Month: March 2021

The 63rd Annual Grammy Awards (Sunday, CBS 8:00 p.m.) — Trevor Noah is promising a full-on show (rather than a pandemic-Zoom show) with a hopefully grand return to in-person hosting. This year’s nominees include Beyoncé, Dua Lipa, Roddy Ricch, and Taylor Swift, and expect performances from Swift, Billie Eilish, Cardi B, BTS, and more. Please join us for live coverage as it happens.

Cherry (Apple TV+ movie) — Tom Holland’s Peter Parker is currently hard at work while web slinging for another MCU movie, but he’s bridging the gap with some diversified projects. That might be an understatement, for this is Tom Holland like you’ve never seen him (far beyond the buzz cut) before, and interestingly enough this is happening while Holland reteams with the Russo Brothers for an adaptation of Nico Walker’s debut novel. This certainly isn’t Spider-Man territory, to say the very least. Cherry‘s an autobiographical story about Walker’s time as an Army medic during the war in Iraq, followed by undiagnosed PTSD that led to falling into the belly of the American opioid epidemic and bank-robbing sprees. Obviously, this is dark stuff but with a satiric edge.

Cold Courage (AMC+) — Two Nordic women find themselves drawn together during the investigation of a series of London-set murders. The story’s based upon Finnish journalist Pekka Hiltunen’s bestselling novels and aims to unite the two aforementioned women (a psychologist who favors underdogs and a graphic artist who’s fleeing from her abusive stalker). The two women want to right wrongs that are committed by the powerful, and a charismatic politician is promising to sort-of Make Great Britain Great Again. This show is dropping three initial episodes with subsequent weekly followups.

The One (Netflix series) — Those who are obsessed with dating apps and need motivation to stop might enjoy this series, which imagines that DNA matching is the key to finding the perfect partner. This sounds like it carries a similar vibe to AMC’s Soulmates but with a flashier polish with results as equaly messy. Married people are gonna retroactively take the DNA test, right? Oh god, yeah. At that point, maybe don’t fall into that trap, but do check out this series. It’s guaranteed to be anything but boring.

Last Chance U: Basketball (Netflix series) — The Emmy-winning franchise returns with a no-holds-barred, somewhat gritty look into community college basketball. The players all want to rise to the next level and achieve dreams, but first, those damn personal demons and warring emotions happen on and off the court, all while the East Los Angeles College Huskies set their sights upon an unprecedented California state basketball championship.

Dealer (Netflix series) — It’s a bloody gang war with subtitles, and it’s happening in the South of France, which sounds wild enough, but this show also revolves around two filmmakers, including a music video director who’s filming a drug gang leader with far too much charisma and not enough predictability inside, and he also wants to bust into the rap scene. This series hopes to thrill you with a fast pace and a found-footage feel.

Supermarket Sweep (Sunday, ABC 8:00 p.m.) — Leslie Jones and every bit of her enthusiasm will host contestants in this revival of the grocery-shopping game show.

Batwoman (Sunday, CW 8:00 p.m.) — Ryan’s worsening condition makes her question the no-killing code when the possibility of avenging her mother’s in full view. Meanwhile, Alice learns some valuable information from Tatiana.

The Walking Dead (Sunday, AMC 9:00 p.m.) — The bonus episodes of Season 10 continue with Maggie, Gabriel, and Aaron on the hunt for food and supplies for the Alexandria crown. While poking around, they end up discovering a stash, but then they begin to lose faith in each other.

Allen V. Farrow (Sunday, HBO 9:00 p.m.) — This four part documentary series continues this weekend to dig into a notorious and still-raging scandal of what, exactly, happened with Woody Allen and his family. This week, the bitter 1993 custody battle deepens the primary rift. Later, Ronan Farrow publicly supports the #MeToo movement, and Dylan comes forward with her story.

Shameless (Sunday, Showtime 9:00 p.m.) — Frank and Liam are attempting to rename the latter’s middle school while Debbie escapes her responsibilities, and Ian and Mickey are far too responsible.

Charmed (Sunday, CW 9:00 p.m.) — Harry and Macy dig into an ancient magical artifact while Abby’s looking for an unseen force, and Maggie’s absorbed with school matters.

Last Week Tonight: Season 8 Premiere (Sunday, HBO 10:00 p.m.) — Everyone’s favorite sarcastic and satiric late-night host returned a few weeks ago, and not a moment too soon. Can’t wait to see who he skewers this week.

