Culture

Here are the facts: Kanye West should be in a psychiatric hospital. Instead, he’s speaking his mind, or what’s left of it. For what it’s worth, Kanye West should not be tweeting or going on podcasts. Unlike the side effects of a prescription drug, the results don’t vary. No, the outcome is usually the same, in one form or another: career suicide. Kanye West’s artistic legacy is undergoing seppuku. We've seen this movie before. Remember Roseanne? After a racist tweet in 2018, ABC immediately canceled her show (it was going to be her comeback). Hulu followed up by removing every season of Roseanne from their streaming service.

Thirty years after it was first released in America, Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula is returning to theaters, appropriately enough for a Halloween re-release. (It also serves as a soft preview for Coppola’s newly announced passion project, Megalopolis, an epic drama starring Adam Driver and Aubrey Plaza.) It is hard to overstate what a difference the past three decades have made in Dracula's popular reception. Although it was a significant commercial hit upon release, thanks in part to Annie Lennox’s enormously popular theme tune "Love Song For a Vampire," it was critically derided as poorly acted, overblown, excessively bloody without being frightening and a travesty of the original novel.

The recent downfall and shaming of Kanye West was likely to have been greeted with schadenfreude by at least one 32-year-old pop star. In 2009, West interrupted Taylor Swift's winning best female video at the MTV Video Music Awards to inform her that the gong should have gone to Beyoncé instead. Their relationship ever since has been a gossip-friendly roundabout of fallout, reconciliation, sniping and bitching. West’s current defenestration from public life, owing to antisemitic comments he made, has not been publicly alluded to by Swift yet. But the lyrics from the song "Karma" on her new album Midnights might make tacit reference to their ongoing feud, as Swift castigates an anonymous man for "talking shit/For the hell of it/Addicted to betrayal but you're relevant.

As we stumble closer and closer towards nuclear war, environmental destruction and societal collapse, young people are feeling understandably a little hopeless. Some are shooting up schools; others are dumping hundreds of gallons of milk out onto grocery store floors to promote a “plant-based future.” Historically, when people are ideologically hopeless, they destroy art. The two disgruntled they/thems who recently threw two cans of Heinz tomato soup on Van Gogh’s "Sunflowers" thought that by defacing an oil painting depicting the sublime fruits of an unscorched earth they would draw attention to their cause: ending all oil consumption and thereby saving the planet. https://twitter.

David O. Russell is one of a small handful of directors whose involvement with a project is enough to get me to see it immediately. From the offbeat energy of Silver Linings Playbook to the tangled period drama of American Hustle, his films are tightly edited and always thick with talented actors. Amsterdam, his latest, is no exception. While it’s thematically fluffy and periodically tends toward the indulgent, it's never anything less than entertaining. There are far worse ways to spend a few hours, especially in the midst of a cinematic drought. Picking up in 1933, Amsterdam is the tale of two injured World War I veterans, slightly disreputable doctor Burt Berendson (Christian Bale) and successful attorney Harold Woodman (John David Washington).

The only time I ever saw Angela Lansbury on stage was in 2014 in London, when she played the half-baked medium Madame Arcati in a revival of Noel Coward’s supernatural comedy Blithe Spirit. Although it was rumored that the then-88-year-old Lansbury was having her lines fed to her via earpieces, it did not affect her comic timing one iota. It is no exaggeration to say that Lansbury took a character who has passed into over-familiarity via decades of revivals and made her fresh and hilarious once again. For anyone to achieve this is remarkable, but to do so at an age when most actors would have long since retired is little short of phenomenal. Lansbury’s death at the age of 96 — a few days shy of her 97th birthday — has some uncanny parallels with the recent passing of the Queen.

Country music superstar Loretta Lynn died last week at the age of 90. Many in the media are remembering her as a feminist and several of her songs as feminist anthems. Yet Lynn herself said, “I'm not a big fan of Women’s Liberation, but maybe it will help women stand up for the respect they’re due.” It’s not surprising that the left wants to claim Lynn as one of their own — she was a badass and extremely successful. But in listening to her music and digging deeper into Lynn’s life, I’ve come to view “The First Lady of Country Music” not as a typical man-hating feminist, but rather as someone who was proud of the heritage that made her a tough woman and who wanted to use her remarkable musical gifts to uplift millions of women who shared her experiences.

