Ja Morant has been away from the Grizzlies since Saturday when he went on Instagram Live in the early hours of the morning from a nightclub in Colorado and flashed a gun to the camera.
After dropping both games in L.A. without Morant, Memphis will now face Golden State, Dallas, Dallas (again), and Miami without their star guard, making the task of holding onto the 3-seed in the West over the red-hot Phoenix Suns all the more difficult. While that is the short-term hurdle for the Grizzlies, they are much more concerned long-term with ensuring the face of the franchise is in a good place on and off the floor to be able to lead them. For now, Morant is seeking help and trying to get on the right path off the floor so he can keep himself and the young Grizzlies on an upward trajectory.
You may have heard that Netflix recently livestreamed Chris Rock’s new special, Selective Outrage. You may also be aware that the standup comic used the latter third of the special to absolutely ream Will and Jada Pinkett Smith over the slapping incident at last year’s Academy Awards. During that extended bit, Rock — who loves to name-check rappers in his act — cited the controversial hip-hop podcast Drink Champs as one of the reasons Smith was so angry at him that he resorted to violence over Rock’s jokes about Jada.
“Everybody called him a bitch and who did he hit? Me!” Rock complained, apparently including Drink Champs, which did discuss rumors that Jada had an extended “entanglement” with singer August Alsina (she even coined that phrase on an episode of her own podcast, Red Table Talk). However, the hosts want it made clear that they never called Will anything of the sort. In their latest episode preview on Instagram, NORE, DJ EFN, and guest Joe Budden discussed Selective Outrage and the shout-out their show got.
In the clip, NORE asks EFN, “You called Will Smith a bitch?” to which his co-host emphatically replies, “No, man! That was you! Nah, nah. Nobody here called him a bitch.” After playing the Rock joke, Budden offered his view, “I don’t agree with anything he did, but I’m not calling another man a bitch. I’m not going to do that, but Chris Rock said y’all did that, Drink Champs.” For what it’s worth, he has a point there; he just makes “careless” jokes about Megan Thee Stallion’s shooting, asks inane questions about Isaiah Rashad’s sexuality, and hashes out accusations of abuse and sexual harassment. But he doesn’t call men “bitches.” Round of applause for Joe.
The Drink Champs hosts seemed enthused about the reference, though. “I love the way he named us, because he put us in the rapper category,” said NORE, giving his signature catchphrase: “Let’s make some noise for Chris Rock, God damn it!”
You can stream Selective Outrage now on Netflix and watch the Drink Champs preview clip above.
Jenna Ortega has a lot going on these days: a new Scream sequel, a new Hot Ones episode, a new BFF in Aubrey Plaza. But people still want to talk about Wednesday. The Addams Family spinoff is still all the rage, despite what a bear it was to make it. Indeed, that dance she made up while beyond frazzled is still all the rage. So it was inevitable that in the promo for Ortega’s upcoming SNL episode, they’d address that particular dancing elephant.
The ad finds her reluctant to do the dance yet again, arguing that “we’ve seen so much of it already and I think it’s time to do something new.” Alas, Ben Marshall, John Higgins and Martin Herlihy — aka Please Don’t Destroy, who’ve been doing pre-recorded digital segments for the show since 2021 — have other plans. That is, all three are dressed like Wednesday Addams in the instantly iconic dance scene. They feign ignorance, saying they just happen to all be decked out in black dresses and claiming their knowledge of the show and its long-running character is scant at best.
Some reverse psychology later and sure enough Ortega is strutting beside them, doing the Wednesday dance one last final time, or at least until the next time someone goads her to bust those specific moves.
Ortega’s SNL will air, as it always does, this Saturday at 11:30pm on NBC. The musical guest is The 1975. You can watch the promo in the video above.
Jim Boeheim’s tenure as the head basketball coach at Syracuse University has come to an end. In a statement released by the program on Wednesday afternoon on the heels of an ACC Tournament loss to Wake Forest that almost assuredly ended the team’s season, Syracuse announced that Boeheim will no longer lead the team, which he has done for each of the last 47 seasons.
Boeheim will be replaced by Adrian Autry, a Syracuse alumnus who has been an assistant since 2011 and became Boeheim’s associate head coach in 2016. In the statement, Autry was quoted as saying, “There have been very few stronger influential forces in my life than Syracuse University and Jim Boeheim. They have both played such important roles and without either of them, I am certain I would not have this incredible opportunity before me. I have spent much of my time in the game of basketball learning from Jim and am so grateful to him for preparing me to carry on the winning tradition that is Orange Basketball. It’s hard to imagine a world without him on the bench, but together with our coaches, student-athletes and fans, we will build on decades of success as a winning program.”
