Aside from wishing that everyone would just call you “The Dark Knight.”
Warner Bros.
Warner Bros.
Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. / Via 9gag.com
It’s great that he’s on board, but we still have a long way to go.
Justine Zwiebel / Via BuzzFeed
On Monday night, appearing on the Late Show With David Letterman, comedian Aziz Ansari came out as a feminist. His girlfriend is a "big feminist," he said, which is what led him to think about feminism in the first place. And as a result of this bit, Ansari is getting pat after pat after pat on the back, simply for picking up the word and calling it his own.
I know that 19-year-old feminist-button-wearing me would have been thrilled. At some point, especially early on in one's interaction with feminism, the word alone feels profound; it's gratifying to share it with anyone.
But now, hearing Ansari's ensuing explanation makes my skin crawl: "If you look up feminist in the dictionary" — the classic introduction of mansplainers everywhere — "it just means someone who believes men and women have equal rights."
I will give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that by "have" he means "should have." In any case, the audience applauds and he goes on: "Now people think feminist means, like, some woman's gonna start yelling at 'em ... That's why even some women don't clap. 'Oh I don't want that crazy bitch yelling at me!'" [Cue raucous laughter.]
In this part of the joke, Ansari summons the specter of this yelling, angry woman as something "feminist" doesn't mean. His feminism doesn't need to be threatening. It doesn't have to make anyone uncomfortable. He knows why you ladies might hesitate to use this cool new word he's handing you, and he knows why you shouldn't. Feminism, in Ansari's portrayal, is a small, easy pill to swallow.
But I'm a woman, and I'm angry. Generally speaking I try not to yell, but it happens. That crazy bitch he's talking about could be me. In disassociating her from Good Feminism, it feels as though Ansari is trying to kick me out of my own club.
Then, too, the issues Ansari goes on to list as the central tenets of his feminism are very particular, and very safe: equal pay. The vote. The undue burden of domestic responsibilities. And certainly, these are all important, and worth caring about, and, with the exception of the vote, which has been ours for the taking for almost 100 years, remain unsolved.
They are, as my friend Christine Friar cheekily put it, "the man with candy in a van of feminist discourse," a conciliatory nod with dubious intent. They are, with the best of intentions, a perfectly fine starting point.
They are also the issues most prevalent among feminism's first wave; Ansari's version of feminism is largely white and upper class. Low-income families can't afford to wonder who will stay home and raise the kids. Women of color face a much steeper wage gap than white women. When Ansari invokes Beyoncé and Jay Z as the model couple, he is speaking about two of the richest human beings on Earth. When he suggests that someone might go to an On the Run show and think to himself that Beyoncé should be at home cooking for Jay Z, it's a joke, but it's also absurd. Obviously, they have a chef.
It also seems worth mentioning that Beyoncé herself has, on countless occasions, presented the public with her own identity as an all-caps FEMINIST — more complex, more challenging, shown more than told. That Ansari somehow manages to put Beyoncé and feminism in the same sentence without acknowledging that is irksome.
That's what grates the most about the interview: Why congratulate Ansari for claiming a watered-down version of something so many women have been arguing (however angrily, or not) for ages? It is akin to someone showing up late to a party already well under way, and to then announce that it can finally begin.
This is not a problem exclusive to Aziz Ansari. Before him, there was Joseph Gordon-Levitt — widely praised for calling himself a feminist, first on Ellen in January, and again in a video called "RE: Feminism" released last month. Gordon-Levitt's feminism echoes the banal platitudes of Ansari's, if delivered more smugly; in the latter video, he says, "To me, it just means that your gender doesn't have to define who you are." Oh, word? How wonderful.
It's not just that he's objectively wrong — our gender, and our gender presentation, how we identify, and the way other people identify us, do absolutely set boundaries in our lives — but that he's making it sound so simple. It's not simple. It's the most difficult thing I encounter every day. To have it borrowed, set to music, and delivered back to me by a handsome young man who strips it of all nuance entirely, feels co-optive. Whatever it makes me feel, it's not congratulatory.
There is a push and a pull here, and it's not only about famous men. I ultimately would rather Ansari, and Gordon-Levitt, and any man, whoever he is, to think about feminist issues than not. It will never be too soon. A little is better than not at all. Feminism is for everyone and I want to believe that. But I no longer think claiming the word feminist is particularly worthy of accolades. Acting like one — that is.
