“You don’t just turn it on and get the apps?”
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She promised nude selfies til she dies, and she is maintaining that promise.
Among other things, she wrote:
I am empowered by my body. I am empowered by my sexuality. The body-shaming and the slut-shaming – enough is enough. I will not live my life dictated by the issues you have with my sexuality. You be you and let me be me. I am a mother. I am a wife, a sister, a daughter, an entrepreneur and I am allowed to be sexy.
“I have a special travel lota that is always in my suitcase.”
Some have a claw, some have a giraffe neck.
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Devon Terrell in Barry.
Courtesy of TIFF
For the second time this year, Barack Obama is at the center of a film debuting at a major film festival — and winning raves, to boot. It turns out, he's an unusually productive filmmaking subject for a sitting US president.
Director Vikram Gandhi was drawn to creating a movie about Obama's first year as a student at Columbia University for many reasons, but particularly because it was an opportunity to render an American experience that's never been quite captured on film, given the current president's unique place in history.
"There's a rhetoric that's happened through Trump of, like, 'This man has divided us,' which I'm always so shocked by, because I actually just felt the complete opposite," Gandhi told BuzzFeed News at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival, where his movie, Barry, debuted on Sept. 10. "It's the first time the world had seen somebody leading America who looked like, I guess, a lot of the world, which is an ever-browning mixture of people. Our future will look more like Obama."
“Our future will look more like Obama.”
Perhaps that's one of the reasons why Barry and Southside With You, which debuted last January at the Sundance Film Festival and opened in theaters in August, share Obama as their central subject. While Southside With You is set over a single day as Obama and his future wife Michelle go on (a hypothetical version of) their first date, Barry stretches over roughly six months during a comparatively less well-known period of Obama's life: his first year at Columbia after transferring in 1981 as a junior from Occidental College in Los Angeles.
"Growing up in Hawaii, he was used to being the only black person in the room. His journey in New York is like, What is it like to be African-American? Are my roots in that? I was drawing from my own experience, usually being the only Indian person in the room," said Gandhi, a fellow Columbia alum. "I was at some event where I was telling Quincy Jones about the movie, and he just looks at me, and he was like, 'Ah, Barack was so confused when he was in New York back then.'"
In that uncertainty, the filmmakers could also capture the different, racially defined spaces the future president had to occupy as a young man. "We wanted to see how he could code-switch," said Gandhi. "All these different switches that he was turning, you can't live your life like that. So he had to integrate all of them. That's what the movie is about — when he integrates them, he can own up to being this guy Barack. But before that, he's Barry."
Barack Obama as student at Harvard University, circa 1992.
Apic / Getty Images
Without a detailed chronicle of Obama's time at Columbia, however, Gandhi and his screenwriter Adam Mansbach (author of the children's book parody Go the Fuck to Sleep, as well as novels Rage Is Back, Shackling Water, and Angry Black White Boy) took some creative liberties with his story, foremost being the invention of Charlotte (The Witch's Anya Taylor-Joy), a white undergrad who becomes Obama's girlfriend soon after he arrives at Columbia.
"We weren't trying to open up, oh, who is the woman before Michelle," said Gandhi. "I just really didn't want anyone to fixate on that." Instead, the filmmakers' hope was to craft speculative portrait of the man Obama would become through depicting a narrow period in his life in which he was still trying to find himself and his place in the world.
Devon Terrell at the TIFF/InStyle/HFPA Party during the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival in Sept. 10.
Matt Winkelmeyer / Getty Images
Even the actor the filmmakers cast to play Obama has his own complex journey with his racial identity. Devon Terrell was born in Long Beach, California, to an Anglo-Indian mother and an African-American father. He lived in Georgia until he was 5, when his family moved to Perth, Australia — very similar to Obama relocating to Indonesia with his mother when he was 6. "I had, like, a Southern accent, and then had to change my accent to fit in with all the kids," Terrell explained to BuzzFeed News at TIFF. "I looked different than everyone else. I wasn't quite Indian. I wasn't quite African-American. I was in this middle. Didn't know where I sat. I didn't know if I was even Australian." After attending drama school in Sydney, Terrell moved to New York to launch his acting career, and immediately ran into the same issues all over again. "I was like, oh finally, people that look like me! [But] it was weird, because then I just didn't feel American," the 23-year-old said. "And then I would have conversations like, 'No, but you're Australian.' It was a confusing time for me."
