Netflix’s Farzar trailer opens with a prescient (and gleefully self aware) question: “Is this gonna be more like Futurama or Rick And Morty?” To that, Farzar’s ruler Renzo (Lance Reddick) has a simple response: “Shut the fuck up.”
The history of the planet, according to unreliable narrator Renzo, goes like this: “This is Farzar. It was a peaceful planet before the evil aliens invaded. But Renzo protected his people from the aliens and their diabolical leader Bazarack. …Then Renzo married queen Flammy, totally for love, not just to gain power, even though she’s a slightly older woman.”
But Renzo’s son Prince Fichael (Dana Snyder) may soon discover that “all is not what it seems and he may be living a lie.” Fiachel believes it’s his “destiny to rid this planet of evil,” so his dad assigns him a “quote-unquote team” to help him do so. Leaving their domed human city, the ragtag squad will find more than just “evil aliens that want to kill and/or eat them,” according to the series’ synopsis, per Deadline.
The gang is in for some very obscene adventures, which find them popping in and out of the orifices of multiple giant creatures. The comedy promises the kind of intergalactic “nasty shit” you can’t find anywhere else (even Futuramaor Rick And Morty).
Farzar is written and executive produced by Roger Black and Waco O’Guin, who created Netflix’s Paradise PD and Comedy Central’s Brickleberry. “We couldn’t be happier that Netflix finally ‘put a ring on it,’” the duo said in a statement when the series was announced in 2021. “It’s an awesome network full of nice people and a great place to work! Now we can finally get those matching cherry red PT Cruisers we’ve had our eyes on.”
Reddick and Snyder are joined in the voice cast by David Kaye (Eternals), Jerry Minor (Brickleberry), Kari Wahlgren (Rick and Morty), Grey Griffin (Loud House) and Carlos Alazraqui (Kamp Koral).
Reality is overrated. Take a break and nestle up to the genre of television that’s the best escape: science fiction! The best new sci-fi shows to watch right now include new takes on classic franchises and wholly original stories, and our list has added Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Love, Death + Robots. All three of those shows are completely different from each other, which is part of why sci-fi is so great, right? For more variation, don’t miss Apple TV+’s Severance and Amazon Prime Video’s Undone.
Below you’ll find plenty of shows across various streaming platforms that are about future societies, clones, robots with feelings, galaxies far, far away, and even immortality. Our list of all the best sci-fi shows to watch right now covers several streaming services, including Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, HBO Max, Apple TV+, and more.
The Newest Sci-Fi Shows
Ewan McGregor, Obi-Wan Kenobi
Disney+
What it’s about: Star Wars’ Obi-Wan Kenobi gets his own series that bridges the prequel films with the original trilogy Why it’s worth watching:Obi-Wan Kenobi picks up with the titular Jedi master (Ewan McGregor, reprising his role) 10 years after the events of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, and it also marks the return of Hayden Christensen as Anakin Skywalker. Rupert Friend stars as the Grand Inquisitor, the latest franchise villain with elaborate face makeup, and Moses Ingram plays Reva Sevander, another Jedi-hunting Inquisitor who uses her own methods to accomplish her goals. How many seasons: 1
Love, Death + Robots
Netflix
What it’s about: Animated sci-fi shorts go all over the place Why it’s worth watching: David Fincher produces this collection of animated shorts that cover everything from sentient robots to massive man-eating sea crabs. Each short, which runs less than 20 minutes, features a unique animation style and original story. It’s perfect for short attention spans. How many seasons: 3
Anson Mount and Ethan Peck, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
Marni Grossman/Paramount+
What it’s about: A prequel to the Original Series follows Captain Pike on the USS Enterprise Why it’s worth watching: It’s always dangerous to dip into one of sci-fi’s most revered franchises for a new take, but Paramount+ has had good success launching new Star Trek franchises, and Strange New Worlds might be the best of the bunch. Set a decade before Star Trek: The Original Series and emulating it, Strange New Worlds sees Kirk predecessor Captain Pike (Anson Mount) at the helm of the Enterprise with a young Spock (Ethan Peck), a total noob Nyota Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding), and the rest of his crew as they explore the universe in standalone episodes. How many seasons: 1
Angelique Cabral and Rosa Salazar, Undone
Amazon Studios
What it’s about: A woman with unique powers helps her deceased dad solve his own murder Why it’s worth watching: This utterly unique animated series from the producers of BoJack Horseman stars Rosa Salazar as Alma, who discovers she has the power to move through space and time, an ability her dead father (Bob Odenkirk) helps her hone to find out how he was killed. It’s animated through rotoscoping, where film is drawn over so the animation preserves actors’ work, which it also uses to achieve Alma’s glorious travels through the continuum. Emotional, funny, and mind-blowing, Undone is one of those rare gems that deserves to be on more people’s watchlists. How many seasons: 2
Halo
What it’s about: A cybernetic super-soldier realizes he may not be a weapon for good Why it’s worth watching: The long-awaited Halo adaptation finally arrives after wearing out its tires on a long, bumpy development road, but the end result is better than naysayers say it is. Pablo Schreiber suits up as Master Chief, uncovering an ancient alien weapon (the titular Halo), a human military using him as a pawn, and a group of hostile aliens that want him and all humans dead. It’s got action AND butts. How many seasons: 1
Adam Scott, Severance
Apple TV+
What it’s about: A company makes its employees divide their consciousnesses into their work selves and their home selves Why it’s worth watching: The idea of a solid work-life balance gets taken to the max in this trippy, unique, and funny series in which workers at a strange company voluntarily have their minds severed so that their work-life is unaware of their personal life, and vice versa. Naturally, the company is up to no good, and as the employees begin to wonder more about their outside lives, things get very weird. The spectacular cast includes Adam Scott, Patricia Arquette, John Turturro, and Christopher Walken. How many seasons: 1
More recommendations:
More Great Sci-Fi Shows
Abubakar Salim and Amanda Collin, Raised by Wolves
Coco Van Oppens
What it’s about: A pair of androids are tasked with saving humanity by raising children on a barren planet, but some religious fanatics have other ideas. Why it’s worth watching: Ridley Scott added his touch — he executive produced the series and directed the first two episodes — to this out-of-this-world-and-any-other-world drama that asks big questions about parenting and religion — “Is a robot having kids an affront to God?” comes up more than once. It’s extremely weird, in a very good way, creating a universe unlike any other you’ve seen, and though its initial episodes appear to be pretty self-contained, there are hints pretty early on that there’s a lot of story to tell. Plus, Vikings‘ Travis Fimmel does some pretty good impressions of ducks. Did we mention that it’s weird? How many seasons: 2
Alan Tudyk, Resident Alien
James Dittinger/Syfy
What it’s about: An alien visits Earth, assumes human form, and is mistaken for the town doctor… but his plan is to kill all humans. Why it’s worth watching: Alan Tudyk. The science-fiction mainstay (Firefly, Doom Patrol) is at his most charming as an extra-terrestrial in disguise in this mystery comedy that’s part small-town mystery, part procedural comedy. Based on a graphic novel series, Resident Alien runs on the threat of Harry (Tudyk) getting exposed as an invader, as well as the strange lessons he learns about these oddball humans. How many seasons: 2
Oats Studios Vol. 1
Netflix
What it’s about: A collection of short science-fiction films from filmmaker Neill Blomkamp Why it’s worth watching: Blomkamp (District 9) is one of sci-fi’s great directors, combining raw action with desolate landscapes to create a moody atmosphere that jumps off the screen. This collection of shorts that span anywhere from 8 minutes to 30 minutes and genres from black comedy to doomsday apocalypses show off Oats Studios’ tech and Blomkamp’s ability to tell a tight story. It’s like Black Mirror. How many seasons: 1
Lou Llobell, Foundation
Apple TV+
What it’s about: In the future, a galactic empire struggles to hold on to its power when a mathematician predicts its demise and a descent into dark ages. Why it’s worth watching: An adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s novels, Foundation is Apple TV+’s big-budget swing to get a genre drama to the masses, and it looks great. The story is a big task as well, as different characters are stationed on different planets and various ambitions create conflict with others. It’s a sort of Game of Thrones in space, if you will. How many seasons: 1
Tom Hiddleston and Wunmi Mosaku, Loki
Disney+
What it’s about: What Loki got up to while Avengers: Endgame was going on Why it’s worth watching: Tom Hiddleston‘s God of Mischief is back, and free from that pesky conscience, in Marvel’s latest Disney+ series. This one is a crime thriller that follows the alternate version of Loki who stole the Tesseract in Avengers: Endgame, an event that basically broke reality. Now he has to fix it. He’s recruited by Owen Wilson‘s Mobius M. Mobius at the mysterious Time Variance Authority (TVA) to travel through history and correct the timeline he messed up. Forgive me for the blasphemy of comparing a Marvel series to a DC one, but it kinda sounds like Loki’s Legends of Tomorrow. How many seasons: 1
Michael Dorman, For All Mankind
Apple TV+
What it’s about: America and Russia race to be the first on the moon… to establish a moon base, in this alternate history drama. Why it’s worth watching: If you want to watch some historical fiction but also have an itch for science-fiction, For All Mankind is your one-stop shop. The show posits what would happen if Russia landed on the moon first, and the great space race never ended as the U.S. and Russia tried to one-up each other for the decades that followed. Full of politics, social issues, and tons of what-ifs for space geeks, For All Mankind is for anyone who wants some grounded science-fiction. How many seasons: 2 (Season 3 out Jun 10)
Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany, WandaVision
Marvel/Disney+
What it’s about: The Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Scarlet Witch and Vision find themselves… trapped inside classic TV comedies? Why it’s worth watching: Better late than never, WandaVision is the first television show from the MCU, and represents the future of Disney+, which is kind of a big deal. For fans of Marvel, it’s a must-see, soft-launching Phase 4 of the MCU and affecting the events of the upcoming movie Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. As for the show itself, it adds comedic dimension to stars Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany while a slowly unfolding mystery keeps things captivating. How many seasons: 1
The Mandalorian
Disney+
What it’s about: A bounty hunter zips about the post-Return of the Jedi Star Wars universe with some very precious (and adorable) cargo. Why it’s worth watching:The Mandalorian is arguably one of the best Star Wars products to be released… ever. As a story that’s only slightly connected to the rest of the franchise’s canon, it’s easy for anyone to jump into right away and enjoy the episodic stories of Mando (Pedro Pascal) and Baby Yoda, the most legit pop culture icon we’ve been blessed with in years. The real reason to tune in is that The Mandalorian is the TV equivalent of candy; it’s throwback, swashbuckling television that looks absolutely incredible, with flecks of tiny Star Wars Easter eggs sprinkled in. It’s pure entertainment of the highest degree. How many seasons: 2
Nick Offerman as Forest, Devs
Miya Mizuno/FX
What it’s about: A woman investigates the disappearance of her boyfriend, who was working on a top-secret project at a powerful tech company in San Francisco. Why it’s worth watching: After movies like Ex Machina and Annihilation, Alex Garland is proving to be one of sci-fi’s most exciting creators, and his TV debut features all his trademarks. Devs is packed with philosophy and intellectual discussions about existence, technology’s place in society’s advancement, and the dire consequences of tinkering with fate, almost to the point that it’s too cerebral. But take it slow and you’ll find a beautifully filmed single-season series that has big points to make about the dangerous precipice advanced computing has us inching toward. How many seasons: 1
Abigail Spencer, Malcolm Barrett, Matt Lanter; Timeless
Darren Michaels/Sony/NBC
What it’s about: A team of three travel throughout time to save the future from a mysterious organization that wants to change history Why it’s worth watching: Time travel shows can become messy affairs of paradoxes, brain-busting theories, and plot holes, but Eric Kripke’s Timeless used time travel simply and splendidly in this throwback, swashbuckling adventure series. A historian, an engineer, and a soldier are sent back in history to prevent the villainous organization known as Rittenhouse from altering history in order to change the future to their advantage, meeting famous overlooked figures from history — often minorities and/or women — along the way. In that sense, Timeless is almost as educational as it is exciting. But the real strength of Timeless comes from its characters and their relationships, like the epic romance between Lucy (Abigail Spencer) and Wyatt (Matt Lanter). Timeless is a real crowd-pleaser, the kind of sci-fi series for people who usually shy away from the genre. How many seasons: 2
Tatiana Maslany, Orphan Black
What it’s about: A woman discovers that she may not be the only one of… her Why it’s worth watching: Orphan Black burst onto the scene in 2013, coming out of nowhere to stun critics and viewers with its crafty premise: a con artist witnesses the suicide of another woman who looks just like her, leading her down a rabbit hole of clones and conspiracies. The BBC America series combines action, science-fiction, and humor extremely well, creating characters you’ll adore (Alison Hendrix is a legend) and anticipate venturing into each others’ orbits. Chameleon Tatiana Maslany won an Emmy for her roles as the many different versions of the same woman, though she really should have won at least three. The first seasons are the strongest, but Maslany and the great cast stay great throughout its run. How many seasons: 5
Battlestar Galactica
Syfy, NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images
What it’s about: A reimagining of the 1970s classic in which alien robots threaten to wipe out humans Why it’s worth watching: Battlestar Galactica is considered one of the all-time great sci-fi series, and when it was released in the mid-2000s, one of the best TV shows period. Ronald D. Moore’s take adds a wrinkle that increases the paranoia tenfold; the Cylons can impersonate humans, meaning the crew of the Galactica realizes that some of its members could be Cylons in disguise, even if the Cylons don’t know it themselves. Watch the miniseries that launched the series first, then dive into the next two seasons, which is some of the greatest sci-fi television ever made. Later seasons tail off a bit, and the ending wasn’t well-received by all, but the show is still well worth the journey. How many seasons: 4
Adrianne Palicki, The Orville
What it’s about: In the far future, the crew of a space ship explores the galaxy to bring alien cultures into the Planetary Union, while also sometimes manufacturing pot brownies in the ship’s food synthesizer. Why it’s worth watching: The Orville is an homage to Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generationfrom Family Guycreator Seth MacFarlane, who fawns over all things Trek while also not afraid to make fun of it. It’s hard to tell what kind of show The Orville wants to be at some points because it’s really trying to be all of them: an interstellar stoner comedy, a sci-fi swashbuckler, a workplace drama, a futuristic Twilight Zone. But that’s part of the fun. Season 1 has some bumps, but Season 2, especially the midseason two-parter “Identity” is an improvement. Though the first two seasons aired on Fox, Season 3 is a Hulu exclusive. How many seasons: 3
David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, The X-Files
Fox
What it’s about: A pair of FBI agents investigate the paranormal and inexplicable — UFOs, ghosts, and even cannibals. Why it’s worth watching: It’s a classic for a reason. The X-Files set the mold with Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) — the definitive believer and skeptic, paired up to investigate the unexplained. But the Fox procedural was always too smart to draw a clean line between faith and science; even Mulder wanted proof, and even Scully had her religion. This is the most scientific thing about the science fiction of The X-Files (which is otherwise not all that sciency): The show’s heroes are two people willing to upend their entire belief systems to get the truth. Mulder and Scully asked the messy questions, and it changed genre television. –Kelly Connolly How many seasons: 11 Bonus:9 Shows Like The X-Files That You Should Watch Next
J.K. Simmons, Counterpart
Starz
What it’s about: A government desk jockey (J.K. Simmons) an an office in Berlin learns that an event split the world into two parallel universes, and the two sides are slowly approaching an all-out war against each other. Yikes! Why it’s worth watching: The gimmick gives its wonderful cast (which includes Olivia Williams and Harry Lloyd) the opportunity to play dual roles as each universe has a “counterpart” in the other. Simmons leads the way as his counterpart is a superspy, and watching him play against himself is incredible. Fans of espionage and science-fiction will have their heads full with the intricately plotted and twisty story. How many seasons: 2
Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Mackenzie Davis; Black Mirror
Laurie Sparham/Netflix
What it’s about: This anthology series tells different tales each episode about the dangers of technology and the depravities people will use it for. From digital worlds to dark dystopias, Black Mirror will have you second-guessing whether you should cut every cord you own just to be safe. Why it’s worth watching: If you’re in the mood to start hating the human race, Black Mirror is the sci-fi show for you. While most of these stories are a little bit depressing (and some are borderline horrific), a few are uplifting enough to cleanse your palate (check out Season 3’s “San Junipero” or Season 4’s “Hang the DJ” for some heart eyes). The best part about this binge is that while you’ll definitely get hooked, the fact that it’s an anthology series means you won’t necessarily find yourself powering through episodes at 3 a.m. since each episode is a standalone story. How many seasons: 5
Brian J Smith, Elyse Levesque, David Blue, Alaina Huffman and Jamil Walker Smith, Stargate Universe
Syfy, NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images
What it’s about: A group of scientists, military personnel and a few civilians accidentally find themselves transported onto an ancient ship, thousands of lightyears from Earth. While stranded in strange galaxies, tensions run high as they attempt to explore the unknown universe and find a way back home. Why it’s worth watching: Out of all the Stargate series that could have made this list, we picked Stargate Universe because it combines all of our favorite sci-fi elements: a brilliant group of stranded strangers, space, time travel, political infighting and terrifying aliens. It’s literally a one-stop shop for every nerd-tastic fantasy you’ve ever had with the bonus of great performances and top-notch storytelling. We do warn you, however, Stargate Universe was canceled after Season 2 and ended on a pretty huge cliffhanger, so you should go into this binge knowing that when you get to the end, you’ll want to pull your hair out wishing there was more. You’re welcome for the heads up. How many seasons: 2
