Month: March 2022

It seems like there’s an annual conversation regarding the NFL’s overtime rules and whether or not they should change. This year, the conversation came after the high-scoring AFC playoff game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Buffalo Bills in which Buffalo’s offense did not get to touch the ball in overtime because Kansas City scored a touchdown on its first possession.

The immediate aftermath of the game featured a huge debate about whether or not this was fair, but no matter what, it does seem like there’s a window for the NFL to do something. And according to Kevin Seifert of ESPN, there is a chance — albeit not a great one — something happens in the coming weeks. Rich McKay, the chairman of the league’s competition committee, says there’s “a lot of momentum” to change the NFL’s overtime rules when the owners come together to meet next week, with a pair of options coming under the microscope.

At the moment, two proposals are under consideration. The Indianapolis Colts and Philadelphia Eagles have proposed making it mandatory for each team to have an overtime possession before moving to sudden death. The Tennessee Titans, meanwhile, proposed a tweak that would implement mandatory possession for each team unless the team that has the first possession scores a touchdown and converts a successful 2-point attempt.

The bad news for those who want the OT rules to change is that McKay has some reservations about one of these getting the green light, telling ESPN that “I think my history on this rule tells me that 24 votes is not easy to get. But I do think the statistics absolutely warrant an examination of whether overtime rules need to be further modified.”

BTS and Snoop Dogg have been linked to each other for quite some time… well, sort of. Back in 2014, when BTS was just beginning their world domination, the track “Hip Hop Phile” singled out Snoop as an inspiration. BTS’s RM starts reeling off the albums that made him “love” hip-hop and spits the lyric, “And of course the classic Illmatic and Doggystyle!” Now, in a full-circle moment eight years later, Snoop Dogg confirmed that he and the K-Pop supergroup are indeed set to collaborate on a track.

“The BTS experience you keep talking about. I’m going to let them tell you about it. It’s official like a referee with a whistle,” he told the A.V. Club on the red carpet for the premiere of his and Kelly Clarkson’s American Song Contest. “I make good music. They make good music. And we end up doing this. This is what it’s always about, bringing our worlds together.”

In January, Snoop said on a Clubhouse chat hosted by the Mogul Talk podcast that BTS had reached out to him about possibly collaborating, but he wasn’t all that familiar with them yet. He explained that his nephew illuminated him to the finer points of Jin, Suga, J-Hope, RM, Jimin, V, and Jungkook, and then likened them to the “Asian New Edition. ”

So there you have it, the D-O-Double-G and the Bangtan Boys will be together on a track soon enough. Stay tuned.

After wowing audiences with its wild second season, the HBO original series Euphoria has become such a huge hit that Maude Apatow, who plays Lexi on the show, has become a bigger name than her father, acclaimed comedy director Judd Apatow. At least with the show’s audience, anyway, and the elder Apatow is perfectly fine with it. In fact, he says that’s the plan.

While sitting down with The Last Laugh podcast, the Knocked Up director recalled his first experience with seeing Maude’s fame eclipse his own on social media. Via The Daily Beast:

“I went online and I looked at my Twitter feed and I saw that my name was trending and the first tweet was something like ‘Judd Apatow is Maude’s dad?!’” the legendary comedy director tells me in this preview from next week’s 150th episode of The Last Laugh podcast. “And then someone else was like, ‘Who the fuck is Judd Apatow?’ And then someone else was like, ‘He’s a director!’ And then that person said, ‘Well, I don’t know every nerdy indie director.’ And then someone else was like, ‘He’s not an indie director. He did Knocked Up!’”

Of course, like any proud parent, Apatow couldn’t be more thrilled of Maude’s work on Euphoria, which he self-deprecatingly jokes is directed better than anything he’s ever put out.

“You’re supposed to surpass your parents,” Apatow said. “You want to be the better version. So that’s already happened and I’m very excited for her.”

(Via The Daily Beast)

Dipping sauces are a quick and easy way to elevate the often one-note flavors of McDonald’s fries and McNuggets (that one note typically being salt) to a level one might call “almost complex.” Okay, maybe “almost complex” is still be too strong a phrase, but our point is that McDonald’s dipping sauces make their food significantly better — which begs the question, which of McDonald’s dips and condiments tastes the best?

