Tim’s long-term evidence-free claim of being an “actor” is soon to be put to the test: he’s landed the role of “coked-up rockstar” Atticus Fetch in the sixth season of Showtime’s Californication.
The show revolves around David Duchovny’s character, writer Hank Moody, who will work with Fetch to write a musical based on one of his novels. Apart from the coke bit, it honestly shouldn’t be too much of a stretch for Tim.
The series is set to air early next year in the US, and will most likely make its way over to the UK and Australia too. Once air dates are confirmed, we’ll let you know so that you can tune in to see Tim doing his acting thing!
We hear that – in true Californication style – his opening scene will involve quite a lot of Tim-flesh, so if that’s your thing…
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War, passion mark 'Hemingway and Gellhorn'
"There's nothing to writing, Gellhorn," Ernest Hemingway tells journalist Martha Gellhorn, his lover and muse, in HBO's Hemingway and Gellhorn. "All you've got to do is sit down at your typewriter and bleed." The line would be easy to dismiss as Hollywood b.s. if it weren't an actual Hemingway quote, rephrased slightly by screenwriters Jerry Stahl and Barbara Turner, and spat out like a plug of chewing tobacco by the film's costar Clive Owen. Within minutes of Hemingway's pronouncement, which is meant to push Gellhorn (Nicole Kidman) past a bout of writer's block while she's covering the Spanish Civil War for Collier's Magazine, bombs fall on the city. Their hotel shudders under the impact. Hemingway gropes Gellhorn while shielding her body from shards of glass, and the two scribes end up naked on a bed, rutting hungrily while explosives flash in a window just beyond Gellhorn's upraised heels.
Amazingly, Hemingway and Gellhorn doesn't attain maximum ludicrousness in this sequence, which occurs about an hour into a 160-minute movie; it's just getting warmed up.
The pair dodge bombs and bullets that at times serve as a dangerous backdrop for their sexual encounters (played with gusto, and a fair amount of nudity, by the film's stars).
And yet, just as amazingly, the film is as smart and sexy as it is extravagantly silly; its silliness is knowing and affectionate. Even when its characters are behaving less like cinematic avatars of real historical figures than hot-tempered Barbie and Ken dolls with genitals, the movie remains stubbornly connected to life, and the relationship between reality and fiction (Hollywood fiction specifically) is always on its mind. Director Philip Kaufman (The Right Stuff) and his editor and sound designer Walter Murch (Apocalypse Now) are masters at splitting the difference between two seemingly different modes, the glossy, easily digestible mainstream spectacle and the allusive, aesthetically innovative art-house movie. Their work here rivals their collaboration on 1988's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, another sexy, soapy epic that wanted to be all things to all people and nearly succeeded.
To some degree all of Kaufman's historical films feel at once classical and counterculture, mainstream and art-house: The Right Stuff, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Henry and June, the forgotten but fascinating Quills. This is another entry in that vein. For all its frank sex and battlefield gore, Hemingway and Gellhorn often feels like the sort of biopic that might have been made about the two writers in the early '60s, not long after Papa put a shotgun in his mouth. The sets are always sumptuous, the costumes and production design spot-on, the actors' hair and makeup always perfect (or perfectly messy), and yet the script and direction are never content to present any scene as eye candy and be done with it. There's always something else humming under the surface: a questioning, even doubtful quality, one that succumbs to the seductiveness of this sort of movie even as it analyzes it. Just in case you doubt the film's fundamental intelligence, a running gag in Hemingway and Gellhorn confirms it: Hemingway claims to have been disgusted by Hollywood's treatment of his novel A Farewell to Arms, but displays the poster prominently in his home.
