Month: December 2020

The most unholy thing that 2020 seemed to be lacking — a fantastical update about Martin “Pharma Bro” Shkreli’s continuing shenanigans behind bars — finally materialized on Sunday. Oh boy, did this story hit the spot. A reporter for an esteemed publication confessed to throwing away her marriage and her job and her dignity for a shot at love with Shkreli (who is serving a 7-year prison sentence for security fraud). And then Christie Smythe, formerly of Bloomberg, told Elle all about this hot mess in lurid detail. Really, if you’ve ever felt bad about a relationship decision in your life, you will probably feel a little better knowing that at least you didn’t have your first kiss with a convicted white collar criminal in a room that smelled of chicken wings.

Actually, I hope that neither of those two variables (kissing a convicted felon/professional troll or the chicken-wing romance thing) never, ever happens to you. Smythe apparently experienced both things before she agreed to freeze her eggs for the dude who had to forfeit his $2 million Wu-Tang album as part of an asset seizure, and damn, she didn’t even get to listen to the thing. Would that be worth throwing away a marriage? Probably not, but it’s time to get silly because Smythe allegedly sold the movie rights to her story. Never mind that she hasn’t even published the book that’s supposed to be the basis of this movie because, my god, we’ve got some dreamcasting to do.

Well, first, it’s pretty important to note (as this Twitter user did) that Smythe’s institution-bound love story with Pharma Bro is “almost precisely Harley Quinn’s origin story.” In other words, I’m catching some serious Jared Leto-Joker vibes now regarding Skhreli the master manipulator.

Really though, who should portray Smythe and Shkreli if their story does get the cinematic treatment? Kristen Bell and Kieran Culkin and Vincent Karthaiser and Betty Gilpin all got mentions, among others (like Ben Shapiro, should he choose to make his Hallmark movie debut).

Heck, let’s give it to this dude. He’s throwing himself on the grenade.

And wait a minute, why stop at a movie? This could be a miniseries.

Thank goodness 2020 can still bring some laughs, right?

Remember Martin Shkreli? The “pharma bro” who jacked up the price of a drug by 5,000 percent overnight? Who paid $2 million for a Wu-Tang record and then made them hate him by taunting them online? Who is currently serving a seven year jail sentence for securities fraud? His strange and inexplicable life has taken a new twist. Elle sat down with former Bloomberg journalist Christie Smythe, who had her own surreal story: She quit her job and divorced her husband so she could be “life partners” with the most hated thirtysomething who’s not part of the Trump administration.

It all began, Christie told Elle, when she began the first journalist to seriously report on Shkreli’s dodgy deeds. She was the one who broke the story of his arrest on fraud charges in December of 2015. Rather than butt heads, the two became closer. A little too close. She soon found herself feeling sorry for him, even making taking his defense. She claimed he “trolls because he’s anxious,” and because he “really, really wants to be somebody.” Even though she admitted to some that was “manipulative” to reporters, she couldn’t help but admit he’d “drawn her in.” After he was transferred to a prison in Pennsylvania, the New York-based reporter got a license so she could see him, even though she “used to get panic attacks when driving.”

The Shkreli business slowly got to Smythe’s husband, and the two eventually divorced. It got to her Bloomberg bosses, too, and she quit that as well. Her defenses “totally eroded,” she decided to go for it:

In the visitors’ room, “I told Martin I loved him,” Smythe says. “And he told me he loved me, too.” She asked if she could kiss him, and he said yes. The room smelled of chicken wings, she remembers.

At the time she had no regrets:

“It’s hard to think of a time when I felt happier,” Smythe says. “At first he’s like, ‘Can I call you my girlfriend?’ ” she says, and “this led very naturally into thinking about a future together.” Soon they were discussing their kids’ names and prenups. After Smythe worried about being too old to have children when Shkreli got out of prison, he suggested she freeze her eggs. She did so last spring.

There’s just one catch: When Shkreli found out she had been telling all of this to Elle, he abruptly severed all ties. When reached for comment, he gave the publication an ice cold response: “Mr. Shkreli wishes Ms. Smythe the best of luck in her future endeavors.” Smythe, meanwhile, sold the movie rights to a book she wrote about Shkreli, which itself has not, incidentally, been picked up by a publisher. She now works for a journalism start-up.

When the news broke, some — including fellow reporters — did not take Smythe’s side.

