It’s a predicament of being a TV watcher in a post-Grey’s Anatomy age that now, every time one character on any show casts a sidelong glance at another, our mind jumps right to, “hmm, are they going to become an item?” And with more than half of our favorite shows these days featuring so-called platonic relationships between plucky women and their masculine bosses (Peggy and Don of Mad Men, Liz and Jack on 30 Rock, Betty and Daniel on Ugly Betty, just to name a few), this phenomenon is beginning to seriously mess with our heads. Witness last Thursday’s “Galentine’s Day” episode of Parks and Recreation…
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TV characters, you’re grossing us out with your fictional hook-ups. Usually we manage to be pretty zen about the whole thing, accepting of the plain fact that on any television show with a decently-sized ensemble, everyone will eventually hook up with everyone else. (Call it The Rachel/Joey Rule.) But then something so totally unholy happens, like the repeat Dan/Georgina encounter on last week’s Gossip Girl, or, worse yet, Peggy’s liaison on last night’s Mad Men, as to shock and appall us anew. Spoilers ahead, obviously. Read More »
The Boys Are Back, an indie film which opens today in New York and L.A., features a Clive Owen we haven’t seen lately: he plays a sensitive type, a sportswriter whose wife dies, leaving him to raise their young son alone. The dynamic gets even more complicated when his teenaged son from a previous marriage joins their estrogen-free brood. We talked to Scott Hicks, the film’s director (who first struck gold with Shine in 1996) about Owen, the best way to cast a 6-year-old and the movie’s cool soundtrack. These are the highlights of what we learned.
1. Clive’s sexy, brutish role in Closer convinced Hicks he was the right choice to play a loving father. Read More »
Once upon a pilot season, the diabolical geniuses at FOX pinpointed a rare, under served demographic — grown-up High School Musical fans — and voila! Glee was born. Skeptics be damned, the weekly valentine to musical theater geeks found an audience right away (Josh Groban cameo’ed in the third episode, which must be some sort of record) and just scored a full-season pickup. Is it possible, though, that FOX network execs are even more cunning than we’re giving them credit for? Behind all the choreography, Glee is, at its core, a show about a teacher no 10th grader could resist crushing on. Join us as we explore this important cultural type and most timeless of secret weapons: the cute teacher. Read More »
Christian Annyas is the designer mastermind behind the Movie Title Stills Collection, the online destination for screencaps of classic film titles. Based in a small village in Amsterdam, Annyas skipped the dusty cinema studies chapter of his film education, going straight to advanced studies in title fonts. As he tells it, it all started with a particularly epic Casablanca-Gone with the Wind-Citizen Kane bender. Read on to hear about Annyas’s unlikely path to film buff-dom, the golden age of movie titles and why he left the Harry Potter movies out of his collection. Read More »
This installment of Found Photo Fridays comes bearing the bad news that our nation’s unemployment rate has reached 9.7 percent, up from 9.4 percent in July. While daytime TV has its charms, we find that funemployment isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and more specifically, isn’t actually fun at all. After the jump, find Flickr-provided visual depictions of our national shit-uation. Wishing you greener pastures in September… Read More »
Save for the Britney Spears meltdowns and Tom Cruise couch-jumping fiascoes of the world, public opinion on any given celebrity is usually a pretty static thing. Everyone likes Will Smith. People have generally good feelings about Reese Witherspoon. Many can’t stand Katherine Heigl lately, but it’s not like she isn’t a teensy bit deserving of all that ill will. What we’re getting at here is that, for being a generally likable celebrity who’s never gotten himself into a weird public spat with Matt Lauer, Ben Affleck is an oddly polarizing figure. His career hasn’t been unlike that of a politician in that his approval ratings have run a wide gamut over the years. (Remember those rumors that he was running for senator?)
This month he’s back in theaters as a stoner sidekick type in Mike Judge’s Extract, and it suddenly finally feels OK to embrace B-Fleck again. Why now? We think we’ve managed to distill Ben’s likability down to five simple tenets. Read More »
Labor Day weekend has us feeling patriotic, so today Design Porn is road trippin’ through the United States, stopping along the way to gawk at meat cut into the shapes of the states, Missed Connection maps and other assorted American wonders, all of which you’ll find after the jump. If you happen across something that you think deserves a mention here, shoot us an email to tips [at] flavorpill [dot] com. OK, enough foreplay already, on to the main event. Read More »
Today at Flavorpill, we liked everything, including iconic 20th century photography, better once it’s been reimagined with Legos. We rooted for Das Racist in their cartoon battle with the New Yorker. We applauded innovative uses for VHS tapes and floppy disks (now if we could only repurpose our Beanie Babies.) We invested in deodorant to evade the Hawaii 5-O. We looked back on a time when bears roamed Manhattan and the whole island cost $12. We shook our heads at Kermit and Miss Piggy’s latest duet — Kermit, you can do so much better! Call us. We felt like we were Facebook friends with Charles Saatchi because he told us 30 things about himself. We totes toted around a tote bag made of a Target billboard. We spreken ze prejudice. We thanked PopCandy for going to the trouble of making us this list of Labor Day weekend TV marathons. Finally, we bore witness to Chris Brown’s bowtie and all the important revelations it made. Hey, bowtie, do you know Aretha Franklin’s crazy hat?
Sarah Schmelling turned a short but brilliant McSweeney’s article called “Hamlet (Facebook News Feed Edition)” into her new book, Ophelia Joined the Group Maidens Who Don’t Float. From a full news feed play-by-play of Shakespeare’s War of the Roses to a game of Scrabulous between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the book reads like a funnier version of CliffsNotes, updated for the Facebook generation. After the jump, we’ve excerpted our favorite LOL bits, including Juliet’s profile, Miss Havisham’s favorite TV shows, and the news feeds of Jay Gatsby and Humbert Humbert. Now if you’ll excuse us, we are totally friend requesting Holden Caulfield. Read More »
