Hollywood does not encourage rising stars to take risks. Sure, once you're Nicole Kidman you can do Dogville, and if everyone hates it, it's forgotten and you move on to The Stepford Wives. But for an actor like Cillian Murphy, with only a couple of major productions under his belt, a hazardous role at this critical juncture in his career could have been his downfall, if botched.
Murphy took the part of Patrick "Kitten" Braden, a cross-dressing Irish lad, regardless. The role was for a movie called Breakfast on Pluto made by Neil Jordan, the director of The Crying Game. In an interview with Nerve, Jordan said Murphy jumped at the chance to be a part of the film, which came out just as the young actor seemed to be fashioning himself as an action-movie star (Batman Begins, 28 Days Later, Red Eye).
Though we loved the screaming zombies of 28 Days Later and thought Red Eye was surprisingly great fun, we'd not even know how Cillian pronounces his name if not for his turn as the transvestite (it's Kill-ian). In our book, any actor with enough artistic bravado to say action stars can also play boys who wear lipstick — and look fabulous wearing it — is single-handedly changing the industry for the better. — Will Doig
Celebrity sex tapes don't shock us. Dirty talk can't faze us. Internet porn is more likely to amuse than embarrass us. But thirty seconds into Damali Ayo's White Chair: A List of Ignorant Questions Frequently Asked by White People of People of Color, we're blushing like naughty schoolboys. We laugh nervously at her Rent-A-Negro FAQ. Her art deals with racism in sparse, witty exhibitions that reject our comfort levels and aim for the gut. The average white viewer will come away shocked, humiliated and enlightened — which is not only a rare combination, but a damn hot one. — Gwynne Watkins
We'd like to be twenty-eight and write funny, well-informed blog posts like, "A couple of years ago I wrote a Washington Post commentary about the film X-2: X-Men United, which misunderstands evolution." Chris Mooney does just that. Mooney, who's written for The American Scholar, Reason and Legal Affairs, has also published what may be 2005's best polemic, The Republican War on Science. Except calling it a polemic makes it sound like a rant, when it's actually one of the most meticulously researched and well-argued books to emerge from the exasperated-liberal genre since Naomi Klein's No Logo. Mooney exposes the White House's ever-metastasizing assault on science in a scope no one else has been able to achieve, splitting open its irrational policies from condom effectiveness to abortion.
So just this once, we're breaking our policy to hate anyone in our age range who's been a guest on The Daily Show. Part of the reason is because Mooney's modesty has the effect of neutralizing envy like vinegar on bleach. Another reason is that he's absurdly cute — in his author photo, he's wearing a long-sleeved jersey and hiking through a birch forest! But mostly, it's because he's the genuine article, not simply the next Hot Young Writer who's an expert at schmoozing editors and looks good on a book jacket. We've always been suckers for hot geeks. This one's actually smart. — WD
Geography counts, even in cyberspace. After Capitol Hill intern Jessica Cutler was fired in 2004 for blogging about
her prolific sex life, her tell-all "novel" found a publisher. After Chinese magazine journalist Li Li was fired around the same time for blogging about a far more prolific sex life, her book was banned. In muzzling Li Li (nom de plume: Muzi Mei), the Party gave the international press a convenient symbol of China's sexual revolution — a little too convenient, perhaps. Once Li Li's supposedly incendiary account of sleeping with over a hundred men (and rating their performance) surfaced in uncensored Hong Kong, few people bought it.
But Li Li's sexiness has less to do with the hundred notches in her pillow book than the hundreds of thousands of blogs she helped launch. At one point, a third of Chinese internet users were reading her stories, no small number of who started their own.
Li Li has since emerged as a promoter for Chinese blog network Bokee, the same company that recently denounced its competitor, Microsoft, for hosting a dangerously popular pro-democracy blog. Microsoft ignominiously caved. Meanwhile, China's leading sexual revolutionary has lately found an even better way to scandalize the Party: she's now podcasting her love life. — Justin Clark
It's become almost jarring to hear of a trial that was decided on merit rather than ideology, particularly one presided over by a Bush-administration appointee. But last December, a Republican judge who was hand-picked by the President in 2002 delivered that same President his holiest judicial dressing-down of the year. The Dover intelligent-design trial was universally considered the most important legal review of science and evolution since the Scopes trial of 1925. A win
for the conservative Pennsylvania school board would have validated the idea that science teachers should teach kids that God put those dinosaur bones there simply to test their faith.
On paper, the fact that Judge Jones would preside over such a trial was a nightmare. Besides being a Bush-pick, he's a conservative Lutheran who once banned a beer because its label featured a frog giving the finger. But as it turned out, he'd be science's savior in 2005. In his 139-page ruling, he went just plain batshit over what he called the "breathtaking inanity" of teaching intelligent design.
