Latest news with #Franco
Buzz Feed
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Buzz Feed
13 Celebs Who Came Off As Wildly Pretentious
James Franco is a poster boy for pretension, especially if you read his bad poetry, which reads like lines from r/im14andthisisdeep. Franco, trying to sound profound, once said his poetry is "trying to say something in addition to what's on the surface" — which, you know, is practically the definition of poetry as this article points out. One of the poems in the book is basically just a list of Heath Ledger's roles. Another reads, "My father died in my Jesus year. He was sixty-three and I was thirty-three. He'd managed a few things and so have I. I drive a bus." The line breaks aren't always where you'd think they'd be. Shia LaBeouf also often tries to appear deep or intelligent in what amounts to little more than publicity stunts. Remember when he wore a paper bag on his head with the phrase "I am not famous anymore," or the time he called his entire life "performance art"? What about when he ripped off Daniel Clowes for a short film, and then tried to turn it into a commentary on plagiarism and inspiration, literally stealing phrases from famous apologies in his own apology? Then there's the time he stormed out of an interview after a fairly innocuous question about sex scenes, quoting (without attribution) soccer player Eric Cantona, who had once done the same while remarking, "When the seagulls follow the trawler, it's because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea." Promoting a film called Nymphomaniac, a question on sex really did not feel like it promoted that reply, and Labeouf's strange response felt like an attempt at appearing deep and intellectual when really he just didn't feel like answering a question. Orlando Bloom raised eyebrows when he spoke to the Sunday Times about his morning routine, which included reading a "bit of Buddhism," Buddhist chanting, drinking a mix of "brain octane oil," and hiking while listening to Nirvana. But the real kicker came when he said, "I spend a lot of my time dreaming about roles for myself and others — for minorities and women. I'm trying to be a voice for everybody." It kinda felt like Bloom was trying a little too hard to sound inclusive without really doing anything to back it up. Oh, and he talked about appreciating the beauty of cows. He also came off pretty pretentious when he spoke about keeping an even head after LOTR and Pirates of the Caribbean fame. "I had this remarkable opening chapter to my career, for which I was only semi-present. Without my Buddhist practice, I could have easily come off the rails. I've been changing the narrative in my head and feel that I can be the driver of my train. I can set it alight, but I can get the fire crew and put it out." I'll be the first to say it: I don't like Brad Pitt. I liked him even less after reading his 2022 GQ profile. In it, he asks the interviewer, "Why the fuck are we here? What's beyond? Because I gather that you believe in something beyond.... Do you feel trapped here, in this body and in this environment?" The two discuss Rilke and Rumi, high art, and the meaning of dreams. Afterward, Pitt sends the interviewer an email with the sections "Summation, Clarification, and Rumination" to expound on his interview question answers. There's also a point where the two are sitting by a fire, and Pitt says, "I am a murderer. I'm a lover. I have the capacity for great empathy and I can devolve into pettiness." Perhaps most ironically, Pitt talks about "radical accountability." Let's not forget what he was accused of doing on that plane, though the lawsuit was dropped. Honestly, I don't know if I can say Tilda Swinton is pretentious, as she really does seem to be that cultured and intelligent (she's related to royalty, after all) but some of the quotes from this New Yorker interview she gave are wild, so I'll let you decide. Her comments on working with the late director Derek Jarman in particular were overly intellectual and mythologizing — she called the experiences an "apprenticeship" and a "movement," saying, "One is in mourning less for the individuals and more for the time, for—I would even go so far as to call it — 'the movement.'" She also gave a long commentary on class and ruminated on the possibility of dying in a plane crash right after 9/11, saying, "Well, where else would you rather be than with other people? What else is there but other people?" Joaquin Phoenix often comes off as a bit pretentious in how seriously he takes his work, but one moment in particular caught fans' attention: his Oscars speech after winning Best Actor for his role in Joker. In it, Phoenix tried to make a grand statement on world issues, but ended up going on a tangent about cows that sort of rendered the whole thing a little silly and flat. "I've been thinking a lot about some of