Remember the Soviet invasion sequence in Being, which seamlessly integrated the film's actors into historical footage of tanks and soldiers invading Prague? Kaufman and Murch (maybe the most hands-on, creative editor in modern movies, which is why I keep listing him and Kaufman as a team) appear to have used that sequence as a template for all of Hemingway and Gellhorn. The movie transitions from lush color images of re-created moments to scratchy archival footage of actual historical events and back again, but so deliberately that it foregrounds the artifice instead of disguising it. In fact, the artifice is the point. The film is framed as an extended interview with Gellhorn circa 1991, with Kidman in old-age makeup speaking in a deep, scratchy, but still-cultured voice that makes her sound vaguely like Sigourney Weaver. The interplay of color and black-and-white, of Hollywood gloss and documentary grit, becomes a visual metaphor for the difference between our own subjective memories of events and the events themselves, and for the human tendency to make ourselves into the leading men and ladies of epics that are mainly about us, with entire civilizations providing us with sets and extras.
Some of the composited shots are more convincing than others, and a few are a tad Forrest Gump-y, more amusing than impressive. But because they all have a tossed-off feeling, they play more like storytelling flourishes than attempts to convince you that Nicole Kidman and Clive Owen were actually in Franco's Spain or in China on the cusp of Communist takeover. And they're all part of the movie's voluptuous yet controlled style. Gellhorn's voice-over narration is just enough of a presence that the tale sometimes becomes a meditation on memory itself – a point made with film buff cleverness in the aftermath of Gellhorn and Hemingway's first tryst, when they lie on a bed, their naked bodies caked with ash like the lovers in Hiroshima, Mon Amour.
Much of the film's first half is set in Spain during the Civil War, with the then-inexperienced war reporter Gellhorn meeting the married Hemingway in a bar and becoming his pupil in writing, war coverage and life generally. He's already got a wife (his second, played by Deadwood's Molly Parker) but can't escape the ruins of that marriage because she's Catholic and won't divorce him. As their romance unfolds over many long years, it becomes clear that Hemingway doesn't observe social niceties of any kind. He tells people that one should do sober what one would normally only do when drunk, but because he's soused most of the time, we never get to see him put his money where his mouth is. In the film's early scenes, Kidman's Gellhorn comes on like a sexy blank and Owen's Hemingway as a fully formed intellectual blowhard hunk. The filmmakers spotlight Kidman's slacks-wrapped posterior and Owen's kudzu chest hair as if they were the movie's most magnificent special effects, which in a sense they are. The stars' yummy magnetism is front-and-center, eclipsing the movie's wildly overqualified roster of supporting players: David Strathairn as John Dos Passos; Peter Coyote as legendary editor Max Perkins; Joan Chen as Madame Chang Kai-Shek; Parker Posey as Hemingway's last wife Mary Welsh.
It's not all glamorous canoodling, though. Over time, Gellhorn becomes more accomplished, tough and poised, and thus more of a threat to Hemingway's overcompensating brand of machismo, and he reacts by becoming impossible to live with, replacing tutelage with bitter rants and even stealing her Colliers' job out from under her. The thing that initially drew them to one another, a shared, heroic sense of life, becomes the only thing keeping them together; it's ultimately not enough because Hemingway is a self-loathing monster who's been playing a self-written role for so long that he's vanished into it. Plus, he's a terrible drunk, cruel and childish. The movie is as much about the pain of having an alcoholic bastard as a soul mate as it is about history, memory, sexual chemistry and self-expression.
Kidman's work here is more than just a case of astute casting. This is her sharpest, most natural work in any major role, and she's just right for the filmmakers' approach. She's playing a genuinely talented woman blessed with movie-star looks, but she never lets Gellhorn become an abstraction or case study. Although we can see Gellhorn working through complex, contradictory emotions in every scene – but particularly in scenes opposite Hemingway – Gellhorn herself never attains total self-knowledge until the very end of her life, the part represented by the 1991 sequences. Hemingway's case is far more tragic, but Owen – who's more often typecast as a recessive brooder – plays the writer with such cartoonish gusto that the film never becomes a doom-spiral downer. The filmmakers never lose sight of the fact that these were a couple of charismatic, gifted people who had amazing adventures together (and apart). Even when they were miserable, they weren't bored, unless they were stuck at home together during peacetime.
