More important than God! TheMarvelous Mrs. Maisel’sRachel Brosnahan opened up about the relationship between Midge and Lenny — and revealed what she loves most about the fan favorite pairing.
“That relationship has evolved in ways, that as fans will know, I never could have expected. And in fact, I was told was never gonna happen,” Brosnahan, 32, exclusively told Us Weekly on the 2023 PaleyFest red carpet. “But it did. I mean, I do love their relationship. Because when Midge first meets him, he’s, like, a god. He’s someone — he’s like a prophet. He’s a fairy godfather throughout the series. And as the show goes on, as she rises and as she begins to find her way, they’re closer. They’re just such a great match.”
For four seasons, the hit comedy teased fans with the chemistry between Midge (Brosnahan) and fellow comedian Lenny Bruce (Luke Kirby). The pair become fast friends after meeting in the back of a cop car during the series premiere. As the show went on, their dynamic continued to flourish as they crossed paths at various gigs. While season 3 hinted that the duo may become something more one day, they kept their distance, never crossing the line into romance.
However, the season 4 finale saw the couple finally give in to their desires and spend a night together in a hotel room. While Brosnahan told Colliderin April 2022 that she was initially hesitant to see Midge and Lenny become anything more than just friends, the House of Cards alum admitted that it ultimately benefited their character development.
“I love that they get together as equals and completely on their own terms, and I love that it’s funny and lovely,” Brosnahan gushed to the outlet of the hotel scene. “If they were ever gonna get together, despite initially being adamantly against it, I couldn’t be more happy that that’s the way they chose to do it. I should never have been surprised that they would have nailed the landing. It was so fun.”
Rachel Brosnahan as Miriam ‘Midge’ Maisel and Luke Kirby as Lenny Bruce in ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.’Philippe Antonello/Prime Video
“I’m always a sucker for people going for it,” the Gossip Girl alum said ahead of the season 4 premiere. “You know, what’s the point of saying goodbye? We’re all gonna have to say goodbye eventually [so] spend the night together.”
Finding the balance between taking the pair’s flirtation to the next level while still honoring Bruce’s real-life history was something creators Amy Sherman-Palladino and husband Dan Palladino took seriously — starting with making sure all of Lenny’s comedy routines were “recreations.” (The real-life Lenny Bruce died of a drug overdose in 1966.)
“There were certain rules with Lenny,” Amy exclusively told Us at PaleyFest. “We never wrote comedy for him. All of his stand-up was [real] Lenny Bruce standup. Because who’s gonna write Lenny Bruce stand-up? That was a big rule.”
Despite their undeniable sparks, Lenny’s role in Midge’s life also goes far beyond romantic intentions for the co-showrunners. “Lenny served as a muse for her for a long time,” Amy explained to Us, to which Dan added, “And a guardian angel.”
“And then, even when that shifted, it immediately snapped back because he was, again, the person saying, ‘Eye on the prize. What are you doing? Eye on the prize. I see you and I can see you f—king this up. You’re gonna f—k this up.’ So, like, having laid all that groundwork and having that sort of relationship, it helped us get to that moment,” the Gilmore Girls creator shared.
SAN FRANCISCO — Amid escalating conflict between the Indian government and followers of the Sikh religion, some supporters of a separatist movement are using automated Twitter accounts to promote acts of vandalism and at times violence around the world.
Some backers of the Khalistani movement are using multiple networks of linked accounts to blast out videos and calls for action simultaneously, before Twitter’s reduced safety staff can respond.
They are also using evasive tactics, such as deleting tweets afterward, and avoiding suspensions by celebrating the planting of a “device” instead of a bomb and by calling for the “political death” of Indian leaders, according to research by Network Contagion Research Institute.
The bursts of activity come as Indian officials wage a manhunt for separatist leader Amritpal Singh, and as protesters have vandalized Indian consulates in San Francisco and around the world and assaulted Indian officials and journalists in America.
The campaign shows that even when it is trying to cut off bots promoting violence, Twitter remains a fertile ground for sowing discontent and real-world action.
Within the Indian state of Punjab, the separatist movement has won significant support among a Sikh farming population that has seen agricultural prices drop and jobs evaporate. A heroin epidemic, locals say, is ravaging the state.
Singh shot from near obscurity to prominence last year by touring through the Punjab countryside, flanked by heavily armed men, to deliver fiery speeches condemning drug usage and calling for a separate homeland.
India recently cut off Punjab’s access to the internet.
Many of the tweets captured by the NCRI urge protesters to gather or take unspecified direct action against such power plants, train tracks and other strategic targets inside India as well as facilities abroad. One widely shared video credited an expatriate Sikh group, Sikhs for Justice, with damaging a railway.
Sikhs for Justice did not return a call seeking comment.
The NCRI found 359 accounts active in the campaign since January. They often worked in networks of 20 to 50 accounts to promote messages or videos, many of them featuring the founder of U.S.-based Sikhs for Justice, which is banned in India. Each account would tweet the same thing dozens of times, tagging different journalists and other public figures to build visibility.
“When you look at the escalation and the intensity of the rhetoric, and how that precedes the events that take place in the real world that result in vandalism or violence, that’s where the concern is,” said Jack Donohue, chief operating officer at the NCRI and a former head of cyber intelligence at the New York Police Department.
Donohue said he would be sending an NCRI report first shared with The Washington Post to local law enforcement in cities with likely targets.
The research also provides grist for those who claim that the Khalistanis are getting significant support from the government of Pakistan, India’s neighbor and strategic rival.
About 20 percent of the accounts identified as part of the Twitter networks claim to be located inside Pakistan. And some of them have tweeted that Sikhs should be thankful for Pakistan or in support of one of the major Pakistani political parties, according to the report.
Attempts to reach some of the accounts deemed by the NCRI to be at the center of the efforts were unsuccessful.
“Involvement by a self-identified Pakistani network of putative SFJ supporters thus suggests not just bot-like activity but raises the possibility of a broader effort for covert influence,” the NCRI wrote. “The fact that this network of self-identified Pakistani accounts amplifies attacks against Hindu houses of worship, agitates for terror and attacks Indian consulates, aligns well with Pakistani strategic interests.”
That is far short of proof, however, and could be misdirection. Indian officials have an incentive to point to foreign powers as being behind domestic unrest to discredit activists and protesters. The Pakistani Embassy in Washington did not respond to an email seeking comment.
Since Elon Musk bought Twitter in October and forced out more than half the company’s staff, researchers and activists have tracked a surge in various forms of hate speech, a replatforming of many users previously banned for spreading lies, and growing connections between online campaigns and real-world confrontations.
In this case, Twitter has acted against the Khalistani campaign, suspending accounts including one that referred to wide use of hand grenades against enemies, the NCRI said. A search showed it has restricted others. But the people behind the accounts have outmaneuvered Twitter, for example returning with slightly altered names.
Twitter’s head of trust and safety did not respond to an email. The company’s press department responded with an emoji.
The U.S. State Department declined to add to a spokesman’s March 28 criticism of the U.S. attacks.
Gerry Shih in New Delhi contributed to this report.
Jen Psaki spotlighted Sunday the changing talking points, and even hypocrisies, of several Donald Trump-supporting, MAGA Republicans when it comes to defunding the police.
The five-minute “Inside With Jen Psaki” segment breaks down how, despite many elected officials rallying around “backing the blue” and heralding “law and order” in the 2020 aftershocks of George Floyd’s murder, the likes of House representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Jim Jordan — and even Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — have changed their tune since Trump’s indictment.
“After all their outrage and fear mongering, they are the ones who want to defund law enforcement,” Psaki argued on her namesake MSNBC program.
The segment began by highlighting how the Republican Party first began portraying itself as the “defenders of law and order while portraying Democrats as soft on crime” during the Nixon administration. Such messaging was echoed in Trump’s 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns and by his political allies in response to Floyd’s death.
Meanwhile, many Democrats at the time were calling for the reallotment of police funds and other social services to better combat police violence — an initiative that boiled down to protestors’ chant to “defund the police.”
At the time, Greene called it a “Democrat war on police,” and in a video called up by Psaki, Gaetz is shown claiming, “They’ll disarm you, empty the prisons, lock you in your home, and invite MS13 to live next door, and the police aren’t coming when you call, and in Democrat-run cities, they’re already being defunded, disbanded.”
Of course, Psaki poked some holes in Trump’s call for “law and order,” considering he stands as the first and only president to ever be indicted.
“Ironically, the ‘law and order’ candidate who led chants of ‘lock her up’ about his Democratic opponent in 2016 is now facing 34 felony counts,” she said. “And his arraignment Tuesday might just be the first of many courtroom appearances. He’s also facing possible criminal charges out of Georgia as well as potential federal indictments over his role on January 6 and his handling of classified documents.”
And the former president isn’t alone in showcasing his “hypocrisy on crime,” she said. “You don’t need to look far to find more examples. Now in an effort to protect Donald Trump, those same defenders of law and order are themselves waging an assault on law enforcement.”
“Inside” then aired videos of DeSantis, Jordan, Greene and Gaetz all calling for variations of defunding the police.
“DOJ and FBI, well, if you never hold them accountable through the legislative process, either through law or through budget, of course power’s going to accumulate there,” DeSantis said on Friday.
Jordan said earlier this month that “we’re gonna have to look at the appropriations process and limit funds going to some of these agencies.”
Gaetz said on March 3, “We either get this government back on our side, or we defund and get rid of, abolish, the FBI, CDC, ATF, DOJ — every last one of them.”
And back in August 2022, Greene declared: “We have to defund and make cuts in the Department of Justice.”
“You heard that correctly: Republicans have apparently come full circle. It turns out after all their outrage and fear mongering, they are the ones who want to defund law enforcement,” Psaki said. “Remember, the job of the justice department is not just to file abstract legal briefs, it is to keep our country safe. That phrase is literally in their mission statement. They also oversee the FBI, which handles domestic and international terrorism, organized crime, white collar crime, as well as the ATF [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives], which plays a major role in fighting drug cartels. But these so-called champions of law and order want to defund, limit funds, and make cuts — those are their words, not mine — to those very agencies.”
The host then explained how such values are not just influencing Republican rhetoric, it’s also seen in these politicians’ actions, whether it be in some of them visiting the Jan. 6 insurrection defendants in jail or Trump’s own budget while president, which proposed cutting funds to local law enforcement.
“So if you worry about crime and want law enforcement to be fully funded and supported, the only place you should be directing your outrage for not doing more, it turns out, is MAGA Republicans and their now indicted leader,” Psaki concluded.
Watch the full “Inside With Jenn Psaki” segment in the video above.
Even before Daft Punk announced their retirement in 2021, fresh updates from the duo were often old news: the release of bonus tracks, archival concert footage, album reissues. It was a welcome surprise, then, when Thomas Bangalter announced the release of Mythologies, his first full-length solo project in 20 years. It was even more surprising that the release was not an electronic record, but an orchestral score originally composed for Angelin Preljocaj’s ballet of the same name. This sharp left turn offers a look at Bangalter’s work beyond the dancefloor—and stripped of the helmet he was apparently all too ready to shed.
Mythologies embodies classical tradition, both musically and culturally, in 23 movements that draw inspiration from mythical tales and figures. Take “Le Minotaure”: The myth of the Minotaur concerns a half-man, half-bull monster created by a god’s vengeful curse. The creature is kept isolated in the center of the labyrinth until the hero Theseus slaughters it on a quest. Bangalter’s piece begins with low strings and grumbling brass, stopping and starting in bursts, anguished and suspenseful. Heavy timpani and syncopated rhythms give way to a lamenting violin solo that sounds like a reinterpretation of the central character of the myth: not a fearsome monster, but a lonely creature crying out into the darkness.
At first glance, these sprawling symphonic compositions bear little resemblance to Bangalter’s more recognizable club anthems and dance epics. But both mediums rely on balance, voicing, and form; both de-emphasize words, focusing instead on sound and atmosphere. Mythologies allows Bangalter to seek a different kind of satisfaction. As he said in an interview with The New York Times, “To write a chord or a melody and have the performers—human beings—play it and have this instant emotional quality to it, is really quite exhilarating. It’s not the fight you have against machines.”
While Bangalter might have wanted to distance himself from computers, lingering sensibilities from electronic music still seep into his compositions. Pieces like “Aphrodite,” “Zeus,” and “Circonvolutions” sound as though they are built on the loops of his past: a repeated arpeggio, a sequenced melody, the same articulation asserted over and over again. Though such repetition may suit a choreographer’s work, the technique grows wearisome across the album. With an entire orchestra at his disposal, the reliance on these mechanistic structures feels like a wasted opportunity to fully explore the expressive potential of the symphonic medium.
Mythologies can be captivating. The devastating “Icare” stretches upward bit by bit and tumbles through the sky like its story’s subject. “Danae,” the tale of a prophecy fulfilled, begins and ends with the same delicate dissonance of fluttering strings, a cyclical choice that imparts a sense of inevitability. A somber chorale theme appears in several pieces, nodding to the fundamentals of classical music and Bangalter’s appreciation of their storytelling potential. This melodic recurrence allows for moments of solace and reflection within the often dour source material, starkly at odds with his former duo’s habitually upbeat demeanor. Mythologies sounds like the work of an artist stepping out of his comfort zone in search of personal creative fulfillment. It might be equally rewarding for the listener if only any of these pieces were as memorable as Daft Punk’s songs.
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What would really revamp the Barbie movie is Ken — but as a fabulously dressed, hilariously witty sidekick to Barbie, helping her look good while never being afraid to back her in drama. Though having said that, Jack could potentially outshine Barbie with his looks, vibe, and fashion sense: a spin-off series perhaps?
The bodies of Chuck Morris, the percussionist for the electronic jam band Lotus, and his son, Charley, were recovered 24 days after the two vanished while kayaking in Arkansas, authorities confirmed Sunday.
The Benton County Sheriff’s Office began search efforts after Morris and his son were reported missing in the area of South South Lost Bridge Village of Beaver Lake. Over the weekend, the Sheriff’s Office posted to its Facebook page that its “efforts were combined with Carroll County [Mennonite Disaster Service] and Christian Aid Ministries Search and Rescue Team … out of Tennessee,” and that they recovered the bodies using underwater drones in a “challenging environment that exceeded depths of 180” feet.
“Sheriff [Shawn] Holloway, along with the family of Chuck and Charley, would like to thank all the men and women who donated their time and efforts to help bring closure to the family and recover the two missing men,” they said. “Our heart goes out [to] the family of Chuck and Charley Morris and we are thankful today that we can help bring closure.”
Five days after the search for Chuck, 47, and Charley Morris, 20, began, Lotus posted a photo of its percussionist to Instagram with a caption saying the band had been hoping for a miracle.
“But at this point, the search for Chuck and Charley has moved to a recovery,” Lotus members wrote. “It is unknown how long these efforts may take. While we are deeply grieving, we plan to celebrate Chuck and Charley’s lives, our memories with them, and what they meant to so many people. Thank you to all who have reached out with fond words, stories, emotional and financial support.”
The band also shared a link to the Morris family’s GoFundMe page via a link in their Instagram bio, asking for help in supporting the family’s “immediate financial needs.”
On Sunday, the band shared a tragic update in the search for Chuck and Charley, alongside a statement from the Morris family via their social media pages.
“Our family was informed by the Benton County Sheriff’s Office that Charley Morris has been found. We have concluded the cause of his death was drowning. The teams are still actively searching for Chuck Morris, but we continue to have faith in their work.” On Monday, they added, “Chuck Morris was also recovered yesterday. Thanks to the efforts of the local search teams. We appreciate your support at this time.”
The band also announced it would be holding benefit concerts that will pay tribute to Chuck and Charley, with 100% of the net proceeds going to the Morris family.
The first two benefit shows will take place at Fillmore Auditorium in Denver on April 21 and 22. According to the band’s Instagram page, both Denver shows will feature special guest musicians who are friends, former band members and close collaborators of Lotus and Morris, including Mike Rempel, Steve Clemens, Gabe Otto, Jeff Franca, Allen Aucoin, Dave Watts, Jeff Lloyd, Rohan Prakash, Scotty Zwang, Jeff Peterson, Anthony Fugate, members of Genetics.
Lotus will also host benefit concerts at XL Live in Harrisburg, Pa., on May 5 and at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, N.Y., on May 6.
“Lotus has officially postponed their April West Coast Tour which had them hitting Texas, Arizona, California, Oregon and Washington. They are working on rescheduled dates to be announced soon,” they wrote on Instagram.
“Tickets to all four benefit shows are on sale now at LotusVibes.com. Fans can also support the Morris Family’s immediate financial needs by donating at the link in our bio.”
