James Gandolfini is dead at 51.
Notable remembrances, anecdotes, and farewells from Matt Zoller Seitz, Mark Harris, Jessica Winter, Glenn Kenny, John Swansburg, the Twitterverse, and, of course, HBO.
Watch the actor's appearance on Inside the Actors Studio here.
David Remnick's tribute includes some memorable clips from the actor's career. More here.
His life in pictures.
[Editor's Note: In Sinful Cinema, the House looks back at so-bad-they're-kinda-good movies that have been forgotten for a reason. You call them guilty pleasures; we call them rightfully buried treasures.]
You gotta love Ralph Bellamy. In addition to having a reputation as an all-around nice guy and consummate professional, he ended his career on an odd, fascinating note. First, he was the guy who never got the girl in the 1930s. Then, in 1958, he became the quintessential interpreter of FDR on stage and screen. Finally, he ended up one of the few studio-system, Hollywood character actors a teenage Black kid in the 'hood could immediately identify. He showed up in a memorable role as one of the Duke brothers in Trading Places, a role he reprised in Coming to America, and between those two films he appeared in Michael Schultz's live-action cartoon, Disorderlies. It’s here that Bellamy not only bronzed his ghetto pass but proved that he's game for working with just about anybody. Disorderlies has both a novelty rap act AND Luke (Anthony Geary) from General Hospital. How can a connoisseur of trash not love this man?
The New York Times visits with the mother of all "housewives": Pat Loud.
Journalist Michael Hastings is dead at 33. Remembrances here and here.
Bait and twitch: Vice magazine, suicide glamour, and not staying quiet.
Keith Uhlich spotlights BAMcinemaFest's can't-miss titles.
James Franco offers a few impressions on Man of Steel.
Is there some sort of a deep political hypothesis nibbling on a carrot and overseeing the action in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? I mean, the film's plot concerns a nefarious developer, Judge Doom (Christopher Lloyd), who wants to dismantle Los Angeles's electrified streetcar system and replace it with a freeway-centric suburban wasteland, and in so doing appropriate and pave over a charismatic minority neighborhood, Toontown. And could it be that the kind of meta-cinematic crossovers—from Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny going skydiving together to Donald and Daffy Duck on dueling pianos—that make this movie so entertaining and weird and such a product of the 1980s are also a utopian-type metaphor for the overcoming of the hostilities and rivalries and the competitiveness of the free market? Or am I going too far with this?
This much, at least, we know: Who Framed Roger Rabbit belongs to that category of slick and ironic and star-studded Hollywood film that takes as its subject Hollywood and moviemaking and life in Los Angeles, like A Star Is Born or Sunset Boulevard or Singin' in the Rain, like Barton Fink or Boogie Nights or The Player. Which is to say, it's self-conscious by default, and is always reminding you either blatantly or slightly less blatantly of other movies or shows or cartoons that you've seen. And yet, for me at least, the film manages to be its own thing, to be more than just a noirish, postmodern Super Friends/Justice League for anthropomorphic animal cartoon characters.
Sigur Rós takes on a more aggressive—or to quote our own Kevin Liedel in his review of the album, "more acute"—posture on their seventh effort, Kveikur, their first since becoming a threesome following the departure of Kjartan Sveinsson last year. The band will perform five songs from the album tomorrow, June 19th, at 2:50 EST during "Kveikur Live 360," a special "360-degree interactive webcast" from Dresden, Germany. Fans will reportedly be able to watch the one-off show from 360 different angles of their choosing at the band's official website.
Though writer-director Sebastiàn Silva's Crystal Fairy chronicles a Chilean desert road trip punctuated by psychoactive drug use and discursive digression, the film is not Fear and Loathing in the Atacama. Instead, it's a clear-eyed look at the fragility of tentative friendships and a clash of personalities, cultures, and desires. It's also wincingly funny: Michael Cera's Jamie, channeling a bit of Odelay-era Beck, sets the tone with deflecting braggadocio about reading The Doors of Perception and "really getting into phenomenology" while failing to cook late-night rice for bored transvestite prostitutes. His obsession to head north with his Chilean compatriots (played by Silva's three brothers) and to ingest mescaline from San Pedro cacti, a prospect built up to mythic proportions in his head, drives the film. However, the plan gets complicated when he ends up inviting another American, the uninhibited "free spirit" Crystal Fairy (Gaby Hoffman), along for the trip.
Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam has been lying relatively low since she flipped the bird at 114 million people during the Super Bowl halftime show last year. Matangi, her first album since signing with Jay-Z's Roc Nation management, has been delayed several times, but it looks like M.I.A. is finally ready to "Bring the Noize." Following 2010's divisive Maya and last year's "Bad Girls," which many heralded as a "return to form," M.I.A. claims her new material is an amalgam of all of her previous releases, coining it "Paul Simon on acid." The minimalist "Bring the Noize" certainly lives up to that description, though it's less "Paper Planes" or "Bad Girls" than "Bird Flu." M.I.A.'s delivery is quick but surprisingly not very forceful (the final bridge is downright Janet-grade) and the beats stutter and ping like BB bullets hitting sheet metal. M.I.A. shared a clip of the forthcoming music video on Vine over the weekend.
After a slight detour into Eurotrash for 2011's Femme Fatale and faux-English accents on will.i.am's "Scream & Shout," Britney Spears returns to her roots on the Dr. Luke-produced "Ooh La La," from one of the most hotly anticipated sequels of the year, The Smurfs 2. Another infuriatingly catchy trifle from the superstar pop tart, the "Smurftastic" (her words) single juxtaposes a hard, stomping beat and a brief, quasi-rapped b-section with a sugary, wafer-thin hook backed by acoustic guitars. The lyrics are, of course, completely nonsensical ("Baby come with me and be my ooh la la"), but they'll no doubt be burned into your brain by the end of the summer. The soundtrack, which also features "I'm Too Smurfy" by Right Said Fred, is out July 23rd.
Click here for a complete list of yesterday's Daytime Emmy Awards winners.
Iranian president-elect Hassan Rouhani pledges path of moderation.
Vadim Rizov interviews Tobias Lindholm on A Hijacking.
Björk dazzles with rare U.S. performance and very unusual outfit at Bonnaroo.
The president's approval rating falls.
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