Search Results for: Comedy

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Ronan Farrow, Nawal al-Maghafi, Corey Robin, Minda Honey, and E. Alex Jung.

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Korean Director Bong Joon-ho on How to Laugh in the Face of Horror

TORONTO, ONTARIO - SEPTEMBER 07: Director Bong Joon-Ho of 'Parasite' attends The IMDb Studio Presented By Intuit QuickBooks at Toronto 2019 at Bisha Hotel & Residences on September 07, 2019 in Toronto, Canada. (Photo by Rich Polk/Getty Images for IMDb)

In this Vulture profile ahead of the release of the his new film Parasite, Korean director Bong Joon-ho (Snowpiercer, The Host) talks to E. Alex Jung about the menace of Harvey Weinstein, having full creative control over his films, and how laughter helps release the anxiety of living in a modern dystopia.

Bong’s work reflects anxieties he feels every day — about the climate crisis, the widening income gap. “My films generally seem to have three components: fear, anxiety, and a kekeke sense of humor,” he says, using the Korean equivalent of “ha-ha.” “Humor comes from anxiety, too,” he adds. “At least when we laugh, there’s a feeling that we’re overcoming some kind of horror.” In his view, our world is already a dystopia, and all tragedy and comedy flows from this fact.

Parasite, in particular, hits a nerve, tapping into the persistent feeling that we are on the brink of social collapse. “The true horror and fear of Parasite isn’t just about how the present-day situation is bad but that it will only continue to get worse,” he says. “That’s my own fear in my life. I’m 50 now, so I’m going to die in about 30 years. My son is 23 now. When he reaches middle age, after I die, will it get better? I don’t know. I’m not so hopeful. Still, we have to try to live happily. We can’t cry every day.” (He’s surprisingly sanguine about all of this.)

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We All Die In the End, But Our Skin Looks Great: A Reading List

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Sara Benincasa is a quadruple threat: she writes, she acts, she’s funny, and she has truly exceptional hair. She also reads, a lot, and joins us to share some of her favorite stories

I am as superficial and vain as anyone who wants to look hot, fun, and flirty 900% of the time (and who achieves it maybe 20% of the time). But for 35 years of my life, my vanity was missing a piece. Then, sometime in 2016, the internet let me know that I needed to pay more attention to the largest organ in my body. Obsessive attention, in fact. I found it impossible to care that much about my skin, but my vanity did permit a certain amount of heightened interest in my birthday suit. So while I have not yet gone for diamond microdermabrasion, a fruit acid facial, a full-body salt scrub and seaweed wrap, gua sha, cupping, or a ritual beating with branches by a woman of Eastern European extraction, I have considered all of these! But why?

The answer, of course, is so that someone will love me. No one told me, specifically, that I must engage in one or all of these things or else risk a lifetime of loneliness, but the message that skin-care marketing sends is: Do this, or wither in isolation. It is demonstrably true that one can live happily and healthily with wrinkles, blemishes, dry skin, dark spots, light spots, inflammation, and visible pores on one’s epidermis. But digital marketing, that most seductive form of storytelling, got married to social media and found even more insidious ways to invade our brains. Look at enough of those headlines, subject lines, Instagram ads, sponsored tweets, and carefully crafted hashtags and calls to action and you, too, will fall into the abyss.

I had a great deal of fun researching the topic and I made it out without buying any goop from Goop, a website primarily known for selling pussy eggs to white women, which is surely some kind of tiny victory. So enjoy this array of skin-care research, stunt reportage, and opining from around the web.

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End of Discussion

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Soraya Roberts | Longreads | October 2019 |  8 minutes (2,066 words)

This will be impossible to tweet. It always is. How do you siphon 2,500 words into 280 characters? More importantly, how do you turn a measured thesis into something interesting, and by interesting I mean shareable, and by shareable I mean divisive. It’s one thing to say, I don’t know, “Todd Phillips is a no-talent ass clown;” it’s another thing to imply that over more than a thousand words analyzing the bottomless lack of depth in Joker. “It was literally like ‘Let’s make a real movie with a real budget and we’ll call it fucking Joker,’” the director told The Wrap in September, his defense against accusations that his film intentionally glorified a character who many considered an incel antihero. And it wasn’t just the critics. Victims of the 2012 Aurora shooting, which took place during a The Dark Knight Rises screening, even asked for donations to survivor funds and gun violence intervention programs. Phillips was confused by the controversy. “Isn’t it good to have these discussions about these movies, about violence?” he asked. “Why is that a bad thing if the movie does lead to a discourse about it?”

