Month: October 2022

Earlier this month, country legend Loretta Lynn died at 90 years old. Since then, Country Music Television (CMT) has been putting together a tribute special, Coal Miner’s Daughter: A Celebration Of The Life & Music Of Loretta Lynn, that aired last night (October 30). Surprisingly, Taylor Swift made an unannounced appearance on the program via a short video clip.

In it, Swift says (as Hollywood Life notes):

“I’m so grateful to Loretta for being an example, not only for songwriters everywhere, but more specifically female songwriters. She was so ahead of her time. The way she exercised brutal, truthful, fearless honesty every time she sat down to write a song is something that changed music forever and paved the way for every songwriter who’s trying to be truthful and honest today.”

Back in 2016, Lynn was supportive of Swift’s shift away from her country roots to more pop-oriented music, saying, “Taylor: get it, girl! That’s what she wanted. I am about as pop as corn bread.”

Shortly after Lynn’s passing, Jack White — who collaborated with Lynn on her 2004 album Van Lear Rose — offered some kind words, saying in a video message, “What a sad day today is: We lost one of the greats, Loretta Lynn. I said when I was first asked about her what I thought, and I said years ago that I thought she was the greatest female singer-songwriter of the 20th century. I still believe that.”

Multiple times per week, our TV and film experts will list the most important ten streaming selections for you to pop into your queues. We’re not strictly operating upon reviews or accrued streaming clicks (although yes, we’ve scoured the streaming site charts) but, instead, upon those selections that are really worth noticing amid the churning sea of content. There’s a lot out there, after all, and your time is valuable.

TIE: 10. Winchesters (CW series streaming in various places)

Jensen Ackles fans go where he goes, and that led to a nice little boost for The Boys, in which he portrayed Captain America parody Soldier Boy. Although that character ended up on ice, Jensen’s been busy elsewhere. He’s plugged in on Big Sky and returned to the Supernatural franchise in this prequel series that sees him as Dean Winchester in narrator form. This series focuses upon Dean’s parents, Vietnam veteran John and demon hunter Mary. There are nefarious forces and super secrets at hand, along with warring family legacies that rear up before this installment collides with the O.G. series.

TIE: 10. The Good Nurse (Netflix movie)

You’ve heard of Typhoid Mary, now meet Charles Cullen, who intentionally killed dozens of patients in his line of work. Cullen is portrayed by chameleon Eddie Redmayne in this dreary tale. His only real foil happens to be a nurse portrayed by Jessica Chastain. Her character illustrates the ironic downfalls of an institution that fails to even provide adequate care for its own workers. This isn’t the easiest watch, but award-calibre performers give enough reason for plopping this one in the queue.

9. Halloween Ends (Universal movie streaming on Peacock)

It’s the end of a long-winded era for sure, and here, Jamie Lee Curtis takes a final lap as Laurie Strode, who’s been dealing with far too many decades of being sister to a horrific serial killer. David Gordon Green takes this one home, which will hopefully make you completely forget about those Rob Zombie pictures. He’s hopefully forgotten them already, too, and it’s fitting that Danny McBride helped Green get this last leg of the franchise moving and puts it in the grave, so everyone can rest a little bit easier, and everyone can move onto other obsessions. That includes Green, known for Pineapple Express but now moving onto The Exorcist for Blumhouse.

8. Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story (Netflix series) and Conversations With A Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes (Netflix docuseries)

Yes, we’re still doing this. Ryan Murphy is as well, and he’s the reigning Netflix king while bringing this dramatized and gross story to life, so we can see too many people asking Evan Peters’ Jeffrey Dahmer why his apartment of horrors emits screams and smells. When you’re done there, check out Joe Berlinger’s documentary series that zeroes in on the procedural angle of putting a serial killer behind bars.

7. Star Wars: Tales Of The Jedi (Disney+ series)

If you’re finishing up this latest round of Andor and wouldn’t mind something a little less grounded from a galaxy far, far away, then dive into this animated anthology series that takes us through a few key paths. That includes a detailing of Ahsoka Tano’s life and a pre-Dark Side Count Dooku. Enjoy those tweaks to the canon while preparing your minds for the live-action Ahsoka starring Rosario Dawson.

6. Interview With The Vampire (AMC series streaming on AMC+)

This series is not only better and more satisfying than the O.G. 1990s movie starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, but it’s also going to last longer. AMC already renewed the show for a second season, so we can all settle back and enjoy Lestat (Sam Reid) and Louis (Jacob Anderson) decloseting their relationship and know that hearts won’t be broken by an abbreviated story. As well, we’ll soon see more Anne Rice materializing onscreen when The Mayfair Witches debuts and stars Alexandra Daddario.