The Orange lost on a buzzer beater to Wake Forest in the opening round of the ACC Tournament on Wednesday, and in the aftermath, the 78-year-old Boeheim danced around questions regarding his future, saying the decision would be up to the school.
Jim Boeheim: “I’ve been very lucky to coach this long. I think everyone missed my retirement speech last week. Nobody picked up on it… it’s up to the University” pic.twitter.com/XbnTV1Zsuj
Boeheim was inducted to the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2005, two years after he won the only national championship of his decorated career. After spending his undergraduate career with the Orange, Boeheim was hired as an assistant in 1969 and got promoted to head coach in 1976. For his career, Boeheim accrued a 1,015-440 record with a 432-275 mark in conference play.
Pour one out for Tom Cruise. The Russians warned everyone a few years ago that they planned to win the race of making a movie that’s literally filmed in space, and now, they’ve officially done so. That is to say, Vladimir Putin is failing hard in his Ukraine war, and he’s fretting over cabbage, but at least Russia has got something to brag about. Beating Tom Cruise is no joke.
CNN has official clips of the movie, called The Challenge, and a synopsis that sounds stressful and claustrophobic:
A surgeon, Zhenya, played by Russian actress Yulia Peresild, has to perform heart surgery on a sick cosmonaut in space because he is unable to return to Earth for treatment. The patient is portrayed by real-life cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy.
Sorry Tom, you snooze, and you lose. Happens to the best of us.
In all seriousness, though, Tom has been pretty darn busy doing other things, which were more important. He’s been saving Hollywood and gifting world-renowned cakes and riding a motorcycle off a cliff for the seventh Mission: Impossible movie and starting the eighth one, too. Never a dull second occurs when it comes to Tom, who probably does not know the definition of rest. However, he hasn’t made it to space yet, and the Russians got him. Still, he’s got a director and a plan, so he’ll likely eventually make this happen.
If you have access to an offshore book, you can currently wager on WWE. That’s not the case, however, at the various “legal” books that are open and operating throughout the United States under the watchful eyes of state gambling regulators, which isn’t a huge shock, as professional wrestling is scripted and it’s very easy for someone with knowledge of what’s going to happen to relay that information to someone who wants to make a bet.
But apparently, WWE is trying to get into the sports betting game. According to Alex Sherman of CNBC, the promotion is holding discussions with gambling regulators in both Colorado and Michigan in an effort to let people bet on matches, and is using the example set by awards shows as evidence that wagers can be placed on things with predetermined outcomes.
WWE is working with the accounting firm EY to secure scripted match results in hopes it will convince regulators there’s no chance of results leaking to the public, said the people, who asked not to be named because the discussions are private. Accounting firms PwC and EY, also known as Ernst & Young, have historically worked with award shows, including the Academy Awards and the Emmys, to keep results a secret.
There is, of course, a bit of a difference between the results of award show voting and a team of writers putting together a storyline that ends with Cody Rhodes beating Roman Reigns for the Undisputed WWE Universal Championship, especially because dirt sheets have published this stuff for years. At the same time, it’s not like it’s always difficult to figure out what is going to happen in a high-profile wrestling match just by using common sense and having an understanding of how stuff gets mapped out.
As for the awards example, it’s one thing to seal the winners envelopes at an awards show where there are far fewer folks who get to see the final result, as opposed to a WWE writing room (and locker room) that already leaks information to people regularly. Given the focus on betting integrity that state regulators have been pushing, it’d be fairly shocking to see any of the larger states adopt WWE betting as a regulated entity, but it’s possible smaller states may be willing to risk it (likely allowing very small limits on bets as offshore books do) to try and rake in more of a handle.
It’s a bittersweet truth that nothing good can last forever and the upcoming 2023 TV slate is proof of that.
Some of the most beloved series on streaming, cable, and network TV are singing their swan songs this year, bidding farewell to fans with final seasons that, while not entirely welcome, should hopefully bring with them satisfying conclusions to long-running storylines. There’s something to be said for going out on your own terms and many of the shows on this list — which we’ll likely be adding to as more streamers and studios revamp their TV lineups — are doing just that, saying goodbye on their watch and leaving the game on top.
