Month: April 2021

Since the pandemic hit, NPR’s Tiny Desk concert series has gone remote, which could be seen as either a positive or a negative. It’s a bit of a bummer that artists aren’t able to play in the classic titular performing space, but it is neat to see what environments they choose for their sets in lieu of that. The latest participant in the series is Rina Sawayama, who took to an office building with giant windows, which offered a stunning panoramic view of a city skyline.

It wasn’t just Sawayama, though, as she was joined by a full band and string quartet. Her set consisted of three songs from her 2020 debut album Sawayama: “Dynasty,” “XS,” and “Chosen Family.” While Elton John didn’t feature on the latter track, like he does on the latest version of the song, Sawayama did decide to perform the track in the style of the new recording.

Sawayama was also happy she was finally able to perform some of her songs live for the first time: “DYNASTY LIVE FINALLY !!!! to think this was the first time I performed it ….,” she tweeted.

Meanwhile, Sawayama just celebrated a major life milestone, as she turned 30 years old over the weekend, on April 16.

Check out Sawayama’s Tiny Desk performance above.

Disney+’s first live-action Star Wars series, The Mandalorian, was nominated for 13 Emmys, including Outstanding Drama Series. That puts pressure on the streaming service’s Marvel shows, WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, to also be factors during awards season. But only one of them will compete against Baby Yoda.

Nate Moore, the vice president of production and development at Marvel Studios, told IndieWire that WandaVision will compete in the Limited Series categories at the 2021 Emmys, while The Falcon and the Winter Soldier will be submitted as a Drama Series.

“[The decision] came about sort of as the series was launching, but it was something we were thinking about even as we were making it — not because we think, ‘Oh my God, it’s so great,’ but because it does feel a bit more dramatic than some of our typical stuff,” he said. “As this is sort of our first foray into television, even if it’s Disney+, we thought [the category placement] was appropriate for what the show is trying to tackle.”

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier could return for season two (“Hopefully at the end of this season, you will see the potential for what we could tell in a subsequent season,” Moore teased), but WandaVision is definitely over. So it will compete for Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series, like recent winners Chernobyl and Watchmen.

“I think WandaVision is a show you can only do once. She can’t go back into that reality. That is such a complete arc of what that character can do and what that story wanted to do, whereas Falcon and Winter Soldier is really about dealing with, to me, the legacy of what a superhero is, through the lens of Captain America and his shield, but ultimately through the lens of all these different characters. And that’s a story I think you can revisit in subsequent seasons because it’s an evergreen story. It’s a conversation.”

If “Agatha All Along” doesn’t win Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics, there will be rioting in the streets. The 2021 Emmys air on September 19.

(Via IndieWire)

Over the course of his legendary career, DMX had about as much success on the charts as anybody: His first five albums all managed to peak at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart. Now, after his passing, the late rapper is continuing to have an impact on the charts, as on the new chart dated April 24, he had an album come so close to placing on top.

Taylor Swift is No. 1 on the current Billboard 200 with Fearless (Taylor’s Version), but the 2010 compilation The Best Of DMX managed to finish the week at No. 2 and become the rapper’s seventh top-ten album. This is up from No. 73 last week, which was the album’s chart peak at the time. Additionally, two of DMX’s studio albums — 1998’s It’s Dark And Hell Is Hot and 1999’s Flesh Of My Flesh, Blood Of My Blood — re-entered the chart, at No. 46 and 107, respectively.

The Best Of DMX features some of the rapper’s biggest hits, including all of his RIAA-certified singles: “Get At Me Dog,” “Slippin’,” and “X Gon’ Give It To Ya.” It’s not surprising that the rapper’s music has shot up the charts, as his streams increased by nearly 1,000 percent after his death. He is also set to be memorialized at Barclays Center in Brooklyn.

When I was a kid my family and I would occasionally visit my cousins up in Mendocino County, a few hours north of San Francisco. A land of twisty roads, rugged terrain, and massive redwoods, I always found something indescribably eerie about the place, where towering, thousand-year old trees distort and block out bright sunlight that lasts well past 10 pm in the summer. It wasn’t until recently that books and television shows began to bolster and explain these childish suspicions — that this was a slightly kooky, slightly lawless sort of place, hostile to outsiders and historically a magnet for outlaws and oddballs, a sort of Appalachia with turquoise jewelry.

