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Friday, 31 March 2017
These Dogs Had An Engagement Photo Shoot, And It's Ridiculously Cute
And you can’t get a text back.
Sebastian, a French bulldog, and Luna, a Pomeranian, are the definition of puppy love.
The dogs, who are the stars of the popular Instagram account of Sebastian Loves Luna, have been "engaged" since June 2016.
And last weekend, Sebastian and Luna had a truly Pinterest-worthy engagement shoot amidst the cherry blossoms in Washington, DC.
It's 2017! Texting isn't that hard, people.
They frolicked...
They wore some adorable outfits...
via Buzzfeed/Animals
"Miss Saigon" And Its Star Are Trying To Get Representation Right
Eva Noblezada as Kim in the London production of Miss Saigon.
Matthew Murphy
When Miss Saigon opened on Broadway in 1991 amid protests against its yellowface casting and characterization of Vietnamese people, Eva Noblezada wasn’t born yet. The star of the Miss Saigon revival, which opened March 23 at the Broadway Theatre, brings a fresh perspective to a show with a complicated history — even as Miss Saigon itself continues to evolve past its contentious beginnings.
The controversy over Miss Saigon — which began with the casting of Jonathan Pryce, a white actor, as the French-Vietnamese engineer, in 1989 — has never really gone away: Protests over the show have followed it throughout various productions over the past 28 years. But the noise has certainly lessened, in part because the show has made significant efforts to correct past mistakes. Following the uproar surrounding Pryce's casting and the prosthetics and makeup he wore, the part has been played exclusively by actors of Asian descent. (In the current Broadway revival, Filipino actor Jon Jon Briones reprises his role from the London production.) The lyrics, too, have been revised, in an effort to add complexity to the show’s portrayal of Vietnam and its people.
For 21-year-old Noblezada, Miss Saigon’s controversial past does not factor into her performance. She deliberately approached the show with a certain remove: When she first took on the role in London in 2014, her research focused on Vietnam and the Vietnam War and not on Miss Saigon itself. “I didn’t really do any research on the show before we started,” she told BuzzFeed News. “I’m a person who needs a blank page. I needed to start from scratch and get my own inspiration.”
Even the plot and the score of Miss Saigon were largely new to Noblezada before she was cast as Kim, the innocent but headstrong young woman who gets her heart trampled over the course of nearly three hours. Based on the Puccini opera Madame Butterfly, the show depicts the ill-fated romance between Kim and Chris, an American GI stationed in Saigon during the Vietnam War. Miss Saigon is remembered for its soaring ballads — Claude-Michel Schönberg wrote the music, with lyrics by Alain Boublil and Richard Maltby Jr. — and its grandeur, including a memorable Act 2 cameo by a helicopter.
Noblezada and her costar, Alistair Brammer, as Chris.
Matthew Murphy
That Noblezada had only a passing knowledge of Miss Saigon prior to starring in it isn’t all that surprising when you consider her story: She was 17 when she was discovered as a high school student at the National High School Musical Theatre Awards, better known as the Jimmy Awards, in New York City. Though Noblezada didn’t win, she caught the attention of casting agent Tara Rubin, who encouraged her to audition for an upcoming production of Miss Saigon.
Being plucked off the stage during a high school competition is the kind of fantasy scenario that most young theater aspirers can only dream of. Noblezada could barely process it. “I think it didn’t hit me until I got home that, OK, that happened, and now I’m actually doing an audition for Miss Saigon,” she said. “It happened so quickly.”
After a successful audition and a couple of callbacks, Noblezada suddenly had an offer to play Kim in the London revival of Miss Saigon. She’d have to leave home in North Carolina for the first time and move to another country, making a quick transition from high school productions to a leading role on the prestigious West End. The prospect was equal parts thrilling and daunting — but Noblezada never considered saying no. “I was wanting to move out and do my own thing when I was 15,” she admitted.
