Culture Pop

Perez Hilton reported yesterday that Forbes magazine has compiled a list of actors with the most male leads in films over the last ten years, and Irish-American Seth Rogen came out on top with 10 leading roles in movies that earned a cushy $892 million total. The Irish were well-represented on the rest of the list as well, on which Matt Damon, Morgan Freeman, Will Ferrell, and Robert Downey Jr. also took spots.

Seth Rogen snuck into the hearts of American moviegoers with his endearing stoner aesthetic in movies like Knocked Up and Superbad, but he's breaking out of his chubby shell as superhero The Green Hornet in the film directed by Michel Gondry, now in post-production. I'll go see it, but I'm nowhere near as excited for that on the comic-book-turned-movie spectrum as I am about Kenneth Branagh's Thor, coming out in 2011 and starring dreamboat Chris Hemsworth.

Playwright Martin McDonagh is well known for going more than a little off the rails. When I first saw his work onstage, in The Lieutenant of Inishmore, I was alternately shocked, terrified, and absolutely gleeful with laughter.

His recent work, A Behanding in Spokane, now on Broadway starring Christopher Walken, prompts many of the same reactions. It's a claustrophobic play taking place in a dingy hotel room, with four characters: Walken as Carmichael, an eccentric if not certifiable and imposing character 47 years into a search for his amputated hand, Sam Rockwell as Mervyn, the hotel clerk, Zoe Kazan as "the girl", Marilyn, and Anthony Mackie as "the black guy", Toby.

I went to see The Runaways last night, filled with excitement and hope that it would be all I wanted it to be: an aesthetically delicious, fully satisfying grrl power rock epic. My enthusiasm was dampened only a little bit by the Twilight preview that inevitably came on before, featuring a deadpan Kristen Stewart looking mildly nauseous but not very much in love with either Team Edward or Team Jacob. I started to feel hesitant, like maybe I'd hyped myself for The Runaways too heavily -- could a cool haircut and a leather jacket really turn the limp 'heroine' Bella Swann into a convincing portrait of Joan Jett, one of our quintessential rock goddesses?

From the first moment of Stewart's appearance onscreen, I realized I needn't have worried. What comes across in the flat franchise of Stephanie Meyer's Twilight as passive, angsty boredom translates in writer-director Floria Sigismondi's script as genuine, tough, fiery, boyish, teenage rock spirit. In the first few of her opening scenes, Stewart as Jett portrays a shameless determination to upend the conventions of popular music, personified by a goofy if well-meaning guitar teacher who tells her, bluntly and naively, that "girls don't play electric guitars."