5. The White Lotus (HBO series streaming on HBO Max)

The sleeper series surprised plenty of people with Armond did, you know, that thing, and this season will see Jennifer Coolidge’s boozy socialite in Sicily, where the show will follow a new smattering of dissatisfied wealthy types. There’s a lot of raciness in this season, and Aubrey Plaza stars as well, which leads to a perfection of the formula while we all long to always-never take vacations again.

4. Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities (Netflix series)

October has been full of rightful and wannabe contributions to the horror realm, and this selection firmly belongs in the former category. The streaming charts have been eating this one up as the horror maestro presents a carefully crafted anthology series full of the most sinister tales imaginable. We’ve got The Babadook director Jennifer Kent and inaugural Twilight helmer Catherine Hardwicke with contributions, including an H.P. Lovecraft tale that hits differently in 2022. Other directors include Ana Lily Amirpour, Panos Cosmatos, Guillermo Navarro, David Prior, Vincenzo Natali, and Keith Thomas. It’s almost the end of witching season, so make this one go out with a bang.

3. Don’t Worry Darling (New Line/WB Film Streaming On POV)

You’ve heard about all of the alleged drama and Olivia Wilde’s special salad dressing. In addition, there’s confirmation that this still-circulating drama is more captivating than what actually materializes in this movie. People are still snapping this one up, though, while the movie plays in theaters. Maybe it’s the Harry Style effect? I still need to hold out hope that he spit on Chris Pine, even though he didn’t, and every day is a good day to appreciate Florence Pugh. The streaming price is steep on this one, but it’s a decent wine-watch.

2. The Watcher (Netflix series)

Netflix and the Internet can’t quit Ryan Murphy, and the feeling must be mutual. Naomi Watts and Bobby Cannivale star as a terrorized couple who’s attempting to figure out who the hell is sending threatening letters that detail their house and their children. There’s no definitive to be seen here, but there’s a lot of fun offshoots, and fortunately, the show remains relatively trigger free while delivering the goods in terms of salacious delights. While stalkerdom is never funny, this show does successfully delve into camp while introducing a whole host of strange neighbors (including characters played by Margo Martindale, Richard Kind, and Mia Farrow) and the worst realtor ever, played by Jennifer Coolidge.

1. House of the Dragon (HBO series on HBO Max)

Dammit, we have to wait until 2024 for more Targaryen drama. That’s not fantastic, but while we console ourselves, it’s worth revisiting how bad Daemon screwed the dragon-pooch and how Matt Smith is a genius who made the final moment happen. And then we should all consider what it would be like to actually have a dragon while reveling in this world we live in, which somehow led to Neil Gaiman fixated upon bodily functions and discussing them in public with George R.R. Martin. We’re in a gilded age of content, people. Crack open a canned Negroni Spagliato (with Prosecco in it), and for the love of god, keep your socks on while watching the season all over again.

Sunday’s race at Martisville was the last opportunity for drivers in the playoffs to punch their ticket to the Championship 4, who will race for the NASCAR Cup Series title in Phoenix next week.

On the final lap, three of the spots were up for grabs, with Christopher Bell winning the race to ensure he got a spot alongside Joey Logano. Behind him, the battle for the final two spots couldn’t have been any closer as Ross Chastain pulled off one of the greatest moves of all time to pass a number of cars, including Denny Hamlin, on the final turn to get to the finish line behind Chase Elliott and knock Hamlin out.

Chastain floored it into the wall going into turn 4 and just held it wide open as his car scraped along the wall, flying by everyone in the corner and eventually slipping just past Hamlin before the start/finish line.

It is an insane move and Chastain explained afterwards that it’s something he’s done before…in NASCAR 2005 on the Nintendo Gamecube when he was a kid and he always wanted to know if it’d work in real life. It turns out, it does and it got him into the last race of the season with a chance to win the Cup Series title.

For every kid that ever tried some wild stuff in a video game to win a race, this is vindication for us all that we weren’t cheating or doing something you could only do in the game. Chastain did it in real life and made himself a legend in the process.

The Detroit Pistons haven’t gotten off to the start to the season they hoped in Year 2 with Cade Cunningham at the helm, as their young stars have had the struggles young players often do in terms of consistency and efficiency, which is part of the reason the team made the move it did on Sunday.

Prior to the Pistons home game against the Warriors, ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski brought word that they were inking Bojan Bogdanovic to a two-year contract extension that will keep him in Detroit through the 2024-25 season for $19.5 million per year — just about the same number he’s currently at.

Bogdanovic is one of a few veterans on the Pistons roster and the sharpshooter has brought some life to the offense as a catch-and-shoot threat opposite his young and talented guards in Cunningham and Jaden Ivey. Bogdanovic is leading the team in scoring through six games at 23 points per, knocking down 51.1 percent of his three-point attempts, and while that rate won’t continue, his presence has been big in opening up the Pistons offense.

