Ike Barinholtz is strikingly well-versed in an array of hot topics, exhibiting just as much enthusiasm discussing Rupaul’s Drag Race as he does politics, or talking about the classic films that inspired him as a first-time feature director.
“There’s this great old movie called Mrs. Miniver, really old,” says the actor. “I always loved that movie because it tricks you, where the first half [depicts] life in this pastoral English village [as] lovely, despite the war. And then it turns into the Nazis in the house.”
Barinholtz is in the nation’s capital to discuss The Oath, the pitch-black comic thriller he wrote, directed, and stars in opposite Tiffany Haddish. Set over a punishing Thanksgiving weekend when every American citizen is expected to sign an oath of loyalty to the president or face the consequences, The Oath, like Mrs. Miniver, takes a hard turn towards the intense. Inside the home of happily married couple Chris and Kai (Barinholtz and Haddish), all hell breaks loose when every member of their extended family can’t agree to disagree about signing the controversial oath.
The gloves come off, the fight gets ugly, and the violence threatens to go too far — though Barinholtz instinctively sensed how far to take things.
“We knew we were gonna have these really dark elements and violence and blood,” he says. “‘People should probably die,’ is what I was told…I resisted that urge because I wanted the movie — despite everything the people in the movie had been through and despite everything we’re going through now — to end optimistically. I am still optimistic about the country.”
The Oath
In the film, that optimism runs along a knife’s edge juxtaposed against wild paranoia, and everyone on every side feels the pain. The situation, though played for both laughs and scares, is grounded enough in reality that The Oath doesn’t seem like a paranoid fantasy, but like a real possibility in this cultural moment. “I think the word I would use to describe our current political ecosystem is absurd,” says Barinholtz. “We have an absurd president, you know what I mean? We have absurd leaders. People handle and process these things in an absurd manner.”
That absurdity led to an obvious comparison: “I wanted people to feel like when they’re watching the movie, [it’s] like they’re going through a Twitter feed. You go to your Twitter feed and you’re like, ‘Oh, that’s a nice video. That’s funny, that dog is hilarious. Oh my God, they’re separating parents and their children at the border. Holy shit.’ I really wanted to make it reflective of that, and just take people on that journey.”
The Oath is rated R, and opens in theaters everywhere October 12. Visit fandango.com.
"On Monday, June 13, 2016, I felt I didn't even know whether or not it would be worth living to see Tuesday," says Brandon Wolf. "There was a part of me that hoped that when I fell asleep, I never woke back up again."
The 33-year-old gun safety and LGBTQ advocate was one of the survivors of the deadly Pulse nightclub massacre that occurred on June 12 of that year in Orlando, Florida.
For Wolf, who lost his friends Christopher Andrew Leinonen -- known as "Drew" -- and Juan Guerrero in the mass shooting, his grief was almost insurmountable. But he credits the LGBTQ community with standing by him during a difficult time and providing the support he needed to resume his regular life.
Marga Gomez, the pioneering lesbian performer, playwright, and comic, is in the midst of what she's dubbed her "Spanking Machine summer," touring her latest solo show, a biting "coming-out-of-age" story about Gomez and her gay, Catholic school classmate Scotty growing up in '60s-era Washington Heights.
"I didn't expect to be writing this story," Gomez says, recalling the origins of Spanking Machine, named after a dreaded disciplinary device favored by one of the Catholic school's stricter nuns. And then, in the winter of 2018, she got an email from Scotty.
"I mean, that's kind of how it starts," she says. "I get this email from an AOL account. I think I'm being hacked. And it turns out to be this person that I had been looking for, for decades online. This kid who I had this beautiful memory of, we were partners-in-crime in Catholic school."
L M Feldman thought she had hit a writer's goldmine when she first heard about Jeanne Baret.
"Jeanne Baret was an 18th-century herbalist who, through a lot of improbabilities, ended up being the first woman known to circumnavigate the globe," Feldman says.
"But she did it dressed as a man. As a gender-nonconforming female, I'm always sort of looking for stories -- hero stories, journey stories, epic adventure quests -- that center on someone who's not a young boy or man. Because I didn't have them growing up, and there's some part of me that's been unquenched for finding myself reflected in protagonists.
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