BULLETT

Yesterday we published a piece about the inevitable news of a Girls porn parody. The culprits are Hustler, and today, the evil empire is feeling the wrath of the person they’re paying, er, tribute to. Lena Dunham took to her Twitter to let the world know what the world already assumed. She ain’t pleased.

Okay, I wracked my brain to articulate why I can’t just laugh off a porn parody of Girls and here are 3 reasons:

— Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) May 24, 2013

1. Because Girls is, at its core, a feminist action while Hustler is a company that markets and monetizes a male’s idea of female sexuality

— Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) May 24, 2013

2. Because a big reason I engage in (simulated) onscreen sex is to counteract a skewed idea of that act created by the proliferation of porn

— Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) May 24, 2013

3. Because it grosses me out.

— Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) May 24, 2013

It’s important to me to be honest about the complexities of having that out in the world. Love, Lena (porn name: Murray Broadway)

— Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) May 24, 2013

This makes sense.

Famed comedian Jerry Lewis, an 87-year-old man who will likely be dead by the time I finish typing this paragraph, reiterated his controversial opinion that women cannot be funny during an interview at the Cannes film festival today where he’s promoting some movie or other that’s probably hilarious.  The AP reports (via Gawker)

In 1998, Lewis famously said that watching women do comedy “sets me back a bit” and that he has trouble with the notion of would-be mothers as comedians.

Asked Thursday if he had changed his mind at all because of performers like Melissa McCarthy and Sarah Silverman, the 87-year-old Lewis said of women performing broad comedy: “I can’t see women doing that. It bothers me.”

“I cannot sit and watch a lady diminish her qualities to the lowest common denominator,” he said. “I just can’t do that.”

Have to disagree with him there. Women are clearly capable of being funny, and have made big strides in the world of comedy in recent years. Here are some of the best ways that women can be funny:

1) Slipping on a banana peel while giving birth to a child. LOL. Woops. Then you cut to a reaction shot of the baby, who’s all “Classic mom.”

2) Getting their period all over the place and being cranky about it. Haha. Always with the vagina blood with these broads, am I right?

3) Rubber chicken except the chicken is a woman chicken because male chickens are called roosters.

4) Crying, like, comically, when their husband won’t let them perform at his Cuban night club. Aww, come on, just let me do one number, she says, and he’s like, “No.”

5) Tina Fey getting her period and Sarah Silverman is there and then a real comedian like, say, Louis C.K., is in the background saying something man-funny, which is the best kind of funny.

6) Vacuum-related pratfall.

7) Cooking dinner for her husband, and she’s chopping onions, except it’s opposite day and the onions make everyone laugh instead of cry, then we’re all laughing but still, all, haha, this is funny, sure. But seriously what time is dinner going to be ready? Because we’ve got plans with the boys to listen to a Marc Maron podcast later.

8) Poop jokes.

9) Blow job time but she’s doing an impression of how another famous woman would give a blow job.

10) Tickles your feet with her boobs.

Follow @lukeoneil47

There are just so many ways to get your pornography fix on the Internet, but here’s one more: This Ain’t Girls XXX, a porn parody of HBO’s Girls sponsored by Hustler that’s due to come out in the new few months. It’s staffed by a great collection of porn names: director Stuart Canterbury, actress Alex Chance (Hannah) and actor Richie Calhoun (Adam), who’ll be doing their best to turn the wacky sexcapades of the original show into the wacky sexcapades of low budget porno.

The plot: Hannah gives up on all the crummy dudes in her life and begins to flirt with lesbianism before eventually running back to the familiar arms of the possibly psycho Adam. “I tried to make it as weird as possible,” Calhoun said in an interview. “I tried to say really weird things and do really weird positions.” (You are super turned on for this, I know.) Calhoun also mentions that because there’s already so much quippy boning on Girls, they didn’t have to do much to imagine things at a racier level. Hence the “as weird as possible,” and who isn’t excited to see what happens next?

If I wanted to watch a video about a porn addict on the internet I would’ve just turned on my web cam and stared into my own blackened soul for twenty minutes. That sounds kind of hot, now that you mention it, thanks for the idea. But nonetheless, let’s all go watch this new trailer for Don Jon, a film written, directed by, and starring Joseph Gordon Levitt, which picks up on that same theme. It tells the story of a New Jersey man with a New Jersey accent, who meets a New Jersey girl with a New Jersey accent, played by Scarlett Johansson, probably in New Jersey, and then she gets mad that he watches porn. Here’s how the story would’ve gone had I directed it: Girl finds boy watching porn, gets mad. He says: “That’s weird, alright, bye.” Then she leaves. It would probably be hard to get financing for that sort of thing, although if any producers are reading this you can definitely email me to talk. Instead, JGL appears to have concocted an entire plot, with various ups and downs experienced by a cast of characters, including Tony Danza and Julianne Moore, all of whom, one can only assume, spend much of the film watching porn. Hard to confirm that based on the details here, but let’s go with that. The synopsis explains a bit more:

