Behind the Scenes of Buffy, Ghost, Daria, and More in Entertainment Weekly
Posted on April 2, 2017 at 2:56 pm
This week’s issue of Entertainment Weekly is a treasure trove of behind the scenes information about favorite movies like “Love Actually” and “Ghost” and favorite television shows like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer and “Daria.” Be sure to pick it up to find out about deleted and never-filmed scenes, cast replacements, and where some of pop culture’s most iconic moments came from. I especially enjoyed the conversation between Kenya Barris (“Black-ish”) and television legend Norman Lear (“All in the Family,” “Good Times,” “One Day at a Time,” “The Jeffersons” and many, many others).
EW Explains the Inside Jokes from “22 Jump Street”
Posted on June 16, 2014 at 8:00 am
I got most of these, and especially enjoyed the “Benjamin Hill Center for Film Studies,” glimpsed during the silly chase scene. But I didn’t know anything about this one.
Lord and Miller treated fans with another Easter egg when they included a familiar dolphin sound in the opening set-up’s exotic animal truck chase. Dolphin references are one of Lord and Miller’s signatures; you can find them in every episode of the pair’s cult favorite TV series Clone High.
Karen Valby has an excellent essay in the current issue of Entertainment Weekly about stripping scenes in recent movies, like Jennifer Aniston in “We’re the Millers” and Gwyneth Paltrow seducing her new boyfriend in “Thank You for Sharing.” Both, of course, are featured in the movie’s advertising and trailers. Valby asks, “Are actresses losing more than their clothes?”
The real foolishness in all of this, though, is the critics’ suggestion that the person who should feel shame is not the “We’re the Millers” screenwriter but the woman hired to perform what’s on the page. Let me be clear: If a woman in your script is a stripper, then the problem is you — specifically, your laziness and your limp imagination. You want to give your female character an edge, make her vulnerable and hungry for redemption? You haven’t nailed it by making her a stripper. All you’ve done is prove that you (or your producer) are likely a venal horndog who wants a T&A moment for the trailer.
It is particularly disappointing because this has been such a poor year for women’s roles in studio films. It’s really good to see people like Valby speaking out.
I love Entertainment Weekly‘s lists of under-appreciated films and the current issue’s list includes some of my favorites, the movies I am constantly begging people to try. It is a great chance to see some wonderful films, and in may you will also have the pleasure of seeing some of today’s most accomplished performers in their early years.Some I was especially excited to see included:
Happy Accidents Marisa Tomei has not had much luck with guys, until this new man (Vincent D’Onofrio), who seems great except for this one small problem — he says he is from the future.
Next Stop Wonderland Like “Happy Accidents,” directed by Brad Anderson, this one stars a radiant Hope Davis. We know long before she does that she is destined to fall in love with a man she won’t meet until the very end of the film.
Backbeat Once upon a time, five boys from Liverpool left England to play at a club in Germany. This is the story of the earliest days of the Beatles, from the perspective of Stu Sutcliffe, an integral part of the beginning of the group (though he was more interested in art than music).
The Daytrippers Hope Davis plays a woman who discovers that her husband (Stanley Tucci) may be unfaithful. So she and her whole family get into her parents’ car to drive to his office and find out. Co-starring Parker Posey, Liev Schreiber, and Anne Meara, with a small gem of a very brief performance by Marcia Gay Harden.
Fly Away Home Before she was hanging out with vampires in “True Blood” and speaking with an American accent, Anna Paquin starred in this exquisite fact-based film about a girl who is adopted by a flock of baby geese and has to teach them to fly to safety.
The Iron Giant Before he made “The Incredibles” and “Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol” director Brad Bird made this marvelous animated film about a boy who befriends a robot.
Love and Basketball About eighty percent love and twenty percent basketball, this is a romance about two basketball-loving kids (Sanaa Lathan and Omar Epps) who go one-on-one in both games for almost twenty years before they get it right.
Entertainment Weekly commissioned a study showing political differences in television-watching and they are so pronounced it provides some explanation of the increasing polarization and partisanship of our political conversations. In the early days of television, Marshall McLuhan famously called it the “Global Village.” With so few choices available to watch, we all saw the same programs and that created a common framework and vocabulary, whether it was “The Ed Sullivan Show” or “I Love Lucy. But the range of choices has led to such disparity in our sources of information and entertainment that television now separates us more than it brings us together. EW asked people who described themselves as “liberal Democrats” or “conservative Republicans” to list the television programs they liked and didn’t like, so the results are intentionally focused on the extremes, and the survey excluded news, sports, and music.
Are you surprised by any of these?
Liberal Democrats like “The Daily Show” and “Masterpiece” and generally picked comedies, highly verbal shows like “30 Rock,” “The Office,” “Modern Family” and “Saturday Night Live” more than the conservative Republicans. They don’t like “Dog the Bounty Hunter” and “Cops.”
Conservative Republicans like “Castle,” Jay Leno, and cable reality shows like “Swamp Loggers” (one of the liberal Democrats’ least favorites). They don’t like anti-hero shows like “Weeds” and “Dexter” and left-leaning political comedy shows like “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report.”
Encouragingly, if a little predictably, both sides like “The Middle.”
Less encouragingly, this data will be used to determine where political advertising dollars are spent, which promotes even less overlap in world view and understanding between the extremes on both sides.
