Month: January 2022

Each week our staff of film and TV experts surveys the entertainment landscape to select the ten best new/newish shows 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.

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10. (tie) True Story With Ed and Randall (Peacock)

What if Drunk History but completely dry and rooted in the charming and sometimes inspirational stories of regular people? As told to the delightful tandem of Ed Helms and Randall Park (who know nothing about the story they’re about to hear), the show pairs its core stories with a cast of guest stars who are given room to play and mine laughs in a series of re-creations, proving the value of an astonishing tale told right. Watch it on Peacock.

10. (tie)MacGruber (Peacock)

It seemed improbable that a one-note SNL sketch sending up an ’80s action TV show could be stretched into a film, but dammit they did it, creating a cult favorite action-comedy that has now spurred a Peacock TV series. Circle of life! Unfortunately, Val Kilmer couldn’t return but the specter of the film’s explosive and urine-soaked conclusion hangs over MacGruber’s life, setting him off on a trail of redemption that is a lot more fully developed than you might imagine. Sure this thing is friggin hilarious in all the ways you’d expect, but it’s also a damn good TV show with a platinum level cast with Billy Zane and Laurence Fishburne joining Kristen Wiig, Ryan Phillippe, and Will Forte as they reprise their roles. Watch it on Peacock.

9. The Witcher (Netflix)

It’s time to go on another swashbuckling rampage through destiny as Henry Cavill’s wig returns for more monster hunting on The Continent. The show’s got a lot to live up to, given that it defied expectations during its debut, and it’s still a banger. That is to say, the Humble Bard is cranking out his angst in song, Geralt has less time to be grumpy, and Ciri is in training mode. The monsters are better, the emotions run higher, and we’ve got two new kids on the block: Killing Eve‘s Kim Bodnia (as Geralt’s mentor, Vesemir) and Game Of Thrones‘ Kristofer Hivju (in highly unflattering prosthetics, and we’ll leave it at that). Watch it on Netflix.

8. Search Party (HBO Max)

The final season of the most exciting, darkly funny comedy on TV right now launches with a near-death experience, a mental asylum stay, and a pair of gay dads who label their genetically-engineered baby a “conversation starter.” Impossibly enough, things only get more bizarre – and a hell of a lot funnier – from there. With a comedically-gifted cast, some wild story arcs, cults, and a Jeff Goldblum cameo, Search Party’s swan song proves it’s the boldest show out there. Watch it on HBO Max.

7. Billions (Showtime)

The degree of difficulty in what Billions is trying to do should not be understated. Not only are they changing things up following Damian Lewis’ exit with a new co-lead but they’re also trying to pull off an on-screen culture change in the way Axe Cap does business, trading brash rule-breaking for a more evolved and above board seeming process. Seeming is a key word here, because while Corey Stoll’s Michael Prince is no Bobby Axelrod, he’s still hyper-competitive and ambitious, putting him square in the sights of Paul Giamatti’s Chuck Rhoades. So, how’s it going heading into season 6? We’ll spare the spoilers, but the whole thing brings a freshness to the cat and mouse game at the show’s center and, as always, dimension and delight can be found in the often compelling and entertaining side characters that populate the show. Watch it on Showtime.

6. Cobra Kai (Netflix)

The O.G. All Valley Karate Tournament confrontation took place 30 years ago, and Daniel LaRusso and Johnny Lawrence can’t get over it. Likewise, their respective dojos, Miyagi-Do and Eagle Fang, attempt to join forces against John Kreese’s ownership of Cobra Kai, but of course, getting along will prove to be a bumpy road. Kreese has called in reinforcements in the form of his old Vietnam War buddy and co-founder of the Cobra Kai dojo, Terry Silver, who returns to the franchise. Who will win the spirit of karate in the Valley, and can Hawk and Tory keep their bully spirits alive while Johnny’s messing around with a crane kick? Robby’s also all in with enemy territory, and training methods are crossing like crazy, for better or worse. Watch it on Netflix.

