Here are puppies for you because there’s nothing else.
Can you read all 8 letters?
Thumbnail: Zonar RF / ThinkStock
How to slay grey hair 101.
And no, I didn’t wash it.
Andrew Richard, Lauren Zaser / BuzzFeed
There were two things I wanted to figure out from this experiment:
1. Would I really enjoy having the same clothes set out for me every morning?
2. Would anyone at my job notice or react to me wearing the same outfit over and over again?
Week 1 Outfit
Oh, brother!
“I will say though, when you don’t have makeup on you’re just as beautiful.”
BuzzFeed Yellow / Via youtube.com
Sit down, Australia. We need to talk.
Why it's wrong: Because cold Vegemite doesn’t spread properly.
BuzzFeed
Why it's wrong: It's lazy AF. Either take your socks off or put shoes on.
BuzzFeed
Why it's wrong: Because it's a Weet-Bix, not a Sao.
Why it's wrong: All you're giving is the sad realisation of what might have been.
♫ It’s our paradise, and it’s our warzone. ♫
RCA / Columbia
1. I'd love to hold you close, tonight and always. 😘
2. She wants somebody to love, in the right way.
3. When I'm with you I'm buzzing and I feel laced.
4. I take a shot for you. 💕
5. I lose control when I'm with you.
6. Can your heart be mine in search?
7. As long as you look me in the eyes, I'll go where you are.
8. Here with you 'cause you got the right vibe. ✌️
9. I go out of my way to treat you.
10. Her smile is all I see.
11. Give her my love and devotion.
12. She knows I need her loving.
13. She is the kryptonite.
14. Saw your face and got inspired.
RCA / Columbia
15. I don't drink to get drunk. 🍻
16. I feel all right funk.
17. She always knows where the crowd's at.
18. We're so late nights, red eyes, amnesia, on ice.
19. We be drunk all summer, drinking and flowing and rolling. ☀️
20. I found my life in between shots and getting high.
21. The dust settled down, now I can see through the crowd.
When then-32-year-old filmmaker Karyn Kusama arrived at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2000 to premiere her debut feature Girlfight, she had steeled herself for a mixed reception. Her movie was about a troubled Latina teenager from Brooklyn's Red Hook housing projects who finds love, and purpose to her life, when she starts training at a dingy local boxing gym. The cast was made up entirely of Latino actors, and its star was an unknown named Michelle Rodriguez. The audience at the premiere screening in Park City, Utah’s 1,200-seat Eccles Theater, by sharp contrast, was filled with upwardly mobile white people, many of them film executives — just like the ones who had told Kusama years earlier that they would be happy to finance her movie, if the lead was white.
But when Kusama stepped in front of the screen for the post-credits audience Q&A, she was greeted with an onslaught of enthusiasm and goodwill for Girlfight, with questions breathlessly praising Kusama’s expressive direction and Rodriguez’s star-making performance — that is, after the cheering died down. Kusama was completely caught off guard. "I really didn't think people would find the movie universally appealing, which is something that a lot of people talked about," Kusama recently told BuzzFeed News, sitting on a couch in her Los Angeles home while her 9-year-old son, Michio, watched episodes of Star Wars Rebels nearby. "They didn't expect to identify with this character, but they did."
When Kusama finally left the stage at the premiere, introductions were hurriedly made, and business cards were thrust in her hands. "None of it could quite register,” she said. “It was all so overwhelming." She could see what she called “the crush of the business coming right at [her]” — it’s her most vivid memory, in fact, of that night.
Michelle Rodriguez in Girlfight.
Screen Gems / Everett Collection
Three days later, after a fierce bidding war, Screen Gems bought the movie for a reported $3 million. Variety raved about "the arrival of a major new talent" in Kusama. Girlfight had become The Big Movie of that year's Sundance, and at the end of the 10-day festival, that designation became official: It won the Grand Jury Prize (along with Kenneth Lonergan's You Can Count On Me), and Kusama won the Directing Award.
To date, she is the only filmmaker ever to earn both accolades.
But rather than celebrate this propitious start to her career at the giant festival wrap party, she chose instead to cook dinner for her cast and crew back at the condo where they were all staying. It was a gesture, of course, to celebrate the people who'd worked so hard to help her realize her film. It was also a way to escape the near-constant bombardment of congratulations, and the subtle judgment that seemed to come with it.