One of the things Cockburn likes best about working for The Spectator is its unswerving devotion to the policy debates that matter. In that intellectual spirit, and bearing in mind the recent photo of Pennsylvania Republican candidate Dr. Oz holding a glass of Cab at a Penn State tailgate, he's proud to announce our first ever Spectator World symposium, featuring the views of his colleagues. Today's subject: is it ever acceptable to drink wine at a football tailgate? Amber Athey, Washington editor If you’re under the age of forty at a college football tailgate, ideally the only wine you’re drinking is from a box. Acceptable consumption methods are out of an oddly dusty and sticky red solo cup or directly from the spout during a game of "slap the bag.

Something happened in American society between the release of Bros last weekend and 2018, when Bohemian Rhapsody, the biopic of gay, HIV-positive Queen front man Freddie Mercury, grossed $900 million at the box office. Comedian Billy Eichner’s gay romcom barely eked out a pathetic $4.8 million on opening night, around the same amount that Ellen "Elliot" Page spent on flannel shirts and Groucho Marx glasses last year. Why the disparity in box office takings? Well, American moviegoers became deeply homophobic. That’s according to Eichner himself, who wrote on Twitter following the paltry opening weekend numbers, “That’s just the world we live in, unfortunately.

Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling is a film more likely to be remembered for its offscreen drama than its substance. If only the final product that made it onscreen was as spicy: here, a promising premise and intriguing themes are let down by languid pacing, scattershot performances, and a willingness to lapse into preachiness that borders on misandry. Don’t Worry Darling is set in the planned community of “Victory” somewhere in the American West, a town led by self-help guru Frank (Chris Pine, playing a mixture of Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, and a televangelist — really, he wouldn’t be out of place on The Righteous Gemstones).

Trevor Noah’s announcement last week that he would be stepping down after seven years on The Daily Show was met with about the same level of attention as when he was announced as host. It trended on Twitter briefly, and then everyone went about their day. Noah never really caught on with the same media outlets that regularly juiced Jon Stewart, blaring about how he "Destroyed" and "Obliterated" things. There are several reasons why this was the case. One was that Stewart, for all his clown-nose-on-clown-nose-off theatrics, was still a capable and interesting interviewer. He was genuinely curious about his guests and didn’t seem like he was just asking questions handed to him on a notecard. Noah, a traditional stand-up comic, was never able to harness that same ability.

Every large-scale historical drama is a product of its time. The introduction to Cecil B. DeMille’s beloved The Ten Commandments explicitly outlines the film’s anti-communist agenda: “Are men the property of the state or are they free souls under God? This same battle continues throughout the world today.” Similarly, Gladiator, released in 2000 at the height of neoliberal dominance, anachronistically portrays the arc of Roman history as bending away from despotism towards democracy. 2022’s The Woman King is no exception to this rule. It centers on a fearless female leader who defends a pan-African, antislavery vision while reckoning with her own private traumas. Historically questionable? Yes. A satisfying movie? Also yes.

The most interesting part of the new Netflix Marilyn Monroe pic Blonde, for me, is the representation of a very specific kind of Hollywood rot. We do not at first appreciate very much about the two men with whom a young Marilyn Monroe, played by Ana de Armas, begins a romantic affair. We know they are two faces in a Hollywood acting class. We know they are bookends of a sort — blandly handsome, interchangeable, good casting on the part of writer/director Andrew Dominik, who in other ways delivers a project that, in the words of a friend, “looks like a very expensive student film.

Country music singer Maren Morris is so open-minded, inclusive, and tolerant that she’s considering not attending a major country music awards show because someone she disagrees with will be there. Here’s the backstory: country star Jason Aldean’s wife, Brittany, posted on Instagram a video of herself getting glam, along with the caption: "I'd really like to thank my parents for not changing my gender when I went through my tomboy phase. I love this girly life." Her husband commented: “Lmao!! I’m glad they didn’t too, cause you and I wouldn’t have worked out.” The post got a ton of support — including a pair of heart-eye emojis from Lara Trump. Then Morris lashed out online, writing: “It’s so easy to, like, not be a scumbag human?

“I always tell the truth — even when I lie,” says Tony Montana in Brian DePalma’s 1983 cult classic gangster film Scarface, which on September 1 became available for streaming on Netflix. The line resonates well in a post-truth world. In the film’s climactic scene, Tony, the drug kingpin played by Al Pacino, has just started his slide to rock bottom. His wife, Elvira, played by a young and then-unknown Michelle Pfeiffer, has publicly dumped him in an embarrassing scene at a high-end restaurant as well-manicured bourgeois types look on aghast. His erstwhile business partner in the drug trade is closing in after Tony failed to dispose of a troublesome investigative journalist.