The only thing Hollywood loves adapting more than comic books these days are stories ripped from the headlines.
Universal Pictures just dropped the first trailer for its journalism drama She Said,an adaptation of New York Times reporters Meghan Twohey and Jodi Kantor’s book She Said, which documents their investigative reporting on influential film producer Harvey Weinstein’s history of abuse, harassment, and assault of dozens of women. Their reporting jumpstarted the MeToo movement in 2017 and, five years later, it’s getting the Hollywood treatment, because of course it is.
Here’s the film’s official synopsis: “Two-time Academy Award nominee Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan star as New York Times reporters Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor, who together broke one of the most important stories in a generation— a story that helped propel the #MeToo movement, shattered decades of silence around the subject of sexual assault in Hollywood and altered American culture forever.”
The She Said trailer follows Twohey and Kantor as they discover the extent of Weinstein’s abuse and as they work together to convince women to go on the record. The trailer shows a quick scene featuring a faceless Weinstein’s voice on a conference call. Weinstein was sentenced to 23 years in prison in March 2020 for two charges including third-degree rape and a first-degree criminal sex act. His earliest possible release date is November 9, 2039, when he will be 87 years old.
She Said is directed by Maria Schrader (Unorthodox) with an adapted screenplay from Rebecca Lenkiewicz (Disobedience). Mulligan and Kazan are joined by a star-studded ensemble cast including Patricia Clarkson, Andre Braugher, Samantha Morton, Jennifer Ehle, Tom Pelphrey and Adam Shapiro.
Ian Sweet had one of the best songs of 2021 with the sassy, nostalgic “F*ckthat.” She’s back today with the release of her new EP Star Stuff, along with an official, glitchy visualizer for the affectionate, dreamy track “Die A Million Times,” which retains a kind of fun fondness for early 2000s pop and technology.
“‘Die A Million Times’ is about being stuck in a negative thought loop that you know you could escape from if you really tried but you’re not willing to let go yet,” Ian Sweet, real name Jilian Medford, said. “A thought loop that is so painful and destructive to your brain but yet you want to keep replaying certain memories over and over. I was living in a fantasy world about a relationship that didn’t end up working out and kept inviting in the thoughts and memories that I knew would continue to destroy me but I wasn’t ready to move on from them yet in order to help myself.”
This EP, also consisting of “Fight,” a Dagr remix of “Fight,” and “Star Stuff,” follows the release of last year’s powerful full-length Show Me How You Disappear.
Watch the visualizer for “Die A Million Times” above. Check out the EP here.
In a new interview with Billboard, Murder Inc. Records founder Irv Gotti calls music the “lowest form” of the entertainment industry while discussing his plans to finance, write, and direct his own film after selling half of his ownership of his label’s past recordings for $100 million. “The entertainment industry is music, TV, and film,” he explains. “The music business is the lowest form, and I just bagged $100 million for s—t I did 20 years ago.”
As he elaborates, “More money is made in TV and with movies than music. It’s a non-disputable fact. We love the music industry and I love the music industry. There’s money to be made. But [it’s dwarfed by] the money made from TV and film. If I have 100 episodes of television and I own it, they’ll probably put a worth on it at $300 or $400 million. With $300 or $400 million, I could sell it at a 10 to 20 multiple. That’s three to six billion. This is why Tyler Perry is a billionaire. That’s why I sold my masters and did this deal with Iconoclast.”
He’s not wrong; the money-making potential in movies and television easily explains why so many rappers have transitioned to acting careers — some of them before they even have an official album out, like Saweetie. More musicians are also pursuing production deals; Kid Cudi, Megan Thee Stallion, and Vince Staples are all working with Netflix, and 50 Cent has developed a media juggernaut with his Power universe on Starz. As for Irv Gotti’s latest endeavor, here’s hoping it goes better than his last one did; despite grossing over $500 million (according to co-founder Chris Gotti, Irv’s brother), the label declined throughout the late 2000s, after federal investigators accused the Gotti bros. of launching the label to help launder drug money.
While Donald Trump has long followed Vladimir Putin around like a lovesick teen, the Russian dictator now seems to be taking a page out of Trump’s book by putting the future of his country’s economy in his daughter’s hands.
As Newsweek reports, Putin’s 35-year-old daughter Katerina Tikhonova has been tapped to co-chair RSSP (Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs), a powerful group that oversees import substitutions throughout all of Russia. In other words: Vlad is hoping his daughter can help the country find its way through the economic downturn it’s facing in the wake of his decision to invade Ukraine. As Isabel Van Brugen wrote for Newsweek:
Some sanctions which were imposed on Russia in response to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24 include stopping purchases of Russian energy, freezing access to some of the country’s foreign reserves and blocking Russia from accessing the SWIFT global banking system.
