The British costume drama has tackled issues from the inequities of class, female subjugation, and the human impact of war. In the new film Hysteria, the stalwart format is breaking new ground with a story about the invention of the vibrator.

In the 1880s, a young, forward-thinking doctor named Mortimer Granville (Hugh Dancy, Ella Enchanted, 2004) takes a new post working in women’s medicine with Dr. Robert Dalrymple (Jonathan Pryce, Pirates of the Caribbean series). At that time, women’s medicine linked many feminine ailments—physical and mental—to a disorder of the uterus called “hysteria.” Dalrymple’s practice treats hysterical women by manually massaging the female organs until the women reach paroxysm, a perceived release of the nervous system (certainly not an orgasm).

Granville dutifully courts Emily (Felicity Jones, Like Crazy, 2011), Dalrymple’s obedient daughter. Oscar nominee Maggie Gyllenhaal plays Charlotte (Dalrymple’s not-so-obedient daughter), a social reformer whose progressive ideas and unrelenting pontification call Granville’s abandonment of modern medicine—and courtship of the unremarkable Emily—into question. Granville’s eccentric friend Edmund St. John-Smythe (Rupert Everett, The Importance of Being Earnest, 2002), helps invent an electric feather duster, which, lo and behold, is very useful for treating hysterical women. The naturally uncomfortable and funny moments are fortified by witty banter, a hint of romance, and true heart.

The film owes a great debt to its strong writing. The historical premise that Granville’s patented electric feather duster was co-opted into treating women—basically becoming the first vibrator—was ripe for dramatization. But co-screenwriters Stephen Dyer and Jonah Lisa Dyer expanded what could have been a one-note comedy into a search to find one’s true calling. The clever and fast-paced dialogue is replete with loaded phrases and double entendres. But there is also a complex layering of subject matter, which adds credibility and heart to the story.

During the 1880s, revolutionary developments like electricity, the telephone, and germ theory heightened the clash between old thinking and progress. Granville starts out as a firebrand for modernization in the medical community, but quickly embraces his role treating women by using a backward practice. Granville’s personal conflict between accepting old practices and innovating new ones reflects the very changes Victorian society was undergoing at the time, weaving the character arc solidly into the film.

If the writing sets up the pitch, the stellar cast and director line it up and knock it out of the park. Director Tanya Wexler (Finding North, 1998) sets a tone for the naturally hilarious circumstances to be played straight, and therefore enjoyed without forced comedy. Dancy is pitch perfect as the straight-laced Victorian gentleman who regularly sticks his hand up posh ladies’ petticoats. Everett is in top form, delivering one-lined zingers at key moments. Gyllenhaal’s character is refreshingly bold, though perhaps too much so to be accurate for the period. Nevertheless, she is the catalyst for the emotional moments of the film and Gyllenhaal’s performance drives the heart of the picture. Though not a true ensemble piece, the entire cast really delivers on the comedy, particularly the various women who experience paroxysm on the table.

The film is bright and colorful—well shot by Sean Bobbitt, who is best known for his dark and edgy photography in Shame (2011) and Hunger (2008). All of the crafts are called upon to add to the comedy at one point or another, from Emily’s interesting hairstyles and wardrobe, to St. John-Smythe’s eccentric study and various inventions. All of the elements play well together to serve up an enjoyable cinematic experience. The film is laugh-out-loud funny and will be a treat for female audiences this summer.

Limité Rating: 5/5

Director: Tanya Wexler

Screenwriters: Stephen Dyer, Jonah Lisa Dyer

Cast: Hugh Dancy, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Rupert Everett, Felicity Jones, Jonathan Pryce, Sheridan Smith

Runtime:  95 min.

Release Date: May 18

1. 2013 SRT Viper GTS

In addition to giving your car a stylish edge, and improving its power to weight ratio by lowering the car’s weight and increasing your car’s power, it’s sleek carbon fiber hood is perfect for the “Wheelbarrow” position.

How to do it: The woman lies face down on the hood, while the man lifts her lower body so that only her torso rests on the hood as enters her from behind.

*Bonus tip: This vehicle’s engine is now slightly offset toward the passenger side to keep side-to-side weight distribution more balanced with just a driver aboard. So be sure to slide slightly to the left to feel all of that V-10 engine purr.

2. 2013 Mercedes-Benz GLK250 BlueTec

This luxury crossover provides plenty of head and legroom which is a bonus for any vehicular sexual position. Additionally, Benz says the drivetrain has been tweaked to minimize noise, vibration, and harshness. What I call the “Passenger Penetration Position” seemed ideal for this car.

How to do it: Recline the seat as far as it can go. Have the woman face the backseat as the man penetrates her in a quasi-doggy style position.

*Bonus Tip: Make sure your penetration takes place in the passenger seat and not the driver’s side. The Benz quiet benefits won’t payoff for your discretion if you kick the horn in the heat of the moment.

