Month: May 2021

Each week our staff of film and TV experts surveys the entertainment landscape to select the ten best new/newish movies available for you to stream at home. We put a lot of thought into our selections, and our debates on what to include and what not to include can sometimes get a little heated and feelings may get hurt, but so be it, this is an important service for you, our readers. With that said, here are our selections for this week.

1. Tenet (HBO Max)

Tenet is all of these things at once: stunning to look at; ambitious; loaded with nuanced performances; littered with breathtaking action set pieces; a marvel of modern filmmaking; and just as confusing as all hell. That last one will go a long way toward how much exactly your mileage varies on the viewing experience. In a way (ironically, given the whole “movie theaters are back, baby!” thing they pushed during its initial release), this might make it the perfect movie to stream at home, because you can pause it every now and then to figure out what’s going on, or maybe even double-back after it finishes to see if individual scenes play differently. It might end up making the whole thing more enjoyable, even. Do not tell Christopher Nolan we said this. Watch it on HBO Max.

2. The Mitchells Vs. The Machines (Netflix)

Well well well, do you want to see a star-studded and fun animated film from the production team behind Into the Spiderverse? We have pondered this question for days and have yet to uncover a valid reason why you wouldn’t. It’s got everything you could want: an oddball family trying to put down a robot uprising; voice work from Abbi Jacobson and Danny McBride and Maya Rudolph and a slew of other people you probably like; and an ending that might tug your heartstrings a little bit. Sounds like a decent Saturday afternoon to us. Watch it on Netflix.

3. Nomadland (Hulu)

In his review of the film last year, our Mike Ryan wrote, “there’s a scene in Nomaldland so beautiful I gasped as it whisked my brain to some of Terrence Malick’s early work.” That pretty much sums it up well — Nomadland is one of the most beautiful and touching movies we’ve seen in a while. And now it’s a full-on Oscar winner. There has never been a better time to check it out, except for every other weekend before this one. Still! Watch it on Hulu

4. Mortal Kombat (HBO Max)

Mortal Kombat is back (again) in movie form (again!), this time from producer James Wan and director Simon McQuoid and coming straight to HBO Max, for a limited time. All your favorites are back: Sub-Zero, Scorpion, Liu Kang, and so on, so if you want to see some familiar (covered) faces chop each other to pieces for various reasons, you are very much in luck. It’s one of the few franchises you can justifiably reboot every few years, if only because a bunch of talented fighters tearing each other apart is always a watchable premise. The plot is just a bonus. This is some extremely weekend viewing, which you deserve. Watch it on HBO Max.

5. Street Gang: How We Got To Sesame Street (VOD)

This documentary lit up Sundance and is now finally available on VOD as of May 7. Is it cute nostalgia-bait? Maybe. Will you probably love watching a touching story about immensely talented creative-types making a thing that has shaped childhoods for decades now, include your own. Uh, yes. Of course. Track it down and be prepared to cry a little.

6. Bad Trip (Netflix)

Eric Andre, Lil Rel Howery, and Tiffany Haddish in a wild road trip prank comedy where they pull strangers into nutso stunts as they make their way to New York. You could do a whole lot worse in on a Saturday night. Watch it on Netflix.

7. Without Remorse (Amazon Prime)

Say what you will about Without Remorse, a mostly disappointing Tom Clancy movie that mostly wastes Michael B. Jordan as a growling Navy SEAL out for revenge against Russia and/or everyone, but it definitely does feature a lot of shooting and fire and corrupt bureaucrats, sometimes all at once. It’s your weekend. If you want to watch something like that… we get it. Enjoy! Watch it on Amazon Prime.

8. Zack Snyder’s Justice League (HBO Max)

After a hardcore fan campaign and plenty of backlash (of both the content-related and behind-the-scenes varieties), the fabled “Snyder Cut” is no longer fabled but a real thing. It’s also a 4-hour thing, so it’s quite a mouthful to chew, but it’s undeniably a vast improvement over the theatrical version. Snyder’s version isn’t technically canon, but it’s still the realization of a fever dream and one that will satisfy those who longed for actual character depth amid all the CGI mayhem. Watch it on HBO Max.

