OAKLAND, Calif.—The people here were out of step with America. In the hours after the attacks of September 11, 2oo1, they were angry at the terrorists who flew planes into the Pentagon and World Trade Center. They wanted the attackers brought to justice. They mourned the victims, cheered the…

If you want to illustrate the old adage about a prophet who is without honor in his own country, look to Terry Gilliam. Mind you, I guess America isn’t even Gilliam’s country anymore, and neither is Hollywood. The onetime Monty Python member and director of “Time Bandits,” “Brazil” and “12 Monkeys,”…

by Bryan Curtis Jeff Henry, Verrückt, and the Men Who Built The Great American Water Park by Bryan Curtis / Photographs by Kevin Cooley / Illustrations by L-Dopa Kansas City, April Seventeen stories above Kansas — above cement rivers and man-made surf waves and cups of Dippin’ Dots: The Ice Cream of…

Back when people had to leave the house if they wanted to buy something, the biggest problem in the book business was bookstores. There were not enough of them. Bookstores were clustered in big cities, and many were really gift shops with a few select volumes for sale. Publishers sold a lot of their…

For someone who’s considered one of the greatest filmmakers in history, Sergio Leone was not especially prolific. While he worked extensively as an assistant director (with credits including “ Bicycle Thieves ,” “ Quo Vadis ” and “ Ben Hur “), he was only credited on seven films across his…

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There’s a joke you can see almost anytime there’s breaking news about violence. Some Auburn fans beat up some Alabama fans before the Iron Bowl, say, and a sour journalist quips, “When will moderate Auburn fans condemn the actions of extremist Auburn fans?” Repeat for any topic. This framework comes…

To say Jay Z is increasingly desperate over the labored launch of Tidal isn’t quite right. For all the stilted grandiosity of its optics (that goddamn press conference) and mission statement (to REVOLUTIONIZE, uh, streaming music!!!), Tidal doesn’t matter to the man’s legacy. Sure, it’d be nice , as…

On Monday Night Raw a few weeks ago, a loud contingent of pro wrestling fans found a new way to disrespect the women pro wrestlers in the ring. “You suck Cena!” they yelled, even though controversial World Wrestling Entertainment superstar John Cena wasn’t wrestling in the ring. Nikki Bella, the…

The world of podcasting has created its own stars, but few have more dedicated fans than Nick Kroll. After graduating from Georgetown in 2001, Kroll had the curious honor of starring in Cavemen , a rapidly cancelled sitcom based on the Geico Cavemen commercials. Kroll had much better luck as a…

MIX MASTER | Young Guru helped design a music curriculum at USC and speaks at companies like Pandora and BitTorrent. Photo: Photography by Brent Humphreys for WSJ. Magazine ON A COOL, RAINY afternoon in Austin, Texas, Young Guru—Jay-Z’s personal sound engineer for the past 16 years—was giving a…

by Isabel Slone If John Waters is the Pope of Trash , Kurt Cobain is the Pope of Teen Angst. My early punk days were spent loading quarters into the high school cafeteria jukebox just to hear the opening chords of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Years later, I forwent Klimt’s “The Kiss” as my dorm room…

Most audiences think of the feature-length film as 90 minutes or longer. The 30-50 minute “medium length” film has proved something of a conundrum for the American festival and distribution landscape. But filmmakers who work within those restrictions have found plenty of benefits. “I don’t know…

About twenty five years ago, two German dance music producers and a U.S.-born rapper plucked from a nearby military base battled it out against Queen Latifah’s friend from Jersey and a tiny hip-hop label to prove who had “The Power” on global dancefloors. Despite the fact that they had used a…

(Benjamin C. Tankersley/For The Washington Post) Several industries have become notorious for the millions they spend on influencing legislation and getting friendly candidates into office: Big Oil, Big Pharma and the gun lobby among them. But one has managed to quickly build influence with…

It’s now two apps. It’s the location layer to the Web. It’s not a game. Well, one app is a game. It’s personal search, goddamnit! And it’s winning! There are reasons that unicorns are rare. It’s incredibly hard to build a billion dollar company. Even if you have a great idea, execute well and draw…

"This league is like life," the star running back and main character of the short-lived ESPN drama, Playmakers , declares in the first episode as he watches his team's owner destroy a tape of him snorting cocaine off a naked woman's shoulder. "The rules don't apply." This scene was one of many which…

R obert Downey Jr. is Iron Man. Over the last seven years, the 50-year-old actor has played Tony Stark in six films (the Iron Man trilogy, an appearance in The Incredible Hulk , and a pair of Avengers films, the second of which, Age of Ultron , comes out May 1). When I meet him in the basement of a…

Every year, the brightest minds in the airline industry assemble in Hamburg, Germany, for the Aircraft Interiors Expo . For the most part, it’s a boring trade show full of talk about seat textiles and fuel economy. But it also includes exhibitors like Boeing and Airbus, which announce plans for…