The Sayreville players allegedly sexually assaulted freshman students, leading to a cancellation of the entire football season. Six players were arrested Friday.
Students at the Board of Education meeting on Tuesday, the after the football season was canceled in Sayreville, N.J.
AP Photo/The Star-Ledger,William Perlman
The players' arrests were just the latest development in a story that has included allegations of violent sexual assault, as well as the cancelation of the school's entire football season.
Six of the players were arrested, the Associated Press reported, while police continued looking for the seventh. Prosecutors charged three of the players with aggravated sexual assault, criminal restraint, hazing and other crimes. The other four were charged with aggravated criminal sexual contact, as well as other crimes.
The players' names haven't been released because they are minors, but they range in age from 15 to 17 years old.
Students leave Sayreville War Memorial High School on Oct. 7.
AP Photo/The Star-Ledger,Patti Sapone
In Season 3, Oliver Queen’s alter ego, Arrow, will face Ra’s al Ghul as the Big Bad. But for fans and The CW, he’s already won.
Graphic by Alice Mongkongllite for BuzzFeed / Warner Bros. Television / The CW
On the Vancouver set of Arrow, during an uncharacteristically sweltering August day in the usually cool city, Stephen Amell was bewigged. The star of Arrow was shooting a scene set in Hong Kong, where Oliver landed in the Season 2 finale, finally sprung from the island where he had been captive in flashbacks during the show's first two seasons. As a present-day billionaire superhero, Oliver veers between his (green) Arrow costume and designer suits, with a cropped haircut that matches his grown-up rich-kid station (despite some current financial problems). In flashbacks, however, Ollie is often dirty, bedraggled, and shaggy. Amell apologized for his appearance, and told a story about going home in the middle of a workday — while still in flashback costume — to say hello to his wife and baby daughter, and how he ended up terrifying his child. In a flattened tone, Amell said, "I hate it."
Too bad. Because the nature of Arrow is that Amell, 33, plays multitudes. He is the Oliver Queen who is a Starling City socialite returned from the dead two years before; he is the Arrow, who was fueled by rage upon his return to the world, but now seeks justice and aspires to heroism; he is the Oliver of the flashbacks, who has had to transform from a hapless prisoner to a shrewd, hardened ass-kicker; and in wayback flashbacks, he's Ollie the playboy douche. And within all of those personas, Oliver is keeping secrets, calculating his future moves, and trying to remain a human being.
Andrew Kreisberg, who developed Arrow with Greg Berlanti and Marc Guggenheim, said to BuzzFeed News: "We always say, every week we're trying to make a movie. And that wouldn't work if we didn't have a movie star in the lead."
Season 3 of Arrow begins Oct. 8 on The CW. For its first two seasons, it has been the network's most-watched show, averaging 3.8 million viewers in Nielsen's Live + 7 ratings. On Tuesday night, relying on Arrow's strength and presumed audience desire, The CW launched a spinoff, The Flash, also based on a DC Comics property. The Flash, starring Grant Gustin as Barry Allen, was born out of an Arrow Season 2 arc; the two shows are set in different cities, but exist in the same universe, and will cross over. The premiere did incredibly well, drawing 4.5 million viewers. Even at this early stage, executives at DC, The CW, and Warner Bros. (the studio that produces the show), are eyeing a third character who could possibly lead another show. "There are discussions going on," said Mark Pedowitz, the president of The CW, in a recent telephone interview, "but I can't tell you what they are."
In addition to Arrow and The Flash, television currently has a number of comic-book-based shows — AMC's The Walking Dead, Fox's Gotham, ABC's Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and NBC's soon-to-premiere Constantine — but let's face it: It's a hard row to hoe. Especially when the genre gets further whittled to superhero TV. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. struggled to find itself creatively in its first season, and Gotham, three episodes in, is making those attempts now. The fanboy community, once won over, is among the most loyal pop culture consumers — but first you have to drag them, screaming, from throwing the project off a precipice of knee-jerk hate.
"When the project got announced, there was a lot of cynicism we were met with online — which, by the way, I totally get," Guggenheim said. "Green Arrow is a character that hasn't always had the most success in comic book form. So the idea of bringing him to a TV show is really hard."
