Month: April 2021

In an effort to support the women who have come forward with allegations against Armie Hammer, only to have people try and discredit their claims, artist Julia Morrison is taking advantage of NFT technology to “authenticate” disturbing text messages that she received from Hammer as recently as August 2020. By using the increasingly popular blockchain process that could have seismic changes on the art world, Morrison believes she’s found a way to nail down Hammer and anyone who questioned the validity of his alleged victims’ accusations. Via The Daily Beast.

“The NFT is the new notary. What I’ve done is, anyone who questions the authenticity of these exchanges, I have now created light boxes with them, and I minted them as NFTs in order to say that these things are authentic and real. It’s like a checkmate.”

According to Morrison, Hammer slid into her Instagram DMs back in 2017, but she didn’t notice the messages until years later when her friends alerted her that the actor was following her account. After striking up a conversation with Hammer about how the rich kept getting richer during the pandemic, he allegedly began making comments about wanting a sex slave after recently being in a country where royalty and wealth allows you to do “very weird” things.

“I have a fantasy about having someone prove their love and devotion and tying them up in a public space at night and making their body free use and seeing if they will f*ck strangers for me,” Hammer wrote, which naturally concerned Morrison and made the exchange an obvious choice for her NFT art project:

“I just can’t get it out of my head. I posted about the greatest wealth transfer we’ve ever seen in the history of humankind, and here we have this rich dude sliding into my DMs trying to lure me in.”

Morrison plans to donate some of the money to charity, but more importantly, she wants to shift the conversation from Hammer losing film roles and put it back on his allegedly abusive behavior where it belongs. “What I’m doing is basically taking Armie Hammer’s head, I’m shrinking it, and I’m putting it on a stake on the outside of the house of #MeToo,” Morrison said. “This is to stand in solidarity and to say believe women and to believe these women’s stories.”

(Via The Daily Beast)

What …in bed is to fortune cookies, …in space is to movie ideas. Last week we had Voyagers, a promising but failed attempt at Lord Of The Flies …in space. This week Netflix brings us Stowaway, a kind of Sophie’s Choice …in space, starring Anna Kendrick, Toni Collette, Daniel Dae Kim, and Shamier Anderson.

Another space movie is still a welcome thing, and this one, from director Joe Panna (Arctic, Turning Point) offers tension and stress-inducing space action, delivering on the unspoken promise of basically every space movie. It’s more competent than inspired, however, with skillfully shot action but not much in the way of bold choices. It’s compelling enough while it lasts, but all but guaranteed to vanish from memory the instant the credits roll.

Kendrick, Kim, and Collette play Zoe, Marina, and David, respectively, astronauts on a two-year journey to Mars. They’ve only barely escaped the Earth’s atmosphere and settled into their long slow glide when an unconscious man (Michael, played by Anderson) falls through a ceiling panel. It turns out he’s part of the ground crew and accidentally ended up on the ship when it took off. Now he’s an accidental astronaut, stuck on a two-year journey in a cramped spaceship he never wanted to be on. Basically my worst nightmare.

It gets worse. Anderson’s character may have damaged the life-support systems during his fall, and the ship, partly thanks to the unexpectedly expanded crew, doesn’t have enough oxygen for all the people on it to make it to their destination. What to do!

It’s an interesting dilemma, even if it moves too quickly from Michael’s horror at being an unwilling astronaut to the scientific problem of how to make this spaceship accommodate additional bodies. Which turns out to be illustrative of Stowaways in general. It’s a film so focused on the “big picture” plot that it consistently glosses over those human elements that would’ve really made it sing.

If the question for the astronauts is how to solve this zero-sum survivor game, the central dilemma for Stowaways screenwriters Joe Panna and Ryan Morrison is how virtuous to make these astronauts. It’s a situation that can potentially bring out the best or worst of humanity, which is what makes it compelling. Yet Panna and Morrison’s choices all feel thoroughly safe, with characters who feel more like they’re going along with some grand plan than individuals with their own independent motivations. Kendrick’s medical officer, Zoe, is meant to be the humanitarian, and Kim’s botanist, David, the cruel realist, but there’s barely any space between them. Collette and Anderson’s characters are even less fleshed out.