Fringe
What it’s about: A team of experts led by a kooky old scientist (John Noble), his son (Joshua Jackson), and an FBI agent (Anna Torv) investigate strange occurrences around the country, X-Files style. Their work leads them to discover something entirely new that will change the world forever. Why it’s worth watching: The J.J. Abrams-produced series is one of the best broadcast science-fiction shows of all time, particularly in its first three seasons, and perfected the art of the serialized procedural by weaving the show’s deep mythology and excellent character work into weekly standalone stories, making it easy to binge or watch in spurts. And by the time the end of Season 1 starts, you’ll have a hard time stopping. How many seasons: 5
Aaron Stanford and Amanda Schull, 12 Monkeys
Syfy, Dusan Martincek/Syfy
What it’s about: After a deadly virus kills 7 billion people, the survivors living in 2043 send a scavenger named James Cole (Aaron Stanford) to the past to stop the virus from being released in the first place. Naturally, time loops and even forbidden romance get in the way of his mission to save the human race. Why it’s worth watching: 12 Monkeys is a show you have to pay close attention to in order to keep track of the changing timelines and loops, but ultimately the mythology and the world-building are just too good to pass up! Plus, this show has some of the most kick-butt women on TV, which is harder to find than it should be in the sci-fi genre. With the fourth and final season come and gone, you’ll be able to binge the whole thing start to finish! How many seasons: 4
Peter Capaldi, Doctor Who
Ray Burmiston, BBC
What it’s about: The Doctor, a humanoid alien of an extinct race called the Time Lords, travels the universe in his (or her!) Tardis, a time-traveling spaceship that takes that shape of a phone booth. Together with his (or her!) human companions, The Doctor regularly saves the world from destruction with his (or her!) quick wit and timey-wimey adventures. Why you should watch: If you’re looking for something a little less intense and more whimsical, Doctor Who is the show for you. Typically, each episode travels to a new time period or galaxy (often both) where the Doctor and companions of the moment have wild adventures while escaping the evil clutches of the Daleks and Cybermen. Although, when you least expect it, the show knows just how to hit you where it hurts. So although it’s a show of whimsy, be prepared to cry your eyes out too. Jodie Whittaker joined the series as the first female doctor in Season 11. How many seasons: 13
What it’s about: Far in the future, scientists have found a way to digitize and save human consciousness, allowing people’s minds to be copied and transported from one body to another, essentially making humans immortal. When one of the richest men in the universe is murdered — though his copied consciousness obviously survives — he hires, Takeshi Kovacs, a mercenary hundreds of years old to figure out who “killed” him. In Season 2, Kovacs, in an entirely new body, searches for his long lost love while investigating a series of new murders. Why it’s worth watching: This futuristic series will have your head spinning with awesome technological advancements and a mystery that’s almost too tangled to unravel. The kicker, though, is the flashback portion of the saga that not only ties well into the overall narrative but will have you begging for a spin-off based completely in the past. How many seasons: 2
Marie Avgeropoulos, The 100
DIYAH PERA, DIYAH PERA/THE CW
What it’s about: Nearly 100 years after nuclear war wipes out the human race on Earth, the only survivors are the members aboard a joint-space station called The Ark circling the globe. When overpopulation becomes a problem, The Ark decides to send 100 teenage delinquents to the ground to see if the Earth is habitable, but these misfits find more than bargained for when they arrive. Why it’s worth watching: Assuming the words “apocalypse” and “teens” didn’t get you, The 100 is worth a binge simply for the dynamic storytelling alone. Rather than focus on hot teens running a community, the show hones in on the lengths to which humans will go to stay alive and whether that survival requires you to lose what it is that makes you human. It’s a pretty insightful look into the future, and with seven seasons under its belt, it’s a good, long binge. How many seasons: 7
Nathan Fillion, Alan Tudyk, Gina Torres and Adam Baldwin, Firefly
What it’s about: Space cowboys. Enough said. Why it’s worth watching: What list would be complete without the cult classic Firefly? This short-lived series took fans by storm back in 2002, though it was canceled after only 14 episodes. That makes it a quick binge full of shoot-outs and smuggling that will leave you begging for more. If you want an end to the story, you’ll have to find the wrap-up movie, Serenity, which is currently streaming through Starz. How many seasons: 1
Louis Hofmann, Dark
Julia Terjung / Netflix
What it’s about: Thanks to a wormhole in the underground caves beneath the local power plant, strange things start happening in the small German town of Winden. Time travel, disappearing children, and family secrets intertwine in a thrilling mystery that spans three generations. Why you should watch: Dark is Netflix’s first German-language Original, meaning you’ve either got to watch with subtitles or the English dub. Though it may take you a minute to get into it, once you do, you’re in for a wild ride. Tangled webs of time travel and family secrets pair well with the show’s odd sense of humor, making for a cool mystery that will keep you binging late into the night. How many seasons: 3
The Expanse
Kurt Iswarienko/Syfy
What it’s about: Set in a future where humans have colonized the solar system, prejudices have divided humanity into three camps: Earth, Mars, and The Belt (an asteroid belt). But when a mysterious alien technology is discovered and a political conspiracy spanning the solar system begins to unravel, it becomes up to the idealist James Holden to try and save humanity from the potential alien weapon — and themselves. Why you should watch: The most intriguing part of The Expanse is the intricate world-building and political machinations that underscore the cool sci-fi stuff like space battles and even gravity torture. The interplanetary conflict at the core of the show’s story creates a ton of juicy arcs that all build toward some seriously unpredictable reveals. How many seasons: 5
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President Joe Biden was Jimmy Kimmel’s guest Wednesday night on “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” and during their conversation, Kimmel asked Biden something that quite a lot of frustrated people have been asking themselves: Why isn’t Biden issuing executive orders to deal with the epidemic of gun-related mass murders the way Donald Trump used that presidential power for his priorities?
Biden’s answer: He thinks Trump abused the constitution and doesn’t want to “emulate” him. You can watch the exchange below in a preview of the interview posted ahead of the show’s broadcast, and read the transcript after if you’re unable to watch now.
“Can’t you issue an executive order? Trump passed those out like Halloween candy,” Kimmel asked.
:I have issued executive orders, within the power of the presidency, to be able to deal with these, everything having to do with guns, gun ownership, all the things within my power. But what I don’t want to do,” Biden said, “and I’m not being facetious, is emulate Trump’s abuse of the constitution and constitutional authority.”
“I mean that sincerely, because I often get asked, ‘Look, the Republicans don’t play it square, why do you play it square?’ Well, guess what? If we do the same thing they do, our democracy would literally be in jeopardy. It’s not a joke,” Biden continued.
“I understand that argument,” Kimmel responded, “but also it’s like you’re playing ‘Monopoly’ with someone who won’t pass go, who won’t follow any of the rules. Then how do you ever make any progress, if they’re not following the rules?”
“You gotta send them to jail,” Biden said.
The full interview will be online later. “Jimmy Kimmel Live” airs at 11:30 p.m. Eastern and Pacific on ABC.
Speaking of jail — or more likely, not jail — Biden’s appearance on Kimmel comes one night before the start of prime time congressional hearings investigating the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection stoked by Donald Trump in order to overturn the election and install himself in a second term illegally. Biden, however, is in Los Angeles for the 2022 Summit of the Americas.
In the decade since Caribou’s Dan Snaith launched his Daphni alias with a flurry of DJ edits, it has evolved from a clearinghouse for club tools into an amorphous side project where the only constant is a focus on moving bodies. “Cherry” is the first new Daphni production in three years, and it’s by far the heaviest thing Snaith has released in that guise. Where classic disco and house have formed the foundation of many Daphni tracks—his last outing, 2019’s “Sizzlin’,” sped up a giddy horn riff from an obscure 1981 Bermudian funk record—“Cherry” tips its hat to the perennially futuristic sounds of Detroit techno.
The track is built around bright, glassy FM synths that chime like tiny bells, and across the track’s six-minute run, Snaith carefully teases the balance between chaos and control. The bell-tone riff moves in seasick syncopations, periodically tripping over the edges of the rhythmic grid; roughly halfway through, he brings the song to a full stop, indulging in a second-long fakeout of pure silence. Pity the poor DJ who isn’t yet familiar with the song’s twists and turns and, confronted with that heart-stopping moment of dead air, thinks that the song is over. For dancers, of course, that precarious moment will be simply thrilling, like the seas parting at 134 beats per minute. But for all that slipperiness, the rounded synth chords that occupy the track’s midrange are rich and reassuring, and the drums interlock like clockwork. Out of the collision of those opposing impulses emerges the track’s spirit: giddy and anarchic but also strangely determined. It’s a summer anthem with sunrise raving written all over it.
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COMING TO THEATERS! I’ve spent my fair share of time in underground Asian video stores perusing the multiple shelves and bins of imported martial arts movies. So it’s not lost on me that the genre has a massive following in the States. I just didn’t think the Midwest was a significant hub of that fandom until I experienced Ryan Harrison’s WTF comedy, Ninja Badass. Running at over 100 minutes, the film has a simple plot, which should say a lot about it.
Writer/director Harrison stars as Rex, a useless white guy who lives in a small redneck town and makes out with a plastic doll on his mother’s couch. By mistake, he uncovers a sinister underground cult known as The Ninja VIP Super Club. It’s led by the menacing Big Twitty (Darrell Francis), who over the years has become a powerful supernatural entity by drinking the blood of hot women and cute puppies.
Rex is thrown into the mix when he falls hard for a hot chick, who then is kidnapped by a team of Ninja VIPs. After a futile effort to rescue her, Rex is saved by a sensei in army fatigues, known as Haskell (Steven C. Rose). Unfortunately, Haskell’s arm is ripped off trying to stop Big Twitty. Not to worry though, Haskell uses his ninja power to grow it back, but for now, his arm is a long sausage with a tiny hand attached at the end. In the meantime, he vows to train Rex to become a ninja, like him, and save the town’s hot chicks and cute puppies.
“…vows to train Rex to become a ninja, like him, and save the town’s hot chicks and cute puppies.”
On first impression, I’d describe Ninja Badass as a silly and insane homage to the over-the-top karate films of the 1970s and 80s (my favorite being The Flying Guillotine). But, I’ll say this, Harrison is clearly a fan of these old martial arts films and has put massive effort into making a faithful parody of the genre while incorporating his midwestern life. Even better, I see no indication whatsoever that Harrison has ever taken a martial arts class at any point in his life. Yet, as chaotic as the plot gets, we have a cohesive narrative that goes off in several directions while still feeling focused.
As a comedy, Ninja Badass serves up one hilarious joke after the next. Harrison lampoons everything and everything, including h***y rednecks, corrupt town leaders, ninja henchmen, and a complete lack of knowledge of Asian customs and cultures. I’m still laughing at Haskell’s dubbed dialogue and his not-even-close-to-fluent Japanese.
But here’s the real reason to watch the film. It’s a visual feast of rotting food for the eyes. I’m pretty sure the lion’s share of the budget went to the practical gross-out gags and make-up, plus a plethora of violent visual effects. The film is loaded with ample amounts of decapitations and dismemberments. Gallons upon gallons of blood are sprayed, thrown, and dumped in this gory mess. There are also plenty of CG effects for a half-dozen explosions, various training segments involving dangerous farm animals, and a room full of cute puppies.
Ultimately, this uber-low-budget production is about a bunch of losers ripping each other to pieces. If that’s not a reason to see Ninja Badass, I don’t know what is. The humor is sophomoric at best, and again if that’s not a reason to see this film… Finally, I’d like to mention my favorite scene involves both boobs and bacon. I love this movie, and it will make the perfect palette cleanser for the uptight Hollywood dreck in theaters now (I’m talking about you, Downton Abbey).
Ninja Badass comes to theaters and VOD on Friday, June 10, 2022.
Yaroslava Sushko holds a photo of her son, Serhii V. Sushko, during a funeral for 27 Ukrainian servicemen who died fighting the Russians, in Dnipro, Ukraine, on June 3. (Wojciech Grzedzinski/For The Washington Post)
DNIPRO, Ukraine — The mourners arrived well before the military funeral was to begin, entire families crowding around a single coffin, side by side on a warm, sunny morning with other families and coffins.
Two lines of soldiers, perhaps 100 in all, stood at attention as the Rev. Dmitro Povorotny and several other Ukrainian Orthodox priests entered the small cemetery, signaling that the mourners should step back from the caskets so the ceremony could begin.
But one woman, overwhelmed with grief, could not. She sat on a bench crying as relatives comforted her. When a military band began playing Ukraine’s national anthem, she wept harder.
“Glory to Ukraine,” an officer called out.
“Glory to the heroes,” mourners responded.
To visit Krasnopilske cemetery during a military funeral is to experience the brutal sweep of Ukraine’s war with Russia and the terrible intimacy of a family’s loss. Twenty-seven soldiers were laid to rest last Friday. Of those, 12 were buried as unknowns in a military section that grows larger almost by the day.
For Povorotny, the small cemetery on the outskirts of Dnipro speaks to the sacrifice his people have paid in blood since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the invasion on Feb. 24. In just three months, the cemetery’s military section has added 293 graves, compared with 175 in the previous eight years,since war broke out with Moscow-backed separatists in the eastern Donbas region in 2014.
“You can see how the war changed. And this is just one cemetery, one of thousands of cemeteries in Ukraine,” said Povorotny, a military chaplain and archpriest in the Orthodox Church of Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region’s diocese.
Povorotny has conducted about 10 mass burials at the cemetery since the war began, he said in an interview following Friday’s ceremony. Every week, he conducts one or two individual funerals, too. He estimated that more than 700 members of the military have been killed in the Dniepropetrovsk region alone.
But when he looks into the faces of the mourners, he said, he’s convinced he can see their faith in ultimate victory, despite their losses and pain.
“Putin called it a special operation. Before that, they called it a civil war,” Povorotny said, holding a hand over the wooden cross hanging from his neck. “For us, it’s a real war of independence.”
The funerals that occur daily around Ukraine are also unfolding with new protocols that have been rewritten to reflect Western customs, such as those followed by the United States, and uniquely Ukrainian traditions, instead of those inherited from Russia and the Soviet Union.
And they come as the nation discusses creating a new national cemetery in Kyiv that would serve Ukraine as Arlington National Cemetery has served the United States. Volodymyr Vyatrovich, a member of the Rada, the Ukrainian parliament, and a former head of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, said in a Telegram post last month that parliament had agreed to create a national cemetery somewhere in or around Kyiv.
To develop new military funeral practices, the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory looked at the country’s history of funeral rites, from the short-lived Ukrainian National Republic in the early 20th century to the burial practices among Cossacks, the bands of warriors who roamed Ukraine’s steppes hundreds of years ago. The institute also analyzed the modern military funeral rituals of Belgium, Israel, Poland, Turkey and the United States and visited U.S. military cemeteries.
Their work culminated in a 2019 video by the Ministry of Veterans Affairs that shows in detail how a military funeral should be conducted. Some of the rituals would be familiar to anyone who has attended a funeral with military honors at Arlington National Cemetery, including a new practice of draping the casket with the Ukrainian flag before folding and presenting it to the family. The new protocols also stipulate that up to six soldiers may fire three volleys in salute.
At Friday’s services, some of the new rituals were on display, such as the folding of the Ukrainian flag — though perhaps with less spit-and-polish precision than one might find where the custom has been conducted for generations.
The 27 coffins — each draped with a blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flag — were laid out before the ceremony in three neat rows with only enough room to walk between them. A wooden cross was laid atop each, with a sign bearing the soldier’s name in ornate script. And on the coffins containing unidentified remains, the sign said, “Here rests an unknown soldier forever to be remembered.”
Many mourners were dressed in black, including several older women wearing kerchiefs, but others wore T-shirts and shorts. Many were in uniform, including a young soldier whose military-green T-shirt was neatly folded and pinned over the stump of his missing right arm. Another mourner laid her cheek on a coffin, stroking thepolished wood with her hand amid a hush so profound that the faint fluttering of the flags could be heard.
“When I look at the flags, it’s like looking at the souls of angels — and there are lots of them, you know?” said Tetyana Kaikova, 34, who attended Friday with family members from around the country for the funeral of her cousin, Serhii V. Sushko. His tank was destroyed on his birthday, May 11, in fighting near the front lines in Donbas.
Though he was pulled from the wreckage, he suffered severe burns and died three days later at a hospital in Dnipro. Sushko, who lived in Kherson and served in a tank crew in the 57th Motorized Brigade, was 49.
When her cousin wasn’t fishing, Kaikova said, he was often in the kitchen whipping up a delicious pot of borscht. Kaikova said she hadn’t seen him in a year or so, but they talked on the phone often about getting together at her dacha, or countryside retreat, for a cookout.
“He was always smiling, always,” said Kaikova, who works in an international trade firm.
Sushko’s once and future wife, Angela Pavluk, was also there to lay him to rest. After 18 years of amicable divorce, she and Sushko were making plans to marry again.