One person dug up an old Smythe tweet in which she either betrayed or joked about ulterior motives.

Some felt bad for Smythe’s ex-husband.

Others were not happy that they suddenly had to remember the name Martin Shkreli.

You can read the full Elle piece right here.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year, which is to say when people online debate one of the most important subjects of our time: Is Die Hard a Christmas movie? The naysayers say it’s an action movie with too high a body count (and, to a lesser extent, some property destruction) to be a Yuletide staple. The yeasayers point out that it literally takes place over Christmas Eve, and no one would chuck Gremlins or Silent Night, Deadly Night from the Christmas canon.

Now there’s a major addition to the pro side: Die Hard’s very own director, John McTiernan. McTiernan helmed both the 1988 original and its 1995 threequel (as well as the first Predator, The Hunt for Red October, and the pretty fun remake of The Thomas Crown Affair). And in an admittedly quite rambling and not always coherent 12-minute interview with the American Film Institute, he discusses, among other things, how one of its inspirations was no less an Xmas classic than It’s a Wonderful Life.

Mind you, he was really inspired by one stretch of the 1946 drama: the section where James Stewart’s George Bailey is shown an alternate universe Bedford Falls, one where he was never born and where evil wealth monster Mr. Potter took over, even calling it Pottersville. That, McTiernan says, is what happens when the evil banker gets to do what he wants in the community without George getting in the way to stop it.”

What’s more, not only is the Pottersville sequence one of the most nightmarish in a Hollywood production, revealing the truly dark side to what has long been thought of as heartwarming Frank Capra-corn. It’s also, says McTiernan, “the clearest demonstration and criticism of runaway, unregulated cowboy capitalism that’s ever been done in an American movie.”

It’s a bit of a stretch to connect this directly to Die Hard, whose villains aren’t so much capitalists as thieves, and whose actual capitalists — the heads of the Nakatomi Corporation — are mostly depicted as sympathetic. (Even cokehead turncoat Ellis is more pathetic — and coked-up — then evil.) And while McTiernan’s argument — that Bruce Willis’ John McClane is a more trash-mouthed, trigger-happy George Bailey — is a bit dodgy, too, it mostly sounds about right that he wanted to stress his hero’s working class bona fides. He recalls pitching 20th Century Fox on an action movie with a more everyman action movie protagonist:

“I said, ‘Okay, if you want me to make this terrorist movie, I want to make it where the hero in the first scene, when the limo driver apologizes that he’s never been in a limo before, the hero says, ‘It’s alright. I’ve never ridden in a limo before.’ A working class hero.”

That said, McTiernan admits that, the It’s a Wonderful Life inspiration aside, they “hadn’t intended [Die Hard] to be a Christmas movie.” But lo and behold, it became one anyway.” “The joy that came from it is what turned it into a Christmas movie. And that’s really the best I can tell you about it.”

So there you have it: If George Bailey liked to cuss a lot, run around without even socks, and was a good shot, maybe he could have been played by Moonlighting-era Bruce Willis. Then again, George Bailey would never have been able to become a good shot because he wasn’t allowed in the army due to that ear infection he got by jumping into that ice cold water to save his little brother. In fact, that gives us an idea for a great double Christmas Eve double feature…

(Via The AV Club)

There are two COVID-19 vaccines being slowly rolled out across America, one of the nations most savagely hit by the virus. And there’s one thing you have to be ready to see in droves: social media posts of people getting injected. There’s just one problem: So far the ones doing that have been Republican lawmakers who’ve spent the last near-year playing down the severity of the pandemic, if not actively making it worse. One of those people is professional pearl clutcher Marco Rubio, and when he posted a picture on Twitter of him being vaccinated, he got the opposite of likes.

On one hand, he meant well: The more people in power who show themselves getting vaccinated, the more the public will ignore conspiracy theorists making baseless claims about their efficacy and do the same. On the other hand, a lot of people found it pretty rich that Rubio — who has been a senator in one of the nation’s unstoppable hotspots, who complained about the press focusing on the Trump administration’s epic mishandling of the pandemic, who even attended the outgoing president’s mask-free “superspreader” rallies, which have led to ballooning infection rates — would be among the first to get a cure.

It left a lot of people angry.

Celebrities were mad, too.

Some compared him to hissable movie characters.

