At a time when so many incredible indie films are being made, Blindspotting sits well amongst the list as one of the must-sees. It’s a feature film that channels the talent of spoken word artists, Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal, into an urgent, compelling fresh take on contemporary America. On screen, as in real life, the actors are friends, co-workers, and co-writers — in the film their co-writing takes place more spontaneously, in between deliveries in their company truck, rather than in room with pen and paper (or keys and a laptop). Diggs, a Tony-winning Hamilton alum, plays Collin, who’s spent a year in prison and has three days left of his…
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Trevor Noah’s Born A Crime
The moment I finished reading the last line of the final chapter in Trevor Noah’s book, Born a Crime, it felt like I was left sitting in a cinema after a really good film has played. You know those moments, when the credits are rolling, the lights are slowly coming back up, people are scurrying out to leave, but you can’t move just yet because you’re still thinking about everything you just saw. Only in this case, it’s what was just read. And instead of a cinema, I was in an Upper East Side coffee shop, Marvin Gaye’s Sexual Healing coming back into ear-shot over the speakers, a woman across from me looking at me with that mix…
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Trevor Noah, Ready to Skydive into The Daily Show
Today is the day. The Daily Show with Trevor Noah begins its first new chapter under the South African comedian, who is about to sit in a chair occupied for 16 years by a man many Americans came to love and cherish as a custodian of critical thinking and on-the-mark jokes. It was only December last year when Trevor Noah joined The Daily Show, sending a wave of positive news through a weary South Africa, drained from the drawn-out coverage of the Oscar Pistorius trial. Still a few months into the joy of that good news, the following February, Jon Stewart, after making his first feature film Rosewater, announced he’d be leaving the…
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The Trevor Noah Tweets
Entertainment news, in the US particularly, tries too hard to be entertaining. It almost entirely relies on gossip and name-dragging and, now with useful technology at our fingertips, screen-grabs of celebrities’ faces so we can read made-up stories about things they surely were thinking while attending an awards ceremony. It would be funny if it wasn’t what passed for actual news. More and more it seems, vindictiveness is playing into this too. With the Internet as a tool, tweets or mistakes or gushes are blown up and out of proportion to levels meant to elicit some kind of rage or outrage or scandalous response. Never mind that it’s a thing of the…
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The Daily Show with Trevor Noah
Two years ago, I jumped into a cab with Trevor Noah, on a hot and oh-so-sweaty NYC night, to grab a quick interview with him as he dashed from one show at the Culture Project to another at the Comedy Cellar. It was but one of the adventures I’ve covered of his, as he’s made his way through stand-up shows, late-night TV appearances on Leno and Letterman and then becoming a contributor to The Daily Show. Today, the next adventure has been announced. On Friday, news came that Trevor Noah had made a shortlist of possible candidates to take over from Jon Stewart when he leaves Comedy Central’s The Daily Show. Jon, who has been…
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