Maybe it depends on your essential worldview, but I’ve always found willingly self-sacrificing characters to be not only a little boring but sort of a screenwriting crutch. It’s much easier to write yourself out of no-win situations if one of the characters just bravely throws themselves into the thresher to save the others. But how realistic is that? And how interesting is it? Inasmuch as he’s often accused of lacking a human touch (by me, among others) one of the most interesting things Christopher Nolan did in Interstellar was making Matt Damon’s character care more about himself than humanity or scientific progress. The best thing about The Sopranos is that the characters are all sons of bitches in their own way — no hugging, no learning.

Stowaway is hamstrung, at a basic level, by being cut more from the Aaron Sorkin cloth, where the characters are all more heroic, more moral versions of ourselves (though it distinctly lacks Sorkin’s snippy-snap dialogue). It’s also less memorable than that, since few of the “character choices” even feel like character choices. Things happen to these people, not because of who they are and how they act, but in order to create plot complications later on.

What it lacks in compelling characters Stowaway does make up for somewhat with deftly staged action. The dangerous-space-walk-resolves-a-plot-dilemma is a predictable choice, but Panna’s compositions are lucid and dynamic, creating a visceral sense of fear and maintaining a baseline suspense that rarely lets up. I found myself chewing my tongue a lot, my standard involuntary nervous behavior. Beware your fingernails.

Stowaway‘s characters work as audience stand-ins but not much more. Such that once the imminent danger passes, the movie loses any momentum it had going and perhaps wisely, just sort of ends. A movie that’s entertaining enough while it lasts and nothing more isn’t the worst thing in the world, but this began as a movie that promised tough choices, and it doesn’t really deliver any.

‘Stowaway’ hits Netflix April 22nd. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.

The executives of the 12 clubs that attempted to create the Super League made exactly one bet in their ill-fated attempt at breaking away from the existing structure of the sport: The one thing they were broadly correct about would make up for all the things they got categorically wrong.

These clubs — six from England, three from Italy, and three from Spain — all believed that they would be able to weather any PR storm that popped up solely because they were correct that UEFA’s signature competition, the Champions League, has some pretty serious flaws, some of which will be exacerbated when the tournament’s recently-approved reforms (which, it must be said, had the public backing of some of these clubs) go into effect in 2024. Make no mistake: The Champions League is one of the most remarkable things in all of sports, but the new reforms had been dreaded even before they got the green light.

UEFA, like just about any gigantic profit-driven organization, cares about its bottom line. Its No. 1 priority, from now until the end of time, will be its bottom line — the new reforms, for example, add 100 new matches over the course of the tournament. Everyone knows this, everyone dislikes this, and the bet made was that fans wouldn’t care about the selfishness of their beloved clubs because of the selfishness made by the organization they already don’t like, that they don’t have a personal connection to because they’re not from Manchester or Barcelona. They’d still stay in their leagues, but when it came time to make money for European competitions, it’d go right to them and not to everyone else.

As a result, the executives behind the clubs came together to make a system where they were the sole beneficiaries of everything that goes into the bottom lines. The pandemic, of course, impacted every single club in the sport, but the ones with the heftiest bills — which is a problem for clubs in normal circumstances, and to quote Soccernomics, “Football is not merely a small business, it’s also a bad one. Anyone who spends any time inside football soon discovers that just as oil is part of the oil business, stupidity is part of the football business.” — really wanted to get some sort of financial remedy to their problems, as they spent in recent years without, you know, the assumption that a global pandemic would cause everything to come crumbling down.

Add in to all of this that the main power brokers in the Super League were clubs with American owners (Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester United) who ostensibly wanted to move more towards a style of management that runs teams like a business (ex: the NFL) and a pair of clubs in deep financial despair due to years and years of lighting money on fire on building dominant squads (Juventus, Real Madrid) and it is not hard to see why this was viewed, to them, as a way to turn this entire project into a way to achieve financial viability or whatever nonsense businesses put out to justify making things worse. It is also not hard to see how, once those clubs came together, the rest would see it as an opportunity to get paid, not be left on the outside while top sides competed, or whatever else.