Throughout, there's a stealthy aspect, a sense that everyone involved is using the moldiest, silliest Hollywood biopic conventions (complete with old-age-interview framing device, for God's sake!) to say something serious about the interplay of art and life. Stirring images and imaginative transitions that would be the highlight of lesser films are scattered liberally throughout Hemingway and Gellhorn. A flashbulb pops over a freeze-frame image of Hemingway writing; then there's another pop and freeze-frame, and another, and the pops on the soundtrack become the whack-whack of typewriter keys, taking us into the next scene. Gellhorn looks in to the eye of a crow and sees her face composited onto its cornea – an image that rhymes with shots of documentary camera crews shooting images of wartime destruction and death, the camera's lenses reflecting mayhem and piled-up corpses. The sequence in which Martha covers the liberation of Dachau, the film dissolves from old Martha to young Martha – both of them breaking the implied fourth wall addressing us directly – and then later to the charred skull of a camp victim, literalizing the idea that a well-told story can transport you into another time and place and compel identification. I can't think of the last American movie I saw that was simultaneously as stirring and ridiculous, clichéd and imaginative, dumb and smart as Hemingway and Gellhorn. They don't make them like this anymore. Never did, really.
From http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/tv/nicole_went_naked_for_daughters_GEJ0swkDiAH4QCEuRsZ7YJ?utm_medium=rss&utm_content=TV
Nicole Kidman’s surprisingly explicit sex scenes with Clive Owen in “Hemingway & Gellhorn” suggest an actress still fearless at 44.
“Phil [Kaufman, the director] said, ‘You made this film for your daughters’ and I said, ‘Did I?’,” said Kidman, who is completely naked in a number of scenes. “And he said, ‘You don’t know it, but subconsciously you made it for them.’ ”
__________________________________________________So, Sarah Ruhl's play 'In The Next Room', commonly knows as 'The Vibrator Play', has finally arrived on these shores for its UK premiere. It has come from Broadway via Peru, Sydney and Nantucket, picking up three Tony nominations and polarising opinion along the way. It will be interesting to see what the genteel patrons of the Theatre Royal in Bath, where it opened a few weeks ago, make of what is essentially a play about the marvels of a good vibrator.
The opening of Ruhl's play followed hot on the heels of the screening of Channel Four's More Sex Please, We're British, a prime-time, behind-the-scenes documentary at sex-toy firm Lovehoney (featuring, as The Sun so elegantly put it, Britain's worst job – sniffing returned sex toys to see if they have been used). And now we hear that chart high-flyer Grimes, aka Claire Boucher, current darling of the indie-electronica scene, has just launched a range of "pussy rings" – essentially large plastic replications of female genitalia – to be worn loud and proud on any digit you choose.
But, of course, all this is nothing new. Explicit imagery has been seeping into the mainstream for years and this just happens to be a random sample of things that are going on this month. We've only just stopped talking about Tulisa's sex tape, Rihanna's X-rated crotch-slapping on Saturday Night Live (YouTube it) and the success of EL James's erotic Fifty Shades... trilogy. Still, it seems the pace of the pornification of our pop culture has just stepped up a notch.
"Pornography manifests itself in movies, TV, music videos, fashion – it's absolutely everywhere," says advertising consultant Cindy Gallop. "Nobody quite knows how all this is going to play out because it's never happened in the history of humankind before. There is a complete lack of open, healthy dialogue around porn in our society. It's everywhere, yet nobody ever talks about it."
Gallop's frustration with what she sees as our refusal to address the "creeping ubiquity of hardcore pornography in pop culture" drove her to create a website called Make Love Not Porn. It's a site that is born out of personal experience because Gallop, who is a 52-year-old former executive at the advertising agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty, has spent the past decade casually and recreationally dating lots of different men in their twenties. As such, she is particularly well placed to witness first-hand the impact this pornography binge is having on our youth.
"I am, if you like, my own research material," she says. "This is an issue that would never have crossed my mind if I hadn't encountered it very directly through having sex with these men. I realised the ubiquity of online porn and its ease of access is having a huge impact on our sex lives."