Sushko was proudly self-reliant, self-effacing and patriotic, she said. A firefighter and paramedic, he refused to use a government pass that allowed him to ride public transit free and enlisted in the army soon after war with Moscow-backed separatists broke out in 2014. He didn’t even bother to tell anyone about two military commendations that he had received since February.
“He wasn’t afraid of anything. He went there from Day 1,” Pavluk said.
Marrying again was a decision that came from staying in touch all those years, and sharing in the lives of their three children and a granddaughter, Pavluk said.
“He was a really good father,” Pavluk said. She even set aside coins and stamps that he might like to add to his beloved collection.
In recent months, Sushko became so eager to wed that he offered to renew their vows online, Pavluk said.
“And I said that I do not want to do it that way,” she recalled. “We’ve already had a wedding before, so I just wanted to have a small family gathering. This is something that we wanted to do, but now, well … we just didn’t make it there.”
Instead, there would be a large family gathering, but of a different and terrible kind — to mourn, not celebrate.
During the funeral ceremony, as Povorotny and the other priests intoned the names of the dead and chanted, and the incense smoke drifted through the crowd with thesweet aroma of myrrh and balsam, a thunderous sound rolled over the ceremony as an antiaircraft missile was fired skyward somewhere south of the city.
The rocket cut across the sky, leaving behind a plume of white smoke that rose, twisted and began to dissolve.The priests continued their chanting, uninterrupted, as mourners turned their eyes upward, searching the sky.
Serhii Korolchuk, Wojciech Grzedzinski, Ievgenia Sivorka and Kostiantyn Tatarkin contributed to this report.
Remembering her love. Sophia Bui, the longtime girlfriend of General Hospital star Jack Wagner’s son Harrison Wagner, is opening up about his death the best way she knows how — through a “love letter to [her] babe.”
“Seven years, on and off, round and round we loved each other. For better or for worse,” the Minx star, 27, wrote via Instagram on Wednesday, June 7, under a photo of herself with her late beau. “In sickness and in health. Sorry, I missed yr calls in the middle of the night these last few days. I miss sleeping in yr polar bear arms, curled up. I miss sending you silly animal videos. I miss you sending gorgeous songs that made me cry.”
Bui, who called Harrison “the balm that soothed my soul,” shared that she was “so brokenhearted” but the California native would always be “my guy.”
“I was never alone in this world with you. You were the balm that soothed my soul,” the Texas native gushed, adding, “I will always choose to love you in this world and in any other life.”
The Top Gun: Maverick actress concluded the post with a trail of broken heart emojis.
Harrison Wagner/Instagram
In addition to the touching tribute, Bui also posted a handful of Instagram stories of herself and Harrison throughout the years, including one of Harrison kissing her cheek as they smile for the camera.
Earlier on Wednesday, Harrison’s older brother Peter Wager broke his silence in memoriam of his younger sibling’s memory. “Always with you,” the actor, 31, captioned a handful of throwback photos of the two via Instagram.
The heartfelt dedications come just one day after Harrison was pronounced dead in North Hollywood, California, at 5:14 a.m. local time, according to the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner report obtained by Us Weekly on Tuesday.
The DJ’s body was found in a parking lot in North Hollywood on Monday. Following the autopsy, the medical examiner deferred the cause of death and more investigation has been requested. According to the filing, once the tests and studies come back, the doctor will evaluate the case again.
Harrison’s father Jack, 62, has yet to speak out about the sudden loss of his son, who he shares with ex-wife Kristina Wagner. The former soap opera stars, who met on the set of General Hospital, tied the knot in 1993 before calling it quits 13 years later. (The former couple also share son Peter and the Melrose Place alum is dad to daughter Kerry from a previous relationship.)
Prior to his death, Harrison faced a long battle with addiction that led to his disappearance in 2016. His dad Jack, 62, turned to social media for help finding his son at the time, writing via Twitter, “I fear for my youngest son’s safety. Harrison has struggled w drugs & alcohol just as I did when I was younger. He’s relapsed & is MIA 5 days.”
Luckily, the music producer was found five days later following the scare. Harrison, for his part, became increasingly vocal about his attempts to turn his life around.
“It is NEVER TO LATE TO MAKE A CHANGE IN ONES LIFE Let alone, if u are struggling believe me … I’ve been there. But we come out on the other seeing the world through a different Lens ❤️☀️,” he wrote via Instagram in September 2021.
Harrison’s final post, shared on May 22, was also one of optimism. “Focus. YOU are left with YOU and your thoughts. ?,” he captioned a picture of himself in Los Angeles.
Listen to Us Weekly’s Hot Hollywood as each week the editors of Us break down the hottest entertainment news stories!
Elon Musk may be about to get more data from Twitter than he knows what to do with.
Twitter’s board of directors, after resisting Musk’s demands for data backing up its claims about spam and bot accounts representing less than 5% of daily active users, has decided to change course, the Washington Post reported, citing an anonymous source “familiar with the company’s thinking.”
Now, in an effort to close the deal, Twitter will offer Musk and his team access to its full “firehose” of raw data from the social platform, which includes 500 million-plus tweets posted daily, as early as this week, the Post reported.
When Musk inked the deal in April to buy Twitter, he waived his right to conduct deep due diligence on the company’s operations. Musk is on the hook to pay a $1 billion breakup fee if he walks away from the deal (and could be the target of lawsuits by Twitter shareholder or Twitter itself) unless he can demonstrate that Twitter significantly misled him about factors related to the company’s value. Wall Street has viewed Musk’s saber rattling over the spam/bot percentage as an attempt to drive down the deal price, or to give him a pretext to nix the acquisition.
Third-party researchers have lent credence to Musk’s skepticism about Twitter’s sub-5% claim about spam and fake accounts. For example, a recent study by data analytics provider GlobalData estimated that about 10% of Twitter’s active users post spam content, although the firm acknowledged that it’s challenging to determine what represents a “spam” account.
Asked for comment, a Twitter spokesman pointed to the company’s previous statement issued Monday.
“Twitter has and will continue to cooperatively share information with Mr. Musk to consummate the transaction in accordance with the terms of the merger agreement,” Twitter said in the June 6 statement. “We believe this agreement is in the best interest of all shareholders. We intend to close the transaction and enforce the merger agreement at the agreed price and terms.”
In another development, Twitter shareholders will vote in late July or early August on whether to approve Musk’s bid for the company, company lawyer Vijaya Gadde said in a staff meeting, Bloomberg reported.
On Wednesday’s “The Late Show,” Stephen Colbert spent his monologue talking quite a lot about the upcoming congressional hearings over the Jan. 6 insurrection. And during this, he figured out a way to make people care about the hearings with a trailer ripped from Pro Wrestling or Monster Truck rallies.
Of course, by now you know these hearings into the deadly riot stoked by Donald Trump to overthrow the government in January, 2021, begin Thursday night in primetime and are scheduled to last two weeks. But as Colbert noted, a lot of media coverage has been less on the substance of the hearings and more about what it will take to get audiences watching.
And Colbert Agreed. “Here’s the thing. Hearings only matter if people are hearing them,” he said. “Which is why we here at “The Late Show” have put together a promo guaranteed to put asses in the TV seats.”
Then he ran the commercial, which you can watch above as part of the full monologue. But read on for the transcript.
“Thursday, Thursday, Thursday, under the Capitol megadome, it’s the hearings on January 6, 6, 6” the ad promises.
“A constitution-crushing lineup of insurrectionist mayhem,” the ad continues, “featuring explosive revelations about: The Wine Gremlin; the Oxy Ogre; and… whoever the hell this is… bringing the pain to former president Schuckasaurus!”
Incidentally, those four referred to above were Rudy Giuliani, Steven K Bannon, Trump associate John Eastman, and of course Donald Trump himself.
“Need more to make you care about the fall of democracy?” the ad goes on. “OK, how about the thing you crave most: Another, even sadder season of ‘This Is Us.’ Every episode is a funeral!”
“Still want more? How about boobs! With 2-dollar gas. Only you can save democracy like the founders intended: By watching tv!” the ad concluded.
Watch the whole monologue above. The ad stuff kicks in just over a minute in.
Adrienne Warren is the reigning queen of the Tony Awards, at least until this year’s winners are announced Sunday night. Of course, Warren won the Lead Actress in a Musical Tony last year for her stunning turn as Tina Turner in Tina – The Tina Turner Musical a role she originated in London and that also got her nominated for the Olivier Award. She even announced this year’s Tony nominees and will appear on this weekend’s CBS broadcast as well.
Although her run in the show was truncated due to the Broadway closure during the pandemic, Warren was able to come back to it a limited run once the Great White Way reopened (the show with its new cast just announced an August close on Broadway that will be followed by a national tour). For the role she also won the Drama Desk, Antonyo and Outer Critics Circle honors.
Her first Tony nomination came for Shuffle Along, and her Broadway debut was in the spirited Bring It On.
After that Tina triumph, Hollywood has reopened its doors to her with a number of interesting projects, and that includes the Emmy-buzzed series Women of the Movement on ABC and which is now running on Hulu. She starred in it playing Mamie Till-Mobley, mother of the tragically murdered Emmett Till. Deadline recently announced a new series project with Hulu and the Women of the Movement team called Black Cake in which Warren will also star. On the big screen this fall she will be seen opposite Viola Davis in Sony’s The Woman King. She is also a co-founder of the Broadway Advocacy Coalition, a cause actively involved in encouraging social change. In addition to her Tina Tony, BAC also received a special Tony Award at the same 2021 ceremony — probably a first for any performer on the same night.
We talk about all of this and the exciting things happening in her career as Warren joins me, appropriately during Tony Week, on location in New York City for my video series The Actor’s Side. To watch our conversation click on the video above.
Join me every Wednesday during Emmy season for another episode.
Title of Film: KEEPING COMPANY Director(s): Josh Wallace Producer(s): Devin Das, Sara Bowers, Josh Wallace, Adam Maffei, Zachary Wanerman Writer(s): Devin Das, Josh Wallace Cast: Jacob Grodnik, Ahmed Bharoocha, Devin Das, Gillian Vigman, Bernard White, Andy Buckley, Suzanne Savoy, Rex Lee, Medina Senghore, William Russ, Mary Holland, John Milhiser, Bryan Safi, Lilan Bowden Total Run Time: 01:22:00 Copyright Line: Copyright 2021 Keeping Company Movie, LLLP. All Rights Reserved. Audio Language: English Country of Origin: United States Resolution (HD or UHD): UHD Primary Genre: Comedy Secondary Genre: Thriller Short Synopsis: Two insurance salesmen find themselves trapped inside of a serial killer’s basement, creating for their toughest sale yet. Medium Synopsis: A fateful chain of events begins to unravel after two brash insurance salesmen go knocking on the wrong door and find themselves trapped inside of a serial killer’s basement, putting their lives and their jobs on the line. Long Synopsis: Sonny and Noah are two brash door-to-door salesmen climbing the ranks within the corporate world of insurance. One day, after feeling the heat from their boss to get their sales numbers up, they cross paths with Lucas, an enigmatic, anti-social creature, whom they see as a potential new client. With no regard for Lucas’ plea for privacy, they rudely force their way into his house but soon find themselves trapped in his basement, incapable of escaping. As the spotlight shifts toward Lucas and his demanding Grandmother, the similarities between this sinister household and the ruthless world of business begin to parallel each other. An exploration on the importance of wealth and class in today’s society, Keeping Company mixes ruthless corporate salesmen with vicious suburban serial killers and asks if you can tell the difference. TV rating: TV-MA (Mature Audience Only)
Marvel is back on Disney+ with Ms. Marvel, a brand new show that’s about as different from Moon Knight as it gets. This time around, our superhero is Kamala Khan, a teenager from Jersey City whose biggest worry is how she’s gonna convince her strict parents to let her go to AvengerCon. When she finds her grandmother’s heirloom bangle, though, she gets a whole new set of worries to go along with a totally rad set of superpowers. The series is off to a great start thanks to a standout performance from total newcomer Iman Vellani. It probably helped that she’s a Marvel superfan playing Captain Marvel’s #1 fan. The enthusiasm is real and the fun has just begun.
The Peabody Awards have today announced their third round of winners, with We Are Lady Parts and The Wonder Yearstaking home prizes in the entertainment category.
Other notable winners include the HBO Max documentary In the Same Breath, which was presented by Lisa Ling, and ABC News’ The Appointment, presented by Jenny Slate.
Winners will be announced each day this week through Thursday, with celebrities will virtually presenting each of the winners online in short video clips. A full list of nominees is available here, and yesterday’s previously announced winners can be found here. Monday’s winners can be found here.
The Peabody Awards are organized by the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia.
A full list of Wednesday’s winners, alongside comments from the jurors, follows.
ENTERTAINMENT
“We Are Lady Parts”
The rebellious spirit of the Sex Pistols meets the guiding wisdom of the Quran in We Are Lady Parts, Nida Manzoor’s subversive British comedy about an all-female, all-Muslim punk band. Dressed in hijabs and ripped jeans, niqab face scarves and combat boots, the women are poised to infiltrate London’s punk patriarchy with original songs like “Voldemort Under My Headscarf” and “Ain’t No One Gonna Honour Kill My Sister But Me.” This irreverent, charming, and utterly fresh series, obliterates MENA and South Asian stereotypes and fearlessly tackles taboos about Islam, offering a multifaceted depiction of Muslim women rarely seen on screen.
Working Title Television, a part of Universal International Studios, a division of Universal Studio Group (Peacock, Channel 4)
“The Wonder Years”
Masterfully altering the comedic premise of the original series to expound on the uniqueness of Black American life in the late 1960s—the pilot opens the week Dr. King was killed—this reboot points out how much there is to overcome, still, in our current time of racial reckoning. What makes it work is the crisp, pitch-perfect timing of narrator Don Cheadle as the older, wiser version of main character Dean Williams, and the wonderfully natural portrayal of Dean in his youth by Elisha “EJ” Williams.
20th Television (ABC)
DOCUMENTARY
“In the Same Breath”
Nanfu Wang’s beautifully realized film is a personal essay-cum-verité chronicle of the early months of the pandemic in Wuhan, China. A towering achievement, the documentary offers viewers unprecedented access to the frontline workers in Wuhan hospitals during the months when no one knew much about a novel coronavirus, with many of Wang’s camera operators opting for anonymity even in the film’s credits—a powerful reminder of the risk they took in capturing what state media carefully kept out of view.
HBO Documentary Films Presents a Motto Pictures/Little Horse Crossing the River/ Little Lantern Company Production (HBO/HBO Max)
“A Thousand Cuts”
FRONTLINE’s A Thousand Cuts introduces viewers to Maria Ressa, the Nobel Prize-winning journalist who dared to champion press freedom in the face of President Rodrigo Duterte’s authoritarian crackdown on the news media in the Philippines. Directed by Ramona Diaz, the documentary takes us inside the escalating conflict between the government and Ressa’s online news site, Rappler, highlighting systems of oppression fostered by autocratic regimes and fueled by profit-driven social media networks.
FRONTLINE with CineDiaz, Motto Pictures and Concordia Studio (PBS/GBH/FRONTLINE)
PODCAST/RADIO
“Southlake”
In Southlake, a northwest Dallas suburb where a 2018 video of white high school students chanting the N-word went viral, the uproar and reckoning the controversy stirred would have put the mostly white enclave on a more inclusive path were it not for the way a school board election allowed the incident and its fallout to become a lightning rod for debate about race and “critical race theory.” In this podcast, NBC reporters Mike Hixenbaugh and Antonia Hylton take listeners through the sordid four-year history of a local story that has national implications for us all.
NBC News Audio (NBC News)
NEWS
“The Appointment”
After nearly 50 years of legal precedent with the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, The Appointment follows 21-year-old college senior “Madi,” who after discovering she is six weeks pregnant, must navigate life under the restrictive abortion ban levied last year in Texas. With concise explanations and empathetic reporting, The Appointment lays out just how common Madi’s predicament is and diligently documents the lengths Madi must go in order to obtain an abortion. Her story poignantly demonstrates the entrapments that would become more widespread after the fall of Roe.
ABC News Nightline (ABC News)
“PRONE”
Reporter Chris Vanderveen’s investigation into the deadly use of the prolonged prone restraint technique by police officers, and the department policy that supported it, proves the power of collective local reporting with direct national impact. Researching body camera footage, autopsy reports, and court filings, Vanderveen created a searchable database that provided specific patterns so reporters could report similar cases in their areas. Over two years, the database became a catalyst for multiple news stories in other cities and for uncovering preventable deaths.
Tenacious D have released a medley of songs from the Who’s rock opera Tommy, including “Pinball Wizard,” “There’s a Doctor,” and “Go to the Mirror.” It arrived with a new video directed by Liam Lynch (who also directed the band’s film The Pick of Destiny), and their recording is being released as a 7″. All sales will benefit Everytown for Gun Safety. Watch it below.
Jack Black and Kyle Gass released this statement with the new single: “Who better to deliver a tribute to the greatest rock opera of all times? Who? The D! That’s Who!! We’ve been working on this medley for 20 years. It’s finally ready to be unleashed. Crank it. It’s a humdinger. Enjoy.”
The duo are about to tour. Find those dates below. They’ve also released a new fiber bar.