Here’s a running list of all the series with planned endings in 2023 … so far.
Succession (HBO)
For the slime puppies and the tomlettes out there, the news that Succession plans for its fourth season to be its last is a particularly hard pill to swallow. The Roy siblings — Kendall, Roman, Shiv, and Connor — were just starting to band together to take down their tyrannical patriarch. We’ll have to wait until the show returns on March 26th to see if they can stop the sale of Waystar-Royco and finally put Logan in a nursing home where he belongs but no matter the outcome, a spin-off following Cousin Greg and Tom Wambsgams corporate adventures, tentatively titled “Executive Level Business Bros” has our full backing.
Barry (HBO)
A hitman pursuing a late-in-life career as an actor was always going to have an expiration date, especially when the bodies started dropping and the authorities closed in on Bill Hader’s mentally-unstable on-screen alter ego. Hader and his team recently announced that season four of the critically acclaimed series — which drops April 16th — will be its last and to be honest, we kind of saw it coming.
Ted Lasso (Apple TV+)
Ted Lasso creator Jason Sudeikis warned us when he launched this comedy experiment — a show can be both funny and nice, what? — that our membership with the Diamond Dogs might be revoked after three seasons and the creative team behind the series has stuck to that so far. Before AFC Richmond and its mustachioed goofball say “Cheerio” fans will find out if the team can survive the Premier League and the now-villainous Nate Shelley.
The Crown (Netflix)
“We gave you Prince Charles breakdancing, what more do you want?” — The Crown creators, probably. In all seriousness, this show has delivered season after season of low-stakes, parasocial drama that titillated and tantalized the peasant masses, casting too-handsome actors to play Prince Harry’s dad and too-talented actress to serve as Princess Diana doppelgangers. The final season’s run date is yet to be announced but it’s likely to be its last, especially if Prince Harry and Meghan Markle keep churning out documentary tell-alls.
The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu)
A dystopic future where women were enslaved and their wombs hijacked to birth the next generation of religious fanatics is a premise that’s only become more relevant as Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale has extended its run. Based on the Margaret Atwood novel of the same name, this show expanded on the author’s idea, building a world where the suffering handmaidens — led by Elisabeth Moss’ June — rose up to challenge the patriarchy in increasingly violent ways. A happy-ever-after might not exist in Gilead, but a finale that satisfyingly wraps up this heavy drama has been promised when the show return for its final season this June.
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Amazon Prime Video)
Judging by the cast’s Instagram posts celebrating the wrap of filming, season five of this Amazon Prime Video comedy is set to be the last time we see star Rachel Brosnahan on stage … doing stand-up … as her character Midge Maisel. But before the curtain call, Midge needs to grapple with her newfound fame, sort out her love life, and manage her expanding extended family. She’ll try to accomplish all that — and likely do so in hilarious ways — when the series returns, on April 15th.
The Umbrella Academy (Netflix)
The Hargreeves siblings have saved the world from no less than three potential doomsday events — some, admittedly, of their own making — so one could make the argument that they deserve a break. But, not before the superpowered family of misfits takes on one last adventure — with Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally’s help — that should land later this year with the show’s fourth and final season.
Cobra Kai (Netflix)
Wax on, wax off — or do whatever you need to do to cope with the news that this reboot is taking its final bow later this year. Old rivalries have fueled new wars, but the show has always held onto the spirit of the original film saga, so we have all the faith that the series finale will finish things the right way.
The Flash (CW)
When one Flash rises, another must fall. Somehow, the controversy magnet that is Ezra Miller is hanging onto his spandex to deliver DC’s Flash movie this year which we guess means that Grant Gustin’s time as the crime-solving speedster was always fated to end like this. Blockbuster plans be damned, we’re invested in seeing how the small-screen version of Barry Allen defends Central City from foes old and new in the show’s ninth and final season, which is airing now.
Manifest (Netflix)
When fans launched an international campaign to save this mystery drama, Netflix answered the call but, like the passengers on Flight 828, the show now has a death date. The second chapter of its final season is expected to be released sometime this year.
Mayans MC (FX)
This Sons of Anarchy spin-off has been steadily ramping up the drama in the biker clubhouse for a few seasons now, and the rising tensions within the Santo Padre charter should provide fans one last wild ride when season five drops in late 2023.
