But it falls far short in terms of teaching children just how unfair life will be. After all, while teaching children that life isn’t always fair, we’re also standing them in front of an American flag and encouraging them to recite a pledge of allegiance to the country, tiny hype men for a nation promising liberty and justice for all. We shouldn’t stop at teaching kids that life isn’t always fair....
The Emmy-nominated “Dropout” star made her screen debut as a teenager in the 1999 season of “As the World Turns” before joining “All My Children” and eventually breaking out in 2004’s “Mean Girls” plus appearing in “Veronica Mars” both at age 19. While Seyfried told Porter magazine that she came out of the pre-#MeToo era of Hollywood “pretty unscathed,” she did open up about being in at-times uncomfortable situations. “Being 19, walking around without my underwear on – like, are you kidding me?...
But as the unspoken code of silence around long-rumored tyrants of Hollywood begins to break, it’s unclear if DeGeneres is bowing out gracefully to avoid increased scrutiny or retreating in shame because of it. No matter how many unrelated reasons she cites for ending the show — needing a creative challenge, her contract ending, more time for animal rights work — it’s clear she’s not ending her Emmy-winning run on a resounding high note....
Indeed, set in a debaucherous mid-1920s when Los Angeles was still a half-formed desert town, “Babylon” is essentially a three-hour-plus bender of a movie that pummels the audience with Boschian-level set pieces of Jazz Era decadence — mountains of cocaine, graphic overdoses, scatological humor, projectile vomiting, horror-movie-style sex dungeons, murder, suicide, and rattlesnake wrestling. Other than breakout Diego Calva, the most talked-about performance will be Margot Robbie, who plays the self-made Nellie LaRoy, a party-and-drug-addicted whirling dervish who tumbles into a Hollywood acting career after wowing a studio exec (Jeff Garlin) with her ability to cry on cue....
Fortunately, most of that wavelength has hysterical results, resulting in an eager-to-please package that tosses off lines designed to inflict maximum comic damage (a gag about “fried bald eagle babies” is impossible to contextualize, but it’s the sort of thing that left this critic gasping for air) before zipping right along to another wacky new set piece. But a series of jokes isn’t the same thing as a cohesive movie: Wiig and Mumolo, who both wrote the film and star in it as the eponymous Barb and Star, seem understandably thrilled to bring this nuttiness to life, but they stretch even their best gags to untenable ends....
“They dug out two stages of Disney for huge asteroid craters, and I didn’t even think about the fact that the basic premise of the movie was totally absurd,” he said. “Why are they training oil drillers to be astronauts rather than astronauts to be oil drillers? You would think the learning curve would be somewhat more steep on the oil-drillers-to-astronauts route. But it was fun and the right time.”...
Betty Gilpin was no stranger to the show in her early years, appearing on both the flagship “Law and Order” show and many of its spinoffs. Appearing on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” this week, the “GLOW” star opened up about the multitude of roles she played on “Law and Order,” including “a pedophile with vocal fry” and “a lesbian with acne.” But her most memorable experience on the show happened during what should have been her easiest role: playing a corpse....
