The Rundown is a weekly column that highlights some of the biggest, weirdest, and most notable events of the week in entertainment. The number of items could vary, as could the subject matter. It will not always make a ton of sense. Some items might not even be about entertainment, to be honest, or from this week. The important thing is that it’s Friday, and we are here to have some fun.
ITEM NUMBER ONE – Listen to me
I have tremendous news: the trailer for the third movie in the Magic Mike trilogy — Magic Mike’s Last Dance — dropped this week. It has Channing Tatum and Salma Hayek and various thrusts and gyrations taking place across Europe. Watch it now if you haven’t watched it yet. Watch it again if you have. Please never underestimate how wild it is that we have a full-on big-budget movie franchise about greased-up male strippers traveling the world that straight men and straight women and gay men and gay women all get kind of equally fired up about. The degree of difficulty on this was remarkably high. And yet. Here we are. It’s kind of incredible.
I really only have one complaint about all of this, which I tipped off in the headline and which any of you probably could have guessed anyway if you’ve spent more than 45 seconds around me: This third film in the trilogy should have been a heist movie.
I say this for three primary reasons, which I will outline below…
REASON ONE: It feels right. The first movie was an underdog story, kind of like Rocky if Rocky had been a Tampa exotic dancer instead of a boxer from Philadelphia, which is a wild thing to type and have be completely true. The second was a road trip movie with a bunch of sweet himbos on a bus and occasionally inside a convenience store covered in Cheetos and water. It just makes sense that the third movie would be a heist film, kind of like how the Fast & Furious movies started out about cars going vroom and the Fast Five was about robbing a Brazilian crime lord. Am I suggesting that they keep making Magic Mike movies until Channing Tatum goes to outer space with Ludacris and possibly gives a lap dance to an alien queen? Hmm. I think I am.
REASON TWO: There is history here. These movies are directed by Steven Soderbergh, who also directed the Ocean’s trilogy and Out of Sight and, perhaps most notably here, Logan Lucky, a heist film that starred Channing Tatum. Everyone here has experience and is good at this and it would be something squarely inside their various wheelhouses. It feels right. We should not fight the natural progression of things.
REASON THREE: I would like it. I really would. Show me Channing Tatum and Joe Manganiello in tearaway security guard uniforms with glistening torsos hidden underneath. Let them hypnotize female pit bosses with a series of wiggles and thrusts. Have them slither through a room filled with crisscrossing lasers that bounce off of their shiny abdomens and shoot back into the source and fry millions of dollars worth of high-tech security equipment. Bring back Al Pacino as Terry Benedict and give me a series of shots of him frowning at various monitors from inside a bunker. I would watch this movie right now if it were on television. I wouldn’t even finish typing this paragraph. I need you to know that I am not joking about this.
Please. Please. Channing Tatum and Steven Soderbergh. Consider this. It’s not too late. Do it for the people. And for me. Do it for the people and me.
ITEM NUMBER TWO – Hey, speaking of dancing and/or Logan Lucky
Here’s the new commercial for Belvedere vodka. It features Daniel Craig dancing and strutting and smirking through the halls of a hotel. I love it very much. I’ve probably watched it 20 times this week. I bet I will watch it another five or six times this weekend. It makes me so happy. Look at him and his face and his arms and legs. He is so happy to be done playing James Bond. Between this and stuff like Knives Out and Logan Lucky, he has become devoted to silliness to a degree that I did not see coming but really appreciate. Good for Daniel Craig.
Variety has a really solid write-up on the spot — which was directed by Taika Waititi, one of those facts that make perfect sense after you learn it — and the Bond of it all. It’s a good read. Here’s the highlight.
Here’s what’s such cool fun about the Belvedere commercial. Craig, playing “Himself,” gallivants through the hotel in a funky, hot, preening dance-club way that is so not James Bond, yet the joke is that it’s almost as if it were Bond doing it. Craig exchanges the rock-hard masculinity of Bond for a different kind of masculinity, one that’s a lot more sexually fluid. Yet if you look at his worn-granite face, he’s the same rugged king-stud dude. In the commercial, his face tells one story and his body tells another. The story the commercial is telling is about the dialogue between the two.
Agreed. I’m glad someone out there watched this and took the time to piece together this interpretation, both because I enjoyed reading it and because it allowed me to blockquote something in this section to look smart instead of just typing “imagine you are staying in a five-star hotel and wake up and stumble to your door to grab the waffles and coffee and orange juice you ordered from room service the night before and you crack it open and look to your left and the first thing you see is international movie star Daniel Craig sashaying down the gallery toward you.”
