Amanda McBaine
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Sundance 2024: Devo, War Game, Girls State
First you get radicalized, then you get professionalized—a familiar trajectory Chris Smith’s Devo retells in a familiar idiom. After sitting down with dour conspiracy theorist Michael Ruppert for 2009’s Collapse, the American Movie director didn’t make a feature for eight years. He returned to begin his populist doc era with 2017’s Jim & Andy, which made generous use of previously unseen videos of Jim Carrey acting like a maniac “in character” as Andy Kaufman on the set of 1999’s Man on the Moon. In present-day interviews, Carrey described his dilemma: having given a performance at a relatively young age that confirmed […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 25, 2024 -
Civic Youth: Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss on Boys State
One week each summer, a thousand-plus bright and accomplished U.S. teenage boys gather at their respective state capitals. Randomly divided into two parties (the Nationalists and the Federalists), they establish party platforms and select party leaders. At the end of the week, they go head-to-head in a mock election. The program they’re participating in, Boys State, was created in 1935 by the American Legion as a way of counteracting a burgeoning socialist movement (the American Legion Auxiliary launched Girls State in 1937). In the years since its inception, this nationwide initiative has introduced the concept of U.S. democracy to countless […]
by Chris Boeckmann on Jul 7, 2020