9. Thunder Force (Netflix)

Thunder Force teams up Melissa McCarthy and Octavia Spencer for a wild action-comedy ride through a super-serum-filled Chicago. It’s probably not the best movie you’ve ever seen, but it is a fun little romp with some solid physical comedy. You can dig that, we imagine. Watch it on Netflix.

10. Shiva Baby (VOD)

A directionless college student runs into her sugar daddy at a shiva (a Jewish funeral, basically). Also in attendance: her family and, oh yeah, her ex-girlfriend. Shiva Baby sounds like a slapstick comedy, but while there are good jokes, it’s also anxious with a tense score that had my skin crawling; it’s an 80-minute panic attack. Shiva Baby might be the best horror movie of the year so far.

Travis Scott‘s Astroworld Festival is making its return this year after being postponed due to COVID safety precautions and the year off did nothing to dull fans’ fervor. According to a press release from Live Nation, the festival’s organizers, tickets to this year’s fest sold out less than an hour after they became available at 10 am CT this afternoon. Even more impressively, neither Scott nor Live Nation has announced a lineup, although the previous fests have included guests like DaBaby, Lil Wayne, Megan Thee Stallion, and Post Malone.

While this year’s lineup will be announced closer to the event dates (November 5-6 at NRG Park in Houston, Texas), one performer is a given: Travis Scott himself. Whether his new album, speculatively titled Utopia, will be out by then is anyone’s guess, but considering how antsy some of Travis’ fellow stars have been to release their delayed 2020 offerings, it’s a safe bet he’ll at least be previewing songs from it, even with a potential setlist full of surefire hits like “Sicko Mode,” “Goosebumps,” and “Franchise.”

As in prior years, Travis’s festival will donate a portion of the proceeds to the Cactus Jack Foundation, which looks to enrich the lives of young people by providing access to education and creative resources. You can learn more about the nonprofit here. Meanwhile, you can stay tuned to Astroworld Festival updates at the official site.

The Sons of Sam: A Descent into Darkness — (Netflix limited series) — Netflix continues to delve deeper into the true crime realm with new selections every month, from the ongoing Unsolved Mysteries revival to bingeworthy limited series like Murder Among The Mormons and Joe Berlinger’s haunting Crime Scene anthology show. Now, the streamer is taking on the case of serial killer David Berkowitz, a.k.a. “Son of Sam,” who was arrested and convicted after a stream of murders in the late 1970s. Upon Berkowitz’s capture, New Yorkers felt a sense of relief after Berkowitz could no longer stalk the streets, but journalist Maury Terry (author of Ultimate Evil) didn’t rest easy. He felt convinced that Berkowitz had a partner, at the very least, and this limited documentary series will dive down the rabbit hole with him. This might be a cautionary tale or the path to the elusive truth or both.

Kung Fu (CW, 8:00pm) — A mid-twenties Chinese-American woman takes a life-changing journey to an isolated Chinese monastery after dropping out of college. Upon her return, she must banish crime and corruption in her hometown with her newfound martial arts skills and Shaolin values, all in the name of justice. This week, an officer-involved shooting in Chinatown sparks shockwaves, and a traumatic experience from the past haunts Mei-Li and Jin.

The Goldbergs (ABC, 8:00pm) — Erica takes a breakup trip to Los Angeles to hang with her best friend, and that turns into the band getting back together.

