And for all the Beliebers out there, the documentary doesn’t disappoint. It’s an excellent mix of footage from his performance last New Year’s Eve — which marked a return to the stage after a nearly three-year hiatus since the Purpose tour — and the lead up to planning the show during last year’s pre-vaccine, COVID-19 reality. There’s also plenty of self-shot footage of Bieber and his new wife Hailey as they settle into their brand new relationship as husband and wife.
One of the topics that comes up during one of their early morning walks? Justin’s preferred timeline for when the coupe starts having kids of their own. On the day of the big show, as he’s detailing his plans for the rest of the coming year, Justin tells a surprised Hailey he’s ready to start having kids. “Do you have an intention for 2021?” his wife asks, which kicks off a very personal response from the pop star.
“My intention for 2021 is to continue to set goals and have fun while doing them. Make sure I put my family first… and hopefully we squish out a nugget,” he finishes with a mischievous look. “Uh – in 2021!?!” Hailey responds. “The end of 2021? We start trying?” He responds. “I don’t know… maybe,” the person who would actually have to bear the child understandably says. “We shall see.” The cute exchange starts around the 1:11 mark for fans who want to check it out for themselves.
And for those with Amazon Prime, you can check out the whole documentary here.
So, what legendary media property does Blade Runner 2049 and Arrival director Denis Villeneuve have his eye on after he wraps up his ongoing Dune saga? If you guessed Star Wars, Star Trek, or any other star voyaging affair, you might be surprised to hear that’s not the case. While the director has certainly made a name for himself creating sci-fi hits, it turns out Villeneuve is actually interested in pursuing a project a bit more… grounded. Something shaken, not stirred.
In a recent appearance on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast (via IndieWire), Villeneuve shared he would “deeply love” a take at none other than the James Bond franchise, explaining to Horowitz he’s been a fan of the character since childhood. Considering current 007 director Cary Fukunaga’s run with the series’ just wrapped up with No Time to Die earlier this month, there might not be a better time for Villeneuve to voice his “massive affection” for the character, as talks have begun as to who will replace both Fukunaga and lead star Daniel Craig.
“Frankly, the answer would be a massive yes,” Villeneuve responded. “I would deeply love one day to make a James Bond movie. It’s a character that I’ve been with since my childhood. I have massive affection for Bond [..] I don’t know if such a thing would happen, but it would be a privilege. That would be pure cinematic joy.”
However, cinematic joy aside, Villeneuve also admitted the idea of taking on the 007 series following Daniel Craig’s departure is a bit intimidating, stating that as “one of the biggest Bond fans,” he found what Craig brought to the series’ “unmatchable.”
“It would be a big challenge to try and reboot it after what Daniel did. What Daniel Craig brought to Bond was so unique and strong and honestly unmatchable. He’s the ultimate James Bond. I can’t wait to see Cary’s movie. I’m very excited. I’m one of the biggest Bond fans.”
Either way, it’s safe to say a Denis Villeneue James Bond movie is still quite a ways out if one were to happen. As of right now, the director is keeping busy working on the second part in his adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune, which — if the first film does well enough — should hit theaters sometime in the next couple of years. While the director originally wanted to release both Dune Part I and Dune Part II at the same time, Warner Bros. and Legendary have apparently kept their feet firmly down with the director, stating they wanted to see the success of the first film before signing off on the second. The first Dune film is scheduled to release in theaters and on HBO Max on October 22.
We love Brendan Fraser, don’t we folks? After vanishing from the public eye in the mid-2010s due to, he believes, being backlisted from the industry after speaking out about an alleged sexual assault, The Mummy actor is back in a big way.
He’s on Doom Patrol. He’s in the new Steven Soderbergh movie. He’s in the new Martin Scorsese movie. And he’s in the new Darren Aronofsky movie, The Whale, as a “reclusive English teacher suffering from severe obesity who attempts to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter for one last chance at redemption.”
Fraser told Unilad that the A24 film, which is based on Samuel D. Hunter’s play of the same name, is “gonna be like something you haven’t seen before. That’s really all I can tell you. Check it out when it comes out next year.” Fraser plays the 600-pound teacher (the role involves “a lot of make-up and prosthetics”), with Hong Chau (Watchmen) as his best friend and Sadie Sink (Stranger Things) as his daughter. Just a reminder: Mickey Rourke was nominated for an Oscar for starring in an Aronofsky movie — could Fraser be next?
One thing’s for sure: he’s going to give 110 percent.
If you weren’t already convinced that Dave Grohl’s new book The Storyteller was a worthy read, the chapter he just shared about the time when he met Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr in London is here to sway you. Entitled “Entering Valhalla,” Grohl posted the excerpt in his “Dave’s True Stories” blog and it’s far less of a #humblebrag than it is a tale of sheer childlike joy.
