Tuesday, 20 August 2013

The GQ Punch List: 8 Things You Need to Watch, Hear and Read this Week

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1. Let Josh Gad be your excuse for seeing Jobs. Cuz you'll need a good one. The Ashton Kutcher-starring Steve Jobs biopic hits theaters on Friday. Finally. Josh Gad steals our attention away in Jobs as Steve Wozniak. (He's the same guy just tapped to play comic icon Sam Kinison, NBD.) Back in April, GQ's Freddie Campion spoke to Gad about taking on the Woz—here, more from that conversation.

GQ: How'd you transform into the Woz?
Josh Gad: Without going into too much detail, so I can keep some of the magic alive, the hair and makeup team did a remarkable job of making me look like a young Woz. People know him now, but if you look at some of the early pictures, it's incredible how much hair the man had. He was incredibly blessed. We tried to chart that journey through the '70s and '80s. I was in the makeup and hair trailer for no less than two hours a day, getting my face taped back, and my head crunched up.
GQ: Did you ever meet him?
Josh Gad: No, I felt like that was actually a benefit. My ultimate goal was to tell the most honest story, and honor the director and screenwriters' vision for the story. I feel like if you meet the person you're playing, it can become counterproductive. To be honest, there wasn't anything else I think I needed to know.
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2. Play this at your next party. "Ratchet"—from British indie band Bloc Party's new EP The Nextwave sessions—is dance-y, punk-y, and rap-y all in one pulsating track. Yes. Cop the rest of the album tomorrow.
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sonofagun.jpg 3. Read the least-breezy beach read of the summer. Son of a Gun—a memoir by Justin St. Germain due out tomorrow—is an easy, quick read...but only because it's impossible to put down. St. Germain revisits his mother's murder at the hands of her fifth husband in absorbing detail, returning to his small Arizona hometown, aptly named Tombstone, to better understand his mother, her life choices, and what killed her. Through flashbacks to the murder scene and his troubled childhood, juxtaposed with his life today and the town's history, Son of a Gun is a raw, compelling read that stays with you beyond the last page.



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patiencestone.jpg 4. Hear the silence in The Patience Stone. Golshifteh Farahani has a breakthrough role in The Patience Stone, which opens Wednesday. The Atiq Rahimi-directed film—an adaptation of his best-selling novel—tells the story of a beautiful young woman caring for her much older, coma-ridden husband in war-torn Afghanistan. Unable to move or speak, her husband becomes a "patience stone"— according to Persian mythology, a stone that absorbs the pain of those who confess to it—freeing her to speak aloud the thoughts, desires, and secrets that have quietly plagued her. We rang up Farahani in Jordan, on the set of the Jon Stewart-directed Rosewater, to talk about her character and dealing with the silence.
GQ: What struck you most about the character?
Golshifteh Farahani: All the contradictions she had—this grey, it's rare to find that. She's not black, she's not white; she's grey, really. She's a combination of contrasts and contradictions, and sometimes she's mean, sometimes she's a mother...she has many, many, many characters.
GQ: You spend much of the film alone onscreen, talking to yourself—was that intimidating?
Golshifteh Farahani: She's talking to herself, she's talking to the universe, she's talking to her husband. It's not a monologue; it's a dialogue with the world. It's a dialogue that she just has inside with the universe. And also, with the camera. So it's with the audience, this conversation, this dialogue. I had to learn like 13-14 pages of monologue for every night. And there is no ping-pong, it's just a ping-pong with yourself, with the wall, with the camera. But it helped me a lot. This pressure that was put on my shoulders, that Atiq wanted to absolutely film everything, helped me to go deeper and deeper in the character. Understand her more.
GQ: Did you ever get used to the silence?
Golshifteh Farahani: After a while I wasn't even thinking about it because I was so captured by that moment and by the pain of this woman. I was just in my own world. It wouldn't matter. He became like a patience stone. Became something I was just using to break free.
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ownersmanual.jpg 5. Read the manual first. Or not. It's the question that's plagued man since the beginning of time. (Or at least since you broke the alarm clock last week and can't figure out how to reset that damn snooze.) To use, or not to use the owner's manual? AMC tries to answer with its new reality series, Owner's Manual, premiering Thursday. Hosts Marcus Hunt (pro-read the manual) and Ed Sanders (pro-do it your damn self) attempt to prove their approach is best through the different challenges each episode. We had them argue their way through three everyday situations to convince us if we should throw away the manual or swear by it.
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chloe-grace-moretz-christopher-mintz-plasse-gq-magazine-comedy-issue-june-2013-03.jpg 6. See McLovin wear bondage gear in Kick-Ass 2. The sequel to the don't-actually-try-this-at-home "super hero" flick Kick-Ass hits theaters Friday and once again stars Chloë Grace Moretz as Hit-Girl and Christopher Mintz-Plasse as the artist formerly known as Red Mist. GQ senior editor Jon Wilde spoke to the real-life BFFs for our Comedy Issue in June—here's more from his chat with the duo.
GQ: From the looks of Kick-Ass 2 trailers SaveFrom.net, they've amped up the violence ten-fold. Chris, you're now the Mother Fucker?
Mintz-Plasse: That's very true. There's a part at the beginning of the movie where I want to be Red Mist, but my mother threw away my costume and I'm kind of at a loss. And I come across a bondage outfit and turn that into the Mother Fucker. And it gets pretty evil and violent.
GQ: Fighter training—fun, or just a crazy ass workout?
Chloë Grace Moretz: To be honest, the process for the second movie was a lot easier for me, because from the first film I had already picked up a lot of training. And also, I was an eleven-year-old. So they had to really be easy with me. But now being 16 years old, I had worked out a little bit, I keep in shape, right? And I knew how the suit would feel. So I could go in and say, "Look, I don't think I'll be able to do this kick in the suit. I can do it in spandex, but not in the suit of leather."
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7. Don't call it a comeback. She looks healthy. She was funny as the guest host on Chelsea Lately. And she was the only person actually acting in the WTF-did-I-just-watch movie, The Canyons. Now, Oprah SaveFrom.net. The next stop on the Lindsay Lohan Comeback Tour 2013 is Oprah's Next Chapter on OWN. (The same network, which will host Lohan's eight episode docu-series next year. Related: NEED to figure out what channel OWN is on.) Sunday's episode is sure to be filled with raspy-voiced confessions, uncomfortable questions, and Oprah doing that Oprah thing where she makes her guest cry while having impossibly bouncy curls. It's also on at the same time as Breaking Bad, which means you probably won't watch it. But that's what DVRs, GIFs and Monday are for. Because we all love a good comeback. And we still love Mean Girls.
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8. Watch Duck Dynasty. Seriously. Lang Whitaker explains why:
The last thing I needed was another TV show to watch. Once the NBA season ended, I was looking forward to wading through my overflowing DVR, my husky Netflex queue and my stout Amazon Prime watch list, not to mention trying to squeeze in a couple of Atlanta Braves games here and there. And then, out of nowhere, I was welcomed into the Robertson family, which threw a duck-shaped wrench into my summer viewing plans

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