Jimmy Kimmel Live — Rob McElhenney, Uzo Aduba, Middle Kids

The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon — Channing Tatum, Josh Duhamel, Joyelle Nicole Johnson

Late Night With Seth Meyers — Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Robin Thede, Ryan Hurd With Maren Morris, Mario Duplantier

The Late Late Show With James Corden — Billy Porter, Brett Gelman

In case you missed this pick from last Wednesday:

The Handmaid’s Tale: Season 4 (Hulu series) — Elisabeth Moss has so much going on these days, but she’s going back again to fight for freedom against the totalitarian government of Gilead. This season, she’ll lead the rebellion while fighting for justice and revenge, but perhaps the biggest threat she’ll face is staying true to herself and the relationships that she values most. Moss and the show keep on racking up Emmys, and she’s back with more with Joseph Fiennes, Yvonne Strahovski, Alexis Bledel, O-T Fagbenle, Bradley Whitford, and Max Minghella. Expect the show to get nomadic this season, leaving the Boston area and officially abandoning home base, which must have presented quite the challenge while filming during a pandemic (as if the show wasn’t socially relevant enough already).

Since releasing their 2020 album Women In Music Pt. III, the Haim sisters have been busy. This year alone, Haim have shared remixes of several of their songs, dropped a Taylor Swift collaboration, and performed at the 2021 Grammy Awards. It now looks like Haim have one more unreleased song up their sleeves, which can be heard in the trailer to one of Netflix’s romance movies.

Netflix debuted a trailer to their upcoming film The Last Letter From Your Lover, which is based on the Jojo Moyes’ popular romance novel and slated for a July 23rd premiere. It stars Shailene Woodley, Felicity Jones, Callum Turner, Joe Alwyn and Nabhaan Rizwan and tells the story of a journalist who uncovered a number of secret letters from the ’60s. According the Billboard, the song heard in the trailer’s outro is actually a snippet of an original track the Haim sisters wrote for the film’s soundtrack. The teaser is brief, but Haim can be heard singing, “We are, we are, we are forever / We are, we are, we are tonight” over soft piano keys.

The preview of the new song arrives shortly after Haim were finally able to reschedule some tour dates. Their six-show 2021 UK tour kicks off in late September is Glasgow and comes to a close a week later in London.

Watch the trailer to Netflix’s The Last Letter From Your Lover above.

Phoebe Bridgers didn’t ask for beef, but she has certainly found it. Earlier this year, she drew the ire of David Crosby after smashing a guitar on stage during a Saturday Night Live performance. Now, though, it seems Bridgers has moved on from the music legend/”little b*tch” and found a new rival (albeit in a more playful way). Appropriately enough, it’s another music icon: Courtney Love.

Over the weekend, Elon Musk was brainstorming about his upcoming SNL hosting gig and tweeted, “Throwing out some skit ideas for SNL. What should I do?” One Twitter user responded with a Bridgers reference, writing, “smash a guitar.” Courtney Love caught wind of that tweet and tweeted at Bridgers, “Elon would never be so ‘basic’ as to smash a guitar,” adding a couple of winking emojis. Now, Bridgers is ready to get into a (fake) beef with Courtney Love, as she shared Love’s tweet and added, “finally, the rivalry of my dreams.”

While the playful emojis certainly suggest that Love is just fooling around, if she had to take sides in a Musk/Bridgers dispute, she might go with Musk, as they seem to be friends. She responded to Musk’s tweet soliciting ideas, “Do a skit recalling how your personal MDMA chefs product didn’t work on me @coachella #awkward.” She has also long been a supporter of Musk’s endeavors in space, tweeting in 2017, “Elon Musk is taking us into the future. Watch out universe, here come the weirdest aliens you’ve ever seen, us!”

Major League Baseball umpires have been no strangers to making bad calls over the year, something that has felt especially true for the 2021 season. The worst call we’ve seen came on Tuesday night, when Angel Hernandez straight up guessed whether or not a ball got caught and chaos ensued in the game between the Cleveland Indians and the Kansas City Royals.

