Month: February 2022

Back in November 2021, Lucy Dacus wrote on Twitter, “the show must go on was a bad take, the show actually does not have to go on.” It would seem she’s had a change of heart since then, though, because last night, the show went on at Detroit’s Majestic Theatre despite Dacus facing significant back issues.

Ahead of last night’s performance, she shared a photo of herself laying down that includes the text, “sup, I have two herniated discs and the only way I’m not in pain is laying down SO tonight’s show I will be singing from a couch, I am both sorry and also pleased to offer this most humiliating and hilarious moment to you good people of Detroit.” She added in the tweet, “I am telling myself I am punk for this please do not say otherwise I’m fragile.”

Indeed, photos and video from the concert show that Dacus did go through with her plan and sang while reclined on a couch, which was spruced up for the stage with plants running along the top of it.

A fan noted that, as if often the case, there’s a “The Simpsons did it first” moment that somewhat applies here: In the Season 19 episode The Homer Of Seville, Homer discovers he sings well while laying down, which leads to him joining the opera and singing while laying down. Joe Seiders of The New Pornographers also responded to Dacus’ tweet with a related story of his own, writing, “Badass, Lucy. I herniated at the end of a tour on the east coast and the only way I could get back home to L.A. was a cross country train, laying down. So f*cking impressed you played that show. Heal up soon!”

Watch clips from Dacus’ performance above.

Jeopardy! has aired on television since 1964, so even the smallest change to the game show’s strict format will not go undetected. The latest tweak comes courtesy of Mayim Bialik, who is splitting hosting duties with Ken Jennings following the death of Alex Trebek (and the firing of Mike Richards). Since taking over, The Big Bang Theory star has been referring to the first round of Jeopardy! as “Single Jeopardy!” instead of simply “Jeopardy!” This is a minor, but not insignificant modification. One of the secrets to Jeopardy!’s success is its comforting consistency, and as pointed out by TV Insider, the slight alteration is driving some viewers bonkers.

“@missmayim #Jeopardy You make my brain hurt when you say ‘Single Jeopardy.’ Jeopardy has had enough change – stop trying to reinvent it please!” one Twitter user wrote, while another added, “#jeopardy @missmayim It is NOT single Jeopardy!! It is the Jeopardy round. Please don’t keep calling it that.” BuzzerBlog spoke for many Jeopardy! fans by tweeting, “There’s no reason hearing Mayim say “Single Jeopardy” should annoy me as much as it does but it makes me irrationally annoyed.”

There are more:

Counterpoint: There’s “Double Jeopardy.” Why can’t there be “Single Jeopardy,” too? Or even better:

(Via TV Insider)

Throughout the early darkness of the pandemic, Last Week Tonight kept people amused with John Oliver’s out-of-left-field obsession with Adam Driver. The host began that running joke (which included calling the Girls star a “f*ckable redwood” and “big unwashed buffalo”) with a declaration that, “There’s only one infectious disease that two thirds of the world should be getting right now, and that’s Adam Driver Fever.” This continued, ridiculously so, for the whole of 2020 (and with John begging Adam to “sneeze in my McFlurry”), which culminated with Driver’s video appearance on the show’s final episode of the year. His tone was appropriately wtf about John jonesing for humiliation (and to be demolished, etc., by the “pensive bison”), but Adam was obviously in on the joke.

It worked, possibly because we were all losing it that year (no judgment on what we’ve been doing this past year). The show even responded to Driver’s shirtless ad campaign, and Oliver eventually revealed how the joke began. Now, Oliver has spoken with Collider about how they kept the joke going. Long story short, the show got in touch with Driver at an early stage, and he was weirded out but receptive. From there, the season finale confrontation was in the cards:

“[W]e reached out to Adam Driver to say, “hey, I don’t know if you know we are doing this joke, if you would like to come on at the end of the year I will keep going and we’ll set it up. If not, we will stop.” Because we did not want to get into that situation, exactly like you say, where you are building to a payoff, and you can’t stick the landing. So once we knew he was going to come at the end of the year, at that point, and this is five jokes in, at that point we realized, oh, we are continuing this at the end of the year then. But you can confidently accelerate knowing that the payoff is going to be beautiful.”

There’s no word on whether the joke shall continue, but it sure as heck did at the most recent Emmys ceremony. Last Week Tonight will return on February 20, hopefully while keeping that dream alive.