Never Have I Ever (Netflix)
This coming-of-age comedy from Netflix is set to grow up in its fourth and final season, streaming later this year.
Nancy Drew (CW)
The mystery of when this young-adult drama on the CW will end has been solved — it’s saying goodbye when its fourth season drops on May 31st.
Riverdale (CW)
Another teen drama graduating to (possible) rerun status is this genre-bending take on characters from the famous Archie comics. Archie, Veronica, Betty, and Jughead Jones have survived serial killers, the Black Hood, parallel universes, organ-harvesting cults, and an explosion that gave everyone mutant abilities, but it’s the time jump back to the 1950s that might finally do them in. The show’s seventh and final season premieres on March 29th.
Servant (Apple TV+)
This psychological thriller from the messed-up mind of M. Night Shyamalan is currently in its fourth and final season on Apple TV+.
Snowfall (FX)
An underappreciated crime drama from FX, Snowfall has thrillingly recounted the 1980s crack cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles for five seasons but its current run — season six — marks its last.
Star Trek: Picard (Paramount+)
Live long and prosper Patrick Stewart. We only got three seasons of the original Jean-Luc Picard piloting a spacecraft on Paramount + but it was worth it. The show’s final season is airing now.
Titans (HBO Max)
You can blame the loss of this DC comics series on the Warner Bros Discovery merger, but you can pay your respects when its fourth season airs later this year.
Sanditon (PBS)
Jane Austen never got to write a happy ending for Charlotte Heyworth and company but hopefully, the PBS period drama adapting her unfinished work can with its third and final season premiering on March 19th.
NCIS: Los Angeles (CBS)
The final season of this long-running police procedural ends with its 14th season, which wraps on May 21st.
A Million Little Things (ABC)
This tear-jerking drama will make us reach for the tissues one last time when it says goodbye in its fifth season, which is airing now.
Mo (Netflix)
Hulu’s Ramy gave us Netflix’s Mo and Netflix’s Mo gave us plenty of laughs in its first season. Expect even more when the show returns for its final run sometime this year.
Fear The Walking Dead (AMC)
This zombie apocalypse spin-off is getting the kill shot with a two-part final season run that kicks off this May.
Doom Patrol (HBO Max)
See the Titans entry above for why this fantastic DC comics adaptation is getting the boot but enjoy the pure chaos these superpowered misfits create when the rest of the show’s fourth and final season drops later this year.
Carnival Row (Amazon Prime Video)
The fever dream of magical creatures existing alongside the human gentry in Victorian England is slowly fading, but you can still enjoy this fantasy drama as it’s currently airing its second and final season.
Ja Morant is currently not with the Grizzlies as he looks to get his off court life situated and in order after a string on alleged incidents, culminating in the young star guard going on Instagram Live from a Denver-area nightclub and flashing a gun.
The other was by Glendale, Colorado police, who were looking into whether Morant violated any laws by possessing the gun in the nightclub, as there is a law against possession of a firearm while under the influence of alcohol. Ultimately, the investigation didn’t turn up any evidence of legal wrongdoing by Morant, as police announced Wednesday there would be no charges filed against the star.
— Glendale CO Police (@Glendale_PD_CO) March 8, 2023
That is obviously good news for Morant, and clears one hurdle towards his eventual return. The NBA’s investigation will be more thorough in that they will want to look into far more than just what happened at the nightclub. In the meantime, Morant remains away from the team and is trying to get himself back on track off the court for his rapid trajectory as one of the faces of the league, which would be in jeopardy if he were not to straighten out some of the things that could derail him off of the court.
Once again, the Academy has nominated 10 films for the best picture Oscar, with the telecast set to air this Sunday. In 2009, the number of nominees was expanded from five to 10. In 2011, they changed it so that anywhere between five and 10 films could be nominated depending on vote totals, and then in 2021 they went back to a set number of 10 and here we are.
Sheesh, what is this, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, or my wife trying to choose a restaurant! Women do be shoppin’, but all that historical stuff aside, the rub is that we’ve once again got a nice even number of 10 films nominated for best picture this year, and there’s nothing the internet Gods love more than nice even numbers of 10. It is to them I shall sacrifice my first born listicle! May the #content crops be bountiful — you’re welcome.