Since then, Russia has seen a shortage of crucial goods, while the country’s economy has seen a downturn. Data produced last month by Russia’s Federal State Statistics Service on the state of the country’s economy indicated that production has plunged in a number of sectors.
So now it’s up to Tikhonova—who, prior to becoming a high-powered tech executive, made her living as a competitive dancer—to save Russia from economic disaster.
Unlike Ivanka Trump, whose dad has repeatedly thirsted over her in public for years, Putin keeps his private life private. He has never publicly stated the names of his children, and little is known about them. Tikhonova’s relationship to Russia’s president was not noted in the RSSP’s announcement of her appointment. And while Newsweek reached out to both RSPP and Russia’s foreign ministry for comment on the appointment, they had received no response as of press time.
Although Jon Bernthal wasn’t feeling so confident about having sex appeal, it seems like he got the hang of it for American Gigolo. The highly-anticipated Showtime series is a modern take on the classic ’80s film, with Bernthal playing the iconic gigolo Julian Kaye, who was originally portrayed by Richard Gere.
The most recent trailer for the series shows a quick glimpse into Kaye’s life as an escort while grappling with his troubled past and investigating the murder that he was wrongfully convicted of. According to the official synopsis:
American Gigolo, a present-day reimagining of the iconic 1980 film, follows Julian Kaye after his wrongful conviction release from 15 years in prison as he navigates his complicated relationships with his former lover Michelle (Gretchen Mol), his troubled mother, and the people who betrayed him. While Julian struggles to reconcile the escort he was in the past and the man he is today, Detective Sunday (Rosie O’Donnell) seeks the truth about the murder that sent Julian to prison all those years ago, unearthing a much larger conspiracy along the way. Starring Jon Bernthal. Stream the premiere on September 9 on SHOWTIME.
Bernthal, who is known for his role as the Punisher, originally thought he was the “wrong guy” for the show, but that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. There are already a bunch of Twitter fan-cams made in his honor, which is the first step to becoming a sought-after leading man, after all. The second step is to randomly show up on a fan-favorite tv show, such as The Bear, which he already did earlier this month, so he’s doing great!
American Gigolo premieres on September 9th on Showtime.
This week’s Frotcast is available to subscribers on Patreon!
This week, Matt and Vince welcome Anna Hossnieh from the Ethnically Ambiguous podcast dedicated entirely to Shinzo Abe and our personal remembrances of the man. Okay not really, but we do discuss the Shinzo Abe assassination, as well as Hunter Biden’s iCloud hack and whether his love of hookers and crack humanizes our otherwise kinda Wizard of Oz-style president.
We also have a few lengthy digressions into Peaky Blinders, and our favorite brand of pseudo-celebrity, the “body language expert.” Specifically, this week we discuss a body language expert’s breakdown of what Prince William and Kate’s “mirroring” says about their parenting styles, an article that includes the now immortal preface, “Speaking to PureWow on behalf of Slingo…”
In addition to that, we also discuss new developments in the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial, the most important legal event of our times, which is somehow not the end of the story! Turns out they managed to seat a totally wrong juror, which as we all know from law school is a violation of article 16 of the Citizen’s Right To Jurisprudence. Something like that. Was it a rural juror? Okay, I’m tired of typing words. It’s a podcast. You guys get it.
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When my oldest daughter was in the deepest throes of a clinical phobia, her fear overtook everything. She practically became a hermit at 16, afraid to go anywhere. Thankfully, we found an excellent therapist who taught her how to tame her fear, to gently manage it, to approach it in such a way that allowed it to dissipate instead of continuing to dominate her every thought.
People who struggle with anxiety or fear, whether it stems from trauma or wonky brain wiring, understand how overwhelming it can be. Fear and anxiety can feel incapacitating at times, making you want to run far away or curl into the tiniest ball and disappear. But neither of those things actually helps. In fact, the first thing my daughter’s therapist told her is that avoidance always make anxiety worse.
Instead, she taught my daughter to approach that fearful voice in her head. After all, that voice was hers, and it desperately wanted to be heard and understood. Ignoring it, avoiding it, trying to distract it way simply made it yell louder. “Maybe you’re right,” she would say to that voice, even though it terrified her to do so. “Maybe you’re right, and maybe you’re wrong. Let’s just wait and see what happens”—that became her mantra to her own brain, and as counterintuitive as it seemed, it worked.
I could explain the science of the amygdala—the fight-or-flight center of the brain that acts on instinct—and why the “Maybe you’re right” approach helped retrain it not to overreact. But an artist has created a visual series that describes it in different terms that may resonate more with people who have experienced embracing fear.
Cécile Carre posted her series of paintings about fear on Facebook and they’ve been shared more than 12,000 times. As with any art, interpretations will naturally vary, but judging from the comments, people dealing with anxiety, fear, or unhealed trauma may find some truth in it.