Jon Martello (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a strong, handsome, good old-fashioned guy. His buddies call him Don Jon due to his ability to “pull” a different woman every weekend, but even the finest fling doesn’t compare to the bliss he finds alone in front of the computer watching pornography. Barbara Sugarman (Scarlett Johansson) is a bright, beautiful, good old-fashioned girl. Raised on romantic Hollywood movies, she’s determined to find her Prince Charming and ride off into the sunset. Wrestling with good old-fashioned expectations of the opposite sex, Jon and Barbara struggle against a media culture full of false fantasies to try and find true intimacy in this unexpected comedy written and directed by Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

Also he has a funny black friend they forgot to mention. And things get wacky, so Martello plays Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch at one point on his car stereo, which is what cheesy bros like this do in 2013 in New Jersey, where it is currently 1994, culture-wise. Haha, burnt you good there, New Jersey.

Watch it here!

There are only a couple of instances when it’s not completely bizarre and pointless to cheer, or boo, at a movie theatre screen. The first, and most common, is if you’re some sort of comically primitive, but ultimately noble soul just arrived from the distant past to teach us all a lesson about how to love again, and we take you to a matinee one afternoon because it’s hot out, and you think the picture box captures people’s souls and they can hear you when you talk. Then, ok, then it’s probably understandable to do the movie yelling thing.

The second is at Cannes, because the French would boo a litter of cartoon dinosaur puppies rolling in a bed of flowers if the romping plot seemed hackneyed. Or, you know, just because.

The human embodiment of playful, animalistic cuteness, Ryan Gosling, got a taste of the latter at Cannes today when his new film Only God Forgives, reuniting him with Drive director  Nicolas Winding Refn was roundly jeered. As Vulture writes, the last time Refn was at Cannes for Drive, “he was the toast of the fest and he, too, won the Best Director laurel. You should never underestimate the willingness of Cannes jurors to go their own way, but to judge from the boos and whistles after the Only God Forgives screening today, I wouldn’t exactly lay odds on a Best Director repeat for Refn.”

HOW DARE THEY. They have “Ryan Gosling” in France too, right? This is absurd. We haven’t seen the film yet ourselves, but early reviews say it features a lot of brooding, manly, taciturn Gosling, brooding, and being manly and taciturn. What’s not to like?

Fortunately our precious baby Goose wasn’t in attendance, or else there’s no telling what sort of disheartening glances he would’ve given while stewing in a man bath of Oedipal repression and violent rage toward the Gallic blackguards with the opprobrium to besmirch his stainless record.

Refn, and co-star Kristen Scott Thomas were there, however. As The Star reported, Scott Thomas doesn’t seem to be a fan either, describing it as “’hyper-violent and quite disturbing’ and agreed with a journalist’s observation that her role as the bloody mama is far different from her usual civility and elegance.”

Counting the crow’s feet on Ethan Hawke’s face in Richard Linklater’s new anti-romance, Before Midnight, is not a task for the faint-hearted. In the third film made in collaboration with stars Hawke and Julie Delpy, the chatty warmth of Before Sunrise and Before Sunset has mostly eroded, leaving a cracked mirror of Michael Apted’s Up series—a movie that appears every 9 or so years to remind us just how goddamn old (and bitter) we’ve become. On the fourteenth floor of The Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, where the film has just closed the SF International Film Festival, Delpy and the Dazed and Confused director sink into a beige Victorian sofa. It’s hard to tell if they’re antsy or if they’re working a shtick: Julie, channeling the vox nervosa of her character in the film, is interrogating Richard about his vintage shirt, and Richard seems to be contemplating infinity, or lunch, which is now overdue. Between the banter, we speak with the pair about psychosis, sci-fi and making art in Texas.

How many years did it take to put Before Midnight together?
JD: We spent five years joking about the next one, or even not really talking about it in a real way.
RL: We were on hiatus. It was just jokes, and then at some point it segues into ‘if we were, what would it be’ and we realized pretty early on what it couldn’t be, again, and where we would have to go with it. At some point we get together, very consciously, to create an outline. We had a year of writing independently. In this one everyone was so busy with their own stuff, that we’re going to go do Greece, we’re going to lock everybody in a room and what we usually do for three or four weeks we’re going to do for ten weeks. This was such a task.
JD: I was very dramatic during the writing period of this one.
RL: Dramatic [Laughs]. That might mean something else.
JD: Maybe psychotic?