5. How I Met Your Father (Hulu)

One of the bigger things to know about this particular franchise revival is that it includes Kim Cattrall, who opted out of another franchise revival (the Sex And The City continuation, And Just Like That). Cattrall portrays the future version of Hilary Duff’s Sophie, and of course, we’re going to hear all about how Sophie met her son’s dad, way back in 2022 when the realm of dating apps made looking-for-love even more complicated than in the IRL days. 87 Tinder dates in one year sounds like a total nightmare, so enjoy the vicarious nightmare. Watch it on Hulu.

4. Peacemaker (HBO Max)

One of The Suicide Squad‘s characters who seemed least likely (well, there actually were a lot of them, including poor Boomerang) to make it out alive has his own spinoff series. That would be John Cena’s horribly patriotic bro, and it’s still hellaciously funny that this is happening because James Gunn got bored during quarantine and decided to write this TV show. Never fear, though. He Of the Butthole Jokes is still as worthy of contempt as always. There’s no telling whether we’ll see another Squad movie, so soak up as much of this end of the DCEU while it’s hot. Watch it on HBO Max.

3. The Righteous Gemstones (HBO)

Righteous Gemstones is back, building on its God-squaded Succession vibes with more in-fighting, corruption, and largesse. Simply put, the Gemstones are in the dynasty business, looking to upsize, let loose, and steer clear of the claw of consequences that keeps grabbing at them. As hilarious as it is compelling, the show has somehow found a way to bring the thunder yet again with its stand-out cast, adding Eric Andre, Jason Schwartzman, and a spectacular Eric Roberts to the mix beside Danny McBride, John Goodman, Walton Goggins, Edi Patterson, and company. Dream Team ’92 level comedy casting, folks. Watch it on HBO.

2. Ozark (Netflix)

The bad news is that Marty Byrde and fam will only be with us for one more season. The good news is that this is a supersized season that will arrive in two halves, so let’s pretend that it’s two more seasons. Jason Bateman’s baby has been good to us all, even if it’s been bad for Marty, Wendy, and the kids, and so-so for Ruth (Julia Garner’s set to rule the world). This season, we’ll see what happened after the blood-spattered tarmac happenings in Mexico. One can bet that this new beginning won’t be any more relaxing than the Byrdes’ money-laundering U.S. life. Watch it on Netflix.

1. Euphoria (HBO)

Euphoria’s first season was a glitter bomb of teenage angst, drug-fueled spirals, and social media-splattered heartbreak. It’s been two years since Jules left Rue on that train platform and the show’s return promises some kind of resolution to their romance, the return of some familiar faces, and new additions that pressure the group to get their sh*t figured out. They won’t, of course, but the mayhem, bathroom fights, drug busts, and masterclass in acting Zendaya will surely give us will still be worth it. Watch it on HBO.

Nas never really struck me as a gamer, but he has been a shrewd investor over the past couple of decades, so his investment in South African mobile game publisher Carry1st actually makes perfect sense. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Nas joined venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Google, and League Of Legends developer Riot Games in raising $20 million of financing for Carry1st, which is known for publishing Tilting Point’s SpongeBob: Krusty Cook-Off. Carry1st is based in Cape Town and looking to expand on its 96 percent monthly revenue growth, moving into games development and pro gaming.

Cordel Robbin-Coker, co-founder and CEO of Carry1st, said in a statement, “We’re excited to partner with this world-class group of investors who, in addition to capital, bring expertise across gaming, fintech, and web3. In 2021, we launched multiple games and digital commerce solutions achieving really strong growth. Together we can accelerate this growth and achieve our goal of becoming the leading consumer internet company in the region.”

Nas’ other recent investments include involvement in cryptocurrency and NFTs, which he’s used to split streaming rights to two of his recent songs with fans, and Audius, an artist-driven streaming platform. Of course, he’s also got his label and media company, Mass Appeal, which has released projects from Nas himself, Boldy James, Dave East, Run The Jewels, and more. If his latest bet pays off, he’ll have a toehold in a whole new arena (shooter, boom), becoming a legend in the rap game and video game worlds.

Like bacon memes and “Call Me Maybe” remixes, local news clips were an internet staple in the early-to-mid 2010s. But they’ve faded in popularity in recent years due to the news being so damn depressing. But every so often, there’s one that’s still worth watching… and re-watching… and watching again just to confirm what you saw.

