Year: 2022

While the world drowns in Jokers, there’s only been two live-action Riddlers in Batman movies: Jim Carrey in Batman Forever and Paul Dano in The Batman. (I’m recusing Frank Gorshin from 1966’s Batman because he, like Cesar Romero, is in a category unto himself.) But the two actors had different takes on the villain befitting the mood of the movies they were in: Carrey plays the Riddler like a rhyming cartoon character, while Dano is a disturbed Zodiac-like livestreamer. Both are memorable in different ways.

Carrey told Unilad that he hasn’t seen The Batman, but he has “mixed emotions” on Dano’s “very dark version” of the Riddler. “To each his own and all that. I love him as an actor, he’s a tremendous actor,” the Sonic the Hedgehog 2 actor said, but “there’s a spot of worry in me over gaffer-taping people’s faces and encouraging people to do the same. Some sickos out there that might adopt that method.”

He continued:

“I do have a conscience about the things I choose. Robotnik has cartoon bombs and no one gets hurt. I know there’s a place for it, and I don’t want to criticize it, but it’s not my kind of thing… It’s very well done, those movies are very well done.”

Carrey (who previously denounced the violence of Kick-Ass 2) is unintentionally making the case for making Batman goofy again. I’ll sanction this buffoonery!

(Via Unilad)

Glass Animals slowly but surely spent 2021 becoming one of the biggest bands in the world, and now that their slow-burning 2020 single “Heat Waves” is sitting at the top of the charts for the fourth week, they’re on the cusp of breaking a huge record for UK bands. If it hits a fifth week, Dave Bayley and his cohort will officially surpass the success of Spice Girls’ iconic hit, “Wannabe,” so that’s pretty huge news! Also on the docket this week is the Grammys ceremony on Sunday, where the Oxford band is up for the coveted Best New Artist award.

In anticipation of that category, Spotify has been partnering with all the nominees to deliver their Spotify Singles feature, and all the artists are covering songs from former nominees in the category. So Glass Animals unearthed their cover of Lorde’s “Solar Power,” previously debuted on the BBC Radio 1 Lounge, for the event. “I chose “Solar Power” because in a time when we were all stuck indoors a bit – this song made me feel like I was on a beach….we all needed a bit of that!” Bayley said of the cover. “It’s a stunning song and then I just had a version of it in my head where it was faster with a gospel choir behind it….so….we made it!”

Check that out below, along with a new version of the band’s latest single, “I Don’t Want To Talk (I Just Want To Dance).”

Captions are functional, first and foremost. They exist so that people who are hard of hearing can follow the dialogue and action in the things they are watching. That’s a good thing. It’s always better to have options that make cool stuff accessible for more people. Everyone should get to enjoy, say, for example, The Righteous Gemstones, a terrific show that is screencapped up above, delightfully mid-vomit, as described by the aforementioned captions. It’s a nice piece of business.

This brings me to my point: Everyone should watch television with the captions on, in almost all situations, even if your hearing is not an issue. I started doing it a few years ago and it has improved my viewing experience a lot. I watch everything with the captions on and the volume up, with the exception of live sports (the captions often lag because they’re catching up to the broadcast and it can be distracting) and stand-up comedy (the captions can get ahead of the delivery and step on the joke). I don’t even remember exactly when or why I started — the general reason was “to make sure I’m not missing anything important, but I can’t rule out anything much less reasonable — but I’m here now and I love it.

And I think you should join me. Start watching television with the captions on. It’s great, just helpful and fun and kind of like unlocking a little secret you’ve been missing out on for years. I’m going to lay out my actual reasoning below, in three parts, at least one of which will involve multiple screencaps of award-nominated actors farting on camera, but feel free to stop reading whenever I’ve convinced you. We all have important stuff to get to. I won’t be offended. The point is that you listen to me.

Okay, here we go.

PART I — Your big, fancy flat-screen television might have garbage speakers

Here’s your practical reason. Televisions have been getting thinner over the years as manufacturers attempt to give you the most sparkling and crisp picture possible in as small a package as they can. That’s cool, in a way, because it’s basically become like hanging a painting on the wall except the painting also plays the Super Bowl. (Take that, Picasso.) But this focus on thinning out the product has left less room for speakers, or at least the kind of speakers one would hope for from a product that they sit in front of for hours a day.

Wired discussed this dilemma in a recent article. It’s actually Wired UK, which I mention only because the word “telly” is in this blockquote and I don’t want you to get distracted. We need to stay focused here.