The big anti-hero team-up has previously been teased as a spiritual successor to Scarlett Johansson’s previous solo outing. Marvel Studios Director of Visual Development Andy Park once stated that the project is like“a Black Widow sequel.”
The claim makes sense, seeing how three of the new team’s main members were first introduced in Black Widow: Taskmaster, Red Guardian, and Yelena Belova.
Despite that, at least one big name from that movie might not be joining the party.
Marvel
In a new interview with Comicbook.com, Rachel Weisz, who played Melina in Black Widow, commented on if her character might be returning to the MCU.
The actress noted how she doesn’t know she’ll return to the MCU and that “no one’s mentioned [Melina] to me [her] for quite some time:”
“I don’t. No one’s mentioned her to me for quite some time. I think she’s still living with her pigs that she experiments on. She loves her pigs, they’re buddies.”
It’s known that Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige has thought about how Melina might return in the future. In July 2021, shortly after Black Widow‘s release, Feige teased how it was“a safe bet” that Weisz’s new character would return and that it’s something the studio “definitely want[s]” to happen.
Will Weisz Skip Out on the MCU’s Thunderbolts Movie?
Thunderbolts would have been an easy opportunity for just that, but if the actress asn’t heard anything at this point, then the odds aren’t looking so good.
However, it’s worth pointing out that claims like this from actors aren’t always the most trustworthy. Ask Lars Mikkelsen, who just got confirmed as Grand Admiral Thrawn in Ahsoka, despite recently claiming not to be involved.
While Thunderbolts was claimed to be a spiritual Black Widow sequel in the past, the current rumor is that the movie is now getting reworked.
No matter what form the big event film takes, one would think that Melina might come up in a conversation. After all, both Red Guardian and Yelena’s last moments in Black Widow were alongside Rachel Weisz’s character.
Werewolf movies are an absolute staple within the horror genre. For many viewers, there’s nothing scarier than a hulking, hairy creature out for blood. For others, they can’t think of anything more absurd than a campy cryptid stomping around the forest, who’s probably just an actor in a fur suit. Whatever your attitude is towards werewolf films, there’s no shaking their influence on the horror genre and multiple appearances in many beloved films.
An article from CNET put it best: “Werewolves are some of the most visually striking supernatural creatures in the lexicon…You’ve got the recipe for a great story: curses, magic, monsters and misunderstood creatures. What’s not to love?”
Updated April 10th, 2023: To keep this article fresh and relevant by adding more information and entries, this article has been updated.
While a handful of films centering around werewolves have achieved cult classic status – like Ginger Snaps – others are more so the unsung heroes of the subgenre. Bringing underappreciated movies into the light allows them to be adored by all kinds of viewers, and exposes them to different types of audiences. Whether you’re typically a fan of creature features or not, werewolf films have a way of unleashing the unexpected in more ways than one. Let’s take a look at the most underrated werewolf movies, ranked.
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14 The Werewolf of Washington (1973)
Diplomat
The Werewolf of Washington is a real off-the-wall movie, and it’s likely you’ve probably never heard about it. It’s a goofy horror/comedy about a White House press secretary who gets bitten by a werewolf while on assignment in Hungary, which causes mass chaos when he returns home to D.C. and starts feeling different every time there’s a full moon.
It’s a very outlandish, overly silly movie from the ’70s, but if you’re a fan of B-movies, this one is a real treat. There aren’t many — or really any — movies that focus on a werewolf wreaking havoc on the White House and presidential staff, and while The Werewolf of Washington isn’t necessarily a “good” movie, it’s still a fun watch, even if you just spend the entire 90 minutes laughing at the screen.
13 Wolf (1994)
Columbia Pictures
Jack Nicholson is a legendary actor who is absolutely brilliant in any role, and his performance in the 1994 romantic horror flick Wolf is no exception. The cinema icon starred alongside Michelle Pfeiffer and portrayed Will Randall, an aging publishing house bigwig whose life is completely turned upside down after being bitten by a wolf in the Vermont wilderness. Will finds himself feeling younger and invigorated following the attack, but begins to exhibit more animalistic and violent tendencies that eventually pushes him over the edge.
Wolf offers a more mature, traditional take on the werewolf trope and truly shines due to Nicholson’s gripping and commanding performance as the tortured Will Randall. The thriller garnered a mixed bag response from critics but nonetheless earned six Saturn Award nominations and was praised as a darker, moodier version of Beauty and the Beast.
12 WolfCop (2014)
Image Entertainment
The delightfully zany and wildly entertaining comedy horror WolfCopstars Leo Fafard as a hard-drinking, small town cop who begins to realize he’s turning into a werewolf after being cursed by a group of bloodthirsty occultists. The cheeky, over-the-top film focuses on Sergeant Lou Garou as he continues to serve-and-protect his community in all his werewolf glory, never shying away from his lowbrow urges but also attempting to be a better cop and man.
WolfCop never takes itself too seriously and completely leans into its own absurdity and lively chaos, and is an enjoyable blend of horror and humor. The success of the film led to its highly-anticipated 2017 follow-up Another WolfCop, with another potential sequel being hinted at.
11 Werewolf of London (1935)
Universal Pictures
Before An American Werewolf in London took the horror world by storm, Universal Pictures’ Werewolf of London introduced audiences to what goes bump in the night. This 1935 classic is regarded as the first werewolf film to hit theaters from Hollywood, even before the more well-known The Wolf Man came out in 1941.
In Werewolf of London, Wilfred Glendon (Henry Hull) is a botanist researching a strange plant when he is bitten by a fearsome animal. Discovering that the flower holds the cure to lycanthropy, the stars seem to align as his body begins to change when the moon grows full.
Prism Pictures, C/FP Video, & Blue Ridge Entertainment
Project Metalbeast is an extreme interpretation of the werewolf subgenre. After injecting himself with werewolf blood collected on a mission, an exasperated military member quickly turns into a monster. Following a spree of violence, he is cryogenically frozen for 20 years and brought back into consciousness to undergo government testing.
Fusing together existing skin with metal under the name of scientific advancement, the project is a painful nightmare, bringing the werewolf roaring to life again. This movie is an excellent example of why some ambitious science experiments should be canceled before they begin.
9 Late Phases (2014)
Dark Sky Films
Werewolf movies typically follow a specific formula that is recreated over and over each time a new movie with a furry man-beast premieres, but Late Phases is definitely one of the more unique entries in the genre. Released in 2014, it’s about Ambrose, a blind war veteran who moves into a retirement community at the edge of a forest with his seeing dog. After meeting his neighbors and settling in, there’s a full moon, and it’s revealed that a massive werewolf is attacking the residents. Ambrose sets out on a hunt for the werewolf, meeting various suspects in the community until he finally solves the mystery.
If werewolf movies aren’t typically your style, Late Phases would be a good one to watch. Yes, werewolves are the primary focus here and the main antagonist, but there’s also a good level of mystery, and it’s somewhat of a “whodunit.” It also has well-developed characters, specifically Ambrose, that you find yourself really growing fond of as the movie comes to an end.
8 The Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020)
United Artists Releasing
Having been released in 2020, The Wolf of Snow Hollow is the most recent installment on this list. It’s a comedy/horror about a small town in Utah experiencing a string of grisly murders, seemingly at the hands — or paws — of a werewolf. The Wolf of Snow Hollow has a little bit of everything. There’s a touch of horror, a mystery to solve, and well-timed sprinkles of quirky humor — thanks to writer, director and lead Jim Cummings.
Like Late Phases, The Wolf of Snow Hollow is another great recommendation for anyone who doesn’t typically gravitate toward werewolf movies. It’s unique and interesting enough to hold your attention from start to finish. It also features a great twist ending, and who doesn’t love those?
7 When Animals Dream (2014)
Nordisk Film
Chronicling a teenager’s terrifying transformation into a werewolf, 2014’s When Animals Dream is a haunting story about a 16-year-old girl who finds herself undergoing unsettling physical changes in her small fishing town, and she begins to realize her family has kept many dark secrets from her. The horror drama offers a thought-provoking, melancholy spin on the werewolf plot and is a slow burn that also depicts the young girl’s spiritual and sexual awakening through the frightening process.
When Animals Dream is the directorial debut of Danish filmmaker Jonas Alexander Arnby and had its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, where it was praised for its haunting cinematography and refreshing take on the fan-favorite horror subgenre. The Hollywood Reporter wrote in their review, “This polished Danish thriller about a sensitive female werewolf is full of restrained horror and tastefully Scandinavian carnage.”
6 Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man (1943)
Universal Pictures
One of the original Universal Monsters, The Wolf Man, made a number of crossover appearances with other signature monsters outside his standalone movie, 1943’s Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man is one of them. In the movie, Larry Talbot (AKA The Wolf Man) is brought back to life and is seeking a way to permanently die and finally escape his werewolf curse. He’s directed to Dr. Frankenstein’s lab to work with another scientist and a Frankenstein descendant to suck his life from his body and then transfer it to Frankenstein’s Monster, played here by Dracula’s Bela Lugosi.
What results is a showdown between Frankenstein and the Wolf Man (Lon Chaney Jr.). There’s something fun about seeing two iconic horror characters from separate universes have a face-off — think, the Freddy v. Jason movies. If you watch Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man today, it may be hard to enjoy given that it’s very old and movies have obviously evolved and improved since then. However, it’s a classic and you simply can’t have a list of werewolf movies without making some mention of the original Wolf Man.
5 Bad Moon (1996)
Warner Bros. Pictures
True to its title, Bad Moon captures the cyclical desperation that comes along with being a werewolf. Ted (Michael Paré) and his girlfriend Marjorie are cornered by a giant wolf-like creature while on a remote photojournalism assignment. Marjorie loses her life, but Ted escapes scathed, moving closer to family as he heals. Together, they all eventually begin to understand that Ted was bitten by none other than a werewolf. His loved ones watch in horror as he begins to transform and turn on them, dredging up the implications of his past.
4 Howl (2015)
Starchild Pictures & Pathé
Howl is one of the more recent works of werewolf cinema. Released in 2015, this film creates a feeling of terror within a confined atmosphere. An overnight train leaving London is suddenly stopped after hitting a deer, allowing ample time for our favorite fang-toothed creature to make its move.
After the wolf kills the driver, the remaining passengers find themselves up against a hairy threat. A review from Bloody Disgusting reads, “The creatures are only a part of the whole look of the film. The dingy, claustrophobic and often dark interiors of the train are absolutely perfect for generating tension and scares.”
3 The Company of Wolves (1984)
The Cannon Group, Inc. & ITC Entertainment
This period piece paints werewolves in a new light, positioning them within the pages of a familiar storybook. The Company of Wolves is a gothic and visually stunning reimagining of the classic Little Red Riding Hood tale and Angela Carter’s inspired short story.
In her nightmarish dreams, Rosaleen (Sarah Patterson) throws her grandmother’s (Angela Lansbury) caution to the wind when she meets a mysterious hunter who turns out to be – you guessed it – a werewolf. As a result of her curiosity, Rosaleen eventually begins to transform too, resulting in a deliciously dark film that puts a terrifying spin on a beloved premise.
2 Dog Soldiers (2002)
Pathé
Dog Soldiers is an action-packed horror about a group of British soldiers who take cover in an old house in the Scottish Highlands while under attack by a pack of werewolves. It’s really a good movie with a decent story and impressive visuals for 2002. Specifically the werewolf design, it’s a very literal take on the half-wolf, half-man portrayal of werewolves. The wolves in Dog Soldiers are very tall and have humanoid-like bodies that feel almost like they’re wolf-like aliens rather than actual wolves you’d see in the woods.
Dog Soldiers was very well-received and launched Neil Marshall’s directing career. At one point, there were even a few sequels planned, but unfortunately, those haven’t amounted to anything. That just means you’ll have to enjoy Dog Soldiers as a standalone movie, and it’s highly recommended if you haven’t seen it yet.
1 The Beast Must Die (1974)
British Lion Films & Cinerama Releasing Corporation
Last but not least, The Beast Must Die is an unsung example of the world of werewolf films. Tom Newcliffe (Calvin Lockhart), a rich and famous hunter, invites a group of guests to his sprawling home with the promise of a weekend to unwind. But their vacation time is cut short when he announces his plan to uncover the werewolf he believes to be among them.
Tom reveals a plethora of different trials to discover the beast, including the introduction of wolfsbane, silver items, and of course, the power of the full moon. This film adds a whodunit, murder-mystery feel to a classic creature premise, which results in a story that is sorely underappreciated.
Since 2017, Jade – aka the face of the Lofi Girl YouTube channel – has been a near-constant companion for fans of quiet, contemplative music. Now, she is missing. At approximately 1PM ET, Jade and her ginger tabby simply disappeared, and not since a took down the YouTube channel for a few days last year has the Lofi Girl fandom been this abuzz.
In her absence, the stream began to slowly zoom in on a window found on one of the buildings opposite Jade’s home. A blinking blue light produced a morse code that fans found points to . As of the writing of this article, there’s not much to see. Clicking the “Launch” button redirects you to a second that’s playing ambient music. The stream features a clock that’s counting down to April 11th at 1PM ET. Outside of that, there’s not much to go on. The room is bathed in blue light and filled with early aughts memorabilia, including a Gunpla model from and a . What it all points to, no one knows yet other than an elaborate marketing campaign.
Earlier in the day, Team AMW, the marketing agency that represents the Lofi Girl channel, promising a “surprise” on April 11th that would take the channel’s “immersive experience to new heights.” As , there’s already you can buy, so there’s probably something more involved on the horizon. Either way, we’ll find out how this mystery ends tomorrow.
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The fifth annual French Riviera Film Festival (FRFF) is pleased to unveil the fest’s 2023 official poster, featuring an original work of art titled To Catch A Thief (oil on canvas, 24×18 inches), created exclusively for the festival by New York City-based, impressionistic/abstract artist Cindy Shaoul, the announcement was made today by festival co-founders Gotham Chandna and Nicole Goesseringer Muj.
“We are thrilled to continue our partnership with the talented artist Cindy Shaoul, who created our 2022 poster titled “Girl On The French Riviera,” comments Muj. “To Catch A Thief, by legendary director Alfred Hitchcock, is one of the most famous films made in the area, starring Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, who later became Princess Grace of Monaco. We’re delighted to honor the film in our 2023 poster.”
“I loved painting this scene from To Catch a Thief, comments Shaoul. “So much of our history remains in these classic films which influence us today.”
The fifth installment of the festival will take place once again at the Eden Hotel & Spa in Cannes, France on May 19 and 20, 2023, during the time period of the Festival de Cannes. The annual festival celebrates short film and short-form content from around the globe and features the works of filmmakers from more than 20 countries in the categories of drama, comedy, documentary, sci-fi/horror, animation, experimental, music video, lifestyle/fashion, microshort and experimental.
The 2023 edition will be a hybrid event, with finalist films being available to view worldwide via the Sparq platform, the festival’s official streaming partner. https://frff.sparqfest.live FRFF will also feature the sixth annual Global Entertainment Showcase, scheduled for May 20, 2023. More details to be announced soon.
FRFF’s Advisory Board includes Michael Benoraya, founder, International Film Trust; Bruno Chatelin, COO, filmfestivals.com (also on festival jury), Emmy Award-winning actor Vincent De Paul; Larry Namer, president/CEO, Metan Global Entertainment Group, Ana B. Remos, vice president, editorial director & founder, azureazure.com (also on festival jury), Dr. Laura Wilhelm, founder/principal, LauraWil Intercultural (also on festival jury), and Daphna Edwards Ziman, president, Cinémoi USA. Jury members include Rehna Azim, awards editor, Movie Marker; Lena Basse, journalist, Hollywood Foreign Press Association; Claude Brickell, filmmaker, screenwriter and educator; Anna Marie de la Fuente; Giovanni Menicocci, Mauxa.com, Daily Bloid, James Prestige, publisher, Close-Up Culture; Tshombe Sampson, entertainment lawyer; Eileen Tasca, managing director, Alien Films & Task Films; and Sue Vicory, founder, Heartland Films and womendocumentaryfilmmakers.com.
First launched in 2019 during the time period of the Cannes Film Festival, FRFF recognizes and celebrates short-form content created for film, television, web and all digital platforms. Each year, FRFF invites filmmakers from around the world to participate in the two-day, by invitation only event that includes screenings, gala receptions and a closing awards ceremony. Attendees and participants include filmmakers, industry executives, celebrities, media and influencers.