And others pointed out that Rubio is hardly the only Republican who jumped to the front of the line, butting in front of people who actually put their lives at risk to save others.

The New York Jets entered Sunday at 0-13 and, at many sportsbooks, were actually favored to go 0-16 for the first time all season after getting absolutely stomped by the Seattle Seahawks a week ago. The path to a win was bleak, with the 9-4 Rams, 9-4 Browns, and 6-7 Patriots left on the schedule, but on Sunday, they finally, miraculously — or, for those hoping for Trevor Lawrence, disastrously — got into the win column with a stunning 23-20 win over the Rams as 17-point underdogs in Los Angeles.

New York marched, as they so often do, on their first drive to a touchdown, but the difference in this game was that even once they got off script, they continued to play well. Sam Darnold was mistake free, going 22-for-31 for 207 yards and one touchdown, while the ageless wonder Frank Gore had 59 yards and one touchdown on 23 carries — and picked up the game-winning first down on a catch on 3rd and 7.

On defense, they were really solid, holding the Rams to just over 300 yards of offense as they had Jared Goff looking rattled and uncomfortable and kept the L.A. ground game in check. The two biggest plays of the day came from the Jets secondary, as they got a spectacular one-handed interception from rookie Bryce Hall and a key pass breakup from Marcus Maye on what ended up being the Rams final offensive possession.

The win thrilled Jags fans and a very small segment of the Jets faithful, but mostly infuriated them by moving them into a tie with Jacksonville for the worst record in the league at 1-13 and opened up the door for them to not get the first overall pick and to end up without Clemson star quarterback Trevor Lawrence next season — as they’ve hoped for some time. Still, for the players it’s a big win and keeps them from suffering the ignominy of a winless season. It also surely thrilled sportsbooks who had taken plenty in on Jets 0-16 props, with likely a larger handle on the “Yes” given the juice they had on that earlier in the year.

The beer world is built on buzz — literally and metaphorically. New and annual releases are hotly anticipated by the drinking public, amplified by outlets like this one, and, eventually, torn down so that new “it beers of the moment” can emerge. Only a few classics are able to endure the cycle year after year.

So why engage in it?

Well, because the process of sampling, evaluating, arguing, learning, and reevaluating cultural products — from food to film to language itself — is fun. Why else would people still write think pieces about Goodfellas or rank Beatle’s songs in 2020? And though expertise is important, when it comes to arguments about food and drinks, all opinions have some degree of validity. Because ultimately what you prefer relies on your unique palate.

Which is all a long way of explaining that we asked bartenders to name overhyped winter beers and some of their picks are beers we love. Some even made our “Best of 2020” list. So remember going in, the critiques offered below are simply opinions held by 10 people who serve beers on the daily. We’re not saying they need to be taken as gospel, you have every right to be outraged, appalled, and combative — that’s what the comments are for!

Samuel Adams Winter Ale

Deena Sayers, bartender at Common Ground in New York City

Sam Adams Winter Ale.

This brand has overwhelming popularity with their seasonal brews. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the best tasting ones on the market. I personally find the mouthfeel to be a little flat, and the taste is not overwhelming with those typical nostalgic winter flavors.

Goose Island Bourbon County Stout

Hayden Miller, head bartender at Bodega Taqueria y Tequila in Miami

Goose Island Bourbon County Stout. No disrespect to Goose, just feels as though the appeal started to wane with the acquisition by AB. No longer so worth the crazy hyped up wait around the block for this bottling.

Anchor Christmas Ale

Seth Falvo, bartender at The Hotel Zamora in St. Pete Beach, Florida

As much as I hate to say anything bad about a company that craft beer in the United States more or less owes its existence to, Our Special Ale by Anchor Brewing is wildly overrated.

Back in 1975, Anchor set the standard for Christmas beers in the United States by releasing the first American Christmas beer since the repeal of prohibition. But there’s a downside to setting the standard – you’re essentially making your product generic by default since it’s now the measuring stick that others are compared to. Our Special Ale seemingly pops up on every “X Must-Try Holiday Beers” list published in the United States, even though there are hundreds of American beers that taste identical to it, and dozens that are, frankly, better.

Anchor Brewing always releases quality beers, but for Our Special Ale to continue to receive such high praise is enough for me to warrant calling it “the most overrated winter beer.”

