Stupid as a noun
(04/23/21 4:00am)
Intelligence is not everything. It is the only thing.
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Intelligence is not everything. It is the only thing.
Even if beloved cult indie band The Antlers had never returned to the music scene, their reputation would remain not just untarnished but scintillating. Peter Silberman’s dream pop outfit first found widespread acclaim with 2009’s “Hospice,” an operatic concept album filled with quietly devastating songs that soon became as iconic as the record’s firework-red cover art. The two albums that followed — the impossibly lush “Burst Apart” and the self-reflective “Familiars” — were met with equal praise, cementing the band’s legacy as a lyrical, soundscape-driven powerhouse. Bolstered by universal critical acclaim and adoration from loyal listeners, The Antlers seemed poised for a precipitous rise to indie fame.
“They say the real fear with these rides comes from the feeling of having no control.”
It has been almost a year since an in-person performance has been staged before an audience at Duke, but that hasn’t stopped student theater organization Hoof ‘n’ Horn from going forward with their spring musical.
With movie theaters closed for the foreseeable future and costumes replaced with masks of a very different kind, Halloween is shaping up to be a solitary affair. Instead of the typical glut of crowd-pleasing cinema slashers and direct-to-video thrillers primed for party-viewing, streaming services have been stocking their virtual shelves with new releases to keep audiences in sufficiently spooky spirits during October. Blumhouse Studios has, of course, been leading the charge as the industry’s most well-known and rousingly successful horror production company, flipping low-budget fixer-uppers into box office smashes.
When the Nasher Museum of Art announced that it would remain closed to visitors throughout the fall semester, students and Durham residents alike braced themselves for a year without the museum’s beautifully-curated exhibits. The Nasher, however, had no such plans.
Before there was the professionally-shot production of “Hamilton” uploaded onto Disney+ to worldwide acclaim, there was “founding fathers slime tutorial.”
I survived the end of the world.
The coronavirus outbreak has shuttered many summer projects and programs, but the interdisciplinary narratives of Duke’s Story+ will continue to be told in spite of — and even because of — the current circumstances.
When I was a young girl, I hated Aphrodite.
Once considered one of the most esteemed and coveted prizes a filmmaker could win, the Academy Award’s luster has since dulled under the corrosive influence of time and progress.
Ever since the dawn of my movie-watching days, I have been singularly obsessed with animation. My fascination transcended fondness for the princesses in Disney films or the squishy CGI characters of early Dreamworks entries: I was fixated on the animation itself, the creation of elaborate set pieces and fluid movement from drawings alone. I grew up watching Pixar movies exclusively with the director’s commentary turned on, marveling at the innovation and invention that went into making something as commonplace as a ponytail or a garbage bag look realistic.
Divorced from visuals and performances, Robert Eggers’s screenplays read like landmark pieces of American theater still studied and performed for their enduring relevance. Though ostensibly marketed as horror films, his movies are historical dramas at heart, so deeply researched and written in such dense, archaic language that they serve as roadmaps into specific eras of American history.
In a perfect world, “Breaking Bad” would be on television forever. The universe that Vince Gilligan painstakingly established and populated over the course of the series’ five seasons is one of the richest ever to exist on the small screen, deftly combining the sandy drudgery of life in suburban New Mexico with the thrilling danger of drug production and trafficking. It is a world so enchanting in both its scope and its finely-crafted minutiae that it could theoretically spawn an infinite number of stories, covering every character and how each decision they make ripples throughout the community and the drug empire situated just beneath it.
The agony of losing a loved one is at once one of the most universal of human experiences and one of the hardest to concretely define. It is a pain that cannot live in words or gestures, a pain totally unique to each individual, a pain so vast yet so entrenched in the minutiae of daily life. A concept as overwhelmingly nebulous and personal as grief might seem impossible to capture in any context, let alone the fleeting frames of a moving image, but cinema has nevertheless striven to reproduce that pain, squeezing and flattening it into a two-dimensional film print.
In episode three of the popular and increasingly controversial HBO series “Euphoria,” there is a sex scene. The show — which depicts the complicated, traumatizing lives and relationships of modern high school students — contains multiple instances of graphic intercourse, but this particular scene garnered intense backlash despite being an animated, ostensibly PG depiction of sex between two adults. What rattled audiences was not the erotic content: it was the fact that the two participants were Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson of the once-famous band One Direction.
The Duke Entertainment, Media & Arts Network — more commonly referred to as DEMAN — will host its annual DEMAN Arts & Media weekend Nov. 1 and 2 on Duke's campus. The events, which include panels hosted by alumni and career-oriented activities, are numerous, and we understand how daunting that can be. (Where do I go? Who should I see? What on earth are “Guac and Talks”?)
Once upon a time, summer was ostensibly blockbuster season. Just as Academy Award Best Picture contenders are invariably saved for a winter release, the biggest films — in both budget and scope — were given summer releases to reach a wider audience and garner greater buzz. Ever since the splashy June premiere of Steven Spielberg’s 1975 film “Jaws,” the hottest months of the year have also been the most entertaining, as studios pack their summer schedules with epic releases and people liberated from work and school swarm theaters.
There is a moment of utter depravity in the fifth of six vignettes that comprise Natal’ya Vorozhbit’s play “Bad Roads,” a scene so chillingly vile that it is legitimately difficult to watch. A soldier beats, sexually violates and finally urinates on a female journalist he has taken hostage, a sequence that feels as though it was lifted directly from a snuff film — or a documentary.
Over spring break, I made an unforgivably heinous choice: I decided to start watching “America’s Next Top Model."