Coming on the heels of Netflix’s Murder Mountain, from 2018, which was set in Humboldt (the “Emerald Triangle,” referring to the marijuana-growing region comprises three adjoining counties, Humboldt, Mendocino, and Trinity) Hulu’s Sasquatch is another docuseries (this one thankfully only three episodes) exploring a murder-mystery in California’s far-north weed country. Debuting April 19th from director Josh Rofé and host David Holthouse (pictured), the twist in Sasquatch is that the murders, as you might imagine, were initially alleged to have been committed by a Sasquatch. Or… Sasquatches.

Sasquatch is surprisingly effective at convincing you that this might actually be possible, and it helps that host David Holthouse overheard the story in a legitimately terrifying moment. But whether “Bigfoot did it” is less important than the picture the show paints, of a time and place where people could believe that Bigfoot did it.

The Emerald Triangle has long been a magnet for kooky people, and when back-to-the-land hippies began to take over from loggers (descended from pioneers and gold rushers, the starry-eyed dreamers of a different age) in the sixties, they built communes. They attracted cults. Jim Jones and the People’s Temple moved into a spot near Ukiah. The Manson Family had a house in Philo. Many of those hippies turned to growing pot (both easy because of Mendocino’s fertile soil and easily disguised because of the rugged terrain, remoteness, and towering Redwoods), which attracted a certain type of person and nurtured a particular lifestyle.

In the 90s, when the “war on drugs” and operation CAMP took a hard line on pot-growing and brought military tactics and draconian sentences to marijuana growing, the locals turned conspiratorial, suddenly suspicious of one another and hostile to outsiders (Larry Livermore, who gets interviewed in Sasquatch, wrote a great memoir about this period). It’s in this environment, of paranoid pot growers, under-the-table seasonal workers, and tweekers living in remote camps in the rugged wilderness, that the rumors of a Sasquatch murder took hold. Josh Rofé’s docuseries sets out to discover not only whether it’s true, but how and why it got started. I spoke to him via Zoom this week.

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Can you tell me how the project came about?

It was February, 2018, a friend of mine, Zach Cregger, he’s one of the executive producers on the show. He mentioned a podcast that he really thought I should listen to called Sasquatch Chronicles. It’s people calling up with their encounter stories. I listened to 11 episodes in four days and was immediately obsessed with it, more specifically with the visceral fear that I was sensing. I was less hung up on whether or not I believed the details, what I was so taken by was these people seemed really afraid recalling these things that they said that they saw or encountered in the woods. Cut to a week later, I’m thinking, okay, I’m going to do a Sasquatch something, I don’t know what that is specifically. And then that morphed into, “Well, what if I could find a murder mystery that is wrapped up or somehow intertwined with the Sasquatch story?” I reached out to David Holthouse who was a colleague of mine already, we at the time were working on a show called Lorena that I made. He’s been an investigative journalist for about 25 years and a Gonzo journalist, so he’s really seen and done a lot of crazy things. I reached out to David and my exact text to him was, “Hey, this is the craziest text I’m going to send you for the next five years. I would like to find a murder mystery wrapped up in a Sasquatch story, and if that exists, pursue it as the next project.” He wrote me right back and said, “I love it. I got one, I’ll call you in five”.

[Slightly incredulous] So he just happened to have that story, like even separate from you wanting to do a Sasquatch show?

Exactly! Then he tells me this story about how in 1993, when he was 23 years old, he was a young Gonzo journalist burning it at both ends, learning the hard way that not everybody gets to be Hunter S Thompson. He needed to escape his circumstances, so he went up to Northern California to visit a buddy who was working on a cannabis farm. And while he was up there, somebody came running into a cabin that he was in and said, “Three people have just been murdered at another farm, further up the mountain and all the eyewitnesses have the same account.” The story was that either a Sasquatch, or multiple Sasquatches, tore these guys to pieces. These guys said that they had seen the bodies literally torn limb from limb and strewn about amongst really a massive patch of weed worth about a quarter million back then.