Southern Tier Pumking

Yasin Orhun Akinci, manager at Orient Express Bar in New York City

I don’t understand why people love aromatic bears like a pumpkin ale, etc. The beer should taste like beer. A great example is Southern Tier Pumking. Why not just eat a piece of pumpkin pie instead?

New Belgium Accumulation

Robert Gleim, managing partner of Bamboo Willie’s Beachside Bar in Pensacola, Florida

New Belgium Accumulation is my pick. It’s too fruity for a winter IPA and surprisingly light. They might make a better version of this for the Summer. I need a little more depth for the cooler months.

21st Amendment Fireside Chat

Erin Gowdy, bartender at Paul’s Landing in St. Petersburg, Florida

121st Amendment Fireside Chat is not necessarily overrated, but it is one of the most popular winter beers when there are so many lesser-known contenders. Local breweries are always a fantastic way to go for seasonal brews.

Sierra Nevada Celebration

Roberto Berdecia, bartender at La Factoria in San Juan, Puerto Rico

In general, the most overrated beer style is the IPA because most brewers use the hops to cover imperfections in the beer. If I was going to choose an overrated wintry IPA, I’d go with Sierra Nevada Celebration. It’s just not as good as the hype.

Writer’s Picks:

Brooklyn Winter Ale

Like many of the beers on this list, there’s nothing wrong with Brooklyn Winter Ale. It’s just not as good as the hype makes it out to be. While it’s malty, hoppy, and crisp, it’s a little too light to stand up to a cold winter night.

Deschutes Jubelale

This 6.7 percent holiday favorite isn’t bad, but it’s a little too potent in the flavor department for our liking. It’s okay to drink one bottle, but the overly sweet, spicy flavor is a little in your face.

Harpoon Winter Warmer

If you purchase this beer, you know what you’re getting. It’s designed to warm you up on a chilly day with the addition of flavors like cinnamon, nutmeg, and other spices. That said, those notes are just a bit too over-the-top for my palate.

In what comes as a surprise to no one, Taylor Swift’s Evermore debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard album charts. The singer’s ninth album came just a little over four months after her previous one, Folklore. Prior to its release, Swift revealed that her two 2020 projects were “sister” records, saying that Evermore came as a result of her inability to “stop writing songs.” She added, “It feels like we were standing on the edge of the folklorian woods and had a choice: to turn and go back or to travel further into the forest of this music … We chose to wander deeper in.”

Evermore sold 329,000 equivalent album units in its first week on the charts. The album was only released through digital retailers while its CD edition will be available for purchase on December 18. The project becomes the eighth No. 1 album of Swift’s career and her second of 2020. She also earned the shortest gap between a pair of No. 1 albums by a female artist since Billboard began consistently publishing a weekly chart in March 1956. Swift holds the new record because Folklore and Evermore were released four months and 18 days apart.

Swift also earned the second-largest streaming week of 2020, thanks to 220.49 million on-demand streams of the album’s songs. This comes second to Folklore which tallied 289.85 million streams of its songs in its first week.

Revisit our review of Evermore here.

(via Billboard)

No one reads the terms of service during when updating apps. What’s more, everyone knows they should. Tucked away in acres of boilerplate and legalese are sometimes, if not always, some really alarming revelations about what certain services can do with your information. There’s even an old South Park episode parodying this very issue (as well as The Human Centipede). Last week some people tried to raise red flags about some scary stuff buried in an Instagram update, which went live on Sunday. One of those people was no less than Madonna Louise Ciccone, better known to you as simply Madonna.

The pop goddess took to Instagram on Saturday, hoping to warn people about an update mere hours before it went into effect. “Starting tomorrow,” she said in a video, “Instagram’s new cyber surveillance policies allow Mark Zuckerberg to spy on you and your family, steal your most intimate secrets and monitor your compliance with government mandates through all your devices – including your television – and sell your data to government and industry or punish you for disobedience.” She added, “This is some scary s*it.”

Mind you, she didn’t go into detail about how the new update does…well, any of this. But she’s far from the only person who’s singled out the December 20th update as a harbinger of worse things to come. Some highlighted some densely and vaguely worded business about what Instagram can do with the pictures you post on their service.

Some pointed out that one section implies that your username can’t also be your own personal url, which could affect bloggers and small businesses.