What Gallop started to notice is that the men she was having sex with were learning everything they did by watching porn: "Almost all mainstream porn is made by men for men," she says. "The entire raison d'être of these sex scenes is to get the man off. So, as a result, an entire generation of guys and girls are growing up believing that is the be-all-and-end-all of sex. Pornography does not teach women to expect their own pleasure, or ask for their own pleasure, and it certainly doesn't show them how to achieve their own pleasure."
Jessica Coen, editor-in-chief of women's sex and fashion website Jezebel, agrees: "It has become increasingly common for young men to request things during sex that they have learnt from hardcore porn – this wasn't happening before porn became so widely available. We have to teach young men how to temper their expectations, how to treat women properly and that there is a big gap between pornography and reality."
It used to be that the line between what constitutes porn and what doesn't was clearly defined. Porn existed in the sticky pages of Razzle magazine. But now it's more blurred. In our post-internet culture, we live in a world where porn stars make the crossover into the mainstream and fledgling actresses further their careers by getting their tits out in FHM. Witness, for example, the career of Sasha Grey: once the proud recipient of "best three-way sex scene" at the Adult Movie Awards, she has now acted in a Steven Soderbergh film and appeared in the hit TV series Entourage.
There has long been a blurring of boundaries in the fashion industry, too, and it seems, porn stars are the current must-have accessory. Iconic fashion designer Marc Jacobs recently showed off his Brazilian porn actor boyfriend Harry Louis on the beach in Rio; Calvin Klein had one, too – 22-year old Nick Gruber – although it's been a bit off and on, especially since Gruber was arrested recently for possession of cocaine.
As we all know, sex sells – it's estimated that the UK sex-toy market is now worth £250m a year – so it's not surprising that American Apparel, the supplier of block-colour cotton clothing to an unashamedly youthful market, regularly uses porn actors in its ad campaigns. But it is because of these blurred boundaries that confusion arises and American Apparel founder, Dov Charney, has also found himself on the receiving end of several lawsuits for sexual harassment. One of fashion's most in-demand photographers, Terry Richardson, meanwhile, has mixed things up on set to such an extent that he has been accused of inappropriate behaviour. "He takes girls who are young, manipulates them to take their clothes off and takes pictures they will be ashamed of," Danish model Rie Rasmussen told the New York Post.
Yet that hasn't lessened his impact. "I think the Terry Richardson-style shoot – that kind of seedy back-alley thing that he does – is everywhere right now," says Coen. "The images are very suggestive and the models get younger and younger and the female form gets taller and lankier and further away from what you would associate with traditional womanhood. But is that because of the porn industry or the fashion industry? I don't know. It's a can of worms."
These days, a glance at any rack of fashion magazines shows that a whole new genre seems to have sprung up which sits somewhere between i-D, Vogue and the top shelf. There's Lovecat, which takes the "sexy pin-up" approach and features hot new models often in various states of undress. There's Tissue, a new launch, featuring umpteen fanny shots and a naked girl locked in a cage. "Are we feminism gone wrong?" asks the introduction. "We hope not. It's just that to us, sex is always on, sex is it."
There's also Treats! magazine, a coffee-table tome which retails at $20, now on its third issue. It was created by the US-based, Cheshire-born photographer Steve Shaw and is due to launch over here in the next month or so. It's been called porn chic, high-end erotica and compared to Playboy at the height of its game in the 1970s. "The best way to describe it is as the magazine version of the Pirelli calendar," says Shaw. "It's a bit like a Helmut Newton photo – not sexually arousing, just visually pleasing. I think people have been subjected to FHM, Maxim and other lads' mags for far too long. Having to look at some girl in a horribly naff bikini with her boobs sticking out is not where it's at. That's been done. People want something different now."
If you had been reading the Daily Mail recently you could be forgiven for thinking that all this sexual imagery has swept over us and turned us all into hardcore-porn addicts. At the end of April the paper devoted no fewer than three front-page stories to the subject and launched a campaign for automatic blocks on online porn. And now TalkTalk, one of Britain's biggest internet providers, has just announced it will be offering its four million subscribers a blanket opt-out for pornography sites.