Suddenly immersed in the world of professional theater, Noblezada found that in some ways, her youth worked to her advantage. Kim is 17 when Miss Saigon begins, orphaned and forced to work as a bargirl in a seedy bar and brothel to survive. Noblezada acknowledged that she drew on her own experience as a newcomer to portray Kim’s wide-eyed innocence.
She was not naive, a point she stresses to those who would conflate her with Kim, but her “blank page” approach to the show gave her a chance to arrive at Miss Saigon with a new, more modern perspective. The musical was also doing some necessary growth of its own, as it struggled to shake off its troubling past and establish itself as a show that could still be moving and relevant to a new, more socially conscious generation.
The differences between this production of Miss Saigon and its previous incarnations are subtle, but the cumulative effect is a show that feels more respectful of the historical truth that it’s mining for a fictional love story. While critics may continue to deride the musical for a “white savior narrative” — an argument with merit — the new lyrics deepen the characterizations of Kim and the other Vietnamese characters, like the world-weary prostitute Gigi (Rachelle Ann Go). Work is still being done in moving the production from London to New York: There’s a moment in Act 1 when Kim and Chris have an impromptu wedding ceremony complete with traditional Vietnamese chanting. Prior to the Broadway revival, the words had been gibberish. Now the lyrics are, finally, in Vietnamese.
And then there’s the commitment to casting only actors of Asian descent in Asian roles, a seemingly obvious choice that nevertheless continues to plague theatrical productions across the world — note the cast lists for countless regional productions of The King and I and The Mikado. For Noblezada, whose father is Filipino and whose mother is Mexican-American, meeting the London cast of Miss Saigon for the first time was breathtaking in large part because of the collective diversity of the room. “At my school it was like me and one other Asian person,” she said. “But now it’s like you’re putting this show on together and you have the opportunity to stand together and put on this masterpiece. It was like meeting a new family that I felt like I knew already.”
Noblezada in a scene depicting the fall of Saigon.
Michael Le Poer Trench and Matthew Murphy
On Broadway, opportunities for Asian-American performers are still limited. According to the most recent report from the Asian American Performers Action Coalition (AAPAC), Asian-Americans made up only 4% of performers on Broadway and in New York City nonprofit theaters from 2006 to 2015. But during the same period, there have been some notable casting coups for Asian-American actors, including Ali Ewoldt as Christine in The Phantom of the Opera and Phillipa Soo as the titular character in the new Broadway musical Amélie. While these roles do little to shift statistics, they are high-profile opportunities for audiences (and producers) to see Asian-American actors in roles that were not written as specifically Asian or Asian-American.
Noblezada is passionate about representation, but she also has the perspective of a new generation for which many of these issues are already second nature. The practice of increasing visibility for performers of color by casting them in roles that aren’t necessarily nonwhite is something she has never really questioned. While Asian-American students were underrepresented at her high school, there were a large number of black students. When it came to school productions, “We didn’t give two craps about race,” she said, referring to her school's practice of casting actors of color in any role. “It was so unimportant in terms of casting.”
Before she took on the role of Kim, Noblezada had a brief stint in Les Misérables to help her get used to a professional production. Again, she viewed her ethnicity as irrelevant to her casting. “I’m a Mexicasian who played Éponine,” she said. “Does that make sense to you? No, but I did it, and it was fun, and I still told the story.”
This matter-of-fact mindset is a major contrast to the anxiety and turmoil surrounding shows like Miss Saigon, which have struggled to correct past wrongs and keep up with an ever-changing world. Noblezada is eager to not let herself be defined by her age, but if there’s one area in which her youth is a clear advantage, it’s in the "why not" perspective she brings to the conversation of casting diversely. She’s not single-handedly modernizing Miss Saigon, but she’s well aware of what it means for people to see actors who look like them onstage.
Now, as more shows evolve and as others continue to broaden their casting, Noblezada finds herself in the position of being a role model to the next generation of performers, particularly actors of color. “I’m surprised, but I’m taking it. I’m grabbing it,” she said. “I’m saying, 'Let’s do it together.'”
via BuzzFeed/Travel
Stop What You're Doing And Watch These Cats Ringing A Bell For Food
More food plz.