As the story goes, Foo Fighters had just played a show at London’s Wembley Arena when Dhani Harrison (the son of late Beatles drummer George) introduced himself to Grohl backstage and invited the band to attend a tribute show for his father that he was putting together at the Royal Albert Hall the following week. Among the concert’s performers were legends in Eric Clapton, Ravi Shankhar, Tom Petty, and Jeff Lynne. As fate would have it, the Foos had that night off on their tour. So Grohl and the band happily accepted the offer to attend as guests.
At the show, Grohl explains that he got extremely emotional when Ringo Starr played “Photograph”:
“As if the previous hour hadn’t already been the most life affirming jolt to my soul, Ringo’s presence and this song in particular struck an unpredicted chord within me. Here was a man, generously withholding his own grief of losing a dear friend and bandmate, spreading love and joy by sharing the most healing force in time of mourning: Music.
I realized that I had been trying to do the exact same thing since that cold, cloudy morning of April 5th, 1994. The day that Kurt Cobain died.
I sang along at the top of my lungs.”
Grohl then goes on to talk about how they settled into an empty VIP Lounge, which soon became very much not empty as the show’s performers slowly trickled in. There was Ravi Shankhar “sitting in the corner eating a plate of Indian food all by himself,” the “fifth Beatle” George Martin, and then the big payoff, when Grohl meets Paul McCartney for the first time:
“What happened next will forever remain a blur. I don’t recall exactly how Paul and I were introduced, what was said, or how long we talked, but I do remember putting on my best ‘this is not the most incredible thing ever to happen to me’ face while trying to keep from making a fool of myself. I think I may have tried the ‘So, are you guys on tour at the moment?’ line, but who knows. I was beside myself, having an out of body experience, living a moment that will surely be revisited in my final hours. I would not be standing there that night, much less writing this today, if it weren’t for this man. Like so many who have made lives as musicians, his music had been a teacher when I needed instruction. A friend when I felt alone. A father when I needed love. A therapist when I needed guidance, and a partner when I needed to belong.”
There are other factoids in the story that might be lost on the casual fan. Like when Grohl mentions his “old friends” Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers and how he nearly joined the band after Nirvana came to an end. But more than anything, it’s refreshing to read his recollection of how giddy he was that night meeting The Beatles. Rock stars: They’re just like us!
Things are moving quickly for Christopher Nolan‘s next movie as the signature director prepares for his first film outside of the Warner Bros. umbrella that he’s operated under for almost two decades. Titled Oppenheimer, the biopic will center on J. Robert Oppenheimer, the inventor of the atom bomb. While Nolan has left behind Warner Bros., he clearly has no plans to abandon the stable of actors he’s come to rely on over the years. Longtime Nolan collaborator Cillian Murphy has been tapped for the lead role. He’s previously worked with Nolan on all three Dark Knight films, Inception, and Dunkirk. In fact, Murphy was Nolan’s top choice to play Batman before the part went to Christian Bale. Via Deadline:
The iMax-shot epic thriller thrusts audiences into the pulse-pounding paradox of the enigmatic man who must risk destroying the world in order to save it. Universal Pictures will distribute Oppenheimer theatrically worldwide and will release the film in North American.
Written and directed by Nolan, the film will also be produced by Emma Thomas and Atlas Entertainment’s Charles Roven and Nolan. The film is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and the late Martin J. Sherwin who sadly passed away this week.
On top of announcing Murphy’s casting, Oppenheimer has also locked down a release date: July 21, 2023. So that should be explosive summer.
This new James Bond movie, it turns out, all goes back to Vesper Lynd. In the middle of Bond’s idyllic vacation in the Italian countryside alongside a beautiful woman (Madeleine, played by Léa Seydoux), there comes a moment when Bond absolutely must drop everything and moon over the grave of a past conquest. For “closure” or some such. At least, I assumed she was a conquest, and why shouldn’t I? Women are so interchangeable in the Bond universe that there’s an acknowledged genre of character called “Bond Girl,” played by a new actress in every movie. He beds them and then moves on, this is canon.
Yet here he was, having a moment of solitary moroseness in front of a grave. For me this is one of the fundamental, irreconcilable contradictions of the Daniel Craig-era James Bond: that Bond can still be that old lady-shagging dog we all know and love from the 60s, with a new femme fatale girlfriend in every film, but also, somehow, a guy who can’t properly love a new girlfriend until he achieves closure by staring maudlinly at an old flame’s gravestone. Where Bond’s ladies used to have names like “Xenia Onnatop” and “Pussy Galore,” puns that probably need no explanation and fitting for disposable conquests, his latest flame is named “Madeleine.” Considering No Time To Die is a riff on childhood memories, I’m forced to assume that the name is a reference to Proust’s madeleine, the simple cookie that spawns seven volumes of the early 20th century novelist’s heartfelt remembrances (This Summer… James Bond… In… IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME)
Of course, at the time of my No Time To Die viewing, I had only the vaguest notions of Vesper Lynd and who she was. When I looked it up later, I discovered that Vesper Lynd was Eva Green’s character, who died at the end of Casino Royale, released in 2006. Was I really expected to possess this kind of encyclopedic recall of a character I saw in a movie 15 years ago? This is mostly what the Craig-era Bond has had to offer, continuity at the expense of consistency.