WSAZ-TV reporter Tori Yorgey (great name) was doing a live news report about a water main break caused by the chilly weather in Dunbar, West Virginia, when she was struck by a car. “Oh my God! I just got hit by a car, but I’m OK. I just got hit by a car, but I’m OK, Tim. I’m OK, we’re all good,” she told anchor Tim Irr, with incredible enthusiasm for someone who literally just got hit by a car. Maybe because it wasn’t her first time:

“That’s live TV for you. It’s all good,” said the upbeat Yorgey, who apparently was reporting solo at the scene. “I actually got hit by a car in college, too, just like that. I am so glad I’m OK.”

The driver who had just struck her could be heard apologizing, but Yorgey assured her that she was all right.

Yorgey said her “whole life flashed before my eyes” (the parts of her life where she wasn’t being hit by a car), but “this is live TV and everything is OK. I thought I was in a safe spot, but clearly we might need to move the camera over a little bit.” After taking a moment to recover, Yorgey got back to the report, so the good people of Dunbar, WV, better chip in and buy her something nice as a thank you. Maybe some pads? A helmet?

As for Orr:

You can watch the footage above.

(Via the New York Post)

Because the secret sauce to MAGA-world has always been conspiracy theories as far as the eye can see, Steve Bannon has hurled a bold new claim at Lindsey Graham that accuses the South Carolina senator of being a secret anti-Trump traitor. During the Wednesday episode of his War Room podcast, Bannon lashed out at the five Republican senators who Joe Biden says are working with him privately so as not to face primary challengers from the fair right. Just the mere thought of members of the GOP not being loyal to Trump sent Bannon into a rage.

Via Raw Story:

“The five traitors — and this is the scumbags and slimeballs you have here in the nation’s capital — he got five Republican senators have told him they agree with what he’s doing,” Bannon fumed. “They agree with what he’s doing and they would vote and support him, but they’re afraid of, wait for it, the War Room Posse.”

While he has no proof, Bannon is convinced that Graham is one of the MAGA traitors, and he had no qualms about calling the senator out by name during his broadcast. “Have enough guts to step up and tell us, Lindsey Graham, who you are,” Bannon said. “We need you guys to step up to the plate, Lindsey Graham!”

Bannon’s theory arrives at an interesting time. Just last week, Graham questioned the leadership skills of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell based solely on his insufficient support of Trump.

“If you want to be a Republican leader in the House or the Senate, you have to have a working relationship with Trump,” Graham told Sean Hannity. “Im not going to vote for anybody that can’t have a working relationship with Trump.”

Perhaps the Lindsey doth protest too much…

(Via Raw Story)

Britney Spears’ long-standing conservatorship was officially terminated back in September, but there are still a few legal loose ends related to that arrangement that still need to be tied up. Yesterday, Spears took another step closer to fully reclaiming her independence, as Rolling Stone reports that a judge ruled Spears will regain control over her fortune, which consists of an estimated $60 million in assets.

Furthermore, there will also be an evidentiary hearing will take place “before the court closes the books on Britney’s recently terminated conservatorship and all its pending requests for outstanding payments” from Jamie Spears. The arguments in the Wednesday hearing reportedly “devolved into shouting matches,” after which Judge Brenda Penny set a follow-up hearing for July 27.

Britney has expressed her gratitude for her attorney, Mathew Rosengart, writing on Instagram in October, “Thankfully I found an amazing attorney Mathew Rosengart who has helped change my life !!!!”

Speaking of social media, Britney has been more open than ever on Instagram and Twitter in recent days. This has mostly been related to her spat with sister Jamie Lynn, which boiled over yesterday when an enraged Britney accused Jamie Lynn of treating their mother poorly and wrote, “F*ck you Jamie Lynn !!!!“

In a new interview, Fat Joe credits his peer and part-time rival Jay-Z for having the “hardest lyric in hip-hop.” Appearing on the I Am Athlete podcast with hosts Brandon Marshall, Chad Ochocinco Johnson, DJ Williams, and LeSean McCoy, Joe explained why he believes a line from Jay’s debut album Reasonable Doubt sums up a philosophy that is underrated but important for success in any endeavor.