3. 2013 Subaru Outback

The “EyeSight” is a driver-assistance system that acts as a second pair of eyes for the driver. It uses stereoscopic cameras mounted above the rearview mirror to determine the distance to a car or a pedestrian ahead. This feature is especially handy when attempting to pull off the “2 Passenger All-Fun-Drive.”

How to do it: She sits on his unfastened lap and rides while she drives. She steers while he controls the gas and brake. He controls the speed of the vehicle, while she determines the speed of the sexual ride.

*Bonus Tip: Be careful to chose a road that you’re familiar with, and is not heavily traveled. The least amount of turns the better. The wheel is in her hands so make sure the height of her pleasure doesn’t take place on a turn.

4. 2013 Mercedes SL65

I can’t imagine that it’s very hard to sell a convertible. Enhancing summer experiences since their debut, drop tops make a good experience great. One of those experiences being what I like to call the “Drop Top, Top Drop.” It’s the perfect way to reward Mercedes for their convertible revitalization when they introduced us to retractable hardtop convertibles in 1996 with the SLK Roadster, and their further expansions on this invention with great style and high performance with the SL65. Any other time you may consider missionary a bit mundane. But after feeling inspired by this car’s top slipping neatly out of sight, it’s not so far fetched that a lady can feel inspired to do the same. If that happens, you will want to seize the moment in the everything-but-ordinary “Mercedes Missionary.”

How to do it: He climbs on top of her using the floorboards to maintain a stance adequate for thrusting in the missionary position.

5. 2013 Lexus ES 300h Hybrid

One of the upgrades of the newest model of the first-ever-gas-electric ES is it’s extra space in the backseat. 0.6 inches of legroom, and 2.8 inches of additional kneeroom compared to the previous generation. To make use of this bonus space I suggest the “Backseat Back Up.”

How to do it: He straddles the middle console facing the rear placing a knee in each of the front seats, she also faces the rear and backs into him.

*Bonus Tip: With standard 10 airbags, including driver and front-passenger knee airbags with optional safety options like a blind-spot monitor with rear cross-traffic alert; lane departure warning; and a radar-based pre-collision system the ES is playing it safe, but it can’t ensure safe sex. That’s up to you.

 

Written by Dale Buss

The obesity debate continues to dominate the public conversation in America. Policymakers and nutritionists and bureaucrats pondered “The Weight of the Nation” at a federal-government conference this week while the four-part HBO series of the same name that debuts on Monday. PepsiCo and Coca-Cola are trying to position their brands as part of the solution, via the lobby group where they’re the 800 pound gorilla members at any meeting.

The American Beverage Association’s “Delivering Choices” campaign has already launched on TV to promote “how America’s beverage companies are making it easier to choose the drink that’s right for you — with more choices, smaller portions, fewer calories and clear calorie labels.” (The sub-text: consumers have choices, and should take personal responsibility for their weight and health.)

The campaign is now getting more targeted with local marketing in the Big Apple. A New York-centric website talks up the Delivering Choices platform while promoting good works by the ABA’s members in the city, such as Dr Pepper Snapple Group funding playgrounds in Brooklyn, and the recent Great Recycle event staged by Coca-Cola’s Honest Tea brand in Times Square. Facebook and Twitter marketing are reinforcing the messaging.

Now the ABA is expanding its NYC push to the subway system, with a new campaign placing posters on trains and in the stations — New York being the same market where the mayor, Michael Bloomberg, has been promoting a healthy agenda, including a PSA campaign depicting their beverages with globs of fat and packets of sugar.

Although rivals in the cola wars, the brands are allies when it comes to getting the word out. Among other things, the companies’ New York campaigning is a counter punch against the city’s subway-based anti-soft-drink campaign, which an ABA spokesman told Bloomberg is “discriminatory and singles out one product out of an array of foods and beverages, all of which contribute equally to this very complex issue.”

PepsiCo, Coca-Cola and the association have spent as much as $70 million on lobbying and issue ads since the beginning of 2009, according to the consumer health watchdog Center for Science and the Public Interest.

All of that fighting back by the companies apparently is doing some good on at least one level: The effort by the federal government to severely limit the marketing of soft drinks and some other foods to children appears to be kaput, Ad Age reports. (This conclusion reached even as Massachusetts is the latest market to ban cupcake-laden bake sale fundraisers at schools because too many kids are obese.)

“It’s probably time to move on,” FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz told Congress recently, following up with a letter to the Wall Street Journal last week in which he said “the commission does not support legislation restricting food advertising to children.”

Even so, the Interagency Working Group of the FTC and other federal regulatory agencies is still working on what it calls “voluntary” guidelines by which food companies would only advertise foods with low levels of sodium, fat and sugar to kids. Leading companies note they’ve already drastically cut back on such marketing anyhow and insist that “voluntary” guidelines become suggested standards and then de facto mandates.

Meanwhile, as the entire nation confronts the still-growing obesity problem, the federal Institute of Medicine has just released a report concluding that 69% of U.S. adults are obese. The IOM sees this as a wake-up call to America that the nation must take far-reaching steps to address the obesity epidemic, including possibly instituting a nationwide tax on sugary sodas as well as changing farming policies and even zoning laws.