The mercurial nature of Hollywood certainly didn't help: After landing the lead role in director Steve McQueen's TV series Codes of Conduct, HBO scrapped it, and that same day he got a call from his agents about Barry. "I wasn't finding the guy [to play Obama]," said Gandhi. "It was like, 'What about that dude who has, like, one thumbnail on the internet who Steve McQueen was interested in? I wonder what's up with that guy?'"
For his initial audition, Gandhi told Terrell not to bother with sounding too much like Obama. "I was picturing this movie where everybody was a great actor, and then, like, there was a cartoon character of Obama walking around," said the director. "I wanted to make something that was authentic on its own, and felt emotional. It wasn't a trick. It wasn't a gimmick." Indeed, the name "Obama" is never uttered in the film, and the character is only ever referred to as "Barry" throughout it.
Anya Taylor-Joy, Vikram Gandhi, and Devon Terrell at the premiere of Barry during the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 10.
Juanito Aguil / Getty Images
Once Terrell had secured the role, however, the filmmakers did need to figure out a way to find the right voice — literally and figuratively — for the character. So they turned to a 56-minute video of Obama talking in 1995 about his memoir, Dreams From My Father. It still features Obama in a familiar stance at a podium, and he is 14 years older than the young, unsure man at the center of Barry. "How do you get really close to the person that's in the photographs of him as a kid?" Gandhi asked rhetorically. "There's no footage of him, like, smoking a bong. But there is him talking in a colloquial way about his youth, and that was the closest to any footage that we'd seen where it seemed like it was him being himself."
"It's like an awkward confidence," added Terrell. "He's so charming when he speaks and when he smiles that you can see everybody in the room lighting up and just fascinated, but he doesn't feel like a leader."
Ultimately, it’s that innate relatability — a quality that’s valued at a premium by both Hollywood and Washington, DC — that makes Obama so tantalizing as a cinematic subject. “As a public figure, he's part of the lineage of African-American leaders, but is also an everyman,” said Gandhi. “I think people see a lot of themselves in him, because he gives you a glimpse into who he is. He was able to break the mold. It feels like there's something authentic under all of it.”
A young model shows off the latest FTL Moda Kids collection during New York Fashion Week in New York City.
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David Brown of the United States celebrates his victory in the men's 100-meter T11 final, during day 4 of the Rio 2016 Paralympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
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Morteza Mehrzadselakjani of Iran competes in the men's sitting volleyball match between Iran and Ukraine on day 7 of the Rio 2016 Paralympic Games.
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A Nepalese mother applies makeup to her daughter at Hanuman Dhoka temple in Kathmandu, Nepal. Girls under the age of 9 gathered for the Kumari Puja, a tradition of worshiping young prepubescent girls as manifestations of the divine female energy. The ritual holds a strong religious significance in the Newar community that seeks divine blessings to save small girls from disease and misfortune in the years to come.
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Model Ashley Graham walks the runway during New York Fashion Week.
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Muslims attend a morning prayer to mark Eid al-Adha in Moscow. Eid al-Adha (the feast of sacrifice) is the second of two Islamic holidays celebrated worldwide to mark the end of the annual pilgrimage to the Saudi holy city of Mecca.
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The image of a face appears as hundreds of military troops holding mosaic cards raise them in a wave, during a practice march for the Independence Day parade in Mexico City. Thousands will gather in Mexico City's main square on Friday for a massive military parade to commemorate Mexico's independence from Spain.
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A demonstrator stares down a riot policeman during a protest marking Chile's 1973 military coup in Santiago.
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A wounded demonstrator is evacuated by riot police following scuffles between protesters and the police as part of a protest against a labor law in Paris. French unions are staging a last-ditch bid to dismantle a labor law that weakens their powers and worker protections.
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A French riot police officer is engulfed by flames during a demonstration against the controversial labour reforms of the French government in Paris.
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Syrian men carrying babies make their way through the rubble of destroyed buildings following a reported air strike on the rebel-held Salihin neighborhood of Aleppo.
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A young Syrian rescue worker carries a wounded boy away from the rubble following reported air strikes on the rebel-held town of Douma.
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A displaced child from Syria is seen at a refugee camp in Baiji, Iraq.
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Visitors make their way through the Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, before candles are carried to the Wall of Names in memory of the passengers and crew of Flight 93.
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Members of an Afghan honor guard greet each other after offering Eid-al-Adha prayers at the Hazrat Ali shrine in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan.