About Cindy Shaoul – Inspired by whimsey and purity of the feminine form, Cindy Shaoul is known for her impressionistic and abstract style. She is best recognized for her series ‘Brides’, ‘Dripping Dots’ and ‘Hearts’, as well as her ‘Plein-Air’ street scenes of quintessential New York locations. Shaoul’s works can be found in various private and corporate collections worldwide. Since her first group show at Parsons School of Design in 2009, her work has been showcased internationally – from Italy to South Korea – and shown at various art fairs nationwide, including Miami, Palm Beach, Dallas, and New York. Shaoul has had numerous solo exhibitions and garnered the attention of notable celebrities such as Emma Roberts, Lily Collins, Ashley Park, Catherine Deneuve and John Malkovich. She is currently represented by Lilac Gallery, Peanut Gallery and Lerebours Antiques.
By this time next year, give or take a few months maybe, Dick Wolf will have put his name on more than 84 seasons of television on NBC. That’s more seasons than the man has been alive for! Hell, TV itself has only been around for a few more seasons than that!
Tori Spelling on “90210”, MTV, and “Love At First Lie”
Of course, Dick Wolf is not a time traveler, so he has accomplished this by producing a veritable crap-load of TV shows all at the same time, and that’s not going to stop any time soon: According to The Hollywood Reporter, NBC has renewed all six of his currently running shows—that’s Law & Order: SVU, the rebooted regular Law & Order, spin-off Law & Order: Organized Crime, windy firefighter show Chicago Fire, windy cop show Chicago PD, and windy doctor show Chicago Med—for new seasons. This will be season 25 for SVU and 23 for regular Law & Order (which was off the air for a little more than a decade and will likely hit 500 episodes with this renewal).
And lest you think those Chicago shows are newcomers to the Dick Wolf scene, this will be season 12 for Fire, 11 for PD, and nine for Med. Add all of that to Organized Crime’s four seasons and you have 84 seasons of television… but Wolf has been creating NBC shows for a long-ass time, and those 84 seasons don’t even include things that are no longer on the air. There’s also Nasty Boysand Mann & Machineand Law & Order: Trial By Jury and Law & Order: LA and Law & Order: Criminal Intent. By our count, that puts him at least a little over 100 on NBC alone, so it’s no wonder that the network just keeps throwing time slots at him.
Imagine being the person in charge of filling out a TV network’s schedule, and one man has been semi-responsible for giving you something to put on TV over 100 times. Sometimes they’re Law & Order and sometimes they’re whatever the hell Nasty Boys was, but at least they’re all something. That’s a man you want in your corner.
Remember when Ben Affleck was that wide-eyed young man who ran on stage with Matt Damon to accept the Oscar for Best Screenplay for Good Will Hunting? Now, he’s a multi-Academy Award-winning megastar actor/director/producer with a kick-ass resume and more than a handful of box office hits under his belt.
Recently, he unveiled his latest critical darling, Air, which tells the tale of Nike’s attempts to land Michael Jordan. Where does his latest directorial effort rank amongst his other projects? Read on to see the five Ben Affleck directed movies ranked.
5) Live by Night (2016)
Ben Affleck audacious Live by Night fizzled with critics and audiences, and with good reason. While incredibly ambitious and visually stylish, the star-studded feature lacks purpose and never quite finds its footing. A couple of cool action set pieces demonstrate Affleck’s incredible gifts behind the camera. Still, the script (also written by Affleck) meanders and struggles to find new ways to present old material.
The story follows gangster Joe Coughlin (Affleck) and his attempts to go straight while dealing with mobsters during Prohibition. Things happen, people say stuff, shootouts occur, and it all ends with a whimper. More problematic, where Affleck’s best work feels intimate and personal, Live by Night lacks a soul. It all looks pretty, but who gives a damn when none of it resonates on an emotional level?
4) Argo (2012)
I never got the hype for Argo. Sure, it’s occasionally tense and intermittently fascinating. Still, I recall enjoying it on opening night, going home, reading the true story, and realizing the film was mostly bullshit. In fact, the true story is far more fascinating in the way various factors contributed to CIA operative Tony Mendez’s rescue of six US diplomats from Tehran, Iran. The film plays too much like a love letter to Hollywood than an intricate tale of survival.
Negatives aside, Bryan Cranston, Alan Arkin, and John Goodman are terrific in supporting bits. Affleck’s direction is solid, and Terrio’s script comes ripe with crackling dialogue. Affleck’s performance is par for the course, and one wonders if the film would benefit from a stronger lead in the central role.
As is, Argo is undoubtedly watchable but a far cry from the cinematic masterpiece many described it as in 2012.
3) Air (2023)
The most surprising thing about Air is how it makes you root for a billion-dollar corporation, Nike, viewed here as an underdog needing a kickstart. Enter Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon), a savvy salesman who spots a young, up-and-coming rookie named Michael Jordan and decides to build an entire brand around him. All that stands in his way are some skeptical bosses and Jordan’s mother, Deloris (Viola Davis), who shrewdly negotiates a massive deal for her son.
Skeptics may scoff at this surprising bit of pro-capitalist cinema, but there’s plenty to admire here. And while one could argue the necessity of a film based on millionaires, Air moves briskly and offers fascinating historical nuggets that appeal to business-minded folk.
Damon mostly reprises his role from Ford v Ferrari, while Davis delivers a strong performance as Jordan’s strong-willed mother. Affleck’s direction is nothing flashy, but the man gets the job done and gives his actors — including a game Jason Bateman — plenty of room to flex their stuff.
Again, I’m not sure if Air is necessary cinema, but damn, was it fun.
2) The Town (2010)
Affleck proved himself a capable action director in 2010’s thrilling The Town, yet another tale about one man’s quest to escape Boston’s ruthless grip – or, at least, that’s how I read it. Affleck stars as that man, Doug MacRay, a bank robber with a heart of gold who yearns for more than his provincial life. He eventually falls for a former hostage, Claire Keesey (Rebecca Hall), much to the dismay of his pal James (a superb Jeremy Renner), on the eve of the greatest heist ever.
Yeah, the plot is pretty standard, but damn if Affleck doesn’t push the material for all its worth. Working with screenwriters Peter Craig and Aaron Stockard, Affleck finds depth in his characters, wretched as they are, and draws our sympathy. Essentially, The Town is an ethical tale coated in various shades of gray – the breathtaking action sequences are merely a bonus. We’re never quite sure whom to root for, and I mean that in a good way.
The Town may not reach the heights of Michael Mann’s Heat, but it’s damned close.
1) Gone Baby Gone (2007)
For me, Gone Baby Gone remains Affleck’s best directorial work. A recent rewatch only cemented its status in my mind. Everything in this powerful morality tale works to perfection. The acting by Casey Affleck, Michelle Monaghan, Morgan Freeman, Ed Harris, and Amy Ryan is on point. Aaron Stockard and Affleck’s script sizzles. And the ample ethical quandaries are refreshingly complex.
In short, this is a great film. Haunting, provocative, and brilliantly staged. It deserves more recognition than it’s received. If you haven’t seen Gone Baby Gone, I suggest you watch it immediately. You can thank me later.
For those unaware, Casey Affleck stars as Patrick Kenzie, a private investigator in Boston who gets swept up in a kidnapping case involving a little girl. As Patrick (along with his partner/wife) digs deeper into the mystery, he discovers not everything is as it seems and must work against the clock to save the young girl’s life before it’s too late.
Again, the mystery is merely the backdrop for a provocative character journey culminating in a surprising twist that sticks with you long after the credits role.
Multiple generations showed up to see Mario and Bowser on the big screen, showing the power that video games now have at the box office
Domestically, the three-day opening of $143 million has topped post-shutdown films like “The Batman” and “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” and is second only to “Incredibles 2” ($182 million in June 2018) on the all-time animation opening weekend list. It’s also the third-highest Easter weekend opening behind only “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice” ($166 million in 2016) and “Furious 7” ($147 million in 2015).
As one might expect for an Illumination film, especially after the runaway success of “Minions: The Rise of Gru” last year, families turned out in droves this holiday weekend for the first animated movie to hit theaters since “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” back on Christmas week. Combining Illumination’s manic, gag-filled style with a Nintendo icon that millions of kids have played with on the Switch was a surefire formula to draw out parents and the under-12 crowd enjoying their Easter break.
But consider this early demographic data from Universal: only 38% of the film’s opening weekend audience were parents and kids, while 62% were general audience. By comparison, Paramount’s “Sonic the Hedgehog 2” last year had a split of 48% families and 52% general on opening weekend.
That’s not to say that “Super Mario Bros.” underperformed among families. With that $204 million extended opening, that 38% family share still equates to an immense turnout from that audience subset. What it does say is that “Super Mario Bros.” also sold a ridiculous number of tickets to everyone else.
That makes sense when you consider what “Super Mario Bros.” is. While critics were mixed on the film, saying in reviews that the film uses its world-class CGI animation to faithfully recreate dozens of elements from Mario’s nearly four decades worth of games but at the cost of a nearly nonexistent plot, nonstop devotion to references is exactly what Mario fans want from such a film.
Social media over the weekend gushed over every callback to Mario’s history, from a nod to the “Luigi’s Mansion” theme to Donkey Kong playing the bongos that sold like hotcakes when “Donkey Konga” was released on the GameCube in 2004. Kids could cheer for Mario wearing the yellow cat suit seen in more recent games, while Gen Xers could catch a glimpse of references to NES games like “Duck Hunt” and “Kid Icarus.”
And that excitement wasn’t confined to any age group or market. Insiders at Universal say that the studio’s internal data showed strong family and general audience turnout across the country. Even with very successful family films like “Minions 2,” the studio would usually see cities in the central and Midwestern U.S. overindex relative to the rest of the country, but data for “Mario” showed even turnout even as it earned the biggest opening in Illumination history.
With no four-quadrant titles coming out for the rest of April, the road is wide open for “Super Mario Bros.” to make a run for $1 billion worldwide, solidifying Nintendo as the newest, shiniest gem in Universal’s IP collection and potentially marking the start of a mutually fruitful relationship for both companies.
For Universal, Mario and his friends now have a cross-generational popularity that will bring with it billions in revenue, not just from theatrical but also from streaming, VOD, merchandise, and theme park visits to the new Super Nintendo World locations open in Osaka and Hollywood along with an upcoming Orlando location under construction.
Nintendo, meanwhile, could see the global cultural boost from having a hit “Mario” blockbuster spill over into new interest in their games. Activision VP Michael Lee noted that unlike Marvel and DC, where only a small slice of those who watch those superhero franchises in theaters also read current comic books, there are hundreds of millions if not billions of people who bought a ticket for “Super Mario Bros.” who are actively playing Nintendo games.
“If I’m a hardcore fan, I’m going into this weekend and wondering, ‘OK, what’s Nintendo and [Shigeru] Miyamoto-san up to? Are they going to make a new Mario game?” Lee said. “That new game is back to top of mind for those fans, and when a new Mario game does come out, they will be the first to pre-order.”
While there’s little hard data directly proving that a hit video game movie can lead to strong sales for the next game in that franchise, it’s worth noting that “Sonic the Hedgehog” saw great success on both fronts last year.
Seven months after Paramount released “Sonic the Hedgehog 2” to a $405 million global box office total, Sega released the video game “Sonic Frontiers,” selling over 26,000 copies in its first week of sales in Japan. By comparison, the 2017 game “Sonic Forces” sold approximately 10,600 copies in Japan in its first week. As of March 2023, “Sonic Frontiers” has sold more than 3 million copies worldwide in just four months.
As of now, Nintendo hasn’t announced any new “Mario” games for the Switch nor any new animated films with Illumination. But after this weekend, a sequel to “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” will almost certainly be greenlit by Nintendo and Universal.
And it likely won’t stop there. In years past, Nintendo has explored other adaptations of its video game franchises such as a “Legend of Zelda” Netflix series that got shut down when its development was leaked to the public. But now that “Super Mario Bros.” has joined the likes of “Sonic,” “The Last of Us” and “Arcane: League of Legends” to make the jump from the video game world to Hollywood, and Sony is actively looking to turn its PlayStation franchises into box office riches, it’s up to Nintendo to decide how far it wants to go in Hollywood.
And if its decision leads to more projects with Universal and Illumination, this record-setting weekend may just be the first of many.
After a couple of weeks off, the UEFA Champions League is back for the quarterfinals.
As always, there’s been plenty of excitement in the world’s biggest club tournament, but soccer fans in the U.S. probably know that figuring out where to watch Champions League games can be tricky in the States. To make sure you can catch every game, we’ve outlined a full guide on how to watch the Champions League online this year — including a few options that let you stream Champions League games for free.
Where to Watch Champions League Online: Streaming Guide
Unlike most sports here in the U.S., only select Champions League games will be shown on live TV. If you have a cable or satellite package, you’ll be able to watch some matches on CBS (for English commentary) or TUDN and UniMás (for Spanish commentary). However, you’ll need to get the streaming service Paramount+ if you want to watch every Champions League game live online this year.
Here are all of your options for streaming Champions League games online:
The best place to watch the Champions League online this year — and the only way to stream every single match — is CBS’s streaming service Paramount+. You’ll need to get the streamer’s Premium plan to watch live Champions League games, which gets you access to CBS livestreams and removes ads for on-demand content.
With CBS, TUDN, and UniMás in its 100+ Choice package channel lineup, DirecTV Stream is another solid way to get Champions League livestreams online. Again, it won’t get you every match (only Paramount+ offers that), but you can still watch a good portion of the tournament’s matches online.
DirecTV Stream also offers a 14-day money-back guarantee so you can test it out and get your money back at the end of those two weeks. Otherwise, you’ll have to continue paying the Choice package’s $84.99 monthly fee.
Another way to watch Champions League games online is to get a live TV streaming service like fuboTV. Although you won’t be able to watch every match, you’ll be able to live stream any games shown on CBS, TUDN, and UniMás with your fuboTV subscription.
But, with up to 200+ live TV channels, fuboTV will come in handy for much more than the Champions League — check it out for free with a seven-day free trial. After the free trial, fuboTV plans start at $74.99 a month.
After the dust cleared in the Champions League round of 16, we’re left with eight teams: Bayern Munich, Real Madrid, Benfica, Chelsea, AC Milan, Manchester City, Inter Milan, and Napoli
Oddsmakers now have Man City as a favorite to win it all with odds of +225, followed by Bayern, Napoli, and Real Madrid, in that order.
2023 Champions League Schedule
The 2022-23 Champions League started way back in September of last year before a hiatus that lasted from November (for the World Cup) through to Feb. 14. We’re now in the quarterfinal stage, which has two legs from April 11-12 and April 18-19. May will see the semifinals, and everything culminates in the Champions League final on June 10 in Istanbul.
Here’s the Champions League schedule for the next few games:
Tuesday, April 11
Manchester City vs Bayern Munich at 3 p.m. ET Benfica vs Inter Milan at 3 p.m. ET
Wednesday, April 12
Real Madrid vs Chelsea at 3 p.m. ET AC Milan vs Napoli at 3 p.m. ET
It’s nearly impossible to walk away from viewing Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli’s Sick of Myself without harboring intense disdain for serial narcissist Signe (Kristine Kujath Thorp) and her slimy boyfriend Thomas (Eirik Sæther). She is an insecure young woman desperate for recognition. He is a pretentious modern artist who thrives on crafting “art” from stolen furniture. The two of them make an unforgettable impression during the film’s opening sequence after they abscond with a $2300 bottle of wine from a high-end Oslo restaurant. Surely these two aren’t going to be the focus of this comedic drama, right? Oh, but they are! Viewers who need their films to have likable characters would be wise to steer clear.
The narrative starts in earnest when, in the aftermath of a vicious dog attack, Signe saves a woman from bleeding to death at the cafe where she works. She’s thrilled about being viewed as a hero. But the true source of her happiness is the opportunity to shift the attention of her friends from Thomas’ asinine art projects to her new role as savior. Thomas’ artwork makes this celebration premature, though.
It’s at this point that Signe begins to find creative ways to play victim, thereupon garnering the sympathy of others. She starts off by faking a dangerous nut allergy. Signe ultimately begins subjecting herself to an experimental Russian prescription known to cause unsightly and permanent skin damage. Her plan works, and her disfigured skin soon makes her the talk of the town.
“Signe ultimately begins subjecting herself to an experimental Russian prescription…”
Borgli pushes the film down a rabbit hole of cynical one-upmanship as Signe keeps upping the ante to get the results she’s striving for. Sick of Myself lacks for subtlety once Signe struggles to separate her delusions of grandeur from reality. However, it still paves the way for important conversations about modern culture’s obsession with identity and its potential use of victimhood as a means to advance one’s position. This sentiment is especially on display when Signe is recruited for a modeling agency specializing in representing and exhibiting individuals with various disabilities.