That’s right, I am once again ranking the year’s best picture nominees in order of goodness to badness. And let me tell you, it’s not going to be easy for me. This year is a tough year to rank. Below my obvious top two, this year’s awards season was largely characterized by movies that were… pretty good. There was probably no Parasite and definitely no Three Billboards this year, and most here were a mixed bag of things I loved and hated. Even my bottom film had a couple scenes in it I loved.
But hey, that’s enough with the hemming and hawing. Who am I, Ernest Hemingway? Ernest Hawingway? Let’s kick this old man in the C and assign some numbers to art! Art! Art! Art! (*my editors carry me off on their shoulders*)
10. Tár
That’s right, I didn’t like Tár. Go ahead and take me off your Christmas list.
Or perhaps more accurately, I didn’t really getTár. I wanted to! It seemed kind of funny on paper! “Tár On Tár,” that’s a funny title for a fictional memoir!
The movie begins with Tár herself (Cate Blanchett) dishing on her life and work as a composer onstage at a New Yorker symposium, hosted by a real New Yorker guy. This is followed by a business luncheon (emphasis on the eon) with a character played by Mark Strong, who is equally worshipful. Together, the two scenes take up 40-50 minutes of screen time. I was hopped up on cold medicine and disassociated a few times during this stretch, like I was trying to claw my way out of my own skin.
Then there was a scene in which Tár guest lectures at Juilliard, during which she hectors a pansexual student who says they don’t listen to Bach because he’s a white cis European. They go back and forth for a while until he snaps and walks out of class. Now that was a solid, juicy scene, full of tension, with identifiable stakes, and graspable subtleties to both of their demeanors. I actually loved this scene and I thought we were finally getting somewhere.
And then the rest of the movie was mostly all innuendo and veiled references like I was watching a movie about people who had actually seen the movie I was supposed to see. I was left to try to piece together what it actually was from clues in their conversations. I actually studied for an MFA in New York City so if there were some annoying art people in-jokes you’d think I might’ve gotten them, but nope, “Tár On Tár” was the best that it got.
Then there was a climactic final scene that was clearly meant to communicate… something. Her downfall? That much I got, but the rest of it — where the event was supposed to be taking place, what it actually was, were unclear. I dunno, man. I can appreciate subtlety and plot points left up for interpretation, but I also need details to interpret. Tár felt like I was trying to watch a movie playing on my neighbor’s TV using binoculars.
East Coast critics all seem to love it, I assume because they’re punishment piggies at heart. Bore them to tears, tell them jokes that don’t make anyone laugh, and they’ll fill in the blanks about why you’re a genius.
I read Sarah Polley’s memoir earlier this year and loved it (highly recommend), but hadn’t caught Women Talking (which Polley writes and directs, adapting from the Miriam Toews novel) until last night.
Set amongst an Amish-esque religious sect in an unnamed country where the women have been systematically drugged and raped in their sleep by the male members of their clan (apparently based on a real incident that happened in a Mennonite colony in Bolivia) Women Talking is the story of the female members of the sect gathering together in a barn to vote and debate on what to do next: do nothing, stay and fight, or leave.
The cast, including Rooney Mara, Jessie Buckley, Claire Foy, and Frances McDormand, are all brilliant and Polley has an ear for dialogue. The characters in Women Talking, despite existing almost outside time and space, feel like real people, much more so than, say, The Banshees Of Inisherin.
And yet Women Talking has a very similar quality of feeling a little like it’s belaboring a theme more than it’s telling a story. At some point fairly early on in Women Talking, it becomes clear that the movie is going to end with the women having decided to do one of the three things but before they do it. Knowing that I wasn’t going to see the next chapter, I felt like I lost that thrill of “what happens next” that tends to propel a story forward.
Sure, art thrives on limitation and all of that, and Women Talking isn’t even close to the first movie to consist mostly of people standing around talking, but… maybe trick us a little? I don’t think I would’ve seen The Whale if it had been called “Fat Guy Dying In His House.” I appreciate the difficulty of what Polley and her actors pulled off here, but appreciation isn’t quite the same thing as love. (It was my mom’s favorite, for what that’s worth).
Honestly, who the hell even knows where to put Avatar 2 on this list? I was so excited for the Avatar sequel that I wrote an entire essay about how excited I was about the Avatar sequel. The gist of it was that I was thrilled that James Cameron, a lunatic genius I will devour any profile of, was at long last selling us a movie. Not a franchise or a brand, but a movie.
