Month: May 2022

Since their 1998 debut album Something About Airplanes, Death Cab For Cutie has been consistent with their album release schedule, dropping a new LP at least once every few years, with the latest being 2018’s Thank You For Today. That was their ninth album and now it appears a tenth is on the way soon.

Yesterday, Ben Gibbard and company shared a photo of themselves in a recording/performance space and wrote simply, “New album done. New music May 11.” They also shared a pre-save link for that new music, but it doesn’t offer additional info about what specifically they have planned for next week.

Meanwhile, the band and Gibbard have kept busy with other endeavors since Thank You For Today. In 2020, Gibbard was one of the biggest figures in the pandemic-prompted livestream concert scene, as he started giving daily livestreamed performances from his home in March. The year before that, they shared The Blue EP. More recently, he curated Ocean Child: Songs Of Yoko Ono, a tribute album in honor of the titular musician. Death Cab offered a rendition of “Waiting For The Sunrise” for the collection.

Death Cab For Cutie is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

It’s a shame for Doctor Strange 2 (aka Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, directed by Sam Raimi) that it’s opening while Everything Everywhere All At Once is still in theaters. Perhaps never before have we had such a stark illustration of the difference between what happens when a filmmaker-driven movie plays with an idea vs. what happens when a massive IP-driven corporate entity-produced franchise movie plays with that same idea.

The idea, in both cases, is the multiverse; the idea that the universe consists not just of our present, visible reality, but infinite, slightly distinct realities running in parallel. What might happen when a character or characters travel between those parallel dimensions through a plot conceit? (Shoutout to Sliders for doing this concept all the way back in the mid-90s, right down to a “green light means stop” gag that Doctor Strange 2 steals).

Released within weeks of each other (depending on where in the world you live) Doctor Strange 2 and Everything Everywhere are playing with that same idea, such that it’s almost impossible not to compare the two. And it’s a comparison that at every level isn’t especially kind to Doctor Strange 2. It’s not for lack of talent or ambition that Doctor Strange 2 comes up short, it’s more that its basic structure prevents it from being able to have fun with the subject matter in the same way. It’s a bit like watching two daredevils shred the same waves, only one is riding a jetski and the other is driving an oil tanker.

While Everything Everywhere can bank off lips and attempt wild moves (even a few that aren’t entirely successful, like the hot dog fingers) Doctor Strange 2 has to carry along with it millions of tons of crude IP, the decomposed fossils of 27 other movies and however many TV shows currently make up the “MCU” — which is so meticulously planned and outlined that Wikipedia can tell you that Doctor Strange 2 is part of “Phase 4.” When the commercial imperative is to try to maintain as much IP as possible, things like story and conflict tend to take a backseat (at least until the time that Disney can “own” a plot).

Doctor Strange begins (boldly, I can acknowledge) with a massive setpiece set in some CGI purgatory (think Dalí meets Escher meets a 90s screensaver) where Doctor Strange, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, is using his vaguely-defined powers of telekinesis (mind bullets! hand bullets! force fields!) to try to protect a teen girl in a denim jacket from a massive squid-like creature with a giant eyeball. They jump from floating platform to floating platform like Super Mario Bros, trying to reach some kind of magical glowing book. The squid wants the girl’s powers, and to keep the evil squid from getting them, Doctor Strange tries to suck her powers out of her body to use them himself, which is apparently another superpower he has (so strange!).

“But that will kill me!” she screams.

“I know, but in the larger calculus of the multiverse, this sacrifice will be…” and so forth.

Doctor Strange wakes up in a cold sweat. He later learns that the girl in the denim jacket is America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez), a teen who pointedly has two lesbian moms (“mis madres!”) — I say pointedly because there’s little else we ever learn about her — and can travel between dimensions. The opening scene Strange thought was a dream was actually another him from a different dimension, which is what dreams actually are.