The line in question appears on “Feelin’ It,” the fourth and final single from Reasonable Doubt. Over a sample of jazz musician Ahmad Jamal’s 1974 song “Pastures” re-worked by Ski Beatz, Jay rhymes, “If every n**** in your clique is rich, then your clique is rugged / Nobody will fall ‘cause everyone will be each other’s crutches.”

Joe expounds on that idea for I Am Athlete, explaining, “Everybody wanna be the man. Everybody wanna be the guy everybody looks up to. There’s no real strength in that. The strength is in everybody eating — so that if one of us falls, we can lift him up. You have to understand that mentality.”

As far as his former rivalry with Jay, he credits that to his jealousy of Jay’s success — and Jay stepping in on the one place Joe reigned supreme: The world-famous Rucker Park basketball league. “The man was always winning,” he chuckles. “I might have been a little jealous if I’m gonna be a man about it. He won at everything. He had the baddest chick in the world. So, what Joe had carved out was this: I always had the streets, no matter who I had beef with. And so The Rucker is part of the streets. That was the streets in the summertime, and out of nowhere here comes this guy after I win five ‘chips in a row, he wants a team!”

Fortunately, it seems they’ve put that behind them, with Jay recently contributing to Joe’s relief fund for victims of the recent Bronx building fire and both co-signing a letter to New York’s governor to support the “Rap Lyrics On Trial” bill.

The Australian Open kicked off earlier this week, and one notable player wasn’t there: Novak Djokovic. The world’s top tennis player, who has triumphed over the competition in Australia a total of nine times, made headlines when he arrived in Melbourne for the tournament, and was kindly asked to leave the continent given that he’s not vaccinated against COVID. And if there’s one person who’s really enjoying this story, it’s The Daily Show host Trevor Noah.

On Wednesday, Noah shared some clips of various global news broadcasts reporting on Djokovic’s deportation back to Serbia and how the Australian government canceled his visa over concerns that “his presence could lead to an increase in anti-vaccination sentiment and even civil unrest.” While Djokovic did have a medical exemption from Australia’s vaccination mandates due to a recent bout with COVID, an estimated 71 percent of Australians wanted the athlete barred from entering the country.

“Damn! It says a lot about you when that many Australians think you’re too dangerous to be in their country,” Noah said. “I mean, this is the country whose health minister is a giant poisonous spider.”

The worst part about this whole ordeal, as Noah sees it, isn’t seeing the top-ranked athlete in a sport turned away and unable to defend his title. It’s spending 25 hours flying all the way to Australia only to then have to turn around and spend another day of your life flying away from Australia. “I don’t know what Djokovic thinks is in the vaccine,” Noah said, “but it can’t possibly be worse than breathing in farts for 50 hours straight.”

You can watch the full clip above.

Today, Jessica Alba is probably best known as the wildly successful founder of The Honest Company, an eco-minded consumer goods company that she founded in 2011 and took public in 2021 with a $1.4 billion valuation. But back in the early aughts she was better known as the breakout star of Dark Angel, a post-apocalyptic TV series co-created by James Cameron. While the series was short-lived, lasting just two seasons, it was enough exposure to help Alba’s acting career skyrocket. But behind the scenes, says her Dark Angel co-star Jensen Ackles, Alba was “horrible.”

Ackles—who has gone on to have a major small-screen career with meaty roles in Dawson’s Creek, Smallville, Supernatural, and The Boys—recently shared all the gory details of the challenges he and Alba faced back in the day while chatting with Michael Rosenbaum for “Inside of You with Michael Rosenbaum.” As Page Six reports, Ackles and Alba didn’t always have the best working relationship.

“I was the new kid on the block, and I was picked on by the lead,” Ackles said of his experience working on the series. Describing their tension as the kind of “bickering” that often happens between siblings, Ackles seems to have adopted a whole new perspective on the situation with time. “It wasn’t that she didn’t like me,” he said. “She just was like, ‘Oh, here’s the pretty boy that network brought in for some more window dressing because that’s what we all need.’”

It wasn’t until Ackles decided to “fight fire with fire” that the two eventually developed what the actor described as a “mutual respect” for each other. “But we bickered,” Ackles reconfirmed. “We bickered like brother and sister.”