One issue, which Madonna did not highlight, is how it could affect sex workers. When the ToS in the update was first made public, those in the industry worried that Instagram — which is owned by Facebook, who forbid sexually explicit or even implicit content — would start deleting their accounts, which they use to attract clients. In fact, social media is often the way they first interact with clients.

Instagram did respond to the concerns, telling Mashable: “that the new terms are focused on clarifying how the app uses data to serve personalized ads; what data advertisers receive; and licensing and IP usage. They did not change any of the language around the posting of sexual or suggestive content.” They also posted an explanatory tweet.

And yet a number of sex workers came forward, accusing Instagram of already targeting their accounts, sometimes deleting them multiple times. Even sex educators, including tantric coaches and professional Dommes, have claimed to have been targeted.

While Instagram’s posts have tried to calm nerves, it hasn’t entirely worked. When Mashable asked them about removing accounts that link to OnlyFans, which has been popular with sex workers, they received some jumbled rhetoric: “We don’t take action simply because accounts post OnlyFans links, we take action if these links are shared alongside content attempting to share or offer sexual materials, or coordinate sexual encounters between adults.”

It’s the kind of impenetrable word salad that George Orwell once warned against; after all, as he argued, being unclear, or even just boring, is a tried-and-true way to screw people over. You can read the full new Terms of Service right here. It may or may not contain some of the grim shenanigans against which Madonna warned, but we may not know for sure until accounts start vanishing en masse.

(Via Mashable)

Home Alone 2: Lost in New York has never had the cultural pull of its predecessor, though not for lack of trying. Indeed, it’s pretty much the first film, with almost every beat replaced by some Big Apple counterpart. Then again, maybe that explains its lowly rep. But it’s remained a holiday staple, despite or maybe even because of the cameo from You Know Who. And its stature is such that it even got parodied on SNL, with host Kristen Wiig stepping into the shoes of the beloved “Pigeon Lady” who some people recently thought — erroneously, alas — was Piers Morgan. (In fact, she was played by Oscar-winner Brenda Fricker.)

The sketch imagined an alternate ending to the movie, in which Melissa Villaseñor played Macaulay Culkin’s Kevin McCallister opposite Wiig’s Pigeon Lady. In the movie, she’s the sequel’s equivalent of the old next door neighbor from the original: a figure of fright who turns out to be a savior. But the parody savages one unremarked-upon aspect of the film: Kevin, the scion of upper middle class parents, armed with a portion of his dad’s wealth, really could have gotten her a room at the Plaza, too.

And so Villaseñor’s Kevin remains oblivious to the desperation of Wiig’s Pigeon Lady, who keeps hoping he’ll at least give her some of that limo pizza. Kevin eventually catches on, but it’s too late: the Wet-turned-Sticky Bandits — Kyle Mooney doing Joe Pesci and Mickey Day doing Daniel Stern — arrive, stealing the kid’s riches. But instead of simply incapicatating them, as she does in the movie, Wiig’s Pigeon Lady bashes them to bloody death.

It’s reminiscent of another famous SNL alternate ending: the one they did for It’s a Wonderful Life, which concludes with Dana Carvey’s George Bailey learning that Jon Lovitz’s Mr. Potter was the one who took his money, leading an angry mob to his home, and beating him to death, all while the townsfolk continue to sing “Auld Lang Syne.”

You can watch the sketch above.

Eddie Izzard, the legendary comedian and actor who’s fond of history, digressions, and James Mason impersonations, has always pushed gender fluidity. She’s a transvestite, not a cross-dresser, and she’s often performed her beloved shows in a dress, and has long called herself a “male transvestite.” That changed recently when Izzard went one step further, declaring that her pronouns are now she/her.

Izzard made the news public last week while sitting in for Sky Arts’ Portrait Artist Of The Year, in which various celebrities pose for portraits, ending in a competition. She was being drawn by artist Curtis Holder — who won, by the way — and while his subject sat, she discussed her new transition.

“I try to do things that I think are interesting, and this is the first program I’ve asked if I can be she and her. A little transition period,” Izzard told Holder, who then asked her how her new status feels. “Well it feels great, because people just assume that they just know me from before, but I’m gender fluid. I just want to be based in girl mode from now on.”

Izzard — whose 1999 show Dress to Kill is truly among the great stand-up specials, teeming with untold quotables — was showered with online support.

She also received a lot of pushback from transphobes.

But those who know her know that this is an organic transition from something she’s been doing her entire career.

(Via EW)