Arrow, as first imagined by Berlanti — the television writer/producer behind Everwood and Brothers & Sisters, among many others — when he got an overall deal with Warner Bros. three years ago and they asked him whether he was interested in developing any DC properties, is an origins story. The show is set to run for five seasons, each flashing back to a year of Oliver's captivity. By the end of the show, Oliver will have evolved from the Hood to the Vigilante to the Arrow — to Green Arrow.
Stephen Amell in the Season 3 premiere.
Cate Cameron/The CW
Like Oliver Queen, Arrow has its own origins story. Berlanti said that when asked about doing a superhero show, "I was a little bit hesitant." But when he thought about the hero's journey of Green Arrow, and thought about making it "real, and grounded in reality," he got excited. Berlanti enlisted Guggenheim, a frequent collaborator, and then Kreisberg, who had worked with both of them on the short-lived Eli Stone and had genre credits ranging from Vampire Diaries to Fringe. (It has likely helped that all three of them are comic book devotees — Guggenheim is writing the female-centric X-Men title, and co-writes the Arrow tie-ins. "The fans can smell a fraud," said Guggenheim.)
None of this would matter, though, if they didn't find the right Oliver Queen. The pilot's casting director told the producers that Stephen Amell, a Toronto-born actor who had done arcs on The Vampire Diaries, HBO's Hung, and ABC's Private Practice, was coming in — and they had to decide on him right away.
"Stephen was the very first person to come in and audition for any role," said Guggenheim. "Our casting director David Rapaport said, 'He will be off the market on Friday.' We were, like, 'You've got to be kidding me, the very first person coming in?'"
It ended up not being a problem. Guggenheim said, "I saved the audition on my computer, thinking, well, even if we don't get to cast him, I want to have this guy's audition. Because he's going to be a big star one day."
Pedowitz was already a fan from his previous job running ABC Studios, the producers of Private Practice. "He's a man! He's a man. He was not a, um —" Pedowitz paused to try to describe what he meant. "He was the opposite in what we were seeing in a lot of superheroes at that point. Or heroes in that time. He played a man. He acted like a man."
Wayyyyy over your head.
Via Nickelodeon
Nickelodeon
ABC
His license was suspended this year over tickets.
Duval in 2013.
Fred Duval 2014 Campaign Facebook
Fred Duval, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Arizona had a suspended driver's license in 2014 for several months following a string a traffic violations.
A search of Arizona's public court records shows Duval had a number of traffic tickets over the past few years. A form Duval filed to have his license reinstated in October showed he checked "yes" when asked if his license is currently suspended.
A spokesman for Duval's campaign told BuzzFeed News that Duval paid a fine and went to traffic school in response to the tickets, but failed to pay a small fee leading to the license suspension.
The license suspension lasted from mid-June to September, according to the campaign spokesman.
A campaign aide for Duval likewise pointed to an Arizona Republic article noting Duval's Republican gubernatorial opponent Doug Ducey had 13 traffic citations over a four-year period. Ducey did not receive a license suspension.
Here's the form Duval filed in October to get his license reinstated:
Arizona Public Records
The world we live in is changing!
BuzzFeedBlue / Via youtube.com
She came in like a wreeeeecking ball… And it was the best.
OH MY GOD HOW IS THIS A THING THAT PEOPLE ARE DOING?
Bravo Networks
HOW EARLY? I ONLY WENT TO BED AT MIDNIGHT WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?!
MGM
It is still dark out. Heyyy, Sydney Harbour Bridge! Heyyy, Luna Park!
Walt Disney
“ALL OF THIS IS BECAUSE I’M HUNGRY!”
Buzzfeedyellow / Via youtube.com
Life isn’t all cityscapes and brunch dates.
instagram.com / Via Instagram: @lizerdeen
instagram.com / Via Instagram: @taylorscottoc
BuzzFeed News went on an exclusive visit to the American Horror Story: Freak Show set to find out about the celebrated franchise’s most controversial season yet, whether or not this is really the end for Jessica Lange, and who will be returning for Season 5.
FX
Although night had fallen on the humid New Orleans set of American Horror Story: Freak Show in mid-August, for the sprawling cast and crew, the day was just beginning.