the distressing issues that we are facing collectively. I think at times we feel, or we're made to feel, that we champion different causes. But for me, I see commonality," Phoenix said, mentioning gender inequality, racism, queer rights, Indigenous rights, and animal rights. While his words on one group always subjugating another of lesser power started nobly, they soon took a turn. "I think that we've become very disconnected from the natural world, and many of us, what we're guilty of is an egocentric world view — the belief that we're the center of the universe," he began. Then he went into artificial insemination. He wrapped it up by advocating for humans to create systems of change and "guide each other towards redemption." Which, sure, but it lacked some specificity, and he'd lost the crowd by then. While again, his intentions seemed noble, maybe don't bring up the morality of drinking milk just seconds after talking about large-scale issues like racial inequality? Russel Brand has a ton of different quotes where he tries to sound deep or smart, but ends up sounding like he's quoting something from a book he read. "The phenomena of consciousness, your very presence, the still, small voice within you and the apparently external world are all proof that God is real," he wrote on Facebook. He's spoken about the need for a "spiritual revolution" — even writing a book on it — the "energy centers in the body," and how the "self" is artificial. His book, Revolution, was criticized by The Guardian for being "heavy going, light on politics and, in places, beyond parody." Framing himself as an expert on spirituality, politics, identity, and truth might not be pretentious posturing if Brand had the credentials to back it Brand is perhaps best known for conspiracy theories, a short marriage to Katy Perry, and his sexual assault allegations (he has pled "not guilty"). Oh, and for someone who talks so much about politics, he doesn't even vote. Jim Carrey's interview with Rüdiger Sturm is full of faux-deep tidbits like this, where he discussed the lack of self. "There is no individual here. There are only energies," he said. "If you want to talk scientifically, break it down to a cluster of tetrahedrons that somehow believe they are a thing." He continued, "But they're ideas — just ideas. Jim Carrey was an idea my parents gave me. Irish-Scottish-French was an idea I was given. Canadian was an idea that I was given. I had a hockey team and a religion and all of these things that cobble together into this kind of Frankenstein monster, this representation. It's like an avatar. These are all the things I am. You are not an actor, or a lawyer. No one is a lawyer. There are lawyers, law is practiced, but no one is a lawyer." He also told Jimmy Kimmel, "I used to be a guy who was experiencing the world and now I feel like the world and universe experiencing a guy." Maybe he's just a New Age sort of guy — but he also seems to act above those who aren't as "enlightened." While attending a NYFW Icons party, he slammed the whole event with a very "better than this" attitude, saying, "I wanted to find the most meaningless thing that I could come to and join, and here I am." Speaking about the theme, he said, "Celebrating icons? That is just the absolute, lowest-aiming possibility that we could come up with." He continued, "I don't believe in personalities. I believe that peace lies beyond personality, beyond invention and disguise, beyond the red 'S' that you wear on your chest that makes bullets bounce off. I believe we are a field of energy dancing for itself. And I don't care." Donald Glover once compared himself to Jesus, after saying that there was nothing he's bad at. "Probably just people. People don't like to be studied, or bested. I'm fine with it. I don't really like people that much. People accept me now because I have power, but they still think, 'Oh, he thinks he's the golden flower of the Black community, thinks he's so different.' But I am, though!" He then said, "I feel like Jesus. I do feel chosen. My struggle is to use my humanity to create a classic work — but I don't know if humanity is worth it, or if we're going to make it. I don't know if there's much time left." While Glover is undeniably talented, the Jesus comparison went a bit far — past pretension and straight into a God complex. This is a small one, but it really irks me. Speaking to THE EDIT by Net-a-Porter, Kate Winslet once said she quit therapy because she was smarter than her therapist. "I tried therapy once and thought, 'Oh God, I could outsmart you, goodbye.' So I won't bother with that again," she told the interviewer. Even if Winslet was smarter than her therapist about everything, she could've tried another. With her platform, it feels irresponsible to suggest therapists are dumb or that therapy is useless if you're smart. hasn't gone to school since she