It’s clear that the filmmaker is unafraid of confronting the controversy surrounding the potential commodification of victimhood. Signe’s method of causing her own deformities is an extreme case, but we also can’t be blind to the real-life currency in emphasizing or overplaying perceived disadvantages and subsequently turning them into advantages. Thorp’s performance carries the film with the help of some truly unsettling makeup. Able to charm at will, her character is intensely unlikable, but that’s simply an indication of the actor’s effectiveness in the role.
The film goes too far at points, and the gradual progression of Signe’s narcissism is more successful than when the story descends into nightmarish sequences. That being said, though, the conversations Sick of Myself are bound to inspire are more than worth investing one’s time. If our increasingly desperate need for attention can result in such uncompromising measures, we’re certainly living in unprecedented times if a solid resume isn’t enough. Dark and uncomfortably funny, this work showcases a filmmaker acutely aware of the nuances of modern society.
It’s time for your daily dose of Quordle hints. And you might need them – because this popular online game takes the Wordle format and quadruples the difficulty. So if you already find yourself searching for Wordle hints, you’ll probably need some for Quordle too.
I’m a Quordle and Wordle fanatic who’s been playing since December 2021, so I can definitely help you solve Quordle today and improve your game for tomorrow. Read on for my Quordle hints to game #442 and bookmark this page so you can easily return.
SPOILER WARNING: Information about Quordle today is below, so don’t read on if you don’t want to know the answers.
Your Quordle expert
Your Quordle expert
Marc McLaren
Marc is TechRadar’s UK Editor in Chief and has been playing Wordle and Quordle for more than a year. He’s authored dozens of articles on the game for TechRadar and its sister site Tom’s Guide, including a detailed analysis of the most common letters in every position. His Wordle streak recently reached the 450 mark and he’ll be inconsolable if he loses it. Yes, he takes it all too seriously.
Quordle today (game #442) – hint #1 – Vowels
How many different vowels are in Quordle today?
• The number of different vowels in Quordle today is 4*.
* Note that by vowel we mean the five standard vowels (A, E, I, O, U), not Y (which is sometimes counted as a vowel too).
Quordle today (game #442) – hint #2 – total vowels
What is the total number of vowels in Quordle today?
• The total number of vowels across today’s Quordle answers is 8.
Quordle today (game #442) – hint #3 – repeated letters
Do any of today’s Quordle answers contain repeated letters?
• The number of Quordle answers containing a repeated letter today is 0.
Quordle today (game #442) – hint #4 – total letters
How many different letters are used in Quordle today?
• The total number of different letters used in Quordle today is 14.
Quordle today (game #442) – hint #5 – uncommon letters
Do the letters Q, Z, X or J appear in Quordle today?
• Yes. One of Q, Z, X or J appears among today’s Quordle answers.
What letters do today’s Quordle answers start with?
• C
• D
• W
• B
Right, the answers are below, so DO NOT SCROLL ANY FURTHER IF YOU DON’T WANT TO SEE THEM.
Quordle today (game #442) – the answers
(Image credit: Merriam-Webster)
The answers to today’s Quordle, game #442, are…
Today’s Quordle puzzles are about as vanilla as you can get. Think vanilla ice cream without sprinkles or sauce, served in a plain white bowl. Each has three consonants and two vowels. None are remotely obscure words. None contains a repeated letter.
In fact, the only notable thing about any of them is BOXER, which has an X in it and which is therefore a potentially difficult one to solve. In fact, it took me three guesses to get it right; I had multiple possible answers left, including ROVER, GOFER, JOKER and BOXER, so needed a couple of answers before I narrowed it down in time to find it on the final guess.
Where Wordle challenges you to guess a new five-letter word each day, Quordle presents you with four puzzles to solve. And rather than complete them in turn, you do so simultaneously. You get nine guesses, rather than the six for Wordle, but the rules are otherwise very similar.
As with Wordle, the answers are the same for every player each day, meaning that you’re competing against the rest of the world. And also as with Wordle, the puzzle resets at midnight so you have a fresh challenge each day.
The website also includes a practice mode – which I definitely recommend using before attempting the game proper! – and there are daily stats including a streak count. You also get Quordle Achievements – specific badges for winning a game in a certain number of turns, playing lots of times, or guessing particularly hard words.
Oh, and it’s difficult. Really difficult.
What are the Quordle rules?
The rules of Quordle are almost identical to those of Wordle.
1. Letters that are in the answer and in the right place turn green.
2. Letters that are in the answer but in the wrong place turn yellow.
3. Letters that are not in the answer turn gray…
4. …BUT the word you guess appears in all quadrants of the puzzle at the same time, so an A could turn green in one square, yellow in another and gray in the final two.
5. Answers are never plural.
6. Letters can appear more than once. So if your guess includes two of one letter, they may both turn yellow, both turn green, or one could be yellow and the other green.
7. Each guess must be a valid word in Quordle’s dictionary. You can’t guess ABCDE, for instance.
8. You do not have to include correct letters in subsequent guesses and there is no equivalent of Wordle’s Hard mode.
9. You have nine guesses to find the Quordle answers.
10. You must complete the daily Quordle before midnight in your timezone.
What is a good Quordle strategy?
Quordle needs to be approached in a different way to Wordle. With four puzzles to solve in nine guesses, you can’t blindly throw letters at it and expect to win – you’ll stand a far better chance if you think strategically.
That’s the case in Wordle too, of course, but it’s even more important in Quordle.
There are two key things to remember.
1. Use several starting words
Firstly, you won’t want just a single starting word, but almost certainly two or three starting words.
The first of these should probably be one of the best Wordle starting words, because the same things that make them work well will apply here too. But after that, you should select another word or possibly two that use up lots more of the most common consonants and that include any remaining vowels.
For instance, I currently use STARE > DOILY > PUNCH. Between them, these three words use 15 of the 26 letters in the alphabet including all five vowels, Y, and nine of the most common consonants (S, T, R, D, L, P, N, C and H). There are plenty of other options – you might want to get an M, B, F or G in there instead of the H, maybe – but something like that should do the trick.
If all goes well, that will give you a good lead on what one or sometimes two of the answers might be. If not, well good luck!
2. Narrow things down
Secondly, if you’re faced with a word where the answer might easily be one of several options – for instance -ATCH, where it could be MATCH, BATCH, LATCH, CATCH, WATCH, HATCH or PATCH – you’ll definitely want to guess a word that would narrow down those options.
In Wordle, you can instead try several of those in succession and hope one is right, assuming you have enough guesses left. It’s risky, but will sometimes work. Plus, it’s the only option in Hard mode. But in Quordle, this will almost certainly result in a failure – you simply don’t have enough guesses.
In the scenario above, CLAMP would be a great guess, as it could point the way to four of the seven words in one go.
Al Jaffee, who created Mad Magazine’s tri-fold back cover with a hidden punchline and other features like “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions,” has died, according to multiple media reports. He was 102.
Jaffee died at a hospital Monday in Manhattan, the New York Times reported. His granddaughter Fani Thomson cited multi-system organ failure.
Jaffee’s bold signature was a familiar sight to any regular reader of Mad since 1964, when his first fold-in comic made fun of Elizabeth Taylor. (She’s still with Richard Burton when unfolded, and with another guy when folded together).
Jaffee said he came up with the idea for a fold-in comic – but he thought the editors of Mad were “not going to buy” his kooky gimmick. But they did, and Jaffee went on to create hundreds of hand-drawn images that, when folded together just so, reveal a hidden meaning or punchline.
For 55 years, Jaffee was the only artist to draw the fold-in feature. In 2007, he was honored with the Reuben Award, putting him in the same company as Charles M. Schulz, Gary Larson, Matt Groening and others.
Mad stopped printing new material, with the exception of year-end specials, in 2019.
Paige DeSorbo and Craig Conover.Stephen Lovekin/Shutterstock
The fear is real. Paige DeSorbo broke into tears while talking about her future with Craig Conover after the two didn’t see eye to eye on an engagement date.
“I want to talk to you about us,” Craig, 34, told his girlfriend, Paige, 30, during the Monday, April 10, episode of Summer House, joking, “Will you marry me?”
The Southern Charm star initially made light of the situation but revealed to Paige that he had some concerns about their future timeline. (The couple became Instagram official in late 2021 after sparking a romance that summer.)
“We [previously] discussed [that] when we settle down it’ll be in Charleston. How the f—k do we get there?” Craig asked his partner while at Kyle Cooke’s 40th hoedown party, which filmed in August 2022. “We’ve never talked about the middle chapters.”
Paige explained that even though she “always thought” she’d be engaged by the time she was 30, things have changed. “Now that I’m turning 30, I don’t want that,” the New York native said. “Like, we would date another year before you even proposed.”
Craig was taken aback by his girlfriend’s statement, confessing, “I’m happy right now. I’m happy doing this for the next year but when would you move to Charleston?”
Paige DeSorbo and Craig ConoverCourtesy Paige DeSorbo/Instagram
“If you were to propose to me tomorrow it would be amazing. But then it would immediately start the clock of ‘When are you moving down? When are you planning your wedding?’ If you proposed right now at this f—king hoedown with a piece of hay, I would say yes,” Paige said. “But it’s a lot. I would be changing my whole life. I will be changing a lot more than you will be. I will be changing my whole life.”
The fashion contributor started to cry, adding, “I have no friends in Charleston. My family [is] in New York. I don’t want to leave my mom.”
Craig quickly interjected, telling his partner, “Baby, it’s going to be OK. Maybe I will come to New York. If it’s for you, I would.”
Paige insisted that she’s “ready to be settled down” but noted that “the thought of moving is scary.” To lighten the mood, Craig replied: “At the end of the day, I love Charleston, but I don’t love it more than you. I know you love New York more than me.”
The Winter House costars laughed, and Paige quipped, “It’s the greatest city in the world.”
While the twosome seemed to be on the same page, the Amazon Live correspondent later told pal Amanda Batula that she was still hesitant about moving to the south. “The thought of getting engaged and getting married and being someone’s wife is very f—king scary,” Paige confessed. “Why doesn’t anyone say it’s terrifying?”
“I gave him some room and a closet,” Paige said at the time. “That was my version of being engaged. The Sewing Down South founder joked to Us, “Well, I mean, her definition of getting engaged is very confusing to me. People keep asking me when [I’m] gonna [propose] and I’m like, ‘When she’s ready.’ [But] we’ve only been dating for a little over a year.”
Earlier this month, Craig confirmed that he and Paige are still going strong after sparking speculation in late 2022 that they were on the rocks. “We don’t post a lot together but she’s always by my side,” the Delaware native wrote via his Instagram Story in April alongside a snap of his girlfriend.
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For Samantha, the past two years were riddled with personal setbacks.
During a recent fan interaction on social media, Samantha Ruth Prabhu hinted that her divorce from Naga Chaitanya has only made her ‘stronger’.
For Samantha Ruth Prabhu, the past two years have been riddled with setbacks. She was diagnosed with myositis, an autoimmune condition. Additionally, she was going through a very difficult personal phase, having announced her separation from actor Naga Chaitanya. The couple had tied the knot in 2017 but decided to part ways in 2021. Despite these challenges, the resilient actress remained focused on her career and continued to deliver noteworthy performances. Samantha was praised for her performance in the Tamil movie Kaathuvaakula Rendu Kaadhal and also went on to launch a clothing line. During a recent fan interaction on social media, Sam hinted that her separation has only made her stronger.
During an AskMe session on Twitter, a fan shared two pictures of the actress – one taken during the last week of filming for her upcoming movie, Shaakuntalam, while the other was taken during a promotional event. “How does it feel to you Sam? It’s been a great long journey,” it was captioned. To this, the actress insinuated that the unexpected events in the past two years have taught her valuable life lessons and that she is ready to face anything that comes her way with a positive outlook. “Gosh!! So much has happened Unimaginable things.. life lessons.. I guess I am prepared for anything now ☺️ #Shaakuntalam,” she replied, adding to another tweet that “I think more than the successes, it is the failures that teach you great lessons.. the failures always change you for the better.”
On being asked what self respect and self-love mean to her, by another fan, she wrote, “When you don’t look to others to define who you are. When you can be happy in your own company.”
There have been rumours that Samantha’s estranged husband, actor Naga Chaitanya and Sobhita Dhulipala are dating, but neither has confirmed anything. However, the two were spotted together in London recently, adding fuel to the fire.
On the work front, Samantha is busy filming for Citadel, directed by Raj and DK. The series is an Indian adaptation of the American show of the same name, starring Richard Madden and Priyanka Chopra in the lead.
In one of the many jacked-up, bodies-leaping-and-flying, vampire-meets-action-film sequences that punctuate “Renfield,” Dracula (Nicolas Cage), jutting into the movie well before we expect him to, does all the throat-ripping damage he can in a montage that culminates in drapes being thrown open, the sunlight flooding in, and the vampire, in his red bathrobe, bursting into flame. It looks like the climax of many a vampire film, and it leaves Dracula a charred husk. But has he been killed? No way! As Renfield (Nicholas Hoult), Dracula’s servant and disciple, explains to us in voice-over, when something like this happens it takes a lot of work to return Dracula to his previous state. Renfield must gather up many new victims for his master to feed upon. But with enough blood and enough time, Dracula can claw his way back to his old robust undead form.
A little later, Renfield, who feeds off Dracula’s powers, faces off against some criminals in a sleazy New Orleans bar, and a hulking hitman in an executioner’s mask uses a knife to slash Renfield’s guts right open. We think that might be the end of him, but no: Renfield eats a bug, which fortifies his strength, and he pops back into action like a superhero who got momentarily knocked for a loop.
One of the many lures of the vampire genre is that it operates in close spiritual proximity to death. But in “Renfield,” with its leaping, limb-tearing, slo-mo-and-back fight scenes that are like something out of a more splatterific “Kick-Ass,” nothing about death is particularly permanent. The blood spurts and flows — it’s a very fluid movie. And the rules turn out to be fluid too. The grip of a Dracula film was once linked to the prospect of a stake being plunged through Dracula’s heart (the finality of it), but in “Renfield” there is no stake. And there’s nothing much at stake.
Is it fun to see Nicolas Cage go full vampire for the first time since “Vampire’s Kiss,” the low-budget 1988 indie in which he essentially launched himself as the Method maniac of operatic kitsch kabuki overacting? Yes, it is. In “Vampire’s Kiss,” Cage played a fusty New York literary agent who thought he was a vampire (the movie, in its maladroit shoestring way, anticipated the premise of “American Psycho”), but in “Renfield” he’s the full grand article: Dracula himself, with pasty mottled skin and hair slicked back and a scary row of teeth, every one of them a gleaming pointed fang. The makeup and costumes, like Dracula’s black velvet smoking jacket with the dark glitter lapels, liberate Cage to give an outlandish but layered performance, one that draws on the entire hallowed history of big-screen Draculas.
There’s a base layer of Bela Lugosi (early on we see Cage and Hoult digitized into black-and-white images of Tod Browning’s timeless 1931 version), and there’s a nod, in Cage’s rictus grin, to the Lon Chaney of “London After Midnight,” as well as an overtone of Christopher Lee’s imperiously gnashing, leering Dracula of the late ’50s and ’60s. On top of it all is the Cage mystique. His faux-aristocratic performance is no mere camp freakout; he sinks his acting teeth into the power of Dracula — the vampire’s addiction not only to blood but to his own megalomania, to the idea that it’s his unholy right to live this way. But, of course, there’s a comic side to the seething dynamics; Cage’s Dracula is so quick, so in thrall to his legend, that he’ll slice you with sarcasm. It’s a witty and luscious performance, unhinged but never out of control, and it deserved a movie that could serve as a pedestal for the actor’s seasoned flamboyance.
“Renfield,” though, has no mystery, no poetry, no grandeur. It’s a scattershot lark jam-packed with “ideas,” none of which really take hold. Renfield, embodied by Nicholas Hoult as if he were the Hugh Grant of the ’90s playing a neurasthenic British pop star of the ’80s (think Robert Smith or the members of Spandau Ballet), is introduced at a 12-step meeting for people in codependent relationships, and the film’s overarching joke is that Dracula is an abusive narcissist whose power over Renfield is a form of gaslighting. The 12-step scenes generate a few chuckles, but for the joke to have taken hold the partnership between Dracula and Renfield needed to be drawn with more depth. Renfield’s complicity in the relationship is alluded to, but it’s not really part of the texture. He’s just a victim trying to wriggle out of an arrangement he’s tired of.