This is probably an actual question you’ve asked yourself in the drive-through — considering McDonald’s offers one to two free dipping sauces with your meal but chargers for extra sauce, thus forcing you to pick a team. Are you all about the Tangy BBQ? Are you a Ranch person? Have you even bothered to try the full lineup?

With the weekend approaching, we decided to find out which sauce tastes the best by taste testing all of them on the two best McDonald’s foods to dip — French fries and McNuggets.

Currently, McDonald’s has the following dips and condiments:

• Ketchup
• Mustard
• Spicy Buffalo
• Sweet n’ Sour
• Hot Mustard
• Ranch
• Tangy BBQ

…And, beginning March 31st for a limited time and while supplies last…

• The legendary Szechuan Sauce.

Pro tip: If you order all of these sauces in one go, as I did, whoever is working will be sure to remind you that you’re paying for each of these sauces (helpful!). They will also treat you like a weirdo who is somehow trying to prank them (less helpful!). Anyway, let’s dip, starting with the worst of the sauces…

8. Tangy BBQ

Tasting Notes:

I’m sorry if you’re team Tangy BBQ but this is legitimately the worst, let me emphasize, the worst, barbecue sauce I’ve ever tasted in my life. It hardly even tastes like BBQ sauce, you would only classify it as such because of the color — which looks more like slightly dark ketchup than your typical BBQ. The sauce goes very heavy on the vinegar notes with a sweet tomato-forward flavor.

There are no traces of smoke here, it’s sugary sweet and bright with a tangy almost sour after taste. Truly the weirdest BBQ sauce ever.

Fries Or Nuggets?

Neither, this sauce tastes equally bad on the nuggets and fries. Once the saltiness of the chicken and fries meets this overly tangy and sweet sauce, the sour flavors come to the forefront causing a wince-inducing experience.

7. Mustard Packet

Tasting Notes:

Mustard is a wonderful condiment, it’s packed with all sorts of complex, earthy flavors, McDonald’s mustard though doesn’t quite… cut the mustard. Sorry, but really, this mustard doesn’t have the complexity of a good blend — it’s a little bit blunt and bitter, with a vinegar dominant flavor. It pairs nicely with beef but as a dip for fries or nuggets, it’s useless.

Fries Or Nuggets?

Fries. Mustard on nuggets just doesn’t really work, the bitter flavors of yellow mustard don’t do anything to elevate the salty flavor and crispy texture of the McNugget. On fries, they’re enjoyable enough, but they’re nobody’s first choice. You’re much better off blending the ketchup and mustard together if you go the fry route.

6. Ranch

Like McDonald’s Tangy BBQ, the flavor of McDonald’s Ranch comes across as tasting cheap, more an approximation of ranch dressing than actual ranch dressing. It’s very sour-forward, with a sort of powdered sour cream and onion flavor with a loose milky consistency. It’s sour in flavor and smell, very off-putting.

Fries Or Nuggets?

You’re going to want to dip fries in Ranch, not the nuggets. The salty slightly sweet flavor of McDonald’s crispy french fries pairs better with the sour cream and onion flavor of this ranch dressing, on chicken it takes on an almost stomach-turning flavor.

5. Ketchup

Tasting Notes:

As far as I can tell, McDonald’s has its own proprietary ketchup — that’s pretty dope, but it tastes almost exactly like Heinz. I know this because I also did a ketchup ranking not too far back, so I’m pretty zeroed in on the nuances of the different brands, and this has that same bright and slightly sweet flavor that Heinz has. It’s kind of hard to hate on ketchup, so the biggest insult we can give to the condiment is saying it’s mid-tier, which it is.

Nothing wrong with that though!

Fries Or Nuggets?

Ketchup tastes equally great on both! I like it a bit more for fries, I find the sweet bright tomato flavors pair nicely with the saltiness of McDonald’s fries, whereas on the chicken all it achieves is adding some moistness to the crispy mouthfeel.