Now, 20 years after the fact, it seems as if Ackles has realized that life for Alba, who was being plastered across every lad mag known to man—including an unauthorized Playboy cover (an with the image taken from a movie still)—probably wasn’t all billion-dollar IPOs and biodegradable baby wipes at the time.

“I love Jess, which I know kind of contradicts what I just said,” Ackles said. “She was under an immense amount of pressure on that show. She was young, she was in a relationship and that was… causing some undue stress, I believe.” (That relationship would be with one Michael Weatherly, a noted sexual harasser and Alba’s Dark Angel co-star/one-time fiancé, who was a dozen years older than her.)

But for all the strife he claims they had, Ackles also remembers Alba as a real comfort in times of need. “My grandfather died while I was shooting it and she literally just walked into my trailer and held me for a half an hour,” he said. “So it was that kind of a relationship. If she walked in, we’d be all hugs, but she didn’t make it easy on me.”

(Via Page Six)

If it’s a funeral, let’s have the best funeral ever.

These words, printed in white type against a black screen like a social media apology, open Shut Up And Play The Hits, the 2012 documentary directed by Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace. When the film premiered 10 years ago this week at the Sundance Film Festival — it later played theatrically in the U.S. for just one night that July — the epigraph had an unmistakable meaning: Shut Up And Play The Hits is about the “final” concert by LCD Soundsystem, held at Madison Square Garden in the spring of 2011. In the movie, we see performances from the show intercut with footage of head LCD James Murphy before and after the gig, including a long, philosophical interview with the cultural critic Chuck Klosterman.

The emotional climax of Shut Up And Play The Hits comes when Murphy, who has expressed uncertainty throughout the picture about whether he’s made the right decision to shutter LCD Soundsystem, is invited to take one last look at the band’s gear before it’s sold off and scattered to the winds. On paper, this is an unusual trigger for a cathartic moment — in fact, one might even call it a strained contrivance for a movie without a strong ending. But as it’s portrayed in the film, the sight of keyboards and sequencers and microphone stands sets Murphy on a Proustian reverie in which the life of LCD Soundsystem flashes before his eyes. And, like that, he breaks down dramatically into tears.

I can’t say how this played at Sundance in 2012. But in 2022, like so much about Shut Up And Play The Hits, this scene is so preposterous that it registers as unintentionally hilarious, like a This Is Spinal Tap for early 21st century indie rock. And the reason for this is obvious: LCD Soundsystem did not break up. They went on a five-year hiatus, and then returned in 2016 to play a series of lucrative shows, including some high-profile appearances at Coachella, Bonnaroo, and Primavera Sound. And then they released their fourth album, 2017’s American Dream, their first for Columbia Records.

To break up and then reunite is hardly unprecedented in popular music. But most bands don’t go out by booking the biggest concert of their career and explicitly marketing it as a “farewell” show. And it’s certainly uncommon to immortalize that show with a self-mythologizing film. Yes, it’s true that The Band continued after The Last Waltz set the blueprint for Shut Up And Play The Hits, but they carried on without Robbie Robertson, the guy who conceived the breakup show and pontificates the most in the film about how he’s eager to escape “the road.” James Murphy theatrically mourned the loss of his gear on celluloid and then procured more gear (or maybe even the same gear?) a mere half-decade later.

Again: He had the right to bring back his band! But LCD Soundsystem’s subsequent “reunion” (if we should even still classify it that way as this point) has transformed Shut Up And Play The Hits into a completely different film. This is what fascinated me most when I revisited it recently. So much of the movie plays in retrospect as unwitting self-parody, and therefore is far more revealing now than it was likely intended to be 10 years ago.

Some of this has to do with how “extremely early 2010s” Shut Up And Plays The Hits seems now, like when Murphy expresses his ambivalence about the band’s end by doing an extended analysis of a Kanye West tweet. (Times were so simple back then!) Some of this has to do with the jarring incongruity between Murphy’s self-serving rhetoric about what LCD Soundsystem “means” (such as aligning the band with a romantic DIY punk-rock ideology) and the reality of what’s on screen (Murphy conversing with his British manager as he sits surrounded by indie-famous luminaries backstage at MSG).