It seems that Wanda, aka The Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), whose kids are apparently dead (maybe this happened in Wandavision? I’ve only seen the 27 other MCU films but not the MCU television shows so I’m unclear on whether I missed something here), has been sending squid demons (which is a power I guess she has) after America Chavez. The Scarlet Witch wants to steal America Chavez’s dimension-swapping powers (stealing powers being a power I guess The Scarlet Witch has) in order to get to a different dimension where Wanda’s kids are still alive. At which point I guess she will kill the Wanda of that reality and assume her life and live happily ever after with her two young boys. Which is, uh, bad, I guess.

Aside from all that window dressing, the main conflicts of Doctor Strange 2 are whether the hero, Doctor Strange is an asshole (he must grapple with the fact that Bizarro Strange was willing to kill a teen girl) and whether he’ll get the girl — in the form of a fellow doctor, Christine Palmer, played by Rachel McAdams. In the main universe, she was Strange’s on-again-off-again lady friend, who apparently moved on during the five years Strange spent turned to dust by Thanos (I’m so tired).

Both motives and methods exist as only the vaguest sketches in Doctor Strange 2. The beauty of Everything Everywhere, and it wasn’t exactly reinventing the wheel by doing so (though it did so deftly), was to ground the metaphor of the multiverse in one, recognizable human relationship — one first generation immigrant’s fraught relationship with her struggling mother. Both movies have a same sex romance angle and POC heroines, but only in Everything Everywhere does it not feel like a corporate-mandated diversity initiative, because it isn’t.

Doctor Strange 2 lacks any human scale, or really even any human frame; no sense of “who is telling me this and why.” So it ends up being mostly just metaphors piled on metaphors, conceits designed to justify other conceits, leaving the audience nothing to hold onto beyond the general idea of “scale.” And it is, to be fair, impressively “large,” and especially loud, though that could’ve just been the IMAX screen I saw it on.

Who is America Chavez? Who does she care about and what does she want? There aren’t any human-level answers to any of these questions, only plot conceits (She’s a girl who can jump universes! She wants to get back to her moms!) mixed with totems of progress that might look good in a press release (Lesbian moms! A feisty Latina heroine!).

No one involved in these movies seems empowered to make artistic choices based on inspiration or personal preference (too big and too important is the IP, with too many people involved), so all that’s left is to achieve self-created benchmarks of “representation” — increasingly the only form of artistic criticism that holds any sway anymore. And even those benchmarks are getting hopelessly watered down with qualifiers (we already had gay superheroes in Eternals, not to mention straight ones having face-to-face missionary sex).

To put it bluntly, when no one is empowered to make artistic decisions, you get shit art. It’s an oil tanker adrift, hoping some current of the zeitgeist will push it somewhere interesting. Which is especially a bummer coming from great artists like Sam Raimi, who happens to be one of my favorite directors. He made my all-time favorite superhero movie. Hell, I even liked Oz, The Great And Powerful.

In Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness, Raimi seems to only be granted occasional cubes of autonomy, within which to shoot charmingly out-there set pieces with a characteristically bombastic score, and periodically remind us that he’s the guy who made Drag Me To Hell and Army Of Darkness. Yet the connections are more literal than spiritual, more a branding device than a reflection of personality. This Malibu Stacy has a Sam Raimi! Increasingly, Marvel characters are the Apes and the directors are just the Slurp Juice.

I hope Doctor Strange 2 makes however much money it takes for Sam Raimi to be allowed to make more Sam Raimi movies. This one feels uninspired and uninspiring, almost from the first minutes. The only level on which it seems capable of relating to us is on the level of recognition, and while I vaguely enjoy the sensation of remembering Drag Me To Hell, I must’ve missed whatever Wandavision or Moon Knight episode that would’ve make me care about Doctor Strange or Wanda or America Chavez.

‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ is playing select theaters nationwide. ‘Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness’ hits theaters everywhere Friday May 6th. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. More reviews here.

Welp, the NFT market is reportedly “collapsing,” and an Elon Musk tweet may be a nail in the coffin. According to a new analysis that dropped this week, NFTs saw their astronomically priced sales plummet 92 percent since September 2021. That’s quite a drop, and not a good sign for the digital tokens that were being aggressively pursued by celebrities, musicians, and the video game industry.