4. Hot Mustard

Tasting Notes:

Take “hot” with a grain of salt here because McDonald’s Hot Mustard sauce isn’t hot at all. There is a spice to it, but it’s spicy in the way garlic is spicy, not chili peppers. The flavor here is a bit blunt, and heavily vinegar-forward before settling into an intense sweet garlic flavor. It’s similar to McDonald’s mustard packets but with more interesting flavors that hit your taste buds in small waves.

I’ll never understand why McDonald’s ditched its delicious Honey Mustard sauce, which was both sweeter and spicier than this sauce.

Fries Or Nuggets?

It pairs much better with the nuggets than the fries. The salt of the fries muddies the sweet flavors of this sauce. On the nuggets, the white pepper and garlic flavor of the McNugget batter becomes emphasized by the slightly earthy flavor of this sauce.

3. Sweet N’ Sour

Tasting Notes:

McDonald’s Sweet N’ Sour sauce attempts to capture the flavor of sweet ‘n sour dishes of takeout Chinese restaurants, and it almost gets there. As you may have noticed by now, a lot of McDonald’s sauces rely on sugar to deliver most of their flavor, and this sauce is no different. The word “sour” may be in the name, but make no mistake, there is nothing sour about this sauce — it’s corn syrup sweet. That said, it also has an interesting fruity component to it which adds a lot of depth. It tastes like apricot and plum with a brown sugar after taste that makes it incredibly addictive to dip into.

Fries Or Nuggets?

Nuggets are the play with this sauce. The way the sweet fruit and brown sugar flavors pair with the crispy light batter of the McNuggets tastes like a fast food version of sweet and sour chicken.

2. Spicy Buffalo

Tasting Notes:

McDonald’s has sadly discontinued its Mighty Hot Sauce so for fans of spicy sauces, the Spicy Buffalo is all we have. The good news is that unlike McDonald’s Ranch and BBQ sauce, this actually tastes like it’s supposed to taste. The Spicy Buffalo has a cayenne pepper forward flavor with garlic and onion notes that settle into a pronounced lingering sizzle on the palate. It’s a great sauce, and if it weren’t for the legendary Szechuan, it would’ve taken the number one spot easily.

Fries Or Nuggets

C’mon, this is buffalo sauce we’re talking about here, you have to eat this on the McNuggets. When the cayenne dominant notes mix with the crispy salty flavor of the McNugget batter, you’ve got one of the best boneless wings in fast food. Grab a nugget, dip it in sauce, and then sandwich it between a small stack of fries. You’ll get your hands dirty, but you’ll have a crispy, salty, spicy treat that comes across better than any McDonald’s chicken sandwich so far.

1. Szechuan Sauce

Tasting Notes:

We have to give the number one spot to McDonald’s Szechuan Sauce. Maybe it’s just the novelty of having something new, but this sauce is just tasting the best to me right now. The sauce will be available for a limited time while supplies last (something McDonald’s anticipates will be “a few days”) beginning March 31st but McDonald’s sent me over a small box of five that I will be now guarding with my life.

Ever since Szechuan Sauce (which was released to coincide with Disney’s Mulan in 1998) was mentioned in an episode of Rick and Morty, it’s gone on to enjoy legendary status amongst McDonald’s fans. And here’s the truth: It delivers!

Like all of McDonald’s sauces, the Szechuan is dominated by sweet notes. It’s not in the least bit spicy or hot, flavors most commonly associated with sauces from the Sichuan province of China. Instead, the sauce leans more on brown sugar ginger flavors, almost Teriyaki-like with a smokey after taste. The island of Japan is about 2000 miles away from the province of Sichuan, but… good try McDonald’s!

Aside from not really delivering on the expected heat, this sauce is pretty damn tasty with a sweet soy sauce flavor (not sure there is actual soy sauce in it though) that balances salty and sweet notes perfectly with a sweet smokey finish.

I can’t figure out why McDonald’s makes delicious sauces like the Szechuan, Mighty Hot, and Honey Mustard limited when they are leagues better than the stock sauces, but here we are, living in an age of artificial scarcity for the sake of hype. Rarely is that hype justified, and if you approach this sauce with a bunch of hype and anticipation, we’re telling you straight up that you’re going to be disappointed.

It’s good, but it’s not that good. At the end of the day it’s a just sugar-loaded sauce, which McDonald’s has many of.

Fries Or Nuggets?