(Via Collider)

Marjorie Taylor Greene has been a congresswoman for just over a year now, but what a year it has been. From stalking Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to comparing mask mandates to the Holocaust, Greene’s level of bonkery is so off the charts that Alex Jones thinks she should run for president. Yet while she has become a go-to punchline for late-night hosts and sane Americans, it turns out that Greene actually wields real power in some Republican congressional districts.

As The Daily Beast reports, even many of Greene’s fellow Republicans seem pretty shocked to learn that the freshman rep has become something of a kingmaker in congressional districts that are open to hearing out her “Jewish space lasers” conspiracy theories. As Asawin Suebsaeng and Sam Brodey write:

According to four longtime Republican operatives working at senior levels on a variety of competitive GOP primaries across the nation, Greene’s endorsement in competitive 2022 Republican House and Senate primaries is not only considered as welcome, but also as one that should be actively courted—particularly in races where the nominee is likely to be decided by which candidate most animates the ultra-Trumpist grassroots.

“It is stunning,” one of these sources said. “Her popularity among much of the base and what she brings to a campaign right now is not nothing. Actually, it can be good for the candidate, and I don’t know if I would have predicted that a year ago.”

Despite the fact that Greene was stripped of all her House committee assignments more than a year ago, her popularity has bizarrely only seemed to grow. “If you can’t get Donald Trump, you are going to want to have MTG in your back pocket,” a political operative—who “professed zero personal admiration for Greene”—told The Daily Beast.

At the moment, more than a half-dozen GOP candidates have secured that all-important MTG stamp of approval, but the gazpacho-hating congresswoman is apparently being judicious in who she endorses, even though judiciousness is generally not a trait she is known for. According to longtime Republican strategist Doug Heye, it’s pretty easy to draw a straight line between Donald Trump’s presidency and MTG’s newfound popularity.

“It’s not that everyone is trying to get her endorsement,” Heye said. “But… if you’re running on ‘Let’s own the libs,’ and ‘Let’s be culture warriors,’ that’s where you go. One of the things we’ve seen over the past decade-plus now, but that Donald Trump really drove home, is that politics is performance art.”

Clogged toilets and Marjorie Taylor Greene: Kingmaker—just two of the many things we can blame on Trump.

(Via The Daily Beast)

Bringing back characters from the ’90s is quickly becoming a Super Bowl commercial trend, but props to Jim Carrey for going for an unexpected pull from his deep bench of films. In a new ad for Verizon, Carrey reprises his The Cable Guy role to promote the company’s 5G internet service. No longer is Carrey’s character dealing with coaxial cables and mounting satellite dishes. He’s joined the modern world of streaming, but that hasn’t stopped him from still being creepy in the process.

After Verizon shared a brief 10-second teaser, Carrey shared a longer clip on Twitter to promote the upcoming Super Bowl spot:

Via Entertainment Weekly:

“Carrey was pretty psyched to do this and felt like this was the right time — you can’t get a better moment than the Super Bowl to do something like this,” McKechnie said. “Hopefully, when the viewers see it, it will feel like a great story both from a cultural standpoint and, in terms of 25 years later, what The Cable Guy ultimately represents.”

Of course, Carrey isn’t the only comedian dusting off an old act. Mike Myers is back for another Super Bowl ad, but this time around, he’s forgoing Wayne’s World and going straight for the world of Austin Powers. Myers plays Dr. Evil in a new commercial for General Motors electric cars, and he’s brought his villainous posse including his son Scott (Seth Green) who’s brought a new addition to the family.

Super Bowl LVI kicks off February 13 on NBC.

(Via Entertainment Weekly)

Is it fair to say 2022 is already a better music year than 2021? After all, 2021 might have been a year without an all-time classic album. But so far, The Weeknd has dropped an Album Of The Year contender with Dawn FM and now, Big Thief has delivered the masterpiece of an album, Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You. This week on Indiecast, Steven Hyden and Ian Cohen talk new LPs by Big Thief and Black Country, New Road; rank Spoon’s discography; and discuss some indie music discourse (which includes Steve Albini defending… Juggalos?).

With the biggest sports event of the year coming up this Sunday, Hyden and Cohen touch on this year’s Super Bowl. Though the stacked halftime performance with Dr. Dre, Eminem, Snoop Dogg, Kendrick Lamar, and Mary J. Blige is sure to be a showstopper, the NFL also signed The Chainsmokers onto a very weird, virtual TikTok tailgate event. This begs the question: “Does anyone lean into doing the most unlikeable thing more than The Chainsmokers?”