Via The Independent:

Analysis by the website NonFungible, first cited by the Wall Street Journal, found that NFT sales fell to a daily average of 19,000 this week, compared to 225,000 seven months ago.

Active wallets, which are used to store NFTs, also dropped by 88 per cent. The article concluded: “The NFT market is collapsing.”

Following the report on the NFT collapse, Musk fired off a pithy response that could have a devastating effect on the tokens. “I dunno … seems kinda fungible,” Musk tweeted on Wednesday morning.

On Twitter, which Musk is in the final stages of purchasing, the Tesla CEO has repeatedly demonstrated his ability to severely affect crypto markets. In June of last year, he sent the price of Bitcoin plummeting and caused a run on, we kid you not, semen-themed cryptocurrencies. (“Cumrocket” was a particular favorite of the enigmatic billionaire.)

However, according to a recent report, a sizable portion of Musk’s Twitter following are actually spam bots. If the social media company were to fully and effectively them from the platform, Musk would reportedly lose nearly half of his followers. As for whether that would impact his ability to influence crypto markets with just a few words… well, who knows. But sorry about your apes.

(Via The Independent)

Mayans M.C. has done well to build its own brand of mayhem before really reeling in some former Sons Of Anarchy members for action. Not that the show hasn’t delivered several nods to the Kurt Sutter flagship series. Quite the contrary, for both Chucky and Potter delivered their vaguely unsettling presences early in the game before Potter got truly nasty again. Then Happy turned out to be the killer of EZ and Angel’s mother, and Chibs finally showed up in Season 3 to curse out everyone like a boss (which he is).

Who next? J.D. Pardo once told us (jokingly) that he’d love to see Jax somehow make a cameo, and of course, it’d have to be flashback or Zombie Jax mode for that to happen. Now that I’ve typed it out, I’d really like to see the undead Jax Teller riding past on his bike with a green screen in tow. However, there’s another popular (but moderately loathsome) SOA character who’s about to ride onto the scene. That’d be Tig, portrayed by the mustache-wielding Kim Coates, who’s coming this season.

This development arrives after speculation, which Coates confirmed on Twitter. “Please forgive me not to get back to the 2.5 million screams and quotes ( ok it wasn’t 2.5 mil but it was a lot 🙂 peace and love,” he wrote. “Bring a seat belt when Trager finally arrives.”

Of course, the first thing that popped into my head was this: if we’re gonna see Tig, then Walton Goggins’ Venus Van Dam could hopefully receive a shoutout. Is it too much to ask for a snippet of actual Goggins, too? My kingdom for that Southern drawl.

Though regularly cited and often slighted for his relentless hedonistic nature, Future has proven yet again that he’s just as committed to giving the people what they want in his new visual for the I Never Liked You standout record “Wait For U” featuring Drake and Tems. The Director X-lead video opens up with an introduction for viewers to the impending toxic king fairytale, set in medieval times. Future finds himself at odds with the queen after being betrayed by a knight played by 4YE’s Trey Richards, whose snitching leads him to later be killed by the 38-year-old.

Drake appears later in the video, embarking on his own journey to rescue a damsel from two villains. In the end, the woman he sought to rescue ends up saving him from an untimely death. While Tems is noticeably absent, the song’s producer ATL Jacob and rapper Strick both make cameo appearances.

I Never Liked You was released on April 29 under Freebandz and Epic Records. In addition to Drake and Tems, the album featured Kanye West, Gunna, Young Thug, EST Gee, Kodak Black, and later added Babyface Ray, Lil Baby, 42 Dugg, Lil Durk and Young Scooter on the six deluxe tracks released Monday (May 2).

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Killing Eve has been a fan favorite since debuting in 2018 to critical acclaim, though the second half of the series was considerably less well-received. When the series ended last month, the shocking finale left many fans confused and even angry at the (spoiler alert) untimely death of the lead Villanelle, played by Jodie Comer.