The industry at large has moved away from selling movies (they sell franchises, brands, merchandise, and expanded universes whose underlying IP they own, to try to turn you into a daily user of their family of products) but, so the thinking went, James Cameron was possibly the one man in the industry with enough clout, enough fuck you money, and enough balls to make whatever the hell he wanted, suits and five-year plans be damned. And what he seemed to want to make was a big crazy blockbuster. To “knock our balls up our assholes” as McG once described it (haha, remember McG?).
And then I went and spoiled it all by actually seeing the thing. James Cameron did make a big crazy blockbuster that at times delivers on its promise — all the whale scenes, Carmela Soprano drinking coffee in a mech suit. High-frame rate is still weird and distracting and detracts from the visual majesty Cameron is trying to create, but that’s forgivable.
In the end Avatar 2 did exactly what I was excited for it not to do. It sold out the emotional climax and replaced it with a tease that it would come in future sequels (an emotional Ponzi Scheme, I believe I called it when Ant-Man 3 did it).
Are we going to have to wait 13 years for those sequels too? After all the whale magic, we end the film on an overlong chase sequence that sort of drags and was arguably the weakest part of the movie. Bummer. I’ll probably still see the next one though, oink oink oink.
[Where to stream it: It’s still in theaters.]
7. Elvis
“Is Elvis any good?” is one of the toughest questions I’ve ever been asked as a film critic. Naturally, it’s a bit of a conundrum where to put it on this list. Mostly I appreciate it as Baz Luhrmann’s magnificently bugfuck fever dream. I felt like I had to take a shower afterwards and found sequins in the drain. Which is… maybe the right way to do an Elvis biopic? When the velvet Elvis painting becomes real, shoot the velvet.
In the era of estate-sanctioned, jukebox musical biopics, Baz Luhrmann gave us an Elvis movie where every song is so filtered, pastiched, and cannibalized that it’s like being in the audience for a contemporary Bob Dylan show trying to figure out what song he’s actually singing.
Tom Hanks was nominated for a Razzie for his performance as Colonel Tom Parker, perhaps because of the “strange” accent, but how is an evil Dutch carnie who reinvents himself as a Southern dandy supposed to sound? I would’ve watched an entire movie about Tom Hanks as an evil Dutch carnie/dandy, by the way, and I get the feeling that’s actually the movie Baz Luhrmann wanted to make but had to call it “Elvis” to satisfy the suits.
The Fabelmans is one of Spielberg’s best movies in years and one of the only ones where he actually allows himself to be a little weird. In the Judd Hirsch scene, Spielberg acknowledges the conflict between art and family, and manages to stage it in a way that comes off more personal, more succinct, and more enjoyable than Martin McDonagh’s entire fable built around essentially the same conflict (The Banshees Of Inisherin). Judd Hirsch got nominated for an Oscar for basically one, five-minute scene and I can’t really argue with it, he shredded that.
The other standout scene in The Fabelmans sees young Steven (er, Sammy Fabelman) basically being devoured by a young shiksa with a Jesus fetish who becomes fascinated by Sammy when she finds out he’s Jewish. Spielberg evoking the genuine bafflement he feels at encountering this deranged culture of suburban WASPs is some of the best filmmaking he’s ever done. Sammy actually turning this situation to his advantage feels almost more like Philip Roth or the Coen brothers than Spielberg.
I really hope it’s this scene that’s a harbinger of Spielberg to come and not the fact that he called his fictionalized family “The Fabelmans.” Oy.
It’s also hard to imagine two better actors worse cast than Paul Dano and Michelle Williams as Sammy Fabelman’s parents. Paul Dano is too young (he looks like a kid wearing his dad’s suit), they’re both too WASPy, and these two perennial awards contenders consistently have scenes stolen out from under them by Seth Rogen (who is fantastic in this).
Gabrielle LaBelle is solid as the teenage Sammy, but he’s saddled with distracting blue contact lenses for the entire movie because Spielberg cast a blue-eyed kid as the young Sammy and thinks he needs their eyes to match. What awful decision-making. And then the David Lynch cameo is brilliant. The whole thing is sort of a mixed bag like this.
Triangle Of Sadness is another tough movie to rank, because it’s a bit like a shit sandwich with a brilliant movie on either end as the bread. It opens with arguably the most thrilling “who’s going to pick up the check” scene ever filmed. Then the movie moves to a luxury cruise, further exploring the whole “predatory relationship between power and beauty” thing, which comes to a hilarious head in the final act with a performance-of-the-year candidate from Dolly DeLeon. “I love you, you give me fish,” is surely one of the best lines of the year.