Does this make their thinking sound, or good, or moral, or whatever else? Of course not! For a moment, think of European soccer the way you think of Minor League Baseball — the teams are part of the social fabric of both their communities. The gripe that people have had as MLB has actively worked to carve up its minor league system is that these teams do not exist to make money. Instead, it is that they are there to provide a communal experience in cities across the United States, a good thing that serves as a bridge from past to present, and are so important to these places that not making a profit is something you live with.

While these 12 teams would not have sought to leave their domestic leagues, giving the sort of hyper-concentrated wealth among a dozen squads that would have came from the Super League would have ruined them forever. These 12 sides would have a perpetual advantage over everyone else, cementing their places in the top-3 or top-6 on an annual basis. Solidarity payments to leagues were kicked around, but money and power would have been so concentrated that this would have been for show.

To go back to the social fabric thing, the people below the very top of a club view themselves as part of a footballing society. Coaches, players, fans, 9-to-5 employees, they love their club and love the sense of community that comes with all of this. Those fans don’t just include schmucks like me — as Gab Marcotti of ESPN said in his fantastic write-up of things, who noted that the backlash was so widespread that it caught decision-makers off-guard.

First, they failed to “read the room.” They completely misjudged what the reaction would be, from fans to media to politicians to UEFA. They expected pushback, but not to this level. One example: By Tuesday night, Liverpool legend Jamie Carragher was on television saying that owners Mike Gordon and John W. Henry should consider selling the club rather than show their face in Liverpool again. And this is an ownership group that, until last week, had been adored, partly for bringing the Champions League and Premier League titles back to Anfield, and partly for the way they were so mindful of being in tune with the spirit and mentality of their fans.

Sam Lee of The Athletic, on the Why Always Us? podcast, posited something similar, speculating that the reaction from the very top of the British government played a role — “I think they underestimated [British prime minister] Boris Johnson getting involved. Because he’s such a populist and he’s such an opportunist, I think the opportunity to be seen as the savior of the world game and the savior of the English clubs led him and his ministers to really put the hammer down and say we’re not gonna let this happen, to divert eyes away from everything else they’ve been doing.”

So consider all of this, and consider the fact that players (lots of players!) and managers (them too!) were publicly not on board with this, and you get to the truth about the league: from the perspective of what this product is, that stinks, too.

The idea of a Super League involving 12 teams that occasionally adds more and they all play one another is an idea totally antithetical to what makes people love the Champions League — getting the opportunities for matchups between mega clubs is special exclusively because it is so rare, because a few balls bounce in a specific way and two heavyweights get drawn into a group together, or Bayern Munich has to play PSG in the quarterfinals because of a draw. It’s all because fortunes come together to give fans something special.

The thought is that Real Madrid vs. Manchester United, or Liverpool vs. Juventus, or any of these high-profile matchups would feel special solely because it exists. Instead, it would turn this beautiful thing into soccer’s version of a sleepy August game between the Yankees and the Dodgers, or a midseason tilt between the Knicks and the Lakers — sure, the names are huge, but we’ve seen this already and will see it again this year, so what’s the point? It is a good idea if you do not understand what makes this silly little game special. It is evidently clear that the power brokers who cooked up this half-assed idea — the same ones who, and I am still baffled about this, called existing supporters “legacy fans” but wanted to target “fans of the future” — do not.

What ultimately happened with the Super League was a bunch of rich, out of touch people thought they knew what the people wanted. (Shocking, I know.) They were wrong (Again, shocking), and this was made loud and clear. But rich people have done things before, and have been told by people they’re wrong, and they’ve gone ahead with it, anyway. It is a testament to everyone who spoke out against this horrific idea that it is not happening.

There will be more attempts at this general idea, and hopefully some sort of serious Champions League reform stems the tied on that. Ideally, the shame that led to this falling apart never goes away, and any efforts at the next Super League collapses before us legacy fans have to get involved.

