The GQ Punch List: 8 Things You Need to Watch, Hear and Read this Week
BY Jen Ortiz
This week, Josh Gad walks off with Jobs, Bloc Party makes party-ready music, Son of a Gun becomes your next beach read, actress Golshifteh Farahani stuns in The Patience Stone, Owner's Manual figures things out, Hit Girl and Red Mist kick some more ass, Lindsay Lohan launches her comeback (maybe), and Duck Dynasty comes calling.
1. Let Josh Gad be your excuse for seeing Jobs. Cuz you'll need a good one. The Ashton Kutcher-starring Steve Jobs biopic hits theaters on Friday. Finally. Josh Gad steals our attention away in Jobs as Steve Wozniak. (He's the same guy just tapped to play comic icon Sam Kinison, NBD.) Back in April, GQ's Freddie Campion spoke to Gad about taking on the Woz—here, more from that conversation.
GQ: How'd you transform into the Woz?
Josh Gad: Without going into too much detail, so I can keep some of the magic alive, the hair and makeup team did a remarkable job of making me look like a young Woz. People know him now, but if you look at some of the early pictures, it's incredible how much hair the man had. He was incredibly blessed. We tried to chart that journey through the '70s and '80s. I was in the makeup and hair trailer for no less than two hours a day, getting my face taped back, and my head crunched up.
GQ: Did you ever meet him?
Josh Gad: No, I felt like that was actually a benefit. My ultimate goal was to tell the most honest story, and honor the director and screenwriters' vision for the story. I feel like if you meet the person you're playing, it can become counterproductive. To be honest, there wasn't anything else I think I needed to know.
2. Play this at your next party. "Ratchet"—from British indie band Bloc Party's new EP The Nextwave sessions—is dance-y, punk-y, and rap-y all in one pulsating track. Yes. Cop the rest of the album tomorrow.···
3. Read the least-breezy beach read of the summer. Son of a Gun—a memoir by Justin St. Germain due out tomorrow—is an easy, quick read...but only because it's impossible to put down. St. Germain revisits his mother's murder at the hands of her fifth husband in absorbing detail, returning to his small Arizona hometown, aptly named Tombstone, to better understand his mother, her life choices, and what killed her. Through flashbacks to the murder scene and his troubled childhood, juxtaposed with his life today and the town's history, Son of a Gun is a raw, compelling read that stays with you beyond the last page.
4. Hear the silence in The Patience Stone. Golshifteh Farahani has a breakthrough role in The Patience Stone, which opens Wednesday. The Atiq Rahimi-directed film—an adaptation of his best-selling novel—tells the story of a beautiful young woman caring for her much older, coma-ridden husband in war-torn Afghanistan. Unable to move or speak, her husband becomes a "patience stone"— according to Persian mythology, a stone that absorbs the pain of those who confess to it—freeing her to speak aloud the thoughts, desires, and secrets that have quietly plagued her. We rang up Farahani in Jordan, on the set of the Jon Stewart-directed Rosewater, to talk about her character and dealing with the silence.
GQ: What struck you most about the character?
Golshifteh Farahani: All the contradictions she had—this grey, it's rare to find that. She's not black, she's not white; she's grey, really. She's a combination of contrasts and contradictions, and sometimes she's mean, sometimes she's a mother...she has many, many, many characters.
GQ: You spend much of the film alone onscreen, talking to yourself—was that intimidating?
Golshifteh Farahani: She's talking to herself, she's talking to the universe, she's talking to her husband. It's not a monologue; it's a dialogue with the world. It's a dialogue that she just has inside with the universe. And also, with the camera. So it's with the audience, this conversation, this dialogue. I had to learn like 13-14 pages of monologue for every night. And there is no ping-pong, it's just a ping-pong with yourself, with the wall, with the camera. But it helped me a lot. This pressure that was put on my shoulders, that Atiq wanted to absolutely film everything, helped me to go deeper and deeper in the character. Understand her more.
GQ: Did you ever get used to the silence?
Golshifteh Farahani: After a while I wasn't even thinking about it because I was so captured by that moment and by the pain of this woman. I was just in my own world. It wouldn't matter. He became like a patience stone. Became something I was just using to break free.
5. Read the manual first. Or not. It's the question that's plagued man since the beginning of time. (Or at least since you broke the alarm clock last week and can't figure out how to reset that damn snooze.) To use, or not to use the owner's manual? AMC tries to answer with its new reality series, Owner's Manual, premiering Thursday. Hosts Marcus Hunt (pro-read the manual) and Ed Sanders (pro-do it your damn self) attempt to prove their approach is best through the different challenges each episode. We had them argue their way through three everyday situations to convince us if we should throw away the manual or swear by it.
Putting together Ikea furniture
Hunt: I'm going to be honest with this one—I don't think having a manual or not having a manual will make you any better at figuring out Ikea furniture. Ikea furniture might be one of the hardest things on the planet to figure out. Trust me, I have my share in my house; I love it. But the owner's manual is always hilarious; they're very cartoon-y, and usually a lot of ooglnflergity and flergenshler...
Sanders: Don't alienate the Swedish fans! She's going to write that in the interview now. Do you know what you just said in Swedish?
Hunt: I said: Watch Owner's Manual, coming up August 15th on AMC. Truthfully, you have to have the owner's manual for that one, just because it's all visual—you don't know what A-B-C-D is and you don't know what the parts are.
Sanders: Get everything out of the box first of all, lay it all out flat on your floor, look at all the fixings and go one step at a time. Simple as that.
Fixing the Office Copy Machine
Hunt: With copy machines, I cannot possibly see how you would know to figure something out with something as complex as that without the manual. And I think even if you have the manual, there are so many small parts that you would probably call as serviceman. But, I guarantee you, ninety-five percent of a copy machine without the manual.
Sanders: Don't have much experience with copy machines, however from what I do know, in the big office ones there are usually doors and compartments that open up to vital pieces of the machine. Motors, pulleys, levers, cartridge replacement. I'd open all the doors first and look at things before I assess the situation. I wouldn't go to the owner's manual, just out of principle. Like Marcus touched on, if it didn't have something to do with one of the doors or traps on the machine itself, then I'd throw up the white flag and call down the technician.
Hunt: On those really big office printers, when you open those doors like Ed said, there's little stickers that will usually show you like an A-B-C-D, or how to unclog a jam—I would consider those stickers, mini-owner's manuals.
Sanders: Well, I would close my eyes. I would be like Obi-Wan Kenobi and feel my way through the machine.
Changing a Flat Tire
Ed: I think you have to me a complete and utter wombat if you cannot change a tire. Listen, you know where the car tire usually is—it's either underneath the back of your car or in the trunk. You open up your trunk, look underneath, and the kit is usually there with the tire. You know you've got four or five nuts to undo. You know they only go one way to tighten and one way to undo. The only thing that'd go against you is if you're not the strongest of people because they can sometimes get welded on there with the dirt and grit. If you can't change a car tire, you need a hefty slap around the back of your head.
Hunt: You absolutely need an owner's manual. Ed is partly right, but he's mostly wrong. First of all, you hopefully have your manual in your glove box. When Ed says the tire is in one of two places, yeah that may be pretty simple. But what he left out is: the kit to change it is all over the place. Mine happens to be under my backseat in a little compartment. There's very few times that everything is just exactly where it is. When you open that kit, you've got to know what you're looking at. That being said, once you get all of your stuff, you have to know where to place the jack on your car. You can't just stick it under anything; you've got to know that you're going to lift the suspension...I'm done. You need a manual! End of story.
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