The first image shows a girl curled in a fetal position with her back to a big, scary monster bearing down on her, with a word painted beneath it.
“Everyday…”
As the girl turns and faces the monster, it immediately looks less scary. Still big, still towering over her, but not terrifying.
“…Trying…”
As the girl walks toward the monster, she starts looking bigger. The monster transforms into a mirror image of herself, the terror of it literally melting away.
“…to watch…”
And then it becomes a child looking for comfort rushing into her arms. Even its color begins to blend with her own.
“…and embrace…”
And then a baby, purely in need of nurturing, wrapped lovingly in her arms.
“…my fear…”
And then…nothing. Just a simple, calm little diamond where the girl was.
“…until it disappears completely…”
The work of turning toward what you fear is not simple or easy, and it may take therapy, medication, or other methods to treat mental illness effectively. But this series of paintings shows what many experience when they stop avoiding and start approaching the roaring voice that tells them to be afraid. Though it’s thoroughly terrifying to make that initial turn—I saw it in my own daughter, and it took a lot of effort—seeing the beast shrink down and eventually disappear is an incredible gift.
Thank you, Cécile Carre, for illustrating that so beautifully. You can order her prints here.
Beyoncé has long been one of the biggest artists in the world and now, she’s starting to take over TikTok, too, as she just joined the platform today (and already has over 3.3 million followers as of this post).
A couple hours ago, she shared her first TikTok video, a compilation of clips from TikTok users (including Cardi B, who makes a brief appearance) either dancing or singing along to “Break My Soul.” She wrote in the caption, “Seeing y’all release the wiggle made me so happy! Thank you so much for all the love for BREAK MY SOUL! – Love B.”
Furthermore, Variety notes that Beyoncé’s full catalog of music is now available for TikTok users to use as backing sounds in their videos.
Now, we wait and see how quickly Beyoncé’s TikTok follower count will catch up to those figures on other platforms; She has approximately 15.5 million Twitter followers, 25 million YouTube subscribers, 56 million Facebook followers, and 268 million Instagram followers.
As for Renaissance, Beyoncé’s upcoming album, she said of it last year, “I’ve been in the studio for a year and a half. Sometimes it takes a year for me to personally search through thousands of sounds to find just the right kick or snare. One chorus can have up to 200 stacked harmonies. Still, there’s nothing like the amount of love, passion, and healing that I feel in the recording studio. After 31 years, it feels just as exciting as it did when I was nine years old. Yes, the music is coming!”
The second season of Kevin Hart‘s Peacock talk series Hart To Heart is set to premiere this week. In a preview clip posted by Access Hollywood, Jay-Z discusses with the comedian the status of his latest semi-retirement. Although Jay notoriously “retired” once in 2003 with the release of The Black Album, he returned in relatively short order just three years later with Kingdom Come. This time, though, he has no plans on making any grand pronouncements of the same nature, even joking about his previous retirement with Hart.
“Nah, I tried that,” he admits. “I’m terrible at that! I just needed a break … I was really burnt out at that time. I was releasing an album every year … I just looked up one day and I was like, ‘I’m tired.’ I’d never been on vacation until, say, 2000, my whole life.” This time, he says he has no intentions of walking away — “for good” or otherwise — despite not currently having any projects in the works.
“I don’t know what happens next,” he acknowledges. “I’m not actively making music or making an album or have plans to make an album, but I never want to say that I’m retired. It’s a gift, and who am I to shut it off? It’s open to whatever. And it may have a different form or interpretation. Maybe it’s not an album, maybe it is. I have no idea, but I’m just going to leave it open.”
While Jay isn’t making music on his own yet, he did recently make an appearance on Pusha T’s album It’s Almost Dry, contributing his voice to the single “Neck And Wrist.” He also cleared seven samples for The Game’s upcoming album Drillmatic.
Watch Peacock’s Hart To Heart clip above and watch the whole series streaming on Peacock.
Each week our staff of film and TV experts surveys the entertainment landscape to select the ten best new/newish shows available for you to stream at home. We put a lot of thought into our selections, and our debates on what to include and what not to include can sometimes get a little heated and feelings may get hurt, but so be it, this is an important service for you, our readers. With that said, here are our selections for this week.
What we have here is an alternate history situation, one where the space race of the 1960s didn’t end, thanks in large part to Russia beating America to a handful of important achievements. The show is now in season three, so there’s plenty for you to dive into if you want, which you probably should, in part due to a bunch of space cowboys doing cool space cowboy things, and in part because all your television-obsessed friends won’t stop talking about it. Win-win. Watch it on Apple TV Plus.