It’s equally great on fries and nuggets and for that reason, we’re putting it just above the Spicy Buffalo. The sweet brown sugar and slightly smokey sauce pairs perfectly with the crispy mouthfeel of the chicken, and its subtle vinegary notes play nicely with the salty fries, offering some of that smokiness that the BBQ sauce is sorely missing.

Get it while you can, but if you miss it, just make your own: sugar, a splash of vinegar, corn starch, a splash of apple cider vinegar, ginger, garlic, and sesame seed oil. Half the ingredients, double the flavor.

In celebration of her infectiously danceable new single with Dua Lipa, “Sweetest Pie” Megan Thee Stallion has linked up with Goldbelly for a special pie collaboration that attempts to capture the spirit of the song. Megan’s H-Town Hottie Pie is inspired by the rapper’s hometown of Houston and goes big on the sweets — featuring a pecan pie loaded up with a combination of shredded coconut, pretzels, butterscotch chips, and gooey brown sugar with a golden glaze over the top.

According to the branding, it promises to taste like your “favorite bakery took a trip down the candy aisle” and it’s very much that. Literally, we’re talking about the “sweetest pie” your money can buy.

Sidenote: We’re eternally thankful Megan take the line “Wanna put his Nutty Buddy in my Fudge Round” too literally with this dessert. Sexual innuendo completely aside, Nutty Buddys and Fudge Rounds are some pretty bottom-tier snacks, so if this was a giant Nutty Fudge Round pie we would’ve had to pass. I’m sorry to the Little Debbie fans out there, you all have bad taste.

Anyway, the H-Town Hottie Pie is currently available for a limited time on Goldbelly for a price of $59. Before you drop that kind of cash on a gold spray-painted pecan pie, you’re probably going to want to know if it’s any good — so let’s eat!

Megan’s H-Town Hottie Pie

Price: $59

Experience & Tasting Notes:

Before we dive into the pie we have to talk about the packaging and presentation, because this is a Gold Belly product, after all. The pie ships frozen in a small box with bubble wrap and is stable at room temperature for a full week, or a full month if you re-freeze it. By the time I received and opened up the pie, it was fully thawed and ready to eat.

That’s great if you live in an apartment with an indoor mailing room like I do, but if you’re getting this delivered to your doorstep and live in a warmer climate, I could see heat damaging the consistency of your pie, which is made of mostly gooey sugar, not exactly the biggest resistor to melt-age.

The pie itself is housed in a special promotional box featuring Megan holding a sprinkled donut with her hair made-up to look like whipped cream. The photo matches some of Megan’s recent promotional material, namely her Apple Music profile photo, but I think it’s an odd choice to decorate this pecan pie with so much whipped cream donut imagery when none of that has to do with the pie.

But hey, we’re not here to talk about the conceptual consistency, we’re here to talk about the pie.

The pie itself looks like — and I say this with all due respect to both Ms. Stallion and Goldbelly — what I imagine C-3P0’s shit would look like if he was a robot capable of using the bathroom. Spray-painted food is a trend that no one asked for and people keep giving us. Stop. I think I speak for everyone when I say that eating spray-painted food, no matter how much you say ‘its edible!’ will always feel wrong.

When it comes to cutting into this pie we’re going to suggest you use a hammer and chisel because it’s incredibly hard to get a knife through this thing. So unless you’re totally fine with eating an ugly, uneven slice, don’t approach this pie as you would any other pie.

The brown sugar/corn syrup substance that sticks all this candied snack food together does a good job of binding the ingredients together, but it makes it hard to get through easily. It’s messy, is the point — most pecan pies are.

Once I finally bit into the pie though, all my criticisms melted away into a pool of sweet ecstasy. This pie is tooth-achingly sweet, brown sugar dominates the flavor with sweet and moist shredded coconut flavor on the aftertaste, mingling with subtly salty notes. While it relies on salted pretzels to act as a counterbalance to the sweetness, it leans much more comfortably on the sweet side of the flavor spectrum.