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Tenacious D: Summer 2022 Tour
Tenacious D:
06-16 Telluride, CO – Telluride Bluegrass Festival 06-17 Sandy, UT – Sandy Amphitheater ~ 06-19 Portland, OR – Northern Quest Casino & Resort ~ 06-21 Woodinville, WA – Chateau Ste. Michelle Winery ~ 06-22 Bend, OR – Les Schwab Amphitheater ~ 06-24 Palo Alto, CA – Frost Amphitheater ~ 06-26 San Diego, CA – Cal Coast Credit Union Amphitheater ~ 09-09 Wilmington, NC – Live Oak Bank Pavilion # 09-10 Alton, VA – Blue Ridge Rock Festival 09-11 Philadelphia, PA – The Mann Center # 09-13 Gilford, NH – Bank of New Hampshire Pavilion # 09-14 Bridgeport, CT – Hartford HealthCare Amphitheater # 09-16 Cuyahoga Falls, OH – Blossom Music Center # 09-18 Milwaukee, WI – BMO Harris Pavilion # 09-19 Minneapolis, MN – Surly Festival Field # 09-20 Cedar Rapids, IA – McGrath Amphitheater # 09-22 Louisville, KY – Louder Than Life Festival
David Cronenberg has been steadily making movies for almost 50 years. In this time the acclaimed, provocative and occasionally controversial Canadian auteur’s work has spanned a variety of genres—from racing drama (Fast Company, 1979), to crime thriller (Eastern Promises, 2007), to queer romance (M. Butterfly, 1993). But regardless of the surprising breadth and depth of his filmography, the 79-year-old filmmaker will forever be associated with the discomforting “body horror” genre he helped pioneer in such landmark as The Brood (1979), Videodrome (1983), The Fly (1986), Crash (1996) and others.
But despite this, the director’s newest film Crimes of the Future—distributed in the US by Neon, in theaters now—is Cronenberg’s first foray back in the subgenre he helped popularized since 1999’s prescient MR gaming caper eXistenZ. That’s over two decades without any signature Cronenbergian mutated flesh or repulsive (yet weirdly erotically charged) biomechanical shenanigans on display! Which isn’t to say the genre has at all been dormant…
On the contrary, a whole new generation of transgressive filmmakers have been ably carrying the body-horror torch in their clammy tentacle-like fingers—and winning major film awards in the process. Here now are some of our favorites:
POSSESSOR (2020)
Writer & Director: Brandon Cronenberg
Producers: Fraser Ash, Niv Fichman, Kevin Krikst, Andrew Starke
Starring: Andrea Riseborough, Christopher Abbott, Jennifer Jason Leigh
Why We Love It: Look, we already burned Crimes of the Future as the peg for this piece (peg = blog industry lingo for tortured excuse to talk about), but it would be an egregious breach of protocol for a body-horror listicle to not include the name “Cronenberg” in some way. So we shift our attentions instead to David’s son, Brandon, who proves that the genetically modified biomech apple doesn’t fall far from the genetically modified biomech tree. Cronenberg the Younger’s most recent feature is plays like a grimy mash-up of Blade Runner, Avatar and Being John Malkovich. In either the near future (or perhaps an alternate present), hired assassin Tasya Vos (Riseborough) uses an advanced projection technology to assume control of other people’s bodies in order to carry out her assignments—at the cost of her own fracturing identity. Things finally come to a head when a seemingly simple mission venturing inside the mind of corporate drone Colin (Abbott) goes haywire, spilling into Tasya’s personal life and drawing danger close to home to threaten both her husband and her daughter.
Where You Can Watch: Hulu, Kanopy
KUSO (2017)
Director: Flying Lotus
Writer: David Firth, Flying Lotus
Producers: Eddie Alcazar, Javier Lovato
Starring: Hannibal Buress, George Clinton, David Firth, Byron Bowers
Why We Love It: Not for the faint of heart, stomach, bowels or urinary tract, musician-producer-filmmaker Flying Lotus’s (Steven Ellison) debut feature is a kaleidoscopic fever dream of weirdness, featuring a panopticon of interlocking nightmare vignettes perfectly calibrated to ruin your day—and we mean this as a compliment! With an obsessive focus on decay, taboo and primal revulsion, it’s no surprise that so many of FlyLo’s visions here focus on distortions of the human body, ranging from comedic (funk icon George Clinton as a shit-obsessed physician) to highly creepy (a woman compelled to eat concrete, who in turn is swallowed up by the sidewalk, depositing her into a terrifying subterranean hole-kingdom.) But whatever the case, it’s all extremely, well… goopy. Seriously—the KY line item in the film’s budget must have been substantial, right along with brown food coloring. And if this all sounds like a bit much, trust us: it is.
Where You Can Watch: AMC+, Direct TV, Shudder
SPRING (2014)
Directors: Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead
Writer: Justin Benson
Producers: Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead, David Lawson Jr.
Starring: Lou Taylor Pucci, Nadia Hilker
Why We Love It: The collaboration between Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead (Resolution, The Endless, Syncronic) is justly praised by cineastes for its innovative approach genre storytelling and empathetic exploration of character dynamics—traits that are both on full display in the duo’s sophomore feature, Spring. A skillful blend of horror, romance, European travelogue and Del Toro-esque fairy tale, the story follows American tourist Evan (Pucci) on a solo sojourn to southern Italy, where he meets gregarious local Louise (Hilker), with whom he quickly develops a sun-soaked romance. The only complication—spoilers!—is that Louise is, well… a 2,000-year-old mutant who on occasion transforms into a giant octopus monster. But hey. Love is love, right?
Where You Can Watch: Hulu, AMC+, Tubi, Shudder
TITANE (2021)
Writer & Director: Julia Ducournau
Producers: Amaury Ovise, Jean-Christophe
Starring: Agathe Rousselle, Vincent Lindon
Why We Love It: A maximalist experience in every way possible, Julia Ducournau’s controversial Palm D’or winner takes its exploration of gender, mechanization and mechanized gender to surreal extremes, essentially told as a diptych following the bizarre transformation of onetime car show model and overall automotive enthusiast (to say the least!) Alexia (Rousselle) into “Andrien,” the long-lost sire of a steroid-abusing, masculinity obsessed fire chief (Lindon.) The result? A surprisingly sensitive portrait of the relationship between fathers and sons—imagine a sort of French toilet-acid greaser version of Field of Dreams. At least it is when the movie isn’t unleashing an unrelenting parade of nightmare visuals like corrosive fetal-abdomen binding and vaginal gearshift penetration. So yeah… you might want to give your local Mommy & Me screening of this one an extremely hard pass.
Starring: Haley Bennett, Austin Stowell, Denis O’Hare, Elizabeth Marvel
Why We Love It: That Swallow is far more grounded in reality than the other titles on this list only makes its depiction of “pica”—the uncontrollable psychological urge to eat unusual items—even more harrowing. Hunter (Bennett) is an upwardly mobile young newlywed marooned at home following her union to corporate heir Conrad. Left swimming in a sea of existential dread in her relationship and life in general, she begins a habit of compulsively swallowing an increasingly dangerous menu of items include marbles, thumbtacks, batteries and more. A frank depiction of deteriorating mental health suffused with the foreboding tone of a horror movie, Hunter’s journey through the psychiatric wringer is a cautionary tale about depression and denial. Guaranteed: viewers will never react to someone using the term mouth feel the same way ever again.
Where You Can Watch: AMC+
SAFE (1995)
Writer & Director: Todd Haynes
Producers: David Brown, Richard D. Zanuck
Starring: Julianne Moore, Xander Berkeley, Peter Friedman, James Le Gros
Why We Love It: Weirdly prescient in the era of COVID, Todd Haynes’ landmark 1995 indie drama doesn’t offer easy answers, implicating in its complex narrative both external environmental polluters as well as internal neurosis, self-obsession and hypochondria. A direct antecedent of Swallow, Safe follows 1980s San Fernando Valley housewife Carol (Moore), whose bland routine of mother-and-wife duties gradually falls apart as she suddenly finds herself allergic to… well, pretty much everything. This kicks off a journey of psychological and medical self-discovery that eventually leads Carol to a cult-like New Age community for the supposedly immunocompromised. Full of slow-burn dread, the film boasts one of Moore’s greatest—and most chilling—performances. Note: perhaps triggering for those of us who feel literally sick of ourselves.
Where You Can Watch: SVOD rental
AMERICAN MARY (2012)
Writers & Directors: Jen Soska, Sylvia Soska
Producers: John A. Curtis, Evan Tylor
Starring: Katharine Isabelle, Antonio Cupo, Tristan Risk, David Lovgren
Why We Love It: With themes that echo the performance art details of Crimes, Canadian “Twisted Twin” cult auteurs Jen and Sylvia Soska’s American Mary follows the descent of cash-strapped surgical student Mary (Isabelle) into the underground world of extreme plastic surgery and body modification, after a brief fill-in gig as a mob doctor. Full of disturbing images deployed to interrogate the blurred line between self-expression and self-annihilation, the sisters’ sophomore feature—after 2009’s evocatively titled Canuxploitation thriller Dead Hooker in a Trunk—will make sure you never look at your piercings or tattoos the same way again.
Where You Can Watch: AMC+, Tubi, Shudder
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“The Gaawijijigemangit Agreement is a symbol of meaningful government to government collaboration and respectful negotiations,” said Treaty One Nation chairperson Chief Gordon BlueSky. “The agreement is a major step forward in expanding Treaty One Nations’ leadership in the Manitoba economy.”
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Once the agreement is formally approved, the lands will be added to reserve and the Treaty One Nation hopes to move forward imminently with development plans.
As VidCon makes its in-person return to the Anaheim Convention Center later this month, Instagram parent company Meta is planning to have a sizable presence at the conference with multiple lounges, parties and panel sessions that will promote its IG Reels and AR/VR product offerings to content creators.
At the conference, Meta is hosting five sessions — two of which will feature Dane Glasgow, Meta’s vp entertainment, and Jackie Pimentel, the head of creator product marketing, on subjects like the metaverse and creator monetization, respectively.
Throughout VidCon, which takes place from June 22 to June 25, Meta will be taking over the nearby Hyatt hotel and pool with interactive installations that will feature the Meta Quest 2 VR headsets and Ray-Ban Stories smart glasses, as well as sets meant to serve as backdrops for creators making Reels content. At the convention center, Meta will also have an invite-only “Reels lounge” for creators.
Meta will host its first poolside happy hour during VidCon on June 23 with a DJ set by Sickick, followed the next day by another happy hour from Meta’s Black creator program, We The Culture, with DJs Angel + Dren. And on the evening of June 24, Instagram will host an off-site party with the “Big Energy” rapper Latto.
The company’s VidCon presence comes a year after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg pledged to pay out $1 billion in creator incentives, while Instagram head Adam Mosseri has acknowledged the “stiff competition” coming from TikTok and YouTube that has compelled IG to turn its focus toward video.
Though TikTok will be the title sponsor at this year’s VidCon, replacing longtime sponsor YouTube, Meta’s director of creator partnerships, Justin Antony, hopes the company’s presence at VidCon will be enticing to those looking to expand into AR/VR content and serve as a show of commitment to creators.
“Nowadays, creators are less talking about the competition because [they’re] becoming much more platform agnostic,” Antony told The Hollywood Reporter. “They use TikTok, they use Instagram, they use YouTube. It’s no longer the days that creators are only on one platform — they’re very much using every platform to reach their audience. So I think all of the competition actually makes us, makes creators stronger because all of these platforms are supporting creators in a meaningful way.”
EXCLUSIVE: The Year Between is the the debut feature film from writer-director-star Alex Heller, who uses her own struggles with mental health to craft a story of a college sophomore diagnosed with bipolar disorder and how her family deals with the corresponding highs and lows.
Heller plays Clemence Miller, who is forced to move back home after a mental breakdown at school. Faced with the surprising diagnosis and a jarring return to the Illinois suburbs, she has to learn how to live with her well-meaning but frustrated family and find balance in a world that seems hellbent on thwarting her.
Steve Buscemi and Succession‘s J. Smith-Cameron play Clemence’s parents. Wyatt Oleff, Emily Robinson, Kyanna Simone, Rajeev Jacob and Waltrudis Buck also star.
Above is the first-look clip of the pic, which is making its world premiere Sunday in the U.S. Narrative Competition at Tribeca Fest. In the scene, Heller, Smith-Cameron listen as Dr. Lismoen (Buck) delivers news about Clemence’s condition.
The pic is produced by Eugene Sun Park, Amanda Phillips, Sonya Lunsford, Rachel Gould, Caterin Camargo-Alvarez and Heller. Adrienne Becker, Susanna Fogel, Smith-Cameron and HaJ are executive producers. It world premieres Sunday at 5:30 p.m. ET at Village East by Angelika: Theatre 1.
During the early weeks of the pandemic (remember those days, when quarantine felt like at-home camp and we had no plans to still be talking about COVID two years later?) and then as the 2020 election went off the rails, my wife and I turned to “Schitt’s Creek” to get our minds off the apocalypse.
So did a lot of folks. That year’s virtual Emmys experienced a winning streak like no other for “Schitt’s Creek,” which won outstanding comedy, as well as trophies for stars Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Annie Murphy and Dan Levy (not to mention wins for writing, directing and more).
It was the right show at the right time, and TV Academy voters clearly agreed. The show was funny, well-crafted and of course, boasted some comedy all-stars (throw Chris Elliott into that mix as well). But there was also something about the show’s idyllic setting that felt like a salve for fans.
The Rose family bought the Canadian town of Schitt’s Creek as a joke, and when they lost everything, they were forced to move into the town’s dumpy motel. But as the series and its episodes progressed, it turned out Schitt’s Creek wasn’t so schitty after all. It was a welcoming small town of eccentrics, who all filtered through the town diner and participated in the area’s quirky traditions.
The pandemic taught us that we have the technology now to do a lot of our work virtually anywhere. I know several of you spent months working remotely from other parts of the country, including Hawai’i, and no one was the wiser on Zoom. That’s starting to change, but the dream of that simpler, small-town life remains.
There’s a great tradition of small towns on TV, in both comedy and drama. Of course, you can go way back to Mayberry on “The Andy Griffith Show.” Small towns are big in creepy TV, including “Twin Peaks,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “True Blood.” Other comedies in recent decades included “My Name Is Earl” and, of course, Pawnee in “Parks and Recreation.”
“Schitt’s Creek” is over, but a number of series are picking up the tradition. In “Life and Beth,” Amy Schumer’s character finds new life in her small Long Island hometown, while in “Ghosts,” a New York couple inherits a haunted mansion in the Hudson Valley. “Young Sheldon” takes place in a fictional East Texas town, while “The Conners” continues in Lanford, Ill., the setting for “Roseanne.”
Other shows exploring different aspects of small-town life include FX’s “Reservation Dogs,” which breaks new ground on the depiction of Indigenous American teens in rural Oklahoma; and Fox’s “Welcome to Flatch,” about the off-center residents in a small Ohio town with an unpleasant name — much like, yes, “Schitt’s Creek.”
But I was particularly charmed this year by Bridget Everett’s HBO series “Somebody Somewhere,” which is inspired by Everett’s hometown of Manhattan, Kan. It’s a bit of wish fulfillment, an America that seems to be out of reach right now: Blue and red, co-existing in the same town and accepting of all. The real Manhattan, Kan., is similarly unique, Everett reports: It’s a college town, but also close to an army base.
“They voted Biden for president, but everybody else was red on the ticket,” she says. “It’s conservative, but there are liberals, so it’s a nice balance. You have the military and the university. Football is huge, as are family and community. My brother Brad still lives there, and he’s always out doing something for somebody. It’s good people.”
And that would surely be just. With #MeToo, Black Lives Matter and other epochal changes roiling American life, the theater has finally begun to talk openly about its foundational and continuing inequities. Sometimes the talk is just lip service, to be sure, as toothless statements on company websites attest. But more than ever, practitioners and critics are asking difficult questions about how we make actors, how we make plays, how we make seasons, how we make money — in short, how we make theater.
It’s about time. For too long the industry has accepted all kinds of impropriety and unfairness as the supposedly inevitable cost of greatness. It has tolerated working conditions and wages that in some cases approach the Dickensian. For the sake of profit or what we glorify as the demands of art, it has laughed as bullies like the producer Scott Rudin terrorized their underlings, and has winked at the sexual misdeeds of men like Harvey Weinstein. In the process, the theater — like most other art forms but perhaps more intensely — has found a neat way to keep its doors largely shut to those who by reason of race, class or connection are not already part of the club.
The Great Read
More fascinating tales you can’t help but read all the way to the end.
But maybe, in the wake of the existential crisis of Covid-19, when the ingrained practices of decades ground to a sudden halt, we are finally approaching an inflection point. What’s on the other side of that inflection is worth thinking about, including the potential benefits — and costs — of the fairer theatrical future many people are working hard to create. It’s a future in which pay transparency and equity, humane treatment of workers, respectful training of all kinds of students, diversity in employment as well as in product are crucial parts of the picture.
And in which sacred monsters aren’t.
Still, if we are approaching a Great Man Götterdämmerung — if those monsters, some of them superb at what they do, are finally beginning to face the music — we’d better look closely at the tune. What are we losing when we banish them? What are we losing if we don’t?