No video game took over in 2020 more than Call of Duty: Warzone, as the free-to-play battle royale became massively popular as it dropped right at the start of pandemic restrictions hitting in March and people finding themselves having to find ways to pass the time at home. A year later and Warzone is still plugging along and entering Season 3, which will see updated maps, weapons, and gear hit after they nuked Verdansk Island to end Season 2.

To celebrate the start of Season 3, the game brought together a number of their biggest celebrity players from the world of sports, music, and entertainment for a ridiculous two-minute trailer that was released on Thursday morning — along with a call to drop in to Verdansk84. The trailer, which you can watch in its absurd entirety above, opens with Young Thug leaping out of a building and grabbing onto a helicopter piloted by Gunna, who then blows up the building that Thug presumably rigged with charges. Jack Harlow, Saweetie, Swae Lee, and others from the music world are featured, along with Dennis Schröder, Jack Grealish, and Mookie Betts from the sports world — with Betts hitting a grenade out of the air with his rifle like a baseball.

In case there were any wonder if Call of Duty was still raking in cash thanks to Warzone, this trailer and all the celebrity cameos should provide the answer, but if it gets people to drop back in, that’s all they care about.

In the early 2010s, TV shows with swear words in the title were all the rage. There was $#*! My Dad Says, GCB (that’s Good Christian Bitches), and Don’t Trust the B—- in Apartment 23, along with Fuck! I’m In My Twenties, How The Fuck Am I Normal, Dumb Fuck, and Grow the Fuck Up, none of which made it past the development cycle. The swear-word title craze went away for a few years, but it looks like it might be back.

First, there was The End of the F***ing World, but that was on streaming (at least in America). Anything goes on streaming. But AMC’s upcoming dark-comedy Kevin Can F**k Himself will make history as, I believe, the first cable series with “f*ck” in the title.

The title is an attention-grabber, but the show itself looks really good. Kevin Can F**k Himself stars Annie Murphy (Schitt’s Creek) as Allison, “a woman who wasted the last 10 years of her life on this terrible marriage and she has this brilliant plan,” as the Emmy winner says in the teaser above. “She keeps playing the perfect housewife, but in the meantime, she decided to kill her husband.” It’s like WandaVision meets Lucky Louie, but with murder. I can’t wait. Kevin Can F**k Himself premieres on AMC on June 20.

The quirky, Boise, Idaho-based Treefort Music Festival is returning this year, posting a revamped 2021 lineup including standout names like Japanese Breakfast, Armand Hammer, and more. The new dates for the festival are September 22-26 in downtown Boise.

Treefort’s site assures attendees that the promoters are “developing plans A, B, C, D, E and even F for a safe, community-run festival” come September, as well as a return of the usual spring edition in 2022. Fans who bought tickets for 2020’s postponed festival will automatically be grandfathered in for September’s fest, which was crowdfunded on WeFunder.com.

In addition, the site provides a timeline for early access sales for both upcoming weekends, while warning that single-day, single-venue, and single-show tickets are a no-go for the fall fest. The lineup, which was posted today, is again wildly diverse, featuring performers as disparate as Andy Shauf and Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, Larkin Poe, New Orleans rapper Pell, and genre-bending veteran producer Prefuse 73. As usual, each artist’s profile on the Treefort site comes with a curated playlist of their essential tracks so fans can familiarize themselves with new names or get a taste of their faves’ potential setlists.

You can find out more at treefortmusicfest.com and check out Uproxx’s review of the 2019 festival here.

There’s a lot to be said about representation in film and television but finding a show that you can truly connect to is extremely special. While watching season one of Bigger on BET+, I saw not only myself but seemingly everyone I’d ever known being represented in a way that felt nuanced, honest, and flat-out hilarious. Now that the show is back for its second season, we’re ecstatic to share a special episode of Obsessed where Britt Ells and I talk Bigger with actress, writer, and comedian Tanisha Long and showrunner Felischa Marye.

