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The Most Uncomfortable Portrayals of Celebrities in Art [NSFW]

By Chloe Pantazi on

Celebrities are voracious connoisseurs of art (even Beyoncé loves art history), and are among the few people in this world who can actually afford to collect it, so it makes sense that celebrities often appear as the subjects of artworks. Of course, that’s not to say they always inspire flattering portraits. The recent $1.9 million sale of artist John Currin’s 1991 nude portrait of Golden Girl Bea Arthur has inspired Flavorwire to round up the most awkward portrayals of celebrities in art, from politicians in the buff and doused in urine to installation art, sculpture, and a certain former president’s wet and wild self-portrait. … Read More

Film

Flavorwire’s Endearingly Exhaustive 2013 Summer Movie Preview

By Jason Bailey on

It’s the first weekend in May, so you know what that means: there’s a new Marvel movie in theaters, and the summer movie season has officially begun. It’s a tricky minefield to navigate, rife with sequels and reboots and sequels and adaptations and sequels, but Flavorwire is here to help: our summer movie guide takes you through the entire season, month by month, spotlighting the films that might be worth seeing (Might! Maybe! No promises!) and delicately averting your eyes from the certain dogs. Take a deep breath and put on your 3D glasses; here we… Read More

Pop Culture

The Absolute Worst Poems by Celebrities

By Alison Nastasi on

We’ve explored deplorable poets in music — like the oft-laughable Jim Morrison and that hilarious ode to his penis — but after spotting the bad poetry of Suzanne Somers on Dangerous Minds, we went searching for more celebrity poesy. Some stars, like Viggo Mortensen, have displayed a bit of genuine talent, but most celebs are predictably oblivious and self-absorbed when it comes to their laughably bad writing. See what happens when pop culture icons pretend to be poets and fail miserably. … Read More

Film

Your Favorite Actors on Their Favorite Actors

By Jason Bailey on

The Ryan Gosling fan club is getting even more crowded. Recently, James Franco took to the Huffington Post to do what countless fans and stalkers have spent the past several years doing: writing on the Internet about Ryan Gosling. “I want to make love to this section,” Franco writes of the first, Gosling-heavy hour of The Place Beyond the Pines. “He played the role to a T. Look at the funny glasses he wears when he robs banks, green on the sides; look at the writing on the bike before he paints it black; Gosling touches, all, I’m sure of it.” Actors obsessing over actors — they’re just like us! And let’s be honest: there’s something kind of wonderful about actors and actresses who genuinely love each other’s work, and who can articulate what makes it great. So we went on the hunt for the favorite actors of some of our favorite actors, to find out who they love, who inspires them, and… Read More

Film

The Best and Worst Movies of SXSW 2013

By Jason Bailey on

Your film editor has returned from Austin, where SXSW’s robust selection of fascinating panels and workshops kept my film consumption lower than I might’ve liked. But the dozen SXSW film entries I did get to see offered up an assortment of riveting performances, inventive filmmaking, and recurring motifs; a quick round-up of the best and worst (of what I saw, at least) is after the jump. … Read More

Film

Harmony Korine on ‘Spring Breakers,’ SXSW 2013′s Most Divisive Film

By Jason Bailey on

AUSTIN, TX: “I had been collecting spring break imagery for a couple of years before. I was using it in paintings and artwork and stuff,” Harmony Korine explained at the SXSW panel Monday for his new film Spring Breakers. “Just pictures that I would get off the Internet, different sites, fraternity sites, co-ed pornography, anything that had that role of adolescent debauchery in Florida. The images were just hyper-sexualized, hyper-violent — the subject matter was — but then all the details, the bikinis and the book bags and the flip-flops and the Hello Kitty bags and the nail polish and the neon, just all those things were childlike, or innocent. I thought it was interesting, both those things playing together, both those things working together.” … Read More

Film

SXSW 2013: Oscar Winner Danny Boyle on Lying to Money Men and Playing with Genre

By Jason Bailey on

AUSTIN, TX: What’s great about going to a Danny Boyle movie is you never know what you’re gonna get. Most filmmakers today, even the best ones, tend to work out from certain templates of themes or genre–it’s how they get people to give them money for their movies, and how they get financiers to indulge them when they occasionally do something different (with an implicit assurance that they’ll be back to what makes money). Not so with Boyle. He’s well aware of the danger, he says, “of thinking, ‘Oh, I know how to get this effect,’ or you start double-bluffing…and you shouldn’t really be doing that. You should really be hunting in the story to present it in as fresh and as original a way as you can.” … Read More

Film

Awesome Fan-Made ‘Spring Breakers’ Posters

By Jason Bailey on

If you’d told us six months ago that we’d be actively looking forward to a Harmony Korine movie starring James Franco, we’d have laughed heartily, pat you on your head, and contemplated hara-kiri. Yet here it is, March 2013, and we genuinely can’t wait to see Spring Breakers, Korine’s sex-and-drugs-and-Disney-girls action/comedy, out next week in limited release (and a week later wide). And we have to admit, part of the pull is the film’s clearly effective marketing campaign, which has given us several frisky trailers and eye-catching posters. But even those aren’t good enough, apparently; Mars, the film’s French distributor, enlisted fans to submit their own posters, and the results (posted at FilmGeek) are clever, sexy, and just plain cool. Check them out after the jump. … Read More

Film

The 10 Worst Moments in Oscar History

By Jason Bailey on

Who’s ready to watch Seth MacFarlane host the Oscars? Well, no matter how wrong the Family Guy creator may be for the job, he can take solace in the fact that there’s a long, rich history of terrible Oscar moments. We’ve assembled ten of the most awkward and cringe-worthy to prime you for what lies… Read More

Film

The Best and Worst of Sundance 2013

By Jason Bailey on

This time last year, the out-of-nowhere indie Beasts of the Southern Wild emerged at the Sundance Film Festival, knocked out everyone who saw it, and embarked on a thrilling year-long ride to become a critical fave, indie smash, and multiple Oscar nominee. Of course, when you have a big hit, everyone’s looking for a sequel — and most of the press out of Park City has been eager to buzzkill, assuring us that no, there’s not another Beasts in this year’s bunch. But that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t an incredible… Read More