A lot goes on in this sequence, which the announcers accurately call “an absolute disaster,” but basically, Salvador Perez hit a ball to right center field that was not caught. Andrew Benintendi got caught up between second and third, unaware of whether or not Perez got called out, and he ended up getting tagged out on the bases. However, he was given third because…

“I got basically blinded by the outfield scoreboard. … I was trying to make out what happened out there. The harder I looked, the less I could see,” first base umpire Angel Hernandez said. “So I was trying to read the players to see what they did with the ball. And I had to come out with the call. I basically guessed on the wrong call. So as soon as I turned around, (home plate umpire) Edwin (Moscoso) started walking towards me. We got the crew together. And we fixed the problem.”

An umpire guessing and getting a call very wrong is, to put it mildly, shocking, and after the game, Indians manager Terry Francona went nuclear on the much-maligned umpire.

“I just kind of told Angel ‘Why’s it always happening when you’re here?’” Francona said, per Lynn Worthy of the Kansas City Star. “It’s aggravating, but I don’t think there was anything we could do. Believe me, I was thinking about it, I didn’t know.

“What are they going to review? We knew it wasn’t a catch,” Francona went on to say. “Everybody I think knew it but Angel.”

Fortunately for Cleveland, it went on to win the game, 7-3, so this is more mild inconvenience than total outrage. Still, this is one of those ones that should probably lead to the league office doing something about an umpire admitting they guessed and got a call completely wrong.

Sharon Van Etten recently dropped Epic Ten, a fun new reissue of her Epic album that also included a version of the record consisting of covers by other artists. Now she has further expanded on the Epic Ten concept with a new live album, on which she performs all of the album’s tracks. The performances on Epic Ten: Live From Zebulon were recorded during her April livestream at Los Angeles venue Zebulon. The album is available to stream exclusively on Amazon Music.

Van Etten previously said of Epic Ten, “Epic represents a crossroads for me as an artist — going from intern to artist at Ba Da Bing, from solo folk singer to playing with a band for the first time and beginning to play shows on tour where people showed up. I am in awe of the artists who wanted to participate in celebrating my anniversary and reissue, from young inspiring musicians, to artists who took me under their wing, who I met on tour, and to artists I’ve looked up to since I was a teenager. Each one of these artists continue to influence my writing and provide a sense of camaraderie during this new era of sharing music.”

Check out the Epic Ten: Live From Zebulon art and tracklist below and stream the album here.

1. “A Crime”
2. “Peace Signs”
3. “Save Yourself”
4. “DsharpG”
5. “Don’t Do It”
6. “One Day”
7. “Love More”

Epic Ten: Live From Zebulon is out now via Jagjaguwar. Stream it here.

Last week, Willow unveiled her pop-punk leaning era of music. Some fans were surprised by her stylistic shift, but seeing as she grew up around her mom Jada Pinkett Smith‘s nu-metal band, her new musical direction only makes sense. To celebrate Mother’s Day and pay homage to Smith’s former group Wicked Wisdom, Willow reunited the band to perform a cover on her family’s series Red Table Talk.

It’s been several yeas since Wicked Wisdom last played together. They had originally formed in 2002 and even got the chance to open for Britney Spears. Explaining her reason to perform the cover, Willow recalled joining Wicked Wisdom on tour when she was very young. Willow says the experience taught her how “unapologetically badass” her mother was:

“When I was about three or four, I went on tour with my mom and her band, Wicked Wisdom. Wicked Wisdom was lit. This is the music that I grew up around. My mother was Superwoman, she was a rock star, she was a warrior, and a nurturer all in one. So unapologetically badass. I remember being on the tour bus with Jaden when I was six or seven and we got the opportunity to clean the bus. That was one of the most purely exciting experiences. I was my mom’s biggest fan. Every night, I wanted to ride on the security guard’s shoulders and watch her perform. She was a rock star and I was living for Wicked Wisdom. I thought it was only right to pay homage to this time because she showed me what ‘woman-ing up’ really is about. For mother’s day, I’m going to reunite with some of my mom’s old band members to do one of my favorite songs by my mom, which is called ‘Bleed All Over Me.’”

https://fb.watch/5iEMeIx7Tp/

Watch the full “Bleed All Over Me” performance above, around the 32-minute mark.