It’s just a shame the movie grinds to a halt in the middle section, with Woody Harrelson and a drunken Russian boat captain doing memes at each other. It’s one of the few times I haven’t laughed at gratuitous vomiting. It all feels so forced and hack, especially compared to the rest of the movie which is the opposite. “A Russian capitalist and an American communist!” the Russian bellows at one point, gesturing to himself and his meming partner, Harrelson’s character.
Ah yes, I love it when characters just say the subtext of a scene out loud. It felt like someone applied Joss Whedon writing rules to European arthouse cinema, which is a combination I definitely didn’t need. It takes a lot for me not to appreciate a Woody Harrelson appearance.
The Banshees Of Inisherin is very much a Martin McDonagh movie in that it feels like the work of a clever grad student who’s trying to get an A. “Ooh, I’m Martin McDonagh, look how clever I am!” he’s always shouting, and most of the time you kind of have to begrudgingly agree.
The film is about a conflict between Padraic, played by Colin Farrell, and Colm, played by Brendan Gleeson. Colm doesn’t want to spend time with Padraic anymore because he thinks Padraic is dull and it’s a distraction from Colm’s art. Basically, it’s a conflict between a character who thinks life is about the human relationships you form while you’re alive (Padraic) and a character who thinks life is about the art you leave behind (Colm).
It’s… clever, as I’ve said, but what was it I said above about belaboring a theme instead of telling a story? (Critics love that shit). I tend to like movies with a story I can lose myself in and characters that are real people, whereas McDonagh movies can feel like he’s tacked a big theme to the wall and periodically nudges us to remember to admire it.
On a macro level, The Banshees Of Inisherin feels more like a montage of New Yorker cartoons at times than a fully-fledged story about characters who have free will. And yet there’s also the gorgeous setting, a scene-stealing donkey, and charming accents and actors who make even the most stilted dialogue sound fun and fresh. What can I say, the man can stage an incredible New Yorker cartoon.
And that’s to say nothing of Barry Keoghan, the National Rascal Of Ireland, who single-handedly injects McDonagh’s otherwise meticulously planned universe with just the element of absurdity it needs. Barry Keoghan is so good he made me remember a character’s name from Eternals. Give the man an Oscar.
Top Gun: Maverick is not just a hard movie to rank, but a fraught one. Half of the loudest people online think it’s the greatest movie ever and if you disagree you’re a communist, and the other half think it’s too stupid to be in awards contention. Allow me to thread the needle a little here: Top Gun: Maverick is great and also incredibly stupid. I’m not giving it the number three spot because I thought it was great art or thought-provoking, I’m giving it three because I had a great time watching it.
I say this as a person who has spent most of his adult life writing about movies: movies can be both very stupid and very good; that is part of the magic of movies. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that movie that is openly stupid and inescapably watchable demonstrates “movie magic” better than almost any other.
Part of the reason Top Gun: Maverick is good is crushingly obvious: fast jets are cool, and so is watching Tom Cruise openly court death. On a less obvious, Galaxy Brain kind of level, Top Gun: Maverick seems to embody the id of the zeitgeist, if probably unintentionally.
This entire film, in the works for more than a decade, was, you imagine, conceived around the notion of Tom Cruise passing the torch to a younger pilot so that this “franchise” could continue. And yet it’s an entire movie about Maverick not passing the torch. He wants to, but he just can’t. He’s just too brash a pilot! He still looks too good without a shirt on! None of these dumb zoomers and millennials could possibly hold his torch!
That he spends the entire movie refusing to acknowledge aging and refusing to cede power in any meaningful way is accidentally the perfect metaphor for our current gerontocracy, and in some ways it’s a delightful little middle finger to the movie franchise machine. Tom Cruise will not be shunted aside, he’s simply too deranged.
Also, “dogfight football” was easily one of the stupidest, most hilarious things I saw in a movie theater this year.
It seems like most of the other recent WWI movies — 1917, They Shall Not Grow Old, War Horse — have been, at some level, about technical gimmicks. The big gimmick of All Quiet On The Western Front is that it’s just a beautifully-made movie. It’s a lot more classical than it is cutting-edge. Partly because of that, it’s immersive in a way that those other movies sometimes weren’t. You don’t spend any of it thinking about the construction.
