Month: April 2022

Academy Award-nominated filmmakers are just like us! Director Richard Linklater is, apparently, owed money for his work on Dazed and Confused, his 1993 feature film about high schoolers in the 70s. The film received high critical acclaim, introduced the world to one Matthew McConaughey, and became one of the biggest cult classics in film history. And yet, writer/director Linklater has never been paid for Dazed and Confused, according to Linklater.

Linklater shared this tiny but significant detail in an interview with The Daily Beast published Tuesday. When asked about the film’s upcoming 30th anniversary and its legacy, Linklater said, “Yeah, and it’s like… where’s my money? How come a movie that cost less than $7 million has $12 million in interest against it?” When The Daily Beast, in understandable shock, followed up by asking if he made any money off of the movie, Linklater said, “F*ck no!”

Linklater didn’t really have an explanation for why he allegedly hasn’t received any payment for Dazed and Confused. “I don’t know. Ask Universal! Hollywood accounting,” he said. “Everybody has that first story of getting screwed with their first project. That film was an indie success. It made more than it cost theatrically, and over the years it’s been everywhere,” he added.

Despite apparently not receiving any payment for Dazed and Confused, Linklater is, like many creatives who do unpaid work, grateful for the experience.

“That’s such a cliché to bitch about,” he said. “But I did go through the Hollywood experience. Here I complain but they did green-light the film, and they wouldn’t green-light the film today. Cast of unknowns? Period film when not much happens, riding around? One film out of Sundance? I don’t think there’s a pitch for that movie today, so I sit here very, very blessed that I came along at a time when studios were going, hey, we’ll make this and this and then throw some chump change over to these guys. I’m still grateful I got the film made, and got it made the way I wanted it to.”

A New York City jury has found Nathaniel Glover — better known as Kidd Creole of seminal hip-hop group The Furious Five — guilty of manslaughter for a 2017 stabbing incident, reports Billboard. Glover was accused of stabbing a homeless man, John Jolly, in the chest with a steak knife in 2017 after Jolly asked him “What’s up?” Glover, who was walking to his maintenance job, believed that the man was hitting on him and attacking him.

Glover’s lawyer Scottie Celestin tried to frame the attack as self-defense, asking, “Ladies and gentlemen, this is New York City. It’s 12 o’clock at night. Who’s saying ‘What’s up?’ to you with good intentions? His fear for his life was reasonable.” Celestin also attempted to blame Jolly’s death on sedatives that he was given during treatment at the hospital rather than his stab wounds.

Unfortunately, the jury did not believe that the former rapper was in danger. While the final verdict of manslaughter is a step down from the original charge of murder, Kidd Creole can be sentenced to up to 25 years in prison as well as fined. His sentencing was set for May 4.

As a member of Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five, Kidd Creole was inducted into Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007 along with the rest of the group. They were the first rap act to be inducted. Their 1982 hit “The Message” is considered one of hip-hop’s first-ever “conscious rap” songs and is a classic that has been referenced repeatedly throughout the years. Co-writer Edward Fletcher, aka Duke Bootee, died last year at the age of 69.

In a telling, and somewhat strange, interview with himself, Donald Glover has revealed a lot about his relatively private life over the last few years. He talks about tucking in his kids, Euphoria, and his upcoming projects, including his highly-anticipated Mr. And Mrs. Smith series in the works for Amazon Prime. You know, the mediocre movie that got overshadowed by the whole Brad/Angelina/Jennifer drama.

The series was originally supposed to star Glover and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, though the Fleabag actress left the project over “creative differences.” Now, Pen15’s Maya Erskine will be the “Mrs.” half of the show. Glover cryptically discussed it in his interview…with himself:

Speaking of men and women, you’re working on Mr. and Mrs. Smith right now. Is that why you shaved your head?
No. I didn’t have to be Earn anymore.
What happened with Phoebe Waller-Bridge? She was supposed to be on Smith, right?
Yeah. But classic creative differences.
Are you and Phoebe still friends?
What does it mean to be a friend? I still like her. I assume she still likes me.
Who’s Mrs. Smith now?
Maya Erskine.
From Pen15? I love her.
Yeah. She’s dope. It’s exciting. I really love the show. I’m writing the finale now.

