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The 1980s were a golden age of merchandising. Giants such as Hasbro and Bandai rolled a juggernaut of plastic toys into the market and cleverly backed them with television shows that could sell the toys without being commercials. Kids watched the shows and then clamored for Transformers, for Strawberry Shortcake
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There will come a time in the life of every hip-hop fan when he or she will be called upon to defend the art form. We are told that rapping is not really an art, that it is a bastardized form of gutter poetry or that it is intolerable for
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I dress up, usually in some subtle combination of campaign-trail colors. I pick a blue-and-white dress and wear red jewelry. I pick a red dress with a blue belt. I am a dork all the way; I update Facebook to gloat about voting, and I Instagram my sticker on the way out.
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Alannah was going to be late. Traffic was backed up way beyond the mouth of the tunnel, and she had left the house with no time to spare. It was days like this that she hated living on an island. It’s barely an island. A stone’s throw from Oakland, is
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“The Tempest” is Shakespeare’s last play, and it’s his strangest. It dives headfirst into the stormy waters of magic, colonialism, the age of exploration and the dehumanization of enslaved people. Nancy Carlin’s production of this fascinating work, presented by the African-American Shakespeare Company in San Francisco, is fearless. It confronts
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It doesn’t try to reinvent the genre — writer-director Justin Simien admits the necessity of understanding “National Lampoon’s Animal House” and “Higher Learning” in his undertaking. It doesn’t try to speak to the ubiquitous college experience. Instead, it presents a very particular slice of life that only happens at a
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Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from “Fifty Years of Free Speech” an original book by The Daily Californian reexamining the movement through its archives from 1964. The book is available here. There is an interpretation of quantum mechanics that holds that there are many parallel universes in which all possibilities
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It is unwise to read too much into celebrity tweets. They’re often generated by a personal assistant, by an intern or by contractual obligation. Nevertheless, Robert Downey Jr.’s tweets about his latest film “The Judge” just throb with authentic need: “Pls help prove films about ppl can do business,” from
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As animated films become more slick and commercial-looking — as CGI takes over not only backgrounds and motion but also character construction and whole projects — stop-motion only gets more charming and valuable. Richly textured, with a distinctly organic feel and the unmistakable stamp of handmade craft, the “The Boxtrolls”
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Imagine the worst week of your life; Judd Altman is having that week. In the first five minutes of “This Is Where I Leave You,” his marriage is destroyed, his career falls apart, and his father dies. What follows does not in any way decrease his misery or constitute closure.
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