While American Horror Story alumni Jessica Lange, Sarah Paulson, Evan Peters, Kathy Bates, Frances Conroy, and franchise newcomer Finn Wittrock were gathered inside one of the production's three massive soundstages to film the fourth season premiere, across the room, behind a bank of glowing monitors, sat AHS co-creator and executive producer Ryan Murphy, who was directing the episode from a script he co-wrote with Brad Falchuk. As the crew tweaked lighting cues and camera movements with the actors' stand-ins, Murphy grabbed the copy of Susan Meiselas' famed photography book Carnival Strippers sitting next to his director's chair and brought it over to Lange and Paulson. The trio hurriedly flipped through photos of scantily clad circus performers and laughed; the kinds of laughs only elicited by a delicious in-joke cultivated over years of late nights — either on a set or over a cocktail.
Once the crew had everything synced up, the actors found their marks, Murphy returned to his director's chair (extremely modern; white cushion, metallic legs), and silence permeated the room, which was filled with non-working crew members who had gathered to watch the season's first truly big scene: a verbal sparring match between Lange's freak show impresario Elsa Mars and Conroy's socialite of considerable wealth Gloria Mott.
The soundstage, which previously housed Miss Robichaux's Academy for Exceptional Young Ladies, the central set of the series' third installment, AHS: Coven, had once again been transformed into the year's most important set piece: the stage where the cast of Fraulein Elsa's Cabinet of Curiosities would perform their freak show.
Underneath an expansive red and white striped tent worthy of Barnum or Bailey and surrounded by rows upon rows of wooden risers sat the ornate stage where "monsters," as Elsa calls them, would be gawked at, talents would be performed, and dreams would (hopefully) be realized.
But there's no dream more important, or aggressively pursued, than that of Elsa, a fallen star whose wardrobe (an attention-grabbing powder blue pantsuit with matching eyeshadow) was as memorable as her singing. Which, despite her delusions of grandeur, is described as "caterwauling" by Mott.
FX
“When I say “It’s nothing…” it’s literally EVERYTHING!”
Buzzfeedyellow / Via youtube.com
In celebration of the release of the Sleeping Beauty Diamond Edition on Blu-ray, Disney shared some of the fantastic behind-the-scenes art that went into putting this classic movie together.
Earle, who was heavily influenced by pre-Renaissance art, would create a bold visual tone for Sleeping Beauty. The film's look was huge departure from Disney's previous films like Cinderella and Lady and the Tramp.
Image courtesy of Disney
Earle's angular style closely reflected the mid-century modern movement of the 1950s.
Image courtesy of Disney
Earle's intrepid modern style caused much infighting among the animators at Disney Studios, who felt that his designs were too much of a deviation from the studio's traditional animation style.
Eventually Walt Disney stepped in to defend Earle, saying, "For years and years I have been hiring artists like Mary Blair to design the styling of a feature, and by the time the picture is finished, there is hardly a trace of the original styling left. This time Eyvind Earle is styling Sleeping Beauty and that's the way it's going to be!"
Image courtesy of Disney
Image courtesy of Disney
With Gone Girl now in theaters, BuzzFeed’s Senior Film Reporter Adam B. Vary and Deputy Entertainment Editor Jaimie Etkin have very different feelings about the movie, and what it’s trying to say about men and women. They agreed on one thing. Maybe two. Warning: MAJOR SPOILERS ahead!
20th Century Fox
Adam B. Vary: Here we are, Jaimie, two people who have seen — and have had quite different reactions to — Gone Girl. In our first meeting about the movie, in fact, one of us may have been moved to speak at quite an elevated volume about the other's opinion about the film. Which, for the record, I think is pretty exciting — it is all too rare anymore that a movie can evoke this kind of raw feeling! And I do think that is something director David Fincher and novelist-turned-screenwriter Gillian Flynn have engineered Gone Girl to do from the very first shot. (I should acknowledge here that Flynn and I both worked at Entertainment Weekly at the same time for a few years, and we were friendly with each other, though I haven't seen or spoken with her since her book tour for her second novel, Dark Places.)
When Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) looks down at the blonde head of his wife, Amy, (Rosamund Pike) resting on his chest and wonders in voice-over what it would be like to crack open her skull to discover what she is thinking, it is at once a horrifying and, I feel, searingly honest sentiment. I think most every person in a relationship has had similar (if perhaps tamer) thoughts pop into their head in the heat of the moment about their loved one. Where those thoughts lead Nick and Amy, however — and what their behavior reveals about how we feel about men and women and how they relate to each other, in private and in our culture at large — is how I think Fincher and Flynn did mean to cause such heated debate among, for example, colleagues who are otherwise good friends.