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Advocates with Oxfam America have placed hundreds of life jackets on the ground along the New York City waterfront to draw attention to the refugee crisis. Many of the life jackets were used by adult and child refugees and collected on beaches in Greece.
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Two men on a motorcycle stop to take a selfie with a burning truck after it was set ablaze by angry mobs in Bangalore, India. India's top court on Monday ordered the southern state of Karnataka to release water from a disputed river to the neighboring state of Tamil Nadu, after violence erupted in both states over water sharing.
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A member of the band called the Red Devils of Victor Jara takes a break during a demonstration commemorating the 43rd anniversary of Chile's 1973 military coup, inside the general cemetery in Santiago.
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A man uses a scissors to make intricate decorative patterns on a camel's back before displaying it for sale at a makeshift cattle market ahead of the Eid al-Adha festival in Karachi, Pakistan.
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A model poses as part of art installation titled "Narcissism: Dazzle Room" by artist Shigeki Matsuyama in Tokyo. Matsuyama's installation features a strong contrast of black and white, which he learned from dazzle camouflage used mainly in World War I.
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A young man struggles to drink a mouthful of homemade alcohol poured from the mouth of an idol of "Swet Bhairab," during the Indra Jatra festival in Kathmandu, Nepal.
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A koala soaked by floodwaters sits atop a fence post to escape the deluge in the town of Stirling, Australia.
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There can only be one Twitter queen.
You voted all week, now here are the results.
Starting off with 373 votes.
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With 384 votes.
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With 471 FAB votes.
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It might not be as easy as you think.
Here’s your (final) chance to ask the cast anything you want!
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Let’s all think of a fun *inside* game to play.
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The opening scene of the new movie Bridget Jones’s Baby (out Sept. 16) will look familiar to anyone who has encountered our heroine in one of her two previous big-screen outings (2001’s Bridget Jones’s Diary and 2004’s Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason). Bridget (Renée Zellweger) is alone in her apartment on her 43rd birthday and about to eat a cupcake while the song “All by Myself” wails. “How in hell did I end up here again?” she asks, which is a question that we too might be wondering. Bridget is — still! — a professional Sad Single Lady; she remarks that she got her annual phone call from her mother to remind her to take her ovaries out of retirement, but "at least I was down to my perfect weight."
If this all sounds familiar, that's because this has been Bridget's refrain since the first movie, when she lamented, "That was the moment I suddenly realized that unless something changed soon, I was going to live a life where my major relationship was going to be with a bottle of wine. And I’d finally die, fat and alone, and be found three weeks later half eaten by wild dogs."
The tropes will get you every time. It's barely a spoiler (since it's in the trailer) to learn that in Baby, there's a wedding at the end of the movie. As decades of rom-coms have taught us, it's impossible to portray singledom as anything besides an extended pit stop on the journey to wedded bliss. But in the age of single-lady empowerment books like Rebecca Traister's All the Single Ladies and Kate Bolick's Spinster, is it too much to expect that Bridget would possibly embrace a different path than the one that every rom-com trope requires?
Well...yes, probably. After her disastrous birthday — her best friends all bail on her birthday dinner for child-related reasons, and she's greeted at work by a cake loaded down by 43 candles — Bridget finds herself rolling around a yurt at a music festival with a sexy American played by Patrick Dempsey. But a week later, she's reunited with her one true love, Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), at a christening, and they too have sex. Then, of course, hijinks about which of these handsome, apparently virile men is the father ensue.
Universal Pictures
The movie is funnier than it needs to be — I laughed out loud several times at the screening I went to, and I was reminded just how good Zellweger is at physical comedy in particular. Still, I was left with the nagging feeling that — like Bridget at the beginning of the movie — the romantic comedy, as a genre, is also in a stage of arrested development. One of the characteristics of Shakespearean comedy was that they ended with a wedding (as opposed to tragedies, which ended in death). English novelists like Fanny Burney and Jane Austen wrote the first romantic comedy novels, which ended with weddings, and the genre has in large part not deviated from that narrative.
