Seth Rogen tops Forbes list

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.

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Walken in Martin McDonagh's A Behanding in Spokane

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.

Rockwell's Mervyn was thoroughly enjoyable, and McDonagh gives him a backstory rich in little-boy dreams crushed and the perverse desires of a Kevin Smith character, driven by monotony into wishing for disaster. He and Walken share definite chemistry.

Marilyn and especially Toby, however, provide the punching bags for the elements of the play that have been critiqued seriously and fairly in reviews. Both Carmichael and Mervyn are unapologetically racist characters, and the n-word is dropped consistently throughout their dialogue (in fact, throughout all the characters' dialogue), often in one-liners that prompt absolute hilarity in the audience. Marilyn is played as over-the-top as possible, alternately flirtatious, manipulative, apologetic and plain stupid, but never is her character as irredeemable as Toby's, who is sometimes sympathetic and often pitiable but never reaches close to three dimensions, given instead to angry outburts or fits of blubbering and begging. The play's overt racism and homophobia were reminiscent in tone of Quentin Tarantino movies, when often epithets are delivered as harshly as a slap in the face, unclear what purpose is served or goal is intended besides furthering the comedy or simply acknowledging the reality of prejudice. Whether this is a worthy aim depends on your beliefs about theatre, audience, art and realpolitik.

What McDonagh does best is plot and dialogue pushed to the point of ridiculous, lines delivered that are so beyond the pale in dark humor they are priceless. There seems to be no better fit for this kind of script than Christopher Walken, an actor who has to my generation become legendary for his delivery, so unique it demands to be impersonated. Carmichael is not different from the Christopher Walkens we've seen before in either his humor, his speech patterns or his weirdness: Vincenzo in Tarantino's True Romance, Senator Cleary in Wedding Crashers, the gardener who is afraid of plants on SNL. For some, the rush of seeing Walken in his element, three rows from the stage, might not have been enough to redeem the play's flaws. But they would have missed a seriously fantastic theatre experience.

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The legacy of Phoebe Prince: bullying and blame in cyberspace and the school system

Media and news outlets have been abuzz since January 14 about 15-year-old Irish Phoebe Prince from a small town in Co.Clare, Ireland, a student of South Hadley High School in Massachusetts, who hanged herself in a stairwell after enduring approximately three months of relentless verbal and physical harassment by her new classmates, nine of whom faced a range of felony charges after Phoebe's suicide including, in the case of Sean Mulveyhill, statuatory rape.

After briefly dating 17-year-old Sean Mulveyhill, Phoebe was met with a campaign of abuse by Mulveyhill's ex-girlfriend 17-year-old Kayla Narey and her friends.

The New York Daily News reported that "students said Phoebe was called "Irish slut" and "whore" on Twitter, Craigslist, Facebook and Formspring. Her books were routinely knocked out of her hands, items were flung at her, her face was scribbled out of photographs on the school walls, and threatening text messages were sent to her cell phone."

This continued until January 14, when Phoebe went home and killed herself, to be found by her younger sister.

Some are blaming school officials, who several students, parents and community members say were aware of the extent of the bullying and turned a blind eye, exercising a kids-will-be-kids mentality and underplaying the severity of the consequences.

I can't help but be reminded of one of the most powerful lines in the 1999 film The Virgin Suicides: after the young Cecilia's first suicide attempt, a patronizing doctor says to her, 'What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets.' Cecilia deadpans, 'Obviously, Doctor, you've never been a thirteen-year-old girl."

There are a lot of issues boiling under the surface here: xenophobia, teenage sexual agency, the responsibility of authority figures to negotiate the complex world of high school social interactions and know when to step in with force.

Matters are complicated by the fact that some of the most damaging actions of the teenagers who endeavored to make Phoebe's life unbearable happened outside of the classroom, as the bullies utilized the Internet, Facebook, Twitter and texting to permeate Phoebe's consciousness with hate speech: chillingly, this continued even after her death. "The kids have a way of communicating with each other without us knowing about it,'' offered school superintendent Gus Sayer lamely. "They really have their own world."

Bullying is in some ways similar to rape cases in that the victim often feels shame about the violation, whether physical or emotional. In wanting badly not to talk about what has been done to them, there is a significant tendency not to report both crimes.

In Phoebe's case, however, it seems sufficient warning was given for school officials to act. Before she started attending South Hadley, her aunt told the school she had been bullied before and was particularly vulnerable. Students report that Phoebe had visibly cried outside classrooms and in the nurse's office. Phoebe's mother asked the school in November whether she ought to be worried about the threats her daughter was receiving.

This seems to leave little question as to who is responsible for Phoebe Prince's death.

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Kristen Stewart in The Runaways: all I hoped for and then some.

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."

Stewart maintains the raw intensity of her performance throughout the film, as Jett gains a begrudging respect from producer Kim Fowley (a hilarious and ugly performance by Michael Shannon), who takes the underage girls under his wing and promises to boot-camp them into stardom. She handles the complex and explosive relationship between Jett and lead singer Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning, in her breakout adult role, has completely come in to her own) with tenderness and absolute emotional maturity. In short, I was completely blown away.

So, you were right, IrishCentral readers-- I take back everything I said about Kristen Stewart. (But not about Twilight. I'm sorry. That's still awful.) She's a fantastic actress who has finally been cast in a deserving role.

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