It’s a pleasure to eat bite after bite, but if you really want to kick it up a notch you’ll throw it in the microwave. A few seconds of heat took the already pleasant experience of eating this pie to the next level. Instead of receiving the flavors in sweet and salty waves, they melded together into a more harmonious whole. The warmed-up pie had a great texture and mouthfeel, courtesy of the combination of sugar, nuts, and shredded coconut, and an even better flavor that tasted like pecan pie reimagined by munchie-seeking stoners.

I still wish it wasn’t spray-painted fucking gold though.

The Bottom Line:

Sweet, salty, nutty, and then sweet again. Once warmed up and topped with your favorite ice cream, you’re in for one of the sweetest pies you’re bound to eat all year. And a pretty damn delicious one.

If you’ve ever dreamed of donning a slick suit and traveling around the world while bringing down the bad guys, perhaps a James Bond-themed competition is for you. Luckily, there is one in the works at Amazon!

007’s Road To A Million will feature contestants traveling the world and competing at tasks in various James Bond locations, all for the goal of winning up to 1 million pounds — which comes to about 1.3 million US dollars. There will be physical challenges as well as trivia questions that the teams of two will have to answer correctly in order to advance.

The show has been in the works for a while since a globe-trotting competition series sounds like it will need a lot of planning. Production is slated to begin this year, so there is still time for civilians to train and practice their Bond-style moves and rehearse the correct way to order a vodka martini. So, more or less, the show sounds like The Amazing Race with fancier cars.

No premiere date has been announced yet, but the show will consist of eight parts and be available to stream on Amazon Prime. The show will be produced by 72 Films in collaboration with Bond producers Michael G Wilson, Barbara Broccoli, and MGM Television.

Now that Daniel Craig is done with his spy days, maybe whoever wins this competition will be the next Bond? And maybe it will be a comedy!

During the never-ending break between seasons two and three of Atlanta (which is finally back, and good as ever), Donald Glover signed an eight-figure development deal with Amazon. “The pact is believed to include a content channel of sorts that will spotlight Glover’s work and other curated content on Amazon’s Prime Video hub,” the Hollywood Reporter wrote. Nothing has made it to streaming yet, but announced projects included a Mr. and Mrs. Smith series with Glover and Phoebe Waller-Bridge (at least until she dropped out) in the lead roles, and another series, potentially called Hive, about a “Beyoncé-like figure.” One of the show’s other writers: Malia Obama.

“She’s just like, an amazingly talented person,” Glover told Vanity Fair about collaborating with the eldest daughter of former-president Barack and first lady Michelle Obama. She previously interned on HBO’s Girls and worked as a production assistant on the Halle Berry-starring CBS series Extant. Glover added, “She’s really focused, and she’s working really hard. I feel like she’s just somebody who’s gonna have really good things coming soon. Her writing style is great.”

When asked how he might shoot down one of Obama’s pitches — knowing that she could tell her parents — [Donald’s brother and Atlanta writer] Stephen joked, “Well, you know, we just hurt her feelings. We can’t be easy on her just because she’s the [former] president’s daughter.” He added, “Nah, she’s very down to earth, and cool. So, it’s not a problem at all. She has a lot of good ideas. She’s great. She’s just a regular person like everybody else.”

It must be tough being the younger sister (tfw you’re the younger sister and also your dad was the freaking president), but Sasha Obama will get the last laugh when she starts writing for Succession.

(Via Vanity Fair)

When it comes to senatorial self-owns, Ted Cruz is the undisputed king, and his skills have been on full display during the Supreme Court confirmation hearing for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. Earlier in the week, Cruz made headlines after he asked Jackson if she thinks “babies are racist” as he joined several Republican senators in using the hearing as a platform to rail against critical race theory. While holding copies of Dr. Ibram X. Kendi’s Antiracist Baby and Stamped (For Kids), Cruz demanded that Jackson denounce the books even though they had absolutely nothing to do with her ability to serve as a Supreme Court justice.

“There are portions of this book that I find really quite remarkable. One portion of the book says babies are taught to be racist or anti-racist,” Cruz said. “Do you agree with this book that is being taught with kids that babies are racist?”