This show brings us the perfect actress, Iman Vallani, for the leading gig of portraying Kamala Khan. She takes us on a fun-filled revamp of her character’s comic character, and this show is a roaring ball of glee that will help to set up The Marvels, which will not only include Kamala and Carol but also Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Paris) from WandaVision. The MCU’s lightening up again, and we love to see it. Watch it on Disney Plus.
One of the biggest problems with television these days is that there are not enough shows that star Maya Rudolph. That’s why it is nice to have Loot, an Apple series that stars Rudolph as a billionaire who learns how the rest of the world lives. It’s a good start. Maya Rudolph is the best. Watch it on Apple TV Plus.
It’s a sublime return for the misfit superhero family. As they are crushed to learn, the Sparrow Academy now aims to be front and center, and the O.G. Hargreeves siblings must adjust to this strange new timeline where their common Bad Dad Reginald’s other kiddos exist. Oh, and there’s another rift in the universe, which actually leads Elliot Page’s Viktor to unite with a character who acted fully like an enemy last season. Gerard Way’s comic book series keeps on giving good adaptation, and hopefully, there will be more dancing to go with yet another apocalypse. Watch it on Netflix.
Good news for mankind: this show takes place 100 years from now when the Moon hosts a utopian colony. The bad news, though, is that there are shadowy forces at work and a conspiracy and a murder and all that jazz. So an intrepid pilot teams up with a detective, and we’ve got a sci-fi procedural vibe going on, which will hopefully be able to vanquish the evil at work. Emma McDonald, Dominic Monaghan, and Joe Manganiello star, but try not to think too hard about that Magic Mike XXLconvenience store scene while you’re enjoying this gorgeous-looking show about the very fate of civilization. Watch it on AMC Plus.
There are a couple of reasons to watch Apple TV+ latest original, the prison drama Black Bird. First, it marks one of Ray Liotta’s final performances on-screen – here he plays a decorated cop who’s “not mad, just disappointed” that his son has followed in the footsteps of the criminals he once hunted. Second, it gives Taron Egerton, the guy who should’ve won that Oscar for a musical biopic about a Queer British icon, a chance to showcase his chops – the serious kind. Third, it’s based on an unbelievably true story about a guy named Jimmy Keene who wiped clean his 10-year sentence behind bars by getting reassigned to a maximum-security prison, buddying up to a criminally-insane serial killer, and eliciting a confession from the guy so that law enforcement could pin down all of his victims. Personally, we’d take the decade of commissary snacks and toilet paper rationing. Watch it on Apple TV Plus.
Phoebe Robinson gets the showcase she’s needed and deserved for a long time with this one, a show about a brash semi-famous podcaster who gets roped into running her brother’s political campaign. Robinson knows a little something about podcasting from her run as a co-host of 2 Dope Queens, so one assumes there is gold to be mined there. This one is cool on a number of levels. Watch it on Hulu.
The second chunk of the fourth season of Stranger Things doesn’t have the same hefty episode count as the first but it is still, in a word, epic. And that’s not because of its cinematic runtimes. Well, not entirely. It is partially due to the cinematic runtimes. But all those minutes are packed with all of the 80s nostalgia, Dungeons and Dragons references, demonic possessions, prison breaks, rink parties, and secret government experiments you could ask for. Who knows what song from the 1980s it will rocket to the top of the charts next. But, no matter what takes place (or who doesn’t make it out alive?), the joy of this season is watching the rest of these weirdos and misfits band together to save each other … and themselves. Watch it on Netflix.
Nathan Fielder is back with another show that toes the line between awkward and brilliant. His first go-round was Nathan for You, the Comedy Central series where he “helped” people “fix” their businesses. Now he’s got this project, in which he “helps” people plan out conversations and various personal interactions in very, very deep detail. It’s a lot and it’s hard to explain on paper (please do imagine Nathan Fielder pitching this to a confused HBO executive), but it also sounds like a perfectly imagined Nathan Fielder show. Worth a shot. Watch it on HBO Max
The good news here is that the vampires are back. The bad is that… well, there’s not really any bad news. How could there be? This show remains relentlessly fun and silly in a way that almost feels like they’re getting away with something, like someone in charge stopped paying attention and they’re just running wild in their own little sandbox. This is, to be clear, a compliment of the highest order. One of our best shows is back and still humming along in peak form. This is worth celebrating. Watch it on FX/Hulu.
There’s so much we know and so much we don’t know about what’s on the other side of Better Call Saul‘s finale. So much anxiety over what happens to Kim Wexler and, ultimately, what happens to Jimmy/Saul after the events of Breaking Bad. But as the season premiere demonstrated, the thrill is in the journey (with surprising turns, masterful storytelling, and gripping visuals), not just in the destination, meaning sit back, relax, and try and enjoy the shooting star that is this all-time best series’ final notes. Watch it on AMC Plus.
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