Music & Film

I don't envy the marketing team handling 'Don Jon.' It can't be easy to sell a film that uses porn (LOTS AND LOTS OF PORN) as a metaphor, no matter how good it is (and 'Don Jon' is very good).

This country's obsession with the private lives of famous people is tragic. It's tragic in the sense that it is so clearly a projection of people's frustration about their government, their economy, their own spiritual bankruptcy. You have no voice in Washington. In Washington, or in any statehouse, no one actually cares what you think. So you post online, you vote with a Roman-esque thumbs up or down on the celebrity debacle of the day. That is your right. It's also fatal misdirection of your voice and need to judge. Occupy Wall Street, on their worst day, had more integrity than the comments page of this website ever will.

And in a year that saw the internet invalidating the issues of women of color, excluding them from important conversations about feminism, and - frankly - excluding them from feminism period (remember @Karynthia’s #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen and Michelle Cottle’s FLOTUS is a Feminist Nightmare), Beyonce came through with the power of Jesus Christ himself and did quite the opposite on a public stage.

The ‘Goonies’ are a close knit group. They believe in themselves, even though there are doubters throwing darts at them outside…’Goonies never say die.’ That’s pretty in line with the mentality of our team.

So what have we learned today that we didn’t already know? Nothing. We learned that the Academy Awards is racist. It always has been. 94% of the voting members of the academy are white. So both the Lone Ranger and Alone yet not Alone feed into the colonial fantasy BS that dominates hollywood stories about Indians.

Mary Matalin and James Carville have given me more hope when it comes to love and relationships than any romance book or chick flick ever.

...It's all sort of dreams and it's all illusion. It's theater; it's not real. We're making up stories, you know, and people tend to run into you and believe you are your characters. And I suppose the funny thing is the longer you go, you do become sort of some version of [your characters]. You both diverge from them - you know - you live, but you also permanently inhabit that geography and that mental space - and so you do morph a little bit. We do become what we imagine.

I’m so sick and tired of all this violence, this gun violence. And how could I speak on it - you know - being one who has advocated violence and gun violence? The only way I could do it was through a song that spoke from the heart.

Director Ken Burns revealed that his next documentary is about Franklin Roosevelt, and it's fourteen hours long...which sounds like too much, until you realize there's been over thirty hours of TV dedicated to Honey Boo Boo.

[Washington, DC] feels like you’re watching performance art. A lot of the time. I don’t believe them, I don’t believe what they say, I don’t think they’re being absolutely sincere. I think it’s performance art. And most of them are bad actors.

To those of us in the industry who are still foolishly clinging to the idea that female films with women at the center are niche experiences, they are not. Audiences want to see them and, in fact, they earn money. So the world is round, people!

This is for the 36 million people who have lost the battle to AIDS and to those of you out there who have ever felt injustice because of who you are or who you love. Tonight, I stand here in front of the world for you.