Arts & Culture

The Screen Actors Guild is none too happy with union brethren the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. AFTRA members accepted a three-year contract with Hollywood studios, while S.A.G. is still holding out for a better deal. Not only did the union snub S.A.G.'s demands, they also talked some trash.

The Associated Press tells us that Federation President Roberta Reardon is accusing S.A.G. of unleashing an "unprecedented disinformation campaign" that put the deal in jeopardy.

S.A.G. leaders "must be held accountable for this ridiculous waste of members' dues money, including my own, in attacking another union's contract," Ms. Reardon told reporters Tuesday.  read more »

Things went much as predicted this Fourth of July weekend. New Yorkers fell in love with a homeless wino with a penchant for busting road signs and throwing live whales into the ocean. Hancock landed on top of Manhattan's sales charts with an $850,956 box office showing. It was the same story nationally. Sony's film scored $66 million in ticket sales, putting it way ahead of Wall-E ($33.4 million) and Wanted ($20.6 million). Since first hitting theaters on July 2nd, Will Smith's jaded superhero has made a total of $107.3 million.

Much like his alky anti-hero, Smith is a force to be reckoned with.  read more »

Why should anyone care about Beck? Isn’t he just some 90's holdover gone morose, gone Scientologist, gone lame with the weight of his early successes and the death of irony, that vein he mined so long and so well?

His last two releases, the aimless Guero and the overworked yet hollow The Information were critically shrugged at and popularly buoyed by the artist’s (deserved) reputation, but seemed to have found Beck Hansen short on good ideas or good energy, something for which he was never, ever lacking.

Yet the father of two is nearing 40, at the tail end of his recording contract, undetermined as to his future, and like the rest of us looking at the abyss that is the future of music.  read more »

Variety reports that Hollywood is still on hold until the Screen Actors Guild and the studios make their decisions.

Meanwhile the magazine reports on an ad aimed at guild members published by S.A.G. in today's Daily Variety: "Our industry does have a clear choice: a fair labor agreement for middle-class actors and their families ... or more management grandstanding. Support your Screen Actors Guild's national negotiating committee as it works every day for a fair deal as soon as possible for actors. Let's keep talking."

Spokesman Jesse Hiestand of The Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers, which used the "clear choice" headline in a recent ad of its own, responded to the ad thusly, speaking to the Variety reporter: "Now, even after 42 days of formal AMPTP-SAG negotiations, SAG's Hollywood leadership remains incapable of closing the deal.  read more »

CONCERTS

"The live show is the new album cover," says David Tobias, singer/guitarist for Brooklyn's electro-funksters Apes & Androids. In a piece in July's Spin on the new vogue for psychadelic stage-shows, we learn that the Androids hand out kazoos to their audience so they can play along to Gary Glitter's "Rock & Roll Part 2," and that the band's friends are known to dress up like zombies on-stage and perform a dead-on impression of Michael Jackson's "Thriller." Sounds like a good time. Even better when you consider who the boys are playing with—the borough's most accomplished sonic terrorists, A Place To Bury Strangers.  read more »

Andy Blankenbuehler, the dance choreographer who won a Tony award for his saucy Latin and contemporary routines for Broadway's In the Heights, will be a guest on the best (in our humble opinion!) reality show on network TV this summer: Fox's So You Think You Can Dance. He'll be creating a new routine for one of the seven remaining couples in the competition. They dance a new routine in pairs each week in different styles, including Broadway, hip-hop, ballroom, contemporary and jazz. If the competitors make their moves on stage and don't get on judge Mary Murphy's "hot tamale train," they'll have to dance solos and risk being eliminated.  read more »

Racy Rushdie

Want to feel uncomfortable? The Enchantress of Florence (Random House, $26, in stores) inspired the L.A. Times to “wonder how Salman Rushdie’s literary fortunes would have fared without the infamous fatwa.” Ouch! We can’t decide if that’s better or worse than the New York Post’s more subtly erudite observation that “TV mannequin Padma Lakshmi really did a number on Salman Rushdie, who takes their separation out on the women of his new novel.” Does Mr. Rushdie deserve such undignified treatment? Probably. (And does the Post review books? Of course it does, you snob.) Don’t blame the book for any of this: Enchantress is everything a beach read should be—a harlequin romp across the continents and cultures of Renaissance Europe and Asia, with a hot orange book jacket, lots of sex and a five-page bibliography of scholarly sources to make it all seem legitimate.  read more »

Gillian Anderson is all about Martha Gellhorn, a war reporter who covered conflicts for 60 years. As a correspondent for Collier's Weekly, she reported on the Spanish Civil War, along with her future husband, Ernest Hemingway. Ms. Anderson read Caroline Moorehead's 2004 biography Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life and was hooked. "Martha Gellhorn was one of the most respected journalists of this century, and I thought Caroline's biography effectively encompassed her rich and complex life," Ms. Anderson told Variety. She was so taken with Ms. Gellhorn's story that she's producing and starring in a new movie about the journalist.  read more »

Manhattan may be famous for its plummeting crime rate (Oslo has four times as much crime as New York this year!), but it's clear its residents still have a taste for violence — that, or they prefer Angelina Jolie's slender arms and James McAvoy's glistening chest to a dented metal-box with eyes. Either way, last weekend New Yorkers resisted the calls of ecstatic critics and chose Timur Bekmambetov's kill-fest Wanted — in which Jolie and McAvoy star as members of a secret gang of assassins — over Pixar's Wall-E. Wanted raked in just over a million dollars locally during its opening weekend, making it the city's no.  read more »

Every weekday morning at 7:42, the NY1 newsman Pat Kiernan does an eight-minute segment called “In the Papers” in which he summarizes important articles from that day’s newspapers. It is this portion of the newscast—not “Weather on the 1’s,” not “The Rail and Road Report,” not the breaking news from the station’s far-flung (in the five boroughs, at least) reporters—that has endeared Mr. Kiernan, who is 39 years old and has been with the station since 1997, to thousands of culturally literate New Yorkers who, it is safe to say, do not watch any other local newscasts. But ask them, and they’ll cop to a certain degree of sincere admiration, bordering on obsession for some, of Mr.  read more »