was a teenager. She thinks she's smarter (when it comes to issues of the mind) than someone who went to graduate school for just that? In another smaller moment, Jennifer Garner once tried to make herself look smart and Conan look dumb by correcting him on his own for Conan to prove that he was right all along. I hate when people (non-teachers) correct others over vocabulary, grammar, or the way they speak. Unless it's someone spreading dangerous misinformation or problematic comments, do you really need to say something? Cole Sprouse has cultivated persona over the years, and he's certainly had his r/im14andthisisdeep cringe-worthy moments. I will never forget him being super weird on Tumblr, going viral, then calling the entire thing a "social experiment" in a very pretentious post. A more recent moment came when he appeared on the podcast Call Her Daddy last year. Fans were quick to cringe at his cigarette smoking inside, as well as the way he held the cigarette, tweeting things like, "he gives me the ick" and "It's giving rich white kid pretending to be a tortured artist." His ruminations on relationships didn't much help, though really, it was the general vibe that irked people more. And finally, we'll end with my time that Woody Allen was super pretentious while interviewing Twiggy and tried to make her look dumb. Twiggy — then a teenager — successfully flipped the script and exposed Allen for not being able to answer the same question he'd posed her. To which I say: ICON! (Yes, the same kind Jim Carrey hates.)
Local Spain
4 days ago
- Politics
- Local Spain
'Franco did it': Five quirky ways the dictator shaped modern Spain
With the 50th anniversary of Franco's death this year, there has unsurprisingly been quite a bit of talk about the dictator's legacy and his impact on Spain. Much of it, of course, is critical. However, some Spaniards, especially younger males, view the dictatorship with increasingly rose-tinted glasses and give examples of the supposed positives Franco did for the country. Often these are untrue, such as the widely-shared claim that Franco created the Spanish social security system, that he made Sunday a rest day for workers or that he set up the country's pension system. However, despite that, to say that the man who ruled Spain for decades didn't have a huge impact on the country would also be absurd. Despite the fact there's a tendency among some foreigners - including foreign correspondents and historians - to see Franco in absolutely everything, it's fair to say that in some specific ways, the dictator's legacy does live on to this day. Everything happens later in the day because of Franco Spain is in the wrong time zone. The country is geographically in line with the UK and Portugal. It makes sense, then, that Spain was in the Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) zone until around 75 years ago. But that changed during the Second World War. With the country ravaged by its own recent Civil War - in which Franco's victory was heavily supported by Hitler - Franco felt obliged to make a gesture of some sort. Although ultimately remaining neutral in the war, he decided to show his support for Hitler by agreeing to put Spain's clocks forward by an hour in an act of solidarity with Nazi Germany. Spain has remained in the Central European Time zone ever since, in line with countries as far east as Poland. But Franco's decision all those years ago isn't just a quirk of Spanish history, or testament to the extent to which the legacy of that period still looms over Spanish society. It was also a decision that has had a lasting impact on Spanish culture and society that underpins everything from Spaniards' sleep cycles and meal times to the country's birth rates and economic growth. There have been calls to make the switch back to GMT because many believe the time zone quirk is affecting Spaniard's productivity and quality of life. In 2013, a Spanish national commission concluded that Spaniards sleep almost an hour less than the European average, and that this led to increased stress, concentration problems, both at school and work, and workplace accidents. Franco introduced Spain's divisive mass tourism model Spain received 94 million tourists in 2024 and even its long-held status as de facto holiday destination for much of northern Europe can be traced back to Franco. After decades of international isolation following the Civil War, cash-strapped Francoist Spain completely changed its strategy in the late 50s and early 60s. The dictatorship liberalised the economy and invested heavily in promoting tourism abroad as a means of whitewashing the regime, turning its back on the Catholic, traditionalist sector of society which shunned the idea of free-thinking northern European tourists gracing Spain's beaches in bikinis. The regime opened its borders without checks or visa requirements, the