The problem, of course, is inherent in flatscreen TVs themselves. Everyone wants their nice new telly to be as slim as possible – but that makes the job of getting worthwhile sound out of them almost impossible. There’s just nowhere in that big, flat, glass-and-plastic and super-resonant frame to fit worthwhile speakers of a decent size – and consequently the sound your TV makes is as weedy, insubstantial and impoverished as the pictures it makes are detailed, bright and bold.

The solution most people point to for this problem is “buy a soundbar,” but soundbars are expensive and do not help you make a slew of funny screencaps that you can send to your idiot friends. This second thing is very important. So important, in fact, that we will now discuss it again, in full, in part two.

PART II — You are missing out on some primo supplemental comedy

To be clear, what we have here is Kieran Culkin, in character as Roman Roy on Succession, doing baby noises and fart sounds to mock one of his siblings. It was good live, with action and sound, and you should all know this because you’re all probably watching Succession. But the captions make it magical. Look at that image up there. It’s practically art. It makes me so happy. I saw it live on my television and then rushed to my computer to make the screencap and I’ve used it maybe 500 times since.

I have a great deal of respect for the person who wrote that caption. It would have been easy to phone it in, maybe just with a “[baby noises, fart sound],” but no. We got a whole “mimics in childish babble” here. That is both helpful — more descriptive, more accurate — for the people who rely on it and just massively funnier phrasing, in general, for everyone to enjoy. It’s a real two-fer. We love the efficiency.

Hey, want more examples of how subtitles can make watching television more fun through the use of out-of-context screencaps? I hope so, because I am about to post a bunch. Here’s one of my favorites, from the short-lined modern-day Dallas continuation series that aired on TNT a few years back.

What we have here:

• Television icon Judith Light
• Doing cocaine at a rodeo
• And then saying “Hot damn. Mama like.”

It is maybe my favorite moment in the history of television and I like that I have it immortalized like this. The captions really add something to the experience. You need to “Hot damn. Mama like” to drive the point home. I can and will make an argument that this moment plays better as a captioned GIF than it did in full motion. It’s incredible.

Also incredible, for different reasons: This series of screencaps from Better Call Saul in which Mike Ehrmantraut, played by Jonathan Banks, groans. He groans so much on this show. It would be easy to miss without documentation. That’s what we’re doing here: documenting things for history. Groans, specifically. We are documenting groans.

Also, farts. We are documenting farts, too. There’s the fake one up there by Kieran Culkin, but there are also these from Jeremy Irons in the terrific Watchmen series from a few years ago. Again, the specificity is important here, both so the people who need the captions can get the joke more completely, and because it makes for a wonderful little piece of still art.

Please, enjoy.

I have, literally, hundreds of screencaps like this from dozens of shows. It has made my life so much richer. And it all started from such a simple place, with me flipping captions on so I could follow along better and not miss anything important that would get me yelled at in the comments of a review or a recap. The takeaways from all of this are as follows:

• I do not like getting yelled at
• I have a lot of screencaps of television characters passing gas

A reasonable argument can be made that I am 12 years old. I feel okay about it. And while I’m on the subject of being a child…

PART III — It is fun to roast your friends with screencaps

I work with a man named Josh. He’s lovely and knows more about The Simpsons and Oscar-nominated movies than anyone I know. I genuinely enjoy chatting with him in our little work chatroom. But I also make it a point to screencap every moment from a television show or movie where a character says something mean to a character named Josh, just so I can deploy them strategically to roast him a little in front of everyone. That’s Kyle Chandler in the one up there, in the movie Godzilla vs. Kong, dropping a “Shut up, Josh.” It’s been extremely useful.

As has this one of Joe Pera in Joe Pera Talks With You, which slightly modified the order of the words to give us a “Josh, shut up.”

And here’s a screencap from the animated Harley Quinn series. This one has been super useful, too.

I recommend you start doing this, too. Watch television with the subtitles on first, for you, so you catch everything and don’t have to drop hundreds of dollars on a soundbar. But then, once you do, start snapping screencaps, especially if you can get some with your friends’ names in them. It makes for a great comeback in the group chat, or a great context-free text, or, if you’re me and your editor is named Brett and you want to leave in a little test to see if he read all the way to the bottom of your piece on captions and screencaps, a fun little experiment.

Hi, buddy.

The lessons here are as follows, in no particular order:

• You should try watching television with the captions on
• I am an idiot
• The second thing does not make the first thing any less true

Thank you.