Wikipedia tells us that in the novel in which Lynd first appeared, Casino Royale, from 1953, “Bond deals with his grief over [Lynd’s] death by renouncing her as a traitor and going back to work as though nothing has happened, coldly telling his superiors, ‘The job is done, and the bitch is dead.’”
Seems a bit harsh! I can understand why the modern incarnation of Bond would try to soften that kind of sentiment. Yet I sort of understand Bond’s flippancy as a character choice. Bond was a guy who traveled the world risking his life and killing people; it would make sense that he’d be able to compartmentalize attachments. For most of the Daniel Craig era, we’ve been asked to see Bond as both ruthless and sentimental, as promiscuous as ever but also moony and lovelorn like an emo teenager. Who is this guy?
Casino Royale was my favorite movie of the Daniel Craig era, probably because it was the most successful at offering a consistent answer to the basic question: who is James Bond? The general idea of the character is as one of the last artifacts of a long-dead mod culture; a suave, sexually cool super spy perfectly suited to the days when perusing a Playboy article on the latest hi-fi systems while puffing on a pipe was considered height of sophistication.
At the dawn of the Daniel Craig era, in Casino Royale, the first true post 9/11 Bond (Die Another Day came out in 2002, starring Pierce Brosnan, who’d been playing Bond since 1995), Bond was no longer a debonair fancy boy; he was brash, streety, impulsive, intense — maybe even a little psychotic. When a bartender first asks this Bond whether he’d like his vodka martini shaken or stirred, Bond responds “Do I look like I give a damn?”
It was a choice, and it worked. It was even true to the character, in a way. If “cool” in 1953 was having a signature vodka martini drink, cool in 2006 looked something like not being so damned finicky about it. Above all, there was a consistency to Bond. He was an intense guy, which seemed to fit with the idea of him being a death-defying, murderous superspy and our ideas about what that might look like. Fittingly, they’d chosen Daniel Craig to play Bond, an actor whose main quality is a kind of pugnacious intensity, the version of Bond who looks least like a fashion model, and for whom the idea of a “wry smirk” (that quintessential Bond reaction) is almost unimaginable.
15 years later, Bond’s character, and Bond movies as a whole, have become less a consistent character or idea than a repository of all the other blockbuster brands the James Bond franchise attempted to copy along the way. First Bourne, then Marvel, and now Mission Impossible. We no longer have sex puns and cheap titillation but synergy and lore, natsec jargon and product placement. In an attempt to become everything to everyone while remaining himself, Bond has become an impossible contradiction of things. Moody, moony, intense, obsessive, faithful, and cold. Romantic, yet capable of changing emotions on a dime. Even from an aesthetic standpoint, he’s confused. Daniel Craig now resembles an albino Doberman in human form, somehow combining an ex-boxer’s furrows and jug-ish ears with an Instagram model’s hairless bare torso, all topped by a haircut borrowed from a middle school vice-principal. His mouth area has stiffened into a sort of rigor mortis Blue Steel, evoking… perhaps the confusion of being asked to be a twink and a daddy simultaneously? This Bond could use a Patrick Bateman morning routine montage just to explain himself.
It helps that Casino Royale was perhaps the last Bond movie whose plot I could explain semi-coherently (I think Quantum of Solace had something to do with stealing water?). In No Time To Die, Bond has yet again borrowed the fractal plotting and breathless national security statisms of the Bourne and Mission Impossible universes. When I first logged in to buy my ticket and saw that the run time was two hours and 43 minutes, I groaned audibly. This was a franchise that used to have the intellectual heft of a Mad Magazine cartoon, a sort of mash-up of action movies and softcore porn. Not that it still needs to be that, but it should be something, recognizably its own.
I bought a 32-ounce soda in the hopes that it would give me the fuel to remain alert during the necessary plot set up scenes, when we watch the actors attempt to outline the alphabet soup of government agencies, terror groups, rogue agents, and doomsday weapons that underpin the plot this time around. I managed to make it through the scenes in which Madeleine has her family killed by a bad guy with a scarred face played by Rami Malek, and the ensuing ruined vacation with James Bond. During which Bond almost gets blown up by a bomb planted in Vesper’s mausoleum by Spectre. He assumes Madeleine set him up and coldly puts her on a train to somewhere else, vowing that this will be a forever breakup.