The Mr. And Mrs. Smith television show was first announced last February. The series, based on your mom’s favorite 2005 romance-action film, was ordered by Amazon Prime. Erskine is known for co-creating the hit Hulu series Pen15 where she played a teenage version of herself. The series just ended after a two-season run. Erskine also has an upcoming role in Disney+’s Obi-Wan series.

Glover has been promoting the third season of Atlanta which just returned after four years off-air. Other notable highlights of his interview include him calling himself Willy Wonka, and also relating his own life to I, Tonya. There is currently no update on when the Mr. And Mrs. Smith series will air, though one thing’s for certain, it will be interesting!

Donald Glover’s show Atlanta gets compared to Lil Dicky’s show Dave a lot. Presumably, it’s because they were both created by rappers who also star in them and because they share a network, FX. Even this very website sorta compared them in a feature about how they depict the weird corners of the rap game in a way that hasn’t been seen before in mainstream media. Glover has said in the past that he doesn’t much like those comparisons, but that didn’t stop him from making one himself in a new interview.

Intriguingly enough, he had all the leeway in the world not to answer the question — or even ask it — since the conversation took place in Interview magazine with Donald interviewing himself. But maybe it’s just been on his mind. He winds up explaining what his (ahem) beef is with Dicky’s show, and how he believes it could be a more honest, “organic” depiction of Dicky’s experience in the rap game — basically, by making it more like Atlanta.

In some recent tweets of yours you reference Dave.

Yeah.

Do you dislike that show?

No! I like that show. But it does bother me when Atlanta’s compared to it.

Why?

You have to think of it like food.

You mean it’s a different flavor.

No. Although I do feel like the flavor is artificial in some sense. The organic show should be about a white rapper who’s more successful than his Black peers from the jump. Because he’s more accessible. But what he actually wants is to be part of the culture, but his success keeps him from that and a lot of his Black peers and friends resent him for it but also feel like they have to fuck with him because it’s good for them. That’s the internal struggle I see. Anyway.

That’s the Donald version of Dave.

Yeah. It’s sadder. What are you gonna do?

Donald goes on to clarify that he doesn’t technically think that Dave should be his version of the show, aptly comparing the two shows to different foods. He also admits that he “can be a snob” but disagrees with assessments that he’s “pretentious.” “Anthony Bourdain wasn’t pretentious,” he says. “But he definitely knew the difference between a dry-aged wagyu and a smash burger. Neither is better or worse than the other. They’re just different experiences. And I wouldn’t want to have either every day.”

There’s an odd trend happening in Elden Ring right now: Players are hiding from each other. This is unusual, because the players that are hiding are usually inviting other players into their game. Historically, souls games like Dark Souls have had a feature where another player could “invade” someone else’s game if they were playing online, so they could go and kill them to get some extra experience points. Of course, if the player fends you off, then they get experience of their own.

Elden Ring, however, is one of the first souls games where you have to opt into allowing other players to invade your game. So if someone is invading you, then that means you’ve chosen to have that kind of game experience. What players are finding is that when they invade other players, they can’t find them anywhere on the map. They search everywhere until they get bored and eventually leave, which nets the player being invaded their own experience points.

Again, this is odd for the invading players, because apparently, the ones invading chose to allow this, so what gives? It turns out that many of these players are using exploits to reach areas that are extremely difficult — if not impossible — for an invader to reach. Then, they call in any invaders to try and get some free experience out of it. Whether you think it’s cowardly or cunning, it’s a trend that is starting to get a little out of hand across Elden Ring.