AS IT HAPPENS, the history of musicals is a good place to seek answers. In the way that musical theater incorporates and exaggerates all the qualities (and problems) of nonmusical theater, so too have the men we reflexively call the Broadway musical greats — the creators and directors and choreographers behind classics like “Oklahoma!,” “Gypsy,” “Chicago” and others — incorporated and exaggerated the traits of Strasberg and his ilk.
Previously discussed in FilmInk’s regular Unsung Auteurs column, Ida Lupino is one of the most essential ground-breaking figures in the world of female Hollywood directors. She worked consistently and creatively in a true boys’ club, and this doco looks at her fascinating life and career.
MY MOTHER THE ACTION STAR
This doco pulls back the curtain on a truly unsung powerhouse of Australian cinema: Western Sydney-based actor, martial artist and director Maria Tran, an action star in Asia who has worked with high profile players like Jackie Chan and Roger Corman. This doco introduces Australia to one of its few cinematic action heroes.
MY FIGHT
Bebi Zekirovski’s My Fight is a documentary portrait of young Australian Mitchell Bath, who spiralled down into the terrifying world of drug addiction after a life filled with pain and bullying, only to rise again via the life-changing sport of boxing.
A CERTAIN MOTHER
Mothers are the very backbone of not just the country, but quite possibly the entire world. But how do you define a good mum? This reasoned doco sensibly doesn’t try, but simply introduces audiences to four very different mothers from four very different parts of Australia, and allows us to watch them navigate the difficult day-to-day of raising a child.
A-HA: THE MOVIE
Take On Me? Yes, please. This doco tells the surprisingly fascinating story of a-ha, Norway’s biggest band, who roared onto the international scene in the 1980s with their (for the time) ground-breaking animation-live action hybrid music video for their smash hit single “Take On Me”.
TELEVISION EVENT
Digging curiously back into not-so-distant history, this doco looks at the creation, impact and legacy of Nicholas Meyer’s incendiary 1983 television movie The Day After, which dealt horrifically with the threat of nuclear war, and forced a worldwide conversation about what could be done to prevent it.
A LIFE ON THE FARM
“Outsider art” is one of the most compelling and curious corners of modern creativity, and A Life On The Farm introduces the unusual figure of late Somerset farmer Charles Carson, an inventor, a wonderfully weird and truly outré filmmaker, and a pioneer of death positivity whose treasure trove of creativity was only discovered upon his passing.
THE WIKIPEDIA PROMISE
Seriously, what we do without Wikipedia? Well, the information is all out there, but things would certainly take a lot longer if the click-your-fingers-and-then-you-know-it website wasn’t around to provide us with answers to just about everything. This doco looks at the intentions and legacy of this extraordinary online resource.
# KIDS ON TECH
Do you have to engage in a WWE-style throwdown just to separate your kids from their phones and tablets? Well, this doco – which details the way in which technology has truly come to dominate and define the lives of young people, via a wide range of interviews with various experts and commentators – might just be for you.
ABBY’S LIST: A DOGUMENTARY
In need of a little feel-good factual storytelling? Well, we are, and this documentary looks all set to provide it, but in a clearly bittersweet way, as a beloved pet dog in its last days embarks on a bucket list cross-country tick-off trek with its owner. Get ready to laugh and cry…
The Melbourne Documentary Film Festival runs from July 1-31 (online) and July 21-31 in-cinema. For all ticketing, session and programming details, click here.
Twitter’s board of directors has decided to comply with Elon Musk’s demand to see internal data about the number of fake accounts on the site, the Washington Post reported early Wednesday afternoon.
Musk reached his agreement to buy Twitter for $44 billion on April 25; less than three weeks later, he suddenly insisted the deal was “on hold,” citing concerns about the number of fake accounts on the site. Since then Musk and Twitter have traded barbs over the matter, even as Musk was accused of making false statements and engaging in market manipulation by Twitter shareholders.
Now, according to the Washington Post, Twitter’s board has offered Musk access to what it calls a “firehose,” internal data made up of “more than 500 million tweets posted each day.” Musk may receive access to this data later this week, the Post said.
Contrary to Musk’s implications, Twitter actually already makes this data available to paying customers, according to the Post, and the company — as well as analysists and other insiders — have accused Musk of using this issue as to force a lower price or break the deal entirely.
On Monday, Twitter spokesperson Scott Bisang said in a statement provided to the Washington Post, “Twitter has and will continue to cooperatively share information with Mr. Musk to consummate the transaction in accordance with the terms of the merger agreement. We believe this agreement is in the best interest of all shareholders. We intend to close the transaction and enforce the merger agreement at the agreed price and terms.”
Wayward Pines is a mystery thriller television series produced by Fox Network and set to premiere in May of 2015.
Based on the book Pines written by Blake Crouch and produced by M. Night Shyamalan Wayward Pines follows the story of an FBI agent Ethan Bruke (played by Matt Dillon), who travels to a small town in Idaho called Wayward Pines where two federal agents have gone missing. Burke’s investigation turns progressively more complicated and raises a number of questions that make him question his own sanity and face the possibility he might not make it out alive.
Wayward Pines is currently in its first season.
Episode List
Season 1
1 – Where Paradise Is Home (S01E01 – 101)
2 – Do Not Discuss Your Life Before (S01E02 – 102)
3 – Our Town, Our Law (S01E03 – 103)
4 – One of Our Senior Realtors Has Chosen to Retire (S01E04 – 104)
Today on Crew Call, The Afterpartyarchitects Phil Lord and Christopher Miller discuss how they took what was a feature concept at TriStar more than 10 years ago and turned into a Rashomon comedy series for Apple TV+.
Deadline
The streamer literally died for it, so much that they gave a greenlight to a Season 2 writers room before The Afterparty even debuted. Season 2’s murder takes place at a wedding, with Tiffany Haddish’s Detective Danner returning assisted by Sam Richardson’s Aniq and Zoe Chao’s Zoe in finding the culprit. John Cho, Ken Jeong, Elizabeth Perkins, Zach Woods and Poppy Liu also star. From the sounds of it, each episode will center around a pair of suspects versus Season 1’s concept of one per episode. And the murder victim this time is not similar to Dave Franco’s Xavier — that’s all the pair can say. Cameras are already rolling.
Apple TV+ ‘The Afterparty’ Apple
The duo, who first honed their comedy skills together as Dartmouth buds and saw their Hollywood career jump-started after being discovered by Disney boss Michael Eisner, talk about the fate of big-screen comedies, their whodunit writing process, and why they’re submitting Season 1’s Episode 3, “Yasper” for Emmys consideration.
They also tease their upcoming Sony TV Marvel Spider-verse live-action series Silk, their Freevee Yellowstone parody, as well as the much-needed delays on Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, due out June 2, 2023, and Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse, now opening March 29, 2024.
Miller directed each episode of The Afterparty, with both serving as EPs.
Tenacious D are hitting the road next week. They haven’t released a proper full-length since 2018’s Post-Apocalypto. The last song they put out was in 2020 when they covered “Time Warp” from The Rocky Horror Picture Show as part of Rock the Vote. This evening, they unveiled a new single where they’re covering The Who’s “Pinball Wizard,” “There’s A Doctor,” and “Go To The Mirror!” The medley will be released as a seven-inch single with all of the proceeds going to Everytown For Gun Safety.
“Who better to deliver a tribute to the greatest rock opera of all times? Who? The D! That’s Who!! We’ve been working on this medley for 20 years. It’s finally ready to be unleashed. Crank it. It’s a humdinger. Enjoy,” the duo said in a statement.
The video for the song was directed by longtime pal, frequent collaborator, and fellow Who fan Liam Lynch. He also directed the band’s 2006 film The Pick Of Destiny.
In 2007, they covered Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey and company’s “Squeezebox” for a VH1 Honors event, so their love of the band goes back a long time.
06/16/22: Telluride, CO – Telluride Bluegrass Festival SOLD OUT 06/17/22: Sandy, UT – Sandy Amphitheater ~ SOLD OUT 06/19/22: Portland, OR – Pioneer Courthouse Square ~ SOLD OUT 06/20/22: Airway Heights, WA – Northern Quest Casino & Resort – SOLD OUT 06/21/22: Woodinville, WA @ Chateau Ste. Michelle Winery ~ SOLD OUT 06/22/22: Bend, OR – Hayden Homes Amphitheater ~ SOLD OUT 06/24/22: Palo Alto, CA – Frost Amphitheater ~ 06/26/22: San Diego, CA – Cal Coast Credit Union Amphitheater ~ SOLD OUT 9/9/22: Wilmington, NC – Live Oak Bank Pavilion # 9/10/22: Alton, VA – Blue Ridge Rock Festival 9/11/22: Philadelphia, PA – The Mann Center # 9/13/22: Gilford, NH – Bank of New Hampshire Pavilion # 9/14/22: Bridgeport, CT – Hartford HealthCare Amphitheater # 9/16/22: Cuyahoga Falls, OH – Blossom Music Center # 9/18/22: Milwaukee, WI – BMO Harris Pavilion # 9/19/22: Minneapolis, MN – Surly Festival Field # – SOLD OUT 9/20/22: Cedar Rapids, IA – McGrath Amphitheater # 9/22/22: Louisville, KY – Louder Than Life Festival
Robert and Kenny begin this Season Premiere (now with video!) with special guest Matt Schrader, discussing our new Patreon exclusive show MORE SCORE, The Oscars’ rough ending, Composer Carol’s new album “Smile” and much more.
Later, composer Tom Holkenborg aka Junkie XL joins the show to share the unique story of getting fired from Justice League, only to be brought back years later to release the Snyder Cut. Tom details why he started from scratch on the four-hour score instead of continuing where he left off and the incredible challenges the pandemic brought along the way.
This episode is presented by Spitfire Audio
Listen or watch the show: https://www.score-movie.com/links
Follow us on Twitter @ScoreThePodcast or send Kenny and Robert your questions for the mailbox at ScoreTheMailbox@epicleff.com
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Palliative care in New South Wales will get a $743m boost as the state’s premier makes good on his promise to fix end-of-life care, making amends for failing on the issue when treasurer.
Dominic Perrottet said it’s the most important budget announcement he’s ever made, after promising to improve palliative care during debate on voluntary assisted dying, which he opposed, but was legalised last month.
“There was no negotiation when it came to palliative care in this year’s budget,” he said on Thursday.
“It was never about the dollars, it was about matching the commitment to say that whoever you are … you will have the care and support that you need.”
The money is on top of the $300m already spent in NSW each year on palliative care, with the first-year funding of the new package to be revealed in the budget on 21 June.
The additional funding will increase significantly over time, growing to an additional $339m in the fifth year.
During the voluntary assisted dying debate in November Perrottet acknowledged he has “failed in my former capacity as treasurer to address this issue”.
“I made that commitment that I would rectify the mistakes of the past … I want the best package possible that provides the greatest support that we can to people as they come to their end of life,” Perrottet said.
“By the end of it, we would have more than doubled the investment in palliative care annually in our state and that will make a world of difference.”
The state’s regional health minister, Bronnie Taylor, who is a former palliative care nurse, said the funding package would strengthen the career pathways for people becoming palliative care workers.
“It is actually one of the most rewarding professions to ever work in,” she said, adding that the increased investment in palliative care will attract more healthcare professionals.
“When they know that investment is there and that specialty is there and that it’s valued … it actually becomes an incredible career opportunity.”
The funding will provide another 600 health care workers including nurses, doctors and support staff, as well as boost hospital capacity for palliative care, at a cost of $650m over five years.
The remaining $93m in the package is for infrastructure.
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Westmead and Nepean hospitals in Sydney’s west will get dedicated palliative care units and regional facilities will be refurbished or redeveloped.
While hospitals will receive some of the funding, Perrottet said it was also important to provide home care.
“For many people who come to their end of life, that’s where they want to be,” he said.
The treasurer, Matt Kean, said more people will be able to live at home and close to loved ones while they receive care thanks to the increased funding.
“It will improve access to new treatments, world-leading pain management services and medications, and community-based services to reduce unnecessary stays in hospitals,” he said.
Unlike a piano or organ, early synthesizers, like the Moog and ARP, could generate only one note at a time. Shaping a particular tone involved setting multiple knobs, switches or dials, and trying to reproduce that tone afterward meant writing down all the settings and hoping to get similar results the next time.
The Prophet-5, which Mr. Smith designed with John Bowen and introduced in 1978, conquered both shortcomings. Controlling synthesizer functions with microprocessors, it could play five notes at once, allowing harmonies. (The company also made a 10-note Prophet-10.) The Prophet also used microprocessors to store settings in memory, providing dependable yet personalized sounds, and it was portable enough to be used onstage.
Mr. Smith’s small company was swamped with orders; at times, the Prophet-5 had a two-year backlog.
But Mr. Smith’s innovations went much further. “Once you have a microprocessor in an instrument, you realize how easy it is to communicate digitally to another instrument with a microprocessor,” Mr. Smith explained in 2014. Other keyboard manufacturers started to incorporate microprocessors, but each company used a different, incompatible interface, a situation Mr. Smith said he considered “kind of dumb.”
In 1981, Mr. Smith and Chet Wood, a Sequential Circuits engineer, presented a paper at the Audio Engineering Society convention to propose “The ‘USI’, or Universal Synthesizer Interface.” The point, he recalled in a 2014 interview with Waveshaper Media, was “Here’s an interface. It doesn’t have to be this, but we all really need to get together and do something.” Otherwise, he said, “This market’s going nowhere.”
Four Japanese companies — Roland, Korg, Yamaha, and Kawai — were willing to cooperate with Sequential Circuits on a shared standard, and Mr. Smith and Mr. Kakehashi of Roland worked out the details of what would become MIDI. “If we had done MIDI the usual way, getting a standard made takes years and years and years,” Mr. Smith told the Red Bull Music Academy. “You have committees and documents and da-da-da. We bypassed all of that by just basically doing it and then throwing it out there.”
In 2013, Mr. Smith told The St. Helena Star: “We made it low-cost so that it was easy for companies to integrate into their products. It was given away license free because we wanted everyone to use it.”
In the early ’70s, before Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in the United States, the Jane Collective helped an estimated 11,000 people carry out a safe abortion. The underground collective, which operated in Chicago, have their stories recounted in the HBO Max documentary “The Janes,” which explores the formation of the group and the risks the leaders took to make abortions available to those that needed it.
“It’s just a great story,” director Tia Lessin told Variety. “It’s full of drama and the thrill of a heist. And a group of unlikely outlaws who go underground risking their professional lives, their personal lives, and a lifetime in jail in order to help strangers in need. And that in itself is just a fascinating story.”
Lessin co-directed the film with Emma Pildes, who explained to Variety that their interest in the story in part came from the increasing attacks on abortion access that have occurred throughout the United States.
“Looking all around, seeing the writing on the wall, seeing the way that we were going in this country, it felt like a very meaningful thing that we could contribute to the fight to show the testimony of these women, of what it looks like in this country when people don’t have the right to make this choice for themselves,” Pildes said.
Lessin and Pildes spoke with Variety deputy editor Meredith Woerner for “Doc Dreams” presented by National Geographic. During their conversation, the two discussed following the story of the Jane Collective, interviewing their subjects today and the sad modern relevance of the group’s actions.
“The Janes” premiered at Sundance this January, before the bombshell news that Roe v. Wade is on the verge of being overturned by the Supreme Court. Lessin and Pildes both spoke about their film’s renewed relevance, and what modern pro-choice activists can learn from the Jane Collective’s actions.
“People are angry right now, and quite upset. What we show in the film and what’s true still today is that the people that are disproportionately harmed by the criminalization of abortion are poor people, they’re rural people, they’re disproportionately women of color,” Lessin said. “Because women of means, people of means, are always going to be able to access private healthcare. That’s just a fact. People without the means, without the insurance, without the income, are going to be left to networks like the Janes, if they can find them.”
“70% of this country believes in women’s right to choose. That 70% has been resting on their laurels and relying on Roe for 50 years now,” Pildes added. “So if we can remind people to speak up and let their voice and their vote be known, that’s all we have to do. We have the majority. We just have to be reminded that we have to express, that we have to take to the streets, that we have to do what we can to be accounted for as the 70 percent and the majority.”
“The Janes” is currently streaming on HBO Max. Watch the full “Doc Dreams” episode above.
Appearing remotely from a cinderblock room painted neon white, jailed Death Row Records founder Suge Knight testified for the first time Wednesday about the day in early 2015 when he tried — but failed — to get a meeting with Dr. Dre at an office for the movie Straight Outta Compton and ended up barreling his truck into two men outside a nearby burger stand, killing one of them.
Knight, 57, is now serving a 28-year prison sentence for the deadly incident at Tam’s Burgers in Compton, California, that claimed the life of local businessman Terry Carter on Jan. 29, 2015. Prosecutors originally charged Knight with murder, claiming he reversed his Ford Raptor truck before intentionally shifting gears, hitting the gas, and mowing down Carter. The case avoided trial when Knight accepted a plea deal and was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in September 2018.
Knight’s long-awaited, sometimes contradictory sworn testimony was shown live to jurors in a Compton courthouse Wednesday as the centerpiece of his defense in the wrongful death lawsuit brought by Carter’s wife and daughters.
