You look at your pay stub, and you see what you are supposed to get paid, and you see what the government takes out of it before you even get it. And that deflation. They have people controlling that for them. Long talks about the prospects that any of the current GOP contenders will garner much support in Hollywood.
Back in , George W. Bush reached out to the entertainment industry, having held a meet-and-greet at the home of Terry Semel, with such figures as Quincy Jones and Warren Beatty in attendance. While moderates may be willing to consider Jeb Bush , Long says, it probably would not be a good strategy for the former Florida governor to be seen hobnobbing with the Hollywood elite. The pressure on Bush in the primary season will be to show his conservative credentials.
PopPolitics, hosted by Ted Johnson, airs Thursdays at 2 p. Home Film News. Mar 28, pm PT. By Ted Johnson Plus Icon. Republicans vote for Republicans; Democrats vote for Democrats. When they have little information about candidates, people gravitate toward familiar names—even if those names are simply ethnically similar to their own.
Even having a common name can help you win down-ballot races, says Jeffrey Glas, a political-science professor at the University of Georgia. Television and movies shape our politics more than many people realize. Celebrity candidates tend to be more charismatic communicators than generic white guys who spent their lives bouncing between the State Department and the Harvard Kennedy School. And that was part of not only his appeal, but also what allowed him to bring the country together at times when it would have been very difficult for someone who lacked those skills to do so.
Plenty of celebrities have flirted with running for office as Democrats. We are currently living through the Matthew McConaissance. Although some voters care too much about policy to back a celebrity candidate, others are repulsed by politicians. Some Democratic strategists I reached out to seemed open to prominent celebrities running, as long as they have a good reason to seek office. When I asked the Democratic strategists who their dream celebrity candidates would be, they played along: The San Antonio Spurs coach and Trump critic Gregg Popovich came up twice.
Democrats have approached the actor and activist Eva Longoria about running in her home state of Texas. Alyssa Milano, another actor-activist, occasionally takes to the Hill in combat boots.
Had Hillary Clinton won the U. Had Hillary Clinton won the election, it would have been tempting to position these movies in a long-overdue parallel narrative of female triumph. But it would almost certainly miss the point of what Clinton, whatever her flaws or virtues as a candidate, came to represent culturally and the iconic stature that she achieved as the first woman to come within spitting distance of the most important job in the country.
None of these cinematic heroines and antiheroines is a direct Clinton analogue, though several of them exhibit the same qualities at work — intelligence, ambition, calculation — that have made Clinton so simultaneously revered and reviled in the public eye. And the movies themselves, perhaps acknowledging the ambivalence that even advanced societies can feel toward the women in power, largely resist the temptation to turn their characters into easy figures of sympathy or identification.
Video by Jason H. She troubleshoots her way to revenge. Elizabeth is so ruthlessly drawn that at times she suggests a near-caricature of empowered femininity. She robotically outsources her sex life to a hired escort.
This math-based movie itself demonstrates a talent for multiplication. The focus on three women — all of them facing equally Sisyphean struggles at work — allows for a more complex, wide-ranging sense of the obstacles at hand than a more focused telling would have managed. There is no easy villain here, and the problems of bigotry are shown to be a collective burden.
Nearly everything about Christine Chubbuck — her hard, guttural voice, her severe on-camera demeanor and her insistence on doing serious, hard-hitting pieces — represents an affront to this paradigm. What makes the movie such a discomfiting experience is that it seems to sympathize with its heroine, acknowledging her intelligence, integrity and work ethic, while remaining unsparingly honest about her very real shortcomings.
The other men in the newsroom — the golden-boy anchor Michael C. Nearly all of these stories regard the lot of working women with an understandable degree of pessimism. And while the major studios have not been quite as attentive as their specialty-division counterparts to the needs of thinking, grown-up audiences, they found their own ways of subverting the status quo.
They dared — and, in a further skewering of Hollywood formula, they even cast Chris Hemsworth as the office mimbo. On Twitter: JustinCChang. I have a simpler explanation: Hollywood made us do it. Not the celebrities, not the executives, the movies themselves. Because whether we are aware of it or not, we often look to the movies to tell us who we are, to reinforce our actions and provide shortcuts that help us categorize and make sense of an increasingly complex world.
So who were voters in this unhappy mood going to select? Again, the movies have to shoulder part of the blame. The apocalypse, by definition, rains destruction only on other people. It is not just American films that see things this way, all national cinemas do. So how is all this going to play out in the next four years?