"It's pretty gratifying to spend so long to make your first film and then feel like it got a lot of love — that was an incredible feeling. But there's something very distorting about that much attention. It felt like such a double-edged sword,” she said. “As much as people said, 'Oh, we want to work with you. What's your next project?' it also was coupled quite frequently — and this came with the press as much as anything — with this rhetorical question of, 'How grateful are you that this happened?' As if somehow luck was a really huge component."
"There's something very distorting about that much attention. It felt like such a double-edged sword."
Once the glare of the Sundance spotlights had dimmed, however, Kusama quickly began to experience another side of "the crush of the business." Rather than catapulting into success, or even slowly building out her body of work, Kusama seesawed between years of demoralizing industry indifference and directing two studio features that were challenging in the extreme: the sci-fi spectacle Æon Flux in 2005 and the horror-comedy Jennifer's Body in 2009. The latter was a flop, but it has become something of a cult favorite. The former, however, was nothing less than a filmmaker's nightmare, a self-described "eviscerating" disaster that nearly killed her career before it could really get started.
On Friday, Kusama's fourth film, the taut psychological thriller The Invitation, opens in limited release and on VOD. When it premiered last year at the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, Texas, the venue held just 298 seats, and after the film's Q&A, there was no mad swarm of Hollywood types eagerly waiting for Kusama to step off the stage. However, once again, the movie played like gangbusters, earning acclaim for Kusama and screenwriters Phil Hay (also Kusama's husband) and Matt Manfredi. In many ways, The Invitation is the ferociously entertaining, idea-packed showcase for Kusama's considerable filmmaking talents, which were always central to the promise of that heady week in Utah. It just took 15 years for it to arrive.
As she sat in her warmly lit living room packed with books on cinema and art, it became clear just how often the now 48-year-old has had to push past difficult circumstances, and how, after being lauded as one of the most promising filmmakers of her generation, she was unprepared for how little the film business was interested in what she actually had to say. The arc of her life and career easily reflects the trials faced by so many other female filmmakers. But it is also the singular story of an (at times) painfully solitary artist, someone whose temperament has put her at odds with the lopsided demands of her chosen profession — and, ultimately, allowed her to survive it.
Director of Girlfight Karyn Kusama walks the red carpet at Cannes Film Festival, May 15, 2000.
Al Seib / Getty Images
From the moment she was born in 1968, to a Japanese father and white Midwestern mother, Kusama stood out in her St. Louis neighborhood. "We were kind of the only family like us," she said. "People felt no problem just coming up to you and saying, 'What are you? How'd you get Chinese eyes and freckles?'"
Her parents met while in college, both of them studying to be mental health professionals: He was a child psychiatrist, and she an educational psychologist. Her childhood imbued Kusama with a keen emotional vocabulary and a therapist's ear for introspection. "There's something about that combo that made for a very open, intellectually lively household, but more reserved emotionally," she said of her parents’ similar professions and differing nationalities. "I think I was a pretty anxious dreamer, maybe a fundamentally lonely kid."
Like so many other filmmakers before and since, Kusama turned to movies as, she said, "a survival tool." By the time she was 13, she was having her parents drop her off at the local art house theater, called the Tivoli, on weekends, where she would drink in a day's worth of revival screenings. "I became obsessed with Warren Beatty," she said. "I could see McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Parallax View, and Splendor in the Grass in one day."
Then, in the same school year, Kusama saw Amy Heckerling's Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Martha Coolidge's Valley Girl. They were a revelation. "I hadn't yet seen a woman's name so close to the main title," she said. "And all of a sudden, it was like, oh! Women do this!" As she began actively seeking out more films directed by and about women — "not that there were tons to find at the time" — she decided she would become a filmmaker, and make movies about women, too.
"All of a sudden, it was like, oh! Women do this!"
She settled on NYU’s prestigious film production program, in part because she could get her hands on cameras right away. “And they gave me a scholarship!” she added. Her thesis film, Sleeping Beauties — a fantastical allegory about two teenage sisters trapped alone in a Gothic house — won a student filmmaking prize and earned her a chance to fly out to Los Angeles to meet with some agents. But those meetings didn't take, and it would be another 10 years before Kusama would make her first feature. "Day-to-day concerns really trumped big dreams for quite a while in my life," she explained. "I was so freaked out about money. And until, honestly, I was in my early thirties and made Girlfight, that anxiety was a real issue: How are you going to live? How are you going to survive?"