"The students, parents and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources," he wrote. He accused the school board of trying to sneak religion into the classroom: "It is ironic that [those] who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public would time and again lie to disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy." Then he ridiculed intelligent design as factually inert, berated the school board for violating the Constitution and wrapped it up by warning that anyone who called him an activist judge would get boot-kicked.
It was ironic and a little sad that it took a Republican to provide the year's most vigorous defense of what should be one of the Left's easiest and most important issues to defend. Still, we love Judge Jones, not only for shooting down a thinly veiled creationist agenda, but also for proving that the President's demand for Mafia-grade loyalty still occasionally ends at the judicial bench. — WD
We interviewed twenty-four-year-old Chicago-based indie director Joe Swanberg a few months ago for his 2005 Kissing on the Mouth. We couldn't get over how gracefully Swanberg depicted both the aimless narcissism of post-college life and the sheet-pulling of explicit sex. In one scene, the character he plays even masturbates to climax in the shower. All the nudity hurt the film's chance for distribution, but all the tangled limbs made for a film that was refreshingly honest about that promiscuous streak so many of us hit in the broke, misguided months after graduation. — Ada Calhoun
The past few years have seen some of the worst criminal acts in America exposed not by congressional inquiry or law enforcement, but by internal whistleblowers and muckrakers. So when the FDA, a department under the jurisdiction of the White House, inexplicably delayed the approval of the emergency contraception drug Plan B last summer, the agency's scientists were outraged.
Most of them voiced their frustration at the water cooler and left it at that, but for Dr. Susan Wood, director of the FDA's Office of Women's Health, the politicization of the drug-approval process was untenable. She resigned in protest and blasted the agency brass for what seemed to be a blatantly ideological decision to keep an important drug out of the hands of the public. By giving up her director's position, she became a true leader.
"None of the decision-making process was followed in a normal way," she said in an interview with Nerve last November about the non-approval of Plan B. "Something happened at the leadership level of the agency, or beyond . . . The agency was not acting independently." For anyone not paying attention, this is fucking terrifying. We're talking about the agency that approves and monitors our medicine being influenced by Bible-aged philosophy and a president who believes he speaks for God. Though we'd prefer not to have to rely on people like Dr. Wood to give up their careers for our own safety, we're thankful they're willing to do it, because this sort of thing gives us a migraine. Pass the Tylenol. — WD
Feel like you've outgrown Tori Amos? Did you find Fiona Apple's comeback album
pleasure-free? Rate Bjork's recent work admirable but unlistenable?
Let Regina Spektor restore your faith in female singer-songwriters. Born in
Moscow and raised in Brooklyn, Spektor stacks her song lyrics like Legos,
constructing elaborate fantasies from tiny details. Take "Ode to Divorce,"
where she watches her ex kiss someone new — from inside his mouth. Or "Aching to Pupate," about a street vendor who sells butterflies out of his
trenchcoat. Or "Chemo Limo," in which Benjamin Franklin emerges from his $100
bill to baby sit a cancer patient's children. When she sings, Spektor
throws her voice around like an elfin Ella Fitzgerald, jumping between
octaves and creating percussion out of thin air. You may be mesmerized, and
you'll never be disappointed. — GW
Ubiquitous Bollywood star Shahrukh Khan is a blow to Western sensibilities.
He does three things in every film that only the bravest Hollywood actor would
ever dare: he sings, dances and weeps. In keeping with Bollywood
tradition, Khan
refuses to kiss his heroines on the lips. And maybe it's that
combination of physical restraint and emotional abandon that makes him so
hot. His appeal is universal enough that last year, on his fortieth birthday, he
was voted the MTV Youth Icon of India. Because true sex appeal knows no
age, no nationality — and sometimes, no kissing on the lips. — GW
Most comic strips are content to be pen-and-ink gag reels, giving you a stale chuckle of recognition ("that's just like my dad!") before you move on. Folks, this is how vaudeville died. Fortunately, Achewood ("A momentary diversion on the road to the grave") is giving the genre a hypodermic. Like Calvin and Hobbes, the last great comic strip in memory, Achewood has populated a world with stuffed animals come to life — except that these animals raid the liquor cabinet, swear, get depressed, get laid and generally suck the reader into their irresistibly adult world. They're also funny as hell (or in Achewood's cadence, "hell of funny"). In pushing the limits of both reality and decency, creator Chris Onstad has revealed the possibilities of online comics, inadvertently transforming them into a respectable genre. With alcoholic cats. — GW
Tomorrow: the affably slutty TV hostess, religious leaders, reality stars and a royal consort.
