When we watched Uma Thurman will herself back to life in Kill Bill after those initial painstaking toe movements, what we didn’t stop to consider was that the yellow jumpsuit-wearing martial arts master was using a stunt double most of the time. Her name is Zoë Bell. A 31-year-old Kiwi, and she has also doubled for Xena: Warrior Princess, and had acting roles in Death Proof, Lost, and Whip It. Bell is the new breed of stunt woman, mentored by old school veterans, like Jeannie Epper, Lynda Carter’s double for Wonder Woman, and current head of the Stunt Women’s Association of Motion Pictures.
2005′s Double Dare, screening tomorrow night in New York as part of the Stranger than Fiction series at IFC, tells their danger-defying stories and offers us all seven helpful hints for getting through life.
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Eileen Myles exists somewhere outside of neat binaries. We know her as a legendary queer poet and novelist, a respected professor, and a one-time presidential candidate. In this book, she shows us yet another side of herself — that of art critic and travel journalist. Myles’ latest work combines broad, universal experiences with a pinpointed mapping of gay and lesbian art-intelligentsia; a large portion of these essays offers up personal and continually relevant analysis of her friends, including Allen Ginsberg, Sadie Benning, James Schuyler, and Jill Johnston. Myles also witnesses the brilliant art spectacle of Björk in concert and interviews Daniel Day Lewis. Read More »
Erik Gandini‘s new film Videocracy depicts present day Italy as a country where there is little separation between media and government; Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is the richest man in the country and owns over 90 percent of the broadcast media. This means that the television channels are state controlled in a country that purports to be a democracy, not a dictatorship.
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