The Emerald triangle seems like it’s basically the perfect storm for creating Sasquatch sightings. Can you describe why that might be?

Are you saying everybody’s high? And so they’re seeing what they think they’re seeing?

I mean… it could be a factor.

You know, what’s wild, David talks a little bit about this in the show, and then there were other things that he said that didn’t make it in, but when you’re in those woods, they’re just, the trees are so big and the forest is so dense and your phone doesn’t work and you can’t hear any traffic, and now you’ve been out there for a while and the sun is starting to go down and it just, it really does look prehistoric. It’s the kind of place that if suddenly a Brontosaurus walked by, you’d say, “Oh, that makes sense.” It’s a place that your senses seem to function differently when you’re out there. A bit of paranoia seeps in, if you’re out there long enough. Weed culture aside.

No, I mean my uncle and cousins grew up in Mendocino County and I visited once or twice when I was a kid, and I always had a sense of it as this eerie place. I don’t really know why I thought that. There’s just something about it that seems eerie. Was that part of what you wanted to explore in the project?

I mean, it was one thing to hear David tell this story to me that night on the phone, but then once we got out there, it really just smacks you in the face and becomes apparent that, “Wow, this is an incredibly cinematic landscape.” I wasn’t expecting it to have this creepy vibe, just as a baseline. And then David starts talking to certain people and you learn that, “Oh, this is a hub for the criminal underworld.” And you add that on top of the rumors of violent Sasquatch and all of a sudden you just don’t feel safe anywhere up there. I know that everybody I made this with when we were on our shoots, we really sort of had this sense of, we better not overstay our welcome. Because we’re sort of already doing that with our first foot on the ground. And so it was just sort of, everything was just sort of tension-filled and adrenalized.

You talked about it being a hub of criminal underworlds; what are the groups of people that that area is drawing and has historically drawn?

I think a good example of what happened there, which we talk about in the first couple episodes, which is, in the seventies, a lot of hippies went out there and they wanted to get out of the city and they wanted to go live off the land and start lives off the grid. So they went out there and they sort of built utopia — they were growing their own food, they were growing their own weed, the kids were all going to school together. Everybody would get together to play music and eat, and it was amazing. And then all of a sudden, the war on drugs quite literally invaded utopia and the marijuana fields, whether it was a family’s small patch or somebody who had become a bigger supplier and had a football field worth of pot, they were now being targeted by these operations that the U.S. government was putting into play.

And I mean, they were just terrorizing people. I’m talking about tanks and helicopters with guys manning machine guns and setting everybody’s weed fields on fire and arresting people left and right. It was wild. The family dog would come running out, they’d shoot the dog and then arrest the parents. And so there were a lot of these hippies who quickly realized, this is not what I came here for, and I’m leaving. I’m not built for war. And so they left and a lot of them went back to the Bay Area or wherever else that they came from. And then there were other people who knew that they were very much built for war and violence, and they didn’t just double down, they quadrupled down and went further into the woods. As somebody in the show says, who was very much of that world, some of these people, they just flat out became feral. Add ten years of living like that to that person’s experience, and you’re going to end up with a pretty dangerous human, and so there is a subculture of that sort of out there.

Did you ever research any of the cults that sort came through that area? I know there were a few, in addition to like the communes and things like that.

You know not the cults, but one of the things, I’m glad you mentioned that actually because you’re reminding me of something that once upon a time, I thought, “Oh, that’ll be an interesting little side road to go down,” but it didn’t make it in. There was a serial killer named Wayne Ford who was living up there. And, yeah, I mean just wild, terrifying characters, just living in a nice, quaint little cabin in the woods, you know what I mean?

[In 1998, Wayne Ford walked into a Sheriff’s office in Eureka, the biggest city in the Emerald Triangle, holding a woman’s severed breast in a Ziplock bag and confessed to four murders]

It being such an insular place with like no cell service and everybody’s sort of hostile to outsiders, how do you make a documentary in that sort of place? What are the challenges?