Did you watch it? Did you SEE the beauty in their impatient little paws?
They push the button, they get food.
It is a simple video, yes. But they say simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Who are "they"? They're cats.
via Buzzfeed/Animals
Thursday, 30 March 2017
The Terrible Hollowness of "Ghost in the Shell"
Scarlett Johansson as the Major in Ghost in the Shell.
Paramount Pictures
There’s a wordless sequence in the middle of Mamoru Oshii’s animated 1995 Ghost in the Shell in which the movie’s main character travels through the city and glimpses her own face, twice, in the crowd. The first time, it’s a doppelgänger whom she makes eye contact with through a window, sitting in a café. The second is a dummy in a shop display, staring blankly outward.
It’s not just eerie symbolism — Major Motoko Kusanagi is literally seeing herself. She’s a cyborg with a state-of-the-art body and, these mirror images imply, an off-the-shelf face common enough that it gets recycled on mannequins and makes it possible to run into twinsies on the street, the high-tech equivalent of spotting someone wearing the same dress you are. She's designed to be formidable and attractive, but also to blend in.
All of which lends an especially piquant irony to the casting of Scarlett Johansson in the role in Rupert Sanders’ splendid-looking but otherwise dreadful new live-action adaptation of the Masamune Shirow manga saga. Johansson’s face is currently one of the most famous in the world, and while the movie occasionally deconstructs it and strips its panels off to expose the mechanical hardware underneath, it also takes care to have others praise its beauty.
Pilou Asbaek as Batou in Ghost in the Shell.
Paramount Pictures
As the Major, who goes by Mira Killian in the latest version, Johansson is periodically reminded of how exceptional she is — not just in how she looks, but in her very being. In this new Ghost in the Shell, the Major is the first of her kind in an already robotically enhanced world, the first fully successful “cerebral salvage." Her human brain was transplanted into a prosthetic body after what, she was told, was a terrible accident that would have killed her. “Try to understand your importance,” pleads Dr. Ouelet (Juliette Binoche), the scientist in charge of the program that birthed Mira. “You’re what everyone will become one day.”
Which is to say, white. Or such is the unstated argument Ghost in the Shell makes in its casting choices.
The film takes place in a dystopian future in a city in which the majority of the population appears to be Asian, but the majority of the important characters are not. Johansson’s casting in a Japanese property that still, while not explicitly stated, seems to be set in Japan caused a righteous uproar when it was announced, in what appeared to be yet another case of a non-Asian actor taking a part originally intended for an Asian.
But in watching the film, which was written by Jamie Moss and William Wheeler (who wrote the far more considerate Queen of Katwe), what becomes evident is that Johansson’s presence is not the usual act of erasure, but that whitewashing is actually and obliviously built into the revamped narrative.
Juliette Binoche as Dr. Ouelet and Johansson as the Major.
Paramount Pictures
The Major has the brain and background of a Japanese woman plunked into a robot body that could have looked like anything — but rather than resembling the majority of the population nearby, it was constructed to look like Johansson. The film offers up what is essentially a reverse Get Out, without the awareness or the satire. In Ghost in the Shell, white characters — led by Cutter (Peter Ferdinando), the sinister head of the government-owned Hanka Corporation leading the cybernetics charge — steal the brain of a person of color rather than the body.
And the movie similarly slips on the idea of Japaneseness like a purloined garment. Its futuristic city is a gorgeously conceived (and let’s be clear — this thing looks great, the screen crowded with hallucinatory detail) if not convincingly functional. It's a place in which holographic ads are projected skyscraper-sizes over streets filled with noodle stands, sex workers, and luxurious restaurants at which grandees sit around low tables being waited on by robo-geishas. Those men wear kimono-inspired suits, but the humans in them, at least the ones who matter, tend to be white.