"Utterly pointless," says Gallop. "They are simply looking in the wrong place for the solution. It is absolutely not about banning porn. It simply can't be done." Indeed, a 2010 White Paper called The History of Modern Pornography concluded by saying, "Censorship and opposition to pornography have had little effect in stemming the tide: the biological chemistry of sexual desire has outlived all censorship attempts and will continue to do so."
But there is an important issue we need to address here. With online porn being so ubiquitous, we are just one or two clicks away from it; increasingly, this means that our children's introduction to graphic imagery comes before they have even reached their teens. "A study done a few years ago by an internet service provider showed the average age at which kids first view hardcore porn online was 11," says Gallop. "That age is now deemed to have dropped to eight. This isn't because eight-year-olds go looking for it, it's because someone shows them on a phone in the playground, or when they go round to a friend's house."
And Gallop has seen first-hand what too much porn can do. "When you are watching, say, five or six hours a day or night and you are masturbating ferociously all the way through you can become sensitised to the way you handle yourself," she says. "I've encountered this myself. I dated one guy who had begun watching porn at the age of 12 and had lost his virginity at the age of 18. So for six or so years he'd been watching vast amounts of porn. He's now 23 and there is nothing that any real-life woman can do for him. It's a syndrome called idiosyncratic masturbatory syndrome."
But, she points out, such cases are few and far between and the main problem is that we may be producing a generation whose sex education is composed solely of viewing pornography. In a country where sex education is lacking to say the least, this could be a big problem. Justin Hancock is the creator of Bish UK, a sex-education programme for teens which is realistic about their exposure to porn and teaches a more critical understanding of it.
"What we need to do is provide kids with a sex education so when they do come across porn they are educated enough to be able to see it in context and see it's not real," he says. "But young people are more nuanced and intelligent about the internet and porn than we give them credit for. They are not just passive consumers of the stuff."
Recently there has been a shift towards a somewhat less hysterical view on all this (the Daily Mail excepted). Next month Gallop is planning to launch Make Love Not Porn TV, an online video channel that which will take a realistic approach to our appetite for erotica. Dr Brooke Magnanti, aka Belle de Jour, has a book just out called The Sex Myth, which questions this so-called epidemic of sex addiction and the sexualisation of our youth. And the 29-year-old Australian writer Rachel Hills has spent the past three years travelling to three continents, interviewing more than 150 young people to see how realistic our current views of sex and porn actually are.
"I started the book [a study of generation Y, sex and identity] because I became frustrated by media portrayals of contemporary sexual cultures," says Hills. "It seemed that there was this kind of compulsory sexual activity imposed on us – that we've all got to be interested in it, we've all got to be doing it and we've all got to be skilled at it. Well, as a younger person, it certainly didn't apply to my life, or my friends' lives, and once I started doing my interviews I realised it didn't apply to many of their lives either."
"Just as there was a fear of TV, a fear of video nasties, and a fear of computer games, now we have a fear of the internet and the pornography it offers," concludes Hancock. "The main problem with the porn debate is the media wanting to present it in very binary terms, about porn being either harmful or not – and that's created a bit of a moral panic. But we shouldn't jump to conclusions. It's way more complicated than that."
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‘Magic City’ stars Steven Straight and Elena Satine.1950s Miami makes for ‘Magic’ story of sexy, gangster life
Steeped in sex, booze and the mafia, Miami in the late 1950s isn’t exactly meant for network TV.
That’s why Steven Strait and Elena Satine, who play seductive South Beach denizens in the hit Starz show “Magic City,” are thrilled that they’re on cable.
“To tell the story realistically, there’s just no way you can do it on network,” Strait told the Track. “It was such a violent, mature time. And it’s not something that you typically associated with the ’50s, or even early ’60s, because you’re groomed to think of that time as apple pies and the nuclear family, but that’s not Miami and it never was.”
Even though “Magic” was originally slated to premiere on CBS, its move to Starz proved to be a good one due to the racy material. It’s a thrill for the cast, who became their own kind of nuclear family on the Miami set.