Well, first to go through the process of thinking you’re not going to be able to actually do this, and you’re going to fail miserably, and have to tell Hulu, “You know what that thing I told you we were going to do?” Once you’re past the existential crisis of realizing how difficult this world will be to penetrate, you know, David started to develop sources and very slowly, but step-by-step over time he would have these little breakthroughs and he would gain the trust and cooperation of certain individuals. And so it was just a slow one step at a time sort of never allowing the disappointments to pile up to high on your psyche type of process.

What about operational security or whatever, did you have to take any sort of steps to stay safe while you were making it?

We actually looked into security and we couldn’t find anybody who wanted to do it–

You mean just as a consultant or an actual bodyguard?

I mean, to have somebody on the ground with us. And we were basically told “what’s going to happen up there is going to happen whether we’re there or not.” And so for us, this is something that David mentioned in the show on camera, but for us there was this sort of cost and risk analysis that was very much a part of our process. Just, in real-time on the fly, “Oh, we just found out this new thing”, or, “Oh, there’s this new person,” and sure, as the filmmaker you all want to pursue that. “Well, okay. Let’s really break down what the potential fallout could be.” And so it was just it was a lot of that.

You interviewed Larry Livermore who lived up there and wrote a book about it. He also put out the first Green Day album, and I know that Tré was from up there. Did you guys ever try to interview any of those guys?

No, we did not.

Were you with David for all of the shooting or was he kind of having to go off alone some on some of these missions?

I mean, for the shooting, I was with him for more or less everything, except the hidden camera stuff — obviously, he was solo for that. But there was also so much that David did away from the camera with meeting various sources to just sort of attempt to ignite those relationships. I think in many ways those were the most dangerous endeavors that he made during his investigation, was where there’s no camera, there’s no crew, he’s going to meet people, it’s 11 o’clock at night. They’ve changed the location on him three times. And oh by the way, the place he’s showing up to it’s actually closed, but he’s now going to be with that person he was going to meet an eight other people he doesn’t know. There was definitely a lot of that.

It’s a three-episode series. How did you decide on that? Was there a conversation about whether this should be one documentary or how many episodes that you wanted to break it into?

You know, we knew pretty early on, we wanted to do three and part of the reason we wanted it to be a series, as opposed to a feature is just all of these different elements, whether it was the war on drugs, the Sasquatch world let alone the investigation. We really just, we wanted to be able to go in deep on all of those, as opposed to if it’s a feature you can’t spend as much time in some of these pockets and felt like a series really enabled us to let David go down the rabbit holes that he was going to go down and not feel like, “Oh, we have to sort of honor the three-act structure of a feature and move things along at a quicker pace.” Whereas you can live in something for longer if it’s episodic. And so that just, that seemed to lend itself to this story.

‘Sasquatch’ hits Hulu April 19th. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.

Earlier this month, Lil Dicky declared, “That’s a wrap on season 2,” presumably talking about his breakout hit FXX series Dave. It didn’t take long, by the way, for FXX to renew Dave for a second season, considering it was the network’s most-watched comedy ever. Anyway, that seems to be what he was referring to, as the premiere date of the show’s second season has now been set for June 16.

Benny Blanco, who appeared in multiple episodes in the show’s first season, is set to return in Season 2. Also making appearances will be Lil Nas X, Doja Cat, CL, Kendall Jenner, Hailey Bieber, Kyle Kuzma, J Balvin, Rae Sremmurd (Swae Lee and Slim Jxmmi), Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Lil Yachty, and Kevin Hart, among others.

Press materials also tease some topics to be covered in the new episodes: “Dave knows he’s destined for rap superstardom — but at what cost? With the pressure mounting as he records his debut album, he has to decide if he’ll sacrifice friendships, love, and his own sense of self in order to make his dream come true. Simultaneously exasperating and inspiring to his friends, Dave vows to leave no stone unturned on his quest to become the next superstar.”

Revisit our interview with the show’s GaTa here.

One of the most important things we as a society can do during a pandemic is safely give out awards to very wealthy actors for movies many people could not safely go see in theaters over the last year or so. But apparently, sometimes optics are more important than actually being safe and wearing masks while around people who may or may not be vaccinated against the novel coronavirus.