The NFL’s bizarre tailgate aside, Indiecast wouldn’t be the same without Cohen and Hyden suggesting some great reads. In this week’s recommendation corner, Cohen spotlights the books Endless Endless: A Lo-Fi History of the Elephant 6 Mystery and Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla.

New episodes of Indiecast drop every Friday. Listen to Episode 76 on Spotify below, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts here. You can submit questions for Steve and Ian at [email protected], and make sure to follow us on Instagram and Twitter for all the latest news. We also recently launched a visualizer for our favorite Indiecast moments. Check those out here.

Adele is fresh off a big evening at the BRITs, where she performed and picked up a handful of awards. She’s still in London and she made her presence known last night when she popped by a nightclub and took a moment to indulge in some pole dancing.

The New York Post notes that after taping an appearance on The Graham Norton Show, Adele headed to the Heaven nightclub, an iconic venue in London’s LGBTQ+ scene. The establishment has long been home to the famous G-A-Y night, and last night, G-A-Y hosted an event dubbed “Porn Idol,” which featured a stripping contest.

An attendee told Daily Star Online, “Adele was absolutely loving the event. She was having a great time with friends and loved watching the show. After the contest was over, she stormed the stage and the crowd went wild. No one was expecting a music icon to be there.”

Indeed, Adele gave the audience plenty of reason to go wild, as the fun she was having was infectious. Video from the event shows Adele raising her leg on a stripper pole on stage before squatting in front of it with her back towards the audience and “dropping it low,” as the move is often described. Naturally, the moment got big cheers from the crowd.

Also on hand was Drag Race UK star Cheryl Hole, who shared photos of her and Adele and wrote on Instagram, “Confirmed: @Adele was devastated I was eliminated on Drag Race too. Love you divalina.”

Check out some more clips and photos from the event below.

One of the more interesting storylines heading into Oscar nominations morning was whether Spider-Man: No Way Home would be up for Best Picture. It was a populist favorite — and the fourth highest-grossing movie ever — with a sparkling 93 percent “Fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes; that’s higher than all but three of the films that were actually nominated (Drive My Car, The Power of the Dog, and CODA; Don’t Look Up is the lowest with a 56 percent rating). But co-presenters Tracee Ellis Ross and Leslie Jordan only said “Spider-Man” once on Tuesday, for Best Visual Effects.

Kevin Smith, who knows a thing or two about spiders, thinks this was a mistake.

“I would just like to congratulate the good folks who made Spider-Man: No Way Home for the very deserved Best Picture nomination that I’m sure it got, I didn’t read the nods. [Co-host Marc Bernardin], tell me that I’m right,” the director said on the FatMan Beyond podcast. When informed that he was wrong, Smith continued, “What the f*ck? They got ten slots, they can’t give one to the biggest f*cking movie of like the last three years? Man, and they’re like, ‘Why won’t anyone watch this show?’ Like f*cking make a populist choice, f*ck, man. You got how many slots? Throw in Spider-Man for God’s sakes.”

After joking that No Way Home deserves to be the second Marvel movie up for Best Picture (after Black Panther) because Peter Parker is “always getting crapped on and sh*t,” Smith’s livestream cut out. When he returned, he joked, “Kids, the conspiracy is real. I spoke about Spider-Man not being nominated by The Academy and we got tossed off of YouTube. Tie those two things together, the truth lies somewhere out there.”

This is exactly how I feel, but about Venom: Let There Be Carnage.

You can listen to the podcast below.

(Via Comic Book)

When Blacklight, Liam Neeson’s latest only-in-theaters shoot-em-up, opened with a thinly-veiled AOC railing against corruption and corporate greed at a raucous rally, I was concerned. The Venn Diagram of people who want to watch Liam Neeson kick ass and people who want to see an old white man maim brown people isn’t quite a circle, but there’s certainly some overlap. You never know when a beloved action hero is going to go full reactionary, like Stallone in Rambo: Last Blood. Would Liam Neeson be tasked with killing the fictional AOC before a cabal of corrupt socialists could institute Sharia law in the US?

