Friday, October 3, 2014

Nicholas Sparks Accused Of Discrimination At His North Carolina School

A former headmaster of Epiphany School of Global Studies said in a lawsuit that Sparks has “vulgar and discriminatory views” about people who are black, LGBT or not Christian.



Cindy Ord / Getty Images


The former headmaster of Nicholas Sparks' private K-12 school is accusing the bestselling author of discrimination in a federal lawsuit filed Thursday.


Saul Hillel Benjamin became the headmaster and CEO at Epiphany School of Global Studies in 2013, which Sparks founded in 2006. The nondenominational school's website heralds its commitment to Christian traditions and the principle to "Love God and Your Neighbor as Yourself," with a "global focus."


In a federal lawsuit filed Thursday, however, Benjamin said that Sparks and the school's board of trustees actually harassed and bullied anyone who attempted to bring in diversity and inclusiveness.


"Sparks has routinely attributed the absence of any African-American students at the School to the fact that 'black students are too poor and can't do the academic work,'" the lawsuit said.


Sparks' attorney said he denies all allegations of the complaint.


"We deny these allegations as presented in the complaint. We will vigorously defend this matter and look forward to pursuing any available remedies," Theresa Sprain said.


The suit also contends that Sparks and school board members prohibited students from discussing their sexual identities or orientation and discouraged school staff from investigating bullying of gay students.


Benjamin also was confronted by Sparks about attending an event that included a speaker from the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) chapter.


"According to Defendant Sparks, Mr. Benjamin had brought 'disrepute to Epiphany' by attending the event and publicly associating with African-Americans," the suit said.


Benjamin, who is Jewish by background and is a Quaker, also said that his personal faith was questioned by school parents who doubted his ability to hire a "true Christian" chaplain for the school. A school board member told him to "back away from issues of diversity because people had suspicions about his religious beliefs," the suit said.


Scott Schwimer, the attorney who represents Sparks in entertainment matters, said he found the allegations absurd.


"As a gay, Jewish man who has represented Nick for almost 20 years I find these allegations completely ludicrous and offensive," Schwimer said.


In the suit, Benjamin added that he was "forced" to defend his personal religious beliefs at a forum in front of hundreds of students, parents, and staff.


Two days later, Benjamin was called into a meeting with Sparks and fired, in spite of a multiyear contract, the suit said.


"From the beginning of the meeting, Defendant Sparks immediately berated Mr. Benjamin and acted in a loud, ranting, and physically intimidating manner," the suit said.


Benjamin was not allowed to leave the room or speak with a lawyer until he signed a letter of resignation, the suit said.


Later, Sparks and others told Benjamin's wife, an education recruiter, and others in the community that he was no longer employed because he had Alzheimer's disease or a mental illness, the suit said. The claim was false, the suit said.


"As a result, Mr. Benjamin has incurred grave reputational damage and has been unable to secure further employment in the area," the suit said.


Lawyers for Sparks and the school have not responded to Benjamin's claims.


The Problem With "Gone Girl" Is That There's No "Cool Girl"

David Fincher’s film, based on Gillian Flynn’s novel, doesn’t so much bring the “Cool Girl” polemic to the masses as dilute its scathing argument. Warning: This post contains MAJOR SPOILERS if you have not read or seen Gone Girl .



Rosamund Pike as Amy Dunne and Ben Affleck as Nick Dunne in Gone Girl


Merrick Morton / Twentieth Century Fox and Regency Enterprises


I spent the first hour of David Fincher's Gone Girl watching Rosamund Pike's performance as Amy Dunne very, very closely. I've admired Pike's work ever since her turn as the amiable eldest Bennet sister in the 2005 version of Pride and Prejudice. But I also knew that she could play icy: Just looking at her in the mostly forgotten 2007 movie Fracture, playing alongside The Gos and Anthony Hopkins, you can see that this doe-eyed girl was capable of menace. Not like Helena Bonham Carter-style menace, but Ice Queen, passive-aggressive, manipulative-bitch-with-a-perfect-manicure-style menace.


That's the sort of menace you need to pull off the Amy in the second half of the movie. The Amy who's not evil so much as cunning and fiercely unsentimental. The Amy who speaks truth to the lies of performance set up in Part 1 — the performance of the "Cool Girl."


Gillian Flynn's novel Gone Girl became a publishing phenomenon for its deft plotting, riptide of a narrative, and complex net of twists. But lots of books have good, addictive mysteries at their core. What's set Gone Girl apart, then, is the incredibly culturally resonate trope of the "Cool Girl." When the narrative switches to Amy's perspective in Part 2, the character offers a trenchant commentary on the type of femininity she had been performing — and with which her husband, Nick, had fallen in love — in the first half of the book:



Men always say that as the defining compliment, don't they? She's a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she's hosting the world's biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don't mind, I'm the Cool Girl.


Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they're fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men — friends, coworkers, strangers — giddy over these awful pretender women, and I'd want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who'd like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I'd want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn't really love chili dogs that much — no one loves chili dogs that much! And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They're not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they're pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. Oh, and if you're not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn't want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version — maybe he's a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he's a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn't ever complain.



I quote the passage at length because it's just so incredibly on point — and reflective of a certain mode of femininity that our current cultural moment valorizes and celebrates. (See especially: the star image of reigning starlet Jennifer Lawrence). And Flynn, who also adapted the screenplay, recognized its importance, so much so that it's reproduced, almost verbatim, in voiceover as the "Gone" Amy drives toward her new life. As the voiceover points to the various iterations of the Cool Girl — the one that matches the vegetarian, or the hipster artist — the camera cuts to other cars on the road, filled with Cool Girls matching that description.