After helping set up Dracula’s lair (candles, pea-green fluourescent light, hanging pints of blood) in the bowels of the Old Charity Hospital, Renfield moves into his own place and gives himself a makeover — a more conservative haircut and a sweater out of an old Benetton commercial. He steps away from Dracula and becomes a little more boring.
I haven’t mentioned the underworld crime-family plot, which feels like something grafted on from another movie. That’s because the director, Chris McKay, working from a script by Ryan Ridley, italicizes everything in a nuance-free way, never creating the organic genre mash-up he’s going for. The Lobos family, led by Bellafrancesca (Shohreh Aghdashloo), with her tattooed hooligan son Ted (Ben Schwartz) as the lead henchman, are drug dealers being protected by the cops. The family forms an alliance with Dracula, but Rebecca Quincy (Awkwafina), a noble renegade officer, want to avenge her policeman father’s death by going after them. Awkwafina gives a blunt and overstated performance, and the connection that develops between Rebecca and Renfield falls into some vague zone between romance and logistical necessity.
Hoult’s Renfield is this shrinking violet, armed with his self-help book about toxic narcissism, but in the fight scenes he’s a kamikaze, using dripping limbs as spears, punching out heads or tearing off faces, the blood gushing in Hawaiian Punch geysers. He’s whatever the movie needs him to be. The calculation at the core of “Renfield” is a cynical one: The filmmakers know that an action film will be bigger at the box office than something that’s just an oddball Nick Cage vampire film. But the hypomanic violence of “Renfield,” even as it will help sell the movie, detracts from what the movie is. How can you tell the story of someone who eases himself out of a codependent relationship with Dracula but does it by being every bit as nonchalantly homicidal as Dracula? “Renfield” is such a flip grab-bag of a movie that it makes Dracula’s thirsty power-tripping look humane.
According to new rumors, three live-action MCU series are set to debut on Disney+ this year.
Marvel Studios has undergone a shift as of late. After releasing some projects that some may have perceived as misses, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige and crew seem to have adopted a philosophy of quality over quantity.
The studio delayed The Marvels by several months and also dramatically pushed back many of its Disney+ offerings, resulting in a far more spaced-out slate. This is reportedly to give each release more room to breathe.
Originally, there were meant to be several different MCU shows arriving in 2023, but that amount whittled down.
Three MCU Disney+ Shows Rumored for 2023
According to a new rumor from insider KC Walsh on Twitter, Marvel Studios will release three live-action series on Disney+ in 2023. Those series are:
Secret Invasion – June 21
Marvel
Secret Invasion was previously confirmed to debut on June 21. Billed as an espionage thriller in the vein of 2014’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the show will see Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury return to Earth to take on a cabal of evil shapeshifting Skrulls who have installed themselves in the world’s governments.
Also starring are Ben Mendelsohn as Fury’s Skrull ally Talos and Cobie Smulders as ex-SHIELD agent Maria Hill. Olivia Colman, Don Cheadle, Martin Freeman, and Kingsley Ben-Adir also have roles.
Loki Season 2 – September
Marvel
Loki and Mobius’ timeline-traveling adventure continues as Loki is rumored to kick off its second season in September. Audiences were left on a significant cliffhanger at the end of Season 1, as the Multiverse erupted and left Loki stranded in a timeline where his new friends at the TVA have no idea who he is.
Tom Hiddleston leads the series as the charismatic trickster while Owen Wilson also returns as Mobius M. Mobius. Everything Everywhere All at Once’s breakout star Ke Huy Quan also has a part in the season, as does a Kang Variant called Victor Timely.
Alaqua Cox stars as Maya, and Charlie Cox continues his tour around the MCU as Vincent D’onofrio reprises the fearsome Wilson Fisk.
Note: Before Marvel’s mass streaming delays, Agatha: Coven of Chaos and Ironheart were meant to hit this year as well but will now reportedly release next year. On the animation front, both X-Men ‘97 and What If…? Season 2 are rumored to have been pushed to 2024
Pushing everything back would conceivably give the studio more time to polish its properties. Plus, many continue to assert that superhero fatigue is a real issue and perhaps delaying content will give those who have become burnt out on the MCU some time to refresh.
The internet is an echo chamber, however, and those loud voices who decry the MCU and its supposed recent lack of success don’t speak for everyone. There are tons of viewers who have been mostly or even entirely satisfied with the MCU’s 2022 output.
At any rate, Marvel was releasing shows and movies at a much-quickened pace, so maybe slowing down is a good strategy for the studio to try for the time being.
Marvel Studios’ Secret Invasion premieres on Disney+ on June 21.
Beau Is Afraid is a deeply strange movie. You probably think you know that already after seeing the trailers, or just knowing it comes from Ari Aster. Hereditary and Midsommar are very weird, amidst the guttural terror they evoke. But Beau is a different beast. In some ways this feels very of a piece of those earlier movies, their uncomfortable and unsettling interactions and deep, disturbing revelations. At the same time, it’s miles and miles different; it’s an absurdist, surrealist take on everything from city living to overbearing mothers that still manages to have some true horror in its heart. I still have kind of no idea what to make of Beau Is Afraid and maybe that’s the point.
A24
Aster clearly has some personal demons to work through, and to their credit, A24 allowed him to do that. It never once feels like the filmmaker needed to hold back or change things for audience appeasement or anything. Like all of his movies, Beau Is Afraid is not easy to watch. At a minute shy of three hours, it’s also the most arduous, but it never drags. We feel like we’ve been on a journey along with our main character. Aster has called the movie a “Jewish Lord of the Rings,” and that feels apt in a lot of ways. In other ways? Just emotional torture porn.
The movie follows Beau (Joaquin Phoenix), a middle-aged man who lives alone in a tiny little apartment in what I can only describe as hell on earth. Though we never 100% know if what we see is true to the film or only Beau’s perception, but his city block has drug addicts and lunatics and murderers mere feet away at all times. (The latter is a nude guy whom the TV news affectionately dubs “Birthday Boy Stab Man”.) Even more than all of the hilariously awful things all around him, Beau fears visiting his mother. He’s supposed to go tomorrow, however the world seems to have conspired against him.
A24
So much of Beau Is Afraid is this poor guy stumbling from one absolutely terrible problem to the next. After losing his keys and locking himself out of his building, he gets hit by a truck. The drivers of which are a seemingly nice couple (Nathan Lane and Amy Ryan) who nurse him back to health. But they, like everyone Beau meets, seems oddly sinister. Beau’s paranoia grows and with it does the audience’s sense of unease. Aster has crowned himself the monarch of icky feelings, and he’s three for three. While you laugh at the escalating nightmare of Beau’s surroundings, you also tense up at what can only be the inevitable horror to follow.
And follow it does. Some truly WTF moments occur throughout, stuff that had my jaw on the floor and my hands on my face. But easily the scariest part of the move is the looming shadow of Beau’s mother. A luminary in some unknown field, the specter of Beau’s mother haunts everything in his life. We see bits of his upbringing, when she seems utterly devoted to him, but with an edge we can’t quite ascertain. When we see her in the present, she’s scarier than any Dracula or Frankenstein you might see. Zoe Lister-Jones and Patti LuPone play the character in different time periods and they are absolutely stellar, and truly terrifying.
A24
Still, weeks later I can’t quite put my finger on why it didn’t quite work for me. Without the visceral punch of Hereditary or the folk-horror slow burn of Midsommar, we can see much more of Aster’s true intent. It’s less to tell a story and more to convey a grievance. Even the movie’s one true masterstroke—an extended fantasy sequence presented as an elaborate stage play—fades away quickly back to zany madcappery and on-the-nose metaphor. And while we definitely have the focus on familial trauma that his earlier features had, without the keening sorrow of those, we end up just watching a guy get kicked repeatedly while he’s down. It’s hard not to see the whole movie as an extended riff on Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown.
Beau Is Afraid is funny, scary, profound, upsetting, bizarre, and ultimately arduous. I’d love to say I love it as more than a filmmaker taking a massive swing with the full support of a studio behind him, but I can’t. It left me feeling upset and exhausted, which I think was the goal, but it’s a journey I’m not entirely sure I needed to take.
In February, with the game still some three months away from release at the time, someone posted images on Reddit under the username JustJulienOffic and on Discord as Julien#2743, claiming that a friend had sent them “an interesting look” at its art book.
The book will be included with the Collector’s Edition of the game, and according to the user is “a little over 200 pages” in length.
Those images appear to have been legitimate, and now Nintendo is attempting to find out who ‘Julien’ is so they can take legal action.
TorrentFreak reports that on April 4 Nintendo filed an application for a DMCA subpoena at a district court in California.
The application, if granted, would order Discord “to disclose the identity, including the name(s), address(es), telephone number(s), and e-mail addresses(es) of the user Julien#2743, who is responsible for posting infringing content that appeared” on the Discord channel in question.
While the user’s original post has since been removed by Reddit moderators, the deleted images were quickly circulated on social media and other forums.
The images showed concept art of Link and other characters in the game (including some new faces), as well as artwork of some new enemies and locations.
The leak will have been frustrating for Nintendo, which historically has taken great pains to keep the content of its games secret before they’re released.
After a number of delays, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom will finally be released on Nintendo Switch on May 12.
Huang Ji and Otsuka Ryuji’s “Stonewalling” won the Chinese-language section of the Hong Kong International Film Festival’s Firebird Young Cinema competition. Lila Aviles’s “Totem” won the equivalent Firebird Award for international films.
The festival began on March 30 and concluded on Sunday evening with a world premier screening of “Vital Sign” at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre’s Grand Theatre. The screening was accompanied by cast and crew including Louis Koo, director Cheuk Wan-chi, producer Jacqueline Liu and performers Neo Yao, Angela Yuen, Ng Wing-sze, Tony Wu and So Yuet-yin.
In total, “Stonewalling” picked up three awards. In addition to the best film prize, it also collected the best actress prize for leads Huang Xiaoxiong and Yao Honggui and the FIPRESCI Award. The tale of an unwanted pregnancy, the film premiered at Venice and Toronto last year. The HKIFF jury said it “[reminds] us of the confusion, difficulty and suffering women face nowadays and the inescapable responsibilities they have to shoulder. It inspires the audience to reflect on this important issue in modern society. It is an invaluable film replete with empathy.”
In the Chinese film section, Hong Heng-fai won the best director award for “Kissing the Ground You Walked On.” The best actor prize went to Li Xuejian for his role in “To Love Again.” A special mention was also given to “Bad Education,” the directorial debut of Taiwan actor Kai Ko which is amassing a growing haul of festival selections and awards.
“Totem,” which documents the unravelling of a family as it prepares for a party, premiered in competition in Berlin in February. The Hong Kong jury called it, “a unique experience of time and space.” Other winners in the international section were Martin Benchimol for debut film “The Castle,” Mirko Giannini as best actor in “Astrakhan.” The ensemble female cast of festival favorite “20,000 Species of Bees” was named best actress.
In the separate documentary competition, Lea Glob’s “Apolonia, Apolonia” was named as winner with “The Hamlet Syndrome” awarded the jury prize. In the short film section, Morgane Frund’s graduation film “Bear” was the Firebird Award winner. Alvin Lee’s black comedy “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” was the jury prize winner.
The HKIFF organizers said that the celebration of Jean-Luc Godard’s life and work that began during this year’s festival will be extended through the May-June-July edition of film outreach program Cine Fan. They also announced dates for next year’s event as March 28-April 8, 2024.
Jeremy Renner made his first late-night appearance since his snow plow accident on Monday evening, guesting on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” to discuss the traumatic incident and his forthcoming Disney+ series “Rennervations.”
Renner was met with a standing ovation by the talk show’s crowd, taking the stage with the help of a cane. A big grin on his face, the actor performed a small dance before taking his seat.
“If there was any question as to who the toughest Avenger is, that’s settled now, right?” Kimmel asked. Renner shut him down quickly, retorting “Scarlett Johansson.”
Renner offered a detailed account of his accident in an interview with ABC News’ Diane Sawyer last week. Renner explained that he and his 27-year-old nephew were attempting to tow a Ford Raptor out of the snow with his snow plow. After his nephew stepped out to chain the two vehicles, the snow plow began to slide on the ice. Renner lost his footing as he stepped out of the plow to look back at his nephew, but neglected to set the parking brake. Attempting to re-enter the vehicle, Renner was run over.
“I got lucky in a lot of ways. I’m happy to be here,” Renner told Kimmel.
The actor gave a shout-out to his mother and the rest of his family, who joined the “Kimmel” crowd. Renner also shared a video that his “Avengers” co-star Paul Rudd sent to him while he was recovering in intensive care.
Critical Role‘s Jester quotes are part and parcel of how Campaign Two amassed more loyal viewers to Matt Mercer’s table. A thiefling cleric of the Traveler who is also one of the most overpowered player character builds in Critical Role history, Jester Lavorre’s 20 Wisdom score made for some of the best banter in the entire series. Filled with excitement and eagerness, Jester brought a lot of laughs and smiles to the audience while easily proving herself to be the strongest member of the Mighty Nein.
The voice behind Jester is Laura Bailey, a mainstay of Critical Role cast and The Legend of Vox Machina, Campaign One’s animated series adaptation. Apart from playing Vox Machina’s Vex and the Mighty Nein’s Jester, Bailey has over a hundred voice acting credits in video games and animated projects. In fact, Laura Bailey has notably received over a dozen awards for her voiceover work. This includes Bailey being named Voice Actress of the Year twice at the BTVA People’s Choice Voice Acting Awards. With the voice of a veteran actor behind the character, it’s not surprising that Critical Role‘s Jester quotes have captured the hearts of so many viewers. Here are some of Jester’s best quips and musings.
Jester is visibly excited that the strange band of characters met in Trostenwald has become a group, as evidenced by this quote in the 2nd episode of the campaign. Indeed, Critical Role‘s Jester quotes often showcase her jovial personality. Out of all the characters in the Mighty Nein (as the group would later be called), she is the one that brings the most joy and excitement to the adventure. Very few things can bring her down, and the fact that she gets to meet and hang out with new people during a time of crisis in town makes her happy.
9 “I’ve Never Traveled With A Bunch Of People I Thought Would Die…”
Though Jester is one of the most likable player characters in Critical Role, she sometimes gets confused about certain things, especially at the start of the campaign. During this scene, in which Jester is tending to an injured Molly, Beau gives her a healing kit and tells her that she’s in charge of healing as the party’s cleric. Jester is confused and objects to being thought of as the cleric, leading her to utter one of the most hilarious Critical Role Jester quotes. However, as time went by, Jester became more accepting of her role, and has saved the Mighty Nein on more than one occasion.
When Molly tells Jester that it’s okay to live her life, Jester responds with this quote. Naturally, this line confuses some of her other companions due to its obvious nature. However, that doesn’t stop the quote from being very iconic, and a very Jester thing to say. And she’s not technically wrong. For life to exist, things do need to live. The line may be odd and obvious, but it isn’t a false statement. Rather, this statement actually shows how some Critical Role Jester quotes echoes her immense Wisdom score.
7 “Do You Feel Like You’re Slowly Turning Into Water?”
Jester’s relationship with Fjord might be one of the best romances in Critical Role, and that leads to some funny lines from Jester regarding him. In this scene, after Fjord’s terrifying vision causes him to cough up some seawater, Jester asks him if he’s turning into water. When he responds, she tells him that if he feels like he is to let the others know, so they can try to catch him in a jar. This isn’t just a hilarious comment — some of Critical Role’s Jester quotes, though funny, may sometimes reveal what’s truly possible with arcane magic in Exandria.
6 “Be Well, Child. The Traveler Is With You.”
Jester is not afraid to try to spread the word of her god — the Traveler — to anyone who will listen. If she has a reason to talk about him, she will. As with most Critical Role Jester quotes, she manages to comfort someone with this line, saying that the Traveler is with everyone. Jester’s devotion to the mysterious god throughout the campaign is absolute and unwavering. Little does she realize that the Traveler was once the archfey Artagan. It’s an intriguing mystery that takes up a bit of the latter half of the campaign, but lines like this one really allow Laura Bailey’s roleplaying to shine.
5 “Hey There, Mister Gentleman…”
Just because Jester has an incredibly overpowered build doesn’t mean she can’t struggle with some of the details of her spells, including the 25-word limit of Sending. In this instance, when trying to cast Sending to send to The Gentleman, Jester quickly goes way past the 25-word limit. While this rambling quote may not seem like much, it’s one of many Critical Role Jester quotes that show off her quirky personality. She’s bright and excitable, and it doesn’t take her much to ramble on and get ahead of herself. This scene is only one of many where her personality gets in the way of sending off vital information.