Josh Valcarcel Google’s new wireless phone service, Project Fi , offers a long list of modern day perks. It automatically moves phones between traditional cellular networks and the WiFi wireless networks inside homes and businesses. Once on WiFi, you can still make calls and send texts. And you can…

mocoo/iStockphoto Looking for news you can trust? Subscribe to our free newsletters. While Kevin Drum is focused on getting better, we’ve invited some of the remarkable writers and thinkers who have traded links and ideas with him from Blogosphere 1.0 through today to pitch in posts and keep the…

The first New Republic I recall seeing erased me. I found it in my local public library during my junior year of high school; the edges were a little bit tattered. The magazine had put a blond, white teenager wearing headphones on the cover and called him “The Real Face of Rap.” People had been…

Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned” is the best-known line from William Congreve’s The Mourning Bride . But I’m concerned with the phrase preceding it, which captures wrath in more universal terms: “Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned.” Even an angry Almighty can’t compete with mortals…

There isn’t any point in denying that the outburst of sympathy and support that followed my confession to an attempt at self-slaughter last year ( Richard Herring podcast ) has touched me very deeply. Some people, as some people always will, cannot understand that depression (or in my case…

Culture homelessness cellphone On Reddit, he’s /u/huckstah, an administrator on /r/vagabond, a subreddit with nearly 10,000 members—many of them identify as “homeless”—who trade skills and stories. On “the road and the rails,” he’s Huck, and even after we speak twice by cellphone, he tells me he’d…

A few months ago, at the height of Oscar season, journalists indulged in what has become an annual orgy of fact checking. Feature films like the best-picture nominees “Selma” and “American Sniper” were subjected to special scrutiny because they were based on true stories. Departures from the record…

Illustration by Robert Neubecker Over the winter I moved from New York City to Portland, Ore. The reasons for my move were purely logical. New York was expensive and stressful. Portland, I reasoned, would offer me the space and time to do my work. Upon arriving, I rented a house and happily went out…

Doc had a very particular fetish, and he talked about it all the time. He fantasized about being murdered, disemboweled, buried in the desert. His friends thought he was joking. But Doc insisted. By Rachel Monroe Illustrations by Steve Kim On a warm day in March 2000, national park ranger Cary Brown…

Imitation is considered the sincerest form of flattery, but when it comes to parody, that’s a bit more hit-or-miss. This is particularly evident within the parody-film genre, which has been watered down by movie studios looking for ways to cash in on the latest pop culture phenomenon without having…

The Copacabana Club in Goodfellas The Copa Shot: It’s one of the few shots in the history of cinema readily identifiable by name, instantly conjuring the image of Goodfellas gangster Ray Liotta leading Lorraine Bracco – and by extension the audience – through the back entrance of New York’s…

The life of Kurt Cobain was not insufficiently documented. After the album Nevermind was released and made Cobain and his band, Nirvana, rock stars of almost instant generational significance, there followed the deluge of magazine and MTV profiles that could be expected of any cultural phenomenon.…

One thing about having a retrospective, it makes you consider where you are and how you got there, wherever and however that may be. It was always my plan to be a writer and film critic, but I was also interested in dance, so I majored in Film and minored in Dance at York University in Toronto. I…

James Franco, left, as Stephen Elliott in The Adderall Diaries . Photo: Courtesy of Tribeca Film Festival This past weekend I saw my life on the screen for the first time, when the movie version of my memoir The Adderall Diaries premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. For the record, I’m grateful —…

1. The Dirty. There is no right budget. There is, however, a right budgeting formula. But before getting to this formula, I want you to consider writing an indie film budget like you would write a script. A widely renowned writer once told me his trick to knowing when a scene is complete. It is when…

Dell Glover manufactured CDs for a living, but he began to wonder: if the MP3 was just as good, why bother with the CD? Photograph by Jehad Nga One Saturday in 1994, Bennie Lydell Glover, a temporary employee at the PolyGram compact-disk manufacturing plant in Kings Mountain, North Carolina, went to…

Cuepoint: Beyond Two Turntables and a Microphone: A Brief History of the DJ Mixer by Joshua Glazer https://t.co/ie3USd39Uo http://t.co/MIj2JPlKyf

The New York Times: Cecily Strong's trial by fire at the White House Correspondents Dinner http://t.co/3CS1wN8stW http://t.co/rCR4WSGIK3

“I thought it was right,” he says. “It is what I thought it was. How it happens came later.” When you talk to him—as I did at Toronto a year ago when he premiered his ill-fated movie directing debut, “Are You Here,” an amiable buddy comedy starring Owen Wilson and Zach Galifianakis, and again just…

Thousands of people gathered in Hyde Park yesterday to mark the yearly event of 420, and protest against the UK's cannabis laws. 420 is an American code word for cannabis with very esoteric, bizarre and not very interesting origins . However, what it means is that on 20 April at 4.20pm, some…

Two Dissolve writers keep The Conversation conversation going... Keith: There are fewer hotter filmmaking streaks than the one Francis Ford Coppola enjoyed in the 1970s. From The Godfather through Apocalypse Now , Coppola seemed incapable of making anything but masterpieces, films with stunning…