Entertainment

April 2014 - Posts

  • RED Hearts: Entertainment: Cutest Crafted Creatures

    By Erika Kwee, 23, reporting from Houston, TX, on adorable animal kits that extend knitting season to spring.

    It seems The Longest Winter in History, or at least in my memory, is finally showing signs of ending. I say this, enough already, and I live in Texas, where the season is relatively gentle (read: I just turned on the A/C in my car for the first time in months). The only—I repeat, only—downside to the appearance of spring at last is that it usually comes with the packing away of my knitting needles. Who can bear the thought of wrestling wool scarves or trying on even a sleeve of a double-ply creation knowing 90-degree humidity will likely be here before that project is done?

    Lucky for all of us who knit, we don’t have to package up that crafty side of our brain quite yet! British-based knitwear magicians Muir & Osborne have the answer to year-round yarnwork. Their wondrous knitted creature kits are just the ticket for spring, summer—heck, anytime is a good time to make your own utterly adorable, utterly handmade little animal.

    Although I’ve been knitting for years, I’ve never gotten more adventurous than patterned hand warmers or a felted yoga bag. But the Muir & Osborne kits inspire me to go wilder. For about $50, they provide all you need to easily bring to life the knitted pet of your dreams—yarn, a pattern, needles, extras for experimenting, even wee collars for the cats and dogs.

    I adore the detail in the mane of this lion and the bamboo with this irresistible panda. Even my sister—the ultimate tomboy who normally shuns cutesy things—could never turn down this Timon lookalike! (If only there was a Pumba to go with him.) And this proud little pug would make an excellent gift for my coworker who loves the pushed-in-nose pups.

    For an even larger universe populated by incredible knits, check out Muir & Osborne’s Museum of Wool, where the masterpieces that can be made with yarn are endless: lobster sweaters to pastas to yes, reindeer hats for greyhounds. No spoilers here, but there are also some surprising celebrity knitters. Go check it out, see how rhymes-with-Crussell Rowe works out his action-hero anger issues. I’ll just be here, patiently twiddling my knitting needles until my armadillo kit arrives.

  • RED Hearts: Entertainment: Teenage: The Movie

    By RED editor Amy Goldwasser, reporting from NYC on a new documentary that's actually true to teens.

    Is it ever refreshing to see a documentary called Teenage—and to see that it doesn’t include a single cliché or overgeneralization about, after all, millions and millions of people. Not a locker or a pep rally or an easy-label Breakfast Club character in sight. The totally stylish but substantive, simple but fascinating new film recognizes how utterly complicated it is, has always been, to live in this world as an in-betweener.

    Teenage is also thankfully a documentation of a time before the common Snapchat era (all phones look near-unliftable, the kind that must be always be referred to as telephones) and a recognition that America doesn’t own the teenager. Based on the book Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture 1875-1945 by Jon Savage, a Brit who also wrote the script, this is a film about a highly politicized and powerful cultural movement—not about kids who are boy-crazed or buy a lot of records.

    From a truly global perspective, with found footage so captivating you can’t believe they found it, Teenage tells the story of young people as both a rising force for change and, in many ways, enactors and heirs to the mess made by adults.

    A fairly sinister history lies behind the power of this part of the population. Basically the grownups realized they needed their kids—first, in the early 1900s, as their labor force, working 14-hour days in factories, then to fight their wars with the world.

    The teenager’s built-in tendency to rebel could be played to, exploited. All of the stories here are smartly humanized and individualized, told from a first-person and unidentified point of view. One of these “I” narrators is a young girl in Germany during the rise of the Nazi party. It’s absolutely chilling to watch her seduced by the Hitler Youth—a group that was designed in every way to appeal to the desire to rebel, a chance to be different from your parents, a chance to be yourself and free and healthy and playing with friends in the great outdoors. Teenage shows it as it must have appealed from her perspective, the perfect summer camp. Shudder. Then, slightly later, there were the Edelweiss Pirates, a group of young Germans who were a reaction against the Hitler Youth. When they’re caught and sent to the frontlines of battle, you can’t help but gasp at the image of boys as young as maybe nine or ten years old, teary under helmets.

    Teenage strikes just the right balance between the tragedy and, at times, the sheer joy and exhilaration of being a teenager. I could probably have watched the birth of swing and the jitterbugs (noun, as in people who jitterbug) with a grin for the full hour and 20 minutes of the film. And the spot-on soundtrack, by Bradford Cox (of Deerhunter) is sparkling and sharp and World of Tomorrow, underlined by a simultaneous concern about the future and the terror of that place between childhood and adulthood, the dream—and nightmare—of growing up.