It’s not a bad thing, except this isn’t a discourse. To have a discourse you need a modicum of intellectual humility on both sides, which is to say, both sides need to have some idea that what they believe might be wrong in order to actually be receptive to the opposing opinion. Neither Phillips nor the social media mob he was taking issue with were having a discourse. It’s hard to blame the latter, since the thing getting in the way was not so much them as it was the medium. It’s easier to blame Phillips, whose party line is that he broke the mold by taking a simplistic trope and turning it into a profound piece of art that explores contemporary fears, when, in actual fact, it only signals depth while remaining superficial. In a similar display of contradictions, now that his clown movie is being swept up into a complex discourse, Phillips is refusing to engage with it, instead opting for reductive dismissal that mirrors the online critiques he so openly disparages. Read more…

Bong Joon-ho’s Dystopia Is Already Here

Longreads Pick

Bong Joon-ho’s work reflects anxieties he feels every day—about the climate crisis, the widening income gap. “My films generally seem to have three components: fear, anxiety, and a kekeke sense of humor,” he says, using the Korean equivalent of “ha-ha.” “Humor comes from anxiety, too,” he adds. “At least when we laugh, there’s a feeling that we’re overcoming some kind of horror.” In his view, our world is already a dystopia, and all tragedy and comedy flows from this fact.

Source: Vulture
Published: Oct 7, 2019
Length: 16 minutes (4,200 words)

Shelved: The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band’s “Brain Opera”

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Tom Maxwell | Longreads | September 2019 | 18 minutes (3,497 words)

 

In 1993, interviewers from the psychedelic music magazine Ptolemaic Terrascope stood on Viv Stanshall’s stoop, wondering if he would answer the doorbell. Stanshall’s friend, who set up the meeting, was just beginning to apologize when she turned and gasped: A frail and obviously drunk Stanshall, according to the article, “staggering down the road clutching a carved stick and a white plastic carrier bag containing a freshly purchased bottle of Mr. Smirnoff’s elixir,” lurched toward the house.

“Vivian, you look awful!” the friend said. “Where’s your shoes?”

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The Bread Thread

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Emily Weitzman | Longreads | September 2019 | 13 minutes (3,335 words)

 

EMILY WEITZMAN IS A HUGE FUCKING SLUT.

 

The words leap out of the computer screen and hang in the air. Enlarging, colliding, rearranging:

 

EMILY WEITZMAN IS A HUGE FUCKING SLUT.

Emily Weitzman Is a Fucking Huge Slut

Emily Weitzman Is Fucking A Huge Slut

Emily Is Weitzman Fucking A Slut

Weitzman A Fucking Slut

Huge Fucking, Emily:

SLUT.

 

When I sign on to my college’s gossip site, the “Anonymous Confession Board,” there’s my name at the top of the homepage. The words glare back at me. I rush into my dorm room and shut the door. I’m terrified the entire freshman class has seen the post by now. “Anonymous” could be in my English class or my dorm room or my bed. I hide in my room and call my friend Lisle, four floors below in Clark Hall. She has seen the thread and already begun retaliating. But every time she replies to defend me, the insult continues to rise to the top of the homepage. Lisle decides we should force the post down the page by starting another thread. Instead of writing slander, we set out to find a topic that’s neutral, undeniably loved.

The answer is simple: bread.

We call it: “The Bread Thread.” Lisle explains: “Everyone loves bread!” Maybe you don’t eat bread, but you likely don’t despise it either. The first post begins: I FUCKING LOVE BREAD! Soon someone adds: I thought no one could relate to my obsession with bread! People get into friendly debates on what’s the best bread spread. They post about white bread, wheat bread, flat bread, pita bread, rye bread, corn bread, banana bread, tortilla. “The Bread Thread” spreads across campus. Everyone writes of their love for the loaf.

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The Art of Acceptance Speech Giving

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Michael Musto | Longreads | September 2019 | 9 minutes (2,135 words)

We’ve heard it a million times: “I was nothing until I got this award, and now I’m everything. But this honor isn’t really for me. It’s for you — all the little people out there in the dark, who now have all the inspiration you need to know that someday you can be as great as I am. You just might be holding this trophy someday long into the future — though right now, it’s me! And I love it! Thank you to the Academy, CAA, and God — in that order!!!!”

Inspirational, right? Nope. That’s actually a tone deaf, self aggrandizing approach to an awards speech, and we usually end up loathing the winner for being so condescendingly grand about their big moment. It comes off extra phony because we sense that, deep down, the winner isn’t really thrilled with the idea that this honor may lead to millions of other wannabes yapping at their heels and trying to win one.

So what should an award winner say? Well, with the mass audience taking to social networks to dissect every moment of awards shows, speechmaking definitely makes a difference, to the point where a 90-second acceptance can make or break a career almost as much as the award itself can. Anne Hathaway seemed to become significantly less popular because of her breathless laundry lists of names (and by starting her Oscar speech with “It came true”), whereas Meryl Streep has become even more beloved because her speeches are invariably witty, pointed, and also touching. (They should let Meryl win every time, even when she’s not nominated, just so we can hear her talk.)