Players are fighting back in some really creative ways, as Kotaku highlighted in its writeup about these “rune farmers.” A personal favorite of mine was a Reddit comment where someone said they’ve started waiting out the player they invaded.

Obviously, players being able to hide from one another like this isn’t how the developers of Elden Ring intended the feature to work. We assume that a patch will be on the way in the near future. What’s particularly weird about this is that most players who are able to access invasions are at a level high enough to where they aren’t in need of runes to level up their character. There are infinitely better ways to farm runes and ones that probably use up far less times, even if this one does have the benefit of not requiring the player to do anything besides wait around.

In the days leading up to the release of her debut album Trendsetter, rapper Coi Leray took some time to answer questions from fans on Twitter. During her Q&A session, the “Twinnem” rapper revealed she wants to break into the world of acting.

Specifically, she hopes to land a role on a hit HBO series in the near future. When Twitter user @CrealotBSB asked Leray “Would you ever get into acting?” she responded, “Yea I auditioned for Euphoria lol but i didn’t get the role !! But I wanna try again !!!”

Leray didn’t specify which role she auditioned for, however, if she were to book a role in the series’ third season, she would be another musician-turned-actor who landed their first major acting role on Euphoria, along with Dominic Fike.

Earlier in the session, Leray explained the meaning behind her album’s title.

“Trendsetter to me means being true to yourself!,” she said. “Having confidence already sets the trend !!! We alllllll Trendsetters if we put our mind to just being great !!!”

Also last night, Leray’s “Blick Blick” collaborator Nicki Minaj appeared on The Late Late Show‘s Carpool Karaoke segment. Minaj rapped the chorus, “Pop up on an opp and watch it blick blick” with host James Corden and hilariously explained what the word “opp” means.

Trendsetter is out 4/8 via Republic. Pre-save it here.

The last we heard from Jack White, he was in the midst of what appeared to be the artistic equivalent of a mid-life crisis. On 2018’s Boarding House Reach, the meticulously pursued primitivism that was his sonic trademark was set aside. Now, he was using ProTools, eschewing his usual “live in the studio” idealism. And he was rapping, if (even now) you can believe it. Everything seemed up for grabs. “This album is the culmination of, like, ‘I don’t care.’ I want it to sound like this,” White told Rolling Stone. “I don’t care how it was made.”

“I don’t care” typically is not a fruitful creative credo. And Boarding House Reach was accordingly greeted with mixed reviews, slammed as “a long, bewildering slog” by detractors and half-heartedly defended by supporters as evidence that White “seemed a little lost” … but in a good way? As for me, I liked it more than pretty much anybody. (Perhaps even more than White himself. Has he felt the urge to blast “Corporation” lately?) I’ve been trained to appreciate a record like Boarding House Reach by listening to so many mid-period albums by legacy artists that were dismissed in their time as middling but now register as interesting misfires. To my ears, Boarding House Reach signaled Jack’s Empire Burlesque era.

I evoke Bob Dylan’s little-loved (but pretty good, kind of!) 1985 album not only because Bob and Jack were around the same age when their respective “interesting misfires” dropped — Bob had just turned 44, and Jack was 43 — or because both Boarding House Reach and Empire Burlesque take a similar “I don’t care” approach to awkwardly embracing technology on the part of stubborn Luddites. Ultimately, I group these records together in my mind because I happen to enjoy their flaws. As I’ve often argued, listening to a good “bad” album by an artist with a big discography can tell you more about what that artist does well than listening to a regular good album, simply by emphasizing and underlining that person’s shortcomings as an illuminating counterpoint. (For one thing, neither Jack nor Bob should ever dance.) With White, there’s added poignancy to hearing this notorious control freak lose his grip a bit. He might command a Willy Wonka-like hold on his color-coded Nashville-based mini-empire, but on his records lately he’s grappled with wild, unwieldy sounds he doesn’t seem able to fully wrangle.

