Tonight we have a repeat and a new episode! Jon Stewart is off in Canada doing director-type stuff at the Toronto film festival so we have a repeat of The Adam Levine episode from last Thursday. Colbert is all new with John Lithgow.
First more about Stewart's visit:
Stewart, who also wrote the Rosewater screenplay, and Bahari talked with the Toronto Star Sunday.
How did you use close-ups in the prison scenes to give a feeling of claustrophobia?
STEWART: Structurally I wanted the audience to feel the discomfort of isolation … to feel the discomfort without it becoming a truly unpleasant experience (for the viewer).
Were you inspired by other prison films? Papillon or Midnight Express?
STEWART: I did have this one scene where I had Maziar jumping off a cliff (laughs at the Papillon reference). I was more inspired by his book and the ideas behind it and the question of how to visualize that was part of the collaborative process. But it was about showing Maziar reclaiming his humanity in the smallest moments.
How much responsibility did you feel for Maziar’s arrest?
STEWART: I was the one who turned him in to the Iranian government (laughs). I don’t feel responsible … there was definitely a moment once when we found out that individuals we had interviewed for all those pieces had been arrested. There was a visceral ‘Oh my God’ was there a causal relationship?’ That was disabused very quickly. What I felt a responsibility to was to tell his story with integrity and to do justice by the source material he had written, which was very beautiful.
Copypasta from last week.
Adam Levine is singer and songwriter and lead singer for the band Maroon 5 as well as a judge on the show The Voice. He will be on to promote Maroon 5's new album V
Every song clocks right in that radio sweet spot between three and four minutes, and nearly all of them go down like candy, but collectively the final product is an album with all the surprise and individuality of a Now That’s What I Call Music compilation.
Maroon 5 crib more pop moves on album number five
Ouch. OK, so A.V. club are not fans.
Leaving scrappier rock behind for the sunny horizons of chart-friendly pop was surely a wise commercial move for Maroon 5, but reaching for ubiquity on the singles chart often means sacrificing any hope of making a conceptually cohesive and musically sophisticated album. As far as lightweight, easy-listening charts pop goes, V doesn’t totally offend the sensibilities, and that’s surely more than can be said about some of Maroon 5’s overly pandering, less exploratory “pop-rock” peers.
popmatters.com
So it would appear that it is an album engineered and written to be a series of pop singles and it works well as that.
John Lithgow is an actor. I know him as Dr. Dick Solomon on Third Rock from The Sun or Rev. Shaw Moore from Footloose. He has been in many films and TV series, most recently as The White Rabbit in Once Upon a Time in Wonderland, Jerry Whitaker on How I Met Your Mother and Ben in the movie
Love Is Strange which he is on to promote.
After Ben and George get married, George is fired from his teaching post, forcing them to stay with friends separately while they sell their place and look for cheaper housing -- a situation that weighs heavily on all involved.
Hide and Seek “Frank” and “Love Is Strange.
The new Ira Sachs movie, “Love Is Strange,” begins where many stories used to end, on a wedding day. There are no bells, but we get an open-air ceremony, a few speeches, a sing-along around a piano, and a deep, smacking kiss between groom and groom. Ben (John Lithgow), a painter, and his British partner, George (Alfred Molina), have been together for decades. Now they set the seal on their affection.
That simple gesture, however, has repercussions. George is the music director at a Catholic church in Manhattan, where his sexuality has never been a secret; by marrying, though, he falls foul of diocesan rules and loses his job.
“Love Is Strange,” however, is not about gay marriage. It is about a marriage that happens to be gay. If the film grows slightly boring, even that can be construed as an advance. In the dramatizing of gay rights, somebody needed to include the right of same-sex partners to be as bogged down in moping and pettiness as anyone else, and Sachs has shouldered the task. He has made things easy for himself, you could argue, by setting the story in a state and a town where two guys getting hitched is no big deal, but, by way of compensation, choosing New York City does provide him with a source of genuine anguish: not sex (we see a quick cuddle on the lower deck of a bunk bed, and that’s it); not religion (George affirms his faith once, then never refers to it again); but real estate. The loss of one income forces the newlyweds to give up their place and, unable to afford an apartment big enough for both of them, find separate refuges. And the moral is: Those whom God has joined together let rents and co-op boards put asunder.
It sounds like an interesting movie. I like the idea of characters who happen to be gay rather than making their primary characteristic be their sexual orientation.
This Week's Guests
THE DAILY SHOW
Tu 9/9: Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand
We 9/10: Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
Th 9/11: Tavis Smiley
THE COLBERT REPORT
Tu 9/9: Jason Segel
We 9/10: Henry Kissinger
Th 9/11: Lonn Taylor