While most of the world, and many of his late-night colleagues, are still trying to piece together the events that led up to—and followed—Will Smith’s violent Oscars outburst, Seth Meyers only has eyes for Madison Cawthorn’s coked-up orgy scandal. The Late Night host had a lot to say about the controversial North Carolina congressman’s allegations, and some serious doubts about their veracity.

On Wednesday night, Meyers dedicated the bulk of his “A Closer Look” segment to the claims made by Cawthorn, who was reportedly given a stern talking to by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy over his already-infamous podcast interview in which he claimed that House of Cards is basically a docuseries—albeit with less cocaine and/or orgies. Noting that the Republican party is “full of weird people constantly saying weird sh*t,” Meyers took aim at, well, all of Congress, really:

“Come on, man. You really expect us to believe that Congress could plan and execute an orgy? At best I can see them announcing an exploratory committee that would begin to investigate the feasibility of an orgy at a later date. And then it would grind to a halt because one faction would say they wouldn’t go unless the orgy was carbon neutral. And then Joe Manchin would say he’s only going to vote for the orgy if there was money for coal in it. And then someone would say, ‘Why do you need coal at an orgy?’ and Joe Manchin would say, ‘I guess you’ve never been to a West Virginia sex party!’

“It just wouldn’t happen.”

Meyers did, however, concede one point: “In Cawthorn’s defense, I will say Chuck Schumer positions his glasses like a man watching an orgy.”

You can watch the full segment above.

A two-hour documentary on the late rapper Ol’ Dirty Bastard will air on A&E. Approved by the “Got Your Money” rapper’s estate, the documentary, tentatively titled Biography: Ol’ Dirty Bastard, will feature never-before-seen archived footage filmed by his wife, Icelene Jones, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

“I am thrilled to tell the full story of my husband. With this documentary the world will learn about the son, the husband, the father and the artist,” Jones told The Hollywood Reporter. “I’m proud of the team that we built, including Pulse, my producing partners Nicole Beckett and Messiah Jacobs at Four Screens, and our directing team, the Pollards.”

Produced by Pulse Films, alongside Four Screens, the documentary will showcase ODB from the beginning of his solo career in 1995 up until 2004, when he died of a drug overdose. The documentary will also provide looks back to the Wu-Tang Clan founder’s “trauma-filled” childhood and how it influenced his craft. Fans, close friends, and family will also share stories of ODB.

“Biography: Ol’ Dirty Bastard will present viewers with the untold story of the man and the musician who made an immense cultural impact across just a few short years,” said A&E’s executive vice president and head of programming, Elaine Frontain Bryant, to the magazine.

Robin Lopez seems like a pretty nice guy, all things considered. The 33-year-old big man for the Orlando Magic has been a steady hand on the court for the duration of his NBA career and has endeared himself to fans for his big personality off of it. Despite that, Lopez has a well-documented problem with mascots, with the latest example of this coming on Wednesday night when the Magic traveled to Washington to take on the Wizards.

Lopez suited up for the Wizards last season and is very familiar with the team’s mascot, G-Wiz. With Lopez’s birthday a few days away — he was born on April 1 — G-Wiz decided to pull a fast one and say it got something for “my favorite Lopez bro.” A moment later, G-Wiz revealed another sign that said “can you give this to Brook?”

In response, Lopez took the gift he was handed and flattened the mascot before getting some love from RJ Hampton.

Lopez and G-Wiz have a long relationship, with the big man once saying that “G-Wiz has always kind of been on my top-five probably most-despised mascot list. So, I don’t know if I’ll be able to reach out the olive branch out to him or if he will even want to reach it out to me.” The good news for all parties involved is the Magic and Wizards do not play again this year, so there will be time for tensions between the two to simmer down.

Will Smith smacking Chris Rock at this Sunday’s Oscars ceremony remains the hot topic of conversation on social media as more celebrities and guests share their thoughts on the surprising (but not that surprising) incident. While some, like co-host Amy Schumer, continue to pretend that it was the most traumatizing event of their lives, others, such as Daniel Radcliffe, are “dramatically bored” by the overblown kerfuffle, which distracted from other meaningful conversations like celebrating Questlove and his collaborators’ Summer Of Soul win.

And while the actors are all seemingly aghast that a man from West Philadelphia would physically confront another man from Brooklyn (two places where such things are a fairly regular occurrence, to be honest), Will’s fellow rappers seem less distraught on the whole. While 50 Cent, Drake, Nicki Minaj, and others either expressed sympathy for Smith or made jokes about the slap, others like Lil Nas X trolled the hilarious overreactions by fans on Twitter who brought up weird and frankly unlikely hypotheticals to score woke points. Now, another member of that fraternity has weighed in.