White’s latest record out Friday, Fear Of The Dawn — the first of two planned records set for 2022, ahead of a quieter LP called Entering Heaven Alive due in July — suggests that he hasn’t yet exited his Empire Burlesque wilderness period. (I haven’t heard Entering Heaven Alive yet aside from the pretty single that White issued in January, so I can’t confirm whether that record is his Oh Mercy.) Signs of an aging rocker struggling to find his footing in a musical landscape that’s hostile to blues guitarists from the upper midwest abound on this album. Like the rest of us, it appears that Jack sort of lost his damn mind during the shutdown. He has said that he stopped writing songs for a spell during the pandemic and focused instead on making furniture. Then he took to fasting for up to five days at a time, which sparked his creativity. Oh, and he also dyed his hair blue, which he claims has made him less recognizable at his neighborhood Target, though I suspect that White likely became more noticeable once he resembled an extra from The Fifth Element.

As for the music, White hasn’t ditched the layered sound of Boarding House Reach in favor of the austerity of old. If anything, Fear Of The Dawn is even busier than its predecessor, with songs unfolding as a series of sections that crash unpredictably into each other. One of the better tracks, “Eosophobia” — which translates to “fear of the dawn” — starts out as stuttering stoner metal, then opens up into a prog breakdown beamed in from an ’80s Rush record, and finally climaxes with some aggressive rap-rock caterwauling. And then there’s “Hi De Ho,” the bewildering early single that marries a Cab Calloway sample, a hip-hop verse from Q-Tip, White’s own mock-operatic belting, and some herky-jerky synth-rock riffage. It’s a mess! And if you didn’t like Boarding House Reach, I suspect it will give you a headache. But if you’re in the pro-Empire Burlesque camp like I am, well, I say bless this mess!

It should be noted that one big advantage that Fear Of The Dawn has over Boarding House Reach is that it rocks way harder. When he was in The White Stripes, White undercut his own proclivity for producing neo-Zeppelin arena rock by playing up the twee aspects of the band’s iconography. On his own and with various side projects like The Raconteurs and The Dead Weather, however, he’s taken a less filtered approach to rawk. There’s still typically some element of the blues, though. But Fear Of The Dawn might be his least bluesy album ever, and it’s definitely his most metal. If you ever wished for Jack to make a Queens Of The Stone Age record, your ship has finally come in.

The most exciting part of the record is the first quarter, in which White charges out of the gate with three manic, electrifying hockey-hair anthems — the crunchy “Taking Me Back,” which synthesizes Gary Numan’s “Cars” with early Van Halen; the galloping, Paranoid-style title track; and the spastic techno-punk taunt “The White Raven.” The momentum dips with “Hi De Ho,” which signals the more hip-hop-driven middle section of the record, in which tunes like “Into The Twilight” and “What’s The Trick” kick up considerable dust but still come off more like “experimental” filler tracks than fully-fledged songs. When White returns more or less to straightforward (and reliably satisfying) garage rock fare in the record’s back half — “That Was Then (This Is Now)” is one of his best songs in that vein in years — it functions as a welcome respite from the forceful, “isn’t this fresh???“ lapels-grabbing of much of the album.

Moving briskly through 12 songs in under 40 minutes, Fear Of The Dawn somehow manages to feel simultaneously overstuffed and slight, like an album that was rounded out with a few marginal tracks in order to justify being a stand-alone record when it might have worked better as half of a more dynamic double record. (White has said he expects fans to like Entering Heaven Alive “three times as much.”) But again, that plays into the Empire Burlesque of it all. What this record demonstrates is that Jack White remains preternaturally gifted at pounding out the sort of kinetic riffs that can rouse both soccer crowds and sleepy dads. But now that we’ve heard him make another “embrace technology” album, the pump is primed for him to return to his dirtier and more primal original guise. I, for one, look forward to whatever his version of “his best album since Blood On The Tracks” is.