As you can see, the line of questioning was completely nonsensical. Not only did it blow up in Cruz’s face as he was ruthlessly roasted on social media and by late-night comedians, but both books have now become bestsellers thanks to Cruz putting a spotlight on them. Via Variety:

“Antiracist Baby” and “Stamped (For Kids),” both of which came out two years ago, shot to Amazon’s bestsellers list the day after Cruz’s comments. Both were No. 1 New York Times bestsellers upon their initial releases in 2020.

Cruz also unwittingly helped boost sales for the other titles that he mentioned. Alex Vitale’s 2017 book “The End of Policing,” which argues for the eventual abolition of the police, became a No. 1 bestseller in Amazon’s Government and Social Policy category.

Like we said, nobody dunks on themselves like Ted Cruz. He’s the Michael Jordan of self-owns.

(Via Variety)

To describe the experience of watching Everything Everywhere All At Once as “sensory overload,” (as Florida Project director Sean Baker put it recently) is a bit of an understatement. There are times it feels like trying to take a sip of content and getting blasted with the totality of the last 40-years of pop culture through a firehose. When the publicist asked me what I thought after the screening, I said “I feel like I just got skull-f*cked. But in a good way?” (The directors apparently appreciated this description).

Everything Everywhere All At Once concerns “the metaverse” — the infinite number of parallel dimensions created by every life decision and the random collisions of sub-atomic somethingorothers. Where other directors may have toyed with concepts like time travel, separate realities running in parallel, and different versions of characters living in separate universes, usually these concepts show up as sparsely-explained excuses for why, say, three different Spider-men have to appear in the same scene. It’s a commercial imposition masquerading as an artistic choice, and Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (the directors known collectively as “Daniels”) don’t believe in those.

To them, the way most movies toy with the nature of reality seemed infuriatingly utilitarian. “My pet peeve is time travel when you introduce it and just do a tiny bit like it’s no big deal,” Scheinert told Indiewire this week. “It would be such a big deal! Like if logic broke down and time didn’t move forward and a million people could go back in time a million number of times, there’d be absolute chaos.”

In many ways, Everything Everywhere All At Once is the Daniels creating the chaos they’d hoped to see in the world, a movie in which commercial impositions cannot exist without artistic consequences. The plot concerns Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh), the owner of a failing laundromat, who has a lesbian daughter who resents her (Stephanie Hsu), a husband who’s sick of being ignored (Ke Huy Quan), and an ailing father with a series of crushing expectations (James Hong). Then one day, a version of her husband who isn’t really her husband shows up to explain that there’s a disturbance in the fabric of space-time or some such, and that Evelyn might actually be the key to everything.

The next 40 minutes or so are a manic pastiche of Evelyn meeting other Evelyns from different dimensions in a race against different daughters from different dimensions with the help of different husbands and grandfathers. Her adversary generally takes the form of Dierdre, an IRS functionary played by Jamie Lee Curtis. The parallels to a thousand other things, from Cloud Atlas to The Matrix to Douglas Adams (AC Weisbecker’s 1986 book, Cosmic Banditos, arguably the funniest book ever written about quantum physics, also deserves mention here), are obvious, and the casting alone should give you some sense of the pop culture stunt the Daniels are trying to pull off.

Just as with mainstream cinema’s too easy takes on interdimensional travel, the Daniels strive to delve deeper into actors who have too often appeared in gimmicky ways. Yeoh, too often the martial arts movie sidekick; Hong, the all-purpose Asian heavy of the 80s and 90s (perhaps you remember him from Big Trouble In China?); and Quan, in another life the little kid who played Short Round in Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom and Data in The Goonies, now a 50-year-old man coming off a 20-year acting hiatus.

As a stunt, Everything Everywhere is interesting enough, at first, though its frantic manic shifting between different universes does get a little enervating. Through it all, it offers just enough moments of weirdly perfect meta-comedy to stay invested. Daniel Scheinert made unforgettable comedic magic with Nickelback and Puddle of Mudd in his 2019 masterpiece, The Death Of Dick Long, and Everything Everywhere similar squeezes comedy from a perfect musical: Nine Days’ 2000 hit, “Absolutely (Story Of A Girl),” which becomes a recurring musical motif in Everything Everywhere. It’s the perfect song, that you remember but can’t place, and don’t know where or why you heard it, the ultimate sonic uncanny valley.