Compton rapper The Game posted a long caption pointing out the hypocrisy of the Academy for launching a disciplinary investigation. “They didn’t even want to give it to him in the first place,” he posited. “He acted off impulse & imposed a slap down out of frustration & embarrassment on behalf of his wife. Most people with opinions on the situation don’t have a committed relationship let alone a marriage of over 20 years to weigh against his feelings in the matter. He’s human & comedy is not always an excuse to publicly humiliate people especially while sitting front & center. Although violence anywhere is & should always be depicted in a negative light, this was a lul ass slap in defense of a woman battling a very delicate health issue. I’ll close by saying, they don’t want us to be equal, never have & never will.”

Of course, it’s unsurprising that The Game would side with Will in this situation, considering he got in hot water for a similar situation at the Drew League a few years ago. But he also makes some strong points, especially in calling out how several prior winners, including Harvey Weinstein and Roman Polanski, were allowed to keep awards even after being investigated by police — and in Weinstein’s case, convicted — of way worse things than delivering a love tap to a fellow member during a live broadcast.

In any case, I’m probably with Harry Potter on all of this. There are way more important things going on in the world; maybe we should focus on those.

Though the Oscars was a wild night for the likes of Will Smith and Chris Rock, whose “slapgate” incident seems to have sucked all the air out of the event, plenty of other celebs had their own drama going on at this year’s Academy Awards. Thankfully, though, no one else seems to have resorted to violence, and it may take weeks for the Academy’s formal review of the incident to play our.

In other news, Lady Gaga, for instance, had a packed night of helping support Liza Minnelli, and trying to avoid future Fox News contributor Caitlyn Jenner. In a stiff exchange between the two, that an eagle-eyed onlooker managed to film, Caitlyn mentioned to Gaga that she hasn’t seen her around Malibu recently. Gaga affirmed that she still spends time in the area, but she “switched baristas.”

“Are you spending time out in Malibu anymore?” Jenner asks, to which Gaga responds “Yes!” Jenner follows up: “Oh you’re still out there? I haven’t seen you at the Starbucks in a while. Gaga, a little stony faced: “Well, I’ve switched baristas.” Given the Fox News contributor angle, and Jenner’s conservative politics in general, despite her status as a trans woman, it’s easy to see why the incredibly liberal Gaga might be seeking to avoid her Malibu neighbor. Of course, Gaga fans had a field day with this one. Check out some reactions below.

Ten years ago I was working from home one day (which, at the time, wasn’t as common as it is now) and my phone started ringing. The number read “blocked,” which means, today, there’s no way I’m answering that call. But back then spammers hadn’t quite figured out the cell phone market, so it looked like more of a curiosity and I was intrigued. So I answered. “Hello,” I asked, with a more straying, exaggerated “o” sound at the end, signaling that I was confused about what was happening. I hear a gruff voice say, “I’m looking for Mike Ryan.” It’s at this point I think I’m in trouble. As far as I knew, I didn’t have an outstanding bills or anything, but now this very stern voice with a blocked phone number is looking for me. I admit to the voice on the other end that I, indeed, am the person he’s seeking. As long as I live I’ll never forget the tone of voice and delivery of the next words that were said. They were said with pride, knowing, I assume, the reaction these words have gotten him over the years, “This is Bruce Willis.” I was not expecting a call from Bruce Willis that day, or any day, really.

Okay, so, yes, for my job I do interview actors, so the idea that someone like Bruce Willis would call me at some point for a scheduled interview isn’t completely preposterous. Though the big factor here is I did not have a scheduled interview with Bruce Willis that day or ever. In shock, I asked, “Why are you calling me?” He responded he was under the impression we were going to talk about the new Rian Johnson movie, Looper. In another moment I will never forget, I said back to Willis, “No one told me we’d be doing this.” And then without missing a beat, like it was John McClane himself delivering the perfect line, Willis responds, “Welcome to Hollywood.”

Willis asked if I needed time to prepare. Which, yes, I did. But also, no, I didn’t. Making a quick decision, I thought the odds of Bruce Willis randomly calling me a second time that day were low, so I told him we could just do the interview now. And it’s not like I already didn’t have a wealth of knowledge about Willis’s career waiting to go, because, especially for people born during a specific window of time, Willis is the guy. From Moonlighting to Die Hard to even admirable failures like Hudson Hawk, I brought up any topic I’ve ever wanted to ask him about, all while kind of hiding behind the whole “hey I had no time to prepare” excuse, just in case Willis got to a point where he was like, “Why are we talking about Moonlighting?” For the record, he could not have been nicer.