Then again, was it actually concern I was feeling, or intrigue? “Having good politics” is not generally something we associate with great action-revenge movies. Most of the great action movies of the 80s and 90s are jingoistic nightmares with the id of a 12-year-old boy. In fact, I would argue that what we want from a Liam Neeson revenge movie (insofar as “we” want anything from one at all, assuming a Liam Neeson revenge movie is anything more than just a complicated tax sheltering scheme for a foreign financier) is tastelessness, specifically. Taken was the movie that kickstarted this whole phenomenon, and if anything made that memorable, aside from the great trailer line, it was its sheer brutality. Like Liam Neeson showing up to a nice dinner and shooting an innocent lady in the arm:

In Blacklight, co-written and directed by Mark Williams, Liam Neeson doesn’t end up having to kill AOC. In fact, he plays Travis Block, an off-the-books FBI fixer whose job is helping deep-cover agents get their heads straight before they can hurt anyone or reveal covert ops. Block has to track down agent Dusty Crane (Taylor John Smith) and in the process uncovers a secret deep state plot against the fictional AOC, Sofia Flores (Mel Jarnson). The big baddy turns out to be the FBI director, played by Aidan Quinn, who at one point growls, “This country is ruled by gotcha moments on Twitter!” and “Hoover had Cointelpro, I have Operation U.”

It doesn’t quite acknowledge the FBI sorta-maybe-probably getting Martin Luther King killed or anything too controversial, but in a very loose sense and graded on a Liam Neeson revenge movie curve, Blacklight‘s politics are reasonably good. In and of itself that doesn’t automatically make for either a good movie or a bad one, but Blacklight is sub-mediocre in execution. It largely lacks the kind of tasteless brutality that would make it interesting.

There is precisely one moment, when Neeson’s character, sitting in the driver’s seat of an SUV, interrogates Quinn’s character in the back, who gives Neeson an answer Neeson doesn’t like, so Neeson slams on the brakes and smashes Quinn’s face into a headrest, that has enough spontaneous physicality to transcend the predictable formula. It’s the only moment, in a film that otherwise consists of barely comprehensible gunfights between actors who may or may not have been in the same room during filming. A lot of thought seems to have gone into how to make a tasteful enough plot for a Neeson revenge picture, which reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of why people watch these movies in the first place. Blacklight is like a nu-metal song preaching quiet introspection.

It seems to me that most of the post-Taken Neeson filmmakers don’t quite understand what they’re making. Which at its heart is a kind of guns-and-knife fight slapstick, with Neeson as the Moe and the armies of faceless terrorists, human traffickers, drug dealers, and child rapists as his Larries and Curlies. Why do they keep kidnapping his wife and daughter?? Probably for the same reason people keep hiring the Stooges to move pianos and cater debutante balls. Blacklight’s filmmakers seem to have spent a lot time trying to figure out why Neeson would have to bonk some heads, and not nearly enough time storyboarding and staging elaborate, gloriously executed head bonks.

Less talking, more bonking, please.

‘Blacklight’ opens only in theaters February 11th. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.

Donald Trump had a terrible habit of clogging up the White House toilets.

Jimmy Kimmel knows “that sounds like just a crude joke,” but it’s just the latest bizarre bit of behind-the-scenes intel being shared about Trump’s presidency. And Kimmel couldn’t wait to talk about it on Thursday night:

“You know how Trump had a habit of tearing up the… official White House documents? He ripped them into little pieces? Well, the papyrus has thickened… According to a book written by the highly esteemed Maggie Haberman of The New York Times, the White House engineer—who’s kind of the plumber, I guess—would frequently be called in to unplug the president’s toilet because he had a habit of flushing papers down it. For real.”

It didn’t take long for Trump—who Kimmel has now dubbed “Mar-a-Cloggo”—to issue a statement denying the claims, in which said that “another fake story, that I flushed papers and documents down a White House toilet, is categorically untrue and simply made up by a reporter in order to get publicity for a mostly fictitious book.”

Kimmel pointed out that the former president sat down with Haberman on more than one occasion, in person in Florida, to be interviewed for this “mostly fictitious book.” While Haberman has been questioned as to whether she’s sure that the plugged-up commode in question was indeed one being used by the 45th president, Kimmel is simultaneously amused and astounded that this is a conversation we’re even having at all.

“I want you to think about the fact that Donald Trump actually had to come out and, in writing, deny he clogged up the toilet at the White House,” Kimmel marveled. “This is a conversation you have with your 3-year-old!”

You can watch the full clip above.