Another year, another viral video of a very hungry person being pseudo-sexually serviced by the Salt Bae. The new clip, posted last night by Twitter user @YouAdoreeShay, shows the Salt Bae doing his Salt Bae thing and feeding a piece of freshly cut (and salted) steak to a woman who just as seductively receives. The scene, which went down at Bae’s Boston restaurant Nusr-Et, is now making the rounds across Twitter as people (mostly jealous dudes) feel deep empathy for the man sitting next to her.

To describe dude’s expression as pained is putting it lightly. But who’s to say who he’s actually jealous of? Maybe he just wants someone to feed him steak in a suggestive manner.

This isn’t the first time the internet has freaked out over the power Salt Bae seems to hold over meat-lovers. Last year, a video went viral after an angry boyfriend lost his cool at Nusr-Et while a woman twerked for a smiling Gökçe. Nusret Gökçe is probably going to get punched before long, but let it be a reminder to us all that tenderness and passion are qualities in high demand. Also, that good food is sexy.

Check out some of the reactions below. Brace yourselves for “meat” jokes.

You might recall a couple of years ago that there was a trend going around where basketball players would drive around a random neighborhood looking for hoops and then film themselves hopping out of their cars and dunking on said hoops and driving away before anyone was the wiser.

It was a very entertaining internet phenomenon while it lasted — I mean, who doesn’t love a good dunk, especially when it involves an NBA star? It’s great content. But it’s also something that lends itself more specifically to something like dunking than, say, shooting a jump shot.

Duncan Robinson found that out the hard way when he attempted to surprise a couple of young hoopers and knock down a long jumper. To hear him tell it, none of it when according to plan.

A humbling experience for @D_Bo20 pic.twitter.com/isVxewRyqR

— The Long Shot (@TheLongShotPod) March 12, 2021

The best part is that the kids didn’t even recognize Robinson, but to add insult to injury, he air-balled the shot on top of it. That’s a far cry, of course, from his usual tract of knocking down three-pointers for the Heat. But regardless, it makes for a great story about coming to humbling realization of just how famous, or in his case, not famous you are.

Years after the show’s final episode aired, The Office remains one of the most popular sitcoms ever made. And now, to add to the other honors it’s received, we have at least one documented case of someone using an image from the show to attempt unemployment fraud. A picture of Jim Halpert. Yeah, it’s weird.

Reports trickled out on Thursday from a Michigan state legislature meeting that someone, for reasons no one seems to understand, tried to use a picture of John Krasinski on a driver’s license in order to obtain unemployment benefits. In a virtual hearing that was described as “testy” by reporters who witnessed it, Michigan’s House Oversight Committee interviewed Liza Estlund Olson, the acting head of the state Unemployment Insurance Agency, who testified about mounting issues with the state’s services amid a pandemic.

Though it was not one of the reasons the hearing was called in the first place, Olson wanted to show off some of the difficulties her department has dealt with in recent months as unemployment skyrocketed amid the pandemic. Which is how the world now has the actual image of a Michigan license with Jim from The Office on it.

According to the Detroit Metro Times, the photo that circulated is something that was actually caught by the unemployment office. Though no one really seems to understand what benefit would come from using a photo of Office Jim on a license in this case.

As confirmed by the Unemployment Insurance Agency on Thursday, a fake ID was submitted to Michigan’s unemployment department by a man who curiously swapped their ID photo for a photo of Halpert in an effort to attempt to fraudulently gain unemployment benefits.

OK — so it is unclear how photoshopping a photo of a fictional character onto a driver’s license would actually fool anyone, or why it would work, especially if the document contained the man’s real name, address, and other personal information.

And, of course, there’s always a quote from The Office to fit the situation.

If anything, the incident would make some Office superfans wonder about the health of the Dunder Mifflin office amid a pandemic. One actor from the show has joked that he’s bringing the Buffalo office back, but if you believe claims out of Michigan, Jim just might be in between gigs.

Matt Berninger sometimes involves himself in musical endeavors outside of The National, but he went solo in his biggest way so far last year when he dropped a full solo album, Serpentine Prison. Today, he returns with a deluxe edition of the album, which adds six new tracks to the proceedings.