The signage is Japanese, and Japanese is what legendary filmmaker and actor Takeshi Kitano speaks as Aramaki, the head of Section 9, the shadowy anti-terrorist agency at which the Major works. She and her multi-ethnic colleagues — her trusted partner Batou (Pilou Asbæk, the definite MVP); the less-developed Togusa (Chin Han), Ishikawa (Lasarus Ratuere), and Ladriya (Danusia Samal); and the blink-and-you’ll-miss-’em Saito (Yutaka Izumihara) and Borma (Tawanda Manyimo) — understand Aramaki perfectly, and vice versa, but they default to English the same way that the Major is defaulted to white, as if it were clearly the premium option.
Takeshi Kitano as Aramaki.
Paramount Pictures
Anime and manga really shouldn’t be any less adaptable than any of the other intellectual property getting sucked into Hollywood’s forever starving maw, though like all imported material, it poses more complicated questions about cultural specificity and translation. But what’s so aggravating about Sanders’ Ghost in the Shell is that it borrows wholesale visuals — the high-rise jump, the garbage truck, the spider tank — from Oshii’s movie and from the Stand Alone Complex TV series, while substituting in a simplified story that feels like a blunted, offensive Robocop knockoff.
And for all the insistence on the part of the filmmakers over Johansson as the only conceivable choice to star in the film, she looks a little lost in the role, never coming across like she has a good grasp of the character she’s playing. Her Major opts for expressionless stares and quizzical head tilts borrowed from more memorable Johansson turns in Under the Skin and Lucy — she may have a human brain, but the Major doesn’t feel nearly as alive as the AI Johansson voiced in Her. She doesn’t feel nearly as alive as the Major has in animated form in Oshii’s venerable, moody movie and Kenji Kamiyama’s lighter-toned TV series.
Paramount Pictures
The new Ghost in the Shell turns the character from a complicated and highly experienced one hovering between humanity and whatever comes next to one whose agency is largely denied — that is, until information from Kuze (Michael Pitt), the terrorist the Major's department has been chasing, leads her down a rabbit hole of self-discovery.
Gone are the dense political machinations and much of the melancholy philosophizing of the original, and in its place is a hollow but ringingly American affirmation of individuality as the most human of qualities. Which, somehow even more than the casting problems, is what’s truly depressing about the film — not just that Sanders and company couldn’t figure out how to adapt the source material, but that they never understood it in the first place.
via BuzzFeed/Travel
Wendy's Logo Has A Secret Message And I'll Never Look At Anything The Same
Who knew?
You know Wendy.
Wendy's
Not this Wendy.
Fox
The Wendy of the Wendy's fast food chain.
Well, turns out Wendy has a secret message in her collar.
NBC
via BuzzFeed/Food
Here's What Happened When We Tried Starbucks' New "Cure For The Common Cold"
The “Medicine Ball” is basically a cough drop in tea form.
Last fall, a new drink off the Starbucks secret menu — the Medicine Ball — gained buzz for its ~restorative cold-fighting powers~ and delicious sweet, minty taste.
The drink got so popular, in fact, that Starbucks recently added it to its official menu.
femail / Via instagram.com
The beverage, also known as the Cold Buster, is made of equal parts steamed lemonade and water + one bag of Jade Citrus Mint Tea + one bag of Peach Tranquility + a packet of honey + an optional pump of mint syrup.
hanseldoan / Via instagram.com
It sounds pretty delicious, but we wanted to know: Does it ACTUALLY have throat-soothing abilities? We ventured to our nearest Starbucks location to find out.
Harpo Studios
via BuzzFeed/Food
The Cast Of "Duck Dynasty" In Their First Season Vs. Now
Quack quack.
Willie Robertson then:
In 2012.
Erika Goldring / Getty Images
Willie Robertson now:
In 2017.
Paul Morigi / Getty Images
Korie Robertson then:
In 2013.
Matthew Stockman / Getty Images
Korie Robertson now:
In 2017.