Variety detailed on Monday the decision from the Academy to not require masks for anyone attending the upcoming Oscars ceremony on April 25, at least not while cameras are rolling on the 170 people who will be allowed to attend the ceremony. It’s all a bit complicated, but what you should not expect is to see anyone wearing a mask during the telecast later this month.

The news was announced on Monday morning during a Zoom meeting with Academy reps and nominees, and studio and personal publicists. Because the ceremony — being held at Union Station in downtown Los Angeles — is being treated as a TV/film production, masks are not required for people on camera, an Academy rep explained.

However, when guests are not on camera, they are being asked to wear masks. For example, masks should be put on during commercial breaks.

Director Steven Soderbergh, who will co-produce the event, did not explain his stance on wearing masks when speaking to the media over the weekend. But he did say the usage of masks will be “central to the narrative” of the show’s festivities, though no one seems to be willing to explain what that means if no one will be wearing them on camera.

He said on Saturday that masks would play “a very important role in the story.” “If that’s cryptic, it’s meant to be,” he added. “That topic is very central to the narrative.”

The meeting included a detailed walk through of what attendees of what they should expect at Union Station. A temperature check will be mandatory. This is after attendees must take at least three COVID tests in the days leading up to the ceremony.

Other award shows put on during the still-ongoing coronavirus pandemic have adhered to different standards. The Grammys, for example, held the ceremony outside and had participants masked unless they were on stage giving out or accepting awards. People nominated for certain categories were essentially moved into and out of the venue space as the show continued, something that will reportedly happen here as well. But while the safety precautions for those attending will undoubtedly be measured, the optics here aren’t particularly great considering mask usage during a pandemic has unfortunately become a political issue, not one of basic human decency and consideration for others.

As vaccinations continue to be more accessible to all American adults as of Monday, continuing to wear a mask when around others in public has become as much about keeping yourself safe as it is about projecting good habits and also limiting the risk of spreading coronavirus to others who have yet to be vaccinated. It’s ultimately more about messaging than mitigation in many ways. Hopefully whatever the “central narrative” is reinforces that because, on paper, this does not seem like a great start.

Piers Morgan is feuding with another star, this time over frozen yogurt. The former Good Morning Britain host recently got sacked after some troubling comments he made about Meghan Markle following the infamous Oprah Winfrey interview she gave with Prince Harry. Morgan had a truly weird obsession with the royal couple but he was fired after getting into on-air arguments with his co-hosts about the sit-down and his continuing fixation on the Suits actress’s personal life.

Now it seems recently announced pansexual Demi Lovato, of all people, might be stepping in to fill that Meghan Markle sized-void.

The singer, who recently opened up about her history with addiction and eating disorders in a revealing YouTube docu-series, called out local frozen yogurt shop The Bigg Chill in Los Angeles on Instagram, blasting them for selling products that “perpetuate a society that not only enables but praises disordered eating.”

https://www.instagram.com/stories/ddlovato/2555462649247492626/

The products Lovato was referring to were sugar-free and low-carb offerings labeled as “guilt-free” treats. Lovato and the shop ended up having an exchange via Instagram — the shop claimed the snacks were for customers with special diets and medical conditions like diabetes and celiac disease. Lovato argued that the “guilt-free” messaging was a confusing and harmful label that could trigger people with eating disorders. It’s become one of the stranger celebrity v. brand arguments on social media we’ve seen this year, but it’s gotten even more bizarre because Morgan has decided to take up arms in defense of his “favourite frozen yoghurt store.”

Look, this guy never fails to capitalize on an opportunity to publicly fight with women. He just can’t resist the pull of the potential retweets or something. So, even if it’s a bit weird for Lovato to come for a small business during a pandemic over sugar-free cookies, we still probably don’t need — and probably never will need — Morgan’s input on it.

Of course, that’s never stopped him before.

In an effort to cash in on his fleeting notoriety for being a trusted advisor to Donald Trump, Mike Lindell (better known as the “MyPillow Guy“) has launched his own social media platform called FrankSpeech.com, which in theory, will cater to conservatives who feel their right-wing views are unfairly censored or “canceled” by other social media channels. In practice, the site will ban swear words and any profanity that “takes God’s name in vain.” It will also almost assuredly be an unmitigated disaster, which Lindell thoroughly demonstrated on Monday.