4 “Sometimes Things That Are The Most Beautiful…”
Jester has had some great moments of wise quotes during the campaign, including this one from the Mighty Nein’s time sailing over the ocean. While in a conversation with one of her friends, Jester makes the comment that “sometimes things that are the most beautiful are the things that can hurt you the worst.” It’s one of many Critical Role Jester quotes that’s also true in real life. Many things may seem deceptively beautiful but can turn out to be things that can seriously hurt anyone that gets close. Some wise words from one of the party’s oddest members and a very iconic quote from her without a doubt.
3 “Sometimes The People That Love You…”
Jester can easily come up with words of advice for any situation, such as on topics like love and relationships, which leads to this gem of advice that she has. In this scene, Jester makes the comment that “Sometimes the people that love you want to keep you around so that they know you’re safe.” It’s a great comment to make and a hidden gem of wisdom. She and her friends all want to keep each other safe, so they stick around with each other to ensure that everyone stays alive. Out of the various Critical Role Jester quotes, this was the first that truly solidified the bond of the Mighty Nein.
2 “Maybe We Will Fight Vokodo And Then Everything Will Become Clear.”
Vokodo was a powerful enemy for the Mighty Nein to fight during Jester’s attempts to start of Traveler Con. But the whole incident of Traveler Con really showed just how far her devotion to him went. Before the party went on to fight Vokodo, they talk to Jester about Traveler Con. Jester eventually admits that she is struggling with being conflicted about the Traveler’s demands while also not trying to trick his followers. Not only does this quote reveal what she’s feeling, it also shows off a clear part of her personality and how far she is willing to go for her beliefs.
1 “We Love You So Much And We Want You Back.”
The most heartbreaking part of the Might Nein campaign was when Molly came back to life as Lucien and became an enemy of the party. This leads to a massive fight between him and his followers at the end of Campaign Two, as well as the most heart-wrenching of Critical Role‘s Jester quotes. The Mighty Nein are successful in killing Lucien, but it is Jester that manages to strike the killing blow. As she does this, she tells Lucien that she knows that Molly is in there and wants him back. In the end, Jester had no choice but to eliminate Lucien, finally giving Molly a chance to rest in peace.
The Nashville Metropolitan Council voted unanimously on Monday to reappoint Justin Jones, one of the “Tennessee Three,” to the state’s House of Representatives. The vote was 36-0 to name Jones an interim representative for the House District 52.
In a public vote last Thursday, Jones and Justin J. Pearson, who are both Black, were expelled by GOP lawmakers for advocating for gun reform on the chamber floor. Rep. Gloria Johnson also participated in the protest, which followed the mass shooting in at a school in Nashville that claimed six lives, but Johnson, who is white, was not expelled with her younger colleagues.
Republican politicians contended that the three had brought “disorder and dishonor to the House of Representatives,” while the House Speaker said they were “inciting violence.”
When you get off the plane with the legendary Joan Baez you know it’s a movement of the spirit. She stands with us in our struggle in Tennessee and said she’s hopeful to see young voices leading.
Among those who voiced their support for the ousted politicians were Vice President Kamala Harris, who gave an impassioned speech in Nashville on Saturday; Paul McCartney guitarist Brian Ray, and late night host John Oliver. Singer and civil rights activist Joan Baez, who was at the Nashville airport, sang, “We Shall Overcome” with Jones in a video he shared to Twitter.
Following today’s unanimous vote, which was met with whoops and cheers in a video of the proceedings, Jones joined demonstrators in a march to the state Capitol, CNN reported.
When the original Child’s Play debuted in 1988, some critics derided it for being too silly, while others approved of its darkly comedic tone mixed with horror. What no one expected is how profoundly a film about a killer doll would strike a chord with the general public. The murderous Chucky was so popular that he went on to star in six sequels, a remake, and a continuation of the original timeline for serialized television. Living with Chucky sees director Kyra Elise Gardner assembling a chronicle of the life and times of Chucky. It’s a charmingly made documentary that fans of the franchise will love, though newcomers might find it overly sentimental.
Gardner — the movie reveals as something of a surprise — is the daughter of special effects guru Tony Gardner, who worked on several of the productions. As such, Living with Chucky feels personal. Her respect for time and place is evident, as the documentary is organized as a chronological deep dive into each Child’s Play and Chucky title. Additionally, perennial writer (and most recently, showrunner) Don Mancini is on hand to give a full retrospective of the franchise’s history. So too is franchise producer David Kirschner, as well as a vast majority of the cast throughout the years, including Jennifer Tilly, who voices Chucky’s doll bride Tiffany, and Chucky himself, Brad Dourif. This ensemble offers a range of perspectives on the many factors necessary to keep Chucky’s blood pumping throughout the years.
“…organized as a chronological deep dive into each Child’s Play and Chucky title.”
The documentary begins by showing a highlight reel of memorable moments from the franchise, complete with snarky quotes: “I am Chucky, the killer doll, and I dig it!” It is clear that the filmmaker not only respects but deeply adores the source material. This gives Living with Chucky a tangible sense of dynamism. Better still are the insights into the creative process. The film is strewn with little tidbits of information, like how it took a dizzying nine puppeteers to make Chucky move in a realistic way. This, combined with the anecdotes of the cast, adds a lot of texture to the movie.
However, when the latter and less well-received entries in the franchise are up for discussion, Living with Chucky takes a somewhat hokey turn. Explanations for the poor reception of those movies can feel contrived and ever so slightly patronizing, like how the “audience wasn’t ready for” their subtextual content. The final twenty minutes are reserved for an unabashed aggrandizement of the families and fans surrounding the Child’s Play franchise. While this is not inherently bad, it comes after a long slide away from the essential form of a documentary. By the closing act, the film is handily overstaying its welcome.
Still, there is enough richness in its content that Living with Chucky has something to offer any viewer. If you are new to the Child’s Play/Chucky universe, the informative side might be stretched too thin. However, for fans of the snarky killer doll, Gardner has crafted a gleeful celebration of all things Chucky.
Clegg said at some point on Friday night, someone cut through the locks on two gates to gain access to the baseball fields at Noel Booth Community Park.
They then drove a 4×4 vehicle down onto the fields, doing donuts and causing extensive damage to the grass.
“They were quite determined to come in, they got through two separate gates and then came down onto the field just to joyride around and cause a bunch of damage,” he said.
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“I really think they don’t understand the impacts this has to the community. You’re talking girls fast pitch, 10-, 12-, 14-year-old girls. They just want to come out and play softball, and now they can’t.”
‘Field of Dreams’ baseball diamond damaged by vandals
The league is just entering the second week of its season, and had planned a major opening day celebration for Saturday.
He said thanks to the tireless work of a field scheduler and executive they think they can still pull the event off by juggling diamonds in the park.
“It’s a real impact to us and we’re going to have to do a lot of scheduling to try and have that celebration go forward.”
Parents and the Township of Langley have rallied to support the players, he said, and are focused on finding a way forward so there is minimal impact for the kids.
The league and the municipality are urging anyone with information to report it to the Langley RCMP.
As for the vandals, Clegg had one simple message.
“Hey guys, take a look in the mirror. Look at what you have done. You’ve done a bunch of damage to a community, you’ve really hurt the experience of kids,” he said.
There is a brief scene in the arresting and spectacular “Beau is Afraid,” Ari Aster’s fearless, labyrinthine and wickedly immersive third feature, when the ink of an uncooperative pen runs out as the film’s hypersensitive protagonist tries to scribble “love”. It’s both a hilarious moment and a heartbreaking one in a bottomless film overflowing with similar emotional gulfs, with sadness and laughter erupting frequently, often within the same instant.
The scene is funny because, by the time it arrives, we have already learned a great deal about the misfortunes of Beau, played with a startling level of vulnerability by a soft-spoken, gloomy-eyed Joaquin Phoenix, both enigmatic and translucently bare.
At this point, we know that Beau is haunted by mommy issues, like many an Ari Aster character before him across modern horror classics “Hereditary” and “Midsommar.” He is so haunted and guilt-ridden that his upcoming trip to visit his overbearing mommy dearest—the would-be recipient of thatlove—requires a dedicated session with his blunt therapist (Stephen McKinley Henderson), who abruptly asks Beau, “Do you wish she was dead?” (Of course he doesn’t. Or so he says.)
And that same scene is soul-crushingly sad because the poor guy who worries about everything—from accidentally swallowing a little mouthwash to a stray spider terrorizing his derelict building—can’t even get a word as simple as “love” out at first try. Everything is laborious in Beau’s trapped life. And how could it not be? When he’s been put through both the emotional and physical wringer since birth, a near-anarchic episode that sets “Beau is Afraid” in motion?
While that opening birth sequence is purposely blurry with indistinct sounds—are those flashlights, firecrackers, guns or screams that we perceive in the background?—what follows in this bizarre stunner is anything but. Swiftly, we are pulled into Beau’s immaculately realized present-tense world accompanied by a Bach Suite, where chaos, murder and grime run amok in alarming doses. Beau’s universe seems like an alternate reflection of our own world, represented in an unnamed “Drop Dead”-adjacent city, infiltrated by all the ills of capitalism.
Look around and you’ll see countless made-up and freshly designed storefronts, posters and products here—so plentiful, ingenious and hysterically titled that production designer Fiona Crombie is bound to make even Wes Anderson jealous with her uncompromising sense of place. It is in this city of pill poppers and maniacal killers that Beau has been planning his trip to mom’s, while a harasser in his building keeps agitating him with triggering messages. Just when he thinks he can safely get out, stolen keys and misplaced luggage delays Beau’s trip, and then the worst news arrives.
Since “Beau is Afraid” is what happens during an epically long, Homeric odyssey to a funeral, it won’t be a spoiler to reveal that before Beau can even get out of town, his mother dies. (She is played by the sensational Patti LuPone and an enchanting Zoe Lister-Jones at different eras.) A freak chandelier accident, he is told; one that smashed his mother’s head and killed her on the spot. (Yes, smashed heads is another Aster mainstay and in “Beau,” there are many.) Heartbroken and overcome with remorse, Beau leaves for the funeral only to fall victim to an accident himself on the heels of a frenzied incident.
If you think everything thus far sounds way too weird, allow me to gently break that “Beau is Afraid” gets even stranger, hazier and more mystical from here on out, and this is by all means the highest possible compliment. After obtaining the audience’s complete buy-in through an impeccably visualized, fast-moving first chapter, full of Fincher-esque hallways and studious ‘70s-cinema grit, Aster gradually dials up the weirdness of his imagination and slows things down considerably with every segment that follows it.
Ultimately, his chaptered opus culminates in a movie—and it is a lot of big-screen-event movie—that begs to be revisited, dissected, discussed and reconsidered over time. In that regard, “Beau is Afraid” is both great art and a great artifact. Prophetically speaking, few cinematic experiences this year will measure up to following Phoenix on his epic quest as he spills his guts and (prosthetic) nuts on the screen, in front of repeat Aster DP Pawel Pogorzelski’s psychedelic lens.
The following segments involve a mischievously posh suburban home, a mysterious theater collective made up of orphans, an animated segment (more on this later), a vivid plunge into a childhood memory on a cruise ship and a sexual encounter with an old friend. The aforementioned classy home is haunted by the memory of a deceased son, and occupied by his parents Roger and Grace—played, stupendously, by Nathan Lane with his signature skeptical grin and a cavernous Amy Ryan, respectively—as well as their druggy daughter Toni (a raging Kylie Rogers, who tears through one of the film’s most memorable scenes).
Instantly, this section feels like the film’s most Aster-ian effort, if you will. Tensions brew amid four-walls and around dining tables—settings deeply familiar to the filmmaker—as this cagey couple and their peculiar offspring in eerily matching pajama sets politely keep a distraught (and very afraid) Beau captive. For whatever reason.
His encounter with the stage troop gets even trippier, exquisitely branching out to the above-said animation—signifying a journey into Beau’s psyche—and a childhood memory of a summertime romance cut way too short by mommy (Armen Nahapetian is ingeniously cast as the young Beau). For the animated segment, Aster works with the Chilean duo Joaquín Cociña and Cristóbal León of “The Wolf House,” creating a phantasmagoric fragment, both in step with the film’s sensory style and a little outside of it. When Parkey Posey arrives in the form of the old friend Elaine she bursts open Beau’s clogged erotic artery with the backdrop of perhaps the funniest-ever use of a Mariah Carey tune.
Aster’s own mom, an accomplished poet, once wrote, “My memories are clumped together into a bundle of constantly interacting fibers, growing increasingly nebulous as they reach out to an outside view.” This line might be both the perfect entry point to “Beau is Afraid” and a meditative finish to it after experiencing it. It’s an extraordinary and deliciously demented study of a tortured soul of clumped memories. At it’s core, it’s surprisingly approachable. After all, Beau is just a guy trying to be whole and unburdened for the first time in his life, free of his family’s past crimes and ingrained fault lines. Aren’t all of us on that secretly hopeful journey, too?
Admittedly, it’s all a bit much, an exercise in familial grief, inherited burdens and compressed feelings of guilt, but that excess is entirely the point of Aster’s longest and most ambitious film to date. It is that excess of a little “Truman Show,” a little Greek Mythology, a little Kafka and whole lot of Freud that hypnotizes and disarms you before his extravagance, while inexplicably inviting you to do it all over again.
There’s a terrific new musical struggling to be set free in Michael R. Jackson’s “White Girl in Danger.” All it would take to facilitate the escape is for a tough dramaturg to cut the show by a good third. In its current incarnation, the soap opera-inspired “White Girl” runs nearly three hours with intermission at Off Broadway’s Tony Kiser Theater, where it opened Monday.
One of the many splendors of Jackson’s previous musical, “A Strange Loop,” is the speed and economy of the narrative. “White Girl” plays like an inspired but deeply flawed first table reading that needs to shed several repetitive scenes and at least three of its endings. For sure, there is a great ending here, among the lesser ones, in which the musical’s big secret is revealed to stupendous effect. And that’s the other wonderful thing about “White Girl in Danger”: just when you’ve given up hope that the show can turn itself around, Jackson and his talented cast startle us back to attention with their theatrical legerdemain. Given the chance to revisit any new musical that opened this season (“Kimberly Akimbo” opened Off Broadway in 2021), I’d pick “White Girl” in a TKTS heartbeat.
Regarding the one great ending that this musical does deliver, it features James Jackson Jr. in an extended tour de force solo that appears to be as strong an indictment of the predominate culture and as personal a confession of that culture’s seductive powers as anything Michael R. Jackson put in his autobiographical “A Strange Loop.” Since the song “Centering Myself” features the show’s Big Reveal, that secret can’t be mentioned in this review, but it’s definitely worth the long wait when the big moment finally arrives near the end of “White Girl,” obscured only in part by all those other flimsy finales.
What can be discussed here is one of the other characters that Jackson Jr. plays: Clarence is that archetypal smiling Black janitor who appears occasionally throughout the musical to deliver the kinds of observations that Eddie “Rochester” Anderson often delivered whenever his boss, Jack Benny, made a mess of things. Jackson Jr. turns Clarence’s few shuffling appearances into a series of high points that never fail to slap the show back into focus.
And what a lot of messes there are on stage!
“White Girl in Danger” is the title of a TV soap opera that has captured the attention of Keesha Gibbs (Latoya Edwards), a young Black actress who wants to break into her school’s teen social circles and storylines dominated by the bad girl Megan White (Molly Hager), the severely anorexic Maegan Whitehall (Alyse Alan Louis) and the chronically masochistic Meagan Whitehead (Lauren Marcus). Those last names say all you need to know.
Jackson’s book delights by having one actor (Liz Lark Brown) play all three of the mother characters and one actor (Eric William Morris) play all three boyfriend characters. These two triple assignments are performed by the very chameleon-like Brown and Morris in grand musical-comedy style. In the process, they deliver the gamut of Hallmark-ready nonsense regarding fraught teen lust and twisted family life.
Along the way, Keesha politely drops hints (repeatedly) that she can take the place of Molly Goodwhite, a peer who we learn has been “bumped off” when her body found in the nearby woods, and join the girl band that needs to win the upcoming rock contest. Hager, Louis and Marcus parody everyone from Cyndi Lauper to Courtney Love in the show-stopping song “Basic.” Rebuffed, Keesha eventually starts her own band (Kayla Davion, Jennifer Fouche, Ciara Alyse Harris) only to learn that starring in a soap opera of her own can inspire the wrath of anyone whose last name begins or ends with the word “white.”
The far greater burden of being the star of “White Girl” is that all the best moments go to the racist supporting characters. Jackson’s book rarely distinguishes Keesha from the other generic heroines in Broadway’s current crop of mediocre new musicals.