The report, titled (bluntly) “America’s Obesity Crisis,” was released in time for HBO’s series, in a timely tie-in with that high-profile program launch. Fighting such efforts would take a lot more than posters and playgrounds to combat.

BrandChannel

The Goccia three dimensional tiles by Lea Ceramiche are actually born out of a collaboration with Kravitz Design. In 2003 Kravitz put together a creative team and set up a design studio. Goccia wall tiles is one of their newest ventures. As with all Lea Ceramiche products you can expect the highest quality from Goccia tiles. Inspired by how light interacts with water (“Goccia” means “drop” in Italian), the concave and convex quality of these tiles also plays with reflected light and generates movement within a space. Pattern, texture, dimension, expression – these tiles offer a lot more than just a way to cover a surface. Goccia three dimensional tiles are available strictly in black or white and in a glossy or matte finish.

This upcoming weekend in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, The Legendary Roots Crew will join 75 food vendors, over 50 brewers/winemakers and slew of top of chefs such as Anthony Bourdain and Tom Colicchio and a iconic musical lineup featuring Led Zeppelin, James Murphy, Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Escort, Hall & Oates at The Great Googa Mooga. This two-day festival was inspired the rich food traditions of New Orleans where Superfly got its start, the stick-to-your-ribs goodness of Tennessee down home cooking at the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival and the vibrant flavor of the Bay Area’s Californian cuisine, wine and produce which is omnipresent at Golden Gate Park’s Outside Lands Festival.

The Roots play the Nethermead stage at 6:45-8:00pm Saturday evening (May 19th), you get more info here and tickets here.

Mixing avant-garde pretensions with horror theatrics, Beyond the Black Rainbow works really hard for entry into the midnight-movie canon. The film plays like a Kenneth Anger work done with Stanley Kubrick production values, throwing in playful shout-outs to Dario Argento, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Nicolas Roeg. It is to the film’s credit that it fuses these influences into something organic that also doesn’t come off as a mere copycat. The debut film from director Panos Cosmatos announces him as a visionary talent, and the film does present some truly outrageous, often striking hallucinatory visuals. Yet, how does a movie that flirts with the cosmic ring so hollow?

The film takes place in 1983. Opening with a faux-infomercial for the Arboria Institute, promising spiritual and psychological enlightenment through modern means, the film settles into the main story of Elena (Eva Allan, The Big Year, 2011), a mute psychic held captive within the compound by the administrator, Dr. Barry Nyle (Michael Rogers, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, 2007). Rogers gives an especially unnerving performance, playing his role like an alien wearing a Christian Bale suit doing its best impression of a human being, which is completely in line with the film’s alienating nature.

Narrative clarity isn’t one of Cosmatos’s main concerns, and for large stretches of the running time the movie plays like abstract science-fiction with its languorous pacing. This is a movie of surfaces. Employing a retro-futuristic aesthetic with fever-dream imagery, Cosmatos’s strengths lie in the pictoral elements—in color and light, form and composition. The sound design complements this, as throughout the first half there is a tonal dissonance that lends the film an intense ambiance. The electronic drones and heavy synths leave viewers in a hypnotic state, making them feel as if they stumbled on some lost cult artifact from the late ’70s or early ’80s.

The filmmakers appear to have no larger thematic concerns going on behind the trippy facade. Beyond the Black Rainbow coasts for awhile on its own narcotics-fueled heady pleasures. However, by sustaining so much promise in the first half only to turn into a slasher film in the second, the film deflates a lot of the palpable tension it created. Cosmatos takes a stab at cultural relevance by inserting a scene of President Reagan delivering a speech, but it appears as just window-dressing to fit the film’s timeline. If there’s an allegorical connection to be inferred, Cosmatos makes it very interpretatively. His film lacks the existential inquiry of 2001: A Space Odyssey or even the gutter poetry of Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void, two masterpieces of the metaphysical mind-fuck that Cosmatos is clearly striving for. The film is an ambitious failure, one still worth watching on the big screen just for the trippy imagery.

Limité Rating: 3/5

Director: Panos Cosmatos

Screenwriter: Panos Cosmatos

Cast: Michael Rogers, Eva Allan, Scott Hylands

Runtime: 110 min.

Release Date: May 18

Military Mom’s and their children celebrate Mother’s Day at the White House, where kids were able to prepare gifts to surprise their moms. Also, at the Naval Observatory volunteers gathered to put together care packages for military mothers.

Combining a classic all-American style with embroidered Oriental detailing, the jacket is a stand-out piece from Ralph Lauren Polo this season. Fully reversible, the jacket can be worn either way, to display rich shades of red or green. Made from a soft blend of cotton and nylon, the jacket is smooth and slightly metallic. It features embroidered Oriental dragon designs on the chest and back, and is finished with varsity style ribbing at the collar, cuffs and hem.