There’s something about the power of digression that crops up a lot in your work, Richard. A lot of Before Midnight takes place on a walk, or in a car, and you did a TV show called Up To Speed recently with Speed Levitch that had a lot of the same ‘wandering’ quality.
RL: Wow. No one saw Up To Speed. That’s all about digression. I’ve always been obsessed with the way the mind works, the way the mind flows through a day or through ideas, and connects up to different ideas, and I’ve always been obsessed with how words flow, and conversations connect up. These films are very much an exploration of two people trying to communicate, and Ethan and Julie have such great ears, and similar interest in that kind of verbal gymnastics, I guess. So we’re a natural match, the three of us. But that’s definitely an area I’ve always been exploring. I know it’s by definition not “cinematic,” but I’ve always felt it was—it’s what you’re conjuring up, and the right digression can be very illustrative.

Maybe that’s what unites your films—you just want to let people go where they want to go?
RL: We reveal ourselves that way. By running down the street, or chasing someone—whatever the physical actions are, that doesn’t define anyone.
JD: Language is what separates us from… the rest of life.
RL: We’re separate biological entities. The only thing that joins us is our ability to communicate, and be cooperative, and try to be heard and understand each other the best we can.

Will you ever make another movie with less verbal communication? Since Slacker your films have a lot of it.
RL: I think all the films I’m trying to get made are pretty talky. Maybe Bernie, my last film—it’s talky but there are less people talking to each other, they’re communicating with the camera. That would be more behavior driven.

So how important was it to get outside of Texas? Before Sunrise was your first big jump outside of that world.
RL: I think my first time out of the country was 1990. I couldn’t afford it and wasn’t that inclined to travel the world or anything, but I made a film and started going to festivals. That’s why I kind of started to think of that film as having an international element to it, and just the notion of travel. I enjoy it. You know, you’re kind of a citizen of the world [as a filmmaker] in terms of what you do, but I tend to go back there, to Texas. It’s just where my brain works from, just kind of how it plays out.

Speaking of returns, can you talk a little about how Ethan Hawke keeps popping up in your films?
RL: You never know how these things are going to work out. Even after that first film, we were sort of like, “well it would be fun if we could all work together again…”
JD: It’s really when we did Waking Life, we realized that it really doesn’t come along that often, to have this work relationship. Even though I have good work relationships with other people, it’s a different dynamic. It’s not like we’re only happy when we work together but it’s true that it is a fun and special thing that we have.

One of the things that you said yesterday is that you’re both fans of sci-fi. Tell me about your sci-fi fantasies.
RL: We like it enough, intellectually. We’re both Philip K. Dick fans. All my ideas as a kid were sci-fi—I grew up in the space age.
JD: I’ve written sci-fi ever since I was a kid, between sci-fi and romance, like ‘porno sci-fi’!  I’ve always liked sci-fi stories. I have a friend that’s a cartoonist, and also an artist, and I think I’ll probably end up doing a graphic novel, and we’ll do a lot of different stories, and she’ll probably put the face of the actor she sexually fantasizes about on the characters and stuff.
RL: Yeah!  What is a good sci-fi movie? I’m critical: I like it in theory but there aren’t many good ones. To me the bar is still up there that’ll never be passed with 2001, and I think there are other stops along the way, but I love Blade Runner.
JD: Alien! But there aren’t many really good ones now. I liked Children of Men a lot, part of it.
RL: Hm. There’s so many brilliant ideas in there it’s almost like “where are the brilliant films?”
JD: I think what really wins in 2001—there’s something—you don’t fucking know what it’s about, in the end. It’s always too—it’s trying to be too rooted in reality. Because financiers are businessmen and to make a good sci-fi film you need a lot of money, so you need those businessmen. They would never have understood the end of 2001 if you explained it to them, and they would have killed the film. Too many pragmatic people involved.
RL: My Dick adaptation was so low budget we were able to actually do Philip K. Dick, we were able to get his humor and paranoia, just go all the way within that story and not just grab a core idea and make it a genre film.

That’s what made you feel you were able to do it—you could get the whole thing?
RL: Or try to. Try to capture his tone and his humor. Not just to extract an idea and run with it.
JD: So what are you doing now? I’m like doing the interview: ‘What is your next thing Mr. Linklater?’
RL: I’m finishing a project I’ve been working on for 11 or 12 years, that’s slowly coming along, it’s about growing up. It’s the 12…
JD: 12-Year Movie. I’m his agent.
RL: The next thing I want to do is maybe a college comedy. I’m realizing after Dazed and Confused I came into something that was really intimate, and after this I want to do another big, rambling ensemble. Something I have in mind is a story about college life that I’ve been thinking about for a long time.