More problematic is the performance of the multi-tasking Tarra Conner Jones, who plays Keesha’s mother in the same raucous shouting voice that she brings to the roles of a nurse, a school lunch lady, an assistant district attorney and a TV personality named Mammy. (Commercials for Mammy’s show, among other ads, run during the intermission.) Some modulation of Jones’ yelling would help, but that wouldn’t solve the disaster of Jonathan Deans’ crude sound design that reduces every high-pitched singing and speaking voice to an indecipherable audio static.
Jackson’s book also sticks Jones and Edwards with a big courtroom scene that goes completely off the track when it tries to replicate the comic climax of “Tootsie.” In that 1982 movie, Dustin Hoffman’s Dorothy parodies the soap opera genre’s many ridiculous storylines before revealing the character’s real male identity. The moment works in “Tootsie” because it is delivered fast and under two minutes. The moment in “White Girl” doesn’t work because it goes on and on and on, and by this late point in the show, every joke regarding the musical’s warped conventions of soap opera plots has been thoroughly exhausted.
But back to the high points: A supporting player in Act 1, Jones dominates the last half-hour of “White Girl” with a series of loud and coarsely amplified anthems that are now de rigueur in most stage musicals.
Lileana Blain-Cruz’s direction of “White Girl” is reminiscent of her Tony-nominated work on the recent lackluster “Skin of Our Teeth” revival at Lincoln Center. Several bits of business are clever, but when Jackson’s book drags and/or repeats itself, which is often, Blain-Cruz leaves her actors stranded.
Then there’s Jackson’s score. Upon first listening, it emerges as mere pastiche, with a heavy emphasis on bubble-gum, which makes sense for a musical about soap operas. After “A Strange Loop,” most of the songs here are a disappointment, but it might be wise to remember that the label of “pastiche” was also thrown at Stephen Sondheim’s “Follies” and Jeanine Tesori’s “Caroline, or Change” when they first opened.
So who knows how we’ll look at “White Girls” a decade or two from now? Hopefully, after some judicious cuts have been made, it will be a shorter, more focused “White Girl.”
Jackson’s new musical is presented by the Vineyard Theatre and the Second Stage Theater.
“Nightmare comedy” is the perfect phrase to describe Ari Aster’sBeau is Afraid, a darkly funny Kafkaesque odyssey that defies easy categorization. The writer and director of Hereditary and Midsommar is back with yet another emotionally complex saga, this one his most ambitious yet. The visionary combs his literary and cinematic influences, infusing them into a surreal, emotionally tumultuous journey that’ll prove divisive for its cryptic, unhurried storytelling.
Beau Wassermann (Joaquin Phoenix) lives with constant unrelenting anxiety smack in the middle of a chaotic city. His ramshackle apartment with thin walls and unkind neighbors seems peaceful compared to the violent chaos outside in the streets. Yet, the most significant source of Beau’s emotional turmoil stems from his strained relationship with his mother, Mona (Patti LuPone). A planned trip home instills panic, prompting Beau’s longtime therapist (Stephen McKinley Henderson) to prescribe medication and coping measures. The sudden, shocking news that Beau’s mother died sends him reeling, giving him enough courage to face his fears and embark on an existential voyage home.
Photo credit: A24
Aster showcases his warped sense of humor in catapulting Beau, a neurotic and ill-equipped protagonist, into a hero’s journey. The filmmaker creates no shortage of impressive sight gags and cringe moments to present how terrifying the world appears to Beau, who lives in constant fear and paranoia. Even the act of crossing the street to buy a bottle of water becomes a nearly insurmountable task as various denizens and obstacles descend upon Beau. Not even Beau’s sanctuary feels safe; hostile unseen neighbors and a pesky Brown Recluse problem highlight his constant instability. Aster wrings a macabre sense of humor through the impressive depth of field here.
The filmmaker fills the frame with background characters and violent acts that give viewers much to take in, instilling laughter and shock as it ensures its on-edge hero feels suffocated by the madness. Phoenix’s primal portrayal ensures Beau’s neurosis is matched by a sympathetic vulnerability that maintains rooting interest as Aster throws every imaginative, insane barrier in Beau’s path. And it gets increasingly wilder as it goes.
The more this peculiar reflection of our reality throws at Beau, the more he retreats inward, becoming passive to the world’s eccentricities as he finds himself instead unearthing repressed memories and past choices that led to his bizarre predicament in the present. Aster propels his lead through an audacious visual odyssey that employs various techniques and styles to mark the filmmaker’s most impressive effort yet. Animators Joaquín Cociña and Cristóbal León, behind the eerie animated horror feature The Wolf House, present a stunning second act sequence that sees Beau working through some of his absent father issues. It’s another example of how Aster manipulates form and technique to explore Beau’s fragile psyche. The almost soothing introspection of Beau’s daddy issues contrasts with the profoundly disconcerting terrors mined from his unhealthy relationship with an overbearing mother.
Photo credit: A24
It’s here where Aster wields his horror with a sharpness. Flashbacks of a young Beau with a younger yet no less controlling Mona (Zoe Lister-Jones) underscore the “nightmare” part of this “nightmare comedy.” As Mona tucks her son into bed, a monologue about inherited traits becomes ominous as only the kaleidoscopic colors of his bedside projector lamp light her face in the pitch-black room. Past and present bleed together in true nightmarish fashion, slowly building the nightmarish puzzle that is Beau’s relationship with his mother.
Beau is Afraid exemplifies Aster at his most daring and unrestrained. Beau’s journey home brings no shortage of physical comedy and suffering, but it’s more interested in the internal voyage and traversing the murky depths of Beau’s id. A three-hour runtime reliant upon a methodical, sometimes meandering, unpacking of Oedipal themes through symbolism and visual form over conventional storytelling makes Aster’s latest the most ambitious yet least commercially appealing. The cryptic unpacking of a life bogged down by guilt and repression comes with no lack of jarring visuals and moments bolstered by riveting performances and a seamless blending of style, form, and genres.
Aster drops viewers directly into Beau’s head, resulting in a wildly ambitious odyssey through one warped mind as it navigates Beau’s memories, dreams, nightmares, and fears far removed from reality. It doesn’t just play with one genre, but all of them, and often at once. That Beau is Afraid remains steadfastly untethered to realism makes for Aster’s most divisive effort yet, but those willing to ride the wave of genre and mind-bending insanity will find themselves rewarded by a profoundly imaginative and audacious artistic experience unafraid to explore unwieldy themes through a Kafkaesque odyssey as dementedly funny as it is often horrifying.
Beau is Afraid releases in limited theaters on April 14 before going wide on April 21, 2023.
The anticipation for The Marvels grew even further after Marvel Studios shared a brief tease of the sequel’s trailer alongside confirming when it will arrive online.
Marvel Studios officially released a new teaser ahead of the debut of The Marvels‘ first trailer, which will arrive on Tuesday, April 11.
The 17-second teaser includes snippets of audio from the trailer, such as Teyonah Parris’ Monica Rambeau saying, “Hello?” and “What the?,” andSamuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury asking where Captain Rambeau is.
Marvel Studios also confirmed that it will premiere on tomorrow’s episode of Good Morning America on ABC, indicating that it will be released online sometime between 8:00 a.m. and 9:00 a.m. ET.
Watch the teaser below:
What Will Captain Marvel 2’s Trailer Show?
Last year’s D23 Fan Expo gave attendees the first-ever look at The Marvels, showcasing a preview of its light-hearted tone and the dynamic of the main trio of Captain Marvel, Monica Rambaeu, and Ms. Marvel.
It’s possible that some, or even most of the footage, will debut in tomorrow’s teaser trailer for Captain Marvel 2. There is also a chance that the teaser could prove how “anime-inspired” the sequel really is.
That said, it appears that Marvel Studios’ marketing for Captain Marvel 2 will be in it for the long haul. This could mean the studio is confident in the sequel since a longer-than-average marketing campaign means a higher marketing budget.
The Marvels is set to premiere in theaters on November 10.
The Flash star Grant Gustin addresses rumors of him having a cameo in The Flash movie. As The Flash TV show is getting ready to end, a different Scarlet Speedster’s adventure is continuing on the big screen. This summer, Ezra Miller’s The Flash movie is officially hitting theaters, only weeks after The CW drama ends. The DCEU film will serve as a reset for the new DC Universe.
In a TVLineinterview, the Arrowverse was asked directly about the rumors claiming he’ll have an appearance in The Flash. Over the last two years, there have been reports suggesting Gustin is in The Flash movie. However, the Arrowverse star said he is not in The Flash movie, sharing the following:
SCREENRANT VIDEO OF THE DAYSCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT
No! [laughs] Yeah, there have been a lot of rumors out there for a long time. No one has come out directly and asked me, like ever on the record. People ask me on the street all the time, and yeah, I’m not keeping some big elaborate secret.
How Grant Gustin’s Barry Allen Could Appear In The Flash Movie
Despite his denial, Gustin could be pulling an Andrew Garfield during the Spider-Man: No Way Home press tour. Even if Gustin is in The Flash movie, he would not be allowed to say admit it due to the secrecy surrounding superhero movies. But if Gustin were somehow to be in The Flash, there are several ways his Barry Allen could show up. The Flash is tackling the multiverse, as evidenced by Micheal Keaton’s Batman.
Even if Gustin didn’t film new scenes for The Flash, there is no reason archived footage of Gustin’s Flash couldn’t be included. In a montage from The Flash season 2, when traveling to Earth-2, viewers saw various Earths in the multiverse. They served as homages to past and present DC media, which included Supergirl. Beyond that minor kind of reference, there is precedent for Gustin and Miller to share the screen together as The Flash.
During Arrowverse’s Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover event, Miller became the first DCEU actor to enter the DC TV franchise. It was during this moment that Gustin’s Flash essentially named Miller’s version of the character. So a cameo in The Flash movie would be a nice continuation of that moment. Whether The Flash movie addresses their first encounter in the Arrowverse crossover, or includes any other reference to Gustin’s Barry Allen, remains to be seen.
We’ve got a ton of Star Wars news to break down, with new details emerging on new entries into the franchise that’s not too far, far away. Starting with both Dave Filoni and James Mangold set to direct two separate upcoming Star Wars films. Detailing what we can expect further from each director, Filoni’s movie will apparently close out the New Republic, tying up the stories told within the Disney Plus shows, The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, and the upcoming Ahsoka series. For Filoni, this’ll be a great way for the interconnected stories we’ve seen play out on the Disney Plus live-action offerings with Mandalorian, Book of Boba Fett, and soon Ashoka, to tie up any loose ends left on the small screen, and potentially bring these characters together for a galactic battle fit for theaters. That’s a tall order, but if anyone’s up to the task, it’s Dave Filoni, who was a protegé of George Lucas’ prior to the Disney era of #StarWars. And finally, John Leguzamo has no plans to see the Super Mario Bros. movie.
Regis Patoff (Christoph Waltz) is the perfect character to design around. Christoph Waltz brings a sinisterly brilliant, poignant, personality-piercing character at the center of the series The Consultant to life. He is a personality that can’t be identified with the history and is untraceable, but at the same time can’t be ignored in the present. He’s a freight train barreling toward us, and we can’t escape or look away.
His very presence evokes mystery, intrigue, and intense visceral fear. These ingredients allowed me to create a storytelling thread throughout my set design for the series. I often balanced on a precarious tightrope on whether to be covert or overt about the design intention in my choices. The scope was up for examination, everything from colors, texture, and light in the built scenery, set dressing, and props.
Designing for the Themes of The Consultant
I was captivated by a few prevailing themes demonstrated to the viewer throughout the show that drove my most significant decisions. First is a magnetic sense of “entrapment.” It was of paramount importance, and it is what we, as the audience, are being drawn into through the eyes of our characters.
The second is the graphic theme in architectural navigation is the “labyrinth.” It can be found in the company logo and many interiors as it became a system of ordering space in the set design.
The third was “imprisonment.” I utilized the theme of prison bars metaphorically to convey this perception. The fourth was a multi-dimensional exposure of self-centered, cruel intentions revealed in the emotional vulnerabilitiesof Patoff’s victims. I tried to create as many connections, leaks, and clues that could convey these messages.
Clarence Major III’s concept examples for ‘The Consultant’Credit: Courtesy of Clarence Major III
There are a couple of examples of how these concepts translated into the physical spaces featured in the show.
CompWare’s main permanent set exterior façade has a cavernous entrance that evokes a prison-like cave. Just inside the main set, the color palette is a mix of stark and subtle coloring, emphasizing tones of gray and intentional red alongside yellow enhancements. A large set element is the wall of monitors which structurally holds the monitors in a way that resembles the concept of prison bars. The ventricular glass creates that same prison bar sensibilities with the lined obscured glass that appears throughout our main set.
As I mentioned, the logo and other graphics containing a labyrinth maze are a subtle clue into how employees feel internally as our story unfolds. A large graphic, which follows this theme, can be found behind the staircase and over the top of the stair as a light fixture is emphasized as a key element within the space. Finally, the main stairs in the lobby are an insecure, seemingly unstable steel spline and glass structure that is like navigating on a knife’s edge of fear.
My concept was to create something shiny and modern and then pull you into a maze where you’re caught off guard, not knowing which direction to move in or where you are in this environment (a nod to The Shining). It creates an unbalanced, unstable, and seemingly unwieldy sense of dread, causing the characters to enter a cave or a dungeon. It is evident in the jewelry store.
Set design of the jewelry storeCredit: Courtesy of Clarence Major III
The front of the store is shiny and modern, but the smelting room in the back resembles a dungeon or prison, which causes desperation. Another example is the route from the elevator to the record room with a server room in the middle. You see decaying walls as you move through the maze of servers, contrasting the modern and sleek main office interior.
The servers were set up as a maze or labyrinth to mimic the CompWare logo, and the lighting in the servers was designed to emphasize the difference between the characters that move throughout it. Another opportunity to create an uneven precarious surface was the glass and steel staircase leading up to the perched office, where the only way to stabilize yourself is by looking at the unsettling object that makes you uneasy in the first place. In this case, it is Patoff.
With as many environments as possible, I was very conscious of making sure that you couldn’t move through the space directly by always putting hurdles in the way and adding jarring breadcrumbs along the way to enhance the unsettledness the characters feel. One of my favorite examples is the sequence in Season 1 Episode 3, Friday. Craig (Natt Wolf) and Patoff start their evening at Chippers, a down-and-dirty dive bar, and move to the shiny object of the Sky Bar that Patoff invites Craig to.
As the characters move from the contrast of Chippers to the Sky Bar, I paid attention to give the audience clues into the future. Before presenting the bar itself, I wanted to present a small environment, the elevator, and a dark space, the chamber outside of the club. Those spaces included small nods to the main themes as the hostess’ circular podium made of prison-like gold bars.
Then the Sky Bar itself is a vast open wide space with lots of shiny objects and a massive contrast to the dive bar we just came out of. We used a color palette of blue and gold with red drinks, giving a clue into who Patoff might be. The blue is representative of the concept of sadness. I even created a blue crying tree that only appears for a second on screen, but it typifies what is going on internally for Craig as we move further into the story.
The bar set design for ‘The Consultant’Credit: Courtesy of Clarence Major III
Behind him, I also placed a gold cage light fixture resembling gold prison bars, and the daggers over his head represent the sword of Damocles. The gold is a clue into who Patoff is internally, the links of how far we may go for success, the jeweler, and the final skeleton in the game.
The production design propels a story forward overtly or covertly, so it’s more about distinguishing which is more salient at the time and will move the story forward. It’s even more critical in horror/thriller storytelling, where one needs to feed these facets to the viewer correctly.
For example, in The Consultant, we toyed with the idea of war-torn architecture and leaking water like in a torture chamber. These key thought patterns evoked the underlying nervousness, and uneasy emotions conveyed in the story. The production design is a delicate balance in learning that things can be better caught than taught. Sometimes good design is silent, and sometimes it needs to be in your face to help you understand the deeper meaning in this sculpted three-dimensional space that we, as viewers, experience.
Clarence Major III’s set design in ‘The Consultant’Credit: Courtesy of Clarence Major III
My chief desire was to execute visual eye candy in a way that allows the viewer to experience the conveyed underlying narrative viscerally. Our medium is powerful when we get it right, as we bring a certain level of understanding to the table as designers that help us understand these worlds and stories a little better. For me, it’s about making sure there are as many thoughtful, meaningful, and storytelling layers of this idea as demonstrated throughout the landscape of each frame.
Al Jaffee, Mad Magazine’s innovative and influential cartoonist, has died. As confirmed by his granddaughter, Fani Thomson, Jaffee died of multi-system organ failure on Monday. He was 102.