As for the price tag, it’s a big payday for Bogdanovic, but that’s part of the tax of getting quality veterans onto teams still in the rebuilding process — see: JJ Redick in Philadelphia. His contract also won’t impact the long-term cap situation for the Pistons when it matters most, as he’ll come off the books before it’s time to sign Cade Cunningham to a likely max extension.

By today’s standards, E.T., the lovable extra-terrestrial of the Steven Spielberg classic, isn’t so believable. He’s a little clunky, a little stiff, especially when he waddles. (That said, the 2002 edition, which graffitis CGI onto what was once a technical marvel, is grossly inferior.) But at least one cast member thought he was real: seven-year-old Drew Barrymore.

On this coming Monday’s edition of The Drew Barrymore Show, the actress-turned-morning chat show host can be seen reuniting with the other co-leads of 1982’s highest-grossing film. A preview clip shows her chatting with Henry Thomas, Robert MacNaughton, and Dee Wallace about how, at her young age, she was convinced the puppet-animatronic was a real creature from another world.

“I really loved him in such a profound way,” she confessed, adding that she “would go and take lunch to him.” One time she even asked one of the wardrobe crew to get him a scarf, “because he was gonna get cold.”

Wallace told her that they actually helped create the illusion that E.T. was a real being, at least for her. “We found you over there just talking away to E.T. and so we let director Steven [Spielberg] know,” she recalled. “And so Steven, from that time on, appointed two guys to keep E.T. alive so whenever you came over to talk to him, he could react to you.”

The four also have bad news for anyone expecting E.T. to get one of those belated sequels that’s all the rage these days: There probably won’t be one — at least with them or Spielberg. Thomas said it was impossible to imagine a follow-up without the original’s screenwriter, Melissa Mathison, who passed away in 2015.

“She was really the heart and soul of it,” he said.

Wallace chimed in, saying, “It’s a classic, leave it a classic.”

Barrymore then remembered Spielberg saying he would “never” make a sequel to the film, one of his biggest hits. “And in that moment I thought, ‘Oh that’s a bummer because that doesn’t bring us all back together again for another round,’” she recalled, “but I also understood and respected and completely knew that it was all about preservation of integrity for him.”

Not that Spielberg isn’t one for nostalgia. His forthcoming next film, The Fabelmans, is a rare semi-autobiographical work concerning his sometimes fraught but at least movie-mad childhood.

(Via People)

The Carolina Panthers and Atlanta Falcons met on Sunday with first place in the NFC South on the line somehow despite being a game between 2-5 and 3-4 teams.

While it wasn’t the marquee game on paper, it became the game of the day as the two teams traded leads in the fourth quarter with some outrageous playmaking in the final minutes. The biggest play came from PJ Walker and DJ Moore, as Walker uncorked a bomb that traveled 70 yards in the air, with Moore somehow getting over the top of the defense to catch what appeared to be the game-winning touchdown.

However, DJ Moore ripping his helmet off in celebration earned him a 15-yard penalty, which made the extra point a 48-yard attempt. Naturally, that got tugged just wide left and a Panthers win became 10 more minutes of football — with the Falcons naturally winning the toss to get the ball in overtime.

It’s a miserable way to have a win taken away from you, particularly considering how great a play that was from Walker — who threw an all-time great pass on the money — and Moore. That said, the rule about not being able to remove your helmet on the field has been in the NFL for a very long time, so this isn’t something new that Moore would be surprised by. Moore was shown with a sheepish smile on the sideline after the missed extra point, as he could only hope to get a chance to atone for his mistake (again, after a great play) in overtime if the Panthers could get a stop on defense.

Luckily, the defense did him one better, picking off Marcus Mariota on a terrible deep shot attempt and then returning it inside the red zone, allowing the Panthers to set up the game-winning field goal with three runs. However, Eddy Pineiro again missed wide left from 34 yards, giving the Falcons life once again.

Naturally, the Falcons marched down the field to set up their own game-winning kick and Younghoe Koo didn’t miss.

It is a dismal way for the Panthers to lose, with Moore and Pineiro both feeling sick after an incredible effort to have two chances to win the game. The Falcons, meanwhile, continue to win games somehow and are now first in the NFC South at 4-4, a game ahead of the Saints and Bucs.

It turns out people love rooting for the anti-hero. With her 10th studio album, Midnights, Taylor Swift has earned her 11th No. 1 album (counting her re-recordings) on the Billboard 200 chart. According to Billboard‘s data source, Luminate, the album pulled in 1.578 million equivalent album units in its week of release, making it the biggest first week for any album in seven years.

The last album to accomplish such a feat was Adele’s 25, which sold 3.482 million units in its first week of release in 2015.

Even before the end of the full week of release, Swift had broken several records with Midnights, less than 24 hours after Midnights’ release, the album broke the record for the most first-day streams on Spotify. The album also helped her break the record for most streamed artist within the course of 24 hours.