Wearing a gold chain over his blue jail uniform and drinking what looked like an iced coffee out of a large plastic cup, Knight claimed that he practically stumbled upon the Straight Outta Compton production base camp that day and wasn’t seeking a confrontation with Dre — even though Knight testified under oath that police told him Dre hired the man who shot him seven times at Chris Brown’s pre-VMA party six months earlier in the summer of 2014.
“I was told about that,” Knight testified Wednesday when asked about the alleged murder-for-hire contract. “People showed me checks, cancelled checks.”
For his part, Dre has denied the wild accusation. “Given that Dre has had zero interaction with Suge since leaving Death Row Records in 1996, we hope that Suge’s lawyer has lots of malicious prosecution insurance,” Dre’s lawyer said in a 2016 statement given when a lawyer purportedly representing Knight dropped the allegation into a now-defunct civil court cross-complaint.
In his testimony Wednesday, Knight claimed that he never worked with the lawyer who filed the cross-complaint, but he didn’t shy away from the topic of alleged hitmen. He claimed that he ended up at the movie’s production office shortly before Carter’s death because he was driving around “in the area” and an unidentified person told him to “come through” to discuss a “situation” with Dre.
“Dr. Dre — we’ve been really good friends for years. Matter of fact, I know his kids, he knows my kids. And I was told that he had paid some guys to harm me,” Knight testified. “I didn’t believe it because authorities do lie. So I went up there. …I was going to talk to him and say, ‘Hey man, I’m not going to react to what authorities say about you having something to do with me getting shot. I just want to make you aware they are saying this, putting it out there.’”
Knight claimed he wasn’t at the base camp to complain that the movie’s script portrayed him as a “bodyguard” or to demand money for the use of his name and likeness onscreen. He said maybe it would come up — but he mostly wanted a face-to-face with Dre to let him know what police purportedly were saying. He claimed that when he heard Dre and his Straight Outta Compton co-producer Ice Cube were too “busy” for a meeting, it wasn’t a big deal because he had plans to take his 5-year-old son to an arcade. Knight said he was voluntarily leaving the base camp when someone “caught up” with him and said, “Hey, Cube wants you to come (back) because we’ve been trying to catch you to take care of you.”
Knight testified that, when he asked about Dre specifically and said he didn’t want to wait around all day, things started to go sideways. Cle “Bone” Sloan, a gang member working security for the movie, took offense to a joke he made and started to get “aggressive,” Knight said. Around the same time, someone tried to put something on his windshield, he testified.
“Were you ever served with a restraining order that Dr. Dre allegedly had on you?” Knight’s lawyer David Kenner asked after the confusing mention of the windshield.
“No,” Knight replied. “Never.”
Knight testified that after he left the film production office for his family outing, he got a call from Carter, a longtime friend. He told jurors Carter invited him to a special meeting with Dre at the home of Dwayne “Knob” Johnson across the street from Tam’s.
“He said, ‘They’re trying to take care of you, get some things squared away. Dre’s gonna come by Knob’s house. Come meet me over there.’ He said, ‘Man they’re trying to give you some bread,” Knight testified, saying he agreed, made a U-turn and headed to the location.
According to Knight, he drove up alongside Carter’s grey station wagon on a street bordering Tam’s and became the subject of an armed ambush. He said Sloan jumped over a wall bordering Tam’s parking lot, brandished a gun and started punching him through his truck’s open window.
Lance Behringer, the lawyer representing Carter’s widow Lillian, and his two daughters, Nekaya and Crystal, grilled Knight over the claim that he “feared for his life” and was acting in self-defense when he gunned his engine and blasted into both Sloan and Carter, killing Carter.
Behringer read from a transcript of Knight’s sentencing in which a judge warned Knight that his “no contest” plea was the same as a guilty plea to voluntary manslaughter. Behringer also pointed out that Knight’s former lawyer, Matthew Fletcher, recently pleaded guilty to conspiracy and perjury after prosecutors said he and Knight plotted to bribe people to say they saw men with guns confronting Knight at Tam’s.
“Isn’t it correct that instead of leaving on 142nd (Street), after you had reversed out of the Tam’s parking lot, being in fear for your life, you decided to turn back into the Tam’s parking lot?” Behringer asked.
Knight responded that fear “sort of freezes you,” so that’s why he drove forward, backward, and then forward again.
Behringer then confronted Knight with the transcript of his first interview with police after Knight turned himself in for questioning hours after Carter’s death.
“Nowhere in that interview with Sgt. Biddle do you ever mention Bone Sloan pointing a gun at you,” the lawyer said.
“Where I come from, from Compton, and how my parents taught me, being a child of God, it’s not about an eye for eye. …I wasn’t going to say, ‘Hey this person put a gun on me and tried to kill me,’ and put them in custody. But at the same time, once I knew they gave Bone immunity, and he can’t get in trouble, if I told the truth, nothing could happen to him, it’s a different story,” Knight claimed.
“Let me see if I can understand. Sloan, the man who you believe pulled a gun at you, and was trying to kill you, you were trying to protect him by not telling Sgt. Biddle that he had a gun there? Is that accurate?” Behringer asked.
“We all friends. There are different rules that we go by — that you don’t personally try to get one of your homeboys in custody, no matter what the situation is. So therefore, when he got immunity, and he can’t get in trouble, it’s a difference,” Knight testified.
“And you want this jury to believe that Bone Sloan was there to kill you, and he had a gun that he intended to use to kill you, but instead of using that gun, he decided to throw punches. Is that true?” Behringer asked.
“That’s not true at all,” Knight said, launching into one of his more convoluted answers. “The truth is this: Tam’s is called ‘Murder Burger’ for a reason. One thing we all know is, you can’t do anything by the area of Tam’s because of the cameras. …Nobody pulled their gun out by Tam’s. Everyone knows there’s cameras. Ask anybody, they call Tam’s ‘Murder Burger.’ Lots of people who didn’t know they have cameras there, they’re still in prison today.”
“I hadn’t done anything wrong to these guys, for them to want to kill me, but there was a contract,” Knight added as Carter’s daughter, Nekaya — who was seated in the courtroom with her mother and sister — shook her head in disgust.
The Carter family filed the underlying lawsuit in June 2015. It initially named Dr. Dre, Ice Cube and NBC Universal among the defendants, claiming they all knew Knight objected to Straight Outta Compton and intended to commit violence on the movie’s sets. The family alleged the producers hired Sloan to stand up to Knight’s violence and then negligently managed him.
Dre and Cube, born Andre Young and O’Shea Jackson respectively, successfully fought the complaint along with NBC Universal.
“The court cannot fathom how Knight’s reckless and allegedly criminal attempt to run over Bone with his truck later in the afternoon was predictable with an ‘extraordinarily high degree of foreseeability’ such that a duty may be imposed on defendants,” Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Brian Currey wrote in a September 2016 decision granting the parties’ demurrers. “The alleged fact that defendants ordered Bone to ‘take control of the situation’ and arrange a meeting with Carter does not make it highly foreseeable that Bone would ‘flank’ and ‘ambush’ Knight by continuing a personal fight with Knight in the presence of Bone’s associates or that Knight would attempt to recklessly and criminally attack Bone with his vehicle, or that Carter would be in any probable danger.”
Knight appeared on camera Wednesday walking both with and without a cane. He testified that he is “100% blind” in his left eye.
“Wouldn’t you agree, Mr. Knight, that if you were driving around without a valid driver’s license, being blind in one eye, and that if you ran over and killed somebody on the sidewalk, you should be responsible?” Behringer asked.
Knight answered that he could “see enough” to drive. “Like right now, I can tilt my head the right way, I can see you, but a different way, I can’t,” he said.
The Carter family’s civil case, seeking more than $10 million in damages, is expected to last into next week before going to the jury.
Released towards the end of 2021, Arcane quickly took the world by storm, becoming one of Netflix’s highest rated original series of all time. Boasting a critic score of 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, as well as an audience rating of 96%, Arcane wowed both long-time fans of League Of Legends, the popular video game series it’s based on, and newcomers to the series — and for good reason. Put simply, Arcane is a masterpiece in visual storytelling. The animation is striking, the storyline is exhilarating and immersive, and the characters are complex and fascinating. But what makes the series really shine is the voice acting, with so much emotion and punch delivered in every single line.
To learn more about Arcane and the nuts and bolts that make up this fantastic series, I chatted with Kevin Alejandro, who voices Jayce Talis. From the incredible voice recording process used by the actors, to the special connections that the cast has with their characters, as well as a teaser about the much-anticipated second season, here’s everything we talked about.
1. For the most part, the actors had to cold-read against each other since filming for Season 1 was done remotely over Zoom.
“Yes!” King told Variety about Samantha and Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) continuing their long-distance friendship. Season 1 left off with Carrie meeting Samantha in London for a drink after throwing Mr. Big’s ashes into the Seine.
“It’s very funny, because every single one of the writers has a different version of what happened during that conversation,” King said of Carrie and Samantha’s offscreen meeting. “So, I think there was some champagne. I think there was a grownup back and forth, and a love affair that they realized that something’s more important than being afraid to heal. I’m sure they had a great night. To me, they had a great night and things became resolved. Once Carrie let go of an old, old love, one of her current loves came back in.”
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Except not literally back: Cattrall, who played Samantha across the original groundbreaking “Sex and the City” series and two subsequent movies, revealed she was not approached to star in “And Just Like That” after turning down the script for the third film.
“I’ve come to the conclusion that really the greatest compliment I could have as an actor is to be missed,” Cattrall previously said of “AJLT” including her character offscreen, before calling it “odd” that the series relies on Samantha’s presence still. “I don’t know how to feel about it. It’s so finite for me, so it doesn’t continue.”
As King formerly told the outlet, “You can literally not make an actress play a part,” about casting Cattrall again. “Magically thinking, it’s great to have Samantha [but] I have no realistic expectation of Kim Cattrall ever appearing again.”
Lead star Parker confirmed that Cattrall was not asked to be part of the revival series because “she made it clear that that wasn’t something she wanted to pursue, and it no longer felt comfortable for us.”
Parker said of the text message workaround for Samantha sans Cattrall, “We felt comfortable moving on without her and without that part because we knew what Michael wanted to do. And we thought he handled it beautifully — that she was there and she was present — and that was kind of nice for all of us and, I think, the audience.”
Francis Ford Coppola‘s Oscar-winning classic ‘The Godfather‘ celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. That made us think, what other films are celebrating anniversaries this year?
In this 4-part series we will take a look at the best movies celebrating their 40th, 30th, 20th, and 10th anniversaries this year.
Finally, let’s countdown the best movies that released in 2012 and are celebrating their 10th anniversaries.
Let’s begin!
Directed by Gary Ross, every year in the ruins of what was once North America, the nation of Panem forces each of its twelve districts to send a teenage boy and girl to compete in the Hunger Games. Part twisted entertainment, part government intimidation tactic, the Hunger Games are a nationally televised event in which “Tributes” must fight with one another until one survivor remains.
Pitted against highly-trained Tributes who have prepared for these Games their entire lives, Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) is forced to rely upon her sharp instincts as well as the mentorship of drunken former victor Haymitch Abernathy (Woody Harrelson). If she’s ever to return home to District 12, Katniss must make impossible choices in the arena that weigh survival against humanity and life against love. The world will be watching.
Directed by Wes Anderson, and set on an island off the coast of New England in the summer of 1965, ‘Moonrise Kingdom’ tells the story of two twelve-year-olds (Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward) who fall in love, make a secret pact, and run away together into the wilderness.
“A tormenting and surprising story of children and adults during the stormy days of the summer of 1965.”
77
PG-131 hr 34 minMay 25th, 2012
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow, the movie chronicles the decade-long hunt for al-Qaeda terrorist leader Osama bin Laden after the September 2001 attacks, and his death at the hands of the Navy S.E.A.L. Team 6 in May, 2011.
Directed by Rian Johnson, in the futuristic action thriller ‘Looper,’ time travel will be invented but it will be illegal and only available on the black market. When the mob wants to get rid of someone, they will send their target 30 years into the past where a looper, a hired gun, like Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is waiting to mop up.
Joe is getting rich and life is good until the day the mob decides to close the loop, sending back Joe’s future self (Bruce Willis) for assassination. The movie also features Emily Blunt, Paul Dano, and Jeff Daniels.
Directed by Joss Whedon, when an unexpected enemy emerges and threatens global safety and security, Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), director of the international peacekeeping agency known as S.H.I.E.L.D., finds himself in need of a team to pull the world back from the brink of disaster. Spanning the globe, a daring recruitment effort begins!
Directed by Sam Mendes, when James Bond’s (Daniel Craig) latest assignment goes gravely wrong, agents around the world are exposed and MI6 headquarters is attacked.
While M (Judi Dench) faces challenges to her authority and position from Gareth Mallory (Ralph Fiennes), the new Chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee, it’s up to Bond, aided only by field agent Eve Moneypenny (Naomie Harris), to locate Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem), the mastermind behind the attack.
Directed by Ben Affleck, as the Iranian revolution reaches a boiling point, Tony Mendez (Affleck), a CIA ‘exfiltration’ specialist concocts a risky plan that involves a Hollywood make-up artist (John Goodman), a producer (Alan Arkin), and a fake movie production to free six Americans (Tate Donovan, Clea DuVall, Christopher Denham, Scoot McNairy, Kerry Bishé, and Rory Cochrane) who have found shelter at the home of the Canadian ambassador (Victor Garber).
Variety Awards Circuit section is the home for all awards news and related content throughout the year, featuring the following: the official awards predictions for the upcoming Oscars and Emmys ceremonies, curated by Variety senior awards editor Clayton Davis; Awards Circuit Column, a weekly analysis dissecting the trends and contenders by television editor Michael Schneider (for Emmys) and Davis (for Oscars); Awards Circuit Podcast, a weekly interview series with talent and an expert roundtable discussion; and Awards Circuit Video analyzes various categories and contenders by Variety's leading awards pundits. Variety's unmatched coverage gives its readership unbeatable exposure in print and online, as well as provide inside reports on all the contenders in this year's awards season races.
To see all the latest predictions, of all the categories, in one place, visit THE EMMYS COLLECTIVE Visit each category, per the individual awards show from THE EMMYS HUB To see old predictions and commentary, click the EMMY PREDICTIONS ARCHIVES For film awards predictions go toTHE OSCARS HUB
UPDATED: June 8, 2022
The nomination round of voting runs from June 16 to June 27. The official nominations for the 74th Emmy Awards will be announced Tuesday, July 12.
The Primetime Emmy Awards, better known as the Emmys, are given out by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (ATAS). Since 1949, the awards recognize excellence in American primetime television programming. They are divided into three classes – Primetime Emmy Awards, the Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards (honors artisan achievements) and the Primetime Engineering Emmy Awards (recognizes significant engineering and technological contributions). The typical eligibility period is between June 1 and May 31 of any given year. The Television Academy comprises over 25,000 members, representing 30 professional peer groups, including performers, directors, producers, art directors and various artisans and executives.
The 74th Emmy Awards will take place on Monday, Sept. 12, and air on NBC.
Cardi B has been serving looks on social media this past week, and her latest ‘fit is just as stunning.
The “I Like It” rapper shared a series of photos and videos to Instagram on Wednesday (June 8) wearing a pink tie-front crop top and mini pink denim shorts, complete with matching boots, a sparkling bag, a pink wig, sunglasses and a ton of glistening accessories.
“Pardon the drip,” she captioned the look.
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Just a day prior, Cardi shared a series of stylish and super sultry photos, opting for a satin blue bikini, complete with furry platform boots in a matching color that rise all the way up to her hips. “I look like SEX,” she fittingly captioned the photos.
The rapper is also fresh off celebrating her baby son Wave’s nine-month birthday. “Happy 9 months Wave!! My baby growing too fast on me,” she captioned an adorable photo of the toddler on social media. Wave, who was born in September, is Cardi and Offset‘s second child together. Big sister Kulture, the couple’s first child together, is three years old. Offset is also the father to three other children from previous relationships.
One month after a sexual assault near a south Edmonton school was reported to police, they have released a composite sketch of the suspect.
On May 8, police were told about a woman being sexually assaulted in the area of 42 Street and 12 Avenue. According to police, the attack occurred at 4:15 p.m. when a man “standing inside the tree line north of the Crawford Plains School park” asked the victim, a woman in her 30s, to come to him.
When she approached him, police said she was sexually assaulted before freeing herself and getting away.
In a news release issued Tuesday, police said the suspect is believed to be about 55 years old. He is about five-foot-seven and 150 pounds and has a “defined jaw,” large nose, small eyes, thick eyebrows, and grey stubble. He is also missing “multiple front upper and lower teeth.”
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At the time the woman was attacked, the suspect was wearing a white Molson Canadian shirt, dark pants and a dark baseball cap. Police noted that the suspect reportedly spoke with a deep and raspy voice.
Anyone with information about the suspect or the assault is asked to call police at 780-423-4567 or #377 from a mobile phone. Anonymous information can also be submitted to Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477 or online at http://www.p3tips.com/250.
Early in the first episode of AMC’s new series “Dark Winds,” Zahn McClarnon’s Joe Leaphorn advises Kiowa Gordon’s Jim Chee about a way to get ahead when investigating crimes on a Navajo reservation. Leaphorn’s been doing this for a while, and isn’t impressed by his new deputy’s credentials, or his naked ambition; sometimes, pragmatic approaches are best, so Leaphorn advises Chee to keep a carton of cigarettes around. On the reservation, people will say more for a pack, he says, “than in an interrogation room.”