peseta was deliberately devalued to make it cheaper for foreigners to spend their holidays in Spain, and legislation fixed the price hotels and restaurants could charge in order to keep them low, all factors that planted the seeds for the 'anything goes' tourism model. In fact, two of the popular tourism slogans of the time were Pase sin llamar ('Come in without knocking') and 'Spain is different', written in English. From 1960 to 1970, the number of international tourists quadrupled from 6.1 million to 24.1 million. It was during this time that Spain's coastal building bonanza kicked off and, decades later, the Spanish costas are still the first choice destination of tourists across the continent. Players use a hyper-realistic replica of dictator Francisco Franco's head as a football during an artistic and political performance titled "La Copa del Generalísimo". (Photo by Josep LAGO / AFP) Franco is largely responsible for 'Empty Spain' Franco is also arguably responsible for the mass migration of Spaniards from rural Spain into big cities, setting the foundations for Empty Spain and the depopulation problems it has caused in more recent years. From the late-1950s, millions in Spain left their pueblos to live in cities in search of transfer of rural populations to industrial centres such as Catalonia, the Basque Country and Madrid led to major regional imbalances, many of which live on today. When we think of the concept of 'Empty Spain', we think of more recent migrant flows and younger Spaniards forced to provincial capitals in search of work, but according to data from INE, in the 1960s alone more than three million Spaniards left the countryside for the city. The economic boom Franco hoped for required a large workforce, which came from rural areas. To compound the trend, agricultural production was mechanised around this time which meant that there was also a surplus of labour in the countryside, forcing more people into the cities in search of work. Spaniards' obsession with home ownership started under Franco This migration from the Spanish countryside also had another effect: it made Spain into a nation of homeowners. Spain has historically had among the highest property ownership rates in Europe. The Spain of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s was a country of tenants. Until the 1960s, half of all housing in the country was rented. Incredibly, in 1950 only one in twenty people in Madrid or Barcelona owned their own homes, but by 2007 the Ministry of Housing estimated that 87 percent of Spanish households owned at least one home. José Luis Arrese, the first Housing Minister in Spanish history, told the Francoist Parliament in the 1950s that 'We want a society of owners, not proletarians.' With the great migration ongoing, estimates suggest that around 12 million Spaniards (roughly 40 percent of the population at the time) moved house between 1951 and 1975. The Franco regime discouraged renting a 1954 limited rent law enabled the construction of millions of subsidised homes. Then the real construction boom broke out: between 1961 and 1975, four million flats were built, often in the classic Spanish apartment block style. To top it all off, the Banco Hipotecario de España was created to compensate private banks granting mortgages to the working classes flowing into Spanish cities. Spaniards' poor English is partly attributable to Francoist policies Something that many foreigners notice in Spain is the relatively low levels of English, especially compared to other European countries. Franco arguably played a hand in this too and it comes down to films. Another quirk (or annoyance, depending on your opinion) of Spain is that the vast majority of films in both cinemas and on TV are dubbed into Spanish. During the early stages of the Franco dictatorship, it was compulsory for all films to be dubbed into Spanish. The Language Defence Law, introduced in 1941, was used to strengthen Spanish nationalism by promoting Castilian Spanish through a mass cultural mode like cinema. As such, Spaniards didn't and many to this day don't regularly hear English. In Spain just 4 percent of Spaniards who go to the cinema choose to watch the original version with subtitles. Figures from the Federation of Spanish Cinemas (FECE) from 2015 show how out of the roughly 3,500 large screen cinemas in Spain, barely 200 of them showed international films in their original language. Compare this with neighbouring Portugal, a country with one of the highest levels of English on the continent, where the post-WWII Portugal of dictator Salazar went the other way and in order to guarantee what was "authentically Portuguese", a 1948 law banned Portuguese cinema from being dubbed.
Evening Standard
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Evening Standard
The Studio should win all the Emmys – why has no-one in Britain watched it?