While we’re not in the business of spoilers we tried to get all the tea for season two and this episode is packed with gems. We talk about the varying themes the show explores and the “situationships” experienced by these wildly relatable characters as they juggle careers and have relationships that represent women’s forward sexual desires. We discuss the growth in Layne (played by Long) throughout season one and how incredible it was to watch and cheer her on as women in today’s world, something that particularly resonates with Britt as a writer and producer in her own right.

Fortunately, we won’t have to wait long to see what’s in store for Layne and the rest of the crew. Season two of Bigger returns to BET+ on April 22, 2021 and you can watch the above episode of Obsessed to hear more about it right now.

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) is having a bad 2021, although the deep sh*t that he’s wading through appears to be nobody’s fault but his own. He’s facing those sex trafficking allegations, and his indicted associate is cooperating with the Feds for leniency, and even Tucker Carlson wants nothing to do with this hot legal mess. Not only that, but James Carville dunked harshly on Gaetz, and throughout all of this, reports have indicated that (via the Daily Beast) that the guy is spending so much money (several hundred-thousand dollars so far) trying to sway public opinion in his favor.

Did anyone tell Gaetz that the Department of Justice will not be swayed by hype videos? Regardless of the answer, that’s what Gaetz is doing while tweeting to his supporters, “Our new ad is launching. Pls donate @ [site name] to help us run it a bunch!”

(The production values here are so bad that it’s hard to believe that this isn’t intentional.)

As Mediaite notes, Gaetz doesn’t explicitly ask for money during the video (which also contains Project Veritas footage to frame himself as a victim), but clearly, he’s asking for money while tweeting it out. And he’s outwardly asking for the cash so that he can make more bizarre self-cheerleading ads? Very strange stuff, and the guy’s trapped in his own vicious cycle. As you might imagine, Twitter’s having a grand time in tossing Gaetz’s stunt-king act right back at him. Naturally, his very curious Venmo transactions are receiving recognition, but several other jokes are flying as well.

At first all he wanted to do was make some dang videos with his friends. But when Hayden Pedigo’s Gummo-inspired, goofball campaign ad parody went viral on Facebook, he realized that he actually didn’t like the way his home city of Amarillo was being run, and thought maybe he actually had some pretty good ideas on how to change it. Why not do it for real? So went the thinking, and Jasmine Stodel’s documentary (her first feature) about Pedigo’s quixotic run ends up playing like Mr. Smith Goes To Washington meets American Movie with a dash of Wes Anderson (not to mention Brigsby Bear, another movie about the joy of small-town oddballs making art together).

Kid Candidate, from Gunpowder & Sky (which has a first-look deal with HBO, though no release date has yet been set) follows this surprise Amarillo City Council campaign by 24-year-old Hayden Pedigo, and a large part of what makes Kid Candidate so compelling is Pedigo himself, a wry but earnest Texan who looks like if Owen Wilson’s personality was transmogrified into Michael Cera’s body with that machine from The Fly.

The movie wouldn’t have a hook if Pedigo’s video wasn’t funny, but it is, not to mention sort of sweet and innocent, like Pedigo himself. An “acoustic guitarist and soundscape composer,” according to his website, Pedigo is a home-schooled kid from rural Texas, whose relationship with his religious parents is somewhat strained, who escaped into making music and movies and art during an isolated childhood. Though somewhat shy and introverted by nature, Pedigo turns out to be some kind of public speaking idiot savant. His reticence often gives way to genuine passion when he talks about his town, such that his entire run is like watching a human seedling blossom into full flower. All he needed was a purpose.

All of Hayden’s sweet earnestness and almost preternatural aversion to controversy might make for a saccharine movie if it wasn’t for local civil rights attorney Jeff Blackburn, an absolute gem of a gruff shit talker who always seems to have vape smoke coming out of his mouth. Who says, upon hearing of Pedigo’s candidacy, “Why am I supposed to vote for this kid? Because he’s young? Well if that’s the case, why not just run a baby?”

