Posts by Sean Fennessey
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MLB 26-Day Warning: Zack Wheeler, the Son of Odin, and Wily Old Sandy Alderson Are Slowly Saving the Mets
With Matt Harvey on the shelf and Bartolo Colon seemingly as wide as he is tall, life in Flushing may seem bleak and grey. But take heart, New York Mets fans: A New Generation K could be just 391 days away.
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It Might Blow Up, and It Will Go Pop
Rap is more susceptible to the influence of other genres — country, dance, pop, rock — than ever before. Is that a bad thing?
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‘Downhill Racer’ and the Baffling Absentee Legacy of Winter Olympics Movies
Joe Jay Jalbert, a 19-year-old former member of the U.S. National Ski Team, had never held a camera before, never acted, and knew next to nothing about the film industry. But he had the skiing expertise, a stuntman’s fearlessness, and the youthful foolishness to be the crash test dummy on the set of the one truly great movie set against the Winter Olympics.
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My End of Villainy: Sharlto Copley in Oldboy and Elysium
Now more than ever, pop culture is about the small stuff — an obscure TV show, a few notes in a pop song, a tweet. To celebrate a year of micro moments, every day a new Grantland writer will highlight one specific thing — a Big Little Thing — that we won’t soon forget. I […]
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Christian Bale and the Age of the Invisible Movie Star
“What do you hope to do next?” “I don’t know. I want to do another film. Definitely.” What a nice young man. That is a 13-year-old Christian Bale talking with Gene Shalit in 1987, carving a career path with good cheer. In his first-ever television interview, he sat before the Muppet-haired maestro of movie puns […]
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How’s Victor Oladipo Doing So Far?
This is how he’s doing. Victor Oladipo is not the most efficient rookie in his class. He is not the most efficient 2-guard in the NBA. He is not even the most efficient 2-guard on his own team. But that isn’t the point. The Orlando Magic have set a course to something worse than mediocrity, […]
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The Boys and Men in Drake’s Life Collide in the ‘Worst Behavior’ Video
Drake’s father is Dennis Graham, a journeyman Memphis drummer known for his work with Jerry Lee Lewis. His adoptive uncle is Teenie Hodges, the legendarily silky Memphis rhythm guitarist. His other adoptive uncle was the late Willie Mitchell, the paterfamilias of Hi Records, the Memphis label that released knuckle-cracking love songs by Al Green, Syl […]
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The Best Horror Movie of the Year Is an Insane, Micro-Budgeted 29-Minute Story About an Indonesian Cult
These are boom times for horror. An unquestioned cavalcade of money and interest and exaltation (and screaming) are in play. In the history of the genre, which spans as far back as a 1910 adaptation of Frankenstein, eight of the 35 highest-grossing horror movies have been released in the last 24 months. These movies include […]
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Ridley Scott’s Trojan Horse Career
Jesus Christ was an alien. That may not necessarily be the first thing that comes to mind after you’ve seen Prometheus, director Ridley Scott’s 2012 prequel to his first hit, 1979’s Alien. But these are the kind of insane, inspired, somehow totally plausible extrapolations viewers draw from Scott’s movies. Scott doesn’t exactly lie as a […]
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Unpopular Opinion Alert: Jared Leto Is Cool
“He’s so cool!” she yelped. “He’s so cool, he’s so cool, he’s sooooo coooool.” The girl was no older than 17, wearing a zebra-stripe skirt, a black T-shirt covered in daisy decals, and her hair in a severe swoop. She was vibrating with excitement. Her voice rose above the crowd in our section, somewhere between […]