After already being forced to push the site’s launch due to a series of server errors that continue to plague the platform, Lindell kicked off a 48-hour “Frankathon” on Monday, which apparently consists of him taking live phone calls during a live-stream. It’s not exactly clear what kind of calls Lindell was expecting, but it didn’t take long before he started getting relentlessly trolled by people who discovered the phone number on Twitter.

In a series of clips uploaded by Salon staff writer Zachary Petrizzo, Lindell can be seen getting punked by a number of callers, including one who pretended to be a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. You’d think all of that would have made Lindell a little more cautious about which calls he let through, but nope. He then got duped into believing Donald Trump was calling in. To be fair, the caller did sound a lot like Trump at first… until the profanity started. It all left Lindell noticeably flustered after getting trolled yet again in front of whoever the heck is watching his live-stream. The good news for him is that it can’t be that many people.

You can watch the MyPillow Guy get prank called below:

(Via Zachary Petrizzo on Twitter)

Zack Snyder is still revealing secrets about the expanded Justice League his most rabid fans still want to force into existence, but he’s also moving on to a zombie universe that has its own Easter eggs.

Army of the Dead is the latest Snyder film generating some considerable buzz online, especially after a wild trailer that showed some surprisingly smart zombies devouring humans under slot machines doling out winnings. But the star of the show, both in the trailer and the reaction it got online, was a zombie tiger that looks like it will give the living stars of the movie a lot of trouble.

And Snyder has revealed that his team did some legwork to make sure that tiger looks realistic, inadvertently looping another Netflix production star, Carole Baskin of Tiger King, into the project, though it all went down well before Tiger King aired and became the early viral sensation of the pandemic. As Collider detailed, Snyder revealed the research his team did at Baskin’s Big Cat Rescue compound in Florida, and how they eventually based the zombie tiger on one of the cats living there.

According to Snyder, the visual effects team called different animal sanctuaries in order to get a real-life reference for modeling and animating Valentine. The chosen candidate ended up being a tiger owned by Baskin, now internationally famous after the world got briefly distracted from the pandemic by following Baskin’s long-time feud with Joe Exotic on Tiger King.

Snyder says this choice was made before Tiger King was released, and the team spent a week on Baskin’s sanctuary before the series revealed the threats and harassment campaigns between the rival exotic animal owners. As Snyder jokingly says, “at least they got out of there alive.”

While Snyder is joking about his safety, it is important to note that there was a murder-for-hire plot that was central to Tiger King and made Baskin famous in the first place. Thankfully everyone is safe, and Snyder did get some very convincing tiger info that has inspired the big dead cat we’ll see in Army of the Dead when it hits Netflix on May 21.

It’s not every day that a song debuts on top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart. In fact, only a few dozen songs have ever pulled that off (51 prior to this week, to be precise). Now, Polo G’s “Rapstar” has been added to that list, as the hit single as debut on top of the Hot 100 dated April 24. The song’s success came thanks in part to the third biggest streaming week of the year, behind only two weeks of Olivia Rodrigo’s “Drivers License.”

Quickly after the news was made official, Polo G shared his excitement on social media, writing on Instagram, “It’s Crazy I really Manifested this sh*t. I got a long list of goals imma b scratchin off just this year alone…Only 52 ppl ever debuted @ #1 on the billboard hot 100 & I’m part of that group U can’t tell me I ain’t chosen I done really beat the odds fr From A Place where n****s like me b the 1st to die who woulda thought I’ll go #1….thank y’all Mann. I can’t stress that enough Ik I work hard asf & y’all work just as hard supporting me We gone keep goin up fr REAL #rapstar Album comin sooooonnnnnnn.” He also wrote on Twitter, “#1 song On the billboard Charts. Thank u God & Everybody Supportin me This sh*t don’t even Feel real. Naw like gang I really just went #1 wtf [crying emoji].”

Polo G recently released a video for the track, so check that out here.