But mostly the accidental satire of Shut Up And Play The Hits stems from Murphy’s relentless push to make this concert (and LCD Soundsystem by association) historically significant. This is conveyed both by how the film is shot and edited — specifically the focus on the audience, who we see basking the band in worshipful adoration in frequent slow-motion montages, which is precisely what you don’t see in films like The Last Waltz and Stop Making Sense — and Murphy’s endless ruminations on whether he’s doing the right thing by ending a band whose legacy is putting out three pretty good albums in the aughts. When you consider that R.E.M., an exponentially more consequential group than LCD Soundsystem by any metric, broke up just five months after this concert by issuing a press release (and then stayed broken up), the self-importance of Shut Up And Play The Hits becomes even funnier.

Not that I’m interested in only laughing at Shut Up And Play The Hits, because I actually believe this film is historically significant, just not in the way it was intended. When viewed with the benefit of hindsight, it really is an “end of an era” film in the vein of The Last Waltz, it’s just that it doesn’t come across as triumphant.

To be fair: There are some genuinely exciting performances. “All My Friends” is an undeniable anthem. “Someone Great” still tugs at my heartstrings. The cover of Nilsson’s “Jump Into The Fire” is expertly rendered. But this was a moment when aughts-era indie was peaking, as signified by the guest-star appearance by the members of Arcade Fire, just two months removed from winning the Album Of The Year Grammy for The Suburbs. Never again would life be as good for either band.

It’s clear now that this period of time, when middle-aged NYC groups could command the culture’s attention by staging a grandiose curtains-closing arena-rock concert, ended soon after the last weeping hipster exited Madison Square Garden. Shut Up And Play The Hits not only marks this denouement, but also the end of “breaking up” being a thing at all in rock music. The relative lack of blowback to LCD Soundsystem’s return proved that the public now understands that any band’s future return — save for possibly R.E.M. — hinges on a combination of sentimental longing, boredom, and stupidly generous festival offers. But that wasn’t the case just five years earlier. Back then, it was still possible to suspend disbelief just long enough to buy the idea of a farewell concert, even as Murphy counterintuitively insists over and over that LCD Soundsystem isn’t even a real band.

It’s no surprise that the central anxiety that animates Murphy in Shut Up And Play The Hits is his self-conscious fear of appearing uncool. This seems to be his main motivation for staging the farewell concert in the first place. It’s his stab at a “let’s just do it and become legends” moment. As he explained to the New York Times in 2017, “The idea of it being ‘next’ was just unappealing. I didn’t want to be that band. I liked being the band that was relevant to me. I felt like we were about to be the band that was not relevant to me.”

Watching the film now, it’s inarguable that the fate Murphy feared is precisely what happened, which gives Shut Up And Play The Hits a poignancy that it didn’t have a decade ago. It’s become very easy (maybe too easy) to take shots at LCD Soundsystem. This is the band who has been pilloried recently for supposedly spreading Covid and co-conspiring with evil corporations on corny holiday specials. Meanwhile, the canon of cool-guy late 20th century music with which Murphy is closely aligned has dimmed in critical favor. As a result, it’s become increasingly difficult to explain to younger generations why this band was ever at the center of indie culture in a way it’s not for, say, The Strokes. (Grouchy bad-asses in leather jackets have a long shelf life.) It’s not that Murphy has “lost his edge,” to quote his most famous song. The kids are no longer coming at him from behind; they’re in an entirely different lane. They no longer care about guys like him.

The critic Larry Fitzmaurice recently wrote an insightful piece about LCD Soundsystem that helped me understand my own distance from their music since that fateful 2011 concert at MSG. Like many music writers engaged with indie rock in the aughts, I was an avowed LCD fan, especially of the self-titled 2005 debut and their landmark second record, 2007’s Sound Of Silver. But I was barely interested in 2017’s American Dream, and I rarely reach for the old records these days.

Fitzmaurice writes:

As a white man prone to white T-shirt wearing and varying levels of unkempt facial hair, there was something about James Murphy in my late teens-early 20s that made me think, “Hey, that could be me, maybe.” That sounds stupid, and it is stupid, but I was far from alone in that aspirational belief. (Anecdotally, I heard other white male critics say the same around the time, nothing accurately quotable though.)