Paul Morigi / Getty Images
via BuzzFeed/Travel
10 Cats Trying To Make Biscuits Out Of Things That Aren't Dough
That is not dough.
Cat.
That is not how you make dough.
That is a blanket.
To start, you need flour and water.
via Buzzfeed/Animals
Here's What Dessert Looks Like In 36 Countries Around The World
Yup, you picked a bad week to try cutting out sugar. H/T Quora
Charlotte Gomez / BuzzFeed
In Venezuela, people nosh on a flan-like treat called quesillo.
It's made with condensed milk, sugar, eggs, and rum, so you know it's gonna taste good. Make it with this recipe.
@laporchettapanini / Via instagram.com
Argentineans love the balcarce cake, named for the city in which it was invented.
Here's a recipe (in Spanish!) for the sweet spongecake.
@jxxcce / Via instagram.com
via BuzzFeed/Food
The Definitive Ranking Of The Best '90s Comedies
According to BuzzFeed readers like YOU!
Half Baked
Why it's timeless: A stoner movie written by Dave Chapelle? God bless the '90s.
Memorable line: "Marijuana is not a drug. I used to suck dick for coke. Now that's an addiction. You ever suck some dick for marijuana?"
Universal Pictures
What About Bob?
Why it's timeless: Nothing better than a neurotic Bill Murray.
Memorable line: "So, what you're saying is that even though you are an almost-paralyzed, multiphobic personality who is in a constant state of panic, your wife did not leave you, you left her because she ... liked Neil Diamond?"
Buena Vista Pictures
The Waterboy
Why it's timeless: It's an underdog story for the ages.
Memorable line: "Bobby, they ever catch that gorilla that busted outta the zoo and punched you in the eye?"
"No Mama, the search continues."
Buena Vista Pictures
via BuzzFeed/Travel
16 Deeply Romantic, Beautiful, And Sexy Places To Stay In Scotland
This enchanting wee boltholes are perfect for a honeymoon, or an intimate weekend away for two *wink wink*.
via BuzzFeed/Travel
21 Reasons Why Cows Are Basically Just Really Big Dogs
Hear me out.
Cows love being pet.
reddit.com / Via i.imgur.com
Cows love giving kisses on the face.
reddit.com / Via i.imgur.com
Cows can learn tricks!
Cows love lounging around with their best bud.
i.imgur.com / Via reddit.com
via Buzzfeed/Animals
Wednesday, 29 March 2017
Which Type Of Hot Sauce Would You Eat With This Food?
It’s gettin’ hot in here.
Here are the rules: you can't opt-out—you have to pick which hot sauce goes best with each food.
via BuzzFeed/Food
Whoa, Spiders Could Eat Everyone In A Year If They Wanted To, WTF
Itsy-bitsy spider, GTFO
Gather round, gather round, let's talk about SPIDERS.
Admit it, you're feeling creepy crawly right now.
You might kinda hate 'em but not really know why.
Which is why they are sometimes depicted with charming accoutrements like old-timey top hats.
Larryrains / Getty Images
WELP. It turns out they are creepier than you could even imagine. THEY COULD EAT EVERY HUMAN ON THE PLANET."
It turns out some scientists — as depicted by this stock photo "mad scientist" — figured out that spiders kill and eat between "400 and 800 tons of prey every year."
That's a lot of prey! In fact, scientists Martin Nyffeler and Klaus Birkhofer found that spiders eat as much or more meat than humans.
Bluberries / Getty Images
via Buzzfeed/Animals
20 Puppies That Are So Perfect, They'll Fix All Your Problems
There is no pain a puppy can’t cure.
This Labrador is proof that dogs are 100% better than people.
Perritos haciendo cosas / Via Facebook: pg
They dream bigger.
Perritos haciendo cosas / Via Facebook: pg
They have an impeccable sense of style.
Perritos haciendo cosas / Via Facebook: pg
And they are always ready for a hug.
Perritos haciendo cosas / Via Facebook: pg
via Buzzfeed/Animals