Meryl knows that an acceptance speech should be sincere yet entertaining, succinct yet somewhat comprehensive, and humble yet confident, and there should also be some real emotion involved. In another seeming contradiction, there needs to be serious thought put into what the winner is saying, but they should also make sure to brim with the spontaneity of the moment. Come on, folks, you’re actors — you can do it.

Glenn Close did brilliantly at the Golden Globes earlier this year, when she was a surprise Best Actress winner for The Wife. Glenn looked shocked when her name was called, yet she quickly composed herself to speak about the themes of the movie and to come off truly grateful and honored. And in framing The Wife as being about a talented woman living in someone else’s shadow, she seemed to herself be crawling out from behind Meryl Streep! It was such a terrific speech that I was sure it clinched Glenn the Oscar, but that instead went to The Favourite’s Olivia Colman, who wasn’t necessarily the favorite, but gave a lovably daffy acceptance that was eccentric and droll.

Alas, instead of speeches like those, we usually get Hathaway-like name checks (“I want to thank my accountant, Jim; my trainer, Joanne…”), speeches that leave out key names (In 2000, when Hilary Swank won her first Oscar, for Boy’s Don’t Cry, she forgot to thank then-hubby Chad Lowe; they eventually split), phony bouts of gushing, self-satisfied preening, fake-spontaneous recitations (“I didn’t plan anything”) that seem to have been rehearsed for months, and canned orations full of platitudes and advice, as if we schlepps out there want nothing more than to someday win Best Lighting in a Musical, and the winner knows just how we can get there.
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Regarding the Interpretation of Others

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Patrick Nathan | Longreads | September 2019 | 30 minutes (8,235 words)


“The only review of Under the Sign of Saturn would be the eighth essay — an essay describing me as I have described them. The pathos of intellectual avidity, the collector (mind as every-thing), melancholy & history, arbitrating the moral claim versus aestheticism, and so forth. The intellectual as an impossible project.”

Susan Sontag, journal entry, May 1980


 

1:

Differently, we buy and borrow, and steal, our ongoing educations. American writers tend to forget this, even dissuade it. There is an assumption — general, if not unconscious — that “we” have all read Raymond Carver and Joan Didion, seen Dazed and Confused and The Princess Bride, and exhausted “prestige” television from Lost to Big Little Lies. That these works are canon in a post- or anti-canonical culture highlights the need for inexhaustible and pluralistic inspiration against the deprivation of that need. What’s worse, if you are labeled — black, queer, immigrant, disabled, trans, or a woman — those expectations constrict; the canon tightens. To be a gay writer means one must have read Edmund White and seen Mean Girls; to write as a black woman means one must have read Angela Davis and seen Kara Walker’s silhouettes. What was supposed to liberate our literary sensibilities has reduced us, clinically, to trained specialists. Under this pressure, so carefully curated and categorized, it’s difficult to will one’s own work into being. To learn passively, and ultimately write passively, is the great cultural temptation.

Yes, I have been reading — and reading about — Susan Sontag. There is nothing passive in her legacy. In her combined erudition, ambition, and seriousness, she has few peers, and for several years she has symbolized my aspirations as a writer — the uncompromising rigor with which she approached her essays; her self-proclaimed interest in “everything”; an urgency in dissenting, when ethically necessary, from received opinion; her energy in consuming art constantly; and the esteem, to the end of her life, in which she held literature, above all fiction. Her passion is contagious. Sontag’s narcotic approach to art and experience is, for a provincial writer with little access, renewably invigorating; and because Sontag’s lifetime of work is willed, Nietzscheanly, from her passions, reading about her life is its own invigorating project. In this, Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life and Work, at 832 pages, is certainly her legacy’s largest complement. Read more…

My Love Affair with Chairs

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Keah Brown | An excerpt adapted from The Pretty One: On Life, Pop Culture, Disability, and Other Reasons to Fall in Love with Me | Atria Books | 2019 | 17 minutes (4,556 words)

 

My longest relationship has been with chairs. We are very happy together, committed and strong, in sickness and health till death do us part, etc. There are arguments and disagreements as in any other relationship, but we apologize and make up before nightfall so we don’t go to bed angry. The notion of love at first sight is a little cheesy but true. Chairs and I have traveled around the world and back again. We cuddled on the beach in Puerto Rico, shared stolen glances in the Virgin Islands, danced the night away in Grand Turk, and gave some major PDA in the Bahamas. My chairs are loyal, with vastly different personalities but an equal amount of appreciation for the butt of mine that sits in them. A few of them like to play it cool: they don’t want me to think that they care as much as they do, and I let them believe that it’s working. After all, sometimes you have to let your partner think they have the upper hand, to work toward the long game of the bigger thing you want later. However, you and I, dear reader, we know the truth. The chairs in my life love me, and I honestly can’t blame them. Read more…