It’s a nicely chosen detail — one that speaks to its setting, its time period (the show is set in the early 1970s, when the Tony Hillerman-penned book series on which it’s based first was published), and the dynamic between the pair. Leaphorn is the wellspring of knowledge about law enforcement among the Navajo. And Chee, possessed with more ambition than street smarts, and happily ensconced in white America prior to being called back home, needs help relating to the community. Both men went to college, but Leaphorn returned home, while Chee, his eyes opened and his assimilation well underway, needed to be summoned back.
McClarnon is a tight, intuitively calibrated coil of frustration throughout “Dark Winds”; the actor, familiar from roles in “Reservation Dogs,” “Westworld” (on which he anchored the standout episode “Kiksuya” in 2018), and “Fargo,” gets a well-deserved turn at the center of the frame, and makes the most of every minute onscreen, including in effective acting duets with Gordon and with Deanna Allison, who plays his wife. The script asks a lot of McClarnon, who serves as viewers’ guide through a web of mysteries that includes an armed robbery complete with crooks escaping by helicopter, as well as bodies turning up dead on the reservation — where the involvement of the FBI, in the person of Noah Emmerich’s Agent Whitover, is unwelcome.
It seems no mistake that one can’t spell “Whitover” without “white”: He comes to represent a snarlingly high-handed approach to policing in a community he doesn’t attempt to understand, and he represents an endless source of temptation for Chee, appealing to the latter man’s vanity in presenting an entirely different vision of how to relate to Native life as a law-enforcement officer. (Emmerich, for many seasons the ultimate nice-guy FBI agent on “The Americans,” relishes each bit of scenery he chews here.) But Whitover is an accent on a story that’s gratifyingly tightly told and focused on its core ensemble and their world.
Produced by a team including Robert Redford, George R. R. Martin, and filmmaker Chris Eyre, and written by an entirely-Native writers’ room, “Dark Winds” has an admirable directness of approach: It doesn’t slow down to explain itself to viewers, trusting that its milieu will come through loud and clear. In the wake of the very different, low-key comedy “Reservation Dogs” last year, “Dark Winds” provides yet more proof of the power of high-quality representation, allowing Native people to lend their perspective and history to the types of stories that are fundamental to American entertainment. Seen a certain way, Joe Leaphorn is an archetypal cop, as familiar as Perry Mason; seen another, he represents something that is unfortunately new on our screens, and welcome all the same.
“Dark Winds” premieres on AMC and AMC+ Sunday, June 12 at 9 p.m. ET/PT.
Chinese tech giant Baidu has unveiled a concept robocar called the ROBO-01. With it, the company’s EV car subsidiary JIDU, and Chinese automaker Geely hope to lead the charge into a world of fully-autonomous cars.
The ROBO-01, which Baidu announced on Wednesday, is a sleek all-electric hatchback with gull-wing front doors, a fold-away yoke steering wheel, and a huge focus on computing power. The car will employ Baidu’s Apollo platform, which is used by many car makers in China. According to the company, it has accumulated nearly 17 million miles (27 million kilometers) of supervised autonomous driving through robotaxis using the platform.
The car will be equipped with Orin X chips from Nvidia as well as 31 external sensors including LiDAR, millimeter-level wave radar, ultrasonic radar, and 12 cameras. The system as a whole, according to Baidu, has been tested thoroughly and verified through JIDU’s simulated vehicle tech called JIDU SIMUCar.
Baidu Concept Car interior (Image credit: Baidu)
Baidu also equipped the car with Qualcomm’s fourth-generation Snapdragon Automotive Cockpit Platform 8295 chip that enables the car’s large dash-mounted screen to display 3D visuals for navigation, games, and “online office” scenarios. A “human-like” voice assistant also inhabits the car, providing offline feedback within milliseconds, according to the carmaker.
Per CEO Xia Yiping via Wired (opens in new tab), the computing power of the training algorithms that power Baidu’s self-driving tech can be compared to that of Tesla’s custom supercomputer named Autopilot (no word, though on how this EV compares to Tesla on the driving range front). Yiping also told the magazine that the leap from building software to making hardware comes from a desire to unite both ideas.
JIDU plans to launch a limited feature production model in the fall that will be “90% similar” to the concept renders, and the company will reveal a second iteration of the concept design at this year’s Guangzhou Auto Show.
Expertly crafted character moments rule this week’s installment.
Disney+ surprised Star Wars fans with a Darth Vader/Obi-Wan Kenobi faceoff in Episode 3 of “Obi-Wan Kenobi,” so it’s not surprising that Episode 4 takes to the proverbial plotting bacta tank to recover.
With two episodes left, the series is laying groundwork for some serious showdowns between the Empire and its infant resistance, not to mention more lightsaber warfare unlike anything seen before. It starts off with a literal bacta tank as Obi-Wan (Ewan McGregor) heals from the burns he sustained on Mapuzo, when Vader (Hayden Christensen) used the Force to drag his former Master through a field of fire.
The imagery isn’t subtle, nor is it meant to be; “Obi-Wan” is deliberately reminding us that its title character and Darth Vader are inextricably linked. The original Star Wars films reveal this in “Empire Strikes Back,” but the majority of Anakin and Obi-Wan’s history has been built retroactively by George Lucas and Dave Filoni. The “Chapter 4” opening cuts between Obi-Wan healing in a bacta tank and Vader doing the same — another twisted bond between the two of them, like the burns now scarring Obi-Wan’s back. Episode 3 — and the series at large — is the first time they’ve crossed paths since “Revenge of the Sith” both in the Star Wars chronology and release timeline, and every interaction carries a weight that the original films could never have anticipated.
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Tala (Indira Varma), who proves to be particularly astute and quick-thinking throughout the episode, notices as much.
“Your body’s not the only thing that needs to heal,” she tells Obi-Wan (which star system has the best therapy rates for a former Jedi in hiding?).
“Some things can’t be forgotten,” Obi-Wan tells her — a line that would make “Revenge of the Sith” proud.
At Fortress Inquisitorius, Reva (Moses Ingram) interrogates prisoner Leia (Vivien Lyra Blair) on the whereabouts of the resistance Path. Again, connection clicks because it’s supposed to; Some of Leia’s earliest scenes in “A New Hope” (as Carrie Fisher) are of her being interrogated aboard about Resistance plans and locations — and notably, she complies. Seeing the pint-sized future Senator Organa in handcuffs sends up a thrill of pure dread, because whatever is about to happen has to directly inform how she acts aboard the Death Star years later.
“Obi-Wan Kenobi”
Disney+
Each episode of “Obi-Wan Kenobi” exposes deeper layers to Reva’s ruthlessness, and Leia’s interrogation is no exception. There’s inherent humor in the setup of an adult grilling a child aboard a space ship, but not a drop of that bleeds through. Ingram is unflinching, playing the scene as serious as imaginable and then some. There is no Good Cop/Bad Cop strategy in Reva’s playbook; There is only a cop, and whomever she’s talking to is a criminal. Blair appears more childlike than ever, puncturing Leia’s steely resolve at all the right moments with undisguised anguish and terror.
It’s the best work yet from Ingram, Blair, and Varma, who makes a massive impression as Tala leads the mission to Fortress Inquisitorius and gets nearly everyone back to safety. This isn’t some Rebel putting on an Imperial suit for a heist, but years of expert espionage, training, and subterfuge at work. Usually, when a character is in such high-stakes situations, they visibly balk in ways that should give up the whole operation, but get a pass because they cue in the audience to how the character feels. Tala does none of that. She’s cool as a cucumber, fabricating backstory on the fly, and commanding others aboard the ship with palpable authority.
As he searches for Leia, Obi-Wan finds a tomb filled with the preserved bodies of dead Jedi, each more horrifying than the last. When he finally faces the unbearable sight of a youngling, Obi-Wan hears Leia’s screams and bolts toward his mission. It’s no accident that he hears the child shrieking for help just as he happens upon the young Jedi’s body. “Obi-Wan Kenobi” constantly underscores the Vader/Kenobi connection, this time recalling the day of the Jedi Massacre when Obi-Wan learned that his former padawan had killed younglings at the temple. Such evil cannot be condoned, and in the moment it is Reva perpetuating that evil as she prepares to torture Leia.
Tala interrupts just before Leia can be harmed physically, leading to a solitary but fantastic sequence between Varma and Ingram. Tala lies to protect the rebels while Reva repeatedly doubts her, a game of duplicitous chicken that escalates with every line. Their pairing crackles with talent and chemistry, both actors operating at 200% and only invigorating each other’s performances. Here’s hoping they get to share another scene before the series ends.
This buys enough time for Obi-Wan to release Leia and leave the interrogation room, but they’re quickly located and attacked by Purge Troopers. McGregor continues to dust off Obi-Wan’s prequel-era lightsaber prowess, demonstrating the character’s growing strength — and the fact that Leia is what unleashes it. For 10 years Obi-Wan looked back at his relationship with a Skywalker as folly and weakness, but this is the beginning of a time when it will prove to be his greatest strength.
Obi-Wan and Tala head for the ship in Imperial garb, which provides the unparalleled comedic image of Obi-Wan literally hiding Leia in a trench coat — still not played for laughs but heightened by the fact that they could be caught and killed at any moment. Indeed, that’s almost what happens; in the ensuing battle, Tala’s allies fly in for rescue and one of them dies in the process. Once they’re safe aboard the ship (or so they think), Leia reaches out for Obi-Wan with her tiny little hand, and they sit there — safe, silent, and together, deeply grateful and vulnerable because of that surprising bond growing between them. It’s the final, expertly crafted character moment in an episode full of them, with two more still on the way.
From traditional West African highlife music to modern-day Afrobeat R&B, Adekunle Gold has become one of the top exports during the genre’s globalization. Initially garnering attention for his 2014 One Direction “Story of My Life” cover (later retitled “Sade”), Gold used that momentum to launch his career and release four studio albums. His 2022 Catch Me If You Can Tour kicked off in Boston in support of his album of the same name released earlier this year, which features contributions from Davido, Ty Dolla $ign and Lucky Daye.
Gold’s tour made its second stop at the famed Apollo Theater in Harlem on Friday night. Matching his suave and eccentric sound as an artist, he donned the stage wearing a silk green-and-purple piece designed by British designer Ozwald Boateng. One of the first songs of the night was “Pami,” which had the crowd singing along with every note while video, lights and pyrotechnics made the Apollo look like a festival ground.
Emmanuel Agbeble
Gold’s vocals were in top form through the setlist, which was drawn heavily from the new album, perhaps leaving longtime fans wanting just a bit more from the back catalog. That being said, the setlist was crafted in a way that kept the energy high, with few dips in tempo and vibe. It felt like a party — he even included an Afrobeat remix of Sisqo’s 2000 hit “Thong Song,” which got a warm (and amused) reaction from the crowd.
Gold also used the concert as a platform for new talent. Before his set, NYC Afrobeat singer Fadi took the stage to perform her new single, “Peace of Mind,” and midway through the concert, Gold took a brief intermission to welcome rising star Pheelz to perform his viral hit “Finesse,” featuring Buju, making the singer’s first performance in the United States.
Shortly after, Gold returned to the stage, with a new outfit and another batch of songs, many of which were slower and mid-tempo. He serenaded the crowd as he sang “One Woman,” and closed out the show with an extended version of his signature song, “Higher” as fans clamored to get closer to him.
Dune Director: Denis Villeneuve Cast: Zendaya, Timothee Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgård, Dave Bautista,
“This is only the beginning,” says the desert nomad Chani (Zendaya) at the end of Dune, the long-awaited adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel from the French Canadian writer-director Denis Villeneuve. Given that this 155-minute-long epic covers roughly half of the story told in the book’s several-hundred pages and is explicitly framed at the beginning as Dune: Part One, it leaves the audience at a high point for a second installment.
The story is about two families, the Harkonnens and the Atreideses, fighting it out for control of the desert planet Arrakis, the only known source of a prized substance called spice. This substance is both necessary to fuel interstellar travel and functions as a kind of performance-enhancing drug. Thanks to their exposure to ‘spice’, Arrakis’ desert-dwelling Fremen people have eerie bright-blue eyes, exceptional fighting ability, and, it is implied, psychic powers.
At the heart of the story which is set in year 10191 is Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), the teenage scion of the powerful Atreides clan. He is the son of Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac), who has been assigned by the emperor to lead the forces colonizing Arrakis. The decision doesn’t go down well with the Harkonnen family, which has controlled the planet for more than 80 years. Paul’s mother Lady Jessica, (Rebecca Ferguson who part of a secret priesthood) is training him to become one of the best leaders. She has some highly developed supernatural skills; for example, they can compel even their enemies to do their bidding using a creepy digitally augmented voice.
Cinema exists to evoke. That is its primary purpose, and Dune breathlessly, relentlessly, gloriously takes over our brains as we watch its blistering narrative. This is owed, most greatly, to the film’s absolute and inspirational level of clarity. Unlike in most cinema that relies too heavily on computer generated effects, Miller’s new film decides to use mostly practical stunt-work, and, this combined with the intricacy of the action set pieces using VFX, making the audience constantly aware of the sprawling epic unfolding on screen. From dragonfly-like spaceships, to a fly shape needle made to kill and even the giant size sandworms, Villeneuve shows why he is slowly becoming the master of sci-fi cinema as he previously proved in films like Arrival and Blade Runner 2049.
There is so much detail to gape at, and so lovingly does the director show it all off, the film oozing originality at every pore. Villeneuve displays his confidence in picking up such a beloved story, builds on it, and throws us some more polarizing plot points that would be argued over in the years to come. He also skillfully combines the key elements of filmmaking – the most obvious one being the absolutely stunning cinematography by Greig Fraiser, The soundtrack was another vital element and maestro Hans Zimmer does complete justice to the film.
A large part of the film – gorgeous, breathtaking and mind numbing – reveled in posing questions about life and love and humanity without bothering to answer them. It made us wonder and question and argue.
The only problem I had was that the story ends abruptly. Warner Bros. has yet to formally green light production of the second and final instalment and Villeneuve has said that it would only happen if the film does well in theatres as well as HBO Max, the two platforms where it simultaneously releases. The sheer awesomeness of Villeneuve’s execution deserves to be watched at the biggest screen near you.
A dystopian workplace and time-traveling cowboys (fittingly) blur the lines between Creative Arts Emmy categories. Bill Desowitz considers how this might impact their chances.
[Editor’s Note: This is the first of two parts analyzing the sci-fi craft contenders, beginning with two outliers, “Severance” and “Outer Range.”]
In a season marked by outstanding science fiction, nothing stands out more than the two genre-benders: Sci-fi thriller “Severance” and sci-fi Western “Outer Range.” That says a lot considering the rest of the field: A Marvel team-up between the mind-bending “Moon Knight” and time-jumping “Loki,” an ambitious adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s legendary “Foundation,” a daring sequel to “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” the latest spin-offs in the “Star Trek” and “Star Wars” universes, and the return of the Netflix blockbuster “Stranger Things.”
“Severance” and “Outer Range” are very dark and unconventional. The critically acclaimed “Severance” is arguably the best new drama among Emmy-eligible series, thanks to its ingenious premise — involving a surgical procedure that splits its characters’ workplace and personal memories — and its minimalist aesthetic. Showrunner Dan Erickson and directors Ben Stiller and Aoife McArdle have created an Orwellian nightmare for Adam Scott’s office worker, Mark Scout, who attempts to investigate what he and his “severed” colleagues are actually doing in the subterranean corridors of Lumon Industries.
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Meanwhile, Outer Range” is like “Yellowstone” meets “The Twilight Zone,” in which stoic and ruthless Wyoming rancher Royal Abbott (Josh Brolin) time-jumps back and forth through a mysterious black void, confusing any sense of time and space. Like “Severance,” “Outer Range” taps an existential dread and feeling of powerlessness.
“Severance” has been submitted in 15 Creative Arts Emmy categories, and “Outer Range” in 14. But here’s the interesting part: both shows are downplaying their sci-fi aspects in these submissions, bypassing Outstanding Production Design for a Narrative Period or Fantasy Program and Outstanding Fantasy Sci-fi Costumes. Thus, “Severance” and “Outer Range,” like the dystopian survival thriller “Squid Game,” will avoid going up against the splashier competition in period, fantasy, and sci-fi programming.
“Outer Range”
Amazon Prime Video
Is this a stretch? In the case of “Severance,” it’s debatable, considering the ambiguousness of when the show takes place and the late-20th-century influences in both production design and costumes. In the case of “Outer Range,” it’s less of an issue, since the show takes place in the present and the only fantastical craft on display is VFX (though the minimalist score leans toward trippy sci-fi). According to the current Emmy rules and regulations, “‘[P]eriod refers to any program whose setting is 25 years prior to January 1 of the current awards eligibility year.” Additionally, “51 percent of the running time must be period or fantasy scenery to be eligible.” Fantasy/sci-fi costumes, meanwhile, are defined as those “designed for imagined characters existing in unknown, or non-existent environments, mythical and/or invented and alternate realities.”