“It feels like summer camp because I go away for five months with people I love,” says Satine, who got her first taste of fame as a child actor in Europe. (“I was like the ‘Hannah Montana’ of Russia!”) “I always said, ‘I want to do features ... or I want to be on cable TV.’ Because for us it’s like making eight mini-movies. You’re not limited. It’s nice for us as actors to have that luxury.”
Satine moved to America to attend the LaGuardia High School of the Performing Arts in New York City. Soon, she landed in Hollywood and scored a guest-starring role on “Cold Case.”
“Which was funny, because it was about this girl who comes from Russia to go to performing arts school ... but is murdered!” Elena said.
Inspired by show creator Mitch Glazer’s formative years spent in Miami, the “Magic City” season finale airs at 10 p.m. Friday. And the cast need not worry about getting renewed: The show was picked up for a second season before the first show even premiered.
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Five reasons you should pay for your porn
Why should you pay for your porn instead of downloading it illegally? Because the consequences of doing so could be costly.
Was that you who was named as a defendant by Raw Films for downloading Bareback Street Gang using Bittorrent?
Chances are, if you download enough free porn, you’ll eventually become one of the 220,000 (and counting) defendants in piracy lawsuits filed by porn publishers. These plaintiffs have had mixed success enlisting the courts to compel ISPs to disclose names of customers based on their IP addresses.
If you live in the Eastern District of New York and Magistrate Judge Gary Brown catches the case, you’re in good shape: he recently slapped down an attempt to sue multiple anonymous porn pirates.
You’re out of luck, though, if you live in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, where U.S. District Court Judge Mary A. McLaughlin ruled that “A Doe defendant who has allegedly used the Internet to unlawfully download and disseminate copyrighted material does not have a significant expectation of privacy.” Same story if you try it in London.
In the end, I think a combination of the legal system, public opinion and corporate self preservation will shut down these lawsuits. We saw the same pattern with pirated music: by 2008 the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) formally announced an end to its pursuit of individual users.
In the meantime, though, I love the excuses defendants in these porn cases come up with:
- It wasn’t me. Someone else must have been using my wireless network.
- I wasn’t home at the time.
- I’m too old to watch porn.
For now, those excuses have a pretty good chance of working, so as your legal advisor my suggestion if you get named as a defendant in one of these lawsuits is that you use a hard-to-disprove excuse (or three), and stick to it no matter how lame it is, because some judge may believe you … or at least think it’s not going to be possible to disprove you.
That being said, there are five good reasons you should pay for your porn instead of downloading it illegally:
1. To avoid embarrassment
You may not have to pay any money, but if you’re publicly named as a defendant in a lawsuit people will find out: your spouse, your employer, your neighbors, your kids. That you ultimately prevail on the legal issues can only do so much to repair perceptions. It’s bad enough to have everyone thinking you download porn, but if you’re one of the Bareback Street Gang defendants and people look the film up on IMDB they’re going to learn that every cast member is male.
2. There’s plenty of free porn available online
It may not be the best porn, but you can visit a gazillion different free porn tube sites if you don’t want to pay for porn and don’t want to be doing anything illegal. As long as you don’t mind the popup windows and low resolution, you’re all set. If you want higher resolution and fewer sales pitches, just pay for it.
3. Porn is cheap
As an alternative to illegally downloading Bareback Street Gang, bear in mind that Bi Now, Gay Later #4 is only $16.99 from Adult DVD Empire. Even if you work at McDonald’s you can probably earn more than $16.99 in the time it takes to deal with managing Bittorrent downloads with Vuze.
4. Porn stars need to make a living
Being a porn star is a tough job. Yes, it’s true that even the most obscure porn actors get to be called stars, but beyond that it’s an exhausting way to pay the rent. Given how much effort these actors put into entertaining you, the least you can do is help support them.
5. If nobody pays for porn, it won’t get made
This is the endgame if everybody copies porn instead of buying it: Nobody will produce it. Rather, the only available porn will be from amateurs who do it because they want to. So unless you want all porn to have the production values of Youtube guitar tutorials, and for all the actors to look like the people in those guitar tutorials, you should just pay for it.
About the author: Steven A. Shaw is a former litigator and is the Executive Director of the Society for Culinary Arts and Letters.
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