Shortly before the album’s release, Swift announced the Midnights Music Movies, a series of music videos accompanying the tracks on the album. So far, she has only released visuals for “Anti-Hero” and “Bejeweled,” however, plans to drop several more.

During an interview with Jimmy Fallon last week, she teased a potential Midnights tour, after not having toured in four years.

Midnights is out now via Republic. Stream it here.

The Chicago Bears have not had a great season and offensive struggles have been a big reason why they came into Sunday’s game in Dallas with a 3-4 record.

The focal point for many has been the play of second year quarterback Justin Fields, who has struggled with consistency throwing the football, and hasn’t been helped by a bad receiving corps and play-calling that hasn’t exactly played to his strengths. The good news was that on Sunday, Fields wasn’t the main problem for the Bears, as he had a pair of touchdowns (one rushing and one passing) and no interceptions in the third quarter.

The bad news for the Bears was their defense had no answers for Dak Prescott and the Cowboys, who rolled up 35 points on them by the mid-third quarter. It was there that the Chicago offense finally gave way, with a David Montgomery fumble on third and 17 deep in their own territory, that was compounded by a rookie mistake from Fields when he jumped clear over Micah Parsons who was laying on the ground after recovering the fumble rather than touching him down.

Fields literally has to try not to touch Parsons on this play, leaping completely over him after coming inches from Parsons on the ground, allowing the Cowboys star defender to pop up and jog to the end zone for the most improbable of touchdowns.

The biggest mistake of this play is, of course, the fumble by Montgomery, but it’s emblematic of the Bears struggles this season that they would compound that with another error on the part of Fields, who in his second year should be accustomed to the NFL’s down by contact rules compared to college. This play all but snuffed out any hopes of a comeback for Chicago, when they had at one point pulled to within five of the Cowboys in the third quarter.

What will happen to Twitter under Elon Musk? Will the Tesla honcho be a benevolent leader, keeping it free of Nazis and other dangerous folks? Or will he take his free speech absolutism to ridiculous lengths and drive all the nice people away? Judging from his first days in power, it’s not looking good. Soon as he took the reins, slurs and misinformation skyrocketed. Now Musk himself is adding fuel to an already raging fire

As caught by The Daily Beast, Musk responded to a tweet Hillary Clinton had written condemning the toxic rhetoric that may have caused the attempted murder of Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul. Since the attack, those on the right haven’t offered much in the way of self-reflection. Instead some have spread baseless conspiracy theories in an attempt to deflect blame. Musk got in on those shenanigans.

“There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye,” Musk tweeted Sunday morning. He also shared a link to a piece from online conservative site Santa Monica Observer, which alleges that Paul Pelosi was actually having a liaison with a male sex worker. The post has since been taken down.

This particular conspiracy has been — surprise surprise — popular among the far right, even if it requires painful attempts to explain away such factors as the broken window and 911 call. Meanwhile, this particular conservative rag has previously shared such tinfoil claims that Hillary Clinton sent a body double to debate Donald Trump in 2016 and that Kanye West has a big time government job.

Hours later, Musk deleted his tweet. But the damage had already been done, with it receiving thousands of shares. That such a scurrilous link had been shared by the new owner of a social media service notorious for the dissemination of misinformation is not exactly reassuring. But hey, it was fun while it lasted.

(Via The Daily Beast)

Lil Wayne brought the treats to New Orleans last night during his annual Lil Weezyana fest. During his set, he ran down some of the biggest hits from his catalog, including, “Mrs. Officer,” “B.M.F. (Blowin’ Money Fast),” “Mirror,” and “How To Love.” Late into his set, Wayne surprised the audience with a special guest.

“Can you please make some noise for this foreigner?” said Wayne. “Let’s show him a good time in America.”

The aforementioned foreigner was Toronto native, Drake, who was signed to Wayne’s Young Money label back in 2007.

“New Orleans is one of the few cities that shaped my career,” said Drake.

Drake performed for a reported 18 minutes. He and Wayne performed “She Will” from the latter’s 2011 album, Tha Carter IV. He then performed “The Motto,” “In My Feelings,” “God’s Plan,” “Nonstop,” “Jimmy Cooks,” and “Knife Talk,” according to Nola.com.

Also during his set, Drake shared a story about a time in New Orleans, when he realized he had made it in the realm of music.

“The day I knew I made it,” he said,” was, I was outside the W hotel in New Orleans, and I walked over to the corner, and there was a guy that had a bootleg CD. It was an album I put out called So Far Gone, and I don’t know if you remember that. But he had bootleg of that sh*t, and that was the first time in my life that I knew I made it. I love New Orleans and everything that you’ve ever done.”

Check out a clip of the two performing “The Motto” above.