Splitting categories is another option “Severance” and “Outer Range” won’t be taking: For instance, “The Man Who Fell to Earth” and “Moon Knight” are submitted in contemporary production design and fantasy/sci-fi costumes. That’s a bifurcation of identity worthy of the Macrodata Refinement team, but it’s not uncommon: “The Handmaid’s Tale” has done this same production design/costumes split; last year, “WandaVision” took home the Emmy for Outstanding Fantasy/Sci-Fi Costumes while also besting all comers, regardless of genre, in Outstanding Production Design For A Narrative Program (Half-Hour). Then there’s Netflix’s “Russian Doll,” which is submitted in the period makeup category this season because of its Season 2 time-hopping.
How “Severance” and “Outer Range” Stack Up
Let’s take a closer look at what “Severance” and “Outer Range” have to offer in the craft races with an eye toward potential success and where they’re likely to face some hurdles.
“Severance”
“Severance”
AppleTV+
Where it’s competing: casting, cinematography, editing, costumes, main title design, main title music, music supervision, choreography for scripted program, hairstyling, makeup, production design, original score, sound editing, sound mixing, and special visual effects
Where it can gain or lose: “Severance” has a definite advantage with its unsettling throwback minimalism. What’s more, it’s literally two shows in one, with the “innie” world of Lumon Industries versus the “outtie” world of personal life. The crafts are just offbeat enough to get noticed by voters and stick out above the competition.
Best bet: Production designer Jeremy Hindle created the maze-like office set for Lumon, keying on the colors green, blue, and gray, and seemingly endless white walls. It was inspired by John Deere headquarters in Chicago along with professional offices from the ’60s and ’70s. In keeping with the period, desks, supplies, computers, and other tech are very anachronistic. For the Lumon exterior, they used the iconic Bell Labs. The “outtie” environment was influenced by ordinary ’70s architecture and a mix of cars from different decades.
Cinematographer Jessica Lee Gagné differentiated the look with very wide lensing, cold lighting, and lots of closeups for the “innie” environment, which she describes as “destabilizing imagery.” The most innovative example of that was the “zolly” effect of mental transition during the eerie elevator ride down to the severed floor. This visual look was in contrast to the longer lensing, warmer lighting, and more open compositions of the “outtie” environment.
Costume designer Sarah Edwards differentiated the retro-looking wardrobes by making the office dress code very simple and tight fitting, while the outside world displayed more colorful, comfortable, and eclectic clothing, yet still not tied to the present.
Other possibilities: For his original score, composer Theodore Shapiro took an appropriately minimal approach by confining himself to four chords. He also experimented with piano notes by reversing, glitching, and making them fall apart. However, the main theme, which is also a contender, has a wonderful melancholy quality that recalls David Shire’s “The Conversation.”
The main title sequence, created by Berlin artist Oliver Latta (aka Extraweg), is extraordinary, like Saul Bass on acid. The way it fixates on Mark Scout as an animated figure, struggling to move like a rat in a maze, or escape, split into multiple versions, is the perfect metaphor for the show. As IndieWire’s Ben Travers and Steve Greene noted, “He’s running through doors to nowhere, taking giant leaps that land him right back in the same cubicle, and pulling desperately on dark threads that release him into a familiar, unnerving cycle.”
The rest of the field: Aside from “Outer Range,” here’s what “Severance” goes up against in terms of its best bets:
For cinematography, previous nominees “Euphoria” (HBO), “Bridgerton” (Netflix), “Ozark” (Netflix), “Stranger Things,” and “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” (Amazon Prime Video), along with newcomers “Pachinko” (Apple TV+), “Squid Game” (Netflix), “Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty” (HBO).
For contemporary production design, previous nominees “Succession” (HBO), “Euphoria,” “Ozark,” “Russian Doll,” and newcomers “Squid Game,” and “Emily in Paris” (Netflix).
For contemporary costumes, previous winners “Russian Doll,” previous nominees “Euphoria,” “Hacks” (HBO Max), “Black-ish” (ABC), and “This Is Us” (NBC), and this year’s CDGA winner, “Emily in Paris.”
“Outer Range”
“Outer Range”
Richard Foreman/Amazon Prime Video
Where it can gain or lose: The challenge for showrunner Brian Watkins was finding a tricky balance between reality and the supernatural without going completely off the rails. This is hard when a stampede of a thousand buffalo pop up out of the black void into the present. Thus, Royal’s struggle to protect his family and save his ranch becomes an existential crisis of chaos and confusion.
Best bet: Production designer Tommaso Ortino effectively straddles the line of his world building between realism and heightened reality with a black void (a sink hole enhanced by VFX) in the middle of a ranch. He contrasts the personalities of Royal and eccentric rival Tillerson (Will Patton) through their different family ranches. The modest Abbott ranch house was completely built from scratch on location in New Mexico, including the barn and farmhouse. An exact replica was built on a sound stage. Tillerson’s house set is large and “Twin Peaks” strange, decorated with expensive wood and filled with lots of taxidermy and exotic artwork. He’s both materialistic and spiritual.
Costume designer Rachel Dainer researched the lives of Montana ranchers in crafting the clothes of her cast, but also made use of the fact that they shot in New Mexico doubling as Wyoming. In particular, she found a custom hat shop in Santa Fe for a variety of hats.
The versatile cinematography of Drew Daniels suffuses the Wyoming vastness with beauty and unease. But then there are the dark and moody moments, such as the scene where Royal plays poker in a saloon with the enigmatic backpacker Autumn (Imogen Poots) and a buffalo suddenly appears.
Other possibilities: VFX is another possibility, with VFX supervisor Jason Piccioni creating the otherworldly void and the mythological stampede of CG buffalo. For the void, they built a sink hole and made it look infinitely deep with the help of New York boutique studio, Break + Enter, which created a lot of CG negative space combined with otherworldly dirt particles.
The score by composers Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans eschewed more familiar Western styles and instrumentation in favor of minimalism more associated with sci-fi. They experimented with four notes as a question and answer that flows throughout the show in different forms. They utilized strings, voices, and synths. The result captured an ethereal intimacy built around the supernatural black void.
The rest of the field: Aside from the head to head competition with “Severance,” which has the advantage being critically acclaimed and awards buzzy, “Outer Range” also goes up against the same best bets in contemporary production design and costumes, and cinematography. When you get into the areas of VFX and sound, though, the competition from the sci-fi heavy-hitters becomes fierce for both “Severance” and “Outer Range.” However, the biggest obstacle for “Outer Range” is avoiding the same snubbing that “Yellowstone” has experienced in its four seasons as an underrated contemporary Western.
Stefani says that starting her own makeup brand reminds her of her No Doubt days when no one told her how to dress, apply makeup, or what to do. In many ways, it’s a full circle moment. “[GXVE] was almost like my backup plan in life that I’m getting to do now, but I get to kind of do both [as a singer and creator], which is so great,” she says. “And also be part of this influencer movement that’s happening, where we share our secrets and our tricks and learn from each other. It’s a super beautiful community.”
And it’s just another reason why the new Mrs. Shelton loves her always-in-progress glam room. “Makeup is one of those things that I could talk about all day long and never get tired of it. I love glam. I never like going to the event [I’m getting glammed up for]. I’m always about the [process].”
So what are her tried-and-true glam rules? For Glamour‘s Big Beauty Questions, the mom of three tells us the beauty hack she swears by, and the new tip she just picked up.
Glamour: What do you love about your new liquid lipstickXtra Sauce?
Gwen Stefani: I had written a song, two years ago now [called “Slow Clap”] and I had that lyric in there (Walk into the room like a boss, slow clap…Putting on a little extra sauce, slow clap). This formula is ridiculous. It does not move. I’m pressing hard, it will not come off. And it’s long-wear and clean, but it also has a shine to it, which I’ve never seen before.
I’ve also never revealed my color formula all these years. I just felt uncomfortable representing a color. I don’t wear one color, but I started to when I came out with the Original Recipe, which is our matte lipstick. It’s the one I probably wear the most because it’s super comfortable, it stays in place and it’s long-wear. I just really love that vintage, old-fashioned kind of matte lipstick. And now those are coming in all new colors.
How long does it take for you to do the perfect, precise, camera-ready red lip?
I could do a perfect red lip in less than a minute. In fact, I never worked with a makeup artist my entire career, really, other than one here or one there. I had a bad experience when I was doing the first No Doubt record, before Tragic Kingdom. This guy came and did my makeup for the artwork and I remember thinking I looked ugly. I was like, “I look prettier when I do my makeup,” but I was too scared to say something. I still look at those pictures and I’m like, “[ugh].” After that I took it into my own control.
When I did my solo record, I let this makeup artist that was working with the Harajuku girls do my foundation, and I loved it so much, I was like, “Okay, you can do my makeup.” [But] I’ve just been very controlling about it. Nowadays I’m the opposite because I’ve met some makeup artists that are so unbelievably gifted. I think it comes down to the fact that the community is so open to sharing.
It’s that time again for a new week of incoming streaming titles as we slowly head through the downward slope of April. All your favorite streamers have some new content arriving, though mid-month is not the most exciting time to premiere their best work. However, there’s plenty to keep you interested.
Netflix has been digging deep into its Asian content, and this week we get a “funny and thought-provoking social comedy” called He’s Expecting. It’s based on a Manga title and is placed in an era where males can give birth. As you might imagine from the title, the storyline follows a successful businessman who finds out he’s expecting with an unplanned pregnancy.
Netflix is also premiering the second season of Russian Doll, Selling Sunset Season 5, plus a new documentary on the rise & fall of popular 2000’s clothing brand Abercrombie & Fitch.
Hulu‘s offering is a little sparse this week, but boy does it look good. Captive Audience will turn you into just that, with the true crime doc of 7-year-old Steven Stayner, who disappeared in 1972, only to return home safely 7 years later. However, that’s just where the story begins as his brother becomes the villain in an unthinkable turn of events.
And Prime Video is dropping season 2 of A Very British Scandal which focuses on the divorce of the Duke and Duchess of Argyll, one of the most notorious, extraordinary and brutal legal cases of the 20th Century.
Director Colin Trevorrow does it again (but somehow, worse).
To say that “Jurassic World: Dominion” squanders its potential would imply it had much to begin with. Perhaps some other, theoretical sequel to J.A. Bayona’s serviceable “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom” may have had promise, as a follow-up to that haunted-house creature-feature that ends with a human clone setting dinosaurs loose upon our world. However, “Dominion” director and co-writer Colin Trevorrow (the man responsible for “The Book of Henry”) is the opposite of an idea guy. His apparent “Jurassic” finale goes by the way of “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” — ironic, since that was Trevorrow’s job — and brushes aside every promise made by its predecessor. It’s a sequel whose images convey little meaning, other than that which they borrow from other movies, and the result is one of the worst big-budget Hollywood blockbusters since, well, Trevorrow’s “Jurassic World.”
To introduce us to this new era of humanity, in which dinosaurs live among humans and alter our relationship to mother Earth, “Dominion” begins with an oceanic set-piece that quickly pulls out to reveal — drum roll, please — a cheaply produced internet news documentary in the vein of The Dodo, the kind of crowd-sourced content that, in a better movie, might have offered a window into the way people viewed this new world. Here, it comes off as an excuse for some thoughtless, haphazard framing with self-serious expository voiceover bordering on parody, given the sheer volume of plot-specific information condensed into a single clip. And yet, the film still spends the next half hour in introductory mode, catching us up on characters and setting up a pair of vaguely related conflicts meant to bring the old cast into contact with the new.
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Movies should, of course, take their time to establish their central characters, but “Dominion” lays out these sequences in utterly mechanical fashion. No one enters or exits a scene with urgency or purpose (a problem that carries over to the action as well). Established characters show up to explain where they are in life and the film moves on to the next item on its checklist.
Claire Something (Bryce Dallas Howard) and Owen Someone (Chris Pratt) occupy an isolated tundra cabin where they care for a now-teenaged Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon), the clone granddaughter of Jurassic Park co-founder Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell). Maisie is now the object of a corporate manhunt, leading to yet another malformed story about Claire accepting her motherhood instincts, not to mention more moody sulking from Owen (Pratt, as usual, struggles to put on a tough-guy allure). Oh, and Owen’s pet raptor Blue shows up as well, having given birth to a cute little merchandising opportunity, Beta.
Meanwhile, in a seemingly unrelated plot about giant locusts threatening worldwide famine, Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) seeks the help of her former lover and comrade Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill). There’s an implied contrast between them — Ellie has risen through the ranks of a prestigious university, while Alan is still a loner in search of funding for his digs, much like his previous appearances — but both characters show up wearing pretty much the same outfits they did 30 years ago.
Everything about them, from their appearances to the way they interact, is defined by who they were in a much better film, as if no time has passed. They are, essentially, trapped in amber, but not in a way that “Dominion” reckons with beyond a fleeting line of dialogue. (Jeff Goldblum’s Dr. Ian Malcolm, who shows up later on, also dons his signature leather jacket but his stammering comedic presence is always welcome.)
When Maisie and Beta are kidnapped, Claire and Owen enlist the help of a wisecracking pilot, Kayla Watts (DeWanda Wise), whose tonally confused quips frequently fall flat — a problem pervading most of the film. There’s an Omar Sy character you most assuredly don’t remember from a previous “Jurassic” entry. They soon make their way to an island lab housing a dinosaur sanctuary, the same place Ellie and Alan happen to be headed, and it’s here that most of the movie is set.
Sorry if you wanted a story about what the world might be like if our eons-old reptile ancestors suddenly invaded and put their feet up for good, but this is another saga of a dinosaur island run by a greedy corporation, far from civilization. But what of the other major promise in “Fallen Kingdom,” the one about reckoning with human cloning, both from an ethical and psychological standpoint? Well, the “Rise of Skywalker” comparisons aren’t just about the movie’s quality, because this idea is also partially retconned in a way that makes it far less intriguing.
In the interest of fairness: There are about 20 minutes in which “Dominion” introduces fun new concepts before flying off the rails and becoming a buck-wild mechanical bull ride — with one action beat in particular that feels like a hallucination — but this delightful section still leaves nearly two whole hours of mind-numbing “legacy-sequel” pablum that barely qualifies as a movie. The number of shots that convey any kind of tension or meaning on their own can be counted on one hand (I know, because I kept track), leaving even fewer pairs of shots where a cut from one to the next is geographically or emotionally comprehensible.
Perhaps comparing it to the original “Jurassic Park” is too a high a bar — somehow, “Dominion” has an inverse relationship to scale, relying entirely on characters pointing out the size of various creatures for this to become apparent — but even the 2015 “Jurassic World” defeats it in the visual department. The shot and scene construction of Trevorrow’s first dino outing was at least somewhat clear, even if the frame always seemed to function antithetically to the story. It’s one heck of a dilemma, having to choose which of his two entries works better: the one where each decision has the opposite effect of what was intended, or the one where decisions have no effect at all.
“Jurassic World: Dominion”
Universal Pictures
There are a handful of exceptions, but these borrow from other contemporary films. There’s a shot that quotes “Mad Max: Fury Road,” and a landscape that seems to ape the works of Chloé Zhao. They don’t last long, but the only time “Dominion” springs to life is when it rips from classic iconography.
Those aforementioned 20 minutes concern a delightful sequence set in and around an underground black market in Malta. It’s a pitstop for Owen and Claire as they search for Maisie, but it’s filled with raptor fights, seedy poachers, and stalls selling dino kebabs, like something out of a “Star Wars” cantina. It’s imaginative, and exactly the kind of setting a sequel like this should have. Soon, a bike chase breaks out, with raptors swerving between buildings and narrow alleyways. The film’s propensity for mismatched shots finally finds a chaotic companion, cutting from one dino chasing a motorcycle to another tracking people on rooftops as if it were Jason Bourne.
The Bourne influence becomes shockingly literal when a bloodthirsty raptor — after a brief shot of it smashing its face through a wooden door, à la Jack Nicholson in “The Shining” — jumps between balconies in a shot that accurately mimics the most famous beat from “The Bourne Ultimatum,” like someone decided to apply the core concept of “The Velocipastor” to a modern spy thriller. It’s the wildest, strangest, most hilariously head-spinning thing any Hollywood movie has done this year — but it’s also a searing indictment of the rest of the film.
The only joy in this movie comes from its precise mimicry. It has no identity of its own, which becomes depressingly apparent when the franchise’s old and new characters finally come face to face. The first meeting plays like the scene from zombie satire “Shaun of the Dead” in which the main cast greets their doppelgangers. Multiple sequences frame the action to crowd the entire cast into frame, like a last-minute family photograph. They aren’t people with unique personalities so much as they are, collectively, the cast of a long-running franchise that needs to be put out of its misery.
With little tension or humor, there’s nothing keeping “Jurassic World: Dominion” afloat beyond the naïve hope that recognizing the familiar will be enough for some viewers. Maybe it will be, but it’s proof that we’re in one of the dullest, most artless periods of Hollywood blockbusters yet — “Top Gun: Maverick” notwithstanding — and we could be stuck here for some time.
Grade: D
A Universal Pictures release, “Jurassic World: Dominion” hits theaters on Friday, June 10.
During the early weeks of the pandemic (remember those days, when quarantine felt like at-home camp and we had no plans to still be talking about COVID two years later?) and then as the 2020 election went off the rails, my wife and I turned to “Schitt’s Creek” to get our minds off the apocalypse.