Of course, Jeff Blackburn is a classic humbug with a heart of gold, who gets inspired by Hayden’s earnest speeches and eventually becomes the JK Simmons to Pedigo’s Michael Cera. Kid Candidate would be remarkably easy to adapt into a quirky Sundance comedy, it practically casts itself. On that note, I could easily envision Carrie Coon as Amarillo’s loopy incumbent mayor, Ginger Nelson, who cries crocodile tears when recounting the unfair attacks on her that some kids made in a Facebook sketch. Along with the other members of Amarillo’s City Council, all endorsed by Amarillo’s only PAC, Nelson describes her ascendance to the office she now occupies as if it were divinely ordained. Her view of politics, apparently shared by the rest of her Amarillo Matters PAC mates, is like if a Medieval monarch had his royal quarters festooned in inspirational cat posters. Her personality evokes a thousand petty tyrants.

Hayden Pedigo wouldn’t be a good hero without some villains, and Amarillo’s ruling class — beef, banking, and oil magnates among them, bankrolling a slate of “business-friendly” Bible thumpers maintaining the status quo — provides them in spades. Pedigo’s earnest forthrightness couldn’t contrast more sharply with Nelson et al’s spacey-eyed declarations, about carrying out God’s will when they decided to fund a new scoreboard for the baseball stadium rather than maintain a beloved city pool in a now-neglected part of town.

We see how the political sausage is made when we follow Hayden as he gladhands at local events, goes doorknocking, and general forces himself to do the things that he, and virtually any right-thinking human being, wants more than anything not to do. It’s an uplifting personal journey wrapped in an eye-opening political exposé, all with the backdrop of a thoroughly quirky and idiosyncratic setting. This is the essential dichotomy of Kid Candidate, watching a right-thinking, essentially kindhearted person attempt to force himself into the soul-stealing business of politics. It’s funnier because it’s local, but we can extrapolate, and the implications for our larger political system… they ain’t good, folks.

To have a person like Hayden juxtaposed with the nuts and bolts of a political campaign is a rare thing, and only happened, and only really could happen, by accident. Kid Candidate explores how office seeking works, as it currently stands, and who it attracts. It’s all enough to make you wonder if maybe we’d be better off just choosing citizens to lead at random (maybe we could have a referendum on them six months later?). A random draw couldn’t possibly be worse than what we have now.

Seeing as Eric Andre‘s job entails pranking celebrities, he’s met his fair share of famous people. Still, there are times that the comedian gets star-struck. One such instance was before he got famous. Andre was able to meet the late MF Doom, who he recalls as “very grounded and sincere,” and even mustered up the courage to ask for an internship.

Speaking in an interview with NME, Andre, who was a college kid at the time, recalled meeting MF Doom when he wasn’t wearing his signature mask and asking if he could intern at Stone’s Throw records: “I ran backstage and got to see him without his mask on, which was very cool. I was like, ‘Hey I’m finishing college, I want to intern at Stone’s Throw records. How can I do that?’ And he gave me somebody’s email that worked at Stone’s Throw. He was very patient with me, very grounded, and sincere. For me at 20-21 years old, to see a hero of mine telling me to just email the people at work, he seemed like salt of the earth.”

Andre also noted that MF Doom’s death had a huge impact on him:

“I was fortunate enough to get to meet him. I met him when I think I was 19-20 years old. He played at my friend Christina’s college spring break show in Manchester, New York. He was very nice, I’ve never heard a bad thing about the guy. I love his work, I love his collaboration with Madlib. He always had good taste in beats. A buddy of mine said he is what rap should be. Rap isn’t macho and aggressive. It shouldn’t be run by jocks. Rap is very mellow, it should be relaxing and simple. Wordplay is just like fun with the poetry and flow of rhyming and the musicality of that. MF Doom captured that spirit and had such a unique voice and such a unique point of view. I rarely cry when a celebrity dies. He was one of the few celebrities that brought tears to my eyes when I found out he passed away.”

Andre isn’t the only one who has honored MF Doom following his tragic passing in 2020. Musicians like Open Mike Eagle, Madlib, Playboi Carti, and many more have paid tribute to the iconic MC.