The worst part of this would be — even as you watched it happen in three dimensions right in front of your face — knowing that no one would ever believe you. They might now, though, after this commercial. Let’s go ahead and that to the list of reasons it’s all just very good.
ITEM NUMBER THREE – Being a stuntman seems cool
In what appears to be my ongoing quest to hammer John Wick content into this column every week, I come to you with this: Collider interviewed the franchise’s director and general mastermind Chad Stahleski to talk to him about the arc of the saga and the recently released trailer for the fourth movie and dogs. Lots of dog chat. Which is fair, for a lot of reasons, some having to do with the whole arc of these movies starting with a dead puppy and some having to do with the thing where it’s just fun to talk to people about dogs for a while. Try it this weekend.
Anyway, the dog talk led to this, which has rocketed into my top five behind-the-scenes movie things ever.
You have to get to know your friends. So in order for the dog to be very playful, and safe, and have the confidence just like a human would, they have to spend time with each individual stunt guy. So we had to rotate every hour. One of our 10 main stunt team guys would go and play. That was his job. He had to go play with the dogs, and get tackled by the dogs, and play Frisbee with the dog. So you get acclimated to our canine friend and then that’s how we started working it. But it was about a little over five months.
There are parts of being a stuntman that do not seem fun to me. Throwing yourself off buildings, lighting yourself on fire, heading into the emergency room with yet another broken bone or squirting wound or charred extremity. This part seems cool, though. The only downside I see is that it would make it impossible to complain about your job to anyone.
YOU, A STUNTMAN: Wow, my legs sure are sore from playing with those dogs all day on the set of the smash-hit Keanu Reeves movie.
YOUR SIGNIFICANT OTHER, WHO IS LIKE A NURSE WHO JUST WORKED A DOUBLE IN THE ER AND HAD TO SPEND TWO HOURS IN THE EXPOSURE UNIT BECAUSE A PATIENT’S BLOOD SQUIRTED IN THEIR EYE: Sorry to hear that.
This is a real problem.
ITEM NUMBER FOUR – I do not think I would enjoy explaining this to Oprah but good for Quinta Brunson
Please tune in
pic.twitter.com/0o9dPJTmgB
— quinta brunson (@quintabrunson) November 15, 2022
We can knock this one out with a series of bullet points:
- Abbott Elementary creator and star Quinta Brunson is going to sit down for a long interview with Oprah
- This is cool
- Quinta Brunson rules and I am happy to see her blowing up to “lengthy sit down with Oprah” levels
- Quinta Brunson also played a very loosely adapted version of Oprah in the Weird Al movie
- Imagine you played a goofy version of Oprah in a movie and then you sat four feet away from her and she asked you about it
- I do not think I would enjoy that at all
- I would immediately retreat into “student getting a stern talking to from the principal” mode
- No thank you
Congrats and good luck, Quinta.
ITEM NUMBER FIVE – Finally, Christmas movies for me
It is my great pleasure to report to you that HGTV and the Food Network, for reasons that are borderline unknowable but can be loosely covered by “if Hallmark can do this crap so can we,” are getting into the business of Christmas movies this year. Like, they are making their own. With actors and stories and everything. And guest appearances by the big-name state of the networks. It’s extremely weird and kind of insane and I enjoy it very, very much.
An example will help. Here is the plot summary of the upcoming Food Network Christmas film A Gingerbread Christmas, starring Tiya Sircar from The Good Place and Duff Goldman from Ace of Cakes.
“After a devastating workplace development throws Hazel Stanley’s (Sircar) job prospects as a full-time architect into question, she leaves NYC to spend the holidays with her father Ted (Varughese) in her suburban Chicago hometown. While there, she discovers that the family bakery is even worse off than she imagined, having been on the decline since the passing of her mother. And to add insult to injury, her former best friend Shelby (Teresa) has opened a trendy new bake shop across the street. When all seems to be lost, she gets the idea to enter a Gingerbread house competition led by homegrown food celebrity Mark Clemmons (Goldman) offering a $100k prize — enough to get the ailing bakery back on track. While working on her magnificent cookie edifice, a romance begins to bloom with a local contractor James Meadows (Bendavid) who — along with his daughter — has been helping her father out by lending his baking prowess to the place while trying to fix it up in his spare time. A series of frustrations and misunderstandings threaten to tear them apart, but will the magic of the holiday lead everyone to have a Merry Christmas?”
