Word: personae
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Stephen Colbert is sitting in his office, cutting up a take-out salad and telling me what a total jerk Stephen Colbert is. He's a hypocrite. A blowhard. Pompous, superficial and vain. He is "poorly informed but highly opinionated." Colbert is speaking about his on-air persona, the pundit and star of The Colbert Report, the spin-off of Comedy Central's hit fake-news series The Daily Show. Still, after a while, he stops himself. "I think I need to start calling him Col-bear," says the actor, using the correct pronunciation of his surname...
...person, Colbert is quite unlike his braying pundit. He's soft-spoken and reflective--tweedy, almost--and the father of three young kids. (His show persona, he says, wouldn't be a good dad. "The kids have to be more important than you.") Born in Charleston, S.C., he studied theater at Northwestern University and then did improv work with Chicago's Second City troupe--a pursuit, he says, not unrelated to his childhood addiction to role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. He also developed a news habit. As a young actor, he would stay up until 4 a.m. watching...
There's an obvious political spin to that caricature--recall the 2004 election, when the Bush campaign positioned itself against ivory-tower liberal élites. Colbert's persona has a conservative bent: in his words, he's a reflexive "Blame America last-er" and has a dog named Gipper. But Colbert is also spoofing the general trend in news to pander to emotion, to value graphics over thinking, gut over brain. "That, I think, is the nutmeat of the show," he tells me. "Enough mind. We tried mind for a long time, and what has it gotten us? You know...
...Sunset Boulevard. Disappointing in London, where it played as a tragedy, Andrew Lloyd Webber's latest has been reborn in Los Angeles as a gothic comedy. Glenn Close dispels her chilly screen persona as a manipulative and shamelessly camp-melodramatic bygone movie queen, a legend in her own mind. John Napier's parvenu palazzo set is the grandest and wittiest of the British megamusical...
...however, whose alienation stems in part from being faceless strangers in the crowd, Spritz is a celebrity. Like any average Joe, he’s constantly screwing up with his kids and wife, but these mistakes are all the more pathetic in light of his glib on-camera persona. Though the depressive aspect of Cage’s character risks monotony, Steve Conrad’s script puts him through a variety of humiliating encounters that bring out the more narcissistic and violent sides of Spritz’s madness. In this latest film, Gore Verbinski seems to be maturing...