40
JANUARY 2013
•
HEMISPHERESMAGAZINE.COM
BRIAN BOWEN SMITH/BUGZILLA PRODUCTIONS (MONAGHAN)
Lost Innocents
Two big-screen arguments
against kids spending too much
time in the woods
They’ll become violent.
And
by “violent,” we mean cross-
bows, head-bu s and worse,
with plenty of coarse talk in
between. In
Hansel and Gretel:
Witch Hunters
,
Jeremy Renner
and Gemma Arterton play the
title characters, who, in this
preposterous adaptation of the
Brothers Grimm fairy tale, have
grown up to become bounty
hunters with “a taste for blood
...
witch blood
.”
jan. 25
They’ll talk to strangers.
In
Mama
,
two feral girls are taken
in by their aunt and uncle. The
grownups soon start noticing
bizarre behavior in their wards
(
they
are
feral, a er all). Turns
out the girls have been com-
municating with the demonic
spirit of their deceasedmother,
with unpleasant results. If
Mama
is anything like the
short filmonwhich it’s based,
by the end you’ll be calling for
yours.
jan. 18
Playground bodyguard
to her kid brother:
“...
Any bully thinking of
messing with him would
have to mix it up with
me first. If I got beat up
on Junior’s account, I
would settle things with
him later, but no one was
going to lay a hand on
him except me.”
Bouncer at a grad student
watering hole at Yale:
“...
I was a more than
adequate bouncer.
Nobody could talk
their way past me,
and I ejected many a
townie trying to climb
in through the window
to avoid the cover
charge.”
Would-be covert
operative:
“[
After
receiving a doll with a
concealed tape recorder
for Christmas] I sent
my cousin Miriam into
the kitchen with the
doll to bug the adults’
conversation, knowing
that I would have been
immediately suspect.”
Before the Bench
My BelovedWorld
,
the
newmemoir by
Sonia
Sotomayor
,
provides an
inspiring look at the woman
who rose from the South
Bronx projects to become the
Supreme Court’s first Hispanic
justice—and reveals a few surprising
stops on her way to the top.
jan. 15
In the Ick of Things
DominicMonaghan gets friendlywith life’s less agreeable cri ers
WHENYOU IMAGINE
a nature documentary
in which the intrepid host ends up in a
tree with a 12-foot python, you’re probably
not picturing the host being Charlie from
“
Lost.” Start picturing. Thismonth, actor and
creepy-crawly fanDominicMonaghan
hosts a new series called “Wild
Things” for BBC America. Here,
he helps us to answer the single
most pressing question about the
show: “Huh?”
Howexactly is it that youknow
so much about exotic ani-
mals?
It’s just something
I have a keen interest in.
I watch a lot of nature
shows and read a lot
of papers about what’s
going on in the world
of natural history. I also
keep a lot of animals, so
that helps.
What kinds of ani-
mals do you have?
Right now I have
a snake, a gecko, a
chameleon, a black
widowspider anda
tarantula.
Not all in the
same cage, I
hope.
Yeah, you
couldn’t put
any of those guys
together or they’d
get a li le ornery.
You’ve said that you learned a lot of life les-
sons from observing insects and reptiles.
Certainly, watching the life of an insect or
an arachnid or any kind of invertebrate or
animal teaches you something. They are
successful in a different way than we
are. We throw the word “awesome”
around toomuch. Hot dogs are not
awesome, but the natural world
is, I think. The more I look at it,
the more genuinely awesome
it becomes.
Do you have a deadly-animal
bucket list?
I do. I sit
down with my team
at the start of each
season and we
work out what
we want to find. I
wanted to go see
armyantsinEcua-
dor and the world’s
largest honeybee
and the world’s
most dangerous
scorpion.
How big is the
world’s largest
honeybee?
Prob-
ably about five or
six times bigger
than the regular
one. It’s not an
absolute beast, but
in terms of a honey-
bee, you know, it’s
large.
jan. 22
culture
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