To make ends meet, Kusama babysat and took odd jobs editing NYU student films, which led to slightly surreal encounters like Bianca Jagger asking for help cutting her documentary on Nicaragua. But those nagging aforementioned questions had much more primal implications for Kusama. Within two years of each other, her closest friend and writing partner, and then her older brother, both died of drug overdoses.
"I had no shortage of wild times in my youth. But it just hadn't occurred to me that a night would get out of control, and then somebody would not be awake the next day." She took a deep breath. "As that was all happening, you know, I had friends my age who I realized had AIDS, and, um…" She sighed again, and her eyes began to glisten with tears. "I think, you know, for all of that to hit by the time I was 24, 25, 26 — the notion of how lives can just turn upside down really hit me in a visceral way. … I really recognized I was not prepared to take on expressions of the adult world because I was still so trying to figure it out."
Emotionally depleted and creatively blocked, Kusama started taking boxing lessons at Gleason's Gym in Brooklyn on the recommendation of a friend. The regimented workouts became a kind of therapy — and a source of inspiration. "There was a moment where I just looked at this gym, took it all in, and wondered, Where are the girls?" Kusama said.
She began listening to the stories of the young Latino and black men who would train next to her, how they would treat their trainers as surrogate father figures and channel their anger from their days at school into their work at the gym. Then, one day, a male sparring partner in a clinch essentially dared Kusama to hit him. A script began to form: It featured a young Latina character named Diana Guzman, whose mother had died when she was young and whose father was a washout alcoholic who barely paid her any notice at all.
John Sayles
Ron Galella / WireImage
It was around this time that Kusama met John Sayles, a dyed-in-the-wool independent filmmaker who was friends with the couple Kusama babysat for. He was in the midst of prepping what would become one of his most acclaimed films, the 1996 Western-mystery Lone Star, and Kusama became his assistant. In Sayles, she finally found a mentor, someone from whom she could learn the practical logistics of filmmaking, and who could supply the focused creative motivation for Girlfight she desperately needed. "He just had a couple of really great notes along with some incredible encouragement," she said with a sigh. "I mean, man, it just means so much to have people you respect just give you a little bit of support."
He also gave Kusama something else only a good mentor can provide: a firm push out the door. "She had been kind of wandering in the wilderness for it seemed like a year and a half with a very good script," Sayles recalled in a phone interview. "And various fairly dilettantish people who sometimes put money into movies were [saying], 'Oh, yes, maybe, no, maybe.' It just got kind of ridiculous. I said, 'Karyn, you have to dedicate yourself to this one thing.'" In essence, he fired her so she could focus on Girlfight full-time.
Thus began a dispiriting multi-year process for the then-29-year-old Kusama of taking meetings with independent film companies and financiers, and hearing the same note over and over and over again. "'Does she have to be Latina?'" Kusama repeated. "And also, 'Can she be not just a white girl, but a vehicle for a more well-known actress?'" And yet, even after she spent the better part of the decade with the director's chair so distressingly out of reach, there was never any temptation for Kusama to acquiesce to their demands.
"It just didn't feel worth it to give away something so personal to me to accommodate somebody else's deep fears."
"I was never going to make much money on the movie, really at any budget," she said. "I knew I could cobble together as much of a life, frankly, by babysitting, being a screenwriter's assistant, and being John's assistant. It just didn't feel worth it to give away something so personal to me to accommodate somebody else's deep fears."
In the end, Sayles and his producing and life partner Maggie Renzi provided the bulk of the film's roughly $1 million budget. "I thought it was really well-written," Sayles said. "I thought it had potential to get a release and a chance to make its money back. I felt like from talking with Karyn, she knew what she was doing. And also, quite honestly, it was frustration that nobody else was going to invest in this thing."
The film's $3 million sale at Sundance did indeed earn Sayles his money back, and the rousing treatment the film received at the festival appeared to validate, quite profoundly, Kusama's creative convictions. But when Girlfight opened in theaters that September, it never played in more than 253 locations, and it only grossed $1.6 million.
"That was like, Oh, it's all over," Kusama said. "It's been three or four weeks. We're done. That's a real comedown." While Girlfight did make several critics' top 10 lists at the end of the year, it is now held up, fairly or not, as a classic example of the fevered, altitude-induced enthusiasm of the "Sundance bubble" unduly inflating a movie's acquisition price — and overestimating its true commercial potential.
Karyn Kusama on the set of Girlfight.