You don’t have to be one of the $90-million-and-counting worth of people who have seen Star Trek Into Darkness to know that the USS Enterprise’s resident bombshell, a physicist played by British actress Alice Eve, strips down to her bra and panties. That’s because the film’s trailers make that plenty clear. As if teenage boys needed more of a reason to shell out for an effects-driven space romp, why not add the ultimate special effect to cap it all off: a push-up bra! The scene lasts all but two seconds, but as many detractors (mostly on Twitter) have pointed out, it feels completely gratuitous.

Now, one of the films three writers, Damon Lindelof—who in a recent Hollywood Reporter cover story came clean about his addiction to responding to critics on Twitter—responded to his critics on Twitter by, of all things, agreeing with them. Big man.

I copped to the fact that we should have done a better job of not being gratuitous in our representation of a barely clothed actress.

— Damon Lindelof (@DamonLindelof) May 20, 2013

We also had Kirk shirtless in underpants in both movies.Do not want to make light of something that some construe as mysogenistic.

— Damon Lindelof (@DamonLindelof) May 20, 2013

What I’m saying is I hear you, I take responsibility and will be more mindful in the future.

— Damon Lindelof (@DamonLindelof) May 20, 2013

Also, I need to learn how to spell “misogynistic.”

— Damon Lindelof (@DamonLindelof) May 20, 2013

Damon Lindelof and his director, J.J. Abrams, strike us as sensitive types who wouldn’t be that keen on the objectification of women, so let’s place the blame squarely on the film’s other two writers, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, the dudes who wrote this scene. Yeah, them.

If you ever went to liberal arts school and hung out with film students—or basically anyone—who loved to do pot, there’s a solid chance you’ve seen Holy Mountain or El Topo, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s acid trip allegories for death, mythology, violence, and all sorts of heavy topics embedded in dizzying imagery and truly idiosyncratic sensibility. Jodorowsky’s career makes for a very satisfying Wikipedia read, if you’ve got the time, but he hasn’t released a new movie since 1990′s The Rainbow Thief. Now, he returns in 2013 with The Dance of Reality, a “surreal vision” of his childhood in Chile. You can watch the first trailer below, and it teases as visceral of an experience as you might hope for: blood splattered over newspapers, children fighting each other, dogs dressed up as humans, and much more. Pot will help, I imagine. A release date hasn’t been set.

Some celebrities have mastered the art of the press junket, which has them sitting in a room all day answering the same type of questions posed by a revolving door of reporters with a publicist listening in to make sure absolutely nothing goes wrong. Others find it impossibly boring and eventually get a little testy, as ABC reporter Romina Puga claimed after interviewing Jesse Eisenberg before the release of his new movie, Now You See Me. You can watch the interview below, but it’s fairly tense: Eisenberg immediately clamps down on her casual affectation of Morgan Freeman as just “Freeman,” gives her crap over her junior magic trick, and calls her “the Carrot Top of interviewers.” Not very nice, as Puga claimed in her recap for ABC:

Having a conversation with Jesse Eisenberg was like having a conversation with my stubborn-as-a-mule older brother; he has to counter everything you say. But unlike my brother, who I am able to get up and walk away from, I had to sit through five minutes of tortuous conversation — scratch that, of arguing — with the 29-year-old New Yorker best known for playing Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network. Again, I should’ve known better.

I spare you a regular written story about him because there’s no other way to explain who Jesse Eisenberg is without witnessing his belittling demeaning demeanor for yourself. Instead, I give you the lowlights (because they’re definitely not highlights) of our interview in the video above. Enjoy, or don’t, Jesse wouldn’t care.

Which, yeesh, and watching the video instinctively kicks to my Tumblr-bred knee jerk reaction of “Wow, what a sexist dick,” since Puga is a woman asking admittedly silly questions. Would Eisenberg have given this level of crap to, say, Billy Bush on his dumbass Access Hollywood show? Of course, common sense says it’s possible to just be a bored dick regardless of who you’re talking to, but it’s hard to say that when some reactions are playing the “she’s just overreacting” card (with a bonus “she’s super pretty” thrown in). So, yuck. Eisenberg seems like the type of actor self-aware enough to realize how words can offend regardless of intent, and maybe this reaction will prompt him to be less of a prat about a routine interaction the next time around. As for the people whose default reaction is to talk about how attractive Puga is, what the hell is wrong with you?

The last time we saw a fairly nude Jennifer Lawrence in scaly, blue body paint was two years ago, when she took on the role of shapely, shiftly, shape-shifter Mystique (five times fast). Since then, Lawrence has ascended to stadium status, so naturally, a new photo of her looking the exact same as she did two years ago is a gargantuan deal. Bryan Singer, director of the next installment in Marvel’s mutant saga, X-Men: Days of Future Past, tweeted a photo of the actress in her costume (is it a costume if there’s no clothes?), and, well, it’s Jennifer Lawrence in blue paint. Only now there’s a certain mystique that surrounds her. See what we did there?