The majority of the new tracks aren’t originals, but covers, as Berninger took on the Velvet Underground’s “European Son,” Bettye Swan’s “Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye,” Morphine’s “In Spite Of Me,” and Eddie Floyd’s “Big Bird.” Aside from those, there are also two new originals: “Let It Be” (which Berninger shared last month and which is not a Beatles cover) and “The End.”

Berninger previously told Uproxx that the process of creating Serpentine Prison actually began with covers, saying, “I wanted to do a bunch of covers just so I could get outside of my comfort zone. Then in that process with Booker [T. Jones], I sent him a few originals — there was one I wrote with Walt Martin, ‘Distant Axis,’ that he really, really was into. And that’s when he said, ‘Let’s start focusing on the originals.’ We ended up doing 12 originals and six covers in 14 days.”

Stream Serpentine Prison (Deluxe Edition) below and revisit our interview with Berninger here.

Long Weekend, opening in theaters this week, is, according to writer/director Stephen Basilone, “a rom-com with a twist.” It’s a tricky film to describe, because basically the entire trick of it is that it comes on as a movie you’ve seen and then gradually reveals itself as something different. It’s a unicorn disguised as a horse — a movie we’re forced to describe in abstractions to keep from spoiling.

Long Weekend is such a smart, off-beat riff on love, and on movies about love, that I never would’ve guessed that it’s also autobiographical. Yet Basilone, a veteran TV writer (Happy Endings, Community, The Michael J. Fox Show, The Goldbergs) assures me that this is the case. His film stars Finn Wittrock as Bart, a down-on-his-luck writer coming off a break-up, who meets a mysterious stranger named Vienna, played by Zoe Chao.

Down-on-his-luck-failing-artist-coming-off-a-traumatic-break-up is a stock romance premise at this point, basically going back to Romeo and Juliet (which was already a “classic” premise in the 16th century). But it’s a stock-premise that Basilone was living. He says the film was inspired by a time in his life when he was coming off a divorce, getting over a life-threatening illness, and the deaths of his mother and grandmother. As if that weren’t enough, some cursory Googling reveals that his divorce was from Orange is the New Black actress Lauren Morelli, who started shooting the show just months after their wedding and soon realized that she was gay.

Being able to experience the joy of a new romance amidst all of this was what inspired Basilone to create Bart and Vienna in Long Weekend. Yet even amidst great trauma and great joy, any intelligent person has to realize that they’re not the first person ever to experience these feelings. I mean there’s nothing cornier than falling in love.

Basilone utilizes the fantastic to explore new love in ways that haven’t already been done to death, all the while subtextually assuring us that, “Yes, I know you think you’ve seen something like this before, but this is different…” It’s an incredibly deft dance, but Long Weekend manages it shockingly well.

And now he faces an equally stiff challenge: selling a movie that succeeds by being slightly different, mostly in ways that it would spoil the movie to explain. All while opening it in theaters at a time when most people aren’t quite sold on returning to movie theaters quite yet. I spoke to Basilone this week about why he seems to love a challenge.

—

I guess the obvious question, these days at least, is when did you guys shoot this, and how much did COVID affect getting all together?

Well, I finished writing it about four years ago, this time around 2017. We shot it in July, August 2019. We were relatively safe. Most of the edit was done by the time we all headed inside. The difficult part was doing remote color correction, final mixing, and doing ADR, where we had to send skits around, and I had to zoom with people while they were huddled away in their closet doing ADR (additional dialogue recording), which was very bizarre but still fun. It was just the getting to the finish line before we sent it out, which was the most complicated, but that was in April, May. It was nice to have, it gave me a little bit of structure, even if it was just sitting in my chair, talking to people. I think weirdly, fortuitously, the timing that this is coming out is nice and appropriate, even though I don’t know who’s going to theaters, but I’m excited about it.

Do people do less ADR now?

I think it depends. I think the technology has gotten good enough that you just notice it less. But I know in TV, we’re always doing something just to like, “Oh, we just need to pace up this scene.” Or, “We need to get some information that didn’t come across in this other joke,” or whatever. There wasn’t much here, but most of it that was there, was just doing that, taking a cut out of a scene and just making a gap for it. It wasn’t a ton, but it was enough to keep us busy.

What was your inspiration for the story?