If Everything Everywhere All At Once was just the Daniels pulling a stunt, even for all its technical brilliance it would go from cute to tiresome in a hurry. But just when you think you’ve been battered within an inch of your attention span by this… cosmic gumbo, which moves to the beat of jazz (oh yeah, Biff Wiff gets a cameo here, did I mention that?)… Everything Everywhere takes a necessary turn for the earnest. It goes from using the multiverse as a narrative plaything (going rightly overboard in the process, like Homer Simpson with the star wipe), to genuinely trying to reckon with the concept of infinite realities.

If existence really consists of an infinite number of parallel universes, who are you in all of it? Why are you? The point at which Everything Everywhere becomes more than just a movie stunt takes place in a dimension where life never happened and Evelyn and her daughter, Joy exist as a pair of rocks, conversing with subtitles about what it means to be, or not to be. It’s cutesy, certainly, but in a world where post-modern digression is the dominant style, being a little cringe is revolutionary.

So yeah, in a fractal kaleidoscope of clashing interdimensional worlds, of course the characters were ultimately going to discover that having each other is really the most important thing. Maybe that’s a corny answer, but it’s kind of the best we’ve got. If Turning Red used the fantastic to explore one first-generation Asian immigrant daughter’s fraught relationship with her mother, Everything Everywhere does much the same using the multiverse — it’s a bit like if Edgar Wright tried to direct a live-action Pixar movie high on ether.

What makes Everything Everywhere work is not that it’s zany, it’s that it actually finds a purpose for its zaniness, or least tries to. The Daniels are provocateurs, brilliant technical filmmakers. More importantly, they actually strive not to be full of shit. God bless them.

‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ opens in theaters March 25th. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. More reviews here.

Grimes revealed recently she and Elon Musk had a second child together, a daughter named Exa Dark Sideræl Musk. They used a surrogate this time around, unlike when Grimes gave birth to her and Musk’s first baby, X AE A-XII. Grimes has suggested that pregnancy didn’t go too well for her health-wise and now she says it was “incredibly traumatic.”

In a new interview with Atmos, Grimes said:

“So I recently had a baby and it was incredibly traumatic for me. And the whole time, I was like, ‘I f*cking hate this and this is so f*cked up and there’s not enough information.’ Having a child is one of the few things in the modern era that is just inherently a pretty savage experience. It’s hardcore, you cannot escape the nature of it. It’s just happening. And it actually really re-centered me in the end. I was like, ‘You know what? I’m really glad I did that. I feel really reconnected with nature in an interesting way.’ And it also made me grateful for modernity. We’ve eradicated pain from most parts of existence at this point, and that’s really amazing. I feel like we don’t realize how lucky we are.”

Grimes touched on pregnancy challenges in a recent Vanity Fair interview, noting she couldn’t walk during the last month of her pregnancy, saying, “He was pressing on my nerves, so I kept collapsing. I took a few steps and collapsed. It was kind of scary, because you don’t want to fall a lot when you’re eight months pregnant. So I would just crawl to the bathroom and crawl back or whatever.” She also said of a moment she thought she was dying, “Like, I hemorrhaged. It was scary.”

Elsewhere in the Atmos interview, she discussed Musk (while avoiding using his name), saying that being involved with him has given her the opportunity to be close to history:

“I’m a huge student of history. I’m just obsessed. My dream in life would be to be able to observe or be around events that matter. Again, I don’t want to invoke the names of certain people because I can very easily get sucked into just being a satellite in the story of certain unnamed people. But whether I like it or not, I’ve had this unavoidable association with certain people, and recently I started being like, ‘Why am I thinking about this so negatively?’

At first it really hurt me because it undermined all the things I’d accomplished and turned me into arm candy. And then I started being like, ‘I have a front row seat to the most historic thing that has ever occurred. The Earth was formed, blue and green algae turned into tiny little creatures, and then creatures went onto the land, and then mammals were formed, and then humans were formed, and then civilization happened — colonization of the stars is on the level of the top five craziest things that have happened in our whole universe. And I’m sitting here watching it with the best seat in the house. Why am I denying this out of some perverted sense of feminism?’ So it’s a weird time because everyone keeps telling me, if you refer to it, you’re losing yourself.”

Read the full interview here.