It’s also, perhaps because it’s being told from the perspective of the Germans, less a story of survival than a story of absurd, senseless tragedy. Which seems like the more salient requiem for the Great War. There are scenes in All Quiet On The Western Front that will stick with me, despite being entirely visual. It’s hard to ask more than that from a movie.
One in particular: when the main character is out on patrol when the Allies first show up with flamethrowers. It’s a nice sunny day and it’s just sort of a strange image at first, the fact that he’s in imminent danger of dying one of the most gruesome and painful deaths imaginable hasn’t really sunk in at first. Like those first few seconds after you wake up when you have to come to grips with where you are and why, only in this case with the smell of burning flesh. “The banality of horror” I suppose you could call it.
Everything Everywhere All At Once has been one of the more polarizing movies this year, and to some extent, I get where the haters are coming from. It’s an A24 movie, with a fantastic premise, directed by the guys (known collectively as “Daniels“) who began their career with a film about a farting corpse. As such it does come very close to being a Film Twitter In-Joke (I would argue this applies much more to Tár and Cocaine Bear, but I digress).
On the surface, Everything Everywhere is also a lot of like an Austin film nerd’s version of Let’s Remember Some Guys. In style, it’s manic to the point of being exhausting at times. It rides that line between kitschy-cool and kitschy-obnoxious.
AND YET.
Just when it was about to alienate with fast cuts or one too many absurdist multiverse gags, Everything Everywhere turned a corner into heartfelt and rewarded your patience. Virtually every other movie about “the multiverse” used the concept basically as a way to squeeze in more characters or justify leaps in movie logic. But how do you introduce the multiverse without questioning existence itself and What It All Means? Everything Everywhere attempts to treat this problem honestly, and yes, a little cutesily,
Another way to say it is that maybe it was a bit of a film nerd in-joke, but it was one that worked perfectly on me personally. If I could choose just one anecdote to explain why, it’s the way “Absolutely (Story Of A Girl)” worked its way into the movie. Basically, the Daniels accidentally wrote the lyrics of a 2000 one-hit-wonder song into their script, then ultimately embraced it. Then they reached out to the writer of the song, the lead singer of Nine Days, for permission to use it in the film.
As it turned out, John Hampson, who is allegedly a high school English teacher now, is also a huge cinephile and was thrilled to help. So not only did he give permission, he wrote and re-recorded three remixed versions of the songs for use as musical cues in Everything Everywhere‘s alternate universes.
While I appreciate a story that “asks the big questions,” what I love is a film that can take a passing thought or some random snippet of mental detritus and turn it into a symphony. Everything Everywhere is a $20 million movie that feels like a $100 million movie.
[Where to stream it: Showtime] Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can read more of his reviews here.
As Tucker Carlson receives bipartisan condemnation for his coverage of exclusive January 6 footage provided to him by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Megyn Kelly is blasting Fox News for not making a bigger deal out of Carlson’s scoop. While Kelly acknowledges that Carlson’s reporting wasn’t entirely accurate thanks to his selective editing of the footage, she still thinks her former employee should’ve touted the exclusive across all of its programs.
“I mean, trust me, I worked at Fox for many years, so if somebody gets a big, big scoop, you know, you ride it, you ride the wave, you, you blanket the channel with it,” Kelly said on the latest episode of The Megyn Kelly Show. “You have it exclusively. It’s yours. Nobody else has it. The fact that it’s not ubiquitous across the channel definitely says something.”
As Kelly questioned whether the damaging revelations from the Dominion lawsuit has Fox spooked, she continues to be baffled over how the network handled the January 6 footage. Via Mediaite:
“But that’s no excuse not to ride your own reporting,” Kelly pushed back.
“Either you stand by it or you don’t. Either it belongs on the channel or it doesn’t, you know, either — If Tucker airs it, it’s fair game for the channel. You can’t just have — like run and hide once he breaks this big story, it’s like, ‘Oh, it’s not happening.’ That makes no sense to me,” Kelly said.
So, apparently, Kelly’s argument is that regardless of whether or not Tucker’s coverage was right, the network should’ve gone big or gone home. In a way, she’s kind of right because Fox News is trying to appease MAGA audiences by downplaying the January 6 attack, but it’s also attempting to maintain “integrity” by not highlighting the fact that it’s biggest personality is dismissing the chaos that everyone saw happen on their TVs in real-time. The QAnon Shaman toothpaste isn’t going back in the tube.
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