It came out of a period that Bart’s character, or Finn’s character, is very much a conduit for myself. It’s autobiographical. I had just gone through a divorce, and I had just gotten over being sick for the better part of a decade. My grandmother and my mother had died, and while my mother was in hospice, I met somebody who was a real bright spot in an otherwise very sad and heavy period. It was this weird dichotomy of spending all day in a hospital then occasionally at night going out and having this very hedonistic experience, of sneaking into college parties and feeling like a teenager making out in my stepdad’s car. It was just a nice reminder that there’s light in even in the darkest of situations, and that you can find hope and a bit of romance, even when you’re not expecting it, and when everything else circumstantially is bad. Just, life is long and we’re very fragile, but also incredibly resilient.

What was your sickness for a decade?

I had this chronic immuno disease called ulcerative colitis. If you ever want a tour of Los Angeles’ greatest bathrooms, I can give it to you. At my height, or I guess my valley, I weighed 88 pounds and was knocking on the door to the great beyond. But, I made it through, and everything’s groovy.

This is the kind of movie that doesn’t work if the leads don’t pull it off. What was the casting process like?

I could not agree with you more. If you don’t buy into their romance, you don’t buy into their chemistry, if you’re not in Finn’s headspace, it does not work at all. I was lucky enough in all the ancillary roles that those were all friends. It was like the greatest hits of all the shows I’ve worked on, which was lovely that people came out and were willing to give their time. It just made the set very comfortable, and also just so talented. But Zoe was like… I knew her through friends of friends. As soon as she read for it, she was based in New York at the time, and as soon as she read it, I said, “That’s it. I will fall on my sword for this.”

She just brings such levity and nuance, and also emotion and depth to the performance. If you don’t have that, it’s not going to work. Then Finn — so I’m, I believe the technical term is, a big, big fraidy cat. I don’t like scary shit. I knew Finn’s worked from Beale Street and The Big Short, and what else? Oh. Stupid and Futile Gesture, but I was not familiar with his stuff, the big splashy stuff, that he’d been nominated for Emmys for [Ed. note: American Horror Story]. He was somebody that a producer suggested, and I was like, “Sure.” As soon as I met with him, he was just so pleasant, calm, excited, had just great thoughts and seemed like a great collaborator. Then as soon as the two of them read, they immediately had the chemistry where I thought, we might be able to pull this sucker off. It was that way the first day. The first day we shot was the first scene. It was just Bart alone. Then the scene with Wendi, that was all well and good, but it was just getting the machine oiled and running. Then the second day, Zoe came in and we did a lot of that cute bedroom montage stuff. Then as soon as we just started rolling the cameras, you could just see it. Everybody got very excited, because they were just coming alive with each other.

You mentioned Bart’s headspace, and the audience being inside of it. The movie seems like it’s aware of the audience’s expectations for a movie like this, with Bart referencing the manic pixie dream girl and whatnot. Why do you think that acknowledging those expectations was important for the story?

I think it’s important for the story for a couple of reasons. A, because I am aware of my station, of being a straight white dude, yet wanting to tell a personal story, and cognizant of where we are societally, I also just wanted to tell a story that hopefully goes against all of the cliché male jerk off fantasies. Also, I don’t know, I just think, when I’m with my peers, you speak in cultural touchstones. You reference things, you make jokes about things, and I like that. You can’t do that too much, then it’ll start to feel dated, but I think because that’s the way I speak, that’s the way I’m going to put it in my writing. To not call that out, I think, would almost feel like a dearth in the story. Also, I just think it was a little bit of a safeguard. Like, “I know. I know what you’re thinking, but hold on, hang on, there’s more to this than that. I understand what you think this may be, but stick with me. There’s more to it.”

Initially, in the script and what we shot, Vienna has more to say about that. She talks about, “Do you think that negates the fact that I’m a person with wants and needs, and desires?” How dare you think that, “Oh. I’m just here to fucking save you.” But I think ultimately my producers are like, “We don’t need all that. Let’s just get to it faster.”

I think that’s largely the trick of the movie, that it’s coming at you in the guise of something you think is conventional, and then gradually revealing that it’s not. But in terms of that, how do you sell this movie without spoiling it in that way?

Initially, when I was cutting this, we had several different editors for a myriad of reasons, because an editor who was a friend works with Zoe Lister-Jones, a lot of times, she was running off to do The Craft in their limited amount of time. Then, everybody just brought a new layer to it, and it’s made it sharper and tighter. But the first day there, I was working with a woman named Libby Cuenin. Now, we were talking about just moving that reveal, the [REDACTED] reveal up, because initially it was 45 minutes in. But it was just like, “What are we watching?” If we don’t know what the movie is, you’re like, “What? This is a nice ride, but what’s happening?”