(So, what had happened was, a few weeks before, Sony Pictures, who distributed Looper, asked if I wanted to talk to Bruce Willis. Of course, I was like, “Hell yes!” But then I never heard another word about it, assumed it wasn’t happening, and completely forgot about it. Apparently, Sony Pictures sent a list of people like me to Bruce Willis’s team to approve. What usually happens is, Willis’s team will then approve who they want, send it back to Sony, then Sony will contact me to set up a time to talk. Somehow Willis himself got this list. And instead of approving people, he just started cold calling. Which I, to this day, find so delightful. Imagining Bruce Willis a little annoyed that he has to deal with this in the first place, but, hey, that’s the job, so better start calling.)

Obviously, I’m retelling this story because of the news that Willis will be taking a step back from acting because of his diagnosis of aphasia. And, now, all those low-budget movies he was doing make a lot more sense. But it’s still a really sad story and it’s a pretty hard to read about. (And obviously, now, there are a lot of ethical questions about why he was put in these positions to begin with.

That all said, I have long hated the Razzies. (I wrote this piece about them in 2011 and linked to it every year until Movieline disappeared from the internet. But now someone found it again, so there it is.) The TL;DR version: even back then they were tiring and that over the first years of their existence a good case could be made they were fun. They would find truly bad movies like Mac & Me and point them out for what they are. Over the years, that changed. Now they either do stunts, like giving Mike Lindell a Razzie. Or they are just petty, like giving LeBron James a Razzie for the new Space Jam. What’s even the point of that?

And speaking of petty, the Razzies decided to do a whole “tribute” to Bruce Willis, just two weeks ago, that’s incredibly mean and, well, just downright shitty. Look, I’m going to assume they didn’t know about his condition (though rumors that something wasn’t right with him have been out there for a while), but, regardless, it’s crass. And now that we do know, their yukfest is still up. Can we be done with this group already? Yeah, they released a new tweet that gives a half-ass apology that basically equates to, “oops,” then passed the blame. Again, if they were seeking out truly awful movies and doing something interesting, their model could probably still work. (Honestly, there are probably 100s of truly bad movies released to streamers every year that we never hear about that would probably love the attention.) But, no, let’s drag Bruce Willis right when he’d going through one of the worst moments of his life. What a bad organization. Bruce Willis, after all he’s given us over the years, deserves better. And, frankly, so do we.

(UPDATE: The Razzies have rescinded their Worst Performance award for Willis.)

You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.

In The Eye, music’s best up-and-coming artists take to an intimate and minimal studio space to perform highlights from their discography, with only one microphone and one take. This time, in the studio is Sabrina Claudio, one of the most intriguing rising stars in R&B.

The Miami-based singer-songwriter got her start, as many do, on SoundCloud, uploading songs there, generating attention, and working her way up. The hustle eventually landed her a label deal with Atlantic and she’s made good on it so far by staying busier than most of her peers: Between albums, EPs, and mixtapes, Claudio has put out a whopping six releases since 2017, with three of those being albums. The future is looking bright, too: In addition to another album, Based On A Feeling, set to drop on May 6, she also earned the favor of The Weeknd, who granted her an opening slot on his upcoming After Hours tour.

Before all that, though, Claudio has taken to The Eye for a performance of her latest single, “Better Version.” As is often the case with The Eye performances, Claudio goes for a more stripped-down arrangement of the song here, which makes it feel more like a tranquil ballad than the original. The minimal instrumentation gives Claudio’s voice plenty of room to breathe, which, when you’re blessed with as much vocal talent and beauty as Claudio, is never a bad thing.

Claudio previously told Paper of the song, “This song stems from the perspective of someone who’s in a relationship with a person who is internally toxic, they choose to remain in this relationship because of those once in a blue moon glimpses of who their partner has the potential to be. It feels like this person is in a relationship with two completely different people and doesn’t want to leave either of them at the risk of losing them both.”

While a studio rendition like this shows off what Claudio is like as a performer, it’s not the same as getting on stage in front of a crowd. However, we know she thrives in that setting, too: Uproxx’s Caitlin White saw her live in 2019 and noted, “Silky, effortless voices like Claudio’s don’t come around that often, so when they do, seeing a performer like her live is the way to go.”

Watch Claudio perform “Better Version” for The Eye above.

Sabrina Claudio is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.