For decades, Charles Barkley’s golf swing has been the butt of jokes. The Hall of Famer had a disastrous hitch in his swing that made it look like he was trying to pump fake mid-downswing and led to him being abjectly awful at the game he loves so much.

Barkley has been trying to fix his swing for years, working with various coaches and trying to get through the mental block that caused the hitch and it appears he has finally unlocked whatever he needed to swing a club normally. Behold, the new and improved swing of Charles Barkley.

It is almost unrecognizable, as he showed it off at a PGA Tour Champions pro-am day with some fellow Auburn legends, causing Bo Jackson to be in such disbelief he had to run up and hug Chuck after the swing. According to Chuck, the credit belongs to his new coach Stan Utley, who has him down to a single-digit handicap which is a wild improvement from the 20+ number he was at previously.

We’re gonna break out the Konica Minolta BizHub Swing Vision Camera to take a closer look at what Chuck has changed and how well he’s hitting it now.

We’ll start at the top of the backswing, where you can see that Chuck’s head moves a touch back, but not nearly as dramatically as he used to. The balance is such an incredible improvement, as he gets a really good hip turn while staying over his feet and not lurching backwards.

Notice how his hips open without getting his back hip outside his back foot. Chuck’s never had a big full turn, but his hand placement is good and high and he’s getting some lower body action going which is important. Now, where the swing really changes is in the downswing.

This is the exact moment where the hitch used to happen, but now he’s just got great, stable movement through the golf ball. Look at the way his right knee is driving down and to the golf ball, as his hips rotate through. His head has gotten almost back to square with the golf ball and the stability on his lead leg is incredible, as he’s driving that weight through but keeping that leg stable rather than waving through the ball.

Now we get to right after impact, which is just about picture perfect. He’s keeping his head down and behind the ball. His hips are still firing all the way through, with his body turning and thrusting upwards while his left foot and leg remain strong and locked down. His arms are at full extension, driving through the ball rather than trying to scoop and lift it.

And then the follow through, where that left leg is still locked down, perfectly vertical, his back leg has turned through, the hips have fired all the way around and his belt buckle is facing the target. He’s in great balance, hands finish nice and high and his head has barely moved at all.

It is truly an incredible swing transformation and it should provide some hope to everyone out there that if Charles Barkley can fix his golf swing, you too can can put the work in to fix something in your life.

While Meghan McCain is known for being one of the more prominent anti-Trump Republicans, her criticisms of her own party’s allegiance to the now former president have always been mild compared to her assaults on Democrats. Well, that changed on Wednesday, when McCain absolutely unloaded on the GOP for its latest attempt to oust Congresswoman Liz Cheney as conference chair.

Cheney, like McCain, has not bought into the “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, and she’s had a target on her back ever since. This time around, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy was caught on a hot mic trashing Cheney, but McCain wasn’t buying the hot mic excuse as she launched into an unusually fiery tirade on the state of the Republican Party. “Well, let’s cut the crap,” McCain said during a panel discussion on The View. “He wasn’t caught on a hot mic. That was done intentionally.” Via Newsweek:

“The message that’s being sent by the highest member of Republicans in Congress is that women like me and Liz Cheney who refuse to bend the knee to President Trump, but still remain loyal Republicans, we don’t have a place in this party,” she said. “We’re worthless. We’re not worth fighting for to keep. It’s Kafkaesque to spin in this any other way.”

McCain then warned the party she’s been in since birth that there will be “consequences” if it continues to only promote Trump-loyalists like Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, who is being eyed to replace Cheney. “Go ahead in this sausage-fest of MAGA up on Capitol Hill!” McCain ranted. “Pull her out and put another woman in who will do anything you want for President Trump.”

(Via The View)