We just wanted to move that up as much as possible. I think to Sony’s credit, they didn’t want to give away the reveal, but I was like, “You know what? In all honesty, I assume whoever markets this is probably going to give that away.” The real reveals are later on anyway.

It’s more about the intrigue, and it’s more about Bart’s journey, the reality of who this person is, “Is this real,” all those things. Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, I think it is more fun, if you don’t know much going into it. That’s the way I feel about most movies. I love reading a review, but I don’t do it until after I see a movie. Because… what was the name of that? You remember the “We’re smart sharks movie?” Deep Blue Sea or something?

Deep Blue Sea, yeah.

There’s that scene, where Sam Jackson gives that rallying cry monologue and then the shark just comes and fucking eats him out of nowhere? I remember reading a review, that was the best part of the movie, and that was given away in a review. After that, I was like, “I’m done with this.” I like going into it as much of a blank slate as possible.

I mean, my instinct was to not spoil the [REDACTED] angle in a review, but then I was also like, “How do you tell people that this movie isn’t what they assume it is?”

I know. It’s been interesting, because just for press stuff, Sony’s been avoiding that, but in the reviews, there’s only so much they can do. They can’t control that narrative. Some people have spoiled it thus far. I don’t know. I mean, I personally like it when you go in knowing enough to be excited, but not enough to be expecting things, because your mind does that subconsciously anyways.

I feel a lot of the time, the goals in making a movie and the goals and selling and marketing a movie are directly at odds.

Yes, exactly. I mean, it’s like, sometimes it’s a bummer when you’re watching a trailer. Like, “That’s trailer looks good, but why do I need to see the movie?” Sometimes, my favorite trailers are the ones that are just tone poems to some degree.

I mean, now I’m asking you to do the thing that I just said is at odds with making a movie, but what’s the what’s the pitch for this movie?

The pitch? The pitch is a rom-com with a twist. It’s the movies I like. I like all rom-coms, I’m a big softie, who doesn’t like scary things. I love You’ve Got Mail. It’s great, but the things I really respond to are the things that subvert and add another layer to the genre, like in Eternal Sunshine, Groundhog Day, or Stranger Than Fiction, About Time, or even to a lesser degree, Beginners. Those are the things that I really love and stick with me more. It’s a rom-com in that vein. It’s a character study. There’s a reason why the main character is named Vienna. It’s definitely a bit of an homage to the Linklater Before Sunrise trilogy. I think it’s just a rom-com with the twist, that hopefully, serves as a little bit of a break in the storm from this last fucking, garbage, chaotic year.

‘Long Weekend’ hits theaters on Friday, March 12th.

On October 20, 2020, Tom Petty would have turned 70 years old. To mark the occasion, a bunch of artists got together to participate in a livestream event in honor of the late rock icon. Among those artists was Spoon, who performed “Breakdown” and “A Face In The Crowd.” Those recordings weren’t made publicly available anywhere, but now the band has decided to share them.

Shortly after Petty’s death in 2017, Daniel told Stereogum of “A Face In The Crowd,” “Divine Fits played ‘You Got Lucky’ at just about every gig we had. What an insane single. It’s got an intense lyric and the most powerful, creepy guitar riff and somehow [Dan Boeckner] was able to tap into that attitude every time. It was the greatest feeling in the world to be in a band that could play that song and pull it off. But since yesterday the song I keep playing is ‘A Face In The Crowd,’ a ballad that came out as I was graduating high school and leaving my hometown and most of the people I knew forever. I relive that moment in the song. The minor chords, the vocal, the melody — all haunting and timeless.

Listen to Spoon’s covers of “Breakdown” and “A Face In The Crowd” above and revisit out ranking of Petty’s best songs here.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

WANTED: Pepe Le Pew footage from Space Jam 2. REWARD: $100,000.