While the books end in a less depressing manner, with a very genuine happily ever after, the fourth and final season of the show finally has the two main characters, Eve (played by Sandra Oh) and Villanelle, becoming romantically involved, just before Villanelle’s death. Oh is very aware of the backlash from the finale, and tried to explain it as best as she could. The former Grey’s Anatomy actress told Deadline that the initial plan was to kill off her character, instead of Villanelle.

Due to COVID production delays, the story was written and re-written. Oh says she and writer Laura Neal were chatting about “how we were going to end this,” when Oh suggested Eve be killed. “I was like, ‘You should kill my character.’ I thought that would be the strongest and the most interesting [ending].” It is the name of the show, after all. Instead, Comer’s character was the one who was killed.

“Eve was starting to get into, like, a nihilistic place, and we’re like, ‘Let’s just continue that line and go straight into it.” Oh explained. Eventually, the writers opted against it. “They came to me, and they said, ‘We can’t do it. We need to change it… Eve needs to live.’” So Eve lived, but Villanelle did not.

“We switched it around,” Oh says, insisting that Comer “was very much on board for that.” Though Comer was on board, many fans critiqued the ending for its tragic outcome after the last four seasons left them cheering for the duo to get together.

“Eve is the way into this world. She’s our everywoman,” Oh concluded. “So it’s kind of really super depressing if she dies.” It was going to be depressing either way, so maybe the actual murderer dying wasn’t the worst move?

Doctor Strange In the Multiverse of Madness is already making a sh*tload of money. Sorry, I am so tired and have nothing else left to say about the seemingly unending Marvel Cinematic Universe today. The film, directed by Sam Raimi who has brought some much-needed artistry to the franchise, has already made $27.2 million internationally according to a Variety box office report. The film, which opens in the United States on Friday, May 6, has been released in other countries including France, Japan, Germany, Italy and Korea. Per Variety, the strong international opening indicates a massive opening weekend domestically.

Variety reports that Doctor Strange In the Multiverse of Madness, which stars Benedict Cumberbatch, Elizabeth Olsen, Xochitl Gomez, and includes a bunch of cameos we’ll probably be hearing about on the internet all week, is “on track to secure a massive opening weekend internationally and domestically” with box office figures only 4% behind those of 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home.

All that to say: if the domestic opening of Doctor Strange In the Multiverse of Madness isn’t massive, it would be pretty embarrassing for theaters such as New York City’s AMC Empire in Times Square, which is literally playing the movie every fifteen minutes. It would also be pretty embarrassing for Marvel, which has built up to this film with multiple television shows and films including WandaVision, Loki, and Spider-Man: No Way Home.

Through two playoff games between the Dallas Mavericks and Phoenix Suns, superstar guard Luka Doncic has scored 80 points on 52 shots and dished out 15 assists. Meanwhile, the Mavericks’ secondary ball-handlers of Jalen Brunson and Spencer Dinwiddie have combined for 41 points on 46 shots and 11 assists, which is part of the reason Dallas finds itself in a 2-0 hole heading home for Game 3.

After Game 2, head coach Jason Kidd stressed the importance of his team’s complementary scorers establishing their footing and providing Doncic some help offensively.

“He had a great game, but no one else showed,” Kidd said. “We’ve got to get other guys shooting the ball better. We can’t win with just him out there scoring 30 a night — not at this time of the year.

“We’re playing the best team in the league, so we’ve got to get other guys going.”

Dallas raced out to a 60-point first half in Game 2, though struggled following intermission, when Phoenix outscored it, 71-49. Devin Booker and Chris Paul took over offensively, but the Mavericks’ offense didn’t offer any chance to keep pace with the Suns’ torrid shooting.

It goes without saying, but unless someone (or someones) can get going, the Mavericks will have an awfully hard time pulling off the already daunting task of knocking off Phoenix. Brunson, Dinwiddie, and the entire Dallas team will aim to turn things around when Game 3 tips off on Friday at 9:30 p.m. EST.