Yet at some point during the next interlude, during which Bond travels to Cuba with his 007 replacement, played by Lashana Lynch, and a sexy rookie operative played by Ana De Armas, to crash a party, I still ended up dozing off for a few minutes. Such is the sedative power of these jargony, shoot-and-scowl Bourne plots: five soft drinks worth of caffeine was no match. How long can we realistically be invested in Bond shooting henchman with a submachine gun? And anyway, we all know that eventually Bond is going to have to go scowl-to-scowl with Rami Malek — we’re not so different you and I — and win back his poisoned Madeleine, Leila Skidoo.
No Time To Die was openly marketed as the final chapter of the Daniel Craig era, and it was only in the last act when Bond, finally freed from the burden of endless continuity, finally came into his own as a recognizable character. In the end, he wasn’t cool or detached or louche or homicidal, but something of a hopeless romantic. No Time To Die belatedly reveals that what we were watching wasn’t an action thriller or a kooky spy caper at all, but a melodrama, a kind of massive budget telenovela about an incorrigible heartbreaker finally allowing himself to be vulnerable and find true love.
These are the kinds of revelations that the demands of endless franchises normally preclude. And so the scattered, sorta emo Daniel Craig era ends, fittingly, not with cigarette boat ride into the sunset or the clink of martini glasses, but with crocodile tears.
‘No Time To Die’ is out now, in theaters nationwide. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.
“Fox News, you should be proud of yourself for the past 25 years. You’ve brought half this country together, against the other half. Who else has done that?”
Point taken, Desi Lydic. The Daily Show comedian has gone full-steam lately with her parody-filled “Foxplains” rants, in which she skewers stereotypical Fox News devotees. Granted, the stereotype isn’t so stereotypical these days when one considers that Seth Meyers called out Fox News for pushing horse medicine as a COVID cure. And in the above video, Lydic deftly bounces between deranged subjects of perceived obsession (like Malia Obama’s college transcript and Common visiting the White House) with the satire pouring full steam.
All of this is aimed, of course, at the Comedy Central show’s faux-saluting of the conservative cable news network, following The Daily Show‘s video that “celebrates” Fox News’ “25 years of sexual harassment” with on-air lines from Bill O’Reilly and more, years after O’Reilly’s ousting (after 20 years of tenure there) amid revelations that he paid out over $30 million for sexual harassment settlements.
Likewise, Desi does not skirt that issue here. “The looney libs say that Fox News built their empire on sexism, but that’s ridiculous,” she ranted. “Would Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly have paid hundreds of millions of dollars to women who used to work at Fox News if they were sexist?” Hello!” To that point, Gretchen Carlson received a $20 million settlement after she sued former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes for sexual harassment), and Carlson took a swing at O’Reilly while declaring, “Nobody pays $32 million for false allegations.”
Back to the above video: it must be noted that Fox News’ website took aim at Desi last week, following her “LEAKED” faux-audition for Meghan McCain’s recently vacated The View seat. Clearly, she’s striking a nerve. Watch that video below.
Men struggle to comprehend the pressures women feel. The same is true of women!
Gah! We’ll never get along.
This conversation between comedian Neal Brennan and Amy Poehler is a pretty good example of how hard it can be to figure life out sometimes.
Neal, the genius who co-created “Chappelle’s Show,” sat down with Amy for his show “The Approval Matrix.” The topic? WHAT are men supposed to be now? Cool? Adorkable? Both? Neither?
It’s maddening, dealing with constantly opposing messages about how to be and how to act.
And Amy, in all her hospitable magical greatness, is straight-up like, “Yeah, bro, welcome to the party! We’ve been here a looong time.”
“This feeling that you’re having right now — which it’s like, ‘I have to be all things,’ — it’s a feeling that women have everyday in their whole lives. So you’re just starting to experience it now. … I’m glad you’re finally experiencing it as a white male.”
Yass, queen! A magical combo of speaking your truth and inviting your friends to the party. That sounds like Amy.
“If you can speak about what you care about to a person you disagree with, without denigrating them or insulting them, then you may actually be heard.”
Patrick Stewart often talks about his childhood and the torment his father put him and his mother through. However, how he answered this vulnerable and brave fan’s question is one of the most eloquent, passionate responses about domestic violence I’ve ever seen. WARNING: At 2:40, he’s going to break your heart a little.
Robert Bush Sr. is an avid outdoorsman who runs a Facebook page called “Bob’s Pennsylvania Wildlife Camera.”
He set up a secret camera on a log that lays across a steam to capture footage of all the different animals that walked across it. The result is a relaxing video featuring all sorts of wildlife including a black bear, chipmunk, coyote, turkey, and great horned owl.
You may have noticed the video is called “The Log 2.” Well, here’s the original.
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