Posted on May 9, 2015 at 8:43 pm
My beautiful and brilliant daughter, Rachel Apatoff, is a costume designer in Hollywood and she was interviewed on NPR today. A woman who worked with costume legends Edith Head and Bob Mackie was selling some of her possessions in a garage sale. Rachel was one of a long line of people, mostly in the industry, who came to see some of the fabrics and patterns she had collected.
Posted on July 13, 2013 at 3:01 pm
I love “This American Life.” For 17 years, Ira Glass has been sharing our stories, funny, wrenching, scary, romantic, always engaging and illuminating. He tells Buzzfeed how he feels 500 episodes later. Definitely worth a look, especially at the list of his favorite episodes and the memo with some of the other titles for the show that they considered and rejected. And here’s a good list of some of the best episodes to get started or to find gems you might have missed.
Posted on June 18, 2013 at 3:59 pm
There are 617 movie showings today — that’s just today, Friday — within 10 miles of my house.
Of those 617 showings, 561 of them — 90 percent — are stories about men or groups of men, where women play supporting roles or fill out ensembles primarily focused on men. The movies making up those 561 showings: Man Of Steel (143), This Is The End (77), The Internship (52), The Purge (49), After Earth (29), Now You See Me (56), Fast & Furious6 (44),The Hangover Part III (16), Star Trek Into Darkness (34), The Great Gatsby (16), Iron Man 3(18), Mud (9), The Company You Keep (4), Kings Of Summer (9), and 42 (5).
Thirty-one are showings of movies about balanced pairings or ensembles of men and women: Before Midnight (26), Shadow Dancer (4), and Wish You Were Here (1).
Twenty-five are showings of movies about women or girls: The East (8), Fill The Void (4),Frances Ha (9), and What Maisie Knew (4).
Of the seven movies about women or balanced groups, only one — the Israeli film Fill The Void — is directed by a woman, Rama Burshtein. That’s also the only one that isn’t about a well-off white American. (Well, Celine in Before Midnight is well-off, white and French, but she’s been living in the U.S.)
There are nearly six times as many showings of Man Of Steel alone as there are of all the films about women put together.
I want to stress this again: In many, many parts of the country right now, if you want to go to see a movie in the theater and see a current movie about a woman — any story about anywoman that isn’t a documentary or a cartoon — you can’t. You cannot. There are not any. You cannot take yourself to one, take your friend to one, take your daughter to one.
There are not any.
I love her description of what’s in theaters now: “Dudes in capes, dudes in cars, dudes in space, dudes drinking, dudes smoking, dudes doing magic tricks, dudes being funny, dudes being dramatic, dudes flying through the air, dudes blowing up, dudes getting killed, dudes saving and kissing women and children, and dudes glowering at each other.”
Posted on April 28, 2013 at 2:53 pm
I love the NPR news quiz show “Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me,” and listen every week. On May 2, fans will be able to watch the show live in theaters across the country. Tickets are available from Fathom Events. Peter Sagal and official judge and scorekeeper Carl Kasell will be joined by panelists Paula Poundstone, Mo Rocca and Tom Bodett to play the quiz in front of a live audience. And Steve Martin will be joining the cast to answer questions and play the popular segment “Not My Job!”
P.S. Ever wonder what Carl Kassel records for the winners? Listen here.
Posted on August 10, 2012 at 3:59 pm
NPR has a great list of the best books for teens, from a poll conducted by the publishing trade association. YA (young adult) readers are a bigger part of the book market than ever and books like the Twilight, Hunger Games, and Harry Potter series were first popular with teens and then became worldwide phenomenons — and box office-record-breaking franchise film series. The top 100 includes those books, of course, but also classics from the 1960’s and earlier: To Kill a Mockingbird, The Hobbit, Catcher in the Rye, Call of the Wild, and Fahrenheit 451. More recent authors include Sherman Alexie, John Green, and Stephen Chbosky, whose listed book, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, is the basis for a film opening later this year.