Pop culture’s most problematic horny French skunk was originally going to be in Space Jam: A New Legacy, but when Malcolm D. Lee took over as director from Terence Nance, Pepe was “eliminated [and] never animated for the live-action footage which was shot,” according to Deadline. The scene — like the entire movie — sounds wild:

Pepe was set to appear in a black-and-white Casablanca-like Rick’s Cafe sequence. Pepe, playing a bartender, starts hitting on a woman at the bar… He begins kissing her arm, which she pulls back, then slamming Pepe into the chair next to hers. She then pours her drink on Pepe, and slaps him hard, sending him spinning in a stool, which is then stopped by LeBron James’ hand. James and Bugs Bunny are looking for Lola, and Pepe knows her whereabouts. Pepe then tells the guys that Penelope cat has filed a restraining order against him. James makes a remark in the script that Pepe can’t grab other Tunes without their consent.

Greice Santo played the woman the cartoon skunk is hitting on, and because her scene was cut, a representative for the actress said that she’s “offering a $100,000 ‘reward’ to anyone who provides the footage of their animated/live-action exchange.” Santo told the Los Angeles Times that it’s “so important to have this scene in a movie to inspire the younger generations, and also the older generations, so we can correct that behavior. I felt that this scene was a way to show kids that this kind of behavior is wrong.”

Now before you contact James Woods and tell him you’re willing to split the $100,000 reward 50/50, you should know that selling the footage is super illegal. “It is a crime for someone to solicit another to steal and distribute Warner Bros.’ property,” the studio told the Times, which added, “After publication of [the original] story, Santo’s representative contacted the Times to state the offer is to pay Warner Bros. for the footage.”

I think I speak for everyone (no one?) when I say: #ReleaseThePepeCut.

(Via the Los Angeles Times)

Before I starting writing this, I just counted. According to my Letterboxd account, I have watched 397 movies since lockdown started. In retrospect, I wish I had made more of a plan. But, then again, I suppose not many of us had much of a “plan.” It all happened so quickly. Especially here in New York City. I don’t need to get into what this week signifies, since it has affected literally all of us. My story isn’t that remarkable. A lot of ours aren’t. And I’ve learned if your story isn’t remarkable, that’s a good thing.

I remember it was Friday the 13th, at a local bar. I was with my friend Ross, and things seemed fraught. I was not having a good time. Our attitude was, well, we’d better go out one last time before everything shuts down, which would wind up happening three days later. Our mayor was still encouraging people to live like normal. We just assumed not many people had it then, which was wrong. This was also back when we thought to get it you had to rub someone else’s spit in your eye, which was also wrong. (It’s really weird how this all went from, “Hey, just don’t touch your face,” to, “yeah maybe you should wear TWO masks,“ without some defining moment of when that happened.) Anyway, little did we know Covid was everywhere in New York City by that point. Add I look back and consider myself fortunate we didn’t get it that night.

My biggest memory that night, besides wiping everything down and constantly using hand sanitizer, was the idea of “the movie list.” Since we knew we’d be stuck inside for the considerable future, we made a list of, get this, eight movies that we considered blind spots. To be fair to myself, I argued for more. But Ross thought eight was “realistic.” If the list got too big we might not finish it. For example, one of my blind spots was Robert Altman movies and Humphrey Bogart movies. Ross’s blind spots were the ‘80s and ‘90s action movies. I had never seen Nashville or The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Ross had never even seen The Terminator or Top Gun. On Saturday, March 14th we didn’t go out. Instead, we watched The Terminator, which I consider as the official beginning of this era. (And why The Terminator gets to be the lead image on this piece.) By March 16th we couldn’t go out. By April the mobile morgue trucks started showing up.

We joke about our lists now, the whole “eight” part of it. You know, how by the end of the pandemic we want to be all caught up on the eight “canon” films we’ve never seen. I’ll be over 400 before the official anniversary. (In that first month Ross watched films like The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, and The Karate Kid. (I rewatched a lot of these movies, too. And, yeah, well, we’re at the point he’s now seen Over the Top, Mickey Blue Eyes, and Legal Eagles. Those eight movies didn’t last long.)

As the streets outside became a nightmare, I immersed myself in these movies. Like I said before, I wish I had a plan. Maybe watch all of the AFI 100 Best Films? Maybe pick a director and work my way through all of their filmography? Or even watch every Best Picture winner? No, no, my plan, if there even was one, was more scattershot. I’d just keep writing down movies people on Twitter recommended that I hadn’t seen. There was no rhyme or reason to the movies I’d watch. It started to feel like the impossible goal was “watch every movie ever made.” In that without a specific goal, it just kind of never ends.

