This post contains spoilers for the third season of The Umbrella Academy, which is now streaming on Netflix. When Elliot Page came out as nonbinary and trans in late 2020, the initial response was rightly focused on what it meant personally for the Oscar-nominated Juno star and what it might …
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Brett Morgen vividly remembers the first time he met David Bowie. When the Thin White Duke insults your work, it tends to burn deep into your memory. It was 2007, at which point Morgen had been a filmmaker for over a decade and had made documentaries on boxers (On the …
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There he was, sauntering into the Paramount Theatre like he owned it. (Wait, does he own it? The man bought castles and dinosaur skulls and albino king cobras. [One quick Goggle search later] Ok, no, he does not.) The cheers grew louder, then deafening, as he nodded, waved, greeted a …
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For most of her acting career, Pamela Adlon was best known for her voice, even though she rarely felt like she had one of her own. Adlon, née Segall, entered the family business as a teenager — her father Don Segall was a sitcom writer — mostly shuffling around in …
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“When you leave here, Google ‘Bill Cosby, rape,’” the guy in the grainy video says. You know the clip we’re talking about. It’s Hannibal Buress, a stand-up working out material in the middle of a set in 2014. The bit starts with him talking about Cosby’s smugness, how he was …
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Biopics ain’t Wikipedia entries. Lives never conform to a tidy narrative arc — even one as dramatic as Aretha Franklin’s. With Respect, screenwriter Tracey Scott Wilson and director Liesl Tommy did an admirable job condensing 20 years of the Queen of Soul’s tumultuous life into a mere two-and-a-half hours. Thanks …
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More than 10 years in the making, director Nabil Elderkin and writer Marcus J. Guillory’s film Gully finally made its big-screen debut earlier this month. Featuring performances from Jonathan Majors, Terrence Howard, Travis Scott, and more, the movie is unlike anything else out there and marks a major debut for …
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Margaret Atwood has always been waiting for the other shoe to drop. Born in Ottawa in 1939, Atwood has been consumed with the specter of a sudden totalitarian takeover, like the one she imagined in her 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale, since she was a girl. She watched with trepidation, …
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Welcome to the latest episode of Too Long; Didn’t Watch, a new podcast produced by Rolling Stone and OBB Sound, presented by Google Assistant, and hosted by yours truly. In each episode, we attempt a new method of scaling Peak TV, by pairing a celebrity guest with a series they’ve …
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Television, it’s often been said without much exaggeration, was invented to sell soap. And the fall television season was invented to sell cars. As Preston Beckman, a retired network scheduler who presided over the Must-See TV era of NBC and the peak of American Idol at Fox (and now tweets …
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