While not every episode of The Studio is one-take, each one makes use of very extended takes, which peaks in episode 9, CinemaCon, probably the single funniest episode of any show this decade. It features the gang turning up to the important fan conference to present their slate, only for Remick to hold a party in his suite the night before, and in typical fashion try be cool by laying on 'an old-school Hollywood buffet,' meaning drugs in the form of magic mushroom chocolate bars. The problem being that he misinterpreted the dosage of the mushrooms, and the chocolate is super-strong, which he doesn't realise until Franco and Zoe Kravitz start tripping wildly; but not as wildly as Cranston's Griffin Mill. Cue an all-timer of a sequence in which Mill goes on the rampage around the hotel with the team trying to find where he is before the press get wind of it, and having to 'Weekend at Bernie's' the man out of the situation.
Courier-Mail
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Courier-Mail
Footage surfaces of Dave Franco, Alison Brie's ‘nasty' public act
Don't miss out on the headlines from Celebrity Life. Followed categories will be added to My News. Alison Brie and Dave Franco might be taking togetherness a step too far. Footage of Brie cutting Franco's toenails while sitting on a picnic blanket in Griffith Park in Los Angeles surfaced on social media on Tuesday — and fans had plenty of thoughts. The Community actress was seen discarding her husband's toenails in the grass, as he scrolled through his phone looking completely unbothered, per Page Six. While some were grossed out, others speculated it might just be promotion for their new horror flick, Together, in which they play a co-dependent couple. 'They're both comedians. They tend to do stuff like this, the cameraman is probably even with them,' one Reddit commenter wrote. 'This is probably staged, and if it's not, the person filming is a lot weirder than they are,' another chimed in. 'This got to be for the new movie cuz why else would they be doing this in public?' a third speculated. Franco and Brie at the SAG Awards in 2018. Picture: Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images Meanwhile, others couldn't contain their disgust. 'Yeah that's nasty Alison,' one user reacted via X, while another commented, 'Doing this for a man in private is also wild …' Another user chimed in, 'TMI. Some things don't need to be shared on here man.' Brie, 42, and Franco, 40, have already made waves with the promo for Together, a supernatural horror film they starred in and produced. They've worked together multiple times on films. Picture: Instagram On Monday, Neon Films posted a picture on Instagram of the two intimately kissing in front of a billboard of their characters kissing in the film, encouraging people to take similar photos. 'The perfect couple in 'the perfect date night horror movie,'' the caption reads in part. Brie and Franco have been married since March 2017 and have worked together multiple times. She previously talked about what it was like having her husband direct her sex scenes with Jay Ellis in the movie Somebody I Used to Know. 'I realise that it sounds wild, but we are actors, this is our job,' she told Jezebel. 'It's actually not that weird. And with something like this, because it's our baby that we made together, I think our first priority is always just the movie.' This article originally appeared in Page Six and was reproduced with permission. Originally published as Footage surfaces of Dave Franco, Alison Brie's 'nasty' public act
BBC News
13-07-2025
- Sport
- BBC News
'We're sick to death of these performances' - your views on Fiji defeat
We asked your for your views following Scotland's disappointing defeat to Fiji in what some of you said:David: If this was such an important fixture, why was it arranged when eight first choice Scotland players were on tour with the Lions? It beggars belief that Scotland's chances in the next World Cup could be put at risk in this Awful from Scotland. Poor discipline, poor handling and they looked knackered from the 10 minute mark. Another group of death at the World Cup awaits and Townsend deserves nothing less. No idea why some of the guys who played last week didn't play this week, shocking decision from the This is Groundhog Day with Scotland. One week promising, the next disappointing. Townsend has never achieved consistency with Scotland which has meant no serious challenge for any trophy. I think he has achieved some great results at times but we will have the same conversations about missed opportunities after the 2026 Six Nations that we have done the last two years. We need a change, no guarantees of improvement but we can't keep going on the same mediocre While the result isn't necessarily his fault, the buck must rest with the head coach. Townsend has done a very good job taking Scotland this far, however, it looks as though we are in for another tough World Cup pool and, thus, an early exit. It's time to promote One of the worst performances I've ever seen from the as fans are sick to death with these performances now. If Alex Williamson is seriously considering offering a new deal then his head needs as fans can see Gregor's time is up ,so Alex needs to have the guts to act before it's too late! To say I'm furious after that would be an understatement 😡!