In the past, I’d joke, “If I had a year off I’d just catch up on all the movies I’ve always wanted to see and never have.” Ah, yes, the ol’ “be careful what you wish for” situation. From the beginning, I read the experts and I felt fairly confident we’d still be in this situation a year later. (Though, thankfully, there now appears to be light on the horizon and finally, a genuine reason for optimism.) I was never blindsided by the fact this didn’t end in three months, or whatever. The situation in New York City last April was too horrifying. It was just all too obvious this wasn’t something that was going to just go away on its own even though the president at the time swore it would. I was, like a lot of us, basically losing a year of my life. But I made a pact with myself it wouldn’t be in vain. I would get something out of it.

It became, and still now is, an obsession. To the point if I didn’t watch some sort of classic film – or, even, just watched a new film for work instead of a classic film – I felt guilty. I was falling behind this imaginary goal for myself that had no finish line. It’s just happenstance that I’ll wind up with a big nice round number. In a year where I felt so helpless, I did have control over this. Years from now, when I think about this past year, I want to be able to say, “It was awful, but at least I did that.”

So, now, as the one-year anniversary looms, it seems like as good a time as any to reflect on my “year of movies.” And it’s kind of weird. I watched so many Bogart movies in such a condensed amount of time there are a couple that blend in together and I couldn’t tell you what scene happened in which movie. There are a couple of movies I legitimately don’t remember watching. Movies I even thought to myself, “Oh yeah, I always wanted to watch that,” then noticed I logged it in last May. But there are also many, many movies I now consider some of my all-time favorites. Movies like California Split, the Altman movie I wasn’t even really aware of before. And Another Altman, The Long Goodbye. (Like I said, I basically hadn’t seen a Robert Altman movie outside of Popeye and The Player.) The Treasure of the Sierra Madre I now consider it one of my favorite movies. (I even bought a poster.) It was nothing like I thought it would be. It’s funny how that works. Another movie I loved, which I just saw this week, Roman Holiday, is something I avoided because I just assumed it was a pretty straightforward movie with two massive movie stars, which it is not. I can’t decide if these are all movies I’m kicking myself for not having seen earlier, or glad I hadn’t seen them so they’d be waiting for me this past year.

I want to make sense of “my year of movies.” I want to be able to look at this list and feel a sense of accomplishment. But I don’t. Not yet, at least. And I can’t make any sense of it, to be honest. At this year mark, I had hoped I could look back and say, well, at least I did that. But, at least right now, I don’t know what to make of it. But, whatever it is I did, I did it.

And, hopefully, someday, when all of this is just a terrible memory, I’ll find more meaning in it than I do right now. Well, other than my new The Treasure of the Sierra Madre poster.

You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.

The always hilarious Amy Poehler dropped by Late Night on Thursday and she left host Seth Meyers absolutely dying after hitting him with a borderline perfect cave-diving joke. Prior to the excellent punchline, Poehler and Meyers were raving about Kathryn Hahn’s work on WandaVision and whether Poehler would join the Marvel films like her former Parks and Rec co-star. While joking that she could see herself playing Captan Marvel’s bossy older sister, Gretchen, who “turns on the lasers” or closes up HQ for the night, Poehler revealed her jealousy at so many of her friends jetting off to Australia to shoot Thor: Love and Thunder. “If they found a part for me in Thor, I’d be on a friggin’ plane in 2.2. seconds,” she responded when asked if she’d be game for a cameo.

Using the topic of Australia as a segue, Poehler decided to hit Meyers with an interesting fact, which was really the set-up for her incredible cave joke:

POEHLER: Remember a couple years, ago, the cave rescue? The boys were — they lived, and I talked abou t it on your show. Well, the great Ron Howard is making a film about it. Guess who was cast today as some of the cave rescuers? Are you ready?

MEYERS: Yes.

POEHLER: Joe Edgerton.

MEYERS: Great.

POEHLER: Colin Farrell.

MEYERS: Oh!

POEHLER: Viggo Mortensen.

MEYERS: Oh, my God.

POEHLER: And guess where they’re shooting it. Guess where they’re shooting it.

MEYERS: Australia.

POEHLER: Yeah. And guess what I’m playing.

MEYERS: Who?

POEHLER: The cave.

You can tell Meyers, like the rest of us, had no idea the delightfully raunchy joke was coming, and it clearly killed. But that’s what happens you invite one of the funniest comedians alive on your show.

(Via Late Night with Seth Meyers)