I'd been waiting to see how Flynn and Fincher handled the evocation of the Cool Girl, and the scene— the one time in the film that the camera focuses on someone outside of the narrative — definitely felt like a disruptive turning point, and not just because Amy's voice is inflected with the menace and misogyny that would flower for the remaining 90 minutes of the film. It feels disruptive because the Cool Girl that Amy is describing — and that the character Amy portrays so convincingly in the first half of the book — doesn't match the script's characterization of her. Put differently, the First-Half Film Amy isn't, well, cool.



Affleck and Pike in Gone Girl


Merrick Morton / Twentieth Century Fox and Regency Enterprises


She's smart, of course, and beautiful and maybe even likable, but the only time you see a hint of the Cool Girl charisma is during her and Nick's "meet-cute" at a friend's party. There, she comes off as a match to Nick's quick-talking seduction; a tit to his tat, a well-timed raised eyebrow to his well-honed yet seemingly unpracticed pickup line. Her hair is up in a thoughtless ponytail, tendrils haphazardly hanging down in that sexy way that seems totally without artifice. It's the first time we meet Amy, and it sets the tone for the Cool Girl to come.


Only that Amy goes away, replaced by an Amy that's almost annoyingly passive-aggressive (the tone as she "narrates" Amazing Amy at the wedding party) or blandly supportive (her we'll-make-it-through-this recession speech). That's not Cool; that's just an amalgam of various female characters from the last 10 years of bad rom-coms and harping wives in Judd Apatow movies.


Amy needs to be Cool. She needs to be that unbelievable mix of charisma and chill, and to give zero fucks and be all the hotter for it. It's Kate (Olivia Wilde) in Drinking Buddies meets Jamie (Mila Kunis) in Friends With Benefits to the every-public-appearance-of-Jennifer Lawrence power. And while First-Half Amy might have that body and that beauty, she doesn't have that ineffable something, that irresistible gravity. That indelible sense of Cool Girl.


Now, I get that the Cool Girl is a performance. She's a projection of the impossible contradiction of contemporary femininity, which Flynn, ventriloquizing through Amy, describes with such skill in the second half of the book. But in order for us to see Amy's skill and insight — the clear-eyed way that she saw what was expected of her and performed it, immaculately — she has to actually be Cool. She can't just be beautiful, or fairly likable. She has to be transcendent — and then, when the twist turns, and she becomes her "real" self, it illuminates the Cool Girl not as a natural state, but a performance calculated to attract, please, and sate a man's desires.


Without that contrast — and, by extension, the understanding that Amy was motivated by her frustration with the impossible expectations of "perfect" femininity — Amy comes off as a one-dimensional sociopath. The woman with the box cutter and the bloody body of a man who loved her. A caricature. A piece of high camp. A "crazy fucking bitch." And so, the sublimated ideological critique of the book disappears, replaced by the pat narrative logic of the film noir, with a fumbling, rather stupid, yet ultimately victimized male at its core.


Don't get me wrong: Amy is a femme fatale. But the best noirs always showed that the women who provided their narrative combustion weren't born evil; society, and the way it forced women to maneuver within it, made them that way.


The Amy of Fincher's Gone Girl isn't Cool, or complicated, or sympathetic. She's the "crazy fucking bitch" that Nick calls her, yet another example for the eternal argument for women's unhingeability and hysteria.


And the film's avoidance of an engaged interrogation of Cool Girl ideal is what makes it just as hollow, dismissible, and superficial as the version of Amy that inhabits it. It's the major failing of the movie — and what downgrades a transgressive meditation on the politics of gender performance into a run-of-the-mill, if entertaining, thriller.




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Lena Dunham Will Promote EMILY's List Candidates On Her Book Tour

The “Girls” star wanted to use the timing of her book tour to help with Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts.



Courtesy of EMILY's List


WASHINGTON — "Girls" star Lena Dunham will be using her book tour in part to promote candidates endorsed by EMILY's List, BuzzFeed News has learned.


EMILY's List — a group that works for female Democratic candidates supportive of abortion rights — has partnered with Dunham for the tour of her book, Not that Kind of Girl.


Dunham had reached out to EMILY's List prior to her book tour, aides familiar with the conversations said, and wanted to use the tour to help the group with get-out-the-vote efforts for Democrats in the midterms. The group has provided her with the number of women voters who drop-off in a midterm elections specific to whichever area she is on the tour, and she'll use them the numbers when encouraging the audience to vote in November. They also gave her names and details of candidates to talk about on the tour.


She'll also promote the group on her Instagram and Twitter accounts.


According to New York Magazine Dunham told a New York audience that she viewed both writing and voting as "a way to get empowered."


"So let's vote and write our way to a better future," she said.


In 2012, Dunham cut an ad for the Obama campaign comparing the first time voting to losing one's virginity.


23 Incredible Quotes From Your Favorite Books That Hit The Big Screen

According to Amazon Kindle, these are the most highlighted passages from your favorite books turned movies.


The Fault in Our Stars


The Fault in Our Stars


20th Century Fox / Via amazon.com


Divergent


Divergent


Lionsgate / Via amazon.com


Insurgent


Insurgent


Lionsgate / Via amazon.com


Allegiant


Allegiant


Lionsgate / Via amazon.com




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Which “Harry Potter” Witch Should You Dress Up As For Halloween?

Which witch are you?



Warner Bros.