What kind of ending will reality provide for a story Hollywood wrote? On Twitter: KennethTuran. The fact that someone with extreme views considered offensive by many people got such a significant book advance shows how the publishing world reflects, and plays to, many of the divides in our culture.
Few left-leaning readers realize that within mainstream publishing, conservative books are a booming business. Together, they publish a mix of polemics, memoir, reportage and even fiction. They typically do business in New York just like their fellows. To make a space for conservative authors within the industry, major publishers created these imprints with targeted editorial direction. As quickly as his fans ordered his book from Amazon and showed their support for him on social media, his critics decried it.
Comedian Sarah Silverman, who has 9. The novel was later published by Vintage. Those who have objected to Yiannopoulos deal pointed to the size of his advance. It is a sizable amount for an unproven author.
For Threshold to make its money back — to turn a profit on the deal — the publisher would have to sell 50, to , books, insiders estimate. Flannery is confident the book will connect with readers. Being racist is quite profitable. Twitter: paperhaus. Cuba had been unplugged from American culture for generations. What happens now? Gomez might have chosen to head to any number of clubs, restaurants or other social gathering places in one of the most vibrant and culturally rich cities in the U.
Instead, foremost on his mind immediately after the Varela concert performance was his search for a power cord to his laptop computer. State-controlled media in the socialist country is heavily censored, and access to the Internet has only begun, leaving Cubans often feeling isolated from the cultural conversations going on in their culture-dominating neighbor to the north.
Consider it a contemporary expression of the cultural grapevine that has long kept Cuban musicians apprised of what their peers elsewhere in the world are doing.
But there is still a strong desire for artists and musicians to interact with their counterparts in the U. The more styles of music I can have access to, the richer my own music becomes. Which means, despite the stereotype created by the large number of pre-Cuban revolution American cars commonly found in Havana and other cities, Cuban music is hardly stuck in the s. The Cuban government has a strict filter on media coming into the country.
That is compounded by the political, economic and cultural embargo imposed by the U. But many musicians and artists who have welcomed improved relations with the U. As the decades have rolled by, musicians, especially the younger generations, have often struggled to work with their American counterparts, to perform and promote their music to U. Music historians must love it, because there is so much richness in one fairly small place.
A major step toward bringing Cuban music to the outside world came in , when American roots musicians Ry Cooder and British producer Nick Gold visited Havana. During that trip, he arranged for them to be exposed to the music of Varela, for whom Browne has become something of a cheerleader in the U. For all of the attempts at isolation, Cuban music has still had an incredible influence in the U.
Bello agrees that the embargo has resulted in misconceptions and ignorance among Americans about the deep well of Cuban music. Cuban musicians say their motives for coming to the U. Bello, who lives in Santa Clara, about miles east of Havana, is planning a U. But he faces challenges, not only in receiving travel visas for himself and others he wants to bring along, but also in arranging funding for the trip and securing venues for stateside performances that could help offset the prohibitive costs of travel and accommodations in the U.
I am looking forward to the possibility to share my work [in the U. Even after the roads that were opened by the Buena Vista Social Club, it is still not anything easy. Bello faces the double-edged struggle of passing on Cuban music traditions to younger players, many of whom would rather leave Cuba and try to pursue careers in the U. Cuban universities still focus on training musicians in European-rooted classical traditions, and Bello is pushing to get Cuban academics to acknowledge and accept traditional Cuban music performance as part of the curriculum at the university level.
He takes a largely positive outlook at the prospect of cultural walls coming down between the U. Twitter: RandyLewis2. But the community is bracing for backlash.
But producer, writer and director Patrik-Ian Polk, one of many LGBT people in the industry, is uncertain how the administration of President-elect Donald Trump will affect Hollywood and the recent increase in more varied representations of — and opportunities for — the LGBT community. I think the response to the snapback has to be even stronger. South Carolina Gov. And Ben Carson, housing and urban development secretary nominee, once compared homosexuality to bestiality and incest.
The McCarthy era gave rise to the Hollywood blacklist, denying employment to industry professionals because they were, or were accused of being, communist sympathizers. Most in Hollywood think that the idea of a new blacklist is far-fetched, but some are suggesting vigilance.
But in a phone interview with The Times, Dungey clarifies her words. She believes the network can do a better job to represent those voices, particularly in its drama series.
But she insists that this in no way means a regression is on the horizon. The resounding belief is that the historic progress the community has seen in recent years cannot be reversed. Twitter: TrevellAnderson. They began railing about injustice to anyone who would listen. How could forces unseen [to them] and unfelt [again, to them] result in such catastrophe? Welcome to the nebulous emotional state that is simultaneously helpless and furious.