So Bridget’s trajectory from sad-sack single lady to happily married woman with a child reflects a traditional, predictable, heteronormative romantic comedy storyline. Few big-budget Hollywood rom-coms have dared subvert that narrative; one that actually did was the Jennifer Aniston/Vince Vaughn film The Break-Up, which ends (spoiler alert for a 10-year-old movie) with Aniston and Vaughn's characters going their separate ways. But in general, the mainstream film industry has been slow to deviate from a script where marriage is seen not just as the goal, but as a sign of a fully actualized life. (Though indie films like (500) Days of Summer and Celeste and Jesse Forever have done a better job at challenging this narrative, and TV has also caught on with shows like You're the Worst, Better Things, and even The Mindy Project.) So are these predictable narratives what audiences actually want, or are they what Hollywood thinks audiences want?
In Bridget Jones's Baby, Bridget has come quite far professionally — she's the producer of a daily TV show called Hard News — but her fruitless dating life is what seems to dominate her identity, as it has since the first movie. Once the main story of Baby — which man is the father of her unborn child — gets set in motion, there's a brief moment when it seems like there could be a world in which Bridget would strike out on her own, but the story very quickly becomes not just about which man is the father, but also about which man she'll spend the rest of her life with. It's a subtle yet significant shift, one that closes the door on the possibility that Bridget will raise her child alone.
So when Bridget gets fired by her younger boss after a disastrous presentation of a new live broadcast app from Hard News, she's worried, but not too worried. After all, she has two handsome, successful men fighting over her. And while it's not clear what might have happened to Bridget professionally, the takeaway is that what she really wanted, at the end of the day, was to be married.
Like Carrie Bradshaw and Ally McBeal, Bridget Jones has long served as an avatar for a certain type of woman: professionally ambitious but unlucky in love, and alternately defiant and despondent about it. This Hollywood "type" has yet to evolve to embrace the nuances of how we live now. As Traister writes:
"Today’s women are, for the most part, not abstaining from or delaying marriage to prove a point about equality. They are doing it because they have internalized assumptions that just a half-century ago would have seemed radical: that it’s okay for them not to be married; that they are whole people able to live full professional, economic, social, sexual, and parental lives on their own if they don’t happen to meet a person to whom they want to legally bind themselves. The most radical of feminist ideas — the disestablishment of marriage — has been so widely embraced as to have become habit, drained of its political intent but ever-more potent insofar as it has refashioned the course of average female life."
The film even ends on Bridget with her new husband and baby — a perfect inverse of the beginning of the film, when she's sad and alone. The implication here is that for Bridget to become fully actualized, she has to commit herself to the most traditional of narratives, because otherwise, what is she? As Kate Bolick wrote in The Atlantic in 2011, in an article that would serve as the basis for Spinster: "The single woman is very rarely seen for who she is — whatever that might be — by others, or even by the single woman herself, so thoroughly do most of us internalize the stigmas that surround our status."
Of course, those stigmas are more complicated when you're not Bolick's (or Bridget's) demographic: white and upper-middle-class. Of single mothers, Bolick writes: "Today 40 percent of children are born to single mothers. This isn’t to say all of these women preferred that route, but the fact that so many upper-middle-class women are choosing to travel it — and that gays and lesbians (married or single) and older women are also having children, via adoption or in vitro fertilization — has helped shrink the stigma against single motherhood." Once rich white women decided it was okay to be single moms, then society came around too.
But again, the mainstream film industry has never been particularly groundbreaking when it comes to challenging social norms. (Trainwreck, which grossed $140 million worldwide, is something of an exception: a rom-com whose heroine is actually multidimensional, although the movie has a typical rom-com ending.) In pop culture, single moms in movies are usually some combination of poor and/or nonwhite and/or young — the implication being that they are for gawking, not relatability. For Bridget to end the movie happy and alone with her child would not have given audiences their satisfying rom-com ending, but it would have been a small but significant improvement in how single women are represented in popular culture.
The familiar structure of the rom-com may provide comfort, but in 2016 it feels unreflective and regressive. While there may not seem to be much incentive for Hollywood to take risks when it comes to the genre, the box office says otherwise — only two of the top 25 highest-grossing romantic comedies since 1978 are from the last five years (Silver Linings Playbook and Trainwreck). Perhaps audiences, too, have soured on a genre that has become rote and predictable.
This may be a sequel and a big Hollywood movie, but that doesn't mean we can't ask more from it. Zellweger has recently been quite vocal about the ways in which she feels that society focuses too much on older women's appearance and how they should age in public. Perhaps she, and we, can now turn our attention to the ways in which Hollywood resorts to old-fashioned ideologies and narratives that reinforce those very same issues.
Not every episode can be the best, even if the show is.
Pure bliss.
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