Jaimie Etkin: Well, seeing as Gone Girl has made me angrier than any movie I've seen in recent history, I guess they were successful in that regard. I think the most important dialogue the movie inspires is something you alluded to in saying it examines "how we feel about men and women and how they relate to each other." Nick's violent prose about wanting to unspool Amy's brains is perhaps the most violent thing he says in the whole film (though not the most violent thing he does), and it seems to be motivated by the fact that he cannot understand his wife in a Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus sort of way. That voice-over sets the tone to me that Nick's motivation is pure, even if his outward appearance (smashing glasses in front of detectives, smiling in front a poster of his missing wife for the media, etc.) says otherwise — it says that he is the one trying and Amy, with her bitterly cold glare, is the frosty bitch who won't let him in.
Besides, after that scene, the camera, which had shown said glare through Nick's eyes, moved away from his first-person perspective to an omniscient, non-voice-over one, which to me, showed the filmmaker's partiality to Nick's side of the story. We never get to see the story from his perspective again and instead, it appeared to me that what we see of Nick from there on out is the but-this-is-what-really-happened version of the story.
Rosamund Pike
Merrick Morton / 20th Century Fox
There is no autocorrect in real life.
Via diply.com
Via cakewrecks.com
The Australian Prime Minister promises to “shirtfront” Mr Putin.
Mick Tsikas / AAP
Sovfoto / Getty Images
Mr Abbott continued to attack Mr Putin for dragging his feet in the aftermath of the MH17 plane crash in which 38 Australians were killed.
It emerged yesterday that Mr Putin would be allowed to attend the upcoming G20 conference on Australian soil, so Mr Abbott went on the front foot... quite literally.
There is only one Sheik.
WWE
“Who gave this to you?” “The King of Sweden.”
"It's not like you get advanced warning, they just sort of call you up, in my case, in the middle of cooking dinner. 'Hello? By the way, you've won the Nobel Prize.'"
Australian astrophycisist Brian Schmidt (left) receives the Nobel Prize for Physics from King Carl XVI Gustaf of Swedenon Dec. 10, 2011 in Stockholm, Sweden.
Pascal Le Segretain / Getty Images
When I won this, my grandma, who lives in Fargo, North Dakota, wanted to see it. I was coming around so I decided I'd bring my Nobel Prize. You would think that carrying around a Nobel Prize would be uneventful, and it was uneventful, until I tried to leave Fargo with it, and went through the X-ray machine. I could see they were puzzled. It was in my laptop bag. It's made of gold, so it absorbs all the X-rays—it's completely black. And they had never seen anything completely black.
They're like, 'Sir, there's something in your bag.'
I said, 'Yes, I think it's this box.'
They said, 'What's in the box?'
I said, 'a large gold medal,' as one does.
So they opened it up and they said, 'What's it made out of?'
I said, 'gold.'
And they're like, 'Uhhhh. Who gave this to you?'
'The King of Sweden.'
'Why did he give this to you?'
'Because I helped discover the expansion rate of the universe was accelerating.'
At which point, they were beginning to lose their sense of humor. I explained to them it was a Nobel Prize, and their main question was, 'Why were you in Fargo?'
Set the date for husband and husband or wife and wife for 31 December 2014.
Russell Cheyne / Reuters
The first same-sex marriages will take place in Scotland on Hogmanay, 31 December 2014, it was announced today.
The Marriage and Civil Partnership (Scotland) Act is expected to come into force on 16 December, meaning the first same-sex weddings will take place after the standard 15 day waiting period on 31 December.
Meanwhile, Scottish couples who are already in a civil partnership will be able to switch to a marriage from the moment the law comes into effect on 16 December by making an appointment with a registry office.
In addition, the law eliminates the 'spousal veto', enabling transgender people who are already married to remain in their marriage without starting divorce proceedings.
The Scottish parliament voted overwhelmingly to legalise same-sex marriage in Febuary this year.
The announcement means that by the end of this year same-sex marriages will have taken place in all parts of the UK apart from Northern Ireland, where a change in the law remains unlikely in the short term.