In case one Oscars “controversy” wasn’t enough, co-host Amy Schumer has been accused of stealing one of her jokes during the ceremony from Twitter. While roasting Leonardo DiCaprio, she said, “He has done so much to fight climate change and leave behind a cleaner, greener planet for his girlfriends.” It’s a similar joke to one made in December 2021 by Twitter user @NicoleConlan, who tweeted, “Leonardo DiCaprio is so passionate about climate change because he wants to leave a better word for his girlfriends.” It’s also a joke many people have made, because Leonardo DiCaprio loves to date younger women, you see, which makes him a real rarity in Hollywood.

On a recent episode of Watch What Happens Live!, Schumer denied the joke theft claim (not for the first time either). “OK. Well, I would like to say, I haven’t personally been on Twitter,” she told host Andy Cohen. “I’ve had my assistant do it, just so I can remain alive and not kill myself. And also, that joke was written by Suli McCullough. But I thank you guys, always, for making sure that I don’t start thievery.” Schumer added:

“I just got to do a lie-detector test on Vanity Fair and they asked me, thank God, ‘Have you ever stolen a joke?’ and I said no, and it was ‘that’s true.’ So, everybody just chill. It’s crazy. I’m funny enough, I don’t need to steal sh*t.”

Schumer also revealed that she donated her $15,000 payday for hosting the Oscars (which is not enough for having to embarrass yourself like this) to Planned Parenthood. You can watch her Watch What Happens Live! interview above.

(Via Variety)

Lauren Boebert took a break this week from being very excited about Elon Musk and her ideas on free speech and getting fired up about gun rights to hit Capitol Hill for lawmaking duties. This included quizzing Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, who was on hand to answer questions about abortion, a medical procedure that’s come increasingly under fire by Republicans (this week, Oklahoma became the latest state to essentially ban a woman’s choice).

There’s no doubt that GOP-led legislatures in states are scoring victories for their agenda, but Boebert’s line of questioning isn’t doing her side any favors on the federal level. Via Ron Filipkowski, the representative from Colorado decided to ask Becerra, “What is a man?” And he fired back, “You’re looking at one.” This was followed by Boebert’s awkward, “Great. You are a man. I like that. Can men get pregnant?”

If aliens touched down and observed this madness, they’d be so perplexed. This exchange included Becerra asking whether “you know something that I don’t know” about whether it’s possible for a man to be pregnant. It’s a pretty embarrassing turn of events, but Boebert eventually got to her point, which is that she’s very angry about the federal government’s “birthing person” terminology. And that prompted Becerra to match Boebert’s strange questions with one of his own: “Are mothers not persons?”

The upcoming midterms should be telling.

When Mattea Roach made it onto Jeopardy!, the Canadian contestant assumed that if she managed to best her competitors, it would take at least a few wins until she made enough to pay off her student loans. However, as Jeopardy! fans saw when Roach’s episode aired this week, the Halifax native made a savvy wager during Final Jeopardy and walked away with a whopping $32,000. Not only was that enough to make Roach the champ, but she can already eliminate her student loan debt.

However, Roach has had to keep her big win a secret since January when she originally filmed the episode, which hasn’t been easy. “I don’t know that I would win any award for best poker face, but I think I tried my best,” she told the CBC before revealing that she still hasn’t fully processed her major windfall:

Even months later, she said it hasn’t really sunk in. “I still get chills hearing myself say that I will be able to, when I receive the money, pay off my student loan with the money from last night’s game, like I still can’t believe it,” she said.

Keeping her Jeopardy! win a secret became quite the task when Roach’s parents threw a huge watch party, as proud parents are wont to do.

“Some extended family, like my mom’s aunt, uncle and cousin, live in Marion Bridge and decided to get a group together to go watch,” Roach said. “There were some folks there who I’ve never even met that are just friends and community members up there.”

(Via CBC)