Allow me to fill in the blank left by the parenthetical: I was one of those white male critics. At the risk of horribly embarrassing myself, here’s an excerpt from a column I wrote right before the Madison Square Garden concert, written in the form of an open letter to James Murphy (shudder):

Like a lot of music critics, I feel a special kinship with you, because we are you. Or, rather, you are a better, smarter version of us. The relationship music critics have with you is similar to what film critics have with Quentin Tarantino, who, like you, started out as a know-it-all fan who, unlike most critics, took all the trivial, microscopic specificities he absorbed from every corner of his fan experience and found a way to create something new with it. But even if you guys are big-shot artists now, you’re also still critics at heart; you did it like Godard, critiquing art by making better art.

To be clear, plenty of people thought this frighteningly sycophantic screed was a bit much at the time. Writing for Slate, Jody Rosen called my piece a “deranged fanboy’s cri de Coeur,” which I knew was a devastating burn even before I looked up what “cri de Coeur” meant.

Reading my own words confirms that LCD Soundsystem appealed to a certain subset of music critics by essentially flattering them. We appreciated the “meta” nature of what he was doing — the way he wrote songs about listening to songs, and then cataloguing songs, and making this seem like something that could make you the center of attention at a party. (Rather than the person people avoid at parties.)

Ultimately, I don’t think I was wrong to observe that Murphy was a kind of critic-musician who instead of writing reviews made records that reflected his aesthetic ideals. The problem (and this is what Rosen nailed me on) is that I bought too much into the mythology of the “farewell” concert at the risk of ignoring simple logic: Of course a man in his early 40s wasn’t actually retiring. It was always the move of an intensely self-reflexive artist who wanted to engineer the “perfect” ending for his band based on how future generations would theoretically revere him for it.

In the space between Shut Up And Play The Hits and LCD Soundsystem’s return, I grew up a lot. I became a parent. I wasn’t going out to bars every night. I like to think I am a little less narcissistic and more inclined to define myself not by what I like but by things that actually matter. You remember that episode of Seinfeld where Jerry dates a woman (played by Janeane Garofalo) who is exactly like him? At first, he loves it. But eventually he comes to a pivotal realization: “I can’t be with someone who’s like me,” he wails. “I hate myself!” My relationship with James Murphy is a lot like that. But my problem isn’t really with James Murphy. It’s with the James Murphy I see inside of myself.

I wonder if James Murphy, in some way, feels the same. Whatever you want to accuse him of, you can’t say that he’s still overly concerned with looking cool. You don’t reunite your band, put out your worst record, and then collaborate with Amazon if you’re still worried about shoring up your punk bonafides. If that’s the case, I’m actually happy for him. We all could stand to be liberated from our inner James Murphy, even James Murphy himself.

2022’s Scream is dedicated to horror legend Wes Craven, who passed away in 2015 after directing the first four installments in the series. There’s a “For Wes” title card as the closing credits begin to roll during the film, but if you stick around until the end, you’ll see some other familiar names. Rian Johnson gets a “thanks” from filmmakers Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (it’s obvious why if you’ve seen the movie), as does some of the original Scream cast, including Drew Barrymore, Matthew Lillard, and Jamie Kennedy. Those three don’t appear in the new Scream, but you can hear them.

“So with Matt Lillard, we have his voice in the movie. He is the voice of the Stab 8 Ghostface with the flamethrower and then he also has a line in the house that says, ‘Cool house, Freeman!’ at the party when Amber’s walking by,” executive producer Chad Villella told Fandom. That is not nearly enough Lillard. The people demand more Lillard (even if casting him as flamethrower Ghostface is an inspired choice).

Gillett also revealed that Barrymore, who appears in the original film’s iconic opening scene, has a voice cameo “as the principal at the high school. That’s her reading the announcement at the end of the school day. And Jamie Kennedy also voice cameos at the party. He’s the guy who says ‘Someone’s goofy ass dad is kicking us out’ while Mindy and Francis are making out on the couch.”

Sadly, the Ghostface parody from Scary Movie was not thanked.

(Via Fandom)