluctantly. But when they’re done, she doesn’t feel deep remorse or have to detox with her girlfriends or call the police. She makes a joke about the 11-year-old, which he doesn’t get, and then goes home to rock out with her roommate to Swedish pop star Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own.”
In Hannah’s charmed but falling-apart life, her encounters with Adam count as “experience,” fodder for the memoir she half-jokingly tells her parents will make her “the voice of [her] generation.” She is our era’s Portnoy, entitled and narcissistic enough to obsess about precisely how she gets off. (Adam, meanwhile, plays the role of the Pumpkin, or the Pilgrim, or the Monkey, the love or lust objects from Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint—all merely props in Portnoy’s long and comical sexual journey.) The suspense in the series is not driven by the usual rom-com mystery—will she or won’t she get her man?—because she snags him pretty early in the series. Instead it’s driven by the uncertainty of Hannah’s career—will she or won’t she fulfill her potential and become a great writer? When, in the season finale, Adam asks to move in, she rejects him. We’re left to believe that one reason is because she’s afraid he might get in the way of her bigger plans to be a writer.
There is no retreating from the hookup culture to an earlier age, when a young man showed up at the front door with a box of chocolates for his sweetheart, and her father eyed him warily. Even the women most frustrated by the hookup culture don’t really want that. The hookup culture is too bound up with everything that’s fabulous about being a young woman in 2012—the freedom, the confidence, the knowledge that you can always depend on yourself. The only option is what Hannah’s friends always tell her—stop doing what feels awful, and figure out what doesn’t.
Young men and women have discovered a sexual freedom unbridled by the conventions of marriage, or any conventions. But that’s not how the story ends. They will need time, as one young woman at Yale told me, to figure out what they want and how to ask for it. Ultimately, the desire for a deeper human connection always wins out, for both men and women. Even for those business-school women, their hookup years are likely to end up as a series of photographs, buried somewhere on their Facebook page, that they do or don’t share with their husband—a memory that they recall fondly or sourly, but that hardly defines them.
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