Jaffee’s contributions to cartooning, comics, and American comedy, cannot be overstated, but they can be summed up in one compound word: Fold-In. The cartoonist redefined how magazines could be read with the 1964 invention of the Fold-in, a parody of Playboy and Life’s centerfolds. Of course, magazines already encouraged readers to unfurl their images, allowing viewers a longer gaze at the subject. But Jaffee’s innovation encapsulated the spirit of Mad, asking the reader to participate in this visual gag, recontextualize the original meaning, and invert the world around them into something as truthful as it was funny.
But this was only a mere frame of Jaffee’s story. Born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1921 to Jewish immigrants Mildred and Morris, Jaffee moved with his deeply-religious mother and three brothers to her hometown of Zarasai, Lithuania, at age 6. His father, the owner of a department store in Savannah, remained in the U.S., sending his boys care packages of comics every few months. “We would just sit there and read them for days and days,” Jaffee told Vulture in 2009. “My brother Harry, who was also artistic, would take these Sunday comic pages, and we’d cut them up and turn them into little books. We would provide our own dialogue, maybe with a Lithuanian joke or two.”
Upon his return to the States, he attended the High School of Music and Art in New York City, where he met many of Mad’s original Gang of Idiots: Harvey Kurtzman, Al Feldstein, John Severin, and Will Elder, all attended high school with him. Unfortunately, cartooning was not allowed in their fine arts school, but that didn’t stop Jaffee, who sold his first comic to Spirit creator and fellow future luminary Will Eisner fresh out of high school.
Jaffee’s early career was filled with stories like this. After working with Eisner, he moved to Timely Comics, later known as Marvel. There, he worked under a 19-year-old wiz kid named Stan Lee, who tossed him the script for the police spoof “Squad-Car Squad.” “If you can do this, you can work for me,” Jaffee recalls Lee’s challenge. He continued to work with Lee on numerous titles in Marvel’s pre-superhero pantheon, including “Ziggy Pig And Silly Seal” and “Patsy Walker,” which included one-page strips by Jaffee’s old schoolmate and future Mad editor Harvey Kurtzman. The old friends stayed in touch. Around this time, Jaffee’s schoolmates, including Kurtzman, Elder, and Severin, were putting out the first issue of Mad for EC. In 1955, Kurtzman invited Jaffee aboard. Jaffee would much of the rest of his career in the pages of Mad.
In 1964, Jaffe changed the shape of magazines with the invention of the seminal Mad Fold-In. Inspired by the “elaborate full-color fold-outs” in the pages of Playboy, Life, and National Geographic, Jaffee asked if he could “mutilate the magazine” with a “cheap, black-and-white Fold-In.” Editor Al Feldstein, who succeeded Mad’s original EIC Harvey Kurtzman, loved it. “‘Do it, and if it mutilates the magazine,’” Jaffee remembered Feldstein saying, “‘the kid’ll buy a second one for his collection.’ Ever the money man.” The success of the Fold-In became a curse. About three weeks after turning in the inaugural foldable, Feldstein wanted more. The Fold-In became one of Mad’s signature features, along with another mid-60s creation by Jaffee, “Snappy Answer To Stupid Questions.”
Throughout the 60s and 70s, the Gang of Idiots continued to deepen their relationship. As an incentive, publisher Bill Gaines invited the staff on trips to meet publishing goals. So, in 1960, they traveled to Haiti to visit Mad’s singular Haitian subscriber and, in 1971, to the offices of Krokodil, the Soviet Union’s humor magazine.
In 1967, Jaffee divorced his first wife, Ruth Ahlquist, whom he married in 1945, and fathered two children, Richard and Debbie, together. Roughly a decade later, he married Joyce Revenson. They remained together for 45 years until she died in 2020.
“I had two jobs all my life,” Mr. Jaffee told the New York Times in 2020. “One of them was to make a living. The second one was to entertain. I hope to some extent that I succeeded.”
Just like the entire series, the ending of “Tiny Beautiful Things” — adapted from Cheryl Strayed’s best-selling book — is messy.
The eight episodes follow Clare Pierce (Kathryn Hahn) as she starts writing for an anonymous advice column called Dear Sugar, while her own shifting personal life both fuels her responses and brings up other emotions. Clare attends marriage counseling with her husband, Danny Kinkade (Quentin Plair), as the two are not seeing eye to eye in their marriage. At the end of the series, Danny shows Clare a letter that she wrote as Dear Sugar that encouraged the advice seeker to “just go” and let go of something if they knew deep down that it was time.
“Danny has to re-find himself. He has to re-find the man he was that attracted Clare in the first place,” Plair told TheWrap. “I don’t think until he can do the work on himself, he’s not gonna have a chance with anyone.”
Clare never told Danny that she had started writing as Dear Sugar, and Plair thinks that if Danny knew she had written the words he reads to her before he leaves, he wouldn’t have said what he said.
“Probably the realization on her end it’s like ‘Man, this thing that’s hurting so much, I’m finally figuring [it] out. I’m coming to this man willing to work on myself and he’s literally giving me my own words back at me to leave,” Plair said. “I can’t imagine what a person might go through to have their own advice that they’ve given, being used in this sense, in a way against them. That’s gotta be a tough thing to sit with. I know that if Danny knew, she had written those words he would have not said that.”
Hahn agrees with her costar that Quentin made the decision for both of them — a call that Clare didn’t want to make.
“I think that Danny was already kind of going down that path for himself. I don’t think the letter necessarily changed it for him,” she told TheWrap. “I think that if he had known it was me, he would have known that maybe I just would have made that choice first. I just hadn’t given myself permission. I couldn’t take my own advice.”
Showrunner Liz Tigelaar told TheWrap that while she wanted the series to have a solid ending, she would keep working with Strayed if it were an option.
“Limited series are kind of my jam. My mom instilled in me, probably because of endless childhood improv plays, that everything always needs to have a beginning, middle and an end,” she said. “I feel like because of the nature of this mother-daughter story, we really wanted to tell something that felt satisfying and complete with adult Claire’s relationship to her own mother’s death.”
“But of course, you know, I’ve been working with Dessi Gomez Cheryl [Strayed] for a year now. Would I do anything to keep this going and do anything and everything with her forever?” she added. “I could work on ‘Tiny Beautiful Things’ for the rest of my life.”
Strayed added, “We can make tiny beautiful a lot of things.”
The Star Wars franchise has seen many celebrity cameos come and go, but fans took instant offence at the appearance ofLizzoandJack Black in episode 6 of The Mandalorian, calling their scenes out as the death of the franchise. While this may sound a little over dramatic, the opinion was shared by many online users, who called out the show for taking away the ability for them to be immersed in the Star Wars Universe when big-name celebrities were put front and center on screen.
Black and Lizzo appeared in The Mandalorianas Captain Bombardier and The Duchess respectively, rulers of the Outer Rim planet Plazir-15 who engage Din Djarin and Bo-Katan to discovery the root of a rogue droid problem. It seems though that some took a particular dislike to this kind of cameo, with one Twitter user saying that Disney have made the Star Wars franchise “for the popular kids who giggled & high-fives the bullies for stuffing you in your locker.” They also called out the franchise for no longer being “for us nerds.”
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Although the cameos were divisive, it was clear from the many similar reactions that a lot of those fans who believe the Star Wars franchise is made for them and only them are not impressed by such prominent celebrities showing up in the show, not matter how they fit into the story. You can see some of the comments below.
One Star Wars Icon Believes Star Wars Needs Its Big Name Cameos To Build Its Audience
It seems that one person who is not at all against this type of of cameo appearance is Star Wars legend Billy Dee Williams. As one of of the original trilogy’s stars, Williams certainly earns his opinion on the modern era of the franchise, and as he noted to TMZ, cameos by stars such as Lizzo and Jack Black are what get new fans interested in the saga. He said:
“It’s a good idea, there’s no question about it. I mean the whole idea is to try and bring it to the younger people today, and you have to utilize the people who are popular today. I mean it’s a business, you can’t forget about that part of it. You’re always trying to build an audience, so building an audience means you have to incorporate or bring in the sensibilities of a younger group of people so you have to use the wonderful talented people who are very popular today to attract new audiences.”
One curious thing to note is that there were not many social media users who had an issue with Back to the Future star Christopher Lloyd also appearing in the episode and in fact appearing in a scene with Lizzo and Black. However, Star Wars has never been far from including some big name cameos, although many are often used as droid voices or behind Storm Trooper helmets. Perhaps this episode just had its celebrities a bit too in your face for some fans to handle.
The cause of death for Frank Vallelonga Jr., an actor who appeared in “Green Book” and “The Sopranos,” has been revealed.
Last November, police responded to a 3:50 a.m. call reporting that a body had been dumped outside of a factory near 1243 Oak Point Ave in the Bronx. The man, who was later identified as Vallelonga Jr., was found unconscious and pronounced dead at the scene, according to the NYPD. He was 60.
Steven Smith, 35, has been arrested and charged with concealment of a human corpse.
According to the New York Post and the Daily News, the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office on Monday concluded in its autopsy report that Vallelonga Jr “died of an accidental overdose of fentanyl and cocaine.”
TheWrap has reached out to the New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner to confirm.
Vallelonga Jr. was the son of the real-life bouncer and actor Frank “Tony Lip” Vallelonga, who Viggo Mortenson portrayed in the 2018 Best Picture winner “Green Book.” Vallelonga Jr. played his uncle Rudy Vallelonga in the film that his brother Nick Vallelonga co-wrote with Peter Farrelly and Brian Hayes Currie.
“Green Book” tells the true story of Bronx native Tony Lip’s tenure as a bouncer who was later hired to drive pianist Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali) on a tour through the Jim Crow-era South.
Vallelonga Jr. landed his first acting gig in 1994’s “A Beautiful Disguise,” written and directed by his brother Nick. He appeared on an episode of “The Sopranos,” on which his father played mob boss Carmine Lupertazzi, in 2004.
Vallelonga Jr. is survived by his wife Angela and 17-year-old son Frank, as well as his brother Nick.
Following reports that Taylor Swift and Joe Alwyn broke up a few weeks ago, some fans are looking for confirmation in the 33-year-old musician’s Eras Tour performances.
On April 9, the day after the breakup was first reported, one fan on TikTok shared a video of Swift performing “Champagne Problems,” claiming the artist was “getting emotional” while singing the lyrics, “Sometimes you just don’t know the answer ‘til someone’s on their knees and asks you.” According to a recent report from People, multiple sources say the former couple was “talking about marriage as recently as a few months ago” but ended up splitting over “differences in their personalities.”
The TikTok video of Taylor Swift’s “Champagne Problems” performance has well over six million views and one million likes, but some commenters weren’t convinced. “She was probably emotional because it was opening night and is overwhelmed by the reaction,” one user replied to the video, while another wrote, “I mean if I was singing ‘Champagne Problems’ I would get emotional regardless of my relationship.”
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However, this isn’t the only supposed piece of evidence of the split that fans have scrounged up. Some fans believe the “Mastermind” singer hinted at the breakup when she switched two Folklore songs on her setlist in late March. “Hold on cause Taylor switched from ‘Invisible String’ (a song about hopeful love to ‘The 1’ (a song about past love) on the set list,” a fan account tweeted on April 8. (For more on that, click here).
Even amicable breakups can be heartbreaking, but one source tells People that the pair still has “a lot of respect” for each other. “[Taylor] doesn’t have anything bad to say about Joe,” the source said. “They just grew apart. Taylor is staying very focused on her tour right now.”
Documentarian Dawn Mikkelson, known for her work on ”Finding Her Beat,” “Risking Light” and “The Red Tail,” is exploring the lives of six of the Minnesota RollerGirls in her upcoming documentary, “Minnesota Mean.”
The documentary feature will make its world premiere at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival on April 15 followed by screenings at the Florida Film Festival on April 17 and the Sunscreen Film Festival on April 29.
‘Minnesota Mean’ is a riveting human drama about the pounding heart of roller derby: powerful, self-sufficient women from all walks of life and identity (straight, gay, trans, etc.),” the doc’s logline reads. “It’s a vital and relevant story of triumph, loss, strength, determination, and a search for balance between individuality and community.”
The documentary follows a year-in-the-lives of six core members of one of the most competitive roller derby teams in the world, the Minnesota RollerGirls. The roller derby athletes are seen training for the Women’s Flat Track Roller Derby, all in an effort to win the competitions top prize, the Hydra.
Mikkelson directed, produced and edited alongside editors Kimberly Brown, SHawn Hissami and M’Daya Meliani. Cliff Dahlberg, Nanne Sorvold, Carolyn Draayer, Sarah Moua, Brenda Pikarski, Maribeth Romslo, Michaek Sutz and Mikkelson each served as film’s cinematographers.
In addition to “Minnesota Mean,” the documentarian is set to produce and edit documentary, “Ribbon Skirt Warriors,” which has been directed by Keri Pickett and executive produced by Jane Fonda and Winona LaDuke.
Federal officials are again warning travelers to avoid using public USB charging stations — often found in airports, hotels or other travel hubs — because the docks can be altered to introduce malware or tracking software onto personal devices.
The FBI recently reminded people that the safest option is to use an electrical outlet with a personal USB cord and charger, or use a portable charger.
It doesn’t appear the recent warning was tied to a particular incident simply a reminder of the problem, which has become a growing concern in recent years.
Avoid using free charging stations in airports, hotels or shopping centers. Bad actors have figured out ways to use public USB ports to introduce malware and monitoring software onto devices. Carry your own charger and USB cord and use an electrical outlet instead. pic.twitter.com/9T62SYen9T
In 2019, the Los Angeles County district attorney warned about the crime that has become known as “juice jacking,” telling Californians to watch out for public charging stations or USB cords. That advisory said scammers have found a ways to introduce malware that can lock someone’s device or export data and passwords.
The Federal Communications Commission, which has warned about the cybertheft tactic since 2021, provides these tips to avoid being the victim of such a crime:
Bring your own charger for an electrical outlet, a car charger, and your own USB cables when traveling.
Carry a portable charger or external battery.
Consider carrying a charging-only cable, which prevents data from sending or receiving while charging, from a trusted supplier.
Using public WiFi networks and Bluetooth connections can also be vulnerable to hackers or cyber crimes, the FCC warned.
Marvel films have attracted many Hollywood talent but don’t expect Bob Odenkirk to appear in the MCU anytime soon. The Better Call Saul actor recently opened up about what type of characters he likes to play and how it doesn’t align with what Marvel Studios produces.
“I always like to keep things grounded, relatable and smaller. I don’t think I’m built for that world,” he told The Independent in a recent interview. “I’m built for characters that make you feel like that guy could live next door.”
Some would argue that his 2021 action film Nobody is a character that doesn’t fall in the category that he just described, but Odenkirk has a different perspective on Hutch.
“[Hutch] is still a family man, but his relationship to violence is different. He’s changed, but he’s still got a long way to go to find real balance in how he’s living his life,” he said about the character he’s reprising in an upcoming sequel.
Odenkirk added, “I care about this more than you could imagine. You’d think it’s the personal story of my life, and not an action-genre movie.”
“I was very surprised by Nobody. I had initiated that project because I had a feeling that the character I was developing in Better Call Saul was the kind of character you see in an action film,” he said. “He has earnest desires and he was willing to sacrifice himself…I still train multiple times a week and if I get my way you’re going to see me doing more action. I found the action sequences a great deal of fun and close to doing sketch comedy…I love the early Jackie Chan films which had humor in them. I’d like to get that in the future.”
Lara Cohen, after exiting Elon Musk’s Twitter last fall, is joining Linktree as VP of partners and business development.
At Linktree, Cohen will oversee business development, strategic partnerships with tech platforms and the company’s community of creators across entertainment, music and other verticals. She reports to Linktree president Mike Olson.
Linktree, founded in 2016, lets social media users post a single link in their bios to a customizable landing page with links to multiple sites. The service has a freemium model, with basic service free to use and subscription packages with enhanced features and support.
Cohen joins the company after a string of recent senior hires, which co-founder and CEO Alex Zaccaria announced last month: chief technology officer Farnaz Azmoodeh (formerly with Snap), chief product officer Sam Rogoway (previously at Headspace) and chief marketing officer Monica Austin (former head of marketing and communications at Calm).
Cohen had worked at Twitter from 2013-17, leading the entertainment talent partnerships team. She left for a year-long stint at OutCast Agency as SVP of entertainment partnerships and influencer marketing, before rejoining Twitter in 2018.
Earlier in her career, Cohen served as editorial director at Us Weekly (when it was owned by Wenner Media). She has a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Rochester and currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