Man, as much as I’ve criticized Eminem for not getting with the times, I feel like I should apologize now. As it turns out, Em’s regressive positions are nothing compared to his longtime foe Benzino’s. The Boston rap totem could certainly be accused of living in the past, as he’s the only one holding onto the massive L Eminem handed him back in the noughties. The latest example of his sour grapes attitude toward basically everything about modern-day hip-hop is his reaction to Eminem’s recent induction into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame.

In a new string of tweets, Benzino claimed that the Rock Hall has “no respect for our culture” after including Eminem. Posting a screenshot of a recent tweet from Rolling Stone, he also wondered “Where’s Nas, Eric B and RAKIM, Kool Moe D, Epmd, Fearless Four, Fat Boyz [sic], Lauren Hill [sic], Little Kim[sic], OutKast and 100s other Black rappers?”

So, there are a couple of things happening here. One: Benzino, who used to “run” The Source, needs that edit button as much as anybody on Twitter. Two: While he makes a valid point in the second tweet, he’s gotta understand that he’s probably the last person who should be making it, since his position in this argument is tainted from the jump. Again, he’s had a longstanding, mostly one-sided vendetta against Eminem since before he was ousted at The Source, then got smoked in a rap battle against the Detroit MC by unanimous public opinion. This ain’t for him.

However, there is some truth to what he’s pointed out. That the Rock Hall chose to nominate and so thoroughly vote in Eminem before so many pioneers of the art form reeks of outsiders’ voyeurism, appropriation, and shallow understanding of the music and culture. It definitely looks very cockeyed in the context of, well, everything about America, but particularly this country’s prickly disposition toward Black folks and our creative contributions to mainstream pop culture.

But there’s no denying that Eminem’s had a huge impact since making his debut in 1998, selling more records than almost anybody else in the genre, redefining rap skills in the mainstream, and introducing practically an entire generation (of suburban white kids) to hip-hop, opening the door for successors like Jack Harlow, who recently had the No. 1 single in the country. Em was also an inspiration for big-name genre leaders like Kendrick Lamar and Tyler The Creator, which can’t be discounted. His run of mainstream relevancy has been much longer than influences like Rakim (sorry, it’s true), and the fact is, his next album will probably also go No. 1, no matter what critics say about his increasing creative stagnation.

Yeah, he probably got to have an advantage due to being white, but … This is America. If anything, that remains an indictment of the broader culture of excluding, ignoring, or erasing Black Americans’ contributions (to say nothing of Asian, Latino, or Indigenous ones). At least, now we’ve gotten him out of the way, opening the door to start recognizing rap’s real pioneers. Plus, there’s a Hip-Hop Hall Of Fame coming at some point, which will at least make up for some of the oversights by allowing the culture to recognize its own, without asking a bunch of guitar snobs to validate them.

Taylor Swift offered the first taste of her eventual 1989 (Taylor’s Version) album in March 2021, when she shared her rerecording of “Wildest Dreams” in a trailer for Spirit Untamed. Now, over a year later, she’s on her way back with another “Taylor’s Version” recording of a 1989 song, this time “This Love,” which was also premiered via a movie trailer.

Some of “This Love (Taylor’s Version)” popped up in a new trailer for The Summer I Turned Pretty. Swift shared the clip and wrote, “Thank you [Jenny Han] for debuting my version of This Love in the trailer for [The Summer I Turned Pretty]!! I’ve always been so proud of this song and I’m very [pleading face emojis] about this turn of events – This Love (Taylor’s Version) comes out tonight at m i d n i g h t!”

Swift previously said of the original song, “The last time I wrote a poem that ended up being a song, I was writing in my journal and I was writing about something that had happened in my life — it was about a year ago — and I just wrote this really really short poem, it said, ‘This love is good / this love is bad / this love is alive back from the dead / these hands had to let it go free / and this love came back to me,’ and I just wrote it down and closed the book and put it back on my night stand […] All of a sudden in my head, I just started hearing this melody happen, and then I realized that it was going to be a song.”

Check out Swift’s post above.