Screen Gems / Everett Collection
Although Girlfight fizzled at the box office, that obviously didn't change the quality of the film, or Kusama's abilities as a filmmaker. And, besides, the movie had still made more money than, say, Todd Haynes' first film, Poison, or David O. Russell's debut, Spanking the Monkey. Kusama believed that she'd earned at least the right for her next film — a sci-fi script she'd written about a man who begins changing into a woman against his will — to be taken seriously. But, to put it mildly, it was not.
"It was pretty interesting to have agents and managers say, 'There is no way my client is going to play a character who is shedding his masculinity, and then have that role taken over by a woman. No fucking way,'" Kusama said. One manager of a major A-list star was "repulsed" by the script, especially a scene in which the man’s balls literally fall off on the bathroom floor. "It was kind of funny, because it's not that challenging," Kusama continued, her genial voice taking on an edge. "But in the same way [as with] Girlfight [when] people said, 'Can Laura Dern play this part instead?' — people said, 'You know, you would have a lot more success making this if this guy would turn into a dog.'"
Kusama understood that her artistic taste was not naturally mainstream. On the eve of Girlfight's theatrical release, she'd even told Bomb magazine, "I wanted to test myself with a traditional narrative story because, in many regards, that's not what interests me." Other filmmakers, though, with more unorthodox career breakouts — Darren Aronofsky, Christopher Nolan, Steven Soderbergh, Richard Linklater — gained at least some financial traction for their follow-up efforts. It had been years, and Kusama was not only nowhere, it began to feel like the system was rigged against her. "I had moments of just being like, wow, I'm kind of getting killed here," she said with a deep sigh, shaking her hands in frustration. “Like, what is legitimate success if the environment you're in feels sometimes fundamentally hostile?”
By 2003, she could not help but ask herself, What if I were male? How much easier would this be? As a female filmmaker who'd already earned a fair amount of press and plaudits, Kusama kept walking into rooms and negotiating expectations for her to be at once brash and charming, independent and humble. But men? "You can essentially be autistic and be male [in filmmaking]," she said, throwing up her hands. "I am in some ways really attempting to really nurture my inner autistic self. But ultimately, my instinct is being an antisocial woman who maybe seems like she had a chip on her shoulder, or seems like she'd be really hard to work with, or maybe seems slightly crazy — that doesn't seem like a good thing. But I feel like there's a promise, this like whiff of excitement, around men who display those traits, as if there's a secret to all of it. Women don't get that free pass."
Charlize Theron with director Karyn Kusama on the set of Æon Flux.
Paramount / Everett Collection
You can communicate an entire personality assessment in a raise of the eyebrows.
HBO
But giving it enough time in between you both leaving so that it doesn't look too suspicious.
NBC
"You can do this, you can wait until 12 before you have lunch."
NBC
*Throws muffin* Baneeena!
Why eat food alone when you can eat it surrounded by animals watching you eat it?
"Harry" is a play on words – it is similar to the Japanese word for hedgehog, harinezumi. Which is appropriate, because the whole thing is full of adorable hedgehogs you can pet whilst having a cup of tea.
For those that find themselves in Scotland and really want an array of beautiful cats to stare at them intently as they eat their food, Maison de Moggy is the place to visit. You must make a prior booking.
Instagram: @youknowitisasecret
Though this is primarily a pet supplies shop, it also features a café where you feed yourself and nine huskies some treats. You must call and make a booking beforehand, as it tends to be very popular, unsurprisingly.
As you would expect of a cat café in London, it doesn't just serve standard tea and cake, but also high tea – featuring tiered plates and the whole works. Booking is required for general admission as it's a very popular destination!
We shit you not.
Andrew Richard / BuzzFeed
$44.73, Neoromantica.
And wish yourself good luck.
$18, Exaltation.
$5, Bruised Tongue.
How good is your fantasy knowledge?
~The more you know.~
ted.com / TED
youtube.com / TED
youtube.com / TED
youtube.com / TED
Girlfriend looks good in literally EVERYTHING.
Via instagram.com
Via instagram.com
All men must die, but we are not men.
*heart eyes emoji*
Frazer Harrison / Getty Images
Frazer Harrison / Getty Images
Christopher Polk / Getty Images
Christopher Polk / Getty Images
Do you know Granger from a stranger?
Like literally so cute.
@kyliejenner / instagram.com
Snapchat: kyliejenner / instagram.com