Welcome to feeling the vast sociopolitical forces arrayed against you while still possessing the desire to just make it through the day. But that simmering rage, too long the nagging ache from shouldering the tonnage of the black experience, has never been fully painted on American TV screens until Sterling K. He grows up to become an upwardly mobile black man working and living in the kind of New York suburb where you imagine all the houses have manicured vines growing on them.
I think — there was an entire episode about how no one knows exactly what he does or how he does it. Except Randall is angry.
Foundationally angry. Angry at the hundreds of micro-aggressions a successful black man navigating a predominantly white world has to absorb on a daily basis. And for the first time, on television, we are registering the weight of that anger.
Because Brown, with a wounded righteousness, shows it to us. Or where that security guard has moved just a little off his mark so he can keep us in his sight. Plus a million things every day that I have to choose to let go. Like I did on the street this morning. Like I have done every day of my life. A myth. A story told to children to help cement the dream of a better tomorrow and a world that wanted them — all of them — in it.
It was an America that seemed — if one uses the meteoric rise in hate crimes after Nov. It, by definition, has to appeal to a broad audience. And it does. With its time-shifting, tear-jerking narratives that deal not only with race but with body image, fame and family loyalty and betrayals, the series is an unmitigated hit. And some of that everyone are people who insist that all lives matter. Because what they are getting is an exploration of barely contained fury.
Twitter: marcbernardin. Long considered a bastion of pathological progressiveness and wanton liberalism Remember the blacklist? The one not starring James Spader? How, many wondered, could the creators and arbiters of popular culture have been so out of step with the viewers and moviegoers they serve? The real elitism of film and television — we like to watch people who seem richer than they should be.
For every film that does not revolve around such a lead character, there are 78 others that do, just as for every series that features a transgender character, there are 8, that do not. Hollywood is still dominated by white men who prefer to make movies and television shows that revolve around other white men. In every era, the oppression of certain groups — nonwhites, women, gays and lesbians — was duly noted but really not the point.
And that is the real elitism of film and television — we mostly like to watch people who seem richer than they should be. America likes to pretend it is a classless yet perpetually upwardly mobile society — look, Ma, no aristocracy! Just a bunch of educated landowners!
And Hollywood is happy to help, from both sides of the fence. Billions are harvested from so-called populist entertainment and celebrity is the local version of royalty. Cowboys and gangsters and society dames, cops and robbers and Charlie Chaplin, all immediately accessible in the ultimate democracy of black and white.
Movies were for the masses, but television, at least in the beginning, was for the chosen few. Like indoor plumbing, electric lighting and the automobile, the television became an instant, and ongoing, symbol of class ascendance.
Families that could afford a television, and all its subsequent iterations, inspired the envy of their neighbors; the windows of appliance stores drew crowds. Because as TVs became more ubiquitous, the programming, and the advertising that supported it, grew more upscale — to attract the moneyed audience, yes, but also to support the general post-war mythology of suburban serenity.
But at the Cleaver house, mother June did housework in pearls and heels. And Donna Reed figured out how to fire her housekeeper. Meanwhile, the business model of both TV and film redefined the term populist. On Twitter: marymacTV.
Not only for the fact of his election, but for what his policies mean for creatives: The possible disappearance of the Affordable Care Act, through which many creative people were able to secure health insurance, is just the tip of the iceberg for many. How to do that, if you are creative person knocked for a loop by the election? At the same time, recognize that no matter who is in power, you still have work and create, and, especially if your creative work is some significant part of your income, you have to get on with it to eat and pay bills and pamper your pets.
Figure out your bandwidth. Some people can engage in the world, including social media, and all its bad news, and still get their work done. Some people need to remove themselves almost completely. Most creative people live somewhere in between. Ask yourself how much space your brain needs for creative work, and how much distance it needs from the outside world to do it.
Disconnect temporarily. Or more! Let them. Create creative space daily. My brain is fresher, I feel more inventive, and my brain is not cluttered up with the news of the day.
When are you most creative? Find that time and then create and guard that time in your daily routine. Disconnect the phone, turn off the TV, disconnect the Internet and dive in to your work. Reconnect judiciously. Is it giving me useful information? Is it inspiring me to engage in the world or does it make me want to run from it? Unfollow that Facebook friend passing along fake news, and block those fake news sites outright.
Mute that person on Twitter who is apparently always angry.
0コメント