“American Horror Story” (2011–) has always had a taste for glamour, gore and grand performances. Since its first season, retroactively titled “Murder House,” creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk have developed a world where a common cast of actors play a variety of characters. Each season ...
Bridget Kathleen O’Leary (BKO): [The play] is set in 1964, right after the Civil Rights [Act of 1964] has passed ... It’s kind of looking at the external scar that [Violet] carries and what it is for [Flick] to travel through the world as a black man in the '60s ... It is of great cost to him to be a black man out in the world, and she is struggling to be a woman that does not believe she has external beauty. There is this really beautiful refrain in a couple of the songs that they both sing, where they say, "Look at me." "Really look at me" is what they ask of each other. It’s this idea of "can you see beyond the exterior to get to the heart of who I am."
Film has long been an artistic medium used to process historical events, both recent and distant. Sometimes films use historical events as a jumping off point or a backdrop for a mainly fictional story, like the way Oscar-nominated film "Dunkirk" (2017) uses World War II to tell stories ...
Content warning: This article discusses violence."The Hate U Give," a cinematic adaptation of Angie Thomas' bestselling novel of the same name, graphically addresses the Black Lives Matter movement through the eyes of a young black woman, Starr Carter (Amandla Stenberg). A code-switching ...
On Sept. 18, singer, songwriter and producer Lana Del Rey played her most recent single, “Venice Bitch,” on Zane Lowe’s Beats 1 show on Apple Music. The 10-minute song is the second release from her work with producer Jack Antonoff, whose past credits include Taylor Swift’s “1989” (2014) ...
Zachary Hertz (ZH): We’re listening to My Chemical Romance’s (MCR) “The Black Parade” (2006) with tech enthusiast and YouTube celeb Dylan Hong, for whom both mozzarella sticks and pop punk have been a staple since early childhood. We have sticks from Wegmans, a store which holds a special ...
Content warning: This article mentions rape and abuse. 2018 marks the tenth anniversary of the Boston Asian American Film Festival (BAAFF). As New England’s largest Asian-American film festival, the BAAFF is dedicated to celebrating the brilliance behind the making of Asian-American films in diverse ...
Content warning: This article discusses addiction.Addiction is the ultimate disruptor, ruining not only the lives of those who immediately suffer from it but everyone who encounters it, forever snarling life’s supposedly linear path. In “Beautiful Boy,” father David Sheff (Steve Carell) is left ...
It’s seven on a Saturday, and after two or three hours of trying, I’ve finally managed to get a good mope going. There’s no experience so aesthetically palpable as a real good mope -- lying back on the velvet fainting couch you lifted off the sidewalk, hand across your forehead, hastily cobbled-together ...
"It’s a 20-year-old album, what the f***? On one hand, it’s cool that it’s held up,” lead singer and guitarist of the Goo Goo Dolls Johnny Rzeznik said to a packed audience at the House of Blues on Wednesday night.“On the other hand, it’s like, ‘You’re old Johnny, what the f***?’ ...
The weekend of Oct. 5 was no ordinary weekend for Somerville. Over the course of three days, activists and musicians from around the world descended on Davis Square for the yearly HONK! festival, a lively combination of music and activism.Since HONK!’s inception 12 years ago, the event has provided ...
Content warning: This article discusses violence.The most underrated quote from NBC's "The Office" (2005–13) comes from Robert California, as he muses on Halloween: "Fear plays an interesting role in our lives. How dare we let it motivate us? How dare we let it into our decision-making, ...
British director Paul Greengrass first gained mainstream recognition in 2004 with “The Bourne Supremacy.” The frenetic, rapid-cutting, unsteady camerawork of the Bourne series — somewhatderided by some critics as “shaky-cam” filmmaking — came to define action movies for the remainder of ...
Growing up black in Dublin, Ireland, Rejjie Snow (whose real name is Alexander Anyaegbunam) has always occupied an unusual vantage point. His musical style is no different. It is hard to categorize Snow's music: an eclectic mix of hip-hop and jazzy rhythms bedazzled by fragments of his own life. ...
On a recent trip with my film class to the Somerville Theatre, one of my classmates noted that we hadn't been asked for our IDs, something that she said normally happens to her, upon purchasing tickets for the R-rated movie we were planning to see. And in a cliché turn of events, the absence of ...
And as "Last Seen" continues its own investigation, it becomes clear that the FBI's findings may not quite add up: Bobby Gentile, the man who the FBI thought of as "their guy," is surely a person of interest, but there's no clear evidence that he had anything to do with the heist itself. He has accepted two jail sentences for separate crimes, and neither time did he answer questions about the Gardner heist in order to receive a reduced sentence.
The October box office has a history of under-performing releases, often mired by overdone horror movies in honor of Halloween. Prior to this year’s record-breaking“Venom” release, “Gravity” (2013) held October’s highest opening weekend, followed by a line of horror films, including most ...
Zachary Hertz (ZH): For our JumboCash-only readers, we’re reviewing oven-reheated mozzarella sticks from Tufts’ own Commons Marketplace. The album title could also describe the people in this room — Good Charlotte’s “The Young and the Hopeless” (2002). And our young and hopeless guest, Petrina ...
Hollywood has produced many ambitious movies about the perils of space travel over the past five years, including “Gravity” (2013), “Interstellar” (2014) and “The Martian” (2015). How, then, can a movie about Neil Armstrong ever hope to stand out at a filmic moment already so fixated on ...
From his early childhood, Ryan Gosling has been destined for the big screen. Gosling rose to prominence after his time on the Disney Channel’s star-producing show, “The All-New Mickey Mouse Club” (1989–94), and arguably has never left the spotlight since then. With his role as Neil Armstrong ...