Dear lord, this one checks all the boxes. We have:
- An architect from the big city
- Who returns home to help with a struggling family business
- And enters a baking competition
- With the help of a single dad who presumably has a jawline you could slice a sheet cake with
It’s perfect. I am so proud of everyone involved in making this happen. All I need now is for this to be a big enough success that they do it again next year with double the budget so I can pitch them my idea about Santa Claus breaking his ankle while going down a chimney and Guy Fieri stepping in to take over. I am barely joking about this. They already have a lot in common.
I will not rest until this happens. That’s not true. I will rest a lot. But I’ll be thinking about it. Sometimes. When I remember. But still. Something to consider.
READER MAIL
If you have questions about television, movies, food, local news, weather, or whatever you want, shoot them to me on Twitter or at [email protected] (put “RUNDOWN” in the subject line). I am the first writer to ever answer reader mail in a column. Do not look up this last part.
From Joe:
I’m not sure if you remember the awesome History Channel show Dogfights, where they would talk about famous air battles and interview historians or even the pilots who were part of the conflict, all while using early 2000s computer technology to re-enact the battle. The show was great and it featured the best moment to ever happen on History, when Jefferson Deblanc talks about how he was rescued after getting shot down in the Pacific Theater in World War Two. This man had to have told this story a million times and I’m sure he loved doing so each and every time.
Okay. First things first, Joe included the clip with the timestamp, which I appreciate almost as much as the fact that this man’s name is Jefferson Deblanc. Really great stuff all around.
https://www.youtube.com/clip/Ugkx_fKnlvV7WXOJ_PrEL7A5UNrzjNtv4UM4
The other thing: So back when I was a freshman in college, a million years ago and before my spinal cord injury, a buddy of mine named Rob found a flier advertising a job making $20/hr to work during a Philadelphia Eagles game. We responded and showed up and it turned out the gig was like a security thing with bright yellow “EVENT STAFF” coats and walkie-talkies and all of it. At one point, we were stationed down by the field while the cheerleaders were rehearsing their dance to the song “Let’s Get Loud” by Jennifer Lopez. I turned to Rob and said “How funny would it be if we just walked into the end zone and started dancing, too?” and Rob thought for a second and motioned to our Event Staff jackets and said “Who’s going to stop us?”
So we did. For a while. The cheerleaders saw us and pointed and giggled. It was awesome.
I bring this up now because I tell this story to every single person I meet and it is maybe 10 percent as good as Jefferson Deblanc’s story. If I were him, I would never shut up about it for a single second. I would not be a good fighter pilot.
AND NOW, THE NEWS
To the Big Apple!
Customs officers at New York’s Kennedy International Airport seized $450,000 worth of cocaine from a traveler who was smuggling the drugs in the wheels of her wheelchair, federal authorities announced.
Two things are important to note here…
The first thing is that this is at least the third time this year a person has been busted smuggling cocaine into an airport inside a wheelchair. It also happened in North Carolina and in Italy. The second note is something I need to be very clear about: None of these people were me. I have never tried to smuggle drugs through an airport inside my wheelchair. As far as any of you know.
The bust happened Nov. 10 when Customs and Border Patrol officers stopped a woman traveling from Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic with a wheelchair whose wheels weren’t turning, agency officials said.
The officers X-rayed the wheelchair and noticed an “anomaly” in all four wheels, CPB officials said in a news release. Officers checked the tires and found a white powder that tested positive for cocaine, they said.
I have this image in my head of these big lopsided tires going CLOMPCLOMPCLOMP through the terminal and leaving a puffy cloud of cocaine dust in their wake. People behind who walk through it getting high as a kite and being jittery and miserable trapped in a huge metal tube on a cross-country flight. This is an episode of 9-1-1 that I would watch tonight.
A total of 28 pounds (12.7 kilos) of cocaine with a street value of $450,000 was removed from the wheels, officials said.
So, a couple notes that I want to cover before we wrap this up:
- This is actually kind of a bummer because a lot of disabled people struggle financially and might be doing stuff like this to make money to pay for like medical supplies or groceries or rent
- I really must stress once again that I have never smuggled cocaine or any other drugs inside my wheelchair, unless you count the times we hid a bottle of bourbon in my lap and snuck it into my dorm building when I went back to school after my injury, which I like to think is more of a “boys will be boys” situation than whatever this is
- I am serious about this being an episode of 9-1-1
Thank you.